Imagined Icebergs

Lightning Rods

2012-01-30T21:58:00.000-06:00

I snapped up a copy of Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods when it came out a few months back, and now that I have had a chance to read it I am and am not a little disappointed. The novel departs so dramatically from the reading experience of the brilliant The Last Samurai that it is hard not to see it in a negative comparative light—even though I was fully prepared by reading some of the advance discussion of the book, including her interview in Bookforum. But really the novel is the astonishingly rare gem of a successful satire—one that it is hard to believe is a satire at first because it would be easy to imagine a similar novel being published with a completely straight face (Jennifer Szalai's review in the NYTimes suggests this as well, though more obliquely, when she imagines a male satirist writing this).

The novel follows Joe, a failed salesman who comes up with the highly unlikely idea of ending sexual harassment in the workplace by incorporating “bifunctional” female personnel who work as temps in companies and fill a secondary role as “lightning rods.” A few times every day a computer program generates a random choice of a high-salaried male employee, who then may accept the offer and proceed to the disability toilet, where he will meet the sexually available lower half of a woman’s body backed through the wall of the women’s toilet on the other side. As a result, Joe promises, sexual harassment in the workplace will disappear because men will have their natural needs fulfilled in a way that doesn’t require bothering the female staff.

What could go wrong? The book tells us all of Joe’s justifications and answers to those who would protest: the narrative is Joe’s, told largely in language he would use in future years to discuss his noble rise in business and justify the shortcuts he took along the way:

What Joe would explain, when later confronted with this kind of criticism, was that at the outset the success of the facility was by no means the foregone conclusion it might in hindsight appear. In an ideal world he would obviously have wanted to spend more time making sure no one was doing anything she didn’t feel comfortable with.

In other words, the novel is told mostly in the language of marketing: Joe selling the idea of what he is doing as justifiable not just to potential businesses that might engage his services and the female employees who would provide those services, but also himself. Once he has decided to go forward with his plan, he looks tirelessly for reasons why it is not just not a bad idea but a good idea: from the dubious idea that this could help sexual harassment in the workplace to the idea that he is a force for good in developing disability-accessible toilets.

Still, having read that Bookforum interview, I found it hard at times hard not to remember DeWitt’s explanation that this book was written in order to build a popular following that would allow her to publish The Last Samurai, which wound up being published first after all. When, in the novel, DeWitt satirizes the market logic that drives Joe’s business, is she also criticizing herself and the publishing world that she sees as requiring her to write a more accessible book? Ultimately, I think she has found the perfect way to take that necessity and turn it into a strength: she adopts a simpler form, a more linear narrative, but she turns it inside out and against itself to question a world that is willing to buy Joe’s line of thought. If a certain self-doubt about the value of her enterprise underlies the book, she takes that doubt head on instead of talking her way around it as Joe might, making a worthwhile novel out of something that could have been simple evasion.

The Unconsoled

2012-01-13T10:13:00.000-06:00

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled was a surprise to me in its deviation from the other novels of his I’ve read—The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go—in that it abandons the narrator reflecting upon a long history leading up to more recent circumstances with increasing revelations of how much around him or her the narrator has missed. Here the narrator is confined to recounting a period of just a couple of days, and the events unfold according to a dream logic rather than the retrospective reflection that makes for a more easily read unreliability in the other novels. Typical examples include the narrator talking to someone for a while only to notice they are wearing or holding something quite distinct that would have been hard to miss, or realizing that the person he is talking to is someone he knows from his childhood or a member of his family, or realizing that the building he has been driven to far from his hotel is actually part of the same building connected by a short passage.

The events begin as the narrator arrives in an anonymous city in order to give a performance: he is a renowned pianist—and yet for some reason has also been asked to speak as an expert orator (perhaps another of the dream-like elements, then: being asked to do some task you don’t normally do). He has three days to make a series of appointments, get to know the issues of the city, and rehearse for his performances of both varieties. But he keeps getting sidetracked by people wanting favors and by issues with his wife, son, and father-in-law who, again in this dream logic, seem to live in this place that is not his home but rather just a performance stop.

Most of the events that drive the narrative have to do with someone refusing to say something in various situations where doing so would save a lot of grief over the long run: the narrator doesn’t want to tell a woman organizing events that he doesn’t know or have his schedule because it would be embarrassing; a father won’t console a child. These two examples typify the kinds of things that aren’t said—those that the narrator avoid out of a desire to please and those out of a desire to not intrude—but they are tied in that they are both ways of avoiding immediate unpleasantness whether or not it might in the long run be beneficial.

Many of these scenes are very moving, but I confess to feeling that something does not quite work for me about this novel: I am very interested in the surreal logic to the narrative, and interested to see Ishiguro do something a little different, but that surrealism also feels a little flat for me. For all of the dramas that the characters are engaged in, I found it hard for me to get too engaged with them: as soon as I began to get a little frustrated with someone, or empathize with some moment of regret or mourning, the form of the novel pulled me back. After all, in this dream logic, it is hard not to see most of the events as projections of the narrator’s mind, so the other characters are only acting as they are as figments of his imagination. I’m not even sure we are meant to read the events as a dream—the surrealism could rather be a metaphorical device indicating something about a particular kind of lifestyle mixed with the experience of a particular kind of European city. Nonetheless, the structure speaks so handily to what we think of as dream logic that it is hard not to come back around to the sense that all this is the unconscious at play. I almost feel that this novel would work better as a film—particularly a David Lynch film (if he scaled back the sex and violence). Unlike his other novels, which I don’t think have been served particularly well by their screen adaptations, this one seems to be attempting to capture a feeling through its surrealism that might work better on screen.

Bad Nature, or with Elvis in Mexico

2011-12-30T14:27:00.000-06:00

When Borders was shuttering its doors several months back, I picked up a few books on the 80% off day, and one of them was Javier Marías’s Bad Nature, or with Elvis in Mexico (trans. Esther Allen). It isn’t the kind of book they usually carried by their end (a translation and one by a small press to boot), so I can only assume it is something a patron had special ordered and then didn’t pick up. This turned out to be lucky for me, as I’d been wanting to read something by Marías without necessarily committing to one of the longer works that he is more known for. Bad Nature was a great introduction to Marías, I’m happy to say, and it leaves me wanting to read more.

The book is tiny, and much like Mario Bellatín’s Beauty Salon it seems like it should be the capstone of a story collection—but it is hard to complain given how delightfully excessive and funny Marías is as he explores the story of a translator hired to work with Elvis on a film set in Mexico. Something, we learn early on, has gone terribly wrong, and the narrator became a target:

No one knows what it is to be hunted down without having lived it, and unless the chase was active and constant, carried out with great deliberation, determination, dedication, and never a break, with perseverance and fanaticism, as if the pursuers had nothing else to do in life but look for you, keep after you, follow your trail, locate you, catch up with you and then, at best, wait for the moment to settle the score. It isn’t that someone has it in for you and stand at the ready to pounce should you cross his path or give him the chance; it isn’t that someone has sworn revenge and waits, waits, does no more than wait and therefore remains passive, or schemes in preparation for his blows, which as long as they’re machinations cannot be blows, we think the blows will fall but they may not, the enemy may drop dead of a heart attack before he sets to work in earnest, before he truly applies himself to harming us, destroying us.

This first paragraph goes on for a few more wild sentences, and then the discussion of all the things being hunted down is not like continues for several more pages: Marías revels in all the different ways he can think up to say the same thing. Despite the narrator’s description of a terrible incident, the novel is comedic, a long anecdotal joke full of humorous descriptions of the people surrounding Elvis and their bizarre behavior. Moreover, Marías makes use of this humor to deflate machismo (and its American equivalent): here, characters’ homophobia and aggression lead only to trouble.

How nice to end a year of reading on such a high note, especially after the bad taste of The Bad Girl.

The Bad Girl

2011-12-29T15:57:00.000-06:00

Having not read anything by Mario Vargas Llosa, I hopped at the chance to buy a super cheap copy of The Bad Girl (trans. Edith Grossman) a couple of years ago, but it had been languishing on my shelves until now. I wish I had let it be. I can only assume Llosa was given the Nobel for other work, because this novel is truly one of the worst things I’ve read in ages. It reminds me a little of Márquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores, and perhaps I should take note that both have the same translator. Does Edith Grossman only translate Latin American novels about a aging male narrator’s screwed up relationship with women?

The novel, in brief, comprises episodes in the life of Ricardo Somocurcio, an expatriate Peruvian translator living in France. Specifically, the chapters record a series of encounters (brief and long) with a woman he considers the love of his life but who nonetheless rejects him in favor of a series of relationships with wealthy men, every time with a new identity. At the same time, the narrator describes the political and social scene in each of these moments.

Part of the problem here is the tale of the tragic women, complete with a narrative comeuppance for her bad behavior. The other major issue is the social and political description. Both the romance and the atmosphere are simply dull-—maybe no word characterizes the novel so much as “dutiful,” in the worst sense. Llosa seems to feel obligated to show us that he is a very good boy and knows about revolutionary activity in the 60s, the sexual revolutions, AIDS, the changed economy of the 90s, but none of it carries any weight. It is just a series of facts and cultural observations, reported without passion or consequence. Likewise, the portrayal of Latin romance is like some ludicrous stereotype Llosa rehearses for the audience. Ricardo and the bad girl joke about his “cheap” clichéd romance. I suppose we are to think that despite its banality his passion is nonetheless true to life, but I found it hard to take seriously.

Even A Naked Singularity a had a few redeeming virtues: unless I’m pretty unlucky, I think Llosa’s novel will end up being my worst read of the year. At least it was relatively short?

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

2011-12-26T16:39:00.000-06:00

Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (trans. Jay Rubin) turned out to be a great post-semester read. Somber and reflective even while leading me on with mystery, it helped clear my mind of everything that had been cluttering it. The novel follows Toru Okada, whose cat and then wife disappear, as he gropes forward with nothing but the opaque clues offered by psychics and other people imbued with mystical attributes.

These clues frequently lead him to stories half-fabricated about Japan’s past in China and Russia during World War II, and the book walks an interesting line in evoking this past as partly responsible for the series of events involved without clearly revealing how this is so. As I was reading, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the various English and U.S. novels of contemporary families whose pasts, tied into major historical events, catch up with them—-novels like Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo, and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. But Murakami’s novel predates all of these and those like them, and it takes the narrative of history catching up with the present in a different direction in large part due to its embrace of fantasy and mysticism (or magic realism). Those other novels are written much more in a tradition of realism: full of descriptive details that reveal class and milieu, but also dealing with the histories more concretely in order to connect them to the present of the novel. History’s finally unraveled connection to the present in these novels pushes them towards realism’s comedic side: the past events may be full of trauma and danger, and their consequences for the present are not always happy, but they are finally fully recognized to humorous effect (White Teeth ends with the novelistic equivalent of the screen freeze you might see at the end of a sitcom when a final joke has just been uttered and has begun to invoke the ire of its target).

Murakami’s magic realism, on the other hand, invokes the past as a source of contemporary traumas but never fully explains the connection to current events, and the lingering mystery keeps unease in the air even when the novel’s plotlines resolve themselves. At one point, Toru Okada’s teenage neighbor May Kasahara writes him a letter that criticizes causal explanations of the world. It isn’t one of my favorite passages precisely because May Kasahara comes across as an annoying kids-say-the-darnedest-things character mostly meant to speak the author’s mind in a cutesy voice (not to mention she is somewhat creepily sexualized). However, it does speak to a key difference between this novel and those later novels that have become somewhat common, and as much as I like those other novels I think Murakami’s approach is more successful because it makes more demands of the reader by leaving you grasping for the connections between past and present—inventing some of them for yourself. Magic realism isn’t necessarily the only way to go about this, but it is fundamental to the way Murakami approaches the task.

As usual, when everyone else is reading the new release I’m reading an older book by the same writer. I’ve got a copy of 1Q84 on my shelf: I’m not sure if I’ll get to it very soon, but I’m looking forward to it after The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle despite the mixed reaction it has gotten.

Beauty Salon

2011-12-18T22:17:00.000-06:00

I read Mario Bellatín’s incredibly short Beauty Salon (trans. Kurt Hollander) a few months ago now—the semester really got away from me, and I haven’t had much of a chance to read the things that I want or write about them until now. Bellatín has been on my list since Beauty Salon was published in English, and I’m not sure I liked it as much as I thought I would. However, I half-think this is because the story is sold as a novella rather than a short story in a larger collection. It comes in at 63 pages and a relatively small number of words per page--there are short stories that are longer than this. Perhaps this seems trivial, but I do think there is something about a short story that is different from a novella or novel, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it turned out that Bellatín is publishing this in the form that he is due to publishers’ beliefs about the value of short stories.

Beauty Salon is narrated by a former salon proprietor who has turned his business into a refuge for those dying from a mysterious disease, one that necessarily echoes AIDS in its progression but also due to the story’s setting in a queer community. And yet it cannot be reduced to AIDS either: the narrator intimates a street gang is responsible for infecting at least some people with the disease. As the narrator tends the dying, he also tends his once-thriving collection of aquariums. The story takes as an epigraph “Anything inhumane becomes humane over time,” and as it unfolds it focuses more and more on how the narrator, unable to do anything to really help these people, ends up making a habit of certain cruelties in order to make the situation bearable for himself--even as he awaits the onset of disease in his own body. Relatively early on he becomes attached to one of the patients until, he claims, he “lost interest” watched the young man die as indifferently as the rest. But the lost interest seems more self-protection than anything else.

All of these concerns pack anger and regret under a style that masquerades as spare and disaffected: a critique of a culture that has allowed this decimation of an underclass, but a critique that also points back to how managing the fallout makes the narrator, as a member of that underclass, complicit with the damage. Yet, dynamic as all of this is, the story feels at last more like a short story or peek into a larger narrative than a novella in its own right, and thus packaged for different expectations than it meets. Perhaps this is because simple waiting is so central to the narrative--to have any more of a sense of beginning and ending would betray something fundamental--that the story either would have to be very short, like this, or very long, one of those behemoth novels where the point is that nothing happens to change the situation.

The Rings of Saturn

2011-09-18T21:32:00.000-05:00

After a summer of fiction that I found mostly only ok, it’s been such a pleasure to immerse myself in W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (trans. Michael Hulse). Is this representative Sebald? If so, what book should I go to next? My pleasure in the book is a special surprise—for whatever reason I was not expecting to enjoy it as much as I did.

The novel is the record of a trip through Southeast England by Sebald the narrator (to what extent similar to the author I do not know). Right here at “travel narrative” is probably one of the reasons I was dreading the book, but it is far more a journey through the mind and through history than anything else. Most of the book comprises reflections spurred by the countryside and one another about history and its figures, with special attention to the history and decay of the British Empire. The style is pensive and Sebald takes his time to let his sentences unfold in a cascading series of thoughts and images. Here he is thinking about fire:

A few years ago, on a Greek island that was wooded as recently as 1900, I observed the speed with which a blaze runs through dry vegetation. A short distance from the harbor town where I was staying, I stood by the roadside with a group of agitated men, the blackness behind us and before us, far below at the bottom of a gorge, the fire, whipped up by the wind, racing, leaping, and already climbing he steep slopes. And I shall never forget the junipers, dark against the glow, going up in flames one after the other as if they were tinder the moment the first tongues of fire licked at them, with a dull thudding sound like an explosion, and then promptly collapsing in a silent shower of sparks.

Here, the discussion of fire bears on the passage that immediately precedes it, where Sebald reflects on humanity’s capacity to burn itself out. He moves between topics metonymically like this thoughout—the page after this one not coincidentally shows a picture of a garden maze shaped like a brain. There are pages and pages of this prose full of sharp imagery and history facts come alive, and the passages make me so enamored of their subjects that I am tempted to run out and read biographies of all of the historical people he discusses—he even makes me want to give Swinburne’s poetry another chance, which is quite a feat.

Probably I would have enjoyed the book even more had I been able to devote the time to reading more of it sooner—I stretched out the reading over a longer period than preferable. My schedule this semester is getting out of control fairly fast it seems. But in those times I could carve out to read a chapter, The Rings of Saturn brought a calm reflection and beauty.

Matt Kish’s Moby Dick Art (On My Wall!)

2011-09-06T21:41:00.001-05:00

Way back in May I bought several of the simply fantastic art pieces that Matt Kish created for his blog project-turned-book, Moby Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page. If you haven’t heard of and seen this project yet, I encourage you to go straight to his website and give yourself a treat to those images and his other projects. Then go buy the book that is coming out in October.

I am so excited to have gotten some really wonderful pieces of art. However, the summer got fairly busy and expensive, so I wound up not getting them framed until August. Then it was a matter of figuring out where to put everything--wall space in my house is at a premium right now--but after a lot of fretting and shifting other things around, I’m happy to say they are all up. Without further ado, here are the pictures (click for larger versions).

1&2: Queequeg and Queequeg, keeping himself company

On the left is the image for page 20: “Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal head-peddler.” On the right is the image for page 23: "Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam- me, I kill-e!’ again growled the cannibal...”

Here they are closer up:

For more detail, you can also see Matt's scans of the images for page 20 and page 23.

3: Next comes Stubb, from page 292: “But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he?” He’s enjoying his meal above another great work of the imagination.

This passage has always been a favorite of mine, and Matt captured it brilliantly with vibrant color. Here it is closer up (slightly askew due to my unsteady hand).

For more detail, see Matt's scan of page 292.

4&5: The Angel of Doom, and Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze!

Above is the image for page 8: “…and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit.” Below that is the image for page 403: “Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally...”

Here they are again, closer up (at an angle due to light problems):

For more detail, see Matt's scans of page 8 and page 403.

Page 403 was a special surprise for me. When I originally contacted Matt about wanting to buy a few of his drawings, this page had already been claimed. The passage is probably my favorite from the novel, and Matt’s imagining of it is so beautifully true to the frantic goodwill and eroticism that I couldn’t help but kick myself for putting in my request too late.

Lucky me! It turns out the person who had beat me to the punch was my partner, who had ordered it as a gift for me. I couldn’t have been more excited.

Pages 8 and 403 make an odd pairing, I suppose—the feeling of the passages couldn’t be farther apart—but it seemed like the best solution to the wall space issue.

Again, I encourage you to go browse around Matt's website. The blog for the Moby Dick project is here, and a blog that he currently updates with other projects can be found here. If you enjoy his work as much as I do, you can also see the Etsy site where he sells his work here. He is gradually putting up more Moby Dick drawings with varying prices, as well as other projects.

Weight

2011-08-21T19:59:00.000-05:00

Jeanette Winterson’s Weight (2005), a retelling of the myth of Atlas (and, to a lesser extent, Heracles), is more like a long personal essay than a novel, which is not to say I didn’t enjoy it. In fact, one thing that might have improved it is a little more detail about Winterson’s life (or the narrator’s—though Winterson makes clear in her intro she doesn’t mind you thinking of them as the same person): the points where she jumps in to write about the weight she has burdened herself with in her life are slightly too abstract to get traction.

In this version of the story, Atlas allegorizes the inability to let go of past wrongs; more than the gods, he sentences himself. Likewise, Winterson carries around her rotten childhood, letting her resentment shape her relation to the world. Where she succeeds best is in her portrayal of the opposing personalities of Atlas and Heracles, the former brooding and masochistic and the latter just shy of being a chatty meat-head (just shy only because of a nagging conscience he’d rather be rid of). Overall, though, the book just felt a little too light in substance. Because I didn’t feel the pull of the personal narrative, the fable just felt like a well-told fable rather than the more personalized myth that Winterson seems out to create. It was a great idea, I think, but perhaps just too quickly executed.

A Naked Singularity

2011-08-14T19:47:00.000-05:00

A little over a month ago I started reading Sergio De La Pava’s long, self-published underground hit A Naked Singularity, and as the long lull since then might indicate I didn’t find it quite the unstoppable read everyone else has. I’m sad to say this given the enthusiasm the novel has generated, which finally I couldn’t resist, especially given some of the comparisons. The novel sounded like just my kind of thing.

And it starts off well: the first chapter, I do admit, is a great, frantic introduction to Casi’s world as a New York City public defender that reveals disenchantment with everyone involved. The remainder of the first part of the novel, while not always quite as stellar, also offers a lot to keep you reading. The story follows Casi as he gets involved with a pro bono death row appeal, works through his everyday caseload, and talks more and more with another lawyer from outside the office, Dane, who tries to embroil him in a scheme to make off with millions of dollars. The vast majority of Part I is told through recounted dialogue: conversations with Dane, conversations between lawyers, debates in court, free form discussions with neighbors—these are only a few of what is something of an encyclopedia of conversational styles. With this much conversation, De La Pava is playing on a ground that is often better covered not in fiction but in film and television, but the sheer enthusiasm of the various speakers in the novel allows it to compete well.

At the end of the first part of the novel, I was thinking that the novel was slightly overhyped but still pretty good and certainly better than most fiction that gets published. My guess at that point would have been that publishers passed on it because of the extensive dialogue, despite this being its best feature.

Then I hit Part II, and my interest slowly started ceding to boredom. I said after reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas earlier this summer that I thought I was getting tired of my inadvertent series of encounters with novels that quote or allude to Nietzsche extensively, so perhaps the way things went from here can be chalked up to the fact that I once again found myself reading a character droning on about becoming superior to all and everyone. By the end of Part I, although I had enjoyed even these conversations, I was getting a strong hint of Dostoevsky, and in fact the rest of the novel becomes pretty much a revision of Crime and Punishment with some flavorings from postmodern fiction. Hey, that even sounds interesting to me now as a possible reading experience, but in practice I just found the novel increasingly dull as the second section went on, so that by the time I got to the third I just wanted it to be over.

This boredom made what might otherwise be minor complaints seem like glaring problems. For example, through Parts II and III there are a series of disruptions where the narrator gradually tells the story of boxer Wilfred Benítez. While they are monologues, these sections, due to the narrator’s hyper-investment in minutiae, work like much of the dialogue in Part I. I’m fine with (and even a fan of) narrative interruptions and interludes, but in this case the interruptions of the narrative felt forced to me: the transitions tend to be something to the effect that the narrator just starts thinking of Benítez, or, from his future perspective, draws a comparison between a moment in his past and the Benítez story (and lucky us it unfolds in timely linear fashion). My problem, in other words, is that De La Pava does too much to make these segments feel relevant to the narrative, and as result they come across as a little more artificial and precious than presumably intended.

By the third section I was pretty much KO’d by irritation that the novel was still in progress. The Pynchon-esque surrealism of much of this part should have been my favorite bit, but after everything else it felt unconvincing as a portrait of psychological decay. Instead, I found myself thinking it reflected more a state of punchiness on the part of the author, every event a product of staying up too late writing and thinking, “wow, here’s something really great and crazy!” without waking up the next morning and revising to make the crazy work. The nadir of all this occurs in what is a sort of mock trial at Casi’s place of work, a scene that is every bit as unconvincingly manic as the opening chapter is convincing.

So that’s what I’ve been up to (when I could bring myself to it) the past month, sad to say. An unfortunate waste of the last half of summer reading. I did finally just break down and pause to read a short novella last week before I trudged through the last hundred pages, so I hope to have a post on that and a couple of others relatively soon, before things get busy again for the fall.

The Fish Child

2011-07-10T22:23:00.000-05:00

Lucía Puenzo’s novel The Fish Child (trans. David William Foster) is something of a minor miracle in that it is a novel narrated by a dog (a fact wisely avoided in any descriptions I had seen) that avoids becoming precious—instead the voice is humorous and even a bit raunchy and brash. Despite addressing situations tangential to her other work (sexuality and gender are both key concerns), the tone here is a long way from either the seething anger of her Granta story or the quieter tension of XXY. The story follows the love affair between a young well-to-do young Argentine woman, Lala, and her family’s Paraguayan maid, Guayi, and tracks the aftermath of their attempt to flee the family to live together in Paraguay. The plan, of course, works out less well than hoped—Lala gets out of the country but Guayi ends up in prison for a crime she hasn’t committed. As the story goes on, it develops a strange hybrid of melodrama and action-adventure film.

None of this works anywhere near as well as the other two Puenzo works mentioned above. What she achieves with the voice of the dog is laudable for avoiding some obvious pitfalls, but the choice still has its problems. One thing she gets from it is an outside perspective on events where only one (or even no) person is present but a dog can be, and this is sometimes played against moments the dog cannot see or hear the action: some of the events leading up to Lala leaving the house, and later events at a police station. Nonetheless, Puenzo doesn’t make much of these blank spots; the first of them serves to add some plot suspense, but the latter serves no clear function. Worse, the dog seems to have an all-too-magical ability to see and describe characters’ (mostly Lala’s) thoughts—something that could be used to question the narration’s reliability but isn’t in this case, all the insights ringing true to the story’s tone and direction.

I am curious to see the film version Puenzo has directed of this novel. In some ways the plot feels better suited to film as a medium, and if the dog’s-eye-view is dropped in the process, that might be for the best.

Cloud Atlas

2011-07-02T12:19:00.000-05:00

It’s always nice to have that happy chance of reading a book that speaks to questions and concerns of another book I’ve just read. In this case, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) forefronts themes of destruction within human nature that echo McCarthy’s Blood Meridian—though between the two of them I’ve read more than enough quotes from Nietzsche to do me good for a while. Mitchell’s perspective offers a little more sunlight than McCarthy’s: whereas even the kid’s ever-so-small amount of resistance to violence was impossible, in Mitchell’s multiple storylines violence and benevolence are both possible outcomes that could occur in any encounter.

Cloud Atlas takes the form of a set of six stories nested within another, each historically distinct and chronologically arranged: you begin reading the oldest narrative, a mid-19th century travel journal recounting a trans-Pacific voyage, move on to a set of letters from 1930s, a 1970s mystery novel, a contemporary comedy, an official trial holographic record from the future, and, beyond that, an oral tale told several generations after civilization has destroyed itself and humanity has returned to tribalism. Each story, then, takes a genre appropriate to the historical moment it portrays. Also, the embedding of the stories works both ways: as a reader you work from the oldest story to the one furthest in the future, and then back out again as you read the second half of each narrative, but structurally it is the furthest future narrative that contains the rest. The narrator in the tribal future still has the hologram as an artifact and shows it to others; the protagonist of the hologram has seen a film version of the comedy; the elderly publisher in the comedy is thinking of publishing the mystery; and so on. What the narratives continually return to is the question of exploiting others versus adopting a more generous ethics, and whether violence is the dominant historical force.

Structurally and conceptually this seems like just the kind of thing that would appeal to me, and I had been looking forward to reading Cloud Atlas for some time now. So I hate to say it, but: a pretty hefty chunk of the book is just boring. The first half, in particular, is increasingly dull: the Louisa Rey mystery and the comedy are excruciating, with the mystery coming off as written by someone who is bored with the conventions of the genre but can’t bring himself to liven it up or even satirize it. The oral tale in the tribal future unfolds well, but the attempt at creating a dialect is overdone with apostrophes for excluded syllables—a few of those tend to go a long way, so when almost every word has an excluded syllable it gets a bit precious.

Not all is lost: the second halves of the narratives are better than the first, and the 1930s “Letters from Zedelghem” are often beautiful: Mitchell manages to evoke a deep relationship between Frobisher and Sixsmith despite providing only Frobisher’s side of the correspondence. Still, for as long a book as this, I’m not sure the payoff sufficiently rewards the effort.

Blood Meridian

2011-06-27T18:11:00.000-05:00

Cormac McCarthy is one of those writers I’ve always heard other people praising but never really had a strong urge to read, as much as anything because I’ve never felt that compelled by the Old West as a setting for fiction. Still, as often as people talk about how much they like his work I was bound to get around to it at some point.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell anyone that Blood Meridian is intensely violent, constantly upping the ante on how grotesque it can get (and it starts roughly). For the most part this was effective and gripping: I don’t generally like narratives with a strong picaresque element, but in this case the repetition didn’t seem gratuitous (even though it is, of course, all about gratuitous violence). It walks a very fine line of nearly becoming a self-parody, overdone with depravity in the way that William Faulkner’s Sanctuary is overdone, and a few times it may cross that line not because of the particulars of a given scene but just because of how relentlessly repetitive the violence is.

One of the more interesting aspects of the novel’s structure is McCarthy’s use of chapter headings: in the mode of a 19th-century novel he begins each chapter with a series of fragments that outline the events that will occur. This parody of form isn’t so intriguing on its own; but, when you start reading the actual chapters and comparing them to the outline, you can see interesting issues emerge. The language of the outline is often very different from that in the text, for example, as if produced by two different narrators: in many cases you wouldn’t know what landscape the characters were in if the outline didn’t identify it, and particular characters (especially the Judge) give speeches that are summed up in technical language in the outline. Additionally, very brief and seemingly insignificant events or described landscapes appear in the outline as equal in importance to major ones. As a result of these features, the outlines don’t really tell you much but lend the appearance of bureaucratic order to the chaos of the novel’s endless violence.

Although there is a terrible beauty to many of the images of the novel, the novel does not offer much in terms of redemption for the reader. The front of my copy advertises it as a “classic American novel of regeneration through violence.” I have no idea what that is supposed to mean: there is nothing in the way of regeneration or epiphany here, not even a belated feeling that there was something good that was missed. The world is rotten all the way down—a grim outlook, but one compellingly framed.

A Quiet Life

2011-06-12T22:09:00.000-05:00

Reading Kenzaburō Ōe’s novel A Quiet Life (1990, trans. Kunioki Yanagishita and William Wetherall), I felt very conscious of the fact that I was reading a translation from a language and culture I know next-to-nothing about—not because the events are impossible to understand (far from it), but because stylistic elements left me wondering if I should complain about the editing, translation, or writing, or if what I was noticing wasn’t just true to patterns of speech in Japan. The first two of the six chapters in particular felt very choppy and stilted to me—I’m not sure whether the later ones improved or if I just got used to the style and absorbed enough in the situation and ideas of the story. I don’t recall the same reading experience from Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness last year, and in at least a couple of places there are what can only be translation/editorial errors: one sentence, as the narrator compares her present experience at a concert with previous experiences, reads, “But now I don’t hear such laughter ring out in the Joining of Hearts Concerts now.” I guess the translators were trying to decide where to put the “now” but wound up leaving it as an exercise for the reader… As a result, I’m left wondering the rest of the time how much the tone is being affected by translation issues in sentence-level style. To my (internal) ear, the narrator comes across as a little more simple-headed than I would guess just from her reflections, even given the fact that the narrative highlights her naïveté.

When I could forget the questions about style, though, I found the story engrossing. In the novel, the narrator (Ma-chan), a 20-year old young woman living with her family, takes care of her older, mentally disabled brother (Eeyore) and her younger brother (O-chan) who is studying for university entrance exams while their parents are in the United States because her father is in what the family calls a “pinch,” or bout of depression. In general the episodes of the novel revolve around situations where people, particularly Ma-chan, have concerns about Eeyore’s well-being, get worked up about them, but then find that everything is ok. There is, throughout, a humorous prodding of the idea that Eeyore’s life is somehow tragic or that he is incapable.

The family is modeled after Ōe’s, and the father, “K,” is an author. One of the things that makes the novel work well is the way the narration through the voice of the daughter gives us distance from “K,” and thus often gives us a sense that Ōe is critiquing himself as much as anyone. Indeed, this novel’s rejection of the idea that Eeyore’s life is a tragedy is a refreshing counter to the perspective on mental disability evinced in the two (decades older) stories in Teach Us that I noted with frustration in my post on that book. On top of this, through the reflections of the narrator and the people around her on her father’s “pinch” and his writing, the novel offers perspective on the relationship between writers, texts, and audiences, a relationship itself loosely tied to questions of faith (or lack of it) and death. There is a conceptual complexity and vigor to the novel that, unfortunately, I’m not entirely convinced is matched by the reading experience in the translation I read.

The Bell

2011-06-04T14:30:00.000-05:00

Not quite ten years ago now I read Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea (1978) and loved it. Since then, I’ve read her first novel, Under the Net (1954), and now The Bell (1958), and I’m finding it hard to get the same enchantment. In the case of Under the Net in particular, Murdoch seems to have just been writing a different (more comedic) kind of novel—I enjoyed it to an extent, but what I had loved about The Sea, the Sea was its depth as a not-wholly-reliable character study.

The Bell fits somewhere between the two: there is a third person distance that allows the narrator to slip between the minds of a few primary characters and offer a little mild comedy in the portrayal of the lay religious community at Imber, but there is a deeper philosophical interest that broadens out the minds of the three primary characters. The novel gives us entry to Imber by way of Dora, a woman unhappy in her marriage but nonetheless returning to her husband while he is immersed in Imber doing historical research with books at the Abbey that Imber organizes itself around. Another outsider, Toby Gashe, has chosen to visit Imber for the summer before he begins college at Oxford. And, to round out the primary trio, Michael Meade runs the lay community and owns the estate on which it exists. Murdoch uses the trio to meditate on sex and religion as interlinked but distinct issues. Dora feels pressure to play the role of the errant wife redeemed, while Michael struggles to reconcile his long-standing desire to become a priest with his equally long-standing desire to sleep with men. Toby is a sort of innocent who enjoys the world and his time at Imber until he gets wrapped up romantically with first Michael, then Dora.

As I read, I kept finding myself frustrated that I found several things simply unbelievable. Michael is the most convincing of the lot in the portrayal of the kind of conflict between religion and sex that plagues him; he is the kind of old school gay character that some contemporary readers might dislike because his story doesn’t end in a triumphant coming out, but whose confusion and uncertain ending reflect tensions that many gay people still live with. A central problem is Toby: a lot of the psychological tension of the plot revolves around his sudden entry into the world of sexual desire. His confusion and fumbling once that happens work well enough, but it is really very hard to imagine someone his age not already being very more aware of desire than he is early in the novel. He is just a little too naïve and carefree to be believable.

I found the particular ways in which Dora’s drama acted out equally unconvincing. Dora, it is established early on, is given to sudden acts of generosity, and it seems to be one of her few saving graces except that it is also what apparently leads her to make key “mistakes.” It is unclear to me how we are supposed to read this. On one side, the community (and far more her husband) frowns on her behavior in a way that comes across as stifling. However, the climactic action of the novel (I won’t reveal it here) turns around one of her moments of inspiration and desire to surprise others, and the overwhelming idea that everyone in the novel seems to accept—and Dora seems to come to realize—is that it is a huge mistake that will embarrass the community at Imber, which it in fact ends up doing. I felt like I was missing something here: Dora’s plan, while it seems unlikely to work, does not actually seem to me like something that would embarrass anyone. Indeed, if she pulled it off it could be quite impressive, and even failing it would end with a revelation that would likely excite everyone involved. Sure, people’s sense of impropriety can be irrational, but it usually has some tie to culture and class that I can’t identify here.

The novel does have its moments: many of the interior monologues of the characters are compelling, and there are scenes—like Toby’s encounter with a nun, Dora’s walk with Michael, and the group’s walk to check the bird traps—that are beautifully executed. Still, overall the motivations and characterizations driving the plot seemed every-so-slightly askew, and that often kept me from really jumping into the text.

Shelves To Read 2011

2011-05-31T22:12:00.000-05:00

Last year at this time I noticed frequent side remarks on book blogs about the stacks of books that people have bought but haven’t yet read, and I thought it might be nice to actually have a photo of my “to read” shelves. I thought it might be nice to make this into a yearly event, so here is the updated version of my “to read” shelves.

It’s fun to compare to last year’s shelves and see where I’ve made progress—and where I haven’t. I’ve moved the “to read” books to a different, slightly slimmer bookshelf than before, so I’ve done a fairly good job of reading more than I buy in the past year. For now, at least, the books all fit the shelves! Of course, some of this may have to do with strategic weeding of the lower shelf, which has the lower priority items…

I hope to be reading a number of these books this summer, so this is about as close to a preview as this blog will ever have.

Granta 113: The Final Five

2011-05-22T16:02:00.000-05:00

(I’ve been working my way through Granta 113: The Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists. The previous installments are here, here, and here. This post covers the final five stories.)

Having now finished Granta 113, I think there is one lesson to take away from all this, and it is a lesson for editors: don’t include so many excerpts from forthcoming novels. Three of the final five authors—Matías Néspolo, Andrés Felipe Solano, and Alejandro Zambra—are represented by excerpts, and the excerpts are all perfectly ok but don’t really make me want to run out and buy the work. I’ve never understood how this was supposed to work as a marketing ploy. When I read a story in a magazine or literary journal, I would much rather see a completed work. Zambra’s bio says he is working on a collection of short stories—why not include one of those? I will probably buy and read the novel the editors have excerpted here, but it will be because I’ve read his previous novels, not because of the excerpt. Give me something that shows the writer can deal with a beginning, middle, and end.

The real standout in this regard is Samanta Schweblin’s story, “Olingiris,” which tells of a bizarre business that allows women to come in and perform a ritualistic hair removal—by tweezing out the leg hairs of another woman one by one. The story has just the right mixture of the unexplained (Why do people line up to do this? How did this start? Who is running it, and what do they do with the hair?) and the explained, giving us the back stories of two women who work in the establishment. The story is amazing because its surreal events evoke all sorts of contemporary rituals—consumerism, the beauty parlor, prostitution, sex tourism—without being reducible to any of them. For me, this kind of story is the narrative equivalent of Emily Dickinson’s saying that poetry should spin your head like a top: it demands certain connections yet doesn’t easily add up to anything, producing a kind of sublimity and dizziness.

Patricio Pron’s story, “A Few Words on the Life Cycle of Frogs,” ends the volume. It is a well-told first-person story about a young writer who lives in an apartment underneath one of his major influences, dwelling incessantly on the life of the older writer and letting that shape his work. The general idea, as it develops, seems to be the way that writers fabricate ideas about their influences, making the line of literary development less clear and more a matter of happenstance and invention. [Insert your own longer Harold Bloom flashback here.] The story develops this idea fairly well, and it works as the final bookend to a volume about new writers; I was less interested in the reflections on writers who come to the city. I also feel I might be missing something just through a lack of thorough familiarity with Argentinean writers—for example, if there is a particular older writer Pron has in mind, I’ve missed the cues entirely.

Coming out the other side of this collection, there are really two writers I am eager to follow up on: Lucía Puenzo and Samanta Schweblin. To a lesser extent I also want to follow up on Carlos Labbé’s novel and on Pola Oloixarac if/as they are translated into English. Alejandro Zambra, as I said above, I’ll read more of, but not because of the excerpt here. Other writers I have some interest in and would quickly be persuaded to read by the right review: Javier Montes, Federico Falco, and even Carlos Yushimito, the last of whom I didn’t write about in my previous post. I’m not really sure that I would call the volume overall a big success, but I am happy that at least I came away from reading it with a few women writers in Spanish that have my interest, given the general problem with the lack of translations of women writers I’ve mentioned before. In that vein, hopefully next time someone makes a list of good new Spanish writing they will be able to do a little better than having only five women out of twenty-two writers.

Carlos Labbé, Federico Falco, Elvira Navarro

2011-05-16T14:16:00.000-05:00

(I’m working my way through Granta 113: The Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists. The previous installments are here and here. This post covers three stories from the next nine.)

With only five more stories left in Granta 113, I haven’t encountered anything I disliked as much as the Barba story, but only three more have really grabbed me, so I will focus on them.

The first is Carlos Labbé’s “The Girls Resembled Each Other in the Unfathomable,” which surprised me with my interest if for nothing else because the title is so bad I expected to groan myself all the way through. Labbé has one of the various excerpts from novels, and I have to say that it is the only one so far that makes me really curious to run out and buy the longer work (thank goodness the novel has a different title). I guess I shouldn’t be surprised it is translated by Natasha Wimmer, as it sits well alongside her work on Bolaño. I find it hard to even describe a plot at this point, beyond its evocation of spy/detective story and a hint of surrealism. The narrator is describing a sighting of two wanted criminals, the sister of one of them, and a congressman publicly believed dead. The surrealism comes from the blend of strange behavior of the four, some seemingly unlikely behavior on the part of the narrator, and the narrator’s ability to tell things he couldn’t possibly have witnessed without quite a lot of voyeuristic effort.

Immediately after that excerpt is Federico Falco’s “In Utah There Are Mountains Too,” which is a funny story about a teenage girl, Cuqui, who develops a crush on a Mormon missionary. It is a little unlike anything else in this volume and works because it is really in all a tender story that somehow manages not to come off as cloying and sentimental.

The last thing I’ve read is Elvira Navarro’s “Gerardo’s Letters”—it is another excerpt translated by Natasha Wimmer, but this is one that I think I would like to stop right where it ends. The narrator tells the story of her disintegrating relationship over the course of a hostel stay, and you get a nice feel for how sick the two are of one another while also being very sad about it. I think the narrator would be hard to follow for the course of a novel, but her internal ranting and euphoria lend nice color to details such as the description of some kids at the hostel and the “creepy gnome” who runs it. One nice line that gathers in the hostel experience and the relationship troubles: “The PC takes a while to start, and it’s so cold that I plug in the hairdryer and rest it on the edge of the keyboard as once again I curse Gerardo and at the same time feel sad because everything is full of his opinions, which have become my own.”

Finally, By the Firelight has just covered several Granta 113 stories. A few I’ve discussed here (by Barba, Montes, and Puenzo), one I haven’t gotten to yet (Shweblin), and another that I read in the set covered by this post but didn’t discuss above. This last is Alberto Olmos’s “Eva and Diego,” and while I didn’t love it, the story has a couple of great moments, such as when Eva realizes she has no memory of the building that has previously occupied a now-empty space in the city (now that I’m on it, I’m reminded of James Merrill’s poem “An Urban Convalescence”). This story is another of the excerpts from novels the editors chose in place of full stories, and I could see this fragment turning into an interesting longer work.

Lucía Puenzo’s XXY

2011-05-08T22:19:00.000-05:00

After enjoying her Granta 113 story, I decided to track down Lucía Puenzo’s film XXY (2007), an adaptation of a short story by Sergio Bizzio. Puenzo makes good on many of the promises of her short story: in particular she is fantastic at weaving a story around highly charged issues of gender and sexuality, playing off of some film genre stereotypes but avoiding the pitfalls they might usually entail. The story focuses on an intersex teenager (Alex) and her parents and a visiting family with a son (Alvaro) of the same age.* The film is playing with material that has real potential to dive headlong into a Lifetime movie combination of voyeurism and pity, but Puenzo seizes the opportunity to play with some of the melodramatic tropes to which she alludes. The story opens through the perspective of the son of the visiting family, which has been invited by Alex’s mother, Suli, because Alvaro’s father, Ramiro, is a plastic surgeon and past friend with whom she’s been discussing the possibility of surgery to “decide” Alex’s gender (as female).

In a more conventional melodrama, this would be an opportunity to show the evils of Ramiro, while Alvaro redeems himself (and through him, the audience) by confronting Alex’s “true nature” and learning to love her—all the while leaving Alex as mostly a scientific specimen discovered on film by the camera’s increasingly prying eye. And to a certain extent this happens: Ramiro is a bully that Alvaro is going to have to continue living with, and there is some sympathy for Alvaro’s situation in the end. But really what is interesting is how the film narratively sidelines Ramiro as the villain: yeah, he’s a bad guy, but the threat he poses is easy to see and ultimately not very interesting here. Instead, the film offers us more and more of the perspective of Alex, Kraken (Alex’s father), and (to a lesser extent) Suli. In the process, the film develops some distance from Alvaro, turns the critique against him in addition to his father, and, as a result, makes the audience squirm. Instead of building on the suspense of what gender Alex “really is” or visualizing her intersex condition, Puenzo asks us why we think about the issue through that lens. The shift also opens up a perspective on the issues within Alex’s family that allows for a more interesting view of intersex lives than the abuse from the outside world and the fight to overcome it.

The film isn’t perfect: excepting the way she plays very well with point of view, Puenzo could work most on the visual in film. Not that the film isn’t beautiful, but there are some images that come across to me at least as a little heavy handed (the turtles, particularly early in the film, although later they work more seamlessly). I also felt Ramiro needed to demonstrate his “bullying” of Alvaro a little more clearly earlier in the film, but maybe its abrupt, seemingly random entrance into the film (in a scene over dinner) is part of the point. Still, these issues don’t come anywhere near to outweighing the strengths, and XXY has confirmed my interest in Puenzo’s writing enough that I’ve order a copy of her novel The Fish Child.

*I use the feminine pronoun in this post because the character has been raised to appear as a daughter, but one nice thing about the film is that it refuses the idea she is “truly” any one gender, something that I noticed was punctuated in the film by that fact that Alex’s father, Kraken, alternately refers to her as “mi hija” and “mi hijo” at certain points.

Granta 113: 7 More

2011-04-29T21:59:00.000-05:00

(I’m working my way through Granta 113: The Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists. The previous installment—on the opening story, by Lucía Puenzo—is here. This post covers the next seven stories.)

After the blast of Puenzo’s opening story, I have to say the next several selections in Granta 113 felt fairly negligible. I drafted part of a paragraph going through the next four stories one by one and explaining what I didn’t like, but I think it suffices to say I found them a bit perfect and dull in the way short stories can fall into. The exception is Andrés Barba’s “The Coming Flood,” which takes on the perspective of a declining porn star hooked on plastic surgery. It is written with an on-and-off quasi-stream-of-consciousness, and the perspective it offers on the protagonist’s way of thinking seems to me to slip into an easy condescension. I felt like I was listening to someone highly religious talking on sanctimoniously about how sex corrodes your soul and pointing to someone dying on the street as proof of a comeuppance rather than really trying to understand that person’s situation. It seems absurd to think anyone would be publishing a story with this perspective in 2010, so maybe something about the tone was lost in translation or in my reading.

Things take a turn back to the genuinely engaging with Pola Oloixarac’s “Conditions for the Revolution.” I won’t say this story is completely successful: I read it twice and in the second half both times I felt like the momentum evaporated. Briefly, the story is set in a present moment of political unrest in Buenos Aires with intermittent memories of the political unrest of the previous generation, and it focuses on a young woman named Mara, her mother Cris (an activist from the era of Perón’s rise), and people close to them.

Despite my reservations about the ending, the story is a worthwhile read: what is most satisfying is the way it uses humor to tease apart the complicated interweaving of political struggles and sexual relationships in an era where the traumas of past political struggles still burn some, stir others with nostalgia, serve as a sexual pretext for others, and invoke imprecise comparisons to the present that no one can help making but that never seem quite right. In this context, Cris’s just-tolerated boyfriend Quique imagines himself ideally positioned for sexual conquest:

In exile, Quique had discovered that the traumatic arithmetic that melded a past and a moustache could function as proof of a set of privileged experiences, as shared as they were private, in the light of whose mysterious shadow the true socialist homeland would always exist, in the hearts of comrades and lovers, as stated in Walt Whitman’s dedication to his readers in Leaves of Grass.

Quique has found that he can use politics as a pretext for sex—Whitman is more a useable slogan to him than a real passion. But Oloixarac doesn’t take that as an opportunity to dismiss political investments in general; Cris sees Quique as a bit of a fool that she lets hang around her. Politics do not seem to have gone wrong in this story because people just use it as a pretext for sex; instead, radical action just seems to be failing for reasons people can’t quite grapple with (there is a protest beginning in the story, but it seems purposeless and doomed despite the passion), and politics saturates the air so much that it inevitably serves to contextualize people’s thoughts on their relationships.

The next story, Javier Montes’s “The Hotel Life,” is an excerpt from a yet-to-be-finished novel: I think I’ll want to read it, although the story works well on its own and I’m a little afraid the novel might end up not matching the escalating weirdness of this part on its own. The narrator is a hotel reviewer who takes a job in a hotel in his home city, which he normally wouldn’t do. I think it might be something about the constant movement of his job mixed with its repetitiveness that shapes the tone of the story: it somehow has much more realistic detail than Paul Auster’s City of Glass while also maintaining a similar feeling of eerie abstraction for most of its length. The last few pages are simply appalling—and I mean that as a compliment, so I won’t spoil anything.

The last story of this bunch is “Gigantomachy,” by Pablo Gutiérrez, and it features the narration of a basketball player who views his size in part with pride, waxing nostalgic about his abilities on the court, and in part with frustration with it as a near disability and a destructive force. His fraught state comes from an unclearly revealed accident (or maybe it wasn’t an accident) that has made him into a media pariah. I haven’t entirely decided what I think of it. The stream-of-consciousness does a nice job of running the gamut of emotions, all of which seem to be substituting for the one emotion he doesn’t take on. Really I should like this more than I do, but I just sort of sigh whenever I start reading a story featuring sports. So ignore my reticence and read the story for yourself.

On a related note, since my last post By the Firelight has a discussion of Texas Tech’s Americas Series, which includes a novel by Lucía Puenzo titled The Fish Child. Amazon doesn’t have a description, but you can read one on the press’s site. It looks fascinating and I look forward to reading it.

Granta 113: Lucía Puenzo

2011-04-18T21:11:00.000-05:00

Time is not becoming abundant as the semester goes on, but I am finding some to spare to make my way through the stories in Granta 113: The Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists, and I think I might make a few posts as I read. For this post, I want to focus on the story by Lucía Puenzo that opens the collection, “Cohiba.”

Although there is nowhere near a majority of women writers in the volume, the choice of Puenzo’s story to lead it seems addressed to people like me who have grown a little weary of the relative lack of women writers translated from Spanish and also of the interlaced machismo and misogyny in those writers that are translated. The story revolves around a sexually abusive encounter a woman has while in Cuba for a writers’ retreat led by Gabriel García Márquez, and it is full of embarrassment and rage at the individual act and the knowledge that it is a part of a culture of abuse. Given my last encounter with Márquez, I’m tempted to read it specifically as a rebuke: incrimination by metonymy. You get a hint of the anger about this perpetual abuse in Bolaño’s 2666, but it is buried by despair over the numbing repetition of the violence. In Puenzo’s story, even desperately small acts of retaliation backfire and compound the violence, keeping the wound fresh.

As for Márquez, you can see another reason why the Granta editors would want to place Puenzo’s story first: whether you see him as indicted or just ridiculous in the story, the portrayal allows them to advance their own thesis about generational differences for their volume. When he bothers to pay attention to the younger writers in the story, he offers banal catchphrases and advice-that-doesn’t-quite-advise. And I don’t think I’ll ever be able to think of Márquez again without imagining him in a jumpsuit, which emblematizes faded glory like nothing else I can think of in literature.

I had heard of Puenzo’s film XXY previously and thought it sounded interesting, but I never got around to watching it. This story makes me want to dig it up for a viewing.

Sidney Lumet, 1924-2011

2011-04-10T13:11:00.001-05:00

I don’t write much about film and other non-book media here much, but I don’t want to go without paying my own brief tribute to Sidney Lumet. I never really got into many of the big 1970s directors that everyone loves so much, but Lumet is someone from that era who I really enjoyed. For me, interest in his work started in the late 1990s when I took my first undergraduate film class: we read his book Making Movies (1996), a fantastic combination of film memoir and introduction to how film works, and watched a number of his movies. To this day, Network (1976) ranks among my favorite films, one that is as important and relevant as ever. I won’t say that every film was a gem, and he made slightly more cop/criminal movies than I care to see, but he had a fantastic career bookended by two great movies, 12 Angry Men (1957) and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007). I’m sad to see him go.

Oryx and Crake

2011-04-07T21:42:00.000-05:00

After reading Oryx and Crake (2003), I’m not as impressed as I was after reading A Handmaid’s Tale last year, but I did enjoy the book. Atwood excels at world creation and pinpointing the dystopian outcomes of our current worst practices. Pigoons, rakunks, ChickieNobs: the words that name things in Jimmy’s world are ridiculous yet completely believable as advertising’s Orwellian legacy. Jimmy’s first encounter with ChickieNobs reminds me of the episode of the televised version of This American Life where they visit a modernized pig farm. Bioforms, environmental disaster…In Handmaid, the world ended in the ice of religious repression; here it ends in the fires of contagion.

Nonetheless, and while all of this extrapolation seems an accurate enough indictment, the book also lacks the sense of threat and dread of the earlier novel. Some of the problem may be the pacing: the last third of the novel reads like Atwood suddenly decided she needed to wrap things up after a leisurely review of Jimmy’s youth and his situation with the Crakers. But I suspect also it is a matter of style and perspective. The ironic knowingness that pervades Jimmy’s world and its portrayal doesn’t work as well as the enforced ignorance of Offred that lends suspense and suspicion to the earlier work. Atwood tries to get those things back through the structure that demands we read to find out what happened to transform the world from Jimmy’s to Snowman’s, but the warmth generated is more that of calisthenics than the main event. Still, that is invigorating in its own way, enough to make me want to continue on with The Year of the Flood when I get a chance.

Flight

2011-03-19T14:59:00.000-05:00

The semester schedule has really put a dent in my reading, not to mention my posting. I’m hoping I can at least get through a couple of things this week before it is back to the grindstone.

First up is Flight, a young adult novel by Sherman Alexie that has been sitting on my “to read” shelf for a couple of years. I don’t really read a lot of young adult fiction, and, on top of that, I’ve also found that I have liked Alexie’s films more than I have his fiction. When I read The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven a couple of years ago, I enjoyed the few stories I had read before, but the book as a whole didn’t really impress me.

That said, I think Flight works very well. The novel opens with an epigraph from Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, “Po-tee-weet”: a bird’s sound that chirps along no matter how good or bad the events and thus mocks our sense of some controlling, caring power that shapes events. And, as in Vonnegut, violence cannot be solved from above but through only through human determination. Alexie plays off of Vonnegut’s structure as well: the multi-racial teenager Zits travels to different points in time, but rather than visiting other moments in his own time-line, he inhabits the bodies of others throughout history.

In doing so, Alexie ties contemporary violence and racial anger to its history without oversimplifying the connection. More importantly, he has a knack for complicating character(s) so that readers can simultaneously understand and even sympathize with the events that drive people to violence while also maintaining our responsibility for our violence and the need to overcome it.

Flight is the type of book I would like more teenagers to read for pleasure (to the extent that any teenagers read for pleasure any more). I’m using the term “pleasure” here loosely, as the issues and events of the novel are by no means “enjoyable” in the usual sense of the term, but I think it is generally true of aesthetic pleasure—and especially literary pleasure—that it cannot be simply reduced to happy thoughts or feelings. Here, Zits has been shunted from one foster home to another, and Alexie, as in much of his other work, is concerned with the way violence (racial and otherwise) perpetuates itself through history, often in intimate ways. Some people might see this as a bit “heavy” for teenagers, but Alexie makes a good case for why teenagers need exactly this kind of book: it is a time in life when most people feel disempowered and angry, and writing that takes those feelings seriously, without condescension, is something to value.

2011 Best Translated Book Award Longlist

2011-01-28T17:54:00.000-06:00

Yesterday the longlist for the 2011 Best Translated Book Award went up over at Three Percent. I've been eagerly anticipating the release: last year's longlist, and more importantly the book-by-book discussion Three Percent hosted (and promises to again this year), highlighted a lot of books I hadn't heard of and promptly put on my to-read list when I did. I got around to reading a few of those this year--Death in Spring (pre-blog: but I loved it), Op Oloop, Rex--and I hope to get to a few more this year or sometime in the future.

I actually read one book that would have qualified for this year's list, Alejandro Zambra's The Private Lives of Trees, but it didn't make the cut. Otherwise, I was already looking forward to César Aira's The Literary Conference after my recent read of Ghosts. The rest of this year's list I know next to nothing about, so I will look forward to reading the descriptions over the coming months and finding lots of things to put on the "to read" shelf.

Ghosts

2011-01-26T17:48:00.000-06:00

By now César Aira’s Ghosts (1980, trans. 2008 by Chris Andrews) has gotten a lot of attention and people have moved on to other Aira titles (of which there are a lot of choices), so I’m a little late to the party. It is a fantastic little book, deceptively short in that it demands pausing and letting your mind work over the densely interwoven details: not that the prose is especially difficult, although some of the more philosophical passages take time to parse, but anyone reading alertly will keep stumbling over details that suggest others in the book. Aira’s increasingly well-known writing method, wherein he writes a page a day and refuses to return and edit a finished page, shows in the way that the narrator’s focus shifts relatively quickly from one topic to another, or from one character’s perspective to another’s. Patri, the young woman who becomes the focus of the later part of the novel, considers at one point, as her mother and aunt shift among conversation topics, that it was “something to be marveled at, a challenge to belief: how is it that conversation topics keep coming up, one after another, inexhaustibly, as if they weren’t tied to objects, which are finite, as if they were pure form?” This comment is clearly self-referential to the book’s structure, but it neglects the way that all these arbitrary transitions build up into a chain of metonymic connections: passages that at first seem unconnected are nonetheless evoked as the book continues, and despite what appears like slipshod construction on a page-to-page basis, the novel builds a solid structure.

The novel follows the activity of a day at a construction site on New Year’s Eve when the work should be done but isn’t. In the morning the various future apartment tenants show up with their personal decorators to take measurements and make plans while the workers continue their jobs. By lunch, the tenants are gone and the holiday begins for the workers, and the book narrows to focus on the family of Raúl Viñas, who doubles as security guard for the site and lives on the top floor, as they prepare for the arrival of relatives for a New Year’s Eve dinner and fireworks. Meanwhile, throughout the book, ghosts haunt the construction site—ghosts whom only the workers and their families can see.

I’ve seen a number of brief interpretations of the ghosts, several revolving around their representation of sexuality (particularly to Patri, who is apparently sexually active but on the verge of being officially an “adult” expected to find a husband ASAP)—but I think in some sense this is opposite of the truth. My take is that the ghosts signify counterfactuals: that is, futures that will not come to pass, things that could be but will not. This is why we have the focus on the almost-complete year and the incomplete construction site, and on Patri’s almost completed childhood. The owners of these future apartments can’t see the ghosts, I think, because the building is going to end up just the way they want it, suited just to their (middle-class) needs. Likewise, to the extent that they suggest sex at all for Patri (and really I think a big part of the attraction is that despite their nakedness their sexuality is mute), it is against a narrative of growing up, getting married, and repeating the lives of her mother and aunts. The ghosts, in this case, suggest everything the life of a young woman might be, if she weren’t tethered to the real expectations of marriage and motherhood that are likely to push other possibilities into the realm of fantasy. Patri’s preference for the ghosts, at the end, is to me a kind of protest against life if life must mean a set path that she would not imagine for herself. My sense is that some readers may take Patri’s actions, as her mother does, as a sign of a problem with Patri, but I take it as indicative of a problem with her world that she sees and cannot solve.

Celebration in the Northwest

2011-01-13T12:38:00.000-06:00

In keeping with my desire to read more women writers translated from Spanish, I tracked down a used paperback copy of Ana María Matute’s Celebration in the Northwest (1963, trans. Phoebe Ann Porter 1997). I find it strange that the University of Nebraska Press currently only has this available in hardback (and crazy expensive at that), and also that there is so little Matute available in English. I would like to think her recent win of the Cervantes Prize will help motivate publishers, but I’m not sure whether that will be the case.

The most enjoyable thing about this book is Matute’s rather twisted but beautiful descriptions and comparisons. Here, for example, is part of protagonist Juan Medinao’s perception of his mother when he is a child: “The black beads of her rosary, like a caravan of ants on a business trip to her soul, looped over her wrist where her blood pulsed erratically.” Or, on first encountering a young priest: “As he watched him, Juan experienced a feeling similar to that which came over him before he ate a baby partridge.”

About the story itself I have somewhat mixed feelings: I enjoyed it most in the first half, where it was harder to get a grip on the allegorical element. Briefly, the story opens with the involuntary and disastrous return to Lower Artámila of Dingo, a traveling mimic, whose presence spurs the memories of Juan Medinao, the owner of most of the region. Yet, while Dingo features briefly in the past scenes, Juan’s memories center instead on his evolving relationship with his half-brother Pablo, a local laborer whose mother had an affair with Juan Senior. It is here where the novel’s allegory starts to become clearer, as Pablo comes to represent values of uprightness, self-sufficiency, and independence against Juan’s position as a landlord who really does nothing and gets his sense of self-worth from religion rather than action. I’m sympathetic to the critiques of class and religion, especially as they apply to the context of mid-century Spain, but an unfortunate side effect of the way Matute approaches them is that moral goodness is equated with “perfect” bodies and immorality with disability. Moreover and because of this, Juan’s feelings toward Pablo comprise an intense jealousy and desire—increasingly sensualized and homoerotic so that homoeroticism comes to be identified with a lack of self-confidence and honesty. In the last half of the novel, this gradually chipped away at my pleasure in the prose.

Still, the book makes me want to read more of Matute’s work and hope that I’ll be able to enjoy some of her other stories more. She clearly has a wicked streak in her understanding of children, and I am curious to see how that plays out in some of her stories geared to a younger audience.

Love and Obstacles

2010-12-30T13:39:00.000-06:00

What I find most interesting in Love and Obstacles is the way Aleksandar Hemon keeps coming back around to worry over the problems of what he calls “antibiographical writing” in his New Yorker interview. As he describes it, antibiographical writing means writing about things that didn’t happen to you but did happen in contexts you experienced, taking a few details and spinning out new ones to create a story. At the same time, the stories in Love and Obstacles, and perhaps most stories written with this method, are so likely to invite biographical readings that a rejection of excessive realism has to become a theme—almost to the extent that the reader (or at least this one) then wonders whether Hemon protests too much in a desperate bid to declare himself a real creator and not just a mimic of reality. So, as someone likewise averse to (auto)biographical fiction, I am a little puzzled by the solution Hemon tries to enact here.

Another frustrating thing about the book—although this may be its most redeeming attribute—is that Hemon never quite lets us sympathize with any of the stories’ characters. This includes the narrator(s) at every age—he (they) comes across as naïve as a youth (not especially surprising) and increasingly obnoxious and obtuse as an adult. Nonetheless, the supporting characters aren’t any better. In the later stories, the narrator first meets with an film student who wants to interview him for a documentary, then, in the final story, with a fellow writer in the narrator’s home city of Sarajevo. Both are candidates to serve as foils to reveal the narrator’s flawed ways of looking at or behaving in the world. Indeed, the American writer Macalister’s writing method, as it is revealed by the end, seems much like Hemon’s. Nonetheless, both are perfectly abhorrent in their own ways: the film student is as stubbornly bent on putting her interpretation on events as the narrator; Macalister is the worst kind of cultural tourist.

What comes through in this last story, and numerous others, is Hemon’s distaste for fellow immigrants desperate to win the appreciation of Americans. The collection is bookended by a story where the narrator as a youth encounters an American in Africa (his father is diplomat) and the final story about the narrator’s encounter with Macalister. In both cases the satire critiques the narrator’s slavish desire to be loved by the American. When Macalister finally includes a minor, disguised reference to the narrator’s family in his fiction, it indicates not so much the validation and recognition the narrator desired but rather that Macalister has simply consumed the experience and moved on: the narrator and his family really mean very little to him. Thus it is also strange that Macalister’s narrative technique should resemble so much Hemon’s own; the story seems to offer a self-repudiation of the writer as a sort of colonialist, taking his resources from everywhere without acknowledgment. In the initial story, set indeed in a colonial situation, the narrator carries around a copy of Heart of Darkness, and Hemon seems to be working out the problems of inheriting the representation of a fictional Other that supplants real others. From these stories, he comes across as a writer not fully convinced of his chosen aesthetic. That may not be a bad thing.

A "To Read" Bonanza from Granta

2010-12-24T11:15:00.000-06:00

Before this slips away from me, I want to make note of Granta issue 113, the Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists, which came out this month. Three Percent has run a series of interviews and excerpts about all of the writers involved--one a day, ending just this past Wednesday. The whole series can be found here.

I'm looking forward to reading the issue soon, and I'm especially excited to see a number of women writers included (although the men well outnumber them). I've noticed that, amid my much increased reading of literature in translation over the past few years, and particularly my reading of translations from Spanish, the reading has nonetheless been dominated by male writers. This has been brought home to me especially by my negative reaction to Marquez's Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores and my biggest beef with Alejandro Zambra's Bonsai (though all in all I've quite enjoyed Zambra's work)--both related to their gender politics.

Perhaps I can begin to correct that this imbalance this coming year, and I hope this issue of Granta helps find some good prospects. (I'm not one to make New Year's resolutions, but maybe reading more women in translation should be one for 2011.) In the wake of all the publicity for her Cervantes Prize win, Ana Maria Matute will certainly be on the list as well, although I haven't decided where to begin.

My Name Is Red

2010-12-18T14:34:00.000-06:00

The last month has been a bit crazy, and it took me longer than I would have liked to finish Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red (1998, trans. from Turkish by Erdağ M. Göknar in 2001). This novel is one of those that have sat on my to-read shelf for a while, but I’m happy to have finally gotten around to it, and luckily it is a novel easy to come back to if you have to put it down after, say, reading the first half over the week of Thanksgiving.

My Name Is Red takes place at the end of the 16th century in Istanbul, where the Sultan has commissioned the creation of a secret book to give as a gift to the West. Amid speculation that the book is illustrated in a style offensive to Islam, one of the miniaturists is murdered. The book opens with this victim speaking from beyond the grave in a chapter titled “I am a Corpse,” and much of the rest of the book concerns the search for his murderer. The “detective,” albeit a somewhat unwilling and unqualified one, is Black Effendi, the nephew of the man in charge of the book’s creation. Black has returned after years of exile in the hope of marrying his cousin, Shekure, and his role in the search for the murderer is more about proving himself to his uncle, Shekure, and the authorities than it is about a desire for justice. Pamuk, like many other authors, takes up the mystery plot and modifies it to make his own literary concoction: Black’s love story and the mystery vie for prominence. The other play on the form lies in Pamuk’s shift in narrators between the chapters, including, as mentioned above, some chapters narrated by the dead, and others narrated by the murderer in a disguised voice.

These multiple voices and the combination of genres are, in many ways, what the novel is most about, as the situations involve extensive reflections and dialogues about the purposes of art. The novel offers a kind of political intrigue around the controversial nature of portraiture, with some factions in the novel opposing painting and illustration of any kind and others, the majority of the characters at the center of the novel, debating the proper role of art. The debate seems fairly simple at first glance: the established line is that illustration may only happen in the mannered style of the “great masters” of tradition, and that its goal is to portray the world as Allah sees it rather than as man sees it. On the opposite side are those who, under the influence of Western artists, have a growing interest in portraiture and realism, and who are thus condemned for privileging man’s perspective on the world over Allah’s, for disregarding tradition in favor of experimentation. But what is most fascinating as the novel goes on is that the distinctions between these opposed sides fall apart: not only do the artists painting in the new style have justifications for how their methods fit into a religious context and serve tradition, but the advocates of tradition themselves acknowledge that art has a history of change rather than a simple passing of tradition, sometimes giving the sense that the idea of tradition is itself just a rhetorical tactic. So many characters give their own slight variations on what they think terms like realism, style, and tradition mean that the novel reveals not so much that these two “sides” are the same thing but that they conflate a much more complicated debate where allies may not believe as similarly as they think and opponents may have a lot in common.

In all of this, the novel’s ideas and form are somewhat boilerplate poststructuralist and postmodernist of varieties that are very familiar by 1998. I think it might be fair to say that there is not a tremendous amount that is new here—although you have to reject the novel’s ideas outright if you uncritically privilege the new over the old without realizing that the new is often a matter of reproducing the old. I think I’ve seen comparisons of this book to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose in its adoption of the mystery plot and medieval religious context for pomo ends, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone dismissed My Name Is Red as being too much the same thing. Nonetheless, as I read on I found myself thinking more and more how the pleasures offered by Pamuk’s novel vary from those of Eco’s, and I wound up valuing it on its own rather than as a way of reliving my enjoyment of the older book through a newer, lesser copy.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

2010-11-17T21:35:00.000-06:00

For a 115-page novella, Gabriel García Márquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004, trans. Edith Grossman 2005) took a long time to finish. I had to make myself get through it. I’m not the kind of person who thinks a writer needs to keep rehashing the same kind of thing throughout his career, so I am at least happy to see Márquez doing something besides the magic realism for which he is most popular in the U.S. Nonetheless, I’m not sure anyone anywhere at this point needs another novel about a man’s relationship to prostitutes.

Sure, Márquez ironizes his narrator: the 90-year-old comes off as having lived a fairly repulsive life, not just frequenting prostitutes and raping his servants but insisting on paying even women who sleep with him of their own accord. The novel, as I take it, is meant to reject this past life in his new-found love for a teenage virgin who he sleeps with, but doesn’t have sex with, every night at a brothel he used to frequent for more expected purposes. This new chaste love, apparently, is the real thing. Except it isn’t really: the young girl is every bit a product of his fantasy as any other relationship. She has no voice in the novel, and the novel doesn’t really draw attention to the way she is silenced.

You could take that description, at least up to the last sentence, and say, well, the novel really is suggesting the narrator is just as bad to the end as he ever was, that his is a false change of heart. I don’t really buy this reading, but even if I did, I’m not sure that it makes the book much better. At this point even a novel fully critiquing this kind of narrator just comes across as self-indulgent masturbatory fantasy.

Last Thoughts on The Last Samurai

2010-11-01T19:44:00.000-05:00

The group read of Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai ended last week, but once again I got caught up in other work, so I want to take a moment to offer that final promised post on the novel, specifically reviewing some of my thoughts on how the issues of risk come back around, especially through the novel’s rumination on suicide. One thing I want to emphasize about this novel is that, despite the feel-good ending (and one big differences of this novel from other postmodern novels is its willingness to offer good old-fashioned closure), it takes quite seriously the idea that suicide is a legitimate way out. In other words, we end with Ludo and Yamamoto (I think?) setting out on a new quest to inspire Sibylla to keep living, but despite this optimistic turn I don’t think the novel rejects Sibylla’s theories about suicide. Moreover, while Ludo’s new quest is inspiring, it doesn’t seem entirely likely to solve the underlying problems he is up against.

First, though, to quote in full a passage I enthused over several weeks ago, the following is one of the earlier indications that Sibylla, beyond feeling the drudgery of her daily existence, has been looking for a way out:

“Four hours have gone by. We have taken the Circle Line around four times. We have been to the toilet twice; L has hopped the length of the platform at Mansion House on one foot and back on the other foot; we have let the train each time at Tower Hill to make faces at the video camera & watch ourselves making faces in the banks of TVs. Or rather—you see yourself in one TV. In the others you do not appear—they show sometimes an empty platform, sometimes a platform with a few people, sometimes a platform with a train pulling around a bend. I think these are images from cameras further down the platform, but they look like glimpses into possible worlds, worlds where the sun rises and the trains run without you. There are pushchairs to be pushed but not by you, bad memories to be dodged but not by you.” (117)

I think even before we get to this last sentence, a kind of romanticism in the description suggests that Sibylla likes the idea of these worlds where she does not exist. I think there is a reference here to the idea of fiction as escapism into other worlds, but the reference works as much to distinguish what Sibylla says as it does to draw a parallel. When people talk about escaping into other worlds in fiction, they usually do so in a way that suggests they would like to imagine themselves as part of that world. Sibylla, by contrast, has no interest in being transported or transformed by fiction; rather, she really likes the idea of not existing at all.

Here we have the reason underlying Sibylla’s constant conversations with people on the tube, conversations that we only get in fragments but aren’t necessarily all that hard to piece together. The basic gist of her repeated argument is that it is better to kill someone than torture them indefinitely, and that by extension people who have a life they find unbearable should be allowed to commit suicide.

By the end of the novel, we get one body of a potential genius father figure who simply could not endure a world of trivialities in the face of extensive suffering, even though he had played a role in alleviating that suffering. His suicide prompts Ludo’s new motivation to help his mother out of her own hole. The ending here is upbeat: the novel affirms the ethics of making other’s lives worth living, and it highlights the role art can play in that ethics. Nonetheless, it hardly rejects Sibylla’s logic in favor of suicide itself, and it can’t, really, if it is to keep its high stakes.

I have to wonder, though, if Ludo’s gambit at the end can finally offer more than a temporary reprieve. He’s up against much bigger problems: not just Sibylla’s sulkiness but the forces behind it concerning risk and success in an economy that favors exploitation and the accumulation of money over concern for others and personal fulfillment. These are where all the threads of the novel come together: all these father figures ranging from the uncaring to the caring, and Sibylla’s own fear of getting trapped in a cycle of greed that will lead her away from the pursuit of better things and a more caring relation to the world. In a world of risk, how can you find a way to support yourself and live in a way that you can love? She says it best: “Once you’ve got one motel you can always get another, said Sib. And if you can get another you can’t really pass up that kind of opportunity” (512). That quote says everything about what Sibylla is running from, only to have run into a life where she has to scrape to get by and can’t pursue what she wants any more than if she went back to the U.S. and managed her family’s motel chain.

Ludo’s ending imagines that this problem can be solved by an act of love through art, but the rest of the novel betrays this ending by clueing us in to the broader forces of capitalism and the workaday world that ultimately create the choice to exploit or be exploited—misery for the those with ethical ideals either way. I don’t mean to say that I think the novel fails—far from it. What it does so well, so beautifully, and indeed so lovingly, though, is show the scope of what art can and cannot do. Absolutely art must inspire us to live, and absolutely we need other things to make us less desirous of deathly, empty platforms where no one waits for the train.

Thanks to those of you who read and commented during the group read. I hope you'll stick around!

The Last Samurai Week Five: Around and Around We Go

2010-10-21T21:57:00.000-05:00

I had planned to write about risk and death this week, but I finished The Last Samurai and it now seems like it will be easier to talk about those issues next week when the group read wraps up. Briefly, that left me wondering exactly what I was going to write about this time around, simply because the current section has us in something of a holding pattern with its repetition: Ludo continues to search out and interview new potential father figures. Each one has a personal history that merges with the last at places and diverges in others. I enjoyed them all, but what to say?

Then I realized that this repetition was exactly what I should write about. One thing that strikes me about the last half of the narrative is that it highlights, simultaneously, this book’s place in a picaresque tradition that goes back to the origins of the novel and its connection to postmodernism through an emphasis on repetition and, through the overlaps and distinctions between these various men’s lives, a refusal to offer any one coherent idea of what makes a man, or father, or person (or whatever other category you want to consider here).

The role of the picaresque in the early novel is easy enough to see here: the episodic nature of the story, where each episode repeats a certain kind of plot structure, featuring a wandering narrator. The way the picaresque seeded the nineteenth-century bildungsroman likewise: each of Ludo’s encounters seems to develop his personality, or at least his sense of what would make a good father and why he might want one, a little farther, educating him in the varieties of humanity.

Nonetheless, this same repetition feels very postmodern, precisely in this last insistence on variety that perpetually undermines any settled idea about what people—or a certain type of person, like “the genius”—are like: each repetition changes our perception of the last and of the whole, destabilizing our ability to say anything with much certainty. As we go on, DeWitt refuses any easy generalizations: genius does not automatically make you crass and indifferent to other people (what people sometimes think of as the autistic model of genius), as it may seem early in this last part (I’m thinking of Yamamoto and HC, but Sibylla qualifies as well); neither does it mean you are going to do anything good for other people or even yourself (taking us back to what I discussed in my first post on risk: genius doesn’t necessarily get you anywhere). Likewise, there is not really any one thing that Ludo or anyone else could expect from a father. There are only various versions of what people might be like, versions compounded by the stories they and others tell: one of the repeated structures here is that Ludo hears/tells one version of a biography, and then hears a different version from the celebrity father figure.

These narrative recursions in Ludo’s last long chapter are not the only way repetition comes up in this novel. We have Sibylla and Ludo riding the tube endlessly on the Circle Line, and we have Yamamoto’s aesthetic theory of the necessity of repetition in order to see differently—beauty needs a background of banality. While the painter, Mr. Watkins, might seem to offer a different theory, his search for the intensity of color also draws deeply on the context in which we see color—that is the relation of specific moments of vision to many others, and the relation among the colors themselves. In the book, the various men, likewise, only mean something in relation to one another, the stories told about them, and the fictional men from the screen with whom Ludo has grown up: their differences make for meanings, but also for their startling singularities for the fascination of the reader.

DeWitt Group Read Week Four: Genius and Ethics in The Last Samurai

2010-10-13T20:32:00.000-05:00

I’m still continuing apace with the reading schedule for the group read of Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, and the book gets more and more fascinating as we continue with Ludo’s narration of his discover of his father and attempt to find a better one once he realizes who exactly it is. I have a lot to say, but in this post I’ll try to stick to the story of HC and RD and how it moves the book’s meditation on genius and ethics forward.

The story of HC and RD (Hugh Carey and Raymond Drecker) follows the description of Yamamoto and the story in the prologue as one of these little morsels of morsels of relatively conventional narrative DeWitt feeds us throughout the novel, all perfectly delightful but interrupting the narrative for long stretches. As with the previous stories, this one tells the stories of other geniuses—but if the Yamamoto story raised the question of genius and ethics then this one raises a problem of definition. Both HC and RD are geniuses of sorts, but HC knows more about how to make people think you are a genius by jumping through all the appropriate hoops; indeed, he has to teach RD how to jump through the hoops by cutting off RD’s own form of genius that wants to refuse the temptation of ever trivializing a philosophical question by answering it in a short form that might, say, fit on an exam form. RD, following Plato (321), thinks of this kind of practical framing of genius as a scam—rhetorical dishonesty against the philosopher’s honesty. I expected RD to be favored here—a distinction of real genius rather than self-serving celebrity—and to some extent that plays out in the story Sibylla tells. However, it becomes apparent very soon that HC is completely correct that RD would never get anywhere if he didn’t make some concessions for the academic game of chess HC teaching him to negotiate, and HC turns out correct again when RD stops playing the game and winds up just working on a dictionary rather than on big philosophical questions. Indeed, the story Sibylla tells basically romanticizes HC from there as he pursues his big adventure.

When Ludo encounters HC at the latter’s home, though, he first notices the surprising glamour of someone known for a commitment to a rugged life, and by the end of his encounter seems to put HC right back into the camp of the rhetorician—someone who only wants to be a celebrity. Notably one of the things motivating his rejection of HC as a father figure echoes Yamamoto’s story: HC, like Yamamoto, has a completely crass lack of feeling about the suffering he has seen and even perhaps inflicted on the tribal group he tracked down. Ludo, walking away from the house in what comes across as a blend of anger, fear, and loss, laments, “He had not killed to learn those moodless verbs and uninflected nouns, but he had brought a slave into existence for their sake” (358). This passage, building off the Yamamoto story, really begins to suggest a postcolonial critique of the resources a certain kind of genius exploits, on whose lives it builds its glory. Yamamoto, like HC, transforms his genius into spectacle on the basis of a lack of response to brutality and his treatment of other people as a natural resource for their personal exploitation (notably, neither tribe wants to give up the private cultural knowledge, whether language or musical ceremony, that the geniuses finally obtain).

Three observations about the way this plays out. First, I was a little surprised that Sibylla had a romanticized view of HC, given that she seems more committed to RD’s perspective. Her commitment to real genius without shortcuts or showy accomplishments comes out in her watching and interpretation of Kurosawa’s films, and, indeed, when Ludo hears the story of HC and immediately wants to follow in his footsteps by becoming the youngest person admitted to Oxford in classics, Sibylla has no interest and tries to dissuade him. Second, coming out of his encounter with HC, Ludo seems to have developed a sense of humanity and decency that Sibylla doesn’t exhibit in her unreflective admiration of Yamamoto. A sense of other people’s welfare is not something Ludo has exhibited much previously. Third and finally, if HC and RD both wind up being right about the other’s limitations, DeWitt has left us wondering what a genius is to do to avoid their respective paths. Will Ludo find a different way?

Next post (hopefully with less time in between!), I’d like to return to that passage, which I referred to previously, where Sibylla looks at the security video screens and tie it to the questions of risk I began talking about in my first post. As I have read on, I have started to rethink my initial reaction in my last post that this problem of risk had disappeared as the novel continues; rather, I think it may transform into the issue of life and death that repeatedly comes up—for example, in Sibylla’s conversations with strangers.

Unfinished Thoughts for Week Two of The Last Samurai

2010-10-01T07:45:00.000-05:00

I’ve been swamped by work and a few other things recently, but I did finish this week’s reading for the ongoing group read of The Last Samurai and would like to get down a few bullet points at least.

First, I also managed to finish watching Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. DeWitt offers summary of tidbits from the first part of the film (but only the first part so far) in the novel itself. Is seeing the movie essential to reading the book? That might depend on what you mean by essential. No, to the extent that as far as we’ve read, I don’t think a lack of knowledge of the film could impede an enjoyment of the book. Yes, to the extent that a viewing of the film would inevitably allow at least some connections in terms of theme, etc., that you probably couldn’t get only from Sibylla’s summary. One very broad connection I am finding between the two is the sense of humor despite serious situations.

I will also say, though I’m not sure yet if I agree Sibylla’s reading of the film is correct, that she is right about one thing: that woman on the tube who thinks Seven Samurai is about an elite band didn’t watch the film (p. 128 in my edition).

After last week’s reading, the passages emphasizing chance have dropped off some, although obviously parenting is still front and center as a focus through the end of chapter ii. Or rather: Sibylla’s increasingly apparent dislike for parenting. She extracts some promises for good behavior that Ludo finds his way around without recrimination, and then of course she doesn’t even notice for an unknown amount of time that he leaves the Yamamoto performance, and talks herself out of being upset about it. She really does not like having to say no to him. At the same time, his walk home and his turn toward self-tutoring is already making her superfluous, and she seems to feel that lack of need when she keeps looking for something to offer to his understanding of Japanese. Is her rewatching of Kurosawa at the end of this section a moment of grasping for stability?

What do we do with this Yamamoto business, anyway? I felt like Yamamoto’s discussion of fragmentation and repetition comes across as a sincere description of what great art should do. Partially I buy it because of what his performance does to Sibylla; also, though, it appears to fit the aesthetic of the book. For example, while I think the writing here is great, I wouldn’t call most of the prose “lyrical”; but every once in a while we get a burst of lyricism that stands out precisely because of its placement amongst the other voices in the text. My favorite so far is Sibylla’s description of looking at herself among many images on the tube security monitors (p. 117, go read the whole thing), which I take to be a reflection on our engagement with books. (Actually, maybe I’ll say more about this another time, because as a possible reflection on how or why we would read, the passage is fascinatingly morbid.) Nonetheless, the artist who expounds this style can’t be bothered to care about the genocide he has witnessed first-hand, and his exemplary viewer (Sibylla) ignores the basic needs of her own child to feel the effect of the performance. I guess at least in the book equivalent, the reader can choose when to take a break.

The Last Samurai: Parenting as Risky Business

2010-09-23T22:13:00.000-05:00

This week begins the new group read of Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai. Scott Esposito over at Conversational Reading is leading the effort: you can find the schedule here and Scott’s initial thoughts here. Scott’s post does a nice job of introducing some of the various threads of the novel. After saying a little about the prologue, I would like to expand on the discussion of chance he started, a motif that so far seems to draw together everything else for me.

Very briefly: so far, we have a prologue that tells the story of Sibylla’s father, and a first chapter that introduces her life with her gifted son Ludo. Sibylla’s father (I think unnamed so far, but maybe I just missed it) was an atheist genius admitted by Harvard at 15 but conned by his minister father into going to theological school instead so he could “give the other side a fair chance.” Sibylla tells this part of her story with much more continuity and cohesion than she can later. Indeed, the beginning reads almost like a fairy tale, with a twist of realism, when her father meets the three Deans, both because of the relatively straightforward and simple style of this section and the “rule of three” structure that leads to his admission at the third school. Again, though, more realistically: his is no “just right” fit, but one that comes from finding an administrator relatively less intellectually honest and more interested in the tuition money he can charge. More amusing, and with a happier (apparently) outcome, is her father’s run-in with an archetypal pool-hall confidence man, in which he actually beats the confidence man. Another twist on myth: the overcome opponent or obstacle that results in a magical gift—insider investment advice.

Much of this already introduces the idea of chance: give the other side a chance, con men, investments. The grandfather’s insistence that the father “give the other side a chance” may at first glance seem to be using the word chance in a different way than would apply to the narrator’s obsession with numbers and odds: the grandfather really means that the father should treat the debate over religion honestly by grappling with the best minds in the field. However, the grandfather himself is playing a con game, as the father later realizes to his own dismay. Indeed, the reason he accepts this challenge has nothing to do with the logic of his grandfather’s statement but with emotion: “Something looked through my grandfather’s beautiful eyes. Something spoke with his beautiful voice.” The use of “Something” here is a way of indicating something non-logical, perhaps sadness or desperation or just a sense of paternal obligation, and this Something, along with “a very delicate sense of honor,” drives the father. Here, and in the way the grandfather successfully convinces the father that the first two Deans are wrong that he could give a fair chance while still going to Harvard, we see the grandfather loading the dice, playing the father’s sense of honor so that it short-circuits logic (“The beautiful voice pointed out…that of course my father must decide for himself”).

Or perhaps the father knows all along: given that he never goes to class once he gets to theology school, his honor may have less to do with giving a fair fight than with a sense of filial duty: either way he gets conned, and so it is interesting that the story’s next major turn comes with his triumph over a con man. In return, what does he get from the con man? Insider advice on land investments: a way to hedge against chance that he does, apparently, then use to make a fortune on a motel chain. Sibylla herself borrows from this tradition when she lies to improve her chances of getting into Oxford, so perhaps one of the things that most ties the first three generations of this family together is not just an obsession with numbers and odds, but a willingness to skew odds in their own favor.

The obsession over chance leads, for me, to some of the funnier passages in the book. For example, here is another brief story told about the father:

In later years my father sometimes played a game. He’d meet a man on his way to Mexico and he’d say, Here’s fifty bucks, do me a favor and buy me some lottery tickets, and he’d give the man his card. Say the odds against winning the jackpot were 20 million to 1 and the odds against the man giving my father the winning ticket another 20 million to 1, you couldn’t say my father’s life was ruined because there was a 1 in 400 trillion chance that it wasn’t.

This is absurd, even given the situation of the game. In what way can you say someone’s life is ruined if they don’t win the lottery, or even if they don’t get the money when someone else wins the lottery on their behalf? The logic, or illogic, becomes clearer at the end of the next paragraph, which describes a variation on the game for European travel. Sibylla writes,

Whatever [the odds] were [of getting the money from the stranger, etc.] it was not absolutely impossible but only highly unlikely, and it was not absolutely certain that my grandfather had destroyed him because there was a 1 in 500 trillion trillion chance that he had not.

My father played the game for a long time because he felt he should give my grandfather a sporting chance.

Aside from its humorous and rococo logic (or even because of it), this passage is revealing—and surprising—because it (along with a more vague passage two pages later) suggests the father’s obsession with chance really has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with a continuing filial piety after realizing his father’s betrayal. First of all, he wants a reconciliation with his father enough to hope that getting rich through some unlikely series of events will mean that his grandfather didn’t ruin him by derailing him from Harvard (an easier path to, or better chance for, financial success). But this passage also seems to suggest that he thinks the occurrence of something extremely unlikely but still possible would vindicate his grandfather’s religious belief. The thinking here echoes religious arguments, particularly the kind you hear about intelligent design (the chances of the development of the eye or some other organ).

All of this echoes with Sibylla’s story once we get into the first chapter: her own guilt about not telling Ludo’s father he has a son and her recurrent idea to bring them together, her obsession with chance and the way certain events seem to shape later ones (I say seem because some of her chains of cause and effect feel rather like fancy). Moreover, I think the motif of chance may have something to do with what Scott called the suspicion that “the narrator tries too hard not to block the genius in her own son.” Is this novel, ultimately, going to be about the obsession with creating chances for children? Certainly Ludo seems to have better chances than most to be a genius on his own merits, but is the way Sibylla relates to his potential really so different than many parents (c.f. Baby Einstein or whatever the current fad may be)?

I think you can turn this to a more historical interpretation too: we aren't just reading about parenting, but parenting in a very modern economy of risk unlike, say, the world of the grandfather, who has no interest in his son’s chances for economic success. I will be interested to see how these themes develop as the novel goes forward.

How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

2010-09-16T21:29:00.000-05:00

Julia Alvarez runs a risk opposite the one causing the problems with Acosta I discussed some weeks ago: rather than offending for the wrong reasons, she comes very close to being too subdued, and even grateful to the American dream in a way that might not challenge her middle class readership enough. And a couple of the individual chapters in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents do perhaps come across as a little too composed, with too much closure and pat metaphorical significance. Nonetheless, as a whole I came away from the book having enjoyed it, largely because as it continues Alvarez increasingly interrogates the García family’s privilege in contrast to many immigrants (or others who cannot immigrate). The novel moves back in time to the family’s beginnings in the Dominican Republic, and the family’s treatment of their servants in that context is not always laudible. I didn’t always like the extent to which the novel focused on Yolanda/Yoyo, perhaps a too transparent stand-in for Alvarez (emphasized by her name’s Yo/I equivalence). However, the contrast between her relatively ignorant privilege in the first chapter when she returns to the D.R. as a grown-up and her comments on what she owes to the D.R. from her childhood in the final chapter create an interesting tension in the book: narratively, she progresses to an understanding that who she has grown up to be has a good deal of privilege due to her class and her move to the U.S., even as the most grown up version of her we see does not exhibit much of that understanding.

This makes for an interesting rough edge to the novel’s portrayal of the immigrant move. She does, perhaps, push back against any readers who would complain, like I do above, about the “American dream” aspect to novel, by showing how substantial the differences of freedom are for women. Yolanda’s mother, in a chapter that takes place just a couple of years after the family’s move, already does not want to move back even after the political situation improves: “But Laura had gotten used to the life here. She did not want to go back to the old country where, de la Torre or not, she was only a wife and a mother (and a failed one at that, since she had never provided the required son). Better an independent nobody than a high-class houseslave.” Even if she is sometimes ashamed of what her daughters do with their freedom, Mami does ultimately want it for them. Still, Alvarez acknowledges that this freedom, while desirable, allows for a certain kind of ignorance to develop in those that have it. The introductory story, in which Yolanda returns with her family to the D.R. portrays her as having a confidence she wouldn’t have developed otherwise, but it leads her to behave in ways that betray a unthinking class superiority with consequences for the people she runs across (she manages to get one little kid beaten up). Unfortunately, I’m guessing the individual episodes of the novel seem extractable enough that they get published as individual stories for classroom collections, and perhaps also were to market the book in magazines—fine for marketing, but bad in that I think a lot of the critique that develops through the novel’s organization gets lost if you just read some of the earlier stories on their own.

Hire Some Librarians, Please

2010-09-09T13:07:00.000-05:00

Over at Salon, Laura Miller sums up some of the search problems plaguing Google Books and interviews Geoffrey Nunberg, who raised the issues last year:

Nunberg, a linguist interested in how word usage changes over time, noticed "endemic" errors in Google Books, especially when it comes to publication dates. A search for books published before 1950 and containing the word "Internet" turned up the unlikely bounty of 527 results. Woody Allen is mentioned in 325 books ostensibly published before he was born.

Other errors include misattributed authors -- Sigmund Freud is listed as a co-author of a book on the Mosaic Web browser and Henry James is credited with writing "Madame Bovary." Even more puzzling are the many subject misclassifications: an edition of "Moby Dick" categorized under "Computers," and "Jane Eyre" as "Antiques and Collectibles" ("Madame Bovary" got that label, too).

It appears that Google, of all places, is having problems understanding the function of metadata, though the root problem may be the outsourcing of scanning and data entry to anyone who wants to do it, no matter how little training. Note to Google: I love this project, but please hire some librarians instead of outsourcing the work to Armenia.

(h/t The Millions)

The Private Lives of Trees

2010-09-08T17:52:00.000-05:00

Julián lulls the little girl to sleep with “The Private Lives of Trees,” an ongoing story he’s made up to tell her at bedtime. The protagonists are a poplar tree and a baobab tree, who, at night, when no one can see them, talk about photosynthesis, squirrels, or the many advantages of being trees and not people or animals or, as they put it themselves, stupid hunks of cement.

This paragraph opens Alejandro Zambra’s The Private Lives of Trees, just published in July by Open Letter with a beautiful translation by Megan McDowell, and, just as when I read his first novel Bonsai, the literary precursor that came to mind is Kurt Vonnegut. This is right out of Vonnegut’s descriptions of his fictional author Kilgore Trout’s sci-fi novels: imagine one of Trout’s stories featuring aliens visiting or observing Earth. The only difference in this passage, as I suggested in that previous post, is slightly more direct sympathy for the characters: Vonnegut would have used that last blunt assessment to describe the humans, something like “dumb hunks of meat.” In fact, just two pages later Zambra gives us the more cynical, while still compassionate, statement that also could come straight from Vonnegut: “Sometimes Fernando is a blot on Daniela’s life, but who isn’t, at times, a blot on someone else’s life.” Yes. And: ouch. Still, I don’t want to overplay the Vonnegut connection: Zambra may have absorbed some of the earlier writer’s formal trappings, but he makes them his own, blending them with a deeper investigation of the internal hopes and fears of his characters in romantic and family life.

The Private Lives of Trees is just a little longer than the previous novel, but still only takes about two hours to read. For me, it is the stronger book, dropping some of the more hackneyed ways of thinking about heterosexual romance and building on the strengths of the first. Here, Julián is watching over his step-daughter, Daniela, and waiting for his wife Verónica to come home from her art class. She is late, and then later, and as the evening passes he thinks about her ex-husband, Fernando, his own ex-girlfriend Karla, his writing, and how Daniela might react to it when she grows up. This is a novel about waiting for someone to arrive, and the thoughts we have while waiting—a far less creepy cousin to David Lynch’s recent (brilliant) film Inland Empire.

Moreover, one of the novel’s two epigrams comes from Georges Perec, and so the novel is also a play off of the Oulipian literary tradition of artificial constraints. Early on, and occasionally throughout, the narrator tells us, after recounting the routine of Julián’s evenings with Verónica,

But this night is not an average night, at least not yet. It’s still not completely certain that there will be a next day, since Verónica hasn’t come back from her drawing class. When she returns, the novel will end. But as long as she is not back, the book will continue. The book continues until she returns, or until Julián is sure that she won’t return.

There is some ambiguity to this passage, and irony to the Oulipian constraint it proposes. First of all, the novel is slightly ambiguous as to who is speaking or thinking here: is “the novel” Julián’s bedtime story for Daniela, his novel, or the narrator’s novel? More basically, is Julián or the narrator creating this constraint? Without giving away the end of Zambra’s novel, it can be said quite easily that Julián stops telling the bedtime story very early, and hardly works on his own novel at all. Does this suggest, slyly, that he has given up on Verónica right from the start, all his thoughts for the remaining pages a kind of elegy for the relationship? Second, as a reader of Zambra’s novel, I can only look on the Oulipian commitment as an ironic one: because Julián and Verónica are themselves fictional characters under the control of a writer, the constraint of ending the novel when one doesn’t show up or the other gives up is also a fiction. The supposed constraint is both an authorial decision and a disguise for authorial decision, and so Zambra’s use of it strikes me as tongue-in-cheek.

You don’t need to pick up on the stylistic or explicit allusions in The Private Lives of Trees to enjoy it. The novel does such a wonderful job of eliciting the experience of a mind avoiding its own conclusions that anyone will simply enjoy following Julián’s thoughts and reading McDowell’s beautiful translation of Zambra’s prose. This book, more than Bonsai, shows why Zambra has become the rising star of Chilean literature others have reported him to be.

FreE-Book

2010-09-02T12:49:00.002-05:00

Here's some fun: Throughout September, the University of Chicago Press is giving away e-book copies of their facsimile of the original 1906 Chicago Manual of Style. In addition, they will be giving away a new e-book each month (I believe the link in the previous sentence will go to whatever the current book happens to be).

It looks like the real amusement in the facsimile hides out in the Appendix advice to copyeditors and their fellow workers. The relationship between the (male) proofreader and his (female) copyholder (who, it appears, reads the original to the proofreader while he reviews his copy) is well-regulated. For him, we have such statements as "Let her work out her own salvation" and "She likes to, and can do it." She is reminded, "you are the housekeeper of the proof-room."

[Update, as I'm on the subject of free books: I just want to add a quick thanks to John Williams, who has been giving away a few books as part of a fascinating focus on William James over at The Second Pass. Courtesy of John, I'll be receiving a copy of a collection of William James's essays, The Heart of William James. I look forward to reading it.]

Housekeeping

2010-09-01T19:47:00.000-05:00

I should say up front that I approached Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980) warily. She is someone whose work enough people in my field respect that I ought to have some familiarity with it, but most of the references I have seen or heard have placed her fiction in one of two broad genres I do not tend to enjoy: nature writing and religious writing.

And up until the last two chapters, I have to say I did find the book quite dull, although not entirely for the reasons I had feared. Briefly, the novel focuses on a girl on the verge of puberty, Ruthie (and to a lesser extent her sister Lucille), whose grandfather and mother die in dramatic circumstances. Left in the care of their grandmother, then two great aunts, then their mother’s sister Sylvie, Ruthie and Lucille lose their sense of connection to society. Sylvie herself, still reeling from her own unvanquished grief over her father’s death, does very little except encourage them to embrace a quasi-oblivion in nature and outside the reach of their rural community.

Against the proclamations of Robinson’s lyricism, I found the prose stale, even in the nature scenes where you might expect some transcendental sparkle. Granted, some of this may be due to the novel’s focus on a variety of grief that completely immobilizes you and then transforms you into an outcast. Still, one of the consolations, even payoffs, of this grief is supposed to be a freedom and a curiosity about nature that should come across more beautifully; but, in the inevitable go-to-nature climactic chapter, when Sylvie does finally take Ruthie out on the lake to a place that, she claims, is “really very pretty,” nature feels quite uninteresting.

Strangely enough, it was when the book took a sudden, temporary turn towards religious didacticism late in the book that Robinson’s style suddenly had some lyrical pull. Here is the first paragraph of the penultimate chapter:

Cain murdered Abel, and blood cried out from the earth; the house fell on Job’s children, and a voice was induced or provoked into speaking from a whirlwind; and Rachel mourned for her children; and King David for Absalom. The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory—there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.

Reading this, I can understand why Robinson has made something of a name for herself as an essayist defending religious humanism. I have no inclination to agree with her viewpoints as they come across in this novel (I suppose Robinson is not the first to take priestly commitments to poverty and turn them into a romance of wasting away), but she works so well with the sudden flourish of allusions to various families in the Old Testament that I could finally, late in the novel, be swept up in her prose. The last image of Eve is so grotesque as to be beautiful.

As a final aside for those who like Housekeeping: I do recommend you read Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s 1822 novel A New-England Tale, which seems to me an implicit reference throughout Robinson’s novel. Sedgwick’s story is a religious fiction with a view of nature verging on what would become Emerson’s transcendentalism. In it, a young girl orphaned when her parents die ends up in the care of an aunt. Sylvie, however, seems modeled less on the aunt than on “Crazy Bet,” a wild woman and vagrant tolerated by the community, who becomes a guiding spirit for the protagonist Jane.

Rex

2010-08-24T09:03:00.001-05:00

José Manuel Prieto’s Rex (trans. Esther Allen) is my most recent read from the Best Translated Book Award 2010 longlist, and it is the best yet. (You can see my thoughts on Juan Filloy’s Op Oloop here; I read Mercè Rodoreda's Death in Spring before I began this blog, but I do highly recommend it, and not just for what might be the best book cover of all time.) To paraphrase Chad Post over at Three Percent, it may be an injustice to try to review this novel without reading it at least twice, but I’m going to try.

Rex opens with an act of devotion on the part of the narrator, a somewhat crazed admirer of Proust: “I’ve been reading it for years, the one Book.” The Book, In Search of Lost Time, is never mentioned directly, nor is Proust, who is referred to only as the Writer. And the best way of describing the tone of the whole novel is to say that it emerges out of religious fervor and ecstatic mysticism. The Writer increasingly comprises other authors, as if a deity were behind them, something like Emerson’s Over-soul except that only geniuses have it, not everyone. The narrator’s obsession with this figure can only be expressed indirectly; in fact he is so dazzled by his literary obsession and his opulent surroundings (see below) that he can rarely narrate anything in a straightforward manner.

The general situation of the book goes something like this: the narrator has been hired by a Russian couple to tutor their son, Petya, at their extravagant home on the Spanish Mediterranean coast. The place drips diamonds, and the narrator suspects the family of being on the run from the Russian mob. Indeed they are: the father, Vasily, a scientist, has developed a method for creating fake diamonds that look authentic using normal testing, and he has sold loads of them to a couple of gangsters. As the novel proceeds, the narrator gets sucked into participation in the household scheming over how best to evade retribution.

The complications of the novel include thick allusions, though many specific references are not necessary for comprehension and Prieto provides an Author’s Note specifying many of his sources. (I was happy to have read the second volume of Proust recently, as there are several references to it.) More challenging is the sentence-level style, which, as I wrote above, gains a stilted quality from the narrator’s mystified devotion to writing and to wealth. Here is a sample paragraph from early in the book, involving the narrator’s first glimpse of a (fake, unbeknownst to him) diamond necklace worn by Petya’s mother, Nelly:

Without my being able to take a step or rather drop to the ground, return to earth, my feet a handsbreadth above the carpet, then falling slowly back down onto it, still plunged in my astonishment. All right: I’d noticed, I knew they were fabulously rich, but…that necklace! Diamonds, without a shadow of a doubt. Because if once in your life you’ve paid attention, if ever you’ve seen a diamond, you won’t mistake one for anything else, Petya. Just as it’s enough for me to read a single page by the Writer, a single paragraph: how it glows, how it scintillates! And I’m not the type to say—as I know some people would, affording themselves the pleasure of stupidly proclaiming: So what? Diamonds? What do I want diamonds for? Why would I pay for a diamond if it’s all the same—you know?—as a piece of cut crystal. I, a reader of the Book, was better prepared.

The most characteristic sentence-level mark here lies in the fragments, or collection of fragments, in the first sentence. In many parts the narrator can only write in a string of fragments that read as the equivalent of watching slow-motion proceed through a series of barely-related frames of film. This form marks either his own mystification, his attempt to mystify his implied reader (who is Petya, at least most of the time), or both. It calls into question his sanity and suggests his own duplicities: a narrator unreliable in multiple, overlapping ways that continuously complicate one-another. His sense that the Book has universal applicability and moral authority, speaking to all situations across time, is only the least of his strangenesses, and some of the humor as the book goes on comes from watching him strain to make his fiction a workable one. In the passage above, the actual falseness of the diamonds already bounces back to undermine the narrator’s authority on all things authentic, and thus, ultimately, his ideas about authentic art.

The resulting sense that he and the people around him are often their own dupes seems to me very much at the heart of what Rex contemplates. In his Author’s Note, Prieto writes something that seems, at first, surprising: that the novel is first and foremost a “post-totalitarian” novel, which is to say it is about life after the end of a totalitarian regime (here communist Russia). What I think he refers to is the crazed scramble for security in the moments after collapse, everyone conning everyone else in a bid to gain some stability in whatever new order arises, and everyone ready to believe in myths of a better life to come, a sudden transformation into utopia. Reading this novel, you should be prepared to disbelieve many of the things various characters profess to believe and even to wonder how anyone could believe them, but these delusions are, I think, the point. Anyone who puts Rex down early due to what appears to be unrealistic characterization will miss a truly outstanding reading experience. Chad Post’s review mentions Nabokov; expanding on this, I would say the result of Prieto’s imagined world is a book that reads as if Proust and Nabokov collaborated on the novelization of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. It is a book with tragedy and humor, but with both buried under a style that ducks and weaves, creating surreal effects out of the narrator’s at once duplicitous and naïve, utopian and fearful, perspective on the world.

The Nicest Way of Saying No

2010-08-18T15:09:00.000-05:00

I have been busy with other things, but I am making my way through José Manuel Prieto's Rex and hope to post on it soon. (Short version: amazing!)

In the meantime, I give you this hilarious excerpt from a live recording of Laurie Anderson in Madison, Wisconsin (10/29/04—my transcription):

I had an idea to do an opera based on the novel Gravity’s Rainbow. So I wrote to the author, Thomas Pynchon, and I made this proposal. And I could just see Slothrop and all the characters caught up in these chords and notes and music. And I described how it all might work. And I didn’t think that I would ever hear from him because he was such a famous recluse. But actually, he did finally write back, and he said that he would be so glad and honored to have an opera made by me and based on Gravity’s Rainbow and how much he loved the idea and that he had only one condition. And that was: that the entire opera would be scored for a single instrument, and that instrument would be—the banjo.

I mean can you imagine like a whole opera, like two or three acts of solid, wall-to-wall, solo banjo and the overture, all the arias, the choruses, you know, the one instrument. And—and some people have the nicest way of saying: No. No. No. Not over my dead body.

Revolt of the Cockroach People

2010-08-10T09:11:00.000-05:00

I have little to say about Oscar Zeta Acosta’s novel The Revolt of the Cockroach People. My understanding is that it is thinly-disguised autobiography, a reading encouraged by the back of the Vintage edition and Marco Acosta’s afterward. For those who do not know, Acosta was a Chicano lawyer defending protesters and dissidents during the (at times more, at times less) militant Chicano movement in Los Angeles. He is most famous now as the character Dr. Gonzo in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Johnny Depp plays him in the film version. Indeed, Revolt reads much like a New Journalist’s account of the 1960s Chicano struggle.

As that kind of journalism, the novel does decent work giving the mood of the moment. Nonetheless, I found it mostly unreadable and a failure in terms of the propaganda Acosta wants it to be. Acosta’s brand of Chicano nationalism leads him to fight a number of worthy battles, and I am more than willing to forgive a certain amount of over-the-top rhetoric that goes along with his work. Nonetheless, misogyny and homophobia overrun the narrative, echoing much of the work in the Black Arts Movement of the same decade (I’m thinking of Amiri Baraka especially, although Acosta perhaps goes even further in offense). Everyone opposing his cause is a fag—justifiable class resentment is conflated with unjustifiable homophobia at every moment. Every woman exists to be fucked (and, he lets us know, isn’t really a woman until she is fucked) and, of course, finds him irresistible. The only political posture Acosta and his allies know is machismo. The best thing about the point where Chicano politics meets literature these days is that such a stance has been left behind for the defter, because more open to difference and alliance, critiques of writers like Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga.

Bonsai

2010-08-04T12:35:00.000-05:00

Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai (trans. Carolina de Robertis) is a pleasure to read (and so quickly too), although given the enthusiastic reviews I had seen previously I was bound to be at least a little let down. I will say this up front: the novel has, despite its generally ironic take on romance, an honest-to-goodness mothering prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold. It may be that Zambra pokes fun at Julio’s initiation via prostitute (although it didn’t seem especially so), but there is no question that the prostitute gives herself over to Julio’s “education.” It is a rather hackneyed moment, doubly dull in a novel that is otherwise so full of humor and insight.

Briefly, Bonsai tells the story of a short romance between two literature students, Emilia and Julio, a romance based largely on their deliberate refusal to see the differences between themselves and a lie about a mutual love of Proust, whom neither of them has read. It is also about the after-life of that romance, with the novella moving around in time, revealing key plot events early or moving back in time to discuss the lovers’ sexual prehistory. Reviews have mentioned other sources for thinking of the genealogy of Zambra’s metafiction, but a name I have not seen is Kurt Vonnegut. The rehearsal of future plot events, the prose in short fragments, the overall sense of absurdity: all of these remind me of him, although Zambra’s sentences run a shade longer and offer, perhaps, slightly more direct sympathy for the characters despite questions about how seriously they can be taken. Here is one fragment from early on:

The relationship between Emilia and Julio was riddled with truths, with intimate revelations that rapidly established a complicity that they wanted to understand as definitive. This, then, is a light story that turns heavy. This is the story of two students who are enthusiasts of truth, of scattering sentences that seem true, of smoking eternal cigarettes, and of closing themselves into the intense complacency of those who think they are better, purer than others, than that immense and contemptible group known as the others.
They quickly learned to read the same things, to think similarly, and to conceal their differences. Very soon they formed a conceited intimacy. At least during that time, Julio and Emilia managed to merge into a single kind of mass. They were, in short, happy. There is no doubt about that.

The novella is full of these little asides rephrasing and undermining a thought that might at first seem unreservedly idealistic: instead of “truth” they want to “scatter[] sentences that seem true.” The last sentence, “There is no doubt about that,” is a zinger—one of the places I thought of Vonnegut: it reads like “So it goes” or another of his brief refrains that says, at once, that what has been narrated is predictable, absurd, and bound to end badly. Nonetheless, at the same time the absurdity of literary lies and romance continues (if Julio’s relationship with Emilia began with a lie about reading, a later relationship begins with a lie that he is editing the book of a famous author), Zambra studs the humor with compassion. I’m looking forward to reading his second novel, The Private Lives of Trees, just published this summer.

After Henry

2010-07-30T17:29:00.000-05:00

By the standards of Joan Didion’s other collections of journalism, After Henry (1993) is not that great, although it has some strong individual essays and would be a satisfying enough read if it were the first Didion I encountered. It did not help that I had previously read Political Fictions, which reprints one and expands on another of the three essays in the Washington section of After Henry—the one really strong section in the book. I will grant that the opening, eponymous tribute to Henry Robbins is one of the better personal essays of hers that I have read: Didion is usually best covering subcultures, politics, or crime. Regarding the last, “L.A. Noir” is a hilarious and brutal smack-down of what Didion describes as the nonsensical news coverage of a 1983 murder. Otherwise, the California section felt a little ho-hum.

The final New York section’s sole essay, “Sentimental Journeys,” also the longest essay in the book, is a more complicated treatment of the various narratives rising up around a particular Central Park rape. In many ways in echoes “L.A. Noir” in its indictment of the media, but here matters are complicated by race, by gender, by class, by the particularities of New York politics. I found myself generally admiring the essay—Didion is especially good at showing how the media and city obsessed over the crime as a way of avoiding other realities, including realities of rape and the tendency to ignore it when it does not happen to an upwardly mobile white woman.

However, from a current perspective I did question Didion’s critique of the news media’s standard practice of not naming rape victims in reporting. She does so because she believes that this anonymity contributed to the fantasy the media built up about the case and, more broadly, because of the possibility that this reinforces a shame surrounding rape that is, essentially, victim blaming. I don’t entirely dismiss that point. Nonetheless, we live in a world now where, partially due to the sensationalism of the 24-hour news cycle and even more due to internet tabloid journalism, rape victims get named all the time. And the general effect has seemed to be that people become incredibly dismissive about rape, probing into the victim’s sexual past in order to find reasons why she shouldn’t be taken seriously. We know the victims all too well these days, in ways that are meant, by those who tell us about them, to suggest that, well, the women really wanted it and are crying rape just to get someone in trouble. This would, in fact, seem make it harder for victims to speak up, knowing that they are likely not to be taken seriously—not quite what Didion is hoping for in her desire for transparency.

On the Horizon: Group Reading

2010-07-28T22:23:00.000-05:00

Ever since the group read on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 ended, I’ve been looking forward to the possibility of another group read, which, I thought at the time, was an ideal way to do book blogging. Still, I passed on Moby Dick (although I avidly followed the posts on Infinite Zombies) since I had read it a couple of times—a book I love, but I already had a lot of summer reading I wanted to do, including one longer read. Ulysses, the current IZ read, was more tempting. I have read about half of it before—all of the Stephen chapters, several, though non-continuous, Bloom chapters, and the Molly chapter—and a few parts several times over, and a group read seems like a fun way to do it. Still, the other reading intervened.

Now, though, Scott Esposito has announced that he will be running a group read this fall over at Conversational Reading. The book is Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai (2002), a book I did not even know about, but which sounds absolutely great. My participation could hinge on how busy I am at the time with life events, but right now I am planning to read along and post. I have already ordered my copy, so even if I am deterred when September rolls around, I will be getting to it. Apparently, though, I need to go watch The Seven Samurai first (no, this book has nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie).

Blindness

2010-07-27T16:27:00.000-05:00

I had been hoping to get to José Saramago’s Blindness this summer anyway, so it is mostly coincidence that leads me to be posting on it so soon after his death. It is easy to see why Blindness has become such an international success—it is convincingly and frighteningly apocalyptic, yet also far transparently allegorical than most apocalyptic narratives (none of the characters have names, for example, and there is little local specificity of any sort). Much of the novel has a feel of The Lord of the Flies with grownups. And perhaps this is why I’m surprised I like the novel so much: I didn’t really like Golding’s novel, nor do I generally care for allegory. Perhaps it is simply that I so easily am caught up in the terror of the possibility of going blind, which I am a little surprised more writers have not explored, at least in my reading experience.

When I read António Lobo Antunes earlier this summer, I recall running across a claim that Antunes and Saramago had a well-known rivalry within Portuguese literature, and a comparison of this novel with Knowledge of Hell suggests the general aesthetic grounds for disagreement. Antunes is a writer with a much stronger tie to place and the problems of modernity, whereas Saramago wants to address concepts of basic humanity (or inhumanity) in a universalizing lack of spatial or temporal context. Both have a tendency to the long sentence and surrealism, but enact them to different effects. With Antunes, the long sentences derive from the modernist representation of mind—even while the sentences are grammatically sound and are not stream-of-consciousness per se, they suggest a train of thought. The same is true of the surrealism, which mostly results from Freudian dream-like conflations and displacements. In Saramago, by contrast, the long sentences are very often just a series of simple sentences spliced together, a neat formal representation of the way that dialogue gets semi-detached from distinct voices for these newly-blind people. Sentences frame particular conversations rather than moments within conversation. The surrealism is also much more that of horrible and degraded situations in gothic fiction: the inexplicable plague of blindness (a perfectly terrifying invention for this thought experiment), the descent into inhumane behavior it brings.

On the whole I am the kind of reader who prefers what Antunes does a little more, even though I think in this particular comparison Blindness holds together as a novel more convincingly than Knowledge of Hell. I think that someone could claim (and perhaps has claimed) that Saramago is basically trading in a watered-down (amongst other things, easier to read) modernism, but it might as easily be said that Antunes is a little too faithful to the Faulknerian model.

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: Part II

2010-07-16T16:13:00.000-05:00

I would guess that most people, like me, enjoy Proust for the meditative quality, its reflections on anticipation, memory, and experience buttressed by carefully crafted sentences piling precision upon precision. Nonetheless, it might be too easy to overlook the humor. I saw one Amazon reviewer insist that Proust never satirizes any of his characters because he cares about all of them equally, but I’m not sure I can agree. The portrayal of Norpois at the beginning of Shadow seems unforgiving and pleasurably barbed. When I read Op Oloop earlier this summer, I found its representation of longwinded blowhards in a dinner conversation a little bit dull—the book itself became too much what it meant to satirize. Proust, on the other hand, manages to represent the endless palaver of Norpois yet make the experience worthwhile. This is where his first-person narrator plays a useful role: Norpois’s speech prompts reflections that interrupt it and offer a reprieve, allowing us to come back to it fresh. Turning away and back again only refreshes the sense of how silly he is.

Yet more interesting to me was how, in the second part of this volume, the narrator himself became much less reliable than he had seemed previously, and the object of the book’s satire. This mostly revolves around the girls of the title, the “little gang” as they are called in this translation, and which include his new love interest Albertine. Everywhere in this section the narrator’s reflections on love become more suspect than they were in regards to his love of Gilberte in the first part. Although I thought she was not a very impressive choice as far as love interests go, his reflections on his experience seemed true enough—particularly his discussion of how love fades slowly over time. With the “little gang” on the other hand, the narrator fully reveals himself to be a typical teenager: he is really only interested in having sex, and all of his attempts to convince himself that what he is feeling has anything to do with love just seems silly. His inability to see Albertine’s disinterest, and Andrée’s obvious attraction to him, reveals his blindness. He also behaves very badly, ditching Robert Saint-Loup with paltry excuses and tortured logic. Although I haven’t read the first volume in some time, I think this must be the section with the most (or most transparent) unreliable narration thus far.

Proust being Proust, the ambivalent waffling between homoeroticism and homophobia is maddening. In what is otherwise a rather funny extended meditation on vices, he considers the principle that “each vice, like each of the professions, requires and acquires a special knowledge that we are not displeased at being able to display.” His immediate example: “It takes a homosexual to detect a homosexual.” Ugh. And yet, while the book does not seem to question the homophobia occasionally voiced by its characters, it is also filled with homoeroticism, as you might expect knowing that Proust himself slept with men. The Baron de Charlus is just the kind of hyper-masculine homophobe that you would expect to find out has sex with men in bathhouses—his approach to the narrator in fact seems like an attempt at seduction. The narrator’s friendship with Saint-Loup (who, I daresay despite the anachronism, reads like some sort of aristocratic McDreamy imported from a Harlequin romance novel) is rife with undertones. Saint-Loup’s letter after leaving sounds exactly like a coded message, referring to a relationship of which he cannot tell his fellow soldiers because they would be “incapable of appreciating” it. Sure, you could justify his language through recourse to the idea of nineteenth century same-sex romantic friendships—but surely it is worth noting that many of those friendships had a sexual element, and that by the time Proust is writing the romantic friendship is already starting to carry the association of homosexuality. Indeed, the fact that the other soldiers could never understand suggests that the lower classes that make up his troops would see romantic friendship as something alien, a little too limp-wristed and aristocratic rather than properly masculine. If anything, it is this homoeroticism that allows one to read against the grain of the novel and find in it many of the pleasures from which it might otherwise distance itself.

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: Part I

2010-07-12T17:16:00.000-05:00

As the previous post indicated, I have been reading Proust, specifically the second part of In Search of Lost Time (the artwork formerly known as Remembrance of Things Past, which I have to say I think does a much better job of capturing the spirit of the book). This is the new Penguin translation, with a different translator for each of the seven volumes; this one, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, is the product of James Grieve. I am finding it delightful—as I did the first volume (trans. Lydia Davis), which I read a few years ago—although I have a hard time imagining reading all seven volumes back to back. It is a novel that requires a lot of time and a willingness to immerse yourself in its series of memories and reflections, and it invites you to pause over the narrator’s conclusions about life and compare them to what you know of people. In this the book is about as far removed from what most people want of media these days as you can get—even more so than most novels, inasmuch as there are no chapters and very few section breaks of any sort. This is not a novel you will be able to enjoy if you are stopping every few minutes to answer a call on your cell phone or look at the latest tweets from your friends, for the simple reason that doing so will cut off the flow of thought—that of the narrator, but also your own, which needs the freedom to wander, spinning off of a particular passage, rather than succumbing to a series of exterior distractions.

Still, the fact that even the individual volumes run long and require such a sustained investment for a single reading seems to undercut the likelihood that they will be reread, even if greatly enjoyed, by many people who are not Proust scholars, and this seems contrary to a theory of perception and art which the narrator offers, as he considers music played by his hostess, a hundred pages into Shadow and which I take to be Proust’s own:

Not only does one not immediately discern a work of rare quality; but even within such a work, as happened to me with the Vinteuil sonata, it is always the least precious parts that one notices first. So not only was I wrong in my belief that, since Mme Swann had played over for me the most celebrated phrase, the work had nothing more to reveal to me (the result of which was that, for a long time afterward, showing all the stupidity of those who expect that their first sight of Saint Mark’s in Venice will afford them no surprise, because they have seen the shape of its domes in photographs, I made no further attempt to listen to it); but more important, even after I had listened to the whole sonata from beginning to end, it was still almost entirely invisible to me, like those indistinct fragments of a building that are all one can make out in the misty distance. Therein lies the source of the melancholy that accompanies our discovery of such works, as of all things which can come to fruition only through time. When I came eventually to have access to the most secret parts of Vinteuil’s sonata, everything in it that I had noticed and preferred at first was already beginning to be lost to me, carried away by habit out of the reach of my sensibility. Because it was only in successive stages that I could love what the sonata brought to me, I was never able to possess it in its entirety—it was an image of life.

The reflection actually goes on for another page, every bit as smitten in its language with the changeability of art, but this excerpt gives the emphasis on time that Proust brings throughout. Art, he emphasizes, needs to be lived with, and can only be recognized and experienced in a series of encounters that reveal art’s pleasures as protean and increasingly complicated. Yet, how do we square this with the immense length of Proust’s work, which places severe limits upon anyone’s ability to re-experience it?

One possibility is that Proust is writing for a class so leisured that it might in fact have the time. However, two others strike me as well, both revolving around the idea that Proust is using the length of his work to simulate repeated contact. He might, for example, be substituting the narrator’s series of encounters, and his ever-evolving, ever-more-subtle reflections on their meaning, for our encounters with the text. In other words, the narrator’s series of encounters become the reader’s aesthetic encounters (and indeed, they to some extent already are aesthetic for the narrator as well). Or, in a different permutation, the simple demands of the length, in leading to a lengthy series of encounters of reader with text, result in a deeper familiarity with Proust’s style (which, presumably, does not change appreciably over the seven volumes, although only being in the second I could not say for certain) than one would normally obtain of a shorter novel, symphony, or other artistic work. In other words, by the end of it, you have gone through the different pleasures of his style just as you would have if he had written a 200-page novel that you then reread a dozen times.

This last is the most satisfying explanation, perhaps, since the second, regarding substitution of the narrator’s experiences for the reader’s, might seem to beg the question. The narrator’s experiences, even if aesthetic, are after all not experiences of Proust’s own style, and thus could not really lead to the same kind of appreciation of the work as art—even if they are certainly one of the pleasures dished out for our delectation.

Hopeless

2010-07-05T12:27:00.000-05:00

Something amusing from Lydia Davis’s translation note at the beginning of each volume of the new edition of Proust published a few years ago:

We agreed, often after lively debate, on certain practices that needed to be consistent from one volume to the next, such as…leaving the quotations that occur within the text—from Racine, most notably—in the original French, with translations in the notes.
…
Some changes may be noted in this American edition, besides the adoption of American spelling conventions. One is that the UK decision concerning quotations within the text has been reversed, and all the French has been translated into English, with the original quotation in the notes.

Shorter Lydia Davis: Even the Americans who read Proust are too insular and incapable to handle brief quotations in French. Yes, even if the footnotes translate them.

Nocturnes

2010-07-04T20:07:00.000-05:00

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes is so disappointing largely because I have so enjoyed the few novels I have read by him—if he was a new author I would just forget it and not read anything else he wrote. The short stories here take a typical feature of his work, the naïve and/or sycophantic narrator, but stretch these faults so that they become implausible. In novels like The Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go, the narrators’ actions and beliefs are sustained by a convincing social fabric, whether a historical reality or an invented dystopia. By contrast, in Nocturnes the characters behave by codes that simply do not make sense for who they are. The stories usually occupy themselves with traditional questions of professionalism in art, and particularly the tug-of-war between a desire for artistic purity on the one hand and the impulse to do whatever will get one a record contract (as the title indicates, these are stories about musicians) on the other. The character flaws are, I suppose, meant to be rooted in the desire to be recognized, out of the masses, as a genius, but the characters always allow themselves to be taken too far. That said, the very worst story, “Come Rain or Come Shine,” uses a different kind of situation, in which the narrator really has no reason at all to debase himself as thoroughly as he does. Is Ishiguro going for slapstick farce here? It doesn’t really seem like it, but it is the only excuse I can think of for how over-the-top the masochism goes.

Admittedly, there are some nice touches here, perhaps because Ishiguro is as skeptical of the purist position, a less typical position in a writer of “literary” fiction, as he is of the argument for simply doing what the audience wants so that you can have a career doing what you want. If the panderers have questionable abilities playing their instruments, then, humorously, so does one of the purists: a supporting character in the final story, “Cellists,” is a musical genius who nonetheless never learned to play her instrument because, she says, she was genius enough to know that the teachers her parents paid were not that good and would thus lead her astray. While the protagonist (although here not the narrator) is an example of too much naiveté to really be believable—he never catches on that she can’t play until she confesses it—her character itself is well drawn, and I wish Ishiguro would have found something else to do with her.

The Handmaid's Tale

2010-06-30T08:44:00.000-05:00

There are some classic books that, for whatever reason, you don’t end up reading until long after you might have, despite even having a clear intention to read them and a good chance of enjoying them. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is one of those books for me. A new category of books for this blog: overdue reads. In this case, I was re-inspired by Atwood’s recent releases Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, both of which sound fascinating but, I insisted to myself, none of that for you until you get through Handmaid’s Tale.

And of course it is gripping stuff: the fragmentary form is just perfect for the narrator’s situation and for the suspense—like some other dystopian fiction (Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go comes to mind), much of the momentum comes from the delicate handling of how much information to give away when. Perhaps this is more specifically a feature of dystopias that have a strong element of Foucaultian panopticism to them (though what truly modern dystopia doesn’t?): it is important, even with a sense of panic in the air, to establish the way that normalcy and habit start to sink in and do the work of the surveillance state. Let the horrors and the history of the descent to madness trickle in through narrative cracks here and there.

Moreover, after nearly twenty-five years (next year is the publishing anniversary) the book feels at least as relevant—and maybe more: the invitation of religious fundamentalism into conservative government of the 1980s, a key underlying motivation for the novel, led to its death-grip on our last U.S. president (it would be nice to say this was the high-point of influence, but I’m not that sure), the environmental situation is increasingly dire (an aspect of The Handmaid’s Tale I had never really heard mentioned, although it is somewhat subordinate in the novel as well).

The only thing that feels aged here is some of the metafictional element: the narrator’s repeated insistence that she is just telling a story, a version of events, seems a bit stale at this point. On the other hand, the closing document, a record of a historical society years after the narrative present, performs something a little unlike, even opposed to, the usual metafictional emphasis on a postmodern contingency of narrative. This document, a talk by a historian about the handmaid’s culture, is a parody of an academic conference: the historian is himself so dismissive of the problems raised by the story that in fact it would seem to solidify the authority of the version of events narrator by the handmaid. To be more specific, the talk concerns problems determining historical fact in the tale, but the speaker goes out of his way to insist that we shouldn’t really judge the oppression of the period because “such judgments are of necessity culture-specific….Our job is not to censure but to understand.” Now, of course to some degree it would be useless to spend all day censuring a historical injustice that may no longer exist—no one gets credit these days for opposing slavery or the Holocaust—but the overall effect here, combined as it is with questioning the accuracy of the text, is to suggest the erasure of the experiences of women, particularly the painful ones. Atwood seems to be warning against a tendency to pat ourselves on the back for overcoming past injustices while also nonetheless perpetuating those injustices by dismissing the experiences of its victims. As a result, the handmaid’s oral history itself feels more reliable, not less—and, perhaps to redeem them, the narrator’s repetition of the idea she is just telling a story comes across not as a metafictional destabilization but rather as a testament to how much she wishes it were only a story. For us, then, it remains a potent warning.

The Fortress of Solitude

2010-06-26T13:14:00.000-05:00

This book got off to a very slow start, and although it came together well by the end I’m not sure I really see why everyone likes it so much. In The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem has written a decent, but nonetheless fairly boilerplate, bildungsroman about growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s, and then returning there at the turn of the century. Its interest lies largely in the milieu, which Lethem does a good job of capturing, with the exception that he has an annoying tendency to use italics the first time he uses slang terms, as if he were announcing to the reader, “Look! Local color!”

Some of the best parts of the novel come not from Lethem’s invocation of superheroes, but in his descriptions of his protagonist’s reactions to a different form of popular culture, music. He has a strong feeling for the way people create their own sense of a song’s meaning in their given context: most humorously, when Dylan takes “Play That Funky Music” as a direct mockery of white kids getting beat up, “lay down and boogie and play that funky music ‘til you die” a taunt to a kid curled up on the pavement and wailing while he gets beat up. Everywhere it comes up, Lethem astutely reveals how our personal position within a culture is tied into our tastes in and interpretations of music.

Still, there are some structural problems. The novel shifts from third to first person at the midway point, but then has to revert back to third person for a couple of chapters, not quite formally coherent. At the end of the novel, Dylan’s epiphany about his supposed unconscious reasons for returning to New York to see Mingus is not especially convincing. And, in the first half, Lethem can’t resist endless side pieces filling us in on the barely-glimpsed lives of minor characters—some of these sections make narrative sense by the end, but others don’t and could be cut without losing anything.

I think if I had read a novel like this years ago, in late high school or in college, I might have really enjoyed it, but at this point in my life I’ve read enough realist coming-of-age stories (in this case with a magic realism twist, but nothing very challenging) that I found myself wishing it would hurry along already. I have a renewed taste these days for something at least a little more ambitious, formally or philosophically. Although Lethem’s novel is long enough to be called ambitious by some standards (Time even tells us it is on the back cover of my paperback), it isn’t really, in the sense of trying to use form to adjust the way you think.

Op Oloop and Knowledge of Hell

2010-06-16T18:42:00.000-05:00

I am a bit behind on posting, and pressed for time as well, so I have two books for this entry that, happily, work nicely as counterpoints. Juan Filloy’s Op Oloop (1934, trans. Lisa Dillman 2009) and António Lobo Antunes’s Knowledge of Hell (1980, trans. Clifford E. Landers 2008) confront the reader with very different forms, but both are about a favorite theme of twentieth-century modernisms: the transformation of human into machine in a world of obsessive rationality and an array of professions (for Filloy statisticians, for Antunes psychiatrists) bent on eradicating the unproductive and abnormal.

For Filloy, this critique takes the form of farce: his titular character, a statistician who obsesses over his schedule, finds himself thrown from his routine and spiraling into chaos. Dalkey’s book jacket is a little misleading here: the description suggests Op Oloop’s schedule falls apart due to “an insignificant traffic delay,” but that suggests a very different working idea than what the book is really after. Op’s system does not crumble due to its own excessive rigidity—as characters somewhat repetitively remind us, he has kept his basic attitude for years, and one would expect he has had minor delays before this one—but rather due to a return of the repressed, although of a more comedic than gothic cast. Here it is love that distracts Op, as well as a past destructive love affair and leftist political commitments that his rigidity was invented to suppress but come back to him in unexpected ways. It is the distraction of love, accompanied by slapstick violence and endless petty arguments between different characters, that give the book the feel of farce, even if the ending deviates from what you might normally expect from the genre. Filloy is a full-on romantic: love here is a force that can bond two people across space in an metaphysical vacuum—as actually happens to Op and his fiancée Franzisca. Honestly, while I enjoyed much of the book, this reverie, and what I suppose is meant to be a comedic tour-de-force dinner conversation, left me a bit cold. This is only the second novel I have read of the Best Translated Book Award longlist from earlier this year (several more are on my list), along with Mercè Rodoreda’s Death in Spring: so far my belated vote goes to Rodoreda.

Antunes, though writing much later, is doing so much more in the vein of experimental modernism: everyone who discusses him seems to bring up Faulkner, and for good reason. The narrator, a psychiatrist driving home from a vacation, speaks in long, elaborate sentences; he switches between the third and first person, although the “he” spoken of is always himself, and he conflates, at an increasing rate, various memories and fantasies. Landers’s translation of the prose in the first half of Knowledge of Hell is especially beautiful and I found myself reading some of it aloud to myself just to enjoy the language, as in this vivid moment:

I would sit on a bench, between the affectionless varicose veins of an old German woman and the intertwined thighs of a teenage couple floating on a raft of hashish, smiling at no one in the contentment of an unknown dimension, until suddenly seeing you, on the other side of the square, with a wicker basket on your shoulder, your hair parted in the middle like a squaw, coming toward me like the girl in the Repimpa mattress commercials who recycled Greta Garbo’s eyeglass.

The multiple comparisons are important here; Antunes’s style is thick with metaphor, with simile after simile often piling up in a single sentence. In this passage these remain distinct—the addressee (the narrator’s daughter) is both like squaw and the girl in the commercials—but as the book progresses metaphors begin to embed one another, as in the following two non-continuous sentences from the same page:

Mr. Carlos was slowly disappearing, the employees were cleaning the windows of the station wagon in circular movements using a kind of sponge, the mechanic was wiping his fingers on his rag, looking at me with the strange fixity of those Christs with exposed hearts in my grandmother’s prayer niche who pursue us with the attentive and severe persistence of an urchin’s gaze.

Aljustrel seemed less and less like a concrete, almost geometric town inhabited by people, by voices, by the restless pictures of the dead, and more like a labyrinth of shadows, an apparition suspended between the black earth and the green sky, adrift, like an enormous boat in a silvery lake of olive groves.

The mechanic is like a Christ figurine which is like an urchin. The town is like a labyrinth or an apparition that is like a boat. The narrator of this novel cannot stop making comparisons—the long, comparative sentences pair up with the narrator’s tendency to slip between memories and the present, comparing his experiences as a psychiatrist with his years fighting in the Angolan war (both of which he feels guilt about, his rage against contemporary injustices driven by his own participation in them), and both in turn are compared to the vacationers he has just left behind. In this most difficult, third quarter of the novel, the alternation between scenes becomes especially chaotic, and the novel makes it hard to discern how much the narrator’s connections of past moments and the present are reliable. While a strong critique of psychiatry as a discipline comes through, the narrator’s rage is often so indiscriminate that it becomes hard to tell where or if Antunes is ironizing it (the narrator, it should be notes, has Antunes’s name), which threatens to topple the book. I found myself especially frustrated with the intermittent misogynist descriptions of women, who most often here are portrayed as devourers and traps for men (of one woman who runs an X-ray machine: “She must have swallowed dozens of doctors with those lips.”) Another inheritance of this kind of modernism, I think, which I really wish he could have left behind.

The Secret in Their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos)

2010-06-10T20:45:00.000-05:00

I don’t really know what Roger Ebert means when he says Juan José Campanella’s The Secret in Their Eyes is “a real movie, the kind they literally don’t make very much anymore.” While there are many things I like about Ebert, the comment just strikes me as unreflective nostalgia. However, the movie is awfully good. And, to add something that people do not usually comment on in film reviews, the make-up and hair designers really deserve their own Oscars. For a while I wasn’t even sure Soledad Villamil was in fact playing her character in both its older and younger incarnations.

I don’t want to reveal too much, but the movie takes place against the political backdrop of 1970s Argentina, remembered from a more contemporary perspective. As much as anything, the film is about the lingering effects of the emergent fascism of the period, and trying to move beyond them.

Betrayed by Rita Hayworth

2010-06-07T17:57:00.000-05:00

I’ve been making my way through Suzanne Jill Levine’s book on translation, The Subversive Scribe, and at the same time I’ve read her translation of Manuel Puig’s Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (both in reprint from Dalkey Archive). It turns out that this book and G. Cabrera Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers, the two Levine translations I’ve now read, are the two she first published. From that experience I will say that Levine’s Scribe is much more interesting when you have read the particular book she is talking about in a given chapter: at other moments I find myself skimming a bit, looking for the nuggets of insight she pulls from the translation experience but less engaged with the details she uses to support them. While certain themes would announce themselves in any case (chief among them: the translator as collaborator with the author but also as necessarily faithful betrayer of the text), the way in which the essays enrich my experience of the books I’ve already read is what has made reading her accounts most worthwhile. In another post I want to say more about Levine’s book and how it strikes me as a reader of translations, but for now I want to focus on Puig.

When discussing Beytrayed, Levine focuses most of her attention on the translation of spoken language, but one thing that happens through the novel’s organization is a progression of forms toward writing. From the overheard conversations of the beginning and the internal monologues that make up most of the central section, we move to a final section that consists of various documents: a diary, an essay, a note, a commonplace book, a letter. The move towards written forms at the end, compounded with the movements forward in time and the maturity of characters’ consciousnesses, make the book easier to understand as you go, though there are still gaps to fill. It is the kind of book that tempts you to draw out a chart of the characters and their relations so you can remember just who it is suddenly reappearing after an absence. Indeed, at the beginning it could be easy to give up due to the difficulty of following just who talks when, but after an initial hesitation I enjoyed those chapters most by not taking many pauses. They struck me as offering, in spirit, a conversation happening in the next room among people whose voices are similar enough to blend with one another. You can’t always sort out who is who, yet individual personalities rise and fade. And what does come through, in Levine’s work on the translation, are the personalities of the characters, though these personalities become more clear, again, as we move to internal monologue and in written forms. Yet if these later moments are when the characters have the most striking voices, they are also voices fabricated for particular occasions, with likely readers in mind: even the diary and commonplace book carry the sense of being written with the sense of a potential future audience.

What the book also offers is an increasingly moving and still relevant rumination on the intersection of rural/urban divides with questions of masculinity and homosexuality. One of the central repeated plot threads highlights the strained relationship between Toto and his father Berto, who considers Toto far too effeminate and artsy, and who favors instead Héctor, an older, macho and womanizing nephew he and his wife Mita have adopted. Yet as the novel ends Berto’s relationship to Toto becomes more complicated; in a letter he wrote and never sent long ago, he reveals his hopes for Toto’s future that implicitly critique the interlaced homophobia and anti-intellectualism he has since adopted. Berto’s earlier wishes betray his future self, and Toto’s fulfillment of those wishes can only betray his father in turn. Part of this is a very common story of parents who want better for their children only to feel alienated when their children in fact succeed; but it also resonates with what has struck me, since childhood in a small town, as a very rural way of linking homosexuality to intelligence in such a way that homophobia and anti-intellectualism become almost synonymous. It is an attitude very much alive in the U.S. today.

Robert Juan-Cantavella

2010-06-03T10:49:00.000-05:00

This is mostly a note to myself: Robert Juan-Cantavella looks fascinating and, like Paul at By the Firelight, I hope someone translates him soon.

Shelves To Read 2010

2010-05-31T11:21:00.000-05:00

One thing I’ve noticed about book bloggers is the frequency of allusions to increasing numbers of bought-but-not-read books. From what I can tell my shelves are more moderate than some: in part due to shelf space limitations, right now I keep my unread books to about two (occasionally overflowing) shelves. But I thought it might be fun to actually see more of these shelves of unread books that people so frequently mention. How extensive are they? What do they have on them? Is there any organization specific to them? So I’m offering mine up, in what I hope to be something of a yearly tradition that might reveal how much or how little the shelves change from year to year as I either pull from them or bypass them for a new release or inspired purchase. If you are reading this, I encourage you to play along and post a picture of your own, and leave a note so I know where to find it!

The only organization to speak of here is top shelf vs. bottom. The upper shelf has books that I would like to read relatively “soon” simply out of current interest. The bottom shelf has less priority. It doesn’t mean those books will not get read, but they are subject to more random whim. There are, though, a couple of books there that I may never read, either from lack of interest or because I never had any but own them because they were freebies. The longest-sitting book currently on the shelves? The Modern Library edition of Le Morte D’Arthur (in a now out-of-print paperback), bought circa 1999-2000.

Isherwood's Documentary Styles

2010-05-27T09:10:00.004-05:00

Over time, without real reading knowledge of the referent, I have come across numerous allusions to Christopher Isherwood’s “documentary style,” which I think is mostly used in reference to The Berlin Stories[1] and its phrase “I am a camera.” This style, accordingly, records the surrounding scene, theoretically “not thinking,” as the narrator of Goodbye Berlin explains. (The narrator is called Christopher Isherwood; in the first of the two books, the Last of Mr. Norris, the narrator’s name is William Bradshaw, Isherwood’s two middle names.) This claim is not quite true: most of the charm of the book is in its humor, which gently exposes the flaws and quirks of its various figures. This includes the narrator (under both names) himself, who perhaps because limited to description often ends up coming across as helplessly naïve. In Mr. Norris this is explicit: the plot revolves around Bradshaw being taken advantage of by Arthur Norris while at the same time priding himself on seeing through Norris’s mannerisms. The humor in that case is played to a great secondary effect for readers keyed into queer subtexts: the book does finally reveal exactly how[2] (1935/39) Bradshaw has been used in relation to Baron Pregnitz (I’ll stay quiet on that point for anyone who would want to read the book), but Isherwood also describes the situation so as to carry the suggestion that Norris has been prostituting Bradshaw to the Baron. Bradshaw, not knowing this, keeps failing to respond to the Baron’s overtures. This is funny, but also irritating for anyone who knows Isherwood himself was gay and the novel autobiographical is thus likely to read his eponymous narrator as excessively coy.

However, having just read that book after A Single Man, I think the phrase “documentary style” could be used differently in regard to Isherwood—and in a way that I frankly found much more wonderful to read, balancing humor and sympathy in a way that The Berlin Stories does not. The excerpt I posted the other day is a good example of the specific documentary voice I mean. It comes out in the minute descriptions of daily routine—the book, following the day of a single man, has the title of a promotional documentary or a pre-film newsreel (essentially advertisements) that would do exactly the same thing, cataloguing the normal, technologically advanced life offered by the suburbs. This is a documentary voice that is already itself a little coy and jocular, even when describing events that are essentially sad.

What is so pleasurable is the way that Isherwood camps up this narrative voice in a way that undercuts suburbia and also gives us a more authentic sympathy for George, its protagonist. First of all, it takes the documentary narrator’s explicit concern in describing characters’ feelings and problems and uses it to approach a character who himself finds suburbia and his fellow suburbanites obnoxious. Whereas the traditional promotional documentary would describe and show the character’s problem only to reveal its solution in modern living, George’s problems don’t get solved. His critiques are not overcome; they remain critiques of suburbia and the oppressive abundance of the nuclear family. And yet he is also shown to be more of a suburbanite than he would like to be, including in his suppressed rage at those around him, which the novel reveals to be not only a product of anger about Jim’s death (although it is in part due to and sometimes about that), but also and even more a nasty side-effect of suburban modernity, including its signature commute:

But does George really hate all these people? Aren’t they themselves merely an excuse for hating? What is George’s hate, then? A stimulant, nothing more; though very bad for him, no doubt. Rage, resentment, spleen—of such is the vitality of middle age. If we say that he is quite crazy at this particular moment, then so, probably, are at least half a dozen others in these many cars around him, all slowing now as the traffic thickens, going downhill, under the bridge, up again past the Union Depot.

The sympathy I think is obvious towards the end of the quote from the previous post: the narrator’s description of a now-demolished morning routine manages to be both detached and intimate in its description of the everyday eroticism that George shared with Jim. The homoeroticism in A Single Man seduces the reader, and when George feels himself attracted to other men in the story yet unable to be direct about it, the effect is much sadder than The Berlin Stories, in which Isherwood sometimes comes across as scornful towards all those missed connections.

All in all, I enjoyed A Single Man much more than I thought I would: while on the surface level an easy read it does very interesting things with form. The Berlin Stories I liked less, though maybe that comes from having read it immediately afterwards. It is a book that likely will most engage people interested in the early-1930s milieu he’s describing. There is some heartbreaking material towards the end with the rise of fascism and its attendant anti-Semitism: Isherwood is at his most interesting when he is less invested in plot and more committed to figuring out the people he describes.

Just as an aside: I have not seen the recent Tom Ford film version of A Single Man (I missed my window at the local art theater), so I have no idea if it preserves any of what I’ve said above. From the trailer I’ve seen I would guess no.

[1] Warning! There is a misprint in this book—page 96 in the first of the two novellas has been replaced by an extra copy of p. 96 of the second. According to Amazon reviewers the book is supposed to come with an errata sheet, so make sure you get yours…

[2] Armistead Maupin accounts for this frustration in his introduction to the text by saying that if Isherwood had been more forthright about his narrator’s sexuality, it would have distracted contemporary audiences too much from the portrayals of other outsiders (largely sexual, sometimes gay) in the text. I find this more or less convincing, but frankly it doesn’t make the narrator less irritating—in fact more and more so as the book continues. Another thing, while I’m on complaints: Sally Bowles is completely obnoxious. I want to see Cabaret even less now than I did before reading the book, although I suspect (hope) that in writing the musical they at least got rid of her casual anti-Semitism.

A Treat

2010-05-22T21:11:00.001-05:00

I read Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (1964) and liked it so much I’ve gone straight into The Berlin Stories (1935/39). The style of the latter is quite different so far (funnier on the surface, but less innovative), and I’m not sure if I’ll end up posting on them together or separately. In the meantime, here is something delectable from just after the beginning of A Single Man:

By the time it has gotten dressed, it has become he; has become already more or less George—though still not the whole George they demand and are prepared to recognize. Those who call him on the phone at this hour of the morning would be bewildered, maybe even scared, if they could realize what this three-quarters-human thing is that they are talking to. But, of course, they never could—its voice’s mimicry of their George is near perfect. Even Charlotte is taken in by it. Only two or three times has she sensed something uncanny and asked, “Geo—are you all right?

He crosses the front room, which he calls his study, and comes down the staircase. The stairs turn a corner; they are narrow and steep. You can touch both handrails with your elbows, and you have to bend your head, even if, like George, you are only five eight. This is a tightly planned little house. He often feels protected by its smallness; there is hardly room enough here to feel lonely.

Nevertheless…

Think of two people, living together day after day, year after year, in this small place, standing elbow to elbow cooking at the same small stove, squeezing past each other on the narrow stairs, shaving in front of the same small bathroom mirror, constantly jogging, jostling, bumping against each other’s bodies by mistake or on purpose, sensually, aggressively, awkwardly, impatiently, in rage or in love—think what deep though invisible tracks they must leave, everywhere, behind them! The doorway into the kitchen has been built too narrow. Two people in a hurry, with plates of food in their hands, are apt to keep colliding here. And it is here, nearly every morning, that George, having reached the bottom of the stairs, has this sensation of suddenly finding himself on an abrupt, brutally broken off, jagged edge—as though the track had disappeared down a landslide. It is here that he stops short and knows, with a sick newness, almost as though it were for the first time: Jim is dead. Is dead.

He stands quite still, silent, or at most uttering a brief animal grunt, as he waits for the spasm to pass. Then he walks into the kitchen. These morning spasms are too painful to be treated sentimentally. After them, he feels relief, merely. It is like getting over a bad attack of cramp.

Offered without comment, for now.

Between the Acts

2010-05-19T21:22:00.002-05:00

World War II has been all over my reading: 2666, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, and now, though much differently, Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, published posthumously in 1941 but begun several years before. In this novel, the war is in the distance, and only impending: Germany is on the march but England is not yet involved, the news not much more than a disturbing flicker at the back of characters’ minds.

Between the Acts narrates a June day at Pointz Hall, the home of the wealthy Oliver family for the previous hundred years. The Olivers are hosting a pageant play: an event where local villagers perform on an estate for an audience of the wealthy and middle class (and not, although I suspect it comes from a feudal tradition, so much the aristocracy—the Olivers are “new money” usurpers even if they are continuing older traditions) in order to raise funds (in this case, for electric lighting in the church). The play condenses a history of England from its beginnings to the narrative present, featuring within it short comedic pastiches of the drama of various periods. The novel, as you would expect from Woolf, shifts between the thoughts of characters—mostly Giles and Isa Oliver, Giles’s aunt and father, and occasionally visitors and estate workers—and gives us much of the play as it is acted. There are myriad subtle conflicts, but none of them really takes center stage enough to put at the center of a plot synopsis. For what I’m sure are necessary marketing reasons, the back cover of my edition chooses one, but while the choice is justifiable it ultimately misleads you into thinking this will be a novel primarily about a marriage suffering from infidelity. Much more it is a novel thinking through what this kind of event means. Can such a play fulfill any artistic function, or can it only offer a trivial jingoism based on quoting Shakespeare and Congreve? What should it be doing with a war looming around the corner?

I have to say, reading the excerpts of the play, it seems very dull, with the exception of its final bit. The audience is certainly not too excited about it: they seem there more out of a sense of duty (again, the feudal tradition) than out of any interest. Nonetheless, Woolf seems sympathetic in her portrayal of the playwrite/director, Miss La Trobe, and her agony over her production. Miss La Trobe’s most ingenious stroke (indeed, the part most enjoyable to read) is to disturb her audience with the final “modern” portion of the play, offering a Brechtian or otherwise modernist disruption of the fourth wall: first, she lets the audience sit with only themselves, nothing happening onstage, to their increasing discomfort, and then she parades a series of mirrors in front of them to show their reflections. She embarrasses her audience by showing them to be a fragmented set, full of secrets and follies as laughable as any from previous eras—the play ends with some doubt as to whether the form of community it is supposed to coalesce can exist. Miss La Trobe is torn between this vision and a sympathy with her audience, a desire to please and be liked, and as the audience is confronted by the initial silence, she berates herself: “Reality too strong,’ she muttered. ‘Curse ‘em!’ She felt everything they felt. Audiences were the devil. O to write a play without an audience—the play. But here she was fronting her audience. Every second they were slipping the noose. Her little game had gone wrong.” But really, she’s upset because her trick is having just the effect she wanted it to have. Torn between sympathizing with her audience’s misery and wanting to inflict it to force some sort of realization, Miss La Trobe can only think herself a failure once it all ends. It is hard not to sense that Woolf is thinking through some of problems of reception of the sometimes difficult forms with which she and other modernists had confronted audiences—perhaps even this novel’s genre blending, which I found disappointing overall.

Much more enjoyable to read are the prose sections of the novel where Woolf gives us character as only she can. There are clunky moments in word choice, especially in opening pages, but her portrayal of Miss La Trobe’s anxieties over the play, Giles and Isa’s jealousies and desires, and the friendly antagonism of Giles’s elderly father and aunt (he a skeptic, she a believer, both somewhat silly) are wonderful. And, regarding homosexuality, what an antidote after Bolaño! We have Miss La Trobe, whose lesbianism is only briefly suggested though not hard to spot, but also William Dodge, a visitor dragged to the show by a married neighbor, Mrs. Manresa. Here’s William, observing Isa with her husband (whose attentions are on Mrs. Manresa, although William can only speculate):

Hirsute, handsome, virile, the young man in blue jacket and brass buttons, standing in a beam of dusty light, was her husband. And she was his wife. Their relations, as he had noted at lunch, were as people say in novels ‘strained.’ As he had noted at the play, her bare arm had raised itself nervously to her shoulder when she turned—looking for whom? But here he was; and the muscular, the hirsute, the virile plunged him into emotions in which the mind had no share. He forgot how she would have looked against vine leaf in a greenhouse. Only at Giles he looked; and looked and looked. Of whom was he thinking as he stood with his face turned? Not of Isa. Of Mrs. Manresa?

So sympathetically and lustily narrated, more so than either Isa or Giles’s forbidden desires for extramarital affairs, William is one of the most interesting characters here precisely because he is an outsider. Partially this is his homosexuality, which everyone seems to suspect with varying degrees of unspoken support or reproach, but more so it is his class: he’s just a clerk. Indeed, Mrs. Manresa tries to introduce him as an artist to justify bringing him along—a doubly telling choice because it would also be a way of vindicating his homosexuality to the circle of the novel—though he refuses to be misidentified.

This is not close to the first Woolf novel I would recommend to someone: too many dull spots, mostly the play, and the occasional stumble in the prose that makes you remember she had not made final revisions before her death. Yet at moments Woolf’s free indirect discourse gives us her characters’ consciousnesses as beautifully and sympathetically (and sometimes satirically, though hers is a light touch) as any of her fiction. Anyone who has enjoyed her other work will probably find a lot to like here as well.

Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness

2010-05-15T16:33:00.003-05:00

Earlier this year when Kenzaburō Ōe’s new novel Changeling appeared I read several reviews that piqued my interest, and then, coming across it in the local library, I read the first few pages and knew that it needed to be on my “to read” list. But the books I wound up buying for now were two used book store finds, the four-novella collection Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (trans. John Nathan, 1977) and A Quiet Life (trans. Kunioki Yanagishita & William Wetheral, 1996). I’ve just finished the first of the two, and it makes me wonder how I haven’t read any of his work before. This first novella in particular, The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, is astonishing, so much so that it may diminish the other three in comparison.

The Day features a delusional narrator in a hospital for a treatable ailment that he nonetheless insists is terminal cancer, recounting a past he refuses to see clearly to be recorded by the “acting executor of the will.” What we read is this record, and its formally ambitious combination of surrealism, indirection, temporal shifts, and interruptions pays off in humor and pathos—the only comparison I can think of in American or English literature is Faulkner. Indeed, like Quentin Compson, the narrator of this story is desperately clinging to an ethical code that belongs to a lost world (the antebellum South for QC, Japan before and during WWII for Ōe’s narrator). It is hard to know how much to say about the plot here before I slide into ruining surprises: this is a story saturated by the narrator’s obsession with events that do not become entirely clear until late in the story. Loosely, he seeks to recount an “official version” of what he calls his Happy Days, a short period during World War II before he lost his father, but this is a story much more about living with guilt and resentment than it is about nostalgia. Much of the narrator’s anger and energy is directed at a mother he blames for an inability to commit suicide; his zeal for his imaginary impending death is really for what he imagines will be his victory over her:

However, even at times like these, he was able to enjoy imagining dreamily the clamor and bustle when the announcement of death would send all the systems of his body, alive now and metabolizing tirelessly, racing one another to be the first to decompose. At the end of the tape which the acting executor of the will would play when he had entered a coma he wanted to record the following words to his mother, who would be coming alone from the house in the valley: Please make sure you stay to observe my body decomposing; if possible I would like you to observe even my putrefied and swollen insides burst my stomach and bubble out as gas and muddy liquid. But it was not easy to deliver such lines without disagreeable masochistic overtones; besides, if the state of his stomach should oblige him to belch just as he began to record and his voice should falter or tremble, he could imagine carrying his chagrin with him right into the world of the dead, so he merely assembled these sentences in his silent head.

Most of the humor here is dark: it comes from the absurdity and excess of his anger, his grotesque imagination, and the impotence in his fury that keeps him from enacting his schemes (best not to make that tape if it might catch an offhand belch). And yes, the narrator speaks about himself in third-person, much as he will only refer to his father as “a certain party”—another tic he blames on his mother.

Ōe’s other stories in this volume are much more straightforward, whether narrated in first or third-person. In Prize Stock, the narrator recalls a turning-point in his youth when an African-American pilot is captured and held in a small parochial village. The story that gives the collection its name describes a man obsessed with his dead father and his mentally disabled son—both relationships disintegrating after a traumatic encounter with a polar bear at the zoo. And Aghwee the Sky Monster tells the story of a man hired to be the companion of a composer who has lost his will to go on, having become obsessed with a giant baby he imagines to come down to him from the sky. This last story is the most unsatisfying—partially because the narrator seems so distant from his own experiences, but more so because the climax, which collapses that distance, is not especially effective.

According to the translator’s introduction and other reviews/blogs I have read, Ōe writes mostly autobiographically, and in these stories you can see him reworking the same set of ideas or problems in different scenarios. The first and third stories have protagonists obsessed with absent fathers who were lost in very similar (with some variation in detail) circumstances. The third and fourth both involve protagonists forced to choose at their sons’ births whether to let them die or save them with a surgery that will leave them mentally disabled—they make different choices, but both of them become obsessed with the outcome. (And it has to be said that the attitude toward people with disabilities here is somewhat trapped in its time, even considering the fathers’ love for their sons, dead and living alike.)

I find myself grappling the most with Prize Stock, largely because I know so little about Japanese cultural contexts for thinking about race. If this story was published by an American or even just Western author, I would know right where to put it: treatment of black men as animals, obsession with the size of their penises, ugh ugh ugh. This is a coming-of-age story where the protagonist and his friends are excited at the spectacle of the prisoner, who becomes their friend only to become dangerous again. It is not entirely clear to me how much of the exoticism here comes from the prisoner’s general American foreignness, and how much comes from his blackness. And either way it is also not clear to me at the end of this story that the prisoner-as-animal attitude is at all repudiated. The narrator’s youthful illusions are destroyed, but the “reality” he comes to face is that the prisoner was, after all, a dangerous wild animal rather than a nice pet. Not much to show in the way of growth.

Still, I can’t emphasize enough how engrossing I found The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away. It evades the problems of the other stories and rewards the reader for finding the rhythm of its stranger prose, and it makes me eager to read more Kenzaburō Ōe.

Parting Thoughts on 2666

2010-05-08T17:09:00.003-05:00

I ended the last post promising one more on 2666 but after thinking about it I’m not sure I have much left to say that makes for some sort of grand exit. Here are some scatter-shot departing thoughts.

1) As I said before, I found the ending a little too neat and satisfying, but perhaps one way in which that is not true is the overall portrait of Reiter/Archimbolde. He does not exactly turn out to be the heroic writer figure some may have wanted him to be earlier. He is as mired in day-to-day reality as everyone else. Yet, I was also left unsure as to how culpable he is supposed to be, and I remain unsure of how far overall we can take the connection of the final section to the previous one. As I commented at David’s blog, what do we make of his murder of Sammer? Vigilante justice seems fairly easy and without consequence here as opposed to Santa Teresa.

2) Ok, here’s the anticlimax. I mentioned when the conversation about homophobia was getting started that there was one later instance where the book seemed to show a different kind of reaction to same-sex innuendo. It comes when Archimbolde reacquaints himself with the baroness and, in post-coital conversation, she jokes that “it was clear Archimbolde had never fucked Entrescu” (814), and if he had then his viewpoint on destiny would be changed. It is not notable because homosexuality is embraced (I really can’t imagine that happening in this book), but because the allusion to same-sex sex doesn’t spark a panicked, defensive machismo. Archimbolde simply keeps on with the conversation. Of course there is not much here, but in some ways that is the point—even given that she is saying he obviously hadn’t fucked Entrescu, in the context of this novel it is nearly miraculous he doesn’t freak out or react with disgust at the idea that he might. Maybe this is just because, since he is fucking her, he knows he doesn’t have to “justify” himself to her. In any case, the novel’s treatment of homosexuality has certainly been the most disappointing, and maddening, part about it. I grant I’m not an expert on Mexico, but I found the arguments that the fourth section was registering some culturally specific use of the terms “faggot” and “maricón” to be unconvincing; indeed, much of the reasoning meant to support that argument seemed to me to end up undermining it (Jeff suggests this as well with further explanation in his follow-up comment to his original post, which I highly recommend).

3) Can I just say I’m glad I found a copy of the three-volume edition of 2666 before they went out of print? It was nice not to have to haul around the whole thing. Plus the individual covers were a nice touch.

4) I wonder if the issue of excessive closure in the final part isn’t related to what David has discussed in terms of the possible biographical reading of the novel as an extended reflection on death. But then, having not read most of Bolaño’s work, I don’t have much earlier in his career with which I can compare it.

5) One thing I found remarkable about the final section was the representation of WWII from the perspective of a German soldier. As much as anything, this remarkability is due to my still far too limited reading of literature in translation, but the descriptions of the war, particularly Reiter’s attempts at getting shot, reminded me both of the English and American literary response to WWI and the response in American fiction to WWII. Vonnegut and Heller were especially useful points of comparison regarding the overall tragic absurdity. Yet, since Reiter is fighting for the Germans, it also has a different valence.

6) Participating in the group read was a great way to start book blogging. Thanks to those who ran it and who participated in it in various ways. It has been a great conversation to follow.

7) Enough is enough, though! It is time for this blog to comment on something besides 2666.

The Bigger They Come

2010-05-02T21:53:00.000-05:00

(Fair warning: 2666 ending spoilers directly ahead if you aren’t done yet.)

In a joke that couldn’t happen to a more deserving jerk, Klaus Haas’s giant turned out not to be so apocalyptic after all. I mean, really, Archimbolde gets to Santa Teresa and…busts Klaus out of jail and goes on the lam? Brings down the wrath of God? What could possibly come of this (besides leading the critics to Santa Teresa)? Archimbolde is not exactly going to have a lot of pull with the authorities. Yet, despite that unfinished business, I found the end of 2666 disappointing for a reason with which I’m sure most others will disagree: too much closure. It isn’t enough for Archimbolde to go to Santa Teresa (validating the critics), or even to have him meet Klaus Haas. Haas has to be Archimbolde’s nephew.

I think the root of the significance in this book to me had been its bagginess, the sense of all these interlaced events and people in the world that, nonetheless, resisted any sense of system. It seems to be a novel about all these intangible threads holding its various parts together, and about a set of crimes interconnected yet not reducible to one cause, so that to come upon an ending that feels so concrete in its closure (not for the crimes, of course, but for Archimbolde’s story) feels like a bit of a betrayal of the novel’s erstwhile truth.

At least one person I can’t recall has mentioned a sense of connection to Thomas Pynchon in 2666 and there was something of this for me too. The Part About the Critics sets up this big hunt for Archimbolde that does not come out to much, but it also sets us as readers up to take over for the critics in their search, and the Table of Contents here tantalizingly offers as an endpoint The Part About Archimbolde. Yet as the novel went on, it became less and less about Archimbolde, more and more about things the critics did not want to or could not see. The desire for Archimbolde’s presence—the presence of the author, of genius—is mocked by the movement of the book up to the final section. What this novel really needed, it seemed to me, was the kind of Pynchonian ending where loose ends aren’t tied up, the search is left unfinished. To give us Archimbolde in the flesh, a traditional nineteenth-century novel of development at the end of this longer beast, is to in some sense validate the critics so scorned in the first part of the book.

Obviously Archimbolde was not going to remain entirely a mystery: a whole section on him lay ahead. My feeling on this at first was that, by the time you get to this last part, Archimbolde seems so beside the point that reading his bildungsroman, something the critics would probably claw one another’s eyes out to be the first to do, would be a huge disappointment. Instead, it’s just the little reward for making it so far that most would like it to be. Yes, there are a lot of unpleasant parts to Archimbolde’s life, and the Santa Teresa crimes don’t fade entirely as the section keeps us thinking about possible thematic ties to the Holocaust, but at the end of it all this is a pretty delectable story, a scoop of ice cream to top off a meal. I think I would have preferred it if he didn’t serve dessert this time around.

I think I have one 2666 post left in me—and one that may actually undercut what I’ve said here, since the end may in fact raise a number of questions despite the feeling of closure. In the meantime, a question: I’ve now read The Savage Detectives and 2666. It may be a bit down the line, but I plan to read some more Bolaño. What should be next?

2666 and Hannah Arendt

2010-04-20T18:33:00.000-05:00

How comparable are the atrocities that makes up The Part About the Crimes to the Holocaust, which is featured in the following and final section of 2666, The Part About Archimboldi?

I want to tackle this via Hannah Arendt and her concept, perhaps inevitable to a discussion of 2666, of the “banality of evil.” The phrase echoes in obvious ways with the crimes in Santa Teresa as portrayed by Bolaño: the repetitiousness of the section, while constantly horrifying, can in another reading be described as pointing to how banal such violence becomes. The fact that they just become a part of the background for the people living in Santa Teresa has featured in a number of the posts by those involved in the group read the past few months.

Bolaño, moreover, seems to invite the comparison by putting the two atrocities back to back and, in this week's reading, by introducing the figure of Leo Sammer and his story of overseeing the murder of a group of Jews accidentally sent to him by apparent clerical error. I’m no Arendt expert, but my understanding of her use of the phrase “banality of evil” was meant to suggest that the participation of minor authority figures and middle men, not to mention its large-scale architect Adolf Eichmann (whose trial was the centerpiece of the book where she coined the phrase), was ultimately not due to an extraordinary and unusual evil but a commonplace human tendency to simply do what you are told, even when that means killing others. (I, probably like many others, am most familiar with Arendt by way of the reference to her by psychologist Stanley Milgram, who devastatingly demonstrated her ideas by having random strangers come into a room and agree to shock someone else to death simply because a scientist was there to tell them to keep pushing the voltage higher.)

Yet, the juxtaposition of the two atrocities also points to differences. Sure, the regularity of the Santa Teresa murders becomes banal to an extent, and people let it slide into the background, but it didn’t seem like there were and Sammer figures lingering. Indeed, there is absolutely no central organization to the murders—that’s why, despite the possibility of maybe several serial killers, it is so hard to end them. Are the murderers in Santa Teresa being told by a higher authority to kill, and they just don’t have the willpower to resist? It seems unlikely, except for murders possibly tied to narcos who might have underlings to dispose of things. It is not a possibility highlighted in the section.

Indeed, the characters, besides Sammer, that could be more plausibly discussed in this context would be Reiter’s father and Reiter himself. Both are serving in wars in which they don’t really believe. This is highlighted with Reiter’s father when he hears Germany has lost World War I and responds, “good” (638), and it seems to be true of how Reiter ends up enlisted as well. Even here there are, of course, differences: soldiers, and drafted soldiers at that, are not in the same position as middle-class administrators. So how far can we really take this “banality of evil” comparison? Is the text undercutting these differences or highlighting them—and does that matter?

As a postscript: Before beginning this post I did I quick Google search for other bloggers who had mentioned the Arendt connection to 2666 (at first glance, there were fewer than I expected, but I did not go especially deep in the stack). The primary entry I found came from a blog others involved in the group read might find interesting: it is only two posts long, and the author claims to be…Boris Ansky. So it is someone having a bit of fun, but they do have one particularly intriguing post making claims about real-world connections for the name Hans Reiter, in which they also briefly explore the Arendt connection to the character of Sammer. If what "Boris" has to say is true, it makes for a fairly dark reading of Archimboldi: indeed, it would seem to validate the idea that Bolaño sees Archimboldi as equally implicated in the "banality of evil."

Machismo vs. Machismo

2010-04-13T19:35:00.001-05:00

A couple of people recently have jumped into a discussion I also have been holding off on, trying to figure out what I think of it: Bolaño’s representation of homosexuality (or, more often, homophobia) in 2666. Jeff Anderson has a good post on the relation of the homophobia in the text to the misogyny and general culture of machismo that frequently come up in the plot. Dan Summers has decided he is ready to fully dismiss Bolaño himself as homophobic—not just pointing it out but engaging in it.

I’m disappointed to say I mostly agree with Dan. I could equivocate on the example that sent him over the edge: the “faggot” sea anemones are called that by a fisherman, not the narrator, and could potentially be just another example of the pervasiveness of homophobia in everyday life (647). And there is a moment near the end of the book, which I will point out when we get there, that I think offers the biggest contrast to the novel’s norms for addressing homosexuality and thus a possible way to distance Bolaño from his characters. But overall in contrast to misogyny I have to confess that Bolaño seems at best indifferent to homophobia and quite possibly thinks it is just funny.

Maybe it is worth listing some of the key moments where characters have voiced homophobia or their homophobic thoughts are narrated to us. It struck me that each of the first four sections of the novel had at least one very prominent moment of homophobic reaction. Notably several of them happen with regard to characters that are otherwise not very likeable anyway, and yet their general hatefulness does not seem to fully explain their homophobia. At least for me, the uncertainty I had felt about the tonal relation to the homophobia comes from this sense of its excessiveness beyond explanations via character. Anyway, here are the moments that struck me most directly.

The Part about the Critics: Norton, Espinoza, and Pelletier temporarily worry that Amalfitano might be gay and in a relationship with Dean Guerra’s son. They are relieved when they decide the relationship is just Socratic “since the three of them had grown inexplicably fond of Amalfitano” (128, 130).

The Part about Amalfitano: The voice in Amalfitano’s head keeps asking him if he is queer (among other variations, most of which are more insulting), taunting him. (201 for the first time the voice appears; 207 for the beginning of the taunting over sexuality)

The Part about Fate: Fate watches a daytime talk show (a la Jerry Springer) in his hotel room, and thinks the man among the three people being interviewed “was clearly a faggot” (257). This is noticeable mostly because it feels so out-of-the-blue and gets dropped as soon as it is mentioned. Later, when Fate proposes he cover the Santa Teresa murders, his editor, sent into a rage by Fate’s use of a single French word (important given the U.S. context—it links up with the homophobia), rants that Fate “want[s] to coucher avec moi [fuck me], but you’ve forgotten the voulez-vous [please], which in this case ought to have been your first move” (295). In response, Fate tells his editor he can “stick Count Pickett up [his] black faggot ass.”

The Part about the Crimes: Klaus Haas considers at length his disgust with sex among men in prison, including his feeling that raping and killing women would be preferable to having sex with a man (488).

The second moment in The Part about Fate suggests that Bolaño is well aware of how homophobia can be tied to anti-intellectualism (the editor’s refusal of the story, and tied to it in this conversation the gay/French stereotype which is left implied). And in general he seems to me aware that it is tied to the misogyny the book otherwise seems to deplore. This is why it is especially frustrating to think that he might nonetheless endorse it.

I think Amalfitano’s voice is the clincher for me, actually, although I was open to there being some other explanation when I read that section. The conversation between Amalfitano and his voice with regards to the insinuation Amalfitano is gay revolves in part around his masculinity, whether he will “run away” (208) from the voice and the violence around him. And in that sense it is very much about Amalfitano living in the midst of a city experiencing horrible violence, doing nothing, and feeling inadequate about that. And it seems to me (and I’m open to other opinions on this) that Bolaño endorses the idea that there is a problem with his inaction—a problem that his actions at the end of the Fate section perhaps redeem (sending Rosa away, but also serving as a delay by going out to talk to the men in the black Peregrino). This critique of inaction might not be a problem in and of itself, but Amalfitano’s mode of regret and subsequent redemption, if it is that, suggest that the voice’s homophobic taunting was a necessary strategy to be “man enough” to do the right thing.

And this is a problem, because it suggests that Bolaño’s solution for combating machismo and the culture of violence it perpetuates is another kind of machismo.

Uncanny Questions on Plata and Norton

2010-04-05T08:01:00.000-05:00

Can you hear it? That would be everyone sighing with relief at finishing The Part About the Crimes. I have to admit, I didn’t dislike it as much as a number of others seemed to. Not that I didn’t feel the punch or the agony or would want it to keep going, but I was surprised to find that I didn’t find it too long and it didn’t lose my attention.

But what I really want to talk about is those mirrors. Yes, one of our new temporary leads, Congresswoman Azucena Esquivel Plata,[1] seems to stay in the exact same Santa Teresa hotel room as Liz Norton did in the Part about the Critics. We are told directly she stays at the Hotel México, which is the same hotel the critics stayed in, but the mirrors suggest it is the same room. Both notice the mirrors are positioned similarly and that they can see the mirrors reflect one another but not Norton and Plata themselves (a crucial difference from the quote below). Norton also notices that having two mirrors in a room is a difference from the other rooms she has seen, the apparent clincher.

Why would this matter? Well, remember Norton’s dream about the mirrors? (Long quote ahead. See here for Maria Bustillos’s original comments on this dream during this section of the group read.)

In Norton’s dream she saw herself reflected in both mirrors. From the front in one and from the back in the other. Her body was slightly aslant. It was impossible to say for sure whether she was about to move forward or backward….Her image in the mirrors was dressed to go out, in a tailored gray suit and, oddly, since Norton hardly ever wore such things, a little gray hat that brought to mind the fashion pages of the fifties. She was probably wearing black pumps, although they weren’t visible. The stillness of her body, something reminiscent of inertia and also of defenselessness, made her wonder, nevertheless, what she was waiting for to leave, what the signal she was waiting for before she stepped out of the field between the watching mirrors and opened the door and disappeared….All at once Norton realized that the woman reflected in the mirror wasn’t her. She felt afraid and curious, and she didn’t move, watching the figure in the mirror even more carefully, if possible. Objectively, she said to herself, she looks just like me and there’s no reason why I should think otherwise. She’s me. But then she looked at the woman’s neck: a vein, swollen as if to bursting, ran down from her ear and vanished at the shoulder blade. A vein that didn’t seem real, that seemed drawn on. Then Norton thought: I have to get out of here. And she scanned the room, trying to pinpoint the exact spot where the woman was, but it was impossible to see her. In order for her to be reflected in both mirrors, she said to herself, she must be just between the little entryway and the room. But she couldn’t see her. When she watched her in the mirrors she noticed a change. The woman’s head was turning almost imperceptibly. I’m being reflected in the mirrors too, Norton said to herself. And if she keeps moving, in the end we’ll see each other. Each of us will see the other’s face….She’s just like me, she said to herself, but she’s dead. (115-6)

And there is plenty more I cut out or that comes after the end of what I quoted. The question, then, is this: is Plata the woman Liz Norton sees in the mirror in her dream? If so, this might seem a little more magic-realist than we would expect from Bolaño (at least as I recall from reading somewhere, he was fairly disinterred in it as a literary mode). We could, though, get around that by saying that even if it isn’t Plata, the similarity of the room is meant to suggest a parallel between the figures—either way Plata becomes a doppelganger for Norton.

In what sense a doppelganger? We could take Norton’s dream as implying that Plata’s investigation and involvement will lead to her death (much like the various other reporters or other investigators into the crimes end up murdered). We could suggest that Plata’s appearance, then, is a warning to Norton. The doubling is uncanny in a very Freudian way: it suggests a fear on Norton’s part that she has more in common with the victims of Santa Teresa that she wants to admit (“just like me…but she’s dead”), and this is one route to its becoming a warning (this could be you if you stay in this place).

Beyond this I am curious about the possibilities for drawing a parallel between Norton and Plata. For example, another formal parallel is that each woman gets to be a temporary first-person narrator at the end of the first and fourth sections of the novel: the fragments of Norton’s email at the end of The Part About the Critics vs. Plata’s narration of her search to Sergio. Norton’s email ends the first part with the announcement of romance; Plata’s narration ends, in the next-to-last segment of the fourth part, with an invitation to Sergio to join forces—another kind of romance, perhaps?

A lot of speculation to I’m not sure what end: the suggestion that Norton and Plata have some things in common. Why? To suggest even Norton’s rather banal life is as caught up in the production of violence as the lives of people in Santa Teresa? Is her turn to Morini a suggestion that she is rejecting her participation in the brutality implicit in her relationship with Pelletier and Espinoza? In that case, is their romance our ray of hope in the novel (a pretty slim one given the broader problems of the later sections)? Or does the reflection double back and reveal Plata’s deeply felt and invested attempts to pursue justice to be only as banal as Norton was? A depressing thought, as I at least am inclined to see Plata as relatively sympathetic and with the potential to dig something substantial up with regard to the crimes. This is tied in part to the fact that she has much more power at her disposal to make things happen—but how much power is that against, for example, the narcos that she seems to be running up against?

[1] It seems like it is left unclear unless I just missed the explicit connection, but does anyone get the feeling that Sergio is the reporter that Guadalupe Roncal is replacing in The Part About Fate, and that the Congresswoman’s recruitment of Sergio for her attempts to investigate the crimes, particularly that of her friend, is going to be the thing that gets him good and dead ?

Not You, Gringo

2010-03-27T14:47:00.003-05:00

[This post began as a response over at Las Obras de Roberto Bolaño ~~(although as of yet it hasn’t made it through the moderation queue)~~. I’ve slightly edited it to stand alone and made a couple of additions at the end.]

Maria Bustillos has begun a conversation about the mysterious and creepy Klaus Haas in part four of 2666. The thread raises an important question about Haas’s authority within the Santa Teresa prison. While, as Steve points out in the thread, part of this authority has to do with his immediate willingness to use violence as a warning to others, I was also reminded of a moment when Haas speaks to something less tangible in his ability to remain untouchable. When Haas speaks with Sergio González over the phone, he reflects on why he hasn't been killed in prison, and a conversation he’s had with a prisoner who seems fairly disinterested in the murders or in accusing him:

Then I asked him if he thought I had killed them and the bastard said no, not you, gringo, as if I was a fucking gringo, which inside maybe I am, although I'm becoming less and less of one. What are you trying to say to me? asked Sergio González. That here in prison they know I'm innocent, said Haas. And how do they know it? asked Haas. That was a little harder for me to figure out. It's like a noise you hear in a dream. The dream, like everything dreamed in enclosed spaces, is contagious.

Now I think, to an extent, Haas's description of the contagious dream holds some truth to how the inmates have come to perceive him. But why does the dream take hold? It seems to have to do with the fact that he hasn't been killed, and it has to do with some other kind of authority than what he has attained by violence.

And I wonder if this is where the seemingly innocuous aside about being called a "gringo" comes in. Klaus is a foreigner, and a white foreigner at that. Does his exotic whiteness give him a kind of power in the prison (and maybe explain some of his power in relation to the media as well)? Keep in mind, as well, that our first physical encounter with him has come from Fate (extremely conscious of race, but usually in the context of his blackness in a white-majority country), who sees him as "an enormous and very blond man," which mimics in turn the description of Haas that Guadalupe Roncal gave Fate. In fact, Roncal uses his blue eyes, blond hair, and height as a lead-in to stating "he has the face of a dreamer." I want to say she's romanticizing Klaus in just the way the prisoners do. It seems like there might be something of a racial fantasy going on with everyone’s fascination with Haas—he’s not just a suspect, he’s always the blond-haired, blue-eyed suspect, the gringo.

And Haas himself is playing into this fantasy that no gringo could ever be guilty: “inside maybe I am [a gringo], although I’m becoming less and less of one.” In other words, his time in the prison drives him more and more insane and his realization of that takes the form of thinking that he is “becoming” one of the local Mexicans who are, by his estimation, naturally insane and violent. I’m not saying this racial (mis)perception suggests he did or didn’t commit any of the crimes (although I tend to think he may be responsible for a few, or perhaps just the one that drew attention to him). Rather, the people of Santa Teresa in the prison and outside of it are too caught up in the racial mystique to make a real effort to find out. Racial fantasy is another one of the distractions keeping much real investigation from happening.

An Introduction

2010-03-26T14:44:00.004-05:00

I hope the hardest thing about blogging turns out to be coming up with a title. I have been on the verge of starting this blog for a couple of years now—with some increased desire to get underway since about a year ago—but coming up with a title I could imagine living with for an indeterminate amount of time kept stymieing me. Perhaps that indecisiveness is a mark against the chances of this blog’s survival.

I am starting this record for reasons similar to many other book bloggers—certainly those I’ve read who give some sense of why they began. First and foremost is the desire to write more about what I read (in particular, outside of teaching). I am by trade an academic literary critic, but that by and large means writing in specific ways about a limited range of material. I mean the scope of this blog to be much larger and to encompass the reading I do outside of a particular project: not only books in my field that I am not actively researching, but well outside my period and national focus. Since finishing my dissertation in particular I have been able to keep up a little more with current releases and literary translation. And there always seems to be a backlog of “classics” I should have read years ago (every literature PhD has their embarrassing—even humiliating—gaps in knowledge). At the same time, while I have more opportunities to get out of my narrow academic shell, I need a way to keep a better record of my thoughts in reaction to books. Something to ground memory. Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Imaginary Iceberg” ends in reference to entities “self-made from elements least visible.” I hope this blog, at its best, will make visible (for myself and anyone who wants to read along) some of what goes on in the shaping of the texts I read. Or, at least, I hope to make clear the icebergs I’ve imagined them to be, as perhaps inevitable any time you attempt to intuit the unseen. While I am an academic by training, and thus less antagonistic to academic modes of reading than even some of my favorite book blogs occasionally are (or so I sense), I am not using this as blog as an academic exercise. I want to write differently here, and to have different kinds of conversations with other readers.

I’m also hoping that this blog will serve as a useful home base for my responses at some of the book blogs on which I’ve been lurking, but not replying, for too long. So look for me in comment threads elsewhere, including those blogs listed in the soon-to-be-added blogroll.

The blog title’s allusion to Bishop might be a little misleading in that most of what I write about will probably be fiction, and sometimes nonfiction or film. Poetry, though, is always a possibility: I find my poetry reading runs in fits and starts, so it may pop up, albeit unexpectedly or short-lived.

First up? I’ve just finished Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. I had planned to read it this summer, but when the group read began over at Las Obras de Roberto Bolaño I couldn’t resist. I am a little over a month ahead of schedule in finishing, so I hope to have a couple of posts spread out at the appropriate times. It’s a long book, with much to be discussed. In the meantime, you should also see posts on other reading.

N.B.: Since I’m learning the Blogger software and dusting off some pretty old HTML skills, expect consistent (I hope small) changes for while.