Little
Library of the Lair
Fiction Readings, continued
Geoffrey
Fox |
Notes
& Essays
| Bio
| Fiction
A-H |
Poetry
| Essays, history
& analysis |
in Spanish:
Pequeña
biblioteca comentada
By author, J-Z
Jackson,
Jon A. Hit on the House
Jing Wang, ed. China's Avant-Garde Fiction
Jones, Edward P. The Known World
Kay, Guy Gavriel. Sailing to Sarantium
Kessel, Joseph. Makhno et sa juive
Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible
Korkut, Dede. The Book of Dede Korkut
Krich, John. A Totally Free Man
Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting
Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies
Lee, Chang-Rae. Native Speaker
Leonard, Elmore. Cuba Libre
Leonard, Elmore. Swag
Mahfouz, Naguib. Children of Gebelawi
Mahfouz, Naguib. The Day the Leader Was
Killed
Mann, Thomas. "Death in Venice."
Markson, David. This is Not a Novel
Marris, Peter. The Dreams of General
Jerusalem
McCaffery, Larry, ed. Avant-Pop
McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men
McCourt, Frank. Angela's Ashes
McCullers, Carson. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Naipaul, V. S. Miguel Street
Okri, Ben. The Famished Road
Ondaatje, Michael. Anil's Ghost
|
Pamuk, Orhan. Istanbul: Memories and the City
Pamuk, Orhan. My
Name is Red
Pamuk, Orhan. The White Castle
Patchett, Ann. Bel Canto
Powers, Richard. Three Farmers on Their
Way to a Dance
Proulx, Annie. Accordion Crimes
Proulx, Annie. Postcards
Pynchon, Thomas. Mason & Dixon
Réage, Pauline. Story of O
Roth, Philip. The Counterlife
Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones
Shaw, Irwin. God was here but He left early
Smith, Martin Cruz. Havana Bay
Smith, Zadie. White Teeth
Stendahl. The Charterhouse of Parma
Stone, Robert. A Flag for Sunrise
Thornton, Lawrence. Imagining Argentina
Tyler, Ann. Back When We Were Grownups
Treece, Henry. The Great Captains
Vargas Llosa, Mario. La Fiesta del Chivo
Vargas Llosa, Mario. Historia de Mayta
Vidal, Gore. Creation
Walker, Barbara K., Ed. Turkish Folk-Tales
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway
|
Jackson, Jon A. Hit on the House.
New York: Dell Publishing, 1993. 297
Intra-mob treachery in Detroit, with hit men getting hit by
other hit men, explodes into greater mayhem when obnoxious, uneducated
but mechanically gifted little Gene Lande starts blowing scum
away as a way of getting a little respect. Detective Sergeant
"Fang" Mulheisen stumbles through this web without
ever understanding any of it.
"It's funny to talk about Detroit when you're someplace
else."
"Really? Why would you say that?"
"Well, you know," she [Bonny, Gene Lande's wife] said,
"You run into these people and you both are like 'Isn't
it great? We're not in Detroit!' Even if you're in, maybe, Buffalo."
[97]
"You white folks have run out on Detroit," she [Yvonne
Marshall] said, "but you still need it, to make money out
of it. We'll have something called the Greater Detroit Urban
Zone. Reorganize all the services, realign the taxes, and cut
through all this bull crap of all these little towns that ring
the city-Warren, Harper Woods, the Grosse Pointes (why in hell
should there be five Grosse Pointes?), Royal Oak, Ferndale, Hamtramck,
Center Line (Center Line!) Why there's dozens of them. Already
the police have so much bureaucratic red tape to get through
when someone robs a store on Eight Mile Road-it's just crazy.
The zone will take in Wayne County, Oakland County, Washtenaw
and we'll have a CEO instead of a mayor, a zone commission instead
of a city council" [199]
Jing Wang,
ed. China's Avant-Garde Fiction. tr. Howard Goldblatt ed. Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 1998. tr. Howard Goldblatt
Fascinating stories from China's
short-lived "avant garde" literary movement of the
1980s.
Jones, Edward P. 2003. The Known World. New York: Amistad (HarperCollins).
This
powerful novel, like a Brueghel painting, is a crowd scene of
individual portraits where each character is engaged in some intense,
private activity. The collective ritual in this case is slavery in the
ante-bellum South of the U.S., and the characters include black slaves,
black freemen and women some of whom are themselves slave owners,
whites of various social statuses and backgrounds, and an Indian of
ambiguous status – not quite enslavable, but not quite a white. Some of
these characters, black and white, attempt to behave honorably without
always succeeding; some do cruel things thoughtlessly or selfishly. All
are trapped in a system that rewards whites for cruelty even when they
want to be just, and servility from blacks no matter how hard they
struggle to attain and retain dignity. The women – especially the black
women -- are as vivid as the men. Though most of the action gets
started in one county in Virginia in the 1840s, Jones wants
to know what became of his creatures after they left the county, some
as far as Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, and shows us the
lives of the surviving blacks many decades later, after the Civil War
and emancipation. Some of them do achieve dignity. 20051121
Kay, Guy Gavriel. Sailing to Sarantium. New York:
HarperPrism, 1998. 533pp.
I read this mainly because I too am writing a novel about
Byzantium, and wanted to see what Kay had done with it. By labeling
Constantinople and its empire "Sarantium," calling
Rome "Rhodias" and endowing his planet with two moons
(one blue), that is, by presenting the story as a fantasy rather
than historical fiction, he permits himself some convenient distortions
and no doubt saved himself a lot of detailed research. Not that
he has neglected his research -- he has done lots and lots of
it, in order to re-imagine the imperial court and the street
life of Constantinople in the heyday of the empire. But he is
not obliged to say just what date that heyday was, and can combine
events and customs from different moments in that empire's 1,100-year
history. Mostly, what he seems to have in mind is the reign of
Justinian (527-565 AD), and particularly his project to build
the world's largest and most magnificent domed cathedral, the
Hagia Sophia ("Holy Wisdom"), inaugurated with a spectacular
feast -- unfortunately not included in the novel -- in 537.The
chief protagonist is the "Rhodian" artisan Crispin,
a mosaicist, whom the emperor -- here called Valerius -- has
summoned to decorate, as magnificently as possible, the great
dome.
In the book's 533 pages there are several incidents and many
forebodings of more important events, but these larger events
never come to pass. Kay must see himself as like his mosaicist,
constructing an intricate design of many pieces -- tesserae,
in the case of Crispin, incidents in Kay's case. And the author
is a skillful artisan. All the incidents do ultimately connect.
And, like Crispin's design for the great dome (we only get to
see the design, because the story ends just as he's about to
start its execution), Kay's novel has a couple of larger, more
complex incidents to balance the composition: an encounter with
a magical, terrible bison called a zubir to which the northern
pagans must sacrifice maidens, and a long, athletically written
(he must have been exhausted at his word processor) eight-chariot
race on the Hippodrome. I don't know what the zubir is based
on, if anything, or the magical mechanical birds that hold women's
souls, but the chariot race tries to bring alive the races of
Constantinople's real Hippodrome. And much is made of the sporting
factions, Blues, Greens, Whites and Reds, which also really existed.
This is a large and well-constructed work of craft, that holds
the eye and leads it from event to event. But because the events
themselves, while interconnected, do not create a cumulative
tension but each has only its own minor and isolated resolution,
it is only a minor work of art. 00/9/17
Kessel, Joseph. Makhno et sa juive. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1987.
In the early morning in a crummy Paris bar for Russian
émigrés, a sickly and angry cigarette vendor insists on
telling the story of the pitiless Ukrainian anarchist terrorist,
massacrer of Orthodox and especially Jews in the civil wars of 1917-18,
who is suddenly softened and almost humanized by a gentle Jewish girl who
shows him compassion. Vividly and compellingly written, makes you feel
the fear when Makhno comes to town, a monster so complex that his
abrupt (and probably brief) sensitivity is completely plausible. Makhno
was a real anarchist guerrilla chieftain who also appears in Isaac
Babel's stories in Red Cavalry. 07/10/13
Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood
Bible. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999. 543
From the first, we step into prose as dense and fecund as
the African forest it describes.
"The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular
animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with
life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched
in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves.
Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for
sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on
branch. ... This forest eats itself and lives forever."
Nathan Price, a white Southern Baptist preacher, has taken
his Georgia-born family to a remote village of the Congo in 1959,
on the eve of independence. He is determined to teach the Africans
God's word and American farm techniques. While his refusal to
adapt to African climate and customs carry the family closer
to disaster, his wife and four daughters do adapt and are transformed
in different ways.
One will grow up to be a champion of the extreme white privilege
that she can enjoy only in black Africa. Another will marry a
Congolese and identify herself with him and the country. The
third will apply her African-based knowledge of living things
to research on viruses, and the littlest will become most literally
a part of Africa. And the mother -- well, hers will be a bitter
sort of triumph.
But the most memorable characters are not the four Price women,
but those we see through their eyes: Among the Africans, the
imposing and ceremonious village chief, the crafty witch-doctor,
the idealistic young Lumumbist, and many women, including a neighbor
with no legs who surreptitiously supports the white family. Among
the whites, some hypocritical and other more generous missionaries,
a sleazy arms trafficker, and the Lear-like monster Nathan Price.
Viewing them all from four points of view is an effective way
to present the complex and violent story of Congolese independence
and its sequels. 020309
Korkut, Dede. The Book of Dede Korkut, tr.
Geoffrey Lewis. London: Penguin, 1974.
Part of the charm of old folktales is their lack of our usual
reference points of time and place. The warriors and princesses
in these stories did not think of their homeland as Central Asia,
but simply as the center of their world. Nor did they think of
themselves as Turks -- they called themselves Oghuz, of whom
there were two great bands: the Inner and the Outer Oghuz. The
"Turks" were another, related tribe, but the Han Chinese
and other outsiders called them all by that label, and eventually
the Oghuz accepted it. These tales reflect a time before the
Oghuz had begun their great migrations westward (pushed out of
their eastern steppes by their cousins, the even more aggressive
Mongols), around the 9th and 10th centuries, and before the majority
of them had been converted to Islam. The version we have was
edited and printed in the century after the Oghuz's most famous
descendants, the "Ottomans" (people of Osman), had
taken Constantinople (1453) and were still expanding their empire.
The old dede, or "grandfather" or "holy
man," who first compiled these stories may or may not really
have been named Korkut. See "Adult
Education among the Oghuz."
Krich, John. A Totally Free Man. 1988 ed. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1981. 171
Fidel Castro tells his life story to a tape recorder. ntbk
3/11/88 (34-6). Implausible premise, funny and probably generally
accurate history. See my essay, Mermaids
and Other Fetishes.
Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter
and Forgetting. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. Edited
by Philip Roth, Writers From the Other Europe. London,
New York: Penguin Books, 1980. 237
Fiction interspersed with essays, autobiographical references
& flights of fancy. What holds it together are: Themes of
"laughter" (subversive of the solemnity of dictators)
and "forgetting" (the dictators' tool, to control the
present by controling the past); the opposition between "angels,"
who represent, not the good, but the well-ordered, & Satan,
who represents chaos, disorder, improvisation; life is really
only tolerable when these two forces are in balance (or are alternating).
The stultifying dominion of the angels is represented by the
spaced-out bliss of the circle dancers, refusing to see all that
is ugly and inharmonious, rising above the steeples and spires
of Prague.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter
of Maladies. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. 198 pp.
The title story is an interesting twist on the famous cave
scene in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India - - here,
instead of a hysterical Englishwoman confronting a polite Indian
male tour guide, it's a near-hysterical Americanized Indian woman
who shares a confidence with the polite Indian male tour guide
without even considering the effects her story may have on him.
Like any collection of stories, this one is uneven, in part
deliberately so, because Lahiri experiments with different voices
and different points of view. The most interesting to me was
"The Treatment of Bibi Haldar," told by a collective
"we" representing the women in Bibi Haldar's neighborhood
in an Indian city. Bibi's malady, and the miraculous cure, remain
mysterious, so the story is really about that collective voice,
which tells us about the ordinary assumptions and routines of
that neighborhood's respectable (though clearly not affluent)
wives. In "Sexy," Lahiri assumes the p.o.v. of a naïve
young American woman who allows herself to be seduced by a dashing,
married Indian gentleman who clearly is experienced at this sort
of affair. It's a pretty successful effort to stand apart from
her own subculture - middle-class Indian expats in the US Northeast
- and look at one of her own as a native American would see him.
Lahiri does something like this again in "At Mrs. Sen's,"
where the p.o.v. character (narrated in third person) is a little
American boy observing his Indian baby-sitter. This is the most
powerful story in the collection, making excruciatingly vivid
the anxieties of many women like Mrs. Sen, uprooted (for the
sake of the husband's career) from the only culture that makes
sense to her.
Not much happens in Lahiri's world. Even the unseen family
of Mr. Pirzada ("When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine"), seemingly
endangered by the ferocious ethnic war that tore Pakistan into
two countries (one now called Bangladesh), emerges utterly unscathed.
Only one truly poor person truly suffers, the possibly delusional
Boori Ma who loses her humble garret and caretaker's job, in
some Indian city, in the story "A Real Durwan." For
the most part, Lahiri's is a gentle world of curry and cosmetics
and mild domestic tensions, a pleasant and quiet place to visit,
but rather boring.
Lee, Chang-Rae. Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead
Books, 1995. 349
A tedious, slow-moving, vastly over-praised story about a
young Korean American man in New York, redeemed somewhat by sensitive
reflections on the confusion and between-ness of the immigrant's
experience. The only two interesting, complex characters are
the narrator-protagonist himself, Henry Park, and his father,
a strong-willed immigrant who fills Henry with admiration for
his tenacity and ingenuity at the same time as he embarrasses
him for his old-country ways and stubborn prejudices. Unfortunately
we see too little of this father. Instead, Lee embeds his observations
on immigrant lives in Queens, New York, in a silly plot about
a clandestine company of identity spies (Henry is one of them),
who gain the confidence of outstanding immigrants in order to
destroy them. This requires Lee to introduce a lot of irrelevant
verbiage about Henry Park's reports to the sneaky and nearly
feature-less president of the spy firm, but you can skip over
this stuff. Henry Park's spy-target, City Councilman John Kwang,
inspires more interesting thoughts, even though he is as shallowly
drawn as most of the other characters. Except for Henry's father,
the characters exist merely as foils for Henry Park to meditate
obsessively on his own adaptation to America. 020324
Leonard, Elmore. Cuba Libre.
New York: Delacorte Press, 1998. 343 pp.
Cowboy Ben Tyler in Cuba 1898 gets caught up in the independence
war with cruel Spanish officers, less cruel Cuban officers in
service to Spain, independence fighters both noble & treacherous,
& a decadent American millionaire landowner; he wins the
girl (Amelia, a tough, opportunistic American) &, after settling
all scores with his Colt .44s, takes her to start a cattle ranch
in Cuba libre. Ridiculous story, in which Cuba is merely a backdrop
for the actions of American characters plucked from a US western,
filled in with meticulous research on naval armaments & prison
conditions of the time. 99/7/21
Leonard, Elmore. Swag. 1985 ed. New York: Dell Publishing
Company, 1976. 229 1985
Used-car salesman Frank Ryan recruits cement mixer & chronic
car thief Ernest Stickley, Jr. ("Stick") for spree
of armed robbery in Detroit's suburbs. But they break several
of Ryan's 10 rules - "Never associate with people known
to be in crime," etc. - when they team up with black hustler
Sportree & his allies to rob J. L. Hudson's in Detroit; unplanned
mayhem in Hudson's, double-cross by Sportree, undone by Stick
& Ryan's death-defying double-double-cross & murder of
Sportree. A clever white cop guided by an even cleverer fat black
prosecutor catches them & the loot. Formerly titled Ryan's
Rules.
Mahfouz, Naguib. The Day the
Leader Was Killed. New York: Anchor Books, 2000.
Takes place in Cairo not on a single day, but over an unspecified
span of weeks culminating October 6, 1981. On that day a young
low-level government clerk named Elwan Fawwaz Muhtashim explodes
in rage at the bourgeois frustrations of his bourgeois love aspirations,
and commits a folly that redeems his honor but will certainly
destroy his career. On that day also, the symbol and partical
cause of the frustrations of the urban middle class, President
Anwar al-Sadat, is assassinated.
This is a slight book of limited ambition, a piece -- barely
more than a chapter -- in Mahfouz's life-time oeuvre of huge
ambition, to retell the whole modern Arab experience. He tells
the story in alternate chapters from three first-person points
of view: Elwan; his grandfather -- as old as the century, a retired
school teacher who remembers his youthful participation in the
1919 "National Movement" and who sees Elwan's dilemma
in that long historical perspective; and Randa, Elwan's long-time
girlfriend and fiancée, who works in the same government
office. She loses much of her respect but none of her affection
for Elwan when, bowing to economic and parental pressure, he
declares their engagement to be at an end.
Mahfouz, Naguib. Children of Gebelawi. Translated
by Philip Stewart. London: Heinemann, 1981.
In a noisome, quarrelsome alley of Cairo, people tell stories
of Gebelawi, a mysterious & powerful old man who is the progenitor
of them all, & of the heroes who periodically have come to
win justice & a fair share of Gebelawi's estate for the people
of the alley. These heroes incl. his son Adham (put in charge
of the estate governed from the Big House, where Gebelawi has
shut himself up with his gardens & servants) & his vengeful
older brother Idris (who cajoles Adham to peek at Gebelawi's
forbidden book of knowledge, thus getting Adham & his wife
expelled from the big house); Gebel, generations later, a poor
orphan brought up in the Trustee's mansion, who believes he has
heard Gebelawi himself instruct him to lead and challenges the
rule of the Trustee & his Chief (who terrorizes the alley)
& leads his people in a successful rebellion, leading them
to control of the promised Estate & becoming Trustee; himself;
Rifaa, a gentle youth, son of a carpenter, who is not interested
in the Estate but in happiness for all, & who is nevertheless
murdered by the chiefs--his body disappears from its tomb, probably
taken by his loving disciples, but the story is told that Gebelawi
himself came and took him up; Kassem, who wants the Estate &
happiness for all, and, after marrying a rich woman & becoming
a prosperous merchant himself, leads his followers to a mountain
redoubt from which they attack the chiefs of the alley &
ultimately triumph--Kassem enforces literally the injunction
"an eye for an eye" & justice reigns during his
lifetime, although succeeding trustees & chiefs fall back
into the old ways; and Arafa, a non-believer or at least a skeptic
regarding the power of Gebelawi, who hopes to redeem his people
by teaching them all magic, and who causes the death of the ancient
Gebelawi by tunneling into his house to peek at the forbidden
book--he never sees the book, but in his fright he strangles
an old Negro servant, & Gebelawi (whom Arafa never sees)
is then reported to have died of shock. A forerunner of Satanic
Verses, which caused a similar (if less bloodthirsty) outcry
in 1959, when the mullah's tried to stop its serial publication.1/19/91
1st pub. as serial in Al-Ahram, Cairo, 1959.
Thomas Mann, "Death in Venice." (Der Tod in Venedig) In Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories. Tr. H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Vintage Books, 1954
Gustave
von Aschenbach, a famous but lonely 60-ish author in Munich, decides to
spark his dull life by a an unscheduled vacation in Venice, where he is
so overwhelmed by the beauty and youth of an unreachable object that he
dies of desire.
The love-object is a young boy (12? 10?) who
is called, Aschenbach thinks, "Tadzio" and whose Polish-speaking family
is staying in the same hotel. The language barrier could be easily
breached, if this were a realistic story; those prosperous Poles would
surely be able to communicate in French or German. Rather, it is
Aschenbach's inhibitions that prevent him from ever speaking directly
to the boy, while desire drives him to spy on him. Death comes to
Aschenbach from a plague that he could easily have avoided, if he had
not been sneaking around the infested parts of town for further
glimpses of the boy.
Mann was himself a famous author by this
time (1911), though only 36. The story seems to be an ironic
commentary, a mean-spirited joke, about his profession -- that no
matter how cultured a writer or other artist may seem, animal desires
win out. Mann uses the story as a structure to hang various reflections
about art and desire, his and Aschenbach's. For example:
"Men do
not know why they award fame to one work of art rather than another.
Without being in the faintest conoisseurs, they theink to justify the
warmth of their commendations by discovering in it a hundred virtues,
whereas the real ground of their applause is inexplicable -- it is
sympathy." (Pp. 10-11 in my edition)
"Sympathy" as in just liking the author's voice, I suppose. Or the cover photo. There's probably something to that.
Here Aschenbach imagines himself as Michelangelo:
"And
yet the pure, strong will which had laboured in darkness and succeeded
in bringing this godlike work of art [Tadzio] to the light of day --
was it not known and familiar to him, the artist? Was it not the same
force at work in himself when he strove in cold fury to liberate from
the marble mass of language the slender forms of his art which he saw
with the eye of his mind and would body forth to men as the mirror and
image of spiritual beauty?" (44)
"Marble mass of language" indeed! Aschenbach is a more pretentious version of Updike's pathetic Bech,
a kind of negative alter ego. Mann was having wicked fun. But here's a
passage that may (possibly) express Mann's own view of his profession:
"This
life in the bonds of art... had been a service, and he a soldier, like
some of them [Aschenbach is thinking of his warrior ancestors]; and art
was war -- a grilling, exhausting struggle that nowadays wore one out
before one could grow old. it had been a life of self-conquest, a life
against odds, dour, steadfast, abstinent; he had made it symbolical of
the kind of overstrained heroism the time admired, and he was entitled
to call it manly, even courageous." (56-57)
Well, maybe Mann did not really mean that. It sounds pretty ridiculous today.
"Some
minutes passed before anyone hastened to the aid of the elderly man
sitting there collapsed in his chair. They bore him to his room. And
before nightfall a shocked and respectful world received the news of
his decease." (75)
One hopes the world awarded him a Purple Heart to match his face.
Markson, David (2001). This is Not a Novel. Washington
DC, Counterpoint.
An entertaining and provocative experiment in writing "A
novel with no intimation of story whatsoever.... / And with no
characters. None. ... / Plotless. Characterless. / Yet seducing
the reader into turning pages nonetheless." Oddly, it works.
If not a novel, it is perhaps an epic poem, if Writer says it
is, or, most accurately, as he suggests on one of the last pages,
"a kind of verbal fugue." The paragraphs, some no more
than two words and none more than five lines, are like (or simply
are) stanzas, most containing odd facts about writers and other
creative people ("Frans Hals was once arrested for beating
his wife.") A recurrent theme is the manners of death of
these people, further emphasized by this repeated statement:-
"Timor mortis conturbat me. / The fear of death distresses
me." Another is the ironies of anti-Semitism: "What
the world would know of the Holocaust if the Germans had won"
is one entire stanza. (The answer? Not much, I suppose.) The
overriding theme is the writer's right to create whatever he
pleases and call it whatever he wants. "Chi son? Chi son?
Son un poeta / Che cosa faccio? Scrivo." It's an inspiring
note for any writer, or at least for this one (me) 021215.
Marris, Peter. The Dreams
of General Jerusalem. London: Bloomsbury, 1988.
A parable about the grotesque misunderstandings and comic
or tragic results when American and W. European do-gooders try
to mesh their dreams with those of Africans. In the capital of
an unnamed country (a lot like Kenya), Englishman George Eaton
-- who was reared there -- returns at the behest of Peter Petterson,
a program officer of The Foundation (also unnamed, rather like
the Ford Foundation) to develop an urban plan for slum clearance
and resettlement, to be financed in part by construction of a
tourist hotel in the vacated seaside property. Government leaders
see this as an opportunity to make money (buying up pieces of
the land and adjacent property), 'General Jerusalem' (aka Livingstone
Karuma) -- a sort of Al Sharpton with a sect based in another
poor neighborhood -- persuades Petterson to include several of
his pet projects (technical schools & industries among them)
-- and only British-educated Wallace Munene, childhood semi-chum
of Eaton & now a minister in the government -- backs the
plan for its own perceived merits. Everything goes wrong: the
slum is cleared precipitously and violently ahead of time, the
new settlement is left shoddy and mostly unbuilt, no hotel is
ever built, Munene is murdered while Eaton romances Munene's
English wife Ann. Yet, when Eaton goes back a few years later,
the country has muddled through and the city seems to have found
at least partial solutions to its many problems. Besides Livingstone
Kuruma, the most engaging character is the fearless, disorganized
American anthropologist Barbara, who sums up the whole mess in
a tape recording she sends to Eaton -- Munene wasn't as pure
as Eaton supposed, and nothing was as it seemed. Marris is author
seven sociological studies and a former professor of urban planning
(and long before that, a colonial officer in Kenya). He writes
here as in his sociology with great clarity and understated humor.
The dialogue is mostly believable, the sex scenes (one and a
half) pretty unsteamy; as allegorical/didactic fiction goes,
it is more convincing than Graham Greene's The Power and the
Glory. 20040113
McCaffery, Larry, ed. Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream
Nation. Boulder, Normal: Black Ice Books, 1993. 247
In the late 20th century, it took a lot to épater
les bourgeois, since the literate bourgeois had become so
jaded. Here we read a lot about cunts and gooey masturbation
in nonlinear (and in one case -- by Samuel R. Delany -- circular)
narrative. The subtlest, and possibly funniest, piece is McCaffery's
introduction (he poses as a "private e" -- i.e., editor),
the most inspired lunacy is, as usual, from Mark Leyner, and
Kathy Acker does her aggressive cunt-in-your-face thing. Also
contributions by William T. Vollman, Harold Jaffe, and some other
folks I'd never heard of and may not hear of again. 020206 (See
also Acker, Kathy. Blood
and Guts in High School)
McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 2005.
Aging sheriff in quiet Texas county c. 1985 is defeated by a
new rash of narco homicides of a scale and brutality outside of his
tradition. Best things in the book are the monologues of Sheriff Ed Jim
Bell, in his peculiar South Texas drawl, reflecting on violence past,
on evil in all times, and on changing society now. The calculated but
naïve run of welder and Vietnam vet Llewellyn Moss, who has
accidentally found an attaché case with over 2 million dollars
and is then pursued by two separate bands of killers, is also good --
it's what keeps you turning the pages. The intelligent, efficient Anton
Chigurh, the killer that nobody lives to describe, never really comes
alive as a character and is not really interesting company--as Carson
Wells, another professional killer who is at first Chigurh's pursuer
but finally his victim, puts it, Chigurh has no sense of humor, just a
rigid code of unemotional vengeance as a kind of justice.
McCourt, Frank. Angela's Ashes. New York: Touchstone, 1996.
Not fiction, strictly speaking, but a memoir narrated with the
fluidity and structure or narrative "arc" of a novel. It is a
beautifully told story of terrible poverty in Limerick, Ireland, from
about 1934, when Francis McCourt was 4, to 1949, when he returned to
New York, where he'd been born. Many forces conspire to drive the
family down, but the decisive one is the alcoholic irresponsibility of
the father, Malachy.
McCullers, Carson. 1940. The Heart
is a Lonely Hunter. Bantam 1953 ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
A placid southern town is revealed to be torn by intense passions
as McCullers takes us into the consciousness of several of its
poor and lower middle-class citizens. The girl Mick Kelly comes
of age (at 15), a radical drifter is defeated once again in his
efforts to make the "Don't knows" understand how they're
oppressed, the owner of the all-night New York Café watches
it all, and the town's sole black physician finally bursts the
dam of a lifetime of rage against white injustice. All these
people confide in the sympathetic deaf-mute, believing he alone
can understand them but he doesn't, and he in turn attributes
such deep understanding of his own emotions to a fat, self-centered
deaf-mute moron. It is the black physician Dr. Benedict Mady
Copeland who is the novel's most thoroughly imagined character
besides Mick, who must be a version of McCullers herself, who
was only 24 when this first novel appeared. 02-10-02
Naipaul, V. S. Miguel Street.
1980 ed. London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, 1959.
Naipaul's "first written, though third published novel."
A series of character sketches from a Port-of-Spain (Trinidad)
slum, related by an East Indian Trinidadian child becoming adolescent,
sketch by sketch. They read like practice pieces, exercises in
portraiture and dialogue, in the peculiar syntax that I suppose
is (was?) characteristic of the Port-of-Spain proletariat. Book
is of interest mainly for understanding Naipaul's development
of his craft. Time is impressionistic, child's time. The early
sketches take place in the "once upon a time," or disappeared
eternity, of the experience of one who is very new to the world
and to whom all adults seem immutable. The story I found most
memorable is "B. Wordsworth," the poet who never existed
and who was never a poet and who may or may not have survived
a girl poet pregnant with their little poet, ut who still left
the boy narrator with the sense that he carried poetry
in him. (1982.10.28)
Okri, Ben. The Famished Road. New York: Anchor, 1991.
500 pages
Sweat, spirits and poverty in
rural Nigeria, as seen by a credulous spirit who consents to
be born to a poor couple. Dad is immensely strong, honest
and rebellious; Mum is infinitely supportive and uncomplaining;
Madame Koto is fat, corrupt, powerful and sometimes kindly. Magic
irrealism, which gets tiresomely repetitive. 2002/07/30
Ondaatje, Michael. Anil's Ghost.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. 307
Terror to combat terror. Those who interfere with the killing
will be killed, preferably in an exemplary manner. Your corpse
will be disfigured, perhaps mutilated, or with multiple fractures,
or your head may be stuck on a pole where everyone in your village
must see it as they pass by. And none better remove it, lest
they suffer the same fate.
This is what Ondaatje confronts in this novel. A three-way
war of terror rages in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s, early 1990s:
the government, trying to hold the center, against Sinhalese
insurgents in the south and Tamil separatists in the north. This
sort of thing is not exclusive to Sri Lanka, he recognizes in
a scene describing the exhumation of terror victims in far-off
Guatemala.
We witness only two acts of violence in this novel, one of them
trivial in this context: Anil, the Sri Lanka-born heroine, in
a rage that is both plausible and incomprehensible, stabs her
obtuse American lover in the forearm and abandons him in their
hotel room.
The other occurs much later, near the end of the novel: we
watch a suicide bomber make his preparations, approach the president
of Sri Lanka in the midst of a festival crowd, and detonate.
Dozens are killed, none of them known to us from the novel.
Mostly, we are acquainted with violence by being forced to
look very closely at its results, those mutilated corpses. To
make a story to contain his cry of anguish, Ondaatje fashions
a murder mystery. Anil, like Ondaatje a long-time expatriate,
returns to Sri Lanka as a forensic pathologist for the UN Human
Rights Commission. Teamed with Sarath, a sad, older Sri Lankan
archeologist, reluctant to probe such dangerous issues but too
good-hearted and honest to refuse, she seeks to discover the
identity of a recent corpse discovered in an ancient burial ground.
It is a flimsy device, but strong enough to hold the willing
reader for the things Ondaatje needs to tell us, about ways of
dying and killing, ancient and modern medicine, familial jealousies,
the beauty of the Sri Lankan sun, its mountains, forests and
waters, which somehow survive the horrible destruction of humanity.
01/4/6
McCaffery, Larry, ed. Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream
Nation. Boulder, Normal: Black Ice Books, 1993. 247
In the late 20th century, it took a lot to épater
les bourgeois, since the literate bourgeois had become so
jaded. Here we read a lot about cunts and gooey masturbation
in nonlinear (and in one case -- by Samuel R. Delany -- circular)
narrative. The subtlest, and possibly funniest, piece is McCaffery's
introduction (he poses as a "private e" -- i.e., editor),
the most inspired lunacy is, as usual, from Mark Leyner, and
Kathy Acker does her aggressive cunt-in-your-face thing. Also
contributions by William T. Vollman, Harold Jaffe, and some other
folks I'd never heard of and may not hear of again. 020206 (See
also Acker, Kathy. Blood
and Guts in High School)
Pamuk, Orhan. 2005. Istanbul: Memories and the City. Translated by M. Freely. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Pamuk projects his personal melancholy -- hüzün
in Turkish -- onto this once-great city, interspersing reminiscences of
a privileged but cloistered childhood with meditations on writers and
artists who have portrayed the city.
Istanbul’s hüzün, he tells us, is different from the tristesse
that Claude Lévi-Strauss found in tropical cities such as Delhi or São
Paulo, because “in Istanbul the remains of a glorious past civilization
are everywhere visible. … For the city’s more sensitive and attuned
residents, these ruins are reminders that the present city is so poor
and confused that it can never again dream of rising to its former
heights of wealth, power, and culture.” (p. 101) Sensitive and attuned
though he may be, he appears unaware that Delhi had “a glorious past
civilization” of its own, even more ancient than
Istanbul/Constantinople.
Flaubert, Gérard de Nerval, Théophile
de Gautier and other foreign visitors help shape Pamuk’s vision of what
the city was like before he knew it, and also, he argues, shaped the
way of looking at it of later Turkish writers, particularly “the great
fat poet, Yahya Kemal”; “the popular historian Reshat Ekrem Koçu”; the
memoirist Abdülhuk Shinasi Hisar; and the novelist Ahmet Hamdi
Tanpinar. (Spellings approximate; I don’t have a Turkish font.)
To
me the most interesting chapter was “The Rich,” the class from which
Pamuk’s family was descending (falling) throughout his childhood, which
includes this acute observation:
“If Istanbul’s westernized
bourgeoisie gave support to the military interventions of the past
forty years, never strenuously objecting to military interference in
politics, it was not because it feared a leftist uprising (the Turkish
left in this country [sic] has never been strong enough to achieve such
a feat); rather, the elite’s tolerance of the military was rooted in
the fear that one day the lower classes would combine forces with the
new rich pouring in from the provinces to abolish the westernized
bourgeois way of life under the banner of religion.” (p. 183)
His
personal story here goes up to about age 20, when, in the final
sentence, he declares that he is going to be a writer. His
reminiscences of childhood help explain some of the peculiarities of
his fiction, for example his childhood fascination with an imaginary
double (“the other Orhan”), which is the central theme of
The White Castle, and his fascination with miniaturists and meticulous
reproduction of familiar scenes, as in My Name is Red.
And the many photographs and other illustrations, one or more on almost
every page, all in black and white, seem to confirm his vision of his
own and his city’s hüzün.
Pamuk, Orhan. The White Castle.
Tr. Victoria Holbrook. New York: Vintage, 1998. 161
A young Venetian becomes slave of a Turk whom he greatly resembles
& over several decades assists in his schemes, especially
the invention of a monstrous war machine, to win the favor of
the sultan. Each man -- slave and master -- teaches the other
his language & details of his culture, until, possibly but
ambiguously, they exchange identities. One or the other of them
escapes the wrath of the sultan (when the machine fails) &
escapes to Italy. Multi-framed (a fictional contemporary claims
to have discovered a manuscript, the manuscript turns out not
to have been written by the person in whose voice it is told),
to multiply the ambiguities of what is otherwise a not very interesting
story. Ntbk 99/8/5
Pamuk, Orhan. My Name is Red. Tr.
Erdag M. Göknar. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
Who cares who murdered Elegant Effendi? You probably won't
and I didn't, but the question obsesses the other miniaturists
working for the sultan, Refuge of the World, in 17th century
Constantinople. The intrigue all has to do with the incursion
of Venetian pictorial techniques perspective, individual
and realistic portraiture in an ancient tradition of painting
perfect and beautiful representations of idealized figures. The
characters address us directly, aware that they have a reader
but seemingly unaware that this reader also knows what is in
the minds (or at least the stories) of the other characters.
Figures from the miniaturists' sketches in a coffee house also
speak to us a hastily drawn dog, a horse, the color red.
Some of these little tales are enchanting (the dog especially),
though they don't always work together very well to make a coherent
total. Besides murder by blunt instruments, mutilations and tortures,
the reader also has to endure the obnoxious, self-absorbed and
rather stupid Shekure, probable widow of a man missing in action
and beloved of the indecisive Black (who is not a color but a
painter). 021127
Patchett, Ann. Bel Canto. New
York: Perennial (HarperCollins), 2001. 318 p.
This is a fairy-tale version of the real seizure of the Japanese
ambassador's home and his party guests by a guerrilla squad of
the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru in Lima in 1997. In
an unnamed country that strongly resembles Peru, worldly and
rich Russians, Japanese, Italians, French, and Creoles are taken
captive by Quechua- and Spanish-speaking naïfs in a mansion
that is like an Enchanted Castle, and the one woman among the
captives a beautiful operatic soprano enchants them
all. It all comes to a fairy-tale ending bloodily poetic
for some, happily-ever-after for others. In narrative structure,
it reminded me of Alejandro Casona's romantic melodrama, Siete
Gritos en el Mar. In subject matter, it made me appreciate
the far grittier realism of Gabriel García Márquez's
Diario de un secuestro. 2002-08-06
Powers, Richard. Three Farmers
on Their Way to a Dance. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985.
Three story lines, each with its distinctive voice, two in
the novelistic present (early 1980s) and one running from 1 May
1914 to some time in 1917, with ambiguous hints of later development
embedded in the other two stories. An unnamed "I" (in
the "present") thinks he recognizes himself in the
August Sander photo and tracks down every bit of information
he can about these three young Dutch farmers, dressed in their
finest and jauntily strolling through fields, on the eve of World
War I. Most impressive is the powerful, vivid re-imagining of
the impact of those war years on ordinary lives. (1987/11/20)
Proulx, Annie. Accordion Crimes. New York: Scribner, 1996.
A series of episodes about European immigrants to the US,
their cultural dislocation & the failure, of most of them, to come
even close to their aspirations. A green-button accordeon passed down
the line, from one family to another, links the tales. Ntbk 1996/9/28
(p. 263)
Proulx, E. Annie. Postcards.
Scribner Paperback Fiction ed. New York: Simon & Shuster,
1992.
In 1944, 24-year old Loyal Blood strangles his girlfriend
Billy while raping her, abandons the rundown little family farm
in Vermont and lives in the western states wretchedly, unable
to approach women & unlucky in his jobs, untill dying decades
later as a bum; meanwhile his stubborn, violent father Mink goes
to jail for burning down the barn for the insurance money, and
then dies, liberating his mother Jewell to reinvent herself as
a quilt-maker, and his one-armed brother Dub ends up a real estate
broker in Miami who owes his success to his canny & well-connected
Cuban wife, Pala. It's a dreary but captivating story, but the
greater pleasures are in the ways it is told. Detailed and surprising
descriptions of outdoor scenes, from Vermont to Minnesota and
Oregon, a moment on the expressway in Miami when Dub's wife Pala
is nearly lynched by a black mob furious at the acquittal of
white cops who've killed a black motorist, the mud of the trailer
camp, the quivering anxiety of a trapped female coyote, and so
on. (v. Journal 99/6/21)
No gentle humor in Proulx, nothing to make you want to laugh
without making you want to throw up at the same time (she has
a short story where the joke is about having to cut off a dead
man's feet to get his boots), but lots of irony. Her work is
(mostly, at least in these novels) anti-escapism: you put the
book down to escape into a much less challenging, even less frustrating
ordinary daily existence. No matter what your troubles are, Proulx's
characters have it even worse, and unlike real life, they are
inescapable. When I'm walking through Manhattan and see a guy
lying in rags up against a building, or a mad young woman, still
pretty beneath her filth, squatting and dreamily begging at University
Place & 14th, I can walk by without focusing long or in detail
on what she (or he) looks like or what horrors have brought her
to that state. Proulx doesn't give me that option. There are
photographers like her - Mapplethorpe was also pitiless - and
comic book artists, such as whatsisname (now dead) whose work
is currently on display at the New Museum. But few writers.
Pynchon, Thomas. Mason &
Dixon. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997. 773
A simple tale of a slow-developing comradeship, 'round which
are spun, woven and tangled many wondrous inventions and ancient
Pynchon obsessions to make a dense, happy, delightful and enigmatic
book.
It begins in London when the morose and newly widowed astronomer
Charles Mason meets the somewhat younger, buoyant and much more
physical Jeremiah Dixon, a country surveyor. These two dissimilar
Englishman Mason a deist and the son of a gruff, love-withholding
miller, Dixon a Quaker and the orphan of a coal miner in the
north country -- are teamed by some plot neither of them can
quite penetrate, perpetrated by the Royal Society and probably
British tea interests, to track the transit of Venus in Capetown,
then commissioned separately to make further astronomical observations
on desolate St. Helena (many decades before Napoleon made it
famous), and after many adventures are sent off to draw a line
along the 40th degree of latitude to settle a boundary dispute
in the American colonies. They encounter: the Learnèd
English Dog, Fang; seaman Fenderbelly Bodine (no doubt an ancestor
of the one who appears in Pynchon's other novels); the neurotic
and ineffectively sinister Astronomer Royal, Neville Maskelyne
(villain of another book, by Dava Sobell see below); a
mechanical duck with wondrous powers of flight and conversation;
a Chinese geomancer named Capt. Zhang; a gigantic axman, Stig,
from the very far north; George Washington and his black slave
Gershom, who is also a Jewish vaudevillian comic; Ben Franklin;
wily Mohawks and other Indians; German and Dutch immigrants with
peculiar obsessions; a worldwide Jesuit conspiracy communicating
by mysterious telegraph, whose nuns are trained in sexual seduction
in the manner of O
at Roissy; an enormous "Torpedo" an electric
eel of very high current and many other more or less fantastical
creatures. On his last mission, this time without Dixon, Mason
runs into Dr. Johnson and Boswell in the Hebrides, and asks Boswell
if he had ever had his own Boswell.
It's great fun, full of things to discover, and I'll want
to go back into it soon to discover some more. I may even want
to read the new book by Edwin Danson, Drawing the Line: How
Mason and Dixon Surveyed the Most Famous Border in America (Wiley),
so as to make it easier to follow Pynchon's version. Readers
of the novel may also profit from reading Dava Sobell, Longitude:
The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific
Problem of His Time (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), which
deals with the machinations of Maskelyne to prevent John Harrison,
inventor of a reliable sea-going clock, from winning the Royal
Society's prize for solving the problem of longitude.
Réage, Pauline. Story of O.
Translated by Sabine d'Estrée. 1967 ed. New York: Grove
Press, 1965. 199
Exquisitely exciting fantasy of sweet suffering in bondage.
Originally published in Paris, France, Chez Jean-Jacques Pauvert
in 1954 as Histoire d'O.
Roth, Philip. The Counterlife.
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987. 324
So clever and witty that now I want to read the rest of the
Nathan Zuckerman saga. In this novel, Zuckerman recounts his
own death (and writes his own obituary), and makes many astute
observations of the social anthropology of Jews in New York and
Israel.
Sebold, Alice. 2002. The Lovely
Bones. Boston: Little, Brown. 328 p.
Like Our Town or a Spanish-language telenovela, or
even Juan Rulfo's famous Pedro Páramo, where the
dead chatter to one another from their graves, gives glimpses
of interrelated lives to reaffirm the consoling myths of community:
good people can pull through any tragedy when they pull together,
and everybody ultimately gets what she or he deserves. In this
case, the point of view device is the ghost of a murdered teenage
girl, who can observe her family, friends and murderer as they
go about their lives. It's a girl's book, in the same sense that
the book I read just previously. Evan S. Connell's Son of
the Morning Star (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), is a
boy's book. That one was full of gunfighters on horseback and
lots of man-to-man combat (Custer's Last Stand); this has a cute
little dog, sweet kids, astute and persistent young women, and
a few pathetically sad men one of whom can't keep himself
from killing little girls. I found it sappy, but it's a huge
sales success, so there must be a lot of present or former teenage
girls who love it. They would probably hate smelly, sweaty, and
raucous Son. 021024
Shaw, Irwin. 1973. God was here but He left early. New York: Arbor House.
The 3 longer pieces are comic fantasies, like Vonnegut but without the
mad imagination. In "Whispers in Bedlam," a not very bright
professional football player who has never thought deeply about
anything suddenly acquires the power to hear distant whispers and even
unspoken thoughts -- enabling him to acquire riches and fame (in
business, poker, and football) but revealing a world of hypocrisy and
deceit that so horrifies him that... Well, you can guess the rest. In
"The Mannichon Solution," a nebbish chemist working in the detergents
department while dreaming of the Nobel Prize accidently discovers a
solution that might make him rich and famous but that kills any
organism with yellow pigment, and for which the only likely buyer is
the C.I.A. (to drop into the Yangtze to solve the "yellow peril"
problem). And "Small Saturday" links the efforts of a little bookseller
to get a date with a bigger woman to the stories of each of the women
he calls-- clever, cute, but not very probing bouquet of anecdotes
about the NYC singles scene circa 1967.
Of
the shorter pieces, "Where all things wise and fair descend," is mostly
an opportunity for Shaw to quote some his favorite 19th century poetry,
which contributes sweetly to the maturing of a nice, good-hearted
college boy. Don't bother, unless you want to read Shelley and don't
happen to have a copy of the original handy.
The title story
is the best -- though the cute title has almost nothing to do with it.
A very believable, attractive, intelligent and divorced American
professional woman is trying rather desperately to arrange an abortion
in Europe. We never learn whether she succeeds or not, because what
interests Shaw is how she develops and what she learns in her sometimes
cagey, sometimes direct attempts to achieve something that Is Just Not
Talked About.
Like the critics say, Shaw's writing did sometimes
remind me of Hemingway, especially in the title story, which is about
the revelation of character rather than the closure of some action. But
then, Hemingway's famous story -- "Hills like White Elephants" -- is so
much subtler that some readers don't even recognize that it's about the
same subject.
Smith, Martin Cruz. Havana
Bay. New York: Random House, 1999. 329 pp.
Arkady Renko goes to Havana to investigate murder of a Russian
colleague & to kill himself, but when Cuban police try to
kill him, he is re-energized, and with help of a small, feisty
mulata policewoman, Ofelia Osorio, foils plot he doesn't understand
but involved yet another attempt on the life of Castro. Very
vivid portrayal of life & its contradictions in contemporary
Havana. 99/8/15
Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. New
York: Viking International, 2000. 448 pages.
Zadie Smith has great fun with accents and attitudes in this
story of conflicting fanaticisms in multicultural London. Characters
include: a middle-aged Koran-obsessed Bengali; his happily agnostic,
slow-witted and good-hearted English army buddy; their much younger
wives a black, patois-speaking Jamaican, a fugitive from
Seventh Day Adventists eagerly awaiting the end of the world,
and a short, practical Bangladeshi who can recite the Koran but
doesn't believe it; a scientist fanatical only about his research,
and the teen-aged children of these three households, alternately
obsessed by religion, drugs, science and each other. The anti-Rushdie
hysteria and the burning of Satanic Verses (an episode
in the novel) make a kind of sense in this confusion of motives
and loyalties.
The novel falls apart only when the author tries too hard
to bring it all together, in an utterly implausible rush of coincidences
in the last couple of pages. But no matter. The other 446 pages
are full of laughs, griefs and insights. 2002-7-23
Stendahl, (Marie Henri Beyle).
The Charterhouse of Parma. Translated by Richard Howard.
Modern Library ed. New York: Random House, 1999. 507 pp.
The hero is a handsome, lucky fool, Fabrizio del Dongo, who
gets into and out of scrapes due to a kind of calculated passion.
That is, he makes grand gestures less because of true love or
any particular political commitment, but because he's concerned
about what pose he should strike. His most memorable adventure
and the best episode in the book is his uncomprehending participation
in the battle of Waterloo, whither he has hied without any military
experience or training or knowledge of French. This is a funny,
poignant, and probably realistic depiction of the confusion of
battle and the panicked disarray of the French soldiers and officers
after their defeat.
There is also fun in some of Stendahl's miscellaneous observations
about love, politics and letters.
"And a man of your talents, Signor, must steal in order
to live!" [says the Duchess (Fabrizio's beautiful aunt)
to the highwayman, who is also a famous poet.]
"That may be the reason I have any talent. Hitherto all
our authors who have become well known were people paid by the
government or by the religion they sought to undermine...."
(p. 357)
Another insight (this time in the voice of the author himself):
I am inclined to think that the immoral delight Italians experience
in taking revenge is a consequence of their power of imagination;
people in other countries do not, strictly speaking, forgive;
they forget. (p. 365)
Stendahl finally gets bored with Fabrizio and lets him die
in a monastery, of love-sickness.
Stone, Robert (1977). A Flag
for Sunrise. New York, Ballantine Books.
Stone is a very good conventional novelist, according to some
very old conventions: pre-Hemingway, Faulkner or Dos Passos,
inter alia. Vocabulary is excessive and too flowery for Hemingway,
psychology too primitive for Faulkner, narrative too linear for
Dos Passos. Plot stars Frank Holliwell, middle-aged, tall, athletic,
an alcoholic with a sinister past with the CIA in Vietnam, married
to an independent professional whom he appears to love and is
now a professor anthropology in Delaware, also with mysterious
past (CIA? anthropological? both?) in Central America. Holliwell
is an implausible concoction, a mix of James Bond, Leamus &
Walter Mitty (or Miniver Cheevy). Somehow they find themselves
in a country like Nicaragua, where there's a mystic, 60-ish alcoholic
priest, and a bewitchingly innocent nun who -- most implausibly
-- lets herself get fucked by the ridiculously incompetent Holliwell.
Pablo Tabor, paranoid speed freak, is a delicious character --
unreal as a whole, but with believable episodes. This is because
his language (in speech and thought) is recognizable & authentic.
Other characters (there are many) are much less successful. Politics:
a pox on both your houses, but with more sympathy for the ever-doomed
and ever-naive rebels against the tyrants who run this mythical
country. (Adapted from ntbk 7/22/86 (174))
Thornton, Lawrence. Imagining Argentina. New York: Doubleday, 1987.
In Imagining Argentina,
Lawrence Thornton imagined as a protagonist a liberal minded,
middle class Argentine as nice as Mr. Rogers (like Mr. Rogers,
he works with children) whose wife is suddenly "disappeared"
by military goons. The story evokes our empathy precisely because
the protagonist, Carlos Rueda, is so much like the probable reader,
and because the Argentina that Thornton imagines is also familiar
-- vaguely like small cities and farmland in the United States.
The bad guys, however, are completely opaque, their motives
no clearer than those of the troll in "Billy Goat Gruff."
Thornton's imagined place is not really Argentina at all, but
the magical kingdom of fairy tales where spirit triumphs over
fear by the appropriate gesture of an individual.
(Excerpted from Geoffrey Fox, “Mermaids and other Fetishes,” 1989)
Tyler, Ann. (2001). Back When
We Were Grownups. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
Clever, but what's the point? The opening line tells the whole
story: "Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered
she had turned into the wrong person." Like a lot of people.
But since it was her own fault, why should we care? 020807
Treece, Henry. The Great Captains.
1980 ed. Manchester, UK: Savoy Books, Ltd., 1956.
The book is comically, absurdly bad. The main story tells
of Artos the Bear, a Celtic tribal chieftain in 477 AD, who will
become Arturius as Count of England and ultimately and way posthumously
King Arthur of legend. This primitive tribal chief knows only
two motivations: to fight (but we know not for what), and to
love his flaxen-haired Gwenhwyfar (who will become known as Guinevere).
The Gwenhwyfar impulse is not as strong as it appeared -- he's
easily distracted by the improbable raven-haired beauty Lystra,
whom he obliges to bleach her hair and rechristens Gwenhwyfar,
so now there are two. So his love for G is hardly an overriding
principle. The original G is, in true telenovela style, his sister
(maybe his half-sister -- I didn't quite follow the rather oblique
references). So if the love story doesn't hold this story together,
it has to be Artos' campaigns to save Britain from the Saxons,
Jutes, Angles and Picts in the wake of the withdrawal of the
Roman legions. But this is a hopeless task from the outset, as
hopeless as dreams of an ethnically pure Greater Serbia. Britain,
Treece acknowledges, is already a great ethnic mix. One of Artos'
two most trusted "captains," Cie (no hint as to how
to pronounce this), is said to be a small, dark man of "Silurian"
descent. There are Irish, who are always sandy-haired and fair-skinned.
The Celts are generally dark-haired, except for Artos himself
& his sister-lover, who appear to be as blond as the invaders,
who are almost always "flaxen-haired." The exception
is one Saxon king whose mother was a Celt, for, as Treece mentions,
there's a lot of miscegenation going on, and the Celts as a whole
don't feel particularly chauvinistic. Artos' own army is made
up largely of Jutes toward the end. Artos' nationalism is suspect
also because he claims authority in the name of Rome, an empire
and civilization that he doesn't know but imagines as vastly
superior to anything in Britain.
This may be fairly accurate as history -- the confusion, the
wars about nothing much at all except which male is going to
dominate, the easy switching of loyalties even across dialect
and language boundaries -- and it might make for a good background
for a story, but it is too diffuse & chaotic to be the story.
Artos, in this portrayal, is just not a very interesting person.
He doesn't know what he wants, beyond being recognized as Count
of Britain, and once he establishes himself as such, has no idea
what to do next besides eat, drink and loll around on his throne
while courtiers seek to amuse him. He's a bore, not a bear.
The story just galumphs along, one little (or big) battle
after another in which, usually, a hundred or more men we don't
know (because Treece has never bothered to introduce them to
us) are said to have been killed. Then the galumphing is interrupted
by a carefully set up dramatic scene, of which I can remember
only two that seem to fully engage the author's (if not the reader's)
attention. First is the dance of the corn men and antler men,
a long set-piece in which the antlered men struggle with the
white-painted corn (i.e., cereal, probably oats or barley) men,which
sounds inspired half by Frasier's Golden Bough (which
Treece cites as a source) and half by accounts of American Indians.
Still, something like that may have occurred in those ancient
British tribes, which surely had some sort of fertility rite.
(The whole thing is about making the new crop prosper.)
The second is the far more improbable bull v. girl dance.
We are to believe that this savage chieftain Artos has ordered
up the reconstruction of the old Roman amphitheater at Caerleon,
itself improbable (and that artisans would be available who knew
how to do it). Then, that he knew something about bull fighting
(never before mentioned in the book, & not popularly associated
with blue-painted Druid warriors). The dance of the near-naked
Lystra to dodge the horns of the mighty bull, and her ultimate
goring, must have been the erotic high-point for Treece.
The roundtable legend is reduced to an incident where Artos
throws his round shield down into the mud and orders the kings
of the west to gather around it, to make the point that nobody
is in the head position. There is no hint of Lancelot in Treece's
story (at least, none that I perceived).
It's not King Lear, which is also ancient Celtic mythology,
but with great characters. The first notable character in this
book is Ambrosius Aurelius, the last Roman Count of Britain (was
that a real title?), who has flashes of impressive authority,
but mainly just withers away until Medrodus (Mordred of the legends)
murders him. He occupies the 1st 50 pp., then lingers on for
a few more after Artos (Arthur) is introduced; he then disappears,
and our attention is supposed to refocus on Artos. It's like
an American soap opera, you use up one main character & then
another rises to carry on, and so on. No dramatic tension here.
Britain will go on and on, whatever happens to Ambrosius, or
Medrodus, or Artos, & with this one-thing-after-another structure,
the story can only be about Britain, not about Artos (or any
of the others). In contrast, King Lear is about Lear (&
his daughters).
It should be a good book for an 11-year old, though -- lots
of sword & horseplay.
Vargas Llosa, Mario. La Fiesta del
Chivo. Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2000. 518 pp.
What does terror look like? How does it feel, to use it or
to be its victim? Mario Vargas Llosa has imagined these things
so vividly that after reading this book you will think that you
know. La Fiesta del Chivo is the most fully achieved novel
yet in this author's long campaign to bring real historical fact
to breathing, pulsating, blood-gushing life. The Chivo (literally,
"goat") is Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, and the "fiesta"
takes place in the last months before, and some five months following,
his assassination in 1961.
Since La casa verde (1966), his second novel, Vargas
Llosa has interwoven social research and fantasy, with much more
rigorous research than most novelists could be bothered with.
In La casa verde he relied for part of the story on what
he'd learned as an anthropological research assistant in the
Amazon. La historia de Mayta (1985) uses interviews and
much documentary evidence to portray the real revolutionary left
of Peru in the 1950s, in which he sets Mayta, a plausible composite
invention.
Here, in La Fiesta del Chivo, he presents a highly
detailed, blow-by-blow documentary of the real conspiracy to
kill Trujillo, including incursions into the mind of the unsuspecting
dictator "el Benefactor," "el Jefe,"
etc., as his terrified subjects call him. This is very exciting,
tense writing, even if we know enough Dominican history to recognize
all the characters and know what their fates will be. Masterfully,
Vargas Llosa wraps this story in another, fictional one, of Urania
Cabral and her father Agustín, at one time President of
Trujillo's senate and one of the Chivo's most trusted collaborators.
The mystery is why Urania fled the country in 1960 when she was
just 14 1/2, and why after refusing any contact with her
father for 31 years she has returned. The conclusion is
as shocking as the scenes of torture and brutality taken from
the archives or testimonies, as shocking, that is, as the historically
documented episodes. But it is even more stunning because, while
completely believable, it is a great and horrible surprise. 01/02/04.
On the Dominican Republic, cf. Michele Wucker, Why
the Cocks Fight, and for another novel on a similar theme,
cf. Julia Alvarez, In
the Time of the Butterflies.
Vargas Llosa, Mario. Historia de Mayta.
Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1984.
Thu, 1997 Nov 27, 11:03 - As Vargas Llosa tells it in La
historia secreta de una novela.(1983 ed. Barcelona: Tasquets,
1971) , La casa verde resulted from his attempts to weld
together two unrelated novels that he was trying to write on
alternate days. La tía Julia y el escribidor
and Historia de Mayta must have similarly disconnected
origins. The first is a joining of the story of Varguitas' romance
of his tía Julia, to a story about somebody MVLL knew,
possibly in the same period, el escribidor of radionovelas.
As I recall, neither is essential to the other, & the only
connection is that the same young man, Varguitas, is a protagonist
in one and an observer in the other.
Mayta is even curiouser in its structure. The author (MVLL's
narrators are almost always transparent versions of himself)
seems to have conducted a real investigation into the history
of a real revolutionary of the late 1950s. He presents his speculative
findings (because the research in newpaper archives and interviews
of survivors and witnesses leaves many questions still in dispute)
through a multilayered veil of fiction. But even the first layer
is not completely coherent. He presents himself as a novelist
who wants to write a fictitious account of real events, and yet
needs to know as exactly as possible what those real events were,
as a way, he says - I don't remember the phrases, because he
offers this explanation several times to doubting interview prospects
- to know how much he is lying. O.k., that may be questionable
strategy, but not implausible. But then he presents himself as
a former schoolmate of Mayta, and therefore of the same age.
This age is never stated more precisely than "cuarentón"
at the time of the crucial events, which must be 1958 - Fidel
Castro is still in the mountains, shortly before entering Havana.
The narrator's quest takes place "now," which seems
to be 1983 -- the book came out in 1984 - by which time, to follow
the logic of the first premise, both he and Mayta would have
to be at least 66. However, the conversations & reflections
of the narrator, & his relationship to the people he interviews,
seem to be those of a man no older than the real Vargas Llosa,
born 1936. How do I know? Well, he doesn't seem to have any personal
memories of Perú prior to the events of 1958 - his description
of school days with Mayta are generic, could be from any period
- nor any acquaintance with any of his interviewees or their
contexts that goes back even to that time. A second & more
glaring inconsistency is the age of Mayta's tía, 70 when
the narrator interviews her. That is, she is barely, if at all,
older than Mayta himself, but is supposed to have reared him.
Then there is the author's strange decision to locate the
events of 1983 in a fantastically apocalytic Perú, which
has been invaded, most implausibly, by a combined Cuban and Bolivian
revolutionary force and is then also invaded by U.S. Marines
to combat the first invaders, leaving the Peruvian armed forces
on the margin and causing great destruction from terrorist attacks
and air-raids. Enough social violence was already occurring in
Perú in 1983 to make this whole scene completely unnecessary,
as well as ridiculously implausible. Worse, it is not fully imagined.
We never meet or even see one of those "Marines" (everybody
uses the English word) or terrucos, nor is there any attempt
to explain how the Cuban-Bolivian revolutionary army could have
been formed or how they can defend their bases in Bolivia from
air or other attacks - it would be possible to make such a case,
I suppose, but what would be the point?
In the course of the novel, MVL slides from one p.o.v. to
another, beginning a sentence in the 3rd person, about Mayta,
and ending in the 1st, as Mayta, or sometimes in the 1st as himself.
The maneuver is tricky but generally successful, but there are
places where it didn't make sense. I don't remember just what
it was, but I think there are places where Mayta as "I"
is saying things that the character could not possibly know.
Then at the end, MVL undoes his whole fiction, by claiming
to have met the real prototype, who is now an ex-con and an employee
in an ice cream parlor. He confesses to having invented the Perú
apocalíptico for no good reason he can explain, and
also to have invented - both to strengthen his fictional Mayta's
motivations and to explain how he became alienated from his political
party on the eve of the revolutionary action - Mayta's homosexuality.
This is a very important theme in the development of the character
of the fictional Mayta. However, it turns out to be not the case
at all of the "real" Mayta, the one he claims to have
found and interviewed after writing his whole novel. This "real"
Mayta is perhaps more interesting than the fictional one, &
although he claims not to be prejudiced, is surprised and a little
disgusted by the attribution of homosexuality. He's married with
several kids, and knows homosexuals chiefly from having seen
them depraved and exploited in Lurigancho prison.
It's about fragmentation, about pulling many different threads
and styles and premises together into one work and achieving
coherence. Vargas Llosa, for all his brilliance, does not always
pull it off. I was moved and amazed by Historia de Mayta,
but also disappointed in it as an aesthetic construct. Come to
think of it, La ciudad y los perros is also two stories
attached to but not integrated into one another. Pantaleón
y las visitadoras is the only one of his novels I can think
of right now that is fully integrated and coherent, in the same
way as GGM's Crónica de una muerte anunciada.
In MVLL, I admire the technical virtuosity, in swift shifts
of p.o.v., pacing of actions, and the pitiless descriptions,
like lingering close-ups of garbage, or broken lives, or ruined
apartments, etc. In Gabriel García Márquez I admire
enormously the aesthetic integration he usually manages to achieve,
starting from ideas and perceptions just as diverse as MVLL's.
Vidal, Gore. Creation. New York: Ballantine Books,
1982.
A 600-page travelogue on a long-gone world. Cyrus Spitama,
half-Greek, half-Persian grandson of Zoroaster, boyhood friend
of Xerxes, journeys across the vast Persian Empire of the 5th
c. BC and to India -- where he marries a king's daughter and
converses with holy men of various persuasions, most memorably
with Gautama Buddha himself -- and thence on to Cathay (China),
where he becomes the prized slave of an impoverished duke, listens
to Lao-Tze, and comes to know the aged Confucius intimately (they
go fishing together). Finally he manages to return to Persia,
in time for Xerxes' assassination and the ascension of his crippled
son Artaxerxes, who sends him on as ambassador to Athens, where
he hears Thucydides' distorted pro-Greek version of the Persian
wars, chats with the young Pericles, and dictates his memoirs
to his grandson Democritus. Lots of action, even more philosophical
discussion, but only sporadic, unsustained narrative tension
-- ideas, rather than characters, are Vidal's main concerns here.
Cyrus, one of the few purely fictional characters to appear,
is seeking to solve the riddle of creation, a paradox for Zoroastrians,
solved by reincarnation for Buddha, an event that never occurred
for Lao-Tze, and an issue beyond human knowing and thus not worth
exploring for Confucius. In an epilogue, Cyrus' grandson Democritus
sums up his famous solution to the problem -- all is matter,
made up of "atoms," ceaselessly recombining to create
new things. Fascinating as popular history of philosophy, but
lacking the sustained, complex character development that Vidal
achieves brilliantly in Burr. We get intriguing glimpses
of Pericles, Xerxes and the others, but the only truly complex
and fascinating characters are Atosa (Darius the Great's wife
and mother of Xerxes) and Confucius. 030819
Walker, Barbara K., Ed. (1988). Turkish Folk-Tales.
Oxford, Oxford University Press.
34 charming tales, selected from over 3,000 collected on audiotape
by Barbara Walker and her husband in villages throughout Turkey,
1961-1987, and retold by BKW. 020807
Woolf, Virginia (1925). Mrs. Dalloway.
New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.
A mistresspiece of internal monologue. The reader gets to
eavesdrop on the conversations that Clarissa Dalloway and her
acquaintances imagine but dare not or know not how to speak.
This is a subtler and wittier X-ray than Orwell's of the anxieties
of the lower middle, middle middle and upper middle classes,
groping for a new normality after the trauma of the Great European
War. Septimus Warren Smith, the war hero driven mad by that war,
and his obtuse but self-assured doctors symbolize a whole eddy
of misunderstandings, while Clarissa submerges her doubts by
organizing a party where the guests make no gesture without calculating
the impression they might create on others. I thank the makers
of the movie "The Hours" for getting me to engage in
this delicious read. 030312
|