Catcher in the Rye

I finally got around to reading Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. 1951. New York: Bantam Books, 1969. (Click on title for my plot summary.) I had long intended to read it, but if I did years ago, I've forgotten. It was this month's selection in our reading club in the Carboneras public library, so I read a (very good) Spanish translation for the first chapters, until all our books (and other things) arrived from New York last week and I found this copy. Our Spanish partners in the reading club found it amusing, I guess, but were not much impressed. I think we're all too old and have seen too much to be shocked by another adolescent crisis of a very privileged kid. (His parents are well off and buy him anything he wants, and his much more stable siblings love him, so what's his problem?) Some of Holden Caulfield's observations of social types are spot on, though, and his irreverence and slang (even in Spanish translation, but better in English) are sometimes very funny.

How to write about war

Somebody had left many boxes of books on the sidewalk on 76th Street between Fifth and Madison, and as Susana and I were walking back from our run in Central Park we stopped and scooped up a bunch. One was a very famous war novel that I had never heard of until our friend Hazel in Carboneras urged it upon us, Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong (London: Hutchinson, 1993). Another was a collection of short stories by Saki, pen name of Hugh Munro, whom I remembered from the delightful, chilling surprise of reading "The Open Window" long ago in high school.

I don't know how I had missed Birdsong -- a quick search on the 'net revealed that it has been a best-seller, there's been talk for years about a movie, and it has even inspired tours of the battlefields that figure in it. It really is a gripping read, especially those horrifying scenes from the trenches of France in 1916 and until the end of the Great War two years later. These are preceded and then intertwined with a kind of love story -- though "love" is an imprecise description for British infantry officer Stephen Wraysford's obsession with a vacuous, self-centered and dimly remembered Frenchwoman. No matter. Even the flightiest characters (including Stephen's Isabelle) are depicted convincingly. There is also a later story, set in 1978-79, about Stephen's granddaughter's search for mature independence and information about that grandfather. All of it clearly and sensitively related, though it is only the two terrible bloody years in France that really matter. Faulks has chosen to remind us of this war which (as his characters say and almost all real-life contemporaries said over and over) unleashed destructive forces so much greater than its predecessors -- including the cruel and bloody Boer, Russo-Japanese, and Balkan wars that immediately preceded it -- that it changed the world.

So it seemed an odd coincidence to find in the same serendipitous heap of books on the sidewalk of 76th Street the short, poetic piece, "Birds on the Western Front," in Emlyn Williams' 1978 edition of Saki's Short Stories.

The other stories here (there are about 60 in the book, a small sample of Saki's voluminous output) are mostly clever, extended jokes, playing on and confirming a public school Briton's class prejudices. They are often annoyingly sexist, in the light, silly manner of situation comedy. In fact, what gives pleasure in reading Saki is the absurd situations leading to startling outcomes (as in "The Open Window"). The characters are simply caricatures, and they all talk alike, however devious their intentions. But-- "Birds on the Western Front" is something else.

The frivolous, supercilious Saki was perhaps a cover for a somewhat more serious Hugh Munro, foreign correspondent (1902-1906) and author of serious-sounding tomes on Russian history and the pre-1914 turbulence elsewhere in Europe. In 1916, at the age of 46 (rather old to serve), he joined the British Army (Royal Scottish Fusileers) and was soon killed in a trench in France. "Birds", which must have been written just weeks or months before his death, ingeniously describes trench warfare without looking at it directly. Instead, it is about the birds whose natural habitat has been destroyed by cannonade, bombs and machine-gunning, but still must find some scrap of something for nesting and carrying on the only life they know. This is a marvelously effective denunciation of the war, still fresh even after the angry sentimentality of Wilfred Owen's “Dulce et Decorum Est” has begun to grate.

I wonder if Faulks was thinking of this short piece by Saki when he chose the title "Birdsong." If so, then maybe what he meant to suggest (with Saki) was that even through the worst horrors, life persists.

Here is my plot summary of and further comment on Birdsong, and rather less on Emlyn Williams' edition of Saki's Short Stories.

Photo of Ancre (France) after the battle from this website.

Holiday message from Roy Blount

This is too good not to share. I endorse the sentiments.

I've been talking to booksellers lately who report that times are hard. And local booksellers aren't known for vast reserves of capital, so a serious dip in sales can be devastating. Booksellers don't lose enough money, however, to receive congressional attention. A government bailout isn't in the cards.

We don't want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods. So let's mount a book-buying splurge. Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party. Buy the rest of your Christmas presents, but that's just for starters. Clear out the mysteries, wrap up the histories, beam up the science fiction! Round up the westerns, go crazy for self-help, say yes to the university press books! Get a load of those coffee-table books, fatten up on slim volumes of verse, and take a chance on romance!

There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they're easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves. Stockpile children's books as gifts for friends who look like they may eventually give birth. Hold off on the flat-screen TV and the GPS (they'll be cheaper after Christmas) and buy many, many books. Then tell the grateful booksellers, who by this time will be hanging onto your legs begging you to stay and live with their cat in the stockroom: "Got to move on, folks. Got some books to write now. You see...we're the Authors Guild."

Enjoy the holidays.

Roy Blount Jr.
President
Authors Guild

Dominican tragedy

Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (San Cristóbal, 24 de octubre de 1891 - Santo Domingo, 30 de mayo de 1961), supreme ruler of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination 31 years later, continues to mark the lives of Dominicans, including those brought up far from the island and even those born after his death -- for example novelist Julia Álvarez, born in New York in 1950, and Junot Díaz, born in Santo Domingo in 1968 and brought up in New Jersey.

Junot Díaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning book,The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead Books, 2007) is, in its structure, a classic tragedy. Óscar de León, a.k.a. Oscar Wao (an ignorant classmate's pronunciation of Oscar Wilde) is more than a fat, nerdy kid from New Jersey who is also (we are given to understand) an extraordinarily gifted science-fantasy writer. He is also the bearer of a terrible hereditary curse, the fukú, which strikes him down right at the moment when he is on the verge of triumph: he has finally got laid, and he has completed or nearly so his magnum opus -- which however disappears before his survivors can publish or even read it.

The fukú in Oscar's family was unleashed when his grandfather, a cautious but prosperous dark-skinned doctor in a small Dominican city, dared to defend his family's honor by keeping his beautiful eldest daughter out of reach of Trujillo, whose favorite sport was deflowering virgins not so much for the sexual thrill as for the excitement of humiliating their fathers and brothers. The doctor's tremulous defiance leads to a series of disasters, including his imprisonment, the deaths of his wife and two elder daughters and the abandonment of the third, the infant Belicia, who is taken in by a family that so mistreats her that she is left with terrible burn scars on her back and even more terrible resentment against -- well, just about everything. The fukú is powerfully reinforced when Beli turns into an extremely sexy teenager (big ass and tits, combined with dark skin that Dominican men associate with voluptuousness) and falls hopelessly in love with The Gangster, a hit man who, it turns out, is married to a daughter of Trujillo. The furious wife sets thugs on Beli, who try and nearly succeed in beating her to death. Hustled off to New Jersey by her protectress, an aunt she calls La Inca, Beli becomes the angry, embittered mother of Lola and Oscar, transmitting the fukú by belittling her daughter and driving Oscar to retreat into his fantasies, his writing and voracious eating.

When Beli finally Oscar off to La Inca in the Dominican Republic, he too falls hopelessly in love with an impossible partner: a prostitute who is married to a very jealous cop. Trujillo is dead by now, but the fukú of his spirit lives on, in the atrocities of police who know no law can touch them. The fukú is a national curse, taking revenge on anybody who seeks to love freely and generously. In short, the faceless minions of the fukú, dressed and armed as policemen, kill him.

All this is told by Yunior, another aspiring writer who lusts after Lola but can't stop himself from screwing other women (and thus sabotaging his relations with Lola) and becomes an odd-couple companion of fat Oscar. Yunior's speech is a mix of English, Spanglish and weirder locutions from the science fantasy literature that he, Oscar, and Junot Díaz seem to know very well.

This was not a lot of fun to read, however. At least for me. Oscar, until the very end of the book, is a colossal bore: a grotesquely fat momma's boy, so passive you want to shake him -- which is what Yunior tries to do, at least sporadically. And Oscar's inner life, his imaginary world, is populated by science fantasy novels which, if you don't know them, amount to simply puzzling references to what must be imaginary planets, heroes and evil-doers. His older sister Lola, who gets a chapter all of her own, is more attractive, a rebel against her mother, but we don't get to know her well and her rebellions don't much matter to the story. The only truly interesting characters, ones who actually take action and make things happen, are the once tortured and now despotic Belicia, a monster you can sympathize with, and the fukú, a malevolent spirit with a truly nasty sense of humor, tempting and destroying the innocents. The good things about the novel: a strong portrait of the adolescent frustration of a nerd, the gross but sometimes clever Spanglish rap of Yunior, and the reminder of true grotesque brutality bequeathed to that small country by the dictator Yunior persistently calls "the Failed Cattle Thief." The painfully detailed destructions of beatings to near-death or even death by rogue cops are based on real incidents that still occur -- we know, something like that happened to someone close to us.

In Díaz's vision, the fukú seems to have swallowed the whole country in hopeless corruption. For a view of a more buoyant, happier Dominican Republic where people are creating things and finding solutions to problems -- though still watching out for unpredictable and potentially violent cops -- check out my Estampas dominicanas: pequeño álbum hablado (in Spanish), a report on a week's adventures mostly among architects and writers, in Santo Domingo and La Vega (we were there in 2001 for the IV Seminario Erwin Walter Palm de Arquitectura y Urbanismo de América Latina y el Caribe, at the UNPHU). And then there's all that fiction by Dominicans living and writing within the country, in Spanish -- the fukú, though usually unnamed in those other works, is nevertheless frequently present. No one has been able to escape completely the curse of a dictator who killed so many, stole so much and humiliated a nation for more than thirty years.

Junot Díaz's website.

Other good fiction about the Dominican Republic and Trujillo's long shadow includes:

• Mateo, Andrés L. La balada de Alfonsina Bairán.
• Álvarez, Julia. In the Time of the Butterflies.

And the most famous of them all, a novel that Junot Díaz seems to be measuring himself against (his character Yunior frequently refers to it in sarcastic tones),

• Vargas Llosa, Mario. La fiesta del chivo.

Photo: Death mask of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, from website 30 de mayo de 1961: Ajusticiamiento del Tirano

Summer readings: authors' bugaboos

I should have mentioned in my note about Axel Munthe's Story of San Michele the frequent appearance of Death, seen as a wise and ancient professional, a colleague of the doctor who has final disposition of the cases Munthe cannot save – including Munthe himself. There are other fantastic or phantom visitors, including an ancient goblin and Munthe's own younger self, but Death is clearly the most important of them. I assume that, as a physician and psychiatrist, Munthe would admit that these beings are really nothing more, and nothing less, than projections of his own fears and premonitions, rather like my own fantastic partners (described here). Such projections compartmentalize persistent concerns (death, or professional anxiety, or whatever else is driving you nuts) and may aid their creator to deal with them rationally. Unless and until you come to believe that they really have an independent power over you, as too often happens. But Munthe appears to me to have been too rational to let that happen.

Since Munthe, I had occasion to read a marvelous collection of short stories – a friend here in Carboneras happened to have a copy – by Carson McCullers, whose first novel had impressed me deeply. (See my note on The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.) This collection includes The Ballad of the Sad Café, where the author's bugaboo is not Death (which doesn't seem to concern her very much) but the dangerous sickness called Love. Marvelous book. Great descriptions of dreariness.

Post-imperial irony

Farrell, J. G. The Siege of Krishnapur. 1973. 2nd ed. New York: New York Review Books, 2004.

During the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857-58, several hundred British subjects in a fortified compound of the East India company (attended by their anonymous Eurasian servants and Sikh loyalist cavalrymen) fight for their lives, their possessions and their beliefs with increasing desperation until, after all looks lost, a smartly-outfitted rescue party find the few foul-smelling and emaciated survivors in this very funny, ironic and violent vision of the British imperial project.

From the first signs of mutiny, the Collector (chief local official of the Company) takes command (after the fortunate deaths of, first, a senile and incompetent general and then an equally incompetent major), young Lieutenant Harry Dunstaple very skillfully manages the compound’s two cannons, a dreamy young idler (Fleury) acts with comical fearlessness, several young women – Harry’s sister Louise, Fleury’s sister Miriam, and the “fallen woman” Lucy – evolve from their various styles of coquetry to more mature responsibility.

Farrell has great fun with stubborn and irreconcilable 19th-century beliefs that various characters consider more important than their very lives. The Padre (as they call the Church of England priest) pursues first Fleury, then the Collector with his absurd proofs of the existence of God (based on the complexities of nature, which he insists could only be the work of Intelligent Design), the Collector keeps making speeches, sometimes to himself, about the wonders of progress as seen in the inventions at the Great Exhibition (London, 1851), even as the siege forces him to reflect on the wondrous destructiveness of modern inventions and the resistance of India to what he sees as Progress. The one declared atheist in the group, the Magistrate, is ironic and sensible on most topics but is an absolute nut about phrenology, which he thinks explains all behavior. Dr. Dunstaple (Harry and Louise’s father) is so convinced of his theory that “an invisible cloud” (not bad water) is the cause of cholera, and so furious with the younger Dr. McNab who disagrees with him, that he publicly swallows “rice water” from a sick patient – and of course dies, quite unnecessarily, because he refuses McNab’s intelligent treatment. Many eccentric and interesting characters die in violent ways that nonetheless raise a smile because, like Dunstaple's, they are so counter to heroic tradition. One of the funniest scenes is also one of the most violent, in which Fleury is pursued through the destroyed Banquet Hall by a giant, saber-wielding Sepoy while he, Fleury, is unable to extricate any of his many weapons (daggers, pistols) from his cummerbund – until finally he gets an extremely heavy, multi-barreled pistol to fire all its barrels at once, disintegrating the upper half of his assailant.

There are no Indian characters with dialogue except Hari, Anglophile son of a local rajah, whose twisted Anglicisms further suggest the misguidedness of British imperial policy. Farrell also makes the point that a mainstay of the imperial enterprise is opium production in India for export to China.

Indian novelist Pankaj Mishra has written a helpful introduction, contrasting Farrell’s version (the 1973 Booker Prize-winner) to the many 19th century British novels about the mutiny, which (according to Mishra) celebrated the heroism and enlightenment of the British in contrast to the brutish savagery of the Indians. In Farrell’s version, the Brits are no more rational than the zamindars (rural landlords), who try to control monsoon flooding by having a Brahmin sacrifice a black goat. It's a view that became possible (and could find a reading public) only a hundred years after the events.

Image source

Code of vengeance

McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 2005.

I saw the movie before I read the book, and it's a good thing: the violence and intensifying threat of more violence is even more stunning in the book than the film. The latter is very faithful to the book, but cuts some of the goriest details. In the movie the central villain (Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh) is more peculiar, like an alien (i.e., extraterrestrial) or robot programmed to kill, whereas a couple of dialogues in the book that don't make it into the film make it clear that he is a quite ordinary human who has reacted more extremely than most of us to traumas. Though not explicit, he is almost surely -- like two of his victims -- a Vietnam vet, which explains his (and their) comfort and familiarity with lethal weapons, and there is a strong hint in his farewell speech to Carson Wells (just before he shoots him) that he has a compulsion, a peculiar personal code, to kill anyone who offends his sense of dignity. I.e., the first murder we see/read of was the result of somebody's having insulted him in a bar.

See my summary & comment here.

Beauty and the beast

In preparation for a visit to Paris, I wanted something to read to revive my half-forgotten French, and among the dozen or so things in French abandoned by tourists in our public library in Carboneras, I found this little bomb of a book. Very short (87 pp.) and very intense, the story of a monster of the civil wars in Russia, 1917-18, how he got that way and the girl who (at least partly and at least for a moment) transformed him.

Kessel, Joseph. Makhno et sa juive. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1987. See my note in Fiction Readings.

Nestor Ivanovich Makhno was a real anarchist guerrilla chieftain and there are those who defend his reputation and denounce Kessel for the bloody, horrific portrait. His defenders see him more or less the way Sonia, the Jewish girl in the novel, does -- "un homme dévoué au peuple, le sauveur des moujiks, le martyr de Sibérie que vengeait sur les riches et les seigneurs les souffrances que lui et ses frères avaient subies." (A man devoted to the people the savior of the muzhiks, the martyr of Siberia who was taking revenge on the rich and the lords of the land for the sufferings that he and his brothers had undergone.)

But this is a novel, not history or biography, and we know the writer has made up stuff. Whether or not the real Makhno was such a monster as Kessel's narrator claims (and the narrator is nearly hysterical and certainly unreliable), it's a terrific story and a very effectively written one. It is also a very old story, going back to Enkidu and the maiden in the Epic of Gilgamesh. But this is an especially vivid telling. And good practice in reading French.

For something about the historical Makhno, here's a socialist take, The Makhno Myth from the International Socialist Review.

Orhan Pamuk

Now that he has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, you may be curious to see my comments on three of his books, a memoir of Istanbul and two novels. As you will see, I was less enthusiastic than the Nobel jury.

Istanbul: Memoirs of a City (Scroll down to see reviews of The White Castle and My Name is Red.)

Short Stories: The Spirit of Emulation

Fernando Sorrentino, an Argentinean author with a fantastic (literally) imagination, has sent this translation of one of his delightful stories. Short Stories: The Spirit of Emulation by Fernando Sorrentino

This however remains my favorite: Short Stories: There's a Man in the Habit of Hitting Me on the Head with an Umbrella by Fernando Sorrentino

Why do people read?

Our reading club in the public library of Carboneras has started off with a workshop, aimed to help us all "read better." It has been more fun than I had expected -- our librarian María José Rufete has brought in

Waples, Douglas, Bernard Berlson, and Franklyn R. Bradshaw. 1940. What Reading Does to People. A Summary of Evidence on the Social Effects of Reading and a Statement of Problems for Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Excruciatingly dull--"pedestrian" the authors themselves call their conclusion, which is actually their starting point: that one has to take into account all the relevant "major factors"; survey of literature on reading tastes (who reads what), effects of propaganda (esp. Lasswell's work), etc. It is literally no more than "a summary of evidence," with no critique of any study mentioned. People read for (1) "instrumental effects" (learning something they want to know), (2) "prestige effects" (feeling better about themselves, e.g. by identifying with a dashing hero/heroine), (3) "reinforcement effects" (to strengthen their previously held opinions), (4) "aesthetic effects" (some people appreciate "belles lettres" for themselves), and/or (5) "respite effects" (to take a break). "Prestige" seems the most amusing as a category, could maybe become a short story.

Günter Grass

It's hard to take seriously the expressions of shock and disdain at Günter Grass's recent revelation that he was, very briefly in the last months of the war when he was 17, a member of the SS. It's not as though we hadn't known that he was a Nazi sympathizer as a youth or that he had served in the armed forces (in an anti-aircraft unit initially). He had reserved this embarrassing added detail, as he told interviewer Hermann Tertsch in El País, until he was ready and had found a way to tell it. But in fact his most famous work is all about coming to terms with, and unsuccessful denials of, the unacceptable past. That in any event is the theme that came through most strongly in the novel I just finished reading, Dog Years.

I had picked up this novel just by chance, a week or so before Grass reappeared in the headlines for his new memoir. Now I want to read its predecessors in the Danzig Trilogy, The Tin Drum and Cat and Mouse. (Little by little and author by author, I'm trying to make up for my cultural deficits.)

See Günter Grass - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Naguib Mahfouz -In Memoriam

The man credited with inventing the modern Egyptian novel, Nobel-prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, has just died at age 94. As my little homage, I give you links to my notes on his audacious early novel Children of Gebelawi (which provoked a knifing attack on him by a God-crazed Muslim), and his politically daring short novel The Day the Leader Was Killed -- about frustrations of the Cairene lower-middle class running parallel to but separate from the crises leading to the death of Anwar al-Sadat on October 6, 1981.

Here's Naguib Mahfouz - Biography

And here is today's obit from the Washington Post: Nobel prize winning author Naguib Mahfouz dies

Word magic and dizzying change in Brazil

Andrade, Mário de. 1984 [1928]. Macunaíma. Translated by E. A. Goodland. New York: Random House.

This is an amazing, perplexing book by a poet, folklorist and musicologist, so unlike anything else I've read recently that I didn't know what to make of it. The publisher of the translation calls it a "precursor of magic realism," but Andrade is not interested here in anything like "realism." It is more "real" than that, in another way, the reality of dreams. Most of all it is an endless inventive series of linguistic displays, so it seems pointless to read it in translation -- though I thought the translation (very fluid, very funny) must be brilliant. The story is just a device to get the game going, but there is a story: Macunaíma is a kind of monster or demigod (Andrade calls him a "Hero"), born magically into the Tapanhuma tribe in the Amazon jungle, at a time that is both the beginning of the world and the modern era. He is a trickster who loves to fuck, and does so at every opportunity. He is also a shape-shifter, turning himself into noxious insects or birds, or from a mewling infant to a strapping young man with a powerful sex urge. He is present at the creation -- and sometimes is himself the creator -- of animals, plants, constellations and pasttimes. For example, he introduces (unintentionally) the addiction to coffee, the boll weevil, and football, "three of the main pests in the country today." Stumbling into an enchanted pool, he magically turns from black to white with blond hair and blue eyes, but there is not enough magic water left for his brothers to do the same: one just turns red and the other remains black. Now of the right complexion for the city, he travels to São Paulo and discovers that he has to learn two new languages, formal written Portuguese and popular spoken Brazilian -- and, being a hero with divine powers, he does. To confront a giant, he goes to the orchard where pistols grow on trees and shakes one loose -- but it turns out to be useless against the giant's magic. He is bitten by fire ants, pursued by monsters, and killed at least twice, one time from shock after a monkey tricks him into smashing his own testicles. Along the way, you get a sense of the enormous changes occurring in Brazil in the 1920s. And you also pick up some useful information. Did you ever wonder where the sun goes at night? Why, she goes home! Her name is Vei and she has three daughters -- one of whom marries Macunaíma, but the relationship ends when on that same day she discovers him in bed with another trollop. Anyway, the sun and her daughters live in a house on Avenida Branco in Rio de Janeiro. Just so you know.

Some day I hope to be able to read it in the original. It must be amazingly funny. When I do, I may come back to this page, which has helped me glimpse what I'm missing.

Maybe God didn't drop by at all

Shaw, Irwin. 1973. God was here but He left early. New York: Arbor House.

I had this book on my "to read some day" shelf for so long that I finally took it down last night & read it. Two short stories (about magazine length) and 3 long ones (70 pp. or more, too long for the magazines). The blurbs have it right: Shaw was a skilled story-crafter. He created intriguing situations, and vivid characters who talked in revealing and often arresting ways. But--

The 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 of 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.

Madness seen from within

Bond, Alma H. Camille Claudel: A Novel. Baltimore: PublishAmerica, 2006.


"In my humble opinion, a woman who hasn't been made love to by a sculptor hasn't been made love to at all." (p. 119)

Camille Claudel (1864-1943) is remembered for her exquisite and emotionally disturbing sculptures, for her passionate 10-year love affair and complex professional relationship with Auguste Rodin, and the utter insanity of her last three decades, when she was persuaded that Rodin was out to destroy her and steal her work and ideas. This treatment of her intense, tortured life is very effectively written from her own, increasingly paranoid point of view. She is supposedly writing this account herself, in the last months of her life, on scraps of paper supplied her by a sympathetic nurse in the Montdevergues Asylum for the insane. The reader must accept the impossible premise that someone who has been so mad for so long could write so coherently, but will probably do so willingly; this is a literary device for understanding a brilliant, paranoid woman's world as she herself sees it. She is a classically unreliable narrator, but her paranoia did have some basis in fact. She clearly was a victim of stultifying anti-erotic and antifeminist attitudes, including those of her provincial mother and her super-Catholic reactionary brother, the writer Paul Claudel. And Rodin no doubt did steal some of her ideas, though on the whole he seems to have treated her better than most of the men she dealt with. Alma Bond's experience as a psychoanalyst and her deep familiarity with the Parisian artistic milieu of the period make the fantastic premise a tool for uncovering what feels like psychological truth. And it's very sexy, as was la petite Claudel.

For examples of her work, see Some Beautiful (If Tortured) Works
of Camille Claudel and these shots of L'age mûr (The Age of Maturity)

For more biographical details and chronology (with photos) in French, see Biographie de Camille Claudel. There you will find images of Oeuvres graphiques (sketches), Sculptures, Liens (links) and much else. There is also a musical about her.

Readers may also enjoy my story about another artist in Paris, exactly 10 years before the 17-year old Camille got there: Courbet and the Red Virgin.

At top: Photo of Camille as a young woman; her bust of Rodin

Posterity

In my younger, arrogant days (I am now in my older, arrogant days -- still obnoxious, but possibly smarter) I used to scorn the idea of writing for posterity. "What has posterity ever done for me?" I'd snort. (Snorting was a bit of a tic; these days I growl.) I wanted to make my impact within my lifetime, on my contemporaries.

But now I realize that posterity is all we've got. The momentum of destruction that the cabal in Washington has accelerated (Rumsfeld, Cheney, W et al.), set on destroying American values (remember civil liberties?) and economy (wasn't the government supposed to maintain the necessary public services, like health, education and public safety, so that we could get on with our private lives?) and the global ecology (even the Kyoto treaty was too much for those guys to bear) is too powerful for sensible people like you and me to deflect, even though we gather in the millions to protest against the latest utterly unecessary and extremely costly war. It is noble to stand up and argue fiercely against these abuses, and I admire my friends who do so. It is noble, but for now, futile -- except to leave a trail for future generations to know that even in these dark times, there were honest, courageous people.

This tragedy will play out till its end, possibly by bankrupting the American power that is propelling it, possibly by the rise of other forces, possibly by the boredom of future generations who begin to wonder what ever happened to all those other interesting cultures that the leviathan has extinguished, and if there may not be some way to recover their values and their songs.

This I believe -- that spite all, human beings will survive, though I hope for the world's sake they do not, as Faulkner predicted, prevail. (I'd like to believe that Faulkner was drunk when he made such a stupid remark at his Nobel Prize speech.) The world itself will prevail, if we let it, and if we human beings accept that we are only part of it. And for them, those future human beings, I write.

But I have not made myself clear. I've been assuming, as I might for a private diary, that too many other things are understood. What I am telling myself, and announcing to you (and I've recently discovered that there are more of you readers of this blog than I had imagined), is that I intend to write less and less political & social analysis (which used to be my main thing) and more fiction, for one old reason and one newer one. The old reason, discovered long ago, is that the only way to really understand other people's lives is to imagine oneself living them. The newer reason is that I now believe that only through metaphor (fiction) can I leave something intelligible and useable for those future generations.

Saga, opening episode

To hold an observer's attention, any extended performance needs a thread or story line. (For an amusing attempt to challenge this principle, read David Markson's This is Not a Novel (2001)). The story line of this blog is going to be one man's struggle to achieve his goal while confronting other challenges. You know, the usual plot line. Our protagonist is not especially glamorous or heroic or good, though all these terms take on new meaning in the context of a story. What he's got are two things: belief in his own talent -- which, he is prepared to accept, may be modest but real -- and desire.

From here on, first person. What I'm declaring here is that I'm going to try to stick to the story of how I work to become both a better writer and a better known one, and cut such distractions as comments on Venezuelan politics, Bush's war, and lots of other stuff. Will anybody care? Probably, because we are a naturally nosy race, and anybody's struggle is interesting if its clearly told and it looks like there may be a beginning, a middle and an end. My main reason for telling it, though, is not you but me, to keep myself on track.

So we'll start our story today. I've written a novel that took a lot of effort (see Archive entry for 1/18 for that story, and apologetic Postscript from the next day, down at the bottom of the page). Now I have to find an agent to sell it well. Meanwhile, I have to complete about half of a very large, unrelated book draft by May. That's challenge Number 1, complicating the main story line. (You always have to have complications.)

The other complication, or peculiar circumstance, is that I'm not making any money. Last year's clients (nonprofits) suffered big funding cuts, so expected assignments haven't materialized. This adds incentive to my struggle: I really need to sell that novel, and I also really need to turn in that draft on Latin American Architecture and Urbanism (LAU) to collect the next portion of the advance. I just lost two days work dealing with technical problems (getting another computer networked for my collaborator on LAU, and installing OS X). I also lost some data on agents, but I think I can reconstruct it. The rest of today is going to be devoted to getting the agent queries off.

A night at BAX

A Gift for the Sultan withstood its first audience test last night, at the first in the new Brooklyn Arts Exchange X-Readings series. Series host Bill Coffel, jovial, portly and bearded, was arrayed in full battle-attire: belt and suspenders and baseball cap. (You can never be too careful around wordslingers.) Readers/performers included Alexandra van de Kamp, whose vivid word-portraits made paintings appear in the air; her husband, whose name I didn't catch, with a story-in-progress about committing adultery and not enjoying it very much; bushy-haired Jero, who performed "Semantics," a biting poem about phony sex talk and phony war-on-terror talk; and Bill Coffel himself, who read from his new novel about Americans behaving badly in Mexico. Bill also played recordings of Alan Ginsburg performing "Sunflowers" and "Howl" -- good to hear, though they made the event run a tad late. It was a small crowd (me and my posse of four accounted for a quarter of us), comfortable size for trying out new material. Thanks, Bill, for creating this proving ground. Next event in the series will be February 22. You can reach him at X-Readings. For more about A Gift for the Sultan, check the Archive for entry for 1/18.

Hearts attack

My friend Lale Eskioglu runs a rapidly growing site that I've mentioned here before, Read Literature, where she invites readers to contribute reviews and to suggest new titles. (Go ahead! Try it.) And there she has included several of my brief comments about books. (I'm delighted. Crankiness always seeks an audience.) Problem: She wants me to rate Saul Bellow, Seize the Day, Don DeLillo, Libra and Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage with up to 5 "hearts." (Why not pens?) She proposes 2 for "Day," 4 for "Libra" and 2 for "Badge." But my opinions on these things are complex, unstable and always open to debate. And what does a single, over-all heart-rating mean, anyway? Crane would get top rating for visual detail, DeLillo for witty, biting dialogue, Bellow for introspective noodling, and so on. I like Francis Coppola's system for rating screenplays and stories (he uses it on the Zoetrope Virtual Studio): separate ratings for character, dialogue, writing flow, etc.

Looking for e-zines

For the past few months, all my fiction energies were going into my novel, A Gift for the Sultan. Now it's time to come back up and try to get other work published. So I've been checking out the e-zines. Starting out with the ones I know because they've published me in the past: In Posse Review continues to be very attractive. Editor Rachel Callaghan published a fable of mine there in Issue 9, "Melliflua and the Fauns." The fable was written for a particular pre-adolescent girl, but with an adult subtext. Besides fiction and poetry, they publish short literary essays, so I just sent Rachel the note below, on the "fiction factory." Exquisite Corpse continues its manic existence. The Corpse published a short story of mine, "A lua no céu da Baía," in Issue 5, but it's not currently accepting submissions. But you don't want to hear all this. I'll just do what I have to do, and make a note if something happens. But check this out: When Literature Goes Multimedia.

Laboring in the fiction factory

Continuing my program of reading famous works that I'd been avoiding, I got through Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) recently. It was a big disappointment. Why then, asked She Who Must Be Answered, is it so famous? (This is the problem of living with articulate people. They're never satisfied with an opinion such as "I loved it" or "Ugh!")

I'm sure there are literary historians who could tell you. I suppose the novel made a big impression because it highlights the gory, ugly details of combat, de-glorifying the heroic gilded myth of America's greatest conflict. The protagonist panics in his first skirmish and runs for his life, fantasizing various means of desertion. He only accidently finds himself in battle again, and his mad rush toward the enemy is presented as a kind of delirium rather than sober heroism. All the details of mud and blood and confusion at the battle of Chancellorsville (May 1-3, 1863) came from attentive research, imagined by a writer who had never been to war. (For a clear account of the reception and background of the novel, see this unsigned three-part essay from the University or Virginia.

So I must admit: it is an important book, and my disappointment with it was strictly personal: I didn't find in it what I had hoped to, which was story-telling technique I could use. It's overloaded with adjectives, the subjects of many of the sentences are inanimate things or abstractions, and it's got more atmosphere than story. Not the sort of thing I want to emulate.

In the first volume of his memoirs, Vivir para contarla (2002), Gabriel García Márquez writes (this is my translation),

my library has never been much more than a working tool, where I can consult instantly a chapter of Dostoyevski, or verify a fact about Julius Caesar's epilepsy or about the mechanism of an automobile carburetor. I even have a manual for commiting perfect murders, in case one of my poor characters ever needs one.

He also says of the North American novelists he was reading while writing his first novel, La hojarasca (1955; translated as "Leafstorm"), that he read them with "insatiable curiosity" to discover how they were written. He read them first "right side up, then backwards, and I submitted them to a kind of surgical disemboweling until I uncovered the most deeply hidden mysteries of their structure."

I think any serious fiction writer reads other fiction he or she admires that way. That was the way I treated García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude when I had to "disembowel" it for a Monarch Note. Red Badge of Courage doesn't invite that kind of operation. It's not complicated enough.

Postscript

"¿No tenés abuela, vos?" asks the Accomplice after reading the essay below. She's right. I can't say the novel is "very good" -- I should let "grandma" (or somebody else) say it for me. I hope it is, and I think it may be. But how can I foretell the reaction of readers new to the story, unfamiliar with all the unspoken thoughts that went into it? That's why the public reading of the first chapters next Saturday will be so important.

Writing 'A Gift for the Sultan'

Next Saturday, January 25, I will be reading the first two chapters of my new novel, A Gift for the Sultan, at the Brooklyn Arts Exchange, BAX, 421 Fifth Av. (near the 4th Ave. subway stop) in Brooklyn. Admission free. The program runs from 8 to 10, and I have a 20 minute slot. I don't know who the other readers/performers will be, but it should be fun.

Here's my proposed jacket copy for the novel:

In the summer of 1402, Constantinople, the greatest city in the Christian world, is betrayed to the Islamic horde at its gates, but a young princess vows to save it while other nobles, merchants, clergy, aristocrats, juvenile street fighters and foreign mercenaries prepare to profit, yield for a price, fight, or die in its defense. The fate of the city and its civilization depends on all of them and on the Turkish frontier raider who has sworn to deliver the city and the princess to his sultan, in time to prevent a fateful clash with an even more terrible Muslim challenger from the East.

This all came together in my head on the plane trip back to New York from Istanbul, after three weeks in Turkey, in 1996. I had to write this story. The city, Constantinople/Istanbul, and our sojourn through central Turkey had filled me with colors, gestures, and evidences of ancient pasts that had to be told. I had known almost nothing about the Ottomans beyond what I'd read in T. E. Lawrence (Seven Pillars of Wisdom), who projected his sadomasochistic desires onto them, and less than that about the people we call the Byzantines (Rumaoi, in their own parlance; they regarded themselves as the true Romans).

Two bits of history determined that my novel's critical moment had be July 28, 1402, the Battle of Ankara, when Timur ("Tamerlane") defeated the Ottoman sultan "Thunderbolt" Bayezid, and thereby saved Christian rule of the city for 51 years. The first historical bit was that, before the battle, Emperor John VII had secretly sent ambassadors with the key to the city to surrender to sultan Bayezid; the surrender was aborted by Timur's victory, which destroyed the entire Ottoman horde. The second historical bit was that on several occasions, Orthodox Christian emperors had sent their daughters to be married to Muslim emirs.

But why write about something that I knew so little about? Why not stick to the Latin American topics I knew well, and where I could read the relevant languages? The research alone, I knew, was going to be an enormous job.

Hard to say why. Part of the reason must have been that I was enchanted by the city of Istanbul, especially, and all of Turkey that we saw. Those ancient walls, the Hagia Sophia turned mosque turned museum, the whole urban palimpsest. Another part was that I had written my sixth book on Latin America and it was time for a change. Going to Turkey had been the Accomplice's idea (she especially wanted to see Hagia Sophia), and I had been so focused on final editing of Hispanic Nation that I hadn't even read a guide book. I'd presented HN at a conference in Mexico just a week before I arrived in Istanbul, and I was ready for a break from social analysis and from things Latin American.

There's another, deeper part of the answer. I had to prove myself, to myself, as a writer of long fiction. It's been something I've been trying to do for a very long time.

I'd written two earlier novels, neither of them published, both on Latin American themes. The first was very ambitious and experimental -- I'd been reading Pynchon and Barth, among others -- with a complex structure of two parallel stories. I called it "The Liberators." One of the stories was a fictional version of myself, a young American social worker in a Caracas barrio in the 1960s; the other was of another young man the same age, but a mulatto working-class Communist in the same barrio. I finished it on schedule, on my 40th birthday, in 1981 (I tend to literalize the concept of "deadline"). Some established writer friends who read it admired it. However, the agents said such things as "It's too Latin American" or "I don't like experimental fiction." I was very disappointed, though I was able to recycle several pieces from the novel as short stories. Some are in my collection Welcome to My Contri, and two others appeared in the now-defunct, once lovely journal Yellow Silk: Erotic Arts and Letters.

Welcome to My Contri got such a rave review in The New York Times that I felt sure I would be able to sell The Liberators. Didn't happen. I tried other things, and then wrote another, much shorter and simply structured adventure novel, Gerry and the Contras. It's very violent and angry, based on real atrocities of the Nicaraguan "Contras," but told from the point of view of a New York-reared Latino street tough who gets recruited into Contra ranks. I thought of him, Gerry (Gerardo), as "Huck Finn as a terrorist." I did have an agent interested in this novel, the same agent who sold Hispanic Nation for me, but she wasn't successful in selling it.

So I was ready for something completely different. I think the work is very good, better than I sometimes had expected. I really have a lot riding on it. Not just the six years it took me to write it (and learn everything I could about Constantinopolitan urban culture, Ottoman military practices, Turkish shamanism, women's roles in both cultures, and how much weight a camel could carry) but the effort in learning how to structure a very complex story, with half a dozen ethnic groups (English Varangian guards, a Frankish knight, several Serbians, a Russian slave, an Armenian merchant, Muslim and shamanist Turks, etc.). And my whole life's project.

So I hope many people will be there Saturday night, Jan. 25, to hear the first two chapters. You will be my first test audience.

World fiction, cont.

Here's another site I just discovered, World Literature. This is entirely different from Lale's Read Literature site: instead of commentary, you get complete on-line texts. Selections on all countries are pretty skimpy (for Israel, only the Dead Sea Scrolls), and Argentina has nothing but Borges (one poem in English translation), and so on. The only things on Iraq, unfortunately, are the Code of Hammurabi and the Epic of Gilgamesh -- the first is kind of tedious read, the second is very exciting but a bit of challenge to connect to present problems.

Links to world fiction--Lale Eskioglu is the hostess of a terrific site, Read Literature, with many reviews by her or by guest authors (including several by yours truly). Besides all the US literary offerings, the site is especially strong in Turkish, Canadian and French fiction and poetry (Lale is a Turkish-origin Canadian who lives in Paris, which may explain the emphases).

Keeping up with new fiction

One good way is to go to The New York Times website and sign up for alerts for "NYT Literature." Once you're registered on the site, just go here. They'll send you links to NYT book reviews and articles. If you have any other good tips, please pass them on.

Imagining World War I

This morning when I read today's The NYT's "Writers on Writing" essay by Richard Price (which is very good), I at first confused him with another author whose work I've admired, Richard Powers. I remembered liking a Powers' 1985 novel enormously, so I looked up my old (1987) note where I reflected on the book and why it felt so important. It fits perfectly my concept of "Literature & Politics" for this weblog. To demonstrate why, I've posted a much-abbreviated version of my notebook entry on Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, from the Fiction Readings section of my website.

Gatsby, Ralph, and rescuing the rich

Finally, something about literature AND politics. I don't usually read the "Styles" section in The NYT, but today I found a real treasure: a hilarious and highly literate story by Cathy Horyn on a Prince of Superficiality: Chasing the Threads in the Life of Ralph Lauren. Horyn was amused to find that our hero likes to compare himself to the title character of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. (Correction to an earlier note: Ralph designed the clothes for the male leads in the 1974 movie; thanks to Kate Coe for pointing out my error; due to too-hasty reading, I thought he'd merely seen the movie.) Horyn comments that the two may have much more in common than Lauren imagines. "I think it's more useful to look at Mr. Lauren," she writes, "and the source of our fascination with him, in a literary way. And the obvious parallel is Fitzgerald's bootlegger, Gatsby. Both came from nowhere; both prize the trappings of old money but have made theirs in new ways,..." etc. But read the article, and think back on Fitzgerald's (not Hollywood's) Gatsby as you ponder the Bush administration's new tax plans for the rich.

City and Anti-City

On Saturday, January 25, at 8 p.m., I shall be reading the opening chapters of my new novel, A Gift for the Sultan. In it, the greatest city in the Western world and its culture are under attack by intransigent Muslim warriors originally from Central Asia. The city is Constantinople, the attackers are (mainly) Ottoman Turks, the year is 1402. The conflict still reverberates down to our day, right through the events of 9/11. To hear the beginning of the story of the 15-year old Byzantine princess and the Ottoman war chief who is charged with delivering her to the sultan, come to Brooklyn Arts Exchange, 421 Fifth Avenue (near corner of 8th Street), Brooklyn NY.

Vagina Dialogue

For me, the most memorable scene in Pedro Almodóvar's wonderfully kooky, sentimental "Hable con ella" -- "Speak to Her" -- is the vagina. Not the real vagina of the comatose girl whom the nurse Benigno massages lovingly, but the huge, hoky inflated rubber vagina in the black-and-white silent movie (invented for this film), "El amante menguante" -- "The Shrinking Lover." The lover, shrunk down to the size of a man's middle finger, first clambers all over the lovely breasts of his sleeping girlfriend, then slips between her thighs to peer into the dark mysterious opening. After some nervous, excited probing, he strips off his skivvies and plunges in. Ah! And there he disappears! It was great fun to see the literalization of this common male fantasy -- I mean, guys, Almodóvar and I aren't the only ones to have such dreams, are we?

Unlike some of Almodóvar's other films -- "Mujeres al borde de la histeria," to cite one of the most hilarious -- "Speak to Me" is not really about women at all, but of the effects of women on men. In particular, it's about how two men -- Benigno and the Argentine travel writer, Marco -- can communicate with each other only through their relations to women who can't respond. It's almost the opposite of Eve Ensler's funny and effective concept in "Vagina Monologues," where the vaginas do the talking. Here, it is the men talking to each other through the vagina. Yes, Almodóvar is on to something here. We guys do often relate to each other in this indirect way. Maybe because we're too shy to talk to each other, we have to tell each other to "Speak to Her."

Vivir para contarla

Gabriel García Márquez's first volume of memoirs, Vivir para contarla (Barcelona: Mondadori, 2002) is as vivid as one of his novels, taking him from his birth in 1927 to his first departure to Europe in 1955 -- 12 years before the appearance of the book that made his international reputation, One Hundred Years of Solitude. This was a period of intense violence in Colombia and of enormous growth for the young writer. For a longer note (in Spanish), see my Pequeña biblioteca comentada. For my 1987 "critical analysis" of One Hundred Years of Solitude, with a bio of Gabito (García Márquez), take a look at my Monarch Note.