The naivete of the narrator of Rebecca

It may not be great literature (it isn't) but Daphne du Maurier's most famous novel, Rebecca, is so far great entertainment and pretty well written for all that, rising above the level of the standard woman-in-distress Lifetime movie genre, of which it was a precursor. Yes, the conventions are all there and, yes, we readers are far more knowledgeable and aware than the (unnamed?) narrator - though you'd think she might have read Jane Eyre if not Turn of the Screw? We know way before she knows, or acknowledges, that there's got to be a screw loose in a wealthy English landowner who proposes to and marries a woman about half his age, w/ whom he has virtually nothing in common, after they take a couple of drives in his car while visiting Monte Carlo (he as a widower in mourning, she as the paid companion to a nasty older woman). And we've got to be suspicious immediately of the dour head-of-household servant, Mrs. Danvers, and her open hostility toward the new bride. If she, the narrator, had any spine about her, which is to say if she were older and more mature and more comfortable in her marriage, she would tell hubby Maxim (de Winter) to fire that nasty woman immediately. And of course we would immediately wonder why she and her husband are settling into new living quarters in the less desirable East Wing while the West Wing, where Maxim lived with his (supposedly?) late wife, Rebecca, remains sealed off. But we're not she, and were she less naive there would be no story here I guess. As it - about a third through - it maintains its pace as a strong narrative - not too believable, but entertaining never the less.

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It turns Jane Eyre inside out: Rebecca

I guess I needed a break from obscure and demanding Eastern European fiction and have picked up Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel, Rebecca, the novel that, whether she liked it or not, defined her as a writer (and made a pretty good movie, too, if my memory serves). It really couldn't be more unlike the postmodern, playful, complex novels of Kundera et al. - it's a straightforward, first-person narrative, character- and plot-driven. That said, it's not a throwaway romance, either. DD is well versed in the English literary tradition, and compared with most novels of its genre it's particularly well written, in fact maybe too well written. DD does not miss a chance for lyrical description, which tends to slow the pace, at least if you're going to read this as if you were reading Proust. It's not Proust, and you can skim along at times when the going gets soggy. She's also aware that she's part of a literary tradition of the stranger comes to the English manor house variety; in fact, she seems to invert the plot of the classic Jane Eyre: in this case, reader she marries him (or at least she's engaged to him; haven't reached the marriage yet) in the first 50 pages and the story unfolds as she arrives at the von Winter manor, Manderley (the novel opens w/ her looking back at a Manderley in ruins, noting it's a place she can visit only in memory). In brief, the narrator (unnamed?) is a paid companion for an elderly (and nasty) lady of means; in Monte Carlo she meets Maxim von Winter, recently widowed owned or Manderley. He's in deep mourning (apparently) for his late wife, the eponymous Rebecca - and the title of the novel lets us know that perhaps she's not dead and will appear in person (the lady in the attic as in Jane Eyre?) or as a ghost (turn of the screw?). In any event, after about 2 weeks together of driving around the countryside, Maxim proposes in a domineering and awkward manner, and the narrator - orphaned, w/ few opportunities in life, and seeming to be in love w/ him - acquiesces. Of course he's at least twice he age (she's 21 I think), and they have hardly met and had no physical contact, and she's of a completely different social strata w/ no particular education or worldly experience - how will this work out? We have to suspect he has another motive in proposing this obviously doomed marriage, but what?

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Laughter and Forgetting - a formative work but one that does not stand up well over time

Despite some great moments in Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978, actually that's when he completed the Czech-language original not published till a year later in French), the two concluding sections are absurd and uncomfortable. Despite MK's claims in various interviews, including the interview w/ Philip Roth that's an appendix to the Penguin ed., that he writes about a liberated sexuality and freedom of express no doubt as a counterpoint or antidote to the Soviet control that squashed free thought and expression in his native Czechoslovakia - what are we to make of this? First, an attractive widow, Tamina, who (in an earlier section of this novel that MK describes as variations on a theme) mourns the memory of her late husband and strives to retrieve a packet of her diaries and letters that are all that physically remain of their marriage (easy to see her search for lost letters left behind in Prague as a "variation" on the suppression of literature and writers such as MK in exile trying to recover their works and their identity as writers), now goes off from the bar/coffee shop where she works with a young man who shows up in a sports car, agrees to get into a rowboat w/ a child at the helm, gets transported onto an island populated only by children, is sexually assaulted by the children, tries to swim off the island, drowns. Yes, this could be about a form of exile, about a "writer" who had to relinquish his occupation when placed in a new language-culture, but what about the abusive sexuality? Women continue to come off as objects of desire in MK's fiction - even this "heroine," Tamina, who is throughout a passive victim. The final section involves a couple, Jan and Edwige, in the midst of a long sexual relationship that seems devoid of passion and expression, and we follow them or at least him through various venues, including a free-sex party and finally, in the concluding section of the novel, to a nudist resort. This may be open sexuality - a big topic for literature in the US and Europe in the 1970s, but it's a joyless, loveless sexuality, particularly for the women who, again, are cyphers (to be fair, Jan isn't particular vivid as a character, either). All told, MK was a powerful voice of protest in his time and in Unbearable Lightness his style developed and matured as he brought the narrative together into a single, focused work rather than these "variations," which is to say unrelated fragments, in Laughter & Forgetting - a formative work but one that does not stand up well over time.

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The themes in and the problem with Kundera's Laughter and Forgetting

As noted yesterday the great power of Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) is its grounding in the Eastern bloc politics - the oppression of writers during the Soviet dominance, especially galling in Czechoslovakia, which had a tradition of literary and cinematic innovation and openness, leading to the exile of many writers (and suppression or worse of others), Kundera included. As he imagines in the section Litost, he is situated in an apt high up in a tower in the French city or Rennes (where he settled when first in exile) and looking back - figuratively - on Prague and the literary culture. It's a painful, mournful image; despite his international success as an exiled writer in France, he thinks of his homeland and native language. The theme of the novel seems to be that there are various not remedies for but anodynes against oppression and censorship, notably laughter (literary humor, raucous storytelling), "forgetting" (the willed absence of knowledge of death and destruction) - the title elements - but also creation of a literature of innovation, comradeship (especially among writers), and above all sex and sexual freedom. Just about every section of this multifaceted novel - each section standing independently, almost like a stanza in modernist poem - concerns sexual relationship, and in several it concerns the lover - in one section a man and in another a woman - striving to recover a packet of love letters or diary notes, a conscious act of forgetting, in fact obliterating the past - and a parallel to the writer's trying to destroy published (and unpublished) literary works or to take shelter in a pseudonym, all to keep a step ahead of the oppressive state. Also as noted in previous posts, one "modern" theme that clearly does not enter into the novel is that of women's liberation and women's rights; MK's view of sex is inevitably from the male POV, and the women are pretty much without exception treated as objects of desire and the men depicted as Lotharios. In that way this novel, experimental and on the cutting edge of form and style in its time, seems dated and remote - though who can't help but feel we should cut some slack for a writer uprooted from his homeland and his native language?

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Thoughts on how to classify Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting

It's really hard to get a grasp on Milan Kundera's 1979 novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, in that, among other things, it's a book not easy to classify. Yes, I suppose it's a novel, though each of its 8 or so sections stands as a story and the connections across the sections are thematic rather that structural (i.e., other than the author himself, characters do not - yet - appear in more than one story). What type of novel? Kundera is or was a devotee of several of the literary movements of his most creative period, among them postmodernism (various references to himself and to the art of writing), magic realism (not a huge part of this work, but there are elements, such as when the teacher and two students take hands and dance in a circle and rise above the ground), sexual liberation (many sex scenes and a groundbreaking frankness about sexual drive and feelings, though dominated too much by male fantasy and misunderstanding - you can see how he and Roth, who brought K to the attention of English-language readers, had much in common for better or worse), free-form writing (an influence from the East and from psychedelia - the novel is dead, break all conventions, write in short takes, jump around in time, etc.). Ultimately what stands apart today and what draws me most to this complex work (multiple readings advised, though I'm not sure I'll do so) is the politics: Behind all of the sturm and drang is a story about exile. The strongest sections are those that describe the Czech surveillance on suspicious citizens, particularly writers, the entrapment of Kundera (not sure how true to life this section is) who had been banned from writing and who secretly wrote an astronomy column of all things - when he's caught both he and the young woman who'd been editing his column, pay the price). Though K landed on his feet, so to speak, w/ a good teaching job in France and literary success in Fr. translation, the pain of exile is evident throughout this work, a continuous subtext - in one powerful section a woman in exile is desperate to get her hands on a packet of letters she had left behind in Prague, and goes through several degrading steps, including sexual subjugation, in this futile attempt to re-gain her lost past. Many powerful scenes in this book, and the overall theme is well-stated in the title: ways to deal with trauma, make light of it or lock it away; interested to see whether the various strands do tie together, even loosely, by the end.

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Smart story by Swedish writer in current New Yorker

Another fine story (As You Would Have Explained It to Me - or something like that, it's a very long title) in the current New Yorker, by Swedish writer Jonas Hassen Khemiri, grabs you right away and keeps you thinking, keeps you off-balance throughout; reminded me of a Twilight Zone or, more recently, Black Mirror episode although it's more literary and postmodern (or post-postmodern). No spoilers, but to give you the premise: A young man sitting at home mind his own business is confronted with a group of armed police officers at his door who come in to search the apartment and put him under arrest. We're bracing at this point for one of many thousand wrong-suspect stories - to stay w/ the TV analogies, a version of The Night Of, say - but we get a strange twist, as the narrator is certain that the cops are actors and this is a ruse put on by his best friends, Miro and the gang, to celebrate his recent engagement to Katje. The longer the arrest and booking process goes on, the more he tries to "play along"- waving to the surveillance cameras in his holding cell, for ex. - as he's sure this event is a hoax and the video will play at his bachelor party or even wedding celebration - so he wants to keep his cool, and let the guys know he's in on the gag. But this "gag" goes on beyond all reason - right through a criminal trial - he the young man never cracks. So what's going on - is he delusional? The victim of a strange hoax? Playing with us, the readers? I won't divulge anything, but will note there are a # of twists in the narrative toward the end, some of which involve "you," the reader. Very smart story; I don't know anything about this writer, but hope to see more of his work in English translation.

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The unbearable attitude toward women in Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Milan Kundera's 1979 novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, brought him a wider readership (it was first published in a French translation from the Czech - he was living in political exile in Paris - and later translated into English and published as part of Philip Roth's series introducing Eastern European writers to English-language readers), though it was later overshadowed by his more ambitious (and filmable) book The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Looking back now on L&F (my first time reading it in fact), and hoping it will stand up after 35 years of history - when the Soviet oppression of the Eastern bloc seems a distant memory - yet some elements of the first two sections (if my memory is right, the book could really be seen as a collection of 6 or so long stories/short novels about various young adults in Czechoslovakia under Soviet domination) still feel on point. The first section begins with discussion of a photograph of three Czech leaders waving from a balcony; 1 of them was later rejected by the state and executed, and the picture was "doctored" to remove him from the image (though he'd loaned his cap to one of the other 2 men, and the cap remains). Altering historical images is still a common practice - and easier to do today - the legacy of Orwell still alive in the age of social media. In this novel, the altered image serves as an icon for political oppression under Soviet Rule; the protagonist in this section is a former avid Communist and now somewhat of a dissident - he keeps detailed notes on all of his political meetings - who comes under surveillance. Meanwhile, he focuses on trying to retrieve from a former girlfriend a packet of letters he'd sent her - a mirror image of the state trying to seize records from him. This links Kundera's 2 themes of love/sex and politics, and also his two themes of brutal oppression and gallows humor. Unfortunately, along w/ the 2nd section of L&F, called Mother, which is about a wife who arranges various sex trios so as to keep her husband interested in her and committed to their marriage, we see the flaw in Kundera's writing and thinking that was not so evident to many readers in the 1970s and 80s: He has a degrading attitude toward women (the girlfriend in the first section repeatedly described as ugly) and a male-dominated view of sexual relationships (in the so-called marriage in part 2, the women are totally subservient to the husband's desires; how would it feel to him if the tables were turned and the wife insisted that he share her with another guy?). This sexism lacks the humor and balance of the sex drive in Roth's fiction, and it has not served Kundera's reputation well in the post-Soviet era, as his recent writing has been an id-drive in search of a theme. 

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Final thoughts on Endo's Silence and Scorsese's insights

Some final notes on Shusaku Endo's 1966 novel, Silence (had date wrong in earlier posts, and have not been able to recall spelling of his surname, so here it is), and I have to give credit to director Martin Scorsese for making this thoughtful, sometimes challenging novel into a fine, accessible, and true-to-source film - and for writing a smart intro to the new edition of the novel. A key point that MS makes that I hadn't quite appreciated: the protagonist, Father Rodrigues, imagines throughout the novel (which is to say throughout his mission to spread the gospel in 17th-century Japan), that he will face a martyrdom similar to Christ's - and many of the events in the novel to parallel the sufferings and humiliations that Jesus endured - riding through the city on the back of a donkey, betrayal by a disciple, fear and doubt in the face of torture and suffering - and Rodrigues notes all of these parallels and in a sense anticipates with hope and bravery his torture and execution. There's a certain hubris in his attitude, and in fact what he doesn't realize until the final chapters (spoilers here) is that the Japanese have outsmarted him in a sense (another point MS makes): They don't intend to torture the captive priest; rather, they will torture some of peasants who have embrace Christianity until the priest renounces his faith. What would Jesus do? Fa. R does renounce, and for the rest of his life laments that perhaps he did so out of his own fear; by the end, we see him as a sad, almost pathetic broken man - still in doubt and fear, especially at the silence of God during all of his suffering. Yes, at the very end he has a vision that Jesus was beside him throughout his ordeal - and we have to wonder about the veracity of that vision. Is he just fooling himself, or is his faith still intact at the end of his life, when he had to give up everything of his Catholic faith and in fact had to work for the Japanese central government inspecting incoming trading ships for contraband items of Christian iconography. (Scorsese's movie, if my memory serves, is a little darker in that Fa R does not have a vision of Jesus at the end of his life - but there is a hint that he was celebrating his faith secretly throughout his final years.) All told, Silence is a fine and complicated book, and, despite its remote setting in time and, for English-language readers, in place, the novel is accessible and compelling throughout. 

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Why the oppression of Christians in the Japan of Endo's novel Silence?

S Endo's great novel Silence builds the tension and the ethical-religious struggle that drives the narrative right through to the last chapter, in which the Jesuit missionary to Japan (17th century) is held captive and transported to an isolated prison near Nagasaki. We experience his captivity and humiliation almost viscerally: in his mind, Fa Rodrigues keeps finding comparisons between his preaching, betrayal by a Judas-figure, march through the streets of Japan on the back of a donkey, the crowd of onlookers hostile and violent, finally the dark, reeking prison cell where he spends the night, expecting to be tortured and killed in the morning. He thinks of all the Japanese Xtian martyrs he has seen in his time in the country, peasants who faced their torture and executions bravely, and he questions his own bravery and most of all wrestles with the silence of his god: Why, throughout all this torture of those who refuse to renounce their faith, has the Xtian god been unable or unwilling to send a sign or offer any consolation? At last, he reconciles himself to torture and death, when the Japanese captors present him with his terrible fate: Unless he renounces his faith, they will continue to torture three Japanese Christian prisoners; if he renounces, they will end the torture and release the prisoners. I'll leave it there rather than get into spoilers. Any reader of this frightening and complex novel will wonder why the eradication of the Christian sects was so important to the Japanese government at the time. The translator touches on this in his preface: when the first European missionaries arrived and set up various Xtian churches (not only Catholic communities), Japan had no centralized government and was wracked by internecine battles among the various shoguns and other rulers. Over time, the central government consolidated, and as it became strong the Xtian community - about 300,000 out of a population of several million, was a threatening minority that the rulers believed had to be eradicated. This obsession built over the course of a few generations of rulers, particularly as Japan became more isolate and less welcoming to European trading partners - so it was all about a consolidation of power and a demonstration of ruthless power and authority. By the early 17th century, the setting for this novel, all trade and correspondence with Europe was suspect and closely monitored and controlled by the central government. Some of this is touched on in the last chapters of Silence and in the concluding segments of Scorsese's movie.

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The unbearable moral dilemma in Endo's Silence

Continuing to read S Endo's Silence, which Scorsese adapted into a film that is, as least so far (about half-way through Endo's novel), faithful to the source. The novel is great in its own right, but reading through makes me even more impressed with Scorsese's adaptation; it's almost impossible not to read the novel w/out thinking of the strong cast Scorsese brought together and his great facility to creating a range of environments - the desolate Japanese landscape, the mountainous coastline, the charcoal hut where the 2 priests live in hiding, the fishing villages, and most of all the period setting and the pervasive sense of loneliness and dread that these 2 priests, believing themselves to be the only priests in all of Japan, trying to bring solace to the few remaining Catholic enclaves, in a time of brutal, almost sadistic repression. The book, as noted yesterday, gives a real sense of verismilitude by conveying the narrative through a series of letters from Father Rodrigues; Endo stops using this narrative device about halfway through (doing this allows him to increase our sense of dread because we don't know if Fa R. actually survives - his communication just stops, like a space mission that has gone beyond the range) and adopts a close 3rd-person narrative, which means the narrator knows not only the action seen and dialog heard but also what's going on in Fa. R's mind. This device is especially important as a great part of the drama in the novel - less so in the film, which by its nature is more about action and dialog - is his questioning of his faith. The pervasive question, and one that people ask to this day of course, is how can a loving god be silent while his faithful adherents are made to suffer? If he's all-powerful, why can't he provide a sign to the faithful? These thoughts torment Father R., as he faces an almost unbearable moral dilemma: Once he is captured by the Inquisitor (another great casting by Scorsese, btw) he is told that they won't torture him but they will torture his Xtian followers until he renounces his faith.

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Scorcese's excellent adaptation of Endo's novel Silence

As long as we're into comparing movies with the source material - yesterday I began reading Endo's novel Silence, which is the source for the recent excellent film of same name by Martin Scorcese. I haven't read too deeply yet into the novel, though I did read the translator's lengthy intro., which provided useful background (both film and the faithfully adapted novel are about Portuguese missionary Jesuit priests in Japan in the early 17th century, in search of info about the vanished priest and mentor, Father Ferreira, and in hopes of helping maintain the persecuted Xtian minority on the Japanese islands) and made it clear that both book and film are based on real events and to a degree on actual priests - at least Father Ferreira is historically accurate, though the translator notes that we know little about his life in Japan after his apparent apostasy (Scorcese has quite a bit about Ferreira's later life; will see whether that's drawn from the novel), largely because records of his later life were destroyed in the bombing of Nagasaki. It strikes me that Silence is a particularly difficult book to adapt for screen; it's obvious to any reader that it's an exciting adventure story that touches on a lot of deep and important issues of culture, assimilation, hegemony, faith, history. But the novel is written as a series of letters home from Father Rodrigues (one of the 2 Jesuits in search of their mentor, Fa Ferreira), so Scorcese didn't have the advantage of working w/ a dialog-rich document, such as a Graham Greene or Elmore Leonard novel. Additionally, every scene involves re-creating the look of the 17th century in a remote and isolate setting - another challenge, to which Scorcese rose, as it happens. In one way, the cinema version is always going to be more engaging: We are drawn in visually and musically and we get the full arc of the story within ab out 2 3/4 hours (long, but held my attention throughout); in other ways, the novel is more engaging in that it's told via letters from Fa R., and we can feel that we are reading actual documents from the era, as if we're the historians or perhaps the contemporary Jesuits following the story as it unfolds over time.

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Comparing Almodovar's film Julieta with the source stories in Munro's Runaway

After watching Almodovar's excellent film, Julieta (2016), I went back a re-read the 3 Alice Munro stories that A used as the source for his screenplay - three single-word-titled stories in her 2004 collection, Runaway (can only remember the title of the 3rd, Silence, which oddly is the title of Scorcese's excellent most-recent film; titles have been Munro's single flaw as a writer). A # of things strike me: First of all, I'm surprised at A's fidelity to the source material, picking up virtually all of the scenes in the 3 stories for his film. Of course he transposed the film into a setting in contemporary Spain, but he even goes so far as to make the fishing village where the eponymous Julieta (Juliet, in Munro's stories) settles and has her child (Penelope, in the stories) a remote location in NW Spain (parallel to the NW American setting of the stories). There are differences between the 2 treatments, however. A devotes a lot more attention the Julieta's contemporary life in Madrid, and in fact begins the movie with J as a 50ish, stylish, intellectual woman in Madrid and with the encounter w/ her daughter's childhood friend, which is near the end of Munro's mostly linear narration. Second, Munro emphasizes that Juliet is a sort of dorky, sexually inexperienced young woman; A keeps the info that she's a classics teacher in a h.s., and even shows her teaching a class (quite effectively), but his young Julieta is a cool teacher and very pretty, not dorky at all. Third, J's visit with young daughter in tow to her parents' rural home is a much bigger part of Munro's stories - in fact, it's the entire 2nd story - and in the Munro stories the parents, or at least the mother, as devout and are disturbed by the fact that her daughter has never married the father of her child; that's not a factor at all in A's film - his whole metier is more hip, multicultural, vibrant contemporary Spain, whereas Munro's stories seem to be set in the 50s or so, in a much more provincial Canada (though published in the early 21st century, they clearly draw on the world of Munro's youth, as so much of her fiction does). 4th, the disappearance of the daughter - though it strains credibility somewhat in both versions - is a little more grounded and explicable in Munro's, as we can almost accept that the daughter is seeking a spiritual dimension to her life that is absent in her birth family. In the A film her disappearance seems even more odd, perhaps driven only by anger at her mother for - perhaps - driving her father to his death (in both versions, they had an argument about his infidelity just before his fatal fishing expedition). Finally, a bit of a spoiler here, A's version, tho by no means a "Hollywood ending" and still leaving much uncertain, ends with J receiving from her daughter the daughter's address (unclear what her daughter's life has been like, though there are hints perhaps of a cult or a ascetic sect) and embarking on a visit to her, whereas Munro's ending is darker - J learns a bit about her daughter's fate (it seems she is living a prosperous life, w/ husband and 5 children, in a remote part of Canada) thru her chance encounter w/ the childhood friend, but J never gets any word from her daughter at all.

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Excellent Danticat story in current NYer about family dynamics and elderly dementia

Excellent story, Sunrise, Sunset, in the current New Yorker ,by the Haitian-born American author Edwidge Danticat (a Soho discovery!) - one of the best depictions I've ever read of the early onset of Alzheimer's disease or at least of some form of dementia in the elderly. The story is tightly encapsulated, keeping well the principle of unity of action, really about a gathering for the christening of a newborn, largely from the POV of the grandmother, who is distressed by her daughter's apparent indifference to the child, with some told from the POV of the mother, suffering from some form of post-partum depression. Part of the effect of the story is to see almost from the inside how the grandmother fades in and out of consciousness; another strength is that, though the story in some ways is universal, it's also a nice depiction of a tightly knit Haitian-American family in Miami. The story builds toward a dramatic, climactic action, as the grandmother enters one of her episodes and grabs the baby and holds him out over the railing in the third-floor condo, putting everyone into a state of panic - and of course part of the beauty of this horrific scenario is how it spurs the indifferent mother into action, perhaps beginning a new phase of her motherhood. Danticat's narrative is swift and eloquent without being overladen, despite the dramatic action with fevered writing. My only quibble: the characters all have short, rather indistinct names (and no surnames) including the names of the mother, father, and baby all beginning w/ J - this allows Danticat to get a nice quip about the "triple-J's," but it makes it hard for readers to sort the characters out in our minds as we're reading (one of the fundamentals of a screenplay, for ex., is to make sure that no two major characters have a name beginning w/ the same letter).

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The characters in A Way Through the Wood: Careless People

Yesterday I referred to The Great Gatsby in discussing narrative voice in Nigel Balchin's A Way Through the Wood (1951), by way of contrast - Nick Carraway's first-person narration is a rare example of a first-person narrator - not the author - with a deep and complex literary style whereas Balchin's first-person narrator - not the author - is a more straightforward style, sometimes with the arch, cynical tone of an American noir detective. It's probably not by chance that I thought of Gatsby when reading Way Through the Wood: the narrative styles may differ but the characters themselves, w/ their moral obtuseness, narcissism, and bigotry are much like Fitzgerald's characters in Gatsby. This novel centers on a fatal car accident - the driver kills a man and takes off and much of the "moral" issue of the novel concerns how to protect her identity. Throughout the long passages of the novel as the narrator, Jim Manning, tries to repair his marriage there's hardly a thought about the accident, the guilt one might or should feel, the obligation to report the crime, and so forth. As Carroway ways about the Buchanans: They're careless people. Though I can recognize the nearly untenable position of Jim - should he encourage his estranged wife to report the crime? - it's hard to feel an iota of sympathy for him or for any of his set, including wife (Jill) and her lover (Bill). Much of their hatefulness derives from their extreme class prejudice. They pretty much think their guilt over the death can be assuaged by a payment of 2 pounds a month to the widow (who is a housekeeper for the Mannings). Stop and ask: How do you think they'd act and react if a working-class man ran down a "upper class" man and killed him? Their condescension to workers and servants, thinking themselves to be great benefactors and thinking they're beloved by those whom they employ is astonishing, and one can only hope that there's at least a touch of irony in Balchin's depiction of class relationships. In fact the only truly noble action in the entire novel is the widow's refusal to press charges and to seek revenge or even redress. As a final note, we learn at the end that the entire narration is a record Jim is preparing to submit to the court in his application for divorce; if he actually does submit it, he's telling the court that his wife was the driver in the fatal hit and run (and in fact that both he and Bill withheld evidence) - though the latter two are safely out of reach in Switzerland. Nice peopl. 

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Social class and issues of first-person narrators in Balchin's A Way Through the Wood

It's probably unfair to expect a first-person narrator such as Jim Manning in Nigel Balchin's 1951 novel, A Way Through the Wood, to create a rich sense of place; that's one of the main differences between first- and third-person narrations. First-person narrators can only rarely develop mood and atmosphere, or they will risk losing credibility as they will sound, inevitably, like the author and not the character (exceptions: Proust's narrator, who obviously is the author; Nick Carroway, just the exception that proves the rule). First-person narrators are, however, a way for the author to establish character and voice; the danger, which I see here in Way Through the Woods, is that they will slip into type. Oddly, Balchin's narrator changes "type," chameleon-like: for the first 100 pp. or so he seems like an uptight, upper-caste Brit, snobbish and bitterly reserved. This tone holds through the first stages of the investigation of the car crash and culminates in his cool acquiescence when his wife, Jill, says she needs to go away to Spain for a few weeks to work things out with her lover, Bill Bule. Wouldn't any normal guy say something like: If you go, don't come back. But JM is fine and understanding and not even angry with the insidious Bule. Go figure. He in fact enters into a little conspiracy with Bule. JM is willing to play along with Bule's subterfuge in order to protect his wife from a charge of hit-and-run fatality; Bule's chauffeur indicates he can provide testimony that will undo Bule's fake alibi, and Bule get JM to go along with him in putting the squeeze on the chauffeur: Bule accuses the chauffeur to theft (rightly so) and tells him to get lost or they'll report it to the police. Well, actually, the chuaffeur should have the upper hand; he should have told Bule you do that and I'll nail you w/ my testimony (additionally, Bule asked him to repaint the scratches on the car!) - but what we see is class politics coming into play: the chauffeur figures, maybe correctly, that no judge would accept his word over the word of an landowner like Bule. Why, however, does Manning sink so low? Then the novel takes a strange turn, as Manning goes off for a visit to Venice w/ an American couple, old friends - and he begins to sound (and act) increasingly like an American noir detective, as he prowls the night haunts of Venice, always with a holier-than-thou attitude (refusing the advances of a friendly, alcoholic, high-class prostitute). The novel is veering off course - as we more or less have forgotten about the fatal hit-and-run and Manning's only concern is his disintegrating marriage and his personal malaise. That said, something about the clean writing and the focus on action keeps me engaged, and I'm eager to see how - or if - the strands come together and who (which social class) will come out on top. I'm betting the wealthy walk away from all responsibility and consequences.

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An entertaining novel of social class in England by a writer long forgotten

Nigel Balchin is a British author so obscure that (to my knowledge) not a single R.I. library has a copy of any of his (dozen of so) books, but a blurb on the English edition pb of A Way Through the Wood (1951) that friend DC recommended and kindly sent to me notes that in his time he was among the most popular English literary novelists, so go figure - sic tempus gloria, or some such phrase. Judging from this novel - the title is a reference to the opening lines of the Inferno - Balchin is a skilled writers with a fine sense of plotting and it's no surprise to also read in the blurb that he wrote several screenplays and several of his books including this one were made into films. That said, he falls a bit short of the standard that his contemporary Graham Greene set, in that this novel, intriguing as the plot may be, doesn't go beyond the plot, at least in the first 100 pp. or so; the characters, a 40-something prosperous Sussex couple, Jim and Jill Manning (Jim is the narrator) don't seem especially complex characters and aside from the social milieu - upper crust - he isn't that interested in establishing a sense of time and place: compare this w/ say The Quiet American or The Heart of the Matter (or even Brighton Rock, a mere "entertainment" acc GG). That said, Way Through the Wood does grab our attention and hold it. Narrator Jim begins by telling us his world fell apart in one year and he will tell us the story (he references Dante; another possible model could be Job). Some spoilers here, but any attentive reader will pick this up in the first 20 pp or so: a working-class man who lives nearby is struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver; Jim quickly determines that the driver is a friend, who had just attended a party at their house. He pursues this information and over time learns that the man - Bill Bule - wasn't driving his own car. Anyone who's read The Great Gatsby has by this point in the novel figured out who the driver is. This fact raises certain moral and ethical issues, which the novel will play out - all against a background of British upper-crust snobbery and repression. When Jill tells Jim what is obvious to all readers, that she's been having an affair, his reaction is so calm and blase - Oh, dear, were you terribly bored in our marriage? I suppose we shall have to tell him that it's all off from here on - and so forth - as to be a form of dark comedy. Socail class is a huge theme of this novel, made paramount when the Mannings visit the decrepit cottage of the man who was killed: this is one in a long history of scenes of the benevolent aristocrats visiting the peasants and offering a few drops of charity - see Dickens, Hardy, Eliot, even H James (The Princess Cassimassima) - I wish I could summon all the examples from memory, but a see a potential doctoral dissertation in this. 

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Why not end a novel in mid-thought? Life is like that.

I guess Dag Solstad's style at least in his 1996 novel (1st to be translated into English), Shyness & Dignity, is just totally weird and he's not trying to reach a wider readership, rather a coterie of devoted fans of narrative peculiarity and experimentation; I can see why Karl Ove Knausgaard might look up to DS as an inspiration and possibly a mentor - KOK's narration goes off on long tangents and can at times focus on the minutia of memory and sensibility - but there's something almost willfully perverse about Solstad's style. In this short novel w/out chapters and w/ only a handful of section breaks, we, first, meet the main character (Elias) on a day that he has a nervous breakdown at the h.s. where he teaches English; then we get the back story of E's college friendship with an older student, who abandons wife and daughter, and the extremely shy and inexperienced E moves in w/ wife (Eva) and later marries her; then we hear how his love for his wife has diminished and we get a long and sad segment in which we learn about how E feels the world has left him and his generation in its wake, the feels alone and friendless and as if he's wasted his life - and then we snap back to the present (day of the breakdown) and leave E in despair at a street crossing. I don't want to give a spoiler, but have to note that - huh? what kind of ending is this? Are we to surmise that he steps into traffic and dies? Or that he ambles on home and tells Eva that he has been an ass and is likely to lose his job? What? But Solstad, as noted, will thumb his nose at narrative convention - and just end this novel in mid-thought. He could have gone on, but why bother? Don't expect a sense of an ending; life is not like that, nor should fiction be, at least in this case. I did like some of the writing in the sad third segment of this novel, particularly the sorrow of Elias overhearing a fellow teacher (a math teacher, much younger) make a passing reference to Hans Castorph (?), and Elias begins to obsess about this teacher, how to befriend him, should he invite him to dinner, and on and on - in fact behaving very much like the indecisive Hans himself - almost expected him to ask the math teacher if he could borrow a pencil. Elias speculates that he himself would make a good character in a Mann novel, and imagines novelists holding something like casting calls to select characters: Would he meet Mann's criteria? Kind of a funny concept, and a jarring one that affects our reading of this novel - I can't remember another novel in which a character speculated about whether he could or should be a character in another author's book (closest I can think of would be Woody Allen's great story The Kugelmass Episode). 

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More on the strange narrative style of Dag Solstad

Norwegian writer Dag Solstad's Shyness & Dignity (1996) continues in its weird, meandering narrative manner; it's a short novel - only 150 rather small pp., with no chapters or section breaks - and even so very little happens. As noted yesterday the first 40 pages or so tell of a burned out h.s. teacher who has an outburst and nervous breakdown one day in school and will no doubt lose his job as a result. (Most of this section taken up w/ tedious recollection of the class lesson he's trying to convey to bored students.) Over the next 40 pages or so, we get the back story on this teacher's youth and his marriage, which is in short: in college he (Elias) became close friends w/ a dynamic and seemingly brilliant grad student (Johan?), a real counterpoint to the shy and self-conscious Elias. At one point J introduces E to his new girlfriend, later his wife, Eva (?), whom the narrator describes as extraordinarily beautiful. As time goes on, the Elias settles into a quiet loneliness and bachelorhood - extremely awkward w/ women - and J's life doesn't follow the prescribed course. His dissertation was not quite as brilliant as all had anticipated, he fails to find a good teaching job. Then one day he calls Elias and, with no forewarning, tells him he's moving to NY to take a job in advertising and leaving behind wife and daughter, whom he says are now E's responsibility. We can only assume that J has mental illness, probably bipolar disorder? Elias does marry Eva, but we know, from the outset of the novel, that she has lost her beauty and their relationship is cold and strained. What drags this potentially good novel down is Solstad's odd narration, in which re redundantly repeats points again and again - much like this sentence. At best, the prose has a kind of incantatory effect - for ex., his repeated references to the beauty of Eva seem almost Homeric - but you also keep hoping Solstad will get on with the story. As readers of this blog know, I am very patient with long interior narratives, from Proust the Karl Ove Knausgaard (who has recommended Solstad to readers), but only if the interior narration continues to provide insight and emotion. Here, the narration feels stuck, stalled - perhaps like life (we all do ruminate over and rework the materials of our inner lives), but offputting as well, for all that.

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Among the strangest narratives I've ever read: Dag Solstad

In a recent NYTBR column Karl Ove Knausgaard touted fellow Norwegian writer Dag Solstad, noting that he would be a well-recognized world writer had he not written in the rarely translated language of Norwegian. Truly, works by Solstad are hard to find, but I did locate a copy of his 1996 novel, Shyness & Dignity. Not sure if this novel is in any way representative of his work, but I an finding it to be among the strangest and, at least initially, intentionally off-putting narratives I've ever read. The novel begins with a 50-something man nursing a hangover and bidding a cold and indifferent good-bye to his wife as he sets off for his job, as a teacher (actually, department chair) at a Norwegian high school. Over the next 30 pp or so we see him teaching a lesson on the Ibsen drama, The Wild Duck; he teaches w/out enthusiasm and is glum and morose and even scornful of his students, who are bored out of their minds by his pedantry. Problem: So are we. Esp non-Norwegian readers, as virtually none of us is familiar with this play (maybe could have worked with the better known Hedda Gabler or Doll's House), let alone the role of one of its minor characters, which the teacher (we don't learn his name until about 50 pp in) makes central to his lesson. (An English translator might take a real leap of faith and translate the whole discussion to, say, Shakespeare.) I was about to throw up my hands in exasperation, when things take a turn: the teacher (his job doesn't seem very demanding of his time) leaves for home mid-morning and when his umbrella won't open he throws a fit - smashing the umbrella against a post, cutting his hands, yelling vile insults at the students who silently watch this emotional breakdown. Then he starts to wander the streets of Oslo (a bit too many street names and neighborhoods of no interest to anyone but and Oslo resident), upset and disturbed about ruining his career and maybe his marriage and his life. A very odd book to say the least, but for the moment I'm hooked by this pathetic, disturbed character. 

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