Fabulous writing about a repulsive topic: Would you read this?

Never has so much fine (sometimes too fine) writing been put in the service of such an unpleasant tale as in Gabriel Tallent's debut novel, My Absolute Darling. Tallent begins with a fabulous description of a cabin in the remote woods of Mendocino County, Cal., in which he describes every vine, root, and tendril of every weed that's working its way through the neglected, half-constructed woodwork. Then we meet the two living in this place, an early-teenage girl, Turtle, and her dad, a fully and totally repulsive character: menacing, slothful, alcoholic, verbally abusive, survivalist, paranoid, with an obsessive interest in weaponry and self-defense. The poor girl is struggling w/ schoolwork and is a general outcast - crudely rebuffs an offer of friendship from a perfectly nice and kind of hip classmate. Father called in for a counsel with school authorities - of course they're afraid of him - and he says he'll work w/ Turtle (he calls her "Kibble" - she has another  "real" name used in school, which I forget) on her homework and for the moment they let it go at that. We soon see that he abuses his daughter sexually, and in a later chapter that he literally tortures her w/ a knife. Whew. This is almost unbearable - and would maybe be more interesting if the dad weren't such a "type," if we were surprised by his abusive behavior. Tallent as noted is really effective at building a scene and at describing a setting; the narrative consciousness obviously is his and not his characters' - so as Turtle runs through a field she doesn't step on just "leaves" but "myrtle" leaves - of course, who knew? - and the leaves all have a color (adumbrated?) and an odor, etc. It's like a story narrated by a botanist! But not just that: he also has a profound knowledge of weapons and their use (in this case, the narrative consciousness is that of the characters), and it's such an ususual combination - guns and flowers - that we're drawn in and a little puzzled. Despite my abhorrence of some of this material, I'm curious and captivated and will keep reading unless or until the balance shifts and I want out.

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O'Neill's disappointing story and Amis's unreadable novel

Joseph O'Neill deservedly received a lot of attention for his breakout novel, Netherland, a really terrific book by all measures, and the good will he received from that book - not only the quality of that novel but his perfect NY literary life story, a guy w/ various law and business degrees who gave up the profession to write full time (not clear if spouse supported the family, but never mind) while living in the Chelsea Hotel w/ spouse and 3 boys (briefly mentioned in the novel) - and that good will has carried him through at least one poorly received novels and several appearances in the NYer. But his current story or short fiction if you will in the NYer, The Sinking of the Houston (or a title close to that) maybe pushes him to the limit. Here's a plot summary: Dad, father of 3 boys (spouse not mentioned) tells of various conversations w/ his teenage sons who seem to continuously ask him if he's aware of various political atrocities, such as the Duvalier family and the child soldiers in Liberia, and he gruffly puts them off. One day one of the boys tells him he's been robbed at gunpoint on the subway; robber took his cell phone and $. Narrator uses a "find my phone" app and locates the perpetrator, and determines to track him down and break his legs. Took the story a while (about half its length) to get to this point, but now I'm aboard. Eventually perp appears in narrator's neighborhood, and he grabs a baseball bat and goes to get him - but at doorway he's waylaid by a friendly neighbor who walks with him and tells him his back story: he was a member of the team of Cuban exiles that invaded the Bay of Pigs back in the 60s. Narrator listens to this tale - and story ends. What the hell? Does he go after the guy? If not why not? What happened? Did O'Neill just stop? Is this a piece from a longer work? If so, why not at least make it a completed piece? Not sure whom to blame here: O'Neill's writing is really good, so maybe the NYer editors made a bad decision. Don't know.

On another front, Martin Amis's 1989 novel, London Fields, gets no better on 2nd night of laborious reading. Not only don't we care about the characters (the murderer and, as Amis quaintly calls her, the murderee) he doesn't even want us to care about them, as he continues w/ he "framing story" about the American writer who's writing the tale we're reading. And the style is so cumbersome. Here's an illustration (though much shorter than usual) roughly recalled: It was lower caste, low caste, untouchable. Well, which? Give us one - don't say the same thing repeatedly. I'm not writing off Amis; from other things I've read he seems to be a top-flight novelist. But this novel was no doubt of its time, but in some ways the last gasp of the self-conscious postmodernism that flared and died in English-language fiction in the late 20th century. Today, it feels almost unreadable.

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Thoughts on postmodernism and wondering if anyone can read postmodern fiction today

The salient characteristics of postmodern American fiction, circa 1980: Narratives that call attention to themselves as acts of narration generally w/ references to the author's engagement with his or her material; a narrative style that draws attention to itself, completely nontransparent, the opposite of Flaubertian naturalism; a tendency toward maximalism, as if the value of the literary work is in direct proportion to the magnitude; following on above a tendency to provide excessive detail, repetition of detail and statement as if saying the same thing in multiple ways increases (rather than diminishes) the effectiveness of the best image; experiments w/ narrative and form, especially in short fiction, following on the premise that the "novel is dead" and must be re-born in a new form. All of these in varying degrees dominated American literary fiction in the 70s and 80s, with the high priests of the movement being Barth, Barthelme, Hawkes, Coover, Gaddis, Gardner - very male-dominated, in fact, and very at home in the halls of academe. In fact, these precepts played perfectly into the graduate seminar, as in some ways postmodern fiction required only inventiveness and imagination - and relatively little lived experience, the perfect metier for a young ambitious writer. Tellingly, there's not much of a 2nd generation of postmodern writers - most of the students of these greats failed to stand on the shoulders of the giants (Marilyn Robinson is one exception). The postmodern movement, however, migrated and crossed the Atlantic and in the late 80s British writers, long imbued w/ realism (esp the Angry Young Men movement) tried their hand - and Martin Amis's 1989 novel, which some consider his best or at least most famous, London Fields, is an example of pretty much all of the above. And you know what? Today, this style - or at least this novel - feels practically unreadable. Begins with the "author" explaining the process he went through in naming this novel; then, the narrator says that every in this novel is true, but also made up, or something like that, and he begins to tell the story of a murder, with various side comments on his invention of the characters and issues he encounters as the writer of this narrative. The novel is long, the paragraphs are long and full of repetition, and the whole project seems artificial, cloyingly self-conscious, and out of date. Can anyone read this novel today? I've gone through about 50 pp., skimming eventually, will give it at least one more night in case I am missing something or was just in a cranky mood while reading, but I believe this is a work whose time has passed.

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What does the voyage To the Lighthouse represent?

In the 3rd and final section of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse various surviving members of the Ramsay family and entourage gather at the family (vacation) house on the Isle of Skye, and few things happen: the now-widowed Mr. Ramsay makes an awkward pass at the never-married painter, Lily Briscoe. He's 30 years her senior and a real grump, and he seems to need a woman who will adore him and wait on him and feel sorry for him and tolerate his many immature outbursts of pique (the late Mrs. Ramsay was not suitably tolerant of his egocentric behavior, leading to some bitter quarrels). Lily recognizes that she could never love Mr. Ramsay, tho she feels guilty about pushing him off. Meanwhile, Mr. Ramsay takes two of the children (the 2 youngest?), Cam and James, on a boat ride to the eponymous Lighthouse - seems to be a sail of several miles in length w/ some difficult navigation (there are references to a # of shipwrecks in which men drowned in these waters - Mr. Ramsay seems obscenely indifferent to the fate of working mariners - all part of the job, says this pampered philosopher). Interestingly, Cam and James make a pact to defy the "tyrant" - they seem to both hate their father, who never speaks to them w/ any kindness or encouragement. Interesting - but not much comes of this (James seems to acquiesce when after many hours at the tiller his father compliments him on his boat-handling). Long and short, they get to the Lighthouse - there was talk of bringing some supplies to the "men" at the light, but it's not clear they ever did so - no more mention of the tuberculous child at the light. Did VW just forget this? And then there are the 2 men - the McAlisters? - who come along on the boat, presumably to do all the hard work of the voyage - they play no role whatsoever, as Mr. Ramsay, like the others in his circle, pays no attention to those who wait on him (was VW equally indifferent, or is she offering a subtle critique of her social set?). Finally, not a lot happens: they get to the Lighthouse, look back, see how small the Isle of Skye looks from across the water; back at the house, Lily Briscoe completes her painting of the Lighthouse and the channel, just as VW completes her novel. So what does the voyage represent?: the artistic process and the creative act, perhaps; also the voyage of time through the lives of various people who pass through the same portal (the house on Skye) - or even the voyage from life to death (hints of maritime disasters, the memory of oldest brother, Andrew, dead - instantly - from shrapnel during the War); very little connection to history or to state of affairs in Britain at the time of this novel - though the world was turning upside down, VW is removed and indifferent - though all readers will recognize the hints of darkness and her much later suicide on the eve of WWII, which it is said she could not bear to endure. 

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Interpreting the Time Passes section of Woolf's To the Lighthouse

And then we get to the strange and short 2nd section of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, about 20 pp (after a first section of about 180 pp.), titled "Time Passes," and that's what it is - we observe teh house gradually decay, w/ a few odd paens to the change of seasons - some of the descriptions of seasons coming on are dark and foreboding, obviously VW was a troubled soul in many ways, unable to take solace in nature, threatened all the time - and, notably, "updates" on the main characters of the novel and what happened to them during the years of Time Passes: first, the main character, Mrs. Ramsay, is curtly dismissed from the novel as we observe her husband on the day after she died "suddenly" (which really means "unexpectedly," as all deaths are in a way sudden - newspaper reporters learn this distinction) - so she's "suddenly" gone from this novel. We also learn that the oldest and smartest of the Ramsay children died in the War (first World War), and that the beautiful daughter married and then died a year later in childbirth. The only other "update" is on the slovenly poet, Carmichael, who had an "unexpected" success with the book of poems he completed during the war years - seems the war increased the public interest in poetry (perhaps it did, but we would think primarily of the war poets such as Brooke rather than an old Classicist). And then we learn that the family, or some of what remains of the Ramsay family, wants to return to the house on Skye, so the servants man up and in a frenzy clean and repair the dilapidated house. So what to make of this section: First, it's almost a novel in inverse; VW has less interest in her characters than in their house, and she completely steps away from scenes of life and death (and combat), the very stuff of most novels. Second, the attitude to the serving class remains extremely condescending - we know little or nothing about their interior lives, they seem to jump at the commands of the home owners, never showing anger or regret, they're props that make the life of the Ramsay family and their entourage possible (and comfortable). Third, Woolf steers away from the most dramatic years of British life in her time and is decidedly unwilling to write about the War Years - and even her reference to a successful publication during the war years seems to have nothing to do w/ the war. What a strange, and sad, novel.

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The famous dinner scene in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

The dinner scene - toward the end of the long first section of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse - is a classic example of modernism in literature, a scene in which the author's narration (3rd person) seems to flow among the adults (there are 15 at the table I think, including the 8 children, most of whom have almost no role in the novel or at least the narrator has no access to their interior lives - contrast w/ Faulkner? - which is probably a good thing, w/ Woolf sensing where her strengths and weaknesses lay), and flow is the right metaphor - building off "stream" of consciousness but in this instance not one consciousness but many. Many small interior dramas play out over the course of the dinner, most notably Mrs. Ramsay's continued attempt to play the good hostess and, to a degree, matchmaker, but also we see the insecurity of the academics - Mr. Ramsay and his acolyte Tanley - worried about their stature in the world and missing the life around them; we see a few loves blooming, or potentially so: Minto and, what's his name?, the handsome young man who walks to the seacoast with he and gallantly (stupidly) pledges to find her lost brooch (anyone knows it's washed away to the sea), and Lily Briscoe (perhaps the character closest to VW herself?, unsure of herself socially, a bit of an outsider and eccentric, dedicated to her art - though in an amateur way, unlike VW) and Bankes (?), the self-confident, widowed scientist - but we also sense that neither of these relationships will develop, nor will Tanleys with Prue (let alone his fascination w/ the much older Mrs. Ramsay) - there's so damn much insecurity and propriety in this assemblage. Any reader has to admire Woolf's craftsmanship not only in executing this complex scene but in setting up the back stories for most of the characters over the span of the first 150 or so pages; yet - each time I've read this section I've wished the stakes were higher, that they'd really gotten into some kind of debate or argument, that someone would do or say something outrageous and dramatic, that we could sense someone's life was at a point of crisis and that this dinner would be a turning point in someone's life. This scene is like an artful painting that never quite grabs you with its beauty, insight, or emotion.

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A classic novel of modernism - To the Lighthouse

The back-cover copy on my old edition of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) says something like: This is a story of an English family on vacation in the Hebrides. Whew, sounds pretty exciting - can you imagine a more dull come-on for any novel? And of course reading a VW novel, especially this one, is not about encountering an exciting plot w/ lots of action and drama or melodrama. This is high modernism, and the novel, while never exciting, is probing and influential. Woolf along w/ the other great modernist writers of her time, particularly Joyce and Proust, was focused on the interior life of her characters - on the giving us access to the consciousness of others (not of herself in particular, as w/ Proust, and not with a broad spectrum of society and culture, as w/ Joyce - she works on a small canvas, at least in Lighthouse and her other great work Mrs. Dalloway). So, yes, this novel is about a English family - the Ramsays, with the pere an Oxford academic with some following but clearly not at the top of his profession, the wife still a beauty at 50, w/ her life focused on building up the ego and self-confidence of her dour husband and dealing with their 8 (!) children, and assort acolytes and hangers-on who join them for part of their summer on the Isle of Skye. The novel takes place over just a couple of days, and in that time we learn of her yearnings, his self-doubt, and the subtle shifts in relationship among several of the peripheral characters: the amateur painter Lily Briscoe (probably the character closest to VW herself), the widower who is somewhat attracted to Lily, the opium addict (Carmichael), and the young-professor dry and dust and a real suck-up to Ramsay, Sr (Tansley). The children are just a vague mass of interchangeable names and characteristics except maybe for the eldest who is extremely bright (Andrew) and the youngest (James), clingy and unpleasant. So you don't do into this kind of novel expecting to be moved, frightened, or astonished - except by Woolf's insight into character, memory, frustration, and longing.

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Denis Johnson's prison story and a note on an unseemly element in Englander's novel

First, a note on the late Denis Johnson's posthumously published story in the current New Yorker, Strangler Bob - another one of the tough-guy, drug-addled, hard-luck stories for which DJ was well known. This one could have fit in well w/ his famous collection, Jesus' Son (see earlier posts), and it's one in a not very long line of American prison stories, which are always scary even horrifying (the scariest probably being Edward Jones's). If you can stomach these brutal stories it's hard not to be mesmerized, in a ghastly way, by the milieu: in this case the story is narrated by a contemporary, heroin-hooked adult looking back on probably his first imprisonment, when he was a scrawny young man, in his late teens. His account of the life on the block in a county holding cell somewhere in the Midwest rings true, at least to me - but it's so hard to know. Is it true because it's like other prison stories I've read? I have nothing against which to check its veracity except other stories and TV/movie depictions. Part of the fascination with prison stories is that writers as a group, in general, have little experience of this life, so we almost revere those who can tell it like it is from the inside - sometimes w/ almost too much reverence, see Norman Mailer and his protegee Jack Abbott. All told, this is a taut story w/ vivid characters and throughout w/ Johnson's smart, sharp language - a report from another country or so it seems. Second, a final note on Nathan Englander's contemporary Israeli espionage novel/love story, Dinner at the Center of the World. Was anyone else troubled by his use of (spoilers here) a female Israeli agent to capture the fugitive turncoat known only as Z - the Israeli woman poses as a young Italian living in Paris who meets Z seemingly by chance and begins a romance with him, eventually luring him to Italy (where they meet her supposedly wealthy Italian father, in fact another Israeli agent). It's one thing if we see this as a story of a lover betrayed - but are they lovers? In fact the young woman was assigned to have sex - over a period of some weeks - with a guy she'd never met, might not like at all, might detest - in other words she's prostituting herself on the orders of the Israeli secret service. Does this go on outside of the world of James Bond? At least in that world everyone knows they're faking it; here she has to pretend she's an innocent and in love. There's something terribly unseemly and sexist about this plot element, right? 

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Englander's novel is a good entertainment though if falls short on a few points

Nathan Englander's Dinner at the Center of the Earth is worth a read in that it's short and entertaining. I won't give away plot points, but he does a nice job pulling the strands together by the end of the novel (we have 3 main characters, an Israeli general based on Sharon, a Palestinian activist/terrorist operating out of Europe, mostly Berlin, and an American recruited to work for the Israeli secret service but who turns and is captured and imprisoned). The speed and efficiency of this novel, however, comes at a certain cost. First of all, the characters are never developed and have only the vaguest of back stories so we don't particularly care for them as people or even know them as people - they are just like board pieces that move the plot along. You can't help but feel that this is a sketch of a spy thriller - a PowerPoint version of Le Carre, if you will. Second, although there are a couple of twists and surprises along the way, in other respects we know far more than the characters and some of the key plot events that catch the protagonists unaware are certainly no surprise to attentive readers. Third, the Palestinian-terrorist plot line is tenuous and thin. Spoilers here: If in fact it's the Palestinian we've been following who gets together w/ an Israeli spy for the eponymous dinner - and I think NE should have made it more clear if this is the case - we just have not bought into their highly improbable relationship. NE desperately wants to conclude this twisty tale with some upbeat notes and images, but the last few chapters, rich w/ heavy-handed imagery, feel out of sync w/ the rest of the novel. Fourth, a knowledge of the complex history of Israeli politics and of the Intifada would help readers, and I have to admit I'm kind of slack in that department. All this said, this novel is a good entertainment and, who knows?, might make a good movie, mutatis mutandis. 

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Lots of chracters, sketches, incidents in Englander's novel but will these elements cohere into a plot?

Have started Nathan Englander's short but complicated novel Dinner at the Center of the World; I'm drawn into his narrative and will definitely finish reading the book as it's pretty fast going, but I'm a little befuddled as well. Gradually, the main characters come into focus, but NE doesn't make it easy for us, as the novel is broken into short chapters, some set in 2002 others in 2014, some in Israel (or on the border, or on either side of the Gazan border), some in Berlin, some in Paris. At first I threw up my hands (figuratively) in despair, but persistence pays off, and now I'm pretty sure I grasp the main characters: An American named Z who in 2002 is in Paris, having worked for some spy agency, presumably an Israeli operation, and having betrayed the operation, perhaps turning against Israel and becoming a double agent of some sort; in 2014 we see Z as a prisoner in Israel, largely held incommunicado (not on any official record), trying to communicate with a top figure in authority through his jailhouse guard, whose mother works for this top man. Second: The top man, called The General (Israeli readers will probably know right off whom this represents, or of whom he's a composite - I suspect he's based on Sharon), a war hero and later political leader now (2014) in near-comatose state and cared for by a loyal servant, Ruthi; we also have scenes of his earlier life, including a scene in which he hears a shot and rushes outside to see his son shot to death by his (the General's) prize antique rifle (at least I think that's what happened; pretty hard to shoot one's self w/ a rifle, however) and in another we see him blown up in a tank explosion - the incident that presumably put him in a comatose state? Third: a Palestinian-born man named Farid whose family sent him off to Europe in youth and now we see him in Berlin (2002) running business deals and fitting in as a prosperous international type. His relationship to the other characters has not been established at all.  He does befriend a man who says he's a businessman from Canada involved in sales of used computers and needs help with some merchandise stuck in Egypt, and the 2 seem on the verge of forming a partnership - though we have to suspect that either or both may be spies or double agents. Ditto for Z, in Paris in 2002, fearful for his life, and we have to suspect that his supposedly Italian girlfriend whom he supposedly meets by chance in a bookstore (she'd previously waited on him in a Near Eastern restaurant) is also an agent or double agent. OK so lots of little sketches of character and action, but how or when will these elements cohere into a plot?

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Possible interpretations of Svabo's The Door

Magda Szabo's The Door (1987) comes full circle and ends where it began, w/ the narrator suffering from nightmare visions of an impenetrable doorway, as she's in mourning for her late friend/emplyee/servant, Emerence, and in agony over her failure to help Emerence in her last days, in fact betraying her by taking part in a scheme to get her out of her decrepit apartment and into the health-care system - and then leaving the scene to do a TV appearance while E is being hauled away and decontaminated by a medical team. In the final chapters, the narrator is lured into lying to E, now hospitalized and recovering from a stroke, and telling her that her apartment is ready for her return - when in fact the entire apartment has been ripped apart and all of her possessions have been incinerated. When it becomes clear that E is ready to return "home" the narrator has to tell her the truth, and she carries guilty about this well beyond E's funeral and beyond all reason. At the end, she inherits the contents of a room that E has kept locked away for decades: turns out to be a priceless set of antique furniture (once property of a Jewish family that fled Hungary), but when the narrator touches the furniture in literally (is this possible?) crumbles into a pile of dust - the wood had been devoured by wood lice. OK so there are a # of ways in which to read this novel, aside from the realist/naturalist tone as a stoyr about the complex relations between two women and their cultural clashes (artist-intellectual v hard-working and long-suffering servant), and I'll touch on a few. First and most obvious, religious allegory: there are many allusions to the life (and death) of Jesus, and in some ways we can see E as a Christ-figure, giving up her life for others, suffering, dying, living on in memory - but also perhaps a false prophet (the legacy crumbling into a pile of dust)? Second, a political analogy, in which maybe E represents the hypocrisy and oppression of the Hungarian government during its various phases of crisis: Nazi occupation/influence and anti-Semitism during the war, repression of free expression during Soviet occupation - and the narrator's struggle w/ her over the course of a lifetime represents the struggle of contemporary Hungarians (or anyone) with an oppressive government. Third, conflict between writer (the narrator) and muse - with E. providing the comfort and security than enables to writer to compose, but disappearing at times and demanding of obeisance and tribute at all times. Finally, there are many references to Greek myth and tragedy, many of which alluded me, but some we can see are part of the scheme - with E. wrathful and petulant like Achilles as battles rage outside. There may be other suggestions as well. 

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Powerful chapters near the end of Szabo's The Door as we learn why the narrator feels guilty over Emerence's death

The late chapters in Magda Szabo's The Door (1987), in which the narrator builds the story to its crisis, tell of how the narrator comes to feel that she is responsible for the death of her friend/employee/servant/neighbor/housekeeper, Emerence - which the narrator foreshadowed in the opening chapter (in which she said that E is dead and she, the narrator, suffers from nightmares stemming from, she believes, her guilt over E's death). In these chapters we see how the fiercely independent E becomes ill and refuses all help from neighbors, pretty much barricading herself in her apartment (along w/ the 9 cats). The narrator agrees to lure E out of her apartment with all good intention, hoping to get her the medical help she desperately needs; but when E understands that the attempt to get her to open her door is a ruse, and that a medical team will grab her and bring her to a hospital, she becomes violent - they have to batter in her door to get to her. Worse (for the narrator), the narrator was trying to squeeze this stratagem into a busy day's schedule - so before E could be subdued she had to dash off to a TV station for an interview (she's receiving a major prize for her fiction - this seems closely modeled on Szabo's own life). After her TV interview and other obligations, the narrator returns home and sees that E has been forcibly removed and that her apartment is a total disaster of almost unimaginable filth and decay; Szablo does a great job depicting this scene of horror. E is taken to a hospital after literally being decontaminated, and her spirit is entirely broken - and the narrator feels overwhelming remorse for turning on E and then turning away from her when she most needed comfort or at least protection. These are powerful emotional scenes, made even more so in that it's hard for us to understand why the narrator is to attached to and fond of E., but this understanding builds slowly, gradually through the course of the narrative, as we begin to see how rivals, antagonists, strong and wilful personalities can clash but also can come to depend on each other. 

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The complete eccentricity of Emerence in Szabo's The Door

Passing the half-way point in Magda Szabo's 1987 novel, The Door, and am getting more puzzled all the time about the central character, the narrator's servant-maid-housecleaner Emerence. Like the narrator we learn more about her back story as the novel unfolds, but much of what we learn at one point turns out to be false or misconstrued, as we realize later, and maybe it's my inattentiveness over the past 2 days of reading but I can't even answer some of the basic questions. At one point it's implied - as the narrator learns on a visit to E's native town - that she had a child, but we later learn from E that the child was an orphan entrusted to her care (she turns out to be the expected guest from America who never turns up for the dinner E has prepared for her, leading to curses and vitriol and an incredible temper tantrum). We know that E had a traumatic childhood - but did she really have twin siblings who died in a lightning strike while in E's care? We know she sheltered wounded soldiers, persecuted Jewish families, and others in her house - during WWII and, it seems, also during the era of Soviet dominance. She tells the narrator that one of the people she sheltered - for 2 years, I think - later rose to prominence in the Hungarian government (she refers to him as "the lawyer's son" - here's an area where the nuances are lost by non-Hungarian readers, I'm afraid). What we do know is that, whatever trauma she faced and whatever good she has done for people in need, she is an extremely difficult and incorrigible character in later life, the time span of this novel: adamant in her condemnation of all religion, narrow-minded in her opinions about literature (worthless) and art (movies are decrepit, she announces, once she learns that they're based on illusion and effects), strangely doctrinaire in her view that only work with one's hands has merit (as the narrator notes, she could have become a great Communist leader had it not been for her contempt for government), hateful of all those who try to help her, indiscriminate in her cold-blooded attitude toward death (she writes a will that among other things commands the narrator to kill her 9 cats so as to avoid their slow death via starvation and neglect), and just plain weird in her ambitions - saving her money to erect an elaborate crypt for herself and the exhumed bodies of her family members. It's hard to sympathize with this eccentric, and part of what drives the novel is speculation about why the narrator tolerates her and even comes to like her.

One of the most enigmatic characters in literature (in Szabo's The Door)

The servant, maid, cleaning lady, housekeeper, employee, whatever you want to call her - her name is Emerence - in Magda Szabo's The Door (1987) remains - about half-way through the novel - among the most enigmatic characters in literature. She is a woman of near-pathological extremes: at times fiercely protective of her privacy (won't allow anyone even closest friends into her house, yells and screams at the narrator not to bother her in off hours when narrator shows up at her door to ask a Emerence to pick up a package) and at times morbidly confessional (in various long passages she tells the narrator about her tragic childhood and death by lightning of her twin siblings, shares w/ narrator her loathing of organized religion), at times sentimental and faithful (she becomes completely devoted to the narrator - and even more so to the dog whom she inexplicably names Viola, although the dog is a male) and at other times cold and indifferent (she casually tells the narrator how she abetted her best friend's suicide the night before, all while shelling peas for dinner, even asking the befuddled narrator to help). What are we to make of her? Is she just an eccentric, or is she suffering from some kind of mental illness or for some traumatic disorder? We know that she lived through the Nazi takeover of Hungary during WWII, maybe even thrived under Nazi rule? She know that she has endured the years of Soviet domination. She drops a hint that she worked at one time for a police department. What has she seen, what has she imagined, what horrors have made her who she is, and why is she so strange? She seems to me a credible and sympathetic character, but I believe there's more to Szabo's narrative than just a study in mental disorder. Her malady seems in some ways characteristic of her nation and her time, though in what way this may be so I'm not yet sure.

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The enigmas of the central characters in Szabo's The Door

The late Hungarian Magda Szabo is best known to the extent she's known at all to American readers for her 1987 novel, The Door, which got some great reviews when recently reprinted in the admirable New York Review Books series of rediscoveries. A year or so back I read another novel by her, Iza's Ballad, and then our book group read it and we were blown away by her style, knowledge, and intelligence. Started reading The Door last night and can see immediately why it was so well received. Szabo knew how to put the bone in the throat; in the first (very short) chapter, almost like a preface, the narrator (unnamed?) confesses that she has repeated nightmares about being shut behind a glass door, and she ties these nightmares into the death of her cleaning woman (can't recall her name; begins w E and that's what I'll call her); in fact, she says she caused the death of E - and that's where the story begins. Over the next 50 or so pp we learn about the strange relationship between the narrator's family (she and her husband, both 60-something intellectuals, in Budapest; the narrator is a writer, obviously a replica of Szabo herself - though this is clearly not a memoir) and this serving woman: E. E is the most hard-working servant ever, but also one of the strangest. In Szabo's time we didn't really have the vocabulary for this, but today we can see that E is "on the spectrum" with some form of autism. She has no capacity for building relationships or showing empathy. She's prone to strange outbursts of vitriol, and fiercely protects her private life. In fact, she will let nobody into her house and she keeps doors and windows blocked. The narrator speculates that E may be hoarding loot pilfered from Jewish homes during WWII; it's also possible that she is afraid for some reason. E has a morbid fear of thunderstorms, and one night in a rare moment of openness she described her horrendous childhood to the narrator - telling a story of her twin siblings, entrusted to her care, killed by a lightning strike. That would explain her fear, but it seems too pat and maybe fabricated, though she does also seem like one suffering from PTSD , cause unknown. So lots of strands open in the first few chapters, we see E as troubled and perhaps dangerous, can't determine whether she's to be pitied or loathed. I also wonder how this fits in with other employer-servant novels - thinking for the moment of My Antonia - but this one seems so much darker and tied in some way not yet clear to the horrors of WWII and to the difficulties, in particular for writers and intellectuals, during the rise of the Soviet bloc.

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Another fine story from Tessa Hadley in current NYer

As noted in previous posts I have become a fan of Tessa Hadley's short fiction - after initial indifference too her work, which seemed to me to calm, careful, "British" - so maybe she has evolved or maybe I have or maybe I just missed something crucial in her early stories. Her story in current New Yorker, Funny Little Snake (terrible title, but forget that for the moment - supposed to be a barbed term of endearment a neglectful mother uses for her 9-year-old daughter) is as strong and mysterious as anything she's written. Story focuses on a stepmother - 2nd and much younger wife of an established academic, historian, in a North England university town - who is suffering through a visit of her husband's daughter, who seems cold and anti-social. When the week-long visit is up, the husband announces that he has various academic obligations and can't bring his daughter back to London; the stepmom (Valerie?) does so, and on arrival at the young girl's home we see immediately that the mom is criminally neglectful: drinking heavily, using marijuana, the house is a sty, the girl's bedroom is a mess w/ only a ragged sleeping bag on the bed, a "musician" is hanging around in his underwear, and so forth. At the end, the stepmom "rescues" the daughter and decides to bring her north to live w/ her and her father. (It's possible that this is part of a longer narrative that will continue from that point; if so, I have to say that it does stand perfectly well as a story in its own right.) Hadley does a great job establishing the various scenes and moods that we move through with this narrative; where she's particularly great, though, is in her subtle, almost hidden touches, particularly about the father/husband: his whining way of asking/ordering wife to bring the girl back to London, his weird tendency to refer to himself in the 3rd person, his "corrections" of his wife's syntax (call it "dinner" or "supper," not "tea," e.g.), her sense of inferiority at her lack to college/university education - in other words, Hadley shows us the stress lines and small fractures in their relationship. How long can it last? Did they really "rescue" the young girl, or just bring her into another psychodrama?
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Some notes on Turgenev's narrative framework in Sportsman's Notebook

Toward the end of Ivan Turgenev's A Sportsman's Notebook IT pretty much gives up on the driving concept, that the sketches are the observations of the sporting narrator or are narratives that he listens to from the people he encounters (or in one case overhears); the long story about the life and death of 2 eccentric lifelong friends (long Russian names that I won't even try to remember and re-create), both once-prosperous landowners who lost their fortune through greed and poor management is an example: The narrator encounters these eccentrics as he's off hunting game when one of them rides up to him out of nowhere and asks by what right is the narrator hunting on this land. After he learns narrator is an "aristocrat" he invites him to continue hunting and to visit him at the manor house. The narrator says he became curious about this man and then says some thing like: And this is what I learned about him. So we might as well just say this is a story that the author has concocted, not a report from one of his shooting expeditions. But so be it - the story has to stand on its own in either event (we recognize pretty early in this volume that the hunting sketches are just a vehicle that carries good narratives), and I think it does, esp when coupled with the much longer 2nd story, the longest piece in the collection and one that apparently IT added in a newly published edition about 20 years after the first edition. In the 2nd part of the story the wealthy spendthrift, morose upon the death of his friend, squanders everything and his entire fortune comes down to a beautiful horse, which a Jewish man provided for him in gratitude for his stepping in to save the man from a brutal beating by a crowd of anti-Semitic thugs (first instance of this theme in the collection, and it speaks well of the spoiled aristocrat, despite his other annoying qualities). The counterpart today would be a man in complete debt who maintains a beautiful Jag or Rolls Royce. But one night the horse escapes from the barn - or is stolen in the night - I haven't finished reading this story yet - ruining the man's life. This note is in keeping with the increasing darkness of the sketches as we proceed through the collection, as discussed in yesterday's post. 



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The darker side of Turgenev's Sportsman's sketches - and his narrative style

The later sketches/stories in Ivan Turgenev's A Sportsman's Notebook (1850 ca.) turn quite a bit darker than the earlier ones. Though throughout the book we see IT's great sensitivity to suffering and oppression, the overall mood of the early sketches one of celebration of the beauty of the outdoors,  a series of meetings and encounters w/ local eccentrics, and some curious hazards enduring during travel and "shooting" expeditions (getting lost, broken axle, sudden rainstorm, etc.), the characters the narrator encounters in the later sketches are more sorrowful and pitiful. Take these 3 that appear in sequence: A long sketch about a man the narrator encounters who, while waiting for fresh horses in a wayside post, pours out his life story: the fell in love with an indentured servant and tried to buy her freedom from the elderly woman who "owned" her but was turned down flat and they shifted her to a remote farm in another part of the country; he's now on his way to Moscow to seek government work. A year later the narrator encounters him in Moscow, still unemployed, and now a drunken ruin. Then, a story that the narrator overhears while resting in the woods: an attractive servant girl has a rendezvous with a liveried servant who will be leaving her as his master is re-locating to Moscow or western Europe. He is callous and indifferent toward her and she breaks down in sobs, asking him only to say he will miss her, which he refuses to do. Oddly, after he leaves the narrator approaches the young girl – with what in mind? – and she gets frightened (of course) and runs away. 3^rd: Narrator attends and all-male gathering at the house of a wealthy neighbor; the men are put up for the night and have to share rooms. His “roommate” goes into a long lament, the story of his life, about his lack of originality, his obscurity, the death of his young wife – until at last a man in an adjacent room asks them to shut up so he can get some sleep. In the morning, the unoriginal man has gone – leaving us to wonder: Was the narrative real? A dream? A distortion (maybe the narrator’s own story)? These sketches seem to anticipate Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man (which I think came later, not sure), with the strangely confessional and oddly self-aware narrative tone, and also Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, a long story that a passenger encountered in travel reveals to a willing stranger, i.e., the narrator. This narrative device, not too common except maybe in narratives to one’s analyst (see Confessions of Zeno, Portnoy’s complaint) was somewhat in vogue in the early 20^th century (see Ring Lardner). 

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The suffering, the sadness, and the beauty in Turgenev's Sportsman's Notebook

Though Turgenev is sympathetic to the peasants and other agricultural workers, in his collection A Sportsman's Notebook, repeatedly finding the peasants, the impoverished, the outsiders far easier to talk to (talk w/) that the landowners and the aristocrats and pseudo-aristocrats who are part of Turgenev's set (he appears to be a wealthy young landowner who can spend a great deal of his time hunting and fishing on his and on neighboring lands), he by no means romanticizes the life of the peasant. In fact, his stories and sketches show us the horrible conditions in which many of the peasants live; we see some people near dead from starvation, an old man subsisting on some dried peas and a crust of dried bread that he puts in his toothless mouth to suck, a child living in a one-room cabin w/ her father, a forester, the air thick with smoke, the room dark and cold, no other living family members, and many other examples. Most of all, we see how death is omnipresent in the peasant's daily existence: in one story we see a funeral process for a seemingly healthy 25-year-old man who died unexpectedly, his wife in procession wailing in mourning - but also in fear. What will become of her? How can she survive? One story, called Death, is among the most powerful, as we see a strong  man, a miller I think, who ruptured part of his stomach doing some lifting and shows up at the doctor's after 10 days of suffering - 2 days too late, the doctor says. The man refuses treatment and goes home to prepare to die (took 3 days - none of which we see, in contrast w/ Ivan Ilyich). In that same story, the narrator visits w/ a scholarly young man who is wasting away from consumption, soon to die. They all see to approach death w/out great fear - perhaps it's for some an alleviation of a life of suffering and difficulty. Yet I also have to note that this collection is far from bleak: There's lots of humor, too (the episode of the sinking boat, the hose dealer who sells the narrator a "lemon," the quest for a replacement for a broken axle), and most of all Turgenev includes in ever sketch at least one beautiful passage describing the landscape, the outdoors, and the pleasure of life in nature, even that of a hunter (one character criticizes the hunter for killing innocent animals for sport, even for game). Surely, Hemingway was familiar w/ Turgenev's work, and influenced and inspired by him. 


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Further thoughts on Trugenev's Sportman's Notebook and its influence

The sketches in Ivan Turgenev's difficult-to-classify A Sportsman's Notebook - much like short stories, but also like short essays or pieces of journalism, albeit w/ much re-created dialog and perhaps with some authorial license - continue to engage and amuse me. Each one involves the rather transparent narrator - seemingly Turgenev himself, and an avid hunter, fisherman, outdoorsman whose expeditions into the villages of the Russian forests and steppe (not too far from Moscow, ca 1850) lead him to encounters with a wide array of eccentrics and "types," of all social classes, as well as to some adventures: for ex., after a long day's hunting accompanied only by his dog, the narrator gets lost and confused as darkness falls and realizes he's been heading off course on his way toward home, spots in a valley by a river or stream a small bonfire or camp fire; he heads toward the fire, is greeted by two hostile dogs, then encounters a group of 5 peasant boys - teens and preteens - who earn some money in the summer (and have fun) bringing horses out to graze at night (apparently blackflies are too intensive for the horses in the summer months). He settles in for the night beside the campfire and listens to the chatter of the boys - w/ a few leading questions of his own - and through this experience we get a great sense of the peasant superstitions, particularly about ghosts, and also of typical campfire chatter of boys then and, I hope, now as well. Throughout, Turgenev's sympathies are more with the peasants than with any other class: overworked, exploited by a new system that charges them rent in return for supposed freedom. His most bitter and satirical story so far - about half-way through this 400-page collection - concerns a highly pretentious landowner so full of himself and so abusive of his staff - although he's too stupid to realize his foreman is cheating him right and left. It's obvious that this collection was influential - not only on the obvious followers such as Chekhov but I think on some American writers as well. Doesn't Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, owe a debt to Turgenev, a portrait of a region at one particular moment in (recent past) history, through a series of sketches about the denizens and their hopes and fears, seen through a single authorial consciousness? 
 
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