The various components of K's journey in Life and Times of Miohael K

The journey and the sufferings of the eponymous K in J.M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K (1983) is one of such suffering, such cruelty (mental and physical), such loneliness that it stands as possible the most sorrowful and harrowing of "road novels," but it also recalls several other themes and literary genres. First of all, all readers will be struck by K's ingenuity and his ability to survive alone, w/out money, just by living off the land - cultivating a few pumpkins and squash plants, shooting birds w/ a hand-made slingshot, chasing down a wild goat that he kills and slaughters. In some ways he's living an isolated life that goes well beyond that of, say Thoreau - and touches on the world of adventure (Robinson Crusue) and even sci-fi and cinema, a story of human ingenuity (The Martian, All Is Lost) - yet w/out the introspection. K remains a blank slate in some ways: skilled w/ his hands, and educated to a degree in gardening and cultivation, but obtuse when it comes to politics and social themes. He's an object acted upon, not an actor; a victim, not a revolutionary. I have wondered if JMC meant K in some manner to represent the oppressed black resident of South Africa during the time of Apartheid - constantly watched by the police, arrested and imprisoned r held in a work camp for no reason, deprived of rights, consigned to a miserable education - but if so JMC is also careful never to specify K's race (at least through the first 125 pp of this short novel). The social climate that JMC delineates (but never, intentionally, clearly explains - the country is at war but there is no discussion of the cause of the war, the antagonist, anything - we see it all from the benighted perception of K, through a glass darkly) is also part of K's journey: he's not traveling into the past (to his mother's native ground) in order to find himself, to reach closure, to make a point. He's on a journey of survival, but a journey that is both interior (man alone) and exterior (man oppressed), an interrogation of the oppressive government and a frightening look at the deprivations - of basic commodities and of all liberties - during a time of war. 

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Why Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K holds up well after 30 years

J.M. Coetzee won a Nobel Prize for literature largely because of his early works set in his native South Africa, before black independence and during the reign of apartheid. I'm taking a look back at his short novel, some consider it his best, from 1983 - Life and Times of Michael K - and finding it a truly harrowing, powerful work that stands up well today, some 30 years later, and in a world with a completely different political climate in SA. The novel is about the eponymous Michael, in his 30s, a man with some physical deformities (a so-called harelip) and with some degree of retardation. He was born out of wedlock to an house-cleaner, who pretty  much abandons him to a school for orphans and the needy, but as the novel begins his mother is in terrible health and calls on him to help her get medical care and some support. Most important, SA is in the midst of a war, and there are everywhere terrible shortages of basic food and supplies, police patrols that can shoot on sight, outbreaks of rioting and street violence, a government crackdown requiring permits for just about anyone using trains or highways, and a bureaucratic backlog that makes it nearly impossible to access government or health-care services. Michael and his mother are living in essentially a crawl space in a building that has been abandoned and looted, and the sense is that thousands or millions of people are living in similar conditions. M and his mother determine to set out for her native village in the north - a foolhardy and dangerous expedition, as the learn right away. Strangely, JMC never (I think) mentions race at all, though it's not hard to see that the experience of Michael and his mother closely tracks that of black residents of Cape Town in the '80s - poverty, poor services, police crackdowns, etc. The war that is tearing SA apart is in some ways JMC's projection into a future - imagining a war that in fact never did happen, or at least not in the way he foresaw; however, it's easy to imagine Michael's experience as a refugee in war-torn countries today - Syria in particular comes to mind. There's also an allegorical element to this novel: a journey toward an unseen and maybe unattainable goal, perhaps a journey toward salvation, that will no doubt (I'm about 1/3 of the way through) will not end happily.

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Why Patrick Modiano's haven't been made into (successful) films

There's a reason why Patrick Modiano's novels, which seem like mystery stories but are not, have not been (to my knowledge) made into movies: In his novels the "mystery" is one of mood and atmosphere but not of plot and narrative. (Maybe someone like Jim Jarmusch could try to film a PM novel, but good luck w/ that.) As in the latest to make its way into English, Sundays in August (1986): Briefly, the plot involves the narrator (Jean) whose girlfriend (Sylvia), who's in possession of a valuable diamond (the Southern Cross) disappears one night, perhaps kidnapped by the mysterious Anglo-American couple who've befriended the Jean and Sylvia. Who dunnit? What happened? Well, much of that is revealed in the last third of the novel, when the narrator describes how, some 7 years back, he met Sylvia and her thuggish husband (or partner), Villecourt, when he (Jean) was working on a book of photographs about the beaches on rivers outside of Paris. As narrative, this is manipulative and absurd; the narrator reveals the mystery of Sylvia's background to us at the end of the novel, when he knew it all along. Unlike the conventional crime novel or detective novel, we are not discovering things along with the narrator; rather, we are in the dark because the narrator is perverse in what he conceals, what he reveals, and when. Oddly, the novel ends with Sylvia and Jean leaving Villecourt et al., in possession of the diamond, and heading off into a period of hiding (financed just how?) and for a time of idyllic rest (the title becomes the last words of the novel) - a period that ends with the moment at the opening of the novel, 7 years later, when Jean runs into Villecourt in Nice and the period of blissful hiding is about to end. Narrative development aside, the last third of the novel puts us squarely into Modiano-land, as he examines another weird corner of the French landscape, the beach resorts on the Marne River east of Paris. We sense that this was once a thriving resort community, now in neglect and disrepair, as the Marne over time had become increasingly silty, murky, and polluted. (I tried to find some pictures of the old beaches on the Marne; not much comes up aside for hard-to-discern images on old post cards. The present-day Marne looks really developed and it's strange think of it as a waterfront resort - precisely PM's intent.) Also, as in almost all PM novels, the look into the past involves some sort of obscure connection to the French resistance - in this case, an assassination of one of Sylvia's relatives, a probable collaborator - and to the French criminal underworld; both of these, from what I've read about PM's life, are a reference to his father and his wartime activities. In sum, Sundays in August is not the best intro to PM's work, but for those already hooked it gives a different slant (the Nice location, and the Marne River section) on familiar PM themes and settings.

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More noir atmosphere in the most unlikely places in the latest translation of Modiano

Another Patrick Modiano novel, this one from 1986, appears in English (Yale UP), translated as Sundays in August (I would prefer August Sundays), and of course it's completely of a piece w/ the many other Modiano novels, another noirish story in which the protagonist is confounded by mysterious happenings, pursued by a vaguely menacing assailant, hiding something from his past, unsure of his own memories, and touched w/ askance references to the Occupation. A major different however is that this novel is set not in Paris and its dingiest environs (though there are references to a previous period in the narrators life in one of the drab Paris suburbs) but in Nice - which is quite a trick as PM turns the sun=dappled Riviera setting with its grand hotels, casinos, and the promenades along beachfront into another version of urban noir. The plot, over the first half at least, concerns the narrator, Jean, who comes across a man (Villecourt) selling leather jackets from the back of a sketchy truck - the 2 apparently had quite a confrontation, seemingly about a woman named Sylvia, about 7 years previous. This encounter prompts Jean to recollect Sylvia: She came down from the aforesaid Paris suburb to meet in him Nice, wearing an expensive diamond (the Southern Cross). The 2 hide out for a time in a furnished room; eventually they are befriended by an elusive American couple. As Jean tries to learn more about this couple he determines that the live at the American consulate - but further inquiries show that the man in the couple had been the consul but some 25 years previously p until he was forced to resign regarding wartime profiteering and alliances w/ the German occupiers. So by the midpoint, we need to know: Who is or was this couple, if they were not an illusion of some sort? Where did Sylvia acquire the expensive diamond? What role did Villecourt plan in her life, and in Jean's? Why is Jean, in the "present," no longer w/ Sylvia, and what does V. want from Jean? Knowing Modiano, one can be sure that he will not close all the loops; these are whodunits that don't much concern who did what - they're about establishing a mood of mystery and an atmosphere of dread, sometimes in the most unlikely milieus.

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Jhumpa Lahiri and the issue of tranlsation

What if anything should we make of Jhumpa Lahiri's metamorphosis into an Italian writer, or actually a writer in Italian? Her terrific short stories that told of the lives of Indian immigrants to America and their family struggles, especially as the parents remain "Indian" and the children full assimilate into Americans. Above all her stories (and novels, to a degree) have been noted for their beautiful prose - almost every paragraph ending with a potential  "pull quote." So at some point in midlife she moves w/ family to Italy and learns the language and now seems set on composing in that language - and she's still great (she does her own translations into English, strange as that seems). Is she just a show-off? Or just plain super-smart? Or does the confrontation w/ a new language push her prose and her thinking to a higher level, as if beautiful prose in English were too easy, almost sub-conscious, for her and the required attention in a new language forces her to focus more intently on the act of prose writing. (Was it the same for Conrad? But of course he never translated his own work back into Polish - why would he? One oddity of JL's decision is that she has moved away from not only her native language but from the "lingua franca" of the contemporary world to a much more obscure language. Oh, well.) A great example of JL's new style is her piece, The Boundary, in the current New Yorker. Though I suspect most readers will figure out what's going on before reaching the closing paragraph, and I won't give it away, this story with its tricky narrative voice is a great meditation not only on the social problems of immigration, race and ethnicity prejudice, and 3rd-world v 1st-world disparities of wealth and culture, it's also a reflection on the act of writing (as was the previous NYer story, John Edgar Wideman's piece on a writing seminar) - a beautiful and surprising story that loses nothing in style or structure in its language migrations, by an American writer working in Italian and translating herself back into English. (Who if anyone will read the Italian version, btw?)

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The title story in Naipaul's In a Free State is a great portrayal of a country in turmoil

The title chapter/selection/story/novella in V.S. Naipaul's novel In a Free State (1971) is a great piece of fiction writing. The story (let's call it that, though it checks in at +100 pp) holds to the classic close to unity of time - takes place in not much more than 24 hours and though the "unity of place" is more than one specific setting it has the feeling of unity in that it is essentially a road story, a journey across an unnamed Central African country recently independent from British rule (possibly Rhodesia/Zimbabwe?). The 2 central characters, Bobby and Linda, are English, about mid-30s, working either in aid agencies or w/ the government in some advisory capacity, none of that is made clear nor does it have to be. Over the course of their journey, Naipaul givess not only a fantastically detailed account of the beauty and terror of the passing landscape and the difficult of 3rd-world travel in re road conditions, scarcity of supplies, danger of kidnapping and attack, but provides in miniature a great portrait of a country in turmoil and of two minds in confusion and doubt. The country is in the process of a revolution - one factor, led by the president, has overthrown another factor, led by the king - which poses a great deal of danger and uncertainty for the two travelers, and to some tense moments in the story, in fact every time they encounter a roadblock or pass a team of army "lorries" their lives are in danger. In a climactic scene when Bobbby's life is in danger as he confronts some soldiers loyal to the new government, Bobby tries to pull rank, asking to see the "boss man" and asserting that he's with the government, a pathetic exaggeration of his stature - but they again he realizes that being what accords him a certain statue and deference. Both of them have come to work in Africa as a noble, brave calling - but they are coming to terms w/ the futility of their work. Yet they haven't gone so far as one of the characters they meet en route, an elderly ex-Colonel who runs a small hotel and restaurant and is completely bitter, old-school, and racist, and still for some reason hanging on: This could be their future, if they stay. The title of course is ironic to say the least, and it's obvious that Naipaul is a bitter, even cynical observer of power politics and of colonialism - yet he never makes the two lead characters into buffoons or objects of ridicule. Each suffers in his or her way, as we learn over the course of the story - and as they learn from each other. Though it would be difficult to film this story and though there might well be political fallout for anyone who tried, it would make a good road movie, I think - the anti Out of Africa. 

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African journey: The long title piece in In a Free State

The title piece in V.S. Naipaul's In a Free State (1971) - whether it's a chapter in a novel, a short novel (aka novella) in itself, or a long short story (is such a thing possible?) is for the most part a road trip: a 30ish, English aid worker in an unnamed, formerly English-dominated, central African country recently independent travels from the capital to his outpost in the southern state in the country, and takes along a passenger, the English wife of another aid worker or perhaps civil servant.He actually doesn't like her at all, finds her insufferable, but he's obligated to bring her along on this day-long (at least) journey. As w/ most road-trip novels, there are adventures, unexpected encounters, and big reveals along the way. The journey occurs before a backdrop of revolution and insurrection: two rival factors/tribes are struggling for control of the country, and the kind, head of one of the factors, is heading off into exile. Along the route, therefore, the two encounter a # of roadblocks and documents checks - along w/ the usual hazards of driving in a remote stretch of a 3rd-world country: sudden rain squalls, shaky food and gas supplies, two men whom they pick up turn out to be a threat, a station attendant (inadvertently?) damages the car's windows, darkness falls, and so forth. Aside from extensive discussion about what brings them to serve in Africa and much gossip about mutual acquaintances the political situation in the land, a big moment occurs when the driver tells his passenger that he's homosexual - not as big a deal today as it would have been in 1971 - and she's rather surprised: She's known as a "fast woman" and perhaps had an interest in a quick affair w/ the man. This is by no means an action-packed novel - at times the drive accurately (inadvertently?) mirrors the boredom of the vast, empty landscape - but it does build slowly and carefully and we'll see how Naipaul pulls the strands together for a payoff. 

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The importance of V.S. Naipaul's stories

I don't mean to keep coming back to this theme, but I'm reading another "novel" from the 1970, In a Free State, by V.S. Naipaul (1971) and am beginning to think that there was either a moment in literary time - the 1970s - when writers decided that the traditional form of the novel was "dead" and that they had to try new forms and structures if the novel was to endure (it has) or publishers decided that anything goes might as well call everything a novel even if it's clearly a story collection, a memoir, an essay, whatever. Naipaul's In a Free State - which won the Booker Prize that year (would not have done so had it been called a story collection, I guarantee) comprises 5 pieces of varying lengths (a short narrative at beginning an end; two substantial stories; one, the title piece, long enough to be considered a short novel or "novella"). I've read the first three. If this were truly a novel there would be some overlap or connective tissue among these three - characters in common, plots touching one another, even the same setting (a form of the novel popular by the 1980s, e.g., Women of Brewster Place); in fact, the pieces, at least the first three, have in common an interest in the life and experiences of exiles and expats, particularly working class or underprivileged characters, outsiders and misfits struggling to find their way in a new, alien culture - in other words, they all read like examples of Naipaul's fiction. These are his themes, and he presents them in his style, So genre quibbling aside, the first 3 pieces are really good stories if you will: the first about a misfit aboard a trans-Mediterranean steamer who is harassed and isolated by his fellow-passengers, the 2nd about a cook/servant from Bombay who moves with his employer to DC and tries to make his way in a culture that seemst o him like another world, and the 3rd, the closest to Naipual's own experience, about a young man who leaves his Caribbean home for London where he hopes to reconcile with his younger brother, supposedly in London to study for advanced degrees. Each story involves struggle, failure, and loss; the 3rd is somewhat mysterious - there are references to the younger brother's killing a friend by "accidental" stabbing, and I can't quite figure out how this fits into the rest of the narrative: for a key plot point, VSN ignores any build-up or development. In any event, these stories, at least #2 (One Among the Many) and #3 (Tell Me Who to Kill) are literature on grand themes, collisions of cultures as seen through the evolving consciousness of an individual - despite all the game-playing and genre-bending of the 19780s these are stories that rise above their times, literature that matters.

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Trying to classify Renata Adler's Speedboat

Call it what you will - novel, story collection, memoir, flash fiction, essays, pensees, apercus - Renata Adler's Speedboat (1976), which she called a novel, does what all good fiction and (and nonfiction) does: Gives us consciousness of the consciousness of another. Attempts to argue that Speedboat is coherent and well-designed and a mirror held up to the turbulent times of America in the 1970s (see the afterword to the NYRB reissue) seem like reasoning after the fact. Why not just accept that these pieces occur as the came to RA over a periods of about 6 years of writing, and the extent to which they cohere into an overall design is another way of saying that they're all about an original writer and the way she thinks. Among the things she thinks about: the personality and behavior of a "wallflower," prowlers, drinking, Wagnerian opera (a hilarious piece in which the narrator is made to suffer thru the 5-hour performance), flying, academic jargon, advertising jargon, college rituals in an all-women's college ca 1950, the list could go on - as noted yesterday, it's probably best to read these entries, all of them short, ranging from a paragraph to at most a page and a half, in random order, letting each stand alone in your mind for a while, rather than galloping on to the next entry (as I did, unfortunately). These pieces capture well a specific time and place as perceived by a woman of an exclusive set, a NY intellectual in a time when there were such people. If you take this as a memoir of sorts, it's not especially forthcoming on key autobiographical elements (family, love relationships, children ... ) and if you take it as reportage there's hardly a mention - and then only in passing - of key news and cultural events of its time (Watergate, hyperinflation, oil shortage) - rather, it's a personal and idiosyncratic attempt to capture a moment and to record the zigs and zags of consciousness, yes, much like a novel, but w/out recourse to the tools generally available to a novelist: plot, character, setting. According to the afterword in the NYRB edition, RA indicated that she loves reading traditional novels (there's no such indication in Speedboat, however), but felt she couldn't write w/in the broader convention, which could be because of the "fragmented" time in which she lived, a personal quirk, or actually a shortcoming - at times I wished she would have developed some of these "moments" into a more conventional short story, at the least. If the latter, Adler made a virtue out of her shortcoming - it's not a novel for everyone, and maybe not even a novel, but it's a unique and striking piece of work.

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Don't read Renata Adler's Speedboat as if it's a novel

I've come to think that I'm reading Renata Adler's "novel" Speedboat (1976) in the wrong way; it's probably not best read straight through cover to cover but better perhaps to think of her many short entries as independent works, each a short story verging on the being a zen koan, stories that one can read and experience in any sequence. There are a few connecting threads - the central character is a journalist in NYC much like Adler (her name, as the jacket copy reminded me, is Jen Fain - but there are very few references to her by name). She's single with an on-again, off-again relationship w/ a well-heeled man, Aldo, who does a lot of traveling, and there's another guy in her life named Jim. We know little about either man. We do see that she travels internationally on assignment, vacations on various Mediterranean islands that are out of the way and underdeveloped (at least int he 60s/70s - not today for sure!), takes up various interests (e.g., flying lessons), attends lots of literary/intellectual gatherings, does some adjunct teaching (at CUNY?), drinks a lot. All this is beside the point. The elements arrange themselves in your mind as you read and the picture of her life becomes a little more clear toward the end - but what really sticks are the wry observations and the sense of time and place, New York in a time when the city teetered on the verge of chaos, when it was still possible to have an urban intellectual class, and when the gap between social classes was not immeasurable, as it is today. For an experiment, read the first (or the last) entry in each of the chapters to get a sense of Adler's "inwit" - or read randomly through the book as if it's a poetry collection. That will work. She does not seem to have an overall design in mind - I cannot believe that when she wrote the first of her short pieces she knew where or how this project would conclude. Don't approach it with the expectations that you usually bring to fiction (to novels). Which pieces are your favorite? Which made you laugh? Which stay w/ you? (For me: the flying lesson, the satire of academic politics, the observations on the language of literary criticism and reviews, the frightening scenes about the prowler at Jen Fain's apartment building in NYC). 



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Adler's Speedboat as a novel about the NYC zeitgeist ca 1976

Am getting my bearings on Renata Adler's unusual "novel" Speedboat (1976), and I put the word novel in quotes because I'm not sure that this reads as a novel by any traditional standard - but it definitely read as a terrific collection of very short pieces; as noted yesterday, these are similar in some ways to Lydia Davis short stories, which of course in a collection of stories bear various inter-rations among characters, milieu, and ideas. This book, however we choose to classify it (in its day, the 1970s, definitions of literary genres were expanding as formal experimentation was more in vogue than it is now), is a work about the zeitgeist, an attempt to capture the mood of a time and place: New York City in the mid-70s. Each of the vignettes, grouped into chapters presumably w/ each a separate publication of a year's worth of fiction writing in her home-base magazine, the New Yorker, captures an aspect of the mood of the times as perceived by a prominent journalist whose social set includes academics and the NY intelligentsia, in other words, Adler herself. The protagonist such as she is (is she even named?) has ongoing relationships w/ one or two men over the course of the narrataive, but no character or plot emerges - that's not the point.  The book is more a mosaic or a collage - again, very in vogue at that time - and what makes it work is the precision of Adler's perceptions and the edge of her wit. The picture gradually fills over the course of (the first half of) the book: we see a NYC that is crime-filled and dangerous, with several of the vignettes about the murder of a landlord and the reaction of various tenants in his building (in a real NY touch, the tenants are ID'd by the music they played, music that reverberates in the hallways; one guy ID'd only as the "girl of constant sorrows" player). There are hilarious send-ups of academic jargon and political maneuvering (regarding for ex. which department should have exclusive rights to teach which authors) and of advertising lingo. There also are a # of vignettes about the men's social clubs, the women's charities, the casual racism expressed by the gentry - but what we also sense is that the wealthy and the intellectuals in NY are endangered - the city itself seems to be on the verge of collapse, with crime and violence everywhere. It's a long way from the current world of NY with the enormous gaps between super-rich and the working class (and even the average rich): in this book all seem teetering on the edge of poverty. We don't sense that there's a large population of financial whizzes on the rise or couples of singles in extremely expensive apartments, dining out every night. Rather, everybody of wealth or promise seems to want to get out - part of the metaphor of the title (as well as of a vignette in which the protagonist takes flying lessons - up and away). Oddly, however, for a book about a specific era and place, there are few references to contemporary events - Watergate and its aftermath, the oil shortage, hyperinflation, the bi-centennial. The NY elite seem to exist above politics, or so they believe.

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Renata Adler's Speedboat in its time and ours

Holding off on any judgment re Renata Adler's first (of 2) novels, Speedboat (1975?), as it's so unusual in every way that one night of reading isn't enough to help me understand her work (she has published many books of nonfiction, many articles in the NYer, where she worked for decades, and only 2 novels). Clearly, to the extent that it's a novel at all, it's a novel in fragments, in the "mosaic" style that some adopted and developed in the 70s in the era of postmodern fiction/the novel is dead/make it new. There is neither an arc to the narrative (or any narrative whatsoever) nor any significant development of characters, at least in the first 2 sections (about 1/4 through the book). Is it a novel at all? What RA has done is string together a sequence of vignettes, in no discernible order (possibly simply order of composition?) about various phases in the life of a character probably much like her though w/ some details changed (e.g., she references various international assignments for "the paper," when everyone knows she wrote for a magazine). The piece reminds me of the near-contemporary novel that I recently read, Eliz. Hardwick's Restless Nights, though EH's was more obviously a story of a life, her life, told out of sequence, in much more developed passages and scenes. What saves RA's work from being just the chaos of a spilled notebook is that every single one of the vignettes is striking and sharply observed, and the constant shifting of time and locale in fact gives the work a broader, more universal scope. There is not nearly the suffering and decline of characters that we saw in Hardwick; Adler's protagonist is more hard-boiled - she's not an ingenue learning about city life but a sly, tough observer ready to take on everything; some of the more powerful pieces involve hardships seen and endured in international reporting, heavy bouts of drinking (in college and after), injuries suffered by friends and strangers. Some are quite short and witty; none is sentimental. In a way they remind me also of Lydia Davis's short, quirky fiction - tho what Davis calls a story collection here is seemingly united into a single novel; if it were published and marketed today, it might well be presented as a collection of flash fiction: Each stands alone surprisingly well. RA deserves huge credit for pouring forth such rich materials, so many ideas - a writer's notebook poured forth into publication in the raw, but you also have to wonder: What if she'd taken one of these pieces, or several related pieces, and developed the material into a more conventional novel? In a way, Speedboat is very much of its time; the world is less open today to such formal experimentation as it was in the 70s - esp. from a well-established NY/NYer writer.

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North and South as novel of ideas, for better or worse

I've gone as far as I care to w/ Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), which is +half-way through this 1,000-ebook page novel, and I give her credit for one of the few works of fiction of its day to truly try to comprehend and convey the plight of the working classes in the so-called Industrial Revolution. Her account of the unsuccessful workers' strike takes a page right out of Engels, but she's not a blind idealist, either - she allows the factory owner, Mr. Thornton, to have his say as well, and, in the section I just finished reading, she has one of the strike leaders - Higgins - distraught about the death of his young daughter, to engage in quite a debate with the lapsed clergyman, Mr. Hale, about workers' rights and the right to strike for higher wages. Higgins more than holds his own - though he, too, is a bit of an idealist, supporting the strike but not any resort to violence (fair enough, but I suspect - and maybe Gaskell would reveal this in later chapters? - that the strikers who began hurling rocks were incited, even hired, by the factory owners to break up the solidarity among the workers. So Gaskell's is a novel of ideas, and they were ideas seldom touched on by her contemporary novelists who seldom portrayed working-class characters other than as comic foils or objects of condescending charity and pity. But I wish it were ... a better novel, for all that. The will she/won't she plot about Margaret Hale and her displeasure w/, even loathing of, Thornton, who is in love with her, and the melodramatic subplot about brother Frederick, charged w/ mutiny for which if captured he would be hanged, who is summoned back to England to visit his mother on her deathbed - these plot devices just feel tedious and attenuated. In other words, I wish I were more engaged with the characters and their troubles. It's not that this is an abstract, intellectual novel by any means, but it feels to me that Gaskell's strength lies in developing dialectics and arguments and less in character development, plot nuance, and style. 

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Did any other Victorian writer take on the issue of workers' rights to directly?

I appreciate the politics of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), unusually forthright for a Victorian novel, with so much of the novel devoted to issues of workers' rights. It's not entirely clear where Gaskell stands on the issue, which is to her credit as a novelist - she captures well the positions of both labor and management - ultimately, I think she sides w/ labor, as the workers during the factory strike, and before the strike for that matter, are truly suffering whereas the factory owners are just defending a system that keeps them in power and in relative comfort - but give Gaskell credit for not making the factory owners, particularly Thornton, piggish or vulgar or unduly affluent, and some of the issues that the owners raise are with us still - the inability to compete w/ cheap foreign labor, for example (ironically, the cheap labor comes from the American factories). Gaskell builds the class conflict into a violent confrontation at the factory gates as the workers rally to protest the importation of cheap labor from Ireland. It's at this dramatic moment, about halfway through the novel, that the social and romantic story lines converge, as factory-owner Thornton, prompted by the heroine, Margaret Hale, who has been moved by the plight and poverty of the workers, bravely confronts the mob - and Margaret throws herself in front of Thornton as the mob charges. For the first time in his life, Thornton - who has been entirely devoted to commerce and not to romance - falls in love, but when he declares his love to Margaret she is outraged - she feels nothing for him, and thinks him to be peremptory in the extreme. Well, if this is truly a "comedy of manners," which I think it is, over the course of the narrative Margaret will have to choose between the 2 suitors, both of whom she's rejected. Maybe Gaskell will surprise me and Margaret will choose another course - independence, to the extent that was possible to one of her class and means in the 1850s? I'm not sure I'll get that far, however, N&S is a novel that I just keep hoping will be better, but it somehow lacks the narrative spark of other surviving Victorian-era fiction: The characters are flat, the plot just jolts along, incident upon incident. It's unusual and has probably endured because of its political and socioeconomic themes - did any other novelists of the time dare to take these on so directly? did any even depict a manufacturing culture, the source of British prosperity in the 19th century, so acutely? - but as literary fiction it's thin gruel; I'll probably read further for a day or w mioght might not hold out for 1,100 ibook pages, sorry.

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The social realism and politics of Gaskell's North and South

Yesterday I posted on what Elizabeth Gaskell is not (not Dickens, not Hardy, not Eliot, et al.), and today I note something that her novel North and South (1855) is: a precursor to Zola, in that it's one of the few Victorian novels that takes on socio-economic issues as a major topic. It's not a "realist" novel a la Germinal, but it's far more socially engaged than, say, Dickens's most political and topical novel, Hard Times, which in the end is primarily a critique of an educational system that focuses on the practical and useful. That's a topic in N and S as well, but I was pleased and surprised to see how directly EG takes on political topics, starting about 200 pp into the novel. UP to a point, we see, mainly through the perspective of the 19-year-old Margaret, that life in the northern industrial city of Milton (i.e., Manchester?) is unhealthy (horrible atmosphere and dirt and grime everyone), nonaesthetic (ugly factories and warehouses and drab housing quarters for all), and grimly pragmatic (a general belief that business and commerce are the essence of modern life and that there's no need for young people to study the classics). But things really heat up when Mr. Thornton, who is essentially protector and sponsor of the Hale family (Margaret's family) that has relocated to Milton, visits and the discussion turns to politics. The factory workers are planning a strike for higher wages, which Thornton, a factory owner, argues that they don't deserve and that he can't afford; Margaret takes the position that the workers should share equally in the prosperity of the factory - she's a proto-Frederic Engels! - which puts her at odds w/ Thornton and puts her father in an uncomfortable position as mediator. To EG's credit, though she doesn't flesh this out, we see in Margaret the evolution of a consciousness: On arrival in Milton she had no sense of how workers lived or what their life struggles may have entailed, but after she befriends a working-class family, the Higginses, who are suffering from poverty and disease, she begins to understand the injustices in her society and to speak out on this topic; I suspect that as the novel progresses she becomes more directly involved in class politics - though how much will she truly risk? How deep is her commitment? How much is truly radical ideas and how much is sentimentality and condescension? Can she truly break w/ her class and w/ her family? 

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Gaskell stays within the conventions of her genre but builds a good narrative

Started reading Elizabeth Gaskell's (long) novel North and South (1855, ergo not about the Civil War) and on first impression it seem to be well written and entertaining, to a degree, but hardly groundbreaking - an example of the kind of magazine-serialized fiction popular in Victorian England, a "comedy of manners" built on a series of contrasts, as hinted at in the title. The basic story line: two cousins, Margaret and Edith, more or less raised together as M's family, her father a poor country parson in Hampshire, send her off to live w/ her cousin's family in London and to learn the ways of the world. The story begins as E is about to marry a dashing young soldier - her family's a little disappointed that he's not wealthy, but accept that it's a love match - and move w/ him to Corfu; in part because her cousin is leaving, Margaret returns to her family in the country, and shortly thereafter her father declares that he no longer can continue his work as a parson and the family must relocate to a newly arisen industrial city in the north (it's called Milton - could possibly be Manchester?) where he will work as a private tutor (and they will have even less money - plus giving up a life in the beautiful English countryside. So there are at least 2 North/South dichotomies going on: North and South England (i.e., old green England with its rural character and traditions and the newly ascendant industrial world, with everything focused on commerce and profits) as well as England v Corfu/Mediterranean - though this has not yet (about percent through) been developed. The story moves along pretty well, but without any great literary flourishes: Gaskell is an etiolated version of the Victorian novelist - without the perspicacity of an Eliot, the humor and sentimentality of Dickens, the confidentiality of Trollope, the world view of Hardy. For one thing, the personal relations among the characters - Edith's marriage, the pursuit of Margaret by E's new brother-in-law are just delivered straight up, no development, little subtlety. And what about M's father and his weird decision to give up his profession and move the family to the far north? EG doesn't examine or explain this at all - a huge opportunity missed, I think. That said, she's working within the conventions or her era but the conventions themselves give her a great deal of latitude to build an entertaining narrative; I'd be shocked in N&S has not been made into a BBC miniseries. 

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A great premise that's left undevelped in The Iron Tracks

In the end, I'm really not sure what to make of Aharon Appelfeld's short novel The Iron Tracks (1991). Put simply, it's a narrative by a man who survived the Holocaust and internment in various prison and work camps in Eastern Europe when he was a young man; the narrator - much like the author - escaped from a camp and survived in Eastern Europe till the end of the war, in the process forgetting his native language and separated from his parents (so far very much like AA). The narrator has, apparently, been traversing Eastern Europe - Austria, specifically - in an annual, yearlong circuitous journey visit a series of small, rural railroad outposts, for 40 years - perhaps also like AA in a figurative sense, as he spent the next 40 postwar years "visiting" the ravaged European landscape through his writings. About a third of the way through the novel the narrator informs us that his goal in his journey is to track an (ex) Nazi, Nachgtigel, who ran the prison camp where the narrator's parents were killed. This is a great basis for a plot, but AA makes little of it. About halfway through the novel, we learn that narrator makes this annual journey in search of Jewish artifacts that turn up for sale at various country fairs and markets; he buys these and sells them to a collector at a good mark-up. This is an opportunity for AA to give some depth and shading to the narrator's character, but AA does not take this opportunity. In other words, AA has established here a basis for a novel, but he opts for shading and understatement rather than development. I'm a great fan of short fiction and short novels, of efficiency in narration, and in narrative by suggestion and nuance, but there are times when a novel, such as this one, feels unfinished - as if the author had a contract to hit 200 pages and when he got there he mailed it in. For example (semi-spoiler-alert): The narrartor (Erwin) does track down his nemesis, Nachtigel, toward the end - once he learns the town where N now lives it proves easy to find him - he spots N walking alone in front of his house early one a.m., engages him in some conversation (falsely flattering N, telling him he's a military hero to those in the village), and then shoots him in the back. End of story; no great scene by any measure; and then the narrator moves on to another location. As noted in previous posts, AA seems to me adept and skilled at creating a narrative premise, but he also seems indifferent to narrative development and character development - at least in the little of his work that I've read.

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Appelfeld's strengths as a writer, and his weakness

The narrative line in Aharon Appelfeld's The Iron Tracks (1991) clarifies as the novel gets to about its midpoint: The narrator, Erwin (?), has explained that his life involves taking an annual circuit route through postwar Eastern Europe, stopping at many small stations and towns (on the same date each year) where he had experienced some kind of trauma or loss (and sometimes love) during the war years when he was a young man, escaped from a labor camp, fleeing for his life (during which time he witnessed the murder of his parents, who were Jewish communist activists). We learn that his journey is part of his professional life: He searches at various fairs and market places for Jewish artifacts - wine glasses, menorahs, prayer books, etc. - that are seen mostly as trash but that are extremely valuable to certain collectors. Over time, others - his "rivals" he calls them - have become aware of the value of these artifacts and have begun to follow him on his route. So much of the foreboding and mystery around his travels turns out to be misguided; he's just a dealer in artifacts, in effect. And yet: He also notes a secondary (or is it primary?) purpose for his peregrinations: He's in search of the man, Nachvogel (?), who assassinated his parents, and he carries a pistol w/ which he will kill N if her ever finds him. He follows various tips and clues he receives while en route and seems, by the mid-point of the novel, to have a good idea where the killer has settled. Throughout his journeys, he has several one-night stands with various prostitutes (AA is very discrete in describing these encounters), and earlier in his life had an ongoing relationship w/ a woman, Bertha, who has left him; he's a lonely, isolate character - we know nothing of where he may have any permanent home, though he talks of emigrating to Israel (as did AA) - and he encounters some warm friendship on his annual journey as well as, from time to time, some hostile anti-Semitism. AA's strength as a writer comes from his ability to create an atmosphere - we get the sense of a ruined landscape, with much underground hatred and menace and w/ many people leading lives of secret shame and terror, after the war - but not in developing a character. In the 2 of his novels that I've read the characters are few and they're sketchy: We know a lot about what this narrator does but not much about what makes him tick. He's an unexplored country, even to himself.

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A holocaust novel that may be a good introduction to Appelfeld's work

A few years ago I read Aharon Appelfeld for the first time, starting w/ his then-most-recent novel, Suddenly Love, and you can see from my posts on that novel that I was truly disappointed in the work but recognized that was not a fair intro to AA (see posts from 2014); AA died last week, and I read a few memorial notices, which inspired me to read among his earlier, reputation-making works; yesterday I started reading The Iron Tracks (1991), and I can seem from the first 3rd of this short novel that it's a profound and unusual piece, with echoes of other novelists who wrote about the Holocaust (in this case the protagonist, a middle-aged man named Erwin, is haunted by his experiences living through the devastation of Eastern Europe during the War, the many losses, including the death of his parents, his multiple migrations and the learning and forgetting of multiple European languages - all I think modeled closely on AA's experiences although his father did survive the war) with a nod toward the mysterious, even supernatural worlds of Kafka and of contemporary South American writers. (Surprisingly, at least in the first third there is no significant mention of AA's adult homeland, Israel - though he's an Israeli writer he seems to be the polar opposite of his contemporary Yehoshuah who writes about contemporary Israeli work; AA's work is a turn toward memory and history). The narrator of The Iron Tracks tells us that his life consists of an annual curcuit on the European railways - a great oval, he says - that takes him from one small outpost to another (visiting each on the same date each year), all of which hold painful memories for him. His perpetual journey is an attempt to recover memory and perhaps to assuage the pain he witnessed and enduring in youth. In some of these towns he encounters hostility and anti-Semitism; in others, he is received graciously, as an old acquaintance. He does seem to be involved in some sort of smuggling operation, the outline of which is not yet clear; he also references his "enemies," whom he finds spying on him or following him at various stages of his journey - though it's not yet clear whom these enemies represent or whether they're even real of just imagined. The novel so far is hazy and mysterious, and its ultimate success will depend on how much clarity AA can bring to this strange man and his obsessive mission. 



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