The Oxford years - and what went wrong for Peri, in Three Daughters of Even

Part 2 of Elif Shafak's Three Daughters of Eve takes place at Oxford, where the protagonist, Peri, a professional-class woman in Istanbul and mother of teenage daughter in the "present" setting of the novel (i.e., ca 2017) went for college. Shafak uses bunch of weird narrative strategies to foreshadow what we can all anticipate: Something went terribly wrong for Peri in Oxford, in particular because of her Muslim heritage and middle-eastern (Turkish) background. Putting the clunkiness of the narrative aside (somehow if you can believe it her teenage daughter doesn't know her mother went to Oxford until she comes across a Polaroid photo of her mother's college days, which her mother apparently always carries w/ her in her wallet ... ), the first scene at Oxford is pretty good, as Peri and her diametrically opposed parents - dad a rationalist and skeptic and mother a devout Muslim - get a tour of the campus from a worldly young woman from an Iranian family who has lived in many countries and cities: the parents are united in distrust of this student. Should we be? We expect that she and Peri will engage in many debates about religion and the role of women in society, Western and Eastern; we anticipate that Peri will change an evolve, as most college students do, and drift away from her parents' beliefs, and we have been given a broad hint that Peri's favorite prof at Oxford got into some kind of scandalous trouble - we don't know the nature of this trouble yet - but we do know that Peri dropped out of Oxford and that she was there until 2002, so obviously the 9/11 attacks led to some crisis that forced her to leave, perhaps against her will? Anyway, this is a plot-dominant novel, would probably make a good movie, but it's a long stretch from literary fiction.

Literary fiiction v popular fiction in novel about Turkey

Elif Shafak's newest novel (she's written ten apparently), Three Daughters of Eve, has all the qualities to make it a best seller and possibly into a movie as well: dramatic opening sequence in which a professional-class woman driving thru an Istanbul traffic jam w/ recalcitrant teenage daughter runs off in pursuit of man who grabbed her handbag from unlocked rear seat and gives him a beat down then heads to social engagement among the city's nouveau riches and elites - then we flash back to her difficult childhood in the 1980s torn between traditional devout Islam mother and "modern" scientific rational father - and family upended by arrest of older brother for leftist views. We alternate between childhood scene Snead contemporary, thereby getting a broad picture of culture in turkey and how it has evolved in some ways as the nation becomes more prosperous (for some) and more western - a country torn historically between its two adjacent continents. We don't however get a sense (yet anyway) of current political oppression in Turkey - perhaps that will emerge; another facet of the novel just emerging ca p 100 is the woman's (Peri's) oxford education - which for some odd and improbable reason she has kept secret from her teenage daughter. This novel in no way feels as thoughtful, structurally imaginative, interior as those of say her contemporary O Pamuk, for betterment or worse; in other words this is popular rather than literary fiction - tho popular of a pretty high order and serious bent. Though the characters and events of the novel don't quite feel realistic, the setting, particularly I present day Istanbul does feel true to life i.e. The contrast between and juxtaposition of extreme wealth and poverty, the unbridled growth and concomitant congestion. Shafak acc to about the author note is Turkish but living in London and apparently she writes in English. Wondering how her boos if this one is typical are received in Istanbul as greatly insightful or as an outsider s view from afar,

Why first-time novelists write about what they know and what happens when they don't

I am perfectly willing to cut Jon McGregor a lot of slack, as it's clear from his first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002), that he has lots of talent, particularly remarkable for a first novel by a 20-something. I believe he has published a few novels since his debut, all of them in a somewhat experimental narrative vein (I will go back and re-read a James Wood review from last year of McGregor's most recent novel). Few writers in their 20s would have such insight into a wide range of characters of a wide range of ages and temperaments - but all living in the same block of houses in an unnamed English city (possibly London). (Who would be his counterparts in this? Carson McCullers for sure, probably Pynchon, maybe DF Wallace?) The problem is, he doesn't seem to have or to want to share any deep knowledge about the many characters in this novel; the novel comprises scenes and sketches, sometimes in first person sometimes 3rd - but in writing about so many people he skips away from writing deeply about any. Most debut literary novels are first person, almost memoir-like and that makes sense, that's where writers tend to start, w/ what they know best. By taking on a much more ambitious challenge, McGregor seems to run out of gas - and to focus more on his elaborate design and less on narrative, plot, character, setting - so by the end we're (or at least I am) confused and disoriented. There is no way that on one reading one could keep all the characters straight; there are many strange allusions in the novel - various incidents of injured or burned hands, a case of a twin who may not really be a twin but may be out of shyness pretending to be his own brother; most of all, there's a big, dramatic conclusion telegraphed in the first pages and then withheld, for no reason other than author's prerogative, till final pages. Can anyone believe in or care about the conclusion? It seems to me that McGregor had to wrap it up in some way and came up w/ an improbable sequences of events not sufficiently built up by the characters and incidents in the preceeding 250 pp. Spoilers here: What happens at the end (I think!) is that one of the residents of the street does a bungee leap (where? why? how?), people are distracted and look up, and a speeding auto hits a child at play in the street. Well, here's where McGregor's timing is unfortunate; most readers today expect from the outset that the conclusion will be an act of terrorism - as a # of novels have been built around the where-were-you-on-9/11 theme, for example - though he must have completed his novel some months before the 9/11 attacks - so the "payoff" scene feels like a letdown when read today. So, yeah, it's a first novel, and I suspect his work has become more confident and skilled as he's matured as a writer - and that he has maintained his commitment to narrative and structural experiment.

The unrealistic demands of Jon McGregor's debut novel

As to Jon McGregor's debut novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002), either (a) I'm too dumb to keep track of what's going on in this novel or (b) McGregor has no idea of what's going on in his own novel of (c) the only possible way to make sense of this novel is to read it more than once and, while doing so, to use a spreadsheet or bulletin board or something to write down each of the characters as introduced and all the salient information about each one. I'm going w/ c - as I'm a pretty good reader and McGregor is obviously a writer of great talent (he was in his 20s when this novel was published). But: Is it worth it? Sure I'll devote that kind of time and attention to, say, Joyce or Proust or Faulkner, but is the game really worth the candle here? I'm about 2/3 through this 250pp novel; as noted in yesterday's post, McGregor moves about among a few different structures: Some chapters go paragraph by paragraph, each giving us info about the various residents of the various building units - ID's on by # - of this unnamed street in unnamed city (possibly London?) and  other chapters are the POV of one character only. Few of the characters have names, and it's literally impossible to keep them all straight as McGregor intentionally holds back key information that would, or might, explain some of the curiosities of the plot: Many of the characters seem to have problems w/ their hands, cuts or burns or something and 2 characters (I think) have st their hands by smashing all the dishes in their apartment. Among the many other characters we need to track are a young woman pregnant by a one-night stand, the young man who walked her home after a party, the man's twin (allegedly, though it's obvious he's one and the same) hoping to date this same young woman, two young boys who create noisy disturbances, a man upset w/ the trash thrown into his yard, an elderly couple (the man is dying of lung cancer), a single parent (dad?) also dying, and there are others. McGregor teasingly indicates there was some kind of catastrophic event on the street - maybe this can explain all the hand injuries? - but withholds any significant info about this event until the final 3rd of the novel, if then. The writing throughout is clear, simple, and intelligent - but what a mess of a design, what an unacceptable burden on the reader. I will finish reading this novel, but I think it has to stand as one of those just-out-of-grad-school brilliant (as the English say) narratives - anyone who's been in a graduate writing workshop knows what I'm talking about - that holds promise of much better works to follow.

Jon McGregor's experimental narrative debut novel - will it hold up over 250 pp?

Jon McGregor's 2002 debut novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, is remarkable itself in a # of ways: extremely confident first novel for a writer in his 20s, an unusual structure and design, an experimental narrative that, at least through the first third, seems to hold together well. This is the kind of novel Virginia Woolf, an obvious antecedent, might have written is she could have transmigrated into our century. McGregor's novel is about all of the tenants om a single block in an unnamed British city, possible London, centering loosely on the events of a single day. There have been plenty of narratives with multiple narrative strands, connected by common locale - Gloria Naylor did a few of these in the 1980s, for example - but generally the form involves a chapter on each subject; McGregor's structure is more daring, in that most of the chapters include multiple narrators or protagonists, the story told in alternating paragraphs. Other chapters are first-person from a single narrator. All of the narration is in stream-of-consciousness style, eschewing conventional sentence structure and technique; the back cover of the pb American edition calls the novel a prose poem, which is a bit of a stretch but does get at McGregor's evident goal, which is to create a novel of mood and texture rather than plot and character. He does include, however, one apparently central dramatic event - an accident? explosion? terrorism incident? - that is reference but so far (100 pp.) not explained or described. All this said, the novel is surprisingly easy to read - if a little self-conscious in its styling. Will it hold up over 250 or so pp?: Readers do like plot (and character); McGregor establishes a scene very well, but as we move along in the novel we inevitably yearn for something to happen, for change, incident, insight, conflict, and conclusion.

Why the last story in Denis Johnson's last collection doesn't work at what that reveals

Sadly, Denis Johnson's final story, Doppelganger, Poltergeist, the last entry in his last book, The Largesse of the Sea Maidess (yes, he was not great on titles), is the weakest entry in this fine collection, but understanding why this final story doesn't quite succeed actually shows us why at his best Johnson was inimitable. The D,P story tells of a poet/professor, the narrator, who may bear some resemblance to DJ, and his lifelong friendship with a student: we first meet the student, Mark, in a seminar the narrator is leading at Columbia; the narrator in complete frustration at the academic world goes off the rail during a seminar, lectures or harangues for some time about of all things Elvis Presley and how he was ruined by his manager, the Colonel; the students are puzzled, except for Mark, who is clearly the seminar star. Over time, narrator and Mark see each other on occasion and stay in touch, and most of their conversations have to do with a weird and complex conspiracy theory that Mark harbors regarding Elvis - belief that E was murdered (by the Colonel) and replaced by his thought-to-be-dead twin brother (apparently there are people who believe this story). The problem w/ this narrative in my view is that DJ spends an incredible amount of time letting Mark explain his various theories - all the while the narrator worries, over decades, about Mark's mental stability. By the end, we don't really care about either man especially nor do we in any way find credibility in Mark's theory (nor are we meant to). Contrast this w/ the other 4 stories in this collection: What makes Johnson at his best so great is that he describes a world - often one of drug addiction, despair, imprisonment, and ruined lives - that is nothing like the world that we, that is most of his readers, have ever experienced and we believe in it completely. This final story is the opposite: a world that most of us (particularly other writers and teachers) have experienced (the brilliant troubled student acolyte) yet we don't really believe it (i.e., the facts and particulars of this story) at all.

Denis Johnson as man of constant sorrow and a loyal friend

Pretty sure I posted on Denis Johnson's story Strangler bob, the 3rd of 5 in his final collection (The Largesse of the Sea Maiden) when it ran pretty recently in the NYer - a classic DJ story about a young man in a county lockup, addicted, in extreme despair, and about the scary and demented characters he meets behind bars, how he manages to get along, and the sorry fates of all those who emerge from such prison hardships - so will focus on the 4th story in the collection, Triumph Over the Grave (I keep forgetting this title and had to look it up): Part of the eerie beauty of this story, definitely one of DJ's best and somewhat atypical of his work, is our constant awareness that the story itself is a triumph over the grave, as DJ seemed to be well aware that this would be published posthumously - a fact his recognizes explicitly in the final knock-out pages. This is to my knowledge his only story that focuses on his work as a writer, w/ the protagonist being someone who seems to be a writer similar to DJ, a man who has triumphed over adversity, and who is somewhat amazed and befuddled by his literary success. The story floats easily along several narrative streams that toward the end converge: his learning by a chance phone call of the death of a friend, his attendance in a hospital as another friend awaits death, a memory - with a flash he tells us this is what it's like to be a writer, your thoughts and mental rhythms can take the story anywhere, which is true - of a knee procedure he underwent when young and foolish and high on LSD, then the most important I think part of the story, a remembrance of a (recent?) stint as a visiting writer at UT and his befriending an older writer whose success, one novel adapted into a film, lay well into the past. DJ plays a mind game with us, saying that it's conventional to give these true-to-life characters fake names but that he will use the writer's real name (a Google search suggests that he does not do so). This final part of the story, which segues back to the hospitalized friend, examines friendship: among men, among writers, and in a sense between writers and their unknown readers - a touching story w/out being sentimental, and a counterweight to all the hardened criminal/addict stories that have made DJ famous and that we too easily assume represent the scope of his character. No, it's obvious from this story that DJ was a noble spirit who lived through difficult experiences, made much of his experiences through art and imagination, and. though we are warned to be cautious in identifying the writer with his works, was throughout a good and loyal friend and a man of constant sorrow.

The sadness of reading the final story collection from Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson will always be ranked among the best American writers, in particular of short fiction, of the late 20th/early 21st century; nobody who's read his work would be totally surprised by his untimely death - he was one writer who lived on and sometimes over the edge, if we can infer from his fiction even a glimpse of the life he must have, at times, led. So now we have what the publisher calls his final collection, five relatively long stories including title piece, The Largess of the Sea Maiden. I've read that and the 2nd story in the collection, The Starlight on Idaho - and from these two we can see the darkness and the struggles that beset most of his writing and, sadly, much of his life. The title story, actually, is perhaps a little less troubled - a lot of drinking and a lot of sorrow but not the desperate stories of addiction and ancillary criminality that we saw in his most famous collection, Jesus' Son. The title story (and I don't really get the title, btw) is about an ad exec of all things, living in San Diego, having forsaken the more prosperous life open to him early in his career in NYC, who goes back to NYC to receive an award for one of his advertisements - simple enough, and familiar to to most readers via memories of Mad Men - but there's an underlying sorrow throughout the story. The is written in short, titled segments (e.g., Casanova, Orphan ... ), and it begins with a few episodes of heavy drinking and odd, self-destructive behavior at polite dinner parties - a cross between Dostoyevsky and Carver - and then moves into some of the protagonist's recollection of strange events and encounters in his life, w/ a particular emphasis on outsider artists. We get a gut punch at the end when the protag sums the sorrow and disappointments of his life - and he is among the healthiest of Johnson's figures. The 2nd story is more familiar DJ turf, a recovery clinic (amusingly, the title refers to the former Starlight Motel on Idaho Ave., in Ukiah, Cal - more Carver territory there, actually) and is told in a series of harrowing letters (some never sent, obviously) from one of the recovering addicts; DJ manages to tell an entire life story through these disjointed, sometimes only loosely coherent, messages. It's not clear to me whether these are stories that DJ considered finished and ready for publication in current form or whether some of the material was still inchoate, in sketch form even, at the time of his death last year. Either way, at least the first two are powerful and among his best work.

Go, Went, Gone as a strong work of nonfiction - but without much narrative engagement

In the last chapters of Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone (2015) we see the crisis of the African immigrants in Berlin build to a crescendo, as many of the refugees are deported against their will to Italy, others are treated w/ equal and weird hardship, such as confinement to a psychiatric ward, and we follow the protagonist, Richard, as he tries to help some of the refugees whom he's befriended, but we see the bureaucratic maze that confronts any attempt to get a hearing on the deportations - it's a real expose of the shameful conditions and hardships that African immigrants face and of the shameful laws that protect inland nations such as Germany from any responsibility for dealing with the refugee crisis. As a fictionalized piece of social history and as a powerful polemic, this novel excels. Where it falls short is in its literary aspirations; I thought it was a great idea to present the plight of the immigrants through the lens of an interested observer, Richard, who (like almost all American readers I would expect) starts with a sympathetic heart but no direct knowledge about the immigrants pouring into his city (Berlin) and gradually learns of their plight as he interview a # for what he calls a research project. At the end, when the crisis is at its peak, Richard goes to considerable length giving up his privacy, his space, and a lot of money to help several of the men he's befriended, and he does heroic work getting many of his German friends to do the same - even invoking the idea of atonement for the past sins of the nation. Would that it were all so easy! To JP's credit she does leave a few rough edges: Richard's house is vandalized and robbed, and the most likely perp is one of the refugees, though this is left open; one couple whom Richard had trusted make some crude and racist statements are refuse to offer help to the immigrants, and these folks are, sadly, probably more representative of the majority of Berliners of their age and status. What I miss, though, is any real sense of conflict, and drama that involves Richard himself and his evolving consciousness. Yes, he's a lens through which we see the story, but he's not opaque enough - by the end I felt I was reading a very good work of nonfiction, but without the narrative engagement that I was hoping for at the outset. 

Why Go, Went, Gone is falling short of initial expectations

Unfortunately I have to report that Jenny Erpenbeck's promising and well-intentioned novel, Go, Went, Gone (2015) isn't making good on its initial promise. No doubt it's an stirring and timely depiction of the plight of immigrants and refugees in Europe - focused on a group of refugees from Africa who have temporarily settled in Berlin - and JE does a great job showing the horrors and suffering and mistreatment that these me endure: they have fled horrendous conditions of war at home, have survived a treacherous passage across the Mediterranean, have lived in limbo for months or years in Italy where there is no work for them, and are now encamped in Germany hoping to get work permits - but up against an intransigent bureaucrasy and strange set of laws and agreements that relegate immigrants to the European country where they first set foot - so the men are on the verge of removal back to Italy (no work) while Germany is in need of more workers. Most Americans I think feel remote from the struggles of immigration that are confounding European citizens and cities, and JE's novel if nothing else brings these issues home to English-language readers in a vivid and compelling manner. That said, part of my interest in the novel has been the "lens" through which this story unfolds: Richard, the protagonist, a retired Berlin classics (or so I'm told on the back cover) professor, becomes interested in the refugees and begins a project - w/ no clear end or goal set forth - of interviewing the men, and gradually becomes a friend and supporter of a few of the men. All well and good, but JE does little or nothing with this frame; I'm at least 2/3 through the novel, and Richard has not faced any crisis or issue - he just continues to gather info for his ill-defined project and occasionally to reflect on the loneliness of his own life. I expected there would be some crisis - a fight w/ a friend, a conflict with authority, a conflict w/ one or more of the refugees - that would give some narrative drive to this novel, but at this point I'm afraid it looks like there will be no such development of story arc. As a form of journalism - telling a "true" story via composite characters - this novel has merit, but as a work of fiction it's falling short of initial expectations and missing narrative opportunities.

Go,Went, Gone slowly developing as both a political novel and novel of personal struggle

As noted yesterday, Jenny Erpenbeck's novel Go, Went, Gone (2015) focuses on a retired Berlin university professor, Richard, who becomes interested in the plight of African refugees squatting in Berlin and begins a project in which he interviews them about their lives and their experiences going into exile and settling, or trying to do so, in Germany. So on a primary level this novel is a polemic about the plight of the immigrant: Through Richard's interviews with several refugees we hear the horror stories of the violence and poverty that they fled and we hear the frustrating stories of their dealings w/ German bureaucracy as they try to get a foothold on the ladder toward a new life. Their fate and status depends greatly on whether they can prove to the authorities that they truly are political refugees who would face death if returned to their native lands. In one sense Germany is generous to these immigrants, providing them with housing and with a small stipend - but what they really want is work. They can't get work permits until they prove their refugee status, and if they don't do so they will get sent back to the land of their arrival in Europe - Italy - where there is no work - a Catch-22 for sure. On another level, though, this is a novel about the protagonist, Richard, and the changes in his life as he interviews and starts to befriend the immigrants. By profession, he's a philosopher/intellectual, so he naturally reflects on the strange aspects of the immigrant's plight and compares that with his own life story: He was a resident of East Berlin, and when the wall "fell" ca 1990 he suddenly found himself to be an "immigrant" in a new land, with much greater freedom of movement and greater political freedom than he'd ever experienced (he was born shortly after the WWII, in which his father fought in the German army). So he reflects on the nature of borders and boundaries - among other things noting that the borders in Africa were largely imposed by Colonial occupying nations, so when he asks an immigrant where he's from the answer is more likely to be a tribal or regional or language group rather than a western-imposed national boundary. That said, the novel moves at a deliberate pace, and, about 1/3 of the way through, Richard observes the mistreatment of and suspicions about the African immigrants and he befriends one in particular, whom he invites to his home, but he himself has not (yet) faced any crisis or moral dilemma or conflict w/ family, friends, or authorities.

Why I'm enjoying reading his novel about African immigrants in Berlin

Jenny Erpenbeck's novel Go, Went, Gone (representing a declension of an irregular verb and thus the drills to learn a new language) published in German in 2015 and last year in English, begins as a novel about a man recently retired from a senior post in I think philosophy at a German University, now, widowed and alone, finding himself bored w the daily routines and obsessing about a man who had drowned in the lake across from his house and whose body has never been recoverered (which keeps him and others from the thought of using the lake for swimming or outings - more on this later or in future posts).  The man takes to wandering the streets of Berlin (his house appears to be what wasn't then east Berlin and all of his explorations have the aura of discovery - his life's and career seem to have been circumscribed by the limitations of eastern bloc governance and culture a he is not what he could have been had he lived a few blocks away).  In his wandering she observes homeless African refugees living in a public square - some engage s in a hunger strike , which draws media coverage. The man decides to begin a research project on these refugees and uses his academic Fred's - this work is far out of his field of expertise, as he recognizes - to gain access to a building where some refugees have been given housing.  His interviews w some of ten refugees from Africa, using Italian as a common language (they all have reached Germany after a stay in a camp in Italy) constitute much of the first quarter of the novel. Generally I'm not so keen on these novels that are tales of suffering and blight , but this one has moved more so far more than others because of the mediating device of the professor - as we watch him change and develop new interests and even friendships this novel moves in unexpected directions). GWG alsorecalls the recent american film in which Richard Jenkins also playing a professor unexpectedly befriends a family of African immigrants who have squatted in his house in Greenwich Village.

The Woman in the Dunes as a novel of its own time and place

As foretold at the outset, the protagonist never returns to his home and is officially declared a missing person - spending, presumably, the rest of his life as a captive among the dunes, in Kobo Abe's 1963 novel, The Woman in the Dunes. Or is he a captive? In the past third of the novel the man does make a dangerous escape from the hollow in the sand dunes where he's been imprisoned - climbing a rope ladder he'd constructed, running toward the highway - but he'd become disoriented in the darkness and inadvertently circled back and was captured near the village atop the dunes and returned to his captivity. At that point he becomes oddly dispassionate; eventually, the woman he's been consigned to live (and to work at slave labor) w/ becomes pregnant, and when she miscarries the villagers hoist her up and take her to a hospital of clinic, leaving the rope ladder behind. The man has an obvious opportunity for escape, but he does not take advantage of the situation. He has either given up hope or come to enjoy or at least prefer his life in captivity. So again we readers (or viewers of the movie, which I will probably watch) ponder the significance of the tale: Does it remind us of The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus), in which all of human life is seen as a ceaseless struggle to complete an impossible task? Is Abe saying that all of human life amounts to nothing more than fighting the encroachment of inevitable decline and decay? I still think that there's something specific to the time and place of this novel, that the predicament of the people in the dunes - forever shoveling away sand that threatens to overwhelm and bury them - is an enactment of the fate of the nation, the dreary and ceaseless recovery from the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'm not sure how to read this novel in contemporary context; perhaps it's also a novel about ecology, about climate change even, and in that sense well ahead of its time: We have built our entire civilization on the brink of ruin, and our fate is to fight back the rising tides. Abe's is also an astonishingly misanthropic novel; there is no love or attraction between the man and woman in the dunes - their sexual encounters are violent and spasmodic, and any physical contact between them is made harsh and grating by the sand that clings to their bodies and infects their every breath - a dark novel, of a world w/ neither redemption to alleviation of suffering, again a novel that seems mythic and timeless on on the literal level but that is also very much of its own time and place.

Further thouhgts on the themes of Woman in the Dunes

The only way to engage w/ Kobo Abe's novel The Woman in the Dunes (1963) is to recognize and accept that it works on two levels: On the surface, it's an adventure/thriller/horror story about a man who finds himself entrapped in a small house deep in a swale surrounded by ever-encroaching sand dunes and forced by the woman who lives in the house and the strange residents of the village who live atop the dunes to engage in the endless, Sysephus-like task of shoveling the sand shifting sand away from the endangered structure. This story of captivity - made all the more grotesque by Abe's many descriptions of the repulsive quality of the sand, the bouts with nausea and dehydration, futile and dangerous attempts at escape - is in the tradition of, say, Room and Misery (as noted in a previous post), a nightmare-quality story with not a lot of action but with a lot of angst. The other and more intriguing level is the metaphoric or allegoric: man struggling against and ineradicable force and trying to maintain at least a vestige of his individuality and humanity while under constant assault. Abe's protagonist has many thoughts about his world, particularly about his attraction to the woman holding him captive (or sharing his captivity) and his repulsion about sex, STDs - he has a cynical, or perhaps clinical, view of sex as an animal-drive that we are subject to only because we are destined to strive for preservation of the species; he gets no real pleasure from sex, not does he seem to have any attachment to other people - friends, family, love interest - and we learn little about his background or career: He's a teacher in a technical high school and a devout amateur entymologist, but an isolated soul. I can't help but read this novel as a cri de coeur from postwar Japan - the constant struggle against encroaching sand seems to be representative of the recovery from the war and in particular from the atomic attacks on Hisoshima and Nagasaki: the shame, the devastation, the seemingly endless and lonely task of reconstruction, the sense of isolation from the world; we'll see how the last third of then novel plays out, whether Abe introduces new themes and how he navigates his way to the end of this narrative.

A well-crafted story by Gish Jen and a suggestion for a follow-up

Gish Jen has a story, No More Maybe,  in the current New Yorker, the latest in a wave of stories over the past few years about the immigrant experience told from the immigrant's POV - often also the author's POV though I think this story is not at all autobiographical: GJ writes about a couple from China settled into the US in low-ranking academic jobs, the woman is pregnant and not at the moment working, and the story concerns a visit of indefinite length from the in-laws (told from pregnant wife's POV) - a twist on most of the immigrant stories in that the in-laws visiting from China are far more prosperous and established in careers (or retired from careers) in academia (the wife's mother cannot afford to visit during the pregnancy, so they communicate by Skype - probably a more typical situation). The twist of the story is that the in-laws are disappointed in the modest career of their son/daughter-in-law - they expect great prosperity and opportunity for educated Chinese immigrants in the US and are surprised by the limitations. The failed expectations fuel the story. Jin's writing is clear and concise, almost childlike at times. With too many sentence fragments. Like this one. Ugh. But she does hav a story to tell and knows how to frame it, which is much more than many other recent NYer authors have been able to do. The crisis of the story occurs when the father-in-law, somewhat mentally enfeebled at this point in his life, which is frustrating and embarrassing to him, sets out to wash his son's "new" (used) car but washes the wrong car. When his mistake is revealed, the family and he laugh it off, and then are surprised when the car-owner shows up a few days later to thank him the father for washing the car; the father adamantly refuses to accept a gift - a cake - and in fact denies washing the car (afraid allegedly of a lawsuit if anything had been damaged). This is a strange and awkward moment, especially in that the car's owner is a black man. All going well up to this point but (spoiler) I don't see why Jen had the black man deface the cake w/ a racist remark that the writes with his finger dipped in the frosting. That seems weirdly hostile and out of keeping with the gift-bearing character. One of Jin's strengths is her ability to sketch in characters efficiently and deftly; I would like to see her try another story, based on same characters and sets of facts, from the POV of the man whose car was washed by a stranger.

Possible themes in Abe's The Woman in the Dunes

Kobo Abe's 1962 novel, The Woman in the Dunes, was an art-house sensation when it came to the US in the '60s - I've never seen it but will probably do so after I finish reading the novel - and it's easy to see why: tightly structured, full of angst and dread, mysteriously elusive, and "exoti" - exactly the qualities we used to seek and expect when we (or our parent) went to see a show at the old Ormont in east orange. The novel itself doesn't feel cinematic in the traditional sense - there's not a lot of action in fact it's mostly inaction through part 1 and not much dialog either - but you can also see how a faithful adaptation would really work. In short on the surface it's much like a novel of suspense: a middle aged Japanese man goes of for a day or maybe two to pursue his hobby as an amateur entomology in search of new species of sand-dwelling insects. He never returns , as we learn at the outset. Then we follow him to see what caused his disappearance. What happens: he wander to a remote stretch of dune on the coast and when he realizes he'll have to fInd a place to stay for the night he asks some villagers who find him accommodations, which turn out to be a frail house deep in a gully among the dunes, inhabited by a 30-something woman.  Her full time job seems to be shoveling away the sand that constantly threatens her home w engulfment. It soon becomes clear that he's being held captive.  Ok so on one level this is like a very subdued thriller - the ancestor in a way of books/movies like The Room or Misery. On another level - and here the art-house elements come in - he and the woman are engaged in an existential struggle, fighting to save themselves from oblivion - a metaphor for life itself in a way. We sense the man's hubris in his attempts to capture insects and seek to discover new species that live in the sand - he is so focused on the minute that he is oblivious to the forces that threaten annihilation. It's impossible as well to fail to see a connection w the atomic attack that destroyed much of Japan: is the constant threat of engulfment by shifting sand a counterpart to man-made destruction?

Thoughts on the ending for Solar Bones

Spoilers here, as I discuss the ending of Mike McCormack's novel Solar Bones (2017). Honestly, I couldn't see it coming until the last 20 pages or so when the narrator, Marcus, began to complain about a burning sensation in his chest, and then, through his run-on recollections - the novel consists of one 216-pages sentence, which I will not emulate in this post - we follow M pretty closely through the next 24 hours or so as he tends to his wife, now recovering from a viral infection caused by water pollution (which particularly galls M because he is a dedicated civil engineer in public service) and heading out to a nearby town to pick up some medicine for her. On the way home his chest pains increase until he pulls over to the side of the road, gasping for breath, and by then all readers will figure out what's happening, what's happened: M's ghost narrates the entire novel; looking back briefly at the opening pages I could see now that the bells he heard tolling from a nearby church were his own funeral bells; he'd been left alone in the house - we assumed it was because his wife was at work - but now we can see that his family was at the church, and that he has a few hours at most - presumably between the first and last tolling of the bells - to recollect and "narrate" his life - not in chronological sequence but as a life might come back to one who is forced into remembrance. In earlier posts I'd noted that the novel, for all its strengths, suffers for lack of a plot - and that's still true to a degree - but at the end we see that the plot such as it is consists of the passing of this spirit from earth/life into an afterlife or oblivion; the plot is his life. (Please do not ask me what the title refers to; the narrator uses this phrase once over the course of the narrative, but it means nothing to me unless it's an attempt to find a metaphor for a life, or death, that is pure spirit and energy?)

Some great scenes in Mike McCormack's Solar Bones

Still impressed by  Mike McCormack's tour de force novel Solar Bones (2016), which is composed of a single 200+-page sentence and for all that is notably easy to read and comprehend; this massive sentence comprises the thoughts and remembrances of the narrator, Marcus, in what appears to be a single day or perhaps a single afternoon - though his mind roams freely back and forth in time, including recollections from his childhood right up to present-day events, crises, and issues. I'm not sure yet, and am almost to the conclusion, why these reminiscences occur on this particular day, which seems to be a typical rather than exceptional day in M's life, but perhaps, in the Joyce tradition, any one single day of consciousness can encompass the entire scope of a life, even of a culture (MMcC does not have the pretense of writing about an entire culture, however). The narrator is notably beset by a conflict w/ his culture, which is to say of the contemporary world, between his rage for order - he is a civil engineer and tends to think problems can be solved by good planning - and the uncertainties of his life, including political interference in his work, unmanageable issues involving each of his adult children, and, as we see in some of his remembrances of things past, crises that he has weathered and that have shaped his life. Though I noted yesterday that SB might be a stronger novel if it had even an echo of a conventional plot (character faces crisis and is changed by its resolution); that said, the novel consists of a # of scenes, some quite powerful, most notably: the shock that takes place when M and his wife, Mairead, attend daughter (Agnes)'s art opening; the death of M's father, following his descent into dementia; Mairead's illness, caused by water pollution (a crisis that an engineer would recognize as a technical problem most likely caused by political corruption; and the scenes in which local pols put the squeeze on M to approve projects that fall below official standards for quality and safety.

In the shadow of Ulysses: An Irish stream-of-consciousness novel, Solar Bones

I continue to be impressed by Mike McCormack's tour de force novel, Solar Bones (2017), as I'm now more than halfway through and then novel still consists of one sentence! I also think the actual foreground events of the novel, the "stream of consciousness," or should we say scream of consciousness?, of the narrator, Marcus, may take place during one day or one 24-hour span, though of course his consciousness takes us back in time to his childhood and reflects on various recent events in his life, so the novel covers a scope much broader than one day. As noted yesterday, the style is unusual but not daunting - it's surprisingly easy to read and, to be honest, MMcC could have presented it more conventionally, w/ traditional punctuation and paragraph breaks - though his narrative style is a big part of the success of this novel: It truly makes us feel as if we are in the "mind" of another, and it also has a headlong rush to it, as w/ no obvious break points in the narration we get caught in the (figurative) flow and keep reading, or at least I do. That said, the novel could do w/ a little more plot development - some issue or crisis or conflict that brings the story to a head or a crest, rather than an assemblage of thoughts, memories, and sensations. (The novel may be building toward some kind of crescendo regarding a public-health crisis, but we're more than halfway through so it's getting late in the day). All Irish writers live in the shadow of Joyce, and I believe MMcC is aware of Joyce's presence looming over him: this is a Ulyssean story of an Irish everyman who encompasses a vast world in his own consciousness and in the a single place and a moment in time. The theme, it seems to me, is the conflict in Marcus's mind, and to a degree in our contemporary culture, between order and public service and self-service and corruption in public life: Marcus is an engineer, who believes in rational solutions; his job is to build bridges and maintain public roads (there's a metaphor at work in that), and he finds himself in conflict w/ various forces of petty corruption: politicians who pressure him to show favoritism toward projects in their districts, various schemes for raking money and property from the public trough, and ultimately a crisis in the water system - which makes his wife grievously ill - and which, we'll see, may have been caused by public corruption or official neglect.

A highly unusual - and effective - narrative technique in Solar Bones

Mike McCormack's 2016 novel, Solar Bones, is a rarity: an experimental and unconventional narrative that is entirely accessible and engaging. I am about 1/3 of the way through the novel, i.e. about 80 pages, and believe it or not the novel to this point consists of a single sentence (and still going). You would that to be an absurdity and entirely off-putting and senseless narrative device, but not so. First of all, the novel is not only easy to read, thanks to MMcC's clear writing but also to his many useful line breaks, which make the novel, the sentence, feel like a long prose poem. Second, the long sentence makes a lot of sense, as this is a contemporary example of that old trope, the "stream of consciousness," so we really feel that we are getting access to the mind of the narrator, a middle-aged man named Marcus, who lives in a small town in NW Ireland (County Mayo) and works for the county (or country?) as a civil engineer. There's nothing sensational or overtly dramatic about the novel (yet), just the thoughts of a smart and sometimes troubled "everyman": happily married to Maeraid (sp?), or so it seems, father of two adult children, the older, daughter Agnes, is an artist living nearby, and the younger, Darragh (sp?) is trekking w/ some buddies across Australia (he and dad communicate by Skype). As the novel builds we get a few dramatic highlights - visit to daughter's art exhibit in which narrator learns that the daughter uses her own blood as her medium, which of course startles and frightens him (Mom is more sanguine); narrator receives pressure from local politician about the completion of a bridge repair project - in other words, the diurnal events of life, but told w/ such clarity and insight, and not slowed down but actual sped along by the headlong narrative device that we feel we are getting to know this character as well as we'll ever know a character in contemporary fiction. It's not just that he is in our consciousness; it's almost as if we are in his. 

Why The Group is still worth reading

Mary McCarthy's The Group (1963) becomes ever darker and increasingly frightening as it builds toward a powerful conclusion - a terrifying look at the fates and fortunes of 8 Vassar grads ('33), intelligent and attractive young women who at the start of the novel have bright futures ahead (and all but one are from wealthy and well-established families) but at the end several of the women are divorced (and not particularly happy in 2nd marriages), only one (the literary agent, Libby) established in a meaningful career, the young mothers bitter and insecure and arguing about various methods of child-rearing while being at times cruel or indifferent to their children, embittered by politics, frightened by the impending war (the novel ends in 1940), and, most disturbing, we focus on Kay, the closest to a central character (the book began w/ he wedding to Harald) held in a mental hospital against her will, put there in an act of spite and cruelty by her unfaithful, brutal, narcissistic husband. Spoilers to follow: MMcM brings the novel full circle in the last chapter, ending with Kay's suicide, as she jumps (or maybe falls, that's the cover story anyway) from a 20th-floor window in the Vassar club - allegedly she was scanning the skies for German aircraft. As the remaining women gather for the funeral one member of the group who has been absent over the course of the novel, Lakey, returns from Europe - fleeing the Nazi occupations - with a Baroness, and her cohort all at once realize that the glamorous Lakey is a Lesbian. This realization leads to a bitter scene between Harald, the ex who virtually crashes the funeral service, and Lakey, w/ which the novel concludes. It's all too easy to dismiss this novel as out of date or a potboiler/best seller/women's novel, and it's all of the above to a degree but also none of the above: Even today, a half-century after publication (at which time it was already a period piece), it's still a smart and disturbing novel that gives us insight into its own time of course but also into the mind of the author (not that any one of the Group is an MMcM avatar - they are each a part of her, I think) and the brutalities of sexual politics - obviously still a significant topic and issue. I will quibble and say that I wish there was at least one good man in this entire opus, but be that as it may - MMcM had a sharp wit and unflinching gaze at each of her characters, all of them troubled, each in her own way.

Psychoanalysis and the novel The Group

Two chapters - 11 and 12 - in Mary McCarthy's novel The Group (1963) were excerpted back in the day by the New Yorker, and you can see why: Each holds together well as a single narrative (w/ some editorial pruning of the names of other members of The Group of 8 Vassar grads who pop in w/ advice or comments at various points in these chapters) and each is a terrific chapter, further evidence of MMcM's excellent writing. First, we learn about Polly (each chapter focuses on a different member of The Group, but without following a strict structure or order, which gives the novel a nice feeling of openness rather than of plodding forward along a predetermined course), who was the only science major in the group (most sci majors, she notes, were socially awkward outsiders or, worse, grinds) working in a medical lab and living in a small apartment in a rooming house (other tenants are socialist/communist European emigres) in St. Mark's Sq. She's the most bland of the group members, a real wallflower; her family had money and social connections but lost it in the crash of 29, and her parents now live in tight straits running a  family farm in western Mass and remembering the old days. In Ch 11 we see that Polly is having a love affair w/ LeRoy, the book editor who was kind to Libby when she was seeking entry into publishing; he is separated from his leftist, free-love wife (and son) and for a time Polly and LeRoy seem like a good couple - but we learn that he is in analysis five days a week, and this becomes a huge issue between them: Polly continually worries about what's really "wrong" with him and about what he discusses in his sessions. Eventually, he claims to become "blocked" as he tries w/out success to recall his dreams - and he breaks up w/ Polly and returns to his wife and son; she's in despair, but at end of chapter gets a letter from her father saying her parents are separating and he wants to move in w/ her. In ch 12 we get to know this eccentric father - who has significant mental issues of his own, which actually threaten Polly's life and he goes an spending sprees during his episodes of mania. But lo and behold, Polly - taken to selling her own blood to make ends meet! - discusses father's case w/ a doctor she knows from work and she and doc fall in love - and he pledges to take her father in to live w/ them when then set up a new apt. So on the bright side - not all of the men in this novel are narcissistic creeps (most are), but on the down side: Can that relationship really endure, or will the father and his obsessions  intrude on the life of the newlyweds? Both Ch's 11 and 12 are full of wit and insight, especially during the long discussions and Polly's troubled contemplation about mental illness and psychotherapy: Like many, when she hears of a symptom she thinks she's got the malady, and like many, including her husband to be, she ponders the efficacy of traditional psychoanalysis. One suspects MMcM is settling some scores here!

The reasons why I'm enjoying The Group

That amazing thing about Mary McCarthy's 1963 novel, The Group - a long novel much of which in involves chapter-length conversations between women and their mothers or their best friends about such topics as contraception, breast-feeding, and marital infidelity, in which all of the men (possibly one exception, the literary editor) turn out to be boors or creeps or worse and in which the women are generally under-employed, unappreciated daughters of white privilege (ca. 1935) - is how much I enjoy reading this book, which on the surface would seem so out of my orbit: I am not part of the target demographics, as we'd say today. Why am I reading it?: First of all MMcM is great at creating character, not through tedious back story but through sharp dialog and interaction with other characters; second, her topical descriptions are fantastic, building a setting, such as an apartment one of the members of The Group (Vassar 33) has rented, by fastidious attention to detail, but all w/ a point, the setting is informative about the characters; third, a great ear for dialog, and the dialog is witty without being self-conscious - it always seems as if the intelligent characters are speaking, not the narrator or author imposing he voice on the narrative; fourth, a smart attention to a time long past, even at the time of composition and more so today, that yet still feels alive and present - not some quaint historical fiction depending on a bunch of topical references, rather it's about young women in their time and struggling for freedom and independence, while still lheld back by the conventions of their day and their class; and fifth, it's a great feminist statement that's smart enough to stand back from the characters, not making them heroic necessarily (each of the group members has a mix of traits, some more conventional than others) but credible, privileged, and each tragic in her way - as we look back from now and to a degree even from 1963 we see how these intelligent women were born too soon, each stifled by the expectations of class, family, husband.

Important plot developments in McCarthy's The Group

Two big scenes (chapters, essentially) in Mary McCarthy's thoroughly engaging and surprisingly contemporary novel The Group (1963), the first of which involves Helena - somewhat unconventional daughter of Cleveland steel baron - going to Norine's (?) house. The night before, at the party to celebrate the sale of Harald's play, Helena had intruded on Harald and N engaged in a passionate kiss. Helena is sure that No has summoned her to beg her not to "tell," which she has no intention of doing. The conversation, however, becomes weird, as N tells H that N's husband, a labor-rights activist, is impotent and they have no sex life. N confesses that she's had an ongoing affair w/ Harald, and he's not the only one. Helena proves to be extremely level-headed and offers a slew of advice such that we think she should become a counselor or an advice columnist (she does in fact write the Vassar class notes for the alumnae bulletin). She also - or MMcM actually, provides a great description of the dirt and squalor in N's apartment, and she makes it clear that the impotent husband (I'm forgetting his name) is a nasty guy, always harping on $ and keeping track of N's expenditures down to the nickel: Let it be said that all the young men in this novel are nasty and oafish. Second great scene involves Dottie, a Boston Brahmin, whom in chapter two had, as MMcM relates in painful detail, her first sexual relationship, w/ a man (Dick) who made it clear he could never fall in love w/ her. As it happens, Dottie, who is engaged to a wealthy Arizona widower (she has moved to Ariz for her health - and perhaps to get away from a relationship gone sour and the accompanying depression), tells her mother - they are in the process of buying wedding gowns and engraved invitations - that she is still in love w/ Dick. Her mother is extremely understanding, and encourages D to delay the wedding, as she recognizes that her daughter must get this first love out of her system, so to speak, or else the marriage will fail. Dottie is ambivalent about this. Finally, a minor scandal has broken out as Harald and N's husband were arrested for leading a demonstration about unionized restaurant workers, an event that got their pictures in all of the newspapers (even out-of-town), a bit of a stretch but so be it. In particular, we see the reaction to the arrests in the home of Pokey, probably the wealthiest in the Group, whose family living in a Manhattan mansion with service (an English butler in particular); P, to the puzzlement of all, is at Cornell studying to become a vet; her family has bought her an airplane, which she has learned to pilot and which she uses to commute to Ithaca. That sounds a little ominous to me; we'll see.

Narcissists and others in Mary McCarthy's The Group

Mary McCarthy's 1963 novel, The Group, in the first third sharpens its focus onto one "group" member, Kay, and her husband, an aspiring playwright in NYC in 1933, Harald (cq), but as the novel sharpens MMcC does a great job in filling us in on the back stories of the other 7 groupies (1933 Vassar grads). In the first chapters we learned more about Dottie and in particular about her first sexual experiences and the accompanying guilt and shame and sadness; by chapter 4, a year or so later, Dottie fades into the background as a minor character and we learn more about another group member, Helena, daughter of a rich Cleveland steel magnate, given "every opportunity," which is to say lessons in languages and in all of the arts, but who ultimately is a "disappointment" to her parents, not graduating at top of class, opting for a career as a preschool teacher. Her parents actually think it's wrong of her to work, taking a job away from someone who might need it; her mother in particular reasons she's glad H did not graduate at top of class, dismissing the top students as grinds and ambitious Jews. Through all this we see the sadness of H., who doesn't quite fit w/ other Vassar grads and whom we suspect may be gay. The main plot, however, stays focused on Kay and Harald, as we see year by year what a dismal and unlikable character he is: We see a nasty fight between them when he is fired from his entry-level theater job for mouthing off to the director. He can be so cavalier about finding work (this is the height, or depth, of the Depression) because Kay is from a prosperous family (H is not; his father is a high-school principal in Boise). In another scene/chapter, we see Kay and H holding a party after H's play - about his father as an Ibsen-like man fighting the corruption of the system - is optioned for production. The behavior of the guests at the party reveals further dark strands running beneath the superficial gaiety of city life: Lots of racists and anti-Semitic remarks; H caught in the act of passionately kissing the wife of another couple from the Group, H acting childish and histrionic and destroying what others at first think is his only copy of his play - a Dostoyevsky-like dramatic action that in the end turns out to be farce (Kay reveals that he has numerous other copies of the manuscript). One after another, the men in the orbit of The Group turn out to be awful narcissists, and the women, at least at this stage of their lives, are content to live in the shadows. We'll see, I suspect, how the tables turn, over time.

Does Mary McCarthy's The Group stand up well over time?

It's easy to see why Mary McCarthy's novel The Group was scandalous (and popular!) in it's time (1963): right at near the start there's a long chapter in which one of the members of the group, Dottie, (the group comprises 8 Vasser grads newly arrived in NYC) has her first sexual experience, w an older man (Dick Brown!) who gives her much instruction and initiation and when all is said and done so to speak tells her to get a "pessary," I.e., a diaphragm. In the next chapter she does so. All this experience told in close third person, as Dottie undergoes a range of feelings and emotions, not so much of shame though there is that a strong of emptiness and loss - the one question she cannot bring herself to ask her obgyn doc is whether it's significant that he never kissed her.  All of this is rather frank and almost clinical at times and even today seems about as open as a novel can get about sexual desire and sexual politics.  But does the novel stand up well over time? So far - about 20 percent in - a definite yes, keeping in mind that it (or at least the first three chapters) was dated (by 03 years) in its own time - I s definitely a look at a way of life and a social class on the wane and today almost gone. The first chapter, Kay's marriage (she is a westerner from a fairly liberal family and marries Harald  cq, also of the same class and beginning a career in theater - tho they live modestly and plan to have no children they obviously are counting on some family $, tho no parents are invited to the unconventional wedding. We meet, sort of, all 8 women at the wedding tho it's hard to keep them each in mind and distinct. The novel begins to take shape in ch two as MmC narrows the focus to Kay and Dottie. I suspect others will share the spotlight in later chapters, each of which is like a drama in miniature, all working together to evoke a time and place and way of life - gone.

Some tips on reading - marking post #3,000 on Elliot's Reading

This is post #3,000 on Elliot's Reading, marking 3,000 consecutive days of posts on this blog. To mark the occasion, a few thoughts on how to enjoy and engaged w/ your reading:

Expand your horizons. Be on the lookout for books that not everyone else is reading. Look beyond the current best sellers, in fact look beyond newly released books. Look for great books from past years, past decades, past centuries. Look for novels in translation - only the best works tend to get translated. Keep track of publishers who publish books you've liked - chances are they'll publish more.

Read book reviews, but beware the hype: Book reviews today are rarely negative, but reading between the lines (often, the next-to-last paragraph of a review) will give you a sense of what the reviewer really thinks about the book.

Beware of blurbs as well. Most blurbs on book jackets or covers are written by friends of the author. In fact, many authors who teach writing (i.e., most authors) have a policy of blurbing only books by their students - kind of self-serving, if you think about it.

Why not revisit great books you've read before? With other great works of art - a painting, a symphony, a poem, a play - we don't pass it by because we've already seen/heard it. Don't be afraid to re-read: Reading a novel that you enjoyed in high school, college, or even a few years ago may be a completely different experience when you come back to it once more, with fresh eyes and more experience in reading and life.

Give every book a chance. Especially if the writing is inventive, difficult, or challenging, it may take some time to get into the world of a novel. I will always give a novel at least two days of reading, and will always try to read about 10 percent of the book at least before turning it aside.

On the other hand, you don't have to finish every book you start. Reading is a pleasure, not an obligation. Again, I have a few checkpoints - 10 percent, 100 pp., half-way through - at which I'll pause and decide whether I really want to continue reading this book. If not, stop and find something else: There are thousands of great books waiting to be read.

Engage with your reading. I always have a pen in hand when reading published book (and I use notes face/highlights when reading an ibook). I write brief marginal notes and I underline - but, no, I don't write in library books, although I do copy-edit when I see an obvious typo (every single book has them), which tends to keep me focused on the language.

Reflect. Keeping this blog has made me a better and more attentive reader, and I encourage everyone to take some time in reflection - whether by writing, blogging, discussing (esp in a book group), or just thinking - about what you're reading.



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Epistolary problems why part two of Uncertain Glory doesn't work

Part one of Joan sales' novel Uncertain Glory (1971) ends w the protagonist, Lluis, meeting w his morose and cynical childhood/college friend as both are away from the front in Barcelona during the Spanish civil war; the friend - Julio? - chides L about a number of shortcomings and at last reveals that he has been carrying on a relationship w L's partner - Trini - they are committed to each other and have a child of about 6 tho neither believes in marriage - for some time. This revelation/confession of course startles L but as a committed radical he has no ground on which to stand and of course he has during much of the past year been pursuing a beautiful widowed woman (without success). We don't yet know anything about the relationship between j and T except that they have been in correspondence throughout the war. Part two - each part of this novel is about 150 pp - consists of trini's letters to j, which j give some to l and which we now begin to read. We see right away that l unlike j has been an irregular correspondent and that the letters (and occasional visits bearing cartons of tinned milk ) are a vital part of t's life during the years of war and separation. Frankly though Trina's letters to J are a bore - long accounts explaining why she is a committed Christian despite her radical politics, an account of her baptism in a clandestine service - all members of the clergy were at risk of assassination by radical groups - and a long account of her sheltering one of l's relatives, in mortal danger as a factory owner. Theough the civilian life during the war seems like a potentially great topic w so many killings and acts of terror T's letters - perhaps intentionally - are so matter of fact and bloodless as to undermine and deflate the narrative. Additionally they're not credible as letters even in the days of epistolatory novels - far too long to believe anyone but a novelist could or would have composed them.

Story in New Yorker about obsession w suicide

Nicole Krauss story in current  New Yorker, Seeing Ershadi, holds your interest and attention throughout though I think that in the end the story misses an opportunity  in brief the story is about two young women - the narrator, a dancer, and her best friend, Roni, an actor - who are smart, talented, successful for their ages, multinational - i.e. Privileged in many ways - tho both dealing e issues of depression and self-image. Strangely the two friends bond over their attraction to even obsession w the protagonist in an Iranian movie of about 15 years ago, taste of cherries. Probably most reader should of this story have not seen the movie; I have, however, and NK's summary of the movie is quite accurate: a man ( not a pro actor NK tells us) drives around modern-day Teheran seeking someone who will help him commit suicide. The two women obsess about this movie so much that both record instances of seeing this acot or his image - possible but unlikely. Why this fixation on death? The 2 seem to have much to be proud of re their young lives and achievements, yet the seat wish remains a strange magnetic pull on the in moments of personal and career crisis (less is said about love and marital crises tho both women have endured these travails).  It's almost like the romanticism of suicide a la Goethe. Perhaps focusIn on the suicide attempt in this movie substitutes for the real thing and keeps thes / alive.  But NK leaves that unexamined or unstated. In that I think she misses an opportunity, which is the political context of the movie - the repression of art and expression in Iran, the filmmaker's struggle to film this movie, a film about a man intent on suicide yet we know nothing about him, nothing of his back story nor of his relations or lack thereof w any other person - surely the adulation the two successful young women have for this handsome (non)actor rings hollow and immature compared w this man in agony in a closed, repressive culture.

Another view of the Spanish Civil War: Uncertain Glory

In the first part of Joan Sales's Uncertain Glory (1971) the protagonist, Lluis (cq) is with a Spanish Civil War brigade, opposed to the fascist army but also fending off attacks from various leftist splinter groups such as the Anarchists (who can understand this?), is posted in a village, Olivel, near Barcelona await orders. Lluis gets involved with a woman who was the mistress of the village nobleman, who was assassinated along w/ his family, but she - because of her working-class origins - was left unscathed and is living in the castle (despite its name, not a glorious palace by any means, more of a fortified house) with her two children. Lluis tries to begin an affair w/ her; she resists, and asks him for one favor, which he obliges: forge a marriage certificate so that it will look as if her children were born in wedlock. Then, she still resists Lluis, and probably wisely so: He has a child of his own, and a longstanding relationship with a woman (neither of the believe in marriage) back home (not sure where that is). What we really see is the torment of a military officer waiting for orders over an extended period of time. Then, the brigade moves off for one of the fronts, and we hear the sounds of battle and get various reports of many casualties, although Lluis himself is not quite at the front or in the line of fire, at least yet. It's a strange novel; we really sense the amateurish nature of the brigade (another brigade, which as it happens acquits itself well in battle, is known as the Flat-Foot Brigade), and tedium, and the terror of marching off into a line of attack. So far, though, for Lluis, the war is an intellectual experience; he spends a lot of time star-gazing (with the medical officer, an amateur astronomer) and reflecting on the vastness of the universe, philosophizing, quoting Symbolist poetry, especially with his somewhat cynical friend and fellow officer, Solares. This unusual novel makes a good counterpoint to Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls) and Graves (Goodbye to All That) - a Spaniard/Catalan's view of the war, as experienced by a combatant - at least initially, not as violent as one might expect, but with many physical hardships, includes days marching w/out sufficient food or water, minimal protection against cold and rain.

A little-known novel of the Spanish civil war

They say that anyone who studies the history of Spain is certain to suffer some kind of mental breakdown, and that is probably true simply for those who try to make sense of the Spanish Civil War. Started reading Joan Sales's Uncertain Glory, his (yes, Joan is a male name in Sp.) novel based apparently on his experiences in the war (the novel was first published in censored and abbreviated form; it went through several significant revisions and the final version, now available from the great NYRB publisher, is from 1971). From the first section, about 50 pp., we can see that the protagonist, Lluis (cq) is serving with a brigade posted somewhere near Barcelona; they mus be fighting against the fascists, but there are all sorts of other groups taking various sides in this struggle, notably the anarchists (there's also the confusing fact that those opposed to Franco and fascists are called the Loyalists, against all likelihood, though that terminology hasn't entered yet into this novel). Lluis is a lawyer, and it seems that much of his work, such as it is, involves drafting legal and procedural documents for the brigade; he also provides instruction on machine-gun use. So far, though, no action - therefore Lluis spends a lot of time visit the ruins of a nearby monastery, where he becomes fascinated by the mummified bodies of the monks and priests, many of which have been disinterred and placed around the ruined church in odd tableaux; it's unknown who desecrated these bodies - but we do know that the anarchists had executed the local gentry - and Lluis becomes friendly w/ a beautiful woman living in the abandoned castle - apparently she had been the mistress of the landowner, but she was left to survive because of her working-class background. There's also talk of the "vulture pit" where dead animals and humans are tossed and left as food for vultures. The war, though, seems far away, as there is much talk about the beautiful young women in the area, and even - when Lluis occasionally meets w/ his childhood friend, also a lawyer serving in the army - talk about philosophy and poetry. We suspect that all this wasting of time and immobility, all the focus on the boredom, inefficiency, even insanity of war (reminiscent of many war novels, e.g., Catch 22), is a prelude to a violent, and perhaps senseless, battle to come. Sales - I know nothing about any of his other writings - has a great sense of humor, often quite subtle - as when Lluis meets a new recruit: Lluis introduces himself as a "solicitor"; the recruit, pleased, says they're in the same line of work. Oh, are you a lawyer, too? No, I walk the streets holding a billboard.