An Updike story from a long-ago era in current NYer

The New Yorker team had a cool idea for the current issue, making the whole issue (thankfully, not a double-issue so-called) a throwback, almost entirely comprising pieces previously published in the NYer, all w/ a focus on NYC. I'll probably poke around in the whole issue over the next day or so (did esp like the Veronica Geng piece on the NYT wedding listings, hilarious) but started with a read of John Updike's 1956 story, Snowing in Greenwich Village. This is one of his Maple family stories; I thought I'd read all or at least most in one of the collections - Museums and Women? - with the M family settled into the North Shore of Boston, where Updike lived for most of his adult life, but this piece is of an earlier stage in their family life, when Richard M seems to be working in advertising. This is a world we're all familiar w/ now through multiple seasons of Mad Men, but the Maples' life is less frat-boy and more WASP societal, though of the same era. In brief this story begins as the M's have settled into a new apartment in the Village and they invite a friend  - is now a near neighbor, so close as they put it - for dinner; Joan M is out of sorts w/ a cold; RM helps very little, aside from pouring and mixing. The guest regales w/ anecdotes about the apartments she's recently lived in and shared w/ various unpleasant or inappropriate roommates. After dinner, R walks her home; beautiful snow setting on the city (recollection of The Dead?), she invites him up to see her place, there's some mile flirtation, and then he departs, reflecting on how they'd come "so close." So: the story as all the Updike gentility and all the foreshadowing of infidelity and marital unease, soaked in much alcohol. In later stories the foreshadowing will give way to real shadowing. I can't say that this was one of JU's best stories, though it typifies the mode and social caste of much of his early short fiction; part of the charm of the story, 60 years later (!), is the view it gives of New York in another era, when a young couple starting out could just pick up a place in the Village - now, unthinkably expensive. The snow, the sensibility, the demure behavior of each of the characters feels so different from anything written about NYC today - frantic, careerist, focused on money or marital fractures, all of which - child-care included if the protags are a few years older - cushioned by pillows of great wealth.

Further thoughts on Ginsberg and Eliot

A few more thoughts on the post of a few days back on Allen Ginsberg and T.S. Eliot: I noted in that post that these two great 20th-century poets presented us, each in his own manner, a vision of a fallen world: Ginsberg's a world in which the "best minds" of his generation have been "destroyed by madness" - as well as by drugs, alcohol, social and political and sexual ostracism; Eliot's a world in which all values and sense of purpose have been attenuated or obliterated, in particular after the World War. Ginsberg's vision is passionate, hallucinatory, at times comical; Eliot's, quite the opposite - dry, controlled, morbid, serious. Yet I both writers, I believe, are trying to transcend the ruined society that they articulate, which I think is what gives their works of value and scope. Ginsberg sees salvation in faith, his Jewish faith early on (Kaddish, qv) but over time moving more toward Eastern religions, Zen, Buddhism, and Hinduism in particular - and of course increasingly toward a transcendence through hallucinatory or visionary drugs (see Wales Visitation for a key example) as well as through sexual freedom and antiwar activism. Eliot is far from Ginsberg in each of these particulars except for their shared interest in Hinduism, with Eliot actually concluding Waste Land with a Hindi chant for peace - but over time his search for transcendence shifted more toward Christianity and ultimately to Catholicism (he was a late convert), as his later poetry becomes even more strict, controlled, and didactic (4 Quartets) in its delineation of faith. And a final note, which I provided via email to blog-reader ML: Though I read Eliot and Ginsberg in my teenage years, I did not read them "in school." (I probably read them in the school building, but they were not part of any curriculum at West Orange High School.) Actually, my brilliant friend the late R.I. Nagel was so advanced that he led two or three English classes on Eliot (I was not in those classes), but for the most part TSE was probably considered too difficult for h.s. students (and maybe teachers). Ginsberg was of course completely out of the question; led by close friend DC, a few of us found copies of that famous City Lights edition of Howl and read the poems surreptitiously.

A challenging novel about the wars that have wracked Europe

It will take me a while to understand the novel I started to read yesterday, Zone, by the French author Mathias Enard (2015), as it's a novel in the Joyce tradition - think of Molly Bloom's soliloquy at novel length - and draws heavily on European military history, about which I know shamefully little. The novel is entirely (500 pp) narrated by a man en route from Milan to Rome via train, carrying a suitcase full of important documents; we understand that this narrator is a secret agent of some sort and that he has a long history of involvement with various military campaigns, notably serving as a soldier in the Croatian army in the Serbo-Croation wars of the 90s and having some involvement with military intelligence regarding the several Palestinian uprisings and the war in Lebanon. Over the course of the first 60 pp or so he (we don't know his name yet; he's traveling under an alias) reflects on some of these military experiences and on his (failed) marriage and on some of his travels, particularly to historical military sights (Troy, Gallipoli) in Turkey. Each chapter of his narration consists of a single sentence; that's not as daunting as it may sound, as his narrative flows easily and is rich with observation and detail; one could punctuate the novel for Enard, but why would you? The use of a single sentence, if done well, moves the narrative along briskly and more accurately reflects the sense of a mind at work (rather than an author at work) - an Irish novel I read earlier this year also used this technique effectively. We do get some chapters - or at least one chapter - which purports to be a short story the narrator is reading on his train journey. At this early stage in the reading I'm enjoying the richness of the narrative but am hoping some of the scenes and moments and characters that are so far just sketches will develop more fully and will leave me w/ a stronger impression as to the personality, life story, and mission of the narrator and to a greater understanding of the many wars and conflicts that have wracked our world but that - like most Americans - I have managed to ignore or to forget.

On Allen Ginsberg and T.S. Eliot and what they have in common

Poking around in an anthology of Modern Poetry (English-language) over the past few weeks and have just re-read for first time in many years the first section of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, which led me to think about the two poets who meant the most to me when I was a h.s. student: Ginsberg and T.S. Eliot. How do you compute that? Could two poets be farther from each other in style, sensibility, world view? One with these tight controlled lines and with hundreds of allusions to mythology and classical literature, the other with a super-abundance of imagery and exploded lines and only the occasional reference to anything outside of his personal experience (nods here and there to the Symbolists, Gardia Lorca, Whitman)? The one who measures out his life in coffee spoons and the other in "cock and endless balls"? But they actually do have some elements in common and points of contact. First, they both offer us their vision of a ruined and deracinated world, with the poet as seer-prophet: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness; I had not thought death had undone so many. Both were innovators who well understand the power of poetry to shock readers/listeners into awareness. I've noted before that the 3rd line of Prufrock was the most shocking line of poetry ever written (after the singsong, pedestrian initial rhyming couplet, this: "...Like a patient etherized upon a table.") And Ginsberg's Howl - though composed for Whitmanesque long lines w/out conventional rhyme or obvious scansion - depends to a great extent on the shock of unexpected images, in particular a noun w/ an unexpected modifier: grandfather night, hydrogen jukebox. Both Eliot and Ginsberg can set a scene with just a few words: "lonely men in shirtsleeves learning out of windows" and "Newark's bleak unfurnished room." Of course I did not comprehend these similarities when I was a teenage reader, and in fact I don't think I could have understood either poet. I "got" Prufrock but The Waste Land and Gerontion were to me just a barely intelligible, and the 4 Quartets were untouchable. Howl, well, somehow I (and some friends, thanks DC!) saw it as a siren call - who wouldn't want to live this exciting life once we were older, free, unloosed from out tight suburban community - and of course we read right through the devastation of mental illness (which we did understand from Kadish -  something that could affect an older generation, not would-be hipsters like us), the alcohol and drug abuse, the dangers of streetlife, the pain of surreptitious homosexual desires and unprotected sex, the self-destructive behavior - I probably didn't think about this poem as a warning and a lamentation. Today, it's equally exciting to read, but it's also sorrowful in a way that as I young man I could never articulate or understand. And Eliot - today, to me, I still love to read his work but I see now the racism, the repression, the tendency to show off his learning rather than to use his learning to illuminate, and, in the later poems, the oracular tendencies and pronunciations. Still, to re-read these two great writers, each trying to enunciate a world view and to make sense of their life's experience, is a pleasure - especially seen against the insipid, inaccessible "language poetry" that continues to appear in the New Yorker and in many (most? all?) literary magazines.

The conclusion of My Struggle and what it signifies

So after 6 volumes and thousands of pages and months of reading and waiting for the next volume to come out in translation I have finished reading Karl Ove Knausgaard's monumental work, My Struggle. As noted yesterday, KOK concludes this publication with a painfully detailed account of his wife's mental illness, a we see the terrible effects of her bipolar disorder on the author, the family, and on Linda (his wife) herself. Over the course of this novel KOK has been unflinching in depicting himself in embarrassing and shameful moments, from his early childhood through his successful career as a writer and a father of 4. Often these painful moments are presented with some humor; in fact, the first account we get of his family life - at the outset of book 2 I think, in some ways foreshadows the devastation in book 6, but in a comical manner, as the family tries to have fun at an amusement park and everything goes wrong. Even in this final volume, comedy offsets the pain, at least early on - the disastrous family trip to the Canary Islands. The theme of this final volume concerns the reaction of the extended family, the press, and the world at large to the publication of the very novel we're reading; KOK is accused of creating a false image of his family (even though this is a work of fiction) and of raping a teenage girl (a topic of his first novel - again, it's fiction and not a public confession). Many family members - including his wife and her mother - accuse him of exposing too much of the family life to the public, in particular for violating the privacy of his own children. The detailed account of Linda's mental breakdown, with which KOK concludes the novel, is in a sense his thumbing his nose at all of the criticism: A writer must tell the truth as he or she sees and understands it, and the lives of others be damned. He is brave and undaunted till the end, but at what cost? He's achieved fame and fortune, literally, but has perhaps hurt his family beyond repair. And yet - the very last pages give us a surprising twist. (Spoilers here.) We see KOK and Linda - she is also an author - speaking at a festival about their works. Linda is recovered - though one has to think that managing bipolar will be a lifetime "struggle." KOK has exposed her in perhaps more pain and detail and suffering than any character in this novel, himself included. And then he concludes with the statement that he's glad to be done w/ this work, no matter the cost, as he will never write again. Though we know that is not correct - he has published (nonfiction) since completing My Struggle - it may be true in a symbolic way: the "character" who narrates My Struggle may be gone, ,and it may be that KOK believes his will never write fiction again. He has hovered on the border between recollection and imagination and now, it seems, he has purged his life of the most painful elements and is free to continue writing as a thinker, and observer, a smart reader, an essayist, and a journalist. Who's to say that's anything but brave?

A haunting and powerful account of mental illness near the end of My Struggle

Despite my concerns and reservations about Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle: Book 6, I have to say that his account of the mental illness of his wife, Linda, whom we see become completely unraveled toward the end of Book 6, is as haunting and powerful an account of the devastating effect of mental illness on a marriage and a family as I've ever read. He achieves this sorrowful effect through careful build-up over the course of this long volume. For most of the book, when he is writing about his family and his marriage, we see them as a reasonably happy couple, getting by in tough financial times (before KOK became wealthy through sales of the book we are reading), strong parental and paternal involvement in family life, and the usual tensions and concerns of early parenthood. Beneath the surface, we begin to sense the cracks in the facade: the many phone conversations and messages between KOK and Linda are stunningly banal, as if taking care of the kids enables them to hide and ignore all the marital tensions. Toward the end of the volume, KOK reveals some scenes of real anger between the two of them, as he feels the victim of Linda's occasional rages and what he perceives as her injustice - criticizing him for not doing enough work around the house, for his withdrawal into his writing, etc. Reading those passages I was torn: I felt Linda was cruel and extremely difficult, but then again I felt that there must be two sides to this and we're seeing/reading only his. But then things take a turn: As KOK faces various deadlines and financial pressures, Linda goes into a manic phase, making ridiculous purchases, including a suburban "cabin" that they can neither afford nor maintain, and then she slips into a deep depression - and KOK's account of her depression is extremely credible and painfully sad. I could kind of see this coming over the arc of this long narrative, but it's still harrowing to read; if the 6-book narrative ends on this sad note - w/ KOK achieving fame and fortune through his writing while losing his wife and his family, though no fault of his own - I, too, will be sad. We all know that Scandinavian culture is generally dark and full of despair (Strindberg, Bergman, e.g.) and I see this long novel heading for the darkness.

Passing judgment on Book 6 of My Struggle

I'm nearing the end of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle - 90% through Book 6 - and it's maybe a tad too early to pass judgement but I have to say that the final book is a let-down, and I say that as a huge fan of Books 1 through 5. One way to make this assessment is to think about each book as a novel in its own right (as you can, say, with Search for Lost Time, Dance to the Music of Time, the Patrick Melrose novels) and in fact each can stand alone as terrific autofiction or semi-autobiographical novels; and in fact you could probably read them in any order, as KOK does not tell his story in straight chronological sequences. That said, the books increase in power and scope if we read them all, and in sequence, as the books relate to each other and the later volumes build on and expand themes (and characters) that appeared in the earlier works - and all go toward the literary delineation of the author. But book six? In my view there is no way it can stand alone, although some of its passages would read well out of context; but the entire vision of the novel concerns the publication of the 1st volumes - particularly volume 1- and their effect on the life of the author, who finds himself the most awkward and self-conscious literary celebrity ever and who also finds that the publication of these highly personal novels threatens (and maybe wrecks?) his marriage. It's really a coda to the first five books, and would have been more powerful had he set aside the long middle section on Hitler and on his thoughts on various writers. I come away, or will soon, with great respect for KOK and with sympathy as well. He adopted a stance at the outset of this massive project - to tell his life story as true to the facts as he can manage - and finds that various social pressures forced him not only to change names and topical details so as to protect the privacy of those depicted (and to avoid threatened law suits) but also to eradicate various episodes and passages that would be too controversial or embarrassing - not to him, the impervious one, but to others - and his eradications and altering of facts leads him to think some of the books are "failures." What a strange attitude - he's writing a novel, not a memoir, but choice, and by presenting the work as fiction he has bought himself right to make whatever changes and deletions, or inventions for that matter, as he would like. Anyway, my view as I near the horizon is that My Struggle remains a fantastic and engrossing work of fiction that would have been stronger in its conclusion if the final volume were a much briefer coda on the publication and reception of the first volumes and the effect on KOK's life.

The honesty of Knausgaard and the price he paid for it

As we near the end of Book Six of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, the inevitable takes hold of the narrative. As noted previously, this volume gives us the odd perspective of a novel eating its own tale (tail?): Book Six is in large part about the reaction to and fallout from the publication, some five or so years back, of the first 2 volumes of this work. Se we see KOK in his domestic life, composing Book 6 and reflecting on the earlier volumes. The main narrative tension - at first - involves the efforts of his Uncle Gunnar to suppress publication; these efforts failed in the broad sense but succeeded in another way, forcing KOK to be highly sensitive to personal information he reveals about others. So he criticizes some of the subsequent volumes, which are painfully revealing regarding many personal aspects of KOK's life, including his sex life, but which he decries as a failure because they are not entirely true to the facts of his life. Near the end of Book Six, the "struggle" comes closer to home. There are many scenes of his rather boring domestic life, involving a lot of child care and schedule coordination w/ his wife, Linda. Hanging over KOK's head throughout, as he composes Book 6, is how Linda will react when she reads the drafts of the as yet unpublished book 2, which largely concerns the early years of their relationship. Ad the inevitable happens: She pretty much freaks out when she reads this volume, and from this opening we learn that their marriage is not so pacific as the earlier pp led us to believe. KOK spews forth his animosity toward Linda and his doubts about their marriage, and she comes back at him (I don't have sequence of events down just right) when read his account of his infidelity in the Book 2 manuscript. On top of this, we are reminded that she has a history of bipolar disorder, for which she has been hospitalized - so we really see how shaky this marriage is and we recognize, with sorrow and pity, that KOK's own commitment to complete honesty is the force that is dividing them. In other words, he won the battle with Gunnar, but he lost the war, so to speak. We see first hand and almost "live" - writer commenting on his ongoing writing - the cost writers often pay (cunning, exile, and terror) for their revelations, with KOK being an extreme case.

A complex story that examines many moods and issues by Sam Lipsyte in current NYer

Sam Lipsyte's story, Show Recent Some Love (yes, the title, a quote from the story, eludes me, too) in the current New Yorker is at first easy to write off as a clever story w/ lots of topical references (set on the upper West Side, seemingly in the know about all sorts of cultural trends and drifts) with TV-clever dialog (the conversation between the protagonist and his elderly mother w/ mild dementia, is hysterical), but there's more to this story than surface glare. The story focuses on a middle-aged guy working in a communications shop in Manhattan; his mentor who was also, as he notes, briefly his stepfather, the one who years back apparently set him up w/ the job, has been ousted from his own company after years of exploitation, sexism, and boorish behavior; this makes the protagonist sure that his neck is on the block, even though he has long been repulsed by his mentor's behavior. So there's a mood of doom and uncertainty throughout, and Lipsyte makes us truly sympathize w/ this troubled man. We see him in a meeting w/ a potential client and in a frightening meeting w/ the HR director at the office and, toward the end, in a meet-up with his mentor who tries to push him into throwing some work his way, a sad, even pathetic scene - especially when the mentor cuts the protagonist's ego to shreds. Alongside these plot lines, we get glimpses of the mentor's difficult family life and, strangest of all, his several encounters w/ a homeless couple who have camped out on a patch of ground near the man's apartment: They are extremely hostile and threatening, adding a tone of darkness and menace to this already complex story. So the brightness of the clever dialog at the outset becomes just one strand, one note, in a story that examines, without didacticism, a wide range of moods and issues; not sure whether this piece is part of a forthcoming novel, but in any event it stands up well on its own.

The narrative resumes - at last! - in Book Six of My Struggle

After a 400-page digression, Karl Ove Knausgaard gets back to his narrative in Part 2 of My Struggle: Book Six (75% of the way through the novel), and I am pleased about that - and I assume most readers who even get this far will agree. To be honest I see no reason why that extensive digression is included in this book - so far his discussion of Hitler and various literary topics provides neither background, foreshadowing, nor any useful information that advances our understanding of sympathies as KOK continues with the final take on his life up to age 40. In this final movement of the novel, we are back to KOK w/ his wife, Linda, and their 3 young children, as he embarks for Oslo for the release of Book 1 of My Struggle, and we get further views of his extreme anxiety and doubt of his self-worth and his social awkwardness - traits that would not necessarily be evident to those who meet him casually or professionally. By all indications, his readings and media interviews went well; he doesn't feel that way though, he remains tormented and wracked w/ guilt - making it all the more amazing that this shy man should write 6 volumes recounting the most intimate and personal aspects of his life. A dark cloud hovers on the horizon as we near completion of this book; there's been a sense from the start of Book 6 that his seemingly happy marriage is on shaky ground, as KOK recognizes that Linda has not yet read the ms. of the so-far unpublished Book 2, which concerns the early years of their relationship. I think all readers have a sense that when she does read that manuscript - and of course we have read Book 2 and know about Linda's psychological troubles - the marriage will break apart. As approach that cliff, however, KOK takes a step back in time to an earlier point in their marriage - L is pregnant w/ their 3rd child at this point - as the foursome take a vacation in the Canary Islands - a package tour of the cheesiest type, and it's hard to believe they would sign up for such a jaunt, but there you go. They even are so naive as to fall for one of those stay at our beachfront for the day and all you have to do is listen to our sales pitch about a timeshare; KOK is so naive as to want to buy the timeshare on the spot; Linda has better sense than that. But we see the fissures in their marriage (as well as his financial irresponsibility and his impulsiveness) and this jaunt ends with an echo of the opening of the fateful Book 2: Everyone else but us seems to be having a good time. Is that accurate - or does "everyone else" also hold and hide secrets and terrors?

What Knausgaard has to say about Hitler, if you really care

I continue to skim through many pp of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle: Book 6, hoping that eventually he will return to his narrative; meanwhile, he's off on his longest-ever digression - by my measure more than 35 percent of the book, or about 400 pp!, largely focused on his analysis of Hitler's personality as revealed through his identically titled My Struggle (with some passages focused on the poetry of Celan, Joyce's epiphanies, Shoah, and other matters). The key points KOK raises, in particular as they relate to his "struggle," are that his early life is in many ways like Hitler's - though obviously the course of their lives bears no similarity at all; he notes that according to Christian ethics we should forgive AH, as he is another mortal human being and it's not ours to judge, yet he notes the distinction between Hitler the person and Hitler's deeds, which can never be forgiven (or fogotten). He also notes AH's methodology of establishing not just what KOK calls "an I" (the pronoun) but a "we," and he opposes the we to the "they": translated this means that Hitler unified the German nation by establishing an opposition to all those not part of (his view of) the nation: Jews, gypsies, homosexual, those w/ disabilities, and so forth. Though this is hardly a new insight, it's particularly painful to read this analysis today, in light of the current American political climate and national so-called leadership (KOK was writing in 2009, btw). All that said: 400 pages of digression? What's happening here? I keep hoping that KOK will return to his own story in the last quarter of this final volume, but my hope may be slim. Perhaps these essays and digressions merit careful and highly attentive reading - no doubt in my mind that KOK is a smart and original reader and thinker - but, no, I have neither the patience nor the interest in reading his "struggle" as a historical-political-literary analysis. I thought I was reading a novel.

Why My Struggle Book 6 should have been cut by half

As noted yesterday I am skipping over the sections on Hitler's life and writings in My Struggle: Book 6, which represent about 100 pp (beginning at about the 40% mark) though it's impossible to know for sure thanks to the ridiculous pagination system on Kindle (what the hell is Loc 4401?). That said, this final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's novel has taken a strange turn. After a long opening section focused on the attempts of KOK's uncle Gunnar to sue the publisher and stop publication of the very work that we are reading, and with much anxiety and gnashing of teeth by KOK, along w/ many detailed scenes of his attentive parenting of 3 children while his wife/their mom Linda is away, KOK begins offering detailed analysis of a poem by Celan, then of Hitler's writings, and then onto other literary and sociological topics. On one level, just about everything he has to say is intelligent and quirky and probably worth reading w/ more attention that I've been giving it - but in all honesty I don't really want to read a series of essays; these insights or epiphanies to use Joyce's term don't rise out of the narrative flow of the the work - as do Joyce's, Proust's, Updike, to name 3 writers known for narrative styles rich w/ authorial insight and observation. Rather, KOK seems to have steered away from his narrative, hijacked his own novel, and turned it into an essay collection. The two (I think) works KOK has published in the wake of My Struggle are essay collections, so it does seem as if he's no longer interested in fiction per se nor in telling his own life story in particular - well and good, but he's done a disservice to the many readers who have followed his narrative toward the end. This final volume has become an indulgence and in my view should have been cut by half, at least, and let the essay-like writing find its own course. I'm still curious as to how this novel "wraps" and will keep reading, but with a wary eye and with a sense of looming disappointment.

Knausgaard and the two Struggles

At about the half-way point through the monumental My Struggle : Book 6 Karl Ove Knausgaard goes off on one of his by-now famous digressions, this one an examination of Hitler's book, also called My Struggle (what a coincidence), a digression that I believe continues for several hundred pages! Why does he do this? First of all let's get this on the table: neither this book nor KOK are in any way apologists for or acolytes of Hitler. kOK makes it clear that his interest in Hitler, sparked when he was in middle school or high school, was his reaction to the horrors of the Holocaust and the concentration camps. In adult life he orders a copy of and reads Hitler's two-volume work, and he seems to be fascinated by the anomalies of h's early life, puzzled by the idea that this seemingly ordinary and somewhat artistic young man could become the most hateful human being of the 20th century. To try to make sense of this horrendous anomaly he engages in a close reading of Hitler's work, along w much commentary by various historians on the life of H. KOK brings to this work the same obsessive attention to detail and nuance that earlier in this book he brought to a reading of Celan's poem about the Holocaust. I suspect part of this Hitler digression is to show how different his own books are from the AH Struggle - in which that odious man tells remarkably little about his family, friends, inner life, and personal experience. Also, it's a bit of a thumb in the eye of any readers who questioned his use of this highly fraught title. Well and good - but why would I want to read this material? I would like to see all memory of Hitler wiped from the earth, and especially from serious literary fiction. Would any editor have allowed the author the leeway for this digression in any other work? But here we are in book 6, we've traveled this far w KOK, so maybe he's earned the right to say whatever he wants. Ok - but readers, too, have rights - and I'll say right here, as a huge fan of Knausgaard, sorry pal you've lost me and I'm jumping ahead to the end of this section and won't read another word by KOK on this topic.

Sent from my iPad

Knausgaard and poetry (and the significance of names in KOK and Proust)

Readers of My Struggle may remember that at the outset of Book 5 (I think) Karl Ove Knausgaard informed us that he had spent 14 (?) years in Bergen but remembers nothing about it - then proceeds to tell us every detail of his years in Bergen over the next 500 or so pp. Ha! He does something of the same in Book 6, noting that he thinks poetry is the highest of the literary arts (because less dependent on external references; the words themselves rather than what they refer to present the feelings, thoughts, emotions of the writer) but says he has no feeling for poetry or of how to read it - them embarks on one of his digressions, an analysis over 100 pp of so of a poem by Paul Celan. Whew. I have to admit that I skimmed much of this section, having got the point that KOK is an extremely perceptive reader (and scholar) when he so chooses. What did strike me, however, was how, despite all of his analyses of every nuance of ever phrase of the poem and managed to miss the point altogether - until the end! - when he notes that the poem is not only about "death" but also and in particular about the Holocaust and the concentration camps. His point in putting this central observation at the end of his "close reading" to end all close readings is I think to show how our reading of a poem can change when we are aware of some facts about the author's life (Celan was a French Jew who fled to Sweden, I think, during the war; I don't think he was ever imprisoned by the Germans, but he must have lost many family members and friends). So which matters more?: know the language of the poem and all of its nuances? Or knowing how the poem illuminates certain aspects of the life of the writer and of the time and culture in which the writer lived and worked? We know the answer, in that the theme and central action of Book 6, at least so far (40% in) is KOK's "struggle" to publish his life story true as closely as possible to the facts as he knows and recalls them. We respond to the novel because we believe in its veracity; if he had told his story through a fictive narrator and changed all the names and locales, it would not have the same resonance; in other words, we want to read this novel as a memoir (which it is not). Not to say that a deeply personal novel must use the names of the characters - Proust, qv - but we do read In Search of Lost Time differently from how we read My Struggle. Interestingly, both Proust and KOK are obsessed to a degree w/ names (this section of Book 6 is called something like Names and Places; Proust has a central chapter called Place Names: The Place), but they use names differently: one using them as factual grounding, the other as evocative referants.

The narrative tone and structure of My Struggle: Book Six

Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle: Book Six has a curious narrative tone and structure: long sections that consist of detailed accounts of KOK's daily life with his children, including the minutia of feeding them, shopping w/ them, bringing them to and picking them up from day care; another set of long passages in which KOK discusses various personal and literary matters w/ his best friend, Geir; yet another set of long passages in which KOK agonizes about his uncle Gunnar's threat to sue KOK's publisher for defamation and to block publication of the forthcoming Book One of My Struggle; occasional long digressions in which KOK expounds theories on a variety of topics, including some literary discussion (why prose in fiction differs from other prose, the need for unique expression of feelings and ideas, as well as general thoughts on fitting into society and how we accommodate others to do so; and finally occasional brief atmospheric set pieces, often acute and unusual observations in diurnal matters, such as description the difference between the colors of raw shrimp and cooked lobster. For which of these do we read and admire KOK? Probably, all - even the tedium, for that sets the ground level for whatever tension this long volume contains or will contain. Now I'm about 1/3 through this book, and on a plot level the narrative is pretty thin - mostly about KOK's agonizing over the pending lawsuit - but there are ominous hints: Is his relationship w/ his wife, Linda, on the edge? Will the lawsuit cause him to lose faith in his role and responsibilities as a writer (unlikely)? And most of all what draws him to a fascination w/ Hitler, hinted at from the start in the title of the work and something he will address in this volume. Of course it's inconceivable to me that he would in any way admire Hitler - I wouldn't be reading this book if I thought that were the case - but what draws him to write about Hitler or even to try to understand his background and his thinking and his capacity to sway public opinion (and hysteria).

Some ominous elements in Knausgaards My Struggle Book 6

Continuing with yesterday's post re some observations on Karl Ove Knausgaard's style: Aside from the attempt by his uncle to block publication of KOK's My Struggle Book 1, KOK has faced criticism across the first 5 volumes of his work because of his somewhat laughable attention to minute detail - not in the Proustian manner of dwelling on a moment or sensation and eliciting all of its evocations of feeling and memory - such moments are rare in KOK's work - but in recounting specific details of daily life that, seemingly, have no bearing on the overall theme of his work (his "struggle" to become a unique artist while - same time - also to be a person accepted by society and loved by others), such as what cereal he ate for breakfast on a given morning. IN Book 6, we begin to see the reason for this attention to detail: In this book, which begins with account of the publication of the first book! (the novel swallows its own tail), he emphasizes the need for veracity throughout the volumes; he is trying to tell his story w/ complete and total credibility - a defense of course against the "deniers," such as his uncle Gunnar. It's all an illusion - he could have made up his cereal brand of course, let alone creating vast stretches of dialog that he could not possibly recall verbatim - but the attention to detail is a shield, his way of saying that this work is as true to fact as one could make it - nothing omitted or dropped aside as irrelevant. I also begin to wonder - about 1/4 through book 6 - whether the excessive attention to his caring for his three young children (now we got not only what KOK had for breakfast but also what each of his kids had!) is setting him up for a fall. There are a few ominous tones and hints; is everything OK w/ his relationship w/ wife, Linda? He is extremely patient as she goes off on a jaunt w/ some friends leaving him with all the kid-duties, but there's a sense that he's just barely got it in control and that he might explode at any time; ditto for Linda - their phone conversations when she's away are so bland, so restricted - checking up on the chores and things - that I begin to wonder whether she's going to make a break for freedom or for a new relationship. The other cloud on the horizon, so to speak, is the fact that, as all readers of reviews know, he will devote several hundred pp later in the novel to a biographical sketch of Hitler. What's that all about? KOK has said some highly politically incorrect things about the immigrant population in Sweden, but that doesn't make him a national-socialist, at least I hope not. What's the fascination w/ Hitler, and how does he pivot the narrative to lead to that weird digression. I'm uneasy.

Some points on Knausgaard's views on fiction

A few points on Karl Ove Knausgaard's thoughts on the process of writing fiction, which he raises in one of his many notable long asides/digressions at about p. 150 in Book 6: First, I was struck by his observation that when we are children we think our world comprises limitless, at least thousands, of people, but by midlife - he's at age 40 when writing this - we come to realize that there are only a few hundred people in our lives and that these hundreds have shaped everything about us. He has tried in My Struggle to incorporate all of the significant people in his life, and it's vital to him that he understand and communicate exactly how these others have shaped the life he is leading - some profoundly, some peripherally. His writing process, like that of all writers of what we now call "autofiction," involves the uncovering and breathing back into life of many memories and encounters, many from people quite distant from his present life. But he makes another observation: He was not aware, until actually fact-checking his first volume (in 2009) that all of these people whom he has summoned from his bank of memories, are completely reachable and accessible to him - just a phone call away, he notes (today, we would probably say just a few clicks away) - in fact he reached easily the love of his teenage years, who was delighted to hear from him and had followed his literary career. Second point, KOK writes at some length about what he calls the "Romantic I" as a narrator/author, and he correctly notes that, beginning with the Romantic era, i.e., early 19th century, writers began to strive for the individual and unique in their writing - to make their work distinctly and only their own (as opposed to working in a grand mimetic tradition). So it's vital to him that My Struggle maintain his voice (even though its style is not high-literary, w/ few metaphors, analogies, or purely atmospheric passages) and, a third point, that it remain precisely true to the facts as best he can recollect them. Is this, however, a mirror-trick of narration? If the facts are primary, why does he present this massive work as fiction? He obviously needs the leeway to invent - particularly regarding reconstructed dialog from decades ago. So it's the narrator of a novel who argues for the primacy of fact - but maybe this narrator has some distance from the author, who may not concur with this literary dicta. Fourth, KOK has been often criticized if not mocked for his fixation on detail - describing the oatmeal he eats on a give morning, for ex., like who cares? - and in Book 6 he goes even farther toward that extreme, w/ much minutia about his child-care activities. What is the point of this? I think, once again, he's trying to ground this novel in reality, in the facts, so as to give greater credence to his grander observations and more dramatic encounters and obsessions. But more of this to come.

African short story

Interesting and unusual short story - cattle praise song, by Rwandan/French writer Scholastique Mukasonga- not so much because any fantastic literary innovations or excellence of style and narrative but because SM provides insight into a culture and way of life that is on the periphery if anywhere at all for most western readers. SM describes in what I would call three "movements" the uprooting of the Rwandan Tutsi population during the territorial wars of - when? The 80s perhaps? - and the complete disruption of families, communities, and a way of life that had been intact for centuries. At the outset we see a community centered on the raising of cattle and built upon a worship of the cows and thei dairy produce - the story told by a man recalling his youth tending the family herd. In an abrupt break to the 2nd movement the family and its community are scratching out a living is a refugee settlement - now deprived of their herds yet retaining an ancestral reverence for the years of prosperity - completely scornful for ex of the family that has taken to raising goats for milk. In a short third and concluding movement the narrator gives a rapid-fire account of his life in exile - learning French, beginning a teaching career, sending home money to help his father buy a cow - and the sorrow that he lives w as one who has escaped the tormenting life of his childhood , the mixture of guilt and pride. As noted the story is not a great work of art in itself but CM does accomplish one of the key tenets of literature: giving us access to the mind and the experience of others. The story is bedecked w many phrases and words in the Tutsi language, I assume, which can seem a bit mannered and willfully exotic but the story will bring almost all New Yorker readers to a place they've never been and, as we see by the end of the narrative, to a vanished place and way of life where they will never go except through art.

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Knausgaard and nationalism

Anyone who's gone this far - to book 6 - in Karl Ove Lnausgaard's My Struggle has wrestled w what he could possibly have been thinking in echoing Hitler in the title of this masterwork, and up to this point he's given us little to go by on this point. About 150 pp in to book 6 , however, we connect again w his best friend, a Swedish writer/journalist, Geier, KOK 's confidant and support as he wrestles w his uncle's threat to block publication of the very novel we're reading. KOK and G engage in some discussion about their work and we learn, first, that G was the one who provided the title and, second, that KOK is already pondering a next work focused on Africa and on the strange European idea of Africa as a version of paradise - where this comes from - primitivism, cynicism, or racism - I have no idea - and that KOK is considering naming this planned novel The Third Realm an uneasy reference to the third Reich. Is KOK just taunting us w these titles, does he have a shade of fascism in his thinking, or his he being satiric or ironic and trying to arouse the ire of his own readers? There is little or no indication to this point of kok's views on any aspect of politics of current events but the title(s) cast a shadow over the whole enterprise. Is he so alienated and embittered as to flirt w or even adopt fascism in response to current unease - the unsettling nature of the waves of immigration changing Scandinavia, the hurt and rejection he has suffered in his life? It's no secret to any KOK reader that this final volume does include a lengthy section on the life of AH - but why? Why such a departure from a work of near-confessional autobiography? Why such a detour and diversion? It seems like this section - which I have not yet reached - might betray the honesty and insight of the entire work - a life of painful insight from a brave author who has, maybe?, unfolded and revealed his deepest secrets and the daily minutia of his life and, in the end, reached all the wrong conclusions.

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Knausgaard explains

About 100 pp in to book 6 of My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard explains his technique and his intentions as a writer. I'm not sure I understand all the nuances of his self-analysis but I get the essence. He is describing his intentions in Book 1, which focuses on his difficult relationship w his nearly abusive father, the unexpected torrents of emotion and sadness he feels on his father's death, and the sorrow and humiliation he feels when cleaning up the squalor in which his father lived and died. He reflects on this when faces w his uncle's threat to bring a lawsuit to prevent publication of the novel. KOK compares his writing on his father's death w a novel by Handke, on his mother's death by suicide. KOK says first he wants to be as accurate as possible - which is in part why his uncle's differing recollection upsets him as it call into question - his own question - his ability to recall accurately. Second he notes that his work differs from handke's in that he wants it to grip us emotionally- not just intellectually. And most important he notes that he almost entirely avoids literary artifact - metaphor, turns of phrase, and so forth. These techniques he says would be artificial and would distract from the topic and the central ideas. (All of this does make us wonder why he didn't call his work a memoir, as well as raises questions about book 6 - perhaps both books 1 and 6 are fictive accounts of his distress and of his thinking about his own work as a writer.) I can follow this far, but he goes further and talks about literature and fascism, w an implication that the artifice and subsequent mesmerizing effect of literary fiction is or at least can be an instrument of fascism. The idea it seems that his novel of truth offers the reader an integral authority of his or her own - that his own writing, so specific to his life experiences, is a open door through which readers can pass through at will and, in followed the course of his life can recognize and better understand their own.


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My Struggle and the threat of a libel suit

Why is Karl Ove Knausgaard so upset in My Struggle Book 6 about his uncle's threat to sue for libel if kok proceeds w plan to publish an account of his father (Uncle Gunnar's older brother) death in alcoholic squalor (and Gunnar's indifference)? In the US such a threat would be easily dismissed - a writer has a great deal of leeway in writing about his or her own family life,especially, as in this case , in which the author is willing to use pseudonyms. Of course the laws may be different in Scandinavia and may restrict writers' freedom and tilt toward the protection of the privacy for private citizens the laws are quite different into U.K. For ex. - but I don't think it's the threat of the suit tha stirs him so deeply - esp in that his publisher seems to be all in on moving forward. His extreme reaction to the threat I think stems from his lifetime quest to be recognized and accepted as a good son and as a good, ordinary person. We have seen this "Struggle" throughout the five volumes to date : his drive to be a great writer constantly at war w his deep need for acceptance and praise: recognition versus resolution we might say, a Struggle at the heart of the work of almost every writer. Why write? For both expiation and recognition- but the are like opposing polar forces, one a Struggle to become exceptional and the other to put to rest the unique experiences that formed - and often tormented - the experience of the writer's life.

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My Struggle Book 6 and the boundaries of autofiction

Karl Ove Knausgaard's monumental 6-book novel, My Struggle, takes a strange twist at the outset of book 6 as the novel seems to eat its own tail (tale?). As all know by now, this is a grand work of autofiction in which KOK recollects in sometimes excruciatingly minute detail the first 40 or so years of his life, with particular focus on his tortured relationship with his abusive, alcoholic father and on his "struggle" to become a writer and to fit in to his society (two conflicting forces). Strangely, the composition of this work and its publishing sequence, which began in 2009, has covered such a span of time that, by book 6, the "struggle" to publish books 1 and 2 has become part of the narrative of KOK's life. This volume opens w/ KOK living in Malmo w/ his (second) wife and their three young children, dividing the house and child-rearing chores, and KOK under great pressure to prepare the first books for release; as a courtesy, he notifies all the people from his family and his friendships who appear in the first volumes, offering to change their names and in other ways to conceal their identities - a pretty noble thing to do, and not standard practice in the U.S., w/ our constitutional guarantee of a freedom of expression, but a nice courtesy never the less. Most of his contacts have no problem w/ their portrayal, but his uncle - father's youngest brother - goes ballistic and threatens a lawsuit and pressures KOK's publisher, issuing a set of impossible demands that would quash the novel. First of all this makes us recall the portrayal of this uncle in Volume 1 - and to the best of my knowledge he was a nonentity who comes off somewhat poorly for his limited efforts to help clear up the mess left behind by his alcoholic brother, KOK's father, who died in squalor. In effect, this malevolent uncle has made himself more prominent in the novel that he would have been had he left all alone. Second, this whole episode leads us to ponder the very nature of fiction and memoir: Is the uncle a "real" person or a character in a novel? How much freedom does KOK have, and how much liberty does he take, in recalling the events of his life? the uncle's reaction occurs because he accepts this novel as a memoir, but what if it isn't a memoir? What if it's all, or mostly, fictive? What if the uncle himself is just a character, someone KOK has "made up"? Of course it doesn't feel that way to the reader - the characters and events feel entirely real to us - which of course is KOK's achievement: even the excruciating detail - what his kids eat for breakfast every morning, for example - which makes My Struggle too tedious for some readers - tends to bolster our confidence in the "reality" of this novel: who would "make up" such trivial detail, and why? It must be real.

Archipleago did nobody a favor by publishing a 1,500-page novel (My Struggle, Book 6)

I couldn't read Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, Book 6 - and that has nothing to do w/ KOK's writing. I couldn't read it because of the publisher's decision to publish Book 6 as a single bound volume. KOK has been a godsend for the publisher Archipelago, a nonprofit publishing venture that I would guess picked up English-language rights to My Struggle for a pittance, never dreaming that a 6-volume autofiction by a to-that-point unknown Norwegian, middle-aged, male writer could become a best selling literary phenomenon. Well, I've read through the first 5 volumes and am completely taken up by KOK's writing, insights, honesty, wit, and intelligence; My Struggle is really one of the great books of the century (so far). Each of the first five volumes was roughly 600 pp., pretty substantial, but completely captivating start to finish. Archipelago has done a handsome hardcover edition of each of the volumes; I really like their unusual, almost squared-up page format, 6" x 7 1/2" by my rough measure. And now here comes the concluding and much-anticipated Book 6, clocking in at 1150 pp. OK, I'm still up for reading it - but how could Archipelago possibly expect any reader to manage a single volume of that size (and shape): 4 inches thick, and weighing approximately 4 lbs. Sorry, my wrists literally cannot handle that. Why not publish Book 6 as two parts, issued simultaneously (as was common in the pre-paperback days and we still see occasionally for the pb editions of various Russian classics)? It's as if they're defying anyone to even attempt to read this novel - what a disservice to their prize author! (Admittedly, maybe something in the contract bound them to single-volume editions?) So I reverted to an ebook (I'd read one of the first 5 volumes by ebook as well) - thanks, Prime, for making it nearly impossible to download the complete book after reading the "sample" - and, yes, it's fine, and I'm OK w/ making notes and highlighting passages on the tablet - which of course I couldn't do at all w/ the library copy I had - and yes I am captivated once again and can hardly wait to get back to my reading. There will be enough days ahead to post on the contents of this novel, but had to give my rant here: Archipelago did nobody a favor by publishing an unreadable 1,500-page hardcover edition of this novel.

Key points about the academic satire Dear Committee Members

Finished reading Julie Schumacher's amusing academic satire, Dear Committee Members (2014), composed entirely of letters of recommendation from Professor Jason Fitger on behalf of various students and fellow academicians. The plot such as it is remains thin - we follow the upward or downward course of a few careers, notably a grad student whom JF is touting for fellowships, publication, and eventually for any sort of menial work or internship - but each of the letters is amusing and taken as whole the novel shows the absurdity of the recommendation process. JF, at the end, is something of a hero; I won't provide any spoilers here but suffice it to say that he takes on some responsibility for his beleaguered English department, he puts some of his own $ on the line for an unfortunate student, and he creates a scholarship fund whose awards will be based on student applications only, no letters of recommendation. Yet we're left w/ a bit of a queasy feeling. JF laments that his recommendations were unable to help deserving student, but in the end the whole academic system is based on pull, connections, favors earned and returned, without regard to the merits of the job/school/fellowship applicant. JF believes his top student should get these encomia based on his say-so, regardless of the (mediocre) quality of his work. All told, though, Schumacher does a great job w/ her many hilarious JF letters, almost all of which do manage to convey the essence of the applicant's merits while pleading the case for JF himself and for his under-financed English department - he seems indifferent to the harm his quirky and aggressive letters may do for deserving students and colleagues. It seems a pity that students have no access to the letters written on their behalf - JF, in his neediness and insecurity, is in many ways a malevolent mentor and a false friend.

You ask why I don't live here? - A satire on the types and gripes of academe

As I near the end of Julie Schumacher's academic satire, Dear Committee Members (2014) she does nudge the pathos up a notch or two, as we begin to see the emergence of a few secondary characters who will, sadly, be familiar types to those familiar with the academic world. Most notable is the emergence of the character (name I forgot, typical) who is completing a 500+-age updating of Bartleby and is touted by his academic advisor as the next great American avant-garde novelist. The novel - which is entirely composed of letters (or emails or electronic responses to sets of queries) of recommendation during one academic year from a writing professor (Jason or Jay Fitger - near-acronym for grief, let's note) - begins with a strong recommendation for a writing fellowship (something like a stay at McDowell or Yaddo). The young man is summarily rejected, and we learn that the turn-down is in part out of spite to JF (his ex-wife is the director). We trace over the time the pitiful demise of the young man, as we read recommendations for increasingly mind-numbing positions - working his way down to managing an RV park. Meanwhile, another student who has all the right charisma - good-looking, topical, etc. - gets a huge advance on her novel-memoir, and of course JR worries he won't get sufficient credit for advancing his career. The letters serve to eviscerate the whole academic system, but at the heart of course is Fitger, and by the half-way point of this book we cringe at the harm he is doing to so many innocent (if sometimes undeserving) aspirants and applicants: All of his letters are really about him and his malaise; he's entirely cynical about the process, surmising that his letters will make no difference either way, and he uses these letters as way to air his gripes, with the university administration, with his agent who's more or less abandoned him, with his two exes who have more or less surpassed him in their careers. One potentially interesting character on the sidelines is acknowledged star from Fitger's grad-school days (he seemingly was part of the Iowa workshop) who is now living off the grid and proceeding slowly with his possibly brilliant 2nd novel; JF seems unable to arouse interest in this guy or his work, either. Most of the letters are pretty nasty in tone, though in a few cases the applicant deserves the scorn, notably one unabashed plagiarist who has the gall to seek a recommendation anyway (she'll probably do OK thanks to her purse brashness). Anyone who's served time in academe will recognize many of the types and gripes, and will get the dark humor - this work must be very entertaining when presented at a reading - but there's a certain coldness at the heart. Characters in novels don't have to be "likable" (Raskolnikov, e.g.) but if they're not they have to evoke at least a modicum of sorrow and pity. I don't feel sorry for one wit for Fitger. (Note: One of JF's students is writing about Cather's The Professor's House, a much more humane, if dated, novel about academe; nice to see Schumacher give a shoutout to that near-forgotten work.)

An academic satire w/ a twist - Dear Committee Members

Another academic satire? Yes, but Julie Schumacher's Dear Committee Members (2014) has the unique twist of being composed entirely of a series of letters of recommendation from a creative-writing professor, most of them pretty funny, some a bit sad or pathetic. It's amazing the variations JS can produce on this theme, including a series of letters to a Yaddo-like retreat touting a grad student who's writing a 500-page contemporary take on Bartleby (his B works as a bookkeeper as a Nevada brothel), various letters to committees on which either or both of his ex-wives serve as members, recommendations for students he hardly knows and for students whom he dislikes, sad letters for a student seeking work in a catfish-canning factory (tough job market). The letters of course serve as a medium for the prof to kvetch about every type of higher-ed grievance and malfeasance, which of course has made this novel a bit of cult piece for academics and of limited interest to most others. Definitely the pro's letters are on the mark about many things - log-rolling, tedious committee work, ridiculous attempts to streamline the recommendation process that only make the process more cumbersome and inaccurate, lack of resources for the humanities, et al (part of the running gag is that the English department building is falling apart as the economics wing gets shored up). On the other hand, jit's hard not to think of the prof as a constant complainer and world-class kvetch who has one of the best jobs in the world and can only complain about the burdens imposed on him and how they pull him away from his writing. Yes, the academic world is unfair and rigged - I can attest that the profs most committed to their teaching inevitably get the short end and get called upon for all sorts of extra tasks and responsibilities while the shirkers are left alone to do with their time as they wish - but it's hard not to feel much sorrow and pity for this unhappy academic. We'll see if a narrative thread develops in the 2nd half of this work and if so where it leads us.

The significance of Kawabata's Thousand Cranes

Yasunari Kawabata's novel Thousand Cranes was published (in Japan) over a span of 3 years, 1949-52. It is the most deliberately old-fashioned novel I have ever read. The point of view seems to be that women exist in an entirely subservient role - the main function of the women in this novel is to preside over the ritualized process of Japanese tea service and to serve as go-betweens (yentles, if you will) in arranging marriages. The novel is somewhat forthright about sex - the (male) protagonist (Kukiju), a 20-something man whose parents are both dead and who seems to have plenty of money has sex with a 45-year-old woman, Mrs. Ota, formerly his father's mistress, and later w/ her daughter; in both instances, the women, consumed with guilt and remorse, kill themselves. His other potential match, a beautiful young woman of about his age, seems just to vanish when he balks at going through with the engagement process. Most of the action such as it is involves lengthy descriptions of the tea service, including much discussion about which pottery should be used in serving the tea; apparently Kukiju has some valuable antique pottery available. Toward the end, he smashes one of the bowls, and later he tries to fit the pieces together, but one is missing. For the most part this is an extremely subtle narrative, w/ little "action" in the foreground and lots of stirred up feeling and emotion left hinted at but unsaid. Still, it's a novel that could have been written in 1850, and for that matter could have been set in 1650, if we could just cut the few references to trains and telephones. It's astonishing that Kawabata could make no reference at all to postwar Japan - the American occupation, the guilt, the bombing and destruction, the difficult recovery - yet it's possible that this novel in its quiet and oblique manner refers to the destruction (the smashed antique tea bowl?) and looks back on a way of life that is doomed, much as, say, Gone with the Wind looked back w/ a false nostalgia on a way of life that deserved its eradication.

Thousand Cranes: A novel placid on the surface but teeming with passion beneath

Yasunari Kawabata's novel from the 1940s (I think; it was translated into English in the 1950s, and the volume I'm reading is amazingly unhelpful re original pub date) Thousand Cranes is on the surface a subtle, placid narrative that focuses on the Japanese tea ceremony: Could anything be less marketable or more alien to most non-Japanese readers? The ceremony, of which there are several over at least the first half of this short novel, involves many subtleties of decorum, decor, and behavior, all of which are deeply meaningful to the participants but completely obscure to most contemporary readers: the kind of bowl in which the tea is served, the protocol of giving a bowl as a gift, the type of tea, the seating, who pours the tea and when, the condition of the tea garden (or screened porch, it seems), the wall hangings, and so forth. But - beneath this subtle and obscure surface narrative there's quite a steamy plot "brewing," which teems with a soap-opera dosage of sexual rivalry, jealousy, attraction and repulsion, Oedipal urges, generational rivalry, courtship, guilt, and suicide, whew! As a brief summary (and I'm sorry that I can't recall the precise names of most characters), a young man (Kikuji) is invited to a tea ceremony at the home of a woman who was, briefly, his father's mistress and who has always repulsed him largely because of a birthmark on her breast; he knows that at this ceremony the woman is trying to introduce him to a potential match; he is annoyed at her forthrightness - he wants nothing to do w/ this woman who repulses him - but she's forward and, as it happens, the young man is attracted to the potential match (a young woman wearing a pink scarf adorned with the pattern of "thousand cranes"). But there's another group at the ceremony (the woman is an expert at tea ceremony and even gives lessons; oddly, the tea ceremony is actually considered a hobby), a mother (Mrs. Ota) and adult daughter - and the mother had also been the mistress of the man's father. Following the ceremony, he escorts the mother home, which leads to a night together and sexual relationships (she's 45 and he seems to be mid-20s); eventually, her guilt and her shame - especially because he never follows up - leads to the woman's suicide, and thus begins a series of discussions between the young man and the bereft daughter. Like the ceremony itself, novel is strange and ritualized, devoid of histrionics, but the calm surface covers deep and strange feelings and a complex network of inter-relationships. I would guess this novel has been adapted for film - probably a good one.

A mostly successsful story by Tony Early in current New Yorker

Tony Early has a compelling story, Back Pack, in the current New Yorker; for whatever flaws the story may evince, it at least has the virtue of being a strong narrative that will engage you right to the end. Throughout my reading of the story, I kept thinking, wondering, what is he doing this?, what will happen next. What happens (no spoilers): a 50ish, somewhat bookish and intellectual guy, living near Chapel Hill, makes a series of purchases in a # of stores, always paying w/ cash and destroying the receipts. Later, after his wife - a successful attorney - leaves for work he shaves his hair and beard and adopts a disguise and new identity, including a new name - Jimmy Ray Gallup, or some name like that, and buys a bus ticket to somewhere in the north. On the bus, a young woman with toddler in tow welcomes him to sit next to her, and events ensue. OK, so we really are trying to figure out what this guy is up to (not that hard to figure out, really) and, more important, why he has adopted this disguise and his seemingly happy home. I'm not sure Early really answers this question and I didn't buy into the way he has things clicking into place at the conclusion - as if Early himself didn't exactly know where to bring this story after he got it off to such a fine start - but it's a totally readable piece and in some ways a successful look into the mind of a man distressed.

Major themes in Kawabata's Snow Country

About 3/4 though reading Yasunari Kawabata's 1937 novel, Snow Country, and am still unsure how to interpret and what YK's attitude is toward the Geisha culture and the, today, obvious exploitation of young women. In this novel about a young man who hikes in the mountains of "snow country" (an equivalent in the U.S. to the White or Green mountains, for ex.) and then stays in a country inn where he expects and receives the services of a young Geisha (in this case, a Geisha in training no less, only 20 years old at the most). YK has a few moments when he shows us or hints at the hardships that the Geishas endure: working so as to pay the medical bills of a mortally ill fiance or family member, working under 4-year contracts that are as binding as indentured servitude, the need to accommodate all sorts of travelers, many of whom must be complete boors or worse, and added to that, for those women who cannot or will not endure those dangers, hardships, and humiliations, we see a sign posted at a rice field offering daily wages for rice harvesters, w/ women receiving 40% less than the male laborers. So at times this seems like a expose of a brutal system, but what about his central characters, Shimamura? He is a man of privilege (doesn't have to work for a living, is kind of an aesthete), who hires the Geisha in training, Komako, and doesn't think or blink at all about her situation in life; she's so desperate and troubled that she gets blind-and-staggering drunk several times in his company - and what does that bode for her future? But all S can do is say, yes, I'll see you same time next year. He imagines, and YK seems to endorse this view, that she can be in love w/ him and will wait for him and remember him and greet him w/ joy and pleasure each time he returns to the inn. More realistically: She would have dozens of "customers" and would feed them all the same line, to make each feel that he's special (modern-day similarity: the programmed voice of a girlfriend in the movie Her). He can offer her nothing special, not even marriage (he's already married!, though YK mentions this only in passing, as an irrelevant detail). So to make this a truly pointed and sociopolitical novel, Shimamura would have to get what he deserves, something would have to awake in him a sense of responsibility for his own cruelty and for his participation in this corrupt system. YK's failure, so far, to turn on his lead character makes this novel feel strangely cold and indifferent - though of course that may be the point: YK avoids the polemical and crafts a "cool" novel (qv McLuhan) so as to draw us in and arouse our anger.