Why Zola's Therese Raquin was shocking in its day

It's easy to see why Emile Zola's 3rd novel, Therese Raquin (1867), was shocking and repulsive and condemned by so many critics and reviewers in its day - so repulsive that the first full published version (it initially ran in serial form, like most novels in the 19th century) omitted several passages and, apparently, one full chapter - the Paris morgue scene. I was not surprised about that, either - in fact, it was one of the passages I was going to cite as particularly powerful (as well as repulsive - rivaling anything in Poe or Lovecraft). But aside from the graphic descriptions of corpses, festering wounds, violent struggles to the death, the novel is an extraordinarily dark account of Parisian life; Zola makes Paris seem like a dismal, putrid city. Most of the book is set on the Ponte Neuf, today a beautiful spot that tourists visit (the oldest bridge across the Seine) but then an arcade-like marketplace - much like today's bridges in Florence perhaps - but a place that's gloomy, crowded, and noxious. Over the course of the novel we see the central couple - TR and Laurant - plot their crime, the murder of TR's husband (and cousin), and then suffer from the guilt, shame, and remorse, until their demise. On the simplest level it's a "crime doesn't pay" novel, as the couple is so torn by guilt and fear that they can never love one another. Of course they never would have been in this quandary had Madame Raquin not been such a controlling and domineering woman - arranging the most inappropriate and loveless marriage between her sickly son, Camille, and TR, her niece/his cousin. It's a novel of two people spiraling toward their inevitable doom - right to the end the comparisons w/ Madame Bovary hold up and make sense, though this novel is not really on the level of Flaubert: It's a little too mechanistic for that, and devoid of the beautiful passages that make the final tragedy all the more poignant and painful. TR probably does serve as a good example of 19th-century realism, esp. insofar as "realism" is associated with the life impoverishment and criminality, in contrast w/ most popular fiction of the era, which was genteel and largely focused on the lives of the wealthy and privileged. (The exceptions to this generalization are the greatest of writers of the century, of course: Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Hardy, Flaubert of course ... ) Zola has the "last laugh," so to speak - as his novel remains in print and has a 2nd life as well on screen.

Zola and naturalism v realism, and two dystopian short stories

Catching up on some recent reading: I've been moving along through Emile Zola's 1867 novel (his 3rd, I think), Therese Raquin (oddly, published as a movie tie-in a few years ago under the title In Secret). Zola is known primarily as a writer in the "realist" tradition, with a deep interest in the social and political issues of his day - his most famous novel being Germinal, about a coal-miners' strike, and for J'Accuse, about the Dreyfus case. TR, however, feels more in the "naturalist" tradition, a portrayal in depth of one or more protagonists through examination of their interior lives as they develop and evolve over a course of time. We can see TR as a clear descendant of Madame Bovary; its eponymous protagonist, like Emma Bovary, is a woman trapped in marriage to a listless, feckless man, dreaming of a greater and more meaningful and sexual relationship, such as the ones she reads about in romance novels. The essence of the plot: TR and her husband's friend and co-worker, Laurent, plot to murder TR's husband, Camille, to clear the way for them to marry - all with dire and unforeseen consequences. The plotline has, as well, some similarities to the nearly simultaneous work, Crime and Punishment, at least insofar as it examines the psychological state of criminals who, nearly, get away with the crime. I'll post further on this novel after I finish reading it, probably tomorrow.

The current New Yorker issue is made up primarily or previously published pieces, including a story from the great George Saunders, I Can Speak(TM). I don't recall this story though I've probably read it before (it ran in the magazine in 1999); it's a typically frightening GS work looking at the absurdities of social - and corporate - behavior: composed as a letter from a corporate sales officer to a disgruntled customer regarding the new line of a product, a mesh-like mask that infants wear that "speaks" for them in supposedly amusing sentences and phrases and makes the child seem to be precocious. We may now - 20 years after the publication of the story - be closer than ever imagined to this kind of bizarre product, if not linked to babies' faces at least easily present before us in many photo apps and on social media. Scary.

Ditto for the story The Era, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. It was clear as I was reading this story, the first in the alphabetically arranged selections in The Best American Short Stories 2019, that this piece owes a huge debt to Saunders, and I was not at all suprised to see that NKA-B has studied at Syracuse, where GS teaches. The story is about some sort of future state in which children are controlled and motivated by injection of a substance called The Good, with particular focus on a teenager who seems to have what today we'd call autism or Asperger's syndrome. The story, like the GS story noted above, is dystopian and somewhat frightening, though so far off on its own spectrum that we think more about the writer - how could he imagine all of this? - and less about the likelihood of these conditions manifesting themselves in our lifetimes, or ever.

An excellent coming-of-age novel from Edna O'Brien

The Country Girls (1960) is the first volume of Edna O'Brien's trilogy, itself called The Country Girls, about a coming-of-age in Ireland in what looks to be the 1940s and 50s. It's an accessible and relatively short novel, which I belief was considered scandalous in its time - though definitely not so by whatever standards remain today. This novel, O'Brien's first, has the feeling of a memoir, although EO'B makes no such direct claims - and in fact writing it as a novel gives her some freedom of movement that writin a memoir would deny her. EO'B is today in her 80s and still writing regularly, including a recent novel for which she traveled to Africa to do first-hand research on the women in Nigeria captured into slavery. Good for her! As to Country Girls, it follows closely the life of a woman, Caithleen Brady, from about age 14 to 18. She lives in a small, rural town in Ireland near Limerick, and at the see she's in a family struggling w/ poverty, mainly because of her father's severe alcoholism. Her mother dies in a drowning accident, which is never completely explained (her body never recovered), and her father loses most of the family property through his drinking and gambling. Caithleen goes off to a convent school (on scholarship) w/ her best friend, the wealthier, more sophisticated, and more rebellious friend, Baba. Over the course of time, Caithleen attracts the attention of a wealthy married man in the town referred to always as The Gentleman, or Mr. Gentleman (EO'B does give his name, which is French and apparently hard for the Irish to pronounce). This relationship lies at the heart of the novel; he's a horrible man, flirting with a teenage girl and luring her into a sexual relationship (which EO'B treats lightly and with indirection - amazing that this was considered scandalous not all that long ago). Typical of a predator's behavior, he latches on to the most vulnerable of girls - the one w/out a family (a father in particular) to protect her in any way. Over time, the two "country girls" manage to get themselves kicked out of the convent school, which they hate, and they move to Dublin, where Baba takes up w/ a married man (Caithleen is repulsed by the married man w/ whom Baba tries to set her up) and there Mr Gentleman returns to Caithleen's life; they make plans to run away together, to somewhere in Europe, but as all readers can figure out, this plan will go nowhere and Caithleen will be left humiliated and in despair. Her story will continue in volume two, The Lonely Girl.

Thoughts on Clarice Lispector's final published work

The 77-page novel (call it a "novella" if you wish), The Hour of the Star, is the final work from Brazilian novelist and short-story writer Clarice Lispector, published in the the the year of her death, 1977, at age 57, now published by New Directions in a new tr. by Benjamin Moser. I wouldn't claim that this is a great work, but it's unusual and sorrowful and worth reading, though probably not the best place to start on Lispector (I haven't read a lot of her works, but would suggest starting w/ her short stories). This novel tells of the life and (possible - the ending is deliberately ambiguous) of a woman from an impoverished background in northern Brazil who settles in to Rio where she lives in cheap housing shared w/ 4 other women (we learn nothing about them in this book), works in an office setting at "below minimum wage" (hard to explain that one), and seems content with her lonely life - until she meets a young man who she falls in love w/ and then loses to a friend of hers who's much more sensual, sexual, and experienced. A typical story of love lost, in other words, except for a few key elements. First, there are strange ways in which this woman, Macabea, mirrors CL's life: both born in NE Brazil and settled into life in Rio, both seemingly of Jewish descent (CL is from a Jewish family; her character bears a name that recalls the Maccabees, though nothing is made of this fact in this novel). Yet of course the 2 are diametrically opposed as well: an urban, literary sophisticate compared with uneducated and not especially bright or curious figure. Also, CL's work is a relatively early example of postmodern narrative - at that time less central to Latin American literature, which was then focused on "magic realism" (in the wake of Garcia Marquez) or just plain magic (in the wake of Borges). CL imagines a narrator - a male one, for some reason - who intrudes at various points in the story he's writing/telling: at one point, for example, stepping aside and saying this story is too sad and demanding and he has to take a break from his writing for a few days; then, resumes the narration - 3 days later, he notes - in the next paragraph - so we are seeing not exactly a story but the creation of a story. Similarly, he wrestles, especially toward the end, w/ various plot points. And finally, it's obvious that CL was aware of her own mortality while writing this novel, which includes many speculations on the experience of death, especially death foretold by a fortune-teller; knowing, as we now do, that this was to be her last work published in her lifetime, there's a special poignancy to reading about a character so unlike the author but similarly on the verge of death: after a character in a novel dies, what's left of them? And what of an author?

The close of the 10th year of Elliot's Reading

Today's post marks the close of the 10th year of Elliot's Reading. I have now posted on this blog an entry per day for the past 3,653 days (a few Leap Years in there).

When I started keeping this blog, in December 2009, I was in the midst of reading War and Peace. My stated goal was to keep a daily record of what I'm reading and what I'm thinking about what I'm reading.

What I've learned from this 10-year project: The commitment to post every day has made me a much more attentive and thoughtful reader; I can never read just a few pages and forget about them until the next time I pick up the book or magazine - I'm always thinking about the work in hand and what I'll say about it when I get back to this blog.

This project has also steered my reading toward top-flight literary fiction; I've been reluctant to sidestep onto books about which I suspect I'd have little to say. I've gone down many strange and sinuous passageways, as I've turned, especially in recent years, more toward world fiction and toward long-forgotten novels - though I have also, a few times a year, gone back to classic works I'd read many years before. I'm amazed, when I do so, how little I remember from previous readings and how much better (I think) I understand these works coming back to them from a different perspective and a different phase in my life.

It's also been troubling to me how quickly I forget some of what I've read; I frequently come across a mention of a novel that sounds like it might be pretty good and when check I'll see that I in fact read (and posted on) that book - sometimes only a year ago. It's been useful to me to have a record of my thoughts, however, humbling as it may be to look back on what I'd so quickly forgotten.

It's also a little sad to see the declining viewership for this blog; keeping the blog has been great for my own development as a reader, but I had hoped that this blog my lead to more dialog and discussion among a circle of readers, however wide. Sadly, the day of the blog has passed, replaced by the more instant gratification of social media. Viewership on this blog has declined from at least 250 per day to a few dozen a day, if that - and comments on the blog are almost nonexistent. Most viewers probably see the blog on a phone; to see the full blog where all posts are accessible and arranged alphabetically by author, see the blog via its web address, elliotsreading@blogspot.com (or search elliots reading) or by clicking "see web version" at the bottom of the screen when the blog appears on your phone.

Having reached this 10-year-mark, I think it's time to take a break from the daily posting obligation - because at times it feels like like exactly that, an obligation, like a burden I'm carrying on my back. I'm not giving up this blog, but I will no longer necessarily post every day. I will, however, try to post at least once on every book I'm reading or have finished reading.

Thanks for your support on this 10-year project!

Why I'm putting aside The Stories of Alice Adams

I'm about 40% (250 pp) along in The Stories of Alice Adams (posthumously published by Knopf, 2002) and will return it to the library today - not because the stories are bad but because they are good. Yet they are good within a very narrow range - pretty much centered on the same kind of characters (the professional class living in the Bay Area from what I'd say is the 50s through the 890s? - with their defining characteristic being infidelity - almost every story involves at least one broken marriage), unadorned in style, not in the least experimental, but just within the worthy tradition of naturalism in fiction, a style championed by the New Yorker at least until the end of the century. But that said I feel it does the stories a disservice to read them (53 in this collection) straight through - what should feel fresh and insightful begins to feel repetitious and overdone. So I may return to this volume later, but have read enough for now (and thanks a lot Knopf for providing these stories with no context whatsoever; would it have killed you to at least indicate the date of publication?). No, AA does not rise to the level of her NYer successors such as Alice Munro, William Trevor, or Tessa Hadley; AA does a great job setting up the stories, sketching in character background, building the narrative through action and dialog, but she is much weaker at concluding these stories, which rarely if ever conclude with a gut-punch or an a-ha moment. For ex., the 3 stories I read yesterday: One (At the Beach) concerns a handsome elderly couple at a Mexican resort; during their stay the woman has what seems like an appendix attack; dr. comes, proscribes some Rx., end of story. In another (Truth or Consequences - nice title!) a woman reads news item one a guy she knew back in h.s. marrying a celebrity - at least she thinks it's the guy she knew - which leads to her recollections about this man in his youth but leaves us with no surprising insights. In Legends we get a long story - perhaps the longest in this book (20+ pp) in which a woman tells an interviewer (and recollects for herself) her long romantic/sexual relationship with her late neighbor, a well-know composer - but again we don't get much info at the end beyond what we learned in the set-up 20 pages back. Still, each story vividly presents its setting and its characters, without fuss or flourish; all told, AA would have been better served had there been a late-life collection of 15 of her best stories.

The conclusions of some Alice Adams stories

Alice Adams's short stories - 53 of which are included in The Stories of Alice Adams, published 3 years after her death, in 2002 - cover a lot of the same ground, as I have in these posts: most of the stores are set in the SF Bay area, often about women raised in the South, and pretty much all of them are about marital infidelity in one form or another, and often about heavy consumption of alcohol (especially be the Southern parents) and, to a lesser extent, consumption of light hallucinogens, usually by the children. The protagonists, almost all of them white women of the professional class, are caught in them middle: not bound by the vows of fidelity but not ready to throw off all social mores. It would be easy to dismiss her stories as too concerned w/ what today (not in her day) we'd call "first-world problems." Generally, her characters are not in any desperate circumstance, sometimes they're quite comfortable, though they're, rightly, consumed by anxiety - especially the women who are dependent on their husbands as "providers." One typical story, Lost Luggage, is about a newly widowed woman who's concerned about how she can maintain her lifestyle; an airline loses he luggage on a return trip from Mexico, and she's most distressed about a notebook she'd been keeping, something like a diary. The story concludes w/ her vowing to continue writing, and getting pleasure from doing so. Another is about a woman concerned that her father's surviving spouse is putting the family house in the Berkeley Hills up for sale; she takes a look at the house, thinking of buying it herself (it's hilarious that she thought the house was worth $200k and it's on sale for half that because of its poor condition - just imagine its value today!) but after viewing it she decides she doesn't want it after all. I could go on - but one thing that does trouble me about these stories is that they tend to conclude in a soft manner, w/ the women starting afresh, off on their new life course. To me the more powerful stories in the collection provide a surprise, or a dramatic moment, at the conclusion - such as one in which the protagonist calls the man w/ whom she'd had a summer affair and he answers the phone and says in a loud voice: You must have the wrong #. That one hit me - and I wish she'd ended the Berkeley Hills story w/ something as emphatic as that, perhaps the woman saying bluntly: I don't need this crappy house! - really throwing off her past in a definitive manner.

A challenging, complex story in current New Yorker:: Sevastopol

Short story in current New Yorker - Sevastopol, by Brzilian writer Emilio Fariai (his first in the NYer?) - is in the 2nd-wave Latin American tradition of Bolano et al., a somewhat challenging work focused on the arts rather than on politics or family or history; it's narrated by a 20-somethng woman (a bit unusual there - you don't find too many successful works by men written in the voice of a woman narrator) recenlty out of college and hoping for some kind of career in the arts. She is befriended by a 60-something theater director, at one time well known or at least a promising new talent but at this point obviously way beyond his prime: drug and alcohol soaked, working for nothing but the hope of box-office fees, writing a play that, it's obvious to all readers (though not to the narrator) that will surely flop. The narrator, taken on as an assistant by the director, is at work on a story, which she summarizes and which goes through three permutations (complete re-writes in fact) over the course of this story. It's somewhat difficult to pick up on a theme in the midst of these strands, but here goes: The director is developing play based on a (fictional) 19th-century artist who is working on depicting a battleground - though he does not (unlike, say, the U.S. Civil War photographers) go to the scene; rather, he re-creates the work from his imagination, in studio. There is a sense that the playwright, too, has avoided the battles and trauma of his continent in his experimental, and failed, theater exercises. As to the narrator's story, the one threat tying the 3 "versions" together is the opening moment of the story - a woman peering down from a tower or tall apartment building on a man who is waiting down on the street level with some kind of message for her (in one version they are lovers, in another she doesn't know him at all, and so forth) - so, again, there's a theme of the narrator being removed from the story, the family, the locale that she is trying to capture in her writing. In a sense, this is a story, then, about the disengaged, about the failure of art in abstraction, about dead ends: the playwright has reached his dead end, and, as he breaks from the young author, there's a hope that she will, on her own, find her voice and direction. (The title has little directly to do w/ the story line - but the story opens as a narrator receives a post card from the playwright, w/ a picture of Sevastopol on the face side and on the obverse a note that they have lots of work ahead of them: Yes, they do, but not together and not about someplace far away.)

Should Alice Adams stories be adapted for film?

Each of the Alice Adams stories I've read - the first 12 in her posthumous collection, The Stories of Alice Adams - could be an outline for a novel. It's amazing how much information she can get across in these short pieces: The complex back-story of many of the characters, some kind of meeting or event (often a dinner or "cocktail" party), a crisis the protagonist faces, usually a strong image at the end. Should they be adapted for film, though? Probably not - if the short-story length is ass that is needed, then that's where the process should end - movies or novels would be so much extra weight. That said, there's a lot of common ground in these stories - or, put another way, the locus of her stories is insular and repetitious: Almost all involve a set of wealthy, professional-class, often artistic couples, usually in the SF Bay Area, who are both victims of and complicit marital infidelities, with children, often adult children, pushed to the side and bearing in the scars. I have no idea to what extent if any these pieces are autobiographical, other than that all stories are autobiographical on some level, but the constant resort to the same social milieu suggests AA's template is her own life; she came before the age of autofiction, but I suspect she would have been damn good at that. Some of the stories involve characters who have left the South for college and beyond, but the Southern upbringing is a recurring theme: many references to Southern manners and to lots of drinking. Only one story, the first in this collection though I have no idea when AA wrote it, takes on the issue of race directly (it's about wealthy Southerners and "the help," about whom they are cruelly indifferent). All told, AA has a distinct world view, and little hope for any long-term love relationship, unless perhaps it's preserved in alcohol.

Alice Adams: Overlooked or over-praised?

Little read today, Alice Adams was one of the premiere story writers of her time; she died in 1999 in her 70s and published over her career +25 stories in the New Yorker and won numerous O.Henry awards and others. But she's seldom if ever mentioned among the great American writers of the 20th century. Has she been overlooked, or was she over-praised in her day? I recently came across an article or review that mentioned her work and thought I'd follow the lead: My library had on shelf at least a dozen of her works, testimony to her popularity at one time and her obscurity today. Recognizing that her stories are considered her best work, I icked up The Stories of Alice Adams, a 2002 posthumous publication from Knopf, then and now a top-drawer literary publisher. A few observations, then, based on the first six stories (of the 53 in this book): First off, what a crappy publishing job by Knopf! There's no sense of her total output of stories, no indication of original publication of any of the stories, no intro or afterward, and, worst of all, no information on date of publication or composition. Are the stories arranged chronologically? Or by some other method? Who knows? But it makes if impossible to read through these stories and get any sense of AA's development as a writer. The first story is set on a wealthy Southern manor house, seeming to be in about the 1940s, and it's a really good piece (Verlie I Say Unto You) that gives a sense of a white family willfully oblivious to the lives and struggles of their "servants." It's also completely different from the next 5 stories, so I don't know what to make of it: One of her earliest stories? A style and setting she later abandoned? Or a one-off that the editor put first because of its emotional and sociological power? In any event, the next 5 stories are, I think, much more typical of AA's writing: Set in San Francisco for the most part (that was her home town), generally among the wealthy professional classes, each one involving doomed doomed or failed relationships: a squabbling couple on a getaway, a woman with a serious alcohol problem who has a meet-up with a college boyfriend from her youth, two brothers whose differing life courses - one is a successful lawyer and the other a literary dilettante, living off family fortune - are perhaps not so far apart as they seem. In many way, her characters are much like the readers in her day most likely to come across these stories in the New Yorker. There is nothing in the least formally inventive in these pieces - she's completely removed from the postmodern movement and even of the "modern" short stories of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Woolf, et al. Yet for all that, they're entirely readable and perfectly accomplish their goals, with minimal fuss and confusion. She's no Alice Munro - who in many ways was the next-generation version of AA - but worth a deeper and longer look at her work.

Another strange story - told in a single 76-page sentence - by a Hungarian writer

Like most books from the estimable New Directions and like most works in English by Eastern European writers (Hungarian in this case), the 3rd story in the Laszlo Krasznahorkai triptych, The Lost Wolfe (2009) is an adventure in narrative technique. The 76-page story (granted, the pages are small in this pocket-sized publication, so probably translates to about 40 pp) is told in a single sentence with no paragraph or space breaks. It's not hard to follow, however, and here's where it gets you: The narrator, living in Germany, probably Berlin, in a "mixed" neighborhood, that is, w/ many Kurdish and Turkish residents, has little or no career or occupation. He spends a large part of each day in a cafe whose name translates as the Piggy Bank, where he nurses one or two beers and, sometimes, speaks to the Hungarian bartender. This entire story is told to the bartender. The narrator explains that he at one time was a prominent philosopher but has not been able to write or teach for many years; a letter arrives inviting him to speak at a conference in Spain. After some trepidation - was it really meant for him? - he accepts the invitation. In Spain, with the aid of supplied driver and translator, he embarks on some research - that was part of the deal on the grant - which leads him to try to find the man who allegedly shot and killed the "last wolf" in this region of Spain. In doing so, he learns that many of the claimants to this title are dubious, and in fact there may still be wolves in the forests of this remote Spanish region. That's it! Aside from the narrative tightrope-walking, there's not a whole lot to recommend this story - which does make a strange closed set w/ the two other stories in this volume, both of which are about forest wardens and game keepers, for some reason - a reason that I cannot fathom.

Two strange stories - actually two versions of the same story, from a Hungarian writer

Another weird little book from New Directions consists of 3 stories by the Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai (you can bet I had to look that up!) - held one way the book contains two versions of a story, Herman (1986) and if you flip to the "back" cover and turn the book upside down it consists of another story (which I haven't read yet) from much later in LK's career - clever device, though I'm not sure of the purpose other than to draw attention (which is OK - this book will never be a best-seller, trust me). The two Herman stories are excellent, though: In the first "version," set in a rural area of, presumable, Hungary, the elders of a community hire the eponymous Herman, a retired game warden, to clean up a neglected forest over-run by vegetation and feral animals. Herman, w/ great, even eccentric, pride in his craft, spends a few years clearing up the forest and clearing out the invasive species - using mostly hand-made traps and great ingenuity. At some point he becomes distressed about the animals that suffer in the traps and develops a method of quick execution to spare them prolonged pain. Gradually, he comes to think that it's wrong to get rid of these mostly harmless animals and he lets the forest go again to weeds. Then he comes to think that people themselves are the invaders and sets up traps to capture and injure people who wander into the forest; these work, and authorities, not suspecting Herman, come after the perpetrator - with tragic results. In the 2nd "version," a group of 7 young people, vaguely defined as "officers," go on a vacation together near a forest (obviously the same location), during which they quite flagrantly engage in sex w/ one another in various semi-public locales. They are, ha!, made to feel unwelcome in this village and in fact are warned about the dangers of entering the forest, as people have been known to be capture and injured by various traps; the group of "officers" join the townspeople in the search for the person setting these lethal traps, which finally leads to a priest discovering a large trap set in the center aisle of his church. Yes, strange, even surreal stories, told in a straightforward, naturalistic manner, these pieces owe a debt to Kafka and Borges for sure,and their meaning such as it is remains elusive - though LK is surely playing with the boundaries between guilt and innocence, between social convention and community obligation.

Pessoa

I read further yesterday in Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, enough to appreciate his achievement - an incredibly record of the course of his adult life - about 20 years - of all his thoughts, fears, and obsessions. The book as noted yesterday is more like a long prose poem - and is definitely not a novel. It's pointless to read it straight through , but for fans of Pessoa it would make sense to have this at bedside to check in from time to time on his thoughts and ideas. The book is full of aphorisms, many depressing and wrought w loneliness: To love is merely to grow tired of being alone. Or: Any interest others take in us is a grave indelicate. The book is divided into 2 sections and from what I read in the second half - composed when FP was in his 50s - the writing is more grounded in a sense of place, w loving descriptions of Lisbon, longer entries (the book consists of +400 entries), and fewer pronouncements and aphorisms. I'll end w this quote tho: I write like someone asleep, and my whole life is like a receipt awaiting a signature.

Sent from my iPhone

How to read and how not to read Pessoa's Book of Disquiet

First of all, Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet (tr. Margaret Jull Costa), though hard to classify, is surely not a novel - I would call it a book-length prose poem. Its history is strange: Apparently Pessoa began writing this work in a series of scraps, almost like daily diary entries, each on a separate piece of paper, and he stashed these scraps away in a trunk or suitcase. The first - among with I read yesterday - were written in 1913, when he was in his 20s; the last in the year of his death (1935) when he was in his 40s. They were published posthumously, and the various editions differ from one another, as there are a million editorial decisions to make about order of composition. All that said, what I read yesterday - about 50 pp or about 10 percent of the work - was quite strange and unusual and sometimes difficult to comprehend. The overall mood is one of extreme self-effacement and yearning for a distant and inaccessible romantic ideal - pretty familiar stuff in the poetry of a lonely, bookish 25-year-old. It seems obvious today that the inaccessible ideal is a man, not a woman, which explains in part F'P's overwhelming guilt and need for secrecy and reluctance to publish his work. It was difficult enough to write about homosexual themes in the early 20th century - see the vast circumlocutions of Proust. the long silence of Forster, the fate of Wilde - and then imagine how much more difficult it would be to defy this taboo in the highly repressive climate of Portugal. I doubt I'll finish reading this book; it's clearly not meant to be read straight through as one would read a novel - there's no plot, no characters, no story arc - it's more like a series of meditations, many - most - of them strange and beautiful. I have opened to a page at random from among those I read yesterday and here's a quote, which is the best way to give a sense of FP's writing and his struggle: "So why am I writing this book? Because I recognize that it is imperfect. Were I to dream it, it would be perfection; the mere fact of writing makes it imperfect, which is why I am writing it."

The 10 most disappointing books I read (or started to read) in 2019

Given that there are thousands, actually millions, of books out there to read and to re-read, I'm selective about those that I choose to take on during my time on Earth - and I'm totally willing to stop reading a book that's going nowhere or doing nothing for me, at least after giving it a fair shot (my rule of thumb: 10 percent, 100 pp., or 50 percent - as markers where I assess the book and where I'm willing to give up on what I've begun). With that in mind, here are the 10 most disappointing books (literary fiction) that I read, or started to read, in 2019, arranged alphabetically by author:

Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes (1936). Honestly I see no reason to read any further (little more than halfway through, about 90 pp.) in Nightwood, a cult novel much admired by avant-garde readers and writers, at least in the 60s and 70s, but today just a weird curiosity, one of those peculiarities that once seemed ahead of its time and now seems behind the times, without ever quite pausing in the middle.

The Spirit of Science Fiction, by Roberto Bolano (2016). Bolano's posthumously published book doesn't really come to any conclusion, just sputters to a stop. A beautiful chapter toward the end of this novel, which shows us how great Bolano could be at his best, makes us sad that he died, too young, in 2005. I in no way blame his family for trying to publish as much of his work as possible, both for his literary legacy and to draw some income from his estate. But it's also clear that it's wrong to put forward a manuscript like this as a completed novel. It's not.

John Buchan, The Thirty-nine Steps (1915). Though it may be entertaining up to a point, I stopped reading John Buchan's novel at about the half-way mark because I just couldn't care less about what happens to the narrator. The novel is full - too full - of ridiculous escapes and the most improbable encounters with friends and enemies. Ultimately, you either go along for the ride knowing this adventure is impossible except in a cheap novel or on film (Hitchcock's loose adaptation is terrific!) or you move on, as I did.

Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery (2010). I was completely lost in the arcana of who's supporting whom and why in the battles for Italian nationhood, so I just had throw up my hands in exasperation and say: Who reads this, other than reviewers paid to do so? Eco's novel is so demanding and so nearly incomprehensible that it does nothing for me other than to prove that Eco was really intelligent and learned. Fine. Got the point.

Kim, by Rudyard Kipling (1901). Spurred by a review in the New Yorker that called the novel the ancestor of today's spy novels, I began reading Kim and  read about 1/3 of it and that was enough: Kim is not a spy novel in any sense that we might recognize the genre today. Kipling's writing is antiquated and far beyond quaint, full of overwritten passages, clumsy attempts at vernacular dialogue, and lots of pasted-on exoticism. Kipling is known today and largely ignored because of his colonial, Eurocentric vision; this novel will do nothing to change one's opinion on that score.

Your Face Tomorrow, volume 1 (Fever and Spear), by Javier Marais (2002). Seldom (never?) has such fine writing and such fascinating info (about the international espionage business) been put to waste by such a lame excuse for a plot. After 380 pp., nothing has actually happened to the narrator - though we sure get a lot of discussion and pontificating, especially by his Oxford-donnish mentor. But there's little at this point to make me want to read volume 2.

Arturo's Island, by Elsa Morante (1957). Sorry to say that 100 pages in (about 1/3) I gave up on Arturo's Island, supposedly a classic work by a well-respected Italian author, the "namesake" of the even more famous Elena Ferrante - but there are so many things that have troubled me about the first third of this novel, notably the mean-spirited contempt for women on the part of all of the major characters and a father who criminally neglects and care for and education of his child (Arturo), that I just couldn't go on.

The Sea, the Sea, by Iris Murdoch (1978). Murdoch's interminable novel is as bad as I'd feared; I continued reading for a 3rd day, hoping this novel would get off the ground, and as I moved into the 2nd section - History One - it was more of the same: Desultory reminiscence by the tedious narrator,about the many love affairs in his life.No man could get away with creating such a misogynist and morally obtuse character, nor should a woman for that matter. Obviously this novel won a Booker Prize in recognition of Murdoch's long career without one.

The Overstory, by Richard Powers (2019), winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. I stopped reading Richard Powers's The Overstory, at about 1/4 in (+100 pp.). I'm sure there's a lot more I could learn about trees were I to finish reading this novel, but I'd rather spend some time among trees or read a nature handbook - and when I'm reading a novel please let it be a novel, replete with fully developed characters who interact with one another in intriguing and sometimes surprising ways. Powers's heart is surely in the right place - who's gonna argue against trees, for God's sake? - and his mind is as acute and copious as ever, but I wish he'd written a pamphlet or a tract.

Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk (2007), winner of a 2019 Nobel Prize; Flights won the International Booker Prize. This "novel" is made up of narratives of various lengths that may, as a whole, constitute a long narrative (400+ pp) about time, space, distance, and dislocation, but to me this work reads like a writer's notebook, full of potential material none of which is assimilated, organized, or resolved. Maybe things cohere in the next 300 pages of the journey - please let me know, because I got off at this next station.

The 10 best classic novels I read in 2019

Most of my reading in 2019 has been among literary fiction from past years, so today I'm posting on the best books I read this year from among the classics (see my post from two days ago for my list of the 5 best contemporary novels I read this year). Here is the list, of the 10 best classic novels I read this year, in order of publication:

Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens (1857): Bleak House may be the more popular among Dickens's late, long novels (and Great Expectations is more popular than either), but Little Dorrit has some terrific comic pieces and character sketches as well as a powerful take-down of the inefficiencies and cronyism in English government and of the corruption of the financial system.

Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866): I don't know how many times one can re-read this novel (this was my 3rd reading), knowing full well the outcome from the start, but it seems to me that every reading brings new understanding and appreciation, not only for some of the greatest scenes in literature but for insight into our present state.

The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett (1896): However you classify this work - memoir, short stories, novel - even a century later it's still quite beautiful and of sociological significance, as well as a good piece of "reporting" on an isolated, highly independent culture, vanishing even then and rare but not unheard of today on the coast of the North Atlantic.

Dom Casmurro, by Joachim Maria Machado de Assis (1900): A terrific book start to finish - full of surprises that are credible rather than forced and gratuitous, guided by a witty and largely self-aware narrator, and presented as a series of about 150 short chapters, which gives us plenty of "breathing room," places to pause and reflect on the developing plot.

Lucky Per, by Henrik Pontoppidan (1904): Lucky Perk gives us all we'd want in a major novel: complex and fully rounded characters who interact with one another and grow over time, a well-realized socio-historical background, beautiful but not overwhelming passages of description, sharp and credible (for the most part) dialogue, and a moral compass against which to measure the strengths and flaws, deeds and misdeeds of the major characters.

A Death in the Family, by James Agee (1957): There's probably no better example in literary fiction of the unexpected death of a parent from the child's point of view, with all of the attendant sorrow, confusion, anger, and strange nuances, such as the use of the father's death to gain stature and credence among other children.

Tambourines to Glory, by Langston Hughes (1958): This novel is in part an expose of the corruption of the many of the storefront churches and street-corner preachers in Harlem whose sole purpose is to squeeze money from their followers, though Hughes's vision is tempered by his profound humanitarian sympathy even for his protagonists, two women who establish one of these exploitative churches.

Morte D'Urban, by J. F. Powers (1962): A portrayal, over the course of his entire life, of a rural priest who struggles with the internal politics of the daily business of running a remote parish, who longs for promotion to a post in Chicago, and who at the end of his life recognizes that he has missed the whole point of being a man of the cloth.

A Personal Matter, by Kenzaburo Oe (1964): In this novel that seems closely modeled on the events in Oe's life, a young man removes his infant son, born with a severe brain malformation, from the hospital and takes him to a shady clinic where he will be "put to sleep," so to speak - and then the man has second thoughts. 

The Heron, by Giorgio Bassani (1968): A day in the life of an Italian landowner in 1947, in the course of which he reflects on the moral compromises he made so as to co-exist with the Fascist forces and his guilt about turning his back on his Jewish faith in order to hold on to his property and privileges.

Promising start to a novel in a setting remote to most American readers: Disappearing Earth

Julia Phillips's novel, Disappearing Earth (2019), which the NYT picked as one of the 10 best books of the year, gets off to a good start but I'll have to withhold judgment on the work as a whole until I'm closer to the conclusion (not 1/4 through - have read 4.5 chapters, but the later chapters seem to be much longer than the first). The novel consists of 12 chapters, each named by the month of their occurrence. The first chapter is about the abduction of two young girls, and in each of the succeeding chapters the characters provide us with insight or at least an update on the search for the girls and their captor (or worse). OK, that's a good way to hold together a dozen "linked stories," but I'm not sure yet whether that's enough to hold together a novel. Honestly, the work feels as if it were initially written as separate stories, each in the same setting (which I'll get to in a moment) - many were published in different form under different titles in various lit magazines; it feels as if the connective device was shoehorned into some of most of the stories: you could read some of them w/ the reference to the abduction excised, and they'd be fine. That said, each of the first five stories is good and quite straightforward, even conventional; some are better than good - notably the abduction story itself and one about a couple going through rough times who narrowly escape a bear attack while on a camping trip. Others are left hanging, without a strong conclusion or resolution. Much of the strength of and interest in this novel comes from its remote setting, the Kamchatka (had to look that up) peninsula in easternmost Russia. Phillips provides lots of information and social context about this locale - in particular, about the strains of transition from communism to capitalism and about ethnic tensions between Russians and members of the native tribes, gravitating toward the few cities on the peninsula. It's always good to learn about new places and cultures when reading literary fiction, but I have to wonder: How well would this novel read it it were set in, say, Alaska (a place with many of the same cultural issues)? On the other hand, how would this novel read were it written by a native Russian or resident of Kamchatka - or, especially, if it were translated from Russian or a native language? We'll see how Phillips navigates these shoals and if she's able to bring together the diverse elements of her plot.

The Top 5 contemporary books that I read in 2019

As I've done each December for the past 9 years, here's the first take on the best books of fiction (that I read) in 2019, staring with the Top 5 contemporary novels that I read this year. For the purposes of this list, "contemporary" means originally published in 2018 (especially for books I read early in the year) or 2019, for a relatively new book, available for the first time in English in 2018 or 2019. Sorry that I'm noting only 5 contemporary works this year, as most of my reading has been among the classics or should-be classics from the 19th and 20th centuries. More to come on those books in a future post, but here are my Top 5 contemporary novels, alphabetically by author:

Milkman, by Anna Burns (2018). Milkman is like no other novel I've come across, and to the extent that some of the key values of literary fiction are access to the consciousness of another, originality ("make it new"), and access to the experience of living in a time and place different from our own, Milkman is a classic and worthy of the accolades (Booker Prize) that have come its way.

Washington Black, by Esi Edguyan (2018). Washington Black is a startling book start to finish and evidence of a descriptive talent far above that of most other young writers today; it will be fun to see Edguyan's work develop and evolve.

All for Nothing, by Walter Kempowski (2006, published in English in 2018). All for Nothing has everything a reader of literary fiction could want or hope for in a book: historical veracity, family and human drama, fully rounded characters, crisp pacing, highly dramatic action, excellent writing line by line without excess or flourishes.

The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason (2018). Mason can't resist showing off his knowledge of medical history, languages, and other arcana, but he builds from these details a good story set during the first World War that centers on character and that establishes a milieu and historical setting that's  far from most American fiction, contemporary or otherwise. 

Normal People, by Sally Rooney (2019). Normal People is a credible and appealing novel in which the narrator is virtually invisible and the characters do all the work, dissecting every nuance of their feelings, longings, and regrets through much discussion and analysis. 

A powerful, simple tale in the current New Yorker, Roddy Doyle's Curfew

Well-known Irish writer Roddy Doyle has a smart and moving story, The Curfew, in the current New Yorker, a day in the life of a man, in his 50s or 60s it seems, on the eve of a hurricane expected to land in Dublin, leading to an imposition of a curfew, which hangs over the story like a weight: the man recollects curfews imposed for fear of rioting and mayhem, and of course this curfew is about something beyond the control of people, a natural phenomenon. Or is it? As he lives through his day, during which both and and his wife will need to return home before curfew falls, he, in his Joycean manner, has a few epiphonies - most notably, he sees a young woman walking toward him wearing a baby sling in which she's carrying something that's not a baby - and he recognizes eventually as a teddy bear - and he feels great sorrow for this young woman and recalls his young parenthood when he carried his daughter in such a sling - and remembers fear of his infant daughter dying while he's carrying her. So, yes, we see another dimension to this story - death and the fear of death - in particular as his action of the day is a medical visit at which he learns he has artery disease; the md provides a scrip for Rx, which the man fills, but he determines that he won't tell his wife about these pills, or tablets as he prefers to call them. At the end, his wife comes home and they talk about this and that, and the man suddenly is submerged beneath a wave of emotion as he realizes that he misses his (4) daughters, who live far away. There's a lot happening in this story, but the strands are woven neatly together and in the end we see that the story is about the most fundamental and profound of emotions: love of family, fear of dying - a powerful and simple tale, not a word too long nor a word too short.

The ultimate in nihilism: Play it as it Lays

As noted in previous posts, the writing in Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays (1970) is perfect-pitch - she has a way with dialog that is strangely elliptical, that always surprises us, but that always seems true to character and setting. The plot of the novel is thin - the gradual breakdown of a 30-something woman in a failing marriage and a declining acting career - though there are some truly powerful segments to the plot, most notably the horrific abortion and the hours on the LA-area highways, speeding along to wipe her mind clean - something you'd never do elsewhere, and from what I hear about LA traffic probably wouldn't do today, either. The David Thomson intro notes, as have in previous posts, JD's unusually stringent close third-person narration, bringing us right into the consciousness of the protagonist, Maria. All that said, however, this is one of the darkest novels of its time or of any time and is not for every reader: It's a purely nihilistic story; there is no redemption of resolution at the end, as Maria sinks ever deeper into drugs and despair. Though we feel sorrow and pity for her as we see her suffer w/ addictions, infidelity, and bad judgement, we never really like her - and we have to wonder about JD's interest in Maria and her fate. Obviously, JD is vastly different from her protagonist - a gifted and hard-working writer (and one who was lucky and happy in love, work, and marriage, as we know from her later autobiographical writing), but what after all is the point she's trying to make? Is Maria a ruined person - or is it the world that has failed her? Part of me just wants to shake her by the shoulders and tell her to get out of these horrible relationships and try to make something of her life. Easy for me to say, obviously - but I do feel that JD created a character who seems to be typical of a time and place but who perhaps is not: The world can't be that bad. It's actually harder and riskier to create a narrative of redemption than one of dissolution - the danger of sentimentality and schmaltz is omnipresent - but finishing this novel, a journey into one woman's version of hell, I only wish JD had taken the risk.

One way to read Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays

Not that there isn't a plot in Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays (1970) - there is at least the ghost of a plot, as we follow the sad protagonist, Mariah, through her depression, breakup of marriage to director Carter (who is surprisingly finding some success w/ his latest film, leaving Mariah more depressed about her failing acting career), and in what seems to be the fulcrum of the story as Mariah, acquiescing to Carter's demand, pursues and gets an abortion (the child may not be Carter's) in one of the most harrowing and disturbing depictions of backstreet abortions in the days when legal abortion was available pretty much nowhere (and is this where we're heading? so-called right-to-life elected officials should be required to read these chapters before mouthing off) - but plot aside, which is somewhat difficult to follow because of JD's propensity to dropping in names of peripheral characters without fully establishing them in our minds, it strikes me that you could read many, probably most of the 80+ extremely short chapters (none more than 2 pp. some just a paragraph) as short stories, or even prose poems, in their own right. Standing these chapters alone, the best of them seem to be early precursors of the abbreviated style of an Eisenberg or, their closest kin, Lydia Davis; for those curious take a look at the chapter on pp. 101-2 in the FSG Classics edition, in which Mariah is sitting at a counter in a restaurant waiting for one of the pay phones to become available (remember pay phones!) an the woman next to her, obviously disturbed, pesters M with odd comments, e.g., "Why are you ignoring me?" M, also listening to a woman on the pay phone calling a cab (has she been abandoned, along w/ her child?), at last offers a few words of solace to the disturbed woman who comes back with some violent invective, something like "Get your hands off of me, whore!" Read this chapter and you'll see what I mean: This is a novel that comprises dozens of gems, stories and epiphanies in miniature, like clothes hanging on a line (remember these?), that make of a composite picture of a woman on the verge of a breakdown, set against the peculiar mores and mannerisms of LA in the 1960s.

Why Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays holds up after 50 years

Joan Didion's (3rd?) novel, Play it as it Lays (1970) was one of the first if not the first to give readers a glimpse of life in SoCal where everyone's in "the business" in the break-out era of the 60s. All of the characters of louche and narcissistic, many are ridiculously wealthy for who knows why as they never seem to be involved in a project w/ any likelihood of success. People speak in cryptic non sequiturs and don't really seem to be listening to anyone but themselves; much time is spent poolside or on the freeways, driving aimlessly. This whole lifestyle was so alien to the NY publishing world, which embraced this and other early Didion works, as to feel like a report from another planet. About 1/3 through this relatively short novel, I find it still reads well and it's still a difficult read: aside from 3 short opening chapters each from one of the characters' POV, JD writes this novel in extremely close 3rd person, focusing on the protagonist, Maria (mar-EYE-uh), a failed actress model of about 30 in the waning days of her marriage to a potentially successful director, Carter. The narration is so close to M's mind that throughout JD introduces names into the story and we really have no idea who they are or why they've entered M's thinking - but this sense of dislocation and confusion is part of the intended mood of the novel, as the characters are so wrapped up in themselves as there's little need to introduce anyone or to give a back story. The essence of the plot up to this point is that M is pregnant and the father is probably not her husband Carter, and C insists that she get an abortion and then "we'll see" about continuing the marriage - part of which involves a battleground of control of their young daughter, Kate, who's in some kind of medical institution under close care - nature of her malady unknown at this point. It's also worth noting that JD's with is rapier-sharp, including many little throwaway lines such as when she introduces a woman who's "very active in the civil-rights movement and group therapy." The novel holds up really well over 50 years, though the world depicted is now much more familiar to us than it was to its first readers, as we've seen sun-drenched, alcohol-soaked milieus in many other books and films since 1970.