A novel of unrelenting pain - more than I for one can bear

 OK I gave it all I could and I tip my hat to Douglas Stuart for his extraordinary writing in his much-praised debut novel, Shuggie Bain - a book w/ so many strong points - terrific even horrifying descriptions of working-class living conditions, addictions, idiosyncratic phrasings, familiar tensions and rivalries in the Thatcher era of the closing of the mines and much unemployment in a system that provided little to nothing in support for the down and oppressed - but by about the mid-point of this novel I just cannot take more of the bleakness, the violence, the misery of the characters: addicted mother, absent and spiteful father, mockery and bullying of the young, effeminate eponymous Shuggie. The novel hits the same notes again and again, driving home its message of course and seemingly a perfectly accurate account of a family in a time and place of hardship, but how much must a reader endure w/out a sign of light or life? It's more than I can give this painful book. 

Excellent writing in an unrelieved bleakness in the much-lauded novel Shuggie Bain

 About 100 pp (25%) into Douglas Stuart's much-lauded debut novel Suggie Bain, and will withhold final judgment till at or near the end but to this point I'd say there's much to praise in this novel but also some cautionary words for potential readers may be in order. This novel is depiction of a three-generation, deeply troubled family living in and around the dismal council housing in Glasgow and vicinity in, I think, the 1980s, the height or depth of Thatcherism, as the defunct coal mines with all the mystery and pollution that they bring to the landscape and populace but at least provided plenty of work for unskilled (and some skilled) laborers hover at the edges of the story. The central character (the novel begins w/ his at age about 20 and living in a rented room in Glasgow and apparently getting by through male prostitution), the eponymous Shuggie, cold and lonely and dismal as is just about everything else in the novel - then jumps back to S's childhood moving from place to place, the mother (Agnes) a severe alcoholic and the father (Shug, just to make the narrative that much more difficult) a philanderer who barely provides for the family welfare. Shuggie as a young child seems somewhat protected by his two older half-sibs and, to a lesser extent, by his maternal grandparents. The plot is thin, but that's OK - this is more a story of mood or setting than a conventional novel. The warning I would put forth is that I've seldom read such an unrelenting portrait of poverty and misery and addiction; there's not a glimpse of humor nor of hope. That said, it's still worth reading and Stuart's facility w/ language, dialect, and acute observation - not by any of the characters but by the omniscient author - balances out the miseries of the setting and astonishes w/ various insightful passages and moments; let's call it the exact counterpart to Proust - beautiful writing about people whom we really don't sympathize w/ or even want to know. Whether I stay with this novel or not will depend, I think, on whether there's a positive moment in the next 100 pages - or will it be just unrelenting sorrow, and who needs that right now? 

Disappointed by Ferrante's new novel

 Just a note here to register my disappointment re Elena Ferrante's The Lying Lives of Adults, which in a previous post, based on my reading of an edited version of the first 4 chapters or so that appeared in the NYTimes, I said I looked forward w/ enthusiasm to reading the whole novel. But having read (most of) the novel, I have to sadly say that the best part by far was the first set of chapters, in which the young woman narrator meets her estranged aunt and learns some of her, and her father's, family secrets. Ferrante knows how to put the bone in the throat right away - same with her famous Brilliant Friend series, which begins as the 2 young girls seek to retrieve a lost toy (a doll?) that had made its way to the local Mafia chieftain - but after the narrator meets Aunt Vittoria the colorful and somewhat unbalanced aunt more or less disappears from the narrative and the novel devolves into a, for me, tedious account of the narrator's coming into adulthood, replete w/ moods and emotions familiar to anyone of any gender - questions about one's body, about sexual attraction (and repulsion), dealing w/ betrayal by friends and family unrest - all good material but in my view EF just lays it all out without any truly memorable scenes of high drama or moments of mysterious beauty, just stepping our way through the events of this young woman's life. What a disappointment! 

The Top Ten Books I Read in 2020

 In this strange year of 2020, cut off from the library and not a great fan of reading on line, I devoted most of my reading time to books in my own collection. In fact, near the outset of the pandemic I decided to focus on books that on first (or even 2nd) reading I loved but that I hadn't re-read in at least ten years. Some good news: I was seldom disappointed in my re-reading adventure; almost all of the books that I remember as great held up the standard, though there were a few that I couldn't finish - either I had changed, or the times (sorry, White Noise and A Wild Sheep Chase). In the end, there were more than 15 novels that I re-read this year w/ no disappointment or disillusionment, for this blog I will bring it down to the Top Ten Books I Read in 2020. It would be kind of ridiculous to give a one-sentence summary of each of these, so I will direct curious readers and visitors who would like to know my thoughts on each of these books to the full version of this blog, which has a complete index by author. If you're visiting this blog by your phone, you need to scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click on "view web version" to see the complete archive. Here's my Top Ten:

The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866). Russian

Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner (1987) American 

Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather (1927) American 

Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1985).  Colombian

The Known World, by Edward P. Jones (2003) American 

Light in August, by William Faulkner (1932) American

The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann (1924). German

Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf (1925). British

Rabbit at Rest, by John Updike (1990) American 

Suite Française, by Irene Nemirovsky. Left unfinished 1942, published 2004. French

OK, so if you've read all of the above, here are some runners' up: The God of Small Things, Out Stealing Horses, The Prisoner (Proust), The Stranger (Camus), A Summons to Memphis, TheTrial (Kafka), plus  one that I read for the first time this year, We, the Accused. 

One of the precursors to the modern novel: Machado's Bras Cubas

 When last I posted on Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (aka Machado) about a year ago I speculated that he may have been influenced by Sterne's Tristram Shandy, but I wondered how much exposure he would have had to European literature. Machado, whose father was a black man descended from emancipated slaves, is today considered one of the great American black writers of the 19th century - though "American" in this case is South American, Brazilian in fact. Having just finished reading Machado's The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881) I learned from the editors' notes that Machado was widely read in many languages and noted himself the influence Sterne had on his work: A confessional narrator, often directly addressing the reader, and a style replete with many comments and insights about the task of writing itself, a self-edited memoir, in which the narrator suggests skipping several chapters (there are about 150 chapters, none longer than 2 pp. - very readable!), in short a precursor of modern (i.e., 20th-century) fiction. In these notes written from the grave the narrator tells his life story, brought up in comfort, falls in love with a young woman from another class, the relationship broken off by his imperious father, and what follows is a lifelong search for love - which he does find in a long and circuitous affair w/ the wife of one of his so-called friends and political allies, but attempts to match him up for matrimony all fail. Late in life he comes across his youthful love and finds her to be a ruin, even her beauty decomposed - and this is perhaps an echo of Sentimental Education, one of the greatest of all 19th-century novels. As the editors/translators, Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, note, Machado show no sympathy whatsoever for Brazilian slaves or their descendants; his narrator accepts all the privileges and prejudices of his class - though perhaps that's not so strange. Machado was no proselytizer. Best to accept him for what is rather than reject him for what he is not: He is an inventive novelist and an acute observer of the mores of his social class, something always best seen and noted, I think, by one on the outside looking in. 

A stunning story by Paul Theroux worth reading right to the surprising ending

 I've been remiss on some of the recent New Yorker stories - sorry, everyone! - some of which have been pretty good, but I'll get back on track with at least a brief note on Paul Theroux's story Dietrologia. Yes, you have no idea what the title means, nor do I, but it fits w/ the story in a weird way. The story focuses on an older man, let's say in his 70s at least?, who enjoys his most-days visit from three neighborhood children; he tells them long and pointless tales and introduces them to some arcane vocabulary (hence, the title) and it's obvious that they don't understand much of what he's telling them, but they do like it that he's a soft touch on giving them cookies. His wife discourages his meeting with the children and focuses on selling their small house (it seems to be in Hawaii?) and moving them into some kind of assisted living - he needs it far more than she, and she comes across poorly this story. OK, so all the description up to this point make it seem as if this is a sweet Hallmark Channel movie about a man who gets a renewed sense of life through the wondrous eyes of children etc., but, no, that's a complete misreading, as Theroux pulls the strings in the last few paragraphs and the story becomes a stunning and surprising narrative, which I will not give away except to say that if you're thinking a ha, the old man is abusing the children you're wrong. Worth reading to the end! 

Excellent depiction of the life (and death) of a homeless man in contemporary Japan

 I feel two ways about Yu Miri's 2014 brief novel, Tokyo Ueno Station (tr Morgan Giles, 2019). On the one hand, Miri - well-known in Japan but just being recognized and lauded in the U.S. - does a great job presenting the life story of the narrator, an older Japanese man who has lived with hardship across the span of his life, mostly living apart from his wife and 2 children as he worked at various manual-labor jobs to keep his family just above the poverty level, faced with sorrow later in life as his son dies unexpectedly and eventually leaves his family and takes up his final years living among the homeless in the large Tokyo Ueno park. She tells his life story in clear, exacting detail and never becomes lachrymose or sentimental; his life, and in particular his life among the homeless, helps us see as few other novels have what it's like trying to survive in such circumstances - faced w/ the bitter elements, random attacks by hooligans, occasional eviction notices from the police (clear the park of all your belongings until a set date/time in the future so as not to disturb the emperor on a visit to the park museums), the cold, the rain and snow, illness, and just the need for warmth and comfort. We see that the homeless are not necessarily suffering w/ addiction or mental illness and not nobody would select this type of life by choice. Interestingly, there's a community of fellowship among the homeless, at least for the most part. Ideally, this novel will help all readers see the life of a homeless man in a new and more sympathetic manner. All that said, why the hell did Miri have to make the narrative so confusing? We figure out quickly - and I'm not giving much away (the NYT story this week on Miri gave away this point in the subhead) by saying that the narrator is a "ghost" who tells his life story from somewhere beyond. OK, fair enough, but why be so ambiguous and confusing about the end, and why the circuitous narrative pathway? Additionally, most American readers will be put off, as was I, by the many Japanese place names, which mean nothing to me but give the novel an exotic veneer - do we need to know the names of all the subway lines?, do we need such detail on the Shinto mourning rites? So in a way, the novel, or at least the translation, could be more friendly to non-Japanese readers just through some simple editorial decisions. But I guess Miri might like the place names for the incantatory effect, much like the prayer litanies that she includes. As a portrait of a homeless man, this novel is excellent, but I wish it had been more straightforward in its narrative development, which at times feels out of control or random. 

Some of Proust's best writing toward the end of The Prisoner

 The last pages of Proust's volume 5, The Prisoner, bring us back to the kind of writing for which Proust is best known, that is, observations about sensory perception and the effect of certain objects and sensations can release hidden pathways in the brain, leading toward memory and recollection - for ex., the long passage a few pp before the conclusion in which MP wakes in the morning and hears sounds of trams outside his window and detects some of the aromas from the world at work outside of his cloistered room, such as the suds from a washer-woman's tub -all of which remind him of his time at the seashore and his first moments of love for, or actually adoration of, Albertine - and so forth. Toward the end we also get some examples of MP's eccentric or at least unconventional literary criticism, esp his critique of Dostoyevsky that left me wondering whether we read the same novels (Proust would say that we did not). Much of the volume overall, however, concerns his obsession w/ Albertine an din particular his distress at the possibility - the likelihood actually - that she has been engaging in Lesbian relationships even while living w/ Marcel. Why is Marcel/Proust so obsessed with and troubled by these suspicions? A # of possible answers: His own guilt or shame about his own homosexuality? A way to lead the reader to recognize the homosexuality of the narrator (say, to imagine Albertine as Albert, having affairs on the side w/ women)? A way to emphasize the narrator's discomfort w/ Lesbianism and thereby to bolster his masculinity? A way to denigrate Albertine and to highlight her infidelity and duplicity? Finally, Proust on memory: it is a kind of pharmacy of chemical laboratory, where one's hand may fall at any moment a sedative drug or a dangerous poison. 

Despite many great passages, the second half of Proust's The Prisoner gets tedious

 Despite the many pleasures and astonishing moments in Book 5 (The Prisoner) of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, some of which I've quoted in previous posts, this volume in particular seems to be heavily freighted w/ long passages about social caste, class, and just plain snobbery, all of which Proust seems to want to bring down but which, somehow, become the complete milieu of The Prisoner. The first half of the volume is focused on the narrator's - who he at last admits is named Marcel! - extreme jealousy regarding his beloved Albertine, in particular a jealousy about her rumored lesbian relationships with other young women. The novel shifts at about the midpoint to focus on a party at Mme Verdurin's in which the ultimate snob and creep throughout the entire Search, M. de Charlus, arranges to have his much younger and untitled protege/lover play violin in a septet previously unheard by the late composer Vinteuil (Marcel's fave!); the importance of a live performance, we realize, is almost unimaginable today - compared w/ the 1920s when there was no possible way to hear music of high-quality in any way but in concert of private performance. This section of the novel gives Proust leeway to offer many insights on musicology - a high point of the volume - and then concludes w/ many pages of social diatribe: M. de Charlus undercuts the host family, the Verdurins, trying to get all the credit for the performance and the event, making sure that all the guests speak to him personally on their way out while insinuating to all that the Verdurins played no role in staging the successful event - but Mme Verdurin gets her revenge, as she turns the violinist, Morel, against he sugar daddy and benefactor. All of this I found disconcerting and sometimes tedious. Ditto for the 20 of so pages near the end of this section, in which Charlus and others express their contemptuous views on homosexuality; Charlus suggests that a near majority of men are homosexual and tells his friend Brichot, a Sorbonne prof., that someday they will teach homosexuality in his school - sounded like a joke in 1920, but in a way her foresaw "queer studies." The final 100-pp of the volume concern Albertine's "escape" from the "prison" of Marcel's family home. 

Proust on music

 It's hard to write, or even to blog, about literature, but at least this type of criticism or analysis (Criticize is, I think, from the Greek for "to separate") is composed from the same signage/materials as the work under examination: Literary criticism uses language to examine art composed in language. It's much harder, I believe, to write criticism of art or music, to use language to examine and appreciate works of art composed of other signage: sound, light, texture. For that reason, Proust's account of the chamber performance of the Vinteuil septet is one of the greatest passages in In Search of Lost Time (in volume 5, The Prisoner). Especially amazing: Vinteuil, the late composer whose work was almost entirely lost but saved be a few devotees who carefully reconstructed several pieces based on V's cryptic notations, is a fictional character, though several have attempted to ID him as one of the late-19th/early20th French composers (I think of Saint-Saens).  Proust's comments on the septet apply to all music, perhaps to all of the arts - and the comments are made even stranger in the context of this volume, as he sits enraptured by the music and surrounded by all the vectors of a pretentious, competitive artists' salon, with the champion of the music - M. de Charlus - in essence using the performance to advance the reputation of his much young male lover (Morel), and in his annoying aristocratic way judging all of the other attendees and ordering everyone around. I could quote many passages to illustrate the complexity and insight of Proust's comments, but here are one or two: "This song, so different from everyone else's, so similar in all his own works, where had Vinteuil learned it? Each great artist seems to be the citizen of an unknown homeland which even he has forgotten, different from the land from which another great artists will soon set sail for the earth." Or: "The only real journey, the only Fountain of Youth, would be to travel not toward new landscapes but with new eyes so see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them can see or can be - and we can do that w/ the help of an [ artist, novelist ] or a Venteuil - with them and their like we can truly fly from star to star. "

Should George Saunders continue writing stories similar to his ground-breaking early work?

 I'm feeling like a hypocritical reader (Lecteur, Hipocrite!) but I'm having a lot of trouble w/ George Saunders's story, Ghoul, in current New Yorker, trouble in the sense that it's a long story and I can't even bring myself to finish reading it in that it all seems such familiar ground and could be/could have been Saunders story ca 1990 when he was just breaking through and his works seemed - were! - strikingly original and weird and in their sly way - most were stories about people in some not too distant future in a somewhat Earthlike planet - employed as  human props in various diorama and amusement parks and in the end each story felt strangely allegorical, in that: What if we all are props in some vast otherworldly game? And in fact, aren't we? Plus many stories about misfits and eccentric losers told with a great deal of empathy and insight. OK, I have been a Sanders champion from the outset, though I registered my disappointment in his (only) novel, Lincoln at the Bardo, which felt like it was forced out into novel length because it is and always has been really hard for a writers of stories only to get the major literary props (Munro aside). And then Lincoln/Bardo gets a Booker Prize, first awarded to a U.S. writer I think, so who am I to judge. He was trying something different, for him, and it obviously worked. So here I go criticizing him when he returns to the ground of his earlier success; the guy can't win! But Ghoul just feels so much like material revisited and already bled dry. So I take it back, George Saunders! Try different forms and milieux, you probably have a lot to say. In fact, I did very much like the previous NYer GS story, a letter, sent sometime in the near future, from a grandfather to his young grandson, about an America stepping ever closer to fascism and about his guilt and shame for not doing more to resist - for GS, a straightforward and emotional piece, quite different from much of his other work. 

Some beautiful passages in Volume 5, the Prisoner, in Proust's Search for Lost Time

 I have slowly and attentively been reading volume 5 - The Prisoner - in Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Carol Clark tr. ; now I'm at about the midpoint - 200 dense and often difficult passages covering a sliver of time, three days so far I think, in which not much "happens" in the conventional sense - the narrator, Marcel, spends his days at home in his bedroom (for the most part) as his beloved Albertine, now living w/ him in an arrangement that seems improbable for its era (she's in an adjacent bedroom in the rather large apartment of his family - mother, father, himself + servants), goes off on various jaunts with her friends, leaving Marcel restless and anguished. This volume is entirely focused on jealousy, which Marcel suggests makes his love all the more sharp and intense and gives him the necessary separation from his beloved to analyze, observe, and write. That's a somewhat thin thread, and in some ways we just want to say to Marcel, get over it, get on w/ it (i.e., your writing). We can understand this section better if we know even a little bit about Proust's life, notably that he was a homosexual and had a long relationship w/ a chauffeur (his family's employee, I think); this would explain the access to each other in the family household and would add dimension to his fear that Albertine when left to her own was having sexual relationships w/ other women - sub in the chauffeur, about whom Proust evidently did not wish to write about directly- and the Marcel-Albertine relationship makes more sense. All that said, we don't read Proust for the plot but for the many insights into memory, human consciousness, art, and beauty; this volume has fewer of these "apercus" than we find in the preceding 4, though some are laugh-out-loud (Proust on the insidious nature of publishers, others of showing insight and beauty, such as this description of Wagner's music: "those insistent, fleeting themes which appear in one act, fade away only to return, and sometimes distant, muted, almost detached, at at other times, while still vague, so immediate, so pressing, so internal, organic, visceral that their return seems not so much that of a motif as of a nerve pain." He could be, he is, describing his own work. Or this concise description, admiring one they pass by as he walks with Albertine, a summary of this entire volume: "We find desiring innocent, and hideous that the other should desire." Or this of his life: "Love, no, pleasure well rooted in the flesh helps literary work because it cancels out other pleasures, the pleasures of social life, for example, which are these for everyone. " Or this on his major theme: "Memory is not a copy, always present to our eyes, of the various events of our life, but rather a void from which, every now and then, a present resemblance allow us to recover, to resurrect, dead recollections the there are also thousands of tiny facts which never fell into this well of potential memory and which we shall never be able to check."

A story about the creepiness of the Pence position on being alone w/ a woman not his wife

 After a week in which the New Yorker story was so oblique and pretentious as to be impenetrable (which is to say, unreadable), it was great to see a story this week, A for Alone, by Curtis Sittenfeld, a writers who's always been approachable and intelligent and whose style seems to be developing over time (though I admit most or all of what I've read of hers, since Prep, has been short fiction). What I like about this story is that if first I didn't like it at all. The plot such as it is involves a 40-something fabric artist and mother of twin boys college-age, obviously fully supported her husband, embarks on a new project: she reaches out to men she has known across her life, some w/ only a tenuous connection to her, to invite them to lunch w/ her at which time she'll ask them to respond to a questionnaire regarding the "Pence-Graham" question: When was the last time they were alone w/ a woman not their wife?, and other related queries. the first few lunch/responses were pretty bland and predictable, and I was not sure of her point; then, in what becomes the last of the series, the lunch invite leads to further meetings and developments, maybe pretty obvious, but I won't divulge anything. I have to say that, though the Pence/Graham connection seemed like a slender thread for a story, by the end CS did get me to think, in ways I hadn't or wouldn't expect to, about the Pence question and how it in a weird way, even though most progressives find the question condescending at best and sexist and discriminatory at worst, we are all in some way we hadn't, or I hadn't, though about. Though I am and always will be completely faithful to my wife, there would be something a little creepy by an invitation to a one-on-one lunch from a woman (I suspect and believe the same would be true in reverse) without a clear message as to what the invite was about, who else if anyone would be there, and so forth. Is that sexist? Or sensible? And how far does that remove me from the creepiness of Pence/Graham? 

The first great work of autofiction?: In Search of Lost Time - The Prisoner

Started reading the most recent publication in the anticipated 7-volume Penguin Classics edition of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time - a much more accurate and accessible translation than the mid-20th-century work that we had to rely on - you can see how the title alone is a change and much closer to Proust's language than the previous "Remembrance of Things Past" (a phrase in a Shakespeare sonnet that not only did Proust not select but that also misrepresents in "Search": the experience is not one of "summoning up" memories but of being overcome by waves of memory - a point well made by my college mentor Richard Macksey). All that said, the 5th volume, The Prisoner, is not, so far (70 or so pp in, about 20 percent?), quite as clear and accessible as some of the previous books - found myself put several ??s in the margins as passages I couldn't decipher, though that could be me and not the translator, Carol Clark (she also includes some Britishisms and does not abide by the which/that conventions, oh well). The first section of The Prisoner is almost entirely devoted to the narrator's obsession w/ his partner, Albertine, who has moved in with him as that live in adjacent bedrooms in the family apartment as Clark notes in her fine intro., this would be highly unconventional and even scandalous in that era and class. The narrator is tortured by jealousy of Albertine and in particular disturbed by the possibility that she may be having sexual relations with her women friends. Of course we view and understand these jealousies today in light of what we know of Proust's homosexuality: Albertine is the placeholder for his male lover (a family chauffeur, I think) about whom Proust could not, or felt he could not, write directly - truly a shame that he could not have been more courageous, but today we can decode much of the novel. In essence, it's probably the first great work of what today we call "autofiction," the story of the writer's life as mediated by literary convention; oddly, al the names in the Search are changed, though pretty easily identified as Proust contemporaries or as composites (particularly the writers, artists and musicians). The single character who cops to his "nighest" name is Proust himself: In the first section of the Prisoner the narrator notes in passing that his name is Marcel, and I think that's the only moment of such candor in the entire series. Even as I quibble a bit about the first section of The Prisoner, there are always some startling and memorable passages and observations, and I know that there will be many more as the narrative shifts focus to a musical salon, where Proust can offer great insight and sensitivity. 

Why Updike's Rabbit at Rest remains a great novel some 30+ years since its publication

 John Updike's Rabbit at Rest remains a great novel 30+ years after initial publication and possibly the best account of life in America ca 1990 - 9/11, pre Obama, pre Trump, pre Covid - the troubles and struggles, as well as the sense of prosperity and of a chosenAmerican destiny seem so far away and in some senses petty, as the past often does - that it's a little quaint to read this novel - but there's so much in it! As a reader who marks up the margins (not in library books of course!, though I do sometimes copy-edit these) I found on marked almost every page noting moments of great insight, dramatic significance, and laugh or at least "smile" passages. Noted previously: Updike's talent can best be understood as observation, insight, information = character and plot. He does a great job linking the inevitable conclusion of this volume with the first scene in this quartet of novels (Rabbit, Run) from about 4 decades earlier - and in this re-reading I noted how Updike the sly included in the final moments a hint at yet a 5th novel in the series, which turned out to be a short novel or long story rather than a full-out novel. There's plenty of plot in this novel, but it's still largely character-driven, and I think it would be impossible to finish this novel without some deep feeling for the protagonist Harry/Rabbit Angstrom; he's a deeply flawed character, with his many infidelities, his moments of rage, his casual racist and sexist comments - but those around him are deeply flawed as well - and when all's done he seems in some ways heroic anode course emblematic of his time and place; his flaws and shortcomings and failings and suffering are all part of his epoch. 

Recent reports from the world of literary fiction on the Covid pandemic

 Two recent New Yorker stories give us some of the first reports from the world of literary fiction on life in the Covid19 pandemic. Each is good, in its way, but, you know what? I don't really want to ready anything about the pandemic. I'm overwhelmed just by living w/ it. I would never say that I turn to reading fiction so as to escape from reality; but I would say that I turn to fiction to experience the consciousness of another, and these contemporary/topical dispatches are too much like my own consciousness, which I've had plenty of experience w/ over the past 8 months. Rabe's story is a retelling of a nightmare - you'll figure out that much right at the top - in which he moves to a new house/apartment in a new neighborhood and learns that he now has a "roommate," and bad things happen w/ dreamlike logic, which to be fair Rabe has down exactly - but the unsettled nature of life, the upheaval from the diurnal norms, is so unsettling, at least to me, that I didn't read the story, Suffocation Theory, to the end. Doyle is another fine writer, and his story in current NYer, Life Without Children, is well-written top to bottom, but do I, did I really want to go there? This piece is from the POV of a man in England apparently on some kind of business trip as his wife and children are home in Ireland - which apparently for a period of time earlier this year had much tighter restrictions on social distancing and mask-wearing than did the UK, which had in essence no restrictions. The protagonist of the story wanders the streets of Newcastle, somewhat overwhelmed by the crowds of heavy drinkers and celebrants in the bars and walking the streets; he dreams of running away from his life and his family - a familiar trope; isn't there a Hawthorn story on this theme? Isn't in the opening theme of Updike's Rabbit quartet? - but all that occurs is that he stupidly tosses his iPhone into the trash, which turns out to be just some histrionics, as he can deal w/ his passwords and flight reservation  via his laptop, which is secure in his hotel room - so what's the point? Again, the story feels true, accurate, and painful - but it's a truth, accuracy, and pain that I've had enough of by now. Haven't we all? 

More thoughts on Updike's style in Rabbit at Rest

 Further observations on John Updike's style as evinced in Rabbit at Rest (1990): As noted in previous post much of Updike's prose and narrative style centers on his acute observations of topical details: e.g., what a house in 1950 central Pennsylvania might look like, for example, down to the smallest detail of decor, aroma, objets d'art and objects of daily use; the amount of detail, whether observed or recollected, in any of his late novels is beyond compare and astonishing, and maybe frustrating, to any reader (those who want the pure forward motion of plot will be dismayed by the overlay of topical detail, which some - not I - would consider ornamental). The second level of his prose: insight, as the topical detail isn't just "background" or "setting"; rather, each (or at least many) of the topical details spiral off on to observations by the narrator or, more often, by the characters (Rabbit, almost exclusively, in this novel) - what does the recollection from the past mean to them? What memories are evoked and released by these seemingly needless details? Updike's obvious influence here is Proust, but in Updike's case the novel never feels like memoir or a piece of auto fiction: Nobody will confuse Rabbit w/ Updike. The insights are, or appear to be, those of his characters. A third facet, which I overlooked in the earlier post on this topic, is Updike's wealth of information; this novel in particular is heavily researched - not only the news of the day over the year or so span that then novel covers (1988-89) but all sorts of arcana that the characters would know and the novelist would most likely not know off hand, such as the economics of running an auto dealership, the various processes involved in heart surgery. Amazingly, Updike wears his learning light - we never (or at least seldom) feel that he's showing off, as the information he includes is central to the lives of his characters and fundamental in building a novel that is in part a novel of ideas. These three aspects of style - observation, insight, information - all are channeled to the key work of a novelist such as JU, as stylistic elements that give us access to consciousness of another. 

Updike's style in Rabbit at Rest

The 2nd (of 3) section of John Updike's Rabbit at Rest (1990) concludes with a horrendous scene that makes us question anything we may have thought or felt in defense of the eponymous Rabbit's (aka Harry Angstrom)'s morality and judgement; I won't divulge the incident in the interest of those who haven't read this novel - though who have will remember it. It's a strange and upsetting incident in that JU's writing is primarily, and especially in the Rabbit quartet, about character - much more than about plot (which moves along like a stream - with occasional waterfalls such as this incident). In fact, there are a # of such incidents along the way: the sunfish expedition and near-drowning, in part one, for ex. It strikes me that Updike's work follow this pattern: from description (the extraordinary facility he has for creating or evoking a time and place through recollection of period and topical details: the look, for ex., of a typical working-class household in an industrial Pennsylvania city ca 1950) to observation (numerous insights that put into context his many descriptive passages; anyone who, like me, makes marginal notations beside passages of unusual insight or perspective will find him/herself marking up the margins of almost every page) to character (who experiences and articulates these observations? from whose POV does Updike write? Ultimately, his own - he perceives articulates a world as none of his characters could - although his articulation as author and narrator provides us with access to the consciousness of another, establishes a character) to plot (Rabbit confronts various crises over the course of the novel and we care about how well, or poorly, he resolves these points of crisis because he is so well established as a character) to significance (the historical context, the evocation of an moment in world history). In Rabbit at Rest we have a double-perspective: Updike is so clear and precise about the particulars of his narration - the specificity of the U.S. in December 1988-spring 1989 - as noted by public events and the objects of life at that time, so it's strange and disorienting to measure the distance between that era and ours; for ex., Updike notes that LPs have been replaced by tapes which he recognizes will someday be replaced by CDs - which we now look at as obsolete as well. Time moves on. 

Updike's great description of Brewer, Pa., ca 1990 in Rabbit at Rest

 The 2nd (of 3) sections in Updike's Rabbit at Rest (1990) takes place back in Rabbit's home town, Brewer, Pa., and as a result this section - compared w/ the first, set on the Florida Gulf Coast - feels familiar to readers of the Rabbit quartet and of other Updike stories and novels. We've been here before - and yet ... Updike still manages to give a terrific description of the fading industrial city as he gives us a vivid account of what it's like to return to one's home town after many years (even though Rabbit still lives half-year-round in Brewer), noticing all the changes, how small the houses once-grand now look, how each locale restores some memory, as Proust well knew and examined. Again, this novel is like a time capsule; the Pennsylvania industrial city JU describes, w/ its factory outlets and the first inroads of some high-tech companies looking for cheap property and housing, would present a completely different face and aura if described today. The plot wanes a bit in this section, as Rabbit pursues his adulterous misadventures - reconnecting w/ (one of his) long-time sex partners, Thelma (readers of Rabbit Is Rich will appreciate some of the nuances here), in a way that is highly improbable, remarkably guilt-free, and typical of Updike's work from Couples onward. With the sex scene out of the way, however, Updike continues forward w/ the main plot, as at last Rabbit suspects his son may be draining funds from the family Toyota dealership to finance his crack habit; as he shares his concerns w/ wife Janice, she is as we know steps ahead of him and, we suspect, will get into deep trouble (and debt?) to defend the immature and selfish behavior of their wayward, cantankerous son. 

Rabbit at Rest as time capsule

 I've been (re)reading John Updike's 1990 novel Rabbit at Rest, the final novel in the Rabbit series that spanned much of JU's literary life (there was a short story/short novel published subsequent to R@R). It's probably best to read the 4 Rabbit novels in sequence and the development of character and of family relationships over time is a large part of the pleasure, but I think there's still plenty to get from reading R@R as a stand-alone; JU's writing, often criticized as over-the-top and too plenteous is on full display here, as the narration, which closely follows Rabbit's life - he's now a 56-year-old retiree spending half the year in Florida mostly playing golf; the narrative begins w/ the arrival of the Angstroms' son, Nelson, and his wife (Pru) and 2 kids, all involved in a deeply troubling family crisis - and the trick of the narration is that JU captures Rabbit's thoughts, feelings, fears, maladies, and milieu and expresses all of this in a way that would be far beyond Rabbit's capacity to do so. There are incidental pleasures throughout, on every page - in the first (of 3) sections in particular as Florida ca 1988 was rife for satire and moral and aesthetic outrage. The novel, like each of the quartet, is a closely observed sense of the U.S. at a particular moment in history; w/ some writers, that might make the work seem and feel dated, but w/ Updike the novel now reads like a time capsule, just pried open. In some ways it feels much more than 30 years ago, and there are many "relics" (e.g., family outings to the movies, searching for phone booths to call home). If there are any flaws in the first quarter or so of the novel it might be the too-obvious groundwork - we can see so much more than Rabbit can - re his son's Rx abuse and Rabbit's weird sexual pursuit of his daughter-in-law. Plus, though the leaves fall where they may, Rabbit does not feel or seem at all like man in his 50s; by today's measures and expectations he seems as if he must be in his 70s - or is that just me carping? 

So much to enjoy in Love in the Time of Cholera, but one warning

 So much to like in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's great novel Love in the Time of Cholera (1985, tr. 1988) - and, for those overwhelmed by Covid-19 panic, the novel has little or nothing to do w/ the cholera epidemic so don't let that put you off - right on through to the final section in which at last Florentino's 50+-year obsession has finally given him the chance to woo and win the now-widowed (as we saw in the first chapter) Fermina. GGM does a terrific job, maybe the best ever, in depicting the sexual relationship in an elderly couple - the courtship w/ its shame and embarrassment, its physical difficulties, its satisfaction in quiet, intimate moments of peace. The final section encompasses a voyage up the Magdalena River, during which Florentino wins her love after years of indifference and even hostility - and the voyage recapitulates a similar journey that Florentino took in his youth, to get away from his heartsick troubles - and in this journey he sees, and we see, how the landscape of this Caribbean country (Colombia, obvious) has been ruined by logging - unexpectedly, this novel has become a dystopian novel of ecological disaster, way ahead of its time. If you, like me, mark in your reading material passages of exceptional beauty, insight, and detail, you'll end up w/ markings on every page - and I can't say that about any other 20th-century writer other than Proust. I do, however, have to reiterate my only quibble with the otherwise great novel about love and the pursuit of happiness, and that's Florentino's sexual relationship w/ the teenage girl (named America, for whatever that's worth) whose family had entrusted her to him to protect her as her guardian when she was a student near his home; there's no excusing his horrible and criminal behavior to this girl (not a woman, thank you) she 50 years his junior - and in fact in the final chapter Florentino learns that, in his absence on the river voyage, America killed herself - and that ends that, w/ hardly a moment of remorse and none of guilt. Sure, a lot of fiction in the 20th century was way off base regarding the treatment of women, but aside from Lolita no other significant novel that I can think of included and seemingly condoned such criminal behavior. Sorry to end on that note, as there's so much else to enjoy in this novel; caveat emptor. 

Lorrie Moore may be the best short-story writer around

 Lorrie Moore has been one of my favorite short-story writers, maybe (along w/ Saunders) the best around w/ the death or retirement of so many greats in the past few years (Munro, Trevor, Roth, Updike et al.), especially noted for her mordant sense of humor and her ingenious admixtures of comedy and tragedy. She seems to have been on something of a hiatus, however, over the past decade - or maybe it's just me not paying attention? - but with the recent publication of her Collected Stories, an act of anointment if ever there was one, she has emerged w/ a few appearances in the NYer and elsewhere. Great! Her story in the current NYer, Face Time, if frighteningly au courant and it touches on an experience that almost all of us have faced, are facing, or will face: an elderly relative (father, in this case) in hospital care in final stages of succumbing to Covid19. Moore with great sensitivity builds a witty and caring relationship between father and daughter (the daughter seeming somewhat like Moore, though this is clearly not a piece of autofiction or memoir) and she also sketches in relationships w/ care-givers (strained) and with siblings (more so), and all done through the medium of FaceTime - all told, quite an accomplishment, Yes, it's a little scary to read this - though much less than with what's probably LM's most famous story, People Like Us ... (about a young couple whose infant daughter is diagnosed w/ kidney cancer) - though both stories have that sense of wit and dedication guiding us, or the protagonists I should say, through medical trauma. FaceTime isn't as "funny" as some of Moore's earlier work, but it's more mature, complex, and wise -whereas her earlier works focused on a  protagonist who was insecure, at loose ends, and at times acerbic. Worth reading this one - and it may drive me toward buying a copy of her Collected Stories (is reading through that collection something like reading an autobiography in installments?, just wondering). 

Did Gabriel Garcia Marquez lost his moral compass?

 For all the strengths of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera - evocation of time and place, clearly developed and distinct characters, an assured authorial narrative voice, vivid topical and psychological portraiture, a range of esoteric but lightly worn knowledge and information - toward the end of the novel there's a plot development that can only leaving me aghast and wondering: Has Garcia Marquez lost his moral compass? Up till now - 250 or so pp into this ca 350-page novel - GGM has made his central character, Florentino Araz, entirely sympathetic, a hero for whom we feel both sorrow and pity. He has vowed to devote his entire life to winning back the love of the woman who was his first love and who spurned him in an unexplained and sudden reversal of her affections. We follow FA over the course of his long bachelorhood - a life that was by no means celibate. In fact, one of the many strengths of this novel has been GGM's success at realistic but not prurient depiction of sex, and in particular his sensitivity toward women characters in general and FA's partners in particular; GGM makes clear that his love interests were usually widows and they, like him, wanted fulfilling sexual relationships but had no interest in marriage or long-term affection; everybody was happy, no one exploited. And then, as we near the climactic and long-awaited scene (which GGM provides in the first chapter and jumps back about 50 years and gives us the whole background of Florentino's pursuit of Fermia) in which Fermia is widowed, Florentino is deeply involved in a relationship w/ a 14-year-old girl who was entrusted to him as her guardian while she was enrolled in a convent high school. For all GGM's attempts to make her sympathetic and to depict this as a mutually healthy sexual relationship, it is impossible for me and I would hope for most readers to see this relationship as perverse, exploitative, and in our culture today criminal - and suddenly I find myself hating Florentino and wondering about GGM himself if he can really imagine this relationship as anything other than exploitation - and don't talk to me about Lolita, another perverse novel unaccountably adored by so many critics - and speaking of critics how many mentioned this exploitative relationship in their review of this novel back in the 80s? (And I include myself here; I know I reviewed it but have no idea if I registered any outrage at this Florentino's behavior). So mea culpa if so, and in either event how could we all let GGM off so lightly on this matter? It's still a great book in many ways, a classic even, but there's some rot at the heart of the matter. 

Is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel a work of "magic realism"?

 For some reason - most likely the extreme success and accomplishment of his most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez is considered to be a founder of the Latin American literary movement Magic Realism; that tag makes sense at least for that novel, which includes such tropes as a young man always seen among a cloud of butterflies (wish I could summon up more examples). These episodes and touches occur within a literary style that is replete w/ realistic topical detail and is never dependent on the "magic" to drive the plot forward (no supernatural characters, for ex.) so that the strange moments when they occur feel to the reader to be part of the realistic re-creation of a specific time and locale. Right now I'm reading GGM's later novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, which with 100 Years stands as the pinnacle of his achievement - and I'm noting in reading it (now about 3/4 through the novel) that nothing in this novel (so far anyway) speaks to the "magic"; on the contrary, it's a fully realized "realistic" setting - an unnamed Caribbean country (obviously based on GGM's native Colombia) in the early years of the 20th century. There is nothing supernatural in the novel - but it's not an example of "naturalism" such as, say Mme Bovary, in that the emotions and actions of the characters are always extreme and eccentric. The novel centers on 3 characters (whose names are distressingly similar): Fermia Daza, Umberto Juvenal, and Florentino Ariza. When Florentino was a young many he fell in love w/ the inaccessible beauty Fermia and courted her surreptitiously and remotely over many years; at last she won her father's approval but suddenly and inexplicably cut off her non-relationship w/ Florentino and married the young physician Umberto. Florentino vows to love her (albeit from afar)all his life - and the novel begins when Umberto dies and Florentino speaks to Fermia for the first time in 50 years (!) and declares his undying love for her. Most of the novel shows the eccentric and exaggerated sexual pursuits of Florentino in his bachelorhood (not quite realistic, in my view, but not "magic" or supernatural) - and toward the end, the part of reading now, we learn of Umberto's infidelity and it's near ruinous effect on the marriage (a rift later healed, at least to a degree). The "love" noted in the title applies to several of the characters, as their half-century romantic obsessions play out against the background of country spinning into despair because of the epidemic and the many civil wars. 

The challenge and the beauty of Love in the Time of Cholera

 When I reviewed Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera back in the 1980s I remarked that it would be one of the few novels of its time that were to be read and re-read in future generations - and that's certainly the case. GGM's reputation and popularity remain extraordinarily high even 40 or so years later - and Love ... Cholera (despite its use as a plot prop in a crappy romcom film in the 90s) stands alongside Hundred Years of Solitude as his twin peaks of excellence. Love/Cholera is far less historical/political that Solitude; it's more of a love story than the turbulent history of a time and place - imagined, but clearly built on GGM's native Colombia. Both novels are built upon a superabundance of absorbed details; probably no other writer of literary fiction had such a cinematic style as GGM; he fully realizes every moment, every scene, every character down to the last and finest detail - all while keeping the plot rushing along (no Proustian languers; rather, a richness of observation that verges at times on the comic). I'm about 1/4 of the way into the novel, which GGM composed in a series of long (50 pp or so) unnumbered sections - all of which are takes on undying love and on sudden decisions or actions that alter the course of one's entire life. There's high drama throughout, vivid characterization, some vastly and often dark comic scenes (the death of a character trying to retrieve a foul-mouthed parrot from its perch in a tree) and of course the re-creation of a time and place, early 20th century in a small city on the Caribbean coast of South America (Colombia, obviously). It can be a demanding novel - sometimes hard to remember characters' names, which in GGM's world are sometimes infuriatingly similar to one another, but worth staying with for the long run, as the novel is absorbing and in a style unique to this one great writer. 

A novel about species extinction that doesn't really come through

Not a lot to say about Charlotte McConaghy's novel Migrations (2020), which I probably won't finish reading, other than that it's highly ambitious and from what I've read, about 25% of the book, beyond the reach of the writer. The bold ambition: we're in a future world in which many species of animal have vanished and the oceans are so depleted that fishing is outlawed. The narrator and central character is studying one of the few surviving bird species, the Arctic tern, and wrangles a passage from Greenland on one of the few operating fishing boats - and talks the captain into extending the voyage from pole to pole to trace the flight a few tagged terns. The obvious antecedent is Moby-Dick, but this book is not really in Melville's league. the sheer improbability of the venture knocks the plot off the rails, and making matters worse CMcC indulges a # of plot by-ways, including the mystery of the narrator's ancestry, her strange3 marriage, her death wish, and her unexplained (so far) strained relationship w/ the ship's captain. The animal extinction is the premise of the novel, but it's unclear how this happened and what its effect is on human existence: Do farms, for example, continue to exist? How have people survived if so many animals have vanished? Questions and quibbles could go on, but not much point to that; for readers willing to buy into the improbabilities and the narrative hi-jinx, this could be a good read and, who knows?, maybe even a (better?) film. 

The many strengths - and one weakness - of The Brothers Karamazov

What's left to say in summary re Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov? It's a vast novel on one level - quite long, so much so that, by the end, I'm guessing most people will have forgotten much of the beginning (in that way, it's like life, time always slowly erasing experience). It's far less plot-driven than Crime and Punishment, though it does center on a crime (which we never actually "see," which of course sharpens the drama and the mystery) - but does so through by building up to the murder trial and its outcome (which I will not divulge) - rather than on the details of the crime and its effect on the character of a protagonist. It's philosophical in its way, as we get several chapters in which various characters discuss their world view and their faith or lack thereof (middle-brother Ivan's Grand Inquisitor chapter being the most famous of these). Mostly, it's about character, I would say - with its detailed examination of the conflicted relationship among the 3 brothers (as well as, to a lesser extent, their relation to the out-of-wedlock brother); the father is quickly delineated but plays a surprisingly minor role - the victim - in the scheme of this novel. What most struck me on this reading was FD's strong feelings about cruelty to animals and, even more so, about our cruelty to one another; he sets this out to two counterbalanced monologues - in the first section of the novel the long account of the life story of the monk (Z) who is the guiding light for the youngest brother, Alyosha; and then, in the final chapter that will inevitably move you to tears, Alyosha's address to the young boys who are mourning the death of their mate. And of course there are some great dramatic scenes in FD unique dramatic style of heightened emotions and frantic action - notably oldest brother Dimitri's mad expenditures just after the murder scene.  Readers will also note that, as with pretty much all of FD's work, this is a male-centered novel, with the women playing secondary parts at best - none really opens up and becomes a thoughtful, rounded character; the women are "types" whereas the men are vivid, each burdened (or blessed) with a complex interior life. So - it's not a novel for all readers, and will require the dedication of a lot of time and thought and much looking back at the list of key characters at the front of at least this translation (Pevear-Volokhonsky) - but that said it's makes for good reading during a time of isolation and quarantine. 

Excellent story by Susan Choi that succeeds by w/holding key information

Susan Choi - most known to me as a novelist, in particular for her excellent novel American Woman - is featured this week in the New Yorker with Flashlight, a short story - or maybe part of a in-the-works? In either event, the piece stands up well on its own merits. In short its tight focus is on a precocious, troubled 10-year-old girl who witnesses a tragedy, suffers from some form of PTSD it would seem, who acts out in through odd hostility and aggression. Her guardians (mother and aunt) send her to a child psychologist, at the request (order?) of the LA school department, and much of the story recounts her initial interview w/ the psychologist, whom she holds in contempt and fools him in a # of ways. So, this young woman could be developed much further if Choi is planning to expand on this opening - we're curious about her and sympathetic to her plight. As it stands, the story has several strengths - among them the credibility of the character, not easy to do w/ a 10-year-old in adult fiction - but of particular note is the manner in which Choi avoids a description of the key event in the story (I won't divulge it); it's an ellipsis, something all the more startling and terrible because Choi doesn't recount it directly. If there's a flaw, I'd say the story would be better if Choi ended it a few paragraphs sooner and didn't tell us what exactly the young woman (Luisa?) did to bring down the psychiatrist's wrath. We could - and should - figure that out by ourselves. 

Will non baseball fans like The Cactus League? Will fans?

What can I say about Emily Nemens's new (2020) novel, The Cactus League, except that I wish I'd like it more? The premise or concept is good: An inside look at the life and culture of major-league baseball through a series of loosely connected stories about various figures in the life of the LA Lions (aka Dodgers?) at the spring-training facility in Scottsdale. And the figures are not always the players themselves; we get a chapter/story about an agent, a hot-dog vender, a gathering of the players's wives, and others. The novel gets off to a good start, as EN captures well the look and feel of the training facility - I can vouch for that, having toured the Dodgers' site in AZ. But as the novel moves along its premise becomes ever shakier. In the first story we meet the star of the team and the central figure, Jason Goodyear, a guy with a squeaky-clean public image but w/ massive problems (mostly, a gambling addiction) that threatens his image and career. Well, its hard to believe this to be possible in this day and age of intense media scrutiny and culture of iPhones and instagram et al - and of course the team would go to great lengths to keep its star (2 mvps!) player in check. EN gives Goodyear a shot at redemption in the last story, which feels engineered and not sufficient to release Goodyear from his demons. Some of the stories en route are pretty good - but EN's knowledge about baseball is a bit suspect; to give just one ex., no MLB team would have a pitcher throw a 9-inning complete game in early- to mid- spring training. Most troubling, EN sets up a mystery in the first chapter that really had me curious - one of the coaches shows up in Scottsdale to find his house completely trashed. Who dunnit? EN never tells us - the set-up story is dropped by the wayside. So, unfortunately, it's likely that much of her ideal readership will be put off by too many facets of the novel, and I'm not sure how widely it would appeal to non-fans. Well, she needs no support from me; reviews have been strong, so, maybe I'm an outlier. 

A forthcoming historical novel of great promise

 As readers of this blog may know, I'm not a fan of novel excerpts in publications - as a rule - but once in a while there are excerpts worth reading on their own and that truly service as an intro to a forthcoming novel that might have been overlooked. No chance of that last happening to Elena Ferrante's latest, excerpted at length recently in the NYTimes - a strong enough selection to make this onto my wanna-read list (despite tepid review in the New Yorker - can't have everything). But the New Yorker fiction piece this week is from an author unknown to me and I expect to many - David Wright Falade - and the piece, which I am sure will be part of his novel (Nigh on a Brother, acc to the NYer "contributors" notes) in 2022, The Sand Banks, 1861, looks like it might be a significant debut novel - w/ possibility of literary and commercial success; it reminded me a little of The Known World and the more recent George Washington Black, in that it's fiction in a historical setting, obviously - the onset of the Civil War - as experienced in a small community on the Va. coast. The central figure is a young man serving as a slave to the largest local landowner, who is also his father; Falade does a good job establishing this character and his sense of exploitation and isolation at a key moment in his life and in his times. He and others on this coastal island are just receiving word that the Union forces have entered Va., and this young man summons the courage to announce to his father/"owner" that he plans to run away to join the Union forces, or at least to support them through some kind of menial labor. And thus the plot is set in motion - which I imagine will lead to many adventures and encounters. I'm not sure how well this movement, slaves running not to freedom but to service in or for the Union armies, this work from this early look gives promise of being topical, informative, and dramatic, and though I'm no devotee of historical fiction I'm looking forward to the eventual publication of Falade's work. 

Dostoevsky's strengths and his one weakness

Finished "book 11" (of 12) in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (1880; Pevear-Volokhonsky, and it's great to see how well FD handles the central plot element: the murder of the brothers' father Fyodor. As noted in an earlier post, FD's narrator gives us an extraordinary amount of info about the interior lives of most of the major characters; he gives us much detail about the conflicts and torments the brothers endure regarding relations w/ the lecherous father (all by the "good" son, Alyosha), he chronicles the events leading up to the murder, from the POV of several characters - but as to the murder itself, he gives us two roses of ellipses. And now we see why! Up to this point in the novel, all the evidence points to the oldest son, Dimitri, imprisoned and on the eve of the first day of his trial for murder. Of course we accept the narrator's information, and we have no doubt that Dimitri is guilty - his behavior so odd and extreme, the evidence to obvious, his excuses so flimsy and contorted (e.g., he was found holding 3,000 rubles, the precise amount stolen from the dead father, though D claims he had been carrying this money around as a favor to one of his (many) woman friends. But - spoilers here for those who haven't read this novel! - in book 11 things turn around, as the epileptic Smerdgov (sp?), who supposedly had been suffering from an extreme fit at the time of the murder, S. admits to middle-brother Ivan that he (widely believed to be the father's out-of-wedlock son) that he'd committed the murder, that he was faking his two-day fit. The tables have turned - but who will come to Dimitri's defense at the trial? A great plot twist - but there's so much more to this plenteous novel that the murder trial. What strikes me in particular on this reading of the word is how effective FD is in creating scenes of pathos: Who can not nearly come to tears in reading the account of the death of the child Ilyusha, and in particular well yup to tears when we see how Alyosho befriends the young boys of the neighborhood and works w/ them to ensure that they behave w/ kindness toward the dying child - and that they continue doing so for the rest of their lives? FD is more widely known for this intellectual heft and for the highly dramatic scenes of fervid mental torment - but he can handle sentimental with greatness as well. Similarly, it's obvious that he had great sympathy for animals and a loathing toward anyone who behaves w/ cruelty toward any animal - though he can understand this cruelty in children and he tries to assuage it. A Dostoevsky weakness, however: Does he have any truly great female characters? She (wittily) contrasts his work w/ Tolstoy's, and part of this imagined rivalry, one would guess, may be jealous of Tolstoy's ability to write about women. The women in FD novels, however, are background players, symbols primarily, and never, as far as I can recall, rounded characters w/ complex emotions and well-founded beliefs - the vanish when compared w/ his dynamic and multifaceted male characters. 

Some observations on The Brothers Karamazov

A few notes on Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (1880, Pevear-Volokonsky tr.), I'm beginning to (re)read  Part 4 (of 4): First, what an unusual narrative device FD uses in describing the scene of the crime - the killing of the father Fyodor Pavlovich K. FD's narrator is by all measures an omniscient figure, giving us access not only to a wide and vivid range of dramatic scenes but also into the background and the thoughts of all of the major characters. He carefully builds toward the murder scene - Dimitri heading toward his father's house, rage and jealousy foremost in his mind, as well as his need for money that he believes his father owes to him. He brings us right into the garden, as he lures his father out of the house with the "secret" code door-knock. And then: the narrative breaks off with a series of ellipse dots; we simply do not see the scene of the murder - we see Dmitri rushing out of the garden, pursued by the elderly servant, Grigorev (sp?). So when the officials arrive the next morning to arrest Dimitri, we have no way to be sure than his claim of innocence is legitimate; it's up to us to make the judgement - though I think all readers will find his recollection of the events to be spurious or dubious at best. 

And what about the interrogation? Look, we all know that the American system of justice is often abused, in particular in regards to those of color and those w/out the means to hire competent attorneys. But the Russian system, as portrayed here, seems outrageous to most of us today: the prosecutor and the local AG immediately begin a complete examination and interrogation of the suspect and all witnesses, without even any pretense of providing the suspect - Dimitri, in this case - with a lawyer or even w/ any legal advice (they to read him a version of what we call the Miranda rights - so perhaps they were ahead of us on that score alone). Yes, this process is more like a grand jury, and Dimitri will get his day in court - but not after providing the state w/ a whole lot of information that he probably would have withheld had he be competent (he's still reeling from his night of revelry) and well advised. 

It also strikes me, deep into the complex novel, how willing FD is to set aside some of his major characters and to move the "off screen" if and when need be. The first part of the book concerned, mostly, Alyosha, the youngest brother, contemplating whether to marry for become a celibate monk. He pretty much vanishes, for half the novel - tho he will reappear in Part 4 (as we pick up, again the story of the impoversihed family and the young boy bullied by his peers). Similarly, the middle brother, Ivan, romantic rival to his brother Dimitri, heads off for Moscow at about the mid-point and we don't seem him about - maybe not till late in the 4th part? It's also surprising how little we see of the lurid father K, and how, with just a few brushstrokes (mostly, Dimitri's loathing and repulsion when he looks at his father) he creates a vivid character. 

Ferrante's forthcoming novel, excerpted in the NYTimes, looks to be definitely worth reading

Definitely worth reading the long excerpt from Elena Ferrante's forthcoming novel, The Lying Life of Adults, which ran as a special section in the Sunday NYTimes. I'm not always a fan of published novel excerpts, which can sometimes feel like a glorified advertisement for a forthcoming publication - but the Times over the past year or so that they've been running occasional excerpts has done a good job in selecting fiction that is in some sense newsworthy - selections for well-known writers who really don't need the publicity boost - and topically relevant (see for ex. Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad). Ferrante now has such a vast following around the world thanks to her Brilliant Friend series that a forthcoming book from her is an event; I have to say that the Times team has done a great job in editing this piece - trimming where appropriate and keeping the narrative line clear and coherent: Good for them! (Though points lost for the ridiculous typography for the title of this work, which is almost impossible to recognize and cogitate.) This excerpt, from the POV of a woman looking back on her early teenage years in Naples, tells of a time in her youth when she begins to learn of her father's complex family history and in particular when she meets, against her parents' wishes, her aunt, who has been at odds, perhaps at war, with the narrator's father for many years. The aunt, whom the parents have described as mean and ugly (the plot gets into gear when the young woman overhears her father compare her w/ the ostracized aunt) turns out to be beautiful, though unconventionally so. She's also quite outspoken, blunt, vulgar at times, and embittered - and it's obvious that the novel, as it unfolds, will be about a struggle for the soul and the allegiance of the young woman. I am one of the few who wasn't crazy about the Brilliant Friend series - though I could see why it meant so much to so many readers - but this novel comes forth with a lot of promise and what I expect will be a more tightly controlled plot and sharper character delineation. 

A promising piece of short fiction, You Are My Dear Friend, in current NYer: Should it be part of a novel?

 I liked Mahuri Vijay's story, You Are My Dear Friebd, in the current New Yorker, at least up to a point. It's the kind of naturalistic piece driven by character and event, told in a direct and conventional style, for the most part quite clear and transparent - though I spent a lot of time at the outset trying to keep straight the names of a # of the characters who as it turned out were entirely tangential to the plot. The story follows several years in the life of a young woman from an impoverished background (parents died young, tragically, in a way that is never explained - is that because this may be an excerpt from a novel?), working as an au pair for an English family; one of the guests as a party her employers becomes almost a stalker, following this young woman around, and eventually persuading her to marry him - a widower  about twice her age. Several years into their dreary marriage they decide to adopt a young girl - who turns out to be extremely difficult and belligerent, and who eventually breaks off from her adoptive parents - and the story or short fiction pretty much ends at that point. I found her establishment of character and situation to be strong and compelling, and I wanted to know more about the central character and her fate - and if this is a novel excerpt perhaps I/we will be able to follow this story line a bit farther; as is, with such an abrupt ending w/ little resolved, I felt a bit cheated: as a story, it opts out; as an excerpt, it shows promise. (Readers of this blog will know perhaps that some of my favorite stories are those that seemingly "could be novels," but that work best by leaving us wanting more. This story doesn't quite make that grade: I not only "want more" but need more in order to bring some resolution to the crisis in the lives of the central characters, the mother and adoptive daughter - and even the husband/father, whose adult daughter will have nothing to do w/ him, for reasons we don't yet understand.)

Thoughts on the first half of The Brothers Karamazov

At the half-way point in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamozov (1880; his last novel) and am surprised on this (re)reading to see how little FD cares about getting a plot into gear; through these long first chapters (total +300 pp) he does a lot of character delineation, particularly of the youngest brother, Alyosha, who differs in temperament from his two brothers and their father (Fyodor). But throughout these pages it seems that FD's greater impulse is to expound some of his views on religion, faith, prayer, devotion. Compare this work w/ C&P, which is plot-driven and gets to the dramatic highlight, the murder of the pawnbroker, in the first 50 or so pp. In some ways, TBsK is the more profound novel, a novel of ideas, but it does feel that at the mid-point that it's time to get the plot off the ground! Not that there aren't some great sections in the first half. Notably, Alyosha's encounter w/ the group of schoolboys bullying the child from a severely impoverished and sickly family; this element of the plot is left hanging at the mid-point, but will become significant in the second half of the novel. The most famous section in the first half of the novel, probably in the whole novel, is brother Ivan's account to Alyosha of a "poem" he's writing, The Grand Inquisitor - a narrative about a leader of the Inquisition imprisoning and condemning a man who may be the 2nd coming of Jesus; this chapter has sometimes been broken out and published as a novella. To me it feels kinds of over-wrought and doesn't hold my interest as well as the "contemporary" passages - the best of which, I think, come in the dying elder's (Zosima's) account to his life, in particular his account of the disturbed older man who confessed that he had committed murder and never been accused or caught. The man asks the then-young Zosima whether he should confess to his crime and thereby ruin the lives of his wife and young daughters. We can see how this is a variant on Raskolnikov's crime in C&P: In that case, the failure to commit the perfect crime and the ensuing guilt and fear. The treatment of the theme in TBsK is more powerful and unusual: When must we own up to our crimes and guilt? To whose benefit? Toward what end? Finally, though the set-up includes many such passages that are not strictly necessary for the novel as a whole (it was published in installments over several years, I think) the elements all work together in establishing the brothers and their father as dynamic, drive, obsessed men whom we know will come into deadly rivalry, particularly in conflict over women and in an Oedipal struggle for power.

Thoughts on plot and character in Brother Karamozov

Sorry for lag of several days, but I've been (re)reading Dostoyevsky's 1880 (and final) novel, The Brothers Karamozov (Pevear-Volokhonsk7 tr.); I won't say it's an easy read, but as you get deeper into the first section the characters become more clear and distinct - and the plot doesn't really pick up until book 2, about 100 pp in. Overall, despite some highly dramatic scenes, it's closer to a novel of character than to a novel of action - somewhat atypical for FD (C&P, for ex., gets the bone into the throat right away, w/ the murder of the pawnbroker). Obvious the central characters are the 3 brothers. We get in the first section a clear delineation of the character of the oldest brother, Dmitri - wild, impulsive, abusive, a man of extremes, the exact counterpart to his father, Fyodor (interesting choice of first name on FD's part); we also get a lot of info about the youngest brother (Dmitri is half-bro to the other 2), Alyosha, serious, sensitive, deeply religious, reliable - the opposite from Dmitri and Fy. We know less about the middle son, Ivan, who seems to be the most intellectual and seems on a course to leave the family and head for Moscow (that may change). The novel, at least from the outset, is about a complex series of rivalries among the brothers and the (widowed) father for the love of two woman - Katenka and Grushenka - w/ Dmitri in love with both and competing w/ father re G. and w/ Ivan re K - and with Alyosha lost in the middle, trying to make peace among all of them. There are many intimations of the violence that we know will erupt later in the novel. As far as I can tell, FD was weak on development of women characters; his female characters are for the most part symbols, often of innocence and penitence. The male characters are by far more vivid and perplexing - going all the way back to the Underground Man, the Idiot, and esp C&P; the Devils is really his novel of ideas and politics. Overall, the scene that in each reading has gotten to me the most is when Alyosha sees the young boy being threatened and bullied by his classmates - A intervenes to protect the young boy, but the boy fights off A as well. Later, A visits the household where the boy lives in abject poverty - a truly sad scene on every measure and indictment of a society w/ no social structures or significant aid for the poor and the ill.

Some themes and key scenes in The Magic Mountain and three questions about Mann's novel

So many great aspects in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924 - previous posts said 1927, but that's the date of the Engl. translation) - the strangeness and beauty of the setting; the amazing arc of characters as we watch the protagonist (Hans) grow and mature over the course of his 7-year (!) stay at the Swiss TB sanatorium; the intellectual battle for Hans's soul between the liberal humanist (Sebbetini) and the dogmatic Jesuit (Naphta) - though who can really understand what Naphta is saying or arguing?,;the fantastic array of secondary characters including the above-mentioned plus of course Frau Chauchat, Peeperkorn, and Han's cousin, Joachim; the scary inside look at the bizarre treatment of lung infection, which at times seems like it must be a scam to keep the wealthy patrons/patients addicted to the treatment at the sanatorium; a few amazing set pieces, including the death of J., Hans's clueless skiing trip during an Alpine blizzard, his confession (in French!) of his obsession w/ the beautiful and inaccessible Frau Chauchat, the seance scene - the strangest hour of Hans's life, it's said, near the conclusion, the duel, and the list could go on. Most of all, the novel is strangely allegorical, and on multiple levels: Hans's stay in the the Berghof is a retreat from an active life is a phase that most people can recognize as part of their life or of their desires - but he changes, grows, matures, and we have to wonder, is he an "Everyman"? Is his journey through life an analog for the course of all lives, for the course of history and knowledge among nations? And what about the vantage we have in looking back on his life, not only as one taking shape in the years before the First World War, but a foreshadowing of what we now know as the horrendous course of life in his native Germany in the 20th century? With all these ideas in mind, I have three unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions. First: Did Hans ever have sex w/ Frau Chauchat? He confesses his obsession w/ her, but at the end of that passionate scene she speaks to him in the formal "vu" and tells him good-night, seeming to put him in his place. But then she reminds him to return the pencil to her (and it's her last night in the sanatorium) - is that an implied invitation to follow her to her room? (Note the sexual innuendo when she loans him the pencil; she troubles to explain to him that the pencil-led must be "screwed in" (visser) for the pencil to work. Hm. Second: Mann ends a chapter with the sudden revelation that Hans has been undergoing psychoanalysis with one of the staff physicians (who delivers to all the patients biweekly lectures on this new medical area). Why does Mann drop or lose this thread? We never see or learn anything about Hans's analysis and how this changes his behavior and self-knowledge, if at all. Finally, when late in the novel Hans sees the vision of his dead cousin Joachim during the seance, why does Hans say "Forgive me." For what? For staying in the sanatorium rather than returning the the "flat land," as his cousin did? For some unknown slight or character flaw? For making nothing - to that point - of his life?

Can Thomas Mann create a comical character?

Thomas Mann is by no means known as a “comic” writer; sure, there are a few laugh lines in The Magic Mountain (1927), but it’s 700+ pages, so a laugh here and there is inevitable, law of averages! But wait: Suddenly, about 600 pp in, this great novelist, the preeminent novelist of ideas, introduces a character who’s hysterical: Mynheer (Dutch for Mr.) Peeperkorn. This character bursts on the scene as a new guest at the Berghof sanatorium (for TB patients, primarily) and he dominates the scene from his moment of arrival: big, blustering, boystrous, out-sizing everyone in his presence through his booming voice, his extravagant expenditures, his excessive eating and drinking, his gambling, a Falstaffian giant, but a deeply flawed magnificence. As it happens, mostly because he’s half (or wholly) drunk all the time, he can never complete a thought or sometimes a sentence. He starts off each utterance w/ a grandiose pronouncement, and in short order his words fall apart and he ends up spouting nonsense or saying nothing (nothing intelligible, at least). He’s a really a Dickensian character, and who knew that Mann could or would create a character in this mode? Yet he’s by no means here for “comic relief,” that rather ridiculous concept (Who really needs to be “relieved” while reading a book or watching a show? Relieved from what?). He comes onto the stage of MM as the new sexual/romantic partner of the strange and beautiful Clavdia Chauchat – the married Russian woman on whom the protagonist, Hans, has developed a huge crush. After declaring to her his love on the eve of her temporary departure (her life is a matter of roaming from one spa or resort to the next), he eagerly awaits her return in hopes of winning her love in some manner; he’s crushed when she returns w/ this new, ridiculous, but hugely wealthy man – but we, of course, see that Hans to her is a plaything, that she could never be serious about him in any way – she’s far more experienced, and far more cruel, than anything he could imagine.

The most powerful death scene in 20th-century literature

I think it’s fair to say that Joachim’s demise, in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (1927), is the greatest death in 29^th-century literature (Tolstoy death of Prince Andrew [right character?] in W&P is the greatest in the 19^th century). To watch this brave and stoic young man wrestle with his condition, keeping his thoughts and fears largely to himself, refusal to blame anyone include the questionable medical staff at the Hofhaus clinic, maintaining the illusion – to himself – that he might return to his post in the army, and his gradual slipping away from those around him, including his mother and his cousin Hans, is incredibly sad and probabably clinically accurate, and in that sense even palliative as his physical suffering is minimal. What reader will fail to remember this scene, or the medical director’s rebuke to the protagonist Hans cannot for some time grasp the gravity and inevitability of his cousin’s fate (the fate, ultimately, of us all)? Perhaps the drama of this scene is heightened as played against the extensive and relentless arguments of the two intellectual antagonists – the humanist Settembrini and the, I don’t even know what to call him, doctrinaire and combative Jesuit (convert from Judaism) Naphta. I suspect that no reader can follow all the nuances of their arguments, which become so intense and obscure as to be almost comedic (and how can we not be overwhelmed by Mann’s knowledge as well!) – though the stakes are of the highest. They are dueling for Hans’s soul, and in that sense for the soul of all huamnkind, in an intellectual debate that becomes physical and tragic.

Congrats to the Times magazine on the all-fiction Covid19 issue

Haven’t quite finished reading last week’s NYTimes Mag devoted to fiction about the Covid19 lock-down; the editors solicited short stories composed in the mode of Boccaccio’s Decameron, that is, to form a collection of stories that entertain and distract us during our enforced isolation. Usually, these ideas don’t come off so well in that most writers of literary fiction don’t take on-demand assignments; but this collection is better than I’d expected, in part because the editors did a great job in getting a diverse line-up of contributors, with particular attention to international literature – a great idea, in that this virus, as many have noted, knows no national boundaries. Sure, some of the stories rely too heavily on a tricky ending and some have no ending at all. But a few of them work well. The best I’ve read so far is Charles Yu’s Systems, a story or essay or poem perhaps that is made up entirely (or nearly so) or Internet search terms (e.g., Harry and meghan). Rachel Kushner’s The Girl with the Big Red Suitcase is fine as well, and much more traditional – in fact, of all these stories it hews closest to the “storytelling” frame of Boccaccio; it reads a little like a Conrad or James story, in which the narrator and the audience are established as part of the work – a fine piece, even if you may be able to see the ending before you get there. Margaret Atwood’s Impatient Griselda – in which the narrator/storyteller is a creature from another galaxy; sounds kind of trite, but Atwood does a great job creating a narrator who speaks English as if through a Google Translator app – very funny. I also liked Leila Slimani’s story, The Rock (translated from the French), a short and enigmatic piece about an author who gains some prominence when attacked for no apparent reason while delivering a speech. There’s one thing I didn’t like at all, however, and that’s the horrendous typeface that the Times used to give author’s name and title on each piece (as well as in the ToC and on the cover. Get this: The first rule of type design is, or should be, be legible.

At last, Hans speaks to Frau Chauchat, in Mann's Magic Mountain

At last, at about the midway point in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (1927) the protagonist, Hans, gets up the courage to speak to the woman he’s admired from afar for about 6 months, a fellow “patient” at the Berghof sanatorium, Clavdia Chauchat, a beautiful, exotic married woman af about 30. Has literally blunders into a conversation w/ her by asking the nearest person – her – if he could borrow a pencil (an exchange that echoes a memory from his school days when he asked the student, a boy, on whom he’d had a crush, for the loan of a pencil, make of that what you will). They then begin their first conversation; it’s obvious that she knows he’s been staring at her for months, and she knows quite a bit about him. This is his opening, and he embarks on a long and complex declaration of love (most of this part of the novel is in French, fine if you can read French but I wonder why the Vintage edition couldn’t provide a translation for those who can’t) – gushingly romantic dwelling in a weird way on her skin, her elbows, her kneecaps, totally strange. Her reaction is what we would expect: after leading him on she pretty much says “see you later, kid” – she’s decamping the next morning. It’s obvious that if any relationship were possible it would be one in which she’d lead him around like a puppy on a leash. Over the next few chapters we’ll see how, or whether, he will recover (will his minimal disease flare up in a more dangerous manner?) from this flirtation, teasing, and, ultimately, dumping – that is, putting him back in his place (he seems completely naïve about love and sex; she is obviously experienced – and dangerous, with her Russian husband somewhere in the background).

Thoughts on the ideas in Mann's Magic Mountain

Nearing the halfway point in Thomas Mann’s monumental novel The Magic Mountain (1927), which is rightly known as one of the great “Modern” novels (20^th century) and one of the greatest novels “of ideas,” which do in fact become a major part of the plot. The plot itself is deceptively simple: 24-year-old Hans Castorp takes a 3-week vacation (before starting a new job, unpaid, as an apprentice in ship design), travels up to the TB Sanatorium, the Berghof, in Davos to spend the weeks w/ his cousin, Joachim; while on the visit, he decides to take part in the cure, which involves a lot of outdoor rest breathing the cold and fresh air and extensive eating. As he nears the end of his stay, he visits the presiding doctor, Behrens, who detects a slight abnormality in Castorp’s lung, and he in fact becomes a patient. This diagnosis of course plays into his laziness, his desultory pursuit of a career, his lack of close ties to the world below, the “flatland,” and his sexual yearning for the 30-ish Russian woman whom he worships from afar, with out ever – yet – getting up the courage to say a word to her. So why is this novel so special? First of all, the ideas that drive the narrative are complex and arresting: the associate doctor, trained in psycho-analysis (new at the time of course, esp. in the prewar setting, ca. 1910), delivers lectures suggesting that the illness all in the hospital suffer from occurs because of repressed desires, which psychotherapy, the “real” cure, can abate; and in fact, the Berghof is rife with sexual tension and expression, though Hans holds himself at a distance from that. His repressed desires are unclear even to himself, but to the reader it’s clear that his attachment to the Russian woman, Frau (yes, she’s married) Chauchat, occurs because she reminds him of a young man he’d had a crush on during his school days. That said, the whole novel feels in some ways closer to Poe and Kafka than to the other great “modernist” novelists (e.g., Proust, Joyce); Hans and his fellow “inmates” are as if imprisoned in the hospital – once you get in, it seems, there’s almost no chance of getting out alive – that Hans faces this fate w/ bizarre equanimity, as if he’s been drugged and deluded by all the excess of food and the enforced rest. Throughout all of this, Hans engages in many conversations w/ a self-described “humanist,” Settembrini, kwho recognizes that Hans – not nearly so ill as he thinks he is – is in danger of turning his back on life when he should be committed and engaged – but Hans is getting pulled deeper and deeper into the whirlpool of life at the Berghof, as if this strange place w/ its multinational clientele is representative of the world at large, which it is not. Rather, it's a perversion of the world at large, and Hans will die unless he can release himself from its seductive spell.

A rare story that encompasses an entire lifetime: A Transparent Woman

Hari Kunzru’s story in the current New Yorker, A Transparent Woman, accomplishes what few short stories do or even try to do: Telling the story of an entire lifetime, without feeling like a hasty summary or highlight reel. Kunzru – an author I know nothing about, but will look forward to reading more of his work – tells the story of a young woman living in East Germany before the fall of the wall and its way of life; it did take me a while to figure out the precise time and place, but we see pretty quickly that the young woman is deracinated, nearly homeless, working crappy jobs, trying to find some peace and means of expression in her life, and she gets drawn into (or willingly joins) a counterculture group and part of a three-woman punk-rock band (The Transparent Women) that becomes attains some success playing, first locally and then at venues around the country, at various head-banging concerts and anti-government scenes. It doesn’t take long before an agent in the Stasi begins following, then threatening her, and we watch in close-up how she is pressured to be a spy and how she is abused by the system – this may remind some of the movie The Lives of Others – and ultimately how her seeming collaboration colors and eventually ruins her life, both before and long after the reunification. I have no idea as to the authenticity of this story, but it feels credible and to his credit Kunzru focuses on his central character and her sorrowful and difficult interior life and not on the mechanisms and methods of the Stasi police. Kunzru’s one of those stories about which we think, for a moment, maybe this should be a novel – but then we realize, no it’s perfect as is.