From famous first line(s) - “Why do you always wear black?”- to famous last line, which I won’t divulge here, Chekhov’s The Sea Gull is a knockout and, though maybe a little heavy-handed in its symbolic compared with the final Chekhov plays, still a great exploration of character, art, and desire over a 2-year span (the later plays adhere more closely to the unity of time). It’s his most directly stated play about playwriting and acting: The central character a young man intent on creating highly symbolic dramas, perhaps a la Strindberg’s Dream Play?, and stages a brief performance for his family and neighbors, in particular his mother who was a star actress now dealing with her fading career as she ages. She’s cruel, mean to him, he pulls the plug on his own play and sulks, or worse. Of course he was in love with the star of the play, Natasha, and when we see her in the 4th act, 2 years along, she’s a mental and emotional wreck, trying to keep together and acting career but seemingly too unstable to persist. The Sea Gull, which the young playwright shot to death for no reason (see Coleridge, maybe?) and with whom Natasha identifies is a rare and great example of the “objective correlative,” a symbol carrying the weight of an entire narrative.
The Cherry Orchard is rightly revered and appreciated not only as his Chekhov’s play - capping a quartet of great plays that set a standard for dramatic naturalism - but also as his most accessible play. The main plot strand is really simple: A seemingly wealthy middle-aged woman returns to her family estate in Russia as part of an entourage (daughter, step-daughter, brother, + a troop of servants) recognizing that she’s completely out of $ and faced with a terrible, to her, decision: should she sell off the land (with the eponymous orchard) to pay her debts and move on - and if so, to whom? To the rapacious landowner, rising from his peasant background, who wants to clear everything for development? Terrible to her, but what’s the alternative? As part of this play we get much more upstairs/downstairs than in other Chekhov play, and a really sad, romantic element as the assembled families and friends try to build a match for the step-daughter, Varya, but nothing seems to click and we get the sense that she will be alone for a long time. Ultimately, the sorrow about the sale of the orchard seems like a romantic delusion, as the woman and her family head off to Paris, leaving behind the sound of the axe hitting the trees - because of her social stature, she can move on. How about the others, though? It’s rightly called a “comedy,” unlike his three previous plays, and technically that’s correct - but it’s possibly the most mournful comedy ever written. Nobody dies, but what kind of life do they lead? The histrionics about the sale seem, in the rear view, comic and hyperbolic.
Like so many books (and films) these days (or is it me?), Domenico Starnone’s novel Trust (2019, tr. from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri) gets off to a great start, maintains that momentum for a while, and then the thread loosens and slips away by the conclusion, as if the author himself lost sight of where he was going w/ this novel (presumptuous of me to day, but does anyone disagree?). Inevitably some spoilers will follow, so if plot is your main reason for reading a novel, reader beware: Trust begins with a person - a writer? writing the very novel we’re reading? how post-modern, which is to say how passee …with the narrator lamenting the end of a passionate affair in his youth (an affair that, as Lahiri rightly notes in her afterword, we might balk at the “me too” element of this affair - h.s. teacher and recent graduate); as part of this relationship, narrator (Pietro) and beloved former student (Teresa) tell each other something they’ve done about which they feel horribly guilty and whose revelation would discredit them forever. This “trust” exercise hopes over the entire novel - am I not right in lamenting that we never learn the confession? The novel follows the narrator over the course of his life, as he becomes a widely read and respected writer about education reform; en route, he provides a # of enemies, notably a leftist critic, who at first hates P but over time develops a friendship and admiration. A few other people complicate P’s life over time, notably the editor of his book, with whom he nearly but not quite begins an affair, and even his wife, who at times feels too much in the shadow of his fame - in other words, several people could disrupt his seemingly self-satisfied and productive professional life. But, hey, nothing happens! Teresa, a constant threat, pretty much just fades into the background; P’s adult daughter uses her influence (she’s a reporter) to get her dad a medal of recognition - a display of hubris that would get her fired in any American newspaper (or it should, anyway). And at the end, the novel, despite flirting with drama and danger, ends up unleavened, with P enjoying his old age (in his 80s) and having just completed a novel (this one??). Starnone keeps the tension up throughout, and his writing is clear and on point - enough to draw me to conclude this relatively short novel, but in the end I can’t help but feel that there was no there there.
Per Petterson shot to international fame, and rightly so, thanks to his novel from 2003, Out Stealing Horses, which subtly and almost invisibly presented a political/historical narrative of Norwegian resistance to the Nazi occupation, story told in retrospect from the POV of a solitary, self-sufficient man who recollected the war years from his childhood, with many lacunas. PP wrote a # of novels before OSH and has done a # since, none of which rose to the elevation of OSH. It took a while for his first published book, Echoland (1989) to land in English in pb but here is is - and how is it? It’s obvious on any reading that this guy would be a real talent - beautiful passages (a night-time fishing expedition, an exuberant bike ride on fitted nearly deserted roads, family waking up in early hours nearly dead because of propane leak, first realization of sexual urges, complicated relationships with domineering dad and a demanding grandfather, puzzlements about his friend’s attraction to older sister. All good - though the book falls into the vacuum of neither fish nor fowl. Roughly, the book is a series of short, seemingly autobiographical, stories or passages about a range of experiences during the 12-year-old central character (told in 3rd person) and his Norwegian family’s summer w/ grandparents in Denmark on a remote coastal town. Each is good - but they don’t quite add up, ending with a contretemps with father that was not particularly well foreshadowed. Defniigely worth reading this book - it’s quite short as well - to get a glimpse of a major writer at the outset of his career and to get a sense of the author’s childhood, background, and native soil; can’t help but wonder, if this book were to be drafted and published today, why the author couldn’t more directly make it either a memoir, a piece of “auto-fiction” pioneered in Norway, see Knausgaard, or coming-of-age novel.
I have read and posted on many Jonathan Franzen works over the past 15 years or so; despite several quibbles and complaints I have found his work significant and engaging, for the most part, and have noted and will note here again that he hardly needs my support - however - his latest, a 600+page tome that’s the first of a trilogy no less (!) - is, how to put it?, a crashing or crushing bore. I couldn’t finish nor will I though I did slog through 100 or so pp about a minister who sometime in the past had been kicked out of leadership in the Church Youth Org., Crossroads (the title of the novel) for reasons that 100 pp in we still don’t know nor do we care; the novel is a gaze into the reckless adolescent social life of the children of the minister, none of which held events slightest interest for me; the writing is flat and unadorned, the characters are quotidian and conventional, the setting (the 80s, Chicago suburbs) is as bland as can be but not in the least illuminated as with, say, just about anything by Updike on that era. So, I’m done - not a book for me, maybe others will find what I evidently missed.
In a week(s) of so-called double-issue of the New Yorker, when the short story concerns a young woman’s struggle with what courses at Harvard in which to enroll, I turn elsewhere for some meaningful (to me) short stories, and have enjoyed reading the now out-of-fashion Guy De Maupassant, master of the short form, whose brief story Looking Back is a simple narration of an elderly priest asked by a widowed woman friend to explain what led him to a vow of lifetime celibacy, and he obliges with a deeply sorrowful recollection of his difficult childhood, bullied and isolated, and his intense feelings for his only source of love and solace, a rescue dog, taken from him in a cruel accident and his subsequent realization that he could never and should never withstand the overwhelming feelings of loss and pain that parents are subject to inevitably - so sad, moving, and credible. Opposite on the spectrum would be the hyper-frenetic Joyce Carol Oates, whose justly famous “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction…” is presented as notes for a story unwritten by a young woman from a well-to-do family compelled to steal/shoplift and whose life was/is obviously headed for rx, destruction, bad company, pain, and early death - with this first-person narrative as her striving for salvation and pledging that she will “reform,” and we can only hope so, though the odds don’t look so great - an exciting and unconventional (in structure) story from a writer always attentive to the needs and strengths of those who’ve survived a rough childhood - usually working-class and underpaid, this one being an exception on that score. Also let’s note a Nabokov story that, unusual for him, has great empathy with the characters, an elderly couple whose son has been confined lifelong it appears to a psychiatric hospital - a story, despite its title (Signs and Symbols) is devoid of literary trickery and impersonation.
Just a brief note on Alejandro Zambra’s brief novel (and I do mean brief, it’s just 80 pp, small pp., lots of blank pages separating the 5 sections) Bonsai, from 1997 (the Melville house tr. doesn’t even give that info) - I mean, seriously, what is so great about this so-called “new classic”? What was new once can years later seem quant and out of date. Essnetially, this novel is about a young man who has a cold and distant sexual relationship with a young woman and after they’re time is over he learns that she has died. He gives us info about the death in brief hints across the course of this narrative. But what’s the point, really? You’d think a so-called novel this short would at least have some poignant or at least engaging scenes, moments, dialogs - but it’s just one of those hall-of-mirror introspections: The narrator is writing a book. But is this book we’re reading the book he’s writing? And, in the end, who cares, just tell us a story!
As an antidote to some of the disappointing reading I’ve been plagued with I went back over past few days to the always-amazing Flannery O’Connor, reading 3 of her classics: A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Everything that Rises Must Converge, and Parker’s Back. These stories are so great for a # of reasons, including: Most of all, the wit and humor, even when writing about situations or moments that in other hands would be sorrowful; the originality of phrasing, partly a result of her Southern heritage I would think, but many - most - of her sentences could never be composed by anyone but her and definitely not by anyone but a Southern writer; her sly religiosity - in that I think a reader coming blind to her stories would not pick up that she was a devout Christian (Catholic?) - but forearmed with that information we can more easily see the religious overtones, the Biblical allusions, in her fiction; the freshness of her voice, not part of any movement or trend, not in any obvious way indebted to her predecessors, and a counterpoint to the anxiety of influence, she seems to have been born as an original; and the tragedy of her life, long suffering w/ lupus and dying too young - not that anyone would know this from her stories - but know it we can’t help but wonder where her talent might have taken her in later years.
