tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-85809468650770789812024-03-01T00:41:13.260-05:00Elliot's Readingelliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.comBlogger3817125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-51313222352960580192023-11-03T13:28:00.003-04:002023-11-03T13:28:54.161-04:00As of this date I have ceased posting on my blogs, Elliotsreading and Elliotswatching. Thank you to those who have followed these blogs.<p> As of this date I have ceased posting on my blogs, Elliotsreading and Elliotswatching.</p><p>Thank you to those who have followed these blogs.</p>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-7326553558898112282023-11-02T14:27:00.001-04:002023-11-02T14:29:25.206-04:00Elliot's Reading October 2023 - Wharton, Auster<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Elliot’s Reading - October 2023</span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Edith Wharton</b>’s early novel <b>The Fruit of the Tree</b> was published in 1907 and has largely been out of print and seldom read until a :K=Literary Classics” republication in 2004 and now I know why: The novel is 600+ pp and it feels like more. The roots and the backbone are there - Wharton is a great analyst and satirist of the ruling classes in America at the turn of the century and her heart was in the right place as she gets this novel going with a long section about a mill worker barely injured in an industrial accident and the “fruitless” attempt by a one of managers at the mill, who hopes through a lot of (wasted) anguish trying to get the mill to improve worker safety and, in the broader sense, improve their lives. Good start - but then the novel drifts away from this central and important theme. We’ve got a mixed potion here: one big part Dickens/Zola/Sinclair about worker exploitation, grim exposes; another part is pure Middlemarch, and nothing wrong with that but it feels almost like a copy - young woman struggling bring better life top her community against a backdrop of marital mismatches, and that’s still good, but we also get a strong dose to top it off of Henry James, long passages hard to work out way through and most significant is that the narrative itself is agonizingly slow - and Wharton is not as good as James here, as we just want to kick the tires and get this vehicle on the move. I’ve read halfway through - 300 pp! - and it seems as if what I’ve read could well have been told a third of that or even less, and at last I’mleft with the feeling that there’s much to like in this novel but it really had to be moving along faster, like most of EW’s work, and it needs more satire, more edge, more commitment as in the first (promising) section and, though I hate to say it, this novel needs more clarity: EW is particularly inept about cluing us in on who’s doing the speaking, who are these characters whom we’d met 200 pp back and no longer remember, what are so many of the names similar for God’s sake: At least let the main characters have names that don’t start w/ the same letter, is that too much to ask? Start reading if you dare, I’m sure I missed or misread some things, but good luck at finishing. </span></p>
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<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">I’ve liked some of </span><b style="font-family: Palatino;">Paul Auster</b><span style="font-family: Palatino;">’s work, especially his ability to capture the mood of upper Manhattan West Side in the 70s and 80s - this in part because I lived there for a short time and I, too, have tried to capture the era but with much less success. His 1993 novel, </span><b style="font-family: Palatino;">Leviathan</b><span style="font-family: Palatino;">, coves this same ground but in my view via a vast exploration of character - a contemporary of the the narrator (who is clearly autobiographical) with many nuances and quirks and obsessions. We learn in the first sentence that a young man died in a bomb explosion in Wisconsin and that the Auster-like narrator survives it’s his friend Sachs. (Some students died in a lab bomb explosion in Wisconsin in this era, which many have inspired this death.) I have to say, though, that after the initial sketching in of character the novel is a long, to me tedious account of this Sachs’s life and obsessions with many side trips that tell of the narrator’s sexual prowess and confidence (and his waning writing abilities and his break-up of marriage) - and I wish it could be more engaging but well than half-way through I was getting no enjoyment or enlightenment by further reading: it’s a novel of character, sure, but it’s also a novel devoid of plot: Why not further investigation, for ex., into the unsolved bombing death, and how could the narrator be the only one to know who built that bomb? Where’s the FBI in all this?</span><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span><span style="font-family: Palatino;">hate dictating what a novel should have or could have been but at least I expect to be entertained and engaged start to finish but with this one the engagement diminished rather than expanded or deepened and I have in at about the half-way point, sorry.</span><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span> </span></p>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-80389035561790203632023-10-02T16:51:00.001-04:002023-10-02T16:51:08.150-04:00Anton Chekhov's short novels <p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <span style="font-family: Palatino;">Elliot's Reading September 2023</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;">You don’t or shouldn’t or maybe can’t read <b>Anton Chekhov</b>’s early first novel, The Steppe (tr. Pevear and Volokhonsky, Complete Short Novels) for its plot - there isn’t much of that - a business man dealing in wool fabrics traveling to make some trades and some $ takes with him his young nephew who is on his way to enroll in school, far from home, and is understandably anxious about the journey away from his family. The uncle is extremely unsympathetic, and pushes his nephew off onto a wagon caravan, no place for a timid young man leaving home for the first time. Many adventures, tales, and characters in the caravan ensued, all of them exciting, and in particular AC’s descriptions of the landscape, the sky, the feeling and misery of being drenched, boiled, traveling my night - all good, but all seem like sketches, though of the highest order. The plot such as it is begins to unfold in the last 20 or so pages, as we see how cruel and selfish the so-called benefactor can be, and the short novel ends on a plaintive note such as we rarely see in modern literature - except maybe in Chekhov’s plays. So this work is a try out; and he makes the team. The there’s The Duel and Story of an Unknown Man. The Duel is apparently the longest work of fiction from AC, and it’s a good place for him to stop - this short novel consists largely of philosophical debate among the major characters - we don’t get to the duel itself until approx 100 pp and there’s not much drama to it, after all - but the value of this short novel is that it anticipates AC’s plays: as P&V notes, this short novel is notably polyphonic, that is, of many voices - and AC went too far with the polyphony here but good foretell that the technique would work better in drama form, with each of the voices establishing a distinct personality, or character. And yet, his much shorter short novel, The Story of an Unknown Man (1892) works particularly well as it’s a first-person narrative, somewhat unusual for AC : the narrator surprisingly is a house servant, who reports on the misdeeds and misdoing of his boss/owner; eventually the narrator spirits away with the master’s latest crush and sets up household in central Europe; the woman, however, is pregnant and upon delivery of the child she goes into post party depression (the term did not exist at that time) and ends her relationship with the narrator. A good guy at least in his re-telling he tries to ensure the well-being of the young girl, w/ the novel ending on a mysterious and ambivalent note, quite typical of the mood established in AC’s great dramas. Three Years, on the other hand, is more direct and accessible, the sad account of an unfashionable, awkward, and homely young man who marries a whom he know does not love him in return, and of course sad consequences ensue; it’s a good but not a great example of AC’s fiction - the story of an outsider - except for the fact that AC seems to have given up on the novel and ended not on a mysterious and resonant note but suddenly, abruptly. And the 6th and final of Chekhov’s short novels (P&V ed and tr - Everyman’s Library - and don’t you think they could change that to “Everyone’s”? - My Life (1896) does not appear at all to be auto fiction despite the title, it’s the life story first-person narrated about a young man from a family in the nobility who believes that the only honest work is with his hands - building, construction, roofing, etc. - to the horror and chagrin of his stubborn father; the narrator reflects on the abusive childhood he and his sister endured - and over the course of the short novel he marries another member of the nobility but the marriage falls apart and the narrator leaves his small-town home bound for nowhere. Was it a wasted life? From his father’s view, yes, but the narrator seems to feel otherwise - the only surprise is that he doesn’t seem politically active - it’s just a personal code that he follows. </span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><br /></p>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-22444841314721864512023-09-03T12:11:00.005-04:002023-09-03T12:11:39.061-04:00Late-career novels from Graham Greene and Edith Wharton and a new one from Richard Russo <p> <span style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: large;">Elliot’s Reading August 2023</span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Edith Wharton</b>’s late novel <b>The Children</b> (1928) is far from her best known for some obvious reasons, the vapid title for one, but it deserves more attention and acclaim that has eluded it for many years. First, the problems: EW has set up a tough standard as the novel is about competing cliques of wealthy and idle New Englanders traveling at leisure in Europe with an entourage of Children from various bad and broken marriages; in the opening scenes, the protagonist, a civil engineer whose job takes him around the world passing for a brief vacation - his name is simply Boyne; he’s aboard a Mediterranean cruise boat and at first frets that he knows nobody aboard - of course that turns out to be false in the microscopic world of EW’s novels - and the entourage that he knows includes a group of 7 ?) children loosely related at best - the Wheatons, they’re called - and Boyne finds himself ever deeply involved in their lives - in fact, he becomes their unofficial guardian given the task of ensuring that nothing breaks up this group of 7 - which of course it will and does. The downside: the characters are so privileged and unaware of their privileges and small-mindedness and most of all parental neglect that we hate most of the characters, inevitably - as in many EW novels in fact. What saves this one and makes reading worthwhile is the intellectual and emotional journey that Boyne takes on, willingly and foolishly, and how this burden that he assumes gradually wastes away his life - and the novel ends with some stunning and beautiful passages. </span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Graham Greene</b>’s late-career novel <b>Travels with my Aunt</b> (1969) is clearly one the funniest of his many publications, a bildungsroman/travelog novel in which the narrator is a self-described bland and obscure personality, retired after long and dull career as a banker in a small branch office, never married never even in love (possibly virginal? repressed homosexual?), his one passion being the dahlias in his garden - who at his beloved mother’s funeral he meets for the first time his eponymous aunt who reveals to him several family secrets (his mother was really his stepmother, e.g.) and sweeps him up into her eccentric and adventuresome social life, which includes friendships and romances (she’s 7+) with several characters, often disreputable, and brings him along on some impulsive, poorly planned trips (e.g. ride the Orient Express to Turkey and then turn around quick and come home to London) that change his once-sheltered life. The novel builds toward a new world for narrator Henry in of all places Paraguay, rich with gunfights and criminals (much like in an earlier GG tropical novel), drawing into a Paraguay prison and tied to a smuggling scheme that he barely comprehends though his experience as a banker provides useful if dubious info. Watching Henry fall apart and be won over to the dark side is part of the hilarity here, and though on a literal level the novel makes no sense and is extraordinarily improbable it’s total fun to read - even, for ex., just GGs description of morning life in a tropical city. </span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The kindest thing to say about <b>Richard Russo’s novel Chances Are…</b> (2019) is that it doesn’t stand up well against his previous and much more engaging works from Mohawk. Empire Falls, et al. Briefly, it’s a story of 4 men in their 60s, college buddies, who go on a weekend retreat to Martha’s Vineyard where they pine for the woman, Jacy, with whom they’d all had a crush back in college days. How this all plays out make for a novel both improbable (why for example did J. fall off the map - a missing-person case that has dropped from all attention for some40 years!) and dissatisfying (it’s all told through recollection about this past love and what became of her - rather than in scenes that deepen the mystery and hold our attention). In short, he’s a fine novelist, but I would’t start an interested reader with this one. </span></p>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-10990228058783538662023-08-02T12:30:00.003-04:002023-08-02T12:30:37.075-04:00Disappointing novel from G. Eliot but some good short stories, a strong late novel from G.Greene, and another disappointment from Trevor<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> July 23</span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;">George Eliot’s <b>Romola</b> (1863), couldn’t finish it, and her story duet - The Lifted Veil (1859) and Brother Jacob (1864), the best of this group, a strange and dramatic story about a young man who steals from hths mother to a leave home and advance is career but who is undone by his affectionate and naive brother with disabilities. </span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>The Human Factor</b> (1978) should be considered among <b>Graham Greene</b>’s strongest works of fiction, alongside The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, The Power and the Glory, et al., but I supposed it’s downgraded by readers and connoisseurs because in structure at least just a story about uncovering a leak in the British MI5, in other words, an entertainment, whereas it’s also, primarily, a love story about an agent in Africa who falls in love with a Black woman, whom he brings home with him to the London, along with her child whom he adopts as their son - yet pressures build as we learn and surmise more about the security leak and the role this agent has played (and why). I would say GG makes the going a little tough for all readers, unfortunately, by his strange affectation of having many characters use names that start w/ the same initial (C and W in this case), whereas all readers know it’s easier to address a novel or play if characters’ names don’t coincide. Not an easy book, but a moving and powerful look inside the workings of the bureau of spies (reminded me a little of Shirley Hazard’s take down of the UN bureaucracy).</span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Despite hating it when forceed to read it (abridged) in grade, people still read <b>George Eliot</b>’s Silas Marner and find it actually quite good, and people still read and enjoy Adam Bede, Mill on the Floss, and others - all leading up to the classic, Middlemarch and the dark and mysterious Daniel DeRonda - but there’s that middle period immediately before Middlemarch when Eliot wrote the dismal Romola and the equally unreadable <b>Felix Holt: The Radical</b> (1866) - who could predict that something as grand as Middlemarch would follow? She must have been struggling with the 2 duds for a reason, perhaps perfecting her capacity for writing long and ostentatiously intelligent sentences, but we don’t read novels for sentences, and in these two he takes forever to get any semblance of a plot in motion and her characters are windy and largely interchangeable. It’s with good reason that Eliot’s middle-period novels are today largely unknown, unread, and out of print; they’re lousy books, but much good was to follow. The pathways of writers can be like a maze, circular and enwrapped in dead ends - with sometimes a breakthrough. </span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>William Trevo</b>r’s novel <b>Nights at the Alexandra</b> (1987) has one thing going for it: It’s short (ca 90 pp). I continue to wonder why Trevor, clearly one of the top two or three writers of short stories in the late 20th/early 21st century could be such a disaster as a novelist - not that his novels are all that bad but they just cannot measure up to the standard the he himself established. Nights is a good example of that: Yes, it has the components of several novels: domineering father issuing commands and dicta, rivalries between Irish Catholics and Protestants, harsh boarding school, and a young man’s yearning for and fascination with a glamours older woman in town - and yet none of this feels sharp or original, just like wired over plot elements. For ex. the eponymous Alexandra is a movie theater that one of the characters (the forlorn husband of glamorous woman; living in social oscillation as a German who escaped to Ireland during the war) dreams of building the first cinema in the small town - he sees a business opportunity - and in fact he accomplishes his goal and the theater is a big hit … and so?? - well the narrator spends some time working as an usher or ticket taker but this says nothing about the culture of the town, the effect of the theater on the town, on the young man - anything! Couldn’t there be some plot development regarding the German living in town and how he’s received, or not? Not a disaster but a total disappointment of missed opportunities here - at least it was short. </span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><br /></p>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-27915354225457753412023-07-04T20:44:00.001-04:002023-07-04T20:44:07.885-04:00June 2023: Graham Greene's The Comedians <p><span style="font-size: medium;"> June 2023: Graham Greene's The Comedians</span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Elliot’s Reading June 2023: Graham Greene’s The Comedians </span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Maybe it was me, but out seems to me that <b>Graham Greene</b>’s mid-career novel, <b>The Comedians</b> (1966) - don’t expect a stand0up routine at the Copa gets off to a good start, with the comedy 3 men taking a boat trip, who knows why? This isn’t 1886 — across the gulf to Haiti, which at the time was ruled by the Tyrannical “Doc” Duvalier and his thugs in the Tontons Macoutes - not a place where most would go for a business venture. The narrator, one of the passengers, owns a nearly worthless hotel in Port au Prince and he’s headed to Haiti to possibly sell the place. The 3 travelers amusingly are named Smith, Jones, and Brown (the narrator0, which seems to anticipate a group of secret agents perhaps each planning a coup or a heist? Smith is the most innocent, a former uS presidential candidate for a fringe party whose single issue is vegetarianism (he lost - and is completely lost in Haiti. But when the plot begins to thicken, GG thins the broth with a long and boring romance between narrator Brown and the wife of an ambassador, and the novel from that point become a drag despite a few real bright spots from GG who is always a pro stylist - notably the escape at night in a rain-drench city to try to make it safely to the border of the DR where, allegedly, the US has better relationships - which is to say more control. The title is puzzling, at least to me, but GG is I think known for dashing off titles - and in fact sometimes for dashing off books. This one, originally, was classified as an “entertainment” rather than as a novel (I think so anyway), and that’s about right: despite opportunities to really examine colonialism and tyranny - Naipaul, e.g. - this steers the easier course toward light entertainment - nothing wrote with a writer’s working for his/her living, but let’s not overrate the middling work that stands up poorly against the more powerful (Power and Glory, End of Affair, et al.). Ton Macuse </span></p><div><br /></div>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-27152394195087373122023-06-01T16:27:00.007-04:002023-06-01T16:27:52.096-04:00Elliot's Reading May 2023: Wharton's the Reef, Stories by Nancy Hale, and George Eliot's Romola <p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <span style="font-family: Palatino;">Elliot's Reading - May 2023</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: medium;">Edith Wharton's The Reef, stories by Nancy Hale, and George Eliot's Romola</span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Edith Wharton</b>’s follow-up to the much better known House of Mirth was <b>The Reef</b> (1912) and it’s surprising how seldom this one is read or discussed in its day and now - perhaps partly due to the title whose meaning and euphony still puzzle me. I found this narrative much more intense, personal, and comprehensible than in her previous work, largely I think because it’s a much narrow field of action - essentially only 4 or 5 characters and two locales. But also: It’s highly dramatic and sort of a rom-com cliffhanger as we are left at numerous reading points wondering what can he/she possbly say to respond to that or wriggle out off that situation. The plot, in brief: a dapper and too-slick and self-involved 30ish man (Owen) on his way to from England to France to meet prenuptial to his wife to be, a widowed woman (Anna) of his age and class; en route he receives a cryptic message from Anna to delay his arrival by at least a week (I don’t even remember why she sent this telegram); his voyage delayed, Owen meets in the station a much younger (and lower “caste”) woman (Sophie) and has with her a brief but intense affair. On arrival finally at Anna’s, he is shocked to see that Anna has hired Sophie as the au pair for her young daughter - and complications ensue. One way to judge this novel in context is to recognize how it was both ahead of its time (scandalous, even!) in depicting an obvious adulterer and philanderer as a somewhat sympathetic character as well as a slam at the social/sexual attitudes that seemed to protect the infelicity of his (andWharton’s) social class. That said, it’s also revealing how indirect Whart had to be in presenting this scandalous plot; the seduction scene occurs behind locked doors, and throughout the long and torturous courtship of Owen and Anna they seem to never had sex - they abide in the same household/estate but with complete sanctimony; how different life (and literature) is today.</span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The Library of America edition of Where the Light Falls, <b>Selected stories of Nancy Hale</b>, brings to the reading public, small though that may be, the work of a long-forgotten short-story writer, Nancy Hale, presenting a selection of her stories from 1934 to 1966, with many of her early stories published in so-called “women’s magazines” and later stories almost exclusively in the New Yorker. Her work has been left aside for a # of reasons: bias against female authors and themes, lack of a single unifying style, and, most of all, not in particular innovative or even emulated: She never really cared for, it seems, the one-ended “new” short fiction of Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and, in a later iteration, in which the New Yorker reigned supreme, of Cheever and Updike. Her stories tend to end with a sense of finality, not of further possibility; they’re truly short stories and not scenes from a novel-to-be. She’s generally limited in scope as well - the New England well-to-do - so that was another strike. But all that said, her stories are universally accessible, insightful, and emotional: stories of social prejudice, of misfits and outcasts albeit from a world of social privilege, and a vivid portrayal of the intricacies of class and taste. Her middle stories, I would say, are her best; later in life she focused on Americans in Europe, and there she doesn’t hold up well against her predecessor (James) or her contemporary (the also nearly forgotten Mavis Gallant). I’d recommend for starters maybe To the North (about racial and social discrimination in a New England coastal town), That Woman (about social pressure and ostracism, Those Are Brothers (war refugees), and Who Lived and Died Believing (love and fate, a young nurse), and then just keep reading. </span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>George Eliot</b>’s (aka MaryAnn Evans’s) 4th novel, <b>Romola</b> (1863) is for me anyway largely unreadable, and I had to turn it aside after + 100 pp w/ + another 800 to go. Not going. Unlike her previous works, including such greats as Adam Bede and Silas Marner, this one gets off to a rugged and jumpy start, as we follow the pathways of a shipwrecked sole survivor washed ashore in or near Florence/Firenzi ca 1492 (auspicious date of when not much is made). This wayward protagonist has several odd encounters over a span of a few days that provide us w/ a good deal of Florentine gossip about which I cared not at all; at some point the young man, who’d set out from Greece and knows a good deal about the Renaissance thinkers and artists, is led to the lair of an unsuccessful philosopher, now blind and unable to work, and whose daughter, the eponymous Romola, is his main aide. Obviously, something will develop between the two - but damn so little has happened up to this point, and it’s so difficult to follow all the strands and systems of the various thinkers who appear here (would they have been more distinct and notable in Eliot’s day?) that I throw up my hands, as I suspect many readers would as well. Think of the powerful opening chapters of SM; think of the dramatic conclusion to Mill on the Floss. And you will wonder as did I what happened to her narrative skill? One aspect stands out for me, however, in trying to make sense of how Eliot would have come to write this novel: Romola is obviously a first run at a character like Dorothea in GE’s masterpiece, Middlemarch: An attractive young woman enslaved to a father/father figure as she tries to help the hapless old man complete his life’s work, for which she will get no credit. Eliot’s 2nd passing at this theme is much more profound, as the philosopher is not the woman’s father, about which she’d have no choice, but is her husband, which brings up all the failure not only of him but of her - a moral, financial, and sexual failure that ruins their marriage and nearly ruins D’s life. </span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><br /></p>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-11067552438350730292023-05-01T12:12:00.001-04:002023-05-01T12:12:26.666-04:00Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, a William Trevor novel, and an Annie Ernaux novel from 2001<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Elliot's Reading April 2023 </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, a William Trevor novel, Annie Ernaux</span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;">It’s amazing how much better <b>Edith Wharton</b>’s 2nd novel, <b>The House of Mirth</b> (1905) is compared with her meandering first novel, The Valley of Decision - an incredible transformation over 4 years. How? Why? I don’t know the timing of her good friend Henry James, but I suspect he might have had a much greater influence on Mirth, a searing and incisive portrayal of the social scene among the old (mostly) families of New York in the early 20th century. Wharton’s writing, like James, requires a lot of close attention to every passage - and the attention is worthwhile: Her writing here is insightful, surprising, and revealing about each of the characters and their mental (and social) status. At the heart of the novel is Lily Bart - beautiful, mannered, but not from a long line of patriarchs and industrialists, just hanging on to the fringes of the social scene and, unlike all the others in her “set,” troubled by debt. She’s truly one of the great tragic heroes of modern fiction, right up alongside of Anna K. For much of the novel, we want to right her off as frivolous and irresponsible - she runs up a huge debt playing bridge w/ a group who could afford to lose (which she can’t), gets a married man who’s coming on to her to “invest” on her behalf, runs into deeper debt, and he has sex with her in recompense - note that EW, as the custom of the age would require, is extremely circumspect about sex throughout and esp re Lily’s fate. In any event, we grow from despising her and her social set - a snobbish group of old $ and arrivistes who do nothing but party, travel, and entertain without a thought of making the world a better place for others, but as she’s forced to leave this scene Lily experiences life asinine of her so-called friends ever did, including a stint in a working-class job in the garment district; EW is by no means a progressive and it’s not clear what Lily actually learns - and there are a few unfortunate swipes particularly near the end - notably a saccharine passage about a young woman whom LB had helped at a difficult life stage (involving out-of-wedlock pregnancy) - but that said the ending is powerful and moving and our empathy for LB remains fast and profound; one unfortunate aspect of the novel, however, is the crude portrayal of the only Jewish character, Rosedale, who sounds like a thug and whom we’re meant to despise - because he has made his own fortune w/out the graces of the social class to which he aspires - as if the old-money social set is in any way better than he; just give him time, he could end up laughing at all of them. </span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;">It gives me no joy to note how disappointed I’ve been by the novels of <b>William Trevor</b>; in March I posted on two of his novels that I couldn’t finish and here’s a 3rd that did nothing for me force 150 pages and so good-bye: <b>Fools of Fortune</b> (1983), in what seems to be an auto-fiction or thinly disguised memoir about a young man in rural Ireland, a Protestant family, well-to-do, and the son dreads leaving for boarding school but then does uneventfully leave and experiences many of the high-jinx (drinking, pranks against teachers) familiar in the genre. What it lacks is any great beauty, struggle, or driving force, a fully developed life - esp notable in comparison with the giants of the genre such as Joyce and more recently Knausgaard and Melrose (Patrick), or even in a lighter vein Prep or in a mystery vein such as Tarrt’s Secret History, to name a few. This sour note stands in contrast to my unrelenting praise for Trevor’s short stories, which I have said and still say are among the best of the past hundred years, unquestionably. How do you figure? Two other novels of his that I read much closer to their published date - The Old Boys (a comic romp) and Felicia’s Journey - were much better than these I’ve read recently or tried to - F’sJ in fact was made into a good movie, or so I’ve heard. But with some these other novels, he’s just lost in a thicket of prose. </span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;">A Brief note on <b>Annie Ernaux</b>’s early novel ∫(2001), which for me was miles (kilometers?) away from her more recent The Years, about which I raved in an earlier post, but all the strengths of The Years - notably AE’s acute observations about the world and social changes and family issues and cultural shifts and fads and trends, in other words all we look and hope for in first-person, diary-like fiction - whereas the recently reissued Getting Lost, though daring and revealing in its day, a milestone for women writing about their sexual drive in a confessional but aggressive manner, has all of the flaws of such fiction - self-centered, narcissistic, and dreadfully dull rather than exciting and revealing, in other words quite the opposite of The Years - I turned it aside after 50 pp or so. </span></p>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-6505893397247735512023-04-08T19:05:00.000-04:002023-04-08T19:05:06.225-04:00March 2023: Greene's The Power and the Glory and The Third Man, Trevor's and Wharton's early novels, Silas Marner<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Elliot's Reading</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">March 2023</span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Elliot’s Reading</span></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">March 2023</span></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Not much doubt that <b>The Power and the Glory</b> (1940) was <b>Graham Greene</b>’s best novel - drawing on all of his skills up to that point in his career: tense and exciting narrative, clearly delineated characters, use of exotic settings and qualities without condescension, occasional sharp-edged humor, interest in moral and even religious ideas and conflicts and all never burdening the plot with sanctimonious hectic or authorial interference. This great novels follows the course of the last few weeks in the life of an (unnamed?) Catholic priest in one of the Mexican states under complete control of the “red shirts” ( i.e., socialist/communist forces) who have banished all religious exercises and issued a death warrant over the lives of any priests remaining in the region. The protagonist leads us through a series of events and crises, constantly in need of shelter, food, clothing, and especially alcohol, as he’s what he himself dubs as a “whisky priest” (possibly endemic to the profession). He’s ineffectual as a leader and as a narrative hero, but he is a monument to suffering (physical and mental) and well aware of his violations of church law and etiquette (e.g., he has a young daughter from a brief relationship with a parishioner). Yet he is fully aware of and devoted to his responsibilities - risking his life to administer confessional for a dying robber/murderer, in one of the great scenes). Other great scenes abound as well: the trek trailed by the annoying “mestizo” who hopes to gain a reward for turning in this wanted man (or so it seems), the night in the foul, crowded prison cell, et al. The final chapter is a little weird as it breaks the 4th wall and we seem to be reading a published account of the priest’s execution at a time when it hasn’t yet taken place - confusing, a bit, but strangely evocative. I’m pretty sure this novel has been made into a film, and pretty sure it couldn’t capture the full set of emotions and ideas brought forth in the novel. </span></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The book jacket on the kind of old library edition claims that <b>Alexandros Papadiamantis</b> (whew) is the “greatest of modern Greek prose fiction writers.” Maybe so - I don’t know whom he’d be up against aside from Kazantzakas, which in itself is a surprise - why has Greek fiction fallen off the map? Translation difficulties (as his translator Peter Levi has implied)? In any event, AP’s novel <b>The Murderess</b> (1903) presents AP’s case. Is it a great novel? Well, not really - though it’s a peculiarly troubling novel that will draw readers along to its ghastly conclusion as it clocks in at about 120 pages. Itself a novel of crime and punishment: The protagonist, who goes by several names (is that typical of Greek writing/culture, or a peculiarity of this translation?) is being pursued by the police, wanted for several killings. t’s a tense and tight narrative and would probably translate well to cinema; Levi posits that the protagonist is an innocent victim, killing young women of all-female sibling families because the girls would only be a burden on the impoverished families because of laws requiring large dowries. Does that make sense? Few readers would come to - or sympathize with - that conclusion. In any event, contrary all expectation, we see quite early in this narrative that the woman - Hadoula, the simplest of her several name, is in fact guilty of several horrifying murders - of children no less! - so whatever her motives we have zero sympathy with/for her. It’s kind of a test for the reader, in a sense: Is it possible for a novelist to write about a serial killer of children and hold our interest (yes, in this case) and sympathy (a resounding no): Read at your own risk. </span></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I’ve many times counted <b>William Trevor</b> as one of the 3 greatest English-language story writers of the century (along w/ Alice Munro and John Updike); Trevor is known primarily for his Chekhovian depictions of life in Ireland, particularly in the smaller towns and villages. Among his most famous, for those looking to start reading his stories, count among his best as the Piano Tuner, Hill Bachelors, and Sacred Statues, about a would-be sculptor who has to give up his art and work as a road-crew laborer. Trevor also wrote more than a dozen novels, and these are not as well known nor, to be honest, well regarded. I’ve read only one, I think (Lucy Gault? Felicia’s Journey?), and that was a long time ago; I liked it, but it wasn’t Trevor at his best. Anyway, I’ve decided to take a closer look at his novels, and started w/ one of his earliest, <b>Mrs. Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel</b> (1969), and I found the novel, which I didn’t finish even though I got about 75% through, to be no better than its title. It’s Trevor, so it has some great moments, in fact the first chapter, in which the eponymous Eckdorf talks to death her assigned seat-mate on a flight to Dublin - an encounter that’s as good as some of the best Monte Python sketches. That said, the novel becomes a tangled and laborious mess: Mrs. E arrives in Dublin, checks into a rather seedy and ill-kept hotel, decides she wants to buy the place, and has strange encounters with the owner, her family, and the many denizens of Dublin who cross her path or who enter the abode - and no one can understand her interest of motive. The hotel is a comic setting as well, with some very insalubrious characters who pass through its doorway. All this is potentially of interest, but the story-telling is so convoluted, packed with characters that we meet intermittently, of incidents that are drawn out and reverted to time and again apparently to give us various perspectives - but - this is not Dubliners or Portrait or Ulysses, despite it’s ambitious format. I just found it was demanding too much of me, just to keep up: such an antithesis to Trevor’s usual precision, economy of style, insight, and sympathetic portrayal of thuds with ill fortune. </span></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I’ll give some unusual advice regarding literature and film: As for<b> Graham Greene</b>’s 1949 novel, <b>The Third Man</b>, see the movie first (and if it’s one or the other, see the movie, dir. Carol Greed, 1949). Not that GG wasn’t aware of this impulse. The novel is quite short and densely packed with plot, and w/ good reason, as it was written almost as a screenplay to guide Reed et al. through the narrative. Sometimes it’s hard to follow - in part because GG chose to have story narrated in first person by one of the characters (Holley, or Rollo, Martins), in part because there’s so much plot to hold in mind, in part because some of the greatest scenes are far less vividl and memorable than the scenes on film (the chase through Vienna sewers; the Ferris wheel and the Welles cameo, the closing shot at the funeral), and in part because these guys knew what they were doing and the film comes alive whereas sometimes the short novel bumps along. No great surprise here: in the preface to the novel GG explains some of this, how the novel was written with film in mind, and in fact he suggests that “it was never meant to be read” but only to be seen: Reader, pass by. </span></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I remember reading <b>George Eliot’s Silas Marner</b> (1861) in 8th grade and hating it (though not as much as I hated the 9th-grade novel, Ivanhoe), and looking back I wonder how they could have made the novel itself feel and seem so bad: they certainly couldn’t let us read about the death of an opium addict. They couldn’t have expected us to parse prose passages that confound me to this day. We couldn’t have seen this as a story of moral redemption, of the evils of the judicial and caste system inlace in the 19th C. Would we even have sensed that it was also a novel about social ostracism and bullying and shaming, topics that might have interested us. No, none of the above - and coming back to this novel in late life I can easily see why it’s a classing - not GE’s greatest work (Middlemarch will wear that crown) but perhaps her most accessible (and teachable, if my jr. high English teachers had a dram of intelligence) - really focused closely on one set of social relations - most notably Silas’s love for his adopted daughter, Eppie - and to a lesser extent the marriage of Godfrey and Nancy Cass. Eliot keeps the focus tight, unlike her more grand and ambitious works, and as a result it’s more emotionally powerful: Who, aside from an 8th-grader pressed into service, can fail to choke up when Silas speaks trust to power and his daughter, within a world of avarice and status-seeking, rejects an offer to educate her to become one of the “betters”? </span></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Edith Wharton</b> is without question one of America’s greatest 20th-century writer of fiction, though it took her some time to gain the recognition she deserved. Her first novel, <b>The Valley of Decision</b> (1902) was hardly her first work of fiction - from what I’ve read she published numerous stories in Scribner’s, a great literary journal in its day, plus at least one story collection and one poetry collection; yes, she was extremely well-connected, but that can get you only so far once you’re in the door. Most of all, VofD (it’s 2 volumes, each of about 135 pp, and I read about 25% through, no more), is a so-called “bildungsroman,” a novel about the “education” of a young person, generally following a course leading from troubled, impoverished childhood to fame, wealth, or recognition later in life - the pattern followed today most often by confessional memoirs and in the 19th and 20th centuries by great novels such as Buddenbrooks, Young Werther, Great Expectations., and the list could go on. The problem for Wharton is that, though she had an excellent eye for period decor and a clear and controlled literary style, she never develops any action of significant conflict in her debut novel - that she learned quickly is obvious in that her 2nd novel, I believe, House of Mirth. VofD for 100 or so pp follows a young man named Ono from a deprived boyhood and, via some poorly explained change in his life circumstances, to a city to further his education - and he seems to be destined for a career in the church, maybe to become a Bishop - all well and good but there’s no particular crisis of conflict that engages us and makes feel for Odo: He’s a vehicle for Wharton’s many fine descriptive passages but the novel - 2 volumes! - just plugs along without character development, plot, or conflict. It’s no wonder VlofD is seldom read or discussed today -the wonder is how Wharton advanced so far and so fast in her literary career. </span></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">It’s amazing how a truly and inarguable a genius of the short-story genre could be so mediocre at best at writing a novel; I’m thinking here of <b>William Trevor</b>, one of the great story writers of our era, and two of his early- to mid-career novels, Mrs Eckdorf in O’Niell’s Hotel (see previous post) and <b>Miss Gomez and the Brethren</b> (1971), which I found to be trivial, sometimes preposterous, and just really hard to make sense of as we follow, sort of, the eponymous Gomez as she has a religious awakening in her homeland (Jamaica) and travels to England where she takes demeaning and ill-paying jobs and tries to spout her religious doctrine to a # of uninterested and sometimes dangerous people and, you know what?, I’ve made the novel sound better than it actually is, go figure: I had trouble following it or caring about any of the willfully eccentric characters and felt no desire to study the weavings of the plot in and as we learn, kinda, of the various characters who live with our near Mrs. G on a London street designated for abandonment and reconstruction. I just didn’t care, and didn’t finish, and hope to someday go back to Trevor’s stories so that I can remember and honor him when at his best. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><br /></p>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-52114304588661835822023-03-01T10:54:00.004-05:002023-03-01T10:54:32.150-05:00February 2023: Yehoshuah, George Eliot, 2022 Booker-Prize winner<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <span style="font-family: Palatino;">A.B. Yehoshua, George Eliot, and a Booker winner I couldn’t finish</span><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Just a quick note on two novels w/ excellent pedigree that I sadly couldn’t finish reading, first, A.B. Yehoshuah’s <b>A Journey to the End of the Millennium</b> (1997) - an author I revere and a book that some consider his greatest, set in the year 999 - obviously on the cusp of a new millennium just as the word was at the time of this novel’s publication, ABY is conveys here the sense of a world on the brink as exploratory missions of merchants and traders for the first time ever travel greater distances and observe and become part of or antagonistic to various cultures - mostly, we follow some Hebrew merchants based in Portugal and Spain, traveling or exploring along the coast of France and, they hope, into the legendary (to them) city of Paris. Sounds good, right, but ABY crowds so many characters - many of whom have similar names - and such a panoply of event into the first 75 pp or so, I for one couldn’t find, much less follow, the narrative strand of the novel. Maybe it’s me, because I’ve also tried to read the winner of the 2022 (most recent) Booker Prize <b>The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida</b> (2002), set in Sri Lanka and, loosely, following the events in the life of a Lankan freelance news photographer during a time of multiple revolutions and insurrections in Sri Lanka, which, as above, is richly promising material and there are some powerful if unpleasant accounts of terrorism, torture, and oppression - though I wished that there was some attempt at coherence: Who is the main character? Why are we constantly shifting scene and locale and events, and how can you expect an international readership with comprehend the scope of the internecine struggles and conflicts without more clear guidelines. It would be like asking a termite to comprehend All the President’s Men - or like asking an intelligent reader too make sense of Finnegans Wake without guidelines. Sink or swim, but I swam. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">George Eliot’s 2nd novel, <b>The Mill on the Floss</b> (1860, is do some degree an indictment of finance, investment banking, debt, early industrial capitalism, and most of all social class - a pre-Marxist indictment of the Industrial Revolution (though set somewhat earlier). The basic plot - Maggie, an attractive young woman who’s father had owned the eponymous mill until it was seized from him to pay off his indebtedness to a neighboring family (Wakem) , which led to the a generation of irrational animosity and, most relevant to the plot, to the impossible love between Maggie and at the son of the W. family, Philip, who has a severe physical disability that isolates him from most of his peers, including Maggie’s beloved brother. Despite all this background info., the novel is mostly a rom-com drama of its day, with Philip being an object for sorrow and pity, and Maggie, forced to break off her relationship with Philip (a Romeo and Juliet story, if Juliet had said go away I can’t be seen with you, family over personal), after that forced estrangement finds herself the object to a suitor, Stephen, who’d been engaged to her cousin. Ugh. The novel builds to its crisis when Maggie, the always innocent, finds herself in an extremely complex infidelity with Stephen, forcing her, like a disreputable woman, horrors!, to live a life of abandonment and disgrace (Tess?, think) until highly melodramatic accident changes everything (for weird contemporary comparison, see video re the Murtaugh family in SC). Mill on Floss is, as with other early GE works, is a step closer to the great Middlemarch, though the characters and their crises feel far less contemporary and original and the social scope is considerably narrowed - a great domestic drama with intimations of social criticism but not on the scale of nor the originality of Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch.</span></span></p>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-25352966735597026612023-02-01T11:54:00.000-05:002023-02-01T11:54:05.574-05:00Elliot's Reading - Jan. 2023 - George Eliot, Graham Greene, Bob Dylan <p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <span style="font-family: Palatino;">Elliot’s Reading - January 2023: George Eliot, Graham Greene, Bob Dylan</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">For the past several weeks I’ve been reading George Eliot’s monumental first novel, <b>Adam Bede</b> (1859, about 1290 pp on iPad), which shows her continued growth as a writer - a much wider scope in her lifelong study off village life in England ca. 1800 compared with her earlier collection of 3 long stories that were more tightly focused on clerical life. AB is, as well, concerned with a religious motif - a central character, introduced in the first chapter, Dinah, is part of what was then a new and controversial preacher of the Gospel according to a new Protestant sect, the Wesleyans or Methodists; but it’s really not per se a novel about religion - it’s really a novel about love & marriage, one of the first if not the first great English Romance novels. The eponymous Adam is the most honest and upright guy in the world, but his fatal flaw is that he has no judgment about women. He falls desperately in love with the beautiful Hetty, who is living w/ her aunt and uncle as in essence one of their servants. Everyone’s attracted to her, but she is entirely vapid and uninteresting - Adam doesn’t see that at all. The novel takes its time getting going for sure, but at about the midpoint there’s a huge crisis as Adam spies Hetty in the woods in a tryst with Arthur, a young, self-centered aristocrat (also a good friend of Adam’s), and Adam takes out his fury on Arthur and he feels crushed and humiliated, asHetty was obviously in love with Arthur, primarily for entree into his social class - not at all his goal, however. Eliot is discrete, as required and expected even of a “male” writer to present the sex scenes by inference rather than depiction - but there we have it: Hetty was not only vapid but also licentious (loose) - a topic that interestsGE both for its say about the oppression of women and, I would think, her feelings about a woman who has nothing but her looks to attract men - GE being notably homely, I say without bias, it’s just a fact - and readers may expect there is some glee as well as accuracy in her depiction of Hetty and her fate. So why read this novel? For one thing it’s way beyond its prototype as throughout we get a strikingly detailed presentation of life as it was led in the “simpler” times of travel by foot or sometimes on horseback. Throughout, we get amazing insights and epigrammatic perceptions from GE about all aspects of life - with here being a few at random examples: “I am of opinion that love is a great and beautiful thing, too, and if you agree with me, the smallest signs of it will not be chips and sawdust to you: they will rather be liked those little words, “light” and”music”…; or, “How is it that the poets have said so many find things about our fist love, so few about later love?”; or, “…and his broad-shouldered aspect something of the bull-dog—‘Don’t you meddle with me, and I won’t meddle with you.” It’s a long way from Adam Bede to Middlemarch, but we see in this novel GE’s first attempt at what today we see as naturalism: Here limited to two characters and to the conventions of marital bliss; later, in her masterpiece, a portrayal of an entire culture and community, with many surprises and many consequences of false first love and poor decisions about life, a world in which not everything turns out for the best, a world much like ours today.</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Somewhere around the time that <b>Graham Greene </b>was writing The Confidential Agent he decided to separate his fiction work (aside from short stories) into either Novels or Entertainments. From what I’ve read, the Greene estate no longer recognizes those categories and treats all as novels (good idea), though the categorization seemed to have helped GG organize his thoughts and ideas. Aside from his “entertainments,” he wrote a # of screenplays, I believe, and at least one of his “entertainments,” The Third Man, became a movie classic (and I think others have adapted his novels, such as The Quiet American, to film). The problem, though, is that he must have considered his “entertainments,” such as <b>The Confidential Agent </b>(1939) as plot-driven, non-literary diversions and sometimes, therefore, pleasing neither readership. Thus, the CA, which has some great, recognizable GG scenes - the threats leveled against the protagonist (always called D.) on his nighttime arrival in England, the train ride and visit to a foundering coal town in the Midlands, the cockeyed plan to escape from England by boat … - yet, at the end, the story line - an “agent” for an at-war European country (Spain?) comes to England to strike secret deal to provide coal to his country (and thereby re-opening some of the dormant mines - is so convoluted and at times thinly sketched that I can’t imagine anyone even trying to adapt this novel, and in fact it’s damn difficult to read as well and troubled by some flaws, e.g., the “love interest” is so scattered and bizarre and obscure that we never quite understand her desires and motives (same with D.’s), the most interesting and appealing character - the teenage maid in a cheap hotel where D. lies low as the scheme unfurls - gets done away with too early - suicide or murder? - that the story feels deflated. It’s worth a look for GG fans and completers, but not great entertainment per se. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Despite/In spit of its ridiculous/whimsical/provocative title, Bob Dylan’s <b>The Philosophy of Modern Song</b> (2022) turns out to be not a toss-off but a terrific source of insight as to what we might more accurately called Themes and Motifs in Popular (mostly) American Music of the 20th Century. Dylan has selected 66 songs to depict and give substance to his major themes; though he never summarizes with an over-riding thesis statement (of essay), several themes, familiar to most Dylan devotees, emerge, notably sympathy for rebels, outsiders, criminals justly or unjustly accused or dispatched, lost love, and vagabonds. Some of these are obvious choices to illustrate this master theme (e.g., Don’t Take Your Guns to Town) and some far more subtle and unexpected, such as a chapter on The Street Where You Live, in which Dylan imagines “you” (many of the essays are in 2nd person) as a guy standing in an alley or street corner waiting for a fix. A second theme throughout concerns the very nature of popular music - CW, rock, folk (a little), Broadway, Crooners, to name a few. His take on Black Magic Woman is among the best accounts I’ve ever read regarding what music means to listeners and thinkers. Many of the brief essays include a background look at the music industry, short accounts of the careers of some of the musicians, discussion of battles over copyrights, a look at stardom and at most talent. These are emphatically not Dylan’s Top 66 songs; rather, these essays recognize and define the driving force that pushed these songs to the forefront (or in some cases didn’t do so). Some of the essays are odd and fanciful: Long Tall Sally as an take on an obscure reference in Genesis to a tribe of tall women. Others are just plain surprising: We all know that Dylan has been a Sinatra fan, but who knew he was also into Perry Como and Rick (not Ricky, thank you) Nelson? There is only one “folk” song (Seeger’s Big Muddy anti-war piece), only one poem (more of a spoken word song, I’d say) and it’s not on any “modern” poet (e.g. no Robert Frost of T.S. Eliot, whom Dylan has quoted from in a radio broadcast: April is the cruelest month. And there’s nothing about the musicians most often compared with Dylan or who performed with Dylan: No Baez, no Simon, no To Petty, not Leonard Cohen. There’s one song from the 1920s though it picks up largely in the ‘40s and there’s only 2 or 3 in the 21st Century (The Who, The Clash, the other Elvis). And only the briefest reference to Dylan’s own corpus (a mention of Subterranean …). Among the surprises are an essay w/ numerous citations of passages in classical music that appear in modern song (he must have had some help in tracking down this info, right?). All told, a terrifically informative book not only for Dylanologists and lot of fun to read; I’d recommend listening to each song before reading Dylans’s take - all are easily available online, many with videos of live performance, </span></span></p>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-46724798244082300672022-12-31T15:36:00.003-05:002022-12-31T15:36:26.349-05:00The ten best works of fiction I read in 2022<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <span style="font-family: Palatino;">The Ten Best Works of fiction I read in 2022:</span><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Anton Chekhov’s <b>Uncle Vanya </b>(1898)</span></span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Inspired by the play-within-a-play in the film Drive My Car, I re-read Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, one of his 4 late-life plays, and was blown away by its beauty and pathos - as audiences (and readers) have universally for a century - the essence of what’s considered Chekhovian: adults living their late life in a provincial setting, a sense that their lives were of great promise that has never materialized; many missed connections among the unmarried, who are generally on the cusp marital eligibility, time has passed them by, and secret longings are never realized or recognized much less consummated, bursts of violence and remorse. (See also: Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull)</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">George Eliot. <b>Scenes of Clerical Life</b> (1857)</span></span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">There’s a long way to from here to Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch; that said, there are in this short many of Eliot’s insights and apercus - plus some sharp-witted addresses to the reader, all of which will sustain her throughout her career. (See also Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda) </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Lion Feuchtwanger. <b>The Oppermanns</b> (1933) </span></span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">This novel has to rank among the greatest (if lesser known) grand 19th-century novels that conveys a great movement in history as seen through a group lens - usually a number of family members, each affected by the change and upheaval taking place around them, and their dawning awareness - or oblivion to and denial of - the change that is gradually becoming universal: e.g., Buddenbrooks of course, also The Leopard, Lucky Per, maybe A Fine Balance, maybe Lonesome Dove, 100 Years of Solitude, The Makioka Sisters, and let’s not forget Middlemarch. What makes The Oppermanns stand out even more among this august group of novels is that Feuchtwanger was writing even as the events - the Nazi takeover of the government of Germany under the leadership of the man called in this book always The Leader - took place all around him.</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Annie Ernaux. <b>The Years </b>(2008)</span></span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I was blown away and deeply moved by the beauty and intelligence of this novel, which I took up with some trepidation but thought I’d like to check out the latest Lit Nobelist of whom I’d never heard - the Nobelists haven’t rung the bell pretty much since the Dylan surprise of ’16. But here this surprise work comes along, so smart, so insightful, and so accessible.</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Graham Greene. <b>A Burnt-Out Case </b>(1960)</span></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">This Greene novel follows Querry (note the homonym), a lost soul, highly intelligent, a bit acerbic, self-destructive - in this case a renowned architect (of churches primarily), famous on the order of, say, Frank Lloyd Wright, who gives up his profession/vocation and journeys aimlessly up an unnamed river in central Africa - shades of Conrad here, obviously - and we find him at the terminus of the river ferry days or even weeks upstream at what we (and he) soon learn is a leper colony staffed by a medically skilled team of (mostly) Catholic priests. Query decides to stay, and he helps out, to some degree. (See also The Quiet American, Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory) </span></span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Shirley Hazzard’s <b>The Bay of Noon</b> (1970) captures a time and place like too few contemporary novelists. It lacks the humor and irony (or sarcasm) of some of Hazzard’s earlier writing, in particular the novel and stories built on her experiences working at the UN in the ‘50s; but it is in tune with some of her short fiction about Americans in Italy in mid-century. I can’t help but think that Hazard would be much better recognized and more often read today had she set more of her fiction in the U.S. (or London). (See also Collected Stories, The Great Fire, Cliffs of Fall) </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Julia May Jonas. <b>Vladimir</b> (2022) </span></span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Vladimiar must have been the success de scandale of the year, maybe the century, at Skidmore College, the thinly veiled setting. So there’s lots to enjoy here, lots of insight into the character of a middle-aged woman desperately seeking to retain and rekindle the allure of her youth, some great skewering of academic politics, and all in not much more than 100 pp.</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Per Petterson’s first work, <b>Echoland</b> (1989) has finally been published in English and it’s obvious 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. (See also Out Stealing Horses) </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Jean Rhys. <b>Wide Sargasso Sea</b> (1966)</span></span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The writing is at times quite beautiful, esp in Rhys’s evocation of the look and feeling of the tropical Windward Island, in its beauty, danger, isolation - in particular the subtle and mean interaction of the proud English landowner and the slave/servant population, on the verge or just past the verge of outright revolt.</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">A.B. Yehoshua. <b>The Lover </b>(1977)</span></span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">This early work by Israeli writer boy the great Israeli novelist, who died in 2022, and possibly his first translated into English is a really excellent novel and a great intro to Yehoshua’s interests and style. (See also Mr. Mani, Open Heart, A Woman in Jerusalem) </span></span></p>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-33835026474513303942022-12-31T11:56:00.002-05:002022-12-31T11:56:25.420-05:00December 2022: George Eliot's first novel, A.B.Yehoshua, and a great work from the 2022 Literature Nobelist, Annie Ernaux <p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <b style="font-family: Palatino;">George Eliot</b><span style="font-family: Palatino;">’s first book of published fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life (1857), a collection of 3 substantial stories each concerned with the relationships - monetary, familiar, amorous, and obviously religious - in small, rural English villages at about 1800 or so (I think). There’s not a bit of nostalgia here; the village life is full of gossip, contentious relationships, animosity, and inequity. We can see in these stories Eliot’s emerging style - acerbic, highly literary, with the occasional metaphor or point of observation that just pierces threader and demands a 2nd look. It’s not yet Middlemarch, Eliot’s master work, but we see the foreshadowing. What’s missing, what she developed in her later style was the ability incorporate and motivate a plot; the character in these 3 stories are far less vivid and complex than later Eliot characters: Each of a type, and the type doesn’t change much or evolve over the course of the work. All the stories including a significant death element; in the first w, that element is more of the pathetic sort - plus a story of love gone wrong and succumbing the family pressure, much like the romantic fiction that Eliot sought to avoid in her choice of a masculine nome guerre. The highlight by far is the final story in the trilogy, where Eliot boldly takes on themes alien to the highly masculine world, at that time at least, of literary fiction, notably drug addiction, alcoholism, and spousal abuse - more than a century ahead of her time.</span><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>A.B. Yehoshua</b>’s early novel A Late Divorce (1982) is a rarity in his work, one of the novels of his that in my view just ran out of gas and got away from him. The main reason to tackle this dense doesn’t work though his experiments with narrative bore fruit in his later work, notably Mr. Mani - maybe his best novel and known for its narrative construction in which the whole story is told from the point of view of a single speaker with his or her respondent must just be surmised from the surrounding - a dialog posing as a monolog. He does the same thing in Divorce none section, but the effect is to put a strain on the reader. This is a novel in 6 long (50+ pp) sections, each from a different POV but following a straight-along 3 (or so) days of plot line; in essence, a father/grandfather who some years back had left his wife (she had tried to stab him to death and is now in a psychiatric hospital) to seek her signature on a divorce decree - and story draws on his three children, their spouses/lover, his grandchildren, ex-wife, and several peripheral characters. This novel cannot support this abundance of characters and events and collapses under its own weight - esp. for American readers who will be puzzled by the many names and nicknames and abbreviated names and the frequent changes in locale - it’s much like the grand Russian novels in this, and a “cast of characters” at the outset would help. Obviously, ABY is indebted as well to Faulkner - the novel opens with an attributed quote from Faulkner - particularly in its use of multiple narrators or points of view esp in Sound/Fury. So in short for ABY readers, such as me, this novel is worth a look, but it’s a big time absorber of mental space for readers new or indifferent to him </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I was blown away and deeply moved by the beauty and intelligence of <b>Annie Ernaux’s The Years</b> (2008) - a book I took up w/ some trepidation but thought I’d like to check out the latest Lit Nobelist of whom I’d never heard - the Nobelists haven’t rung the bell pretty much since the Dylan surprise of ’16. But here this surprise work comes along, so smart, so insightful, so accessible. If one had to classify this work it could maybe be called a work of autofiction - Ernaux’s depiction in some 240 pp. of the span of her life, mostly spent in France, Paris esp in her adulthood, a full-time teacher in a lycée (high school) and later a prof in a college ed dept - but still she writes a slew of books, perhaps picking up the pace in her retirement. As the title suggests, this covers the span of her life -but it’s not exactly a memoir; in fact, it’s an autobio w/out using the word “I” - it’s the story of the evolution of the world in which she lives/we live or have lived, and full of such odd insights and observations that the only close counterpart might be Proust - but AE’s case without the stylistic flourishes. Anyone whose life span is remotely close to AE’s can recognize him/her/their self, or world, in which and of which she writes - entirely in short, clear sentences, each passage an essay in and of itself. Toward the end she discusses this writing project directly: “She would like to assemble these multiple images of her self, separate and discordant, thread then together with the story of her existence, starting with her birth…up until the present day.” She succeeds. Some readers may be a bit stumped by her observations on French politics; never mind that, skip past the Mitterands and the Le Pens et al and get what you can from the rest, including trenchant and timely passages on immigrants, on Sept 11th, popular culture, on hypermarkets and capitalism, on it goes - a remarkable work that pushes the boundaries of genre. </span></span></p><div><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-42775905038968118462022-12-01T14:22:00.005-05:002022-12-01T14:22:55.018-05:00November 2022:Yehoshua's The Lover, Greene's The Shipwrecked, Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life, and The Oppermanns<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <span style="font-family: Palatino;">Elliot's Reading - November 2022</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The Lover (1977) is and early work by Israeli writer <b>A.B. Yehoshua</b> and possibly his first translated into English (?), is a really excellent novel and a great intro to ABY’s interests and style. It’s really quite long - -350- pp. but a font using a minuscule style, thanks a lot Harcourt Brace and it’s told in a series of personal voices - 5 main characters and smattering of minor ones - so we’re going from speaker to speaker and sometimes of scenes covering the same ground, a style that could be annoying in the hands of others but honestly ABY’s great skill at maintaining a narrative and establish a character’s voice and milieu that there’s no problem in following the story line and in watching the characters grow and develop; at times toward the end ABY’s style is (intentionally) a recollection of Faulkner and Joyce - exalted company if you ask me. Yet there’s nothing pretentious about the story - it’s easy to follow and offers a great insight into life in the multi-linguistic, multi-faith populace that feels both ancient and contemporary. In brief the story line: A young man (Gabriel) who had been living with a Haifa family, enters the Army during the 2nd War (I think) and disappears: did he die in combat? Did he desert? The head of the family (Adam, aha!) who runs a highly successful car-repair company, sets out to find out the fate of Gabriel, in a long search that takes him across military lines and across much of the land of Israel - in a plot that also involves his teen daughter and his wife (who’d had an affair with Gabriel - this does not seem to bother Adan in his quest, which is one of the few flaws in the novel) and, most consequently, Na’im, a teenage Arab boy who works in Adam’s garage and plays a pivotal role in the chase for Gabriel. In each of ABY’s novels he seems to don a cloak of expertise in a different field - in this one, auto repair in particular: How does he know, or lean, so much about so many different skills and occupations (in later novels, more tilted toward the arts: classical harpist, film director …)? How does he know so much and wear it so lightly? That’s part of the pleasure of reading ABY: His ease with such a wide range of skills lends credence to every other aspect of his writing. This is not a perfect novel, as several key elements are established but never resolved (most notably a highly troubling affair involving a friend of Adam’s daughter), but it’s a striking, memorable piece - an announcement to the literary world that here’s a new guy with whom to reckon. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>The Shipwrecked</b> is an early <b>Graham Greene</b> novel in which he was working out some new material - good! - but has a # of flaws that have kept it more or less underground. It was first issued in 1935 and was a complete failure; initial title: England Made Me. Reprinted some 20 years later under the banner: The Shipwrecked. Neither title tells us anything we need to know about the work itself, which begins w/ a meeting between a career-woman (Kate) and her woefully incompetent dashing twin brother (Anthony) - Kate lands him a job at her company, which seems a lot like a behemoth investment conglomerate such as Berkshire Hathaway, with the stink, however, of bending the rules to advantage. It turns out, improbably, that Kate is to get married to the head of the conglomerate; things, therefor, look promising for Anthony, but when he witnesses some shifty trading, faming of a second-tier associate, brutal beating of a man who crossed the line Anthony’s had enough and says (improbably) that he intends to moved to the U.S. and marry a trashy showgirl he’d met at the Rivoli gardens. So there’s a lot of plot material here, but in this instance the dough never rises: We don’t know or care enough about Anthony’s fate, nor can we look back sympathetically from our 21st century on Kate’s using sexual favors to advance in the corporation. That said, there are some find passages never the less - notably a great description of an early airline flight and a good meditation on the observations one make when traveling by train. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) was <b>George Eliot</b>’s (Mary Ann Evans’s) first published book of fiction; it consists of 3 sections, each of which is what today we’d consider to be of novella (short fiction)-length or even a novel. We turn to this work with its unenticing title for insight into the writer Eliot was to become. I read just the first section, and will probably come back to the latter 2. The first section - which tells of a rural English minister whose wife takes in to share their domicile an exotic (for rural England) lady, the Countess, which leads to much gossip about the stress this must put upon the husband-wife relationship. Rumors develop end fly - but then tragedy hits the family and the townsfolk feel guilty and admonished for their nasty supposition. There’s a long way to from here to Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch; that said, there are in this short seaman many of Eliot’s insights and apercus - plus some sharp-witted addresses to the reader, all of which will sustain her throughout her career. What this work lacks, however, is a sense of narrative: We get numerous dinner-table conversations and introduction to a lot of characters, but it’s hard to find a driving force in this work - a lot of chatter, but the characters are not faced with crucial life decisions and their consequences; they characters, some of them, may suffer - but not because of their doings and the failures. As Eliot matures as a fiction writer, this will change. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel <b>The Oppermanns</b> (1933) has to rank among the greatest (if lesser known) grand 19th-century novels that conveys a great movement in history as seen through a group lens - usually a # of family members, each affected by the change and upheaval taking place around them, and their dawning awareness - or oblivion to and denial of - the change that is gradually becoming universal: e.g., Buddenbrooks of course, also The Leopard, Lucky Per, maybe A Fine Balance, maybe Lonesome Dove, 100 Years of Solitude, The Makioka Sisters, and let’s not forget Middlemarch. What makes The Oppermanns stand out even more among this august group of novels is that LF was writing even as the events - the Nazi takeover of the government of Germany under the leadership of the man called in this book always The Leader - took place all around him (I think he was in exile in Switzerland when he completed this novel?, not sure haven’t yet read the brief intro to this intelligently edited (helpful rather than pedantic or condescending footnotes, e.g.); the novel has the vividness of journalism and long perspective of literature. In essence we follow the lives of various members of the O family and several friends/neighbors as the Nazi (Nationalist) party flourishes and there’s one attack or indictment of the Jewish community after another, as many of the characters refuse to recognize the changes in their beloved country, unable to give up their prosperity, fantasizing that this too shall pass - it’s only a phase, only a small # of Germans, etc. - as their world collapses into death and exile. Nobody could read this today and not make analogies between the growing, leadership inspired hatred and oppression that we have seen, are seeing, in our own country: We all are Oppermmans! No doubt the novel gets a bit disentangled and frayed on the cuffs at the end: How could LF possibly bring this novel to a conclusion in 1933 as anything but death in obscurity or a false hope; ending aside, though, the O’s is a completely engaging, informing, and sadly familiar nearly a century after its publication. Langth aside (+500 pp) this novel deserves a much wider readership. </span></span></p>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-80390595352118952932022-11-02T20:38:00.004-04:002022-11-02T20:38:40.852-04:00October 2022: Graham Greene novels. Cormac McCarthy and Thomas McGuane stories, Eliz. Strout, Banana Yoshimoto, a note on Bob Dylan <p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <span style="font-family: Palatino;">Elliot's Reading - October 2022</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">You can tell fro <b>Graham Greene’s first novel, The Man Within </b>(1929), that he was a writer on the path to a great career, although what type of career may not have been immediately evident. The novel, in essence, is the tale over a few days of a man (Andrews) who had been involved in smuggling (from France to England) of whiskey (his father’s profession, and one to which he was not well suited) who turns on this crew - a highly dangerous thing to do esp in that the entire justice system of the coastal town is dependent in one way or another on the illegal trade. The novel opens with Andrews running in fright from the vengeful crew when he gains entry from a sympathetic woman, Elizabeth, who shelters him - and with whom he falls in love. A crime story? A love story? Something more? Less? First of all readers will note the many philosophical and psychological passages, and will also note that there’s relatively little space given to the more exciting scenes - the chase through fog, the flight from the town after the men are acquitted in trial, guarding the house and Elizabeth as the vengeful troop approaches in the dark night - while a lot of space is that of Andrews and his meditation about his love, his cowardice, his competence. So the novel in some sense is neither fish nor foul, way to meandering in its structure to appeal as a crime novel, but as a work of psychological insight it’s hampered by the improbability of most of the action (e.g., how can we in any way believe in his love for Eliz. and hers for him over a period of 2 or 3 days?). The novel could have been tightened and trimmed to half its length at no great loss - but we can see, throughout, the intelligence and wide range of knowledge of the narrator, and hence (though less probably) of Andrews. In the brief preface to the Penguin paperback edition Greene writes disparagingly of this early novel; for Green fans, it’s worth reading, for others, not so much. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I have no complaint against novelists who set their work in the present and go all out to be timely and relevant - so long as what they write provides us with some fresh information, some drama, some feeling, some style. I do have a problem w/ the usually reliable <b>Elizabeth Strout’s latest in her Lucy saga, Lucy by the Sea</b> (2022), which begins at the outset of the pandemic and, through the first half of this novel, which is as far along as I traveled, follow Lucy as, prompted by her ex-husband, William, gets ushered to a somewhat spacious seaside rental on the coast of Maine. One problem: everything she writes here about the dawning awareness of the lethality of Covid, the initial denial, the warnings and promptings by her ex, the sense of isolation, the fear of the unknown - all so familiar to all readers, to lacking in surprise and wonder, and therefor of little interest, at least to me. This novel should be put into time capsule so that when our grandchildren open the cache readers will have a sense of what life was like back when in the ‘20s. Among other problems: Nothing really happens to Lucy “on stage.” All the the drama takes place among her offspring, about whom she frets and with good reason: divorce, illness, back choices, etc. A novel needs something to happen to and by and for the protagonist (in this case, the narrator): Something dramatic in Lucy’s life, that is. For example, she develops a nodding acquaintance w/ one of the locals, an elderly man whom she suspects may have put a “Yankees go home” placard on her car. Did he do so? I can tell you that nothing on this score develops in the first 125 of so pp., and M tells me that toward he end the man briefly apologizes. That’s it? Come on. And Lucy’s relationship w/ her ex - well nothing happens in the first half, for sure, and whatever connection is made later - there is one, I am told - is of little interest or importance at that point (William is no prize). I could go on. But I have to suppose that Strout is of sufficient stature - well deserved - that no work of hers will be turned down, ever, and readers may often feel comfortable w/ her style - relaxed and informal, if sometimes forced (many phrases such as “what I’m trying to say is…” so, hey, you’re a writer, just say it!). There have been several other “plague novels”: </span></span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Blindness, the Decameron - and they generally succeed when the plague itself is almost like a character, a horror, effecting all, or when the plague stands for some other condition, e.g., Camus’ Plague and its sociopolitical repercussions. Strout’s have neither, but what can I say? Reviews have been glowing, though I can’t help feeling that Strout can do better. She has done better. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I may be wrong, probably am, won’t be the first time, but it seems to me that most of the <b>Thomas McGuane stories</b> I’ve read in the New Yorker have been about the lives of Montana immigrants or about Montanans who have made their small fortunes in the service of the arriving waves of settlers - the real-estate agents, attorneys, et al. who had once been peripheral to the life of the far west and have become central players. TM’s story, Kae Half, Leave Half, in the current New Yorker seems a departure for him - a story about two guys who’d been friends since boyhood and who over time follow their love of the rugged outdoors and become ranch hands - a totally non glamours and non prosperous type of work but deeply satisfying to these two adventuresome sorts, until. … It’s a really good about Westerners whose lives have been romanticized and glamorized when in fact it’s difficult and dangerous and hasn’t changed greatly since the days of the cattle drives. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Graham Greene’s novel A Burnt-Out Case</b> (1961), which could apply to any of several characters in the novel, came right after a string of his most famous novels, including The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, and The Quiet American, and it’s overshadowed by these, perhaps rightfully, though it’s still a novel worth reading - typical Greene central figure, Querry (note the homonym), a lost soul, highly intelligent, a bit acerbic, self-destructive - in this case a renowned architect (of churches primarily), famous on the order of, say, Frank Lloyd Wright, who gives up his profession/vocation and journeys aimlessly up an unnamed river in central Africa - shades of Conrad here, obviously - and we find him at the terminus of the river ferry days or even weeks upstream at what we (and he) soon learn is a leper colony staffed by a medically skilled team of (mostly) Catholic priests. Q decides to stay, and he helps, to some degree, with patient care and with sketching out plans for a new hospital on site. Eventually, a world-weary journalist discovers Querry in exile and writes a profile, which brings Q unwanted attention. Much of the novel involves debate and discussion about faith and belief; Q of course is resistant and insists he is note devout, though we have our doubts - and he resists all efforts to gothic to announce his faith. He also gets entangled with the wife of a palm-oil magnate who provides the colony with its fuel - and finds himself accused, unjustly, of having sex with extremely naive and immature young woman - leading to a final crisis and to complete misunderstanding of his life. The novel is dark and gloomy, though w/ touches of sarcastic humor - typical of GG - and it’s frightening in its account of the dreadful disease and the risks and discomfort of those who run the colony: will remind some of Naipaul’s African novels (e.g. Bend in the River) and of much more recent work from Theroux on theme of fateful visit to leper colony. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Not one but two sizable excerpts from forthcoming books in yesterday’s NYT; first, in the Arts and Leisure section, 4 full pages of <b>Cormac McCarthy</b>’s The Passenger. CMcC has become a member of the top tier of living American writers, lauded by lovers of literary fiction, lovers of Westerns, and lovers of adventure yarns - and a man w/ a distinct enigmatic style, obviously deeply influenced by Hemingway, the tough dialect and exterior, the glancing conversation in which characters address one another only obliquely. The except in the Times, particularly the first half, was a taut, exciting adventure among divers tasked with pulling up the remains from a multi-fatal plane crash. I would read more of this! But the accompanying story about CMcC dissuaded me from even trying: 800 pp? Much of which is about particle physics? Props to the author for knowing so damn much and exploring this esoterica in what will probably be his last work of fiction (he’s 89!) but I don’t think I could make my way in any such narrative short of giving it my life. Then, in the NYTBR, there was an excerpt from <b>Bob Dylan</b>’s The Philosophy of Modern Poetry, a title he must have chosen as the most boring and conventional work of the year; it virtually sends the message “don’t read this boo”; it sounds like a course-catalog entry for a course you wouldn’t take. Except that it’s Dylan - so - I’ll probably someday give it a look - it’s a series of short appreciations by Dylan of presumably the songs most important to him (none by him, I believe); unfortunately, the two pieces excerpted here did nothing for me and worry that these may be a set of castoffs from his erstwhile radio show. I’d love to know his real thoughts on these songs, but the 2 excerpted looked strange - quick takes rather than thoughtful essays and analysis. I’ll someday leaf through the book and see if his riffs on songs I know will ring more truly. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">To say that I’m not the target readership for Sarah Thahkam Mathews’s NBA fiction finalist, <b>All This Could Be Different</b>, would be a bit of an understatement - yet I do enjoy reading novels and stories that are far from my life and experiences - as any quick glance over recent posts on this blog will evince - but said characters and communities must have some reason for being to get my interest and commitment to the work. STM’s (unnamed?) narrator (and I suspect there will be other narrators - I’ve stopped about 25% into the novel) is of Indian descent, Queer, 20-something, has a job that she doesn’t like though it pays well, in the not-often-written-about city of Milwaukee, whose small size, esp in the Qureer community, allows for many meetups that in NYC, for ex., would be highly improbable. This is to say that her novel rings many bells - but what it doesn’t have, at least for me, is a driving force: Something problem or crisis that the narrator or central character experiences, something he or she or they much overcome, a crisis, a revelation - + a fully realized back story can be good, too - but by p. 80 or so we have experienced none of these, other than a slowly blooming relationship developing between narrator and Black Queer friend and much drinking, pick-ups, mild intoxicants, and self-described “sluttish” behavior that would be ridiculed if acted out among White males - in short, lives seemingly going nowhere, opportunities wasted, crises averted. Good fortune to STM but I concede that this work was not meant for me. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Dead-End Memories, the collection of 5 short stories from the prolific Japanese author <b>Banana (yes, that’s her published name; is it a pen name?) Yoshimoto</b> (2003, but first English tr. 2022, Asa Yoneda), has some of the strange, sometimes supernatural style sometimes reminiscent of her contemporary Murakami, but with more of a focus on young women and often tragic family life. There’s some pretty gruesome material in this book: a poisoning, a double-suicide, a rape, child neglect - but the mood is not as dark as it may seem from these instances. The characters narrating these stories triumph over their adversity, though not unscathed. The best story to me in this collection is the final story, the title story in fact, in that it’s about a woman suffering from betrayal by her fiancé - a brutal shock to her, but one that she recovers, at least so it seems, and gets on with her life. We feel deeply sorry for her - and for all of the protagonists, narrators, and victims in this collection. BY is difficult to categorize, and her elliptical style may be difficult for American fans of the short story; they’re more quiet and acquiescent in their tone - for ex., the woman who’s a victim of a random act of internal food poisoning is more upset by her outburst of anger the presence of a professor who pesters her with a string of questions about her ordeal than she is at the co-worker who poisoned the cafeteria food. Does that say something about the Japanese temperament, or is it a quirk of BY’s style? In any event, the stories are compact and well-crafted, the translation seems really good (AY even uses “nauseated” correctly!), and it’s a good introduction to BY’s works, albeit from nearly two decades ago </span></span></p>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-51451868965323429022022-10-02T11:57:00.000-04:002022-10-02T11:57:01.774-04:00Elif Batuman's The Idiot and Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire <p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <span style="font-family: Palatino;">Elliot's Reading - September 2022</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Elif Batuman</b>’s debut novel, <b>The Idiot</b> (2017) - not Dostoyevsky’s, but all readers likely to read this novel get the joke& feel smart having done so - proves one thing: She’s really smart and so are most Harvard undergrads. Did you need this novel to tell you that? EB makes clear from the outset that she’s a super student - tallying all or most of her “semi-autobiographical” (read: autobiographical) freshman courses, all of which she seems to cruise through with minimal sleep and dubious nutrition. This is by no means the typical remembrance of syllabi past - as her point seems to be not that Harvard is hard going but that it’s easy going, academically - and the typical woes of such a novel involve for the most part drinking, rx, and sex - all of which are missing in the first half of the novel (as far as I’ll get with it). There’s really no notable tension - there’s a guy with whom the narrator is in love w/ from the start - but he’s a graduating senior (sigh) and, most strangely he seems to want to spend a lot of time w/ narrator although he makes it clear that he has a girlfriend and seems to show no sexual interest in the narrator whatsoever. Aside from that strange romance there no tension, crisis, obstacle in the novel, just observations and quips, many of what are really shrewd and funny. Take this for example: “The dining halls were open late for exam period. At a table near the door, two students were slumped over their books, either asleep or murdered. In a corner, a girl was staring at a stack of flash cards with incredible ferocity, as if she were going to eat them.: But such observations are not enough to carry a novel that is painfully short on conflict, crisis - it’s a Bildungsroman without the “bild.” </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Shirley Hazzard</b>’s last (?) novel, <b>The Great Fire</b> (2003), at its best is exemplary of SH’s literary style: thoughtful, dense, intelligent, yet frustrating as she willfully refuses to guide the reader: a confusing array of characters many of whom go by several different names - she just doesn’t guide you at all as if she wishes her style to demand a close reading, which it does. I found myself frequently re-reading passages, even sentences, to get their full force and significance and, to her great credit, the re-reading always pays off: She’s smarter than her readers or at least than this one. Try this: “He worked late at his notes, and at midnight looked over a Japanese lesson, rereading hew sounds in undertones. At this stage, competence appeared an exciting impobability, which he went to sleep pondering.” The novel set in postwar (1947) Japan (mostly, with intervals in Hong Kong, England, New Zealand…) among mostly former British soldiers in Japan as part of the Occupation. The main character, Leith, is preparing a study of life in post-war Japan. Honestly, I wished for more about his work; I though this would be a novel in the spirit of Forster’s Passage to India, about cultures in collision. As it happens, this theme is never developed after an initial start (in Hiroshima!) and the novel becomes more Conradian, about the drift of rootless characters across the seas of Asia - but mostly among themselves. The biggest problem in The Great Fire, however, is that over the course of the narrative we find ourselves immersed in a love story: Leith falls in love with the beautiful by all accounts Harriet - who is I think precisely half his age - he 34 and she 17, and a young and inexperienced 17 at that. I found their whole relationship creepy and unlikely to succeed, with Leith’s gushing, effusive missives to her from across the globe just putting me on edge. Sorry. Much to like here - I finished reading it, which is rarely the case these days! - but to without a sense of uneasiness, the sense that Hazzard was working unfamiliar ground here (I missed the sharp, satiric wit of her earlier fiction such as Cliffs of Fall) and never quite drew the various strands together. </span></span></p>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-5996667071176127782022-09-04T21:21:00.004-04:002022-09-04T21:21:43.606-04:00Shirley Hazzard's The Bay of Noon, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Yehoshua's The Retrospective, and a '64 Dylan interview <p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Erin Swan’s debut novel, <b>Walk the Vanished Earth</b> (2022), has so much going for it that I hate to be a spoilsport and note that it’s just not the right novel for me; I’m pretty much dedicated to literary fiction in the realist or naturalist mode - and ES does include many long passages in her novel that fit the bill - notably her devastating account of how mental illness (caused by abusive trauma, or so it seems half-way through the novel) can stalk a family. The central character in this novel is a young man, abandoned by his mother at birth, raised in various foster homes and institutions, who age 30 or so reconnects with his mother, who is alone and severely disabled by her illness.This part of the novel stands on its own - harrowing. Swan, however, is nothing if not ambitious - totally admirable, esp for a young novelist - and includes several other narrative lines - one in 19th-century on the Great Plains, and other some 50 years or so into the future, with three people - two men and a preteen woman - living in an outpost on Mars. Yipes! ES does all she can to make these sections credible, and as we read deeper in we see some of the connecting strings that tie the narratives together - but for me the very aspects that make this novel so distinct were for me the biggest drawbacks. That said, writing is so clear and thoughtful, Swan’s imagination in bounteous, and i think this would be a great book for readers interested in speculative fiction and with a high tolerance for vivid accounts of mental illness and anguish. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Shirley Hazzard</b>’s 1970 novel, <b>The Bay of Noon </b>(great book, lousy title that refers to nothing particular in the narrative) is in outline a pretty straightforward small-cast drama: Adult narrator (Jenny) references back to her life as a 20-something in ca.1957 (the Sputnick/Space Race era) when she was assigned by the U.S. Govt. to be on the staff for a massive report on some issue, not even sure it it’s ever ID’d, with a large team deployed to the still war-ravaged Naples. During her time there she befriends an older Italian couple - she a writer, he a film director - who become the lens through which she sees and absorbs the culture around her; she also has a relationship of some sort - it doesn’t seem to have been sexual, although that could just be the narrator’s demure nature - with a young Canadian man assigned to the same project. Over time she is betrayed by these so-called friends - and then takes up w/ the now jilted man - Gianni - as they start a relationship of their own, until it’s time for her to sail away - to America! - and he drifts off the resume his relationship with the other woman (Giaconda) - followed by a short where-are-they-now epilog. What makes this novel great, however, is not the plot but the wise observations and insights of the narrator, which is to say of SH, who has her own, sometimes quite difficult, way of convey her observances and impressions of everyone and everything around her - the city still in ruins, the beauty of some the seascapes (which the narrator notes from her1970 vantage have been ruined by development). This book does not benefit from a quick reading; rather, you have to pause at almost every sentence to take in what Jenny/SH are saying, seeing, feeling. She captures a time and place like too few contemporary novelists. This novel lacks the humor and irony (or sarcasm) of some of SH’s earlier writing, in particular the novel and stories built on her experiences working at the UN in the ‘50s; but it is in tune w/ some of her short fiction about Americans in Italy in mid-century. I can’t help but think that SH would be much better recognized and more often read today had she set more of her fiction in the U.S. (or London) - the choice of Italian settings in so many of her works does carry a touch of exoticism and a cultural reference point but it’s a point that will feel remote by too many of her potential readership. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Jean Rhys</b>’s last (?) novel, <b>Wide Sargasso Sea</b> (1966) is a bit of a neat trick - one that I really couldn’t get when I first read this novel many years ago - before I’d read Jane Eyre, about which one must know at least the rudiments of the plot of JE (Jane’s beloved from a far “master,” Rochester, lives in a strange old house within which he’s stashed away his delusional and dangerous first wife - who takes her revenge of sorts by setting fire to the mansion). OK, to Rhys’s WSS is an attempt to bring to life the unexamined “mad” wife held captive in the attic: What brought her to this point? To what extent is Rochester complicit in her death, in her madness? All that said, it’s also important to be able to read and appreciate and even enjoy this dark novel without making the JE connection - and JR does a neat job tracing the course of the wife’s - Antoinette’s? - abandonment and decline; the unfeeling narrator (is he named at all?\) of the 2nd half of the novel turns against his young, beautiful, mixed race (?) wife after receiving documents that suggest she is “mad” and any children they have together will suffer from the same or similar madness. This man is as weak and cruel as can be - and a racist to boot. All of our sympathies are with the vulnerable bride. The writing is at times quite beautiful, esp in Rhys’s evocation of the look and feeling of the tropical Windward Island, in its beauty, danger, isolation - in particular the subtle and mean interaction of the proud English landowner and the slave/servant population, on the verge or just past the verge of outright revolt. I would say that JR, probably too heavily under the influence of Faulkner, makes the narrative line unnecessarily difficult to follow - with little clarity about the characters names and with the sequence of events - but as one progresses through the novel the major strands of the plot become more clear: a challenging book, but worth the effort. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I’m not a huge fan of the annual Archival issue of the New Yorker, but it was strange and informative thread <b>Nat Hentoff’s profile of Bob Dylan</b> published back in 1964 (I was too young to have read that!); Hentoff wrote many smart analyses of popular music and, especially, of jazz (lots of liner notes) - back then I though he too often stated the obvious and I felt a little jealous that his insights, so evident to teenagers, were treated as gospel by so many publications - now I have a better sense of Hentoff’s groundbreaking work, crossing cultural barriers. Anyway, his must have been one of the few extensive profiles of Dylan toward the end of his “folk era.” Without a doubt he had more face time w/ Dylan than any other magazine writer before and perhaps since; Dylan became increasingly guarded over the years, understandably. My takeaway from this profile was that Dylan was impatient to bring his work in a new direction but couldn’t yet quite characterize his inchoate work - the songs, when written and recorded would speak for themselves (so to speak), and Dylan was aware of this. Hentoff got from Dylan the sense that he was moving beyond protest/folk songs and more into social commentary - a much more complex and rich vein for his music. What Hentoff missed was any sense that Dylan was soon to “go electric” and change forever the nature of rock music - from a kind of classical voice - each rock song could in effect be performed by anyone; rock was from a universal voce - to a “romantic” voice: Each song was the personal affirmation of an individual artist. Who could possible foresee where Dylan would go in his career? Who would have bet, in 1964, that Dylan would be a Nobel laureate? We also see from this early profile that Dylan liked, and needed, an entourage for his support, esp in a recording session. Also that Dylan was sincere and generous in his support for righteous causes. And that Dylan could be unhinged and inappropriate at times (the account of his recording session; the priceless account of his speech to a liberal social-action group that had presented him w/ an award) - likely indications of a drinking problem in its early stages. Hentoff was also suckered by Dylan’s exaggerated autobiography; Dylan did not wish to talk about his family - but we know now that his childhood and youth were conventional and that he did not run away from home pretty much every year from age 10 or so.</span></span></p>
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<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">A.B. Yehoshua’s novel </span><b style="font-family: Palatino;">The Retrospective</b><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> (2011) is far from his best work, although there’s always some value in reading his fiction, which always presents a viewpoint on contemporary life in Israel among a wide social set and in many of his novels, including this one, with lots of insight and opinion on those who work in the arts - writers, actors, musicians, et al. The drawback in this work is that the central figure is a film director toward the end of his career, invited to Spain for the eponymous retrospective on his films - and although I could recognize his un-ease at seeing screenings of his early works it’s really hard to describe effectively a movie that doesn’t and never has existed; the mid- or late-career artist works well as a trope in film - see 8 1/2 - as does the artist/writer at the end of his/her rope - see The Great Beauty - but here I never got a clear sense of the content and context of his movies. More troubling, the ending of the novel is preposterous - too bad because the penultimate section, in which the director drives to a remote family complex near the Gaza border for a final confrontation with the screenwriter with whom he’d had a life-long falling out - a great and beautifully rendered scene - and ABY should have left it there rather than send his director off on a pointless and maddening attempt to re-enact a scene from a Reubens painting. Don’t even ask.</span><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span> </span></p>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-9411524863437567762022-08-01T13:24:00.005-04:002022-08-01T13:24:57.341-04:00July 2022: Yehoshua, Laxness, and Soderberg (with a note on Nabokov)<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <span style="font-family: Palatino;">Elliot’s Reading - July 2022: </span></span><span style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: large;">Yehoshua, Laxness, and Soderberg</span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I don’t think anyone would say that recently deceased <b>A. B. Yehoshua’s novel The Extra</b> (2014) is his best, not when compared with, say, Mr. Mani or Open Heart or even the more recent A Woman in Jerusalem, but I’ve yet to come across a novel of his that failed to hold my interest and to inform me about daily life in war-torn Israel, where we Americans probably imagine all life to be on the edge and in fact, as ABY presents it, Israeli life is loud and complex and full of cultural significance and more cross-cultural than we could possibly imagine. The Extra centers on a 30-something woman, divorced and without children - by her choice, but a choice that led to the break-up of her marriage - now spending two months or so in her mother’s Jerusalem apartment while her mother tries out a new living arrangement in assisted living in Tel Aviv: Will she stay or will she go? While tending her mother’s apartment, the “extra” (she earns a little money and has some adventures in playing several roles as a movie extra) recognizes many elements in her own life story - which is quite engaging, in fact, the best part of the novel I’d say: She’s a harpist in a Dutch orchestra, on leave, and through her perspective we learn a ton about orchestral performance and idiosyncrasies. I totally enjoyed that aspect. Less so, the complexities of her family life and her sojourn as an “extra,” a neat plot angle but with little pay-off. Ditto for her on-going battle with some young kids in the neighborhood who keep breaking in to her unit to watch TV (forbidden in their Orthodox home) - lots of set-up with little payoff. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Some novels I didn’t finish reading - including <b>Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift,</b> which he finished in the late 1930s but wasn’t published till the ‘40s and not available in English (VN and son, trs.) until I think the 1950s - and though it was mentioned in an NYT story as a good intro to life in Berlin in its time I found it to be only an intro into the life of a Nabokovian character, meaning a writer who’s more interested in displaying his genius than in telling a story or evoking a time and place; obviously, the first section is an homage to Proust, or maybe an attempt at doing Proust one better, but the obsession w/ memory and desire is central to appreciating and loving the Search for Lost Time in VN’s hands these topical details about his early life do not go toward developing character or theme or even in entertainment. Some of his early English-language novels go one better, tho I have always loathed his most famous. Second novel I will not finish is clearly just not meant for me - <b>John Avid Lindqvist’s Harbor</b> (2008, tr. 2010), which, similar to above, was touted as a good intro to life in Sweden, which it clearly is not - Swedes are not Stephen King characters and monsters and horrible beings don’t just emerge from the ice - I liked the movie based on one of JAL’s novels, Let the Right One In, in that, surprisingly, it told a drama of your misfits, the beaten and bullied, but Harbor just didn’t carry that wait nor could it carry me along buoyed by suspended disbelief much beyond 50 pp (out of 500!) </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Swedish novelist <b>Hjalmar Soderberg’s most famous (only famous?) novel, Doctor Glas</b> (1905) is a strange, short, first-person confessional narrative is the woeful tale of a sad and it would appear thoroughly deranged 30-something physician in Stocholm who for some reason is writing a notebook/diary about his deeply troubled interior life. He’s a successful but not world-beating GP; he lives alone and in fact has never had sexual relations w/ anyone, male or female; in one passage he tells of the one brief love of his life, a woman who died through accident shortly after they had met and seemed to fall for one another, though nothing transpired, so to speak. At this point in his life he sees himself as an outsider, a loner, an unattractive man who has been passed by in life - he’s a descendant, so to speak, of Dostoevsky’s “underground man.” As it happens, a woman whom he’s really attracted to calls on him asking him to resolve a sexual issue in the woman’s marriage; this leads to Glas’s animus against her husband, a noxious clergyman, and, later, to extreme jealousy as he recognizes the handsome young man w/ whom the woman has fallen in love. The novel chronicles the unraveling of a mind driven mad by loneliness and social isolation - a terribly sad story that feels to be at just the right length; who could take anymore of this sadness? </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">The Icelandic writer <b>Halldor Laxness</b> is known to American readers, if at all, as perhaps the most obscure winner of a Nobel Prize in literature and in particular for his novels Independent People, which I delved into many years ago and didn’t finish reading but probably I was not ready to read that novel (I’ve since been to Iceland) and for Iceland’s Bell, which I did read and it held my interest. <b>The Fish Can Sing</b>, his poorly titled novel from 1957, is not an excellent gateway to HL’s work but is a pretty good “bildungsroman,” part of that tradition - largely Germanic and, I guess, Scandinavian - of a novel that traces the course of the life of the artist. Nobody will be fooled by HL’s identifying the calling of his young protagonist as an aspirant to Opera, spurred by his longing the emulate the most famous Icelandic opera singer, Gardar Holm, well maybe the only one, of this day. Of course it’s the story of the coming of age of a young writer - and in fact it mostly focuses on his childhood home and the eccentricities of many of the people in the impoverished, remote fishing village of his childhood. Today a novel such as this would the identified w/ Auto Fiction - or, if not that, would be reworked as a nonfiction narrative, such as Per Peterson’s more recent collection of essays about his childhood in a remote part of Denmark. Fish Can Sing is really two novel sin one: the first, the story of a childhood prodigy, and the 2nd the account of the young man’s encounters with the world famous Gardar Holm and his occasional, strange return visits to his homeland - mostly in the latter half of the novel. Few readers will be surprised by the plot twists and big reveals in that section, but so be it. The novel as a whole is quite readable, far less intimidating than HL’s grandest works, but on the other hand not really the best account of what made his fiction step onto the world stage. </span>Elliot’s Reading - July 2022</span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Yehoshua, Laxness, and Soderberg</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I don’t think anyone would say that recently deceased <b>A. B. Yehoshua’s novel The Extra</b> (2014) is his best, not when compared with, say, Mr. Mani or Open Heart or even the more recent A Woman in Jerusalem, but I’ve yet to come across a novel of his that failed to hold my interest and to inform me about daily life in war-torn Israel, where we Americans probably imagine all life to be on the edge and in fact, as ABY presents it, Israeli life is loud and complex and full of cultural significance and more cross-cultural than we could possibly imagine. The Extra centers on a 30-something woman, divorced and without children - by her choice, but a choice that led to the break-up of her marriage - now spending two months or so in her mother’s Jerusalem apartment while her mother tries out a new living arrangement in assisted living in Tel Aviv: Will she stay or will she go? While tending her mother’s apartment, the “extra” (she earns a little money and has some adventures in playing several roles as a movie extra) recognizes many elements in her own life story - which is quite engaging, in fact, the best part of the novel I’d say: She’s a harpist in a Dutch orchestra, on leave, and through her perspective we learn a ton about orchestral performance and idiosyncrasies. I totally enjoyed that aspect. Less so, the complexities of her family life and her sojourn as an “extra,” a neat plot angle but with little pay-off. Ditto for her on-going battle with some young kids in the neighborhood who keep breaking in to her unit to watch TV (forbidden in their Orthodox home) - lots of set-up with little payoff. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Some novels I didn’t finish reading - including <b>Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift,</b> which he finished in the late 1930s but wasn’t published till the ‘40s and not available in English (VN and son, trs.) until I think the 1950s - and though it was mentioned in an NYT story as a good intro to life in Berlin in its time I found it to be only an intro into the life of a Nabokovian character, meaning a writer who’s more interested in displaying his genius than in telling a story or evoking a time and place; obviously, the first section is an homage to Proust, or maybe an attempt at doing Proust one better, but the obsession w/ memory and desire is central to appreciating and loving the Search for Lost Time in VN’s hands these topical details about his early life do not go toward developing character or theme or even in entertainment. Some of his early English-language novels go one better, tho I have always loathed his most famous. Second novel I will not finish is clearly just not meant for me - <b>John Avid Lindqvist’s Harbor</b> (2008, tr. 2010), which, similar to above, was touted as a good intro to life in Sweden, which it clearly is not - Swedes are not Stephen King characters and monsters and horrible beings don’t just emerge from the ice - I liked the movie based on one of JAL’s novels, Let the Right One In, in that, surprisingly, it told a drama of your misfits, the beaten and bullied, but Harbor just didn’t carry that wait nor could it carry me along buoyed by suspended disbelief much beyond 50 pp (out of 500!) </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Swedish novelist <b>Hjalmar Soderberg’s most famous (only famous?) novel, Doctor Glas</b> (1905) is a strange, short, first-person confessional narrative is the woeful tale of a sad and it would appear thoroughly deranged 30-something physician in Stocholm who for some reason is writing a notebook/diary about his deeply troubled interior life. He’s a successful but not world-beating GP; he lives alone and in fact has never had sexual relations w/ anyone, male or female; in one passage he tells of the one brief love of his life, a woman who died through accident shortly after they had met and seemed to fall for one another, though nothing transpired, so to speak. At this point in his life he sees himself as an outsider, a loner, an unattractive man who has been passed by in life - he’s a descendant, so to speak, of Dostoevsky’s “underground man.” As it happens, a woman whom he’s really attracted to calls on him asking him to resolve a sexual issue in the woman’s marriage; this leads to Glas’s animus against her husband, a noxious clergyman, and, later, to extreme jealousy as he recognizes the handsome young man w/ whom the woman has fallen in love. The novel chronicles the unraveling of a mind driven mad by loneliness and social isolation - a terribly sad story that feels to be at just the right length; who could take anymore of this sadness? </span></span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The Icelandic writer <b>Halldor Laxness</b> is known to American readers, if at all, as perhaps the most obscure winner of a Nobel Prize in literature and in particular for his novels Independent People, which I delved into many years ago and didn’t finish reading but probably I was not ready to read that novel (I’ve since been to Iceland) and for Iceland’s Bell, which I did read and it held my interest. <b>The Fish Can Sing</b>, his poorly titled novel from 1957, is not an excellent gateway to HL’s work but is a pretty good “bildungsroman,” part of that tradition - largely Germanic and, I guess, Scandinavian - of a novel that traces the course of the life of the artist. Nobody will be fooled by HL’s identifying the calling of his young protagonist as an aspirant to Opera, spurred by his longing the emulate the most famous Icelandic opera singer, Gardar Holm, well maybe the only one, of this day. Of course it’s the story of the coming of age of a young writer - and in fact it mostly focuses on his childhood home and the eccentricities of many of the people in the impoverished, remote fishing village of his childhood. Today a novel such as this would the identified w/ Auto Fiction - or, if not that, would be reworked as a nonfiction narrative, such as Per Peterson’s more recent collection of essays about his childhood in a remote part of Denmark. Fish Can Sing is really two novel sin one: the first, the story of a childhood prodigy, and the 2nd the account of the young man’s encounters with the world famous Gardar Holm and his occasional, strange return visits to his homeland - mostly in the latter half of the novel. Few readers will be surprised by the plot twists and big reveals in that section, but so be it. The novel as a whole is quite readable, far less intimidating than HL’s grandest works, but on the other hand not really the best account of what made his fiction step onto the world stage. </span></span></p>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-74026041491170043722022-07-01T13:41:00.003-04:002022-07-01T13:41:48.546-04:00June 2022: Fiction from Shirley Hazzard, Portugal (Claudio Pineiro,) Pakistan (Ahmida Ahmad), and the U.S. (Hernan Diaz) <p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <span style="font-family: Palatino;">Elliot's Reading June 2022: Shirley Hazzard, Claudio Pineiro, Ahmida Ahmad, and Hernan Diaz</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">You can see why the Argentine writer <b>Claudia Pineiro </b>has been compared with Hitchcock if you read her 2007 novel <b>Elena Knows </b>(Eng. tr. 2021 by Frances Riddle) as the novel is on the surface a quest by a 50ish woman, Elena, whose daughter, Rita, has been found hanged from a belfry inside a church an apparent suicide but not apparent to Elena who is striving to discover who killed her daughter. Great, a mystery - but it doesn’t take long before we realize that the mystery itself is far less significant than the development of Elena’s character, notable in particular in that she is in an advanced stage of Parkinson’s and every motion, every step, for her is agony. Never, I think, has an illness been depicted so vividly in fiction from the POV of the suffering character, and by the end we have tremendous sympathy for Elena and for anyone else trying to make headway in his/her life with this affliction. That said - the mystery has to be resolved. I will not divulge anything here, but I would have to say that it feels as if CP set herself a challenge that she could not meet; I would guess that she did not foresee the conclusion when she started; rather, the suicide/homicide was like Hitchcock’s famous “Maguffin,” the prop that sets all in motion and is by the end largely irrelevant. The novel takes a strong stance, near the end, in the indictment of the ban on abortions and in support of a woman’s right to choice - good on that - though I have to say the politics feels squeezed in or tacked on and not sufficient in scope to explain the course of Rita’s last days. I doubt if any reader will be satisfied with the outcome of the narrative - though all readers will be moved and troubled by the depiction of a woman suffering in a mortal illness. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The last section of <b>Shirley Hazzard’s Collected Stories</b> (2020) consists of stories “uncollected” or unpublished to date; we have to assume that she had tired for the form and had moved on, successfully, to novel-length work; in fact, her 2nd collection, People in Glass Houses, reads much like a novel. Two of the stories among the unpublished probably shouldn’t be recognized as finished pieces; they seem to be stories she put aside or abandoned. A few of the uncollected, though, are of the highest caliber; I particularly liked Out of Itea, that quite simply and beautifully recounts a Grecian ferry crossing - delving into the personality and behavior of each passenger w/ particular attention to the young Norwegian couple that seems to attract comment and attention from all the others. Even at her weakest, SH is quick with a quip or odd turn of phrase, and all of the stories have a suitable conclusion, rather than drifting off to nowhere as do so many NYer stories in the present day. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">First, what’s right and admirable in <b>Aamina Ahmad</b>’s debut novel, The <b>Return of Faraz Ali</b> (2022): start off that AA writes in an intelligent third-person style, not the usual first-person often narcissistic style of recent auto-fiction of personal confession. Second, she’s nothing if not ambitious: She could have confined this novel to one narrative line and she’s got a good one at the center of her vision, an eponymous police officer in a provincial city in 1960s Pakistan is re-assigned to the capital, Lahore, and pretty much ordered to take care of the investigation of the murder of a teenage girl (prostitute, probably), that is, to make the crime go away. His attempt to please his superiors, while also taking seriously a horrendous crime, leads to many complications. Good! Third, she hasn’t confined her ambition to one plot line; rather, there are several, one concerning the Farraz’s search for his secret of his mysterious parentage, also a washed-up Pakistani film star tries to return to the limelight, also we get the back story of the Faraz’s immediate superior, re his escape from an Italian prison in Libya during or just after the WWII. Whew. Which leads to my frustration with this novel: despite AA’s sly homage to George Eliot, this is no Middlemarch, as it’s hard to carry this kind of narrative weight in the 21st century, or even the 20th for that matter. My patience ran thin. Second, AA goes to great length to capture and depict street life in Lahore, but in doing so she uses so many words and phrases from Urdu, some discernible others not, at least to me, that it almost becomes a joke. Good luck if you can read this book and look up all the unfamiliar terms. Third, With all that narrative weight, I had to struggle to keep everything in mind, even the names of the major characters - she falls short, I think, on simple depiction, and add that to the unfamiliar names, many of which start w/ the same letter!, and even + half-way through the novel I’m flipping back pages to see who might be who. Ultimately, there’s so much going on here that I lose sight of - and interest in - the main plot line, as the novel, so impressive at times, for me began to die of its own weight. So I may not be the ideal reader here, but I couldn’t push much beyond the half-way point - but I’m sure this novel will interest many and I’m sure AA has started a brilliant career. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Hernan Diaz’s 2022 novel, Trust</b>, consists of 4 sections of roughly equal length (ca. 100-pp.), all of which, though this is not evident at first pass-through, concern the same family : a family of a huge investment firm in the early 20th century. The first section is a third-person account of the rise of the family and the mental illness suffered by the patriarch and by the spouse of the financial leader, whose decline into fear and paranoia is the heart of the story, in particular the crude and cruel supposed treatment she received at a “Magic Mountain”-like clinic in Europe. As others have noted, this section is in the style of say Wharton or even H. James - though not nearly as sharp and nuanced; it seems amateurish. The 2nd section tells of a similar clan, with similar issues of mental decline, though in this instance, first-person narrative, the declining wife receives tender and loving care; it’s also evident that this is a detailed sketch for a memoir (includes many passages such as “as details here”). OK - but I’m getting pretty bored by now! Third section (which I skimmed, sorry - reader’s privilege, this is not a “book review”) is told any a writers in late life - late 20th century - who was hired to ghost-write the novel, a re-write of the 2nd section. OK, but why? What’s happening here? It seems like a series of unreliable narrators (the 4th section is the notebook kept by the woman in the sanatarium, all fragments) - in the style of say Remains of the Day, in which the (various) narrator(s) reveal much about themselves inadvertently and in which we can see around the edges of each piece of writing. So, it’s a smart, clever book that entails intense reading and skepticism, but in the end, I’m sorry to say, that from the plot line was uninteresting, not enough to carry the wait of the various narrative stances - a work rich in irony and ambiguity but without a sharp enough payoff. </span></span></p>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-28037177882164316282022-06-01T12:17:00.001-04:002022-06-01T12:17:25.100-04:00May 2022: Shirley Hazzard, Allice Munro, Vladimir, Groundskeeping, Fortune Men (The),Occupational Hazards<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <span style="font-family: Palatino;">Elliot’s Reading - May 2022</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Just a few words on <b>Shirley Hazzard</b>’s first published book, the story collection Cliffs of Fall (1963), collected in her <b>Collected Stories</b>, in which Zoe Heller’s Foreword recounts how SH sent the story Harold unsolicited to the NYer, w/ a note that there was no need to return it if they didn’t want to publish, which led to a call from the fiction editor who enthusiastically picked up the story and many other subsequently from SH. So is Harold still an amazing story? SH’s writing sentence by sentence is immaculate - both her eye and ear for topical detail and nuances of speech but in particular for her thousands for social observations and insights - we can see this quite well in Harold, whose eponymous central character is an obviously disturbed young man living w/ tyrannical parents. So, yes, her fiction stands up well to the test of time - if not as well as the more dramatic and eccentric likes of O’Connor or Welty, to name 2 s-s masters. What holds SH back from the very top ranks is the confinement of her work, her settings - almost all in this first collection involving Brits and Americans spending the summer in various pensions in Italy - a way of life possible when the dollar was so strong (and the lira weak) but now remote, as if from another planet. At some point I’ll read further in her fiction and see if she breaks out of the tight confines of a narrow social set.</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">ll say this about <b>Julia May Jonas’s novel, Vladimir</b> (2022): It will keep you reading (it kept me reading) right to the end, which is more than most contemporary novels manage to do. It’s pretty tense and intriguing throughout - a first-person narration in which a highly intelligent intellectual professor novelist recounts her infatuation with a new colleague, the eponymous Vladimir, and how her infatuation and the ludicrous terms of her marriage in which they each pledge to tolerate the dalliances and worse of each other - you can imagine how that works out as she gets older, in her own eyes, and husband continues to attract his adoring students - until he suddenly doesn’t as the world caves in around him and he finds himself facing public hearings and discipline. There’s an extraordinary amount of drinking and smoking throughout the novel (plus a lot of high-end grocery shopping and home cooking) and I have to say that none of the leading characters is appealing (to me) in any way and the satire of university politics wears a little thin - such an easy target! - but I love the many literary allusions (sorry, can’t help myself there) and name-dropping and, though the conclusion isn’t entirely credible, it’s at least quite dramatic, and how can you not see this novel as the prelude to a miniseries? If nothing else, this novel must the success de scandale of the year, maybe the century, at Skidmore College, the thinly veiled setting. So, look, lots to enjoy here, lots of insight into the character of a middle-aged woman desperately seeking to retain and rekindle the allure of her youth, some great skewering of academic politics, and all at not much more than 100 pp. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Lee Cole</b> must be a really nice guy, as the characters in his debut novel, <b>Groundskeeping </b>(2022) are pleasant, friendly, and credible people - esp noteworthy in that this is yet another campus-based novel, a genre prone to cynicism, irony, and deep character flaws (see above - post on the recent novel Vladimir). A review of a Richard Russo novel some years back - and it’s no coincidence that this novel carries a blurb from same - said that RR initiated a 3rd novel “type” - someone takes a journey, a stranger comes to town, and, in Russo’s case, Schmo stays at home. Cole’s novel stays at home or close to it, and it feels as if it must be somewhat autobiographical, as it’s about the coming of age of an aspiring novelist - though it’s clearly not a work of auto-fiction. That said: This novel is, how else can I put this?, really dull. The plot in essence - this based on a reading of the first 100+ not-small pp., about 1/3 through the book - entails a protagonist meeting an alluring woman at a grad-student party, he learns that she’s a visiting writer (he’s enrolled in one fairly ludicrous writing course, a perk he gets because he works on the grounds crew of the U.), he pursues her w/ some ardor, she tells him she’s in a relationship however, and he learns that said relationship is w/ a guy in his writing course. They all converge at a downtown (Louisville) club, without any serious consequences. Meanwhile, writer living with his grandfather (quaint, old-fashioned, veteran) and his uncle with disabilities (cranky, selfish). Schmo stays at home. In some ways this novel reminds me of the talk and gossip in a Sally Rooney novel - a worthwhile role model, as perhaps a male-centered v. will take off - or at least make another good miniseries. In other ways, I ask: Why the fuss over this debut? The jacket blurbs are of the highest order, and there was a rave review in the NYTBR, which drew me to this work. I guess I’m missing something - it’s a pleasant enough work, which in itself sets it apart, but there must be more to it than this. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Two excellent and quite different stories this week, first, <b>Alice Munro’s Runaway</b>, the title story in one of her final collections, and if anyone is in doubt about her deserved winning of a Nobel Prize take a look at this piece; there’s a twist at the end, and I won’t give anything away - but this story in about 40 pp. covers as much ground as many novels, but in a clear, sharp manner, never feeling rushed or arbitrary - quite conventional, in fact, in the technique, a series of short narrative patches that follow part of the life course of a young woman on a remote Ontario farm, her fears about her temperamental husband, tensions with the nearest neighbors who are of an entirely different social class and milieu (he’s a famous poet; the young couple are working class and not well educated; the young woman is their cleaning-lady). In fear of her husband’s violence, the young woman - is she the runaway? - expresses her worry to the neighbor woman who takes exulting joy in helping the young woman to feel to Toronto and a new life. The consequences of her impulsive flight resound right to the final sentence. Second story not by a eminence but by a writer unknown till now to me, <b>Occupational Hazards, by Jamil Jan Kochai</b> - and the entire store is told as a series of imagined job applications spanning the course of the life of a man born in Syria (?), later emigrating to the U.S. and trying amid much hardships to support a family and raise children. It’s a truly sad story, and truly global in its scope, and though I doubt whether another writer will ever take on the same narrative strategy it in this appearance feels organic and right, never gimmicky. As in Runaway, the story concludes with a surprising twist of fate, which again I won’t give away, and along the course of the narration there is much heartbreak, struggle, and intensity - and a close look at a culture and way of life rarely addressed in American fiction. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">O had a lot of trouble engaging w/ <b>Nadifa Mohamed’s Booker-finalist novel The Fortune Men</b> (2021) - maybe it’s just me but from the outset I had trouble developing a clear picture of the major characters, of which there are several, and the novel to me didn’t really get going until the central event - a murder - and the arrest of an innocent man, mistreated misjudged by the police in Cardiff because he’s a Black man (Somali). Much of the novel feels to me over-written and willfully difficult (there are throughout so many foreign (as in, not English) terms that I literally could not understand some of the sentences. It’s a novel of high ambition and apparently based on “true events,” but for a novel with such potential - racial conflict, injustice, crime and punishment - I just never felt drawn to the story nor to the plight of the protagonist. Gave up half-way through. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Shirley Hazzard’s 2nd book, People in Glass Houses</b> (1967), also a collection of stories almost all of which appeared in the New Yorker, would today probably be marketed as “linked stories” forming a novel. Well, they are linked in that all have the same setting, the thinly disguised United Nations (always called the Organization) HQ (where SH had worked), though I think only 1 of the characters appear in more than 1 of the stories. Whatever we call it, however, it’s an incredible tour de force that, though it’s read rarely today holds up well as a chilling portrayal of a bureaucracy run amok - almost Kafka-esque, especially in the weird, almost frightening account, of one of the employees’s attempt to get a small pay raise. The stories were particularly poignant in their day, when the UN was relatively new and seemed a beacon of hope lighting the way for peace and prosperity - and here we see what it’s like working in the UN, the petty bureaucratic fights, the endless reports and position papers, the subtleties and nuances and need for across-the-board approval for any statement or action, all of which lead nowhere and die in an endless cycle of review - familiar to anyone who’s worked for a bureaucracy: But we somehow expected more of the UN. Even the building - the glory of the world back in the ‘50s, feels archaic and inhuman; as noted in one point, the founders cared about how the building would look from the outside - cool, reflective, “modern” glass - and how it looks for those inside: offices in long windowless hallways. Her turns of phrase and her names for the many offices and programs are hilarious (e.g., DALTO: The Department of Aid to the Less Technically Oriented). </span></span></p><div><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-9695720575449749592022-05-01T11:45:00.001-04:002022-05-01T11:45:05.003-04:00Chekov plays, O'Connor stories, J. Franzen in brief, and novels by Petterson, Zambra, and Starnone <p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <span style="font-family: Palatino;">From famous first line(s) - “Why do you always wear black?”- to famous last line, which I won’t divulge here, Chekhov’s </span><b style="font-family: Palatino;">The Sea Gull </b><span style="font-family: Palatino;">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.</span><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>The Cherry Orchard</b> 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. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Like so many books (and films) these days (or is it me?), <b>Domenico Starnone’s novel Trust</b> (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. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Per Petterson</b> 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, <b>Echoland</b> (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. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I have read and posted on many <b>Jonathan Franzen</b> 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., <b>Crossroads</b> (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. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">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. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Just a brief note on <b>Alejandro Zambra</b>’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! </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">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 <b>Flannery O’Connor</b>, 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.</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">There’s much to admire and like in Louis Menand’s monumental work, <b>The Free World</b> (2021) - and some annoyances as well. I have to agree with friend Frank K that it’s great to imagine, while reading this book, that Menand is your perfect dinner guest, entertaining all at some length with this account of the lives, contributions, and ideas of among the most famous or notorious thinks of the post-Cold War I (as I now would call it) era. He covers a lot of ground with the 20 (I think) chapters, including literature, music, advertising, photography, fashion, art, student protests, theVietnam War, and I could go on. This book feels like a omnium gatherun, with most of the pieces, I think, reworking of various magazine articles, esp in the NYer where LM is a staffer (in addition to his day job at Harvard). The problem such as it is w/ this book is that there’s no over-riding theme, nothing to hold the 20 chapters together, no conclusion in fact - the book just ends (with a whimper). So, skim away, and, for that matter, you can probably read the chapters in any order over any length of time! A few of the chapters that interested me the least I just skimmed through, but those that I cared more about - the literary topics esp - I read carefully, even all the footnotes, which are universally amusing; as to the index, LM is a genius at annotation, with practically every sentence in this 700+-pager backed by a citation. Nice work! This may be my own shortcoming, but I was most attentive the the chapters about which I was already well informed - less so about those that would have brought me new insight of inspiration. That said, I enjoyed his take on Kerouac and the Beats, on Ginsberg, on the Beatles … and others who shaped our world and our consciousness (though why hardly a mention of Dylan?). Wished I could have understood more about structuralism and deconstruction - LM is not great at finding illustrative examples of different styles of literary criticism, and he goes light on some of the critics whose star rose and has fallen: Northrup Frye and his attempt to build an anatomy of criticism, foolish and restrictive; Paul de Man, whose deconstructionist ideas indicated that a “text” doesn’t mean what it says (how convenient for a critic who in his youth spouted Nazi propaganda and ideology). As Frank K anticipated, I particularly liked his take on the “new Criticism” and its link to conservative and even racist thought - an oppressive and short-sided dicta from on high as to how a poem should be properly read. Good riddance to that! Examples would have been good, however. Anyway, the field is so much more open and engaged than it was 20 years ago. The prose cane dense at times - but the essence is always there, and one can only guess that LM is an incredibly accessible and inspiring teacher. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I read Haruki Murakami’s story collection <b>Men Without Women</b> (2014) primarily to see how it was adapted and developed into the film Drive My Car. Here are some notes: First, the only 2 characters in the story by that name are the director and his driver; the entire story consists of conversations between these 2. Both are closely modeled on the published story. Unlike the story, the director meets the driver right away (he needs a driver because he’s been diagnosed with a near blindness in one eye; that’s retained in the movie, but it’s not the primary reason why he needs a driver). The director is very particular about his driver, but less recalcitrant than the director in the movie. Though at one point the driver tells the director of her difficult childhood, there’s no journey to Hokkaido to visit her childhood village; hence, their relationship is not nearly as profound as in the film. Curiously, the film adaptation also extended to 2 other stories in the collection: Scheherazade and to a lesser extent, Kino. In Sch., the main character (who seems to be in some kind of witness-protection program) has an ongoing sexual relationship w/ a woman who tells him a story after each time they have sex (see, Arabian nights), and the longest story she narrates is similar to the one that the driver’s wife tells him after they have sex in the opening scene of the film. The film cleverly entwines the two story lines, with the unfaithful wife being narrator of the child breaks into house of school-yard crush. (The third element, much more brief, is of a man returning home unexpectedly to find his wife having sex with another.) What’s not adapted from any part of Mw/out Women: the whole Uncle Vanya segment, in fact any aspect that shows the director at work; most significantly, the relationship between the director and young man whom he’d seen having sex w/ his wife and whom he casts as the lead in Uncle Vanya - which is to say that the most powerful and unusual sequence, in which the actor/rival tells the director (and the driver overhears) a story of marital infidelity (the wife, we learn, is a screenwriter who shares her story ideas w/ husband/director); in short, the movie version is far more complex and profound than the 2 1/2 stories from the source, though lots of credit due of course to HM for his always surprising and inventive, yet grounded in social conditions of the day, stories and novels. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Just a short note on a really long novel - <b>The World as I Found It </b>(1987), by Bruce Duffy - that I’d never heard of until reading of Duffy’s death and being struck by his unusual history: This novel, his first, received high praise on publication but he never was able to make a life as a full-time writer nor did he seem to make any connections that would have led to a teaching post, if that was what he would have liked, instead working in communications and some lesser-caliber jobs as he struggled w/ a 2nd novel, published after failure to find an agent and received almost no notice, and then a 3rd, ditto - although he did live to see World/Found It picked up by the estimable New York Review Books. And I picked it up, daunted by its length and depth - a novel that unfolds the life story of Wittgenstein, with side trips to others in W’s life, notably Bertrand Russell. So, OK, I read about 70 pp (book totals nearly 600), enough to see that it’s a hugely impressive work - how can he know so much about these strands of philosophy and the life and times of these diverse, and remote, characters/people? - yet not one for me. I found my only interest was in FW - and if that’s the case why wouldn’t I prefer to read a biography (I would) in which I could at least be assured of the veracity of the facts; by embarking on this alternate course, a true-life novel you might say, there’s some burden on the author to make the novel moving and beautiful, and I just found it a slog, on the literary level, though more promising (yet not enough to keep me engaged) on the philosophical level: for ex., he unravels some of Ressell’s thoughts via his conversation with the woman w/ whom he’s having an affair - yet this double vision in my view made the novel neither fish nor foul, so to speak: Much credit to Duffy, and to his readers, and even to the publishers who at least took a chance on this almost guaranteed to not be a best seller novel. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Yes, inspired by Drive My Car, I re-read Chekhov’s <b>Uncle Vanya</b>, one of his 4 late-life plays, and was blown away by its beauty and pathos - as audiences (and readers) have universally for a century - the essence of what’s considered Chekhovian: adults living their late0life in a provincial setting, a sense that their lives were of great promise that has never materialized, much missed connections among the unmarried, who are generally on the cusp marital eligibility, time has passed them by, and secret longings are never realized or recognized much less consummated, bursts of violence and remorse, often (specifically in UV) a physician if I correctly remember about other Chekhov plays who can voice the weariness and the danger of the doctor’s life in that era of few useful medicines and great unrelieved pain, and specific to UV the beautiful elegy by Sonya, who recognizes that she will most likely never marry, that she will be for the rest of her life consumed by menial chores to keep the estate running even though she derives no benefits from that, and her expression of faith and of its reward, which is neither heaven nor salvation but simply “rest.” What a knockout!</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Chekhov’s <b>TheThree Sisters</b> is somewhat tough going for a reader who knows no Russian - as always hard to keep the characters straight, and there is is less distinction among the 3 than any readers would like - but this would not be a problem on stage, the best place to encounter any of AC’s late plays. The themes and motifs from earlier plays are abundant here as we’ll: the sense of a wasted life and failed opportunity, the failure to live up to high youthful expectations, some strange and moving passages in which the characters speak of their views as to what the world will or might become centuries later - with some thinking the world will be much the same, cold and miserable, and others (specifically, the Baron) believing that the world will get better and better and though we in the present will never sense of know this we are leaving a better world for future generations, etc. As to the characters’ life in the present, as usual there is some high drama (a fire that nearly destroys the provincial town of the setting), a shooting death, a physician who’s a bit of an outsider and an incompetent (AC’s negative version of himself?). What emerges here and that we did not see in Vanya per is the yearning of those confined to provincial life, the eponymous sisters in particular, who yearn to return to Moscow and of course never will be able to do so - there’s a great sense of loss when the military squadron, who created all of the social life in this province - are reassigned and leave town; military life here seems to be about everything but the fighting - and we can see this in other AC works (e.g., The Kiss) and even in Shakespeare (e.g., Much Ado). </span></span></p>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-61098593548967147932022-03-01T11:21:00.000-05:002022-03-01T11:21:24.564-05:00Elliot's Reading February 2022:Danish, Zambian, The Hague, and a case of plagiarism <p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Palatino;">Read the first volume - Childhood - of </span><b style="font-family: Palatino;">Tove Ditlevsen</b><span style="font-family: Palatino;">’s three-vol memoir - The Copenhagen Trilogy; it’s still the age of the memoir (and of autofiction), the tail-end perhaps - this work closer to memoir than to fiction as I suppose it’s a work of memory rather than invention. It would mean a lot more to me if I were familiar w/ TDs work as a writer and poet, but, like most American readers I’d guess, I knew little about her. This first volume opens a window on life in the working -class neighborhoods of Copenhagen in the 1920s or so; TD, like so many writers, was an early misfit, and the volume presents sketches of her struggles with a restrictive mother, tempestuous relationship with her politically radical father, a sense of the extreme poverty and hardship of the working-class lives - reminds me a little of recently read Breadgivers, similar topics in setting of NYC. Unfortunately, though, despite some insightful episodes - notably TD’s being drawn into a life of minor crime in order to save face and keep up with the tougher, rougher kids in the neighborhood, kids she would later grow away from (cf. My Brilliant Friend?) but these episodes tend to be sketched in rather than examined, probed, developed (cf Knausgaard, ditto Proust).</span><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Katie Kitamura</b>’s new novel, Intimacies, is in a sense 2 novels in one. The narrator (name??) is a translator at the World Court in the Hague, and to me the best part of this novel were the accounts of her work, in particular, her (i.e., KK’s) discussion of the art and the act of translation and the need for the translator to be objective and impersonal, almost like a machine. This attitude is particularly stressful and even unattainable in the World Court, as the narrator shows when she is assigned to translate into French for a man - the former president he’s called - who is charged with brutal crimes; KK gives a great sense of how a translator becomes inured to words and the world around her - and that’s worth pondering as a condition for all of us, every day. KK interweaves this story w/ the narrator’s loves/sex life, as she falls in love with a handsome Dutch man who leaves town for what he says will be a week - turns out to be much longer - and lets the narrator live in his apartment; it was hard for me to get up any interest in this story line - the stakes were so much lower than in the other narrative - my god, they knew each other only for a week, it was not in my view a deeply invested relationship. This part of the narrative was also skewed by some highly improbable encounters and revelations, and it just didn’t fly the way it should; I kept expecting the 2 plot lines to converge, but that never really happened. Still, the writing is excellent (except someone ought to teach KK about the comma splice - see Elements of Style); there aren’t that many contemporary novels thatI can bear to finish, but this one moved along easily and thoughtfully. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I’ve read about half of current Nobel literature winner <b>Abdulrazak Gurnah</b>’s 2017 novel, Gravel Heart, and have found it to this point - as far as I’ll go - an intelligent, detailed account of the life of a young man born in Zanzibar, where his grandfather was killed for participation in some kind of unsuccessful insurrection and whose father has become a recluse with mental illness of some unknown sort or cause and whose mother has shamed him by having a relationship with a local TV news star - the first chapter, which details this, is pretty good; then the narrator moves to London for school and spends several years moving from place to place and trying to find himself as a student of literature and carrying on a few inconsequential relationships and friendships and managing a difficult relationship with his overbearing uncle who tries to control his life. All told, pretty good, if familiar ground - especially familiar to those who’ve read Naipal - with the difference that AG’s novel lacks the humor and the tension of Naipal, or of most immigrant novels. The narrator just drifts from one locale to another and there’s never any great tension or dramatic build-up, and I’m 230 small-print pp in; this book, which seems closely autobiographical, might be better if presented as “auto-fiction,” but without that claim on reality - portrait of the artist as a young immigrant man - there’s little to hold my interest despite the obvious professionalism of the prose. If I’d known or cared much about AG’s work, this novel would have had more to hold me, but it doesn’t seem to me a good starting point for reading this Nobelist’s work. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel <b>The Plot</b> (2021) is above all else a page-turner, this one about a writer of literary fiction, frustrated with his work - first book received nice notices but has slipped into obscurity and getting by via teaching summer residency workshops, who writes a 4th book that becomes a mega-best-seller - following which he finds himself anonymously accused of plagiarism; he sets off on a course of amateur detective work to find out who’s accusing him and why (this summary passes o ver several key plot points so as not to lead to any unintended reveals). All readers will be caught up in the author’s plight - and especially readers (and writers) of literary fiction, as JHK has that world down pat. As with most whodunits, unfortunately, far too much hinges on unlikely coincidence and on the protagonist - Jake - have an enormous # of lucky breaks: the lawyer who fills him in, the house=-cleaner who just happens to remember the woman Jake is seeking, and so on: He encounters no dead ends, and life is full of those. I would guess most astute readers will figure out who dun it before the big reveal. Most of all, I have to say, this novel doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny in the end - so much that’s put forth makes little or no sense when you look back on the story line, but, hey, it was fun to read - I actually read it straight through to the end, which is rare for me when I delve into contemporary fiction. (Weirdly, there seems to be another novel out now - Last Resort - also on the theme of an author accused of plagiarism; maybe these two novels ought to meet up?)</span></span></p>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-37278844586103796442022-01-31T21:01:00.005-05:002022-01-31T21:01:48.200-05:00Elliot's Reading January 2022: Bread Givers, stories by James and Mansfield, Middlemarch, Magnificent Ambersons <p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <b><span style="font-family: Palatino;">January 2022: Bread Givers, Middlemarch, Scarlet Letter, Magnificent Ambersons</span><span style="font-family: Palatino;"> </span></b></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Anzia Yezierska’s collection of stories </b>from 1925, Bread Givers, is a bit of social realism about life in the Jewish/Yiddish immigrant community on the lower East Side of NYC, written intentionally in an awkward and often broken English to capture the sound and voice of the community. Today we would call this book a collection of (about 30?) “linked stories,” which in sequence tell of the life and gradual adaptation and emancipation of a young woman, Sara, in a strictly Orthodox family - who overcomes the shortcomings, financial and emotional, of her birth family to complete college and embark on a career as a school teacher. (First publication was of a 3-volume set, but each would be no longer than a pamphlet by today’s measures.) There is a sense that this collection is autobiographical, though the fate of the protagonist doesn’t quite follow AY’s lifeline; it’s also a much stronger and nuanced book than it appears at first viewing: it’s not a romantic, fiddler on the roof, tree grows in Brooklyn loving re-creation of immigrant life. The father, who at first seems just eccentric - devoted to his studies while wife and daughters slave to maintain the household - gradually is revealed as a tyrant, ruining his children’s lives through his selfishness. All told, quite a book good book - both for its window on its time and place and for a surprisingly strong narrative arc. I have to note here as well that the edition I read, from the library, is a dreadful, shameful work of publishing. The publisher, the Wilder Publications (never heard of them) seems to claim copyright to this book, a claim that seems dubious at best. There is not a word in this poorly designed edition about the author and a reader might suspect that it was published in 2021, the date of the claimed copyright. Great to have this book widely available (I believe it was published in the 1970s), but a disgrace to have it published in such a poorly edited, designed, and truncated manner. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I posted on <b>Katherine Mansfield</b> in March 2015; yesterday re-read her great story The Garden Party - once again I’ll recommend it. What starts out as looking like a tedious account of the preparations for a big party - don’t these people have anything better to think about and spend money on? - and we can feel superior to the characters in particular because of their condescension toward the “help” and their unquestioned social privilege, and then everything us overturned, for them and for us, when there’s news that a young man living nearby - but in a totally different social set, a neighborhood of workers’ cottages and neglect - has died in an accident (his horse rears when frightened by a train, I think - some heavy-handed symbolism there). The young woman at the center of the story agrees to take some leftovers to the home of the bereaved, and it’s not so much that we see the social disparities and feel the discomfort and apprehension of the young woman (Laura) - as we ponder the ambiguity of her concluding social insight: Isn’t life … - and she doesn’t complete the sentence. How would we? Unfair? Beautiful? Scary? </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">And a few more notes on what I’ve been reading this month:</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">First, at last finished (re)reading George Eliot’s <b>Middlemarch</b>. For some weird reason I had the conclusion of the novel all wrong in my mind, seeming to remember that it ended w/ a bequest to establish a hospital for elderly men, with Legate as the supervising physician. What book am I confusing this one with? The novel ends with what many other authors would present as an instance of high comedy - the villain vanquished and the young couples embarked on their married life. But with Eliot this otherwise “happy” ending is salted w/ tears: Can Ladislaw and Dorothea really make a go of their marriage? Aren’t they such different types? Will Ladislaw give up his flirtatious ways? Won’t he be drawn to life in London - which is antithetical to Dorothea? And Eliot pulls no punches in portrayal of Lydgate and Rosamond’s shaky marriage - and with the sense of failure that will follow him through life. The only truly bright spot: Mary Garth’s marriage to the immature but sweet and abiding Pilcher. Maybe he will reform, who knows? Great book that accomplishes all GE set out to achieve, a portrait of an English village in the early 19th century as seen through the intertwined lives of several inhabitants, each distinct and peculiar.</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Also re-read several stories that I’d come across in a cheap anthology several years back - still hugely impressed by Hemingway’s Three-Day Blow, a story told almost entirely in oblique dialog, important as much for what is not said as for what is. <b>Henry James</b>’s Brooksmith, the life story of a servant on a downward slide, may not be his greatest story but it’s a great example of high irony, the narrator all full of himself for his courtesy to this household butler but unable to do anything of substance to same the man’s life and never recognizing his complicity. <b>Pushkin’s</b> The Shot another fine story in essence about military life and bravado, a story of revenge and codes of justice and behavior: How far would you go to settle a dispute of honor? </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Also started re-reading <b>The Scarlet Letter</b>, and though it’s compelling in some ways - as a portrayal of the eccentricity of Puritan life in the 17th century in Boston - finding it clumsy and belabored: Can anyone not foresee who’s the father of the out-of-wedlock Pearl? Not sure I want to slog through the whole novel to find out how or whether Hawthorne maintains the narrative tension. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">And finally tried reading Booth Tarkoington’s <b>The Magnificent Ambersons</b> - a really rare instance in which the film version, despite its flaws, improved upon the original. Written ca. 1915 and set in the late 19th-century in a small midwestern town - in fact a town that’s growing and thinks it’s on the verge of prosperity but in fact is on the cusp of manufacturing, pollution, and general decline, told through the rise and fall of the Amberson family. The best scenes - the ball, the sleigh ride - are so much more vivid and dramatic in the Welles film version; in contrast, the plot, despite Tarkington’s genial tone - Twain without the sarcasm and romanticism of youth - the novel feels overly programatic. Also, there are some painful passages of racism and condescension that flag the novel as incendiary and not likely to rise from the ashes. </span></span></p><div><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580946865077078981.post-22008254305598592552022-01-01T12:05:00.002-05:002022-01-01T12:05:27.427-05:00December 2021: Updike bio, stories by Malamud and Mann, Booker Prize winner Galgut <p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <span style="font-family: Palatino;">Elliot’s Reading - December 2021</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Adam Begley’s <b>biography Updike </b>reads something like 250 A+ college essays in sequence; AB gives us a concise summary and a report on the public and critical reception for each of JU’s many works (novels especially but not exclusively) almost each of which involves some discussion of how the material is drawn from and reflects on JU’s life - quite different from the Bailey Roth bio that I read recently, and for two reasons: First, JU’s life was much more private and free from the controversy and deep trauma of Roth’s; second, Bailey had access to an enormous amount of Roth material and most important he had the full cooperation of Roth and of many of his family members and friends - Roth was extremely concerned about how his life would be memorialized, whereas JU seemed to agree reluctantly to a bio but gave Begley little aside from the works and some archive material - few interviews, and even fewer interviews w/friends and family. And how could one not note the seething, beneath the surface hostility between Begley and JU’s second wife, Martha - who is not even mentioned in the acknowledgments!? Though it’s far thinner on gossip and life drama, Begley’s is still well worth reading for anyone serious about Updike’s work, in particular for the illuminations about his childhood and how that carried him through, or that he carried through, till his death. The final section, on his fatal illness (lung ca), is moving and mysterious, and throughout Begley gives his valuation of most of the works (Bailey was less judgmental about Roth). Overall, JU comes off well, as one would anticipate - thoughtful, forthcoming about his writing, reserved about his personal life. (I met Updike once, seated next to him at a post-reading dinner, and found him polite, witty, a very nice man, but guarded about everything he said to or near a reporter [me].) I would add here a bit of trivia: One of JU’s Harvard classmates and his supposed equal as an English major was Jacob Neusner, who became a rabbi and scholar and on the Brown faculty; JN was extremely prolific, more so than JU! Jacob and I were friendly when I was books ed. at the Journal, and at one point he asked if I would like to visit JU for a feature/magazine story. Of course! So Neusner wrote to or called JU, who responded to me w/ a polite no, via one of his famous postcards (I can’t believe I can’t find it!). About a year later, JU published his next novel, Memories of the Ford Administration, and one of the characters was unquestionably modeled on Neusner. The character’s name: Krieger. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Reading and Re-reading from the RV Cassill <b>short-story collection</b> - so just a brief post on two of the stories that I re-read but that I wrote in more detail in previous blog entries: First, <b>Bernard Malamud</b>’s The Jewbird, and, as at my previous reading, this story gets a big shrug of the shoulders. Sure, there are some broadly comic lines and images as this bird lands on a NY fire escape and joins (and disrupts) family life: the bird expects to be coddled, and munches on herring pieces, and effects a Yiddish vocabulary, and in the end - takes flight. But does it mean anything? Is there any greater mystery to this metamorphosis, if that’s what it is? It’s just a “what if,” not nearly as poignant and provocative as, say, Roth’s early stories (let alone Kafka) - just a few gags that probably made the story fun to read aloud. Second, <b>Thomas Mann</b>’s Disorder and Early Sorrow - which remains one of the great short stories, an account at great (maybe too great) length of a middle-class German family hosting a dinner/dance party. The focus is on the grandfather, who dotes on his 8-year-old (approx) granddaughter; at end of story granddaughter has hysterical tears when she’s put to bed as she wants to be with one of the men at the party w/ whom she’d danced; grandfather recognizes that this is the first of many passions that will be part of her life - and that he’s completely excluded from her fantasies and yearnings - she’s growing away from him into a life of her own, over the course of which she will inevitably endure the sorrows foreseen in the title. Story is far too long by more standards of our era, but its antiquity is part of its charm.</span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">And a word in praise of <b>Colin Barrett, </b>new to me, whose short story in last week’s ew Yorker, A Shooting in Rathreedane (an Irish village/small town), which to my mind is as good a story about a police procedure that I’ve ever seen - the story closely follows through a work day a mid-career, female police officer off to the scene of a possibly accidental shooting, upon which she finds - small-town police - that she knows the victim, a long-time ne’er do well, and his family; over the course of the story she works valiantly to keep the victim alive and takes part in the on-scene interrogation - the shooter claims to have been trying to scare off an intruder, likely true, but then again, did he have to shoot to the body? - and of course she is thinking all the time about details of her life and of those working with her - all told an excellent, tense, credible piece of short fiction. </span></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">This is the kind of book I usually deplore, a generational story (yawn) with multiple narrative voices (choose one and carry it through!) about an ordinary, everyday family that we follow through the lives and to deaths of all but one all wrapped neatly in 250 pages or less - and that’s what the recent Booker Prize winner, <b>Damon Galgut’s The Promise,</b> is and the surprise is that I really liked this novel against all my prejudices and trepidations. What a great job he does in bringing this farming family in rural South Africa as over time the struggle and die off and adapt, awkwardly, to the land that is changing and evolving even as they are not. There are 5 main characters, across two generations, and Galgut artfully weaves their story and stories, moving seamlessly among the several narrative voices - he’s really the child Joyce and Faulkner, Sound and the Fury in particular - although obviously he is nearly a century later so readers today are for more adept at making their way through this sometimes circulative narration, that offers a few postmodern winks toward the end (one of the characters aspires to write a novel, though he has no literary training or skills - yet is it his novel that we are reading? how is that possible?). So, yes, it’s not the easiest book to read - it’s definitely “literary fiction” and not the debut of a movie or episodic series - but once you by in an being to clarify the populace (unhelpfully, yeah of the 3 children has a name beginning w/ A) you will, or I was anyway, be drawn into this world, a world most American readers know little of I would guess. </span></span></p>elliothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097945161482561807noreply@blogger.com0