Kemposki's life story and the conclusion of All for Nothing

A final note on Walter Kempowski's 2006 novel, All for Nothing, which I highly recommend to all readers of these posts (see previous posts on this novel), but spoiler will follow: I read Jenny Erpenbeck's forward, which did touch on the unusual ending to the novel, in which the 12-year-old son is the only surviving member of the von Globil family and in which the head of the local Nazi party gives his "seat" on the last boat escaping from Eastern Germany over to the young boy. I still am not sure why this nasty and officious party leader would make this gesture of sacrifice to the young man whom he barely knows and whose landed-gentry family he holds in contempt - but there you have it, a charitable gesture from a despicable man, a sort of "Christian" ending to this dark story of the final days of World War II. But JE's intro does indicate that my hunch was correct in that, although the novel is not autobiographical, the life of the young boy and his escape from the Russian advance does parallel that of Kempowski himself. Kempowski's father was captain of the last ship to escape into the Baltic - the ship that the young boy was bound for once he leaves the harbor aboard the skiff - and Kempowski was separated from his family for some time as hundreds of thousands of refugees made their way west at the end of the war. He was 15 years old at the time, still young but not as vulnerable as the 12-year-old von Globil child, obviously. JE's intro also notes that Kempowski spent much of his writing life compiling a 10-volume (?) collection of first-hand accounts of the German experience in the war, along w/ many documents and artifacts; in the novel, there are at least 3 "collectors," assembling at archiving various pieces and records of German culture and contemporary German life. Preservation of history, and of memory, is one of the forces that drives someone to write, whether a novel or in some other genre, and Kempowski's - an unflinching depiction of a German family, not exactly collaborators or even sympathizers with Hitler's leadership, but going along with quiet acquiescence and willful blindness to the horrors taking place in their country. and in the end abandoned by their leaders and left to die, literally, in the snowbanks by the side of the road.

Kempowski's All for Nothing has everyone one could want in a literary classic

The long and short of it is that Walter Kempowski's 2006 novel, All for Nothing, has everything a reader of literary fiction could want or hope for in a book: historical veracity, family and human drama, fully rounded characters who face various moral and ethical dilemmas, clearly delineated characters and sharply defined setting, crisp pacing, highly dramatic action, excellent writing line by line without excess or flourishes. OK, maybe there's not much humor - this is a grim time and the novel focuses on how various families and individuals face this time of political crisis - but that's more than made up for by our empathy with these characters, even though some are highly unsympathetic. The last few chapters, as all of eastern Germany seems to be moving in an endless caravan of cars, horse-drawn carts and carriages, and people afoot with all their belongings in tow on sleds or packed on their back, everyone heading west in fear of the approaching Russian army coming from the East, but with no idea as to what they will find ahead of them, as many cities have already been destroyed by bombings and the families whom the refugees expect to meet may themselves have moved further inland, or worse. These scenes - with their harrowing descriptions of the trudge forward along a rutted, snow-clogged path with many dead bodies - the young and the old - and dead horses left behind to freeze or rot - add a gruesome cinematic element to the novel, as if it needed anything more. Why this novel has not found a wider readership is beyond me; sometimes, it takes time to recognize a classic. Spoiler alert: I am a little puzzled by the end of the novel, with the 12-year-old Peter as the only surviving member of the von Globil family; it's particularly surprising that the village Nazi enforcer, the officious Drybowski, gives up his seat on a launch to Peter, allowing Peter to be one of the last to escape by sea ahead of the Russian advance; is Peter's life in some way similar to Kempowski's? I will later read the intro essay to this novel, which may provide light on that issue.

All for Nothing and a comparison with two other major novels (Woolf and Nemirovsky)

I continue to praise Walter Kempowski's 2006 novel, All for Nothing (NYRB publisher), and noting today two possible influences or points of comparison. I've already noted how this novel, about a family of landed gentry living on a small estate in eastern Germany in 1945, as the Russian troops approach from the east, in some ways calls to mind Lampedusa's great novel, The Leopard, as we see a vanishing way of life in its final stages, in a time of great political crisis. I'm also struck by the possible comparison with Nemerovsky's great Suite Francaise, which reads like an eyewitness, first-and account of the flight from Paris to the South as the Nazis took over the capital and imposed the Occupation. That novel captured the fear and terror of the refugees and their despair at leaving all of their belongings behind w/ no clear destination. Kempowski looks at the exodus from the war zone from the standpoint of those staying put, at least for the present; the von Globig family members cannot quite recognize the peril they're in as the Russian army advances; they've been in power and authority all of their lives and they have a naive trust in the power of the German army to fight off the attack, as they screen out any news they don't want to hear. They're not really Nazi sympathizers, but they dutifully display some Hitler portraits - and suddenly they're getting warnings that the Russians will shoot all landowners on sight and that they'd better leave immediately. But they look at the ever-growing stream of refugees that pass by their estate heading West and can't imagine joining with these dispossessed, few or none of them of the same social class. So this novel tells a story similar to that of Suite Francaise, but with a focus on those who can't or won't give up their privilege or even recognize their privileged status and how fragile that status may be. Another comparison, of a completely different order, is with Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, which at first glance shares nothing thematically with All for Nothing other than that both are about families (Woolf's about a family on a summer vacation, along w/ many acolytes, artists and writers, in the Hebrides I think). Though Woolf's novel has no overt political context, note how both novels use what I'd call a kaleidoscopic third-person narrative, moving among the characters almost paragraph by paragraph, giving us many points of view an many moments of insight into the characters and their backgrounds, while making the narrative line clear and easy to follow because of specific details and sharp delineation of each of the many narrative voices.

What makes All for Nothing a terrific and unusual novel

Past the half-way point I continue to be impressed by and drawn to Walter Kempowki's 2006 novel, All for Nothing. For those readers who may be daunted by a novel in translation (from German) about a, for Americans, an unfamiliar setting - life in a small estate near the front lines in 1945 in what was soon to become East German - published by the esoteric NYRB press, I can only say that this book is perhaps surprisingly accessible. Kempowski builds the narrative in a series of very short takes - most just a paragraph or two - in chapters arranged by in time sequence (novel coves, so far, just a few days) and by topic (e.g., some chapters have the name of a character, some have titles like a short story or a film outtake, such as The Stranger or The Offense). Most important, he clearly delineates the characters and makes the setting vivid through careful selection of detail and avoidance of jargon and literary flourish. In that sense, the novel is almost minimal, but the themes are powerful and the narrative stance unusual. In essence, throughout the novel we are much more knowledgeable and aware than any of the characters; we see these members of the von Globig family - a mother, an elderly Auntie, and a 12-year-old son, living with three servants - as the world unfurls around them and they, holding onto what possessions and privileges they can, are unaware of the impending peril. They seem have no sense of the horrors of the Nazi regime - they display a few portraits of Hitler around the house because that's what's expected - and they are just starting to sense that they are unprotected, that as the Russian troops advance (they can hear the explosions from the front, maybe 50 miles away) they will be attacked. They start to pack up to prepare to leave in a rush if needed, but they seem immobilized and naive. Pressed by a priest in the nearby village, the mother - Katherina - a great beauty who shows little feeling or empathy for anyone but herself - agrees to let a fugitive hide out for a night in her house; she seems thrilled by this adventure, but it's more like a game to her. She thinks little about the sufferings of others, and can't imagine trying to protect her family - which would mean giving up all of their belongings and comforts. It's hard to imagine how we as contemporary readers could sympathize w/ this pathetic, opportunistic family, but Kemposki brings us right into their lives, their troubles, and their conflicts.

What makes Kempowski's All for Nothing so surprising and unusual

A little farther along in Walter Kempowski's great German-languish novel All for Nothing (2006), which looks at the final year (1945)  of World War II as experienced by a bourgeois family living in relative comfort in what was soon to become East Germany. What makes this novel so surprising and unusual (and accessible I should add) is that the focus remains on this family, though we get different perspectives from each chapter, as the focus w/in the family estate shifts around - from the mother (Katherina) to the Auntie to the 12-year-old son, and sometimes to a particular episode or visitor or local setting, which all told gives us a sense of the broad scope in this era but with a grounding a specific time, place, community, and family. We would expect to approach this family w/ little or no sympathy, but WK succeeds in helping us understand this family but not to judge them too harshly. It's hard to sympathize with them, as they are naive about the world around them and indifferent to the fate of others, but we recognize their limitations - and we see them as a window into a turbulent and uncertain time. The family home includes various little portraits of Hitler, but the seem to have no knowledge or understanding of or even interest in or sympathy for the Nazi party and its atrocities; there is a "labor camp" nearby, but they seem to have no awareness of the systematic murder of Jews and others. The foolishly believe the local cant, that the German army is standing tall and will prevail in this war - yet there are rumblings all around about a possible, or likely, attack from the Russians. They do nothing about this, other than stupidly blog out some images of Hitler on a collection of stamps. They worry and fret - should they have evacuated the family to one of the major cities (which are by this time all destroyed); should they take steps to get their young son farther away from the front - but they seem to have no extent of the futility of these thoughts at the end of the war. They try to go on with their lives, with luxuries far beyond the reach of any of the people on the "housing" in their small city and they never think for a second about the suffering of others. So in a way they are pathetic and contemptible, yet did they deserve their likely fate? Could they in any way have avoided it? For those who hate all Germans who lived in peace and ignorance through the Nazi era will despise these people, and who can blame them? But the novel does provoke us into thinking about fate, resistance, courage, perspicacity - and how we ourselves would stand up against tyranny and racial terrorism.

Is Kempowski's All for Nothing one of the great novels of the century?

After literally months waiting for a copy - only one exists in the entire state library system ! - I finally began reading Walter Kempowski's All for Nothing (2006), from the great NYRB series, a novel that all reviewers immediately recognized as a classic. And from the first 60 pp or so I am recognize that, at least at the start (and many novels of course start well but fall flat) this is a terrific book that should have received a lot more attention. Kempowski was apparently one of the greatest writers of post-war Germany, though he never attained anywhere near the worldwide recognition of others, such as Grass. He should have. This novel is set in 1945 in eastern Germany, and it focuses on a single household near the front and the Polish border; the family is of the upper echelon, descendants of what was once an aristocracy, then became a plutocracy; the family made money in investments in steel and rice flour, and the father is an officer in the German army, but far from the fighting, he is assigned to deal w/ acquisition of property to support the troops. Now that the war is near its end, he's in Italy seizing olive oil and wine; he keeps his family well supplied, at least compared with their less fortunate neighbors suffering from wartime shortages. So we are looking at an isolated home of privilege, in which the people - a wife, an "auntie," a 12-year-old son, 3 servants - live in complete naivete, without any recognition of the horrors inflicted by their government, nor the postwar calamities they will face when Germany falls to the allies. There's a generalized fear of the Russians, but without any sense that danger is imminent; they still think the German army will triumph somehow. The sense of a class in isolation and on edge is similar to that great European novel of the 20th century, The Leopard, and it also recalls a novel by Yourcenar, whose title I can't recall but is about a similar household at the end of the war (first world war, I think), living comfortably in a world soon to be destroyed. Kempowski composes the novel as a series of very short takes or segments brought together into groups - each chapter focusing on a different event of family member; but the narrator is always third-person, and we're always much more aware of the context than any of the characters could ever be - they are willfully obtuse or blind to evil, keeping their lives insulated and relatively comfortable. How can you blame them?, yet their oblivion is perhaps a higher form of evil. The narrative line is straightforward, and the individual scenes, at least so far, are memorable and distinct, several of which involve visitors seeking shelter for the night who are engaged in dubious actions, such as a man who claims to be a political economist who takes careful note of the house valuables - we assume he may later return w/ Russian troops who will appropriate the bounty. So far, a powerful novel that offers most Western readers a view of Germany at a time of great crisis, a view from inside, seldom before examined or appreciated.

On the character of Prospero in The Tempest

Reading further in Shakespeare to offer some advice re a project to stage contemporary-language versions of each of S's plays, I read a contemporary-language v of The Tempest and was mainly struck by the political context of the play. Though critics over hundreds of years have written about The Tempest as a "romance" and have accepted the play as Prospero's alone, as a story of his paternal benevolence, his wise rule, and his justified restoration to power - keeping up the theme of The Winter's Tale and as well as the 2 lesser-known romances of that which was lost has been found, how could any production or critical analysis of the play today avoid the obvious references to colonialism, racism, and tyranny? And these are not just contemporary ideas applied to S's work in retrospect; these are obviously ideas in S's mind and in the consciousness of his world, when he wrote the play - the beginnings of the yeas of global exploration (and exploitation), of the "discovery" (by Europeans) of a "new" world, and of great wonder and curiosity about the indigenous people and about what kind of life, society, and government could be established in these unexplored territories. So, yes, the Tempest is Prospero's play, and yes there are ways in which his character expresses ideas and thoughts of S himself about the art of drama and illusion - but it's impossible today to overlook that he's a tyrant and exploiter, a slave-master who uses his (white?) power/magic to control others, most obviously his two servants (slaves), one of whom is the good servant, "yes massah!," kept in line through promises, someday, of "freedom," and the other a rebellious, trouble-making slave who takes what opportunity he can to get free from his bondage and torment - and suffers for that. Additionally, Prospero is cruel and manipulative even to his daughter - keeping the secret of her origins for 15 years, then - in a somewhat hilarious manner - hooking her up w/ the man he wants her to marry, for political reasons only; of course she falls for Ferdinand, he's the first man her age she's eve seen!, but note her famous gasp of surprise (and 2nd thoughts?), "Oh, brave new world!," when she realizes that there are plenty of other men in this world. Does this bode ill for the arranged marriage? Prospero doesn't care; he takes what he can get, a true imperialist and colonialist.

Detective novel, traveloge, philosophical tract - what is Murdoch's Under the Net

The narrator, Jake, in Iris Murdoch's first novel, Under the Net (1954) springs off to Paris in pursuit of ... what?, I don't even remember, either his French editor or his beloved Anna, it doesn't so much matte, and in a sense that's too bad because this was a certifiably London novel, with visits to numerous neighborhoods and streets known and little known and pubs and other landmarks, so his visit to Paris break one of the unities (place) - but then again, the long chapter in which Jake walks through Paris hoping to find Anna (well, it's a small city, at least central Paris is, but not that small - so come on) would make a great walking tour for a first-time visitor who is indefatigable. So the interlude in this novel is fun, though as noted in previous posts, you might as well give up on trying to follow the plot, which strains credulity at every juncture. Chances of finding someone you're looking for just by wandering the streets of Paris? About zero. Odds that the moment you arrive in Paris you will learn that the barely talented French author you've been translating has just won the top literary prize. Zero. Chances that you (Jake), a struggling writer who is basically homeless (living on a cot in a friend's flat - though it's never explained how he affords all his travel and pub expenses), would turn down a perfectly reasonable offer to write screenplays and adaptations for a film studio. Again, about zero - but the turndown was needed to keep the narrative on course. So what really makes this novel is Murdoch's smart narration and wise observations, some of which touch on various philosophical issues, her unusual creation of a (male) voice in the mode of an American noir detective with a style that is at times literary and even scholarly. Altogether, the novel is fun to read as long as you surrender yourself to the improbabilities and hyperboles, which abound.

How to read and enjoy Murdoch's Under the Net

At some point the best strategy for a reader is just to give up on any semblance of a reasonable or credible plot and just go along for the ride, enjoying whatever pleasures and insights the writer may provide along the way. This holds true for much genre fiction (how many crime novels are actually believable?) and, as an aside, almost all the time w/ crime miniseries (such as the one we happen to be immersed in right now, The Tunnel). And it's definitely holds true for Iris Murdoch's debut novel, Under the Net (1954), which, yes, you can follow step by step as the narrator has a series of close encounters and close calls over a several-day span in London, but do they make any sense?, are they in the least believable? No, and no - but that doesn't really matter. Net is a novel in search of a plot that loses the reader's attention along the way but engages us in another manner, as I find myself and so will most readers captivated by the narrator's (Jake's) voice, by his laconic observations that would seem right in place in the world of an American noir crime novel of its time, and by the occasional philosophical observations and asides as the characters grapple w/ ideas (as noted in previous posts, Murdoch was a philosopher before turning to writing fiction). Net is a pub-crawl, drinking novel, and makes about as much sense as most pub crawls: Jake and his friends spend a night drinking in London, ending w/ a swim in the scummy Thames (the best descriptive scene in the novel by far), and in the morning Jake tries to break into the house/flat of a mega-film star whom he knows (obviously this could not happen) and while on her fire escape he, amazingly! overhears her in discussion with a film producer, also one of Jake's buddies, about how to use a purloined copy of one of Jake's manuscripts as the basis for a major motion picture - you figure the chances! Jake then takes off for the producer's flat where he and friend Finn break in again (likely?), fail to find the mss., but kidnap the producer's dog, a film star in his own right. I could go on, but - yes, it's high-jinx comedy and, who knows?, could maybe even be a riotous if pointless film itself, so the best way to read and continue reading this novel is to have a laugh at the entanglements and let it go - this is not exactly Great Gatsby-like plot development.

Murdoch and philosophy in her first novel

It helps to know that Iris Murdoch was a philosopher before she started writing novels as this prepares as to see the context in which she wrote her first novel, Under the Net (1954). On the surface  level, that of plot, this novel, at about 100 pp in, is a meandering, peripatetic story told by a narrator who's a hack writer (as described on the jacket) and translator, living off the welfare of friends, who's kicked out of his rent-free digs and pays a series of unannounced visits to various friends, male and female, looking for a place to live. It's not exactly Joyce, but the plot is amusing enough to draw us along. What makes this novel a marker for a career about to begin are the philosophical passages - and in particular this aspect of the novel is sharpened by what we know of IM's philosophical thinking - and for this I thank a recent article I read on this topic. She apparently was of that quaint philosophical school, somewhat out of fashion esp in England at the time, who believed that the purpose of philosophy is to help us make the write moral and ethical decisions in life - not to ponder the nature of existence and being. The narrator of this novel, Jake, gets into a long dialogue w/ his best fiend, Hugo, about the nature of being, which at a later point Jake publishes as a book of philosophy based entirely on his discussions w/ Hugo - the book seems to be modeled on Plato, using the Socratic method for elucidation. The problem is that he never tell Hugo about the book, and its publication destroys their relationship. So in effect he has mis-used his knowledge and failed to make a good ethical decision and share his thoughts and intentions w/ his best friend. At the time of the narrative, some years post-publication (the book was a flop) he tries to reconcile w/ Hugo, now a wealthy film producer, and is rebuffed, which leads to further philosophical discussions, notably w/ a Communist/Socialist, using the moniker Lefty, whom Jake encounters in a bar: They discuss the conundrum of though and belief vs. action. I feel in reading this novel that I'm just too ignorant about the philosophical issues of its time (or of any time for that matter) to get everything or even most of the things that IM is discussing; clearly, the perfect readership for this novel is a minuscule cohort. Is there enough, then, in the narrator's dilemma, the various predicaments, unlikely though they be, in which he finds himself as he seeks food and shelter (and drink)? So far, I'm in, and the novel isn't that long, but it's starting to slip through my fingers.

What if a male writer were the author of Murdoch's Under the Net"

Iris Murdoch's debut novel, Under the Net (1954), is an atypical first-fiction in that IM was a well-established philosopher by that time in her life, having earned advanced degree(s), teaching position, several publications. I wish I could say more about her philosophy - recently read a detailed essay on same but can't claim to understand how she fits among the various "schools" of her time, except that she was ore interested in moral decisions rather than explaining the nature of being - yet w/ that as background we can see how and why she was drawn to literary fiction as a way to examine moral predicaments and conundrums. I haven't reach any such point in the first 50 or so pp of Under the Net, but she does establish a first-person narrator who, I believe, over the course of his narration will be faced with some kind of moral or ethical crisis. We immediately recognize in this novel, from the voice of the narrator, that we're in the hands of a skilled and intelligent author. The narrator, Jake, is a writer and essayist, though we don't yet know much about his work, in dire financial straits, 30 years old (he seems much older; that may be his Britishness?), who has one close friend - Finn, whom many people think is his servant; the precise nature of their friendship is a little odd to an American reader, as Jake is clearly the "boss" and Finn is taciturn and seemingly uneducated, tho he performs "odd jobs." Novel opens as Fin reports to Jake, just returning from France (where he does some translations for publishers), that they've kicked out of their housing: They live rent-free w/ a woman who says she's about to be married (to a well-known theater producer) and they have to leave (said producer would kill them if he found them at woman's house). This announcement sets Jake off on a mini-odyssey in search of at least temporary housing - visiting an elderly woman shopkeeper where he stores a lot of his papers, a friend (Dave) who runs some sort of leftist philosophy salon where it seems he parks Finn at least for the night, and then to find a former girlfriend, Jacky, whom he tracks down in the costume and props room of an experimental theater troupe. It's a little surprising to see a female novelist adopt a man's POV for the narration of her first novel; that said, though Murdoch is convincing and witty in her appropriation of the male POV, I think this novel would have met w/ much opprobrium if a guy had written it: In Jake's world, all a guy has to do is show up on the his ex's doorstep 6 years after a breakup and she'll welcome him in, indicate that she loves him, give in as he literally throws himself on her - and nothing has changed in her life in 6 years, as if she's just been waiting for the prodigal's return. We'll see how Jake's life takes shape - or falls apart.

The abrupt ending to a promising story in current New Yorker

The story by rising star French writer Leila Slimani in current New Yorker (leave it to the NYer to "doscover" a writer who's already a best-selling author on 2 continents), The Confession turns out to be a story w/ so much promise but w/ little delivery. The promise: The story is narrated by an older man (we don't know how old) looking back on a shameful episode in his youth. At 16, his prosperous father sent him to a mountain village (setting is Morocco) to experience the hardship of life; the boy feels like an outsider in the village, but one day the village strongman brings him along on some field work, cutting grass for fodder I think. Along comes a young woman who has been ostracized from a near-by village; the strongman encourages the young man to attack the woman and have sex with her; the young man obliges, but w/ lots of guilt and shame. Then we just forward in time. So many things could happen! Does he ever meet anyu of the characters again in life? Does he take on some kind of penance? Do we learn more about the other characters in any way? Does this shameful action ruin other relationships in the man's later life? Is he haunted or obsessed in some manner? But actually all we get is a paragraph describing his life in college at which he drank copiously and then a nightmare in which he dreams that he is being carried in a horse-drawn carriage and the driver beats the horse to death (this is a familiar trope in Dostoyevsky, btw). I actually hate stories that use a dream as a resolution. Yes, there's a haunting moment at the end of the story when the narrator opines that everyone has shameful secrets; probably so, though the shame in this instance is or should be on the extreme end of the spectrum, just short of murder. This man's life and his shame are beyond the typical, and I expected more developments, more of a conclusion, rather than an abrupt and conventional wrap-up that leaves us, or me anyway, shrugging my shoulders and wondering if Slimani thinks "they all do it."

Who has read Brief History of Seven Killings start to finish?

As anyone who reads this blog will know, I do not shy away from reading and posting on complex, demanding novels and would not aandon reading a book just because it's a difficult read, but I have to say that Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings pushed me to my limit and beyond. I am confident that, for those (few) who can make it through this 650+-page narrative that consists of a series of first=person narrations by a vast array of characters, will find much to admire and love and learn from in this novel; I accept that it's a report from the ground on life in Jamaica among the various street gangs and rastafarians and musicians from the 1970s and beyond. But I honestly cannot imagine reading this novel with the attention and concentration it demands and probably merits. Each chapter in and of itself requires extremely close reading just to figure out the patois, and the connections among the various narratives - at least for the first 80 pp or so - are tenuous and hard to fathom. Yes, some of the greatest classics are "difficult": Moby-Dick, Ulysses, Sound & the Fury, The Waves, each of which demands unusual line-by-line attention - but in each it's also fair to say that the narrative, the clearly delineated characters, and the details of setting hold our interest right from the start and keep us engaged; this novel, ambitious though it may be, is an in-your-face challenge to any serious readers, and I have to wonder how many have actually finished reading this book, reviewers aside (if they even did). There just isn't world enough and time.

The challenge of reading A Brief History of Seven Killings

Marlon James's novel A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), which won the Man Booker Prize, is one of those daunting books that may be great but demand an almost unreasonable degree of patience and persistence from all readers. Yes, there probably are seven killings and yes this is their history - but it's not brief! I'm amazed that I literally know no one who has read this novel; usually Booker Prize winners pop up on all sorts of reading lists and comments. Sometimes the demand on the readers is too much and though we may be missing out on great literature we have to put that in the balance against the required commitment and attention (think Gravity's Rainbow, or even Finnegans Wake): Do I really want to spend the next month, at least, reading nothing but this novel? Can't answer that yet, and I will give it at least one more day and maybe will settle down w/ this novel for the long run. So far, it's a 680-page - and these are large pages w/ relatively small point size - with a novel that narrative that takes place in three slots of time, the first being 195 or so, in Jamaica, with the story told by a large number of narrators, each giving a first-person account of events - all of which (so far, about 60 pp. in concern various gangster activities and police brutality loosely arranged around a planned assassination of The Singer as he is called - obviously it's Bob Marley. On the plus side, each of these narrative segments is sharply detailed and feels like authentic language, but on the minus side some of the language is obscure to non-Jamaican readers, the narrators sound alike, and up to this point it's difficult to piece together the overall story line without any type of narrative guidance from a third-person narrator or even an omniscient first person. Sometimes novels like this take shape in our minds gradually, and I'm willing to see if that happens here but so far it's rough going, even as it's obvious that James is a smart and talented and ambitious writer.

Sarah Orne Jewett's place in the literary canon

Read a few more stories by Sarah Orne Jewett in the terrific Library of America edition of her work and have come to believe that she may not be a great writer - her output is limited in scope and size compared w/ her greatest contemporaries, James, Cather, Wharton to name three, but she's of nearly the same rank and her best work, the novel Country of the Pointed Firs, is nearly as good as Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. The stand-alone stories of SOF's that I've read - that is, not part of Pointed Firs or the other stories about the fictional Maine town of Dunnet Landing - are in the same style as her other work, a lot of narration unspooled as two or more people, often but not always two women, share stories of their past or tell their life story to a visitor, replete w/ excellent NE dialect writing (Strunk & White warning: Don't write dialect unless your ear is good. Hers is.) Her story about a walk in Autumn is a small thing of beauty, as she captures not just the obvious beauty of the season - the changing leaves, crisp air, etc. - but the sense of fulfillment from a full harvest, the comparison with old age and a look back at one's life; she must have been influenced by Keats's great ode to Autumn, but she builds from the insight into a nice short narrative. Two others that are noted by title in the jacket copy are The White Heron and story about two women sitting watch over the dead body of a friend, Tempy (can't recall the title of the story); this latter story is quite subtle as we gradually realize that the two watchers are of different temperaments and don't especially get along, but they are united in a way in spending the long, scary hours on the body-watch before the morning's funeral. The Heron story is especially powerful, as it's about a lonely 9-year-old girl who meets a handsome young man who is studying (and collecting) birds; initially, she sets off to help him find the rare (for that area) bird of the title, but gradually she comes to a realization that the young man is cruel in his wanton destruction of that which he claims to love; she rejects his somewhat creepy "friendship," and we sense that she will lead a life of loneliness and isolation but perhaps w/ solace from a love of nature and of animals - far more rich and pure than that of the man who shoots birds and collects their bodies for display. These stories each contain moments of insight that stand up against some of the best writing of her time, though in a sense SOJ was eclipsed by the early Modern movement - Joyce, Hemingway, Woolf - that shortly followed on pigeonholed as a "women's writer." That may be true re her primary readership, but she is worth a look from anyone interested in early 20th-century fiction.

Why 4 stories were excluded from Country of the Pointed Firs

The great Library of America edition of Sarah Orne Jewett's works includes four stories that are part of the Dunnel Landing series, i.e., further stories about a writer who spends the summer on the coast of Maine and tells us of the lives of the people, in some ways antique and isolated but in other ways a tight community w/ many complex relationships and inter-relationships over the decades; the people are independent and resolute, but often reticent and quick to judge; many are lonely and eager to tell their stories, in a taciturn and indirect manner, to a visitor. It's as if the writer - never explicitly named as SOJ - came to the coastal town to work on a project but found her subject matter inadvertently. In any event, the 4 additional stories were never included in the collection Country of the Pointed Firs, at least during SOJ's lifetime, and their exclusion shows I think her exquisite judgement - not that any of these stories are weak or poorly written, but each in its way would tip the balance of the delicate collection, or perhaps we should call it a novel. The Queen's Twin, about a woman in the community who is obsessed w/ and fixated on Queen Victoria, is amusing but would focuses too much on events in London and would have worked against the sense of isolation and independence that Pointed Firs establishes. Similarly, The Foreigner, though a fine story about how the village reacts to a woman from the Indies who marries a local ship captain and is widowed - again, this story would draw too much energy away from the isolation of lives on the coast of Maine. Two other stories not included could have fit into the story well, both of which concern the narrator's landlady's taciturn brother, a bachelor of about 50 years, and his delicate courtship and ultimately marriage to a woman on a nearby farm. If these stories had been included, Pointed Firs would end on a sweet, comic note of happiness and resolution, and part of the beauty of the novel as it is comes from the sorrowful and unexpected conclusion as the narrator leaves the village behind and heads on w/ her life as a writer, while the villagers hardly look back.

The sadness and beauty of Jewett's Pointed First and other summer-island books

Today Sarah Orne Jewett's "novel" The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) would probably be packaged and marketed as a memoir or collection of essays, which says more about our standards of veracity for nonfiction today: Composite characters and any other narrative devices to bring observations and reporting on the actual into the realm of the marketable are all OK. But in her time, the only way to fairly represent this material is as fiction, even though it has the ring of veracity (w/ made of up names of people and locales). However you classify this work it's, even a century later, quite beautiful and of sociological significance as well, as good a piece of "reporting" on an isolated, highly independent culture, vanishing even then and rare but not unheard of today on the coast of the North Atlantic. She does a beautiful job throughout of bringing these people and their habitations to life, in a way that never seems condescending and is rich w/ detail and highly credible vernacular. It's a portrait of a place, of course, but primarily of the people living on the coast of Maine, and we get a sense of how lonely they are - and especially eager for conversation w/ any outsider who hasn't heard their tales before - yet how strong and self-reliant - tending their gardens, gathering herbs, navigating the challenging waters. The novel closes w/ a grand expedition (land travel then by horse-drawn carriage) to a family reunion a few miles inland, and we sense that these relatives, only a few miles apart from one another, see one another only once a year or so - and also that all gripes and grievances are kept alive forever. Then the narrator - obvious a v of SOJ, a writer come to spend the summer months in this small community (on Boothbay Harbor, apparently) - spends an afternoon w an elderly, widowed fisherman, and we see how lonely he is and how competent and the daily tasks of living on his own, everything from mending clothing to harvesting potatoes and lobsters and keeping his house warm and in order. It's hauntingly sad and truthful, yet this lonely man isn't seeking pity or condolence, just some brief conversation and companionship. The farewell, as the summer ends, is unexpectedly abrupt, w/ the narrator's summer host, Mrs. Todd, with whom she's grown quite close, packs up a lunch for the narrator and barely says good-bye - an instance of the shutting out emotions so as not to disrupt their lives of independence and isolation. These summer-island narratives are part of a small genre that is most at root in Scandinavian literature, see Tove Jansson's Summer Book and of course the great People of Hemso, by Strindberg.

The beauty and veracity of Country of the Pointed Firs

It's been many years since I last read Sarah Orne Jewett's 1896 novel, The Country of the Pointed Firs, and, coming back to her work in the fine Library of America edition, I find the novel just as moving and observant as I remembered it. Is it really a novel? Today, with standards of veracity so much lower than in the 19th century, this work would probably be put forward as a collection of short essays, but no matter - it has the sense of real sociological reportage on a community that even in SOJ's time was archaic and (seemingly) on the verge of extinction, and today it's even more so. In essence the work focuses on an unnamed narrator who decides to rent a room in a house on the coast of Maine in order to find some seclusion and to devote herself to a writing project; she doesn't say what the project is to be about, but it's obvious that, like it or not, she finds herself writing about her summer experiences and encounters with the people in this town on the Atlantic. So in the course of this understated novel we meet these people, gossipy, tough as nails, resourceful, and extremely isolated from the news and culture of the world of their time. And the amazing thing is that, though some aspects of life along the Maine coast have changed radically over the past century - the advent of summer tourism, the phenomenal growth of towns like Freeport w/ its shopping malls, the hip culture that's formed around Portland, and of course the access to the Internet in even the most remote of settings - there are elements that are unchanged. I can recall visiting a small village in coastal Nova Scotia at which the few inhabitants were amazed to see visitors, they couldn't get enough of us, new faces, new voices; because we had, amazingly!, a car, they convinced us to drive to a nearby village where they had a reunion w/ friends they hadn't seen, apparently, in many years - these scenes could have played verbatim in SOJ's novel from a century back. One of the highlights of Pointed Firs entails the narrator's visit to a woman who has lived in isolation on a remote island - and anyone who's visited the deserted Little Cranberry, as we have, will know that the story of the hermit woman is precise and accurate: On Little Cranberry, today uninhabited, you can see the ruins of a cottage, an abandoned cemetery, and a long stretch of rocky beach that at one time had been replete w/ lobsters for the picking - precisely the experience SOJ describes. Firs is not a novel packed with action, but it's a rich document full of nuance and pathos and a look at a culture mostly gone but I suspect still enduring in some remote outposts.

Translating Shakespeare into contemporary English

Following up on post from 2 days ago, here is my attempt at a "translation" of Shakespeare into contemporary English, with an attempt to maintain the meter:

Can I go on living with this anguish

Or should I end it all? That’s what drives me

Nuts. Is it better to put on a front

Pretending I’m OK, or should I take

Action? Dying, it’s like going to sleep,

Except you won’t wake up to face the pain

And anguish that is torturing you to death.

Would that it were so! Dying, sleeping,

Even dreaming. Damn it, there’s a catch.

Who knows what dreams we might endure

Throughout eternity? Hold it right there.

If not for dreams, wouldn’t everyone

Choose death rather than a miserable life,

Pushed around by big shots, bosses, bullies,

Unloved, unwanted, angry at the world,

A victim, a laughing stock, a loser?

Who’d put up with that if he could end

His misery with a simple razor blade?

Who’d work  himself to death if he could die

With ease, except that we’re afraid

Of what could happen to us after death?

No one’s come back from death to give us word

About that outcome. We put up with what

We’ve got rather than head for the unknown.

Okay, I’m scared of death. As are we all.

And when I think of taking that last step

I think too much. I feel pale and sick,

And in the end I just can’t do it. Listen,

Here comes Ophelia! Babe, remember me

A poor sinner, in your prayers!

Themes in Bolano's By Night in Chile

Hard to know how to interpret Roberto Bolano's debut novel, By Night in Chile (2000), as the plot unfolds in a dreamlike manner, moving from one scene to another w/ no obvious breaks or conclusions - the story of a Chilean priest, Sebastian, who is reflecting about the course of his life - his faith and his literary aspirations. In what roughly marks the 2nd half of this short (130 pp) novel, Father S. tells how he goes on a special assignment for the church to report on the decay of church buildings in Europe; on this mission he notes that most of the decay is caused by pigeon shit, and some of the priests have figured out a way to clear out the pigeons - using trained falcons. This must signify something, though I honestly have no idea what. Father S. returns to Chile an continues with his dual life, priest and poet/literary critic (not unheard of - GM Hopkins, Brother Antonius, Thas Merton...). He gives us a remarkably quick summary of the political upheavals in Chile, the election and the death of Allende, and then something really strange happens as he's approached by two men and hired for a top-secret mission, giving Pinochet and his entourage a series of lessons on Marxism. In one scene Pinochet privately boasts that he - unlike Allende and other Chilean leaders - is a true intellectual and an author of books on military strategy (true, I think) - but despite the ominous setting nothing in particular comes of these episode, Eventually Father S joins a literary salon held at the house of a wealthy woman and aspiring though barely competent writer; eventually, the salonists realize that the woman's house is a front and that political prisoners are interrogated and tortured in the many rooms of the sinuous basement. Father S withdraws from the salon and in the final moments reflects on his life, wondering about his complicity and guilt - so again this seems to be symbolic (there also are strange dreams involving a confrontation w/ the Judas Tree, place for the guilty to commit suicide I think) but the symbolism is elusive. Perhaps the point is that artists and intellectuals (and the clergy?) living in a corrupt culture, under a military dictatorship, are really collaborators, at least by their inaction and willful blindness; religious institutions are corrupt as well  (the pigeon shit) and are equally guilty for resorting to violence (falcons trained to attack birds) to protect their status and property. This novel probably merits a 2nd reading - or at least further exploration in Bolano's work, which is always worth reading, especially the short stories.

Thoughts on why Timon of Athens points toward King Lear

Because friend AW is working on a project involving translating Shakespeare into contemporary English - and I do have some concerns about that concept, but will let that lie for the moment - I've been reading a "translation" of Timon of Athens, which, to put it bluntly, is not the play that brought Sh. immortality. It's clearly an immature work, with a schematic plot that whose twists and reversals one can see from the first moment: Good-natured citizen in ancient Greece, the eponymous Timon, is generous to a fault, an absurd fault, and bestows lavish gifts and entertainments on all of his so-called friends, but when Timon suffers a reversal of fortune his "friends" abandon him and come up w/ all sorts of excuses as to why they can't loan him a dime (so to speak); this sends Timon into a nearly psychotic rage, and he, improbably, becomes the epitome of misanthropy, embittered toward all of humanity. In his rage he opines about the evil of money - gold specifically - how it corrupts all who touch it, how gold can do damage in creating debt and want, how people are judged and evaluated simply by the amount of gold they possess rather than by any intrinsic qualities or by what they do and accomplish in the world - these passages are famously cited by Marx in Das Kapital, one of the few places where M and Sh intersect (though not in a sophisticated way - there are other "Marxist" elements in Sh's work aside from direct quotations). Obviously this play is seldom performed today and is in the province, primarily, of Complete-ists, but there's one reason in particular why it's worth at least reading: Clearly (to me, but others must have written about this), Timon is an attenuated, early version of King Lear: what in Timon is caricatured and schematic in Lear is subtle, evolving, rising to a crescendo, and resolved in sorrow and pity: the old man giving everything away, behaving rashly, suffering from the ingratitude, at best, or his older daughters, going mad, raging against the elements in futility, guided by a loyal friend whose vision helps us see the lineaments of Lear's tragedy, recognizing too late his pride and his folly. In both plays the eponymous hero gives up his property in what they mistakenly believe is a reciprocal exchange of love and friendship.

Roberto Belano's first novel and his unusual literary style

Started reading the late Chilean author Robert0 Bolano's first novel, By Night in Chile (2000) and from the start he enunciates a certain style that he maintained across his too-short career. The novel is in the form of one long (130 pp) take, no page breaks, no paragraph breaks - and the work comprises many extremely long sentences as well, but the novel is not as difficult to follow or grasp as one might think: Bolano's style is clear and crisp and he keeps the narration moving along, like a long, unspooling thread of film. That said, though the novel is easy to follow, it's much harder to say what it's actually "about." The book begins with an older man reflecting on a "wizened youth" who, we believe or he believes, has slandered him in some way, and then the man, the narrator, jumps back to his childhood in Santiago. He was from a prosperous family and grew up w/ literary ambitions but for some reason not entirely clear he entered a seminary and became a priest. After his ordination he became friendly w/ the leading literary intellectual in Chile at the time, who introduces him to other literary figures, notably the near-godlike Neruda (as w/ other Bolano work, this novel is strewn w/ names of artists and authors - most of them obscure to English-language readers, but from the few that I do recognize I believe all of them were Bolano's contemporaries). The narrator's literary fame rises, and as he ages he maintains his friendship w/ his benefactor, who tries (unsuccessfully so far) to seduce the young priest. Much of the narrative so far consists of the benefactor's long digressions, mostly about the European literary scene: he describes a meeting w/ the German author Junger during the Occupation of France (a section that intentionally revolts us as the benefactor seems to have no recognition of what the Occuapation entailed for millions of French citizens, Jews especially) and another digression about a wealthy shoemaker who gets the Emperor's blessing to build a monument - this at the outset of WWI - and goes bankrupt in doing so: a warning against those who idolize and prostrate themselves before political leaders, emperors, or kings. That's what's happened so far, and it's anyone's guess where this narrative is headed.

The success and shortcoming os the postuhumous works of SK

Following up on yesterday's post on the Ukrainian writer Sigismund Krzhashanovsky, who wrote avant-garde short stories in the Soviet Union from roughly the 1920s to the 50s but was never published in his lifetime thanks to Soviet censorship and paranoia, I've tried as hard as I can to get engaged w/ his fiction but come away feeling great admiration for his persistence in the face of critical indifference and government hostility and personal danger, but his work, as judged by the first half of the NYRB-published collection Autobiography of a Corpse (as well as previous readings in his Munchausen collection, which I also couldn't finish reading) seems always to begin with a great premise that he never quite lifts off the ground. As noted yesterday, he's clear in the same mode as Borges and Calvino - two of the great writers of imaginative fiction, who found international success years after SK was writing in obscurity; he's also a descendant of Gogol and Kafka - though it's not clear (to me) how much he'd read of their works, as well as of Dostoyevsky (his narrators, with their outsider status and hostility to their society and culture, always recall Notes from Underground) and a forerunner of Becket, whom I think he would have loved to read, with a narrator strangely questioning his own existence. That's heady company, but that said, the stories just continue to disappoint me: Where Gogol could take the premise of a nose taking on a life of its own and bring it to hilarious conclusion, where Kafka could take the premise of a man starving himself in public as an act of performance art and make the story sorrowful and frightening, SK seems to go from his premise - a man sees an image of himself in his girlfriend's pupils and follow the image right into her eyeball (!) - to a series of philosophical investigations that are are (for me) to follow and don't really move or amuse me in the ways I'd hoped or anticipated (an exception is the brief story DNP, which stands for Do Not Publish and in which this frustrated writer opens his heart). It's great that his work has been lifted from obscurity, and he's worth a look - it may be that I'm missing something and expecting his work to be something it isn't; probably the right way to read these pieces is as philosophical "investigations," a la Wittgenstein, rather than as speculative fiction - but he doesn't bring, at least to me, the same kind of pleasure and enlightenment and sense of awe from the best of his European and Latin American (and maybe American, if you add in George Saunders) contemporaries and successors.

Krzhizhanovsky

Aside from having the name that is the hardest to remember, type, and pronounce, the 20th-century Ukrainian writer sigismund krzhizhanovsky (which I will henceforth and forever abbreviate as SK) has a sad life story- a writer completely suppressed by Stalin and the soviet state who had I think zero publications in his lifetime but who kept at it w almpst no hope of publication - and now has been published in English over the past few years by the intrepid New York review boos, so who wouldn't want to give this guy a chance? In part we read him to try to get an understanding of what kinds of works the Soviets suppressed, and a read through from his volume w the great title autobiography of a corpse gives a hint they weren't after him because of anything overtly political, radical, or revolutionary in his stories but to fear that he would open a new channel for soviet letters. The writers' union at that time gave stamp of approval to only those works that celebrated the life of the proletariat and the workers, so called social realism, and sk's work is the opposite - completely unreal, fantastic, and unconcerned w any life outside of that of the mind and the imagination. He's definitely in the school of Borges and Calvino- and I wish I could say he's as good as they were, a true discovery - but he's not. Once you get beyond the concept that drives his stories - a new tenant discovers in his digs a memorandum from a previous tenant, a suicide (an echo of Dostoyevsky 's notes from the underground) that gets lost in its convolutions or a man sees an image of himself in the pupils of a wo,an w whom he's having an affair and then enters her pupil and encounters her previous lovers, each given a # but that ultimately gets mired in some dated sexist trivialities. I keep trying to give so chance but keep setting his stories down disappointed and frustrated,mthoughi might try one more night of reading.



Sent from my iPad

A story about a troubled family in current New Yoker

Two things I dislike about many contemporary short stories are, first, the use of sentence fragments to establish a scene or a mood. Fragments inevitably feel to me like incomplete thoughts and disconnected sense data. A sentence is thoughtful and elegant and serves the purpose of introducing action and perception into a scene or moment and linking the characters to the setting and to one another. Fragments are shorthand; sentences are completed articulation. Second, I hate that many stories introduce too many characters, by first-name only, within the first few paragraphs of the story, leaving me constantly thinking, wait, who's that one", the brother or the boyfriend or the dad? Emma Cline's story in the current New Yorker with the inexplicable (to me) title, What Can You Do with a General (no question mark, either), suffers from both these annoying tics  - sentence fragments and slew of characters, John, Linda, Sasha, Richard (who never even appears!), et al right at the start. Ugh. These problems aside, I have to say that she does a good job delineating the inter-relationships in a troubled family that suffers from first-world problems: they live in what seems to be a fabulously expensive tract in the Bay Area, and the centers on the family xmas gathering w/ particular attention to the sullen elder daughter. Though she writes w/ little affection for any of the characters, the spoiled elder, Sasha, as the least likable of the lot, selfish and mean to her parents. I kept expecting the story to build toward a crisis and a denouement, which it doesn't. Should the father tell her off for her adolescent behavior when he's trying to help her out after she's lost her luggage in flight? Should she take off to see her left-behind boyfriend - or maybe he should show up unannounced? But this is, intentionally, a story w/ no arc, ending up with everyone right where they were when the weekend (the story) started. It's a story of domestic distress - but its arc lies flat.

The disappointment of Murakimi's latest story

Over the past 40 or so years Haruki Murakami has made a career by writing strangely elusive narratives that follow a dreamlike pattern of strange encounters and hallucinatory moments but set against a background of noir or quest narratives in which, usually, a young professional in contemporary Tokyo pursues a vision or follows a series of steps or commands. These journeys are marked by certain repeated tropes and obsessions: cats, earlobes, Western food (spaghetti), jazz, distance running, to name a few. Over time, HM's narratives have become ever more elusive and, in fact, arbitrary: the protagonists seem to be running the same course again and again, and the narratives seem increasingly about the mood and the locale and less about character, much less about plot. I still think HM should have won a Nobel Prize, though that seems less likely w/ each passing year; in fact, sometimes I think the committee made a gaffe in awarding the prize to the much less accomplished British writer Kazuo Ishiguro. That said, his story in last week's New Yorker doesn't advance his case - in fact, it shows the rut into which he's run. Again we start off w/ a character in a curious quest and follow a pathway of obstacles seemingly set out before him as in a dream: He's invited to a musical recital and when he arrives at the destination it's obvious no recital had been scheduled, which leads him onto a bit of a quest. But, sadly, despite many intimations and possibilities (who is the woman from his past who invited him?, what was her motive if any in misleading him?, why does a car pass by w/ a speaker imploring people to accept the grace of Christ?) the story offers no answers, no conclusions, and no intimations of anything meaningful or significant beyont the stated facts of the journey. If there is a deep metaphor or allegory, it eludes me. It's further evidence that few are as good as Murakami at setting a scene, but he too often disappoints us as he has no more idea of what to do w/ his narrative than do his readers.

Surprised to see a Vietnam War story in current New Yorker - and it has the stamp of authenticity

I'm really surprised to come across, in last week's New Yorker, a piece of short fiction - obviously, an excerpt from a forthcoming novel, that centers on the experiences of a young Marine in service in the Vietnam War. That was a half-century ago, with several American wars - and attendant re0creations of on-the-ground fighting from a # of novelists - since then. (British writers of course are still drawn to the two World Wars - one of them more than a century ago! - for material.) The fiction piece, Do Not Stop (the most basic order for military convoys), by Salvatore Scibona, has all the feeling of an autobiographical piece - that, or else he's done a great job at re-creating an on-the-ground scene from research and imagination. So if it is based on his actual experiences, where has he been all these years? Fact, fiction, memoir, work of imagination, however you score it this piece seems to have the stamp of authenticity, and it's a little unusual in that it focuses on a naive young Marine without any political baggage and without any great deal of awareness or self-awareness - just his traumatic experiences on convoys to and from the "in country" advance lines, a struggle against the elements and the dangers, with the sense of invulnerability the soldiers had to develop and with death and damage always just a blink away. There's nothing heroic in these scenes, but each soldier was a hero in his own way, altogether forming a powerful armed force with no chance of victory as the cause was futile and unjust. I'm not sure how or whether SS sustains this narrative over novel-length - to work on the long form, the protagonist - Vollie (a play on his been a Volunteer, no doubt) grows and changes over the course of his service: Does he develop politically? Does he face some kind of crisis in battle, moral or physical? Do we follow him back to the States and perhaps over a lifetime? The writing's really impressive here, and what SS has to develop is a broadening of Vollie's character and awareness.

Davis's seemingly simple story that raises signficant points: Addie and the Chili

Lydia Davis's story Addie and the Chili, in the January Harpers, ring in at 3 pages of magazine text, which for Davis is the equivalent to a Henry James late novel, yet even at this for her long stretch she maintains her wry humor and elusive narrative style. Davis teases us w/ the idea that this story is a strict and direct account of an event in her life, some 30 years back, and it feels as if this may be so, but who's to say?, it could be an entirely fictive statement - and does that matter? She says that a friend of hers, Ellie, years ago urged her to write about an encounter with their friend in common, Addie, and Davis, or at least Davis's narrator, tried, years ago, to do so but was stymied, largely because of issues in her life at the time - divorce, single parenthood, and others. But now 30 years later she has at it again and tells this story, seeming quite simple: She and Ellie go to a movie - we never learn which movie - that seems to have something to do w/ the Vietnam War, and that leaves many in the audience wracked by tears at the end, especially because of the suffering of children. After the movie she and Ellie collect their friend, Addie, and they go out to a restaurant for dinner - all 3 order chili (to the chagrin of the sullen waiter, who expected a bigger order). Addie goes off on a long ramble about herself and he social and sex life. Clearly, this is a mismatch - 2 women distraught about the movie and now listening to his friend yak on about herself. "Davis" berates her for being insensitive to others, which leads to some tears, a brief spat, and a reconciliation. The narrator tells us then that she's lost touch w/ Addie (though she looks up her and sees that she's accomplished some fine things in her life) and Ellie, when asked, says she has no recollection of theser events, or at least of asking Davis to write about them. So we're left with a few points to ponder: The difference between types of crying, sorrow for others and sorrow for one's self; the difference between types of memory, so vivid to this writer and faded away from the mind of her friend; the impossibility of sensing the course of a life based on a brief encounter or an early friendship - people grow and change in surprising ways; the possible unreliability of narrative, as this story, which seems so much like a memoir or a personal essay may be nothing of the sort; and the availability of material for fiction in so many brief encounters: We could dissect and examine almost any sequence of moments in our lives and, if we all had Davis's skill which we don't, find therein a story waiting, maybe even for 30 years, to be told.