Another disappointing read - is it me?: Joy Williams's NYer story

Three cranky days of reading in a row - is it me? - but I'm disappointed by the Joy Williams story, The Fellow, in the current New Yorker; JW is a writer who had a really exciting and promising start to her career a few decades back, then went kind of quiet, and has enjoyed a later-in-life resurgence with really strong reviews of recent books and occasional appearance in the NYer; I have posted on her two previous NYer stories, typical of her work in their edgy dialog and strange happenings bordering on the surreal, plus her obvious love of and interest in animals. But sometimes writers who establish a distinct and unusual voice become labored and mannered as they hit the same keys over and over again, and sometimes writers find publication in the loftier places based on their reputation rather than on any one particular work. What to make of this slight story? It begins OK, with a narrator describing her current unrewarding job as some kind of academic assistant assigned the task of managing a home/retreat that her college/department maintains for visiting writers (the retreat - a rural house in the SW in a desolate and quite remote setting - is something I think I've read about, though I'm not sure if it was in an article or a story, but it may be a place that JW has been a fellow). The current visiting writer turns out to be a troublesome and curt guy who, against regulations, brings a dog to the retreat. Oddly, one requirement for the narrator's job (and for visiting writers?) is to have no fear of water; OK, that's intriguing and just the right note of weirdness. But then what happens? There's a flash flood; narrator goes out to the retreat; no sign of the writer; the dog, however, is still there and the dog engages the narrator in an aimless "conversation." We see in the supposed conversation some of JW's wit and skill at edgy, that is to say nonconsequential, dialog, but as far as I can see there's no point to this "conversation" and really no point to the story - you come away feeling not only disappointed but marooned: What did you take me on this journey? It feels improvisatory rather than completed.

Really tried, but stopped reading Drndic's novel EEG

I really did try to read the late Croatian writer Dasa Drndic's last novel, EEG (2016) but after two days of desultory reading through the first 100 or so pp I just can't give this novel any more of my time and attention. Yes, it's unconventional - it seems at times to be a straightforward narrative about a man's recollection of various episodes in his peripatetic life - but there are so many digressions (e.g., a long chapter detailing the many attempts by Nazi and Soviet agents on the lives of famous chess players) and so little attempt to present the back story in any coherent and consistent manner that this book demands more than I'm willing (able) to give it. It's a novel that flaunts its own significance: DD admirably documents that horrors of the 20th and early 21st century in Europe, in particular in her war-torn region in the former Yugoslavia. Reading these accounts of barbarity, fascism, ethnic cleansing, anti-Semitism, political purges feels like a journey through a chamber of horrors; noble goals - yet why is this novel so off-putting? We don't (at least through the first 1/4th) identify or even understand any of the characters; compare this, for example, to the great account of the horrors of WWII, All for Nothing, that presents its frightening information through a great narrative about a family facing the advance of Russian troops near the end of the war. Maybe it's not fair to judge this novel by what it isn't, but DD leaves herself open to that charge by denigrating the work of some of her peers, notably KO Knausgaard: Why write a book (let alone 6 volumes) about one's own life?, the narrator asks. Why not just keep a diary? Well, maybe so, but at least what KOK writes is accessible, unlike this novel that poses narrative difficulties and interminable digressions (to be fair, KOK did the same in his disappointing 6th volume, when his own story seemed to get away from himself). News flash: Readers like plot and character, even within the scope of experimental novels and novels on painful, disconcerting topics. Call me a philistine, but good luck to anyone who tries to read EEG (I have no idea about the title, btw.)

Why I read novels in translation - but this one's a challenge

Gotta say even 60 or so pp in I'm still at sea w/ the final novel by the late Croation writer Dasa Drndic, EEG (2016), which so far seems to be about a man's recollections of the seaside town in Croatia where he spent much of his life and that now has become a quaint tourist mecca; his memories of home and childhood, including a long discussion w/ the woman then and still living in the basement apartment in his former dwelling, seem to be the main topic of this novel, with all of the expected allusions to Proust and his childhood recollections. The narrator is writer of some sort, though evidently one whose life has been thwarted in many ways, including significant difficulty find a teaching post, especially after he'd emigrated for a period of time to Canada, then returned looking for work. The subtext through all of these recollections and ruminations (on a variety of topics, including a long chapter on the associations between chess and suicide, w/ many cited instances of suicidal or otherwise disturbed chess masters) is the wars in the former Yugoslavia and continued tensions between Croats and Serbs. There's a lot of material in a short space, some presented directly and much be allusion; I'm hoping the novel will settle down and get some focus or direction, though I have my doubts, as this work seems very much in the contemporary tradition of free-form narratives that evince the author's knowledge and dexterity but don't provide us w/ the traditional hand-holds of literary fiction: plot and character. I also warn that most American readers, me included, will be baffled by the many references to contemporary events in Croatia and to the references to the history of Serbo-Croation warfare. So, sue me - part of the reason I read so many novels in translation is to learn about cultures around the world and places I will never visit. Whether I can continue to the end of this 400+-page novel or pause in exasperation, we'll see.

Why the narrative fails in Bail's Eucalyptus

Despite some initial promise and some exceptionally clear and observant writing throughout, Murray Bail's novel Eucalyptus (1998) never delivers and rewards readers with an exceptionally poorly managed deus ex machina conclusion. We can see why the novel received many accolades, especially from other "Commonwealth" writers, at the time of its publication, but today all the homages to postmodernism (author commenting on his own writing, a device that Bail seems to abandon about midway through), elements of surrealism and magic realism (the plot makes no sense if taken on a literal level, nor is it meant to), a sheen of arcane information (each chapter is named after a variety of eucalypt), and interest in fairy tales, ghost stories, and legends - all seem to work against one another and give this novel far too much baggage for the thin narrative to bear. For example, the young woman (Ellen) whose fate is in her father's hands as he seeks a suitable husband for her through an arcane test, meets a young man on he property whom she sees, secretly, almost every day and each day he tells her a "story" - but these stories (there are about 15 or so by the end) don't shed any light on the characters or the plot, they all end w/ a whimper (e.g., man courts and wins a woman, they go to buy a wedding ring, she looks at a bunch, then say, no, I want 18 karat - and that's it) and he never engages Ellen in conversation, never says anything to her directly, never even tells her his name. In the end, Ellen is a cypher - we know little or nothing about her personality. Another example: With all the naming and description of the many eucalyptus species, what does that tell us about the people in this novel and their lives? Yes, Melville could fill out his novel with arcana, but all in the service of a great story and vividly rendered characters. Here, the arcana about these trees does nothing but show off the author's knowledge or research. At one time, this novel might have been considered on-the-edge, inventive story-telling, but today it feels meandering and hapless, requiring a lot more buy-in than I was willing or able to give.

Thomas McGuane and the new West

Thomas McGuane, despite his great resume of publications and at least one iconic novel (Even Cowgirls) is not all that well-known or appreciated, perhaps because he's lived in and written about the West (Montana, specifically) and perhaps because he had no single major breakout novel (cf Richard Ford America trilogy) and he's never "joined" any school of writers (postmodernist or otherwise). The New Yorker has published him regularly for many years, though, and his story in the current New Yorker, Wide Spot (I keep forgetting the title), typifies his recent work. He write about the culture class in the "new" West: on one side, the absentee landowners (mostly from LA) who see the West as a vast weekend playground and getaway and the people in the West who have made a lot of money through rising real-estate values; on the other side, the long-time residents, many living in poverty and victims of the contemporary vices, notably drug and alcohol abuse. His narrators, generally, are mediators between these two group, long-time residents with a deep history in the land but also opportunists or just plain fortunate to have caught the crest of the wave. In this story, his narrator is a member of the Montana legislature, doing some early campaign work and fundraising in some of the small towns in his rural/agricultural district. As always, McGuane captures the voice and personality of the narrator as well as the secondary characters: a town official who greets the narrator gruffly and bluntly states his lack of support for the candidacy; an encounter with a man who was the lead singer in a rock band that the narrator performed with back in the day. McGuane is one of the few writers around who still believes short stories should have a plot and a resolution; this one does - and it's a good one - though along the way there are too many unlikely chance encounters (e.g., the fellow bandmate somehow still lives in this small town and the narrator never knew that?) and some behavior on the part of the narrator (trying to hook up w/ ex-bandmate's daughter, a generation - or 2 - younger than he is) - that don't quite sit right. Still, always worth reading McGuane's new work.

Trying to make sense of Murray Bail's Eucalyptus

Starting to think it's ridiculous to read Murray Bail's novel Eucalyptus (1998) as in any way a realistic/naturalistic novel about a father's relationship w/ his beautiful daughter and his bizarre efforts to match her w/ a husband-to-be. Even by the widest reach of eccentricity, no normal man would pledge his daughter to the first man to be able to ID the correct species of the hundred of so eucalypts on his property (and this all takes place in late 20th-century Australia - not some sage from the middle ages). OK, so how do we interpret this weird novel? As noted yesterday, it feels like the last gasp of postmodernism (fittingly, at the very end of the 20th century) in which authors had free reign to include in their works all kinds of disparate elements and modes, that authors won "points" for off-beat and unexpected references to the process of writing, when narrative strands were deliberately left unfinished,  when the plot deliberately (one hopes) meandered, and when authors were encouraged to expose and dwell on their personal obsessions or love for arcana. This novel checks all of those boxes, especially the arcana, as every chapter is named for a eucalypt species, which shows me of course how knowledgeable Bail is or at least that he's assiduous at research but really doesn't inform me about his plot or his characters. At this point, 2/3 of the way through this novel, the daughter (Ellen), left to her own as the father (Holland) spends 10 days or so w/ a suitor (Cave) who seems about to win the species-ID challenge, begins spending time w/ a young man whom she finds sleeping in a grove on the property; w/out introducing himself in any way, he begins telling her "stories," none of which seems to come to a conclusion - how postmodern! How Arabian-nights-like! But to what end? We get the sense that this entire novel is an improvisation - again, a last gasp of postmodern sensibility - but overall it's not paying off for me. Friend DC who recommended I check out this book noted an unusual twist at the end, so I will definitely finish reading, but, sadly, with minimal expectations.

An imaginative novel that feels like the last gasp of postmodernism

About half-way through, I'm finding Murray Bail's novel Eucalyptus (1998) readable and imaginative - that's saying something, as far too many novels are neither - though it leaves me w/ some qualms (which is not unusual). In essence, after some complex back story that I'm not sure I fully understand and several amusing asides in which the author comments on his own novel, the narrative settles down to this: A man (Holland) buys a vast tract of land in the Australian outback (using money from an insurance claim) and over time collects, plants, and nourishes every conceivable variety of eucalypt - the national tree of Australia. He is alone and raising his beautiful daughter, Ellen; when she's of marriageable age, he Holland sets up a test to select her husband-to-be: Anyone who can successfully name all of the hundreds of variants on his property will win Ellen's hand in marriage. Many men try; all - up to this point - fail. OK, so this ridiculous test recalls to us the same kind of schemes set up in Shakespeare (Merchant of Venice, e.g.), w/ sources even further back, in Roman comedies I think, and more recent in other art forms, such as Puccini's Turandot. But after all what does this say about women? In this novel, Ellen - completely sheltered through all of her upbringing - is pliant and passive in her acceptance of this strange, even cruel whim of her father. There's no way to accept this novel on a literal level - yet what is Bail getting at on the symbolic level? He opens every chapter (each named after a eucalypt variant) with the description of the characteristics of one of the plants, yet these descriptions bring little or no clarity to the plot of the characters. Is Bail indulging in a personal obsession here, or showing off his research chops? So far, I can't tell. This narrative, as well, is strangely deracinated; in yesterday's post I mistakenly placed this novel in the 19th century when in fact in must be set in about 1960, though it feels antique and w/ changes in a few topical details it could be set much earlier. So, I don't know: This novel, which never really got a foothold in the U.S. despite some international (Commonwealth) awards and the imprint of the prestigious FSG, is easy to read but in the end it feels a little like the last gasp of postmodernism.

The 2 basic plots in literature and the novel Eucalyptus

At suggestion of friend DC who has steered me to many excellent though little-known books have started reading Murray Bail's 1998 novel, Eucalyptus; he's an Australian writer who, unlike some of his contemporaries, has never found a foothold among American readers (Eucalyptus won the Commonwealth Prize, acc. to DC, but Bail has never won a Booker, which seems to be the ticket to an international readership.) Too early - only about 15% - into the the novel for any judgment yet, but was amused by some of Bail's narrative antics. It's been said that there are two plots that prevail over almost all of literature: Someone takes a journey and A stranger comes to town. This novel, set in the "bush" some distance west of Sydney, is definitely the latter - and, with it's early 19th-century setting, struck me at first as very much like an American western transposed: The stranger, named Holland, buys up a vast tract of land, unseen, and arrives in the small town, the object of great interest, especially from unmarried women (he is alone), but remains aloof - and then a young girl arrives, seemingly his daughter, though Bail notes a few ambiguities in Holland's back story (which his new townsfolk do not know): It seems her mother was pregnant by another man when Holland married her; it seems the mother died shortly after childbirth (and a twin brother died in the childbirth), but Bail's account of these events is so vague that we suspect some other strangers will arrive in town somewhere down the line. Bail has a wry sense of humor and notes even in the telling that this plot set-up is practically a literary cliche. He also has a great interest in botany (see the title) and spends (too much) time describing the various species of eucalypts, noting that it used to be a symbol of Australia but now has been exported and taken root around the world; so far, so what? (I tried to read The Overstory, about the lives of trees, and didn't like that, either.)

Trying to get at the significance of Oe's Nip the Buds... - is it allegorical?

Kenzaburo Oe's 1958  novel Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids has an intriguingly open ending leaving us to ponder the fate of the band of so-called juvenile delinquents in what appears to be wartime Japan, though we clearly do know that the narrator, one of the boys, escapes from the village where they'd been held captive and lives to tell the tale - reminds me there of Ishmael at the end of Moby Dick. I'm still ot sure and never will no for certain what Oe is trying to represent in this novel: Is it an imagined adventure tale about the fate of a group of boys abandoned to live on their own in a village cut off from the rest of the world, a different take on Lord of the Flies, or is there some deeper allegorical significance to the boys and their fate: Do they represent all of human-kind in their struggle against the elements for survival? In other words, is this an existential novel, an examination of "man's (and woman's) fate"? I wish I could answer these open questions or even offer an opinion, but I'm just not certain. What is clear is that on the adventure level alone this novel as tense and captivating, but also dark and disquieting; it has some elements in common with Abe's more famous Woman in the Dunes. Abe's novel is famous in part because of the excellent movie adaptation; Oe's would be too painful and dark for a movie, I think - full of brutality, bestial behavior, lots of spasmodic sex, vomiting and illness and nausea -  I can't imagine sitting through a screen version of this tale, and it would feel graphic and even exploitative - though as a novel it feels more sorrowful and sympathetic  to the young boys and more of a social critique, as even the title tells us: These young boys are expendable, as are so many social misfits and outcasts. Whether there is any factual basis during wartime Japan, analogous to the Nazi camps and exterminations, I have no idea.

Trying to figure out the allegorical significance, if any, of Oe's Nip the Buds...

About two-thirds through Kenzaburo Oe's first novel, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (1958, St.-John tr.) and am still impressed with this novel though it's exceptionally dark. Somewhat like an end-of-world dystopian novel - comparisons w/ Lord of the Flies are obvious and even noted in one of the jacket blurbs: A group of about a dozen boys labelled juvenile delinquents (we get no good info on what crimes they may have committed) consigned to some kind of work gang and given the task of burying rotting corpses, human and animal; their over-seers learn of suspect that the dead had died from the plague and they abandon the village, in effect imprisoning the boys in what seems to be certain death from the plague. A few other young people, in particular a young girl, also turn up in this village - apparently consigned to starve and die there along w/ other Koreans, whom the Japanese during the war years considered to be an inferior race or population. So we watch the boys manage to survive, make some attempts at escape, get into a few fights, and the narrator falls in love with the young girl - they have sex, but it is described as a violent and unfeeling action, more like a spasm of hatred than anything loving or even pleasant. The question throughout is: What does this mean? Is it just an imagined adventure story, that could be re-enacted in any time or culture? Or is there something specific to Japanese culture. During the war? Were there gangs of homeless boys pressed into service and struggling to survive? Postwar? Were there gangs of boys roaming through the nearly destroyed civilization? Do the boys represent the entire nation during or after the war, struggling to survive and to rebuilt a society? Clearly, the boy are victims - though Oe's portrayal of them isn't entirely sympathetic. He seems to be getting at an indictment of Japanese - or perhaps any - culture that can dispose of their troubled youth, but I sense that we are not to interpret this novel literally; there's some kind of symbolic or allegorical level that, even this far in, I can't quite connect. Perhaps the concluding chapters will clarify some of the significance, or else perhaps it's must enigmatic, like the works of some of Oe's predecessors like Abe or Mishima.

Oe's first novel and the despair of post-war Japen

Kenzaburo Oe's early (first?) novel, from ca. 1955, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (yes, that's the title) is one of those dystopian narratives that feels in some ways post-apocalyptic: a group of about a dozen teenage boys, apparently all or most arrested for some type of juvenile delinquency (at least one is just in the group because his brother was nabbed) are social pariah, marched through rural Japan under armed guard and subject to severe deprivation and brutal discipline. After a long march and truck ride they are penned into an abandoned barn and assigned to a work detail disposing of animal (and human?) carcasses - and it's clear that the dead animals and people were victims of a highly contagious plague. But the setting isn't exactly post-apocalyptic/dystopian - it appears that we're in Japan during the 2nd world war. I'm not sure if there's any basis in fact for this kind of barbaric mistreatment of the young - but we do know about the barbaric mistreatment of Korean women forced into prostitution; in this novel, the victims of plague are part of a South Korean settlement. So, one-third of the way through this relatively short novel, I'm not sure what it is meant to represent - but it's a disturbing narrative to say the least, made even more so by Oe's excellent descriptions of scenes of horror and by his establishment of a nuanced and sympathetic narrative voice. The narrator is one of the boy, close to protective of his younger brother, and willing at times to step forward and be the leader of his group, even though doing so makes him more vulnerable to the whims of their captor. Sometimes the narrator speaks in first-person singular; more often, he speaks in first-person plural, giving us the sense of all the boys as part of a shared consciousness, what one experiences they all experience. There are hints int the first 70 pages of a rebellion by the boys; we'll see how Oe moves and develops his plot - and what he's getting that, aside from a disquieting sense of dread and despair, perhaps typical of the writers of his generation shortly after the devastation of Japan during and after the war.

Why Updike's The Centaur is still worth reading, at least in part

Yes, John Updike's early novel The Centaur (1963) is still worth reading, especially for Updike fans (me, too) who can't get enough of his amazing ability to recall and capture moments in time from his past (particularly childhood in Pennsylvania) w/ Proustian accuracy - and what readers of my age (and gender?) won't recognize themselves in some of these Updike moments, regardless of how different our lives seem to have been and have become? That said, it's clear to that this novel would be better, or at least better appreciated today, had it been cut by about 50 pages, i.e., leaving aside all the pretentious references to Greek mythology and the pointless attempts to draw parallels between the father and a mythical Centaur; had there been some payoff, some way in which these comparisons provided us with any moments of connection, astonishment, or insight, then sure, OK, but the parallels between these denizens of a small Pennsylvania city in 1947 and anything  having anything to do w/ Greek mythology are so obscure and undeveloped - what's the point? The point, I think, was for Updike to show that he was more than just a fine lyrical writer but that he was also a thinker and was not estranged from the narrative experimentation that was shaping American fiction - led by the South Americans - in the 1960s: take that, John Barth, John Hawkes, Robert Coover, et al. This strategy did earn JU his first national award (which she should have won for Rabbit, Run) but he was playing from weakness; today, these ventures - telling the story out of chronological sequence, the oddly ambiguous ending (did the father live or die?), the shifting of modes make the novel feel quaint and out of date. Still worth reading - though some brief sections are worth skimming.

On Updike's style

The knock against John Updike has always been that he devotes far too much of his work to extended, sometimes mannered, descriptions of time and place that do little or nothing to advance the plot or develop character and theme - a little extra thrown in for the carriage trade, as one unkind reviewer once wrote. There no denying that Updike at times seems to be in love with his own style and with his ability to "summon up remembrance." Proust is his cousin - though not his sibling, as even Proust uses his set pieces as a way to examine the very nature of memory and perception. That said, in Updike's best and most mature work the descriptions are integrated into character and plot, notably the last two volumes of the Rabbit series and in his late-life recollections, which seem almost like memoir, of his childhood home in Pennsylvania. The Centaur (1963) is not one of his "mature" novels, and it's obvious that a ruthless editor could trim this slim novel down to a short story; there are numerous descriptive passages - first snowfall of the season, car stuck in snow, views from hotel window of downtown Alton at night, sites and sounds of a high-school basketball game - that could be cut. Could, but should not be: These passages are Updike's first attempt to collect his memories and to create a mood and sense of place, and sometimes to give us a moment of insight that's closer to lyric poetry than to literary fiction. The Centaur is by no means his best novel - and the guiding metaphor of the network of references to Greek mythology seems over-thought and inconsequential, though it probably earned him is first National Book Award, as the judges made up for overlooking Rabbit, Run (you want something more serious and literary? here it is!). But the very things that could be cut are the passages that today make reading this novel pleasurable and worth while; he hadn't yet figured out how best to use his many talents and his weirdly prodigious memory and "negative capability," but what we see in The Centaur is the early promise of a great writer near the start of his career. If JU were a young writer today, would he be tempted toward the now quite popular "auto-fiction"? Possibly, though by writing literary fiction he gave himself the opportunity to revisit the same territory repeatedly, each time w/ a slightly different angle of approach and launch.

Updike and his time capsules

Chapter 2 and 4 of John Updike's 3rd (?) novel, The Centaur (1963), depict in exquisite detail a day in the life of the protagonist, Peter, a high-school student, from his awakening, rush through breakfast and his ride to school w/ his father, a chemistry teacher at the rural high school, through the school day (most of the school day told in more in summary except for his encounter w/ a young woman at the nearby luncheonette where many of his friends gather for lunch) to the end-of-the-day drive w/ his father to the nearby city of Alton (Reading, Pa.) where Peter goes to a movie as father coaches at a swim meet, and various things go wrong - car troubles - that lead them to stay overnight in a seedy hotel (the New Yorker, ha ha). Many things are important about this passage, which is foundational for Updike's work across his long career: the setting (the sandstone farmhouse to which his family moved during the Depression, far from the city and emblematic of the father's failure to thrive), the adoring mother, the tense and complex relationship w/ the father who considers himself a failure and who brings way too much attention to himself at the school as an eccentric teacher - to Peter's mortification, the young man's yearning for an artistic career in New York. The whole passage - about 60 pp., interrupted briefly for a chapter on another theme - is beautiful start to finish and really gets at the young man's anxiety and his love for and sometimes struggle w/ his parents, typically adolescent in many ways but made so specific and vivid here. Much of this novel is self-consciously built as a series of points of reference to numerous Greek myths (there's even an index at the end), which to me seems pretentious and unnecessary, but if there is one myth that it most closely mimes it would be the voyage of Ulysses on his way home from battle - though the young JU wastoo smart to claim to work the same field as Joyce. These passages - the beautifully rendered night-time in Alton, with the lights in the town center and the all-night garages and diners - were a time capsule even at the time of composition and more so now, a look back at the small industrial cities that provided millions of jobs in small business and manufacturing, particularly in the East; these communities have seldom been depicted in literature, which tends to gravitate toward the major cities, though we do see elements of this social strata in a few other writers: McCullers, Russo, Agee come to mind, and there are others - but none so focused on the forlorn as Updike in this early work and his later Alton/Olinger novels; of course the Rabbit quartet brings the small-city culture and economy into the then-present day. We don't generally think of Updike as a writer of historical or documentary fiction (a few of his later works on historical literary figures aside) but in a way that's what the Centaur (and Of the Farm and The Poorhouse Fair, his earliest works) is about.

Many key Updike lifelong themes introduced in his 1963 novel The Centaur

I've started reading one of the few John Updike novels I'd never read, The Centaur (1963); it's one of 4 collected in the first vol of the great Library of America Updike series - though I'm reading it in a a Fawcett pb +50 years old w/ too-small type and crumbling pages but still, I can write in it! The Centaur won Updike his first National Book Award, though once again it's clearly a case of right author, wrong book - seeming to be a make-up for passing over the now-classic Rabbit, Run. Still, Centaur is Updike, so there's some excellent writing throughout and we get an introduction to some of the themes and motifs that will be with Updike throughout his long career: the family move from the small city of Alton (Reading, Pa.) to the mother's family's farm; the garrulous father, a high-school teacher, who'd had other aspirations; the strong bond between son and mother; the son's artistic sensibilities (in this novel, he dreams of becoming an artist) so out of place in this rural setting; the son's first awakening to sexuality; his love for and embarrassment by his father; and others. The second chapter (these chapters are all pretty long - +30 pp) is a great example of Updike's lifelong themes. The novel, however, balances these naturalistic portrayals of family life with some strange, over-wrought, even pretentious attempts to model this novel on the myth of the Centaur (explained briefly in a note at the start of the book: In chapter 1, a Centaur wounded by a poisoned arrow, which an artisan removes and, in return, the Centaurs give up their immortality and institute an annual (human?) sacrifice to appease the gods - who knew?) - so in the first chapter a character who seems to be an alternate v. of the family father (closely modeled on Updike's father) gets shot in the ankle by a student and goes to the nearby auto mechanic to have the arrow removed - quite preposterous if taken realistically, but it seems that this will shed some light on the family that we meet in chapter two - though why all this superstructure is needed is at this point in my reading beyond me. Does it add to the novel? Or just show JU's cleverness and erudition?

A day of disappointing reading

Just a depressing day of reading yesterday; maybe it's me, or maybe not. But went with high hopes to current New Yorker story, Garbor, by Gareth Greenwell, an author being heavily promoted now for his forthcoming novel from FSG, still probably the top major-market literary press, and the story starts well, writing strong a captivatingly conversational, but after all the story is about an American writer at a writer's conference in Bulgaria and his interactions over the course of a night of heavy drinking with a small cadre of writers - and really what's a more tired, navel-gazing topic than the travails of a young writer among other writers abroad? But perhaps GG can lift this story above expectations, and at times he does so - I did follow the narrative to the end - but what's the payoff? We shift focus a few times to narrator's lamenting the breakup w/ his boyfriend, but this sorrow is not developed into much of anything (perhaps GG makes much more of this broken relationship in the forthcoming novel, from which this seems to be an excerpt); there's a moment when one of the Bulgarian writers expounds that writing a story is like making love to a woman, to which the narrator adds, Why not to a man?, thereby confounding the Bulgarian - and, yes, part of the point is that there are multiple perspectives on love and sex (of the narrator's longing for his ex-boyfriend we could say: why not a girlfriend), but this is hardly a groundbreaking insight at this point. At the end, one of the Bulgarians, a priest, swims naked in the harbor; expected more to come of this, but story or excerpt just ends with the priest swimming against the tide - not much or a resolution, nor of an insight. Will still look to his novel for more when it's published. Speaking of which, tried to read further in Umberto Eco's Prague Cemetery and finally, completely lost in the arcana of who's supporting whom and why in the battles for an Italian nation under Garibald, I just have throw up my hands in exasperation and say: Who reads this, other than reviewers paid to do so? This novel is so demanding and so nearly incomprehensible that it does nothing for me other than to prove that Eco was really intelligent and learned. Fine. Got the point. Not reading any further in Eco. Or maybe it's just me. 

The challenge of reading Eco's Prague Cemetery

The essence of the plot of Umberto Eco's 2010 novel, The Prague Cemetery, seems to be that the narrator, Simonimi (?), is a despicable character in every sense; yesterday's post noted his racism, anti-Semitism, and misanthropy, and the matter only gets worse as the novel moves along. The narrator, telling us his life story, explains that he became a clerk and notary as he launched his career, but his true aspiration was to become an expert forger, which he did. Recognizing that forgeries, which rob innocent people of their rightful possessions and inheritances, was just another part of a the notary's daily business, S puts his skills as a forger to grander youth: the forges military and political communications that played a key role in ensuring the defeat of insurrectionist nationalist forces (led by Garibaldi) and the maintenance of a corrupt monarchy governing most of Italy. I have to say that the account of Garibaldi's army entering Sicily is to me completely unfamiliar ground and extremely difficult to follow; it's almost as if Eco, known for his erudition and his love of the recondite, is just showing off his knowedge of these battles of 170 years ago. The Garibaldi revolution was no doubt a great moment in history, not just of Italy but of Europe and the world, but Eco is not writing a historical novel - almost the opposite. He's presenting history as the everyday life of his central character, and because the events are so familiar to S (and to Eco I guess, background and context are never necessary, or so he thinks. To me, this remains a novel w/ much potential but with such a profusion of events, schemes, subterfuge, all told in a moral vacuum, that the novel is needlessly inaccessible and unpleasant. I'm curious enough to read further for a day or so, but at some point I'm afraid I'm going to throw up my hands in exasperation.

Should we read a novel whose narrate is racist and anti-Semitic?

Umberto Eco's Italian-language novel The Prague Cemetery (hard to believe but it's the first Eco novel I've read - now about 80 pp. in) is set in about 1895 and is narrated by a young (30 or so?) man, Sabatini (?) who begins by describing his neighborhood, a blind alley on the Left Bank near the Sorbonne, as the most unpleasant and corrupt street in Paris, perhaps in the world - an obvious exaggeration. He's set out to write the story of his life, and he begins by giving an account of all of his biases, prejudices, and hatreds - of just about every race and ethnic group except for his own - and even then, he seems ashamed of his Italian (Piedmontese) background and claims to be more French than Italian. Yet despite his hatred and loathing of everything and everyone, he reserves particular hatred and vitriol for Jews - he's an incorrigible anti-Semite, and he unleashes all of the racial stereotypes that attach to Jews and Judaism. Why would anyone read this novel?! Well, it's obvious that his hatred of Jews comes from his family background and his upbringing by a racist and hateful grandfather, and his attempt to write his life story is an examination of the origins of racism and anti-Semitism (we learn early on that he may be a victim of multiple personality disorder and may at times exhibit the personality of a Jesuit priest). We also can sense of course a distance between his views and Eco's (Eco of course plays with the idea of narrative frames, stories within stories, etc. - very much in vogue in the late 20th century, especially in Europe, when he wrote this work). But is that enough? It's one thing to examine the roots of racial hatred and another to exploit racism. Just about any reader, but any Jewish reader in particular, will be put off by Eco's wallowing in the stereotypes of the past, largely because those stereotypes have not vanished and in fact are nourished and kept alive by works such as this. Yes, this novel, like all of Eco's works apparently, is narrated at a quick pace, presents (male) characters w/ strong personalities, and is full of esoteric and recondite information about a vast range of Euro-centric subjects - history, philosophy, the arts, languages, theology. It's enough to keep me interested and to keep me reading for at least another day, but if the novel continues to wallow in the lower depths of racism I won't give it any more credence or attention.

The most challenging story in the Grove Press collection of Oe's pre-Nobel works

By far the most complex and challenging of the 4 novels (some would call at least 2 of them "stories") in the Grove Press 1977 Kenzaburo Oe's Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness is the first in the book, Some Day He Himself May Wipe Away Our Tears (I think I have that right; the title, apparently a passage in a Bach contata?, is an explicit Xtian message as well as a reflection on the Emperor worship in Japan up to and through the Second World War. Story is narrated, for the most part, by a 35-year-old man dying of liver cancer (it may, however, be an illusion) who's telling his life story to a scribe/nurse (and many of the passages break away from his narrative and involve discussion between narrator and scribe or other characters such as his mother about the work he is trying to compose). Whew. The story itself is mostly about his difficult childhood, in which he was bullied, and about his father who, as best I can make out, deserted from the Japanese army toward the end of the war, came home to his village, lived in isolation in a storage room suffering from many maladies (a theme in other Oe stories), and eventually led some kind of doomed post war expedition to try to restore the Emperor to his divine status. It is extremely difficult to follow this plot on first reading; the translator/editor, John Nathan, notes in his intro that most Japanese readers could not finish reading this piece! (There are other elements specific to the Japanese wartime experience that are even harder for most readers to elicit: the mother is Chinese and there seems to be a suggestion that the father was suspected to be a spy for China during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria - again, cloudy and hard for any reader to follow.) Though this story may have been Oe's most ambitious at the time of publication, why on earth did Nathan make it first in this collection, almost deliberately scaring readers away? I would encourage any reader to take on these 4 novels in order of publication: Prize Stock, Teach Us, Aghwhe the Sky Monster, He Himself. You'll have to look elsewhere to get the pub dates; Nathan doesn't offer guidance on this matter, nor does he say much about Oe's status in Japanese literature. Still, his intro, to be fair, does give a good first-hand portrait of Oe - who became a good friend of Nathan's: What he looked like, his personality quirks, his relationship with his son, Pooh, w/ mental disabilities. Overall, this collection is a good look at Oe's early career, pre 1994 Nobel Prize.

Will Louise Erdrich win a Nobel Prize?

And speaking of Nobel Prizes, I hold to my prediction that Louise Erdrich will be the next American (and 1st Native American) to win the prize, based on her nearly 20 works of fiction and poetry, most of them portraying the life among Native Americans int he contemporary Northwest. Her story, The Stone, in the current New Yorker is somewhat atypical, not one of her greatest works, but a thoughtful and at times moving short story that encompasses the lifespan of the protagonist: A young woman on annual family summer vacation on a Lake Superior island finds an unusual rock that has the appearance of a human face; she brings the rock home w/ her and keeps the rock throughout her life - it's a talisman and at times a sex toy and always a kind of security blanket, helping her through tough times but also limiting and restricting her in some odd way. The woman, for example, becomes a successful concert pianist - and she brings the rock on stage w/ her at every performance; she becomes known for this eccentricity. The rock - as rocks tend to be - is steady, but her life is not; her marriage fails, and we sense that her weird obsession w/ this rock was part of the break-up. In one key passage in the story, Erdrich steps back and gives us the history of the rock, its origin as part of a volcanic eruption 3 billion years ago and its travel into and through human history - the woman of this story was not the first to notice the features of this rock and to keep it as a possession - which makes us think in the widest terms possible about life on Earth, not just human and not just organic but all forms of life and their endurance and interaction. We know, in a sense, little about the protagonist - we don't even know here she lives, and if she has a name I've forgotten it already - but we see her both as representative of all people and also as a sad and lonely soul whose troubles were never recognized (let alone treated) and whose life has slipped past her.

The kind of novel that earned Oe his Nobel Prize

The 3rd short novel in the 1977 collection of 4 from Kenzaburo Oe gives the collection its title, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (the novel suggests that this is a phrase from a poem by one of the British poets of WWI, Owen or Brook perhaps?); as noted previously, I'm reading these short novels in order of publication/composition, not order in this collection, which offers little guidance on publication dates. This one is the saddest so far and is clearly based on the central fact of Oe's life, the birth of his son w/ severe brain damage and consequent mental retardation. In this work, the protagonist, referred to only as the Fat Man, has a caring and loving relationship w/ his son; the two go out for lunch - same place, same order - every day and take excursions that his son - who's maybe about 4 or 5? - enjoys, notably to the zoo. It's hard at times to piece the narrative together, but it seems that at one point some nasty guys grab the Fat Man and pretend to toss him into the polar bear exhibit; meanwhile, the on wanders off - crisis ensues, all sad and troubling. In another episode, the son goes to a specialist for an eye exam and creates havoc in the office - he's strong and stubborn and extremely disturbed when anyone touches him, let alone examines his eyes. All of these, and other, trying episodes split marriage, leaving the Fat Man alone with his obsessions: He is struggling to write a biography of his father, who spent the last years of his life self-imprisoned in a storage locker, until he committed suicide. So this strange novel involves mental illness and brain damage across several generations and is, intentionally, upsetting and challenging (told out of sequence and sometimes from a perspective of limited vision and comprehension), though we cannot help but feel sorrow and pity for the man, so devoted to his son, and to the poor child, suffering without understanding. This is the kind of work that later earned Oe his Nobel Prize.

A short novel from Oe that would be a great subject for a sophisticated literature class

The short novel Prize Stock in the collection of 4 short novels by Japanese author Kenzaburo Oe would be a great piece for discussion and analysis in a college course (far too controversial for most h.s. classes). The novel - written I think in about 1950? - tells of the capture of a black American soldier whose plane crashes in the very last days of WWII near a remote Japanese village. The villagers hold the man in a dungeon-like cell awaiting instructions on what to do with the prisoner (the Japanese army is in complete disarray apparently and the villagers get no clear message, at least at first). Over time, the narrator and two other young boys, assigned to care for the prisoner, seem to develop a friendship w/ him, and eventually they remove his shackles and, later, he does favors for some of the villagers through various repairs (such as of the prosthetic leg of the village "clerk"). It seems at moments that this will become a happy story of enemies and opposites building a cross-cultural understanding; at first the soldier - the first and only black person the villagers had ever seen - is viewed in almost monstrous terms and we see all of the racist stereotypes emerge (which of course would make this a work to be discussed in class in the most sensitive terms: Is the story racist? or, Is it an accurate account of attitudes toward race at that time and place? and, Weren't the Japanese themselves subject to racist stereotypes, esp during the war years?). But the story surprises us right to the end (which I won't divulge), when then villagers get word about what to do with the soldier, which leads readers (students) to try to figure out who was right, who was wrong - what the soldier should have done, what the boys should have done or not done. Apparently this was made into a film called "The Captive" (a better title); no idea of its quality. It seems atypical of Oe's work, staying clearly in the realist mode; another short novel in the collection Teach Us to Overcome our Madness from Grove Press, in 1977, pre Nobel Prize), Aghwee: The Sky Monster, better typifies Oe's work: visionary and dreamlike, centered on a man with mental disabilties and musical genius (apparently somewhat based on Oe's son), in many ways, I see for the first time, a forerunner of an influence upon the much more popular Japanese novelist Murakami.

A strange short novel that defies convention in Nobel-winner Oe's early collection

Kenzabura Oe was pretty much unknown to American readers before he won a Nobel Prize in the mid-90s; I found and read one of his novels way back then, liked it, don't remember it (I think it was about a man and his son w/ severe disabilities and perhaps based on Oe's own family and life), but haven't read his work since then. I pulled from the shelves in my town library a copy of one of his early books, actually predating the Nobel, a collection of four short novels called Teach Us to Outgrow our Madness (weird title and hard to remember; it's the title of one of the 4 short novels). I'm glad to have this edition from the '70s, but its a poor example of publishing: Could you maybe give us some info about when each of these novels was originally published? Could you perhaps give us the 4 in chronological sequence? I started, as you'd expect, reading the first in the four - about a man in a hospital, perhaps in the ward for mental illnesses, who believes he's dying of liver cancer; this novel is full of weird narrative shifts and is extremely difficult to follow and is a terrible introduction to Oe's work. I stopped after about 20 pp. and moved on to the next in the collection: Prize Stock. This one, clearly an early work, is much more conventional and accessible: Set in a small and remote Japanese village during World War II, the story concerns an appearance of an "enemy" plane that crashes in a nearby forest; the only survivor is a black soldier who'd parachuted to safety. The villagers bring him in and hold him prisoner in a dank basement, almost like a dungeon or tomb. The story is told from the POV of a young boy in the village who's assigned the task of daily feeding and care for the soldier, who fascinates the boy and all the other boys in the village. This is in no way a Sidney Portier-type movie in which the "enemies" form a bond of friendship and caring - it's dark and mysterious; our moral compass is askew: We can see why the villagers keep the soldier chained and imprisoned but we hardly sympathize with them - nor do we know a single thing, at least halfway through, about the captive soldier. Novels are about change - transformation of character over the course of a series of events - but this one seems to defy convention, and I expect the characters will be pretty much the same at the end of the narrative as they were at the outset. We'll see.

A terrific short novel about a political prisoner in Latin America and dilemmas facing his family members

Mario Benedetti's novel Springtime in a Broken Mirror is a terrific, short (ca 180 pp) novel told in tight and sometimes beautiful short chapters alternating among 5 points of view: a political prisoner in Uruguay and his exiled family/friends in Argentina: wife, young daughter, father, and best friend. Over the course of the novel the characters wrestle with a # of moral, political, and familial crises and moral dilemmas, most notably the gradual estrangement of the wife (Gracius?) from imprisoned husband (Santiago) and her developing relationship w/ best friend (Rudolpho): Should they tell Santiago? While he's still in prison or on his (someday) release? How to explain things to the child (Beatriz)? The father-in-law, Reynoldo, who maintains an excellent relationship w/ Gracius, is maybe the central figure and the one given the wisest, most experienced voice. For those sometimes put off by narrative sleight of hand, the alternating points of view are generally quite clear (once you've ascertained which chapters belong to which characters); yes, there are some narrative idiosyncrasies, as w/ probably all Latin American fiction of the era (MB is Uruguayan, novel published there in 1982), most notably the author himself is the focus of a few chapters - these told in italics - not sure that these add much to the story, but they do present a sidelight giving us a broader picture of the dangers of activism in those days. My only quibble comes from the ending, which I won't divulge but will say that it's a bit of a lady-or-the-tiger conclusion that leaves in my view too much unsettled and open. That said, some terrific moments and passages throughout in this through-provoking and sometimes disturbing novel that in its brief space goes way beyond a prison novel or a struggle with marital fidelity, though it includes these within its scope. I have never seen another work in English by this author, but will probably seek some.

A terrific novel about political repression in South America ca 1980

The short novel by Uruguayan author Mario Benedetti, Springtime in a Broken Mirror (1982, in English 2018), is - through the first half - a fantastic and disturbing account of the political climate in South America during the late 20th century; the novel is the story of a young father imprisoned for his political activism in Uruguay - but, in its brief and subtle manner - it's really the story about how the incarceration of this one man, Santiago, has ramifications across a broad expanse of characters. Benedetti builds the novel in a series of brief sections from 5 (I think) points of view: Santiago in prison (told from his letters to his wife), his wife (Gracia?), his daughter age about 8 (Beatriz), his father (Rafael, I think), and his best friend (Rudolpho). What we see over the course of the narrative is Santiago's yearning for his wife and his struggle to get through imprisonment without providing any information to his captors/torturers, while his wife feels increasingly estranged from him and falls in love w/ his best friend. She confides in the father-in-law, who offers sage though unexpected advice (he has some of the most powerful brief chapters including one at the heart of the novel that gives a harrowing and poignant account of the effects across a culture of political oppression). The daughter's brief and sometimes funny sections give us a child's point of view on the trauma of political imprisonment as she reflects on her family and her community (the family fled Uruguay and are now living as political exiles in Buenos Aires). The use of alternating short sections makes this novel, on such painful subject, easy to read and to comprehend - though, as a side note, I'm not sure why MB wouldn't intro each section w/ the name of the speaker nor why he would give 2 of the 5 main characters a name beginning w/ the same letter (something a screenwriter or dramatist would never do).

Story v novel: An excellent piece of short fiction by Kate Walert

The impressive story from Kate Walbert, To Do, in current New Yorker in a few pages gets at the essence of a complex mother-daughter relationship and a look at feminism across two different eras; I don't know too much about Walbert's work, but did read about 10 years ago her impressive novel A Short History of Women, which also examined feminism and women's empowerment across several generations while maintaining efficiency and focus. This story is a novel in miniature: the protagonist, Constance, is a professor (English) at a college in Chicago; she goes to a women's storytelling event - it seems to be sponsored by her department head, but that's not clear - and tells a story about the recent death of her mother in a nursing home and the many "to do" notes that she left behind. The story gets almost no reaction from her friends and colleagues in the crowd (though the do heartily applaud a salacious performance by a colleague who balances spoons from her breasts). Constance leaves w/ this colleague, goes home to her nondescript condo where she's locked out (no key); she calls a locksmith and invites him in for a drink and of course they have sex. After he leaves (going home to his wife) she recollects a story about her mother than she should have told - and this "untold" story focuses on her mother's prim demeanor and exterior and her secret drinking and a day in which the teenage Constance covered for her mother, out cold from drinking, by taking her place in a bridge game - and the story ends w/ quite a kick, which I won't divulge, when her mother asks "What did I miss?" As noted in other posts, there are so many stories about which people say: Why not build this into a novel? The answer, sometimes, is: Because the story accomplished its goals and is perfect as it is.

Are there examples of historical fiction that are also great as literary fiction?

Nearing the end of John Williams's novel Augustus, it seems that none of the characters in this historical fiction come "alive" in any literary sense; they remain historical figures rather than personalities, in part because of the broad canvas on which Williams works - a span of about 40 years - and his decision to narrate this novel entirely through documents: mostly letters between the key figures and many long passages from a not-quite-believable diary that A's daughter, Julia, keeps in her years of exile. That said - and the dearth of deep or rounded characters stands in particular contrast w/ JW's previous novel, Stoner, one of the great literary characters of the 20th century - Augustus is still worth reading as it does present in a clear and sometimes dramatic form a synopsis of the history - seen from the top only, there are no plebeian characters - of ancient Rome, from the assassination of Caesar to the death (I assume this is how the novel ends) of Augustus. Sure, you could read a history book that will be true to the facts - but also bound by them, whether a history written from the Classic era, such as Livy's History of Rome (Livy is a minor character in A) or a contemporary history (son-in-law MS recommends David Carlin's podcasts). But historical fiction has its place as well, though examples of great success as literary fiction are few (Gore Vidal maybe?), or maybe that's just my personal taste. Glad I've (nearly) read Williams's Augustus, but it feels as if I've read it as a pop version of history rather than as a novel, if these distinctions matter at all.

Women's fate in John Williams's Augustus

Toward the end of John Williams's Augustus (1972) the focus sharpens on Augustus' daughter Julia, obviously his equal in intelligence and determination but with never a chance for power or authority on her own; in fact, more and more we see that the women in the family of the Emperor are very much like pawns in the game - divorcing and re-marrying at the command of the Emperor for the sole reason of building alliances and consolidating power. Only Julia balks at this, but in the end she does comply with her father's dictates; he's not a brute and actually feels terrible about ordering her to marry a mean and nasty guy, Tiberious Nero. So the women are forced into unhappy marriages - however, in consolation, there's overall acceptance and tolerance of the women having multiple affairs and flings, with the men stationed in far away military outposts. I don't know much about the various historical figures from ancient Rome, but any reader will recognize the name Nero and deduce that Julia's marriage to him did nothing to advance the fortunes of her family; in fact, much of the text of this novel is from Julia's imagined diary from her time in exile, ca 2 AD, on an island off the coast of Italy - a victim of the hazards of marrying to build family alliances.

John Williams and feminism

It's turning out that to some degree John Williams's 1972 novel, Augustus, is a feminist look at history; Augustus Caesar, the ostensible focus of this historical novel, may be the most powerful man in the world ca 20 BC, but the women in and around his life are the smartest and most competent - although confined to obscurity and deprived of the right to a full education by the laws and mores of the time. (As a counter-example though, from another culture, there's still Cleopatra, a clear rival to the Roman empire but somewhat peripheral to this novel). Of particular note is Augustus's daughter, Julia, whose diary (fictional, I'm pretty sure) from her late life in exile, is the most insightful strand in this epistolary novel of many voices. She was one of the few women to receive a near-complete education and clearly had the intelligence to succeed her father as emperor, but seems to have been to much of a threat, not only to Augustus' many rivals but also to the entire male hierarchy, which may explain her exile (the two "halves" of the narrative - contemporary records from the time of Caesar's assassination going forward through A's reign and reflective records from ca 5 AD, such as Julia's diary. Interesting contrast here w/ JW's previous and most famous (and best) novel, Stoner, which - though extremely sympathetic to Stoner's student/lover, whose professional life was derailed because of her affair w/ her prof., had little or nothing to do w/ feminist issues and women in power - though it was true to the mores and practices of its depicted era, academic life from the 30s to the 60s.

The experience of women in John Williams's historical novel, Augustus

Following up on yesterday's post on John Williams's Augustus (1972) as I begin reading Part 2 (essentially it's a 2-part novel, with a 3rd part much shorter than the first two sections), it seems clear that Augustus himself will be a bit of an enigma in this historical novel in that all or virtually all of the information we glean about him and his actions and his thinking comes from the observations and recollections of other characters, some obviously historical figures (e.g., Marc Antony), others Williams's creations - though I' not sure how many of these there are or whether any are really composite characters; I'm sure the intro to the Vintage edition I'm reading will shed light on that so I'll read that intro after I finish reading the novel. At the outset of Part 2 we see some people whom history has pushed aside, notably Augustus' mother (Atia?),  sister (Julia? - not sure I'm remembering the names correctly, and the servant woman (i.e., slave, for all intents and purposes) who more or less raised him. The most powerful emotional scene in the novel, so far, is this woman's appearance at a ceremony in which A is marching toward the Forum in a procession; he comes over to her for moment - they had not seen each other since his childhood - and we see a glimpse of warmth in his personality and the sadness that pulls him toward a destiny and responsibility that he'd never anticipated and perhaps does not really want; she is moved deeply by his recognition of her, as would be any reader. Oddly, this reminded me of a scene in Alex Haley's Roots (OK, the TV v thereof) in which the plantation daughter and her childhood friend, a slave, cross paths late in life - and in this instance the wealthy, elderly white woman pretends she does not know that slave woman (who then spits in her requested cup of water) - also an incredibly powerful moment w/ a different outcome. This second section of the novel also seems to be focusing on the experiences and memories of women characters (and historical figures), in particular A's sister who was much smarter and more promising than he was but who's gender kept her from becoming a philosopher or political leader; lest we be too judgmental, however, there's the counter example of Cleopatra who became a powerful world ruler (who died for love - at least in Sh's version if not in Williams's).

History v literature in Augustus

Sent from my iPhone yesterday, not published for technical reason:

Reading further into John Williams’s epistolary novel, Augustus (1973), and thinking about differences between reading literature and reading history. Part of the interest in reading A comes from its apparent veracity; we don’t feel so much that we’re meeting “characters” (tho I’m pretty sure that JW creates some character to fill gaps in his narrative - in particular A’s friend who become a resource and correspondent for the historian Livy) but we/I feel as if I’m learning about a fascinating era in western civ. I don’t think JW takes significant liberties w the known facts; compare w say the HBO series Rome, which told the story largely fro. The POV of 2 Roman soldiers/centurions, one of whom became a senator and the other who became one of Cleopatra’s lover (and father of a child? I don’t remember). JW in contrast stays for the most part w known figures such as mark Antony and A himself as the sources for info on these historical events. It’s been many years since I read/saw either of Shakespeare’s Roman dramas on the Caesars but I think his too were closer to the known facts. Big difference: the power of language in JC and the focus on the power of love in A&C - whereas JW plays it straight - none of the language calls attention to itself and he never - At least thru first half of the novel - turns minor characters into major figures or viewpoints for the history of ordinary roman citizens. There are no powerful crowd scenes and the accounts of battle are 2nd or 3rd hand. But what the novel does have is a clarity of vision and a good balance between using “documents “ such as correspondence and official pronouncements and using letters written some 30 years after the events to present a variety of vantages - noting of course that all of these documents are JW’s creations - he has much greater freedom of composition than does any historian, ancient or contemporary. Great way to learn more about Roman history; not sure yet how much we’ll get to know about the character of A, who remains at this point somewhat distant and enigmatic.