July 2022: Yehoshua, Laxness, and Soderberg (with a note on Nabokov)

 Elliot’s Reading - July 2022: Yehoshua, Laxness, and Soderberg

I don’t think anyone would say that recently deceased A. B. Yehoshua’s novel The Extra (2014) is his best, not when compared with, say, Mr. Mani or Open Heart or even the more recent A Woman in Jerusalem, but I’ve yet to come across a novel of his that failed to hold my interest and to inform me about daily life in war-torn Israel, where we Americans probably imagine all life to be on the edge and in fact, as ABY presents it, Israeli life is loud and complex and full of cultural significance and more cross-cultural than we could possibly imagine. The Extra centers on a 30-something woman, divorced and without children - by her choice, but a choice that led to the break-up of her marriage - now spending two months or so in her mother’s Jerusalem apartment while her mother tries out a new living arrangement in assisted living in Tel Aviv: Will she stay or will she go? While tending her mother’s apartment, the “extra” (she earns a little money and has some adventures in playing several roles as a movie extra) recognizes many elements in her own life story - which is quite engaging, in fact, the best part of the novel I’d say: She’s a harpist in a Dutch orchestra, on leave, and through her perspective we learn a ton about orchestral performance and idiosyncrasies. I totally enjoyed that aspect. Less so, the complexities of her family life and her sojourn as an “extra,” a neat plot angle but with little pay-off. Ditto for her on-going battle with some young kids in the neighborhood who keep breaking in to her unit to watch TV (forbidden in their Orthodox home) - lots of set-up with little payoff. 

Some novels I didn’t finish reading - including Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift, which he finished in the late 1930s but wasn’t published till the ‘40s and not available in English (VN and son, trs.) until I think the 1950s - and though it was mentioned in an NYT story as a good intro to life in Berlin in its time I found it to be only an intro into the life of a Nabokovian character, meaning a writer who’s more interested in displaying his genius than in telling a story or evoking a time and place; obviously, the first section is an homage to Proust, or maybe an attempt at doing Proust one better, but the obsession w/ memory and desire is central to appreciating and loving the Search for Lost Time in VN’s hands these topical details about his early life do not go toward developing character or theme or even in entertainment. Some of his early English-language novels go one better, tho I have always loathed his most famous. Second novel I will not finish is clearly just not meant for me - John Avid Lindqvist’s Harbor (2008, tr. 2010), which, similar to above, was touted as a good intro to life in Sweden, which it clearly is not - Swedes are not Stephen King characters and monsters and horrible beings don’t just emerge from the ice - I liked the movie based on one of JAL’s novels, Let the Right One In, in that, surprisingly, it told a drama of your misfits, the beaten and bullied, but Harbor just didn’t carry that wait nor could it carry me along buoyed by suspended disbelief much beyond 50 pp (out of 500!) 

Swedish novelist Hjalmar Soderberg’s most famous (only famous?) novel, Doctor Glas (1905) is a strange, short, first-person confessional narrative is the woeful tale of a sad and it would appear thoroughly deranged 30-something physician in Stocholm who for some reason is writing a notebook/diary about his deeply troubled interior life. He’s a successful but not world-beating GP; he lives alone and in fact has never had sexual relations w/ anyone, male or female; in one passage he tells of the one brief love of his life, a woman who died through accident shortly after they had met and seemed to fall for one another, though nothing transpired, so to speak. At this point in his life he sees himself as an outsider, a loner, an unattractive man who has been passed by in life - he’s a descendant, so to speak, of Dostoevsky’s “underground man.” As it happens, a woman whom he’s really attracted to calls on him asking him to resolve a sexual issue in the woman’s marriage; this leads to Glas’s animus against her husband, a noxious clergyman, and, later, to extreme jealousy as he recognizes the handsome young man w/ whom the woman has fallen in love. The novel chronicles the unraveling of a mind driven mad by loneliness and social isolation - a terribly sad story that feels to be at just the right length; who could take anymore of this sadness? 

The Icelandic writer Halldor Laxness is known to American readers, if at all, as perhaps the most obscure winner of a Nobel Prize in literature and in particular for his novels Independent People, which I delved into many years ago and didn’t finish reading but probably I was not ready to read that novel (I’ve since been to Iceland) and for Iceland’s Bell, which I did read and it held my interest. The Fish Can Sing, his poorly titled novel from 1957, is not an excellent gateway to HL’s work but is a pretty good “bildungsroman,” part of that tradition - largely Germanic and, I guess, Scandinavian - of a novel that traces the course of the life of the artist. Nobody will be fooled by HL’s identifying the calling of his young protagonist as an aspirant to Opera, spurred by his longing the emulate the most famous Icelandic opera singer, Gardar Holm, well maybe the only one, of this day. Of course it’s the story of the coming of age of a young writer - and in fact it mostly focuses on his childhood home and the eccentricities of many of the people in the impoverished, remote fishing village of his childhood. Today a novel such as this would the identified w/ Auto Fiction - or, if not that, would be reworked as a nonfiction narrative, such as Per Peterson’s more recent collection of essays about his childhood in a remote part of Denmark. Fish Can Sing is really two novel sin one: the first, the story of a childhood prodigy, and the 2nd the account of the young man’s encounters with the world famous Gardar Holm and his occasional, strange return visits to his homeland - mostly in the latter half of the novel. Few readers will be surprised by the plot twists and big reveals in that section, but so be it. The novel as a whole is quite readable, far less intimidating than HL’s grandest works, but on the other hand not really the best account of what made his fiction step onto the world stage. Elliot’s Reading - July 2022

Yehoshua, Laxness, and Soderberg

I don’t think anyone would say that recently deceased A. B. Yehoshua’s novel The Extra (2014) is his best, not when compared with, say, Mr. Mani or Open Heart or even the more recent A Woman in Jerusalem, but I’ve yet to come across a novel of his that failed to hold my interest and to inform me about daily life in war-torn Israel, where we Americans probably imagine all life to be on the edge and in fact, as ABY presents it, Israeli life is loud and complex and full of cultural significance and more cross-cultural than we could possibly imagine. The Extra centers on a 30-something woman, divorced and without children - by her choice, but a choice that led to the break-up of her marriage - now spending two months or so in her mother’s Jerusalem apartment while her mother tries out a new living arrangement in assisted living in Tel Aviv: Will she stay or will she go? While tending her mother’s apartment, the “extra” (she earns a little money and has some adventures in playing several roles as a movie extra) recognizes many elements in her own life story - which is quite engaging, in fact, the best part of the novel I’d say: She’s a harpist in a Dutch orchestra, on leave, and through her perspective we learn a ton about orchestral performance and idiosyncrasies. I totally enjoyed that aspect. Less so, the complexities of her family life and her sojourn as an “extra,” a neat plot angle but with little pay-off. Ditto for her on-going battle with some young kids in the neighborhood who keep breaking in to her unit to watch TV (forbidden in their Orthodox home) - lots of set-up with little payoff. 

Some novels I didn’t finish reading - including Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift, which he finished in the late 1930s but wasn’t published till the ‘40s and not available in English (VN and son, trs.) until I think the 1950s - and though it was mentioned in an NYT story as a good intro to life in Berlin in its time I found it to be only an intro into the life of a Nabokovian character, meaning a writer who’s more interested in displaying his genius than in telling a story or evoking a time and place; obviously, the first section is an homage to Proust, or maybe an attempt at doing Proust one better, but the obsession w/ memory and desire is central to appreciating and loving the Search for Lost Time in VN’s hands these topical details about his early life do not go toward developing character or theme or even in entertainment. Some of his early English-language novels go one better, tho I have always loathed his most famous. Second novel I will not finish is clearly just not meant for me - John Avid Lindqvist’s Harbor (2008, tr. 2010), which, similar to above, was touted as a good intro to life in Sweden, which it clearly is not - Swedes are not Stephen King characters and monsters and horrible beings don’t just emerge from the ice - I liked the movie based on one of JAL’s novels, Let the Right One In, in that, surprisingly, it told a drama of your misfits, the beaten and bullied, but Harbor just didn’t carry that wait nor could it carry me along buoyed by suspended disbelief much beyond 50 pp (out of 500!) 

Swedish novelist Hjalmar Soderberg’s most famous (only famous?) novel, Doctor Glas (1905) is a strange, short, first-person confessional narrative is the woeful tale of a sad and it would appear thoroughly deranged 30-something physician in Stocholm who for some reason is writing a notebook/diary about his deeply troubled interior life. He’s a successful but not world-beating GP; he lives alone and in fact has never had sexual relations w/ anyone, male or female; in one passage he tells of the one brief love of his life, a woman who died through accident shortly after they had met and seemed to fall for one another, though nothing transpired, so to speak. At this point in his life he sees himself as an outsider, a loner, an unattractive man who has been passed by in life - he’s a descendant, so to speak, of Dostoevsky’s “underground man.” As it happens, a woman whom he’s really attracted to calls on him asking him to resolve a sexual issue in the woman’s marriage; this leads to Glas’s animus against her husband, a noxious clergyman, and, later, to extreme jealousy as he recognizes the handsome young man w/ whom the woman has fallen in love. The novel chronicles the unraveling of a mind driven mad by loneliness and social isolation - a terribly sad story that feels to be at just the right length; who could take anymore of this sadness? 

The Icelandic writer Halldor Laxness is known to American readers, if at all, as perhaps the most obscure winner of a Nobel Prize in literature and in particular for his novels Independent People, which I delved into many years ago and didn’t finish reading but probably I was not ready to read that novel (I’ve since been to Iceland) and for Iceland’s Bell, which I did read and it held my interest. The Fish Can Sing, his poorly titled novel from 1957, is not an excellent gateway to HL’s work but is a pretty good “bildungsroman,” part of that tradition - largely Germanic and, I guess, Scandinavian - of a novel that traces the course of the life of the artist. Nobody will be fooled by HL’s identifying the calling of his young protagonist as an aspirant to Opera, spurred by his longing the emulate the most famous Icelandic opera singer, Gardar Holm, well maybe the only one, of this day. Of course it’s the story of the coming of age of a young writer - and in fact it mostly focuses on his childhood home and the eccentricities of many of the people in the impoverished, remote fishing village of his childhood. Today a novel such as this would the identified w/ Auto Fiction - or, if not that, would be reworked as a nonfiction narrative, such as Per Peterson’s more recent collection of essays about his childhood in a remote part of Denmark. Fish Can Sing is really two novel sin one: the first, the story of a childhood prodigy, and the 2nd the account of the young man’s encounters with the world famous Gardar Holm and his occasional, strange return visits to his homeland - mostly in the latter half of the novel. Few readers will be surprised by the plot twists and big reveals in that section, but so be it. The novel as a whole is quite readable, far less intimidating than HL’s grandest works, but on the other hand not really the best account of what made his fiction step onto the world stage.