Unusual works by Dinesen and the new phenomenon Murnane

Two unusual and quite different (from each other ) stories yesterday: First, Gerald Murnane's Land Deal made available as a preview from his new US publisher FSG. After reading the amazing profile of the elusive and cantankerous Murnane (Most Books Are Crap) in the NYT Mag who knew what to expect? I expected something obscure and impenetrable - but this story is both mind -bending and ciiletely accessible. Written in first-person plural it tells from the Native American POV the experience ca 1830 of trading w white settlers/invaders for a large tract of the native land. Yes we all know that the native tribes had no concept of land as something that could be owned much less bought and sold. But this story goes way beyond that commonplace and gives us a sense of how the natives first perceived the objects of the trade - mirrors, knives, scissors etc. they considered these objects, in murnane's take, as the "possible" compared w their current tools (e.g. Sharpened rocks) as the "actual" , which leads to some weird cosmic speculation as they begin to think of their entire existence as being part of some other's dream - kind of like the founding of a religion or the beginning of a tragedy. Beautiful and odd - in the tradition of Borges and Calvino but more political and more charged w ideas rather than mere playfulness and experimentation w form. Other story: Isaiah Dinesen's The Immortal Story, about a European merchant in canton in the 1800s whose entire life is about power and money who becomes obsessed w engineering the events in a famous sailors' yarn about a sailor ashore asked by a wealthy old man to have a tryst w a beautiful woman (I think Hemingway wrote about this as if it actually happened to him, probably a complete boastful lie). Like just about everything else by Dinesen it's creepy and cold, w no sense of human emotions and feelings and in this instance w a particularly distasteful portrayal of women (and of Jews for that matter). How such a talented, educated, and fiercely independent woman could build her works around such characters is a mystery - I may read more of her works to see if there's an answer or at least a clue.

Fine story w/ dark humor and quirky dialog by Camille Bordas in current New Yorker

Fine story, The State of Nature, in current New Yorker by a writer unknown to me till now, Camille Bordas, a portrait of a woman - intelligent, quirky, distressed - facing and dealing with a crisis, and in the process growing, meeting new people, and learning some key information about her mother. The offbeat humor reminded me at times of Lorrie Moore at her best, and the angularity of the writing may be a result in part of Bordas's apparently complex linguistic background - the bio note in the magazine says that she has published 2 novels in French and her newest is in English. I'm impressed! This story is about a young optometrist (get this: I began reading this story in the waiting room of my optometrist, how odd is that?) whose apt is burglarized while she's taking a morning nap. She never even hears the burglar(s) at work; she asks the cops if that's possible: "It happens, not often," one responds - giving you a brief sense of her sharp use of dialog. Another: Her mother: "Don't you watch the news?" Response: "Of course I don't watch the news!" Ha! In short, she goes on a quest in search of the lost items, leading her to the "thieves market," i.e., the flea market where fences move stolen items and where burglary victims are willing to go and buy their own stuff back, no questions asked, accepting it is a small premium to pay for the return of desired objects. In the process the woman crosses paths w/ one of her more eccentric patients - a man who anticipates that the world will soon plunge into chaos and he wants to be prepared to live in a "state of nature," in particular by having Lasik to ensure perfect vision (he's a bad candidate for the process, however). The story is full of dark humor and a distant sense of menace - or maybe that should be a sense of distant menace: Much discussion about creating a "go-pack" of items to carry w/ you in case of emergency, as well as discussions about a "rape whistle" to summon help in event of attack. Throughout we expect the much-discussed whistle (and go-pack) to play a role in the story, and we're not entirely let disappointed, but as w/ much else Bordas surprises us, even in the expected payoff.

Why it's so difficult to "get" Pedro Paramo on first reading

Though the narrative attains some clarity toward the end of Juan Rulfo's novel Pedro Paramo (1955) - the last third of the book or so focuses on PP's alliance of convenience with a group of armed rebels (one of the many revolutionary groups in Mexico in the early 20th century), his sexual abuse of many women who lived and worked on his estate in rural Mexico, his immoral and devious accumulation of wealth - does he remind us of anyone today? - and ultimately of his little-mourned death. Even so, this part of the novel is difficult to follow, with its many jumps in time and point of view that Rulfo indulges in w/out any attempt at transition or narrative guidance. Even more strangely, by the end we have completely lost touch w/ the establishing events in the novel, which begins with a young man pledging to his dying mother that he will travel to her homeland in search of his father, the eponymous PP. By the end, this young man - I can't even recall his name - is no longer part of the story, and PP is long deceased. All of this narrative experimentation was groundbreaking in the 1950s and feels, flowered across the globe - and especially in Latin America - in the 1960s, and today feels quaint and self-indulgent. The edition I read has a short forward by a deeply admiring Susan Sontag (patron saint of the impenetrable), which offers some insight: Apparently JR wrote this novel (his only published novel) over a long period of time, discarding much of his drafts as he went along in order to pare this novel to a bare minimum (it's only 124 pp); we can assume that he eliminated all of the transitions and back story that he considered irrelevant or unnecessary (I beg to differ), giving then novel at best a feeling of openness and velocity or at worst a feeling of confusion. That said, the writing is at times hypnotic and powerful, especially the accounts of death and of the fear of haunting and the surreal sections in which ghosts speak to one another. No doubt a second or third reading would bring more clarity, and more approbation, and maybe someday I'll come back to PP and see if a 2nd pass-through brings more light to the darkness - but not today.

The unique and demanding narrative style of Pedro Paramo

Juan Rulfo's novel Pedro Paramo (1955) is considered one of the great modern (i.e., post-1900) works from Mexico, ranked alongside the works of Carlos Fuentes. Time hasn't exactly been kind for Pedro Paramo, however, as reading it now (for the first time) it seems almost quaint in its eagerness to defy narrative convention. This short novel - about 125 pp. - consists of many brief sections and a constantly changing point of view: sometimes first persona narration from the protagonist, sometimes 3rd person concerning various scenes over the past two generations in the small Mexican town of Colma (fictional?). In addition, some of the scenes seem to be "live," some are visions or dreams; some of the characters are "live," others are ghosts and revenants. To say this places a heavy demand on the reader is to put it mildly; the jacket blurb calls it a work of "surrealism," but I think that simplifies the case. As with its near contemporary The Master and Marguerita (USSR), this novel mixes visionary writing and imagery w/ realism - delving into the complex history of the town, blood rivalries, killings. It predates the Magic Realism that dominated Latin American literature from the 60s onward, but there is a little foreshadowing of this genre as well, with the tales of the Paramo family gobbling up land and then crashing into ruin and oblivion hinting at the tales of the Buendia family still to come (Garcia Marquez). Very roughly, the story line involves a man urged by his mother on her deathbed to visit her home town for the first time to meet the eponymous Paramo, who she tells him is his father. The man arrives at the town only to learn that PP has died some years back; the town is almost deserted, but he finds a woman - who turns out to be his aunt - willing to give him housing for the night. The woman - and just about everyone else he meets - turns out to be a ghost. In some strange manner the people (ghosts) in teh village were aware that this young man was coming to pay a visit. In a series of dream-visions he learns of various events in the history of the Paramo family, some involving his alleged father, Pedro, others involving Miguel, whom I think is his grandfather? Not sure. He also learns more about his mother and her difficult marriage to PP. This novel demands at least one re-reading if one is to fully comprehend the narrative - and that's probably OK for such a short novel. In a way, it reads more like a prose poem that traditional narrative fiction, so perhaps it's best to approach it as such: a collage of images, moods, and viewpoints.

Isak Dinesen's cruelty and Babette's Feast

Recently watched Axel's 1987 film, Babette's Feast (see related post on Elliotswatching blog) and have gone back to read Isak Dinesen's short story on which the film was based; it's part of what I think was her final collection, Anecdotes of Destiny (1958). First thing to note is that Axel's adaptation is extremely faithful to the text of the story, down to the smallest morsels of dialog, with a few exceptions, all but one of which are insignificant: setting moved from Denmark to Norway (actually Denmak feels more correct, as that's ID's native land and where she lived when writing these late-life stories), the opera singer is more dashing and handsome in the story, the General's remarks about the feast are internal in the story and spoken aloud in the film - for obvious reasons, but they also give the other guests more guidance on how to eat and appreciate the feast. Maybe it's also significant that in the story Babette never learns to speak good Norwegian, whereas in the film she seems to be fluent. The only significant difference, though, occurs at the end, when Babette tells the two sisters who'd taken her in that she won't go back to France because all the people she'd loved are gone. The sisters say: But all these people you've named were aristocrats, the ones you'd fought against (B was a "communard," advocating the "rights of man") and who killed your husband and child. She notes that these people patronized her restaurant and knew what a great chef she was; she states that she can now, having completed the feast, be at peace for the rest of her life because she has proven that she is a "true artist." Virtually all the commentary I've read/seen re the film indicate that the feast is like a communion and that the rigid and restrained villagers become more loving and winsome, as if the feast were something beautiful and holy w/ the power of transformation. Sorry but I don't see this at all, aside from the fact that the villagers seem a little tipsy by the end - though the still can't bring themselves to say anything kind to B. I see her feast as an act of hubris and cruelty: She spends all her money on one meal, leaving herself once again completely at the mercy of the charity of others. The feast itself represents everything that the villagers - whether right or wrong - oppose and reject: earthly pleasure, extravagance, waste, diverting money from charity to personal welfare. Forcing them to eat this feast is cruel - and could certainly have made many of the villagers ill: after a lifetime of dried fish and bread they're eating quail and tortoise soup and caviar and fois-gras? And all so that B can see herself as an "artist"? What vanity! A true artist, by the way, would create a great dinner that all would enjoy and that could be created (and re-created) with what's at hand; a truly generous person would have given back to the community in some meaningful way, in gratitude for taking her in as a refugee. (Of course, however, B does have a right to resent living based on charity from others: In the film, we see the rude and sparsely  furnished room in which she lives, quite a contrast to the simple, Shaker-like rooms where the sisters live.) In all, Dinesen is a cruel writer - cruel to her characters and indifferent to their cruelty to others. (See related post on her story The Sorrw-Acre).

A New Yorker story story that tells much - though not enough - by allusion

A writer named Sam Allingham - I know nothing about him - has an intriguing story, The Intermediate Class, in the current New Yorker; I can't say I loved the story, but it drew me along right to the end, which says something. Roughly, the story is about a young man, Kyril, who attends an adult-learning class in intermediate or second-year German, and we follow him through a semester of the class, with most of the narrative consisting of conversations among the classmates, guided by the teacher. The conversations are in "German," that is, the students are told to converse in German only, though they conversations appear in accurately translated English, that is, broken English - pretty much the way students might converse in an "intermediate" class in English. I'm drawn to the story from my own experiences learning a language while living in another culture, and it's interesting to see relationships develop or hint at developing among the classmates and between some of the classmates and the teacher. That said, there is so much about this story that we don't know and don't learn. For example, Allingham never states where this story takes place, though it does not appear to be in Germany. We know nothing about Kyril aside from what takes place in class or among the students; he could be a Russian immigrant, judging from his name, but we don't really know why he or any of the others in the small class are interested in learning German. One of the classmates becomes perturbed about some of the teaching methods and indicates he's feeling ripped off re the $300 enrollment fee - this would suggest that he has to take the course to learn German, though again it's not clear why. Another classmate disappears for some time but returns for the final class, looking disheveled and perhaps a victim of an assault - no explanation given. I like stories that have some mystery and allusion, but I think Allingham pushes his luck too far in this one. I finished feeling that I didn't know enough about the characters to make the journey worth the candle (it's pretty long for a NYer fiction piece), and as w/ so many NYer pieces I wondered if this might be part of a longer narrative - if not, perhaps it should be.

Reflecting on William Butler Yeats on Easter Sunday

I've been reading through some of the poems of William Butler Yeats, including, coincidentally, Easter 1916, which I read yesterday. Is it still a great poem? Part of the pleasure and interest in reading through some selected Yeats poems comes from watching the evolution of the mind of a poet: from the early somewhat romantic and sentimental work, to an interest in traditional Irish verse and mythology, to the political poems about the Irish uprisings and fights for independence (such as Easter 1916), to the late poems built in part of Yeats's own mythology, and some final poems about age and death, such as Among School Children. Naturally when I was younger I was most drawn to the early poems, including 2 in the Modern Poems (eds Ellman and O'Dair) that I've been reading through: The Like Isle of Inisfree, most of which I can quote from memory thanks to a folk album I had as a teenager - Paths of Victory, By Hamilton Camp - in which he set some poems to his own musical compositions - and When You are Old: strangely, I was really struck by the reference to his loving the "pilgrim soul" of this beautiful woman. I still don't quite know what that means, however, The Irish Uprising poems didn't do much for me when I was younger - and I have to say that now they don't read so well, anyway. Any poem for which we have to look up virtually every name reference is probably not going to last as great verse. Yet: Yet, the poem has memorialized the Uprising - which seems so incredible today, Irish freedom fighters jailed and within a month executed by the British state! - in a way that no history book or account can do, has done. "A terrible beauty is born," still rings like the tolling of a bell. Most of all, it's inspiring to think that there was a day when poems such as this could be published in a daily newspaper, and readers would care about the verse and react to it: It was brave of Yeats to publish such incendiary materials; though many of the topical references in his political poetry are today obscure, we read these poems today to keep alive the idea of poets as the "unacknowledged legislators of the race." Any look at any set of current New Yorker poems will show us, sadly, how far we've moved away from that political ideal.