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| Jackson,
Jon A. Hit on the House Jing Wang, ed. China's Avant-Garde Fiction Jones, Edward P. The Known World Kay, Guy Gavriel. Sailing to Sarantium Kessel, Joseph. Makhno et sa juive Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible Korkut, Dede. The Book of Dede Korkut Krich, John. A Totally Free Man. Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies Lee, Chang-Rae. Native Speaker Leonard, Elmore. Cuba Libre Leonard, Elmore. Swag Mahfouz, Naguib. Children of Gebelawi Mahfouz, Naguib. The Day the Leader Was Killed Mann, Thomas. "Death in Venice." Markson, David. This is Not a Novel Marris, Peter. The Dreams of General Jerusalem McCaffery, Larry, ed. Avant-Pop McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men McCourt, Frank. Angela's Ashes McCullers, Carson. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter Naipaul, V. S. Miguel Street Okri, Ben. The Famished Road Ondaatje, Michael. Anil's Ghost |
Pamuk, Orhan. Istanbul: Memories and the City
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Intra-mob treachery in Detroit, with hit men getting hit by other hit men, explodes into greater mayhem when obnoxious, uneducated but mechanically gifted little Gene Lande starts blowing scum away as a way of getting a little respect. Detective Sergeant "Fang" Mulheisen stumbles through this web without ever understanding any of it.
"It's funny to talk about Detroit when you're someplace else."
"Really? Why would you say that?"
"Well, you know," she [Bonny, Gene Lande's wife] said, "You run into these people and you both are like 'Isn't it great? We're not in Detroit!' Even if you're in, maybe, Buffalo." [97]"You white folks have run out on Detroit," she [Yvonne Marshall] said, "but you still need it, to make money out of it. We'll have something called the Greater Detroit Urban Zone. Reorganize all the services, realign the taxes, and cut through all this bull crap of all these little towns that ring the city-Warren, Harper Woods, the Grosse Pointes (why in hell should there be five Grosse Pointes?), Royal Oak, Ferndale, Hamtramck, Center Line (Center Line!) Why there's dozens of them. Already the police have so much bureaucratic red tape to get through when someone robs a store on Eight Mile Road-it's just crazy. The zone will take in Wayne County, Oakland County, Washtenaw and we'll have a CEO instead of a mayor, a zone commission instead of a city council" [199]
Fascinating stories from China's short-lived "avant garde" literary movement of the 1980s.
This powerful novel, like a Brueghel painting, is a crowd scene of individual portraits where each character is engaged in some intense, private activity. The collective ritual in this case is slavery in the ante-bellum South of the U.S., and the characters include black slaves, black freemen and women some of whom are themselves slave owners, whites of various social statuses and backgrounds, and an Indian of ambiguous status – not quite enslavable, but not quite a white. Some of these characters, black and white, attempt to behave honorably without always succeeding; some do cruel things thoughtlessly or selfishly. All are trapped in a system that rewards whites for cruelty even when they want to be just, and servility from blacks no matter how hard they struggle to attain and retain dignity. The women – especially the black women -- are as vivid as the men. Though most of the action gets started in one county in Virginia in the 1840s, Jones wants to know what became of his creatures after they left the county, some as far as Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, and shows us the lives of the surviving blacks many decades later, after the Civil War and emancipation. Some of them do achieve dignity. 20051121
Kay, Guy Gavriel. Sailing to Sarantium. New York: HarperPrism, 1998. 533pp.
I read this mainly because I too am writing a novel about Byzantium, and wanted to see what Kay had done with it. By labeling Constantinople and its empire "Sarantium," calling Rome "Rhodias" and endowing his planet with two moons (one blue), that is, by presenting the story as a fantasy rather than historical fiction, he permits himself some convenient distortions and no doubt saved himself a lot of detailed research. Not that he has neglected his research -- he has done lots and lots of it, in order to re-imagine the imperial court and the street life of Constantinople in the heyday of the empire. But he is not obliged to say just what date that heyday was, and can combine events and customs from different moments in that empire's 1,100-year history. Mostly, what he seems to have in mind is the reign of Justinian (527-565 AD), and particularly his project to build the world's largest and most magnificent domed cathedral, the Hagia Sophia ("Holy Wisdom"), inaugurated with a spectacular feast -- unfortunately not included in the novel -- in 537.The chief protagonist is the "Rhodian" artisan Crispin, a mosaicist, whom the emperor -- here called Valerius -- has summoned to decorate, as magnificently as possible, the great dome.
In the book's 533 pages there are several incidents and many forebodings of more important events, but these larger events never come to pass. Kay must see himself as like his mosaicist, constructing an intricate design of many pieces -- tesserae, in the case of Crispin, incidents in Kay's case. And the author is a skillful artisan. All the incidents do ultimately connect. And, like Crispin's design for the great dome (we only get to see the design, because the story ends just as he's about to start its execution), Kay's novel has a couple of larger, more complex incidents to balance the composition: an encounter with a magical, terrible bison called a zubir to which the northern pagans must sacrifice maidens, and a long, athletically written (he must have been exhausted at his word processor) eight-chariot race on the Hippodrome. I don't know what the zubir is based on, if anything, or the magical mechanical birds that hold women's souls, but the chariot race tries to bring alive the races of Constantinople's real Hippodrome. And much is made of the sporting factions, Blues, Greens, Whites and Reds, which also really existed. This is a large and well-constructed work of craft, that holds the eye and leads it from event to event. But because the events themselves, while interconnected, do not create a cumulative tension but each has only its own minor and isolated resolution, it is only a minor work of art. 00/9/17
In the early morning in a crummy Paris bar for Russian émigrés, a sickly and angry cigarette vendor insists on telling the story of the pitiless Ukrainian anarchist terrorist, massacrer of Orthodox and especially Jews in the civil wars of 1917-18, who is suddenly softened and almost humanized by gentle Jewish girl who shows him compassion. Vividly and compellingly written, makes you feel the fear when Makhno comes to town, a monster so complex that his abrupt (and probably brief) sensitivity is completely plausible. Makhno was a real anarchist guerrilla chieftain who also appears in Isaac Babel's stories in Red Cavalry. 07/10/13
From the first, we step into prose as dense and fecund as the African forest it describes.
"The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. ... This forest eats itself and lives forever."
Nathan Price, a white Southern Baptist preacher, has taken his Georgia-born family to a remote village of the Congo in 1959, on the eve of independence. He is determined to teach the Africans God's word and American farm techniques. While his refusal to adapt to African climate and customs carry the family closer to disaster, his wife and four daughters do adapt and are transformed in different ways.
One will grow up to be a champion of the extreme white privilege that she can enjoy only in black Africa. Another will marry a Congolese and identify herself with him and the country. The third will apply her African-based knowledge of living things to research on viruses, and the littlest will become most literally a part of Africa. And the mother -- well, hers will be a bitter sort of triumph.
But the most memorable characters are not the four Price women, but those we see through their eyes: Among the Africans, the imposing and ceremonious village chief, the crafty witch-doctor, the idealistic young Lumumbist, and many women, including a neighbor with no legs who surreptitiously supports the white family. Among the whites, some hypocritical and other more generous missionaries, a sleazy arms trafficker, and the Lear-like monster Nathan Price. Viewing them all from four points of view is an effective way to present the complex and violent story of Congolese independence and its sequels. 020309
Korkut, Dede. The Book of Dede Korkut, tr. Geoffrey Lewis. London: Penguin, 1974.
Part of the charm of old folktales is their lack of our usual reference points of time and place. The warriors and princesses in these stories did not think of their homeland as Central Asia, but simply as the center of their world. Nor did they think of themselves as Turks -- they called themselves Oghuz, of whom there were two great bands: the Inner and the Outer Oghuz. The "Turks" were another, related tribe, but the Han Chinese and other outsiders called them all by that label, and eventually the Oghuz accepted it. These tales reflect a time before the Oghuz had begun their great migrations westward (pushed out of their eastern steppes by their cousins, the even more aggressive Mongols), around the 9th and 10th centuries, and before the majority of them had been converted to Islam. The version we have was edited and printed in the century after the Oghuz's most famous descendants, the "Ottomans" (people of Osman), had taken Constantinople (1453) and were still expanding their empire. The old dede, or "grandfather" or "holy man," who first compiled these stories may or may not really have been named Korkut. See "Adult Education among the Oghuz."
Fidel Castro tells his life story to a tape recorder. ntbk 3/11/88 (34-6). Implausible premise, funny and probably generally accurate history. See my essay, Mermaids and Other Fetishes.
Fiction interspersed with essays, autobiographical references & flights of fancy. What holds it together are: Themes of "laughter" (subversive of the solemnity of dictators) and "forgetting" (the dictators' tool, to control the present by controling the past); the opposition between "angels," who represent, not the good, but the well-ordered, & Satan, who represents chaos, disorder, improvisation; life is really only tolerable when these two forces are in balance (or are alternating). The stultifying dominion of the angels is represented by the spaced-out bliss of the circle dancers, refusing to see all that is ugly and inharmonious, rising above the steeples and spires of Prague.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. 198 pp.
The title story is an interesting twist on the famous cave scene in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India - - here, instead of a hysterical Englishwoman confronting a polite Indian male tour guide, it's a near-hysterical Americanized Indian woman who shares a confidence with the polite Indian male tour guide without even considering the effects her story may have on him.
Like any collection of stories, this one is uneven, in part deliberately so, because Lahiri experiments with different voices and different points of view. The most interesting to me was "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar," told by a collective "we" representing the women in Bibi Haldar's neighborhood in an Indian city. Bibi's malady, and the miraculous cure, remain mysterious, so the story is really about that collective voice, which tells us about the ordinary assumptions and routines of that neighborhood's respectable (though clearly not affluent) wives. In "Sexy," Lahiri assumes the p.o.v. of a naïve young American woman who allows herself to be seduced by a dashing, married Indian gentleman who clearly is experienced at this sort of affair. It's a pretty successful effort to stand apart from her own subculture - middle-class Indian expats in the US Northeast - and look at one of her own as a native American would see him. Lahiri does something like this again in "At Mrs. Sen's," where the p.o.v. character (narrated in third person) is a little American boy observing his Indian baby-sitter. This is the most powerful story in the collection, making excruciatingly vivid the anxieties of many women like Mrs. Sen, uprooted (for the sake of the husband's career) from the only culture that makes sense to her.
Not much happens in Lahiri's world. Even the unseen family of Mr. Pirzada ("When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine"), seemingly endangered by the ferocious ethnic war that tore Pakistan into two countries (one now called Bangladesh), emerges utterly unscathed. Only one truly poor person truly suffers, the possibly delusional Boori Ma who loses her humble garret and caretaker's job, in some Indian city, in the story "A Real Durwan." For the most part, Lahiri's is a gentle world of curry and cosmetics and mild domestic tensions, a pleasant and quiet place to visit, but rather boring.
A tedious, slow-moving, vastly over-praised story about a young Korean American man in New York, redeemed somewhat by sensitive reflections on the confusion and between-ness of the immigrant's experience. The only two interesting, complex characters are the narrator-protagonist himself, Henry Park, and his father, a strong-willed immigrant who fills Henry with admiration for his tenacity and ingenuity at the same time as he embarrasses him for his old-country ways and stubborn prejudices. Unfortunately we see too little of this father. Instead, Lee embeds his observations on immigrant lives in Queens, New York, in a silly plot about a clandestine company of identity spies (Henry is one of them), who gain the confidence of outstanding immigrants in order to destroy them. This requires Lee to introduce a lot of irrelevant verbiage about Henry Park's reports to the sneaky and nearly feature-less president of the spy firm, but you can skip over this stuff. Henry Park's spy-target, City Councilman John Kwang, inspires more interesting thoughts, even though he is as shallowly drawn as most of the other characters. Except for Henry's father, the characters exist merely as foils for Henry Park to meditate obsessively on his own adaptation to America. 020324
Cowboy Ben Tyler in Cuba 1898 gets caught up in the independence war with cruel Spanish officers, less cruel Cuban officers in service to Spain, independence fighters both noble & treacherous, & a decadent American millionaire landowner; he wins the girl (Amelia, a tough, opportunistic American) &, after settling all scores with his Colt .44s, takes her to start a cattle ranch in Cuba libre. Ridiculous story, in which Cuba is merely a backdrop for the actions of American characters plucked from a US western, filled in with meticulous research on naval armaments & prison conditions of the time. 99/7/21
Used-car salesman Frank Ryan recruits cement mixer & chronic car thief Ernest Stickley, Jr. ("Stick") for spree of armed robbery in Detroit's suburbs. But they break several of Ryan's 10 rules - "Never associate with people known to be in crime," etc. - when they team up with black hustler Sportree & his allies to rob J. L. Hudson's in Detroit; unplanned mayhem in Hudson's, double-cross by Sportree, undone by Stick & Ryan's death-defying double-double-cross & murder of Sportree. A clever white cop guided by an even cleverer fat black prosecutor catches them & the loot. Formerly titled Ryan's Rules.
Takes place in Cairo not on a single day, but over an unspecified
span of weeks culminating October 6, 1981. On that day a young
low-level government clerk named Elwan Fawwaz Muhtashim explodes
in rage at the bourgeois frustrations of his bourgeois love aspirations,
and commits a folly that redeems his honor but will certainly
destroy his career. On that day also, the symbol and partical
cause of the frustrations of the urban middle class, President
Anwar al-Sadat, is assassinated.
This is a slight book of limited ambition, a piece -- barely
more than a chapter -- in Mahfouz's life-time oeuvre of huge
ambition, to retell the whole modern Arab experience. He tells
the story in alternate chapters from three first-person points
of view: Elwan; his grandfather -- as old as the century, a retired
school teacher who remembers his youthful participation in the
1919 "National Movement" and who sees Elwan's dilemma
in that long historical perspective; and Randa, Elwan's long-time
girlfriend and fiancée, who works in the same government
office. She loses much of her respect but none of her affection
for Elwan when, bowing to economic and parental pressure, he
declares their engagement to be at an end.
In a noisome, quarrelsome alley of Cairo, people tell stories of Gebelawi, a mysterious & powerful old man who is the progenitor of them all, & of the heroes who periodically have come to win justice & a fair share of Gebelawi's estate for the people of the alley. These heroes incl. his son Adham (put in charge of the estate governed from the Big House, where Gebelawi has shut himself up with his gardens & servants) & his vengeful older brother Idris (who cajoles Adham to peek at Gebelawi's forbidden book of knowledge, thus getting Adham & his wife expelled from the big house); Gebel, generations later, a poor orphan brought up in the Trustee's mansion, who believes he has heard Gebelawi himself instruct him to lead and challenges the rule of the Trustee & his Chief (who terrorizes the alley) & leads his people in a successful rebellion, leading them to control of the promised Estate & becoming Trustee; himself; Rifaa, a gentle youth, son of a carpenter, who is not interested in the Estate but in happiness for all, & who is nevertheless murdered by the chiefs--his body disappears from its tomb, probably taken by his loving disciples, but the story is told that Gebelawi himself came and took him up; Kassem, who wants the Estate & happiness for all, and, after marrying a rich woman & becoming a prosperous merchant himself, leads his followers to a mountain redoubt from which they attack the chiefs of the alley & ultimately triumph--Kassem enforces literally the injunction "an eye for an eye" & justice reigns during his lifetime, although succeeding trustees & chiefs fall back into the old ways; and Arafa, a non-believer or at least a skeptic regarding the power of Gebelawi, who hopes to redeem his people by teaching them all magic, and who causes the death of the ancient Gebelawi by tunneling into his house to peek at the forbidden book--he never sees the book, but in his fright he strangles an old Negro servant, & Gebelawi (whom Arafa never sees) is then reported to have died of shock. A forerunner of Satanic Verses, which caused a similar (if less bloodthirsty) outcry in 1959, when the mullah's tried to stop its serial publication.1/19/91 1st pub. as serial in Al-Ahram, Cairo, 1959.
Gustave
von Aschenbach, a famous but lonely 60-ish author in Munich, decides to
spark his dull life by a an unscheduled vacation in Venice, where he is
so overwhelmed by the beauty and youth of an unreachable object that he
dies of desire.
The love-object is a young boy (12? 10?) who
is called, Aschenbach thinks, "Tadzio" and whose Polish-speaking family
is staying in the same hotel. The language barrier could be easily
breached, if this were a realistic story; those prosperous Poles would
surely be able to communicate in French or German. Rather, it is
Aschenbach's inhibitions that prevent him from ever speaking directly
to the boy, while desire drives him to spy on him. Death comes to
Aschenbach from a plague that he could easily have avoided, if he had
not been sneaking around the infested parts of town for further
glimpses of the boy.
Mann was himself a famous author by this
time (1911), though only 36. The story seems to be an ironic
commentary, a mean-spirited joke, about his profession -- that no
matter how cultured a writer or other artist may seem, animal desires
win out. Mann uses the story as a structure to hang various reflections
about art and desire, his and Aschenbach's. For example:
"Men do
not know why they award fame to one work of art rather than another.
Without being in the faintest conoisseurs, they theink to justify the
warmth of their commendations by discovering in it a hundred virtues,
whereas the real ground of their applause is inexplicable -- it is
sympathy." (Pp. 10-11 in my edition)
"Sympathy" as in just liking the author's voice, I suppose. Or the cover photo. There's probably something to that.
Here Aschenbach imagines himself as Michelangelo:
"And
yet the pure, strong will which had laboured in darkness and succeeded
in bringing this godlike work of art [Tadzio] to the light of day --
was it not known and familiar to him, the artist? Was it not the same
force at work in himself when he strove in cold fury to liberate from
the marble mass of language the slender forms of his art which he saw
with the eye of his mind and would body forth to men as the mirror and
image of spiritual beauty?" (44)
"Marble mass of language" indeed! Aschenbach is a more pretentious version of Updike's pathetic Bech,
a kind of negative alter ego. Mann was having wicked fun. But here's a
passage that may (possibly) express Mann's own view of his profession:
"This
life in the bonds of art... had been a service, and he a soldier, like
some of them [Aschenbach is thinking of his warrior ancestors]; and art
was war -- a grilling, exhausting struggle that nowadays wore one out
before one could grow old. it had been a life of self-conquest, a life
against odds, dour, steadfast, abstinent; he had made it symbolical of
the kind of overstrained heroism the time admired, and he was entitled
to call it manly, even courageous." (56-57)
Well, maybe Mann did not really mean that. It sounds pretty ridiculous today.
"Some
minutes passed before anyone hastened to the aid of the elderly man
sitting there collapsed in his chair. They bore him to his room. And
before nightfall a shocked and respectful world received the news of
his decease." (75)
One hopes the world awarded him a Purple Heart to match his face.
An entertaining and provocative experiment in writing "A novel with no intimation of story whatsoever.... / And with no characters. None. ... / Plotless. Characterless. / Yet seducing the reader into turning pages nonetheless." Oddly, it works. If not a novel, it is perhaps an epic poem, if Writer says it is, or, most accurately, as he suggests on one of the last pages, "a kind of verbal fugue." The paragraphs, some no more than two words and none more than five lines, are like (or simply are) stanzas, most containing odd facts about writers and other creative people ("Frans Hals was once arrested for beating his wife.") A recurrent theme is the manners of death of these people, further emphasized by this repeated statement:- "Timor mortis conturbat me. / The fear of death distresses me." Another is the ironies of anti-Semitism: "What the world would know of the Holocaust if the Germans had won" is one entire stanza. (The answer? Not much, I suppose.) The overriding theme is the writer's right to create whatever he pleases and call it whatever he wants. "Chi son? Chi son? Son un poeta / Che cosa faccio? Scrivo." It's an inspiring note for any writer, or at least for this one (me) 021215.
A parable about the grotesque misunderstandings and comic or tragic results when American and W. European do-gooders try to mesh their dreams with those of Africans. In the capital of an unnamed country (a lot like Kenya), Englishman George Eaton -- who was reared there -- returns at the behest of Peter Petterson, a program officer of The Foundation (also unnamed, rather like the Ford Foundation) to develop an urban plan for slum clearance and resettlement, to be financed in part by construction of a tourist hotel in the vacated seaside property. Government leaders see this as an opportunity to make money (buying up pieces of the land and adjacent property), 'General Jerusalem' (aka Livingstone Karuma) -- a sort of Al Sharpton with a sect based in another poor neighborhood -- persuades Petterson to include several of his pet projects (technical schools & industries among them) -- and only British-educated Wallace Munene, childhood semi-chum of Eaton & now a minister in the government -- backs the plan for its own perceived merits. Everything goes wrong: the slum is cleared precipitously and violently ahead of time, the new settlement is left shoddy and mostly unbuilt, no hotel is ever built, Munene is murdered while Eaton romances Munene's English wife Ann. Yet, when Eaton goes back a few years later, the country has muddled through and the city seems to have found at least partial solutions to its many problems. Besides Livingstone Kuruma, the most engaging character is the fearless, disorganized American anthropologist Barbara, who sums up the whole mess in a tape recording she sends to Eaton -- Munene wasn't as pure as Eaton supposed, and nothing was as it seemed. Marris is author seven sociological studies and a former professor of urban planning (and long before that, a colonial officer in Kenya). He writes here as in his sociology with great clarity and understated humor. The dialogue is mostly believable, the sex scenes (one and a half) pretty unsteamy; as allegorical/didactic fiction goes, it is more convincing than Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. 20040113
In the late 20th century, it took a lot to épater les bourgeois, since the literate bourgeois had become so jaded. Here we read a lot about cunts and gooey masturbation in nonlinear (and in one case -- by Samuel R. Delany -- circular) narrative. The subtlest, and possibly funniest, piece is McCaffery's introduction (he poses as a "private e" -- i.e., editor), the most inspired lunacy is, as usual, from Mark Leyner, and Kathy Acker does her aggressive cunt-in-your-face thing. Also contributions by William T. Vollman, Harold Jaffe, and some other folks I'd never heard of and may not hear of again. 020206 (See also Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School)
Aging sheriff in quiet Texas county c. 1985 is defeated by a new rash of narco homicides of a scale and brutality outside of his tradition. Best things in the book are the monologues of Sheriff Ed Jim Bell, in his peculiar South Texas drawl, reflecting on violence past, on evil in all times, and on changing society now. The calculated but naïve run of welder and Vietnam vet Llewellyn Moss, who has accidentally found an attaché case with over 2 million dollars and is then pursued by two separate bands of killers, is also good -- it's what keeps you turning the pages. The intelligent, efficient Anton Chigurh, the killer that nobody lives to describe, never really comes alive as a character and is not really interesting company--as Carson Wells, another professional killer who is at first Chigurh's pursuer but finally his victim, puts it, Chigurh has no sense of humor, just a rigid code of unemotional vengeance as a kind of justice.
Not fiction, strictly speaking, but a memoir narrated with the fluidity and structure or narrative "arc" of a novel. It is a beautifully told story of terrible poverty in Limerick, Ireland, from about 1934, when Francis McCourt was 4, to 1949, when he returned to New York, where he'd been born. Many forces conspire to drive the family down, but the decisive one is the alcoholic irresponsibility of the father, Malachy.
A placid southern town is revealed to be torn by intense passions as McCullers takes us into the consciousness of several of its poor and lower middle-class citizens. The girl Mick Kelly comes of age (at 15), a radical drifter is defeated once again in his efforts to make the "Don't knows" understand how they're oppressed, the owner of the all-night New York Café watches it all, and the town's sole black physician finally bursts the dam of a lifetime of rage against white injustice. All these people confide in the sympathetic deaf-mute, believing he alone can understand them but he doesn't, and he in turn attributes such deep understanding of his own emotions to a fat, self-centered deaf-mute moron. It is the black physician Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland who is the novel's most thoroughly imagined character besides Mick, who must be a version of McCullers herself, who was only 24 when this first novel appeared. 02-10-02
Naipaul's "first written, though third published novel." A series of character sketches from a Port-of-Spain (Trinidad) slum, related by an East Indian Trinidadian child becoming adolescent, sketch by sketch. They read like practice pieces, exercises in portraiture and dialogue, in the peculiar syntax that I suppose is (was?) characteristic of the Port-of-Spain proletariat. Book is of interest mainly for understanding Naipaul's development of his craft. Time is impressionistic, child's time. The early sketches take place in the "once upon a time," or disappeared eternity, of the experience of one who is very new to the world and to whom all adults seem immutable. The story I found most memorable is "B. Wordsworth," the poet who never existed and who was never a poet and who may or may not have survived a girl poet pregnant with their little poet, ut who still left the boy narrator with the sense that he carried poetry in him. (1982.10.28)
Terror to combat terror. Those who interfere with the killing will be killed, preferably in an exemplary manner. Your corpse will be disfigured, perhaps mutilated, or with multiple fractures, or your head may be stuck on a pole where everyone in your village must see it as they pass by. And none better remove it, lest they suffer the same fate.
This is what Ondaatje confronts in this novel. A three-way
war of terror rages in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s, early 1990s:
the government, trying to hold the center, against Sinhalese
insurgents in the south and Tamil separatists in the north. This
sort of thing is not exclusive to Sri Lanka, he recognizes in
a scene describing the exhumation of terror victims in far-off
Guatemala.
We witness only two acts of violence in this novel, one of them
trivial in this context: Anil, the Sri Lanka-born heroine, in
a rage that is both plausible and incomprehensible, stabs her
obtuse American lover in the forearm and abandons him in their
hotel room.
The other occurs much later, near the end of the novel: we watch a suicide bomber make his preparations, approach the president of Sri Lanka in the midst of a festival crowd, and detonate. Dozens are killed, none of them known to us from the novel.
Mostly, we are acquainted with violence by being forced to look very closely at its results, those mutilated corpses. To make a story to contain his cry of anguish, Ondaatje fashions a murder mystery. Anil, like Ondaatje a long-time expatriate, returns to Sri Lanka as a forensic pathologist for the UN Human Rights Commission. Teamed with Sarath, a sad, older Sri Lankan archeologist, reluctant to probe such dangerous issues but too good-hearted and honest to refuse, she seeks to discover the identity of a recent corpse discovered in an ancient burial ground. It is a flimsy device, but strong enough to hold the willing reader for the things Ondaatje needs to tell us, about ways of dying and killing, ancient and modern medicine, familial jealousies, the beauty of the Sri Lankan sun, its mountains, forests and waters, which somehow survive the horrible destruction of humanity. 01/4/6
Sweat, spirits and poverty in rural Nigeria, as seen by a credulous spirit who consents to be born to a poor couple. Dad is immensely strong, honest and rebellious; Mum is infinitely supportive and uncomplaining; Madame Koto is fat, corrupt, powerful and sometimes kindly. Magic irrealism, which gets tiresomely repetitive. 2002/07/30
In the late 20th century, it took a lot to épater les bourgeois, since the literate bourgeois had become so jaded. Here we read a lot about cunts and gooey masturbation in nonlinear (and in one case -- by Samuel R. Delany -- circular) narrative. The subtlest, and possibly funniest, piece is McCaffery's introduction (he poses as a "private e" -- i.e., editor), the most inspired lunacy is, as usual, from Mark Leyner, and Kathy Acker does her aggressive cunt-in-your-face thing. Also contributions by William T. Vollman, Harold Jaffe, and some other folks I'd never heard of and may not hear of again. 020206 (See also Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School)
Pamuk, Orhan. 2005. Istanbul: Memories and the City. Translated by M. Freely. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Pamuk projects his personal melancholy -- hüzün
in Turkish -- onto this once-great city, interspersing reminiscences of
a privileged but cloistered childhood with meditations on writers and
artists who have portrayed the city.
Istanbul’s hüzün, he tells us, is different from the tristesse
that Claude Lévi-Strauss found in tropical cities such as Delhi or São
Paulo, because “in Istanbul the remains of a glorious past civilization
are everywhere visible. … For the city’s more sensitive and attuned
residents, these ruins are reminders that the present city is so poor
and confused that it can never again dream of rising to its former
heights of wealth, power, and culture.” (p. 101) Sensitive and attuned
though he may be, he appears unaware that Delhi had “a glorious past
civilization” of its own, even more ancient than
Istanbul/Constantinople.
Flaubert, Gérard de Nerval, Théophile
de Gautier and other foreign visitors help shape Pamuk’s vision of what
the city was like before he knew it, and also, he argues, shaped the
way of looking at it of later Turkish writers, particularly “the great
fat poet, Yahya Kemal”; “the popular historian Reshat Ekrem Koçu”; the
memoirist Abdülhuk Shinasi Hisar; and the novelist Ahmet Hamdi
Tanpinar. (Spellings approximate; I don’t have a Turkish font.)
To
me the most interesting chapter was “The Rich,” the class from which
Pamuk’s family was descending (falling) throughout his childhood, which
includes this acute observation:
“If Istanbul’s westernized
bourgeoisie gave support to the military interventions of the past
forty years, never strenuously objecting to military interference in
politics, it was not because it feared a leftist uprising (the Turkish
left in this country [sic] has never been strong enough to achieve such
a feat); rather, the elite’s tolerance of the military was rooted in
the fear that one day the lower classes would combine forces with the
new rich pouring in from the provinces to abolish the westernized
bourgeois way of life under the banner of religion.” (p. 183)
His
personal story here goes up to about age 20, when, in the final
sentence, he declares that he is going to be a writer. His
reminiscences of childhood help explain some of the peculiarities of
his fiction, for example his childhood fascination with an imaginary
double (“the other Orhan”), which is the central theme of
The White Castle, and his fascination with miniaturists and meticulous
reproduction of familiar scenes, as in My Name is Red.
And the many photographs and other illustrations, one or more on almost
every page, all in black and white, seem to confirm his vision of his
own and his city’s hüzün.
A young Venetian becomes slave of a Turk whom he greatly resembles & over several decades assists in his schemes, especially the invention of a monstrous war machine, to win the favor of the sultan. Each man -- slave and master -- teaches the other his language & details of his culture, until, possibly but ambiguously, they exchange identities. One or the other of them escapes the wrath of the sultan (when the machine fails) & escapes to Italy. Multi-framed (a fictional contemporary claims to have discovered a manuscript, the manuscript turns out not to have been written by the person in whose voice it is told), to multiply the ambiguities of what is otherwise a not very interesting story. Ntbk 99/8/5
Who cares who murdered Elegant Effendi? You probably won't and I didn't, but the question obsesses the other miniaturists working for the sultan, Refuge of the World, in 17th century Constantinople. The intrigue all has to do with the incursion of Venetian pictorial techniques perspective, individual and realistic portraiture in an ancient tradition of painting perfect and beautiful representations of idealized figures. The characters address us directly, aware that they have a reader but seemingly unaware that this reader also knows what is in the minds (or at least the stories) of the other characters. Figures from the miniaturists' sketches in a coffee house also speak to us a hastily drawn dog, a horse, the color red. Some of these little tales are enchanting (the dog especially), though they don't always work together very well to make a coherent total. Besides murder by blunt instruments, mutilations and tortures, the reader also has to endure the obnoxious, self-absorbed and rather stupid Shekure, probable widow of a man missing in action and beloved of the indecisive Black (who is not a color but a painter). 021127
This is a fairy-tale version of the real seizure of the Japanese ambassador's home and his party guests by a guerrilla squad of the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru in Lima in 1997. In an unnamed country that strongly resembles Peru, worldly and rich Russians, Japanese, Italians, French, and Creoles are taken captive by Quechua- and Spanish-speaking naïfs in a mansion that is like an Enchanted Castle, and the one woman among the captives a beautiful operatic soprano enchants them all. It all comes to a fairy-tale ending bloodily poetic for some, happily-ever-after for others. In narrative structure, it reminded me of Alejandro Casona's romantic melodrama, Siete Gritos en el Mar. In subject matter, it made me appreciate the far grittier realism of Gabriel García Márquez's Diario de un secuestro. 2002-08-06
Three story lines, each with its distinctive voice, two in the novelistic present (early 1980s) and one running from 1 May 1914 to some time in 1917, with ambiguous hints of later development embedded in the other two stories. An unnamed "I" (in the "present") thinks he recognizes himself in the August Sander photo and tracks down every bit of information he can about these three young Dutch farmers, dressed in their finest and jauntily strolling through fields, on the eve of World War I. Most impressive is the powerful, vivid re-imagining of the impact of those war years on ordinary lives. (1987/11/20)
In 1944, 24-year old Loyal Blood strangles his girlfriend Billy while raping her, abandons the rundown little family farm in Vermont and lives in the western states wretchedly, unable to approach women & unlucky in his jobs, untill dying decades later as a bum; meanwhile his stubborn, violent father Mink goes to jail for burning down the barn for the insurance money, and then dies, liberating his mother Jewell to reinvent herself as a quilt-maker, and his one-armed brother Dub ends up a real estate broker in Miami who owes his success to his canny & well-connected Cuban wife, Pala. It's a dreary but captivating story, but the greater pleasures are in the ways it is told. Detailed and surprising descriptions of outdoor scenes, from Vermont to Minnesota and Oregon, a moment on the expressway in Miami when Dub's wife Pala is nearly lynched by a black mob furious at the acquittal of white cops who've killed a black motorist, the mud of the trailer camp, the quivering anxiety of a trapped female coyote, and so on. (v. Journal 99/6/21)
No gentle humor in Proulx, nothing to make you want to laugh without making you want to throw up at the same time (she has a short story where the joke is about having to cut off a dead man's feet to get his boots), but lots of irony. Her work is (mostly, at least in these novels) anti-escapism: you put the book down to escape into a much less challenging, even less frustrating ordinary daily existence. No matter what your troubles are, Proulx's characters have it even worse, and unlike real life, they are inescapable. When I'm walking through Manhattan and see a guy lying in rags up against a building, or a mad young woman, still pretty beneath her filth, squatting and dreamily begging at University Place & 14th, I can walk by without focusing long or in detail on what she (or he) looks like or what horrors have brought her to that state. Proulx doesn't give me that option. There are photographers like her - Mapplethorpe was also pitiless - and comic book artists, such as whatsisname (now dead) whose work is currently on display at the New Museum. But few writers.
A simple tale of a slow-developing comradeship, 'round which are spun, woven and tangled many wondrous inventions and ancient Pynchon obsessions to make a dense, happy, delightful and enigmatic book.
It begins in London when the morose and newly widowed astronomer Charles Mason meets the somewhat younger, buoyant and much more physical Jeremiah Dixon, a country surveyor. These two dissimilar Englishman Mason a deist and the son of a gruff, love-withholding miller, Dixon a Quaker and the orphan of a coal miner in the north country -- are teamed by some plot neither of them can quite penetrate, perpetrated by the Royal Society and probably British tea interests, to track the transit of Venus in Capetown, then commissioned separately to make further astronomical observations on desolate St. Helena (many decades before Napoleon made it famous), and after many adventures are sent off to draw a line along the 40th degree of latitude to settle a boundary dispute in the American colonies. They encounter: the Learnèd English Dog, Fang; seaman Fenderbelly Bodine (no doubt an ancestor of the one who appears in Pynchon's other novels); the neurotic and ineffectively sinister Astronomer Royal, Neville Maskelyne (villain of another book, by Dava Sobell see below); a mechanical duck with wondrous powers of flight and conversation; a Chinese geomancer named Capt. Zhang; a gigantic axman, Stig, from the very far north; George Washington and his black slave Gershom, who is also a Jewish vaudevillian comic; Ben Franklin; wily Mohawks and other Indians; German and Dutch immigrants with peculiar obsessions; a worldwide Jesuit conspiracy communicating by mysterious telegraph, whose nuns are trained in sexual seduction in the manner of O at Roissy; an enormous "Torpedo" an electric eel of very high current and many other more or less fantastical creatures. On his last mission, this time without Dixon, Mason runs into Dr. Johnson and Boswell in the Hebrides, and asks Boswell if he had ever had his own Boswell.
It's great fun, full of things to discover, and I'll want to go back into it soon to discover some more. I may even want to read the new book by Edwin Danson, Drawing the Line: How Mason and Dixon Surveyed the Most Famous Border in America (Wiley), so as to make it easier to follow Pynchon's version. Readers of the novel may also profit from reading Dava Sobell, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), which deals with the machinations of Maskelyne to prevent John Harrison, inventor of a reliable sea-going clock, from winning the Royal Society's prize for solving the problem of longitude.
Exquisitely exciting fantasy of sweet suffering in bondage. Originally published in Paris, France, Chez Jean-Jacques Pauvert in 1954 as Histoire d'O.
So clever and witty that now I want to read the rest of the Nathan Zuckerman saga. In this novel, Zuckerman recounts his own death (and writes his own obituary), and makes many astute observations of the social anthropology of Jews in New York and Israel.
Like Our Town or a Spanish-language telenovela, or even Juan Rulfo's famous Pedro Páramo, where the dead chatter to one another from their graves, gives glimpses of interrelated lives to reaffirm the consoling myths of community: good people can pull through any tragedy when they pull together, and everybody ultimately gets what she or he deserves. In this case, the point of view device is the ghost of a murdered teenage girl, who can observe her family, friends and murderer as they go about their lives. It's a girl's book, in the same sense that the book I read just previously. Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), is a boy's book. That one was full of gunfighters on horseback and lots of man-to-man combat (Custer's Last Stand); this has a cute little dog, sweet kids, astute and persistent young women, and a few pathetically sad men one of whom can't keep himself from killing little girls. I found it sappy, but it's a huge sales success, so there must be a lot of present or former teenage girls who love it. They would probably hate smelly, sweaty, and raucous Son. 021024
The 3 longer pieces are comic fantasies, like Vonnegut but without the
mad imagination. In "Whispers in Bedlam," a not very bright
professional football player who has never thought deeply about
anything suddenly acquires the power to hear distant whispers and even
unspoken thoughts -- enabling him to acquire riches and fame (in
business, poker, and football) but revealing a world of hypocrisy and
deceit that so horrifies him that... Well, you can guess the rest. In
"The Mannichon Solution," a nebbish chemist working in the detergents
department while dreaming of the Nobel Prize accidently discovers a
solution that might make him rich and famous but that kills any
organism with yellow pigment, and for which the only likely buyer is
the C.I.A. (to drop into the Yangtze to solve the "yellow peril"
problem). And "Small Saturday" links the efforts of a little bookseller
to get a date with a bigger woman to the stories of each of the women
he calls-- clever, cute, but not very probing bouquet of anecdotes
about the NYC singles scene circa 1967.
Of
the shorter pieces, "Where all things wise and fair descend," is mostly
an opportunity for Shaw to quote some his favorite 19th century poetry,
which contributes sweetly to the maturing of a nice, good-hearted
college boy. Don't bother, unless you want to read Shelley and don't
happen to have a copy of the original handy.
The title story
is the best -- though the cute title has almost nothing to do with it.
A very believable, attractive, intelligent and divorced American
professional woman is trying rather desperately to arrange an abortion
in Europe. We never learn whether she succeeds or not, because what
interests Shaw is how she develops and what she learns in her sometimes
cagey, sometimes direct attempts to achieve something that Is Just Not
Talked About.
Like the critics say, Shaw's writing did sometimes
remind me of Hemingway, especially in the title story, which is about
the revelation of character rather than the closure of some action. But
then, Hemingway's famous story -- "Hills like White Elephants" -- is so
much subtler that some readers don't even recognize that it's about the
same subject.
Smith, Martin Cruz. Havana Bay. New York: Random House, 1999. 329 pp.
Arkady Renko goes to Havana to investigate murder of a Russian colleague & to kill himself, but when Cuban police try to kill him, he is re-energized, and with help of a small, feisty mulata policewoman, Ofelia Osorio, foils plot he doesn't understand but involved yet another attempt on the life of Castro. Very vivid portrayal of life & its contradictions in contemporary Havana. 99/8/15
Zadie Smith has great fun with accents and attitudes in this story of conflicting fanaticisms in multicultural London. Characters include: a middle-aged Koran-obsessed Bengali; his happily agnostic, slow-witted and good-hearted English army buddy; their much younger wives a black, patois-speaking Jamaican, a fugitive from Seventh Day Adventists eagerly awaiting the end of the world, and a short, practical Bangladeshi who can recite the Koran but doesn't believe it; a scientist fanatical only about his research, and the teen-aged children of these three households, alternately obsessed by religion, drugs, science and each other. The anti-Rushdie hysteria and the burning of Satanic Verses (an episode in the novel) make a kind of sense in this confusion of motives and loyalties.
The novel falls apart only when the author tries too hard to bring it all together, in an utterly implausible rush of coincidences in the last couple of pages. But no matter. The other 446 pages are full of laughs, griefs and insights. 2002-7-23
Stendahl, (Marie Henri Beyle). The Charterhouse of Parma. Translated by Richard Howard. Modern Library ed. New York: Random House, 1999. 507 pp.
The hero is a handsome, lucky fool, Fabrizio del Dongo, who gets into and out of scrapes due to a kind of calculated passion. That is, he makes grand gestures less because of true love or any particular political commitment, but because he's concerned about what pose he should strike. His most memorable adventure and the best episode in the book is his uncomprehending participation in the battle of Waterloo, whither he has hied without any military experience or training or knowledge of French. This is a funny, poignant, and probably realistic depiction of the confusion of battle and the panicked disarray of the French soldiers and officers after their defeat.
There is also fun in some of Stendahl's miscellaneous observations about love, politics and letters.
"And a man of your talents, Signor, must steal in order to live!" [says the Duchess (Fabrizio's beautiful aunt) to the highwayman, who is also a famous poet.]
"That may be the reason I have any talent. Hitherto all our authors who have become well known were people paid by the government or by the religion they sought to undermine...." (p. 357)
Another insight (this time in the voice of the author himself):
I am inclined to think that the immoral delight Italians experience in taking revenge is a consequence of their power of imagination; people in other countries do not, strictly speaking, forgive; they forget. (p. 365)
Stendahl finally gets bored with Fabrizio and lets him die in a monastery, of love-sickness.
Stone is a very good conventional novelist, according to some very old conventions: pre-Hemingway, Faulkner or Dos Passos, inter alia. Vocabulary is excessive and too flowery for Hemingway, psychology too primitive for Faulkner, narrative too linear for Dos Passos. Plot stars Frank Holliwell, middle-aged, tall, athletic, an alcoholic with a sinister past with the CIA in Vietnam, married to an independent professional whom he appears to love and is now a professor anthropology in Delaware, also with mysterious past (CIA? anthropological? both?) in Central America. Holliwell is an implausible concoction, a mix of James Bond, Leamus & Walter Mitty (or Miniver Cheevy). Somehow they find themselves in a country like Nicaragua, where there's a mystic, 60-ish alcoholic priest, and a bewitchingly innocent nun who -- most implausibly -- lets herself get fucked by the ridiculously incompetent Holliwell. Pablo Tabor, paranoid speed freak, is a delicious character -- unreal as a whole, but with believable episodes. This is because his language (in speech and thought) is recognizable & authentic. Other characters (there are many) are much less successful. Politics: a pox on both your houses, but with more sympathy for the ever-doomed and ever-naive rebels against the tyrants who run this mythical country. (Adapted from ntbk 7/22/86 (174))
Clever, but what's the point? The opening line tells the whole
story: "Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered
she had turned into the wrong person." Like a lot of people.
But since it was her own fault, why should we care? 020807
The book is comically, absurdly bad. The main story tells of Artos the Bear, a Celtic tribal chieftain in 477 AD, who will become Arturius as Count of England and ultimately and way posthumously King Arthur of legend. This primitive tribal chief knows only two motivations: to fight (but we know not for what), and to love his flaxen-haired Gwenhwyfar (who will become known as Guinevere). The Gwenhwyfar impulse is not as strong as it appeared -- he's easily distracted by the improbable raven-haired beauty Lystra, whom he obliges to bleach her hair and rechristens Gwenhwyfar, so now there are two. So his love for G is hardly an overriding principle. The original G is, in true telenovela style, his sister (maybe his half-sister -- I didn't quite follow the rather oblique references). So if the love story doesn't hold this story together, it has to be Artos' campaigns to save Britain from the Saxons, Jutes, Angles and Picts in the wake of the withdrawal of the Roman legions. But this is a hopeless task from the outset, as hopeless as dreams of an ethnically pure Greater Serbia. Britain, Treece acknowledges, is already a great ethnic mix. One of Artos' two most trusted "captains," Cie (no hint as to how to pronounce this), is said to be a small, dark man of "Silurian" descent. There are Irish, who are always sandy-haired and fair-skinned. The Celts are generally dark-haired, except for Artos himself & his sister-lover, who appear to be as blond as the invaders, who are almost always "flaxen-haired." The exception is one Saxon king whose mother was a Celt, for, as Treece mentions, there's a lot of miscegenation going on, and the Celts as a whole don't feel particularly chauvinistic. Artos' own army is made up largely of Jutes toward the end. Artos' nationalism is suspect also because he claims authority in the name of Rome, an empire and civilization that he doesn't know but imagines as vastly superior to anything in Britain.
This may be fairly accurate as history -- the confusion, the wars about nothing much at all except which male is going to dominate, the easy switching of loyalties even across dialect and language boundaries -- and it might make for a good background for a story, but it is too diffuse & chaotic to be the story. Artos, in this portrayal, is just not a very interesting person. He doesn't know what he wants, beyond being recognized as Count of Britain, and once he establishes himself as such, has no idea what to do next besides eat, drink and loll around on his throne while courtiers seek to amuse him. He's a bore, not a bear.
The story just galumphs along, one little (or big) battle after another in which, usually, a hundred or more men we don't know (because Treece has never bothered to introduce them to us) are said to have been killed. Then the galumphing is interrupted by a carefully set up dramatic scene, of which I can remember only two that seem to fully engage the author's (if not the reader's) attention. First is the dance of the corn men and antler men, a long set-piece in which the antlered men struggle with the white-painted corn (i.e., cereal, probably oats or barley) men,which sounds inspired half by Frasier's Golden Bough (which Treece cites as a source) and half by accounts of American Indians. Still, something like that may have occurred in those ancient British tribes, which surely had some sort of fertility rite. (The whole thing is about making the new crop prosper.)
The second is the far more improbable bull v. girl dance. We are to believe that this savage chieftain Artos has ordered up the reconstruction of the old Roman amphitheater at Caerleon, itself improbable (and that artisans would be available who knew how to do it). Then, that he knew something about bull fighting (never before mentioned in the book, & not popularly associated with blue-painted Druid warriors). The dance of the near-naked Lystra to dodge the horns of the mighty bull, and her ultimate goring, must have been the erotic high-point for Treece.
The roundtable legend is reduced to an incident where Artos throws his round shield down into the mud and orders the kings of the west to gather around it, to make the point that nobody is in the head position. There is no hint of Lancelot in Treece's story (at least, none that I perceived).
It's not King Lear, which is also ancient Celtic mythology, but with great characters. The first notable character in this book is Ambrosius Aurelius, the last Roman Count of Britain (was that a real title?), who has flashes of impressive authority, but mainly just withers away until Medrodus (Mordred of the legends) murders him. He occupies the 1st 50 pp., then lingers on for a few more after Artos (Arthur) is introduced; he then disappears, and our attention is supposed to refocus on Artos. It's like an American soap opera, you use up one main character & then another rises to carry on, and so on. No dramatic tension here. Britain will go on and on, whatever happens to Ambrosius, or Medrodus, or Artos, & with this one-thing-after-another structure, the story can only be about Britain, not about Artos (or any of the others). In contrast, King Lear is about Lear (& his daughters).
It should be a good book for an 11-year old, though -- lots of sword & horseplay.
What does terror look like? How does it feel, to use it or to be its victim? Mario Vargas Llosa has imagined these things so vividly that after reading this book you will think that you know. La Fiesta del Chivo is the most fully achieved novel yet in this author's long campaign to bring real historical fact to breathing, pulsating, blood-gushing life. The Chivo (literally, "goat") is Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, and the "fiesta" takes place in the last months before, and some five months following, his assassination in 1961.
Since La casa verde (1966), his second novel, Vargas Llosa has interwoven social research and fantasy, with much more rigorous research than most novelists could be bothered with. In La casa verde he relied for part of the story on what he'd learned as an anthropological research assistant in the Amazon. La historia de Mayta (1985) uses interviews and much documentary evidence to portray the real revolutionary left of Peru in the 1950s, in which he sets Mayta, a plausible composite invention.
Here, in La Fiesta del Chivo, he presents a highly detailed, blow-by-blow documentary of the real conspiracy to kill Trujillo, including incursions into the mind of the unsuspecting dictator "el Benefactor," "el Jefe," etc., as his terrified subjects call him. This is very exciting, tense writing, even if we know enough Dominican history to recognize all the characters and know what their fates will be. Masterfully, Vargas Llosa wraps this story in another, fictional one, of Urania Cabral and her father Agustín, at one time President of Trujillo's senate and one of the Chivo's most trusted collaborators. The mystery is why Urania fled the country in 1960 when she was just 14 1/2, and why after refusing any contact with her father for 31 years she has returned. The conclusion is as shocking as the scenes of torture and brutality taken from the archives or testimonies, as shocking, that is, as the historically documented episodes. But it is even more stunning because, while completely believable, it is a great and horrible surprise. 01/02/04. On the Dominican Republic, cf. Michele Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight, and for another novel on a similar theme, cf. Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies.
Thu, 1997 Nov 27, 11:03 - As Vargas Llosa tells it in La historia secreta de una novela.(1983 ed. Barcelona: Tasquets, 1971) , La casa verde resulted from his attempts to weld together two unrelated novels that he was trying to write on alternate days. La tía Julia y el escribidor and Historia de Mayta must have similarly disconnected origins. The first is a joining of the story of Varguitas' romance of his tía Julia, to a story about somebody MVLL knew, possibly in the same period, el escribidor of radionovelas. As I recall, neither is essential to the other, & the only connection is that the same young man, Varguitas, is a protagonist in one and an observer in the other.
Mayta is even curiouser in its structure. The author (MVLL's narrators are almost always transparent versions of himself) seems to have conducted a real investigation into the history of a real revolutionary of the late 1950s. He presents his speculative findings (because the research in newpaper archives and interviews of survivors and witnesses leaves many questions still in dispute) through a multilayered veil of fiction. But even the first layer is not completely coherent. He presents himself as a novelist who wants to write a fictitious account of real events, and yet needs to know as exactly as possible what those real events were, as a way, he says - I don't remember the phrases, because he offers this explanation several times to doubting interview prospects - to know how much he is lying. O.k., that may be questionable strategy, but not implausible. But then he presents himself as a former schoolmate of Mayta, and therefore of the same age. This age is never stated more precisely than "cuarentón" at the time of the crucial events, which must be 1958 - Fidel Castro is still in the mountains, shortly before entering Havana. The narrator's quest takes place "now," which seems to be 1983 -- the book came out in 1984 - by which time, to follow the logic of the first premise, both he and Mayta would have to be at least 66. However, the conversations & reflections of the narrator, & his relationship to the people he interviews, seem to be those of a man no older than the real Vargas Llosa, born 1936. How do I know? Well, he doesn't seem to have any personal memories of Perú prior to the events of 1958 - his description of school days with Mayta are generic, could be from any period - nor any acquaintance with any of his interviewees or their contexts that goes back even to that time. A second & more glaring inconsistency is the age of Mayta's tía, 70 when the narrator interviews her. That is, she is barely, if at all, older than Mayta himself, but is supposed to have reared him.
Then there is the author's strange decision to locate the events of 1983 in a fantastically apocalytic Perú, which has been invaded, most implausibly, by a combined Cuban and Bolivian revolutionary force and is then also invaded by U.S. Marines to combat the first invaders, leaving the Peruvian armed forces on the margin and causing great destruction from terrorist attacks and air-raids. Enough social violence was already occurring in Perú in 1983 to make this whole scene completely unnecessary, as well as ridiculously implausible. Worse, it is not fully imagined. We never meet or even see one of those "Marines" (everybody uses the English word) or terrucos, nor is there any attempt to explain how the Cuban-Bolivian revolutionary army could have been formed or how they can defend their bases in Bolivia from air or other attacks - it would be possible to make such a case, I suppose, but what would be the point?
In the course of the novel, MVL slides from one p.o.v. to another, beginning a sentence in the 3rd person, about Mayta, and ending in the 1st, as Mayta, or sometimes in the 1st as himself. The maneuver is tricky but generally successful, but there are places where it didn't make sense. I don't remember just what it was, but I think there are places where Mayta as "I" is saying things that the character could not possibly know.
Then at the end, MVL undoes his whole fiction, by claiming to have met the real prototype, who is now an ex-con and an employee in an ice cream parlor. He confesses to having invented the Perú apocalíptico for no good reason he can explain, and also to have invented - both to strengthen his fictional Mayta's motivations and to explain how he became alienated from his political party on the eve of the revolutionary action - Mayta's homosexuality. This is a very important theme in the development of the character of the fictional Mayta. However, it turns out to be not the case at all of the "real" Mayta, the one he claims to have found and interviewed after writing his whole novel. This "real" Mayta is perhaps more interesting than the fictional one, & although he claims not to be prejudiced, is surprised and a little disgusted by the attribution of homosexuality. He's married with several kids, and knows homosexuals chiefly from having seen them depraved and exploited in Lurigancho prison.
It's about fragmentation, about pulling many different threads and styles and premises together into one work and achieving coherence. Vargas Llosa, for all his brilliance, does not always pull it off. I was moved and amazed by Historia de Mayta, but also disappointed in it as an aesthetic construct. Come to think of it, La ciudad y los perros is also two stories attached to but not integrated into one another. Pantaleón y las visitadoras is the only one of his novels I can think of right now that is fully integrated and coherent, in the same way as GGM's Crónica de una muerte anunciada.
In MVLL, I admire the technical virtuosity, in swift shifts of p.o.v., pacing of actions, and the pitiless descriptions, like lingering close-ups of garbage, or broken lives, or ruined apartments, etc. In Gabriel García Márquez I admire enormously the aesthetic integration he usually manages to achieve, starting from ideas and perceptions just as diverse as MVLL's.
A 600-page travelogue on a long-gone world. Cyrus Spitama, half-Greek, half-Persian grandson of Zoroaster, boyhood friend of Xerxes, journeys across the vast Persian Empire of the 5th c. BC and to India -- where he marries a king's daughter and converses with holy men of various persuasions, most memorably with Gautama Buddha himself -- and thence on to Cathay (China), where he becomes the prized slave of an impoverished duke, listens to Lao-Tze, and comes to know the aged Confucius intimately (they go fishing together). Finally he manages to return to Persia, in time for Xerxes' assassination and the ascension of his crippled son Artaxerxes, who sends him on as ambassador to Athens, where he hears Thucydides' distorted pro-Greek version of the Persian wars, chats with the young Pericles, and dictates his memoirs to his grandson Democritus. Lots of action, even more philosophical discussion, but only sporadic, unsustained narrative tension -- ideas, rather than characters, are Vidal's main concerns here. Cyrus, one of the few purely fictional characters to appear, is seeking to solve the riddle of creation, a paradox for Zoroastrians, solved by reincarnation for Buddha, an event that never occurred for Lao-Tze, and an issue beyond human knowing and thus not worth exploring for Confucius. In an epilogue, Cyrus' grandson Democritus sums up his famous solution to the problem -- all is matter, made up of "atoms," ceaselessly recombining to create new things. Fascinating as popular history of philosophy, but lacking the sustained, complex character development that Vidal achieves brilliantly in Burr . We get intriguing glimpses of Pericles, Xerxes and the others, but the only truly complex and fascinating characters are Atosa (Darius the Great's wife and mother of Xerxes) and Confucius. 030819
34 charming tales, selected from over 3,000 collected on audiotape by Barbara Walker and her husband in villages throughout Turkey, 1961-1987, and retold by BKW. 020807
A mistresspiece of internal monologue. The reader gets to eavesdrop on the conversations that Clarissa Dalloway and her acquaintances imagine but dare not or know not how to speak. This is a subtler and wittier X-ray than Orwell's of the anxieties of the lower middle, middle middle and upper middle classes, groping for a new normality after the trauma of the Great European War. Septimus Warren Smith, the war hero driven mad by that war, and his obtuse but self-assured doctors symbolize a whole eddy of misunderstandings, while Clarissa submerges her doubts by organizing a party where the guests make no gesture without calculating the impression they might create on others. I thank the makers of the movie "The Hours" for getting me to engage in this delicious read. 030312