This novel doesn’t read now the way it did to me as a younger reader. Deeply explicatory of the ways people arrange their brains to suit the facts thaThis novel doesn’t read now the way it did to me as a younger reader. Deeply explicatory of the ways people arrange their brains to suit the facts that show them in the best light, it is a cynical book but not a cruel one. This is the way people act, moral or not, so we’d best take that feature into account when facing criminal charges.
First published on a fortnightly basis as a 27-part serialization in Rolling Stone magazine in 1984, this first novel of Tom Wolfe was later published, with revisions, by Farrar Straus & Giroux in 1987. With the book publication, Mr. Wolfe became a cause célèbre. He’d been disappointed with the reaction of the public to the magazine serialization and that earlier effort seems to have been almost lost to history:
It felt all the more ironic given the book’s title. The first vanities bonfire happened in Florence, Italy in 1497 when supporters of friar Girolamo Savonarola publicly burned what they considered vain objects – books, art, music, anything deemed immoral. It’s easy to see Wolfe playing the part of Savonarola, eradicating all evidence of his early attempts at fiction.
Considering Bonfire was Wolfe’s first novel, it was a marvel of description, capturing the technicolor of the Wall Street bond market, the holding pen in the Bronx Criminal Courts Building, as well as the well-padded offices of Reverend Bacon, the profitable nonprofit savant.
The language is the thing to enjoy here. Plot is not this book’s strong suit. I read with real admiration Wolfe’s description of a crime victim, shot dead in the back of a Cadillac: “The victim was a fat man with his hands on his legs, just above his knees, as if he were about to hitch up his pants to keep them from being stretched by his kneecaps.”
Somehow that description blew me away. The next sentence, how the rear window of the Cadillac looked like someone had thrown a pizza against it, confirmed that the victim himself had, in fact, been blown away.
Wolfe claimed in a couple places that there was truth in the saying that “A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.” That’s his own ‘saying’ and the first time I read it I laughed. When I read it again, I wondered…I don’t think that is true anymore, fifty years later.
So, I am still scratching my head over the title. I am inclined to agree with another reader who has pointed out this is probably less of a bonfire of the vanities than a celebration of them, but perhaps the title refers to the main character, Sherman (Shuhmun) McCoy.
Sherman McCoy, whose name recalls the ‘real thing,’ is in fact, ‘the real McCoy’ insofar as he is a man untouched by human drama to this point in his life. Raised in wealth and working in bonds, he has hardly had occasion to consider what a ‘bump in the road’ might mean to the ordinary man on the street.
In the beginning, McCoy is fearful and respectful, still, of law enforcement and legal matters in general though gradually one can perceive his discernment increasing as time—and his opportunities for incarceration—go on. Perhaps the title is not meant as anything other than the notion that the innocence of man, in the larger and smaller senses, is set alight every day in urban America, were we only aware....more
Modern day Israel can sometimes feel like a recent bruise. It can hurt to brush up against it. Occasionally someone with experience in the region writModern day Israel can sometimes feel like a recent bruise. It can hurt to brush up against it. Occasionally someone with experience in the region writes a new melody that is both beautiful and plaintive, and perhaps the saddest sound ever heard, a sound from the other side of a wall.
Englander’s new novel might be that new music, filled with regret for the wasted time and wasted lives, for what could have been, and what has not come to be. He points out that the time to settle state issues have come many times, and each time something more dangerous, deadly, and self-defeating was chosen. What is there to lose now? How can “even-ing the score” help in any way? Haven’t we been here before all the deaths?
The novel describes a twelve year period beginning in 2002, a year of enormous instability and fear throughout the Middle East, on every side a battle. Spies were everywhere, and some were looking not just for weaknesses but for opportunities. What Englander reminds us again and again in this novel is how close the Palestinians and Israelis are, how well they have studied each other. Their hate is more like love.
During eight of those twelve years 2002-2014, ‘the General’ Ariel Sharon lie in his bed, in a waking coma, able to hear, apparently, though perhaps unable to make sense of what he heard. While the General remained alive, hope for peace remained among his supporters because Sharon alone had shown willingness to withdraw from Gaza. Though Sharon led some of the most decisive attacks against Palestinian aggression anywhere, he understood that he was responsible for Israel’s future, which meant peace. Military ends had not brought the stability he’d sought. Every year he lay in bed, the hope dimmed further.
The story’s other individuals are connected in some way with a couple degrees of separation. All appear to have been spies at some time or other, so the tension starts strong and never really abates. One is continually aware when a conversation is intended to communicate far more than casual niceties about work, weather, or sports. In Berlin, a Palestinian operative gathers the money and resources he will need to make a difference. Approached by an American Jew working for Mossad, a connection is made.
In counterpoint to Sharon’s story and that of the American spy in Europe, is another story told some years later of a man, Prisoner Z, being held in an Israeli dark site in the desert, a disappeared man we initially assume to be Palestinian. But no, he is one of their own, which means a crime of treason. He's held twelve years already, by the same jailor. They have become friends, these two lonely disappeared men, and more perhaps. Brothers.
Englander’s characters are believable—they are not better nor more evil than anyone else in the world. That is his point, after all. It may be illegal, treasonous, monstrous to suggest that Israelis would be safer if they had less protection, less surety, but that may be what it will take to get where they claim they want to go. The Palestinians are going to want parity, so if parity is not what one is willing to give, then one will always be looking over one’s shoulder at what could have been.
A beautiful small novel that feels European, filled with hope and despair, possibility and its opposite. And love.
I listened to the Penguin Random House audio production of his novel read by Mark Bramhall. Bramhall does an Oscar-worthy Jewish mother talking on the telephone to her son, the spy. It can’t be beat, his impersonation. Listening is a fine way to enjoy this novel....more
Religion, corruption, promiscuity, sodomy, violence, bloodshed, humor, terror, betrayal, redemption, salvation. These are the subjects of Marlon JamesReligion, corruption, promiscuity, sodomy, violence, bloodshed, humor, terror, betrayal, redemption, salvation. These are the subjects of Marlon James’ work, particularly this debut novel about a town in Jamaica in the midst of a preacher war. Go no further if reading about these things will affect your judgment of what is art and what is not. We all have our limits, and James is happy to play right to the edge.
There is no Table of Contents in this novel, and midway through, we may find we need a roadmap. Where is James going, and how did we get here? That is when I noticed he began this book, before Part I, with “The End,” three pages which confused and frightened and warned us what was to come. A “murder of crows” hangs around the yard of one Widow Greenfield until one day she discovers many of them lifeless and bloody on the grass in front of her house.
When author Kaylie Jones was contacted twenty minutes after Marlon James won the International Man Booker Prize for Literature in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings, she said that acceptance and affirmation for him was a long time coming. Jones is credited with “discovering” James, passing his first manuscript for John Crow’s Devil on to an agent and an editor back in 2003. She was sure of James’ talent from that first time they met. “His writing was so confident. There was not one word that wasn’t precise. That voice was already there.”
The manuscript that eventually became John Crow’s Devil had famously been rejected 78 times before Ms. Jones saw his potential. James was 35 years old when it was finally published in 2005, his first novel. That means James was in his twenties when he wrote it, and this is the thing that slays: a twenty-something with shuttercock eyes writing sentences like
"Her mother was on the dresser, her sweaty back greasing the mirror as the man rammed inside her. Lucinda imagined his cock as stubby as he was plunging in and out of her mother’s vagina that was as loose as she was. Then he shifted and she saw it for a second, his penis disappearing into her mother and his jerky balls bouncing like elastic."
There is more than a little aggression in that passage, and an exactitude one isn’t expecting. But the whole book has this level of keen observation and imagination, speaking of forbidden things, blasphemies, and essentially…reporting, judging, laughing. Some of the horror and anger and judgment manifest are probably even nonfiction authorial license.
Two preachers fight one another over the ‘godly’ leadership of a town. One man is an alcoholic, and the other appears possessed. Both of them struggle with sexual temptations; neither fits any usual definition of godly, or good men. The townspeople, filled with the superstitions of their culture as well as warm natures mixed with hard-eyed realism, carol an absurdist relief, making comment upon one another’s needs, or sometimes jettisoning their good sense altogether under religious influence.
In an interview, James tells Charlie Rose that at this time in Jamaica he hadn’t yet publicly acknowledged his homosexuality but considered himself “Christian celibate…and believing it.” Only when he subsequently moved to St. Paul, Minnesota to teach writing, and when he was forty-four years old, did he acknowledge his sexuality. There is a lot, a whole lot, of explicit language and description of sexual acts, only some consensual, in James’ novels, but he appears to capture something that we recognize as real, even if we prefer not to look at it. “Violence should be violent,” he tells us, “Sexuality should risk the pornographic. It’s a fine line.”
Marlon James writes conversation in dialect, perhaps one reason his first book was not accepted immediately. Now, of course, dialect seems the most basic effort one can make to represent a culture. But James also manages the difficult feat of keeping readers unsure if they know what exactly is happening without losing the thread altogether, or giving up. His storytelling definitely leads readers in the direction of some kind of reckoning for evil, thoughtless, or uncaring behaviors, no matter what the preachers, with their contrasting styles, have to say. The murder of crows and the flight of doves are both menacing, and vengeful. But the ending, in a two-page chapter called “The Beginning,” is reassuring. This novel feels like something brave, unflinching, and new.
If you are still unconvinced about James' creativity, read this about his new project and then tell me he isn't looking deeply into the myths we tell ourselves, and exposing all....more
At the midway point in this graphic novel I was still smiling. It sort of clipped me upside the head as I read, and though it drew blood, I still thouAt the midway point in this graphic novel I was still smiling. It sort of clipped me upside the head as I read, and though it drew blood, I still thought it might be a little cute. I didn't reallylike the story--it seemed a bit grim--but... I thought it was going to come around.
The authors (it would have to be two, one couldn't bear that dark vision alone, for long) are making a comment on man's seemingly infinite capacity for evil--really banal, thoughtless evil. It hurts, this vision, because sometimes it looks like it could be interpreted: Hateful redheads (wearing the red caps) with virtual spears yelling their frustration into the startled faces of those without the scarcity--the scarcity of everything, including education & opportunity, but also love, generosity & kindness, warmth, food...you know...what those of us who have, call "basics."
I don't believe in this vision. It may be hurtful to even entertain a performance of it in art. But I personally am not threatened. I feel sure that there is more to us--stop chewing on my sneakers, kitty!--there is more to us than looking after our own needs...No! you may not have my last crust of bread...Arg...did you stab me for the crust? You can have half, but you know we should get more from...though we may have to fight them for it...
You know how bad it is when I have already thought of these scenarios. ...more
Margaret Atwood has outdone herself in this re-staging of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. For those of you unsure whether or not you will grasp it, forget Margaret Atwood has outdone herself in this re-staging of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. For those of you unsure whether or not you will grasp it, forget that notion. The play, which is being performed scene by scene for film, is thoroughly explained by the director to the players who happen to be presently incarcerated...in the Fletcher Correctional Institute. Eventually, the screening of the play for an audience of government and prison officials is paralleled with a real-life enactment of the play featuring the inmates, a female dancer, and the play's director. Atwood kindly gives a short and snappy synopsis of Shakespeare’s original story after her own presentation to refresh our memories. If you have the book, you can read that first if you want.
The Director of the Fletcher Correctional Players, once a Duke who directed plays for Canada's prestigious Makeshiweg Theatre Festival, takes the role of Prospero himself. He loses his position at the theatre festival one year and is pushed out to sea in a small boat (rusty old car) where he washes up in a cave-like rental for some years before he decides to stage a comeback using the Fletcher Correctional Players.
The audio for this book is particularly good. Some of the Fletcher Players shorten and update Shakespeare into current rap rhyming lyrics. This seems so entirely appropriate since Shakespeare often did the same, not in such short meter, but to the same end. And as the Director/Duke points out, Shakespeare often appeared to modify and create character’s speeches on the spot in the theatre, depending on the skills of the person in the role.
The Director had a rule for inmates: they couldn’t swear at one another using the more commonplace four-letter words we are familiar with, but they were allowed to use Shakespeare’s own swear words, e.g., born to be hanged, whoreson, pied ninny, hag-seed, abhorred slave, red plague, etc. Caliban calls himself hag-seed, and though his role is central to this retelling, the real thrust of Shakespeare's story belongs to Prospero, who seeks revenge for his dismissal so late in life.
There is real tension in this re-telling, and readers are dying to know how it is going to work out. Prospero’s plan is an elaborate deception featuring magic, and in this case, eavesdropping and kidnapping within a prison environment. We are at the edge of our seats to know what Prospero has in mind and whether his chosen goblins can pull it off without losing the thread (or losing their parole).
The play is a big success, and after the production is all over, the Director/Duke/Prospero gives the players the opportunity to discuss the outcome of the play as they see it. This important part of Atwood’s presentation fills out our modern perception of the centuries-old play, as each of the main characters tries to explain what might have become of them after the action of the play as written has ended.
Perhaps not surprisingly, we get at least one unpleasant but realistic take on the journey back to power for Prospero. The Miranda role, in another’s telling, is a completely unexpected evolution along the lines of the action movie grande dames like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill or Zhang Ziyi in Crouching Tiger.
But the most rewarding of the after-stories is the one presented by Caliban, the Hag-Seed himself, who escapes the play altogether and creates a new one. And this is why this book is called Hag-Seed. In the end, the story is not about that old revenge play The Tempest at all, but about the rolling ball of creation, and how it is impossible to stop its onward journey.
I had access to the paper copy of this book while I listened, which allowed me to get every nuance. If one must choose one, I think I would go with the audio, which is beautifully read by R.H. Thomson, and who has a string of screen and theatre credits to his name. Produced by Penguin Random House Audio, the production is also available as Whisper-sync from Audible. Hogarth produces the paper copy. Choose your weapon and let the show begin....more
The form of this novel is what readers will notice first. It begins as a series of quotes from reporters’ notebooks, eyewitness accounts, historians uThe form of this novel is what readers will notice first. It begins as a series of quotes from reporters’ notebooks, eyewitness accounts, historians using original sources, and we must assume, Civil War-era gossip rags, describing an 1862 White House party which a thousand or more people attended. To say the affair was elaborate understates the case. Apparently when a thousand hungry guests descended on the tables of food, the quantity was such that it looked untouched after the assault.
Some of the reports mention that this lavish dinner party was going on during the war between the states (1862), and while Lincoln’s favorite son, Willie, lay dying upstairs, probably of typhoid. Some accounts criticize rather than report. Some are clearly inaccurate: “There was a large moon”; or “there was no moon.” Surely there can be no argument about these truths; one of the accounts must be untrue.
As the novel progresses, it changes form. The reportage becomes a chorus, as voices of the bardo—that state of existence between death and rebirth—declaim and consider the suffering of Lincoln as he contemplates his son’s death. Father and son (who’d been but a child!) had been intimates, together at every opportunity, heads often canted towards one another in deep conversation. The voices of the bardo are bawdy, rowdy, yet weirdly profound in their discussion of how fleeting life and how final death and what we learn in the course of a life and what we learn only when we’ve lost it all.
A bardo implies rebirth, but these characters appear to be looking only to escape everlasting nothingness, and enjoy discussing and dissecting the lives of others. Occasionally one of the dead will enjoy a peek at their future (best) selves, which they hadn’t the time or the opportunity to attain. It can be quite moving as each considers his or her life. And here, amidst the humor and tragedy and regret and outright joy—the stuff of life—resides the talent of George Saunders, as he tries to reach his best self, whether in love, work, or understanding.
It’s difficult to believe this is Saunders’ first published novel, and yet that is its designation. It doesn’t even seem like a novel, but immediately brings to mind a radio show, something meant to be spoken aloud, in its many and varied voices. The thread of the novel is not difficult to follow like some avant-garde works, though one may wonder if Lincoln’s sorrow at the death of Willie is all Saunders meant to convey. I think not.
I think there is another step that Saunders wants us to take: that the spirits of the bardo (how it begins to sound like bordello, the more we know of it!) influenced Lincoln when his son died, giving him insight, empathy, and the strength to carry on with his responsibilities, and to bear his personal sorrow, but also the sorrows of a nation at war. We have yet to meet the man who could have stood it alone.
"His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact…We must try to see one another in this way…As suffering, limited beings…Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces…And yet…Our grief must be defeated; it must not become our master, and make us ineffective…We must, to do the maximum good, bring the thing to its swiftest halt and…Kill more efficiently…Must end suffering by causing more suffering…His heart dropped at the thought of the killing…"
So, we must fight, if fighting is required, to defeat wherever oppression exists. We must work together, and we’ll need all the help we can get from those who have glimpsed truth, and the value of kindness.
In a radio podcast with David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, Saunders tells us that in his research he discovers that Lincoln could have negotiated an end to the war in 1862 when the casualty levels were terrifically high. He must have wanted to end the slaughter so desperately, but one requirement of the agreement would have been to return the slaves to the South, and Lincoln simply refused. The black people who make an appearance in this novel live cruelly unfair and insecure lives.
One could make the case that a novel of this kind is not unprecedented. Think of the ancient Greeks with their choruses of wise and not-so-wise men; Italy’s Dante with his examination of the good or bad we do in life affecting our placement in the afterlife; England’s Shakespeare with his oft-found articulate spirits remarking on the action; Ireland’s Beckett (and his influence Joyce) for language and the insight wrapped in foolishness; America’s Barth and Mamet for exactitude and a deep, abiding humor when rationality might suggest despair.
The rich variety of voices in this novel are captured in the audio production of this book. In an interview published in time.com, Saunders explains how the Penguin Random House team worked with him (kudos, everyone) to get the requisite 166 voices, including famous stage and screen actors like David Sedaris, Ben Stiller, Lena Dunham, among others, to speak the parts so that it sounds like the “American chorale” Saunders was trying to convey.
At the same time, I found it helpful to have a written text to clarify Saunders’ experimental form which uses footnotes interspersed with conversation among ghosts. I adored what Saunders was able to tell us from his advanced age of 58 years—the stuff about not doing anything you can’t adequately explain to heaven’s gatekeepers, and how “it wasn’t my fault” actually isn’t much of a defense when one has been lingering in the afterworld for more than fifty years, unable to convince even a bleeding-heart saint that one wasn’t a douche that time.
This handbook for knights is a 6” x 4” hardcover bound with green cloth and a gold ribbon to place as you read. Hawke initially did not intend it for This handbook for knights is a 6” x 4” hardcover bound with green cloth and a gold ribbon to place as you read. Hawke initially did not intend it for wide circulation: It was begun when his wife and he decided to have some “rules of the house,” which became more like “rules for living” the more he tried to think about what was really important to share with his children.
The format and the content suit one another. Twenty chapter headings address key attributes or phenomena that face each person as they grow, accompanied by a pen-and-ink drawing of a long-lived bird and a short statement around the concept. This is followed by a longer story, parable, lesson, or illustration of the concept in action. For instance, one of my favorites was “Discipline,” pictured with a grey heron:
”In the field of battle, as in all things, you will perform as you practice. With practice, you build the road to accomplish your goals. Excellence lives in attention to detail. Give your all, all the time. Don’t save anything for the walk home.The better a knight prepares, the less willing he will be to surrender.”
The story that follows sounds like eastern philosophy: “Often we imagine that we will work hard until we arrive at some distant goal, and then we will be happy. This is delusion. Happiness is the result of a life lived with purpose.” Hawke goes further, articulating the need for discipline: “Without it, locating your saddle may take all morning.”
On that tricky question of “Honesty” illustrated by a little owl, Hawke tells us that often
“people lie because they feel the truth will cause pain to themselves or others. Do not fear suffering. The strongest steel is forged in the hottest fire. The facts are always friendly. Without a little agony, none of us would bother to learn a thing. The earth has to be tilled before the seeds can be planted.”
Hawke adds chapters on surprising things, like "Equality" (tawny owl), and his chapter on "Love" (mute swans) is heartfelt and personal. His chapter on "Death" (blackbird skull) shares a wisdom we can all use.
"Life is a long series of farewells, only the circumstances should surprise us."
In this small book we sense naked emotion and lived experience at the same time it is charming, and useful. Perhaps it is his actor's gift, to do that. Hawke’s stories are often not his own: he has chosen stories and lessons he learned from Native American myth, Buddhism, high school coaches, Bob Dylan, among others and has turned them to his own purpose. Hawke adds a list of those he considers knights at the end of the book, in which list we find the names of Julian of Norwich, John Keats, and Martin Luther King, Jr. along with Thich Nhat Hanh, Joseph Papp, and River Phoenix.
In a New Yorker interview about this book, Hawke says that he learned just enough to entertain rather than be scholarly. I sensed that lack a depth just a little at times, but we can all use what he has collected. We can imagine how purposeful and meaningful it must have been for him to pull together the more constant precepts he has encountered in his life and to have pared them all down to a few short pages. Very satisfying indeed, and an admirable attempt. We may not always agree with what Hawke has chosen to highlight or his interpretation, but placing our thinking next to his raises his challenge. This collection is well worth the perusal for teachers, parents, novelists, poets as well as middle-graders and teens.
”After all, as Aquinas wrote, the least degree of pain in Purgatory ‘surpasses the greatest pain that one can endure in this worl
Franzen in Purgatory?
”After all, as Aquinas wrote, the least degree of pain in Purgatory ‘surpasses the greatest pain that one can endure in this world.’” ----Stephen Greenblatt in Hamlet in Purgatory
Writing a novel is an intimate act. And a novel about intimate acts is even more revealing. After listening, twice, to Purity read on audio by Jenna Lamia, Dylan Baker, and Robert Petkoff, I immediately listened to several of the author interviews Franzen gave in the push phase of his novel promotion. I came away thinking Franzen is in a world of hurt.
The voices in this book all seem to be coming from inside the mind of one man. I never assume the writer has himself under the microscope, but in this case I have drawn the conclusion that Franzen doesn’t even know what he doesn’t know: how his self-styled isolation and arrogance about his experience of “the battle between the sexes” or “what other people do” has left him bereft of folks who could tell him what he needs to hear. His anger and confusion is slowly draining his battery. Something is rotten indeed in Franzen’s world.
Franzen is completely intentional and self-aware about his “stale, obese, exhausting…bloated and immensely disagreeable” work. “More matter, with less art.” (Hamlet, Act II.ii) The question remains why he wrote this book and not another.
Let’s agree on two things at least. Franzen has talent. Franzen has been exceedingly popular. He was popular because in the past he used a sharpish humor to define recognizable family dilemmas. His books were long but that was a particularity, not a peculiarity.
In Purity there are moments of giggle-bit humor: "His stomach looked like that of an adult sea-turtle" and the journalistic coup describing whole nuclear warhead fiasco. But what is missing from this novel is kindness. Did anyone else see a moment of inexplicable, un-self-interested, or unexpected generosity? Perhaps Tom re-burying the dead body? Even that gruesome helpfulness was predicated on gaining Wulf’s intimacy.
Descriptions of marital disharmony can only be funny when one knows that the two love one another. Franzen tells us Tom and Anabel do, but we don’t actually see any of that until arguably much later, when it surfaces that neither of them tries to expose the other. Not quite love then, since it is a negative, rather than positive, expression. We all know how intimacy can turn toxic, but what I didn’t feel is any relief from it, which I guess is Franzen’s point. None of us is pure. No one acknowledges the full complement of one’s own deceptions.
The good news is that this book does not define or reflect the world. I am hardly a poster child for unreserved glee, but I recognize that there are only two ways out of a "terminally fucked-up world:" do everything you can to improve its outlook or get out of the way. "To be, or not to be." (…III.i) Difficult choice: "For who would bear the whips and scorns of time…but that the dread of something after death…makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all." (…III.i)
In an interview with NPR Radio Host Terry Gross and in several other interviews, Franzen admits to feeling he may have missed out on a key human adventure: having children. When he was advised against it by an editor, he threw away the idea of adopting some Iraqi orphans. He should have gotten different opinions if he cared what others thought. People will talk you out of the best things you will do in life. I’m one who thinks it may have made him a better person, a more loving, loved, and forgiving man. And a better author, not a worse one.
For one, Franzen may have learned something about a key societal malfunction facing America today: race relations, including social profiling, and discrimination. In an interview included at the end of the unabridged Macmillan Audio file, Franzen explains he couldn’t write about race because he has no intimate knowledge of race relations, but "I have plenty of experience with the battle between the sexes." Yes, it appears to be so. Unsurprising, given (among other things) his constant insistence on beauty in lieu of more lasting, purposeful, and buildable human attributes including generosity and kindness. At a time when people around the world are celebrating the loosening bonds of constraint around “differentness,” here is a throwback novel from a rich old white male, anguished for having missed the point. Purgatory, indeed.
One only has one go at life, unless one believes in reincarnation. And there may well be "more things in heaven and earth…than are dreamt of in your philosophy." (… I.5) So, lose the leafy splendor of your golden crown, your self-pity, anxiety, "great expectations," and get on with life, Franzen. Grab it with both hands. Time is short.
Franzen returns again and again to his bitterness about the failure he sees in the promise of an Obama presidency. "The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll capture the conscience of the king." (…III.i.) How quickly Franzen became disillusioned. "[wo]Man, thy name is frailty." (…I.ii) Hath thou no understanding of the opposition our king hath faced? Do not thou think our king would have moved with sure swift sword on those who abuse their privilege, could he have done so? And what of his diplomacy of these last years, after your accusation? Do you not think he hath fulfilled some small part of his promise? Forgive not, and neither shall thee be forgiven.
This book is a tragedy.
Two stars for Franzen finishing it, despite his obvious agony in writing it....more
Morris, most everyone knows, is one of the premier travel writers of the 20th Century. She went everywhere, and wrote with such interest and eruditionMorris, most everyone knows, is one of the premier travel writers of the 20th Century. She went everywhere, and wrote with such interest and erudition about the places she visited that one reads her works simply because she writes better than anyone else. One publisher gave her the opportunity to write fiction, and Morris created an invented place, Hav, to which many folks immediately wanted to book a flight.
This novel is composed of two parts: in Last Letters from Hav Morris describes for us her first glimpse of the Protectorate of Hav, its residents, flora, fauna, religions, and origins. In Hav of the Myrmidons written twenty years later, Morris returns to a much-changed Protectorate. In the Epilogue to the combined novel called simply Hav published by nyrb, Morris tells us that the allegories of old Hav have been transmuted from a place of “overlapping ancient cultures but with familiar signposts based in history” to allegories of “civic prodigies…hitherto inconceivable and themselves all but fictional still.”
Hav is an international protectorate near the Black Sea and on the Mediterranean. Every major nation had its representatives there, ensconced in (formerly) grand buildings that carried a storied history. When Morris visited in the 1980’s, Hav was rundown and a tiny bit disreputable, but the glamour of earlier days still shone through.
Morris shares her first impressions upon her arrival at night (monotonous and cold, stark and forbidding) and those again modified by clear morning light (bright, colorful, polyglot). She stays several months, buys an automobile, and travels by ferry to outlying islands. She meets the important citizens and legal representatives of countries occupying national concessions in Hav and witnesses the major celebrations—the coming of the snow raspberries and the Roof Race. Her visits to The Iron Dog, and The House of the Chinese Master (“the most astonishing aesthetic experience Hav can offer”) are accompanied by marvelously detailed descriptions composed of wonder and awe.
The novel is just a travel memoir, a very good one with historical references and informative notes about where to find the best food, until Morris comes to her discussion of the British Concession and its history in the province. Morris seems to become much more pointed in her references when she describes the British consul, his wife, and English interests in establishing a base in Hav. Morris includes notes General C.J. Napier wrote to his wife about Hav: “A dreadful hole—worse than Sind!” and “Oh what a foretaste of hell this is.” The British always kept some distance from true involvement in the life of Hav (they “loathed the Protectorate”), created buildings that looked quite like those created in India for their comfort, and were reputed to house only spies in their offices.
We learn that celebrities and leaders from many countries visited Hav in its heyday. Morris’ description of Nijinsky’s visit is particularly poignant, but Hitler and Wagner (at different times, naturally), George Sand and Chopin, Kim Philby, and the shadowy Sir Edmund Backhouse, scholarly sinologist and baronet, were all said to have stayed there at some time or another.
An escarpment just to the north of Hav was home to a cave-dwelling tribe of troglodytes who never settled in the city proper but who form “a still living bridge between the city and its remotest origins.” Their language has a fragile connection with the Celtic, but is still incomprehensible to everyone outside their group. It is said when they first saw the peninsula upon which Hav now sits, surrounded by blue sea, they called the place “Summer,” or hav in the surviving Celtic language of the West.
The underlying political structure of Hav was a shambles of competing interests and insufficiently expansionist beliefs which added to the rich confusion of organic growth in the labyrinthine city. Hav was likewise a rich stew of religions, all in stages of isolation from their original tenets. One mysterious group called Cathars of Hav was composed of secret members of the community and whose ceremonies and meetings involve robes and chants in underground locations. The Cathars are said to trace their history to the Crusades and their beliefs to Manicheanism, or the dualistic cosmology between the forces of good and evil, darkness and light. This group alone gives Morris pause in her ramblings about the city, but she does not spend much capital thinking about them before she is advised by the British Consul to leave the city in haste.
Morris ends Last Letters from Hav on a note of uncertainty, with low-flying war planes streaking over the city. Morris sees warships on the near horizon as she pauses on an overlook near where she will abandon her vehicle and catch a train away from Hav.
Morris uses the word “maze” to describe Hav more than once, leading us to think she meant, among other things, to suggest “a-maze…ing” Hav. In 2005 Morris was invited to revisit Hav. Her later map of the city looks completely different from the earlier one, with many of the wonderful places she described razed. Now the Myrmidon Tower dominates the landscape: “a virtuoso display of unashamed, unrestricted, technologically unexampled vulgarity” upon which is emblazoned the state emblem of the Republic, the letter ‘M’ flashing in sequential colors of red, yellow, green and blue and overlaid against an Achillean helmet outlined in gold. When Morris ascends the Tower, she discovers the nearby newly constructed Lazaretto! Resort (“the name is written with an exclamation mark because we believe you will find it a truly exclamatory experience”) is, in fact, built like a maze when viewed from above. The suites are named for places once a part of the old Hav before the Intervention in 1985.
As luck would have it, the first people Morris interacts with in the New Hav are a “very English middle-aged couple” whose advice “don’t experiment too much with the local stuff” seems designed to remind Morris however things have changed, much has stayed the same. But then: “The thing is one feels so safe here. The security’s really marvelous, it’s all so clean and friendly, and well, everything we’re used to really.” And that turns out to be the most frightening and curious thing.
The troglydytes who originally named Hav are no longer living in whitewashed caves on the escarpment but have been moved to barracks near the airport where the menfolk work on airport construction. While many Morris spoke with seemed pleased with the central heating and the comfortable living, one man pointed out that they were experiments of “ethnic engineering,” given a few certainties in exchange for their unique though hardscrabble culture.
Morris must leave after only six days this time, while she was forced to leave after six months on her first visit. Things have changed quite a lot and the menace is palpable. People are afraid to speak openly for a very tight grip by the Cathars of Hav hear all and see all.
This science fiction reminds us what a woman of the world Ms. Morris is, for she has caught the national character of each resident group in Hav quite clearly. But it is her certainty that events and locales have really lost their historical basis and point of origin is one that stays with us long after we put her book down. The world is renewing itself, and has become strange to even one so practiced in the art of travel.
”The great ‘M’! ‘M’ for what? ‘M’ really for Myrmidon, or ‘M’ for Mammon? For Mohammed the Prophet? For Mani the Manichaean? ‘M’ for McDonald’s, or Monsanto, or Microsoft? ‘M’ for Melchik? ‘M’ for Minoan? ‘M’ for Maze?...’M’ for Me?”
Again from the Epilogue, Morris says “A whole world…has come into being since I wrote Last Letters from Hav. New states have emerged, and new kinds of cities suddenly erupted.” The world is a new thing in this century, and history doesn’t always provide a signpost. Morris, the great traveler, is perplexed and uneasy. ...more
This novel is considered by many to be Bulgakov’s masterpiece. The translation copyrighted by Mirra Ginsburg in 1995 is quite modern enough for today’This novel is considered by many to be Bulgakov’s masterpiece. The translation copyrighted by Mirra Ginsburg in 1995 is quite modern enough for today’s readers to get a sense of the arc of Bulgakov’s life (1891-1940), for it is there, thinly disguised. Bulgakov trained & worked as a doctor in provincial towns, but since childhood was enraptured with literature--with words. And words were the cause of his joy and anguish, for his whole life he was never allowed to publish or produce anything without severe rancor from government censors.
Bulgakov saw war. He was sent to the front by the Red Cross just out of medical school in 1913, when he was twenty-two years old. He was badly injured, twice, and suffered such pain that, after a stint as a provincial doctor after the war, he became a morphine addict for a two-year period. The horror of that addiction is recalled in his short fictional monograph, Morphine, which is also immortalized in the BBC 2012 TV series A Young Doctor’s Notebook now playing on Netflix, starring Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame and John Hamm, who starred in Mad Men.
What would Bulgakov think now, that so long after this death his work is exciting audiences around the world? He would be pleased, though sorry it took so long, I’m sure. He was writing for those suffering through the reign of Stalin, writing to bring them joy and to urge perseverance. It never happened. Many of his works were unable to be published, and he was reduced to writing screenplays or librettos for opera. Even these came under attack.
His work on The Master and Margarita commenced in 1928, but because of the vitriolic reaction to his work, he burned the work in the 1930s in despair. As a medical man, he became aware he had an inherited kidney disease (his uncle had died of it), and began rewriting his great novel, knowing he would never see its publication.
Bulgakov’s parents and grandparents were Christian. His father was a clergyman. The Master and Margarita is a novel imbued with a Christian mentality and perspective. The scenes that riveted me the most were those in which Bulgakov imagines the sentencing of Jesus by Pontius Pilate. Pilate had a migraine, and couldn’t focus on his task: to sentence four men to death, and to reprieve one. What enormous arrogance, intellect, empathy, and knowledge of humanity it takes to imagine a scene two thousand years earlier, if it took place at all. All is shrouded in myth, and we feel that, palpably, in this novel filled with humor and tragedy.
Bulgakov’s great gift was to see clearly, and to speak truth to power. This work is a humorous fiction, but no less searing for that. Dante wrote about man’s weaknesses and Bulgakov parallels him in another century. It is said this work is modeled on Goethe’s Faust. The devil seduces Moscovites and plays on the delights of human desire, and then strips it all away in the most caustic way possible.
The novel references important events or experiences in Bulgakov’s life and can be read as a philosophy, an allegory, a stinging indictment of the Soviet state, or simply as a humorous play on words. Gogol’s Dead Souls is explicitly named, as is Dostoyevsky. Bulgakov wrote contemporaneously with another playwright whose work also couldn’t be published, the Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Soviet intelligentsia in the 1920s and 1930s must have kept the censors very busy and made the public very canny. It was a fantastically fruitful environment for satire. At one point in this novel, terrorized artists make casual reference to “they are coming to arrest us” as they sit at the dining room finishing breakfast. One man replies, “Ah…well, well…” When a Mauser appears from under the goon’s coat, it sets off a scene of comedic slapstick, ending with a Browning in the hands of a demon cat.
Pontius Pilate returns at the end of the novel and we are treated to Bulgakov imagining Pilate’s discomfiture over the death and disappearance of Christ. The Master is a writer who wrote a novel on the imagined meeting of Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ. He is confined to a mental institution where he meets a poet imprisoned there for imagining he’d heard just such a story.
Margarita is a lusty, outspoken woman married to a man who was “young, handsome, good, honest, and [who] adored his wife.” But Margarita loves the Master and tries to find him when he disappears, but cannot. “She often cried bitterly and long in secret. She did not know if she loved a living man or a dead one.” She blamed herself for allowing the Master to write about Pontius Pilate.
One of the most remarkable things about the story is how period Moscow comes so vibrantly to life. There is so much intellect, passion, love, and yes, absurdity in the prejudices and manners exposed. Bulgakov names a character with a patronymic matching his given name, Archibald Archibaldovich; shares the mores of drinking houses and artists’ clubs; stages a grand ball; exposes apartment-house living and lust: the uncle of a murdered man tries to secure his Moscow apartment before handling the details of his funeral. It is a marvelous parade of woe and fury.
We cannot mourn Bulgakov. We can only read him. His work is the result of the pressures in his life. But he does need to be celebrated for the great humanist that he was. Ah, humankind! ...more
This short and devastating novel of the year 1389 in the region of the Balkan Peninsula is in the form of three stories. A great battle commenced in lThis short and devastating novel of the year 1389 in the region of the Balkan Peninsula is in the form of three stories. A great battle commenced in late June of 1389 in which the Serbs, Bosnians, Croats, Albanian and Hungarian troops were routed by the Turks. The Turkish Sultan, Murad I, and his eldest son were believed to be murdered by their own troops because of a difference in opinion about the direction of the empire. Murad’s blood was spilled on that plain in Kosovo, nourishing the ancient hatreds that grew there like weeds.
"These tales bring to mind the Greek tragedies," [the Great Lady] said in a low voice. “They are of the same diamond dust, the same seed." "What are these Greek tragedies?" the lord of the castle asked. She sighed deeply and said that they were perhaps the greatest wealth of mankind. A simple treasure chest, like the one in which any feudal lord hides his gold coins…"
Told in simple and elegant prose, the story relates these ancient hatreds and impresses upon the reader how the oral traditions of the martial minstrels of the region managed to keep the conflict immortal with their songs. Ismail Kadare, born in 1936, is Muslim by birth in an area of Albania that was primarily Christian. In a 1998 Paris Review interview, Kadare talks a little about the Albanian language and its literary traditions—how it had been mostly oral.
The wide-ranging interview is helpful in understanding what Kadare was saying in this novel. When it was written in the 1990s, the plains of Kosovo were again suffering under the onslaught of warring factions attacking each other "like beasts freed from their iron chains." Kadare, who had much experience writing under repressive regimes (he studied writing in the USSR, and later published work under the regime of Enver Hoxha in Albania) believed that fiction might be able to accomplish the impossible, like change a regime.
In a review published in Britain’s The Independent in 1999, Kadare says that "personal freedom for the writer is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature…" We know this to be true, of course, though literature can also be nourished in a less repressive atmosphere. Kadare took the route of writing elliptical allegorical pieces that were more difficult to interpret, like Chinese writers have been forced to do for decades. In fact, Kadare’s work was so elliptical, some reviewers could mistake his meaning for support of the repressive regime.
Kadare claims this was never his intention. Maria Margaronis, who writes for The Nation suggests in a review for the online magazine EXPLORINGfictions that Kadare’s “Great Lady” in this novel was in fact Madeline Albright, U.S. Secretary of State at the time of the war in Yugoslavia, and that Kadare was again writing allegorically and elliptically in support of U.S. intervention to stop the war. Maragonis goes on to say
"But Kadare, of all writers, was uniquely well placed to express in fiction the contradictions facing his people in the post-cold war world. Instead he has chosen to continue the old game, throwing in his lot with those who see the Balkans as a cauldron of atavistic hatreds while claiming favored status for his own tribe. In the long run, this does the Albanians no favors."
Let’s say this: Kadare writes fiction eloquently, clearly, and persuasively. I hope to look further into his work.
A note on the translation: it was done by the incomparable Peter Constantine, who deserves full kudos for retaining the beauty of the language. ...more
This novel has the spine-tingling atmosphere of an episode of Netflix’s original series Sense8. Chance, coincidence, gambles, even miracles figure intThis novel has the spine-tingling atmosphere of an episode of Netflix’s original series Sense8. Chance, coincidence, gambles, even miracles figure into the actions of a young woman seeking to make sense of her life and her mother’s death. The distinct sense of foreboding that pervades the pages comes partly from us: we are involved, judging the character’s choices against our own. The main character cannot be sure how this will play out, either. "I feel new. I’m a blank slate. A gamble…" This is a teenaged alienation story that does not run to drugs, alcohol, nor sexual perversion.
Katherine (Kit) Carlyle was an IVF baby who had been kept as a frozen embryo for eight years before she was implanted in her mother’s uterus with two other embryos. She was the one who survived, and from her years waiting in limbo, we know her conception and birth was a kind of gamble. Kit is nineteen and living in Rome when we meet her. Somehow Kit claims a kind of DNA memory of that pre-time of frozen suspension, and finds herself going in search of those origins when she feels abandoned by her parents--her mother to death, and her father to a peripatetic career.
Kit is a woman who doesn’t always have the motivations we associate with a woman of her wealth, beauty, and intellect. She is young but her naïveté is paired with a world consciousness that few people over thirty can claim. She also has waist-length hair. When I pointed out to friends that this seemed a male fantasy, one man said “not so fast: women with very long hair tend to obsess over it.” It turns out that hair is like a talisman in this novel, a touchstone upon which feelings, actions, and behaviors turn.
Author Rupert Thomson has published nine other novels, one described by critic Jonathan Miles writing for Salon.com as "disquieting" for the horrific scenes of sexual abuse depicted. Thomson, now sixty years old, has been praised for his sentence craft and is often in the running for major literary prizes. One suspects it is his unusual sense of story rather than his writing talent that advances other authors over him to win prizes. In this novel, for instance, the palpable sense of doom and danger does not often play out: we readers are bloodied but whole. There is a rape scene late in the novel, but it is not graphic and is only implied.
More disturbing are the dreams and fantasies of the young woman, who likes to imagine her father searching for her, trying to find her. She writes letters to him, and despite accusing him of not loving her enough, she dreams that he will feel anxious moments trying to locate her with the few clues she has left behind. The author adds to our sense of unease by italicizing a sentence that could only be said by an older person to a younger one: "Even negative experiences contribute to the sum of who you are." There is a sense of inevitability about pain and exposure, though Thomson does not do his worst, to Kit nor to us, in this novel.
Thomson’s work may simply be too uncomfortable to win the prizes, but this novel stands as an entry in the new literature being written that gives us a sense of being untethered in time and space. Thomson’s characters appear to acknowledge and accept the many mysteries that come with interactions with new people. It remains an open question whether his reading public wants that, too. ...more
As a novel this huge piece of work has almost too many faults to name, but Eggers’ imagination and style makes the experience of reading or listening As a novel this huge piece of work has almost too many faults to name, but Eggers’ imagination and style makes the experience of reading or listening to it a special kind of pleasure. Filled to the brim with fledgling discussions of privacy, freedom, fairness, democracy, and control, the novel has in its DNA all the previous great works who have posed the questions “What is privacy and is it good?” and “What is democracy and is it good?” and “What is personal freedom and is it good?”
This is a long but easy read because it brings us a glimpse of a world many of us have only heard about and yet cannot help but be intensely curious about: the campuses of the technology giants like Google or Facebook. The company in this novel is called The Circle, based loosely on what is known of the more famous real life companies. We have heard enough, perhaps, to know Eggers is not making all of this up: the campus, company structure, and internal reporting requirements are drawn (and undoubtedly exaggerated) from life. But the mania and mindthink of bright young things anxious to gain approval in a large, successful, innovative, and fast-moving company is perfectly believable.
Eggers creates a character, Mae, who unwittingly is drawn into becoming the “voice” of the company philosophy. Her answers to carefully-posed questions by the company leadership become soundbites and her not-well-thought-out responses are said to exemplify what humans really want. Her soundbites are then clipped and pasted to the walls of the media space created by the company as though to she expressed the unfettered will of all the people, when in fact, Mae had been groomed, prodded, bullied, corrected, corralled into making the utterances that became an command that could not be challenged.
I enjoyed Eggers’ imagination and willingness to engage the important subjects of technology, privacy, education, and democracy but grew weary before the end. This may be a great book for teens who may have a larger appetite for the glamour of high technology campuses and need a point hammered home by a thousand blows. Part of the story is that of Mae developing a crush on someone she does not really know, as well as instructive incidents ill-considered sex with someone she doesn’t even like. These ring true, as does the celebrity side of Mae’s meteoric rise to stardom at The Circle.
Certainly the questions at the heart of Eggers book are not merely for teens. The pace and direction of our lives leaves little doubt that technology has changed concepts of privacy, celebrity, and participatory democracy. These are issues we need to consider now. Opting out of the whole system is not really a possibility. In Eggers book, the person who tried to opt-out did not end well and he ended early. Eggers also points out that our politicians are not going to do this for us, being “bought” as it were by corporate interests. This is up to reasonable people taking reasoned positions and fighting like hell. ...more
"It is hard to understand nothing, but the multiverse is full of it."
Were I a resident of Discworld, I am not entirely sure I wouldn’t be classified a
"It is hard to understand nothing, but the multiverse is full of it."
Were I a resident of Discworld, I am not entirely sure I wouldn’t be classified a goblin, a troll, or a dwarf. Terry Pratchett has created a satire so rich that we see our lives, successes, failures, and intentions reflected back at us. Pratchett can be biting, but he is never cruel. He retains an equanimity about human failure that inspires us to greater acts of idiocy and splendor.
Now the fortieth entry in the cycle of Discworld brings us the Rail Way by little tinkers who carried on tinkering. It changes everything! "…nothing…hurried to become something even faster."
I am sorry now I did not join Pratchett’s league of admirers earlier. He has a vast body of work on Discworld already that follows along with humankind’s stumbling activities and manages to illuminate our deepest held secrets and most agonizing social issues. Allusions to previous great works of literature and moments in history abound. Was there ever a more wise and humorous critic of our best and our worst tendencies?
A reader does not have to begin at the beginning with this series, though you may find yourself wishing to go back and delve into the riches of Pratchett's vision and humor. While these books can be read as delightful interludes 'twixt more serious fare, you may find yourself wishing there were more folks with Pratchett's understanding guiding our multiverse.
I was given the opportunity to listen to the Random House Audio version of this title narrated by the incomparable Stephen Briggs. He has narrated over thirty of Terry Pratchett’s books and has won numerous awards for his work. There is perhaps no better way to gain entry into the world of Ank-Morpork than listening to Stephen Briggs share his range of voices and interpretations of Terry Pratchett’s memorable saga. This is classic literature for our times. ...more
This is far and away the best and most accessible translation I have read and I looked at several since 2010. But best of all is that it can now be liThis is far and away the best and most accessible translation I have read and I looked at several since 2010. But best of all is that it can now be listened to, as it is read with great cognition by Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, Nobel Prize Winner Seamus Heaney, Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize Winner Louise Glück, and Bolligen Prize Winner Frank Bidart, in a new production cosponsored by Penguin Audio and FSG Audio. It doesn't take long to listen to (5 hours), and it packs a punch, just like the original should have.
Dante's The Divine Comedy is an epic poem in three parts and was written in the 14th Century, at a time when oral traditions in storytelling were still prevalent. One benefits from hearing the work spoken aloud, as in all poetry. But in this audio presentation we get only Part I, The Inferno and not Purgatorio and Paradiso. How I yearn to learn that the latter parts will also be translated by Pinsky. I have read Part I many times, Part II once, and never Part III. I'd like to see what Dante has to say about heaven. The whole work was originally entitled Commedia, and in later centuries other artists added the "Divine." The meaning is the same: our God plays with us humans...setting us difficulties and seeing how we manage. Many of us fail.
I came away wondering if this is the version of hell that the Catholic Church promulgated and has adhered to for centuries. Wikipedia says it is, and that in fact, Dante drew on St. Thomas Acquinas' Summa Theologica from medieval Christian theology. It is grim. It is horrible. It is hell in every definition. It is so similar to what I was taught that I wonder now how it is possible that so little has changed in Church teachings and at the imaginations of our religious leaders that no one has come up with a more hellish (or even a different) scenario. How little ignorance is excuse for wrongdoing in Dante's eyes. We have only ourselves to blame, he says. How clear our human moral conundrums seem from this fiery pit.
Remind yourselves of moral wisdom, and listen, just listen to our greatest living poets read Dante....more
O strange and wondrous story of an ordinary man “conceived on the circus trail by a traveler who owned a c
“Everything ends with a flight, I thought…”
O strange and wondrous story of an ordinary man “conceived on the circus trail by a traveler who owned a camel and a mother who swung from the ropes.” This story of a circus performer-turned-taxi driver is perhaps not as strange as Hage’s last novel which featured a cockroach. Suffice it to say, Hage wants to take us out of our comfort zone so that we really look at what his characters are experiencing, thinking, and saying.
The sympathetic and unnamed narrator, friend of society’s underclasses, both invokes and evokes Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude, as he was gifted a large library which fills his small apartment to overflowing. He spends his free time reorganizing the volumes according to a personal and impressionistic system.
“Dead protagonists take priority over triumphant, happy-ending characters but are surpassed by books with open-endings books that don’t have moral conclusions. Novels with open endings I consider to be of a higher rank; hence they are located before novels with happy endings, which I often call religious or “resurrection” endings…As for historical novels, they are organized based on the name of the winner of the first battle that appears in the book. For instance, War and Peace will be filed in the N section, N in reference to Napolean, of course...and here, if you look above the toilet…all libraries must submit to a certain order…“
Our narrator is called “Fly.” When asked if it refers to the insect or the action, he answers “I’m not sure.” But I think I might know. Once his mother, in a state of mental distress, came in from the circus outside and saw her son shivering and naked, cold and wet from a storm.
“She called me some other name. And she laughed when she saw me naked and stared at me. Flying man, she kept on saying, flying man, let me please you. And she drew me close to her bosom and kissed my neck and her hand swept across my skin and touched me and held my erection and stroked me until I came. There you go she said now you can leave and march towards your desert and your stone.”
Fly is a taxi driver in a city that sounds like New Orleans to me; there is a week-long annual Carnival that involves much of the city. He alternately calls his taxi his boat, his plane, his ride, his car. He “flies” to pick up fares or to get home. Or to escape.
“There are two kinds of taxi drivers: the Spiders and the Flies. Spiders are those drivers who wait at taxi stands for the dispatcher‘s call or for customers to walk off the streets and into their hungry cars….Flies are wanderers, operators who drive alone and around to pick up the wavers and the whistlers on the edges of sidewalks and streets…I am a wanderer.”
Fly masturbates on a carpet that his true father had left him. One suspects it is a prayer rug, but it suits Fly to lie on it and fantasize endlessly, his mind filled with dreams of “gladiators, sailors, or women in need of rescue.” Fly does occasionally share his seed with women, but he prefers to be alone, perhaps to concentrate on his imaginary world rather than working to please another.
(view spoiler)[Violence has a central role in this narrative. Violence is part of our worlds, though it is visited more upon some than others. Fly himself is violent, though he seems to use it more as a means of communication rather than from psychopathy. Taxi drivers begin to turn up dead, killed in gruesome ways. The litany of the dead recalls Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 in which he lists endlessly the names of Mexican girls killed in the desert over a period of years. The victims in this novel are male immigrants on the night shift. We are set up to imagine the killers of the taxi drivers to be the work of two feral boys who grew up rough and live under an overpass by a river. Fly knows the boys, and tries to help them but finds his efforts too little too late. One of the boys’ mother is a drug addict, the nominal “father” a pimp. “I don’t judge those who can’t dream…” Fly says.
Other people are murdered: a psychiatrist, an industrialist, a college professor. The boys admit to these murders, though the mystery of the taxi drivers remains unsolved. By the end, nearly everyone close to Fly is dead or disappeared. He flies. (hide spoiler)]
Every review I have looked at picks out different authors or works of literature of which this book is reminiscent: Calvino, Kafka, Wallace, O’Toole are a few, but I suspect there are many more. Hage is aligning his story of a neglected underclass of misfits with the vast body of literature, and placing his group in that hallowed hall. Why shouldn’t it be there? he seems to be asking. Their lives are as interesting and telling as any other. Their lives are our responsibility.
In a remarkably difficult but revealing interview with CBC Radio 1's Q host Jian Ghomeshi, we learn a little about the Lebanese Canadian author Rawi Hage. Hage, born in Lebanon, lived in the United States for a few years before moving to Montreal. He thinks of himself as integrated but he has that “outsider” vision allows him to zero in on cultural touchstones and problems.
“There is a war out there, and believe me, Fly, it was never really between Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Crusaders, and Confucius. The final battle is between those who love, respect, and liberate the body and those who hate it, Fly…”
Thus the masturbation, and the library--feeding the body and the brain. But real food is another story.
“Communists and Muslims are not the enemies to fear in this land, Fly. It is the food consumption that will eventually blow up in everyone’s face.”
Hage is a very interesting man and author. I think he could have helped us out by making his story more user-friendly; I had to work hard to get somewhere with this and I’m still I’m not sure I got all that he meant. I do think Hage is doing something unique…he has his own style and his own subjects. I hope I have the opportunity to see his earlier work. ...more
This strange and absorbing fiction from Nobel Prize winner Coetzee has a post-apocalyptic feel. We meet a five-year-old boy, David, and a man, Simón, This strange and absorbing fiction from Nobel Prize winner Coetzee has a post-apocalyptic feel. We meet a five-year-old boy, David, and a man, Simón, who have been given names as part of their relocation from where and to where, we never learn. We know only that they are refugees and that they stayed some time in a camp called Belstar where they learned Spanish in preparation for their move by boat to Novilla. People in Novilla can’t remember the past and appear to have no curiosity about it. They are kind, generous even, but appear emotionally and physically anesthetized.
The young boy David has lost his documents on the boat from Belstar so Simón determines to help him find his mother (“I will know her when I see her”). One day Simón finds a woman and offers the boy to her. She is not perfect: she has strange child-rearing techniques and is too liberal, but under the guidance of both Simón and Inès the mother, David grows a year older, learns to read, and enters school.
At this point we start to realize vivid parallels with the life of Jesus Christ as told in the Bible, for the boy begins to seem extraordinary in his grasp of or rejection of the written word, the number system, philosophical arguments, perhaps even commonly accepted ‘truth’ itself.
This slim novel demonstrates Coetzee’s mastery. The novel is both gripping and involving: who among us does not have firm child-rearing opinions? We are curious about the place David and Simón have landed and sympathize with Simón’s half-remembered passion for something outside the ordinary. The novel is almost completely dialog and yet we have a sense of the landscape, the people, and the dilemma they face. Coetzee raises important religious, philosophical, and ethical questions that have been debated over the ages but he dresses it in simple allegory rich with allusions.
From within the story we might recognize pieces of a worldview, perhaps a statement about the world today, another place where history is irrelevant.
"'I have not let go of the idea of history,' says Simón, 'the idea of change without beginning or end.' [Simón is then challenged by his workmates. Climate is acknowledged, but history is not:] 'Consider now history,' counters Eugenio. 'If history, like climate, were a higher reality, then history would have manifestations which we would be able to feel through our senses.' He looks around. 'Which of us has ever had his cap blown off by history?'"
What is Coetzee really telling us? That Jesus is a myth created by ideas, ideas from a childlike sensibility?
"‘Forgetting takes time,’ says Elena. ‘Once you have properly forgotten, your sense of insecurity will recede and everything will become much easier…Children live in the present, not the past. Why not take your lead from them? Instead of waiting to be transfigured, why not try to be like a child again?’"
Simón, the man who still remembers remembering, who remembers passion, wanting, and something more, finds himself explaining to David the meaning of a book: “you don’t need love if you have faith.” Ah, so.
This is a book one reads quickly and ruminates long. Remember Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil? It is an opening to the soul of an author. “Why is he continually asking himself questions instead of just living, like everyone else?” ...more
This is a western, set in the bush of Australia, featuring some very unusual characters, among them a Tasmanian devil, a platypus, a wombat, some wallThis is a western, set in the bush of Australia, featuring some very unusual characters, among them a Tasmanian devil, a platypus, a wombat, some wallabies, dingoes, bandicoots, and memorably, a raccoon from California. Strange though it may seem, this is not a book for children, nor is it a story written by an Australian. Together, all these facts weave a wonderfully strange allegory of life’s circuitous journey to happiness and fulfillment and some measure of wisdom.
When a book appears outside of the usual genres, it must be difficult to market. But my favorite reader/writers have been raving about this book since its arrival on the scene in the summer of 2012. And so it goes by word of mouth, and I add my own to the paeans of praise.
Albert is a platypus. Naked and alone in his cage in the Adelaide zoo, he dreams of escape—to a life without incessant examination by “faces smeared with cotton candy and jaws that dribbled popcorn.” He has heard tell of “old Australia” which he conflates with “the Promised Land.” He jumps a freight train, heading north carrying a soft drink bottle filled with water…
Many bad things happen, but there are good things, too. “Old Australia” isn’t quite what Albert imagined, but he’s made some friends and sometimes he still dreams of finding a shady riverbank populated by friendly platypussies. Life is a journey, and in this, we travel along with a thoughtful, civilized life form, slow to anger but fierce in vengeance, who can tell a story that makes us see what we might have done better when we ourselves came upon a band of marauding wallaby, terrorizing dingoes, or facing down the brown snake in a cave or in our office.
We come to admire Albert, and wish him well. We’d like to know him, and sit about the campfire trading stories. What more can we ask of fiction?
A word about the author: he is American who has lived as a general roustabout, a perfect background for a writer. He is currently working in New Mexico as a public defender, where he represents people from Mexico charged with crimes north of the border. He is one of the living writers I’d most like to meet.
When an author tries something completely unusual, and succeeds, we need to take notice and support them in their endeavor. Buy this book. You can pass it on after you’ve had a chance to ramble the Outback. ...more
In an interview Craig Thompson told his audience that artists must become vulnerable if their work is to mean anything. This dark and agonized work haIn an interview Craig Thompson told his audience that artists must become vulnerable if their work is to mean anything. This dark and agonized work has a great deal of nakedness in it, both literally and figuratively, and a lot of staring directly at human experience and trying to make sense of it. It also looks with a colder, more dispassionate and assessing eye at the overlap in the religious teachings of Christianity and Islam.
This is Thompson’s fourth published work, and one glance inside gives some idea why it took six years to complete. The graphic work is fantastically detailed and patterned, which over more than six hundred pages becomes claustrophobic and oppressive with patterns repeated again and again in different combinations. This is partly due to the size of the pattern, which seems to become more and more compressed as the story progresses, and the more-black-than-white palette.
The patterns are beautiful, and may represent mathematical principles that sustain the progress upon which the world is built, but by the end I got the distinct impression Thompson was asking us to question even that progress: is it good? Who is it good for and how can it be modified to suit a different world with better outcomes? One is not accustomed to such weighty questions in the work of graphic artists.
Thompson is unique in many ways, but certainly the source of his questioning may come from his fundamentalist Christian upbringing in rural Wisconsin, an upbringing he explores in his second graphic novel and the first large-scale project of his career, Blankets. Thompson freely admits he still believes in God, but he is less sure now how best to worship him.
That his father was a plumber Thompson credits with the understanding that water is precious. This book is plumbed through with references to the primacy and importance of water in our world, our lives. This aspect of the book was another piece that elevated the story-telling to something essential.
Some discussion among reviewers condemns the sex, violence, and numerous representations of the naked human form depicted in this work as gratuitous. I will argue that is not the case. There is no question that the storyteller in this case is frightened by and ashamed of his powerful sexual feelings, but his arousal is well within the bounds of normal male sexuality and should, in fact, educate readers about the conflicted emotional trauma that can accompany the physical manifestations of desire.
In the years Thompson worked on this book, he learned to appreciate and to write some Arabic script, but never learned to speak. His translators and friends in the endeavor to understand Islam—its culture, science, and art—reviewed the story he created to check for realism and racism. In the end, any understanding readers take away about the religion or culture of the region belong to Thompson alone, but I suspect he feels confident in his depiction.
Simply sketched, the story is as follows: a light-skinned girl and a dark-skinned boy find themselves orphaned in the desert. They make a life and grow up together for a period of years before they are violently separated. They spend a long period of time hoping to find one another again and then one day, they do. The story has an impetus and emotion even without the later personality-defining moments of coercion and despair depicted with the same pitiless camera-eye that captured their earlier life.
If I say that there are many complications and observations along the way, it will give you scant warning for the deluge that is to come. This work is huge, covering enormous ground, picking up and putting down again many topics worthy of examination and discussion. It is overwhelming, as it undoubtedly was to write. I have never determined how an editor deals with slimming the opus of an auteur. The only thing I can think of is that cut pages or threads could be sold separately once the work has been published to acclaim.
Thompson’s willingness to look closely at who we are evinces in me admiration and gratitude, not censure. I look eagerly forward to what he decides to do next, whether it be drawing, writing, or something else of his choice. He is extraordinary in every way....more
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