Several short stories about an absent minded professor rammed together and called a novel (but that’s okay, people do it all the time), Pnin is almostSeveral short stories about an absent minded professor rammed together and called a novel (but that’s okay, people do it all the time), Pnin is almost beloved by readers who aren’t me. Professor Pnin with his hilariously broken English is allegedly endearing but I was not even slightly endeared. This was footling stuff. He gets on the wrong train. He nearly misses giving an evening lecture. He buys a football for a kid who doesn’t like football. He doesn’t realise his job is on the line. He talks to people. Some of them like him.
[image]
So that’s how Pnin sank down to the two star basement. But of course Vlad the Impaler is one of the all time English language stylists, so he could be writing about - oh, say, the experience of getting all your teeth pulled out – and it would be heavenly :
It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate.
But there is not enough of this grotesquerie and way too much description of rooms. My God, writers love to describe rooms! Describing rooms must be as good as sex for writers.
VN wrote Pnin while he was stuck toward the end of writing Lolita, as a kind of holiday from the horror, which is like if the Beatles stopped recording "A Day in the Life" to knock off "Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da", and if the melancholy uncomedy of Pnin gave VN the break he needed to complete his masterpiece, then I celebrate this very thin novel for that reason alone.
2.5 stars, rounded up to 3 to make me not look like an idiot - this is Nabokov!...more
Forster deals blows right and left in this novel and modern readers will grimace when they read the intricately exposTHIS IS AN ANTICOLONIAL NOVEL BUT
Forster deals blows right and left in this novel and modern readers will grimace when they read the intricately exposed racism of the British in India (the lofty British ladies learning just enough Urdu to be able to give instructions to the servants); but alas, some of the generalisations about Indians will jar as the narrator throws out stuff like
Like most Orientals, Aziz overrated hospitality, mistaking it for intimacy, and not seeing that it is tainted with the sense of possession.
Or
What they [the Indians] said and what they felt were (except in the case of affection) seldom the same. They had numerous mental conventions and when these were flouted they found it very difficult to function.
or
Suspicion in the Oriental is a sort of malignant tumour, a mental malady, that makes him self-conscious and unfriendly suddenly; he trusts and mistrusts at the same time in a way the Westerner cannot comprehend.
That doesn’t sound very nice to me, I had thought that Mr Forster was a nice man. Well, he was a nice man. This book was published in 1924 and is brilliantly anti-colonialist but even progressive minds could not help generalising about The Oriental.
THE MYSTIC EAST
Part of the opposition displayed between western colonialists and Indian subjects is expressed as the English demanding facts and figures and making religion a department of the Colonial Office (“God who saves the King will surely support the police”) versus continual suffocating Indian religious fervency, both Islamic and Hindu. This cliché had caterpillar legs, it was very strong 40 years later when the Beatles set up a tax avoidance scheme called Apple and then immediately left for Rishikesh to meditate on ineffability with the Maharishi. But the insistence on the hardnosed versus the floaty mystical-twistical can be irritating and possibly strike the reader as crypto-racist. Forster himself seems to participate in this Mystic East schtick. Here is the narrator waxing not so much lyrical as borderline incomprehensible :
All over the city and over much of India the same retreat on the part of humanity was beginning, into cellars, up hills, under trees. April, herald of horrors, is at hand. The sun was returning to his kingdom with power but without beauty – that was the sinister feature. If only there had been beauty! His cruelty would have been tolerable then. Through excess of light, he failed to triumph, he also; in his yellowy-white overflow not only matter, but brightness itself lay drowned. He was not the unattainable friend, either of men or birds or other suns, he was not the eternal promise, the never-withdrawn suggestion that haunts our consciousness; he was merely a creature, like the rest, and so debarred from glory.
TUMESCENCE/DETUMESCENCE
The action of the plot turns into a big courtroom drama. This is the second classic in a row that I read with a John Grisham tendency, the other one was The Brothers Karamazov. The case collapses in dramatic fashion and after that comes a lot of ruefulness and bumbling and personal bitterness but not too much happens. There is maybe seventy pages of deflation. I could imagine that some reader might be a trifle impatient with that.
ON THE OTHER HAND
You have to love zingers like
A friendliness, as of dwarfs shaking hands, was in the air.
And a crafty observation like
There is always trouble when two people do not think of sex at the same moment
In 1929 Freud wrote that The Brothers Karamazov was “the most magnificent novel ever written”. Well, it’s possible he had not got round to reading UlyIn 1929 Freud wrote that The Brothers Karamazov was “the most magnificent novel ever written”. Well, it’s possible he had not got round to reading Ulysses yet (copies were hard to get until 1934) and of course he never did get the opportunity to read the work of Dan Brown or J K Rowling, but even so, this gives you the idea of this novel’s impact on the brains of its readers.
A SUMMARY OF THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
The major themes are
Comedy Tragedy Psychology Politics Theology Life Death Drinking Borrowing money
THIS NOVEL IS A SHAPESHIFTING BEAST
For chapters at a time this novel is about children. For most of the last half this novel is like a Richard Price police procedural (Clockers, Freedomland, Lush Life) and also like a great courtroom drama with verbatim closing speeches. Elsewhere it’s a detailed debate about monastic life and the intricacies of the Christian message. The rest of the time it’s an intense psychodrama between seven or eight major characters. In one chapter (“An Ailing Little Foot”) Dosto prefigures Molly Bloom’s stream of conscious. Got to say, this guy Dosto was not a one trick pony, not by a country mile.
SOME POINTS ABOUT 19TH CENTURY RUSSIA
Only peasants and servants work, leaving the rest of the people time to talk a lot
People are really ill quite often. This might be connected to the high alcohol consumption or the poor medical facilities
It is clear that the concept of interrupting someone had not yet been introduced into Russia at this point. So everyone is able to spout forth about anything they like, rambling on with multiple digressions for ten pages, and none of the other people in the room will say “oy, shut it, sunshine, we’ve heard enough from you, let somebody else have a go”. No one will say this. Eventually the speaker collapses to the floor from lack of oxygen and the next character will launch into their ten page rant.
THE NARRATOR IS A MAJOR CHARACTER
He is a bumbling old fart who lives in the little town where all this happens. He says he has gone round talking to people to get all this story straight. He continually says things like The details I do not know – I have heard only that…
I myself have not read the will
This arrival [of Ivan] which was so fateful and which was to serve as the origin of so many consequences for me long afterwards, the rest of my life, almost…
And on P 573 he says
Today’s item in the newspaper Rumours was entitled “From Skotoprigonyevsk” (alas, that is the name of our town, I have been concealing it all this time).
THERE ARE ZINGERS
You probably thought Dosto was a bit gloomy but this is often a comic novel, yes really. For instance Dmitri says
Who doesn’t wish for his father’s death ? …Everyone wants his father dead
And the narrator himself comes out with
The two were some sort of enemies in love with each other
And Ivan says stuff like
When I think of what I would do to the man who first invented God! Stringing him up on the bitter asp would be too good for him.
THERE IS A MACGUFFIN
There is an amount of 3000 roubles that Dmitri borrows from his current squeeze, and readers had better get used to the phrase 3000 roubles popping up about three times on every other page of this 900 page novel. Because you see, totally co-incidentally, the dead father was robbed of this exact sum also. It can get slightly tiresome, I admit that. We never hear the last of it.
SOME BLURB WRITERS SHOULD BE STOPPED BEFORE THEY BLURB ANY MORE
The blurb on the back of my Penguin copy says
The murder of brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov changes the lives of his sons blah blah blah
This is likely to get readers all het up and their anticipation of a juicy whodunnit may turn to irritation because the murder doesn’t happen until page 508. This is not Dosto’s fault.
This is the holy joe, novice monk, all round too good to be true guy, but he doesn’t seem to have much vim, zip, pazzaz or get up and go about him. You wouldn’t want to be stuck in a lift with him. Not good boyfriend material.
3. Dmitri (a.k.a. Mitya, Mitka, Mitenka, Mitri)
This is the roister-doistering swaggering loudmouth uber-romantic aggravating jerk who because of his ability to drink ox-stunning amounts of hard liquor and then do the Argentinian tango or the Viennese waltz at the drop of a samovar is a wow with the ladies but you better be expecting to pay for his exhausting company because he never has a bean. Except that on the two occasions he does have a bean (3000 beans!) you will have the best time ever! Definitely not good boyfriend material.
2. Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov (aka the lackey)
The unacknowledged bastard of Big Daddy Fyodor who is kept around as a skivvy and although he has brains because he’s epileptic and an unacknowledged bastard is never given any education and therefore becomes an autodidact with a full tank of bloodcurdling homicidal suppressed rage. He’s completely boring until he starts talking then whooahhhhh. Really not good boyfriend material.
1. Ivan (a.k.a. Vanya, Vanka, Vanechka)
Obvious star of the show, the full-on atheist and progressive thinker – he’s given two entire chapters of brilliant ranting against religion – Rebellion and The Grand Inquisitor and every time he slams into the room and starts sneering the quality of the conversation is going to increase. Also probably not good boyfriend material.
NICE BIT OF DOSTO META HUMOUR
Dmitri gets to make a good joke :
Eh gentlemen, why pick on such little things : how, when and why, and precisely this much money and not that much, and all that claptrap… if you keep on, it’ll take you three volumes and an epilogue to cram it all in.
He looked at Edna's book, which he had read; and he told her the end, to save her the trouble of wading through it, he HOW NOT TO HELP A NOVEL READER
He looked at Edna's book, which he had read; and he told her the end, to save her the trouble of wading through it, he said.
ORIGINALITY IS NOT THE POINT HERE
If you piled up all the novels about marital infidelity you would… well, you’d need a team of assistants with engineering skills and probably ninja powers, plus some hang gliding experts when the extendable ladders reached their limit, and then a lot of expensive final assistance from the NASA International Space Station because the pile would reach to the moon.
So I can’t recommend this novel for its original theme. Reviewers at the time called it the American Madame Bovary. In fact it got a bad reception all round. They were shocked by the boldness of Edna, our heroine, who never loved her husband, can live cheerfully without seeing her two kids for months at a time, and gets to kiss two separate men who aren’t her husband.
This was 1899, not the swinging sixties, and it was New Orleans, not Paris when it sizzles, so Edna’s awakening to the possibilities of life outside bourgeois convention was never going to be a frenzied spree of threesomes and hot tubs and alfresco shagging exploits. But there is no doubt Edna does get to shag one of these kissy guys. This is how Kate tells us :
He had detected the latent sensuality, which unfolded under his delicate sense of her nature's requirements like a torpid, torrid, sensitive blossom.
That’s hot, isn’t it.
HATING ON EDNA
Aside from the implied extramarital sex the reviewers hated on Edna for her less than maternal desire to park the kids and get on with her painting. But actually, you see guys in books doing this all the time, Brideshead Revisited springs to mind, but any story featuring a boarding school will do. Edna got clobbered for being seen to breathe a sigh of relief when the kids were off her hands. She makes oddball statements like :
I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself.
Elsewhere Kate is fiercer and less ambiguous
The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul's slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them.
Such a kicking was dished out to The Awakening that it faded into obscurity for 50 years and was rediscovered and then became a classic, whatever that means. So Kate Chopin lines up with the likes of Mississippi John Hurt, Nick Drake, Rodriguez and, of course, Herman Melville (you couldn’t give copies of Moby Dick away in 1920).
PROBLEMS OF A RECALCITRANT WIFE
Kate is funny, She has a glinting, wicked, stiletto-between-the-ribs humour, especially about ghastly husbands. Edna’s other half moans to his doctor
She’s making it devilishly uncomfortable for me…she’s got some notion in her head concerning the eternal rights of women
And she point-blank refuses to go to her sister’s wedding :
She says a wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth. Nice thing for a woman to say to her husband!
The doctor comforts Mr Pontellier
Woman, my dear friend, is a very peculiar and delicate organism—a sensitive and highly organized woman, such as I know Mrs. Pontellier to be, is especially peculiar. It would require an inspired psychologist to deal successfully with them. And when ordinary fellows like you and me attempt to cope with their idiosyncrasies the result is bungling. Most women are moody and whimsical. This is some passing whim of your wife, due to some cause or causes which you and I needn't try to fathom.
Some other old trout gives up the following wisdom :
“You are too lenient, too lenient by far, Leonce,” asserted the Colonel. “Authority, coercion are what is needed. Put your foot down good and hard; the only way to manage a wife. Take my word for it.” The Colonel was perhaps unaware that he had coerced his own wife into her grave.
When Edna does finally grab a few pleasurable evenings with a nonhusband, the delicious cynicism is still there
“I'll go away if I must; but I shan't amuse myself. You know that I only live when I am near you.” He stood up to bid her good night. “Is that one of the things you always say to women?” “I have said it before, but I don't think I ever came so near meaning it,” he answered with a smile.
IN THE END
I loved all of this novel, even the ending. I could imagine some readers hurling The Awakening at the wall after reading the last page – I can’t say why naturally – and I sympathise with them but no, this was a great ending.
I could have read this many years ago, it was always there, but better late than never....more
There’s a kind of cheap thrill to dishing out one star to a Nobel prize winner and a guy I previously gave 5 stars to for the brilliant One Hundred YeThere’s a kind of cheap thrill to dishing out one star to a Nobel prize winner and a guy I previously gave 5 stars to for the brilliant One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it has to be done because on a sentence by sentence level this this thin story in a thin book is as dull as ditchwater which has lost the will to live, all about some honor killing but of a guy not a woman, the alleged deflowerer of a returned bride. Yeah, we are in a society where if the bride isn’t a virgin she’s returned – “this one’s secondhand, I ordered new, I want my money back”, so the brothers of the unfortunately-all-too-consummated sister go and shoot the alleged deflowerer. I didn’t care who shot who or how many chickens were cooked or how or what the dress looked like or why or how many complicated street festivals there were for who knew what obscure saints and who saw who do what at 3.32 on the fateful afternoon or which sisters of which family were able to levitate and how many times the brothers told everybody and his uncle and his uncle’s uncle that they were going to shoot Santiago Nasar and when and how and where and which and why nobody called the cops and all this and that. But that's just me, I hope you like it....more
I have been such a well-behaved reader this year, ploughing my way through many throbbing mountainous classics and hardly reading anything written lesI have been such a well-behaved reader this year, ploughing my way through many throbbing mountainous classics and hardly reading anything written less than a hundred years ago, so I thought I’d have a holiday and frolic with something almost guaranteed to put a smile on my fizzog and rescue me from the sturmy drangy skies over Petersburg.
But look what happened.
[image]
I would say by the time page 200 came into view I was just about approaching Bitterness with this damned annoying book. Charlie Kaufman, a guy who has an almost flawless film career (Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – just those two – gets him the P Bryant Lifetime Achievement Award ™ – all right I wrenched it out of his hands when he produced the portentous wretchedness that is Synecdoche, New York but then I broke in to his house and stuck it back on his shelf after Anomalisa and I’m Thinking of Ending Things) has written a giant 700 page self-loathing self-referential unfunny comic novel because that’s what white male novelists love to do and having been buffeted and gashed by several previous giant unfunny postmodern novels* I had pitifully hoped good old Charlie would be the one who could do it right but that hope faded as fast as a rainbow with toothache as all these sub sub Woody Allen whiny routines began flooding forth, all about this moaning complaining failed film lecturer and critic who has an African American girlfriend and discovers that an African American guy who is over 100 years old and is living in a nearby apartment has made an unknown and unseen except by himself stop-motion film which lasts for three months (ha ha take that Guinness Book of Records) which is the best film ever – is all this sounding silly? That’s because it is.
Also our first person protagonist B Rosenberger never stops banging on about how everyone thinks he’s Jewish because he looks Jewish but hey, he isn’t Jewish. Okay, you’re not. I got it. Rosenberger, I GOT IT. But no, this becomes something that has to be repeated ten trillion times. And because Charlie is clever, he thinks – aha, along about now, my readers will be getting irritated with my book because of its many erudite cinephile references and haven’t-we-been-here-a-thousand-times-before main character and cruel contemptuous thoughts will be bubbling up in their minds right at this point, so let’s have the main guy go into a bitter rant about how Charlie Kaufman is a self-deluded fool of no importance, that will defang them all :
From p 148
Stranger than Fiction is the film Kaufman would’ve written if he were able to plan and structure his work, rather than making it up as he goes along, throwing in half-baked concepts willy-nilly, using no criterion other than a hippy-dippy “that’d be cool, man”. Such a criterion might work if the person making the assessment had even a shred of humanism within his soul. Kaufman does not, and so he puts his characters through hellscapes with no hope of them achieving understanding or redemption… leaving an audience depleted, depressed, and, most egregiously, cheated. … Kaufman is a monster, plain and simple, but a monster unaware of his staggering ineptitude
Well, I personally wouldn’t go that far, and I admit it’s kind of neat to try to tickle all nasty commentators like me by slagging himself off like that, but no Charlie, it won’t work – I see through your ploy!
To all the fans of this book who would like to assure me that it gets way better after page 250 may I say with regret and sorrow that I will probably never find out.
[image]
*****
*The Instructions by Adam Levin Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer The Tunnel by William Gass To name but three...more
There should be a few warnings on the cover of this short novel : contains no likeable characters and many descriptions of really disgusting racist beThere should be a few warnings on the cover of this short novel : contains no likeable characters and many descriptions of really disgusting racist behaviour. I can’t remember reading so much intimate detail about the white racist’s seething physical and mental horror at the very presence of a black person before. This is going to upset some readers for sure. Here is a mild passage about that :
She had never come into contact with natives before, as an employer on her own account. Her mother’s servants she had been forbidden to talk to; in the club she had been kind to the waiters; but the ‘native problem’ meant for her other women’s complaints of their servants at tea parties. She was afraid of them, of course. Every woman in South Africa is brought up to be. In her childhood she had been forbidden to walk out alone and when she had asked why, she had been told in the furtive, lowered, but matter-of-fact voice she associated with her mother, that they were nasty and might do horrible things to her.
Doris Lessing wrote this age 25, it was her first novel, and it’s quite brilliant. It does several difficult things at once. It traces the slow painful collapse of a hideously inappropriate marriage between two people who should have stayed single and didn’t simply because of the social pressure to conform; it explains the class divisions within white colonial society whereby “comfortably-off” British farmers were okay with thinking of some Afrikaans farmers as poor whites but couldn’t stand it if a British farmer couldn’t make a go of his farm; it shines a laserbeam light on the horrible dealings of the white farmers with their black workers in the fields and in their homes where men are always called boys, always; and it expertly performs that trick of making you think for many pages our main character Mary Turner is sympathetic and is just a misunderstood oddball until gradually you see she is a monster. I love that trick.
Mary is what cute columnists these days call a kidult – she never wants to grow up, she freezes at the mental age of 14, she becomes an office worker and lives in a boarding house for young ladies until she’s 30 and then unfortunately overhears a conversation and is rudely awakened to the fact that she should already be married with children so she marries the first guy who shows the slightest interest and this is a young farmer, so in the twinkling of an eye she is out in the bush on a run down farm with a guy who turns out to be a fool. This husband has some notions about soil and tree preservation and crop differentiation which may be ecologically sound but which condemn him as an eccentric and are guaranteed to never make him any money. There is a particularly great section showing how when Mary shakes off her depression and focuses her brain she sees exactly why their farm never makes money and how to improve their grinding life and he sees what she means and admires her rare burst of mental clarity and even agrees with her but he just can’t bring himself to rip everything out and plant tobacco, he just can’t do it.
In the end, everything goes to hell. Don’t look for any morally uplifting message here. This short novel was on course for the full five stars, that's how good it is, until 40 pages from the end when Doris started waffling about Mary’s final mental disintegration and it seems couldn’t stop. She starts writing in slow-motion and it keeps getting slower. Such a shame, after being so sharp and indelible until then.
I CORRECTED WIKIPEDIA, AND I LIKED IT : A GEEKY MINOR ANECDOTE
Since The House of the Spirits is all about Chile I thought I’d check out some history oI CORRECTED WIKIPEDIA, AND I LIKED IT : A GEEKY MINOR ANECDOTE
Since The House of the Spirits is all about Chile I thought I’d check out some history on Wikipedia. I found a page called Timeline of Chilean History. So I was reading that and I came across this under the year 2006 – it was a classic WTF moment :
Strange Missile Accident in Chile killing 50,000 citizens as investigators call it just an accident, some think is was planned to hit the oceans of California but went wrong. Sources say that nobody knew about the missile and thats what made it even more dangerous. Unsuspecting people dying at 12:00 P.M exactly.
Oho, I thought, a piece of vandalism if ever I saw one. This insane item was unsourced - because everyone knows there was no strange missile accident in Chile killing 50,000. I think we would all have been somewhat aware of it if there had been. (Vandalism as you probably know is when people with a sense of innocent fun insert wild and crazy untruths into the hallowed pages of the great Wiki. Editors should prowl all ten billion pages of Wikipedia 24/7 and prevent this happening but some things get missed. The more obscure page it is, the longer your ridiculous made up nonsense will stay there.)
I left the strange missile accident there for 24 hours then I came back and deleted it just like that, because anyone can edit Wikipedia.
THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS
And now back to our scheduled programme. This is a very looooonnnnngggggg novel often described as magical realist. Well, there is a charming young proto-hippy called Clara who has telekinetic and clairvoyant powers, she can predict the future, but this happens only sporadically. There was not enough magic for me. If I had a kid like Clara she would have been bundled up and taken to the track every Saturday. “Which horsey is gonna win this race, dear?”
IF I MAY BE SO BOLD
As to complain just a leetle bit about a couple of leetle things, really nothing at all, but in this 500 page 20th century panorama, until the election of Allende, the author only mentions three historical events – world wars get a vague reference and the moon landing comes up briefly. So most of the time we are rafting lazily in timeless mode. Well, maybe that’s how it was in Chile mostly. But it was like being on holiday with no signal and no newspapers.
And I must say that this book is full of page long paragraphs of explication and descriptive listings of interior decoration, and for long stretches is wholly bereft of dialogue. I could have used a bit more lively dialogue. These are plenty lively characters so let's hear them talk to each other! C'mon!
Then also, I have a dislike of when authors call characters The Candidate or The President or The Poet and decline to give them names. I guess in this case Isabel Allende wanted to be clear that she was referring to Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda but still, a fictitious name would look better I think.
WHIMSY REPLACED BY TORTURE
This is a book of two halves. Make that four quarters. Maths is not my strong subject. The last 150 pages are a whole other thing. Up to then we get a whimsical family saga about three generations of women coping with the usual crew of misshapen hideous men-beasts, mainly in the form of the nasty padrone of the hacienda Esteban Trueba, whose hobbies were raping peasant girls and screaming at people.
But when Salvador Allende wins the 1970 election everything changes. In the military coup that followed after three years of chaos torture replaces cuteness and we get a gruelling horror story full of despair. This was the great part of the book for me. I noticed that this appalling account of what fascists will do to anyone who looks at them in the wrong way was written only ten years after the actual events. It gave me a chill.
3.5 stars for me (a life-changing 5 stars for many other readers, of course)...more
You are plunging into a world of misery and suffering, peopled by creatures who are strangers to everything but disease and policemen.
Ha, right you arYou are plunging into a world of misery and suffering, peopled by creatures who are strangers to everything but disease and policemen.
Ha, right you are, sunshine.
This newspaper has hired an agony aunt which is a man, but he’s referred to throughout this teeny tiny 80 page miserable shoot your brains out in despair 1933 novel as Miss Lonelyhearts. There are 15 very short chapters and according to the author hisself each one relates to a religious experience as delineated in the famous book The Varieties of Religious Experience by Henry James’ brother. This went a little bit over my head. There is no plot, Miss Lonelyhearts just drags his sorry ass around and occasionally gets to shag some poor woman.
Point being that reading all theses terminal horror letters from the public day in and day out is making Miss Lonelyhearts sick in the head.
It’s another one of those provocative disturbing the-world-is-a-festering-swamp-of-filth books they use to like to write. Which come to think of it they still like to write. Probably because the world is still a festering swamp of filth.
The characters in this book say remarkable unpleasant stuff to each other.
In the speakeasy he discovered a group of his friends at the bar. They greeted him and went on talking. One of them was complaining about the number of female writers. “And they’ve all got three names,” he said. “Mary Roberts Wilcox, Ella Wheeler Catheter, Ford Mary Rinehart…” Then someone started a train of stories by suggesting that what they all needed was a good rape.
If this book was an album it could might be Tomb of the Mutilated by Cannibal Corpse. It could might be that Cannibal Corpse fans would complain at the comparison.
What I learned from this novel is that if you look intensely and soulfully at a painting in a gallery and the artist himself happens to see you doing What I learned from this novel is that if you look intensely and soulfully at a painting in a gallery and the artist himself happens to see you doing it and conceives the notion that you and only you alone have perceived the true great meaning of this work you might find yourself cajoled, inveigled, drawn in, stalked obsessively, obsessed over night and day, belittled, berated, bewildered, bamboozled, brutalised and finally stabbed and killed in a blizzard of male rage in just exactly the same way these ghastly things are done in any old vulgar sex crime you might see on Forensic Files or in the pages of your local tabloid, and so the moral is clear : if out of the corner of your eye you do see the famous artist looking at you looking, you should beat it out of there as fast as your little feet can carry you and don’t look back until you’re back behind double-locked doors, because he might, just might, be the protagonist of an existential novel from the 1940s....more
By page 130 I ran out of patience with this thing so I channeled my inner irritable 14 year old and composed the following review:
This Ballsack is a gBy page 130 I ran out of patience with this thing so I channeled my inner irritable 14 year old and composed the following review:
This Ballsack is a great writer I am told but one problem is that he wrote 4,578 novels, so which one should I read. I saw that Old Goriot has mostly 4 and 5 star reviews, so it looked like a good choice, but I was so so wrong. For the first 70 pages Ballsack describes buildings and characters, as if nobody knows what anything looks like or has ever met a student or an old dame or a boring old fart before. Everyone has met those types before, I meet them every day. No one needs 5 pages about what an old fart does. So nothing happens. Then after 70 pages people start to go into rooms and make speeches and go out of rooms. Not so often but sometimes, they take a carriage which is French for taxi to another house so they can go in another room and make a speech. There is no story but if there is it is about this old Goriot who gave all his dough to his daughters who surprise turned into ungrateful bitches and don’t give a stuff about their old dad anymore and it breaks his heart but he should of thought of that earlier. Like King Leer, another windbag.
But then I read ten pages more and found – wait! – a little bit of plot appeared, and then some more, and pretty soon Old Goriot was bowling along spiffily, there were evil schemes, criminals were unmasked, there were huge rows, there was police involvement, there were gold lame dresses… it was most entertaining!
There is a fabulous villain named Vautrin - here he is being very cheeky to some old dear who has just squeezed herself into a dress two sizes too small :
“Ah! Here comes Ma Vauquerre, fair as a star-r-r, decked like a Christmas tree – do we not feel just a shade too tight, Ma?” he asked, laying a hand on the lady at the place where her corset took most strain. “Our little front is well squeezed in. If we get worked up there will be an explosion; but I will gather up all the fragments with an antiquary’s care.”
Now and then Balzac throws in some zingers like
You can do without a King but you can’t do without your dinner
and most of the time (after page 130) he writes with great comic energy, but he still doesn’t know when to shut up, so that when the big dramatic scene rolls round at the end we have to put up with a whole lot of eyerollingly ridiculous wildly overstated camped-up drama-queening
He stopped abruptly looking like a thunderbolt had struck him
He fell on his bed as if a bullet had struck him
“Papa! Papa!” the two young women cried, clinging to him to prevent him dashing his head against the walls
I cannot risk meeting your husband again, I should kill him on the spot
And perhaps the most ridiculous line in all of French literature
I wish I were God so that I could throw the universe at your feet
So..... this is a fairly infuriating mixture of the tedious and the fabulous. You may need amphetamines to get through the first 100 pages but after that this is pretty much a bittersweet tragicomical King Learish hoot.
3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 to make me look better...more
Here is a fantastic brainspinning cringemaking you-can’t-say-THAT! satire from 1931 which would be a perfect addition to any Black Lives Matter readinHere is a fantastic brainspinning cringemaking you-can’t-say-THAT! satire from 1931 which would be a perfect addition to any Black Lives Matter reading list in order to show that in the right hands a broad comedy about racism in the USA is not only possible but is a very welcome place to rest and recuperate for a moment or two, and look at the whole problem again from the strangest perspective.
George Schuyler has the highest of high concepts – a black doctor invents a process to turn black Americans white. It’s cheap and available to all. Got that ? Now let the uneasy laughter begin.
The process is available at the various clinics operated by Black No More Incorporated, and it’s immediately wildly popular. Our author drily comments :
A lifetime of being Negroes in the United States had convinced them that there was a great advantage in being white.
We follow the fortunes of one black chancer Max Disher, who wants to be the very first to turn white. And he does. The leaving of black society give him twinges of remorse :
Max stood irresolutely in the midst of the gibbering crowd of people. Unaccountably he felt at home here among these black folk. Their jests, scraps of conversation and lusty laughter all seemed like heavenly music.
Well, that wistfulness doesn’t last long. He immediately thinks
What a treat it would be to mingle with white people in places where as a youth he had never dared to enter. At last he felt like an American citizen.
Very soon Max is off on some adventures amongst the racists of the southern states.
Let’s just take a pace back here. This is a science fiction idea and you have to swallow it lock stock & barrel for the satire to work. George Schuyler dismisses any issues of different physiognomy – it seems all this is “fixed” during the whitening process. That leaves one very obvious difference – language. Surely all these blacks-turned-white would still speak in the same way, using their usual vocabulary, mannerisms, slang, and so on, and therefore be instantly recognisable. George Schuyler waves all this away in one unconvincing paragraph. The reader has to just get on board with the idea that these whitened blacks cannot be distinguished from white people.
He follows through the logic of this massive ironic offensive idea mostly in order to deal satirical blows to both white and black politics, wheelers and dealers, the capitalist barons who use race to suppress the Southern white workers, the grandiose black charities, the community leaders, the great and the good - they all get it in the neck.
I think he loves to goad intellectuals the most :
Like most men with a vision, a plan, a program or a remedy, he fondly imagined people to be intelligent enough to accept a good thing when it was offered to them, which was conclusive evidence that he knew little about the human race.
and again
During his leisure time he wrote long and learned articles, bristling with references, for the more intellectual magazines, in which he sought to prove conclusively that the plantation shouts of Southern Negro peons were superior to any of Beethoven’s symphonies and that the city of Benin was the original site of the Garden of Eden.
and yet again
His well-known work “The Fluctuation of the Sizes of Left Feet among the Assyrians during the Ninth Century before Christ” had been favourably commented upon by several reviewers, one of whom had actually read it
Of Dr Bonds, head of the Negro Data League :
He was engaged in a most vital and necessary work, i.e. collecting bales of data to prove satisfactorily to all that more money was needed to collect more data.
The revolutionary Black No More process, strangely, according to George, does not provoke any white supremacist violence :
As there had never been more than two million Negroes in the North, the whitening process had been viewed indifferently by the masses because those who controlled the channels of opinion felt that the country was getting rid of a very vexatious problem at absolutely no cost.
It’s quite true that Schuyler does not get into the detail of how the “new whites” would possibly live their lives, and how existing whites would reacts to the rapid vanishing of black people in the USA (by page 132 practically all blacks in America are now white). But to do any of that would capsize the fast and furious momentum of this delicious novel as it races towards some final corkscrewingly ironic twists.
Oh yes, and when you think George has, well, been softer and kinder to everybody than you were expecting, he ambushes you with an ending that shows the teeth and dripping red claws under this brilliant comedy.
What a very lurid sleazy shocking sordid unsavoury distasteful delicious potpourri of popular parricidal perversion this was, to be sure. Highlights oWhat a very lurid sleazy shocking sordid unsavoury distasteful delicious potpourri of popular parricidal perversion this was, to be sure. Highlights of the story include
Suicide Incest Murder Underage sex Cat strangling Breast exposing in moving automobile leading to fatal crash Hideous fairground accident And much more
Spoilerish remarks may now follow.
SOME REPRESENTATIVE QUOTES
Mr Card was on his knees on the ground, his face hidden in Mrs Card’s flesh, and Mrs Card was lying very still, with her legs spread a little, and a smile on her face that showed her teeth.
- This is Norman peeping through a hedge and observing the canoodlings of a married couple
When Norman could stand it no longer, he jumped at the cat and fastened his hands round its throat
- This is Norman’s reaction to observing the canoodlings. Sad to say, the cat dies.
Be nice to me honey…be good to me. It ain’t like I was your real pa.
This is the main scumbag of the novel speaking to his stepdaughter. The publishers made Grace change the character into a stepfather.
Blood gushed up in a fountain and bathed her face.
- This is the consequence of trying to rape her when she’s all grown up and can crack his skull with a poker.
“Ginny”, he would demand in a terrible voice, “did you ever do it with my father?”
- This is a guy uncertain about the faithfulness of his dear wife.
I’ve got the hardest breasts you ever played with.
-This is the girl in the car just before she exposes one of the breasts causing the driver to crash.
I also know that in addition to a child being physically ready for sex at fifteen or sixteen his mind has been educated and conditioned to sex and he feels a tremendous basic drive for sex
- This is the massively boned (see below) impossibly handsome new high school principal speaking, telling the mother of a 16 year old to take a chill pill. This was before the abovementioned auto accident.
I thought I was dying and it was the loveliest feeling in the world. - This is me reading Peyton Place. No, haha not really.
GREAT AMERICAN TRASH
After Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Lols and Harold Robbins’ The Carpetshaggers I thought well, why not, let’s do it : Peyton Place, the 1956 trash classic to complete the trilogy.
This novel shocked American people so badly they all had to read it, and it quickly beat Gone with the Wind and became the biggest selling novel of all time in the USA. It was later beaten by To Kill a Mockingbird and The Godfather.
Grace Metalious is no Henry James, but that might not be a bad thing. Henry never wrote
Thomas Makris was a massively boned man with muscles that seemed to quiver every time he moved
or
Anyone, she declared to herself, would be impressed with a man that size, with his almost revolting good looks and that smile that belongs in a bedroom.
or
His lips were full without being loose and the line of his chin was pleasantly pronounced.
So this is a novel where you can encounter massively boned men. And when women lose their temper, this can happen :
“I won’t have it!” she cried, stamping her foot and flinging her cigarette into the empty fireplace. “I simply will not stand for it!”
Constance’s teeth chattered with an anger such as she had never known.
And when a man with normal bones gets mad at his wayward son, this happens :
Harmon threw his newspaper down on the floor and pounded the fist of one hand into the palm of the other. … “I’m not going to sweat blood at the mill to send him to college if this is the way he’s going to behave,” said Harmon.
But then Grace rescues that scene with this sly comment
Harmon Carter did not sweat blood at the Cumberland Mills. He was a bookkeeper in the office, and the only time he ever broke out in a mild perspiration was when one of the young secretaries there bent over his desk to ask him a question.
Because Grace has a terrible tragic tale to tell there isn’t as much of that kind of wit as I would have liked
There’s no doubt this novel has the right targets in view – sexual hypocrisy, male privilege, small town politics, the viciousness of neighbours, the moral squalor of poverty. I confess I hated Grace making herself a character in the book – all the stuff about wanting to be a writer then going to New York then failing to write a novel was eurrgh my brain my brain. I wish writers didn’t always think we want to read about writers when everyone knows writers are the dullest of all dull people and all have the same problems and live in the same grotty apartments. So there was that. And also, yes, these days Peyton Place is more like a walk on the mild side. But in context this was a monster and …. Just…. is still worth reading. It’s probably clinging on with its fingernails.
And one thing you can say about trash- what with girls falling in machinery and cat strangling and secret abortions and huge boned men it’s almost never boring. And you can’t say that for Henry James....more
Place: some middling city in Germany still full of bomb sites and ruined buildings
Characters: Fred and Kate
Subject: theirTime: about 5 years after WW2
Place: some middling city in Germany still full of bomb sites and ruined buildings
Characters: Fred and Kate
Subject: their falling apart marriage
Method : alternating first person narratives
Mood : extremely depressed
Religion : Catholic – there is a great scene where Kate is seized by a violent urge for confession; a priest hears her and is staggered and appalled at the ghastly vistas of misery she then rolls out for his absolution
Situation: they have three kids and a one room flat; he has a rubbish job; they are so poor they can’t afford a bigger place to live; he can’t stand it so he’s moved out and drifts around finding odd place to sleep at night; occasionally they meet up at a cheapo hotel to spend the night together, but this makes her feel like a prostitute
Best scene : a mate of Fred’s is caretaking the empty mansion of some rich guy and letting him sleep in a small room there. Fred describes the vastness of the empty rooms in great and excruciating detail to Kate – thirteen rooms, all larger than the one Kate & the kids live in, all empty for 9 month of the year.
Rating : Three stars… Ingmar Bergman and Thomas Bernhard fans may find this a four star experience ...more
It’s a good news bad news kind of thing. Bad news is your husband has been away serving in the trenches in World War One and you haven't heard anythinIt’s a good news bad news kind of thing. Bad news is your husband has been away serving in the trenches in World War One and you haven't heard anything from him for a while. The good news is that you find out that your husband is physically well. Bad news is that he might have shell shock. Good news is that he’s coming back home next week! Bad news – when he arrives he can no longer remember the last 15 years. It’s like “so your name is Kitty and you’re my wife? Really?” But what he can remember is his true love of 15 years ago, who turns out to be shock horror a working class girl called Margaret, who is now a dowdy married woman. He longs to see Margaret. So they go and fetch her.
How awkward is that.
The star of this show however is the narrator Jenny who is an extraordinarily uncomfortable creation. She is the unmarried cousin who lived with the fabulously rich couple in their country home and really you would have to say that she’s in love with her cousin Chris, the returned soldier, and also worships Kitty, his picture-perfect wife. There’s something murky going on here. When Margaret is disinterred from the lower depths Jenny cannot control her feelings of loathing and disgust. For Jenny, this Margaret is
not so much a person as an implication of dreary poverty, like an open door in a mean house that lets out the smell of cooking cabbage and the screams of children
Now usually, these upper class types are careful to conceal their horror of the working class from us behind a screen of bland genteel politeness, like you see when the Royal family meets the public. But the gloves are off when Margaret trudges up the drive.
Surely she must see that…no one accustomed to live here could help wincing at such external dinginess as hers
Jenny observes poor Margaret in the hallway standing next to a table with an exquisite objet d’art on it, and she comes out with this quite amazing sentence (This might be my sentence of the year so far) (note, the plumes are feathers on her hat):
Beside the pure black of the bowl her rusty plumes looked horrible; beside that white nymph, eternally innocent of all but the contemplation of beauty, her opaque skin and her suffering wre offensive; beside its air of being the coolly conceived and leisurely executed production of a hand and brain lifted by their rare quality to the service of the not absolutely necessary, her appearance of having but for the moment ceased to cope with a vexed and needy environment struck one as a cancerous blot on the fair world.
This novel is probably too much of a neat parable on the surface, but below the waterline there are enough festering dank weeds and mouths with teeth to make any psychologist smile grimly.
Pretty much recommended.
Oh yes, the other bad news is that Rebecca West wrote this when she was 24, further fracturing my rule that good novels can't be written by anyone under 30. I may have to abandon that rule....more
Well I pretty much hated the worldly weary opium smoking politically neutral smug bastard of a first person our-man-in-Vietnam reporter narrator who dWell I pretty much hated the worldly weary opium smoking politically neutral smug bastard of a first person our-man-in-Vietnam reporter narrator who dolefully wraps his middle aged melancholia around himself and sprinkles mournful aphorisms into the languid air like ditsy bumblebees dressed up as badass hornets :
You cannot love without intuition (Yes you can)
Even an opinion is a kind of action (well, not really)
To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you (ridiculous)
When you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear (he must have found that in a Vietnamese fortune cookie)
Innocence is a kind of insanity (no it’s not)
and shacks up with a local woman named Phuong who is also pursued by a young go-getting CIA operative named Pyle so we have
a triangle in which each character represents a country which you may think is rather crude –
Fowler : ironic, cool, affectedly neutral but with a disguised moral compass deep within…. He represents Britain so he gets to dispense wisdom
Pyle : thinking he’s got the Answer to the messy communist insurrection, he’s making deals with a local warlord in the naïve belief that he can create a Third Force (independent nationalism) … in so doing he of course spreads death and destruction, he’s like a kid in a toyshop where the toys all explode and take your hands off, he has to be stopped. So Pyle gets to represent America.
Phuong : a terrible sexist cipher, the graceful silent male fantasy sex machine, she lays out Fowler’s opium pipes each night before laying out her own young tender flesh if he can be bothered after his drug of choice. After Pyle decides he’s in love with Phuong, she gets passed back and forth like a parcel. She doesn’t say much. Apparently she does not have a brain that works :
She’ll suffer from childbirth and hunger and cold and rheumatism but she’ll never suffer like we do from thoughts, obsessions – she won’t scratch, she’ll only decay.
says Fowler the wise Englishman – I’m not sure how much we are supposed to nod along with this guff or to think Fowler is a creature of his time or what but anyway, So Phuong represents Vietnam being fought over by various Outside Powers and having little or no say in its own destiny.
When you’re about to consign this saggy not much of a plot novel to the 2 star bin then it moves up a gear and you get to the strongly anti-colonialist part, and this does go a long way towards justifying the love this novel gets.
But I didn’t enjoy my time in this guy’s rancid mind, I didn’t like his elliptical conversations with philosophical cops, his pearls of wisdom got old, and by the time we find out (no surprise) that his heart is in the right place it’s pretty much too late to care.
If Oblomov was Hamlet the famous soliloquy would have been “To get off my arse or not to get off my arse, that is the question” but actually there wouIf Oblomov was Hamlet the famous soliloquy would have been “To get off my arse or not to get off my arse, that is the question” but actually there wouldn’t have been a soliloquy because Oblomov wouldn’t have bothered with anything hard like that. There would just be the sound of light snoring. Never do today what you can put off till a week on Friday, he says.
It’s a fact that Oblomov spends the first 160 pages of this novel in bed or, having made a herculean effort to heave his body across the room, in a chair. Yes, 160 pages describing one day. So we have here a fat-ass do-nothing couch potato who being a member of the property owning class has an estate with 300 serfs whose job it is to do backbreaking work all year long so that at regular intervals Oblomov can get lots of lovely free money. The estate is 1000 miles away from Petersburg and Oblomov never visits it, are you kidding? – so he has no idea what goes on there, all he wants is the free money so he can continue to eat heartily and doze, eat heartily and doze, eat heartily and doze.
In the novel Oblomov has a little group of people around him who love him, and many readers of the novel seem to share their views that he’s admittedly useless but kind of cute, he looks dimwitted but really he’s intelligent, he has a heart of gold and a pure soul, he’s an angel in disguise. I didn’t buy any of that. This is a guy, this Oblomov, who never combs his own hair. His servant does that for him. And yet his best friend says
he had no less intelligence than other people, only it was sleeping idly, hidden, covered over by all sorts of rubbish. Would you like me to tell you why he is dear to you, what it is in him that you still love? …. You love that in him which is worth more than any amount of intelligence: his honest, faithful heart! It is like pure gold in him from nature; he has preserved it throughout his life unharmed. He sank under difficulties, grew cold, dropped asleep, and finally, crushed and disappointed, lost the strength to live, but he has not lost his faith and honesty. His heart has never struck a single false note and nothing has sullied it…. Oblomov will never worship false idols and his soul will always be pure, honest, good. . . . His soul is clear as crystal; there aren’t many men like him, they are rare ; they are like pearls among the crowd.
Sorry, no. He’s an enemy of the people is what he is, along with the rest of his class of leeches. He's an infantilised man who bats his puppydog helpless eyes at his friends and servants and they scurry about making sure he has enough larks tongues and champagne for his supper. As far as I was concerned, if he fell down an abandoned salt mine and died horribly it would have been no great loss.
Ivan Goncharov wrote a great novel about a guy who drives you into spasms of irritation. Not only that but it’s about this annoying guy not doing things. So there is no plot to speak about in these 500 pages. And yet Oblomov is great. It is also true that Mr Goncharov could have done with an editor to tell him to chop out some really dull philosophising about marriage or another ten pages about meals being prepared
“Pickled cabbage and salmon,” she said. ‘‘There isn’t any sturgeon to be had: I’ve been to all the shops and my brother asked for it, but there isn’t any. Only, perhaps, if a live sturgeon is caught— a merchant from the Karetny Ryad has ordered one — the fishmonger promised to cut us some of it. Then there is veal and fried corn-meal.”
And yet in spite of all of these awkwardnesses and imperfections, this is a great novel. The hideous damaging life-withering vampirism that is Oblomov’s life is a steady dead-eyed devastating hatchet-job on Russian society as it was before the serfs got liberated. Along the way, Goncharev lobs in one liners
Cunning is like small coin with which one cannot buy much.
And brilliant page-long soft-voiced denunciations – here he is on the idle rich :
her thorough knowledge of house-keeping and of all home comforts, was for him the incarnate ideal of a life of boundless and unruffled repose, the picture of which had been indelibly stamped on his mind in childhood, under the parental roof. His father, his grandfather, the children, the grandchildren, the visitors, sat or lay in restful idleness, knowing that there were in the house unsleeping eyes that watched over them and never-weary hands that sewed their clothes, gave them food and drink, dressed them, put them to bed, and closed their eyes when they were dead; and now Oblomov, sitting still on the sofa, saw something quick and lively moving for his benefit, and knew that the sun might not rise to-morrow, whirlwinds might hide the sky, a storm might sweep the world, but his soup and roast would be on the table, his linen would be fresh and clean, the cobwebs would be taken off the wall, and he would not know how it was all done; that before he had taken the trouble to think of what he wanted it would be guessed and placed before him — not rudely and lazily, but by clean, white hands and arms bare to the elbow, with a cheerful and gentle glance and a smile of profound devotion.
Like Carl Douglas with "Kung Fu Fighting" or the Baha Men with "Who Let the Dogs Out?" Ivan Goncharov was a one hit wonder. His first novel is no longer read and his third and last, The Precipice (820 pages), is described by the translator here as "cumbersome and drearily tiresome". But Oblomov is, mostly, sharp, devastating and funny.
I am from that laid back generation that liked to tell people to do their own thing and not judge anyone and all that, but if Story of the Eye is yourI am from that laid back generation that liked to tell people to do their own thing and not judge anyone and all that, but if Story of the Eye is your thing then I would like to run quite a long way away from you and never have to speak to you again and I will judge you.
To say it’s rather pervy would be to say the pope is a bit of a Catholic, or that God is really quite potent.
Now, it’s true that pervy erotic porn sounds like some kind of fun, just ask your grandmother, but it turns out it really isn’t if it’s George Bataille’s kind of fun. Because his kind of fun is going to involve a lot of really unpleasant stuff. Oxymoronically, this is total turn-off porn. Each and every sex scene, meaning each and every paragraph, will involve eggs, eyeballs, dead people, blood and fountains, geysers, and bucketloads of urine. If you’re going to take a walk on this wild side, you will need an umbrella and a raincoat and I would think gloves too.
A FELLOW READER’S ANGUISH
Over at The Reader’s Room blog *, where they are ploughing through 1001 Books you must Read Before the Next Global Pandemic Overtakes Us, Bookworm wrote :
Yet again the 1001 editors have managed to select a book that no sane person could enjoy. They appear to be obsessed with perversion and the more disgusting the descriptions of sex, the better. There is no need for anyone to read this before they die. In fact, it should be on the “don’t read this even if you have only days to live” list.
You see blurb-writers lazily describing this book as
one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.
I am on the side of Bookworm here. What we seem to have is two completely different concepts of the erotic or the pornographic. The intellectual version includes Story of an Eye, Story of O and all of De Sade. I suggest that none of that stuff is likely to excite or turn on most people, they all involve extreme cruelty and dismemberment and death along with all the major and minor bodily fluids so it seems to me that the intellectual version of porn could only be enjoyed by Ted Bundy. And Bundy wannabes. And Susan Sontag, whose 1967 essay included here appear to celebrate them all, or at least redesignate them as literature.
Simone was tall and lovely. She was usually very natural; there was nothing heartbreaking in her eyes or her voice. But on a sensual level, she so bluntly craved any upheaval that the faintest call from the senses gave her a look directly suggestive of all things linked to deep sexuality, such as blood, suffocation, sudden terror, crime; things indefinitely destroying human bliss and honesty.
Yes, in Georges’ world sexuality involves blood, suffocation, sudden terror, and crime. Also many many raw eggs (never poached or fried or boiled).
HE LOOKED LIKE A PRIEST OR A CHEMISTRY TEACHER
[image]
Georges said :
In general, people savour the 'pleasures of the flesh' only on condition that they be insipid.
By people I think he means me – my pleasures, even those of my wildest imagination, are all from Georges’ point of view, irredeemably insipid. They never involve eggs, eyeballs, dead people and buckets of urine.
My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.
I will spare you any quotations relating to the eggs, eyeballs, orifices and unlikely genital manipulations that festoon the pages but I need to give you an idea of what some intellectuals appear to think of as horny. But before I do, here’s a funny thing I found.
THE AGE OF THE CHARACTERS
It says before each story on the website Literotica
All characters are eighteen or older.
But Georges breaks every rule (as well as every egg). He doesn’t care. He says :
I was nearly sixteen when I met Simone, a girl of my own age
So it appears all of these very unhygienic goings-on are performed by 15 years olds. Why hasn’t this book been busted for underage sex ?
A BIKE RIDE
So anyway, our two teenagers go for a bike ride. Now, many of us probably did this in our carefree youth. This is how Georges describes it :
It struck me that …if Simone and I were killed, then the universe of our unbearable personal vision was certain to be replaced by the pure stars, fully unrelated to any external gazes and realizing in a cold state, without human delays or detours, something that strikes me as the goal of my sexual licentiousness: a geometric incandescence (among other things, the coinciding point of life and death, being and nothingness), perfectly fulgurating.
It doesn’t sound like any bike ride I ever went on in my youth. Also, it doesn’t sound like it makes any kind of sense to me.
BATAILLE IS AN ALIEN PLANET
Apparently he had a tragic childhood. Also apparently he gets thrown in with all of those other terrifying French thinkers like Baudrillard, Derrida, Barthes, Lacan and so on. But this novella was enough and too much for me. I have a naïve idea that eroticism and porn should in some way evoke pleasure in the reader. I know, I’m hopeless.
We had abandoned the real world, the one made up solely of dressed people, and the time elapsed since then was already so remote as to seem almost beyond reach. Our personal hallucination now developed as boundlessly as perhaps the total nightmare of human society, for instance, with earth, sky, and atmosphere.
Thinking of how to review this little novel is beginning to take me longer than reading it so let’s just do this. Like a radio station with a dodgy siThinking of how to review this little novel is beginning to take me longer than reading it so let’s just do this. Like a radio station with a dodgy signal sometimes this book is sharp and clear and beautiful and sometimes it’s vague and mushy and hard to hear. Many pages I wanted to turn into wallpaper and paper my house with, so I could read them again when I gazed into the mid-distance looking for inspiration, but others were just blah blah blah about tiresome rich people in Peru in the 18th century. Enough about neurotic actresses and their sycophants! So what you get is potted biographies of three people who got killed when the famous bridge collapsed. You might say it’s an examination of any random death. What is the meaning of it? What is God up to? A humble monk investigates the incident and compiles a massive book. (Okay he can’t be that humble then.) His idea was to prove that God knew what he was doing when he either broke the bridge deliberately or passively allowed the last threads to fray (it was a rope bridge). The concept that the municipality of Lima should have instituted regular bridge inspections and it was their gross negligence in not doing that was the obvious reason for the tragedy is bizarrely not addressed, even though, clearly, that would have got God off the hook. The priest did not have to go rootling around in the lives of these victims to figure if they in some way deserved to die.
Fans of this book quote the last sentence which is about there being a bridge between the living and the dead and the bridge is made of love. But I thought that was the worst bit. It made me feel a bit sick. Maybe I’m a fan of the parts the real fans of this book think are the worst bits!
Well, it’s an oddity and it’s worth your time. 3.5 stars rounded up because I don’t wanna plunge to my death from a frayed rope bridge in Lima, Peru on Friday, July 20th, 1714 or any other day. And so far I haven’t.
[image]
This kind of thing.
****
Uncle Pio came of a good Castilian house, illegitimately. At the age of ten he ran away to Madrid from his father’s hacienda and was pursued without diligence. He lived ever after by his wits. He possessed the six attributes of the adventurer – a memory for names and faces, with the aptitude for altering his own; the gift of tongue; inexhaustible invention; secrecy; the talent for falling into conversation with strangers; and that freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt for the dozing rich he prayed upon. From ten to fifteen he distributed handbills for merchants, held horses, and ran confidential errands. From fifteen to twenty he trained bears and snakes for travelling circuses; he cooked and mixed punches; he hung about the entries of the more expensive taverns and whispered information into the travellers’ ears – sometimes nothing more dubious than that a certain noble house was reduced to selling its plate and could this dispense with the omission of a silversmith. He was attached to all the theatres in town and could applaud like ten. He spread slanders at so much a slander. He sold rumours about crop and about the value of land. ...more
This was a lot like O Klahoma! but without those catchy songs. "O! what a Beautiful Morning" would have slotted right into O Pioneers! on page 14, 29,This was a lot like O Klahoma! but without those catchy songs. "O! what a Beautiful Morning" would have slotted right into O Pioneers! on page 14, 29, 47, 83 and 112. Right in there. There are a lot of beautiful mornings in these pages. Maybe in those days you said everything with an exclamation mark. “O breakfast!” “O horse!” “O my head!”. Or in my case “O how many pages are left… O no…”
This was dull.
Our lives are like the years, all made up of weather and crops and cows.
Yeah, that’s about right. In this novel there was one pretty good argument and one evil deed. But Willa, darling, it wasn’t enough. All this waffling about larkspur, hoarhound, foxtail, apricots and alfalfa. It’s like a catalogue at times or maybe a press release from the Nebraskan Chamber of Rural Commerce.
Okay, I did find one slightly saucy moment, but I don’t think it was intentional :
He thrust his hand into the pocket of his velvet trousers and brought out a handful of uncut turquoises, as big as marbles. Leaning over the table he dropped them into her lap. “There, will those do? Be careful, don't let any one see them. Now, I suppose you want me to go away and let you play with them?”
Marie was gazing in rapture at the soft blue color of the stones. “Oh, Emil! Is everything down there beautiful like these? ”
It’s possible she’s referring here to Mexico, where he’s just come from, rather than his trousers, but I think it’s ambiguous.
This novel is worthy. If it could, this novel would sell slab cake at a church bring-and-buy sale in aid of blind donkeys.
I don’t want to put the boot into Willa Cather too much, but if she calls round here again, give her a fiver and tell her I’m out.
Loading...
