No book is beyond criticism but a book of mournful elegiac wistful anguished memorialising of Jewish Germans before, during and after the Third Reich No book is beyond criticism but a book of mournful elegiac wistful anguished memorialising of Jewish Germans before, during and after the Third Reich might come close. Honesty compels me to admit that where everyone else found in The Emigrants profoundly moving narratives of trauma, loss and emigration spooling ribbons of intense melancholia, I, wretch that I am, could only keep tripping over maunderings about gardening and breakfasts and photograph albums and schoolrooms and upholstery and rooms and houses and illnesses and more houses until it because very clear that this was as much not the right book for me as it was the exact right book for everyone else with their garlands of stars; at which point I tiptoed backwards and away. ...more
Valerie Solanas was the woman who shot Andy Warhol. She had previously formed the Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM) (she was the only member) and wrotValerie Solanas was the woman who shot Andy Warhol. She had previously formed the Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM) (she was the only member) and wrote a big manifesto which pointed out that all men are highly injurious to all women and if they all died tomorrow it wouldn’t be the worst thing, in fact we might look into the possibility. Regarding her difficult life, she said
I couldn’t take living like a lobotomized brood cow, and the world around me couldn’t take that.
And she also said
If they could put one man on the moon, why not all of them?
Valerie would have liked this novel, a short, bitter account of why this lady shot her husband. She would have said - yes, this is exactly what I mean.
If you know any young ladies who are thinking of getting married, you might give them a copy of this very short novel. It could help....more
We are NYRB Classics and we have perfect taste. For our supremely elegant distinctive and well-beloved book covers we take a gorgeous painting and we We are NYRB Classics and we have perfect taste. For our supremely elegant distinctive and well-beloved book covers we take a gorgeous painting and we cut a big box out of the middle. That’s where the title and the author goes. Right in the middle.
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You might say – Hey, NYRB, why don’t you put your box in a corner, so we can better appreciate the cool paintings and photos you have chosen with such lapidary care? But we say Faugh! Begone with your pettifogging cavilling, we are NYRB and we have perfect taste.
As to the book itself…
A plunge into the brutal world of Greek peasants, early 20th century : a sharp cry of agony, a strange bitter style, a short, uneasy read. ...more
Was there ever a title of a short novel that more accurately summarised what it was about? This is the third I read recently in which a guy excruciatiWas there ever a title of a short novel that more accurately summarised what it was about? This is the third I read recently in which a guy excruciatingly contemplates his impending death. (It’s not like I’m seeking out such bleakness, it’s just like when three buses come along at once.) The other two were The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy and The Seven who were Hanged by Leonid Andreyev, and although this one by Victor Hugo was very intense and compelling, the other two were better. This one is excellent but those two were brilliant.
The guy in this book has been sentenced to execution by guillotine and we see as the hours tick by how his mind scurries like a trapped rat here and there turning over a myriad of mad ideas of escape, yearning for his little daughter, observing his fellow prisoners (including a great scene where a lot of miserable-but-pretending-not-to-care convicts are fitted with chains and shipped off to do hard labour for life), raging at the throngs of rubberneckers waiting to see his grisly termination. This is all good.
But there were two large omissions. I thought a guy in his situation would obsess over what brought him to this terrible situation, his crime, what led to it, how he thought it was justified and the lawyers were incompetent, that kind of thing But he never thinks about his crime at all; he mentions in passing that it was a murder, that’s all we know. Maybe this was deliberate – Hugo didn’t want to distract from his anti-capital punishment message.
The other thing was that aside from a paragraph of deranged fantasy he doesn’t think about what might be his post-guillotine fate. Will God forgive him or is he going to Hell? What will Hell be like? You get the impression people in 19th century France took religion really seriously, so you might think he would be wondering about how unpleasant it all might turn out, since the guillotine was not the end, just a machine to bundle you rudely into the next more alarming phase of your existence.
But still, a quick, fiery, cruel read.
PLAYLIST
I don't know any songs about being guillotined, so here are some about being hanged.
Characters: for a tiny book I counted 24 characters with names – that’s like a Time: A couple of weeks in February in 1974
Place: Cologne, West Germany
Characters: for a tiny book I counted 24 characters with names – that’s like a lot, don’t you think? Probably about 15 have speaking roles so it’s probably a good idea to keep a handy list so you can immediately check who Moeding or Schonner or Brettloh or Straubleder is. Of course if you have a great memory for German names you’ll be fine.
Subject: the deliberate destruction of ordinary people’s lives by the rancid loathsome shameless degenerate tabloid press, which is still with us to this day.
Method : an official report into the murder of Werner Totges, reporter, by Katherina Blum, 27 year old caterer, housekeeper and occasional waitress.
Mood : ironical, playful, a little smirky if we’re honest
Religion : these people are a little too busy for God right now. This is a crisis!
Situation: there’s no doubt she shot that disgusting reporter guy, that’s not a spoiler, but untangling the skein of events that led to the fatal discharge is the thing we are engaged upon. But what was Ludwig Gotten doing at Katherine’s flat? Didn’t she know he was on the run from the cops? That was why the press started in on her.
Language : Because this is all straight-facedly pretend-officialese, we have sentences like There is always the possibility that certain relatively clear pointers toward a relationship between various events and actions will be misinterpreted or lost as mere hints.
Rating : Three stars
Cultural impact : Immediately made into a movie. In the book the outlaw Ludwig Gotten is an army deserter and thief. In the movie he becomes a terrorist on the run which makes sense as the Baader Meinhof Gang were in full flow at the time. I think Heinrich Boll should have thought of that angle himself, it makes the tabloid frenzy about his character more understandable.
Apology to German speakers: there are an awful lot of umlauts missing from this review.
Painfully laborious excruciating elephantinely humorless routine about Noah and God's plan and why he do like he do and having babies at the age of 50Painfully laborious excruciating elephantinely humorless routine about Noah and God's plan and why he do like he do and having babies at the age of 500 - honestly there is plenty of comedy gold to be found in the Book of Genesis but Mario Brelich was looking in all the wrong places....more
A lot of novels are psychological case histories and this is a perfect example. This 15 year old kid develops a death wish, gradually. It begins with A lot of novels are psychological case histories and this is a perfect example. This 15 year old kid develops a death wish, gradually. It begins with his increasing irritation, then fury, at all the demands of normal living - you know, sit up straight, clean your boots, eat your dinner, do your homework, nothing out of the ordinary, but this kid, in the words of Howard Beale from Network, says to himself I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore so he stops behaving but he does it secretly at first, like giving his stamp collection away, and selling his books and then, shockingly, ripping up his money and burying the bits. He thinks of giving his money to the poor but nah, that would be one more rule he should obey.
Anyway then he starts eating less, stealthily, and then it becomes a study of the mind of what we would now call an anorexic. But just as this short beautifully written novel gets interesting, the author swerves away into rather lame territory (no spoilers). En route we get pages of descriptions of some spectacularly revealing dreams – as you know I usually advise skipping every dream description in novels but these are eyebrow-raising. Here is my favourite – all you armchair psychiatrists, gather round :
An assembly of corpulent animals with long snouts sat gravely round his bed… they threw themselves down on their knees all round the bed, stretching out their snouts on top of the bed-clothes. Luca was terrified by these snouts which were long and flexible… the largest and most important of these great animals was at the foot of the bed and stretched out its snout between his legs. Twisting and undulating, the snout grew longer and longer and reached up towards his stomach, and he, weeping and shouting, seized it with both hands and tried to turn it aside. But the snout, though flexible, was hard, and increased in size as he held it in his hands, and reached up towards his face.
Well, did you get that? No prizes for guessing what Luca is really dreaming about there. So as we know depression (in the form of anorexia here) is anger turned inwards, and this appears to be very true here. It seems to me that Moravia was just on the point of writing a valuable novel about child abuse but lost his nerve as he got to the end. Or maybe I’m wrong, and those snouts are just snouts.
OTHER PSYCHOLOGICAL CASE HISTORY NOVELS
There are so so so many, for instance
The Piano Teacher – Jelenek The Stranger – Camus Zeno’s Conscience – Svevo The Room – Selby And one of the great big ones The Tunnel - Gass
We are entirely enclosed in the musing, reflective, probing, ruminative, endlessly qualifying always tergiversating mind of Juan, an interpreter, who We are entirely enclosed in the musing, reflective, probing, ruminative, endlessly qualifying always tergiversating mind of Juan, an interpreter, who has a lovely new wife and a father who makes him nervous like his own personal raincloud about to burst forth. Juan’s mind circles and swoops around and around, graceful repetitive incantatory flights of meditation like a philosophical kittiwake or a Jesuitical lapwing, and what is he contemplating? Why, the suicide of his mother’s sister who was his father’s second wife. This is a tale of unease.
The father is the sinister centre of the story. He had three wives. The first two died. We begin with the second one. A few days after returning from her honeymoon, she rose from a family dinner, went to the bathroom, took out a gun, and shot and killed herself. So that’s the question … why would she do that?
But this is not a family saga or a thriller. This novel is much closer to poetry than other conventional novels. There are repetitions, of phrases, of images, and of situations. Several times, a man stands before a house, looking up at a window, waiting to see a woman. Different men. Different women. Predatory men, women imperiled, perhaps, surely, definitely. One woman hopes a man will end the life of another woman. He overhears this from the hotel room next to his. Another time in another city he helps a friend of his make a nude video for a stranger she has met through a personal ad. (This is before the internet. Tinder users will find this sequence hilarious.) Will she be okay when she meets this guy? There’s always something to worry Juan.
Juan is a nervous guy, he can’t relax, but I liked his sense of humour, even though there wasn’t much of it. One time, he was interpreting in a high level meeting between a top Spanish politician and the female British Prime Minister (does he mean Margaret Thatcher? I think so!) and he gets so bored with the inane blandishments they are exchanging that he starts to make stuff up (“Do you think we are ever loved?”…"Shall we take a walk in the garden outside?"). I hope interpreters do that sometimes.
You have to let Javier Marias’ prose flow through your mind like a rippling never slowing tumbling stream that sometimes flows into blind nooks and crannies and sometimes takes unexpected turns -it took a while for me to get on Javier’s wavelength. At first I didn’t get it. Then I got it. This guy Juan, he thinks his whole life is an unexploded bomb, he tiptoes around carefully while his mind races, sometimes fearfully, sometimes rhapsodically. It's a book about men and women and marriages and secrets and language and interpretation and overhearing and whether the truth is best left alone.
I might mention that there seemed to be a shortage of paragraph breaks in Spain in 1993 when this was published because some of these paragraphs go on for five pages. Also, some of the sentences in this book are longer than the paragraphs. Literally!
So this is probably one for Henry rather than E.L. James fans....more
Many books are famous for one thing – what’s the first thing anyone thinks of when remembering Proust’s 3000 page masterpiece? Oh yes, that’s the one Many books are famous for one thing – what’s the first thing anyone thinks of when remembering Proust’s 3000 page masterpiece? Oh yes, that’s the one where the guy dunks a madeleine in his tea. What about the 1000 page Don Quixote? Yeah, old crazy guy fights with a windmill. And Shakespeare’s masterpiece Hamlet? Oh, wait, I got this – to be or not to be. This goes for music too – what do people think of when they think of Beethoven? Da da da DAAH.
So sometimes Zeno’s Conscience is remembered as the one where the guy tries to quit smoking and fails miserably. Yes, that’s the first 30 pages. The next 410 pages are not much about smoking.
This is a novel that starts off really well, great comedy about smoking (yes!), looking after old cranky people, and a long section on getting married to the wrong sister. All excellent. But then this novel develops a leak, and the balloon starts slowing sinking, and even fans of Italo Svevo might concede that the section called “The Story of a Business Partnership” (134 pages) could be chopped without anyone crying their eyes out.
Here is my favourite joke in this comical book. Zeno has been pouring out his life story to a psychoanalyst, including his lustful desire for his wife’s two lovely sisters, and he is becoming increasingly convinced that psychoanalysis is total bollocks. Referring to his analyst, he says
I believe that he is the only one in this world who, hearing I wanted to go to bed with two beautiful women, would ask himself : Now let’s see why this man wants to go to bed with them.
But this book is stuffed with sly observations :
“You are my first lover,” she went on to say, “and I hope you will go on loving me.” That information, that I was her first lover, a designation implying a possible second one, did not move me greatly. … Softly I murmured in her ear : “You’re my first lover…since my marriage.”
But also this book is stuffed with pages of slightly off-kilter waffling by Zeno, who can be located on the literary map somewhere equidistant between Oblomov and Charles Pooter in Diary of a Nobody. He rambles and rambles. And loses track of what he's talking about. Which sometimes isn't worth bothering with. Frankly, between you, me and the gatepost, Zeno Cosini can be a bit of a conceited bore.
I think if you cut the boring section completely out, and trim the rest down to a lean 280 pages, you have a splendid 4 star comedy. Alas, somehow, they never consulted me in 1923....more
There are four stories in this book and disturbingly, two of them are about teenage girls becoming obsessed, besotted, infatuated with inappropriately There are four stories in this book and disturbingly, two of them are about teenage girls becoming obsessed, besotted, infatuated with inappropriately older men. The title track, “Letter from an Unknown Woman”, is early-Pedro-Almodovar melodramatic to say the very least, gothically morbid and full of unacceptable behaviour. Well, what would you call it if (view spoiler)[a 13 year old girl is besotted by a 25 year old man and remains so obsessed that she never gets married, becomes a call girl and meets up with this guy years later, and is hired by him for three straight nights of high intensive physical interconnectivity, he not, of course, recognising her as his shy 13 year old former neighbour, and she, of course, not divulging that she has stalked him for years and is now, in the most lurid of circumstances, living her dream. As we are now in full-on soap opera mode, of course she conceives a child, of course. Now read on! (hide spoiler)]
The other, “The Debt Paid Late”, is gentle, sweet, sad and altogether wonderful. Best long-short-story I have read in an age. Brought tears to the eyes.
Come to think of it, there is a third long-short-story here all about underage sex. Hmmmm. ...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
The first posting for the newly qualified junior officer Giovanni Drogo is a distant border fortress, Fort Bastiani, a kind of military Gormenghast wiThe first posting for the newly qualified junior officer Giovanni Drogo is a distant border fortress, Fort Bastiani, a kind of military Gormenghast with vast corridors, distant redoubts and an ancient regime of mindless inflexible ritual. It guards the kingdom against the enemy to the north. The forlorn wilderness overlooked by the fortress is called the Tartar Steppe. Where was that ? This was Tartary
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but the name had been discarded by the 19th century. So this is not a historical novel.
Our unheroic hero asks an officer about this wilderness.
“A desert. Stones and parched earth – the call it the Tartar steppe.” “Why Tartar?” asked Drogo. “Were there ever Tartars there?” “Long, long ago I believe. But it is a legend more than anything else.” “So the Fort has never been any use?” “None at all,” said the captain.
There are three parts to the universe of this novel. There is the city – source of the pleasures of ordinary life, of taverns, pretty women, dancing, of business careers; there is the fort itself, austere, useless, monotonous and soul-destroying; and there is the wasteland to the north, a terrifying, blank mystery.
But strangely, the Fort is also clothed in magic :
Then he seemed to see the yellowing walls of the courtyard rise up into the crystal sky, with above then, higher till, solitary tower, crooked battlements crowned with snow, airy outworks and redoubts which he had never seen before. … Never before had Drogo noticed that the Fort was so complicated and immense. At an almost incredible height he saw a window… In the abyss between bastion and bastion he saw geometrical shadows, frail bridges suspended among rooftops, strange postern gates barred and flush with the walls, ancient machicolations now blocked up, long rooftrees curved with the years.
The sense of time spiraling away in pointless ritual, in perpetual maintenance of readiness for an enemy which never arrives, and the sense of a normal life voluntarily jettisoned for this utter uselessness, and the hypnosis that seems to pin poor Drogo to his drudgery, is the whole story of this melancholy book. You can make various meanings from it should you be so inclined. You can see it as a parable - Drogo waiting forever for the Answer to arrive from the Tartar steppe – a philosophic or religious answer, maybe; Ingmar Bergman fans might want to read it as an extended metaphor for the silence of God; but others may prefer to find here a beautiful meditation on disappointment, institutionalization, unfulfillment and resignation. Unheroic virtues.
(So many other writers and their buildings were interweaving with Dino Buzzati as I read this – everyone says Kafka, but also Dracula’s castle, Mervyn Peake, Ballard’s lonely landscapes, JG Farrell’s Majestic Hotel, even Tolkien’s Minas Morgul, there are many of these great constructions of the mind.)
And there are several long passages that lift off into exquisitely sad canticles of how spendthrift human life is, how the hours, the days and the years fall through our fingers.
Recommended. 4.5 stars.
(Great thanks to my friend Selma in Istanbul who pretty much ordered me to read this one.)...more
I found that my glasses perfectly fit over Robert Musil's head on the cover of my paperback
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WHAT IT IS LIKE
For those yet to try this famous noveI found that my glasses perfectly fit over Robert Musil's head on the cover of my paperback
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WHAT IT IS LIKE
For those yet to try this famous novel you can get an idea of what it’s like by putting a metal bucket over your head and getting a friend or partner or your children to bang on the bucket for thirty minutes or so using a very sophisticated spoon.
It must be a spoon encrypted with all the subtleties of psychology and indented with the complex analyses of the five major sciences and the handle should be engraved with great mathematical formulae and the coats of arms of the major aristocratic families of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. To complete the demonstration the spoon banger should, during the banging, read out alternating verses of T S Eliot’s The Fire Sermon and George Formby’s hit “Why Don’t Women Like Me?”
After the suggested 30 minutes you will have got a reasonable idea, and you can then decide if you wish to proceed with reading the actual book.
Another way of putting it might be to imagine you are in a large room where hot air blowers are blowing thousands and thousands of very intellectual feathers over you, feathers which stick in your hair and clothes and tickle your nose and make you sneeze to the point where you can’t see the door anymore.
AN ATTEMPT TO PRESERVE MY SANITY
I decided early on that I would limit myself to VOLUME ONE, around 340 pages of this 1500 page unfinished work (1000 pages were published in Mr Musil’s lifetime and another 500 pages were later kindly supplied by his widow).
My dear friends, Volume One was enough for me for now. I may crack on with volume two in another ten years or so, maybe twenty. It is on my to-do list, but rather low down, between learning Sanskrit and getting a spiderweb neck tattoo.
THE ELUSIVE GOLDEN TAMARIN
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So what we have here is a strange lumbering beast. There is not much story to be had, and readers have been known to gasp out loud when they turn a page to see actual dialogue on the next page. Sadly, it is as rare a sight as the golden tamarin in the forests of Brazil. So instead of plot and dialogue what we mostly have here is bucketfuls of character and deluges of musings. Pages and pages. This main guy Ulrich has a thoughtful turn of mind. He’s a rich 32 year old mathematician and we are in Vienna in 1913, just before the roof fell in on this elaborate aristocratic world he floats around in.
WHAT DO WE MEAN WHEN WE SAY THIS IS A NOVEL OF IDEAS
When I say that Ulrich (and the narrator) like to philosophise, I mean this kind of thing :
all moral events took place in a field of energy the constellation of which charged them with meaning, and they contained good and evil just as an atom contains the potentialities of chemical combination. They were, so to speak, what they became, and just as the one word ‘hard’ describes four quite different entities according to whether the hardness relates to love, brutality, eagerness or severity, so the significance of all moral happenings appeared to him the dependent function of others. In this manner an endless system of relationships arose in which there was no longer any such thing as independent meanings, such as in ordinary life, at a crude first approach, are ascribed to actions and qualities. In this system the seemingly solid became a porous pretext for many other meanings; what was happening became the symbol of something that was perhaps not happening but was felt through the medium of the first; and man as the quintessence of human possibilities, potential man, the unwritten poem of his own existence, materialised as a record, a reality, and a character, confronting man in general.
If you are still reading, this massive book is the novel you have been waiting for your whole life. But it’s not all like that, no.
WHAT THE HELL – A DEAD CAT!
Ulrich gets involved with a very dull business called the Parallel Campaign, which is a committee of great ones to celebrate the 30 year reign of Emperor Franz Joseph. Just when you are thinking “how dull is this book going to get?” Musil suddenly throws a dead cat onto the family Christmas dinner table, in the form of a guy called Moosbrugger, who is a sex murderer. Blam – just like that – in the middle of all the tinkling chandeliers and the ptarmigan brain pate we are contemplating a very gruesome crime, and the novel begins to talk about curiously modern issues. For instance, this Moosbrugger is a prototype Gary Gilmore, insisting that he be executed when the lawyers are trying to get him pardoned. And then the whole issue of diminished responsibility is debated.
This Moosbrugger part is an excellent strategy, setting off the glittering jawbreaking hoity toity parties with this hideous dose of human misery. The two realities lie side by side on the reader’s plate.
MASSIVE PATIENCE REQUIRED
I think Musil’s greatest fans would have to admit that he is asking massive patience from readers and the stuff about the committee to celebrate Austria is deadly dull. BUT there are always always glints of gold in the bleak granite, Musil suddenly breaks out a great turn of phrase or wicked one-liner. You never know when he’s going to do it! He can be really funny. He isn’t often enough for me but he can do it when he feels like it.
A great many people today feel themselves antagonistic to a great many other people.
(Yes, Robert – they do ! They do !)
the tenderer feelings of male passion are something like the snarling of a jaguar over fresh meat – he doesn’t like to be disturbed.
Walter smiled like a fakir preparing not to bat an eyelash while someone runs a hatpin through his cheeks
Diotima barricaded herself in her tall body as in a tower marked with three stars in Baedecker
(that last one could almost be Raymond Chandler!)
And a summing up of our whole human dilemma :
Permit me to say that we’re in a very peculiar situation, unable to move either forward or backward, while the present moment is felt to be unbearable too.
STUMBLING INTO THE LIGHT
Musil’s prose is so dense at times it’s like he wanted to be the black hole of literature, sucking every subject into his novel and not letting anything out again. It’s some kind of monumental achievement, all right, but just as surely it’s not for most readers. It took me forever just to get through volume one and I humbly salute all those great readers who made it to the end.
Obviously this is a five star masterpiece but I was only intermittently in love with it, so three stars from this churlish reviewer....more
From the Upanishads (Indian) and later Jesus (a Palestinian) through Pieter Breughel (Dutch) via Samuel Beckett (Irish) comes The Parable of the BlindFrom the Upanishads (Indian) and later Jesus (a Palestinian) through Pieter Breughel (Dutch) via Samuel Beckett (Irish) comes The Parable of the Blind by Gert Hofmann (German).
I guess Jesus’ version is the best known – the scribes and Pharisees start slagging off the disciples for not washing their hands before they eat (that’s not an unreasonable request, by the way) and Jesus then slags off the scribes and the Pharisees :
And he called the multitude, and said unto them, Hear, and understand: Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.
Then the disciples say Jesus, you know you’ve really offended those scribes and Pharisees? And he says
Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.
So that was the context, which was rendered literal by the great painter Pieter Breughel – six blind guys are walking along holding the shoulder of the guy in front, and the first of the blind guys has fallen into a ditch, and the second is on his way down, so we know all the others will too.
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This novel is about the day the six blind guys turned up at the painter’s house in order to be painted. Getting there was a problem, nobody in the village was especially helpful and being blind they had no idea where they were going. But that’s what it was like for them every day anyway. People playing tricks on them. Dogs biting them randomly. Probably stepping in cow poo quite often.
I’m not so sure this is really a parable, so much as an elaborated metaphor for EACH AND EVERY ONE OF US – yeah, whew, huh? We are all stumbling around blind every day, we don’t know where we’re going or why, trying to figure out what’s out there, what’s really real and what’s just our feeble deductions based on wornout language and third hand thought; and no damn body tries to help us; and some artist fool wants to encapsulate our gruesome dilemma in his all time masterpiece. And we haven’t got anything better to do, so we line right up and when he says “fall in the ditch” that’s what we do. And worse, when he says he needs us to do it over again, we all line up and fall in the ditch again! And again!
He directs us, please, not to fall so quickly next time, but to prolong the fall or drag it out, because it’s not possible for him to capture us at such a speed.
The sight of us… as he exclaims again and again, does wondrously sum up the ways of the world and the fate of man.
Trip, stumble, scream, fall.
Trip, stumble, scream, fall.
3.5 stars. It’s no Jose Saramago but it’s squelchy enough....more
A hundred years ago there was a craze for giant plotless novels that tried to slice through an entire city or even country and look down at the thousaA hundred years ago there was a craze for giant plotless novels that tried to slice through an entire city or even country and look down at the thousands of humans milling around like badly dressed ants and itemise them all. These huge novels (Ulysses by Jimmy Joyce, U.S.A by Johnny Dos Passos, The Waste Land by Tommy Eliot - not a novel but the same kind of thing) use newspaper clippings, adverts, random dialogue, doggerel, children’s rhymes, radio announcements, political proclamations, Greek myths [they love those] and anything and everything to collage & mash together ALL OF MODERN LIFE in a frantic attempt to mirror the stressed-out psychological dissociativeness and allround bonkers quality of how we live NOW (multivalent) as opposed to how we lived THEN (linearly). This large and enormously impressive novel Berlin Alexanderplatz is one of those.
If you’re serious about literature you have to like this one, it’s an acknowledged masterpiece so get with the program, and I am impressed that many goodreaders proclaim their love for this massive stodge of tiresome detail, dull unattributed conversation and rancid behavior (the guy we are following, Franz Biberkopf, has just done a 4 year stretch for beating his girlfriend to death – an act described as “some stupid stuff”).
But as a serial abandoner of great literature, you may be assured that I could not finish it, so it got chucked on the pile that already contains The Man who Loved Children, Sentimental Education, The Naked and the Dead, The Adventures of Augie March and of course Miss Macintosh My Darling amongst many other lesser works.
Sometimes you come across stuff and you says to yourself – that there Mona Lisa is a great painting, I know that, it’s obvious enough, but she gets on my nerves, I don’t have to like it. So I do says that Berlin Alexanderplatz is a hell of a novel, probably a great novel, but I didn’t like it.
Note on Ulysses
This is not Alfred Doblin’s fault at all, but some of his fans say that this novel is like Ulysses when it really isn’t. It’s somewhat like the stream of consciousness sections of Ulysses, but they are a small part of Ulysses. But even then, Mr Doblin doesn’t really do much stream of consciousness either, he does stream of conversation. Perhaps more accurately described as stream of inane blathering. ...more
- Anatol Stiller, I am arresting you for tax evasion, unpaid parking tickets, voting ironically and travelling with a fake - What’s all this, officer?
- Anatol Stiller, I am arresting you for tax evasion, unpaid parking tickets, voting ironically and travelling with a fake passport.
- Officer this is a big mistake – I am not this guy Stiller, my name is Paul Bryant, look, just like it says there.
- But sir, your passport is sooo fake. It says “Umited Kingdom of Great Britian” on the front – see?
- Damn that rogue! Well, anyway, I’m not Stiller.
***
- Good morning, I am your court appointed defence attorney, Mr er Bryant.
- Ah great, let me tell you a lot of boring stories about my life in Spain, Mexico and Nottingham which will prove that I am not this Stiller guy.
- Oh, must you?
***
- Hello Stiller.
- Hello Miss …er, Mrs?
- Come on, stop playing dumb, it’s me, your wife.
- Wife?
- Yes, your neurotic quarter-Hungarian teensy ballerina with the tuberculosis, the plucked eyebrows and the wild red hair. That wife.
- For some reason I can’t quite place you. That must be because I never met you before because I am not the person you and everyone else seems to think.
- Oh don’t give me that.
- Look, I can prove it – remember I had a wart here on my neck? Well, I don’t have one any more. See?
- Yes, I can see you have had it removed. Not a very professional job either. But the fact that you knew you used to have a wart on your neck is rather a giveaway, mon cher Stiller.
- Damn, you are too quick for me.
***
- Good morning, I am the public prosecutor. I will prove to the world you are Stiller and the fact that you had an affair with my wife and I had an affair with your wife is immaterial.
- Not only am I not Stiller, who is to say who I am or anyone else, hmm? Never mind me, who are you?
- Hem hem, don’t play the slippery eel with me, Herr Stiller.
- But I am not Stiller, who was a sculptor. Here, give me some clay. I won’t be able to do a thing with it. But if you give me a moment I will write you a review of this rather dubious, prolix and rather aggravating novel I just finished called I’m Not Stiller by Max Frisch. By the way, I’m not Max Frisch either.
- And what would that prove, dear sir?
- It would prove that I am Paul Bryant, Goodreads reviewer!
- But Herr Stiller, that would not prove anything, anyone can write a review of a novel, you know. I could do it myself.
- Ah, you think you could, but just try, cher public prosecutor.
- All right, I will try…. One moment… I happen to have read I’m Not Stiller myself, so wait…. Here, what about this :
- What’s all this, officer?
- Anatol Stiller, I am arresting you for tax evasion, unpaid parking tickets, voting ironically and travelling with a fake passport.
- Officer this is a big mistake – I am not this guy Stiller, my name is Paul Bryant, look, just like it says there.
- What? That’s…. an accurate version of exactly what I had in mind…. This is disturbing. Perhaps…. Perhaps YOU are Paul Bryant.
- Ha ha, guess what – I AM! So what would that make you then?
If the blurb had said "Overwritten, pompous sub-Borgesian spooky-ookums waffle with very few discernable points" then I would not have bothered to reaIf the blurb had said "Overwritten, pompous sub-Borgesian spooky-ookums waffle with very few discernable points" then I would not have bothered to read this, but I have found out that a lot of the time blurbs do not tell the truth. Somebody should do something about that. ...more
I got the dvd of the movie of this book, and just as I was about to play it I said to myself hold on, I already watched this movie; and then IUpdate :
I got the dvd of the movie of this book, and just as I was about to play it I said to myself hold on, I already watched this movie; and then I wasn't sure - had I already seen it or not? What a puzzle! but then myself answered back and said that the only way to find out was to watch it, so I did and I hadn't seen the movie at all.
But the book had instilled such strong scenes and dialogues within the portals of my brain that I thought I had.
I think that deserves another half star. And I do recommend the dvd, a very bitter affair, less hideously funny than the book, and arguably better. Except for Steve Cogan pretending to be an American - I don't know why they do that. It's like Dr Johnson's dog walking on two legs.
*******
Original review :
They say, do they not, that The Dinner is the European Gone Girl. Mais non! I say. I threw GG at the wall after around page 100 with some force, but I finished The Dinner with a distinct smacking of the chops and dabbing of the napkin, so that’s a big difference. Both books are about extremely irritating people, it must be admitted. But the plot swerves in GG are more than a little ridiculous and there for the standard lo-cal thriller effect, whereas I thought the disturbed and frankly nasty personalities on display here were just this side of plausible and therefore gave me a frisson, which sounds like something you could eat but isn’t.
It’s hard to discuss the plot. You know it’s all about one single dinner in a very posh restaurant so the whole book is one evening from around 8 to around 1 am but with copious flashbacks. The ultra-sophistication of the restaurant brought me out in a cold sweat all by itself, with the maître d’ hovering by each dish and explaining what is on the plate – “The goat’s cheese comes from the Rarata-Monteoru region of Romania. It is an organic farm established by monks in 1459. Each goat has a nominated chef to attend its dietary needs etc etc”. So all that is quite amusing.
It is two brothers and their wives who are eating this dinner. Or actually pecking at it then jumping up and rushing outside to make a mysterious phone call. Gradually the ghastly family secrets are unveiled. Each brother has a 15 year old son and the two of them have been spoiler-oiler which is enough to put a person off his escargots. It turns out that the brother who is narrating is spoiler-spoil so you just don’t know what a guy like that will do. So very spoilerish things have happened and indeed will happen. And I cannot say any more than that.
I rattled through this and as I did the movie was already forming in my brain. I see fluid camerawork swirling round and round the table and many revolting close-ups of the fancy grub. IMDB says it will be out next year starring Richard Gere, Laura Linney and Steve Coogan. What? Steve Coogan? Is there time to change that?
Three stars. Kind of sort of slightly recommended. Haute cuisine is what they eat in this novel but The Dinner is strictly burger and fries....more
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