1. Deeply transgressive novel that's Dovstvyeoskian in length and intellectual depth. I feel assailed by the bNotes (since the book is unsummarizable)
1. Deeply transgressive novel that's Dovstvyeoskian in length and intellectual depth. I feel assailed by the book yet I keep on reading.
2. It reminds me a little of my emotional response while watching the World Trade Center collapse from my UWS rooftop. (In the days after, whenever a plane flew over, everyone would look up: "Oh, it's one of ours. . .")
3. The narrative often feels derived from post hoc historical considerations, but I suppose this is inevitable. For instance, the talk our Dr. Aue has with his friend Thomas about the possibility of the Wehrmacht failing to subdue Moscow before the winter. There’s a post-hoc feeling, too, when Sturmbannführer Blobel rants against the Wehrmacht’s efforts to distance themselves from the killing. Examples might be multiplied. So, I wonder, were these considerations undertaken by the Germans themselves during the war? But then isn’t this the problem with historical novels generally? Didn’t Tolstoy have to deal with it too?
4. Years ago I began reading widely on the Holocaust. So it's almost as if I can recognize the source material as I read. No doubt I am sometimes mistaken, but sometimes I think I've absolutely nailed it. Here are a few of my suspicions.
5. The Einsatzgruppen— death squads which entered Poland with the Wehrmacht in September 1939 — found the direct killing of Jews too traumatic. This repulsion was one of the reasons why an industrialized killing process requiring less human involvement had to be devised, resulting in the lethal adaptations of Auschwitz and other camps. These “factories” however were not up and running until late 1941 at the earliest, and most of the mass killing — gassing— began in 1942.
“As the weeks went by, the officers acquired experience, and the soldiers got used to the procedures; at the same time, one could see that everyone was searching for his place in all this, thinking about what was happening, each in his own way. At table, at night, the men discussed the actions, told anecdotes, and compared their experiences, some sadly, others cheerfully. Still others were silent; they were the ones who had to be watched. We had already had two suicides; and one night, a man woke up emptying his rifle into the ceiling, he had to be held down by force, and a noncom had almost been killed. Some reacted with brutality, sometimes sadism: they struck at the condemned, tormented them before making them die; the officers tried to control these outbursts, but it was difficult, there were excesses. Very often our men photographed the executions; in their quarters, they exchanged their photos for tobacco, or stuck them to the wall - anyone could order prints of them. We knew, through the military censors, that many of them sent these photos to their families in Germany; some even made little albums of them, with captions: this phenomenon worried the hierarchy but seemed impossible to control. Even the officers were losing their grip. Once, while the Jews were digging, I surprised [SS officer] Bohr singing: ‘The earth is cold, the earth is sweet, dig, little Jew, dig deep.’ The Dolmetscher was translating; it shocked me deeply. I had known Bohr for some time now, he was a normal man, he had no particular animosity against the Jews, he did his duty as he was told; but obviously, it was eating at him, he wasn't reacting well. Of course there were [also] some genuine anti-Semites in the Kommando.” (p. 88-89)
6. The author evinces a deep knowledge of the units and divisions and legions of the Wehrmacht and the SS, the place names, terrain, equipment, ranks (Hauptscharführer, Obersturmführer etc.), not to mention some of the many German euphemisms for killing. My favorites are Sonderbehandlung or special treatment (gassing), and Aktion or bloody massacre. Victor Klemperer wrote an entire book about such Nazi euphemisms; it’s called The Language of the Third Reich: LTI--Lingua Tertii Imperii.
7. The author was about 38 when the novel was published by Gallimard in French, though he’s American and a Yale grad. One wonders in what way his father’s many novels of espionage — The Amateur, Mother Russia, etc. — were influential. The father was publishing in the 1970s when the author was in short pants. How fortunate such a dad must have been for the author's development. I am reminded of other literary fathers & sons, — a relatively rare phenomenon — Kingsley Amis & Martin Amis; etc.
8. Dr. Aue’s speech about the ancient rituals of homosexuality is both preposterously long and clearly an evocation of Remembrance of Things Past. It cleverly seeks to provide his handsome young friend, whom he meets on leave in Crimea, with something like a National Socialist basis for homosexual behavior.
"’After the thirteenth of June,’ I went on, ‘when it turned out that many of Röhm's accomplices, like Heine’s, were also his lovers, the Führer was afraid that the homosexuals might form a State within a State, a secret organization, like the Jews, which would pursue its own interests and not the interests of the Volk, an Order of the Third Sex, like our Black Order. That's what was behind the denunciations. [“The Night of Long Knives”] But it's a political problem, not an ideological one. From a truly National Socialist point of view, you could on the contrary regard brotherly love as the real cement of a warlike, creative Volksgemeinschaft. . .' — ‘Yes, but still! Homosexuals are effeminate, men-women as you said. How do you think a State could tolerate men that are unfit to be soldiers?’ — ‘You're wrong. It's a false notion that contrasts the virile soldier with the effeminate invert. That type of man does exist, of course, but he's a modern product of the corruption and degeneration of our cities, Jews or Jewified men still caught in the clutches of priests or ministers. Historically, the best soldiers, the elite soldiers, have always loved other men. They kept women, to watch over their household and give them children, but reserved all their emotions for their comrades. Look at Alexander! And Frederick the Great, even if no one wants to acknowledge it, was the same. The Greeks even drew a military principle from it: in Thebes, they created the Sacred Band, an army of three hundred men that was the most famous of its time. The men fought as couples, each man with his lover. . . .’” (p. 197)
9. In my view, the book doesn’t take off until page 291. It’s the winter of 1941-42 and the narrator and his fellow officers are 450 miles south of Stalingrad, in the Caucasus Mountains, distracting themselves with “Who’s the Jew?” Here’s a portion of the discussion:
"‘From the Abwehr's standpoint,’ von Gilsa explained, ‘it's a purely objective question of the security of the rear areas. If these Bergjuden cause disturbances, hide saboteurs, or help partisans, then we have to treat them like any enemy group. But if they keep quiet, there's no reason to provoke the other tribes by comprehensive repressive measures.’ — ‘For my part," Bräutigam said in his slightly nasal voice, ‘I think we have to consider the internal relations of the Caucasian peoples as a whole. Do the mountain tribes regard these Bergjuden as belonging to them, or do they reject them as Fremdkörper [foreigners]? The fact that Herr Shadov intervened so vigorously in itself pleads in their favor.’ — ‘Herr Shadov may have, let's say, political reasons that we don't understand,’ Bierkamp suggested. ‘I agree with Dr. Bräutigam's premises, even if I cannot accept the conclusion he draws from them.’ He read some extracts from my [narrator Aue’s] report, concentrating on the opinion of the Wannsee Institute. ‘This,’ he added, ‘seems confirmed by all the reports of our Kommandos in the theater of operations of Army Group A. These reports show us that dislike of the Jews is general. The Aktions against the Jews — such as dismissals from public offices, yellow star, forced labor — all meet with full understanding from the general population and are heartily welcomed. Significant voices within the population even find actions so far against the Jews insufficient and demand more determined actions.’ — ‘You are quite right when it comes to the recently settled Russian Jews,’ Bräutigam retorted. ‘But we don't have the impression that this attitude extends to the so-called Bergjuden, whose presence dates back several centuries at least." He turned to Köstring: ‘I have here a copy of a communication to the Auswärtiges Amt from Professor Eiler. According to him, the Bergjuden are of Caucasian, Iranian, and Afghan descent and are not Jews, even if they have adopted the Mosaic religion.’ — ‘Excuse me,’ said Noeth, the Abwehr officer from the OKHG, ‘but where did they receive the Jewish religion from, then?’ — ‘That's not clear,’ Bräutigam replied….’” (p.295-96)
The subject, historiography perverted for genocidal ends, has been explored elsewhere, but to my knowledge its treatment has not been equalled in fiction.
10. The virtues of narrative — continuity, catharsis, closure etc— are things that the Holocaust does not possess. The book abounds in the pleasures of storytelling; it’s masterly. There’s an account of famished soldiers dying in Stalingrad that’s terribly sad. Does it humanize the Einsatzgruppen, too? I’m afraid it does. No doubt this is what director Claude Lanzmann meant when he criticised the novel. Are the pleasures of narrative misplaced in such a story? Someone said, after Auschwitz to write a poem is barbaric. That’s a noble view. But, there is poetry, there is art.
11. In the Stalingrad kessel – a few days before General Paulus's surrender to the Red Army — Dr Aue, feverish and lice-ridden, begins to ramble; his narration soon turns phantasmagorical.
"I was walking on the Volga . . . . In front of me, a dark hole opened up in the ice, quite wide, probably pierced by a high-caliber shell that had fallen short. . . . I dove in. The water was clear and welcoming, a maternal kind of warmth. The swift current created whirlpools that soon carried me away under the ice. All kinds of things were passing by me, which I could clearly make out in this green water: horses whose feet the current was moving as if they were galloping, fat and almost flat fish, bottom-feeders, Russian corpses with swollen faces, entwined in their curious brown capes, pieces of clothing and uniforms, tattered flags floating on their poles, a wagon wheel that, probably soaked in oil, was still burning as it swirled beneath the water. . . Above me, the ice formed an opaque screen, but the air lasted in my lungs, I wasn't worried and kept swimming, passing sunken barges full of handsome young men sitting in rows, their weapons still in their hands, little fish threading through their hair agitated by the current. Then slowly in front of me the water grew lighter, columns of green light plunged down from holes in the ice, became a forest, then melded into each other as the blocks of ice drifted farther apart. I finally rose back to the surface to regain my breath. . . . Upriver, to my left, a Russian ship was drifting in the current, lying on its side, gently burning. Despite the sun, a few large flakes of luminous snow were falling, which lay hidden as soon as they touched the water. Paddling with my hands, I turned around: the city, stretched all along the shore, lay hidden behind a thick curtain of black smoke. Above my head, seagulls were reeling and shrieking, looking at me curiously, or possibly calculatingly, then flying off to perch on a block of ice; the sea was still far away, though . . . ." (p. 415-416)
And then it corkscrews into something close to slapstick. Dr Aue comes out onto the far side of the Volga where he sees a dirigible aloft and walks toward it. Soon uniformed men without military insignia accompany him aloft in a kind of balloonist's basket to meet a mad doctor (foreshadowing Auschwitz) whom he interviews then has to escape by climbing a ladder, running across the dirigible's convex surface chased by thugs with guns, before parachuting to safety.
12. Many historical figures appear. Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Eichmann, Rudolf Höss (see Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz), Odilo Globocnik, Josef Mengele, Albert Speer (see Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth), and Hitler himself, batshit in the Führerbunker. When Aue travels to Occupied Paris in the center of the book he meets old pro-Nazi friends again like Robert Brasillach, Lucien Rebatet, Charles Maurras, and is newly introduced to another rabid antisemite, Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (Celine). All the names but Celine's I had to look up. Moreover, Dr. Aue walks insouciantly around Paris. He's on convalescent leave and primarily concerned with his next posting. He's a careerist.
13. Meanwhile a hideous extermination is taking place in Poland. This is the background to Aue's days. While cracking jokes with his friend Thomas, dining out, "having my ass drilled by unknown boys," (p. 763) taking his twin sister to Potsdam, seeking a new post, while all this and more transpires — 6 million Jews are executed. Goldhagen called it "eliminationist anti-semitism." Eleven million if we include the Roma, "asocials," homosexuals, and 3 million Soviet POWs who were starved to death in open camps.
14. There's a twins motif. Dr. Aue and his sister, Una, are twins. When he goes to visit his mother in Italy, she is watching the children of friends, twins who can't be told apart. I think the image has popped up about five or six times. This might make it convenient for Aue when he visits Auschwitz, where Dr. Mengele performed infamous pseudo-scientific experiments on twins, causing enormous pain and death. See Robert Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.
15. A great enigma is the tussle within the SS between those who want to exterminate the Jews, and those who wish to employ them as slaves. It's interesting to see dramatized a conflict that some scholars have blamed for Germany's loss of the war, since it diverted essential investment from a commitment to so called total war. They couldn't work the prisoners as slaves because they were too intent upon killing them. In this sense, they were shooting themselves in the foot. Here's the fundamental argument: Eichmann wants to kill the Jews, and Aue wants war production out of them.
"'You know, Obersturmbannführer [Eichmann],' [Aue] replied evenly, 'in 1941 we had the most modern army in the world. Now we've gone almost half a century back. All our transports at the front are driven by horses. The Russians are advancing in American Studebakers. And in the United States, millions of men and women are building those trucks day and night. And they're also building ships to transport them. Our experts confirm that they're producing a cargo ship a day. That's many more than our submarines could sink, if our submarines still dared to go out. Now we're in a war of attrition. But our enemies aren't suffering from attrition. Everything we destroy is replaced, right away, the hundred aircraft we shot down this week are already being replaced. Whereas with us, our losses in materiel aren't made good, except maybe for the tanks, if that.' Eichmann puffed himself out: 'You're in a defeatist mood tonight!' . . . 'I'm not a defeatist,' I retorted. 'I'm a realist. You have to see where our interests lie.' But Eichmann, a little drunk, refused to be logical: 'You reason like a capitalist, a materialist ... This war isn't a question of interests. If it were just a question of interests, we'd never have attacked Russia.' I wasn't following him anymore, he seemed to be on a completely different tack, but he didn't stop, he pursued the leaps of his thinking. 'Were not waging war so that every German can have a refrigerator and a radio. Were waging war to unify Germany, to create a Germany in which you'd want to live. You think my brother Helmut was killed for a refrigerator? Did you fight at Stalingrad for a refrigerator?' I shrugged, smiling: in this state, there wasn't any point in talking to him." (p. 767)
16. Himmler, declaring the "Jewish Question" solved, orders Auschwitz shut in October 1944. Subsequently attempts were made to demolish it. Dr Aue's account of the Death Marches rings true, but not his involvement in them. Not his running about trying to secure food and clothing for the exhausted inmates or trying to stop the killing of those who can't walk....more
As a Sontag admirer, I’m saddened to learn one of my favorite writers was such an asshole. There are reasons for it, but they don’t excuse her. Well, As a Sontag admirer, I’m saddened to learn one of my favorite writers was such an asshole. There are reasons for it, but they don’t excuse her. Well, Sarajevo, may in part excuse her — maybe…
“When, after her death, extracts from Sontag’s‘s diaries were published, many who knew her were surprised by the often-remorseless self-awareness they revealed. ‘I've always identified with the Lady Bitch Who Destroys Herself,’ she wrote, for example, in 1960. ‘I'm not a good person,’ she emphasized in 1961. ‘Say this 20 times a day. “Sorry, that's the way it is.”’ A few days later, she added: ‘Better yet. Say, “Who the hell are you?”’ She did not think she was bad, she wrote in 1965. Rather, she was ‘incomplete. It's not what I am that's wrong, it's that I'm not more (responsive, alive, generous, considerate, original, sensitive, brave, etc.).’ . . . ‘Rather, it’s that I’m dumb, insensitive.’” (p. 245)
Sontag lost her intriging father, an importer who often traveled to China, when she was very young. Sontag’s mother, spoiled by opulence and many servants in Tientsen — well before the Revolution — taught her daughter to suppress unpleasant news. The book calls her the Queen of Denial. Nothing negative was to be uttered in her presence. She ran off to another room when that happened. She drank vodka from a tumbler while offering guests water out of similar glasses.
At Berkeley however Sontag broke free. She had an affair with a woman which she celebrated in her journals yet quickly sought to expunge. Shame? She was a 17 year old beauty and wunderkind when she went to Chicago University and married her professor. This in an attempt, apparently, to heterosexualize herself. During this time she wrote his first book for him — Freud: The Mind of the Moralist — which he published under his name.
A few highlights:
1. Sontag had no visual eye.
“‘She would forbid David to look out of the window from buses or trains when they were traveling,’ said one of David's later girlfriends, Joanna Robertson. ‘She used to say that he needed to hear all about a place in terms of facts and history in order to understand it, but that looking out of the window would tell him nothing. She never looked out of the window on journeys like that- I remember her, always talking about the places we were in or were headed towards, but never curious to simply look out to see them.’" (p. 162)
2. She was apolitical.
“Her time in Paris coincided with one of the turning points of French history: in May, as a result of the ongoing disaster in Algeria, civil war loomed. The American embassy considered evacuating its citizens as France fell under martial law: Corsica was conquered by dissident elements from the French Algerian army, and only an emergency government under General de Gaulle prevented a coup d'état. Yet there is not a word about this in Susan's journals. ‘I came to Paris in 1957 and I saw nothing,’ she said ten years later. ‘I stayed closed off in a milieu that was in itself a milieu of foreigners. But I felt the city.’
“She was so weighed down by heavy choices that she could spare little attention for even the most dramatic events; later, when she became a public figure called upon to pronounce on world affairs, her difficulty in seeing political matters became clear.” (p. 165)
3. She was irrational in the face of death.
I understand this is the biography of an asshole. I also understand the biographer’s need to give the reader a balanced portrait. But isn’t this a bit cruel?
“Her alienation from her body was so extreme that she had to remind herself to bathe. She neglected her health in astonishing ways. She never exercised. She barely slept. Sometimes she forgot to eat, and sometimes she gorged. She was a heavy smoker —and lied about her habit even to her oncologist. But in Illness as Metaphor—in her zeal to transform her story of guilt, shame, and fear into something usable—she acknowledged none of this. Instead, she dismissed ‘crude statistics’ brandished for the general public, such as that 90 percent of all cancers are 'environmentally caused,’ or that imprudent diet and tobacco smoking alone account for 75 percent of all cancer deaths. She does not say what is crude about these statistics, or display any interest in the science behind them.
“The pathogenesis of cancer is extremely complex; the disease strikes for all sorts of reasons. But under the onslaught she lost her ability, so recently acquired, to distinguish between tragedy and drama. Her dismissal of personal responsibility—for some cancers, for some people—made contracting cancer from chain-smoking Marlboros sound as inexplicable as being dashed to pieces by a meteor. She chose to dissociate her choices from any potential responsibility for her disease, and created, instead, a story about why she had been saved. She credited her survival to her own determination to be treated by the most radical methods, and to the doctor who had administered them. At the heart of this story was an impossible paradox. She was not responsible for her illness--but she was responsible for its cure.” (pp. 375-376)
The author makes a good point. But because this bit has to do with her mental state during her illness, it strikes me as beyond cruel. Alas, there’s no way around it for the author. As Sontag said, “The job of writers is to speak out.” (p. 486) So her irrationality during illness is an ugliness we must see — like photos of a cataclysm that make no exception for personal dignity.
4. She was in deep need of psychoanalysis but never got it.
“‘I loved Susan,’ said Leon Wieseltier, speaking for many others. ‘But I didn't like her.’ She grew more and more insulting toward the people who did love her, and as a result her isolation often astonished people who knew her only as a famous public figure. Many formerly close friends abandoned her. ‘It was like Marilyn Monroe, who couldn't get a date on a Saturday night,’ Wieseltier said. ‘She had absolutely no understanding of herself.’ And so she suffered genuinely from the cruelty and indifference she perceived in others. But she could not perceive her effect on those she hurt in turn, and friends and acquaintances were constantly befuddled by her behavior, which they would still be analyzing years after her death.” (p. 480)
5. She made 11 visits to Sarajevo. In a life of so emotionally fraught, this may have been her finest hour.
“At the end of that first visit, he (David Reiff) spoke to Miro Purivatra, who later founded the Sarajevo Film Festival, and asked if there was anything, or anyone, he could bring back. ‘One of the persons who could be perfect to come here to understand what's going on would definitely be Susan Sontag,’ he [Purivatra] said. Without mentioning the connection—‘for sure," Miro said, ‘I did not know that he was her son’—David said he would do what he could. He appeared at Miro's door a few weeks later. ‘We hugged each other and he told me, “Okay, you asked me something and I brought your guest here.” Just behind the door, it was her. Susan Sontag. I was frozen.’ It would be at least a month before he figured out their relationship: ‘They never told me.’” (p.556)
“‘She was the first international person who said publicly that what is happening in Bosnia in 1993 was a genocide," said Haris Pasovié, a young theater director. ‘The first. She deeply understood this. She was absolutely one hundred percent dedicated to this because she thought it was important for Bosnia but it was also important for the world.’" (p. 558)
6. Somehow, in Bosnia, Susan became nice. Her return from Sarajevo, though, when I read about it, reminded me of a closing line in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”:
”She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
But back in New York, there was no such incentive.
"’Everything she said about Bosnia was admirable,’ said Stephen Koch. ‘Her behavior about it was insufferable. Because if you had not gone to Sarajevo yourself, you were obviously just a morally inferior being. And she let that be known very clearly, with almost sneering condescension.’“ (p. 589)
As her posthumous journals attest she never quite believed she was working hard enough. This was reflected in her final months. She undertook a bone marrow transplant that, according to the author, was almost suicidally toxic and unlikely to work because this was her third cancer. The treatment was another way of working hard. It’s a shame she should have achieved so much yet enjoyed it so little. Her life really as I read it was paradoxical.
This is an excellent critical biography. No admirer of Sontag will want to miss it....more
A tale of desire and loneliness and literary creation that is exceptionally well written. Summary makes the book sound like a superficial gloss on theA tale of desire and loneliness and literary creation that is exceptionally well written. Summary makes the book sound like a superficial gloss on the life of E.M. Forster. It’s anything but. It exhibits a rich interiority and emotional directness which are bracing. Homosexuality in the Britain of Forster’s day was a state crime. We recall how how Alan Turing, after his work at Bletchley Park, was sexually poisoned.
Here we are with Morgan as he tries to live his life in that toxic society. A very handsome, dark complected, seventeen year old Indian is brought to him one day at his mother’s house because he is in need of tutoring in Latin. There’s very little pretense made toward this academic objective. Instead that two become friends and poor Morgan falls in sadly unrequited love with the fellow. It’s even hard to quote passages, since out of context the prose come across as merely melodramatic. But let us try. A good decade or more later we are in India.
“Morgan was making an early start in the morning, and had told Masood not to wake up. Although he'd said it firmly, he had wanted his friend to overrule him; he had wanted him to insist on waking and seeing him off on his journey. But Masood had yawned and agreed that he was very tired and that there was no point in getting up early. It was a sensible solution. So they had said goodbye just before going to sleep, in a stiff, incomplete way, both feeling shy, and then retreated. But almost immediately after, as he'd started to undress, Morgan had felt himself speared on the point of sharp emotion. He had gone back through to Masood's room and sat on the edge of his bed and taken hold, very tightly, of his hand. Cold anguish made certain details stand out, the white hanging shroud of the mosquito net, the shadows in its folds. Even if he'd been able to speak, he could not have said what he wanted. But the yearning had made him lean towards Masood, trying to kiss him. In the fizzing white burn of the lamp-light, his friend's face had been at first astonished, and then shocked. His hand had come up sharply, to push Morgan away, and that little movement had felt enormous, a force that could move a boulder. Morgan had accepted the refusal, because he'd known in advance it would come, and sat hunched miserably over his kernel of loneliness. By then Masood was merely irritated. He had rubbed Morgan's shoulder and patted him on the back, in a way that was both reassuring and dismissive. Neither of them spoke, but both of them understood. He did not feel as Morgan did; that was all. There was nothing else to say.” (p. 79)
In a letter Hemingway said, criticizing Faulkner, that true literature when it works doesn't give away its methods; that even on second or third reading it somehow transcends its limitations as a text; whereas with Faulkner on a second reading "you can see how he's tricked you."
No trickery is evident in Galgut. Somehow the author succeeds. One reads and rereads it, and there seems no clear formula to its success. But there it is before you in its aching sublimity. I have also read this author’s The Promise and In A Strange Room with great pleasure and at times astonishment.
When WW1 commences he volunteers to help the Red Cross identify British wounded in ancient Alexandria. He is in a role which allows him to befriend the soldiers, write letters for them, run errands, listen to what they have to say. His experience here being uncannily like that of Walt Whitman during the U.S. Civil War. (Whitman’s account appears in his Specimen Days.) He is 37 when he meets Mohammad, aged 18, who works as a train conductor.
“He had tried to flatter Cavafy, but had never been allowed to draw near. Nevertheless, his project almost put their friendship on a new footing. The advice came in a torrent, nearly all of it useful and encouraging. Had Morgan read Plotinus? Did he know about Philo and the Logos? Was he up on his Athanasius? He, Cavafy, had some books that Morgan simply had to read.
“As he researched in preparation, Morgan realised that he and the poet were embarked on a similar labour. He thought of this book as a resurrection, restoring a graveyard to life. And in his own work, in his own way, Cavafy was doing the same thing. Dipping into myth and ancient history, veering off into the modern streets, too, his poems stitched between an old, lost Alexandria and the immediate, sensual, modern one he lived in. In his words, the past quite literally drew breath.
“But Cavafy lived here, after all. What pulled Morgan so powerfully? He hadn't responded warmly to Egypt when he'd first arrived. When he considered it, he decided that it was precisely because Alexandria felt like a place - almost a country, alone - separate from what surrounded it. And what stirred him most deeply was that it was a mixture: an interbred miscegenation, a bastardy of influences and traditions and races. He had learned to mistrust purity — or the idea of purity, rather because the real thing didn't exist. Everybody by now was a blend; history was a confusion; people were hybrids.” (p. 228)...more
Truly the cruelest thing I’ve read this side of the Marquis de Sade. The soul crushing humiliation narrator Colin encounters takes the breath away. SoTruly the cruelest thing I’ve read this side of the Marquis de Sade. The soul crushing humiliation narrator Colin encounters takes the breath away. Someone here said that Mars-Jones was depathologizing BDSM. What? Moreover, after Colin’s debasement, which he apparently finds unremarkable, I lost all confidence in him as a narrator and stopped reading with only ten pages to go. No doubt why the book is subtitled: A Story of Low Self-Esteem. How can one sustain interest in a narrator so lacking in self-respect? Four golden projectile vomits....more
It surprising how continuous author Romm is able to make his story, considering he worked from so many fragmented sources. Told with alacrity and wit,It surprising how continuous author Romm is able to make his story, considering he worked from so many fragmented sources. Told with alacrity and wit, the tale positively hurtles along. I knew nothing before reading this book about the long-suffering Peloponnesian city-states’ bloody revolt against Spartan tyrrany, ca. 380 BC, and the role Thebes played in it. It’s deeply satisfying to read about. But it’s just part of the story of the Sacred Band, whose engine was erôs.
The theory goes that a fighting force made of male couples would possess a keener impulse to win at war than other fighters, because lovers would not want to disappoint each other. The idea was discussed by Xenophon in his Hellenica—he was a booster of Sparta who thought male erôs could only be weakness, never a virtue. Plato, however, in both Symposium and Phaedrus, suggested the motivation of same-sex lovers might be greater than that of ordinary unattached soldiers.
“Pammenes understood the Sacred Band, for it was he, according to one account, who first thought to station its lovers side by side. Plutarch explains the rationale, in words that perhaps came from Pammenes himself: ‘Men abandon their clansman and kinsman, even—by Zeus!— their parents and children; but no enemy ever came between an erastês and his erômenos.’ Significantly, Plutarch here calls Pammenes an erôtikos anêr, a term of high praise in this context: a man devoted to matters of erôs.” (p. 209)
Coincident with the formation of the Theban Sacred Band was the discovery of a new style of fighting. Instead of the rigid Greek phalanx, one of the Sacred Band’s leaders, Pelopidas—the other was Epaminondas—saw how an attack focused at a single point of the enemy's weakness could be radically advantageous. This is how the Thebans fought Sparta at both Tegyra and Leuctra which helped precipitate the aforementioned Spartan collapse.
There are so many narrative satisfactions here that I cannot begin to summarize them. Please read this wonderful book....more
Engrossing. This is the follow up to the author’s previous novel, the brilliant Days Without End. It’s set after the Civil War, during the time of wesEngrossing. This is the follow up to the author’s previous novel, the brilliant Days Without End. It’s set after the Civil War, during the time of westward expansion in North America. It’s a time almost completely without rule of law in the west. It starts with Thomas McNulty, the narrator of the first volume, and his lover John Cole, wondering what to do about their charge, Winona, an American Indian who tragically lost her family during the recent Indian wars, and who has just been assaulted in the local town of Paris, Tennessee. In this volume Winona takes up the narration. Coincident with the main story is the rise of the KKK and the failure of Reconstruction. Freedom for men and women of color is a very recent invention in the U.S. For the most part this is the moving story of a young woman starting to find her way in life during especially troubled times. ...more
Brilliant. Very violent. The closest American parallel I can think of would be Michael Punkes’ The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge. Days Without End is uBrilliant. Very violent. The closest American parallel I can think of would be Michael Punkes’ The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge. Days Without End is unsummarizable, but here goes. In terms of its invented argot, the novel is reminiscent of True History of the Kelly Gang and The North Water. The trick apparently is to have just enough dialect, but not so much that it slows the reader down. The touch in all of these books, the artistry, I mean, is deft.
The novel starts as a story of aboriginal genocide, as such it is essentially American. The narrator is a young Irishman, McNulty, a homosexual fleeing the Irish famine who comes to America with John Cole, his lover, and after a brief cross-dressing episode in Daggsville, a mining town, joins the army of that time which was barely kept fed and clothed. So far the Indians are matching their army pursuers slaughter for slaughter. One harrowing massacre of Sioux Indians takes place in the beautiful Black Hills, sacred ground in what is now South Dakota. I like how the narrator speaks for his fellow soldiers, as if he were a one-man Greek chorus of lamentation. But don’t be misled; for the most part the action is vibrant and the narrative moves at an intoxicating pace.
Then John Cole’s hitch is not renewed, due to some recurring illness, and McNulty joins him on leaving the army. They are joined by the 9 year old Winona, an Indian, as housekeeper. She becomes their de facto adopted daughter, taking Cole’s surname. They reconnect with Mr. Noone from Daggsville days whose now a swell in Rapid City and he engages them for another bit of cross-dressing tomfoolery at his saloon. Their act seems to consist of nothing more than McNulty dressing superbly as a woman and going onstage to be deeply kissed by Cole as the swain. The gypsum miners go quiet with awe then they’re wildly applauding in tears. Mr Noone is over the moon. I was reminded of how men used to play women in Elizabethan times, and still, I believe, in some traditional forms of Japanese theater.
Soon Lincoln’s president and it’s time to muster for the Civil War. Winona is left in Rapid City with the elderly Mr. Beulah McSweny, a freeman. McNulty and Cole go to Boston. They join their units and march to Washington D.C. They march south into old Virginny. They march to abolish slavery. John Keegan has called the American Civil War, for its use of artillery, the true antecedent of World War I, and you can see that in Barry’s descriptions.
“Now we know there be a huge force of them approaching up the right bank of the river. Ten miles off a blind man can see the dust and ruckus of men. Must be ten-thousand. At least a division of those hole-in-the-trousers boys. We are only four-thousand but we’re dug in like prairie dogs. Rifle pits galore a mile wide and all set in devious vees and on each flank full batteries and we got so much shells they rival the pyramids of Egypt.” (p. 138)
About the last half, I’ll say only this: What a marvel of mayhem. McNulty’s cross-dressing saves his life. The whole thing is both preposterous (as all good literary fiction must to some extent be) and moving. Please read it. It’s the truth....more
What Belongs to You is a tragic story exquisitely told. We step backwards into the tale. First, we hear of the nameless young American, a teacher, whoWhat Belongs to You is a tragic story exquisitely told. We step backwards into the tale. First, we hear of the nameless young American, a teacher, who falls for a hustler in Sofia, Bulgaria, in the present day. Then we get the nameless young man’s backstory, his family dysfunction, a portrait of his horrible father and his extramarital affairs, the young man’s first love, coming to terms with his sexuality. Then we go back farther, back to the great-grandparents, and their loose daughter, the narrator’s grandmother, her many out-of-wedlock children, the family violence. This grandmother in her youth threw herself at bad trade with regularity, violent men. The reason she did so was to punish her father (the narrator’s great grandfather) for an act of violence so brazen that I was reminded of Joe Christmas killing his step-father on the dance floor in William Faulkner’s harrowing Light in August. Mitko is the name of the uneducated hustler here who breaks our narrator’s heart. I can't think of a debut this exciting since Dale Peck’s Martin and John, which, ironically, is about a hustler falling for a plague-stricken client in 1980s New York. Part III, about which I’ll say nothing, returns to present-day Sofia. A dark story, not for the faint of heart, deeply moving....more
A memoir as much about writing as reading. Naturally, my backlog is growing by leaps and bounds with every page. There’s also some insight into the moA memoir as much about writing as reading. Naturally, my backlog is growing by leaps and bounds with every page. There’s also some insight into the models he used for his fictional characters. New discoveries here for me include Jean Giono, Mircea Cărtărescu, Elizabeth Bowen and Matthias Énard. The essays on Jean Giono, Colette, Pierre Guyotat, Jean Cocteau, Rebecca West, Penelope Fitzgerald, who once snubbed White at a New York lunch, and Curzio Malaparte are wonderful. The book descends to name dropping halfway through. Well, White’s a better gossip than Truman Capote, who was just a snob revering status, and his acquaintance seems very broad. But the impulse to name drop is the same. The book was apparently written in conjunction with writing courses he taught at Princeton until recently. The praise about his husband is cringeworthy, or so I thought at first, but White works at it so earnestly that he wins one over in the end. He really is a fantastic writer. The Beautiful Room Is Empty is sheer brilliance, while The Farewell Symphony is a major work of literary fiction that is in a sense without historic parallel. See my reviews....more
The novel is structurally and thematically interesting—there’s a brilliant patterning of motifs—but these things can’t thread the component parts togeThe novel is structurally and thematically interesting—there’s a brilliant patterning of motifs—but these things can’t thread the component parts together. It’s a novel of manners. The narrator has no apparent backstory and an almost pathologically selective memory. He wakes on an island in a cottage shared with other men, all of whom are subject to some unwritten code of behavior. Consequently everyone is dissembling and false. It’s strange. It doesn’t surprise me that Vladimir Nabokov and his wife liked the book. It has the same sort of absurdist underpinnings as, say, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. There’s also some discussion of poetic form which would have pleased the painstaking translator of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and other Russian poets. I mean, this guy is in a serious fugue state. He doesn’t know what his precise relationship is to other people. He doesn’t know his last name—is it Valentine? He doesn’t know if the woman he’s dealing with is his lover or his sister. Lying in her cottage naked, he’s unsure of what to do. When she sucks his limp cock, he thinks of it as a kind of “dumbshow.” (p. 92) The ensuing sex is amusing. It’s what a virgin might think on his first experience of sex, having never heard of it before. It was for me a slog. I was thinking that, fortunately, because it’s short, it’s a slog I can afford, since I admire White’s other work so. But if it’s 184 pages it reads like 368. I don’t think it’s the best book to start with if you’re new to the author. My favorites by Edmund White include Hotel de Dream, The Beautiful Room is Empty and The Farewell Symphony....more
I admire Mishima. It’s too bad though that he ever heard of philosophy. It makes for his worst writing. And the moment he frees himself of it, the proI admire Mishima. It’s too bad though that he ever heard of philosophy. It makes for his worst writing. And the moment he frees himself of it, the prose awakens and moves, often sinuously as in the early pages here. He might have subtitled this one The Big Book if Misogyny. In its heartless cruelty it reminds me of Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Mishima’s second novel, it was originally published in two parts in Japan, in 1951 and 1953, when he was 25 and 27. In it an ugly old man, a Japanese writer of some standing, who’s taken to falling in love with very young women, finds a way to exact a horrible revenge. As in the Laclos’s novel, this is undertaken through a number of elaborately feigned love affairs. A beautiful young man, who is both gay and the boyfriend of the old writer’s current dalliance, Yasuko, is actively ensnared in a plan to jilt her. There are budget struggles in the home of the young man’s ailing mother. Shunsuké promises to make these money problems go away if the young man, Yuichi, will work with him to actively break the hearts of Yasuko, and many other women to whom he has in the past fruitlessly pledged his troth. Shunsuké is every bit as viscous and malign as the Marquise de Merteuil in the Laclos novel, but at least she possessed the virtue of devising amusing escapades. Shunsuké’s by contrast are absolutely humorless. It’s this fundamental sobriety alloyed with anger that, it can be argued, is at the core of many of Mishima’s novels. Here it takes on the petty injustices of both the gay world of the day, with its superficial thralldom to beauty, and the institutionalized tedium of straight marriage, which in Japan at this time was still often an arranged affair. In my view, Mishima doesn’t like what he sees in either camp....more
An absolutely astonishing book. The verbal brio is downright heady; its mastery, its facility, reminds me of the work of Martin Amis, although in termAn absolutely astonishing book. The verbal brio is downright heady; its mastery, its facility, reminds me of the work of Martin Amis, although in terms of subject matter the two writers could not be more dissimilar.
The nameless gay narrator here has an astonishing prose style and a semi-permanent erection. He’s just one man in a New York teeming with newfound homosexual freedom, just after the storied Stonewall Uprising (1969). But the feral sexual insatiably here is a sign not simply of freedom or release after millennia of oppression, but of something else. I don’t know what, but it isn’t joyous, and it may very well be desperate. I keep thinking of the loose ends some people come to in the face of too much freedom, almost a kind of existential panic.
If my [gay] shrink thought that sex was a matter of cuddling and intimacy, I thought it was a cold, calculated rite promising transcendence but certainly not affection.(p.317)
It occurs to me that the sex, which is relentless, really could not have been moderated. To do so would have been a kind of dereliction, a failure to speak true and clearly. So the sex, some of it admittedly ecstatic, much of it dreary, is here in full, all of it assuming a premonitory chill. For this is the story of cultural efflorescence and death. The world described here—with its leather bars, orgies, fisting, poppers and Quaaludes; a world, too, of prodigious artistic ferment in virtually all media—is now utterly gone. You might as well be reading about the Plantagenets. The present era of safety in monogamy—gay marriage—grew out of this pandemic.
With brilliant precision, White develops a long line of interesting, often fascinating, often debauched, male characters who are sadly soon to be so many carcasses, so many piled bones. One seems to see their ghosts prefigured in their promiscuity; the effect is harrowing. So much life and talent about to be extinguished . . . .
I can still remember the joy in certain quarters when the “fags” started to die. It was not withheld. Not at all, it was a joyous, prancing, self-righteous, far-right victory lap. “God’s justice” for the abominations, they called it. Young adults today know virtually nothing about this time when no one knew what was killing people straight and gay in such numbers, and whether one might not oneself be next.
Ah but then the plague trickled beyond the queers, Jamaicans, IV druggies, and blood transfusers into the broader heterosexual population. Uh-oh, that was enough for Raygun, honor bound as he was to preserve the sanctity of heterosexual adultery at all costs. Things started to happen. And science—surprise!—after years of harrowing uncertainty, science revealed that it wasn’t hellfire or the Rapture after all that was killing so many so grotesquely. It was nothing more than a microscopic retrovirus perpetuating itself by means of the exchange of bodily fluids. See Randy Shilts et al.
Edmund White reminds me of Vladimir Nabokov, not in subject matter or tone or even diction so much as in his spritely thoroughly nailed metaphors and mastery of narrative propulsion. In fact, I’ve come to think there’s something of a Lolita-effect here; that is, taking a figure of rebarbative habits (Humbert Humbert in Lolita), and getting the reader to follow him eagerly despite his off putting nature. Is there anything objectionable in a man who fucks on average three partners a week, or more than 3,100 lovers over 20 years? Is there anything objectionable about a man who fucks 12-year-old girls? Another Nabokovian trope seems to occur in White’s middle American landscapes, which smack of the road trip in Lolita.
But I’m being too humorless. The novel by contrast is often funny. Now how can this possibly be? How can White be so hilarious in the looming shadow of the plague? Of course, he knows the end. He didn’t die and he knows who did die; that must surely help. But it would be like Daniel Defoe joking in A Journal of the Plague Year. Inconceivable, one would think, yet here it is. Most of the descriptive flights bite, like this one about country boy Butler and his many affectations in New York.
Certainly he was an epicurean who could pick quizzically over a single fresh sardine during a long evening in which I would knock back two dozen oysters, an entire roast chicken, potatoes with a whole head of garlic and half a gallon of California red. He kept up with me only in his alcohol consumption, although unlike me he modulated tastefully from blond Lillet on the rocks with a twist of orange peel to a white wine with the sardine, a light Beaujolais with the four kinds of goat cheese (chalky, white, near tasteless—the ultimate upper-class food), an Armagnac in a giant globe snifter to toy with beside the fire, as though he’d accepted it only for its light refracting properties.... When he crossed the room he appeared to have an extra folding place above his kneecaps. In sandals his feet looked immense, as though so much willowiness above need a big taproot below. When he danced he seemed to be treading grapes in place. In fact, closer study revealed that he never moved his size-twelve shoes at all, although his feet generated waves of motion sent up through his long legs and into his lean flanks and supple torso, down through his shoulders which shone as though they’d been chamoised with an expensive, furniture maker’s beeswax. (p.135)
Some things that aren’t here: friends in groups. There is the lone friend, and there are friends in the collective sense, but they never seem to merge into joyous community. There are just men trying to come. There is no other objective except to try to come more often. White is unsentimental and relentless in conveying this truth. Friendship is discounted. The minute love turns to friendship, it’s instant flaccidity, and hasta la vista, baby. The horrible sex-robbing nature of mere friendship is abhorred at length. And two relationships in particular, that between Joshua and the narrator, and between Kevin and the narrator, bring the point home.
The word count here must be 170,000 or so. A mighty tome, for the most part beautifully sustained. One point: throughout bisexuals are belittled or criticized as being dissembling, dishonest little rats who are actually gay men playing both sides of the field. Other than that bit of myopia, I found the book astonishing and humbling, as is all great art....more
I like this more than the three stars would indicate. The melodrama was a problem for me. The plot is simple and brilliantly done. David the American I like this more than the three stars would indicate. The melodrama was a problem for me. The plot is simple and brilliantly done. David the American doesn’t want to admit he has homosexual impulses. His fiancée, Hella, doesn’t know he’s gay because David doesn’t know it. David is confused, as his friend Jacques at one point remarks. He’s experiencing major cognitive dissonance, simultaneously knowing something and acting as if it weren’t so. For he has met the beautiful, the irresistible Giovanni. Giovanni and David do it in the former’s squalid room, which David sees as a metaphor for punishment and grief, for poverty. There’s no goddamned way he’ll end up stuck in that rat hole. During their renovations, they remove bags of bricks from the room and scatter these in the neighborhood. (?)
Now Hella is returning from Spain where she has gone briefly to think about whether she wants to marry David. David is set to dump Giovanni because he doesn’t want to be a faggot. No way, he wants to be a real American man, with the little woman putting the kids to bed at night while he’s in the study drinking himself to death and dreaming of cock. Soon his fiancée will learn the truth. Giovanni, driven mad by lost love, will be guillotined for a grisly crime. Yes, we’re in Paris. The writing style is assured, even mellifluous, if at times highly melodramatic in the manner of some—my least favorite—of Emile Zola’s novels of social realism. The prose wavers between a kind of operatic hysteria and passages that are sonorous if not haunting. The merde’s about to hit the fan. Clear the room everyone. This would make a lovely opera. Is there a Rossini among us? Here’s your libretto....more
“Every day he looked thinner, older, more fragile, almost like someone recently dead who appears in our drAn astonishing writer. I love his metaphors:
“Every day he looked thinner, older, more fragile, almost like someone recently dead who appears in our dreams, unshaved and reproachful.”
“In the hollow of her neck there was a smudge of red paint, just where a grandmother in a play might have worn a cameo on a black ribbon.”
”The sitter was posing as though his profile was about to go on the coin of the realm.”
“Outside, saltimbanques of snow were leaping up and flipping backwards.”
The story is set unpromisingly in a 1950s midwest America. The narrator at its start is 17. He attends Eton boarding school. No, not the real Eton but a fake Eton which is just across the street from an arts academy somewhere in the midwest. The two young populations rarely mingle, but our narrator, bored to death, has decided to be different and make the crossing. He meets Maria, an artist, with whom he’d rather fall in love than be gay. For at the time “The three most heinous crimes known to man were Communism, heroin, and homosexuality.”
The nearby filthy metropolis to which they abscond is Detroit. The law student William Everett Hunton has to be experienced on the page to be believed; he is a cock-crazy maniac, who prefers them short but “beercan thick.” Then there’s Tex the bookseller and Mason his unpaid clerk, and Lou, one of the narrator’s lovers, and Sean, another lover who goes mad so incapable is he of dealing with his “criminal” nature.
Then comes the summer after the narrator’s freshman year at the University of Michigan. During this joyous weather his father (humorless, business-minded) seeks to drive the narrator’s gayness out of him through a superfluity of yard work. The old man’s apoplectic at his ex-wife’s suggestion that his son is gay because of the divorce. The guilt-ridden father naturally hates his son for this and takes it out on him in yard work. His new step-mother tells of how much the old man has wanted to kill him. We find out later, tellingly, that dad hates men, doesn’t trust them, and is very much a loner, if a successful one.
Last I heard, a month ago, there were 77,000 young men still in so-called regression therapy programs run by US churches. That‘s 2018. Can you imagine what the climate must have been like in the late 1950s? And this is a narrator who knows what he is by the time he’s out of adolescence. Sadly he’s in thrall to a speed-freak psychiatrist who promises to cure him. His father is footing the bill. He is sick shamed by what he is: the crimes he commits, his disease. He yearns for the no-self of Buddhism. He dearly wants the cure his wired shrink has promised him. He hates his incessant men’s room cruising. No one wants to be gay, you see. The mainstream medical establishment still views homosexuality as an illness, and so it remains a pathology described in the pages of the DSM. No wonder James Baldwin moved to Paris about this time, 1955. No wonder White lived there for 16 years.
(“In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) asked all members attending its convention to vote on whether they believed homosexuality to be a mental disorder. 5,854 psychiatrists voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM, and 3,810 to retain it. The APA then compromised, removing homosexuality from the DSM but replacing it, in effect, with ‘sexual orientation disturbance’ for people ‘in conflict with’ their sexual orientation. Not until 1987 did homosexuality completely fall out of the DSM.”—from Psychology Today)
The queer railery scenes are quaint, the old-fashioned shrill queenliness funny. “We piled into a car with some friends of his, all a few years older than I, and as we passed a policeman directing traffic, the driver lowerered his window and shouted, ‘Love your hat, Tilly!’” “Hush, you’re a caution,” someone in the backseat said, “don’t upset Lily law, she be bad, that girl.” I’m no fan of sex in novels, but at least White’s has the virtue of alacrity, like violence in Poe.
This fiction gives voice to an historically maligned population, and that’s vital, but in the end it transcends social function. I’m trying to think of some of the great American novels of the 20th century. You can draw up your own list. I’ll include Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. I think this novel stands securely among them. There’s not a false page in it. The novel then ends with the Stonewall Uprising, the first roar of Gay Pride in 1969. By this time the narrator is 29.
This is an astonishing book! I also enjoyed White’s remorselessly grim Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel. I look forward to catching up on his output, which is ample, though this one calls for immediate re-reading....more
What’s taken me so long to read Edmund White? What’s that line in Rilke’s Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus? “You must change your life.” That’What’s taken me so long to read Edmund White? What’s that line in Rilke’s Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus? “You must change your life.” That’s how I feel. Such a divine writer is so rare, he recalibrates one’s soul. There’s a fascinating freshness on every page. Great narrative thrust, force, propulsion— call it what you will, it carries me breathlessly along. Stephen Crane is dying from TB. He and his wife Cora, a former brothel keeper, are in Sussex, England, as his last days play out. He’s a very famous American writer, Stephen Crane—see The Red Badge of Courage and his stories, especially “The Open Boat,” “The Blue Hotel,” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”—and he’s visited in his decline by Henry James (the description of James alone is a gem) and Joseph Conrad. Within this novel of Crane’s last days is another novel, which Crane means to be his last; he dictates it to wife, Cora, between bouts of illness. It’s called The Painted Boy, and it’s written ostensibly as a counterpart to his Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. In it a 15 year old boy hooker, benumbed by a childhood in which both father and brothers buggered him senseless, meets thirtyish bank official Theodore who falls in love with him. Fortunately, the kid’s by now taken a liking to anal pleasure and lives with Theodore in an all too brief idyll. But it ends tragically for both of them. Then, just before he can finish The Painted Boy, Crane dies in a sanitarium in Switzerland’s Black Forest....more
This book is a fucking axe to the heart. But because my heart, perhaps yours, too, was broken long ago, no further damage can be done. So perhaps the This book is a fucking axe to the heart. But because my heart, perhaps yours, too, was broken long ago, no further damage can be done. So perhaps the book's more like a probe, yes, a very discomfiting probe, making a fuller assessment of the wreckage. The book is also a final report of the survey. Finally, one thinks, here’s someone who has not only plumbed the depths of heartbreak, but who’s taken excruciatingly detailed notes along the way revealing every nuance of the required self-abasement. The result is an astonishing catharsis for the reader.
This is what literature at its best can do. Think Aeschylus’s Oresteia, but with an all-mortal cast and without the choruses. I speak here of the novel’s sheer emotional power.
For most of the novel the narrative is the first-person thoughts, fantasies, worries, shames and fears of Elio in the summer of his 17th year. The young man is with his parents at their big comfortable summer house on the Italian Riviera. It’s the mid-1980s. The boy’s father is an academic and Oliver, 24, is a young American colleague exchanging some brief work as amanuensis for room and board while finishing his own manuscript. But in the marvelous, big-hearted Italian sense, Oliver, even if for only the six weeks of his stay, is very much a part of the family.
Women are alluring to Elio but they are not his predominant fascination this particular summer. Description is thin at first, almost transient, and because the reader’s not distracted by descriptive flights he or she never feels far from the anguish of Elio. Life’s first love is the theme, and this iteration is so fresh, so vivid and beautifully layered, that it’s not to be missed. Among the best parts of the novel are those passages in which Elio—before his intimacy with Oliver begins—imagines what he might say to Oliver, the multiple responses he might at any moment utter in Oliver’s presence, or imagined presence. Elio’s mind is racing with alternative scenarios. Is this even what he wants? He’s not sure but he wants to find out. Matters are thought out and after some new bit of action or information, rethought and modified. The technique reminds me of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, in which circumstances are similarly considered then reconsidered. There is a mastery of tone here that constantly astonishes and bewilders.
Later in the novel, when the description intensifies, it’s as if it has been saved for just these moments of lovemaking, the confidential exchanges between the two in their subsequent walks and swims, their farewell in Rome, the devastating coda. It is the frankness between the two young men that to my mind constitutes the book’s magic. That something as amorphous as desire can be written about with such fluidity and integrity is near miraculous. The wrenching depiction of Elio’s new and utterly discomfiting passion consumes not only him but us as well.
In closing, let me say that this book is likely to resound more with those with some mileage on them (real or metaphorical). The prerequisite is suffering. One can’t imagine the novel’s insights and wisdom working their wonders on anyone who hasn’t at some time put everything on the line.
“In love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve.” —Thornton Wilder
The end was simply excruciating yet I couldn't stop reading. Extremely powerful. I will reread this one soon. In terms of achievement, I place Call Me By Your Name on the same shelf as Madame Bovary and Lolita and, yes, very near Aeschylus too....more
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