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Καρτεσιανή σονάτα και άλλες νουβέλες
Τέσσερις νουβέλες που εξερευνούν τα όρια ανάμεσα στο καλό και το κακό, τη σκέψη και τη δράση, τη λύτρωση και την εξουσία. Ο αναγνώστης θα συναντήσει μια γυναίκα-μέντιουμ κι έναν κακοποιητικό σύζυγο· έναν διεφθαρμένο λογιστή που έρχεται αντιμέτωπος με την πιθανότητα τῆ� σωτηρίας του· μια ανορεκτική γυναίκα που αναζητά τη λύτρωση στην αγάπη της για την ποίηση της Ελίζαμπεθ Μπίσοπ και έναν πικραμένο έφηβο, πού, με μια σειρά μυστικών εκδικήσεων, αποφασίζει να επιφέρει τη δικαιοσύνη που ο ίδιος ο Θεός δεν επιβάλλει.
Οι ιστορίες, με το χαρακτηριστικό ύφος, την ευφυΐα και τη φιλοσοφική διάθεση του Γουίλιαμ Γκας, υπόσχονται να καθηλώσουν κάθε αναγνώστη.
ΚΑΡΤΕΣΙΑΝΗ ΣΟΝΑΤΑ
ΔΩΜΑΤΙΟ ΣΥΝ ΠΡΩΙΝΟ
Η ΕΜΜΑ ΜΠΑΙΝΕΙ ΣΕ ΜΙΑ ΠΡΟΤΑΣΗ ΤΗΣ ΕΛΙΖΑΜΠΕΘ ΜΠΙΣΟΠ
Ο ΜΕΤΡ ΤΩΝ ΜΥΣΤΙΚΩΝ ΕΚΔΙΚΗΣΕΩΝ
Οι ιστορίες, με το χαρακτηριστικό ύφος, την ευφυΐα και τη φιλοσοφική διάθεση του Γουίλιαμ Γκας, υπόσχονται να καθηλώσουν κάθε αναγνώστη.
ΚΑΡΤΕΣΙΑΝΗ ΣΟΝΑΤΑ
ΔΩΜΑΤΙΟ ΣΥΝ ΠΡΩΙΝΟ
Η ΕΜΜΑ ΜΠΑΙΝΕΙ ΣΕ ΜΙΑ ΠΡΟΤΑΣΗ ΤΗΣ ΕΛΙΖΑΜΠΕΘ ΜΠΙΣΟΠ
Ο ΜΕΤΡ ΤΩΝ ΜΥΣΤΙΚΩΝ ΕΚΔΙΚΗΣΕΩΝ
490 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
39 people are currently reading
926 people want to read
About the author
William H. Gass
68books666followersWilliam Howard Gass was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and former philosophy professor.
Gass was born in Fargo, North Dakota. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Warren, Ohio, where he attended local schools. He has described his childhood as an unhappy one, with an abusive, racist father and a passive, alcoholic mother; critics would later cite his characters as having these same qualities.
He attended Wesleyan University, then served as an Ensign in the Navy during World War II, a period he describes as perhaps the worst of his life. He earned his A.B. in philosophy from Kenyon College in 1947, then his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell University in 1954, where he studied under Max Black. His dissertation, "A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor", was based on his training as a philosopher of language. In graduate school Gass read the work of Gertrude Stein, who influenced his writing experiments.
Gass taught at The College of Wooster, Purdue University, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a professor of philosophy (1969 - 1978) and the David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities (1979 - 1999). His colleagues there have included the writers Stanley Elkin, Howard Nemerov (1988 Poet Laureate of the United States), and Mona Van Duyn (1992 Poet Laureate). Since 2000, Gass has been the David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities.
Earning a living for himself and his family from university teaching, Gass began to publish stories that were selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of 1959, 1961, 1962, 1968 and 1980, as well as Two Hundred Years of Great American Short Stories. His first novel, Omensetter's Luck, about life in a small town in Ohio in the 1890s, was published in 1966. Critics praised his linguistic virtuosity, establishing him as an important writer of fiction. In 1968 he published In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, five stories dramatizing the theme of human isolation and the difficulty of love. Three years later Gass wrote Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, an experimental novella illustrated with photographs and typographical constructs intended to help readers free themselves from the linear conventions of narrative. He has also published several collections of essays, including On Being Blue (1976) and Finding a Form (1996). His latest work of fiction, Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas, was published in 1998. His work has also appeared in The Best American Essays collections of 1986, 1992, and 2000.
Gass has cited the anger he felt during his childhood as a major influence on his work, even stating that he writes "to get even." Despite his prolific output, he has said that writing is difficult for him. In fact, his epic novel The Tunnel, published in 1995, took Gass 26 years to compose. An unabridged audio version of The Tunnel was released in 2006, with Gass reading the novel himself.
When writing, Gass typically devotes enormous attention to the construction of sentences, arguing their importance as the basis of his work. His prose has been described as flashy, difficult, edgy, masterful, inventive, and musical. Steven Moore, writing in The Washington Post has called Gass "the finest prose stylist in America." Much of Gass' work is metafictional.
Gass has received many awards and honors, including grants from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1965, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1970. He won the Pushcart Prize awards in 1976, 1983, 1987, and 1992, and in 1994 he received the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Literature of the Midwest. He has teaching awards from Purdue University and Washington University; in 1968 the Chicago Tribune Award as One of the Ten Best Teachers in the Big Ten. He was a Getty Foundation Fellow in 1991-1992. He received the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997; and the American Book Award for The
Gass was born in Fargo, North Dakota. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Warren, Ohio, where he attended local schools. He has described his childhood as an unhappy one, with an abusive, racist father and a passive, alcoholic mother; critics would later cite his characters as having these same qualities.
He attended Wesleyan University, then served as an Ensign in the Navy during World War II, a period he describes as perhaps the worst of his life. He earned his A.B. in philosophy from Kenyon College in 1947, then his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell University in 1954, where he studied under Max Black. His dissertation, "A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor", was based on his training as a philosopher of language. In graduate school Gass read the work of Gertrude Stein, who influenced his writing experiments.
Gass taught at The College of Wooster, Purdue University, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a professor of philosophy (1969 - 1978) and the David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities (1979 - 1999). His colleagues there have included the writers Stanley Elkin, Howard Nemerov (1988 Poet Laureate of the United States), and Mona Van Duyn (1992 Poet Laureate). Since 2000, Gass has been the David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities.
Earning a living for himself and his family from university teaching, Gass began to publish stories that were selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of 1959, 1961, 1962, 1968 and 1980, as well as Two Hundred Years of Great American Short Stories. His first novel, Omensetter's Luck, about life in a small town in Ohio in the 1890s, was published in 1966. Critics praised his linguistic virtuosity, establishing him as an important writer of fiction. In 1968 he published In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, five stories dramatizing the theme of human isolation and the difficulty of love. Three years later Gass wrote Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, an experimental novella illustrated with photographs and typographical constructs intended to help readers free themselves from the linear conventions of narrative. He has also published several collections of essays, including On Being Blue (1976) and Finding a Form (1996). His latest work of fiction, Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas, was published in 1998. His work has also appeared in The Best American Essays collections of 1986, 1992, and 2000.
Gass has cited the anger he felt during his childhood as a major influence on his work, even stating that he writes "to get even." Despite his prolific output, he has said that writing is difficult for him. In fact, his epic novel The Tunnel, published in 1995, took Gass 26 years to compose. An unabridged audio version of The Tunnel was released in 2006, with Gass reading the novel himself.
When writing, Gass typically devotes enormous attention to the construction of sentences, arguing their importance as the basis of his work. His prose has been described as flashy, difficult, edgy, masterful, inventive, and musical. Steven Moore, writing in The Washington Post has called Gass "the finest prose stylist in America." Much of Gass' work is metafictional.
Gass has received many awards and honors, including grants from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1965, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1970. He won the Pushcart Prize awards in 1976, 1983, 1987, and 1992, and in 1994 he received the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Literature of the Midwest. He has teaching awards from Purdue University and Washington University; in 1968 the Chicago Tribune Award as One of the Ten Best Teachers in the Big Ten. He was a Getty Foundation Fellow in 1991-1992. He received the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997; and the American Book Award for The
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews
December 5, 2024
The book is a set of four profound novellas about loneliness: three modernistic and one postmodernistic.
Cartesian sonata is a dualistic tale of madness � two streams of consciousness: wife’s and then her husband’s, both are rotten and cacophonic. Ella is locked in her insanity and despair and she is absolutely lonely in that prison.
Bed and Breakfast is a story of a lonely man in the world of things. He is a rolling stone. He has no place he could call his own. He resides among the things belonging to the others. He lives in the world of his fantasies. And he desperately tries to escape.
Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's is an extremely bleak pastoral. Emma is a captive of poetry, she is an ultimate recluse, she has entirely lost any liaison with the outside world, and there’s no way out.
The Master of Secret Revenges is a postmodern treatise on vengeance full of exotic outings into religion, mythology, literature and history. It is a sarcastically frilly black comedy of a lone avenger.
Solitude is a bottomless well of sorrows; one may drink out of it lifelong�
Space wasn’t space to Ella, it was signals. Everything was emitting: a flower its scent, a bat its ping, a file its roughness, a lemon its acidity, a girl her gorgeousness, a summer street its summer heat, each muscle its move; space has more waves than the ocean: X rays, radio and television transmissions, walkie-talkie talk, car phone messages, ultraviolets, microwaves, cosmics of all kinds, kids communicating on oatmeal phones, radiations from high-tension lines, signal boxes, transistors and transformers, gazillion pieces of electronic gear leaking information, earth tremors, jet planes, other wakes and winds�
Cartesian sonata is a dualistic tale of madness � two streams of consciousness: wife’s and then her husband’s, both are rotten and cacophonic. Ella is locked in her insanity and despair and she is absolutely lonely in that prison.
History was here, too. History. Not a life lost, not a thought gone, not a feeling faded, but retained by these things, in the memories they continually encourage, the actions they record, the emotions they represent, not once upon a time, but in the precious present, where the eye sees and the heart beats, and where you clear gutters of leaves whose trees you know and recognize, and you furthermore remember when the soldered copper shone and the roof’s slates were reset and how the kitchen will any moment smell of bread like the brightness of the day and where the ladder’s shadow falls as though it were a sun clock striking three.
Bed and Breakfast is a story of a lonely man in the world of things. He is a rolling stone. He has no place he could call his own. He resides among the things belonging to the others. He lives in the world of his fantasies. And he desperately tries to escape.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Emma remembered with gratitude that lesson. But she took it a step further. She lost the sense of loss. She learned to ask nothing of the world. She learned to long for nothing. She didn’t require her knives to be sharp. Her knives weren’t her knives anyway. She gave up property. She didn’t demand dawn. When the snow came she didn’t sigh at the thought of shoveling. There was no need for shoveling. Let the snow seal her inside. She’d take her totter about the house instead of the narrow path around the woods. She moved as a draft might from room to room.
Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's is an extremely bleak pastoral. Emma is a captive of poetry, she is an ultimate recluse, she has entirely lost any liaison with the outside world, and there’s no way out.
Luther Penner, after many years, had perfected the art of secret revenges. They were pallid, to be sure, these revenges; they were thin; they were trivial and mild compared to the muscular and hearty recoveries of honor that brighten history and make it bearable to read; yet they were revenges so secretly conceived and so deftly executed that the spider might have learned a more entangling web, the wasp a surer sting, by studying them.
The Master of Secret Revenges is a postmodern treatise on vengeance full of exotic outings into religion, mythology, literature and history. It is a sarcastically frilly black comedy of a lone avenger.
Solitude is a bottomless well of sorrows; one may drink out of it lifelong�
December 8, 2017
RIP
Jonathan Enters a Sentence of William H Gass's
Out there by the bare yard the woodshed stood in a saucer of sun where she once went to practice screaming her cries and the light like two cyclists passing on a narrow road, the light coming in through cracks between the shed’s warped boards, the ax she wouldn’t handle, its blade buried in an ash tree’s stump the shed had been built around so the stump would still be of service though its tree had had to come down, dad said, it would have a life like an anvil or a butcher’s block because as long as you had a use you were alive, birds flew at the first blow, consequently not to cry that the tree’d been cut, groaning when it fell its long fall, limbs of leaves brushing limbs of leaves as though driven by a wind, with plenty of twig crackle, too, like a sparky fire, the heavy trunk crashing through its own bones to groan against the ground, scattering nests of birds and squirrels, but now she was screamed out, thinned of that, or the thought of the noble the slow the patiently wrought, how the tree converted dirt into aspiration, the beautiful brought down, branches lofty now low and broken, the nests of birds and squirrels thrown as you’d throw a small cap, its dispelled shade like soil still, at toppled tiptop a worm’s web resembling a scrap of cloud, it should have been allowed to die in the sky its standing death, she’d read whatever there is of love let it be obeyed, well, a fist of twigs and leaves and birdspit rolled away, the leaves of the tree shaking a bit yet, and the web
whispering
what was left
In this review, rather than speak about how great these stories are, and how essential Gass is for anyone interested in words, and what they are capable of doing, instead of that I intend to wander a little inside this long, limpid, convulsing sentence and thereby attempt to gain a little insight into the craft of a Master.
As Gass has pointed out in interview, we are taught to avoid rhyme, assonance and alliteration in prose. Editors are apparently prone to committing unilateral genocide against any evidence of such techniques. As Readers, we should therefore be grateful for those Writers with Egos large enough to let them stand their ground�
What editorially-transgressive joys can we find in this sentence? A brief skimming sights the following:
"there" "bare"
"wood" "stood" "wouldn't"
"bones" "groan"
"die" "sky"
"by" "bare" "boards" "blade buried" "butcher's block because" "birds" "blow" "brushing" "bones" "birds" (again) "beautiful brought" "branches" "birds" (again!) "be" "birdspit" "bit"
"stood" "saucer" "sun" "she" "screaming" "shed" "stump" "shed" "stump" (lovely repetition there) "service" and on and on with "shade like soil still" and "scrap" and many more.
"toppled tiptop a worm's web"
There is much more, of course, though this suffices to demonstrate the point, not to mention all the consonance, assonance and other evidence of Craft contained in this single, though admittedly long, sentence.
Alliteration is one of Mr Gass's favourite techniques, and it has, of course, a long and important history within the development of the English language. It formed a cornerstone of Anglo-Saxon literature, and has remained part of our heritage for over a thousand years, and yet a simple Google search finds hundreds of pages advising aspiring writers to keep it out of their prose, lest they "distance" the reader. But distance us from what? Distance us from the "story"? From the fact that we are reading a series of words placed in a certain order on a page by another human being? Why on earth would we want to be distanced from that? The Writer's Consciousness on display at every turn of phrase is a gift to the Reader, and an act of intellectual honesty. We should be grateful for it.
Some criticism of Gass submits that his characters lack clear, authentic voices; that it is Gass himself that speaks through and around and over them. Well of course it is, how could it be anything other? Do we criticise Egon Schiele because every line of every one of his portraits is so recognisably his? If I wish to write from the perspective of a mute character, must every page be blank? The intent is not to create someone "real", and to pretend to do so is a lie. But, just as Schiele's paintings tell us so much about our own Being, and the Being of others, so can these long, twisted and twisting sentences of William H Gass.
That they are, whatever this word is worth, Beautiful and filled with Music, is an added pleasure. His sentences wait for us to slip into them, as though into a warm and complexly scented bath. I will stay in until I wrinkle.
Jonathan Enters a Sentence of William H Gass's
Out there by the bare yard the woodshed stood in a saucer of sun where she once went to practice screaming her cries and the light like two cyclists passing on a narrow road, the light coming in through cracks between the shed’s warped boards, the ax she wouldn’t handle, its blade buried in an ash tree’s stump the shed had been built around so the stump would still be of service though its tree had had to come down, dad said, it would have a life like an anvil or a butcher’s block because as long as you had a use you were alive, birds flew at the first blow, consequently not to cry that the tree’d been cut, groaning when it fell its long fall, limbs of leaves brushing limbs of leaves as though driven by a wind, with plenty of twig crackle, too, like a sparky fire, the heavy trunk crashing through its own bones to groan against the ground, scattering nests of birds and squirrels, but now she was screamed out, thinned of that, or the thought of the noble the slow the patiently wrought, how the tree converted dirt into aspiration, the beautiful brought down, branches lofty now low and broken, the nests of birds and squirrels thrown as you’d throw a small cap, its dispelled shade like soil still, at toppled tiptop a worm’s web resembling a scrap of cloud, it should have been allowed to die in the sky its standing death, she’d read whatever there is of love let it be obeyed, well, a fist of twigs and leaves and birdspit rolled away, the leaves of the tree shaking a bit yet, and the web
whispering
what was left
In this review, rather than speak about how great these stories are, and how essential Gass is for anyone interested in words, and what they are capable of doing, instead of that I intend to wander a little inside this long, limpid, convulsing sentence and thereby attempt to gain a little insight into the craft of a Master.
As Gass has pointed out in interview, we are taught to avoid rhyme, assonance and alliteration in prose. Editors are apparently prone to committing unilateral genocide against any evidence of such techniques. As Readers, we should therefore be grateful for those Writers with Egos large enough to let them stand their ground�
What editorially-transgressive joys can we find in this sentence? A brief skimming sights the following:
"there" "bare"
"wood" "stood" "wouldn't"
"bones" "groan"
"die" "sky"
"by" "bare" "boards" "blade buried" "butcher's block because" "birds" "blow" "brushing" "bones" "birds" (again) "beautiful brought" "branches" "birds" (again!) "be" "birdspit" "bit"
"stood" "saucer" "sun" "she" "screaming" "shed" "stump" "shed" "stump" (lovely repetition there) "service" and on and on with "shade like soil still" and "scrap" and many more.
"toppled tiptop a worm's web"
There is much more, of course, though this suffices to demonstrate the point, not to mention all the consonance, assonance and other evidence of Craft contained in this single, though admittedly long, sentence.
Alliteration is one of Mr Gass's favourite techniques, and it has, of course, a long and important history within the development of the English language. It formed a cornerstone of Anglo-Saxon literature, and has remained part of our heritage for over a thousand years, and yet a simple Google search finds hundreds of pages advising aspiring writers to keep it out of their prose, lest they "distance" the reader. But distance us from what? Distance us from the "story"? From the fact that we are reading a series of words placed in a certain order on a page by another human being? Why on earth would we want to be distanced from that? The Writer's Consciousness on display at every turn of phrase is a gift to the Reader, and an act of intellectual honesty. We should be grateful for it.
Some criticism of Gass submits that his characters lack clear, authentic voices; that it is Gass himself that speaks through and around and over them. Well of course it is, how could it be anything other? Do we criticise Egon Schiele because every line of every one of his portraits is so recognisably his? If I wish to write from the perspective of a mute character, must every page be blank? The intent is not to create someone "real", and to pretend to do so is a lie. But, just as Schiele's paintings tell us so much about our own Being, and the Being of others, so can these long, twisted and twisting sentences of William H Gass.
That they are, whatever this word is worth, Beautiful and filled with Music, is an added pleasure. His sentences wait for us to slip into them, as though into a warm and complexly scented bath. I will stay in until I wrinkle.
December 25, 2024
The four novellas of this collection follow four protagonists whose stories try to answer the philosophical questions of Matter, mind, God, reality, good, evil and salvation. At another, more down-to-earth level these are four stories of the people who are lonely for different reasons; each of them has lost touch with reality and has created or is trying to create his/her own world and make sense of it.
Gass is a philosopher, so his prose is philosophical as well as lyrical and extremely expressive. It took time to get used to his writing because it is so unique but later I came to love it. The author employs a different tone and a new focus writing about each of the four characters - Ella, driving her husband crazy with her gift (or curse) of clairvoyance, Walt Riff, who becomes so fascinated with the numerous kitchy objects at a bed and breakfast that he decides to stay there, Emma who stops eating and immerses herself into the world of poetry and, finally, Luther Penner, the 'master of secret revenges' who develops a philosophy (and then a religion) based on the neccessity of retribution.
'She possessed an abnormal number of sensitive receivers. She was almost totally attention and antennae.'
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
'I wonder if you understand about that m. The other day I idly scribbled twelve of them in the margin of a canceled page: mmmmmmmmmmmm. . . . Look at them again: mmmmmmmmmmmm. Hear them hum. Isn’t that the purply dove? the witches� mist? It’s Ella Bend in receipt of her gift.'
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
'Emma lived between the lines, her life a fragment caught in the current of someone else’s words.'
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
'Language was her landscape, each word a peak or valley, her memories folded into syntax and sound.'
Gass is a philosopher, so his prose is philosophical as well as lyrical and extremely expressive. It took time to get used to his writing because it is so unique but later I came to love it. The author employs a different tone and a new focus writing about each of the four characters - Ella, driving her husband crazy with her gift (or curse) of clairvoyance, Walt Riff, who becomes so fascinated with the numerous kitchy objects at a bed and breakfast that he decides to stay there, Emma who stops eating and immerses herself into the world of poetry and, finally, Luther Penner, the 'master of secret revenges' who develops a philosophy (and then a religion) based on the neccessity of retribution.
'She possessed an abnormal number of sensitive receivers. She was almost totally attention and antennae.'
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
'I wonder if you understand about that m. The other day I idly scribbled twelve of them in the margin of a canceled page: mmmmmmmmmmmm. . . . Look at them again: mmmmmmmmmmmm. Hear them hum. Isn’t that the purply dove? the witches� mist? It’s Ella Bend in receipt of her gift.'
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
'Emma lived between the lines, her life a fragment caught in the current of someone else’s words.'
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
'Language was her landscape, each word a peak or valley, her memories folded into syntax and sound.'
June 12, 2012
James Wood, critic and extraordinaire, the problem with Gass’s style in this quartet of novellas from 1998 (reprinted by Dalkey in 2009)—Gass stretches the credulity of his characters� interior narration by bestowing them with the same stylish gifts as Gass the narrator. It doesn’t stop each novella excelling on its own terms but for a consistent stylistic trick, this problem bobs to the surface all too often (for this reader). The title novella is the oldest (dating to the 60s) and most inscrutable: a baffling musical structure obfuscates for the first forty or so pages before a blackly moving tale of an abusive husband emerges from the gloaming. ‘Bed & Breakfast� reads like an homage to the nouveau roman movement’s obsession with interiors and their imprint on consciousness—a travelling accountant flits from B&B to B&B, doting upon the rooms� contents (as metaphors for loneliness and the harsh self-sacrifice of fundamentalist Christians?). ‘Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s� is structured around the sentence: The slow fall of ash far from the flame, a residue of rain on morning grass, snow still in air, wounds we have had, dust on the sill there, dew, snowflake, scab: light, linger, leave, like a swatted fly, trace to be grieved, dot where it died. This is a beautiful novella dripping with sweat, murder and a deep, gasping loneliness. ‘The Master of Secret Revenges� is more in the comic and philosophical mode of The Tunnel: Luther is a semi-fascistic terror out to wreak revenge on all those who have slighted him by spreading his propaganda pamphlet ‘An Immodest Proposal,� which inverts Swift’s child-eating satire into a more cold-blooded medieval pissing torture program. So: 3.5 stars rounded up to 4. I still have an immense hard-on for Gass.
November 2, 2024
“Leía a escondidas. Pero leía a escondidas al igual que otros niños fumaban o se acariciaban unos a otros a través de la ropa.
[...]
"Leía con miedo a la interrupción. Así que aprendí a leer deprisa. También leía sobre todo los primeros versos, los primeros capítulos, y me precipitaba por el resto, ya que mi oído, cuando se volvía para captar los pasos a lo lejos, arrastraba mi mirada con mi frente hacia el sonido."
Con Gass es cuando más siento el acto de leer como una exploración de uno mismo, ya sabemos que es además una experiencia totalmente solitaria por mucho que luego comentes lo leído pero es casi imposible poder transmitir a otra persona durante la lectura lo que este autor consigue revertir en tu subconsciente. Con Gass más que nunca funciona ese tópico de la soledad del lector, que realmente no es un tópico sino una verdad como un templo. Es difícil además poder transmitir el impacto de muchos momentos que son como cuchillos que se van clavando en el subconsciente porque su prosa es muy turbadora, impenetrable en muchos momentos pero al mismo tiempo profundamente musical, tanto que hubo momentos en que tuve que cerrar el libro por la belleza de algunos de estos momentos, y aquí tengo que reafirmar la figura del traductor, en esta caso Ce Santiago, porque es absolutamente fantástico como transmite este estilo salvaje, seco y lírico a la vez. Leer a William H. Gass es todo un desafío, lento en mi caso, pero profundamente revelador a medida que se va desplegando.
"No recordaba más de aquel poema de belleza brutal. Las palabras vagaban hasta sus ojos. Cuando estaba leyendo, siempre era verano bajo el fresno, y las palabras caían delicadas por sus pupilas como ceniza hollín polen polvo que depositándose tan despacio sobre las horas sobre los días de verano una estación una vida entera incluso que su acumulación era otra capa. Consuelo para la piel."
[...]
A veces tardaba en leer un poema como el de Nueva Escocia -por breve que fuera- semanas, o, más bien, tardaba semanas en registrar todas las palabras, y nunca en orden de impresión. Ese orden vendría después. Un día, por fin, cuadraba las lineas y las hacía marchar ante su mirada tal y como estaban impresas..�
En "Sonata Cartesiana y otros relatos" Gass aborda cuatro historias en las que sus personajes intentan interpretar, comprender, el mundo en el que viven y lo hace sobre todo lanzando al igual que a sus personajes, al lector, señales y símbolos para que puedan ir desentrañando este mundo casi agónico para ellos. No se puede decir que sus historias a primera vista tengan una linealidad pero sí es verdad que hay un cierto sentido del humor soterrado, muy caústico en momentos imprevistos en los que el lector puede estar perdido por cómo Gass se deleita en los pequeños detalles: sus personajes son su excusa para que su arte cobre sentido a través de las palabras: las reinventa, las interpreta, las redefine en una especie de bucle que parece no tener fin, y si entras en el juego, la experiencia de leer a Gass se puede convertir en una adicción, porque una frase, un párrafo gassiano, le abre la mente al lector a asociaciones que le llevarán más allá de lo que tiene delante.
"Era pequeña y flaca, mi madre. No había quien la animara. Un vestido, una copa, un pollo asado, para ella era todo lo mismo. Iba por la casa sin esperanzas, sin aire. La vi sonreír una vez pero no fue agradable, más como una grieta en un plato. ¿Qué demonios había hecho para que se hiciera tan poco por ella? Me cosía la ropa, pero los dobladillos estaban torcidos."
…]
“Ajetreada de aquí para allá como una abeja sin zumbido. Permaneciendo inalcanzable, ahora lo sé. Pasando un paño por los espejos para librarlos de cualquier imagen. Plantada en su lejanía a fuerza de fingir cuidado y atención y orden y limpieza y pulcritud y barrer y remendar y fregar y abrillantar. Casada con un tarugo de tipo. Creo que se avergonzaba de cómo lo había dejado vivir."
De los cuatro relatos, el primero de ellos, “Emma entra en una frase de Elizabeth Bishop�, me ha volado literalmente la cabeza, aunque tengo que decir, y siendo este mi favorito, que los otros tres relatos no se quedaron cortos, solo que este primero me pilló por sorpresa, por los giros, la sequedad que se mimetiza con una poesía imprevista, casi inesperada por lo agreste de lo que está contando. En este primer relato, Emma parece ir haciéndose invisible fisicamente debido a un entorno que la va engullendo, pero a medida que esto ocurre y se va haciendo más pequeña, la poesía de Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore o Emily Dickinson, único escape, también se va engrandeciendo mentalmente, tanto que va adquiriendo entidad por sí misma. Es un relato que me ha impactado profundamente, por cómo Gass elige las palabras, por cómo disecciona la mente, y el entorno de Emma. Es un relato hermosísimo y muy desconcertante en el que Gass pretende demostrar que las palabras pueden redimir al mundo, por muy mal que este vaya.
"Qué crees tú que tramaba Proust, me preguntó con falsa entonación retórica. ¿Qué clase de delito grave había cometido que exigiera tantas palabras en franchute para ocultarlo? Recuerdo mi cara de perplejidad... porque estaba perplejo. Proust confesó ante su escritorio, no ante un cura. Sabía que su novela lo consolaría, que su arte lo perdonaría."
El segundo relato “El maestro de las venganzas secretas� se centra en el personaje de Luther Penner obesionado por una teología que se va fragmentando en una religión en la que la venganza será la esencia de su creencia. Luther será un personaje excesivo, inestable, carcomido por un fuego interno del que no puede liberarse; Dios que se le aparece en forma de Satán, desde su adolescencia hasta la su madurez, una historia entre el horror y el humor. En el tercero de los relatos, otro de mis favoritos “Bed & Breakfast�, un viajante de comercio, Walter Riff, se obsesiona de una de las habitaciones del mótel en el que se hospeda, tanto que decide no marcharse más. Otro relato que me ha llegado al alma por la soledad que destila el personaje de Walter, tan desapegado del mundo, que encuentra un agarradero a su vida en esa habitación de motel a través de los objetos, de los libros que encuentra, abandonados por otros que estuvieron ahí antes que él, le harán sentirse conectado con el mundo.
“Libros que en su día se abrieron ante los ojos de alguien. Que descansaron un tiempo en la mesita de noche de alguien. Quizás junto a una flor. Y que sostuvieron nanos consideradas, apoyadas en una barriga acogedora. Luego acabaron sin duda en una balda con otros. Y finalmente al desván. Pero la muerte había dispersado la colección. O los dieron a la beneficiencia.
[...]
Cómo coincidieron aquí por casualidad, cómo habían suplicado hasta que los eligieron, cómo llegaron a ser escritos, cuál era su puesto en la familia del autor. Y también habría una historia, o quizás solo una anécdota, que explicaría una sobrecubierta rota aquí y allá, o un lomo maltratado, esa parte que dañó el agua, esa un poco descolorida por el sol. Horquillas a modo de marcapáginas que revelaban dónde había abandonado la lectora; páginas dobladas por las esquinas señalaban una pausa.�
En el último de los cuatro relatos, y el que da título a este libro, “Sonata Cartesiana�, Gass cuenta la historia de Ella Bend Hess, que se considera una clarividente porque oye sonidos, señales impalpables que la hacen tomar consciencia de la vida que lleva junto a un marido tan convencional cuando ella se ve a si misma totalmente diferente: “Así regresaba el pasado, por un puente de dolor, y lloraba por su niñez cuando la revivía como lloraba por todo lo inmortal. Condenado, eternamente, a ser. Sus ojos se llenaron de lágrimas y notó cómo intentaba moverse. Quiso rodar hasta el agua y ahogarse. Esta vez sé qué hacer, pensó�. El retrato que hace Gass de este matrimonio, a través de fragmentos aparentemente inconexos desde la mente de Ellen, convierten este relato en el estudio de una vida interior, el de una mujer que no tiene salida: “Te voy a decir yo lo que es real. Yo. YO SOY REAL. Y ella había sonreído desde el suelo, una sonrisa se expandía como el sirope, tan colmada de lástima lenta y dulce por él que podría haberla matado...�
“Para Ella el espacio no era espacio, eran señales. Todo emitía: una flor su aroma, un murciélago sus chillidos, una lima su rugosidad, un limón su acidez, una niña su hermosura, una calle en verano su calor de verano, cada músculo su movimiento; en el espacio había más olas que en el océano...�
[...]
“De Ella Bend podía decirse que era clarividente porque poseía una cantidad anormal de receptores sensitivos. Era atención y antenas casi en su totalidad.�
Realmente los cuatro personajes que protagonizan estos relatos no son otra cosa que la excusa de Gass para explorar la mente, la materia y Dios. No solo sentimos una profunda empatía por ellos, por la soledad que los circunda, sino que Gass es capaz de hacernos transmitir, una vez más, esa máxima proustiana por la que el arte será lo único que nos hará redimirnos, en este caso, la palabra de Gass. Se mueve entre la narración en tercera persona y el monólogo interior, el flujo de conciencia inabarcable que le habla directamente al lector, haciendo quizás, que ambos, personaje y lector, se sientan menos solos en esta aventura gassiana. Cada uno de los relatos de esta Sonata Cartesiana trata de un personaje, una historia y una vida interior: Emma, Luther, Walter y Ellen. Leer a Gass puede ser un desafío, sí, pero, la recompensa está ahí. Gracias a Navaja Suiza Editorial por traernos a Gass una vez más.
“Tendría que marcharse como si fuera a trabajar y permanecer un buen rato ilocalizable para que pareciera que era una persona de enjundia y tenía trabajo que hacer.
(...)
Él, Walter Riffaterre, solo tenía que aprender a comportarse, integrarse y cantar al unísono.�
˫♫� ˫♫�
February 23, 2021
The master prose stylist at it in these four novellas, full Gassian splendor. Whatever criticism at being overwrought and/or gilded in character representation go to bosh, eh, bask rather poesy singsong sentence after sentence cacaphony; it's rythmn, harmony, at words. Philosophy too!
Read
December 16, 2017You want me to review Gass?
Knot.
Get out of here.
Nope.
Forget it.
Ain't gunna happen.
I beg off.
I'd prefer not to.
Kowtow is sufficient methink.
Knot.
Get out of here.
Nope.
Forget it.
Ain't gunna happen.
I beg off.
I'd prefer not to.
Kowtow is sufficient methink.
March 4, 2019
Being Gass, all four of these novellas are replete with immense descriptive power, though their individual impacts varied somewhat for me.
The title novella is the most obscure of the lot, with the narrator (and I suppose author) initially refusing to stick the story he's started. There is in its first part though a strikingly sad but fleeting portrait of one Peg Crandall, proprietress of the Harrison County Historical Museum. Eventually Gass settles on portraying the married life of the clairvoyant Ella Hess with which he started but subsequently avoided. There seems to be something going on about the relation of Mind and Matter that's presumably the rationale behind "Cartesian" in the story's title, but it largely eluded me.
The second novella is a more straightforward tale of a lonely travelling accountant who resolves to stay on, perhaps even indefinitely, at a Bed and Breakfast teeming with trinkets and memories. Many fine descriptions abound and although more affecting overall than the first story, I had a sense of this one being less than the sum of its, admittedly very fine, parts.
However, the third novella, Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's is a complete and utter masterpiece. This portrait of the titular Emma's youth and maturation on an Iowa farm - where, emotionally abused, actively by her father and passively by her mother, she seeks solace in poetry and literature. It's easily among the three best short fictions of Gass' I've read (The Pedersen Kid and Heart of the Heart of the Country being the other two), which is to say it's among the best short fictions I've read by anyone. Gass switches so brilliantly from evoking Emma's sadness and burning resentment to creating beautiful moments of transcendence in Emma's escapes into reading and nature. Totally and overwhelmingly marvellous.
The fourth was my second favourite with Gass focusing on some of his favourite themes: revenge, resentment, meanness of spirit. Gass is truly wonderful at rendering how everyday slights and pettiness fester away into visceral interior epics and, not surprisingly, he does just that repeatedly in Master of Secret Revenges. Although I found its title charcter, Luther Penner, finally more of a comical figure and a less full, impactful character than some of Gass' other great resenters and revengers (e.g. William Kohler or Jethro Furber), but I did also think this novella the most philosophically interesting of the collection.
The title novella is the most obscure of the lot, with the narrator (and I suppose author) initially refusing to stick the story he's started. There is in its first part though a strikingly sad but fleeting portrait of one Peg Crandall, proprietress of the Harrison County Historical Museum. Eventually Gass settles on portraying the married life of the clairvoyant Ella Hess with which he started but subsequently avoided. There seems to be something going on about the relation of Mind and Matter that's presumably the rationale behind "Cartesian" in the story's title, but it largely eluded me.
The second novella is a more straightforward tale of a lonely travelling accountant who resolves to stay on, perhaps even indefinitely, at a Bed and Breakfast teeming with trinkets and memories. Many fine descriptions abound and although more affecting overall than the first story, I had a sense of this one being less than the sum of its, admittedly very fine, parts.
However, the third novella, Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's is a complete and utter masterpiece. This portrait of the titular Emma's youth and maturation on an Iowa farm - where, emotionally abused, actively by her father and passively by her mother, she seeks solace in poetry and literature. It's easily among the three best short fictions of Gass' I've read (The Pedersen Kid and Heart of the Heart of the Country being the other two), which is to say it's among the best short fictions I've read by anyone. Gass switches so brilliantly from evoking Emma's sadness and burning resentment to creating beautiful moments of transcendence in Emma's escapes into reading and nature. Totally and overwhelmingly marvellous.
The fourth was my second favourite with Gass focusing on some of his favourite themes: revenge, resentment, meanness of spirit. Gass is truly wonderful at rendering how everyday slights and pettiness fester away into visceral interior epics and, not surprisingly, he does just that repeatedly in Master of Secret Revenges. Although I found its title charcter, Luther Penner, finally more of a comical figure and a less full, impactful character than some of Gass' other great resenters and revengers (e.g. William Kohler or Jethro Furber), but I did also think this novella the most philosophically interesting of the collection.
July 10, 2013
Alright so second time around I'm having a better time, in "Bed and Breakfest" a man checks in the a B&B and he finds himself lost in the all the paintings,old photos, and chiars, beds, all of which are old and sort of haunts him and affects him, Gass is a writer of fine prose,the title story still escapes me, but Gass does something fucking brillant, something that hasn't been done yet. If you know the name William H. Gass than you no doubt have fine taste in books, you realize that there's more to a book than just plot,that a work of fiction can break the rules and make other books that fallow the rules somehow seem lesser even. So is it fair to write a review having only read half a novel, I don't know, but this my third and half(read a little of The Tunnel)by H. Gass. I would take leap and say that this falls a little short from his other novels, but it's still better written than most anything you'll read in your whole life. William H. Gass is a master of words with mind that's in kin with Palto.
"Cow?
Willis & Hobrat-money
May,Edna, Nona & Margaret-gas iron & rug
Gas iron? Wonderful...the names were...the bride's
especially Fae...Fae...Ar-line. Not Arlene. My."
that's a sip. thristy still. Of course you are, now read this book.
"Cow?
Willis & Hobrat-money
May,Edna, Nona & Margaret-gas iron & rug
Gas iron? Wonderful...the names were...the bride's
especially Fae...Fae...Ar-line. Not Arlene. My."
that's a sip. thristy still. Of course you are, now read this book.
December 16, 2017
All four of these novellas are splendidly written, though Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's resonated the most with me. It ranks as one of the most sublime fictional works I've ever read. Thank you, Mr. Gass.
April 4, 2025
"cogito ,ergo sum" ,"σκέφτομαι ,άρα υπάρχω " ήταν η βασική αρχή του Καρτέσιου και εξίσου γνωστό ήταν το συνολο που απαρτίζει την ύπαρξη που είχε δημιουργήσει ,αποτελούμενο από 1. Το πνεύμα 2. Το σώμα 3. Τον Θεό . Το πρόβλημα είναι πώς αυτές οι τρεις αρχές μπορούν να συνυπάρχουν και να αλληλεπιδρούν. Στο βιβλίο αυτό όμως τα καταφέρνουν κάτι παραπάνω από καλά ,αφού ο Γκας ,εμπνευσμένος από όλο αυτό το σχήμα ,ξεκινά με την ομότιτλη νουβέλα την οποία χωρίζει σε ΤΡΙΑ μέρη (ένα για κάθε ένα από τα παραπάνω σημεία αξιών ),ενώ μετά ακολουθούν τρεις ακόμη νουβέλες όπου καθεμία έχει σαν πυρήνα της και πάλι το πνεύμα ,το σώμα και το θεό .έτσι ,με αυτή τη μουσικότητα ,θα έλεγε κανείς ,ο Γκας κάνει τα μαγικά του σε ένα μεταμοντέρνο έργο που απλά πρέπει να του αφεθεις και να ακολουθήσεις τα βήματα που επιβάλει ο ρυθμός .
Η ανάγνωση του βιβλίου είναι από μόνη της ��ια εμπειρία που σε πιάνει σίγουρα απροετοίμαστο ,χωρίς ιδιαίτερη πλοκή ,αλλά με πολλά θέματα για να σκεφτείς και να συζητήσεις . Είναι από αυτά τα βιβλία που σε πάνε μπροστά σαν αναγνώστη και κάπως σε "καθαρίζουν" από τα κλισέ και τα επαναλαμβάλανομενα μοτίβα . Λυρικότητα ,φιλοσοφία ,ώμο χιούμορ είναι μόνο κάποια από τα χαρακτηριστικά του που απόλαυσα .
Οι δυο καταληκτικές ιστορίες ήταν σίγουρα οι αγαπημένες μου ,όπου στη μεν μια ,μια νεαρή γυναίκα διηγείται την ιστορία της ως "δέσμια " των γονιών της που ήταν βασανιστές της ψυχής της ,μια ιστορία με κεντρικό πυρήνα το κομμάτι του πνεύματος ,τη σκέψη που μπορεί να μας σώσει από τα χειρότερα βάσανα και η τελευταία ιστορία με πρωταγωνιστή τον Λούθηρο Πένερ ,εναν άνδρα που θεωρεί ότι έχει αδικηθεί στη ζωή του και εξετάζει με ακραίο και αιρετικό τρόπο το ποια είναι η κατάλληλη τιμωρία για όσους μας αδικούν και ποιος ο ρόλος της εκδίκησης . Μου θύμισε έναν ακραίο "Ντέμιαν " του Έσσε με ιδέες που σοκάρουν αλλά που οι περισσότεροι μπορεί να έχουμε σκεφτεί ,αλλά όχι αναλύσει .
Συνολικά το βιβλίο μπαίνει κατευθείαν στα αγαπημένα μου της χρονιάς ως τώρα και ο συγγραφέας μέσω του στυλ του με προκάλεσε να βγω από τον αναγνωστικό comfort zone μου και να θυμηθώ αυτές τις χρυσές και μοναδικές στιγμές της ανάγνωσης. Ραντεβού στο "τούνελ "
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫/5 αστέρια
Ορκίστηκα ότι θα μάθω ,θα μάθω να το κάνω καλά . Να τα βγάζω πέρα μόνη μου ...υποσχέθηκα στον εαυτό μου να δω μια βελτίωση . Πεθαμένοι κι οι δυο ,κι εγώ απαλλαγμένη από το απελπισμένο προσωπο της μαμάς ,από την οργή του μπαμπά . Υπενθύμισα στον εαυτό μου ότι το σπίτι τώρα ήταν δικό μου . Επομένως μπορούσε να σταθεί σχεδόν απαλλαγμένο από μένα .να σταθεί και να υπάρξει . Να γίνει ορατό .γιατί εγώ παραιτήθηκα από οτιδήποτε έχει υπάρξει δικό μου . Οι σκέψεις μου ,πιτσουνακια που τα άφησα να πετάξουν έξω από το κλουβί .
Η ανάγνωση του βιβλίου είναι από μόνη της ��ια εμπειρία που σε πιάνει σίγουρα απροετοίμαστο ,χωρίς ιδιαίτερη πλοκή ,αλλά με πολλά θέματα για να σκεφτείς και να συζητήσεις . Είναι από αυτά τα βιβλία που σε πάνε μπροστά σαν αναγνώστη και κάπως σε "καθαρίζουν" από τα κλισέ και τα επαναλαμβάλανομενα μοτίβα . Λυρικότητα ,φιλοσοφία ,ώμο χιούμορ είναι μόνο κάποια από τα χαρακτηριστικά του που απόλαυσα .
Οι δυο καταληκτικές ιστορίες ήταν σίγουρα οι αγαπημένες μου ,όπου στη μεν μια ,μια νεαρή γυναίκα διηγείται την ιστορία της ως "δέσμια " των γονιών της που ήταν βασανιστές της ψυχής της ,μια ιστορία με κεντρικό πυρήνα το κομμάτι του πνεύματος ,τη σκέψη που μπορεί να μας σώσει από τα χειρότερα βάσανα και η τελευταία ιστορία με πρωταγωνιστή τον Λούθηρο Πένερ ,εναν άνδρα που θεωρεί ότι έχει αδικηθεί στη ζωή του και εξετάζει με ακραίο και αιρετικό τρόπο το ποια είναι η κατάλληλη τιμωρία για όσους μας αδικούν και ποιος ο ρόλος της εκδίκησης . Μου θύμισε έναν ακραίο "Ντέμιαν " του Έσσε με ιδέες που σοκάρουν αλλά που οι περισσότεροι μπορεί να έχουμε σκεφτεί ,αλλά όχι αναλύσει .
Συνολικά το βιβλίο μπαίνει κατευθείαν στα αγαπημένα μου της χρονιάς ως τώρα και ο συγγραφέας μέσω του στυλ του με προκάλεσε να βγω από τον αναγνωστικό comfort zone μου και να θυμηθώ αυτές τις χρυσές και μοναδικές στιγμές της ανάγνωσης. Ραντεβού στο "τούνελ "
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫/5 αστέρια
Ορκίστηκα ότι θα μάθω ,θα μάθω να το κάνω καλά . Να τα βγάζω πέρα μόνη μου ...υποσχέθηκα στον εαυτό μου να δω μια βελτίωση . Πεθαμένοι κι οι δυο ,κι εγώ απαλλαγμένη από το απελπισμένο προσωπο της μαμάς ,από την οργή του μπαμπά . Υπενθύμισα στον εαυτό μου ότι το σπίτι τώρα ήταν δικό μου . Επομένως μπορούσε να σταθεί σχεδόν απαλλαγμένο από μένα .να σταθεί και να υπάρξει . Να γίνει ορατό .γιατί εγώ παραιτήθηκα από οτιδήποτε έχει υπάρξει δικό μου . Οι σκέψεις μου ,πιτσουνακια που τα άφησα να πετάξουν έξω από το κλουβί .
April 16, 2015
this is the book that made me realize what i wanted from literature and what i thought i wanted were really very different
April 16, 2015
Few people write as well as William H Gass. I mean, the fundamental awesomeness of his sentences is sort of mindboggling. However, I find his stories hard to read. Yes, there's a difficulty to the text, but that's not what I mean. I just find reading him unpleasant.
This was my second attempt at Gass. I quit the Tunnel after a few hundred pages because I simply couldn't take it anymore. Gorgeous prose written so bitterly, with such vehement anger and regret: I couldn't do it. The longest rantfilled novel I've ever encountered, and so I gave up.
While the novellas in here are less aggressively angry, they're not really that much better to read.
It's odd, how someone can write so well but make me care so little about what's being said.
This was my second attempt at Gass. I quit the Tunnel after a few hundred pages because I simply couldn't take it anymore. Gorgeous prose written so bitterly, with such vehement anger and regret: I couldn't do it. The longest rantfilled novel I've ever encountered, and so I gave up.
While the novellas in here are less aggressively angry, they're not really that much better to read.
It's odd, how someone can write so well but make me care so little about what's being said.
November 3, 2018
William H. Gass, our lightning-bolt brandishing Zeus of syntax, Grand Grand Poobah up on ol' Mount O. Right? You know it be the case. Unless you new here. Haven't read any Gass? He is the finest writer of sentences the English language ever produced and there is no surer hand when it comes to the niceties and not-so-niceties of rhetoric. Deals the contrapuntal like house you will never beat. He wrote fiction. He wrote essays. I have traditionally recommended to newbies that they start with the essays. There is no mistaking in the essays that the main treasure in Gass is wisdom and guidance dispatched in the context of an arousal. My introduction to Gass came in my late teens in the form of the then-still-fresh decades-in-the-rendering tome THE TUNNEL, one of the most ambitious and perspicacious American novels ever written, as well as a harrowing moral nightmare. It slayed me. Convert for life. But I don't tend to recommend it for beginners, especially if they aren't as fucked-up as I am (or was). It would be like telling somebody to go and politely request to have frightful violence done to them. THE TUNNEL completely changed my life. As much as GRAVITY'S RAINBOW did. Maybe even more. Thirty years in the making. Something like thirty. And, Christ, you can tell! Gass published little if any fiction during that monster's incubation and medicining. Interestingly, CARTESIAN SONATA would arrive quite soon after THE TUNNEL. Four fleet novellas on the tail of a sprawl of inferno. I am only getting to them now. Many, many years later. So sue me. It almost isn't even my fault, actually. CARTESIAN SONATA was not exactly rapturously received. Resounding thud? Something like that. Why? Because people, bless them, are disappointing. Finishing it, I can now say I have read all of Gass's various books of fictions save his debut, OMENSETTER'S LUCK, which I actually owned (Penguin edition), but never read, and appear to have lost in my dereliction and at-times-too-too-dissolute waywardness. Sue me. I am here to tell you that CARTESIAN SONATA contains some of Gass's very finest fiction. Especially the completely stupefying masterpieces that are the two bookends. Another ŷ reviewer of SONATA has decided to run with stalwart super-critic James Woods' criticism of Gass: apparently everybody in a Gass story talks and thinks like Gass and that is, hmm, er, I suppose...uncouth (?). Because literally nobody is up to talking and thinking like Gass (oh, we sort of are). You know what, realists? You can't win 'em all. Sometimes using fiction as a means to doing essays by other means (see especially here "Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's"), Gass almost always writes about American life from the standpoint of an occupying force. He puts his hand up people and puppets them. So sue him. It made perfect sense when in his final book, EYES, he started getting inside inanimate objects and telling their stories. I, of the promiscuous brainstem, am all for it. Hip hop hooray! The opening eponymous story of CARTESIAN SONATA is itself broken into three sections, and the introductory section inaugurates the book by sanctifying the digressive. The dexterity is balletic and the élan is Bergsonian. Find a margin's margin and deterritorialize, then pop your head up like a magic trick, Act 1, Scene 1. This book begins so magnificently I had to go find a cap to doff. We intuit that some much of what this book contains was probably crafted as a means to respite during the prolonged campaign that was the writing of THE TUNNEL. Adorably (or I guess, also, you know, chillingly) the resolutely vile narrator-antagonist of THE TUNNEL gets a shout-out early on in the opening piece (as does Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife). This one's for the lifers! Thanks for keeping the faith! The two middle pieces are superlative and worthy of serious meditation (from the writer, from the lay person). "Bed and Breakfast" demonstrates a quality of superhuman attentiveness (born of what I imagine to be hard-won humility) to American spaces and bric-à-brac, finding the ecstatic where the crumudgeon might well habitually locate nothing but impertinent visual noise. You can occupy American life like a looting army and still be very fond of it, still maintain holy reverence. I have already said that "Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's" is the most-essay-by-other-means piece here (they all have a little of that going on). I am going to get fancy and call it "Gass on Hermeneutics." A story about the horizon of she who goes about her encounters, especially her encounters with poetry. We know Gass the essayist. We know he can parse and unpack with peerless art. But in "Emma" he reminds us that each reader brings herself to each encounter with each line of verse; each encounter is spectacularly individual and properly holy. Now a few words on "The Master of Secret Revenges." So. "The Master of Secret Revenges" is the piece where Gass really gets in there, sleeves rolled up, and does Swift. Do you remember that epic, legendary PARIS REVIEW interview where Gass said that he writes for purposes of revenge? He was certainly being slightly disingenuous, but not exactly trafficking falsehood across state lines, and I am guessing not especially proud. This is one of my favourite pieces of writing ever about the coextension of the petty and the high-minded. It is very funny, sly and wise, while also being sort of TUNNEL-level bleak in its way (though Lucifer does dispense his light). I read CARTESIAN SONATA late-October/early-November 2018, shortly before American midterm elections, and encountered the following sentence in "The Master of Secret Revenges": "But the liar who lies long enough, the liar who wants his lie to be the truth, the liar who sees belief in other people's faces, for whom his lie is honey to their ears, is eventually a believer too, sincere as sunshine, clean as stream, faithful, too, as old clubfoot was, to his hope-filled falsehoods, and to Adolph Hitler." I have spoken of William H. Gass: Sentence Guy, correct? That one oughtta warrant a "goddamn." How about this one from the same piece: “Here sexual problems rose—they always do—because the breast with its tempting suckle center was not to be eyed and prized as a source of solace or stimulation, but for its curvature, its design, its iconographic history, and this was a dish more easily ordered than eaten.� Double damn. You're still with me? Who wouldn't be pleased positively pink to sit in a pasture and read such things indefinitely whether the cows ever deign to come home or not?
November 24, 2019
Cartesian Sonata****
Bed and Breakfast****
Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's
The Master of Secret Revenges
десь чотири з половиною зірочки. усі тексти металітературні по-своєму. окремі речення просто неймовірно оркестровані, але з сюжетами як завжди халепа. найкраща - повість про Емму: тут і фабула, і форма геніальні + безліч цитат, які "споживає" героїня, мріючи потрапити у поетичний рядок.
"майстер" - такий собі Достоєвський light для американців, цікаво і хитро зроблений есей про помсту.
однойменна повість - есей про синестезію та кепського чоловіка (черговий батько Ґесса у його прозі).
"нічліг і сніданок" - якби Кафка написав "перетворення" релігійно і без жуків.
Bed and Breakfast****
Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's
The Master of Secret Revenges
десь чотири з половиною зірочки. усі тексти металітературні по-своєму. окремі речення просто неймовірно оркестровані, але з сюжетами як завжди халепа. найкраща - повість про Емму: тут і фабула, і форма геніальні + безліч цитат, які "споживає" героїня, мріючи потрапити у поетичний рядок.
"майстер" - такий собі Достоєвський light для американців, цікаво і хитро зроблений есей про помсту.
однойменна повість - есей про синестезію та кепського чоловіка (черговий батько Ґесса у його прозі).
"нічліг і сніданок" - якби Кафка написав "перетворення" релігійно і без жуків.
July 13, 2012
William Gass is one of the most accomplished and provocative American writers of the last half century. He is a masterful stylist, cunning creator of unique characters, and major theorist of what makes fiction fiction--in other words, in addition to writing beautiful sentences and stories, he's a philosopher/critic of the first order.
The four "novellas" that make up Cartesian Sonata are "Cartesian Sonata" itself, "Bed and Breakfast," "Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's," and "Master of Secret Revenges." I confess I'm losing track of what makes the difference between a long story and a novella. In Gass's case, I think there really isn't much difference, especially since one of his strengths is not "plot." These fictions flow along, striking sentences bejeweled with stunning images and metaphors, contingent upon immediate satisfactions and revelations. Forget about suspense. What Gass does is study in minute detail the features of reality, sometimes physical, sometimes metaphysical, that require literary artistry if they are to become visible to the reader's mind and imagination.
He specializes in oddballs, cranks, besieged souls, and loners adrift somewhere in the Midwest. I take most of his work to center on Iowa, but that's more guess than fact. And according to Gass's theory of fiction, it doesn't really matter. He homes in on that which is confined within his verbal subject; everything else is immaterial. He also writes, I think, in a phenomenological mode that tracks its own aesthetic purposes, not history, not larger context, not what just happened in the story or what will happen next but what is happening right now. I know this sounds pretty abstract, but if you read to the end of this book, plowing through the sordid bordering on rancid "Master of Secret Revenges," you'll find an almost religious outcome in Gass's brooding on the random magic of people, places, and emotions getting mixed up in the mind. That's phenomenology as I understand it: an affirmation that although we all are locked within our own subjectivities, something luminous and possibly numinous spins around us like motes of dust in sunlight...issuing no special "meaning" other than intense particularity, microscopic truths, and imaginative possibilities...not certainties.
So Gass is a very, very literary writer. How could he be otherwise if he proposes a story about a mistreated young woman finding relief by entering into one of Elizabeth Bishop's sentences?
Now, I want to add a few biographical details to flesh this comment out: I had never heard of William Gass until I was a sophomore in college and my creative writing instructor, Geoffrey Wolff, announced to me and my fellow students that Gass was one of the most important literary theorists since Aristotle. None of my fellow students had heard of Gass either. We went to the bookstore, however, and bought a book of exceptional essays Gass had written called Fiction and the Forms of Life. That book partially convinced me Wolff was right about Gass. The deal was closed when I then read a collection of Gass's stories called In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, one of the most compelling, beautiful short stories I've read to this day (many years later.)
After graduating, I moved to Virginia and heard that Gass was participating in a literary festival in Lexington at Washington and Lee. He, Donald Barthelme, and Walker Percy were the headliners. So I hopped in the car and snuck into the auditorium just as Walker Percy was beginning to give a talk. Behind him sat Barthelme, a somewhat devilish looking fellow, and an elderly woman with a large smooth face and long gray hair. Percy talked a bit about science and literature, as I recall. I didn't know his work at the time but later came to admire it a great deal. Then Barthelme got up and was as witty and irreverent as his wicked short stories. Next came the elderly woman who turned out to be a man...William Gass, in fact. What did he say? I don't recall. I just sat there looking at him, listening to his man's voice, thinking about his writing -- which I knew pretty well-- and wondering if everyone else, or anyone else, mistook him for a woman.
There was a reception afterward and I approached all three writers. There's never anything worth saying on such occasions, so I didn't say anything worth repeating, and they didn't either. But each of the three has remained on my bookshelves, and each of the three continued to fashion a more or less iconic status for himself in American letters. If you're prepared to read slowly, not be sure where a tale is heading, and yet be bowled over by a poetic/philosophical literary talent, go try Gass. The Cartesian Sonata is a good place to start.
The four "novellas" that make up Cartesian Sonata are "Cartesian Sonata" itself, "Bed and Breakfast," "Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's," and "Master of Secret Revenges." I confess I'm losing track of what makes the difference between a long story and a novella. In Gass's case, I think there really isn't much difference, especially since one of his strengths is not "plot." These fictions flow along, striking sentences bejeweled with stunning images and metaphors, contingent upon immediate satisfactions and revelations. Forget about suspense. What Gass does is study in minute detail the features of reality, sometimes physical, sometimes metaphysical, that require literary artistry if they are to become visible to the reader's mind and imagination.
He specializes in oddballs, cranks, besieged souls, and loners adrift somewhere in the Midwest. I take most of his work to center on Iowa, but that's more guess than fact. And according to Gass's theory of fiction, it doesn't really matter. He homes in on that which is confined within his verbal subject; everything else is immaterial. He also writes, I think, in a phenomenological mode that tracks its own aesthetic purposes, not history, not larger context, not what just happened in the story or what will happen next but what is happening right now. I know this sounds pretty abstract, but if you read to the end of this book, plowing through the sordid bordering on rancid "Master of Secret Revenges," you'll find an almost religious outcome in Gass's brooding on the random magic of people, places, and emotions getting mixed up in the mind. That's phenomenology as I understand it: an affirmation that although we all are locked within our own subjectivities, something luminous and possibly numinous spins around us like motes of dust in sunlight...issuing no special "meaning" other than intense particularity, microscopic truths, and imaginative possibilities...not certainties.
So Gass is a very, very literary writer. How could he be otherwise if he proposes a story about a mistreated young woman finding relief by entering into one of Elizabeth Bishop's sentences?
Now, I want to add a few biographical details to flesh this comment out: I had never heard of William Gass until I was a sophomore in college and my creative writing instructor, Geoffrey Wolff, announced to me and my fellow students that Gass was one of the most important literary theorists since Aristotle. None of my fellow students had heard of Gass either. We went to the bookstore, however, and bought a book of exceptional essays Gass had written called Fiction and the Forms of Life. That book partially convinced me Wolff was right about Gass. The deal was closed when I then read a collection of Gass's stories called In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, one of the most compelling, beautiful short stories I've read to this day (many years later.)
After graduating, I moved to Virginia and heard that Gass was participating in a literary festival in Lexington at Washington and Lee. He, Donald Barthelme, and Walker Percy were the headliners. So I hopped in the car and snuck into the auditorium just as Walker Percy was beginning to give a talk. Behind him sat Barthelme, a somewhat devilish looking fellow, and an elderly woman with a large smooth face and long gray hair. Percy talked a bit about science and literature, as I recall. I didn't know his work at the time but later came to admire it a great deal. Then Barthelme got up and was as witty and irreverent as his wicked short stories. Next came the elderly woman who turned out to be a man...William Gass, in fact. What did he say? I don't recall. I just sat there looking at him, listening to his man's voice, thinking about his writing -- which I knew pretty well-- and wondering if everyone else, or anyone else, mistook him for a woman.
There was a reception afterward and I approached all three writers. There's never anything worth saying on such occasions, so I didn't say anything worth repeating, and they didn't either. But each of the three has remained on my bookshelves, and each of the three continued to fashion a more or less iconic status for himself in American letters. If you're prepared to read slowly, not be sure where a tale is heading, and yet be bowled over by a poetic/philosophical literary talent, go try Gass. The Cartesian Sonata is a good place to start.
May 26, 2020
It's very difficult to enter the world of Gass but once the door is opened, it's a treasure trove of words where the psychological-philosophical world crisscrosses with the metaphorical one. All these stories seem plotless with inauthentic character voices, yet they have mega-plots with characters being psychological mouthpieces of microcosm criticizing the macrocosm.
September 21, 2017
Ehhhh ... these novellas remind me of journal articles on deconstruction written in the 1980s, just this sort of "vintage" postmodernism that is incredibly dated and tedious, as if authorial intrusions into the narrative and obsessive playfulness with language were actually still interesting or fresh. To be fair, the ideas were reasonably new when Gass wrote these novellas, but it's hard to feel too invested at this point ...
July 11, 2024
There is so much to praise within these pages. Gass is a writer far above most. Gass knows letters and sounds and how it all can dance on a page. Most of this book fucking danced!
The last story, ‘The Master of Secret Revenges�, is one I could not find my way around or in or through. I don’t know if it is good or bad. But it is one I have to spend some time thinking on.
The last story, ‘The Master of Secret Revenges�, is one I could not find my way around or in or through. I don’t know if it is good or bad. But it is one I have to spend some time thinking on.
July 23, 2012
Welcome to a collection where plot doesn't matter, but words flicker like stars. Cartesian Sonata, a collection of 4 novelas, is more a trip though the beauty and power of the word, than any set a/b/c plot. Infact, if clear cut formulaic books are your thing, then I'd suggest you stear clear of Cartesian Sonata. However, if floating in a sea of images, humorous proes, and well-crafted turns of phraze interest you, then I highly recommend this. Even if you don't think it's your cup of tea, it's not overly long, and new experiences are the spice of life.
I liked my first review I wrote, but FF crashed.
I liked my first review I wrote, but FF crashed.
December 18, 2020
This is the literary equivalent of an old white man looking at his own butthole in the mirror and being proud of it. Not interested.
January 26, 2021
Should hopefully put Trump in an underground cage, too.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.
August 27, 2023
He doesn’t miss.
May 30, 2020
CARTESIAN SONATA - run Gass' disjointed po-mo gauntlet then afterwards settle into an exotic, disturbing, hyper sensitive fantasy of wonder. Brilliant.
BED AND BREAKFAST - loneliness, sentimentality with a little sexy surprise at the end. LOL.
EMMA ENTERS A SENTENCE OF ELIZABETH BISHOP'S - a masterwork of prose and suffocation. Bleak, gothic farm house family. If you liked the family in The Tunnel check this one out; it's like Gass perfected his art in this subtle & silent hellscape.
"Her father found out that, though Emma attended the garden, she didn't pull weeds or kill bugs. So he removed her from that duty and made her hold the guts he pulled from the plucked chickens."
"Her mother's face was closed as a nut, but you might say the same of Emma's too, who learned, as her mother doubtless had, to conceal her feelings for so long she forgot she had any."
"...the tree groaned and crashed with a noise of much paper being angrily wadded, as if God were crumpling the Contract. A cloud stood above the tree like the suggestion of a shroud to mark the spot and evidence the deed."
THE MASTER OF SECRET REVENGES - "...Luther knew he would continue to stumble about, injured by everybody, until he'd taken his revenge, for revenge was necessary in the absence of justice, and in distasteful equalitarian societies where the quiet merits of the meek were given but fat lip service. The lady with the scales wore bandaged eyes."
This should be everyone's introduction to Gass; it's four "novellas" are representative of his talent and sensibilities. Masterwork.
BED AND BREAKFAST - loneliness, sentimentality with a little sexy surprise at the end. LOL.
EMMA ENTERS A SENTENCE OF ELIZABETH BISHOP'S - a masterwork of prose and suffocation. Bleak, gothic farm house family. If you liked the family in The Tunnel check this one out; it's like Gass perfected his art in this subtle & silent hellscape.
"Her father found out that, though Emma attended the garden, she didn't pull weeds or kill bugs. So he removed her from that duty and made her hold the guts he pulled from the plucked chickens."
"Her mother's face was closed as a nut, but you might say the same of Emma's too, who learned, as her mother doubtless had, to conceal her feelings for so long she forgot she had any."
"...the tree groaned and crashed with a noise of much paper being angrily wadded, as if God were crumpling the Contract. A cloud stood above the tree like the suggestion of a shroud to mark the spot and evidence the deed."
THE MASTER OF SECRET REVENGES - "...Luther knew he would continue to stumble about, injured by everybody, until he'd taken his revenge, for revenge was necessary in the absence of justice, and in distasteful equalitarian societies where the quiet merits of the meek were given but fat lip service. The lady with the scales wore bandaged eyes."
This should be everyone's introduction to Gass; it's four "novellas" are representative of his talent and sensibilities. Masterwork.
February 1, 2020
Like anybody coming to this book with eyes open, I see myself as open to, even excited by, challenging fiction. I've read a fair amount of high-concept, plotless, stream-of-consciousness writing. But I still found this extremely hard to get into, particularly the first (and title) story, which is a wave of words about...a couple...who are God...or mind and matter? The others get a bit more accessible: there is one which is mostly describing different rooms, one which talks a lot about what went on in bed between Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, and one which tells the life of the devil as a rather nasty prankster. I did appreciate some of the individual sentences - it was probably a mistake to imbibe this in audiobook form. Still planning to plough on with later this year!
February 17, 2014
So I'm maybe committing some kind of sin by reviewing this before I finish the last novella, but here goes anyway...These pieces are beautifully written but difficult to read in a way that I find grating rather than gratifying. Gass has a kind of Faulkner-ian cold, airy distance from the reader that makes it hard to get really immersed in the narrative. Much of the process of reading this book has felt like attending a recital. Gass is performing in front of you rather than pulling you into the reading experience, standing on stage and showing you what a good writer he is and expecting you to sit quietly and respect his talent. He's not wrong about his talent, mind you. His prose is beautiful and the structure of the book so far is exquisite, but I simply can't get fully behind a book that feels so unengaging.
July 11, 2014
I once finally saw William Gass read. He read from A Temple of Texts and then a short story titled The Man Who Talked With His Hands. He read beautifully and accompanied his reading with fluid gestures with his hands.
One of our national treasures, there is no one who writes essays and fiction quite like William Gass.
One of our national treasures, there is no one who writes essays and fiction quite like William Gass.
July 21, 2022
"It occurred to me that to deprive objects of their instrumentality was to destroy their essence. It meant Penner was turning the world upside down: taking revenge by rendering the useful useless and the useless valuable."
Gass's heart-devouring portraits of loneliness and spiritual starvation are marked by the treachery of the double-edged: the scalpel that heals in the hands of the surgeon, and disembowels in those of the monster. His considerations of various escapes from the blanketing and terrifying oneness of the human condition (that there is no life unlived, no transcendence, no easy-out from the maelstrom of inner turmoil that is the existence of each and every one of us), poetry, religion, hedonism, ephemera, memory, all consider this duality. His infatuation with language as not only a tool for communication, but for evocation through abstraction and sound and image, is something of his own transcendence. He is almost horrifyingly keyed-into his own failings, understanding the venomous entrapment of his own artistry. Similarly, his characters are all overwhelmed by something like despondency.
Sometimes the sources, these weights, the grounding, are in ways incredibly petty and simple (Gass's poetess's adolescent insecurity about the flatness of her chest, or his Hubbardian Luther-Romulus's repressed homosexuality), but they seem to be purposeful scapegoats for the deeper emptinesses -- these inner expanses of cold winds and endless horizons, like Midwestern flatlines of the soul.
The novellas progress from the most challenging to the most straightforward. Each is ravishing in its own way. Personally, I was enormously moved by 'Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's', which so keenly captures that feeling of being a stunted observer -- of an artistic sensibility of seeing all the world and feeling all experience one believes possible, all through watching even the narrowest and most minute of surroundings and scenes. Like as it is with that scalpel, Gass manages to render both the beauty and the horror impeccably. In 'Bed and Breakfast' his protagonist is like a castaway treading water among a sea of wallpaper, knick-knacks and taxidermy. He dips beneath and disappears within them, only to surface again -- fighting the tide and the prose, struggling to breathe. The desires to succumb, to simplify or find a balm to the tempest of one's internal world by allowing yourself to be immersed and thus destroyed by a vision, an idea, an environment. To disappear, to be numbed, to claim contentment, is the ultimate temptation.
The final novella (the most straightforward and conventionally legible) is a peripheral outsider's attempt to unspool one of these characters. He is woefully like a literary critic, hoping to dissemble the madness down into something that offers up cause and effect; with plot, with purpose, of simplicity even. Here is artist as enigma, a salvation of poison. I get sucked into and lose myself in Gass so easily, and reading him very quickly becomes a tango between his words and my own. My constant inner monologues do not subside, they collaborate. He is a vicious little devil -- a heathen sermonizer goading and colluding with my own depravity and beauty. The great revenge of a ghost, frustrated that he had to suffer and eventually had to die, forcing you to admit yourself besotted so much of the same pendulous burdens.
All of his characters are woeful deviants and trainwrecks (whether they be surgeons or monsters), their trespasses and failures and dejected spirits are embraced by Gass, regardless of their lovability or reprehensibility. He elevates us from the cesspools, the pisspits, to the heights of the beauty of poetic sound and speech, the embarrassingly ribald descriptions of breasts ("tempting suckle centers") and members, the wordplay, the mental funhouses of anxiety and rumination that blend in and out from more concrete action. He eschews plot. It only gets in the way. Instead he creates human landscapes, huge and entangled interiorities of dreams and contradictions, horrible ugliness that is unbearably beautiful.
Dreams of becoming, of embracing, of lives unlived. Always we are tugged back to this: another glance into the mirror, down into the pisspit, hacking up phlegm and bile, muttering the same old curses. That this is all so very like the air I breathe is alarming. It is the great revenge and the greatest gift enacted upon and given unto me.
Gass's heart-devouring portraits of loneliness and spiritual starvation are marked by the treachery of the double-edged: the scalpel that heals in the hands of the surgeon, and disembowels in those of the monster. His considerations of various escapes from the blanketing and terrifying oneness of the human condition (that there is no life unlived, no transcendence, no easy-out from the maelstrom of inner turmoil that is the existence of each and every one of us), poetry, religion, hedonism, ephemera, memory, all consider this duality. His infatuation with language as not only a tool for communication, but for evocation through abstraction and sound and image, is something of his own transcendence. He is almost horrifyingly keyed-into his own failings, understanding the venomous entrapment of his own artistry. Similarly, his characters are all overwhelmed by something like despondency.
Sometimes the sources, these weights, the grounding, are in ways incredibly petty and simple (Gass's poetess's adolescent insecurity about the flatness of her chest, or his Hubbardian Luther-Romulus's repressed homosexuality), but they seem to be purposeful scapegoats for the deeper emptinesses -- these inner expanses of cold winds and endless horizons, like Midwestern flatlines of the soul.
The novellas progress from the most challenging to the most straightforward. Each is ravishing in its own way. Personally, I was enormously moved by 'Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's', which so keenly captures that feeling of being a stunted observer -- of an artistic sensibility of seeing all the world and feeling all experience one believes possible, all through watching even the narrowest and most minute of surroundings and scenes. Like as it is with that scalpel, Gass manages to render both the beauty and the horror impeccably. In 'Bed and Breakfast' his protagonist is like a castaway treading water among a sea of wallpaper, knick-knacks and taxidermy. He dips beneath and disappears within them, only to surface again -- fighting the tide and the prose, struggling to breathe. The desires to succumb, to simplify or find a balm to the tempest of one's internal world by allowing yourself to be immersed and thus destroyed by a vision, an idea, an environment. To disappear, to be numbed, to claim contentment, is the ultimate temptation.
The final novella (the most straightforward and conventionally legible) is a peripheral outsider's attempt to unspool one of these characters. He is woefully like a literary critic, hoping to dissemble the madness down into something that offers up cause and effect; with plot, with purpose, of simplicity even. Here is artist as enigma, a salvation of poison. I get sucked into and lose myself in Gass so easily, and reading him very quickly becomes a tango between his words and my own. My constant inner monologues do not subside, they collaborate. He is a vicious little devil -- a heathen sermonizer goading and colluding with my own depravity and beauty. The great revenge of a ghost, frustrated that he had to suffer and eventually had to die, forcing you to admit yourself besotted so much of the same pendulous burdens.
All of his characters are woeful deviants and trainwrecks (whether they be surgeons or monsters), their trespasses and failures and dejected spirits are embraced by Gass, regardless of their lovability or reprehensibility. He elevates us from the cesspools, the pisspits, to the heights of the beauty of poetic sound and speech, the embarrassingly ribald descriptions of breasts ("tempting suckle centers") and members, the wordplay, the mental funhouses of anxiety and rumination that blend in and out from more concrete action. He eschews plot. It only gets in the way. Instead he creates human landscapes, huge and entangled interiorities of dreams and contradictions, horrible ugliness that is unbearably beautiful.
Dreams of becoming, of embracing, of lives unlived. Always we are tugged back to this: another glance into the mirror, down into the pisspit, hacking up phlegm and bile, muttering the same old curses. That this is all so very like the air I breathe is alarming. It is the great revenge and the greatest gift enacted upon and given unto me.
January 8, 2024
Four novellas of roughly equal length.
The second one, 'Bed and Breakfast' is the weakest, a sort of high modernist take on Eugene O'Neill in which a travelling businessman believes he has found a more elevated and respectable way of life in a wayside motel but then has it compromised at the end. The scenario is the only thing that's conventional here; the majority of the story is consumed by fussy indexes of kitschy interior decoration characteristic of family-owned businesses in the American midwest. These sentences are all very robust, this is Gass, but I found the formal exercise a bit uninvigorated by the content.
The first, 'Cartesian Sonata' is about a woman who becomes clairvoyant, although a highly sensitive synesthesia gives a better approximation of the condition as it is described. There is one brief reference to the supernatural, alchemy or magic spells but Gass deliberately keeps this by the by in favour of a portrait of the petty resentments accumulating within the woman's marriage, from the point of view of her husband. I thought this was an unfortunate deflection and indicative of Gass preferring to strain the everyday through his particular idiom. But what a style. I usually recoil from writing at this pitch, to borrow someone else's phrase on this, because it makes me feel like I've eaten too many sweets, but there's enough dirt, erudition and raw skill that Gass never sounds as adenoidal as e.g. a Nabokov imitator (or Nabokov himself). *I think* this is because he is not just trying to work things through on the page, in an interview I read recently he talked about how he draws on the alliterative patterns of oral sagas and sure enough, pick a page at random and he's playing around with the vowel sounds.
The intensity of this stylistic vision makes it all the more curious that he doesn't really break from what all habitual readers of fiction know, that all writers have a set number of themes that they never really break outside of. In all of Gass' works there is a far-right patriarch, a precocious + put-upon child, the mid-west is represented as a kind of purgatory and the protagonist is in possession of a highly developed and sophisticated esoteric cosmology. After spending a lot of years holding to a slightly hectoring and perhaps censorious view on fiction I'm trying to think about how another of his tropes, his prurience might have some value but I came out of the third novella, which features a series of graphic descriptions of Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore getting off with each other thinking that it was just juvenile and crass. I think it would be anachronistic to suggest he's trying to 'trigger' a prudish reader but I also think i) it's a double standard given every other page features a showcase of a system of thought or creative achieved developed by Hume or Kant or Adorno and ii) this is in turn an outgrowth of the thesis undergirding almost all of Gass' literary critical output, which continually emphasises the uselessness / asociality / hermeticism of literary expression.
Final one is by far the best, it reads like a compressed section of the highlights of The Tunnel, with a narrator who sounds an awful lot like his alter-ego William Frederick Kohler, which I am fine with.
The second one, 'Bed and Breakfast' is the weakest, a sort of high modernist take on Eugene O'Neill in which a travelling businessman believes he has found a more elevated and respectable way of life in a wayside motel but then has it compromised at the end. The scenario is the only thing that's conventional here; the majority of the story is consumed by fussy indexes of kitschy interior decoration characteristic of family-owned businesses in the American midwest. These sentences are all very robust, this is Gass, but I found the formal exercise a bit uninvigorated by the content.
The first, 'Cartesian Sonata' is about a woman who becomes clairvoyant, although a highly sensitive synesthesia gives a better approximation of the condition as it is described. There is one brief reference to the supernatural, alchemy or magic spells but Gass deliberately keeps this by the by in favour of a portrait of the petty resentments accumulating within the woman's marriage, from the point of view of her husband. I thought this was an unfortunate deflection and indicative of Gass preferring to strain the everyday through his particular idiom. But what a style. I usually recoil from writing at this pitch, to borrow someone else's phrase on this, because it makes me feel like I've eaten too many sweets, but there's enough dirt, erudition and raw skill that Gass never sounds as adenoidal as e.g. a Nabokov imitator (or Nabokov himself). *I think* this is because he is not just trying to work things through on the page, in an interview I read recently he talked about how he draws on the alliterative patterns of oral sagas and sure enough, pick a page at random and he's playing around with the vowel sounds.
The intensity of this stylistic vision makes it all the more curious that he doesn't really break from what all habitual readers of fiction know, that all writers have a set number of themes that they never really break outside of. In all of Gass' works there is a far-right patriarch, a precocious + put-upon child, the mid-west is represented as a kind of purgatory and the protagonist is in possession of a highly developed and sophisticated esoteric cosmology. After spending a lot of years holding to a slightly hectoring and perhaps censorious view on fiction I'm trying to think about how another of his tropes, his prurience might have some value but I came out of the third novella, which features a series of graphic descriptions of Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore getting off with each other thinking that it was just juvenile and crass. I think it would be anachronistic to suggest he's trying to 'trigger' a prudish reader but I also think i) it's a double standard given every other page features a showcase of a system of thought or creative achieved developed by Hume or Kant or Adorno and ii) this is in turn an outgrowth of the thesis undergirding almost all of Gass' literary critical output, which continually emphasises the uselessness / asociality / hermeticism of literary expression.
Final one is by far the best, it reads like a compressed section of the highlights of The Tunnel, with a narrator who sounds an awful lot like his alter-ego William Frederick Kohler, which I am fine with.
December 13, 2017
While there's some nice wordplay here ("lowjinks," for example, more prankish and sinister than "hijinks") the bulk of these stories bored me. "Bed And Breakfast" had some nice moments before devolving into a catalogue of doilies and basketry. I cringed each time a new piece of furniture was discovered. "Master of Secret Revenges" at least brings some humor to the table, but the annoying inconsistency of the narrator character made the first-person style a fail.
The most successful for me by a mile, "Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s," overlong and deadly dull in places though it may be, had an intensity and drama to it that reminded me of Munro, but without Munro's crisp distillation of ideas and emotions that leaves you reeling.
I don't think I'll read another by Gass. Even his fun with puns and alliteration tends to go in one ear and out the other -- or whatever the reading equivalent of that may be. (In one eye and out the other?)
The most successful for me by a mile, "Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s," overlong and deadly dull in places though it may be, had an intensity and drama to it that reminded me of Munro, but without Munro's crisp distillation of ideas and emotions that leaves you reeling.
I don't think I'll read another by Gass. Even his fun with puns and alliteration tends to go in one ear and out the other -- or whatever the reading equivalent of that may be. (In one eye and out the other?)
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