Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse's A New Name: Septology VI-VII (2021) is the third volume of what Fosse intended to be a single book, and is now availablNobel Prize winner Jon Fosse's A New Name: Septology VI-VII (2021) is the third volume of what Fosse intended to be a single book, and is now available as such. As with many great works, it took me a long time to figure out what this is about. In my initial review of the first volume I admit I kinda made fun of the mundanity, the repetition. While acknowledging that some interesting things were going on with the character, when I saw the words "hypnotic" associated with the prose, I used the phrase "sleep-inducing" to describe what is going on sometimes in that first volume. I regret that and feel foolish and ignorant about it. So I'll once again revise my reviews of the first two volumes to reflect my current view that this work is, like the other two novellas I read and liked, a real contribution to the history of literature, a great story about a simple rural painter, Asle, and his dead wife and his explicitly clear doppleganger.
The surface story of an aging, isolated painter, quietly spiritual, here comes to conclusion. The whole story takes place in seven sections, one for each day leading up to Christmas. Asle's world is small, painting every day, so,metimes seeing Åsleik, his neighbor and friend; Beyer is his gallerist who shows and sells his paintings. A doppelganger artist also named Asles. His dead wife, Ales, with him very day. We sometimes go into the past, and fluidly, quickly interchangable with the present. In the last week we meet two women who like the two artists, who look alike, both named Guro, one of them a woman he meets in a restaurant, one of them Åsleik's sister. I think it is all told in one unbroken sentence, all 667 pages!!
After what has been pretty steady pacing, abrupt but fluid shifts of point of view and time frames, there is an intensity in the final pages to underscore Fosse's intention to convey what is happening to the main character at the end, on Christmas day. Notes: Joyce, Beckett, language, great empathy for this man, for all of his characters. What is going on? Ultimately, mystery, magic; someone said Gregorian Chant; the music of Hildegard von Bingen, Tomas Transtromer, Tarjev Vesaas's The Birds, stories of simple people in the deeply spiritual struggles of their every day lives. And the place of art and its relationship--for a Christian artist--to God.
I don't know at this point in my life that I will take the time to reread it all, but I really should, now that I am just beginning to understand it, but I am not foolish enough to pretend that anyone can fully understand great works of art. As Ales says, art shoud also be operating beyond anyone's rational capacity to describe it. If it could reduced to an argumentative "point," it would not be art. Art lives in mystery. Fosse said it: "writing is a way to express the unsayable."...more
Pessoa/Soares: “I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.�
Pessoa/Soares: “I write because Job: “My soul is weary of my life.�
Pessoa/Soares: “I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.�
Pessoa/Soares: “I write because I don’t know.�
You are planning a party; here’s your guest list:
Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov (from Crime and Punishment) Melville’s “Bartelby the Scrivener� Kafka’s Gregor Samsa (from The Metamorphosis) Joyce’s Stephan Dedalus (from The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) Camus’s Merseault (from The Stranger) Beckett’s Molloy Sartre’s Roquentin (from Nausea)
I'm a comics guy, too, so let's let in Noah Van Sciver (who wrote Disquiet [I suspect naming it with Pessoa in mind] and a comics biography, The Hypo: The Melancholic Young Lincoln.
Hmm, maybe you also invite Hamlet (for some historical perspective) to recite his “To be or not to be. . . � soliloquy as entertainment, or have Macbeth say out his speech at the party opening, “Tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day. . .�
And you will add your own literary grumps, when you begin to pick up the pattern of this literary party guest list. Some fun, eh? What’s a good party game for this bunch, Russian Roulette? My list above is all male, but I also just read (8/21) Anna Kavan's Asylum Piece, so I could make another list of just women, too, of course.
I just met someone who is a perfect addition to the guest list, Bernardo Soares, from Ferdinand Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet published in 1982, 47 years after his death at 47 in 1935. What do they have in common, the characters on our guest list? All men, yep. Men largely living without women. And many of them alone, even if they live with others. Sad, sad men. Melancholic. Intense. Maybe today we would psychologically diagnose some of them as bipolar or neurologically diagnose them as autistic/Asperger Syndrome or philosophically diagnose them as nihilist?
So what does Soares, a mild assistant bookkeeper, bring to the party that we don’t already have? Well, for one, he’s Portuguese, from Lisbon, and The Rua dos Douradores, where he lives and works and eats alone in one solitary restaurant night after night. Soares’s “story”—never to be finished, based on scraps of paper Pessoa threw in a trunk, edited and arranged by Richard Zenith with loving care—is mainly a collection of aphorisms and philosophical reflections and psychological insights with respect to Soares’s experience of “disquiet,� which I take to be a psychological condition akin to depression, ennui, and alienation, but which also seems to be a kind of existentialist statement.
Some people think Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet makes of Lisbon what Joyce’s works make of Dublin, or Kafka’s works make of Prague. The difference? Joyce’s novel is a narrative, and Disquiet actually resists narrative in most respects. It resists coherence, completion, and is a kind of deconstructionist, meta-fictional precursor to postmodernism. Resistant to logic. Often absurd. I don’t think it is for everyone, especially if you want to read a good old-fashioned story, but it does create a portrait of an interesting character, and it does have some of the most beautiful and insightful sentences you will ever read in a book. Many people list it as one of the greatest works of fiction of all time, and I won’t say nay to that, but I think as he never finished it, most readers won’t finish it, either. Would Pessoa care if we finished it? What does it mean to "finish" or not finish any book, especially this one?
The basic move Pessoa makes to convey “disquiet� is a set of repeated paralyzing contradictions, inversions, circularities or oxymorons, which can also seem very darkly funny:
�. . . the stoicism of the weak.�
“Though naturally ambitious, he savored the pleasure of having no ambitions at all.�
“Consoler of the inconsolable, Tears of those who never cry, Hour that never sounds � free me from joy and happiness.�
“To give love is to lose love.�
And on and on, delightfully and sometimes painfully so.
The Book of Soares’s Disquiet is a portrait of melancholy, of isolation:
“Do not make the infantile mistake of asking the meaning of things and words. Nothing has any meaning.�
“I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.�
“I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect.�
Soares in his spare time keeps a journal of sorts, though we have no idea when he wrote what he wrote. Writing and reading do sustain him, in a way.
“There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality.�
But writing is also not self-discovery so much as it is self-erasure:
“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.�
“I write because I don’t know.� {but not that he now expects to know; see above where life has no meaning to discover]
And he’s also sustained by dreaming (which is of course related to reading and writing):
“I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry.�
But as with writing, there's also the flip side of dreaming:
“The only important fact for me is the fact that I exist and that I suffer and cannot entirely dream myself out of feeling that suffering.�
And he's alone:
“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.�
We are left with this explosion of dolorous language, “those feelings that inhabit the gloom of my wearinesses and the grottoes of my disquiets.�
The Book of Disquiet raises questions about the nature of authorship in that, while it is technically authored by Pessoa, it is credited to one of his several heteronyms, Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper. Who is Pessoa? He’s not a stable, unified person, but multiple and fractured. Pessoa was known primarily as a poet with several titles under several different names. The whole idea most of us ascribe to of an author's "voice" is clearly undermined by Pessoa. He leaves us with fragments of literature and identity.
As Soares says, I feel “The vast indifference of the stars.� Seems like he and Hamlet and Beckett and Camus would have a lot not to talk about at your party. ...more
Trilogy (2016) by Jon Fosse features three closely linked short novellas (Wakefulness, Olav s Dreams, and Weariness) about two homeless people, Asle aTrilogy (2016) by Jon Fosse features three closely linked short novellas (Wakefulness, Olav s Dreams, and Weariness) about two homeless people, Asle and Alida, the latter about to give birth any day. They have some food, almost no money, and as is the obvious allusion, there is “no place at the inn� for them to stay. They are, in contemporary terms, unwanted refugees. The story is bleak and possibly inspiring, though these two wanderers seem lost and naive about how it is they may be able to survive.
As with A Shining, the first (and also short) work from Fosse that I recently read, there is something deeply allegorical about the work, with visions/dreams hard to separate from the couple’s walking reality. I won’t say here what happens later, but there are surprising turns, crime, and maybe some kind of redemption. Haunting, visionary, with simple language, and a more complex morality than I had expected from the author of A Shining, and based on the first novella in this Trilogy. Again, I see echoes of Dostoevsky and Coetzee, and also Beckett, interestingly. The poet Tomas Transtromer, Vesaas (The Birds, The Ice Castle). ...more
The Safekeep (2024) by Yael Van Der Wouden, her first novel (?!) is shortlisted for the 2024 Man Booker prize. I was busy and into other books, had trThe Safekeep (2024) by Yael Van Der Wouden, her first novel (?!) is shortlisted for the 2024 Man Booker prize. I was busy and into other books, had trouble concentrating on it at first, but my third time in beginning it was a charm. It grows on you, builds suspense, and a twist at the end makes it clear this is a different book than it appeared to be, where you see everything in a different light. It reminded me of Patricia Highsmith in its mystery, it’s insinuation of the darker side of human nature. It’s also beautifully erotic, which is to say it is sexually explicit, speaking of:
"[T]he secrets of the body unfolded in the night."
But if you are thinking (as I was) that this was just a very good psycho-sexual drama, a vein of political reality that emerges, as it is set in 1961 Holland and this moment in time reaches back to WWII. Maybe that’s the closest I will get today to spoilers as this is a book a lot of people are just now reading because of the Booker attention, obviously.
Bare bones: Orderly and repressed Isabel lives in a big (one is tempted to say gothic, as a nod to maybe Daphne DuMaurier, Shirley Jackson, Highsmith, as the house is a key “character� in the novel that breathes and speaks and has a relevant history) house. As in many? all? gothic stories from The Fall of the House of Usher (oh, throw in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Castle of Otranto) on, we can see an analogy between the troubled people living in a troubled house and the body as (always already) the decaying prison-house of the soul. I repeat that line from above:
"The secrets of the body unfolded in the night." Tortured bodies/minds, tortured house.
Isabel is visited by Eva, and by Isabel's brother Hendrik and his friend Sebastian. The relationships between all these folks interweave and hothouse sweat DH Lawrence and Ingmar Bergman notes of psycho-sexual intensity, dark secrets, eroticism, slow-burning, elusive, and then exploding in intensities of various kinds.
I guess I wanna say that I think it is difficult to write well or with any originality about sex, but this author does it very well, lyrically. . . and, uh, passionately. But all the writing is powerful throughout with more than physical or romantic implications. You have been successfully misdirected if you think (as I did) that this is just a hot book, as I keep saying. It's so much richer than just that.
I was somewhat disappointed in the ending initially which I would like to talk about, but won’t. The author had been criticized for it in some reviews, I heard, so I read her strong defense of it and ya know, I’ll buy her argument. Read this book, trust me! I listened to it and the readers were fantastic in creating just the right tone, but I'll buy it and read it again, now knowing the ending....more
I found this book in a used bookstore and read it, even though it has not been my habit in the past couple years to read books in a series out of ordeI found this book in a used bookstore and read it, even though it has not been my habit in the past couple years to read books in a series out of order. A couple years ago I read the first one in the series and thought it was okay, published in 1931, read other books by him that friends had said were generally better than his Inspector Maigret series.
So this one, Maigret and the Killer, is #70 of 74, published in 1969, almost forty years after he beagn writing the character. In it you get a sense of Maigret's essentially compassionate and thoughtful personality, which you can bets see when he actually interviews the killer. At this point Maigret is older, and is Superintendent of Police, so wouldn't ordinarily investigate cases but the killing happened near a place he is having supper with his friend, a doctor, called to the scene.
21-year-old Antoine Braille is killed, stabbed seven times, and left to die in the street. He comes from a wealthy family, hut is private, disconnected from them in most ways. He has a hobby, tape recording random conversations of people all over Paris. The last place he had been in he recorded talk between some guys playing cards who also happen to be criminals.
Not much happens in the way of solving the case happens until the last quarter of the book, when the killer begins sending letters to the newspaper to clarify some inaccuracies the press has in speculating about the case. The press notify Maigret, and the killer calls Maigret and eventually meets with him. He is not a typical hardened criminal, but a man without a record, who trusts Maigret enough to share his story with him. It's simple, and better than the initial story I read in the series. But now I'm intrigued enough to consider reading ALL of the books in the series, which were written with the purpose of their being read in one sitting. In other words they are short. I am going to read some more, for sure, at least....more
Jean: “there has never been a present or a past. . . It felt like a dream. This often happened in that period of my life, especially after nightfall .Jean: “there has never been a present or a past. . . It felt like a dream. This often happened in that period of my life, especially after nightfall . . . Everything gets jumbled in your mind, past, present, and future; everything is superimposed.�
The Black Notebook (2012) was first published in English in 2016. It bears all the signature marks of his fiction: Melancholy, uncertain danger, and the fading echoes of lost love. Mystery, noir, melancholy, the past, memory, The Occupation.
It’s fiction, but if you know some of Modiano’s life, there is some question as to the auto-fictional nature of the narrator and/or main character. For instance, in this book the main character’s name is Jean, which is Patrick’s first name, and Jean is a writer who has published several novels. And in keeping with the trade, Jean kept a black notebook that he looks back into after decades.
So a writer’s notebook is usually just jottings, random notes a scrap of conversation, so in a way it’s like fading memory itself, that you try to use to piece together past experience. So what is the difference between a story, history, chronology, all formats for capturing experience? Notebook jottings are more like refractions than reflections, shards. So Jean finds much of what he wrote down in the notebook as fragmented, but some of it is intriguing. A woman, Dannie, is mentioned, a mystery, and he’s off to see if he can see if it takes him somewhere useful.
Dannie, seen fifty years later, is described as “no more than a spot of light, without relief, as in an overexposed photograph. A blank.� She had various aliases, connected to a seedy gang in Paris, where Modiano has lived for decades. Jean and Dannie live together for a time a fleeting relationship, one of many over any one’s lifetime. Dannie may have been involved in some criminal activity, but as with anyone seen from fifty years later, there are increasingly more questions than answers. You can never recapture the past. It exists like a dream. He strives in all his books to weave “bits and pieces from the past� into a story, without pretending to know things he cannot.
Is there anything new Modiano adds to his collection of fictional reminiscence"? Maybe not, but every so often I like to go inside his head and experience his rich sensuous search for the past....more
I here, a few weeks after my original review, revise my thinking after seeing more of what this book is about, almost done with the third and fourth sI here, a few weeks after my original review, revise my thinking after seeing more of what this book is about, almost done with the third and fourth sections. When I began reading it I made sure I had read nothing of the book, not even the book description on the cover. The Other Name: Septology I-II (2019) comprises the first two (of seven) sections of Nobel Prize in Literature 2024's (in translation, 647 page) novel about a small town Norwegian artist. Or rather, two artists who are in many ways very much like each other. Okay, obvious dopplegangers, wearing sometimes the same clothes, same hair, both artists, one a widower, the other a bachelor. So maybe ultimately it is the story of one artist whose life could have gone in other ways? We'll see. It's puzzling when you first read it, and intriguing as you read on.
I had read two shorter works by him and recommend them as introductions to his work, A Shining and Trilogy. I am not deeply read in Norwegian or even Scandinavian literature, though I early on cut my teeth on the intensely anguished spiritual films of Ingmar Bergman, am a fan of Ibsen and Strindberg, and most recently the work of the poet Tomas Tranströmer, the fiction of Tarjei Vesaas, among others.
Asle is an aging painter and widower, wife Ales. He has two friends; his neighbor, Åsleik, a bachelor and fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, who sells Asle's paintings for him in a gallery in Bjørgvin where yet another Asle, also a painter, lives. The more we get to know them, we see they are living different versions of the same life, but of course shaped by their somewhat different circumstances. To be a widow versus a bachelor, to be an atheist versus a devout Christian.
The story, such as it is, involves simple things that isolated people do in small towns, a lot of repetition in talk and routines. The first Asle talks to his dead wife Ales on a regular basis, in continual grief at her loss. But he paints every day, and has strong views about art:
�. . . what's beautiful in life turns out bad in a painting because it's like there's too much beauty, a good picture needs something bad in it in order to shine the way it should, it needs darkness in it. . .�
�. . . what I want to show to other people has to do with light, or with darkness, it has to do with the shining darkness full as it is of nothingness, yes, it’s possible to think that way, to use such words. . .� In writing as in painting: " . . . what matters isn’t what it literally says about this or that, it’s something else, something that silently speaks in and behind the lines and sentences."
So, the light shining in the darkness is what Fosse also seems to be about. And there is a fluid (or jarring, depending on your interest in these things) set of transitions between first person and third person, between the two Asles, between past and present, whicih may happen more an dmore as we age, and Asle is indeed aging. The first Asle is a simple Christian, Catholic. His repetition of the phrase "I think" throughout might drive any reader crazy here, I think (ach! I'm infected), but over time I came to find this simple artist, meant to seem like a kind of working class saint, seductive in his appeal to the spiritual, as with Vesaas, Bergman, all these works about tortured individuals. Simple lives, on the edge of madness/spiritual insight. Like his fellow Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgård in his attention to the minutiae of the commonplace. I was reminded of the tortured artist father painting the same thing every day in Henning Mankell's Wallander series.
I like the trips into memory in book two, the most memorable being the story the artist experienced as a youth of the drowning of another child. And then the point of the dopplegangers becomes increasingly clear (but not totally clear to me yet), that identity and memory are fluid and complex concepts, that "reality" is infused with memory that is always present. This is not a new concept, of course, but the approach here has this spiritual resonance, this dimension of reflection that is interesting and profound.
It took me a long time to engage with these simple country folk, but having been finally captured, I will read on. I think!...more
The Naked Tree is the third book I have read in the last couple years by Korean cartoonist Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, after the powerful Grass, and The WaitThe Naked Tree is the third book I have read in the last couple years by Korean cartoonist Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, after the powerful Grass, and The Waiting. The Naked Tree is a comics adaptation of a classic Korean novel by Park Wan-suh about a Korean painter, set during the Korean War that was of course devastating for both South and North Korea, tearing the very fabric of the country in shreds, separating families. War between families. The only way we can relate to this in the US is to think of the Civil War. But any territorial conflict will do, of course, as reference, The Middle East, Ireland. Maybe even the Ukraine invasion fits.
The year is 1951. Twenty-year-old Kyeonga works at the US Post, where goods and services are available for purchase by American soldiers, Two colorful guys that Kyeonga manages hand-paint portraits on silk handkerchiefs, specifically images of girls and women to which the soldiers send the handkerchiefs back home. A serious painter, a Northern escapee, OK-Huido, comes to join the crew, working to support his family. Young Kyeonga falls in love with him, but I won’t tell you how this all shakes out. OK-Huido only really wants to create serious art; the handkerchief painting is a job he has to take out of necessity.
This is a story of first love--Kyeonga’s for the married OK-Huido. Let's call it a coming-of-age story. It’s also the story of the Korean War and the struggle for survival. It’s the story of the passion for and commitment to art exemplified by OK-Huido. It’s the third novel by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim translated by Janet Hong that I’ve read in a year. Keep translating, Ms. Hong, and keep producing these stellar books, Drawn & Quarterly, I will keep reading and reviewing!
*I like how the cartoonist brings the novel’s author into the story in her adaptation. I like the artwork that calls up the time and place. Grim, but character-driven illustration.
*OK-Huido later paints a naked tree with two women--one, OK-Huido’s wife, the other Kyeonga--on either side of the tree. Maybe this tree is OK-Huido, in the war, devastated, caught between two. . . impulses.
*A wind-up chimpanzee that OK-Huido and Kyenoga sees in the public square comes to symbolize how society and war make people function, as automatons.
I truly appreciate the afterword, with photographs and an essay helping us with the background of the war, the novel, the art. I highly recommend all of this artist’s works you can get your hands on. Powerful story, powerful adaptation.
Thanks to the author, Drawn & Quarterly, and Net Galley for the early look. If you also want an early look, try Net Galley, as the (English translation of the) book officially launches 22 August 2023....more
Time Shelter by Georgi Gospidinov was awarded the International Man Booker Prize for 2023. I bet it is my first Bulgarian novel, translated wonderfullTime Shelter by Georgi Gospidinov was awarded the International Man Booker Prize for 2023. I bet it is my first Bulgarian novel, translated wonderfully by Angela Rodel. The skinny: An enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a “clinic for the past� that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail. Gaustine’s assistant narrates the story.
How can I describe it? Post-modern? A playful philosophical meditation on time, the past, memory. A reflection on the fact that in an aging population, someone is diagnosed with Alzeheimer’s or dementia every few seconds, and that begs the question how many are undiagnosed. It’s less a novel than it is an explosion of ideas/perspectives about memory and memory loss. Things like this are on every page:
“Somewhere in the Andes, they believe to this very day that the future is behind you. It comes up from behind your back, surprising and unforeseeable, while the past is always before your eyes, that which has already happened. When they talk about the past, the people of the Aymara tribe point in front of them. You walk forward facing the past and you turn back toward the future.�
“We are constantly producing the past. We are factories for the past. Living past-making machines, what else? We eat time and produce the past. Even death doesn’t put a stop to this. A person might be gone, but his past remains.�
So it’s kind of exhilarating in some ways in terms of structure and invention, form, and terrifying in terms of its theme--memory loss--even as we can acknowledge that memory is one of the central foci of all literature. But it’s not a story where you “like� the characters; it’s meant to nudge you to think. I wasn’t all that engaged, maybe in part because I have been reading several sort of traditionally emotionally engaging novels, the likes of Elizabeth Strout and Kent Haruf. But:
*I have two older sibs who no longer know who I am that I visit periodically in nursing facilities. The places are filled with people like them.
*I had a talk with the 91-year-old mother of friends recently who asked me four times where I now live; on the fourth occasion, I nearly answered, “I am so glad you asked that question! No one ever asks me that!� to lighten the conversation for others in the room, but I held off. I mean, that might be me, sooner than I think.
I didn’t love this book, but I was impressed with its drive and energy. There’s a lot in here about the writer’s role in the process of exploring memory and the past, the impossibility of getting it right. It’s also about Bulgaria and the European Union generally and the anxiety of dealing with the challenges of the present as we ever forget the past....more
My too long return to the work of Nobel-prize winning Patrick Modiano, in what became a very popular novel in France. The book is less about plot, of My too long return to the work of Nobel-prize winning Patrick Modiano, in what became a very popular novel in France. The book is less about plot, of course, as usual with Modiano, than tone, of creating a sense of what it is like for many people in their late teens and early twenties. Modiano was then a product of a boarding school, a veteran of the Army, was quite independent from his parents, as are the two main characters here. I know a lot of readers in the US seem to find Modiano novels uneventful--nothing dramatic happens--but it is that very thing that attracts me to it, in many ways. Slice of life. Lovely, achingly nostalgic prose.
The story opens in 1980 in eastern France near Switzerland. Odile Memling will be celebrating her 35th birthday. Husband Louis will be turning 35 in a few weeks. They have two kids. They run a children’s academy, but it is going to close and reopen as a restaurant. Then we shift to a decisive period of seventeen months in Paris when they meet and try to figure out what to do with their lives.
Louis at nineteen gets out of the war and goes to Paris and meets also nineteen-year-old Odile. They have no plans, they go from job to job, both used by various shady characters: “They were living through one of those moments when you need to feel the need to grab on to something stable and solid, the longing to ask someone for advice. But there wasn't anyone. Except for the gray silhouettes with their black briefcases crossing rue Réaumur in the rain, coming into the café, having their coffee or drink at the counter, and leaving. Their movements made Odile and Louis feel numb. The ground was shifting under their feet.�
The book shifts from the perspective of Louis and Odile and back, though primarily focuses on Louis:“Louis was seized with a feeling of helplessness. What were they going to do in Paris? He felt the need to confide in these Englishmen, even ask their advice. No one had ever once given him and Odile advice. They were alone in the world.�
Memory is very important in this novel, as it is in most of Modiano's work. They were young once, and they meet people who reflect also on their youths that were so important to them. Most Modiano novels have a character that is modeled on Modiano’s own life. Louis is obsessed with knowing his father, who died years ago with his wife in an automobile crash, neither having been personally involved in Louis's upbringing. In almost all Modiano books a son searches for his father, and this is true here. Parental responsibility is important in this book.
Here’s a bit of what I mean by tone:
“So they wouldn't suffer too much from hunger, they slept and rested in bed for as long as they could. They lost all notion of time, and if Brossier hadn't come back they would never have left that room, not even the bed, where they listened to music and little by little drifted off. The last thing they saw from the outside world were the snowflakes falling all day on the sill of the open window.�
This is more of a conventional novel for Modiano, less dreamlike, though the events still seem to me pretty ethereal, as they did for Louis and Odile in some ways. Both of them have secrets they never reveal to each other that happen to them, but they don’t ever reveal them to each other. That is part of the unsaid mystery in the book. I really love Modiano! He reminds me a bit of the subtle Annie Ernaux’s work, too. ...more
The Glass Cage was first published in 1971. This is my first time reading the book, and maybe my second or third novel from the celebrated Georges SimThe Glass Cage was first published in 1971. This is my first time reading the book, and maybe my second or third novel from the celebrated Georges Simenon, who was both prolific and critically acclaimed as an author. Most of his books are mysteries, following the famed detective Maigret, and when Glenn Russell recommended this book as one of his four or five favorites, I expected it to be a Maigret murder mystery. I was wrong, as this is a novel of murder, but not a mystery novel, one that explores how it is a seemingly ordinary person might, after decades of never having done so, commit murder.
The Glass Cage is the story of Émile Virieu, a proofreader of regular habits. When I realized this was not a detective story, but knew (from the book jacket) that it involved a murder, I began to associate Emile as a kind of middle-aged Meursault, the nihilist from Camus’s The Stranger. Emile has from childhood been an outsider, mocked for having “glass eyes,� which is to say he seems to have n0 emotions. He neither hates nor loves anyone, though he eventually marries Jeanne because he prefers not to be alone, though they talk little, for twenty-five years. He has migraines that no medicine seems to ease.
Emile says something mildly to himself as he imagines the (slim) possibility of Jeanne’s ever leaving: “I’d kill her,� which of course sets up an expectation, though Jeanne only cares for him.and is perfectly docile. Four surprising events happen in this year: Emile suggests they travel to Italy for their holiday (though he neither has a great or terrible time there), and Emile later suggests that Jeanne get a dog. Three quarters of the way into the book, which is narrated in third person, from the perspective of Emile, not much happens except to establish the mundanity of their lives, and his “nowhere man� persona. He is apathetic, possibly nihilistic, but he’s never been violent. He is only extreme in his passivity. Theres a strong existentialist vibe to this book, perfect for 1971 Europe.
The third event occurs to Emile’s brother-in-law, who had long had numerous affairs, and who comes drunk to Emile’s house professing his undying love for his latest girlfriend (and not Emile’s sister). Later (spoiler alert?) the guy kills himself at the door of his girlfriend’s apartment. He acts, Emile observes, in a kind of passion Emile has never felt.
The fourth event is that a young couple moves in across the hallway, and for perhaps the first time in his life he notices the 20-year-old woman, Lina, who notices his noticing and somewhat flirts with him. Is she teasing him? He’s just a big oaf, and clearly asexual (we know this because he has had very little sex in his life, including with his long term wife), except he makes a point to leave for work in the morning when she goes out to shop. For reasons he can’t name, he becomes increasingly agitated. He knows he is not in love with the young woman, but she functions as a kind of irritant to his life.
Then a fifth thing happens, seemingly small, but it is consistent with what happens to Emile’s brother-in-law, in a way. Emile’s sister wants Emile to talk her twenty-year-old son out of impulsively leaving for America, but Emile supports him making the move. Has Emile ever made such a move? Well, he left his parents to head to Paris, but never since.
So, yeah, there’s a murder, an impulsive act, and it takes place in the last page of the book, and I won’t tell you what happens. Simenon writes like a warm knife slicing through butter. So smooth! Seemingly effortless. Georges Joseph Christian Simenon was a Belgian writer who published an astounding 500 novels and other short works. When he planned the Maigret books he said he wanted to write books that could be read in a couple hours, in one sitting, and this is entirely possible. This book, Maigret-less, is also a short read. I'd recommend you check this guy out, one of the greatest writers of all time, by critical and popular reputation.
Oh, the title? It’s really a reference to the only place he feels comfortable, at work, doing his job every day, in a glassed-in cubicle:
"At last he found himself back in his corner, his cage which protected him against everything that existed outside. After so many years he hardly knew the names of the men who worked in the pressroom, right under his eyes."
I don’t like how women are treated by this guy, finally, something that only emerges in the closing pages, though it is true he does not love or respect any man, either. Most people find Emile and Jeanne unattractive, and they use the word “ugly� to describe her, which is an ugly word to use for someone so nice and doting. Emile begins to acknowledge this criticism of her and this word, too, unfortunately. There’s some complicated tension in the book about male-female relationships, from the brother-in-law’s affairs to Emile’s relationships with Jeanne and Lina. But I liked the book quite a bit, thanks Glenn Russell. It’s a bit haunting, subtle, staying with me in its quiet way. I admire the writing that explores how the extraordinary might come about in “ordinary� lives....more
“And somewhere from the dim ages of history the truth dawned upon Europe that the morrow would obliterate the plans of today.�
So more than twenty year“And somewhere from the dim ages of history the truth dawned upon Europe that the morrow would obliterate the plans of today.�
So more than twenty years after Czech-American Maria gave me a copy of this 1921 classic, I have finally read it and loved it. It’s a messy, episodic story of WWI; not a tale of the western front, but of the eastern front. Of course there is a long history of anti-war literature, but this story is the obvious precursor to other darkly satirical novels such as Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, all farces indicting (especially) military and political leaders.
“Preparations for the slaughter of mankind have always been made in the name of God or some supposed higher being which men have devised and created in their own imagination.�
The Good Soldier Švejk is a rural naif, patriotic, quite simple, not questioning the military leadership that berates him regularly as an idiot--”Are you an idiot?!� “Yes, begging your pardon, sir. I am an idiot, I've been certified so!�
The humor is absurd and ultimately indicts military leadership as the true idiots, in the tradition of most war literature, but Švejk also is clearly some combination of clueless, too--he doesn’t know who Archduke Ferdinand is at all, and in the tradition of almost all of the poor folks we send to die in wars, he has no idea what the political situation is that has led to WWI--though he also on some occasions plays the fool to his benefit:
“Could you measure the diameter of the globe?" "No, that I couldn't, sir," answered Švejk, "but now I'll ask you a riddle, gentlemen. There's a three-storied house with eight windows on each story. On the roof there are two gables and two chimneys. There are two tenants on each story. And now, gentlemen, I want you to tell me in what year the house porter's grandmother died?�
At one point a lieutenant tells Švejk to "attend to the needs" of a woman he is seeing:
“And so it came about that when the lieutenant returned from the barracks, the good soldier Švejk was able to inform him: 'Beg to report, sir, I carried out all the lady's wishes and treated her courteously, just as you instructed me.� ‘Thank you, Švejk,� said the lieutenant. ‘And did she want many things done?� ‘About six,� Švejk replied." (haha, good soldier, Švejk!)
At another point a sergeant suspects that Švejk may have deliberately given him a poisoned bottle of Schnapps, so he orders Švejk to drink it. And he does, as he always follows orders, this good soldier. The whole bottle!
Here’s another anecdote to help us understand his character:
Švejk's landlady tells him she is going to jump out the window, to which the good soldier replies: "If you want to jump out the window, go into the sitting room. I've opened the window for you. I wouldn't advise you to jump out of the kitchen window, because you'd fall on the rose bed in the garden, damage the bushes and have to pay for them. From the window in the sitting-room you'll fall beautifully on the pavement and if you're lucky you'll break your neck."
But this is the kind of humor you see early on; as Švejk gets closer to actual battle, the humor gets darker, more absurd (as is the case with Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five):
“The night spent in the detention barracks will always be one of Švejk's fondest memories. Next door to Number 16 was a cell for solitary confinement, a murky den from which issued, during that night, the wailing of a soldier who was locked up in it and whose ribs were being systematically broken for some disciplinary offence." (The presumption is that he is lucky not to be THAT guy).
"Švejk inspected the provost-marshal's office. The impression which it produced could scarcely be called a favorable one, especially with regard to the photographs on the walls. They were photographs of the various executions carried out by the army in Galicia and Serbia. Artistic photographs of cottages which had been burned down and of trees, the branches of which were burdened with hanging bodies. There was one particularly fine photograph from Serbia showing a whole family which had been hanged. A small boy with his father and mother. Two soldiers with bayonets were guarding the tree on which the execution had been carried out, and an officer was standing victoriously in the foreground smoking a cigarette.� (You begin to see how the humor gets darker, bleaker).
Švejk is constantly being sent to the wrong places and in the wrong direction throughout the tale, as he dutifully tries to get to the front, and is threatened with court martial for various offenses. It’s always military chaos, all the time. And as with Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five, it’s an ultimately devastatingly sad story, of course, considering millions were maimed and slaughtered. Oh, it's meandering, repetitive, messy, but it remains a classic satirical novel anyone would enjoy reading, as we experience yet another war (in Ukraine) “developed� by Our Esteemed and Unquestionably Wise Military, Political and Corporate “Leaders,� though perhaps military veterans would enjoy it most, nodding knowingly and sadly at the black humor....more
9/12/24: Rereading it for my Fall Ghosts class. This is my third time reading this book, and some of the students in my class discussed the notion of 9/12/24: Rereading it for my Fall Ghosts class. This is my third time reading this book, and some of the students in my class discussed the notion of grief in the book. A girl comes to this small Norwegian town, orphaned after her mother has died, to live with her aunt. She instigates an intense friendship with another girl, invites her over to her anunt's house after school, and the next day goes to a huge "ice palace" made by a waterfall dropping into a lake. I had not considered before that the girl was grieving, nor that she was drawing her friend into this intense relationship because of her grief, but it could be true. However, we never know what is going on in either girl's head. It's just super intense, adding to the mystery in part created by the ominous and somewhat foreboding presence of the natural world: The ice on the lake cracks, the trees moan, the wind whips through the trees. And the ice palace--something like a gothic castle?--seems to be a growing, breating entity. I think this class liked the book quite a bit.
9/9/27/23: Reread for my Ghosts class. My take is that many of the students were less than enthralled by it, but I love it. And my similarly-aged son thinks it is one of the best novels he has ever read, so I can die happy. As I agree with him.
Original review August 2022, with a few small edits: The Ice Palace (1963) is one of the two (short) books--the other is The Birds--I have thus far read from Norwegian author Tarjev Vesaas, and they are two of my favorite books that I have read this year. I wouldn’t call either of them “fun,� in the sense that they are not action-filled, but their very subtlety is captivating. They are both mystical, strange, and luminous in their own ways. The Ice Palace I would say is dark and cold and mysterious, but also lyrical, haunting, drawing you in word by word. I think it is beautiful, just amazing in its quiet, eerie, way. Magic. Some might call it dark magic, even horror, but I'm already maybe saying too much.
The focus of this short novel is on two eleven-year-old girls in a small Norwegian village, Siss, and Unn, a new girl whose mother has passed away, necessitating that she move in with her aunt in the village. The two connect at a first after-school meeting on an emotional, almost mystical, level. Unn says she has a secret to tell Siss; Siss makes a promise to Unn at one point. We don't know what the secret or promise are. Then, within the next twenty-four hours, everything changes.
The “Ice Palace� is a beautiful ice structure created by a waterfall near a rural lake in the coldest point of winter. But it's the first time it has happened like this, becoming so large and dramatic, and so the school decides to take a hiking trip to explore around it. A school trip, via cross country skis! The most (quietly) gripping chapters focus on the ice palace. Obviously it's the central image in the book.
I won’t tell you what happens, though I see other reviews do; I knew nothing about it and liked the surprises in it.
Here’s some passages that give you a sense of how smart Vesaas is about relationships, especially the relationships between children, which feel psychologically compelling, convincing, and how beautifully he writes about nature, which seems to come alive everywhere in the book, becoming itself a distinct character or set of characters in the novel:
* "There is something secret here�--girl secrets, but also the natural world communicating * The ice on the lake cracks, groans, booms as it gets colder, the ice stronger: “It thundered, like a gunshot.� The thunder is always ominous. Evidence of the the natural world communicating. * About the ice: “It was the mystification that fascinated her.� *The two girls hold a mirror together, looking at themselves: “Four eyes full of gleams and radiance" (this reminds me of the mirror scene in Ingmar Bergman's film Persona, where two intense women look at a mirror together and similarly see how much alike they are, the more they look). * As she walks home in the dark Siss sees that, “She was in the hands of what was at the sides of the road� (the road seen here as liminal space between darknesses, alive with creatures, with danger). * "Her words seemed like fences alongside the road to school, it was difficult to climb over them. . .� (language itself as liminal space for Siss). * "They walked along, keeping her in the middle� (in the middle is where she always is, in the space between childhood and adolescence, another kind of rich and perilous liminal space). * "During the evening she noticed that she was sitting with Mother and Father on either side of her.� Again, that sense of Siss's being in the middle, in the center, the object of attention, throughout. Liminal space!! * Unn skips school and goes to the Ice Palace, but stops to lay face down on the ice on the lake, to see that “Her slim body was a shadow with distorted human form on the bottom.� This chapter is narrated from Unn’s perspective, and it is gripping, mysterious, ominous. * Around the ice palace, “Unn jumped from tussock to tussock in this fairyland.� Dark magic! * "She stared wide-eyed into a strange fairy-tale.� Magic, mystery, fantasy, fairy tale (all of this kind of writing is an exploration of liminal spaces, the edge of knowing/unknowing) * “I have been given a great gift and I don’t know what it is.� Siss, who always conveys this sense of not being fully aware of what is happening, not knowing, in unknowing liminal space.
I would share more quotes, but will not give away what happens, I will not!
So it’s less a book about plot--what happens, because so much is shrouded in mystery--than tone, mood, and the psychological realism of living in a place where the natural world speaks to all who live there. And two girls, growing up, living precariously in the liminal space between childhood and adolescence.
* One chapter is a short poem; it's like a burst of lyricism, not quite rational language * One chapter just features a “wild bird with steel claws,� a kind of symbol of the threat of nature.
So in the writing style there is this sense of pastiche, of fragmentation, at times, incompleteness, part of the mystery, the dark magic, things outside the narrative that guide it or impinge on it. You don't know but you sense things will happen, with a sense of foreboding. Breaking out of narrative continuity, being startled by something Other.
Do I have anything negative to say? Well, the translation feels a little rough at times, just a tad awkward in a few small places, but in general the language is both simple and amazing. Haunting. Quietly, ominously intimate. Inside the world of two intense little girls, as with many mystery and horror books, paired twin souls: Turn if the Screw, The Others, so many others.
And other works that this book made me think of: Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (unexplained mystery, quietly intense, lost girls in a natural setting); Maids by Jean Genet (darkly intense relationships between two mysterious sisters); Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (same); We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (intense relationship between two sisters); Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, (the ice palace as gothic structure like a castle has its secrets, is a kind of living, breathing character in the story, and it crashes down in the spring). Oh, and Claire Keegan's Foster, which I want the whole world to read and compare with this! I am buying these books for everyone....more
The Birds is a short novel by Norwegian poet and novelist Tarjei Vesaas, translated with great respect for the author’s lyrical prose and the quiet chThe Birds is a short novel by Norwegian poet and novelist Tarjei Vesaas, translated with great respect for the author’s lyrical prose and the quiet characters. I think it is a masterpiece, without question. It was certainly in the top four or five books I read in 2022, but it was published in Norwegian in 1957, so is not exactly flying off the shelves today (in the USA, at least; I am sure he is still very popular in Scandanavia).
Mathis is known by everyone that lives nearby as Simple Simon. He’s never labeled, but then in 1957 when this book was published, no one would have used this word to describe him: Neurodivergent. I have two boys on the autistic spectrum, and I think these contemporary terms fit Mathis in many ways. He can’t quite function in society without help; he can’t really work regularly, it’s too much for him, and he can’t quite understand the patter of “clever� people. He just wants to be outside with birds and fish on the lake. He lives with his sister, Hege, who works at home and takes care of him. She sends him out to try to get some work, but this is rarely successful.
“What can you do when everyone around you is strong and clever?�
Mattis is intensely connected (as my sons are) with nature and animals. He has an almost psychic or spiritual connection with trees, storms, the lake, and yes, birds. When a woodcock flies over his head he takes that as a good sign for them. When a hunter kills the bird, he takes that as a bad sign for them. I thought of indigenous spiritual connections to land as inhabiting spirit. Two aspens stand nearby his house (older, with a leaky ceiling) he associates with him and his older sister, who takes care of him, knitting sweaters constantly to make enough money to feed them. When one of the aspens is hit by lightning, he takes that as a bad sign for them. Nature speaks to him, or to anyone, if we listen.
Increasingly, Mattis and Hege are living a precarious existence, financially. At one point she suggests (though she mainly needs to just get him out of the house, because he is driving her crazy with his questions and his crazy ideas) he take his (also leaky) boat to ferry people across the lake. He has to bale water out of it all the time, and his head is elsewhere, so at one point he barely makes it to a far shore. Two girls help him, and so suddenly this is a good day! I thought of Steinbeck’s Lennie, also a simple, sweet guy in Of Mice and Men, who also likes girls, especially when they are nice to him, of course.
Increasingly, there is an accumulation of ominous moments that seem to portend. . . something bad: The dead bird, the lightning strike, the leaky house, the leaky boat, and then the turning point, when Mattis picks up his one “ferryboat� passenger, lumberjack Jorgen, who (okay, I won’t spoil the ending, I promise, but he's part of the turn) comes to live with Mattis and Hege, and falls in love with her. What can this possibly mean for Mattis’s future? What if Hege were to leave? People in town are generally nice and respectful to him, but it is only Hege who truly takes care of him, and to some extent understands him, as lonely as she herself has been. We are sympathetic with her need for love. We can see her dilemma.
Here’s a passage that can give you a little flavor of how Mattis’s mind works, and how respectfully Vesaas crafts him as a character:
“This gave him another opportunity to use one of those words that hung before him, shining and alluring. Far away in the distance there were more of them, dangerously sharp. Words that were not for him, but which he used all the same on the sly, and which had an exciting flavour and gave him a tingling feeling in the head. They were a little dangerous, all of them.�
Over time we begin to see the world as Mattis does, seeing the fearfulness of communication, and the signs and portents he sees. We begin to understand him, as “simple� (which is to say different) but also very complex. We worry about him in his engagements with the community. We come to see the world through his eyes, to some extent. I loved this book so much! It's one of my all time favorite books already, and in my first encounter with Vesaas’s work! I highly recommend this sweet, achingly sad, lyrical work. So much compassion here for Mattis, and Hege, too. Such lovely writing. I will read more of his work, for sure.
PS And then I read another book by Vesaas I felt was just as powerful, The Ice Palace! Two of my very favorite books of the year! Both short, both intense, mysterious, lyrical, luminous....more
“The king ordered that the saint be placed in the olive press until his flesh was torn to pieces and he died. They then threw him out of the city, but“The king ordered that the saint be placed in the olive press until his flesh was torn to pieces and he died. They then threw him out of the city, but the Lord Jesus gathered the pieces together and brought him back to life, and he went back into the city”—The Story of St. George, the Great Martyr�
Frankenstein in Baghdad is an amazing novel that clearly assumes you at least know about Mary Shelley’s work, which it riffs off in a political/spiritual landscape set in the ongoing nightmare wreckage of Baghdad, Iraq, a place we all know as a site of suicide bombings, car bombs and terror more than its historical relation as the cultural mecca it remains. So it’s horror—as is Frankenstein—featuring a monster, but it is also an anguished love letter to and lament for the author’s beloved city. Filled with lyrical writing, honoring the dead there, it also possesses one of the darkest veins of black humor I have ever read. Fitting to use horror, surrealism, magical realism when there are just no words in the vocabulary of realism for the emotional effects of a terrorist act.
Hadi, a junk dealer, gathers body parts from the wreckage of unending bombings so he piece together a whole body and can give his friend Nahem a proper burial. Elishva too, wants to properly mourn her son, Daniel, killed in the Iran-Iraq War, though Elishva doesn’t yet quite accept he is dead. Hadi finds body parts where he can, from a range of humans attached to sects, good folks, criminals, whatever. And presto! We have a material representation, a map, of the body politic of Iraq, a deeply sad if macabre rendering of a body of fragments that fall off and need to be replaced all the time by the body parts of newly dead..
“Because I'm made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds - ethnicities, tribes, races and social classes - I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past. I'm the first true Iraqi citizen, he (the Whatsitsname) thinks.�
But one day this body, this Whatisname, walks away and begins to take revenge on those he sees as responsible for what has happened to the collective him and his country. Revenge, you ask? I thought this was poetry, a national tragedy! What about the need to heal? Well, this is Frankenstein territory, which means it is horror, in a world gone very very wrong. Macabre? Right, but also surprisingly lyrical and elegiac and tragic and sad even as it is sometimes bizarrely funny. For instance, in the process, Elishva claims Whatisname as Daniel, her son, returning as promised by St George!
How to get at the humor? Well, there’s a certain kind of rage and tenderness that attends Hadi’s job of stitching together bodies but its also outrageous comedy. And religion is part of what heals us but also divides and sometimes destroys us, so some of what we read acknowledges its importance and sometimes it is just flat out satire. And there’s this tender aspect of caring about the material body and in another light it’s a ludicrous act of desecration. It’s surreal, this act, impossible, and yet hopeful, giving hope in one instance to a mother who thinks her long lost son has come back home, not dead at all.
There’s so much I am not getting at here. The stories that people tell both sustain and obfuscate: Hadi was a well-known liar. Can we even believe his story of whatisname? What about all these djinns and apparitions and saints?
Frankenstein in Baghdad was originally published in Arabic in 2013. In 2014, it was awarded the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (sometimes known as the "Arabic Booker"). And I think it is a masterpiece I'll never forget, and will need to read again to better understand. ...more
"In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead"--William Blake, "Proverbs From Hell"
�"In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead"--William Blake, "Proverbs From Hell"
“In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind � that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences: in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality � its inexpressibility.�
I knew nothing about this book when I picked it up but saw that two months after it was published (originally in 2009, re-released in 2019 in a new translation) the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I'm told she has written better, deeper books that I may check out, this book is seen as "lighter," but I liked the title, that it came from Blake's "Hell side," and that it was a mystery.
“Nobody takes any notice of old women who wander around with their shopping bags.�
Janina tells her own story. An older woman, she and her friend Oddball discover a murdered neighbor, Bigfoot, and they spend much of the book embroiled in the investigation, which expands as more people are killed. Janina is easily dismissed as an anarchic crank; each of her chapters opens with Blake quotes--he's her philosophical hero in his defense of nature.
“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we're living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what's good and what isn't, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves. . . And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.�
She's also into astrology, which helps get he dismissed throughout by everyone. But since Janina tells us her ideas throughout, the book becomes more of a philosophical treatise and indelible character portrait. She's quirky, cranky, amusing, and until very near the end I was a bit impatient with the book, not quite knowing what I held in my hands. I highly recommend it, but stick with it to the end.
"For people of my age," she thinks, "the places that they truly loved and to which they once belonged are no longer there. The places of their childhood and youth have ceased to exist. . . And if their outer form has been preserved, it's all the more painful, like a shell with nothing inside it anymore. I have nowhere to return to. It's like a state of imprisonment. The walls of the cell are the horizon of what I can see."...more
“I know, though, that we'd have to come from a better family to be able to bury our childhood - we'd have to lie under a layer of earth ourselves, but“I know, though, that we'd have to come from a better family to be able to bury our childhood - we'd have to lie under a layer of earth ourselves, but the time isn't ripe for that yet.�
How can I write about this book? The Discomfort of Evening by Dutch author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld was awarded the International Man Booker Prize for 2020 and I see many very bright and thoughtful people here could either not finish the book or ended up so disturbed by it that they one-starred it. Being Dutch-American, I’d been feeling I should read more Dutch books, and here was one that was supposedly good. And I agreed, but not without putting it down a few times and despite a nightmare or two. But that was the author’s intent, to capture the horrors of trauma. Hey, a book for our times. So this won’t exactly be a review, but I’ll say I, too, was deeply disturbed by the book even as I was completely taken in by the ten-year-old girl narrator. There’s much lyrical writing and many starkly painful descriptions of death, sexual acts, animal cruelty.
What’s it about? The story is told by Jas, who loses her brother after she prays for him to die rather than her rabbit. And then the whole family, living on a dairy farm, steeped in the Dutch Reformed Church, falls apart in grief and madness--Mom stops eating and openly admits she wants to die; Dad shuts down and goes into his own madness even as he also loses his cattle to disease, and the three remaining kids are left to fend for themselves, rudderless. The spectre of a noose is present throughout.
There’s a lot of disturbing vulnerable or vicious coming-of-age books--I’ve read Foster and The Ice Palace recently; there’s Lord of the Flies--that defy the often commonplace understanding that youth is about innocence and adulthood about corruption. That’s part of this book, for sure, that the horrors of the world can shape you--break you--even at the earliest ages. The children in Lydia Millet’s The Children’s Bible--for the most part good kids-- are left to raise themselves. The kids in Rinjeveld’s book are mostly not handling things well, but why do they have to be? They’re in trauma, and they’re kids.
But it’s something else, too. I’m Dutch-American, as I said. My grandparents on both my mother’s and father’s sides--Schaafsmas and Kuypers--came over to the US in the late nineteenth century; both families lived in the Groningen area. The Schaafsmas were sheep farmers for generations. My mother’s family, coopers, barrel-makers, cask-makers-- had in its lineage the Dutch theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper, aligned with John Calvin. Both of my parents' families settled in Dutch western Michigan--the Holland and Grand Rapids area. They spoke Dutch and never taught us; they also spoke Frisian with each other at times.
I knew (a little, maybe wrongly) that a lot of Dutch families came to the US because of religious oppression. Many were extremists. The Reformed Church featured in this book is one with which I am familiar, though the dark madness Rijneveld depicts I never personally knew. My family is/was largely sane and loving. But I knew of the Protestant Reformed Church, where kids dressed in clothes without bright colors, no tv or radio, no Sunday work or play; my family's version is called the Christian Reformed Church--I also couldn’t play outside and we couldn’t watch TV on Sunday, either--my parents went to church three days on Sunday, one service all in Dutch; I was required to go twice on Sunday. I was forced by my family and church to make public Profession of Faith and the elders urged me to renounce all worldly pursuits, including the watching of films and contemporary music and dancing. I refused. But my religion banned dancing; we did, anyway; we could these events "foot functions."
I really do not know if this is true but we had heard, growing up, that there were more churches per square mile in the Zeeland area of Michigan, near Holland, than any other place in the country, but also more venereal disease and teenage pregnancy. Repression. I and my friends snorted with dark laughter when we heard this in the early seventies.
The Dutch Reformed Church shapes much of the horror of this book. It provides the basic grim background, and is foregrounded many times when Dad quotes from The Bible--"The Authorized Version." It begins with the death of a brother but the religious extremism provides no comfort, only further horror. Is it fair to Dutch Christians? Everything the mad Dad quotes from the Bible to threaten his children I know. But this Dad is crazed in a way I have never met.
“I’ve discovered that there are two ways of losing your belief: some people lose God when they find themselves; some people lose God when they lose themselves.�
In my church as I grew up--steeped in a Calvinist first principle of Original Sin as a way of understanding all the bad in the world--I heard much more about sin than love, much more about Hell than Heaven. My church was one of the most conservative in western Michigan, though my family was happy, not brutal or cruel. In this book the parents are just lost, and thus the kids are.
Jas has deft and lyrical observations, but she is spinning in her grief and her own madness:
“I nod and think about the teacher who said I’d go far with my empathy and boundless imagination, but in time I’d have to find words for it because otherwise everything and everybody stays inside you. And one day, just like the black stockings which my classmates sometimes tease me about wearing because we’re Reformists � even though I never wear black stockings � I will crumple in on myself until I can only see darkness, eternal darkness.�
“I don’t want to feel any sadness, I want action; something to pierce my days, like bursting a blister with a pin so that the pressure is eased.�
“Later I sometimes thought that this was when the emptiness began. . .�
At one point Jas decides to never take off her coat:
“Nobody knows my heart. It's hidden deep inside my coat, my skin, my ribs. My heart was important for nine months inside my mother's belly, but once I left the belly, everyone stopped caring whether it beat enough times per hour. No one worries when it stops or begins to beat fast, telling me there must be something wrong.�
I left the Dutch Reformed Church that I saw in my experience--though I had friends who had much better and more uplifting and loving experiences--was dark and repressive and joyless. I think that this is a book about loss, grief, madness, framed by the darkness of a religion that provides no relief, no succor, no healing balm, no joy. What happens in the book as the family descends into madness is very disturbing though also is filled with amazing observations and lyrical language, too. It’s horrible and heart-breaking and at the same time kind of amazingly depicted at times. I am quite sure it is too graphic for many people and I understand that and warn you.
“We find ourselves in loss and we are who we are � vulnerable beings, like stripped starling chicks that fall naked from their nests and hope they’ll be picked up again.�...more
"Not that he looked like a cartoon policeman. He didn't have a mustache and he didn't wear heavy boots. His clothes were well-cut and made of fairly l"Not that he looked like a cartoon policeman. He didn't have a mustache and he didn't wear heavy boots. His clothes were well-cut and made of fairly light worsted. He shaved every day and looked after his hands.
But his frame was proletarian. He was a big, bony man. His firm muscles filled out his jacket and quickly pulled all his trousers out of shape.
He had a way of imposing himself just by standing there. His assertive presence had often irked many of his own colleagues."
Marking the debut of Detective Chief Inspector Jules Amédée François Maigret of the Paris Police Judiciaire in 1930, this is the first of 75 novels and 28 short stories in a series. I think this may be my first Simenon and I am considering reading more, maybe all of them. Simenon is considered one of Belgium's great writers, one of the greatest detective writers of all time, so I am of course intrigued, but in this first one you get to only see the faint shape of his purposes. Maigret is a large, pipe-smoking detective, at sort of the advent of police procedurals. It is really a novella, and I understand he wanted people to be able to read this as each of them in a day.
I won't recount the story, but the point is less suspense here than how Maiget solves the crime, with some surprises in the telling, especially as things pick up a bit at the end. I wasn't really all that engaged, but I paid attention, because I will read more because others have told me of the great ones to come....more
“One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences, yes, one’s silences, because silence“One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences, yes, one’s silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one’s silences�--Roberto Bolaño
By Night in Chile is a novella, my second book by Roberto Bolaño after my reading last year of the 900 plus page 2666. It is tempting to say the former (an earlier) book is just a shorter version of 2666. Which is not to dismiss it in the least. There’s more “complexity� in 2666, which I loved, but at this moment I would recommend this book to any reader curious about Bolaño (Savage Detectives is next up for me from him). Both novels deal in similar ways with the responsibility of the writer to real events in the world. The first section of 2666 is a kind of satirical look at a bunch of fawning literary critics all writing about a reclusive novelist who may or may not be hiding out in Mexico, where there was the real-world killing of women in the nineties, known as the femicides, the murders (and usually rapes) of 112 young, poor, and mostly uneducated women in the Juarez area of Mexico, in the state of Sonora (though he calls the city Santa Teresa). The literary critics write about writers, not femicides, obviously!
Later in 2666 we meet an academic, a philosopher who is visiting Santa Teresa with his daughter. Again, he’s a writer but this is not his “area� to write about, though he is concerned about his daughter’s safety. Later we meet a journalist from an African American publication in NYC, sent to cover a boxing match there, even though sports is not his area. He becomes interested in the local coverage of the femicides, but his boss does not want him to write about it (not his area, again).
In By Night in Chile we have a first person death-bed rant by a flawed priest, Father Urrutia, who has written poetry and literary criticism but was conscripted to teach Marxism to Pinochet and his generals. Early on he meets Pablo Neruda, a very different Chilean poet who like Bolaño was an activist against dictatorships, both jailed for it.
And what of the responsibility of the Church to the real world? Father Urrutia tells of a trip to Europe where he meets with other priests interested in falconry. ‘Nuff said. Increasingly, the darkly satirical nature of this story becomes clear. It can also be funny in places, and pretty surreal at times. The priest is delusional self-justifying, twisting things to make himself look better than he is.
Cut to the chase: Both 2666 and By Night in Chile are about the purpose of writing; Bolaño urges us to write and read to save the planet, to change the direction from barbarism to humanism. He thinks that most writing is damagingly disconnected with the decline of western civilization, such as fascism and the murder of women and the neo-liberal capitalist creation of poverty and the world’s increasing and utter disregard for the poor, climate change, the fate of the planet, and so on. In the end Bolaño confronts us with devastating questions that anyone, anywhere should be asking of themselves right now: What does what is happening to the world and others have to do with me? What is my responsibility (or debt to be paid) for living on the planet? ...more
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