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| 1906694990
| 9781906694999
| 1906694990
| 4.07
| 16,645
| Aug 23, 2005
| Jan 01, 2011
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it was amazing
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Ìý Home [NOTE: I read this in French in 2011. I am copying the review to Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ now after having read Fredrik Backman's And Every Morning the Road Hom Ìý Home [NOTE: I read this in French in 2011. I am copying the review to Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ now after having read Fredrik Backman's And Every Morning the Road Home Gets Longer and Longer. No, they are not the same, although both are about an old man and a child. But both are short, both are very moving, and there is a childlike wonder to the writing in both books that makes me think of them in the same breath.] An old man stands on the stern of a boat, watching his homeland disappear into the distance. He holds a small suitcase and an even smaller child, a baby girl. His name is Monsieur Linh, but he is the only one to know that, since everybody else who knows him is dead. So begins Philippe Claudel's novella of 2005, so simple it is almost a fable. Monsieur Linh comes to a big Western city where he is put into a dormitory for refugees. The other families feed him, following the custom which dictates respect for their elders, but otherwise leave him alone to tend to himself and the tiny child, Sang Diû, rescued after an atrocity that killed his son and daughter-in-law. At first, this new city seems neutral and forbidding to Monsieur Linh, lacking the warmth, the scents, the colors of his tropical home. But resting on a bench one day, he is joined by a big man who introduces himself as Monsieur Bark. A widower grieving for his wife who used to operate a carousel in the park, Monsieur Bark is glad of somebody to talk to, even though the only phrases the men can exchange with mutual comprehension are the expressions for "Good day" in their respective languages. Although Monsieur Linh does not understand the meaning of the actual words, he picks up on their emotional content, and the two become fast friends, seeing each other every day, with the old man's grandchild sitting between them, as quiet as an angel. There is much beauty in Claudel's almost simplistic writing, as the old man, who has lost so much, finds a new home in the heart of his unexpected friend, just as he makes his own heart a home for the little girl. But just as one is beginning to think that the book is in danger of getting sappy and over-optimistic, other people—social workers—intervene who have other ideas of proper homes for the two of them. The story passes into disturbing shadow, making us think of the inadvertent cruelty with which, albeit with the best of intentions, we often treat old people, orphans, and aliens. But Monsieur Linh has not survived the desolation of his country for nothing, and his determination to be reunited with his friend brings this brief tale to a climax that is both inevitable and surprising. One assumes that Monsieur Linh comes from Vietnam, though Claudel never says. Indeed, having now read four books by the author, I realize that one of his central techniques is to give no more information than is absolutely necessary. It explains his latest [as of 2011], The Investigation, a surreal nightmare in which neither the setting nor any of the characters are given proper names. It explains his two most famous novels, Grey Souls and especially his masterpiece Brodeck, in which the vagueness of some details and the precision of others, in the shadow respectively of the First and Second World Wars, gives a nightmare quality, as though everything is taking place in a confined space by half light. But what comes through all four books is Claudel's sympathy with forgotten people, the collateral victims of large conflicts, and small children. Although requiring to be read as a fable, with a willing suspension of disbelief, this short novella is surely the brightest in Claudel's oeuvre, reminding us of those special moments in the other books when he also breaks free of the prevailing darkness. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 03, 2011
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Jan 04, 2011
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Jul 04, 2017
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0940322471
| 9780940322479
| 0940322471
| 4.10
| 21,483
| 1980
| Oct 31, 2000
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it was amazing
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The Summer After the War [NOTE: I have recently reviewed Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent. In the appendix to the British paperback edition, she lists a The Summer After the War [NOTE: I have recently reviewed Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent. In the appendix to the British paperback edition, she lists a number of novels as being especially important to her: I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith), A Month in the Country (J. L. Carr), Jane Eyre, Tess of the Durbervilles, and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. Most of them I have read, but I knew the first two only by reputation. Perry has inspired me to remedy that omission.] Although brief and charmingly unpretentious, this little novella caught me in a time warp from the very first page, and did not let go until the end. A man gets off a steam train at the Yorkshire village of Oxgodby, carrying an odd assortment of baggage and wearing a prewar coat. Which war? Everything was pointing to 1920 or so; the style, the detail, the off-hand humor of the first-person narration was absolutely that of a memoir of the period, the genuine article. I looked at the copyright: 1980. Something must be wrong; surely the date must refer to some later edition? But no: James Lloyd Carr was only three when war broke out; this novella, though clearly based on some of his real-life experiences, is an extraordinary feat of imagining himself back to an earlier time. Tom Birkin is a veteran of Passchendaele in WW1, and further reeling from his wife's desertion; a nervous twitch disfigures one side of his face. He has accepted a commission to uncover a medieval mural of the Last Judgement hidden behind layers of whitewash on the apse of a village church, sleeping in the belfry and attending to his needs behind the cowshed. There is one other veteran similarly employed, an ex-captain called Moon, who is searching for the tomb of a disgraced ancestor of the lady of the manor, whose wealth will not be available to the parish until these tasks have been performed. The vicar, Rev. Keach, is a misanthropic skinflint living in a vast decaying rectory; his beautiful young wife, however, takes to visiting the church to watch Tom at work. Another visitor is the young daughter of the stationmaster, who involves Tom in the Sunday life of her father's Wesleyan chapel, which he finds more to his secular taste than the services in the dusty church. If Birkin was not always an unbeliever, his experiences in the Flanders mud have made him so. Yet religion plays a great part in the novel. Bit by bit, as he works on the apse mural, he sees that it is a masterpiece, executed with a richness of color, eye for detail, and sense of drama that propels it right out of its time. While the side showing the blessed ascending into Heaven is blandly conventional, the part depicting Hell is strikingly personal. Birkin has known his own hell at the front; Moon has been through a hell of his own, but of a different kind; Alice Keach, the vicar's wife, indicates that she may know yet another kind of hell, but this is left for Tom and the reader to surmise. All the same, amid the work at the Church and hymns at the Chapel, a real restoration is taking place. It is not just the painting that comes to life, but Tom Birkin himself. He finds himself making friends, expanding from his solitude into the life of the community, taking a whole day off with Moon, for instance, to help with the harvest. Tom is slowly getting cured. This book stands, I think, with Pat Barker's Regeneration as one of the great novels about first-war shell-shock and the road beyond it. I have no idea why Carr chose the same title as the famous Turgenev play. Perhaps because both works share the same sense of erotic possibility never entirely realized. But I think it is another of Carr's games with time. You expect four weeks, five at the most. But the endless summer stretches for month after month until one morning, after an overnight storm, Birkin suddenly realizes that summer has gone, autumn too, and that all around him people are preparing for winter. If I had any doubt before, the beauty of Carr's final pages convince me that he was a great writer—not of our time for sure, not even of his own, but heir to the great tradition of English pastoral melancholy, the poetry of A. E. Houseman and autumnal music of Edward Elgar: It would be like someone coming to Malvern, bland Malvern, who suddenly is halted by the thought that Edward Elgar walked this road on his way to give music lessons or, looking over to the Clee Hills, reflects that Houseman has stood also in that place, regretting his land of lost content. And, at such a time, for a few of us there will always be a tugging at the heart—knowing a precious moment has gone and we are not there.+ + + + + + FOOTNOTE 1 : THE MOVIE I ordered the movie after reading the novel. Made in 1987, it stars the young Colin Firth (Birkin), Kenneth Branagh (Moon), and Miranda Richardson (Mrs Keach). All are perfect in their parts, and the whole thing is beautifully filmed in the Yorkshire countryside. A special feature is the use of existing music (I think I caught Vaughan Williams and some Tallis) that exactly fits subject and period. Any fears that the film might coarsen the quiet understatement of the novel are entirely unfounded. "Understatement" here is itself an understatement; the strongest emotions are conveyed in silence; Miranda Richardson is especially poignant in this regard. [The one exception (and this surprised me) is the soldier Birkin encounters in the York cafe, who tells him about Moon. In the book, as I recall, it was handled with some subtlety; here, it is merely vindictive and frankly unbelievable.] Carr's novella is short, but in order to give the movie the space it needs, much has had to be cut. Birkin's relationship with the Chapel folk, for example, is greatly abbreviated, and that final harvesting scene has been omitted. As for the mural Birkin is supposed to be restoring, the painter hired by the film company has done a terrific job, but by the same token, what you see is what you get; you are not left with the idea that this is a work of blazing genius, as is possible when all you have are the author's words. Be warned, though: there are no subtitles. Given that many of the characters, especially the children, have strong Yorkshire accents, this makes it all but incomprehensible at times. And the pervasive understatement in both Branagh and Firth's delivery makes for a lot of tailing off and murmuring. Not therefore recommended for the hard of hearing! + + + + + + FOOTNOTE 2 : THE COVER New York Review Books are usually so marvelous with their covers that it baffles me how they could have chosen this Bonnard painting for this particular book. It is indeed vibrant and gorgeous, but it gives an entirely wrong idea of the novel. Mediterranean color for Yorkshire rain? Hot passion for understated erotic possibility? An close interior for a book that is spent largely outdoors or in drafty churches? I tried playing with similar covers using an English artist of the period, Stanley Spencer. They don't all work equally well (I would have loved to have found a Spencer painting of a church without other figures in the foreground), but any one of them sets up better expectations than the Bonnard. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 22, 2017
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Jun 23, 2017
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Aug 24, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0241145333
| 9780241145333
| 0241145333
| 3.69
| 556
| Jan 01, 2013
| Jun 06, 2013
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it was amazing
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Possessed by Doubt On December 21, 1988, almost exactly twenty-five years ago as I write, Pan American flight 103 from London to New York was brought d Possessed by Doubt On December 21, 1988, almost exactly twenty-five years ago as I write, Pan American flight 103 from London to New York was brought down by a bomb and crashed over the small town of Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people aboard and eleven more on the ground. Although others may have been implicated, only one man was convicted of planting the bomb, a Libyan national who was released several years later on compassionate grounds; he died of prostrate cancer in 2012. His death may well have been the trigger for Scottish author James Robertson's imaginative and morally profound novel; it is certainly the event with which it opens. Not that Robertson mentions real names: the airline, places, and foreign countries involved are left anonymous, and the convicted bomber, his presumed accomplice, and the chief witness are given pseudonyms. But as every detail that Robertson does give—even down to the date, time, and 38-minute duration of the flight—are precisely the same as the Pan Am crash, he is clearly not trying to disguise his intended subject. Or rather, not his subject. For although he goes into the crash and subsequent investigation in detail, his focus is on aspects of such a story that are not put to rest by a simple verdict. Do law enforcement agencies ever bend the facts to fit a politically expedient narrative? Can vengeance be exacted against a scapegoat who may not in fact be guilty? Is there such a thing as true closure? What happens when a man's grief turns to an obsession that prevents him from leading a meaningful life? When truth is found, will it stand out like a pristine shining object, or will it be a tarnished affair of accident and compromise? Alan Tealing is a Lecturer in English at a new university in an old Scottish town (I imagine Stirling). After losing his American wife and six-year-old daughter in the bombing, he devotes his research skills to following the case in every aspect. But some things at the trial convince him that they have got the wrong man, and he takes his doubts public. As the book opens, he is giving a television interview proclaiming that the death of the convicted bomber will change nothing. But it does change something. It brings to his door a former CIA/FBI operative named Nielsen who needs to make peace with his own conscience before dying. What he tells Alan will send him off to Australia, where the novel reaches its climax in the midst of a series of devastating bush fires. The antipodean leap from the first part, entitled "Ice," to the second, "Fire," is the one weak point in an otherwise superb novel, requiring that the reader shares Alan's obsession enough to follow even the slimmest of clues. But his encounters with the two principal people he meets there will propel the story into new depths, and open him to disasters other than his own. The action climax is magnificently handled, but even more magnificent is the quiet settling that follows it, so much more meaningful than a pat solution to some mystery or conspiracy theory. A truly fine book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 06, 2013
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Dec 08, 2013
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Jul 21, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1860499333
| 9781860499333
| 1860499333
| 3.43
| 1,295
| 2001
| Aug 01, 2002
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it was amazing
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Trust This is one of those extraordinary novels where, from the very first page, you find yourself just trusting the author. Never for a moment did I d Trust This is one of those extraordinary novels where, from the very first page, you find yourself just trusting the author. Never for a moment did I doubt I was reading anything less than a five-star book, but its quality was whispered rather than shouted. It has no obviously heroic characters or striking locations; it barely has a story; if it deals in great themes, they are left for the reader to discover, without fanfare. Even the Kyoto gardens of the title are invoked only as an image; the main action barely leaves the Philadelphia area and the rural Eastern Shore of Maryland. I could not even say how the various parts of the novel fit together, yet fit they do. You read as an act of discovery, simply trusting that the pattern will be revealed. Meanwhile, though, the characters are nuanced and real, the emotion touching in its understatement, and the evocation of period is perfect—and that is all that matters. "I had a cousin, Randall, killed on Iwo Jima. Have I told you?" Ellen, the narrator, opens the book with these words. She would see Randall whenever her family visited their Maryland farm, a former stop on the Underground Railroad. To his poetic soul, the former fugitives are still a vital presence and their ghosts occupy the house. He and Ellen become teenage soulmates, more than half in love by the time he is shipped off to war. His loss affects her more than she knows. Many years later, when she is in college, Ellen meets another soldier about to go to war, this time to Korea. Although he originally had eyes only for another girl, when he reenters Ellen's life, everything will have changed. Death in battle is not the only tragedy of war. At one point, Ellen makes a cryptic reference to Rupert Brooke's elegiac 1915 sonnet, "The Soldier": If I should die, think only this of meWalbert's whole novel is a kind of elegy, set not on the battlefields but in ordinary corners back home. It is no less poignant that these are simple losses felt by people who are young and about to embark on their lives. Indeed, at a time when the whole country was making a fresh start on life. Trust implies truth, but not necessarily at every stage along the way. Ellen is not a simple narrator, and only in sum is she a reliable one. The novel has two main time periods, the mid-forties and mid-fifties; Ellen keeps going back and forth between them, throwing in little surprises at each turn, often contradicting what she had implied before. The first of the five parts, for example, ends with what appears to be a bombshell, but Ellen will later reveal that she and Randall both knew about this much earlier. In another section, the death of another family member will be reported as established fact, and you thumb back wondering if you have missed something. But no, she will tell you the details in her own good time. Meanwhile, there are a number of quite short chapters that appear to have nothing directly to do with Ellen, Randall, or Henry. Scenes, for instance, involving a horticulturist who kept himself sane in WW1 by drawing the flora of Northern France. A teacher on Iwo Jima who kept his class safe by hiding in a cave filled with blue butterflies. Or the gardens of Kyoto, sacred spaces with a healing purpose. If I was briefly disappointed that Walbert never takes us there in person, I began to yearn for these oases of calm as the gentle force that holds the story together. One of these, Koto-In, is a garden that you approach down a long avenue of trees shaped so that their shadows spell poems on the path. Poems that are incomplete by the time the traveler reaches the single arch through which the garden may be seen... But this window is impossible to pry open, the gardens [left] as much to the imagination as the endings of the Koto-In poems that are left unfinished, the ones interrupted by a sudden change of weather.Oblique; enigmatic; wonderful. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 26, 2014
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Sep 28, 2014
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Jun 09, 2016
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Paperback
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| 1935744925
| 9781935744924
| 1935744925
| 3.70
| 325
| 1981
| Apr 15, 2014
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it was amazing
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Ìý If I could writeâ€� If I could write, I would take up a porcupine quill and scratch your enormous belly full from top to bottom. I would clamber up aÌý If I could writeâ€� If I could write, I would take up a porcupine quill and scratch your enormous belly full from top to bottom. I would clamber up as far as your branches and carve notches in your armpits to make you laugh. Big letters. Small letters. In a script full of lobes and curls, in circumambient lines I write round and round you, for I have so much to tell of a trip to a new horizon that became an expedition to a tree.But of course she cannot write. For this is a former slave, captured as a young girl in the heart of Africa, sold to rich merchants in the South willing to pay first for unplucked fruit and later for a compliant young concubine. Now, presumably still young, she is in the heart of the African plains once more, living in a hollow baobab tree, alone, but her own mistress for the first time. The fact that she cannot write at all is not limitation but licence. Licence for Afrikaans writer Wilma Stockenström to give her words that she could not possibly know, aided now by a luxuriant translation by Nobel Prizewinner J. M. Coetzee. Licence to have her ignore the normal rules of narrative, and enfold the past into the present, reality into dream, until this short but exquisite book becomes a single long poem in prose, lament and celebration and lament once more. Facts emerge, but very little can be pinned down. We never know the year, though it is probably in the earlier 1800s. We are not told the country of her captivity, though we assume the southeast tip of Africa. The girl herself is never named. Gradually, we form a picture of her various owners, lascivious, cruel, or indulgent, and the final one that she calls only the Stranger, who serves more as protector than master. For the most part, hers is not a slavehood of the hovel and the lash; before long, she is well fed, splendidly clothed, and pampered. But never her own person. She depends upon the will of others. Her children are taken away from her as soon as they are weaned. When she visits the quarters of her former companions, she is rejected. Though she is carried by other slaves in a palanquin on that final quixotic expedition to find a city of rose quartz by the shores of a distant sea, she has no choice but to go along. So we see her now, the only survivor, emaciated, grubbing in the earth for doubtful food. She is saved by an encounter with a tribe of tiny bushmen, who bring her daily offerings as though to a god, but it is only another kind of captivity: I often ask myself whether they are displaying charity towards me or bringing tribute. I try to behave fittingly. Acknowledge to myself that there is nothing for me to do but accept my fate as a pampered captive and show myself grateful accordingly.But things can change. She may have no power over the world around her, but still retains some power over herself. The final pages of the book, if possible, are even more beautiful than those that had preceded them. And even more disturbing. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 12, 2014
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May 13, 2014
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Jun 03, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0143122673
| 9780143122678
| 0143122673
| 3.51
| 1,957
| 2010
| Feb 26, 2013
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it was amazing
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Ample make this bed Ample make this bed.Ample make this bed Ample make this bed.This beautiful, beautiful book, a novel with the intimate feel of a novella, opens with a two-stanza poem by Emily Dickinson, "Ample make this bed." It closes with a translation of the same poem into Dutch. By the time we reach the end, we have taken possession of the epigraph, fully understanding its relevance to the whole—and why the protagonist, a youngish Dutch Dickinson scholar named Emilie, needed to translate it into her own language, to take that possession, to make it personal to her. Dickinson's poetic style, deceptively simple diction hiding profound thoughts, is also true of Bakker, whose short chapters and clean declarative sentences pack an insidious emotional heft. If this sounds too airy-fairy, turn to the facts. The setting is NW Wales, a little south of Caernarfon, nestling by the western slope of Snowdon, Wales's highest mountain. The young Dutch scholar has rented an isolated farmhouse at the far end of a mile-long lane. In one of her fields are ten white geese that slowly begin disappearing, prey perhaps to foxes. Flocks of sheep or herds of cows appear in other fields from time to time, though she knows nothing about that. The location and countryside is so precisely described that you can easily locate the area on a map, walk where she walks, and see what she sees, including the shy badgers that for some reason appear to her but are seldom seen by others. The recurrent landscape and animal references are clearly intentional; there is something instinctual in Emilie's escape here also, like an animal going to ground. I must be cautious in describing the human parts of the story, because Bakker is masterly in how he parcels out information. We soon learn that Emilie has come to Wales at short notice from Holland, leaving both her husband and her former job at a university. Her need for solitude in Wales is matched by the combined curiosity and suspicion in the few locals that she meets. Only two people visit her house: one a local sheep farmer whom she immediately sees as an enemy, the other a young man of around twenty called Bradwen. He is as sensitive and caring as the older man is surly, and the blossoming of their relationship (though seldom in obvious ways) is largely responsible for the beauty that suffuses the latter half of the book. In thinking about how to avoid spoilers, I have come to realize one of the most extraordinary aspects of Bakker's novel. It is full of secrets and minor revelations, and yet at the same time it also seems preordained, a natural process that you just wait to be played out. I don't think I have ever before experienced the curious combination of emotions I felt as various forces all come together towards a climax in the last fifty pages of the book: perched on the edge of my chair to learn what would happen next, yet all the time feeling this was right, right, right. Absolutely one of my top books of the year so far. The only thing that might have made it even more enjoyable would have been to read it in the British edition. The book and the excellent translation by David Colmer are the same; the title, The Detour, is less evocative, though closer to the Dutch—but there is that magnificent cover which is even truer to Bakker's spare elegance. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 11, 2014
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Apr 12, 2014
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Jun 03, 2016
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Paperback
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| 1590171993
| 9781590171998
| 1590171993
| 4.35
| 208,738
| 1965
| Jun 20, 2006
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it was amazing
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You CAN Tell a Book by its Cover! Seldom has a book had a more perfect cover. It is dark, serious, and intense, yes, but then so is John Williams' 1965 You CAN Tell a Book by its Cover! Seldom has a book had a more perfect cover. It is dark, serious, and intense, yes, but then so is John Williams' 1965 novel of university life. Look more closely at the figure on the cover and you will see a man approaching middle age, a man of great sensitivity, upright but private, lost in his own thoughts; appropriately, this is a Thomas Eakins portrait entitled "The Thinker." In 1910, William Stoner sets out to walk the fifteen miles from his parents' farm to Columbia, Missouri, to study agriculture, boarding with a relative and doing farm work to pay his way. In the middle of his second year, an acerbic English professor challenges him with literature, and he secretly changes his major, staying at the university during the war years to complete his doctorate, and teaching there for the rest of his life. The book opens with reference to his death in 1956, still only an assistant professor, half deaf, and with a reputation as a campus curmudgeon. A failure, then? Not a bit of it! As the book explores five decades of Stoner's life, the man we meet is a person of passion, someone with a great potential for love, but too much principle to give in to the enmity of others. It may be the best novel of university life I have ever read. But Williams makes little allowance for non-academic audiences. One crucial scene in the middle shows the oral examination for a PhD candidate in English. For those of us who have been there (on either side of the table), it is perfect, but it does require some familiarity with literary history, campus politics, and the styles of academic bombast. The exam is the turning-point in the relationship between Stoner and Hollis Lomax, his department chair and implacable enemy. Lomax is a superb portrait: physically deformed, academically brilliant, and motivated by an inexplicable hatred buried deep in the psyche. But Stoner is not to be defined by university politics, but by his commitment to his subject, his increasing abilities as a teacher, and above all by his value as a human being. It is here that John Williams connects most strongly with the lay reader. Vicariously, we join in his intense friendship with two student colleagues, we feel his attraction to the beautiful banker's daughter from St. Louis with whom he falls in love, we despair at the failure of the marriage, yet share in Stoner's intense love for his growing daughter. Edith, Stoner's wife, is another of Williams' most brilliant portraits. As with Hollis Lomax, there is no easy explanation for her irrational behavior, but we sense its truth nonetheless. And when Stoner, in his forties, falls in love with a graduate student, we rejoice to see his intellectual respect and innate sensuality finally entwine and blossom. Later still, at sixty, he thinks that "he ought to be beyond the force of such passion, of such love... But he was not beyond it, he knew, and would never be. [...] He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive....more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 17, 2013
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Aug 19, 2013
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May 29, 2016
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 159017013X
| 9781590170137
| 159017013X
| 3.80
| 1,776
| 1955
| Aug 01, 2002
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it was amazing
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A Vigil for All the Murdered She knew that a bay and rocks and trees bending over the surf cannot relieve sadness—can sadness be relieved, or can onA Vigil for All the Murdered She knew that a bay and rocks and trees bending over the surf cannot relieve sadness—can sadness be relieved, or can one only pass it by, very slowly?In my reading over the past decade, I have really come to trust the reissues of the New York Review of Books—works of fiction, predominantly foreign, that have undeservedly slipped out of circulation. They do for older literature what the Europa Press does for contemporary: open the reader's eyes to a wide range of geographical locations, subjects, and narrative approaches. There are many hits but few misses, and even the oddball books that are hard to classify are fascinating in their oddness. So it is with this unique novel by Dutch author Maria Dermoût, first published in 1958. How to describe it: a ghost story, a generation-spanning romance, a tropical idyll? It begins as a novel, then dissolves all the conventions in a series of apparently unconnected stories, only to pull it all together in a final chapter resonant with the echoes of old losses and present joy. But let's start with the beginning: "On the island in the Moluccas there were a few gardens left from the great days of spice growing�". On one of these, on the Inner Bay, lives a widow, an old Dutch settler, known as "The Lady of the Small Garden." She has a grand-daughter, Felicia, who grows up among the plants, shells, and animal life of the bay, an idyllic childhood full of discovery and imagination. Full, too, of the imagination of others: the beliefs of the island people, the visits of the old Bibi selling objects with special powers, the collections in her grandmother's curiosity cabinet, and the ghosts of three little girls in pink who died long ago on the same day. The book's presiding spirit is the 17th-century German Dutch botanist Georg Eberhard Rumphius, who first classified the plants of the Indonesian archipelago, but also published a book of curiosities which is as speculative as his herbiary was scientific. Dermoût also shifts from objective description to inner imagination, often within a single sentence. Fact and fancy intermingle in this book, time is dissolved, the Lady of the Small Garden even morphs from grandmother to granddaughter in the book's opening section, and nobody even notices. For Felicia, after completing her education in Europe and marrying a man who soon deserts her, comes back to the Island with her infant son Himpies. She lives in the Small Garden and grows old in her turn. Decades slip by in an eyeblink. Major happenings pass in moments; minor ones seem suspended in time. World events hardly seem to touch this outpost; it is hard even to put a date on the action, though it probably begins in the later 19th century. But Felicia is no hermit; even as an old woman, she welcomes the guests who sail their proas to her dock. One day each year, however, she keeps strictly for herself, as a vigil for all those who have been murdered on the island�. Accustomed as I now was to the unpredictable aspects of this book, I was taken by surprise when, about half-way through, Dermoût suddenly takes leave of Felicia and embarks upon three stories which seem to have no connection with each other. There is the retired Commissioner at the Outer Bay, holed up in an old house with four women and a collection of gold and pearls. There is the cook Constance, with her parade of admirers and her fondness for dancing at the rattan tug-of-war. There is the Javanese prince who takes work as a clerk to a Scottish professor, revisiting Rumphius' work on the flora and fauna of the islands. Only at the very end, when we return to Felicia's annual vigil, do we see the connections between the stories, not merely in the deaths they contain, but also in the cycle of life, a vision of wholeness that embraces shells and pearls, a fleet of jellyfish and a tame cockatoo, memories of children and young men killed in their prime, and extending even to the murderers themselves. ...more |
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Apr 21, 2012
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Apr 23, 2012
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May 18, 2016
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| 0312275420
| 9780312275426
| 0312275420
| 3.73
| 5,298
| Jan 01, 1999
| 1999
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it was amazing
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Life Cycle This is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read, vying with D. M. Thomas' The White Hotel for poetic originality, though qu Life Cycle This is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read, vying with D. M. Thomas' The White Hotel for poetic originality, though quite different in manner. And one of the most extraordinary things about it is that it makes no claim to concern itself with world events at all, but something utterly ordinary: the death of a middle-aged couple near a small seaside town. Which brings me to the first of the four points I offer as demonstration.� 1. The Story. Joseph and Celice are zoologists in their later fifties. As the novel opens, they die together shortly after making love in a hollow in the dunes of Baritone Beach, the setting of their very first tryst three decades before. The book is well titled: their death is simply a fact. There is a crime, but no mystery; nobody has much hope of solving it. Instead, what Crace concentrates on is simply death itself, and what happens to the bodies in the six days between being killed and carried away. He does this in clinical detail which at first seems disgusting, but soon develops its own kind of poetry; this is death as it might be described by a scientist such as Joseph and Celice are themselves. But death is not Crace's only subject.� 2. The Handling of Time. The novel juggles three time-frames simultaneously. One, hour by hour, day by day, is the post-mortem narrative that I mentioned above. Against this, Crace sets a second sequence, describing how the couple arrived at the beach, and moving backwards an hour at a time to Joseph waking Celice at daybreak to tell her that the day promises to be too good to waste indoors. For this is also a portrait of a marriage, a marriage held together by love and parenthood, though no longer by passion. A third timeline goes back thirty years to their first meeting, as graduate students on field study, and the unpredictable twists that led them into each other's arms. There are surprises in this story which will affect their later lives, including their last excursion. All in all, this is as much a book about love and companionship as about death. You could even argue that Crace's objective description of dying is the mechanism that allows him to paint an entirely clear-eyed portrait of marriage, totally free from sentiment, and to have it emerge as something both ordinary and beautiful. 3. The Setting. Crace is a superb writer, and brilliantly evokes the duneland setting of Baritone Bay (so called for the occasional phenomenon of its singing sands) and its flora and fauna. But it has the quality of somewhere you almost know but can't quite place. I wondered about East Anglia, since Crace is English, but that doesn't quite fit. I thought the American Northeast, but no fit there either. I am not the first to note this; I came upon at least one blog entry raising the same questions. This story about biologists, for instance, is filled with plants of all kinds, from the manac shells that surface the paths to the lissom grass on which the couple bed down; look them up, though, and you will find they don't exist. The people in the town, too, seem part of the familiar Anglo world, but the drinks they consume, the drugs they take, the customs of their lives, all are slightly unfamiliar: cousinly, not fraternal. It is a superb balancing act, doubly so in that you are hardly aware of it at all. I suppose it is a kind of science fiction: the everyday world re-imagined through the mind of a scientist. 4. The Language. Crace invents a linguistic world in order to be master of it, to hold it to the light, turn it on its head, hold it up to the scrutiny of eternity. That reversal of time, for instance. At the start of the book, he describes an old custom (I think invented) of "quivering," a kind of wake whose purpose is to shake the body and turn time backward: Their memories, exposed to the backward-running time of quiverings in which regrets became prospects, resentments became love, experience became hope, would up-end the hourglass of Celice and Joseph's life together and let their sands reverse.I am reminded of Martin Amis turning time backwards in Time's Arrow, although Crace has far greater subtlety. His object is not illuminate some particular event but to make a statement about life in the universe—an atheist's philosophy perhaps, but as consoling as anything offered by religion. So let me end with the passage when Joseph and Celice's bodies are finally separated: Joseph's body rolled towards the west. His wife went east. They came off the grass and on to cotton, then into wood-effect, then on to the flat bed of the sand jeep, along the beach and through the suburbs to the icy, sliding drawers of the city morgue, the coroner's far room, amongst the suicides. Their bodies had been swept away, at last, by wind, by time, by chance. The continents could start to drift again and there was space in heaven for the shooting stars....more |
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Dec 12, 2011
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Dec 14, 2011
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May 17, 2016
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| 0802170846
| 9780802170842
| 0802170846
| 3.78
| 130
| Aug 02, 2011
| Aug 02, 2011
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it was amazing
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Dreams from Exile Do we still know what it's like to dream about the other side of the mountain? At what point does one cross the crest of forgettinDreams from Exile Do we still know what it's like to dream about the other side of the mountain? At what point does one cross the crest of forgetting?There is the generation of Cubans who have made the dangerous trip across the straits, who have settled, even prospered, in Miami, but who still dream of that scented island across the sea. Then there are the later generations, of whom Ana Menéndez is one, raised in one language but living in the world of another, where the place-specific losses of parents and grandparents become metaphors for the losses, dreams, and quest for identity that shape us all. And that is what she does in this extraordinary book, dealing in metaphors of remarkable potency, in a miscellaneous collection of stories, poems, nightmares, and quirky fragments that, so far from breaking apart, resonate together in a vast echo chamber of sorrow, joy, and possibility. Ostensibly, the book is collection of work by Cuban poets gathered by an Irish expatriate who came to the island as a child. All the authors, of course, are fictional, but the fiction provides a framework for the book's extraordinary range. And no matter what voice she chooses, Menéndez can write. Here, from the beginning of the book, is a six-year-old boy woken by his mother to set out on a long trip: "Children are the slaves of other voices. They have not yet mastered the first person singular and are always at the blunt end of someone else's dream." This story, "Cojimar," and the two that follow are obviously based on the 1999 story of Elián González, the sole survivor of an escape by sea from Cuba, who was eventually repatriated by the US authorities. But Menéndez shies from telling the story straight: the first tale is suspended somewhere between the uncomprehending wonder of the child and the almost mystical fears of an old fisherman. The second is a comedy set in an officeful of Miami expatriates engaged in milking the US Government. The third is a Cuban press-release. This technique of approaching a subject from different angles and in wildly differing styles is central to the author's method. Few of the other pieces can be tied down so clearly to an historical event. She has mostly chosen to occupy the mind of the exile as a psychic space, dreaming alternately of escape and return. Images of transport abound: flight, wings, parachutes, balloons; boats, winds, and the call of the sea; grand railroad terminals, and trains speeding through darkness that never reach their destination. The images collide in the ending to the first story, a surreal nightmare of an old man hunted by killers in a station whose roof opens to the firmament: "With a great concussion of air, the train swept into the station, bearing with it the smell of the sea." Another old person a couple of stories later unspools her dying life to the moment of her birth in a pristine Cuba: "Nameless now she goes, tearing stars into time's shroud, cleansed and purified for the journey's return." Menéndez' evocative surrealism is so quotable, but her style keeps changing. Some of her most effective stories are quite realistic and barely connected to the Cuban theme at all. In "Three Betrayals," an ordinary divorce case becomes an allegory of loss. In "The Express," a professor commuting home from another city starts to reevaluate her life when the train hits a suicide: "And now? Now she was whole, complete, content. She breathed and loved. She'd banished danger; but never again would she be invited to dance on its electric rim." Ana Menéndez certainly knows the electric rim, but she writes from a center of completeness. Despite her verbal wizardry—in Spanish as well as English, using the very act of translation as another metaphor—what I keep coming back to are the deeply-rooted passages that touch me again with their beauty, wonder, or sorrow. Reading this is an experience like no other. ...more |
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| 0940322153
| 9780940322158
| 0940322153
| 3.77
| 10,230
| 1929
| Jan 01, 1928
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Ìý A Subversive Masterpiece [July, 2011] I have just begun reading New Yorker critic James Wood's wonderful handbook, How Fiction Works, and so am partic Ìý A Subversive Masterpiece [July, 2011] I have just begun reading New Yorker critic James Wood's wonderful handbook, How Fiction Works, and so am particularly attuned to questions of narrative voice: who is telling the story, with whose thoughts, and for what audience? A perfect focus for Richard Hughes' 1929 novel, a subversive masterpiece of apparently straightforward narrative used for disturbing ends. Hughes writes like an adult telling stories to children. He is not a parent, but black-sheep Uncle Dickie with a deliciously cavalier attitude towards convention. The book begins with five English children leading a carefree life on a run-down plantation in mid-nineteenth-century Jamaica. Their parents having little time for them, they amuse themselves by such pursuits as catching small animals and swimming. Here is Emily, the eldest girl: Once, when she was eight, Mrs. Thornton had thought she was too big to bathe naked any more. The only bathing-dress she could rig up was an old cotton night-gown. Emily jumped in as usual: first the balloons of air tipped her upside down, and then the wet cotton wrapped itself round her head and arms and nearly drowned her. After that, decency was let go hang again: it is hardly worth being drowned for—at least, it does not at first sight appear to be.Decency go hang—how great for a child! You would not find such laissez-faire attitudes in genuine Victorian children's literature such as E. Nesbit's The Railway Children, and you certainly don't find it in C. S. Lewis' high-minded The Chronicles of Narnia a quarter century later. But what about that authorial aside, "at first sight"? A warning of more serious trespasses still to come? Or consider this passage. The children, on a visit to a neighboring plantation, are swimming in a lagoon. It is heavy, close, and suddenly very still: The water of the bay was as smooth and immovable as basalt, yet clear as the finest gin: albeit the swell muttered a mile away on the reef. The water within the pool itself could not reasonably be smoother. No sea-breeze thought of stirring. No bird trespassed on the inert air.By giving nature a well-bred sense of decorum with his "reasonably," "thought," and "trespassed," Hughes is playing to the children—but the comparisons to basalt and gin are disconcertingly adult. The switches of voice, together with the brilliant description of the earthquake which follows, keep the reader off-balance for a page or two; but when it is over, he returns to Emily, surprised that her hosts take the Big Event as a matter of course: How funny Creoles were! They didn't seem to realize the difference it made to a person's whole after-life to have been in an Earthquake.Soon it will not be merely a matter of stylistic hints, though these have laid the groundwork. The story proceeds like a wonderful adventure. The children survive a hurricane, but are shipped off to England for safety. Their ship is captured by pirates and they remain on the pirate boat for several weeks, getting dirty as mudlarks, climbing the rigging, and making friends with the ship's menagerie, which at one point even includes a lion and a tiger. But animals from the beginning have been more than childhood playmates—more like predators and prey, and a primal image of an animality that the children themselves share. Not that Uncle Richard's child listeners would notice; he already has them in thrall. But imagine the shock in their bright eyes when he suddenly kills off one protagonist, involves another in homicide, and makes to drown a third. And any adults reading over his shoulder would certainly pick up on the burgeoning sexuality and loom of puberty just over the horizon. Not a story for children, after all. The children turn out to be more feral than the basically benevolent pirates, but it is not evil coming out, so much as the inherent amorality of childhood, the darker side of innocence. I thought, of course, of William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954), but while Hughes' actual events are less horrific than Golding's, the implication of that horror is more pervasive. Golding wrote of the breakdown of boarding-school order into savage mob rule; Hughes' children are in their natural anarchic state to begin with and they keep a sort of innocence to the end. To some extent, Golding was writing a political novel in the shuddering transition from hot to cold war. Hughes would go on to write political fiction later, in his planned trilogy on the rise of the Second World War that began with The Fox in the Attic in 1961, but here he is doing something deeper; his battlefield is mapped by Freud and Jung. Yet he was subliminally aware of the currents of his time. I cannot do better than quote the ending of Francine Prose's fine introduction to the NYRB edition: Published in 1929, just as history was preparing events that would forever revise the terms in which one could talk about innocence and evil, A High Wind in Jamaica is one of those prescient works of art that seems somehow to have caught (on the breeze, as it were) a warning scent of danger and blood—that is to say, of the future....more |
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Jul 16, 2011
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| 1862075891
| 9781862075894
| 1862075891
| 3.91
| 568
| 1954
| Jan 01, 2004
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it was amazing
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Totentanz
Why is this author almost unknown in this country? This novel from 1954 is a compact masterpiece, a lurid but fascinating dance of death Totentanz Why is this author almost unknown in this country? This novel from 1954 is a compact masterpiece, a lurid but fascinating dance of death that anatomizes the German psyche in the decade following the Second World War. Its setting is Rome in the early 1950s, evoked in a brilliant collage of sights, sounds, tastes and smells. Into this, with the choreographed contrivance of artistic licence, Koeppen brings together several members of a German family, scattered by hatred or exile since 1945. Chief among these is Judejahn (the name has overtones of "Jew hunter"), an ex-Nazi general and executant of the Final Solution, now training the armies of some Arab country under an assumed name. He is brought to Rome by his brother-in-law Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath, a loyal functionary who once claimed that his position as Oberpresident of a province made the events of Kristallnacht none of his business, now denazified and elected °¿²ú±ð°ù²úü°ù²µ±ð°ù³¾±ð¾±²õ³Ù±ð°ù by the citizens of his town. Pfaffrath believes that the conscience-laundering process can be applied to Judejahn also, not realizing the intensity of the other's continued devotion to the ideals of the old Third Reich. Set against these as representatives of the younger generation are their respective sons, who also happen to be in Rome at the same time. Judejahn's son Adolf, coming upon a stalled train of concentration camp inmates in the last days of the war, has suffered a crisis of conscience and is now in process of becoming a priest. His cousin Siegfried Pfaffrath is a composer, turning his back on German Romanticism to write in the new atonal style. The four men come together for the first time at the premiere of Siegfried's symphony, a scene that forms the dialectical climax of a book that has already screwed itself up to fever pitch and plumbed the depths of despair. Listening to the music, the deacon Adolf feelsâ€� …it was like a reflection of his childhood in a broken mirror. The Teutonic fort was in the music, the exercise grounds, the woods, sunrise and sunsets and dormitory dreams. But the cynicism and unbelief, the narcissistic flirtation with despair, and the drift into anarchy drove Adolf away.As in his earlier Pigeons on the Grass (1951), which deals with the post-Hitler limbo in a German city under American occupation, Koeppen switches subjects and viewpoints almost paragraph by paragraph, now listening to Siegfried in the first person, now following him in the third, now breaking off to another character, or looking something outside the story altogether such as his wonderful reflection on the Pope at prayer. The effect is musical, but while the earlier novel was almost skittish and jazzlike, here the rhythms are slower, the connections tauter, the language cutting deeper. Originally separate, Koeppen's four figures (and several others beside them) circle one another in a tighening spiral, to come together in a climax of outward hatred and inner doubt. Keeping them separate for so long, Koeppen can show their private lives as clearly as their public personae, revealing everything from grandiose mania to crippling self-loathing, even in the same person. He can contrast their sexual proclivities: the confused yearning of Adolf, the pederasty of Siegfried, or the sadism of Judejahn. But it is by no means all inner monologue; a clear sequence of events generates increasing momentum over a couple of days. The climax, when it comes, may seem contrived, but the psychology is utterly convincing, etched in blood, bile, and acid. The brilliant translation by Michael Hoffman is a living thing, jumping from high art to slang, exalted and depraved by turns. Hoffman has also provided that rare thing: an introduction that can safely be read before the book itself and which greatly deepens one's appreciation of it. And renders my own comments derivative by comparison. ...more |
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Feb 19, 2011
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Feb 21, 2011
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May 12, 2016
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| 1741668379
| 9781741668377
| 1741668379
| 3.70
| 5,048
| 2009
| unknown
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it was amazing
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Mortals David Malouf, who first visited the classical world near the start of his career with An Imaginary Life (1978), about the poet Ovid, now re Mortals David Malouf, who first visited the classical world near the start of his career with An Imaginary Life (1978), about the poet Ovid, now returns to it with his latest novel Ransom, a retelling of the last book of The Iliad. This short book, its small beautiful pages fitting easily into the hand, is nonetheless vast in scale, fully worthy of its original. Malouf writes as a poet, beginning with Homeric grandeur, but moving towards simple humanity. He strikes the heroic tone early in describing Achilles, his life shaped by foreknowledge of his certain death: He had entered the rough world of men, where a man's acts follow him wherever he goes in the form of a story. A world of pain, loss, dependency, bursts of violence and elation; of fatality and fatal contradictions, breathless leaps into the unknown; at last of death—a hero's death out there in the full sunlight under the gaze of gods and men, for which the hardened self, the hardened body, had daily to be exercised and prepared.By the end of Homer's epic, Achilles has slain the Trojan hero Hector, in revenge for the killing of his best friend Patroclus. Not content with that, he degrades the body by tying it by the heels to his chariot axle and dragging it around the camp. By evening, the corpse is bloodied and unrecognizable, but each night it is magically restored to its former purity. This goes on for eleven days. Homer then describes how Priam, the Trojan king and Hector's father, goes alone to Achilles with a cart laden with treasure, which he offers in ransom for the body of his son. Malouf's novel is the story of that single incident, the same in every important detail, but how different in tone! As he does throughout The Iliad, Homer opens this final book with a scene for the gods in Olympus. They argue about the situation on earth, and eventually dispatch various deities to prepare Achilles, command Priam, and guide him safely on his way. Homer's mortals are effectively the puppets of the gods. But Malouf sees the story entirely in human terms (though one god does make a cameo appearance). Priam, who had himself been ransomed as a child, conceives the idea himself, over the opposition of his courtiers. As a king, he had always served as a remote ceremonial figurehead; his intent now is to put off all signs of rank and grandeur, and travel in a mule cart with a simple peasant as driver. For me, the heart of this deeply moving novel is this journey shared by the two old men, the one in his element, the other learning about it for the first time. The water, the fish, the flocks of snub-tailed swifts had always been here, engaged in their own lives and the small activities that were proper to them, pursuing their own busy ends. But till now he had had no occasion to take notice of them. They were not in the royal sphere.For the first time Priam finds himself talking with a man who is not constrained by ceremony or rank, and he finds himself first interested in and then moved by the story of his small joys and many sorrows. With his newfound humanity as a shield, Priam approaches Achilles as man to man, father to father, mourner to fellow mourner. And his entreaty succeeds, as Homer tells. It buys only a short respite, but it lays down a marker for human beings taking their destiny out of the hands the gods. Perhaps only in small things: Troy will yet fall, Priam will die, and Achilles also. But the acceptance of death is itself a form of grandeur, and to cling to simple humanity in a cruel world is true nobility. ...more |
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Apr 11, 2010
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Apr 12, 2010
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May 08, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0224081187
| 9780224081184
| 0224081187
| 3.62
| 98,610
| Apr 05, 2007
| Mar 23, 2007
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it was amazing
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Ìý Almost A brilliant book, but such a sad one; it would be unfair not to say so up front. Ian McEwan is a master at dissecting emotions. Every page of t Ìý Almost A brilliant book, but such a sad one; it would be unfair not to say so up front. Ian McEwan is a master at dissecting emotions. Every page of this wonderfully-crafted novel gave me the uncanny feeling of living within the skins of the two main characters, Edward and Florence, just married as the book opens. When they fall in love, nurture ambitions, experience happiness, I feel these things too. But when happiness eludes them, the pain is unbearable, not least because the author never lets us forget by how small a margin their happiness was missed. In his last major novel, Saturday, McEwan pulled back from the multi-decade scope of Atonement , its predecessor, choosing to confine himself to the events of a single day. Here, the essential action occupies a mere three hours, described in a book which is itself unusually compact, a mere novella of only 200 delicate pages. In an opening that is surely a homage to Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," the new husband and wife sit in a hotel room within sound of the sea on England's South coast. They eat a mediocre meal in one room; in the next, their bed stands waiting. They love each other, there is never any doubt about that, but they are inexperienced and secretly afraid. The book tells how they came to that moment, and what becomes of their love and fears as they move from one room into the other. I have not known McEwan to write before in such detail about sex, but his writing is never prurient. Every detail serves to illustrate the psychological intercourse between these two talented and caring young people. On this particular night, as in a high-stakes game, their honeymoon bed becomes the board upon which all the other pieces of their relationship must be played. By going back to the early 1960s, that dark hour just before the dawn of the sexual revolution, McEwan performs the remarkable feat of undoing the modern liberation of sex from marriage and returning to a mindset in which marriage was not only a contract for sex, but sex might also be a prime reason for marriage. But not the only reason. The focus on the bedroom also makes you consider all the other qualities that these two bring to their marriage, and before long you feel that you know them very well. [Exceptionally well in my case, since I was also born in Britain in the same year (1940), and share qualities with each of them; readers might take this into account when weighing the objectivity of my reactions.] Edward is a bright young man from the country who has recently achieved a first-class academic degree. Florence comes from a more socially sophisticated family, though she herself is naive in most things. The one exception is her calling as a violinist; here as in Saturday, McEwan is extraordinary in his use of music; the sections describing Florence's quartet playing are right up there with Vikram Seth's An Equal Music, my touchstone for sensitive writing about musicians. So both are bright, both are talented, both feel the stirring of new possibilities, but there are big differences between them, socially and culturally (Edward, for example, is into rock), and they each want different things. But the most heartbreaking things in this book are not their differences, but how often and how close they come to making new connections; just an inch more, a moment longer, and everything might be all rightâ€�. Almost. But McEwan does not end the story in the bedroom or on the beach below. Much as in Atonement, though in only a few pages, he adds an epilogue continuing the story forward several decades. At the time, I felt it was too brief to settle all the emotions stirred up by the preceding pages, but now as I write, several hours after closing the book, I begin to see its rightness and appreciate its consolation. ====== [image] I saw the movie last night. With one exception, though, I will have to put my comments as a spoiler, for those who haven't already read the book. (view spoiler)[The photography was excellent, especially in evoking the loneliness of that pebble beach. The sense of period was uncanny, not just in visual details but also practical ones. It’s in the book too, but seeing the unspeakable awfulness of that honeymoon dinner—melon slice with glacé cherry, and overcooked roast beef with mixed veg—slammed me with repellent recognition. The leads, Billy Hawle and Saoirse Ronan, were both good, if just a smidgen too old. But also—and this is what matters—too present. The scene in the hotel bedroom soon became excruciating to watch as the camera returned to it again and again. Not that it was inappropriate or in any way pornographic. But the reader manages his own balance between the psychological damage to these two young people and the clumsy physical act in which it is played out. The cinemagoer has to accept the director's balance, and loses a dimension as a result. The screenplay was by McEwan himself. I would need to go back to check, but my impression is that, in contrast to the usual approach of trimmming a novel to make a movie, the author has taken his own trim novella and expanded it. I certainly learned a lot more of the back-story than I recall from the book; I am not sure it was all relevant, however. Edward's family was certainly colorful, but the knowledge did not help me understand his honeymoon problems any better. Although still only hinted at, the relationship between Florence and her father seemed much more significant than anything I had picked up the book. As a result, in terms of the baggage that each brings to the marriage, the focus shifts almost entirely to Florence, as the victim of specific trauma in addition to the general repressed atmosphere of the time. Given her difficulties with physical sex, I don't understand why McEwan plunged her straight away into an apparently successful marriage with somebody else; how did that work any better? Indeed, the filling out of the later lives of the characters is weaker than the rest of this generally strong movie. (hide spoiler)] One thing I wholeheartedly admired was the music. In the book, we know that Florence is a violinist, and we see her with her quartet in concert at the end. But we cannot hear her. Not only does the film contain several scenes of her rehearsing or playing, but her music is there in the sound-track throughout: chamber music by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, all beautifully matching the emotional temperature, and music by others as well. My first reaction on coming home was to pull out one of the featured pieces and play it through with my wife, also a violinist. Through music, if not always in words or pictures, I felt I could live inside Florence, and experience something vital in her that transcended her problems. Is it any wonder that Edward seemed a little ordinary by comparison? [image] ...more |
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Jun 15, 2007
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Apr 30, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0753809257
| 9780753809259
| 0753809257
| 3.84
| 5,036
| 1981
| Dec 02, 1999
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it was amazing
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Freud and the Final Solution [2005] An extraordinary book, historical in its way, yet put together like the movements of a musical composition. Introdu Freud and the Final Solution [2005] An extraordinary book, historical in its way, yet put together like the movements of a musical composition. Introduced by Sigmund Freud, the book's first three movements consist of the erotic fantasies and case-history of one of his female patients, overlapping, expanding, and gradually turning into almost normal narrative. But then the story takes a different course with the convulsions of the century, and becomes a testament of the Holocaust, harrowing and chillingly authentic. Only at the end does the fantasy element return, pulling together the earlier themes into a kind of benediction. I originally questioned whether the book cohered as a whole, but as it has lingered in my memory I have become aware of structural unities that are entirely satisfying. I am submitting this review after also reading W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz, another Holocaust novel that stalks its subject from an unexpected angle. It makes me wonder whether, with this subject, the frontal approach of straight narrative is possible any more, but here are two masterpieces that not only succeed brilliantly in their own genre but chart new directions for the modern novel as a whole. Both writers recognize that some events are so powerful as to warp the consciousness of entire generations. While Sebald looks for traces of this trauma like an archaeologist studying past artifacts, Thomas moves in the opposite direction, starting at the beginning of the century, when Freudian psychology made it possible for the first time to trace the rifts in the human psyche that would ultimately lead to such inhumanity. ====== [2017] This was one of the very first reviews I wrote, when I was just beginning on Amazon. Despite many, many other Holocaust-related books I have read since, with a particular interest in what I called "stalking its subject from an unexpected angle," this one still sticks with me as utterly sui generis, and it has remained among the very top of my best books ever. I looked back just now to see if I had done it justice. I certainly conveyed my enthusiasm, but I am surprised too by all I left out that I would have included if writing today: the fact that an entire section of the book is written in verse; the extreme use of pornography in the erotic sections; the wonderful writing about an opera singer; and (looking at it again just now) the proportions, whereby the parts packing the greatest punch (the first and last) are also the shortest. On the other hand, I now wonder if it is a book that can be reviewed at all without spoilers. Even to put it on my Holocaust shelf is to give away something that Thomas (as I recall) keeps as a complete surprise until the very end. And yet nothing of what I have written above, especially the discussion in the second paragraph, could have been said without it. Perhaps this is a case for hiding the entire review? ...more |
Notes are private!
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Dec 22, 2005
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Dec 24, 2005
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Apr 29, 2016
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Paperback
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| 1590177711
| 9781590177716
| 1590177711
| 4.10
| 31,691
| 1987
| Jan 27, 2015
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it was amazing
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The Gospel of Judas "I killed Emerence. The fact that I was trying to save her rather than destroy her changes nothing." So ends the first chapter of M The Gospel of Judas "I killed Emerence. The fact that I was trying to save her rather than destroy her changes nothing." So ends the first chapter of Magda Szabó's stupendous novel of 1987, released this year by NYRB in a fine translation by Len Rix. The narrator, a writer in mid-career also called Magda, awakens from a recurring dream in which an ambulance waits in the street outside but she cannot get through the door to reach it. Roughly 200 pages later, we will arrive at the real-life source of her dream, only now Magda is on the outside of the door and the person within, who cannot or will not open, is her elderly housekeeper, friend, and nemesis: Emerence Szeredás. The entire novel is the story of their relationship. Magda and her unnamed husband, also a writer, move into a large apartment in Budapest. Looking for someone to cook and clean, she is advised to go to Emerence, the caretaker of the block of flats across the road, who also works for several other neighbors. It is a strange interview, with the boot on the other foot: Emerence demands references from Magda before she will agree to work for her. Finding these satisfactory, she starts a couple of weeks later, coming in at unpredictable hours, even in the middle of the night, but transforming their lives. Although at least two decades older, Emerence is immensely strong and apparently indefatigable. In addition to her work in her own building and for her various employers, she sweeps the sidewalks and goes on errands of charity bearing food to ailing neighbors. She lives to give to others—but her gifts are absolute, delivered with a hand of iron. One of the many crises between Magda and her housekeeper comes when she tries to return a china dog in doubtful taste that Emerence had picked out for her in a yard sale. Angel she may be, yet as inflexible as a tyrant. Emerence keeps a close guard on her own life and history. Although she has many friends and entertains them on the porch of her flat, she never lets anyone inside; hers is the other door of the title that never can be opened. Magda suspects that she is hoarding property looted from Jews killed in the Holocaust. The story that gradually emerges in fragments over the years does indeed go back to that time, but its moral implications are quite different: Emerence emerges as a savior, even at the expense of personal shame. As a reader, I have become attuned to picking up Holocaust references; were I Hungarian, I would probably pick up on other things too. For one of the miracles of this book is how Szabó makes Emerence both totally believable as an individual* and larger than life, almost archetypal, as a symbol. You get the sense that she embodies most of the history of Hungary in the twentieth century, with all its contradictions in the face of competing ideologies. And increasingly towards the end of the book, you also come to see Emerence in a religious light. Not that Emerence had any time for organized religion. "She may have heaped expletives on the Church as an institution," Magda says of her after her death, "but I've known few devout believers who were as good Christians as this old woman." If she was Christlike, this was no Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild, but a wild and prickly John the Baptist in a wilderness of her own making. She could be a pain in the neck, but she was also right. Even when she wanted to strangle her, Magda was learning important letters about honesty, courage, and how to live. Magda may see herself as the Judas behind Emerence's death, but she has redeemed herself by writing this Gospel, and it is a masterpiece. *Another 2015 publication featuring just such a dominating elderly caregiver is Paolo Giordano's Like Family , a wonderful novella that nonetheless lacks the larger dimensions that make Magda Szabó's novel so special. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Dec 29, 2015
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Apr 27, 2016
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