With the enthusiastic reception of Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky's 1940 panoramic novel depicting the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, discovered by her daughter fifty years later and published in English translation in 2006, there has been an ever increasing interest in any and everything else of the neglected author's work that might be resurrected. Two other volumes followed: Fire in the Blood, a novella in 2007 and a 2008 collection of short works, including the novella, "David Golder." Now a newly translated collection of ten of her short stories, Dimanche and Other Stories has become available from Vintage Books.
While three of the ten stories, deal with the period around the beginning of WW II, indeed two of them, concerned with refugees of one kind or another fleeing the approaching Nazi army, could well have sat nicely in Suite Francaise, six of the other stories are set between the wars and the seventh is set in a pre-war Ukraine. Moreover, the tone of most of these stories is reminiscent of no author so much as Anton Chekov. Nemirovsky's Russian heritage translates well into the Parisian cafes and drawing rooms of these stories.
"Dimanche," ("Sunday:" all titles are given in French and then translated) the feature story, parallels in counterpoint the story of a mother in her forties trapped in a passionless marriage and that of her daughter just twenty and beginning to experience what she thinks is love. It is a bitter sweet story illustrating how quickly youthful passion turns to gray middle age, and it is all played out on a beautiful Sunday afternoon as the various members of a family of four go about spending their day. The daughter goes off to secretly meet her lover; the father leaves after lunch for a tryst with his mistress. The mother stays at home with the younger child. Little happens, but as in a Chekov story, everything happens.
"Les rivages heureux"("Those Happy Shores") also deals with the loss of youth contrasting a young woman's happiness in her love affair with the plight of an aging tart she meets in a café as she waits for her lover on New Year's Eve. Although, Christiane, the young lady in this story, seems much more worldly wise than Nadine, the naïve young lady of "Dimanche", the suggestion is fairly clear that age will be as unkind to her as it seems to be for everyone else, be they mothers or tarts.
In "Fraternite" ("Brotherhood") an older Frenchman, paradoxically named Christian Rabinovitch, who has spent his life fleeing from his Jewish heritage meets a poor old Jewish man at a train station. Christian is on his way to a weekend with gentile friends whose daughter his son would like to marry. Christian has some qualms about the marriage, both from his own pride and his fear that though friends they may well reject a Jewish suitor for their daughter. The old Jew at the station functions as a doppelganger, evoking in Christian the brotherhood of the title. This is quite an interesting story given the charge of self hating Jew sometimes leveled at Nemirovsky.
"La Femme de don Juan" ("Don Juan's Wife") takes the form of a long letter written by a dying servant to the daughter of an old employer revealing her mother's dark secret. Le sortilege ("The Spell") is the story set in Russia. It is a story about an adult relationship told through the eyes of a young girl who really doesn't understand what is happening. Liens du Sang ("Flesh and Blood"), the longest story in the volume, examines family relationships as a pride of older children gather together to deal with their elderly mother's sickness and their own hopes and fears, jealousies and pettiness. In Le spectateur ("The Spectator"), an aging dilettante from a neutral country trying to leave France at the beginning of the war, discovers that neutrality is not necessarily going to keep one safe. Each story focuses like a laser beam on the vagaries of the human condition, and the ironies that abound in human relations.
Whether she is describing the torturous impatience of a young girl waiting for a lover who doesn't show up or the labyrinth of relationships in a large family no longer close, Nemirovsky is always the most astute of observers. And always those observations are presented with a typical understated irony. At the end of Le confidente, the husband who has learned the truth about his recently deceased wife from a woman he thought was her friend explains why that truth is irrelevant. It is characteristic Nemirovsky: "He now understood that he had loved an illusion, a shadow. He knew with absolute certainty that he had at last learned the truth. But he was more tormented than ever because he understood what Camille could not grasp: that his wife's soul, her wit and intelligence, were of no importance—all that was superfluous. What really mattered was the gentle movement of her shoulders when she turned her head toward him, the shape and warmth of her breast, the expression of her face, her tone of voice, the quick, bored way she pushed him aside when he approached her when she wanted to escape him (and now he knew why). This was what he would never get over."
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Friday, January 29, 2010
Book Review: "The Hummingbird’s Daughter," by Luis Alberto Urrea
Although Luis Alberto Urrea is the award winning author of five books of non-fiction, three books of poetry and two other works of fiction, I am ashamed to confess that until I began reading his third novel, “The Hummingbird’s Daughter,” I had never so much as heard of him, let alone read any of his work, but if this third novel is in any way representative of his previous work, that is truly my loss. Luckily it is a loss that is reparable, if not at the local library than perhaps at Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
Set in rural Mexico in the last third of the nineteenth century, “The Hummingbird’s Daughter” tells the story of Teresa Urrea, the illegitimate daughter of a poor Indian woman and a philandering wealthy rancher. Abandoned by her mother, Teresa is left in the care of an unfeeling aunt who treats her much in the fashion of the storybook wicked step mother, until the girl is taken under the wing of an older Indian woman healer who sees in the her a great destiny. Even as a child, Teresa seems marked as someone special. She is inquisitive and learns quickly, even insisting on learning to read. A natural healing heat seems to emanate from her hands, and she can affect others with her mind. She is a guileless child of nature, who will grow from this fairy tale beginning into a healer revered as a saint, a champion of the poor and the powerless, and a symbol for a people’s revolution.
On a personal level, she must not only discover her destiny, but she must learn to accept it, as must those who are close to her. It is not easy to be a saint, nor is it easy to live with one. For people like her father, Thomas, a sinner and a cynic, her saintly faith and sacrifice are perhaps beyond comprehension. For people like Gabriela , her father’s mistress, simple and sensual, her saintly miracles spur fear and estrangement. For people like Segundo, her father’s loyal foreman, a practical man of action, her saintly notoriety is more nuisance than anything else. Still, in spite of that, a father must love; a friend must stay true, a retainer, devoted.
Teresa’s story is the archetypal initiation myth characteristic of the great hero. It follows her from her birth as she slowly distinguishes herself from the other Indian children. She learns the wisdom of her Indian ancestors from Huila, the old healer, and the wisdom of the modern world from her father’s friend, Aguirre, a great engineer: from Huila, herbs and cures, from Aguirre, the mysteries of the printed page. Already as a child she demonstrates her strength of character as she walks boldly into the forbidden territory of the rancher father’s house to try to discover who she is. She learns to see in her dreams a world more real than the physical world around her; she discovers the force of spirituality. And then after a kind of death and resurrection, she manifests at nineteen, the saintliness that has been her destiny. It is a story both mystical and miraculous.
But the power of the novel is less in its plot, than in its form and language. A good many of the most sensationalistic events–rape, torture, murder--are left to happen offstage in a fashion that reminds the reader of the ancient Greek tragedies. Indeed, Urrea artfully appropriates many of the techniques and forms associated with the most elemental literary expressions, those early masterpieces of world literature that characterized and defined their peoples and civilizations for the ages to come. He combines folk elements–tales, proverbs, home remedies, superstitions–with literary techniques drawn from the classics–epic lists, metaphysical imagery, irony and understatement, and he does it all with a poetic style that is always sensual and often startling in its originality.
There are the simple adages of the people: “If you were born to be a nail, you had to be hammered.” “Honey wasn’t made for the mouths of donkeys.” There are the folk remedies: tobacco juice for bee stings, manzanita tea to clean out the birth canal, vervain to open the black nipples to suckle the newborn. There are the superstitions: a campfire on the south side of the road is “a good omen–north was the direction of death.” “A five-fingered foot that looked like a human hand” found in a dried up turd is the remains of a devil eaten by a coyote. There is the tale: a hunter shot a doe and followed the trail of blood to a pool, “where he found a beautiful maiden with her breast pierced by his arrow.”
Complementing these primitive elements are the more sophisticated literary techniques. Long lists reminiscent of the warriors in Homer or the fallen angels in “Paradise Lost” lend a heroic stature to somewhat more mundane concerns. For example, there is this catalogue of the contents of a wagon driven North by an Arab and his family:
“A Singer sewing machine.
Cans of peaches, pears, and stewed prunes.
Bolts of cloth.
A case of repeater rifles.
One thousand rounds of long bullets.
One slightly rotten burlap bag of new Burbank potatoes.
Jujubes wrapped in wax paper.
Twenty pounds of sugar.
Five huge tins of lard.
A tin of Nestle’s Infant food: the newest sensation advanced
science.
Cotton unmentionables, parasols, stockings. . . . .”
And so on for another ten or so items.
There are metaphors and similes that seem to descend in their exotic range from the Metaphysical poetry of seventeenth century England. “In Sinaloa, café with boiled milk, its burned milk skin floating on the top in a pale membrane that looked like the flesh of a peeled blister.” “And a bowler hat squatted on his head like a dirty turtle.” If these images are not the extended conceits of a John Donne or a George Herbert, they are at least as original and startling. Moreover there are descriptive passages that echo the elaborate comparisons used by the epic poets. For example there is this description of the fall of evening:
“The peaks grew heavy with night, the points flaring
orange, then impossible molten copper. Red like a deep infection
crept down the cliffs and the arroyos, heavy and somehow fluid,
until it spilled purple across the plain, drowning wagon after
wagon, crawling up the legs of horses until only their backs
were left in light, like small oblong islands in a shallow sea.
Horse by horse, night conquered the plain. Fires blinked to
life, and soon the stars above and the fires below looked the
same, as if a slice of the sky had been stretched out on a drying
rack so they could eat it in the morning.”
Much like the epic lists these expansive images elevate the stature of what might otherwise be considered mundane or pedestrian. It is almost as if Urrea, like Arthur Miller in “Death of a Salesman,” is saying that these more sophisticated literary elements are not only appropriate for the rich nobility. They are suitable for the common man as well. In effect there is nobility, heroism, in all men, and the heroic style is no more to be limited to the upper classes than in the heroic character. The style then reflects the themes of a novel focused on a lowly Indian girl who becomes the heroic symbol of a people’s revolution.
This use of classic techniques for a more modern agenda is reinforced by an intermittent note of ironic understatement that runs through the novel and begins on its very first page:
“On that October day, the fifteenth, the People had already
begun readying for the Day of the Dead, only two weeks away.
They were starting to prepare plates of the dead’s favorite
snacks: deceased uncles, already half-forgotten, still got their
favorite green tamales, which due to the heat and the flies, would
soon turn even greener. Small glasses held the dead’s preferred
brands of tequila, or rum, or rompope: Tio Pancho liked beer, so
A clay flagon of watery Guaymas brew fizzled itself flat before
his graven image on a family altar. The ranch workers set aside
candied sweet potatoes, cactus and guayaba sweets, mango jam,
goat jerky, dribbley white cheese, all food they themselves would
like to eat, but they knew the restless spirits were famished, and
no family could afford to assuage its own hunger and insult the
dead. Jesus! Everybody knew that being dead could put you in
a terrible mood.”
Thematically the novel, in still another echo of classical literature, is at least on one level concerned with the age old question of destiny (fate) and individual responsibility. Teresa has a destiny she must fulfill, but she is also responsible for making the choices necessary to meet that fate. It is not merely that, like and Oedipus, she must take responsibility for those choices, rather she must actively pursue those right choices. This may well be the difference between the tragic hero and the saint. In a dream (and in dreams, the right kind of dreams, there is truth) she sees herself floating in bubbles in space–countless Teresas in countless bubbles, all representing possibilities for every second of her life. “You are always in a universe of choices,” she is told by her teacher. “Any moment of your life can go in any direction you choose.”
Urrea tells us that the novel is based on the life of a real person and a distant relation of his, but this is a novel, not a biography. The Teresa Urrea of “The Hummingbird’s Daughter” is a mythical figure. There is a real Joan of Arc and there are Joans created by Shaw and Anouilh. Urrea’s Teresa has her analogs in the latter.
“The Hummingbird’s Daughter” is a beautifully written novel, filled with passion and insight. It shows men at their best and men at their worst. It recognizes that there is brutality in life, but it also recognizes that man is capable of rising above that brutality to something sublime. What is possible for a bastard Indian child is no less possible for each and every one of us.
Set in rural Mexico in the last third of the nineteenth century, “The Hummingbird’s Daughter” tells the story of Teresa Urrea, the illegitimate daughter of a poor Indian woman and a philandering wealthy rancher. Abandoned by her mother, Teresa is left in the care of an unfeeling aunt who treats her much in the fashion of the storybook wicked step mother, until the girl is taken under the wing of an older Indian woman healer who sees in the her a great destiny. Even as a child, Teresa seems marked as someone special. She is inquisitive and learns quickly, even insisting on learning to read. A natural healing heat seems to emanate from her hands, and she can affect others with her mind. She is a guileless child of nature, who will grow from this fairy tale beginning into a healer revered as a saint, a champion of the poor and the powerless, and a symbol for a people’s revolution.
On a personal level, she must not only discover her destiny, but she must learn to accept it, as must those who are close to her. It is not easy to be a saint, nor is it easy to live with one. For people like her father, Thomas, a sinner and a cynic, her saintly faith and sacrifice are perhaps beyond comprehension. For people like Gabriela , her father’s mistress, simple and sensual, her saintly miracles spur fear and estrangement. For people like Segundo, her father’s loyal foreman, a practical man of action, her saintly notoriety is more nuisance than anything else. Still, in spite of that, a father must love; a friend must stay true, a retainer, devoted.
Teresa’s story is the archetypal initiation myth characteristic of the great hero. It follows her from her birth as she slowly distinguishes herself from the other Indian children. She learns the wisdom of her Indian ancestors from Huila, the old healer, and the wisdom of the modern world from her father’s friend, Aguirre, a great engineer: from Huila, herbs and cures, from Aguirre, the mysteries of the printed page. Already as a child she demonstrates her strength of character as she walks boldly into the forbidden territory of the rancher father’s house to try to discover who she is. She learns to see in her dreams a world more real than the physical world around her; she discovers the force of spirituality. And then after a kind of death and resurrection, she manifests at nineteen, the saintliness that has been her destiny. It is a story both mystical and miraculous.
But the power of the novel is less in its plot, than in its form and language. A good many of the most sensationalistic events–rape, torture, murder--are left to happen offstage in a fashion that reminds the reader of the ancient Greek tragedies. Indeed, Urrea artfully appropriates many of the techniques and forms associated with the most elemental literary expressions, those early masterpieces of world literature that characterized and defined their peoples and civilizations for the ages to come. He combines folk elements–tales, proverbs, home remedies, superstitions–with literary techniques drawn from the classics–epic lists, metaphysical imagery, irony and understatement, and he does it all with a poetic style that is always sensual and often startling in its originality.
There are the simple adages of the people: “If you were born to be a nail, you had to be hammered.” “Honey wasn’t made for the mouths of donkeys.” There are the folk remedies: tobacco juice for bee stings, manzanita tea to clean out the birth canal, vervain to open the black nipples to suckle the newborn. There are the superstitions: a campfire on the south side of the road is “a good omen–north was the direction of death.” “A five-fingered foot that looked like a human hand” found in a dried up turd is the remains of a devil eaten by a coyote. There is the tale: a hunter shot a doe and followed the trail of blood to a pool, “where he found a beautiful maiden with her breast pierced by his arrow.”
Complementing these primitive elements are the more sophisticated literary techniques. Long lists reminiscent of the warriors in Homer or the fallen angels in “Paradise Lost” lend a heroic stature to somewhat more mundane concerns. For example, there is this catalogue of the contents of a wagon driven North by an Arab and his family:
“A Singer sewing machine.
Cans of peaches, pears, and stewed prunes.
Bolts of cloth.
A case of repeater rifles.
One thousand rounds of long bullets.
One slightly rotten burlap bag of new Burbank potatoes.
Jujubes wrapped in wax paper.
Twenty pounds of sugar.
Five huge tins of lard.
A tin of Nestle’s Infant food: the newest sensation advanced
science.
Cotton unmentionables, parasols, stockings. . . . .”
And so on for another ten or so items.
There are metaphors and similes that seem to descend in their exotic range from the Metaphysical poetry of seventeenth century England. “In Sinaloa, café with boiled milk, its burned milk skin floating on the top in a pale membrane that looked like the flesh of a peeled blister.” “And a bowler hat squatted on his head like a dirty turtle.” If these images are not the extended conceits of a John Donne or a George Herbert, they are at least as original and startling. Moreover there are descriptive passages that echo the elaborate comparisons used by the epic poets. For example there is this description of the fall of evening:
“The peaks grew heavy with night, the points flaring
orange, then impossible molten copper. Red like a deep infection
crept down the cliffs and the arroyos, heavy and somehow fluid,
until it spilled purple across the plain, drowning wagon after
wagon, crawling up the legs of horses until only their backs
were left in light, like small oblong islands in a shallow sea.
Horse by horse, night conquered the plain. Fires blinked to
life, and soon the stars above and the fires below looked the
same, as if a slice of the sky had been stretched out on a drying
rack so they could eat it in the morning.”
Much like the epic lists these expansive images elevate the stature of what might otherwise be considered mundane or pedestrian. It is almost as if Urrea, like Arthur Miller in “Death of a Salesman,” is saying that these more sophisticated literary elements are not only appropriate for the rich nobility. They are suitable for the common man as well. In effect there is nobility, heroism, in all men, and the heroic style is no more to be limited to the upper classes than in the heroic character. The style then reflects the themes of a novel focused on a lowly Indian girl who becomes the heroic symbol of a people’s revolution.
This use of classic techniques for a more modern agenda is reinforced by an intermittent note of ironic understatement that runs through the novel and begins on its very first page:
“On that October day, the fifteenth, the People had already
begun readying for the Day of the Dead, only two weeks away.
They were starting to prepare plates of the dead’s favorite
snacks: deceased uncles, already half-forgotten, still got their
favorite green tamales, which due to the heat and the flies, would
soon turn even greener. Small glasses held the dead’s preferred
brands of tequila, or rum, or rompope: Tio Pancho liked beer, so
A clay flagon of watery Guaymas brew fizzled itself flat before
his graven image on a family altar. The ranch workers set aside
candied sweet potatoes, cactus and guayaba sweets, mango jam,
goat jerky, dribbley white cheese, all food they themselves would
like to eat, but they knew the restless spirits were famished, and
no family could afford to assuage its own hunger and insult the
dead. Jesus! Everybody knew that being dead could put you in
a terrible mood.”
Thematically the novel, in still another echo of classical literature, is at least on one level concerned with the age old question of destiny (fate) and individual responsibility. Teresa has a destiny she must fulfill, but she is also responsible for making the choices necessary to meet that fate. It is not merely that, like and Oedipus, she must take responsibility for those choices, rather she must actively pursue those right choices. This may well be the difference between the tragic hero and the saint. In a dream (and in dreams, the right kind of dreams, there is truth) she sees herself floating in bubbles in space–countless Teresas in countless bubbles, all representing possibilities for every second of her life. “You are always in a universe of choices,” she is told by her teacher. “Any moment of your life can go in any direction you choose.”
Urrea tells us that the novel is based on the life of a real person and a distant relation of his, but this is a novel, not a biography. The Teresa Urrea of “The Hummingbird’s Daughter” is a mythical figure. There is a real Joan of Arc and there are Joans created by Shaw and Anouilh. Urrea’s Teresa has her analogs in the latter.
“The Hummingbird’s Daughter” is a beautifully written novel, filled with passion and insight. It shows men at their best and men at their worst. It recognizes that there is brutality in life, but it also recognizes that man is capable of rising above that brutality to something sublime. What is possible for a bastard Indian child is no less possible for each and every one of us.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Book Review: The Bad Book Affair, by Ian Sansom
There are the hard boiled detectives who stalk the pages of Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. There are the rational logicians who look to their little grey cells while traveling on the Orient Express or breakfasting at Baker Street . There are the disillusioned police officials, the scientific sleuths, the high brow elites playing sometimes seriously, sometimes not, at police work. And of course there is the amateur detective: the rabbi who takes time out from his preaching to find killers, the crime fiction writer more adept at solving crimes than any detective she creates, the rare book specialist, the forensic psychologist, the elderly spinster, and so on.
It is to this latter group, that Israel Armstrong, the somewhat anti-hero of Ian Sansom's Mobile Library Mystery series belongs. An English, Jewish, vegetarian librarian working on a mobile library in a small village in Northern Ireland, Armstrong is as unlikely a crime solving candidate as any amateur sleuth in the pantheon. As The Bad Book Affair, the fourth in the Mobile Library series begins, Israel is in a depressive funk. He is approaching his thirtieth birthday. He has been dumped by his long time girl friend, and is feeling himself the proverbial fish out of water stuck in the Irish backwater, humdrum Tumdrum. Not only is Armstrong an amateur, he is something of a 'nebish.' A 'nebish' is the Yiddish equivalent of the naif who always seems to be saying and doing the wrong thing, who is constantly being taken advantage of, who never seems to have a clue. Although, in this case, Israel Armstrong in one 'nebish' who despite his inadequacies manages to get it right in the end.
As mysteries go, The Bad Book Affair is rather innocuous. If you're looking for murder and mayhem, this is the wrong book. The actual problem doesn’t even show its face until a hundred or so pages have passed, and even then it isn't a problem that is going to compete with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. What we've got here is no violent who done it, but more realistically a fairly gentle what happened. In fact, Sansom, it would seem is much less interested in any crime plot, than he is in things like character, tone and style.
The book is filled with as quirky a cast of characters as you'd be likely to find in even a Dickens novel. There is Ted, Israel's co-worker at the library, who doesn't seem to have a last name, and who doses Israel with commonsensical prescriptions that more often than not make absolutely no sense. He speaks home spun words of wisdom in a language all his own. "What's the point of having a dog and barking yerself, eh?" He invents words: "deedlin'," as in if you were driving, you'd be "deedlin'." "Jandies," as in "Ye give me the jandies." Linda Wie is Israel's jargon spouting, Chinese lesbian boss. Maurice Morris is an adulterous politician looking to get back into the government. There is a landlady named George, well on the way it seems to be a new love interest for Israel, and she is complemented by a Bible spouting fire and brimstone grandfather. There is a free thinking Presbyterian minister and a breakaway charismatic leader. It is these characters and Armstrong's interaction with them, rather than the somewhat piddling mystery that serves for plot, that is the central interest of the novel.
In general the tone of the book is satirical. Like a naïve Candide, Israel wanders through his world bumping into all sorts of behavior worthy of censure and ridicule: from a doctor who has no interest in his patients to a fish and chips Bible quiz, from a hidden shelf of 'bad' books to be kept out of the sight of impressionable youth to a teenage Wikipedia editor who has no knowledge of what he is editing. He pokes fun at religion, politics, literary icons like Harry Potter, artistic pretension, vegetarianism, journalism and almost anything else you can think of.
He likes the occasional play on words: a restaurant is called the Thai Tanic. Someone comes into the library and asks to borrow the De Saurus, the book with words. All books have words, Israel tells him. As a stylistic matter, it's the kind of thing that either makes you chuckle or makes you groan. Me? I chuckle. He also infuses his prose with allusions, both, classical and modern, literary and pop. So at the novel's opening, Israel in his depression is reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Later he reads from Madame Bovary to his dying friend. He talks about his ideal of living in a Brooklyn brownstone like Paul Auster and asks "who cares about Five People You Meet in Heaven with Morrie?" He has Romanians upset because people don't know Ionesco. Meanwhile, he clearly knows his readers will be sure to recognizeGrand Theft Auto, Dawson's Creek, Buffy , Lurch and Morticia. When it comes to allusion, eclecticism is the rule.
The Bad Book Affair is a whimsical entertainment that never hesitates to take potshots at a good many modern targets, and more often than not hits the bull's eye.
It is to this latter group, that Israel Armstrong, the somewhat anti-hero of Ian Sansom's Mobile Library Mystery series belongs. An English, Jewish, vegetarian librarian working on a mobile library in a small village in Northern Ireland, Armstrong is as unlikely a crime solving candidate as any amateur sleuth in the pantheon. As The Bad Book Affair, the fourth in the Mobile Library series begins, Israel is in a depressive funk. He is approaching his thirtieth birthday. He has been dumped by his long time girl friend, and is feeling himself the proverbial fish out of water stuck in the Irish backwater, humdrum Tumdrum. Not only is Armstrong an amateur, he is something of a 'nebish.' A 'nebish' is the Yiddish equivalent of the naif who always seems to be saying and doing the wrong thing, who is constantly being taken advantage of, who never seems to have a clue. Although, in this case, Israel Armstrong in one 'nebish' who despite his inadequacies manages to get it right in the end.
As mysteries go, The Bad Book Affair is rather innocuous. If you're looking for murder and mayhem, this is the wrong book. The actual problem doesn’t even show its face until a hundred or so pages have passed, and even then it isn't a problem that is going to compete with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. What we've got here is no violent who done it, but more realistically a fairly gentle what happened. In fact, Sansom, it would seem is much less interested in any crime plot, than he is in things like character, tone and style.
The book is filled with as quirky a cast of characters as you'd be likely to find in even a Dickens novel. There is Ted, Israel's co-worker at the library, who doesn't seem to have a last name, and who doses Israel with commonsensical prescriptions that more often than not make absolutely no sense. He speaks home spun words of wisdom in a language all his own. "What's the point of having a dog and barking yerself, eh?" He invents words: "deedlin'," as in if you were driving, you'd be "deedlin'." "Jandies," as in "Ye give me the jandies." Linda Wie is Israel's jargon spouting, Chinese lesbian boss. Maurice Morris is an adulterous politician looking to get back into the government. There is a landlady named George, well on the way it seems to be a new love interest for Israel, and she is complemented by a Bible spouting fire and brimstone grandfather. There is a free thinking Presbyterian minister and a breakaway charismatic leader. It is these characters and Armstrong's interaction with them, rather than the somewhat piddling mystery that serves for plot, that is the central interest of the novel.
In general the tone of the book is satirical. Like a naïve Candide, Israel wanders through his world bumping into all sorts of behavior worthy of censure and ridicule: from a doctor who has no interest in his patients to a fish and chips Bible quiz, from a hidden shelf of 'bad' books to be kept out of the sight of impressionable youth to a teenage Wikipedia editor who has no knowledge of what he is editing. He pokes fun at religion, politics, literary icons like Harry Potter, artistic pretension, vegetarianism, journalism and almost anything else you can think of.
He likes the occasional play on words: a restaurant is called the Thai Tanic. Someone comes into the library and asks to borrow the De Saurus, the book with words. All books have words, Israel tells him. As a stylistic matter, it's the kind of thing that either makes you chuckle or makes you groan. Me? I chuckle. He also infuses his prose with allusions, both, classical and modern, literary and pop. So at the novel's opening, Israel in his depression is reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Later he reads from Madame Bovary to his dying friend. He talks about his ideal of living in a Brooklyn brownstone like Paul Auster and asks "who cares about Five People You Meet in Heaven with Morrie?" He has Romanians upset because people don't know Ionesco. Meanwhile, he clearly knows his readers will be sure to recognizeGrand Theft Auto, Dawson's Creek, Buffy , Lurch and Morticia. When it comes to allusion, eclecticism is the rule.
The Bad Book Affair is a whimsical entertainment that never hesitates to take potshots at a good many modern targets, and more often than not hits the bull's eye.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Book Review : “Beginner’s Greek” by James Collins
Talk about coincidence: gathering dust near the top of my “to read” pile is a copy of James Collins’ debut novel, “Beginner’s Greek,” and I’m listening to the February 22 podcast of the N.Y. Times Book Review, and who is Sam Tannenhaus, host and editor of the Review, about to interview? You guessed it. None other than the first time novelist himself. Coincidence, you ask? Where is the coincidence in a novelist being interviewed on a broadcast devoted to books? But then this is the N. Y. Times Book Review, and isn’t this a first time novelist? Well alright, it may not rank with the convergence of the twain, but it is a little spooky.
Talk about coincidence: Peter Russell, the hero of James Collins’ debut novel, “Beginner’s Greek” is sitting on a plane bound for L.A. on business.. The seat next to him is empty, and as he waits for its occupant he dreams that a lovely intelligent woman will appear to fill it, that they will make an immediate connection, that they will fall in love and live ever after happily. And who should plop down next to him: the lovely intelligent Holly (no last name as yet), and they do make an immediate connection, clicking as only mutual admirers of “The Magic Mountain”can. Falling in love is undoubtedly inevitable when she gives him her number and he promises to call. But. . .there has to be a but. . .Peter loses her number, and, you will no doubt remember from the prior parenthetical, the beautiful, intelligent Holly has no last name.
Talk about coincidence: four years pass and Peter, back in Manhattan, is invited to a party to meet the new girl friend of his best friend, a cad of a novelist, and who does this new girl friend happen to be. Give that reader a Kewpie doll. But now Holly is his friend’s girl, and Peter is a noble fellow; besides though he still feels the attraction, he has no idea how Holly feels about him. Life has a way of throwing monkey wrenches into dreams. Peter keeps quiet. Holly and the novelist eventually marry. Peter is the best man.
Talk about coincidence: I could go on, but it wouldn’t do to give away the plot of the novel, which, if you have no problem with coincidences, is undoubtedly quite entertaining. And, after all, why should you? Although there was a time when novelists were criticized for relying on coincidence to resolve their plots (one thinks of Dickens, for example, managing to have the little Oliver Twist get caught stealing by Mr. Brownlow), critics have long since concluded that coincidence may well be less a crutch to move along a recalcitrant plot than it is an indication of a particular vision of life(at least in some novels). There are no such things as coincidences, one might argue; what happens in life is indeed what is supposed to happen (at least in some novels, by some novelists).
And it is certainly arguable that it is just this fatalistic word view that suffuses Collins’ novel. Note the reference to Greek in the title. What happens to Peter and Holly is no more random happenstance, than what happens to Oedipus or Antigone. It is an elemental step in a greater cosmic plan. The universe described in this novel is as deterministic as any in a Thomas Hardy novel, if, all in all, a much more pleasant place. If Peter and Holly were meant for each other, they will get each other; if not, not. If however, whatever will be, will be, there is still the question of whether what will be is somehow determined by anything we human beings may do. Is there some relation between a person’s moral behavior and a person’s fate? Does the good guy get the girl? Does the bad guy get his ‘come upance?’ Do good guys finish last? In some sense, this is the question “Beginner’s Greek” tries to answer.
On another level, the novel is a kind of adult fairy tale which the reader has to pursue to the end to find out if the prince and Cinderella get to live happily ever after. And appropriately it is peopled with a cast of supporting characters straight out of the Grimm Bothers. There is a fairy godmother surrogate of sorts, an adulteress whose own story is much too delicious to spoil for the prospective reader. There is an evil dwarf in a sub-plot concerning Peter’s job with a prestigious Wall St. financial firm. There is a powerful king who, if benevolent, can make all well; but if tyrannical, can ruin everything. There is a wolf in sheep’s clothing who can charm the pants off every female he comes near, and usually does. There is a crazy old man who is often wiser in his insanity than the worldly cynics around him.
It is set in the world of the upper East side of Manhattan, a fairy tale world where people have boxes at the opera, live in lavishly furnished mansions and fly off for weekends on the islands in helicopters. It is filled with the beautiful people, the movers and shakers, the power elite. And if Peter is not yet quite there, not yet at the top of the mountain, he surely aspires to get there, and one imagines that as a bright young man, he may well manage to do so (if, that is, it is in the stars?).
Every once in awhile Collins seems to question the conspicuous consumption of his characters, as for example, when Holly demands that the money spent for an expensive necklace be donated to a hospital for children with cancer. Although, even then, it is made clear that while too often charity is little more than an enabling crutch, in the case of child hood cancer that is certainly not the case: compassionate conservatives at work. This may be the kind of thing that Tannenhaus is referring to in his interview when he makes the point that the book combines romance with more serious concerns, moral and social concerns. Collins, for his part, agrees. He adds that he was trying to add elements of characters struggling with issues as well as elements of satire.
While there is some truth to this assertion, there are some barbs thrown at the world of high finance, there some punches at the idle rich, there are even some sneers at literary ladies and randy novelists. There is certainly the whole philosophical question the book raises about determinism and morality. Nevertheless, when you come right down to it, the overwhelming import of the book is its romance. No one is going to read it for its social criticism or its philosophical discourse. One is inclined to think that the whole issue is a less than subtle attempt to distinguish “Beginner’s Greek” from what is too often dismissed as “chick lit.”
However, as romance, the book certainly has its charms. Collins prose is sharp and pointed. He is adept at the arresting metaphor. Tears fall on a letter like bullet holes. People who are supposed to be friends but who don’t quite connect have keys that don’t quite fit each other’s locks. When a beautiful person joins a group, the tome changes like a film going from black and white to color. It plot is filled with twists and unexpected turns, so that pages keep turning almost on their own. It provides insights into a social world inaccessible to most readers, and it gives the impression that the author knows whereof he speaks. These are no mean accomplishments.
Besides, if you want philosophy, you can always read “The Magic Mountain.”
Talk about coincidence: Peter Russell, the hero of James Collins’ debut novel, “Beginner’s Greek” is sitting on a plane bound for L.A. on business.. The seat next to him is empty, and as he waits for its occupant he dreams that a lovely intelligent woman will appear to fill it, that they will make an immediate connection, that they will fall in love and live ever after happily. And who should plop down next to him: the lovely intelligent Holly (no last name as yet), and they do make an immediate connection, clicking as only mutual admirers of “The Magic Mountain”can. Falling in love is undoubtedly inevitable when she gives him her number and he promises to call. But. . .there has to be a but. . .Peter loses her number, and, you will no doubt remember from the prior parenthetical, the beautiful, intelligent Holly has no last name.
Talk about coincidence: four years pass and Peter, back in Manhattan, is invited to a party to meet the new girl friend of his best friend, a cad of a novelist, and who does this new girl friend happen to be. Give that reader a Kewpie doll. But now Holly is his friend’s girl, and Peter is a noble fellow; besides though he still feels the attraction, he has no idea how Holly feels about him. Life has a way of throwing monkey wrenches into dreams. Peter keeps quiet. Holly and the novelist eventually marry. Peter is the best man.
Talk about coincidence: I could go on, but it wouldn’t do to give away the plot of the novel, which, if you have no problem with coincidences, is undoubtedly quite entertaining. And, after all, why should you? Although there was a time when novelists were criticized for relying on coincidence to resolve their plots (one thinks of Dickens, for example, managing to have the little Oliver Twist get caught stealing by Mr. Brownlow), critics have long since concluded that coincidence may well be less a crutch to move along a recalcitrant plot than it is an indication of a particular vision of life(at least in some novels). There are no such things as coincidences, one might argue; what happens in life is indeed what is supposed to happen (at least in some novels, by some novelists).
And it is certainly arguable that it is just this fatalistic word view that suffuses Collins’ novel. Note the reference to Greek in the title. What happens to Peter and Holly is no more random happenstance, than what happens to Oedipus or Antigone. It is an elemental step in a greater cosmic plan. The universe described in this novel is as deterministic as any in a Thomas Hardy novel, if, all in all, a much more pleasant place. If Peter and Holly were meant for each other, they will get each other; if not, not. If however, whatever will be, will be, there is still the question of whether what will be is somehow determined by anything we human beings may do. Is there some relation between a person’s moral behavior and a person’s fate? Does the good guy get the girl? Does the bad guy get his ‘come upance?’ Do good guys finish last? In some sense, this is the question “Beginner’s Greek” tries to answer.
On another level, the novel is a kind of adult fairy tale which the reader has to pursue to the end to find out if the prince and Cinderella get to live happily ever after. And appropriately it is peopled with a cast of supporting characters straight out of the Grimm Bothers. There is a fairy godmother surrogate of sorts, an adulteress whose own story is much too delicious to spoil for the prospective reader. There is an evil dwarf in a sub-plot concerning Peter’s job with a prestigious Wall St. financial firm. There is a powerful king who, if benevolent, can make all well; but if tyrannical, can ruin everything. There is a wolf in sheep’s clothing who can charm the pants off every female he comes near, and usually does. There is a crazy old man who is often wiser in his insanity than the worldly cynics around him.
It is set in the world of the upper East side of Manhattan, a fairy tale world where people have boxes at the opera, live in lavishly furnished mansions and fly off for weekends on the islands in helicopters. It is filled with the beautiful people, the movers and shakers, the power elite. And if Peter is not yet quite there, not yet at the top of the mountain, he surely aspires to get there, and one imagines that as a bright young man, he may well manage to do so (if, that is, it is in the stars?).
Every once in awhile Collins seems to question the conspicuous consumption of his characters, as for example, when Holly demands that the money spent for an expensive necklace be donated to a hospital for children with cancer. Although, even then, it is made clear that while too often charity is little more than an enabling crutch, in the case of child hood cancer that is certainly not the case: compassionate conservatives at work. This may be the kind of thing that Tannenhaus is referring to in his interview when he makes the point that the book combines romance with more serious concerns, moral and social concerns. Collins, for his part, agrees. He adds that he was trying to add elements of characters struggling with issues as well as elements of satire.
While there is some truth to this assertion, there are some barbs thrown at the world of high finance, there some punches at the idle rich, there are even some sneers at literary ladies and randy novelists. There is certainly the whole philosophical question the book raises about determinism and morality. Nevertheless, when you come right down to it, the overwhelming import of the book is its romance. No one is going to read it for its social criticism or its philosophical discourse. One is inclined to think that the whole issue is a less than subtle attempt to distinguish “Beginner’s Greek” from what is too often dismissed as “chick lit.”
However, as romance, the book certainly has its charms. Collins prose is sharp and pointed. He is adept at the arresting metaphor. Tears fall on a letter like bullet holes. People who are supposed to be friends but who don’t quite connect have keys that don’t quite fit each other’s locks. When a beautiful person joins a group, the tome changes like a film going from black and white to color. It plot is filled with twists and unexpected turns, so that pages keep turning almost on their own. It provides insights into a social world inaccessible to most readers, and it gives the impression that the author knows whereof he speaks. These are no mean accomplishments.
Besides, if you want philosophy, you can always read “The Magic Mountain.”
Friday, January 22, 2010
Book Review: The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios by Yann Martel
Readers who have come to Yann Martel through his magical account of Pi Patel’s epic journey across the Pacific Ocean in an open boat with his beastly companion will welcome this reissue of his 1993 collection of four short stories: The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios. Although they may not have the almost mythical aura that transforms young Pi’s voyage, the stories are rewarding pieces of fiction and rich augers of what was to come.
In an introduction to the volume, Martel talks about his early work and explains how he decided that writing fiction was for him the one thing needful. “There was something deeply compelling about creating a setting, inventing characters, giving them dialogue, directing them through a plot, and by these means presenting my view of life.” Much of his early work–plays, short fiction, a novel–he rejects as ‘awful,’ ‘bad,’ ‘none of them good,’ the work of a writer learning his craft. Slowly with practice, he finds his voice. He discovers what it is that in his mind makes for a good story: “My developing sense was that the foundation of a story is an emotional foundation. If a story does not work emotionally, it does not work at all. The emotion in question in not the point; be it love, envy, or apathy, so long as it is conveyed in a convincing manner, then the story will come alive. But a story must also stimulate the mind if it does not want to fade from memory. Intellect rooted in emotion, emotion structured by intellect–in other words, a good idea that moves–that was my aim.” The four stories collected in this volume presumably represent those in which the author, at least, felt his aim was true.
The idea that literary value lies in some sort of emotional investment balanced by an intellectual distancing is not particularly novel. In the late eighteenth century, the great English Romantic poet William Wordsworth was writing about poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility,” the tranquil recollection no doubt meant to supply the kind of intellectual structure that Martel is talking about. Of course Wordsworth is speaking of poetry, still the application to other genres is not necessarily inappropriate. A few years later, Wordsworth’s contemporary, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was to describe the function of the imagination in terms of the synthesis of opposites, much in the manner of Martel’s blending of feeling and idea–heart and mind. Such balance of opposites would then would seem to be a reasonable standard by which to judge these stories.
The title story of the collection, “The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios,” is perhaps more a novella than a short story. It is a first person account of young man’s attempt to cope with the process of dying, as he watches a friend succumb to the ravages of AIDS, a disease he contracted from a blood transfusion after an accident while with his family vacationing in Jamaica. The story, written at a time when an AIDS diagnosis was akin to a death warrant, describes a scheme developed by the narrator to help himself and his friend endure the hours and days of dying. Taking his cue from Boccaccio’s Decameron, in which a group of people tells stories to pass the time while they try to escape the plague, he proposes that they too should create stories to help pass the empty time. “The transformative wizardry of the imagination. Boccaccio had done it in the fourteenth century, we would do it in the twentieth; we would tell each other stories. But we would be the sick this time, not the world, and we wouldn’t be fleeing it, either. On the contrary: with our stories we would be remembering the world, re-creating it, embracing it. Yes, to meet as storytellers to embrace the world–there, that was how Paul [the AIDS stricken friend] and I would destroy the void.”
The plan they develop is to create stories about an imaginary family in Helsinki, Finland–the Roccamatios. Each story will take as its inspiration a factual event from one year in the twentieth century beginning with 1901 and ending in 1986, the year in which the story is set.
The specific events, the “facts,” will not be the subjects of the stories, rather they will serve as metaphorical catalysts, much in the manner that Homer’s Odyssey serves as a metaphorical–perhaps intellectual–structure for James Joyce’s Ulysses. Martel does not include the actual Roccamatio stories. Instead what he provides are the “facts” that inspired those stories. These are intertwined wi th an account of the ups and downs of Paul’s condition, his highs and lows, and presumably metaphorical indicators of what is happening in his life.
There would also seem to be a further metaphor implicit in the analogy between what is happening to the individual and what is happening in the larger world–microcosm as emblem of the macrocosm and vice versa. Paul has his good days and his bad; the century has its great discoveries, its wars. One day Paul is improving: “He has an appetite and hardly any diarrhoea.” Another day, “Paul has a fungus called Cryptococcus neofomans in his spinal fluid.” In 1928 Mickey Mouse stars in Steamboat Willie; in 1925 Adolph Hitler publishes the first volume of Mein Kampf. The emotional journey of the characters is in this sense tied intellectually to the journey of mankind in the twentieth century. The emotions and the facts complement one another. Form and content blend organically.
“The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton” is the second story in the volume. The narrator, a Canadian philosophy student (much like the narrator of the first story), is wandering around Washington, DC when he comes across an old dilapidated theater in a decaying neighborhood which is advertising a concert the following evening featuring a number of Baroque works and the world premiere of the “Rankin Concerto.” Intrigued, although he maintains that he is not particularly musically knowledgeable, he returns the next night to find a wreck of an auditorium in the process of being demolished and an orchestra of amateur musicians, all veterans of the war in Viet Nam.
Yet despite what would seem to be an unpromising situation, surrounded by the decaying wreck of what was once a center of culture with the prospect of a mediocre performance by marginally skilled artists, the concert proves to be a transforming experience, especially the Rankin Concerto. Even though the musicianship isn’t always equal to the demands of the music, there is something about the performance that transcends its flaws.
John Morton is both composer and soloist. But though his playing is inadequate, still, “the full force of the Rankin Concerto was expressed through Morton’s inept playing. His every false note hinted at impregnable perfection, his every falter was liberating. . . .there was no robotic flawlessness here.” There is something mechanical about perfection; it is in the passion of a man trying to go beyond his abilities that emotion is “perfectly translated from the keenly felt to the heard to the keenly felt again,” or as the poet has it–a man’s reach must exceed his grasp. “The Rankin Concerto wasn’t long, not ten minutes, and they didn’t play it right, nor did they finish it the way they were supposed to, but during those few minutes everything in my life that is waste, torment and drivel was swept away–the clouds parted–and I beheld the sublime.”
The last two stories in the book are somewhat less emotionally charged, much more dominated by their intellectual concern with form. “Manners of Dying” is a collection of letters from a prison warden to the mother of a prisoner describing the details of his last hours. Each is a form letter with variations, different meals, different reactions to religious counseling, different deaths, but each talks about the same prisoner. “The Vita Aeterna Mirror Company: Mirrors to Last Till Kingdom Come” deals with a machine that makes mirrors out of memories spoken into them, no doubt suggesting the reflective qualities of art holding the mirror up to nature. In both stories, however, concerns with form get in the way of the emotional content, rather than meshing in the same kind of imaginative synthesis that characterizes the first two stories. They seem more self conscious. When Martel does manage to balance emotion and idea, form and content, as he does in the first two stories, there is none better, and if he doesn’t always quite manage that balance–well remember the Rankin Concerto.
In an introduction to the volume, Martel talks about his early work and explains how he decided that writing fiction was for him the one thing needful. “There was something deeply compelling about creating a setting, inventing characters, giving them dialogue, directing them through a plot, and by these means presenting my view of life.” Much of his early work–plays, short fiction, a novel–he rejects as ‘awful,’ ‘bad,’ ‘none of them good,’ the work of a writer learning his craft. Slowly with practice, he finds his voice. He discovers what it is that in his mind makes for a good story: “My developing sense was that the foundation of a story is an emotional foundation. If a story does not work emotionally, it does not work at all. The emotion in question in not the point; be it love, envy, or apathy, so long as it is conveyed in a convincing manner, then the story will come alive. But a story must also stimulate the mind if it does not want to fade from memory. Intellect rooted in emotion, emotion structured by intellect–in other words, a good idea that moves–that was my aim.” The four stories collected in this volume presumably represent those in which the author, at least, felt his aim was true.
The idea that literary value lies in some sort of emotional investment balanced by an intellectual distancing is not particularly novel. In the late eighteenth century, the great English Romantic poet William Wordsworth was writing about poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility,” the tranquil recollection no doubt meant to supply the kind of intellectual structure that Martel is talking about. Of course Wordsworth is speaking of poetry, still the application to other genres is not necessarily inappropriate. A few years later, Wordsworth’s contemporary, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was to describe the function of the imagination in terms of the synthesis of opposites, much in the manner of Martel’s blending of feeling and idea–heart and mind. Such balance of opposites would then would seem to be a reasonable standard by which to judge these stories.
The title story of the collection, “The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios,” is perhaps more a novella than a short story. It is a first person account of young man’s attempt to cope with the process of dying, as he watches a friend succumb to the ravages of AIDS, a disease he contracted from a blood transfusion after an accident while with his family vacationing in Jamaica. The story, written at a time when an AIDS diagnosis was akin to a death warrant, describes a scheme developed by the narrator to help himself and his friend endure the hours and days of dying. Taking his cue from Boccaccio’s Decameron, in which a group of people tells stories to pass the time while they try to escape the plague, he proposes that they too should create stories to help pass the empty time. “The transformative wizardry of the imagination. Boccaccio had done it in the fourteenth century, we would do it in the twentieth; we would tell each other stories. But we would be the sick this time, not the world, and we wouldn’t be fleeing it, either. On the contrary: with our stories we would be remembering the world, re-creating it, embracing it. Yes, to meet as storytellers to embrace the world–there, that was how Paul [the AIDS stricken friend] and I would destroy the void.”
The plan they develop is to create stories about an imaginary family in Helsinki, Finland–the Roccamatios. Each story will take as its inspiration a factual event from one year in the twentieth century beginning with 1901 and ending in 1986, the year in which the story is set.
The specific events, the “facts,” will not be the subjects of the stories, rather they will serve as metaphorical catalysts, much in the manner that Homer’s Odyssey serves as a metaphorical–perhaps intellectual–structure for James Joyce’s Ulysses. Martel does not include the actual Roccamatio stories. Instead what he provides are the “facts” that inspired those stories. These are intertwined wi th an account of the ups and downs of Paul’s condition, his highs and lows, and presumably metaphorical indicators of what is happening in his life.
There would also seem to be a further metaphor implicit in the analogy between what is happening to the individual and what is happening in the larger world–microcosm as emblem of the macrocosm and vice versa. Paul has his good days and his bad; the century has its great discoveries, its wars. One day Paul is improving: “He has an appetite and hardly any diarrhoea.” Another day, “Paul has a fungus called Cryptococcus neofomans in his spinal fluid.” In 1928 Mickey Mouse stars in Steamboat Willie; in 1925 Adolph Hitler publishes the first volume of Mein Kampf. The emotional journey of the characters is in this sense tied intellectually to the journey of mankind in the twentieth century. The emotions and the facts complement one another. Form and content blend organically.
“The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton” is the second story in the volume. The narrator, a Canadian philosophy student (much like the narrator of the first story), is wandering around Washington, DC when he comes across an old dilapidated theater in a decaying neighborhood which is advertising a concert the following evening featuring a number of Baroque works and the world premiere of the “Rankin Concerto.” Intrigued, although he maintains that he is not particularly musically knowledgeable, he returns the next night to find a wreck of an auditorium in the process of being demolished and an orchestra of amateur musicians, all veterans of the war in Viet Nam.
Yet despite what would seem to be an unpromising situation, surrounded by the decaying wreck of what was once a center of culture with the prospect of a mediocre performance by marginally skilled artists, the concert proves to be a transforming experience, especially the Rankin Concerto. Even though the musicianship isn’t always equal to the demands of the music, there is something about the performance that transcends its flaws.
John Morton is both composer and soloist. But though his playing is inadequate, still, “the full force of the Rankin Concerto was expressed through Morton’s inept playing. His every false note hinted at impregnable perfection, his every falter was liberating. . . .there was no robotic flawlessness here.” There is something mechanical about perfection; it is in the passion of a man trying to go beyond his abilities that emotion is “perfectly translated from the keenly felt to the heard to the keenly felt again,” or as the poet has it–a man’s reach must exceed his grasp. “The Rankin Concerto wasn’t long, not ten minutes, and they didn’t play it right, nor did they finish it the way they were supposed to, but during those few minutes everything in my life that is waste, torment and drivel was swept away–the clouds parted–and I beheld the sublime.”
The last two stories in the book are somewhat less emotionally charged, much more dominated by their intellectual concern with form. “Manners of Dying” is a collection of letters from a prison warden to the mother of a prisoner describing the details of his last hours. Each is a form letter with variations, different meals, different reactions to religious counseling, different deaths, but each talks about the same prisoner. “The Vita Aeterna Mirror Company: Mirrors to Last Till Kingdom Come” deals with a machine that makes mirrors out of memories spoken into them, no doubt suggesting the reflective qualities of art holding the mirror up to nature. In both stories, however, concerns with form get in the way of the emotional content, rather than meshing in the same kind of imaginative synthesis that characterizes the first two stories. They seem more self conscious. When Martel does manage to balance emotion and idea, form and content, as he does in the first two stories, there is none better, and if he doesn’t always quite manage that balance–well remember the Rankin Concerto.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Book Review: Dead Boys, RichardLange
Lives of noisy desperation might not be a bad description of the characters that people the twelve stories in Richard Lange’s debut collection, “Dead Boys.” At best they are people who get by at dead end jobs they despise, at worst they wallow in misery in drugs and alcohol. They live in shabby apartments in run down neighborhoods where a child’s wading pool can’t even be left out in the yard over night. They live in sleazy motels where the desk clerk sits caged behind bullet proof glass and the room next door echoes with prostitutes plying their trade. More often than not their marriages have failed or are failing. They are as like as not estranged from their families. If they have friends, male or female, those friends are likely to be as miserable as they are if not worse. Their hopes and their dreams, if they still have them, are bubbles just about ready to burst. All of this is to say: the world of Dead Boys is not what you would call a pleasant place to be spending your life.
These are helpless people caught up in the web of a deterministic universe: they wriggle and they writhe, they moan and they complain, but they cannot escape, Most of them have given up even trying. Here’s one of his narrators (all twelve stories have first person narrators) forecasting his future: “Christina’s sister will crash at my apartment for a few days, and it will be fun and all, but we’ll finally come to our senses. I’ll tell her to leave, and she’ll try to stab me with a broken tequila bottle. After that I’ll be lonely for a good long while, but then things will get better. I’ll find a job, lose it, find another. A few years form now I’ll come into enough money to take a trip to Hawaii. I will not enjoy it.” In another story, the narrator’s relationship with his wife is described as running in circles as he waits for her to come home from some party where he’s sure she’s seeing someone else. In a third story the narrator is haunted by the memory of his wife who jumped from a highway bridge. He blames himself for her suicide, and he blames her ghost for everything that has gone wrong in his life since–everything from his car breaking down to his inability to keep a decent pair of shoes. “She wants me to suffer, and I have obliged, but the price of peace remains a mystery.” There is no peace for any of the people in these stories.
They are set for the most part in Los Angeles, but although there are the stars on the Walk of Fame and every once in awhile someone gets a view of the Hollywood sign, they might as well take place on another planet. The L.A. Lange describes is “a rough neighborhood, graffiti twisting like angry black vines up the sides of the buildings, half the streetlights shot out,” where the grocery market is a “windowless bunker that’s been tarted up with a thin coat of hot pink paint.” In the meat department pig snouts are on sale, and “a fly that’s succumbed to the cold lies belly-up on the hamburger.” The dining spots of choice are Macdonalds and donut shops. Far from the Beverly Hills Hotel, Lange’s people step into lobbies where “a few men are hunched on the spavined couches, rapt before a silent television chained to a shelf up near the ceiling.” The man next to you smells like “yeast and moth balls.” The hotel sits on streets that the “sun never quite reaches. . . .and those who have chosen to live in this constant twilight collide with those who have no choice and those who are simply, in one way or another, lost.” Forget maps to the homes of the stars: “The sky out this way is a map of hell–blood and fire and gristly bruised clouds.” This is not red carpet; this is filthy motel shag.
Society’s dregs caught in the lower depths–there was a time, over a hundred years ago now, when this kind of thing was innovative and startling, scandalous even, for an author to turn to the social under belly for his subject matter. This was the time of Emile Zola and novels like “Nana,” of Stephen Crane and his Maggie. That time has long gone, taken the last of the exits to Brooklyn. Authors have long since freed themselves from the confines of the genteel and the socially acceptable. There is no class of people, no actions of these people, no language to describe them and their actions that has not been mined for it potential ore. There is a good deal of ugliness in the world and it has been a long time since writers have chosen to ignore it.
Given this truism, it isn’t saying much about the quality of Lange’s stories to say they are gritty pictures of the seamier side of life in glamorous L.A. To say this is merely to place them in a tradition, what gives them their life and their power is the author’s ability to create characters, who despite their many failures and flaws, despite their depravities and cruelties, can still manage to stimulate a reader’s compassion. Sometimes they can even seem likeable. To take weak, unpleasant, and even evil characters and have your reader coming away perhaps finding something to like in them, this is no mean feat.
All the first person narrators are flawed in some way. They drink away their problems. They subject themselves to faithless women. They take advantage of friends and relatives. They blind themselves with illusions. Yet listening to them is much like sitting at a bar next to a slightly tipsy stranger rambling on about his life and loves in the pleasant glow of a warm buzz. You know deep down he’s only a seedy drunk, but you can’t help kind of liking him. So when the narrator of “Bank of America” talks about robbing banks to set up a nest egg for his family, the last thing you do is make moral judgments. He seems like such a nice guy, he just wants “a Subway franchise somewhere quiet with good schools.” When the narrator of “Blind-Made Products” describes how he treats his blind girlfriend at first, you can almost forgive him the way he treats women in general, if not quite his slimy treatment of her at the end of their affair. It’s not that his drunks and his dopers are loveable, it’s just that they’re all too human. And if they are bad, and they are, there are so many others that are worse.
Moreover, they speak so well. They are nothing if not articulate. Sometimes one has to wonder if they are perhaps not too eloquent, if their descriptive abilities are a bit too articulate.
The speaker in “Blind-Made Products” talks about the difficulty he has trying to describe things to his blind girl friend. Yet he doesn’t seem to have any problem describing things to the reader.
A drawer full of panties is “arrayed like the lustrous black and blue and red pelts of small exotic creatures.” He talks about the hands of blind people preparing their coffee as “seeming to have an intelligence of their own.” A sheet of black plastic blowing up against a car’s windshield “flaps and billows in the wind like and ugly ghost.” And he is not the only narrator with the gift of language. They all seem to have it. Razor wire looks like the skeleton of a snake chewing on its own tail, according to the security guard telling the story of “Loss Prevention.” In “Telephone Bird,” the narrator describes a marihuana high: “How nicely th couch cradled me then, like the softest cloud. I lost touch of the game, charting the snaky creep of darkness across the rug and up the wainscoting. The black tide slopped over onto the wallpaper, drowning the roses row by row, and I was right there when it reached the ceiling, the only witness as night overtook us.”
Sometimes the figurative language echoes the kind of fanciful indulgence of the 17th century metaphysical poets: “The rain comes down so hard it cracks the night into a million pieces. All I can see through the windshield is glistening shards of cars and blacktop and the kaleidoscopic whorl of a woman skedaddling across the parking lot.” This is brilliant description–literate and precise, but is it appropriate for someone starting on his first night as a security guard in a ghetto market, even if he did go to college? I don’t know what the answer is. I do know I wouldn’t want to lose that gem of description.
Often the author lays a symbolic leitmotif over the narrative. The smoke and ash from an out of control fire that covers everything in “Fuzzyland” parallel the haze and dirt that pervade the character’s lives. The stench from the decaying body of the suicide in Room 210 that fills “Love Lifted Me” is a constant reminder of the decay which surround us all and compliments the
running theme of the suicide the narrator’s wife. The bird who mimics the telephone ring with its false promises, the brick wall that the one window of a tiny apartment faces, the action figure of a man who finds out he’s a robot: all develop into significant comments on the narrators and their lives. Perhaps none more so than the running fantasies of Scarlet Johansson in “Loss Prevention.” She represents the kinds of dreams that get a lot of people through the smoke and ash covered night,” marihuana, alcohol, Scarlet Johansson.
Finally, Lange’s narrators often add a touch of irony to their stories that seems to put things in just the right perspective. When killing a bird brings no divine retribution, the narrator observes: “I knew the disappointment some criminals feel when their most daring transgressions fail to make the papers.” Or as he later observes: what’s the good of being crazy if you still feel shame? There is the Yuppie in a dead end job who ends up putting on his ex-con brother’s T-shirt and socks. The narrator of “Love Lifted Me” deflates the Jesus spouting father of a street punk by asking him how long it has been since he’s seen his son. “The guy’s smile goes mushy at the edges,” he tells us. “It’s the kind of reaction I was looking for. I’m fucked that way.”
On the one hand one might argue that such insights nd such literary eloquence in general is out of character for the kinds of people who are supposed to be speaking, yet this has always been the paradox of literary naturalism unless it is presented by some third person observer more literate that the characters described. Not everyone, however, can have a Huck Finn speak like a Huck Finn. After all who wants to read transcripts of the conversations of alcoholics and petty criminals. The real question is does the author manage to get the reader to forget the chasm between the speakers and the way they say what they say. Nothing is duller than the stories of drunks when you’re sober. It is art that makes these drunks interesting. It is art that makes us realize that attention must be paid. And it is the art of Richard Lange that he manages to do just that.
These are helpless people caught up in the web of a deterministic universe: they wriggle and they writhe, they moan and they complain, but they cannot escape, Most of them have given up even trying. Here’s one of his narrators (all twelve stories have first person narrators) forecasting his future: “Christina’s sister will crash at my apartment for a few days, and it will be fun and all, but we’ll finally come to our senses. I’ll tell her to leave, and she’ll try to stab me with a broken tequila bottle. After that I’ll be lonely for a good long while, but then things will get better. I’ll find a job, lose it, find another. A few years form now I’ll come into enough money to take a trip to Hawaii. I will not enjoy it.” In another story, the narrator’s relationship with his wife is described as running in circles as he waits for her to come home from some party where he’s sure she’s seeing someone else. In a third story the narrator is haunted by the memory of his wife who jumped from a highway bridge. He blames himself for her suicide, and he blames her ghost for everything that has gone wrong in his life since–everything from his car breaking down to his inability to keep a decent pair of shoes. “She wants me to suffer, and I have obliged, but the price of peace remains a mystery.” There is no peace for any of the people in these stories.
They are set for the most part in Los Angeles, but although there are the stars on the Walk of Fame and every once in awhile someone gets a view of the Hollywood sign, they might as well take place on another planet. The L.A. Lange describes is “a rough neighborhood, graffiti twisting like angry black vines up the sides of the buildings, half the streetlights shot out,” where the grocery market is a “windowless bunker that’s been tarted up with a thin coat of hot pink paint.” In the meat department pig snouts are on sale, and “a fly that’s succumbed to the cold lies belly-up on the hamburger.” The dining spots of choice are Macdonalds and donut shops. Far from the Beverly Hills Hotel, Lange’s people step into lobbies where “a few men are hunched on the spavined couches, rapt before a silent television chained to a shelf up near the ceiling.” The man next to you smells like “yeast and moth balls.” The hotel sits on streets that the “sun never quite reaches. . . .and those who have chosen to live in this constant twilight collide with those who have no choice and those who are simply, in one way or another, lost.” Forget maps to the homes of the stars: “The sky out this way is a map of hell–blood and fire and gristly bruised clouds.” This is not red carpet; this is filthy motel shag.
Society’s dregs caught in the lower depths–there was a time, over a hundred years ago now, when this kind of thing was innovative and startling, scandalous even, for an author to turn to the social under belly for his subject matter. This was the time of Emile Zola and novels like “Nana,” of Stephen Crane and his Maggie. That time has long gone, taken the last of the exits to Brooklyn. Authors have long since freed themselves from the confines of the genteel and the socially acceptable. There is no class of people, no actions of these people, no language to describe them and their actions that has not been mined for it potential ore. There is a good deal of ugliness in the world and it has been a long time since writers have chosen to ignore it.
Given this truism, it isn’t saying much about the quality of Lange’s stories to say they are gritty pictures of the seamier side of life in glamorous L.A. To say this is merely to place them in a tradition, what gives them their life and their power is the author’s ability to create characters, who despite their many failures and flaws, despite their depravities and cruelties, can still manage to stimulate a reader’s compassion. Sometimes they can even seem likeable. To take weak, unpleasant, and even evil characters and have your reader coming away perhaps finding something to like in them, this is no mean feat.
All the first person narrators are flawed in some way. They drink away their problems. They subject themselves to faithless women. They take advantage of friends and relatives. They blind themselves with illusions. Yet listening to them is much like sitting at a bar next to a slightly tipsy stranger rambling on about his life and loves in the pleasant glow of a warm buzz. You know deep down he’s only a seedy drunk, but you can’t help kind of liking him. So when the narrator of “Bank of America” talks about robbing banks to set up a nest egg for his family, the last thing you do is make moral judgments. He seems like such a nice guy, he just wants “a Subway franchise somewhere quiet with good schools.” When the narrator of “Blind-Made Products” describes how he treats his blind girlfriend at first, you can almost forgive him the way he treats women in general, if not quite his slimy treatment of her at the end of their affair. It’s not that his drunks and his dopers are loveable, it’s just that they’re all too human. And if they are bad, and they are, there are so many others that are worse.
Moreover, they speak so well. They are nothing if not articulate. Sometimes one has to wonder if they are perhaps not too eloquent, if their descriptive abilities are a bit too articulate.
The speaker in “Blind-Made Products” talks about the difficulty he has trying to describe things to his blind girl friend. Yet he doesn’t seem to have any problem describing things to the reader.
A drawer full of panties is “arrayed like the lustrous black and blue and red pelts of small exotic creatures.” He talks about the hands of blind people preparing their coffee as “seeming to have an intelligence of their own.” A sheet of black plastic blowing up against a car’s windshield “flaps and billows in the wind like and ugly ghost.” And he is not the only narrator with the gift of language. They all seem to have it. Razor wire looks like the skeleton of a snake chewing on its own tail, according to the security guard telling the story of “Loss Prevention.” In “Telephone Bird,” the narrator describes a marihuana high: “How nicely th couch cradled me then, like the softest cloud. I lost touch of the game, charting the snaky creep of darkness across the rug and up the wainscoting. The black tide slopped over onto the wallpaper, drowning the roses row by row, and I was right there when it reached the ceiling, the only witness as night overtook us.”
Sometimes the figurative language echoes the kind of fanciful indulgence of the 17th century metaphysical poets: “The rain comes down so hard it cracks the night into a million pieces. All I can see through the windshield is glistening shards of cars and blacktop and the kaleidoscopic whorl of a woman skedaddling across the parking lot.” This is brilliant description–literate and precise, but is it appropriate for someone starting on his first night as a security guard in a ghetto market, even if he did go to college? I don’t know what the answer is. I do know I wouldn’t want to lose that gem of description.
Often the author lays a symbolic leitmotif over the narrative. The smoke and ash from an out of control fire that covers everything in “Fuzzyland” parallel the haze and dirt that pervade the character’s lives. The stench from the decaying body of the suicide in Room 210 that fills “Love Lifted Me” is a constant reminder of the decay which surround us all and compliments the
running theme of the suicide the narrator’s wife. The bird who mimics the telephone ring with its false promises, the brick wall that the one window of a tiny apartment faces, the action figure of a man who finds out he’s a robot: all develop into significant comments on the narrators and their lives. Perhaps none more so than the running fantasies of Scarlet Johansson in “Loss Prevention.” She represents the kinds of dreams that get a lot of people through the smoke and ash covered night,” marihuana, alcohol, Scarlet Johansson.
Finally, Lange’s narrators often add a touch of irony to their stories that seems to put things in just the right perspective. When killing a bird brings no divine retribution, the narrator observes: “I knew the disappointment some criminals feel when their most daring transgressions fail to make the papers.” Or as he later observes: what’s the good of being crazy if you still feel shame? There is the Yuppie in a dead end job who ends up putting on his ex-con brother’s T-shirt and socks. The narrator of “Love Lifted Me” deflates the Jesus spouting father of a street punk by asking him how long it has been since he’s seen his son. “The guy’s smile goes mushy at the edges,” he tells us. “It’s the kind of reaction I was looking for. I’m fucked that way.”
On the one hand one might argue that such insights nd such literary eloquence in general is out of character for the kinds of people who are supposed to be speaking, yet this has always been the paradox of literary naturalism unless it is presented by some third person observer more literate that the characters described. Not everyone, however, can have a Huck Finn speak like a Huck Finn. After all who wants to read transcripts of the conversations of alcoholics and petty criminals. The real question is does the author manage to get the reader to forget the chasm between the speakers and the way they say what they say. Nothing is duller than the stories of drunks when you’re sober. It is art that makes these drunks interesting. It is art that makes us realize that attention must be paid. And it is the art of Richard Lange that he manages to do just that.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
DVD Review: Surrogates
It was in 1920 that Karel Capek, a Czech writer, first used the word robot in a play called R. U. R., the initials standing for Rossum's Universal Robots. His robots were humanoid machines that in the course of the play developed the capacity to love, so that not only were they human-like externally, but internally (at least as far as emotions are concerned) as well. The implication was that they were no longer machines, but had become human like us. They were a new Adam and Eve.
Since that first appearance, robots of all kinds have invaded both fiction and the cinema screen. There have been threatening mechanicals and cute little droids. There have been servants to man and servants to man gone berserk, computer-like know-it-alls and dogged garbage cleaners. There have been diabolic humanoids and perfected human idealizations. The surrogates in the eponymous Jonathan Mostow film are robots from this last category.
In a world in the not too distant future humans have taken to living vicariously through perfected humanoid surrogates controlled by their thoughts as they, themselves, lie prone in their homes. The surrogates are all good looking, all young, all physically strong and athletic, supermen and women. Surrogates work for their controllers; they play for them. They love for them. All interaction between people is between surrogates: even, it seems, between husband and wife. Life is beautiful for everyone in a world where everyone is beautiful and nothing seems beyond human capacity through the agency of these surrogates. But when suddenly two surrogates are destroyed by a secret weapon, and even more significantly, their controllers are killed as well, this utopian paradise begins to reveal some fissures.
Enter Bruce Willis as F.B.I. agent Tom Greer; it is up to him to find out what is going on. This is the set up of Mostow's Surrogates based on the comic series by Robert Venditti now available on DVD. Willis plays both a bald grizzled human version of himself and his wavy haired surrogate, and he plays them both with more or less the same kind of intense commitment we have come to expect from the hero of the Die Hard franchise. He is aided by Radha Mitchell as his surrogate F.B.I. agent partner. Ving Rhames does a supporting turn as the dreadlocked leader of a sect of surrogate refuseniks and James Cromwell shows up as the discarded inventor of the surrogates. In general all their performances are workmanlike, if not award winning.
Indeed, workmanlike is an apt description of the whole film. The plot is perhaps overly complex. Too often action sequences, car chases, crashes, surrogates leaping onto roofs of buses, substitute for dramatic content. Nevertheless the film is effectively paced and beautifully photographed. And if its themes are not as compellingly elaborated as they might be, they are still worth thinking about. After all the idea of a world in which we can all be the beautiful people we want to be and do all the exciting things we wish we could deserves some consideration. Although one might well wonder how it is that in a world capable of inventing surrogates, the surrogates still have to get around in cars and buses. A little more futuristic thinking might have been welcome.
Still, if you missed it in the multiplex, Surrogates is certainly worth a spot in your Netflix queue (if only to see Bruce Willis with hair). Besides, the DVD includes a commentary by director Mostow, and a well done music video, "I Will Not Bow," with a collage of scenes from the movie, by Breaking Benjamin.
Since that first appearance, robots of all kinds have invaded both fiction and the cinema screen. There have been threatening mechanicals and cute little droids. There have been servants to man and servants to man gone berserk, computer-like know-it-alls and dogged garbage cleaners. There have been diabolic humanoids and perfected human idealizations. The surrogates in the eponymous Jonathan Mostow film are robots from this last category.
In a world in the not too distant future humans have taken to living vicariously through perfected humanoid surrogates controlled by their thoughts as they, themselves, lie prone in their homes. The surrogates are all good looking, all young, all physically strong and athletic, supermen and women. Surrogates work for their controllers; they play for them. They love for them. All interaction between people is between surrogates: even, it seems, between husband and wife. Life is beautiful for everyone in a world where everyone is beautiful and nothing seems beyond human capacity through the agency of these surrogates. But when suddenly two surrogates are destroyed by a secret weapon, and even more significantly, their controllers are killed as well, this utopian paradise begins to reveal some fissures.
Enter Bruce Willis as F.B.I. agent Tom Greer; it is up to him to find out what is going on. This is the set up of Mostow's Surrogates based on the comic series by Robert Venditti now available on DVD. Willis plays both a bald grizzled human version of himself and his wavy haired surrogate, and he plays them both with more or less the same kind of intense commitment we have come to expect from the hero of the Die Hard franchise. He is aided by Radha Mitchell as his surrogate F.B.I. agent partner. Ving Rhames does a supporting turn as the dreadlocked leader of a sect of surrogate refuseniks and James Cromwell shows up as the discarded inventor of the surrogates. In general all their performances are workmanlike, if not award winning.
Indeed, workmanlike is an apt description of the whole film. The plot is perhaps overly complex. Too often action sequences, car chases, crashes, surrogates leaping onto roofs of buses, substitute for dramatic content. Nevertheless the film is effectively paced and beautifully photographed. And if its themes are not as compellingly elaborated as they might be, they are still worth thinking about. After all the idea of a world in which we can all be the beautiful people we want to be and do all the exciting things we wish we could deserves some consideration. Although one might well wonder how it is that in a world capable of inventing surrogates, the surrogates still have to get around in cars and buses. A little more futuristic thinking might have been welcome.
Still, if you missed it in the multiplex, Surrogates is certainly worth a spot in your Netflix queue (if only to see Bruce Willis with hair). Besides, the DVD includes a commentary by director Mostow, and a well done music video, "I Will Not Bow," with a collage of scenes from the movie, by Breaking Benjamin.
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