|
Herein
a log of some of my efforts to understand how writing works and
how to make it work. See also a
sisterly site, | Abbey,
Edward. The Fool's Progress Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School Alvarez, Julia. In the Time of the Butterflies Auster, Paul. Moon Palace Bellow, Saul. Seize the Day Blacker, Terence. Kill Your Darlings Borroughs, William S. The Last Words of Dutch Schultz Boyle, T. C. Tortilla Curtain Busch, Frederick. Girls Cao, Lan. Monkey Bridge Carver, R., & T. Jenks, eds. American Short Story Masterpieces Carr, Caleb. The Alienist Chevalier, Tracy. Girl With a Pearl Earring Coelho, Paulo. O Alquimista Constantini, H. The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis. V. Mermaids Coupland, Douglas. Generation X Crimmins, G. Garfield The Republic of Dreams Davies, Robertson. The Manticore De Bernières, Louis. Corelli's Mandolin DeLillo, Don. Libra Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend Files, Lolita. Getting to the Good Parts Fraser, George MacDonald. Flashman Gaitskill, Mary. Bad Behavior Grafton, Sue. O Is for Outlaw Gibson, William. Idoru; Neuromancer Greene, Graham. The Human Factor Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises Hijuelos, Oscar. Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love Hope, Anthony. The Prisoner of Zenda Jackson, Jon A. Hit on the House |
Jing
Wang, ed. China's Avant-Garde Fiction
Kay, Guy Gavriel. Sailing to Sarantium Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible Korkut, Dede. The Book of Dede Korkut Krich, John. A Totally Free Man. Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. Lee, Chang-Rae. Native Speaker Leonard, Elmore. Cuba Libre Leonard, Elmore. Swag Mahfouz, Naguib. Children of Gebelawi Markson, David. This is Not a Novel McCaffery, Larry, ed. Avant-Pop McCullers, Carson. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter Okri, Ben. The Famished Road Ondaatje, Michael. Anil's Ghost Pamuk, Orhan. My Name is Red Pamuk, Orhan. The White Castle Patchett, Ann. Bel Canto Proulx, Annie. Postcards Pynchon, Thomas. Mason & Dixon Réage, Pauline. Story of O Roth, Philip. The Counterlife Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones Smith, Martin Cruz. Havana Bay Smith, Zadie. White Teeth Stendahl. The Charterhouse of Parma Thornton, Lawrence. Imagining Argentina. V. Mermaids Tyler, Ann. Back When We Were Grownups Treece, Henry. The Great Captains Vargas Llosa, Mario. La Fiesta del Chivo Walker, Barbara K., Ed. Turkish Folk-Tales |
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Fiction
Abbey, Edward. The Fool's Progress. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1988. 485
The "fool" is a character much like Abbey -- a tall, gaunt rural easterner and a veteran of World War II and several marriages -- and his story is a chapter of a thinly disguised, semi-bitter, self-mocking autobiography. See my review in The Village Voice Literary Supplement, Jan. 31, 1989:54.
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Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School. New York: Grove Press, 1978. 165
The fantastic adventures of Janey, from age 10 to her death at 14, fucking from Mérida to Luxor. Frank plagiarisms,freely altered, from Hawthorne, Genet, Catullus, Erica Jong, some crude drawings, mostly of cocks & cunts, a Persian lesson, & some funny parodies of translations from the Persian. Implausible President Carter is one of her fucking partners, & she hangs out with Jean Genet for most of the penultimate part of the book. The last parts are The World and The Journey, illustrated somewhat in the manner of Egyptian tomb drawings. I can't say just why, but the book gave me pleasure. Acker is wild & smart. ntbk 2/5/88 (15) (See also McCaffery, Larry, ed. Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation)
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Alvarez, Julia. In the Time of the Butterflies. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1994. 325 pp.
An advance over her technique in How the García Girls Lost Their Accent, but still the same technique: alternating naratives of sisters. Here they are the four Mirabal sisters, three of whom became famous when, as well known and popular figures in the resistance against Generalísimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, they were assassinated in a staged car accident on November 25, 1960. In a postscript, Alvarez tells us that her father had been involved in the same anti-Trujillista movement, and had moved himself and his family to New York just one step of Trujillo's esbirros, so the Mirabal sisters had to be part of her family's legend. She uses their story to imagine, in sensuous and sometimes horrifying detail, the lives of four very different but intimately connected women. Patria Mercedes, the eldest, born 1924, is a dutiful and conventional farm mother reluctantly drawn into the struggle by injustices to family and neighbors; Minerva, b. 1926, is the tall firebrand, a rebel and anti-Trujillista from her early years and the first to use the code name Mariposa, "Butterfly"; María Teresa, called "Mate" (two syllables), born 1935, is the kid sister, the pretty one, a mix of vanity and valor, who acts boldly even when terrified. The fourth sister, Dedé, b. about 1925, refuses to get involved, leads an emotionally impoverished life (compared to the acted-out passions of her sisters), and survives to be the custodian of the tale. Alvarez' telling doesn't add to the drama of the true story, but has the virtue of making it accessible to a wider, English-speaking audience. 01/02/11 Cf. MarioVargas Llosa, La Fiesta del Chivo; Michele Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight
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Auster, Paul. Moon Palace. New York: Viking, 1989. 307
Very silly comedy of manners, with absurd New York City characters. It's mostly about reading -- or about all the Great Books that Auster has read. Also about writing, with comments on its own defects contained in the narrator's comments on the poor writing of the other characters. ntbk 8/27/89:39-40
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Bellow, Saul. Seize the Day. Crest paperback, 1965 ed. New York: The Viking Press, 1956. 128
A feckless fool has a really bad day. Clumsy, paunchy, 40-something Tommy Wilhelm, a failure as a salesman, soldier (he's an undistinguished WWII vet), actor (he was an extra in 1 movie long ago, when he was still handsome but no brighter), son (his distinguished father, a retired physician, finds him repulsive) & husband (his estranged wife will not divorce him, nor let him have much time with their sons, but squeezes him for money he doesn't have), entrusts his last $700 to an extravagant old con man, Dr. Tamkin (who may not be a real doctor), who gambles it on lard futures & disappears when the investment crashes.Tommy then stumbles into a funeral and weeps so at the futility of it all, the others think he must be a relative of the deceased. The end. All this takes place on upper Broadway, between 70th & Columbia U., in Bellow's version an urban shtetl inhabited entirely by middle-aged & older Jewish men. Dr. Tamkin is amusing, but otherwise there's nothing here to merit the extravagant blurbs; if it was "one of the central stories of our day" (Herbert Gold, The Nation) back in the '50s, it's neither central nor much of a story today (April, 1997).
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Boyle, T. Coraghessan. Tortilla Curtain. New York: Viking Penguin, 1995. 355 pp.
Slapstick with a sledgehammer. Instead of taking pratfalls, Boyle's characters get smashed by an automobile and gang-raped (the Mexicans), forced to flee their homes by a holocaust (white exurbanites), until everything is swept away in a huge landslide.
A couple of poor, luckless Mexicans -- a veteran border-crosser and his much younger, innocent bride -- chase a dream of prosperity in the mountains near Los Angeles, where people like them are the nightmare and the labor force of idle and extravagant, boorish Anglo exurbanites.This sounds like a great comic premise for mordant social satire, and I'm glad he chose to highlight this very real, widespread conflict and the human costs of stupid racism. Unfortunately, Boyle makes everybody into a buffoon or a charlatan, except for the young Mexican bride, who is merely pathetic. This makes it hard to work up much concern for all the mounting disasters that befall them -- which is probably why Boyle has to keep intensifying the disasters. How can Boyle expect us to care about his characters when he obviously doesn't? 00/3/15
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Blacker, Terence. 2000. Kill Your Darlings. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Witty satire of the intense, incestuous little literary world. The narrator (of all but the last few pages) is Gregory Keays, a writer so desperate for recognition he will commit any crime to get it. He sprinkles his text with the useless literary trivia often found in magazines for would-be authors, including the Faulkner quote "Kill your darlings" and "Five Great Authors with Physical Oddities: 1. Ben Jonson weighed nearly 20 stone. ... Keays bête noire, and no doubt the main model for this book, is Martin Amis. 02-10-10
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Burroughs, William S. The Last Words of Dutch Schultz
Written as movie screenplay, & looks as though Wm Kennedy ripped off chunks of it for his Dutch Schultz in the movie "Cotton Club." Wonderful character portrayal. (18.ii.85, read about a week earlier)
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Busch, Frederick. Girls. New York: Harmony Books, 1997. 279
Tough, tender, mature campus security cop with killing skills solves mystery of disappearance (murder) of 14-year old farm girl, but can't save his own marriage. Busch is almost as good at describing a woman's or girl's fears and desirese as Annie Proulx is at describing a man's. ntbk 99/03/30
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Cao, Lan. Monkey Bridge. New York: Penguin, 1997. 260
Autobiographical novel of young Vietnamese woman refugee in Virginia and her mother, terrified of the new world because of all the horrors experienced in the old one. The "monkey bridge" is a contraption woven of vines that lets the peasants travel above the paddies.
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Carr, Caleb. The Alienist. New York: Bantam Books, 1994. 599
In 1896 NYC, Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, alienist (criminal psychologist), seeks serial murderer of boy prostitutes with aid of police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt & team made up of NYT crime reporter James Schuyler Moore (the narrator), protofeminist Sara Bewley, the detective sergeant bros. Lucius & Marcus Isaacson, 3 former patients & present Kreizler servants, & a little surreptitious help from gangland entrepreneur & future labor leader Paul Kelley & J.P. Morgan. Silly, silly book. Caricatures rather than characters except for the murderer, whose character is "discovered" bit by bit by the investigators as they try to identify & finally confront him. Except that murders involve sexual mutilations, there's no sex whatever in the book, & Sara h nothing to do but act like a 1970s feminist. v. Everything Log, 8/22/95
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Carver, Raymond, and Tom Jenks, eds. American Short Story Masterpieces. New York: Dell Publishing, 1987.
Lately I've been re-reading, or in some cases reading for the first time, the 36 pieces collected by Carver & Jenks. They supposedly limited themselves to stories published between 1953 and 1986, but the powerful opener, James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," was first copyrighted 1948. The editors eschewed modernist, po-mo and experimental stuff, going instead for narrative. I love these things, most of them. And even though there are very few murders (Flannery O'Connor provides the only real ones, in "A Good Man is Hard to Find," whereas Leonard Michaels' "Murderers" isn't about murder at all), there's a lot more punch per page than in, say, Sue Grafton's whole alphabet series. 2002/6/12
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Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quijote de la Mancha. Edited by Juan Alcina Franch. 1981 ed. 2 vols. Vol. 1. Barcelona: Bruguera, 1605. 659 pp.
I hope I live for a very long time, because I'm still more than 400 years behind in my reading. For example, I have just finished volume I of Spain's most famous metafiction, a discourse on literature which has kept people laughing all these years. It is very funny and (this was a surprise) very easy to read.
The story, as everybody knows, is of a middle-aged country squire of modest means who has persuaded himself that the popular romances of knighthood are all literally true and that he himself must become a knight modeled on those stories. He further persuades an illiterate peasant, Sancho Panza, to be his squire. The joke is not only that the stories and most of their heroes are fictitious, so that the squire who calls himself Don Quijote must imagine giants and monsters where there are none. It is also that whatever space there may have been for real free lances has long since disappeared. Spain now has a national police force, the Santa Hermandad, for righting wrongs and punishing offenders.
There are dull parts. Cervantes, either to bulk up the book or to keep feeding pages to his avid publisher, included several stories unrelated to his main plot, and one in particular --the Curioso impertinente, an entire short novel-- is tediously told and obvious. But other parts are hilarious-- especially the scene toward the end of Volume I, where characters from earlier strands of the story, plus several new ones, all assemble at an inn, and half of them are in on the joke of Don Quijote's madness and half are not.
Don Quijote himself is not developed as a character, and Cervantes barely cares what happens to him (in fact, he leaves that open and mysterious at the end of this volume). He is merely a vehicle for Cervantes to poke fun at the ridiculous exaggerations of chivalric romances that were still popular in Spain. We know nothing much about the don, not even his "real" name, or how he happens to be single at his age (which early on is said to be 50 but is never again mentioned), nor what has driven him to his madness. He's funny, because of the situations he gets into by taking literally the romantic fantasies, and because his rhetoric parodies those romances. The most complex character, one who is torn by conflicting loyalties, is Sancho Panza, a simpleton with moments of shrewdness.
Above all, this comedy is a discourse and critique of literature, not only of novels like the ones Don Quijote has been reading, but also of stage comedies (where Cervantes had had disappointing experience). In a long dialogue, the Cura and the Canónigo (two priests) lament the commercialization of stage plays and the lowering os standards. At one point the Cura even proposes a national censor, to review all plays before they are produced and maintain high standards -- could Cervantes have been serious?
If you are comfortable with 20th and 21st century Spanish, you will have little difficulty with Cervantes. There are some unfamiliar words, of course, some of them archaic even in 1605, and some of the long-winded, high-falutin speeches of the deranged "knight" and the companions who want to string him along get very complex, but for that this edition has footnotes. (00/7/24)
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Chevalier, Tracy. Girl With a Pearl Earring. New York: Plume (Penguin Group), 1999. 233
This is a wonderfully
sensitive reconstruction of the lives behind the marvelous paintings
produced by Johannes Vermeer and others in Delft, Netherlands,
from 1664 to 1676 which was also the subject of a major
recent show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The
Met show described the broader cultural and economic context
that permitted a group of artists and artisans in this small
city to achieve artistic effects realism, surrealism and
trompe l'oeil that still dazzle us. The novel gives a glimpse
of what life must have been like for some of the people portrayed,
both the rich patrons and, especially, the humbler folk who were
made to pose. In the novel, Griet, a very modest, dutiful Protestant
girl from a newly impoverished family (her father lost his trade
as a tile maker when a kiln blew up and blinded him) takes a
job as a maid in the large Catholic household of the painter
Johannes Vermeer, which can barely afford all its servants and
children. Vermeer is an extraordinary painter but a slow and
deliberate one. He is also (in the novel) a well-meaning, self-centered
and extremely passive man, so intent on avoiding confrontation
that he lets minor conflicts grow into major crises. To avoid
offending his main patron, the lascivious and self-indulgent
Van Ruijvens, he agrees secretly to do a painting of Griet the
servant girl. Secretly, because if Vermeer's wife finds out that
he's giving such attention to a servant, she will be scandalized.
Griet is more concerned about her own reputation, but she can
hardly say no to the master. Besides, she admires him and wants
to please him all the while carefully protecting her modesty.
There is a delightfully charged moment when Vermeer, more out of confusion than aggression, enters the space where Griet has withdrawn to wind the makeshift turban she has agreed to use for the painting Vermeer didn't want to paint her with her maid's cap, and Griet could not bear to put on a lady's fine hat. He sees her hair for the first time. This so embarrasses Griet that she feels she has no more shame to lose, and at the next opportunity she surprises her persistent suitor, the butcher's son, by letting him have his way with her (of course, this being Holland, nobody takes off any clothes).
Besides letting us peer into the lives behind the paintings, the book describes the painter's technique through the words of Griet, a close observer who also is set to work grinding materials for paints. What you would have learned from the show at the Met, but not from the novel, is how important certain other artists were in creating a cultural climate in Delft in those years. The city's prosperity as a producer of tapestries had begun to wane (Antwerp and other cities had taken most of the market), but there were still enough rich burghers to be patrons of the arts. Also, many of those burghers' and artisans' sons had traveled to Italy, where they became enamored of the sunlight and of the paintings, especially those of Carvaggio. The explosion of painterly talent in Delft began then with attempts to reproduce Italian effects (especially the bright sunlight) with the Dutch subject matter that appealed to local patrons. Rivalry among these artists, and knowledge of new inventions such as the camera obscura, spurred innovation in both themes and techniques. It was a glorious moment, which ended when that particular generation died (Vermeer in 1676) and their successors, competing now for a diminishing clientele, became more cautiously repetitive of what had worked in the past. (01-6-6)
Click here to view the painting Vermeer did of the girl Tracy Chevalier calls "Griet" (and many other works by Johannes Vermeer).
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Coelho, Paulo. O Alquimista. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Rocco Ltda., 1999. 247 First published 1988.
I bought this book last December in São Paulo, because (1) I wanted to practice reading simple Portuguese, (2) I was curious about the world's second-best selling author (after John Grisham, according to a NYT article), and (3) I was ready for an uplifting message. It certainly is simple Portuguese. My only disappointment was that Coelho deliberately avoids using Brazil or his hometown, Rio, as a setting, so I didn't pick up as much local vocabulary as I would like. The story is also extremely simple, a fable about a shepherd boy, o rapaz, who dreams of becoming rich and, after traveling from Spain (why Spain?) across the North African desert, and running into various wise and not-so-wise characters, he does.
The tone is a little like that of Antoine de Saint Exupéry's Le petit prince, except that the little prince dies in order to return to his planet and his rose, whereas the shepherd boy finds an earthly treasure so he can return and marry the rich merchant's daughter back in Spain. In both stories, the boy protagonist is parent-free in a world of benign adults.
What makes this and Coelho's other books so popular is not just that they're so easy to read, but that they tell us what almost all of us most want to hear: That what we truly desire will be ours, as long as we dare to act on our desires. There is something to this, I think. It is the same message presented in the popular self-help book Wishcraft . No doubt many readers absorb the lesson more easily when it's presented as a parable. (Sher, Barbara, with Annie Gottlieb. Wishcraft: How to Get What you Really Want. New York: Ballantine Books, 1979. 278.)
Coelho's term for one's true, essential desire is lenda pessoal, i.e., "personal legend," or maybe "personal myth" better conveys the idea. It is not just anything you may think you want, or some momentary appetite, but your most basic desire. Sher gives you exercises to help you discover what that is - because most of us repress that desire. This may be because we feel ourselves unworthy, or just because we suspect it's an impossible dream and we want to guard ourselves against disappointment. Of course, if we were in Hogwarts Academy, we could just look into the mirror of Erised, as in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
Coelho's rapaz doesn't look into a magic mirror, but he does consult an alchemist, who helps him discover his true desire. Sher, like Coelho, insists that no dream is impossible, and presents ways to plan on achieving it. Rowling, on the other hand, is happy just dreaming it, in her wonderful Harry Potter series, but that's just spectator magic - she doesn't really expect her readers to take up the game of Quidditch. Coelho's formulation is more like applied magic. He writes (repeatedly, for this is a very repetitious book), "Tudo é uma coisa só," or "Everything is all one thing," which means apparently that there is order in the universe, and everything in it supports every other thing. And by following one's "lenda pessoal," everything in the universe "conspires" to help one achieve his/her desire. We can all use a shot of such optimism now and then. And as I said, I think there's something to it. (00/9/1)
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Coupland, Douglas.Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991.
Rambling, disjointed, but with some brilliant moments, like the lives it narrates: two guys and a gal, with no place to go and no desire to get there. Occasionally one of them makes an arresting comment, like this one:
The carapace of coolness is too much for Claire, also. She breaks the silence by saying that it's not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments. "Either our lives become stories, or there's just no way to get through them." p. 8
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Crimmins, G. Garfield (artist Jerry Crimmins). The Republic of Dreams: A Reverie . New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998.
A travel guide and oneiric thriller to read with someone you love. In La République de Rêves, old forests float overhead, and everything is up to date as of 1936 -- or maybe any other time. Reverians enjoy good wine, lovemaking and undress -- in fact, they enjoy all experiences. But now the Reverians are being attacked by the LOC (League of Common Sense). On the cover (gray & white image), "A Zeppelin enthusiast breaks into a dance as an airship of the Reverian fleet passes overhead."
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Davies, Robertson. The Manticore, 1972.
Terribly thin story, of implausibly simple characters, contrived to illustrate certain concepts of Jungian psychotherapy. The analysand is a rich alcoholic from Toronto, tormented by memories of an overbearing father, a beautiful and weak mother, and a stupid and repressive governess; the analyst is a Swiss woman so brilliant and insightful as to be scarcely human, not a person at all (she is given no past, no complicated relations in the present) but a symbol of rationality. This is the middle novel of a trilogy; I don't intend to read the others. 020206
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De Bernières, Louis. Corelli's Mandolin. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. 436 pp.
This is a great mess of a novel, a polemic wrapped in a love story, often brilliant, just as often tedious,but ending satisactorily. It is a mix of pedantry, diatribe, sentiment and chills, told in different voices and from different time perspectives, with a beautiful closing that casts over everything preceding it the illusion of coherence. The polemics are about the origins of the Cold War, the perfidy of politicians, the peculiarities of various nations, the simple joys of peasant life, and the brutality of fascists, Nazis, and Greek Communists. The wrapping is really two love stories centered on the same man, for both the Greek island-girl Pelagia and the hulking Italian officer Carlo Guercio, fall in love with the charming Antonio Corelli, a musician who by accident is a captain in the Italian force occupying the Greek island of Cephalonia.
There were times when the polemics so irritated me that I lost all connection to Pelagia et al. and wanted to slam the book shut, permanently, convinced that de Berniéres was an insufferable Tory with condescending opinions about everybody not British. But, since it had been warmly recommended by a friend, and because the critics' blurbs are so glowing, I persisted, and was rewarded. A Tory he may be, but one with a lively imagination that allows for some complexity of his stereotypes.And he is very, very good at describing excruciating pain, whether of the Italian and Greek soldiers freezing in the mountain or of a man taking machine-gun bullets in the chest.
De Berniéres has done an awful lot of research, not all of it thoroughly digested, and insists on using it all, alas. Many of the incidents he describes may have happened as he says, but can it really be that there is nothing good at all to be said for the Greek Communists, even as anti-Fascists?* The polemics also distort the style of the novel, introducing unlikely and unengaging voices -- a long, unlikely interior monologue by Mussolini, for example, or ironic commentaries -- wisecracks, really -- written by Pelagia's father, the impossibly virtuous Dr Iannis.Usually those pages are eaten by Pelagia's pet goat, but not, unfortunately, before we have been obliged to read them. Still, when he does focus on his characters, de Berniéres knows how to bring them to life, and sometimes to death, most convincingly. Corelli himself is rather vague -- he makes funny faces and plays mandolin beautifully, but we have little sense of what motivates him -- but Carlo Guercio, Pelagia, her adopted mother-figure Drosoula and several others will remain vivid in my memory. 2000-8-6
* See the critique by Maria Margaronis, "Whitewash in the Ionian," The Nation, August 20/27, 2001, on both the 1994 novel and the 2001 movie (which I haven't seen, and may not bother to see). Judging from her essay, the novel is far superior as art, while the movie is far less offensive politically (especially to former Communist partisans, some of whom are still alive and remember these events). 2001-8-12
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DeLillo, Don. Libra. New York: Viking, 1988. 458
Like La Fiesta del Chivo, Libra is a chillingly realistic novel that re-imagines and reconstructs a famous magnicide. But the more mysterious circumstances of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the particular obsessions of Don DeLillo, make this a very different book from Vargas Llosa's telling of the killing of Rafael Trujillo.
According to DeLillo (through his stand-in character, Nicholas Branch),"the conspiracy against the President was a rambling affair that succeeded in the short term due mainly to chance." Many people with different motives were out to get Kennedy from right-wing Aryan-nation types to nonideological drifters desperate to leave a mark on history but (in this version) the most systematic pursuers were people who blamed him for the "loss" of Cuba and thought that his elimination would help them get that country back. These included embittered CIA cast-offs, mobsters, investors, and Cuban exile terrorists. You get the impression that even if they'd missed in Dallas, somebody was going to get JFK as long as he insisted on riding in an open car.
DeLillo is fascinated by the narratives we make up to explain ourselves and the world around us. Mostly he is fascinated by those with the weirdest and most complicated narratives, narratives that need frequent adjustment because they keep bumping into contradictory realities. Lee Oswald struggles to persuade himself that he is on to some secret understanding of the world, gained from laborious reading (because he's dyslexic). Jack Ruby has convinced himself that he must always be a defender of the Jews and works very hard to silence his own suspicions that he may be homosexual. The rogue ex-CIA men, outwardly very calm, have an absolutely loony interpretation of history and their role in it. The most sensible character is Marina, Oswald's Russian wife, who can't take seriously any of her husband's elaborate poses and just wants him to teach her English and help her and their baby daughters survive in what for her is a strange new world.
DeLillo has a very great novelistic strength that Vargas Llosa also exhibits (though more in the Peruvian novels than in Chivo): pitch-perfect dialogue. Ruby's scenes are the best. He is a club owner, big spending and always on the brink of bankruptcy. His conversations with himself, his strip-teasers, a mobster associate from whom he's seeking a loan, his feckless male roommate, and the cops he loves (he's always taking them big, cholesterol-laden sandwiches) are hilarious, fragmented, contradictory, and utterly believable. In fact, my one complaint about the book is that we have to wait too long for Ruby to appear. Here's a sample, from his meeting with Tony Astorina, chauffeur for the mobster:
"Jack, I come by here for
old time."
"We used to swim on the Capri roof."
"I'm saying. I didn't come by for the coffee."
"Tony. I appreciate."
"I come by because we go back together."
"We got laid in adjoining rooms."
"Havana, madonn'."
--Etc. It's wonderful.
We can't know whether or to what extent DeLillo's reconstruction of the messy, haphazard but ultimately successful plot to kill President John F. Kennedy is accurate, but it certainly is plausible. And it does create a coherent narrative that DeLillo offers as a "refuge," "away of thinking about the assassination without being constrained by half-facts or overwhelmed by possibilities, by the tide of speculation that widens with the years." (Author's Note, at end of book)
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Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. 1907 ed. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1865.
This is a ridiculously long, complicated serial novel (originally published in 19 monthly installments) with some vivid scenes of London's nouveaux riches and its toujours pauvres. Characters are simplified like cartoon characters -- with the possible exceptions of three minor ones. Much of the dialogue is ridiculously long-winded, though in places very effective. Plotting takes bizarre implausible turns but does eventually tie almost all the threads. The book's greatest single merit is its descriptions, of physical settings --the Thames, Venus's "articulation" shop, the Veneering table settings, the London streets, etc. Its most irksome features are Dickens' frequent interjections of preachments, and --far, far worse --his maudlin sentimentalizing of such a ninny as Bella Wilfer, who gets the full Dickens treatment of loving attention to the details of speech, dress and grimace.
The only characters with a little complexity are (1) Sophronia, the wife of Alfred Lammle and his accomplice in con games, but with qualms of conscience; (2) Mr. Venus, the "articulator" (he assembles miscellaneous bones to construct whole skeletons of men and beasts), who also finds he has scruples after having allowed himself to be dragged into a nefarious plot; and (3) Twemlow, a poor relative of an aristocrat, who never understands what is going on and is frightfully timid, but who acts on an independent code of honor in the end.
I was glad when Dickens finally got so enraged at one of his ineffectual characters, Eugene Wrayburn, that he broke him to pieces. It was distressing to learn later that Wrayburn had survived and was likely to recover. But Wrayburn was not the most annoying character. I would have preferred that Dickens commit some mayhem on obtuse, saccharine-sweet Bella Wilfer and shut her up -- but that was too much to hope. The author seems actually to have liked that character.
The key to Dickens' clumsiness is the medium he chose: Monthly installments over 19 months, the author keeping only a little ahead of his readers. Thus, by the time he had sickened of Wrayburn, a professional failure who becomes a stalker of a pure-hearted poor girl (daughter of a river scavenger), it was too late to go back and rewrite his story to make him more interesting or attractive; all of London (the novel-reading part of it, that is) had read those earlier chapters, and Dickens was stuck with him. The author's only recourses were either to let Wrayburn's ineffectualness continue to slow down the story, or to do him violence. The violence is stunning, and quite a bit more than would be necessary for the plot. The villain -- another stalker, more infuriated with Wrayburn's behavior than even I was -- doesn't merely knock him out and try to drown him; he cudgels him, breaks his arms and wrists and cracks his skull before hurling his limp, barely pulsating body into the river. Dickens was really pissed off.
But then, to please his sentimental readers (he could hardly have had any other kind), he lets Lizzie Hexam (the stalkee) rescue him and nurse him back to life. She even marries him! And all the nasty bad guys (who all dress badly) are duly punished, and the sweet-natured good gals and guys (they're the ones who have good grooming) live happily ever after. Ugh.
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Files, Lolita. Getting to the Good Parts. New York: Warner Books, 1999. 334
A 32-year old black bourgeoise with no previous acting and no serious dancing experience becomes an off-Broadway star, and overcomes her own history of sexual betrayals to marry & live happily ever after with a handsome, rich prince. The "good parts" must mean all Reesy Snowden's explicit sex, with a handsome dancer in the company (a black musical, "Black Barry's Pie"), her prince Dandre (so rich & spoiled he's never had a job, but is handsome, fit and idle), the German theatre producer Helmut Wagner (a good fucker but a villain so evil he's hilarious); the other intense, near-orgasmic scenes are her breakups & reconciliations with her girlfriend Misty Fine, "Miss Divine." Of course, Reesy never has any real-world problems except relational, since, she can always fall back on her trust fund from financially generous, if emotionally stingy, rich parents. A silly book, with lots of black slang & names of black hang-out spots in Manhattan & Brooklyn.
Fraser, George MacDonald. Flashman: From the Flashman Papers, 1839-1842. Plume, 1984 ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1969. 256
Harry Flashman, b. 1822, wastrel, scoundrel & coward, becomes a hero of the British débâcle in Afghanistan (1842) through good luck as he is fleeing for his life. Very funny, delightful way to learn some 19th century colonial history.
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Grafton, Sue.
O Is for Outlaw. New York: Ballantine Books, 1999.
This book is all about Kinsey Millhone's exercise routine. Her schedule permitting she jogs every day but Sunday and works out with weights at a gym in her L.A. suburb of Santa Teresa. This is how she stays in shape despite her diet of MacDonald quarter-pounders, fries, and coffee with lots of milk and sugar. We get to see her do reps at the gym in almost every chapter. She also solves a murder, discovers another murder that occurred 20 years earlier in Vietnam (novel takes place in 1986), and in the last pages gets to witness yet a third murder, but the people involved are all pretty uninteresting and they all talk exactly alike. So the only reason I can tell for reading O is for Outlaw and the A through N novels that preceded it is to watch how a 36-year old divorcee with no steady job stays in shape. Some people seem to care. 2002/6/12
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Gaitskill,
Mary. Bad Behavior. New York: Poseidon Press, 1988. 203
Stories of college-educated middle-class women & their boyfriends, and their attempts to be naughty. The women generally turn out to be stronger and more resilient than they think they should be. A couple of them become part-time prostitutes, but nobody gets hurt. The funniest premise (though it doesn't yield an especially funny story) is in "A Romantic Weekend" -- a young married guy who thinks he's a sadist gets a weekend away with a young single woman who thinks she's a masochist, but their kinks just don't match, and they end up so frustrated that if they weren't such well-behaved middle-class people, they might do something mean to each other. But they are too nice, and part as mutually exhausted friends. This playing at transgression made me think this is the child's version of the truly ferocious book, Last Exit to Brooklyn. Authentic-sounding dialogue, skillful evocation of New York streetscenes and interiors, often moving depictions of young woman's Angst, but I got bored by story after story about people whose most serious problems are entirely their own creations, and couldn't finish the book. 01-6-25
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Gibson, William. Idoru. Berkeley
1997 ed. New York: Putnam, 1996.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984.
William Gibson is probably the best-known and best-selling author of cyberfiction, the man who did more than anybody else I know about to invent the genre. His work differs from a lot of science fiction in that it is not mainly about gadgets, but about people -- believable, somewhat complex characters -- and what access to the gadgets does to them. Gibson's future is only a few steps ahead or our present, pushing the possibilities of the technology only a little further in the directions where they already seem to be heading. I read these novels as simulation experiments (not unlike the experiments that sometimes occur in the novels themselves) to explore how such technology will further complicate our messy popular culture.
In Neuromancer (the novel that introduced the term cyberspace into our language), Gibson had some hilarious things to say about the acquisition of knowledge, which is one of our current, generalized obsessions. With the devices in the world of Neuromancer, our students would never have to worry about passing the CUNY WAT. They would just have the appropriate rod, containing all the necessary information, inserted into their skulls for whatever time necessary for taking the test. Once the rod were removed, they wouldn't be troubled by any lingering memories of grammar or syntax, but might stick in instead a rod full of baseball statistics or whatever else they were interested in.
The other most memorable (to me) invention in Neuromancer was the virtual presence of a dead man, synthesized from all sorts of information about him in life -- his vocabulary, knowledge, style of humor, tone of voice -- so that our hero, a nerdy cybernaut, could converse with him and ask his advice on new crises, things that had occurred since the old guy's death. This seems to be a more plausible possibility in the real world than those knowledge rods; something like that is the goal of artificial intelligence, a machine that can converse with you -- all that needs to be done is to give that machine the tone of voice and mannerisms of some known person, alive or dead, and you've got Gibson's living ghost.
Idoru is concerned mostly with celebrity culture, and the manufacture of celebrity here is both literal and virtual. Rez, half of the pop music duo Lo/Rez, is a real person, but known to his fans almost exclusively through computer-controlled imagery, in which he is perpetually in his 20's and perpetually smiling. (Lo is almost invisible and has no role in this novel; he is really just a syllable in Gibson's punning name lo-rez, to which Gibson has arbitrarily assigned a couple of traits: he's a half-Chinese, half-Irish guitarist.) But Rez has fallen in love with and determined to marry a media creation that he knows has no fleshly existence: the idoru (Japanese for idol, as in pop singing idol) Rei Torei. She is composed entirely of information, projected as a hologram, her voice and looks synthesized from, probably, information about real people. Or maybe not. Wherever the information comes from, it has become increasingly more complex, so that Rei has a personality of her own, and desires, one of which is to join Rez in matrimonial union. They will then use the marvels of nanotech, little information robots that will assemble, or "grow," buildings out of whatever materials they find available, to create their own special world on an island off of one of the main islands of Japan.
To convey this story, Gibson gives us two p.o.v. characters: First, Colin Laney, another of Gibson's nerdy computer freaks, has the uncanny and probably unique ability to infer patterns, or "nodal points," in vast streams of information. He is hired first by a media company that lives off of celebrities, used to scan information to find information useful for blackmailing them (I think -- specifics are often unclear in Gibson's fantasies), and later (is hired) by Rez's bodyguard, who wants him to find out everything he can about the virtual idoru, to learn who's controlling/creating her and if possible to scotch the marriage.
The other p.o.v. is Chia Pet Mackenzie, a 14 year-old member of the Lo/Rez fan club in Seattle, who is sent to Tokyo by her club to investigate the rumor, already out on the net, that Rez has announced that he wants to marry Rei. Chia travels physically, by ordinary jet plan, to Tokyo, but meets with her counterparts in the Tokyo fan club by "porting" through her Sandbenders computer (a cute device -- a computer designed by an Oregon Green to give an attractive natural-seeming, non-discardable case that would not end up in landfill and could be opened and refitted with whatever the latest electronics may be) to a virtual clubhouse created, at some expense (why virtual realities would cost so much is not explained in any detail; presumably, as is already happening, certain web designers are charging high prices for use of their images) by the Japanese girls.
There's also Keith Blackwell, a huge, deadly Australian (Tazzie, actually) ex-con who is Rez's loyal bodyguard; his face, hands and neck are a mass of crisscrossed scars, and his favorite weapon is a battle ax that opens out in a series of clicks like a switchblade; Russian toughs from the Kombinat; a couple of young Japanese nerdy hippies, who spend most of their time in the virtual Walled City, which is not exactly a MUD (multi-user domain) but sort of (that's as clear as the explanation gets), a floozy named Maryalice who is in love with a no-good petty hoodlum named Eddie, and assorted other characters. But the story is really about the idoru, and just what kind of personality someone who is not really a person might develop. (GF, 980612)
P.S. Reality is catching up to Gibson faster than I'd thought. Arthur Paris has called to my attention this article from Wired: "Virtual Humans Stepping Out," by Susan Kuchinskas, dated 5:03am 18.Jun.98.PDT
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Greene, Graham. The Human Factor. New York: Avon, 1978. 302pp.
What can we learn from an old thriller about a world that's disappeared? That Graham Greene had a complex understanding of the world and its moral conflicts. And why am I now (August 2000) just getting around to reading it ? Because someone once compared my fiction to Greene's, and I wanted to find out what that was about, and I expected to find a master storyteller.
Maurice Castle served as a British intelligence officer in South Africa, where he learned to loath apartheid and fell in love with an African woman, Sarah, who was one of his agents. Separately, they escaped the murderous thugs of South Africa's BOSS with the help of a South African Communist named Carson. Now married to Sarah and working for MI6 in London, Castle has been passing secret information to the Soviets, out of gratitude to Carson and because the Communists are foes of apartheid. The leak is discovered, Castle's superiors murder the wrong man (Castle's only office colleague) to plug it, an encounter with the BOSS officer who tormented him and Sarah (and with whom he is supposed to cooperate) leads him to leak more documents, he realizes he is about to be caught, tells Sarah what he's been up to, and -- just barely -- slips past security and defects to Moscow, where at the end of the story he is waiting in terrible loneliness for Sarah, who wants to but may not be permitted to join him. One moral of this story is stated by Sarah, when he describes himself as a "traitor." Your country was me and Sam" (her child by a one-time African lover, whom Castle is rearing as his own), she tells him, "and you never betrayed us."
Hargreaves, the head of the whole operation, lived in Africa for many years, fell in love with it, and still regards himself as a moral man; Dr. Percival, who no longer cures people but knows some nifty ways to kill them for the good of the agency, was a Communist sympathizer in his youth; Col. Daintry, the security chief assigned to find the leaker, and who was brave in a real war but is hopeless and helpless in this one. Each of these men has betrayed his values. Castle has merely betrayed his country, but at the end, even his gesture seems futile --the Soviets haven't been interested in his information in order to combat apartheid, but merely to bolster the bona fides of another of their agents. It's a complicated world, and every right action enwraps a wrong one. I don't know whether my work bears comparison to Greene's (click here to see who made it and where). I do know that it really is a complicated world. And Greene remains a good storyteller.
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Hemingway, Ernest. 1926. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
About a woman named Brett, and the men who fall in love with her and with whom she toys. She's a wonderful creation, an unhappy and insatiable Circe. I fell in love with her myself, that bitch (her word). Jake Barnes, who narrates, is Hemingway's typical p.o.v. character: a competent, unpretentious man, often hurt but never willfully hurting, so responsible and well-organized that his disorderly friends count on him to pick up after their emotional and other messes. Here Hemingway has given him a mysterious war wound, which leaves him full of testosterone but unable to fuck so he is unable to test Brett's fantasy that, if only carnal love were possible between them, they would be a contented couple. The dialogue is wonderfully effective at revealing the confusions of Brett and her pretenders, who all blame themselves for being unable to keep her except for one, the proud and self-assured 19-year old bullfighter, who retains his youthful dignity. The other memorable element of this novel is the travel writing, especially trout fishing in the Pyrenees and the running of the bulls in Pamplona, vividly rendered. 02-10-02
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Hijuelos, Oscar. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989. 407
César & Néstor Castillo meet Desi Arnaz & never recover ntbk 11/7/1990 (pp. 46ff.)
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Hope, Anthony. The Prisoner of Zenda. 1968 ed. New York: Langer Books, 1894.
What is marvelous about this famous novel is its economy of geography, character and social analysis: no more than is absolutely necessary for the action. Ruritania has just 2 towns (Zenda, conveniently furnished with a castle, and the capital, Streslau, which has downtown slum, mansions beyond, and a palace somewhere), a railroad that connects them to the real world (via Dresden), and a forest. Character is reduced to essentials: The men are all handsome, the women are all beautiful, the peasants are saucy and picturesque, servants are servile. Several characters exist only to be slain in some confrontation, and have no traits at all. Social analysis: kings and aristocrats rule by unquestioned divine right. The plot hinges on the Lois Lane premise: the fair damsel is so unobservant that she can't tell who's kissing her now.
Plot: An aristocratic English idler, visiting Ruritania for amusement, happens to look enough like the king (and to speak flawless Ruritanian German) to substitute for him when the real king is imprisoned (in the castle in Zenda) by his wicked step-brother, the Black Duke. In disguise, the English narrator wins the heart of the king's betrothed and springs the king (this involves fencing, riding, shooting, swimming and climbing), but is honor-bound to leave Ruritania (and the princess) forever and never to tell a soul. Which makes it odd that he writes it all in this book.
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Jackson, Jon A. Hit on the House. New York: Dell Publishing, 1993. 297
Intra-mob treachery in Detroit, with hit men getting hit by other hit men, explodes into greater mayhem when obnoxious, uneducated but mechanically gifted little Gene Lande starts blowing scum away as a way of getting a little respect. Detective Sergeant "Fang" Mulheisen stumbles through this web without ever understanding any of it.
"It's funny to talk about
Detroit when you're someplace else."
"Really? Why would you say that?" ¶"Well,
you know," she [Bonny, Gene Lande's wife] said, "You
run into these people and you both are like 'Isn't it great?
We're not in Detroit!' Even if you're in, maybe, Buffalo."
[97]
¶"You white folks have run out on Detroit," she [Yvonne Marshall] said, "but you still need it, to make money out of it. We'll have something called the Greater Detroit Urban Zone. Reorganize all the services, realign the taxes, and cut through all this bull crap of all these little towns that ring the city-Warren, Harper Woods, the Grosse Pointes (why in hell should there be five Grosse Pointes?), Royal Oak, Ferndale, Hamtramck, Center Line (Center Line!) Why there's dozens of them. Already the police have so much bureaucratic red tape to get through when someone robs a store on Eight Mile Road-it's just crazy. The zone will take in Wayne County, Oakland County, Washtenaw and we'll have a CEO instead of a mayor, a zone commission instead of a city council" [199]
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Jing Wang, ed. China's Avant-Garde Fiction. tr. Howard Goldblatt ed. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998. tr. Howard Goldblatt
Fascinating stories from China's short-lived "avant garde" literary movement of the 1980s.
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Kay, Guy Gavriel. Sailing to Sarantium. New York: HarperPrism, 1998. 533pp.
I read this mainly because I too am writing a novel about Byzantium, and wanted to see what Kay had done with it. By labeling Constantinople and its empire "Sarantium," calling Rome "Rhodias" and endowing his planet with two moons (one blue), that is, by presenting the story as a fantasy rather than historical fiction, he permits himself some convenient distortions and no doubt saved himself a lot of detailed research. Not that he has neglected his research -- he has done lots and lots of it, in order to re-imagine the imperial court and the street life of Constantinople in the heyday of the empire. But he is not obliged to say just what date that heyday was, and can combine events and customs from different moments in that empire's 1,100-year history. Mostly, what he seems to have in mind is the reign of Justinian (527-565 AD), and particularly his project to build the world's largest and most magnificent domed cathedral, the Hagia Sophia ("Holy Wisdom"), inaugurated with a spectacular feast -- unfortunately not included in the novel -- in 537.The chief protagonist is the "Rhodian" artisan Crispin, a mosaicist, whom the emperor -- here called Valerius -- has summoned to decorate, as magnificently as possible, the great dome.
In the book's 533 pages there are several incidents and many forebodings of more important events, but these larger events never come to pass. Kay must see himself as like his mosaicist, constructing an intricate design of many pieces -- tesserae, in the case of Crispin, incidents in Kay's case. And the author is a skillful artisan. All the incidents do ultimately connect. And, like Crispin's design for the great dome (we only get to see the design, because the story ends just as he's about to start its execution), Kay's novel has a couple of larger, more complex incidents to balance the composition: an encounter with a magical, terrible bison called a zubir to which the northern pagans must sacrifice maidens, and a long, athletically written (he must have been exhausted at his word processor) eight-chariot race on the Hippodrome. I don't know what the zubir is based on, if anything, or the magical mechanical birds that hold women's souls, but the chariot race tries to bring alive the races of Constantinople's real Hippodrome. And much is made of the sporting factions, Blues, Greens, Whites and Reds, which also really existed. This is a large and well-constructed work of craft, that holds the eye and leads it from event to event. But because the events themselves, while interconnected, do not create a cumulative tension but each has only its own minor and isolated resolution, it is only a minor work of art. 00/9/17
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Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999. 543
From the first, we step into prose as dense and fecund as the African forest it describes.
"The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. ... This forest eats itself and lives forever."
Nathan Price, a white Southern Baptist preacher, has taken his Georgia-born family to a remote village of the Congo in 1959, on the eve of independence. He is determined to teach the Africans God's word and American farm techniques. While his refusal to adapt to African climate and customs carry the family closer to disaster, his wife and four daughters do adapt and are transformed in different ways.
One will grow up to be a champion of the extreme white privilege that she can enjoy only in black Africa. Another will marry a Congolese and identify herself with him and the country. The third will apply her African-based knowledge of living things to research on viruses, and the littlest will become most literally a part of Africa. And the mother -- well, hers will be a bitter sort of triumph.
But the most memorable characters are not the four Price women, but those we see through their eyes: Among the Africans, the imposing and ceremonious village chief, the crafty witch-doctor, the idealistic young Lumumbist, and many women, including a neighbor with no legs who surreptitiously supports the white family. Among the whites, some hypocritical and other more generous missionaries, a sleazy arms trafficker, and the Lear-like monster Nathan Price. Viewing them all from four points of view is an effective way to present the complex and violent story of Congolese independence and its sequels. 020309
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Korkut, Dede. The Book of Dede Korkut, tr. Geoffrey Lewis. London: Penguin, 1974.
Part of the charm of old folktales is their lack of our usual reference points of time and place. The warriors and princesses in these stories did not think of their homeland as Central Asia, but simply as the center of their world. Nor did they think of themselves as Turks -- they called themselves Oghuz, of whom there were two great bands: the Inner and the Outer Oghuz. The "Turks" were another, related tribe, but the Han Chinese and other outsiders called them all by that label, and eventually the Oghuz accepted it. These tales reflect a time before the Oghuz had begun their great migrations westward (pushed out of their eastern steppes by their cousins, the even more aggressive Mongols), around the 9th and 10th centuries, and before the majority of them had been converted to Islam. The version we have was edited and printed in the century after the Oghuz's most famous descendants, the "Ottomans" (people of Osman), had taken Constantinople (1453) and were still expanding their empire. The old dede, or "grandfather" or "holy man," who first compiled these stories may or may not really have been named Korkut. See "Adult Education among the Oghuz."
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Krich, John. A Totally Free Man. 1988 ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981. 171
Fidel Castro tells his life story to a tape recorder. ntbk 3/11/88 (34-6). Implausible premise, funny and probably generally accurate history. See my essay, Mermaids and Other Fetishes.
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Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. Edited by Philip Roth, Writers From the Other Europe. London, New York: Penguin Books, 1980. 237
Fiction interspersed with essays, autobiographical references & flights of fancy. What holds it together are: Themes of "laughter" (subversive of the solemnity of dictators) and "forgetting" (the dictators' tool, to control the present by controling the past); the opposition between "angels," who represent, not the good, but the well-ordered, & Satan, who represents chaos, disorder, improvisation; life is really only tolerable when these two forces are in balance (or are alternating). The stultifying dominion of the angels is represented by the spaced-out bliss of the circle dancers, refusing to see all that is ugly and inharmonious, rising above the steeples and spires of Prague.
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Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. 198 pp.
The title story is an interesting twist on the famous cave scene in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India - - here, instead of a hysterical Englishwoman confronting a polite Indian male tour guide, it's a near-hysterical Americanized Indian woman who shares a confidence with the polite Indian male tour guide without even considering the effects her story may have on him.
Like any collection of stories, this one is uneven, in part deliberately so, because Lahiri experiments with different voices and different points of view. The most interesting to me was "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar," told by a collective "we" representing the women in Bibi Haldar's neighborhood in an Indian city. Bibi's malady, and the miraculous cure, remain mysterious, so the story is really about that collective voice, which tells us about the ordinary assumptions and routines of that neighborhood's respectable (though clearly not affluent) wives. In "Sexy," Lahiri assumes the p.o.v. of a naïve young American woman who allows herself to be seduced by a dashing, married Indian gentleman who clearly is experienced at this sort of affair. It's a pretty successful effort to stand apart from her own subculture - middle-class Indian expats in the US Northeast - and look at one of her own as a native American would see him. Lahiri does something like this again in "At Mrs. Sen's," where the p.o.v. character (narrated in third person) is a little American boy observing his Indian baby-sitter. This is the most powerful story in the collection, making excruciatingly vivid the anxieties of many women like Mrs. Sen, uprooted (for the sake of the husband's career) from the only culture that makes sense to her.
Not much happens in Lahiri's world. Even the unseen family of Mr. Pirzada ("When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine"), seemingly endangered by the ferocious ethnic war that tore Pakistan into two countries (one now called Bangladesh), emerges utterly unscathed. Only one truly poor person truly suffers, the possibly delusional Boori Ma who loses her humble garret and caretaker's job, in some Indian city, in the story "A Real Durwan." For the most part, Lahiri's is a gentle world of curry and cosmetics and mild domestic tensions, a pleasant and quiet place to visit, but rather boring.
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Lee, Chang-Rae. Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995. 349
A tedious, slow-moving, vastly over-praised story about a young Korean American man in New York, redeemed somewhat by sensitive reflections on the confusion and between-ness of the immigrant's experience. The only two interesting, complex characters are the narrator-protagonist himself, Henry Park, and his father, a strong-willed immigrant who fills Henry with admiration for his tenacity and ingenuity at the same time as he embarrasses him for his old-country ways and stubborn prejudices. Unfortunately we see too little of this father. Instead, Lee embeds his observations on immigrant lives in Queens, New York, in a silly plot about a clandestine company of identity spies (Henry is one of them), who gain the confidence of outstanding immigrants in order to destroy them. This requires Lee to introduce a lot of irrelevant verbiage about Henry Park's reports to the sneaky and nearly feature-less president of the spy firm, but you can skip over this stuff. Henry Park's spy-target, City Councilman John Kwang, inspires more interesting thoughts, even though he is as shallowly drawn as most of the other characters. Except for Henry's father, the characters exist merely as foils for Henry Park to meditate obsessively on his own adaptation to America. 020324
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Leonard, Elmore. Cuba Libre. New York: Delacorte Press, 1998. 343 pp.
Cowboy Ben Tyler in Cuba 1898 gets caught up in the independence war with cruel Spanish officers, less cruel Cuban officers in service to Spain, independence fighters both noble & treacherous, & a decadent American millionaire landowner; he wins the girl (Amelia, a tough, opportunistic American) &, after settling all scores with his Colt .44s, takes her to start a cattle ranch in Cuba libre. Ridiculous story, in which Cuba is merely a backdrop for the actions of American characters plucked from a US western, filled in with meticulous research on naval armaments & prison conditions of the time. 99/7/21
Leonard, Elmore. Swag. 1985 ed. New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1976. 229 1985
Used-car salesman Frank Ryan recruits cement mixer & chronic car thief Ernest Stickley, Jr. ("Stick") for spree of armed robbery in Detroit's suburbs. But they break several of Ryan's 10 rules - "Never associate with people known to be in crime," etc. - when they team up with black hustler Sportree & his allies to rob J. L. Hudson's in Detroit; unplanned mayhem in Hudson's, double-cross by Sportree, undone by Stick & Ryan's death-defying double-double-cross & murder of Sportree. A clever white cop guided by an even cleverer fat black prosecutor catches them & the loot. Formerly titled Ryan's Rules.
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McCullers, Carson. 1940. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Bantam 1953 ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
A placid southern town is revealed to be torn by intense passions as McCullers takes us into the consciousness of several of its poor and lower middle-class citizens. The girl Mick Kelly comes of age (at 15), a radical drifter is defeated once again in his efforts to make the "Don't knows" understand how they're oppressed, the owner of the all-night New York Café watches it all, and the town's sole black physician finally bursts the dam of a lifetime of rage against white injustice. All these people confide in the sympathetic deaf-mute, believing he alone can understand them but he doesn't, and he in turn attributes such deep understanding of his own emotions to a fat, self-centered deaf-mute moron. It is the black physician Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland who is the novel's most thoroughly imagined character besides Mick, who must be a version of McCullers herself, who was only 24 when this first novel appeared. 02-10-02
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Ondaatje, Michael. Anil's Ghost. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. 307
Terror to combat terror. Those who interfere with the killing will be killed, preferably in an exemplary manner. Your corpse will be disfigured, perhaps mutilated, or with multiple fractures, or your head may be stuck on a pole where everyone in your village must see it as they pass by. And none better remove it, lest they suffer the same fate.
This is what Ondaatje confronts
in this novel. A three-way war of terror rages in Sri Lanka in
the late 1980s, early 1990s: the government, trying to hold the
center, against Sinhalese insurgents in the south and Tamil separatists
in the north. This sort of thing is not exclusive to Sri Lanka,
he recognizes in a scene describing the exhumation of terror
victims in far-off Guatemala.
We witness only two acts of violence in this novel, one of them
trivial in this context: Anil, the Sri Lanka-born heroine, in
a rage that is both plausible and incomprehensible, stabs her
obtuse American lover in the forearm and abandons him in their
hotel room.
The other occurs much later, near the end of the novel: we watch a suicide bomber make his preparations, approach the president of Sri Lanka in the midst of a festival crowd, and detonate. Dozens are killed, none of them known to us from the novel.
Mostly, we are acquainted with violence by being forced to look very closely at its results, those mutilated corpses. To make a story to contain his cry of anguish, Ondaatje fashions a murder mystery. Anil, like Ondaatje a long-time expatriate, returns to Sri Lanka as a forensic pathologist for the UN Human Rights Commission. Teamed with Sarath, a sad, older Sri Lankan archeologist, reluctant to probe such dangerous issues but too good-hearted and honest to refuse, she seeks to discover the identity of a recent corpse discovered in an ancient burial ground. It is a flimsy device, but strong enough to hold the willing reader for the things Ondaatje needs to tell us, about ways of dying and killing, ancient and modern medicine, familial jealousies, the beauty of the Sri Lankan sun, its mountains, forests and waters, which somehow survive the horrible destruction of humanity. 01/4/6
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Okri, Ben. The Famished Road. New York: Anchor, 1991. 500 pages
Sweat, spirits and poverty in rural Nigeria, as seen by a credulous spirit who consents to be born to a poor couple. Dad is immensely strong, honest and rebellious; Mum is infinitely supportive and uncomplaining; Madame Koto is fat, corrupt, powerful and sometimes kindly. Magic irrealism, which gets tiresomely repetitive. 2002/07/30
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Mahfouz, Naguib. Children of Gebelawi. Translated by Philip Stewart. London: Heinemann, 1981.
In a noisome, quarrelsome alley of Cairo, people tell stories of Gebelawi, a mysterious & powerful old man who is the progenitor of them all, & of the heroes who periodically have come to win justice & a fair share of Gebelawi's estate for the people of the alley. These heroes incl. his son Adham (put in charge of the estate governed from the Big House, where Gebelawi has shut himself up with his gardens & servants) & his vengeful older brother Idris (who cajoles Adham to peek at Gebelawi's forbidden book of knowledge, thus getting Adham & his wife expelled from the big house); Gebel, generations later, a poor orphan brought up in the Trustee's mansion, who believes he has heard Gebelawi himself instruct him to lead and challenges the rule of the Trustee & his Chief (who terrorizes the alley) & leads his people in a successful rebellion, leading them to control of the promised Estate & becoming Trustee; himself; Rifaa, a gentle youth, son of a carpenter, who is not interested in the Estate but in happiness for all, & who is nevertheless murdered by the chiefs--his body disappears from its tomb, probably taken by his loving disciples, but the story is told that Gebelawi himself came and took him up; Kassem, who wants the Estate & happiness for all, and, after marrying a rich woman & becoming a prosperous merchant himself, leads his followers to a mountain redoubt from which they attack the chiefs of the alley & ultimately triumph--Kassem enforces literally the injunction "an eye for an eye" & justice reigns during his lifetime, although succeeding trustees & chiefs fall back into the old ways; and Arafa, a non-believer or at least a skeptic regarding the power of Gebelawi, who hopes to redeem his people by teaching them all magic, and who causes the death of the ancient Gebelawi by tunneling into his house to peek at the forbidden book--he never sees the book, but in his fright he strangles an old Negro servant, & Gebelawi (whom Arafa never sees) is then reported to have died of shock. A forerunner of Satanic Verses, which caused a similar (if less bloodthirsty) outcry in 1959, when the mullah's tried to stop its serial publication.1/19/91 1st pub. as serial in Al-Ahram, Cairo, 1959.
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Markson, David (2001). This is Not a Novel. Washington DC, Counterpoint.
An entertaining and provocative experiment in writing "A novel with no intimation of story whatsoever.... / And with no characters. None. ... / Plotless. Characterless. / Yet seducing the reader into turning pages nonetheless." Oddly, it works. If not a novel, it is perhaps an epic poem, if Writer says it is, or, most accurately, as he suggests on one of the last pages, "a kind of verbal fugue." The paragraphs, some no more than two words and none more than five lines, are like (or simply are) stanzas, most containing odd facts about writers and other creative people ("Frans Hals was once arrested for beating his wife.") A recurrent theme is the manners of death of these people, further emphasized by this repeated statement:- "Timor mortis conturbat me. / The fear of death distresses me." Another is the ironies of anti-Semitism: "What the world would know of the Holocaust if the Germans had won" is one entire stanza. (The answer? Not much, I suppose.) The overriding theme is the writer's right to create whatever he pleases and call it whatever he wants. "Chi son? Chi son? Son un poeta / Che cosa faccio? Scrivo." It's an inspiring note for any writer, or at least for this one (me) 021215.
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McCaffery, Larry, ed. Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation. Boulder, Normal: Black Ice Books, 1993. 247
In the late 20th century, it took a lot to épater les bourgeois, since the literate bourgeois had become so jaded. Here we read a lot about cunts and gooey masturbation in nonlinear (and in one case -- by Samuel R. Delany -- circular) narrative. The subtlest, and possibly funniest, piece is McCaffery's introduction (he poces as a "private e" -- i.e., editor), the most inspired lunacy is, as usual, from Mark Leyner, and Kathy Acker does her aggressive cunt-in-your-face thing. Also contributions by William T. Vollman, Harold Jaffe, and some other folks I'd never heard of and may not hear of again. 020206 (See also Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School)
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Pamuk, Orhan. The White Castle. Tr. Victoria Holbrook. New York: Vintage, 1998. 161
A young Venetian becomes slave of a Turk whom he greatly resembles & over several decades assists in his schemes, especially the invention of a monstrous war machine, to win the favor of the sultan. Each man -- slave and master -- teaches the other his language & details of his culture, until, possibly but ambiguously, they exchange identities. One or the other of them escapes the wrath of the sultan (when the machine fails) & escapes to Italy. Multi-framed (a fictional contemporary claims to have discovered a manuscript, the manuscript turns out not to have been written by the person in whose voice it is told), to multiply the ambiguities of what is otherwise a not very interesting story. Ntbk 99/8/5
Pamuk, Orhan (2002). My Name is Red. Tr. Erdag M. Göknar. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
Who cares who murdered Elegant
Effendi? You probably won't and I didn't, but the question obsesses
the other miniaturists working for the sultan, Refuge of the
World, in 17th century Constantinople. The intrigue all has to
do with the incursion of Venetian pictorial techniques
perspective, individual and realistic portraiture in an
ancient tradition of painting perfect and beautiful representations
of idealized figures. The characters address us directly, aware
that they have a reader but seemingly unaware that this reader
also knows what is in the minds (or at least the stories) of
the other characters. Figures from the miniaturists' sketches
in a coffee house also speak to us a hastily drawn dog,
a horse, the color red. Some of these little tales are enchanting
(the dog especially), though they don't always work together
very well to make a coherent total. Besides murder by blunt instruments,
mutilations and tortures, the reader also has to endure the obnoxious,
self-absorbed and rather stupid Shekure, probable widow of a
man missing in action and beloved of the indecisive Black (who
is not a color but a painter). 021127
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Patchett, Ann. Bel Canto. New York: Perennial (HarperCollins), 2001. 318 p.
This is a fairy-tale version of the real seizure of the Japanese ambassador's home and his party guests by a guerrilla squad of the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru in Lima in 1997. In an unnamed country that strongly resembles Peru, worldly and rich Russians, Japanese, Italians, French, and Creoles are taken captive by Quechua- and Spanish-speaking naïfs in a mansion that is like an Enchanted Castle, and the one woman among the captives a beautiful operatic soprano enchants them all. It all comes to a fairy-tale ending bloodily poetic for some, happily-ever-after for others. In narrative structure, it reminded me of Alejandro Casona's romantic melodrama, Siete Gritos en el Mar. In subject matter, it made me appreciate the far grittier realism of Gabriel García Márquez's Diario de un secuestro. 2002-08-06
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Proulx, E. Annie. Postcards. Scribner Paperback Fiction ed. New York: Simon & Shuster, 1992.
In 1944, 24-year old Loyal Blood strangles his girlfriend Billy while raping her, abandons the rundown little family farm in Vermont and lives in the western states wretchedly, unable to approach women & unlucky in his jobs, untill dying decades later as a bum; meanwhile his stubborn, violent father Mink goes to jail for burning down the barn for the insurance money, and then dies, liberating his mother Jewell to reinvent herself as a quilt-maker, and his one-armed brother Dub ends up a real estate broker in Miami who owes his success to his canny & well-connected Cuban wife, Pala. It's a dreary but captivating story, but the greater pleasures are in the ways it is told. Detailed and surprising descriptions of outdoor scenes, from Vermont to Minnesota and Oregon, a moment on the expressway in Miami when Dub's wife Pala is nearly lynched by a black mob furious at the acquittal of white cops who've killed a black motorist, the mud of the trailer camp, the quivering anxiety of a trapped female coyote, and so on. (v. Journal 99/6/21)
No gentle humor in Proulx, nothing to make you want to laugh without making you want to throw up at the same time (she has a short story where the joke is about having to cut off a dead man's feet to get his boots), but lots of irony. Her work is (mostly, at least in these novels) anti-escapism: you put the book down to escape into a much less challenging, even less frustrating ordinary daily existence. No matter what your troubles are, Proulx's characters have it even worse, and unlike real life, they are inescapable. When I'm walking through Manhattan and see a guy lying in rags up against a building, or a mad young woman, still pretty beneath her filth, squatting and dreamily begging at University Place & 14th, I can walk by without focusing long or in detail on what she (or he) looks like or what horrors have brought her to that state. Proulx doesn't give me that option. There are photographers like her - Mapplethorpe was also pitiless - and comic book artists, such as whatsisname (now dead) whose work is currently on display at the New Museum. But few writers.
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Pynchon, Thomas. Mason & Dixon. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997. 773
A simple tale of a slow-developing comradeship, 'round which are spun, woven and tangled many wondrous inventions and ancient Pynchon obsessions to make a dense, happy, delightful and enigmatic book.
It begins in London when the morose and newly widowed astronomer Charles Mason meets the somewhat younger, buoyant and much more physical Jeremiah Dixon, a country surveyor. These two dissimilar Englishman Mason a deist and the son of a gruff, love-withholding miller, Dixon a Quaker and the orphan of a coal miner in the north country -- are teamed by some plot neither of them can quite penetrate, perpetrated by the Royal Society and probably British tea interests, to track the transit of Venus in Capetown, then commissioned separately to make further astronomical observations on desolate St. Helena (many decades before Napoleon made it famous), and after many adventures are sent off to draw a line along the 40th degree of latitude to settle a boundary dispute in the American colonies. They encounter: the Learnèd English Dog, Fang; seaman Fenderbelly Bodine (no doubt an ancestor of the one who appears in Pynchon's other novels); the neurotic and ineffectively sinister Astronomer Royal, Neville Maskelyne (villain of another book, by Dava Sobell see below); a mechanical duck with wondrous powers of flight and conversation; a Chinese geomancer named Capt. Zhang; a gigantic axman, Stig, from the very far north; George Washington and his black slave Gershom, who is also a Jewish vaudevillian comic; Ben Franklin; wily Mohawks and other Indians; German and Dutch immigrants with peculiar obsessions; a worldwide Jesuit conspiracy communicating by mysterious telegraph, whose nuns are trained in sexual seduction in the manner of O at Roissy; an enormous "Torpedo" an electric eel of very high current and many other more or less fantastical creatures. On his last mission, this time without Dixon, Mason runs into Dr. Johnson and Boswell in the Hebrides, and asks Boswell if he had ever had his own Boswell.
It's great fun, full of things to discover, and I'll want to go back into it soon to discover some more. I may even want to read the new book by Edwin Danson, Drawing the Line: How Mason and Dixon Surveyed the Most Famous Border in America (Wiley), so as to make it easier to follow Pynchon's version. Readers of the novel may also profit from reading Dava Sobell, Longitude, which deals with the machinations of Maskelyne.
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Réage, Pauline. Story of O. Translated by Sabine d'Estrée. 1967 ed. New York: Grove Press, 1965. 199
Exquisitely exciting fantasy of sweet suffering in bondage. Originally published in Paris, France, Chez Jean-Jacques Pauvert in 1954 as Histoire d'O.
Roth, Philip. The Counterlife. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987. 324
So clever and witty that now I want to read the rest of the Nathan Zuckerman saga. In this novel, Zuckerman recounts his own death (and writes his own obituary), and makes many astute observations of the social anthropology of Jews in New York and Israel.
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Sebold, Alice. 2002. The Lovely Bones. Boston: Little, Brown. 328 p.
Like Our Town or a Spanish-language
telenovela, or even Juan Rulfo's famous Pedro Páramo,
where the dead chatter to one another from their graves, gives
glimpses of interrelated lives to reaffirm the consoling myths
of community: good people can pull through any tragedy when they
pull together, and everybody ultimately gets what she or he deserves.
In this case, the point of view device is the ghost of a murdered
teenage girl, who can observe her family, friends and murderer
as they go about their lives. It's a girl's book, in the same
sense that the book I read just previously, Son
of the Eastern Star, is a boy's book. That one was full
of gunfighters on horseback and lots of man-to-man combat (Custer's
Last Stand); this has a cute little dog, sweet kids, astute and
persistent young women, and a few pathetically sad men
one of whom can't keep himself from killing little girls. I found
it sappy, but it's a huge sales success, so there must be a lot
of present or former teenage girls who love it. They would probably
hate smelly, sweaty, and raucous Son. 021024
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Smith, Martin Cruz. Havana Bay. New York: Random House, 1999. 329 pp.
Arkady Renko goes to Havana to investigate murder of a Russian colleague & to kill himself, but when Cuban police try to kill him, he is re-energized, and with help of a small, feisty mulata policewoman, Ofelia Osorio, foils plot he doesn't understand but involved yet another attempt on the life of Castro. Very vivid portrayal of life & its contradictions in contemporary Havana. 99/8/15
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Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. New York: Viking International, 2000. 448 pages.
Zadie Smith has great fun with accents and attitudes in this story of conflicting fanaticisms in multicultural London. Characters include: a middle-aged Koran-obsessed Bengali; his happily agnostic, slow-witted and good-hearted English army buddy; their much younger wives a black, patois-speaking Jamaican, a fugitive from Seventh Day Adventists eagerly awaiting the end of the world, and a short, practical Bangladeshi who can recite the Koran but doesn't believe it; a scientist fanatical only about his research, and the teen-aged children of these three households, alternately obsessed by religion, drugs, science and each other. The anti-Rushdie hysteria and the burning of Satanic Verses (an episode in the novel) make a kind of sense in this confusion of motives and loyalties.
The novel falls apart only when the author tries too hard to bring it all together, in an utterly implausible rush of coincidences in the last couple of pages. But no matter. The other 446 pages are full of laughs, griefs and insights. 2002-7-23
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Stendahl, (Marie Henri Beyle). The Charterhouse of Parma. Translated by Richard Howard. Modern Library ed. New York: Random House, 1999. 507 pp.
The hero is a handsome, lucky fool, Fabrizio del Dongo, who gets into and out of scrapes due to a kind of calculated passion. That is, he makes grand gestures less because of true love or any particular political commitment, but because he's concerned about what pose he should strike. His most memorable adventure and the best episode in the book is his uncomprehending participation in the battle of Waterloo, whither he has hied without any military experience or training or knowledge of French. This is a funny, poignant, and probably realistic depiction of the confusion of battle and the panicked disarray of the French soldiers and officers after their defeat.
There is also fun in some of Stendahl's miscellaneous observations about love, politics and letters.
"And a man of your talents, Signor, must steal in order to live!" [says the Duchess (Fabrizio's beautiful aunt) to the highwayman, who is also a famous poet.]
"That may be the reason I have any talent. Hitherto all our authors who have become well known were people paid by the government or by the religion they sought to undermine...." (p. 357)
Another insight (this time in the voice of the author himself):
I am inclined to think that the immoral delight Italians experience in taking revenge is a consequence of their power of imagination; people in other countries do not, strictly speaking, forgive; they forget. (p. 365)
Stendahl finally gets bored with Fabrizio and lets him die in a monastery, of love-sickness.
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Tyler, Ann. (2001). Back When We Were Grownups. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
Clever, but what's the point?
The opening line tells the whole story: "Once upon a time,
there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong
person." Like a lot of people. But since it was her own
fault, why should we care? 020807
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Treece, Henry. The Great Captains. 1980 ed. Manchester, UK: Savoy Books, Ltd., 1956.
The book is comically, absurdly bad. The main story tells of Artos the Bear, a Celtic tribal chieftain in 477 AD, who will become Arturius as Count of England and ultimately and way posthumously King Arthur of legend. This primitive tribal chief knows only two motivations: to fight (but we know not for what), and to love his flaxen-haired Gwenhwyfar (who will become known as Guinevere). The Gwenhwyfar impulse is not as strong as it appeared -- he's easily distracted by the improbable raven-haired beauty Lystra, whom he obliges to bleach her hair and rechristens Gwenhwyfar, so now there are two. So his love for G is hardly an overriding principle. The original G is, in true telenovela style, his sister (maybe his half-sister -- I didn't quite follow the rather oblique references). So if the love story doesn't hold this story together, it has to be Artos' campaigns to save Britain from the Saxons, Jutes, Angles and Picts in the wake of the withdrawal of the Roman legions. But this is a hopeless task from the outset, as hopeless as dreams of an ethnically pure Greater Serbia. Britain, Treece acknowledges, is already a great ethnic mix. One of Artos' two most trusted "captains," Cie (no hint as to how to pronounce this), is said to be a small, dark man of "Silurian" descent. There are Irish, who are always sandy-haired and fair-skinned. The Celts are generally dark-haired, except for Artos himself & his sister-lover, who appear to be as blond as the invaders, who are almost always "flaxen-haired." The exception is one Saxon king whose mother was a Celt, for, as Treece mentions, there's a lot of miscegenation going on, and the Celts as a whole don't feel particularly chauvinistic. Artos' own army is made up largely of Jutes toward the end. Artos' nationalism is suspect also because he claims authority in the name of Rome, an empire and civilization that he doesn't know but imagines as vastly superior to anything in Britain.
This may be fairly accurate as history -- the confusion, the wars about nothing much at all except which male is going to dominate, the easy switching of loyalties even across dialect and language boundaries -- and it might make for a good background for a story, but it is too diffuse & chaotic to be the story. Artos, in this portrayal, is just not a very interesting person. He doesn't know what he wants, beyond being recognized as Count of Britain, and once he establishes himself as such, has no idea what to do next besides eat, drink and loll around on his throne while courtiers seek to amuse him. He's a bore, not a bear.
The story just galumphs along, one little (or big) battle after another in which, usually, a hundred or more men we don't know (because Treece has never bothered to introduce them to us) are said to have been killed. Then the galumphing is interrupted by a carefully set up dramatic scene, of which I can remember only two that seem to fully engage the author's (if not the reader's) attention. First is the dance of the corn men and antler men, a long set-piece in which the antlered men struggle with the white-painted corn (i.e., cereal, probably oats or barley) men,which sounds inspired half by Frasier's Golden Bough (which Treece cites as a source) and half by accounts of American Indians. Still, something like that may have occurred in those ancient British tribes, which surely had some sort of fertility rite. (The whole thing is about making the new crop prosper.)
The second is the far more improbable bull v. girl dance. We are to believe that this savage chieftain Artos has ordered up the reconstruction of the old Roman amphitheater at Caerleon, itself improbable (and that artisans would be available who knew how to do it). Then, that he knew something about bull fighting (never before mentioned in the book, & not popularly associated with blue-painted Druid warriors). The dance of the near-naked Lystra to dodge the horns of the mighty bull, and her ultimate goring, must have been the erotic high-point for Treece.
The roundtable legend is reduced to an incident where Artos throws his round shield down into the mud and orders the kings of the west to gather around it, to make the point that nobody is in the head position. There is no hint of Lancelot in Treece's story (at least, none that I perceived).
It's not King Lear, which is also ancient Celtic mythology, but with great characters. The first notable character in this book is Ambrosius Aurelius, the last Roman Count of Britain (was that a real title?), who has flashes of impressive authority, but mainly just withers away until Medrodus (Mordred of the legends) murders him. He occupies the 1st 50 pp., then lingers on for a few more after Artos (Arthur) is introduced; he then disappears, and our attention is supposed to refocus on Artos. It's like an American soap opera, you use up one main character & then another rises to carry on, and so on. No dramatic tension here. Britain will go on and on, whatever happens to Ambrosius, or Medrodus, or Artos, & with this one-thing-after-another structure, the story can only be about Britain, not about Artos (or any of the others). In contrast, King Lear is about Lear (& his daughters).
It should be a good book for an 11-year old, though -- lots of sword & horseplay.
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Vargas Llosa, Mario. La Fiesta del Chivo. Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2000. 518 pp.
What does terror look like? How does it feel, to use it or to be its victim? Mario Vargas Llosa has imagined these things so vividly that after reading this book you will think that you know. La Fiesta del Chivo is the most fully achieved novel yet in this author's long campaign to bring real historical fact to breathing, pulsating, blood-gushing life. The Chivo (literally, "goat") is Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, and the "fiesta" takes place in the last months before, and some five months following, his assassination in 1961.
Since La casa verde (1966), his second novel, Vargas Llosa has interwoven social research and fantasy, with much more rigorous research than most novelists could be bothered with. In La casa verde he relied for part of the story on what he'd learned as an anthropological research assistant in the Amazon. La historia de Mayta (1985) uses interviews and much documentary evidence to portray the real revolutionary left of Peru in the 1950s, in which he sets Mayta, a plausible composite invention.
Here, in La Fiesta del Chivo, he presents a highly detailed, blow-by-blow documentary of the real conspiracy to kill Trujillo, including incursions into the mind of the unsuspecting dictator "el Benefactor," "el Jefe," etc., as his terrified subjects call him. This is very exciting, tense writing, even if we know enough Dominican history to recognize all the characters and know what their fates will be. Masterfully, Vargas Llosa wraps this story in another, fictional one, of Urania Cabral and her father Agustín, at one time President of Trujillo's senate and one of the Chivo's most trusted collaborators. The mystery is why Urania fled the country in 1960 when she was just 14 1/2, and why after refusing any contact with her father for 31 years she has returned. The conclusion is as shocking as the scenes of torture and brutality taken from the archives or testimonies, as shocking, that is, as the historically documented episodes. But it is even more stunning because, while completely believable, it is a great and horrible surprise. 01/02/04. On the Dominican Republic, cf. Michele Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight, and for another novel on a similar theme, cf. Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies.
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Walker, Barbara K., Ed. (1988). Turkish Folk-Tales. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
34 charming tales, selected from
>3,000 collected on audiotape by Barbara Walker and her husband
in villages throughout Turkey, 1961-1987, and retold by BKW.
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