at work this week i was given seaton’s THE SON MASTER by a teenager who told me i’d become enlightened upon reading any page. and so i was.
peter seaton was a prose artist who, along with using subtle stepping stones of sound, mimicked and subverted common narrative strategies so that we had the shape, if not the exclusivity, of quotidian thought. (distant relatives might include rob stephenson’s recent PASSES THROUGH or the more abstract stories of Robert Creeley, e.g. those in “Presences: a text for Marisol“).
here’s a paragraph (which is a pleasure to type out):
Until the lean years of the revolution it’s usually the other way around — a man steals an idea circulating as a plan. Say there was slander, it was worked out in the parallel twenties. All the players left the country suddenly saying so you were hearing the actual sound. To prove dreamily I was a child, I think, the most truthful one. And the war, I don’t know, at the same time I like it very much. It’s easy to look at. The most popular saying or appropriate interest called the custodial style used to call it a search in an ancient city or a landscape clearing up and a woman walks by and says there’s some anniversary movement created by a hope monument made of brick and the bricks broke through and were just put back. And if you don’t dig around inside it wears off quickly, take that to the others sleeping at night and falling apart (p 47).
witty and elegant, what makes enrique vila-matas’s NEVER ANY END TO PARIS something more than a (witty and elegant) memoir of his literary apprentice years is the transformational yet thin veneer of fiction that coats this ingenious novel. the book follows a spanish writer (with a more than passing resemblance to vila-matas) who recalls — in a lecture spoken during a three-day symposium on irony — how in the mid-1970s he had moved as a young man from barcelona to paris to work on his first novel in a garret apartment rented from no less a personality than marguerite duras.
in paris the young writer lives off an allowance from his father and nurses his despair with a hilarious and familiar tenderness. along the way he bumps into a host of literary notables (e.g. perec, barthes, beckett), but the writer who haunts him the most is the Ghost of Paris Past: ernest hemingway. specifically it’s the hemingway of A MOVEABLE FEAST who recalled his own years in the City of Light as “very poor and very happy” — so unlike our irony man who, looking backward, can only say he was “very poor and very unhappy.”
papa hemingway seems to enthrall our narrator’s imagination not only due to the virile charisma of his exploits and writing but perhaps more importantly because of the clear limits his talent impotently struggled to overcome. he quotes julien gracq who wrote hemingway “knows he will never bore us; he puts marks on paper as naturally as others walk down stairs. His mere presence bewitches us; then we go outside to smoke and stop thinking about him.”
this assessment on hemingway leads to a division of the world into two types of writers: the ordered and bourgeois manner of a writer like thomas mann versus the chaotic disordered hurricane of talent à la rimbaud. while aging is the historical force that implodes this dialectic (our narrator realizes with a glance at his obsessively ordered writing desk that he has become what in his youth he had once disdained) there remains a potent yearning for the virtuosic chaos of a poet like the young rimbaud. it’s this bittersweet longing for an imperfect past that gives the novel its emotion; and it’s the advantage of hindsight that allows it its wit.
* * *
is the book a lecture or a novel? the book asks itself this question repeatedly and while no doubt existing as a kind of conflation of the two, collage is the name that might most tellingly reveals its structure. like benjamin’s collection on 19th century parisian arcades or the late novels of david markson, vila-matas is determined to make a work of literature through quotation. and while in an extreme sense all acts of fiction are collages, here the items chosen – from autobiography and memory, from literary history and anecdote, from criticism and gossip – are arranged less for the illusion of plot or even movement but rather in order to present a portrait of the artist as a young man. or, more specifically, the portrait given is of the artist as an older man looking back at himself as a younger one. it serves vila-matas’s purposes to portray his younger (fictional) self as a struggling poseur and plagiarizer of stances, so he puts his most learned lines in the mouth of his chief foil and best friend raúl escari. and on the very notion of unity in the novel he has escari say the key truth: “[I]t’s not a question of unity or a degree of tolerance for digression. It’s a more profound or complex matter than it appears to be. The paragraphs should be connected to each other. Nothing more and nothing less.”
the third in a series of translations of vila-matas into english by new directions (a fourth, DUBLINESQUE, is just out), all with a meta-literary premise, NEVER ANY END TO PARIS seems to me the most successful so far. in part this is because of the graceful translation by anne mclean, which allows the humor to come across intact, but as well it is because vila-matas’s irony works particularly well in this fictional autobiography—because it seems here so sincere. our narrator admits as much: “Everything I’ve said about irony is not at all ironic. The fact is, after all, art is the only method we have of pronouncing certain truths. And I can’t think of a greater way of stating truth than being ironic about our own identity.”
a bit plodding but in reality wonderfully so. like that wise, avuncular speech that gets tedious at times but which you nonetheless love hearing.
ionesco’s only novel tells of an everyman who is decidedly not an artist or a saint but one who nonetheless is struck forcibly with the great question of his own existence. as this narrator faces the familiar but unsolvable koans, a deep and growing sense of recognition and pity (for the narrator and for ourselves) arises:
I have never recovered from my initial surprise at making contact with the world, a feeling of surprise and wonderment that cannot be dismissed. We are told to free ourselves from the feeling of astonishment and move on to other things. But in that case, on what basis can we found any knowledge or morality? There is no way that basis can be ignorance, and yet we are swimming in ignorance; our point of departure, our foundation, is nothing but the void. How can we build on nothing? (57)
All we are, perhaps, is knots, ephemeral intersections of energies, forces, various and contradictory tendencies which only death unties. And yet these forces, these energetic events are ourselves; we are built, we are produced, we are acted upon, but also we make ourselves, we act and we act upon ourselves. Oh, if only I had some philosophical talent! All the things I’d understand! I’d understand the same things I know now, but I could explain them to myself better, and I’d also be able to explain it better to others and exchange ideas. (65)
one of the bits i liked the best is when the narrator actually does confront a scholar, a philosopher, who tells him his questions are quite ordinary, that there isn’t anything at all new to them… to which our isolato replies:
“Of course,” I answered, “I’m sure you’re aware of these problems; you’ve read a lot, you have a great fount of knowledge. But for me these questions are crucial, they take me and shake me. For you, they’re only cultural. You don’t wake up every morning with fear and trembling, asking yourself what the answers are, then telling yourself there aren’t any. But you know that everyone has asked himself these same questions. And you also know that no one has ever come up with any answers, because there aren’t any. The only difference is that for you the whole thing is files and catalogues… Despair has been domesticated; people have turned it into literature, into works of art. That doesn’t help me” (87-88).
[later on (actually the passing of time in the book is beautifully done, and years pass almost imperceptibly differently from hours), a civil war breaks out. and here the book could be argued to have a reactionary or anti-revolutionary point of view. for it has little faith in any progress of state. unfortunately this seems an increasingly convincing cynicism.]
the pseudonymous Meng-hu has a great review on the book here, which acknowledges the work’s tardy appearance “in the sequence of existential literature” and speaks well of its narrator’s identifiable mental illness and alcohol-fueled escapism.
roy kuhlman — famous for his grove beckett book covers — designed this one. translated by the maverick publisher and editor richard seaver.
Click below to see poems read by Lewis Warsh, Lisa Jarnot, Joanna Sondheim and more… And give your $upport to the great-looking, new magazine: Staging Ground.
who knew macho came in so many delicate colors? evidently don carpenter did. and displayed the entire spectrum in his great brutal HARD RAIN FALLING. with a palpable adherence to some unsaid code of defiant honesty, carpenter’s first novel anchors itself in a historically determined idea of manhood that dates itself much less than one might at first assume.
three very different eras in one man’s life: a raging early hoodlum boyhood of poolhalls and not-so-petty crimes; then stints at prison including one tremendous tear of writing and existential fury describing a solitary confinement episode and also, later, a very moving and tragic love story between inmates at san quentin… the book perhaps should have ended there but gives us a final portrait of the ex-con as a young father… this bit, while burning not quite as hot, also has its philosophical rewards. this last domestic section may also only seem a letdown because by then you’ve become accustomed to the explosive miracles carpenter seems to be pulling off scene after extended scene.
usually i dislike books where i’m constantly wondering what happens next because i feel manipulated, as if i’m on some kind of ride. i wondered what came next here, but i didn’t mind.
a lightning strike, a revelation. populated by persons afflicted — the two serious ladies of its title most so — by some hilarious strain of nutty. each too acquiring a certain kind of self-proclaimed but not entirely inaccurate sainthood. “saint” a title to use advisedly, but there is something of the seeker and holy fool about these characters. an air of privilege perfumes our ladies but their disavowal of it through the casual violation or even destruction of propriety makes it seem the transgressions and non sequiturs are actually the fastidious following of a much higher order. my edition has an awful cover and a great intro by lorna sage who reveals parenthetically that Christina Goering was “named after Jesus Christ and Hitler’s aviation minister”(!) …published in 1943 TWO SERIOUS LADIES can be thought of as a proto-beat novel — only in the sense that it too seems a response and protesting statement to the bourgeois strictures from which it arises — but otherwise a total sui generis. it’s madcap, movingly in touch with despair, structurally profound, and in the best sense foolishly holy.
“It’s possible,” Koestenbaum tells me, “that I worship Jane Bowles a little less than I did five or ten years ago. Self destructiveness isn’t as easily idealized as you get older.” It’s true. The loneliness of Bowles that seemed grand to me at 20 now seems like a question that was never answered.
houellebecq is a supreme market analyst, not shying away from drawing a trendline even if it’s more based on cynicism than data:
They had several happy weeks. It was not, it couldn’t be, the exacerbated, feverish happiness of young people, and it was no longer a question for them in the course of a weekend to get plastered or totally shit-faced; it was already — but they were still young enough to laugh about it — the preparation for that epicurean, peaceful, refined but unsnobbish happiness that Western society offered the representatives of its middle-to-upper classes in middle age. They got used to the theatrical tone adopted by waiters in high-star establishments as they announced the composition of the amuse-bouches and other appetizers; and also that elastic and declamatory way in which they exclaimed: “Excellente continuation, messieurs, dames!” each time they brought the next course (58).”
inhaled it and enjoyed it thoroughly, but not his best (though maybe his most consciously ambitious). somehow it didn’t appear to have the energy to finish what it started. the houellebecq character seemed to exist simply to settle scores and mock his own public image — but after those tasks were (often, it’s true, hilariously) done there ironically was a painful lack of development for this rather essential, important character. and the (d)evolution into police procedural i think was in some ways, even if premeditated and even if enjoyable, shark jumping.
there are even moments of unfortunate false notes and unexpected sentimentality, for example when the main character tries to find meaning in his life so waxes nostalgic for the one that got away:
The word passion suddenly crossed Jed’s mind, and all of a sudden he found himself ten years previously, during his last weekend with Olga… Night was falling, and the temperature ideally mild. Olga seemed deep in contemplation of her pressed lobster. She had said nothing for at least a minute when she lifted her head, looked him straight in the eyes, and asked: “Do you know why you’re attractive to women?… It’s very simple: it’s because you have an intense look in your eyes. A passionate look… If they can read in the eyes of a man an energy, a passion, then they find him attractive” (106-7).
[this is houellebecq writing?!]
and/but there’s plenty to love… here’s a favorite stand-alone bit. typical in its wry cultural observation, it ends with a quietly explosive insight:
The Sushi Warehouse in Roissy 2E offered an exceptional range of Norwegian mineral waters. Jed opted for the Husqvarna, a water from the center of Norway, which sparkled discreetly. It was extremely pure — although, in reality, no more than the others. All these mineral waters distinguished themselves only by the sparkling, a slightly different texture in the mouth; none of them were salty or ferruginous; the basic point of Norwegian mineral waters seemed to be moderation. Subtle hedonists, these Norwegians, thought Jed as he bought his Husqvarna; it was pleasant, he thought again, that so many different forms of purity could exist (80).
Harp & Altar #9 now up! I’ve stepped down as Fiction Editor and want to send many thanks to Keith Newton for the opportunity to work on this great magazine. The new issue has poetry and fiction by Amaranth Borsuk, Tina Brown Celona, Oisín Curran, Kate Dougherty, Farrah Field, Kevin Holden, Gregory Howard, Paul Killebrew, Noelle Kocot, Aubrie Marrin, Jenny Nichols, and Sampson Starkweather. http://www.harpandaltar.com/
One advantage of trading mothers would be that you could have sex with her, your mother who was not really your mother but somebody else’s mother that you had traded with. I imagine this might appeal to some people. It might be an exciting idea to them. On the other hand, it would be equally true that someone, specifically the person you had traded with, could be having sex with your mother, your real mother that you traded away. I understand that this would be upsetting to some people. Although not to others.
reminded me of walser — maybe a more worldy walser. as if instead of retreating to the madhouse, hrabal was sentenced to the purgatory of the diplomatic corps — forced propriety despite the absurd or horrific swirls of history around him. but, like walser, he recognizes the poetic gesture… poetic or romantic despite or because of the old world sexism and classism rampant (and rampant still) just before the second world war, the ripened-to-rot but still shiny weimar-type decadence… without mentioning it to spoil it, the first chapter has one of the more romantic scenes i’ve read in many a year.
the movement from charming and bawdy to dark satire and political farce to apocalyptic dream and finally into prayerful meditation — all that transition done quietly, even feigning modesty, yet this quiet hiding a great ambition. the transitions’ build-up and execution reflective of not only the change of an individual but of nation-states.
here’s a scene to wet yer whistle:
“I saw Zdenëk, the headwaiter at the Hotel Tichota, who enjoyed having a good time so much when he was off work that to get it he’d spend all the money he had with him, which was always several thousand. Then I saw his uncle, a military bandmaster now retired, who split wood on his little plot of land in the forest where he had a cottage overgrown with flowers and wild vines. This uncle had been a bandmaster at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and still wore his uniform when he split wood, because he had written two polkas and several waltzes that still got played all the time, although no one remembered who the composer was and everyone thought he’d died a long time ago. Zdenëk and I, as we were riding along in a rented buggy on one of our days off, heard the sound of a military brass band playing one of his uncle’s waltzes, and Zdenëk stood up and signaled the driver to stop, then went over to the band and had a little talk with the bandmaster. He offered to give him all the money he had, four thousand crowns, for the soldiers to buy themselves beer, if they would do what he asked. Buses were waiting, and the whole band was getting ready to climb aboard to go to a band tattoo, so we left the buggy there and got on the first bus with them. After an hour’s drive we stopped in a forest, and soon a hundred and twenty uniformed musicians with their shiny instruments were advancing slowly down a road through the woods. Then they turned onto a footpath lined with thick bushes and pine trees that towered overhead, and Zdenëk signaled them to stop and slipped through some loose planks in a fence, disappeared into the bushes for a few moments, then came back and told them his plan. When he gave the sign, the soldiers climbed one by one through the hole in the fence into the bushes while Zdenëk, like a soldier at the front, directed them to take positions around the tiny house. They could hear the sound of an ax striking wood, and the entire band silently surrounded the chopping block and an old man in an ancient Austrian bandleader’s uniform. When Zdenëk gave the signal, the bandmaster flung his golden ceremonial baton in the air, gave a loud command, and out of the bushes rose a glistening array of brass instruments and the band began to play a clamorous polka by Zdenëk’s uncle. The old bandleader stood transfixed over the piece of wood he had just split, while the band moved forward a couple of steps, still up to their waists in pine and oak shrubs. Only the bandmaster stood in the greenery up to his knees, swinging his golden baton while the band played the polka and their instruments flashed in the sunlight. The old bandleader slowly looked around with a heavenly expression on his face, and when they finished the polka the band started right in on one of his concert waltzes, and the old bandleader sat down, put his ax across his knees, and began to cry. The bandmaster came up and touched his shoulder, the old man looked up, and the bandmaster handed him the golden baton. Now the old man got to his feet and, as he told us afterward, he thought he’d died and gone to heaven with a military band all around him, and he thought they must play military music in heaven and that God Himself was conducting the band and was now turning His own baton over to him. So the old man conducted his own pieces, and when he’d finished, Zdenëk stepped out of the bushes, shook hands with his uncle, and wished him good health. Half an hour later the band climbed back into their buses and as they were driving away they played Zdenëk a farewell ceremonial fanfare. Zdenëk stood there filled with emotion and bowed and thanked them, and finally the buses, and with them the fanfares, faded down the road through the woods, lashed by beech branches and shrubs” (159-61).
in no particular but starting it off: giancarlo’s glamour-soaked narcissus tale as lit journal advertisement… hans rickheit’s SQUIRREL MACHINE is a great gross-out dream… the beautiful ephemera of luca’s DAS DING #3… saying goodbye and anticipating saying goodbye to merce… the tumult of a chinese lifetime told in incredible locked down, long take that is wang bing’s FENGMING… the state of the disunion address of teju cole’s OPEN CITY… catching up with lewis warsh’s A FREE MAN (1991) and its inverse mirror A PLACE IN THE SUN (2010). they’re what social realism could admirably be — if those words meant something different… monica youn’s love song of j alfred IGNATZ (“and the fading//echo of the detox/mantras://helpless helpless/helpless helpless“)… speaking of which, 1st volume of beckett’s letters, which include the quip “T. Eliot is toilet spelt backwards” and untaken advice from his brother in the form of the question “Why can’t you write the way people want?” …and, a year late, but RIP barry hannah you lunatic god.
& last but definitely not least: hat’s off to the erstwhile and ever OWS People’s Library, which rallied the troops and served as symbol in a way yer kindle download will never.
i’m happy to have a new story called “Booster Rockets” in the latest issue of FENCE magazine. here’s how it starts:
I was coming from a haircut and I was upset. I had just spent a lot of money on the haircut but I didn’t have a lot of money. It’s not because I’m vain but looking good is important to me. Anyway I was walking across Washington Square Park and I was not happy. I was pissed off. I wasn’t crying or raving or anything like that, just cranky, because I’d taken a chance on a new hair cutter and just then I thought she’d fucked it all up, not done what I wanted her to do, what I’d told her to do. A little bit later, a few days later or even the very next day, I realized it was actually a very nice haircut, that I liked what she’d done, and I kept going back to her for several more years…
An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris was written by Georges Perec during a gray Parisian weekend in October 1974. The stated intention was to “describe … that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds.” A nonambulatory flâneur, Perec sets himself up at a cafe in Place Saint-Sulpice to do as his directive epigraph of Life: A User’s Manualorders us to do also: “Look with all your eyes, look.”
what would happen to raskolnikov if he hadn’t killed the old woman? kurumatani seems to ask that question in this grim tale about a young japanese man who decides to opt as far out of life as he can. if not wholly unique in tone and content, a very good book on a great theme: the isolato in both the noir-y tradition of philip marlowe and the devastatingly pure refusnik ‘tude of bartleby. like his literary predecessors, our man here is an individual who rejects the prescribed ambitions of life, judging them as ultimately disappointing and petty.
reminiscent of recent down-and-out memoirs like TRAVELS WITH LIZBETH or GRAND CENTRAL WINTER this contemporary take on the autobiographical watashi shosetsu genre, or “I-novel,” is grimly poetic and sweatily spiritual. like the tales of the marginalized burakumin of nakagami but less macho, more philosophical — something akin to the depressed soul of perec’s A MAN ASLEEP except ikushima’s no student and he has no rent money.
I was about to visit somebody I had never met. A complete stranger. My only hope was to talk this stranger into giving me a job so that I could keep on living. I had lost everything, thrown everything away. I had already been made to understand, all too well, that I was a loser. Whoever I was about to meet was probably used to being tough toward people as unworldly as me. No matter; whether it turned out to be some guy I couldn’t get anywhere with, or a woman with a heart of stone, I had no other choice; I was at the end of my rope (10).
a review of kurumatani and keizo hino in the quarterly conversation here.
watch the trailer of the movie based on it (in japanese) here: ____________________
[found this one browsing a bookstore’s shelves, that encounter with chance and fuzzy curating now increasingly rare and endangered. but how else to find that book not clamoring by tweet and hype but just by consistent work on the page? o well.]
your poor fabulously wealthy man of leisure slash hipster is nursing a dying love affair while his highly sensitive instrument notes, in languorous and voluptuous detail, the grime and dazzle of his worldly world.
We took shelter inside for a moment, passing abruptly from the bluish gloom of the night to the violent and timeless white blaze of overhead fluorescent lights. I glanced casually at the only two clients in the store, a young man in an orange turtleneck and a small rasta cap who was leafing through a magazine in front of the newspaper rack, and a salaryman of indeterminate age, with wet shoes and a damp forehead, who was doubtfully considering the almost empty shelves in the refrigerated section, occasionally selecting some plastic-wrapped tray filled with stringy black seaweed or sliced mushrooms, bringing it closer to his eyes and raising his glasses to read something on the label, the product’s packaging date or place of origin, then replacing the plastic tray where he had found it. Marie was in front of the baked goods shelf, looking rather apathetically at the packages of cookies, moving arbitrarily from one shelf to another, lingering at the displays of instant soups and colorful cellophane bags of noodles. She carried her damp coat in the crook of one arm, and wearing her sunglasses again because of the excessive glare in the store, she strolled, yawning, by the shelves, watched indifferently by the dejected cashiers, who followed the nonchalant progress of her splendid starry-night silhouette sailing up and down vacant aisles (47).
as satirical of the decadent consumerist life as DEMONLOVER or LOST IN TRANSLATION or ENTER THE VOID, that is: barely or not at all…
but even if the trite subject is only mitigated slightly and rather shamelessly with a thin glaze of self awareness, toussaint transcends the shallowness with his sumptuous, gloriously paced, and perfectly elegant style. he’s at some of his best here; MAKING LOVE was a bestseller in france and the first of his, by The New Press, to be translated into english. rarer to find than the dalkey archive translations but if you’re a fan absolutely worth the tracking down.
using a realist, pseudo-autobiographical style very reminiscent of sebald, the main character, Julius, wanders through an up-to-date and recognizable NYC, an accomplishment in itself, observing the marathoners and skyscrapers at columbus circle, the twin towers intact in the queens museum’s diorama, conversations with cabdrivers infused with political subtext, bedbugs — and uses that general observation to describe, repeatedly and profoundly, the immigrant’s situation. maybe in fact the novel is the first since sebald to successfully tackle our moment of simultaneous globalization and alienation without resorting to parody or genre plot or any other distancing device. and for all the meandering of its narrative, this roaming belies a close-hewed line, and the book is not really a flâneur’s accounting at all but a meditative monologue on history told to the slow-hearbeat pace of a stroll’s footfall.
Farouq turned to me and said, It’s very busy, as you can see. Not only for all the people making New Year greetings but also for a lot of people calling home for the Eid. He gestured to the computer monitor behind him, and on it was a log of the calls ongoing in all twelve booths: Colombia, Egypt, Senegal, Brazil, France, Germany. It looked like fiction, that such a small group of people really could be making calls to such a wide spectrum of places. It’s been like this for the past two days, Farouq said, and this is one of the things I enjoy about working here. It’s a test case of what I believe; people can live together but still keep their own values intact. Seeing this crowd of individuals from different places, it appeals to the human side of me, and the intellectual side of me (112).
the lesson here seems to be that there is less and less frequently a typical immigration story than that each immigrant has a unique tale as bizarre as it is wholly probable. and each of these, in julius’s necessarily passing view, only half reveals its tangled provenance through scars and tics and layers of peeling disguise. cole shows again and again people who have been caught and hurled by history into their odd displaced places: a liberian in immigration prison, a dying english professor who had been in a japanese internment camp, rwandan dance clubbers, arab-european cafe leftists. these individuals are not always victims of history but are — in their singularity, in their movements unreplicated by nations of others — perhaps more uniquely aware of how history has determined their lives. and as cole’s novel superbly illustrates (and as globalization intensifies) there will arguably be fewer and fewer citizens of states and more and more castaway members of diasporas.
for these latter, in OPEN CITY, the question of belonging and authenticity as well as the proper and appropriate methods of political speech and protest are never far from mind. one of the most memorable characters in this regard is farouq — who with his somewhat naive leftism plays foil to our ever-so-increasingly unreliable (and occasionally reactionary-ish) narrator. farouq is an employee at an internet cafe in brussels and from that vantage freely comments on global politics… one of the book’s best provocations in fact is that it is a NYC book confronting the transforming moment zero of 9/11 by archly recounting a bar debate of arab intellectuals posturing resistance in brussels(!) …if it wasn’t so possible, it would be perfect satire.
Farouq’s face — all of a sudden, it seemed, but I must have been subconsciously working on the problem — resolved itself, and I saw a startling resemblance: he was the very image of Robert De Niro, specifically in De Niro’s role as the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather II… A famous Italian-American actor thirty years ago and an unknown Moroccan political philosopher in the present, but it was the same face. What a marvel that life repeated itself in these trivial ways, and it was something I noticed only because he hadn’t shaved for a day or two…
What was the meaning of De Niro’s smile? He, De Niro, smiled, but one had no idea what he was smiling about. Perhaps this is why, when I first met Farouq, I had been taken aback. I had subconsciously overinterpreted his smile, connecting his face to another’s, reading it as a face to be liked but feared. I had read his face as that of the young De Niro, as a charming psychopath, for this most trivial of reasons. And it was this face, not as inscrutable as I had once feared, that spoke now: For us, America is a version of Al-Qaeda. The statement was so general as to be without meaning. It had no power, and he said it without conviction. I did not need to contest it, and Khalil added nothing to it. “America is a version of Al-Qaeda.” It floated up with the smoke, and died. It might have meant more, weeks back, when the one speaking was still an unknown quanity. Now he had overplayed his hand, and I sensed a shift in the argument, a shift in my favor” (121-122).
. . .
near novel’s end julius observes a woman davening and comments on prayer. his definition of it could easily also apply to the novel in general but especially to OPEN CITY itself — an elegant, brainy, careful, and finally hopeful meditation:
I had made some tea, and I drank it as I watched the woman pray. Others are not like us, I thought to myself, their forms are different from ours. Yet I prayed, too, I would gladly face a wall and daven, if that was what had been given to me. Prayer was, I had long settled in my mind, no kind of promise, no device for getting what one wanted out of life; it was the mere practice of presence, that was all, a therapy of being present, of giving a name to the heart’s desires, the fully formed ones, the as yet formless ones (215).
TEJU COLE: We don’t experience our lives as plots. If I asked you to tell me what your last week was like, you’re not really gonna give me plot. You’re gonna give me sort of linked narrative. And I wanted to see how do we bring that into fiction without losing the reader. But of course, I’m not the first person to think about this. This is actually a problem that the Modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Wolfe solved pretty well. So part of my thinking was going back a little bit to re-inventing that particular wheel, which only seems innovative because most novels that are written today are being written on Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, 19th century novel.
not purely fiction but located somewhere between death porn, a bipolar’s daybook, and a conceptual suicide note, levé’s novel — which is inseparable from its author’s biography — seems less a treatise on suicide than a portrait of an elegant but somehow dull faculty. (or dulled? the translator’s afterword calls levé’s aesthetic habitually “austere.”) the narrator notes moments of the pedestrian sublime or accounts for days with gestures toward the philosophical, but somehow never does his sense flare into the poignancy it seems to, despite itself, strive for. the unrelenting dark gray of depression’s long term palette, however, the book does seem to get just right.
bernhard writes a devastating book, a poetry of mental illness — without romanticism but with music, true also to the horror. both an emulation of the sickness and an attendant commentary on its causes and end. we read bernhard for his musical eremitism, which takes the barest fact, the most stripped-down situation (here, a man living in the country, encountering a potential and temporary walking and talking companion) and creates a layered, bittersweet counterpoint at times as rich as bach.
But this release, of course, could only last a few days, after two or three weeks I had been back in a deep depression, but that is another story. The Swiss couple, in conjunction with Moritz and his family, had brought about a prolonged, indeed the most prolonged, period without an attack, never before had I had such a long interval between two attacks without being totally at the mercy of my sickness, in other words being almost entirely liberated from that sickness, as during the period when I went for walks with the Persian woman and that is the period under discussion here; had I not come to the country that sickness, which logically got worse with my existence in the country, could not have developed in that devastating manner, but had I stayed in the city I would no longer be existing at all, and therefore this new thought, whether I would not have done better to stay in the city and not move out to the country, is senseless (67).
here mental illness is both itself and synecdoche for the idea — and if there is a lingering romanticism it is this — that these ill, despite their illness and inability to function, perceive more accurately, more deeply, a crushing vileness, which is our inescapable condition. perhaps it’s a grandiose and deluded position, but how accurate does the following sound :
…and the frightful political conditions in our country and throughout Europe had perhaps triggered this catastrophe, because everything in politics was developing in precisely the opposite direction from what I had been convinced was correct and from what I am to this day convinced is correct. Political conditions at that point had suddenly deteriorated in a way which can only be described as dreadful and deadly. The endeavors of decades had been wiped out within a few weeks, and what had always been an unstable country had in effect collapsed within a few weeks, dim-wittedness, greed and hypocrisy were suddenly again at the helm just as in the worst times of the worst regime, and those in power were once again ruthlessly working towards the extermination of the intellect… Anyone thinking must be mistrusted and must be persecuted, that is the old slogan according to which they are once more acting in the most terrible manner. The newspapers speak a distasteful language, the distasteful language they have always spoken but which, during the past few decades, they had spoken only with lowered voices, which suddenly they no longer had any reason to do, almost without exception they were posturing like the people in order to please the people, those mind murderers. Dreams of a world of the mind had been betrayed during these weeks and thrown on the popular refuse heap. The voices of the intellect had fallen silent. Heads were ducking. There was now only brutality, vileness and infamy (61-3).
Thanks to Douglas Messerli for publishing an excerpt from a novel-in-slow-progress currently called STRANGE TWINS at his EXPLORINGfictions:
How I got the job is an interesting story. Like all her hires, I was recruited. It was when my twin brother invited me to a party.
A self-help book my brother had secretly ghost-written was having a launch party in the old-fashioned pomp and gilt of the Hotel Europa downtown. Its publisher was projecting tremendous sales so had spared no expense. I’d no idea what I was walking into (my brother had called a few days prior, surprising me with an invite), and so when I arrived and saw that I’d misjudged the event’s size and glitter by several orders of magnitude, I realized it was going to be difficult to get any time at all with my brother, the epicenter of the maelstrom, whose tuxedo’d point from the mezzanine balcony I could amusedly observe drawing the aim of scheming vectors and incurring trails of vaporous gossip. Also, I was painfully underdressed. So I was both relieved and delighted when, twenty minutes later, he spotted me and instead of waving or just blowing me a kiss, immediately made his way over.
SIMPLY SEPARATE PEOPLE was a delicious act of worldbuilding which viewed its characters through an unexpected slant angle. the result was a very familiar but hard-to-put-your-finger-on strange depiction of the every day. personable, a book easy to fall into, as its characters’ hardships and motivations are recognizable and crawford’s view of them is generous and refrains from judgment. here’s the beginning:
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and now, just published, is SIMPLY SEPARATE PEOPLE, TWO. less a sequel so much as a second variation on her theme of the quotidian mixed with the uncanny. the focus here is storytelling, our urge to be storytellers, and what stories tell about its teller. crawford has her suburban mother narrator retell stories by hemingway and henry james in such a way that our view of ourselves turns almost unconsciously satirical and/or creepy.
Here is what happens. One morning, a mom, pretty, dressed in a sweat suit, sneakers, approaches me at morning drop off. She tells me I look fit and wonders if I exercise. I tell her we have a swimming pool on our roof and, in warm weather, I sometimes swim there. But otherwise, no, not really. She tells me she and a group of mothers go to a nearby gym ever morning to triathlon train, and invites me to join them. Maybe tomorrow?
She points to the group. There they stand. Oh, I think, those women. I have, honestly, noticed them, admired them, felt dwarfed by them. They are not the professional moms, carefully dressed, with no time to linger. Not the tired looking moms carrying chewed up sippie cups, wearing sweat suits that they might have slept in, with strands of dog hair on the seat, huddling together, complaining about how dirty their kitchens are, how much weight they have put on. Not the moms in tunics and flip flops, dreamily heading off to yoga or meditation. No. these moms wear pony tails under sports caps, tinted moisturizer, clear lip gloss and seem to be (like the professional moms) in a hurry, or at least revved up (99-100).
SIMPLY SEPARATE PEOPLE, TWO is a magical machine whose innards are in plain view but whose operating principles remain profoundly mysterious. a dazzling feat of collage and reverse-engineering, crawford writes in a deceptively easy-going style that’s both critical of and generous to all our sad and beautiful scurrying around.
a suite of four interacting works that do meta-fictionality without that embarrassing pedantic odor. and in the title work lock so refines a style that his figurines gesture on an exquisite stage with a perfect modulation of wit and heartbreak. these miniatures gradually develop their emotional and formal ambitions so, as with the funambulist named within, we hold our breath — unbelieving the instant-by-instant and sentence-by-sentence marvels of lock’s high-wire act.
The Prime Minister is in the vestibule, brushing his silk hat with his sleeve. He comes each night after the cares of state have been put away. He lays them in a drawer among maps and pairs of immaculate white gloves. To be here with us requires finesse; for the nation believes he is lucubrating, not waltzing — certainly not doing the two-step or tango with a rustling girl in his arms! A girl in a pale-yellow dress whose frou frou causes desire to rise up in his thinnest ducts. He left the ministry by the back stairs, eluded the stiffly standing military guard, tiptoed past the alleys where, since nightfall, men and women have come in search of contraband. Each night he slides a stack of crimson inflationary currency over the sill of the wire wicket, behind which a woman sits who hands him, in return, a loop of blue tickets. Always it is the same girl with whom he dances — the one in the yellow dress, which makes a crepuscular music. She whose hair is the color of certain sunsets. It is for this the Prime Minister lives — not for his wife or his countrymen, who pity him over their beer and sausages for his ceaseless devotion. I lift my glass to him as he passes near my table, but his mind is elsewhere — on a diagram of the samba he is now dancing, studied intently an hour ago (a map of movement through a space hostile to gracelessness). I know what is in his mind, for inside the hotel I have the gift of omniscience. Do not ask who gave me it. I don’t know, unless it is the bottle of clearest gin, the mermaid on the swizzle stick, or the strength of my own desire (52-3).
Thursday, May 19
6:30 p.m.
Flushing branch of the Queens Library
Rooms A&B, Lower Level
41-17 Main Street
718-661-1200
Join us and celebrate Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month with a reading featuring Queens Poet Laureate Paolo Javier, novelist Eugene Lim, and poet/art critic Christine Hou. A short open mic will precede the reading, with sign-up at 6:00 p.m. Books will be available for sale and signing.
(it’s not very helpful to say but: a book you don’t really feel like describing–but to say (nonchalantly) (or hiss) : “read it” …also a book that you don’t want to analyze overly much. at least not with logic. maybe a different, weirder, more hopeful tool.)
i let three trains pass on the platform so i could finish it. POV of a scorned bourgeoise. horror episodes of her total fury in sentences that sear and become beautiful. other times: accurate, intimate and desolate portraits of a broken self. a carefully balanced, patient plot that’s worth battling through its accurate depiction of thick monotonous depression. but despite its extreme emotions, not manipulative or fantastic. in those contemporary fictions with similarly traditional ambitions, ferrante’s hard-won poise and bitter realism are only palely reflected.
here’s a bit:
I was like a lump of food that my children chewed without stopping; a cud made of a living material that continually amalgamated and softened its living substance to allow two greedy bloodsuckers to nourish themselves, leaving on me the odor and taste of their gastric juices. Nursing, how repulsive, an animal function. And then the warm sweetish odor of baby-food breath. No matter how much I washed, that stink of motherhood remained. Sometimes Mario pasted himself against me, took me, holding me as I nearly slept, tired himself after work, without emotions. He did it persisting on my almost absent flesh that tasted of milk, cookies, cereal, with a desperation of his own that overlapped mine without his realizing it. I was the body of incest, I thought… I was the mother to be violated, not a lover. Already he was searching elsewhere for figures more suitable for love, fleeing the sense of guilt, and he became melancholy, sighed. Carla had happened then into the house at the right moment, a figment of unsatisfied desire. She was then thirteen years older than Ilaria, ten more than Gianni… Mario must have imagined her as the future, and yet he desired the past, the girlhood that I had already given him and that he now felt nostalgia for. She herself perhaps believed she was giving him the future and had encourage him to believe it. But we were all confused, especially me. While I was taking care of the children, I was expecting from Mario a moment that never arrived, the moment when I would be again as I had been before my pregnancies, young, slender, energetic, shamelessly certain I could make of myself a memorable person. No, I thought, squeezing the rag and struggling to get up: starting at a certain point, the future is only a need to live in the past. To immediately redo the grammatical tenses (91-2) .
the narrator is hired to ghost-write the autobiography of Tobold the Hamburger King. a kind of steve ballmer larry ellison dick cheney rupert murdoch lex luthor mashup. full of spot-on recognitions. and while it doesn’t do so much to complicate the archetype and plot of the amoral and ruthless capitalist (of course born in poverty, self-made, lonely-at-the-top), it does provide a sharp insight into the artist class’s response: servility, impotence, hypocrisy and envy.
the last third disappoints in that it tries to give Tobold, its embodiment of the Free Market, a tortured conscience. the move feels false and sentimental. and makes the book drag.
but first two thirds are a nice rip. here’s a page:
I ended up thinking that brutality, calculation, profit-oriented thinking and contempt for all things spiritual (all qualities that are required to be worthy of being called an investor) were not only respected by everyone, but promoted and praised. People saw them as assets, as stenghts, as indispensable guarantors of success, so much so that it had become impossible to scoff at them.
Times are vulgar, I told myself in the prudish and bombastic tone of those who believe themselves to be exempt from the criticisms they throw at others.
The ancient civility of Old Europe is dead, I told myself. This argument provided me infinite consolation since by itself it justified all of my powerlessness.
I told myself with a sickening complacency that if tact were to be considered a weakness from then on, if erudition was thought of as pretension, self-effacement as a disorder, and manners as a hindrance to fun, then it made perfect sense that I found myself in this fucked-up situation. It was perfectly normal that I didn’t have a place in this world. It was inevitable that I would always be out of touch, isolated, unable to join the crowd, solitary. So it is with artists.
Vulgarity is ruining the world, it’s making a mess of things, I told myself. I was never short on indignation. And this charge that I was leveling against the spirit of the times somehow compensated for the sum of my daily spineless concessions (130-1).
refashioning the detective narrative into something more art-y evidently is such a tempting strategy perhaps it’s a trap. note the murder puzzles of echenoz’s house-mate at les editions de minuit, robbe-grillet. or robert coover’s recent deconstruction of noir or pynchon’s neon vices or lethem’s genre mashups or haruki murakami’s career-long channeling of chandler… even bolaño wants to be a homicide cop in his next life… that ongoing and probably easily extended list suggests there’s not only something fashionable about this trope-slumming but that the mystery narrative is somehow deeply fundamental to the novel form. its searcher protagonists and elusive, ineffable obscure objects of desire might arguably be the nucleobases of the novel’s DNA.
reading three echenoz in a row — BIG BLONDES, I AM GONE, and CHEROKEE — made that thought pop again to mind as echenoz displays an intimate and scientific knowledge of the genre’s workings. he also does something that feels unique with it, stripping almost everything out — certainly as much interiority as he can — and leaving only plot. not that these are zippy momentum-gathering page turners — rather they’re drôle collages of event where a thousand peculiar items are glued together with comedic and/or convenient coincidence. cubist mysteries of fractured planes, they’re fun reads with, when the pieces come together at the end, an almost guaranteed mild let-down (maybe even a purposeful, subversive one). oddly addictive.
against the odds, the great jaimy gordonwon this year’s national book award for LORD OF MISRULE, a gritty look at a 70s era down-and-out west virginia racetrack. its creation of character through dialect and its vivid rendering of a lost place and time is remarkable. she’s also the author of the gorgeous and virtuosic SHAMP OF THE CITY SOLO and the very different but equally beautiful and emotionally connecting SHE DROVE WITHOUT STOPPING.
i think this (slightly protesting) comment on plot in this recent interview on michael silverblatt’s bookworm reveals a bit about her method: “…otherwise it all goes into a kind of a slurry in my imagination… I just try to recreate the atmosphere and then kind of weave a plot into it. And I do like the element of plot very much. It doesn’t have to be an extremely complex plot worthy of a mystery story, but the element of suspense in fiction, the necessity of continuing to follow a narrative until you find out what happens to the characters whom you’ve come to care about. I just don’t see how any fiction writer could dispense with that, could want to. It’s what’s so entrancing about the experience of reading fiction for me, or one of the main things that’s makes it so necessary for me.” (15:10)
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as a bonus, at the end of the interview she lists her favorite under-appreciated novels:
