As some of you may have noticed, blogging at 2x3x7 has been kind of slow lately (I'm down to just about 3 posts a week, imagine that!) and I might as well say right now that it's likely to continue that way for a while to come; if anything, it's likely to get worse.
To make this up to you, I thought I'd add a few links to the sidebar, just a random list of online lit journals that I read if not regularly than at least occasionally, and that you might enjoy as well. That way, every time you come to this blog and find I haven't put up a new post you can do something useful with your time instead of muttering under your breath about people who don't update their blogs. I realize, of course, that 20 journals featuring considerable bodies of work by some of the more interesting poets and writers working today is poor compensation for a daily dose of my inimitable genius, but hopefully it'll tide you over for a bit.
And just to get you started (if on a somewhat morbid note), I recommend, if you haven't read it yet, Fady Joudah's tribute to Darwish over at KR Online and a tribute to Lynda Hull over at Blackbird. Happy reading.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Down Under and Over the Top
Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole
I blame Rushdie. It's been nearly thirty years since Midnight's Children was first published, but the specter of the capacious, gravity-defying, say-it-all novel is still with us, and continues to lure unsuspecting young novelists to their doom. Its latest victim, it seems to me, is Steve Toltz, whose debut novel A Fraction of the Whole, tells the story of the All-Australian Dean family - brothers Martin and Terry (the former a champion misanthrope, the latter a legendary outlaw) and Martin's son Jasper - in "fist-eating, gut-wrenching, seat-edging, nail-biting, lip-pulling, chain-smoking, teeth-clenching detail". A Fraction of the Whole is in many ways a splendid and exhilarating work, but one so overwrought with cleverness, so fraught with baroque contrivances, that it fails to establish an emotional connection with the reader. James Wood would call this hysterical realism; and he would be right.
This is not, by itself, a criticism. Unlike Wood, I don't believe that every novel has to conform to some form of 'lifeness'. I'm quite willing to trade cleverness for authenticity, inventiveness for depth. Done properly, there are few things more mesmerising than truly larger-than-life fiction.
And mesmerising, for the first 200 pages or so, is exactly what Steve Toltz is. That long first section of A Fraction of the Whole is a comic tour de force: vigorous, imaginative, witty, pugnacious and bristling with kind of manic energy that keeps you glued to the page with a big grin plastered all over your face. Judged by the first 200 pages alone, A Fraction of the Whole may be one of the finest books published this year, and certainly one of the funniest.
Which is why it's a pity that Toltz doesn't stop there, but keeps going for another 330 pages, in the course of which the momentum of that glorious opening is allowed to dissipate. Oh, Toltz tries all right, and the book is still funny - there are some electrifying one-liners, some hilarious diatribes and every now and then a genuinely comic situation. But nothing that quite matches the full-throttle brilliance of those early pages. Having started off at an almost Pynchon-ian pitch, Toltz slips into a mode that is half Martin Amis and half Peter Carey - without either the former's sharpness or the latter's gift for character development.
Much of the problem, I suspect, is that having told us all there really is to know about Martin Dean (who is the book's undeniable epicenter) in the first section, Toltz is left with very little to add; so that the rest of the novel becomes a set of repetitive variations on a familiar and, by the end, hackneyed theme. So successfully has Toltz brought Martin Dean to life, so swiftly has he added nuance and depth to this unforgettable character, that we come to know him a little too well, and when no further revelations are forthcoming, Dean Sr., whose only real charm is his ability to shock, quickly turns into something of a boor. And because no other character in the book is half as fascinating as Martin Dean is, he takes the rest of the book down with him.
In part, this is deliberate: the central point of Toltz's novel is that for all his smarter-than-thou intellectualizing Martin will end up a bitter, frightened and deeply frustrated man. But because Martin Dean is too outrageous a figure to merit any emotional investment on our part, his eventual fall from grace inspires not sympathy but disappointment. And the fact that Toltz keeps the story going long after it has lost all dramatic interest - the last section in particular is a terrible miscalculation - only makes this worse. By the time the book finally ends that brilliant starting seems a distant memory, as though from a different book.
All of that said, A Fraction of the Whole is a rambunctious, scathingly funny book that, despite its considerable length, is well worth the read. Even at his most uninspired Toltz is never really dull, and the sheer ambition of what he sets out to do here is admirable, even if his achievement falls a little short of his aspiration. If this book is anything to go by we're going to be hearing more about Toltz in the years to come, and I, for one, look forward to that.
[Part of the 2008 Booker Mela]
I blame Rushdie. It's been nearly thirty years since Midnight's Children was first published, but the specter of the capacious, gravity-defying, say-it-all novel is still with us, and continues to lure unsuspecting young novelists to their doom. Its latest victim, it seems to me, is Steve Toltz, whose debut novel A Fraction of the Whole, tells the story of the All-Australian Dean family - brothers Martin and Terry (the former a champion misanthrope, the latter a legendary outlaw) and Martin's son Jasper - in "fist-eating, gut-wrenching, seat-edging, nail-biting, lip-pulling, chain-smoking, teeth-clenching detail". A Fraction of the Whole is in many ways a splendid and exhilarating work, but one so overwrought with cleverness, so fraught with baroque contrivances, that it fails to establish an emotional connection with the reader. James Wood would call this hysterical realism; and he would be right.
This is not, by itself, a criticism. Unlike Wood, I don't believe that every novel has to conform to some form of 'lifeness'. I'm quite willing to trade cleverness for authenticity, inventiveness for depth. Done properly, there are few things more mesmerising than truly larger-than-life fiction.
And mesmerising, for the first 200 pages or so, is exactly what Steve Toltz is. That long first section of A Fraction of the Whole is a comic tour de force: vigorous, imaginative, witty, pugnacious and bristling with kind of manic energy that keeps you glued to the page with a big grin plastered all over your face. Judged by the first 200 pages alone, A Fraction of the Whole may be one of the finest books published this year, and certainly one of the funniest.
Which is why it's a pity that Toltz doesn't stop there, but keeps going for another 330 pages, in the course of which the momentum of that glorious opening is allowed to dissipate. Oh, Toltz tries all right, and the book is still funny - there are some electrifying one-liners, some hilarious diatribes and every now and then a genuinely comic situation. But nothing that quite matches the full-throttle brilliance of those early pages. Having started off at an almost Pynchon-ian pitch, Toltz slips into a mode that is half Martin Amis and half Peter Carey - without either the former's sharpness or the latter's gift for character development.
Much of the problem, I suspect, is that having told us all there really is to know about Martin Dean (who is the book's undeniable epicenter) in the first section, Toltz is left with very little to add; so that the rest of the novel becomes a set of repetitive variations on a familiar and, by the end, hackneyed theme. So successfully has Toltz brought Martin Dean to life, so swiftly has he added nuance and depth to this unforgettable character, that we come to know him a little too well, and when no further revelations are forthcoming, Dean Sr., whose only real charm is his ability to shock, quickly turns into something of a boor. And because no other character in the book is half as fascinating as Martin Dean is, he takes the rest of the book down with him.
In part, this is deliberate: the central point of Toltz's novel is that for all his smarter-than-thou intellectualizing Martin will end up a bitter, frightened and deeply frustrated man. But because Martin Dean is too outrageous a figure to merit any emotional investment on our part, his eventual fall from grace inspires not sympathy but disappointment. And the fact that Toltz keeps the story going long after it has lost all dramatic interest - the last section in particular is a terrible miscalculation - only makes this worse. By the time the book finally ends that brilliant starting seems a distant memory, as though from a different book.
All of that said, A Fraction of the Whole is a rambunctious, scathingly funny book that, despite its considerable length, is well worth the read. Even at his most uninspired Toltz is never really dull, and the sheer ambition of what he sets out to do here is admirable, even if his achievement falls a little short of his aspiration. If this book is anything to go by we're going to be hearing more about Toltz in the years to come, and I, for one, look forward to that.
[Part of the 2008 Booker Mela]
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
No man is an almost
The new issue of Almost Island is out, and features, among other things, this lovely piece by Forrest Gander, some delightful new poems by W.N. Herbert and translations of Joy Goswami's work along with the originals. Go read.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Window Dressing
Linda Grant's The Clothes on Their Backs
Many years ago, as an impressionable young boy just discovering Oscar Wilde, I went through a phase of trying to come up with bon mots - witty yet wise one-liners that I fondly imagined future generations would quote at each other. The fruits of this Rochefoucaldian labor, needless to say, were uniformally ghastly, and included, among other horrors, the following observation: "All clothes are revealing; they reveal who we are". Even to my relatively uncritical twelve year old mind this was a cliche, so much so that I mercifully decided not to share it with another living soul (well, until now).
Linda Grant, it seems, has no such compunctions. Not only does she seem to feel that the idea that the clothes we wear express and shape our identity is a startling new insight (imagine that! the clothes you wear are reflective of who you are! who would have thought it?), but so enamored is she by the thought that she makes it the central motif of her new novel, repeatedly hammering home the point with an avidity that would cut through the thickest of crania. The result is a banal, pointless book that takes a set of stock characters, clothes them in the flimsiest of plots and then pretends that the result is haute couture, when it's really little more than drab pret-a-porter.
Set in London in the 70's (amid the growing popularity of the right-wing National Front) with sidetrips to Nazi Europe, The Clothes on Their Backs is the story, told in flashback (isn't everything these days?) of Vivien Kovaks, a young girl born to immigrant parents, who finds herself caught between the cloistered life of her parents, who fled to England from Hungary just before World War II and have lived fearfully in their adopted country ever since, and the larger-than-life presence of her Uncle Sandor, a Holocaust survivor who emigrated to England in the mid-50s only to become a slumlord and a pimp, and whose flamboyance Vivien finds herself drawn to both because it represents a way of being acutely alive and because it gives her the chance to connect to her family history, a history her parents have kept assiduously hidden from her.
By itself, this is a not unpromising if somewhat hackneyed plot (I found myself thinking, for instance, in my long stretches of being bored by the book, what a fine job someone like Roth would have done with a character like Sandor Kovacs). The trouble is, that's pretty much all there is to the book. That little one paragraph outline is more or less the sum of what the book has to offer. Oh, there are a few additional details of course, a handful of perfunctory characters, a few dabs at plot development, if an accumulation of wildly improbable and arbitrary coincidences can be given that name, but on the whole Grant doesn't so much deepen the story as extend it. True to her central idea of surface appearance being all, Grant's characters never take on the authentic feel of flesh and blood and remain mere mannequins, artfully arranged in deliberate poses to represent the different attitudes and idealogies she wants them to. Indeed, there are points in the story when Grant almost seems to rely on the generic nature of her plot. Rather than describe Sandor's experiences during the War in any real detail, for instance, she gives us only a sketchy outline and falls back on the easy shorthand of tagging him a Holocaust survivor. The result is an underdeveloped book that has virtually no emotional impact and that feels, if not quite formulaic than at least mathematical - a sort of writing by numbers, all the pieces fitting together in a neat but uninspired way.
To be fair, every now and then Grant does exert herself a little, adding a handful of colorful scenes and side stories (a dance lesson, a side-character's half gypsy parentage) to make the novel a little more interesting. These interjections seem unmotivated and unnecessary, though, and while they do little to relieve the tedium of the main story, they make the plot seem even more bizarre by adding a number of peculiar side-stories to a narrative already too weighed down by improbable coincidence. There are moments when The Clothes on Their Backs is genuinely engaging - most notably, to my mind, when Grant describes the sub-culture of 'vintage' clothing and the rituals involved in searching for it - but these are mere flickers in an otherwise stale and unoriginal book.
Overall, The Clothes on Their Backs is not so much a bad book as a trivial one - a novel with so little to offer the reader that it doesn't justify even the three to four hours it takes to read.
[Part of the 2008 Booker Prize Mela]
Many years ago, as an impressionable young boy just discovering Oscar Wilde, I went through a phase of trying to come up with bon mots - witty yet wise one-liners that I fondly imagined future generations would quote at each other. The fruits of this Rochefoucaldian labor, needless to say, were uniformally ghastly, and included, among other horrors, the following observation: "All clothes are revealing; they reveal who we are". Even to my relatively uncritical twelve year old mind this was a cliche, so much so that I mercifully decided not to share it with another living soul (well, until now).
Linda Grant, it seems, has no such compunctions. Not only does she seem to feel that the idea that the clothes we wear express and shape our identity is a startling new insight (imagine that! the clothes you wear are reflective of who you are! who would have thought it?), but so enamored is she by the thought that she makes it the central motif of her new novel, repeatedly hammering home the point with an avidity that would cut through the thickest of crania. The result is a banal, pointless book that takes a set of stock characters, clothes them in the flimsiest of plots and then pretends that the result is haute couture, when it's really little more than drab pret-a-porter.
Set in London in the 70's (amid the growing popularity of the right-wing National Front) with sidetrips to Nazi Europe, The Clothes on Their Backs is the story, told in flashback (isn't everything these days?) of Vivien Kovaks, a young girl born to immigrant parents, who finds herself caught between the cloistered life of her parents, who fled to England from Hungary just before World War II and have lived fearfully in their adopted country ever since, and the larger-than-life presence of her Uncle Sandor, a Holocaust survivor who emigrated to England in the mid-50s only to become a slumlord and a pimp, and whose flamboyance Vivien finds herself drawn to both because it represents a way of being acutely alive and because it gives her the chance to connect to her family history, a history her parents have kept assiduously hidden from her.
By itself, this is a not unpromising if somewhat hackneyed plot (I found myself thinking, for instance, in my long stretches of being bored by the book, what a fine job someone like Roth would have done with a character like Sandor Kovacs). The trouble is, that's pretty much all there is to the book. That little one paragraph outline is more or less the sum of what the book has to offer. Oh, there are a few additional details of course, a handful of perfunctory characters, a few dabs at plot development, if an accumulation of wildly improbable and arbitrary coincidences can be given that name, but on the whole Grant doesn't so much deepen the story as extend it. True to her central idea of surface appearance being all, Grant's characters never take on the authentic feel of flesh and blood and remain mere mannequins, artfully arranged in deliberate poses to represent the different attitudes and idealogies she wants them to. Indeed, there are points in the story when Grant almost seems to rely on the generic nature of her plot. Rather than describe Sandor's experiences during the War in any real detail, for instance, she gives us only a sketchy outline and falls back on the easy shorthand of tagging him a Holocaust survivor. The result is an underdeveloped book that has virtually no emotional impact and that feels, if not quite formulaic than at least mathematical - a sort of writing by numbers, all the pieces fitting together in a neat but uninspired way.
To be fair, every now and then Grant does exert herself a little, adding a handful of colorful scenes and side stories (a dance lesson, a side-character's half gypsy parentage) to make the novel a little more interesting. These interjections seem unmotivated and unnecessary, though, and while they do little to relieve the tedium of the main story, they make the plot seem even more bizarre by adding a number of peculiar side-stories to a narrative already too weighed down by improbable coincidence. There are moments when The Clothes on Their Backs is genuinely engaging - most notably, to my mind, when Grant describes the sub-culture of 'vintage' clothing and the rituals involved in searching for it - but these are mere flickers in an otherwise stale and unoriginal book.
Overall, The Clothes on Their Backs is not so much a bad book as a trivial one - a novel with so little to offer the reader that it doesn't justify even the three to four hours it takes to read.
[Part of the 2008 Booker Prize Mela]
Sunday afternoon, 4 pm
At the statue opposite the library the line of people waiting for a photograph is four families deep. Cameras are exchanged with a minimum of solicitude, 'just press this button' being the order of the day. Reluctant teenagers are prodded into posing on the steps of the statue by their proud parents; they stand there self-conscious, afraid of being seen. Sometimes their parents join them, which makes them relax a little, perhaps because they feel camouflaged in the midst of their family, perhaps because the presence of their parents in the photograph means that posterity will know this was not their idea.
After the families leave, a squirrel climbs up to the top of the base, crouches at the statue's feet and nibbles away at a morsel, supremely unaware of being watched. Above it, Ben Franklin clutches the arms of his chair, trying to decide whether to scowl or look aloof.
Long lozenges of light melt on the summer lawn. A church bell intones the hour, a baritone rehearsing his notes. In the silence that follows, the rustling of leaves in the wind sounds like distant applause, as though the trees were praising the sky for its blue.
By the flight of steps that lead out of the park, a trio of long-haired teenagers is clattering back and forth on skateboards, practicing the geometry of defiance. They are ignored by the great halls of the University, which have learned to hold their peace.
After the families leave, a squirrel climbs up to the top of the base, crouches at the statue's feet and nibbles away at a morsel, supremely unaware of being watched. Above it, Ben Franklin clutches the arms of his chair, trying to decide whether to scowl or look aloof.
Long lozenges of light melt on the summer lawn. A church bell intones the hour, a baritone rehearsing his notes. In the silence that follows, the rustling of leaves in the wind sounds like distant applause, as though the trees were praising the sky for its blue.
By the flight of steps that lead out of the park, a trio of long-haired teenagers is clattering back and forth on skateboards, practicing the geometry of defiance. They are ignored by the great halls of the University, which have learned to hold their peace.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Shelf Life
So it's been exactly one year since I started putting the books I read up on Shelfari, and it seems that in that time I've read 166 books. Which works out to almost a book every two days. And that's not counting books I've started to read but given up on, lit journals, old favorites I've reread, the books I've forgotten to add to Shelfari, and the books I'm currently reading (there are six of them - including The Lost Dog and The Clothes on their Backs from the Booker longlist, Stanley Plumly's Posthumous Keats, Roberto Bolano's incredible Nazi Literature in the Americas, Marjorie Welish's delightful Isle of the Signatories and Raymond Queneau's Between Blue and Blue). And obviously it's not counting books I've read for my research.
And here I was thinking I don't read enough any more.
Of course, keep in mind that the vast majority of these books are slim 60-70 page volumes of poetry, so 166 books isn't as much as it sounds. Still, I have to admit I'm surprised the number is that high.
On the flip side, I was trying to go over the list of books I'd read and realized that there are about a third that I already have no memory of reading. Sigh.
And here I was thinking I don't read enough any more.
Of course, keep in mind that the vast majority of these books are slim 60-70 page volumes of poetry, so 166 books isn't as much as it sounds. Still, I have to admit I'm surprised the number is that high.
On the flip side, I was trying to go over the list of books I'd read and realized that there are about a third that I already have no memory of reading. Sigh.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Two minutes with Joyce and Dostoevsky
Via the New Yorker's Book Bench, I came across this article on a San Fran writer's conference by someone called BS Prakash (the initials are prophetic) who claims to be India's ambassador to Brazil - an article so cringe-inducing it makes you wonder what the good folks at the Book Bench were doing surfing Rediff, of all godforsaken corners of the Internet.
I'm not going to dwell on Mr. Prakash's excessive use of cultural stereotypes (xenophobia is the term the Book Bench uses, which is harsh, but not inaccurate), the quaintness of his 'discoveries' (they actually try to teach writing! imagine that!) or just the overall fuddy-duddiness of his point of view. Nor am I going to comment on the irony of bemoaning the 'American' obsession with publication when the last decade has seen a virtually unchecked proliferation of writers on the Indian publishing scene, the vast majority of whom could frankly do with some lessons in basic writing. And as for Mr. Prakash's chances of ever producing great literature - let's not even go there.
No, what I'm going to focus on, for the moment is the following claim:
or like this:
I'm not going to dwell on Mr. Prakash's excessive use of cultural stereotypes (xenophobia is the term the Book Bench uses, which is harsh, but not inaccurate), the quaintness of his 'discoveries' (they actually try to teach writing! imagine that!) or just the overall fuddy-duddiness of his point of view. Nor am I going to comment on the irony of bemoaning the 'American' obsession with publication when the last decade has seen a virtually unchecked proliferation of writers on the Indian publishing scene, the vast majority of whom could frankly do with some lessons in basic writing. And as for Mr. Prakash's chances of ever producing great literature - let's not even go there.
No, what I'm going to focus on, for the moment is the following claim:
You are told that your first chapter, first page, first sentence should be such so as to captivate the reader in two minutes. That is the test. It is another matter that Dostoevsky or James Joyce would have flunked this test and would never have got publishedWould Joyce and / or Dostoevsky really have failed this test? I don't know about you, but I would certainly want to keep reading a book if it opened like this:
"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckooHis father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face."
"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."
or this, for that matter:
"I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man."
and if you think about it, it's hard to imagine a book more amenable to a two-minute pitch than Ulysses:
Q: So, young man, what's your book about?
A: Well, it's an epic of the everyday: a re-imagining of the Odyssey in which I use the central themes and motifs from Homer's work to tell the story of an ordinary Dublin day from a cross-section of perspectives, using internal monologues and stream-of-consciousness techniques to explore the thoughts, perceptions and memories of ordinary people. The overall structure of the book emulates that of the Odyssey, but every chapter is an exercise in a distinctive style or form - so for instance, one chapter parodies romance novels, another uses a question-and-answer form, a third is written as a play.
See what I mean?
Or, for that matter, how's this for an engaging one-line summary:
My novel tells the story of a young man who murders an elderly moneylender and is then terrified that he won't be punished for his crime, because this would imply that there really is no God.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Afterwards
"You stupid bastard!"
"I know."
"You stupid, stupid bastard!"
"I know."
"Just how drunk were you?"
"I don't know. Enough."
"Obviously."
"Look, it was a mistake okay? I didn't mean for it to happen."
"Yes, well that's besides the point now, isn't it?"
"I guess."
"So what are you going to do?"
"I don't know. I was thinking maybe I'd go away for a bit."
"Running away won't solve anything."
"It might."
"It won't."
"Yes, well, at least it's something to do."
"I guess."
"So where are you going to go then?"
"I don't know. Somewhere."
"Got any money?"
"Enough."
"You're sure?"
"Ya, I'm okay."
"Well, goodbye then."
"Look, I just wanted to say..."
"Forget it."
"I just wanted you to know..."
"Forget it. Just go."
"...that I'm sorry"
"Just go."
"Right. Goodbye then."
"Goodbye."
"I'll be seeing you."
"No, you won't."
"Oh, right. Well, bye then."
"Bye."
"I know."
"You stupid, stupid bastard!"
"I know."
"Just how drunk were you?"
"I don't know. Enough."
"Obviously."
"Look, it was a mistake okay? I didn't mean for it to happen."
"Yes, well that's besides the point now, isn't it?"
"I guess."
"So what are you going to do?"
"I don't know. I was thinking maybe I'd go away for a bit."
"Running away won't solve anything."
"It might."
"It won't."
"Yes, well, at least it's something to do."
"I guess."
"So where are you going to go then?"
"I don't know. Somewhere."
"Got any money?"
"Enough."
"You're sure?"
"Ya, I'm okay."
"Well, goodbye then."
"Look, I just wanted to say..."
"Forget it."
"I just wanted you to know..."
"Forget it. Just go."
"...that I'm sorry"
"Just go."
"Right. Goodbye then."
"Goodbye."
"I'll be seeing you."
"No, you won't."
"Oh, right. Well, bye then."
"Bye."
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Godawful Poetry # 1
Zigzackly informs me that today marks the beginning of the godawful poetry fortnight, so I thought I'd do my bit:
Night Song
Now the moon, like a smallpox victim,
hides his pitted face,
afraid that the sun may evict him
from his nightly dwelling place.
While the sad and unplucked roses
dream in slow perfumes
and rehearse the unconscious poses
of Death in living rooms.
And a little mouse squeaks like a gate
someone has forgotten to oil;
squeaks of Love and Loss and Fate
and Blood and Sweat and Toil.
P.S. Zigzackly also points to a Flash Fiction contest, one that is, alas, only open to those residing in India.
Godawful Poetry Fortnight
Night Song
Now the moon, like a smallpox victim,
hides his pitted face,
afraid that the sun may evict him
from his nightly dwelling place.
While the sad and unplucked roses
dream in slow perfumes
and rehearse the unconscious poses
of Death in living rooms.
And a little mouse squeaks like a gate
someone has forgotten to oil;
squeaks of Love and Loss and Fate
and Blood and Sweat and Toil.
P.S. Zigzackly also points to a Flash Fiction contest, one that is, alas, only open to those residing in India.
Godawful Poetry Fortnight
Friday, August 15, 2008
Friday, August 08, 2008
So much for stereotypes
Over at India Uncut, Amit points to a program that uses your browser cache to assess whether you're male or female.
My score: Probability of being female: 84%. Probability of being male: 16%.
Sigh.
My score: Probability of being female: 84%. Probability of being male: 16%.
Sigh.
Monday, August 04, 2008
The Last Straw
The pain is excruciating. The muscles in his back ache with exhaustion, his flanks are sore with blisters, and his legs tremble as though about to give way. Bent under the weight of the sacks he cannot lift his hooves, but shuffles forward as though his feet were chained together.
Lord! will this suffering never end?
Yesterday, what a chance! An apprentice was loading him, the new one, and he almost overdid it, almost broke his back. He quivered in anticipation, feeling load pile on load, knowing death was a few handfuls away, craving its release. One more straw would have done it!
Then the foreman came and stopped the boy, cuffed him on the ear, told him to be more careful.
And to think he was so close.
Lord! will this suffering never end?
Yesterday, what a chance! An apprentice was loading him, the new one, and he almost overdid it, almost broke his back. He quivered in anticipation, feeling load pile on load, knowing death was a few handfuls away, craving its release. One more straw would have done it!
Then the foreman came and stopped the boy, cuffed him on the ear, told him to be more careful.
And to think he was so close.
Sunday, August 03, 2008
The Master of Go
Over at the Guardian, Mark Lawson has a fun, if somewhat rambling article about sport in books. He even manages to include Roth's Great American Novel, which I was hoping he'd miss so I could do my book snob thing and gloat about the omission.
The book he does miss, and which remains one of the most compelling descriptions of sport I've ever read is Kawabata's Master of Go. It's incredible how vividly Kawabata brings the game of Go to life, even to someone who knows nothing about the sport, how he makes you see the different styles of the two players, makes you feel the palpable tension in the room. It is a testament to the exquisite skill of this subtlest of masters that in his hands the game remains a gripping spectacle even as it transcends its board to become a meditation on the face-off between generations and world-views, between grace and energy, tradition and innovation.
The book he does miss, and which remains one of the most compelling descriptions of sport I've ever read is Kawabata's Master of Go. It's incredible how vividly Kawabata brings the game of Go to life, even to someone who knows nothing about the sport, how he makes you see the different styles of the two players, makes you feel the palpable tension in the room. It is a testament to the exquisite skill of this subtlest of masters that in his hands the game remains a gripping spectacle even as it transcends its board to become a meditation on the face-off between generations and world-views, between grace and energy, tradition and innovation.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Fiction at Work
James Wood's How Fiction Works
The principal side-effect of reading James Wood's How Fiction Works is an almost overwhelming yearning to re-read the canon - a yearning that can only be fully allayed by taking, say, two weeks off and spending them drowned in a heady cocktail of Flaubert, James, Bellow and Tolstoy. This is great news if, for instance, you have two weeks of summer vacation coming up and have been wondering what to do with it, but for the rest of us, reading Wood's book is liable to lead to a profound sense of dissatisfaction, the direct consequence of having it demonstrated that we haven't really read the books we think we've read [1]. As Wood puts it:
Touching faith in the power of fiction aside, this is a deeply depressing thought. If even Wood was missing stuff when he was twenty, what about the rest of us? For the point about Wood, the thing that makes him, in my view, one of the finest book critics writing today (aside from the lucid quality of his writing itself) is his eye for detail. In many ways, Wood is a preternaturally careful reader, and it is this that gives him, I think, that most prized of abilities for a book critic - the ability to take a book you've already read and make you see it anew.
These qualities of Wood's criticism are on ample display in How Fiction Works, which is less the coherent statement of a world-view and more a loose association of ideas about fiction, a circling of intellectual wagons around a center that remains somewhat vague. The key insight of the book comes, I think, in the last chapter (though in a way the entire book has been building up to it) and has to do with the nature of realism. Realism, according to Wood, is not a stubborn insistence on depicting the commonplace, but the pursuit of what he calls 'lifeness', an attempt to portray what is 'true', to create characters and situations that strike the reader as somehow genuine, even if they lie outside his / her own life experience. Few people, for instance, have killed an aging moneylender in an attempt to test whether God exists. But that does not make Crime and Punishment a work of speculative fiction or fantasy. Dostoevsky's novels are savagely, hauntingly real because he is able to imagine himself so firmly into the minds of his characters, and make us share so vividly in what he imagines, that his depictions of the Raskolnikovs of the world are instantly recognizable, and entirely authentic [2]. And that, to Wood, is the essence - not only of 'Realism' (a term he dislikes) but of fiction more generally. What realism requires then - and to Wood all good fiction is realistic - is not the recycling of mudane detail into a simulacrum of existence that approximates our own, but an adventure of the imagination that retains our sympathy and our sense of the genuine, even as it widens our idea of what life can be.
Nor is it simply plot or character to which Wood applies this principle, if it may be called such (though his chapter on the development of character, in particular the misleading - according to him - distinction between 'round' and 'flat' characters is fascinating). It applies equally to what Wood calls style. Wood's general idea - or at least my (admittedly unreliable) interpretation of it - is that simplicity is the product of careful artifice, that the skilled writer uses language with carefully studied precision, combining inventiveness, a wide range of registers, and an eye for the telling word or phrase to create prose that is almost transparent, that lives unobtrusively on the page but is successful in operating at multiple levels at once, so that the reader experiences the work both from the narrator or character's perspective as well as from the writer's [3].
This is an exalted view, and an exacting standard. If there is a criticism I have of How Fiction Works it is that its notion of fiction seems, if not quite old-fashioned, then at least middle-aged. Wood is scrupulously fair, but his allegiance seems to lie squarely with the nineteenth century novel. His gods are Tolstoy, James, Bellow, Flaubert and Chekhov; a good three quarters of the books he cites date from more than fifty years ago; and the more recent writers he does praise - McCarthy, Saramago (and, surprisingly, Roth) - he seems to like for the way they carry on the old traditions, rather than for any inventiveness on their part. This is not, by itself, a criticism; this is not a pantheon I would care to take issue with, and it is certainly true, as Wood every now and then bemoans, that a lot of rubbish is written in the name of the avant garde. Still, I can't help feeling that the views of fiction that Wood exposes to ridicule are those of convenient strawmen, and that a book that claims to discuss how fiction works should have more to say about the way in which fiction has evolved in the twentieth century. Wood is quick to give the credit for the development of the modern novel to the French writers of the nineteenth century - Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust - but he's mostly silent on everything that's been done in French fiction (or in European fiction more generally) since.
Wood's defense, I suspect, would be that he's not so much trying to detail all the directions in which fiction can (and perhaps should) go, as trying to establish the central current of what fiction consists of, to which all other innovations are mere distributaries. As he puts it:
What Wood is trying to do, then, aside from setting down his thoughts about fiction on paper, is establish the basic principles (as he sees them) upon which all fiction may be built, and against which it must be judged. This is what excuses his slightly stodgy approach to fiction, as well as his limiting himself, in his discussion, so firmly to the canon. More than anything else, though, what saves this book from becoming insufferably pedantic is the acuteness of Wood's skills as a reviewer, his ability to make you see established classics in a new light. By itself, Wood's claim that "almost all the great twentieth-century realist novels also reflect on their own making, and are full of artifice" seems a little inflated. What rescues the claim is that it comes accompanied by mini-essays like this one:
It's been eight years since I read The Portrait of a Lady, but even from that distance (or perhaps because of it) this seems both accurate and insightful. Certainly it is impossible to argue with, and once you grant that James is an intensely 'modern' novelist, who can you possibly exclude?
More than anything though, the last sentence of that extract contains the best description of the book it is taken from. Wood's real strength is not as a theorist but as a critic, and he is most sure-footed, and most engaging, when he leaves the big questions aside and focuses on detail. His new book may leave you with some additional, if somewhat obscure, insights into the enterprise of fiction, but mostly it will delight you with the sincerity of its admiration, with its marriage of an active and appreciative intelligence to a deep and instinctive love for great prose. Consider, for instance, one final extract. If this doesn't sharpen your appetite for fiction to the point where you want to drop whatever you're reading and go find your favorite Woolf, I don't know what will.
Notes
[1] I had to make do with a re-reading of Joyce's 'The Dead'.
[2] The example is mine, by the way. Wood uses Hamsun's Hunger to make more or less the same point, though.
[3] Did I mention that Wood gives the credit for the creation of the modern narrative to Flaubert? He writes: "Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him."[4]
[4] See my point about the middle-aged thing? In what century do they live, these poets who thank Spring?
The principal side-effect of reading James Wood's How Fiction Works is an almost overwhelming yearning to re-read the canon - a yearning that can only be fully allayed by taking, say, two weeks off and spending them drowned in a heady cocktail of Flaubert, James, Bellow and Tolstoy. This is great news if, for instance, you have two weeks of summer vacation coming up and have been wondering what to do with it, but for the rest of us, reading Wood's book is liable to lead to a profound sense of dissatisfaction, the direct consequence of having it demonstrated that we haven't really read the books we think we've read [1]. As Wood puts it:
"Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practise on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. And so on and on. You have only to teach literature to realise that most young readers are poor noticers. I know from my own old books, wantonly annotated twenty years ago when I was a student, that I routinely underlined for approval details and images and metaphors that strike me now as commonplace, while serenely missing things which now seem wonderful. We grow, as readers, and twenty-year olds are relative virgins. They have not yet read enough literature to be taught how to read it."
Touching faith in the power of fiction aside, this is a deeply depressing thought. If even Wood was missing stuff when he was twenty, what about the rest of us? For the point about Wood, the thing that makes him, in my view, one of the finest book critics writing today (aside from the lucid quality of his writing itself) is his eye for detail. In many ways, Wood is a preternaturally careful reader, and it is this that gives him, I think, that most prized of abilities for a book critic - the ability to take a book you've already read and make you see it anew.
These qualities of Wood's criticism are on ample display in How Fiction Works, which is less the coherent statement of a world-view and more a loose association of ideas about fiction, a circling of intellectual wagons around a center that remains somewhat vague. The key insight of the book comes, I think, in the last chapter (though in a way the entire book has been building up to it) and has to do with the nature of realism. Realism, according to Wood, is not a stubborn insistence on depicting the commonplace, but the pursuit of what he calls 'lifeness', an attempt to portray what is 'true', to create characters and situations that strike the reader as somehow genuine, even if they lie outside his / her own life experience. Few people, for instance, have killed an aging moneylender in an attempt to test whether God exists. But that does not make Crime and Punishment a work of speculative fiction or fantasy. Dostoevsky's novels are savagely, hauntingly real because he is able to imagine himself so firmly into the minds of his characters, and make us share so vividly in what he imagines, that his depictions of the Raskolnikovs of the world are instantly recognizable, and entirely authentic [2]. And that, to Wood, is the essence - not only of 'Realism' (a term he dislikes) but of fiction more generally. What realism requires then - and to Wood all good fiction is realistic - is not the recycling of mudane detail into a simulacrum of existence that approximates our own, but an adventure of the imagination that retains our sympathy and our sense of the genuine, even as it widens our idea of what life can be.
Nor is it simply plot or character to which Wood applies this principle, if it may be called such (though his chapter on the development of character, in particular the misleading - according to him - distinction between 'round' and 'flat' characters is fascinating). It applies equally to what Wood calls style. Wood's general idea - or at least my (admittedly unreliable) interpretation of it - is that simplicity is the product of careful artifice, that the skilled writer uses language with carefully studied precision, combining inventiveness, a wide range of registers, and an eye for the telling word or phrase to create prose that is almost transparent, that lives unobtrusively on the page but is successful in operating at multiple levels at once, so that the reader experiences the work both from the narrator or character's perspective as well as from the writer's [3].
This is an exalted view, and an exacting standard. If there is a criticism I have of How Fiction Works it is that its notion of fiction seems, if not quite old-fashioned, then at least middle-aged. Wood is scrupulously fair, but his allegiance seems to lie squarely with the nineteenth century novel. His gods are Tolstoy, James, Bellow, Flaubert and Chekhov; a good three quarters of the books he cites date from more than fifty years ago; and the more recent writers he does praise - McCarthy, Saramago (and, surprisingly, Roth) - he seems to like for the way they carry on the old traditions, rather than for any inventiveness on their part. This is not, by itself, a criticism; this is not a pantheon I would care to take issue with, and it is certainly true, as Wood every now and then bemoans, that a lot of rubbish is written in the name of the avant garde. Still, I can't help feeling that the views of fiction that Wood exposes to ridicule are those of convenient strawmen, and that a book that claims to discuss how fiction works should have more to say about the way in which fiction has evolved in the twentieth century. Wood is quick to give the credit for the development of the modern novel to the French writers of the nineteenth century - Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust - but he's mostly silent on everything that's been done in French fiction (or in European fiction more generally) since.
Wood's defense, I suspect, would be that he's not so much trying to detail all the directions in which fiction can (and perhaps should) go, as trying to establish the central current of what fiction consists of, to which all other innovations are mere distributaries. As he puts it:
"Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or lifesameness, but what I must call lifeness: life on the page, life bought to different life by the highest artistry. And it cannot be a genre; instead, is makes other forms of fiction seem like genres. For realism of this kind - lifeness - is the origin. It teaches everything else; it schools its own truants: it is what allows magic realism, hysterical realism, fantasy, science fiction, even thrillers, to exist."
What Wood is trying to do, then, aside from setting down his thoughts about fiction on paper, is establish the basic principles (as he sees them) upon which all fiction may be built, and against which it must be judged. This is what excuses his slightly stodgy approach to fiction, as well as his limiting himself, in his discussion, so firmly to the canon. More than anything else, though, what saves this book from becoming insufferably pedantic is the acuteness of Wood's skills as a reviewer, his ability to make you see established classics in a new light. By itself, Wood's claim that "almost all the great twentieth-century realist novels also reflect on their own making, and are full of artifice" seems a little inflated. What rescues the claim is that it comes accompanied by mini-essays like this one:
"James is really suggesting that he has not formed his character, that she is still relatively shapeless, an American emptiness, and that the novel will form her, for good and ill, that Europe will fill in her shape, and that just as these three waiting, watching men will also form her, so will we, as readers. They and we are a kind of Greek chorus, hanging on her every move. Two of the men, Lord Warburton and Ralph Touchett, will devote their lives to watching her. And what, James asks, will be the plot that poor Isabel will have written for her? How much will she herself write it, and how much will be written for her by others? And in the end, will we really know what Isabel was like, or will we have merely painted a portrait of a lady?
So the vitality of literary character has less to do with dramatic action, novelistic coherence and even plain plausibility - let alone likeability - than with a larger, philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character's actions are profoundly important, that something profound is at stake, with the author brooding over the face of that character like God over the face of the waters. That is how readers retain in their minds a sense of the character 'Isabel Archer', even if they cannot tell you what she is exactly like. We remember her in the way we remember an obscurely significant day: something important has been enacted here." (italics in the original)
It's been eight years since I read The Portrait of a Lady, but even from that distance (or perhaps because of it) this seems both accurate and insightful. Certainly it is impossible to argue with, and once you grant that James is an intensely 'modern' novelist, who can you possibly exclude?
More than anything though, the last sentence of that extract contains the best description of the book it is taken from. Wood's real strength is not as a theorist but as a critic, and he is most sure-footed, and most engaging, when he leaves the big questions aside and focuses on detail. His new book may leave you with some additional, if somewhat obscure, insights into the enterprise of fiction, but mostly it will delight you with the sincerity of its admiration, with its marriage of an active and appreciative intelligence to a deep and instinctive love for great prose. Consider, for instance, one final extract. If this doesn't sharpen your appetite for fiction to the point where you want to drop whatever you're reading and go find your favorite Woolf, I don't know what will.
"'The day waves yellow with all its crops.' That is Woolf, from The Waves. I am consumed by this sentence, partly because I cannot quite explain why it moves me so much. I can see, hear, its beauty, its strangeness. Its music is very simple. Its words are simple. And its meaning is simple, too. Woolf is describing the sun rising and finally filling the day with its yellow fire. The sentence means something like: this is what the field of corn on a summer's day will look like when everything is blazing with sunlight - a yellow semaphore, a sea of moving colour. We know exactly and instantly what Woolf means, and we think: that could not be put any better. The secret lies in the decision to avoid the usual image of crops waving, and instead, to write the day waves: the effect is suddenly that the day itself, the very fabric and temporality of the day, seems saturated in yellow. And then that peculiar, apparently nonsensical waves yellow (how can anything wave yellow?) conveys a sense that yellowness has so intensely taken over the day itself that it has taken over our verbs, too - yellowness has conquered our agency. How do we wave? We wave yellow. That is all we can do. The sunlight is so absolute that it stuns us, makes us sluggish, robs us of will. Eight simple words evoke colour, high summer, warm lethargy, ripeness."
Notes
[1] I had to make do with a re-reading of Joyce's 'The Dead'.
[2] The example is mine, by the way. Wood uses Hamsun's Hunger to make more or less the same point, though.
[3] Did I mention that Wood gives the credit for the creation of the modern narrative to Flaubert? He writes: "Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him."[4]
[4] See my point about the middle-aged thing? In what century do they live, these poets who thank Spring?
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
The Last Mistress
Okay, give it to me straight. Am I really the last person on earth to discover Asia Argento? To be fair, I'd vaguely heard of Ms. Argento before, but never actually watched anything she'd acted in, largely because her repertoire seemed to consist of vowel-less action flicks and macabre horror films (not my favorite genre) directed by Ms. Argento's father (nepotism alert!). Then, this evening, I watched her play Vellini in Catherine Breillat's Une Vieille Maitresse [1] and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't blown away.
And it isn't the nudity (though there's a lot of it) and it isn't the sex scenes (which are done with Breillat's customary vividness and make Ang Lee's little jaunts in Lust, Caution look like a game of Twister for fourteen year olds), it's the smouldering presence of the woman, the brutal, almost contemptuous sexual confidence that reminded me of no one so much as Jeanne Moreau [2]. This is not some tarted-up siren diverting Ulysses from his Penelope, this is Circe herself, a woman capable of turning men into pigs with a snap of her fingers. At one point in the film Vellini's hapless lover, M. Marigny remarks to the grandmother of his fiancee how she's probably surprised that anyone would be willing to ruin herself for 'such a creature'. The genius of Breillat's film - and an achievement that I have no doubt owes as much to her talent as to Ms. Argento's - is that having seen Ms. Argento's Vellini the idea that someone would want to destroy his life for her doesn't seem surprising at all. On the contrary, you have to wonder what all the other men in Paris are doing that might be equally worthwhile. When Ms. Argento takes a knife and playfully slashes her lover's cheek with it, what you feel is not horror, but envy. Oh to be a cheek under that knife, you think, or words to that effect.
In any case, Une Vieille Maitresse is a mesmerising, subversive and visually ravishing film that is all the more brilliant for having Ms. Argento as its magnetic center. Now if only someone would convince Julie Taymor to do a film version of Carmen with Ms. Argento as the lead. That I would kill to see.
[1] It seems to me that 'maitresse' is one of those few words where the English translation actually sounds sexier than the French word. 'Mistress' sounds suitably sibilant and sinful, Maitresse sounds like a cross between someone who shows you to your table and something you put on your bed (and no, I don't mean it that way, smartass!).
[2] Which, just in case you had doubts, is high praise indeed.
And it isn't the nudity (though there's a lot of it) and it isn't the sex scenes (which are done with Breillat's customary vividness and make Ang Lee's little jaunts in Lust, Caution look like a game of Twister for fourteen year olds), it's the smouldering presence of the woman, the brutal, almost contemptuous sexual confidence that reminded me of no one so much as Jeanne Moreau [2]. This is not some tarted-up siren diverting Ulysses from his Penelope, this is Circe herself, a woman capable of turning men into pigs with a snap of her fingers. At one point in the film Vellini's hapless lover, M. Marigny remarks to the grandmother of his fiancee how she's probably surprised that anyone would be willing to ruin herself for 'such a creature'. The genius of Breillat's film - and an achievement that I have no doubt owes as much to her talent as to Ms. Argento's - is that having seen Ms. Argento's Vellini the idea that someone would want to destroy his life for her doesn't seem surprising at all. On the contrary, you have to wonder what all the other men in Paris are doing that might be equally worthwhile. When Ms. Argento takes a knife and playfully slashes her lover's cheek with it, what you feel is not horror, but envy. Oh to be a cheek under that knife, you think, or words to that effect.
In any case, Une Vieille Maitresse is a mesmerising, subversive and visually ravishing film that is all the more brilliant for having Ms. Argento as its magnetic center. Now if only someone would convince Julie Taymor to do a film version of Carmen with Ms. Argento as the lead. That I would kill to see.
[1] It seems to me that 'maitresse' is one of those few words where the English translation actually sounds sexier than the French word. 'Mistress' sounds suitably sibilant and sinful, Maitresse sounds like a cross between someone who shows you to your table and something you put on your bed (and no, I don't mean it that way, smartass!).
[2] Which, just in case you had doubts, is high praise indeed.
Scooped / War and Headpiece
One of most exhilarating and depressing things that can happen to you as a writer is to discover that an idea you came up with totally out of the blue has already been done (and needless to say done better) by some greater writer ages ago.
Take this sentence from James Wood's new book How Fiction Works (on which more later):
Which reminds me, of course, of this. Needless to say I haven't read Hadji Murad (has anyone? Except Wood?) and had no idea till I read this that it had a similar conceit.
Now one part of me [1] is thinking: "WooHoo! Tolstoy! Him and me, we're like two peas in a pod, see? Okay, so he has a wee bit more published work than I do, but what's a deathless 1000 page classic or two between friends?"
And the other part of me is thinking: "Some writer you are. Tolstoy only beat you to it, by, like a HUNDRED YEARS! Tchah!"
Next thing you know I'll find out that my idea for a novel about a girl who meets this really arrogant guy but then figures out that he's actually quite nice has been done before as well.
[1] These are both parts of Night Falstaff, naturally. Day Falstaff is busy explaining to anyone who will listen how it isn't really that surprising if you think about it; how it's all just random chance and doesn't prove anything. Day Falstaff is perilously close to having a Hadji Murad experience himself.
Take this sentence from James Wood's new book How Fiction Works (on which more later):
"Tolstoy, again, in an electrifying moment at the end of his novella Hadji Murad, imagines what it might be like to have one's head cut off, and for consciousness to persist for a second or two in the brain even as the head has left the body."
Which reminds me, of course, of this. Needless to say I haven't read Hadji Murad (has anyone? Except Wood?) and had no idea till I read this that it had a similar conceit.
Now one part of me [1] is thinking: "WooHoo! Tolstoy! Him and me, we're like two peas in a pod, see? Okay, so he has a wee bit more published work than I do, but what's a deathless 1000 page classic or two between friends?"
And the other part of me is thinking: "Some writer you are. Tolstoy only beat you to it, by, like a HUNDRED YEARS! Tchah!"
Next thing you know I'll find out that my idea for a novel about a girl who meets this really arrogant guy but then figures out that he's actually quite nice has been done before as well.
[1] These are both parts of Night Falstaff, naturally. Day Falstaff is busy explaining to anyone who will listen how it isn't really that surprising if you think about it; how it's all just random chance and doesn't prove anything. Day Falstaff is perilously close to having a Hadji Murad experience himself.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Longlist
Yup, it's that time of the year again. The Booker Prize Longlist is out, and as usual I've only read two of the thirteen books on it. Well, two and a half.
Of those I have read, my pick would be Netherland (see post about it here) which I really liked and would not be disappointed to see win. I also quite enjoyed The Enchantress of Florence, which felt like Magic Realism without the Realism, or in other words, an out and out fable gloriously told by one of the most silvertongued writers of our age, though not, on the whole, a meaty enough novel for me to want to read again.
The only other novel on the list I've read (or more accurately tried to read) is Aravind Adiga's White Tiger, which was so awfully synthetic that I gave up on it some 100 pages in.
Of course, the real joy of the Booker Longlist is reading the books you've never heard of before (and probably wouldn't have heard of at all, but for the list), which are invariably the best of the lot. That said, I think I'm unlikely to come close to reading the whole of the list this year (too much else to read / get done) though I'm hoping to get my hand on the Barry soon, and maybe a couple of the others.
Sigh. So many books, so little time.
Of those I have read, my pick would be Netherland (see post about it here) which I really liked and would not be disappointed to see win. I also quite enjoyed The Enchantress of Florence, which felt like Magic Realism without the Realism, or in other words, an out and out fable gloriously told by one of the most silvertongued writers of our age, though not, on the whole, a meaty enough novel for me to want to read again.
The only other novel on the list I've read (or more accurately tried to read) is Aravind Adiga's White Tiger, which was so awfully synthetic that I gave up on it some 100 pages in.
Of course, the real joy of the Booker Longlist is reading the books you've never heard of before (and probably wouldn't have heard of at all, but for the list), which are invariably the best of the lot. That said, I think I'm unlikely to come close to reading the whole of the list this year (too much else to read / get done) though I'm hoping to get my hand on the Barry soon, and maybe a couple of the others.
Sigh. So many books, so little time.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Spoons
"Have you ever considered the immortality of spoons?"
"Oh, Christ! Not that again!"
"Here we sit, you and I, polishing our souls to silver, rubbing language into our wounds. And all the while it is this spoon, this humble spoon, modest, depressed, the perfect servant, that will outlast us all, will outlive every mouth that has fed from it, will taste the lips of our grandchildren as it once savored the tongues of our grandmothers."
"Yes, yes, all right, now drink up and let's get out of here."
"I think I would like to form a religion of spoons. A religion where the spoon was both cross and prayer. Where the spoon was a psalm endlessly lipped, hymn to a convex God."
"You'd better put that thing down before you take your eye out with it."
"Oh, the knife has an edge to it, I grant you, and the fork is more intellectual, but it's the spoon, this balding pot-bellied spoon that carries the weight of the world. Can you imagine what we would be without it? Mere animals, all of us, snouts in the trough"
"Don't you even think about reaching for that bottle! You've had enough!"
"I empty my glass and find the moon at the bottom. Who said that? Have you noticed how the spoons have a special bond with the moon? Lay one out on a table on a moonlit night and you can see it calling, see it yearn. Like some stranded alien calling to its mother ship. At such times the future is very near, very delicate. All you have to do is take the silver spoon from your mouth and cross your palm."
"Yes, yes, all right. Time to go home now. See, the moon is out there, waiting for you, calling you. See it? So come on then. That's right. No, put the spoon back. Don't put it in your pocket, put it back on the table! No, you can't take it with you. Because you can't. Go on, put it down. That's a good boy! Come along now. Sorry about this, Jose. You know what he's like when he's drunk. You'd think at his age he'd show a little more dignity. No, it's all right, I can manage, but thanks anyway. Good night!"
"SO WE'LL GO NO MORE A ROVING, SO LATE INTO THE NIGHT. THOUGH THE HEART BE STILL AS LOVING AND THE SPOONS BE STILL AS BRIGHT."
"Ssshhh! Quiet! People are trying to sleep!"
"THOUGH THE NIGHT WAS MADE FOR LOVING AND THE DAY RETURNS TOO SOON, STILL WE'LL GO NO MORE A ROVING BY THE LIGHT OF THESE SPOONS."
"Quiet I said!"
"Oh, Christ! Not that again!"
"Here we sit, you and I, polishing our souls to silver, rubbing language into our wounds. And all the while it is this spoon, this humble spoon, modest, depressed, the perfect servant, that will outlast us all, will outlive every mouth that has fed from it, will taste the lips of our grandchildren as it once savored the tongues of our grandmothers."
"Yes, yes, all right, now drink up and let's get out of here."
"I think I would like to form a religion of spoons. A religion where the spoon was both cross and prayer. Where the spoon was a psalm endlessly lipped, hymn to a convex God."
"You'd better put that thing down before you take your eye out with it."
"Oh, the knife has an edge to it, I grant you, and the fork is more intellectual, but it's the spoon, this balding pot-bellied spoon that carries the weight of the world. Can you imagine what we would be without it? Mere animals, all of us, snouts in the trough"
"Don't you even think about reaching for that bottle! You've had enough!"
"I empty my glass and find the moon at the bottom. Who said that? Have you noticed how the spoons have a special bond with the moon? Lay one out on a table on a moonlit night and you can see it calling, see it yearn. Like some stranded alien calling to its mother ship. At such times the future is very near, very delicate. All you have to do is take the silver spoon from your mouth and cross your palm."
"Yes, yes, all right. Time to go home now. See, the moon is out there, waiting for you, calling you. See it? So come on then. That's right. No, put the spoon back. Don't put it in your pocket, put it back on the table! No, you can't take it with you. Because you can't. Go on, put it down. That's a good boy! Come along now. Sorry about this, Jose. You know what he's like when he's drunk. You'd think at his age he'd show a little more dignity. No, it's all right, I can manage, but thanks anyway. Good night!"
"SO WE'LL GO NO MORE A ROVING, SO LATE INTO THE NIGHT. THOUGH THE HEART BE STILL AS LOVING AND THE SPOONS BE STILL AS BRIGHT."
"Ssshhh! Quiet! People are trying to sleep!"
"THOUGH THE NIGHT WAS MADE FOR LOVING AND THE DAY RETURNS TOO SOON, STILL WE'LL GO NO MORE A ROVING BY THE LIGHT OF THESE SPOONS."
"Quiet I said!"
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Martin Adan
Love is anywhere, but nowhere is it any different.
***
The world is not exactly crazy, just overly decent. There is no way to make it talk when it is drunk. And when it isn't, it abhors drunkenness or loves its fellows.
But I honestly don't know what the world is or what mankind is.
I only know that I must be fair and honorable and love my fellow man.
And I love the thousands of men within me that are born and die each instant and do not live at all.
Behold my fellow men.
Justice is a few ugly statues in city squares.
***
I am not wholly convinced of my own humanity; I do not wish to be like the others. I do not want to be happy with permission of the police.
Now there is a little sun in the streets.
I don't know who has taken it away, what evil man, leaving stains on the ground like of a slaughtered animal.
***
I want to be happy in a small way. With sweetness, with hope, with dissatisfactions, with limitations, with time, with perfection.
Now I can board a transatlantic liner. And during the crossing fish adventures as if they were fish.
But where would I go?
The world is insufficient for me.
It is too large, and I cannot shred it into little satisfactions as I would like.
Death is only a thought, nothing else, nothing else.
And I want it to be a long delight with its own end, its own quality.
***
The panaroma changes at every corner like a movie.
The final kiss already echoes through the shadows of a room full of burning cigarettes. But this is not the final scene. This is why the kiss echoes.
Nothing is enough for me, not even death; I want proportion, perfection, satisfaction, delight.
- Martin Adan, from The Cardboard House (translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver)
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
What endures
Outside the storm gathers. The lightning cracks its whip, as though punishing the thunder, which growls in disdain. Great slaps of rain buffet the window. The world dissolves in a pattern of blurred light, skids down the glass.
Inside Richter is playing Schubert. Sonata in G Major, first movement. The patient dignity of these notes that recognize the moment's sanctity, its delicate precision. And the majesty of spirit that goes to the making of a great pianist, an amplitude of heart that allows the music to assume its rightful shape, then entrusts it, ever so gently, to sound.
And the longing of one who, being mortal and therefore unworthy, finds himself caught between these two weather systems, these two species of awe, the one furious, the other tranquil. Two infinities of turmoil that the mind can barely comprehend, much less contain.
P.S. You may also want to see this. A lot of footage of Glenn Gould talking about Richter, some of it insightful, some rather ironic, but all made up for by snippets of Richter playing the G Major Sonata.
Inside Richter is playing Schubert. Sonata in G Major, first movement. The patient dignity of these notes that recognize the moment's sanctity, its delicate precision. And the majesty of spirit that goes to the making of a great pianist, an amplitude of heart that allows the music to assume its rightful shape, then entrusts it, ever so gently, to sound.
And the longing of one who, being mortal and therefore unworthy, finds himself caught between these two weather systems, these two species of awe, the one furious, the other tranquil. Two infinities of turmoil that the mind can barely comprehend, much less contain.
P.S. You may also want to see this. A lot of footage of Glenn Gould talking about Richter, some of it insightful, some rather ironic, but all made up for by snippets of Richter playing the G Major Sonata.
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