Wednesday, November 13, 2024

Books I read in October 2024 - the old, care-free days of Wuthering Heights

I should do one of these “what I read” bits before October becomes too distant.

I should also mention my health.  A little over a year ago a surgeon of genius removed a cancerous tumor from my liver, taking much of my liver along with it.  My recovery went well, and my liver grew back without, so far, another tumor.  An experimental immunotherapy treatment likely had a role in that.  A doctor told me that my liver is now “funny looking,” but who will get to laugh at it?

I am a lot healthier than I was a year ago, and much healthier than I was two years ago.  Fewer visits to the doctor.  More energy for reading, maybe even for writing.

This was October.


FICTION

The Story of the Stone, Vol. 1: The Golden Days (c. 1760),  Xueqin Cao

Memoirs of a Midget (1921),  Walter de la Mare – surprising to find de la Mare writing such a Brontêish thing in 1921 – “with how sharp a stab reminded me of… the old, care-free days of Wuthering Heights” (Ch. 33)

The Haunted Woman (1922),  David Lindsay – a weird one, neither as bad or unfortunately as good as Voyage to Arcturus.

Toad of Toad Hall (1929),  A. A. Milne – I read this because Judi Dench mentioned that she played Mole in it alternate nights with Portia in Merchant of Venice.  She greatly disliked the Shakespeare, but the Grahame / Milne was enormous fun.  Maybe I will see it someday.

The Code of the Woosters (1938),  P. G.  Wodehouse

Angels in America: Perestroika (1992),  Tony Kushner – I did see this one.

Watershed (1996),  Percival Everett

The Other Name: Septology I-II (2019) &

I Is Another: Septology III-V (2020) &

A New Name: Septology VI-VII (2021),  Jon Fosse

Not a River (2020),  Selva Almada

Herscht 07769 (2021),  László Krasznahorkai

The Oceans of Cruelty: Twenty-five Tales of a Corpse Spirit: A Retelling (2024),  Douglas J Penick – my Halloween reading, thousand-year-old Sanskrit weirdness and moral puzzles as told by a horrible corpse demon carried on the back of a king.  Penick has rewritten a public domain English translation of a Hindi translation of the Sanskrit.  His piece on it is quite interesting; just ignore the word “translating” in the title.”


POETRY

Collected Poems (1953),  Dylan Thomas – just the 1950s additions, really.

Another Animal (1954) &

A Cage of Spines (1958),  May Swenson

Selected Poems (1955),  Randall Jarrell

The Less Deceived (1955),  Philip Larkin

Not Waving But Drowning (1957),  Stevie Smith


TRAVEL & MEMOIR

A Time of Gifts (1977),  Patrick Leigh Fermor

Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent (2024),  Judi Dench – I expected a lifetime of theater stories, and there were plenty of those, but this is actually a book of serious textual Shakespeare criticism, with Dench and her interviewer friend working through every Shakespeare role she ever did, all of which she still has memorized.  I wish she would sit down for a sequel covering her non-Shakespearian roles.


IN PORTUGUESE

Did I not finish a book in French?  I guess not.  The book I had going was temporarily stolen by a hacker.

Tempo de Fantasmas (1951),  Alexandre O'Neill – a key text of Portuguese post-Surrealism.

História Trágico-Marítima: Narrativas de naufrágios da época das conquistas (1735-6),  António Sérgio – a school edition, pieces selected and modernized from an 18th century collection of narratives of famous Age of Exploration shipwrecks.  What does it tell us about Portuguese culture that 10th graders are assigned a book about 400 year-old maritime disasters?  My ship and sea vocabulary is now much improved.  Quiz me about types of sails and masts!  No, please, do not quiz me.

Tuesday, November 12, 2024

The Story of the Stone, volume 2 - all agreed that this was the definitive poem on the subject of eating crabs

I have continued on with The Story of the Stone, the 2,500 page 18th century Chinese novel by, or mostly by, Cao Xueqin.  Here I will write about the second volume of the David Hawkes translation, The Crab-flower Club.  Last time, after reading the first fifth of the novel, I wrote about the interesting tension between the materialist side of the novel, mostly about adult women managing a large, wealthy Beijing household, and the Buddhist fairy tale side, mostly about a boy born with a jade stone in his mouth who is in a teenage love triangle, or quadrangle, counting the enslaved maid he is sleeping with.

In the second volume, she gets a raise and an informal acknowledgement of her status, “her unofficial promotion to his bed” (204).

The teenage cousins, almost all girls, and their cloud of teenage maids, also almost all girls, had moved into a fantastic artificial garden at the end of the last chunk I read.  Something curious happens.  Much of the interest in the novel still comes from the tension between the realist and fantastic side, but for nearly 600 pages the Buddhist fairy tale is abandoned and replaced with a different fantasy genre, one I know well from European literature, the idyll.

It has been the custom from time immemorial to make offerings to the flower fairies on this day.  (24)

… but just at that moment she noticed two enormous butterflies a little way ahead of her, each as large as a child’s fan, fluttering and dancing on the breeze.  She watched them fascinated and thought she would like to play a game with them.  (26)

When [the courtyard] was nicely flooded, they rounded up a number of mallards, sheldrakes, mandarin ducks and other waterfowl, tied their wings together, and having first closed the courtyard gate, set them down in the water to swim about.  (105)

At first he merely nodded and sighed sympathetically; but when he heard the words [cutting some poetry here] he flung himself on the ground in a fit of weeping, scattering the earth all about him with the flowers he had been carrying in the skirt of his gown.  (41)

I am just giving some examples.  That last one really is like the weepy sentimental strain of the European 18th century novel.  With a different bit of poetry it would fit into Rousseau’s Julie (1761), an exact contemporary of The Story of the Stone.

The characters, teenage and adult, spend many chapters planning parties and then throwing parties.  The New Year’s celebration that closes the volume is especially impressive.  The teens also spend a great deal of the novel forming a poetry club, the Crab-flower Club the translator uses as the volume’s title.  They elect officers, write by-laws, set up a calendar and a budget, everything necessary.  Many chapters are devoted to the club’s meetings, poems and all.

“It sounds a splendid idea,” said Xiang-yun.  “But what sort of verbs or abstract nouns had you in mind?”  (236)

The poetry discussion gets awfully sophisticated.  And it all climaxes what must be the greatest scene in world literature, where the poetry club feasts on steamed crabs while composing comic poems about steamed crabs.

When they had finished reading, all agreed that this was the definitive poem on the subject of eating crabs.  (258)

But once in a while the adult world intrudes into the idyll with violence and horror. 

When Jia Zheng heard this, his own heart was softened and he began to wish that he had not beaten the boy quite so savagely.  (153)

The father had just beaten his son nearly to unconsciousness, nearly to death.  Then the re is the episode where another of the men in the family asks his adult daughter to ask his mother to give him her favorite servant (who is somewhere between fifteen and seventeen) as his concubine.  The servant is horrified and luckily the grandmother refuses.  The problem is solved by buying a new teenage concubine in the slave market.  I do not think it as bad as The Tale of Genji, but The Story of the Stone has some serious “consent issues.”

I imagine the American equivalent, if some 18th century Virginian had somehow written a detailed, female-centered thousand-page novel about the family and household help in a giant tobacco plantation.  What a valuable book this would be, historically and perhaps even artistically.  But boy would some scenes would be hard to take.  I think of the trouble we have with the values of Gone with the Wind, published 71 years after the Civil War, and then imagine the horrors in the novel published 71 years before the war.  But no one wrote such a novel.

On to the third part, the middle of Stone.  I am almost half done.  With the poetry club plus later scenes full of rhyming riddles and improvised poems based on dominos, I have concluded that the David Hawkes version is a heroic translation.  Endless difficulties, all overcome somehow.

Monday, November 11, 2024

The appeal of Septology as religious fiction - the urge, inexplicably, to pray - because it helps! it helps!

Septology is a stream-of-consciousness novel throughout, a mix of sentence fragments, unconventional punctuation, and temporal shifts, meaning the painter Asle is sometimes thinking about the present and sometimes about the past. 

These are all old moves, old techniques.  I was a little surprised that the story of Asle’s past life was told almost entirely in chronological order. 

Fosse’s and Asle’s stream-of-consciousness has a repetitive, looping aspect that often reminded me of – is deeply influenced by – Thomas Bernhard.  Fosse is a gentler writer, lacking Bernhard’s rage and thus his over the top humor.  No mad rants about the outrageous perfidy of Anton Bruckner or Adalbert Stifter or their wretched Norwegian equivalents here.  In Septology the humor is not in Asle’s head but out in the real world, where somehow the characters he encounters enact his repetitive, looping style.  Septology, like a number of late Bernhard novels, is also a novel about grief.

I have only read a few Bernhard novels but I can’t imagine him using the sincere religious expression that is frequent in Septology.  Many readers of Fosse’s book, including many reviewers, have responded strongly to this aspect of the novel.  Wyatt Mason’s review in Harper’s (August 2021) of the first two novels is a helpful example.  He writes (this also appears on the back cover of the novel):

With Septology, Fosse has found a new approach to writing fiction, different from what he has written before and—it is strange to say, as the novel enters its fifth century—different from what has been written before. Septology feels new.

Let’s pretend we did not see that “fifth century” bit.  I saw this quote when I was far enough into Septology that I had some footing, and “new” is not how it seemed.  “Like Thomas Bernhard,” rather.  Surely Mason will tell me what he means later in his review.

There is nothing formally new about narratives that deploy the long sentence. Thomas Bernhard, who inherited its sound from Joyce and Woolf, pursued the long line with rage at its heart.

Hey now, I was just saying!  For some reason Mason digresses with a list of other recent writers influenced by Bernhard – Sebald, Marías, Krasznahorkai – all of whom seem more formally interesting to me than Fosse.  Not to Mason:

Fosse seems both the most obviously influenced by Bernhard and the most radically his own.

Strong claim, but now he will explain.

But what feels most striking about Fosse’s method is something this review can only gesture at.

Oh.

I can say that Fosse’s novel, its vocal progress, is incantatory, or that the prose reads like an extended prayer, which sounds blurbily [!] fine, and not wrong, just empty and familiar. Reading Septology, watching Asle progress through life and, I suspect, in parts six and seven, to the end of it, one feels—I felt—in the welter and waste of a single solitary life, the urge, inexplicably, to pray.

Not to deny the experience of Mason or any other reader, but at no point did I feel the urge to pray.  “It would be too much to suggest that in Septology one comes to feel the love of God, but the way Fosse wields the novel’s form does something spooky to one’s heart.”  Yes, it would be too much, way too much.  This seems like something a specific kind of reader brings to the novel, not something in the novel itself as Mason claims.  “We are here to pray, the form says.”  I do not think form can “say” this.  Bernhard’s similar form does not.

I am surveying the blurbs.  Ruth Margalit writes that “the experience of reading these works” is like “the act of meditation.”  Actually she “hesitate[s]” to make the comparison, but of course does make it.  Sam Sacks thinks the prose “feels almost holy.”  Dustin Illingworth thinks it “trembles with the beauty, doubt, and gnostic weariness of great religious fiction.”

So I take it that all of that is there if you want it.  I guess all of these people mean what they say.  "[I]f they saw me thinking I could sit in a parked car in a turnoff saying Kyrie eleison Christie eleison, it's absurd, they'd have to laugh, but let them laugh, let them, let them, because it helps! it helps!" (p. 30-1).  But I will add that the reader who is not in that market, who thinks, for example, that religious belief is a matter of psychology, may well find Septology interesting not for its novelty or aid to meditation but for its creation and exploration of the psychological interior of a complex character, a unique and enduring specialty, to go back to form, of the novel.

I should mention that the translation by Damion Searls is superb, his project almost heroic.  I can’t judge the technical details, but his control of tone and voice is superb. He learned a new language, Nynorsk, just to translate Fosse’s novels, with the likely reward of complete indifference in the English world.  Fosse was for a long time the most produced living playwright in Europe, while the English theater world ignored him.  (Does anyone reading this know his plays?  I have read one scene).  But anyway it all worked out all right for Searls, and Fosse.

Dolce Bellezza encouraged me to read Septology for her Norwegian Literature month, ongoing.  I was planning to read only the first novel of the novel, The Other Name (2019), but I had questions, and enjoyed Asle’s company, so I kept going.  Thanks! 

Sunday, November 10, 2024

Jon Fosse's Septology - art "can only say something while keeping silent about what it actually wants to say"

Jon Fosse’s Septology (2019-21) is a long stream-of-consciousness novel about a Norwegian painter trying to understand one of his paintings.  Each of the novel’s seven sections begins with Asle looking at the painting:

AND I SEE MYSELF STANDING and looking at the picture with the two lines that cross in the middle, one purple line, one brown line, it’s a painting wider than it is high and I see that I’ve painted the lines slowly, the paint is thick, two long wide lines, and they’ve dripped, where the brown and purple line cross the colours blend beautifully and drip and I’m thinking this isn’t a picture… (p. 13)

It is possible that Asle is not looking at the painting, but imagining that he is looking at it.  Again every section literally begins with “AND I SEE MYSELF STANDING” and then a paraphrase of the above quotation.

Each of seven parts ends the same way, too, with Asle praying his rosary, a “brown wooden cross” (276 and elsewhere).  The endings of Parts II through V have the same prayer and are paraphrases; Parts I and VII feature a somewhat different prayer* and some other differences, one of which gives the novel an actual ending, perhaps.  Someone more knowledgeable will have to tell me about the meaning of the two prayers.

Asle is an exploratory artist, a “look first” artist, not a conceptual or “think first” artist, the kind who dominate the high end art world today.  I am borrowing my own terms from years ago.  Asle is the kind of artist who has to create a work of art before knowing what it means.  “[T]he only thing I can do is paint, yes, try to paint away these pictures that are lodged inside me, there’s nothing to do but paint them away, one by one” (27). 

Is the painting, for example, good?  Asle argues the case.  “I can’t stand pictures that directly paint feelings even if I’m the only one who knows it, that isn’t the kind of thing I paint, it’s not the kind of thing I want to paint, because a painting can certainly be filled with feelings but you shouldn’t paint feelings themselves, like screaming and weeping and wailing” (409).

The novel has many passages where Asle thinks about not just this particular painting but why he paints at all.  He is Catholic, converted by his somewhat dream-girly wife.  The “wordless prayer of painting” (463) he calls his art, late in the novel, wondering if he is done with it (painting, not prayer) for good.  Among a cluster of ideas indebted to Meister Eckhart, Asle “sit[s] and stare[s] into the empty nothingness, and probably in a way I am the empty nothingness I’m looking at,” and “these silent moments enter into the light in my paintings, the light that is clearest in darkness, yes, the shining darkness” (168).  His special fondness is for white and black paint “because it’s in the darkness that God lives” (267).

There is something of a manifesto in Septology, but it is in fragments across the book.  A conceptual artist would put it all in one place.

I wonder how abstract Asle’s paintings are meant to be.  The cross is both a stark form but also an object full of symbolism (although the lines are diagonal, so it is a Saint Andrew’s cross).  “[I]t was so badly painted, but it was oil paint on canvas and that, oil paint on canvas, lodged inside me from the very first moment and stayed there to this day” (63).  Medium, color, form, those are the pieces Asle uses to create meaning.  Although clearly not exactly an abstract painter, his ideas often reminds me of the American Abstract Expressionists.

The cross is perhaps his last, or next to last, painting, which gives at least a little bit of an excuse for telling this story at this time.  The meaning of the painting requires a review of not just Asle’s ideas about painting but his life, from his early childhood to the present, as well as his religion, his time, in the past, as an alcoholic, his life with his wife, who died young, and most curiously the parallel life of his double, another exploratory alcoholic painter named Asle, who I guess is meant to actually exist, although at times I had doubts.  But his dog is real.  Whole separate essay about what that dog is doing in this novel.

Anyway, that’s how Fosse takes a painter thinking about a painting to nearly 700 pages.  Most of the usual novelistic stuff is there.  Asle is one of those complex, well-rounded characters many readers look for.  The inefficient, even at times tedious style – “he can just launch into talking nonstop, this and that, past present and future all jumbled together” (57) – now has a long history as a way to create complex fictional characters.  I had originally planned to read only the first novel of Septology – three novels, seven parts – symbolic! – but found Asle interesting enough to stay with him until the end.

Many prominent critics have found Septology interesting for other reasons.  I will write one more piece expressing some doubt about them.

The aphorism in the title, which is not true in general although true for Asle, is on p. 464 of the Transit Books edition.

*  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  Please see the comments for the schema.