What I read in January 2025 - You must understand that truth is fiction, and fiction truth.

Farewell to The Story of the Stone and a valuable browse in Chinese literature.  I’ll do it again someday.

FICTION

The Peony Pavilion (1598), Tang Xianzu – written up back here.

The Story of the Stone, Vol. 5: The Dreamer Wakes (c. 1760), Cao Xueqin & Gao E – some notes here.  The quotation in my title is from p. 94.

Naomi (1924) &

Quicksand (1930), Junichiro Tanizaki – and these are over here.

Calamity Town (1942), Ellery Queen – A very lightly metafictional mystery.  Not only does the detective share his name with the book’s actual “author,” itself a fiction, but he is a mystery writer who at times seems to be generating the crime within the novel so that he will have something interesting to write about.  But not quite doing that, unfortunately.  That novel would have been more interesting.  The actual novel was fine.  This is one of those mysteries where every instance of clumsy plotting is in fact a clue.

A Question of Upbringing (1951), Anthony Powell – I think I will write something about this book once I have read another volume of the series.

Damned If I Do (2004), Percival Everett – short stories.  A perfect Everett title.  It is all his characters need since it doesn’t matter what will happen if they don’t.  They always do.

On the Calculation of Volume I (2020), Solvej Balle – a Groundhog Day story told with more philosophy and less humor.  A good fantasy on its own terms, but the puzzle is that the series has six more volumes, two of which have not been written yet.  The whole thing will be at least 1,200 pages long, for all I know more.  This first volume is reasonably complete, so I have no idea where the series might be going.

 

POETRY NOT IN FRENCH OR PORTUGUESE

Selected Poems (1968), Zbigniew Herbert

 

TRAVEL, MUSIC HISTORY

Tschiffelly's Ride (1933), Aimé Tschifelly – a Swiss English teacher rides a pair of Pampas horses from Buenos Aires to Washington, D. C., just for fun, and writes an equestrian classic.  Lots of emphasis on the horses and horse-riding.  My geographical knowledge of South and Central America has greatly improved.  I have only been to one of the countries Tschifelly passes through.  Peru gets the largest number of pages; Mexico second.

Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance (2023), Jeremy Eichler – Before I finished The Emigrants in 1996 I knew that Sebald was going to be an important writer.  I knew that people were going to want to do what he was doing.  That was the only time I have been right about that, really, and I did not predict how much Sebaldian visual and musical art would follow, nor that there could be Sebaldian music history, which is what classical music critic Jeremy Eichler has written.  Lightly Sebaldian – he includes uncaptioned photos, yes, but always says, somewhere in the text, what they are.  The book is about World War II memorial pieces, built around Schoenberg’s A Survivor in Warsaw (1947), Strauss’s Metamorphosen (1945), Britten’s War Requiem (1962) and several Shostakovich works.  Highly recommended to anyone who likes this sort of thing.

 

IN  FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE

Odes et Ballades (1828), Victor Hugo – young, young Hugo.  I had read the first half several years ago; now I finished it up.  He sounded like himself from the beginning, but he would not become the greatest French poet until, well, almost immediately after this book.

Les songes en equilibre (1942) &

Le tombeau des rois (1953) &

Mystère de la parole (1960), Anne Hébert – Lovely dream and childhood poems from a Quebecois poet.  I have not read Hébert in English, but I will bet there are some good translations.  Her Catholic poems did not do much for me.  If you have opinions about her fiction, please share them.

Éthiopiques (1956), Léopold Sédar Senghor – One would not – I would not – guess that he would be President of Senegal four years later.  I have visited his childhood home.

Post-Scriptum (1960), Jorge de Sena

Flores ao Telefone (1968) &

Os Idólatras (1969), Maria Judite de Carvalho – I do not remember exactly how this book was recommended to me by a soon-to-be distinguished Portuguese author.  “If you like sad stories about depressed people, these are good.”  Carvalho has a place in Portuguese literature and feminism perhaps a little like Edna O’Brien in Ireland or Grace Paley in the United States, sharply ironic domestic stories, although without O’Brien’s sexual explicitness or Paley’s humor.  Culture hero Margaret Jull Costa is bringing Carvalho into English and is presumably working right now on these books, recently published in Portuguese in Volume 3 of Carvalho’s collected works.  Of course with that recommendation I had to buy a copy.

Two poisonous Tanizaki novels, Naomi and Quicksand - the same as a fruit that I’d cultivated myself

Two Junichiro Tanizaki novels from the 1920s for Japanese Literature Month over at Dolce Bellezza.  Always interesting to see what people are reading.  Thanks as usual.  18th edition!

The two novels I read, Naomi (1924) and Quicksand (1928-30), are closely related.  Both are about dominant and submissive sexual relations, an obsession of Tanizaki.  Both were serialized in newspapers.  How I wish the books had explanations of how the serialization worked.  Both novels are written in, or at least translated as, plain, sometimes even dull prose, perhaps a consequence of tight serial deadlines.

Both have narrators who may well be playing tricks on me, although if so I did not see the signals, and believe me I am alert to the signals, well-trained by Pale Fire and The Tin Drum and Villette and so on.  Maybe Tanizaki’s tricks are different.

Naomi is narrated by a creep of an engineer who picks up – grooms – a 15 year-old waitress who he finds especially “Western.” 

… most of her value to me lay in the fact that I’d brought her up myself, that I myself had made her into the woman she was, and that only I knew every part of her body.  For me Naomi was the same as a fruit that I’d cultivated myself.  I’d labored hard and spared no pains to bring that piece of fruit to its present, magnificent ripeness, and it was only proper that I, the cultivator, should be the one to taste it.  No one else had that right.  (Ch. 18, 161)

Pure poison.  By this point in the novel Naomi has taken power, well on her way to complete control, crushing her groomer, who is likely, it turns out, happier crushed.

Much of the novel is set in the modern, Westernized Asakusa neighborhood of Tokyo, before the terrible earthquake that obliterated the dancehalls and movie theaters.  I found all of that detail quite interesting, as it was in Yasunari Kawabata’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1929-30).  One more piece of bad luck and Naomi might have become one of the homeless teen prostitutes in The Scarlet Gang.  Too bad Naomi does not have the innovative linguistic interest of Kawabata’s crackling novel.

The Japanese title of Quicksand is a single character, the Buddhist swastika, a perfect representation of the content of the novel, which is a four-way struggle for dominance among the narrator, her girlfriend, her husband, and the girlfriend’s boyfriend.  Some of the weapons in the struggle are pretty crazy, like a scene where the narrator and the girlfriend’s lunatic boyfriend swear a blood oath.  Eh, they’re all crazy.  The narrator is the eventual winner, obviously, I guess. 

Maybe she is making it all up.  Quicksand has a lot in common with Ford Madox Ford’s devious The Good Soldier, another four-way struggle, but as I said if Tanizaki’s narrator is a tenth as tricky as Ford’s I sure couldn’t see it.  She seems more unreliable in theory than practice.

One technique that is interesting and may hold clues: Tanizaki and the narrator return to key scenes, describing what happened from different perspectives, yes, like in Akutagawa’s “In a Bamboo Grove” (1922), except everything is filtered through the narrator, which does have the appearance of what I am calling a trick, a technique of emphasizing and controlling unreliability.  How newspaper readers followed this over two full years baffles me, but my understanding is that the lesbian aspect got the attention.

I have trouble imaging the literary world where these were newspaper novels.  Naomi was in fact too shocking and was booted from the newspaper, with Tanizaki completing it in a magazine.

Should I give an example of what I mean by dull prose?  Is it worth the tedium of the typing?  I mean that there is a lot of this:

“Were you still asleep, Mitsu?”

“Your phone call wakened me!”

“I can leave anytime now.  Won’t you come right away too?”

“Then I’ll hurry up and get ready.  Can you be at the Umeda station by half-past nine?”

“You’re sure you can?”

“Of course I am!”  (Quicksand, Ch. 15, 98)

And this is nominally supposed to be the narrator telling her story to Tanizaki.  Serialization filler?  Maybe you can see why I am not in a hurry to solve the puzzle of Quicksand.  The appeal of both novels, for me, was exploring the psychology of the believably awful characters and seeing how their less believable awful schemes work out.

Anthony Chambers translated Naomi; Howard Hibbett did Quicksand.

Reading The Peony Pavilion with the teens in The Story of the Stone - That garden is a vast and lonely place

The teens living in the garden in the YA romantasy The Story of the Stone spend a lot of time reading forbidden books, much older YA romantasys.  These books are all famous classical Chinese plays.  Cao Xueqin gives a couple of chapters early on to their reading, including a list of titles.  I figured I’d better try one of them.

How about The Peony Pavilion by Tang Xianzu, written in 1598, an exciting time in English and Spanish drama, too.  The play is really an opera, partly sung and partly spoken, a monster, eighteen hours long in a complete performance, a wild mix of stories and tones.

An attempt at the story: beautiful young Bridal Du begins her education with a tutor.  The explication of four lines of 2,500 year-old Chinese poetry, the limit of her education, are enough to make her curious about the outside world.  She goes for a walk in an artificial garden where, in the title’s Peony Pavilion, she falls into a dream where she meets and has sex with a stranger, an experience so powerful that after waking she soon dies.  This is one-third of the way in.

Luckily the lover is real and stumbles across the garden.  After an idyllic period of ghost sex, he figures out how to resurrect Bridal Du, launching the final third of the play which is full of bandits, severed heads, mistaken identities, and heroic test-taking.  There is a scene I have never encountered in dramatic form before, Scene 41, where the test examiners grades essays:

Every kind of error:

what a bunch of blockheads

grinding their ink for nothing,

not one brush “bursts into flower.” (230)

What could be more dramatic than watching a teacher grade papers?

The Peony Pavilion also has comic scenes in Hell, songs about manure, comics scenes with a couple of slapstick servants, and a comic scene with a pompous government inspector.  I thought this scene must be one of the most cut – the entire opera has been performed rarely, or perhaps never before 1999 (!) – but no, it is one of the most performed, historically, often performed on its own at village festivals.

The text is full of quotations and lines and entire poems from two thousand years of Chinese poetry, all identified, as above, by quotation marks and occasionally by footnote identification, but there is so much quotation that the editor gives up on identifying the authors by page 5.  The quotations are sometimes turned into dirty jokes or elaborate poetry games much like the kids play in The Story of the Stone.

It is all the most amazing thing, is what I am saying, one piece of craziness after another.  Someday I will have to read more of these things, and maybe a book or two about how to read them.  Cao Xueqin clearly learned more about writing his novel from these plays than from earlier Chinese novels.  “It’s very pretty in the garden” but “[t]hat garden is a vast and lonely place” (Sc. 11, 54).

Oh, why are classical plays forbidden to the 18th century youth?  One, kids are not supposed to be wasting their time with romantasys but instead reading the Five Classics and practicing calligraphy; second, the plays will give young ladies corrupting ideas about falling in love and marrying who they want rather than the dud or monster chosen by their parents.

Cyril Birch is the translator.  Page references are to the Indiana University Press 2nd edition.

The image is from the 1998 Peter Sellars production of The Peony Pavilion.  How I wish I had seen it. Tan Dun’s music for that production (the album is titled Bitter Love) is worth hearing.

Finishing The Story of the Stone - What a blessing this is, to return to the scene of my childhood dream!

How I wish all long novels were published in sensible multi-volume editions.  I have finished The Story of the Stone, 2,500 pages in five volumes, the last two translated by John Minford.  Cao Xueqin and his posthumous editor Gao E again share credit for authorship.  Chapters have become shorter and a few episodes seem abbreviated, but otherwise I have no sense of who did what.  Perhaps Minford smooths everything out for me.

In the last 22 chapters and 380 pages the novel necessarily narrows.  Necessarily if it is going to have an ending, which in this case it does.  A series of catastrophes strike the family began hitting the family at the end of the last volume, and they only accelerate.  Disgrace, crime, debt, deaths, so many deaths, some of them expected for a long time, some real surprises.  One shocked even jaded ol’ me.  There is some resemblance to the occasional contemporary event of the Chinese billionaire who suddenly falls from party favor and is arrested for corruption.

The garden, scene of so many teenage poetry games, is abandoned, a haunted ruin:

The Garden’s caretakers saw nothing to be gained by staying.  They all wanted to leave the place, and invented a whole series of incidents to substantiate the presence of diabolical tree-imps and flower sprites. (Ch. 102, 72)

In the next paragraph a minor character dies suddenly, perhaps as the result of sexual assault by one of those flower sprites, more monstrous than their name suggests.

Subplots resolve amidst the disasters and funerals.  Story elements abandoned for 2,000 pages return.  The architecture of this novel has some long, long arcs.  Eventually, the story narrows back to Bao-yu, the boy born with the jade stone in his mouth, who had “degenerated into a complete idiot” (109, 79) to the point where I was beginning to wonder how he could continue to function as a protagonist.  But the magical monk, seen rarely but at key moments previously, returns to take our away from the earthly plane into the Daoist fairy realm.  More or less.

“I know I’ve been somewhere like this before.  I remember it now.  It was in a dream.  What a blessing this is, to return to the scene of my childhood dream!” (116, 286)

Bao-yu is here in a complex dream chapter paralleling one that was well over 2,000 pages earlier, pulling together all of the major teenage female characters, dead and alive, like a last farewell to them before Bao-yu himself exits the novel just slightly ahead of the reader.

But not before he – I am giving away an important part of the story – so skip ahead if this bothers you – but seriously you probably want to know this one, it is so good – not before saving his family from disgrace by getting a high score on a test.

The Chief Examiner presented the successful candidates’ compositions to the throne, and His Majesty read them through one by one and found them to be well-balanced and cogent, displaying both breadth of learning and soundness of judgment…  His Majesty, as a consequence of this information, being a monarch of exceptional enlightenment and compassion, instructed his minister, in consideration of the family’s distinguished record of service, to submit a full report on their case.  (119, 351)

So most of the characters, if they made it this far, get a happy ending of one kind or another.  It is not so much that The Story of the Stone is the greatest Chinese novel but rather that it is the greatest Chinese novel.

“What is truth, and what fiction?  You must understand that truth is fiction, and fiction truth.” (103, 94)

This from another (or perhaps the same) magical monk.  The words “truth” and “fiction” are puns on the names of the two branches of the novel’s family.  Bao-yu is on the fiction side, and to the extent that Cao Xueqin is his double so is the author.  The great paradox of the novel, from beginning to end, is the contrast between the materialistic, dangerous “realistic” world of the adults with its budgets and corruption and the idyllic, fantastic world of the kite-flying, poetry-reciting teenagers in the garden, both ephemeral compared to Daoist eternity.  What then, was Cao Xueqin doing, who does not become a monk but rather writes a monumental realistic (and ant-realistic, and unrealistic) novel based on his early adolescent moment of happiness?  He finds an alternative immortality.

“So it was really all utter nonsense!  Author, copyist, and reader were alike in the dark!  Just so much ink splashed for fun, a diversion!”  (120, 375, almost the last words of the novel) 

Read and To Read, in 2024 and 2025

What did I read in 2024?

The best book I read last year was Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE).  Best books, really, in translations by Arthur Golding and Charles Martin.  My “best book of the year” answer will never be interesting.  America’s librarian Nancy Pearl asked, somewhere on Twitter, if people thought they had already read the best book they would ever encounter.  The answers were, by far, that they had not, which is even possible, for them, but I have read The Odyssey and King Lear and Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland and so on, a lot of books, a lot of great, great books.  The odds are low.

Maybe the best book of 2025 will be The Odyssey.  It has been a while.  My favorite book, maybe.

I kept up on my French, and learned a lot of Portuguese.  A week of intensive French in a classroom in Porto helped a lot.  I could use some more of those.

I read some long books: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (1110), Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925), the first 2,200 pages or so of Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone (c. 1760) and Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1931), barely over six hundred pages but in such difficult French that I am counting it, am I ever.

I built little projects around several books, piling more Persian books around Shanameh and Chinese literature around The Story of the Stone.  I did the same thing during the summer with Arabic literature while reading The Arabian Nights (13th c.) in Husain Haddawy’s great, not especially long, translation, adding modern poetry by Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish and a novel and book of stories by Naguib Mahfouz.  My kind of fun.

Let’s see.  I read nine Percival Everett books, including James (2024) just a bit before everyone else read it.  How odd it felt to have read anew book that so many other people were reading.

The best contemporary book I read, though, was easily Judi Dench’s Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent.  It is “Dench and her interviewer friend working through every Shakespeare role she ever did, all of which she still has memorized,” enormously pleasurable for those of us who enjoy such things.

What will I read in 2025?

Some more long books, I hope.  I have barely over a hundred pages of The Story of the Stone left.  I enjoyed John Cowper Powys’s eccentric Wolf Solent (1929) last summer and will try The Glastonbury Romance (1932), preposterously long, any day now.  Then what – The Tale of Genji?  Another of the big Chinese monsters?  Maybe Vassily Grossman’s Stalingrad?  Someday, anyway, with luck.

If Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-75) counts as one novel, which it does not, that will be one of my long ones.  Brad “Neglected Books” Bigelow is hosting a year-long readalong, one short novel per month.  I just finished the first book, A Question of Upbringing (1951) and will tag along for a while.  Unfortunately discussions will be on Zoom but what are ya gonna do, who wants to write anything anymore.

Speaking of which, in the spirit of reading the Greek plays, I would like to begin a Not Shakespeare project, let’s say next fall, where I read and write about not all but many of the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries.  Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, The Spanish Tragedy, those folks, not that one could not also read some Shakespeare along the way.  A play every two weeks maybe?  If anyone is interested in joining in, please let me know.

The WPA poster can be found at the Library of Congress site.  I have put it up before.  It is full of truth.

The books I read in December 2024 - From her earliest youth she had discovered a fondness for reading

A different kind of month with a different category of reading.

CHINA

Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China (5th-13th cent.), tr. David Hinton – The teenagers in The Story of the Stone play various games based on their memorization of massive amounts of classical Chinese poetry.  I revisited an arbitrary sliver of it, the “mountains and rivers” school, in David Hinton’s Buddhist-leaning translation.  It made the Qing games look artificial and perhaps decadent.  But it also emphasized a difficulty, or pleasure, of the vast length of the Chinese tradition.  English-speaking children in the 18th century, or today, could not memorize and play games using thousand-year-old English poems.  No such thing, no such language.

The Story of the Stone, Vol. 3: The Warning Voice &

The Story of the Stone, Vol. 4: The Debt of Tears (c. 1760), Cao Xueqin – Please look here and here for notes on these books.

Selected Stories (1918-26), Lu Xun – The Chinese literary tradition must have been oppressive in some ways, but here a young modern writer revitalizes the Chinese short story using the same tools that European and American writers were using: Turgenev and Chekhov.

Love in a Fallen City (1944), Eileen Chang – And here is another writer fully aware of her own tradition – one story even has what sure looks like a parody of a bit of The Story of the Stone – while pulling in every outside influence available.

Cold Mountain Poems (1958) &

Riprap (1959), Gary Snyder – The other direction, an American poet immersed in Chinese poetry.  The first little book is a translation of Cold Mountain, the most “outsider” of the great “mountains and rivers” poets, while Riprap is Snyder’s absorption of the sensibility into his own voice.

Ts'ao Yin and the K'ang-hsi Emperor, Bondservant and Master (1966), Jonathan D. Spence – He uses a different orthography, but Ts’ao Yin is also Cao Yin, the grandfather of Cao Xueqin, author of China’s greatest novel.  Chinese scholars, in search of the actual characters and the actual teenage fairy tale garden, had tracked down every scrap available about Cao Xueqin’s family history, giving Spence the material to write a dissertation on the social history of the period focused on one figure.  Cao Xueqin’s grandfather was analogous to today’s Chinese billionaire, managing companies in close cooperation with the state but part of a power structure distinct from the government bureaucracy.  Spence explained a lot of my puzzles about the background of the novel.

MFA Highlights: Arts of China (2013) – Presumably an author or authors are involved but I could not figure that out.   Because of its maritime wealth, Bostonians have given their Museum of Fine Arts has an outstanding collection of Chinese art, some of it on display here.  If you are reading The Story of the Stone, do not hesitate to visit your nearest Asian art collection.  The ceramics and clothing, in particular, were a big help.  For example, the silk robe pictured uses a peacock-feather-wrapped thread that is featured in a heroic sewing scene in the novel.  Useful to see that in person.

 

FICTION

The Female Quixote (1752), Charlotte Lennox – Please see this post.

The Crucible  (1953), Arthur Miller

Nights at the Alexandra (1987), William Trevor

Every Arc Bends Its Radian (2024), Sergio de la Pava – His last novel packed with American football, I wondered if this new novel was some kind of compromise with his agent, since it is, for a while, a detective novel.  But no, it goes off – actually literally gets on – the rails and turns into another novel entirely, one likely to bore and mystify mystery fans.  Some of it bored me.  But I enjoy de la Pava’s voice and intelligence, and he seems to be writing the books he wants to write.

 

IN  FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE

La fleur de l'age (1949), Colette – More little bits of Colette.  Back to the music hall and so on.  A theme of love among the aged, there in the title, is new.

Fidelidade (1958), Jorge de Sena

Becket (1959), Jean Anouilh

 

The Story of the Stone, volume 4 - It was an eerie, desolate night.

At the two-thirds mark, after 80 chapters of the 120, three big changes hit The Story of the Stone (c. 1760 / 1791).  First, David Hawkes, the original translator of the Penguin edition, retires; John Minford finishes the job.  Second, the author of the novel, Cao Xueqin, dies, leaving a lot for textual scholars of the novel to do.  Are the last 40 chapters an edit of Cao Xueqin’s drafts, or maybe complete inventions by someone else, or something in-between?  The Penguin book, The Story of the Stone, Volume 4: The Debt of Tears, adds “edited by Gao E,” which is as far as I will go.  I have kept reading as if none of this matters.

The third change, though, which began in the last few chapters of the previous volume, is that the world of the novel is collapsing.  The beautiful teenage garden Arcadia can only last so long.  The “real,” adult world is having its problems – money trouble – but the true villain is time.  The characters age.  The teenagers become, tragically, marriageable.  The garden empties out; the idyll ends.

The novel becomes unbearably sad.  That is another way to describe the change.

A key character dies, with plenty of warning, but still.  The mood of the prose fits the event:

The wedding chamber was a long way off, and the guests heard nothing of the weeping, but from the Naiad’s House, in a brief interval of silence between their lamentations, they heard a faint snatch of music in the distance.  They strained their ears to catch it, but it was gone.  Tan-chun and Li Wan went into the garden to listen again, but all they could hear was the rustling of the bamboos in the wind.  The moonlight cast a wavering shadow on the wall.  It was an eerie, desolate night.  (98, 377)

If only more of the novel were written like this.

Cao Xueqin occasionally, not often but once in a while, uses time-shifted scenes, describing events in one location and then jumping back a bit to look at something happening simultaneously elsewhere in the garden.  The device is especially effective in this part of The Story of the Stone, where the author announces the death, an event of the greatest importance, in what is in a sense the wrong place, and then goes back to let us experience it in person.  Like Faulkner or what have you.  We are so used to this device now but it took a while for Western novelists to figure it out, Tristram Shandy’s herky-jerky line notwithstanding.

A number of other curious things are scattered through this chunk of the novel.  Another terrible double-suicide love affair, a compressed parallel to the best story in the previous volume.  A vendor brings the family some wonderful artifacts to sell, including a magnificent Mother Pearl that attracts other pearls to it, like a magnet.  A long digression on music and the playing of the qin, adding to the inventory of this novel about everything:

‘And before you think of playing, be sure to dress in a suitable style – preferably in a swansdown cape or other antique robe.  Assume the dignified manner of the ancients, a manner in keeping with the chosen instrument of the sages.  Wash your hands.’ (86, 154)

Seriously, before you do anything put on your swansdown cape and wash your hands. 

‘Do let’s put an end to this depressing conversation,’ said Jia She, ‘and have another drink.’ (92, 261)

One more volume to go.

The books I read in November 2024 - like a hideous spinster who has learned the grim humor of the disappointments of life

 

Thank goodness I write these down.

FICTION

The Story of the Stone, Vol. 2: The Crab-flower Club (c. 1760), Cao Xueqin – written up long ago.

Cartucho (1931) &

My Mother's Hands (1938), Nellie Campobello – Brutal vignettes of the Mexican revolution by a diehard partisan, a child at the time, later an important figure in Mexican modern dance.  The title tough guy Cartucho (Cartridge) is killed on the first page.  The rate of killing is not one per page, but close.  The later book is more of a tribute to Campobello’s mother but still incredibly violent.  If you wonder why Fernanda Melchor’s novels are the way they are, or why that one section of 2666 is the way it is, well, here is an ancestor.

The Horizontal Man (1946), Helen Eustis

Last Seen Wearing (1952), Hillary Waugh – By pure chance the two mysteries I read this month were both set at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.  Or, you know, “Smith,” made fictional, but not really hiding much.  I did not know this in advance.  The novels are tonally opposites.  The murdered English professor in The Horizontal Man, and everyone who knew him, is neurotic or worse.  Smith is one high-strung, Freudian place.

He liked his tall old house.  It had a bitter friendly ugliness, like a hideous spinster who has learned the grim humor of the disappointments of life.  (205 of the Library of America edition)

While Last Seen Wearing is an early, influential police procedural, literally inspired by the Dragnet radio show, all about legwork and dead-end leads told in plain language.  A little bit of detective novel nonsense slips in, but not too much.

Smith College, was, I presume, a pleasant and safe place at the time, with fewer lunatics and predators than most places.

The Passion (1987), Jeanette Winterson

So Much Blue (2017), Percival Everett – The typical – usual – same every time – Everett narrator is an abstract painter in this one, interweaving three stories in three genres (in one life). 

Suggested in the Stars (2020), Yoko Tawada

Our Evenings (2024), Alan Hollinghurst

 

POETRY

The Dispossessed (1948) &

Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1953), John Berryman

Some Trees (1956), John Ashbery

95 Poems (1958) &

73 Poems (1963), E. E. Cummings

Expressions of Sea Level (1964) &

Collected Poems 1951-1971 (but I only read 1951-65), A. R. Ammons

I never write anything anymore about the poetry I read.  I do not know why.

 

TRAVEL

My Life as an Explorer (1926), Roald Amundsen – written up over here.

The Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024 (2024), various – I learned a lot.  Some of the prose was quite purple, which surprised me, given the tendencies these days, but why bother writing about grilled cheese sandwiches or gas station food if you’re not going to write.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers (1870), Jules Verne – best read with constant reference to your globe and your beautiful illustrated childhood encyclopedia.  Seeing Verne’s many debts to Poe is interesting.

La steppe rouge (1923), Joseph Kessel – The journalist’s first book, sad, violent stories set during or soon after the Bolshevik revolution.  Kessel is highly skeptical.  Given the high interest of the subject matter, I am surprised that this book has never made it to English.  To any young translator from French: it is short, easy, about interesting people and events, and in the public domain.  Please see the Book around the Corner review of The Red Steppe that led me to the book.

L'Étrange Défaite. Témoignage écrit en 1940 (1946), Marc Bloch – Besides being among the greatest modern historians, Bloch had a special place in Lyon because of his service, and death, in the French Resistance.  I finally got to his frustrated memoir of his official military service in World War II, where he managed the French army’s gasoline supplies in the Low Countries and was evacuated with the British troops at Dunkirk.  The essay about the reasons for the French defeat were less interesting because they have been so thoroughly absorbed.

As Duas Águas do Mar (1992), Francisco José Viegas – An early entry in one of the few long-running detective series in Portuguese, written by a bigshot in the Portuguese literary scene.  Editor of their Bookforum-like magazine, for example; a perpetual guest on the literary panel shows.  I wish someone else would write some Portuguese detective novels for me, because this one was thin, sometimes I suspected contemptuous of the genre.  There is a scene where the insomniac police detective goes through a drawer – his own drawer! – listing every object.  The novel literally ends with the same character preparing, step by step by step, a dish of eggs and ham and potatoes.  Now, given that I read the book to improve my Portuguese, these scenes were great.  Tedious fiction; terrific language exercises.  French language-learners owe Georges Simenon a lot.

The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox - counting the pages, he was quite terrified at the number, and could not prevail upon himself to read them

Di at The little white attic is chasing Don Quixote through the 18th century, so she read, obviously, The Female Quixote (1852) by Charlotte Lennox.  I had not read it, so I trailed along.

An archetypal novelistic heroine, young Arabella has had her brain addled by novels:

From her earliest youth she had discovered a fondness for reading, which extremely delighted the marquis; he permitted her therefore the use of his library, in which, unfortunately for her, were great store of romances, and, what was still more unfortunate, not in the original French, but very bad translations.  (I.1, 7)

But, and this is key, the wrong novels, the colossal 17th century French romances (I wrote about them briefly here) and their English imitations that had an audience in England when for whatever reason the English were not producing such vast quantities of novels themselves.  The books were owned by Arabella’s mother, although more realistically they were the reading of her grandmother’s generation.  A nice touch in The Female Quixote, a touch of realism, is the mix of characters familiar with the old romances and the characters who have no idea what Arabella is talking about.

Because Arabella for some reason has concluded that these endless series of preposterous adventures, with kidnapped princesses and heroes slaughtering armies, just the kind of thing many of us still like today however different the precise conventions and rhetoric, are history, are true, and is thus believes that random strangers are going to kidnap her and that her suitors are literally dying of love for her.

That is pretty much the joke for the entire novel.  I thought it was an amusing conceit with a mildly funny development; Di found it “very, very funny”; Steven Moore, reading the book for The Novel: An Alternative History: 1600-1800 (2013), “laughed myself silly over it” and thought that Lennox “like a seasoned comedian milks [the romances] for every possible laugh” (773). I thought she left a lot of laughs on the table, so to speak.  But that’s two to one against me; maybe you would join the other two.

Moore, providing an example of a funny bit, picks the exact moment I found funniest, when Arabella tells the man pursuing her that he just needs to do the reading:

Arabella having ordered one of her women to bring Cleopatra, Cassandra, Clelia, and the Grand Cyrus from her library, Glanville no sooner saw the girl return, sinking under the weight of those voluminous romances, but he began to tremble at the apprehension of his cousin laying her commands upon him to read them; and repented of his complaisance, which exposed him to the cruel necessity of performing what to him appeared an Herculean labour, or else incurring her anger by his refusal. (I.12, 49)

Just a reminder that Cyrus, for example, in its original French edition, was ten volumes and 13,000 (!!!) pages long.  No idea what the bad English translation was like.  “[C]ounting the pages, he was quite terrified at the number, and could not prevail upon himself to read them  (I.12, 50).  Yeah, no kidding.  These books are very close to unread today, even in France, scholars of the literature of the period aside, and 13,000 pages is a lot even for them.

This suitor never reads more than a page of any of these books but he does prevent Arabella’s father from burning them, like the priest in Don Quixote does to the knightly romances.  A heroic feat as far as I am concerned.

The poor editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition spends most of her time tracking down each of the many references Arabella makes to the French romances, summarizing and often correcting them, so the endnotes are mostly tedious summaries of tedious episodes from tedious novels.  Luckily the clichés of the 17th century are not so far from the clichés of today, so it is easy to follow along without the details.

Many passages suggest that Arabella would be happy if she just had someone to talk to about her hobby, if she had a fandom, a forum on the internet and an annual convention where she could cosplay.  The “original fangirl,” Di calls her.  Lennox’s prose is minimally descriptive but does have passages describing the heroine’s fantastic costumes, her own designs.

At one point it seemed like the novel would end with Arabella’s mania infecting everyone around her, which might have been fun, but instead it all jerks to a halt when Samuel Johnson, disguised as a priest, convinces her that the French romances are un-Christian and that she should be reading the morally improving novels of Samuel Richardson instead.  I have read three of Richardson’s four novels; all three feature, prominently, in a contemporary, nominally realistic setting, the kidnapping of the heroine, so honestly I don’t think reading Richardson is going to work here.  One delusion will be replaced with another.  Reading novels is basically poison; we readers of novels all know that.

The Story of the Stone, volume 3 - melodrama, drinking games, and "a convocation of bees and butterflies"

I am two-thirds through Cao Xueqin’s enormous The Story of the Stone (c. 1760), volume 3 of the David Hawkes translation, and the next twenty chapters have arrived at the library so I had better write this chunk up.

In this big middle section a number of minor or even new characters are given stories, making the structure even more episodic than previously.  Both the teenage love triangle and the Daoist fairy tale recede behind these new stories. 

The mysterious, magical Daoist monk makes just one appearance, in the middle of the best story as such so far (meaning in the first 1,800 pages), a hundred page novella about a young woman who becomes the secret second wife of the shallow, impulsive husband of one of the novel’s best characters, Wang Xi-feng, the woman who has managed the enormous household for over a thousand pages.  The secret comes out, and Xi-feng, a great Machiavellian, slowly but relentlessly destroys the new wife.  Along the way, the poor woman’s sister is also destroyed.  The novel known for its realism is interrupted by an outstanding, horrifying piece of melodrama, one part more fairy-tale like (thus the appearance of that monk), the other more of a domestic soap opera.  I was not surprised to learn that the story of these two sisters has often been detached from The Story of the Stone and adapted into operas and plays.

Immediately after this long, intense episode, the teens in their arcadian garden have a meeting of their poetry club which ends with them all flying kites.  Four full pages of pure kite flying.  “The cousins clapped their hands delightedly” (70, 392).  Me, too.  Some of the art of Cao Xueqin, some of the strong emotional effects, come from these big tonal shifts, the suicide of a teenager followed by poetry and kites.

Much of the substance of this volume is, like the previous, parties and planning for parties.  The theme of the decline of the family becomes more visible.  Budgets are tighter.  But the parties go on.  There is a long section full of Chinese drinking games, simultaneously too obscure:

Li Wan was to begin.

‘Gourd,’ said Li Wan.

‘Green,’ said Xiu-yan.

‘Green’ was evidently correct, since Li Wan appeared to be satisfied and the two women simultaneously sipped their wine.  (62, 200)

and too detailed, if there can be such a thing:

When she and Bao-chai had drunk, she threw the dice.  Twenty.  That meant that Aroma was to draw.  Aroma reached out and took a card.  (63, 228-9)

The unsupervised teens can really – realism! – put away the sauce.  Here a fifteen year-old girl has passed out on a bench:

She was covered all over from head to foot with crimson petals from the peony bushes which grew round about; the fan which had slipped from her hand and lay on the ground beside her was half buried in petals;; and heaped-up peony petals wrapped in a white silk handkerchief made an improvised pillow for her head.  Over and around this petalled monstrosity a convocation of bees and butterflies was hovering distractedly.  (62, 204)

I am really quoting this passage because it is so unusual in a novel where the materiality is more often expressed in lists of art objects or descriptions of clothing than in striking original images.  “Petalled monstrosity”!

Here’s another surprising bit from the end of the novel, another inset story about another jealous wife:

She was inordinately fond of gnawing bones, especially the bones of fowls.  To satisfy this craving she had ducks and chickens killed every day.  The meat she gave to other people; it was only the bones, crisp-fried in boiling fat, that she kept for herself, to nibble with her wine.  (80, 606)

Getting close to the fairy tale again.

All right, time to pick up the next volume.

The depiction of the setting of the novel, the mansion and garden, can be found on p. 33 of Approaches to Teaching The Story of the Stone (Dream of the Red Chamber) (2012), ed. Andrew Schonebaum and Tina Lu.

Roald Amundsen’s My Life as an Explorer - an adventure is merely a bit of bad planning

One last book for Norwegian November, Roald Amundsen’s My Life as an Explorer (1927), a memoir covering the polar explorer’s entire career.  It’s a good book, full of adventure.

To the explorer, however, adventure is merely an unwelcome interruption of his serious labours.  He is looking, not for thrills, but for facts about the unknown.  Often his search is a race with time against starvation.  To him, an adventure is merely a bit of bad planning, brought to light by the test of trial. (237)

To the reader, however, adventure, the times Amundsen is almost killed but for some reason is not, is much of what makes the book good.  To this reader.  I know that many readers are searching for characters like themselves.  I read books about exploration to meet people utterly unlike me.  I mean, these folks are nuts.

Amundsen had written an earlier (1912) book about his expedition to the South Pole, so there is less of that in My Life as an Explorer than I had expected.  He had become more interested in polar aviation, so there is a lot of that, including perhaps too much detail and score-settling about his recent dirigible flight over the North Pole in the company of Umberto Nobile, an incompetent blowhard Italian pilot.  Nobile is a hilarious character, as if from an Evelyn Waugh novel, although I understand how Amundsen has trouble seeing him that way.  The scenes where the characters are trapped in Nome, Alaska, arguing by telegram with the Aĕro Club of Norway about the wording of contracts is almost comedy, even in Amundsen’s exasperated account.

Still, the book, beginning with Amundsen’s teenage inspiration to explore the poles, is mostly about expeditions: preparation and skills (skiing, navigation), multiple brushes with death (“adventure”), then survival and celebrity.

Richard Halliburton called his first two books The Royal Road to Romance (1925) and The Glorious Adventure (1927) – I have read the former but not the latter.  Twenty-eight years younger than Amundsen, he had no interest in exploring and went straight for the adventure.  Perhaps he just had no interest in science.  But I think he understood that the celebrity explorers like Amundsen, with clear accomplishments – first expedition to the South Pole, first flight over the North Pole – had prepared the way – created the market – for the celebrity adventurer.  The two men’s books look like evidence in the cultural shift form glory to celebrity.

Amundsen’s memoir is the real Norwegian literature, the place to find something essential about Norwegianness.  I got this sense visiting the extraordinary campus of ship museums in Oslo, one holding a Viking ship, on the Kon-Tiki, and the largest containing the Fram, the ship Fridtjof Nansen built for Arctic exploration that Amundsen later took to the Antarctic.  The ship is itself a celebrity, for a time holding both the “farthest north” and “farthest south” records.  You buy a ticket and they let you walk around on it, with no risk of freezing to death or starving.  There’s an ice cream stand right outside.

Nansen’s book, Farthest North (1897) is, I should say, better than Amundsen’s.  Maybe next year I will read Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki Expedition (1948).  Norwegians love madmen at sea. 

I assume the book was written in Norwegian and translated by someone, but there is no information in the 1927 edition.  Maybe Amundsen wrote in English, what do I know.  The photo of the Fram is borrowed from the Fram Museum website.

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.

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.

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! 

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.