Monday, May 30, 2022

Colette's last hit, Tanizaki's puppets, McBain's police work - the wash of blue and white which was the sky

 

Some of these books have to got back to the library.  Let’s write ‘em up.

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Some Prefer Nettles (1929) by Tanziaki Junichiro.  A married couple has fallen out of loe with each other, and the wife in love with someone else.  They should divorce, probably, but then what’s the hurry.  Every literature has, at some point, its divorce novels, and here is a Japanese example.  It is mostly from the point of view of the shallow Westernized husband, whose Westernization is described in two fine scenes, one where he buys a multi-volume Richard Burton Arabian Nights in order to read the dirty parts (which he never finds), and another where he visits his Western “mistress,” who is a Russian-Korean prostitute working in a brothel.  Some readers may wish the story had a different point of view character, but I had a good laugh at him.

My puzzle was how this tight but flatly-written domestic novel is a candidate for “greatest novel by greatest Japanese writer.”  Let’s see what Donald Keene says in the “Fiction” volume of Dawn to the West (1984):

Some critics consider this to be Tanizaki’s finest work, not only because of its intrinsic literary excellence  but because it presents both subtly and effectively the great transformation in Tanizaki’s life from a worshiper of the West to a believer in the Japanese heritage.  (759)

The intrinsic excellence is unspecified, and the last part is not remotely an aesthetic quality.  So I am still puzzled.  The Japanese cultural detail, including several substantial sections about the puppet theater, is of high interest, the ironies of the marriage are well-observed, etc. etc.  But “finest” and so on, I don’t see it.

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Cop Hater, Ed McBain (1956).  I am continuing my education in the history of crime fiction with a key police procedural, the first of a long line of 87th Precinct novels that abandon any hint of a puzzle mystery for the grind of ordinary, tedious police work.  Or at least make steps in that direction.  My sense of the realism of Cop Hater is based entirely on subsequent cop shows deeply influenced by these novels, so what do I know.

Salvatore Lombino was a classic hack writing science fiction under these pseudonyms and crime fiction under those, more or less settling for the McBain name when these books became his biggest hits.  In classic hack fashion, his prose can get kinda purple, when I would expect nothing but plainness:

The clear silhouettes of the buildings slashed at the sky, devouring the blue; flat planes and long planes, rough rectangles and needle sharp spires, minarets and peaks, pattern upon pattern laid in geometric unity against the wash of blue and white which was the sky.  (1)

A little purple is all right with me.  I enjoyed this book, and if I were a real fan of mysteries I would seek out more, but really I would rather know what else was out there.

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Gigi (1945) by Colette.  Age 71, writing in occupied Paris, Colette writes the biggest hit of her life, a novella about a fifteen year-old girl being groomed to be a courtesan by her grandmother and great-aunt, both courtesans themselves.  The story is not as creepy as it sounds only because it is not clear what is going on for quite a while.  Maybe the grandmother is just unusually obsessed with etiquette, or something.  And the real story of the story is Gigi’s subtle resistance, ultimately successful, to her groomers.  The character in the 1958 Vincente Minelli musical is surely aged quite a bit?

The book titled Gigi includes the novella and three other pieces.  “The Sick Child” is the saddest thing, a lovely piece about the imaginative life of a boy bedridden with polio.  “The Photographer’s Wife” oddly has more detail about the lost profession of pearl stringing – “Because I had, in the old days, a pearl necklace like everyone else” (2nd paragraph) – but the title character takes over by the end.  “Flora and Pomona” is not a story but an extended wander through Colette’s love of flowers, plants, and even, why not, fruit.  Colette mostly writes at my reading level, but with that last one she kicked me around pretty hard.  The flowers, the parts of flowers, just to begin.  Good for my French, I tell myself.

“Gigi” is easy to find in English.  The next two stories are in the big Collected Stories, although all translation above is mine.  “Flora and Pomona” is in a 1986 collection of Colette’s essays titled Flowers and Fruit.  All a pleasure to read, setting aside the difficulty of the French.

  

18 comments:

  1. I assigned Cop Hater a couple of times in my mystery class as an example of the 'procedural.' It didn't wear that well (students once remarked that they felt like they could hear the "tha-thump" Law & Order music between every paragraph break, which seemed fair enough). You're right that it really does show the *work* of policing, and it's an interesting effort to make it clearly collective work rather than glamorizing the lone detective or the 'rogue' cop. The series was really influential. But like you, I wasn't inspired to read any further into it.

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  2. I can see how the novel would teach well in some ways but be a little thin in others. It must be very hard to separate the text from all of the later iterations. I know it was hard for me, constantly comparing the novel to Homicide and NYPD Blue, my shows.

    I wonder if there is a risk in the genre of gravitating towards sensational cases, like the serial murders of police detectives in Cop Hater. Genuinely ordinary ordinary police work is just too boring. I remember Homicide really fighting with this problem, and moving towards the sensational to stay on the air.

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  3. the last part is not remotely an aesthetic quality.

    This puzzles me about so many academic/critical discussions of literature: a novel will be praised because it introduced a new topic (serfdom, say, or the liberation of women), or because it provides insight into the workings of some industry, or because (as here) it marks a stage in the development of the author's writing, when all of this is entirely irrelevant to literature as an art (which is surely what's important about it -- otherwise why not read history or biography?).

    I wonder if there is a risk in the genre of gravitating towards sensational cases, like the serial murders of police detectives in Cop Hater. Genuinely ordinary ordinary police work is just too boring.

    This is a problem for literature in general: most readers are not interested in the boring lives of boring people like them, they want to read about exciting things happening to people who wear expensive clothes and will have extensive obituaries. They can be made to care about ordinary people, of course, but that's fighting the odds, so most of the novels people actually read, like most movies, present life as, well, richer than it generally is. Which degrades both people's esthetic sense and their ability to appreciate their own lives.

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    1. I don't know if this is a problem for literature so much as it's a problem for some readers. I don't think any art has the burden of presenting life "as it is," or of uplifting anyone's aesthetic sense and their ability to appreciate their own lives. That's a heavy burden on a poor novelist, who also has to uplift his own aesthetic sense and appreciate his own life. Most books are crap and have nothing to do with art, anyway, right?

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    2. It's a problem for literature because your "some readers" includes the vast majority of those who actually buy books. If this were not so, the sales of Dorothy Richardson and Nicholson Baker (to pick two novelists who do not cater to the craving for exciting events and protagonists) would far outpace those of (say) Dan Brown. It's obvious that I agree with you about the burden of art, but the fact remains that all but the most esthetic/ascetic of artists would prefer to, you know, sell their work.

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    3. It's the problem of capitalism estranging people from themselves in order to sell them a different idea of who they are. It goes far beyond the arts. I think all but the most esthetic/ascetic of artists would prefer to eat, so they want to sell their art, but the art they'd prefer to sell might not be marketable, so they are also estranged from themselves by the marketplace. Nobody wants my novels, so I put them on my website for free, but I have a good job that allows me to eat even if nobody buys my books. Maybe the vast majority of people who buy books just want entertainment, like the vast majority of people (who don't buy books). The publishing industry is a baffling mess, no different I guess from any of the arts (I just got an email telling me about the new season of a respected contemporary theater here in Seattle, and golly, what contemporary shallowness they have planned but I'll bet they have high ticket sales). More and more, I lean on Auden's statement that art is unnecessary to almost everyone, just another part of the human comedy.

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    4. It's the problem of capitalism estranging people from themselves in order to sell them a different idea of who they are.

      Oh, it goes well beyond that. People liked hearing about gods and kings long before capitalism was a thing. Most Greeks were of the ilk of Thersites, but they were happy to hear him mocked and Achilles lionized. I suspect it has something to do with why nobody's happy just to cultivate their garden.

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    5. Well, we already are experiencing our own lives. Why would I turn on the tv to watch myself watch me on tv? I got the real thing, 24 hours a day. People like to use their imaginations and to watch other people use their imaginations, so I guess it's not really a problem. It's evidence of interest in creativity. I confess I'm no longer sure what we're talking about.

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    6. Anyway, as you say above, people can read history and biography if they want to see about themselves. I never liked the "art as mirror" idea; I prefer "art as window."

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  4. We're talking to hear ourselves think, of course! Always assuming our host doesn't mind...

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  5. Mind! How pleasant to see all this.

    I would add that I was thinking more of - having a go at my old enemy - "realism," the police procedural being a logical "realistic" step within the detective genre. "Forget those phoney baloney amateur detectives and puzzle mysteries and metaphor-goofy gumshoes - here's the real thing!" And in some ways Cop Hater is more real, and in other ways not.

    Ariosto and Rabelais did not have to worry about getting too sensational. No such thing. In the other direction, the conceptual purity of Dorothy Richardson is a rare thing, even among her peers. I would not mind a little more of that, but where does it get you?

    K. C. Constantine's series of novels about police chief Mario Balzic are close to my ideal. They are really a roman fleuve about this character, his family, and the social changes in his town over decades, with as little melodrama as possible. Cult novels, now.

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  6. I like Sciascia's crime fiction. On the surface they are "realistic" procedurals, I think, but really they're sort of exhausted essays about the problem of evil. Dostoevsky on Valium.

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  7. I should say that one factor influencing me is my latest read-through of War & Peace (I'm reading it to my wife in the evenings); I'm finding myself irritated at Tolstoy's insistence on dragging in Napoleon, Kutuzov, and other Famous People when what the reader is interested in is Prince Andrei, Pierre, Natasha, et al.

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  8. But I love the Napoleon scenes; it’s a brilliant comic character that Tolstoy invented. And you need Napoleon and Kutuzov for the “Russia is way better than France” theme. It’s a big book, containing multitudes.

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  9. Oh, sure, you need Napoleon and Kutuzov for the novel Tolstoy wanted to write; you also need those interminable and maddeningly repetitious maunderings about History and Fate and the People. If I were his editor, I would have excised the latter mercilessly, but I agree that Boney is a brilliant comic character and that those scenes work as they were intended to -- I'm just saying that I find myself tiring of the Famous Personage as a mandatory element of historical novels.

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  10. I like Sciascia a lot. Still, in Sicily, it is hard to make your realism too sensational. I agree with your description.

    As for Napoleon as a character, I suppose I prefer the one in Love and Death, obsessed with the loss of prestige caused by Beef Wellington.

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  11. I am a little surprised by Keene’s comments. But not as surprised by some of the comments made in the thread to your post on The Makioka Sisters. That novel, as well as this one, was very much written about beauty. I am amused by Languagehat’s lazy assumption that I was commenting like a Neanderthal for Dolce Bellezza’s Makioka Sisters readalong. She herself focused on beauty & was correct for that… I will post my response there. My apologies Tom for commenting at length but I feel it’s necessary.

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  12. I appreciate the long comment. I admit I still do not understand a lot of it. Perhaps the heart of it" saying a novel is "about beauty" does not get me very far. Nettles is as much "about ugliness."

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