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.

Naming the garden in The Story of the Stone - the pleasures of incomprehension

The older sister of Bao-yu, the boy, now a young teen, who was born with the jade stone in his mouth, is an Imperial Concubine, a high prestige slave of the Emperor.  She is likely herself still a teen when we learn, in Chapter 16 of The Story of the Stone, that she has been given permission to visit her family.  The family responds by planning an enormous party, thus the inventory of drapes and tablecloths I quoted two posts previously.  Thus the purchase of a dozen actors to perform a series of plays and musical numbers.  And thus the construction of a large, fantastic landscaped garden, full of adorable little pavilions and bridges and tiny “mountains.”

Two semi-digressions. 

First, all of this absurd expense is meant to, and does, as I understand it, pay off not just in prestige but in money, met or exceeded by gifts from the emperor.  The Buddhist fairy tale story floats in the background, but this is mostly a crass novel. 

Second, I do not want to say I understand the exact legal status of the Concubine, or those actors, who are definitely purchased, not hired, or of the many servants.  One servant openly discusses the possibility of returning to her own family if they could afford to buy her back, which they cannot.  She thinks her owners would just let her go free, forgoing payment, if she would just ask.  This is all quite interesting.

More artistically interesting, though, In Chapter 17, is a long scene where Bao-yu, his father and a bunch of lickspittle “literary gentlemen” tour the garden, assigning poetic names and epigrams to each rock and pavilion.  The father, who has barely been in the novel before, challenges Bao-yu to beat the scholars, then insults his son while secretly being proud of him.

“Yes,” said Bao-yu, “but [the classical allusions] are too contrived. ‘The Phoenix Dance’ is more fitting.”

There was a loud murmur of assent from the literary gentlemen.  [The father] nodded and tried not to look pleased.

“Young idiot! What can be expected of so feather-brained a creature?” (Ch. 17, 332)

We get this business eight times in twenty pages, at much greater length than the quotation suggests, almost exactly repeated: the feature is described, the literary gentleman provide names that are dismissed as terrible, and Bao-yu comes up with a better name and an accompanying couplet of poetry. My interest in this chapter was in its alien quality, in my complete lack of ground to judge what the heck was going on.  The Imperial Concubine visits in the next chapter, and its rituals – including a complete renaming of the garden features! – seemed just as arbitrary.

I was never really fussing over the “greatness” of The Story of the Stone, certainly not this early into the novel, but it is hard not to be curious, right?  Strong claims have been made, although I note that Kenneth Rexroth, who adored the novel, begins his Classics Revisited essay with “Its virtues are not as obvious. In fact, they are not obvious at all.”  Anyway, it was with the garden scenes that I realized how far I was from making any kind of judgment about the book.  It is, in parts, at least, much too strange.  I hope there are many more such parts.

I might contrast the Concubine’s visit with Chapter 21, which is set, more or less, in a teenage girls’ dormitory during a boring holiday, when even the servants, who are themselves teenage girls, have nothing to do.  There is some sexual friction as the story of the love triangle, or quadrangle including Bao-Yu’s chamber-wife, advances, but mostly the many characters spend the entire chapter getting on each other’s nerves.  An outstanding piece of psychological realism.  Honestly, it will take Western literature another 150 years to really discover the teenager as a psychologically distinct character.  Please see Colette’s Le Blé en herbe / Ripening Seed (1923) for a pioneering example.

The teenagers, massive numbers of servants in tow, have now moved into the fantasy garden.  My understanding is that much of the remaining two thousand pages of the novel takes place there.  One can visit a 32 acre replica of this garden, built in 1984, in Beijing (source of the Sun Wen painting up above).

Di at the Little White Attic happily put all of her many posts about The Story of the Stone, which she read in a Vietnamese translation, likely quite different than the book I read, in one place.

 

The Story of the Stone, fairy tale and realism - Not so wonderful, really, is it?

I left the characters of The Story of the Stone as they were buying drapes and tablecloths for a party.  I will rejoin the party planning momentarily.

The Story of the Stone is a massive domestic novel about an extended family.  The main plot is the teenage love triangle, but that story takes place among an enormous, sometimes baffling number of aunts, cousins, siblings, and servants, just an unbelievable number of servants.  Every teenage aristocrat has a complement of personal servants, many of whom are themselves major characters.

Anyone can become the protagonist for a chapter.  The structure often feels like that of a television drama, where each supporting character gets one feature episode per season.  At least that is how many dramas worked in the old days, the 1990s; how would I know how they work now.

The Story of the Stone is also a Buddhist fairy story.  It is at the same time a radically “realist” novel, innovative for Chinese fiction and nearly a century ahead of European fiction.  Yet it is also about a magical jade stone and the boy who was born with it in his mouth, the kind of Chosen One who is so popular in juvenile fiction today, but chosen for what, exactly?

The tension or mismatch between the stark domestic materialism of the novel and the dream-like fairy tale elements is unlike anything I have ever seen.  In a curious scene, the hero Bao-yu is visiting the family of Aroma, his chamber-wife (his servant and sexual partner – he is, what, 14 here, and she is 15?):

… she reached out and took the Magic Jade from his neck.

“Here’s something that will interest you all,” she said, holding it out to the others.  “You know how often you’ve spoken about that wonderful jade of Master Bao’s and said how much you’d give for a look at it?  Well, here it is!  Now you can look to your heart’s content.  There you are, that’s all it is!  Not so wonderful, really, is it?”

They passed it from hand to hand, and when it had gone full circle and all had examined it, she hung it once more around his neck.  (Ch. 19, 382)

Pure anti-climax.  What should be “wonderful” is just another bit of jewelry.  The jade does save Bao-yu’s life at the end of this first volume, when a magical monk last seen several hundred pages earlier uses it to remove a witch’s curse from Bao-yu and his mother.  I take, perhaps wrongly, the fortuitous appearance of the monk as part of the fairy story and the witch’s curse, purchased by an envious, villainous aunt, as part of the domestic realism.

As a sociological novel, a place to go for insight into Chinese culture, I have no doubt that The Story of the Stone deserves the label of “greatest.”  All of the little rituals and interpersonal relations, the hierarchies, the way the domestic world interacts with the outside world, the pettiness, the crass money-grubbing, the astounding clothes and furniture (the food is abundant but sadly not described) – of course all of this is highly interesting.  Is it artistically interesting, though?  One more post, back to the teenagers, back to that garden.

I borrowed another image from Wikipedia, this time one of a large album of scenes from the novel by late 19th century painter Sun Wen, one of those scenes where I wish I knew what they were eating. 

On the greatness of The Story of the Stone - it is in a vigorous, somewhat staccato style

Some notes on The Story of the Stone, Volume 1: The Golden Days (c. 1760 or maybe 1792) by Cao Xueqin, the first of the five volumes of the Penguin edition of the greatest Chinese novel.

I don’t like writing about a book before I have finished it, but in a sense I did finish a book, right, so why not.  I am keenly aware that the novel has another 94 chapters and two thousand pages to go.  Well, 92 chapters, since I have begun the second volume.

From this text, I would never guess that The Story of the Stone is the greatest Chinese novel or even guess the grounds on which the claim could be made.  I will expand on that a bit.

“To hear you talk, it doesn’t sound as if all your years of play-going have taught you much,” said Bao-chai.  “This is an excellent play, both from the point of view of the music and of the words.”

“I can’t stand noisy plays,” said Bao-yu.  “I never could.”

“If you call this a noisy play,” said Bao-chai, “it proves that you don’t know what you’re talking about…  That means, musically speaking, that it is in a vigorous, somewhat staccato style.  In fact the musical excellence of this piece goes without saying.  But apart form that, the libretto is good, too.”  (Ch. 22, 435)

All references are to the landmark 1973 David Hawkes translation.

The Story of the Stone is, in large part, a teenage love triangle set in a fairy garden, a so-called Young Adult romantasy.  The characters above, magically-born Bao-yu and the perfect Bao-chai, are two-thirds of the love triangle.  Aren’t they adorable, what with their literary criticism?  Tragically, although Bao-chai loves Bao-Yu, he loves the third side of the triangle.

What is “great”?  The Story of the Stone is written in the vernacular rather than classical register, and had a significant effect on literary Chinese language, perhaps, as I take it, like Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (1827 / 1842) had on literary Italian.  All of this is invisible to me.

Visual artists have looted the novel for illustrations.  The characters and scenes are famous from paintings, prints, and film and television adaptations.  I assume comic books, too.  Potentially visible to me.  I should see if there is a book of artistic responses to the novel.  Please recommend if you know of such a thing.  The Wikipedia entry for The Story of the Stone has many interesting examples, one of which I borrowed, although it depicts a scene from the second volume of the translation.

Those are two objective reasons, a step removed from the text, for “great.”

Cao Xueqin’s language, as Hawkes writes it, is vigorous and somewhat staccato, often plain with lots of dialogue and minimal metaphor and scenes that would not be written so differently if they were in a play.  Descriptions are elaborate but reserved for clothing, furniture, and an extraordinary garden.  Descriptions often resemble, or are, lists.  Or inventories:

“Curtains, large and small, in various silks and satins – flowered, dragon-spot, sprigged, tapestry, panelled, ink-splash: one hundred and twenty. – Eighty of those were delivered yesterday. That leaves forty to come. – Blinds: two hundred. – Yes.  They all arrived yesterday. But then there are the special ones. – Blinds, scarlet felt: two hundred.  Speckled bamboo: one hundred. [skipping more kinds of bamboo] – Chair-covers, table-drapes, valances, tablecloths: one thousand two hundred of each” (17, 333)

Not the sort of prose I call great, yet I read this particular chapter with fascination.  But look how long I am running.  More tomorrow.  The garden, the poetry, and more teenagers in love.  “Each night I ask the stars up above / Why must I be a teenager in love?”  That is Dion, not Cao Xueqin, although it would make a good epigraph for The Story of the Stone.

How Ivan Bunin and Vasily Grossman spent the war - He was in the countryside then for the last time in his life

Without planning it I recently read three books by Russian writers from three different strands of Russian literature: Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur (1929 /1972, tr. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler) in the Gogolian and Dostoyevskian strand, Ivan Bunin’s Dark Avenues (1943/1946) following Turgenev and Chekhov, and A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army (2005, ed. and tr. by Anthony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova) for a Tolstoyan.  I will save Chevengur for later.  The Bunin and Grossman books, however different, had one interesting thing in common.  They were both documents of how these great writers spent World War II.

Grossman spent the war becoming the greatest Soviet war correspondent, and also it turns out acquiring the experience and subject matter to become a great novelist.  A Writer at War would be of the highest interest – the Soviet war from the perspective of an outstanding journalist – if Grossman had never written Life and Fate, but this book would likely not exist without the later novels. 

Surprisingly, the text of A Writer at War is mostly not his published journalism, too filled with propaganda, but rather excerpts from his journals, filled with things that would have gotten him sent to the gulag or worse, whatever his fame, if the wrong people had known he was recording them.  A good chunk of the text, maybe 30%, is actually by the historian Beevor, providing the big picture and tying Grossman’s pieces together. 

As the Soviet army advances, Grossman also becomes a pioneering journalist of the Holocaust.  “The Road to Treblinka” (1944), an early masterpiece, if that is the right word, of its kind is excerpted in A Writer at War, although it is worth reading it in full in The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays (2010) if you can stand it, and no judgment from me if you cannot.

Ivan Bunin, in his early seventies, spent the war in southern France, impoverished, helping other Russian émigrés and prisoners as best he could, the 1933 Nobel money long gone, distributed to charities.  He also spent the war writing love stories, three dozen love stories, sensual, nostalgic, sad, beautiful.

Here is the first paragraph of “An Emerald,” a page-long story about a young couple’s attempt to articulate love:

The nocturnal dark-blue blackness of the sky, covered in quietly floating clouds, everywhere white, but beside the high moon pale blue.  If you look closely, it isn’t the clouds floating, it’s the moon, and near it, together with it, a star’s golden tear is shed: the moon glides away into the heights that have no end, and carries the star away with it, ever higher and higher.  (69)

That first sentence is ur-Bunin.  Colors upon colors, even “blackness” modified by another color.  The shorter pieces, sometimes only half a page, are close to prose poems.  “Her lips moving over her white teeth were blue-grey, the bluish down of her upper lip thickened above the corners of her mouth” (245), from “The Camargue,” a page of male gaze with only a hint of story at the end.

Longer stories are more in the line of Turgenev.  Lots of First Love.  But Dark Avenues is a “theme and variations” book, so there is a little bit of everything, jaded lovers, affairs that end in renunciation or violence.  They always end.  I think that is true.  The time is almost always before the Revolution, but not always.  One story, but only one delicate tale of young love, ends like this:

This was in February of the terrible year of 1917.  He was in the countryside then for the last time in his life.  (“Tanya,” 115)

This story is followed by “In Paris,” with the Revolution in the distant past.  There are lots of little connections between the stories.  The end of “In Paris” may be too sad to quote.

Some other last sentences:

Returning to his room, he lay down on the couch and shot himself in the temples with two revolvers. (15)

I don’t remember anything else.  There was nothing else… (183, ellipses in original)

He was beaten with lashes and sent to Siberia, to the mines.  (205)

In some sense Dark Avenues is a relentlessly miserable book.  In other senses, not.  It is an erotic book, explicit for its time, much more so than anything allowed in the Soviet Union at this period since Stalin was something of a Puritan, forgive the anachronism, about sex in art.  Perhaps that was something of a political statement by Bunin.

I have been referring to the recent (2008) Hugh Alpin translation of Dark Avenues, the first English translation of the entire Russian collection.  I have read some of the stories in other collections by other translators, but the Alpin version is the place to go to try to see this masterpiece as a whole.

Books I read in September 2024 - Boring books had their origin in boring readers

My reading took an interesting Russian turn that I will write about, soon, tomorrow, there, I said it out loud so maybe I will really do it.

November is Norwegian month at Dolce Bellezza.  I will be joining her by reading at least the first novel, The Other Name (2019), of Jon Fosse’s Septology, and polar explorer Roald Amunden’s memoir My Life as an Explorer (1927).  Please join in the alliterative fun.

 

FICTION

The Mind of Mr J. G. Reeder (1925), Edgar Wallace – “The author of crime novels at one time so popular that every fourth book sold in Britain came from his pen” is how H. R. F. Keating introduces the extraordinary hack Edgar Wallace in Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books (1987, p. 31).  Can this possibly be true?  Exactly when, I wonder.  But it is true that although Agatha Christie won the war, Wallace won the early battles.  For a couple of decades in the detective novels of other writers, Edgar Wallace is the common reference, the mystery writer all of the characters apparently read, and the creator of all of the clichés that you won’t find in my novel, or if you do we can wink at them as deliberate Edgar Wallace stuff.

Wallace writes in a light, witty version of the 1920s British house style, simpler than Christie who is in turn simpler than Dorothy Sayers, not as funny as Wodehouse or Waugh, obviously, but with some good jokes in their line.  The crimes and solutions (this is a book of linked short stories) are nonsense but much more than those of many of his peers?  Not much more.  Easy, fun reading.

Passing (1929), Nella Larsen

Chevengur (1929/1972), Andrei Platonov – I’ll write about this one soon.  The quotation in the title is from Chevengur, p. 151.

Dark Avenues (1946), Ivan Bunin – This one, too.

The Remains of the Day (1989), Kazuo Ishiguro – For several years the contemporary writers who have attracted my attention have mostly been – see the next two books – conceptual art weirdos who are not necessarily trying to write great or perfect books.  But I still enjoy such things, like this one.  An intricate construction.  At times I almost – well, an experienced or jaded reader, I did not applaud or gasp, but I sure thought “Oh, good one, nicely done” or the equivalent.

Game of the Worlds (2000), César Aira

Half an Inch of Water (2015), Percival Everett – Short stories set in the Rocky Mountains.  Of a piece with his novels, except with more horses.

A Shining (2023), Jon Fosse – A single short story for some reason published as a book.  Minor.

 

POETRY

The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (1948-62), Derek Walcott – Some apprentice work, I guess, absorbing the influence of many other poets, but getting darn good by the end (meaning 1962).  Who knows when I will follow Walcott into the 1960s and 1970s.

O Lovely England and Other Poems (1952), Walter de la Mare – His last poetry book, barely distinguishable from his first in 1902.  Fifty years of lovely England, lovely poetry.

Collected Poems (1953-85), Elizabeth Jennings – A British Catholic in the quadrant with Auden and Larkin, maybe.  “Art is not self-expression while, for me, ‘confessional poetry’ is almost a contradiction in terms” (13).  Lots of interesting poems about paintings and music, and, sadly, mental asylums.

Sonnets for a Missing Key and some others (2024), Percival Everett

 

ADVENTURE AND JOURNALISM

The Royal Road to Romance (1925), Richard Halliburton – Fresh out of Princeton, young Halliburton begins what will become a round the world tour.  His tramp through Europe has me wondering why I was reading this trivial book, but it gets more interesting once he gets to India, and his enthusiasm, his love of the “romance” of pure movement, never stops.  I am reading another book about a tramp across Europe just a few years later, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Time of Gifts (1977), and they are opposites, in style, purpose, and tone.  Halliburton’s book may now be more interesting as part of the history of travel writing, the creation of the celebrity traveler, now I assume found on Instagram, than for its own sake.

A Writer at War (2005), Vasily Grossman – Another I will write a bit about separately, I swear.

 

FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE

Coral (1950), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen – Sophia’s mythological seashore poems take a dark turn in her third book.

Pedra Filosofal (1950), Jorge de Sena – Abstract compared to Breyner Andresen, and more difficult for the poor language learner.

O Cavaleiro da Dinamarca (1964), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen – The Knight from Denmark, a peculiar children’s novella which gives a little tour of European culture.  Portuguese children learn about Giotto and Dante and so on.  An oddity.  The other children’s books I have read of Breyner Andresen – and bless her, the Portuguese language learner says, for writing them – were about little children having magical adventures.

Mes Cahiers (1941), Colette – My Notebooks, a wartime scrapbook dump, of most interest for stories featuring early versions of her Cheri character.  But then there is some travel writing from the 1920s that is exquisitely written, almost abstract assemblages of form and color.

La Douleur (1985), Marguerite Duras – More notebooks, which the older Duras says she does not remember writing, about the events of the end of the war in Paris, like waiting for loved ones to return from camps, or the Resistance punishing collaborators.  Of high interest for the subject matter.  In English as The War.

 

Books I read in August 2024

My ambition this summer was to read extensively in Arabic literature.  Eh, I did all right, but I will have to save Ibn Battuta’s Travels and the second half of Leg over Leg for some other time.

 FICTION

The Arabian Nights (14th c.), many hands – In the great Hassan Haddawy translation.

I and My Chimney (1856), Herman Melville – Because I saw the actual chimney last month.  I thought it was made up.

I, Claudius (1934), Robert Graves – Is this a book for people who know Roman history, or is it a way to learn Roman history?  I suppose both.

Herself Surprised (1941), Joyce Cary – Classic mid-century British-adjacent novelistic eccentricity.  “I never saw Rozzie laugh right out in her life but once, and that was when she lost all her money and her left leg in the same week” (NYRB edition, p. 96).  Like I, Claudius, interesting in the ways it is a novel pretending not to be a novel.

Laura (1942), Vera Caspary – I was almost irritated by the voice of the narrator of the first third of the novel.  But then the narrator changes and there is a twist that completely changes the story - that moves me to an entirely different story - and everything was fine

The End of the Affair (1951), Graham Greene – Now that I have read it I do not understand the reputation of this novel, likely related to my puzzlement over that of Brideshead Revisited.  I mean, characters debate theism.  Am I supposed to take that seriously?

Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), James Baldwin – An entirely different way to write a novel that is serious about religious belief.

Fountain and Tomb (1975), Naguib Mahfouz – Fragments, some of which almost amount to stories, which thirty years after Midaq Alley again depict life in one little corner of Cairo, this time largely from a child’s point of view.  Formally and sociologically quite interesting.  “But that’s how stories are told in our alley” (96).  Set in the 1920s, the book is of course full of gangsters.

Hurricane Season (2016), Fernanda Melchor – Perhaps the most disgusting book I have ever read, up there with Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God (1973), but where McCarthy aestheticizes the language, shoving signifiers of beauty against the appalling subject matter, Melchor lets the ugliness spill over everything.  I would like to think of the novel as a fantasy, a horror novel, but I am afraid it is also a Condition of Mexico novel – poor Mexico!  And the most outrageous, maybe the best, part was the last chapter, the last three pages, a travesty of hope.

Telephone (2020), Percival Everett – Every Everett novel I have read is some kind of balance or reconciliation of the postmodern and domestic novel, and this one leans the most to the domestic side.  It is the sad story of parents with a mortally ill child.  But it is also the most conceptually radical Everett book I have encountered, an art object that attacks the idea of a stable text.

PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy in the Islamic World (2016), Peter Adamson

POETRY

Selected Poems (1851-1901), George Meredith

Poems by Emily Dickinson (1859-80) – A chapbook length selection sold at the Dickinson House in Amherst, well chosen by three of the amazing house guides.  It is worth going to the Dickinson House just to meet the guides.

The Music of Human Flesh (1966-77) &

Adam of Two Edens (1989-95) &

If I Were Another (1990-2005), Mahmoud Darwish

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

La vendetta (1830) &

La bourse (1832), Honoré de Balzac – I had read La bourse (The purse) in English, but La vendetta was new, #46 in my reading of the Comedie humaine.  Almost halfway!  I will never read them all.

Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), Louis-Ferdinand Céline – Some notes back here.  If only Céline could read that Melchor novel.

Dia do Mar (1947), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

Vou Mudar a Cozinha (2022), Ondjaki – I’m Going to Move the Kitchen, stories from Angola and elsewhere.

A Descoberta das Ilhas Selvagens (2024), José Pedro Castanheira – The second self-indulgent diaristic travel book I have read in two months by a Portuguese journalist, this time about a sailing trip to desert islands belonging to Madeira.  A great book for the Portuguese language learner, full of useful vocabulary with strong context and much repetition.  That is all I am asking for.  Yes, the book comes with its own bookmark.

You drool from it. You are happy. - Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit

Finally, I have finished Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), known in English as Journey to the End of Night.  That “end of night” is death.  The existence of death makes everything hateful and nullifies the value of anything else.  I gotta say that the ideas and satire in the novel are not exactly deep.  It’s all in the attitude, the language.

Le voyage c’est la recherche de ce rien du tout, de ce petit vertige pour couillons…  (274, 1952 Gallimard paperback, ellipses in original, how Céline loves ellipses)

The voyage is the search for this nothing at all, this little vertigo for imbeciles...  (tr., against good judgment, mine)

“Couillons” has stronger, more obscene possibilities.  The translations of this novel are feats.  It is the longest and most difficult French book I have ever attempted, 630 pages of informal, slangy French, much of it in the form of commentary or even rants.  Some earlier books, like Emmanuel Bove’s My Friends (1924), had pushed towards a less formal, less correct, literary French, but it was Céline who demolished the concept.  Surrealist semi-novels like Nadja (1928) and Paris Peasant (1926) look so well-behaved by contrast.

The influence of the novel is linguistic and formal.  Henry Miller scrapped his manuscript and rewrote The Tropic of Cancer (1934) from scratch as soon as he finished Voyage.  Jean-Paul Sartre completely rewrote Nausea (1938), not that he did anything half as radical.  Here is Céline’s narrator on Sunday mornings, a bit borrowed directly by Sartre:

An empty bus rushed towards the depot.  Ideas also end by having their Sunday; you are more stunned than normal.  You are there, empty.  You drool from it.  You are happy.  You have nothing to do, because nothing really occurs to you, you are too poor, you are disgusted with existence?  That would be the usual.  (377)

Poisonous pessimism, but from a narrator too passive to do anything about it.  The novel is structured like Candide (1759), with the narrator spending the first half of the book experiencing terrible things – the front line of World War I, colonial Central Africa, Spanish pirates (?), and the Ford Motor Company – and the second half observing terrible things happening to other people, in the role of a doctor in a working class Parisian suburb and later in a mental hospital.  Although by temperament Céline is over on Rousseau’s side of things, not Voltaire’s.

The ethos of Voyage is anti-war, anti-colonial, anti-American, and anti-industrial.  There is a chapter that is specifically against scientific testing of animals.  Based on nothing else, I would align Céline with the French left of the time, and my understanding is that the literary French left was fooled for a while.  But Céline was not going to be aligned with anyone, even if he had to prove it, a few years later, by becoming the most hysterical Jew hater in French literature. If there was a hint of anti-Semitism or any mention of any Jewish subject at all in Voyage I did not recognize it.

Crazy stuff.  I am glad to have finally read this missing link between Rabelais and Villon one the one end and Jean Genet and the anti-novel on the other.

Then they looked at me, he and Madelon, like they found themselves before a druggie, a victim of poison gas, a drooler, and it was not even worth the trouble of responding to me… (603)

What am I doing, I have no business translating Céline.  I do hope I will now remember his favorite vowels like baver (drool) and bafouiller (stammer).  Metaphysics, a vision of existence, expressed by verb choice.