The Wuthering Expectations Best of 2009

Three extra-large Humiliations were crossed off my list: Walden, The Scarlet Letter, and The Flowers of Evil, all highly rewarding.  Let's set those aside, though. 

Some fleeting highlights:

1. Thoreau recommends the "rich sweet cider" of the frozen-thawed apple.  "Your jaws are the cider-press."  ("Wild Apples").

2.  Charles Baudelaire smashes an itinerant glass saleman's backback of samples with a flower pot, just to hear the smash ("as of lightning striking a crystal palace"), to introduce some beauty into this ugly world of ours. "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!"  (Paris Spleen, "The Bad Glazier").

3. We spend eighteen hours or so sitting next to Judge Pyncheon.  Hawthorne tells us about the Judge's big day.  They're going to nominate him for Governor!  Why won't Judge Pyncheon move?  "Rise up, Judge Pyncheon!" (Chapter 18 of Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables).

4. A Kazakh railroad worker battles his prize bull camel.  We gaze upon a sturgeon; the sturgeon gazes upon us.  (Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years).

5.  All that Yiddish literature, so much, so good.  The futile attempt of I. L. Peretz's poor student to come up with a story that's not about the blood libel. ("Stories").  Hodl's farewell to her father, Tevye the Dairyman.  "Let's talk about something more cheerful.  Have you heard any news of the cholera in Odessa?" (Sholem Aleichem, "Hodl," Tevye the Dairyman).

6.  Arthur Hugh Clough can't get milk for his coffee.   ("Amours de Voyage").

7.  Cranford, Silas Marner, Villette.  Three perfect novels, allowing for some variety in one's standards of perfection.  The methods varied, too: Eliot compressed, Gaskell tied up loose ends, and Brontë pushed, hard.  If I end up marvelling more at Villette, it's because it is so complex, and because after just a bit of looking at secondary souces I have developed the crackpot notion that I possess an original idea about the novel.  Forthcoming in 2010, if I can bring myself to do the work, which I mightn't.

8.  The moment in Flaubert's "A Simple Heart" when they put the stuffed parrot - no, you'll have to go see for yourself.  Is this story the best thing Flaubert ever wrote?  Talk about perfection.

I just want to keep going.  The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan.  Edouard Mörike's  Mozart's Journey to Prague.  Gérard de Nerval's Sylvie.  "The benediction of the air."  John Galt!

I should skip this last part.  No, it's eating at me, since I just read it.  Worst of the year:  the second half of A Study in Scarlet (1887), the first Sherlock Holmes novel.  The Holmes-free Utah section is so, so bad, an undramatic jangle of clichés.  It's not only terribly written on its own, but once we return to Holmes, its dreadfulness has somehow even soaked into Watson's journal, tainting the rest of the novel.  The first half was all right!

A toad sings amorously, his throat full of pearls - Colette's animals

"A little later comes a hedgehog, a muddle-headed, scatter-brained creature, bold yet easily frightened, who scuttles along in a nearsighted way, goes into the wrong hole, eats greedily, is frightened of the car and makes a noise like a young pig on the loose. The gray cat hates him, but hardly ever goes near him, and her green eyes grow bitter when she looks at him." (23)

That hedgehog and cat live in Colette's Retreat from Love (1907), where we also find a toad, a bat, a dog, a crab, and probably other critters that I have forgotten. I read this novel fifteen years ago, I would guess, and I had to remind myself what it was about - a bunch of crisscrossing love affairs, lovely but diaphanous, hard to remember.

But I remembered that hedgehog, and the bitter cat. And the toad, definitely the toad:

"under the five loose stone steps a toad sings amorously, his throat full of pearls. At dusk he drives away the last midges, the little grubs which live in the cracked stones. From time to time he looks at me deferentially, but with reassurance, then - leaning one hand against the wall in human fashion he stands up to swallow - I hear the nop sound of his wide mouth. When he rests he moves his eyelids in such a pensive and lofty way that I haven't yet dared say a word to him." (22-3)

I found it interesting that Chingiz Aitmatov had been a veterinarian, which certainly informed his writing about animals. Aitmatov reminded me of Colette, oddly. I mean, her world of Parisian courtesans seems pretty far removed from the Kazakhstani steppes. Who knows why she wrote about animals so much, and so well? She, like Aitmatov, observed their world carefully, and made it part of her book. Few novelists do that.

Or am I wrong? Juvenile novels are menageries, right, definitely. I remember reading all sorts of animal stories - raccoons as pets, bears as pets, dogs and more dogs. I don't remember too well if any of them were that well written. I'll think some more. I had not really planned to write about this; maybe it won't go anywhere.

Suggestions, though, are most welcome - who, novelist or otherwise, was good at writing about animals?

Quotations from the Margaret Crosland translation, the only English version, I think.

The unfamiliar light was like a blow on the head - Chingiz Aitmatov's animals

The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years contains one more surprising jab at the Soviet government that I did not mention yesterday. The protagonist grew up as a fisherman on the Aral Sea, and Chingiz Aitmatov vividly, angrily, describes its destruction. It's more of a sub-theme than a primary one, but this is, among other things, an eco-novel.

The first three pages of the novel are told from the point of view of a fox. I first thought this was a way to "make it strange" - "it," in this case, being the railroads that run across the steppes. But later scenes are from the point of view of a camel, and an eagle, and, for part of one paragraph, maybe just a couple of sentences, a sturgeon:

"It was a large fish, a powerful and beautiful fish. It flapped its golden tail feverishly, twisting, jumping and throwing the wet pebbles around; at the same time, with its rosy mouth open, it turned towards the sea, struggling to get back to its own element, back to the surf. For a second or so it was suddenly still and quiet, looking around with its unblinking, reproachful eyes, round and clear, trying to adjust to the new world in which it had found itself. Even in the dusky evening of the wintry day, the unfamiliar light was like a blow on the head. The fish saw the shining eyes of the two people leaning over it, a bit of the shore and the sky; in the distance far away out over the sea, it could make out on the horizon, behind thin clouds, the unbearably bright light of the setting sun." (245)

Oh, this is better than I had remembered. "Powerful" and "beautiful," those are the thoughts of Yedigei, the protagonist. The next sentence is more objective, but by the word "reproachful," perhaps, we have entered into the perceptions of the fish. So Aitmatov leads us into the fish. First we, with the people, see the eyes of the fish, then, with the fish, we see the shining eyes of the people. The gaze into space actually hints at the science fiction subplot and the climax of the novel.

A fragment from the bull camel's persepctive:

"How dare people come into his territory? How dare they approach his harem? What right had they to interrupt his rut? He shrieked in loud protest and shaking his head on his long neck, bared his teeth like a dragon, opening wide his fearsome, yawning maw. His breath poured like smoke from his hot mouth out into the cold air and settled on his black, shaggy locks as a white hoarfrost. In his excitement he began to piss, standing there and sending forth a stream into the wind so that the air stank of it and icy drops fell on Yedigei's face." (268)

Aitmatov was actually a veterinarian before he became a writer. That explains his interest in animals, perhaps, but not the way he writes about them.

Chingiz Aitmatov's The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years is a good novel

I have some bad news. I recently came across the name of Chingiz Aitmatov, Kyrgyzstan's "greatest writer". I read one of his novels, The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years (1980). Here's the bad news: it's good, really quite good. Here's worse news: it is, strictly speaking, socialist realism.

I'm joking, but I'm not. If there were a single literary genre which I thought I could completely skip, that must be entirely without literary value, it was socialist realism. Meine Frau tells me that she once read an East German socialist realist novel about apple-cheeked young factory workers who inspired their colleagues to ever-greater productivity. That is definitely not the novel Aitmatov wrote.

Burannyi Yedigei works at a railroad junction in the southern Kazakhstani steppes. His best friend has died, and Yedigei organizes a journey to bury him in a traditional cemetery. That gives us the "day" of the title; we rummage around in Yedigei's past as he rides his camel across the steppes. We learn about his World War II service, his relationship with a young family who are exiled to the railroad junction, and his perhaps even more complicated relationship with his bull Bactrian camel. There's a lot about camels. Some of the best writing is about the camel.

The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years has, intermixed with Yedigei's story, a genuine science fiction plot, about alien contact. The novel also dives back a lot farther than a hundred years to pull in a couple of "traditional" stories, one from the oral folk epic Manas, one of Aitmatov's own invention. So we sometimes leap from cosmonauts on a space station to a legendary tale of warrior nomads who tortured their captives until they became mindless automatons, and a heroic mother who tried to rescue her enslaved son. Science fiction fans may very well find this more irritating than reg'lar ol' readers of literature. My only criticism is that some of the allegory is a little bald. But the linked layers work - they mean more together than they do spearately.

The tortured and brainwashed slaves, a weak-willed rationalist who argues that soon the state will control people's behavior through radio waves, a science fiction plot that is clearly a criticism of the Iron Curtain and Soviet cultural isolation, and an entire novel that seems to me plainly to advocate individualism within the context of a traditional culture, and whose protagonist is unapologetically Muslim - how was this published in the Soviet Union in 1980?

I don't know, and neither does the author of the foreward, Katerina Clark. She suggests that the Soviets were allowing more expression of nationalism by minorities, and that Aitmatov was a Communist insider, and that the novel is sufficiently ambivalent that the Soviets could let it through. I did notice that most of the really bad activity in the novel occurs under Stalin, and there are just a few pages of dull stuff near the end ("We must, all of us, all as one, hold on to this view of justice," and so on, p. 320) that sound like the real socialist realist deal. Was that really enough to assuage the censors?

Lest I give the wrong idea, I don't want to claim that Aitmatov's novel is One Hundred Years of Solitude or Midnight's Children or The Emigrants or Things Fall Apart, one of those novels of big international reputation that most readers should probably try just to see what the fuss is all about, nor that it's a great injustice that the novel is virtually unknown.

But it's a modest injustice, and I would like to read more of Aitmatov's books.

Chingiz Aitmatov, Kyrgyzstan's greatest writer, and an epic twenty times longer than Homer

So yesterday I made a list of the most famous 19th century books that I have not read. I did not list any Asian books, because to my knowledge the 19th was not such a hot century for Asian literature. I mean that relatively - but I have a pretty good idea that my Asian Humiliations reside elsewhere:

Japanese: Lady Murasaki, The Tale of Genji
Chinese: Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone
Sanskrit: Kalidasa, The Messenger of Sakantala
Persian: Attar, The Conference of the Birds

And much, much else. I'm still learning the lay of the land here. For example, to leap across the centuries, I came across this upcoming seminar / adult ed class at the Newberry Library in Chicago (scroll down a bit at the link, past the Musil and Proust):

"Chingiz Aitmatov: Lion of Central Asia

In June 2008 Kyrgyzstan lost arguably its greatest writer. We will discuss the novel of Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, considering both its literary merit and its cultural context. The Kyrgyz epic, Manas, will also be sampled as part of the ancient background of modern Kyrgyz literature. We will discuss themes from the novel and the epic, fragments from Aitmatov's other works, as well as current Kyrgyz culture.

D. Stanley Moore, a former teacher at Rich Township High School and Prairie State College, has taught in Russia, China, the Czech Republic, and as a Fulbright scholar in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan."

Six classes, $155. This has to be money well-spent - I predict an extremely high return on investment. Chingiz Aitmatov? The Kyrgyz epic? I poked around a bit and found this extremely useful piece, with sample translations, by a University of Washington Ph.D. student. Manas, we are told, dates from no-one-knows-when, and in its longest version extends to half a million lines, making it two and a half times longer than the Mahabharata, which, you may remember, is being published in a thirty-plus volume edition by the Clay Sanskrit Library. It's also twenty times longer than Homer's two books combined. I don't understand how this is even physically possible.

I've outgrown, I hope, the completeness neurosis, the idea that once I've read a certain list of books, I'm done. There is no completeness, there is no list. It's all wonderfully endless. Or sufficiently endless. There is a "done", I'm afraid. "Done" is a whole 'nother thing.