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My handwriting hieroglyphics being incomprehensible, I decided some time ago to compose my reading notes on computer. These “reviews” were personal. They were, we might say however, written for somebody else, namely…me, because I know that over time, me becomes somebody else: what we read slowly fades from our memory. Why can’t somebody else be you, if you’re willing? Maybe these notes—all quite recent—will interest you and inspire you to read some of the books. There are only a few non-fiction works reviewed here: they are highly recommended. The others are fiction. The fiction reviews are in two parts:
OVERVIEW presents general impressions on the subject and mode of writing. This is not a “spoiler,” as it doesn’t reveal the plot, so it can be read before reading the novel. Often, there are quotes of passages from the book to give an idea of the writing style, which counts a lot for me. I always try to bring out the particularity of the work, eventually its innovation. I have personal thematic and artistic preferences, which I expose as clearly as possible, because I don’t hesitate to qualify the writing and the subject matter of the books. Needless to say, a number of books here have not impressed me positively.
THOUGHTS AFTER READING delves into how the novel works. You should read the book before consulting these notes. There can be quotes of passages from the book to illustrate the technique of writing or to develop certain themes. Occasionally, I sum up the plot (just for memory’s sake). I encourage you to read the Thoughts section.
New reviews are forthcoming.
NOTE: People have suggested that, in the book list, I give a clear indication which books I recommend. This should, undoubtedly, make things faster and easier for my readers. However, I find it impossible to grade my preferred books, because each has its specific qualities. I endeavor to reveal the stylistic and thematic characteristics of each book as diligently as possible to help future readers decide if the work corresponds to their taste, whatever my personal preferences. Also, a short review and the absence of an Afterthoughts section should not be construed as a negative opinion or lack of interest on my part.
The preferred books in the list are preceded by a ¤ ; however they are not listed in any particular order. A number of the other books are excellent and may correspond to certain readers’ taste.
NOTE: Links << or >>
In the book list, click on the authors’s name<<: the corresponding Overview will open immediately upper left.
At the end of the Overview, three possibities:
1-the Overview continues, click on the >>book-title-OVERVIEW link to read the rest of the Overview;
2-the Overview is complete and you want to read the Thoughts page, click on the >>book-title-THOUGHTS link;
3-the Overview is complete and you want to go back to the book list, click on the >>THE BOOKS link, which brings you back to the top of the book list.
The files labeled doc… are documentation for certain books and are referenced in their respective reviews. When there are links to exterior documentation, the documents open in a separate window, allowing an easy return to the present website.
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OVERVIEW
When we discover Count Rostov at his trial at the beginning of the book, with his titles, his “festooned” jacket, his nonchalance, we might think we are dealing with a reincarnated Oblomov. But differences become immediately apparent: contrary to the latter, Rostov has humor and he has a truly superior intelligence. To these qualities will be added many others as the story progresses: Rostov possesses a solid healthy physic, authentic cultural and philosophical depth and above all, real humanity. In no time at all, we become attached to him.
Towles’ writing espouses the personality of his character. Elegant, supple, precise. A tale told by a narrator-bard who comments events directly in the text, sometimes with a certain irony, and even relates authentic historical elements in footnotes.
At the beginning of the story, the reader understands the general historical context: we are in Moscow in the Metropol Hotel in 1922, when the revolution has practically ended and the Bolsheviks are fully in power. The hotel—a form of unity of place—is a microcosmic world, isolated from the outside: ideal to permit the observation and evolution of Rostov’s personality through his interaction with a limited number of characters and events.
Not isolated, in fact. The outside world comes into the hotel already in the first chapters in the form of a Railway Workers Union meeting in the hotel. As the story develops, we are more and more conscious of the things that are happening outside, via the introduction of certain characters and events inside the hotel and via remarks of the narrator.
However, the day-to-day is always inside the hotel, and the story is centered entirely on Rostov.
While creating a memorable portrait of a person, Towles helps us understand the tragedy and contradictions of Russian society in the period from 1922 to 1954. And he catches the reader off guard: from a simple tale, the story evolves surreptitiously into a superb thriller.
After reading the book >>A Gentleman in Moscow THOUGHTS
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OVERVIEW
400 pages of small print. And it’s non-fiction. The subject: one of the remotest and coldest parts of our planet. Full half of the book concerns the life of animals and humans in this environment. Much of the rest describes the 19th century explorations, often tragic, of the region. But how is it possible to read every page, untiringly, utterly captivated, till the very end? Perhaps the best way to answer that “how” is to read a few extracts from the book.
I remember the wild, dedicated lives of the birds that night and also the abandon with which a small herd of caribou crossed the Kokolik River to the northwest, the incident of only a few moments. They pranced through like wild mares, kicking up sheets of water across the evening sun and shaking it off on the far side like huge dogs, a bloom of spray that glittered in the air around them like grains of mica.
I remember the press of light against my face. The explosive skitter of calves among grazing caribou. And the warm intensity of the eggs beneath these resolute birds. Until then, perhaps because the sun was shining in the very middle of the night, so out of tune with my own customary perception, I had never known how benign sunlight could be. How forgiving. How run through with compassion in a land that bore so eloquently the evidence of centuries
of winter. (xxvi)
During those summer days on Ilingnorak Ridge there was no dark night. Darkness never came. The birds were born. They flourished, and then flew south in the wake of the caribou. [xxvi]
Read the complete >>Arctic Dreams OVERVIEW
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OVERVIEW
There are books that change the way you see things, that transform the feelings and concepts you espoused up till the moment you read them. Such is the case with Madeline Miller’s Circe.
Greek mythology has always been a source of interest and pleasure for me. Outside of the inevitable Iliad and Odyssey, I have enjoyed the mythological evocations in Greek drama−Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes−and in Latin poetry−Ovid, Virgil−and in the French theatre of Racine and Anouilh.
Knowing Odysseus’ adventures, I expected Circe to be a genre of fantasy literature and therefore a simple amusement. Madeline’s Miller’s book proved otherwise. It is not only beautifully written, with poetic language and imagery, but it is profoundly philosophical. The drama, the magic, even the spectacular are all there, for sure; but they are a sort of background to the real story, with the nobler and deeper emotions and thoughts that constitute the essence of the book. The original myth is transcended, enlarged, and put into a new perspective.
After reading the book >>Circe THOUGHTS
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OVERVIEW
Never would I have thought to read a novel that is a Western. Sebastien Barry's Days Without End has it all: a real Western with cowboys, Indians, troopers in the Far West, shoot-outs, skirmishes, the normal stuff. Admittedly, in films, I tolerate these ingredients only in the greatest of the genre, essentially films with anti-heroes, those which attain a dimension of reall tragedy or, why not, real comedy, those which go outside the stereotype. Thank goodness, this is the case in Sebastian Barry's novel.
But still: how incredible to read a Western! Clearly, there's something more: among many other things, for example, an expression of profound humanity devoid of sentimentalism. Or also, a spontaneous embrace of the bewitching beauties of the landscape. These observations of nature--practically prose poems--are perfectly integrated into the hero-narrator's personality, without ever giving us a feeling of incongruity.
A tour de force. This is writing of the highest caliber.
Narrator, Thomas McNulty, looks back at his experiences in and out of—mostly in—the US Army mid 19th century out West. He has a unique Irish twang, which catches us right from the start, along with a colorful, rather philosophical, view of things.
The method of laying out a corpse in Missouri sure took the proverbial cake. Like decking out our poor lost troopers for marriage rather than death. All their uniforms brushed down with lamp-oil into a state never seen when they were alive. Their faces clean shaved, as if the embalmer sure didn’t like no whiskers showing. No one that knew him could have recognised Trooper Watchorn because those famous Dundrearies was gone. Anyway Death likes to make a stranger of your face. True enough their boxes weren’t but cheap wood but that was not the point. You lift one of those boxes and the body makes a big sag in it. Wood cut so thin at the mill it was more a wafer than a plank. But dead boys don’t mind things like that. The point was, we were glad to see them so well turned out, considering. [1]
Thomas flashes back to his fortuitous encounter with John Cole before they went into the army.
John Cole and me we came to the volunteering point together of course. We was offering ourselves in a joint sale I guess and the same look of the arse out of his trousers that I had he had too. Like twins. Well when we finished up at the saloon [where, adolescent boys, they had worked as dancers dressed in women’s clothes to amuse miners] we didn’t leave in no dresses. We must have looked like beggar boys. He was born in New England where the strength died out of his father’s earth. John Cole was only twelve when he lit out a-wandering. First moment I saw him I thought there’s a pal. That’s what it was. Thought he was a dandy-looking sort of boy. Pinched though he was in the face by hunger. ... ...
After reading the book >>Days Without End THOUGHTS
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OVERVIEW
Normally, stories with “too-nice” characters bore me. I have to admit that Gail Honeyman’s book is an exception. The characters are “idealized” perhaps, but they’re also “right-on.” Humanity without vulgarity or over-simplification.
Eleanor's voice—unique, magnificently developed by Honeyman—catches us right from the start and we never tire of it till the end. Refined vocabulary, superior intellect, acute sense of observation. As Honeyman explains in an interview at the end of the book: ”Once I could ‘hear’ Eleanor’s voice, the characterisation developed from that starting point. I enjoyed the challenge of creating the character, working her out and trying to balance humour with the darker aspects of the narrative. I also tried to ensure that Eleanor was never self-pitying, so that there was space for the reader to draw their own conclusions and, hopefully, empathise with her...I feel that I know my characters intimately—how they smell, the state of their teeth, what they’re scared of…”
Early on in the book, Honeyman has given us hints so we know...or think we know...what Eleanor’s story is. But there's a twist. Nicely done!
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OVERVIEW
At the time of my visit, there were only forty women in the Penitentiary. This speaks much for the superior moral training of the feebler sex. My chief object in visiting their department was to look at the celebrated murderess, Grace Marks, of whom I had heard a great deal, not only from the public papers, but from the gentleman who defended her upon her trial, and whose able pleading saved her from the gallows, on which her wretched accomplice closed his guilty career.
Susana MOODIE, Life in the Clearings, 1853
So begins Alias Grace. This is a real historical document. Then, a ditty, a rimed ballad, tells the whole story of the murder, the trial, and the imprisonment of Grace Marks. A young doctor wants to understand Grace. Is she a murderess? Is she insane? Is she a dissembler? Who is she?
The story alternates between Grace unraveling her thoughts in the first person and third person narrative or epistolary exchanges between the doctor and different persons.
Each chapter is illustrated by a quilt piece: metaphorically we will try to assemble a patchwork.
For some 530 odd pages, three quarters of which we are in Grace’s mind, Atwood never let’s us go. Characters speak and write in the style of the epoch. Grace’s inner dialogues are without quotation marks. Her observation of details, her analyzing how others think, her reasoning on what to say blur the lines between objectivity and subjectivity and make us share in her thought processes. Her voice is unique: its tone and rhythm become ours and haunt us long after we have finished reading.
... He smiles, and then he does a strange thing. He puts his left hand into his pocket and pulls out an apple. He walks over to me slowly, holding the apple out in front of him like someone holding out a bone to a dangerous dog, in order to win him over.
This is for you, he says.
I am so thirsty the apple looks to me like a big drop of water, cool and red. I could drink it down in one gulp. I hesitate; but then I think, There’s nothing bad in an apple, and so I take it. I haven’t had an apple of my own for a long time. This apple must be from last autumn, kept in a barrel in the cellar, but it seems fresh enough.
I am not a dog, I say to him.
Most people would ask me what I mean by saying that, but he laughs. His laugh is just one breath, Hah, as if he’s found a thing he has lost; and he says, No, Grace, I can see you are not a dog.
What is he thinking? I stand holding the apple in both hands. It feels precious, like a heavy treasure. I lift it up and smell it. It has such an odour of outdoors on it I want to cry.
Aren’t you going to eat it, he says.
No, not yet, I say.
Why not, he says.
Because then it would be gone, I say.
The truth is I don’t want him watching me while I eat. I don’t want him to see my hunger. If you have a need and they find it out, they will use it against you. The best way is to stop from wanting anything.
He gives his one laugh. Can you tell me what it is, he says.
I look at him, then look away. An apple, I say. He must think I am simple; or else it’s a trick of some sort; or else he is mad and that is why they locked the door—they’ve locked me into this room with a madman. But men who are dressed in clothes like his cannot be mad, especially the gold watch-chain—his relatives or else his keeper would have it off him in a trice if so.
He smiles, his lopsided smile. What does Apple make you think of? he says.
I beg your pardon, Sir, I say. I do not understand you.
It must be a riddle. I think of Mary Whitney, and the apple peelings we threw over our shoulders that night, to see who we would marry. But I will not tell him that.
I think you understand well enough, he says.
My sampler, I say.
Now it his turn to know nothing. Your what? he says.
My sampler that I stitched as a child, I say. A is for Apple, B is for Bee. ..[43-45]
After reading the book >>Alias Grace THOUGHTS
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OVERVIEW
It’s hard for me to understand why this book is so successful. Is it more so in the US? Is it because its heroine postulates that the color of her skin does not have social significance and is not central to her existence...in Africa and...outside of the United States? Is the book perceived differently in the US, in Europe, in Africa?
One thing is certain: the writing is elegant, flowing, direct, uncomplicated, and the story intermingles seamlessly present and past. The novel is, however, tainted by demagoguery and discursiveness. Also, the heroine’s life, is very feminine-centered, with multiple preoccupations around feminine physical beauty, hair-styling, etc. which aren’t particularly my thing−although I suppose I’ve opened up more to this world through the book.
Below is a long passage illustrating the excellent writing:
...she finished eating her eggs and resolved to stop faking the American accent. She first spoke without the American accent that afternoon at Thirtieth Street Station, leaning towards the woman behind the Amtrak counter.
“Could I have a round trip to Haverhill, please? Returning Sunday afternoon. I have a Student Advantage card”, she said, and felt a rush of pleasure from giving the t its full due in “advantage”, from not rolling her r in “Haverhill”. This was truly her, this was the voice with which she would speak if she were woken up from deep sleep during an earthquake. Still, she resolved that if the Amtrak woman responded to her accent by speaking too slowly as though to an idiot, then she would put on her Mr Agbo Voice, the mannered, overcareful pronunciations she had learned during debate meetings in secondary school, when the bearded Mr Agbo, tugging at his frayed tie, played BBC recordings on his cassette player and then made all the students pronounce words over and over until he beamed and cried “Correct!” She would also affect, with the Mr Agbo Voice, a slight raising of her eyebrows in what she imagined was a haughty foreigner pose. But there was no need to do any of these because the Amtrak woman spoke normally. “Can I see an ID, miss?”
And so she did not use her Mr Agbo Voice until she met Blaine. ... ...
After reading the book >>Americanah THOUGHTS
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OVERVIEW
Self-evident: our proper experiences and culture play a vital role in our reception of a work of fiction. There is a difference between those who connect to the writing of Michael Crichton and those who connect to that of William Faulkner or James Joyce. I clearly do not connect to the former (for me, a pure vulgar bore), rather to the latter; and my judgment of a literary work is influenced by this bias. Which is not to say that I am closed to works which are a lot less demanding than Faulkner or Joyce (with Crichton still way off-limits).
Now, what do I do with George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo? My position below may seem extreme, but, as they say, I cannot do otherwise...
Colson Whitehead is quoted on the cover of the book: “A luminous feat of generosity and humanism.” Really?! We’re supposed to feel Abraham Lincoln’s suffering for his son’s death, while the Civil War rages, and that—but for some boring real and invented “historical” documents—through the lucubrations of dead souls floating around in a cemetery before they disappear into oblivion. Language and imagery (if such a flattering term can be employed) are ... ugly. Worse: pathos, prosaism, no imagination...
Where imagination is manifest: in the Man-Booker prize declaration concerning this novel which qualifies it as “utterly original” and “deeply moving.” George Sanders must surely have thought as much of the prize of £50,000: divine surprise!
PS: I’m aware that my remarks may actually inspire you to see for yourself. If so, do abstain, go to your book shelf and choose a great classic, ancient or modern, and enjoy. Time is precious.
PPS: OK. If you're still tempted, go to your book shop, open the book and take a look: you can easily read it right there in a quarter of an hour. This book must have the record for empty pages and pages practically empty! “Empty” is the word...
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OVERVIEW
Cogent and eye-opening. Of course, how are we to judge if this vision from behind the scenes or from bellow, if we could use these expressions, corresponds to the reality of life in India in the beginning of this twenty-first century? Agreed: we’re dealing with fiction, therefore true to life is not our problem per se. Nevertheless, Aravind Adiga (educated at Columbia and Oxford, former correspondent in India for Time magazine) is evoking social and political questions. His novel—fiction for sure—is also documentary. And political commentary.
The “Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian” (10), as the narrator calls it, is addressed to the Chinese prime minister. This is a pretext, since he’s writing it on a computer in his office, probably just for himself without any intention of mailing his text to anybody. A confession and a cynical worldview; but with a strong statement about modern capitalism. A story of rags to riches, and a story of
the half-baked foundations of successful business. (6)
... Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half-hour before falling asleep - all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.
The story of my upbringing is the story of how a
half-baked fellow is produced.
But pay attention, Mr Premier! Fully formed fellows, after twelve years of school and three years of university, wear nice suits, join companies, and take orders from other men for the rest of their lives.
Entrepreneurs are made from half-baked clay. (p10)
...
Continue Reading >>The White Tiger OVERVIEW
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OVERVIEW
Vary your menu: it’s good for your reading “health.” Every once in a while, I like to have an easy read, one with direct, effective writing, one with highly “fictional” characters and events—idealized and not completely credible—, where, rather than our intellectual engagement, the motor is suspense, where the over-reaching perspective is “black-and-white”—“good guys vs bad guys.” Why not a crime novel (excluding those that are morbid and/or sensational)? Why not something as relaxing and as exciting as a…(better quality) Hollywood movie?
Such an easy read does correspond to Kate Quinn’s The Huntress. It is, in fact, a classic form of crime fiction: a man-hunt, where you know more or less the end right at the beginning and you keep wanting to know how to get to that end. It is a palpitating suspense and it does move along at a breathtaking pace. However, in saying this, we don’t do justice to the imaginative qualities of the book.
First of all, we’re dealing with “historical fiction.” Despite its highly “fictional” nature, the book is based on real people and real events from WWII and shortly after. Yes, they have been transposed, largely transformed and fictionally developed, but they have a historical base. Quinn’s post-script notes explain her historical sources, and you should read the notes when you’ve finished the novel. We learn, for example, how after the war, the American government largely abandoned finding Nazis on its soil. These sources underline even more the quality of Quinn’s fictional imagination, and, naturally, they enlarge our culture.
Secondly, contrary to pure “black-and-white” personalization, the characters have a certain depth. (There are essentially only five characters for a novel 540 pages long.) Yes, they are “fictional,” even “black-and-white.” But they grow throughout the story, and we discover the deeper motivations for their actions progressively. The character the most radically different from my psychology ends up being my favorite: Nina is one of those fictional characters that linger on in my mind.
Finally, the construction of the novel is a model of clarity and effectiveness: each chapter centers on a character at a specific time in the past or in the present. Shifting back and forth, the story bristles with life.
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OVERVIEW
Harold Bloom calls it a “fantasy.” That would imply strange places, strange beings. Not so: these are normal people in ordinary 1990’s western society. Exactly where, we don’t know; but a normal modern town. Only the circumstances are particular: one little thing has changed, one little thing that changes everything. Let’s call it a tale. The narrator is addressing us collectively: he’s speaking to a group of listeners, like a story teller or folk narrator surrounded by an audience. The story is of past events, but it’s being told to us and now. So we mustn’t be surprised by the narrator saying “we” and “us,” nor by his expressing thoughts and opinions…in passing.
The first lines of the novel:
THE AMBER LIGHT CAME ON. TWO OF THE CARS ahead accelerated before the red light appeared. At the pedestrian crossing the sign of a green man lit up.
A simple description of past events. And now, at the end of the next sentence, here’s the storyteller himself thinking:
The people who were waiting began to cross the road, stepping on the white stripes painted on the black surface of the asphalt, there is nothing less like a zebra, however, that is what it is called.
Next, transition to the present tense (and future); the everyday, predictable, way of things:
The pedestrians have just finished crossing but the sign allowing the cars to go will be delayed for some seconds,…[3]
And the storyteller’s comment:
.… some people maintain that this delay, while apparently so insignificant, has only to be multiplied by the thousands of traffic lights that exist in the city and by the successive changes of their three colours to produce one of the most serious causes of traffic jams or bottlenecks, to use the more current term. [3]
The language is straight-forward, the comments are simple, almost commonplace. Our narrator has the power to tell, that which comes from knowing or inventing the story; yet, his comments are almost trite, he’s more or less like us, like the ordinary people of his story. This will not preclude irony in his observations and comments throughout the story and even a certain humor. He will often hypothesize about aspects of the events, also about the thoughts or intentions of the people in his story. Hypothesizing implies that he’s not sure or he’s not obsessed with clear explanations per se, and he’s inviting us to think along with him. Could he be making things up as he speaks? ... ...
After reading the book >>Blindness THOUGHTS
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OVERVIEW
Hadley Freeman’s House of Glass is a non-fiction biography covering four generations of−as it is subtitled−a “twentieth-century Jewish family.” It reveals how Hadley Freeman’s family went from a Shtetl in Eastern Poland beginning of the century to France and then some members to the United States and England. I suppose there are a plethora of such stories, but Freeman has a unique tone and manner in bringing this one to life through her candidness and lively writing.
None of the Glahs siblings ever spoke about their childhood, and if they mentioned Poland at all they’d spit with disgust and move on, no elaboration necessary. So without personal anecdotes to act as my starting point, I turned to historical documents. If my family had been one of the famous Jewish dynasties−the Rothschilds, say, or the Freuds, or even the Halberstams, a wealthy family who who lived in the region at the time−this would have sufficed. But they were not, and it did not. There aren’t many records of the individual billions of poorer lives from Europe’s past, people who leave only footprints in the sand that blow away as soon as they are buried; people who leave, at most, unidentifiable black and white photos behind them, their faces blankly solemn for the photographer’s studio, the flash bleaching them of personality; or perhaps a brief mention in a census locked away in an obscure government vault that proves they once existed and nothing more. These people are merely referred to by history as “the poor”, “the illiterate”, even though their lives are far more revealing of the times in which they lived than those of the grander families whose lives are faithfully recorded ever after by historians. [18-19]
In the back of a closet, Freeman discovers a shoebox with a bric-a-brac of photos, texts, postal cards, souvenirs, and so, launches into “the story and secrets” of her family.
After a very brief historical contextualization of Chrzanow and its Jewish population−the majority− based on notes of one of her grand uncles, Alex, she presents the relationship between her great grand parents:
Chaya...spoke only Yiddish and Polish...Reuben...unlike Chaya...was fluent in multiple languages−German, Polish, Russian, Yiddish−...and the only person in Chrzanow other than a rabbi who could read and write Hebrew. Where Chaya was tough, practical and energetic, Reuben was gentle, scholarly and slow. In his memoir, Sender−Alex as I knew him−draws frequent comparisons between his parents (invariably to his mother’s disadvantage, no matter how neutral the differences he was describing): she liked to debate furiously in the market square, washing the family’s dishes around the central well where the townswomen gathered, while he preferred to sit with his friends in the cafés, listening and nodding and drinking coffee. She was ambitious for more whereas Reuben thought you should be happy with what you have. Between them, they represented the different attitudes peasant Jews had about their place in the world at that time: should you fight for a better life than the one you were born into, or should you meekly sit back and be grateful for what you were given? Chaya and Reuben never resolved this difference, and their marriage was less than blissful...
When they met he was a handsome man celebrated in the town for his intellect, but Chaya soon learned you can’t eat intellect. He worked diligently from the day of his wedding, but life only got harder for them, because of his unfailing inability to earn money. He tried his hand at being a tailor, a glass blower, a potato picker, a translator and, finally, a Singer sewing machine travelling salesman, and each career was less successful than the last. They were desperately poor, and became more so with each child born. [23 -25]
The tone is given. Freeman sketches the different and enduring personality traits of each of the four Glahs children. And we discover, over the remaining 9/10ths of the book, how their lives evolve after immigrating to Paris beginning of the 1920s. An astonishing evolution. An inventor, a high-fashion designer and millionaire art collector, a victim of Vichy, a dissatisfied housewife, and a great grandmother who till the end speaks only Yiddish. And through their story, an original view of twentieth century history.
A fascinating reading journey well worth making.
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OVERVIEW
Colson Whitehead: The Underground Railroad 2016
OVERVIEW
Whitehead dared it: Recuperate the well-known metaphorical name for the historical organization which helped sneak slaves out of the South and give it a literal—fictional—existence. He walked a tightrope: with the artifice of literalism, he ran the risk of denaturing the historical reality and transforming it into something so completely artificial that the reader couldn’t accept the historical reality on which his fiction is based. He does seem to have succeeded in staying on, because, with the exception of the underground railroad itself, the fictional situations he describes are close enough to the historical reality. He succeeds in giving us the feeling for the horror, the danger, the fear that permeated the process of helping slaves get to the North. And, of course, that of the slaves’ existence in the South, which occupies the first part of the novel.
Where Whitehead may have fallen off is in making things too Hollywoodian, too cinematographic. The slave hunter, Ridgeway, except for his “underground-cinema” literary pretentiousness, is pure Hollywood-Western head-hunter stuff. He’s a lot of writer’s fun and perhaps “too much.” Enjoyable, but it doesn’t quite jive for me. I suspect others will enjoy outright.
Cora’s passage toward the light of the tunnel at the end is in the realm of the easy metaphor.
I like the way Ridgeway sums up the essence of the slave economy and of the expanding capitalist one:
Here was the true Great Spirit; the divine thread connecting all human endeavor—if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.
After reading the book >>The Underground Railroad THOUGHTS
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OVERVIEW
This is a curious case. The novel’s construction is that of a crime...movie. Similarly for the images, sequences, dialogues, characters. The latter have the archetypal quality of cinema. Why, then, can the story produce such a haunting persistence, one that no film can? The answer may be in the intricate intertwining of surroundings and feelings, of description and poetry. The crime investigation stimulates the reader’s progress through the book, but the real motor, the real story, is inside the main character, Kya, and inside the swamp that is her home. The real story is in the beautiful descriptions of nature and feelings.
Marsh is not swamp. Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into sky. Slow-moving creeks wander, carrying the orb of the sun with them to the sea, and long-legged birds lift with unexpected grace—as though not built to fly—against the roar of a thousand snow geese.
Then within the marsh, here and there, true swamp crawls into low-lying bogs, hidden in clammy forests. Swamp water is still and dark, having swallowed the light in its muddy throat. Even night crawlers are diurnal lair. There are sounds, of course, but compared to the marsh, the swamp is quiet because decomposition is cellular work. Life decays and reeks and returns to the rotted duff; a poignant wallow of death begetting life. (Prologue)
At the beginning of the story, the Kya of six years old isn’t yet intimately connected to the marsh, even if it’s been her home from birth. She is still completely connected to her family, her mother in particular. And the image of her mother’s absence will haunt her always and, so too, us, the reader:
The next morning, Kya took up her post again on the steps, her dark eyes boring down the lane like a tunnel waiting for a train. The marsh beyond was veiled in fog so low its cushy bottom sat right on the mud. Barefoot, Kya drummed her toes, twirled grass stems at doodlebugs, but a six-year old can’t sit long and soon she moseyed onto the tidal flats, sucking sounds pulling at her toes. Squatting at the edge of the clear water, she watched minnows dart between sunspots and shadows.
...Kya returned to the porch steps later and waited for a long time, but, as she looked to the end of the lane, she never cried. Her face was still, her lips a simple thin line under searching eye. But Ma didn’t come back that day either. [11]
The marsh becomes “her mother:”
...Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn’t know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land who caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother. [34]
But the “heart-pain” will always be “there...deep” inside.
She didn’t note the time of moonrise or when a great horned owl took a diurnal dive at a blue jay. From bed, she heard the marsh beyond in the lifting of blackbird wings, but didn’t go to it. She hurt from the crying songs of the gulls above the beach, calling to her. But for the first time in her life, did not go to them. She hoped the pain from ignoring them would displace the tear in her heart. It did not.
Listless, she wondered what she had done to send everyone away. Her own ma. Her sisters. Her whole family. Jodie [her brother]. And now Tate. Her most poignant memories were unknown dates of family members disappearing down the lane. The last of a white scarf trailing through the leaves. A pile of socks left on the floor. [144]
Over time,
...The science and art entwined in each other’s strengths: the colors, the light, the species, the life; weaving a masterpiece of knowledge and beauty that filled every corner of her shack. Her world. She grew with them—the trunk of the vine—alone, but holding all the wonders together.
But just as her collection grew, so did her loneliness. A pain as large as her heart lived in her chest. Nothing eased it. Not the gulls, not a splendid sunset, not the rarest shells. Months turned into a year. The lonely became larger than she could hold. She wished for someone’s voice, presence, touch, but wished more to protect her heart.
Months passed into another year. Then another. [146]
Later, when Kya boats out to the open sea and lands on a sandbar where she picks up rare shells,
As she pushed off, she knew no one would ever see this sandbar again. The elements had created a brief and shifting smile of sand, angled just so. The next tide, the next current would design another sandbar, and another, but never this one. Not the one who caught her. The one who told her a thing or two.
...If anyone understood loneliness, the moon would.
Drifting back to the predictable cycles of tadpoles and the ballet of fireflies, Kya burrowed deeper into wordless wilderness. Nature seemed the only stone that would not slip midstream. [211]
Up to the end, her “connection” to nature will remain intact:
Sometimes Kya walked alone to the beach, and as the sunset streaked the sky, she felt the waves pounding her heart. She’d reach down and touch the sand, then stretch her arms toward the clouds. Feeling connections…She knew the years of isolation had altered her behavior until she was different from others, but it wasn’t her fault she’d been alone. Most of what she knew, she’d learned from the wild. Nature had nurtured, tutored, and protected her when no one else would. If consequences resulted from her behaving differently, then they too were functions of life’s fundamental core.
For Kya, it was enough to be part of this natural sequence as sure as the tides. She was bonded to her planet and its life in a way few people are. Rooted solid in this earth. Born of this mother. [363]
Rarely has a book so closely bonded nature and a fictional character.
After reading the book >>Where the Crawdads Sing THOUGHTS
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OVERVIEW
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2014 (!!!)
864 pages. (!!!)
“The No.1 International Bestseller” (!!!)
This novel is smart. And (sorry sorry sorry for this)...tart. Literally (if it’s possible)...pungent. Sounds strange? Perhaps a few extracts from the book may help you understand (not a spoiler):
...The closed-off formal rooms smelled faint and damp, like dead leaves. I mooned about looking at her things, wondering where she was and what she was doing and trying hard to feel connected to her by such tenuous threads as a red hair in the bathtub drain or a balled-up sock under the sofa. But as much as I missed the nervous tingle of her presence, I was soothed by the house, its sense of safety and enclosure: old portraits and poorly lit hallways, loudly ticking clocks. It was as if I’d signed on as a cabin boy on the Marie Céleste. As I moved about through the stagnant silences, the pools of shadows and deep sun, the old floors creaked underfoot like the deck of a ship, the wash of traffic out on Sixth Avenue breaking just audibly against the ear. Upstairs, puzzling light-headed over differential equations, Newton’s Law of Cooling, independent variables, we have used the fact that tau is constant to eliminate its derivative, Hobie’s presence below stairs was an anchor, a friendly weight: I was comforted to hear the tap of his mallet floating up from below and to know that he was down there pottering quietly with his tools and his spirit gums and varicolored woods... [442]...
A concentrated series of metaphors to help us feel what the narrator feels. One of the best passages in the book. Great for analysis in a college creative writing course.
However, here in the follow extract, the metaphor of “post-catastrophe Manhattan” at the end may simply be too much:
But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous [534] mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent… [535]
This goes on for a page-and-a-half.
There are the pages and pages and pages describing drug-alcohol debauches.
The question of the first-person narrative voice never comes up, whatever twist or turn Tartt might want to pull out of her hat. The—her—writing is brilliant, we might say, if it is admittedly not light (excessively metaphorical? too Hollywoodish? too snobbish?). The story is logically—implacably—constructed (but way too long). The characters are nicely developed. The milieus are perfectly—with irony and even humor—delineated. Are you interested in antiques, how they are restored or falsified (uniquely for the ultra rich)? Do you want to get a (critical) view of the ultra rich and ultra snob? Are you interested to live with lower middle-class people, who can seem heartless and cruel but can actually be quite human? Do you want to be on the border of the drug-dealing quasi-mafiosi world? Do you appreciate deep, unqualified friendship? Are you interested in art, great painting?
The latter is the most interesting, though very limited, part of the book. Sure, it isn’t a real art appreciation course and remains fairly superficial on this level—we never leave the fiction. However, the deep emotions great art can stimulate, the philosophy of life it can inspire, are present, we might say,...in the background.
...between ‘realityʼ on the one hand, and the point where beauty comes into being, where two different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.
And—I would argue as well—all love. Or, perhaps more accurately, this middle zone illustrates the fundamental discrepancy of love...[863]
I might add that beautiful writing doesn’t require layer upon layer, simplicity rather.
Am I being acrimonious? There are novels which can be intellectually stimulating and which don’t linger in your mind, like Pynchon’s, for example. There are novels which are complex and musical and which leave their mark forever after, like Faulkner’s, for example. There are novels which aren’t masterpieces, but which leave you with a memory of the pleasure they gave you. There are novels where you learn something or enlarge your general culture. ...Donna Tartt???
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OVERVIEW
Atwood’s novel is a kaleidoscope of viewpoints: a diary of present-day events; a family saga centered on the childhood and early adulthood of two sisters in an historical-geographical context; a mystery, composed of suspicions and questions, which grows and moves to final discovery; a novel inside the novel we are reading; even a science-fiction fantasy inside that inner novel; finally, some pure prose poetry. The construction of the novel makes these different viewpoints manifest. The chronology is not linear, but the order of events is clearly established, often explicitly dated.
The encompassing narrative is made up of the memories of the narrator, Iris, written in the present day (the exact time of writing and the addressee will become known only progressively). Iris writes of her present old-age and then goes into a systematic chronicle of her past. In the first pages, we learn about the deaths—all under rather strange circumstances—respectively of Iris’s sister, her husband and her daughter. The reader cannot help but feel that Iris may somehow be responsible for these deaths. The reader’s desire to know the truth will be one of the novel’s motors throughout its 637 pages. ... ...
After reading the book >>The Blind Assassin THOUGHTS
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OVERVIEW
NOTE: After reading the book and/or my complete review, you might like to consult the following documents included here (see Thoughts):
-z-miscelaneous-extract-human-rights-watch-Toll-of Criminality-Drug-Use-2016
-z-miscelaneous-extract-Nat-Acad-Sc-report-on-incarceration-2014
-z-miscelaneous-violent-crime-following-military-strikes-1980s-published-1994
NOTE: This book and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me are complementary. The legislative, judicial, police, prison, and economic system studied by Michelle Alexander is a source of the deep metaphysical fear and sadness permeating Ta-Nehisi Coates’ auto-biographical, highly poetic letter to his son. Although my book reviews are predominantly of fiction, I’ve decided to include these works of non-fiction because they make you see the world differently after reading them. Each book is treated in a separate review, composed of a general resume (OVERVIEW) followed by my observations (THOUGHTS).
This book was published in 2010. The ideas of the book are very clear, but I have made numerous quotes in my overview, because it seems to me essential to see how the author develops her arguments. I believe my choice of extracts gives a fair idea of the book, but, naturally, nothing can replace a first-hand read. At the end of the overview, I present my reactions and observations. There are several important documents annexed under my z-miscellaneous- files.
Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer. In her Acknowledgments, she indicates that her husband, a federal prosecutor, “does not share [her] views about the criminal justice system” and has a “different world view” from hers, although he has supported her “efforts to share [her] truth.” (pxvi) I’m curious to know what specific reservations her husband might have expressed.
Introducti
Since the Reagan administration’s instauration of the “war on drugs” in 1982, a “new racial caste system” [11] has come into being in the United States. A racial caste is defined as “a stigmatized racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom” [12] such as were Jim Crow and slavery. “Mass incarceration in the United States ha[s] emerged...as a stunningly comprehensive and well-designed system of racialized social control.” [11] “The criminal justice system...[and] the larger web of laws, rules, policies, and customs...control those labeled criminals both in and out out of prison. Once released, former prisoners enter a hidden underworld of legalized discrimination and permanent social exclusion.” [13] “The system of mass incarceration is based on the prison label, not prison time.” [14] ... ...
Continue Reading >>The New Jim Crow OVERVIEW
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OVERVIEW
This letter addressed to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 15-year-old son is in the lineage of Jame’s Baldwin’s “letter” to his nephew in The Fire Next Time. We might call the book an auto-biography of the writer’s mind, somewhat like Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Thoughts, feelings, and one thing permeates it all: fear, a sort of metaphysical core to which every life experience is related. “I would have loved to have a past apart from fear.” (p125) Even when he can affirm that at college “here at the Mecca, we are without fear,” (p57), he knows that on the outside, in “the other world suburban and endless”(p20), as it was in his Baltimore streets of childhood, fear is pervasive, ever-present. And it’s simply because he is black.
The epigraph of the book, from which Coates draws the title, quotes a famous poem of Richard Wright:
And one morning while in the woods I stumbled suddenly upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks and elms
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves between the world and me.....
To know those “sooty details, which follow in the poem but which Coates does not quote, is to understand the fear permeating Coates’ being, something so profound, so traumatic, that it festers inside like a stress disorder or an endless nightmare.
...
And while I stood my mind was frozen within cold pity for the life that was gone.
The ground gripped my feet and my heart was circled by icy walls of fear...
...
The dry bones stirred, rattled, lifted, melting themselves into my bones.
The grey ashes formed flesh firm and Black, entering into my flesh...
The poem finishes with the narrator symbolically moving into the body of the victim, details of the mob and finally the physical sensations of the man as he is being lynched and burned alive—this is one of the most harrowing descriptions I have ever encountered in literature. (Another one is in Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, but without the symbolic weight of Wright’s poem.) Thank goodness Coates has not made a more extensive quote from the poem: it might discourage future readers, which would be extremely unfortunate considering the book's human and literary qualities!
Fear for the body : Coates’ childhood in the streets, streets which “transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions,” [22] required him to learn “these laws...essential to the security of the body,” “a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.” [24] “Fear ruled everything around me, and I knew, as all black people do, that this fear was connected to the Dream out there, to the unworried boys, to pie and pot roast, to white fences and green lawns beamed nightly into our television sets.” [29]
Later, in his late teens, becoming “politically conscious,” he will understand that “the violence that undergirded the country...this violence was not magical, but was of a piece and by design.”[34] ... ...
Continue Reading >>Between the World and Me OVERVIEW and link to THOUGHTS
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OVERVIEW
The writing device isn’t new: each sub-chapter centers on one character, each character isn’t necessarily related family-wise to the others, some are, and all of the characters cross paths at one point.
The style of writing: the rhythm of the language and the vocabulary of each portrait corresponds to the personality of the character, while maintaining the form of story telling. You slide from third-person narrative into first person thoughts or into direct dialog without transition, smoothly, almost invisibly, without any feeling of artificiality...helped by the fact that each phrase is a separate paragraph, without capital at the beginning or period at the end. The words flow along with ease and clarity.
The subject: the world of black women in Britain from the early 1900’s to the present, in particular the question of colour and sex. Six generations. You enter into the complexity and extreme diversity of that world. Girl, Woman, Other is an eye-opener. In point of fact, Evaristo wants to go beyond the specificity of the milieu to reach universal ground, “members of the human family” ... ...
After reading the book >>Girl, Woman, Other THOUGHTS
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OVERVIEW
Have you encountered a novel which you read some time back and which you have decided to reread simply for the pleasure? Rereading for the pleasure is not usually my thing. For me, it’s usually a good read and done. I go back to the book to confirm or infirm a first reaction or first interpretation. I go back to analyze the book’s literary qualities. I often go back to read poetic passages. A complete reread: never. Here’s an exception: Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music.
We might think this book is somewhat of a tall order: a string quartet, the quartet’s modus operandi and its repertoire. For me, the string quartet is the pinnacle of Western classical music. It was invented and perfected by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, with its latest proponents in Debussy, Ravel, Bartok, and a few others. Its public is small: nothing, compared to the piano, the symphony, or the concerto. And classical music in general hasn’t the hugest public. So you’ll say Seth’s book must be only for the happy few. I don’t think so.
It’s a 500 page first-person narrative. The narrator is the second violin of the string quartet. The personalities of all of the characters with their inter-relations are admirably developed, essentially through dialogues which are among the most natural and realistic that I have ever encountered in a novel. We learn how a string quartet works: debates on repertory and interpretation, discovery of little-known works and rare editions, transcriptions and adaptations, problems with string instruments (particularly the necessity for a string player to find the right instrument, which she/he can afford financially), relations with music critiques, impresarios, record producers, and, of course, preparations and repetitions, finally, the musicians’ interactions and sensations during the execution in concert. Sounds more documentary than fiction. Not so: there’s no need to be versed at all in questions of music theory or instrumental practice. This is first and foremost fiction: mystery, suspense, discoveries, memories, emotions, and...a real love story. ... ...
After reading the book >>An Equal Music THOUGHTS
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OVERVIEW
When we start to read Eve Harris’ The Marrying of Chani Kaufman, we know it’s fiction. Yet we know that it is also documentary, based on personal experience. If the film Kadoch (1999) of the Israeli Amos Gitai reflects reality, we can get an idea of how strict, how closed-in, how tough, the Hasidic Orthodox Jewish milieu can be. Eve Harris does reveal precisely that, except she delves deeper. She develops her characters’ personalities within their social context (today), she penetrates into their psychology, and she does so—I have the impression—without over-simplification or excessive bias.
From the biographic notes in the book, we learn that Harris was an inner-city school teacher in London, lived in Israel for three years, taught in an all girls’ Catholic convent school and one year in an all girls’ ultra-Orthodox Jewish school in North West London. Her novel is situated in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Hendon, a borough of London, and is clearly based on her observations of this community from close up.
But for a few flashbacks in Israel, all the events take place over specific months in 2007 and 2008. Right from the first chapter of the novel, we are plunged into the complexities and strangeness of the marriage ceremony, the preparations, the doubts and fears of the bride. The rest of the novel will retrace the events that lead up to the marriage and give us a deeper insight into Hasidic mores. The order isn’t chronological, putting events and characters’ reactions into better perspective and stimulating reader interest.
Four main characters, and two secondary: we have a closed world, a sort of theatre stage. Perfect for making rich interaction between the personages. And for developing lively dialogues, where Harris really excels. She latches onto details of posture, gesture, surroundings corresponding to the inner thoughts, emotions, or general personality of the person who is thinking, listening or about to talk. Scenes come alive, ring true-to-life and gain emotional and symbolic depth. Stylistically, The Marrying of Chani Kaufman is quite remarkable. A real surprise: lively, enlightening, and highly satisfying.
Note: Despite a strong Protestant upbringing, I am totally atheist and cannot identify with extremist religious practice. This statement, however, is not to be construed to mean anything beyond what it says. I reject all forms of intolerance, particularly those based on notions of race or religion.
Note: The book has a Yiddish-English Glossary in annex, because Yiddish expressions are frequently employed. Fascinating.
For illustrations of Harris’ superb writing technique, see my THOUGHTS After Reading. Also in these notes are quotes showing certain aspects of ultra-Orthodox Judaism as presented in the novel.
After reading the book >>The Marrying of Chani Kaufman THOUGHTS
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OVERVIEW
Dystopia: Way back, there were Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984. Even further back, Swift, why not Dante? More recently: McCarthy’s The Road. The list of dystopian fiction is long. All deal with the future collapse of societies as we know them. The Road stays in the realm of the near-future and tries to be as logically—boringly and sensationally—realistic as possible, whereas the majority of modern dystopias add technological inventions similar to those in science fiction. Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood push present-day technology to future extremes. These works are essentially non-poetic and emotionally superficial, i.e. their motor is dread and dismay. Saramago’s, Blindness and Death at Intervals are apart: they are superb social-philosophical exercises, practically exercises in style, designed to provoke thought rather than gut sensation.
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is more or less in the Saramago vein. In her introduction to the 2017 edition, Atwood explains:
I would not put any events into the book that that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the “nightmare” of history, nor any technology not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities. God is in the details, they say. So is the devil. [XIV]
Dictatorships that place women in a position of servitude exist today. The originality of Atwood’s novel is to place this type of regime in the United States. But, if we leave the thematic aspect aside and concentrate on the artistic one, it’s Atwood’s first-person narrative that really stands out. This is something we have already remarked in The Blind Assassin and Alias Grace. Atwood succeeds in giving her narrators a special tone which catches the reader. What Offred describes is terrifying and depressing, and yet she draws what little hope she can from her faculty to tell her story and from—precisely—the “details,” from the little feelings deep within, from the little things in her surroundings, from the little kinks in the system.
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling; I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance.
If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
It isn’t a story I’m telling.
It’s also a story I’m telling in my head, as I go along.
Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else.
Even when there is no one.
A story is like a letter. Dear you, I’ll say. Just you, without a name. Attaching a name attaches you to the world of fact, which is riskier, more hazardous: who knows what the chances are out there, of survival, yours? I will say you, you, like an old love song. You can mean more than one.
You can mean thousands.
I’m not in any immediate danger, I’ll say to you.
I’ll pretend you can hear me.
But it’s no good, I know you can’t. [39-40]
...
I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better a light, if not happier, then at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish it were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one’s life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow.
Maybe it is about those things, in a way; but in the meantime there is so much else getting in the way, so much whispering, so much speculation about others, so much gossip that cannot be verified, so many unsaid words, so much creeping about and secrecy. And there is so much time to be endured, time heavy as fried food or thick fog; and then all at once these red events, like explosions, on streets otherwise decorous and matronly and somnambulent.
I’m sorry there is so much pain is this story. I’m sorry it’s in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it.
I’ve tried to put some of the good things in as well. Flowers, for instance, because where would we be without them? [267]
...
The one with the mustache opens the small pedestrian gate for us and stands back, well out of the way, and we pass through. As we walk away I know they’re watching, these two men who aren’t yet permitted to touch women. They touch with their eyes instead and I move my hips a little, feeling the full red skirt sway around me. It’s like thumbing your nose from behind a fence or teasing a dog with a bone held out of reach, and I’m ashamed of myself for doing it because none of this is the fault of these men, they’re too young.
Then I find I’m not ashamed after all. I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there. I hope they get hard at the sight of us and have to rub themselves against painted barriers, surreptitiously. They will suffer later, at night, in their regimented beds. They have no outlets now except themselves, and that’s a sacrilege. There are no more magazines, no more films, no more substitutes; only me and my shadow, walking away from the two men, who stand at attention, stiffly, by a roadblock, watching our retreating shapes. [22]
...
I go back, along the dimmed hall and up the muffled stairs, stealthily to my room. There I sit in the chair, with the lights off, in my red dress, hooked and buttoned. You can think clearly only with your clothes on.
What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.
But that’s where I am, there’s no escaping it. Time’s a trap, I’m caught in it. I must forget about my secret name and all ways back. My name is Offred now, and here is where I live.
I live in the present, make the most of it, it’s all you’ve got. [143]
The Handmaid’s Tale was made into a television series. The first season corresponds fairly closely to the novel, although there are a few additions. The over-all atmosphere is fairly close to that of the novel, which is exceptional for an adaptation. Some people may even prefer the “materialization” of the story. The second season adds elements, not always in the spirit of the novel. The third season is a catastrophe, where the authors clearly lose all inspiration and fall into Spielbergian excesses.
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OVERVIEW
The “parable” here is simple enough: “A sower went out to sow his seed...some fell upon rock...some fell among thorns...others fell on good ground...”, citation at the end of the novel drawn from the Gospel of St. Luke. Each chapter is preceded by a citation from a sort of modern moralistic Gospel which is being authored by its principal character. The story: in a dystopian future, a small community tries to survive and founds a religion or moral creed based on the preservation of nature. Simple. Also, unfortunately...simplistic. The collapse of American society through the complete privatizing of public services and security and the dissemination of guns seems...ordinary dystopia. The necessity of weapons for survival, even for those who are non-violent, recalls...ordinary Hollywood cops-and-robbers-cowboy-disaster stuff. Characters: artificial and shallow. Descriptions and dialogues: conventional, even down-right mediocre.
Octavia Butler is supposed to have been a brilliant author of science fiction, recipient of numerous awards. The Parable of the Sower (1993) clearly inspired Margaret Atwood, other champion of dystopian literature. Atwood’s Year of the Flood (the Mad Adam series), published 16 years after the Parable of the Sower, has disturbing similarities to Butler’s book−we could almost speak of plagia. Butler does better than Atwood in anticipating numerous issues of our present day. However, her lack of refinement in characters and plot and second-rate writing make her novel considerably inferior to Atwood’s works. We should not forget that Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1983. A model of dystopian literature, perhaps not the most anticipatory−let’s hope so!−but real literature.
Butler’s Parable: a real dystopian disappointment.
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OVERVIEW
Viral epidemics of international dimensions exist. Living example: Covid. Its origins are unknown, even if the hypothesis of transmission from bat to pangolin to human is the most favored. But a human error or malevolence isn’t to be excluded...so some say. Pharmaceutical laboratories are more and more international. Medicines based on genetic manipulation are more and more common. Margaret Atwood started publishing her Mad Adam series in 2009. Not bad!...as a sort of prediction.
The next step: Corporations of international dimensions exist, e.g. GAFA. The next World War will be computer-internet-based...so some say.
All of this has already been amply exploited in hundreds of Hollywood films. But does it make good literature?
I’m willing to admit that Atwood’s Jimmy, in Oryx and Crake, is an amusing character. His tone of voice, his style of speech seems to hark back to Kerouac-Ginsberg-Dylan, a jargon, an aloofness, a libertarianism, a dissatisfaction, a doubting, a fear. Then there’s the hypothesis of the mad scientist creating new life and destroying the old. Pure Hollywood. Not great literature.
If you read my introduction to The Handmaid’s Tale, you learned that Atwood wanted not to “put any events into the book that that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the “nightmare” of history, nor any technology not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities.” (The Handmaid’s Tale [XIV]. This she did, and the formula worked because she transformed the horrors of the world without into a world within, a world in which the human will triumphed over, or rather, within the horror. Offred’s desire to communicate attained a level of tragedy. In Oryx and Crake, Atwood isn’t that far from her old rule of conduct, but something is missing, something more deeply human, something more deeply poetic. Without that something, no great literature. The phenomenon is exacerbated in The Year of the Flood: a world atomized into micro-societies, a world where we cannot find a character to latch onto, where in the end, there is little soul and finally...little art.
Atwood has abandoned literature for Hollywood. How sad...
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OVERVIEW
The picture on the cover of the American paperback edition of this book seems to hark back to naive illustrations of the 1950s or to amateur painting: a woman we might almost take at cursory glance for an American Indian with long braids and colorful dress, but, upon closer scrutiny, is wearing an embroidered silk and felt gown, on a backdrop of grassy step, galloping horses, and snowy peaks. The elegant lady is far from the reality of 13th century Mongolian life described in the book. And the amateurism of the illustration is even more remote from the refined literary professionalism of the novel.
In a postscript note, Stephanie Thornton describes her Tiger Queens as “an unabashed work of fiction.” (459) Historical rigueur, if such is possible from the sources concerning the 12th-13th century adventure of Ghengis Kahn and his descendants, clearly is subordinate to the telling of a story. In this respect, Thornton’s book recalls my models for novels based on history: Robert Graves’ I, Claudius and Marguerite Yourcenar’s Mémoires d’Hadrien and l’Oeuvre au noir. These have in common the use of historical figures and contexts to produce pure fiction. They make us understand the historical context through the mind of their protagonist−we might say, make us enter into the mind of the epoch. In truth, they are subjective visions: historical rigueur isn’t the goal, literature is, and they are great works of literary art.
No doubt the Kahn’s contemporary chroniclers had a tendency to embellish his life. Be that as it may, Stephanie Thornton’s story telling has so much force and detail that we can’t help but see her “chronicle” as objectively true. She puts us in the heart of Mongolian society through the eyes and thoughts of four witnesses to and participants in the the rise to power of Ghengis Kahn and the expansion of his empire from 1171 to 1248. Four women: the Kahn’s first wife, his daughter, a Persian woman captive, and the wife of his youngest son. All four women are real historical figures, but who, Thornton imagines, were instrumental in the construction of Ghengis’ empire and to its preservation after his death.
Four first-person narratives, where the reader enters into the person’s thoughts, perceptions, feelings with acute detail about the way people (may have) lived and reasoned ... ...
Continue Reading this OVERVIEW >>The Tiger Queens OVERVIEW
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OVERVIEW
The story is narrated by Yunior, former friend of the principle character, Oscar Wao. In the first pages, which are placed outside of the book’s sections and chapters, the narrator explains the roots of the story. All Dominicans or descendants of Dominicans, he proposes, are possessed of a fukú or curse that pursues them throughout their existence, the fukú americanus:
They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antillles[…]Also called the fukú of the Admiral because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims […]No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we’ve been in the shit ever since. [1-2]
Example of fukú: the dictator Trujillo (ruled Santo Domingo from 1930 to 1961). There is a scathing diatribe against him already in the third paragraph of the book. Other historical, very judgmental footnotes, mostly about Trujillo and his regime, will appear at different moments throughout the story. These footnotes give verisimilitude and emotional depth to the novel.
The family at the center of story is under the influence of the fukú.
I mean, shit, what Latino family doesn’t think it’s cursed. [33]
Everybody in Santo Domingo has a fukú story knocking around in their family. [5-6
As he narrates, Junior is convinced that the fukú has,
got its fingers around my throat. [6]
At the same time, he hopes that telling his story will be his zafa,
a word...one surefire counterspell that would keep you and your family safe. [7]
Even now as I write these words I wonder if this book ain’t a zafa of sorts. My very own counterspell. [7]
After reading the book >>The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao THOUGHTS
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OVERVIEW
Epigraph:
Abusua te sε kwaε: sε wo wɔ akyire a wo hunu sε εbom; sε wo bεn ho a na wo hunu sε nnua no bia sisi ne baabi nko.
The family is like the forest: if you are outside it is dense; if you are inside you see that each tree has its own position.
—AKAN PROVERB.
On the next page: two family lineages listed in parallel, seven generations, spanning—so we will discover—two-and-a-half centuries, on the Gold Coast of Africa and in the United States. As the back cover sums it:
Effia and Esi: two sisters with two different destinies. One sold into slavery; one a slave trader’s wife….
A geographical see-saw, centering each time on one descendant in chronological order.
It’s a novel, because there is a unifying structure, the chapters incorporating characters and common historical elements. However, it is also a series of short stories, each with its particular characters, theme, and development.
Yaa Gyasi is a brilliant story teller. With few words, she makes us understand each character and the social context. Each chapter has its particular atmosphere and development, at once simple and subtle.
Cobbe came home to find his other wives attending to Eiffia’s wounds and understood immediately what had happened. He and Baaba fought well into the night. Eiffia could hear them through the thin walls of the hut where she lay on the floor, drifting in and out of a feverish sleep. In her dream, Cobbe was a lion and Baaba was a tree. The lion plucked the tree from the ground where it stood and slammed it back down. The tree stretched branches in protest, and the lion ripped them off, one by one. The tree, horizontal, began to cry red ants that traveled down the thin cracks between its bark. The ants pooled on the soft earth around the top of the tree trunk.
And so the cycle began. Baaba beat Effia. Cobbe beat Baaba. By the time Effia had reached age ten, she could recite a history of the scars on her body. The summer of 1764, when Baaba broke yams across her back. The spring of 1767, when Baaba bashed her left foot with a rock, breaking her big toe so that it now always pointed away from the [4] other toes. For each scar on Effia’s body, there was a compagnon scar on Baaba’s, but that didn’t stop mother from beating daughter, father from beating mother.
Matters were only made worse by Effia’s blossoming beauty. When she was twelve, her breasts arrived, two lumps that sprung from her chest, as soft as mango flesh. The men of the village knew that first blood would soon follow, and they waited for the chance to ask Baaba and Cobbe for her hand. The gifts started. One man tapped palm wine better than anyone else in the village, but another’s fishing nets were never empty. Cobbe’s family feasted off Effia’s burgeoning womanhood. Their bellies, their hands, were never empty. [5]
The language is simple, direct. So too the metaphors, the imagery. A down-to-earth orality that doesn’t over-dramatize—a distancing, of sorts.
In Africa, each person’s life evolves in the context of Fante and Asante royalist mores and their imbrication in the slave trade established by the British military. In America, slavery and the slow process of liberation and adaptation impact each character’s existence up to the present day. Inside the evolving contexts, Gyasi’s characters seem so real that you don’t see them as fictional. Each story rings true and has something unique and lasting. Stories you can read and read again.
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OVERVIEW
The nicest way to introduce this book is to quote a few passages from its first pages:
When the moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule
ENTRY FOR THE FIRST DAY OF THE FIFTH MONTH IN THE YEAR THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTHWESTERN HALLS
When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule to witness the joining of the three Tides. This is something that happens only once every eight years.
The Ninth Vestibule is remarkable for the three great staircases it contains. Its Walls are lined with marble Statues, hundreds upon hundreds of them, Tier upon Tier, rising into distant heights. ... [3]
... The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.
A Description of the World
ENTRY FOR THE SEVENTH DAY OF THE FIFTH MONTH OF THE YEAR THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTH-WESTERN HALLS
I am determined to explore as much of the World as I can in my lifetime. To this end I have traveled as far as the Nine-Hundred-and-Sixteenth Hall to the West, the Eight-Hundred-and-Ninetieth Hall to the North and the Seven-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eighth to the South. I have climbed up to the Upper Halls where Clouds move in slow procession and Statues appear suddenly out of the Mists. I have explored the Drowned Halls where the Dark Waters are carpeted with white water lilies. I have seen the Derelict Halls of the East where Ceilings, Floors—sometimes even Walls!—have collapsed and the dimness is split by shafts of grey Light.
In all these places I have stood in Doorways and looked ahead. I have never seen any indication that the World was coming to an End, but only the regular progression of Halls and Passageways into the Far Distance. ...[5]
…
... Outside the House there are only the Celestial Objects: Sun, Moon and Stars. ...[6]
...
A list of all the people who have ever lived and what is known of them
ENTRY FOR THE TENTH DAY OF THE FIFTH MONTH OF THE YEAR THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTH-WESTERN HALLS
Since the World began it is certain that there have existed fifteen people. Possibly there have been more; but I am a scientist and must proceed according to the evidence. Of the fifteen people whose existence is verifiable, only Myself and the Other are now living. …[7]
Is it fantasy? Is it science fiction? On the next page we may have the impression that we are dealing with something not too original:
... The Other believes that there is a Great and Secret Knowledge hidden somewhere in the World that it will grant us enormous powers once we have discovered it. ...[8]
If we stay on this level, if we take this literally, we’ll miss the meaning and aesthetic virtues of the novel, which are real.
Also, we don’t frequently read novels which support rereading, which is the case here. ... ...
After reading the book >>Piranese THOUGHTS
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OVERVIEW
Sebastian Barry has a way of twisting literary genres. Days Without End: a Western? Yes. But no, a love story, and a very special one at that, one of great depth. Old God’s Time: a police murder novel? Yes. But no, it’s a story of aging and of memory and, once again, of love, profound love. And in both novels, there is a special tone of language, a perfection of style. And finally, a profound humanity.
In Old God’s Time, Sebastian Barry is a master of “Train of thought”: concentration on the moment, no apparent hierarchy or direction, piling up, piece by piece, things that gain meaning only as the story unrolls. The reader has to be patient, for sure, and also particularly attentive: the insignificant can turn out to be essential. What a pleasure!, when you’ve finished the novel, to go back to those pregnant first paragraphs of the book:
Sometime in the sixties old Mr Tomelty had put up an incongruous lean-to to his Victorian castle. It was a granny flat of modest size but with some nice touches befitting a putative relative. The carpentry at least was excellent and one wall was encased in something called ‘beauty board’, its veneer capturing light and mutating it into soft brown darknesses.
This premises, with its little echoing bedroom, its tiny entrance hall, a few hundred books still in their boxes and his two old gun cases from his army days, was where Tom Kettle had in his own words ‘washed up’. The books remembering, if sometimes these days he did not, his old interests. The history of Palestine, of Malaya, old Irish legends, discarded gods, a dozen random matters that at one time or another he had stuck his inquisitive nose into. The stirring sound of the sea below the picture window had been the initial allure but everything about the place pleased him – the mock-Gothic architecture, including the pointless castellation on the roofline, the square hedges in the garden that provided a windbreak and a suntrap, the broken granite jetties on the shoreline, the island skulking in the near distance, even the crumbling sewerage pipes sticking out into the water. The placid tidal pools reminded him of the easily fascinated child he once had been, sixty [1] years ago, the distant calling of today’s children playing in their invisible gardens giving a sort of vaguely tormenting counterpoint. Vague torment was his forte, he thought. The sheeting rain, the sheeting sunlight, the poor heroes of fishermen trying to bring their rowing boats back against the ferocious current into the little sut-stone harbour, as neat and nice as anything in New Ross where he had worked as a very young policeman – it all seemed delightful to him. Even now in winter when winter was only interested in its own unfriendly harshness.
He loved to sit in his sun-faded wicker chair in the dead centre of his living room, feet pointed towards the affecting murmurs of the sea, smoking his cigarillos. Watching the cormorants on the flourish of black rocks to the left of the island. His neighbor in the cottage next door had set up a gun-rest on his balcony and sometimes in the evenings would shoot at the cormorants and the seagulls as they stood there on the rocks innocently, thinking themselves far from human concerns. A few falling like fairground ducks. As peaceably, as quietly, as you can do such a thing. He had not been to the island but in the summer he had witnessed the parties of people going out in the rowing boats. The boatmen leaning into the oars, the current ravishing the keels. He had not been, he did not wish to go, he was quite content just to gaze out. Just to do that. To him this was the whole point of retirement, of existence – to be stationary, happy and useless.
That untroubled February afternoon a knocking on the door disturbed him in his nest. In all the nine months he had lived there, not a soul had bothered him aside from the [2] postman, and on one peculiar occasion Mr Tomelty himself, in his gardener’s weeds, asking for a cup of sugar, which Tom had not been able to provide. He never took sugar because he had a touch of diabetes. Otherwise, he had had his kingdom and his thoughts to himself. Although why did he say that, when his daughter had been out to see him a dozen times? But Winnie could never be said to disturb him, and anyway it was his duty to entertain her. His son never came, not so far, not because he didn’t wish to, but because he lived and worked in New Mexico, out near the Arizona border. He was a locum on one of the pueblos. [3]
The narrative tone, the inner voice, is the writer’s, simple and direct (with a characteristic Irish tang), but also poetic. From beginning to end of Old God’s Time, we never step outside of Tom Kettle’s mind. Every thought, every observation, every feeling, every dream is his. ...
Continue Reading >>Old God's Time OVERVIEW and link to THOUGHTS
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OVERVIEW
Note:
- Before reading the novel: For the historical context concerning Korea and Japan and issues of Korean-Japanese nationality and, more specifically, pachinko as a game and as an industry, see the following documents included here included here (see Thoughts): z-miscellaneous koreans in japan - pachinko - wikipedia
- After reading the novel: For a resume of the novel and its characters, see the following documents included here (see Thoughts): z-miscellaneous pachinko characters and plot - wikipedia
I’m not a fan of sagas, however this novel has a number of positive qualities. And we might consider this novel a model of a saga: a family and its evolution over time in a historical and social context, multiple characters and events, discovery of a milieu. The writing is simple, clear, effective third-person narrative, moving in and out of the characters’ minds.
The main characters have depth, beyond the simply fictional. An example, from the beginning of the novel, is Koh Hansu’s seduction of Sunja. We know from the start that he is twice her age and controls much of the fish market brokerage. His intentions to seduce her are clear enough at first. At the same time, he reveals real human qualities: his observations of Sunja’s character, his revelations on his own life, his way of listening to Sunja, show a sincere interest in her as a person and not a simple object of desire. ... ...
Hansu already knew what there was to know about the girl, but that was different from knowing her thoughts. It was his way to ask many questions when he wanted to know someone’s mind. Most people told you their thoughts in words and later confirmed them in actions. There were more people who told the truth than those who lied. Very few people lied well. What was most disappointing to him was when a person turned out to be no different than the next. He preferred clever women over dumb ones and hardworking women over lazy ones who knew only how to lie on their backs. [41]
This is followed by real memories of his modest background which he exposes to Sunja. We can’t help but feel that what may have been a simple seduction at first, becomes real love.
Sunja on her side, she who “didn’t know her letters in either Korean and Japanese” [47], is both impressed and flattered by Koh Hansu’s interest, and appreciates his gentleness and apparent sincerity. Also,
She was enraptured by his talk and his experiences, which were far more unique than the adventures of fishermen and workers who had come from far-flung places, but there was something even more new and powerful in her relationship with Hansu that she had never expected. Until she met him, Sunja never had someone to tell about her life—funny habits of the lodgers, her exchanges with the sisters who worked for her mother, memories of her father, and her private questions. She had someone to ask about how things worked outside of Yeongdo and Busan. Hansu was eager to hear about what went on in her day; he wanted to know what she dreamed about even. Occasionally, when she didn’t know how to handle something or someone, he told her what she could do; he had excellent ideas on how to solve problems...For three months, they met in the same way, growing easier in each other’s company. [44-45]
When they finally make love, it seems natural, not imposed on her by Hansu: she clearly consents. And she quite naturally is convinced thereafter that he will marry her.
Already in these first chapters, Min Jin Lee succeeds in giving psychological depth to Sunja and Hansu, which will evolve throughout the novel. In only a few paragraphs, she is capable of communicating the essence of a personage.
Among the interesting social and psychological elements brought into light by the novel, we are struck by how the successive generations of Yangjin and Sunja’s family, despite their normal diversity of character, show an exceptional sense of solidarity and also a mutual openness. Phoebe, Solomon’s American girlfriend, expresses how she
...loved being with Solomon’s family. It was much smaller than her own, but everyone seemed closer, as if each member were organically attached to one seamless body, whereas her enormous extended family felt like cheerfully mismatched Lego bricks in a large bucket...Solomon’s family was warm but far more muted and intensely watchful. None of them seemed to miss anything. [497]
Even if we consider that this family has a unique history, its solidarity clearly stems from the way Koreans are treated as inferiors by the Japanese. Even higher education can’t eliminate prejudice and economic restrictions by the Japanese, as the story shows. With one exception on the economic level:
In Japan, you’re either a rich Korean or a poor Korean, and if you are a rich Korean, there’s a pachinko parlor in your background somewhere. [491-492]
>>doc-japanese-koreans-and-pachinko-in-japan
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OVERVIEW
My comments on Kate Quinn’s The Huntress can nicely apply to The Alice Network: easy read, suspense, character development, construction, and mixing of true historical context and facts with the purely fictional. Read my comments on the former before these here.
Like the former novel, The Alice Network is centered on female heroes. And a major part of Quinn’s research as listed in the bibliography at the end of the book centers on the highly important role of women in the two World Wars.
In The Alice Network, despite their Hollywood idealistic aspects, characters have greater depth than in the other work. How is it, then, that I find the book less satisfying? Perhaps it comes from the rhythm of the story: a nice beginning and a speedy, suspenseful−even more exciting−end part, however a somewhat slower middle part−exactly the opposite of The Huntress, where the middle part is action-packed.
Overall, a nice read.
Note: It can be said that the German occupation of the western part of France during WWI was even crueler to the population than was the occupation of WWII. Certain passages of the novel, when they evoke the living conditions of the network, give intimations of this tragedy. Quinn shows, again, her scrupulous respect for historical evidence.
PPS: A small detail: The restaurant central to the story is called Le Léthé. The restaurant owner (and collaborateur with the German occupiers) is a lover of Baudelaire. Le Léthé is one of the most famous poems in Les Fleurs du Mal. The Léthé is the Greek mythological river of forgetfulness the dead must cross before entering the kingdom of the dead. Is it possible that such a word, with its implication of death, could be used for the name of a restaurant? Given the nature of the story, I can understand Quinn’s amusement using the word and the reference. Isn't it just a little too much?
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OVERVIEW
You’ve seen this before: a novelist: hero of the novel, a novelist; a professor: hero of the novel, a professor; etc. etc. etc.
Biographical note on the cover page of A Measured Thread: Mary Behan is a “retired professor of neuroscience,” who lives “in the Driftless Area of Wisconsin in a historic log cabin overlooking a tallgrass prairie.”
The hero and the hero’s abode in her novel are...you’ve guessed it!
Maybe it isn’t autobiographical.
Maybe the main character is...nice.
Maybe the writing is...simple.
Maybe nothing’s...vulgar.
On the back cover: “Fifty years is a long time to keep a secret.”
...I concur...
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OVERVIEW
A narrator looking back on her childhood and early adolescence, trying to put her past in order. Sight, bodily sensation, sound, dialog, fragments are all seen through an eye excruciatingly lucid and analytical, where even feelings are treated with a precision almost emotionless:
I felt the notice of people all over me, like the pressure of a denser medium. Lucille, impatient with my sorrows, had pried the heels off my shoes to make me shorter, but it seemed to me that without them the toes turned up. At times like this I was increasingly struck by Lucille's ability to look the way one was supposed to look. She could roll her anklets and puff her bangs to excellent effect, but try as she might, she could never do as well for me. She had even developed a sauntering sort of walk that made her hips swing a little, but the easy and casual appearance she strove for was very much compromised by my ungainliness, my buzzard’s hunch. We were on our way to buy setting gel and nail polish. I hated these excursions, and I would begin to think of other things in order to endure them.[121]
In her thinking “of other things,” her dreamy ways, Ruth is registering, connecting outside to inside or inside to outside. And, in hints, always somewhere, are shadow and cold, things hidden and inexplicable, beings secret and gone for always and hence,…never lost:
I simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones. Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable. Say that my mother was as tall as a man, and that she sometimes set me on her shoulders, so that I could splash my hands in the cold leaves above our heads. Say that my grandmother sang in her throat while she sat on her bed and we laced up her big black shoes. Such details are merely accidental. Who could know but us? And since their thoughts were bent upon other ghosts than ours, other darknesses than we had seen, why must we be left, the survivors picking among flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter that was all that remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe made notable? Darkness is the only solvent. While it was dark, despite Lucille’s pacing and whistling, and despite what must have been dreams (since even Sylvie came to haunt me), it seemed to me that there need not be relic, remnant, margin, residue, memento, bequest, memory, thought, track, or trace, if only the darkness could be perfect and permanent.[116]
Robinson’s paragraph—her sentence even—often evolves through an implacable movement of sound, image, sense, feeling, like some time-accelerated blossoming that ends in full bloom; a final something, however, which isn’t as you’d have anticipated—a punch line of sorts, unexpected, yet oh! how perfectly logical, retrospectively evident. This implacable development with unforeseeable, logical finale corresponds to the way the whole story works.
One spring my grandfather quit his subterraneous house, walked to the railroad, and took a train west. He told the ticket agent that he wanted to go to the mountains, and the man arranged to have him put off here, which may not have been a malign joke, or a joke at all, since there are mountains, uncountable mountains, and where there are not mountains there are hills. The terrain on which the town itself is built is relatively level, having once belonged to the lake. It seems there was a time when the dimensions of things modified themselves, leaving a number of puzzling margins, as between the mountains as they must have been and the mountains as they are now, or between the lake as it once was and the lake as it is now. Sometimes in the spring the old lake will return. One will open a cellar door to wading boots floating tallowy soles up and planks and buckets bumping at the threshold, the stairway gone from sight after the second step. The earth will brim, the soil will become mud and then silty water, and the grass will stand in chill water to its tips. Our house was at the edge of town on a little hill, so we rarely had more than a black pool in our cellar, with a few skeletal insects skidding around on it. A narrow pond would form in the orchard, water clear as air covering grass and black leaves and fallen branches, all around it black leaves and drenched grass and fallen branches, and on it, slight as an image in an eye, sky, clouds, trees, our hovering faces and our cold hands.
My grandfather had a job with the railroad by the time he reached his stop. It seems he was befriended by a conductor of more than ordinary influence. The job was not an especially good one. He was a watchman, or perhaps a signalman. At any rate, he went to work at nightfall and walked around until dawn, carrying a lamp. But he was a dutiful and industrious worker, and bound to rise. In no more than a decade he was supervising the loading and unloading of livestock and freight, and in another six years he was assistant to the stationmaster. He held this post for two years, when, as he was returning from some business in Spokane, his mortal and professional careers ended in a spectacular derailment. Though it was reported in newspapers as far away as Denver and St. Paul, it was not, strictly speaking, spectacular, because no one saw it happen. The disaster took place midway through a moonless night. The train, which was black and sleek and elegant, and was called the Fireball, had pulled more than halfway across the bridge when the engine nosed over toward the lake and then the rest of the train slid after it into the water like a weasel sliding off a rock. A porter and a waiter who were standing at the railing at the rear of the caboose discussing personal matters (they were distantly related) survived, but they were not really witnesses in any sense, for the equally sound reasons that the darkness was impenetrable to any eye and that they had been standing at the end of the train looking back. [4-6)]
This is from the book’s first pages. Exemplary of the style of writing, the passage also contains the dominant leitmotivs of the novel: the lake, the railroad, water, dampness, cold, depths, darkness and light, fatality (the town of Fingerbone pointing to the lake, like a statue in a cemetery to beyond), absence, meaninglessness, going somewhere without knowing where.
Beguilingly subtle and masterful writing.
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OVERVIEW
I read this novel some time ago and have found it very difficult to write about. Why? Simply because, contrary to my enthusiasm for Saramago’s Blindness, here I couldn’t connect. I suspect many people experience Blindness as a dystopian reality: not so for me. I have seen it rather as a logical demonstration, a demonstration made, however, to highlight the feelings and thoughts of its characters. In Death at Intervals, we’re dealing again with a logical demonstration, but there are no real characters, not even emotions. It’s a pure exercice de style. Could it be a dystopia of the mind itself? A logic of the absurd? Inferences abound thoughtout the novel, and they are down-to-earth, even rather simplistic.
On the surface, the story and writing are uncomplicated. Saramago’s stream of consciousness writing technique operates with its usual efficacy and through his usual omniscient narrator. So we have to delve deeper into the text to uncover its meaning. What follows is a modest proposition for an explanation.
The story is divided into two parts, but these are not delineated physically. The first two thirds of the book deal with the social and political consequences, in an unnamed enclaved country, of the disappearance of death and then its re-apparition. The last third leaves the social context of the first part in the background and centers on a story involving death personified in the classic form of a shrouded female.
I will not evoke here the specific events in the book. The passages below I think can shed light on Saramago’s intentions. ... ...
Epigraph: We will know less and less what it means to be human. Book of Predictions
Epigraph: If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in so doing, you did not encounter new images, new linguistic fields.
Wittgenstein
Lovers of concision, laconism and economy of language, will doubtless be asking, if the idea is such a simple one, why did we need all this waffle to arrive, at last, at the critical point. The answer is equally simple, and we will give it using a current and very trendy term, that will, we hope, make up for the archaisms with which, in the likely opinion of some, we have spattered this account as if with mould, and that term is context. [58]
...united we stand, that is our motto, our watchword, if we remain united, then the future is ours, there you are, quick work as you see, these official communiqués don’t demand any great imaginative effort, they almost write themselves... [88]
... I must confess that I have no idea whether those two expressions, for ever and eternally, are as synonymous as is generally believed... [91]
We humbly recognise that our explanations about this and much more have been sadly lacking, we confess that we are unable to provide explanations that will satisfy those demanding them, unless, taking advantage of the reader’s credulity and leaping over the respect owed to the logic of events, we were to add further unrealities to the congenital unreality of this fable, now we realise that such faults seriously undermine our story’s credibility... [124-125]
...life is an orchestra which is always playing, in tune or out, a titanic that is always sinking and always rising to the surface, and it is then that it occurs to death that she would be left with nothing to do if the sunken ship never managed to rise again...[E]ven I, death, will come to an end when there’s no one left to kill...It was the first time that thinking it had brought her such a feeling of profound relief, like that of someone who, having completed a task, slowly leans back to take a rest. [157]
...what impressed death was that she seemed to hear in those fifty-eight seconds of music a rhythmical and melodic transposition of every and any human life...that final chord, like an ellipsis left hanging in the air, something left to be said...and then death, having finished her observations, concluded that it isn’t true that the antonym of presumption is humility, even if all the dictionaries in the world swear blind that it is, poor dictionaries, who have to rule themselves and us only with the words that exist, when there are so many words still missing, for example, this word that should be the polar opposite of presumption, but never the bowed head of humility, the word that we see clearly written on the face and hands of the cellist, but which cannot tell us what it is called. [160]
... You’ve lost me, talking to you is like finding oneself in a labyrinth with no doors, Now that’s an excellent definition of life... [187]
...death is standing naked before the mirror. She doesn’t know who she is. [189]
...you gave the meanings you wanted to words which, in the end, meant something else entirely, meanings that you don’t know and never will know... [191]
...she must be someone else, says the cellist to his heart, but his heart, which has better eyesight, tells him, open your eyes, it’s her...[193]
The quotes above should give us a better idea of what Saramago has attempted to do in Death at Intervals.
He labels his story a fable and insists on its congenital unreality. What is described, cannot exist in reality, because the fiction is composed simply of words, only labels we stick on things, not the things themselves. In fact, they are archaisms, conventions. Even if you regard the story simply as the elemental reality of fiction, i.e. as a simple convention and not as anything real or half-real, you will still have given the meanings you wanted to words which, in the end, meant something else entirely. Saramago wants you to encounter new images, which are in fact new linguistic fields, but these ideas actually require new names, new words. Writing is based on poor dictionaries, who have to rule themselves and us only with the words that exist, when there are so many words still missing. The essence of life, deep feelings of communion with others and of love, cannot be expressed in words. Only music comes close to doing so. When the cellist plays, there is the word that we see clearly written on the face and hands of the cellist, but which cannot tell us what it is called...[Death] seemed to hear in those fifty-eight seconds of music a rhythmical and melodic transposition of every and any human life...that final chord, like an ellipsis left hanging in the air, something left to be said... All of the expressions in italics above are in the novel.
Death at Intervals is a writer’s recognition of the limits of language. Words can help us imagine other realities, even what goes beyond logic, such as the absence of death in human society. But we cannot accept these other realities, fruits of our imagination, as real. We can, however, be certain that there is no death without life. Life is real. And it’s purest expression−communion between human beings−cannot be through words.
...
PS: After having written the above, I did some research. Most critics remain on the social-political level, underlining the humor and irony (which permeate all of Saramago’s works). No one brings up the idea of the limitations of language as a theme in Death at Intervals.
The Nobel commission’s Prize motivation in 1998 was: “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality.”
“An elusory reality”: Thinking back to the Wittgenstein epigraph, I believe that Saramago wants to “encounter new images, new linguistic fields”. However, he admits that there is a gap between ideas and basic human feelings that language cannot span.
As intermitências da morte was published in 2005 just five years before Saramago’s death at age 88.
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Let’s recognize Lahiri’s technical skill. Very classical. We might make a stretch to agree with the Indian review (on the paperback insert):
At her height, as in “Year’s End,” the tensely measured tone alone can convey the full impact of unexpressed pain and unanticipated violence that leaves in its wake a desolate, distant melancholy.” The Telegraph
But, frankly, what a conformist (stereotypical?) middle class milieu!
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The pleasure we get from a novel comes from the marriage of subject and style, or let’s say, story subject and writing style. The more successful the marriage, where the partners stay united till the end, the greater the pleasure. Pleasure is subjective, of course, based on our intellectual capacities and our artistic experience and taste. As in all marriages, there is a balance in which subject and style play a more or less dominant role; but the important thing is that the union last. Problems crop up when the marriage doesn’t tick: there’s a dichotomy between subject and style. I believe this dichotomy characterizes Jacqueline Woodson’s novel Red at the Bone.
On the level of the story, it’s a fact that I don’t really connect. The ceremony of Melody, preoccupations concerning the dress, the music for the ceremony; teenage mother who doesn’t want to raise her child and prefers to pursue her education, devolving the parenting to the father (this is the main “theme,” supposedly very original); heterosexual and gay sex; grandparents recalling their parents’ suffering from racial violence in Tulsa and their move to Brooklyn; 9/11 “injected” near the end; finally, a bar of gold. For me, no doubt exaggerating some, the overall impression is that of soap-opera, of sentimentality on the level of The Bridges of Madison County.
The story...and now the style: The technique of unfolding events via different characters’ points of view and via different epochs, when employed by a Faulkner or a writer of taste and imagination, is excellent. Here, however, it prevents us from getting into the story, leaving us with simple “stories” and an absence of real emotions. If you add to this the writing itself, a convoluted mix of past and present, of distant allusions and present dialog or present thoughts, you never escape a feeling of artificiality, preventing the story—as concerns my sensibility and my demands for imagination—from communicating deep feelings.
I think Woodson would be better off writing short stories. Chapter 15 holds its own and may be the best in the whole book, where its train-of-thought narrative, despite its complexity, operates nicely and could be a short story.
Note: For the social and psychological issues and a more sympathetic critical viewpoint, I suggest reading the The Guardian review:
>>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/27/red-at-bone-jacqueline-woodson-review
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OVERVIEW
After Evaristo’s excellent Girl, Woman, Other, I had high expectations for The Emperor’s Babe. Unfortunately, they have not been fulfilled.
The book never escapes an “exercice de style”. The mixing of old and modern hip language (and accents) is remarkable, no doubt. But you’re obliged to constantly decode it. Once you’ve done the decoding and you get to the framework of the book, you realize that there’s not much of a story, or let’s say not much of an original story.
A Nubian slave beauty married at age 11 to a Roman patriarch who has a residence in London at the time of the Empire, the unimaginable luxuries of her existence surrounded by innumerable slave servants, her debauches with her prostitute, transvestite, homosexual friends in a downtown brothel, her ambitions to become a poetess, her love-sex affair with the Eperor Septimius Severus who has come to conquer (unsuccesfully, as history revealed) the Caledonians up north: nothing here is exceptional. Oh, perhaps a little, despite our Hollywood-peplum-saturated minds, in the sequence of the forum games, which is—this time, thank goodness—couched in Evaristo’s sophisticated language, but sufficiently explicit to communicate the unmitigated gore. This can’t, however, compensate for the rest.
Yes, we can be astonished by how the complex language mix (some might call it poetic), where you might not get it all, still leaves the story line bright and clear.
If only we could plummet into depths, feel, identify, hold onto something when it’s all over, something which reaches into our being, our soul.
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OVERVIEW
Murakami uses the same basic principle in both of these novels: in a present-day context, along with the normal, bring in the paranormal, let them live together. (No doubt this belongs to an old Japanese artistic tradition, as well as to the present comic-book mode.) His characters evolve between clear-sightedness of themselves, people, world events on the one hand, and incomprehension of these on the other. Progressively, the incomprehension has to be accepted as normal by the characters and concomitantly by the reader, not rejected as totally absurd—or rather, totally stupid. On one level the characters seem to have verisimilitude, on another they simply could never exist. Murakami walks a tightrope between what’s reasonable and what isn’t, and he mustn’t lose the reader. He must convince the reader to accept what doesn’t seem logical, reasonable, normal—at least up to a certain point, but which?, no doubt variable for each reader—in order not to lose the reader’s interest. Part of the trick is to keep the reader curious as to what’s going to happen next, so that he can’t have time to ponder the question of verisimilitude. So, chapters are fairly short, and they alternate between different characters, times, places. There are also numerous leitmotivs.
Apropos the characters: there is always a principal male character-narrator, and a series of secondary third-person-narrated characters, chapters alternating between these. This permits events parallel to the narrator’s experiences, and spatially and/or temporally outside of them. Naturally, characters and events will cross at one point. The main character-narrator must have sincerity, hope, feeling, but he doesn’t endear to the reader. This may be a weakness in Murakami’s work: the reader gets into the hero’s mind, but he doesn’t accept him, which could be OK, except that he cannot identify with the hero’s most essential sentiments, with his deeper being. In the end, the reader has the feeling of having been drawn along, but left with nothing deep, no profound emotion, no personal inner change. All seems superficial and, finally, nothing remains. This is also true on the purely artistic level.
Other negative aspect: Murakami is macho, masculine oriented. There’s rather crude sex to trap the reader; and it’s totally phallocentric.
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OVERVIEW
“C’était le jour de la mort de Michel Leiris”. Ainsi commence ce mince livre (100 pages) aux phrases bien enflées qui s’étalent sur une ou deux pages. Oeuvre bien littéraire, s’il en fut, car faisant explicitement référence à Leiris, Sophie Calle et Virginia Woolf, mais ce ne sont que les principales références, en fait, inspirations, car le texte est dans leur lignée : autofiction, mêlant autobiographie et fiction. Ou est-ce ici simplement autobiographie ?
Pourtant, j’abordais ce livre sans connaître quoi ce soit sur Bouillier ou sur Sophie Calle, connaissant Leiris uniquement par des références extérieures, et ayant lu de Virginia Woolf uniquement To the Lighthouse et Mrs Dallaway. Il est vrai que ma culture littéraire française est bien limitée en dehors des grands classiques, car mes lectures actuelles sont essentiellement en anglais, ma langue maternelle. Ce qui ne m’empêche pas, bien entendu, d’avoir l’outrecuidance de porter un jugement sur ce que je lis en français.
J’entrais dans le livre en pensant que c’étaient une pure fiction. Et, je me suis dit que si c’était le cas, cela ne manquait pas totalement d’intérêt ou, du moins, d’allure. Bien sûr, je m’agaçais de retrouver cette obsession française (notament cinématographique) autour des “histoires d’amour”, et aussi cet étalage trop explicite de la “culture française”, deux choses qui m’ennuient progidieusement. OK, après tout, c’était assez astucieux et la langue était jolie. Pourtant, quand j’ai réfléchi un peu, je suis arrivé à la conclusion que c’était réellement autobiographique et…, franchement, snob. Après m’être documenté un peu, mon opinion n’a pas changée. Pour moi, dans la lecture, la question est toujours la même: “Que reste-t-il après?”
Voici un passage sympathique :
Cette certitude ne m’empêchait pas d’être fébrile et inquiet et dans un état d’écoeurement absolu et de rage et d’impuissance à la perspective de me rendre à cette soirée où j’allais jouer les rôles de curiosité sentimentale et de singe emaillé et de nain prêt à être lancé le plus loin possible ou battre un record dont la nature m’échappait et à Flint, Michigan, Etats-Unis, les responsables locaux de la firme [29] General Motors n’avaient-ils pas organisé une grande soirée pour réconforter la population licenciée après la “délocalisation” de ses usines et dans le parc de l’immense propriété située sur les hauteurs de la ville des chômeurs étaient payés pour jouer les statues vivantes et garder la pose tandis que circulaient des hommes en smoking fumant le cigare et des femmes en robe du soir buvant des coupes de champagne californien. Je songeais alors à Baudelaire taillant les Belges en pièces et Rimbaud insultant les littérateurs de son temps et à Thomas Bernhard et à Artaud et à Alfieri et à Paul envoyant ses épîtres et heureusement qu’ils avaient existé, tout à coup je me sentais moins seul et gonflé de leurs exemples comme si leur refus d’être avali et dépossédé de soi et dénaturé était aussi le mien et à mon tour j’allais arracher le masque de mon époque et de ses représentants les plus en vue, oui, je voulais moi aussi bondir hors du rang des assassins et de leurs complices en divertissements et n’étais-je pas “l’invité mystère” et ils ne soupconnaient pas jusqu’à quel point j’allais le devenir pour eux. [30]
La phrase la plus poétique du livre est sur la quatrième de couverture :
On croit penser à tout et on oublie le livre posé sur la table de nuit.
J’aurais pu en l’occurrence faire de même. Un livre bien mince...
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OVERVIEW
Curiosité. Exercice de style. Difficile de qualifier ce petit livre. Pour comprendre ce que je veux dire, le plus simple sera de lire les quelques extraits ci-dessous.
Notons au passage que l’auteur est québecois et que des auteurs québecois de langue française utilisent parfois un langage un peu particulier, que l’on dit proche du français tel qu’il était en usage aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles à Paris. Cependant, le langage de ce récit est bien une invention originale.
Le narrateur est un jeune adulte (age exact indéterminé) qui a été élevé depuis sa naissance dans la forêt par son père. Dès les premières pages, nous savons qu’il raconte son histoire devant un juge.
Père possédait toutes sciences. Notions et lumières siégeaient sous son casque. Il concevait que Terre est plate, qu’elle stationne au milieu des cieux et que les astres tournoient à l’entour tel le chien ancré au pieu. Que la déesse Lune assure le salut de toutes choses vives : bestieuses, végéteuses et humaines. Que maux de corps se soignent par saignées et autres secours modernes. Que le cauchemar engouffre la cervelle par esgourdes. Père traduisait [9] aussi les allées et venues de l’air : par simple grimpement aux arbres il étudiait au loin le progrès de la bourrasque ou du cyclone cheminant vers nous, et augurait ainsi de notre péril ou de notre quiétude. Boussole et instruments paraissaient tenir en son pied, aussi savait-il circuler sous arbres et sur sentes sans entraves ni déroutements. Il pénétrait le sens des astres et des étoiles, et détenait le don de leur lecture. Aussi, par soirs, il m’arrivait, quand il lorgnait la voûte, de le questionner sur ma destinée. Telle était ma voix : « Père, que distingues-tu cette nuit de ce qu’il en sera de moi ? » Mais père n’était pas parleur.
Dès mon âge le plus vert, il m’avait instruit de tout : comment prendre le poisson, démêler la voix de la bête, talonner le gibier, découper le bif, rissoler le cuissot, tailler en billettes l’arbre abattu, apprêter le crevard de mouffeton, sauter la russule et autres champignes, recouvrer levant et ponant, circuler noctantement, coudre l’accoutre, étriper le chevrillard et même juguler la vipère qui se faufilait dans nos godillots laissés le soir sur le seuil.
Malgré qu’il fût gorgé d’entendement et qu’il eût pu aisément susciter amples égards, père goûtait une existence coite et quasiment solitaire. J’étais, en fait, la seule humanité autorisée d’avoisinance en ses parages. Ainsi coulaient ses jours, distants de tout commerce avec les gens, bourgeois ou créatures, qu’il qualifiait souventes fois de « racaille », de « marauds », de « pendards », de « faquins » et de « gueux ». Détournant volontiers sa face de la foule, il rebroussait toujours à la forêt, qui lui fournissait bien suffisamment tous asiles, pâtures et combustibles nécessaires. Préférablement au discours, il élisait les criailleries des bêtes, les bruissements de la bise dans les branchottes, les craquements des arbres pourris ou tordus, et même le tonnement terrible du grain quand il crève. [10]
Ce langage n’est évidemment pas vraisemblable pour une personne qui n’a vécu toute sa vie qu’avec un père reclus et silencieux dans la forêt à l’écart de la civilisation et qui n’a reçu une éducation formelle que peu de temps avant de raconter son histoire. Les néologismes, les orthographes étymologiques, les mots d’ancien français, l’absence fréquente d’articles définis servent uniquement à l’atmosphère étrange et poétique du récit. De nombreux passages sont pure poésie:
Et toujours des saisons paraissaient, s’établissaient puis repliaient, abandonnant à la forêt leurs pluies, leurs bêtes nouvelles, leurs sociétés d’oiseaux, leurs brigades de tanières, leurs branches engrossées. Par printemps, l’air s’échauffait et gonflait de sève arbres et boqueteaux. En arrière-saison, les cieux ornaient le monde du rideau souple des averses. Ramures saignaient puis lâchaient leur cargaison de feuilles comme pages déchirées. Bourrasques s’en emparaient, et c’était tout le récit de l’été qui s’envolait. Venaient ensuite neigettes, déposant couvercle sur l’étang et capiton de ouate sur toutes choses. En leurs trous, ratons, putois, belets, marmottes et ours entamaient ample roupil, et parientaient sous chairs ensiestées que rebroussent herbettes. La forêt elle-même stoppait sa vie en attendant que lombrics, faufilés en leurs couloirs, recommencent à monger la terre.
Cette écriture unique nous tient tout au long du récit. Un récit où l’étrange côtoie le réel. Et où se dégage un sentiment de tristesse profonde. En décrivant, dans son langage particulier, comment lui et son père survivent au quotidien dans une nature sauvage, en marge de la société, le narrateur exprime quelque chose qu’il ne peut définir lui-même mais qui nous frappe, nous, lecteur : l’absence, ou plutôt des absences : l’absence de communication avec son père, qui ne lui adresse directement que de rares paroles sous forme d’injonctions, mais qui parle, dans ses délires, aux esprits lointains ; l’absence du moindre geste d’affection de la part de son père ; l’absence de sa mère, dont la mort en couches est sans doute à l’origine de la folie de son père et que le narrateur ne voit que sous la forme d’un esprit qui essaie, précisément, de communiquer avec lui ; enfin, l’absence du sentiment le plus essentiel de l’être humain : l’amour.
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OVERVIEW
Some writers have a style of writing which is so particular that it takes a few pages to assimilate their style into our reading habits. But when we “catch” it, make it ours, it can become a powerful means to communicate images and feelings. In particular for a story completely centered on one person and told entirely through that individual’s thoughts and perceptions. The “she” here—Grace—is always interior, totally subjective. And Lynch’s dense poetic language really makes us see and feel what Grace sees and feels.
I guess some readers may find Lynch’s style “snobish” or “sophisticated” or “elaborate” or “too metaphoric” or whatever. For me it is superlatively poetic and, perhaps, even makes tolerable the endless turmoil which permeates much of the novel.
In Grace, we’re dealing with a form of dystopia, i.e. the collapse of a social structure and its associated horrors. Contrary to speculative dystopian disaster, however, such as in Cormach McCarthy’s The Road, which is rife with Hollywood conventions and their over-simplification bordering on vulgarity, the disaster described in Grace is based on a real historical context: the An Gorta Mór, the “Great Hunger”, or An Drochshaol, the “Bad Life”, which ravaged Ireland between 1845 and 1852, when the staple food resource for the poor tenant farmers—the potato—was devastated by a mold. An example among so many historical dystopias, in particular those of famine—Holodomor, Ruanda, etc. etc. etc—of how reality goes well beyond fiction. One million deaths from starvation and another million who emigrated.
Lynch uses this context to imagine what could happen when a girl of 14 years old is forced to leave her home, her pregnant mother and younger brothers, and find the means to survive alone. Never does he idealize Grace, nor does he mitigate the harshness of the world around her. Never does he fall into fictional artificiality, no pathos, no idealization of any sort. No fictional excesses. Just implacable logic. Imagination. Art.
Grace survives in physical discomfort and under ever-present doubt and fear. The menace of aggression and murder and starvation are everywhere. She has an acute faculty of observation and a considerable depth of thought, along with an innate intelligence. Early on, from her experience in her family before her peregrinations, she has understood that men are prone to violence and to the exploitation of women. Progressively, she will develop an awareness that the social turmoil around her is in part the result of political and economic injustice.
Her experience is not without psychological consequence. She develops a form of dual personality. For her survival, she is obliged to disguise and pretend to be a boy. Trauma will provoke a continuous inner dialog with her younger brother, often an inner debate where she is actually reasoning the different aspects of her present situation, and which sometimes reaches the point where she voices aloud, despite herself, what her “brother” is saying in her mind. This is one of Lynch’s most brilliant inventions.
Needless to say, Grace’s surprising wanderings, encounters, and thoughts leave their mark. This is a fascinating and enriching read.
Immediately below a few extracts to show the writing style of more contemplative passages. For further details on style and construction, see Thoughts after Reading.
Later she thinks, where has all time gone? She feels she has not been present for most of it. And yet this winter drags on like a leaden sack pulled by some dumb and sightless mule up an impossible hill. The pale sun hidden. The trees in their bones standing penitent. Everything, it seems, waiting for the earth gravid with spring but not yet. She is luck itself, she knows. The way she has evaded the worst of winter. The year previous, the frost came furtive into the house like a long hand under the door. Icicles on the jambs and Colly licking them. And now the days are almost warm if you keep moving. Just the rain and the way the clouds swell with dark purpose, there seems no end to it. She walks down-headed and internal to the rain, her eyes turned to chatter. [51]
In every ditch she sees shadows that might leap to kill, cuts at shadow-men in sleep with her knife.
Colly says, keep your eyes open for forage. But the cottier fields are cabbaged clean and every ditch is stripped of its nettles. Even the chickweed that Mum used to soothe the rashed botties of the youngers is being sold in handfuls. Women calling to strangers waving fistfuls of the herb. For your soup, they say. She counts the months that have passed since the failed harvest. Can see that the wintering has only deepened in spring. So many fields now along these roads lie unbroken by harrow. They are returning to an ancient wilderness, she thinks, as if nature were weeding the workingmen from their fields. Such men now walk the roads following the devil’s footsteps. In their slump-walk you can see them coming slowly undone. How they look like they are losing both their inwardness and outwardness. Or those too weak to work sit about watching the road. How they always ask first for work before getting to what they really want. Have you the kindness of an offering? Can you spare a coin? She is growing indurate to what is held in the eye of such men. Men stood with that dead-staring of donkeys. Their faces eaten in. (107] How they watch you from the moment you rise from the road to the moment you disappear past them. You can tell a wild lot from the far-off of a walk. The rise of a foot. The slump of a shoulder. The hold of a head.
Who is and who isn’t. [108]
She sits at the doorstep letting the air do its work. Listens to the wild story of the night. This wait for tiredness. Wishing the smell out of the house. Wishing for nights of summer, when the sky is clear with stars to twinkle some suggestion of heat. In the glen below, the farmhouse winks each window to dark and the world closes around it. A short while later Colly says, what in heaven is that? She maps the dark until she can see it, some strange orb of light traveling slowly. It has appeared, it seems, from the farmhouse but perhaps not. A yellowing mote that moves steady and in one direction like a cat’s-eye caught by candle. She thinks, it is a walker’s pace. Somebody out to check on animals in the snow. Then the light disappears.
Not a soul to be seen or heard, her mind a wandering stare through the night’s dark. She is trying to unthink everything that has happened, all the trouble of the world reduced to black stillness.
So this is what freedom is, she thinks. Freedom is when you are free to disappear off the earth without anybody knowing. Freedom is (137] your soul in the emptiness of night. Freedom is this dark that is as great as what holds the stars and everything beneath it and yet how it seems to be nothing, has no beginning, no end, and no centre. Daylight tricks you into thinking what you see is the truth, lets you go through life thinking you know everything. But the truth is we are sleepwalkers. We walk through night that is chaos and dark and forever keeps its truth to itself.
The cat’s-eye of light reappears and she watches it bobbling like hope towards the farmhouse below in the glen.
Colly says, he’s a poisoner of horses—that’s what he is.
It could well be a person up to no good.
Maybe it’s not a person at all, maybe it’s another witch and we’re living in the valley of witches.
Maybe it was the glowing eye of the pooka.
Maybe it is the work of a smuggler, or—hee!
What?
It’s just somebody from that farmhouse gone to the outhouse for a dump. [138]
The sound of hard rain hurtling through the dark is a cold hand that grips her. As it was at the beginning is now and ever shall be world without end. Thought falling out of prayer until she can hear only rainfall. She rests her forehead against her hands. How the rain carries the sound of eternity within it, carries the sound and shapes of other places, the mountains and the hills and the bogland where you come from, the sound of other voices, the looks that others put upon the rain in other places and how the rain carries their looks, puts them down here. She opens her eyes and stares at the pitch window, the rain hidden, she thinks, our own lives hidden and everything falling. [329]
After reading the book >>Grace THOUGHTS
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