Somehow Penelope Lively found the checklist of subjects I like to see explored in literature that I leave lying around, because her novel Moon Tiger, which won the Booker Prize in 1987, contains all of them: lyrical, sweeping accounts of histories both personal and international; objects imbued with the etymologies of their names; people overcoming their questionable excesses of pretentiousness; the violent impact of war and progress on society; hot, ancient deserts; varying perspectives, beliefs, and suppositions causing people to misinterpret each other, with conflict arising from miscommunication and a tension arising from the various ways in which several people can see the same thing; and people struggling to understand the strangers within themselves--the people they were and the actions they do that contradict who they think they are and who they want to be. Check, check, and check.
Claudia Hampton is a popular historian who, with death imminent, decides to write a startling new chronology of the world from her deathbed, entirely inside her head. Her history will free associate; the dinosaurs of the Jurassic will roam freely with the Victorian construction workers who unearthed their bones, and her own opinions and memories and connotations of both will earn just as much factual merit as scholarly opinion, so that a recollection of bathing on the shore with her little brother and discovering an ammonite fossil will be just as important as any geological-biological description of the rise and fall of the ammonite species. Her world history, which is Moon Tiger, will be life as we live it, with complications, contradictions, confusions, regrets, pining for the future, and fondness for the past all jumbled together, and so the book drifts freely from personal narrative to historical explanation, between various overlapping and contradictory viewpoints, through several nonlinear time frames, making declarative statements yet admitting to the shakiness of Truth.
Claudia is at once a feeble old woman and a brilliant wunderkind, a neglectful mother and a life-saving surrogate mom, a controversial and florid populist and a harsh critic of popular entertainment, an independent sexual partner and a devoted lover, a judgmental sibling and an incestuous admirer, a pretentious bullhorn and an insecure human. At what moment were parts of her personality born? At what moment did aspects die? With all these forces competing, how will she be remembered by those she offended, betrayed, loved, and ignored?
Central to the story is her daughter, Lisa, the offspring of a prolonged affair whom she quickly dismisses as dumb at a very early age. Caught up in her own world of intellectuals and unready for motherhood, she judges her three-year-old for being unable to discourse, rationalize, and argue effectively. To her dumb daughter, all wide-eyed and full of ignorant wonder, she is Claudia, since Mom is a stupid and immature name. We, perhaps more willing to trust in a child's eventual advancement and development and its need for certain attentions and bonds, see Claudia's flaws reflected through her own arrogant dismissals, and when Lisa is an adult--an average mother with an above average intelligence and a below average self esteem--we see the chasm that Claudia's poor choices of four decades ago has eroded between them, an unbridgeable gap of misunderstanding, with Claudia still convinced that her daughter is a bit simple and Lisa wrongly convinced that she knows more about her mother than her mother knows about either of them. Lisa, clinging to memories of affairs and secrets that her mother will never know, embraces the satisfying idea that she is able to make herself more than meets the eye, that anyone who writes her off as easily understood is sorely mistaken, even if they never know so. We all perhaps hold onto these secrets, mementos, guilts, desires, and memories that are unique and individual, that allow us to believe that even if we are unearthed, humiliated, dismissed, and attacked, some private part of ourselves will remain intact and untouched. Lisa's insecure defense against an all-knowing and presumptuous mother carries into her other relationships; despite having a loving marriage, she carries on an extramarital affair that only she and her lover know anything about--an extraneous affair, from many viewpoints.
Lisa fails, though, in assuming that her secret defense is a personal innovation, that offenders like her mother don't have hidden stores of private energy. As her mother dies, a fading and crippled woman, she avenges her bad childhood by dismissing her mother as an arrogant, mistake-prone bitch incapable of loving anyone. Given our insight into Claudia's mind, we know this is a huge mistake, and perhaps the worst curse that Claudia has bestowed upon her daughter is her own proclivity toward making narrow assumptions about those around her.
In the end, Lisa's revenge is thwarted by Claudia's sudden revelation of something completely inconsistent with her outward behavior toward her daughter: an apology leaves both of them surprised and perplexed, trying to make sense of the tangled mess of ideas, traits, contradictions, and actions that comprise the gray regions of history, personality, and truth.
Moon Tiger is a fantastic book about ancient Egypt, dinosaurs, World War II, the French and Hungarian revolutions, love, death, and childhood thoughts that I highly recommend to everyone.
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
11 February, 2009
12 December, 2008
Of course she never has breakfast at Tiffany's!
I remember seeing Breakfast at Tiffany's in my "film studies" elective class in seventh grade, though I don't really remember much of it other than daffy, romantic banter, a cutesy moment centered on a Cracker Jack box, talk of a guy in Sing Sing, and a bespectacled Mickey Rooney screaming down a flight of stairs. I also distinctly remember having no idea what the title meant and deciding that it was an intentional non sequitur serving only to confuse. She never has breakfast at Tiffany's! How could she? It's a jewelry store.
So when I decided to read the novella a few days ago, I actually didn't expect much insight. In fact, when gabby, beautiful Holly Golightly--to a certain extent a New York City escort, to another extent a social butterfly and starlet, but quite possibly none of the above--first drops the titular line, it is indeed a non sequitur. She confesses:
At that point it's not even clear if she's talking about the store or some friend's house, though other than her big dumb lovable brother Fred--long estranged by the trials of adulthood--she doesn't seem to have any real friends she thinks of by name and would make such plans involving. But soon after, hugging the cat that lives in her transient apartment, she clarifies:
Tiffany's is home, and as revealed throughout the book through the eyes of a nameless neighbor narrator she lovingly calls Fred (for a while), Holly spends her whole life looking for it, abandoning her abusive childhood, slipping away from an empty teen marriage, escaping all ties and titles (her business card simply states, "Holly Golightly, traveling"), and eventually fleeing the country to South America and then onward to third-world Africa.
Holly and the narrator are cursed by their excessive talent and their overwhelming ambition. In a world populated by pudgy-faced millionaires with baby complexes, huge, flat-chested women who seductively accentuate their speech impediments, and other such absurdities, they are two smart, young souls bursting with life and ability and unwilling to be imprisoned by anything less than their desert. The narrator, it's assumed, succeeds because he's able to focus his energy on the singular goal of being a published writer, but Holly is unable to align her broad array of exceptional talents and gifts, which brought her from an impoverished life in the deep south to the upper echelons of fashionable New York society.
She despises zoos for their cages, lives out of a few hastily packed cardboard boxes, never seems to sleep, and talks several interesting pages at a time. Breakfast at Tiffany's is hilarious, scandalous (I'm curious to see how the G-rated Audrey Hepburn movie was even made, now that I know about the drugs, sex, and language that proliferate the source material), and rich with modern absurdities, but Capote treats his shy, nameless narrator and his wayward star with a heartfelt tenderness. Their relationship is sweet though not quite romantic, and their peaceful success is yearned for by the reader.
In the end, as Holly prepares a hasty departure, she unleashes her moniker-less feline friend (the cat is like the narrator, who she first calls Fred and then calls Buddy, never bothering to learn the real name because she knows she's destined to lose him in short time), who runs off to find his own Tiffany's while she, perhaps tragically, continues her quest for a sense of belonging and a chance to stop and breathe.
***
There are three additional short stories compiled with Breakfast at Tiffany's, all of them very diverse: "House of Flowers," a fable about Haitian prostitutes and Carnivale that reminded me of Black Orpheus; "A Diamond Guitar," a precursor to The Shawshank Redemption; and "A Christmas Memory," a beautiful recollection of a perfect friendship.
Of the three, the last is by far my favorite. Capote writes of two friends and distant cousins, one a septuagenarian and the other a seven-year-old, the former as youthful as the latter is wise, preparing for an advancing Southern Christmas by baking fruitcakes for distant acquaintances (motorists who once broke down at the driveway, the bus driver, the President of the United States) and crafting gifts and decorations. Capote's images are precise, as in this scene where the two misfits, neither with any source of traditional income, dig out their savings to prepare for grocery shopping:
The pair enjoy Christmas richly without material goods, savoring the smells of good cooking, the warmth of companionship, and the taste of adventure. Yet for all its tenderness and tranquility, in spite of its familiar theme and message, the story never comes off as schmaltzy, moralistic, or falsely nostalgic. It's a terrific snapshot of a sweet spot from childhood, and it deserves to be a Christmas classic by now, though unfortunately I'd never heard of it before.
So when I decided to read the novella a few days ago, I actually didn't expect much insight. In fact, when gabby, beautiful Holly Golightly--to a certain extent a New York City escort, to another extent a social butterfly and starlet, but quite possibly none of the above--first drops the titular line, it is indeed a non sequitur. She confesses:
I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous. That's very much on my schedule, and someday I'll try to get around to it; but if it happens, I'd like to have my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's.
At that point it's not even clear if she's talking about the store or some friend's house, though other than her big dumb lovable brother Fred--long estranged by the trials of adulthood--she doesn't seem to have any real friends she thinks of by name and would make such plans involving. But soon after, hugging the cat that lives in her transient apartment, she clarifies:
Poor slob... poor slob without a name. It's a little inconvenient, his not having a name. But I haven't right to give him one: he'll have to wait until he belongs to somebody. We just sort of took up by the river one day, we don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I. I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together. I'm not quite sure where that is just yet. But I know what it's like.... It's like Tiffany's.... Not that I give a damn about jewelry.... It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany's, then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name.
Tiffany's is home, and as revealed throughout the book through the eyes of a nameless neighbor narrator she lovingly calls Fred (for a while), Holly spends her whole life looking for it, abandoning her abusive childhood, slipping away from an empty teen marriage, escaping all ties and titles (her business card simply states, "Holly Golightly, traveling"), and eventually fleeing the country to South America and then onward to third-world Africa.
Holly and the narrator are cursed by their excessive talent and their overwhelming ambition. In a world populated by pudgy-faced millionaires with baby complexes, huge, flat-chested women who seductively accentuate their speech impediments, and other such absurdities, they are two smart, young souls bursting with life and ability and unwilling to be imprisoned by anything less than their desert. The narrator, it's assumed, succeeds because he's able to focus his energy on the singular goal of being a published writer, but Holly is unable to align her broad array of exceptional talents and gifts, which brought her from an impoverished life in the deep south to the upper echelons of fashionable New York society.
She despises zoos for their cages, lives out of a few hastily packed cardboard boxes, never seems to sleep, and talks several interesting pages at a time. Breakfast at Tiffany's is hilarious, scandalous (I'm curious to see how the G-rated Audrey Hepburn movie was even made, now that I know about the drugs, sex, and language that proliferate the source material), and rich with modern absurdities, but Capote treats his shy, nameless narrator and his wayward star with a heartfelt tenderness. Their relationship is sweet though not quite romantic, and their peaceful success is yearned for by the reader.
In the end, as Holly prepares a hasty departure, she unleashes her moniker-less feline friend (the cat is like the narrator, who she first calls Fred and then calls Buddy, never bothering to learn the real name because she knows she's destined to lose him in short time), who runs off to find his own Tiffany's while she, perhaps tragically, continues her quest for a sense of belonging and a chance to stop and breathe.
***
There are three additional short stories compiled with Breakfast at Tiffany's, all of them very diverse: "House of Flowers," a fable about Haitian prostitutes and Carnivale that reminded me of Black Orpheus; "A Diamond Guitar," a precursor to The Shawshank Redemption; and "A Christmas Memory," a beautiful recollection of a perfect friendship.
Of the three, the last is by far my favorite. Capote writes of two friends and distant cousins, one a septuagenarian and the other a seven-year-old, the former as youthful as the latter is wise, preparing for an advancing Southern Christmas by baking fruitcakes for distant acquaintances (motorists who once broke down at the driveway, the bus driver, the President of the United States) and crafting gifts and decorations. Capote's images are precise, as in this scene where the two misfits, neither with any source of traditional income, dig out their savings to prepare for grocery shopping:
Dollar bills, tightly rolled and green as May buds. Somber fifty-cent pieces, heavy enough to weight a dead man's eyes. Lovely dimes, the liveliest coin, the one that really jingles. Nickels and quarters, worn smooth as creek pebbles. But mostly a hateful heap of bitter-odored pennies.
The pair enjoy Christmas richly without material goods, savoring the smells of good cooking, the warmth of companionship, and the taste of adventure. Yet for all its tenderness and tranquility, in spite of its familiar theme and message, the story never comes off as schmaltzy, moralistic, or falsely nostalgic. It's a terrific snapshot of a sweet spot from childhood, and it deserves to be a Christmas classic by now, though unfortunately I'd never heard of it before.
19 November, 2008
Buchi Emecheta's The Rape of Shavi
I was going to write about Buchi Emecheta's The Rape of Shavi, which I just finished yesterday (a very quick, 178 page read), but it turns out that all of my thoughts about the book have already been eloquently stated in this New York Times article that's a month older than I am.
Essentially, though trying to be a timely allegory, the novel doesn't exist outside of its own pages, and hardly within them. Emecheta, a woman from Lagos, Nigeria, who had previously written a couple autobiographical works, sets her fable in the fictional, hardscrabble village of Shavi, somewhere on the lakes of Ogene in the southern Sahara. Emecheta can't quite decide whether the Shavians are heroic, idyllic primitives or warmongering imperialists just waiting to explode out of the past; one things for certain: they're not complex, well-rounded human beings, since no character is afforded more than a few pat summarizations and philosophical objectives.
Some offensive because they're supposed to be offensive liberal white intellectuals crash-land a flaming bird--birds being an oracular animal to the Shavians--into the Shavian wilderness, and the two groups spend a couple years teaching their moral flaws to each other. Their being there is somewhat nonsensical; they've fled Europe in a supposedly indestructible plane because they were certain that the civilized world was on the brink of nuclear holocaust. I'm not sure how people that paranoid and jumpy could be smart enough to build an indestructible plane, but what's more surprising is that when they land said indestructible plane and meet the locals, they can't even figure out where they are. It takes several chapters for them to deduce they're in Africa, and then only because a modified version of a certain African instrument is used in a celebration. Come on, guys? Weren't you looking out the window? Wasn't there any navigational gear? Can't you freaking tell when you're in the Sahara surrounded by a stereotypical African tribe?
The thoughtful, slow-moving Shavians--themselves refugee slaves from five hundred years ago--distrust the leprous, albino monkeys at first, many assuming that they're not human, but eventually they become convinced that, because of the flaming bird they arrived in, they are angels from Heaven sent to test their hospitality as well as deliver gifts that will free them from starvation and drought. This is a key distinction between the Europeans and the Shavians, perhaps the difference that's supposed to be most important. When the plane is fixed, a Shavian returns with the surviving Europeans to England. This man wrapped in goat skins who crash-lands into England in a strange, unregistered plane with five people who have been missing for over a year is detained by immigration officials for a couple of days before being released and embraced by society, which quickly corrupts him with its Western ways. Whereas the Shavians bestow great honors upon the visiting Europeans, the Europeans temporarily detain the visiting Shavian.
But here's the essential difference that's ignored by Emecheta: none of the Europeans think that the Shavian is an angel from God, which he proves by quickly adopting only the worst of Western habits (and there are no good Western values in this book; we're a bunch of jumpy, arrogant baby-killers with no respect for the simpler things in life). Likewise, no European suspects the Shavian is a contagious leper or a beast. It makes sense that the Shavians would pay special attention to visitors from the sky when a) they've never seen airplanes or white people and b) they never receive visitors. It's a little silly to expect one of hundreds of daily immigrants to be treated like royalty, yet Emecheta condemns the British for not giving the man a plush suite at Buckingham Palace.
One of the white people, a female doctor, is cut down a notch for attempting to impose her arrogant Western medicine on the Shavians. Watching a breach birth in progress, she attempts to provide her assistance in possibly performing a Caesarian section and saving the infant's life. She is shooed away, the birth is performed naturally in a squatting position, and everything ends up okay. Later she beats herself up for having fooled herself into thinking that her medical expertise would be superior to tradition (a tradition which, keep in mind, believes that female clitorisation is necessary for a woman to have sex--an act that is brought up but never really explored, a mutilation that is treated as a normal operation). I guess I'm biased, but I like to think that Western medicine and medical procedures have probably saved a few lives. There's something to be said for doing things naturally and holistically--but, uh, the outcome isn't always as peachy.
The Shavians don't exist in the real world, but they seem more realistic than the one-dimensional Europeans in the novel--Europeans that actually do exist and that Emecheta would've known. Lagos with its population of 8 million isn't exactly isolated Shavi. It's difficult pinpointing a reality in this book (the valuable, "hard" stones that proliferate the Shavian land and aren't quite diamonds add an extra dimension of implausibility), which makes the hamfisted statements and talking-head dialogue all the more difficult.
Essentially, though trying to be a timely allegory, the novel doesn't exist outside of its own pages, and hardly within them. Emecheta, a woman from Lagos, Nigeria, who had previously written a couple autobiographical works, sets her fable in the fictional, hardscrabble village of Shavi, somewhere on the lakes of Ogene in the southern Sahara. Emecheta can't quite decide whether the Shavians are heroic, idyllic primitives or warmongering imperialists just waiting to explode out of the past; one things for certain: they're not complex, well-rounded human beings, since no character is afforded more than a few pat summarizations and philosophical objectives.
Some offensive because they're supposed to be offensive liberal white intellectuals crash-land a flaming bird--birds being an oracular animal to the Shavians--into the Shavian wilderness, and the two groups spend a couple years teaching their moral flaws to each other. Their being there is somewhat nonsensical; they've fled Europe in a supposedly indestructible plane because they were certain that the civilized world was on the brink of nuclear holocaust. I'm not sure how people that paranoid and jumpy could be smart enough to build an indestructible plane, but what's more surprising is that when they land said indestructible plane and meet the locals, they can't even figure out where they are. It takes several chapters for them to deduce they're in Africa, and then only because a modified version of a certain African instrument is used in a celebration. Come on, guys? Weren't you looking out the window? Wasn't there any navigational gear? Can't you freaking tell when you're in the Sahara surrounded by a stereotypical African tribe?
The thoughtful, slow-moving Shavians--themselves refugee slaves from five hundred years ago--distrust the leprous, albino monkeys at first, many assuming that they're not human, but eventually they become convinced that, because of the flaming bird they arrived in, they are angels from Heaven sent to test their hospitality as well as deliver gifts that will free them from starvation and drought. This is a key distinction between the Europeans and the Shavians, perhaps the difference that's supposed to be most important. When the plane is fixed, a Shavian returns with the surviving Europeans to England. This man wrapped in goat skins who crash-lands into England in a strange, unregistered plane with five people who have been missing for over a year is detained by immigration officials for a couple of days before being released and embraced by society, which quickly corrupts him with its Western ways. Whereas the Shavians bestow great honors upon the visiting Europeans, the Europeans temporarily detain the visiting Shavian.
But here's the essential difference that's ignored by Emecheta: none of the Europeans think that the Shavian is an angel from God, which he proves by quickly adopting only the worst of Western habits (and there are no good Western values in this book; we're a bunch of jumpy, arrogant baby-killers with no respect for the simpler things in life). Likewise, no European suspects the Shavian is a contagious leper or a beast. It makes sense that the Shavians would pay special attention to visitors from the sky when a) they've never seen airplanes or white people and b) they never receive visitors. It's a little silly to expect one of hundreds of daily immigrants to be treated like royalty, yet Emecheta condemns the British for not giving the man a plush suite at Buckingham Palace.
One of the white people, a female doctor, is cut down a notch for attempting to impose her arrogant Western medicine on the Shavians. Watching a breach birth in progress, she attempts to provide her assistance in possibly performing a Caesarian section and saving the infant's life. She is shooed away, the birth is performed naturally in a squatting position, and everything ends up okay. Later she beats herself up for having fooled herself into thinking that her medical expertise would be superior to tradition (a tradition which, keep in mind, believes that female clitorisation is necessary for a woman to have sex--an act that is brought up but never really explored, a mutilation that is treated as a normal operation). I guess I'm biased, but I like to think that Western medicine and medical procedures have probably saved a few lives. There's something to be said for doing things naturally and holistically--but, uh, the outcome isn't always as peachy.
The Shavians don't exist in the real world, but they seem more realistic than the one-dimensional Europeans in the novel--Europeans that actually do exist and that Emecheta would've known. Lagos with its population of 8 million isn't exactly isolated Shavi. It's difficult pinpointing a reality in this book (the valuable, "hard" stones that proliferate the Shavian land and aren't quite diamonds add an extra dimension of implausibility), which makes the hamfisted statements and talking-head dialogue all the more difficult.
05 November, 2008
Thomas Mann and the Artist Other
Vintage International's Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories
The creative mind is an alienating and lonely place in the short stories of German Nobelist Thomas Mann, a shadowy, self-sufficient cell in which the creative person hides and stews, occasionally peeking out at the simpler world beyond.
Art is effervescent, a resident of the mental aether, fueled only by other mental sustenance--its own creative momentum, the growing breadth of knowledge and understanding, other creations and works of art. The artistic mind needs artistic fodder, and no external incentive can truly satiate it, if the urge to create can ever truly said to be satiated. Fame and money, honor and sexual favors, privilege and notoriety, all can benefit the person encasing the artistic mind, but the mind itself becomes encumbered. In the work of Mann is a fatal dichotomy between the internal and the external: the outside man with his belongings, his social relationships, his loves, his physical appearance and surroundings, and the inside man with his private thoughts, his emotions, his intelligence, and his need to procreate his knowledge. Rarely do the two coexist happily and fully empowered; the benefit of one tends to destroy the other.
In "Death in Venice," published in 1912, the acclaimed author Gustav Aschenbach has steadily and quietly acquired the trappings of literary fame, culminating in the addition of the surname prefix "von," a preposition denoting nobility. Aschenbach has grown tired and lonely, distracted from his art by the clutches of aristocracy. He undergoes a standard upper class treatment to deal with his writer's block, an exotic vacation on the sunny shores of foreign Venice, itself now an old and tired resort, humid, filthy, and gray. The vacation will presumably calm and enrich his mind, but of course the more realistic outcome is one of softening distraction, a thoughtless immersion in sunshine, rich food, and other sensual pleasantries.
On the boat ride, Aschenbach experiences a revulsion at the sight of a superficial old man, a disgusting, flamboyant clown in adolescent attire, with a youthful but clearly artificial wig, a thick smearing of rosy makeup, false teeth, and a nauseating exuberant attitude, eagerly pursuing young sailors as though they are fooled by his costume. The old man is a fake, obsessed with an external, physical youth he can never again possess, living backward, unable to accept his own reality. With age comes maturity, wisdom, a strengthening of the artistic abilities, but the old man shuns these hard-fought skills, instead chasing after the easy gifts of youthful vigor and beauty.
Filled with contempt, Aschenbach arrives at Venice committed to his ideals, eager to embrace the mind he has spent decades shaping and honing, willing to shed his long-gone youth. His sojourn soon weakens his commitment, however, as a full belly and mindless trips to the sandy shore allow his thoughts to prattle and his eyes to fall on a blonde, Polish adolescent, a pubescent Adonis with flawless features, traveling with his wealthy Eastern European family. Despite being a widowed father, a surprise sexual obsession creeps in, at first explained away with pederastic allusions to Roman and Greek mythology but eventually acknowledged as outright infatuation. The unblemished youth, the overwhelming self-confidence, the full future ahead--Aschenbach becomes enamored of all these features of his young Tadzio, a boy he fearfully and lustfully pursues without ever speaking to or interacting with, beyond an unheard, whispered "I love you."
Lust, regret, and unjustified optimism flood into the recesses of his mind, preoccupying his thoughts and commanding his actions. Artistic creation, intellectual stimulation, moral ideals, and even concern for physical well-being slip away as Aschenbach pursues his unconquerable tease. With obvious threats of an intense cholera epidemic sweeping Venice and with his health beginning to falter, Aschenbach forgets his original salubrious intentions, seeking every opportunity to prolong his stay in this false paradise. In the end, he becomes the elderly clown he once scorned: dying his hair, rouging his cheeks, and expending much money on foppish attire. As he dies in his beach chair, completely hypnotized by the illusion of paradisaical youth that surrounds him, he witnesses a boyish opponent trample his perfect boy hero into the sand, revealing a crying, weak, and selfish boy beneath the godlike physical perfection. Nostalgia and regret may make childhood seem perfect, but childhood is a time of powerlessness, egocentrism, and emotional volatility.
***
In "Tonio Kröger," published in 1902, the inverse occurs with equally regretful though not quite as tragic results. Tonio, an introspective, wealthy schoolboy ostracized for his foreign name, exotic Italian mother, and effeminate disposition but tolerated due to his family's social standing, admires his equally upstanding buddy Hans Hansen, an Aryan ideal with blonde hair, blue eyes, an outgoing personality, and boyish attributes. Tonio admires Hans, who--in appearance, at least--remains unsullied by self-doubt, emotional conflict, and troubling thoughts. Hans is friendly and blameless, thoughtlessly acting according to societal standards, and the only books he reads are about horse racing. Tonio respects Hans's bourgeois simplicity while belittling his own commitment to literary novels and poetic thoughts, and when he realizes that the only way they could ever closely connect would be for Hans to muddy his charm or for Hans to turn off his brain, Hans decides to preserve Hans's mindless posterboy ideal by retreating from their tenuous friendship. Similarly at the age of sixteen he departs from Ingeborg Holm, his beautiful, spoiled dancing partner who detects Tonio's complicated differentness.
By adulthood, his family prestige having vanished, Tonio becomes a famous writer in exchange for abandoning interaction with the real world. In Tonio's mind, a person on the verge of artistry must choose between being vibrant and devoting oneself to art. To pursue art is to kill the external self, to destroy any enjoyment of physical reality or personal relationships. The artistic temperament makes pleasantries too complex to be truly enjoyed, and hedonistic pleasures distract too much from mental fulfillment. Tonio consciously chooses death, in his mind sacrificing himself so that other, more simple, more beautiful people can more easily enjoy the outside world.
Tonio Kröger is a socially awkward, sexually confused pariah, demeaning the people he admires most to protect his fragile ego from rejection. His dichotomy of dead artist versus living simpleton is unfounded and fatalistic, and his painter friend Lisabeta seems to realize this as she quietly dismisses his diatribe on the subject. In the end, he journey north to Denmark, home of the loner intellectual Hamlet, passing through his hometown--all the more transformed due to his own transformation--on a quest to gain some refuge from his alienation. He confesses his love for humanity but remains too trapped in his fears and preconceptions to become a part of it.
***
Detlev Spinell, the unsuccessful, pretentious, and cowardly novelist from "Tristan," published in 1902, also suffers from his own feelings of martyrdom and condescension toward the easy-living, non-artistic simpleton. His one claim to fame is a short, substanceless novel bogged down with florid descriptions of furniture and scenery. All the same, he parades this novel around the sanatorium in which he resides, frequently rereading it and pushing it off on any interested potential admirer. He acknowledges that his profound intelligence has made him physically weak, but his praise toward normal, hardworking humans with their flabby ideas, coarse tastes, and strong wills is backhanded and insulting. His love for his alien distinction blinds him from how others more realistically perceive him and prevent him from having valuable interactions. His writing his hyperbolic, absurd, and clumsy, and his perceptions of his fellow men and women are offensive. Rather than loving the totality of a woman--her unique shortcomings, her attractive qualities, her human flaws--Spinell prefers to see women only briefly from the corner of his eye, never tarnishing his perfect first impression with unsightly realities.
When a philandering, foreign merchant's wife, the sensitive, piano-playing daughter of a dying German dynasty, enters the sanatorium with respiration problems following the birth of her healthy baby boy, Spinell chooses to fall in love with his illusion of the heroine--a fragile piano prodigy possessing the greatest thoughts and talents. Flaws such as a garish, bulging vein on her forehead irk him, but he loves his image of her all the same, criminalizing her pragmatic, normal husband while urging the woman to exert herself through music, an exhausting activity that, as warned by her doctors, kills her. According to Spinell, artists have a duty to succumb to their art, to sacrifice themselves to their ideals, that each minute spent living in the real world is one step farther from true divinity. Spinell is, of course, sociopathic, and his confrontation with the husband, who reveals to Spinell a more mundane portrait of his wife, is tense and charged.
***
Aristocratic pretension and the tension between nobility/wealth and art emerge again in "The Blood of the Walsungs," a disturbing tale from 1905 in which two incredibly privileged twins, their thoughts bogged down with their own superiority, fashion, wealth, and societal conventions, look down upon inferior outsiders so hatefully that their quest for companionship leads to incest. Siegmund longs to be an artist and to have interesting, imaginative thoughts, but his preoccupations with customs, fashions, and money oppress his ideas.
***
A depressive longing for youth and nostalgia emerges again in "Disorder and Early Sorrow," from 1925, wherein a history professor with a one-track mind dedicated to the fully explainable events of several centuries ago (and how they sometimes relate to the modern topics at hand) stresses over the atraditional behaviors of his rebellious children and their new styles of culture, dress, dance, and politics. Like "Death in Venice," the story's obsession with resisting progress borders on the pedophiliac, as the professor bestows all of his faith and love (approaching sexually deviant expectations) on his youngest daughter, a girl as yet untarnished by the revolutions and odd styles of the times.
***
And in "Mario and the Magician," from 1929 on the eve of European fascism, the artist becomes a complete dictator, a fully committed mastermind who expends all his energy, health, thoughts, and life on exerting power over and for the benefit of the common man. The magician Cipolla, whose advertising sways an entire Italian town to attend his performance, is a hunched, chain-smoking, alcohol-swilling hypnotist who bends both the willing and unwilling to do what he desires. The people dance frantic jigs and become erect as boards so that the sneering, condescending man can use them as chairs. The audience delights at the mystery yet allows a smidgen of concern for the hypnotized, to which Cipolla responds that it is he who should be pitied, it is he who does all the work, who must supervise the slaves, who must constantly exude totalitarian control.
"Mario and the Magician" is fascism in a microcosm. It details a people's ability to be persuaded by the smooth talking and originality of a dictator. It showcases the slow succumbing to undesirable events; the first-person-plural narrator ("we," this is all of Italy and Germany, all of humanity perhaps, not just the stereotypical family in the narrative) at one point longs to leave the performance with his kids, but allows himself to remain locked in with everyone else, choosing to further examine the spectacles rather than raise the energy to break out. The somewhat admirable fascist seeks pity while degrading his subjects, going so far as to expose the deepest, most cherished secrets in the mind of Mario, a docile, easygoing, reticent, handsome waiter (already a servant, already subjected to daily degradation). Mario is an everyman--a quiet, unheroic working man who embraces his hope of marrying his dream girl. When the magician dashes that dream, fooling Mario into kissing Cipolla's elderly, distorted, leering face.
"Mario and the Magician" ends on a hopeful, though violent, note. With Mario's deepest, holiest thoughts having been trampled upon, he incites revolution, producing a revolver and murdering Cipolla. The spell breaks and the people resume their normal lives, free of the autocrat's chains.
Art, intelligence, and thinking are powerful forces that can take on almost viral qualities, infecting the brain and destroying chances at happiness, love, social interaction, and physical fitness. On the other hand, too much happiness, too much social interaction, and too much wealth can also be toxins, poisoning one's ability to think originally and creatively, to pursue ideals. There are not many examples of people who are both intelligent and happy, artistic and popular in the works of Thomas Mann, though clearly Mann places higher emphasis on loving others, on working hard, and on not becoming self-indulgent, self-centered, and condescending.
Mann paints fascinating portrayals of artistry, of sexual abnormality, and of alienation, and I gladly look forward to reading more from him (The Magic Mountain, Budenbrooks).
***
There's one other story in the collection I read: "A Man and His Dog" from 1918. This is a beautifully written, novella-length snapshot of a perfect love affair between a quiet man and his energetic dog. It's probably autobiographical, it doesn't explore any profound themes, it has nothing to do with martyred artists, and it is entirely straightforward with no allegorical symbolism. It's also the happiest story in the book, with perfect, precise details about the dog Bashan's behaviors, appearance, etc. Any dog lover and any admirer of beautiful prose just for beauty's sake would certainly enjoy this story, even if I couldn't work it in to the rest of this analysis.
The creative mind is an alienating and lonely place in the short stories of German Nobelist Thomas Mann, a shadowy, self-sufficient cell in which the creative person hides and stews, occasionally peeking out at the simpler world beyond.
Art is effervescent, a resident of the mental aether, fueled only by other mental sustenance--its own creative momentum, the growing breadth of knowledge and understanding, other creations and works of art. The artistic mind needs artistic fodder, and no external incentive can truly satiate it, if the urge to create can ever truly said to be satiated. Fame and money, honor and sexual favors, privilege and notoriety, all can benefit the person encasing the artistic mind, but the mind itself becomes encumbered. In the work of Mann is a fatal dichotomy between the internal and the external: the outside man with his belongings, his social relationships, his loves, his physical appearance and surroundings, and the inside man with his private thoughts, his emotions, his intelligence, and his need to procreate his knowledge. Rarely do the two coexist happily and fully empowered; the benefit of one tends to destroy the other.
In "Death in Venice," published in 1912, the acclaimed author Gustav Aschenbach has steadily and quietly acquired the trappings of literary fame, culminating in the addition of the surname prefix "von," a preposition denoting nobility. Aschenbach has grown tired and lonely, distracted from his art by the clutches of aristocracy. He undergoes a standard upper class treatment to deal with his writer's block, an exotic vacation on the sunny shores of foreign Venice, itself now an old and tired resort, humid, filthy, and gray. The vacation will presumably calm and enrich his mind, but of course the more realistic outcome is one of softening distraction, a thoughtless immersion in sunshine, rich food, and other sensual pleasantries.
On the boat ride, Aschenbach experiences a revulsion at the sight of a superficial old man, a disgusting, flamboyant clown in adolescent attire, with a youthful but clearly artificial wig, a thick smearing of rosy makeup, false teeth, and a nauseating exuberant attitude, eagerly pursuing young sailors as though they are fooled by his costume. The old man is a fake, obsessed with an external, physical youth he can never again possess, living backward, unable to accept his own reality. With age comes maturity, wisdom, a strengthening of the artistic abilities, but the old man shuns these hard-fought skills, instead chasing after the easy gifts of youthful vigor and beauty.
Filled with contempt, Aschenbach arrives at Venice committed to his ideals, eager to embrace the mind he has spent decades shaping and honing, willing to shed his long-gone youth. His sojourn soon weakens his commitment, however, as a full belly and mindless trips to the sandy shore allow his thoughts to prattle and his eyes to fall on a blonde, Polish adolescent, a pubescent Adonis with flawless features, traveling with his wealthy Eastern European family. Despite being a widowed father, a surprise sexual obsession creeps in, at first explained away with pederastic allusions to Roman and Greek mythology but eventually acknowledged as outright infatuation. The unblemished youth, the overwhelming self-confidence, the full future ahead--Aschenbach becomes enamored of all these features of his young Tadzio, a boy he fearfully and lustfully pursues without ever speaking to or interacting with, beyond an unheard, whispered "I love you."
Lust, regret, and unjustified optimism flood into the recesses of his mind, preoccupying his thoughts and commanding his actions. Artistic creation, intellectual stimulation, moral ideals, and even concern for physical well-being slip away as Aschenbach pursues his unconquerable tease. With obvious threats of an intense cholera epidemic sweeping Venice and with his health beginning to falter, Aschenbach forgets his original salubrious intentions, seeking every opportunity to prolong his stay in this false paradise. In the end, he becomes the elderly clown he once scorned: dying his hair, rouging his cheeks, and expending much money on foppish attire. As he dies in his beach chair, completely hypnotized by the illusion of paradisaical youth that surrounds him, he witnesses a boyish opponent trample his perfect boy hero into the sand, revealing a crying, weak, and selfish boy beneath the godlike physical perfection. Nostalgia and regret may make childhood seem perfect, but childhood is a time of powerlessness, egocentrism, and emotional volatility.
***
In "Tonio Kröger," published in 1902, the inverse occurs with equally regretful though not quite as tragic results. Tonio, an introspective, wealthy schoolboy ostracized for his foreign name, exotic Italian mother, and effeminate disposition but tolerated due to his family's social standing, admires his equally upstanding buddy Hans Hansen, an Aryan ideal with blonde hair, blue eyes, an outgoing personality, and boyish attributes. Tonio admires Hans, who--in appearance, at least--remains unsullied by self-doubt, emotional conflict, and troubling thoughts. Hans is friendly and blameless, thoughtlessly acting according to societal standards, and the only books he reads are about horse racing. Tonio respects Hans's bourgeois simplicity while belittling his own commitment to literary novels and poetic thoughts, and when he realizes that the only way they could ever closely connect would be for Hans to muddy his charm or for Hans to turn off his brain, Hans decides to preserve Hans's mindless posterboy ideal by retreating from their tenuous friendship. Similarly at the age of sixteen he departs from Ingeborg Holm, his beautiful, spoiled dancing partner who detects Tonio's complicated differentness.
By adulthood, his family prestige having vanished, Tonio becomes a famous writer in exchange for abandoning interaction with the real world. In Tonio's mind, a person on the verge of artistry must choose between being vibrant and devoting oneself to art. To pursue art is to kill the external self, to destroy any enjoyment of physical reality or personal relationships. The artistic temperament makes pleasantries too complex to be truly enjoyed, and hedonistic pleasures distract too much from mental fulfillment. Tonio consciously chooses death, in his mind sacrificing himself so that other, more simple, more beautiful people can more easily enjoy the outside world.
Tonio Kröger is a socially awkward, sexually confused pariah, demeaning the people he admires most to protect his fragile ego from rejection. His dichotomy of dead artist versus living simpleton is unfounded and fatalistic, and his painter friend Lisabeta seems to realize this as she quietly dismisses his diatribe on the subject. In the end, he journey north to Denmark, home of the loner intellectual Hamlet, passing through his hometown--all the more transformed due to his own transformation--on a quest to gain some refuge from his alienation. He confesses his love for humanity but remains too trapped in his fears and preconceptions to become a part of it.
***
Detlev Spinell, the unsuccessful, pretentious, and cowardly novelist from "Tristan," published in 1902, also suffers from his own feelings of martyrdom and condescension toward the easy-living, non-artistic simpleton. His one claim to fame is a short, substanceless novel bogged down with florid descriptions of furniture and scenery. All the same, he parades this novel around the sanatorium in which he resides, frequently rereading it and pushing it off on any interested potential admirer. He acknowledges that his profound intelligence has made him physically weak, but his praise toward normal, hardworking humans with their flabby ideas, coarse tastes, and strong wills is backhanded and insulting. His love for his alien distinction blinds him from how others more realistically perceive him and prevent him from having valuable interactions. His writing his hyperbolic, absurd, and clumsy, and his perceptions of his fellow men and women are offensive. Rather than loving the totality of a woman--her unique shortcomings, her attractive qualities, her human flaws--Spinell prefers to see women only briefly from the corner of his eye, never tarnishing his perfect first impression with unsightly realities.
When a philandering, foreign merchant's wife, the sensitive, piano-playing daughter of a dying German dynasty, enters the sanatorium with respiration problems following the birth of her healthy baby boy, Spinell chooses to fall in love with his illusion of the heroine--a fragile piano prodigy possessing the greatest thoughts and talents. Flaws such as a garish, bulging vein on her forehead irk him, but he loves his image of her all the same, criminalizing her pragmatic, normal husband while urging the woman to exert herself through music, an exhausting activity that, as warned by her doctors, kills her. According to Spinell, artists have a duty to succumb to their art, to sacrifice themselves to their ideals, that each minute spent living in the real world is one step farther from true divinity. Spinell is, of course, sociopathic, and his confrontation with the husband, who reveals to Spinell a more mundane portrait of his wife, is tense and charged.
***
Aristocratic pretension and the tension between nobility/wealth and art emerge again in "The Blood of the Walsungs," a disturbing tale from 1905 in which two incredibly privileged twins, their thoughts bogged down with their own superiority, fashion, wealth, and societal conventions, look down upon inferior outsiders so hatefully that their quest for companionship leads to incest. Siegmund longs to be an artist and to have interesting, imaginative thoughts, but his preoccupations with customs, fashions, and money oppress his ideas.
***
A depressive longing for youth and nostalgia emerges again in "Disorder and Early Sorrow," from 1925, wherein a history professor with a one-track mind dedicated to the fully explainable events of several centuries ago (and how they sometimes relate to the modern topics at hand) stresses over the atraditional behaviors of his rebellious children and their new styles of culture, dress, dance, and politics. Like "Death in Venice," the story's obsession with resisting progress borders on the pedophiliac, as the professor bestows all of his faith and love (approaching sexually deviant expectations) on his youngest daughter, a girl as yet untarnished by the revolutions and odd styles of the times.
***
And in "Mario and the Magician," from 1929 on the eve of European fascism, the artist becomes a complete dictator, a fully committed mastermind who expends all his energy, health, thoughts, and life on exerting power over and for the benefit of the common man. The magician Cipolla, whose advertising sways an entire Italian town to attend his performance, is a hunched, chain-smoking, alcohol-swilling hypnotist who bends both the willing and unwilling to do what he desires. The people dance frantic jigs and become erect as boards so that the sneering, condescending man can use them as chairs. The audience delights at the mystery yet allows a smidgen of concern for the hypnotized, to which Cipolla responds that it is he who should be pitied, it is he who does all the work, who must supervise the slaves, who must constantly exude totalitarian control.
"Mario and the Magician" is fascism in a microcosm. It details a people's ability to be persuaded by the smooth talking and originality of a dictator. It showcases the slow succumbing to undesirable events; the first-person-plural narrator ("we," this is all of Italy and Germany, all of humanity perhaps, not just the stereotypical family in the narrative) at one point longs to leave the performance with his kids, but allows himself to remain locked in with everyone else, choosing to further examine the spectacles rather than raise the energy to break out. The somewhat admirable fascist seeks pity while degrading his subjects, going so far as to expose the deepest, most cherished secrets in the mind of Mario, a docile, easygoing, reticent, handsome waiter (already a servant, already subjected to daily degradation). Mario is an everyman--a quiet, unheroic working man who embraces his hope of marrying his dream girl. When the magician dashes that dream, fooling Mario into kissing Cipolla's elderly, distorted, leering face.
"Mario and the Magician" ends on a hopeful, though violent, note. With Mario's deepest, holiest thoughts having been trampled upon, he incites revolution, producing a revolver and murdering Cipolla. The spell breaks and the people resume their normal lives, free of the autocrat's chains.
Art, intelligence, and thinking are powerful forces that can take on almost viral qualities, infecting the brain and destroying chances at happiness, love, social interaction, and physical fitness. On the other hand, too much happiness, too much social interaction, and too much wealth can also be toxins, poisoning one's ability to think originally and creatively, to pursue ideals. There are not many examples of people who are both intelligent and happy, artistic and popular in the works of Thomas Mann, though clearly Mann places higher emphasis on loving others, on working hard, and on not becoming self-indulgent, self-centered, and condescending.
Mann paints fascinating portrayals of artistry, of sexual abnormality, and of alienation, and I gladly look forward to reading more from him (The Magic Mountain, Budenbrooks).
***
There's one other story in the collection I read: "A Man and His Dog" from 1918. This is a beautifully written, novella-length snapshot of a perfect love affair between a quiet man and his energetic dog. It's probably autobiographical, it doesn't explore any profound themes, it has nothing to do with martyred artists, and it is entirely straightforward with no allegorical symbolism. It's also the happiest story in the book, with perfect, precise details about the dog Bashan's behaviors, appearance, etc. Any dog lover and any admirer of beautiful prose just for beauty's sake would certainly enjoy this story, even if I couldn't work it in to the rest of this analysis.
18 October, 2008
I have completed Gravity's Rainbow. Where's my paycheck?
So on Tuesday night, at the tail end of a feverish throat infection, I finally finished the 887 tiny-print pages of Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel--the one that the Pulitzer Prize committee refused to award (despite its nomination) for being "unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene." I began the book way back in April, at the beginning of my last serious, feverish illness, and it's taken me this long to slug my way through it. To be fair, I wasn't reading it from June until the beginning of September because I was reading other books for class and because I was on vacation, but to be honest, just because I was reading other books and just because I was on vacation shouldn't have stopped me from being able to continue with Gravity's Rainbow. The fact that it did is only proof of how difficult the novel is; it was impossible, at least for me, to commit my mind to anything else while struggling through Pynchon's world.
I'll attempt a plot synopsis here. American private first-class Tyrone Slothrop is doing military research and engaging in sexual hijinx while in England during the second World War (which is in its final year). As an infant he was sold by his parents to controversial behaviorist Dr. Jamf (think Pavlov and his dogs) for erectile conditioning experiments in exchange for financial security. The bizarre experiments became a humorous national news anecdote due to the intended response (infantile erection), though the stimuli were never made public. Two or three decades later, the various paranoid British and American coconspirators who have been recruited to spy on Slothrop's mysterious (yet extremely mundane) whereabouts begin to realize that his supposed sexual frolics correspond directly to German rocket blasts that strike London several days after his trysts, falling into a perfect graph of a classic Poisson distribution. I don't even know what that means exactly, but eventually through various mishaps Slothrop ends up as a spy in Germany investigating the history behind an advanced, enigmatic super-rocket developed by lonely geniuses from an exterminated South African-German tribe. While spying, he becomes a flamboyant drug mule who dresses like an astronaut/superhero and goes by the moniker Rocket Man. Shit hits the fan, and the world descends into madness as he escapes across the German countryside with a sow companion at the very end of the war.
I hope that makes sense to you because that's the best I can do. With something like 400 characters, most of them only vaguely, tangentially connected to Slothrop, engaging in detailed, directionless subplots while digressing into lengthy, rambling soliloquies, the novel frequently made no sense to me at all. While each one of the 500+ individual scenes/rants/images/routines/conversations/insights were interesting/clever/beautiful/comic/well-crafted/insightful, the sum of these multivarious parts was incoherent and dull. I won't even attempt to deny that Pynchon is an absolute genius and an extremely talented writer--his grasp of vocabulary, linguistics, history, rocket science, wordplay, geography, human behavior, and every single thing in between is mindblowing--but I have no shame in or trouble admitting that I have no idea what the point of Gravity's Rainbow was or what idea or affect I was supposed to take away from it. Is it pacifist? Yes. Is it paranoid? Yes. Is it self-mocking? Yes. Is it relevant? I'm not sure. Despite thousands of brilliant ideas and moments, the overall book itself is surprisingly forgettable, rarely if ever reaching the reader (well, me at least) on a personal, meaningful, or life-changing level.
And I was expecting something like that by the end. Some heart-shattering moment of clarity--maybe even just a page or two--in the climactic final chapters. But that moment never came, nor did a climax.
I know this isn't much of a review, but in my opinion it's as scatterbrained as the book itself. Do I regret spending so much time trudging through this? Not at all; at times I had very much fun with it. Would I recommend it to anyone else? Not without the aid of a comprehensive reader's guide (and they do exist). And perhaps not even then.
I'll attempt a plot synopsis here. American private first-class Tyrone Slothrop is doing military research and engaging in sexual hijinx while in England during the second World War (which is in its final year). As an infant he was sold by his parents to controversial behaviorist Dr. Jamf (think Pavlov and his dogs) for erectile conditioning experiments in exchange for financial security. The bizarre experiments became a humorous national news anecdote due to the intended response (infantile erection), though the stimuli were never made public. Two or three decades later, the various paranoid British and American coconspirators who have been recruited to spy on Slothrop's mysterious (yet extremely mundane) whereabouts begin to realize that his supposed sexual frolics correspond directly to German rocket blasts that strike London several days after his trysts, falling into a perfect graph of a classic Poisson distribution. I don't even know what that means exactly, but eventually through various mishaps Slothrop ends up as a spy in Germany investigating the history behind an advanced, enigmatic super-rocket developed by lonely geniuses from an exterminated South African-German tribe. While spying, he becomes a flamboyant drug mule who dresses like an astronaut/superhero and goes by the moniker Rocket Man. Shit hits the fan, and the world descends into madness as he escapes across the German countryside with a sow companion at the very end of the war.
I hope that makes sense to you because that's the best I can do. With something like 400 characters, most of them only vaguely, tangentially connected to Slothrop, engaging in detailed, directionless subplots while digressing into lengthy, rambling soliloquies, the novel frequently made no sense to me at all. While each one of the 500+ individual scenes/rants/images/routines/conversations/insights were interesting/clever/beautiful/comic/well-crafted/insightful, the sum of these multivarious parts was incoherent and dull. I won't even attempt to deny that Pynchon is an absolute genius and an extremely talented writer--his grasp of vocabulary, linguistics, history, rocket science, wordplay, geography, human behavior, and every single thing in between is mindblowing--but I have no shame in or trouble admitting that I have no idea what the point of Gravity's Rainbow was or what idea or affect I was supposed to take away from it. Is it pacifist? Yes. Is it paranoid? Yes. Is it self-mocking? Yes. Is it relevant? I'm not sure. Despite thousands of brilliant ideas and moments, the overall book itself is surprisingly forgettable, rarely if ever reaching the reader (well, me at least) on a personal, meaningful, or life-changing level.
And I was expecting something like that by the end. Some heart-shattering moment of clarity--maybe even just a page or two--in the climactic final chapters. But that moment never came, nor did a climax.
I know this isn't much of a review, but in my opinion it's as scatterbrained as the book itself. Do I regret spending so much time trudging through this? Not at all; at times I had very much fun with it. Would I recommend it to anyone else? Not without the aid of a comprehensive reader's guide (and they do exist). And perhaps not even then.
09 October, 2008
Nobel Prize in Literature
So now I have to add another name to the list of authors I know nothing about with whom I need to acquaint myself. Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, a novelist who divides his time between France, Mauritius, the United States, Panama, Mexico, Great Britain, and South Korea (seriously), just won the Nobel Prize.
I've never heard his name in my life.
I was thinking Nuruddin Farah would win.
I've never heard his name in my life.
I was thinking Nuruddin Farah would win.
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