Kafka is the author of frustration. He writes about frustration, he's frustrated about writing, The Castle breaks off mid-sentence, he asked Max Brod Kafka is the author of frustration. He writes about frustration, he's frustrated about writing, The Castle breaks off mid-sentence, he asked Max Brod to burn his work but he knew Brod wouldn't do it. Kafka knew he would be frustrated in frustrating his frustrated book about frustration. What's it all about? I don't know, you're not supposed to know, not knowing is the point. There's no decoder ring. In The Trial K. doesn't know how to defend himself, he doesn't even know what he's accused of, he just knows he's guilty. In The Castle K. doesn't know the way to it, he doesn't even know what the Castle is, he just knows he wants in. "If only you didn't always, like a child, insist on having everything served up right away in edible form!" His first translators the Muirs thought it was about God, they made it into a creepy Pilgrim's Progress. There might be a pilgrim but there is no progress. This new translation by Mark Harman knows better than to guess what's what. "No matter how much you keep encouraging someone who is blindfolded to stare through the cloth, he still won't see a thing." Everyone is corrupt. Sex is ever-present, threatening, icky. Kafka never finished a novel but The Trial is more finished. It feels over, at least. This book ends in the middle of a sentence, the middle of a scene, it feels like it was maybe two-thirds done. This is frustrating. I like The Trial better and his short stories best. Kafka famously had trouble getting through public readings because he kept cracking up. K. doesn't get it. "'What are you complaining about?' asked K. 'We are complaining,' said Jeremias, 'that you cannot take a joke.'"...more
For his first book in 1952 Kurt Vonnegut made an entry in a long string of dystopian novels stretching back to (where else) Eugene Zamyatin's 1921 claFor his first book in 1952 Kurt Vonnegut made an entry in a long string of dystopian novels stretching back to (where else) Eugene Zamyatin's 1921 classic We. It's not the best entry.
These books all deal with futures in which social class has ossified and production has mechanized. They deal with the automation of society, and with socialism (in wildly different ways).
Vonnegut was a socialist. The way he deals with it is boring. The long section in the middle set at a company team-building retreat seems padded, even before we get to the complete play contained in it. And (as usual) he has no idea what to do with women. The new machines take away work from both genders: mechanical work for men, dishwashing for women. Seriously, that's it. Lead character Paul Proteus's wife is a shrew (although she does, in fairness, get one scene that's not bad).
Shitty Wives in Literature Edith Stoner Mildred Montag Dominique Francon Rosamond Vincy Anita Proteus
Vonnegut's point - that people need to work to feel useful - seems surprisingly valid. I say surprisingly because not having to work sounds fine to me. But we continue to see unemployment as a great personal embarrassment, and we continue to more or less invent stuff for people to do. My job is about three levels removed from anything that could remotely be considered useful. So, decent point: simplistic and boring execution.
Vonnegut famously graded his own books. His best book by a long shot, Slaughterhouse-Five, gets a cocky A+, as (more arguably) does the okay Cat's Cradle. He gave Player Piano a B. I think he was being generous....more
Where have you gone, Cormac McCarthy? Blood Meridian is an apocalyptic masterpiece, and twenty years on folksy Ed Tom Bell, played inevitably in the mWhere have you gone, Cormac McCarthy? Blood Meridian is an apocalyptic masterpiece, and twenty years on folksy Ed Tom Bell, played inevitably in the movie by Tommy Lee Jones, is dispensing Buckaroo Banzai homilies like this:
It's not about knowin where you are. It's about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you.
He's gone sentimental in his old age. Conservative.
These old people I talk to, if you could of told em that there would be people on the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses...well, they just flat out wouldnt of believed you. But what if you'd of told em it was their own grandchildren? Well, all of that is signs and wonders but it dont tell you how it got that way.
Back away, kids, gramps has been at the moonshine again.
Look, there's nothing irredeemably wrong with this book. It's a crackerjack action story, at least until around the three-quarter mark where it commences to never stop ending. ("You know what this book needs is an old guy rambling for like 75 pages," says an old guy.) Before that there are exciting shootouts and suspenseful sequences. I'm giving it four stars because I had a good time reading it. Llewelyn Moss will do for a hero: you hope he gets away with that terrifically bad decision he's made. (Which, technically, involves water not money.) Chigurgh is a terrific villain, with his bolt pistol and his coins.
But he's a henchman. He is no Judge Holden. He's a servant of the judge. He has a sort of psychotic Zen to him: at times he allows a coin toss to dictate his actions.
"Call it," he says to one terrified man in the best scene of the book. "Well I need to know what it is we’re callin here." "How would that change anything?"
Compare that to a coin scene in Blood Meridian, where the judge tosses a coin that flies in a circle around the fire and returns to his hand. Chigurgh is human.
And this book is a henchman to the awful majesty of Blood Meridian. The Road is the same way: McCarthy's got his usual tricks, his shocking violence and cruelty toward people and punctuation, but both books deliver essentially corny messages. He's made a bold attempt to acknowledge that women exist, but about the most he can think of to say about them is that they seem nice. "That's my heart yonder," says Ed Tom to his horse. "It always was." Barf, gramps. Now in his 70's, he's come to a conclusion about the armageddon he wrote twenty years ago: "It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners."
McCarthy's worldview hasn't really changed. It's still bleak. It's just that he's gone from showing it to whining about it. If this is good manners, I miss the judge....more
The Collector is about a guy who kidnaps a young lady and keeps her imprisoned in his basement. The two main characters are well-drawn. The woman, MirThe Collector is about a guy who kidnaps a young lady and keeps her imprisoned in his basement. The two main characters are well-drawn. The woman, Miranda, is intelligent and resourceful. She thinks clearly and unsentimentally about her predicament and she never gives up. She's a little bit awful and pretentious, and I'm not sure whether Fowles intends me to think that. (Probably.) The man - Frederick Clegg, whom she calls Caliban - is pathetic, more dangerous than he knows.
The book, the first written and the first I've read by John Fowles, is about more than that. Miranda is an artist; Caliban has no feel whatsoever for art. She tries and fails to get through to some kind of soul in him, through (among other things) art. He understands possession (collection!) but not appreciation. The first half is narrated by him; the second half repeats the first half from her point of view. (A bit of the tension does drop out here.) While retelling the story Miranda also reminisces, in a secret journal, about another older man she knew out in the world, a True Artist type. (Like many True Artist types, also a womanizer and a twat.) Like Stephen King in Misery, Fowles wants to talk about the nature of art and non-art. The allegorical aspect of the book feels a little icky. Why do so many men choose despoliation as metaphor? Miranda ends up deciding that, should she ever get free, she'd (view spoiler)[like to get with the older artist, despite her lack of attraction for him. Is this Prospero? Ew. And why are both her options men? (hide spoiler)]
Michael Schmidt accuses John Fowles of writing "books that appeal to the general fiction market and to the academic theorist." I don't know why this is an insult, but it appears to be intended as one. Gore Vidal sniffed that "Fowles is regarded as a sort of Daphne du Maurier with grammar," and I don't know why that's an insult either. (Also, I don't at all understand the grammar dis.) The idea is that Fowles challenges you just enough to make you feel smart and no farther. Whatever. I found this book both thought-provoking and entertaining, which seems like a win to me.
Appendix: Things You May Want To Know 1. 73,000 pounds in 1963 is equivalent to about 1.1 million pounds today, or 1.676 million US.
2. I cannot figure out what "Scotch love" is. I assumed it meant butt stuff, because generally when you prepend "Scottish" or "Welsh" to anything it means butt stuff, but Urban Dictionary has nothing for me.
3. Here are Cezanne's apples: [image] Call me Caliban, because I fail to see how they're "everything about all apples and all form and colour." They just look like apples to me. ...more
I'm suspicious of dystopias. They present extreme visions of the world, in order to illuminate issues with the real one; that's all fine, but in orderI'm suspicious of dystopias. They present extreme visions of the world, in order to illuminate issues with the real one; that's all fine, but in order to get to those extreme worlds people have to act in extreme ways, and I end up not buying it. I guess I'm not great at suspending my disbelief.
I didn't have this problem with Handmaid's Tale. Atwood's detailed imagination and the force of her vision just swept me entirely in. It's perfectly constructed, always exciting, and - wonder of wonders - uses its dystopic setting to make real points about today, just like dystopias ought to do. And there's nothing particularly unbelievable* about any of this. Atwood was writing when apartheid was still a thing; America itself is only 150 years out from slavery, which institutionalized rape.
The idea is that America has been taken over by a fundamentalist Christian sect who are super into "family values" (remember those?). Women who have done terrible things like get married twice are punished by becoming handmaids - pregnancy machines for aging powerful men who are almost certainly sterile themselves, which puts the handmaids in an awkward position. Our unnamed heroine is no heroine, but she is wicked good at Scrabble. This was the least believable part of the book for me. No one spells "zygote."
I first read this book in high school, hoping for sexy parts. There are not sexy parts. The description of a handmaid rape - the wife positioned at her head, holding her hands grimly while the husband plows away - is...not sexy parts.
I hated the epilogue, btw. Reads like Cliffs Notes mixed with fan fiction....more
You can see why the Color Purple ran up against censorship in the eighties. It's firmly against organized religion, although it's spiritual in its ownYou can see why the Color Purple ran up against censorship in the eighties. It's firmly against organized religion, although it's spiritual in its own hippie way. It's pretty gay: Alice Walker defines a "womanist" (her term for black feminists, which has caught some traction) as a woman who, among other things, "loves other woman, sexually and/or nonsexually," and she seems to have a fluid idea of female sexuality.
It's pro woman in the same way its contemporary Handmaid's Tale is. Neither book is anti-male; both protagonists like some males quite a lot, although many others are dangerous. But both emphasize relationships between women. (I suppose we could mention that there are zero black people in Handmaid's Tale and no white people in Color Purple, so there's that difference.)
The narrator is Celie, a young woman who's got a tough row to hoe. She gets raped on like page one. She gets pretty much shat on by the whole world except two women, musician Shug and sister Nettie, who get to work on a pretty dire self-esteem problem.
Celie speaks in a heavy dialect, so that takes some getting used to; it's a tough act to pull off and I think Walker totally nails it. I didn't find Celie's voice difficult or condescending; when she emerges with some startling burst of poetic wisdom I believe it. "What the world got to do with anything, I think." It sounds like it's meant to: something smart said by someone smart in a certain dialect.
There's a subplot featuring Celie's sister Nettie going to Africa that fails to engage me as much as the main story. I understand what Walker's up to: she's widening the scope. And she may feel that we need a break from Celie's voice. But we don't.
The story is basically over when pants enter the scene. There are lots of pants. The last quarter or so of the book I could maybe do without.
It's an unapologetically radical book. Walker is not here to pander to anyone. I totally dug it....more
Here's Richard Wright going door to door in the 1920s Jim Crow South trying to sell his dog for a dollar because he's starving. A white lady offers hiHere's Richard Wright going door to door in the 1920s Jim Crow South trying to sell his dog for a dollar because he's starving. A white lady offers him 97 cents and, feeling some distant surge of fury inside, he turns her down, goes home with his dog and his hunger. A few days later (view spoiler)[the dog gets run over by a coal truck, (hide spoiler)] and this book is a bummer. This is not quite 100 years ago, this hellish world he's trying to claw out of. The degradation required of black people in order to survive is a nightmare.
So this skinny kid teaches himself to read, borrows a lone sympathetic white guy's library card, forges a note from him. He makes sure the note includes a racial slur, to make it more believable; it's crucial that the librarian not guess the books are for himself. He dives into Dostoevsky, Dreiser, Gertrude Stein.
The plots and stories in the novels did not interest me so much as the point of view revealed. I gave myself over to each novel without reserve, without trying to criticize it; it was enough for me to see and feel something different. And for me, everything was something different...
In buoying me up, reading also cast me down, made me see what was possible, what I had missed. My tension returned, new, terrible, bitter, surging, almost too great to be contained. I no longer felt that the world around me was hostile, killing; I knew it.
If you've ever wondered how reading can be an act of revolution, this book will lay it all out for you. Jim Crow depended on the ignorance of black people. As Wright started to see other perspectives, he understood how the system oppressed him and he started to see that things could be different. Reading was war for him. He tried to hide what was happening behind the shuck and jive, but it was impossible; white people could sense that he had become dangerous.
"Why don't you laugh and talk like the other niggers?" [his boss] asked. "Well, sir, there's nothing much to say or smile about," I said, smiling. His face was hard, baffled; I knew that I had not convinced him..."I don't like your looks, nigger. Now, get!" he snapped.
And he does; (view spoiler)[he gets to Chicago, where he joins up with the Communist party only to find that while their ideals are noble, the reality is just more fitting in. (hide spoiler)] Here, as in Native Son, Wright slows down quite a bit; the back third of each book gets extremely talky. He sucks you in and then he's like "Now that I've got you, let's talk about Communism." But even with the - let's face it - boring stuff, this is still the best description of life under Jim Crow I've ever read. Wright is not just a self-made man but a man who has made himself in the face of an entire system dedicated to keeping him unmade; it's pretty inspiring stuff. And he's succeeded in turning himself into one of the great writers of the century.
Perhaps, I thought, out of my tortured feelings I could fling a spark into this darkness...I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.
Mission accomplished, Wright. Sorry about your dog....more
I've been fooled twice now into thinking Nella Larsen isn't a great writer. She is. She controls her story perfectly; she gives you exactly the informI've been fooled twice now into thinking Nella Larsen isn't a great writer. She is. She controls her story perfectly; she gives you exactly the information you need at exactly the right time. Her stories are carefully constructed, each one building steadily towards a wallop. They make a huge impact. There's no fat, nothing that doesn't exactly need to be there.
There's a six-floor walkup in one scene of Passing; the characters complain about it, and one makes a racial comment about it. It's there for a reason; Larsen is positioning you, making sure you know you're six floors up, because one of the characters will have to come back down. It's extremely careful and effective, but it doesn't seem positioned. It just does its job.
What she doesn't have time for, particularly, is sentences. She comes out with stuff like this:
This, she reflected, was of a piece with all that she knew of Clare Kendry. Stepping always on the edge of danger. Always aware, but not drawing back or turning aside.
And you're like jeez, that's...clunky. It gets you where you need to go - Clare, who passes as white and has married a racist, is capable of anything. But it's not pretty.
I was reminded of something Steinbeck said:
I have no interest in the printed word. I would continue to write if there were no writing and no print. I put my words down for a matter of memory.
He had no time for punctuation; he was uninterested in the craft of writing. Prose is a cracker. You don't need it to be interesting; you just need it to hold the cheese.
Nella Larsen has a lot of cheese. Don't let the cracker fool you....more
“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking… Some day all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”
T“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking… Some day all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”
That's the famous mission statement from Christopher Isherwood, who steadfastly refuses to fix it - to tell you what it's all about. It's intriguing. One finds oneself naked with a younger person. Why has the person become naked? What is the person's goal? This seems unusual. It's all a little bit oblique. It's intriguing but frustrating. Does anyone know what's going on? Not to flap my hands helplessly and whine "Fix iiiiiit," but only one of us is getting paid for this.
In the middle of the last century Isherwood wrote what Edmund White called some of "the only serious, non-pornographic accounts of gay experience I came across back then." That's brave and useful from a historical perspective; it's lost the transgressive thrill now. I live in Brooklyn. I can't go to the bodega without tripping over serious, non-pornographic gay experiences and their huge fucking strollers.
Which, believe me, I realize how lovely it is that I get to be bored by all this. But - all triumphing over small-mindedness aside - we're still reading a book here, and it turns out that it's yet another one about a middle-aged white male college professor. He has oblique experiences. The book's over before it's begun. It's quiet and subtle. It's sad but it's so buttoned up that no flesh shows. It's quite passive. I'm not saying I want it all fixed, exactly, but this is so restrained that you can barely feel it....more
Say there's a bad guy. He's in a book; the book is well-written; fine, there are many books about bad guys. Say further that the book is written by a Say there's a bad guy. He's in a book; the book is well-written; fine, there are many books about bad guys. Say further that the book is written by a bad guy. Fine; lots of authors are dicks. Now say that the author is unaware that they're both bad guys. He hasn't written the book he thinks he's written. Now where are you?
A Bend in the River's Salim is a bad guy. He's a bully and a coward. He doesn't know that he's a bully and a coward, and VS Naipaul doesn't seem to know either. (view spoiler)[In the end Salim saves his own skin, abandoning his ward to violence. He seems okay with it. (hide spoiler)] In one part, he savagely beats his mistress. "The back of my hand, from little finger to wrist, was aching; bone had struck bone." She seems okay with it. She calls him later. "Do you want me to come back? The road is quite empty. I can be back in twenty minutes. Oh, Salim. I look dreadful. My face is in an awful state. I will have to hide for days."
The passage confused me because, from what I know about people, they don't like being beaten without a safeword. It confused me so much that I wanted to learn more about Naipaul. I had to know what was going through his head when he wrote this passage. I don't do this normally; I think books should be taken on their own terms. But this doesn't ring true for me. It disturbs me. What happened here?
What I found was a quote from Naipaul about his own mistress, Margaret Murray: 'I was very violent with her for two days with my hand; my hand began to hurt...she didn't mind it at all. She thought of it in terms of my passion for her. Her face was bad. She couldn't really appear in public." So this is where the passage comes from. It's a direct quote from his life; Salim and Naipaul are the same. So this is the truth, right? In its own way?
But whose truth? "She didn't mind it at all," Salim and Naipaul both say, and that still doesn't seem right. It's the truth to Naipaul; is it the truth to Margaret Murray? So I kept looking, and I found a letter from her, in response to the above quote. She says, drily: "Vidia [Naipaul] says I didn’t mind the abuse. I certainly did mind."
So Naipaul is not telling the truth; he doesn't have the truth; he doesn't see the truth. He's the villain in his own story and he's incapable of realizing that he's written the villain in this one.
And why would we read a book by someone who doesn't recognize truth? It's well-written. It's a well-written book by someone who is incorrect about who he is, what the world is. He's telling two stories: one about Africa, one about people. He doesn't know about Africa; he's only visited. He's certainly a racist. He doesn't know about people, either. The situation is imaginary; he made it up to illustrate his twisted, cynical, violent view of the world.
The thing is that this is a good book. The plot is thin, and didn't engage me as much as I'd hope, but the ideas are powerful and disturbing. The writing is something like brilliant. It taught me something about a certain kind of person: the bad kind. To get into the head of someone as corrupt and as devoid of self-awareness as VS Naipaul is, that's interesting and even valuable. He has told the truth; he just doesn't know the truth he's told. Know your enemy, right? Here is the enemy....more
You cannot shape your child into what you want, says Doris Lessing: you must help him become what he is. He may not be exactly in your image - but he You cannot shape your child into what you want, says Doris Lessing: you must help him become what he is. He may not be exactly in your image - but he will be a special snowflake in his own way. Glad to be getting more parenting tips from literature....more
Fairy tales are mostly about fucking. You already knew that, but it wasn't really explicitly pointed out until Angela Carter, the towering misty cult Fairy tales are mostly about fucking. You already knew that, but it wasn't really explicitly pointed out until Angela Carter, the towering misty cult mid-1900s author, flipped them on their backs. Neil Gaimansaid she pointed out, "'You see these fairy stories, these things that are sitting at the back of the nursery shelves?...Each one of them is a loaded gun.'"
[image] Here she is looking like she's got a gun
The thing with fairy tales is that it's not just stories for children that are dark and lurid, it's childhood itself. The reason they're so enduringly popular with children is that they hint at the huge dark secrets, death and danger and sex, that we were very busy trying to deal with already. (The originals, of course, had all the violence but not the fucking; later versions were increasingly pasteurized.) You always knew Little Red Riding Hood was about fucking. The story didn't exactly say it and you didn't either, because if anyone said it out loud you wouldn't be allowed to read it. It was subtle enough so that you could think about it in your private head. But we weren't idiots, right? We knew all these things were there, and they seemed like they had a lot of shadows and maybe some sparkles, and we had a lot to think about.
Carter unpacked lots of things, not just fairy tales. Her biographer Edmund Gordon says:
At a time when English literature was dominated by sober social realists, she played with disreputable genres – gothic horror, science fiction, fairytale – and gave free rein to the fantastic and the surreal. Her work is funny, sexy, frightening and brutal, and is always shaped by a keen, subversive intelligence and a style of luxuriant beauty. She was concerned with unpicking the mythic roles and structures that underwrite our existences – in particular the various myths of gender identity.
But fairy tales are what she's about here, in her best-known book, and those myths of gender identity. The frisson we used to feel reading these stories was because we were always afraid (or hoping, or both) that a girl was about to be defiled. They were victims. Carter flips that, making the woman the lead actor. In The Erl-King this lady realizes that the wild man of the woods is going to turn her into a bird and put her in a cage as soon as they're done fucking, and what does she do? (view spoiler)[She strangles him and sets all his other little birds free. (hide spoiler)] You probably already know that the title novella, The Bloody Chamber, is based on Bluebeard. There will be ex-wives!
During her lifetime no one was quite sure what to do with Carter, who was messing with magical realism and "slipstream" way before it was cool. Now she's the patron saint of Carmen Maria Machado,Kelly Link, Jeanette Winterson,Anne Rice, about a million movies...I mean, and she's still obscure.
[image] Company of Wolves, directed by Neil Jordan, based on the story from this book
To grow up and have a grown-up conversation about those stories sends this little thrill through us, then. In a way, it feels like we got busted! "They knew all along that these were dirty?!" And in another way, we realize that we're not as alone in our private heads as we maybe thought we were. In The Company of Wolves, Riding Hood comes on the wolf after he eats her grandmother and she's like, (view spoiler)[well, are we going to fuck or what? (hide spoiler)] In The Tiger's Bride, she finds out that her husband is a tiger and you're like oh shit, right? A tiger! And she's like (view spoiler)[lol, I'm a tiger too, let's do it. (hide spoiler)] We're all monsters up in here, friends. Let's get weird.
Here are my notes on the individual stories, with (view spoiler)[
Bloody Chamber Bony girl becomes fourth wife of Marquis who wears a real monocle. He’s the kind of dude who puts mirrors all over his bedroom. Carter certainly would like to work in a bunch of references to the Decadent movement, a 19th-century thing involving Gothicness and symbolism and dirty stuff. Oscar Wilde was involved, and Baudelaire. Here are some of the references I looked up:
[image] Is...is Oedipus going to fuck that sphinx? wtf bro
Puss in boots Cat helps his master murder the rich old husband of a hot lady, after which they get married and live happily ever after.
Erl king Atmospheric fairytale woods; wild man who seduces a virgin. She realizes he will turn her into a bird and keep her in a cage. Sudden shift from first to third person as she kills him and sets the birds free.
Snow child Wife tried to murder her; count fucks her corpse.
Lady of the house of love A young beautiful vampire who hates killing molders away in her rotting castle until a dashing young man stumbles into her lair. Is this the inspiration for Anne Rice, for Twilight? It has some of that adolescent romance. The vampire kills herself instead of eating him. He rejoins his company, soon to learn shuddering in the trenches of whatever world war.
Werewolf Love this brief one! Flips little red riding hood. Girl maims a wolf that tries to eat her in the woods; arrives at grandmothers to find her maimed in the same way. Wild paw has turned into severed grandma hand. Villagers stone her to death and girl gets her house.
Company of wolves Riding hood again, a werewolf again, he kills grandma but then she’s into it and they fuck instead of him eating her.
Wolf-Alice Some sort of Nell girl is housekeeper for a vampire? I didn’t totally follow this one and should maybe read it again. (hide spoiler)]...more
she writes to Elizabeth Bowen in 1932, that the esteemed Prix Etranger award has gone to someone named Stella Gibbons. "WhoVirginia Woolf is enraged,
she writes to Elizabeth Bowen in 1932, that the esteemed Prix Etranger award has gone to someone named Stella Gibbons. "Who is she?" she asks. "What is this book?"
The Starkadders were not like most families. Life burned in them with a fiercer edge.
And when Flora Poste is flung among them in their great crouching, rotting farm, she immediately commences meddling. She aspires to write Persuasion, but she's more of an Emma herself - Emma accidentally transported to Northanger Abbey to find the Earnshaws squatting there.
There'll be no butter in hell.
But Flora is a tidy person: "Unless everything is tidy and pleasant and comfortable all about one, people cannot even begin to enjoy life. I cannot endure messes." So she promptly sets about tidying things - tidying things for Hardyan rake Seth, Pygmalion-ready Elfine, brimstone-breathing Amos, and even for poor Aunt Ada Doom (name your cat that) who saw something nasty in the woodshed*, which does beg the question, has there ever been anything in a woodshed that was not nasty? Don't say wood. Leave wood in a woodshed for ten minutes and it's teeming with centipedes.
* yes I spent 20 minutes making that video, yes it was an excellent use of my time
This is a very funny book. I don't know how far funny takes us. Is funny alone enough to make a book great?
And does literature have any sort of obligation to give good advice? Because no one should actually be like Flora. Flora works only in a very tidy world. In the untidy real world, people like Flora don't get invited to parties.
Gibbons is a little too pleased with herself by the end, which goes on like the last scene in Star Wars. We still have questions. Did the goat live? Will anyone ever find Graceless's leg, which fell off and no one even noticed for half a day?
To answer Virginia Woolf's question: Stella Gibbons wrote 22 books but we remember only this one, which has survived all this time because everyone just likes it very much. It has, pound for pound, the best names this side of Dickens. It's very funny and very tidy. There are worse things to give the Prix Etranger to....more
This probably isn't going to sound good, but I feel for Tom Ripley. He embodies all my weakest, most petulant, lowest self-esteem moments - when I finThis probably isn't going to sound good, but I feel for Tom Ripley. He embodies all my weakest, most petulant, lowest self-esteem moments - when I find myself asking, "Why don't you like me more? Why can't I have what you have? Why can't I take the easy way?" Just...my stuff sucks, give me your stuff.
Nobody likes Tom. No one's ever really even tolerated him. He can't tolerate himself. You root for him not because you like him - you probably don't - but because...there but for the grace. What would you be like, if no one had ever liked you?
"The psychopath," Patricia Highsmith says, "is an average man living more clearly than the world permits him." What makes you root for Ripley is not that he's a bottomless pit of want, but that he proactively tries to fill it. Where we think, "Why can't I have what he's having?" Mr. Ripley sets out to take it. He's ambitious, hard-working, and - in his own way - brave. I hope he gets away with it.
This series goes downhill pretty quickly, and I suggest you don't bother. Here are my reviews of rest of them: - Ripley Under Ground (4 stars, fine) - Ripley's Game (3 stars, blah) - The Boy Who Followed Ripley (2 stars and we're well off the rails here, although the result is accidentally funny) - Ripley Under Water (1 star, just a dire waste of pages)...more
Lise doesn't make sense. She acts like a lunatic - not even a real lunatic, a lunatic's conception of a lunatic. All the way through the book, I thougLise doesn't make sense. She acts like a lunatic - not even a real lunatic, a lunatic's conception of a lunatic. All the way through the book, I thought: "Really? This is the plot? This seems very far-fetched." It seems like a story a lunatic would come up with. She gets herself into very dangerous situations with men - some would even say she's leading them on and then stealing their cars. She keeps mumbling about her imaginary boyfriend, whom she's looking for, who doesn't exist yet. "Will you feel a presence? Is that how you’ll know?" says the old lady Lise takes shopping for no reason. and "Not really a presence," Lise says. "The lack of an absence." What is she talking about? Why did she plant her passport carefully in a cab? No one does that. If this is what's happening, it's not a very good book.
But I gave this five stars, because (view spoiler)[it doesn't happen. When Lise describes the book she's carrying as a "whydunnit", Spark is talking about this book, and I think this book is really the answer to "Why did you do it?" It's a confession.
We never meet Lise. The woman in this book exists only in the mind of the guy who killed her. Everything she does - leading men on, ending up with things this guy's mother bought, planting her passport in a cab, looking for "her type," whom she will mystically know when she sees - they suddenly make sense if they've been invented by a murderous nutcase. When she finally finds him and orders him to murder her - "Tie my feet and kill, that's all. They will come and sweep it up in the morning." - well, that's how it is for lunatics.
This doesn't seem like a crazy theory to me. The last paragraph says, "The typewriter ticks out his unnerving statement," which seems to me like Spark is explaining the book to us. But I don't see this explanation kicking around elsewhere, so I don't know. This is why I think he did it. (hide spoiler)]
And then on a third level, also, we're talking about Flaubert and Tolstoy, right? There's this whole genre of men (view spoiler)[who murder women they've invented: who invent women who demand to be killed. (hide spoiler)] Men writing women behaving badly - what men define as badly - who are punished by these same men, to teach a lesson. "Do not behave in this way that I insist you keep behaving in." That might be getting a little too "here's my postgrad thesis" about the whole thing, but it does work....more
You have this impression of Agatha Christie as a kindly old lady who writes generic mysteries featuring tea and knitting. [image] And she was that, butYou have this impression of Agatha Christie as a kindly old lady who writes generic mysteries featuring tea and knitting. [image] And she was that, but before she was that she was this lady [image] who is significantly younger and looks like a little bit of a badass, and in fact she was one.
The central question of a mystery is "Who done it," right? And what Christie did is she took that question and said, "How far can I take the answer? How weird can I make it?" And she comes up with these wild, experimental, metafictional reveals. I don't want to spoil this particular book, but I didn't see it coming. It's actually crazy stuff, and this is why she's the queen of mystery: she took mysteries to their absolute limits. No one has been able to take them farther.
I mean, look, she's not Borges, she's not going to blow your mind on contact. Hers is a quieter magic, and it's constrained by genre. She's straining the limits of mystery novels; Borges is straining the limits of reality. But it's still audacious.
Christie created two (!) of the greatest sleuths in the genre: knitting busybody Miss Marples, and the hero of Murder on the Orient Express, smug Hercule Poirot. He bills himself as a sort of opposite to Sherlock Holmes: "I am not one to rely on the expert procedure. It is the psychology I seek, not the fingerprint or the cigarette ash." If Holmes represents science, Poirot represents intuition. This case takes place in a closed room - the train is stuck in a snowstorm, with no communication with the outside world. No one's identity can be verified. Poirot resolves to solve it entirely through sitting around thinking. And when he does:
"How did you get wise to all this? That's what I want to know." "I just guessed."
The evidence was there for us - Agatha Christie never cheats, her puzzles are airtight - but it's a pretty impressive guess anyway. And it's an impressive book.
Here's a diagram of the train car, in case you're interested. [image]...more
Elizabeth "No, the other one" Taylor's Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is about old people doomed to die alone because their relatives don't love them, Elizabeth "No, the other one" Taylor's Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is about old people doomed to die alone because their relatives don't love them, so it's basically more harrowing than Blood Meridian.
What I was really blown away by was Taylor's unsentimental empathy for her characters. She doesn't sugarcoat their loneliness and pain, but she doesn't wallow in it Père Goriot-style either. She neither condemns nor excuses their snobbery and petty gossip; she just lays it out. When one character becomes incontinent, you feel how humiliating and terrifying that is, but you don't feel voyeuristic or creepy about it. That's a marvelous thing to pull off, and this book is bad ass. ...more
Of two best TV shows of this century, Breaking Bad is a deep character study; The Wire is a deep city study. Breaking Bad is about people; The Wire isOf two best TV shows of this century, Breaking Bad is a deep character study; The Wire is a deep city study. Breaking Bad is about people; The Wire is about systems, architecture, an entire structure from the top to the bottom. That's a tough trick to pull off. It's not very inviting; there are necessarily many characters, some of whom you don't get to spend much time with, and it's hard to get into a story that keeps shifting under you. (This is also why nonfiction history books are way more fun when they narrow their focus.)
Manhattan Transfer is to early 1900s New York as The Wire is to early 2000s Baltimore: a panoramic picture of the city, from the politicians at the top to the most hopeless castaways. (One major difference: there are only white people in this book. Dos Passos himself was one quarter Portuguese, in case you were wondering.)
That's ambitious and interesting, and it's not like there aren't any characters at all to latch onto. The two major recurring ones are Jimmy Herf, the author's stand-in, and Ellen Thatcher - variously known as Ellie, Elaine and Helena, for some reason. The two orbit each other all through the book.
Most of the characters weave in and out of each other's lives. There are like a jillion of them, and you don't really have to keep all of them straight: "How can you tell them apart nurse?" "Sometimes we can't", and she's talking about babies but he's talking about New York. Other recurring ones include:
- Bud, the first guy we meet, who comes to NYC to escape his brutal farm life (view spoiler)[and ends up committing suicide (hide spoiler)] - Jimmy's cousins James and Maisie - Ellen's whiny friend Cassandra, who has a speech impediment that Dos Passos himself apparently shared - Stan Emery, a dissipated, drunken young rich guy; (view spoiler)[Ellen is in love with him, but he drunkenly manages to kill himself in a fire (fire being an ongoing theme in the book for some reason, everything's always on fire here) - I was a little unclear on whether Ellen and Jimmy's eventual baby is Stan's, or whether she aborted Stan's and got pregnant by Jimmy. I guess the first option makes more dramatic sense. (hide spoiler)] - George Baldwin, a lawyer who makes his career on a case where a drunken milkman gets hit by a train - Gus McNeil, the drunken milkman, and his wife Nellie - Joe Harland, a former wall street wizard who's fallen on hard times - Dutch, a WWI veteran who can't get a decent job when he returns, and his fiancee Francie - Congo Jake, an Italian sailor (view spoiler)[who becomes a wealthy bootlegger (hide spoiler)] - Tony Hunter, a gay guy (view spoiler)[who tries to go straight with Nevada Jones, a woman who seems of loose morals and ends up with Congo Jake (hide spoiler)]
Each of these stories is interesting, believe it or not. Dos Passos gets accused of a lack of people understanding, and of being a little cliched, but I think he's found interesting ways into each character - the self-hating gay guy, the suicidal failure, the drunk, they've all got a little something that makes them stand out.
But that's not even all of them, just the ones I noted down as I went. I took notes! This book is a little difficult - and Dos Passos doesn't do us any favors about it, either; he doesn't make all his major plot points super clear. He's modernist in that way, although his whole systemic thing looks forward to postmodernism. If you're looking for a fun time reading a nice book, this probably isn't your jam.
Dos Passos doesn't give us a particularly nice view of New York. "If a man's a success in New York, he's a success!" says Jimmy's uncle (side note:New York, New York was written fifty years later), but most people are not successes, and those that are cheated. The city is the villain of this story.
Manhattan Transfer is said to be practice for dos Passos's mammoth USA trilogy, which broadens the scope to War & Peace levels. I haven't read it and not sure I'm going to - this might be enough for me. I like it and I respect it but it's a little exhausting. ...more
James Baldwin's closet romance is so good that you find yourself pitying the authors of straight romances. There's so much less drama available! ThereJames Baldwin's closet romance is so good that you find yourself pitying the authors of straight romances. There's so much less drama available! There's this whole stratum of pain available to those conflicted or in denial about or hiding their sexuality, and those in their wake. Why do we even read straight romances? So boring!
Giovanni's Room is a perfect novel. Clear and merciless and focused. Okay, and screamingly melodramatic, but I've never had a problem with melodrama. And it contains an amazing straight sex scene - one of those rare ones that exist for a reason. It's a nightmare of a scene.
"You play it safe long enough," says an older gay man to the closeted David, "and you'll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever - like me." It's an awful warning. This is 1956, and it's just barely possible that David could have lived more or less publicly as a gay man - Ginsberg was doing it - but it would have taken a lot of courage. Maybe not as much as it took for Baldwin, who was also black. So the book - about David's intense love affair with Giovanni over the course of a summer in Paris - is about whether David will come up with that courage or not. ...more
This almost reminded me of Shirley Jackson - not in its tone or theme, but in its oddness. Like, here's this West guy just off doing his weird thing aThis almost reminded me of Shirley Jackson - not in its tone or theme, but in its oddness. Like, here's this West guy just off doing his weird thing and I don't even know whether it's funny or tragic.
It might be because I just finished Sun Also Rises, but the whole book seemed sortof like a parody of that. Parody might not be the right word. A small-scale version? A diorama? With cockfighting instead of bullfighting. Faye Greener is like a smaller, more tawdry Brett. ...more
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