History: This novel was written in 1944. It is Saul Bellow’s first published work and established him in the literary world.
Plot: At 27, a Chicagoan named Joseph, a university graduate, an intellectual, five years married, leaves his job with a travel bureau, and under the pressure of waiting to be taken to war as a draftee feels himself alienated from society. In his diary between Dec.15,1942, and April9,1943, he objectively describes his quarrels with friends, in-laws, his wife Iva, by whom he is supported in their mean rooming house, and his brother Amos, a go-getting success, as he undergoes intense self-analysis dedicated only to the belief “I must know what I myself am.” Talks with his alter ego, “Tu As Raison Aussi,” finally convince him that man creates his own destiny and send him to volunteer in the army rather than continue to wait indefinitely to be inducted.
Review: Dangling Man is Bellow’s debut from 1944, bringing us into his twin worlds of thought and fascination, and of colourful characters. The book takes the form of a journal kept by Joseph, surname undeclared, as he waits for his call-up by the Army after enlisting, when “there is nothing to do but wait, or dangle, and grow more and more dispirited.” To keep his spirits up he records his thoughts, contrary to the spirit of the day (“Do you have feelings? There are correct and incorrect ways of indicating them.
Pretty quickly Joseph learns that to have all this free time, this freedom, leads him not only into dolour but into mischief, and he manages to start fights during the course of the novel with his wife (“Iva, it’s this situation we’re in. It’s changed us both”), his neighbours, his friends and his precocious niece Etta, who pushes him too far in a superbly ambiguous set piece. He toys with infidelity and it is this “avidity” which is Joseph’s other problem, his desire to experience and record everything.
Opening Line: “December 15, 1942: There was a time when people were in the habit of addressing themselves frequently, and felt no shame in making a record of their inner transactions.”
Closing Line: “Long live regimentation!”
Quotes: “At the root of it all was my unwillingness to miss anything. A compact with one woman puts beyond reach what others might give us to enjoy; the soft blondes and the dark, aphrodisiacal women of our imaginations are set aside. Shall we leave life not knowing them? Must we?”
Rating: Okay
Monday, March 25, 2013
Thursday, March 21, 2013
536. The Book of “O” – James Thurber
History: The Wonderful O is the last of James Thurber’s 5 short-book fairy tales for children. It was published in 1957
Plot: Pirates Black and Littlejack have sailed their ship, the Aieu1, to the island of Ooroo in search of treasure. The catch? (and the source of the book’s title?): Littlejack has declared a vendetta against the letter O, as his mother became stuck in a porthole years before. They could not pull her in, so they had to push her out.While they search, Black, Littlejack and their nefarious crew insist that the island residents no longer use the letter O, either spoken aloud or on paper, a move which affects the population across the board. Group names are partially exempt, but the quest is on for O-less synonyms for all the flowers and orchestral pieces, professions, jobs, and personal names rendered laughable, unpronounceable and flat-out offensive by Littlejack’s vowel phobia. Violin, oboe, viola and bassoon are gone from the orchestra; forget-me-not, rose, violet and hollyhock removed from the countryside; Otto Ott and Ophelia Oliver stutter and flee society. Pigs and sheep are acceptable, but not pork or mutton, bacon or chop; hens and geese are allowed but not poultry or goose, rooster or flock. And so on.
The villagers, led by the lovers Andrea and Andreus, conspire in the forest in the dark of night on how to restore all the necessary things which require O to exist, not least four concepts which make life worth living: hope, love, valor and the fourth one, unnamed until the end of the book. The Wonderful O does have a happy ending, with the pirates driven away by all the things with O, and the islanders free to use all the vowels as needed.
Review: Black and Littlejack are bad men. Littlejack has a map that indicates the existence of a treasure on a far and lonely island. He needs a ship to get there. Black has a ship. So they team up and sail off on Black’s vessel, the Aeiu. “A weird uncanny name,” remarks Littlejack, “like a nightbird screaming.” Black explains that it’s all the vowels except for O. O he hates since his mother got wedged in a porthole. They couldn’t pull her in so they had to push her out.
Black and Littlejack arrive at the port of the far and lonely island and demand the treasure. No one knows anything about it, so they have their henchmen ransack the place—to no avail. But Black has a better idea: he will take over the island and he will purge it of O.
The vicissitudes visited on the islanders by Black and Littlejack, the harsh limits of a life sans O (where shoe is she and woe is we), and how finally with a little luck and lots of pluck the islanders shake off their tyrannical interlopers and discover the true treasure for themselves (Oh yes—and get back their O’s)—these are only some of the surprises that await readers of James Thurber’s timelessly zany fairy tale about two louts who try to lock up the language—and lose.
Opening Line: “The man with the map, and the man with the ship sailed for the island rich with sapphires, emeralds and rubys.”
Closing Line: “The sun went down, and it’s golden glow, lighted with fire, the Wonderful O.”
Quotes: “Taking a single letter from the alphaber," he said, "should make life simpler."
Rating: Not very good even for a fairy tale.
Plot: Pirates Black and Littlejack have sailed their ship, the Aieu1, to the island of Ooroo in search of treasure. The catch? (and the source of the book’s title?): Littlejack has declared a vendetta against the letter O, as his mother became stuck in a porthole years before. They could not pull her in, so they had to push her out.While they search, Black, Littlejack and their nefarious crew insist that the island residents no longer use the letter O, either spoken aloud or on paper, a move which affects the population across the board. Group names are partially exempt, but the quest is on for O-less synonyms for all the flowers and orchestral pieces, professions, jobs, and personal names rendered laughable, unpronounceable and flat-out offensive by Littlejack’s vowel phobia. Violin, oboe, viola and bassoon are gone from the orchestra; forget-me-not, rose, violet and hollyhock removed from the countryside; Otto Ott and Ophelia Oliver stutter and flee society. Pigs and sheep are acceptable, but not pork or mutton, bacon or chop; hens and geese are allowed but not poultry or goose, rooster or flock. And so on.
The villagers, led by the lovers Andrea and Andreus, conspire in the forest in the dark of night on how to restore all the necessary things which require O to exist, not least four concepts which make life worth living: hope, love, valor and the fourth one, unnamed until the end of the book. The Wonderful O does have a happy ending, with the pirates driven away by all the things with O, and the islanders free to use all the vowels as needed.
Review: Black and Littlejack are bad men. Littlejack has a map that indicates the existence of a treasure on a far and lonely island. He needs a ship to get there. Black has a ship. So they team up and sail off on Black’s vessel, the Aeiu. “A weird uncanny name,” remarks Littlejack, “like a nightbird screaming.” Black explains that it’s all the vowels except for O. O he hates since his mother got wedged in a porthole. They couldn’t pull her in so they had to push her out.
Black and Littlejack arrive at the port of the far and lonely island and demand the treasure. No one knows anything about it, so they have their henchmen ransack the place—to no avail. But Black has a better idea: he will take over the island and he will purge it of O.
The vicissitudes visited on the islanders by Black and Littlejack, the harsh limits of a life sans O (where shoe is she and woe is we), and how finally with a little luck and lots of pluck the islanders shake off their tyrannical interlopers and discover the true treasure for themselves (Oh yes—and get back their O’s)—these are only some of the surprises that await readers of James Thurber’s timelessly zany fairy tale about two louts who try to lock up the language—and lose.
Opening Line: “The man with the map, and the man with the ship sailed for the island rich with sapphires, emeralds and rubys.”
Closing Line: “The sun went down, and it’s golden glow, lighted with fire, the Wonderful O.”
Quotes: “Taking a single letter from the alphaber," he said, "should make life simpler."
Rating: Not very good even for a fairy tale.
535. The House in Paris – Elizabeth Bowen
History: First published in 1935, it was well received by critics past and present.
Plot: The novel opens in Paris, early in the morning, as eleven-year-old Henrietta Mountjoy, accompanied by Miss Naomi Fisher, travel via taxi to the house of Mme Fisher, an elderly and sickly lady who for years has taken in well-off girls for a season. Henrietta is traveling to Menton, in the south of France, to spend time with her grandmother, Mrs. Arbuthnot. Henrietta that she will be spending her day with Leopold, a nine-year old boy who is supposed to meet his mother there for the first time; Miss Fisher asks Henrietta to "be a little considerate with Leopold", and "to ask Leopold nothing". After breakfast and a nap in the salon, Henrietta awakens to find Leopold standing before her. The two young children talk about their life: Leopold explains Mme Fisher's illness and his own anticipation regarding the arrival of his mother later that day; Henrietta reveals to Leopold that her mother is dead. Even though Leopold angers Henrietta by spilling the contents of her handbag, the two children develop a rapport.
Miss Fisher leads Henrietta to Mme Fisher's room. While they are upstairs, Leopold rummages through Miss Fisher's handbag, discovering three envelopes. He disregards the first, a letter pertaining to Henrietta. The second envelope, with a Berlin postmark, is from his mother, but the envelope is empty, and he feels like Miss Fisher has "done him down." The third envelope contains a letter from Marian Grant Moody, his adoptive mother, to Miss Fisher. Besides discussing the boy's itinerary, she writes exhaustively of Leopold's delicate and rather unstable constitution, and says more than once that the boy has not had a sex education yet, so any explanation of his birth will have to be handled delicately.
Leopold returns to the first envelope concerning Henrietta, written to Miss Fisher by Henrietta's grandmother, Mrs. Arbuthnot. Referring repeatedly to her old acquaintance and present addressee as "Miss Kingfisher", she informs Miss Fisher that Henrietta is to spend the remainder of the winter with Mrs. Arbuthnot in the south of France, and should only be staying a day in Paris. The tone of the letter is manipulative: Mrs. Arbuthnot subtly chastises Miss Fisher for not visiting her, all the while asking that Henrietta be allowed to spend the day in Paris.
During this time, Henrietta is introduced to Mme Fisher in her upstairs bedroom. As Miss Fisher sits knitting, her mother and the young girl converse, Mme Fisher frequently critiquing her daughter, commenting on her own bad health, and, ultimately, discussing Leopold: Henrietta learns that Leopold's now-dead father at one time broke her daughter's heart.
Henrietta then returns to the salon and discovers Leopold going through the handbag. The section concludes with the arrival of a telegram, summarized by Miss Fisher: "Your mother is not coming; she cannot come."
"Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own." The novel's second section shift back a decade to the story of Leopold's parents. The introductory pages of the section make clear that this the entire section is imaginary, perhaps a long and dramatic imaginative vision on Leopold's part. The section contains the information that may have been exchanged between Karen and Leopold should she have actually kept her promise to her son and arrived as scheduled that day in Paris.
Karen Michaelis, ten years or so before the day of the previous section, is sailing from her native England to visit her Aunt Violet and Uncle Bill Bent at Rushbrook, County Cork, Ireland. Karen is escaping the pressures of her recent engagement to Ray Forrestier, ambivalent about the wedding; Ray himself is on a business trip. Her time with Uncle Bill and Aunt Violet is rather uneventful and uninspiring until Uncle Bill, a nervous and socially inadequate man, tells Karen that Violet is to have surgery in the coming weeks, a procedure that could prove fatal. Back in England, Karen finds Naomi Fisher waiting for her; she has traveled to London to see to the affairs of her recently deceased aunt, and tells Karen of her engagement to Max Ebhart, whom Karen met years before during while she was one of the girls staying at Mme Fisher's house. Despite Karen's objections—she had always been afraid of Max—Naomi insists the three spend time together before Max and Naomi return home.
During a picnic, Max and Karen come close, sharing a secret touch and holding hands. Afterward, Karen resigns herself to her upcoming marriage, but before too long, the Michaelis family receives news of Aunt Violet's death, and once again things are in a state of disorder. During this chaotic time Max calls and asks to see Karen. They meet clandestinely in Boulogne and spend the day together. Max reveals that Mme Fisher believes her daughter is not good enough for him, but according to Max, Naomi is an acceptable match, simply because she is "like the furniture or the dark", comfortable and reassuring. Ultimately, however, she evokes no passion in him. Likewise, Karen confides that she does not wish to marry Ray. They part, but meet again on Folkestone pier the following Saturday, spending the remainder of the day and evening in a hotel room. Karen awakens in the middle of the night and while examining her and Max's shared circumstances, she develops a type of unconscious awareness of Leopold, despite having no clear evidence he will eventually exist, suggested by the author in second person: "All the same, the idea of you, Leopold, began to be present with her."
The following day, Max writes a letter to Naomi, explaining his relationship with and feelings for Karen. Karen implores him to rethink the revelation, specifically the unreality of the arrangement ("You and I are the dream. Go back to her".) She tears up the letter, and they agree that while Naomi must be made aware of the affair, it is best both to write her and tell her in person. Karen's rendezvous with Max is eventually discovered by Mrs. Michaelis, and while Karen tries to explain the relationship, Mrs. Michaelis cannot understand.
Next, Karen learns through the French newspapers that Max has committed suicide, and Naomi arrives in London, where she explains the circumstances surrounding his death: after receiving his letter and informing Mme Fisher of his intentions, Naomi is quarantined by her mother, who intends to keep Naomi from seeing Max and removing any possibility of spoiling Max's chance for happiness with Karen. Max does visit Naomi, however, speaking to her of the failure inherent in his relationship with Karen: "'What she and I are' he said, 'is outside life; we shall fail.'" He is visibly distressed as Mme Fisher returns to the salon. Naomi returns to her upstairs bedroom. There is a commotion in the salon, and Naomi returns to find her mother strewn across the sofa and blood on the floor. Max has cut his own wrist, making his way out the door into the street, and dying in an alley. In the following days, Mme Fisher will observe that "it was the commendation he could not bear. I was commending him when he took his knife out." At the end of the section, Karen reveals to Naomi that she is pregnant with Max's child, and will leave for Germany to try to avoid any scandal.
The first sentence of the last section repeats the last sentence of the first: "Your mother is not coming; she cannot come." Leopold again imagines how the meeting would have gone if it had occurred. Henrietta senses Leopold's disappointment; she holds him and cries. Miss Fisher reenters the salon, informing Leopold that Mme Fisher would like to see him.
Not unlike the earlier exchange with Henrietta, the conversation between Leopold and Mme Fisher is uncomfortable and at times Mme Fisher is blunt, even cruel. She attempts to explain Karen's unique nature to the disconsolate boy, abandoning any of those delicacies requested in Marian Grant Moody's earlier letter. She explains Leopold his history, including the details of his birth, the death of his half-sibling, his adoption, and his general displacement in the world. Leopold begs to remain in the house, exclaiming, "At Spezia when I am angry I go full of smoke inside, but when you make me angry I see everything." At this point Miss Fisher returns to the room and whisks Leopold away again.
Ray Forrestier is waiting in the salon for Leopold. When the child arrives, their interaction is strained, distant, and uncomfortable. A good portion of the narrative focuses on Ray's conflicting feelings about Leopold, his marriage to Karen, the child's inescapable presence in their shared life, and Ray's own situational obligations. Ultimately, Ray and Leopold leave the house together, dropping off Henrietta at the train station on the way; the two children say their goodbyes and head off in different directions.
Review: ''The House in Paris'' is Bowen's best novel, ''one of those books that grow in the mind, in time.'' It is also a book about the growth of the mind in time. Two children cross paths in this house. One of them, Leopold, is waiting for his mother, who does not arrive. That, in a sense, is all that happens, except that the reason she doesn't arrive encompasses Leopold's paternity, and the nature of passion, and deaths both literal and of the soul, and everything that divides the knowledge of children from the knowledge of adults. It is tragic, exquisite and told in strange and exact sentences that only Bowen could write. Of one bitter character: ''Caring for nothing, she seemed to keep every happening, like rows of sea-blunted pebbles with no character, in her lit-up mind.''
The novel is concerned throughout with betrayal and secrecy. Karen betrayed her mother by not revealing Aunt Violet's terminal illness during her remaining weeks of life; in fact, the narrator reports that "Karen did not even ask herself why she had said nothing." Mme Fisher betrayed Naomi by encouraging Max to choose Karen, enabling Max and Karen to begin their affair and betray their respective fiancés, while Karen betrayed Naomi as well: when Karen admonishes Max, "you cannot do that to Naomi," Max responds, "Did you always think so much of her?" Maud Ellmann even asserts that Karen only loves Max "precisely because he is another woman's". Later, after Karen has conceived her illegitimate child, Mrs. Michaelis betrays her husband by sending Karen on a year of supposed European travel and study, just as Karen further betrays Ray by secretly giving birth to and then giving away an illegitimate son. In the present, Karen still betrays her father, who is desperate for grandchildren, by hiding his grandson's existence. Ultimately, Karen betrays Leopold at the eleventh hour when she refuses to meet him in Paris, a betrayal underscored by the repeated message to Leopold, "Your mother is not coming; she cannot come." Because of Karen's betrayal of Leopold, Bennett and Royle qualified The House in Paris as "Bowen's most rigorous and unremittingly clairvoyant elaboration of the structure and effects of psychic trauma. The House in Paris is what we propose to call a traumaturgy, both a work and theory of wounds." Finally, Ray betrays the Grant Moody foster family by stealing Leopold at the novel's close. There is so much secrecy throughout the text that, according to Marian Kelly, "Bowen forces readers into the position of detective by making constant deduction at the level of both conversational references and character psychology a central element of reading her novel".
Opening Line: “In a taxi skidding away from the Gare de Leon, one dark greasy February morning before the shutters were down, Henrietta sat beside Miss Fisher.”
Closing Line: “The copper night sky went glossy over the city crowned with signs and started alight with windows, the wet square like a lake at the foot of the station ramp.”
Quotes: “...there must be something she wanted; and that therefore she was no lady.”
Rating: Really good.
Plot: The novel opens in Paris, early in the morning, as eleven-year-old Henrietta Mountjoy, accompanied by Miss Naomi Fisher, travel via taxi to the house of Mme Fisher, an elderly and sickly lady who for years has taken in well-off girls for a season. Henrietta is traveling to Menton, in the south of France, to spend time with her grandmother, Mrs. Arbuthnot. Henrietta that she will be spending her day with Leopold, a nine-year old boy who is supposed to meet his mother there for the first time; Miss Fisher asks Henrietta to "be a little considerate with Leopold", and "to ask Leopold nothing". After breakfast and a nap in the salon, Henrietta awakens to find Leopold standing before her. The two young children talk about their life: Leopold explains Mme Fisher's illness and his own anticipation regarding the arrival of his mother later that day; Henrietta reveals to Leopold that her mother is dead. Even though Leopold angers Henrietta by spilling the contents of her handbag, the two children develop a rapport.
Miss Fisher leads Henrietta to Mme Fisher's room. While they are upstairs, Leopold rummages through Miss Fisher's handbag, discovering three envelopes. He disregards the first, a letter pertaining to Henrietta. The second envelope, with a Berlin postmark, is from his mother, but the envelope is empty, and he feels like Miss Fisher has "done him down." The third envelope contains a letter from Marian Grant Moody, his adoptive mother, to Miss Fisher. Besides discussing the boy's itinerary, she writes exhaustively of Leopold's delicate and rather unstable constitution, and says more than once that the boy has not had a sex education yet, so any explanation of his birth will have to be handled delicately.
Leopold returns to the first envelope concerning Henrietta, written to Miss Fisher by Henrietta's grandmother, Mrs. Arbuthnot. Referring repeatedly to her old acquaintance and present addressee as "Miss Kingfisher", she informs Miss Fisher that Henrietta is to spend the remainder of the winter with Mrs. Arbuthnot in the south of France, and should only be staying a day in Paris. The tone of the letter is manipulative: Mrs. Arbuthnot subtly chastises Miss Fisher for not visiting her, all the while asking that Henrietta be allowed to spend the day in Paris.
During this time, Henrietta is introduced to Mme Fisher in her upstairs bedroom. As Miss Fisher sits knitting, her mother and the young girl converse, Mme Fisher frequently critiquing her daughter, commenting on her own bad health, and, ultimately, discussing Leopold: Henrietta learns that Leopold's now-dead father at one time broke her daughter's heart.
Henrietta then returns to the salon and discovers Leopold going through the handbag. The section concludes with the arrival of a telegram, summarized by Miss Fisher: "Your mother is not coming; she cannot come."
"Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own." The novel's second section shift back a decade to the story of Leopold's parents. The introductory pages of the section make clear that this the entire section is imaginary, perhaps a long and dramatic imaginative vision on Leopold's part. The section contains the information that may have been exchanged between Karen and Leopold should she have actually kept her promise to her son and arrived as scheduled that day in Paris.
Karen Michaelis, ten years or so before the day of the previous section, is sailing from her native England to visit her Aunt Violet and Uncle Bill Bent at Rushbrook, County Cork, Ireland. Karen is escaping the pressures of her recent engagement to Ray Forrestier, ambivalent about the wedding; Ray himself is on a business trip. Her time with Uncle Bill and Aunt Violet is rather uneventful and uninspiring until Uncle Bill, a nervous and socially inadequate man, tells Karen that Violet is to have surgery in the coming weeks, a procedure that could prove fatal. Back in England, Karen finds Naomi Fisher waiting for her; she has traveled to London to see to the affairs of her recently deceased aunt, and tells Karen of her engagement to Max Ebhart, whom Karen met years before during while she was one of the girls staying at Mme Fisher's house. Despite Karen's objections—she had always been afraid of Max—Naomi insists the three spend time together before Max and Naomi return home.
During a picnic, Max and Karen come close, sharing a secret touch and holding hands. Afterward, Karen resigns herself to her upcoming marriage, but before too long, the Michaelis family receives news of Aunt Violet's death, and once again things are in a state of disorder. During this chaotic time Max calls and asks to see Karen. They meet clandestinely in Boulogne and spend the day together. Max reveals that Mme Fisher believes her daughter is not good enough for him, but according to Max, Naomi is an acceptable match, simply because she is "like the furniture or the dark", comfortable and reassuring. Ultimately, however, she evokes no passion in him. Likewise, Karen confides that she does not wish to marry Ray. They part, but meet again on Folkestone pier the following Saturday, spending the remainder of the day and evening in a hotel room. Karen awakens in the middle of the night and while examining her and Max's shared circumstances, she develops a type of unconscious awareness of Leopold, despite having no clear evidence he will eventually exist, suggested by the author in second person: "All the same, the idea of you, Leopold, began to be present with her."
The following day, Max writes a letter to Naomi, explaining his relationship with and feelings for Karen. Karen implores him to rethink the revelation, specifically the unreality of the arrangement ("You and I are the dream. Go back to her".) She tears up the letter, and they agree that while Naomi must be made aware of the affair, it is best both to write her and tell her in person. Karen's rendezvous with Max is eventually discovered by Mrs. Michaelis, and while Karen tries to explain the relationship, Mrs. Michaelis cannot understand.
Next, Karen learns through the French newspapers that Max has committed suicide, and Naomi arrives in London, where she explains the circumstances surrounding his death: after receiving his letter and informing Mme Fisher of his intentions, Naomi is quarantined by her mother, who intends to keep Naomi from seeing Max and removing any possibility of spoiling Max's chance for happiness with Karen. Max does visit Naomi, however, speaking to her of the failure inherent in his relationship with Karen: "'What she and I are' he said, 'is outside life; we shall fail.'" He is visibly distressed as Mme Fisher returns to the salon. Naomi returns to her upstairs bedroom. There is a commotion in the salon, and Naomi returns to find her mother strewn across the sofa and blood on the floor. Max has cut his own wrist, making his way out the door into the street, and dying in an alley. In the following days, Mme Fisher will observe that "it was the commendation he could not bear. I was commending him when he took his knife out." At the end of the section, Karen reveals to Naomi that she is pregnant with Max's child, and will leave for Germany to try to avoid any scandal.
The first sentence of the last section repeats the last sentence of the first: "Your mother is not coming; she cannot come." Leopold again imagines how the meeting would have gone if it had occurred. Henrietta senses Leopold's disappointment; she holds him and cries. Miss Fisher reenters the salon, informing Leopold that Mme Fisher would like to see him.
Not unlike the earlier exchange with Henrietta, the conversation between Leopold and Mme Fisher is uncomfortable and at times Mme Fisher is blunt, even cruel. She attempts to explain Karen's unique nature to the disconsolate boy, abandoning any of those delicacies requested in Marian Grant Moody's earlier letter. She explains Leopold his history, including the details of his birth, the death of his half-sibling, his adoption, and his general displacement in the world. Leopold begs to remain in the house, exclaiming, "At Spezia when I am angry I go full of smoke inside, but when you make me angry I see everything." At this point Miss Fisher returns to the room and whisks Leopold away again.
Ray Forrestier is waiting in the salon for Leopold. When the child arrives, their interaction is strained, distant, and uncomfortable. A good portion of the narrative focuses on Ray's conflicting feelings about Leopold, his marriage to Karen, the child's inescapable presence in their shared life, and Ray's own situational obligations. Ultimately, Ray and Leopold leave the house together, dropping off Henrietta at the train station on the way; the two children say their goodbyes and head off in different directions.
Review: ''The House in Paris'' is Bowen's best novel, ''one of those books that grow in the mind, in time.'' It is also a book about the growth of the mind in time. Two children cross paths in this house. One of them, Leopold, is waiting for his mother, who does not arrive. That, in a sense, is all that happens, except that the reason she doesn't arrive encompasses Leopold's paternity, and the nature of passion, and deaths both literal and of the soul, and everything that divides the knowledge of children from the knowledge of adults. It is tragic, exquisite and told in strange and exact sentences that only Bowen could write. Of one bitter character: ''Caring for nothing, she seemed to keep every happening, like rows of sea-blunted pebbles with no character, in her lit-up mind.''
The novel is concerned throughout with betrayal and secrecy. Karen betrayed her mother by not revealing Aunt Violet's terminal illness during her remaining weeks of life; in fact, the narrator reports that "Karen did not even ask herself why she had said nothing." Mme Fisher betrayed Naomi by encouraging Max to choose Karen, enabling Max and Karen to begin their affair and betray their respective fiancés, while Karen betrayed Naomi as well: when Karen admonishes Max, "you cannot do that to Naomi," Max responds, "Did you always think so much of her?" Maud Ellmann even asserts that Karen only loves Max "precisely because he is another woman's". Later, after Karen has conceived her illegitimate child, Mrs. Michaelis betrays her husband by sending Karen on a year of supposed European travel and study, just as Karen further betrays Ray by secretly giving birth to and then giving away an illegitimate son. In the present, Karen still betrays her father, who is desperate for grandchildren, by hiding his grandson's existence. Ultimately, Karen betrays Leopold at the eleventh hour when she refuses to meet him in Paris, a betrayal underscored by the repeated message to Leopold, "Your mother is not coming; she cannot come." Because of Karen's betrayal of Leopold, Bennett and Royle qualified The House in Paris as "Bowen's most rigorous and unremittingly clairvoyant elaboration of the structure and effects of psychic trauma. The House in Paris is what we propose to call a traumaturgy, both a work and theory of wounds." Finally, Ray betrays the Grant Moody foster family by stealing Leopold at the novel's close. There is so much secrecy throughout the text that, according to Marian Kelly, "Bowen forces readers into the position of detective by making constant deduction at the level of both conversational references and character psychology a central element of reading her novel".
Opening Line: “In a taxi skidding away from the Gare de Leon, one dark greasy February morning before the shutters were down, Henrietta sat beside Miss Fisher.”
Closing Line: “The copper night sky went glossy over the city crowned with signs and started alight with windows, the wet square like a lake at the foot of the station ramp.”
Quotes: “...there must be something she wanted; and that therefore she was no lady.”
Rating: Really good.
Monday, March 18, 2013
534. Burger’s Daughter – Nadine Gordimer
History: This book was first published in the United Kingdom in 1979. The book was not published in South Africa because it was expected to be banned in that country. A month after publication in London, the import and sale of the book in South Africa was prohibited, although the restriction was lifted six months later.
Gordimer herself was involved in South African struggle politics, and she knew many of the activists. She described Burger's Daughter as "a coded homage" to Fischer. While still banned in South Africa, a copy of the book was smuggled into Mandela's prison cell on Robben Island, and he reported that he "thought well of it".
Plot: The novel is set mostly in Johannesburg in the early- to mid-1970s during Apartheid. Rosa is the daughter of Lionel Burger, a white Afrikaner anti-apartheid activist, who is standing trial for treason. The court finds him guilty and sentences him to life in prison. Rosa visits him regularly, just as she visited her mother, Cathy Burger when she was imprisoned some ten years previously. Cathy died when Rosa was still at school. Rosa grew up in a family that actively supported the overthrow of the apartheid government, and the house they lived in opened its doors to anyone supporting the struggle, regardless of colour. Living with them was "Baasie", a black boy Rosa's age the Burgers had "adopted" when his father had died in prison. Bassie and Rosa grew up as brother and sister. Both Rosa's parents were members of the outlawed South African Communist Party (SACP), and she was told from an early age that they could be detained by the authorities at any time. When Rosa was nine, both her parents were arrested and she was sent to stay with her father's family in a rural farming community. Baasie was sent elsewhere because, she was told, he would not be accepted there. It was here that Rosa experienced apartheid for the first time and the way black people were mistreated.
In 1974, after three years in prison, Lionel succumbs to ill-health and dies. At 26, Rosa sells the Burger's house and moves in with Conrad, a post-graduate student who had befriended her during her father's trial. Rosa is not in love with Conrad, but their relationship is convenient during this difficult time. Conrad questions her role in the Burger family and the fact that she always did what she was told. He questions whether she has her own identity, because everyone sees her as Burger's daughter, not Rosa. Later Rosa leaves Conrad and moves into a flat on her own and works as a physiotherapist at a hospital.
While some of Lionel's former associates are banned or under house arrest, Rosa is "named", meaning that she is labelled a Communist and is under surveillance. In 1975, despite her restrictions, she attends a party of a friend in Soweto, and it is there that she hears a black university student dismissing all whites' help as irrelevant, saying that whites cannot know what blacks want, and that blacks will liberate themselves. Realising she needs to be somewhere else, Rosa manages to get a passport, and flies to Nice in France to stay with Katya, her father's first wife. Rosa spends several months there and is able to be herself for the first time in her life. She meets Bernard Chabalier, a visiting academic from Paris, and they become lovers. He persuades her to return with him to Paris, where he says the French Anti-Apartheid Movement will be only too happy to organize a flat for Lionel Burger's daughter.
Before joining Bernard in Paris, Rosa stays in a flat in London for several weeks. Now that she has no intention of honouring the agreement of her passport, which was to return to South Africa within a year, she openly introduces herself to others as Burger's daughter. This attracts the attention of the media and she attends several political events. At one such event, Rosa sees Baasie, but he is reluctant to talk to her. She gives him her phone number, and he later contacts her and starts criticizing her for not knowing his real name (Zwelinzima Vulindlela). He says that there is nothing special about her father having died in prison as many black fathers have also died there, and says he does not need her help. Rosa is devastated by her childhood friend's hurtful remarks, and overcome with guilt, she abandons her plans of going into exile in France and returns to South Africa.
Back home she resumes her job as a physiotherapist in Soweto. Then in June 1976 Soweto school children start protesting about their inferior education and being taught in Afrikaans. They go on the rampage, which includes killing white welfare workers in Soweto. The police brutally put down the uprising, resulting in hundreds of deaths. In October 1977, many organizations and people critical of the white government are banned, and in November 1977 Rosa Burger is detained. Her lawyer, who also represented her father, expects charges to be brought against her of furthering the aims of the banned SACP and ANC, and of aiding and abetting the students' revolt.
Review: It's strange to live in a country where there are still heroes.'' The words seem to echo through this book, which is concerned above all with the nature of commitment and heroism in South Africa. But it is not about romantic hero-worship; it is about the problems, the humanity, the ruthlessness and the cost of political involvement, all against a background of love, squalor or boredom.
It is Miss Gordimer's most political and most moving novel, going to the heart of the racial conflict in South Africa. But it does not deal publicly with riots, tortures or crusades: Its politics come out of its characters, as part of the wholeness of lives that cannot evade them.
The hero of the book, whom we never meet, is Lionel Burger, a respected Afrikaner doctor who joined the Communist Party, worked for the revolution, was jailed and died in prison; and the story is that of his daughter Rosa, brought up under her father's spell, waiting outside prisons and living among dedicated Communists, yet trying to escape, alone, after her father's death, from a commitment that was all-enveloping.
For Burger was the kind of South African Communist who was drawn to the party by his humanity and determination to share the cause of the blacks; and in his house blacks and whites came together with a sense of common hope and faith in the future, defying the apartheid surrounding them. With his Afrikaner ancestry and his political understanding, Burger was a man who, as a compatriot describes him, ''could have been a prime minister if he hadn't been a traitor.'' (His story bears some resemblance to the actual story of Bram Fischer, the distinguished Afrikaner lawyer who likewise became a Communist revolutionary and died in jail.)
What is it like to grow up in the shadow of someone so dedicated and so charismatic and then to seek to become a separate, fulfilled individual? Rosa's answer, as it unfolds, tells us not only about South Africa but about the whole nature of commitment. It was Burger's gift to be able to break through ''the closed circuit of self,'' to give purpose to other people's lives; in his house the real definition of loneliness was to live without social responsibility.
The opening chapters describe vividly the splendors and miseries of that commitment; the passionate concern with the future, the moral certainties, the sense of identification with blackness as a way of perceiving sensual redemption, revealed in the magnetic attraction of the beautiful Marisa Kgosana. But on the other hand, there is the bossy narrowness of other white Communists, the jargon of dogma, the lack of escape and the sheer brutalizing effect of the race conflict. When Rosa sees an old black man senselessly flogging a donkey in Soweto, yet cannot intervene, she realizes suddenly ''I must know somewhere else.'' She makes her bid to escape, flying off to the South of France to stay with her father's first wife, in a world of gigolos, lesbians and sun-seekers.
It is a spectacular transition, showing the brittle sophistication and lushness of this cosmopolitan life through the eyes of a South African girl, ''dissolving in the wine and pleasure of scents, sights and sounds existing only in themselves, associated with nothing and nobody. . . .'' The style itself becomes sensuous and multicolored, against the stark background of the Johannesburg past, as Rosa loses herself in the laziness and the waveless peacock-shaded sea.
She falls in love with a French teacher, stays in London and Paris, and finds a new dimension in her love affair that seems to put politics in a neat theoretical pigeonhole. The tolerance, the detachment and cultivation of Europe surround her: To the lesbians in the South of France, the police are no closer than the crime thrillers on television.
Yet the responsibility, the need for identity, remains. The denouement of the novel is too subtle and important to be summarized, for it is about much more than the need for a political cause; it is a whole view of individualism. In her father's house the people had discovered their own kind of individualism, with the liberation that comes from belonging. Her black childhood friend, in spite of her guilt and his bitterness, was still a blood-brother. The political attitudes came from the inside outward: ''It was a human conspiracy, above all other kinds.'' Rosa sees clearly enough the limitations of that conspiracy--the exploitation, the psychological blackmail and the ultimate cost to herself. But she is still Burger's daughter.
It is the combination of political authenticity with sensuous awareness that makes this novel so powerful. Its account of black movements, against the historical background of real people, is harshly realistic; the intense argument in a house in Soweto has the sharp detail of a documentary.
No one has better described the vigor and humor, as well as the misery, of Soweto. Yet the political moments are always illuminated by the intense observation of people and places--tiny details precisely and lovingly described--that brings every incident to life and that give Miss Gordimer's writing such universality. People, landscapes and politics are blended together in this evocative style, and through the eyes of the young, bewildered daughter the wide arc of South African politics comes into sudden focus. It is an integration reminiscent of the great Russian prerevolutionary novels.
It remains extraordinary that such a novel should come out of a country so uncompromising and so increasingly brutalized, where the image of the flogged donkey has such fearful relevance; and it might seem equally surprising that an author of such sensitivity could live there. But this, too, was a Russian phenomenon. The very bleakness of the political predicament and the closeness to suffering seem able not only to provide insights into the political crisis, but to give a heightened awareness of the richness and values of lie.
In one passage the author describes how Rosa and her father's first wife find themselves subtly transformed for each other by their relationship with Lionel Burger, ''like a change of light transforming the aspect of a landscape.'' Coming out of the harshness of South Africa, this dazzling book also brings a new light to the landscape, not only of Johannesburg and its black townships, but of the European cities that have forgotten about darkness.
Opening Line: “Among the group of people waiting at the fortress was a school girl in a brown and yellow uniform holding a green eiderdown quilt, and by the loop at it’s neck, a red hot water bottle.
Closing Line: “But the line had been deleted by the prison sensor, Madame Bagnelli was never able to make it out.”
Quotes: The will is my own. The emotion's my own. The right to be inconsolable. When I feel, there's no 'we', only 'I'.
Rating: Okay.
Gordimer herself was involved in South African struggle politics, and she knew many of the activists. She described Burger's Daughter as "a coded homage" to Fischer. While still banned in South Africa, a copy of the book was smuggled into Mandela's prison cell on Robben Island, and he reported that he "thought well of it".
Plot: The novel is set mostly in Johannesburg in the early- to mid-1970s during Apartheid. Rosa is the daughter of Lionel Burger, a white Afrikaner anti-apartheid activist, who is standing trial for treason. The court finds him guilty and sentences him to life in prison. Rosa visits him regularly, just as she visited her mother, Cathy Burger when she was imprisoned some ten years previously. Cathy died when Rosa was still at school. Rosa grew up in a family that actively supported the overthrow of the apartheid government, and the house they lived in opened its doors to anyone supporting the struggle, regardless of colour. Living with them was "Baasie", a black boy Rosa's age the Burgers had "adopted" when his father had died in prison. Bassie and Rosa grew up as brother and sister. Both Rosa's parents were members of the outlawed South African Communist Party (SACP), and she was told from an early age that they could be detained by the authorities at any time. When Rosa was nine, both her parents were arrested and she was sent to stay with her father's family in a rural farming community. Baasie was sent elsewhere because, she was told, he would not be accepted there. It was here that Rosa experienced apartheid for the first time and the way black people were mistreated.
In 1974, after three years in prison, Lionel succumbs to ill-health and dies. At 26, Rosa sells the Burger's house and moves in with Conrad, a post-graduate student who had befriended her during her father's trial. Rosa is not in love with Conrad, but their relationship is convenient during this difficult time. Conrad questions her role in the Burger family and the fact that she always did what she was told. He questions whether she has her own identity, because everyone sees her as Burger's daughter, not Rosa. Later Rosa leaves Conrad and moves into a flat on her own and works as a physiotherapist at a hospital.
While some of Lionel's former associates are banned or under house arrest, Rosa is "named", meaning that she is labelled a Communist and is under surveillance. In 1975, despite her restrictions, she attends a party of a friend in Soweto, and it is there that she hears a black university student dismissing all whites' help as irrelevant, saying that whites cannot know what blacks want, and that blacks will liberate themselves. Realising she needs to be somewhere else, Rosa manages to get a passport, and flies to Nice in France to stay with Katya, her father's first wife. Rosa spends several months there and is able to be herself for the first time in her life. She meets Bernard Chabalier, a visiting academic from Paris, and they become lovers. He persuades her to return with him to Paris, where he says the French Anti-Apartheid Movement will be only too happy to organize a flat for Lionel Burger's daughter.
Before joining Bernard in Paris, Rosa stays in a flat in London for several weeks. Now that she has no intention of honouring the agreement of her passport, which was to return to South Africa within a year, she openly introduces herself to others as Burger's daughter. This attracts the attention of the media and she attends several political events. At one such event, Rosa sees Baasie, but he is reluctant to talk to her. She gives him her phone number, and he later contacts her and starts criticizing her for not knowing his real name (Zwelinzima Vulindlela). He says that there is nothing special about her father having died in prison as many black fathers have also died there, and says he does not need her help. Rosa is devastated by her childhood friend's hurtful remarks, and overcome with guilt, she abandons her plans of going into exile in France and returns to South Africa.
Back home she resumes her job as a physiotherapist in Soweto. Then in June 1976 Soweto school children start protesting about their inferior education and being taught in Afrikaans. They go on the rampage, which includes killing white welfare workers in Soweto. The police brutally put down the uprising, resulting in hundreds of deaths. In October 1977, many organizations and people critical of the white government are banned, and in November 1977 Rosa Burger is detained. Her lawyer, who also represented her father, expects charges to be brought against her of furthering the aims of the banned SACP and ANC, and of aiding and abetting the students' revolt.
Review: It's strange to live in a country where there are still heroes.'' The words seem to echo through this book, which is concerned above all with the nature of commitment and heroism in South Africa. But it is not about romantic hero-worship; it is about the problems, the humanity, the ruthlessness and the cost of political involvement, all against a background of love, squalor or boredom.
It is Miss Gordimer's most political and most moving novel, going to the heart of the racial conflict in South Africa. But it does not deal publicly with riots, tortures or crusades: Its politics come out of its characters, as part of the wholeness of lives that cannot evade them.
The hero of the book, whom we never meet, is Lionel Burger, a respected Afrikaner doctor who joined the Communist Party, worked for the revolution, was jailed and died in prison; and the story is that of his daughter Rosa, brought up under her father's spell, waiting outside prisons and living among dedicated Communists, yet trying to escape, alone, after her father's death, from a commitment that was all-enveloping.
For Burger was the kind of South African Communist who was drawn to the party by his humanity and determination to share the cause of the blacks; and in his house blacks and whites came together with a sense of common hope and faith in the future, defying the apartheid surrounding them. With his Afrikaner ancestry and his political understanding, Burger was a man who, as a compatriot describes him, ''could have been a prime minister if he hadn't been a traitor.'' (His story bears some resemblance to the actual story of Bram Fischer, the distinguished Afrikaner lawyer who likewise became a Communist revolutionary and died in jail.)
What is it like to grow up in the shadow of someone so dedicated and so charismatic and then to seek to become a separate, fulfilled individual? Rosa's answer, as it unfolds, tells us not only about South Africa but about the whole nature of commitment. It was Burger's gift to be able to break through ''the closed circuit of self,'' to give purpose to other people's lives; in his house the real definition of loneliness was to live without social responsibility.
The opening chapters describe vividly the splendors and miseries of that commitment; the passionate concern with the future, the moral certainties, the sense of identification with blackness as a way of perceiving sensual redemption, revealed in the magnetic attraction of the beautiful Marisa Kgosana. But on the other hand, there is the bossy narrowness of other white Communists, the jargon of dogma, the lack of escape and the sheer brutalizing effect of the race conflict. When Rosa sees an old black man senselessly flogging a donkey in Soweto, yet cannot intervene, she realizes suddenly ''I must know somewhere else.'' She makes her bid to escape, flying off to the South of France to stay with her father's first wife, in a world of gigolos, lesbians and sun-seekers.
It is a spectacular transition, showing the brittle sophistication and lushness of this cosmopolitan life through the eyes of a South African girl, ''dissolving in the wine and pleasure of scents, sights and sounds existing only in themselves, associated with nothing and nobody. . . .'' The style itself becomes sensuous and multicolored, against the stark background of the Johannesburg past, as Rosa loses herself in the laziness and the waveless peacock-shaded sea.
She falls in love with a French teacher, stays in London and Paris, and finds a new dimension in her love affair that seems to put politics in a neat theoretical pigeonhole. The tolerance, the detachment and cultivation of Europe surround her: To the lesbians in the South of France, the police are no closer than the crime thrillers on television.
Yet the responsibility, the need for identity, remains. The denouement of the novel is too subtle and important to be summarized, for it is about much more than the need for a political cause; it is a whole view of individualism. In her father's house the people had discovered their own kind of individualism, with the liberation that comes from belonging. Her black childhood friend, in spite of her guilt and his bitterness, was still a blood-brother. The political attitudes came from the inside outward: ''It was a human conspiracy, above all other kinds.'' Rosa sees clearly enough the limitations of that conspiracy--the exploitation, the psychological blackmail and the ultimate cost to herself. But she is still Burger's daughter.
It is the combination of political authenticity with sensuous awareness that makes this novel so powerful. Its account of black movements, against the historical background of real people, is harshly realistic; the intense argument in a house in Soweto has the sharp detail of a documentary.
No one has better described the vigor and humor, as well as the misery, of Soweto. Yet the political moments are always illuminated by the intense observation of people and places--tiny details precisely and lovingly described--that brings every incident to life and that give Miss Gordimer's writing such universality. People, landscapes and politics are blended together in this evocative style, and through the eyes of the young, bewildered daughter the wide arc of South African politics comes into sudden focus. It is an integration reminiscent of the great Russian prerevolutionary novels.
It remains extraordinary that such a novel should come out of a country so uncompromising and so increasingly brutalized, where the image of the flogged donkey has such fearful relevance; and it might seem equally surprising that an author of such sensitivity could live there. But this, too, was a Russian phenomenon. The very bleakness of the political predicament and the closeness to suffering seem able not only to provide insights into the political crisis, but to give a heightened awareness of the richness and values of lie.
In one passage the author describes how Rosa and her father's first wife find themselves subtly transformed for each other by their relationship with Lionel Burger, ''like a change of light transforming the aspect of a landscape.'' Coming out of the harshness of South Africa, this dazzling book also brings a new light to the landscape, not only of Johannesburg and its black townships, but of the European cities that have forgotten about darkness.
Opening Line: “Among the group of people waiting at the fortress was a school girl in a brown and yellow uniform holding a green eiderdown quilt, and by the loop at it’s neck, a red hot water bottle.
Closing Line: “But the line had been deleted by the prison sensor, Madame Bagnelli was never able to make it out.”
Quotes: The will is my own. The emotion's my own. The right to be inconsolable. When I feel, there's no 'we', only 'I'.
Rating: Okay.
533. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
History: Published in 1996, the novel includes 388 numbered endnotes (some of which have footnotes of their own) that explain or expound on points in the story. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Wallace characterized their use as a method of disrupting the linearity of the text while maintaining some sense of narrative cohesion.
The novel's title is from Hamlet, Act V, Scene 1. Hamlet holds the skull of the court jester, Yorick, and says, "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!"
Wallace's working title for Infinite Jest was A Failed Entertainment.
Plot: In the novel's future world, the United States, Canada, and Mexico together compose a unified North American superstate known as the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.). Corporations are allowed the opportunity to bid for and purchase naming rights for each calendar year, replacing traditional numerical designations with ostensibly honorary monikers bearing corporation names. Although the narrative is fragmented among several years, most of the story takes place during "The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment" (Y.D.A.U.) Directly related to the formation of the O.N.A.N is the fact that much of what used to be the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada became a hazardous waste dump due to federal negligence, an area known as the "Great Concavity" among Americans, and the "Great Convexity" among Canadians.
The novel's primary locations are Enfield Tennis Academy ("ETA") and Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, which are separated by a hillside in suburban Boston, Massachusetts, and a mountainside outside of Tucson, Arizona. Many characters are students or faculty at the school or patients or staff at the halfway house; a conversation between a quadruple agent and his government contact occurs at the Arizona location.
The plot partially revolves around the missing master copy of a film cartridge, titled Infinite Jest and referred to in the novel as "the Entertainment" or "the samizdat". The film is so entertaining to its viewers that they become lifeless, losing all interest in anything other than viewing the film. The video cartridge was the final work of film by James O. Incandenza before his microwave suicide, completed during a stint of sobriety that was requested by the lead actress, Joelle. Quebec separatists are interested in acquiring a master, redistributable copy of the work to aid in acts of terrorism against the United States. The United States Office of Unspecified Services (USOUS) is seeking to intercept the master copy of the film to prevent mass dissemination and the destabilization of the Organization of North American Nations. Joelle and later Hal seek treatment for substance abuse problems at The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, and Marathe visits the rehabilitation center to pursue a lead on the master copy of the Entertainment, tying the characters and plots together.
Review: Reading David Foster Wallace's latest novel, ''Infinite Jest,'' I couldn't help thinking at times about 7-year-old Seymour Glass's book-length ''letter'' home from camp, published in The New Yorker in 1965 as ''Hapworth 16, 1924.'' I felt a similar feeling of admiration alloyed with impatience veering toward strained credulity. (Do you suppose Seymour's parents actually read the whole thing?) I had previously been a great admirer of Mr. Wallace's collection of stories, ''Girl With Curious Hair,'' and, to a lesser extent, of the loose, baggy monster that was his debut novel, ''The Broom of the System,'' which I confess to not finishing. If Mr. Wallace were less talented, you would be inclined to shoot him -- or possibly yourself -- somewhere right around page 480 of ''Infinite Jest.'' In fact, you might anyway.
Alternately tedious and effulgent, ''Infinite Jest'' is set in the near future, specifically in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, which would seem to be about 18 years from now. The United States has become part of the Organization of North American Nations (ONAN), federated with Canada and Mexico; most of northern New England has been transformed into a huge toxic waste dump and palmed off on the Canadians. Qubcois separatists, many of them in wheelchairs (les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents), prowl the lower, nontoxic states, performing terrorist acts, understandably more bilious than ever now that giant fans along the border blow Northeastern American waste products in their direction. President Limbaugh has been fairly recently assassinated, and the calendar has been sold to the highest corporate bidder, giving us the Year of the Whopper, the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad and so on.
All of this might -- and sometimes does -- feel cartoonish in the extreme. But this skeleton of satire is fleshed out with several domestically scaled narratives and masses of hyperrealistic quotidian detail. The overall effect is something like a sleek Vonnegut chassis wrapped in layers of post-millennial Zola. Mr. Wallace's earlier fiction revealed him as a student of literary post-modernists like John Barth and Robert Coover, flirting with metafictional tropes and self-referential narratives. Here, despite the ''Gravity's Rainbow''-plus length and haute science flourishes, Mr. Wallace plays it straight -- that is, almost realistically -- and seems to want to convince us of the authenticity of his vision by sheer weight of accumulated detail. The weight almost crushes the narrative at times -- as when, for example, we are treated to 10 dense pages about the disassembly of a bed, complete with diagrams.
The two overlapping microcosms of this nonlinear narrative are the Enfield Tennis Academy, a Boston-area institution founded by the mad genius James O. Incandenza, whose clan of athletic and academic prodigies still resides there, and Ennet House, a residence for recovering drug addicts and alcoholics just down the hill. James O., a former tennis prodigy, physicist specializing in optics and avant-garde film maker, has by the time the story opens killed himself by sticking his head in a microwave oven. Surviving him are his sons: Orin, a pro football kicker; Hal, a 17-year-old student at the academy who is as gifted mentally as he is physically; and Mario, who is severely deformed and mildly retarded.
The details of day-to-day life at the academy are rendered in something very close to real time, as are several matches between the junior athletes; Mr. Wallace knows his serve and volley from his baseline game: readers may feel qualified toward the end to march down to the court and challenge the club pro to a match.
Opening Line: “I am seated in an office surrounded by heads and bodies.”
Closing Line: “And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of the low sky, and the tide was way out.”
Quotes: “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
The novel's title is from Hamlet, Act V, Scene 1. Hamlet holds the skull of the court jester, Yorick, and says, "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!"
Wallace's working title for Infinite Jest was A Failed Entertainment.
Plot: In the novel's future world, the United States, Canada, and Mexico together compose a unified North American superstate known as the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.). Corporations are allowed the opportunity to bid for and purchase naming rights for each calendar year, replacing traditional numerical designations with ostensibly honorary monikers bearing corporation names. Although the narrative is fragmented among several years, most of the story takes place during "The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment" (Y.D.A.U.) Directly related to the formation of the O.N.A.N is the fact that much of what used to be the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada became a hazardous waste dump due to federal negligence, an area known as the "Great Concavity" among Americans, and the "Great Convexity" among Canadians.
The novel's primary locations are Enfield Tennis Academy ("ETA") and Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, which are separated by a hillside in suburban Boston, Massachusetts, and a mountainside outside of Tucson, Arizona. Many characters are students or faculty at the school or patients or staff at the halfway house; a conversation between a quadruple agent and his government contact occurs at the Arizona location.
The plot partially revolves around the missing master copy of a film cartridge, titled Infinite Jest and referred to in the novel as "the Entertainment" or "the samizdat". The film is so entertaining to its viewers that they become lifeless, losing all interest in anything other than viewing the film. The video cartridge was the final work of film by James O. Incandenza before his microwave suicide, completed during a stint of sobriety that was requested by the lead actress, Joelle. Quebec separatists are interested in acquiring a master, redistributable copy of the work to aid in acts of terrorism against the United States. The United States Office of Unspecified Services (USOUS) is seeking to intercept the master copy of the film to prevent mass dissemination and the destabilization of the Organization of North American Nations. Joelle and later Hal seek treatment for substance abuse problems at The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, and Marathe visits the rehabilitation center to pursue a lead on the master copy of the Entertainment, tying the characters and plots together.
Review: Reading David Foster Wallace's latest novel, ''Infinite Jest,'' I couldn't help thinking at times about 7-year-old Seymour Glass's book-length ''letter'' home from camp, published in The New Yorker in 1965 as ''Hapworth 16, 1924.'' I felt a similar feeling of admiration alloyed with impatience veering toward strained credulity. (Do you suppose Seymour's parents actually read the whole thing?) I had previously been a great admirer of Mr. Wallace's collection of stories, ''Girl With Curious Hair,'' and, to a lesser extent, of the loose, baggy monster that was his debut novel, ''The Broom of the System,'' which I confess to not finishing. If Mr. Wallace were less talented, you would be inclined to shoot him -- or possibly yourself -- somewhere right around page 480 of ''Infinite Jest.'' In fact, you might anyway.
Alternately tedious and effulgent, ''Infinite Jest'' is set in the near future, specifically in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, which would seem to be about 18 years from now. The United States has become part of the Organization of North American Nations (ONAN), federated with Canada and Mexico; most of northern New England has been transformed into a huge toxic waste dump and palmed off on the Canadians. Qubcois separatists, many of them in wheelchairs (les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents), prowl the lower, nontoxic states, performing terrorist acts, understandably more bilious than ever now that giant fans along the border blow Northeastern American waste products in their direction. President Limbaugh has been fairly recently assassinated, and the calendar has been sold to the highest corporate bidder, giving us the Year of the Whopper, the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad and so on.
All of this might -- and sometimes does -- feel cartoonish in the extreme. But this skeleton of satire is fleshed out with several domestically scaled narratives and masses of hyperrealistic quotidian detail. The overall effect is something like a sleek Vonnegut chassis wrapped in layers of post-millennial Zola. Mr. Wallace's earlier fiction revealed him as a student of literary post-modernists like John Barth and Robert Coover, flirting with metafictional tropes and self-referential narratives. Here, despite the ''Gravity's Rainbow''-plus length and haute science flourishes, Mr. Wallace plays it straight -- that is, almost realistically -- and seems to want to convince us of the authenticity of his vision by sheer weight of accumulated detail. The weight almost crushes the narrative at times -- as when, for example, we are treated to 10 dense pages about the disassembly of a bed, complete with diagrams.
The two overlapping microcosms of this nonlinear narrative are the Enfield Tennis Academy, a Boston-area institution founded by the mad genius James O. Incandenza, whose clan of athletic and academic prodigies still resides there, and Ennet House, a residence for recovering drug addicts and alcoholics just down the hill. James O., a former tennis prodigy, physicist specializing in optics and avant-garde film maker, has by the time the story opens killed himself by sticking his head in a microwave oven. Surviving him are his sons: Orin, a pro football kicker; Hal, a 17-year-old student at the academy who is as gifted mentally as he is physically; and Mario, who is severely deformed and mildly retarded.
The details of day-to-day life at the academy are rendered in something very close to real time, as are several matches between the junior athletes; Mr. Wallace knows his serve and volley from his baseline game: readers may feel qualified toward the end to march down to the court and challenge the club pro to a match.
Opening Line: “I am seated in an office surrounded by heads and bodies.”
Closing Line: “And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of the low sky, and the tide was way out.”
Quotes: “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
Rating: Amazing
532. The Girl with Green Eyes – Edna O'Brien
History: This book was published in 1962 with the title of “The Lonely Girl” It is the second in the “Country Girls” trilogy .
Plot: The Lonely Girl continues the story of childhood friends Kate and Baba, now both twenty-one, as they navigate the rocky, sometimes treacherous pathways of urban life. With hearts as big as Dublin, and hopes as bright as new pennies, they move bravely and eagerly toward the future. Yet the two couldn't be more different. Kate toils in a grocery shop and lives out her romantic fantasies in books. Baba entertains more earthbound dreams. Kate becomes involved with a much older and married man, a writer named Eugene Gaillard, who eyes her and ignores her more worldly roommate.
The relationship is much opposed by her father and the village she had run away from. Her father comes to get her and imposes her to the house to get her away from Eugene. But Kate is determined to go back to Dublin, and she eventually escapes from her father and the rural village.
Eugene and Kate consummate their relationship and Kate moves in with him in the country. Unfamiliar with him, his friends, and his life with his wife, trouble is inevitable. They argue and make up numerous times. Until Eugene pushes her away finally, she moves out and goes back to Baba. He eventually goes back to his wife, and Kate is heartbroken.
Review: Published in one volume, the three books known as “The Country Girls Trilogy” – were what put Edna O’Brien on the map. Her first novel was “The Country Girls”, published in 1960. True to Irish tradition, her book was banned. Not just that book – but all the subsequent Country Girls books, as well as many of her other books. O’Brien just wasn’t “playing nice” with Irish sensibilities, and wrote openly about sex and the life of Dublin girls, and marriage, and religion – and so stepped right into hot water. As a young girl, Edna O’Brien read James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, and it changed her life. She didn’t know what she wanted to do – but it had to be something to do with literature. She recently wrote a biography of Joyce (one of my favorite quotes from it: “He would carry his work ‘like a chalice’ and all his life he would insist that what he did ‘was a kind of sacrament.’ Father, Son and Holy Ghost along with Jakes McCarthy informed every graven word. On a more secular note he liked blackberry jam because Christ’s crown of thorns came from that wood and he wore purple cravats during Lent.”), and I believe at one point she also wrote a book about the marriage of James and Nora Joyce. Her artistic mentor, the star she followed. There’s a funny line in The Country Girls – Kate and Baba, the two best friends, hang out in Dublin in pubs (and this is 1950s Dublin) – and at one point Baba pulls Kate aside and says, “Stop asking the boys if they’re read James Joyce’sDubliners.” Like – that is NOT a good courtship technique!
Opening Line: “It was a wet afternoon in October, as I copied out the September accounts from the big grey ledger.”
Closing Line: “What Baba doesn’t know is that I’m finding my feet, and when I’m able to talk I imagine that I won’t be so alone, or so very far away from the world he tried to draw me into, too soon.”
Quotes: “We all leave one another. We die, we change - it's mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it's inescapable...”
Rating: Good.
Plot: The Lonely Girl continues the story of childhood friends Kate and Baba, now both twenty-one, as they navigate the rocky, sometimes treacherous pathways of urban life. With hearts as big as Dublin, and hopes as bright as new pennies, they move bravely and eagerly toward the future. Yet the two couldn't be more different. Kate toils in a grocery shop and lives out her romantic fantasies in books. Baba entertains more earthbound dreams. Kate becomes involved with a much older and married man, a writer named Eugene Gaillard, who eyes her and ignores her more worldly roommate.
The relationship is much opposed by her father and the village she had run away from. Her father comes to get her and imposes her to the house to get her away from Eugene. But Kate is determined to go back to Dublin, and she eventually escapes from her father and the rural village.
Eugene and Kate consummate their relationship and Kate moves in with him in the country. Unfamiliar with him, his friends, and his life with his wife, trouble is inevitable. They argue and make up numerous times. Until Eugene pushes her away finally, she moves out and goes back to Baba. He eventually goes back to his wife, and Kate is heartbroken.
Review: Published in one volume, the three books known as “The Country Girls Trilogy” – were what put Edna O’Brien on the map. Her first novel was “The Country Girls”, published in 1960. True to Irish tradition, her book was banned. Not just that book – but all the subsequent Country Girls books, as well as many of her other books. O’Brien just wasn’t “playing nice” with Irish sensibilities, and wrote openly about sex and the life of Dublin girls, and marriage, and religion – and so stepped right into hot water. As a young girl, Edna O’Brien read James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, and it changed her life. She didn’t know what she wanted to do – but it had to be something to do with literature. She recently wrote a biography of Joyce (one of my favorite quotes from it: “He would carry his work ‘like a chalice’ and all his life he would insist that what he did ‘was a kind of sacrament.’ Father, Son and Holy Ghost along with Jakes McCarthy informed every graven word. On a more secular note he liked blackberry jam because Christ’s crown of thorns came from that wood and he wore purple cravats during Lent.”), and I believe at one point she also wrote a book about the marriage of James and Nora Joyce. Her artistic mentor, the star she followed. There’s a funny line in The Country Girls – Kate and Baba, the two best friends, hang out in Dublin in pubs (and this is 1950s Dublin) – and at one point Baba pulls Kate aside and says, “Stop asking the boys if they’re read James Joyce’sDubliners.” Like – that is NOT a good courtship technique!Opening Line: “It was a wet afternoon in October, as I copied out the September accounts from the big grey ledger.”
Closing Line: “What Baba doesn’t know is that I’m finding my feet, and when I’m able to talk I imagine that I won’t be so alone, or so very far away from the world he tried to draw me into, too soon.”
Quotes: “We all leave one another. We die, we change - it's mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it's inescapable...”
Rating: Good.
Thursday, February 28, 2013
531. The Leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
History: Published posthumously in 1958 by Feltrinelli, after two rejections by the leading Italian publishing houses Mondadori and Einaudi, it became the top-selling novel in Italian history and is considered one of the most important novels in modern Italian literature. Tomasi was the last in a line of minor princes in Sicily, and he had long contemplated writing a historical novel based on his great-grandfather, Don Giulio Fabrizio Tomasi, another Prince of Lampedusa. After the Lampedusa palace was bombed and pillaged by Allied forces in World War II, Tomasi sank into a lengthy depression, and began to write Il Gattopardo as a way to combat it.
Plot: The Leopard is the story of Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, at the time of the main action a man in his forties, with several children. He is a sort of benevolent tyrant in his household, a man of a very old family, accustomed to knowing his place and to having those about him know their places. The Prince is also a man of great sensual appetites, careless with his money (though not wasteful or dissolute), politically knowledgeable but completely apolitical in action, and also an amateur astronomer of some note.
When the story opens, the Risorgimento is ongoing, but it is clear that it will be ultimately successful, and that the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies will be absorbed into the newly unified, somewhat more democratic, Italy. Don Fabrizio, out of loyalty, is nominally supportive of the old regime, but he realistically stays out of the conflict. His favorite nephew, Tancredi, the penniless but charismatic son of his sister, is an ardent supporter of Garibaldi (leader of the revolution).
Several long chapters, separated by months, follow the progress of the Risorgimento at a distance, and more closely follow events which impinge directly on Don Fabrizio's life, yet which reflect the coming societal changes. These include the plebiscite to confirm popular support for the unification of Italy, his nephew Tancredi's love affair and eventual marriage to the daughter of a wealthy but decidedly lower class neighbor, his daughter's reaction to the attentions of a friend of Tancredi's, and Father Pirrone's visit to his home village. Finally, the action jumps forward some decades to the Prince's death, in a very moving and beautiful chapter, then still further forward to the household of his unmarried daughters in their old age.
Review: The Leopard was published 50 years ago, following a war that had devastated Europe. The aristocrat di Lampedusa wrote it as an elegy to past times amid the ruins of the capital city Palermo, smashed by Allied bombing raids. It tells the story of the noble Salina family in the late 19th century, as the shoots of democracy sprout in the parched feudal island. It richly evokes the sights, sounds and smells of Sicilian high life, the parties, the rabbit hunting, the vendettas, the courting, the politics.
The 'Leopard' of the title is Don Fabrizio, patriarch of the family, a measured, middle-aged Hamlet. He ponders the fleeting nature of life, the nobility's loss of power to Garibaldi's revolution, and muses melancholically on the way the nobility have squandered that power.
But the book is not only about political change, far from it, but tells many human stories, not least the marriage of his nephew Tancredi who makes what at first seems to be an unsuitable match which causes considerable upset among his relatives. We read of the family’s chaplain, and the impact of change on his own life, and also of the effects on the peasants and townsfolk too, as their fortunes go up and down.
Perhaps the main character after Fabrizio is Sicily itself. Lampedusa describes the arid summers and the almost desert-like landscapes of this baking country. The city of Palermo features in all its squalor, and also the smaller towns on which most of the narrative occurs.
Opening Line: “Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.”
Closing Line: “Then all found peace in a little heap of livid dust.”
Quotes: 'They had passed through crazed-looking villages washed in palest blue; crossed dry beds of torrents over fantastic bridges; skirted sheer precipices which no sage or broom could temper. Never a tree, never a drop of water; just sun and dust.'
Rating: Not that good, sorry.
Plot: The Leopard is the story of Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, at the time of the main action a man in his forties, with several children. He is a sort of benevolent tyrant in his household, a man of a very old family, accustomed to knowing his place and to having those about him know their places. The Prince is also a man of great sensual appetites, careless with his money (though not wasteful or dissolute), politically knowledgeable but completely apolitical in action, and also an amateur astronomer of some note.
When the story opens, the Risorgimento is ongoing, but it is clear that it will be ultimately successful, and that the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies will be absorbed into the newly unified, somewhat more democratic, Italy. Don Fabrizio, out of loyalty, is nominally supportive of the old regime, but he realistically stays out of the conflict. His favorite nephew, Tancredi, the penniless but charismatic son of his sister, is an ardent supporter of Garibaldi (leader of the revolution).
Several long chapters, separated by months, follow the progress of the Risorgimento at a distance, and more closely follow events which impinge directly on Don Fabrizio's life, yet which reflect the coming societal changes. These include the plebiscite to confirm popular support for the unification of Italy, his nephew Tancredi's love affair and eventual marriage to the daughter of a wealthy but decidedly lower class neighbor, his daughter's reaction to the attentions of a friend of Tancredi's, and Father Pirrone's visit to his home village. Finally, the action jumps forward some decades to the Prince's death, in a very moving and beautiful chapter, then still further forward to the household of his unmarried daughters in their old age.
Review: The Leopard was published 50 years ago, following a war that had devastated Europe. The aristocrat di Lampedusa wrote it as an elegy to past times amid the ruins of the capital city Palermo, smashed by Allied bombing raids. It tells the story of the noble Salina family in the late 19th century, as the shoots of democracy sprout in the parched feudal island. It richly evokes the sights, sounds and smells of Sicilian high life, the parties, the rabbit hunting, the vendettas, the courting, the politics.
The 'Leopard' of the title is Don Fabrizio, patriarch of the family, a measured, middle-aged Hamlet. He ponders the fleeting nature of life, the nobility's loss of power to Garibaldi's revolution, and muses melancholically on the way the nobility have squandered that power.
But the book is not only about political change, far from it, but tells many human stories, not least the marriage of his nephew Tancredi who makes what at first seems to be an unsuitable match which causes considerable upset among his relatives. We read of the family’s chaplain, and the impact of change on his own life, and also of the effects on the peasants and townsfolk too, as their fortunes go up and down.
Perhaps the main character after Fabrizio is Sicily itself. Lampedusa describes the arid summers and the almost desert-like landscapes of this baking country. The city of Palermo features in all its squalor, and also the smaller towns on which most of the narrative occurs.
Opening Line: “Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.”
Closing Line: “Then all found peace in a little heap of livid dust.”
Quotes: 'They had passed through crazed-looking villages washed in palest blue; crossed dry beds of torrents over fantastic bridges; skirted sheer precipices which no sage or broom could temper. Never a tree, never a drop of water; just sun and dust.'
Rating: Not that good, sorry.
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