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Saturday, March 13, 2010
Bad Books
My favourite line from this American Book Review piece: Michael Berubé on Lawrence’s Women In Love. ‘It’s like someone put a gun to Nietzsche’s head and made him write a Harlequin romance.’
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Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Martin Amis’s Pregnant Widow
This novel is not as bad as I expected it to be. It’s bad, certainly; but not that bad. I’d say ‘it’s not as bad as Yellow Dog‘, but that would be redundant. Nothing could be as bad as Yellow Dog. Having Amis personally come to my house to administer a lava enema would hardly be as bad as that novel.
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Monday, March 01, 2010
Wellsian Swearword Question
I’m still thinking about 2666; when my thoughts have mulched down a little more I’ll post an overview. But in the interim I’m puzzling over this: the opening paragraph of H G Wells’s Food of the Gods (1904).
In the middle years of the nineteenth century there first became abundant in this strange world of ours a class of men, men tending for the most part to become elderly, who are called, and who are very properly called, but who dislike extremely to be called--"Scientists." They dislike that word so much that from the columns of Nature, which was from the first their distinctive and characteristic paper, it is as carefully excluded as if it were--that other word which is the basis of all really bad language in this country.
I give up. What is that other word which is the basis of all really bad language in this country? Does it rhyme with ‘scientist’? Does is start with the letter? I’m sure I’m being stupidly dense here, but ... does anybody know?
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Saturday, February 20, 2010
2666 Part 5: Archimboldi
[Previously: one, two, three and four]. It ends with the fifth section: ‘the Part About Archimboldi’. And, apart from being (obviously) about Archimboldi, the reclusive German novelist who so obsessed the Critics in part one—this section not only ends the novel but is about endings, I think, although in a rather veiled way. The structure is a more-or-less straightforwardly linear narrative of Archimboldi’s life. His birth-name is Hans Reiter. The son of a one-legged First World War veteran and a one-eyed woman, he grows up near the Prussian North Sea coast. As a boy he is fascinated with the bottom of the sea; he dives repeatedly (on two occasions he comes close to drowning), reads about seaweed, daydreams about the submarine world. He grows very tall, and remains an odd, singular, friendless child. Come WWII, he is mobilized into the regular German army and fights mostly on the Eastern Front—he is even awarded the Iron Cross for bravery, although his bravery is actually a kind of passive recklessness predicated upon a state of mind that would welcome death. Although he is badly wounded, he does not die. Recuperating, he discovers the manuscript memoir of a Jewish Soviet writer called Boris Ansky—this enables Bolaño to interrupt his tale with a lengthy digression on Ansky’s revolutionary fervor and disillusionment in Moscow 1920s/30s, and in particular his friendship with Evraim Ivanov, a science fiction writer. I was very interested to read a novel about an imaginary Soviet science fiction writer. In my opinion, there should be many more novels about imaginary Soviet science fiction writer than there are. Anyhow, Ivanov falls foul of the purge, and is executed; and it’s unclear what happens to Ansky, although presumably he is killed in the war. Recovered from his wounds, Reiter is sent back to the front, and the book hurries through the rest of the war.
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Tuesday, February 16, 2010
2666 Part 4: Crimes
[Previously: part 1; part 2; part 3] And so we come to it, the notorious fourth section: ‘The Part About the Crimes’. It is, as people warned, a thoroughly grueling read: 300 pages mostly filled with detailed quasi-forensic descriptions of the bodies of many many raped and murdered women.
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Saturday, February 13, 2010
2666 Part 3: Fate
[Part 1 here; Part 2 here]. Part 3, ‘The Part About Fate’, is not, despite its title, about destiny in the abstract, but rather about its main character. His name is Quincy Williams, but ‘everybody at work called him Oscar Fate’, and that’s what Bolaño calls him too. Fate is a journalist working for a niche New York magazine. At the beginning of this book his mother dies, and we learn about Fate’s vaguely L’Étrangerish reaction to his bereavement. He deals with his mother’s effects, and then flies out Detroit, where he interviews an ex-Black Panther called Barry Seaman, for a magazine article—Seaman is now an elderly and rather eccentric preacher, and Bolaño includes one of his (lengthy) sermons, unabridged. In Detroit, a sickening Fate (he vomits several times, perhaps because he has a stomach bug, perhaps in psychosomatic reaction to his mother’s death) is called by his New York editor. The magazine’s sports reporter died recently, and has not been replaced. Despite not having any experience reporting sport, Fate is to go down and report on a big boxing match in Santa Teresa, Mexico. Fate flies to Tucson and drives over the border. The rest of the book is taken up with a lengthy, and perhaps over-detailed account of Fate’s doings in Santa Teresa, the build-up to the fight (between a Mexican fighter called Merolino and a Yankee called Count Pickett). Said build up soon begins to feel interminable, and the actual fight is rendered in a deliberately anti-climactic manner. Indeed, I’d say that up to the point the whole section is pretty hit-and-miss: duller than either of the two earlier sections, and exhibiting several nontrivial problems in the representation of its central character.
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Friday, February 12, 2010
2666 Part 2: Amalfitano
[Part 1 here] ‘The Part About Amalfitano’ is a little over a third the length of ‘The Part About the Critics’, and it picks up one of the characters from the first section: the academic philosopher at the Mexican University of Santa Teresa, Amalfitano. It is one undivided piece of prose, although it falls in the telling into two roughly equal parts. In the first we learn that Amalfitano, whom the critics were sure was gay, ‘had a daughter who always lived with him. Hard to believe but true’ [163]; we learn all about the mother of this child, a crazy Spanish girl called Lola, in Barcelona. Amalfitano’s passive, suffering love for Lola is only a small part of this; much more space is given to the story of Lola’s passion for an insane poet, whom (she claims) had sex with her once at a party in Barcelona. The poet is now confined to an asylum in Mondragón, near San Sebastián (in Spain), and Lola abandons Amalfitano and their small daughter to hitch-hike there. She hangs around for a while, eventually meets the poet, sleeps in a cemetery, has sex with pretty much any man who approaches her, makes her way up to France, occasionally sending Amalfitano letters detailing her adventures. In Paris she gets work as an office cleaner, and has another child, a son this time. When she returns to Barcelona she has AIDS. She sees her husband and daughter, and then hitch-hikes away again.
This vision of Lola lingered in his mind for many years, like a memory rising from glacial seas, although in fact he hadn’t seen anything, which meant there was nothing to remember, only the shadow of his ex-wife projected on the neighbouring buildings in the beam of the streetlights, and then the dream of Lola walking off down one of the highways out of Sant Cugat, walking along the side of the road, an almost deserted road since most cars took the new toll highway to save time, a woman bowed by the weight of her suitcase, fearless, walking fearlessly along the side of the road. [185]
Then the action shifts to Mexico, where Amalfitano has taken a university position. He lives in a house with Rosa, his (now) grown-up daughter. His life seems settled enough externally, but actually Amalfitano is a mass of anxieties. Some of these are more-or-less rational—a serial killer is murdering Santa Teresa’s young women by the hundreds, and he (and we, the readers) are concerned about the safety of his daughter. But some are harder to understand. When the critics visited Amalfitano’s house in Part 1 they noticed a weatherworn book hanging pegged to a line in the back garden, about which Amalfitano behaved strangely. In this part we discover this reason it is there—a geometry textbook hung, originally, in imitation of a Duchamp readymade, but which assumes enormous though inchoate symbolic significance for Amalfitano.
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Wednesday, February 10, 2010
2666 Part 1: Critics
The first part of Bolaño’s leviathanic 2666 is named, after the logic of a Friends episode, ‘The Part About The Critics’. It’s a novel-sized chunk of text in its own right—something like 70,000 words—and it is indeed about critics, four in number: Jean-Claude Pelletier, from France; Piero Morini, from Italy; Manuel Espinoza, from Spain; and Liz Norton from England. All four are Germanists, and all four specialize in an obscure German-language novelist called Benno von Archimboldi. This is how the book starts:
The first time Jean-Claude Pelletier read Bruno von Archimboldi was Christmas 1980, in Paris, when he was nineteen years old and studying German literature. The book in question was D’Arsonval. The young Pelletier didn’t realize at the time that the novel was part of a trilogy (made up of the English-themed The Garden and the Polish-themed The Leather Mask, together with the clearly French-themed D’Arsonval), but this ignorance or lapse of bibliographical lacuna, attributable only to his extreme youth, did nothing to diminish the wonder and admiration that the novel stirred in him.[3]
Each of the four has a similar reaction to Archimboldi, and as they age, each becoming prominent academics, they fall in with one another. Bolaño works hard to add detail and depth to characters who (like Archimboldi’s novels) perhaps run the risk of collapsing back into merely notional national-European figurative types: as if the story is a Continental version of the venerable old joke that begins ‘an Englishman, and Irishman and a Scotsman…’
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Sunday, February 07, 2010
Tonight we’re gonna blog it like it’s 2666
Not tonight, actually: but sometime this week. I got Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 for Christmas, and now I’m finally getting around to reading it. As I’m sure you know, Bolaño wanted this huge novel published as five separate books—here’s the ‘Note From The Author’s Heirs’ with which the book opens:
Realizing that death might be near, Roberto left instructions for his novel 2666 to be published divided into five books corresponding to the five parts of the novel, specifying the order in which they should appear, at what intervals (one a year), and even the price to be negotiated with the publisher. With this decision, communicated days before his death by Roberto himself to Jorge Herralde, Roberto thought he was providing for his children’s future.
The note goes on to explain how blithely his executors disregarded this decision, hence the microwave-oven-proportioned book sitting on the desk in front of me. My plan is to blog my reading, book by book, as I go through it. I’ll start with book 1, ‘The Part About the Critics’, later this week. Wednesday, maybe. If you wanted to read along with me, comment and so on, that would be very nice. But I’ll understand if not. I don’t mind blogging in a vacuum. For are we not all, in an existential sense, ultimately blogging in a vacuum?
I have never previously read a Bolaño novel; but if this one’s half as good as the hype suggests, I daresay I’ll go back over his backlist. The Savage Detectives is supposed to be pretty good.
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Sunday, January 24, 2010
Behold The Man II
I’m thinking of writing a variant of this famous novel, with the following premise: a time traveller (an American) returns to the Holy Land c.AD33 with the following macabre mission: to shoot Jesus with a high-power, 21st-century rifle, after he has been crucified and resurrected but before he ascends to heaven. The early stages of the novel would make narrative play with the questions of who and why, teasing the reader with possible motivations—is he a radical atheist? An agent of Satan? Of a rival religion? Perhaps his intention is to prove that post-resurrection Jesus is unkillable (that, let us say, he has not simply spent three days in his tomb recovering from serious but not fatal wounds inflicted upon the cross). The later stages would pay off these questions, and reveal what happens when the ressurected Christ is shot at.
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Saturday, January 09, 2010
Wyndham’s Chrysalid Puritans
I’m writing an introduction for John Wyndham’s excellent 1955 novel The Chrysalids, and as part of that I’ve been thinking about the representation of Puritans in mid-20th-century literature. Because, although they’re not identified as such, Wyndham’s fundmentalist-religious rural Waknuk dwellers, persecuting all genetic mutants in God’s name (’KEEP PURE THE STOCK OF THE LORD. THE DEVIL IS THE FATHER OF DEVIATION. WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT!’) are evidently a kind of Salem-Witch-Trial variety Puritan. Now it’s clear enough that one of the things Wyndham is doing here is channelling Miller’s Crucible (1953), translating that world, and its claustrophobic edge-of-hysteria paranoia, into a post-apocalypse future. But this is what I don’t know: what studies have there been of representation of analogue-Puritans in contemporary culture? I don’t mean actual studies of Puritan culture, or analyses of the Witch Trials themselves; JSTOR is chock-full of them. And I don’t mean dramatic or novelistic accounts of that culture, or those trials—although there’s lots of those too. Though Miller’s text is the one that casts the longest shadow, influence-wise, a very little searching uncovers lots of earlier or contemporary versions of the same thing: Shirley Barker’s novel Peace, My Daughters (1949), A Mirror for Witches (1933) by Esther Forbes, or Lyon Phelps’s play The Gospel Witch (1955). No, I’m talking about texts that deal, as Wyndham’s does, in imaginary religious communities clearly based upon Puritan culture without actually being Puritan; some Crucible or Scarlet Letter retread. The community in M. Night Shyamalan’s 2004 film The Village would be another example of what I’m talking about.
I would assume that, in addition to the myriad studies of actual Puritan life and culture with which the library catalogues are so well supplied, there must be critical studies of the broader representation of ‘Puritanism’ in culture. What are they? Does anybody know?
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Friday, January 01, 2010
Difficulty
Over on my review blog, and by way of reviewing to a bound proof of a Rollicking Big Fantasy Adventure due out in March 2010, I quote a John Lanchester article on video games.
About a year ago John Lanchester published ‘Is It Art?’, an essay in the London Review of Books on video games ... Lanchester considers gaming intelligently as a sort of invisible seismic shift in culture, and one of the things he’s good on is the difficulty of most video games. Here he is on Ken Levine’s 2K Boston/2K Australia game Bioshock, which he likes a great deal:
As a video game, BioShock fully subscribes to the conventions of the medium, and if you as a non-gamer were to pick it up and give it a try, it is these you would probably notice most. Not just the conventions of which buttons and levers you press to move about the world of the game (annoying and hard to recollect as these often are) and not just the in-game mechanics, such as the ‘plasmids’ which you have to inject to give your character the powers he needs, or the tapes which are conveniently left around for you to discover and play back to hear the story of Rapture; but also the whole package of conventions and codes and how-tos which become second nature to video-game players, but which strike non-gamers as arbitrary and confining and a little bit stupid. Northrop Frye once observed that all conventions, as conventions, are more or less insane; Stanley Cavell once pointed out that the conventions of cinema are just as arbitrary as those of opera. Both those observations are brought to mind by video games, which are full, overfull, of exactly that kind of arbitrary convention. Many of these conventions make the game more difficult. Gaming is a much more resistant, frustrating medium than its cultural competitors. Older media have largely abandoned the idea that difficulty is a virtue; if I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable. It’s a bit of an irony that difficulty thrives in the newest medium of all – and it’s not by accident, either. One of the most common complaints regular gamers make in reviewing new offerings is that they are too easy. (It would be nice if a little bit of that leaked over into the book world.)In the spirit of that admirable sentiment, I say: Tome of the Undergates is too easy.
I don’t mean to pick on Tome of the Undergates, by the way. It’s a very entertaining yarn, and is going to be huge. But Lanchester’s question interests me. Why should it be that people specifically prize ‘difficulty’ in their video games, but fight so thoroughly shy of it in their novels?
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Sunday, December 13, 2009
Potter, Harry
Below the fold, brief thoughts on each of the seven Harry Potter novels in turn. As I was typing this out, the theme to Rawhide kept trundling through my head: ‘keep Rowling, Rowling, Rowling ...’
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Friday, November 27, 2009
Friday Instant Quiz
The rules: identify the author of the following complete poem. No googling (google will turn this up pretty quickly, I think; and where would the fun be in that?). If you happen to know the answer for sure (because, let’s say, you have studied this author) you may keep it to yourself, with or without a smug ‘I know who this is’ comment posting, according to your taste. If this is easier than I think then the answer will become apparent immediately; if not, I’ll post the answer tomorrow.
Frost upon small rain—the ebony lacquered avenue
Reflecting lamps as a pool shows goldfish.
The sight suddenly emptied out of the young man’s eyes
Entering upon it sideways.
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Friday, November 20, 2009
The Original of Laura
This month’s big book—it would have been nice to say ‘this year’s’, but having got hold of a copy I discover it more curio than cry-it-from-the-rooftops—is Nabokov’s last, unfinished novel: The Original of Laura. Three things:
:I:
This is a large, thick-paper, orgulous and ultimately self-regarding exercise in the material business of book-making. Plush. Each of Nabokov’s original note-cards is reproduced in facsimile form, with all his neat, slightly childish, un-joined-up pencil handwriting upon them. The text of each card is reproduced in type (‘Filosofia’ a variant of ‘the classic Bodoni font’) below; but (can you smell that? that whiff of gimmicry?) each of the facsimile note-cards is perforated such that they could be removed from the book ‘and rearranged’, says Dimitri Nabokov, invitingly, in the book’s preface, ‘as the author likely did when he was writing the novel.’
All of this seems to me very poorly judged. I can understand, from a practical point of view, Penguin wanting to make an ‘event’ book out of this title—not least because there’s so little here, practically speaking, of the actual novel to be excited by. But it is based on a false premise. Dmitri Nabokov’s introduction, despite his crotchety, old aristocratic manner, is actually inviting a sort of intimacy of the reader. He rehearses his father’s instruction that the unfinished book be burned, and then goes through the reasons why he did not do so, sniping at ‘the lesser minds among the hordes of letter writers that were to descend upon me’ as he does so. The whole book, from a physical point of view, is a sort of mummification. ‘You and I,’ it says, confidentially, ‘we understand the difficulties; we care about Vladimir and his literary genius—we share a filial duty. We respect his reputation too much to ... let us say ... carp at the rubbishy aspects of what is, viewed objectively, barely-a-fifth-finished project. Instead, with ritual solemnity, we shall play the game, and go through the motions: as if the book is still being written, as if the decision not to burn the MS could conceivably be based on aesthetic, rather than commercial, grounds.’ The book, in short, is being presented to us as a fetish.
But here’s the thing: I neither have nor want that sort of relationship with my imaginary Vladimir Nabokov. He is of course one of the twentieth-century writers I admire the most, even—for some of his novels—adore the most; but this admiration, and adoration, has never been about intimacy. He’s not the reader’s friend, or father-figure, or anything like that. He’s something much more aloof—that’s the whole point of him. This exercise in faux-filiality grandly misses the point.
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