The Time of the Angels by Iris Murdoch (1966) struck me as very similar to her novel A Fairly Honourable Deafeat, in that it's also very overtly about the struggle between good and evil, and it also has two male centres to represent the two ideals, with all the women and some beta-male types traveling between the two poles (pun intended) to create the action of the novel. It's impossible to miss, even if you tried: they're compared at some crucial moment as being one white and innocent, the other black and threatening. We are given no psychological insight into the evil man, he is learned through glimpses caught by others. He is very sexual, and uses sex variously for control, for revenge, for otherworldly communication. There is a bit more exposure to the good man and his thoughts, although as a person he is strangely undeveloped. His biggest characteristic is that he suffered a lot (concentration camps, refugee camps, then abject poverty in England) after having had a glorious and uber-privileged early childhood. By his own account, he stopped really living a long time ago -- he only tried to survive in a little corner, without possessions or purpose other than bringing up his son, who he isn't close to and who has no respect for him.
The Time of the Angels (1966) is probably my least favourite of the four Iris Murdoch novels I've read, and I'm not usually a huge fan of hers anyway. I like the easy-read-but-not-empty feel of them. But they lack feeling and psychological depth. Murdoch seems to set her characters up as symbols for ideas, which makes them very artificial representations of human beings. She's very good at detail and complexity that makes things come alive, but all the characters are too much one way or another, too self-conscious and too-frequently philosophical in their conversations and in their desires.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Friday, December 18, 2009
Getting out of Hebrew school
The central theme of Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmoszgis (2005) is life as a Latvian/Eastern European Jewish immigrant in suburban Toronto. The stories are chronologically arranged: you follow the narrator from his first years in Canada, where he doesn't understand much of what's said at school and his parents are poor, struggling and confused by the language, to his adulthood where he seems to be a kind of suave, quirky writer guy.
I always like the theme of complicated relationships to cultural heritage. For the first half of the stories, I sort of assumed that he was describing a person who didn't have much genuine allegiance to any big idea of Jewishness. I was probably projecting; it's easy to see lots of futures in stories about a kid. But when he's an adult there's more suggestions of embracing the cultural identity, being into all the trappings, if not the God part. None of this comes out directly, but it's cleverly in the style of the stories being told about the older I. Little things like how he's doing research for an article on a boxer being inducted into the old-timers' category of the International Boxing Hall of Fame who, among other attributes, happens to be "America's first great fighting Jew." In an earlier story, "An Animal to the Memory" he gets severely reprimanded for knocking another boy to the ground and choking him with his hands while a rabbi makes a speech for Holocaust Rememberance Day. And he desperately wants out of Hebrew school.
A few weeks ago, arriving at my parents' house for dinner, I was immediately briefed on the discussion topic of the evening, an article published that day in a British newspaper, with the headline "Who is Jewish?" It described a recent decision of the Court of Appeal, which yesterday was upheld by the Supreme Court (what happened to the House of Lords? Apparently its judicial branch is no longer, as of October 2009, which I guess is good from a division-of-powers standpoint). The appellate courts found that a London Jewish school's admission policy discriminated on ethnic grounds. There's legislation that allows faith schools that receive government funding to give preference to students who are members of the group the school is set up to cater to if they have more applicants than spaces. The school that was taken to court is a good school and gets twice as many applicants as it has new spots each year. The kid who took them to court is an observant Jew whose dad is ethnically Jewish and whose mother converted, in the Reconstructionist synagogue or something, which means that Orthodox Jews don't consider her Jewish. So the school treated him like any other goy and he didn't get into the school. Meanwhile any random born Jew whose never been to synagogue a day in her life would be put near the top of their admissions list.
The trial court found in favour of the school, reasoning that it was part of their faith practice to decide who was a member of their group. Court of Appeal said no, too bad - giving preference to kids of a certain faith can't equate promoting kids with certain birth-related characteristics. I was amazed that there would be a decision from the appeal so fast. Maybe the Supreme Court, having only been created two months ago, has so little backlog that it can be ready to hear new appeals almost immediately.
I always feel double about it: on the one hand, I'm totally and immutably Jewish. On the other hand, I don't relate at all to the idea of Jewish identity. I have no interest in joining groups that identify with Jewishness, even to protest Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. There are not two but three strands to the thing: the ethnic, the cultural, the religious. Accent, or things like "shut the light" fall more into ethnic than cultural, I think. I say "shut the light" because that's how I learned to speak, and not because of some practice I engage in willfully (though I like it that I say "shut the light" and have ever since sometime around the age of 20 I was made aware that other English speakers don't say that). The cultural is the stuff that most of my relatives are into, the special charities, the chosen-people history books, lighting candles, reading at Passover, and on and on. They're not religious, they're just really into some thing that is being Jewish. And it's because of the ethnic, not the cultural, that I always tell my father that he can't simply decide he's not Jewish anymore. That kind of Jewish is defined by who would want to kill you, and not by what you yourself aspire to be. And that part of the group identity I have no problem with, the kind that says, this is what I was born into. And I prefer it if the British government thinks that entitles me to no special consideration when it comes to attending a particular school.
Anyhow it occurred to me, thinking about Nathasha and Other Stories, that it might be a lot easier for a third-generation immigrant to separate ethnic and cultural identity than it is for a first-generation immigrant, whose sense of difference must pervade every social encounter in his new home.
I always like the theme of complicated relationships to cultural heritage. For the first half of the stories, I sort of assumed that he was describing a person who didn't have much genuine allegiance to any big idea of Jewishness. I was probably projecting; it's easy to see lots of futures in stories about a kid. But when he's an adult there's more suggestions of embracing the cultural identity, being into all the trappings, if not the God part. None of this comes out directly, but it's cleverly in the style of the stories being told about the older I. Little things like how he's doing research for an article on a boxer being inducted into the old-timers' category of the International Boxing Hall of Fame who, among other attributes, happens to be "America's first great fighting Jew." In an earlier story, "An Animal to the Memory" he gets severely reprimanded for knocking another boy to the ground and choking him with his hands while a rabbi makes a speech for Holocaust Rememberance Day. And he desperately wants out of Hebrew school.
A few weeks ago, arriving at my parents' house for dinner, I was immediately briefed on the discussion topic of the evening, an article published that day in a British newspaper, with the headline "Who is Jewish?" It described a recent decision of the Court of Appeal, which yesterday was upheld by the Supreme Court (what happened to the House of Lords? Apparently its judicial branch is no longer, as of October 2009, which I guess is good from a division-of-powers standpoint). The appellate courts found that a London Jewish school's admission policy discriminated on ethnic grounds. There's legislation that allows faith schools that receive government funding to give preference to students who are members of the group the school is set up to cater to if they have more applicants than spaces. The school that was taken to court is a good school and gets twice as many applicants as it has new spots each year. The kid who took them to court is an observant Jew whose dad is ethnically Jewish and whose mother converted, in the Reconstructionist synagogue or something, which means that Orthodox Jews don't consider her Jewish. So the school treated him like any other goy and he didn't get into the school. Meanwhile any random born Jew whose never been to synagogue a day in her life would be put near the top of their admissions list.
The trial court found in favour of the school, reasoning that it was part of their faith practice to decide who was a member of their group. Court of Appeal said no, too bad - giving preference to kids of a certain faith can't equate promoting kids with certain birth-related characteristics. I was amazed that there would be a decision from the appeal so fast. Maybe the Supreme Court, having only been created two months ago, has so little backlog that it can be ready to hear new appeals almost immediately.
I always feel double about it: on the one hand, I'm totally and immutably Jewish. On the other hand, I don't relate at all to the idea of Jewish identity. I have no interest in joining groups that identify with Jewishness, even to protest Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. There are not two but three strands to the thing: the ethnic, the cultural, the religious. Accent, or things like "shut the light" fall more into ethnic than cultural, I think. I say "shut the light" because that's how I learned to speak, and not because of some practice I engage in willfully (though I like it that I say "shut the light" and have ever since sometime around the age of 20 I was made aware that other English speakers don't say that). The cultural is the stuff that most of my relatives are into, the special charities, the chosen-people history books, lighting candles, reading at Passover, and on and on. They're not religious, they're just really into some thing that is being Jewish. And it's because of the ethnic, not the cultural, that I always tell my father that he can't simply decide he's not Jewish anymore. That kind of Jewish is defined by who would want to kill you, and not by what you yourself aspire to be. And that part of the group identity I have no problem with, the kind that says, this is what I was born into. And I prefer it if the British government thinks that entitles me to no special consideration when it comes to attending a particular school.
Anyhow it occurred to me, thinking about Nathasha and Other Stories, that it might be a lot easier for a third-generation immigrant to separate ethnic and cultural identity than it is for a first-generation immigrant, whose sense of difference must pervade every social encounter in his new home.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
The futuristic past
Don DeLillo's Mao II (1991) opens with a scene of a mass wedding in Yankee Stadium. A girl's parents sitting in the bleachers look through their binoculars to find their daughter among the six and a half thousand couples on the field, being group-blessed by their religious leader/marriage officiant. It's a very eerie scene, and for someone who isn't much of a history buff it seems very sci fi. Also, the title, indicating a future second Maoist or Mao-analogous era. I went along thinking I was reading sci fi until some hundred or so pages in where it mentions Moonies. I looked up the Moonies, and found out that they used to practice these mass weddings. The biggest one was at Madison Square Garden (incidentally, this is still going on -- according to the Telegraph, there was a 40 000-couple wedding just a few months ago; many of the couples were marriaged via simulatenous broadcast).
Mao II, it's later revealed, is the name of an Andy Warhol painting, not a reference to an imaginary future political leader.
The ambuigity of time period is intentional. A conversation between Bill, a reclusive writer, and Karen, the Moonie daughter who is no longer with the Moonies makes this explicit:
In case it's not glaringly obvious already, the book left me a little cold. The writing is pretty in parts. The characters are okay but not extremely interesting - they all read a bit like stock characters, frankly: the girl from the cult, the writer who got famous and now doesn't want anyone to know where he lives. The structure is very pat (I won't describe it too much because I don't like to ruin endings, but the themes from the beginning are all taken up again at the end, in that way that is usual for short stories maybe more often than novels). My favourite parts are when Bill thinks about his bodily functions and his ailments. I kept waiting for it to get to other things I might find interesting: actual insights into the cult, for instance, beyond tidbits like, they do their laundry communally and then parcel it out so that you are always wearing someone else's underwear.
Mao II, it's later revealed, is the name of an Andy Warhol painting, not a reference to an imaginary future political leader.
The ambuigity of time period is intentional. A conversation between Bill, a reclusive writer, and Karen, the Moonie daughter who is no longer with the Moonies makes this explicit:
"I never think about the future."
"You come from the future," [Bill] said quietly.But if the book is trying to make some kind of point about the place of cults in the world's future, it's a bit lost on me. The world-events juxtaposition is between the Moonies and the war in Beirut (though what the purpose of this juxtaposition is eludes me). The war is a big feature of the book, and especially a terrorist group that operates from Beirut. There's a recurring mention of Bill's theory that terrorism has made writing irrelevant. Writing used to be the act that shaped culture, but now terror is. The theory is not given a lot of credence by the other characters, but it might be a kind of central theme for the book. I guess.
In case it's not glaringly obvious already, the book left me a little cold. The writing is pretty in parts. The characters are okay but not extremely interesting - they all read a bit like stock characters, frankly: the girl from the cult, the writer who got famous and now doesn't want anyone to know where he lives. The structure is very pat (I won't describe it too much because I don't like to ruin endings, but the themes from the beginning are all taken up again at the end, in that way that is usual for short stories maybe more often than novels). My favourite parts are when Bill thinks about his bodily functions and his ailments. I kept waiting for it to get to other things I might find interesting: actual insights into the cult, for instance, beyond tidbits like, they do their laundry communally and then parcel it out so that you are always wearing someone else's underwear.
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