Carnage

Yasmina Reza's 2006 play, Le Dieu du carnage just finished its scheduled four-week run and week of extra performances at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde (in case you were thinking I might write a review of a play in time for it to be useful to someone). I saw Art in London about ten years ago and really loved it. Art is one of those plays in which nothing happens: three friends stand on stage talking about a painting one of them bought, a very expensive all-white canvas. I don't remember it being deep or revolutionary in its message, but it was a bit of intellectualish entertainment. Le Dieu du carnage seemed to promise a similar experience: four people in a living room, in real time. And I laughed a lot during the performance. There are some good jokes and the four actors were amazing, and brought out all the comedy in the text and possibly more.

They were so funny, in fact, that my neighbour wondered afterwards whether the content might have come to us as more substantial if the buffoonery had been toned down a little by the director (Lorraine Pintal, also the artistic director of the TNM, who I'm a bit dubious about; the productions she directs never seem to be among my favourite of the season). Because one was left with a feeling that although the play appears to be giving you all sorts of witty reflections on life, there is no wittiness and no reflection left when the curtain falls. It's all just jokes. I did genuinely find it funny, and disagreed with an unknown man, friend of my neighbour, who claimed that people laughed too readily, because they had been primed to think it was an outstandingly funny show.

There's an extremely naturalistic on-stage vomiting scene, which I enjoyed. There's the four high-culture snobs and then the vomit, all over the front of the stage, through the uptight lady's hands, which cover her mouth the entire time she's spewing, as though she could hold it back and save some dignity. She fully gives up on that idea later on, and lets loose more than any of the others after awhile. There were also some funny dramatizations of a few things: the woman driven nuts by her husband's cell phone, which he never turns off, the couple who are totally freaked out about vomit getting on their special out-of-print art show catalogue, the mother who wants to come across as calm and neutral but is really seething at the other little boy and wants not only for him to apologize to her son but to be able to lecture him herself, face to face, in a formally agreed-to meeting.

I don't mind a show that does nothing other than deliver good jokes (though I confess, I might not like it as much as I'd like to think I like it; I tend to require a bit of meat if I'm going to enjoy myself for more than a few minutes -- and I think most people do). The only disappointment here is that the play sets itself up as a thinker's comedy: the characters ask, do we ever do things for anyone other than ourselves, really? and discuss the savagery of childhood, and the falseness of something they keep referring to as civilization. The premise, two couples getting together to discuss the fact that one of their sons has hit the other one in the face with a stick, is a good one. And she brings in good elements. But to raise all these potentially interesting questions and then go nowhere with them creates a dissatisfaction that needn't have been there if there hadn't been the pretension of probing major themes. Nonetheless, it was a very enjoyable evening.

"So few of the upper classes go into politics these days, you've all got to stick together."

I read Alan Clark's Diaries (1993; surprisingly in its twenty-sixth impression by 2001) on the recommendation of my esteemed brother-in-law. In fairness to him, I did ask for a book that described the political process in Britain (as quasi-research for a piece of fiction that I'm writing). It's a pretty entertaining read. Clark's funny and he's a kind of a horrible person, which can make it more interesting to know what he thinks about other people.

Alan Clark was a member of the British Parliament who lived in a house/castle with a moat around it. He's a super duper snob (see the title quote, actually uttered to him by his wife but quoted approvingly in his diary) and generally hilariously arrogant politician, who was in government under Margaret Thatcher, who he refers to as the Lady, reverentially. One way in which this book offers great insight into what goes on in Parliament is that he's generally frank about the kinds of jobs that people usually act polite about, for instance he writes about being a Minister:

As for the Dept, I never want to go through its doors again. Total shit-heap, bored blue. Strained and befuddled by all the paper work. Fuck them. 

That's when he's at the Department of Employment. While he's there, one gets the impression he might just be in politics for the glory. All he wants is to be Secretary of State, the big leagues. Though when he gets transferred to the Ministry of Defence he's actually quite passionate and knowledgeable about the material. He's still incredibly pissed that he's not Secretary of State for Defence and spends a lot of time trying to undermine the guy who is.

With all of his personal and unidealistic ambitions, he does give an interesting view of how intensely petty big-time politics is, really. Here's a pretty good summation of the world at least as Clark describes it:

[P]olicies are neither determined or evolved on a simple assessment of National, or even Party, interest. Personal motives -- ambition, mischief making, a view to possible obligations and opportunities in the future, sometimes raw vindictiveness -- all come into it.

Some of this may be his own outlook, but he makes a pretty strong case that this is true for almost everyone in the Conservative Party (he doesn't talk about the Opposition much). I shouldn't be surprised, I realize. I knew it was all cynical positioning that drove politics, but I guess I thought it would be more on the level of trying to get power for one's own party. But no, it's all just about vanity and revenge. On the vanity front, Clark excels. Maybe many people's diaries reveal them to be more smug than they'd have admitted in public (though of course he oversaw the publication of these documents, as is clear from the absolutely idiotic footnotes explaining about family dogs and cars owned by his father etc). He really just loves himself. A lot of it is about how he's getting old but is still so athletic and amazing and everyone else his age looks at least thirty years older than him. He is unabashedly lecherous with twenty-year-old girls and at some point makes some remark to the effect that if he were poor, he'd probably have been arrested for harassment or rape long before.

Even though he comes off as funny and smart, I wouldn't even want to have a beer with this guy, is how gross he is. He bemoans the degradation of the class system. I'm trying to figure out on what earthly basis one could lament that other than self-interest? He writes this, which seems like a lame non-excuse:

I fear that the police have abandoned their old class allegiances. Indeed many of them seem to carry monstrous chips, and actually to enjoy harassing soft targets. And where has it got them? Simply widened the circle of those who resent and mistrust the police. Two or three stabbed every day and the assailants usually discharged by the Magistrates.

Is he saying that because the police no longer love rich people, they're being killed on the job more often? Because that would lead right to the conclusion that it's the rich people doing the stabbing. Which would speak against them being "soft targets". Perhaps the police wouldn't feel so bad about being stabbed if only they had their love of the upper classes to cling to. But this is the kind of thinking you have to resort to when you're trying to argue for better treatment for certain individuals based on birth.

He's writing in the 1990s so it seems unlikely to me that he would believe in a genetic superiority -- or maybe he does! Some of his negative comments about Churchill made me wonder if he wasn't a Nazi sympathizer. He's definitely ambivalent about Churchill having become Prime Minister -- speaks wistfully of a coalition that failed, and wasn't the whole thing that Churchill was the one who said fight when the others said give in a la Vichy France? Mind you, he also speaks excitedly about the military victories: "showed we were going to fight, and fight rough." But in that same passage he writes, "We could have made peace at the time of the Hess mission and the world would have been completely different." Now, I'm not going to say that we could have is equivalent to I wish we had, but it sounds like the kind of statement that is at least open to positive outcomes from that world being completely different. I had no idea what the Hess mission was, so I looked it up. Rudolf Hess, Hitler's Deputy, flew to Scotland in 1941 to (apparently; but there's some controversy about all of this) broker a peace with England under which Euro countries would return to own governments, with German police presence to remain, in exchange for England helping the Germans fight the Soviet Union. Incidentally, according to Wikipedia Hitler ordered planes to stop Hess on his way to Scotland, so it's not clear that Clark is correct in thinking that they could have made peace at all. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt but it all seems highly suspicious to me.

Conclusion: evil makes for interesting reading. Especially towards the end of the volume when there's a leadership race and Thatcher gets voted out. It's all very high drama. And despite only caring about himself, he actually really adores Thatcher, even disagrees with people who criticize her for not being of the right class. That's love, right there.

A night at the movies with facebook

Watching The Social Network (2010, dir. David Fincher) last night definitely made facebook feel creepy -- not that we needed a movie for that. Of course the creepy feeling is about the history that is drawn in the movie of the site's original central concept being that of exclusivity, rather than privacy, as I'd previously believed. I suppose I was naive to believe that, since I was told that I needed a school address, which struck me as definitely creepy. I didn't make my own profile, it was done for me by some American friends who insisted that this was the only way to stay in touch when we were going back to our respective schools after a summer working together. I could have questioned it more initially, but I was being swept along. And my questioning probably wouldn't have mattered, since even my most politically engaged friends are on the site now.

What the movie didn't do was make fbook founder Mark Zuckerberg seem as creepy as I thought it would from reviews and a New Yorker profile of the man himself that conveyed that he was upset about the movie portrayal. Of course it could be upsetting because you could take it as pretty embarrassing. It shows someone very interested in class status. I think the class aspect is the issue because a lot of people are trying to reach a higher status in some vein, artists, musicians, actors, kids trying to make friends. It's particularly the status of stuff like private Harvard clubs that seems inane and pompous and generally idiotic, to me and presumably to lots of others. The movie has only one voice of reason on this topic: Erika, the B.U. student who breaks up with Mark in the first scene (or maybe technically you'd call it a third scene; the movie's a little spiced up but that's the scene the movie starts on and it's chronologically first).

Other than Erika all the characters are in some way buying into extremely superficial social markers. Then again all - ALL - the other characters are men or boys. In the first half or so of the movie that point is at least made, not by characters but by general thematic highlighting, for instance of the offensiveness of the prettiness comparison game Mark creates that only includes girls' faces. But the later movie was a total let down by Sorkin et al. (he's only a co-writer but he's the only one who's oeuvre I'm familiar with and he generally tries to come off as some kind of feminist which I appreciate even though I don't always like his brand of feminism). The movie stays with all-male action and has pretty girls draped around as accessories, but no longer includes any semblance of commentary about it, which it could so easily have done - or for instance at a minimum shown us one girl programmer, instead of only the female intern at the office whose main job is to have long blond hair and skinny thighs and to do coke at parties. Also, the only girl-accessory in the movie who gets promoted to girlfriend is an insane psycho who sets someone's apartment on fire out of unprovoked jealousy.

Oh wait, there is one other minor girl character whose sole function isn't to provide sex or the anticipation of sex (or say, to be the secretary outside the Harvard president's office). She's a second year associate with Mark's lawyers' firm who sits in on a deposition that is one of the splice-scenes throughout the movie. Her role is completely opaque to me. I'm guessing there was more of her that mostly got cut out in post-production. She offers Mark some of her lunch (at this point we don't know she's with his side and her friendliness looks possibly like a cheap attempt by the other side to get information by luring him into a friendly interaction with a pretty chick). So, she offers lunch, which he refuses, refuses dinner, which he offers, asks a question supposedly as personal curiosity but in fact to tie up a loose end before the credits roll. She also informs him (and us) that he'll be settling the case tomorrow. I don't know why they have her in there. Surely they could have used a simpler device to tell us about the settlements (actually they do use the simpler device, they do that thing that all based on real life movies do where they give each character a little write-up epilogue).

But back to Mark's character. The reasons he doesn't come off as a bad guy are: 1) he seems like he could be fairly high on the autism spectrum, which excuses a fair amount of what would otherwise be very callous and asshole-y behaviour. He has zero intuitive understanding of friendship or courtship. 2) one might, if so inclined, feel that he has some genuine intellectual passion, that if everything else is bitterness and status-seeking, he does at least love the computer and maybe other intellectual pursuits, which I add because he's quite clever conversationally, in a pompous-nerd way. Now, the talky cleverness is something I'm particularly positively disposed towards, so maybe it's biasing me and some of his character rehabilitation is unwarranted. But I think the people who made this movie are also probably biased towards talky cleverness, so I'm inclined to see it as intended positive character drawing. 3) he's motivated by resentments and a desire to be a big man, which is lame, but the thing is, those are not unusual motivations and aren't irredeemably gross as long as they're not your only motivations (which I'm arguing they aren't, see 2) above). The reason they seem so terrible in him is really mostly that he goes after revenge and chest-puffing in such unsophisticated ways, on which see 1) above. He's definitely not suave, but he's not worse than a lot of porsche-driving dopes. 4) beyond an initial mistake with the girl-rating site, which is gross but forgivable because he's so young and stupid when it happens, the movie's misogyny can't be imputed to him. 5) unlike many movie anti-heroes, the narrative here allows the audience to believe that Mark learns or grows towards the end of the flick. Maybe the character learns a bit about the value of friends and the foolishness of trusting bad guys. Maybe the reason this seems rehabilitating is that the character is so young. In other movies the guy learns when he's 50 and has killed people and dealt dirty drugs and alienated his family and is serving a life sentence in maximum security prison, at which point you feel the learning is something but not much, because he won't have lots of opportunity for acting better.

What I'm left wondering is, did the movie's creators intend to paint a very unflattering portrait with a few wrinkles without realizing how mitigating those wrinkles are, or did they intend to create a sympathetic though problematic portrayal. I suspect it's the first one, but that might just be because I like the idea of coming to a conclusion other than the one the heavy-handed movie execs intended. Their intention should be just as unimportant as the intentions of an author or other artist, but I'm curious about what it says about them rather than about the piece. 

P.S. I'd like to replace the words audience, viewer, reader and listener with some new word like ingester or interpreter (not really replace the words, just replace my use of them). Consumer might have worked but it's too negatively connotated now and also doesn't have the active interpreting role that I'm looking for. The only trouble with ingester is it sounds so stupid.

Classical Love

Lust abounds in Euripides' tragedy Hippolytos, written in 428 B.C.E., translated by Robert Bagg in 1973. I suppose the Greeks thought it was really about being careful what you say about the gods, but what I found most illuminating was the lust.

Hippolytos is an upright man who reveres the gods, except for one Aphrodite, who he despises and is outright rude to. He's contemptuous of sex and love. Aphrodite gets pissed off and decides to punish him. She accomplishes this by making Phaidra, his father's wife (though not his own mother), fall into mad crazy uncontrollable lust with him. She is so ashamed that she is driven half crazy. Finally her nurse gets the truth out of her and goes to Hippolytos. She first swears him to secrecy then propositions him on Phaidra's behalf. Hippolytos is disgusted and says no, and only keeps quiet because he made an oath and he can't break that. Phaidra is very upset at what the nurse has done. She decides the only way to save her honour is to kill herself and write a suicide note in which she says she did it because Hippolytos tried to rape her (interestingly, Hippolytos describes this later as an honourable act, even as  Theseus, his dad, banishes him for it -- I would have thought the honourable would have been undercut by the horrible lying and slander and ruining of an innocent's life, but no).

As I read the first pages, I thought I the insertion of gods' deeds into human emotions was about to start reading as false or artificial, but that was sadly underestimating Euripides. A god who instills lust in someone's soul against her will can be made to explain the human feelings and emotions just as plausibly as any naturalistic explanation. This is Phaidra, who has been acting like a madwoman for several days and refusing to tell anyone what is wrong with her:

I am being violently shoved
somewhere I must not go.
Where? My mind's going, I feel unclean,
twisted into this madness
by the brawn of a god who hates me.

Passions are foisted upon one despite what one would wish. I guess I sometimes think that there's a give and take between what we're spontaneously drawn to and what we decide. But it is more like someone's stuck their hand into you and used you like a puppet. That's what Phaidra feels and even with the personified gods the sense is totally realistic. And so the addition of the gods, rather than being an a sideshow that I had to ignore, was a brilliant highlight, causing me to reflect on what other mechanisms I could use to explain that passion, and whether it was more believable to say something like, chemicals in the brain, or biological imperative. No, "I'm being used like a sock puppet" is a much better explanation, because it gives a better sense of what it's like.

(incidentally, though I'm no real position to judge, my impression was that Bagg, who is also a poet, did a very good translation).

One problem I had with Aphrodite's ways was, why do it by tormenting Phaidra, the wife? I don't mind that Phaidra dies, I know lots of people have to die before the curtain falls and despite being one of those people who's overly squeamish about fictional violence, I'm resigned to that. But shouldn't Hippolytos' punishment for not giving her the respect she's due be that he suffers from some horrible stomach-twisting stronger-than-him passion? Not that being killed isn't a meaningful punishment and all, but Phaidra gets both. Why not have it be him? Is it part of the implicit logic of the allegory that I was conceiving above that even Aphrodite can't make someone lustful if their nature doesn't tend that way? There might be some reason why she thought it would be a crueler victory, but I can't imagine why. Maybe because he doesn't have to feel any guilt, and guilt would make him feel he deserved death, which in some way alleviates the suffering, since if he's totally innocent he just gets to feel outraged and hard done by. But that's a little disappointing. Some readers (me) might not mind if Hippolytos didn't get to feel so innocent, since he's really kind of a schmuck, prone to making speeches like this:

I'm too plain-spoken
to overwhelm a crowd
I'm more at home pursuing rigorous
enlightenment with a few wise friends.

I.e., I'm too smart to talk convincingly to a big crowd of people. Whatever, H. Is that supposed to come off as charming? That and a lot of other things he says just seem pompous. Which I guess I felt worked well with the book. He's morally upright but obnoxious, that's why he draws Aphrodite's wrath down on himself. He's not under the radar enough when he disrespects the goddess. I would have liked it if it was intimated that the other characters see he's an ass but they don't seem to, and Artemis, another goddess, thinks he's awesome (he also thinks he's awesome, describes himself as the most virtuous man on earth). But I suppose a tragic hero has to be complex, and his element of complexity is having a lame personality. Phaidra, who is the one who struggles, is the more interesting character.

New Yorker stories

I recently gained access to the New Yorker archives and am totally thrilled about it, specifically loving old Mavis Gallant stories. They're so perfect in all their details and their explanations of human peculiarities. Reading them I feel like a student, that I need to understand and memorize everything she's doing so that I can learn to do it myself. I'm looking at the one I'm currently in the middle of, called "The Chosen Husband," and trying to find some lines to excerpt but I can't choose because there are so many beautiful lines, and yet I'm not sure their beauty will be conveyed out of their perfect context.

For instance,

Marie at this moment seemed to think he would do; at least, she showed no sign of distaste, such as pushing out her lower lip or crumpling her chin. Perhaps she had been getting read to drop her Greek: Mme. Carette had warned her that she would have to be a servant to his mother, and eat peculiar food. "He's never asked me to," said Marie, and that was part of the trouble. He hadn't asked anything.

I'm particularly liking this one (although I feel that "particularly" about many of them), it being set in Montreal and mentioning the street I live on several times, and having all sorts of good detail about the city in 1949. For instance I had no idea that the mayor was imprisoned for sedition throughout the World War II, either for agitating against conscription or for saying that French Canadians are closer to Italy than England and also that they are Fascists "by blood but not by name" whatever that means. The quote continues "The Latins have always been in favour of dictators." What is he talking about? It's almost charming in its craziness. (this information is all wikipedia, Gallant simply alludes to a mayor's internment during the war).

I am not as in love with the most recent fiction issue, in which I found two of the stories downright bad and the three best were good but not amazing. The magazine did this thing where it got contributions from their chosen "Best 20 under 40" (there's only seven in the issue, the others are in future issues). I have a feeling that they made the list first, got the contributions later. They then maybe had to accept whatever their solicited writer gave to them, and some of the stories seemed thin and rushed. I liked Jonathan Safran Foer's story for being stylistically unusual, but the end was disappointly weak. The other two I liked best, by ZZ Packer and C.E. Morgan, seemed cut off at weird points. The story about the two runaways seemed like a novel excerpt, and I think I might like the novel that it would be part of. Gary Shteyngart is what I imagine you would get if you walked onto St. Viateur and picked up the worst Mile End hipster you could find and then smooshed him into written form. It's even stronger in the story from the issue but it's also pretty true of The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2003), which I found very funny at first and then not.

I think some contemporary writers (examples here, maybe, being Philipp Meyer and Salvatore Scibona) confuse nasty occurrences with interesting plotting. On the other hand, the seven stories mostly have good titles (like "The Entire North Side Was Covered With Fire").

Howard Jacobson, Coming From Behind (1983)

Coming From Behind was recommended to me by someone who, though I didn't know this until later, hadn't read the book. She had read a later book by the same author and found it funny. Maybe I'm not as subject to humour as some people (ie maybe I don't enjoy a joke as much as the next guy) but I found this book really irritating. It's about a professor at a polytechnic (those second-class universities they used to have in England until they abolished them but everyone still treats them as second class because the English don't let status markers be erased quite that easily). His life is terrible and depressing and he himself is terrible and depressing in his values and aspirations and his general state of being a schlub. So is everyone else in the book. It's that approach to comedy where it's funny because everything is blown up into hyperbole. And bad things happen but I don't care because a) it's inevitable that bad things happen in this kind of book, so I'm braced for it (I have a low tolerance, under regular circumstances, for bad news, even in fiction) and b) I dislike everyone involved.

It's is also extremely, but exceedingly, Jewy. He's obsessed with everything being about being Jewish. Maybe it's because he's British, where there's less of a tradition of writers writing about Jewiness. I don't love that kind of thing, being kind of an unjewy Jew myself, and in this case it became particularly irritating because it is subjected to the same hyperbolizing treatment as everything else, so that, for instance, the reason dude doesn't know what a flower is called is because he's Jewish.

Occasionally I found it funny, but mostly I just wanted to get to the end.

Edward St. Aubyn, Mother's Milk (2006)

Since I'm running a terrible backlog in this chronicle of my reading, I've had a fair bit of time to reflect on Mother's Milk before sitting down to write about it. And I think I like it better now than I did when I read it. Some books are like that for me, they swirl around and mature in the mind. I don't know if that happens a lot to other people. Certainly in music it's a common idea that you have to listen to something three or four times before you know if you really like it.

Mother's Milk is narrated by three different characters with two chapters of first-person apiece: first the eldest son of a family, who is four years old (I believe; one of downsides of writing with such a delay is that the book is back at the bibliotheque). He's a strange four year old in that there's absolutely no indication that he's four, except that the book tells you so. He's preternaturally precocious. In other kid's-voice books, the kid is often unusually smart or gifted but still a kid. If it was St. Aubyn's goal to achieve that kind of balance, he failed. The other two narrators are the mother and father of the nuclear family. They're very intellectually and wryly clever, with a feeling of superiority that is not exactly my favourite, but at least it fits since they're adults.

I don't usually like to say that a book has a theme, because it feels reductionist and assumptionist, but this book definitely has a theme. It is a consideration of the parents' relationships with their own parents, but really only the mothers. They each had what they consider to be highly dysfunctional childhoods, in the sense that both their mothers were too preoccupied with other matters to properly love and care for their children, and, when they became parents themselves, these two seem to have done it with a conscious mission to improve parenting and break the cycle of dysfunction, and both seem to have worried whether or not they would accomplish it. During the period the book is set in, the mother of the pair of little boys has gone over to the light side. She's a wholly, self-sacrificingly attentive mother. She does everything she can to make life perfect, especially for her younger son. The father, on the other hand, is falling apart. He's fighting a lot with his mother and mourning the loss of the mothering attentions of his wife, who now has no time for him because of the aforementioned wholeness of her attention to her baby. And his bitterness is infecting his precocious and perceptive elder son. To his credit, he realizes that he's doing this, and feels bad about it. I suppose both are partially succeeding in their attempts to break the they-fuck-you-up cycle, and partly, inevitably, fucking up in their turn.

It's a neatly organized book. It's an intelligent book. But it doesn't feel like a lovable book. Maybe for the very reason that it states its theme and makes its arguments too clearly. It made me reflect on the nature of parenthood and the history of families, and it had interesting insights into those questions, but they were essayistic insights rather than flowing fiction.

Susan Minot, Evening (1998)

This is a beautiful book. I wasn't sure at first, I guess because it takes a while to figure out what story is being told. The book is in three tones: one is the story of the young woman Ann Grant attending her friend's wedding and falling in love with another guest, another is of Ann Lord, who is Ann Grant after three marriages and four children, who is in and out of lucidity on her deathbed, the third, and shortest, is a dialogue between two voices that are never explicitly named. The three streams cut across one another and give a lovely succinct sense of this woman's life (and possibly a sense of her afterlife, depending on your reading of the incorporeal dialogue stream).

Ann Lord She has her four children around her in her final days, but her thoughts are much less on them than on all the men in her life. I particularly liked the way the three husbands get condensed sometimes -- those experiences of falling in love that seem so unique in the moment become fungible at a remove, when evaluating what mattered over a whole life.

Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)

Even though I used to be a sci fi head as a teenager, I'd never read this book, and it was lying around my place the other week when I was in bed all day with a cold, so I picked it up. It's pretty engrossing, in a Harry Potter/murder mystery kind of way. But it also struck me as either extremely un-self aware or as very subtly super-colonialist in its views. Were it written in the 18th century the latter would make more sense to me as a political view. As it is, I think it's the former.

The book takes place on a planet called Arrakis that has been colonized by a state that spans many other planets and has lots of military and economic might. Arrakis is very rich in a natural resource they call spice, which is an addictive drug that everyone really loves and that only exists on this one planet. But the planet has a big problem which is that it's all desert, and the large indigenous population has so little access to water they can barely survive (you might think they'd be trading spice for water but in fact the colonists don't trade, they just go in and take the spice themselves). The way in which it's un-self aware is this: on the one hand, Herbert clearly loves this people he has made up. They're so much cleverer and more beautiful than the technologically-dependent money-driven colonists. You get all of that noble savage stuff, or maybe it's the modern fetishization of the non-white world, it really comes to the same thing. But even though they're so strong and so much more knowledgeable than the thieving colonists, they only win the battle because of two successive leaders, both of whom are sons of colonist fathers -- the first one has a native Arrakian mother, and he does a lot for Arrakis, but the real saviour is the guy who is a full-blooded colonial prince who had to escape to the deserts of Arrakis because of a grave injustice done to his family.

Maybe it's terribly naive of me to be surprised by this kind of white man as saviour narrative in a storyline where someone seems at the same time respect and honour the other (imaginary) culture. But really, by 1965 I thought people were a little past this kind of thing. Maybe I was also surprised because of how much I'd heard about this classic, and that in telling me to read it no-one ever mentioned the racist sub-text, but only told me that it was a great read. It is that, with the usual sci-fi caveat that you have to read for the ideas and ignore the nuts and bolts of the writing style.

Blindness by José Saramago (1995; trans. Giovanni Pontiero 1997)

Two parts fable, one part sci-fi action thriller. It opens with a man suddenly going blind while stopped at a red light at a busy intersection. When the light turns green, people start to yell. The blindness is viral (or at any rate contagious) and soon the entire country is in a panic.

The fable nature of the piece comes not just from the symbolic, magic-realism-with-a-clear-message plot. It's accentuated in all sorts of little ways: for instance, names are conspicuously absent: the city is the city, the country is the country, the man who went blind in his car is referred to throughout as 'the first man'. His companions are the old man, the doctor, the doctor's wife, the pretty young woman, the young boy, the first man's wife. You may also note a gender discrepancy that I preferred while reading to ascribe to a kind of old-fashionedness but which could also be felt as just an old man's sexism. But anyhow, the effect is of essentializing everyone and everything: the soldier, the rapist, the man who reads braille. It works well, as he's done it. He doesn't mean to be writing about idiosyncrasies.

Another feature of the book is a frequently encountered editorial voice that is neither character's nor author's. This voice's statements are always general and blunt. For instance,

they could just as easily have had their provisions cut off for ever, as is only just when someone dares to bite the hand that feeds them.

The hand-biters are the members of one ward of the mental hospital turned internment camp who send eight representatives to peacefully complain about how little food the blind mafia has been giving them. Or, when a group encounters a man and woman who are joking lewdly, the abstract voice wonders whether these two could be married and answers surely not, because "no married couple would say these things in public." It is possible that these are intended to be character's thoughts, but if so Saramago is switching in and out of them with particularly little signal. But he definitely does that too, like in the line: "Shortly there would be darkness all around and no one will have to be embarrassed." I'm assuming the abrupt tense change isn't a horrible translation error and so I assume that we've switched from the third person to the first, with our only marker being that change from the past conditional to the future simple. But I don't think the first two sentences are examples of that, because it's hard to know in either context whom to attribute the thought to. Throughout, there's this extra narrator who is a cynical and extremely convention-bound omniscient observer.

 Anyhow, I like fables and I'm a big fan of the sci-fi action thriller. There's something very compelling about the book -- I'm easily grossed out but I had to keep reading long after my bedtime because I was so wrapped up in it. And sometimes because I just needed to have the characters be out of the horrible spot they were in before I could safely close my eyes to sleep.

Marcel Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes (1920)

Yesterday I happened to read about someone's view that Proust wasn't really a novelist, but an essayist in disguise. That seems kinda right. Swann is about obsession, Jeunes filles is about living in the world - loves, friendships, restaurants and so on. Guermantes is about aristocracy and snobbery.

The thing I find really funny is while I (and lots of others who are more serious learned than me) love reading this book, it really doesn't make any sense that it should be so good. If one tries to describe this volume, it sounds completely odious (as opposed to all three of the books in Swann, which are just amazing in the things they tell you about what it is to be human). I'm reading a book about a man who is introduced into aristocratic circles. The sentences usually contain about twenty clauses that I have to keep in mind in order to loop them all back up before I can go on to the next, equally convoluted, idea. Often I fail and have to start the sentence over again two or three times before I can move ahead (the difficulty in this case being exacerbated by reading in a second language, but I think it would be almost the same - reading Henry James was a bit like that in English). A huge amount of the book is taken up with a discussion of how people I've never heard of are related to other people I've never heard of and how these connections make each connectee ever more illustrious. Some of these people were real, some fictional, and some might have been real except maybe Proust got his details mixed up (and of course it's part of his genius that he mixes fact and fiction and really doesn't care -- he's above worrying about attributing a real story about Manet to a made-up character). Aside from that there are major sections devoted to who visits who, including such sub-topics as people who visit certain others only because they are close family, where otherwise that person would not be fashionable enough for them to visit, people who are visited by certain people but don't visit them back, charity drop-in visits, the excuses a person may come up with for why they cannot possibly invite some particular would-be visitor because that person is so unpleasant, or of such low rank, that it would be disastrous to have them at your table or in your salon. Then Proust provides special insight into the mean and silly things that fashionable people say about unfashionable people. I suppose they were the celebrities of the time, and it's no weirder than people who obsess over the marriages of boring rock stars now. But I don't read People, let alone furrowing my brow and devoting this kind of time and energy to it.

The main attraction is simply the way he puts words next to each other. Two things that turn these ridiculous tales into good story-telling: his dissection of the vanities and the fears of his characters is insightful and therefore entertaining, and the trick of the dual narrator, who is scornful as he tells you the story, but who is honest enough to depict his past self as totally impressed and awed. A brilliant essayist can entertain with any topic. The moments of awe were most tightly packed (for me) in Swann but there are more still here than in almost anything else I've ever read.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1915)

It took me an unfortunately long time to read this because I moved apartments while I was in the middle of it, lost the book in the move, and then waited a few months before getting a library membership and taking it out. I think I enjoyed it a bit less than I would have if I'd given it my sustained focus. It is in some ways a hard book, because its rhythm is very slow and because so much of it is this minute-by-minute tracking of the mental processes behind everyday activities, which is amazing and it is done well here, but you can miss if you're not paying close attention. It's not an airplane book.
There's a split authorial personality. The core of the book is a portrait of Woolf's mother and father. Their children are running around all over the novel and in some way necessarily Woolf occupies the role of child of her parents, or at least member of her own family. But there is another important character who is not a member of the family but a visitor to their summer house, Lily Briscoe, a painter. Amost Lily's whole being in the book centres around a landscape that she is painting and trying the whole time to get right - not in terms of faithful representation, but rhythmically. It's like Woolf is telling the story of her work in trying to find the right moments of light and shadow to best paint this group portrait. She is both in and out, which is also necessarily true of a writer. And this book gives a particularly good demonstration of that without any self-reference or post-modern piercing of frameworks. Then towards the end the children gain some subjectivity and we see the parents through their eyes as well as through the parents own thoughts about themselves and each other.
I'm thinking about rhythm because I read recently that Woolf once wrote in a diary that writing is all about getting the rhythm. Once you've understood your rhythm and can get into it, the words you use don't matter much. I love that. And this book is so full of awesome rhythms. I love Cam's sequence of emotions on the sailboat going toward the lighthouse. Earlier, she and her brother made a compact (presumably unspoken but real to each of them) to be sullen and unhappy throughout the trip in protest of their father's overbearing, selfish manner. But then Cam's on the boat and the water is spraying and the air is blowing in her hair and she's trying to hold onto being unhappy but she can't help feeling the exhilaration of being on the sailboat. She goes back to the unhappiness for a moment, calling to mind her good reasons for being unhappy and the need for loyalty to her brother, then she feels the pull of the moment, and back and forth until the prior emotion breaks and she is in the good happy feeling, which incidentally also allows her to think lovingly of her father again. I used to feel like that all the time, wanting to hold onto some pact I'd made with myself to resist the temptations of false happiness. The push and pull and the actual slowness and uncertainty of shifts in emotion are perfectly true, as are the depictions at other points in the book of the quickness and randomness of shifts from enjoyment to sudden annoyance at some small thing someone does, and back again. It's like Woolf is telling us that the reality of human beings is really the opposite of the humours theory, that a character is made up of constant minute backs and forths, the sum total of which will create a person who overall seems one way or another, happy or bitter or serious. It makes me think of physical balance, in which stillness is only achieved through constant tiny adjustments of little muscles in different parts of the body that are all active and actually moving the body from place to place in order to attain an overall appearance of stillness. 

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009)

Wolf Hall might be the best political thriller ever written, but then I'm not an expert in the genre. Anyhow it totally gripped me from beginning to end. My only disappointment was that there wasn't more -- I felt like I was cut off abruptly from the ongoing machinations. It has the kind of ending where if it was a movie you'd know they were setting you up for the sequel rather than giving you a stand-alone first film. I guess I'll have to buy a real history book to see how it plays out.

It's a fictionography of Thomas Cromwell, advisor to Henry VIII. He was an extraordinary character if this book is to be believed: became fluent in every language he was exposed to, could make money without even really thinking about it, didn't need to sleep, always knew the right thing to say, was stronger and physically tougher than anyone else even as he grew older, and was really, really knowledgeable about textiles. Also loyal, kind, reasonable, loving and pretty gender-egalitarian for the time period. I was occasionally annoyed, as I got further into the book, that there was almost no criticism of Cromwell. It made him seem un-round, but it's also lots of fun to read a book with such an easily heroic hero. There's more than enough criticism of Henry and the Boleyns and Mary to make up for Cromwell's virtues.

The book isn't moving or worldview-altering, but it is impressive. Mantel is amazing at inventing interior lives and detailed relationships that flesh out the historical account. It's so well done that it's hard to believe they're not fictional. I kept thinking that as I read, and then thinking it must not make a difference. But it must take much greater force of character to add all that to the insides of a real person, rather than making someone up over whom you would have total dominion.

Modern fates

Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore (translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, 2005) is a modern-day, Japanese Oedipus Rex. There are some alterations: the person who foretells that Kafka Tamura will kill his father and sleep with his mother and sister is not a disinterested augur but the soon-to-be-murdered father himself, who doesn't banish Kafka for it, and seems quite content with the arrangement, and in fact he probably was the one to ordain it. Fifteen-year-old Kafka bans himself from the kingdom, a great gated estate in Tokyo, maybe in order to avoid the curse but mainly to avoid his odious father entirely. His mother and sister left home when he was small and he does not know either of them. Lots of mystical events ensue, some of which are explained and others which are not.

It's very replete with cultural references, but in a way that's not annoying. There's a marriage of Western and Eastern artistic heritage that I find interesting. Many of the characters are conversant with the western literary and musical canons, and they also have a great interest in Japanese literature and art. I enjoyed feeling like that cleavage between the two histories isn't necessarily as deep and immutable as my university great books classes made it seem. I also like thinking about a world in which people are so in touch with literature and art, so day-to-day affected by them.

It's a fantasy book, I guess. Its mystical events are not just backdrop but central stage, the meat of the story. But it's an inward-looking, character-driven sort of fantasy. Even the other-worldly slime-being who climbs out of a dead man's mouth looking for a portal seems has personal salvation in mind.

An Upper-Middle-Class Manifesto

1. We will not hide our disapproval of drunks, especially if they are men of colour, walking on our streets.
2. We try to avoid all contact with people not like us, including changing our route so as not to drive through their neighbourhoods on the way to our summer cottages.
3. We will not hide our disgust, even when we are invited into people's homes and treated with civility. 

This is what I get from Paula Fox's Desperate Characters (1970). Jonathan Franzen, in his 1999 introduction, puts it this way:

Sophie and her husband, Otto, are pioneering urban gentry in the late 1960s, when the civilization of the Free World's leading city seems to be crumbling under a barrage of garbage, vomit and excrement, vandalism, fraud, and class hatred.

I don't want to sound mean or petty, but it just makes him sound like he's signing on to the manifesto. Franzen lives in Brooklyn, like Sophie and her husband Otto, and maybe he's also against drunks walking on the sidewalks of his neighbourhood. The Free World's leading city? I find it funny that New Yorkers always say that as though it's trivially true.

When I wrote about Fox's kids' book a few months ago I said I thought it was the perfect novella experience - more concise than a novel, but with more depth and breadth than a short story. This book, still a novella but over 50% longer than The Stone-Fraced Boy, at 153 pages, is more like a short story with a few extra scenes spliced in. Nothing happens. I like many novels where things happen very slowly, but there's usually something. Here there's a cat bite which might be infected but turns out not to be. There's no character growth, there's no realizations about their worlds or themselves, there's no change of situation of any kind. It's written nicely enough, and for the first fifty pages or so I enjoyed it, but then the relentless whining about poor people, without any authorial distance or perspective, got to me. I read to the end thinking there would be some kind of redeeming change in these people, but there wasn't. I found it too hard to take their eponymous desperation seriously when they were so callous about everyone around them.