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.

Boring old good and evil

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.

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.