Results matching “2666”

Life A User's Manual

By Emily on April 30, 2010 1:07 AM | <« | »>

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The painter and collage-ist Robert Rauschenberg came of age during the heyday of abstract expressionism in the New York scene; and while his own work involves a similar level of abstraction (as, for example, 1954's Charlene, pictured above), he often found himself at odds with the dominant rhetoric of the "tortured artist." "There was something about the self-confession and self-confusion of abstract expressionism," he says, "that personally always put me off."

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself; it revolved around words like "tortured," "struggle," "pain" [...] I could not see such conflicts in the materials and I knew that it had to be in the attitude of the painter [...] I used to think of that line in Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," about the sad cup of coffee. I've had cold coffee and hot coffee, good coffee and lousy coffee. But I've never had a sad cup of coffee.

Elsewhere, Rauschenberg tells his biographer "Work is my joy [...] I don't know anybody who loves work as much as I do."1

I thought about Rauschenberg a lot while reading Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual, and not just because Perec takes the novel to a conceptual height similar to that of the painter's "assemblage" innovations, or because they share a fondness for surprising connections among seemingly unrelated objects and stories, or because they both craft the unusual out of aggressively ordinary materials. No, what really struck me about the two men is the sheer joy they both seem to take in their chosen art form: their ecstatic fearlessness in the face of constraint, or lack thereof. To adopt Rauschenberg's language, I had seen many of the materials Perec uses before: the humorously overdone cataloging of objects, for example, and the repeated obsession with ordering of objects, both appear in the work of Perec's forerunners Samuel Beckett and Julio Cortázar, and his admirer Roberto Bolaño. But seldom have I seen these elements used as tools of sheer delight in the way Perec uses them. In Bolaño's 2666, the forensic cataloging of corpses reinforces the inhumanity of the Santa Teresa killings, and Beckett's characters' obsessive need to catalog the objects and events around them is a symptom of their sinister (yet hilarious) inability to break out of stagnation.

But Perec? It's easy to tell that for Perec, as for Rauschenberg, work—storytelling, word-painting—is a joy. Like his character Bartlebooth, he sets himself a strict yet more or less meaningless structural challenge. In Bartlebooth's case, this challenge consists of an ostensibly zero-sum loop: spend a decade learning to paint watercolors; two decades sailing around the world and painting sea-ports, which are then sent back to France and cut into jigsaw puzzles; two decades, upon his return, solving the jigsaw puzzles, upon which they are reconstituted and returned to their place of composition, dunked in an acid bath, and returned to their original state of pristine white paper. For Perec, the challenge is to construct a novel out of a series of motionless vignettes, each vignette featuring a different room or corridor in the same apartment building, at a moment when one particular event is taking place. Both the author and the character go about their assigned tasks with remarkable vigor, but Perec's performance is more remarkable than Bartlebooth's: whereas the fictioneer is merely competent, the author's narrative expands within his structural framework, flexing and reaching, revealing a tapestry of interwoven stories, all the tales of the current and former residents of the rue Simon-Crubellier as revealed through their rooms: their divans and settees; their crumpled letters lying in waste-paper bins; their traveling trunks stowed in their cellars; their blackened pearls; reproduction wall-hangings; foreign currency; collectible ink-blotters; books and paintings; photographs tucked under arms; all the artifacts of a century or more.

Life seems to me at once a compulsively structured exercise and a mass of undifferentiated stuff. In the face of this dichotomy, it's unsurprising that the book displays an obsession with the different possible ways of ordering things. The passages dealing with this obsession were consistently among my favorites; in addition to being great fun, I think they reflect something important about the book's essence. From a multitude of angles, Perec seems to be asking: "Is there a "proper" order to the objects we encounter? Are some methods of ordering better than others? Are all equally valid?" Here, for example, is Bartlebooth's valet Smautf, fretting over how (or, in the end, WHETHER) to sort the labels from his employer's twenty years of travel:

He wanted, so he said, to sort the labels into order, but it was very difficult: of course, there was chronological order, but he found it poor, even poorer than alphabetical order. He had tried by continents, then by country, but that didn't satisfy him. What he would have liked would be to link each label to the next, but each time in respect of something else: for example, they could have some detail in common, a mountain or volcano, an illuminated bay, some particular flower, the same red and gold edging, the beaming face of a groom, or the same dimensions, or the same typeface, or similar slogans ("Pearl of the Ocean," "Diamond of the Coast"), or a relationship based not on similarity but on opposition or a fragile, almost arbitrary association: a minute village by an Italian lake followed by the skyscrapers of Manhattan, skiers followed by swimmers, fireworks by candlelit dinner, railway by aeroplane, baccarat table by chemin de fer, etc. It's not just hard, Winckler added, above all it's useless: if you leave the labels unsorted and take two at random, you can be sure they'll have at least three things in common.

What strikes me about this passage is Smautf's criterion of "satisfaction": his preference for one classification system over another is pretty much purely a matter of aesthetics. By contrast, Western civilization has a lot of angst tied up in arguments over "true" classification: how closely grouped are humans and apes? Should animals be classed by method of reproduction, type of food, outer body covering, number of appendages, or some other factor? Should pagans be considered closer to Christians than Muslims? What is more valuable: a Fabergé egg or a Tiffany lamp? Here is Perec, arguing that all methods of classification are imposed from without, essentially a form of art, and that we are free to choose whichever schema appeals to us personally. Unless, like Winckler's jigsaws, a puzzle has been crafted with the puzzler in mind (which most of life, Perec seems to argue, is not), there is no "right" or "wrong" order.

Obviously, this idea can play havoc with one's idea of propriety and value, but it can also come as a relief, or even be exhilarating. Here, for example, we see the entire apartment building needlessly agonizing over the correct pronunciation of a neighbor's name, spelled "Cinoc":

Obviously the concierge didn't dare address him as "Nutcase" by pronouncing the name "Sinok." She questioned Valène, who suggested "Cinosh"; Winckler, who was for "Chinoch"; Morellet, who inclined toward "Sinots"; Mademoiselle Crespi, who proposed "Chinoss"; François Gratiolet, who prescribed "Tsinoc"; and finally Monsieur Echard, as a librarian well versed in recondite spellings and the appropriate ways of uttering them, demonstrated that, leaving aside any potential transformation of the intervocalic "n" into a "gn" or "nj" sound, and assuming once and for all, on principle, that "i" was pronounced "i" and the "o," "o," there were then four ways of saying the initial "c": "s," "ts," "sh," and "ch," and five ways of pronouncing the final: "s," "k," "ch," "sh," and "ts," and that, as a result, depending on the presence or absence of one or another diacritic sign or accent and according to the phonetic particularities of one or another language or dialect, there was a case for choosing from amongst the following twenty pronunciations:

SINOS SINOK SINOCH SINOSH SINOTS
TSINOS TSINOK TSINOCH TSINOSH TSINOTS
SHINOS SHINOK SHINOCH SHINOSH SHINOTS
CHINOS CHINOK CHINOCH CHINOSH CHINOTS

As a result of which, a delegation went to ask the principal person concerned, who replied that he didn't know himself which was the most proper way of pronouncing his name.

It turns out that the family's original surname was "Kleinhof," a pronunciation nobody would have considered based on the current spelling, and Cinoc himself maintains that "it wasn't at all important whichever way you wanted to pronounce it." Here we have all the humans in the rue Simon-Crubellier attempting to ascertain the "correct" order and combination of sounds to designate their neighbor, when in point of fact there literally IS no correction pronunciation, since Cinoc's name has traveled so far from the original "authentic" Kleinhof (if indeed "Kleinhof" itself was authentic) that it's no longer reasonable to claim that it ought to be pronounced in the old way, but no definitive new way has been settled upon by Cinoc himself or by anyone else. Thus, it seems to me, Perec often shows us puzzle pieces belonging to no puzzle—or, maybe, objects that have a tendency to look like puzzle pieces, but which are actually some quite different object, unless, like the collector of unica who must decide what qualifies as "genuine" and "one-of-a-kind," we can find a way to make them fit into an aesthetically-created puzzle of our own invention.

*******

Life A User's Manual was, ironically, my April read for the Non-Structured Book Group.

Other posts:

Up next month: Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels!


1All Rauschenberg quotes pulled from Robert Rauschenberg, a full-color monograph with text by Sam Hunter, published by Ediciones Polígrafa.

Year of Challenges: Complete!

By Emily on December 16, 2009 2:29 PM | <« | »>

Can you believe 2009 is almost over? This was the first year I spent keeping up a dedicated book blog, and I've met so many amazing people and read so many great books as part of the reading challenges I signed up for in the early days of Evening All Afternoon. Now that they're all finished I'm thinking about what my 2010 reading project(s) will be. Far fewer challenges, I think (although I am planning on joining Women Unbound - and just maybe the GLBT Challenge). I'll continue with my thoughts on the Great Ideas series. I'm greatly looking forward to the Woolf in Winter readalong in January and February, and further readalongs that will follow. Other than that, I think 2010 will be a year of less directed, more spontaneous reading. Sounds lovely.

And with that, here are the finished list, with links to all my reviews. They're in reverse finishing order.

Decades '09
(10 out of 10 completed)

Japanese Literature Challenge 3
(1 out of 1 completed)

Orbis Terrarum
(10 out of 10 completed)
I have to give a special shout-out to the Orbis Terrarum Challenge. Without it I wouldn't have met Richard, Claire, Sarah, and probably others of my bloggy friends as well (it's hard to keep track of where y'all came from!). MUCH THANKS to Bethany for putting it all together.

Dewey Decimal
(10 out of 10 completed)

What's in a Name
(6 out of 6 completed)

9 for 2009 Challenge
(9 out of 9 completed)

2666: The Part About Archimboldi (Part 5)

By Emily on September 30, 2009 10:40 AM | <« | »>
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My readalong friends! Even though I turned the last page of 2666 and wrote the following post several months ago, I've been putting off publishing it because of my sense of loss at this fantastic readalong finally ending. The book alone would have been a great ride, but meeting all of you and having our discussions...let's just say, I feel lucky to have stumbled into such a special reading experience. And I'm psyched that so many members of our group will be meeting again for Kristin Lavransdatter, yet it's still a little sad to be saying goodbye to Bolaño. But enough sentimentality! Here's what I wrote after finishing 2666 all those months ago.

There's a lot of talk, in bookish circles, about "circular narratives": stories that take the reader on a journey, only to return, in the end, to the point of departure, imparting in the process a new perspective. Roberto Bolaño's 2666 also returns to the point of departure, to "the scene of the crime," as one character puts it. In many ways, The Part About Archimboldi deposits the reader back in the world of The Part About the Critics: a European world, insular, preoccupied with the struggle between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and preoccupied with literature - preoccupied, in particular, with Benno von Archimboldi, the elusive novelist pursued by the critics of the first part, and here followed from his seaweed-obsessed boyhood, through his service as a soldier during the Second World War, and into his old age. Toward the middle and end of the fifth part, we even find ourselves back behind the scenes of the literature machine manned by Mr. and Mrs. Bubis, as we witness interactions at the publishing house and in the salons of literary critics. Once again we are treated to the light, satirical touch that characterized The Part about the Critics. (One of my favorite satirical passages of the fifth part concerns a woman at a dinner party whose unhappy expression escaped no one

"except Willy, the other literary critic, whose specialty was philosophy and who therefore reviewed philosophy books and whose hope was someday to publish a book of philosophy, three occupations, if they could be called that, which made him especially insensitive to indications of the state of mind (or soul) of a fellow diner."

There wasn't too much of this kind of high-brow ribbing in The Part About the Crimes.)

Nevertheless, I wouldn't describe the structure of 2666 as circular. In fact, I'd say it looks more like this:

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The first three books tighten into an ever-more tense and surreal vortex, narrowing uncomfortably toward the mysterious wrongness in Santa Teresa, Mexico, which is related to the sexual homicides being committed there. Just as the third part reaches a climactic pinhole, the narration suddenly widens, becomes a stark, straightforward descent through a pile of dead bodies, the hardboiled chronicling of the female corpses of Santa Teresa, and of the inability of police, private citizens, detectives and seers to stop the perpetual appearances of more. As opposed to the increasing tension of the first three parts, I experienced the fourth part to be even throughout, tension released and stark reality confronted. Then, in The Part About Archimboldi, the narrative turns a sharp corner into something more like a traditional bildungsroman, in which a young boy grows up, lives his life and finds his calling: a calling which gradually curves toward the literary world of the first part, and a life which, even more tangentially, intersects with the Santa Teresa killings.

I can't decide to what extent I feel the loose ends are tied up as 2666 draws to its close - nor am I sure to what extent I want them to be. Surely, given the still-unsolved nature of the Juarez crimes on which those in Santa Teresa are based, it would seem wrong to provide an easy answer to the central, unanswered questions: what is the truth behind the killings? Who is responsible for them, and what has gone so horribly wrong in this person's mind and the world outside it? Maybe it's not possible to answer this last, despite the tidy endings of most detective novels: how to locate the ongoing sickness that makes humans engage in extreme violence, whether the atrocities of war, the mutilation of female factory workers, or the savage beating of a sexist taxi driver?

The whole of 2666 brings the world of reading and writing into contact with the world of violence, and it seems to me that they coexist, without negating each other. It doesn't seem to me that 2666 is asking "What is the point of art in such a fucked up world?" Often, this is the way the debate is framed, as if art must somehow overcome the world's darkness in order to validate itself. Bolaño, on the other hand, lets them exist simultaneously, each on its own terms. It doesn't seem to me that literature or art, in Bolaño, can rescue a person from violence or explain the violence away. Art doesn't even necessarily engage with the violence - the book that alleviates the tedium of Barry Seaman's jail time, for example, An Abridged Digest of the Complete Works of Voltaire, has little to do with the race-motivated violence that landed him inside. In fact, the title of this book is so odd-seeming that Oscar Fate remembers it later and laughs about it. But Seaman argues that reading - reading just about anything, he seems to mean - is an inherently useful activity:

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other peoples' ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.

In other words, reading is a way of living one's life, a way of bringing oneself into contact with the vast vitality of existence. And some way of being present in one's life is necessary for survival, regardless of the rest of one's environment. Or maybe I should say it is an indicator of survival. I wouldn't go so far as to claim that The Part About the Crimes, the only section of the novel in which nobody seems to read anything (policeman Epifanio is even amused when his young protegé Lalo Cura asks if he can bring home some outdated detection manuals lying neglected in the Santa Teresa police station), owes its plethora of corpses to the conspicuous absence of books. But the two could both be symptoms of that underlying wrongness. And the underlying wrongness could be a lack of presence on the part of some person or some group of people - people who are not, to use Seaman's language, thinking, praying, talking to friends, expressing their thoughts, listening to other peoples' ideas, listening to music, looking at the view, walking on the beach, or, indeed, reading, but existing without presence in a void of destruction. Indeed, one of my favorite passages in the entire novel contrasts this destructive void with a compassionate, imaginative act not unlike reading:

"His name was Dmitry Verbitsky," said the one-eyed man from his corner, "and he died fifty miles from Warsaw."
        Then the one-eyed man shifted in his chair, pulled a blanket up to his chin, and said: our commander's name was Korolenko and he died the same day. Then, at supersonic speed, Ansky imagined Verbitsky and Kerolenko, he saw Korolenko mocking Verbitsky, heard what Korolenko said behind Verbitsky's back, entered into Verbitsky's night thoughts, Korolenko's desires, into each man's vague and shifting dreams, into their convictions and their rides on horseback, the forests they left behind and the flooded lands they crossed, the sounds of night in the open and the unintelligible morning conversations before they mounted again. He saw villages and farmland, he saw churches and hazy clouds of smoke rising on the horizon, until he came to the day they both died, Verbitsky and Korolenko, a perfectly gray day, utterly gray, as if a thousand-mile-long cloud had passed over the land without stopping, endless.
        At that moment, which hardly lasted a second, Ansky decided that he didn't want to be a soldier, but at that very same moment the officer handed him a paper and told him to sign. Now he was a soldier.

There are so many details in this epic tome on which I would love to focus, which I'm sure would prove fruitful, but I'm overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of them. I'm intrigued, for example, at the prevalence in The Part About Archimboldi of people talking to themselves (a preoccupation of mine ever since reading Woolf's The Years). It's described as "a common sight" to see people talking to themselves in post-war Cologne, and, later on, Archimboldi is driven by a taxi driver who talks to himself. Merely examining the roles of taxi drivers in this novel could produce an intriguing study, as would contrasting Bolaño's portrayal of reading with his portrayal of writing. And of course, the sexualization of violence would be a fertile theme as well (taken, I thought, in an interesting direction by the naked crucifixion of Entrescu). So too, I would love to examine The Part About Archimboldi through the lens of all the references to detective novels (writing as similar to "the pleasure of the detective on the heels of the killer," for example, or the old woman's insistence that Archimboldi not "return to the scene of the crime") in light of the soul-numbing reality of the Santa Teresa murders outlined in The Part About the Crimes.

But alas, it's not going to happen in this blog entry. I look forward to many re-reads of 2666, and now that I have some experience of the novel, I can pick and choose what to focus on when I revisit it. MANY thanks to Claire and Steph for suggesting this readalong; I've benefited enormously from the book itself, and the act of reading it with so many other smart, perceptive people. Ciao for now, everyone!

Thoughts on Part 1: The Part About the Critics
Thoughts on Part 2: The Part About Archimboldi
Thoughts on Part 3: The Part About Fate
Thoughts on Part 4: The Part About the Crimes

(2666 is my eighth book for the Orbis Terrarum Challenge, representing Chile.)

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

By Emily on September 24, 2009 9:53 AM | <« | »>
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Lest anyone think it's getting to be all Susan McClary all the time around here, with her "feminist" this and "alternative" that, I present you with my most recent read: Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, otherwise known as "the most grotesquely violent novel I have ever read." That's right: this book is way more violent than Part 4 of Bolaño's 2666, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. Ironically, I had taken issue with Bolaño's chosen point of view: we are only privy to the evidence of "The Crimes," rather than witnessing them first-hand. Anybody picking up Blood Meridian can certainly rest easy in that regard: most of the legion atrocities committed in this book are related in brutal, bullet-by-bullet detail - although, to call them "crimes" would be to ignore the fundamental moral vacuum that dwells at the heart of McCarthy's border country. Blood Meridian takes the romanticized, sepia-toned mythos of the Wild West, the legends about men escaping restrictive over-civilization and achieving a freedom to live in rough but rewarding brotherhood, and systematically destroys it in an avalanche of casual scalpings, gurgling pools of blood, and trees full of murdered babies hung by their jaws. Its bounty-hunting characters, far from the charismatic outlaws of folk legend, are blood-blackened butchers, completely lacking in the notion of any higher virtue than to survive as long as possible at the expense of anyone and everyone else. The times, far from being simpler, are fraught with war, exposure, and bare desperation. Almost every time I picked the book up, I encountered multiple passages that inspired me to make revolted noises out loud - and then, much to his chagrin, to share said passages with David as he tried to concentrate on something else. One night, as we walked the dog and I recounted the part about the man dragging himself through the desert after having the soles of his feet cut off, David asked, reasonably enough: "So...is it good?" and I found, a little to my surprise, that I unhesitatingly answered "Yes."

What redeems this morass of gore-soaked treachery? It's easy to praise the beauty of McCarthy's writing, which most often struck me as breathtaking and only occasionally crossed the line into overwrought. Passages like the following, unfolding in a rumbling, biblically-inflected cadence that reminded me of Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, went a long way to keeping me reading whenever I was tempted to stop:

The sun rose on a column already ragged these six days out. Among their clothes there was small agreement and among their hats less. The little painted horses stepped shifty and truculent and a vicious snarl of flies fought constantly in the bed of the gamewagon. The dust the party raised was quickly dispersed and lost in the immensity of that landscape and there was no dust other for the pale sutler who pursued them drives unseen and his lean horse and his lean cart leave no track upon such ground or any ground. By a thousand fires in the iron blue dusk he keeps his commissary and he's a wry and grinning tradesman good to follow every campaign or hound men from their holes in just those whited regions where they've gone to hide from God.

Or this:

All the creatures that had been at vigil with him in the night were gone and about him lay only the strange coral shapes of fulgerite in their scorched furrows fused out of the sand where ball lightning had run upon the ground in the night hissing and stinking of sulphur.

Seated tailorwise in the eye of that cratered waste he watched the world tend away at the edges to a shimmering surmise that ringed the desert round.

Amazing stuff. But, as one LibraryThing reviewer asked, are we supposed to wade through three hundred pages of unredeemed murder because of a few literary flourishes? If this were all the novel offered, even I (and I love a gorgeous writing style) would have to agree. But I think McCarthy is doing so much more. I think he's interrogating the nature of evil, and asking questions about action and intention which I'm still mulling over.

On one level, there is the Grecian inevitability about the books's narrative arc: the Mexican government, which has been colonizing Indian land that the Apaches have been defending, offers a bounty on Apache scalps. McCarthy makes the valid point that from this decision, the entire descent into chaos is unstoppable: the bounty hunters, a troupe of desperate and brutal Americans exiled from their own country, are given a hero's welcome, but they soon progress from battling the aggressive Apaches, to slaughtering peaceful Indian tribes in their encampments, to butchering and scalping the Mexicans themselves, to (eventually) murdering each other. After all, one scalp is indistinguishable from another. By the time the Chihuahuan coffers are bankrupted and the bounty rescinded, the entire citizenry is living in fear and a band of voracious killers is set loose upon the land, to survive however they can. Considering that there will always be a class of the absolutely desperate, every step in this descent is predictable to the point of inevitability: the Chihuahuan government brings about its own destruction in setting the bounty to begin with.

Most of the members of the bounty-hunting band, though, are operating on that basic level of survival: their brutalities are committed because in their experience, there is no other way. Either they have never been exposed to any different notion, or it's been beaten out of them by experience. Between the eleven-year-old kid who runs away from the shack of his alcoholic father, and the scarred and hardened product of Van Dieman's Land with his necklace of human ears, these men are products of the world in which they live - a world which allows no margin for hesitation. I think one of the functions of the extreme violence in the novel is to stress that McCarthy isn't apologizing for these men. The reader is constantly reminded what brutal, treacherous, repulsive people they are. The fact that they are unthinking products of their environment coexists with their actions, to some extent explaining but never excusing them.

Contrasted with all other members of the band, McCarthy gives us the larger-than-life figure of Judge Holden: educated and almost preternaturally skilled, he speaks five languages and is an accomplished draftsman, knowledgeable about art, botany, philosophy, and chemistry, facile with conversation and gifted with money. In other words, it's obvious that the judge, out of all the members of the band, chooses the life of utter brutality he's living - and furthermore, it's obvious that he enjoys it. The first time we meet him, Judge Holden walks into a revivalist's tent and exposes the preacher for a fraud: wanted in five counties, the judge says, the man's a pedophile and a thief. After whipping the rough crowd into a murderous mob, the judge walks away. A few pages later, we learn that he had never heard of the preacher before in his life; that all of his accusations were completely fabricated, and that the impulse spurring him to craft his lies was not one of passion or revenge, but of pure, undirected malice. This is a fair introduction to Holden: he's the spirit of darkest nihilism made flesh, a sharp-witted sadist who delights in control - of people, of situations, of information. He believes himself the rightful master of any person or landscape he encounters, and he delights in proving his sovereignty. And the question I pondered throughout all this was: is the judge worse than the other members of the band?

It's not like the acts performed by Holden are measurably worse than those performed by the rest of the gang. Every member in it actively seeks out and commits terrible violence, and the judge is no different. Does his bare enjoyment of the life he's living make him into more of a monster than the other characters? Something in my gut believes that yes, the judge is creepier and darker than the other gang members because of his nihilistic delight, because of his own conviction that he is an immortal god among men and that murder is his right. But something else in me believes that intention doesn't really matter here, that what matters are the actions of the characters, and that they are all equally heinous in that regard, the judge no more than the others. Because if I claim that the judge is worse, wouldn't I be implying that the others are better? And does it really make a remorseless mercenary "better" if he's murdering and maiming in order to earn a few bucks and some swallows of whiskey, rather than because he believes himself some kind of immortal war-god bringing men to a final reckoning? Furthermore, is it even valid to make this kind of moral distinction about a world itself devoid of even the most basic morality? I don't have the answers, but I'm indebted to McCarthy for bringing up, not for the first time, these very interesting questions.

(Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West was my sixth and final book for the What's in a Name Challenge, representing the "time of day" category.)

Delta Wedding

By Emily on September 16, 2009 1:18 AM | <« | »>
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I've been writing a lot lately about feminist musicologist Susan McClary and her ideas about the need for an alternative narrative practice. McClary goes in search of a mode of storytelling that does not dwell in a land of perpetual desire, of constant striving for a climax or resolution which, once achieved, spells the end of the story (the so-called "phallic" or "heroic" narrative arc), but that instead stresses pleasure over desire, that glories in what McClary calls a "voluptuous 'being-in-time' quality" - an examination of what we have and who we are, rather than what I want and who I would rather be. Understandably, when I've written about this in the past certain people have commented thusly: "That's a cool idea, but what would a "non-phallic" novel look like?" Well now, my friends, I can tell you: for a heartbreakingly beautiful example of prose that savors its own moment, its voluptuous being-in-time, look no further than Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding.

The plot of Delta Wedding is so simple it's basically contained in the title: Welty gives us subtle, lush, yet endlessly dynamic portrait of a large family in the Mississippi Delta, preparing for the wedding of their second daughter as the bustle of life goes on around the group and its individual members. The Fairchild clan is always in motion: "there's always so much - so much happening here!" cries an aunt delightedly, and Welty excels at capturing the lovingly oppressive whirl of the packed plantation house, bursting at the seams with arrivals, departures, personal legends and their aftermaths, cross-currents of conversation, momentary crises and unlooked-for delights. Yet many characters realize, or feel, at different moments, that for all the whirling bustle of the Fairchild life, there is a way in which their constant state of iridescent change is itself an unchanging landscape

Robbie put her hand up to her head a minute as she danced, against the whirl. Dabney was dancing before her, by herself, eyes shining on them all...Indeed the Fairchilds took you in circles, whirling delightedly about, she thought, stirring up confusions, hopefully working themselves up. But they did not really want anything they got - and nothing, really, nothing really so very much, happened! But the next moment Miss Primrose and Miss Jim Allen arrived with so much authority and ado that she almost had to believe in them.

Throughout this novel, Welty plays with the tension between the changing and unchanging, the momentary and the perennial. In describing the Delta twilight, she writes, "It was not yet dark - it would never get dark." A baby is about to be born who will carry the name of his dead war-hero uncle, long remembered by the family. And at the close of the book, one of the youngest children tells her cousin "My secret is...I've seen it all afore. It's all happened afore." Welty situates her narrative at a day of transition - a wedding, after which Dabney Fairchild will leave her parents' home. Change: and yet, Dabney and her new husband Troy will still live in a house owned by the Fairchild family, only a short ride away. This seeming change is just another step in the process of perpetuating the close Fairchild family ties into another generation. The clan as a whole functions as its own character, and yet individuals walk their own paths within it - sometimes honoring the status quo, sometimes rebelling against it; sometimes craving the attention of the Fairchilds, and sometimes longing to escape. Even Dabney's marriage is conceived as a kind of rebellion - she is marrying "beneath her" as a gesture of independence, to the dismay of much of her family. But at the same time, many of her other family members have also married out of their class, including the favorite son, Uncle George, on whom everyone fawns. So Dabney is simultaneously challenging the family structure, and yet fitting in perfectly with it; moving away from it, and yet forming its next branch. Delta Wedding catches her at that exhilarating, headstrong moment of youth when her passionate resolutions have yet to be tested or compromised:

The eagerness with which she was now going to Marmion, entering her real life there with Troy, told her enough - all the cotton in the world was not worth one moment of life! It made her know that nothing could ever defy her enough to make her leave it. How sweet life was, and how well she could hold it, pluck it, eat it, lay her cheek to it - oh, no one else knew. The juice of life and the hot, delighting taste and the fragrance and warmth to the cheek, the mouth....

"I will never give up anything!" Dabney thought, bending forward and laying her head against the soft neck. "Never! Never! For I am happy, and to give up nothing will prove it. I will never give up anything, never give up Troy - or to Troy!" She thought smilingly of Troy, coming slowly, this was the last day, slowly plodding and figuring, sprung all over with red-gold hairs.

Like Virginia Woolf (of whom Welty strongly reminds me), Welty astounds with her ability to communicate the unexpected yet crucial importance of certain crystallized moments in time - the tiny catalysts that prompt a blaze of emotion or insight out of all proportion to the initial tiny spark - and the deep, quiet pools of reflection that unfurl within her characters at the oddest moments - while picking up a piece of cake at a rehearsal dinner, or waiting for the photographer to get everyone posed in a line.

"Not for me, not for me," she murmured, stunned at the sight of George at that moment offering the loaded [cake] plate to her. It seemed to Shelley all at once as if the whole room should protest, as if alarm and protest should be the nature of the body. Life was too easy - too easily holy, too easily not. It could change in a moment. Life was not ever inviolate. Dabney, poor sister and bride, shed tears this morning (though belatedly) because she had broken the Fairchild night light the aunts had given her; it seemed so unavoidable to Dabney, that was why she cried, as if she had felt it was part of her being married that this cherished little bit of other peoples' lives should be shattered now. Dabney at the moment cutting a lemon for the aunts' tea brought the tears to Shelley's eyes...

One of the things I most treasure about both Woolf and Welty is the subtle and perceptive ways they both portray human communication. A lot of modern, and modernist, writing focuses on the ways in which our standard modes of communication fall short: a husband and wife are unable to say "I love you"; a supposed mourner feels nothing at his mother's funeral; two lovers make wildly erroneous assumptions about one another's feelings; a gulf grows between a father and mother because they cannot discuss their dead baby. Welty and Woolf explore these truths as well, but they also portray the flip side: the fact that, just as communication often fails when we try for it directly, so too it often succeeds in unexpected and unlooked-for ways: the glance of empathy that connects two sisters across a room full of family; the way the minds of two old friends can flow easily in and out of each others' thoughts; the unexpected welcome of an errant daughter-in-law by a family expected to reject or punish her; a favorite uncle's genuine compassion when his niece steals his pipe in order to give it back to him as a present; the self-sacrifice of two maiden aunts, giving their most precious possession to a headstrong young bride. Welty seems to argue, here, that although we can none of us predict or wholly understand ourselves or others, and although our attempts at connection will seldom work as we intend, there are still moments of true, loving communion available to us in the world, and they will come to us unexpectedly, as gifts.

It seemed to Ellen at moments that George regarded them, and regarded things - just things, in the outside world - with a passion which held him so still that it resembled indifference. Perhaps it was indifference - as though they, having given him this astonishing feeling, might for a time float away and he not care. It was not love or passion itself that stirred him, necessarily, she felt - for instance, Dabney's marriage seemed not to have affected him greatly, or Robbie's anguish. But little Ranny, a flower, a horse running, a color, a terrible story listened to in the store in Fairchilds, or a common song, and yes, shock, physical danger, as Robbie had discovered, roused something in him that was immense contemplation, motionless pity, indifference...Then, he would come forward all smiles as if in greeting - come out of his intensity and give some child a spank or a present. Ellen had always felt this about George and now there was something of surprising kinship in the feeling ... In the midst of the room's commotion he stood by the mantel as if at rest.

(Delta Wedding was my fifth book for the Decades '09 Challenge, representing the 1940s.)

Kristin Lavransdatter Readalong!

By Emily on September 13, 2009 4:38 PM | <« | »>

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Richard and I, co-participants in Claire and Steph's Bolaño readalong, realized a week ago that we were going to be totally beside ourselves once it finishes at the end of this month. It's been completely amazing to read this novel with so many other fantastic bloggers, and we don't want it to end. Our solution? Continue right on reading together, this time with a different book!

So, here's the scoop. Starting in October and continuing through December, we'll be tackling the three volumes of Sigrid Undset's classic Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, one volume per month. Aside from its similar bulk, Kristin is going to be a very different ride from 2666: set in medieval Norway, its three volumes track young Kristin from early childhood through marriage and into old age. In the process, Undset portrays a Scandinavia in the process of transition from old belief systems to Christianity, and populates it (so I hear) with a host of interesting, complex characters. The books are often called "modernist" (they were originally published in 1920-1922) which fascinates me because I've never read modernist or experimental fiction set so far in the past. Undset won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928, and Kristin is her best-known work, so I'm looking forward to giving it a try.

We'll be reading the Tina Nunnally translation, which won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize in 2001 and apparently restored a number of the more experimental passages, which had been excised from the original English translation. It's available from Penguin in both omnibus and three individual editions.

Just like with Bolaño, people will all post their reviews of each section around the end of the month, and we can compare notes. The casual schedule is as follows, with pagination from my omnibus edition, pictured above:


  • October: The Wreath (pages 1-291)

  • November: The Wife (pages 295-697)

  • December: The Cross (pages 703-1124)

Feel like reading along? We've got an awesome group so far:

Just looking at that list makes me so excited to get started. Anyone who feels the same way is welcome to join in; just leave a comment here or on Richard's blog to let us know, and we'll corral everyone's entries for easy reference when they start appearing.

I can't wait!

2666: The Part About the Crimes (Book 4)

By Emily on August 31, 2009 1:08 AM | <« | »>
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For better and worse, the fourth section of Roberto Bolaño's 2666 was, almost universally, not what I expected.

There were three things that did line up with my expectations: The Part About the Crimes was thought-provoking, well-written, and dealt, as the title implies, with the hundreds of sexual homicides committed against women in Mexican border-town Santa Teresa (Bolaño's fictionalized version of Ciudad Juarez). But the ways in which these things were true greatly surprised me, and I thought I would organize my thoughts around all those surprises.

First of all, after the slow, Lynchean tension and (as I said in my thoughts on Part 1) "bizarre, semi-surreal wrongness" of the first three parts of the novel, the reader suddenly finds herself, in Part 4, deposited instead in the the clipped, no-nonsense language of a police procedural. Most scenes in The Part About the Crimes are more reminiscent of Elmore Leonard or James Ellroy than than Vladmimir Nabokov, more suggestive of L.A. Confidential than Mulholland Drive:

The woman was wearing a white dress and she was barefoot. She was about five foot seven. There were three cheap rings on her left hand, on the index finger, middle finger, and ring finger. On her right hand she was wearing a couple of bracelets and two big rings with fake stones. According to the medical examiner's report, she had been vaginally and anally raped and then strangled. She wasn't carrying any identification. The case was assigned to Inspector Ernesto Ortiz Rebolledo, who first made inquiries among Santa Teresa's high-class hookers to see whether anyone knew the dead woman, and then, when his questioning yielded scant results, among the cheap hookers, but no one from either group had seen her before.

I found this sylistic shift to be disconcerting, but ultimately quite effective. All along, I had assumed that the root of the wrongness, that intangible thing that was nightmarishly "off" in Santa Teresa, WAS the murders. I had subconsciously assumed that to see the crimes themselves would be to come face to face with the mysterious wrongness - and I think that this is the assumption around which most police dramas revolve. The Part About the Crimes deconstructs this assumption in just about every way possible, and its first method is to remove the sense of mystery, of intangibility, as soon as the crimes are revealed. It's as if the reader has been walking down a long hallway, as Oscar does in The Part About Fate, with a mysterious, tinted light at the end of it. Perhaps there is some distorted music playing in the distance. The reader brushes away veils, distractions, grotesque strangers met in the corridor, and eventually reaches out her hand, pushing the door inward to reveal the mysterious contents of the room...and right at that moment, someone flicks on the switch. The light is no longer sickly green, but plain, everyday white. The occupants of the room are not a sinister pair of businessmen and a femme fatale, but a team of bored cops performing a routine investigation. One of the cops walks over and hits a button on a boom box, and the atmospheric music clicks off. Everything is factual, mundane, even tedious. And yet...there are still hundreds of unsolved murders. Something is still very wrong, but merely looking at the discarded bodies of the murdered women can bring no enlightenment. The wrongness dwells elsewhere.

In a standard police drama, the mysterious horror of human crime is made "okay," neutralized, by the way in which it's solved and explained in the course of the story. I think this is the reason so many readers find murder mysteries to be a comforting genre, even when the crimes involved are horrific. The plot is formulaic and the action, in the abstract, predictable: the reader is presented with the description of a crime scene, sometimes multiple crime scenes, and tries to absorb all the details in order to "solve the mystery" later on. Soon the cops arrive. Sometimes the initial wave of police are corrupt or lazy, inclined to sweep the whole thing under the rug. Eventually, though, the reader is introduced to the main character, who, due either to professional integrity, a personal vendetta, or sheer cussedness, is invested in "getting to the bottom" of the crimes. He (for it is usually a man) strikes out on his investigation, uncovering relevant secrets and overcoming various obstacles. If the story began with multiple, seemingly unrelated crimes, the protagonist usually comes across evidence that connects them. He convinces himself of the true culprit, then runs various risks gathering enough evidence to prove his suspicions. In the end, whether he apprehends the criminal, witnesses the criminal's death, or is forced to let the criminal go, he has at least explained the sequence of events to his own and the reader's satisfaction.

Bolaño turns all this on its head, and toys gleefully with the expectations produced by the crime-writing quality of his language. In the first place, the sheer volume of the Santa Teresa murders would quickly overwhelm any reader stubbornly attempting to process each crime scene in the traditional way, much as it overwhelms the resources of the Santa Teresa police department itself. Whereas, in a traditional cop drama, we are hardly ever treated to descriptions of crimes truly unrelated to the main action, The Part About the Crimes summarizes the discovery of every single female victim of violent death between 1993 and 1997, including those which are proved - or not proved - to be isolated incidents, usually family violence on the part of boyfriends, husbands, or fathers. Presenting this unfiltered, yet clinical, view of the violence against women in Santa Teresa creates a kind of background noise - the constant reports of dead women are like a skipping record against which the reader comes up again and again, always expecting, in vain, to progress to the next bar, the next phase of the mystery plot. Bolaño refuses us a beginning, middle, and end, and gives us instead a perpetual beginning, crime piling on top of crime in a way that obscures them all and confuses any attempts at forward progress.

So too, unlike the neat and tidy, identically "signed" serial murders featured in many crime plots, the Santa Teresa murders are messy, illogical: there are too many specific linking elements to be coincidental, yet many seemingly connected murders lack some or all of the "signature" ingredients. Many women are found anally and vaginally raped and then strangled, but many others are found stabbed, and some are not raped. Many of the victims have long hair, but, as another character points out, this is a trait shared by most of the female population of Santa Teresa. Many witnesses report having seen the victims coerced into a black Peregrino (like the one parked outside Amalfitano's house in Part 2), but on the few occasions the cops manage to catch up with such a car, those who possess it are thieves, who just stole it and don't know its history. Most victims are murdered elsewhere and transported to the place where their bodies are dumped, but this is not always true. As one police inspector tells a reporter toward the end of The Part About the Crimess, it seems futile to apply any organized logic to the pattern of attacks: "It's fucked up, that's the only explanation." This is not the message the reader is left with in a traditional police drama, but it may be a more honest one.

I spent a long time thinking about the presentation of "the crimes" in this section, and how I feel about it. For some reason, I had expected The Part About the Crimes to deal with the murders as they happened, from the perspective of a third-person narrator who would probably have access to the victims' thoughts and feelings. On the one hand, I'm relieved that this wasn't the case, because I don't think I could have made it through that many rapes and murders at such close quarters. Examining what's left over afterward is much easier, and can be much more concise. On the other hand, the decision to present not so much the crimes as the evidence of the crimes, seems to depersonalize the victims in the same way their attackers did. It makes the police the protagonists of the story, rather than the women. To a certain extent this is probably inevitable - as I said, detailed descriptions of the actual crimes would quickly become too disturbing for most readers, including me. And I do think Bolaño's decision to chronicle each specific dead woman, rather than merely stating "That month a dozen more bodies were found," accords each victim some degree of individuality, as well as developing the messiness and confusion of the investigations.

Bolaño confronts the reality of misogyny and classism in Mexican society - especially within the police force - in a way that definitely doesn't condone it. He makes it clear that, despite the overwhelming volume of murders confronting them, the police would be more motivated to solve these crimes if most of the victims were not lower-class maquiladora workers, and female. Many of the cops share, to some degree, the killer's (or killers') view of these women as disposable trash, as evidenced by their joking conversations about how many ways it is possible to rape a woman, and their morning sessions of sexist jokes. The depictions of these callous, sexist cops is far from flattering, and the police who are as close to "heroes" as the novel gives us, are those who oppose them. But I still have mixed feelings about the treatment of women at the hands of the narrative in this section, and I'd be interested in others' thoughts. Is there a feminist way to write a novel about something like the Juarez murders? Maybe, maybe not.

I found The Part About the Crimes less pleasant to read than the first three books of 2666. The seemingly endless descriptions of female corpses got tedious, despite my previous comments about honoring each victim's individual identity, and there were fewer flashes of the satirical humor that pervaded the first few sections. Nevertheless, I thought it did important work: it interrogates what we expect from a crime novel, and posits that our desire to be comforted by a neat, satisfying conclusion after a spate of grisly murders is, in words of Inspector José Márquez, "fucked up, that's the only explanation." I am extremely curious to move on to Part 5, and see where Bolaño's narrative arc will take me.

Dorky lit-crit note, added August 18: While reading Susan McClary's Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, it occurred to me that Bolaño's refusal to "move on" with the story in Part 4, but instead to "stall" in a perpetual beginning of endless crime scenes, could actually be read as explicitly feminist. McClary argues that the traditional story arc, in which the protagonist works diligently toward a climax, overcoming certain obstacles in order to reach his successful conclusion, is a narrative model predicated on a forceful, stereotypically individualist male erotic practice. I know that this will sound wacky to people not used to thinking in terms of feminist criticism, but it strikes me as profoundly relevant. The audience (reader or listener) is taught, by encountering this narrative arc again and again in every TV show and Saturday morning cartoon, to crave that final climax even if - perhaps especially if - it requires a violent explosion of force to bring about. McClary points out that, although this model seems universal and "just the way things go" to modern folks, it hasn't always been the case: prior to the seventeenth century, there were many musical and lyric modes that stressed pleasure rather than desire, which gloried in a voluptuous "being-in-time" quality, rather than an individualistic striving after change and closure. It occurs to me that the standard detective-story narrative is one of the most blatant literary examples of this phallic striving-to-climax model: it even finishes, frequently, with an orgasmic car chase, gun fight, or other display of violent bravado. It therefore makes sense to choose to problematize the detective novel format when writing about the Santa Teresa murders, since all the dead women are victims of exactly the same kind of individualistic male sexual violence that McClary associates with the buildup-to-climax storyline. Perhaps Bolaño didn't want to perpetuate said violence all over again in his narrative structure. Again, I know it sounds kind of off-the-wall, but it was an idea that intrigued me.

Thoughts on Part 3: The Part About Fate
Thoughts on Part 2: The Part About Amalfitano
Thoughts on Part 1: The Part About The Critics

Ourania, or, on reading in French

By Emily on August 28, 2009 6:28 AM | <« | »>
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J.M.G. Le Clézio's Ourania is the first full-length novel I've ever read in the original French. I'm proud of the accomplishment, since I started taking French during college in order to read Proust in the original; it feels great to be progressing toward that goal. Yay! I liked Le Clézio's writing style, and had mixed feelings about his plot: a French geologist, who as a child distracted himself from the Nazi invasion by imagining a Utopian land, travels as an adult to Mexico, where he encounters two more attempts at Utopias: an egalitarian academic Institute, and a sort of hippie commune for society's outsiders; both are doomed to failure. But more than that, it was enormously enriching (and frustrating, and empowering!) to start making this language my own on a footing of sophisticated, adult literature. Huge thanks to my friend Marie Christine for bringing me Ourania all the way from Toulouse!

The act of reading in a second language vastly colored my perception of this novel; much of my experience of it was the experience of reading French, rather than the experience of reading Ourania specifically. Reading in translation had its triumphs and frustrations for me; there were only a few passages, for example, in which I could absorb the rhythm and flow of the language, the atmosphere of the scene, in the same way I do effortlessly when reading English prose. (When I did succeed at this, I typically made the kid-learning-to-ride-a-bike mistake of realizing I was doing it, thinking to myself "Look! I'm doing it!" and then promptly losing the ability because I was distracted.) I'm not conscious of skipping over words when I read in English; in fact, I usually pride myself on being a pretty careful reader. But dealing with non-English prose really made me realize how much I take for granted when reading natively: a large vocabulary, colloquial turns of phrase, the small details of tone and cadence that create particular moods or signal different authorial styles. In French I was forced to slow WAY down, increase my levels of patience with making slow progress, and learn when to look words up and when to read for rhythm and general meaning.

Interestingly, I also found that reading in French made me hyper-sensitive to individual words - sort of like an enforced close-reading exercise. Whereas in English I am often conscious of the richness of prose overall, my reading in French currently involves more acquisition and appreciation of individual words. (I think my favorite of the words I picked up from Ourania is recroquevillé(e) - curled or shriveled up. It rolls off the tongue so nicely!) Early in the novel, I noticed the narrator's use of the adjective "vide" - empty or void, which can also be a noun and has a verb form vider - to describe a look in his grandfather's eyes. Shortly thereafter I started noticing the word cropping up all over the novel - a total of twenty-three instances, at least that I noticed.

  • "Il y avait des corbeaux dans les champs de pommes de terre, ils tenaient des sortes de réunions, leurs glapissements emplissaient le ciel vide." (15) /
    "There were ravens in the potato fields; they had kind of gatherings there, their barking filling the empty sky."
  • "Le rez-de-chaussée était composé d'une grande pièce vide qui avait servi autrefois de dépôt..." (15) /
    The ground floor consisted of a large, empty room that had at one time served as a warehouse...
  • "À part le bruit des moteurs, tout était vide. Aucun voix." (21) /
    Aside from the noise of the motors, everything was silent. Not a voice.
  • "Peut-être est-ce le vide de son regard, la pâleur de son visage qui me permettent de comprendre l'importance de l'événement que nous étions en train de vivre..." (22) /
    Perhaps is was the emptiness of his look, the pallor of his face, that allowed me to understand the importance of this event we were living through...
  • "Je me suis un peu perdu dans le quartier des Parachutistes. Un dédale de rues, de maisons sommaires, de cours vides." (48) /
    I was a bit lost in the Parachutists' neighborhood. A labyrinth of streets, of sleeping houses, of empty paths.
  • "Le jardin était quasiment vide." (82) /
    The garden [of the brothel] was almost empty.
  • "Peut-être que c'est cela qui sifflait dans mes oreilles et me donnait le vertige. Ma solitude. Le sentiment du vide, du très grand vide de mon existence." (122) /
    Maybe that's what hissed in my ears and gave me vertigo. The feeling of the void, of the great emptiness of my existence.
  • "Je me souviens qu'à cet instant j'ai ressenti un vide, et mes oreilles on tinté, parce que je venais de comprendre la folie des habitants de Campos et leur Conseiller..." (149) /
    I remember that at that instant I felt a void, and my ears rang, with having just understood the naivete of the inhabitants of Campos and their Conseiller...
  • "Je ne comprenais pas, alors il a dit: "Même se tu pouvais distinguer des milliers, des millions d'étoiles avec un télescope, ce qui est le plus grand, le plus vrai dans le ciel, c'est le noir, le vide." (188) /
    I didn't understand, so he said: "Even if you could identify thousands, millions of stars with a telescope, still, the biggest, the truest thing in the sky is the blackness, the void.
  • "...les incursions, les violations, les maladies aussi, l'avortement fait à la hâte par ls vielle curandera que tu appelles ta grand-mère, la racine très amère qui a vidé ton ventre..." (209) /
    The incursions, the violations, the illnesses too, the hurried abortion performed by the old procuress you call your grandmother, the bitter root that emptied your belly...
  • "Elle a un visage triste de fille sage, une frange au ras de son regard vide." (215) /
    She had the sad face of a wise girl, a fringe lining her empty gaze.
  • "Il répète ce qu'il m'a dit à mon arrivée, ce ne sont pas les étoiles qui importent, mais la connaissance du vide." (220) /
    He repeats what he told me when I arrived: it's not the stars that matter, but getting to know the void.
  • "Rapaël a quitté son travail à la boutique de grains du marché, dès qu'il a su l'arrêté d'expulsion. Il a vidé sa chambre au-dessus du magasin..." (249) /
    Raphael quit his job at the grain market as soon as he learned of the order of expulsion. He cleaned out his room above the shop...
  • "Les bas-côtés étaient vides, les Parachutistes étaient retournés chez eux..." (250) /
    The road shoulders were empty, the Parachutists had returned to where they came from...
  • "Elle m'a regardé, j'ai lu un vide dans ses yeux jaunes." (251) /
    She looked at me; I read a void in her yellow eyes.
  • "Je suis un peu intimidé d'entrer chez Uacas. C'est pauvre, un peu vide..." (256) /
    I was a little intimidated to enter Uacas's house. It was poor, a bit empty...
  • "Avant le départ, le Conseiller a vidé tous les comptes qu'il avait overts dans les banques de la Vallée." (272) /
    Before the departure, the Conseiller closed all the accounts he had opened with banks in the Valley.
  • "Les journées étaient longues et vides." (280) /
    The days were long and empty.
  • "En même temps, il ressentait une douleur, un vide au centre du corps." (285) /
    At the same time, he relt a sadness, a void at the center of his body...
  • "Le bâtiment est vide, sauf trois grandes croix en bois peintes en noir..." (287) /
    The buildling is empty, save for three large wooden crosses painted black...
  • "La mer est vide, frisée par le vent, d'un bleu un peu gris." (296) /
    The sea is empty, ruffled by the wind, of a slightly greyish blue.
  • "Un rêve tellement effrayant que le vieil homme était apparu tout nu sur le seuil de sa maison, le corps en sueur, les yeux grands ouverts et vides, comme s'il était devenu fou." (323) /
    A dream so terrifying that the old man had appeared completley nude on the threshold of his home, his body covered in sweat, his eyes large and empty, as if he had gone mad.
  • "[Mon père] ne me causait aucun problème, juste une légere amertume quand je pensais au vide qu'il avait laissé dans le coeur de ma mère." (324) /
    [My absent father] didn't cause me any issues, only a slight bitterness when I thought of the void he left in my mother's heart.

I don't know whether I would have noticed the predominance of an equivalent word if I had been reading a novel in English; I might have read right over it, or it might have blended in with the other words or been eclipsed by other aspects of the prose. I definitely wouldn't have had access to the repetition if I had read this novel in English, since, as you can see from my lame attempts at translation, the different senses of vide(r) become at least four English terms: empty, void, silent, cleaned out. I'm not even sure if I want to claim significance here: is it remarkable to repeat "empty" twenty-three times in a 335-page novel? I'm not sure, but I do think it's interesting that the repetitions of the word tend to cluster around passages of great emotional import: the protagonist's childhood memories of World War II, the hope (of the commune Campos) and poverty (of the Red Light slums) he encounters in Mexico, his meetings with the prostitute he falls in love with (this was my least favorite aspect of the story), and the grief he feels upon learning that Campos is being disbanded. And at least two of the above quotes are definitely a key idea in the philosophy of the novel: the Conseiller's claim that it's not the stars that matter, but the void between them. And overall, thinking back on the novel's obsession with imagining Utopian alternatives in which to live, I believe this return of the void is important: it's the thing these characters are trying to either fill or understand, the troubling, vertiginous reality of human life with which they're trying to come to terms.

I have to rant a bit about what annoyed me in the novel: namely, the admittedly realistic 1970s mentality of the characters. The social sciences department where the protagonist Daniel goes to work is full of extremely obnoxious anthropologists - characters intended by Le Clézio to be obnoxious - who form a clique that dominates department events, cracking crude jokes about the Red Light area and how they want to "conduct anthropological studies" there, if you get my drift. Daniel, understandably, gets totally fed up with them, but then he goes off the deep end in the other direction and starts idealizing a young prostitute named Lili, imagining himself in love with her and wanting her to personify the buoyancy of the human spirit to triumph against great cruelty and abuse. There are passages where he remarks on how "childlike" she still is, despite a litany of abuses, all imagined in detail by Daniel, and also ones in which he calls her "immortal." Dude, I am SO TIRED of this sensitive-bourgeois-man-fancies-himself-in-love-with-young-prostitute-and-wants-her-to-alleviate-his-cultural-guilt storyline! The man in question always thinks he's such an open-minded hero for "seeing past" her corrupted façade to the wellspring of purity beneath, but he never actually, I don't know, gets to know her at all; he just lets her function as yet another void onto which he can project his own dreams and desires. I kept wondering whether Daniel's egotistic tendency to essentialize Lili would be addressed critically at all, and honestly I could have missed some subtleties of the French prose, but as far as I could tell, the author is sympathetic to his protagonist's angsty "love" for a woman he doesn't even know, which irked me. (There is also an essentialized portrayal of the "childlike wisdom" of a Central American Indian character, although that was somewhat balanced by other, more complex Native characters such as the French-Chocktaw war veteran Conseiller of Campos.) Nevertheless, I have to admit that I found this essentializing, romaticizing tendency to be an accurate addition to Daniel's character, given his background, era, and political leanings, even if it did make him less sympathetic to me personally. So this is not exactly a complaint about Le Clézio's characterization; more a rant about supposedly liberated people who react to bigotry with "positive," romanticized stereotyping. That said, Daniel's so-called relationship with Lili is really just a detail, and overall I found a lot to love in this novel and its meditations on the flawed, transitory nature of Utopian dreams.

As an amusing little side-note, now that we're coming up on the fourth installment of the 2666 readalong: I originally started Ourania right before diving into Part I of Bolaño's novel, but I had to postpone it because there were so many eerie similarities in the subject matter that I was having a hard time keeping them straight. I had never before read a novel about self-absorbed professors visiting Mexico and getting romantically involved with poverty-stricken women there, so it was bizarre to coincidentally end up reading two of them at once!

(Ourania was my seventh book for the Orbis Terrarum Challenge, representing France.)

Book Blogger Appreciation Week

By Emily on August 22, 2009 10:12 AM | <« | »>

I may be the last person in the book-blogging world to mention it, but Book Blogger Appreciation Week is such a cool idea, and I've been looking forward to jumping in with both feet come September 14. (I had a moment of panic that I would still be in rural, internet-free New Hampshire on the 14th, but no worries; I'll be home.) What I DIDN'T expect was that Evening All Afternoon would be nominated for several awards! Thank you so much to whoever put my name in for Best General Review Blog, Best Writing, Best Name (credit to Wallace Stevens on that one), and Best Post. I know the people I nominated for those categories are forces to be reckoned with, so I'm in good company.

I thought this would be a good opportunity finally to do the meme associated with BBAW:


What has been one of the highlights of blogging for you?
Everyone has been answering this with "Meeting other book bloggers," and that has definitely been a big highlight for me as well - getting to know other smart readers and talk with them about books. But for the sake of a little originality, I thought I'd mention another highlight: getting more out of my reading. Since starting Evening All Afternoon, I've found that taking the time to write about my reading material means that I engage more completely with the books while I'm reading, get more out of them as a result, and remember them more clearly for longer after the fact. So, enriching my own experience of literature: definitely a plus!


What blogger has helped you out with your blog by answering questions, linking to you, or inspiring you?
Well, he's not exactly a blogger at this point, but my partner David deserves a huge thank-you for designing this beautiful site for me (and even doing the charcoal drawings!). Once I started actually writing here, Claire and Richard were among the first to reach out and make me feel at home in the book-blogging world. Thanks, guys!


What one question do you have about BBAW that someone who participated last year could answer?
I don't have a clear idea of how this will go, but I don't think I need any specific questions answered - I'm just looking forward to jumping in and enjoying the ride!

2666: The Part About Fate (Book 3)

By Emily on July 31, 2009 11:13 AM | <« | »>
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With the third section of Roberto Bolaño's 2666, I started to feel a movement and symmetry in the novel as a whole. Moving away from the semi-insider Amalfitano's interior landscape, The Part About Fate returns to an outsider's perspective: this time, we see the crimes' fallout from the perspective of an African-American political reporter for the Harlem magazine Black Dawn. This sandwiching of Amalfitano's story of madness between two more exterior narratives made me feel like the middle story was a kind of tunnel through which I squeezed, emerging into a transformed reality on the other side.

The world of Oscar Fate, protagonist of the section, is certainly different from the jet-setting milieu of the four academics in The Part About the Critics. Before his editor sends him to Mexico to cover a boxing match (after the unexpected death of the magazine's regular sports correspondent), we see Fate's late mother's apartment in Harlem, and his travels to a run-down section of Detroit to cover a speech by Barry Seaman, a fictionalized version of Black Panthers co-founder Bobby Seale. As a US reader, the mental atmosphere of this section was noticeably closer to home for me: racial identity politics were front and center in a way that wasn't true for the European intellectuals or for the Chilean professor working in Mexico. Suddenly, the familiar landscape of black versus white was in evidence. Fate is always conscious of certain people as black people: he goes to a film, for example, and notices how many black people and how many white people are acting in each scene. He thinks of his employer as "a magazine for brothers," and in one scene, where he unthinkingly identifies himself to a Mexican person as "an American," he later grills himself about why he hadn't said he was "African American":

Why didn't I say I was African American? Because I'm in a foreign country? But can I really consider myself to be in a foreign country when I could go walking back to my own country right now if I wanted, and it wouldn't even take very long? Does this mean that in some places I'm American and in some places I'm African American and in other places, by logical extension, I'm nobody?

I hadn't thought about identity politics in quite this way before, but it's an interesting point: it's obviously disorienting to feel that one's identity could be stripped away, or is more fluid than one anticipated. In Fate's particular case, that of an African American in Mexico, there is also a subtle layering of privilege going on. From the scenes in Detroit and Harlem, it's obvious that Fate is acutely aware of the racist structure of US society, and of what it means to be black within that structure. But south of the border, he finds himself transformed from an oppressed insider minority (African American) to a privileged outsider symbol of power (American). Not only does he suddenly find the economic and political might of the US behind him - just his ability to walk across the border whenever he chooses distinguishes him from most people he meets in Santa Teresa - but his press credentials open doors for him, despite his lack of experience as a sports correspondent and his inability to speak Spanish. Yet when he tries to exercise that power, by asking his editor for an extension so that he can stay in Santa Teresa and do some investigative reporting on the crimes being committed there, he again comes up against the racial politics of the United States: the editor refuses him the extension, arguing that none of the murdered women have been black. Fate, like Amalfitano with his madness-inducing geometry book, is caught in a double-bind, which spirals horribly toward the murders.

The style of this section was also different: whereas the first book feels to me, more than anything, like an homage to the novels of Vladimir Nabokov with a bit of David Lynch thrown in, the second two books describe a gradual slide into a more and more thoroughly Lynchian aesthetic. By halfway through The Part About Fate, this vibe was so strong that I was actually flashing to specific scenes from Inland Empire. (Indeed, the Lynch references are explicitly acknowledged a little farther along, in a postmodern assertion by a hotel clerk.) Take this passage:

The staircase ended in a green-carpeted hallway. At the end of the hallway there was an open door. Music was playing. The light that came from the room was green, too. Standing in the middle of the hallway was a skinny kid, who looked at him and then moved toward him. Fate thought he was going to be attacked and he prepared himself mentally to take the first punch. But the kid let him pass and then went down the stairs. His face was very serious, Fate remembered. Then he kept walking until he came to a room where he saw Chucho Flores talking on a cell phone. Next to him, sitting at a desk, was aman in his forties, dressed in a checkered suit and a bolo tie, who stared at Fate and gestured inquiringly. Chucho Flores caught the gesture and glanced toward the door.
    "Come on in, Fate," he said.
    The lamp hanging from the ceiling was green. Next to a window, sitting in an armchair, was Rosa Amalfitano. She had her legs crossed and she was smoking. When Fate came through the door she lifted her eyes and looked at him.
    "We're doing some business here," said Chucho Flores.
    Fate leaned against the wall, feeling short of breath. It's the green color, he thought.
    "I see," he said.
    Rosa Amalfitano seemed to be high.

Almost every element of this scene could be straight out of Twin Peaks: the dark hallway with the faint light at the end, the sinister green light, the checkered suit of the forty-something stranger, the stares of the room's inhabitants as Fate approaches, the beautiful woman with her legs crossed, smoking, who seems to be somehow impaired. It's a great atmosphere, and also, perhaps, reinforces the American-ness of 2666's third part, evoking a particular kind of bizarro LA noir that originates squarely north of the border. This Americanized lens eventually brings up the question of just how the hulking presence to the north of Santa Teresa is related to the crimes being committed there. Someone - or multiple people - are treating the lower-class women of Santa Teresa as disposable sub-human matter, murdering them and throwing their bodies in empty lots. But if the feminists of Santa Teresa are protesting corruption outside the police station, and Fate's Harlem editor doesn't view these women as worthy of notice because of the color of their skin, it starts to look like the killer isn't the only one whose ability to value human life is skewed. Amalfitano tells Fate toward the end of this section that "they're all mixed up in" the killings, and it's unclear whether he is referring to his daughter's group of friends, or to a more general "they."

Equally disturbing, on the Amalfitano front, is that as Fate is walking away from the house with Rosa, we see Amalfitano leaning against the sinister black Peregrino, chatting amicably with its driver after having just denied ever having seen him before. Is the owner of the Peregrino Marco Antonio Guerra? If it is, why does Amalfitano deny knowing him? And does this familiarity with the car's owner imply that Amalfitano himself is a member of the "they" who are "all mixed up in" the murders"? Sitting in a coffee shop just north of the border, Fate overhears a conversation fragment that reminded me strongly of Amalfitano's mental refusal to address the murders:

That said, words back then were mostly used in the art of avoidance, not of revelation. Maybe they revealed something all the same. I couldn't tell you.

What is revealed by Amalfitano's avoidance of the crimes? And does this scene shed new light on Guerra's strange declaration in Part 2 that "You have nothing to fear from me, Professor?"

I found The Part About Fate somewhat less funny than the first two books, but just as engaging. The sense of sinister foreboding builds in intensity throughout, delivering the reader to the threshold of The Part About the Crimes with an unnerving gasp. I keep waiting for the point at which I'll feel like taking a break from 2666, but it certainly hasn't happened yet.

Thoughts on Part 2: The Part About Amalfitano
Thoughts on Part 1: The Part About The Critics

Challenges

By Emily on July 11, 2009 12:25 PM | <« | »>

Here we go with another meta-post; I swear an actual review is coming soon!

A few weeks ago one of the weekly round-ups involved checking in on annual reading challenges now that the year is halfway over (HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?). This is the first year I ventured into the realm of dedicated book blogging and group reading challenges, and it's been such a rewarding experience so far. I've learned a lot about what kinds of challenges I'd like to continue doing, which elements really make a challenge worthwhile for me, and what I'd like to get out of writing about books.

The Bolaño read-along hosted by Steph and Claire is turning out to be a highlight of the year, not only because I loved the novel with an unholy passion, but because it's fascinating to see what different people take away from it. It's got me thinking about what spurs my own reactions to literature, and it's also challenged me to analyze and articulate those reactions more clearly than I might have done otherwise. I'm done with the book, but still have three more installments of discussion to look forward to, so it's a win/win!

9 for 2009 Challenge
(9 out of 9 completed)
I wrapped up the 9 for 2009 Challenge a few weeks ago, and it was highly enjoyable. I liked the idea of a flexible challenge that focuses on diminishing (or at least refreshing) one's to-be-read shelf while also incorporating the fun of categories (who doesn't love categories?). I especially liked that there were a few slots that tended to push people out of their comfort zones. Thanks, Isabel! My final list was as follows:

What's in a Name
(5 out of 6 completed)
I'm narrowing in on finishing the What's in a Name Challenge, with only one book left. This is the project that alerted me to the fact that reading challenges are a "thing," so I feel very warmly toward it. It's fun, but hasn't really pushed me much. I'm planning on wrapping it up with Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: or the Evening Redness in the West in the next month or so.

Dewey Decimal
(6 out of 10 completed)
I'm loving the uniqueness of the Dewey Decimal Challenge! It's really encouraging me to stretch beyond my normal reading habits: more nonfiction on more different subjects can only be a good thing. I've learned a ton from the books I've read as part of this challenge. I can pretty much guarantee that without it, I would never have picked up volumes on the early Shaker movement or the history of the bookshelf, and I'm glad I did! Next year I'm thinking of tweaking it so that instead of one book from each Dewey century, I'll read one book from each decade of a single century. I'm keeping pace pretty predictably with this challenge, reading in order by century. My 600-century book, Anne Mendelson's Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages, is already waiting on my to-be-read shelf.

Orbis Terrarum
(5 out of 10 completed)
I'm loving the Orbis Terrarum Challenge so much! The best thing about it is how proactive everyone is about visiting other peoples' reviews and commenting on them. I've met some great folks through this challenge, and it's also made me conscious of national diversity in my reading list. Awesome props to Bethany for putting it all together. I'm currently in the midst of Thomas Mann's epic The Magic Mountain as my Germanic addition to this list, which is why I haven't been posting as often as usual. This challenge only started in March, so I feel good about my progress thus far, and I have lots of possibilities for the next six months. The list thus far:

Decades
(1 out of 9 completed)
I joined the Decades '09 Challenge six months late, so I've only read my first book for it thus far: Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, representing the 1890s. I'm still not sure whether I'll finish this one by the deadline, especially since several of the books on my list are epic tomes. But we'll see what happens! With a few of the earlier challenges completed, I may just swing it. And even if I don't, the journey will be lots of fun.

2666: The Part About Amalfitano (Book 2)

By Emily on June 29, 2009 12:16 PM | <« | »>
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Claire and Steph's 2666 readalong continues! To be completely honest, I read the last page of this amazing novel a couple of weeks ago, but I scrupulously wrote up notes after finishing each section, and I'm publishing them just as I wrote them, at the end of each month. It's more fun this way!

The Part About Amalfitano is by far the shortest book of the five that make up 2666, so I feel a bit disconcerted to be writing up reading notes again so soon after the first batch (I'm writing this on May 19). Amalfitano does, though, provide some new food for thought: it goes in new directions with the themes established in The Part About the Critics, and piqued my interest even more for what is to come.

Primarily, I think, The Part About Amalfitano transforms that feeling of vague unease introduced in The Part About the Critics into something interior rather than exterior. In Book 1, the critics have the feeling that "something is wrong" - something more or less out there, whether "out there" means "in Santa Teresa," or "in Mexico," or "on the streets of the world." Only Norton has some sense that the "something wrong" could dwell within her, too. But for Amalfitano (the Chilean professor, incidentally, of whom the three Europeans were so dismissive in Part 1), that same something is decidedly wrong in here, rather than out there. In here: in the town where he works, in the house where he lives, inside his own brain.

The Part About Amalfitano is obsessed with madness and forgetting, from Amalfitano's memories of his wife Lola (disappeared on a wild quest after a poet, now institutionalized, with whom she may or may not have had sex years before), to his own evolving relationships with a mysterious geometry treatise and a disembodied voice. Whereas the Critics of the first book fight their battles in cafés, conferences and capitals, Amalfitano and Lola fight theirs within their own heads. Lola's story raises all the old questions of how to define madness, and how we deal with an institutionalized person who seems saner than his visitors, but Amalfitano's own story is, to me, even more compelling. Bolaño's stellar sense of the bizarre and hilarious is showcased to perfection, as in this passage, which finds Amalfitano obsessing, Beckett-like, on a mysterious, privately-published geometry book that he (totally uninterested in geometry) has discovered in one of his boxes.

I probably picked it up at Laie, he thought, or maybe at La Central, the time I stopped in to buy some philosophy book and the clerk was excited because Pere Gimferrer, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, and Juan Villoro were all there, arguing about whether it was a good idea to fly, and plane accidents, and which was more dangerous, taking off or landing, and she mistakenly put this book in my bag. La Central, that makes sense. But if that was the way it heppened I'd have discovered the book when i got home and opened the bag or package or whatever it was, unless, of course, something terrible or upsetting happened to me on the walk home that eliminated any desire or curiosity I had to examine my new book or books. It's even possible that I might have opened the package like a zombie and left the new book on the night table and Dieste's book on the bookshelf, shaken by something I'd just seen on the street, maybe a car accident, maybe a mugging, maybe a suicide in the subway, although if I had seen something like that, thought Amalfitano, I would surely remember it now or at least retain a vague memory of it. I wouldn't remember the Testamento geométrico, but I would remember whatever made me forget the Testamento geométrico. And as if this wasn't enough, the biggest problem wasn't really where the book had come from but how it had ended up in Santa Teresa in one of Amalfitano's boxes of books, books he had chosen in Barcelona before he left. At what point of utter obliviousness had he put it in there? How could he have packed a book without noticing what he was doing? Had he planned to read it when he got to the north of Mexico? Had he planned to use it as the starting point for a desultory study of geometry? And if that was his plan, why had he forgotten the moment he arrived in this city rising up in the middle of nowhere? Had the book disappeared from his memory while he and his daughter were flying east to west? Or had it disappeared from his memory as he was waiting for his boxes of books to arrive, once he was in Santa Teresa? Had Dieste's book vanished as a side effect of jet lag?

What I love about this passage is its double-edged nature: is Amalfitano needlessly belaboring an unimportant detail, as his daughter Rosa seems to think? Or is this ostensibly small incident part of, perhaps even a key to, that intangible "something wrong" which all Bolaño's characters are chasing? And what does it mean that the inquiry into the origins of this innocuous geometry book is spiked with so many catastrophic allusions: plane crashes, car accidents, muggings, suicides? Is Amalfitano onto something in this passage, or are we witnessing his first slide toward madness? In the end, these two options may be just two paths to the same outcome: if Amalfitano is fixating on an unimportant detail, it may indicate that he is going mad. On the other hand, he may be correct in his insistence on the book's significance, and what he thinks it signifies is...that he's going mad. The book catches him in a logical trap, and his delightfully odd solution (or is it an exacerbation?) of transforming the volume into a Duchamp-inspired readymade doesn't dispel his nameless fear.

And speaking of fear. The second book of 2666 includes further allusions to "the crimes": those hundreds of female bodies being discovered all over Santa Teresa, with no end in sight. Interestingly, though, it generally chooses to talk around the murders, rather than addressing them head-on. In one scene, just after Amalfitano has discovered the disquieting geometry book, he calls a professor friend of his and confides that he's a nervous wreck. She assumes that this is because he is worried about the murders:

Professor Pérez soothed him, told him not to worry so much, all you had to do was be careful, there was no point giving in to paranoia. She reminded him that the victims were usually kidnapped in other parts of the city. Amalfitano listened to her talk and all of a sudden he laughed. He told her his nerves were in tatters. Professor Pérez didn't get the joke. Nobody gets anything here, thought Amalfitano angrily.

Even in this relatively explicit passage, there is so much that is ambiguous. Bolaño gives the impression that, despite Pérez's assumptions, the murders are not the actual cause of Amalfitano's frayed nerves. It's plain that Pérez's talk about them, for whatever reason, is either irrelevant or offensive to him: he interrupts her, and then feels angry that she does not understand his "joke" about tattered nerves. We never see Amalfitano, here or elsewhere, thinking explicitly about the crimes, which seems bizarre in itself given that, in the first place, he lives with his teenage daughter, and in the second place, he has long internal monologues about everything from his colleagues, to a volume of crackpot pseudo-history once sent to him by a friend. On the other hand, the reader could certainly interpret the murders as an unacknowledged influence on his mood, a partial explanation for why he is so on edge, why the appearance of a strange book so unsettles him, why he is sleeping poorly and hearing voices. One could see, in his dearth of thoughts about the murders, a pointed avoidance of the subject rather than a lack of interest. But if Amalfitano's encroaching madness is related to the murders, what is the connection?

Time, perhaps, will tell. Or perhaps not: an outcome I might even prefer. In any case, I'm still heartily enjoying 2666, and I'm eager to move on to the third book, The Part About Fate.

(My thoughts on Part 1, The Part About the Critics, are over here.)

For my amusement...

By Emily on June 6, 2009 8:00 PM | <« | »>

Because I found myself inserting my own answers to these questions when I read Lu's responses over at Regular Rumination. I left off the final section, as I've already answered those.

Which author do you own the most books by?
Virginia Woolf is the clear winner here, with 21 books.

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Which book do you own the most copies of?
I have a French and an English copy of Proust's A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (translated as Within a Budding Grove) - hopeful thinking that I'll ever be fluent enough to read it in the original! I also have two copies of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: one's a fancy illustrated edition and the other's a Norton Critical Edition. Oh, and I have an extra copy of Conrad's Victory, but the second copy is an old paperback with cover art by Edward Gorey, which I keep meaning to send to a former professor of mine who collects vintage paperback editions of modernist novels.

Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
Yeah, a bit. I know it can be technically correct to end a sentence with a preposition, but to my ear, most sentences sound stronger if they don't end in prepositions. I think it's because the reader is left thinking about the content of the sentence, rather than its structure. For example, I'd prefer "Which author has the largest presence in your library?" The reader is left with "library," which is a much more satisfying concept than "by." Or, farther down, "With which literary character are you secretly in love?" leaves me with "love" instead of "with": so much more powerful. But I recognize that it's just my personal preference.

What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
I'm not too strong on either end of the chronological spectrum - I've never read The Aeneid, and until about three months ago I had never heard of Neil Gaiman.

Which fictional character are you secretly in love with?
David and I are listening to Sarah Waters's The Night Watch right now, and I have a crush on her character Julia Standing. I think it's that upper-class British androgyny.

Which book have you read more than any other?
Probably either Mrs. Dalloway or Jane Eyre. Although if we're counting audiobooks, then the Jim Dale-performed Harry Potter series would utterly eclipse anything else, as David and I listen to them compulsively and have for years.

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What was your favorite book when you were 10 years old?
I'm so bad at remembering the chronology of my childhood...at seven, the Anne of Green Gables books were my favorites, but I think by ten I was probably in my sci-fi phase, reading a lot of Orson Scott Card. Ender's Game? Maybe something like that.

What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
If I genuinely don't like a book, I don't finish it. But in December I read Matthew Gregory Lewis's classic Gothic pot-boiler The Monk, which was TERRIBLE in a thoroughly enjoyable, hilarious, page-turning kind of way. I highly recommend it, actually, but only if you have a sense of humor and an appreciation for the grotesquely clichéd.

What is the best book you've read in the past year?
True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey. Astounding.

What is the worst book you've ever read?
The book I hated the most of any in recent memory was Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook.

If you could tell everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons.

--

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Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
I love both literatures, but if pressed I'd go with the French, primarily for Céline, Camus, and Colette. And Beckett, who was Irish but wrote in French.

Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
What, are you kidding me? Shakespeare!

Austen or Eliot?
I love them both utterly. But if I had to choose, it would probably be Austen.

Roth or Updike?
Bukowski.

David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
A warm bath.

--

What is your favorite novel?
Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, although of course it's impossible to choose.

What is your favorite play?
Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. An obvious choice, but it's so delightful. "I am greatly distressed, Aunt Augusta, about there being no cucumbers, not even for ready money."

What is your favorite short story?
Eudora Welty's "The Winds." It's not very well-known, I don't think. It's stunning.

What is your favorite poem?
It's so hard to pick. I think it's between Theodore Roethke's "The Lost Son" and H.D.'s "Other Sea Cities."

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What is your favorite epic poem?
I think Pope's The Rape of the Lock is endearing and hilarious.

What is your favorite non-fiction?
My favorite non-fiction? Of any sort? It's like comparing apples to existentialism.

What is your favorite essay?
By far, without question or rival, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.

What is your favorite graphic novel?
I haven't read enough of them to say.

What is your favorite science fiction?
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. I adored it.

What is your favorite fantasy?
The one where I time-travel back to 1924, and I go shopping in London and buy a cream-colored, lace-trimmed flapper dress and a big matching sun-hat, and then wander around Bloomsbury and E.M. Forster sticks his head out an upper-story window and invites me in to tea. (Just kidding! It's Harry Potter.)

What is your favorite memoir?
I don't read much memoir, but my favorite non-fiction with elements of memoir would be William Vollman's Rising Up and Rising Down, which is a series of essays about the role of violence in global society, with case studies from around the world, gleaned from his time as a war correspondent.

What is your favorite history?
Maybe Judith Ulrich's The Age of Homespun, which examines early American history through the lens of specific, everyday artifacts like spinning wheels and unfinished stockings. Extremely thought-provoking!

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What is your favorite mystery or noir?
I love surreal mysteries where little is cleared up at the end, like Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.

Who is your favorite writer?
This may come as a shock, but...Virginia Woolf.

Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
Well, I haven't read ALL the writers alive today. But I can still say, without a doubt, that the answer to this question is indisputably Harold Bloom. I even made up a limerick about him once. It begins "There once was a privileged white male / Who discoursed on Hamlet at Yale."

What are you reading right now?
Roberto Bolaño's 2666 (obsessively, hungrily); Andrey Kurkov's Death and the Penguin (amusedly, in fits and starts), J.M.G. Le Clézio's Ourania (slowly).

2666: The Part About the Critics (Book 1)

By Emily on May 19, 2009 8:06 AM | <« | »>
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A big thanks to Claire and Steph for suggesting read-along of Roberto Bolaño's epic 2666! They've described what they're hosting as a "do-as-you-please read-along," and suggest spreading the five books (or parts) of the novel over five months, interspersing them with other books so as to avoid burnout. They're also asking for monthly check-ins and reading notes. Taking my cue from the "do-as-you-please" aspect of this project, and from Bolaño's own desire that each part of 2666 be published as its own free-standing novel, I think I'll just read this at whatever pace seems right to me, and write up a review of each of the five sections as I get to them. I'll wait to publish each of them, though, until the month allotted by Claire and Steph for that particular book. Sound good? Good.

And now that we've got the logistics out of the way...

I thoroughly enjoyed The Part About the Critics, which is the first book of the five that make up 2666. With all the talk of sex and violence surrounding this novel, I was pleasantly surprised by the humor in these first pages, by Bolaño's light, satiric touch and keen sense of the absurd. (We all know I'm a sucker for absurdism.) More than anything, his style and subject matter reminded me of Vladimir Nabokov: the ridiculousness and insularity of academia, the minute dissections of the reading life, the way that the four protagonists are more than a little silly, yet still sympathetic - Bolaño and Nabokov both handle all these elements masterfully. Bolaño has a firm grasp of the "don't belabor every little joke" principle of humor: his anecdotes are peppered with light, unexplained touches that I found hilarious. In this passage, for example, he writes a brilliant send-up of the self-importance among two opposing camps of scholars studying the enigmatic German author Archimboldi:

The Bremen German literature conference was highly eventful. Pelletier, backed by Morini and Espinoza, went on the attack like Napoleon at Jena, assaulting the unsuspecting German Archimboldi scholars, and the downed flags of Pohl, Schwartz, and Borchmeyer were soon routed to the cafés and taverns of Bremen. The young German professors participating in the event were bewildered at first and then took the side of Pelletier and his friends, albeit cautiously. The audience, consisting mostly of university students who had traveled from Göttingen by train or in vans, was also won over by Pelletier's fiery and uncompromising interpretations, throwing caution to the winds and enthusiastically yielding to the festive, Dionysian vision of ultimate carnival (or penultimate carnival) exegesis upheld by Pelletier and Espinoza. Two days later, Schwartz and his minions counterattacked. They compared Archimboldi to Heinrich Böll. They spoke of suffering. They compared Archimboldi to Günter Grass. They spoke of civic duty. Borchmeyer even compared Archimboldi to Friedrich Dürrenmatt and spoke of humor, which seemed to Morini the height of gall. Then Liz Norton appeared, heaven-sent, and demolished the counterattack like a Desaix, like a Lannes, a blond Amazon who spoke excellent German, if anything too rapidly, and who expounded on Grimmelshausen and Gryphius and many others, including Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus.

Although the overarching joke here is a good one (only academics themselves would be so absurdly self-involved as to liken their conferences to Napoleonic battles; it's like something out of a Christopher Guest film), there are so many tiny, near-irrelevant touches that heighten the humor. It's somehow hilarious that the students have come "by train or in vans." The caution or incaution of the conference audience is equally hilarious, given that all most of them are doing is nodding or shaking their heads, as is the fact that Morini finds the suggestion of humor somehow more offensive than suffering or civic duty.

But more than being funny, the pan-European, colonializing self-importance of the critics (representing the big four European centers of France, Spain, Italy, and England) holds a darker note. In this scene, they've come to a German city to attack and triumph over German scholars, in a discussion of a German author, and they are outraged when their interpretations are challenged. The German scholars, who attempt to locate the work of Archimboldi within a greater context of German literature as a whole, are ridiculed. Instead, the protagonists favor of a glamorous, individualistic interpretation that allows Archimboldi to belong to everyone and no one (but mostly, to the four European critics).

Later, when three of the four friends descend on a small Mexican border town to search for Archimboldi himself, their cultural arrogance becomes even more obvious. When a Mexican Archimboldi scholar addresses a note "Dear Colleagues," for example, two of them burst into laughter while the third finds the note depressingly pathetic. None of them seriously consider that a professor from Latin America could possibly be worthy of their regard, yet they fully expect local cooperation in their obsessive quest to track down a writer who obviously wishes to remain hidden. When their motivation is questioned, indeed, their interrogator is met with blank incomprehension: "Because we're studying his works, said the critics."

But the darkness in this first book is not limited to the cultural imperialism of the four protagonists. Indeed, the Mexican section of The Part About the Critics begins to introduce a more sinister note all around. There is a feeling that something is wrong in Santa Teresa, and Bolaño does a fantastic job of creating, via certain bizarre incidents, that atmosphere of vague but profound unease. The critics learn, for example, of an unexplained war between cabbies and hotel doormen, in which the doormen will beat the cabbies senseless unless the latter pay them off. A group of drunk Americans in the bar seem to be observing something of great interest in the street, but when the critics try to share the view, there is nothing to see. Even the critics' hotel rooms and the landscape outside are vaguely unnerving to them. And then there are the rumors of the hundreds of murdered women that have been turning up in the area, about which none of the Europeans can get much information. Something is definitely rotten, and the critics are tempted to put it all down to the lack of civilization in this backwater Mexican burg. At least one of them, though, has the nagging feeling that this vague "something" has been wrong all along:

These people are crazy, said Espinoza and Pelletier. Bu Norton thought something strange was going on, on the street, on the terrace, in the hotel rooms, even in Mexico City with those unreal taxi drivers and doormen, unreal or at least logically ungraspable, and even in Europe something strange had been happening, something she didn't understand, at the Paris airport where the three of them had met, and maybe before, with Morini and his refusal to accompany them, with that slightly repulsive young man they had met in Toulouse, with Dieter Hellfeld and his sudden news about Archimboldi. And something strange was going on even with Archimboldi and everything Archimboldi had written about, and with Norton, unrecognizable to herself, if only intermittently, who read and made notes on an interpreted Archimboldi's books.

And looking back, the reader does remember examples of the same kind of skewed-ness taking place in Europe. There's the recurrent theme of the painter Edwin Johns, who cut off his painting hand, and a certain academic conference "of which Morini had reason to believe the whole thing was a hoax." And then, of course, there is the deliciously bizarre scene about the mugs. I won't say any more. You'll just have to read it for yourself.

I love this kind of unknowable, semi-surreal wrongness in literature, and have ever since I was a child. So Bolaño's mix of Lynchian unease with absurdist humor is pretty much guaranteed to please. I'll be eager to see what the second book of 2666 holds in store.

Best birthday ever

By Emily on May 10, 2009 9:47 AM | <« | »>

I've been living on a reduced budget lately, and the hardest thing about my more frugal lifestyle has been the lack of book-buying. I hadn't even been to Powell's in months. So as my birthday approached, I did some shuffling of funds, sold some fancy yarn, and asked the people I knew if they had any books they no longer wanted, that they might donate to me to sell for trade. The result was the most leisurely, delightful, therapeutic, exactly-what-I-wanted birthday I think I've ever had.

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A delicious dinner with David and my folks, followed by two blissful hours at Powell's and a sojourn at a stellar dessert joint was just what the doctor ordered. I left feeling refreshed, reinvigorated, and, of course, laden with months of mouth-watering reading material. Looking at these stacks this morning, it struck me how much my contact with the rest of the book-blogging community influenced my selections. Starting at the upper left, we have:

  • Inventing English, by Seth Lerer. I'm always fascinated by the history of the English language, and I've heard good things about Lerer's book. It's slated to be my 400-century selection for the Dewey Decimal Challenge.

  • Seeing, by José Saramago. I wrote a review of Saramago's Blindness a while ago, and Hedgie recommended its sequel. I found a used copy of this in near-mint condition for a very reasonable price, so I was psyched.

  • The Crow Road, by Iain Banks. I've been reading about this novel on the Powell's site and elsewhere, and I'm excited to give it a shot. I have a good dollop of Scottish ancestry, and I'm always curious to read Scottish authors. Plus, the opening paragraph of this book is quite intriguing.

  • The Ark Sakura, by Kobo Abe. Abe has been recommended to me (I forget by whom), and this novel sounds right up my absurdist/surreal alley.

  • Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar. When Sarah reviewed this a few weeks ago, it reminded me that I've been meaning to read it ever since I first heard about its unconventional narrative structure back in high school. I'm always excited by experimental, modernist prose, so I think this will be a real treat.

  • Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides. Am I the last person on Earth to read this novel? Probably. Still, I'm looking forward to it.

  • A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick. This is a super-exciting addition to the mix, because it means my amazing partner and awesome in-laws signed me up for Powell's Indiespensable program! I've been coveting these shipments forEVER, and am so excited to be receiving another two in the mail over the next three months. Basically, they're deluxe, hand-numbered and signed limited editions of new fiction, sent to your doorstep and packaged with a selection of cool treats. Included with A Reliable Wife were these tempting goodies:

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    That's a beautiful little zine excerpt from Jill McCorkle's upcoming book Going Away Shoes, and a Garden-in-a-bag that will grow basil for us! I mean, come on, how cool is that? Very cool. As far as Goolrick's book itself, I've heard it's lovely and gothic, so we'll see.

  • Dressed: A Century of Hollywood Costume Design, by Deborah Nadoolman Landis. I'm almost ready to do a full review on this freaking amazing book. David gave it to me, and it's just incredible.

  • Ravage, by René Barjavel, French language edition. This was recommended by my French friend Marie Christine when she read in my Blindness review that I like stories of quarantine and small groups of people reorganizing themselves in the face of catastrophe. I'm enjoying reading a novel in French right now, so I thought I'd supply myself for the future as well. I haven't exactly committed to the bilingual section of the Orbis Terrarum Challenge, but let's just say, I'm aware that it's out there.

  • Death and the Penguin, by Andrey Kurkov. I forget who reviewed this, but it's another one I heard about via my newfound connection with the world of book-blogging. Whoever you are, thank you! I bet I will really enjoy this.

  • Cloudstreet, by Tim Winton. I first heard of Winton through Michael Silverblatt's Bookworm podcast, and I've been on a casual lookout for his work ever since. This was another affordable, near-mint-condition used find.

  • Roman Fever and other stories, by Edith Wharton. Hermione Lee's biography of Wharton made me curious to read more of her work, and this was too good a deal to pass up: a new, sale copy for only $2.50! Score.

  • Delta Wedding, by Eudora Welty. Welty is one of my favorite authors of all time, and one I think is sorely underrated. I've read her complete short stories and one or two novels, but it's exciting to think that there are several more novels awaiting me. This was another good find, money-wise, as well.

  • Cancer Ward, by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. Again, my fascination with quarantine asserts itself. I've been looking for a nice (unmarked, attractive, easy to read) edition of Cancer Ward for years, and finally lucked out.

  • 2666, by Roberto Bolaño. Claire over at kiss a cloud is co-hosting a read-along of this epic tome, and I'm really looking forward to joining in - especially after I was accosted by the waitress at the dessert cafe, who asked, in breathless tones, "Did you just get that book?" and, upon my answering yes, said "Oh...it will make you feel...things." She had that particular look of a person who has had a life-changing experience and envies another person's ability to have the same experience for the first time. (I usually dispense this look upon recommending Mrs. Dalloway.) Needless to say, this is quite intriguing, and makes me want to take the novel to public places more often! Onward and Bolaño-ward!

  • And, finally, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums, by Stephen T. Asma. This will be my 500-century book for the Dewey Decimal Challenge, and another one I've heard good things about through the blogging community. I'm casually fascinated by the idea of museums and how we interact with them, so I think this will be a good match for me.

Whew! What a birthday. It was truly glorious, and I'm now luxuriating in the possession of so many tempting volumes, all ready for me to dive in and experience new worlds and engaging journeys. I'm off to read!

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