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Before you read the book:
Here’s a short one (hardly a novella, more than a short story) that didn’t stay long on my “currently reading” list but will make its way there again. Stefan Zweig’s Chess Story (Schachnovelle, 1942; tr. from the German by Joel Rotenberg, 2006), published after Zweig and his wife committed suicide in Brazil, “one of Hitler’s posthumous victims,” said Peter Gay in the introduction to my edition. I’m not well informed about Zweig’s life or work, but it’s time I learned. I’m glad to say I’ve begun. The edition I read was translated in 2006 from German by Joel Rotenberg and was issued in the New York Review Books Classics series (it has also been translated and released as Chess and The Royal Game). This particular cover features a fitting detail from The Chess Game (1943), a painting by Vieira da Silva.
Chess Story begins and ends on an ocean liner going from New York to Buenos Aires. The narrator discovers that Mirko Czentovic, the world champion chess master, is on board. Czentovic has an intriguing story. Raised by a priest, he was basically forsaken as a child because he had no visible intelligence. He never learned how to spell or how to interact with people. But he watched the priest play chess and for some reason chess stuck. When the priest found this hidden skill he compared Czentovic to “Balaam’s ass!” Lacking most other skills, Czentovic quickly rose to become the best in the world, and with that rank came no little amount of pride. The narrator wants to meet Czentovic to attempt to understand him a little better.
Interestingly, Czentovic is not the book’s true subject, as I was led to believe at first. While the narrator and some other men are together playing against Czentovic, out of obscurity comes Dr. B, who helps the men achieve a draw with the chess master. The men immediately say that he must challenge the world master in a game just between the two of them. As it plays out, Dr. B is a man with an even more interesting story story than Czentovic, but he hasn’t played a proper game of chess in over twenty years.
“You see,” he added with a pensive smile, “I honestly don’t know if I can play a proper chess game according to all the rules. Please believe me, it was absolutely not out of false modesty that I said I hadn’t touched a chess piece since grammar school – that was more than twenty years ago. And even then I wasn’t considered a player of any particular talent.”
Dr. B has come to know the game in a way that Czentovic never could. How Dr. B. came to learn chess is the main story here. Where Czentovic became proud and cold, Dr. B’s knowledge changed him in a different, more fundamental way. In telling Dr. B’s story, Zweig indicts Nazi Germany. With a pace that keeps winding and winding in tighter and tighter circles, Zweig propels his story to its pleasing, disturbing denouement.
This is my first encounter with Zweig, an Austrian writer who apparently was one of the world’s most recognized and respected writers in the early 20th century. I have Beware of Pity on my shelf and anxiously wait to read it.
After you read the book:
How exactly does this book sound the death knell on the Enlightenment? Zweig recognized that his intellect and writing were no longer recognized thanks to the Nazi’s, but how does Zweig’s story connect to Dr. B’s?
Before you read the book:
While reading Zuckerman Unbound (1981), Roth’s sequel to the delightful (that’s only partially the right word) The Ghost Writer, I discovered something unexpected about myself. When I’m reading these books I must look as giddy as a teenage girl (and their moms) reading Twilight. My thrill is not some suave vampire, but fantastic sentences, incredible timing, and stunning depth!
In Zuckerman Unbound we meet Nathan Zuckerman in his thirties. Though his writing has been successful already, he just published his major work that launched him into stardom: Carnovsky. Now rich, famous, the subject of gossip columns, and well recognized as a literary genius, he must deal with the downside of his dream while transitioning into celebrity life. On the surface, that is what this book is about: being famous.
But what Roth has accomplished is so much more, delving deeply into the other elements in the life of a man who has achieved all he wanted but who is beginning to take the measure of the costs. Some of the costs are comical: “What the hell are you doing on a bus, with your dough?” (the first line in the novel). Others are disturbing, like his hilarious encounter with the Alvin Pepler, an incredibly amusing quasi-Herb Stempel, the guy who took the dive in the quiz show scandals. We are fortunate to have two extended discussions between Zuckerman and Pepler! Pepler, still furious that he, the obvious genius, took a fall and now has nothing to show for it, is trying to write a book about his life. Zuckerman, in a way, since both are from Newark and are Jewish, has written that book with Carnovsky. But these encounters and others are increasingly disturbing and potentially threatening:
Zuckerman the stupendous sublimator spawning Zuckermaniacs! A book, a piece of fiction bound between two covers, breeding living fiction exempt from all the subjugations of the page, breeding fiction unwritten, unreadable, unaccountable and uncontainable, instead of doing what Aristotle promised from art in Humanities 2 and offering moral perceptions to supply us with the knowledge of what is good or bad. . . . If only he could understand that it is the writers who are supposed to move the readers to pity and fear, not the other way around!
In the midst of this, Zuckerman encounters unwelcome feelings – is it potential regret about what this fame has cost his relationship with his family? He has already been divorced three times. From The Ghost Writer we know that his relationship with his family is strained because of his artistic subjects which they think are exploitative and case not only the family but the Jewish people in a negative light, a difficult thing for them to stomach so soon after the Holocaust. And now, to make matters worse, people think Zuckerman’s mother is Carnovsky’s mother. However, what Zuckerman feels is not exactly regret – not yet, at least. Here Zuckerman is analyzing whether he should feel regret. And everyone telling him he should be more repentent serve only to show him that he shouldn’t. That’s exactly the type of thing he’s trying to get away from. This along with the occasional maniac on the street cause Zuckerman to consider withdrawing from society:
First you lock yourself away in order to stir up your imagination, now you lock yourself away because you’ve stirred up theirs.
I only wish I could adequately convey what this book contains. It is not a simple “perils of fame and fortune” story. It is much more nuanced than that, thankfully. And on the side, Roth allows examination of other elements. For example, the book contains some hard glances at Newark, where both Roth and Zuckerman (and Pepler!) grew up, a city visibly declining in the 1960s. Zuckerman has moved to New York City, but his stories, like Carnovsky, take place in a pre-war Newark that no longer exists, and this has led to the implication that he has exploited it like he exploited his family.
Newark is finished, idiot! Newark is barbarian hordes and the Fall of Rome!
I have put off reading the next book in the series, The Anatomy Lesson, just in an attempt to prolong the joy.
After you read the book:
Having your father’s last word - ”bastard” – be directed at you must be difficult (and comical – I loved all the theories about what else it was he might have said “better,” “batter,” “faster”). But I really like how Roth does not allow the reader to fully sympathize with Zuckerman or with his father. In a way, the decline of Zuckerman’s relationship with his family is tragic, a higher cost to pay for art (and fame) than I am willing to pay, but my family isn’t the same as Zuckerman’s. I could easily see Zuckerman’s perspective. He’s cut the ties that have held him back. The reaction by his father has only strained things more given Zuckerman even more grounds for separation.
However, Zuckerman’s brother Henry has some painful insights into the matter, and sets himself as a great counter to Zuckerman’s emancipated state. Henry is in a marriage in which he feels obligated to stay. He has always sought to please others, including their father. Yet even now Henry is having an affair. Is it noble of Henry to keep up the façade? To let sleeping dogs lie just because it might be unpleasant to disclose the truth? To me, neither Zuckerman nor Henry are saintly. Neither of them have the answer.
Before you read the book:
I read Eugenides’s Middlesex a while ago and was surprised it had won the Pulitzer. Though Eugenides is an excellent writer of sentences, overall that book just didn’t do it for me. The story never came together, the tone never felt right, it felt like a knock-off of Midnight’s Children or Forest Gump, albeit with many clever twists and turn in both the writing and the story. Despite my unsatisfactory experience with Eugenides, I was attracted to The Virgin Suicides (1993). Okay, I admit it: I saw the movie and was intrigued but not satisfied. I hoped to have some questions answered, or at least discussed, in the book.
This is not the edition I read. Mine, though purchased years later, still suffers the curse of the movie poster edition – a curse at least for those like me who also like their books for their body.
Now, how to start a fairly positive review of The Virgin Suicides without sounding morbid . . .
Eugenides doesn’t hide what happens here. The title should give it away. If not, the book’s blurb will. And if that doesn’t, the first few pages should be enough. But that the Lisbon girls’ suicides happen is not the real purpose of this book. Telling the story from the first person plural, a group of middle-aged men who, when adolescents, were neighbors of the Lisbons during the “year of the suicides” have never been able to get over the deaths. In fact, they’ve been obsessed, collecting “exhibits” such as photos, shoes, retainers, anything they can get their hands on. Through the years they’ve interviewed everyone who can give them any details into the girls’ lives, including the poor parents. This book is their reflection, their report (though, don’t be frightened, it does not read at all like a report).
I do have a major gripe with this book (disclosed in the “after your read the book” section, and, strangely, one that actually made the book even more appealing in the end), but because I don’t want to spoil the book, in this “before you read the book section” I can really only say what I liked - I liked many things about The Virgin Suicides, in fact.
For one, Eugenides is an excellent stylist. His sentences weave in and out, he has a great sense of timing, and the atmosphere he creates is appropriately comical, muggy, and haunting. I enjoyed how he could be funny and ominous at the same time while describing this otherwise mundane suburban setting.
The sun was falling in the haze of distant factories, and in the adjoining slums the scatter of glass picked up the raw glow of the smoggy sunset.
Furthermore, the narrators’ reflections are superb and enlightening even when they are puerile, coming from the memories of adolescence. For example, in clever ways Eugenides shows how even our seemingly innocuous, nerdy narrators objectified the Lisbon girls:
Our amazement at being formally invited to a house we had only visited in our bathroom fantasies . . .
. . . five pairs of bronzed baby shoes preserved for all time the unstimulating stage of the Lisbon girls’ infancy.
And what makes this story even more unique is the fact that these very boys are the ones attempting to explain why adolescent girls would commit suicide. All of their attempts to comprehend these girls belie their underlying obsession which is a direct offshoot of the attraction these girls held in life.
No, despite my gripe, I was not disappointed by the book. In some ways it felt like it was relying a bit too much on Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” – first person plural, decaying house, putrid smell, hidden lives, naïve community – to create its motifs, but this is minor because Eugenides really makes it his own.
After you read the book:
Now for my major gripe (which my wife helped me turn into something that made the book more interesting). Eugenides alludes to the conclusion that the suicides cannot be explained. All the typical theories – abuse, loneliness, teenage angst, revenge - don’t hold water according to the “we” telling the story and it definitely felt that Eugenides wanted the reader to feel the same. And I wanted to believe it. I wanted to feel like there was more to the suicides. I didn’t come away with that though. I never felt that Eugenides succeeded in presenting any nuances that led me to feel like there was more to the story. It’s not that I wanted an answer - most of the best books don’t have an answer – but I at least wanted some evidence of why there is a question or mystery. Just because Eugenides says there is more to this, and his characters back him up by saying the same thing, did not convince me.
I just never had reason to believe that the totality of the factors leading up to the suicides wasn’t their cause. I don’t think the remaining daughters would have killed themselves but for Cecilia’s suicide and the subsequent grief and lock-down. And even after that, I don’t think they would have committed suicide but for the general objectification by the boys who refused to get to know them and the even harsher lock-down in the steadily decaying house. Adding those factors together I can understand their suicides. They were not individuals. They were even punished as a whole. I’m not sure why – other than because I was told – I’m supposed to think that there was something else, something deeper, something more mysterious, more to the source. As I said earlier, I don’t need the answer to the mystery. I just need the foundation for believing there’s a mystery to begin with.
Then again, this might just be more clever than I first thought. Indeed, this disconnect between what is averred and what is really there – that absence of mystery - might be part of the point. Perhaps the boys’ attempts to find another cause that does not exist is also their attempt to feel less guilty for their fascination with the girls’ deaths and to take away their indirect complicity in the suicides. This is plausible because throughout the book death is another spectacle, another source of intrigue that titillates the boys more than saddens them.
Before you read the book:
It is with great pleasure that I present my own pick for the Best of the Booker on Booker’s 40th Anniversary. Kazuo Ishiguro’s transcendent The Remains of the Day (1988). One of my favorite books, let alone favorite Booker winners.
I am not bitter that this book was not selected for the short list for the Best of the Booker, but I really don’t understand it. Perhaps they thought – and were possibly right – that many people who read this book are informed by the beautiful Merchant Ivory production with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. Perhaps – and this is unfair – they thought the book was unduly esteemed and does not on its own merit a high place. They are wrong. The book itself has the power to evoke all of those emotions, that wonderful atmosphere, that subtle pain.
You’ve got to enjoy yourself. The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.
The book begins with Stevens, an old butler of a now musty Darlington Hall, asking his new American master if he can have leave to visit an old friend, Miss Kenton (now Mrs. Mrs. Benn), a friend who might just solve their staffing problems since she once was the home’s housekeeper during its glory days between the world wars, when important gentlemen from all over the world met to discuss international affairs. Then Darlington Hall was immaculate, a true source of pride for Stevens. A small misfortune, Miss Kenton’s marriage is breaking up, could perhaps have some silver lining if it allows Miss Kenton to come back to help restore it. Stevens gets his leave and begins his quest down the road.
While driving through the country, Stevens thinks back on the Darlington Hall’s glory days, that have now become infamous. Stevens still feels a sense of pride but is troubled by a barely acknowledged sense of shame. These conflicting emotions confuse him, and he can never quite reconcile them. He is proud of his work maintaining the house; only now, looking back, he realizes that his service might not have been as important or as noble as he once thought. He’s staked his life on his impeccable service, and to make matters worse, the home now does not even need much of a staff. Time is moving away from the haunting past.
Stevens is now entering the evening of his life. It is sad to watch him move forward with such trepidation and insecurity. In a way, he is seeking his old housekeeper both as an attempt to bring back the wonderful period between the wars and as an attempt to atone for his indirect involvement in the affairs of the home. This might provide some comfort in what’s left of his life.
Of course, a lot of this is back story, intricately woven into a tale of an aging and unsettled old man. I feel that if I try to explain it further I would not only spoil some of it for you but also cheapen the book itself – it’s best just to refer interested readers to Ishiguro’s handiwork.
Ishiguro’s writing is subtle. Somehow he gets us to feel and understand so much from a narrator who says so little and who avoid acknowledging his feelings. Stephens is one of my favorite characters in all of literature, despite the fact that he is only a butler of a great house. He holds so much emotion even though he won’t let it out (which is an excellent puzzle for the reader attempting to understand). Stevens’s emotions seep into his guarded words. It is a pleasure to reread this book for at least two reasons: the story has so many layers one can always uncover something, and it’s an excellent exercise to analyze sentences and paragraphs to study how Ishiguro achieves what he does.
Ishiguro’s ability to write about large themes (in this book we see pacifism, bigotry, class structure, duty, feminism, real politik, old passing to new, old age, guilt, regret, and most importantly life, death, and love) without addressing them directly or becoming didactic is what makes him one of the best writers out there today. I have been slightly disappointed after reading his two latest: When We Were Orphans (2000) and Never Let Me Go (2005) (but even those were shortlisted because of their masterful writing). He still has my complete attention simply because he wrote The Remains of the Day.
After you read the book:
What happens to Stevens? How does he spend what’s left? He’s left sitting on the pier under those beautiful moody lights which helped him realize that his best days have turned out to be shameful, and he has nothing to look forward to. Honestly, he has really lost Miss Kenton. That time passed years before when he still considered his job more important than his life.
Ishiguro’s ending is much better than the film’s not-so-subtle, disappointing resolution.
It occurs to me, furthermore, that bantering is hardly an unreasonable duty for an employer to expect a professional to perform. I have of course already devoted much time to developing my bantering skills, but it is possible I have never previously approached the task with the commitment I might have done. Perhaps, then, when I return to Darlington Hall tomorrow – Mr Farraday will not himself be back for a further week – I will begin practising with renewed effort. I should hope, then, that by the time of my employer’s return, I shall be in a position to pleasantly surprise him.
A perfect ending which shows that Stevens’s foray into the uncomfortable unknown is about to be shut down. Back to the cave. And now with even less of a reason to come out.
[This book was shortlisted for the Best of the Booker 2008. The other five are The Siege of Krishnapur, The Conservationist, Midnight's Children, The Ghost Road, and Disgrace.]
Before you read the book:
This was my first Peter Carey (my only, actually, so far). The hype the book garnered wasn’t necessarily the type of hype that attracts me – “millions of painstaking details” kind of sounds like a chore. But I was definitely interested that a book about two gamblers falling in love and conspiring to transport a glass church across the outback in colonial times could also be called “life-changing.” Could it be that good?
Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988 ) was a great trip for me. And the details? Oh yes, they are there. But it’s amazing how comfortable they made me feel. This was not detailed just to sound important (grumble, grumble, Conservationist, grumble); these details conveyed a tone, an atmosphere, and an intricate story – it simply wouldn’t have been as good without them. It was great to have unfamiliar things, places, and concepts explained in such detail that they felt familiar. And it was great to have familiar things described in such detail that they felt new. Definitely do not be discouraged into thinking you have to slog through a marsh to get to the heart of the story.
The story takes place around the mid-nineteenth century, first in England, then in Australia. In the beginning we meet Oscar, the son of a peculiar religious zealot who even slaps his son across the ear because he dared eat a Christmas pudding. Why? Well . . .
He had so convinced his small congregation of farm workers, thatchers, warreners, charcoal-burners, fishermen – all of those earnest white-laundered fold who, if they could read at all, could only do it slowly, with a finger on each word – so convinced them that Christmas was not only pagan but also popish, that they went out about their fields and lanes on Christmas Day as if it were any other day. Their Baptist neighbors laughed at them. Their Baptist neighbors would burn in hell.
Who knows where this story would have ended up without that slap, though?
We also meet Lucinda as a little girl whose father dies and whose mother, also a bit extreme and indignant about the death of her husband, is forced to make a living on the failing farm her husband purchased to make them rich. Lucinda’s mom, Elizabeth, and later Lucinda, must overcompensate for being a woman and suffers from the “disease of neatness.”
Elizabeth Leplastrier believed, as many still believe today, that you can tell everything you need to know about a farmer’s skills by the condition of his sheds and fences, and whilst this may be true enough in a way, it became, for Elizabeth, such a tenet of faith that fences and sheds were attended to in preference to sheep and wheat and, on one occasion that was soon notorious in the district, amongst Protestants and Catholics alike, Mrs. Leplastrier chopped down a Bartlett pear, a ten-year-old tree, healthy and fruitful in every respect, because she could no longer abide it standing out of line.
And in a note about Carey’s prose style: Usually sentences with so many interruptions drive me crazy. It is difficult to get from one end to the other without losing your way. But I think it is nice that when reading the above sentence the first time, I didn’t even notice it was only one sentence. He has great sentence variation and knows when to make a sentence drift along and also when to make it pop.
Back to the story: Oscar and Lucinda grow up. Both are outcasts: Oscar because he’s just really strange and gawky and at ever choice he encounters flips a coin to know God’s will; Lucinda because she’s a woman, a strong-willed woman, a land-owning woman (and kind of strange herself). Both develop a passion for gambling. And then, quite a ways into the novel (but that’s not a bad thing in my book) they meet. It is because of this meeting that Oscar and Lucinda is categorized as a love story. It’s true – it is a love story – and quite possibly one of the most touching I’ve read, neither simple nor convoluted. The characters have many different, deep-running feelings (all of which Carey tracks to some extent): guilt, pleasure, holiness, despair, longing, loneliness, attraction. It’s a rich rich book.
While the story is basically what’s written above, it is more honest to say that the transporting a church thing is just something that happens in the book. An important element in the plot, it is by no means a gimmick that drives the plot. It comes across as the most natural thing in the world. Not only that, but it quite brilliantly allowed Carey to really dig into deep questions of the soul, like faith, doubt, righteousness, hypocrisy, wickedness, the fragility of relationships. While I read this book I really cared for the characters as they struggled to find their identity amidst so much external and internal conflict – and somehow that church helped me feel it even more.
The book is also pretty funny. There are several great parts that made me laugh out loud on the subway, which can be awkward but was worth it here. It was difficult not to laugh. It’s the way Carey describes things and his sense of timing (impossible to convey in a review). And that same talent helps him also acheive a devestating effect in the reader. The comical story is a major part of the novel, but so is the tragedy and despair. The relationships are so important to the characters, who have struggled so hard to connect with anyone. Yet the relationships, while honest, are also desparate. It’s hard to read at times for fear of what discoveries will be made.
Ultimately these two characters gamble everything they care for on each other. This all somehow leads to a very insightful look at faith, colonialism, love, and death (whew! I’ve listed a lot of abstract terms while reviewing this book; Carey is much better than I am at bringing them down to the earth). Some day I will definitely have to reread this one because it deserves more time and I want to learn more from it. And it should be admired. I like the way Angela Carter described it in an early review of the book in The Guardian: like building the Taj Mahal out of matchsticks (by the way, if you want to see what Carter might have had in mind, click here for an exhibit). It’s (back to the book) impressively put together, and quite beautiful.
So is this my vote for the Best of the Booker? No. Though I wanted to get away from it because it is already so well recognized and acclaimed, I honestly thought Midnight’s Children was the best book on the shortlist. But I will not be disappointed if Oscar and Lucinda were to win. Even though it didn’t change my life, I still enjoyed the bit of life I spent reading it.
After you read the book:
One of the most touching and tragic things for me was that I don’t really think that Oscar or Lucinda knew that they were loved by the other. They suspected. They hoped. But the church was a way for each of them to maintain their relationship a bit longer, almost like it was a way for them to stall while figuring out a way to truly win over the other. And what made it even more touching was that even though they had some self-interest, they were also genuinely trying to do something for the other, even if it got them no where.
In some ways, the glass church itself represented their relationship. It was unlikely and beautiful. It was also very fragile. As it floated down the river I cringed each time it bent too far, not necessarily because I admired the church but because I knew what Carey was alluding too (or, at least, that’s the way I took it, so it had the same effect). I was actually quite devestated when I got to the ending. Oscar lost a lot in that moment of passion. His teetering faith was still quite enough to make him feel incredibly guilty. And his love for Lucinda was enough to break him. It’s as if he went back on the boat, into the peaceful nave of the glass church, because he hoped that what he feared would finally end him.
[This book was shortlisted for the Best of the Booker 2008. The other five are The Siege of Krishnapur, The Conservationist, Midnight's Children, Oscar and Lucinda, and Disgrace.]
Before you read the book:
Two Best of the Booker shortlist reviews, two disclaimers: Unfortunately, in my zeal to finish the Best of the Booker shortlist before the winner was announced, I didn’t read the first two books in this trilogy, Regeneration (1993) and The Eye in the Door (1995). I am sure that has an effect on my opinion of this book. But, and I know I’m not the only one with this view, I think if a book is going to be named the best of anything it should stand alone. It shouldn’t win on the strength of previous books. I know, I know – I’m such an idealist.
But don’t think you already know I’m giving this book a bad review just because of my disclaimer (then again, I wonder when I would write a disclaimer before a good review). Truth is I had a strange experience with Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995). Up to the last page, the last word, I was happy while reading it. In fact, I didn’t really want it to end I was so engaged. But within moments of finishing, it all changed for me. I’m still trying to understand why.
The Ghost Road takes place towards the end of World War I, a fascinating time period both historically and culturally. Barker puts a lot of this together in this book: war, empire, civilizor/civilizee, suffrage, sexuality – particularly homosexuality. I also enjoyed the bits about real historical figures like Dr. Rivers, Wilfred Owens, and Charles Dodgson (a.k.a., Lewis Carrol). I hear that more time is spend with Wilfred Owens and Siegfried Sassoon in the first two books – a reason to read them.
My favorite part of The Ghost Road was the first part, when Billy Prior is home on leave, just waiting to be allowed back to the front. His relationship with Sarah, his fiancé, though he himself is homosexual, is a welcome different look at the girl saying her potentially last goodbyes to her soldier. And for fun, Barker throws into the mix Prior’s future mother-in-law, Ada.
Billy Prior sat at the other end of the table, a concession to his new status as future son-in-law. No more material concessions had been forthcoming: he and Sarah had not been left alone together for a second. Though Ada was gratified by the engagement. She believed in marriage, the more strongly, Prior suspected, for never having sampled it herself. You don’t know that, he reminded himself. But then he looked round the room and thought, Yes, I do.
For this section of the book alone I wish I had read the first two in the trilogy.
Sadly, this part is over too soon. Prior, inevitably, goes back to the front, and Barker begins telling his story through his own diary entries. Meanwhile, Dr. Rivers’s story of his past and his experience in the present continue to converge. It was definitely compelling. And like I said above, I enjoyed it until I put the book down.
That’s when I started to think about what I’d received from the book. I have since come to the conclusion that I didn’t receive much. There were parts that were intriguing to me. Tying death and sex together is an interesting concept, but it remains in the abstract for me. Barker’s attempts to bring that abstract concept into gritty realism didn’t work. But perhaps I just wasn’t expecting such things in a World War I novel since most of the stories I’ve heard have not even been too violent let alone sexual. But in the end, a theme I was interested in didn’t ever really come together.
The worst part was that when I set the book down, I kind of felt like I’d heard most of it before, in some other war book or movie. Such reflection – even if just a repeated exercise – is important, but the book became part of a much larger montage and didn’t stand out in any significant way. Before my very eyes, it faded away. I realized it wasn’t that good after all. (Perhaps if there had been more about Prior and his future mother-in-law.) Also, another intriguing part of the book, which I was anxious to see develop into an original statement, was the overlay of Dr. Rivers’s memories of his early days as a missionary doctor in the south seas onto his experiences as a doctor/psychiatrist during World War I. But even there, in the end, I felt that nothing new was being said.
I enjoyed reading this book many times over how much I enjoyed reading The Conservationist. Interesting that my experiences with both were so opposite. With The Conservationist I despised it while I read it and only after putting it down did I begin to see how it had worked in me (not enough to change my opinion on the book though).
After you read the book:
I am still intrigued by the connections between death and sex in this book. Sex seemed to be a way of leaving a bit of you behind, an attempt at immortality. But Barker didn’t let it stand at that. All of these images in the end came to one thing: death. The absence is what stands out rather than any physical trace.
Also, I admit that while I didn’t see anything new in the Dr. Rivers’s storyline, I still want to. Please give me your thoughts.
[This book was shortlisted for the Best of the Booker 2008. The other five are The Siege of Krishnapur, Midnight's Children, Oscar and Lucinda, The Ghost Road, and Disgrace.]
Before you read the book:
Because of the content of this post, I feel I must answer a few questions up front.
* Have you ever been on the Nobel Prize selection committee? No.
* Have you ever been on the Booker Prize selection committee? No.
* Any selection committee? No.
* Has anyone ever come to you and said, hey, your views on literature are really important and should be highly regarded by everyone, especially the authors themselves? No.
* Do you know how difficult it is to write a book? I’ve tried to write something good, but I didn’t succeed. I can’t imagine how hard it is to write a book.
* Have you read Alex Pheby’s post on Vulpes Libris about how difficult books are important? Yes. That a little bit of obfuscation can be a good thing? Yeah, I got that part. Do you agree with him? Yes. Can you honestly say you gave this book the time it deserves? Not honestly, no. So you’re a hypocrit? I just might be. And hopefully someone will see fit to enlighten me about this book.
You might think from my answers that I didn’t like the book. While that’s true, it is probably also true to say that I am ambivalent about this book. I just might be able to be persuaded to see the light.
On the one hand, The Conservationist (1974) had some brilliant parts. The overall themes that alluded to apartheid are subtle, very subtle, but powerful. Many of the passages are poetic and evocative. At the end I could honestly say that I felt I’d been through a good experience. Gordimer does a great job showing awkward relationships between Mehring and his black workers. The dead man found at the beginning haunts the rest of the novel – and that image works brilliantly.
On the other hand, most of the time I read it I was annoyed by what felt to me like an overly self-important, self-indulgent style. I felt like I was at an amateur poetry reading where the poet is reading some obfuscated poem entitled something like “A purple evening on the hood of my 1965 Mustang with the engine turned off while the moon rose over the hills to the East, a bright circle” – the kind of writing that lays out details in a way not meant to be descriptive but to sound profound, even when the details are not important at all. It’s the kind of writing that draws attention to itself and the author for no other purpose other than to show off. For example, here is the beginning of a chapter:
Golden reclining nudes of the desert.
That is it. Then there is a full space between that and the next paragraph. I’m just not into this kind of writing. I enjoy a more simple style.
I’m sure a lot of this was just my approach to the novel, but I couldn’t help feeling like the narrator was drolling on and on in this way, enunciating alliteration and assonance to show how clever it was. James Joyce could write in a style that took full advantage of the sounds of words, but it all sounded natural. Gordimer’s writing, in this book, does not. Here, the more simple passages were the most touching, not the ones that were obviously worked and reworked to have a rhythm that screams at the reader look at this rhythm!
A plover has landed within a few yards of his feet, tipping from beak to tail for balance. Its exquisitely neat black and white markings take his eye into visual discipline.
I’m not one hundred percent sure what the “visual discipline” means. Unless it’s saying that somehow the crane makes the character examine the rest of the landscape because Gordimer does next launch into a full paragraph about the scenery. It’s all a bit obfuscated, to me. And nothing ever made me say, hey, the prize might be worth the work.
I don’t want to discourage anyone from reading this book. I feel awfully pretentious saying all of that about a Booker Prize winner (one that beat out thirty-five others to be shortlisted for the Best of the Booker), let alone about a Nobel Prize winner. Griping about style in a book of obvious substantive value is probably petty.
I admit, this is the only book by Gordimer that I’ve read, but I still believe that she’s an important writer. She has been progressive with her portrayals of race pre- and post-apartheid. This book surely fits in to all of that. Unfortunatly, The Conservationist felt dated to me. The Best of the Booker judges surprised me here (was this the book they didn’t fully agree on – I’m betting it was this one or The Ghost Road). I didn’t feel like this book should have survived the early 1980s.
For after you read the book:
Please, tell me what you think about this book. Point out passages that will help me understand why Gordimer chose a style that made it next to impossible to know who was talking. It just seemed like Gordimer mistook sounding difficult with being deep.
Before you read the book:
After reading Kertész’s Liquidation, I decided I’d better check out the books he wrote earlier, especially since they are the ones bearing the weight of the Nobel Prize. Fatelessness (Sorstalanság, 1975; tr. from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson, 2004), the first book Kertész published, also the first book in a supposed tetralogy, is one of his most recognized.
Despite that fact, when I began it I was reading it more with the mindset of getting through it quickly to be able to read Kaddish for an Unborn Child, which appealed to me more. And at the beginning, nothing changed my mind.
Fatelessness, previously translated as Fateless (but doesn’t Fatelessness have a more Nobel-worthy name?), is a first-person narrative account of Auschwitz and Buckenwald, told from the perspective of a fifteen-year-old Hungarian boy, Georg Koves. At first, he sounded as apathetic and cynical as Holden Caulfield. His father is getting sent to a labor camp, and he doesn’t show much emotion and seems to accept it as “natural.” In fact, he feels a bit awkward at his family’s display of sentiment. Even when Georg himself is taken from a bus and shipped on a train to Auschwitz he has more comments about seemingly petty irritations or puerile observations:
I didn’t even know offhand which way I was supposted to turn, and all I remember is that in the thick of it I felt a bit like laughing, in part out of astonishment and confusion, a sense of having been dropped slap in the middle of some crazy play in which I was not entirely acquainted with my role, in part because of a fleeting thought that just then flashed across my mind, which was my stepmother’s face when it finally dawned on her that it would be pointless to count on seeing me for supper this evening.
Mixed in were comments about how it really wasn’t that bad: the police were cordial, he didn’t have to go to work that day, etc. It is a very interesting way to approach a story about the Holocaust, but it still didn’t appeal to me – at first – it felt like cleverness just to be clever, just to be different.
Soon my attitude changed, though. Before I knew what was happening, the narrative changed in a subtle, imperceptible way. I realized that, like the great Remains of the Day, the power was under the surface, what was not being said, how the deeper feelings emerged from underneath the narrative. Unlike Stevens, however, Georg is not pushing down feelings, refusing to feel them. He just notes things with a very noticeable lack of sentimentality. It isn’t a scientific disinterestedness. It is more, though I’m sure there’s a better way of explaining this, a deferential, understated attitude, an accepting as natural the way things were that somehow lets a subject become clearer because it is not hampered by sentimentality, somewhat – please forgive the incongruous reference – like Winnie-the-Pooh.
I had to concede, there could be no doubt about it, we were indeed at our destination. I was glad, very naturally, though in a different way, I sensed, than I would have been glad yesterday, say, or still more the day before that.
The power of these types of understatements grows and grows as Kertész narrative and philosophical stance build speed. Turns out, it’s not just a gimmick. Here is a particularly poignant passage where Georg is in a medical ward, sharing his bed with a fellow patient. Here, somehow, the understatement made me less aware of the suffering and more aware of the time and cold logic of the circumstances:
Hey! Cut it out, ease up there, and in the end he heeded the advice. I only saw why the next morning, when my repeated attempts to rouse him for coffee were futile. All the same, I hastily passed his mess tin to the orderly along with my own since, just as I was about to report the case, he snappily asked me for it. I later also accepted his bread ration on his behalf, and likewise his soup that evening, and so on for a while, until one day he began to go really strange, which was when I felt obliged finally to say something, as I could not carry on stowing him in my bed, after all.
Also of interest is the seemingly warped but curiously thought-provoking depictions where Kertész chooses to show a scene focusing on those who run the concentration camp rather than on the suffering Jews (though that’s still there):
I have no idea when the barbers get any sleep, for I am told that nowadays newcomers may have to stand around naked for two or three days in front of the bathhouse before being able to proceed farther while the Leichenkommando too, as I can hear, is constantly at work on its rounds.
There is much more to discuss about how these narrative choices affect the overall philosophy of the novel. Fatelessness has an interesting perspective about what it means to live life in a concentration camp or out of it. I gladly move on to Kaddish for an Unborn Child but not because I’m relieved at having finished this book; rather, this book encouraged me to keep up with my current trek through Kertész.
For after you read the book:
While I understand the narrator’s point about fatelessness, I’m not sure how that tied into seeing the beauty of the concentration camp. I enjoyed passages like this one:
It was that peculiar hour, I reconized even now, even here – my favorite hour in the camp, and I was seized by a sharp, painful, futile longing for it: nostalgia, homesickness.
However, how does this fulfill or rather emerge from the philosophy of taking steps and surviving that way? Does it echo Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning? Was it the choice to see the beauty that helped him survive? If so, that isn’t what I got from the actual account of the concentration camp. He chose to escape by imagining and also by attempting to understand the system, and I see how that helped him appreciate what he still had on his “earthly remains.” Still, I’m not sure I understand how this fits in with the idea of being fateless. I see how reckognizing one’s fatelessness leads to accepting one’s ability to choose. I see how that affects one’s ability to find beauty. I don’t see how this meshes with the other side of the coin: that fatelessness also uncovers the arbitrariness of one’s circumstances. And recognizing that arbitrariness, for most I’m assuming, does not lead one to happiness but to bitterness.
[This book was shortlisted for the Best of the Booker 2008. The other five are The Siege of Krishnapur, The Conservationist, Midnight's Children, Oscar and Lucinda, and The Ghost Road.]
Before you read the book:
When Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, Disgrace (1999) was the first book I bought by him. Though it was short, it took me a long time to open it up and begin to read. Years in fact. When I finally did begin reading it, I consumed it in less than one day, a busy day at that.
Disgrace is a very quick read. But it’s not quick just because it’s short (though it is short); it is a quick read because Coetzee’s writing is sweet and simple. I don’t remember getting tied up by a single sentence. It’s siplicity on the surface is even more impressive when considering the complexity – all the allusions, all of the conflicted feelings – that is actually going on. As an example of how fast this book can move and yet how much goes on in the lines, anything I disclose in this post takes place in the first thirty pages – and so much happens in those thirty pages, so many emotions that affected me viscerally.
However, though short and quick, I still don’t think I get all I should have gotten from the book – so please enlighten me with your comments!
The novel opens up when David Lurie’s prostitute stops meeting with him. He’s caught a glimpse of her outside the hotel room where they met weekly and where, until now, they’ve had a great relationship. He wants to console her, tell her that he understands:
He is all for double lives, triple lives, lives lived in compartments. Indeed, he feels, if anything, greater tenderness for her.
But she cannot deal with the fact that a client has seen her in her daily life, so she drops him. His week becomes ”as featureless as a desert.” He seeks to assauge his libido (let alone his ego) by seducing one of his students. It is one of the most painfully compelling sections of a book I’ve ever read. In a way I felt guilty for reading it, like I was somehow involved. That sick feeling of guilt and desire radiates from the page. It’s an unpleasant thing to experience, especially when Coetzee inserts cold reason.
He is vexed, irritated. She is behaving badly, getting away with too much; she is learning to exploit him and will probably exploit him further. But if she has got away with much, he has got away with more; if she is behaving badly, he has behaved worse. To the extent that they are together, if they are together, he is the one who leads, she the one who follows. Let him not forget that.
And this is just the first thirty pages. The real force of the book comes after this, when Lurie moves away to live with his daughter on her farm. There is more disgrace to come.
David Lurie is a character to be despised – at least, that’s what I wanted to do. I couldn’t fully despise the man though. Somehow I could not help but pity him and feel somewhat complicit. Underneath the cold, selfish skin, there was a real human being. I don’t quite know why. I admit that I have not fully informed myself of the criticism this book takes from those who purport to know about South Africa and race relations post-apartheid. I’m not sure how I’d feel about it if I knew more, but as I stand now, it is a book to be read for its stylistic, stark beauty and for its substance.
For after you read the book:
Mostly I have just questions here, about various matters.
What is the connection with the animals? That was an aspect that I didn’t particularly care for honestly, but maybe I just didn’t get it. Even though I pitied the animals, it was in no way sufficient for me to associate that pity with anything I consider more important.
I can see some reasons why Lucy was so passive about her rape and her assaulters. But I know this offended a lot of people. How does it fit in the larger picture of the book? Her passivity and the somewhat redemptive ending do not seem to mesh in my mind.
[This book was shortlisted for the Best of the Booker 2008. The other five are The Conservationist, Midnight's Children, Oscar and Lucinda, The Ghost Road, and Disgrace.]
Before you read the book:
Of the Best of the Booker shortlist, The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) was the most pleasant surprise. It came in New York Review of Books Classics edition, which while stylish gave the book the feel of an academic historical piece. I enjoy academic historical pieces, but not for the same reasons I enjoy a good novel. Still, I feel very smart when I read a book like this on the subway.
The novel is, as the title says, about a siege that happened at Krishnapur in 1857. In his afterword, Farrell claims to have gotten a lot of his material from actual accounts, even in ”in some cases with the words of the witnesses only slightly modified.” So its roots really are, in a way, academic. But Farrell has a good story-telling style, and it never seemed to me that he felt constrained by diaries when writing his prose. In fact, I wish that Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger had been written in a similar style – the language is good and meticulous, poetic yet simple, and does an excellent job setting the historic atmosphere with a sense of formality without being stifling.
With the ominous arrival of several batches of chapatis, one of the main characters, the Collector, begins gearing up for trouble from the Muslims. At first, his fellows think he is just being a silly old man, a bit cracked after so many years. Chapatis, even if undesired, are hardly cause for alarm. But an attack does come, and the residents are forced to live under siege for months, watching their friends die around them. On that level, this book is a rather thrilling adventure novel at times. Farrell manages to express the excitement and fear at the same time as he relays the strategies of the defense, making it informative as well as entertaining.
My favorite aspect of the novel, however, was its discussion about civilization, colonialism, and “ideas” of progress, all from an early Victorian perspective. Most of the characters, at one point or another, have to examine how they feel about their position in both India and in the greater construct of “civilization.” There is a lot of pride, of course, and I particularly enjoyed how Farrell displayed that pride with ironic undertones. For example, when one soldier dies, a speech is given:
Providence has denied his country the privilege of decking his youthful brow with the chaplets which belong to the sons of victory and of fame, but his deeds can never die. The pages of history will record and rehears them far and wide, and every Englishman, whether in his island home or a wanderer on some foreign shore, will relate with admiration what George Foxlett Cutter did at the siege of Krishnapur!
Even though I have to admit it looks like Farrell basically watered down Henry V for this passage, I have a feeling that’s what these Englishman would have done too, making it authentic and comic. There are better, more subtle passages, almost on every page. It was entertaining and perhaps did feel a bit overdone after a time.
Since the book takes place soon after the Great Exhibition, that event provides another nice backdrop to the conversation. Farrell delights in making his characters comment on the inventions they thought were brilliant (which are absurd by today’s standards) and those that they thought were absurd (some of which we use all the time today). It was hardly original, but it was fun and, as I said, surprisingly pleasing to read.
One of my complaints is that much of the book felt disconnected with its historical context (other than the Exhibition which really just allowed Farrell to comment on how naïve these colonizers were). I felt a strong desire to get more placement, to have more of a perspective from the Muslims, to know some other events that led up to the siege, not in great detail, but a little bit more. Sure, I know about the time period in a general sense, but there had to have been some specifics. Then again, this book is about isolation inside a siege, a siege that turned out to be rather insignificant even in its own time. The lack of context fits nicely into that feeling of isolation.
Probably not a Booker I would have shortlisted, but I can see why it was chosen. It is an impressive piece from the unfortunately short life of Farrell.
After you read the book:
One part I particularly liked was after the siege ended and Lieutenant Stapleton finds Louise emaciated and stinking. Fluery, who smells worse, probably doesn’t notice her smell, but at this point he doesn’t care. They’ve been through it together, and a superficial thing like that, another dig at civilization’s sensibilities, does not bother him. Stapleton has the military experience, and the arrogance that comes with it, and Louise he no longer considers Louise a catch.
That said, I never admired Fluery much. I don’t think I much cared for the Collector either. But perhaps that’s another reason I liked the novel. I didn’t see these characters as representing whatever Farrell held up as an ideal. They were both flawed, both had their ideals changed, and still didn’t come out much better in the end. Their lives are visibly altered because of the siege, but they feel no real connection after the years pass. I can respect an author who allows this to happen to his characters.
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