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Gail Hareven wrote one of the more intriguing pieces of short fiction published in The New Yorker last year: “The Slows.” Despite that, I didn’t rush into reading The Confessions of Noa Weber (She’ahava Nafshi, 2000; tr. from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu, 2009). However, when the book won Three Percents Best Translated Fiction Award I knew I’d be missing something if I didn’t read it. I have faith in the good opinion of that judging panel.
Review copy courtesy of Melville House.
Like her short story, the book started out fresh:
The city of J lies at the top of the hills of J. That’s how I’d like to begin my story; at a calm distance, with a deep breath, in a panoramic shot focusing very slowly on a single street, and very slowly on a single house, “this is the house where I was born.” But you’d be making a fool of yourself if your J were Jerusalem, since every idiot knows about Jerusalem. And altogether it’s impossible to talk about Jerusalem any more. Impossible, that is to say, without “winding alleys” and “stone courtyards,” “caper bushes” and “Arab women in the market place.” And I have nothing to say about caper bushes and stone courtyards, nor do I have the faintest desire to flavor my story with the colorful patois of colorful Jerusalem characters, twirling their mustaches as they spin Oriental tales.
Noa Weber is a 47 year-old woman. She has single-handedly raised a successful daughter, Hagar, who is now 29. After years of activism, particularly for women, Noa has become a writer of detective fiction. Her central character is Nira Woolf, a strong female lead who finds no need to attach herself to a man. Noa might like to think she’s like her protagonist, but for the last thirty years she has been consumed by her love for Alek, the father of her child, her nominal husband. Perhaps finally feeling empowered by her female protagonist (“Your heart aches because of some man?” she would say. “Nonsense, darling, just hypochondria, a little twinge you’ve decided to blow up out of all proportion. But never mind, sweetie, if you want to feel sorry for yourself, you go right ahead. And I hope you never know what real pain feels like.”), Noa feels it’s time to “confess.” In the paragraph above, which is the book’s first, Noa gives a bit of context to her confession by taking it out of any preconceived context the reader might have coming in. There is no easy way to situate this story:
Not that I’m complaining, God forbid. The facts of my birth and upbringing have nothing to do with what follows here, and even if they did, you need calm and composure to distance the camra like that; calm and composure and a sense of historical perspective, and as far as my situation is concerned, I clearly suffer from a severe lack of both.
To her, her love just is. People don’t look at the context surrounding Romeo and Juliet — they just fell in love, and their love simply was. “Me and my love for Alek — which against my better judgment I experience as transcendence. Me with my dybbuk — which is the only thing that gives me a sense of space.”
The problem is that Alek has no interest in Noa. He never has. In the early 1970s they met as part of a group of young thinkers, people against the “traditions” of Israel. Alek himself isn’t from Israel and finds sees himself as a bit of a saviour. He roams around Europe looking for causes. In Noa he finds a woman who will have to serve in the military if she isn’t married. So, almost on a dare to see if he’s really serious about his beliefs, Alek says he will marry Noa to keep her from having to serve in the military. Noa knows Alek’s motives, but this is what she wants. Soon Noa is pregnant. Alek has no desire to be a father, though he’s not necessarily brutal about the fact. He says he’ll take her to get an abortion, but when she says no he says that a woman has the right to raise her child. He soon leaves the country. Noa realizes all along that one of the reasons she wants to have her baby is because the baby will be partly Alek. However, this “gasping confession without any perspective” isn’t for her daughter’s benefit.However, this “gasping confession without any perspective” isn’t for her daughter’s benefit.
In the years since Hagar’s birth, Alek turns up now and again, always nice but never allowing anyone to think he feels any differently than before. Noa also feels no differently. She continues to life her life as if he’s watching her and judging her every move.
She recognizes that this might not be that healthy. In the evenings Noa joins the “LAA — Love Addicts Anonymous” forum, though she sits silently as the other women in the world try to conquer their obsessive and hurtful addictions to one man or another. Noa has attempted to find ways to overcome her own desperate, visceral attachment to Alek:
I could have and could have and could have, but the problem of course is that I couldn’t. That is to say that from a chemical point of view there was simply no possibility of my detaching myself from him. Just as there was no possibility for me to change my soul, or to cut myself into pieces. I loved him. In other words, he had infiltrated my very depths and then spread through all my cells, and changed my being until I was no longer mistress of my love. It wasn’t “my” love. It didn’t belong to me, I belonged to it and was ruled by it. Or perhaps I belonged to him and was ruled by him. I don’t know.
It’s that last line that give a glimpse at the novel’s power. We have no reason to doubt Noa loves Alek. We also have no real reason to dislike Alek just because he doesn’t return the feelings. We might want him to accept responsibility and help support the child, but at least he’s been clear from the beginning. Nevertheless, Noa realizes that she has no idea who is controlling her life. Both Alek and Nira are absent presences feeding her thoughts.
In the background is Israel through the 70s and 80s. Sometimes those issues come up in the dialogue, though they are never central to the narrative. Still, the politics of that time pervade the way Noa sees herself, especially since it’s through Alek that she sees herself. I found that aspect very interesting.
Sadly, as much as I admired the book, at about the halfway point my interest began to falter. I started to feel like I was reading the same passages over and over again as Noa attempted to understand her love for Alek and explain the major periods in her life, in whatever order they came up. Passages like the following started to feel like they were placed all over just to be clever and not because they were particularly necessary to moving the narrative or building Noa’s character:
If there was any logic in the world, the radio would bleep every time the word “love” was mentioned. The censors would blacken the television screen and warn that the material in question is not suitable for children, that it is subversive, dangerous. That anyone who seriously succumbs to this madness is definitely not friendly to the environment. But nobody apart from me seems to see things this way.
We don’t really need that at the point it comes in the novel. We know how Noa feels. We’ve experienced her wit and unique perspective. The cleverness and unique voice, then, in the end became annoying to me and the book started to look flabby. The book, then, ended rather flat despite the fact that I continued to admire what Hareven was doing with the whole of the novel. And if we zoom back out to the whole, then, despite some of the flab, it is a magnificent book, a great look at an obsessive love from a political and unique narrator. I’m glad I read it, and if you find the passages above interesting, I think you’ll like it too. I can see why it won the Best Translated Book Award. However, of the four shortlisted titles I’ve now read I would have chosen The Twin, The Walsers, or Ghosts above it.
I decided to start my venture into the Lost Booker shortlist with the shortest of the bunch, Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat (1970). I could have produced this review as part of my Clock at the Biltmore feature that highlights classic New Yorker fiction fortnightly; The Driver’s Seat appeared in the New Yorker‘s pages on May 16, 1970. While I had no idea what I was in for, the violent New Directions cover offered little comfort.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
The only other Spark novel I’d read was The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie. However, though there are some slight thematic similarities, The Driver’s Seat is not at all what I’d have expected from the writer of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. This one is hellishly dark.
There are several stylistic similarities, though. In both, Spark eschews foreshadowing and, early on, discloses information about the characters’ fates. For example, in The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie we learn almost at the beginning that,
Mary Mcgregor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and a mouth like a snowman, who was later famour for being stupid and always to blame and who, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a hotel fire . . .
Similarly, in The Driver’s Seat Spark gives us an unflattering portrait of a character — the central character here — and lets us know that we won’t be with her for too long:
Lise’s eyes are widely spaced, blue-grey and dull. Her lips are a straight line. She is neither good-looking nor bad-looking. Her nose is short and wider than it will look in the likeness constructed partly by the method of identikit, party by actual photography, soon to be published in the newspapers of four languages.
And, just in case the reader didn’t catch the meaning of that “identikit” (which, incidentally, is the name of the film based on The Driver’s Seat, starring Elizabeth Taylor as Lise), Spark doesn’t keep us in the dark for long:
She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab-wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is travelling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.
Knowing that Lise will be dead the next morning doesn’t offer much light on the story, though. We don’t know who will commit the murder. Throughout the day Lise will meet several brutal men, and we will keep wondering, “Is it him?” But even if we did know who the murderer was early on, we would still have no idea why. And that is the crux of this story: why does this woman end up dead the next morning?
So we know the story won’t end happily. But, the story doesn’t begin happily either. Lise is going on a holiday, and she’s trying to find the perfect dress. Just when she thinks she’s found one, the sales clerk tells her it is made of that new stain-resistant material. Lise freaks out, giving us our first clue early on that Lisa is just not a stable person. This is not a comical scene, either; it’s uncomfortable to read. Spark has us in her control immediately, and her confidence is apparent without getting in the way.
Finally, Lise does find an awful dress she likes and goes to the airport. She keeps telling people that she’s going on holiday and that her boyfriend is waiting for her at the other end. However, we get the sense that she doesn’t know who this man is yet, only that she will know him when she sees him. And, just as in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie we get Jean’s common refrain “I am in my prime” whenever she defends herself, in The Driver’s Seat we get “he’s not my type” with almost everyone Lise meets.
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The chapter on the airplane is strange. Honestly, throughout the novel I felt I was reading something by Roberto Bolaño. People just kept doing strange things for no apparent reason. It’s unsettling. It’s also at this point when we meet, Bill, one of the most unsettling characters in the novel:
Lise’s left-hand neighbor smiles. The loudspeaker tells the passengers to fasten their seat-belts and refrain from smoking. Her admirer’s brown eyes are warm, his smile, as wide as his forehead, seems to take up most of his lean face. Lise says, audibly above the other voices on the plan, ‘You look like Red Riding-Hood’s grandmother. Do you want to eat me up?’
If you’ve seen the Elizabeth Taylor film, then you cannot get this image out of your mind. Bill is just creepy as he stares, almost salivating, at Lise. He’s on a macrobiotic diet, always eschewing Yin for Yang. On his diet he is required to have one orgasm per day. He will pester Lise through much of the book. If he doesn’t, he has to make up for it the next. And it gets stranger:
The engines rev up. Her ardent neighbour’s widened lips give out a deep, satisfied laughter, while he slaps her knee in applause. Suddenly her other neighbour looks at Lise in alarm. He stares, as if recognizing her, with his brief-case on his lap, an dhis hand in the position of pulling out a batch of papers. Something about Lise, about her exchange with the man on her left, has casued a kind of paralysis in his act of fetching out some papers from his brief-case. He opesn his mouth, gasping and startled, staring at her as if she is someone he has known and forgotten and now sees again. She smiles at him; it is a smile of relief and delight. His hand moves again, hurriedly putting back the papers that he had half-drawn out of his brief-case. He trembles as he unfastens his seat-belt and makes as if to leave his seat, grabbing his brief-case.
Throughout the book, Spark has her characters flashforward a day, and we see them answering questions about Lise for police reports. Here’s what the man who abandoned his seat says:
On the evening of the following day he will tell the police quite truthfully, ‘The first time I saw her was at the airport. Then on the plane. She sat beside me.’
‘You never saw her before at any time? You didn’t know her?’
‘No, never.’
‘What was your conversation on the plane?’
‘Nothing. I moved my seat. I was afraid.’
‘Afraid?’
‘Yes, frightened. I moved to another seat, away from her.’
‘What frightened you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why did you move your seat at that time?’
‘I don’t know. I must have sensed somehting.’
‘What did she say to you?’
‘Nothing much. She got her seat-belt mixed with mine. Then she was carrying on a bit with the man at the end seat.’
Unlike a Bolaño novel, however, this one does begin to resolve itself, and we begin to connect the dots in the narrative. Ultimately, it is a sad novel displaying emptiness. And, in one final effort to compare this one to The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie: I think The Driver’s Seat is better.
In an effort to get some more current classic New Yorker fiction in the Clock at the Biltmore feature, I decided to choose a story from the 1970s, Patricia Hampl’s “Look at a Teacup,” published June 28, 1976. I had heard of Hampl but never read her. I had never heard of this story and I had no idea what it was about. Again, I was a bit shocked (as always, in retrospect, I should have been) at how much it seems a product of its time. I’ve said it before, but if you ever get the chance, go browse the New Yorker cover art archives (go ahead, they’re all there from 1925 to today) and just watch the century of politics and art unfold before you.
Click for a larger image.
The story begins:
She bought the teacup in 1939, of all years.
Hah! Another reason I went for the 1970s was an attempt to see a piece of fiction a bit more distant from World War II. It’s not that I don’ t like that fiction — I love it — it was more to get some variety in the dates of these features and to see the themes arising at different parts of the century. Of course, the War has been at least a shadow is so much fiction since 1939. Of course, in 1976 in particular, as the mother in the story says, “It wasn’t that long ago.” “Look at a Teacup,” however, is still a product of the 1970s, a time when social mores were changing rapidly and yet where this narrator — a daughter, trying to connect in some way to her mother — feels a strong pull to the past.
We soon learn that the narrator’s mother was married in 1939 (“Even on sale, it was an extravagance as far as her new in-laws were concerned; it set her apart.”). The narrator is unmarried (“Some people just don’t want to get married — I know that,” she says broadmindedly. But she knows I’m saying marriage isn’t there anymore; the flowered flannel nightgown isn’t being hung on a peg in a closet next to a pair of striped pajamas anymore.”). From that date — 1939 — the daughter contemplates the passing years — for a teacup. We get what must be one of the most beautiful, evocative descriptions of a teacup ever. But the teacup isn’t really the point. It is “a detail, a small uncharred finger from the mid-century bonfire.” There are no embedded photographs (other than the comics), but the subtle emotion-laden description of an object while keeping in mind the passage of time reminded me of W.G. Sebald:
In the cup, amid the bundle of pastel falling flowers at the bottom of the bowl there is another firm, thin gold circlet. It shines up just below the most deeply submerged flower, like a shoreline submerged by a momentary tide of morning tea. The engulfed flowers become oranges and violets — those colors. Above the tea-line there are green leaves and several jots of blue flowers, not deep and bright like cornflowers but a powdery, toneless blue, a monochrome without shadow or cloud. Also, there is the shape of the flowers. Some are plump, all curve and weight. There is a pale lavender rose on the saucer, with a rounded, balled-up cabbage head of petals; and on the opposite side a spiky, orange dahlia-like flowers. None of the flowers looks real. They are suggestions, pale, almost unfinished, with occasional sparks of brightness, like a replica of memory itself. There is a slur of recollection about them, something imprecise, seductive, and foggy but held together with a bright bolt of accuracy — perhaps a piercing glance from a long-dead uncle, whose face, all the features, has otherwise faded and gone.
There is an interesting contrast between the mother and the daughter. The daughter is constantly looking back — “everything drives me into the past that she insists is safely gone.” The mother insists that “you can’t keep going over things . . . It’s the flow of life that counts.” And the mother isn’t being coy. She really doesn’t seem to think she has much to offer:
I try to get her to talk about her life, but she won’t do that. It’s not that she thinks I’m prying. “Well, honey, what do you want to know?” she says. “I mean, what’s there to say?”
And there’s this wonderful line, coming after the wonderful details of the teacup: “Her details don’t add up to a life story.” There is a lot going on in this very short story — passage of time, mother/daughter relationship, generational gaps, war, marriage, family – and it is all beautifully written. Highly recommended. So far, my efforts to find “classic” New Yorker fiction for the Clock at the Biltmore have been paying off.
While I looked to see who the winner was this last Sunday, I forgot to post it here for those interested. This year the award went to Brigid Pasulka for A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True. I haven’t heard of the book, which is Pasulka’s first — hence the elligibility for this award.
The two finalists were C.E. Morgan for All the Living and Abraham Verghese for Cutting for Stone. There are also two honorable mentions, Mary Beth Keane for The Walking People and Lydia Peele for Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing.
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