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I have next to no knowledge of Chinese literature. My knowledge of Chinese history, even fairly recent history, is negligible. So I approached The King of Trees(1984, 1985; tr. from the Chinese by Bonnie S. McDougall, 1990, 2010) with some real trepidation. Surely the cultural references would zip by my head. The back of the book says, “Never before had a fiction writer dealt with the Cultural Revolution in such Daoist-Confucian terms, discarding Mao-speak, and mixing both traditional and vernacular elements with an aesthetic that emphasized no the hardships and miseries of those years, but the joys of close, meaningful friendships.” I know what the Cultural Revolution was, I know what Daoism and Confucianism are, broadly, and I know who Mao was. But throw all of that in one sentence, along with aesthetics, and I’m afraid I’m in over my depth; in all honesty, surely I missed a lot of that subtext. However, what I didn’t miss was that second part of the quote, those “close, meaningful friendships.” I was also worried I wouldn’t be able to relate to the characters, but here I was completely wrong. While all things political zipped passed my head, I was enraptured in the story of these characters, mostly men forming deep friendships with other men. Ah Cheng’s writing is so intimate, I was surprised at how touching it was, at how deeply I felt for the characters. This was probably my biggest surprise of the year, so far.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
The King of Treesis a compilation of three novellas Ah Cheng wrote in the early 1980s: The King of Trees, The King of Chess, and The King of Children. When I finished The King of Trees, I didn’t quite want to move on. I felt the same way when I finished The King of Chess. And, not surprised this time, I felt the same after The King of Children. These a wonderful, sometimes aching (but always softly), stories.
The first novella in the collection is The King of Trees. At the beginning we see a tractor transporting our party of Educated Youth into a valley. During the Cultural Revolution, youth from the urban areas of China were sent to the countryside to live among the peasants, all in an effort to have the urban youth re-educated. These particular youth are in charge of cutting down a forest on a mountain side, all the while mingling with the peasants who have lived there for generations. One peasant, whose name is Knotty, has a special relationship to the area and to the trees. Here is an exchange between Knotty and the narrator.
“Have you been sent here to clear trees?”
“No,” I answered after thinking it over. “We’re here to be re-educated by the poor and lower-middle peasants, to build up and defend our country and to eliminate poverty and ignorance.”
“Then why cut down trees?”
“We’ll cut down useless trees and replace them with useful ones,” I replied. (We had been given a general idea of our work when we got here.) “Is felling easy?”
He lowered his head.
“Trees can’t run away.”
There is one particular tree that no one has, so far, cut down. Knotty has said that it will lead to death. It’s large enough that it would take days to cut it down, so that combined with general superstition have saved the tree. Still, the tree is blocking valuable light. Some of the Educated feel they need to educate the peasants: “In practical terms, old things must be destroyed.”
There are, obviously, several things going on here, and in my ignorance of the Cultural Revolution, I’m not going to say much about them. The best part of this story, for me, was the relationship between the narrator and Knotty and Knotty’s peasant family. As he narrates, our Educate Youth shows respect and compassion towards Knotty. We get the sense that the narrator has no desire to mess with this landscape.
The next story, The King of Chess, likewise has a lot to say about Chinese culture, in particular Daoism, but were it not for the excellent essay at the back of the book by the translator, much of this would have passed by me, though I was quick enough to feel that moments were important, even if I didn’t get their deeper significance. Again, what pulled me into this story was the relationship between the narrator and a rather pathetic young chess master named Wang Yisheng. They meet on a train that will take them out to their work camps. When the narrator enters a room on the train, Yisheng asks him if he would like to play chess. The narrator politely refuses. Later we learn that while Yisheng is waiting on the train for someone he can challenge to a chess match, his sister is outside trying to say goodbye to him. He knows this, but he doesn’t care. His life is chess.
Yisheng is certainly self-absorbed and arrogant, yet from the narrator’s eyes we start to see him differently. They develop a friendship, seemingly based on nothing, but we still feel the strength. One day Yisheng shows up at the narrator’s camp for a brief visit (he’s walked for over a day to get there), and he finally finds someone who wants to have a chess match. It’s fascinating to see how this conflict brings both the narrator and Yisheng to new realizations (which, I am told, stems from the Daoist concepts in the story).
Probably my favorite of the three was the final novella, The King of Children. The story begins with a transfer of one Educated Youth from one job to another:
By 1976, I had been working in the countryside for seven years. I had learned how to clear the land, burn off the undergrowth, dig holes, transplant seedlings, hoe the fields, turn the soil, sow grain, feed the pigs, make mud bricks, and cut grass. If I was a little slower than the others it was only because I wasn’t as strong. This didn’t bother me, though, as after all I was still earning my keep.
One January day, the local Party Secretary summoned me over to his place. Not knowing what it was about, I squatted at the threshold of his door, waiting for him to speak. He tossed over a cigarette, but I didn’t notice until it dropped on the floor. I quickly picked it up and looked up at him, grinning. He threw over some matches; I lit my cigarette and inhaled.
“Gold Sand River?” I asked.
He nodded, puffing at his water-pipe so that it burbled.
When he finished his smoke, he leaned the pipe against the wall, brushed the dust off his rough hands, blew his nose between his fingers, and asked, “Coping with our life here with the team?”
I looked up and nodded.
“You’re a bright guy,” he went on.
This alarmed me, and I wondered if he was being sarcastic. I turned his words over in my mind like a millstone, but as I hadn’t done anything wrong, I smiled: “Are you kidding? If it’s a job I can manage, give me the assignment and I’ll do my best.”
“You’re out of my hands now. The branch farm has transferred you to teach in the school. You are to report for work tomorrow . . .”
He (and everyone around him) are baffled by this assignment. They see it as a cushy job; the hard times are over.
When he arrives at his new post, he meets his supervisor Chen who says he will take him to his class:
I still wanted to argue but I saw the other teachers in the office were looking at me curiously. “What is there to be afraid of?” one of them said. “We’re not that brilliant either but we still teach, don’t we?”
At first the narrator finds some comfort in the job. He sets the children to copying passages and writing on the chalk board: “children were easier to look after than cattle.” One of the students is very dedicated and sets himself to the task with a focus that is never diverted. I like classroom/school novels. Usually they seem to be from the perspective of one of the students, though, and this novella gets us into the head of a teacher in a very interesting time and place, China in 1976. Mao dies that September.
Again, my primary pleasure in the novella was its depictions of relationships like the one between the narrator and the gifted student and the one between the gifted student and his father, whom the narrator knows from his old work.
Now, this work deserves far more scholarly criticism than I’ve given it here. While I’d like to be qualified to speak on its place in world literature due to its technique in speaking about China during the Cultural Revolution, I suppose it will have to suffice here to say that if you are looking for an exceptional read that will hopefully lead you to another place and time you’d like to learn more about, this is the book (not David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet). Indeed, I like that for me the primary focus of these novels was on the characters just getting by day to day and not on the political world around them. This made me care for them as people in a very difficult world.
Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat was so strange, so not what I was expecting from the author of The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie, that I couldn’t wait to find out what else she had up her sleeve. There are quite a few to choose from, and unfortunately I don’t see them that often in the bookstores. But New Directions recently released a new edition of Not to Disturb (1971) that in its lovely black, matte cover called out to me as I was passing it one day.
Not to Disturb (perhaps obviously from its cover) follows Spark’s stranger, more moribund fiction, though I didn’t find it quite as strange as The Driver’s Seat . . . still, it’s pretty strange.
When the book begins, we are thrown into an already ongoing conversation. Several servants are talking about some future event — some future death or murder — as if it has already happened.
‘Small change,’ he says, ‘compared with what is to come, or has already come, according as one’s philosophy is temporal or eternal. To all intents and purposes, they’re already dead although as a matter of banal fact, the night’s business has still to accomplish itself.’
There is a meeting about to take place in the library between the home’s regal owner, his wife, and one of his private secretaries. They have locked the door from the inside and said they are not to be disturbed. For some reason, these servants are preparing for death. How? By arranging their alibis and signing contracts with journalists who will want their personal perspective. They think the police and camera crews will show up first thing in the morning, if not sooner. By their estimation, the event should occur around 3 o’clock in the morning or maybe 6 o’clock.
‘I really could sleep,’ she says. ‘I really feel like another nap.’
‘No,’ says Pablo. ‘Lister wants us all to be suffering from shock when the police arrive. Lack of sleep has the same effect, Lister says.’
Brewing underneath that macabre surface are the strange relationships between all of the people. One of the young maids is pregnant, and they don’t know who the father is.
‘I never went with him,’ says Heloise. ‘I had the chance, though.’
‘Didn’t we all?’ says Pablo.
Sex is very much the issue here. There are a series of other strange relationships too, and not just among the servants.
‘Sex is not to be mentioned,’ Lister says. ‘To do so would be to belittle their activities. On their sphere sex is nothing but an overdose of life. They will die of it, or rather, to all intents and purposes, have died. We treat of spontaneous combustion. One remove from sex, as in Henry James, an English American who travelled.’
Not to Disturb is a very short book. And it seems everything I can say about it would reveal its secrets, and they are more fun to learn — or, rather, discern – from the book itself. The whole book is a lot of fun, even if it is a dark criticism of the upper class and their world, which includes their servants. The characters are revealed through incisive dialogue that is almost always evasive (that’s part of the fun). However, I didn’t find in it the depth of The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie or even of The Driver’s Seat. Still, it suited my mood perfectly when I read it. There is a lot to decipher, interesting people to meet, and Spark fills it with dark comic lines like this one.
‘Death is that sort of thing that you can’t sleep off . . . .’
I have a lot more Spark to enjoy. An exciting prospect considering the fact that I have no idea what to expect next. In a way, it’s the same feeling I get when I anticipate another Aira novel: who knows what is going to be between the covers, but it will be interesting.
Albert Cossery, according to the write-ups I’ve read of this book, has been called “the Voltaire of the Nile.” Egyptian by birth, he moved to France when he was around seventeen and lived there until his death, in 2008, at the age of ninety-four. Despite the long separation between Cossery and his birthplace, he set most all of his books in Egypt (and all in some Arab country). I knew nothing about the author before seeing this book, but I enjoy Voltaire enough to wonder just what someone with Voltaire’s cynicism and wit might write about Egypt in the twentieth century. So with little background, I began A Splendid Conspiracy (Un Complot de Saltimbanques, 1975; tr. from the French by Alyson Waters, 2010)
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
When the novel begins, we meet the young Teymour, recently returned to his hometown after spending six years in Europe getting a degree. The first line is pretty perfect:
Seated at the café terrace, Teymour felt as unlucky as a flea on a bald man’s head.
Teymour despises his hometown. There is nothing to do. It is completely barren of the things he’s sustained himself with over the past several years. We learn that Teymour has a rich father who sent him to Europe to study almost on a whim:
Nevertheless, somewhat belatedly — perhaps his daily reading of the paper had made him concerned about the transformations taking place in the world — the ludicrous idea had come into his head of seeing his son get a degree; and — the height of ambition! — a degree in chemical engineering, merely because of some stock he owned in the sugar refinery that was the city’s sole industry. This request, so late in coming, would probably have been rejected by the party in question had Teymour not seen his father’s vanity a means of spending a few years abroad where, he knew from reliable sources, fascinating pleasures and lasciviousness reigned supreme.
And Teymour did engage in all forms of lasciviousness, so much that the streets of his hometown seem completely sanitized by the daytime sun. In fact, Teymour engaged in so much lasciviousness that he failed to do any real studying — he never matriculated in any subject, never went to a class, just spent the money sent to him and managed, through some miracle, to spread his education out to six years. Upon his return home, he spent the bulk of his remaining small fortune on a forged diploma, a small one that displeases his father somewhat.
“It isn’t very big,” he said. “I hope you haven’t forgotten everything you’ve learned. This piece of paper cost me a fortune.”
Teymour remained silent; he almost pitied his father. But a mad hope led him to say:
“Father, if you’d like, I can get a bigger one, but I’ll need to go back there for a few more years.”
I think from the above passages that one can see the understated humour and social cynicism of Voltaire. It’s in little bits like this one — “This romance had been going on for some minutes when suddenly the husband appeared at her side and, although not blessed with particularly good eyesight, quickly perceived the danger to which his honor was being exposed.” — that began to solidify, in my mind, Cossery’s reputation as a writer.
However, as entertained as I was by the book, I had a hard time taking in Cossery’s philosophy, particularly as it is presented in this book. Cossery, it turns out, had “elevated idleness to an art form,” according to The London Times. That’s not to say I wasn’t refreshed by the thought of spending six years in Europe on someone else’s dime, and it certainly isn’t to say that I think a degree is the noblest achievement of life — I got along fine with Teymour’s malaise, even if I myself failed long ago to take his path through life. No, my problem comes a bit later, after Teymour’s attitude has had an about-face thanks to a couple of his friends. One friend in particular, Medhat, has never left his hometown, has no desire to, looks down on those who can’t find enough to do:
Medhat refused to forgive the absurdity and madness of people who learned all kinds of foreign tongues simply to grasp the meaning of the same idiotic remarks they could hear at home for free.
In the middle of “this vast universal dupery,” Medhat has taken it upon himself to enjoy life to the fullest because life, “while essentially pointless, is extremely interesting.” I’m still entertained at this point. I can even say that I follow the idea that many of the things we do in this life are pointless, part of a system we pay homage to in order to enjoy a few moments here and there (okay, I’m only that cynical when work is really busy — which it certainly has been lately). I’m enjoying this splendid book. The story and the characters grow in ways that show Cossery was a magnificent talent. It turns out that in the little hometown wealthy men are disappearing. No one knows what has happened to them, but the local police chief suspects Medhat, Teymour, and their friends. Why else wouldn’t they be working? he asks at one point. He assumes they are up to some political mischief and are planning something much larger. His paranoia is entertaining to the reader; it is also entertaining to Medhat and Teymour who do all they can to encourage the poor police chief in his beliefs. After all, this gives their pointless life some desirable color. Teymour completely engages in Medhat’s philosophy and never regrets leaving Europe again.
Besides pulling pranks agains the police chief, though, Medhat and Teymour do other things to keep themselves entertained, at the expense of several of the city’s fools. Again, no real problems from me, except that so often these pranks involved pedophilia, a topic that is often brought up and to no real derision. It’s one thing to have pedophilia in a story — it’s a real topic, a part of this world — it’s another to use it as a way of showing just how interesting (and entertaining) this life can be if we only open our eyes. The fools get just desserts; but it’s not the same for Teymour and Medhat who encourage and probably partake in the behavior. We get the definite sense that they are the real heroes in Cossery’s eyes, that their actions are above reproach because they are simply enjoying this otherwise pointless existence. It certainly rubbed me the wrong way, and it didn’t surprise me afterwards to discover that Cossery is also known as an anarchist.
The tiniest bomb that explodes somewhere should delight us, for behind the noise it makes when it explodes, even if barely audible, lies the laughter of a distant friend.
I found the characters, in the end, repulsive, and the author’s presentation of them fascinating because I feel so very much the opposite. Things happen that should never be laughed at. Cossery wrote an absolutely entertaining and compelling book that shows a different perspective. I’m not sure whether to praise its obvious skill or throw it across the room for its hideous ideas. I see that New Directions is issuing another of his books later this year. I suppose that the fact that I’m very anxious to read it gives you my answer, though it is mostly to see this author’s mind in action again.
Most of Bolaño’s New Directions book covers are similar in style. I’ve liked them. However, because Antwerp (Amberes, 2002; tr. from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, 2010) looked so different, I’ve been more excited to read it. It arrived in a coverless hardback, small-sized and well designed, simple and bold. It suggests weight.
Still, despite the cover, I wasn’t sure the content would hold up. I always have doubts when I approach Bolaño, like I’ll realize what many suspect: that there’s nothing there. Perhaps this feeling is some vestige from my initial experience with the Chilean when I read 2666. I loved the book while reading it, but I was so frustrated at the end. Now I think my feelings would be different. I’ve come to realize that much of reading Bolaño is the experience of reading itself, the search for meaning, the disturbing images, the powerful prose. Antwerp exceeded my expectations.
The book is divided into 56 fragments, each a paragraph that spans a page or two. They begin with a statement many might attribute to Bolaño’s work itself:
1. FACADE
Once photographed, life here is ended. It is almost symbolic of Hollywood. Tara has no rooms inside. It was just a facade.
These fragments, at first, drift from one subject to another with no apparent link, though if you’ve read Bolaño the characters might sound familiar: there’s the corrupt and brutal policeman, the prostitute, the poet. Part of the enjoyment in reading Antwerp is allowing these lives to just happen in front of you, to just accept that you will not understand everything for a while, but that the experience itself is worth its time. And what does that initial fragment say about the fragments that follow?
I’d like to quote in full one of the first passages that really grabbed my attention:
11. AMONG THE HORSES
I dreamed of a woman with no mouth, says the man in bed. I couldn’t help smiling. The piston forces the images up again. Look, he tells her, I know another story that’s just as sad. He’s a writer who lives on the edge of town. He makes a living working a riding school. He’s never asked for much, all he needs is a room and time to read. But one day he meets a girl who lives in another city and he falls in love. They decide to get married. The girl will come to live with him. The first problem arises: finding a place big enough for the two of them. The second problem is where to get the money to pay for it. Then one thing leads to another: a job with a steady income (at the stables he works on commission, plus room, board, and a small monthly stipend), getting his papers in order, registering with social security, etc. But for now, he needs money to get to the city where his fianceé lives. A friend suggests the possibility of writing articles for a magazine. He calculates that the first four would pay for the bus trip there and back and maybe a few days at a cheap hotel. He writes his girlfriend to tell her he’s coming. But he can’t finish a single article. He spends the evenings sitting outdoors at the bar of the riding school where he works, trying to write, but he can’t. Nothing comes out, as they say in common parlance. The man realizes that he’s finished. All he writes are short crime stories. The trip recedes from his future, is lost, and he remains listless, inert, going automatically about his work among the horses.
I know the basic concept here — a man who cannot escape his circumstances — is not original. But in Bolaño’s universe, this writer of crime stories comes up again and again, both antic and listless at the same time. This passage also begins to tie the book together — er, at least, tie it together a bit more. The riding school comes up several times and we start to see how the various characters fill the space around it. We find out who is dreaming of women with no mouths and whom he’s talking to here. We get a sense of the community: ”Nothing shocking, really, people upset because they were out of work, etc. These are the sad stories I have to tell you.”
While the characterization was fine, I found that I valued other aspects of the book. I liked the fragmented quality. I liked that it was at least somewhat self-conscious: “Our stories are sad, sergeant, there’s no point trying to understand them.” Again, I really didn’t fret this time when I couldn’t put the pieces together. Perhaps it is because the book is set up in fragments that made me care less about structure. It reminded me strongly of a poem, lonely and longing and hopeless, which the following passage reinforces:
36. PEOPLE WALKING AWAY
Nothing lasts, the purely loving gestures of children tumble into the void. I wrote: “a group of waiters returning to work” and “windswept sand” and “the dirty windowpanes of September.”
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.
Click for a larger image.
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.
When we were newlyweds, my wife enrolled in a World Literature class. I still remember how excited she was after reading a Japanese story, how it held on to her for days. Despite her excitement, I didn’t read it for some reason. From time to time over the years she has reflected on that story, only she forgot who wrote it and what it was called. When Patriotism (Yukoku, 1966; tr. from the Japanese by Geoffrey W. Sargent, 1966) came in the mail, I felt certain I had in my hand a nice copy of the story she had read and loved several years ago. I read the description to her, and all the excitement and awe came back in her face. It was the same story. And I have now read it too.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
A note on this edition: New Directions has just began issuing titles from its new Pearl series. The first issuance includes Patriotism as well as Federico García Lorca’s In Search of Duende, Javier Marías’s Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico, and Tennessee Williams’s Tales of Desire. Forthcoming are César Aira’s The Literary Conference and Jorge Luis Borges’s Everything & Nothing. In truth, some of these are shorter than novellas. Patriotism is only just over 50 large-type pages. Patriotism, though standing alone here, would be “Patriotism” and is available in a collection of Yukio Mishima’s stories also published by New Directions, Death in Midsummer and Other Stories. Whether you are willing pay for a stand-alone volume that forms part of a bigger series is up to you. Personally, I like having the story on its own, isolated from other stories. Plus, for collectors, the titles look great on the shelf together. And venerable.
I have one gripe: there were at least a handful of typos that interrupted my reading. In one place Reiko’s “sucks” slip on the floor — now I knew it meant “socks” but the error is jarring in its nature of being an error but also because of its preposterous albeit accidental imagery. I’m not sure what process was involved in pulling “Patriotism” from Death in Midsummer, and since I don’t have that volume, I’m not sure if the Pearl edition’s errors are new or have been part of the text for a while. You’ll notice in the paragraph below that there is an “eight-mat room of his private resident in the sixth block.” I’m pretty sure it should be “residence,” and if I’m right then there’s a silly error in the first paragraph. I have spent time in publishing. I know that errors get through, despite how many eyes cover the documents, but this had a large number of fairly obvious ones. I think I’m more disappointed due to the fact that this is part of a new series that will cost its readers a bit of money since each short story / novella is being sold for around $10.
Now, let’s move on from the gripe. New Directions does fabulous work, and I don’t want typos to distract us from the fact that they consistently acquire and publish at the forefront of world literature in striking editions. This is no exception.
Patriotism is a very strange story. First, you learn everything that happens in the first paragraph. I’ll start with it, since it provides a great summary of the story with preemptive spoilers.
On the twenty-eighth of February 1936 (on the third day, that is, of the February 26 incident), Lieutenant Shinji Takeyama of the Konoe Transport Battalion — profoundly disturbed by the knowledge that his closest colleagues had been with the mutineers from the beginning, and indignant at the imminent prospect of Imperial troops attacking Imperial troops — took his officer’s sword and ceremonially disemboweled himself in the eight-mat room of his private resident in the sixth block of Aoba-cho, in Yotsuya Ward. His wife, Reiko, followed him, stabbing herself to death. The lieutenant’s farewell note consisted of one sentence: “Long live the Imperial Forces.” His wife’s after apologies for her unfilial conduct in thus preceding her parents to the grave, concluded: “The day which, for a soldier’s wife, had to come, has come . . . .” The last moments of this heroic and dedicated couple were such as to make the gods themselves weep. The lieutenant’s age, it should be noted, was thirty-one, his wife’s twenty-three; and it was not half a year since the celebration of their marriage.
The style of this opening paragraph reminded me of the opening paragraph to a news report or maybe a short obituary. It lays out all of the facts of the story while only alluding to some of the emotion; in other words, the style itself here is not emotive. It is a striking contrast to the remainder of the story when two central events and their preparations are described in a direct yet lyrical style devoted entirely to bringing out the elevated emotions of its two characters.
Before the lieutenant even returns home two days after the failed coup, Reiko already knows what to expect. His closest friends were the instigators, but he cannot fight against them. His loyalty is to the Imperial Forces, so he cannot contradict their order. The only honorable way out is seppuku, the ritual suicide. Less than six months earlier Reiko had promised him she would follow him where he had to go. We get a glimpse of her cleaning the house perfectly to prepare for the solemn event.
It is difficult to describe the rest of the story because most of it is, as I mentioned above, a wonderful description of their complex emotions as they make love one last time and then commit suicide. But it’s not all emotion; there are some great questions being asked. Though the characters are composed on the outside, they are jittery on the inside. It’s not so much fear as it is anticipation of the great events — the love making and the suicide.
He folded his hands beneath his head and gazed at the dark boards of the ceiling in the dimness beyond the range of the standard lamp. Was it death he was now waiting for? Or a wild ecstasy of the senses? The two seemed to overlap, almost as if the object of this bodily desire was death itself. But, however that might be, it was certain that never before had the lieutenant tasted such total freedom.
Somehow Mishima succeeds in exalting sex and death, though he spends a great deal of time merely describing the physical details. For example, here is a passage that connects the imminent suicide with the current sex:
The lieutenant’s naked skin glowed like a field of barley, and everywhere the muscles sowed in sharp relief, converging on the lower abdomen about the small, unassuming navel. Gazing at the youthful, firm stomach, modestly covered by a vigorous growth of hair, Reiko thought of it as it was soon to be, cruelly cut by the sword, and she laid her head upon it, sobbing in pity, and bathed it with kisses.
There is also the great moment between the suicides that Mishima captures. I know the first paragraph of the story gives away the events, so I don’t want to describe too much of the emotion. Rather, I’ll leave this review with this interesting complexity:
Ever since her marriage her husband’s existence had been her own existence, and every breath of his had been a breath drawn by herself. But now, while her husband’s existence in pain was a vivid reality, Reiko could find in this grief of hers no certain proof at all of her own existence.
The first W.G. Sebald book I heard of was The Rings of Saturn (Die Ringe des Satrun, Eine englische Wallfahrt, 1995; tr. by Michael Hulse, 1998). Something in the tone of the recommendation and the title of the book made me start to imagine how the book would feel and how I would feel about it — you’ve been there too. I tried to avoid such imaginings, but with all of its positive criticism it was hard to hold back my expectations. About a year ago I began my Sebald project (to read all four of Sebald’s books of “fiction” in the order in which he wrote them), and Vertigo and, particularly, The Emigrants just made my anticipation for this book all the more acute.
When I began reading The Rings of Saturn I knew next to nothing about the book. Sure, I knew that it was structured as as walking tour around Norfolk, in eastern England. I knew from the other two books I’d read that this walking tour would be replete with ruminations on the past, complete with documentary photos. But the main theme? I didn’t know what this one would be about.
The title, with no context, did little to help. What do the rings of Saturn have to do with East Anglia or even with modern history in general? I see it now: a lot, in a very beautiful metaphorical sense. This is a book about the ravages of time, about destruction, particularly the destruction (self- or otherwise) of human endeavor. East Anglia was once the scene of thriving communities living off of some of the most important ports in Europe. Today, little of that remains. The fishermen Sebald encounters facing the east, sitting on the beach ”just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness.” That line alone, and the orientation of the fishermen, nicely sums up the book. The rings of Saturn were once large moons in orbit, but through time and great destruction they’ve been reduced to an ephemeral dust — something tragic, something whose trace haunts the present with its reminder of the past — yet it’s beautiful.
And that’s one of the best ways I can think of to describe this book — tragic, yet beautiful. Sebald begins the book in his unassuming manner; he’s just finished a project that entailed a lot of work (I see many think he’s referring to his book The Emigrants), and he wants to relax and settle down again by taking a walking tour around Suffolk:
At all events, in retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place.
What follows would be very difficult for me to summarize in any decent way in the space I’m giving myself here. It’s a walking tour, so Sebald encounters many people, many sights, and many artifacts. During such encounters, he lets his mind roam through his own personal past as well as into the history of the region — and of the world (I particularly liked the segment on the silk worm’s migration). One of the firs things he encounters is the skull of Thomas Browne, a seventeenth-century physician (whose father was a silk merchant). As a doctor, Browne was very interested in the human body, but his other interests also brought in the natural world. Sebald briefly discusses Browne’s book Urn Burial. In this book, Browne describes an ancient Roman burial site found in Norfolk. Urn Burial becomes very melancholy when Browne discusses mortality and destruction. Browne’s view (which reminded me of Yeats’ view) is that “On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation. For the history of every individual, of every social order, indeed of the whole world, does not describe an ever-widening, more and more wonderful arc, but rather follows a course which, once the meridian is reached, leads without fail down into the dark.”
Over this burial ground, over the centuries, battles were fought and forgotten — or remembered with a slant, as this one Sebald describes from a painting:
This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. I requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was. The desolate field extends all around where once fifty thousand soldiers and ten thousand horses met their end within a few hours. The night after the battle, the air must have been filled with death rattles and groans. Now there is nothing but the silent brown soil. Whatever became of the corpses and mortal remains? Are they buried under the memorial? Are we standing on a mountain of death? Is that our ultimate vantage point? Does one really have the much-vaunted historical overview from such a position?
As with the other two Sebalds I’ve read, The Rings of Saturn has no strong narrative. Sebald goes from topic to topic at will. Yet the book is held together wonderfully by melancholy and that central theme of destruction. It’s got a beautiful, respectful tone. And it is full of wonderfully rendered scenes, my favorite being that of a massively destructive storm that Sebald witnessed first-hand — fantastic writing (and translation). I think this may change at times through my life, but right now my favorite Sebald book is still The Emigrants, but I can see how The Rings of Saturn could swap positions — they are both marvelous works, full of insight and beauty as they force us into astonishment as we gaze at a great void.
For those of you who have been interested in but wary of Roberto Bolaño, you might find a friendly meeting place (more friendly than, say, 2666, which was my meeting place) in Monsieur Pain (1999; tr. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, 2010). This is one of Bolaño’s earliest works — that’s not to say “easy” works, but I think it is more accessible than anything else of his I’ve read. It was published as Monsieur Pain only in 1999, but it was written in 1981 or 1982 and titled The Elephant Path, an apt title that connotes both trailblazing and following, though I can’t say that is why the title was used. Under this title it won a few awards in Spain; under another, it won some more. Though it’s an early work, and one in which we can see seeds of what would sprout in his later books, I would hesitate to call this an apprentice novel. To me, that means the novel is useful primarily to the author, helping him or her develop something else that is of benefit to readers. That is not the case here, though, because in Monsieur Pain we see an already mature author. More than an apprentice novel, then, it is a fully developed point of departure. Rather than follow the elephant track created by other writers, which he shows he can do in this book, he shows he is also going to create his own elephant track through the bushes. In his later books he starts knocking down the trees.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
Of the works I’ve read, this is Bolaño’s most traditional prose piece. He sets up what appears to be a fairly conventional story set in Paris in 1938. In fact, the setup (and Chris Andrews’ excellent translation) seems to come from this period in literature. It adheres to formal constructs while showing an awareness of what’s going on underneath the text. Here are the first lines in the novel; they reminded me, to my pleasure, of modern European literature:
On Wednesday the sixth of April, at dusk, as I was preparing to leave my lodgings, I received a telegram from my young friend Madame Reynaud, requesting, with a certain urgency, my presence that evening at the Café Bordeaux, on Rue de Rivoli, relatively close to where I live, which meant that if I hurried, I could still arrive punctually at the specified time.
The narrator is Monsieur Pierre Pain, a veteran of the first world war, in which, he says he might have been a deserter had he not nearly died when his lungs were burned out by gas. He doesn’t have much direction in his life, but since his convalescence he has stumbled into a profession of sorts.
From then on, supported by a modest invalid’s pension, and perhaps as a reaction agains the society that had imperturbably sent me forth to die, I gave up everything that could be considered beneficial to a young man’s career, and took up the occult sciences, which is to say that I let myself sink into poverty, in a manner that was deliberate, rigorous and not altogether devoid of elegance. At some point during that phase in my life I read An Abridged History of Animal Magnestism, by Franz Mesmer, and, within a matter of weeks, became a mesmerist.
At the beginning of the book, as is seen in the first quote above, Pain receives a telegram from the young widow of one of his ex-patients. Pain rushes out of his apartment to meet her, but on his way out he is surprised to run into two men who are speaking Spanish. When they see him, they go quiet and stop going up the stairs. They also don’t move aside to let him by easily. They seem confused by his presence or by his leaving, and do not hide the fact, even as he is walking out the door, that they are watching him. The narrative then interrupts a bit, and we go back to the short week when Pain was treating the widows husband, truly trying to save this admirable man’s life even though he knew it was too late. This interruption is one of the novel’s highlights, in my opinion — he, of course, falls in love with the widow, but he can never tell her. He and the widow have met several times in the intervening months, but this telegram is unprecedented. When he meets her, she requests his assistance:
“Pierre,” she repeated, stressing each word, “you must see my friend’s husband, professionally, it’s urgent.”
I think I ordered a glass of mint cordial before asking what illness Monsieur . . .
“Vallejo,” said Madame Reynaud, adding, with equal concision, “Hiccups.”
Throughout the remainder of the novel, Pain tries to meet with this man dying of hiccups. The first time, he is thwarted by doctors who scoff at him and his strange trade, though they can find nothing wrong with Vallejo. But even after Pain has left, thinking his assistance will not be needed, the two men speaking Spanish show up and ask him not to treat the dying man. They offer him quite a large bribe to just go away.
I can already tell that if I try to recount even just a little bit more of the novel I’m going to describe something the novel is not. Yes, Pain continues to attempt to meet and treat Vallejo, but that is not really what the story is about. Pain is an interesting character in Bolaño’s universe because, though like others he is seeking an elusive target through strange mazes, he does not have the ability to ascribe meaning to his search — he’s no poet, in other words. He tends to reflect the following description of mesmerism well:
For me, mesmerism is like a medieval painting. Beautiful and useless. Timeless. Trapped.
Still, he is an interesting character to watch as he becomes increasingly paranoid, and perhaps delusional (we’re not really sure if the horrors he believes are coming are really on their way). The book becomes surreal and dreamlike at times, and we’re sailing smoothly on Bolaño’s flowing prose. Interestingly, I wouldn’t classify the other Bolaño books I’ve read as surreal. Here, the disorientation he conveys is more akin to Kafka’s type of absurdity; his later works tend to show a disorientation brought on by an empty shock caused by violence or loss. Perhaps, because of its surrealism, it also feels more conventional. But even while this seems more like a conventional novel, within it are the fascinating rifts, subtly placed, the anti-climactic dead ends that leave his character (and his reader) wondering what the buildup was for, that show what Bolaño will be capable of when he throws convention out. If you cannot tell, I am becoming more and more a Roberto Bolaño fan.
It’s been a few months since I read anything by Bolaño, but every time I finish a book my first urge is to pick up another of his. The only reason I don’t is for the sake of variety and to make sure I can have some Bolaño left for the future. This month Monsieur Pain comes out, and in the Spring Antwerp comes out, both from New Directions here in the U.S. And I still have a few of his already published books to read, so I thought it was safe to pull out Distant Star (Estrella distante, 1996; tr. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, 2004).
You probably don’t remember, but when I reviewed Nazi Literature in the Americas I said in my last paragraph that “his conclusion is its own reward,” meaning that the conclusion was so outstanding that reading the book was worth the conclusion alone. Well, here’s the introductory paragraph in Distant Star:
In the final chapter of my novel Nazi Literature in the AmericasI recounted, in less that twenty pages and perhaps too schematically, the story of Lieutenant Ramírez Hoffman of the Chilean Air Force, which I heard from a fellow Chilean, Arturo B., a veteran of Latin America’s doomed revolutions, who tried to get himself killed in Africa. He was not satisfied with my version. It was meant to counterbalance the preceding excursions into the literary grotesque, or perhaps to come as an anticlimax, and Arturo would have preferred a longer story that, rather than mirror or explode others, would be, in itself, a mirror and an explosion. So we took that final chapter and shut ourselves up for a month and a half in my house in Blanes, where, guided by his dreams and nightmares, we composed the present novel. My role was limited to preparing refreshments, consulting a few books, and discussing the reuse of numerous paragraph with Arturo and the increasingly animated ghost of Pierre Ménard.
Besides being an exhilerating paragraph in its own right, the paragraph explains that Distant Star is basically a stand-alone expansion to that final brilliant (anti-climactic??) chapter in Nazi Literature in the Americas. That’s both true and misleading, which I think was Bolaño’s intent. Distant Star is not a rewrite of that last chapter; rather, it is an expansion on the ideas, on the horror, we witnessed in that last chapter. It is also another perspective to the horror of the Pinochet regime and the failed revolution shown to us in what is still my favorite Bolaño: By Night in Chile. So, where The Skating Rink was a diversion from all of this, Distant Star took me back to familiar ground. That’s not to suggest that there are no similarities to The Skating Rink; in some ways, this is a literary detective novel too. I really can’t wait to read all of Bolaño so I can get a better picture of how his work ties itself together.
Here is how the book begins; we meet the demon himself, Carlos Wieder:
I saw Carlos Wieder for the first time in 1971, or perhaps in 1972, when Salvador Allende was President of Chile.
At that stage Wieder was calling himself Alberto Ruiz-Tagle and occasionally attended Juan Stein’s poetry workshop in Concepción, the so-called capital of the South. I can’t say I knew him well. I saw him once or twice a week at the workshop. He wasn’t particularly talkative. I was. Most of us there talked a lot, not just about poetry, but politics, travel (little did we know what our travels would be like), painting, architecture, photography, revolution and the armed struggle that would usher in a new life and a new era, so we thought, but which, for most of us, was like a dream, or rather the key that would open the door into a world of dreams, the only dreams worth living for. And even though we were vaguely aware that dreams often turn into nightmares, we didn’t let that bother us.
At this time the narrator is a young eighteen-year-old, and Wieder is probably twenty-three, or close to that. Augusto Pinochet is looming on the horizon, but this group of young poets continues in its youthful pursuit of the ideal, never knowing that in their midst is a monster. When Pinochet takes power, and Chile is a very dangerous place for these young idealists. ”In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.”
Wieder disappears, but in the clues the narrator realizes that Wieder has become something truly terrible and has even murdered some of their friends. Another of their friends, Fat Marta, is so afraid of disappearing herself that she becomes manic, almost insane:
The main thing was to keep active (any kind of activity would do, like moving a flower pot five times in half an hour, to stop herself going mad) and to look on the bright side, tackling problems one by one, instead of all at the same time, the way she used to do before.
They don’t know where Wieder is (at this point, they really don’t know who he is), but bits keep linking together until we find that he is probably the man responsible for writing poetry in the air. Indeed, this pilot becomes famous for his new art. “[H]e was called upon to undertake something grand in the capital, something spectacular to show the world that the new regime and avant-garde art were not at odds, quite the contrary.” The art show is Bolaño at his horrific best.
In Distant Starwe also see Bolaño at his darkly comic best. Here is a story from within this story:
Once upon a time in Chile there was a poor little boy . . . I think the boy was called Lorenzo, I’m not sure, and I’ve forgotten his surname, but some readers may remember it, and he liked to play, and climb trees and high-tension pylons. One day he climbed up a pylon and got such a shock that he lost both his arms. They had to amputate them just below the shoulders. So Lorenzo grew up in Chile without arms, an unfortunate situation for any child, but he also grew up in Pinochet’s Chile, which turned unfortunate situations into desperate ones, on top of which he soon discovered that he was homosexual, which made his already desperate situation inconceivable and indescribable.
Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that Lorenzo became an artist. (What else could he do?) But it’s hard to be an artist in the third world if you are poor, have no arms and are gay to boot.
Distant Star is, to me, not as good as By Night in Chile, but it is a brilliant work, another look at Pinochet’s Chile. Bolaño’s writing, translated fluently by Chris Andrews, is wonderfully paced, always running right off the page. I feel I am now ready to read The Savage Detectives; after all, here we have a strange detective story of poets seeking poets, and I can hardly wait. Before we move on, though, it is no spoiler to allow everyone to savor the last lines in this novel:
We stood there for a while on the edge of the pavement waiting for a taxi, not knowing what to say. Nothing like this has ever happened to me, I confessed. That’s not true, said Romero very gently. Worse things have happened to us, thing about it. You could be right, I admitted, but this really has been a dreadful business. Dreadful, repeated Romero, as if he were savouring the word. Then he laughed quietly, grinning like a rabbit, and said, Well, what else could it have been? I wasn’t in a laughing mood, but I laughed all the same.
I just read Dylan Thomas’s prose/poem “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” (1954) and thought recommending it would nicely accompany my holiday greeting. The phyiscal book itself is striking. The high-quality paper is visible in the picture below as are some of the woodcuts that we find throughout this short but impactful book. It’s a book best read in one sitting, and perhaps with little more foreknowledge than this: “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” begins with childish mischief in the form of snowball fights and ends with a nice Christmas night.
I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.
Merry Christmas!
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