The Mookse and the Gripes

Year: 2012

  • Alice Munro: “Pride”

    Alice Munro: “Pride”

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    “Pride”
    by Alice Munro
    from Dear Life

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    [fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]T[/fusion_dropcap]he narrator of “Pride” is a man with a hare-lip, making this one of only a few Munro stories that I know of to be narrated by a man. Of course, and this is no fault, the story is still centered on a woman.

    Oneida Jantzen was born into a wealthy family, so wealthy that they weren’t in a category with anybody else in town, even the well-to-do ones.” She grew up separate from everyone else, attending a private girls’ school and spending the summers in the family’s vacation home. In the 1930s, the family had a reversal of fortune when her father, a bank manager, used bank funds to invest in an ill-fated dream to bring back the steam-driven car. The narrator notes that had it been anyone else, the manager would have been sacked, but Horace Jantzen was someone special, so he was treated differently, though perhaps not kindly. He was made bank manager in a tiny village that didn’t need a bank manager. Here is the first iteration of pride:

    Surely he could have refused, but pride, as it was thought, chose otherwise. Pride chose that he be driven every morning those six miles to sit behind a partial wall of cheap varnished boards, no proper office at all. There he sat and did nothing until it came time for him to be driven home.

    Oneida is his driver, and due to this and the reversal of fortunes, she’s around town a lot more. Still, she’s out of place, a misfit.

    When she went into a store or even walked on the street, there seemed to be a little space cleared around her, made ready for whatever she might want or greetings she might spread. She seemed then a bit flustered but gracious, ready to laugh a little at herself or the situation. Of course she had her good bones and bright looks, all that fair dazzle of skin and hair. So it might seem strange that I could feel sorry for her, the way she was all on the surface of things, trusting.

    Imagine me, sorry.

    That last sentence is the beginning of our relationship with our narrator. At this time in the 1930s, he’s finished high school and has gone on to become a bookkeeper, a job that doesn’t involve a lot of talking. Despite his deformity, he is able to make a place for himself in this town. So what does he mean when he says, “Imagine me, sorry.” Is it the simple irony that someone like him should be sorry for anyone else? Is it specifically directed to Oneida? Is there bitterness in that sentence? At any rate, though his deformity — in fact, much of his whole personality — has been pushed aside to focus on Oneida.

    We don’t know much about him yet, but we begin to get glimpses into how he sees himself. The story actually begins with a small introduction about town life. Some people make mistakes but still manage to settle in and become part of the community. “With other people, it’s different. They don’t get away but you wish they had.” Our narrator sees himself as the former; he has worked hard to become self-sufficient and find his place in this community.

    All my school years had been spent, as I saw it, in getting used to what I was like — what my face was like — and what other people were like in regard to it. I suppose it was a triumph of a minor sort to have managed that, to know I could survive here and make my living and not continually be having to break new people in.

    He sees Oneida as the latter because, despite everything, she simply cannot fit.

    But it isn’t as if our narrator has settled in, not really; perhaps it’s just something he tells himself. Soon the war is on, and he’s exempted from service. They don’t live a great life, but he explicitly notes that he never felt sorry for them, but we cannot trust this fully. He and his mother go out to watch movies and experience the drama of war on film and in the news. One evening in particular, after they hear the tragic news that a civilian ferry was sunk between Canada and Newfoundland, our narrator cannot sleep and goes for a walk:

    I had to think of the people gone to the bottom of the sea. Old women, nearly old women like my mother, hanging on to their knitting. Some kid bothered by a toothache. Other people who had spent their last half hour before drowning complaining of seasickness. I had a very strange feeling that was part horror and part — as near as I can describe it — a kind of chilly exhilaration. The blowing away of everything, the equality — I have to say it — the equality, all of a sudden, of people like me and worse than me and people like them.

    Time keeps clipping by in this story, as happens in most of Alice Munro’s stories. Soon, Oneida’s father and the narrator’s mother are dead, and Oneida comes to him to ask for advice selling her home. She trusts him, and none of us knows why. This is the beginning of a strange relationship. Despite the narrator’s advice, Oneida sells the home for a song and is soon disappointed when the swindler tears it down to build an apartment complex. Soon she’s saying she forgives him — “‘After all, it’s people like him who make the world go round,’ she said of her shyster” — and even moves into an apartment on the top floor. But she also begins spending her evenings with the narrator. The two of them eat dinner and watch television — for years! We soon find ourselves in the late 1990s, the narrator is sick, and Oneida is taking care of him, moving into his mother’s bedroom. He simply cannot stand it, bringing on a surprising and yet fitting conclusion to this story.

    I read this story three times. The first time, I was enthralled but mostly just trying to understand what was going on, where we were, etc. The second time, the themes began to cohere, and the tragedy under the surface of these lives came to the foreground, as did the narrator’s motives in telling this story at all. After the second time, I turned right back and read it again, out of genuine awe. I doesn’t matter that I’ve had similar reactions to most other Alice Munro stories; she still surprises me. How anyone can pack and texture a short story so well, especially since so much is below the seemingly mundane surface, is a mystery to me.

    Not everyone shares my view of this story. Published in Harper’s in April 2011, there are already several responses to it online. Of course, it’s a given there will be many who read the story once and wonder what the big deal is. So many of the “big” events are elided, so many of the emotions barely hinted at, does anything actually happen? That’s a typical response to Alice Munro, and I hope many of these readers give her the time and attention she requires and deserves. I think they’ll find a lot there. I was flabbergasted by this response, though: “Munro gets almost everything wrong” (here). Yes, I completely disagree with that review, but I link to it here to show what must be the direct opposite of my own, in case there is any need for balance.

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  • Andrey Platonov: Happy Moscow

    Andrey Platonov: Happy Moscow

    Happy Moscow
by Andrey Platonov (written between 1933 and 1936; published posthumously in 1991)
translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler, 2012)
NYRB Classics (2012)
266 pp

    Andrey Platonov has been called the greatest Russian prose stylist of the twentieth century (see here). I had never read anything by him, though I’ve looked longingly at the NYRB Classics editions of Soul, a collection of various works (one of which Penelope Fitzgerald called one of the “three great works of Russian literature of the millennium”) and The Foundation Pit, a novel often considered to be his masterpiece. I have been so enamored with Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, another Soviet writer who suffered from censorship during his life (both died in relative obscurity, in 1950 and 1951), that I am thrilled to get to know another contender for the crown. My first foray into Platonov is Happy Moscow.

    Evidently, Happy Moscow is unfinished, though it didn’t feel that way to me. This short novel (117 pages in this edition) is a remarkable allegory of Moscow during the early years of the Soviet Union, when idealism was still clinging on. Platonov, though supportive of Communism, was not supportive of Stalin. This book takes us slowly through the transition from idealism to a stark image of the crippled city — which is why the book remained unpublished until 1991.

    Because this is an allegory and political, I was a bit wary. I hoped such features wouldn’t stamp the life out of the characters and that the emotions would stay true. After the first paragraph, I knew I was in good hands:

    A dark man with a burning torch was running down the street into a boring night of late autumn. The little girl saw him through the window of her home as she woke from a boring dream. Then she heard the powerful shot of a rifle and a poor, sad cry — the man running with the torch had probably been killed. Soon after this came many distant shots and a din of people in the neighboring prison . . . The little girl went to sleep and forgot everything she saw later in other days: she was too small, and the memory and mind of early childhood were overgrown in her body forever by subsequent life. But until her late years a nameless man would unexpectedly and sadly rise up in her and run — in the pale light of memory — and perish once again in the dark of the past, in the heard of a grown-up child.

    This child (who grows up to become that “grown-up child”) is our central character, Moscow Ivanovna Chestnova. That “boring” night was the start of the October Revolution in 1917. Her birth name was not actually Moscow. Quickly orphaned, she wanders for several years, “[r]emembering neither people nor space, her soul gone to sleep.” Eventually, she is taken into a children’s home and school, and there given a name in honor of the city. But she is destined to wander and doesn’t last many years at the school. She marries, but she abandons her husband to wander more (all this in just the first couple of pages).

    She is found by Bozhko, a thirty-year-old idealist who has devoted his life to “universal joy.” He loves Moscow deeply and lusts for her body, but love is not the way to universal joy. Instead he supports her, paying for her food and eventually for her parachutist training. She’s a success story, and he’s proud of what he did, even if “[a]fter her visits Bozhko usually lay facedown on the bed and yearned from sorrow, even though universal joy alone was the reason of his life.”

    As I said above, the book starts out idealistic, with everyone excited about the promise of the new system, but this doesn’t stick. Tragedy begins when Moscow Chestnova streaks across the sky on fire, losing her fame and settling with the masses, breaking the heart of one man after another. Each loves Moscow Chestnova, but she cannot stay in one place: “And anyway Chestnova would not be faithful to him; never could she exchange all the noise of life for the whisper of a single human being.”

    These men — doctors, engineers, students — are important to the narrative as Moscow’s body is more and more clearly representative of Moscow the city. Indeed, more and more of the narrative is focused on them and how they deal with their lust and her absence in a city that is getting increasingly alienating as technology overtakes Moscow.

    It isn’t a spoiler to share the final paragraph in the novel. Here, one of the men who has loved Moscow has married and sits at night:

    At night, after his wife and son had gone to sleep, Semyon Ivanovich would stand there, above Matryona Filippovna’s face, and observe how entirely helplessly she was, how pathetically her face had clenched in miserable exhaustion, while her eyes were closed like kind eyes, as if, while she lay unconscious, some ancient angel were resting in her. If all of humanity were lying still and sleeping, it would be impossible to judge its real character from its face and one could be deceived.

    The extensive notes included in this edition say that this is where the novel ends, yet in the coming years Platonov continued to make notes about the characters and further scenes. Some of those characters do reappear in the handful of additional works included in this edition of Happy Moscow. While it was nice to see these pieces and they show just how much work NYRB Classics does to give us readers everything we could ask for, I was happiest with the self-contained world of Happy Moscow, an overt political allegory, to be sure, but one filled with emotion and beautiful prose, a good start for me as I get to know Platonov.

  • 2012 National Book Award Winners

    2012 National Book Award Winners

    the-round-houseThe National Book Award winners were announced tonight.

    Fiction: The Round House, by Louise Erdrich

    Nonfiction: Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

    Poetry: Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, by Davide Ferry

    Young People’s Literature: Goblin Secrets, by William Alexander

  • Alice Munro: “To Reach Japan”

    Alice Munro: “To Reach Japan”

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    “To Reach Japan”
    by Alice Munro
    from Dear Life

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    [fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]T[/fusion_dropcap]he story, about a woman’s desire to explore and the maternal guilt she suffers (and how, in the past and still today, those two things are difficult to reconcile), begins on a Vancouver train platform. Greta and her young daughter Katy are on the train, heading to Toronto for the summer, looking out to husband and father Peter as he waves and smiles. We find out, through simply observations Munro gives us, that this is a happy family, but not all is perfect. Peter is one of those slightly nervous types who will avoid intimacy if it also means avoiding a potential, spontaneous problem, even minor ones:

    Once Peter had brought her suitcase on board the train he seemed eager to get himself out of the way. But not to leave. He explained to her that he was just uneasy that the train should start to move.

    This is nothing new to Greta. She’s used to her decent husband’s cautious and practical nature. It’s endearing, but it is also alienating. He has no idea she has the slightest twinge of misgivings. They’re married, after all, and that afords him security to the point he doesn’t have to worry at all. Once out on the platform, he can wave and smile with confidence.

    The smile for Katy was wide open, sunny, without a doubt in the world, as if he believed that she would continue to be a marvel to him, and he to her, forever. The smile for his wife seemed hopeful and trusting, with some sort of determination about it. Something that could not easily be put into words and indeed might never be. If Greta had mentioned such a thing he would have said, Don’t be ridiculous. And she would have agreed with him, thinking that it was unnatural for people who saw each other daily, constantly, to have to go through explanations of any kind.

    The telling word: “constantly.” Time, as it so often does in a Munro story, extends and the train doesn’t depart until the story is already over halfway through. During this period we learn that as a child Peter and his mother escaped from Soviet Czechoslovakia, and he now works as an engineer. In fact, that’s why Greta and Katy are leaving Vancouver for the long train journey to Toronto. Peter is going to work the summer in Lund, up north, and there are no accomodations for his family. Rather than spend the summer home alone, Greta decides to housesit for one of her friends in Toronto who will be spending the summer in Europe. Greta’s choice to go to Toronto is based on more than a desire for a change of scenery.

    Greta herself is a poet. She’s not well known and she feels incredibly awkward at publishing parties, drinking way too much and communicating with no one until, at a party the summer before, a kind face offers her a hand. This is Harris Bennett, resident of Toronto. He takes her home that evening and off-handedly expresses his desire to kiss her. They don’t, though maybe it would have been better if they did because now Greta feels a void she cannot stand: “During the coming fall and winter and spring there was hardly a day when she didn’t think of him.” This terrible longing comes mostly during the day, when Peter is at work: “Yet all this fantasy disappeared, went into hibernation when Peter came home. Daily affections sprang to the fore then, reliable as ever.” That’s not strong enough, though. Before she left for Toronto, she sent Mr. Bennett simple note containing the time and date of her arrival.

    All of this, in a way, is foundation. At this time, the train jolts onward and Peter is left behind as Greta and Katy take the long cross-continent train ride. For a time, we almost forget about Peter and Mr. Bennett as we focus on what Greta and Katy are doing, particularly as they make new friends on board the train. We remember back to the beginning of the story when Peter is smiling at Katy, both marvelling at the other. Katy, for her part, is young enough not to understand what they are doing. She asks where her father is, assuming they’ll be meeting with him at any moment, causing Greta to think about her relationship with her daughter:

    All of her waking time for these hundreds of miles had been devoted to Katy. She knew that such devotion on her part had never shown itself before. It was true that she had cared for the child, dressed her, fed her, talked to her, during those hours when they were together and Peter was at work. But Greta had other things to do around the house then, and her attention had been spasmodic, her tenderness often tactical.

    This doesn’t mean, as we may have figured out, that Greta’s feelings toward Peter or Mr. Bennett — or the new friends — aren’t going to lead her to distraction. And just what does Greta have in mind when she reaches Toronto if Mr. Bennett shows up? There is no perfect pathway.

    While “To Reach Japan” is not my favorite story in this collection, I was still drawn in and deeply affected. The characters are deep and Munro tantalizes us by giving us a wealth of information in a few gestures. It ends with a question we’ve been asking all along, and we welcome the chance to answer it ourselves.

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  • Alice Munro: Dear Life

    Alice Munro: Dear Life

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    Dear Life
    by Alice Munro (2012)
    Knopf (2012)
    319 pp

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    Alice Munro’s new collection of short stories, Dear Life, is out today. I don’t know how many more Munro short stories we’re going to get since she is 81 and has threatened retirement before (thankfully, she didn’t carry through). Munro is my favorite living author. Her stories are both bitter and compassionate. Though on the surface they may seem traditional as they dwell on the seemingly simple but ultimately terrifying ordinary moments in life, they are structurally, syntactically, and thematically ambitious. They don’t leave me, so this release is a big deal.

    Rather than post a review of the collection as a whole, I’d like to make this post a kind of anchor index. Several of the stories were published in The New Yorker over the last couple of years, so I already have reviews of them complete with a string of rich comments from others. Here I’m going to link to those reviews and then review each remaining story in Dear Life on its own over the next little while. As I post reviews, I will update the links below. In the end, below I will post some final thoughts on the collection as a whole.

    For some reason “Axis,” one of my favorites of the last few years and which was just included in the Best American Short Stories: 2012, is not in this collection. Click here for my thoughts on “Axis.”

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  • Maile Meloy: “Demeter”

    Maile Meloy: “Demeter”

    "Demeter"
by Maile Meloy
Originally published in the November 19, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.

    A new Maile Meloy short story: a good way to start the week.

    “Demeter” was written to be part of a collection of short stories based on myths due out next year. For those who need refreshing, Demeter is the goddess of the harvest, of marriage, and of the cycle of life and death. She had a daughter named Persephone who is each year taken to the Underworld to be with Hades. At that time, Demeter goes into mourning, the days shorten, and winter overtakes the earth. The ties between “Demeter” and the myth are clear from the first line:

    When they divided up the year, Demeter chose, for her own, the months when the days started getting longer. It was easier that way. It meant that she delivered her daughter to her ex-husband in the late, bright Montana summer and she could handle it then, most of the time, with a little pharmaceutical help. She couldn’t handle giving her up in the dead of winter.

    Hank is Demeter’s ex-husband. Their relationship was troubled well before they had their only daughter, Perry, “unexpected, the pregnancy a buoyant gift at a time when Demeter and Hank were like drowning people, tugging each other under.” As the story begins, Demeter is driving her daughter to stay with Hank for the next six months. She’s distraught and already mourning. Naturally, she can hardly bear being away from her daughter. Also, she believes her daughter prefers living with Hank (after all, there she will have red meat and processed foods; Demeter’s hearth is stocked with grains), and so she feels like she’s losing her daughter in more ways than one. So acute is her grief that when Perry gets out of the car, Demeter cannot drive away. When she finally does, she is struck by a thought:

    When she was young, she had liked to say that she would never have regrets. Her life was her life, her choices her choices, and she would stand by it all. But she did have a regret now. She wished she had never had a child.

    She pulled the care over to the curb, startled by the thought. It was true. She couldn’t wish her daughter away now, but if she had a time machine she would go back and erase the conception. Then there wouldn’t be this agony, there wouldn’t be the black times. She would have found other sources of love, and she wouldn’t have this gnawing emptiness. One tiny erasure and everything would be different. Catastrophe avoided.

    I had never connected the myth of Demeter and Persephone with the contemporary legal structure of joint custody. Meloy’s stories often revolve around the legal world, family law in particular, and the emotions here strike genuinely.

    However, I’m still not sure how to reconcile what we’ve read so far with the story’s next act, where the story shifts dramatically. At this point I was delighted to find reference to one of Meloy’s older short stories, “Four Lean Hounds, ca. 1976,” from her collection Half in Love (my review here). In that story, Demeter is a side character, probably the least mentioned of the four individuals who make up the two young married couples, best friends. At that time she is still married to Hank (they haven’t had Perry yet). The other couple is Duncan and Kay. All suffer when Duncan drowns while working on a dam with Hank. Grief-stricken, Hank and Kay sleep together: “The first time Hank slept with Kay — the only time — was the night her husband drowned.” In “Demeter,” we learn that Demeter and Duncan had been sleeping together for some time; and another result of the grief was Perry: “[Demeter and Hank] were moving around the death like two satellites in separate orbits when they collided in the bedroom and Perry was conceived.”

    The story shifts because Demeter runs into Annie, Duncan and Kay’s daughter, at the swimming pool, and Demeter’s thoughts are centered now on Duncan, not on Perry. Ties to the Demeter myth continue, especially when there’s a freak snowstorm in August, but I’m having a difficult time putting part two of the story with part one. That said, it’s a puzzle I’m interested in thinking about, meaning the story succeeds for me, even if it is not one I’d put in Meloy’s top tier. I’m anxious to look into it again and to read anyone’s thoughts. I believe there is a lot here.

  • Gonçalo M. Tavares: The Neighborhood

    Gonçalo M. Tavares: The Neighborhood

    The Neighborhood
by Gonçalo M. Tavares (O Bairro, 2010)
translated from the Portuguese by Roopanjali Roy (2012)
Texas Tech University Press (2012)
304 pp

    I feel terrible that I’ve been negligent in reading Tavares, whose work started appearing in English a few years ago. After only a few paragraphs of The Neighborhood I knew I would be reading everything he puts out there, and thanks to Dalkey Archive and Texas Tech University Press for serving us with these publications. Okay, I don’t know if I’ll like the books in his Kingdom series when I get to them — who knows? But if the control, intelligence, erudition, wit, charm, humor, and sadness that we find in The Neighborhood is any indication, I’m going to be a big fan of Tavares.

    The Neighborhood is a compilation of six “Mister” stories based on the lives and work of some of our greatest authors: Mister Valéry (Paul Valéry), Mister Calvino (Italo Calvino), Mister Juarroz (Roberto Juarroz), Mister Henri (Henri Michaux), Mister Kraus (Karl Kraus), and Mister Walser (Robert Walser). Importantly, these are not biographies (and are the furthest thing from dry biographies). Each “Mister” story is a playful riff on a theme inspired by the man and his work, both his style and his characters. They are whimsical and charming, though they also contain a great deal of sadness. All of those emotions are nicely underlined in the varied illustrations by Rachel Caiano (Tavares’ wife).

    The book begins with Mister Valéry. Paul Valéry was a French poet and philosopher who died in 1945. At various times in his life, he published short pieces centered around a Monsieur Teste (Mister Head) (one can feel the relationship between Tavares’ project and Valéry’s). Monsieur Teste is an intellectual who seeks self-mastery by exploring the limits of the physical world. The first segment of the book is called “Friends,” and we meet a Mister Valéry who seems to be occupied in the same pursuit as Monsieur Teste:

    Mister Valéry was very short, but he used to jump a lot.

    He explained: “I am just like any tall person, except for less time.”

    But this constituted a problem for him.

    Later, Mister Valéry began to ponder about the fact that, if tall people were also to jump, he would never match them on a vertical level. And this thought dampened his spirits a bit. One fine day, Mister Valéry ceased to jump. Definitively. However, it was more due to tiredness than for any other reason.

    He stops jumping but continues to consider ways he can be as tall as those around him. He could stand on a bench, but then he’s immobile. He could take a chair with wheels, but this isn’t practical. He wishes he could freeze his jump, “if only for an hour (he did not ask for any more than that).” Finally he “decided to be tall in his mind.” So he imagines he’s looking at people as if he were twenty centimeters taller, and “[b]y concentrating, Mister Valéry even managed to see the tops of the heads of people who were much taller than he.” This results in another problem: he then can’t remember their faces. “Essentially, with his newfound height, Mister Valéry lost friends.”

    We continue to read about Mister Valéry as he navigates the physical world. Not only is it interesting and witty, but it is also a lot of fun. This can be evidenced by the fact that children in Portugal often perform pieces from these narratives. I’ve even found a video on YouTube where some children filmed their interpretation of “Friends” (click here).

    While all of the six stories are charming and sad, and all are approached with whimsy, they are not the same in style. A few have an episodic feel (like Mister Valéry) and a few progress more like a conventional narrative. Further, they match, to an extent, the styles or personalities of the authors they are improvising. Mister Henri, for example, brings up his love of absinthe and encyclopedias in almost every vignette in the Mister Henri segment. Mister Kraus is writing a chronicle of a “Boss” pre- and post-election, and in this narrative Tavares injects the cyncisism and philosophies of power of the real Karl Kraus, the Austrian journalist and satirist.

    Probably my favorite of the six (and I loved each) was Mister Walser, a touching and frightening improvisation on Robert Walser, the jubilant writer of long sentences packed with frenetic energy and fearless of that exclamation mark. Mister Walser, you’ll see in the map that makes the cover to this edition, has his abode far from the neighborhood. He’s a wanderer and comfortable in solitude. Yet he’s animated. He’s just finished construction of his home and is anxious to start his new life:

    Mister Walser was overjoyed! In the midst of bushes, wild plants, and other manifestations of nature, in the course of a full and unpredictable life, this was what he had managed to build — using all the specialized technical skills that only a great civilization is capable of providing — a simple house, nothing luxurious or ostentatious, a modest home in which to live, the house of Mister Walser, a man who, for the time being, was alone in the world, but someone who viewed this house that had finally been finished — how many years had it taken to build?! so many! — as an opportunity to, frankly speaking, find company at last.

    That is pitch perfect Robert Walser prose — the exuberance, the embellishment, the existential fear just under the surface. Proud of his home, he now wishes to inaugurate it, and a proper inauguration requires the presence of the proper individual: Thereza M. He sits to write her a letter. Nearly finished, he is shocked when someone rings his doorbell. A handyman has arrived to fix his tap. Polite and proper as always, Mr. Walser lets him in to do his work, anxious for it to all be finished so he can move on with his plans (the way Tavares describes Mister Walser’s emotions and feelings during the time he waits for the handyman to finish is reason enough to buy and cherish this book). But, before the handyman can leave, another repairman comes, followed by others, until the house is filled with people fixing it up properly, tearing down walls, putting cardboard over windows. The house’s “long career” now seems like a fancy. It’s a remarkable progression of events, culminating in the saddest passage of the book. Night has fallen, and most of the repairmen are still there and have asked to spend the night. Hospitality requires Mr. Walser to be a kind host, so he wanders around, finding ways to make sure everyone is comfortable:

    At that point he was just too exhausted. He decided to lie down right there, in what appeared to be a corridor, although it was not very narrow. Not having foreseen this turn of events he had neglected to bring his coat from the hall. It was quite cold there owing to the fact that some windows had been removed from their frames and the cardboard covering these gaps was insufficient.

    The entire “Mister Walser” section is charming, witty, funny, as are the other sections, but, also like the other sections, underneath the whimsical descriptions of a bad day is the genuine terror of broken, abandoned, eventually forsaken dreams and the swift (or is it merciful) passage of life. Obviously, that passage takes our mind to that Christmas Day in 1956 when Robert Walser, after spending 27 years in a mental hospital he put himself in, went on a lonely walk and died in the snow.

    Genuinely, I feel I’ve discovered a treasuer that will keep me rich for life. I’m thrilled to say this volume didn’t originate from one book. Tavares has been publishing these short pieces in an ongoing series since 2002, and this book is merely a compilation of six of the ten currently available (hopefully a volume containing Mister Brecht, Mister Breton, Mister Swedenborg, and Mister Eliot is in the works). And I have more wonderful news: there are several more planned (apparently the map of the neighborhood now contains 39 names, including Mishima, Woolf (a Mrs.!), and Gogol).

  • Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth: The Space Merchants

    Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth: The Space Merchants

    The Space Merchants
by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth (1953)
The Library of America: American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, Volume 1 (2012)
186 pp

    I don’t read a lot of science fiction these days, but it’s a genre I loved when I was growing up. Clearly, The Library of America knew what they were doing when they constructed their new science-fiction box set, because when I received the announcement for the collection I stared, like a child, at the cover art. I sent my brother a picture, and within a minute he told me he had pre-ordered the set on Amazon.

    The set includes nine science-fiction novels from the 1950s: The Space Merchants (1953), by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth; More Than Human (1953), by Theodore Sturgeon; The Long Tomorrow (1955), by Leigh Brackett; The Shrinking Man (1956), by Richard Matheson; Double Star (1956), by Robert A. Heinlein; The Stars My Destination (1956), by Alfred Bester; A Case of Conscience (1958), by James Blish; Who? (1958), by Algis Budrys; and The Big Time (1958), by Fritz Leiber. As usual, the books come with extensive notes. But outdoing themselves, The Library of America has also launched an accompanying website that contains essays about each novel, cover galleries, and several critical essays about science fiction in the 1950s. Check it out here.

    I’ll be making my way through the set and happily started at the beginning of Volume 1 with The Space Merchants.

    I’ve had a very miss-and-miss relationship with recent novels and short stories that, claiming to be science fiction, venture into our future a few years to some kind of corporate dystopia. It’s not that I don’t take the threat seriously, but the refrain is so familiar and blunt. It doesn’t challenge our perspectives or incite us to action. It’s become a formula: plug in a few references to current companies merged into super giants, like AmExDisneyGoldman; show that people are oblivious to their desperate state because advertising tells them they’re wonderful; but make that world as ugly and rotten and polluted and over-populated as possible; mix in stock characters with starkly black-and-white views — voila! The basic building blocks for many works of socially-aware fiction. Here are links to three I’ve reviewed on this blog: Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood; Gary Schteyngart’s “Lenny Hearts Eunice” (which I believe became part of Super Sad True Love Story); and George Saunders’ “The Semplica-Girls Diaries” (as well as many other short stories by George Saunders). Again, it’s not that I take issue with the aim; it’s the self-congratulatory and pedantic tones that overshadow any serious confrontation with where we’re going.

    The Space Merchants is, in many ways, their forebear. Here we have a future where, through the power of suggestion and addiction, advertising executives rule the ugly world. Our narrator is Mitchell Courtenay, a highly skilled and admired copysmith for one of the two giant advertising agencies, Fowler Schocken. Courtenay is a star-class citizen, happily entrenched in the high life that few people enjoy. He doesn’t consider himself a “consumer,” but to keep accounts happy he uses their products. When the book begins, Courtenay is attending a work meeting and Mr. Schocken himself is introducing their new project: moving people to Venus to exploit whatever resources they can:

    “There’s an old saying, men. ‘The world is our oyster.’ We’ve made it come true. But we’ve eaten that oyster.” He crushed out his cigarette carefully. “We’ve eaten it,” he repeated. “We’ve actually and literally conquered the world. Like Alexander, we weep for new worlds to conquer. And there — ” he waved at the screen behind him, “there you have just seen the first of those worlds.”

    Courtenay is shocked and elated when he finds out that he will be heading the account. It’s hard work, even dangerous. After all, rumor has it Schocken stole the account from Taunton, the other advertising firm; if Taunton dares it can file a complaint and start a war with Schocken where associates really can be murdered in a legally sanctioned manner. Courtenay is pretty sure, though, that Taunton wouldn’t dare. He can focus all of his attention on getting enough people to move to the hottest planet in the solar system, one where the atmosphere alone will crush you, one with winds strong enough to take your remains and spread them across the entire land in a matter of minutes. It’s a challenge he accepts greedily.

    But it’s not all roses in Courtenay’s life. Eight months ago, he married — kind of. Really, he and a doctor, Kathy, filed papers to start a kind of year-long trial. If they want to stay married, they file another paper. Courtenay has already done this; Kathy has not, and now she’s moved out. He genuinely loves Kathy and cannot quite understand why she won’t stay with him.

    But on to Venus. One of Courtenay’s first tasks is to get all of the information he can from the one person who has flown to Venus and back, the thirty-six-inch tall Jack O’Shea. Which brings me to one of the reasons I liked this book much more than most others of its type: Pohl and Kornbluth really seem to understand the advertising and corporate worlds they are criticizing. As outlandish as the world they create is, they establish its reality with an appropriate tone, nuance, and mentality sourced directly from Madison Avenue. This explains why, according the Oxford English Dictionary, this book is the origination of the now-common terms “soyaburger,” “R&D,” “sucker-trap,” and “musak” as a general term. Pohl and Kornbluth show us how Courtenay approaches problems and explains his method as he creates copy that will sell the product. For example, why does Courtenay speak with O’Shea even though O’Shea has been already been drilled by researchers and has written exhaustive reports? Because Courtenay’s kind of advertising doesn’t rely on technical reports: “I wanted to know the soul of the fact, the elusive subjective mood that underlay his technical reports on the planet Venus, the basic feeling that would put compulsion and conviction into the project.”

    Sadly (for me, anyway) when the book is not world-building and starts dealing with an adventure plot, it isn’t nearly as strong. Not long after Courtenay starts to work on the account, he is high-jacked in Antarctica, his death is faked, and he left to join the ranks of the consumers, getting a taste of how terrible things really are. He lives the life of the oppressed:

    At sunset you turned in your coveralls and went to dinner — more slices of Chicken Little — and then you were on your own. You could talk, you could read, you could go into a trance before the dayroom hypnoteleset, you could shop, you could pick fights, you could drive yourself crazy thinking of what might have been, you could go to sleep.

    Mostly you went to sleep.

    Thankfully, the book isn’t so simplistic as to make this an immediate cause of conversion. He retains his conviction that the world is fine and that he just needs to find a way to let the people who love him know he is not dead. How to do that, though, when everything is stacked against you?

    I won’t spoil any more of the plot — and this book does get very plot heavy as Courtenay dashes around the globe in his efforts to regain his social status and control over the Venus project. I was glad when later in the book we do go back to world-building and see Courtenay’s mind, rather than convenient plot points, work him through and around his problems. Also, thankfully, the book is so cynical we really don’t know how it’s going to end.

    So, though I was disappointed in the heavy, often convenient, plot, I still found a lot to love in this book, not the least of which was the nostalgia I felt. It’s a great start to this nine-book set.

  • David Gilbert: “Member/Guest”

    David Gilbert: “Member/Guest”

    "Member/Guest"
by David Gilbert
Originally published in the November 12, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.

    When David Gilbert published The Normals in 2004, I read mostly bad reviews. Consequently, I have never read a word by him, and I’m not terribly excited to read this one — but I will soon. In the meantime, feel free to leave your thoughts below.

  • Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Time of Gifts

    Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Time of Gifts

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    A Time of Gifts
    by Patrick Leigh Fermor (1977)
    NYRB Classics (2005)
    321 pp

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    [fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]A[/fusion_dropcap] few years ago I read and reviewed Patrick Leigh Fermor’s short A Time to Keep Silence (here). At that time I also picked up several of his other books, excited for the day when I’d sit down and read them. As happens, they fell back in line, but when my brother and I put down a tentative podcast episode, we both knew we’d soon do Leigh Fermor’s famous A Time of Gifts; it turned out to be our second episode (which you can find here). There is much to love in this book, so many paths to walk down, so many stones to turn over, and Leigh Fermor is a wonderful guide. I’ve thought about the book a lot since I finished it, and it just keeps getting better and better.

    A Time of Gifts recounts the first leg of a trip Leigh Fermor made when he was only eighteen years old. Recently expelled from school and finding no success living the writer’s life in London, he decided he could afford to leave it all behind. Here was his plan:

    To change scenery; abandon London and England and set out across Europe like a tramp — or, as I characteristically phrased it myself, like a pilgrim or a palmer, an errant scholar, a broken knight or the hero of The Cloister and the Hearth! All of a sudden, this was not merely the obvious, but the only thing to do.

    He left on a barge down the Thames on December 9, 1933, the same year Hitler came into power in Germany, and he takes us to a world on the brink of change. It will never be this way again.

    One of the themes in A Time of Gifts is the inevitable passage of time. The walk — passing through towns, leaving friends behind — mimics and underlines the passage of time, and Leigh Fermor injects that sense of movement into his prose. It’s the work of a master. See this passage at the beginning of the book when Leigh Fermor is drifting away from London:

    There was a reek of mud, seaweed, slime, salt, smoke and clinkers and nameless jetsam, and the half-sunk barges and the waterlogged palisades unloosed a universal smell of rotting timber. Was there a whiff of spices? It was too late to say: the ship was drawing away from the shore and gathering speed and the details beyond the wider stretch of water and the convolutions of the gulls were growing blurred.

    As any good travel writer would, Leigh Fermor details the sights and sounds and smells so that we might feel we are there with him. However, he goes further. Leigh Fermor shows these things as they recede in time and space — “Was there a whiff of spice? It was too late to say.”

    This gift for giving us the sensation of the passage of time through prose is also used to show the destruction of time, and given the decade, this effect is emphasized greatly; after all, many of these towns were no longer there just a few years later, and many of the people he met and who showed him hospitality were dead or displaced. It is not consistent, but as we read we often feel the sensation of impending destruction. In our podcast, I spend a bit of time talking about Peter Brueghel the Elder, whose painting Hunters in the Snow is on the cover of this edition. Brueghel lived in a dark time, and in many ways this painting shows peace with a touch of doom in the background.

    But, stepping back from the decade and World War II’s approach, Leigh Fermor also shows this in simpler, intimate settings. One of my favorite parts of the book is a small two-page passage. Leigh Fermor has stopped at the home of Frau Hübner, a widow whose children have moved away. As evening drops, Leigh Fermor finds himself sitting down while she tells him stories, but he can’t stay in that moment; in fact, even as it’s happening, he’s drifting away:

    Sleep was creeping on. Gradually Frau Hübner’s face, the parrot’s cage, the lamp, the stuffed furniture and the thousand buttons on the upholstery began to lose their outlines and merge. The rise and fall of her rhetoric and Toni’s heckling would be blotted out for seconds, even minutes. At last she saw I was nodding, and broke off with repentant cry of self-accusation. I was sorry, as I could have gone on listening for ever.

    It’s a remarkable book for other, perhaps more obvious reasons. For one, much more than an account of impending doom, A Time of Gifts heaps praise on the general goodness of humanity. Everywhere Leigh Fermor went, he found people willing to help him, giving him food and board. But that wasn’t all. He also found deep friendships with many. It’s a heartwarming book through and through, though this also serves to make the upcoming loss that much more poignant.

    I have some minor criticisms, which I hesitate to even bring up so much did I enjoy the book as a whole. There are several passages where Leigh Fermor takes a back seat and recounts in an impersonal way the history of some of the places he’s visiting. I had a similar issue with A Time to Keep Silence. With such emotion can Leigh Fermor inject the personal into his book, that when these passages come up the book tends to dry out, no matter how much I enjoyed the history it was recounting.

    Still, that’s a minor quibble. It’s not one that will keep me from reading more and more Leigh Fermor; in fact, it’s not one that will keep me from reading A Time of Gifts again in the future and certainly not one to keep me from recommending the book far and wide.

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