Here we are on the ninth week! Fall is settling on 1967!
Thanks to everyone who comments, as always! Please keep going, however it works best for you!
Here is the post for any and all discussions about passages from October 16 – 22, 1967.
For the main page of this read-along, please go here.
I’m 100 pp into vol. 2 now, so it’s quite helpful to dip back into October from vol. 1 for this readalong. In the Oct. 16 section Cresspahl’s wife Lisbeth, Gesine’s mother, whose story she’s telling to Marie, is called by her maiden name, Papenbrock. I hadn’t noticed that first time. It’s significant, because this is the chapter in which she seemed to be settling into life with her husband in Richmond, England: was learning the language, taking an interest in local affairs and the history of the area; but out of the blue she announces that the baby she’s about to have will be born back in Jerichow. She says this passive-aggressively: ‘submissive and absolutely unyielding.’ She gets her way, ‘not unfriendly’, strangely assertive, even hurtfully dismissive of her husband’s role in her (and her baby’s) life.
‘And that’s why I was born in Jerichow,’ says Marie when Gesine’s narrative stops. Then asks her, ‘avidly curious’, if she’d have preferred to be born in Richmond. G says she would. Marie’s response is telling: ‘–I don’t get it. Oh. Right. Right, sorry.’
This passage illustrates, for me, one of the strengths of the novel (despite the boring bits I’ve mentioned before) and makes it worth persevering with: we’re not told what thought process the child goes through (she’s SO precocious!), we have to figure it out. I presume she remembers as an afterthought the rise of the Nazis that followed from Gesine’s birth in Germany, and the horrors that followed there (and these are narrated on and off for the rest of vol. 1 and into vol. 2: I’m now at the part where the Soviets have occupied the town at the end of the war; this slow unfolding of history in parallel with the mundane activities of Gesine, Marie and their acquaintances in NYC – plus the running commentary on events reported in the NYTimes – create a richly textured, intertwining set of narrative threads. In Oct. 17 there are reports of events in Prague, immediately followed by one of those trademark detailed profiles of Sam, who runs the cafeteria in Gesine’s office building
I too thought October 17th was one of the most intriguing so far.
Oops, I meant 16th in my previous post. Am reading the 17th now. I seem to have gotten behind!
Oct. 22: Gesine is having another ‘mental conversation’ – a dialogue with unnamed interlocutors (one of whom seems to be Marie), berating her for not attending the anti-Vietnam war demonstration in Washington. She defends herself by saying the President’s policy won’t be changed ‘by the protests of a minority’. She responds to another critical sneer: ‘Not even the president decides the president’s policy’ (lower case p, I notice). The interrogator suggests this is from Dos Passos; ‘No. Baran and Sweezy. “Monopoly Capital”.’ I had to look that up: it was book developing Marxist thought on politics and economics, applying to monopolistic tendencies of giant corporations (if Wikipedia can be trusted). Gesine still abides, it seems, by the socialist principles of the DDR in which she grew up. I wondered if anyone can confirm that what she says is indeed a quotation from Dos Passos. By coincidence I read a post by fellow blogger Karen at Kaggsysbookishramblings this week about The 42nd Parallel, vol. 1 (publ. 1930) of his trilogy USA; a suggestion was made that the non-linear, experimental form was similar to that of Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), another urban novel about the oppressed and dispossessed underclass (among other things). Anniversaries could be seen in that sort of tradition, I suppose, with its newspaper clippings, unattributed snatches of dialogue like the one mentioned at the start of this comment, fragmented structure…At the end of this italicised, 3-page dialogue, Gesine is again taken to task for not attending the demo, but she refuses to give a reason: she’s a hypocrite, is the underlying accusation; her final remark is interesting and revealing: ‘If I don’t think it through, it doesn’t exist.’ Johnson is so good at getting right into a character’s mind like this.
I was still behind and just got to October 22nd. I thought all of it was Gesine’s thoughts, in effect arguing with herself. She thinks:
– You can tell us.
– I can’t. Not even in a mental conversation.