Maurice Collis was born in Dublin in 1889, studied history at Oxford, and spent twenty years in Asia with the Indian Civil Service. His career was effectively destroyed by his book Trials of Burma, published in 1937 and describing sedition trials in Burma in 1929-1930, in which he adopted a too sympathetic attitude towards the Burmese nationalists and a too critical one towards the British colonial authorities (he was district magistrate for Rangoon at the time). Upon his return to England he wrote many books of history and biography, mostly to do with the British in Asia.
In the early 1950s he became interested in the Spanish conquest of Mexico and, finding himself dissatisfied with the Eurocentric Conquest of Mexico published by the American William Prescott in 1843, and seeing further possibilities opened up by the much more rigorous Hernan Cortes published by the Spaniard Salvador de Madariaga in 1941, he wrote Cortes and Montezuma, originally published in 1954 and reissued in 1999 by the wonderful New Directions Books, which has been one of the most important American imprints for serious literature for many years.
New Directions knows good writing when they see it, and we should be most grateful that we have this book, where a master storyteller spins the tale of what has to be one of the most bizarre and gaudy epics to have ever transpired: something much deeper and stranger than anything that anyone could make up. As a student of literature in college I discovered history when I realized that this was true of a great deal of history. Meanwhile, when I ordered this book from the New Directions' catalog some years ago (since when it has been floating around my bookcases), I had no idea if it was history or some sort of interpretive fiction or what. It just looked cool.
And cool it is, as Collis, convinced that previous chroniclers failed to understand the thinking of the Mexicans (they called themselves "Mexicans," by the way. "Aztec" is, according to Collis, a word of European coinage), set out to learn all he could about the "astro-magical" calculations of Montezuma and those around him. This has traditionally been difficult since the Spanish Catholic priests who came in Cortes's wake, although not genocidal and with their share of selfless heroes, did do their best to destroy every vestige of Mexican sacred writings, icons, and rituals. As with many other areas of early history, we are actually today in a better position to interpret many of these events than anyone has been since they occurred, as we now have several reasonably well reconstructed Mexican sources as well as a cadre of scholars of the classical Nauatl language to read them.
The story is of course amazing, better when one has the sensibility both to appreciate the magical aspects and to ask sceptical questions. On the one hand Cortes had the seemingly impossible luck as to appear to the Mexicans to be the incarnation of Quetzalcoatl, the god of the highways and the wind, who had disappeared into the East millenniums before with the promise that he would destroy anyone who resisted his return. According to Mexican legend he was a white-skinned man with black hair and beard. The year that Cortez arrived on the coast of modern Mexico, 1519, was, according to legend and to Collis's reading, the end of a 52-year cycle that culminated in the return of Quetzalcoatl and his confrontation with Humming Bird, the militant incarnation of Smoking Mirror. Thus Montezuma attempted to convince Quetzalcoatl/Cortes to go away without confronting him directly. It is a great part of Collis's thesis that Montezuma regarded Cortes as a modern astronomer would regard a returning comet, and that highly precise calculations of an astronomical nature governed his thinking on strategy. (It is also important that Cortes understood none of this, perhaps not even to the very end.)
On the other hand it is certainly not the case that the Mexicans simply acquiesced, on astro-magical grounds, to the hegemony of Spanish forces. In fact Montezuma was killed by stone-slingers of his own people who revolted when Montezuma acquiesced to his confinement in the temple of Lord Face of Water's Palace, just down the street from his own palace. Subsequently the Spanish were routed from Mexico City and spent the better part of a year besieging the city and conquering it by force. An undeniable part of the story is Cortes's prowess as a field officer, who held his troops together under attack from numbers exponentially greater than his own.
As in the case of Pizarro's subsequent conquest of the Incas in the Andean lands (which did much to eclipse the reputation of Cortes during his own lifetime), a crucial part of the story is the cooperation with the extranjeros of local subject peoples. In particular Cortes enlisted, after fierce battles that convinced them of his importance, the Tlaxcalan people, who were older residents of the area (the Mexicans were derived from North American tribes) who saw themselves as culturally older and more distinguished than the Mexicans and who resented their depredations.
As to that, another decisive factor was the fact that the locals fought in a manner calculated to obtain live captives, who would subsequently be sacrificed to the gods and eaten. (The ruler before Montezuma is on record as having sacrificed as many as 20,000 people at a time in rituals designed to placate the gods of nature.) Montezuma himself was known to dine on the flesh of young boys, a fact highly distracting to the Spaniards who shared his table and who were at times unable to distinguish between various savories.
The Spanish, by contrast, had horses, heavy armor, and fought with sword and lance thrusts designed to kill. They were concerned with maintaining their own formations in order to survive, although the fact is that hundreds of Spanish were killed and many more were captured and sacrificed to the gods of the Mexicans. Cortes was tough and shrewd, and vastly ambitious, but his real genius was as a field officer. It was clear to every Spaniard, not all of whom were entirely loyal to him, that they would all perish if he were killed. Meanwhile the lure of gold was not merely fantastic; Cortes had a difficult time paying his local allies for provisions and always needed cash and credit to proceed.
All of this is superstructure to a fantastic story of individuals, men and women, Spanish and Mexican, who underwent tests of fortitude that most of us, thank God, will never even have to contemplate. Bernal Diaz's reminiscences, certainly the most important source for Collis, tell us of many individuals, their personalities, their foibles. I have a copy of Diaz here, and a copy of Prescott of course, but I'll move on, reluctantly enough: this is one of the great stories of all time, brilliantly narrated by Collis.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Sunday, June 14, 2009
W. G. Sebald
I've just read The Emigrants (1992), one of W. G. Sebald's earliest writings and probably his best-known work (I read the English translation by Michael Hulse). It's easy to see why the cognoscenti have embraced this book, which is not a large novel at a fast-reading 237 pages with black-and-white photographs scattered through the text. It is written in a clear, elegant and very urbane style; stylistically it could have been written anytime in the 20th century. The author conveys both landscapes and characters in a deft and persuasive manner that is made to appear effortless, although a great deal of thought as well as research certainly must have gone into its composition. Regarding the quality of the prose one could read it all day long and never tire of either the tone or the sensibility. It is the epitome of cosmopolitanism and sobriety.
But the superb quality of Sebald's technique is not what makes The Emigrants a book that will, I predict, be read and cited for many years to come. Sebald has taken the topic of literally thousands of books - European antisemitism and the ongoing destruction of Mitteleuropa Jewish culture throughout the early 20th century, culminating of course in the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust - and given it a treatment so subtle, so gentle, so personal and yet so indirect as to cause the reader to gain further appreciation of the human cost of events and movements that have been at the center of discussion for half a century.
Four sections present reminiscences (a nameless first-person narrator is different people and yet the same person in all four) of four different displaced European Jews. Some left before the rise of Nazism (but still to escape antisemitism). Others are survivors of families that perished in the camps. They come from disparate parts of Europe, although Switzerland figures most prominently throughout the book. Some have gone to England, some to America, some are still on the Continent. They all live, superficially, more or less ordinary lives. They are not necessarily poor, although certainly several are now in greatly reduced circumstances. They remember their school days. They remember earlier lives as proper people in the proper German-speaking world. They remember a world that is gone.
It is one thing to reflect on the violent deaths of millions (six million Jews, twenty million Russians, who knows how many millions of Asian people), but there is another dimension to the human cost of war and genocide: the people who are scattered, like dust, to the four winds, left to live out their lives as displaced persons, with no choice but to carry on, as people who have lost loved ones must also simply continue. Suicide is an option. Silence is unavoidable. One must get on. Memories persist. There is a long, impressive passage in the last section of detailed memories of growing up in a respectable Jewish family in rural Germany. It is an ordinary, traditional, conservative life. It is neither luxurious nor deprived. It is strict but comfortable. Pleasures are simple. This is normal human life, and it is very beautiful.
The narrator is given these written memoirs by a relative of the now-deceased woman who wrote them. He feels he must go to these towns (Kissingen and Steinach), and he makes a pilgrimage there (one of several such trips of return in the book). He manages to find an old, overgrown Jewish cemetery. Otherwise nothing remains. There is nothing to go back to, and these journeys of return are unsatisfying if not disturbing. All that remains are human flotsam, now far away. That, and something else.
This is not a great masterpiece, but it is a minor masterpiece, and I certainly recommend reading it. I will read another.
But the superb quality of Sebald's technique is not what makes The Emigrants a book that will, I predict, be read and cited for many years to come. Sebald has taken the topic of literally thousands of books - European antisemitism and the ongoing destruction of Mitteleuropa Jewish culture throughout the early 20th century, culminating of course in the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust - and given it a treatment so subtle, so gentle, so personal and yet so indirect as to cause the reader to gain further appreciation of the human cost of events and movements that have been at the center of discussion for half a century.
Four sections present reminiscences (a nameless first-person narrator is different people and yet the same person in all four) of four different displaced European Jews. Some left before the rise of Nazism (but still to escape antisemitism). Others are survivors of families that perished in the camps. They come from disparate parts of Europe, although Switzerland figures most prominently throughout the book. Some have gone to England, some to America, some are still on the Continent. They all live, superficially, more or less ordinary lives. They are not necessarily poor, although certainly several are now in greatly reduced circumstances. They remember their school days. They remember earlier lives as proper people in the proper German-speaking world. They remember a world that is gone.
It is one thing to reflect on the violent deaths of millions (six million Jews, twenty million Russians, who knows how many millions of Asian people), but there is another dimension to the human cost of war and genocide: the people who are scattered, like dust, to the four winds, left to live out their lives as displaced persons, with no choice but to carry on, as people who have lost loved ones must also simply continue. Suicide is an option. Silence is unavoidable. One must get on. Memories persist. There is a long, impressive passage in the last section of detailed memories of growing up in a respectable Jewish family in rural Germany. It is an ordinary, traditional, conservative life. It is neither luxurious nor deprived. It is strict but comfortable. Pleasures are simple. This is normal human life, and it is very beautiful.
The narrator is given these written memoirs by a relative of the now-deceased woman who wrote them. He feels he must go to these towns (Kissingen and Steinach), and he makes a pilgrimage there (one of several such trips of return in the book). He manages to find an old, overgrown Jewish cemetery. Otherwise nothing remains. There is nothing to go back to, and these journeys of return are unsatisfying if not disturbing. All that remains are human flotsam, now far away. That, and something else.
This is not a great masterpiece, but it is a minor masterpiece, and I certainly recommend reading it. I will read another.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Ken Bruen's The Guards
Last year for St. Patrick's Day I posted about "hard-boiled Irish," the distinctly noirish atmospherics that come blowing in in no time at all when one starts reading contemporary Irish fiction. In days gone by, before I started this blog, I also spent many's the long evening enjoying detective stories, scores and scores of them, working out (like everybody else) from the masters Chandler and Hammett. The "hard-boiled" (promise not to use the phrase again) detective novel is a highly formalized, almost ritualistic genre, with a strict set of criteria for the protagonist: he must be tough, dogged, honest and loyal, indifferent to money, unafraid of a fight, and on a knightly quest to save or avenge an innocent, preferably a comely woman of the fallen variety.
The basic rows for post-Chandler novelists to hoe are: working variations on the form without going too far (larcenous antiheroes for example); applying the form to some geographical region, profession other than shamus, or some other target-demographic niche; and working the borderlines between the detective novel and close genres such as the murder mystery, a kind of puzzle book, or the thriller, which is usually a military or espionage fantasy, or the western, where heroic virtues are also stressed. It is optional to aspire to high literary quality (some of the best, like Elmore Leonard or Donald Westlake, couldn't care less), but it is not optional to write well: detective novelists must "write for story," that is they must keep the action moving along, they must hide the machinery (like good television hosts, they make something that is hard to do look effortless), and they must find some way to make the narrative emotionally compelling. I've tried it, it's a lot harder than it looks. (My characters always seemed to end up standing around in a circle on the lawn. Raymond Chandler claimed that he would write the phrase "A man came through the door with a gun" when he was blocked, and that did the trick.)
So seeing strong literary notices of Ken Bruen's The Guards, a tough-guy novel set in Galway, where my mother's family comes from and where I've traveled a bit, it was a natural for the Stack. It is as advertised very tough indeed and aficionados of the genre will come away satisfied. It also provides much local color including even Kenny's Books, a great store that has helped me long-distance since my visit, as well of course of other environs too subterranean for the average tourist. It reads, as tough-guy novels should, very fast, almost too fast as Bruen empties his pages with terse dialogue and lists and just empty space. But what I found most entertaining was the way Bruen bent the rules of the genre around.
First there is Bruen's fine conceit, and one to which perhaps only an Irishman is entitled, that every character and certainly the protagonist/narrator is highly literate, concerned with grammar, and widely familiar with popular culture. There are many asides about the merits or lack thereof of various American, English, and Irish locutions; no matter what the circumstances Jack Taylor finds time to grouse about the careless or cliched way someone is speaking. Very many allusions to music and to books are welcome to an exploratory reader who likes to take suggestions. It is a nice joke that the most erudite speaker of all is Padraig, a kind of lordly wino amongst the shoals of drunks.
As to that, there is the alcohol issue. Philip Marlowe used to drink water glasses filled with rye whiskey (can you even find a bottle of rye any more?) before he went to bed, and Nick and Nora Charles would gleefully line up eight martinis on the bar to unwind. These days there is a revisionist line on the booze issue. In terms of the popular detective novel, I would mention James Lee Burke's very good (and at this point very prolific) series set mostly in the bayou country of Louisiana with his AA 12-stepping hero Dave Robicheaux. Jack Taylor is very much "in his disease," as we say, but Bruen also talks the Big Book talk. In terms of recent Irish fiction, I'm an advocate of Eamonn Sweeney's Waiting for the Healer, a novel that traverses some of the same territory that Bruen is developing here. Another recent Irish novel that can fairly be put up against this one is Dermot Bolger's The Journey Home, although if it's entertainment you're after I'd recommend The Guards.
Jack Taylor's alcoholism is a central theme of the book. It bends, as I said, the conventions of the genre. Jack isn't much of a detective. He doesn't bring the bad guys to justice. He doesn't, at the end of the day, do much of anything, because his own basic struggle is with The Bender. He blacks out for days. The pretty mother of the (maybe) murdered girl gives up on him and moves on, and she's right. The bad guys are dealt with, as much as for any other reason, because one of Jack's friends is one of the local psychopaths. He rejects the police (the garda, the Irish term universally used in Ireland), the church, and his own mother, but the reader can see that they're not all bad (just bad enough). He's got the Chandlerian virtues, but that's pretty much it, because the truth is he can't hold his liquor.
So in the end, the book is what I would call a "pure noir": a damaged character just barely does anything virtuous, and what he does do he is able to do solely because the other people he is dealing with are themselves so morally compromised that any action grounded in any sense of justice is relatively good. Another master of this form is James Crumley, whose protagonist C. W. Sughrue is also an alcoholic; as in a western, he might just be checking in to a motel and run into some bad guys - he just can't help himself.
There are now a number of Jack Taylor novels, and if I ever go back to reading tough-guy genre novels I'll check them out. If that's what turns you on, you could do worse. But I can't go on recommending, because really this is a thriving genre, and there are just too many good examples to mention. This one's Irish: that's a good thing.
The basic rows for post-Chandler novelists to hoe are: working variations on the form without going too far (larcenous antiheroes for example); applying the form to some geographical region, profession other than shamus, or some other target-demographic niche; and working the borderlines between the detective novel and close genres such as the murder mystery, a kind of puzzle book, or the thriller, which is usually a military or espionage fantasy, or the western, where heroic virtues are also stressed. It is optional to aspire to high literary quality (some of the best, like Elmore Leonard or Donald Westlake, couldn't care less), but it is not optional to write well: detective novelists must "write for story," that is they must keep the action moving along, they must hide the machinery (like good television hosts, they make something that is hard to do look effortless), and they must find some way to make the narrative emotionally compelling. I've tried it, it's a lot harder than it looks. (My characters always seemed to end up standing around in a circle on the lawn. Raymond Chandler claimed that he would write the phrase "A man came through the door with a gun" when he was blocked, and that did the trick.)
So seeing strong literary notices of Ken Bruen's The Guards, a tough-guy novel set in Galway, where my mother's family comes from and where I've traveled a bit, it was a natural for the Stack. It is as advertised very tough indeed and aficionados of the genre will come away satisfied. It also provides much local color including even Kenny's Books, a great store that has helped me long-distance since my visit, as well of course of other environs too subterranean for the average tourist. It reads, as tough-guy novels should, very fast, almost too fast as Bruen empties his pages with terse dialogue and lists and just empty space. But what I found most entertaining was the way Bruen bent the rules of the genre around.
First there is Bruen's fine conceit, and one to which perhaps only an Irishman is entitled, that every character and certainly the protagonist/narrator is highly literate, concerned with grammar, and widely familiar with popular culture. There are many asides about the merits or lack thereof of various American, English, and Irish locutions; no matter what the circumstances Jack Taylor finds time to grouse about the careless or cliched way someone is speaking. Very many allusions to music and to books are welcome to an exploratory reader who likes to take suggestions. It is a nice joke that the most erudite speaker of all is Padraig, a kind of lordly wino amongst the shoals of drunks.
As to that, there is the alcohol issue. Philip Marlowe used to drink water glasses filled with rye whiskey (can you even find a bottle of rye any more?) before he went to bed, and Nick and Nora Charles would gleefully line up eight martinis on the bar to unwind. These days there is a revisionist line on the booze issue. In terms of the popular detective novel, I would mention James Lee Burke's very good (and at this point very prolific) series set mostly in the bayou country of Louisiana with his AA 12-stepping hero Dave Robicheaux. Jack Taylor is very much "in his disease," as we say, but Bruen also talks the Big Book talk. In terms of recent Irish fiction, I'm an advocate of Eamonn Sweeney's Waiting for the Healer, a novel that traverses some of the same territory that Bruen is developing here. Another recent Irish novel that can fairly be put up against this one is Dermot Bolger's The Journey Home, although if it's entertainment you're after I'd recommend The Guards.
Jack Taylor's alcoholism is a central theme of the book. It bends, as I said, the conventions of the genre. Jack isn't much of a detective. He doesn't bring the bad guys to justice. He doesn't, at the end of the day, do much of anything, because his own basic struggle is with The Bender. He blacks out for days. The pretty mother of the (maybe) murdered girl gives up on him and moves on, and she's right. The bad guys are dealt with, as much as for any other reason, because one of Jack's friends is one of the local psychopaths. He rejects the police (the garda, the Irish term universally used in Ireland), the church, and his own mother, but the reader can see that they're not all bad (just bad enough). He's got the Chandlerian virtues, but that's pretty much it, because the truth is he can't hold his liquor.
So in the end, the book is what I would call a "pure noir": a damaged character just barely does anything virtuous, and what he does do he is able to do solely because the other people he is dealing with are themselves so morally compromised that any action grounded in any sense of justice is relatively good. Another master of this form is James Crumley, whose protagonist C. W. Sughrue is also an alcoholic; as in a western, he might just be checking in to a motel and run into some bad guys - he just can't help himself.
There are now a number of Jack Taylor novels, and if I ever go back to reading tough-guy genre novels I'll check them out. If that's what turns you on, you could do worse. But I can't go on recommending, because really this is a thriving genre, and there are just too many good examples to mention. This one's Irish: that's a good thing.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Two Guyanese Novelists
My copy of Roy Heath's Kwaku, or The Man Who Could Not Keep His Mouth Shut (1982) came to me in a box of books given to me by a friend who was moving, a box mostly full of African literature from the sixties, and I confess I didn't have much idea of what it was when I added it to the Stack. It is a novel of Guyana, and by coincidence the author has historical similarities to the author of the only other Guyanese fiction I have read, Wilson Harris, whose Guyana Quartet (a 1985 omnibus edition of his first four novels, Palace of the Peacock, 1960, The Far Journey of Oudin, 1961, The Whole Armour, 1962, and The Secret Ladder, 1963) I read sometime before starting this blog a couple of years ago. They are contemporaries, Harris born in 1921 and Heath in 1926; Heath moved to England in 1951 and Harris did the same in 1959, and both men spent the rest of their lives there (Heath died in 2008 and Harris, as far as I can tell from Googling, is still with us), and both started writing as expatriates.
Today there is a vibrant Guyanese literature written in-country and by young writers with working class immigrant backgrounds in the US, including women writers and much social realism, similar in all of these ways to contemporary Spanish Caribbean literature. Wilson and Harris represent the previous generation, with the traditional colonial sense of living on a far fringe of the old (in their case British) empire, and without the omnipresence of America and its secular pop culture. They are inward-looking writers who focus on the quotidian challenges of economic survival, social dignity, and romantic happiness of their young male characters. The younger generation of Caribbean writers (Maryse Conde, Junot Diaz, or Edwidge Danticat for examples) tends to have a strong sense of identity forged in the post-colonial, post-sixties dialectic of identity politics.
The characters in these earlier novels are almost wraithlike in comparison, unsettled and inchoate in their sense of themselves, their relation to historical and cultural elements (notably magical explanations and folk mythologies), and live in deeply insular worlds of small villages at the very edge of the bush. They are humble people confronted with a hardscrabble reality who do not necessarily see themselves as moral agents or as representatives of a "people." They are self-interested by necessity. They do not see, say, endemic alcoholism as a symptom of oppressive conditions caused by far-off sinister powers, but rather as a plain fact of emotional survival. No information is coming in from beyond the horizon, and none is sought.
In Kwaku Heath does a wonderful job of conveying the ragtag fatalism of these poor people. Everyone, including Kwaku himself, sees him as a sort of village idiot, but what sets him apart from the rest is not obvious. He dares to think that he might make things better, get to a better world, but he is unable to organize himself and is so resistant to conformity as to have virtually no friends among his village peers. Still he lives a life that is much more than nothing, with his wife Miss Gwendoline (originally scouted out by Kwaku's uncle who needs to marry him off to get rid of him), who in spite of everything is in love with Kwaku to the end, and their eight children, a job soling shoes for the local cobbler who knows him to be a reliable worker, and even something of a photography hobby encouraged by his neighbor old Mr. Barzey who gives him an ancient camera.
All of this comes apart when Kwaku decides to try to escape village life by moving to New Amsterdam (Georgetown is too intimidating a prospect) where he acquires a reputation as a healer. He is patently a fraud although in fairness he never asked for people to decide he had such powers. Thus ensues an interlude of having money, decent clothes, and a sense of respect that has heretofore eluded him. This is all short-lived. Kwaku is one of the lost, without the resources to be a householder, a patriarch, or a professional. His only freedom is poverty, the freedom to lose your house, or your job, or all of your money, because it never amounted to anything anyway.
That all sounds pretty bleak, but this isn't a bleak book. It's frequently funny and filled with engaging characters and incidents, episodes just outlandish enough to be outrageous and possible at the same time. Everyone speaks in a local English patois that features interesting grammatical structure and plenty of idiomatic phrases and verbal tics. I found it entertaining and I recommend it.
The pleasures of Wilson Harris are more austere. His style is both erudite and dreamlike. He is not following the Spanish "magical realist" formula, he comes to his foggy surrealism through his own ideas about characters who live on the margins of the town and the jungle, the old and the new. There is a far greater awareness of the surrounding tropical forest (Harris was a trained land surveyor and served as Senior Surveyor for Projects for British Guyana for four years in the fifties). Some of the most memorable passages occur at a work camp where a small group of men have to sort out their status and their motives. He is darker than Heath, there is violence and menace, both between characters and from nature (a jaguar carries away a neighbor's baby). The river is always present, both of these writers of Guyana portray the fact that coastal Guyana is a wet, tropical place. At times Harris was a little too atmospheric for my taste, I remember a sense of plowing along through a pea-fog narrative that could be hard to follow, but as I said this is definitely by design. Harris is the more ambitious of the two, but Heath is the more entertaining.
Today there is a vibrant Guyanese literature written in-country and by young writers with working class immigrant backgrounds in the US, including women writers and much social realism, similar in all of these ways to contemporary Spanish Caribbean literature. Wilson and Harris represent the previous generation, with the traditional colonial sense of living on a far fringe of the old (in their case British) empire, and without the omnipresence of America and its secular pop culture. They are inward-looking writers who focus on the quotidian challenges of economic survival, social dignity, and romantic happiness of their young male characters. The younger generation of Caribbean writers (Maryse Conde, Junot Diaz, or Edwidge Danticat for examples) tends to have a strong sense of identity forged in the post-colonial, post-sixties dialectic of identity politics.
The characters in these earlier novels are almost wraithlike in comparison, unsettled and inchoate in their sense of themselves, their relation to historical and cultural elements (notably magical explanations and folk mythologies), and live in deeply insular worlds of small villages at the very edge of the bush. They are humble people confronted with a hardscrabble reality who do not necessarily see themselves as moral agents or as representatives of a "people." They are self-interested by necessity. They do not see, say, endemic alcoholism as a symptom of oppressive conditions caused by far-off sinister powers, but rather as a plain fact of emotional survival. No information is coming in from beyond the horizon, and none is sought.
In Kwaku Heath does a wonderful job of conveying the ragtag fatalism of these poor people. Everyone, including Kwaku himself, sees him as a sort of village idiot, but what sets him apart from the rest is not obvious. He dares to think that he might make things better, get to a better world, but he is unable to organize himself and is so resistant to conformity as to have virtually no friends among his village peers. Still he lives a life that is much more than nothing, with his wife Miss Gwendoline (originally scouted out by Kwaku's uncle who needs to marry him off to get rid of him), who in spite of everything is in love with Kwaku to the end, and their eight children, a job soling shoes for the local cobbler who knows him to be a reliable worker, and even something of a photography hobby encouraged by his neighbor old Mr. Barzey who gives him an ancient camera.
All of this comes apart when Kwaku decides to try to escape village life by moving to New Amsterdam (Georgetown is too intimidating a prospect) where he acquires a reputation as a healer. He is patently a fraud although in fairness he never asked for people to decide he had such powers. Thus ensues an interlude of having money, decent clothes, and a sense of respect that has heretofore eluded him. This is all short-lived. Kwaku is one of the lost, without the resources to be a householder, a patriarch, or a professional. His only freedom is poverty, the freedom to lose your house, or your job, or all of your money, because it never amounted to anything anyway.
That all sounds pretty bleak, but this isn't a bleak book. It's frequently funny and filled with engaging characters and incidents, episodes just outlandish enough to be outrageous and possible at the same time. Everyone speaks in a local English patois that features interesting grammatical structure and plenty of idiomatic phrases and verbal tics. I found it entertaining and I recommend it.
The pleasures of Wilson Harris are more austere. His style is both erudite and dreamlike. He is not following the Spanish "magical realist" formula, he comes to his foggy surrealism through his own ideas about characters who live on the margins of the town and the jungle, the old and the new. There is a far greater awareness of the surrounding tropical forest (Harris was a trained land surveyor and served as Senior Surveyor for Projects for British Guyana for four years in the fifties). Some of the most memorable passages occur at a work camp where a small group of men have to sort out their status and their motives. He is darker than Heath, there is violence and menace, both between characters and from nature (a jaguar carries away a neighbor's baby). The river is always present, both of these writers of Guyana portray the fact that coastal Guyana is a wet, tropical place. At times Harris was a little too atmospheric for my taste, I remember a sense of plowing along through a pea-fog narrative that could be hard to follow, but as I said this is definitely by design. Harris is the more ambitious of the two, but Heath is the more entertaining.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Vile, Silly Bodies
I have a few old favorite writers with whom I salt the Stack. Anthony Burgess, Lawrence Durrell come to mind. One of them is Evelyn Waugh, and I've just read Vile Bodies (1930), published when he was 27. I read Waugh essentially for laughs. He is a social satirist with the sharpest of tongues, and a keen ear for English (as in the country, not the language) accents and idioms. England is a country where accents reflect class as much as they do region, and Waugh epitomizes this very English practice of using idiom to portray the farcical collisions of parallel social worlds.
Waugh is also a master of English silliness. "Silliness": not exactly absurdity, although closely related (Monty Python), there is a streak of adolescence running through English humor. Part of this is catharsis for the socially hyper-vigilant, protocol-bound English, part of it reflects a feeling of insularity and of belonging to a closed society, like the "public school" communities that produced so many English writers. There is a kind of showing off to the other lads, talented enough to get away with it with teacher (if history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce, that would be Evelyn Waugh:wicked::Kingsley Amis:obnoxious). Other notable in-crowd entertainments of the period are Ronald Firbank whose antics have not aged as well, and P. G. Wodehouse's very funny stories of Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves, which are still very funny and still have a satiric bite (an Englishman in graduate school with me in the States frowned once at the mention of Wodehouse: "I don't approve of all that class snobbery," he said, obviously having no idea).
In Vile Bodies a drunken socialite, strip-searched at customs coming over from France, uses her social connections to the Prime Minister to exact revenge, only to precipitate the fall of the government when the PMs mousy daughter has the Bright Young Things over to 10 Downing Street in the wee hours of the morning. The writer of a London gossip column commits suicide when he can no longer get invited to the right parties, and his replacement finds success making people up and touting awful restaurants and clubs as the next hot place, although his attempt to get London's gentlemen to wear green bowlers meets with little success. And so on. The first half, where the Bright Young Things are rampaging around London and environs, is better than the second, mostly taken up with the stilted and abortive courtship of Adam and Nina against the backdrop of Nina's deranged old gentleman father and his crumbling estate.
This is the Waugh that everyone knows: sharp-tongued, witty, laugh-out-loud funny. My favorite of these is Scoop (1938, the first Waugh novel I read), more lampooning of the newspapers which in Waugh's universe are filled with the sheerly false as well as some great sequences in British East Africa, which is also the scene of Black Mischief (1932; Waugh's inhumanity to man certainly extends to Africans towards whom he is patently racist. The only thing that can be said in his defense is that, come on, he hates everybody). These three and Decline and Fall (1928, his first novel) are the best satirical novels and they all deliver: you will laugh while you read them.
But it is easy to be misled about what Waugh is, easy to identify him as someone reveling in the gratuitous privilege of classista interwar Britain. He is not that. He is in fact deeply critical of this society, drawing attention through conspicuous absence to the generation of young men who lost their lives in World War I and chillingly prescient about more wars to come. On the last page of Vile Bodies two officers drink champagne with a prostitute in the general's staff car in the middle of a devastated battlefield "and presently, like a circling typhoon, the sounds of battle began to return." George Orwell described Waugh as "about as good a novelist as one can be while holding untenable opinions." I love George Orwell but I doubt he grasped Waugh.
Waugh is also a deeply religious man who seems to embody secular modernism precisely because he is at war against it. There are occasional glimpses behind the mask in the satirical novels, but his masterpiece is Brideshead Revisited (1945) (I remember as a teenager thinking that I really needed to read Brideshead first!). In this novel he is in the zone, at the peak of his powers as a stylist, and the writing is beautiful enough to carry the reader along through the disquisition on the modern loss of moral foundations. Come to think of it, he reminds me of Nabakov this way: most of Nabakov's work is dark, well-written, and under-read (Laughter in the Dark, Despair, Invitation to a Beheading), but Lolita rises above the rest by the power of the prose itself. Brideshead Revisited is Waugh's equivalent, the masterpiece.
There is much more. There is a trilogy of war novels (published together under the title Sword of Honor) that I have not read but that is not regarded as his best work. I have read A Handful of Dust (1934) which in my opinion is too rough to be considered "satire" although I can imagine being in a dark enough mood to be amused. There is quite a bit of travel writing that I do intend to explore.
Waugh is also a master of English silliness. "Silliness": not exactly absurdity, although closely related (Monty Python), there is a streak of adolescence running through English humor. Part of this is catharsis for the socially hyper-vigilant, protocol-bound English, part of it reflects a feeling of insularity and of belonging to a closed society, like the "public school" communities that produced so many English writers. There is a kind of showing off to the other lads, talented enough to get away with it with teacher (if history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce, that would be Evelyn Waugh:wicked::Kingsley Amis:obnoxious). Other notable in-crowd entertainments of the period are Ronald Firbank whose antics have not aged as well, and P. G. Wodehouse's very funny stories of Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves, which are still very funny and still have a satiric bite (an Englishman in graduate school with me in the States frowned once at the mention of Wodehouse: "I don't approve of all that class snobbery," he said, obviously having no idea).
In Vile Bodies a drunken socialite, strip-searched at customs coming over from France, uses her social connections to the Prime Minister to exact revenge, only to precipitate the fall of the government when the PMs mousy daughter has the Bright Young Things over to 10 Downing Street in the wee hours of the morning. The writer of a London gossip column commits suicide when he can no longer get invited to the right parties, and his replacement finds success making people up and touting awful restaurants and clubs as the next hot place, although his attempt to get London's gentlemen to wear green bowlers meets with little success. And so on. The first half, where the Bright Young Things are rampaging around London and environs, is better than the second, mostly taken up with the stilted and abortive courtship of Adam and Nina against the backdrop of Nina's deranged old gentleman father and his crumbling estate.
This is the Waugh that everyone knows: sharp-tongued, witty, laugh-out-loud funny. My favorite of these is Scoop (1938, the first Waugh novel I read), more lampooning of the newspapers which in Waugh's universe are filled with the sheerly false as well as some great sequences in British East Africa, which is also the scene of Black Mischief (1932; Waugh's inhumanity to man certainly extends to Africans towards whom he is patently racist. The only thing that can be said in his defense is that, come on, he hates everybody). These three and Decline and Fall (1928, his first novel) are the best satirical novels and they all deliver: you will laugh while you read them.
But it is easy to be misled about what Waugh is, easy to identify him as someone reveling in the gratuitous privilege of classista interwar Britain. He is not that. He is in fact deeply critical of this society, drawing attention through conspicuous absence to the generation of young men who lost their lives in World War I and chillingly prescient about more wars to come. On the last page of Vile Bodies two officers drink champagne with a prostitute in the general's staff car in the middle of a devastated battlefield "and presently, like a circling typhoon, the sounds of battle began to return." George Orwell described Waugh as "about as good a novelist as one can be while holding untenable opinions." I love George Orwell but I doubt he grasped Waugh.
Waugh is also a deeply religious man who seems to embody secular modernism precisely because he is at war against it. There are occasional glimpses behind the mask in the satirical novels, but his masterpiece is Brideshead Revisited (1945) (I remember as a teenager thinking that I really needed to read Brideshead first!). In this novel he is in the zone, at the peak of his powers as a stylist, and the writing is beautiful enough to carry the reader along through the disquisition on the modern loss of moral foundations. Come to think of it, he reminds me of Nabakov this way: most of Nabakov's work is dark, well-written, and under-read (Laughter in the Dark, Despair, Invitation to a Beheading), but Lolita rises above the rest by the power of the prose itself. Brideshead Revisited is Waugh's equivalent, the masterpiece.
There is much more. There is a trilogy of war novels (published together under the title Sword of Honor) that I have not read but that is not regarded as his best work. I have read A Handful of Dust (1934) which in my opinion is too rough to be considered "satire" although I can imagine being in a dark enough mood to be amused. There is quite a bit of travel writing that I do intend to explore.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Sembene Ousmane
God's Bits of Wood (French original, Les Bouts de bois de Dieu, 1960) is the only novel by the Senegalese writer Sembene Ousmane that I've read, I gather from my follow-up research that many consider it his best. I think I'll go on to read Xala (1973) which looks interesting.
This book is a narrative of the real-life Dakar-Niger railway workers' strike of 1947-1948. The strike was long, bloody, and ultimately successful: the African workers were given the same rights and benefits as the French workers (the French and whites in general are called toubabs by the locals). A sticking point was the practice of polygamy by the Muslim African workers: the French authorities had refused to give family allowances to men with multiple wives, with accompanying reactionary rhetoric about degeneracy, too much breeding and so forth that outraged the deeply moralistic Senegalese and Malian workers. The French underestimated the abilities of deeply committed cadres of organizers, and repressive violence that had been sufficient in earlier labor disputes this time provoked the mass participation of the women, something hitherto unheard of. Thus the strike was a major turning point both for labor relations between the French colonial authorities and African workers, and for the political culture of the workers' community.
The perspective is that of the workers and their families in the gritty maintenance hub of Thies, where families one or two generations out of subsistence farming have been transformed into a classic proletariat that assembles at the plant gates for the morning whistle and returns to the shanty town at night. Ousmane depicts a large community of disparate characters, all with their own strengths and weaknesses and their own roles to play. There is a conspicuous absence of the heroic individual in favor of a communal dynamic driven both by tradition and by modernization. In fact the title is an idiomatic African phrase (the Africans here speak Ouolof and Bambara) used to avoid using specific names, which is thought to attract demons, a manifestation of a deeply-held value of humility.
This kind of social realism requires quick sketching of numerous characters and it is impressive that Ousmane manages to pack so many personalities and relationships into a 248-page novel. There is Bakayoko the itinerant organizer, offstage for the first part of the novel as he is walking the backcountry with his hat and his pack taking the message to remote villages along the line. He is completely dedicated to his cause but needs the help of Lahbib who has a better sense of political tactics. N'Deye Touti attracted to both Bakayoko and Beaugosse; when Beaugosse sides with the toubabs on the grounds that they represent progress (a not uncommon opinion) N'Deye Touti chooses Bakayoko, only to be stung by his rejection as he must move on with his work (Maimouna, the blind woman who sees much, had warned her of this). Bakayoko, who already has a wife, is against polygamy anyway (as in all societies there are the conservatives and the progressives to be found here), although he might have given in for Penda, a young woman with a reputation as the town's harlot who emerges as a brave leader on the women's hard march to Dakar, where she is shot down by soldiers at the bitter end. Mame Sofi reviles Penda and is on the lookout for witches, an obstructive nativist presence until her consciousness is raised by the march.
Ramatoulaye, one of the central characters, is a wife and mother in her 30s who wants no trouble but is inexorably drawn in to the struggle by her innate good character. Her brother, El Hadji (an honorific for a man who has made the hadj to Mecca) Mabigue, represents the Imams who are depicted here as apologists and enforcers for the authorities and the status quo. In this critical appraisal of the clergy, the social realism weaving a large cast of characters together, and the background of a bitter labor dispute the book reminded me of the Irish author James Plunkett's Strumpet City (1969) which takes a similar approach to the bitter Dublin dockworker's strike and lockout of 1913. Both novels treat of early conflicts that lead on to much larger subsequent events.
As with so many West African writers Ousmane celebrates the organic democratic behavior of deeply spiritual village Africans, even after they are thrust into semi-urban settings where they feel displaced. He also is typical of African writers in his focus on the suffering and the stoicism of individuals, indicting many destructive forces but none more than plain callousness and the smug hypocracy of the privileged. He is an excellent writer all around, my last point would be that unlike some of his contemporaries he does not let his didactic intent coarsen his prose. Readers get a sophisticated political education without a sense that they are swallowing any medicine at all. Highly recommended.
This book is a narrative of the real-life Dakar-Niger railway workers' strike of 1947-1948. The strike was long, bloody, and ultimately successful: the African workers were given the same rights and benefits as the French workers (the French and whites in general are called toubabs by the locals). A sticking point was the practice of polygamy by the Muslim African workers: the French authorities had refused to give family allowances to men with multiple wives, with accompanying reactionary rhetoric about degeneracy, too much breeding and so forth that outraged the deeply moralistic Senegalese and Malian workers. The French underestimated the abilities of deeply committed cadres of organizers, and repressive violence that had been sufficient in earlier labor disputes this time provoked the mass participation of the women, something hitherto unheard of. Thus the strike was a major turning point both for labor relations between the French colonial authorities and African workers, and for the political culture of the workers' community.
The perspective is that of the workers and their families in the gritty maintenance hub of Thies, where families one or two generations out of subsistence farming have been transformed into a classic proletariat that assembles at the plant gates for the morning whistle and returns to the shanty town at night. Ousmane depicts a large community of disparate characters, all with their own strengths and weaknesses and their own roles to play. There is a conspicuous absence of the heroic individual in favor of a communal dynamic driven both by tradition and by modernization. In fact the title is an idiomatic African phrase (the Africans here speak Ouolof and Bambara) used to avoid using specific names, which is thought to attract demons, a manifestation of a deeply-held value of humility.
This kind of social realism requires quick sketching of numerous characters and it is impressive that Ousmane manages to pack so many personalities and relationships into a 248-page novel. There is Bakayoko the itinerant organizer, offstage for the first part of the novel as he is walking the backcountry with his hat and his pack taking the message to remote villages along the line. He is completely dedicated to his cause but needs the help of Lahbib who has a better sense of political tactics. N'Deye Touti attracted to both Bakayoko and Beaugosse; when Beaugosse sides with the toubabs on the grounds that they represent progress (a not uncommon opinion) N'Deye Touti chooses Bakayoko, only to be stung by his rejection as he must move on with his work (Maimouna, the blind woman who sees much, had warned her of this). Bakayoko, who already has a wife, is against polygamy anyway (as in all societies there are the conservatives and the progressives to be found here), although he might have given in for Penda, a young woman with a reputation as the town's harlot who emerges as a brave leader on the women's hard march to Dakar, where she is shot down by soldiers at the bitter end. Mame Sofi reviles Penda and is on the lookout for witches, an obstructive nativist presence until her consciousness is raised by the march.
Ramatoulaye, one of the central characters, is a wife and mother in her 30s who wants no trouble but is inexorably drawn in to the struggle by her innate good character. Her brother, El Hadji (an honorific for a man who has made the hadj to Mecca) Mabigue, represents the Imams who are depicted here as apologists and enforcers for the authorities and the status quo. In this critical appraisal of the clergy, the social realism weaving a large cast of characters together, and the background of a bitter labor dispute the book reminded me of the Irish author James Plunkett's Strumpet City (1969) which takes a similar approach to the bitter Dublin dockworker's strike and lockout of 1913. Both novels treat of early conflicts that lead on to much larger subsequent events.
As with so many West African writers Ousmane celebrates the organic democratic behavior of deeply spiritual village Africans, even after they are thrust into semi-urban settings where they feel displaced. He also is typical of African writers in his focus on the suffering and the stoicism of individuals, indicting many destructive forces but none more than plain callousness and the smug hypocracy of the privileged. He is an excellent writer all around, my last point would be that unlike some of his contemporaries he does not let his didactic intent coarsen his prose. Readers get a sophisticated political education without a sense that they are swallowing any medicine at all. Highly recommended.
Monday, April 6, 2009
The Siege of Krishnapur
It was because of my interest in Irish literature and history that I first discovered J. G. Farrell, when I read his wonderful book Troubles (1970), the first of a trilogy of novels about the British Empire (and the subject of an earlier post here). A novel that is page-for-page laugh-out-loud funny is very rare indeed. Novels that manage to walk the reader, through simple story-telling, up to the plain facts of economic, historical and political injustice, and the inexorable processes of collective guilt and historical dialectic over which humans only imagine they have any control, are also precious. To see them combined in one novel with so much grace and wit made me an instant devotee.
Noting that it was the second book of the trilogy, The Siege of Krishnapur, that won the Booker Prize in 1973 only added to my anticipation of a book that I wouldn't have missed anyway; I'd been looking forward to it ever since I tore open the Amazon package and added it to the Stack some months ago. Meanwhile I also have an interest in the contemporary Indian English-language novel and one of my recent favorites is Pankaj Mishra's The Romantics (2000), a wise and charming book, so another good sign was that Mishra wrote the Introduction to the NYRB Classics edition (needless to say I didn't read it before finishing the novel. Don't ever do that! Usually I don't bother with Intros at all). To top it off this is an adventure novel set during the Great Mutiny of 1857, when new rifle cartridges covered in impure animal grease precipitated a revolt of the Hindu sepoys (Indian soldiers). So my anticipation was high as I watched Seige progress through the Stack.
I've just finished it, and in none of this was I disappointed. I thought that Troubles was one of the best books I'd read in quite a few years, and The Seige of Krishnapur, while in some ways a different sort of exercise, absolutely qualifies for the same level of praise. It stands with the imperial writings of Paul Scott, Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, Anthony Burgess: I doubt that an Englishman will ever write a better book about the Raj (I hope that an Indian writer may).
Farrell is his own man. His psychological insight is acute (and neverendingly witty), but he has written an old-fashioned novel of blazing adventure with riveting action scenes, where wholly believable characters have wholly believable thoughts in the midst of the most horrific episodes. I'm an academic in my day job, but the thoroughness and precision of his research into the period, the technical expertise about the rifles and cannons, the fluency with Victorian mores, poetry and religion, and the elegance with which this research is woven into the narrative reflect a degree of concentration that your humble blogger fears he might never achieve. As in the earlier novel there is a sense of overall composition, of an immense concept arranged into a story and unfolding in a most disciplined way, as if Farrell had envisioned the entire narrative before carefully rendering it in 344 seamless pages.
Other similarities with Troubles are interesting. Perhaps his most gratifying quality is his realization of the way that people think of the strangest things in the most inappropriate circumstances. This is exactly right about people. Most writers aim for compositional elegance by editing out of their characters' interior monologues everything that is not literally storyline, but Farrell harnesses our out-of-control stream of consciousness to reveal character (Virginia Woolf is also a master at this). Personal character, and the way character is both the wellspring of action and at the same time practically irrelevant to the fate of people caught up in immense historical processes, is one of his signature preoccupations; he has an effortless talent for evoking it.
This is the same effortless (or at least he makes it appear effortless, like all good artists) talent that makes him so funny. He is funny, and humanely, wisely funny, under any and all circumstances. This is a book that depicts a great deal of suffering and violence. Troubles, although culminating in inevitable violence, is not a war novel as such, and thus its appeal lies largely in the humorous sadness, the sad humor, of its depiction of the follies of silly human beings. One sits with it chuckling aloud. Seige is a much more intense and critical book, and too much writing for laughs would run the risk of gratuitousness and cynicism. Still Farrell's gift of trenchant wit succeeds in imbuing the novel with an irresistible background of laughter; it is just a more cosmic laughter, sad and jester-like.
One last observation: In both novels we live with the English characters, the colonialists. We experience the events through their eyes. Both the Irish and the Indians are remote figures, menacing, misunderstood, suffering, but we are never in their heads. I think Farrell understood that both his comic sense and his psychological insight were both thoroughly English and simply acknowledged his own limitations as a creative artist, but this structural element also serves to keep the larger theme in focus. He is aiming his critique at the English; he's just so good that his work is universal.
When he was 44 he was hit with a wave and swept out to sea. The third book of the trilogy, The Singapore Grip (1978), is nine books down in my Stack.
Noting that it was the second book of the trilogy, The Siege of Krishnapur, that won the Booker Prize in 1973 only added to my anticipation of a book that I wouldn't have missed anyway; I'd been looking forward to it ever since I tore open the Amazon package and added it to the Stack some months ago. Meanwhile I also have an interest in the contemporary Indian English-language novel and one of my recent favorites is Pankaj Mishra's The Romantics (2000), a wise and charming book, so another good sign was that Mishra wrote the Introduction to the NYRB Classics edition (needless to say I didn't read it before finishing the novel. Don't ever do that! Usually I don't bother with Intros at all). To top it off this is an adventure novel set during the Great Mutiny of 1857, when new rifle cartridges covered in impure animal grease precipitated a revolt of the Hindu sepoys (Indian soldiers). So my anticipation was high as I watched Seige progress through the Stack.
I've just finished it, and in none of this was I disappointed. I thought that Troubles was one of the best books I'd read in quite a few years, and The Seige of Krishnapur, while in some ways a different sort of exercise, absolutely qualifies for the same level of praise. It stands with the imperial writings of Paul Scott, Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, Anthony Burgess: I doubt that an Englishman will ever write a better book about the Raj (I hope that an Indian writer may).
Farrell is his own man. His psychological insight is acute (and neverendingly witty), but he has written an old-fashioned novel of blazing adventure with riveting action scenes, where wholly believable characters have wholly believable thoughts in the midst of the most horrific episodes. I'm an academic in my day job, but the thoroughness and precision of his research into the period, the technical expertise about the rifles and cannons, the fluency with Victorian mores, poetry and religion, and the elegance with which this research is woven into the narrative reflect a degree of concentration that your humble blogger fears he might never achieve. As in the earlier novel there is a sense of overall composition, of an immense concept arranged into a story and unfolding in a most disciplined way, as if Farrell had envisioned the entire narrative before carefully rendering it in 344 seamless pages.
Other similarities with Troubles are interesting. Perhaps his most gratifying quality is his realization of the way that people think of the strangest things in the most inappropriate circumstances. This is exactly right about people. Most writers aim for compositional elegance by editing out of their characters' interior monologues everything that is not literally storyline, but Farrell harnesses our out-of-control stream of consciousness to reveal character (Virginia Woolf is also a master at this). Personal character, and the way character is both the wellspring of action and at the same time practically irrelevant to the fate of people caught up in immense historical processes, is one of his signature preoccupations; he has an effortless talent for evoking it.
This is the same effortless (or at least he makes it appear effortless, like all good artists) talent that makes him so funny. He is funny, and humanely, wisely funny, under any and all circumstances. This is a book that depicts a great deal of suffering and violence. Troubles, although culminating in inevitable violence, is not a war novel as such, and thus its appeal lies largely in the humorous sadness, the sad humor, of its depiction of the follies of silly human beings. One sits with it chuckling aloud. Seige is a much more intense and critical book, and too much writing for laughs would run the risk of gratuitousness and cynicism. Still Farrell's gift of trenchant wit succeeds in imbuing the novel with an irresistible background of laughter; it is just a more cosmic laughter, sad and jester-like.
One last observation: In both novels we live with the English characters, the colonialists. We experience the events through their eyes. Both the Irish and the Indians are remote figures, menacing, misunderstood, suffering, but we are never in their heads. I think Farrell understood that both his comic sense and his psychological insight were both thoroughly English and simply acknowledged his own limitations as a creative artist, but this structural element also serves to keep the larger theme in focus. He is aiming his critique at the English; he's just so good that his work is universal.
When he was 44 he was hit with a wave and swept out to sea. The third book of the trilogy, The Singapore Grip (1978), is nine books down in my Stack.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Crazy Irish
Happy Day-After-St. Patrick's-Day. I wanted to post about Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture (2008) yesterday, but it's a really good book and I didn't want to rush finishing it. Besides, considering that St. Patrick's Day for most people is seen as an opportunity to drink too much beer - the very worst interpretation of the meaning of the festival one could have, so far as I can see - maybe the "day after" is appropriate enough in itself.
Last St. Patrick's Day I posted about "Hard Boiled Irish," discussing a number of novels that reflected the deep root of noir sensibility that permeates modern Irish fiction. This year, and on the occasion of reading The Secret Scripture, I'll mention some books that develop another defining motif: Irish madness, or more precisely the fact that lives of unrelenting hardship, injustice and poverty inevitably break people. We meet a lot of broken souls in Irish fiction. Both the past and the present weigh on the characters with a weight that is just too much for everyone to bear. Women, and particularly mothers in this most conflicted of Catholic nations, are frequently found among these walking wounded.
In Barry's novel (that is set in the present) the issue is confronted directly, as it is an epistolary book in the form of alternating entries from the private journals of Dr. William Grene, head psychiatrist at Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, and Roseanne McNulty, who at 100 years old has been an inmate (definitely the proper word) in the system for over 60 years, transferred to RRMH in 1957 at the closing of the old "lunatic asylum" in Sligo (there are nice descriptions of this remote part of Ireland's west coast by the way). Now RRMH, itself grown decrepit, is slated for demolition and Dr. Grene must decide what to do with the remaining, mostly quite elderly, residents. Part of his charge is to investigate the circumstances of the original admission of these old people into the system, as consciousness has been raised about the fact that some were placed there for what are delicately called "social" reasons and there is public sentiment that any remaining such people ought to be released. In the case of the 100-year-old Roseanne her birth circa 1908 means that she was a young woman during the fight for Irish independence and the subsequent civil war, an era possessed of an abundance of cruelty and treachery. Barry is a keen student of Irish history and we are in good hands as he weaves the politics and violence of the period into the narrative.
Roseanna is writing her own autobiographical account of her early years, hiding them under the floorboards of her room. She is unbroken and wants to defend herself, also she wants to try to remember events that have been dimmed by the years as well as by trauma, and ultimately indeed wants to leave a testament to be read, although she is not admitting quite so much to herself. The vagueness and unreliability of memories and documents from seventy and eighty years ago is a literal way to establish the moral ambiguity of actions and intentions, a familiar literary device but one that Barry deploys artfully and to good effect.
The bare bones of the story are quite typical and not necessarily promising: the beautiful young woman who, through a combination of failed parents who come to bad ends, indiscretions that would be barely noticed today, and the machinations of vindictive and small-minded people in positions of power, is cast out of society and eventually packed of to the madhouse. Central to this is Father Gaunt, the standard-issue Evil Priest of Irish fiction, whose own account of Roseanne's commitment is the only extended document that Dr. Grene can find in the ancient moldering records. It is Father Gaunt's bigotry (Roseanne is Presbyterian), misogyny (he despises beautiful young women as embodiments of carnality), and arrogance (he feels perfectly entitled to his position as God's agent in small-town Sligo) that are the immediate causes of Roseanne's undoing. Typical as all this may be for the genre, I am not going to go into the various twists and turns of this Dickensian narrative that dishes out equal measures of the inevitable and the improbable and makes for quite a page-turner when all is said and done. Once I was halfway through it I didn't want to put it down.
One thing I got to thinking this week, when we have seen the return of mindless violence to Northern Ireland from pathetic boys posing as the mythical "hard men" of their macho imaginations, is this contradiction: the Irish bohemian intelligentsia tend to be, like myself, republicans. The worst historical figure is Cromwell, the worst 20th century bad guys are the Black and Tans. But at the same time the relationship to the priesthood is entirely conflicted (or not even: in Irish literature the priesthood is generally bad). Maybe this is a clue to eventual reunification: the conflict is at its roots economic and political, not religious. Thus the Protestant majority of the North might come around to voting for reunification (and their continued political resistance is the only thing in the way at this point).
Anyway, let me conclude with a short overview of some other "Irish Crazy" books. The mother driven mad by hardship related to political conflict is prominent in William Trevor's Fools of Fortune (1983) and Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark (1996), while men damaged by history are the subjects of John McGahern's Amongst Women (1990) and Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea (2005). Lone madmen whose pathologies are stand-ins for pathologies of Irish identity are the narrators of the great John Banville's The Book of Evidence (1989) and Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy (1992). Joyce's Modernist development of interior monologue (Molly Bloom being only the most notorious example) is an obvious influence on virtually all of Irish letters, but if we're talking just plain crazy there's no greater well-spring than Beckett and his Trilogy that is required Irish reading notwithstanding that he wrote it in French. Two other giants who ought to be mentioned if the topic is the relationship between deprivation and madness are Flann O'Brien and his The Poor Mouth (written in Irish, An Beal Bocht) (1941), and the greatest of Anglo-Irish writers, my biggest Irish hero after Joyce, Jonathan Swift, whose Gulliver's Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729) are mad works written by a man made mad by the Irish condition, in every sense of the word "mad."
Last St. Patrick's Day I posted about "Hard Boiled Irish," discussing a number of novels that reflected the deep root of noir sensibility that permeates modern Irish fiction. This year, and on the occasion of reading The Secret Scripture, I'll mention some books that develop another defining motif: Irish madness, or more precisely the fact that lives of unrelenting hardship, injustice and poverty inevitably break people. We meet a lot of broken souls in Irish fiction. Both the past and the present weigh on the characters with a weight that is just too much for everyone to bear. Women, and particularly mothers in this most conflicted of Catholic nations, are frequently found among these walking wounded.
In Barry's novel (that is set in the present) the issue is confronted directly, as it is an epistolary book in the form of alternating entries from the private journals of Dr. William Grene, head psychiatrist at Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, and Roseanne McNulty, who at 100 years old has been an inmate (definitely the proper word) in the system for over 60 years, transferred to RRMH in 1957 at the closing of the old "lunatic asylum" in Sligo (there are nice descriptions of this remote part of Ireland's west coast by the way). Now RRMH, itself grown decrepit, is slated for demolition and Dr. Grene must decide what to do with the remaining, mostly quite elderly, residents. Part of his charge is to investigate the circumstances of the original admission of these old people into the system, as consciousness has been raised about the fact that some were placed there for what are delicately called "social" reasons and there is public sentiment that any remaining such people ought to be released. In the case of the 100-year-old Roseanne her birth circa 1908 means that she was a young woman during the fight for Irish independence and the subsequent civil war, an era possessed of an abundance of cruelty and treachery. Barry is a keen student of Irish history and we are in good hands as he weaves the politics and violence of the period into the narrative.
Roseanna is writing her own autobiographical account of her early years, hiding them under the floorboards of her room. She is unbroken and wants to defend herself, also she wants to try to remember events that have been dimmed by the years as well as by trauma, and ultimately indeed wants to leave a testament to be read, although she is not admitting quite so much to herself. The vagueness and unreliability of memories and documents from seventy and eighty years ago is a literal way to establish the moral ambiguity of actions and intentions, a familiar literary device but one that Barry deploys artfully and to good effect.
The bare bones of the story are quite typical and not necessarily promising: the beautiful young woman who, through a combination of failed parents who come to bad ends, indiscretions that would be barely noticed today, and the machinations of vindictive and small-minded people in positions of power, is cast out of society and eventually packed of to the madhouse. Central to this is Father Gaunt, the standard-issue Evil Priest of Irish fiction, whose own account of Roseanne's commitment is the only extended document that Dr. Grene can find in the ancient moldering records. It is Father Gaunt's bigotry (Roseanne is Presbyterian), misogyny (he despises beautiful young women as embodiments of carnality), and arrogance (he feels perfectly entitled to his position as God's agent in small-town Sligo) that are the immediate causes of Roseanne's undoing. Typical as all this may be for the genre, I am not going to go into the various twists and turns of this Dickensian narrative that dishes out equal measures of the inevitable and the improbable and makes for quite a page-turner when all is said and done. Once I was halfway through it I didn't want to put it down.
One thing I got to thinking this week, when we have seen the return of mindless violence to Northern Ireland from pathetic boys posing as the mythical "hard men" of their macho imaginations, is this contradiction: the Irish bohemian intelligentsia tend to be, like myself, republicans. The worst historical figure is Cromwell, the worst 20th century bad guys are the Black and Tans. But at the same time the relationship to the priesthood is entirely conflicted (or not even: in Irish literature the priesthood is generally bad). Maybe this is a clue to eventual reunification: the conflict is at its roots economic and political, not religious. Thus the Protestant majority of the North might come around to voting for reunification (and their continued political resistance is the only thing in the way at this point).
Anyway, let me conclude with a short overview of some other "Irish Crazy" books. The mother driven mad by hardship related to political conflict is prominent in William Trevor's Fools of Fortune (1983) and Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark (1996), while men damaged by history are the subjects of John McGahern's Amongst Women (1990) and Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea (2005). Lone madmen whose pathologies are stand-ins for pathologies of Irish identity are the narrators of the great John Banville's The Book of Evidence (1989) and Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy (1992). Joyce's Modernist development of interior monologue (Molly Bloom being only the most notorious example) is an obvious influence on virtually all of Irish letters, but if we're talking just plain crazy there's no greater well-spring than Beckett and his Trilogy that is required Irish reading notwithstanding that he wrote it in French. Two other giants who ought to be mentioned if the topic is the relationship between deprivation and madness are Flann O'Brien and his The Poor Mouth (written in Irish, An Beal Bocht) (1941), and the greatest of Anglo-Irish writers, my biggest Irish hero after Joyce, Jonathan Swift, whose Gulliver's Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729) are mad works written by a man made mad by the Irish condition, in every sense of the word "mad."
Friday, March 6, 2009
Chukwuemeka Ike's Wheel
The Potter's Wheel (1973) is the first novel I've read by the Nigerian Chukwuemeka Ike. He has written quite a few (I gather that Toads for Supper is his best known work) and I'll get back around to him sometime. It's a short novel that takes us in to a village Nigeria where one of the basic elements of the local idiom is sayings, much like a Bible-based community where people communicate through chapter and verse citations. Here the young boys have riddle and proverb contests to see who knows the most. They are at times convoluted and cryptic ("The rat who follows a lizard into the river should come out with skin as dry as the lizard's"), but after a while the cumulative weight of them is fun in itself.
The story is a simple one of an eight-year-old boy, Ubo, who, as the only son with six older sisters, has been badly spoiled by his adoring mother. His father, a kindly man but fearing for the boy's future, sends him off for a year to be a servant of Teacher and Madam, proprietors of the local school (a mere sixty miles away), where he and an assortment of other youngsters (some of whom are the children of Teacher's debtors) are beaten, abused, and work in semi-slavery. The moral of the story is ambiguous, however. While Teacher and Madam are clearly greedy, violent people with no scruples about lying and being dangerously cruel to the children, after a year of this Obu returns for Christmas and has indeed been transformed into a dutiful, hardworking young person. Despite his initial joy at his salvation from what he had experienced as an almost unbearable hell, after some talk with his father he even chooses to voluntarily return in January.
I can't quite work out in my own conscience the balance here between the idea that a child needs to learn to endure hardship and adapt to difficult circumstances, which is surely true, and my aversion to corporal punishment of children (I am a parent myself), especially the gratuitously cruel treatment that these children receive. There is some culture clash here between author and reader. Ike is telling us about a much harder, crueler (that is, poorer) world than my own so that is part of it.
Meanwhile as in so much African literature there is constant interplay between the (in this case Igbo) vernacular and the English language (and a glossary of terms at the end). Another ubiquitous element is the discussion of food which I found fascinating. Various roots and starchy fruits are pounded into mash that is shaped into balls and dipped into herb broths; that is the basic food. There is occasional meat that is much coveted, fried termites that are considered a treat, and great attention is paid to the cola nut that plays an important role in etiquette between hosts and visitors. I'm going to look into growing cola here in Puerto Rico where I have a number of fruit trees on my land. I also enjoyed the critical, sarcastic banter that is kept up between Igbo villagers who have known each other all their lives. There is an optimism and an innocence to much of the African writing of this period that belies the stereotype of the African novel as a politicized horrorshow (even as Ike does include some pointed satire of the British colonial authorities and their native lackeys).
Igbo
The story is a simple one of an eight-year-old boy, Ubo, who, as the only son with six older sisters, has been badly spoiled by his adoring mother. His father, a kindly man but fearing for the boy's future, sends him off for a year to be a servant of Teacher and Madam, proprietors of the local school (a mere sixty miles away), where he and an assortment of other youngsters (some of whom are the children of Teacher's debtors) are beaten, abused, and work in semi-slavery. The moral of the story is ambiguous, however. While Teacher and Madam are clearly greedy, violent people with no scruples about lying and being dangerously cruel to the children, after a year of this Obu returns for Christmas and has indeed been transformed into a dutiful, hardworking young person. Despite his initial joy at his salvation from what he had experienced as an almost unbearable hell, after some talk with his father he even chooses to voluntarily return in January.
I can't quite work out in my own conscience the balance here between the idea that a child needs to learn to endure hardship and adapt to difficult circumstances, which is surely true, and my aversion to corporal punishment of children (I am a parent myself), especially the gratuitously cruel treatment that these children receive. There is some culture clash here between author and reader. Ike is telling us about a much harder, crueler (that is, poorer) world than my own so that is part of it.
Meanwhile as in so much African literature there is constant interplay between the (in this case Igbo) vernacular and the English language (and a glossary of terms at the end). Another ubiquitous element is the discussion of food which I found fascinating. Various roots and starchy fruits are pounded into mash that is shaped into balls and dipped into herb broths; that is the basic food. There is occasional meat that is much coveted, fried termites that are considered a treat, and great attention is paid to the cola nut that plays an important role in etiquette between hosts and visitors. I'm going to look into growing cola here in Puerto Rico where I have a number of fruit trees on my land. I also enjoyed the critical, sarcastic banter that is kept up between Igbo villagers who have known each other all their lives. There is an optimism and an innocence to much of the African writing of this period that belies the stereotype of the African novel as a politicized horrorshow (even as Ike does include some pointed satire of the British colonial authorities and their native lackeys).
Igbo
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Nigerian Graceland
I found out about Chris Abani's Graceland (2004) when I noticed my sixteen-year old niece reading it (she's plowing through cool books these days, glory be). I read African literature and Nigerian literature in particular (Nigeria has had a vibrant literary tradition for decades now), and I'm also interested in foreign writers' perspectives on North American culture (a la Murikami), so the novel appeared to be right up my alley and I immediately ordered a copy for the Stack.
It's a good novel, he's a good writer, he pulls you in and the novel reads very fast. He knows how to write for story, he's all action. There are all sorts of story lines lying around that lead off into interesting directions. Our young protagonist Elvis makes money by doing his Elvis Presley imitation at tourist spots around Lagos, in full King drag. Presley's music represents another world to him, although there are plenty of references to highlife, Fela, juju, jazz and more. This Nigerian cityscape is a worldly place. Bob Marley is likely to be playing on the radio, and when we meet Elvis he is dozing over a copy of Ellison's Invisible Man. But it's hard to be a smart kid growing up among the urban poor. A nice device is that Elvis speaks in educated English while everyone else has a pidgin patois ("Look at dis mad boy O!"). He's already an alien.
To a large extent this is not about his relationship to Nigeria so much as it is about his relationship to Lagos. After the death of his mother and the failure of his father, Sunday, as a politician, Sunday moved them from their small town to the city in hopes of better prospects. He has set up with another woman, Comfort (the name is ironic), who has three younger children of her own. She and Elvis cordially despise one another. Sunday has slid into alcoholism, a contemptible figure now to both Comfort and Elvis as he tries to cadge their money for the evening's supply of palm wine. Elvis has witnessed the sexual abuse of his cousin Efua by his uncle, but the adults tell him to be quiet about it. Now Efua has run off, and Elvis imagines that he spots her as he moves around the city. His Aunt Felicia, still a young woman herself, sexually toys with the adolescent Elvis. There is a colorful cast of characters as Elvis, through simple and spontaneous acts of kindness, befriends a number of older men in the neighborhood, running from the pious to the criminal.
All of this, as I said, presents a rich field of plot possibilities. But in the second half of the novel Abani leaves this carefully constructed world behind and moves in to polemic about the social ills of Nigeria (Abani, who now lives in Los Angeles, was subjected to torture himself after the publication of his first novel at age sixteen). Trying to find work through his older friends, Elvis wraps up drug packets to be swallowed by smuggling mules; he helps guard a group of kidnapped children who are to be sold to Saudis and slaughtered for their organs; he prostitutes himself to wealthy foreign women; he finds himself in the pay of a murderous army colonel who kills people for bumping into him. We get a tour of some of the worst criminal excesses of the Lagos underground, culminating in a graphic depiction of Elvis's torture when he is interrogated by the colonel who is looking for a social activist called The King. The result is an unfinished novel, I would say: the close detail of the first part is simply dropped in favor of a didactic screed.
One detail caught my attention. While driving through the night with some vicious criminals, Elvis notes that they enjoy running over dogs in the road. They hit so many dogs that they make a sport of it. Where I live in Puerto Rico there is a fairly high incidence of dead dogs in the road as well, along with stories about uncaring people who hit them deliberately. Abani thinks this is emblematic of something, and I think he's right. It's an allegory about post-colonial society. A regime that doesn't care about the welfare of the people develops a society without civic solidarity. Family, clan and other formations may summon loyalty, but if "the system" doesn't work for people there is no reason for them to follow its rules. The model from the top, after all, is cruel indifference and selfishness. And while both Nigeria and Puerto Rico have come a long way and enjoy good measures of cosmopolitanism and middle class culture, there is still a noticeable lack of the sense of contributing to the common good that is evident in countries with less difficult political histories (let's just say). Throwing trash out the window, disobeying traffic laws, running over stray dogs: these are expressions of "me first," quotidian acts on a continuum with dealing in drugs and slaves, and with politicians who are kleptocrats. This is the challenge of post-colonial societies: learning how to care.
It's a good novel, he's a good writer, he pulls you in and the novel reads very fast. He knows how to write for story, he's all action. There are all sorts of story lines lying around that lead off into interesting directions. Our young protagonist Elvis makes money by doing his Elvis Presley imitation at tourist spots around Lagos, in full King drag. Presley's music represents another world to him, although there are plenty of references to highlife, Fela, juju, jazz and more. This Nigerian cityscape is a worldly place. Bob Marley is likely to be playing on the radio, and when we meet Elvis he is dozing over a copy of Ellison's Invisible Man. But it's hard to be a smart kid growing up among the urban poor. A nice device is that Elvis speaks in educated English while everyone else has a pidgin patois ("Look at dis mad boy O!"). He's already an alien.
To a large extent this is not about his relationship to Nigeria so much as it is about his relationship to Lagos. After the death of his mother and the failure of his father, Sunday, as a politician, Sunday moved them from their small town to the city in hopes of better prospects. He has set up with another woman, Comfort (the name is ironic), who has three younger children of her own. She and Elvis cordially despise one another. Sunday has slid into alcoholism, a contemptible figure now to both Comfort and Elvis as he tries to cadge their money for the evening's supply of palm wine. Elvis has witnessed the sexual abuse of his cousin Efua by his uncle, but the adults tell him to be quiet about it. Now Efua has run off, and Elvis imagines that he spots her as he moves around the city. His Aunt Felicia, still a young woman herself, sexually toys with the adolescent Elvis. There is a colorful cast of characters as Elvis, through simple and spontaneous acts of kindness, befriends a number of older men in the neighborhood, running from the pious to the criminal.
All of this, as I said, presents a rich field of plot possibilities. But in the second half of the novel Abani leaves this carefully constructed world behind and moves in to polemic about the social ills of Nigeria (Abani, who now lives in Los Angeles, was subjected to torture himself after the publication of his first novel at age sixteen). Trying to find work through his older friends, Elvis wraps up drug packets to be swallowed by smuggling mules; he helps guard a group of kidnapped children who are to be sold to Saudis and slaughtered for their organs; he prostitutes himself to wealthy foreign women; he finds himself in the pay of a murderous army colonel who kills people for bumping into him. We get a tour of some of the worst criminal excesses of the Lagos underground, culminating in a graphic depiction of Elvis's torture when he is interrogated by the colonel who is looking for a social activist called The King. The result is an unfinished novel, I would say: the close detail of the first part is simply dropped in favor of a didactic screed.
One detail caught my attention. While driving through the night with some vicious criminals, Elvis notes that they enjoy running over dogs in the road. They hit so many dogs that they make a sport of it. Where I live in Puerto Rico there is a fairly high incidence of dead dogs in the road as well, along with stories about uncaring people who hit them deliberately. Abani thinks this is emblematic of something, and I think he's right. It's an allegory about post-colonial society. A regime that doesn't care about the welfare of the people develops a society without civic solidarity. Family, clan and other formations may summon loyalty, but if "the system" doesn't work for people there is no reason for them to follow its rules. The model from the top, after all, is cruel indifference and selfishness. And while both Nigeria and Puerto Rico have come a long way and enjoy good measures of cosmopolitanism and middle class culture, there is still a noticeable lack of the sense of contributing to the common good that is evident in countries with less difficult political histories (let's just say). Throwing trash out the window, disobeying traffic laws, running over stray dogs: these are expressions of "me first," quotidian acts on a continuum with dealing in drugs and slaves, and with politicians who are kleptocrats. This is the challenge of post-colonial societies: learning how to care.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Its' Name is Red
I didn't put Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red (Turkish original, 1998; English translation by Erdag Goknar, 2001) in the Stack because of the amazing story of his being charged with "insulting Turkishness" in 2005 and of those charges being dropped in 2006 as Pamuk was unexpectedly awarded the Nobel Prize, largely on the basis of this book. I hadn't actually paid much attention to all that (and don't get me started on the Nobel Prize). No, it was because G. read it and liked it and as she described it to me it sounded like I'd like it too: strictly word of mouth. G. and I are book people and this is a book about books.
Specifically, it's about the fabulous illuminated manuscripts that were produced in the royal workshops of the Ottoman Sultan Murat III in the late 16th century, the twilight of a tradition of "miniaturists" producing treasures for patrons with roots in ancient China and Persia. It is a meticulously detailed historical drama about the life of these miniaturists, in the form of a murder mystery with much action and intrigue, combined with a sustained philosophical disquisition on the confrontation of this Islamic art tradition with the new naturalistic portraiture of Renaissance art from the West. These elements are woven together into a coherent piece of literature that is engrossing and masterful in several ways.
The charge of "insulting Turkishness" (granting it was provoked by Pamuk's comments about the Armenian genocide) is one of those inanities that only the truly ignorant can conjure (happens in the US all the time). The humane quality of life (family life, working life, religious life, social life) under the Muslim Ottoman Sultan is conveyed in an entirely persuasive manner (even as the routine official use of torture and execution is unflinchingly worked into the story). A deeply cultured Islamic society is portrayed where there is rich diversity, ample private life and yes, even good sex. The reader comes away with deepened respect for this 16th century world standing on the cusp of modernity (the action takes place in the 1590s, the time of Cervantes and Shakespeare).
In traditional Islamic art, portraying the world as it seen through one's own eyes was considered a blasphemy, as was naturalistic representation of specific individuals, as well as signing one's name to one's work. Art was for exalting the glory of God. Historical and Koranic scenes were portrayed in highly formalized conventions, the same iconic horse, for example, used over and over until the miniaturists worked to depict a ritualized code of images that were quite deliberately removed from the corruptions of our debased, animal experiences of sensory reality. As Ottoman elites were gradually exposed to the new representational art emanating from Venice, where the wealthy and powerful celebrated themselves in sumptuous portraits, sultans, pashas, and their illustrators were exposed to a powerful set of temptations, even as fundamentalist elements would mount attacks on any representational art at all.
An inspiration of Pamuk was to realize that this milieu provided all of the elements needed for a great classic murder mystery: you have the ambitions and rivalries of the artisans, who have histories with each other going back to their youthful apprenticeships, as well as powerful emotions about the future of the workshops and the Islamic purity or lack thereof of the various projects of the Sultan. Suspects abound.
An even greater inspiration was to see the connection between clues (to a murder) and the relation between what we see with our eyes and the truth, a central philosophical problem for late Islamic art. Blindness is more than a metaphor here, it is a real element in the lives of these artisans, the most legendary of whom were frequently claimed to have lost their sight as a consequence of a lifetime of close work. And of course a powerful, dangerous, or wicked artisan might be blinded deliberately by conquering soldiers or wrathful shahs. Thus when we have a murderer in our midst: do we want to see him? Those who have eyes to see, let them see. That's a Biblical aphorism; Pamuk's excellent novel compels me now to take the Koran down from the bookcase and follow up on some of his tantalizing references.
Specifically, it's about the fabulous illuminated manuscripts that were produced in the royal workshops of the Ottoman Sultan Murat III in the late 16th century, the twilight of a tradition of "miniaturists" producing treasures for patrons with roots in ancient China and Persia. It is a meticulously detailed historical drama about the life of these miniaturists, in the form of a murder mystery with much action and intrigue, combined with a sustained philosophical disquisition on the confrontation of this Islamic art tradition with the new naturalistic portraiture of Renaissance art from the West. These elements are woven together into a coherent piece of literature that is engrossing and masterful in several ways.
The charge of "insulting Turkishness" (granting it was provoked by Pamuk's comments about the Armenian genocide) is one of those inanities that only the truly ignorant can conjure (happens in the US all the time). The humane quality of life (family life, working life, religious life, social life) under the Muslim Ottoman Sultan is conveyed in an entirely persuasive manner (even as the routine official use of torture and execution is unflinchingly worked into the story). A deeply cultured Islamic society is portrayed where there is rich diversity, ample private life and yes, even good sex. The reader comes away with deepened respect for this 16th century world standing on the cusp of modernity (the action takes place in the 1590s, the time of Cervantes and Shakespeare).
In traditional Islamic art, portraying the world as it seen through one's own eyes was considered a blasphemy, as was naturalistic representation of specific individuals, as well as signing one's name to one's work. Art was for exalting the glory of God. Historical and Koranic scenes were portrayed in highly formalized conventions, the same iconic horse, for example, used over and over until the miniaturists worked to depict a ritualized code of images that were quite deliberately removed from the corruptions of our debased, animal experiences of sensory reality. As Ottoman elites were gradually exposed to the new representational art emanating from Venice, where the wealthy and powerful celebrated themselves in sumptuous portraits, sultans, pashas, and their illustrators were exposed to a powerful set of temptations, even as fundamentalist elements would mount attacks on any representational art at all.
An inspiration of Pamuk was to realize that this milieu provided all of the elements needed for a great classic murder mystery: you have the ambitions and rivalries of the artisans, who have histories with each other going back to their youthful apprenticeships, as well as powerful emotions about the future of the workshops and the Islamic purity or lack thereof of the various projects of the Sultan. Suspects abound.
An even greater inspiration was to see the connection between clues (to a murder) and the relation between what we see with our eyes and the truth, a central philosophical problem for late Islamic art. Blindness is more than a metaphor here, it is a real element in the lives of these artisans, the most legendary of whom were frequently claimed to have lost their sight as a consequence of a lifetime of close work. And of course a powerful, dangerous, or wicked artisan might be blinded deliberately by conquering soldiers or wrathful shahs. Thus when we have a murderer in our midst: do we want to see him? Those who have eyes to see, let them see. That's a Biblical aphorism; Pamuk's excellent novel compels me now to take the Koran down from the bookcase and follow up on some of his tantalizing references.
Monday, December 29, 2008
The Journey to Dermot Bolger's House
Dermot Bolger's The Journey Home was originally published in 1990 but not in the United States, apparently, until this University of Texas Press edition came out in 2007 (and kudos to UTP for publishing two Stack books in a row, that's more than coincidence). That was indeed something that needed rectifying, as Bolger has written a novel that epitomizes the concerns of contemporary Irish novelists; it's hard to imagine a more explicit rendering of the late 20th century Irish malaise than this one. To me, an American who lives in the Spanish Caribbean, with Irish Catholic ancestry from one parent and a WASP heritage from the other, Irish literature helps both to nurture my Irish identity and to appreciate the larger human condition. The Irish, like the Eastern Europeans, are Europeans who have the kind of rough history that one associates with less insulated parts of the world.
In the present case the central issue is universal. There is an old Ireland, but still only a couple of generations past, still alive in the memory and culture of today's Irish, but increasingly existing only in the collective memory, and then there is today's Ireland, quickly assimilating into the powerful forces of globalization that ravage traditional culture. Ireland's difficult history as an Anglophone country heightens sensitivity to the nihilistic power of "development." Bolger is clear on his emotional resistance to modernity, a reaction familiar to me both from Puerto Ricans and from my years in the Rocky Mountain west, two other wonderful worlds under siege by the present.
The old plazas in the center of Spanish colonial towns in Puerto Rico are largely dead zones today, the small businesses wiped out by the malls outside of town, malls that could just as well be in Minnesota or California or, say, Cork. It's hard to identify some specific, malevolent force driving modernization, Bolger resists the facile temptation to simply identify secular modernity with America (granting he's writing in the late 80s before Europe discovered this easy demonic Other), and he is far from unaware of the pathologies of the Old Country. In fact a striking feature of his work is an underlying insistence that Ireland (and Irish literature) must move forward into the future or risk becoming part of a cottage industry of nostalgia. He wants us to see an Ireland that we don't necessarily want to see.
As in John McGahern's Amongst Women, Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark, and the work of William Trevor and Roddy Doyle, there is anger directed at what the Irish Republicans made of their power to build a nation once they had it, a sense of debts incurred but never repaid. There is a strong sense of displacement such as we find in Anne Enright's The Gathering or the earlier Protestant elegy Langrishe, Go Down by Aiden Higgins. The vehicle here is a noirish story of the corruption of youth that reminds me of the under-rated Waiting for the Healer by Eamonn Sweeney. Bolger's high-concept achievement is to have written a novel that takes these themes to a sort of benchmark conclusion: he is the Irish novelist's Irish novelist.
As an artist Bolger is technically fine although I don't find his prose to be beautiful, his dialogue does not have a wide range (a common fault of didactic writers), and his exposition is unrelieved by humor (unlike so many of the best Irish writers). The structure is very interesting and well-done, the chapters comprised of five consecutive nights of the flight of Hano, the young murderer, narrating the backstory so that events spanning a couple of years are gradually unfolded. The construction is maybe a little too good, the climactic episode of violence has been built up to so well that it is inevitably a bit too predictable; by the end Bolger has lost the power to shock. This is a book for committed devotees of Irish letters, not one to introduce someone to the joys of Irish literature: one submits to an ordeal.
There is a question as to whether the novel is homophobic, as the villain Plunkett forces the young protagonists, Hano and Shay, into vile sexual encounters. This sexual exploitation is emblematic of the betrayal of the Irish working class by the new breed of capitalist roaders, a reasonable plot device, but a mention of Shay's "gay friends" late in the book feels like an acknowledgment by Bolger that he has perhaps gone too far in demonizing Plunkett's sexuality. Meanwhile the relationship between Hano and Shay is plainly homoerotic, a common trope in depictions of young adult men for whom "mates" are sometimes more important than families afflicted with deep generation gaps.
P
In the present case the central issue is universal. There is an old Ireland, but still only a couple of generations past, still alive in the memory and culture of today's Irish, but increasingly existing only in the collective memory, and then there is today's Ireland, quickly assimilating into the powerful forces of globalization that ravage traditional culture. Ireland's difficult history as an Anglophone country heightens sensitivity to the nihilistic power of "development." Bolger is clear on his emotional resistance to modernity, a reaction familiar to me both from Puerto Ricans and from my years in the Rocky Mountain west, two other wonderful worlds under siege by the present.
The old plazas in the center of Spanish colonial towns in Puerto Rico are largely dead zones today, the small businesses wiped out by the malls outside of town, malls that could just as well be in Minnesota or California or, say, Cork. It's hard to identify some specific, malevolent force driving modernization, Bolger resists the facile temptation to simply identify secular modernity with America (granting he's writing in the late 80s before Europe discovered this easy demonic Other), and he is far from unaware of the pathologies of the Old Country. In fact a striking feature of his work is an underlying insistence that Ireland (and Irish literature) must move forward into the future or risk becoming part of a cottage industry of nostalgia. He wants us to see an Ireland that we don't necessarily want to see.
As in John McGahern's Amongst Women, Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark, and the work of William Trevor and Roddy Doyle, there is anger directed at what the Irish Republicans made of their power to build a nation once they had it, a sense of debts incurred but never repaid. There is a strong sense of displacement such as we find in Anne Enright's The Gathering or the earlier Protestant elegy Langrishe, Go Down by Aiden Higgins. The vehicle here is a noirish story of the corruption of youth that reminds me of the under-rated Waiting for the Healer by Eamonn Sweeney. Bolger's high-concept achievement is to have written a novel that takes these themes to a sort of benchmark conclusion: he is the Irish novelist's Irish novelist.
As an artist Bolger is technically fine although I don't find his prose to be beautiful, his dialogue does not have a wide range (a common fault of didactic writers), and his exposition is unrelieved by humor (unlike so many of the best Irish writers). The structure is very interesting and well-done, the chapters comprised of five consecutive nights of the flight of Hano, the young murderer, narrating the backstory so that events spanning a couple of years are gradually unfolded. The construction is maybe a little too good, the climactic episode of violence has been built up to so well that it is inevitably a bit too predictable; by the end Bolger has lost the power to shock. This is a book for committed devotees of Irish letters, not one to introduce someone to the joys of Irish literature: one submits to an ordeal.
There is a question as to whether the novel is homophobic, as the villain Plunkett forces the young protagonists, Hano and Shay, into vile sexual encounters. This sexual exploitation is emblematic of the betrayal of the Irish working class by the new breed of capitalist roaders, a reasonable plot device, but a mention of Shay's "gay friends" late in the book feels like an acknowledgment by Bolger that he has perhaps gone too far in demonizing Plunkett's sexuality. Meanwhile the relationship between Hano and Shay is plainly homoerotic, a common trope in depictions of young adult men for whom "mates" are sometimes more important than families afflicted with deep generation gaps.
P
Monday, December 15, 2008
Gertrudis and Sab
I'm not sure where I got this copy of the University of Texas Press omnibus edition of Sab and Autobiography by the 19th century Cuban writer Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda y Arteaga (1814-1873). Occasionally I notice a book that's been on the shelves unread for a while, and that I don't have any clear take on, and add it to the Stack. Part of the way that the Stack (actually it's a shelf, actually it's books between bookends on top of a bookcase) works is that books come up to be read six months or so, I think, after I add them, I can't say exactly why I feel that pre-programming my reading in this way is a good practice but I do. It subtracts some willfulness from the activity, or something like that.
Anyway, what we have here is an anti-slavery novel written by a disaffected, expatriate, upper-class Cuban woman and published in 1840, early enough to be of some historical significance (although it is hardly, as a blurb-writer for the jacket states, "without a doubt one of the most important works of fiction in the nineteenth century," even if we limit our scope to Latin America). In its didacticism and formality it reminds me of W. E. B. DuBois' Dark Princess (1928). We value this kind of politicized cultural artifact more for what it represents, or for the fact that it simply exists, than we do for its purely literary merit.
Not that that is true of all historical writing with a strong social agenda, by any means. I don't think that Uncle Tom's Cabin (published, as the jacket points out, eleven years after Sab) is a great work of literature but it measures up to a lot of more popular fiction of its time. This edition of Sab has a photo of a black man posing in the stocks from 1850s Cuba, but don't look here for any unflinching depiction of the physical brutality of slavery. Rather this is essentially a romantic novel about a noble and competent "mulatto" (the author's word), a cousin in fact of the minor gentry to whom he belongs, and his doomed love for the planter's daughter - that sort of thing. The story does not even end in the violence with which the real-life version inevitably would have; the broken-hearted man just dies of a mysterious something.
Really, for the non-specialist, the only really essential period literature of 19th century slavery are the slave narratives themselves, the English-language ones have been well-excavated (although I'm sure there's more), and there is undoubtedly more than one undiscovered treasure written in Spanish or Portuguese, where there is much more work to be done.
What made this read most interesting to me was the inclusion of Autobiography, a short sketch of the author's life written close in time to Sab. Gertrudis Gomez has many admirable qualities, as we already know from the simple facts that she was appalled by slavery even though she was raised at the top of a slavery society, and that she resisted and in fact escaped arranged marriages and hypocritical respectability, and that she made her way to the literary salons of Europe where she promoted herself and enjoyed some recognition during her own life. But it's the less attractive, more contrary, more damaged side of Gomez that is more interesting to the reader. She has a strong pattern of becoming involved with men and then "discovering" that they are not what they seem: of poor character, manipulative, and false in love, is the basic indictment. She cycles through this pattern enough times that one comes to realize that she is her own issue. The Bronte sisters romanticized this type of alienated woman (and rightly linked her to social inequities of the time), but with Gomez we see her unvarnished, vain and difficult (more like the wonderful real-life Grimke sisters). This awareness (Autobiography is placed before Sab in the book) makes the text much more interesting, both politically and psychologically.
Anyway, what we have here is an anti-slavery novel written by a disaffected, expatriate, upper-class Cuban woman and published in 1840, early enough to be of some historical significance (although it is hardly, as a blurb-writer for the jacket states, "without a doubt one of the most important works of fiction in the nineteenth century," even if we limit our scope to Latin America). In its didacticism and formality it reminds me of W. E. B. DuBois' Dark Princess (1928). We value this kind of politicized cultural artifact more for what it represents, or for the fact that it simply exists, than we do for its purely literary merit.
Not that that is true of all historical writing with a strong social agenda, by any means. I don't think that Uncle Tom's Cabin (published, as the jacket points out, eleven years after Sab) is a great work of literature but it measures up to a lot of more popular fiction of its time. This edition of Sab has a photo of a black man posing in the stocks from 1850s Cuba, but don't look here for any unflinching depiction of the physical brutality of slavery. Rather this is essentially a romantic novel about a noble and competent "mulatto" (the author's word), a cousin in fact of the minor gentry to whom he belongs, and his doomed love for the planter's daughter - that sort of thing. The story does not even end in the violence with which the real-life version inevitably would have; the broken-hearted man just dies of a mysterious something.
Really, for the non-specialist, the only really essential period literature of 19th century slavery are the slave narratives themselves, the English-language ones have been well-excavated (although I'm sure there's more), and there is undoubtedly more than one undiscovered treasure written in Spanish or Portuguese, where there is much more work to be done.
What made this read most interesting to me was the inclusion of Autobiography, a short sketch of the author's life written close in time to Sab. Gertrudis Gomez has many admirable qualities, as we already know from the simple facts that she was appalled by slavery even though she was raised at the top of a slavery society, and that she resisted and in fact escaped arranged marriages and hypocritical respectability, and that she made her way to the literary salons of Europe where she promoted herself and enjoyed some recognition during her own life. But it's the less attractive, more contrary, more damaged side of Gomez that is more interesting to the reader. She has a strong pattern of becoming involved with men and then "discovering" that they are not what they seem: of poor character, manipulative, and false in love, is the basic indictment. She cycles through this pattern enough times that one comes to realize that she is her own issue. The Bronte sisters romanticized this type of alienated woman (and rightly linked her to social inequities of the time), but with Gomez we see her unvarnished, vain and difficult (more like the wonderful real-life Grimke sisters). This awareness (Autobiography is placed before Sab in the book) makes the text much more interesting, both politically and psychologically.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
The Importance of Being Oscar Wao
Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a gratifying book for several reasons, but the language is the key (I'll get to the passion in a moment). It is written in a variant of "Spanglish," a broad term that denotes any mixing of English and Spanish by bilingual speakers. By and large these have been native Spanish speakers in the English-speaking world, although now it is hard to miss the increasing presence of Spanish in North American English. Sometimes Spanglish is a matter of switching from one language to another; at committee meetings here at the University of Puerto Rico, some topics (grant proposals, say) are naturally handled in English, others (e.g., faculty politics) are obviously to be discussed in Spanish. I have heard students conversing in English and recounting conversations in Spanish: "And so I said, 'Que dices mi amor?' and then she said, 'tu me oyes,'" and so on. More commonly Spanglish drops words, phrases and idioms from one language into conversation in the other, as Diaz does.
In the present book it is thick enough that someone with no Spanish will have some trouble understanding everything that is being said, but for those who can handle it it's a fun read ("Oscar Wao" is how one of Yunior's Dominican buddies pronounces "Oscar Wilde"). Spanglish enjoys the benefit of being able to choose the word, phrase, or idiom from either language that is most appropriate for whatever is being expressed. It is particularly rich in profanity, an advantage that is not lost on Diaz, who writes an idiomatic, personal prose that is designed to convey the "street."
And what is this tragicomic novel about? It is about multiple generations of a Dominican family, from their professional-class origins in Santo Domingo in the early part of the century through their ruination during the Trujillo dictatorship up to their struggling incarnation in contemporary New Jersey, where their talents are slowly bringing them back from not-so-genteel poverty (Tio Rudolpho is a dope fiend, but Oscar and Yunior are aspiring writers and teachers, of English of course). It is a Murakami-like celebration of Anglo fantasy pop culture ("Anglo" rather than "American" because Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is one of the touchstones of the book).
Oscar and Yunior (who narrates) are devotees of fantasy and science fiction. The references to comic books, role-playing games, science fiction movies and the whole gamut of nerd escapism are as thick as the Spanglish, I think it's a good irony that Diaz's unconcern about whether readers will be able to follow him is what makes this a text that might endure. Oscar, the obese, obsessive, permanent-virgin protagonist, finds solace in escape into fantasy. Fantasy has become, more or less, his whole life, and his ultimate downfall. The dragons, monsters, and aliens of the fantasy world are comforting compared to the horrific reality of what one person can do to another in the real world.
Which brings us to the real topic of this novel, which is the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo over the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. The thesis of the book is that Trujillo was such a powerful force of evil that he has placed a "fuku" (a kind of santeria curse) over Oscar's family, over the DR and all Dominicans, maybe even over the United States. This is not a standard-issue indictment of the depredations suffered by Dominicans at the hands of perfidious yanqui. The evil is home-grown, the pathology is deep inside. Diaz has a burning anger about Trujillo, who he has obviously studied for years (a semi-comic device here is the use of footnotes, emphasizing the idea that we are being educated, a distinctively Caribbean Spanish trope of "telling it like it is").
There is a beef against Vargas Llosa, whose Feast of the Goat (that I enjoyed) is soft on Balaguer among other sins. Good writers are not afraid of taking us to the depths, where some good might be done, and the confrontation with the violence above all of wanton injustice is conveyed here with an unflinching rage. The combination of violent content with comic form is effective and deeply satisfying; I think this is the single biggest reason Diaz has received such critical acclaim (by the way the book jacket really does overdo things a bit. Publishers, I observe, are notably desperate these days to sell books).
Also worth mentioning is the treatment of sex and sexuality. Diaz walks a line here: on the one hand he buys into the stereotype of the Caribbean Latino as endlessly and irresistibly oversexed, a distracting theme also for the Cubans. On the other he has split himself into two halves, the hopeless onanistic Oscar, who falls in love with strange women on the bus, and on the other hand the "normal" Yunior, who can't hold his relationship together because he can't keep it in his pants for ten hours. And as in contemporary Cuban literature, so in Diaz sex is both an expression of the power of the powerless and simply something for the disaffected to do.
Diaz's first novel Drown received notices even more glowing than those for Oscar Wao; I'm going to Amazon a copy and add it to the Stack.
In the present book it is thick enough that someone with no Spanish will have some trouble understanding everything that is being said, but for those who can handle it it's a fun read ("Oscar Wao" is how one of Yunior's Dominican buddies pronounces "Oscar Wilde"). Spanglish enjoys the benefit of being able to choose the word, phrase, or idiom from either language that is most appropriate for whatever is being expressed. It is particularly rich in profanity, an advantage that is not lost on Diaz, who writes an idiomatic, personal prose that is designed to convey the "street."
And what is this tragicomic novel about? It is about multiple generations of a Dominican family, from their professional-class origins in Santo Domingo in the early part of the century through their ruination during the Trujillo dictatorship up to their struggling incarnation in contemporary New Jersey, where their talents are slowly bringing them back from not-so-genteel poverty (Tio Rudolpho is a dope fiend, but Oscar and Yunior are aspiring writers and teachers, of English of course). It is a Murakami-like celebration of Anglo fantasy pop culture ("Anglo" rather than "American" because Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is one of the touchstones of the book).
Oscar and Yunior (who narrates) are devotees of fantasy and science fiction. The references to comic books, role-playing games, science fiction movies and the whole gamut of nerd escapism are as thick as the Spanglish, I think it's a good irony that Diaz's unconcern about whether readers will be able to follow him is what makes this a text that might endure. Oscar, the obese, obsessive, permanent-virgin protagonist, finds solace in escape into fantasy. Fantasy has become, more or less, his whole life, and his ultimate downfall. The dragons, monsters, and aliens of the fantasy world are comforting compared to the horrific reality of what one person can do to another in the real world.
Which brings us to the real topic of this novel, which is the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo over the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. The thesis of the book is that Trujillo was such a powerful force of evil that he has placed a "fuku" (a kind of santeria curse) over Oscar's family, over the DR and all Dominicans, maybe even over the United States. This is not a standard-issue indictment of the depredations suffered by Dominicans at the hands of perfidious yanqui. The evil is home-grown, the pathology is deep inside. Diaz has a burning anger about Trujillo, who he has obviously studied for years (a semi-comic device here is the use of footnotes, emphasizing the idea that we are being educated, a distinctively Caribbean Spanish trope of "telling it like it is").
There is a beef against Vargas Llosa, whose Feast of the Goat (that I enjoyed) is soft on Balaguer among other sins. Good writers are not afraid of taking us to the depths, where some good might be done, and the confrontation with the violence above all of wanton injustice is conveyed here with an unflinching rage. The combination of violent content with comic form is effective and deeply satisfying; I think this is the single biggest reason Diaz has received such critical acclaim (by the way the book jacket really does overdo things a bit. Publishers, I observe, are notably desperate these days to sell books).
Also worth mentioning is the treatment of sex and sexuality. Diaz walks a line here: on the one hand he buys into the stereotype of the Caribbean Latino as endlessly and irresistibly oversexed, a distracting theme also for the Cubans. On the other he has split himself into two halves, the hopeless onanistic Oscar, who falls in love with strange women on the bus, and on the other hand the "normal" Yunior, who can't hold his relationship together because he can't keep it in his pants for ten hours. And as in contemporary Cuban literature, so in Diaz sex is both an expression of the power of the powerless and simply something for the disaffected to do.
Diaz's first novel Drown received notices even more glowing than those for Oscar Wao; I'm going to Amazon a copy and add it to the Stack.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
On My Third Murakami
I've been keeping this reader's blog since December 2006, not very long ago: I was surprised to realize that I read Haruki Murakami's 1994 masterpiece The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle before then. The novel seemed so fresh in my mind that it was hard to believe that it's been over two years since I read it. Yesterday I finished with After Dark, a lesser work from 2004, so now it's finally time to post about Murakami.
My first experience with Murakami was A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), which I subsequently learned was part of a larger series of novels. A big part of the experience of a North American reader with Murakami is the devotional and slightly obsessive treatment of American popular culture and of the place cultural America occupies in the Japanese social identity (I gather that for his Japanese readers as well he is memorable partially for this reason). Here is a young Japanese writer doing parody/homage to Raymond Chandler and the campiest conventions of noir, by way of leading us across a Pynchonesque townscape of vaguely realized paranoia. Here are young Japanese characters who grew up on Elvis Presley, Motown and The Beatles, but who are hip enough to prefer Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. The extent of exposure to and assimilation of American culture is surprising and raises questions. What sort of statement is Murakami making with this striking leitmotif that runs through all of his work? How does he relate to, say, French philosophers such as Bernard Henri Levy who stir things up by being openly pro-American, or European writers like Gunter Grass or Harold Pinter who exploit an anti-American shibboleth? Intuitively he seems to be expressing both his real affection for a popular culture of which he is indeed a full-fledged member, and the striking degree to which modern Japanese popular culture reflects the consequences of losing the wars of empire, now receding to oblivion in popular memory.
But as to A Wild Sheep Chase itself, I appreciated the improbable and slightly surreal plot about something in an old photograph that draws Big Labowskian attention, and Murakami's fascination with physical isolation, here represented as remote, snow-blanketed mountain towns. The penultimate image of the man in the sheep costume mysteriously moving about in the snow, although slightly Avengersish and Walruslike, finally struck me as a bit twee: pushed it a bit far.
Still I liked the book enough that I thought I'd give a whirl to what was generally reported to be his masterpiece, the 611-page, 1994 novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. In that I was not disappointed. If I had only read A Wild Sheep Chase I would have thought of Murakami as a campy satirist with a penchant for upsetting preconceptions. With The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle this writer takes his achievement to another level.
Unemployed and floating away from his working professional wife (maybe being floated away, after all), our hero lives in his uncle's modest but comfortable house in the suburbs, on a quiet (running to silent), sun-bleached cul-du-sac. He is looking for his cat and gets a bit caught up in this landscape that is both fenced in and empty. He starts to explore and meets the only other inhabitant of this particular asteroid, a teenaged girl named May.
There is a recurring theme in Murakami of young women as diffident oracles, seemingly random confidants of slightly older and more floundering men. In W-UBC there are all sorts of women characters, including women possessed of magic powers. The women, maybe, are there to draw something out of the men. The men have lost touch with themselves and with their lives. This brings us back around to the war. There are really good, ambitious passages about a Japanese officer's adventures crossing the disputed Mongolian-Manchurian border in the middle of the desert (another place without people) during the war, and the atrocities that he witnessed there. Eventually this memory of war is too strong to be communally repressed and the young man must seek out an old veteran, on the pretext of one of Murakami's endless maguffins.
But my favorite part of W-UBC is definitely the well. Around the side of one of these close-to-deserted suburban houses is an old dry well, basically a very deep hole under a cover. May shows him the well, and the rope that is used to lower oneself in. It's not just the evocation of withdrawing and containing in order to escape. The subtler experience of the dreamy child, around the back of the garage, staring at that one little space where nobody ever goes, that sense that time stands still so long as we can linger in this microcosm, that is the moment when the quotidian meets the surreal, and Murakami works with the atmospherics of that moment of consciousness. The sense is of a unique effect achieved by art. Such a still surface to be roiled by memories of conquest, torture and war.
Alright, this week I've finished my third Murakami, After Dark (2004). It's the least of the three that I've read, but still worth reading. It does not go in for some of the campy, "postmodern" high-jinks of the earlier Murakami, but it is not without surreal elements. Mari is the smart young woman sitting in a Denny's (a 7-Eleven store is also a setting, and the Alphaville "love hotel"), who sets off on an adventure with a passing acquaintance, Takahashi. Takahashi knows Mari's older sister Eri. Eri is the "pretty one," Mari is the "smart one." But Eri has decided to sleep. She's not in a coma or anything, she seems to have simply made a decision to stay asleep (I thought of Oskar in The Tin Drum). Meanwhile a small number of characters wind in and out of each others' lives during the course of a night. I wrote that the book is slight (191 pages), but it is ultimately a meditation on the repression of young women and I don't think that I've seen the bottom of it. Murakami has a way of evoking a difficult truth under the surface; the use of vagueness is one of his most interesting techniques.
My first experience with Murakami was A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), which I subsequently learned was part of a larger series of novels. A big part of the experience of a North American reader with Murakami is the devotional and slightly obsessive treatment of American popular culture and of the place cultural America occupies in the Japanese social identity (I gather that for his Japanese readers as well he is memorable partially for this reason). Here is a young Japanese writer doing parody/homage to Raymond Chandler and the campiest conventions of noir, by way of leading us across a Pynchonesque townscape of vaguely realized paranoia. Here are young Japanese characters who grew up on Elvis Presley, Motown and The Beatles, but who are hip enough to prefer Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. The extent of exposure to and assimilation of American culture is surprising and raises questions. What sort of statement is Murakami making with this striking leitmotif that runs through all of his work? How does he relate to, say, French philosophers such as Bernard Henri Levy who stir things up by being openly pro-American, or European writers like Gunter Grass or Harold Pinter who exploit an anti-American shibboleth? Intuitively he seems to be expressing both his real affection for a popular culture of which he is indeed a full-fledged member, and the striking degree to which modern Japanese popular culture reflects the consequences of losing the wars of empire, now receding to oblivion in popular memory.
But as to A Wild Sheep Chase itself, I appreciated the improbable and slightly surreal plot about something in an old photograph that draws Big Labowskian attention, and Murakami's fascination with physical isolation, here represented as remote, snow-blanketed mountain towns. The penultimate image of the man in the sheep costume mysteriously moving about in the snow, although slightly Avengersish and Walruslike, finally struck me as a bit twee: pushed it a bit far.
Still I liked the book enough that I thought I'd give a whirl to what was generally reported to be his masterpiece, the 611-page, 1994 novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. In that I was not disappointed. If I had only read A Wild Sheep Chase I would have thought of Murakami as a campy satirist with a penchant for upsetting preconceptions. With The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle this writer takes his achievement to another level.
Unemployed and floating away from his working professional wife (maybe being floated away, after all), our hero lives in his uncle's modest but comfortable house in the suburbs, on a quiet (running to silent), sun-bleached cul-du-sac. He is looking for his cat and gets a bit caught up in this landscape that is both fenced in and empty. He starts to explore and meets the only other inhabitant of this particular asteroid, a teenaged girl named May.
There is a recurring theme in Murakami of young women as diffident oracles, seemingly random confidants of slightly older and more floundering men. In W-UBC there are all sorts of women characters, including women possessed of magic powers. The women, maybe, are there to draw something out of the men. The men have lost touch with themselves and with their lives. This brings us back around to the war. There are really good, ambitious passages about a Japanese officer's adventures crossing the disputed Mongolian-Manchurian border in the middle of the desert (another place without people) during the war, and the atrocities that he witnessed there. Eventually this memory of war is too strong to be communally repressed and the young man must seek out an old veteran, on the pretext of one of Murakami's endless maguffins.
But my favorite part of W-UBC is definitely the well. Around the side of one of these close-to-deserted suburban houses is an old dry well, basically a very deep hole under a cover. May shows him the well, and the rope that is used to lower oneself in. It's not just the evocation of withdrawing and containing in order to escape. The subtler experience of the dreamy child, around the back of the garage, staring at that one little space where nobody ever goes, that sense that time stands still so long as we can linger in this microcosm, that is the moment when the quotidian meets the surreal, and Murakami works with the atmospherics of that moment of consciousness. The sense is of a unique effect achieved by art. Such a still surface to be roiled by memories of conquest, torture and war.
Alright, this week I've finished my third Murakami, After Dark (2004). It's the least of the three that I've read, but still worth reading. It does not go in for some of the campy, "postmodern" high-jinks of the earlier Murakami, but it is not without surreal elements. Mari is the smart young woman sitting in a Denny's (a 7-Eleven store is also a setting, and the Alphaville "love hotel"), who sets off on an adventure with a passing acquaintance, Takahashi. Takahashi knows Mari's older sister Eri. Eri is the "pretty one," Mari is the "smart one." But Eri has decided to sleep. She's not in a coma or anything, she seems to have simply made a decision to stay asleep (I thought of Oskar in The Tin Drum). Meanwhile a small number of characters wind in and out of each others' lives during the course of a night. I wrote that the book is slight (191 pages), but it is ultimately a meditation on the repression of young women and I don't think that I've seen the bottom of it. Murakami has a way of evoking a difficult truth under the surface; the use of vagueness is one of his most interesting techniques.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
The Savage Detectives and the Untamed Writer
I've just finished reading one of the best novels I've seen this year, easily one of the best five novels out of the past fifty or so that I've read. A few months ago when I read By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolano I was enormously impressed by the literacy, the political engagement, the psychological insight and significantly by the attention to the pleasure of the reader. Talented and generous writers are rare. So I Amazoned up a copy of The Savage Detectives, the 648-page novel that established his international reputation virtually overnight when it was published in Spanish in 1998.
I read the 2007 English translation by Natasha Wimmer. I do speak and read Spanish fairly well, but ambitious novels with their slang, wordplay and dense vocabulary - lots of lampposts, boat keels, dustballs, grackles, rolling pins and so forth - are the last frontier for the non-native reader. Having said that, the Wimmer translation is delightful and obviously excellent, a serious literary novel in its own right, funny when it should be, disturbing when it should be.
Like the man says in Baby Snakes, what can I say about this marvelous elixer? Let me start with the heart of the matter: this is a novel about poets and about the practice of poetry. It's not about poetry. There are occasional snippets of poems, cited and invented, but these verses are presented without any pretention that they are necessarily good. Some of the most prominent "poems" are actually punning little line drawings of no great originality. There is much (endless) discussion of whether this or that character is a good or a bad poet, this or that poem a good or a bad poem. There are lists (at one point going on for pages) of poets, mostly actual poets. But it is poets, the practice of poetry and the cultural role of poetry that is the subject.
It is a long love prose poem to Spanish-language poetry, the product of an intense love-hate relationship with poetry and literature. A great joke is that poets are memorialized by having abuse heaped upon them (one minor character has a system by which he divides all Mexican poets into two categories: the "queers" and the "fags"). Poetry for these characters is something for which one gives up one's life, something more important than life itself, and the reader plumbs the text in increasing amazed realization that the author has, must have (Bolano died in 2003 at the age of fifty) thrown himself into this passion to bring this crazy testament back to us.
But that makes it all sound so serious. It's a bawdy picaresque about bohemian students, drifters and drunks, oversexed pot-peddling bums and mentally unstable minor literati at the very margins of the publishing industry, people who live in the bottommost depths of obscurity. They hang around cafes in Mexico City (this is a fantastic novel about Mexico City), wander around Europe working as dishwashers and night watchmen, float around South America, move to California with their mothers. They drink a lot, they smoke a lot, they have lots of sex. Years go by. It's really fun to read about. As I said, this is a remarkably generous writer. He's giving us everything he's got.
It's a novel about the written word, the word is more real than reality. Place names, for example, are handled with a lexicographic meticulousness: obviously the name of a place is one of the most important things about it. Oddly enough this cultish devotion to the Logos, self-consciously echoing Cervantes (or more accurately Don Quixote himself) is tied to the theme of authenticity (the defining obsession of the modern poet). Odd, also brilliant: the fictional Arturo Bolano and Ulises Lima as latter-day Quixotes reveal a gnostic, subversive Cervantes, the Quixotic champion of mythic culture vs. modern reality presented as a visionary rather than a fool. Public acknowledgement is corruption, the true artist (and the true philosopher) must defend their obscurity or lose their voice. And modernity, urbanity, secularism are the ultimate enemies of poetry: the heroic poet is Don Quixote, and that's not a windmill at which he is tilting, it's a dragon.
Speaking of bad attitudes, I've thought so far of two people who I feel I need to contact personally. One was Phil Lumsden who went to New College in Sarasota with me in the late 70s. Out of about 300 students we had a pretty good-sized contingent of poets, under the guruship of A. McA. "Mac" Miller, who only brought enough beer for himself to class in his six-pack-sized carrying case (we had to bring our own), an ex-military man with a complicated home life and a taste for Hughesian poetic violence. There were Southern boys who struck manly, racist poses, Bay Area-style hippies whose apartments would be condemned by the health authorities, do-it-yourself punkers who dutifully broke all of their empty beer bottles on the wall, the Russian literature professor was an incomprehensibe fanatic for structuralist theory, one of the English lit professors was on his second student wife and apologized to me for hitting on my girlfriend (he hadn't known she was, he explained to me), the other once had a conversation with me in the dark with his head face-down on his desk (I suspect strong drink), road trips to Tallahassee or Jacksonville to see Kesey, say, or Ferlinghetti (no, Ferlinghetti was a road trip to Buffalo when I was in high school), one night in a bar in Fruitville a drunken man started to recite The Wasteland much to our amazement as we were working through reading the allusions and Pound's editing with Mac - the man said he'd memorized it while he was in the state prison. Later I had to persuade him to get out of the car (of course we had invited him along) when he started to get violent and threaten the girls, I remember seeing him chasing the car in the rearview mirror.
The friendly neighborhood Marxist generally finds the local poets to be dilettantes, decadently apolitical, even frankly antisocial, lost in their cups, penniless moochers. All true. But there is something inevitably subversive about the poetic act, at least there has been since, say, the Industrial Revolution. Bolano recognized that poets in the developed world in the 20th century are crazy, useless, wretched: sacred.
I read the 2007 English translation by Natasha Wimmer. I do speak and read Spanish fairly well, but ambitious novels with their slang, wordplay and dense vocabulary - lots of lampposts, boat keels, dustballs, grackles, rolling pins and so forth - are the last frontier for the non-native reader. Having said that, the Wimmer translation is delightful and obviously excellent, a serious literary novel in its own right, funny when it should be, disturbing when it should be.
Like the man says in Baby Snakes, what can I say about this marvelous elixer? Let me start with the heart of the matter: this is a novel about poets and about the practice of poetry. It's not about poetry. There are occasional snippets of poems, cited and invented, but these verses are presented without any pretention that they are necessarily good. Some of the most prominent "poems" are actually punning little line drawings of no great originality. There is much (endless) discussion of whether this or that character is a good or a bad poet, this or that poem a good or a bad poem. There are lists (at one point going on for pages) of poets, mostly actual poets. But it is poets, the practice of poetry and the cultural role of poetry that is the subject.
It is a long love prose poem to Spanish-language poetry, the product of an intense love-hate relationship with poetry and literature. A great joke is that poets are memorialized by having abuse heaped upon them (one minor character has a system by which he divides all Mexican poets into two categories: the "queers" and the "fags"). Poetry for these characters is something for which one gives up one's life, something more important than life itself, and the reader plumbs the text in increasing amazed realization that the author has, must have (Bolano died in 2003 at the age of fifty) thrown himself into this passion to bring this crazy testament back to us.
But that makes it all sound so serious. It's a bawdy picaresque about bohemian students, drifters and drunks, oversexed pot-peddling bums and mentally unstable minor literati at the very margins of the publishing industry, people who live in the bottommost depths of obscurity. They hang around cafes in Mexico City (this is a fantastic novel about Mexico City), wander around Europe working as dishwashers and night watchmen, float around South America, move to California with their mothers. They drink a lot, they smoke a lot, they have lots of sex. Years go by. It's really fun to read about. As I said, this is a remarkably generous writer. He's giving us everything he's got.
It's a novel about the written word, the word is more real than reality. Place names, for example, are handled with a lexicographic meticulousness: obviously the name of a place is one of the most important things about it. Oddly enough this cultish devotion to the Logos, self-consciously echoing Cervantes (or more accurately Don Quixote himself) is tied to the theme of authenticity (the defining obsession of the modern poet). Odd, also brilliant: the fictional Arturo Bolano and Ulises Lima as latter-day Quixotes reveal a gnostic, subversive Cervantes, the Quixotic champion of mythic culture vs. modern reality presented as a visionary rather than a fool. Public acknowledgement is corruption, the true artist (and the true philosopher) must defend their obscurity or lose their voice. And modernity, urbanity, secularism are the ultimate enemies of poetry: the heroic poet is Don Quixote, and that's not a windmill at which he is tilting, it's a dragon.
Speaking of bad attitudes, I've thought so far of two people who I feel I need to contact personally. One was Phil Lumsden who went to New College in Sarasota with me in the late 70s. Out of about 300 students we had a pretty good-sized contingent of poets, under the guruship of A. McA. "Mac" Miller, who only brought enough beer for himself to class in his six-pack-sized carrying case (we had to bring our own), an ex-military man with a complicated home life and a taste for Hughesian poetic violence. There were Southern boys who struck manly, racist poses, Bay Area-style hippies whose apartments would be condemned by the health authorities, do-it-yourself punkers who dutifully broke all of their empty beer bottles on the wall, the Russian literature professor was an incomprehensibe fanatic for structuralist theory, one of the English lit professors was on his second student wife and apologized to me for hitting on my girlfriend (he hadn't known she was, he explained to me), the other once had a conversation with me in the dark with his head face-down on his desk (I suspect strong drink), road trips to Tallahassee or Jacksonville to see Kesey, say, or Ferlinghetti (no, Ferlinghetti was a road trip to Buffalo when I was in high school), one night in a bar in Fruitville a drunken man started to recite The Wasteland much to our amazement as we were working through reading the allusions and Pound's editing with Mac - the man said he'd memorized it while he was in the state prison. Later I had to persuade him to get out of the car (of course we had invited him along) when he started to get violent and threaten the girls, I remember seeing him chasing the car in the rearview mirror.
The friendly neighborhood Marxist generally finds the local poets to be dilettantes, decadently apolitical, even frankly antisocial, lost in their cups, penniless moochers. All true. But there is something inevitably subversive about the poetic act, at least there has been since, say, the Industrial Revolution. Bolano recognized that poets in the developed world in the 20th century are crazy, useless, wretched: sacred.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Seamus Deane
Seamus Deane, born in Derry, is a professor of literature at Notre Dame. He is the author of several critical studies of Irish literature (among other scholarly works) and several volumes of poetry. In 1996, at the age of 56, he caused a minor sensation in the world of Irish letters with the publication of his first novel, Reading in the Dark. I confess that when I bought my Vintage paperback copy and added it to the Stack, the title and what I knew of Deane led me to believe that it would be something along the lines of a literary memoir or maybe a novel about a young Irishman reading (in the dark); I had tried to track down a copy of his out-of-print A Short History of Irish Literature (another book Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature is still available).
As it turns out this is not a novel about the sort of young man who reads much, although the protagonist's reading habits are not mentioned. His family definitely wouldn't encourage a lot of time for education, and particularly not about the family past. A twisted past it is, full of violence and betrayals stemming from the Troubles. I won't go into the specifics that hold up the labyrinth of shame and loathing that imprisons the family of the unnamed narrator, the plot (that is, the story of dark deeds of the past slowly and incompletely revealed) is interesting and complex but the real business of the novel is not to entertain us with lurid story but rather to meditate on the costs of collective and individual guilt to generations of families. The young boy himself is set up one day by a sadistic police sergeant who drives him around deliberately making him look like an informer, a casual bit of malice that blights the boy's life for years, but this is far from the worst of it for him and his already-marginalized family. Even when the sergeant returns years later to tearfully apologize the emotional atmosphere barely registers this ripple of contrition. The burdens of the past, and the lies that past forces on the boy's family, are much worse.
For that matter, the deep dark family secrets themselves are never revealed exhaustively. That too would be beside the point, as these people have suffered not from their own decisions but from the dark current of injustice that has maimed not only them, the "guilty" ones, but everyone else in their hopeless, paranoid community. Even the dignity of family loyalty is denied to the exploited and the poor.
The writing, meanwhile, is first-class, sustaining a lyrical tone and keeping the narrative focused on the gradual unravelling of history. It is a novel that does not wander one pace away from the story. Using the boy's relationship with his emotionally shattered mother as a broad, unifying allegory of his Irish Catholic identity makes for elegant symbolism, one of the hardest things to do in a socially-conscious novel. Very satisfying.
As it turns out this is not a novel about the sort of young man who reads much, although the protagonist's reading habits are not mentioned. His family definitely wouldn't encourage a lot of time for education, and particularly not about the family past. A twisted past it is, full of violence and betrayals stemming from the Troubles. I won't go into the specifics that hold up the labyrinth of shame and loathing that imprisons the family of the unnamed narrator, the plot (that is, the story of dark deeds of the past slowly and incompletely revealed) is interesting and complex but the real business of the novel is not to entertain us with lurid story but rather to meditate on the costs of collective and individual guilt to generations of families. The young boy himself is set up one day by a sadistic police sergeant who drives him around deliberately making him look like an informer, a casual bit of malice that blights the boy's life for years, but this is far from the worst of it for him and his already-marginalized family. Even when the sergeant returns years later to tearfully apologize the emotional atmosphere barely registers this ripple of contrition. The burdens of the past, and the lies that past forces on the boy's family, are much worse.
For that matter, the deep dark family secrets themselves are never revealed exhaustively. That too would be beside the point, as these people have suffered not from their own decisions but from the dark current of injustice that has maimed not only them, the "guilty" ones, but everyone else in their hopeless, paranoid community. Even the dignity of family loyalty is denied to the exploited and the poor.
The writing, meanwhile, is first-class, sustaining a lyrical tone and keeping the narrative focused on the gradual unravelling of history. It is a novel that does not wander one pace away from the story. Using the boy's relationship with his emotionally shattered mother as a broad, unifying allegory of his Irish Catholic identity makes for elegant symbolism, one of the hardest things to do in a socially-conscious novel. Very satisfying.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Mariama Ba
Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter (original French, Une Si Longue Lettre), 1980, is short, 89 pages: as advertised, it is a letter from Ramatoulaye, a Senegalese schoolteacher living outside of Dakar, to her friend Aissatou, who has gone on as a translator to a life in Europe and the United States. These are not impoverished people, they are professionals with houses, cars, and children in schools, but the reality of extended families, crowded communities and precarious good fortune insures that financially desperate characters are always in the mix.
The real issue here, though, is marriage. This book is a narrative of injustice based on Islam's acceptance of polygamy, something Arab evangelists of Islam had in common with African populations during the spread of Islam across that continent. Ramatoulaye is herself a Muslim with a strong spiritual practice, and her faith gives her the strength to come out into the light of forgiveness, firmness and integrity during her struggles. Ba does not inhabit a simple world. All of the characters are respected, there are some who have progressive ideas, others who are good-hearted, and this compassion extends to the older men and younger women who can make life such a hell for older women in a society where polygamy is accepted.
Aissatou's vengeful mother-in-law orchestrated a second marriage for her husband, the orphaned daughter of his uncle who his mother has raised explicitly for this purpose. Ramatoulaye, years later, essentially loses her husband when he marries one of her daughter's friends after twenty-five years of marriage, and quickly drifts away from the first wife who has had twelve pregnancies, and has nine children, by him. Both women are galvanized by the experience to develop their own lives and characters. The letter is written on the occasion of the death of Ramatoulaye's husband and the revelation that one of her daughters has become pregnant, which perhaps helps to explain the atmosphere of forgiveness and compassion that suffuses the book, although hard-won spiritual strength is clearly driving this narrative.
There is an interesting connection between writing quality and the quality of passion that a writer has. Many African novels that I read are engaging for place, for custom, and for history, but Ba's book stands out as particularly well-written, and one can't help but feel that the precision of the sentences is reflecting the author's passion to communicate the power of the injustice that she has seen and experienced. The heterogeneity of attitudes, opinions, and styles expressed by the various characters defy easy stereotypes. It is a great loss that Ba passed away after writing only two books. This one reveals talent to spare.
The real issue here, though, is marriage. This book is a narrative of injustice based on Islam's acceptance of polygamy, something Arab evangelists of Islam had in common with African populations during the spread of Islam across that continent. Ramatoulaye is herself a Muslim with a strong spiritual practice, and her faith gives her the strength to come out into the light of forgiveness, firmness and integrity during her struggles. Ba does not inhabit a simple world. All of the characters are respected, there are some who have progressive ideas, others who are good-hearted, and this compassion extends to the older men and younger women who can make life such a hell for older women in a society where polygamy is accepted.
Aissatou's vengeful mother-in-law orchestrated a second marriage for her husband, the orphaned daughter of his uncle who his mother has raised explicitly for this purpose. Ramatoulaye, years later, essentially loses her husband when he marries one of her daughter's friends after twenty-five years of marriage, and quickly drifts away from the first wife who has had twelve pregnancies, and has nine children, by him. Both women are galvanized by the experience to develop their own lives and characters. The letter is written on the occasion of the death of Ramatoulaye's husband and the revelation that one of her daughters has become pregnant, which perhaps helps to explain the atmosphere of forgiveness and compassion that suffuses the book, although hard-won spiritual strength is clearly driving this narrative.
There is an interesting connection between writing quality and the quality of passion that a writer has. Many African novels that I read are engaging for place, for custom, and for history, but Ba's book stands out as particularly well-written, and one can't help but feel that the precision of the sentences is reflecting the author's passion to communicate the power of the injustice that she has seen and experienced. The heterogeneity of attitudes, opinions, and styles expressed by the various characters defy easy stereotypes. It is a great loss that Ba passed away after writing only two books. This one reveals talent to spare.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Aut Tunc, aut Nunquam
"It's now or never." This epigram from Nunquam sums up Lawrence Durrell's approach to both writing and living. A wondrous childhood in much-beloved India followed by a painful adolescence in much-despised England formed a man ravenous for cultural experience and obsessed with authenticity of feeling. Durrell wandered widely ("peripatetic" is the word), spending the last decades of his life in France, but the eastern Mediterranean, cradle and crossroads of the world, was his great love.
Exiled from Greece to Egypt by WWII, his first marriage breaking under the strain, he produced in 1957-1960 the novels collectively known as The Alexandria Quartet, a gem of bohemian sensibility and psychological style perfectly timed between the Beat 50s and the Psychedelic 60s (neither of which cultural movements Durrell, born in 1912 and the expatriot's expatriot, with little interest in the US, ever had much to do with). If you're going to read Durrell for the first time (lucky you) the Quartet is it. After that, much of his best writing is non-fiction, his writing about Greece is priceless and my personal favorite is Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953), a perfect little book that puts one in the company of about as good an evening's companion as you are likely to find. Also not to be missed are his humorous memoirs of working for the British diplomatic authorities in Greece after the war, Esprit de Corps (1957), Stiff Upper Lip (1958) and Sauve Qui Peut (1966).
So I added to the Stack The Revolt of Aphrodite, a 1974 omnibus edition of his second novel sequence Tunc (1968) and Nunquam (1970). This came up to be read just in time for our summer travels, a happy circumstance (at Christmas I ended up with Cormac McCarthy, not exactly festive).
To me "bohemian" means as much "worldly" as it does "arty," the timeless sensibility of the citizen of the world. Society at large moves through periods of relative liberality or prudishness, but the true bohemian lives outside of fashion, always creative, always subversive, always a mix of civility and uninhibitedness, in whatever city, in whatever time. Literateness, the ultimate product of true literacy, is prized above all: understanding is the savor of life. The true bohemian is their own life's work. The masterpiece is not a novel or a painting, but a conversation over a drink. This is the appeal of Durrell.
Having said that, The Revolt of Aphrodite is for established Durrell fans like me to move on to. It is not as good as the Quartet. That's hardly damning. The books are well worth reading. Tunc, the first one, is better than Nunquam, which works through the concepts and the business of Durrell's ideas, and thus lacks some of the character and color of the earlier passages.
Felix Charlock is a scientist and engineer by training, interested in the technology of audiology and the nature of speech. Thus are set up two of the major themes here, first the tension between the natural, intuitive artistic sensibility and the controlling, analytic scientific sensibility, and second the nature of memory and of the narratives that we construct to represent our lives and selves to ourselves and others. Charlock (perhaps resonances of Shylock, as in Shakespeare, but easier to feel resonances of Sherlock, as in Holmes) is a typical Durrell character, moving easily among an elite group of professionals and tattered scions of local nobility, starting the evening at the grand but crumbling villa before moving on to dusky bars and brothels, bedding the local talent with seemingly no effort (Durrell is old school so far as the libido is concerned). The city is Athens, later we are in a much more impressionistic Istanbul and much of Nunquam takes place in London.
Athens is true civilization, Turkey Asiatic barbarousness and England European soullessness. There is a good character named Caradoc, a brilliant but erratic architect. Charlock is engaged to record Caradoc's speech at the Parthenon; Hippolyta, a wealthy local, has organized the speech as a social event. I didn't expect Durrell to actually write the speech. This sort of thing is very difficult to do, as when an author has a character who is a great poet or scientist. The usual practice is simply to refer to the character's talents and let the reader imagine the rest. But Durrell gives us quite a brilliant disquisition on architecture, power, and mythology. There is a sense that Durrell wants to present some of his philosophical work. Many of the characters make pronouncements that are well-formed aphorisms.
Charlock becomes an employee of "the firm," a corporate entity, ostensibly mercantile, that has grown into a kind of secret society, controlling the lives of its members. The characters thus have a very literal version of the moral dilemma of integrity and autonomy vs. worldly success. In Nunquam we move on to heavier allegory, as one of the twisted Svengalis of the firm sets the project of constructing an artificial woman, a replica of the beautiful Iolanthe, a Greek woman of the streets who has become a film star and then died tragically. Durrell isn't interested in the science fiction possibilities here. He doesn't bother trying to explain how an artificial woman might be possible. He wants to think about the difference between our idea of a lover, or of an object of desire, and the real person (or the unreal person, for that matter).
As I said, Durrell is old school and it must be said that there is a fair degree of misogyny in the air. The women characters are physically beautiful but not personally so, although here as elsewhere (Justine) Durrell acknowledges women's sexuality with the same frank acceptance as men's. Part of the sense of rough treatment of women characters in Durrell stems from the fact that they fall into sexual liasons just as easily and naturally as the men, but that is perhaps closer to real life after all.
Last word on The Revolt of Aphrodite: if you already know that you like Durrell, you'll enjoy more of the same. First-timers, I refer you to The Alexandria Quartet.
Exiled from Greece to Egypt by WWII, his first marriage breaking under the strain, he produced in 1957-1960 the novels collectively known as The Alexandria Quartet, a gem of bohemian sensibility and psychological style perfectly timed between the Beat 50s and the Psychedelic 60s (neither of which cultural movements Durrell, born in 1912 and the expatriot's expatriot, with little interest in the US, ever had much to do with). If you're going to read Durrell for the first time (lucky you) the Quartet is it. After that, much of his best writing is non-fiction, his writing about Greece is priceless and my personal favorite is Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953), a perfect little book that puts one in the company of about as good an evening's companion as you are likely to find. Also not to be missed are his humorous memoirs of working for the British diplomatic authorities in Greece after the war, Esprit de Corps (1957), Stiff Upper Lip (1958) and Sauve Qui Peut (1966).
So I added to the Stack The Revolt of Aphrodite, a 1974 omnibus edition of his second novel sequence Tunc (1968) and Nunquam (1970). This came up to be read just in time for our summer travels, a happy circumstance (at Christmas I ended up with Cormac McCarthy, not exactly festive).
To me "bohemian" means as much "worldly" as it does "arty," the timeless sensibility of the citizen of the world. Society at large moves through periods of relative liberality or prudishness, but the true bohemian lives outside of fashion, always creative, always subversive, always a mix of civility and uninhibitedness, in whatever city, in whatever time. Literateness, the ultimate product of true literacy, is prized above all: understanding is the savor of life. The true bohemian is their own life's work. The masterpiece is not a novel or a painting, but a conversation over a drink. This is the appeal of Durrell.
Having said that, The Revolt of Aphrodite is for established Durrell fans like me to move on to. It is not as good as the Quartet. That's hardly damning. The books are well worth reading. Tunc, the first one, is better than Nunquam, which works through the concepts and the business of Durrell's ideas, and thus lacks some of the character and color of the earlier passages.
Felix Charlock is a scientist and engineer by training, interested in the technology of audiology and the nature of speech. Thus are set up two of the major themes here, first the tension between the natural, intuitive artistic sensibility and the controlling, analytic scientific sensibility, and second the nature of memory and of the narratives that we construct to represent our lives and selves to ourselves and others. Charlock (perhaps resonances of Shylock, as in Shakespeare, but easier to feel resonances of Sherlock, as in Holmes) is a typical Durrell character, moving easily among an elite group of professionals and tattered scions of local nobility, starting the evening at the grand but crumbling villa before moving on to dusky bars and brothels, bedding the local talent with seemingly no effort (Durrell is old school so far as the libido is concerned). The city is Athens, later we are in a much more impressionistic Istanbul and much of Nunquam takes place in London.
Athens is true civilization, Turkey Asiatic barbarousness and England European soullessness. There is a good character named Caradoc, a brilliant but erratic architect. Charlock is engaged to record Caradoc's speech at the Parthenon; Hippolyta, a wealthy local, has organized the speech as a social event. I didn't expect Durrell to actually write the speech. This sort of thing is very difficult to do, as when an author has a character who is a great poet or scientist. The usual practice is simply to refer to the character's talents and let the reader imagine the rest. But Durrell gives us quite a brilliant disquisition on architecture, power, and mythology. There is a sense that Durrell wants to present some of his philosophical work. Many of the characters make pronouncements that are well-formed aphorisms.
Charlock becomes an employee of "the firm," a corporate entity, ostensibly mercantile, that has grown into a kind of secret society, controlling the lives of its members. The characters thus have a very literal version of the moral dilemma of integrity and autonomy vs. worldly success. In Nunquam we move on to heavier allegory, as one of the twisted Svengalis of the firm sets the project of constructing an artificial woman, a replica of the beautiful Iolanthe, a Greek woman of the streets who has become a film star and then died tragically. Durrell isn't interested in the science fiction possibilities here. He doesn't bother trying to explain how an artificial woman might be possible. He wants to think about the difference between our idea of a lover, or of an object of desire, and the real person (or the unreal person, for that matter).
As I said, Durrell is old school and it must be said that there is a fair degree of misogyny in the air. The women characters are physically beautiful but not personally so, although here as elsewhere (Justine) Durrell acknowledges women's sexuality with the same frank acceptance as men's. Part of the sense of rough treatment of women characters in Durrell stems from the fact that they fall into sexual liasons just as easily and naturally as the men, but that is perhaps closer to real life after all.
Last word on The Revolt of Aphrodite: if you already know that you like Durrell, you'll enjoy more of the same. First-timers, I refer you to The Alexandria Quartet.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Duodu's Gab Boys
In 1967, ten years after Ghanaian independence and within a year of the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah in a military coup in 1966, Cameron Duodu published The Gab Boys (he went on to a long and distinguished career as a journalist and editorialist, most recently criticizing Robert Mugabe's destructive clinging to power in Zimbabwe). Duodu simultaneously represents two currents in West African literature of the time, on the one hand the exploration of cultural conflict and political corruption in post-colonial African society associated with novelists and playwrights such as Chinua Achebe and Ama Ata Aidoo, and on the other hand the optimistic affirmation of African cultural strengths found in poets of the time such as David Diop and Frank Kobina Parks. These themes come together in a very compassionate discussion of the way that individual people, rich and poor, are pushed to compromise themselves as they try to navigate a near-chaotic transitional society.
Unlike a lot of politicized African literature, however, Duodu writes in a comic spirit, and presents a world where young people cannot be prevented from having fun: a celebration of the indestructible joy of youth. Kwasi Asamoa is one of the "gab boys" (the name refers to their expensive gaberdine trousers), local youths who have been educated in the early years of independence, only to find themselves idle as the economy slips into kleptocracy. Both economically marginalized and despised as snobs by the uneducated, they loll about Pusupusu, their rural village, making wisecracks and causing trouble. Eventually the local lawmen devise a plan to drive them away by holding them liable to a tax that these teenagers obviously cannot afford, and Kwasi must run away first to a friend who drives a taxi in Accra and then to a job as a cleaner on the railroad. Trouble with the law, with money, with tough guys and with alcohol dog him as he tries to establish the most basic arrangements of work and shelter.
Tough as this is, Kwasi's narrative is the story of a young man having fun with his friends, with girls, and with discovering the world. The interlude with the taximen on the streets of the big city is particularly good, four men sleeping in one room and working all night are nonetheless having a grand time of it and acting as if they owned the city. Even the death of one of the gab boys in a railway accident is an occasion for a raucous road trip back to Pusupusu, as everyone comes together after various differences and the village elders are forced to admit that they were wrong to try to drive away the youths.
The mechanisms of informal democracy based on familial and tribal loyalty are well-depicted. The ending is unabashedly happy, with the young people learning to understand the traditional village drumming. There is good, sustained attention to the welter of local dialects and overlapping languages, with much discussion of words and rhythms. A most enjoyable book.
Unlike a lot of politicized African literature, however, Duodu writes in a comic spirit, and presents a world where young people cannot be prevented from having fun: a celebration of the indestructible joy of youth. Kwasi Asamoa is one of the "gab boys" (the name refers to their expensive gaberdine trousers), local youths who have been educated in the early years of independence, only to find themselves idle as the economy slips into kleptocracy. Both economically marginalized and despised as snobs by the uneducated, they loll about Pusupusu, their rural village, making wisecracks and causing trouble. Eventually the local lawmen devise a plan to drive them away by holding them liable to a tax that these teenagers obviously cannot afford, and Kwasi must run away first to a friend who drives a taxi in Accra and then to a job as a cleaner on the railroad. Trouble with the law, with money, with tough guys and with alcohol dog him as he tries to establish the most basic arrangements of work and shelter.
Tough as this is, Kwasi's narrative is the story of a young man having fun with his friends, with girls, and with discovering the world. The interlude with the taximen on the streets of the big city is particularly good, four men sleeping in one room and working all night are nonetheless having a grand time of it and acting as if they owned the city. Even the death of one of the gab boys in a railway accident is an occasion for a raucous road trip back to Pusupusu, as everyone comes together after various differences and the village elders are forced to admit that they were wrong to try to drive away the youths.
The mechanisms of informal democracy based on familial and tribal loyalty are well-depicted. The ending is unabashedly happy, with the young people learning to understand the traditional village drumming. There is good, sustained attention to the welter of local dialects and overlapping languages, with much discussion of words and rhythms. A most enjoyable book.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Ancient Celtic Tribes of Gaul
I recommend Philip Freeman's books for rigorous scholarship bearing fruit as an entertaining and interesting book. Freeman is the author of St. Patrick of Ireland: A Biography, as well as The Galatian Language (he does his own translations of the material from Greek, Latin, and various ancient Celtic languages), and several other books drawing on the latest philological and archaeological evidence to cast light on the Gauls and Celts of antiquity.
The present book, The Philosopher and the Druids: A Journey Among the Ancient Celts (2006) is focused on the Gaullic tribes in the first century before Christ, a time of expansion of the Roman Empire and increased contact for the two cultures. An Athenian-educated philosopher named Posidonius undertook a trip deep into tribal territory, recording some of the first known ethnological and cultural notes on the Celts in classical sources. You get the sense that a host who has his enemies' heads hung on the dining room wall might actually be the kind of guy you'd like to have a beer with. The equally tough Celtic women are rightly emphasized, with some discussion of their cultish temple communities.
Freeman is scrupulously careful about sticking to the known facts which pays off with a sense of satisfaction that one has got a glimpse of them. The ending is poignant with a discussion of some recognizably Celtic elements found in Tomas O'Crohan's The Islandman (1937) and other early twentieth century Blasket Island sources. I very much enjoyed it.
The present book, The Philosopher and the Druids: A Journey Among the Ancient Celts (2006) is focused on the Gaullic tribes in the first century before Christ, a time of expansion of the Roman Empire and increased contact for the two cultures. An Athenian-educated philosopher named Posidonius undertook a trip deep into tribal territory, recording some of the first known ethnological and cultural notes on the Celts in classical sources. You get the sense that a host who has his enemies' heads hung on the dining room wall might actually be the kind of guy you'd like to have a beer with. The equally tough Celtic women are rightly emphasized, with some discussion of their cultish temple communities.
Freeman is scrupulously careful about sticking to the known facts which pays off with a sense of satisfaction that one has got a glimpse of them. The ending is poignant with a discussion of some recognizably Celtic elements found in Tomas O'Crohan's The Islandman (1937) and other early twentieth century Blasket Island sources. I very much enjoyed it.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Enright's Gathering
This 2007 Booker Prize winner is maybe a little over-hyped, but that's the only bad thing I'll say about it. Anne Enright's style is both flowing naturalism and clipped impatience, psychological insight is achieved through a fearless candor and character development set on the frame of a very simple story. Veronica Hegarty is the eighth of twelve children of a lower-middle class Dublin family, born across the upwardly-mobile 50s and 60s from Ada and Charlie, the parents who grew up in another world.
It is a story about the anger of a modern Irish woman who sees a family of twelve children as, if not a crime, a towering negligence. Her mother's lack of self-determination, and therefore of responsibility towards her children, is what the daughter cannot forgive, and the central event of the story, now long past, adds a concrete dimension to Ada's guilt even as it reveals her as a victim of classic injustice. Now Veronica is in her late 30s, the wife of a professional man and a mother of two daughters of her own. The death of her brother Liam, next older than her in birth order and her childhood companion, precipitates her own confrontation with her unhappiness and disappointment as she retrieves his body from England and works through the reunion of her mother and the nine remaining siblings for Liam's wake and funeral.
Veronica is thoroughly modern, at least she certainly seems to be, but one is soon struck by how she epitomizes basic themes of twentieth-century Irish life. She is conflicted about and fixated on sex and particularly the sexual nature of the male, her consciousness of the male body around her brings to mind Molly Bloom's awful hatrack. There are even observations of rich and carefree Americans that could have been made thirty years before (I thought of The Quiet Man). A long-ago relationship with an American during her college years still haunts her as she wonders if he was her true love, but as with all such totems of memory this one has more to do with her present dissatisfaction than with anything else. The legacy of Irish history and the legacy of Catholicism cannot be left behind for her generation; she will leave her marriage but she will not leave Dublin or her family, although she is constantly physically acting out escape (her husband is by now used to her simply driving off after a fight).
This book is part of a discernible trend in recent Irish writing, an insistence that the Irish gaze must be turned now forward, a resistance to the traditional Irish trope of a longing backwards for a lost world and a new determination for reinvention. Another example published this year is Dermot Bolger's The Journey Home, also see Diarmaid Ferriter's The Transformation of Ireland (2004), a thorough history of the emergence of Ireland as a modern nation that also documents a forward evolution.
It is a story about the anger of a modern Irish woman who sees a family of twelve children as, if not a crime, a towering negligence. Her mother's lack of self-determination, and therefore of responsibility towards her children, is what the daughter cannot forgive, and the central event of the story, now long past, adds a concrete dimension to Ada's guilt even as it reveals her as a victim of classic injustice. Now Veronica is in her late 30s, the wife of a professional man and a mother of two daughters of her own. The death of her brother Liam, next older than her in birth order and her childhood companion, precipitates her own confrontation with her unhappiness and disappointment as she retrieves his body from England and works through the reunion of her mother and the nine remaining siblings for Liam's wake and funeral.
Veronica is thoroughly modern, at least she certainly seems to be, but one is soon struck by how she epitomizes basic themes of twentieth-century Irish life. She is conflicted about and fixated on sex and particularly the sexual nature of the male, her consciousness of the male body around her brings to mind Molly Bloom's awful hatrack. There are even observations of rich and carefree Americans that could have been made thirty years before (I thought of The Quiet Man). A long-ago relationship with an American during her college years still haunts her as she wonders if he was her true love, but as with all such totems of memory this one has more to do with her present dissatisfaction than with anything else. The legacy of Irish history and the legacy of Catholicism cannot be left behind for her generation; she will leave her marriage but she will not leave Dublin or her family, although she is constantly physically acting out escape (her husband is by now used to her simply driving off after a fight).
This book is part of a discernible trend in recent Irish writing, an insistence that the Irish gaze must be turned now forward, a resistance to the traditional Irish trope of a longing backwards for a lost world and a new determination for reinvention. Another example published this year is Dermot Bolger's The Journey Home, also see Diarmaid Ferriter's The Transformation of Ireland (2004), a thorough history of the emergence of Ireland as a modern nation that also documents a forward evolution.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Farrell's Troubles
J. G. Farrell's Troubles (1970)is the first novel in his so-called "Empire Trilogy," followed by The Siege of Krishnapur (1973, Booker Prize winner) and The Singapore Grip (1978). Of course "Troubles" refers to the ongoing violence between Irish republicans and British security forces (the notorious "Black and Tans") in the early 20th century after the Easter Uprising of 1916 and during the subsequent Irish civil war, and then later between Protestant Unionists and the IRA in the middle decades of the century and sporadically until the present day.
Farrell, meanwhile, sees the fall of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy in the wider context of the general collapse of the British Empire starting with World War I. Troubles is written from the perspective of these Englishmen whose world is rapidly collapsing, the "native Irish" are here seemingly passive but unmistakably menacing townsfolk, mostly offstage. The central allegory, and a brilliant concept it is, is the Hotel Majestic, a Victorian-era grand hotel on the Irish Sea coast near Wexford, the southeastern coast of Ireland (that is, looking towards England). The hotel is huge and was once magnificent, the scene of generations of memories of the grand old days of Anglo dominance, and the abode of a coterie of elderly ladies who have been there so long that they are part of the legacy.
The building, however, is falling down around their heads, as Edward Spencer, the proprietor, hasn't been able to summon either the money or the will to maintain it for years. Algae-filled swimming pools, handball courts used as pig sties, long-empty rooms full of mouldering furniture, and mysterious recesses known only to malingering, half-mad servants and feral cats: the crumbling old pile is the star of the book. Not that the book isn't filled with excellent human characters, in fact there is a large eccentric cast of people, centered around Major Archer, a veteran of the trenches who wanders out to Ireland at loose ends and drops himself off of the earth by becoming Edward's best friend and installing himself at the Majestic, where he whiles away the weeks playing whist with the "old ladies," as they are invariably called.
Of course this is a world out of time, drifting towards the falls, and things are going to end badly. The genius of the book (and this is one of the best Irish novels I've read, and if you look over this blog you'll see that I've read quite a few) is that it is, page after page, hilarious. It's so funny that one laughs out loud again and again. This humor is what makes the book powerful. It brings out the essence of tragedy, that is that it's the simple foibles and limitations of human nature that slowly lead us into inevitable moments of violent upheaval. The imperial madness of the English, defiantly asserting their cultural prerogatives against the background of a subjugated but overwhelming local culture that is only dimly understood, is brilliantly rendered.
I've Amazoned up a copy of The Siege of Krishnapur and will put it in the Stack.
Farrell, meanwhile, sees the fall of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy in the wider context of the general collapse of the British Empire starting with World War I. Troubles is written from the perspective of these Englishmen whose world is rapidly collapsing, the "native Irish" are here seemingly passive but unmistakably menacing townsfolk, mostly offstage. The central allegory, and a brilliant concept it is, is the Hotel Majestic, a Victorian-era grand hotel on the Irish Sea coast near Wexford, the southeastern coast of Ireland (that is, looking towards England). The hotel is huge and was once magnificent, the scene of generations of memories of the grand old days of Anglo dominance, and the abode of a coterie of elderly ladies who have been there so long that they are part of the legacy.
The building, however, is falling down around their heads, as Edward Spencer, the proprietor, hasn't been able to summon either the money or the will to maintain it for years. Algae-filled swimming pools, handball courts used as pig sties, long-empty rooms full of mouldering furniture, and mysterious recesses known only to malingering, half-mad servants and feral cats: the crumbling old pile is the star of the book. Not that the book isn't filled with excellent human characters, in fact there is a large eccentric cast of people, centered around Major Archer, a veteran of the trenches who wanders out to Ireland at loose ends and drops himself off of the earth by becoming Edward's best friend and installing himself at the Majestic, where he whiles away the weeks playing whist with the "old ladies," as they are invariably called.
Of course this is a world out of time, drifting towards the falls, and things are going to end badly. The genius of the book (and this is one of the best Irish novels I've read, and if you look over this blog you'll see that I've read quite a few) is that it is, page after page, hilarious. It's so funny that one laughs out loud again and again. This humor is what makes the book powerful. It brings out the essence of tragedy, that is that it's the simple foibles and limitations of human nature that slowly lead us into inevitable moments of violent upheaval. The imperial madness of the English, defiantly asserting their cultural prerogatives against the background of a subjugated but overwhelming local culture that is only dimly understood, is brilliantly rendered.
I've Amazoned up a copy of The Siege of Krishnapur and will put it in the Stack.
Monday, May 26, 2008
O'Connor's Sea Story
Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea (2002)is part thriller, part historical fiction. Principally he has researched the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s, and the emigration to America that happened at that time. In the early 1840s the population of Ireland was around four million, as it is today. By the later part of the decade it was less than half that, after somewhere around a million deaths and a similar number of emigrants, most to North America.
The phrase "potato famine" suggests that the catastrophe was due to natural causes but as O'Connor rightly emphasizes this was very much a human-caused event, tied directly to the feudal system of English lords and Irish tenants imposed on that society after Cromwell's depredations in the late 17th century. With food available, those without the money to buy it were allowed to starve, even as price-gouging merchants continued to display food in shop windows and the landed gentry suffered no interruption of luxury. In fact, the large textile fortunes of 19th century Ireland (Blarney for example) were established after the native Irish had been forced off of the land by deliberate rent increases to free former small farmlands for grazing. The human cost of this included trenches where tens of thousands of bodies were buried in mass graves, as England stood by with much lampooning of the supposedly inferior Irish in the London press. The famine was also arguably the fatal blow delivered to the Gaelic language, which was still widely spoken in the early 19th century.
Against this background O'Connor has spun a period drama involving the passengers on a refugee ship bound for New York in 1847, including Lord Kingscourt, heir to a bankrupt estate in Connemara, his family, and a number of Irish from the same place travelling in steerage, where passengers are dying rapidly of disease and starvation. David Merridith, Lord Kingscourt, is basically a refugee himself, a terribly damaged man with a morally compromised past, but a decent person. His stalker, Pius Mulvey, a dispossessed former tenant now the veteran of a life of crime and murder, is much the same. The aim of the novel is to show how an inherently corrupt system made monsters of these two.
Having said all that, I must add that I was inclined to review this book as a fine page-turning entertainment, which it is, with lots of action and finely-drawn characters. The main town near the estate is Clifden, where I found people named Lowry, the name of my great-grandmother Sabina, one of my ancestors out of Galway and Mayo (others were Eliots and of course O'Malleys). This one is good enough that I'm going to send a copy to Leslie Lee, a family friend who researches Irish history.
The phrase "potato famine" suggests that the catastrophe was due to natural causes but as O'Connor rightly emphasizes this was very much a human-caused event, tied directly to the feudal system of English lords and Irish tenants imposed on that society after Cromwell's depredations in the late 17th century. With food available, those without the money to buy it were allowed to starve, even as price-gouging merchants continued to display food in shop windows and the landed gentry suffered no interruption of luxury. In fact, the large textile fortunes of 19th century Ireland (Blarney for example) were established after the native Irish had been forced off of the land by deliberate rent increases to free former small farmlands for grazing. The human cost of this included trenches where tens of thousands of bodies were buried in mass graves, as England stood by with much lampooning of the supposedly inferior Irish in the London press. The famine was also arguably the fatal blow delivered to the Gaelic language, which was still widely spoken in the early 19th century.
Against this background O'Connor has spun a period drama involving the passengers on a refugee ship bound for New York in 1847, including Lord Kingscourt, heir to a bankrupt estate in Connemara, his family, and a number of Irish from the same place travelling in steerage, where passengers are dying rapidly of disease and starvation. David Merridith, Lord Kingscourt, is basically a refugee himself, a terribly damaged man with a morally compromised past, but a decent person. His stalker, Pius Mulvey, a dispossessed former tenant now the veteran of a life of crime and murder, is much the same. The aim of the novel is to show how an inherently corrupt system made monsters of these two.
Having said all that, I must add that I was inclined to review this book as a fine page-turning entertainment, which it is, with lots of action and finely-drawn characters. The main town near the estate is Clifden, where I found people named Lowry, the name of my great-grandmother Sabina, one of my ancestors out of Galway and Mayo (others were Eliots and of course O'Malleys). This one is good enough that I'm going to send a copy to Leslie Lee, a family friend who researches Irish history.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Buchi Emecheta
Some friends who had lived in Nigeria for a number of years extolled the writings of the expatriate Buchi Emecheta, and reading The Slave Girl (1977) I was not disappointed by their build-up. It is one of a series of novels on the theme of the subjugation of women in African society that she wrote in the 1970s (others are Second-Class Citizen, 1974, The Bride Price, 1976, and The Joys of Motherhood, 1979).
The story is about a seven-year-old Ibo girl who is sold into slavery by her brother after her parents die, in the early 20th century as Portuguese and British colonialism works through its endgame in upriver Nigeria. The writing is clear and direct, an omniscient narrator laying out the facts of the situation in a compassionate but unsentimental voice. It is not a horrorshow, although the slaves of a wealthy merchant woman are beaten and sexually abused. There is much humanity and Ojebeta returns to her home village after nine years in bondage, still a young woman and now determined to have as much influence in her own destiny as possible. She is like a Jane Austin character who happens to be an African from "the bush" with tribal scarifications on her face.
The pacing is excellent and I didn't put the 179-page novel down once I got in to it. It is didactic in a good way, with loads of information for non-African readers about village life along the river, the lingering influence of exploitative Europeans, class and tribal divisions among the Nigerians, and tribal customs around women and marriage. The critical appraisal of the status of women is aimed at Africans and non-Africans alike.
A long time ago in a "Philosophy Through Literature" course I assigned a novel by Tsi Tsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (1988), reputedly the first novel to be published by a Zimbabwean woman. It too deals with the stresses on young African women who have even the slimmest hope of economic and social advancement. The protagonist's struggle with an eating disorder was a good bridge between an account of post-colonial Africans and my mostly affluent students in Boulder.
The story is about a seven-year-old Ibo girl who is sold into slavery by her brother after her parents die, in the early 20th century as Portuguese and British colonialism works through its endgame in upriver Nigeria. The writing is clear and direct, an omniscient narrator laying out the facts of the situation in a compassionate but unsentimental voice. It is not a horrorshow, although the slaves of a wealthy merchant woman are beaten and sexually abused. There is much humanity and Ojebeta returns to her home village after nine years in bondage, still a young woman and now determined to have as much influence in her own destiny as possible. She is like a Jane Austin character who happens to be an African from "the bush" with tribal scarifications on her face.
The pacing is excellent and I didn't put the 179-page novel down once I got in to it. It is didactic in a good way, with loads of information for non-African readers about village life along the river, the lingering influence of exploitative Europeans, class and tribal divisions among the Nigerians, and tribal customs around women and marriage. The critical appraisal of the status of women is aimed at Africans and non-Africans alike.
A long time ago in a "Philosophy Through Literature" course I assigned a novel by Tsi Tsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (1988), reputedly the first novel to be published by a Zimbabwean woman. It too deals with the stresses on young African women who have even the slimmest hope of economic and social advancement. The protagonist's struggle with an eating disorder was a good bridge between an account of post-colonial Africans and my mostly affluent students in Boulder.
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