Monthly Archives: September 2008

Now that the school year is underway again, I’m back to listening to audiobooks on my drive in.  I started the year off with Henning Mankell’s crime novel The Dogs of Riga, which I snatched up at the library after remembering that Kate from Kate’s Book Blog praised this series highly.  I think Kate was right — I enjoyed the book, both for its plot and for the main character, Kurt Wallender.

Wallender is a police officer in Sweden, and is the kind of character who seems much too nice and normal to get caught up in the kind of violent plots he finds himself enmeshed in.  He comes across as unassuming — he’s not particularly ambitious; he’s competent but doesn’t seem brilliant at what he does, or at least he doesn’t think he’s brilliant at what he does; he can make mistakes and bumble along like any average person.  And yet when he finds himself caught up in a plot involving international politics that could potentially put his life at risk — yes, he hesitates and agonizes over what to do, but ultimately he jumps into the fray.

The story begins with two men out on a ship who see two dead bodies afloat on a life raft; they pull the life raft closer to shore and then abandon it for the police to find.  Wallender is assigned the case.  Initially the case moves slowly, and Wallender has little idea where their few leads will take them.  But then the dead men turn out to be of eastern European origin and are traced to Latvia, at which point the situation becomes an international one and suddenly much more complicated.  Wallender travels to Latvia and has to negotiate a world that is entirely unfamiliar to him — it’s set during the time when the Soviet Union’s grip on eastern European countries is loosening and new forces are beginning to take its place.  The situation is complicated further when Wallender falls in love with the beautiful widow of a Latvian police officer.

The Dogs of Riga offers a satisfying plot, but it also offers much to think about, particularly in Wallender’s musings about the way the world seems to be falling apart around him.  The book has a mournful tone to it — Wallender himself is quietly sad — and much of this sadness comes from Wallender’s feeling that it no longer makes sense to be a police officer and to try to carry out justice in a society that cares about it so little.  He toys with the idea of applying for a job as a security officer and leaving his police work behind because of this loss of confidence in society and because of the toll his job takes on him personally.  He’s drawn back to the fight for order and justice, however; as much as he longs for a life that is simpler, he can’t quite leave his idealism behind. He’s a reluctant romantic — he wants a simpler, less complicated life, but at the same time when the chance comes along to be a hero and help a woman in distress, he can’t say no.

Listening to this book on audio worked particularly well because of the way the reader’s voice helped to create a sense of atmosphere.  I respond more emotionally to a book when I’m listening to it, and this means I get caught up in the character development and the excitement of the plot twists and turns that much more.  Now I’m left hoping that my library as more Mankell books on CD …

David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is a moving, beautifully written, emotionally taxing, very well-told novel.  It’s the kind of book that’s difficult, not because of the way it’s written, but because of the direction you know the story is headed in — you get caught up in the novel’s world and want to stay in it, and yet you know things are going to go bad at some point and you dread the thought.

The novel is a retelling of Hamlet, a fact that shapes your experience of it one way or another.  If you are familiar with the play, then you have the pleasure of trying to figure out which character in the novel corresponds to which character in the play, and which plot event is a version of the play’s events.  The novel doesn’t follow Hamlet exactly, but it’s close enough that there are plenty of convergences to pick up on. You also have a general sense of the direction the plot will take and it’s satisfying to watch exactly how Wroblewski works everything out.

The risk of retelling a well-known story is that the reader might lose a sense of urgency or feel that what happens is too expected and familiar, and I did feel a laxness now and then when the novel followed the play particularly closely.  But the method offers plenty of other pleasures (although perhaps “pleasure” isn’t quite the right word, since we’re talking about a tragedy here), not least the experience of hoping against hope that things will turn out differently than you are afraid they will.

If the reader isn’t familiar with Hamlet, there is another possible risk, which is that some of the plot events may seem a little strange and out of place.  I read this book for a book group (which hasn’t yet met) and another member who hadn’t realized that it’s a version of Hamlet was a little startled to find that a ghost makes an appearance in a novel that is otherwise very down-to-earth and realistic.  But this friend said it was only a small jarring moment in what was otherwise a good experience.

If you do get the Hamlet reference, there is the intellectual pleasure of seeing just how Wroblewski reshapes a story originally set in a very different time and place.  He does this wonderfully well; with the possible exception of ghosts, there is no awkwardness in having a Hamlet who lives on a farm in Wisconsin in the 20th century and grows up raising dogs.  Wroblewski handles the relationships among the Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude characters marvelously well, and his take on Ophelia is astonishing.

But to set the Hamlet issue aside, the world of the novel is remarkably well-realized and his main character an appealing one.  Edgar’s life is simple — he attends school but spends most of his time working with the dogs his family is known for, the Sawtelle dogs, distinguished by their unusually strong ability to communicate with humans.  He and his mother and father raise and train the dogs, pouring their energy into them so that they are among the best-trained dogs available.

Edgar’s life is also shaped by the fact that he was born unable to speak, although he can hear normally.  This is a mystery to the doctors, who conducted test and after test on him but could never figure out the problem.  Something about this inability to speak gives him an unusually close rapport with the dogs, so close that his ability to train them sometimes suffers.  His companion, Almondine, is always by his side; she is trained to keep an eye on him and to alert the others if he is in trouble.  Her devotion to him — and his to her — is almost too moving to bear.

The novel’s point of view is most often focused on Edgar, with some chapters that shift to other characters and now and then even to Almondine, and Wroblewski often tells us what Edgar is thinking and feeling, but he rarely tells us what Edgar thinks of his inability to speak.  This fact is simply a given, something Edgar seems to accept.  (The one exception to this general rule is horrifying, however — all the more horrifying because of this earlier reticence.)  We also don’t learn much about Edgar’s life off the farm.  We know he attends school, but what his experience is like there we have no idea, and we never hear of any friends or outside interests or future plans.  For such a long novel, it’s remarkably focused on just a few people in a constrained setting.  This narrowness of focus intensifies the sense of doom that slowly settles over everybody; if things are going to go wrong, they are going to go spectacularly wrong and it will be a horrifying sight.  The farm is all that Edgar knows — it’s his whole world, and this gives him a strength and a vulnerability that are wrenching to behold.

This is Wroblewski’s first novel, and I’m very curious to see what he will publish next; this is a wonderful debut from a writer I hope gives us many more books in the future.

(If you decide to read the hard cover version of this book, I’d suggest not reading the front flap, as it gives away way too much of the plot.  After all I’ve said about Hamlet, you might think I’ve given away too much too, but the description on the front flap gives many more details than I have here, and I wish I hadn’t known them when I was reading.)

I’ve just started some lovely new books that I would like to tell you about.  One is Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall, which starts out at a fast pace, with a quick survey of the heroine’s childhood and then the early years of her marriage.  I am horrified at her struggle with her in-laws, who do their best to make her life as miserable as possible by ordering, manipulating, and guilting her into living as they think she should.  It reminds me of Evelina and the way that character got knocked around and ordered about by nearly everyone.  It’s painful.  But I have a feeling the action hasn’t really gotten going yet, and the book is about to take off in another direction.

Then I started Kenko’s Essays in Idleness, a collection of thoughts from a 14th century Japanese writer.  I picked up this book because of Philip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay, which has a brief selection from Kenko.  I was utterly charmed by the very first entry (it is now on my sidebar):

What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.

This is such a perfect description of blogging!  Or at least what blogging can be.  It doesn’t really describe my method, as I tend to keep my nonsensical thoughts to myself, but I enjoy reading bloggers who use the medium this way, and I love the idea of spending whole days doing nothing but jotting down thoughts.

While comparing Essays in Idleness and Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book, the editor of my edition writes that both books:

… belong to the random mode of composition known as zuihitsu (follow the brush) in Japanese.  This form — or lack of form — was most congenial to Japanese writers, who turned to it perhaps because it was less “dishonest” than creating fiction.  The formlessness of the zuihitsu did not impede enjoyment by readers; indeed, they took pleasure not only in moving from one to another of the great variety of subjects treated but in tracing subtle links joining the successive episodes.

Leaving aside the question of the honesty or dishonesty of fiction versus nonfiction (a point we could argue about for days), I’m drawn to this lack of form, the loosely associative kind of writing you find in essays and diaries and blogs.

Thinking of loosely associative kinds of writing brings me to my third book, Jenny Diski’s Stranger on a Train, which I already have fallen in love with.  It’s a travel book, sort of, but also an anti-travel book, meaning that Diski seems to be fighting against the usual approaches to travel every step of the way.  In the book’s first section, she describes riding all day on the London underground’s Circle Line, which, as the name implies, travels in a continuous circle, so she never had to get off.  She would visit the library, find three books to check out, and read them as she rode around in circles underground.  This is a perfect introduction to a book that, so far at least, is about trying to stay still while moving through space, or maybe I should say it’s about the hope that moving through space can offer a novel way of staying still.  The next chapter describes a sea voyage she took that allowed her to spend three weeks doing hardly anything but staring at the sea.  She’s traveling, but really she’s trying to find a section of time where nothing at all happens.  As someone who believes that if only life would slow down and nothing would happen for a while I would be able to think and come to grips with things and finally do something, I find this immensely appealing.  Of course, the attempt is doomed to failure, but I can’t help but admire her for trying.

Diski might be trying to stay still, but her book wanders all over the place, through time and space and from story to philosophical reflection back to story.  It reminds me of Geoff Dyer’s Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, another travel book that is about learning to stay still, and which also has a difficult, prickly persona who meanders through places and ideas, trying to make sense of life.  This is another genre I need to read more in — the anti-travel travel book.  I wonder what other examples are out there.

First of all, the reminder: the Slaves of Golconda are reading and discussing their next book soon — it’s Ruth Hall, and posts are due September 30th.  Anyone is free to join the group; just write about the book on your own blog and/or join the discussion at Metaxu Cafe.  It will be fun!

And now for the used bookstore.  I spend a couple hours yesterday afternoon with friends (three of whom have blogs!) browsing in the Book Barn in Niantic, Connecticut.  This is no ordinary used bookstore.  It’s got multiple buildings, first of all, each of which is jam-packed with books, over 350,000, as I learned from the website.  These buildings vary in size and in their holdings; there is the main barn, which is where the store first began and which has all kinds of subjects, from African American studies to women’s studies and woodworking.  There is also an area called Ellis Island, which houses books new to the shop that haven’t yet been sorted.  You can shop here, but nothing is alphabetized.  Then there is the Annex, where the fiction is kept and where I spent most of my time.

There is also Hades, with this sign:

And there is the haunted book shop (horror, mystery, science fiction), the “last page” (travel, sports), and another building about a mile away, with a whole range of subjects.

And that’s not all — there also also sheds and tents and other makeshift spaces that hold books that you can look through on your way from one building to another.  And there were goats!  And cats too, and the shop owners offer coffee and donuts, just in case you tire yourself out from all that browsing.

It was a mix of indoor and outdoor shopping — people sat around on park benches and at tables scattered around the property, and you wandered indoors and out and hardly noticed the difference.  It was lovely!

Of course I came home with some books:

• Elizabeth Taylor’s A Wreath of Roses.  I love Elizabeth Taylor and want to read as many of her books as I can.  This one is a Penguin edition, but it was also published by Virago.
• Vivian Gornick’s The End of the Novel of Love.  This is a collection of essays on love in novels by people such as Kate Chopin, Jean Rhys, Willa Cather, and others.
• Margaret Oliphant’s The Perpetual Curate, a Virago edition.  The store had a lot of Viragos, and I could have come home with a dozen, easily.
• Rosamund Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets, another Virago.  This is a sequel to her novel Invitation to the Waltz.

I will certainly be visiting this store again!  After shopping, our group went out to dinner and told stories of bike crashes through much of the meal.  These friends are readers, and they are also cyclists.  Who could ask for a better day, right?

I’m working my way slowly through Franco Moretti’s collection of essays The Novel, Volume I: History, Geography, and Culture and am about halfway through it.  It’s the kind of book that’s best for browsing in rather than reading straight through, except that I’m the kind of person who prefers to read straight through if possible, and this book rewards it.  I decided when I picked the book up that I would give up on any essay that wasn’t interesting, but I’ve quit reading only one essay (because it was horribly written, full of the worst kind of academic jargon) and have skimmed my way through only a couple more.  Otherwise, I’ve read and enjoyed each one.

The essays generally take up a time period and a country and give you an overview of what was happening with the novel at that time, so, for example, there are essays on the novel in 19C Japan, premodern China, 19C Russia, ancient Greece, medieval France, and early modern Spain.  There are also essays that take up a particular type of writing that is related to the novel or to narrative more generally and explain that relationship, forms such as midrash, myth, monogatari (a Japanese form), romance, and qissa (an Arabic form).

I just finished a section with some of the most fascinating essays in the book so far.  The essays in the section take up the question of book production and consumption in various locations at various times.  So, for example, the first essay analyzes how many novels were published in Britain from 1750-1830, as well as how many novels were published anonymously, how many publishing companies were involved in producing new novels, how many of the new novels were epistolary in form, and how many translated novels were published and from what languages.  There are similar essays describing the situation in the United States, Italy, Spain, India, Japan, and Nigeria, covering periods from the 19C into the 20th.  Each of these essays has lots of tables and charts, and each one makes an argument about how looking at statistics on book production and consumption can alter the accepted wisdom about each place and time.  Literary critics and historians tend not to be number crunchers, but these essays make the case for looking at the publishing and marketing context within which writers write.

There is so much good information here!  I’ve been tempted to write posts on individual essays as I’ve gone along, but it was the kind of thing that got pushed aside when I had other books to write about.  But if all this sounds interesting to you, the book is worth a look.

It is written by various people, though, which means the quality of writing varies, as well as the level of difficulty and the use of jargon.  My biggest complaint about the quality of writing is that many of the essays seem to presume the reader is already familiar with the field.  This would be fine, as it seems to be marketed toward academics or at least toward very knowledgeable general readers, except that the book covers so many fields that even an expert can’t be an expert in all of it.  With my academic background I’m pretty well equipped to read this book, and yet I still found some of the essays disorienting and difficult to follow because I lack a background in, say, narrative forms in ancient Greece.  I sometimes wanted a little more explanation, a little more by way of introduction to each piece.

But not all essays have this problem, and some of the best have made me think about time periods I’m familiar with in new ways.  One of the best essays is by Franco Moretti himself, and it explores, among other things, the role of “fillers” in fiction — those sections of a narrative where no major plot events, no turning points in the narrative, occur.  One of the main innovations of the 19C novel is the way it draws on this filler more and more; whereas 18C novels often have one major plot event after another in quick succession (unless you’re Samuel Richardson, I suppose), Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice gives us three major plot events and the rest of the novel is made up of smaller moments:

Narration: but of the everyday.  This is the secret of fillers,  Narration, because these episodes always contain a certain dose of uncertainty (how will Elizabeth react to Darcy’s words?  will he accept to talk with the Gardiners?); but the uncertainty remains local, circumscribed, without long-term consequences “for the development of the story,” as Barthes would say.  In this respect, fillers function very much like the good manners so important in Austen: they are both mechanisms designed to keep the “narrativity” of life under control – to give a regularity, a “style” to existence.

He then goes on to talk about the role of the everyday in the 19C novel — why it all the sudden became so important and what this has to do with the social and economic conditions of the time.

I’m only about halfway through the book, so I’m looking forward to what’s coming up, although at the rate I’m reading, it might be another half a year before I finish.