Sunday, January 20, 2008 · 7:55 pm

James Hogg, part 2

6002370.gif So, back to James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. It’s interesting the way people shorten the title into Confessions of a Justified Sinner; I understand not wanting to repeat the whole thing, but chopping off the first four words makes the book sound more religious than it may be — there’s tons of religion in the novel, definitely, but there’s a more secular way of reading it that the “private memoirs” part captures.

But first, I think the introduction-writer made the rather ridiculous claim I wrote about the other day because of the complexity of the book’s structure, i.e. the two narrators and the ways their stories overlap and diverge. But this makes up a big part of the fun of reading the book and doesn’t mean it’s particularly hard to follow.

The story is basically this: Robert Wringhim is raised by his mother and her severely-pious friend (or “friend” — their relationship is ambiguous) to believe that he, according to a Calvinist belief in predestination, has been chosen as one of the elect — he has received salvation and is guaranteed a place in heaven. He is taught that salvation comes not through works but by faith alone. The novel, written in 1824, takes place during the end of the 17C and the early years of the 18C in Scotland, and in the context of religious controversy, which gets played out in Robert’s life through his pious mother and her husband who cares little about religion. Robert’s parentage is uncertain; many believe that his mother’s friend is his real father (and this seems likeliest), although, of course, the friend denies it.

Into this situation comes a strange figure who quickly enmeshes himself deeply into Robert’s life. Exactly who this figure is never gets clarified. He doesn’t want to reveal any information about himself; he only reluctantly tells Robert to call him Gil-Martin, although it seems clear this is not his real name. He prefers to see Robert only when they are alone.

With the entrance of Gil-Martin, the book only gets stranger and stranger; when Robert first sees him, he is astounded because he looks exactly like Robert. He looks exactly like Robert at that particular moment, but his appearance changes. He can look like whoever he wants to at whatever moment he wants to. He also holds strange powers of attraction over Robert:

I felt a sort of invisible power that drew me towards him, something like the force of enchantment; which I could not resist. As we approached each other, our eyes met, and I can never describe the strange sensations that thrilled through my whole frame at that impressive moment.

They soon begin to spend all their time together, devoting hours to deep theological discussions. Gil-Martin appears to hold many of the same beliefs as Robert, but soon he pushes them to extremes that make Robert uneasy; he begins to argue that since Robert is part of the elect and his salvation is assured, he can do whatever he likes with no consequences. He can even commit murder — in fact, he may have a duty to commit murder, according to Gil-Martin, because if humanity is divided into two categories, the saved and the damned, and if they can tell who is who, then why not murder the damned? Why not rid the earth of them and make it a better place?

Robert at some level knows how twisted this logic is, but he is under Gil-Martin’s spell and whenever he is in his presence he loses his ability to think clearly. He is trapped.

Robert doesn’t seem to understand who Gil-Martin is, at least at first, but the reader quickly realizes that he may very well be the devil, tempting Robert to commit horrible deeds. On the other hand, and here is the more secular reading, he may be Robert’s own creation, a product of a diseased, schizophrenic mind. The two figures blend strangely and Robert begins to lose hold of his sense of self:

I generally conceived myself to be two people. When I lay in bed, I deemed there were two of us in it; when I sat up, I always beheld another person, and always in the same position from the place where I sat or stood, which was about three paces off me towards my left side. It mattered not how many or how few were present; this my second self was sure to be present in his place; and this occasioned a confusion in all my words and ideas that utterly astounded my friends … The most perverse part of it was, that I rarely conceived myself to be any of the two persons. I thought for the most part my companion was one of them, and my brother the other; and I found, that to be obliged to speak and answer in the character of another man, was a most awkward business at the long run.

By this point, Robert is a complete wreck, and the reader is on shaky ground — who is who and what is happening and what does it all mean? And then there’s the business of the two narratives. The story is not told in a straight-forward manner; rather, an editor tells what he knows of Robert’s life — his information coming partly from research but largely from tradition and so therefore suspect — and then Robert tells his story, covering some of the same ground the editor already covered and branching off in new directions. So there’s an editor who claims to be reliable but probably isn’t entirely, and there’s Robert who clearly is not reliable but who has most of the information we want, if only we could believe him.

To add to the fun, Hogg includes a page of Robert’s handwriting in the front of the text; it’s a page supposedly from Robert’s confessions. Hogg had a friend imitate handwriting from Robert’s time period to give the book a greater air of authenticity. Detracting somewhat from this sense of authenticity, however, is an appearance in the novel by James Hogg himself and by a servant of Sir Walter Scott’s. It seems that Hogg is having a little postmodern fun with his readers, blurring the boundaries between fiction and real life, refusing to offer any solid answers, drawing attention to the unreliability of history and the artificial nature of any text.

The more I write, the more complex the book seems. I still do not agree with David Groves when he says that “no one will understand very much about Hogg’s Confessions on first reading,” but I do believe that the more you think about this book, the murkier it gets. Perhaps the true situation is that the reader understands the book best on a first reading, but subsequent readings only undermine that confidence.

7 Comments

Filed under Books, Fiction

Friday, January 18, 2008 · 6:24 pm

James Hogg, part 1

6002370.gif I have finished James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself, with a detail of curious traditionary facts, and other evidence, by the editor. I love long titles! I couldn’t resist including the whole thing here. I won’t review the book tonight, but I did want to say a couple things. I loved it; it’s crazy and fascinating and weird. The long version of the title hints at its complexity: it’s got two narrators, and is a good example of the perspective-shifting technique Charlotte recently wrote about. It begins with an editor’s version of events, and then turns to the “confessions” of the justified sinner himself, and then closes with the editor again. They retell many of the same events, so part of the fun of the book is comparing their two versions.

Yes, the book is strange and weird, but I’m not sure that justifies this sentence from David Groves, the guy who wrote the introduction to my edition:

No one will understand very much about Hogg’s Confessions on first reading.

Am I wrong, or is that not the best thing to say in an introduction? It seems to me an introduction should get the reader excited about reading the book, not turn the reader off. And it’s not true. I’m sure I’d understand much more on a re-reading, but, still, I got an awful lot on the first go-round.

Okay, more on the novel soon …

10 Comments

Filed under Books, Fiction

Thursday, January 17, 2008 · 7:26 pm

A Compendium of Imaginary Saints

Ella from Box of Books recently sent me a copy of A Compendium of Imaginary Saints, a book she not only wrote and illustrated, but one she made, as in, created the covers and bound the pages. I am in awe — the book is extraordinary.

It’s small and easy to hold in your hand, with gold varnish on the covers. You can see pictures of it here and a description of its contents here. The inside cover tells you that the book is published by The Absent Classic publishing company: “Printers of Unexpected Books.” For those of you who don’t know about The Absent Classic series, it consists of a series of blog posts Ella created, each one featuring a made-up classic complete with a picture of the book’s cover, some excerpts, and information about the author’s life. I loved this series; I wished the books actually did exist so I could read them. Ella’s first TAC book was called Great Victorian Zombie Stories. How could anyone resist that, assuming there actually was a book to resist? Many of the books in the series came from the nineteenth century and captured perfectly a certain kind of Victorian sensibility — serious, pious, and deeply odd. (I can’t seem to find where these posts are now — help me Ella!)

Next there is the title page (also pictured in the post linked to above), which tells you that the Compendium is by Eleanor Hofstead and illustrated by Gloria Glass, Ella’s authorial and artistic pseudonyms. Then there is a brief note by Thaddeus R. Windrow, the editor-in-chief of The Absent Classic, which gives a brief biography of Hofstead — she is “a Catholic schoolteacher and amateur hagiologist,” who “spent her lifetime absorbed in the rich tradition of Christian saints.”

And then the main text begins, a one-page biography of each saint, with the saint’s portrait on the facing page. The portraits are perfect, what Ella calls “imitation medieval,” flat, simply-drawn faces in black and white, surrounded by a golden halo. And the biographies are fascinating — they are also portraits in miniature, telling about conversion experiences, visions, good works, and horrendous deaths. Each one ends by telling you what the saint is patron saint of, and this is where Ella’s sense of humor comes in, because these saints are patrons of some odd things. Here’s one of my favorites, quoted in full; it’s the biography of St. Eve of Aquitane:

St. Eve of Aquitane was born in France around 1645. As a young girl, she was noted for her extraordinary beauty, and also for her quiet, humble disposition. Although her mother, a near-destitute widow, arranged several wealthy matches for Eve, she refused them all. By the time she was in her twenties, her beauty was so famous that people came from all over the countryside to look at her. Finally St. Eve rubbed her face with nettles and thorns until she was scarred, whereupon she was left alone as she desired, to pray and meditate. She is the patron saint of acne sufferers.

There are also bios of the patron saint of reformed prostitutes, of school principles, of rescue workers, of male nurses, and of divorce lawyers. These are extraordinary saints indeed. I love the way the book mixes the realistic — the portraits, the horrific details — with the amusing and slightly absurd — there’s a patron saint of tatto artists!

Included with the book is a flyer about The Absent Classic publishing company, this particular title, and the next title to be printed: “Selected Works of J.E. Echwell,” which will “offer the best stories, drawings, and essays of that celebrated Victorian moralist, the founder of the Society for the Improvement of Literature.” I’m looking forward to it already!

7 Comments

Filed under Books

Tuesday, January 15, 2008 · 7:26 pm

The Novel

First of all, Muttboy is feeling much better and wants to thank those of you who offered your good wishes. He was out running around by this afternoon and behaving in such a way as to make his owners wonder whether his yelps last night weren’t the tiniest bit theatrical in nature. But no, he just heals quickly.

So, on to books. I have begun looking into The Novel: History, Geography, and Culture, edited by Franco Moretti; I’m not sure to what extent I’ll read this straight through or pick and choose — the book seems made for picking and choosing, but I really don’t like to read that way, and all of the essays do look interesting. The first one offered a good start, at any rate.

The book is divided into sections on various aspects of the novel, although the section titles aren’t always crystal clear, so it’s hard to say what they are about; I’m not sure why the first section is entitled “The Struggle for Space,” for example, although maybe when I read further into it, it will become clearer. A short introduction by Moretti helpfully explains that there are three types of pieces in the book. First there are “Essays,” which are:

… works of abstraction, synthesis, and comparative research: they establish the great periodizations that segment the flow of time, and the conceptual architecture that reveals its unity.

“Readings,” the second type, “are shorter pieces, unified by a common question, and devoted to the close analysis of individual texts.” Finally, there are sections called “Critical Apparatus,” which:

… study the novel’s wider ecosystem, focusing, for instance, on how the semantic field of “narrative” took shape around keywords such as midrash, monogatari, xiaoshuo, qissa — and, why not, romance.

Hmmm … I’m not sure what some of those words mean … I’ll look forward to learning about them.

The first essay, “From Oral to Written: An Anthropological Breakthrough in Storytelling” by Jack Goody, begins by discussing the extent to which storytelling was as important to oral cultures as people generally believe it was. Goody argues that it was not:

Indeed, I want to argue that, contrary to much received opinion, narrative … is not so much a universal feature of the human situation as one that is promoted by literacy and subsequently by printing.

Images that we might have of people in purely oral cultures quenching their thirst for narrative by listening to a bard recite long stories of heroes and war might not be realistic — rather, epic and other forms of narrative seem to require the development of reading and writing:

…the societies of the Heroic Age during which the epic flourished were ones where early literacy was present. By contrast, in the purely oral cultures of Africa, the epic is a rarity, except on the southern fringes of the Sahara, which have been much influenced by Islam and by its literary forms.

The reasons for this scarcity of narrative — particularly long narrative — include the difficulty of listening to long recitations — the attention they demand. But also narrative, in the sense of fictional storytelling, was mistrusted because of its complicated relationship to truth; fiction is, after all, lies, even though it may have a particular kind of truth to tell. But fiction was, if anything, associated with childishness and so existed most commonly in the form of folklore meant for children.

After this opening section, Goody turns to the development of writing and the novel. It’s writing that makes longer narratives more likely to arise; in writing, it’s much easier to understand and digest a long complicated story and the writer doesn’t have to deal with interruptions from listeners. But the problem of fiction and lies remains, and this is why, Goody argues, the novel developed fairly late and unevenly across cultures. Early novels tried to get around this problem by claiming that they were truthful, even though they weren’t; Robinson Crusoe, for example, is presented as an autobiography featuring real events that Daniel Defoe is merely presenting to us, not writing himself. Slowly, over time, fiction became more acceptable, although even so it tended to be relegated to “frivolous” women readers, while the men focused on serious nonfiction.

And the uncertainty about fiction remains today; we still get upset when lines between fiction and nonfiction are blurred, as the James Frey debacle will attest. Goody believes that even today nonfiction is taken much more seriously than fiction; this may be true, although it’s hard for me to see, novel-lover that I am.

So, after this interesting start, we’ll see where the rest of the book leads …

11 Comments

Filed under Books, Fiction, Nonfiction

Monday, January 14, 2008 · 6:51 pm

Notes and news

Today is one of those days that should have been excellent but wasn’t — my semester hasn’t begun yet, so though I still have work to do preparing syllabi and such, I’m not terribly busy. What do I have to complain about, right? Except I could never rouse myself to do much today and so had the sense that I was wasting time but didn’t have the energy to do anything about it. I’ve been enjoying my books but even they weren’t satisfying me. The weather is lousy too — wet and cold. But the worst thing is that poor Muttboy hurt himself out in the woods this afternoon; Hobgoblin noticed him walking slowly but didn’t think much of it until they were both home a couple hours later and Muttboy started whining. When he tried to stand up, it was obvious that it hurt and he would yelp now and then. A suffering dog is a really sad thing, isn’t it? Hobgoblin called the vet who basically said to give Muttboy two aspirin and call her in the morning — good advice, I’m sure, but not terribly comforting. Now he’s curled up on the couch sleeping.

But I don’t want this post to be one long whine, so I’ll mention a few things besides my troubles. For one, Litlove’s new book, The Best of Tales from the Reading Room arrived in the mail today, and what a nice looking book it is! It’s got a picture of Litlove and some comments from blog readers on the back and an introduction that tells the story of how she got into blogging. The book itself is made up of many of her best posts — ones on Rilke, Julian Barnes, Virginia Woolf and many other authors and topics, and some more personal posts as well.

And one more thing about Litlove — her new edition of The Best of New Writing on the Web is up, so go check it out!

In other news — Harper’s has an essay by Ursula Le Guin called “Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading,” unfortunately not available online. It’s interesting, though, so if you are in a library or bookstore and see it, it might be worth a glance. In the article she says some very sensible things, in particular her point that we tend to forget that for most of history people didn’t read all that much:

… I also want to question the assumption — whether gloomy or faintly gloating — that books are on the way out. I think they’re here to stay. It’s just that not all that many people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?

For most of human history, most people could not read at all. Literacy was not only a demarcator between the powerful and the powerless; it was power itself. Pleasure was not an issue.

Of course, it’s a shame that many people choose not to read today, but I think the point is right that we tend to think that reading is in a crisis that has never existed before. While Le Guin has no kind words for those who choose not to read, the real villain of her essay is the publishing industry. She lambastes it for seeking never-ending growth in profits in an industry that just can’t sustain it:

To me, then, one of the most despicable things about corporate publishers and chain booksellers is their assumption that books are inherently worthless. If a title that was supposed to sell a lot doesn’t “perform” within a few weeks, it gets its covers torn off — it is trashed. The corporate mentality recognizes no success that is not immediate. This week’s blockbuster must eclipse last week’s, as if there weren’t room for more than one book at a time. Hence the crass stupidity of most publishers (and, again, chain booksellers) in handling backlists….

But capitalists count weeks, not years. To get big quick money, the publisher must risk a multimillion-dollar advance on a hot author who’s supposed to provide this week’s bestseller. These millions — often a dead loss — come out of funds that used to go to pay normal advances to reliable midlist authors and the royalties on older books that kept selling. Many midlist authors have been dropped, many reliably selling books remaindered, in order to feed Moloch. Is that any way to run a business?

Finally, I’ve begun looking into Franco Moretti’s The Novel: History, Geography, and Culture and have found much to learn. I’ll post more on that later.

12 Comments

Filed under Books, Life

Sunday, January 13, 2008 · 2:47 am

For the TBR pile

Which theologian are you?
created with QuizFarm.com
You scored as Paul TillichPaul Tillich sought to express Christian truth in an existentialist way. Our primary problem is alienation from the ground of our being, so that our life is meaningless. Great for psychotherapy, but no longer very influential.

Paul Tillich
 
73%
Friedrich Schleiermacher
 
60%
Jürgen Moltmann
 
53%
Anselm
 
33%
Charles Finney
 
33%
John Calvin
 
27%
Jonathan Edwards
 
20%
Augustine
 
13%
Martin Luther
 
13%
Karl Barth
 
0%

Thanks to Emily.

7 Comments

Filed under Books, Links

Saturday, January 12, 2008 · 7:37 pm

Paris Stories

For the most part, I am enjoying Mavis Gallant’s book Paris Stories; I say for the most part because my response to them has been a bit uneven — I’m not sure if this is my fault or the stories’ fault. But at the halfway point of the book I can say I’ve liked most of them, especially the one I just finished, “Speck’s Idea.” The story is about a gallery owner in Paris, Speck, who is trying to revitalize the gallery and earn some money to keep himself going; he gets the idea to revive the work of the artist Hubert Cruche and spends much of the story negotiating with Cruche’s widow, a woman who has some surprises up her sleeve. Although the story is a little sad — Speck seems like someone who will always dream of success and never quite find it — but it’s charmingly told. Gallant’s wit shines through and she has a brilliant way of describing her character. Unfortunately, I failed to mark any of the brilliant passages so I can’t reproduce them here, but trust me! They are brilliant.

The stories I’ve liked best in the collection are the ones where Gallant slows down the pace a bit and takes some time to describe scenes and dialogue. Some of the stories give the full sweep of a character’s life, from birth to mature adulthood if not beyond (such as “The Moslem Wife”), rarely stopping to linger on any one moment, and these leave me a bit cold; what I find myself wishing for is more detailed interaction among the characters. I do admire Gallant’s way of summing up a life, however; in just a few phrases, she can capture the essence of a person.

Many of the stories in the book are on the long side, but two of the shorter ones are particularly good; “In Transit” describes a couple as they wait in an airport — the story manages to give you a sense of their entire history while concentrating on a brief period of time. The other one, “From the Fifteenth District” is a playful tale of haunting — except it’s the living who haunt the dead rather than the other way around.

S0 — we’ll see what the second half of the book brings.

Cross-posted here.

8 Comments

Filed under Books, Short stories

Friday, January 11, 2008 · 7:03 pm

Final thoughts on Out of Sheer Rage

While I liked Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage a lot (a lot — my previous posts on it are here, here, and here), the last 50 pages or so had some irritating sections. I suppose when you read a book as raw as this one, some places are bound to irritate you. Dyer says some strange things about women, he sounds more whiny than he did earlier in the book, and he begins to write more about his rage, which is interesting I suppose, but what he describes is so far outside my own experience I began to tune out a bit.

But, still, I loved this book; I love this kind of quirky, non-categorizable nonfiction, the kind that takes you interesting places, although along the way you have no idea where you’re going. I want more books like this one! (If you know of any, please say so.)

I’ll leave you with a passage, one that captures something I’m familiar with — the way our desires and regrets shift and change:

I accept the consequences of doing things which I will later regret. In a sense then I regret them before I do them. Instead of resolving to learn to cook I regret to inform myself that by the end of the year I will still not know how to cook (because I hate cooking) even though learning to cook would improve my life no end. Instead of doing the exercises which will save my right knee … I resign myself to regretting not having done something about what will, in a few years, be a debilitating, potentially crippling ailment. I resign myself to things: this is my own warped version of amor fati: regretting everything but resigning myself to this regret. However things turn out I am bound to wish they had turned out differently. I am resigned to that.

Take this book which is intermittently about Lawrence. Right now I profoundly regret ever having started it. I wish I hadn’t bothered. But if I hadn’t started it I would have regretted not having done so. I knew this and so I got on with it and now that I have got on with it I regret that I got on with it in the way I did. I regret that it will not turn out to be the sober, academic study of Lawrence that I had hoped to write but I accept this because I know that, in the future, when it is finished, I won’t want it to be any different. I’ll be glad that this little book turned out how it did because I will see that what was intended to be a sober, academic study of D.H. Lawrence had to become a case history. Not a history of how I recovered from a breakdown but of how breaking down became a means of continuing. Anyone can have a breakdown, anyone. The trick is to have a breakdown and take it in one’s stride. Ideally one would get to the stage where one had a total nervous breakdown and didn’t even notice.

5 Comments

Filed under Books, Nonfiction

Friday, January 11, 2008 · 5:29 pm

For those of you worried about the demise of the book

Check this out.

(via)

4 Comments

Filed under Books, Links

Thursday, January 10, 2008 · 6:46 pm

The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen

19599946.jpg I thought I might fall in love with this book, and it turns out I didn’t, but I don’t want to hold that against it. It is a very good novel; I’m glad I read it, and I’d like to read more Bowen. There’s something cold about the book, though, that made me admire more than love it. Its subject matter is rather depressing, and although I generally like depressing books, this one … well, it left me sad and didn’t dazzle me in a way that would make me feel better. But, really, I do admire it, and I believe I don’t need to fall in love with a book to recognize that it’s quite good.

It’s a story of lost innocence; Portia, a 16-year-old girl who is newly-orphaned comes to live with her much older half-brother Thomas and his wife Anna, and while she is there she learns some harsh lessons about the world. Her new family doesn’t really want here there; they took her in because it was Portia’s dying father’s request and because it seemed like the right thing to do. But Anna particularly resents having Portia in her home — the opening scene reveals that Anna has secretly read Portia’s diary and found that Portia has written some unflattering things about her and her friends. It’s as though Anna feels like she is competing with Portia; we learn that Anna had a love affair when she was much younger that ended disappointingly and it’s implied that Anna has never really recovered — now she sees Portia with her youth and beauty and attractiveness and resents the life she has ahead of her.

Portia meets a young friend of Anna’s named Eddie and the plot gets more complicated from there. The two quickly begin a relationship, but this relationship means something quite different for each of them. Portia in all her innocence believes she has fallen in love, but it’s clear that Eddie is merely interested in having some fun.

Poor Portia. She doesn’t fit in anywhere, and she clings to Eddie as the one she feels she can trust the most. She attends what sounds like a dreadful school and makes one friend there, but this friend doesn’t really satisfy, and she only gets in trouble while trying to make it through the school day. In the book’s second section, Anna and Thomas head off to France and leave Portia behind at the house of Anna’s old governess. Here, too, Portia feels like an outsider, and when she invites Eddie to visit her there, events head in a direction she never anticipated.

It’s Portia’s innocence that causes so much trouble, or, rather, it’s the world around her that causes the trouble, not knowing what to do with her innocence. Portia isn’t trained to deal with proper London society or with boys who make rash promises or with the isolation she endures. Anna and Thomas live dull, sterile lives; they have carefully cordoned themselves off from any real interaction with other people or even with each other:

Callers were unheard of at Windsor Terrace. They had been eliminated; they simply did not occur. The Quaynes’ [Thomas and Anna’s] home life was as much their private life as though their marriage had been illicit. Their privacy was surrounded by an electric fence — friends who did not first telephone did not come.

In this atmosphere Portia dries up; it’s no wonder she turns to other people, even harmful people, to try to find some liveliness and love.

Bowen is very much interested in psychological states. The back cover describes her style as Jamesian, and I think that claim holds true; Bowen describes her characters’ inner lives in depth, capturing the ebb and flow of their feelings and responses. It’s a thoughtful book, one that moves slowly — although not in a way that might bore — and tells its story with pleasing thoroughness. If you like books with emotional and psychological insight — ones that capture the complexity of character, then you may like this book.

On another note entirely, I began James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner last night and am enjoying it so far — the first 20 pages at least. I may begin another novel soon — The Road, most likely. I am also enjoying Mavis Gallant’s Paris Stories. So it looks like my indecisive period may be over — which is a relief.

Cross-posted here.

13 Comments

Filed under Books, Fiction

Tuesday, January 8, 2008 · 9:51 pm

Indecision

I feel completely incapable of making a decision about what novel to read next. I’ve thought about it ever since I finished Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart two days ago, but have come to no conclusions. It’s rare for me not to be in the middle of a novel, and usually I have one lined up to go the minute I finish the previous one. It’s the variety of possibilities that’s paralyzed me. Should I read a classic? If so, from what century? Something obvious like Balzac’s Cousin Bette or a little less so like James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner? Or should I read Virginia Woolf? Or something contemporary? If something contemporary, should it be challenging or comfortingly familiar? By a man or a woman? American or British? Something written in English or translated?

One thing is certain — it’s good that I’ve finished Geoff Dyer’s book Out of Sheer Rage, because as much as I liked the book, his chronic indecision is rubbing off on me, I’m afraid.

14 Comments

Filed under Books, Reading

Tuesday, January 8, 2008 · 6:01 pm

The beach loop

I had a very nice ride in the 60 degree weather today; actually it was 47 when I left, but 61 when I returned. I’m so used to bundling up for rides these days that I felt very underdressed — I wore only very light covers over my shoes and could probably have gone without them (most people call these booties, but the word seems ridiculous), shorts, tank top, short-sleeve t-shirt, jersey, arm warmers, knee warmers, and cycling gloves — short fingered! — and that’s it. Oh, and a helmet of course.

I rode for 3 1/2 hours, down to the Long Island Sound and back, following what my cycling club calls the beach loop. Or one version of the beach loop — there are many, many ways to get to the beach and back (Compo Beach for those of you from the area).

I did run into some troubles, though, minor ones. Heading south I went straight when I should have turned right and unnecessarily climbed a huge, steep hill, the sort where I was standing up in my easiest gear. I had written down the roads when I did a slightly different version of this loop a year ago, but I mistakenly wrote “left” when I should have written “right” and never corrected it, so when I saw the right turn I should have taken, I went past it because according to my paper it wasn’t correct. And I didn’t remember making any mistake last year. The thing is, my intuition told me I needed to turn right, but Connecticut roads are so tricky that intuition (especially mine) doesn’t generally help much. So even though I sort of knew I needed to turn right, I thought I was doing the best thing by ignoring what I “knew” and just riding on. So now I have no idea whether I should follow my intuition or not if I find myself in a similar sitution — either way, I’ll make the wrong decision probably.

The rest of my troubles were solved by friendly police officers — two of them! I got to a tricky intersection I hadn’t ridden through before and wandered around for a while, annoying the many drivers around me. Luckily for me, there was construction going on just up the road and a police officer watching over things, and he gave me directions. He called out as I began to ride away “I’m jealous!” Yes, I was lucky to have enough free time today to go on a long ride by the beach.

The second police officer was very friendly too; I ran into him while trying to ride down a road that was closed because of a fallen something or other, and he gave me directions around to where I needed to go. This one yelled out “enjoy your ride” as I pedaled away. Very nice!

I also had a rough last 10 miles or so; I think I hadn’t recovered from a hard ride I did on Sunday, and my quad muscles were rebelling. I was also getting hungry; I’d eaten two Cliff bars, which should have been plenty, except I was riding during my lunch time when normally I’d eat more than that and burn a lot fewer calories.

But otherwise, it was wonderful to be out in the spring-like weather. I’m trying not to think about how far away spring actually is.

Cross-posted here.

5 Comments

Filed under Cycling

Monday, January 7, 2008 · 4:20 pm

Novels and notes

I was never terribly won over by the novels of D.H. Lawrence, and Out of Sheer Rage is not making me change my mind about that, but it is interesting me in Lawrence’s other works, his letters and criticism.

(I was trying to trick you with my post title into believing that I’d finally moved on to something besides Out of Sheer Rage, but I haven’t — sorry! I will post about something else soon — the Elizabeth Bowen novel I just finished, for example.)

Geoff Dyer himself feels ambivalently about Lawrence’s novels; he knows he should re-read them for his book, but he really can’t bear to, and so he doesn’t. It’s not that he disliked them that much; it’s just that he has no desire to re-read them. Instead, he’d rather read more in the other material — the notes to the great works rather than the great works themselves:

As time goes by we drift away from the great texts, the finished works on which an author’s reputation is built, towards the journals, diaries, letters, manuscripts, jottings. This is not simply because, as an author’s stature grows posthumously, the fund of published texts becomes exhausted and we have to make do not only with previously unpublished or unfinished material but, increasingly, with matter that was never intended for publication. It is also because we want to get nearer to the man or woman who wrote these books, to his or her being …. A curious reversal takes place. The finished works serve as prologue to the jottings; the published book becomes a stage to be passed through — a draft — en route to the definitive pleasure of the notes, the fleeting impressions, the sketches, in which it had its origin.

I have not experienced this myself, or perhaps I haven’t yet reached that stage, except possibly in the case of Virginia Woolf, but I do find what he has to say about Lawrence’s notes and letters intriguing. He quotes from Lawrence’s wife Frieda to explain his attraction to these more ephemeral forms of writing:

“Since Lawrence died, all these donkeys years already, he has grown and grown for me … To me his relationship, his bond with everything in creation was so amazing, no preconceived ideas, just a meeting between him and a creature, a tree, a cloud, anything. I called it love, but it was something else — Bejahung in German, ‘saying yes’.”

Dyer goes on to write that he finds this “saying yes” most clearly in Lawrence’s letters — it exists in the novels but comes through most excitingly elsewhere. There’s something about Lawrence’s writing that makes a reader wish to have known him, in a way no one, he says, really wishes to have known E.M. Forster.

Dyer then connects these ideas about Lawrence’s notes and letters to his own writing:

If this book aspires to the condition of notes that is because, for me, Lawrence’s prose is at its best when it comes closest to notes.

I do like this reversal of the traditional genre hierarchies, the “rules” that say that novels are more important and literary than letters and certainly more so than notes. I love the idea of aspiring to the condition of notes and would say that Out of Sheer Rage does have a note or letter-like quality; the ideas are developed, yes, but there is a rambling nature to the book, a spontaneity that you don’t often find in nonfiction.

Dyer gives Lawrence’s book Sea and Sardinia as an example of fine Lawrentian prose; Lawrence took no notes while visiting Sardinia, and wrote his book a few weeks afterwards based on memories:

The lack of notes, in other words, accounts for the book’s note-like immediacy. Notes taken at the time, on the move, and referred to later … would have come between the experience and the writing. As it is, everything is written — rather than noted and then written — as experienced. The experience is created in the writing rather than re-created from notes. Reading it, you are drenched in a spray of ideas that never lets up. Impressions are experienced as ideas, ideas are glimpsed like fields through a train window, one after another. Opinions erupt into ideas, argument is conveyed as sensation, sensations are felt as argument.

I wonder about this, actually — couldn’t it be the case that writing that seems the most spontaneous and impressionistic might be the writing the author most labored over? Wouldn’t spontaneity more likely be an illusion than a reality? I wonder if Lawrence really wrote the book in the way Dyer describes, and if, in fact, Dyer really wrote his book the way these passages imply he might have — carelessly, lazily, on-the-fly. Perhaps he labored over every transition, every seemingly-spontaneous and emotion-filled fragment and exclamation point.

At any rate, Dyer closes this particular section with an intriguing paragraph:

“A book which is not a copy of other books has its own construction,” warned Lawrence and the kind of novels I like are ones which bear no traces of being novels. Which is why the novelists I like best are, with the exception of the last-named, not novelists at all: Nietzsche, the Goncourt brothers, Barthes, Fernando Pessoa, Ryszard Kapuscindki, Thomas Bernhard …

A future reading list perhaps?

6 Comments

Filed under Books, Nonfiction

Saturday, January 5, 2008 · 7:32 pm

Out of Sheer Rage, continued

In a comment on my previous post about Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, Smithereens, drawing attention to the book’s title, asked, “Is there anywhere in the book a raging moment or is it pure second degree?” Actually, there’s not a whole lot of rage in the book, at least not of the obvious, overt sort. For the most part, what rage there is lies under the surface, smoldering beneath Dyer’s melancholy, laziness, indecision, and contrariness.

The book’s title comes from a D.H. Lawrence quotation:

Out of sheer rage I’ve begun my book on Thomas Hardy. It will be about anything but Thomas Hardy, I am afraid — queer stuff — but not bad.

This is a perfect epigraph for the book — Dyer’s own book is ostensibly about D.H. Lawrence, but really is not about Lawrence at all. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say it’s about much more than Lawrence. It’s also “queer stuff — but not bad.” Not bad at all.

There is one section I’ve come to with more overt rage, however, and it’s the only section I’ve felt ambivalently about, the only one where Dyer began to irritate me. In this section he talks about a book a friend had given him, a collection of critical essays on Lawrence, the sort with titles like “Lawrence, Foucault and the Language of Sexuality” and “Alternatives to Logocentrism in D.H. Lawrence.” Merely reading the book sends him into a rage:

Oh it was too much, it was too stupid. I threw the book across the room and then I tried to tear it up but it was too resilient. By now I was blazing mad. I thought about getting [the editor’s] phone number and making threatening calls. Then I looked around for the means to destroy his vile, filthy book. In the end it took a whole box of matches and some risk of personal injury before I succeeded in deconstructing it.

I burned it in self-defence. It was the book or me because writing like that kills everything it touches.

Yes, Dyer throws a temper tantrum because he can’t stand academic criticism. He goes on about how much he can’t stand academics either:

Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because hundreds of academics are busy killing everything they touch.

I’m very tired of this clichéd idea that academics secretly hate the thing they study and that they can’t write and that everything they say is inscrutable and pointless. Yes, sometimes this is the case, but obviously not always, maybe not even often.

But Dyer knows this too. First he starts talking about literary criticism he does like, the criticism written by other writers:

If you want to see how literature lives then you turn to writers, and see what they’ve said about each other, either in essays, reviews, in letters or journals — and in the works themselves. ‘The best readings of art are art,’ said George Steiner (an academic!); the great books add up to a tacit ‘syllabus of enacted criticism’.

He claims that writerly criticism is different from academic criticism because writers throw their lives into it:

Brodsky has gone through certain poems of Auden’s with the finest of combs; Nabokov has subjected Pushkin to forensic scrunity. The difference is that these works of Pushkin’s and Auden’s were not just studied: they were lived through in a way that is anathema to the academic …

And then, with that closing ellipsis — Dyer’s, not mine — he saves himself, in my opinion, by finally coming to some sense. The next paragraph reads:

Except this is nonsense of course. Scholars live their work too. Leon Edel — to take one example from hundreds — embraced Henry James’s life and work as perilously intimately as any writer ever has. I withdraw that claim, it’s ludicrous, it won’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny. I withdraw it unconditionally — but I also want to let it stand, conditionally.

And now he gets all angry again —

Scholarly work on the texts, on preparing lovely editions of Lawrence’s letters is one thing but those critical studies that we read at university … Research! Research! The very work is like a bell, tolling the death and the imminent turning to dust of whichever poor sod is being researched. Spare me. Spare me the drudgery of systematic examinations and give me the lightning flashes of those wild books in which there is no attempt to cover the ground thoroughly or reasonably.

Well. As much as I’d like to stay irritated with Dyer, I relent a little bit, because that closing sentence was wonderful, and so is this passage, just a little after the above:

That’s why Lawrence is so exciting: he took the imaginative line in all his criticism, in the Study of Thomas Hardy or the Studies in Classic American Literature, or the ‘Introduction to his Paintings’. Each of them is an electrical storm of ideas! Hit and miss, illuminating even when hopelessly wide of the mark (‘the judgment may be all wrong: but this was the impression I got’). Bang! Crash! Lightning flash after lightning flash, searing, unpredictable, dangerous.

Yes, I too love criticism that takes the imaginative line, which Dyer’s book certainly does, and which any kind of critic is capable of doing, writer or not — a fact Dyer does recognize, if grudgingly. This makes me long to read the Study of Thomas Hardy and Studies in Classic American Literature. And, although I’m still mildly irritated with Dyer, I’m more than willing to read on in his book …

9 Comments

Filed under Books, Nonfiction

Thursday, January 3, 2008 · 7:24 pm

Out of Sheer Rage

1625693.gif I’m reading Geoff Dyer’s book Out of Sheer Rage and am liking it at least as much as his later book Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It. (Interestingly the cover of my edition is similar to the one pictured here, except that Dyer has no beard and his head is shaven. I have an ARC, which would explain things; I guess he grew some hair out before the hard cover edition.) It’s a book about not writing a book about D.H. Lawrence. It’s a little about his obsession with Lawrence (and here it occasionally reminds me of one of my favorite books ever, Nicholson Baker’s U and I), but mostly it’s about his attempts to write and his failure, and all the things he does to work around this problem. He’s got a very dry sense of humor, which I find immensely appealing and which makes me laugh, when I hardly ever laugh at books. He’s also got a contrarian view of the world, which I also find appealing and funny.

I thought I’d give you a few excerpts today. There’s really so much to enjoy in this book, it’s one I could write multiple blog posts about, although I’m reading it too fast to make that work. Here’s a passage where he talks about his writing process:

From the start I’d known that I had to write my book as I went along. There are people who like to complete all the reading, all the research and then, when they read everything that there is to read, when they have attained complete mastery of the material, then and only then do they sit down and write it up. Not me. Once I know enough about a subject to begin writing about it I lose interest in it immediately. In the case of Lawrence I knew I’d have to make sure that I finished writing my book at exactly the moment that I had satisfied my curiosity, and to do this the writing had to lag fractionally behind the reading.

The book he’d originally intended to write about Lawrence will never get written, although this one got written in its place, but there are times I wish the original idea had worked out, although exactly what the original idea was I’m not entirely sure. But here’s one vision of what the original idea might have been; this passage comes after a discussion of Dyer’s collection of photos of Lawrence:

What I might do, it occurred to me in Rome, was prepare an album of these pictures, arrange them in a fashion that pleased me — interspersing them, when appropriate, with pictures of my family and myself — provide captions (lengthy ones, quite often) and then, late in the day, remove the pictures so that only the captions and the ghosts of photos remained. And not to stop there: to rearrange these captions so that they referred only occasionally to the photographs for which they had been intended, so that they existed, instead, in relation to each other, — that, I thought to myself, might not only enable me to get started on my study but even prevent my falling into idleness and depression for a while.

In a way he has done this, as much of the book discusses photos of Lawrence. He also has interesting passages on language and emotion — how language doesn’t really capture what we feel — or don’t feel:

The sea: you watch it for a while, lose interest, and then, because there is nothing else to look at, go back to watching it. It fills you with great thoughts which, leading nowhere and having nothing to focus on except the unfocused mass of the sea, dissolve into a vacancy which in turn, for want of any other defining characteristic, you feel content to term ‘awe.’

And then there’s this:

We drank our beer on the balcony of the deserted cafe, looking across the deserted road at the deserted station, engulfed, periodically, by the thunder of hooves and the whine of ricochets from the television. For the third or fourth time that day a strange floaty indifference to everything came over me. Since this sensation was utterly unfamiliar and not at all unpleasant I decided that, if experienced again, I would refer to it as contentment.

Dyer’s persona is often like this: detached, melancholic if not depressed, analytical, isolated, and often surprising. As he’s obsessed with getting and not getting writing done (mostly not), he returns often to the figure of the writer and the space within which a writer works:

… did it matter so much where you lived? The important thing, surely, was to find some little niche where you could work; to settle into a groove and get your work done. Logically, yes, but once, in north London, I had found myself walking along the road where Julian Barnes lived. I didn’t see him but I knew that in one of these large, comfortable houses Julian Barnes was sitting at his desk, working, as he did every day. It seemed an intolerable waste of a life, of a writer’s life especially, to sit at a desk in this nice, dull street in north London. It seemed, curiously, a betrayal of the idea of the writer. It made me think of a picture of Lawrence, sitting by a tree in the blazing afternoon, surrounded by the sizzle of cicadas, notebook on his knees, writing: an image of the ideal condition of the writer.

Or so it had appeared in memory. When I actually dug it out it turned out that there was no notebook on his knees. Lawrence is not writing, he is just sitting there: which is why, presumably, it is such an idyllic image of the writer.

This, I suppose, accounts for some of Dyer’s “failure” as a writer (although obviously he’s not, really): his image of the writer doesn’t actually involve the writer doing any writing. This book is about wanting to be a writer, but not wanting to do the work. Which would be highly annoying, if Dyer weren’t, in reality, such a good writer …

9 Comments

Filed under Books, Nonfiction

Wednesday, January 2, 2008 · 7:52 pm

A brief post on new books

I had a gift card to use at Barnes and Noble and needed some other things as well, so last Saturday, Hobgoblin and I used this as an excuse to head to Manhattan to go on a shopping spree (which included getting me a new pair of running shoes, so now I consider myself officially a runner). I really, really will stop accumulating books, very soon, I promise, but in addition to the Barnes and Noble trip, I did order a couple other books online that I can’t do without and I mooched one that looked irresistible. So here’s the last “new books” post I’m going to do for a while (seriously!):

  • Javier Marias’s All Souls. Marias looks like an interesting new (new to me) author, and Litlove’s intriguing review made me pick this one up. There’s also this article from the NYRB if you’d like to know more.
  • Rosamund Lehmann’s The Echoing Grove. I loved Lehmann’s A Note in Music, which I read last year, and I wanted to find The Echoing Grove in particular as a follow-up because it inspired the Jonathan Coe novel I’ve got, The House of Sleep, so perhaps I’ll read the two back to back.
  • Elaine Scarry’s Dreaming by the Book. I loved Scarry’s book On Beauty and Being Just, and this one looks fabulous too. One of the Amazon reviews says that Scarry “wonders how the best writing enables us to produce images and scenes in our minds that carry something of the force of reality. She deftly unfolds an answer by identifying and explicating several general principles and five formal practices by which authors invisibly command us to manipulate the objects of our imagination.”
  • Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel is on its way to my house right now; it’s the next Slaves of Golconda book, the discussion of which will be held at the end of February.
  • Plutarch’s Selected Essays on Love, the Family, and the Good Life. Phillip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay recommends this one as follow-up reading for Plutarch.
  • Gabriel Josipovici’s Moo Pak. This one is coming to me from Book Mooch. I know very little about it, but I’m sure it’s going to be good!
  • Amanda Vickery’s The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England. I love reading about this time period!

10 Comments

Filed under Books, Lists

Tuesday, January 1, 2008 · 6:39 pm

New Year’s Non-Resolutions

As several of you know, because I’ve left comments on your blogs saying as much, I’m feeling anti-planning and anti-resolutions right now. Which does not mean I’ll be making no plans — at the same time as I’m feeling anti-planning, I’m also rather envious of everyone else’s plans — rather, it means I’m going to try to make them as vague as possible and as realistic as possible. I just looked back at my New Year’s resolutions post from last year, and it began with a similar hesitancy about planning, but I went on to list all kinds of specific goals, most of which I did not meet. I’ll try another method this time around.

So how badly did I do meeting last year’s resolutions? I planned to read 13 classics and got to only 7 of the ones I’d listed, although I did read a number of classics not on the list. But now that I’m looking at it more closely, I see that the rest of my record isn’t so bad. I wanted to read more books of poetry than the previous year, which I did (4); to read more plays than the previous year, which I did (1); to read more short stories, which I did (3 collections); to read more books in translation, which I did (15); and to read one science book, which I did not.

I also did not complete Kate’s Reading Across Borders challenge, although I came close. I committed to reading 5 books in translation from outside Europe, and I read 4 (Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City, Mario Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk, and Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter). I did read 11 books in translation from Europe, so I think I did fairly well in the translation category, even if I didn’t meant my particular challenge.

I’m doing okay with the Outmoded Authors challenge and this one goes on until the end of February, which gives me plenty of time.  I committed to reading Walter Scott and a few other authors from the list, and so far I’ve read Scott, plus Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, and now I’m reading Elizabeth Bowen, which means I need only one other author after Bowen, assuming “a few” means three or more.

So — what’s for next year? First of all, I would like to change some attitudes of mine. I don’t like the way I get down on myself if I don’t read what I set out to read. So any resolutions I make and challenges I sign up for are only suggestions to myself, not requirements. If I don’t meet them, it’s not a big deal. I would like to emulate Kate’s attitude about challenges:

I’ve never regretted signing up for one even when I didn’t finish it, so great is the pleasure of embarking on a reading journey in the company of congenial fellows, and so great the rewards of the encounters with new authors and books thereby provoked.

Next, I’m going to do my best not to worry about the total number of books I read. I do like keeping track of the number, but I don’t like how I notice the number of books I read each month and wonder what the yearly total will be based on the monthly number, and wonder whether this year’s number will be higher or lower than last year’s. I would like to follow Stefanie’s resolution to value quality over quantity.

I’d like to keep reading lots of books from earlier centuries. I won’t name a specific number, but I will try to read regularly from pre-20thC times throughout the year. Last year I read 12 books from earlier centuries, which wasn’t so bad.

I’d also like to join Kate’s Short Story Challenge — keeping in mind my new attitude toward challenges, of course. I do want to keep reading in the genre, so joining the challenge only makes sense. As I prefer to read collections rather than single stories, I’m going to choose Option #3, which entails reading 5 to 10 collections from any author. I’m drawn to Option #4, which involves the same number of books but by authors I haven’t encountered before, but I can think of a few authors such as Raymond Carver whose work I’ve read but would like to read more of, or Flannery O’Connor whom I might want to re-read, so it makes more sense to stick with Option #3.

Finally, I’d like to keep going with my essay project, which involves using a couple essay anthologies I’ve got as guides to a broader survey of the genre. I made some progress on this project today by reading Plutarch’s “Consolation to his Wife” and liking it enough to order a collection of his essays.

And that’s it. I’m hoping to make this coming year a calmer, less goal-oriented reading year.

15 Comments

Filed under Books, Reading

Monday, December 31, 2007 · 4:36 pm

Happy New Year Everyone!

Happy New Year! Hobgoblin and I will spend the evening as we usually spend New Year’s Eve, drinking hard cider, eating chips and other food that’s bad for us, watching movies, and trying desperately to stay up till midnight (and perhaps failing). Have a great evening whatever you are doing and have a wonderful 2008!

13 Comments

Filed under Life

Sunday, December 30, 2007 · 6:52 pm

Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations

1imagedbcgi.jpg Many thanks to Imani for writing so well about Gabriel Josipovici’s novel Goldberg: Variations and inspiring me to read it. I mentioned in an earlier post that I finished this book and then immediately read it again; this re-reading worked better than the time I re-read Nightwood immediately after finishing it: this time I was able to understand more of the book the second time around and I enjoyed staying in the world of the novel for a little while longer. I wouldn’t, in fact, mind reading it again; I won’t do it, but if someone asked me to for some reason, I wouldn’t object. There’s something soothing about reading the novel, which doesn’t sound like an appropriate way to describe a serious work of fiction, but that’s how I felt. In spite of the fact that the identity of the narrator/authorial presence is uncertain throughout much of the book, I felt like I was in the hands of someone I could trust.

The novel’s initial premise is that Samuel Goldberg, a writer, has been hired by Tobias Westfield, a wealthy English gentleman, to read to him until he falls asleep. Westfield suffers from terrible insomnia and is desperately searching for a cure. Goldberg begins to read to him, but Westfield engages him in conversation, and eventually asks him if he would write an original piece to read the next night. Goldberg agrees, but the next day he finds himself suffering from writer’s block. The only solution he can find is to write the story of coming to Westfield’s house, being asked to write an original composition, and failing. In other words, he will try to turn the failure itself into a success. And thus ends the first chapter.

What follows are 29 more chapters, each one a “variation,” each one telling some story about Goldberg and his family or Westfield and his family, or describing some local historical event, or narrating the conversations Goldberg and his friend Hammond have as Hammond drives him to the Westfield manor, or telling some other story that relates in some way to the others. Part of the fun of the book is figuring out how all these pieces fit together. In one chapter, Goldberg’s wife writes him a letter (this was one of my favorite chapters — her voice is beautiful); in another, we learn what happened to Westfield’s first wife; in another, we learn how he came to marry his second; in another, the narrator tells the story of Goldberg’s friend Isaac Sinclair, the poet who went mad.

Many of the chapters record conversations characters have about literature or philosophy, for example, the conversation Hammond and Goldberg have about the differences between Achilles and Odysseus as heroes, or the chapter where Goldberg gets summoned by the King (did I mention this takes place in the 18C?) and is asked to improvise a speech on this topic: “A man who had enough wanted everything … as a result he was left with nothing. Treat this not as a morality but as a tragedy.” Whereupon Goldberg pauses for a moment and then launches into a detailed explication of a John Donne poem illustrating the topic. When he arrives home afterwards, he decides he is unhappy with his response and sends the King something more pleasing — a series of stories illustrating the idea.

All these disquisitions are included in the novel, so that it has a patchwork feel — we are given narratives, descriptions, literary criticism, philosophical explorations, conversations, letters, fantastical stories, historical events, all of them ultimately fitting together in one way or another. In later chapters, new characters and new narrators are introduced, which puts the earlier material in a new light and broadens the scope of the novel. As you work your way through it, the novel comes to seem like a puzzle, the reader left wondering how each new piece, each new chapter, fits with the rest.

Many of the stories are about failure and loss, particularly the failure of artistic inspiration. Goldberg, upon his failure to compose a story that might put Westfield to sleep, contemplates the changes that have occurred in the circumstances of artistic production over the centuries; in an imaginary conversation with Westfield he says:

It may be the case, sir, that in the time of Greece and Rome, and even in the time of our glorious Shakespeare, a man of letters might have fulfilled your commission. The writers of those times might in a day have produced for you a dazzling series of variations on any theme of your choice. You would have had but to speak, but to outline, however briefly, the subject about which you wished them to discourse, and in an hour or two, or perhaps even less, they would have regaled you with the most delightful fancies and stirring sequences based upon your subject. But, alas, our own age is grown altogether less inventive and more melancholic, and few can now find it in their hearts ‘to take a point at pleasure and wrest and turn it as he list, making either much or little of it, according as shall seem best in his own conceit’, as an ancient writer on these matters puts it. For what we list has grown obscure and difficult to define.

Situated in the 18C, Goldberg is living in the transition time between the artist as craftsperson and the artist as Romantic genius, and his ability to improvise before the King and also his inability to write at Westfield’s command illustrates this tension. He is torn between these two definitions of the artist, longing to be a craftsman but recognizing that the artist-as-craftsman figure is disappearing:

The truth of the matter is that something deep within me yearns to be the kind of craftsman he believes me to be, but something else, equally deep, rejects the formulation. But if that is so, why do I still yearn for that other version of myself, why do I still hold up to myself as an ideal the image of the maker, skilled and inventive, capable of coping with every challenge?

He met the challenge of the King, yes, but he couldn’t resist writing another response later, one he could compose at leisure, when inspiration struck. He is subject to doubts, no longer able simply to create and enjoy what he created.

The novel is about artistic failure, but also about success: in her letter to Goldberg, Mrs. Goldberg writes beautifully about what writing can accomplish:

I had never thought of any of this till I sat down half an hour ago filled with the need to write about you. That is what writing is like. The sheet of paper before one and the pen in one’s hand seem to allow those things to emerge which one knew but didn’t know one knew. It may not be very interesting or very profound, but it brings relief. Like hugging you. But why is it not sufficient to sit in my chair and imagine myself hugging you? After all, when I write here in my notebook you are no more present than if I closed my eyes and thought of you. Indeed, less so perhaps, since if I close my eyes then I can see you, whereas when I write I certainly do not. But then when I hug you I do not see you, I feel you. And that is what seems to happen with writing. But why should that be so? To feel you, you have to be present and close to me, and now you are neither. Yet I am sure this is the truth, that when I close my eyes I see you but when I write I feel you.

Beautiful, yes? Do you see why I loved this book? Really, if this book sounds at all appealing to you, read it.

9 Comments

Filed under Books, Fiction

Friday, December 28, 2007 · 7:28 pm

Another blog

I don’t want to bury my post below, which I finished only a few minutes ago, but I do want to post a link to my new blog, inspired by Jenny D’s Triaspirational, which will be about my triathlon training. I’m writing it on an experimental basis, just to see how it goes. I reserve the right to delete it the minute I get bored (or the minute I quit triathlon training, which is still a possibility). The purpose will be to keep track of my training, so I don’t expect it will be of much interest to others, unless you’d like to know just how hard I’m working.

6 Comments

Filed under Links