35 posts tagged “fiction”
Carey, Peter. His Illegal Self. New York: Knopf, 2008.
On the long list of things that Mr. Carey does damn well, I would give top place to children. Those who fear that the child POV was exhausted with high modernism and is now verboten and twee will be glad to meet Che, or Jay, who is rendered with fidelity in his moments of perception and emotion and transgression, who is used neither sentimentally as a miniature adult nor sadistically as a punching bag for the world's arbitrary cruelty. Both cruelty and love in this book come as surprises, reversing themselves without warning - Carey has the genuine storyteller's confidence, with no fear of the leaping metaphor or the unexpected lurch in time and perspective. Damn if he doesn't know how to deploy them. This doesn't enter the marketplace for another month or so (a friend in high places scored me a review copy), but watch the skies.
On the long list of things that Mr. Carey does damn well, I would give top place to children. Those who fear that the child POV was exhausted with high modernism and is now verboten and twee will be glad to meet Che, or Jay, who is rendered with fidelity in his moments of perception and emotion and transgression, who is used neither sentimentally as a miniature adult nor sadistically as a punching bag for the world's arbitrary cruelty. Both cruelty and love in this book come as surprises, reversing themselves without warning - Carey has the genuine storyteller's confidence, with no fear of the leaping metaphor or the unexpected lurch in time and perspective. Damn if he doesn't know how to deploy them. This doesn't enter the marketplace for another month or so (a friend in high places scored me a review copy), but watch the skies.
Flaubert, Gustave. Bouvard and Pécuchet; with the Dictionary of Received Ideas (Bouvard et Pécuchet, Dictionnaire des idées reçues). Trans. A.J. Krailsheimer. London: Penguin, 1976 (1874-1880).
It's so funny. It's so mean. It's so funny. There's no way to do right by it - one of B. and P.'s principal occupations is mocking the stupidity and unoriginality of other people, and they aren't precisely wrong to do so. It doesn't feel unfinished. The tone is so homogenous that it's easy enough to superimpose it over Flaubert's plot sketch for the last chapters (with another steel-trap ending, just like L'Éducation Sentimentale), have the received ideas for dessert and go to bed with heartburn.
It's so funny. It's so mean. It's so funny. There's no way to do right by it - one of B. and P.'s principal occupations is mocking the stupidity and unoriginality of other people, and they aren't precisely wrong to do so. It doesn't feel unfinished. The tone is so homogenous that it's easy enough to superimpose it over Flaubert's plot sketch for the last chapters (with another steel-trap ending, just like L'Éducation Sentimentale), have the received ideas for dessert and go to bed with heartburn.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1996 (1910).
They call it a novel, but the notebook format basically turns it into a series of prose poems held together by the Brigge persona, who sometimes is a solid character with a personal history and sometimes is just a voice - more willfully naive than a lot of Rilke's poetic speakers but recognizably continuous with them. So it's a book of wonderful moments: funny, often scary, circling around anonymity, death and time. My favorite might have been the fable about the man who exchanges his fifty remaining years of life for a titanic heap of seconds, which immediately start to vanish on him - but it's hard to choose.
They call it a novel, but the notebook format basically turns it into a series of prose poems held together by the Brigge persona, who sometimes is a solid character with a personal history and sometimes is just a voice - more willfully naive than a lot of Rilke's poetic speakers but recognizably continuous with them. So it's a book of wonderful moments: funny, often scary, circling around anonymity, death and time. My favorite might have been the fable about the man who exchanges his fifty remaining years of life for a titanic heap of seconds, which immediately start to vanish on him - but it's hard to choose.
Melville, Herman. "The Piazza," "Benito Cereno," "The Encantadas," "The Bell-Tower." In Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories. New York: Bantam, 1984 (1856).
This Billy Budd edition is rounded out with the entire contents (minus "The Lightning-Rod Man") of the only story collection Melville published in his lifetime. The famous ones are "Bartleby," which was never a huge favorite of mine, and "Benito Cereno," which what do you say about "Benito Cereno," but "The Piazza" is one of the weirdest versions of pastoral I've ever read; the whimsical narrator superimposed on a scene of actual hardship strikes (and strikes hard) that difficult, uneasy note that the early Wordsworth is always trying for. "The Encantadas" is an amazing series of sketches on the Galapagos islands with a lot of quotes from Spenser; Melville allegorizes the Galapagos tortoise with no less ingenuity, though at far less length, than he allegorizes his whale, and then there are these sorts of inimitable moments:
This Billy Budd edition is rounded out with the entire contents (minus "The Lightning-Rod Man") of the only story collection Melville published in his lifetime. The famous ones are "Bartleby," which was never a huge favorite of mine, and "Benito Cereno," which what do you say about "Benito Cereno," but "The Piazza" is one of the weirdest versions of pastoral I've ever read; the whimsical narrator superimposed on a scene of actual hardship strikes (and strikes hard) that difficult, uneasy note that the early Wordsworth is always trying for. "The Encantadas" is an amazing series of sketches on the Galapagos islands with a lot of quotes from Spenser; Melville allegorizes the Galapagos tortoise with no less ingenuity, though at far less length, than he allegorizes his whale, and then there are these sorts of inimitable moments:
If now you desire the population of Albemarle, I will give you, in round numbers, the statistic, according to the most reliable estimates made upon the spot:
Men..............none
Anteaters......unknown
Man-haters....unknown
Lizards.........500,000
Snakes........500,000
Spiders.....10,000,000
Salamanders....unknown
Devils...........unknownMaking a clean total of.........11,000,000
exclusive of an incomputable host of fiends, anteaters, man-haters, and salamanders.
Rulfo, Juan. Pedro Páramo. Ed. José Carlos González Boixo. Madrid: Cátedra, 1992 (1955).
Since I'm starting the semester with two of my very favorite books, I took the opportunity to go back and read this in Spanish, which I'd never done before. (I wish I could show you the awesome cover of my edition, which appears to depict a skull eating a watermelon.) Páramo in Spanish means a barren stretch of land; apparently Eliot's Waste Land was first translated into Spanish as El Páramo in 1930, but it's unknown if Rulfo ever came across it.
To the extent that there are traces of modernism in this book, it's modernism of a certain stripe only. The jumbled chronology and focus on a rural past could have been another case of Faulkner gone south, but Rulfo's terse sentences give precisely the opposite effect; and if Quentin finds himself in limbo at the end of Absalom, Absalom!, compelled to narrate the past, Rulfo goes one better by putting his young narrator six feet underground and breaking his consciousness completely apart. The narrative that emerges is in a sense historical, but not really interpretive; a tragic structure gradually comes into view, but as with old Aeschylus the facts are formidably bare, somehow discouraging psychological explanation. (The reigning critical controversies tend to do with ambiguities of fact - who kills who at the end, whether the narrator is dead all along, etc.) And the book's brief length draws a sharp limit to what can be said about history -- if such a sordid hodgepodge of events even deserves the name. In the end you can only stare at it.
Since I'm starting the semester with two of my very favorite books, I took the opportunity to go back and read this in Spanish, which I'd never done before. (I wish I could show you the awesome cover of my edition, which appears to depict a skull eating a watermelon.) Páramo in Spanish means a barren stretch of land; apparently Eliot's Waste Land was first translated into Spanish as El Páramo in 1930, but it's unknown if Rulfo ever came across it.
To the extent that there are traces of modernism in this book, it's modernism of a certain stripe only. The jumbled chronology and focus on a rural past could have been another case of Faulkner gone south, but Rulfo's terse sentences give precisely the opposite effect; and if Quentin finds himself in limbo at the end of Absalom, Absalom!, compelled to narrate the past, Rulfo goes one better by putting his young narrator six feet underground and breaking his consciousness completely apart. The narrative that emerges is in a sense historical, but not really interpretive; a tragic structure gradually comes into view, but as with old Aeschylus the facts are formidably bare, somehow discouraging psychological explanation. (The reigning critical controversies tend to do with ambiguities of fact - who kills who at the end, whether the narrator is dead all along, etc.) And the book's brief length draws a sharp limit to what can be said about history -- if such a sordid hodgepodge of events even deserves the name. In the end you can only stare at it.
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung). Trans. Stanley Corngold. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996 (1912).
This was my teaching copy this semester. I think the Corngold translation is about as good as anyone's going to manage, and the footnotes are helpful, but the essays in the back turned out to be no use at all in the classroom; either they're smart but way too technical for undergrads (Corngold's essay) or just plain crummy (most of the others). If I teach Kafka again I'll probably go with the Bantam Classics Metamorphosis, which has the same translation and features generous excerpts from Walter Sokel's excellent "Education for Tragedy" in the back, along with some really silly old-school psychoanalytic readings (apples as anal impregnation!) that we can all laugh at.
This was my teaching copy this semester. I think the Corngold translation is about as good as anyone's going to manage, and the footnotes are helpful, but the essays in the back turned out to be no use at all in the classroom; either they're smart but way too technical for undergrads (Corngold's essay) or just plain crummy (most of the others). If I teach Kafka again I'll probably go with the Bantam Classics Metamorphosis, which has the same translation and features generous excerpts from Walter Sokel's excellent "Education for Tragedy" in the back, along with some really silly old-school psychoanalytic readings (apples as anal impregnation!) that we can all laugh at.
James, Henry. The Awkward Age. New York: Penguin, 1966 (1899).
After some initial casting about, the motor for the plot resolves into an older man's offer of a healthy financial bequest to a younger man on the condition of a certain marriage taking place. The Tragic Muse had a similar situation, but this time around the matter is treated with a great deal more hesitation and indirection; for one thing, a point is made of never mentioning the sum, so that it joins Milly Theale's mysterious illness and Lambert Strether's mysterious manufactured item in the list of Crucial Jamesian Unspeakables. On the level of form, the strategy has something to do with modernist ideas of purity: factoring out the contingent. On the level of plot, it has something to do with complete terror of being conditioned by the material world.
After some initial casting about, the motor for the plot resolves into an older man's offer of a healthy financial bequest to a younger man on the condition of a certain marriage taking place. The Tragic Muse had a similar situation, but this time around the matter is treated with a great deal more hesitation and indirection; for one thing, a point is made of never mentioning the sum, so that it joins Milly Theale's mysterious illness and Lambert Strether's mysterious manufactured item in the list of Crucial Jamesian Unspeakables. On the level of form, the strategy has something to do with modernist ideas of purity: factoring out the contingent. On the level of plot, it has something to do with complete terror of being conditioned by the material world.
Pater, Walter. Marius the Epicurean. 2 vols. London: Macmillan and Co., 1900 (1885).
This was a hard book to enjoy, and I didn't really rise to the challenge. In writing about the present by writing about the past, Pater courts some of the same dangers as Charles Johnson's The Oxherding Tale - we must cultivate beauty! Roman culture is so belated - how can we write anything when the Greeks got there first? But in general Pater wants to avoid making his second-century Italy into too transparent an allegory, so he overloads on specifics - thus endless translations and general donnish lecturing interspersed with pretty landscapes, behind which one can very dimly make out the moving outlines of the characters. It was like walking through ancient Rome with a towel over my head.
This was a hard book to enjoy, and I didn't really rise to the challenge. In writing about the present by writing about the past, Pater courts some of the same dangers as Charles Johnson's The Oxherding Tale - we must cultivate beauty! Roman culture is so belated - how can we write anything when the Greeks got there first? But in general Pater wants to avoid making his second-century Italy into too transparent an allegory, so he overloads on specifics - thus endless translations and general donnish lecturing interspersed with pretty landscapes, behind which one can very dimly make out the moving outlines of the characters. It was like walking through ancient Rome with a towel over my head.
James, Henry. The Other House. New York: NYRB Classics, 1999 (1896).
This is a good way to read a Henry James play without reading a Henry James play. It's his first novel after five years spent in an unsuccessful attempt to conquer the theatre (Oscar Wilde, that unclean beast, had captured the public heart) and is taken from a scenario originally intended as a three-act play. James would pull this adaptation trick more than once, and the results could be pretty awkward, but this one has its merits; after a clunky first act (excuse me, "first book") designed to get the machinery going, the melodrama plays out with brio. The style betrays its origins - mostly dialogue, with interspersed sentences that read like stage directions, stitched together with periodic paragraphs of Jamesian introspection - but somehow it does serve as a forerunner (a "precedent," James calls it in his notebooks) to the late style. I need to do more work to figure out how.
This is a good way to read a Henry James play without reading a Henry James play. It's his first novel after five years spent in an unsuccessful attempt to conquer the theatre (Oscar Wilde, that unclean beast, had captured the public heart) and is taken from a scenario originally intended as a three-act play. James would pull this adaptation trick more than once, and the results could be pretty awkward, but this one has its merits; after a clunky first act (excuse me, "first book") designed to get the machinery going, the melodrama plays out with brio. The style betrays its origins - mostly dialogue, with interspersed sentences that read like stage directions, stitched together with periodic paragraphs of Jamesian introspection - but somehow it does serve as a forerunner (a "precedent," James calls it in his notebooks) to the late style. I need to do more work to figure out how.
James, Henry. The Tragic Music. New York: Library of America, 1989 (1890).
This one gave me a bad dream where I was running around the house screaming about the mediocrity of my own talent; but that's my problem and not the book's. Of all the meditations on art and life I've seen from James - or anyone, really - this is one of the best; it manages to treat the struggle and sacrifice of the vocation without lapsing into self-pity or cheesy Romantic notions of inner torment. The book contains both an aesthete and a working artist, but they aren't the same person; and at the end of the book, having served as a necessary goad, the aesthete vanishes ("like a symbolic personage"), leaving the artist his lot of daily work, not poetry but sober prose.
There are three or four other principal threads in the book, all done just as well - but I'm not such a pedant as to go through them all.
This one gave me a bad dream where I was running around the house screaming about the mediocrity of my own talent; but that's my problem and not the book's. Of all the meditations on art and life I've seen from James - or anyone, really - this is one of the best; it manages to treat the struggle and sacrifice of the vocation without lapsing into self-pity or cheesy Romantic notions of inner torment. The book contains both an aesthete and a working artist, but they aren't the same person; and at the end of the book, having served as a necessary goad, the aesthete vanishes ("like a symbolic personage"), leaving the artist his lot of daily work, not poetry but sober prose.
There are three or four other principal threads in the book, all done just as well - but I'm not such a pedant as to go through them all.
