→ May 23, 2008
→ By

Germinal.

The Novel 100 author Daniel Burt described Emile Zola’s Germinal as “perhaps the angriest book ever written,” and it’s hard to deny that anger – or perhaps rage – is the fuel on which the book’s engine runs. It’s also a riveting novel, a highly readable novel, and a complex novel that is expertly plotted and contains within it stories of unrequited love and deep suspense.

Germinal, which is present on the Novel 100 (#66) and the Bloomsbury 100, is the story of a conflict between the poor laborers of a coal-mining town in 1860s France and the bourgeois management and owners. The workers live in grinding poverty, barely earning subsistence wages, dying in the mine or because of it, and ultimately living lives devoid of meaning. Ownership pits worker against worker to drive labor costs down, yet points to the subsidized housing it provides as evidence of its beneficence. Zola doesn’t exonerate his laborers, showing how their infighting and ignorance hold them back.

The plot centers around Etienne, an unemployed mechanic who finds work in the mine but, discovering the appalling conditions and dead-end wages, decides to put his knowledge of Marxism to use and organizes a general strike. The strike has severe consequences for everyone in the town, and to some degree for ownership, and precipitates a spree of violence punctuated by one of the most vicious scenes I can recall in a Western novel.

Buried within the greater story is a for the time progressive view of women’s rights and role, by way of a savage depiction of the women in the mine, including Catherine, who captures Etienne’s heart but instead chooses to be with the violent man who first “takes” her virginity by force. Zola attacks nearly everyone and everything by distilling them into sharp and unappealing characters, from abbes more interested in peace than helping the poor to shopkeepers who prey on customers near starvation to the idle rich who own the means of production.

The primary literary criticism of Germinal seems to be its inaccuracy. Zola introduces early-1800s working conditions into the latter half of the century, but adds Marxist ideas and organizations before they could have reached France. I have less of a problem with this, since the novel is functioning on some level as satire, and satire works via exaggeration.

Next up: Italo Calvino’s short work Marcovaldo, or seasons in the city.

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→ May 15, 2008
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A Dance to the Music of Time, completed.

UPDATE, December 2010: The University of Chicago Press has made volume one of the Dance available as a free e-book on amazon.com and on their own site.

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Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, is a masterwork of dry English humor and brilliant characterization. Part of both the TIME 100 and the Modern Library 100 (where it ranked 43rd), Dance is told by Nick Jenkins over a period of nearly fifty years as he moves through the social circles of interwar London, serves in a rather low-risk infantry unit in World War II, and then becomes a distinguished writer after the war and returns to many of the same characters who populated the earlier books. It’s a popular series in the United Kingdom, but it’s not well-known in the United States.

Nick himself is a wry observer but a milquetoast character, and his wife, Isobel, is a phantom in the stories. The main character and antihero is Kenneth Widmerpool, a climber lacking in social skills but not in confidence who always seems to find himself in the right situation, exasperating anyone hoping to see him fail. The series is full of funny, well-drawn secondary characters, from Nick’s alcoholic school-mate Charles Stringham to the “mobile laundry unit” head Bithel to the ice queen Pamela Flitton, who destroys every man on whom she sets her sights. The narrative greed that I look for in every novel isn’t strong here, but the reader is drawn forward simply by the music of time: We’re following Nick as he goes through life, seeing the world through the lens of his professional and personal lives.

Powell’s observations on the rhythms of life display Nick’s interest, but with a surprising bit of dispassion. Broken marriages, personal setbacks, and even deaths are reported as facts intrinsic to life, but by and large unworthy of comment; by the last book, where secondary characters are dropping like flies, their deaths become parenthetical phrases, a reflection (I suppose) on how we perceive the deaths of those with whom we’ve lost touch as we ourselves grow older. Instead, Jenkins (whom Powell admitted was based on himself) prefers to find interest in small stories and little scandals, although as the series advances the scandals do become proportionally bigger and Powell’s writing veers somewhat more towards the risqué and sensational, perhaps a reflection of the various time periods covered by the series.

The twelve novels, comprising roughly 65-70 long chapters over about 3000 pages, don’t quite match Wodehouse for laugh-inducing content, but Powell infuses the writing with wit. His characters names can totter on the line between the ridiculous and the plausible, from the Walpole-Wilsons to Flavia Wisebite (and her ex-husband, Cosmo Flitton) to Scorpio Murtlock. When books written by some of the secondary characters are mentioned, they have glorious titles like Camel Ride to the Tomb and Dogs Have No Uncles. The punch lines, when they do arrive, are funny because of the context; having one character pour the contents of a sugar-bowl over another’s head is not intrinsically all that funny, but when it happens in Dance, it rises to another level of humor. Jenkins plays the Bob Newhart role of the one sane or normal person surrounded by wackos on lunatics, leaving him, with some later help from Isobel, to offer his commentary.

I have a strong feeling that J.K. Rowling has read Powell’s series and paid homage to it through two minor characters in the Harry Potter series. One minor character in the series is a mystic and spiritualist named Dr. Trelawney, who speaks in aphorisms and vague pronouncements, greeting people by saying, “The Essence of All is the Godhead of the True,” and expecting (but rarely receiving) the reply, “The Vision of Visions Heals the Blindness of Sight.” The similarity to Professor Trelawney in name, in bent, and in obsession with visions is unlikely to be a coincidence. I also saw similarities between Powell’s character Sillery and Rowling’s Professor Slughorn; both are slightly unctuous men who ran salons in their college’s houses and seemed to devote significant energy to determining whom to invite, measuring their gatherings’ success by the names and status of the attendees.

If you enjoy English writing, Powell’s depiction of upper-class English society from the immediate aftermath of World War I into the turbulent 1960s is worth the significant time investment. Next up for me: I’m already a third of the way into Emile Zola’s seminal socio-political novel Germinal.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,
→ May 11, 2008
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Zeno’s Conscience.

Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, listed in the Bloomsbury 100 and in the honorable mentions in the Novel 100, was Svevo’s third and last novel, published shortly before his death in a car accident and resulting from a lengthy professional relationship with James Joyce.

Zeno’s Conscience, previously translated as The Confessions of Zeno, is a modernist comedy, narrated by the neurotic, duplicitous Zeno, looking back on his life and his marriage, his affair with a young singer, his business partnership with his brother-in-law, and his interminable attempts to quit smoking. Zeno’s analyst has asked him to write down his “confessions” as part of his therapy, and the short introductory note from “Dr. S” says that the therapist is publishing them as a sort of revenge against his former patient, who has revealed that not everything he wrote therein is true. Because the story is told from Zeno’s perspective, it’s full of amusing rationalizations and subtle attempts to shift blame on to the people around him.

Zeno’s antics and his descriptions of them are amusing for about 300 pages, but halfway through the book’s longest section, the description of his partnership with brother-in-law Guido, the narrative begins to drag, and the fact that that story offers a distinct conclusion doesn’t help the fact that the path there was aimless. Guido is, himself, a fraud, but I could never be sure how much of Zeno’s written treatment of him was real and how much was projection. The strongest section is the story of Zeno’s courtship of the beautiful Ada, who spurns him for Guido, and how he seems to enjoy watching Ada deteriorate physically in middle age.

If this seems like a more indifferent review than I normally give, it reflects my uncertainty over whether or not I liked the book. I tore through the first three-fourths of it, then stumbled to the finish line as I lost interest. The introduction labels the book as a commentary on the idle rich of pre-War Trieste, which may be true but might be too far removed from us to have as much impact as, say, Fitzgerald’s portraits of the idle rich in America in his books.

Next up: I’ve just finished the last book of A Dance to the Music of Time, and will post my thoughts on the whole twelve-volume series shortly.

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→ May 3, 2008
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Independent People.

I love this book. It is an unfolding wonder of artistic vision and skill – one of the best books of the twentieth century. I can’t imagine any greater delight than coming to Independent People for the first time.

That’s not my take on Halldór Laxness’ novel; it’s from novelist Jane Smiley, who wrote a more direct takeoff on King Lear and provided the above blurb for the cover of Independent People. No, I didn’t think that the novel was a revelation on every page or a life-changing experience. I thought it was awful.

To be more specific, I think it is the most bleak, humorless, and misanthropic book I’ve ever read. Laxness himself admitted that his protagonist, Bjartur, was “stupid,” but it’s worse than that – he’s a complete asshole whose lack of regard for the feelings of others, above all women, borders on sociopathy. The ideal of “independence” around which the novel is structured is folly and leads to Bjartur’s ruin in various ways. And none of the supporting characters is built with enough depth or dimension to overcome the long shadow of Bjartur’s obstinate, materialist, misogynistic point of view.

Independent People is the story of Bjartur’s adult life as he leaves the servitude of the local Bailiff of Myri and attempts to build an independent life as a self-sufficient farmer on a local croft. He marries twice, although his stubbornness and lack of empathy lead to the deaths of both women. His eldest child, Asta Sollilja, is the only one to whom he shows any affection, but when she becomes pregnant at fifteen at the hands of a rapscallion whom Bjartur himself invites into the home, he throws her out and resolves (with finite success) to have nothing more to do with her. Depending on how you interpret the ending, his assholishness may lead to her death too. Around all of this happiness is famine, bankruptcy, fraud, parochialism, and the pointless deaths of several people and many animals.

What made the book so difficult to gut my way through was the complete lack of warmth. You could freeze your drink if you sit it too close to the novel; the only glimmers of empathy from any major character come from Asta, but they’re depicted as the confused feelings of an ultra-sheltered teenaged girl, and she too falls into a cynical stoicism when her father throws her out. Laxness tries to create some embers of emotion in the short conclusion, but it seemed forced.

Laxness won a Nobel Prize and appears to have a small but highly devoted following, at least in the literary world. All I can say is that I’m glad I went to Iceland long before I read this book, because I doubt he would have made the country come off any worse if he’d written that the locals bite the heads off of live puppies.

Next up: Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, a modernist comedy of psychoanalysis and self-absorption.

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→ April 23, 2008
→ By

The House of the Spirits.

The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende, is one of the great works in the magical realism movement prominent in post-colonial literature, especially that of Latin America. While it lacks the broad scope and dreamlike qualities of the genre’s paragon, One Hundred Years of Solitude, it is still an epic combining romance, the rise and fall of a great family, and the turbulent political history of the never-named country of Chile. (The book also appears in the “second 100” list of honorable mentions in the Novel 100.)

The central thread in the story is the Trueba family, introduced after what amounts to a lengthy prologue on the daughter of a prominent local family who is betrothed to Esteban Trueba. When that girl, the beautiful Rosa, dies suddenly, Trueba heads to his family’s property in a remote section of the country and builds a modern-day plantation, sublimating his grief into work. He returns to marry Rosa’s younger sister, the clairvoyant Clara (Spanish for “clear”), and the two enter a long and ultimately stormy marriage, begetting three children and one grandchild who will become central in the book’s rapid-fire conclusion during the overthrow of the democratically elected government of The Candidate. (Never named, the Candidate is obviously Salvador Allende, the author’s uncle, who was overthrown and assassinated in a US-backed coup in 1973 that installed the brutal dictator Augustus Pinochet into office and plunged Chile into over a decade of political and economic misery.)

The emphasis of the story is fluid, with early emphasis on the passionate yet dispassionate love affair between Esteban, who on some level still yearns for his deceased lover, and Clara, whose connection to the spirit world puts her beyond Esteban’s emotional reach:

He wanted far more than her body; he wanted control over that undefined and luminous material that lay within her and escaped him evening those moments when she appeared to be dying of pleasure.

Esteban is, despite humble origins, a reactionary, an ardent defender of The Way Things Are and The Way We’ve Always Done It, putting him in conflict with his wife, his daughter and her revolutionary lover, and eventually his granddaughter and her own forbidden paramour. The father’s sins are ultimately visited on his progeny, especially granddaughter Alba, who ends up a political prisoner of the Pinochet regime.

Allende mixes narratives, with most of the novel told by an omniscient narrator with a wry outlook and hints of sarcasm, broken up by occasional soliloquies from Esteban Trueba, speaking in his last years as he looks back over his life and those of his family members. Trueba’s sections drag relative to the remainder of the book because we know that his perspective is tainted by his political leanings and complicity in much of the violence that peppers the book. The third-person narration also has a near-monopoly on the book’s subtle humor, which never dominates the text but slips seamlessly into the narrative, such as the description of one of Esteban’s sons, returned from a spiritual journey in India:

… his skin clinging to his bones, and that lost gaze so often observed in those who eat only vegetables.

Or, in my favorite line from the book, in the discussion of how most families have one member who’s certifiable, while the Truebas appear to have avoided that affliction:

No. Here the madness was divided up equally, and there was nothing left over for us to have our own lunatic.

Allende clearly favors the progress of modernity over the rigid hierarchy of the old economic system and the autocratic system used to prop it up, but there’s a recurring note of wistful nostalgia for the culture of the earlier years. The book’s spiritual underpinnings, ranging from Clara’s communications with the spirits living in their urban mansion to her ability to play Chopin on a piano that’s several feet away to the simple naturalism of the peasants on their rural estate, are all presented favorably, even admiringly, and are set off from the obstinate conservatism of Trueba and the old guard.

The novel undergoes one abrupt change after Clara dies and the coup to overthrow the Candidate begins, turning from an epic romance/family saga into a political or psychological thriller. Allende takes us into the political prison with Alba while we also see the frantic efforts of her aged grandfather, now politically impotent after years of playing a critical role in the government, to free her. How he ultimately does so is one of the most charming, emotional, and wryly funny passages in the book.

Next up: Having finished book eleven of A Dance to the Music of Time while I procrastinated on this writeup, I’ve just started Halldór Laxness’ Independent People. Laxness was an Icelandic novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955, but 120 pages in, I’m not impressed.

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→ April 13, 2008
→ By

The Alchemist.

Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist is subtitled “A Fable About Following Your Dream,” and within the context set out by the author – that this is a fable, and not a traditional novel – it’s good.

The linear plot revolves around a shepherd boy who meets with a mystical man who implies that he is a physical manifestation of the Soul of the World and encourages the boy to pursue his life’s purpose, which involves a trip to the pyramids and a search for treasure. Along the way, the boy meets an Englishman who seems to be on a similar quest but for the wrong reason, a girl who appears to him to be his soulmate, and the title character, whose skill in alchemy is secondary to his wisdom about our “Personal Legends” and the vicissitudes of life.

The Alchemist has a strong religious component, and all I’ll say about it is that if you’re opposed to religion, the book will be a tough read because belief in God and in a purpose in the universe underpins the entire story. Coelho is clearly engaging in a bit of magical realism here, doing so within the context of a sort of ecumenical theism. Whether The Alchemist is a self-help book in addition to a work of fiction is a subject I will avoid here.

As a straight novella, the book works well because the main character develops. The Alchemist struck me as a straightforward example of how to structure a short novel: The main character is on a quest or journey with a clear endpoint, and encounters obstacles along the way that help him grow emotionally while providing tension and moving the plot forward. Coelho could have extended some of the tense moments to enhance the reading experience, and probably should have, since I estimated that the book clocks at under 50,000 words, a shade short of what’s required to build the crescendo I expect in a typical novel.

My main complaint with the book was that the translation came off a bit stilted. It’s possible that Coelho’s language is just choppy, but my instinct says that it was translated too literally, and it gives some of the narration a trite feeling that, at the least, couldn’t have been intended. Quick reads, which any 167-page book should be, need smooth prose to succeed, and The Alchemist didn’t deliver that.

Next up: Having started and dispatched a Wodehouse book en route to Baltimore on Friday, I’m now about a third of the way through Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, another of the great works in the tradition of magical realism novels from Latin America.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ April 7, 2008
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E.L. Doctorow on Ragtime.

Just wanted to throw up a link to a Q&A with E.L. Doctorow from New York magazine on how he wrote Ragtime. That novel appears on the TIME 100 and is one of the best reads on the list, evoking turn-of-the-century America with crisp language and the use of actual historical figures. It’s a serious work that also manages to be a page-turner.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , ,
→ April 6, 2008
→ By

Kafka on the Shore.

Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami’s most recent novel, wasn’t quite the masterpiece that its predecessor, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, was, but it’s still in the upper echelon of contemporary novels I’ve read.

Murakami’s narrative is split into two, although we know from the start that they will converge near the book’s conclusion. The first narrative, told in the first person, is the story of a fifteen-year-old boy who runs away from home for reasons that are never entirely clear and adopts the pseudonym of Kafka Tamura. Kafka flees to the city of Takamatsu, on the island of Shikoku, largely because there’s a library there to which he is inexplicably drawn. The second narrative, told in the third person, follows a sixty-year-old simpleton named Nakata who can talk to cats and who is either a mystic or a pawn of mystical forces. Kafka is, to some degree, on a quest to find the mother who abandoned him and his father when he was four years old. Nakata ends up committing a crime he doesn’t understand that may have involved an out-of-body experience … and this just skims the surface of the events in the book.

Like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore is a mind-bender with plenty of magical realism and dreamlike passages. And like its predecessor, it has one scene of very graphic violence (this time against animals, not that that’s much easier to tolerate) and lots of slightly awkward descriptions of sex, although confused sexuality is a major theme in the novel, perhaps as a subset of the larger theme of confused identity. Murakami also raises questions about independence and fate, but like any skilled writer, offers little in the way of set answers other than a few platitudes in the book’s closing pages.

What I particularly enjoy about Murakami’s writing is the way he makes coincidence and fate a part of the novel without allowing the characters to ignore it. They’re either amazed by the coincidences, or are pondering whether it’s fate or Fate at work. Even the magical realism elements get mixed reactions, with some characters unfazed but a few always there to offer some double-u-tee-eff thoughts on the matter.

Next up: We’ve had Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist for some time, and I’ve even brought it on a few trips, but never got around to actually reading it.

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→ April 5, 2008
→ By

Naked Lunch.

William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is on the TIME 100, but I have to admit I’m hard-pressed to explain its presence there. I suppose it was highly influential in its day, judging by the number of band and book names I found within its pages (as well as the name of a defunct Massachusetts company, Thinking Machines). From my vantage point today, however, its intended window into drug addiction and the attendant delusions and paranoia seem overdone, and the violent sexual content that fill the middle third of the novel are just gratuitously disgusting while at the same time managing the unusual trick of being boring.

The book starts out as the disjointed narrative of a well-educated heroin addict who’s fleeing from something, although we don’t find out what until the book’s end. With no obvious transition, we’re shifted into the Interzone, a dystopian North African city populated by deviants, addicts, and at least one Josef Mengele-type doctor, leading to a barrage of stories about orgies and murders, often at the same time, all told in deliberately explicit language reminiscent of the way that kids curse when they’ve learned that certain words are bad and start inserting them at random throughout their speech. There’s an obvious anti-consumerist, anti-conformist message somewhere under the text, but it’s half-formed and is left on the floor under the bodily fluids Burroughs pours all over his text.

If Naked Lunch has a saving grace, it’s that Burroughs could spin a phrase, from the insightful witticism (“Citizens who want to be utterly humiliated and degraded – so many people do, nowadays, hoping to jump the gun”) to inspired silliness (“where they are referred to the We Don’t Want to Hear About It Department”). He was also capable of extending his humor over longer passages, such as the story within the story about a man whose anus learns to eat and then speak, after which it takes over the man’s body. The story implies a question of whether we as individuals are anything more than consumers (and waste producers) within the global ecosystem – reminding me of Robert Rankin’s references to humans as “meat” in The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse– but it’s a floating island of sense within a larger sea of verbal sewage.

Next up: Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ March 29, 2008
→ By

Berlin Alexanderplatz and another list of novels.

I’m still not sure if I liked Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. I did not enjoy the process of reading it: It is slow, disjointed, and frequently aimless. Döblin uses a weird stream-of-consciousness style that almost seems to be an attempt to represent the inner thoughts of a borderline lunatic, even though Franz Biberkopf, his main character, isn’t so much crazy as unintelligent. He bounces from dialogue to thoughts to poetry and song lyrics to text from advertisements seen on posters and in newspapers. The book is written in the third person, but the majority of the prose is spent in Franz’s head, making it thoroughly confusing when Döblin switches to the internal monologue of another character. And on top of all that, the plot is relatively thin on action, with the pace only quickening in the final two chapters (of nine). So if the question is whether I enjoyed reading Berlin Alexanderplatz, I’d have to say no.

At the same time, I can understand why the book is consistently ranked among the greatest novels ever written, including #70 on the Novel 100 and an appearance in the Bloomsbury 100 as well (more on that list in a moment). It is a novel of ideas, or more specifically a novel of an idea, that of the increasing sense of alienation brought about by rapid urbanization and industrial development. The more that we are surrounded by people, the more we are alone. Yet we can not survive or thrive alone, and solving this conflict is key to the redemption of Biberkopf towards the novel’s end. I can also see why literary critics would heap praise on the book’s writing style, which is thoroughly modern and clever and draws from one of the century’s most exalted works, Joyce’s Ulysses. (Apparently Döblin rewrote Berlin from scratch after reading Joyce’s magnum opus.)

Berlin tells the story of Franz Biberkopf, a ne’er-do-well just released from Tegel prison, where he’d served four years for beating his girlfriend to death in a drunken rage, back into Berlin in the 1920s. The city, which is the second-most important character in the book, is changing rapidly, urbanizing and industrializing, facing social upheaval between communist and fascist movements, suffering an apparent decline in morality, and isolating its residents from each other and from society as a whole. Biberkopf says he wants to live righteously, but ends up falling in with the wrong people and making some stupendously bad choices, getting tied up in murder and racketeering, all the while blaming Fate for what’s happened.

Up until the final 30-40 pages, Franz’s refusal to take any responsibility for his actions, which among other things cause the death of someone close to him, drove me insane, particularly because the narrator appears to agree with Franz’s point of view. Franz’s redemption is incomplete and deliberately ambiguous, but it requires Franz to face up to who he is, the choices he’s made, and the need to adapt his approach to life to the changing environment of Berlin. If you can tough your way through the prose and are willing to ignore the allusions you missed (as I did, although I found myself wishing for an annotated text), there’s some payoff at the end both in terms of plot and the novel’s philosophical aims.

Next up is a nonfiction book I’m already mostly through, John Emsley’s The 13th Element: The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorus, an entertaining if somewhat macabre read. I admit it might be more entertaining because of the macabre material, though.

—

Bloomsbury Good Reading Guides: 100 Must-Read Classic Novels is yet another list of 100 novels (actually, 99 novels and one collection of short stories), with a strong emphasis on the classics. This one comes with a short essay on each entry, and each ends with short lists of similar books to read if you liked the one covered in that essay. The author/editor, Nick Rennison, limited himself to books published by 1950, and cast a fairly wide net, including a number of books with which I wasn’t familiar (such as Icelandic Nobel Prize winner Halldor Laxness’ Independent People, currently on my to-be-read shelf) and mixing in a P.G. Wodehouse book to balance out all the depressing books on the list. Rennison does have one strong bias towards English authors, who account for 42 of the books on the list, 46 if we include the two Scottish authors on the list as well as Joseph Conrad, who was born in Poland but moved to London in his early 20s and wrote in English. I was dismayed at the omission of The Master and Margarita, which is mentioned in at least one of the recommendation lists, but pleased to see that some of the overlong “classic” novels of early English literature, like Pamela and Clarissa, the latter of which runs to over a million words or roughly 3300 pages of normal text, weren’t included.

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