In this coming Sunday's New York Times Book Review (November 30) Newsweek hack David Gates gives Toni Morrison's new novel A MERCY a black kiss.
The photograph of Morrison with bright light shining upon her face reminds one that surely BO will be inviting her to his inauguration to read as JFK invited a dottering Robert Frost.
Of course informed observers have reported that Morrison will receive her second Nobel Prize for literature next year since the Swedish Academy wishes to overcome its inherent racist attitudes as expressed in having only given her one Nobel Prize thus allowing people to compare her to Pearl Buck, the writer most people associate her name with when commenting on Morrison's first Nobel Prize.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Friday, November 21, 2008
COLLAGE AGAINST FUTILITY: thinking of SHALAMOV, PINON, DONOGHUE, JUNGER
A collage to help me forget the futility of writing since each day is spent, hour by hour, consciously trying to forget that writing is futile and in my ignorance of not knowing a single publisher who might be capable of publishing my new books, sadly, and since Heidegger mentions that one of the aspects of the activity called writing is based upon "conversation"...no act of writing is complete until it has been read by someone other than the writer...
seven
A quote from what is probably the best literature site in the world: www.signandsight.com::::
Frankfurter Rundschau 18.11.2008
The poet Olga Martynova writes about Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov and recounts a memorable decision that Georgi Vladimov had to make as editor of the periodical Novyi Mir. He could only publish one text about the Gulag, and had to decide between Solzhenitsyn's "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" or Shalamov's "Tales from Kolyma": "'You see' Tvardovski admitted, 'Shalamov might be the better writer. But' – and here the hidden mechanisms started to kick in - 'Solzhenitsyn's novel can be published in one go. Even if the censors tear it to bits, it will at least remain whole as a work. But with Shalamov's short stories, the censors would simply remove the best ones and the rest would perish.' And so it was ultimately down to censorship that Alexander Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel prize, went into exile, and taught mankind, and the Russian people in particular, 'not to live a lie'. While Shalamov, who was not allowed to publish a single paragraph in Russia during his lifetime, died bitter, sick and lonely in 1982."
One hopes that everyone would have read the KOLYMA TALES by Varlam Shalamov but I well understand this is probably not possible as it is the grimmest book ever written and its obscurity is testament to its power. Only A TESTIMONY by Alatoly Marachenko comes close. People have been stuffed with horror by the current and recent focus upon the Nazi killing machine, so stuffed is the public that there is little room for any other victims...
eight
To try to outlive the awfulness one can end up reading collections of letters in which one discovers comments about people one has known and well liked:
WORDS IN AIR The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell sent me to the index and NELIDA PINON but before I quote I opened again THE TRIQUARTERLY ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE, published by E.P. Dutton-- does anyone remember when that was a real and important publisher?--- and there is an inscription to me from Nelia prefacing her story "Brief Flower": TO DEAR THOMAS NOT A BRIEF AFFECTION BUT A LONG ONE I HOPE. Nelida Pinon New York 1971. I had met Nelida through Hannah Green and that year Nelida was living in a bare apartment in Brooklyn with a young elegant protege...this time in America, Nelida told me, she was not meeting famous people. In a previous visit he had met famous people. Updike had been warm and hospitable and a meeting with Philip Roth in a low bar on Eighth Street in Manhattan had been very disturbing as he felt called upon to make an advance on her and at the same time telling her, bragging almost, that this was his year to make a million dollars as had Bellow and Styron in previous years... and it is what he thought he deserved, she said.
Nelida Pinon no longer much travels to the Unites States. She reported on a later visit when she discovered universities in America are of no real importance and what happens in them seems to have very little impact on the country as a whole in spite of most academics' inflated sense of self importance. She learned this when she was invited to a big conference at Duke University and during that time she had the occasion to watch the local news reports and never once did any of them ever report on the conference which had brought writers and intellectuals from all over the world to discuss...
I do remember her talking about Lowell and his mental breakdown... but in the letters Nelida's affection for both Lowell and Bishop seems...
Bishop writes on September 21 1962, "Nelida has been here once to talk the higher Portugese with me and I think she will come now twice a week."
And then on November 7, 1962, "That girl Nelida came to call--- with a poet friend---pretty awful--- the Teasdale school, I think. They treat me as if I were 100--- help me up steps,etc! I hate lack of respect--- hate respect--- never pleased, I guess."
On December 24 from Lowell, "They (the Fairfield Foundation) also might be able to finance a trip by Nelida to New York. She might get a Ford if you and I and Keith sponsored her. I think she would have to apply first."
On January 8, 1963 from Bishop, "I don't want to mean-- but I don't think Nelida would be a good person unless there are fellowships to spare. Her novel is so bad, really. She is nice, personally, but arty and pretentious. I could have told you this that first time I met her, out of my superior knowledge of the language and the customs, but for some reason I was being discreet... maybe Nelida will learn. Clarice suffers the same kind of datedness provincialism, etc-- but she really has talent..."
nine
Edward M. Burns has just published with UCD Press in Dublin: A PASSION FOR JOYCE. The Letters of Hugh Kenner and Adalyne Glasheen. Kenner writes to Glasheen that, "DENIS DONOGHUE is not one to bury himself in a magnum opus, spending years away from the gratifications of celebrity continually conferred and renewed... Donoghue is an articulate ass."
The magnum opus was a biography of W.B. Yeats. Over the years Kenner and Donoghue had run into each other in reviews of each other's work. And I remember Donoghue in 1966 in the UCD Kevin Barry Room I think it was--- I might have the wrong room--- mentioning that the problem with Kenner was that he had no voice of his own. When he writes of Joyce he sounds like Joyce, like Beckett when writing about Beckett, when writing about Wyndham Lewis, Lewis...
As we all know, Kenner left really only one solid important book THE POUND AGE and it is a model of critical writing. DENIS DONOGHUE has written one of the greatest memoirs in WARRENPOINT and it easily holds its own in the company of such books as MANHOOD by Michel Leiris, BLACKLIST SECTION H by Francis Stuart, LITTLE SAINT by Hannah Green and A TRIP TO KLAGENFURT In the Footsteps of Ingeborg Bachmann by Uwe Johnson.
ten
And why not: the best book of 2008. ON PAIN by ERNST JUNGER just published by TELOS PRESS:
There are several great and unalterable dimensions that show a man's stature. Pain is one of them. It is the most difficult in a series of trials one is accustomed to call life... Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are!
seven
A quote from what is probably the best literature site in the world: www.signandsight.com::::
Frankfurter Rundschau 18.11.2008
The poet Olga Martynova writes about Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov and recounts a memorable decision that Georgi Vladimov had to make as editor of the periodical Novyi Mir. He could only publish one text about the Gulag, and had to decide between Solzhenitsyn's "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" or Shalamov's "Tales from Kolyma": "'You see' Tvardovski admitted, 'Shalamov might be the better writer. But' – and here the hidden mechanisms started to kick in - 'Solzhenitsyn's novel can be published in one go. Even if the censors tear it to bits, it will at least remain whole as a work. But with Shalamov's short stories, the censors would simply remove the best ones and the rest would perish.' And so it was ultimately down to censorship that Alexander Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel prize, went into exile, and taught mankind, and the Russian people in particular, 'not to live a lie'. While Shalamov, who was not allowed to publish a single paragraph in Russia during his lifetime, died bitter, sick and lonely in 1982."
One hopes that everyone would have read the KOLYMA TALES by Varlam Shalamov but I well understand this is probably not possible as it is the grimmest book ever written and its obscurity is testament to its power. Only A TESTIMONY by Alatoly Marachenko comes close. People have been stuffed with horror by the current and recent focus upon the Nazi killing machine, so stuffed is the public that there is little room for any other victims...
eight
To try to outlive the awfulness one can end up reading collections of letters in which one discovers comments about people one has known and well liked:
WORDS IN AIR The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell sent me to the index and NELIDA PINON but before I quote I opened again THE TRIQUARTERLY ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE, published by E.P. Dutton-- does anyone remember when that was a real and important publisher?--- and there is an inscription to me from Nelia prefacing her story "Brief Flower": TO DEAR THOMAS NOT A BRIEF AFFECTION BUT A LONG ONE I HOPE. Nelida Pinon New York 1971. I had met Nelida through Hannah Green and that year Nelida was living in a bare apartment in Brooklyn with a young elegant protege...this time in America, Nelida told me, she was not meeting famous people. In a previous visit he had met famous people. Updike had been warm and hospitable and a meeting with Philip Roth in a low bar on Eighth Street in Manhattan had been very disturbing as he felt called upon to make an advance on her and at the same time telling her, bragging almost, that this was his year to make a million dollars as had Bellow and Styron in previous years... and it is what he thought he deserved, she said.
Nelida Pinon no longer much travels to the Unites States. She reported on a later visit when she discovered universities in America are of no real importance and what happens in them seems to have very little impact on the country as a whole in spite of most academics' inflated sense of self importance. She learned this when she was invited to a big conference at Duke University and during that time she had the occasion to watch the local news reports and never once did any of them ever report on the conference which had brought writers and intellectuals from all over the world to discuss...
I do remember her talking about Lowell and his mental breakdown... but in the letters Nelida's affection for both Lowell and Bishop seems...
Bishop writes on September 21 1962, "Nelida has been here once to talk the higher Portugese with me and I think she will come now twice a week."
And then on November 7, 1962, "That girl Nelida came to call--- with a poet friend---pretty awful--- the Teasdale school, I think. They treat me as if I were 100--- help me up steps,etc! I hate lack of respect--- hate respect--- never pleased, I guess."
On December 24 from Lowell, "They (the Fairfield Foundation) also might be able to finance a trip by Nelida to New York. She might get a Ford if you and I and Keith sponsored her. I think she would have to apply first."
On January 8, 1963 from Bishop, "I don't want to mean-- but I don't think Nelida would be a good person
nine
Edward M. Burns has just published with UCD Press in Dublin: A PASSION FOR JOYCE. The Letters of Hugh Kenner and Adalyne Glasheen. Kenner writes to Glasheen that, "DENIS DONOGHUE is not one to bury himself in a magnum opus, spending years away from the gratifications of celebrity continually conferred and renewed... Donoghue is an articulate ass."
The magnum opus was a biography of W.B. Yeats. Over the years Kenner and Donoghue had run into each other in reviews of each other's work. And I remember Donoghue in 1966 in the UCD Kevin Barry Room I think it was--- I might have the wrong room--- mentioning that the problem with Kenner was that he had no voice of his own. When he writes of Joyce he sounds like Joyce, like Beckett when writing about Beckett, when writing about Wyndham Lewis, Lewis...
As we all know, Kenner left really only one solid important book THE POUND AGE and it is a model of critical writing. DENIS DONOGHUE has written one of the greatest memoirs in WARRENPOINT and it easily holds its own in the company of such books as MANHOOD by Michel Leiris, BLACKLIST SECTION H by Francis Stuart, LITTLE SAINT by Hannah Green and A TRIP TO KLAGENFURT In the Footsteps of Ingeborg Bachmann by Uwe Johnson.
ten
And why not: the best book of 2008. ON PAIN by ERNST JUNGER just published by TELOS PRESS:
There are several great and unalterable dimensions that show a man's stature. Pain is one of them. It is the most difficult in a series of trials one is accustomed to call life... Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are!
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA by CAMILO JOSE CELA: the perfect book for this moment or any moment
For the last year or so, midst other readings and writings, I have been reading CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA by Camilo Jose Cela (Dalkey Archive). It is the perfect book for this exhilarating or gloomy moment, as the case might be. Or it is for any other time.
In my mind it shoves over a little Celine's JOURNEY TO THE END OF NIGHT.
CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA is both very hard and incredibly easy to describe. On one level it is 261 pages being told by, "My name is Wendell Espana, Wendell Liverpool Espana, or maybe it isn't Espana but Span or Aspen, I've never found out for sure, I've never seen it written down..."
The book goes on for those 261 pages without a period. It is vaguely centered on Tombstone or Tomiston the most notorious town in Arizona and upon the famous gunfight at the OK Corral. But as there are at least a hundred different versions of that gunfight in reality--- I might be under counting--- these are just two of hundreds of places and events mentioned in the book...
Cela through Wendell Liverpool Espana has created the great necessary epic of Arizona and by implication the West. He never falls into a dreary realism which attempts to describe the psychologies of any of the people he mentions or takes the time to tease out a dreary plot of conflict and either resolved or un-resolved resolution... he counter-points a vast array of "characters" with the constant refrain from the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary... and while it is easy to lose track of these characters they gradually inhabit your imagination and while some appear and re-appear you are gradually brought into this familiar yet mysterious world that seems as timeless as that created by Rabelais or Dante, forsaking always the temptation to fantasy or invention. My own GOING TO PATCHOGUE is a genuine companion to CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA
In homage to the last few days (early November 2008) I thought to share some selected lines from Cela's book and telling you these should give you a very good idea as to why I put this book on the top of what everyone should be reading. I have not cited any of the famous Earps who are mentioned of course in passing ...
It is all an eerie counterpoint to the shrieking political celebrations going on beyond my windows here on East First Street in Manhattan still at 2PM on the day after...
1.
...there's a lot of loneliness around here, and rosemary grass is used to fix up vaginas, to fake virginities, and my friend and I still have two steps to go, drinking beer and pissing on the Chinaman's door...
2.
...she gets her mouth of your asshole puts in her tongue a little and sucks hard, like a vacuum, it's called the "black kiss" and it was invented by Bonne Mere Mauricette, a madam from Napoleonville, near New Orleans, my mother does it to anyone who pays for it, I'm exempt, she doesn't charge me for it...
3
...do you know if it's true that they instituted proceedings against Christ in Arizona?, no, no I don't know, nobody can take Christ to court because he's God and God always wins, God can work miracles and change a woman into a lizard with three eyes and horns, it depends what he wants, Christ-- rather, God--- is tougher than Arizona...
4.
..where the Papago Indians stand and brood about poverty, loneliness and the wind, and the Papago Indians don't like that name, they are the Tohono-O'Odham, the cactuses resemble bell-towers, surrounded by disaster...
5.
...what's bad is when a man wants to put his thoughts into another person's head, that's a sign that death is lurking nearby and feeling brave...
6.
a man has to come from somewhere. what's bad is being a stranger, all strangers go around dragging a dirty bloody history that they don't want to tell anyone, silence ends up making the bones ache, but anything is better than the gallows, strangers don't have any traditions and that's why they rob banks and trains, they cheat at cards, they steal cows and horses and they shoot you in the back, tradition doesn't forbid robbing banks and trains or cheating at cards or stealing horses but it does forbid killing a man from behind
7.
Negroes want to turn their children white and the only thing that matters for whites is making money, if this isn't the end of the earth it's something very close to it...
8.
...when halfwits finish coming they also fall asleep if the woman sucks their cock very carefully, first their thoughts fade away and then they doze off,
9.
Ronnie killed him with a bullet between the eyes, the price of life is life and no one escapes this law, nobody can know what will happen after they go
10.
nobody knows it God is male or female but if she is female instead of male the Grand Canyon would be the cunt of God, the horrendous Grand Cunt of God
11.
...you have to organize what you're saying so people don't get confused, the best way is to keep telling the story in terms of the dead, I said to him, it's very easy to talk but bringing order to what you're saying isn't so easy...
12.
...reason is worthless if a man can't get a hard-on, words are always traitorous and end up betraying whoever speaks them, if a men were mute the jails would be empty and the gallows wouldn't have been invented, man is an animal that doesn't know enough to die on time and keeps praying to go on living...
13.
the opposite of mercy is indifference--- people think it's cruelty--- but what's really bad about cutting off a dead man's privates is doing it without even looking, when giving someone food or drink you must look into his eyes, the same applies to forgiving insults or cheering up sad people...
14.
the Chinaman Wong wasn't a murderer because he didn't kill living men but instead disinterred dead children, afterwards he would slice them up or shred them, all very carefully, the soybean shoots with minced pork were also delicious...
15.
there's always one woman that would like to blow the hanged man, custom doesn't allow it and the law even less, it's a pleasure that hardly any woman gets to enjoy...
16.
my little brother Pato Macario's flatulence doesn't make any noise because by now all his farting has smoothed out the wrinkles in his asshole, we usually say "ripe avocado, fart for sure," real men's farts sound like whiplashes, they crack the wind
17.
...dogs don't piss on the houses of the dying, they are very respecful and go straight past, this detail doesn't belong here but I wanted to note it down before I forgot
18.
it's the custom to smile at the hangman and spit in the face of the man sentenced to death, men are born wearing their masks and every line already carved in its place, on the forehead, the corners of the eyes, at the corners of the mouth, in the cheeks the same things have always been done, spitting on the one who loses and smiling at the one who wins
19.
the women wait at the Nabor Guevara tavern, groping and feeling each other up, their hearts pounding they while away the time telling each other dirty stories and killing doves by squashing their heads, they also strangle roosters by pinning them their between their thighs, there's plenty of pleasure in it
20
...nearly every day remembers Maggie Cedarvael the little neighbor girl who as a child used to play with his little cock, she would fondle it delicately and also suck it, later she died of tuberculous, this game of life and death is upsetting
In my mind it shoves over a little Celine's JOURNEY TO THE END OF NIGHT.
CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA is both very hard and incredibly easy to describe. On one level it is 261 pages being told by, "My name is Wendell Espana, Wendell Liverpool Espana, or maybe it isn't Espana but Span or Aspen, I've never found out for sure, I've never seen it written down..."
The book goes on for those 261 pages without a period. It is vaguely centered on Tombstone or Tomiston the most notorious town in Arizona and upon the famous gunfight at the OK Corral. But as there are at least a hundred different versions of that gunfight in reality--- I might be under counting--- these are just two of hundreds of places and events mentioned in the book...
Cela through Wendell Liverpool Espana has created the great necessary epic of Arizona and by implication the West. He never falls into a dreary realism which attempts to describe the psychologies of any of the people he mentions or takes the time to tease out a dreary plot of conflict and either resolved or un-resolved resolution... he counter-points a vast array of "characters" with the constant refrain from the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary... and while it is easy to lose track of these characters they gradually inhabit your imagination and while some appear and re-appear you are gradually brought into this familiar yet mysterious world that seems as timeless as that created by Rabelais or Dante, forsaking always the temptation to fantasy or invention. My own GOING TO PATCHOGUE is a genuine companion to CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA
In homage to the last few days (early November 2008) I thought to share some selected lines from Cela's book and telling you these should give you a very good idea as to why I put this book on the top of what everyone should be reading. I have not cited any of the famous Earps who are mentioned of course in passing ...
It is all an eerie counterpoint to the shrieking political celebrations going on beyond my windows here on East First Street in Manhattan still at 2PM on the day after...
1.
...there's a lot of loneliness around here, and rosemary grass is used to fix up vaginas, to fake virginities, and my friend and I still have two steps to go, drinking beer and pissing on the Chinaman's door...
2.
...she gets her mouth of your asshole puts in her tongue a little and sucks hard, like a vacuum, it's called the "black kiss" and it was invented by Bonne Mere Mauricette, a madam from Napoleonville, near New Orleans, my mother does it to anyone who pays for it, I'm exempt, she doesn't charge me for it...
3
...do you know if it's true that they instituted proceedings against Christ in Arizona?, no, no I don't know, nobody can take Christ to court because he's God and God always wins, God can work miracles and change a woman into a lizard with three eyes and horns, it depends what he wants, Christ-- rather, God--- is tougher than Arizona...
4.
..where the Papago Indians stand and brood about poverty, loneliness and the wind, and the Papago Indians don't like that name, they are the Tohono-O'Odham, the cactuses resemble bell-towers, surrounded by disaster...
5.
...what's bad is when a man wants to put his thoughts into another person's head, that's a sign that death is lurking nearby and feeling brave...
6.
a man has to come from somewhere. what's bad is being a stranger, all strangers go around dragging a dirty bloody history that they don't want to tell anyone, silence ends up making the bones ache, but anything is better than the gallows, strangers don't have any traditions and that's why they rob banks and trains, they cheat at cards, they steal cows and horses and they shoot you in the back, tradition doesn't forbid robbing banks and trains or cheating at cards or stealing horses but it does forbid killing a man from behind
7.
Negroes want to turn their children white and the only thing that matters for whites is making money, if this isn't the end of the earth it's something very close to it...
8.
...when halfwits finish coming they also fall asleep if the woman sucks their cock very carefully, first their thoughts fade away and then they doze off,
9.
Ronnie killed him with a bullet between the eyes, the price of life is life and no one escapes this law, nobody can know what will happen after they go
10.
nobody knows it God is male or female but if she is female instead of male the Grand Canyon would be the cunt of God, the horrendous Grand Cunt of God
11.
...you have to organize what you're saying so people don't get confused, the best way is to keep telling the story in terms of the dead, I said to him, it's very easy to talk but bringing order to what you're saying isn't so easy...
12.
...reason is worthless if a man can't get a hard-on, words are always traitorous and end up betraying whoever speaks them, if a men were mute the jails would be empty and the gallows wouldn't have been invented, man is an animal that doesn't know enough to die on time and keeps praying to go on living...
13.
the opposite of mercy is indifference--- people think it's cruelty--- but what's really bad about cutting off a dead man's privates is doing it without even looking, when giving someone food or drink you must look into his eyes, the same applies to forgiving insults or cheering up sad people...
14.
the Chinaman Wong wasn't a murderer because he didn't kill living men but instead disinterred dead children, afterwards he would slice them up or shred them, all very carefully, the soybean shoots with minced pork were also delicious...
15.
there's always one woman that would like to blow the hanged man, custom doesn't allow it and the law even less, it's a pleasure that hardly any woman gets to enjoy...
16.
my little brother Pato Macario's flatulence doesn't make any noise because by now all his farting has smoothed out the wrinkles in his asshole, we usually say "ripe avocado, fart for sure," real men's farts sound like whiplashes, they crack the wind
17.
...dogs don't piss on the houses of the dying, they are very respecful and go straight past, this detail doesn't belong here but I wanted to note it down before I forgot
18.
it's the custom to smile at the hangman and spit in the face of the man sentenced to death, men are born wearing their masks and every line already carved in its place, on the forehead, the corners of the eyes, at the corners of the mouth, in the cheeks the same things have always been done, spitting on the one who loses and smiling at the one who wins
19.
the women wait at the Nabor Guevara tavern, groping and feeling each other up, their hearts pounding they while away the time telling each other dirty stories and killing doves by squashing their heads, they also strangle roosters by pinning them their between their thighs, there's plenty of pleasure in it
20
...nearly every day remembers Maggie Cedarvael the little neighbor girl who as a child used to play with his little cock, she would fondle it delicately and also suck it, later she died of tuberculous, this game of life and death is upsetting
Monday, October 27, 2008
TRANQUILITY or a book to buy right now
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-ca-attila-bartis26-2008oct26,0,1679894.story
From the Los Angeles Times
BOOK REVIEW
'Tranquility' by Attila Bartis
By Tom McGonigle
October 26, 2008
Tranquility
Attila Bartis
Translated from the Hungarian
by Imre Goldstein
Archipelago Books: 292 pp., $15
"Tranquility" is a moving, emotionally complex, subtle, shocking novel -- and the inadequacy of these words of praise might be overcome by considering imagery, such as the narrator's "remembering how I crawled, like a creeper, upon the back of that woman. Like a slug on the wound of a decaying fruit tree." Or this: "You live only as long as you can lie into the mug of anybody, and without batting an eye. And when you can't anymore, well, it's time to get hold of that razor blade." Or this: "[The narrator's mother's] nakedness was like that of the dead, in whom only the corpse washer and God take any delight."
The first of Attila Bartis' books to be made available in English, "Tranquility" may come as no revelation to those who have followed the incredible explosion of literary greatness coming out of modern Hungary: Péter Esterházy, Peter Nadas, Imre Kertész, Zsuzsa Bank. Each of these writers may seem like an individual voice speaking into a solitary silence, but the effect is of a startling chorus and of a sustaining vision of how to survive in a world that is increasingly hostile to the individual imagination.
Andor Weer, the narrator of "Tranquility," is a writer of short stories entangled with his aging, controlling mother who is terrified by the thought of being cremated (she has been told that her corpse will sit up in the oven). Once a leading actress on the Budapest stage, she has been reduced to playing bit parts as a punishment for being unable to lure her violinist daughter back to Hungary from the West.
Spanning the declining years of the Communist regime, Bartis' novel presents a form of narration that twines a record of Andor's day-to-day life as a writer with what are surely snippets, both long and short, of stories echoing his own mastery of the short story (by which Bartis first rose to prominence in Hungary) in a novel that moves effortlessly through all levels of a truly damaged society attempting to recover from communist devastation.
Bartis comes close to exemplifying Louis-Ferdinand Céline's wonderfully provocative comment that one has to be a little bit dead to be really funny. Bartis fractures any sense we have as to whether the characters -- the narrator, his sister Judit, his girlfriends, his mother and father -- are actually alive or dead. And it doesn't matter, for even the minor characters imprint themselves thoroughly upon one's memory.
Bartis creates an atmosphere of believability in this novel without forsaking the use of irony. Early in the story, for instance, Andor reads a short story to a provincial audience about a homicidal priest who kills off his congregation with poisoned communion wafers. After the reading, the priest in the village invites Andor to supper. "I've got a pretty good ceremonial wine, if you've got the courage," he tells him. During the course of the evening, the priest reveals himself to be one of those rare members of the clergy -- a priest who actually does believe in God -- and, next morning, as Andor leaves on a train, the priest gives him a book as a gift.
It isn't a copy of Augustine's "Confessions" or some such but is something else entirely, which isn't revealed for another 30 pages. What that book is won't be identified here -- no plot spoiler for readers -- so get the book as soon as you can.
McGonigle is the author of "Going to Patchogue" and "The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov."
From the Los Angeles Times
BOOK REVIEW
'Tranquility' by Attila Bartis
By Tom McGonigle
October 26, 2008
Tranquility
Attila Bartis
Translated from the Hungarian
by Imre Goldstein
Archipelago Books: 292 pp., $15
"Tranquility" is a moving, emotionally complex, subtle, shocking novel -- and the inadequacy of these words of praise might be overcome by considering imagery, such as the narrator's "remembering how I crawled, like a creeper, upon the back of that woman. Like a slug on the wound of a decaying fruit tree." Or this: "You live only as long as you can lie into the mug of anybody, and without batting an eye. And when you can't anymore, well, it's time to get hold of that razor blade." Or this: "[The narrator's mother's] nakedness was like that of the dead, in whom only the corpse washer and God take any delight."
The first of Attila Bartis' books to be made available in English, "Tranquility" may come as no revelation to those who have followed the incredible explosion of literary greatness coming out of modern Hungary: Péter Esterházy, Peter Nadas, Imre Kertész, Zsuzsa Bank. Each of these writers may seem like an individual voice speaking into a solitary silence, but the effect is of a startling chorus and of a sustaining vision of how to survive in a world that is increasingly hostile to the individual imagination.
Andor Weer, the narrator of "Tranquility," is a writer of short stories entangled with his aging, controlling mother who is terrified by the thought of being cremated (she has been told that her corpse will sit up in the oven). Once a leading actress on the Budapest stage, she has been reduced to playing bit parts as a punishment for being unable to lure her violinist daughter back to Hungary from the West.
Spanning the declining years of the Communist regime, Bartis' novel presents a form of narration that twines a record of Andor's day-to-day life as a writer with what are surely snippets, both long and short, of stories echoing his own mastery of the short story (by which Bartis first rose to prominence in Hungary) in a novel that moves effortlessly through all levels of a truly damaged society attempting to recover from communist devastation.
Bartis comes close to exemplifying Louis-Ferdinand Céline's wonderfully provocative comment that one has to be a little bit dead to be really funny. Bartis fractures any sense we have as to whether the characters -- the narrator, his sister Judit, his girlfriends, his mother and father -- are actually alive or dead. And it doesn't matter, for even the minor characters imprint themselves thoroughly upon one's memory.
Bartis creates an atmosphere of believability in this novel without forsaking the use of irony. Early in the story, for instance, Andor reads a short story to a provincial audience about a homicidal priest who kills off his congregation with poisoned communion wafers. After the reading, the priest in the village invites Andor to supper. "I've got a pretty good ceremonial wine, if you've got the courage," he tells him. During the course of the evening, the priest reveals himself to be one of those rare members of the clergy -- a priest who actually does believe in God -- and, next morning, as Andor leaves on a train, the priest gives him a book as a gift.
It isn't a copy of Augustine's "Confessions" or some such but is something else entirely, which isn't revealed for another 30 pages. What that book is won't be identified here -- no plot spoiler for readers -- so get the book as soon as you can.
McGonigle is the author of "Going to Patchogue" and "The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov."
Thursday, October 16, 2008
2666 BY ROBERTO BOLANO, TRUE CRIME and TRANQUILITY: some hints for reading now
bbbbb
2666 By Roberto Bolano has landed and will be making its way into bookstores. It probably should have come with stickers: ONLY TO BE READ AFTER READING THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES. As 2666 is likely to be the only big literary book of this season--- and it is a genuine literary book, the real thing--- most readers will have read THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES in great expectation of 2666 but new readers will find the first long section of 2666 tough going though for readers of THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES we well know there is a reason, a purpose behind what could be very off-putting: the entanglements of four academic critics with a reclusive German author's life and novels.
bbbb
To date no one has mentioned the name B. Traven but since Bolano is soaked in literature and surely he is aware that B. Traven is the only German author who is in anyway mysterious and surely Bolano is depending on our faint memories of Traven...
bbbb
2666 is a baroque balloon capping Bolano's career. It is not a Finnegans Wake to his Ulysses. It is of a piece with all his work.
bbbb
If Bolano was alive I think that he would be reading two other books published this season in New York. As 2666 is filled with violent crime he would be reading the Library of America's TRUE CRIME, edited by Harold Schechter. He would have remembered Williams Burroughs talking about how essential crime was to American life: it was there before the Indians… as you well remember.
TRUE CRIME: from the first murder and the first hanging in Boston mentioned by William Bradford to Dominick Dunne, by way of Jack Webb (Dragnet) and a wonderfully rescued piece by Dorothy Kilgallen who I remember reading in the old Journal American which my father brought home at night turned to the comics page though mother was listening to her on the radio having lunch at Sardi's talking of the celebrities lunching around her and her husband Dick..
Much as the characters in Robert Musil's great novel THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES were fascinated by a brutal psychopath, TRUE CRIME has stories about the two disturbing and ever fascinating contemporary killers, Charles Manson and Ed Gein who together occupy much of the popular imagination with either their deeds or their influence on an endless series of trashy violent movies
bbbb
As I was reading Robert Bloch's piece on Ed Gein (the inspiration for PSYCHO) I was remembering Duane, the boyfriend of Bink Noll in Beloit, talking about growing up in the same town as Ed Gein. Duane was a little odd being a male nipple fetishist who published a newsletter for those so inclined from Noll's basement via a post office box in South Beloit. Duane said that was the most disturbing aspect of Gein's career was that he had supplied meat for sausages to the local butcher shop and when he was found out people realized they had been eating their relatives for quite some time…
Another friend who had become a cop in Wisconsin after college told me that he had been up the state lunatic asylum to look at Ed Gein who was their prized exhibit and was a reminder that criminals are very very ordinary looking.
bbbb
TRUE CRIME is the best anthology that the Library of America has published… well to be really scrupulous it is the best if you also say that their anthology on Los Angeles and about American in Paris are also included in that bite of praise…
Bbbb
AND TRANQUILITY (Arhipelago Books)the first novel of Attila Bartis to be published in the United States would attract Bolano. I have written a review of it which will appear shortly in the LA Times… SO not to chew the cabbage twice. Bolano would have liked the particularity of detail in TRANQUILITY: the acceptance of the appearance of convention and then the trusting to a fearless honesty and the necessity of destroying chronological time in the telling of his narrator's entanglement with his mother, his father, his father's whore and the sister in exile… Bartos with this novel joins that little essential pantheon made in Hungary composed of Peter Nadas, Peter Ezsterhazy, Imre Kertesz and Zsuzsa Bank
2666 By Roberto Bolano has landed and will be making its way into bookstores. It probably should have come with stickers: ONLY TO BE READ AFTER READING THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES. As 2666 is likely to be the only big literary book of this season--- and it is a genuine literary book, the real thing--- most readers will have read THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES in great expectation of 2666 but new readers will find the first long section of 2666 tough going though for readers of THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES we well know there is a reason, a purpose behind what could be very off-putting: the entanglements of four academic critics with a reclusive German author's life and novels.
bbbb
To date no one has mentioned the name B. Traven but since Bolano is soaked in literature and surely he is aware that B. Traven is the only German author who is in anyway mysterious and surely Bolano is depending on our faint memories of Traven...
bbbb
2666 is a baroque balloon capping Bolano's career. It is not a Finnegans Wake to his Ulysses. It is of a piece with all his work.
bbbb
If Bolano was alive I think that he would be reading two other books published this season in New York. As 2666 is filled with violent crime he would be reading the Library of America's TRUE CRIME, edited by Harold Schechter. He would have remembered Williams Burroughs talking about how essential crime was to American life: it was there before the Indians… as you well remember.
TRUE CRIME: from the first murder and the first hanging in Boston mentioned by William Bradford to Dominick Dunne, by way of Jack Webb (Dragnet) and a wonderfully rescued piece by Dorothy Kilgallen who I remember reading in the old Journal American which my father brought home at night turned to the comics page though mother was listening to her on the radio having lunch at Sardi's talking of the celebrities lunching around her and her husband Dick..
Much as the characters in Robert Musil's great novel THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES were fascinated by a brutal psychopath, TRUE CRIME has stories about the two disturbing and ever fascinating contemporary killers, Charles Manson and Ed Gein who together occupy much of the popular imagination with either their deeds or their influence on an endless series of trashy violent movies
bbbb
As I was reading Robert Bloch's piece on Ed Gein (the inspiration for PSYCHO) I was remembering Duane, the boyfriend of Bink Noll in Beloit, talking about growing up in the same town as Ed Gein. Duane was a little odd being a male nipple fetishist who published a newsletter for those so inclined from Noll's basement via a post office box in South Beloit. Duane said that was the most disturbing aspect of Gein's career was that he had supplied meat for sausages to the local butcher shop and when he was found out people realized they had been eating their relatives for quite some time…
Another friend who had become a cop in Wisconsin after college told me that he had been up the state lunatic asylum to look at Ed Gein who was their prized exhibit and was a reminder that criminals are very very ordinary looking.
bbbb
TRUE CRIME is the best anthology that the Library of America has published… well to be really scrupulous it is the best if you also say that their anthology on Los Angeles and about American in Paris are also included in that bite of praise…
Bbbb
AND TRANQUILITY (Arhipelago Books)the first novel of Attila Bartis to be published in the United States would attract Bolano. I have written a review of it which will appear shortly in the LA Times… SO not to chew the cabbage twice. Bolano would have liked the particularity of detail in TRANQUILITY: the acceptance of the appearance of convention and then the trusting to a fearless honesty and the necessity of destroying chronological time in the telling of his narrator's entanglement with his mother, his father, his father's whore and the sister in exile… Bartos with this novel joins that little essential pantheon made in Hungary composed of Peter Nadas, Peter Ezsterhazy, Imre Kertesz and Zsuzsa Bank
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
J.M.G. LECLEZIO: Getting older sometimes just means getting older
t
Let's not kid ourselves into thinking literary prizes are meaningful. They are a real pain in the ass. You will have seen the film The SWIMMING POOL and remember when the Charlotte Rampling character complains about not getting any literary prizes her editor consoles her with the sentence, Literary prizes are like hemorrhoids, eventually ever asshole gets one.
o
SO, the Nobel and J.M.G. LeClezio. A Canadian correspondent wrote complaining of Swedish racism in that they failed to give the Nobel Prize a second time to Toni Morrison for her having to live in such a hostile environment as the United States…
Of course we all know that the three saddest words in the English language (according to Gore Vidal) Joyce Carol Oates grew a little sadder and more Chinese food was consumed as Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill once told me that when she was invited to Princeton she was surprised that the chief subject of conversation there was about Chinese versus Indian take out…
Of course we all know that Princeton is a dumping ground for second rate Black intellectuals that even Harvard could no longer stomach…
d
One should be happy he got the prize if only in the hope his earlier books will be re-printed in the US.
Let us remind ourselves that the Nobel did get it right when it gave the prize, to Claude Simon and Camilo Jose Cela and again they didn’t give it to that hick P. Roth.
a
I took down from my shelves that pile of LeClezio books. He has been well published in the United States.
In 1970 I must have written to LeClezio as I have a little note from him in which he carefully mimics the typewriter in his block lettering: The mind is not too well but the hand continues to write.
I had written to him after reading TERRA AMATA which was the fourth of his books to be published in the US by the long gone Atheneum…
I had heard of him on a pig farm in West Branch Iowa from Elliott Anderson who had been reading FEVER, a collection of Le Clezio's short stories.
Those early seven books: FEVER, THE INTEROGATION, THE FLOOD, TERRA AMATA, BOOK OF FLIGHTS, WAR, THE GIANTS… catalogue a vision of disintegration of the known world… the desperate isolation of the individual and I probably had written to LeClezio suggesting that Max Stirner so long ago had talked about the creative nothingness out of which everything is possible…
Again when I go to TERRA AMATA, THE FLOOD… I am midst that collapse and LeClezio's ability to find a language and form for it: "He turned into writing; it turned into crossing-out." (TERRA AMATA) or "All that remains now is writing, writing by itself, groping its way with words, searching and describing, meticulously in depth, hanging on hammering out reality, rejecting compromise." FEVER (1965)
aa
Of course all young people should be so imbued… and not seek out as today the tired best sellers and mimicking them as seems the case for 99% of what is published in the US today.
aaa
And the great ambition: "You must abandon the field of solitary contemplation, the false protection of forgetfulness; you have to sally forth recklessly into the open, determined to explore the outside world in all its aspects, driven on by a mad desire to invade every space and drain every attraction to the dregs. No longer, either, by analytical reason, but by a willing acceptance of the illogical in your reactions to every room and person, each tree, each speck of dust… (THE FLOOD).
aaaa
I have mis-placed THE BOOK OF FLIGHTS but with WAR and THE GIANTS LeClezio gives himself over totally to the visionary in the hope of staying alive: "One day, round noon, he looks round him, in the big city where he lives; he stops moving, and looks round him. He stops flapping the twin cushions of his speaking lips, he stops blinking his eyes at the sight of set pieces, women, cars, trains, films, pages of essay-poem-novels and looks round him. In a single stroke the world stops moving. (THE GIANTS)
THE GIANTS appeared in 1975 and for almost twenty years LeClezio did not exist in the US. I tried and failed to get Dalkey Archive to reprint the early books.
In France, of course LeClezio continued to publish and I picked up VERS LES ICEBERGS in the hope of seeing that one day into English or… and I waited.
aaaa
In 1993, finally THE PROSPECTOR and THE MEXICAN DREAM appeared. Larry Kart (some day I will write about him--- one of the great editors of our time) then editor of the book section of the Chicago Tribune allowed me to review them… by then LeClezio was part of the usual forgetfulness.
In my review I wrote that THE PROSPECTOR was a romance… and while it did not continue in the vein that I had treasured in those earlier novels… of course in 20 years a writer… I disguised my disappointment and allowed that he had written a very good novel, one that as they say, kept me reading… I imagine nothing much happened for Godine, the publisher of this novel… I had found some words they could use as a blurb but there would be no paper version, I was sure of that. The book of essays THE MEXICAN DREAM was a hodgepodge and sadly LeClezio had given himself over to a too easy self-hatred of being a white European writer.
aaaaa
When I read again today in THE MEXICAN DREAM… I see something I had missed before… and which I have only recently become aware in regard in my case the state of Arizona and the native peoples living there: I know nothing. I know nothing.
LeClezio was trying to share that idea with his readers and only if he had been able to free himself from his ordinary European self-hatred so as to truly give words to what he mentions was, the greatest disaster in human history: the destruction of the various Indian civilizations in the Americas… if only it was possible to do this but not from now comfortable and well rewarded self-hatred…
y
Since then the novel ONITSHA, and a book of stories THE ROUND AND OTHER COLD HARD FACTS have appeared from Nebraska…and seemed too conventional for me… in 2004 Curbstone published WANDERING STAR and not for a moment was I interested in LeClezio's take on the Palestinian/Israeli situation…the novel might have been a parody for all I know and LeClezio was creating a mock entertainment.. Not for a moment did I believe that he could inhabit the experience of an Israeli or Palestinian woman… not for a moment was I unaware of the dreadful fall into the imperialism of LeClezio's imagination and a politically correct and calculated arrogance that had displaced his heroic stuttering yet articulate hesitation that had shaped those early book…but it is for these later books that he was being honored so possibly the comment in THE SWIMMING POOL is not too far off…
yy
Maybe in real old age LeClezio will return to the consoling truth of the last lines of TERRA AMATA: How can one bear witness? I am only an actor who doesn’t know the play he's acting in. What I've done I've done by chance, like a gnat in a strong wind. I've said first one thing, then another. I've written pins, tobacco, passions, suffer, nylon, seed. You've read zip-fastener, top, beauty, woman, cigarette, cloud. And accurate chance is its own individual path. But I've said enough. Now it's your turn."
Sadly, I doubt it.
-----
Re-located material.
Of course Princeton is a wonderful place…according to the late George Garrett, Princeton used to recruit Black students and allow them to go through the first two years with no grades… just passed them along and then in the final two they began to be graded and flunked out. Princeton thus had to it both ways: good liberal admission policies and then ruthless preserving of the degree….now of course the more typical graduate of Princeton is Michelle Obama--- discovering the nasty secret racism of Princeton which allowed her to go there and being half way alert discovering she was probably just not as smart as the non-Black students she found herself among… and of course she was aware of how the good liberal professors treat the hired help. No wonder many Black people voted for George Wallace…
Let's not kid ourselves into thinking literary prizes are meaningful. They are a real pain in the ass. You will have seen the film The SWIMMING POOL and remember when the Charlotte Rampling character complains about not getting any literary prizes her editor consoles her with the sentence, Literary prizes are like hemorrhoids, eventually ever asshole gets one.
o
SO, the Nobel and J.M.G. LeClezio. A Canadian correspondent wrote complaining of Swedish racism in that they failed to give the Nobel Prize a second time to Toni Morrison for her having to live in such a hostile environment as the United States…
Of course we all know that the three saddest words in the English language (according to Gore Vidal) Joyce Carol Oates grew a little sadder and more Chinese food was consumed as Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill once told me that when she was invited to Princeton she was surprised that the chief subject of conversation there was about Chinese versus Indian take out…
Of course we all know that Princeton is a dumping ground for second rate Black intellectuals that even Harvard could no longer stomach…
d
One should be happy he got the prize if only in the hope his earlier books will be re-printed in the US.
Let us remind ourselves that the Nobel did get it right when it gave the prize, to Claude Simon and Camilo Jose Cela and again they didn’t give it to that hick P. Roth.
a
I took down from my shelves that pile of LeClezio books. He has been well published in the United States.
In 1970 I must have written to LeClezio as I have a little note from him in which he carefully mimics the typewriter in his block lettering: The mind is not too well but the hand continues to write.
I had written to him after reading TERRA AMATA which was the fourth of his books to be published in the US by the long gone Atheneum…
I had heard of him on a pig farm in West Branch Iowa from Elliott Anderson who had been reading FEVER, a collection of Le Clezio's short stories.
Those early seven books: FEVER, THE INTEROGATION, THE FLOOD, TERRA AMATA, BOOK OF FLIGHTS, WAR, THE GIANTS… catalogue a vision of disintegration of the known world… the desperate isolation of the individual and I probably had written to LeClezio suggesting that Max Stirner so long ago had talked about the creative nothingness out of which everything is possible…
Again when I go to TERRA AMATA, THE FLOOD… I am midst that collapse and LeClezio's ability to find a language and form for it: "He turned into writing; it turned into crossing-out." (TERRA AMATA) or "All that remains now is writing, writing by itself, groping its way with words, searching and describing, meticulously in depth, hanging on hammering out reality, rejecting compromise." FEVER (1965)
aa
Of course all young people should be so imbued… and not seek out as today the tired best sellers and mimicking them as seems the case for 99% of what is published in the US today.
aaa
And the great ambition: "You must abandon the field of solitary contemplation, the false protection of forgetfulness; you have to sally forth recklessly into the open, determined to explore the outside world in all its aspects, driven on by a mad desire to invade every space and drain every attraction to the dregs. No longer, either, by analytical reason, but by a willing acceptance of the illogical in your reactions to every room and person, each tree, each speck of dust… (THE FLOOD).
aaaa
I have mis-placed THE BOOK OF FLIGHTS but with WAR and THE GIANTS LeClezio gives himself over totally to the visionary in the hope of staying alive: "One day, round noon, he looks round him, in the big city where he lives; he stops moving, and looks round him. He stops flapping the twin cushions of his speaking lips, he stops blinking his eyes at the sight of set pieces, women, cars, trains, films, pages of essay-poem-novels and looks round him. In a single stroke the world stops moving. (THE GIANTS)
THE GIANTS appeared in 1975 and for almost twenty years LeClezio did not exist in the US. I tried and failed to get Dalkey Archive to reprint the early books.
In France, of course LeClezio continued to publish and I picked up VERS LES ICEBERGS in the hope of seeing that one day into English or… and I waited.
aaaa
In 1993, finally THE PROSPECTOR and THE MEXICAN DREAM appeared. Larry Kart (some day I will write about him--- one of the great editors of our time) then editor of the book section of the Chicago Tribune allowed me to review them… by then LeClezio was part of the usual forgetfulness.
In my review I wrote that THE PROSPECTOR was a romance… and while it did not continue in the vein that I had treasured in those earlier novels… of course in 20 years a writer… I disguised my disappointment and allowed that he had written a very good novel, one that as they say, kept me reading… I imagine nothing much happened for Godine, the publisher of this novel… I had found some words they could use as a blurb but there would be no paper version, I was sure of that. The book of essays THE MEXICAN DREAM was a hodgepodge and sadly LeClezio had given himself over to a too easy self-hatred of being a white European writer.
aaaaa
When I read again today in THE MEXICAN DREAM… I see something I had missed before… and which I have only recently become aware in regard in my case the state of Arizona and the native peoples living there: I know nothing. I know nothing.
LeClezio was trying to share that idea with his readers and only if he had been able to free himself from his ordinary European self-hatred so as to truly give words to what he mentions was, the greatest disaster in human history: the destruction of the various Indian civilizations in the Americas… if only it was possible to do this but not from now comfortable and well rewarded self-hatred…
y
Since then the novel ONITSHA, and a book of stories THE ROUND AND OTHER COLD HARD FACTS have appeared from Nebraska…and seemed too conventional for me… in 2004 Curbstone published WANDERING STAR and not for a moment was I interested in LeClezio's take on the Palestinian/Israeli situation…the novel might have been a parody for all I know and LeClezio was creating a mock entertainment.. Not for a moment did I believe that he could inhabit the experience of an Israeli or Palestinian woman… not for a moment was I unaware of the dreadful fall into the imperialism of LeClezio's imagination and a politically correct and calculated arrogance that had displaced his heroic stuttering yet articulate hesitation that had shaped those early book…but it is for these later books that he was being honored so possibly the comment in THE SWIMMING POOL is not too far off…
yy
Maybe in real old age LeClezio will return to the consoling truth of the last lines of TERRA AMATA: How can one bear witness? I am only an actor who doesn’t know the play he's acting in. What I've done I've done by chance, like a gnat in a strong wind. I've said first one thing, then another. I've written pins, tobacco, passions, suffer, nylon, seed. You've read zip-fastener, top, beauty, woman, cigarette, cloud. And accurate chance is its own individual path. But I've said enough. Now it's your turn."
Sadly, I doubt it.
-----
Re-located material.
Of course Princeton is a wonderful place…according to the late George Garrett, Princeton used to recruit Black students and allow them to go through the first two years with no grades… just passed them along and then in the final two they began to be graded and flunked out. Princeton thus had to it both ways: good liberal admission policies and then ruthless preserving of the degree….now of course the more typical graduate of Princeton is Michelle Obama--- discovering the nasty secret racism of Princeton which allowed her to go there and being half way alert discovering she was probably just not as smart as the non-Black students she found herself among… and of course she was aware of how the good liberal professors treat the hired help. No wonder many Black people voted for George Wallace…
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
AIDAN HIGGINS: How His Writing Died
THIS IS A MODEL FOR HOW TO READ
I was asked by Cornelius Anthony Murphy (Assoc Prof)--- as it is listed on his e-mail---to write about Aidan Higgins since I had contributed to the Review of Contemporary Fiction a piece entitled "51 Pauses After Reading Aidan Higgins" now many years ago.
Cornelius Anthony Murphy (Assoc Prof) decided it was not for his book of essays on Aidan Higgins.
Aidan Higgins wrote two great books LANGRISHE, GO DOWN and BALCONY OF EUROPE. He also wrote some very good short descriptive travel pieces and short pungent notices in Hibernia, a newspaper in Dublin… and then he made the mistake of writing and writing and writing and writing.
Actually READING a book (LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD by Aidan Higgins.
Got to find some therapy
This treatment is taking too long.
"Twenty four Hours"
---Ian Curtis. JOY DIVISION
a-
Letters from Cornelius Anthony Murphy (Assoc Prof):
Any word on the Higgins article? Sorry to be a pest but the publisher is on my trail. I am hoping…
I really hope you can pull something together, about LIONS, or something else even (Balcony?) as I really…
Just checking to see if you've been able to muster any enthusiasm for the Higgins piece. I too re-read LIONS recently and am less taken with it than previously--- bad time in the game for me to shift my point of view! I hope you've found some way through the thickets that appear to have sprouted around you…
Letter in reply:
You will have an essay… but since you asked for something I will write and have I think a way into Higgins.
a-
I must have bought LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD by Aidan Higgins in January of 1994 because in those years I was going to London in that month for a few weeks every year. As I open the paperback, as I have been opening the paperback during the summer of 2008 and now it is the autumn and I am still opening the book: it is falling apart and the pages long ago began to brown and I am sure it will not survive for many more years.
The edition I have was published by Martin Secker and Warburg Ltd--- then part of Reed Consumer Books--- as paper original with what they fall French flaps. The name of the author is printed in a golden box. That year Secker books had a distinct look and that ended rather quickly.
Currently LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD seems out of print both in the UK and in the US. It is available for 99p in the UK and for eight dollars in the US.
As many know Dalkey Archive has taken to reprinting many of Higgins' books and it is a noble endeavor. From the very start of that press the publication of Higgins' work was a priority.
I do not know if Dalkey will be publishing for the first time LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD in the US… but I am pretty sure all the people who want a copy of this Higgins title already have it and it is unlikely that many people would be seeking it out.
a-
Of course I could be wrong and hope I am wrong as everything that Higgins writes is of interest as he and Desmond Hogan and Dorothy Nelson are pretty much it when it comes to prose writing in Ireland after James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Francis Stuart. Of course there are many many prose writers in Ireland: almost as many as the standing army of Irish poets but but but…
a-
Berlin is a fascinating place, maybe less so now that it has been reunited and become a sort of entertainment zone for the privileged subsidized international artistic middle class. During the time of a divided Berlin Uwe Johnson--- as readers may actually remember--- wonderfully perceptive hard earned and authentic books were set in Berlin and in that moment of two Germanys… but now as the years have gone by writers as good as Julian Rios and Ceese Nooteboom have fallen under the sway of Berlin and come to a certain defeat… and part of the reason is that they are not prepared to admit their ignorance of the complexity of Berlin--- they have to use it as background, mere background painted on…
a-
Higgins's book is based on his own residence in Berlin--- just before the actual fall of the Berlin Wall as a guest of one of those international sinecures that the German government uses to get people to come to Berlin for a period of time…
Higgins gives into the mostly deadly of all traps: the academic literary satire… and crosses it with a sentimental entanglement of the central character Dallan Weaver who is a guest of DILDO (Deutsche-Internationale Literatur-Diesnt Organisation and it is probably right there in that footnote attached to a listing of characters, just after the CONTENTS that the book falls apart.
a-
---It is understood that LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD is Higgins's favorite book
a-
The trouble continues right in the prologue with a slice of jazzed up or down potted history: "Zukov's men, the advanced spearheads, entered Berlin through the northern suburbs, screeching as they ran. The infantry went in first over the mine fields and tank traps to be blown to glory; others came on screeching wave after wave. Then the tanks went in."(P.1-2)
This is immediately followed by, "The sneery sculptor who had fluent Spanish asked Weaver what was his astrological sign." (p.2)
The word sneery, astrology and the previous ham-fisted allusion to the Battle for Berlin got me to close the novel right there the first time I tried to read the novel though I had noted that Rudolf Hess is helpfully listed with the others characters in the book as "the last Nazi in Spandau Prison." (P. x)
a-
So, one tries again in the summer, so many years later, having remembered having defending Balcony of Europe for an early issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction-- when it was neither profitable or even useful for a resume to echo Flann O'Brien.
a-
Well, the Weavers ( do we really read Higgins, wife and child?) house hunt for a place during their Berlin stay. There is party going. Mention of Rudolf Hess comes before two mentions of the "bullet riddled Amerika Haus" (p33) and "Amerika Haus was bullet riddled." (p46).
a-
"And where had the brainy Prof read that all whales have syphilis?" (p.33) It is that word brainy coupled with Prof that makes the sentence read like a bad translation…
a-
Early on and sadly dominating the book THE AFFAIR complete with the wife Nancy, "the dispossessed and disgruntled spouse." (p.97) There will be the other woman, Lore, who will having been made pregnant: "Their child's life had been terminated in The Hague by the sinister lady abortionist…"(p.267).
a-
Another unnecessary word: "The right-hand window of Margot Schoeller's famous bookstore…" (P.71) How could could Higgins allow his man Weaver to think that or he to write it? But it sets up a moment of letting us know that Higgins, Weaver knows Samuel Beckett who has just received the Nobel Prize. AS good anecdote is recorded, "Watt (dismissed by its author into Weaver's ear as not so much shit as dysentery." (P.73).
a-
But the book is not all heterosexual. After all this is Berlin: "Two sad sodomites frantic with grief and betrayal were copulating in the snow, lit by the headlights of a parked car… Weaver averted his eyes as he would have looked away from a bloody traffic accident. (p.56).
a-
12 pages are given over to Weaver's child's writing. Enough said. A sort of filler, I guess. Allows for a ink drawing by the "brilliant son" (P.87) of the author.
a-
3 pages of dreams. No check attached for listening. At the going rate today of 150$ per fifty minutes…how many sessions would they require?
a-
But followed up by more Dublin gossip: well that old warhorse Brendan Behan hungover demanding that his wife, "Come up here with you now, Bethrice, an' thrim me toenails." (p.135) and there is mention of "wild Ralph Cusack" (P.134) and I would have liked to have had him about for more than a name drop.
a-
And then the reader is off to drunken Spain but we have been there and in far better verbal company in BALCONY OF EUROPE but we are quickly--- since these pages are read quickly out of embarrassment--- though it takes ages as is said but we are back in Berlin right smartly: "The British Council always gave good parties."(p202); "Lore(the mistress, girlfriend whatever as the kids might say) had discovered a good Japanese restaurant near Fat George's flat…" (P.211); "In the summertime (when the living is easy) it was a very different story."(p.216) The parenthetical phrase is Higgins and he bears full responsibility for it, sadly.
a-
But off to Munich during Olympic season. Israelis will be murdered ( it is THAT Olympics) and now it gets cloudy. Is the following the author, Weaver or who? "When a pure negroid (small n) American could run faster, jump faster and fly first over hurdles faster than any white man, that only confirmed his own conviction abut racial degeneracy: those fellows had just come down out of the trees. (p241)
a-
I missed listing some more "famous" people who appear or are mentioned: Per Olaf Enquist, Leni Riefenstahl, Volker Schlondorff, Margarethe von Trotta who you might like to know, "spent some time under the table retrieving poor shots, sulking 'shitshitshit!"(p243)
a-
And not to let a name go: "Hess was still serving pit his life sentence in Spandau Prison, the Russians would not him go. (P.252).
a-
Now that we are nearly at the end of the book a selection of letters from Berlin to Weaver and one letter from Lore that prepare us for the disappearance of the wife and how true something lives… some years after the body of the book.
a-
And an epilogue he (whether it is Higgins or Weaver?) conflates a meeting between Gunter Grass and Max Frisch and manages to drag in Uwe Johnson and an allusion to Ingeborg Bachmann which is supposed to?... beats me, I have to point out that one of the he's or the proofreader overlooks the misspelled Frishe (p299) while making some point about the Gauloises smoked by Grass and the pipe tobacco stained fingers of Frisch…
a-
I found a book marker reminder (though I can't explain the dates because as we know LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD was published in 1993) of an earlier reading of LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD in the form of a newspaper clipping, now a darker brown than the pages of the book: from the December 25, 1978 THE VILLAGER ( a local paper in Greenwich Village, NY:
DEATH ON 12TH STREET: At 6 pm on December 12, a resident of 343 West 13th Street was found by two friends hanging by the neck in his apartment. The 31 year-old resident, wearing a leather-studded collar, a gas mask with the air vents closed and other assorted sexual equipment, apparently choked to death. The case while is may be an accidental death, is being investigated by the First Homicide squad.
But this scrap can serve as a telling commentary for we know that much of LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD appeared in previous books and while movie directors are endlessly providing new versions (think of Oliver Stone's various Final cuts of ALEXANDER) I would have had no problem---as is said--- with a book solely of observation and quotation but the sheer dreariness of the love/sexual triangle: why not just publish the divorce degree and parts of the hearing transcript if such exists?
b-
I would like to read a NEW book by Higgins of his life in Ireland.
c.
Aidan Higgins is still the best English-language prose stylist in the country.
---Nuala Ni. Dhomhnaill.
New York
1 October 2008
I was asked by Cornelius Anthony Murphy (Assoc Prof)--- as it is listed on his e-mail---to write about Aidan Higgins since I had contributed to the Review of Contemporary Fiction a piece entitled "51 Pauses After Reading Aidan Higgins" now many years ago.
Cornelius Anthony Murphy (Assoc Prof) decided it was not for his book of essays on Aidan Higgins.
Aidan Higgins wrote two great books LANGRISHE, GO DOWN and BALCONY OF EUROPE. He also wrote some very good short descriptive travel pieces and short pungent notices in Hibernia, a newspaper in Dublin… and then he made the mistake of writing and writing and writing and writing.
Actually READING a book (LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD by Aidan Higgins.
Got to find some therapy
This treatment is taking too long.
"Twenty four Hours"
---Ian Curtis. JOY DIVISION
a-
Letters from Cornelius Anthony Murphy (Assoc Prof):
Any word on the Higgins article? Sorry to be a pest but the publisher is on my trail. I am hoping…
I really hope you can pull something together, about LIONS, or something else even (Balcony?) as I really…
Just checking to see if you've been able to muster any enthusiasm for the Higgins piece. I too re-read LIONS recently and am less taken with it than previously--- bad time in the game for me to shift my point of view! I hope you've found some way through the thickets that appear to have sprouted around you…
Letter in reply:
You will have an essay… but since you asked for something I will write and have I think a way into Higgins.
a-
I must have bought LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD by Aidan Higgins in January of 1994 because in those years I was going to London in that month for a few weeks every year. As I open the paperback, as I have been opening the paperback during the summer of 2008 and now it is the autumn and I am still opening the book: it is falling apart and the pages long ago began to brown and I am sure it will not survive for many more years.
The edition I have was published by Martin Secker and Warburg Ltd--- then part of Reed Consumer Books
Currently LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD seems out of print both in the UK and in the US. It is available for 99p in the UK and for eight dollars in the US.
As many know Dalkey Archive has taken to reprinting many of Higgins' books and it is a noble endeavor. From the very start of that press the publication of Higgins' work was a priority.
I do not know if Dalkey will be publishing for the first time LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD in the US… but I am pretty sure all the people who want a copy of this Higgins title already have it and it is unlikely that many people would be seeking it out.
a-
Of course I could be wrong and hope I am wrong as everything that Higgins writes is of interest as he and Desmond Hogan and Dorothy Nelson are pretty much it when it comes to prose writing in Ireland after James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Francis Stuart. Of course there are many many prose writers in Ireland: almost as many as the standing army of Irish poets but but but…
a-
Berlin is a fascinating place, maybe less so now that it has been reunited and become a sort of entertainment zone for the privileged subsidized international artistic middle class. During the time of a divided Berlin Uwe Johnson--- as readers may actually remember--- wonderfully perceptive hard earned and authentic books were set in Berlin and in that moment of two Germanys… but now as the years have gone by writers as good as Julian Rios and Ceese Nooteboom have fallen under the sway of Berlin and come to a certain defeat… and part of the reason is that they are not prepared to admit their ignorance of the complexity of Berlin--- they have to use it as background, mere background painted on…
a-
Higgins's book is based on his own residence in Berlin--- just before the actual fall of the Berlin Wall as a guest of one of those international sinecures that the German government uses to get people to come to Berlin for a period of time…
Higgins gives into the mostly deadly of all traps: the academic literary satire… and crosses it with a sentimental entanglement of the central character Dallan Weaver who is a guest of DILDO (Deutsche-Internationale Literatur-Diesnt Organisation and it is probably right there in that footnote attached to a listing of characters, just after the CONTENTS that the book falls apart.
a-
---It is understood that LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD is Higgins's favorite book
a-
The trouble continues right in the prologue with a slice of jazzed up or down potted history: "Zukov's men, the advanced spearheads, entered Berlin through the northern suburbs, screeching as they ran. The infantry went in first over the mine fields and tank traps to be blown to glory; others came on screeching wave after wave. Then the tanks went in."(P.1-2)
This is immediately followed by, "The sneery sculptor who had fluent Spanish asked Weaver what was his astrological sign." (p.2)
The word sneery, astrology and the previous ham-fisted allusion to the Battle for Berlin got me to close the novel right there the first time I tried to read the novel though I had noted that Rudolf Hess is helpfully listed with the others characters in the book as "the last Nazi in Spandau Prison." (P. x)
a-
So, one tries again in the summer, so many years later, having remembered having defending Balcony of Europe for an early issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction-- when it was neither profitable or even useful for a resume to echo Flann O'Brien.
a-
Well, the Weavers ( do we really read Higgins, wife and child?) house hunt for a place during their Berlin stay. There is party going. Mention of Rudolf Hess comes before two mentions of the "bullet riddled Amerika Haus" (p33) and "Amerika Haus was bullet riddled." (p46).
a-
"And where had the brainy Prof read that all whales have syphilis?" (p.33) It is that word brainy coupled with Prof that makes the sentence read like a bad translation…
a-
Early on and sadly dominating the book THE AFFAIR complete with the wife Nancy, "the dispossessed and disgruntled spouse." (p.97) There will be the other woman, Lore, who will having been made pregnant: "Their child's life had been terminated in The Hague by the sinister lady abortionist…"(p.267).
a-
Another unnecessary word: "The right-hand window of Margot Schoeller's famous bookstore…" (P.71) How could could Higgins allow his man Weaver to think that or he to write it? But it sets up a moment of letting us know that Higgins, Weaver knows Samuel Beckett who has just received the Nobel Prize. AS good anecdote is recorded, "Watt (dismissed by its author into Weaver's ear as not so much shit as dysentery." (P.73).
a-
But the book is not all heterosexual. After all this is Berlin: "Two sad sodomites frantic with grief and betrayal were copulating in the snow, lit by the headlights of a parked car… Weaver averted his eyes as he would have looked away from a bloody traffic accident. (p.56).
a-
12 pages are given over to Weaver's child's writing. Enough said. A sort of filler, I guess. Allows for a ink drawing by the "brilliant son" (P.87) of the author.
a-
3 pages of dreams. No check attached for listening. At the going rate today of 150$ per fifty minutes…how many sessions would they require?
a-
But followed up by more Dublin gossip: well that old warhorse Brendan Behan hungover demanding that his wife, "Come up here with you now, Bethrice, an' thrim me toenails." (p.135) and there is mention of "wild Ralph Cusack" (P.134) and I would have liked to have had him about for more than a name drop.
a-
And then the reader is off to drunken Spain but we have been there and in far better verbal company in BALCONY OF EUROPE but we are quickly--- since these pages are read quickly out of embarrassment--- though it takes ages as is said but we are back in Berlin right smartly: "The British Council always gave good parties."(p202); "Lore(the mistress, girlfriend whatever as the kids might say) had discovered a good Japanese restaurant near Fat George's flat…" (P.211); "In the summertime (when the living is easy) it was a very different story."(p.216) The parenthetical phrase is Higgins and he bears full responsibility for it, sadly.
a-
But off to Munich during Olympic season. Israelis will be murdered ( it is THAT Olympics) and now it gets cloudy. Is the following the author, Weaver or who? "When a pure negroid (small n) American could run faster, jump faster and fly first over hurdles faster than any white man, that only confirmed his own conviction abut racial degeneracy: those fellows had just come down out of the trees. (p241)
a-
I missed listing some more "famous" people who appear or are mentioned: Per Olaf Enquist, Leni Riefenstahl, Volker Schlondorff, Margarethe von Trotta who you might like to know, "spent some time under the table retrieving poor shots, sulking 'shitshitshit!"(p243)
a-
And not to let a name go: "Hess was still serving pit his life sentence in Spandau Prison, the Russians would not him go. (P.252).
a-
Now that we are nearly at the end of the book a selection of letters from Berlin to Weaver and one letter from Lore that prepare us for the disappearance of the wife and how true something lives… some years after the body of the book.
a-
And an epilogue he (whether it is Higgins or Weaver?) conflates a meeting between Gunter Grass and Max Frisch and manages to drag in Uwe Johnson and an allusion to Ingeborg Bachmann which is supposed to?... beats me, I have to point out that one of the he's or the proofreader overlooks the misspelled Frishe (p299) while making some point about the Gauloises smoked by Grass and the pipe tobacco stained fingers of Frisch…
a-
I found a book marker reminder (though I can't explain the dates because as we know LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD was published in 1993) of an earlier reading of LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD in the form of a newspaper clipping, now a darker brown than the pages of the book: from the December 25, 1978 THE VILLAGER ( a local paper in Greenwich Village, NY:
DEATH ON 12TH STREET: At 6 pm on December 12, a resident of 343 West 13th Street was found by two friends hanging by the neck in his apartment. The 31 year-old resident, wearing a leather-studded collar, a gas mask with the air vents closed and other assorted sexual equipment, apparently choked to death. The case while is may be an accidental death, is being investigated by the First Homicide squad.
But this scrap can serve as a telling commentary for we know that much of LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD appeared in previous books and while movie directors are endlessly providing new versions (think of Oliver Stone's various Final cuts of ALEXANDER) I would have had no problem---as is said--- with a book solely of observation and quotation but the sheer dreariness of the love/sexual triangle: why not just publish the divorce degree and parts of the hearing transcript if such exists?
b-
I would like to read a NEW book by Higgins of his life in Ireland.
c.
Aidan Higgins is still the best English-language prose stylist in the country.
---Nuala Ni. Dhomhnaill.
New York
1 October 2008
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