Short, dense, unsettling, sharp and incredibly relevant to this day and age although it was written fifty years ago. It could be a Harold Pinter play Short, dense, unsettling, sharp and incredibly relevant to this day and age although it was written fifty years ago. It could be a Harold Pinter play or a Michelangelo Antonioni film. It is one of the best books I’ve read lately.
[image] La Notte, 1961 Jeanne Moreau, Marcello Mastroianni
This is the story of a weekend in the life of the Bentwoods, a middle aged pair of well-to-do New Yorkers living in an ascending Brooklyn neighborhood at the end of the 60s. It’s a suspenseful tale of personal and social turbulence, loaded with images of order and chaos, attachment and estrangement. These partners dance around each other for 155 pages, an intimate choreography the steps of which, one senses, have been repeated multiple times in their longstanding relationship. Otto Bentwood, once an actively liberal lawyer, finds himself spiritually confused in a fast-changing society. Sophie Bentwood is soporific enough to go on clinging to their world of privilege even as it suffocates her. They are both so well-equipped to read themselves and their environment that there’s a kind of horror in such an overload of meaning. Yet, they are in that phase of life where their capacity and readiness for change is rapidly diminishing. (I felt for them.) And so, they remain in perpetual inertia although they frantically move around in a setting that seems to be closing in on them. The cracks in the carapace of their ‘civilized’ existence are affecting them and they can’t pretend otherwise.
Ominous signs are everywhere: a stone is thrown into their living room, a drunk is sleeping in his own vomit across the street (and this is supposed to be a good neighborhood.) An anonymous caller breathes into the phone late at night, a stranger barges into their house frenziedly asking money for train fare. Their Victorian country house is being vandalized and they are aware of class-hatred even in the rural kitchen of their ex-farmer-turned-to-caretaker of the summer houses of “city folks.” The novel opens with Sophie getting bitten by a stray cat she had fed minutes ago; for the following three days she’s dreading what the bite will bring her: rabies, shots in the belly, death or nothing at all.
"God, if I am rabid, I am equal to what is outside," she said out loud, and felt an extraordinary relief as though, at last, she’d discovered what it was that could create a balance between the quiet, rather vacant progression of the days she spent in this house, and those portents that lit up the dark at the edge of her own existence. She cleaned up the kitchen, saying to herself over and over, I have to think. Think, she commanded her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Then she covered her face with a cream that had cost $25 for four ounces.
This reminder of mortality, paired with the couple’s emotional desolation, makes them the “Desperate Characters” of the title. Still, as Jonathan Franzen says in his brilliant introduction, this is “…the rare novel that does justice to both sides of marriage, both hate and love, both her and him.” Vivian Gornick, another writer I respect and the one that put this on my radar in the first place, sees this work solely through a feminine lens. I can certainly relate to that but I prefer Franzen’s more universal approach.
"I wish someone would tell me how I can live," he said, and shot her a glance. The half-question affected her unpleasantly, and she turned her head away instantly so he could not see her face. She felt the injustice of her own response – what if his words were puerile? The plea behind them was not. But she couldn’t tell anyone how to live!
The questions the novel raises are radical and unpleasant. Easy answers are not given. Franzen adds: “As bad as it is to be desperate, it’s even worse to be desperate and also be aware of the vital questions of public law and order and privilege that are entailed in your private desperation, and to feel as if by breaking down you’re proving a whole nation of Charlie Russels right.” Charlie Russel being the close friend and ex business partner now accusing Otto of complacency: “… Charlie brayed that no oppression had ever been so difficult to resist as middle-class oppression, because it wears a thousand faces, even the face of revolution, and that it is an insatiable gut that can even nourish itself on the poison its enemies leave lying about to destroy it. I asked him what alternative he had in mind and he buzzed his secretary and told her to send in his appointment.”
Nothing much happens in the end but the beauty of the book lies in that what little happens stands up to all kinds of interpretation. The perspective kept changing according to my mood as I went through. Franzen claims that he had read it half a dozen times by the time he wrote the preface in 1991 (which, brilliant as it is, should better be read after one is finished with the story.) I believe I’ll do the same before I can safely say I’m done with it. For me, that is what defines great fiction and instantly puts this in my favorites.
Mundane though it may be I couldn’t help thinking throughout this little gem of a book that I’m being reacquainted, this time in stunning English prosMundane though it may be I couldn’t help thinking throughout this little gem of a book that I’m being reacquainted, this time in stunning English prose, with a thought that had been drilled into me ever since I became aware of the real world. The thought had been communicated in practical every day language, not the least bit literary but urgent to be heard nevertheless. It was this: money, the luxury of owing it and the capacity to earn it in order to support one’s self, is indispensable to freedom, self-expression and self-preservation.
Both my grandmothers, born a decade or two later than Woolf, had neither rooms nor money of their own and when they were her age at the time she wrote this (40) the idea that such commodities were achievable was out of reach for them here in the European South. My mother, on the other hand, was among the few of her social environment to manage having both, however modest. Her rural family couldn’t provide her with a dowry other than a state-funded practical education that secured her an urban job and a freedom that must have seemed exotic to her fellow village girls. My own middle-class upbringing gave me the privilege of choice between academia or a respectably-paying job. And my daughters are luckily living lives that enable them to act and think in ways their great-grandmothers wouldn’t have dreamed of.
One of those grandmothers was illiterate, the other was allowed to complete grammar school, they probably wouldn’t have known what to make of this book’s inspired train of thought had it miraculously found its way to them. My mother can’t read the English original but she has earned the right to read and know what to make of her readings. I’m going to find a nice Greek translation and I’m sure she’ll feel the meaning of the text to her bones. Myself, I’m fortunate enough to have the room, time, knowledge and empathy to properly appreciate both the beauty of Woolf’s language and the brilliance of her arguments. My girls have all the above but perhaps lack the empathy, having grown up in a society where what Woolf describes as women’s burning desires are taken for granted – at least in some parts of this world. I can only wish that it will be curiosity and not a sense of having joined the club that will one day lead them to it; the English text of course – this goes without saying for their generation.
Now all this says next to nothing about the book itself (but maybe not). It says something about where Woolf’s sisters were, are and hopefully will be; I’d like to think she would have smiled at the thought of just that. ...more
Beautiful. Imaginative. Eloquent. Too stylized sometimes, absolutely transporting throughout. Just like those magazines (yes…magazines) that appear earBeautiful. Imaginative. Eloquent. Too stylized sometimes, absolutely transporting throughout. Just like those magazines (yes…magazines) that appear early in the story and keep returning as props that punctuate the changes in the lives of the novel's characters.
It’s 1958 when it all begins and as early as page six “water-curled copies of Vogue” appear in “the principal bath, with its stains, sponges, soaps the color of tea, books, carpeting on the floor, a basket of smooth stones, an empty glass of the deepest blue.” The bath of the large, white-bricked Victorian house on the shore of the Hudson River where Viri Berland, the male lead, steams in peace, his little daughters waiting on the other side of the closed door for the storyteller in him to deliver. He is thirty.
Nedra, the “long-necked, graceful wife”, “dressed in her oat-colored sweater, slim as a pike, her long hair fastened” appears on the next page, in the kitchen, “stunning in her concentration.” She is dressed for the evening; people are coming for dinner. On page eight we find, among an array of house objects “glistening as evidence”… “magazines in which were photographs of women to whom she compared herself.” She is “a woman whose cool remark forms the mood of a dinner.” “Her dreams still cling to her, adorn her” but she has also “accepted the limitations of her life.” She is (only) twenty-eight.
Objects, textures, sounds, light, weathers, nature, meals, all are meticulously described in this book. They are part of the rich scenery of this family’s life, a life brimming with friends, gatherings, outings, summer stays by the sea, culture, domesticity, everything “the carefully laid out luggage of bourgeois life” of the 20th century had to offer.
James Salter’s writing is incredibly visual. He follows the Berlands from the late 50s to the 70s in a series of cinematic vignettes, explicitly showcasing the “life people believe you are living”, all the while insinuating another life longed to be discovered. “It is this other which causes the trouble” - and propels the characters to whatever misery or conquest lies ahead.
The author zooms in tableaux that contain pleasures, agonies and people who make fleeting appearances not always serving the narrative; they become part of it for no apparent reason and then disappear, pretty much the way real life doesn’t follow the causality of fiction. But because this is fiction, he also zooms out and offers his narrator’s point of view in lyrical musings and aphorisms. The beauty of the words turns the reading experience into an aesthetic, as well as an intellectual one- even when you don’t quite agree with said point of view.
On page forty Nedra is in the city, “wrapped in herself, staring in the windows of bookstores at the beautiful heavy volumes of painters, the Italian edition of Vogue.” Why the Italian, when a bunch of local ones are readily available? In prose so carefully crafted nothing is coincidence or mere affectation. For all its abundance, this mid-century Eden leaves its inhabitants craving for more. Their possessions, their work and pastimes, the security of their haven are not enough. Something is missing, something is out of reach. Maybe it’s a matter of geography.
It's 1963, Christmas. “There was a treasure hunt, ice cream, lighting real candles on the tree, a huge tree standing near the window, thick as a bear’s coat, birds in its branches, silver balls, mirrors, angels, a tree with a wooden village nestled beneath it and a ten-pointed star bought at Bonnier’s on top. Nine magazines were placed on the floor, three in each row…”, props for a game of magic. House entertainment for family and friends. Their neighbor is there, a constant visitor, the kids love him. Nedra is sleeping with him. (Viri also sleeps with his secretary but she isn’t part of the domestic bliss.)
Five years later Nedra is flipping the pages of Vogue while waiting at a runway’s end “in a shimmering line of aircraft” for their own to take off. They’re going to Europe, to England, a lifelong dream finally realized. Maybe their marriage will be saved in a different scenery. In a secluded house in Kent “filled with pictures and prints… with gardens down to the sea… views of remote, ordered country” they observe their hosts, a couple that radiates the calmness of a well-arranged but passionless life. They are stunned by the image of “conjugal life in its purest form, problems held suspended, at peace within the regency of this pair”; Viri is overcome by “terror which cannot be confessed when one realizes one’s own life is nothing.” To Nedra the image is “proof that life demanded selfishness, isolation, and that even in another country, a woman utterly unknown to her could confide this so clearly.”
They stand together in a “leafy churchyard redolent with the dust of Englishmen” and have a vision “of what the years might bring: the too-familiar restaurant, a small apartment, empty evenings.” They cannot go back to their old life. They are in their 40s, but they feel and think like present day fifty-somethings. They did everything early, were married at 20, had children at 23, that was the way of their generation, of their time slot in history. A decade could be added by present day readers to make them more compatible with contemporary standards. Their disillusionment is recognizable regardless of day and age.
It's the 70s and the Berlands are no longer together. Their nuclear family has scattered, their house has been sold, the years are not illuminated by common lights. New characters have entered the picture, the fates of old ones are briefly mentioned; life has provided a wide range of scenarios, most of them bitter even for those with the best intentions. Once more the focus is on Viri, on Nedra. “She has made the pilgrimage through vanity, the pages of magazines, through envy itself to a vaster, more tranquil world. Like a traveler, there was much she could tell, there was much that could never be told.” She manages to tell her daughter the one sentence her ex-husband had always longed to give his children as his sole piece of advice: “You must go further than I did. With your life. You must become free.”
It was not a matter of living alone, though in her own case this had been necessary. The freedom she meant was self-conquest. It was a natural state. It was meant only for those who would risk everything for it, who were aware that without it life is only appetites until the teeth are gone.
In the end, we realize that the story of the Berlands is not as extraordinary as the illustration created by James Salter’s luminous language and imagery. Those magazines he keeps using were doing the same: sumptuous editions, their pages brimming with the best photography and literature, hordes of objects and suggestions of glorious lives, glimpses of artificial perfection, unattainable beauty. Illusions not entirely pointless if they manage to light up the blandness of everyday life, even for the little while it takes to leaf through them.
Of course, magazines do not provide answers, they use beauty first and foremost to sell the goods advertised in their pages. Salter’s literature uses beauty to “renew, console, transform – by a word, a sentence, a rhythm – all the surrounding tragedy of life into pleasure we find nowhere but in literature’s domain”, as Richard Ford notes in the introduction. This book is not a moral statement or critique of a way of life; the occasional acerbic remark from the narrator doesn’t conceal the affection he feels for his characters. There’s genuine appreciation for all that refines the texture of everyday life and genuine sorrow that triviality seems to be prevailing at the end of the day.
The breathtaking photo on the cover of the March 1963 issue of Harper’s Bazaar (did Nedra flick through it?) is particularly relevant:
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A model dressed in elegant, light-as-air chiffon floats high above New York’s Hudson River in a plastic bubble. Free or trapped? The bubble is suspended from a crane by a steel cable, any evidence of which has been retouched from the photograph, same as the practical details of the life described in the novel are left out of it. For all their cosmopolitanism, the characters seem to be oblivious to events beyond their ‘bubble’, but overly sensitive to their own feelings and predicaments. The author, same as this cover, asks us to let down our guard, get carried away by the sensations of their fictitious world. For those readers willing to do so, Light Years promises immense reading pleasure. I’m glad I was one of them....more
I can’t begin to tell you how much I enjoyed this little ‘story’ of urban loneliness. 150 pages of nuanced prose that reads like a poem. Constructed oI can’t begin to tell you how much I enjoyed this little ‘story’ of urban loneliness. 150 pages of nuanced prose that reads like a poem. Constructed of the fewest words possible in order to cut to the core of what their writer meant to convey: the outer dialogue of a single woman with her surroundings as she goes through the motions of her every day life; and the deeply rich inner monologue that accompanies this same existence.
The place is an unnamed city, somewhere in Italy; it could be Rome but that’s only a guess, it could be any old town where past and present meet. The time is an unspecified present spanning the course of a year, complete with all the scenic props the change of seasons entails. The unnamed narrator is a 40ish dottoressa in the local university who has consciously chosen to lead a life quite detached from intimate relationships. Throughout nearly 50 vignettes/chapters with titles like “On the Sidewalk”, “In the Piazza”, “On the Couch”, “At Dawn”, "In the Mirror”, “In My Head”, we get glimpses of her solitary life – and in the process we put together the personal landscape the author set out to paint.
Lahiri has always been adept at describing emotional depths with spare literary means: the simplest words, the least elaborate sentences. Starting from her previous book In Other Words and advancing the challenge she undertook when she decided to start writing in a language other than English (I am reluctant to use the term ‘mother tongue’ since her mother’s was actually Bengali), she’s driving her no-frills prose to new heights here. She wrote this one in Italian sometime before translating it herself in English. As I constantly find myself trying to communicate in a language that’s not my own, I have the utmost admiration for what authors like Lahiri are doing. There’s a lot of effort involved in choosing the right word from the assortment available in a dictionary that hasn’t got a clue of the subtle difference between, say, loneliness, solitude, privacy or reclusiveness. Never mind trying to achieve a personal tone of voice, as distinguishable as the one in my mother language. Nabokov made it seem as something easily attainable – it is nothing but. However, being able to not only talk but think in another language is an alluring challenge and a rather innocuous escape from one’s self that is well worth the trouble, in my opinion.
It should be said that there’s not much of a plot here, not in the traditional sense. But because the story is deliberately vague, a sort of build-up game is offered to its readers who are invited to make what they want of its missing details, reasons and possibilities. In almost every chapter I found thoughts or gestures that could have been my own although the particulars of my life couldn’t have been further from those of that woman. Are they really, I wonder… Solitude and its management is after all part of our lives much more than we’d care (or dare) to admit.
I started this write-up with the phrase “I can’t begin to tell you”. I realize it’s only a figure of speech; but I’ll make use of my non-native-speaker status and proclaim that, indeed, I can: the minute I reached the last page I returned to the first and started reading this all over again. Lahiri’s double-translated words (Italian to English by her, English to Greek in my own mind) had an even more soothing and satisfactory effect the second time around!
Nowhere
Because when all is said and done the setting doesn’t matter: the space, the walls, the light. It makes no difference whether I’m under a clear blue sky or caught in the rain or swimming in the transparent sea in summer. I could be riding a train or traveling by car or flying in a plane, among the clouds that drift and spread on all sides like a mass of jellyfish in the air. I’ve never stayed still, I’ve always been moving, that’s all I’ve ever been doing. Always waiting either to get somewhere or to come back. Or to escape. I keep packing and unpacking the small suitcase at my feet. I hold my purse in my lap, it’s got some money and a book to read. Is there any place we’re not moving through? Disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, uprooted, turned around. I’m related to these related terms. These words are my abode, my only foothold.
Many thanks to Ilse, whose insightful review (of the Dutch-translated edition!) https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... gave me early notice of the publication of this latest book of a favorite author....more
This is a truly beautiful book. Its language is rich and its premise is a reader’s dream of what literature should do at its best: connect, converse aThis is a truly beautiful book. Its language is rich and its premise is a reader’s dream of what literature should do at its best: connect, converse and contain all that haunts us when contemplating our human predicament.
I don’t know whether Michael Cunningham set out to write this novel in order to pay tribute to Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” or if that book just happened to serve as the perfect vehicle for his own reflections on Love, Life and Death. Whatever the case, the result is a masterful narration that uses Mrs. Dalloway's plot and character as the link between three women, Virginia Woolf included, who share the same fears and yearn for more meaningful lives although they live in different times and places. Cunningham improvises on Woolf’s theme of Time, how it unrelentingly flows and how it mercifully seems to stop sometimes, to offer us those precious, wholesome moments that keep us carrying on; or not…
I think the book is also a tribute to the reading experience itself; how readers find themselves containing and contained in certain authors and fictional characters. How reading suspends us in time, has us occupying a space that is neither here nor there, a unique time-bubble that is common secret among those eager to live in it every once in a while. How authors and readers find themselves engaged in a conversation that transcends time and place.
It helps but is not necessary to have read the original. This book stands on its own but the pleasure is enhanced if one can spot the references to the source material and the way Cunningham manages to weave them into his novel. I underlined so many dazzling sentences. I put exclamation marks next to so many passages, along with little arrows to help remind me exactly what was worth pointing out. I scribbled words such as ‘self-detachment’, ‘remorse’, ‘continuity’, ‘consolation’, ‘transcendence’, planning to elaborate on them in this review. In the end the author perfectly summed it up himself in this paragraph ... the way a painter might brush a final line of color onto a painting and save it from incoherence:
Yes, Clarissa thinks, it’s time for the day to be over. We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep – it’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself. There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.
What more could I possibly add except for my admiration?
[image] I'm walking up Fifth Avenue at noon straight into the cold harsh sunlight of a morning in November. Mobs of people are coming at me. Once the [image] I'm walking up Fifth Avenue at noon straight into the cold harsh sunlight of a morning in November. Mobs of people are coming at me. Once the dominating color of this crowd was white, now it is black and brown. Once it wore blue and white collars, now it is in mufti. Once it was law-abiding, now it is not. The idiom has changed, but the character remains stable.
Ms Gornick and I have almost nothing in common except for our love for New York City, she as a native and I as a visitor. We are of different generations, ethnicities, backgrounds and we have made opposite life choices. This is an anthology of thoughts, experiences, grievances and consolations that are hers and hers alone. Why then did I feel that I knew exactly what she was talking about page after page of this deeply personal book? Because she is so frank and willing to give away so much of herself that one can only stop and listen to this woman who's clear-sighted, street-smart, well-read and a keen observer of herself and those who surround her. Chances are that she will be understood by many.
This is not a traditional memoir or a mere account of colorful scenes of city life. It is also a study of solitude and companionship and of lives containing both. The rhythm of the narration is masterful, alternating between ruminations on the human condition, brief stories of people from all walks of life and snapshots of the drama that unfolds daily on the streets of any metropolis. In this case a very NY-ish one. It reminded me of the best of Woody Allen films from the 70s to the 90s when he too was proclaiming his love for the city and its restless inhabitants. The minute I finished this little book I wanted to start all over again to better appreciate and digest the author's condensed wisdom and her outlook on city (and her own) life that is as unflinchingly sharp as is emotionally moving.
Here's a tiny sample:
"Early on a Friday evening in spring, cars coming from three directions are halted in the middle of Abingdon Square, in their midst a rat running frantically back and forth. A man turns the corner nearest to where I'm standing, mesmerized. He is in his forties, wearing khaki shorts and a bright blue camp shirt and carrying a Whole Foods shopping bag in each hand. His brown thatch is graying, his features painfully delicate; his eyes blink worriedly behind designer glasses. "What is it?" he cries at me. His eyes follow my pointing finger. "Oh," he says wearily. "A neur-rotic rat". "Or else a prelude to the plague, " I say. "Now there's an only slightly more comforting thought." For a moment the man looks thoughtful. Then he shakes his head no. "Poor thing. He's looking for a way out and there isn't any. Believe me. I know." He shoulders his fancy provisions anew and goes his way, now burdened by the useless wisdom he only rarely has to face up to." ...more
“Children drown, beautiful women are mangled in automobile accidents, cruise ships founder, and men die lingering deaths in mines and submarines, but “Children drown, beautiful women are mangled in automobile accidents, cruise ships founder, and men die lingering deaths in mines and submarines, but you will find none of this in my accounts. In the last chapter the ship comes home to port, the children are saved, the miners will be rescued. Is this an infirmity of the genteel or a conviction that there are discernible moral truths?” From “The Jewels Of The Cabots", written in 1972, the last story of this magnificent collection.
These are the words of the protagonist and we’re likely to think that they might be Cheever’s too. But if we’ve come this far in the book we know by now that only the part about the moral conviction is true. There’s no infirmity in this man’s writing although he is undoubtedly of the genteel kind of a bygone era. In his stories people do perish, accidents do happen and the happy ending is not a given. Great writers are profoundly immersed in their time and place and Cheever is no exception. On the contrary; he is so much of his time and place that it’s for a good reason that he’s called “the Chekhov of the suburbs”. He says so himself: “I am, after all, one of perhaps ten American writers who are known as the American Chekhov; but then I have been described as the Budd Schulberg of New England.”
His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the New York suburbs and the state of Massachusetts. This is the America of the 50s and 60s. Prosperous, gleaming, thriving, awash in Technicolor, rejoicing in its WW2 victory. The rewards, even if they don’t apply to all its people, apply to the social class Cheever belongs, of which he’s a keen observer. The members of this middle to upper-middle class live in well-appointed, brightly lit houses with tended lawns, have well-paid jobs, travel abroad, gather in country clubs, around dining tables and swimming pools where the banquets are lavish and the drinks are flowing. The women’s jewelry is shining (even if it’s faux), the cars are huge and shine too (even if they’re of the mass-market kind). The children are healthy, the housewives are caring, summer houses and boats are readily available. The rest of the world is gawking. America is the Promised Land, the Dream, the place to be.
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Why then the men and women who inhabit this land are not content, satisfied, serene? Why does this sensitive writer detect the restlessness, the flinch of fear, the frozen smile, the haunted look of anxiety, the fleeting gesture of insecurity everywhere he looks? Well , as it turns out people then, now and forever carry their own personal heaven and hell no matter where or when they live. These stories are love letters to a land of plenty as much as they are cries of futility and despair. Despite the wealth, the dogged insistence in abiding by the rules of civility, the strong sense of decorum, the potential to make life as pleasant and virtuous as can be, Eden keeps slipping away. [image]
[image] “I stand, figuratively, with one wet foot on Plymouth Rock, looking with some delicacy, not into a formidable and challenging wilderness but onto a half-finished civilization embracing glass towers, oil derricks, suburban continents, and abandoned movie houses and wondering why, in this most prosperous, equitable, and accomplished world –where even the cleaning women practice the Chopin preludes in their spare time- everyone should seem to be disappointed.” “The Death Of Justina” 1960
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They are American stories even when they take place abroad (in Italy mostly, where Cheever and his family spent a couple of years). However, the search for meaning, beauty and reason and the longing for something that may never was, nor will it ever be, is universal. “Fifty per cent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. But I don’t suppose you’re old enough to understand. When you’re in one place and long to be in another, it isn’t as simple as taking a boat. You don’t really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don’t have, or haven’t been able to find.” “The Bella Lingua” 1958
They are soaked in Martinis, Manhattans, champagne and Old-Fashioneds, same as they are soaked in light, all kinds of light. Cheever is obsessed with it. His words again: “The constants that I look for in this sometimes dated paraphernalia are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.”
They have killer opening sentences… “It was one of those rainy late afternoons when the toy department of Woolworth’s on Fifth Avenue is full of women who appear to have been taken in adultery and who are now shopping for a present to carry home to their youngest child.” “The Geometry of Love” 1966 …and their endings are thresholds to the life that is to follow and we will never know of. “It had begun to blow outside, and the house creaked gently, like a hull when the wind takes up the sail. The room with the people in it looked enduring and secure, although in the morning they would all be gone.” “The Day The Pig Fell Into The Well” 1954
More often than not something sinister is lurking in the corner and when it makes its appearance it rarely fails to be the cause of ruin. When it does fail, our relief is almost supernatural. “The touchstone of their euphoria remained potent, and while Larry gave up the fire track he could still be seen at the communion rail, the fifty-yard line, the 8:03, and the Chamber Music Club, and through the prudence and shrewdness of Helen’s broker they got richer and richer and richer and lived happily, happily, happily, happily.” “The Worm In The Apple” 1957
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There’s humor and just a hint of mockery here and there, that is never nothing less than elegant. “I would not want to be one of those writers who begin each morning exclaiming: “O Gogol, O Chekhov, O Thackeray and Dickens, what would you have made of a bomb shelter ornamented with four plaster-of-Paris ducks, a birdbath, and three composition gnomes with long beards, and red mobcaps?” “The Brigadier And The Golf Widow” 1961
Most of all, there’s love of life, and compassion, and almost childish wonder as to why this same life doesn’t turn out to be as fair as it was promised in the brightly-colored nurseries and playgrounds of affluent suburbs, in spite of the best intentions of all those involved in the solemn vow.
This book kept me wonderful company for a good part of this wretched year. It was deliberately savored ever so slowly in order to prolong the pleasure. I’ll now miss the sight of it on the bedside table but it will forever hold a special place in my heart as only the best books do.
Αν υπήρχε Υπουργείο Λογοτεχνίας θα έπρεπε να τοποθετήσει προειδοποίηση όμοια με αυτή των τσιγάρων σε εμφανές σημείο κάθε βιβλίου του Ουελμπέκ και ιδιαΑν υπήρχε Υπουργείο Λογοτεχνίας θα έπρεπε να τοποθετήσει προειδοποίηση όμοια με αυτή των τσιγάρων σε εμφανές σημείο κάθε βιβλίου του Ουελμπέκ και ιδιαίτερα σ'αυτό το τελευταίο. Θα έλεγε: "Η ανάγνωση αυτού του συγγραφέα σκοτώνει αλλά και, αν αντέξετε μέχρι τέλους, λυτρώνει." "Περιέχει σκέψεις που θα επηρεάσουν σημαντικά τη διάθεση και τις υπαρξιακές αγωνίες σας, ιδιαίτερα αν βρίσκεστε στην ευεπίφορη φάση της μέσης ηλικίας και έχετε την τάση να ταυτίζεστε με τους ήρωες των βιβλίων σας." "Περιέχει σκηνές πρόκλησης που θα δοκιμάσουν τα όρια της αναγνωστικής δεκτικότητάς σας."
Το ερώτημα στην καρδιά του μυθιστορήματος είναι απλό και διατυπώνεται νωρίς: "Μπορούσα να είμαι ευτυχισμένος μόνος μου; Δεν το πίστευα. Μπορούσα να είμαι ευτυχισμένος γενικότερα;" Κι άλλο ένα, προς το τέλος, περνάει σχεδόν απαρατήρητο μέσα στο χείμαρρο της αφήγησης: "Είχε περιθώριο επιλογής; Έχει ποτέ κανείς;" Και η ιστορία απλή: μεσήλικας άντρας, έμπλεος υπαρξιακής αγωνίας και μοναξιάς, δεν μπορεί να αποφύγει τον απολογισμό ζωής (που κατα πως φαίνεται είναι αναπόφευκτος ακόμα και για τους πιο "οχυρωμένους") και, ανήμπορος να γεμίσει το κενό μέσα του, κόβει δεσμούς (δεν έχει και πολλούς) και ξεκινάει ταξίδι πραγματικό και εσωτερικό αναζητώντας πρόσωπα, λόγους και τρόπους που θα του δώσουν κάποιο κίνητρο για να συνεχίσει να ζει.
Ο Ουελμπέκ βέβαια, επειδή είναι αυτός που είναι (μεγάλος μάστορας, δεινός αφηγητής, οξυδερκής παρατηρητής, δηλητητιώδης χιουμορίστας, απολαυστικό μείγμα κυνισμού και...ναι...συμπόνιας, προκλητικός και ανατρεπτικός), μεταμορφώνει το κοινότοπο, ίσως, θέμα σε συναρπαστική περιπλάνηση. Σε 300 σελίδες περιγράφει την αγωνιώδη πορεία του ήρωά του και της μεταπολεμικής Ευρώπης, παρασύροντας μας σ' ένα συναισθηματικό roller coaster όπου δεν χάνει στιγμή τον έλεγχο. Παραδόξως, σ'αυτό το τελευταίο βιβλίο του είναι πιο μισάνθρωπος αλλά και πιο ουμανιστής από ποτέ. Αλλά έτσι ήταν πάντα, κατά τη γνώμη μου, μόνο που με τα χρόνια η αντίφαση του αυτή γίνεται ακόμα πιο έντονη. Ή μήπως δεν είναι αντίφαση;; Ας βρουν οι αναγνώστες τη δική τους απάντηση - αυτό δεν κάνει η μεγάλη λογοτεχνία;! Ακόμα κι αν δε συμφωνούν με τον ήρωα/ συγγραφέα, το συγκλονιστικό κλείσιμο αποζημιώνει.
Υ.Γ. Αξίζει μνείας το ευρηματικό εξώφυλλο της ελληνικής έκδοσης. Βρέθηκα να κυκλώνω ασυναίσθητα την τελευταία παράγραφο, ίδια με το σκίτσο, και αυτό κάτι λέει...
As I was making my way through this one, it once more occurred to me: how unfair that Joan Didion will be mostly remembered as the High-Priestess-of-GAs I was making my way through this one, it once more occurred to me: how unfair that Joan Didion will be mostly remembered as the High-Priestess-of-Grieving (on account of The Year of Magical Thinking), instead of the Cool-Bitch-Chic author she had been for the better part of her writing career. I love her prose in either of those capacities. The White Album is of the latter. It’s engrossing and sharply written, brimming with the detachment and empathy she simultaneously uses to observe the world around her - how does she do that???
I love her refusal to be swallowed by the trending vernacular and doctrine.
I love how she somehow makes everything personal, from the Hoover Dam to an orchid greenhouse in Malibu run by a highly skilled Mexican flower breeder. In fact, that’s Didion’s incomparable skill: to have you actually caring about topics you’d never thought you would care. But since she graced them with her attention you find yourself thinking that, of course, you HAD to know about Hollywood rituals and policies, Bogota’s 70s aura, the architecture of shopping malls, the social idea behind the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu.
There is a reputation of arrogance and ostentatious name-dropping following her, and yes, she may be doing that at times, but a writer who NEVER fails to end her paragraphs/ chapters/ pieces with one magnificent sentence after another affords to do that, if she so wishes.
A few of the essays are strictly of their time and place; some are irrelevant to our times but fascinating to read nevertheless. And another few, like the titular one about the overall feeling of the late 60s, are both timelessly relevant and chillingly fascinating in the realization that history does indeed repeat itself and we are not that far from what we had thought we had left behind.
It is a privilege to have had someone like Didion, “a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees” (her own words for Georgia O’ Keeffe in the essay on the legendary artist), describe all that has, or hasn’t, changed to anyone willing and unprejudiced enough to listen.
[image] Didion at the time she wrote most of the pieces in this book, at her house in Malibu, with husband and daughter.
“And now Clarissa escorted her Prime Minister down the room, prancing, sparkling, with the stateliness of her gray hair. She wore ear-rings, and a si “And now Clarissa escorted her Prime Minister down the room, prancing, sparkling, with the stateliness of her gray hair. She wore ear-rings, and a silver-green mermaid’s dress. Lolloping on the waves and braiding her tresses she seemed, having that gift still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the moment as she passed; turned, caught her scarf in some other woman’s dress, unhitched it, laughed, all with the most perfect ease and air of a creature floating in its element.”
[image] Portrait of Mrs Allan Bott, 1930 - Tamara de Lempicka
There, on page 174 of my edition, Virginia Woolf exquisitely sums it all up and presents her heroine in all her glory as a society lady. It’s the same heroine that opened up the brilliant novel, on page 1, with the well-known declaration of her intention to buy the flowers herself for the party she was to give, at her London house that night in June of 1922. It took Woolf 174 pages to bestow on this creature of her imagination the well-deserved recognition of her ability and determination to live in the Here and Now, to acknowledge the reality of the present as the “supreme mystery” that leaves her wondering if love or religion are able to solve.
“And the supreme mystery which Kilman might say she had solved, or Peter might say he had solved, but Clarissa didn’t believe either of them had the ghost of an idea of solving, was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?”
It won’t take me half as long to give this breathtakingly beautiful piece of work my admiration and gratitude for having stirred up my deepest emotions. And that is perhaps the most important thing of all, as another female character in the book attests on behalf of Woolf, as she explains her approach to life: “For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt”
[image] The Blue Scarf, 1930 - Tamara de Lempicka
It is maybe unfair that the author reserves this approach for a girlfriend of Clarissa and not for Mrs Dalloway herself. It would have supplied her heroine with the key to the mystery of how to live early on. But if Clarissa had possessed that answer, or any answer, we the readers would have been deprived of her agonizing musings. Her mind quests, together with those of an extraordinarily-depicted parade of people that have a place in her life, past and present, make for one of the most existential novels of all time. And one perfect sample of modernist literature prose. We have in this book a tapestry of characters, places, times, moods and realities that are as individual as each one of the characters and their ideas of what reality is. For it seems that there is no such thing as objective reality. Or, there is, but it is one that leaves room for as many subjective ones as the people on the face of this earth.
“Well, I’ve had my fun; I’ve had it, he thought, looking up at the swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to atoms, his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one makes up the better part of life, he thought – making oneself up; making her up; creating an exquisite amusement, and something more. But odd it was and quite true; all this one could never share – it smashed to atoms.”
“What a lark! What a plunge!” that our author has set herself on, in trying to paint this vast canvas of subjectivity! I’m using the word “canvas” but as I was making my way through the book, the word “cinematic” kept coming to mind. Woolf moves as a camera would, from one place to the next in the vividly sketched scenery of London in the 20s, having one character cross ways (literally) with the next, thus smoothly changing the scene as in the finest montage, using the ticking of clocks, the invisible threads of spiders, the change of light as the one and only day in the life of Mrs Dalloway plays out. If I were a film director I would do this in a single- shot, having the actors ready to move at my signal, amid carefully constructed settings and hundreds of extras that would recreate the atmosphere of post-war London, capital still of an Empire. I realize I wouldn’t be able to dive into the past, that way. And the past is as much present into the novel as the present is. In fact, Time seems to be another key-character.
[image] So yes, there are limitations in this approach. Which makes Woolf’s achievement all the more astonishing; for I don’t have to see the film that was in fact made of this book 20 years ago. I have formed my own images and they are now indelibly imprinted on my mind, as I suppose they had been imprinted on Woolf’s, together with all the ruminations on Life and Death and Love and Choices and Youth and Aging and How To Live and How To Die. I can see her sitting in “a room of her own” years ago, writing her novel, words pouring out of her brilliant and tormented mind, in the (original at the time) style of “stream of consciousness” writing. What magic, what gift to be able to transform images into words, to transmit them across Time to countless readers who, in turn, will, each one of us, turn them into our own unique images, forever to be treasured in our mind’s private gallery. If that’s not another key, another way to transcend the finite nature of our existence that so tortured this writer, I don’t know what is.
P.S. I can’t resist offering Woolf’s description of the sea and its effect on one’s state of mind. Having lived all my summers near the sea, in this Mediterranean country of mine, I bow to the words of this fellow-islander, however in the north she may have lived.
“So on a summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying “that is all” more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking.”