Here's the back story: Born in 1900, William Heinesen was an author, poet, and painter from the Faroe Islands, which was for much of his life under DaHere's the back story: Born in 1900, William Heinesen was an author, poet, and painter from the Faroe Islands, which was for much of his life under Danish rule (The Faroes are now mostly autonomous, although Denmark still handles their defense, legal system, and 'foreign affairs.') Although very much invested in the life, culture, and language of his native land, Heinesen elected to write in Danish for practical reasons. It was for this reason that in 1981, when Nobel-Prize-rumor-mongers (the best type of rumor-monger, for my money) spread the word that Heinesen was going to win that year's prize, the author immediately wrote to the Swedish Academy and withdrew his nomination. As he said,
"The Faroese language was once held in little regard – indeed it was suppressed outright. In spite of this the Faroese language has created a great literature, and it would have been reasonable to give the Nobel Prize to an author who writes in Faroese. If it had been given to me, it would have gone to an author who writes in Danish, and in consequence Faroese efforts to create an independent culture would have been dealt a blow."
[Thank you, Wikipedia...]
Anyway, Laterna Magica is not supposedly Heinesen's best (or best known) work, but I found both the premise and execution of this collection rather fascinating. A loose thread runs through all the stories, which all take place in a small Faroese village, and are being narrated in the present tense by a person who is supposedly walking with you from one end of town to the other. (This is a book that would do very well to have a map in the front...) On the way, the narrator points out houses to you and tells you about the inhabitants. These aren't really full stories, or even full anecdotes, simply slices of the lives that take place in this village.
Sometimes the effect is rather anti-climactic, or even disconcerting. For instance, the first story is presented as a ghost story (they all have explanatory subtitles). It seems that two boys who once lived in a certain house were sitting at home one day and were visited by two old women. The women scared the boys, who couldn't get them to leave until their parents could be heard returning home, upon which, the women disappeared into thin air. That's it. No explanation, to future sightings--the mother merely remarks, 'oh, that happens sometimes,' and the story ends.
The book itself ends on a similar note--no fanfare, no fade out "yay, we got to the other end of town" moment. The framing device of this walk you've been taking just drops off. What makes it work then is that these are the type of stories that you would actually hear if you were walking through a remote fishing village. There's not always narratives to each moment of life, but in the context of everyday life, these moments are still important just for having happened. There's a continuity to these tales that does make you feel like you've visited this town, that you have some insights into the dramas that drive its citizens.
Reading Laterna Magica is not unlike taking a vacation to your childhood home and wandering around with your grandparents--perhaps not the something that you'd want to do all the time, but certainly an enriching experience to have had....more
Obama may simply be too nice, well rounded, and educated to be our next president. How could we, as Americans, ever live with ourselves if we elected Obama may simply be too nice, well rounded, and educated to be our next president. How could we, as Americans, ever live with ourselves if we elected such a man? A man with a balanced a viewpoint, an awareness of the world outside of the US, a powerful handle on the law (he was a professor of law at U. Chicago), a sense of how his past experiences have informed his current point of view, an apparently genuine optimism about the US (despite a recognition of its faults), and hell, a multisyllabic vocabulary? Could we do such a thing?!
Although many of Ekman's future concerns--tensions between the Sami communities in Northern Sweden and Swedish society, small town politics, the meaniAlthough many of Ekman's future concerns--tensions between the Sami communities in Northern Sweden and Swedish society, small town politics, the meaningless violence that comes as the consequence of violence with motivation--are also elemental in this, her first novel, Under the Snow definitely reads as a primer for better things to come. Namely, Blackwater. If this had been the first novel of Ekman's that I had read, I wouldn't necessarily believe that she'd develop into so fine a prose-writer. Her characters lack a real emotional depth, her dialog is witty and clever to the point of embarrassment. But she does have an excellent sense of atmosphere and setting and uses these to her advantage here. Even so, Under the Snow is imminently skippable for all but the most anal completist. ...more
I picked up War by Candlelight as part of my new project: To find contemporary (possibly American?) authors whose work wouldn’t immediately turn me oI picked up War by Candlelight as part of my new project: To find contemporary (possibly American?) authors whose work wouldn’t immediately turn me off with snarky postmodern pyrotechnics and faux quirkiness, with concepts and plotlines that outstrip the prose, with the constant I-Get-It-Do-You-Get-It? nudge-nudging that seems to be the currency in which so many contemporary writers traffic in. This is not, of course, to say that all self-aware, reflexive, fanciful writing is garbage—simply that I personally am rather tired of it and want some sort of reassurance that this isn’t the only thing going on in fiction right now.
This book turned out to be a really good counter to all of the above. Not only is it the first book of short stories that I have finished from cover to cover since Karen Russell’s delight of a collection (St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves) came out last year, but it consistently manages to approach its subjects and characters with a kind of critical empathy: Alarcon feels for his characters, but is never so caught up in their respective dramas that he falls back on sentimentality or cheap laughs.
Alarcon treats everyday drama (troubled relationships with family members and lovers) with the same gravity with which he approaches larger conflicts with grander implications (revolutionaries hiding in the Peruvian jungle, riots in a prison inhabited uniquely by ‘students’ and ‘terrorists’ which are subdued via firebombing, mudslides that bury whole villages). This is unusual and refreshing, a wide-angle perspective on human conflict that appreciates that all pain and drama is pivotal to those who are experiencing it, no matter what the stakes or scale.
The only real weakness in this collection is one that can be easily understood and pardoned. War by Candlelight is staged almost entirely in Peru (generally Lima), Alarcon vying for the position of national writer with a simultaneous earnestness and naiveté that bespeaks the conflict inherent in the immigrant experience. No opportunity to describe the hustle and claustrophobia or Lima “in all her glory” is passed by, an underlying affection for his third-world milieu that takes on the tone of a college student returning from a particularly eye-opening semester spent abroad, and occasionally becomes downright patronizing and simplistic. Alarcon did, after all, spend most of his formative years in Alabama and can’t be expected to completely shake the voice and outsider perspective of an Americano.
On the whole, however, War by Candlelight is a well-written, engaging read. Alarcon is a writer of experiences, not concepts, and a distinct voice among his peers. ...more
A great example of how genre-fiction can be "literary." A really enjoyable, quick read that plays with the conventions of the western without strayingA great example of how genre-fiction can be "literary." A really enjoyable, quick read that plays with the conventions of the western without straying into self-aware parody....more
I read a short story by Einar Mar Gudmundsson ("Uninvited") in the Icelandic issue of McSweeny's (Issue 15--it's really good, you should pick it up) aI read a short story by Einar Mar Gudmundsson ("Uninvited") in the Icelandic issue of McSweeny's (Issue 15--it's really good, you should pick it up) and it had quite an effect on me. The story was broken into discreet sections, each a photographic anecdote which wasn't necessarily being included in linear order, but was organized in such a way that you felt as if you were entering the situation--and the events leading up to the immediate story--in an organic fashion. there was an event, there were emotions, there were moments leading up to and progressing from that event, and they all got sort of muddled up in the re-telling. Which is about as accurate of a portrayal of one's personal experience as I think you can get.
This is a narrative approach that I know I've harped on before--Isak Dinesen addresses her characters' memories and anecdotes in a similar fashion--but I think it really does merit some further attention. Chances are, when you're meeting someone new and sharing stories about your life, you don't reel off a time-line of events starting with your birth, progressing through your adolescence, and skipping one by one through each of the important events of your adult life without ever stopping on a digression, or more detailed explanation, or being pulled off course by a memory that perhaps isn't the point per se, but really did make a difference to the way your perspective developed. But for some reason, every biopic (what a foul terrible genre that is) and ever so many biographies approach one's life in this fashion. Which to me is a veritable attack on the nature of memory and a truly boring way to tell a story.
Like Gudmundsson's aforementioned short story, Angels of the Universe, understands memory and experience fully, and really gets to the heart of these by building meaning and significance slowly, as the book progresses. Chapters are divided into mini 'chaplets,' each of which relates a memory or image or exchange that when collaged together, gives you a broad, layered picture of the main character and of his experiences going in and out of a psychiatric hospital in Reykjavik in the 60s.
It doesn't sound like a fast, 'fun' read, but it's very compelling--wry and observant and funny, and never in the least self-pitying.
Certain novels come to you with pre-packaged expectations. They just seem to be part of literature's collective unconscious, even if they are completeCertain novels come to you with pre-packaged expectations. They just seem to be part of literature's collective unconscious, even if they are completely outside of your own cultural referents. I, for instance, who have no particular knowledge of--or great love for--romantic, Anglo-Gothic fiction, came to Wuthering Heights with the assumption that I was picking up a melancholy ghost story of thwarted, passionate love and eternal obsession. Obsession turned out to be only accurate part of this presumption.
Having an image of Heathcliff and Cathy embracing Gone with the Wind-style on a windy moor ironed in my mind, I was almost completely unprepared for the hermetic, moribund, bleak, vengeful, perverse, and yes--obsessive--novel that this really is. Don Quixote is not about windmills and Wuthering Heights is not really a love story. Heathcliff and Cathy's love affair (if it can be called that) is a narcissistic ("I am Heathcliff!" Cathy exclaims at one point), possessive, and imminently cruel relationship predicated on self-denial and an obsessiveness that relies not on passion, but rather borders on hatred. They are selfish, violent, and contriving people who have borne their fair share of abuses (mostly Heathcliff in this respect) and in turn, feel no compunction about raining similar abuses on those who they find beneath them.
Given this dynamic, it seems perhaps inevitable that these two characters would make not only themselves miserable, but everyone around them miserable--even after death. This is particularly easy to accomplish mainly because there are--with the exception of Mr. Lockwood, the tenant who rents a home from Heathcliff--no outside characters. Everyone in the novel (including the servants) is isolated, trapped between the same two homes, with the same two families, and have truly no chance of escaping any of the events and repercussions that occur.(One character makes a temporary escape, only to suffer all the more for it later.)
More important, however, is the fact that Heathcliff and Cathy don't even need be present (although they usually are in some fashion) for their influences to be felt by the other characters. The sins of the father, are literally, inherited and distributed among the next generation. The children of Wuthering Heights are not only physical doubles of their parents (At least 3 characters look like Cathy, and one resembles Heathcliff), but they are also spiritual stand-ins. They must suffer for past transgressions, and they must find a way to make amends for them. All, I might add, without the particular benefit of ever having the full story, the context that might be necessary to actually change their circumstances. Misery, it seems, is inevitable.
There is, of course, much more to be said about this novel. One could spend quite some time dissecting all the various repetitions and doublings, the narrative structure (the story is told by the housekeeper to the lodger who then writes it down as a diary entry), or the archetypal analogies and semi-biblical symbolism that seems to be implicit to every part of this story.
The point being, I suppose, that while Wuthering Heights may not be the wistful romance one (or maybe just I) expected to be, it is a particularly satisfying one for all of its dark and layered surprises. ...more
During the particularly bleak summer of my 11th year, I spent a month hiding from my wicked step-mother in the basement bedroom I shared with my sisteDuring the particularly bleak summer of my 11th year, I spent a month hiding from my wicked step-mother in the basement bedroom I shared with my sister. No TV, no movies, and very little radio reception meant I read more than usual, and when I went through my own summer reading, I started borrowing from my sister, whose taste ran mostly to Goosebumps and Choose Your Own Adventure books (which were, admittedly, totally awesome). But she did have some racier titles tucked away. The book I remember in particular was about a girl who got run over by her best friend after sleeping with the friend's boyfriend while high as a kite on strawberry-flavored hash. The dead girl then somehow inhabits the body of her murderous friend and spends the book trying to figure out how she died, while intermittently having second-hand, multi-positional sex with the newly reunited couple.
It was disturbing and sexy and taboo and I read it twice in one day.
What's the point of all this, you ask? The point is this: Given the alluring, soft-lit ads that the CW has been spinning out about the new Gossip Girl TV show, I was really hoping the book would have that same sort of effect. I was hoping that somewhere out there, a sheltered teenage girl was hiding this book under her mattress and pulling it out in secret to learn about blow jobs and pot smoking and underage drinking.
To be fair, Gossip Girl does cover this ground amply--its debauched youths smoke French cigarettes on the steps of the MET, drink cosmos and vodka tonics in swank hotel bars, molest each other, sleep around, and buy pot in Central Park. Unfortunately, though, the sense of taboo is lost. Don't get me wrong--I'm not asking for moralizing. I just think it takes away a lot of the fun when no limits are being defied. These kids don't have to steal liquor from their parents' cabinets--they buy them at members-only, A-list clubs. They don't have surreptitious sex in the back of parked cars--they get seduction advice from their parent's lovers. If I had read this as a teenager, I wouldn't have had anything to live vicariously through. It would simply have been too unimaginable that I could possibly experience anything that these uber-cool semi-adults do.
My other qualm (well, main qualm--I have limited space here) is the overall irony of the book. Cecily Von Ziegesar (what an appropriate name, no?) gets it--Her anonymous gossip-blogger gets it. Her artsy outcast reading Camus on the traffic island gets it. Her rebel-turned-reject heroine gets it. And they're all above it, too. Beautiful wild-child Serena may be so worried about her future that she 'can't taste her Tic Tacs,' but at the end of the day, she still knows how to play the game: "She could keep up with the likes of Christina Aguilera and Joaquin Phoenix. No Problem." The outcast may succumb to his fantasies of what it would be like to escort a rich girl to a benefit party while wearing an Armani suit, but he'll end up taking the suit back to the department store before he makes a fool of himself. This is exactly the problem. They know too much to make fools of themselves. Even when they fuck up--even when they sleep with their best friend's boyfriend, when they spend a night vomiting on themselves in their own bed--there's no embarrassment, no regret. Nothing at stake. They're still beautiful and rich and savvy no matter what, and they'll always get what they want eventually.
Not for nothing though, Gossip Girl still includes such gem observations as "Blair...gap[ed] at Nate's hard-on. It looked like it was going to take over the world," and may be able to single-handedly re-educate us fogeys on the multitudinous uses of the word 'slut.' So that's gotta count for something. Thx, GG!...more
Arnaldur Indridason’s third ‘Icelandic Thriller’ finds his Inspector Erlendur in a plush Reykjavík hotel five days before Christmas trying to puzzle oArnaldur Indridason’s third ‘Icelandic Thriller’ finds his Inspector Erlendur in a plush Reykjavík hotel five days before Christmas trying to puzzle out yet another gruesome murder—the brutal stabbing of the hotel handyman cum Santa Claus—that seems to have its roots in the past. Indridason’s previous efforts (the multi-award winning Jar City and Silence of the Grave) practiced such hindsight to rather compelling effect: rather than celebrate in the killers’ capture, we empathize with their motives. In fact, we almost applaud them for enacting what feels like a sort of karmic justice. Some people, it turns out, just really deserve to die.
In Voices, however, Indridason’s sympathies cast too large a net for either himself or his stodgy Inspector to reel in. It takes up the familiar cause of the downtrodden—battered women, abused children, victims of rape, those suffering from substance additions—but clumsily adds to it, trying to evoke even more reader compassion for Indridason’s new cast of prostitutes, pedophiles, and homosexuals. Unfortunately, trying to empathize with so many different characters leaves us not feeling for many of them at all. Moreover, reading Indridason’s frequently clunky prose (no fault of the translator—a seasoned veteran with Old Norse sagas and a fistful of modern Icelandic literary translations to his credit) reveals a distinct lack of authorial understanding. He wants to empathize with the hardships of gay men coming of age in 1980s Iceland, but doesn’t quite know how to, or even why. The act of empathizing has then become a knee-jerk reaction, and virtually abandons true insight into the experiences of another person for the satisfaction of arelatively empty gesture.
It’s pity that defines Voices—and a shame, too. For as we had seen in Indridason’s previous work, Iceland may be a small country where the phone book is alphabetized by first name, but its problems are not so different from our own.
This book began with a great premise: in the wake of his girlfriend's murder, a man discovers a picture of her having (porno-style) sex with another mThis book began with a great premise: in the wake of his girlfriend's murder, a man discovers a picture of her having (porno-style) sex with another man. Though this is his only clue, and despite the fact that he is still the police's main suspect, he decides--vigilante-style--to solve her murder himself. Along the way, he begins to sleep with a woman who not only resembles his deceased girlfriend, but who also works for the same airline. The Hitchcock-ian echoes compound when he begins spying on his neighbors (and they on him) from his...Rear Window. Unfortunately, even for these great (and as it has been pointed out to me--Thanks, M. Asher--rather De Palma-esque) cinematic flourishes, the narrative simply cannot sustain itself under the equal weights of empty characterization (we know that the main character is a war reporter and a technophobe, but don't know why or really see any traits in action) and a foolish plot which presupposes the downfall of contemporary civilization via the evils of digital television.
Rather than give us a true picture of our anti-hero, Larsen hides the man behind incendiary speeches about the masses' inability to understand modern art, society's dumbed down morality and passivity, and strangely damning monologues about having raped women who he knew actually 'really wanted it in the end.' Which doesn't really give us any reason to invest in this person when the plotline--hinging on the untamed power and evil of High Definition Television (that is, H.D.T.V!)--spirals into a the paranoiac realm of such Technopocolypse classics as "The Net."
What's worst for me, however, is that we're seeing, yet again, a novel that begins with an exciting, meaning-laden, and (gasp!) entertaining concept, degenerate immediately upon trying to tackle--with a remarkable lack of foresight--some bigger, grander issue. Because apparently, one murder is not enough for us, and nothing really counts unless we can attach some grand, global crisis to it. ...more
Given that the premise of this 'study' is that the author and his wife were debating the pros and cons of moving to Denmark permanently after spendingGiven that the premise of this 'study' is that the author and his wife were debating the pros and cons of moving to Denmark permanently after spending three non-consecutive, Fulbright-aided years there--I can hardly claim that this is an exhaustive, academically rigorous study of Danish life or Expat culture in Dejlige Lille Land ("The Nice Little Country.") However, given that all of my knowledge of the country has thus far been accumulated through tour guides, travel brochures, and novels, any first-hand accounts (especially from a similar cultural perspective) are useful.
Most of the authors, artists, and teachers that the author interviews are individuals that came to Denmark in the 60s and 70s, either as a result of 'falling in love with a Dane' (this is a major theme for many of my Danish-language classmates, actually), never leaving after a brief period of study, or for some (although less than you might expect) because of political restiveness with the Good Ole' U S of A. As a rule, they point out the more 'humane' system of health care and overall societal compassion in Denmark, as well as the less media-stimulated, less violent, and generally more 'secure' Danish environment. They also note a lack of 'vitality' and energy, and a sense that all must conform in order to maintain a societal balance. According to these folks, the Danes don't appreciate boat-rockers.
Despite the relative homogeneity of the answers, I did particularly enjoy certain tidbits:
1) Children help pick out their own curriculum each year.
2) Birthday parties, dinner parties, holiday celebrations, and social of events of pretty much any stripe tend to follow the same agenda. The same foods are eaten, the same games are played, and generally, this happens in the same order.
3) A 'typical' Dane would rather walk around the block a few times rather than show up to a place too early.
4) Foreign university degrees don't mean a whole lot in Denmark, unless you've also been educated in one of their own universities.
5) Danish Parliament has twelve different parties represented in it.
Anyway, there are more neat little things, but lest I start horribly generalizing (too late! some of you say) I'll leave it at that.
Having read the first few stories in Seven Gothic Tales, I'm happy to report that the hype around Dinesen is well deserved. Relating her tales as wellHaving read the first few stories in Seven Gothic Tales, I'm happy to report that the hype around Dinesen is well deserved. Relating her tales as well-wrought tangents--elliptical anecdotes nested inside one another, ever expanding to the bigger picture--Dinesen not only provides a conversant fabric and background for her characters, but also taps into the spontaneous, memory-triggering quality of oral storytelling.
"The Chevalier's Tale" is particularly indicative of this: The storyteller (who is relating his tale to another narrator) starts off by telling us that his story is about a remarkable woman whom he met on the day his lover tried to poison him. It then becomes necessary to digress--Who was his lover? Why did she try to poison him? These stories raise questions of their own, which in turn, must be answered before the story that was ostensibly 'the point' can be told with any clarity. Could Dinesen have just started at the 'beginning,' telling her story in a compact, linear fashion? Probably. But such forethought is, once again, the project of prose narration (which is perhaps not truly Dinesen's aim here), and would have robbed the story of the organic familiarity that I'd argue makes it so accessible and pleasurable for the reader in the first place....more
I started this book at 3:30 on an insomniatic Friday night and finished it on the subway on the way to work on Tuesday. It was a rather apropos readinI started this book at 3:30 on an insomniatic Friday night and finished it on the subway on the way to work on Tuesday. It was a rather apropos reading schedule considering the format of After Dark which begins around midnight and ends around 7 AM.
It's a simple and sufficiently enjoyable book--one that I'm sure hardcore fans and mild appreciators can both agree is 'Minor Murakami.' But it brings up an interesting conflict that I think is implicit in Murakami's writing, namely that his ideas often outstrip his prose. And while I found After Dark to be a little cutesy and gimmicky and perhaps beneath what Murakami is capable of, I do think that it's subject matter is far better suited to his writing style than say--and I know I'm about to wholly alienate a good 58% of you--The Wind-Up Bird Chronical, which was so sprawling and large that by the time I got to the end of it I was perhaps, impressed at the expanse of the novel, but not terribly sure of why any of it actually mattered.
It's not to say that Murakami can't write about larger, more involved, more resonant topics. I hear, for instance, that his essays about the Kobe earthquake and the posion gas attacks in the Tokyo subway are quite good. And I was strangely moved after reading Hardboiled Wonderland. But even in the case of the latter, we're dealing with unicorns, and time travel, and secret subway tunnels, and then finally, something larger, something more tangible in the midst of all of his fantasies. And I suppose I trust more in his ability to deal with a Big Idea like the vulnerability of memory than I do in his ability to render accountability for Japan's role in mainland China massacres and its actions in Manchuria.
I read Murakami for his 'pop sensibility,' for his aging jazz aficiandos and Beatles fan self-stand ins and his fondness for mysticizing the darker, more hidden worlds within urban settings. I like his quirkiness. I like the fact that he conned The New Yorker into publishing a story about a talking monkey.
I like, truth be told, Sputnik Sweetheart best, which I realize does not make me his 'ideal reader.'