A poem for this morning …

… Yannis Ritsos — Provincial Spring

Good to know …

… “Los Angeles Has Not Yet Lost Its Way”: Viktor Rayzman on the Number 4 Bus BORIS (Hat tip, Dave Lull)

Indeed …

… Tony Bennett: The Great American Songbook’s Steadfast Hero (Hat tip, Dave Lull)

Shirley Hazzard

 

Let me say at the start that I found The Transit of Venus to be a very difficult book. Its author, Shirley Hazzard, writes with unusual detail, but everything is qualified: the sun is hot, and yet, it shows signs of abating; the motor is loud, and yet, it could be slowing. The effect is a cascade of description, of approximation: whether of emotion, circumstance, or geography. But it all leads, in a way, to nothing: because all that qualification, very little in this novel is certain -- not even its ending. 

At its core, The Transit of Venus struck me as a novel about, well, about adultery. You dress this up a bit and argue that the book's about relationships or the dynamics of marriage. But I think that would be going too far. Really, this is an extended meditation on the nature of the affair: about how it evolves and collapses; and about how some find their way to it more often than others. 

But for a novel about adultery, there was surprising little sex or sexuality; and more than that: there's surprisingly little emotion. The characters in Transit undergo hardship; they engage in travel; they grow old. And yet, throughout, I never understood how they truly felt: there were long passages that evoked very little emotion, despite their having been built on a complex web of events cast as part back as the characters' youth. 

If The Transit of Venus takes as one of its themes the idea of growing old -- as a person, as part of a relationship -- that passage of time was not always well marked: unlike, say, The Old Wives' Tale, which chronicles the impact of time and history on two sisters, Transit rarely accomplished this: we are told that the sisters have grown older, but they seem still to be struggling with the same issues, with the same unresolved circumstances from their youth. (They are still engaged in adultery or seeking to find their way to it.) 

The culmination this novel in its final two chapters did speak to at least some of its magic: here, Hazzard manages to brings portions of the plot full circle, resolving a number of arcs, and clarifying the uncertainty tied to several interlocking relationships. And good for her: this was well done. But for me, it was all too late: after more than three hundred pages of struggle and adultery and more struggle, I'd expected an emotional release, clarity; instead, it was more of Hazzard's qualified narrative style, coupled with oddly detached personalities.   

Hapy birthday …

… Mel Brooks at 100: A Century’s Worth of Laughs (Hat tip, Dave Lull}

Tarjei Vesaas

 

In a recent edition of Granta, Karl Ove Knausgaard reviewed -- and recommended -- the work of Tarjei Vesaas, the Norwegian author nominated on multiple occasions for the Nobel Prize. Needless to say, I'd not heard of Vesaas, but having finished The Birds, I can confidently say: Vesaas strikes an unusual, and successful, balance between the calm and the anxious, between independence and belonging. 

First published in Norway in 1957, The Birds tell the story of a brother and sister -- Mattis and Hege -- living in a remote corner of the country. Mattis, who has a cognitive impairment, is dependent on his sister, who spends the majority of the novel knitting sweaters to generate sufficient money to support them.

Mattis is intellectually disabled, but he is not defenseless: indeed, his physicality -- his power and agility -- marks his character and movements. Mentally, Mattis is not entirely disabled: his thoughts emerge at all moments, but they tend to be truncated or selfish, or shared without sufficient context. The result is a reliance on Hege and the sense that Mattis will never advance beyond his current station. 

As the novel progresses, it is clear that Hege -- for her own part -- has changed, and that her relationship with Mattis has fractured: this is the result of one of the book's great ironies: that Mattis brings into their home the man who will become Hege's lover. 

That fracturing results in a question Mattis must ask himself: whether he belongs in this new world, or whether his dependence has run its course. Ultimately, Mattis sets a test -- a tragic test -- for himself, leaving his future to something approaching fate.

This short novel generates an immediate emotional response, and the foreshadowing that Vesaas develops -- by way of a secondary plot involving birds -- is very well done. I don't know enough to say whether, as Knausgaard suggests, this is the "greatest Norwegian novel," but I can say that it operates on a number of levels, and that its culmination is one I won't soon forget.

A great poem …

… by a great poet. Today’s Poem: Dream Song

Will Self

I'd wanted to read the work of Will Self for a while, and recently finished his debut collection, The Quantity Theory of Insanity. I should say at the start that this is not a perfect book, and it's not for everyone. Self seems to have set a goal for himself of charting in this collection the strange, the unusual, the unstable. Each of the stories uncovers a certain irrationality -- even, yes, a form of insanity -- but that in itself appears to be in the service of a smaller granule of truth. When Self writes of a psychiatric ward, for instance, he has as much to say about the nature of the psychotic as he does about our crazed attempts to manifest pathologies. Self does this elsewhere, too: his chapter about a philosophy of "waiting" unlocks as much about time as it does about an uncommon addiction to motion. I enjoyed these stories, but I didn't love them: I wasn't always sure about Self's style; it felt rickety, and sometimes predictable. The quirkiness of the stories, like their characters, also felt contrived: evocative, but contrived. There's an urban quality to The Quantity Theory, and an appreciation for London as a caldron of human experience. And for this, Self is to be celebrated. But in the end, I thought that there were other ways, perhaps, to explore the unorthodox, and locating a faint truth under cascades of irrationality seemed formulaic. For a more effective rendering of the insane, or the absurd, see When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamín Labatut's tremendous rendering of science and psychology amidst the tumult of the twentieth century. 

A poem for this morning …

… … Jill Grossman — Poem

In case you wondered ……

…, THE TOP 10 CLASSIC DETECTIVE NOVELS, ACCORDING TO JEFFREY ARCHER (Hat tip, Jon Caroulis)

Change of address

… for Cynthia Haven's blpg: The Book Haven

John Updike

 

I didn't think too much -- as I recall -- of Rabbit, Run, but now, having returned to Updike, and having finished Rabbit Redux, let me take that all back: at his prime, Updike packed a serious punch. Much, of course, has been written about Updike, but I'd like to focus, in this post, on the quotation from the Sunday Times on the back of the British edition of the novel. That quotation attempts to sell Updike's vision as one in which he "transfigures the commonplace" into something "beautiful." Let's stop there: I don't read Rabbit Redux in that way at all. In fact, I understand the novel as attempting to assert the opposite: namely that there's an unbearable banality to the commonplace, and that boredom and sexuality are what propel the suburban experience in America. Rabbit Redux is less a celebration of the average, the mediocre, and far more an evaluation of the ways they persist, of how they interact. There's lots of intercourse in Updike's world, but much of it is pained; rarely is it ecstatic -- as you might expect from a marketing quotation like the one on the Penguin edition. Rabbit Redux, despite the sales pitch, really is a triumph: a sorrowful, hip, urgent novel composed at the intersection of many worlds: those racial, those violent, those political. The book is a reminder that even the most common moments are subject to external factors, and that while sex may bring two people together, it is rarely enough for them to truly communicate. 

A poem for this morning …

… Birds ( Hat tip, Dave Lull)

A poem for this morning …

…^Carolyn Kizer — On Rising from the Dead

A song of praise …

… Sara Teasdale, ‘May Day’ (Hat tip, Dave Lull)

A poem for this morning …

… Antarah ibn Shaddād — “I didn’t start this …

A poem for this morning …

… Unknown —=The Moon that fell from heaven

Robert Walser

 

Robert Walser came to me by way of my enduring interest in W. G. Sebald. Indeed, Sebald identified Walser as a primary influence, pointing to his stories -- Walser's stories -- as an unusual mixture of the historical, the nature, and the "small." 

Published as a collection of vignettes composed on either side of the First World War, The Walk functions as a series of, in Walser's words, loosely connected "sketches." The pieces here are "short chapters" drawn from a range of imagined novels: or perhaps from a single novel. Either way, as Walser makes clear, the only novel he is truly developing -- that is, consistently developing -- is the "book of himself." 

I must say, despite the praise, The Walk left me confounded: I did not enjoy Walser's prose, and I have trouble following his stories. This may have been because of their disjointed quality: they do not always build on each other, and so the effect is of reading the fragment of one story, followed by the fragment of another. And the style, too, left me frustrated: there are moments when Walser writes with unyielding complexity; but there were others when his prose are almost ethereal, barely hanging on. 

For me, The Walk seemed to always be searching for the next aphorism, for the next piece of intellectual beauty. And sometimes Walser delivers. But at others, it's tough going, and the result, despite engaging content, and a focus on history's repeated intrusions -- is a collection with only, for me, a faint pulse. 

"All the songs of singing birds heard by people such a long, long time ago!" 

A poem for this morning …

… Today’s Poem: A Fairy Song

For this mornng …

… Poem in the Shape of the War