Goodreads | Carpinteiros Levantem Bem Alto a Cumeeira e Seymor: uma Apresentação

Terry rated it:

(review of isbn 0316766941)

05/04/08

Read in April, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

I take a certain satisfaction in completing this volume as it means I've now read all of the Salinger work that remains in print; but I must admit that this is the least satisfying volume out there. Both novellas re-examine Seymour Glass, the character Salinger created in his 1948 short story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and whom, in these later Midrashim, he seems desperate to defend from subsequent criticism.

"Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" is by far the better...more I take a certain satisfaction in completing this volume as it means I've now read all of the Salinger work that remains in print; but I must admit that this is the least satisfying volume out there. Both novellas re-examine Seymour Glass, the character Salinger created in his 1948 short story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and whom, in these later Midrashim, he seems desperate to defend from subsequent criticism.

"Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" is by far the better of the two stories. The charm and brilliance of Salinger's Nine Stories flash out intermittently as Buddy Glass, Seymour's younger brother, tells the story of Seymour's wedding day (the title is taken from H. T. Wharton's translation of one of Sappho's epithalamia), a day Buddy spends locked in debate with Muriel's angry matron of honor over Seymour's suitability as a husband. There's a narrative here, but it's largely an exercise in obliquity (neither Seymour nor Muriel appear directly) and an excuse to fill in background anecdotes about the ill-fated couple. Though parts of Seymour's diary render beautifully the sensitive artist-perfectionist's doomed effort to love, in Muriel, the imperfect ordinariness of the world, I couldn't help but feel that these were ultimately just instructions on how to read "...Bananafish." As in that story--and in Catcher in the Rye--the enemy is psychoanalysis, the fashionable pseudo-science that labels the emotionally precocious seers of the world neurotic and sets out to make them normal in a world where normalcy is the real insanity. Here is Seymour's account of his meeting with Muriel's mother's analyst (a gloss, perhaps, on Holden's encounter with Mr. Antolini): "...he seemed to feel that I have a perfection complex of some kind. Much talk from him, and quite intelligent, on the virtues of living the imperfect life, of accepting one's own and others' weaknesses. I agree with him, but only in theory. I'll champion indiscrimination till doomsday, on the ground that it leads to health and a kind of very real, enviable happiness. Followed purely it's the way of the Tao, and undoubtedly the highest way. But for a discriminating man to achieve this, it would mean that he would have to dispossess himself of poetry, go beyond poetry. That is, he couldn't possibly learn or drive himself to like bad poetry in the abstract, let alone equate it with good poetry. He would have to drop poetry all together. I said it would be no easy thing to do. Dr. Sims said I was putting it too stringently--putting it, he said, as only a perfectionist would. Can I deny that?" (86-7). As Buddy Glass struggles, as both a narrator and a debater, to defend his brother, it becomes clearer and clearer that the real spiritual center of the story is supposed to be the happy old deaf-mute (shades of Holden again) who leaves only an empty glass and a cigar butt as evidence of his existence. In the end, the blank page is held out as the most eloquent of explanations.

Still, in "Seymour: an Introduction," Buddy goes to the page again to try to explain his older, smarter, nicer, more saintly brother to us--this time without even the pretense of any narrative save that of the writer's own story of trying to write about his emotionally burdensome topic. Just as Holden Caulfield blames himself for Allie's death, Buddy is wracked with guilt at surviving Seymour; but while Holden punishes himself and so gains our sympathy, Buddy punishes us with his self-conscious, endlessly over-written prose and so manages to alienate us not only from himself but from Seymour as well. Underneath the torturous surface, the story wants to be a reflection on the relationship among writer, subject and audience, but Salinger spoils it with his reflexive need to respond to his own detractors. He's too anxious to correct misperceptions (Seymour is not gay, alright!?), and in the end it feels like reading a set of rather pushy end-notes to an otherwise subtle and lovely oeuvre. (For Catcher... readers and teachers, here's one nice note to apply to the Radio City kettle drummer and other performers beloved for their nervousness: "'The sage is full of anxiety and indecision in undertaking anything, and so he is always successful.'--Book XXVI, The Texts of Chuang-tzu"(240).)

[On a final, personal note, having disparaged this as the least of Salinger's books, I hasten to add that I will long treasure my own copy for the very kind inscription written in the front cover by the friend who gave it to me for my birthday.]...less

Like this review? yes

title link
avg rating
small image
med image
large image

Carpinteiros Levantem Bem Alto a Cumeeira e Seymor: uma Apresentação

discuss this book

groups with this book

friend reviews (0)

lists with this book

other reviews (showing 1-20 of 5432)

book data (includes all editions)

blog this book

popular shelves

other editions