Richard Seltzer's Blog: Richard Seltzer, page 7

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Weird. I was tempted to read this because I loved her humorous and insightful dealings with magic in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. This is a short and confusing journey through a labyrinthine alternate world. The power of the prose and the clues that teasingly almost make sense of what is going on compelled me to keep reading even when I had no idea at all what was going on. Maybe someday the meaning of this story will suddenly dawn on me and I'll think it is brilliant. For now I'm simply puzzled, but pleasantly so.



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Names and Naming by Richard Seltzer

(excerpt from Lenses, a collection of short essays, in search of a publisher)

The Name of God has special significance in the first commandment − "Do not take the Name of the Lord Thy God in Vain" and in the Lord's Prayer − "Hallowed be Thy Name."
Why this focus on the "name of God" as opposed to God Himself or Herself?
As Kant pointed out, there is the thing itself, the unknowable essence that we presume exists outside of our mind; and there is the concept of the thing which is the representation of the thing in our minds.
The human mind evolved to make practical sense of the world around us, to allow us to cope in a world that is fundamentally unknowable.
We use names to organize and associate thoughts, and we relate those thoughts to our personal experience in dealing with the world.
In the beginning was the Word.
In traditions based on magic, everyone has a true name which expresses that person's nature and knowing someone's true name gives power over that person.
Your name, whether traditionally or randomly chosen by your parents, is an empty vesssel that takes on meaning over the course of your life. That name comes to stand for the unique person that you become. It is also a connection with others who came before who were given that same name.
The word name also refers to the categories which we apply to all of creation, like dog and cat, in recognition of characteristics that a set of things or creatures have in common. In Genesis Adam and Eve named all creatures.
And the word name is also used as a token standing for an unknowable essence − God − enabling us to talk about and contemplate what essentially cannot be known.
The mind uses names to mirror the world. When we give names to what we encounter in the world, we set up mental equivalents that we can manipulate and compare and remember. In striving to understand these concepts we assign meaning to them and associate them with one another and meaning grows from what we think about them as well as from our experience in the world. With this cumulative remembered mental activity we enrich our lives and come to better cope with the experiences we encounter in the world.
By the ways we associate these concepts with one another, we create maps in our minds that represent how we imagine the real world − not just a one-to-one association of ideas to things, but ideas of ideas of ideas − a rich tapestry of layer upon layer of associations, the names of things being far richer than the things themselves, because we can associate them in our minds and we can communicate these complex ideas to others.
To name is to begin the effort of trying to understand.
By this line of reasoning, the Name of God is the first step in trying to understand what God might be.

The Scandal of Pleasure by Wendy Steinert

The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism by Wendy Steiner

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Reading this book made me realize that I was culturally asleep in the 1980s and 1990s. (The book was published in 1995). People actually did that? said that? believed that? cared about that? I missed the culture wars. I had no idea that they took place. I missed the evolution of college art and literature departments. I must admit that I have no idea what "art" is or why that definition could matter so much to so many.

Others who, like me, slept through that time (busy with work and family), or who weren't born yet back then, will enjoy this book as a revelation of what people are capable of.




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The Exiles by Christina Baker Kline

The Exiles by Christina Baker Kline

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Intricately woven stories of convicts transported from England to Australia in the 1840s and an aborigine orphaned there at the same time. Surprises. Pathos. You get caught up in the challenges facing those characters and women in general in that time and those places.

Two repeated metaphors tie it all together.

One was associated with the orphan aborigine girl was based on necklace her mother gave her "Just imagine you're the thread. And the people you love are these shells. And then they'll always be with you." (p. 321)

The other was associated with an orphan English girl. It was told her by her father, and she retold, and people she told it to retold it. "'When you cut down a tree, you can tell how old it is by the rings inside. The more rings, the sturdier the tree. So ... I imagine I'm a tree. And every moment that mattered to me, or person I loved, is a ring.' She put the flat of her hand on her chest. 'All of them here. Keeping me strong.'" pp. 161-162

And again, at the very end, years later, the daughter of the convict, having gone to England to be trained as a doctor and on the brink of returning to Australia. "She thought of all the women she knew who'd been given nothing, who'd been scorned and misjudged, who'd had to fight for every scrap. They were her many mothers: Evangeline, who gave her life, and Hazel, who save it. Olive and Maeve, who fed and nurtured her. Even Dr. Garrett. Each of them lived inside her, and always would. They were the rings of the tree that Hazel was always going on about, the shells on her thread ... And she was on her way." pp. 360-361

And the work most frequently alluded too is Shakespeare's Tempest. Hence the title of this review.



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The Conjure Woman by Charles Chesnutt

The Conjure Woman by Charles W. Chesnutt

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book consists of stories recounted by Julius, an old black servant, to a younger wealthy black couple that recently moved to North Carolina from Ohio. Julius' dialect is thick. But if you read those passages aloud, the meaning is soon clear, and the surprise of recognizing a seemingly opaque word or phrase is part of the charm. The tales are full of trickery, including the probable reasons for Julius making up such tales and telling them to his boss. The irony and the humor are reminiscent of the Br'er Rabbit stories of Joel Chandler Harris, a contemporary of Chesnutt. I picked this up because of the similarity of title to the recently published Conjure Women by Afia Atakora. This was a delightful find.


PS -- Reading his dialect was a bit like reading Finnegan's Wake -- the surprise pleasure of recognizing a word or a phrase -- only much much easier than Joyce.



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Review of Conjure Women by Afia Atakora

Conjure Women by Afia Atakora

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is not just another slavery-oriented historical novel based on the author's family tradition. This author was born in England and lives in New Jersey She has no southern roots. Yes, she researched the period meticulously. But then she created an artificial world in which her characters could come alive and thrive despite crushing obstacles. That's what makes this book unique and interesting. It's not about the horrors of slavery. Rather it's about characters caught in a limbo-land between slavery and freedom, who don't really know what freedom means.

There are two interwoven threads of story -- pre- and post- Civil War. The pre- is realistic, with dashes of possible magic and heavy foreshadowing of secrets, lies and their possible consequences. The plantation and the light dialect are not connected to any particular state. It's a generic, plausible, familiar setting for a Civil War/slavery story.

The post- is an artificial world where the characters have to figure out their real identities and their real connections to one another. Through a series of lies for five years after the war, everything continues on the plantation as it had before the war. The characters feel tied to the land, but not by force of ownership and law. The plantation has no known owner and somehow (unexplained) everything continues as before. The implication is that they continue to work as they had before though now there is no owner and presumably no overseer. Somehow, they survive on the produce of the plantation without any need to sell or buy anything. Somehow, no one ever expects the plantation to pay taxes. Supernatural possibilities hum in the background but are never confirmed, This post-war world feels Kafkaesque or scifi.

This novel isn't a hackneyed indictment of slavery. Rather it's an exploration of what happens to people when they are forced to live through extraordinary experiences, how they can relate to one another and how they can both shape and discover their identities. The rough edges, the questions left unanswered or answered ambiguously heighten the interest and make the characters all the more engaging and credible, and tempt the reader to read it a second or even a third time.




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The Grandest Madison Square Garden by Suzanne Hinman

The Grandest Madison Square Garden: Art, Scandal, and Architecture in Gilded Age New York by Suzanne Hinman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The New York of Yesteryear

I didn't know that the present Madison Square Garden is the fourth structure with that name. And it didn't occur to me that it was strange that today's Madison Square Garden is far from Madison Avenue. I had no idea that the architectural landscape of NYC had changed so radically over the last hundred years. This book is an introduction to New York after the Civil War and before the First World War, the New York that Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, and Henry James knew -- a world that no longer exists.

This book is about an immense building that once stood at the intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, that housed circuses, concerts, plays, horse shows, dog shows, restaurants, every imaginable form of entertainment. It was a famous landmark of both the city and the nation. And no trace of it remains today. I thought of humans as transitory and buildings as permanent. But buildings too have their lifetimes, and in New York City those lifetimes can be shorter than those of men.

I'm reminded of The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, which tells of the World's Fair in Chicago, 1893. The first version of a statue of the naked goddess Diana that was once the focal point of the Madison Square Garden, atop its tall tower, was moved to the Chicago World's Fair. The buildings of the World's Fair were built from scratch and then torn down, only intended to last for less than a year, while the Madison Square Garden was intended to be permanent and, given the quality of its construction, it could have lasted for centuries. But yet it was destroyed a few decades later, to make room for another building.

The main character of this story is the building itself. We watch its birth, its coming of age, and its destruction. We also hear the stories of its parents -- the architect Stanford White and his sculptor friend and colleague Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

I'll look at New York City differently now, appreciating that the experience of walking through its streets today may never be repeated. It seems to be a city of reinforced concrete and stone. It projects the illusion of solidity and permanence. But it is ephemeral, like a Japanese watercolor, to be cherished for its fragility, its unique and fleeting beauty.




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Review venue by Fiona Davis

The Lions of Fifth Avenue by Fiona Davis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


As in her novel The Address, in The Lions of Fifth Avenue two stories set in different time periods revolve around a single building in New York City, and critical plot elements depend on details of the architecture. In The Address the building was the Dakota. In Lions it's the New York Public Library. And in both books, the characters are so well drawn, believable, and empathetic, that you forget the artificiality of the structure and get caught up in the intersecting plot lines.

This book grew on me, quickly. After a slow start, about halfway through the characters came alive and I literally couldn't put it down. This was true for both of the story lines, 1913 and 1993.




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Shadow of the Wind by Zafon

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Fun, like Dumas is fun. Pure story.

This is a book about books -- love of and obsession with books. Echoes of The Club Dumas by Perez-Reverte, The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, Le Mystere Henri Pick by Foenkinos.

p. 483
"As I write these words on the counter of my bookshop, my son, Julian, who will be ten tomorrow, watches me with a smile and looks with curiosity at the pile of sheets that grows and grows, convinced, perhaps, that his father has also caught the illness of books and words."

p. 484
"Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offrs us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read , we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readrs are becoming more scarce by the day."

The author conjures up new characters (often caricatures) one after the other at a dizzying rate, each with bizarre and intriguing backstories, that intersect in unexpected ways. Then those stories are revealed to be riddled with lies and the lies with other lies.

Even in translation, the turns of phrase are delightful.
p. 165 "I suddenly thought that, despite herself, Nuria Monfort exuded a certain air of the femme fatale, like those women in the movies who dazzled Fermin when they materialized out of the mist of a Berlin station, enveloped in halos of improbable light, the sort of beautiful women whose own appearance bored them."

Enjoy.




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Why do you pray? by Richard Seltzer

(excerpt from the novel The Name of Hero, published 1981).

"Why do you pray?" Sasha asked his mother. She was kneeling in front of an icon of Christ as she always did before going up to bed. He was on the brink of manhood.

She glared up at him, then squeezed her eyes shut, trying to concentrate again on her prayer.

He had just passed his last exam in geography, his worst subject. Proud of himself, he would soon be out on his own, away from his despotic mother. He had an urge to provoke her, to arouse her martyred wrath. But despite himself, he would miss her and the simple pattern of her rewards and punishments, the certainty of her disapproval when he broke her rules.

"Why do you pray?" he persisted.

She opened her eyes, pursed her lips, and heaved a sigh of disappointment. "Have I raised a heathen? Don't you believe in God?"

"No," he surprised himself with his answer. He observed all the forms of religion, including prayer. But since the typhoid death of his sister Lilia, he had avoided thinking about God.

Lilia and he had squabbled often. He teased her; she retaliated. Through their running battles they grew close, testing themselves against one another, anticipating one another's responses. Then she was gone. It was as if he had been standing in front of a mirror, showing off his abilities. Then, suddenly, the mirror was gone and he was standing before an endless dark chasm.

For days he had prayed to God to bring her back or to wake him from this nightmare. Then he had asked for a sign that there was a God. But silence was the only answer. He had cursed God and all of creation. He had cursed Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. He had cursed the Church and the priests and all believers. And he had dared God to strike him dead for such blasphemy, as he knelt, trembling, beside his bed, cursing God innocently, in the humble posture of prayer; saying he didn't believe in God, but fully expecting at any moment to be struck by a bolt of lightning.


There was no lightning. But he continued his ritual of evening prayers, never asking himself, as he asked his mother now, "Why do you pray? Do you expect that God is going to give you something? that He's going to do something for you?"

"No," she answered. He was shocked that she took his question seriously. He had expected her to attack him verbally, as she had so often with far less provocation. But instead, she sank into self-reflection, as if his question had awakened old memories. She looked old and defenseless. He had never thought of her as old before. He had never seen her with her guard down like this. He was used to her using her diminutive size and presumed frailty as a weapon. She manipulated people by making them pity her. She was well practiced at assuming the look of a martyr, and she did so with finesse and authority. But now the muscles of her face hung more loosely than he had ever seen before. She was an active, dynamic woman in her early fifties. But for the moment, the energy was gone from her face. She just looked old.

"Then why do you pray?" he persisted.

"I suppose ... because I'm weak... because I'll die."

Sasha continued, "But I remember when we were in Switzerland, at Father's grave." His mother was clearly shaken. He knew his words were hurting her, but still he kept up this line of questioning. "You brought Meta and me back to visit the grave, years after he had died. You asked a Catholic priest to say a prayer at his grave, because Father had been Catholic. The priest refused. He said Father wasn't Catholic enough because he had married an Orthodox woman and let the children be raised Orthodox. You cried and told him that his prayers weren't worth anything, that prayers hadn't kept Father alive, that no prayers were worth anything. And yet every night you still pray. Can you tell me why?"

"I don't know," she admitted, bewildered as he had never seen her before. "Whatever happens to me, I always want to pray...to talk to God... I can't imagine living without praying. I suppose even animals pray."

They were both silent for a while. Then she continued. "I remember a conversation I had with an old priest when Anatole, the man I was betrothed to, died, just a week before we were to be married, and I believe he said almost the same words to me When I returned years later, when your father died. I was numb, empty.

"The priest asked me what was wrong.

"I answered, 'Death.'

"'Is that all?' he asked.

"'That there is death. The fact of death."

"'Yes, it is just a fact, just a fact. Facts you find in the outside world. They can be proved and disproved. They can change. Unlike faith. Faith you find inside yourself, beyond change, beyond proof, beyond reason. Reason sees only change and difference. It can only deal with distinctions − separating and combining to arrive at 'understanding.'

"'There is no end to the number of facts. But there is only one faith.

"'The truth of facts we call 'pravda.'

"'The truth of faith we call 'istina.'

"'To seek oneness with the unchanging truth that is within you is to pray.'

Sasha's mother continued, "So I prayed then. I shut my eyes and shut out the world and fell into deep prayer, for hours, remembering the context of all the times I had prayed before, the smell of incense, the feel of a priest's hands on my head as a child, the tones, not the words, of chanting. When I came out of it, Anatole was still dead, your father was still dead, but I was at peace with myself and had the strength to do all the day-to-day things that had to be done. I believe that praying puts me in touch with an inner reservoir of strength. Praying is like dipping a bucket into a deep well within ourselves, hoping to bring up some of the water of life."