Jack Messenger's Blog, page 3
November 5, 2018
The Stendhal Summer | Laurie Levy
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Somewhere, surely, a psychologist has written at length on the significance and symbolism of humanity’s baggage. In particular, handbags and tote bags can carry us as much as we carry them, and their fetishization as objects of desire and aspiration means we perform our cherished self-identities every time we drape them lovingly over our shoulder or grasp them warily at arm’s length.
The central character in Laurie Levy’s The Stendhal Summer, Alison Miller, carries a lot of baggage on her trip to Europe. She struggles to wrangle her luggage on and off trains, in and out of taxis and hotels, up and down stairs. Alison, 54, is a professional PR writer from Chicago. Her husband George has left her for his latest young conquest, their twins Abbie and Dan are concerned for her happiness, her mother worries Alison will be mugged or worse. Alison has taken the risk of blowing her life savings in pursuit of her great love, the French author Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle, 1783–1842), whose biography she plans to write. Her travels take her from Grenoble to Milan, Civitavecchia, Rome and Paris; along the way, she meets old friends, encounters new ones, and is reawakened to the possibilities of life and love.
The business of the bags and their contents, with obvious emotional and sexual connotations, is handled unemphatically by the author, so that it impinges on the reader quite late on in the novel. There is much going on in The Stendhal Summer that is equally subtle and literary, yet also born of experience. One can’t help thinking, for example, that the author really knows this hotel room in Rome with its single window where ‘to see out, it was necessary to climb up an odd, thin, carpeted ledge that ran the length of the room.’
The story of The Stendhal Summer takes place in the 1990s, but it also harks back to earlier times – most obviously in its reflections on the experiences of Stendhal himself, whose voice we hear inside Alison’s head and in her dreams. Alison’s stifled romanticism and her partially unacknowledged need for fulfilment remind one of other dramas: the David Lean film Summer Madness (1955) immediately springs to mind, so readers feel very clever when Alison herself later mentions the film (under its US title, Summertime).
The Stendhal Summer is concerned with what used to be called ‘highbrow’ culture. It presumes the reader is interested in these things as well, even if, as is inevitable, he or she has not read every last novel, or listened to that particular opera, or admired this particular painting. It reveals in us an appetite for these things we did not know we had. Relatedly, if we have not read Stendhal in decades (as I have not) or indeed at all, The Stendhal Summer invites us to do so. It is refreshing to be treated as an adult with a mind capable of expanding its range of interests.
Similarly, the range of Levy’s allusions and references is wide, unconfined by what might be fashionable or contemporary. The Stendhal Summer takes the risk of being uncomprehended, yet pays us the compliment of presuming we have lived a little. Thus, mentions of Jean-Louis Barrault, Yves Montand, and Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André (1981), to name just a few examples, either mean something to us or they do not. When they do, they conjure a world of meaning, or an image captured in time, or the tone of a conversation. Such resonances are strange and powerful, as Alison herself knows: ‘Strange how one small romantic moment could sum up a lifetime of need.’
Laurie Levy’s writing contains other wise and deft touches: ‘the apartment she and George so tentatively shared after thirty years of marriage’ is marvellously concise and funny, as is this sudden thought about an admirer: ‘Maybe he seemed wise and witty in public and went home and watched lowbrow TV in his briefs.’ I think he probably does.
It is difficult for any writer successfully to depict the gradual change that overcomes a character over the course of a novel. Alison changes convincingly, her transforming image in the mirror and in the eyes of her lover are outward signs of her inner renaissance. At first, ‘the rest of the trip was a blur. Like her life.’ As if to remind her of the need to refocus, she trips over a cobblestone in a Proustian moment that leads to an error of emotional judgement. ‘When you’re alone,’ she says much later, ‘cloaked in silence, you cannot fight, but the passions don’t fall away; they’re internalized.’
Part of Alison’s enforced retreat from life is captured in the observation that ‘the dead don’t abandon you,’ which perhaps underlies her complete confidence in Stendhal. ‘When happiness is a static condition, it is only for fools.’ Happiness has to keep moving in order to flourish or else it becomes complacency and delusion. Yet movement can also revivify happiness: ‘Amazing, she thought. I am OK.’ Alone and in a foreign land on the other side of the world, realizing one’s ‘okay-ness’ is a revelation of hope and wonder.
Literary rancour is among the threads that tie The Stendhal Summer together. Another is Alison’s extraordinary ability to meet people and make friends. This is occasionally hard to swallow but, then again, women of Alison’s age and temperament can have that gift in abundance, so swallow it we must. There is a friendly, traditional feel to this aspect of the novel, as if we are reading something written in the 1950s or 1960s, before elegant conversation went out of literary style. And yet, early on, we are treated to this gloriously unexpected simile for Alison’s isolation: ‘She stood at the [museum] cases, listening to critical comments ebbing and flowing around her, as if she were an old inner tube tossed into this river of Grenoble society.’
Is The Stendhal Summer a little too hermetic, excessively private, obsessively Stendhalian? Does it exclude us even as it invites us in? Our answers will depend on who we are and what we have read, and I suspect that more women than men will be able to grasp all that is going on. However, these are legitimate questions that might leave us with reservations. On the other hand, if we feel confounded, it might be that Stendhal’s theory of crystallization, his description of the stages of love, might just apply to The Stendhal Summer: ‘like a branch hung outside a salt mine, and in the night picked up salt crystals that changed the barren limb into an object of sparkling beauty.’
I still have my reservations, but then I recall my complete acceptance of a long-awaited plot point that would have been disastrous if clumsily handled. Clumsy, The Stendhal Summer is not. It is a delightfully accomplished and intelligent novel. Witty and refined, cerebral and sensual, it juggles its antinomies with flair and conviction, while its protagonist provides us with genuine companionship – baggage and all.
Amika Press | ISBN 9781937484552 (pbk) | ISBN 1937484556 (ebook)
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October 25, 2018
Farewell Olympus ★★★★★ Review
I loved reading Farewell Olympus. It was a page-turner with humor and insight, the characters were complicated and fun, and the story started simply and played out in a more complicated way with Paris as the setting. But Paris as a place to live and work and not the romanticized faux version of baguettes or berets. Although easy to read, I had to look up several words which were seamlessly woven into the narrative but were new to me. Amazon US review
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October 24, 2018
Reykjavík | Tom Maremaa
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Reykjavík is a novel of the Cold War and its aftermath which takes as its starting point the Reykjavík summit in October 1986 between US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.
Dylan Rose, aged 24, is the foreign correspondent for a New York paper. While in Iceland to cover the summit, he unexpectedly encounters Professor Nathalie Campbell, his former teacher of Russian at Berkeley, who herself meets and falls in love with Russian scientist Andrei Heilemann. Over subsequent decades, their lives criss-cross against the backdrop of the dissolution of the Soviet Empire and the rise of oligarch mobsterism in the new Russia. Andrei’s brother Mikhail is one such oligarch, and his personal/political vendetta with Andrei leads to espionage, danger, persecution and murder.
‘All roads in life converge, one way or another, whether we want them to or not.’ I suspect this highly qualified and unconvincing assertion probably doesn’t mean very much. And, sooner or later, an avid reader is likely to come across an entire book that is just as unconvincing. For me, I am afraid, Reykjavík is one such novel. The reasons are simple, but they are intertwined in complicated ways.
The main problem with Reykjavík is that its relationships quickly strain credulity to breaking point. Dylan infrequently encounters Nathalie and Andrei (and, later, their two children) over the years and, charitably interpreted, provides them with valuable help. Yet the strength of these ties is quite unbelievable. ‘She talks about you often, like, maybe a couple times a week,’ Nathalie’s teenage daughter tells Dylan, while Dylan tells us that he regards them all as his second family. These assertions, however, come out of the blue, and the evidence for them is in short supply. One wonders what Nathalie finds to say about Dylan two times a week and why they do not fade from each other’s consciousness. Certainly, their tenuous connections provide little justification for the emotions alleged to be in play, most of which are profoundly underdetermined. Astonishingly frank confessions between characters who otherwise seem hardly to know one another do not help tether things to reality.
Some of the stylistic choices in Reykjavík exacerbate this problem. The absence of quotation marks and even line breaks to indicate speech has a distancing effect, as if people are speaking to one another (and to the reader) through a dense fog. It is also frequently confusing, especially as lengthy monologues are often nested one inside the other, as when, for example, Dylan narrates what Nathalie quotes from Andrei.
I share the scepticism of Dylan’s editor when Dylan claims:
My journalistic wheels, the ones in my head, were spinning rapidly: there was definitely a story in there about the meeting of East and West, against the backdrop of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the transition and monster changes that had occurred in the lives of the new couple, with their young son and daughter.
‘Who really wants to know? Where’s the drama … What’s the news hook? The angle? These were some of his [editor’s] immediate responses.’ And mine. Late in the novel, as reports pile up (e.g. ‘And then my father died’; ‘your wife has filed for divorce’), drama goes out the window.
As does historical accuracy, especially when it comes to Ronald Reagan, who was a complicated man, capable of callous disregard for people in his politics yet sensitively protective of bit-players in his acting career. Reagan is described as an ‘amazingly popular president’, a persistent myth that does not bear scrutiny. True, for a two-year period around his reelection the president was popular, but for the rest of his tenure – marred by the disgraceful Iran–Contra scandal, among other things – his approval ratings were often amazingly low and certainly no better than anyone else’s.
Reykjavík does mention (Governor) Reagan’s ‘order [for] the pepper-spraying of protesters from military helicopters in 1969,’ but otherwise gives Reagan all the credit for the end of the Cold War. History tells us that Gorbachev undoubtedly had something to do with it, but he is reduced to little more than a desperate emissary who stands in Reagan’s shadow. Important figures and movements from the previous couple of decades that enormously contributed to the end of the Cold War are simply elided. ‘All this momentous change in the air, following Reagan’s challenge to “tear down this wall”’ actually preceded the challenge and was instigated by Gorbachev. And Reykjavík ups the ante: ‘This was, after all, the height of the Cold War.’ Well, actually, no, the Cold War was easing; its cold rage was at its height when the Berlin Wall was constructed, increased in the subsequent airlift, continued through the Cuban Missile Crisis, and lingered in the proxy wars waged by the Superpowers around the globe.
The Reykjavík summit is described by Dylan as ‘the biggest chess match of the century, the one where the fate of mankind, humankind, if you will, is being decided.’ In light of the twentieth century’s remarkable history, this is a startling conclusion to draw about a summit; in general, summits themselves are seldom as momentous as they might seem at the time.
What Reykjavík does get absolutely right is the Russian regime’s century-long predilection for poisoning its critics, dissidents and traitors. Arkadi Vaksberg’s meticulous history The Poison Laboratory: From Lenin to Putin (Gallimard) details the state’s expertise at home and abroad in silencing its enemies, all the way from Lenin’s order in 1921 to create a poison laboratory. They’re still at it in 2018, in Salisbury, UK, for example. Reykjavík uses thallium-polonium 210 for its assassination, but many others were developed and used.
Politics aside, Reykjavík includes some interesting intertextual episodes. A dream of a duel is nuanced with quotations describing Pierre Bezukhov’s encounter with Dolokhov in War and Peace. And April, we are told in an aside, is ‘the cruelest month,’ a quotation from Eliot’s The Wasteland. There are other such interventions (Nabokov especially), but those quoting the lyrics of David Bowie simply don’t have the intellectual or emotional heft to contribute much. The influence of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz is largely formal: the novels share the same intermittent encounters with a narrator in various locations, as well as an episode of mental breakdown.
There are many unfortunate proofreading errors in Reykjavík. The president travels on ‘Air Force On,’ for example, and the egregious ‘I felt badly for her’ – impossible to get wrong if you have ever watched teacher George (Kirk Douglas) explain it in A Letter to Three Wives (1949), a film that really can claim to show how ‘all roads in life converge, one way or another, whether we want them to or not.’
Black Tea Press | ISBN 9781728628288 (pbk) | ebook
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October 22, 2018
Crowd of One | Filip Severin
The epigraph to Crowd of One is taken from Edward Bernays, one of the least-known and most influential figures of the modern era: ‘Men are rarely aware of the real reasons which motivate their actions.’ Bernays pioneered what eventually became known as public relations (aka propaganda) by applying crowd psychology to control the ‘herd instincts’ of the ‘irrational masses’. What he termed the ‘crystallizing’ of public opinion rapidly evolved over the course of the twentieth century into the manufacturing of consent to the political and commercial imperatives of society’s managers and elites. Like it or not, we all live in Bernays’ world.
Marlon Renner, the central character in Crowd of One, certainly does. He is a young man from Maine who works in Paris for Atlas Analytica, a shadowy entity in a world of low-profile companies that eschew publicity, websites or even premises. ‘To map out an individual’s personality traits, Atlas Analytica uses a psychometric model known as the Big Five,’ which helps it understand a person’s needs and fears and persuade them ‘into thinking or doing as you like.’ Usually, such persuasion is based on a suitably invented narrative of conflict, so as to engage with strong emotions such as anger and anxiety.
The use of these techniques – particularly in social media, with the help of ‘bots’ – is perfectly legal, Marlon and his colleagues assure us (and each other), although companies like Atlas Analytica take care to distance themselves from the action by creating a string of shell companies and offshore havens. The buying and selling of psychological profiles based on people’s likes and dislikes, comments and purchases, takes place on an industrial scale, as there are always loopholes that permit organizations to sell their data even when they are ‘committed to ensuring your privacy.’
Mr LaFontaine, Marlon’s boss, has returned to Paris because he sees which way the wind is blowing. In a blizzard of mixed metaphor, he explains Europe to Marlon:
Now, the cracks are widening, and the tables are about to turn. What you see out there is a society in freefall, ready to crash and rebuild itself. That’s why I came back. The old continent is facing another turnaround …
The quicker you learn how this works, the more you’ll be able to squeeze out of this system before it goes belly-up.
Whatever the legality of these pervasive business and political practices, they are based on a profoundly cynical view of human society. Marlon becomes increasingly enmeshed in a network of morally dubious decisions and clandestine structures, all of them linked by lonely journeys and anonymous hotels. Yet Marlon’s success ‘is what he wanted – to prove that he can make his own way in life. That he is worthwhile.’
It is here that one thinks of the sociological classic The Lonely Crowd (1950) referenced by Crowd of One. Marlon is not much given to introspection and seems only partially acquainted with himself: ‘He can’t tell whether he is going home or leaving home, or whether it makes any difference.’ He requires the self-justification of defending free speech even as he schemes to bring down a country’s economy. Marlon feels like a young man in search of a cause who has found it in the wrong place. When he says ‘Our in-house psychologists say that it’s in our DNA to follow the crowd and seek homogeneity … They call it the soul of the wolf and the fear of loneliness’ – he describes himself.
In short, Marlon is as much a ‘part of a pattern in someone else’s head’ as the masses he manipulates. There is a great deal of talk about ‘the big picture’ in Crowd of One, a metaphor frequently used to make the ends justify the means and enable a megalomaniac’s vision to outweigh a world of suffering. ‘The mind of a crowd is a different beast than that of an individual,’ Marlon thinks. ‘It’s strong, authoritative, and capable of a brutality that most individuals are not.’
Recent events such as massive data breaches, interference in elections, the exposure of espionage, the misuse of information and the existence of state-sponsored troll factories make Crowd of One extremely topical. And while, for that reason alone, it is a readable book, it also has considerable weaknesses. The prose is frankly dull and utilitarian in the manner of notes to a screenplay: ‘Marlon walks to the desk’ and thousands of similar phrases become tiring and repetitive. The present tense is mannered and clumsy when used with so little variation. In addition, people invariably ‘grab’ a cup of coffee rather than simply pick it up; descriptive details are so minimal as to be cursory; a word used in one sentence will be repeated needlessly in the next; characters are flat; significant plot points are telegraphed.
We inhabit Marlon’s perspective throughout, but not much goes on inside his head that is particularly interesting. His past is vague and generic and, while it hints at underlying reasons for Marlon’s conformism, there is not enough to go on to make speculation worthwhile. Marlon’s father is an unfortunate man, which might explain Marlon’s unquestioning acceptance of LaFontaine and his need to please him. In a rare descriptive significance, reference to a ‘dry fountain’ near LaFontaine’s home office suggests he is not the fount of knowledge and wisdom Marlon takes him to be.
This is all a great shame, especially as Crowd of One leads us to ponder the contempt with which most of us are regarded by the sociopaths and scoundrels who run much of the world. Perhaps everyone thinks of themselves as exceptions to the crowd, as impervious to manipulation and advertising, but what ‘crowd’ do we mean and have we ever met it? In an age when social media are discovered to be unsociable, when much of our communication and ‘keeping in touch’ via the internet actually degrades our relationships, when the ‘friends’ we ‘like’ can be algorithms generated by unscrupulous agencies, each of us is forced deeper into his or her crowd of one.
Filip Severin | ISBN 9781983217036 (pbk) | ebook
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October 16, 2018
Verne R. Albright: Two Novels and Twenty-Three Years
Verne Albright lives in Calgary, Canada. He worked on two novels for twenty-three years and in the process received 153 rejection notices from agents and publishers. Again and again, friends and family told him his books were better than most that get published and that the publishers and agents were wrong. But rather than feel sorry for himself, he recognized the need to improve his manuscripts, which he did over and over until a publisher finally accepted them with enthusiasm.
For more on Verne Albright’s two historical fiction/adventure novels, see Playing Chess with God and The Wrath of God, or click/tap on the cover images.
Albright has several rules for success as an author:
Rule number one: The way to succeed as an author is to polish, edit, and rewrite as often as necessary to make your story so good that a publisher or agent falls in love with it. Don’t listen to people who commiserate with your failures. If you can’t get a publisher or agent, it’s almost invariably because your manuscript isn’t good enough. That was definitely the case with mine. How do I know? Because I, myself, like the latest version far better than any of its many predecessors.
Rule number two: This one will meet resistance because it costs a fair bit of money and gives new authors the idea that it will put them under the thumb of an ogre who’ll take all the fun out of writing by trying to change them. Rule number two is: Get a good editor – and the key word is good. Many so-called editors are ex-teachers whose mission is to enforce the rule of grammar and punctuation, sometimes to the point where they clean up the grammar of your uneducated characters as well as your university professors. They take all the fun out of writing by going through the manuscript with a red pencil and telling you how you should have said most of what you said.
A really good editor (mine calls herself a Rewrite Specialist, a far better description of the job) knows your book is yours and doesn’t impose his or her ideas. Instead, he or she reaches inside you and brings out your very best. If you’re open-minded, their suggestions will frequently strike you as improvements. But good editors give you general suggestions and leave the specifics to you. They usually cost around $4.00 a page, and are worth every penny.
Rule number three: The famous designer Coco Chanel – who was on Time Magazine’s list of the hundred most influential people of the last century – said that before leaving the house, a woman should look in the mirror and take off at least one piece of jewelry. Likewise, before submitting a manuscript, an author should remove all words and connective language that add no meaning. This should be done mercilessly in narrative, but a bit less stringently in dialog.
Remember the scene in A River Runs Through It where the father looks at his son’s theme for English class and says, “Write it again with half as many words,” then reads the result and says, “Again, please, with only half as many words”?
Nothing slows a story down as much as excess words and long descriptions. My first editor told me to always set my scenes with what he called “brushstrokes.” That, I soon discovered, meant enough detail to start the reader forming a mental image after which he’ll fill in the details on his own.
I hope these suggestions will help some aspiring writers succeed.
Verne R. Albright
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Apocalypse Chow | David Julian Wightman
The subtitle to Apocalypse Chow describes it as a ‘remix of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’. Pastiche, parody, or whatever we wish to call it is a difficult art, made more difficult if the original is a pillar of the western literary canon of which many people have heard, but few have read. Conrad’s prose is too dense and allusive for contemporary tastes, the novel was written a long time ago, and one has to be prepared to work hard to get to grips with it.
Of course, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) has been ‘remixed’ and reincarnated many times before Apocalypse Chow. Eliot referenced it in The Hollow Men (1925), for example, and the novel has been repeatedly excavated by literary and postcolonial scholars for its buried racism. The phrase ‘heart of darkness’ has become enshrined, albeit awkwardly, in the store cupboard of phrases to be trotted out by authors as a shorthand for Conrad’s evocation of evil, mystery and madness (including, if I remember correctly, myself).
As its cover typography immediately signals, Apocalypse Chow approaches Conrad’s novel via Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), which was ‘inspired’ by Conrad’s masterpiece. Thus, as well as Conrad’s majestic prose style, Apocalypse Chow also reimagines scenes from the film that have acquired a life of their own apart from the larger work. Robert Duvall’s Colonel Kilgore, who blasts the enemy with Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries from his Huey attack helicopters, and who famously claims ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’, is transformed into a Canadian veteran who drives a chip wagon that blares precisely the same music as it pulls into town. ‘I love the smell of bacon in the morning …’ he admits.
Kurtz, the mysterious genius who has gone rogue upriver, is Chef Kurtz in Wightman’s novel, and, indeed, the story of Marlow’s quest for Kurtz now unfolds as a narrative of the restaurant business told by Marlow himself late one night around the dinner table of a New York restaurant. Marlow, we are told, was given the task by his employers to track down Kurtz in the Canadian wilderness and fire him. According to them, Kurtz had made Chow restaurant one of the best in the world with his innovative cuisine, but now he had gone mad and had to be evicted.
If Apocalypse Chow sounds odd it is because it is odd. It is entertaining for anyone familiar with the works it lovingly skewers (note the culinary metaphor) and it is strangely compelling even if, like me, you haven’t read Conrad for a long time. It is quietly witty and also serious. It manages to borrow something of the gravitas of Conrad’s novel and – like all good parody – it makes you want to return to the original for a fresh look.
For an example of its humour, take this passage from the novel’s description of Marlow’s river journey:
Cutlery, for Christ’s sake! We were being attacked with cutlery. Forks and knives and spoons were raining down on the boat. There were even metal chopsticks thrown at us; empty tin cans and broken old pots and pans flying through the air.
When Chow opened for the first time, Chef Kurtz cooked up meals comprising such unlikely dishes as:
Malaysian Edible-nest Swiflet soup – made from a single nest constructed entirely from the bird’s saliva, if you can believe it – garnished with a fried African guinea fowl egg, black osetra sturgeon caviar, and Himalayan rock salt. Imagine the expense! Next came a procession of charcuterie items served on individual planks of Lebanese cedar.
Kurtz’s madness – his sin against the increasingly desperate exaggeration of haute cuisine embodied above – is suddenly to turn his back on such unsustainable extravagance, and to research, discover and utilize the edible flora and fauna of the local wilderness, creating an entirely different kind of cuisine for the future. The apocalyptic last supper served at Chow features a cornucopia of little-known nuts and berries, plus a selection of predatory invasive species, all of which serves as an edible symbol of humanity’s greed: Kurtz is undisturbed by ‘the horror’ of the world; rather, it is ‘The hunger! The hunger!’ that obsesses him. ‘Don’t you see, Marlow,’ he says, ‘humans are the ultimate invasive species.’
Kurtz himself recites from Eliot’s The Hollow Men and, after serving Chow’s final meal, he gives a lecture to his rapt admirers:
Imagine an ocean without sharks or tuna … The time will soon come when there are none left, for we are eating them into extinction. Imagine a world without honeybees, the humble creatures that pollinate almost all the crops we consume, yet are dying in their billions because of climate change, and our industrial agriculture’s addiction to pesticides. Imagine a world without mountain gorillas, tigers, or polar bears. These species will be lost as we devour their habitats.
Humour blends seamlessly with this sudden seriousness, much of which is allusive and elusive. For instance, just the one word, upriver, evokes more mystery and menace than one can immediately account for. An individual’s capacity for uncritical admiration is incarnated by the restaurant critic who has ‘not critiqued his passion, his own blind loyalty [to Kurtz]. It came to him, and he accepted it with a sort of eager fatalism.’ The uncritical Critic is as purblind as the similarly obsessed photographer in Apocalypse Now.
The boat Marlow takes upriver is called Blacky’s Barge. It is as if the relocation from Conrad’s Africa (the Heart of Darkness) and the Vietnam of Apocalypse Now (denuded of its rightful inhabitants so as to repaint the war – and indeed Colonel Kurtz – as a solely American tragedy) to the wilds of Canada has brought with it the first foray of the hitherto occluded subaltern colonial Other, still inflected with a racist slur. The entirely coincidental resonance of the author’s surname acts as an accidental indicator of racial hegemony.
Of course, Kurtz is right about food and our place in Nature. Our hunger is our greed, and greed has destroyed too much for the world to recover. Thus:
Kurtz’s words had behind them a terrible suggestion of things heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares. He wasn’t a lunatic. Chef’s intelligence was perfectly clear, and concentrated upon himself with horrible intensity.
Apocalypse Chow is a short work of humble ambition, many of whose virtues are probably emergent properties rather than intended outcomes. Perhaps it is best read for humour and entertainment (excellent reasons to read anything), so that its seriousness can creep up on you like an unexamined appetite. ‘The hunger! The hunger!’
David Julian Wightman | ISBN 9781775357902 (pbk) | ebook
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October 9, 2018
A Breathlessly Impatient World Can Now Read Noah’s Arc
T...
A Breathlessly Impatient World Can Now Read Noah’s Arc
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72 Raisins | Nikki Nash
Monkey on a Wire: a book review of 72 Raisins by Nikki Nash
72 Raisins tells the story of Scott Mullan, a Los Angeles-based comedy writer for The Late Enough Show, whose star is the diminutive Dylan Flynn. Scott is fifty and married to Rebecca. They have two children, both of whom are due to start college and are busy choosing – along with Rebecca – where to go. Scott is hoping for promotion to head writer on the show, but his ambitions and his marriage are thrown into turmoil when his agent asks him to read the typescript of a book called Seven Mythic Doorways to Freedom by Ben Doss, with a view to editing it, a suggestion that Scott fears indicates he will never get the job he covets.
72 Raisins opens with the redolent image of two nervous cops pointing their guns at the back of a suspect. The suspect is Scott and he has done nothing wrong, yet by the time the story gets around it doesn’t much matter, as he is branded as a ‘perv’ anyway. Thus, as the subtitle to 72 Raisins succinctly puts it, this is ‘a novel about fame, delusion and indecent exposure’. More significantly, it is about story, myth and faith.
The stories we tell ourselves and perhaps hold sacred as individuals and as a society help us make sense of our experience and enable us to steer a course through life. Stories become myths when they solidify as foundational narratives about how and why we became what we are, and often invoke divine sanction and guidance. When, as happens from time to time, circumstances force us to reexamine, revise, replace or discard our myths, it can be a painful and confusing process – so much so that many of us avoid honest encounters with new realities and instead use our myths for refuge and exclusion rather than illumination and connection.
Few of us these days learn our myths from an impressively bearded sage sitting around the old camp fire. Instead, it is television and cinema and social media that tell us who we are and what we may become. The difference with social media and a lot of television is that stories can be diffused with such rapidity and scant regard for authenticity and authorship that they become truths whether or not they are true.
Any novel that references the immortal Dick Van Dyke Show is likely to get my vote. In 72 Raisins the show is perhaps a foundational narrative for Scott and Rebecca’s marriage – a righteous blend of harmoniously sexy family life in an affluent suburb with a fun and rewarding career (for the husband, at least). In a flashback to their first meeting, Scott tells Rebecca:
I always wanted to be Rob Petrie. From The Dick Van Dyke Show. I want to be a head writer. I’m doing stand-up because I’m good at it and it helps me refine the words, but deep down – I want to be Rob Petrie.
Whereupon Rebecca impersonates Mary Tyler Moore and their relationship is sealed. (Incidentally, an early episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show contains a memorable entrance by the lovely Mary in a tailored outfit with pillbox hat typical of the First Lady, Jackie Kennedy. The live audience indulges in a collective swoon of rapture. The myth of Camelot has already taken hold.)
Seven Mythic Doorways to Freedom claims some impressive reviews from Rollo May, Robert Bly, the New York Times Book Review and Robert Graves. It is ostensibly a book about myth and how myth can be used to enlighten a life via some bizarre applications that Scott decides to follow, among which are attempting to see the messiah in the people he encounters, and rocking back and forth as a form of meditative exercise. These things get Scott thinking:
Scott … thought about his father. How things could have been different. His father had never handed him a knife and said, ‘You must slay me first.’ He’d handed him a hammer and said, ‘Don’t fuck this up,’ but Scott had to remember this was mythology.
No doubt, many of us can relate to this kind of parental advice.
Family life is not dwelt upon in 72 Raisins, but is artfully suggested. Little details such as Rebecca leaving the radio quietly tuned to classical music so that anyone returning to the empty house doesn’t feel lonely, and the way she can be relied upon to answer text messages immediately, are quietly moving and evocative. The scenes in the family home and the family car are among the best in the novel. Scott and Rebecca share a similar sense of humour but, unlike Scott, Rebecca knows when to stop and sees when her husband uses humour merely to deflect difficult questions.
Seven Mythic Doorways to Freedom becomes a Pandora’s box of doubt and nihilism that threatens everything that Scott holds sacred:
What if God was just a story? Was the comfort of a potential heaven, or even seventy-two raisins, just the next palliative in a long line of comforts from birth to death? Pulling us forwards, soothing us through the pain of life? Was life indeed painful, or did he even know? He hadn’t experienced anything without the undercurrent of a deeper, assumed connection to something greater than himself. That would always be there, that was taking care of him.
Any writer is likely to question his or her motivations sooner or later. Somewhere behind their lust to create there is usually a quest for love, validation or immortality (preferably accompanied with huge sales and a film option).
Scott wondered if his own pursuit of recognition was tied to some kind of story he was telling himself. Was he proving his father wrong, that he was in fact able to be a ‘man’ and provide for his family using nothing more than his humour? What would he do if his humour left him? If God left him? Could he do this life without God? What if God was merely the hope of future solutions to current problems?
Deepak Chopra and his New Age mysticism are mentioned numerous times in 72 Raisins because, after all, California has had its share of religious cults and spiritual movements, quacks and charlatans, messiahs and gurus. Scott’s story is in part the story of a nation whose professions of faith are everywhere but whose doubts and uncertainties erupt in myriad ways. This is not a story that could have been written in the UK, for example, where secularism is the de facto religion.
Comedy is often no laughing matter. It requires a great deal of talent and hard work to get it right, much of it collaborative. It is notoriously difficult to perform. It is a medium that is often undervalued and misperceived as trivial or mere entertainment. When it’s bad it’s bad; when it’s good, we are so busy laughing that we cannot reflect about it afterwards. Yet great comedy is as great as great tragedy, for example, and the two often go hand in hand. 72 Raisins shows the toll it takes on Scott, whose mental processes circle the humorous possibilities of any and every situation, no matter how serious.
It is a strength of 72 Raisins that whether or not the reader foresees the revelation that comes midway through the book, it does not matter. What matters is its effect on Scott. Similarly, in the early stages of the novel, where there are many extracts from Seven Mythic Doorways that take us away from the main narrative, it is possible to doubt one’s commitment to reading yet, at the same time, be compelled to continue. Readers who persevere will be glad they did so. It is a funny, moving and ultimately serious novel that concludes with a moment of quiet grace.
Overhead Bin Publishing | ISBN 9780692139462 (eBook) | ISBN 9780692148082 (pbk)
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September 18, 2018
Take the Late Train Has Arrived
The New Novel Has Arrived
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‘This book is ingenious. It is a page-turning, suspense-...
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‘This book is ingenious. It is a page-turning, suspense-filled detective story that includes a sharp sense of humour AND it has a hero who fulfils his detective role with an intellectual slant, giving us a sceptical view of the world as filled with corruption, literary references, irony, and relatives we’d rather not see.
There is a wonderful dead-pan attitude of the hero that makes the reader eager to hear more. Here is the hero’s reaction when he is woken in the night by his unwanted house guest who is also his brother: “‘Shouldn’t you be in bed?’ I asked, after I’d had enough and put on a robe. I checked the time: three o’clock. A bad time. The hour of the demon. Shovel-faced men with pitiless eyes knock at doors at three o’clock in the morning.”
The hero’s troubled and hysterical interaction with women he’s attracted to is akin to Peter Sellers’ experiences in the Pink Panther movies:
‘There is nothing wrong with your teeth, Howard. In fact, I have noticed how well you look after them. They are very even – so even that I thought they might be dentures. Delphine says she is almost certain they are genuine.’
‘They are genuine.’
Celeste approached and manipulated my upper lip with her thumb. She examined my teeth. I could see them reflected in her eyes. They looked blue today – her eyes, that is. She tugged at my lower lip and pulled it around. It was curiously unsettling to have a beautiful lawyer examining my mouth in that way. I could hear people passing on the street outside her window. I wondered what they would think if they could see through the blinds.
Here’s an example of the irresistible style and humour of the story when the character is struggling to deal with the hot weather and his professional and sleuthing dilemmas:
Deeply unhappy, I wandered to the balcony in search of perspective, to feel the elements against my skin. The cloudless sky pressed against my best intentions; the sun battered at my humble ambitions. The city couldn’t take much more of this. People had fainted in the streets; an elderly man had died of sunstroke; the president had removed his jacket.
The novel’s humour is corny and fresh at the same time. This trait mixed with a reluctant, under-dog detective makes this tale a highly diverting read. To top it off, this detective who sees no hope in this world ends up giving us just that! I highly recommend this book! (Amazon UK review)
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