Jonas David's Blog, page 15

Character quirks

I’ve been listening to my first Raymond Chandler novel, The Big Sleep, and it’s a lot better written and a lot less sexist than I’d expected. 

What has stood out to me so far is how good he is at quickly putting a clear picture of a new character in your head. All of the many characters are memorable because they each have very distinct ways of behaving and speaking. 

The most striking for me, was one woman who would bite on her handkerchief when nervous. It only happened a couple times in the book, but it stood out to me as something very human. In one scene she’s sitting in a car with Marlowe, in the dark and rain, and I can’t even remember what they were talking about, something stressful though. It’s silent and she’s staring ahead at the rainy windshield, thinking, and biting on her handkerchief, pulling on it and making little tears in the cloth. 

There are other examples, but that was my favorite. I am going to try to use this strategy on my own characters, and give each a little quirk, and a certain thing they like to say… it could end up being really fun

The Emigrants, W.G. Sebald

Much like the others I’ve read by this author, this book deals heavily with memory, loss, and–more directly than the others–the holocaust. 

The narrator recounts his experiences with four characters, in four sections of the book. Each character is an emigrant from Germany, and each, in some way, seems to want to forget some aspect of their life. 

What struck me most about this book was the vivid reality of these four characters, not only in what was described, but in what was left unknown. The unknowable insides of the minds of others was palpable, and made this seem more like a non-fiction book than any of his other books–though they all have this effect to some extent. 

The addition of the pictures, an occurrence in all books of Sebald’s I’ve yet read, had a very strong effect. I always find myself wondering about the lives of the people in old pictures. In this book, like his others, we are shown old pictures of people, then explained who they are and told something about their life. The pictures add a strong sense of realism, and also surrealism. A sort of deep, vertigo type feeling that I often get when thinking about the past, and the vast unknown world of other people.  

[image error]

The end did not have the stunning effect that the previous two books I read (Rings of Saturn and Vertigo) It did not completely shift the whole idea I had of the book in the final pages. But, such a feat is not necessary for an amazing read. (and of course it’s very possible I missed some subtlety.) 

Reading these three books has been eye-opening as to how far I have to go as a writer. It’s almost overwhelming, knowing that the heights I will never reach are even higher than I ever supposed. I must learn to be okay knowing that my peak will only be at the base of someone else’s mountain. 

The Handmaid’s Tale: a negative side of human adaptability

I finished this dystopian classic by Margaret Atwood and was both impressed and frustrated.

I was impressed by how believable the story was. In the afterward the author talks about how she took great care to put nothing in the book that hadn’t already happened somewhere in history, and no technology that didn’t exist. She did this in an effort to not distract from the reality of it, to not make the story seem fanciful with crazy gadgets or unrealistic things.

And it was very effective. I had no trouble believing in the slow ratcheting up of  authoritarian control over women.

I found the whole story to be very realistic, which made it all the more scary. The actions of the narrator were also realistic, but that made them, to me, highly frustrating. The rest of this post contains spoilers for the novel, and probably the TV show, though I haven’t watched it.

While I identified with Offred at first, as I read on I found myself disliking her more and more, and I wonder if this was intentional.

I didn’t like how she always made herself satisfied instead of resisting. She never took any opportunity to try to help Ofglen when she found out she was part of the Mayday resistance, even though Ofglen asked her multiple times to take advantage of her relationship with the captain, to find some papers or anything that might be of use. Instead Offred chose safety and comfort and did nothing.

When Offred was shown the picture of her daughter I thought this would be the moment she woke up and and realized that the same things would happen to her own daughter as were happening to her, and that would inspire her to act, but she only lamented internally about missing out on a part of her daughters life. None of it even worried her at all.

The whole of it seemed to be her constant acceptance of her situation. Inside her head,  she rails against it, and has constant wishes that she could do something, or take action, but she never does. Even the tiny tiny act of saving the match amounts to nothing. She only even briefly thinks about setting a fire, instead of doing it or even planning how she might achieve anything. The lack of trying was very jaw-clenching. In fiction, usually we see the character trying and eventually succeeding, or at least trying and failing. Offred doesn’t even try.

Because of all that I found Offred to be not a very sympathetic character. I’d rather have heard Moira’s story. Moira made a daring escape, despite being horribly tortured after a previous failed attempt. Offred was not once punished in any way that we witness, and experienced no kind of torture of pain, yet is so afraid to act. Moira is already a more sympathetic character just based on this. Though, in the end even Moira settled into her situation, and seemed to be satisfied with the small amount of freedom she gained.

On the other hand… I don’t know what these characters could have done, how they could have resisted in any meaningful way. Maybe, the only real resistance they could have made was to stay alive, and stay unbroken in their minds. And I think that is part of the point.

Though Offred’s lack of action was frustrating to read, it is a familiar feeling to me. So often I get mad at a situation, but in the end do nothing about it because it is easier to just adapt to it and move on. I think this story shows that humanity’s capability to adapt to any situation can be a problem when we are being forced into terrible situations by small, acceptable steps.

Translating poetry: how can meaning be preserved?

I’m so enamored with Sebald that I got a book of his poetry, Across the Land and the Water (from the library, just in case it turns out I’m not a poetry kind of guy.) I’ve not read much of any poetry, by anyone,  but Sebald’s writing is just so damn poetic anyway, I figured if I was going to like poetry by anyone it would probably be him.

Before I started reading the poems, though, there was an introduction by the translator about the origins of the poems and the process of translating them, and I thought, oh yeah… Sebald wrote in German. This isn’t something I thought much about while reading his books, but when I think about reading poems that were originally written in another language, it seems to me somehow… impossible that they could be faithfully preserved, even if he had still been alive when they were translated.

A novel (or whatever you want to call Sebald’s books) has so much text in it, that it seems far more likely that a translation will preserve the tone, intent, and message of the author. But some of the poems in this collection are only a couple dozen words long. Here is one example, the first poem in the book:

For how hard it is
to understand the landscape
as you pass in a train
from here to there
and mutely it
watches you vanish.

I love this. It had a memorable effect on me when I first read it (just a couple days ago in the library.) I imagined myself on a train looking out at the passing landscape, then suddenly, with the final line of the poem, things have reversed and it is the landscape that is watching me. The train vanishes into the distance, with me still aboard, and only the landscape is left, mute and timeless. I had visualized, for some reason, snow-dusted pine trees and a frozen lake, and I felt a moment of isolation and quiet stillness.

But what was this poem like in the original German? Did the original have the same number of syllables per line? The same spare writing style? The same pace and number of words? Do any of these things matter? How did the translator decide to use ‘understand’ instead of ‘know’ or ‘comprehend’? Why ‘hard’ instead of ‘difficult,’ why ‘mutely’ instead of ‘silently’ or ‘quietly’? How many different ways could one write the above six lines, and at what point is it no longer the same poem, and only an ‘inspired by the original’?

Of course, one could ask these same questions of any translated work. But it seems much more impactful when the piece you are translating is so very short.

Regardless, I am enjoying the collection. Knowing it’s translated has only added an overlay of curiosity, rather than ruin anything for me. Sebald is fast becoming one of my favorite writers, and may even climb up past Nabokov on whatever internal literature ladder I keep in my head. Highly recommend reading anything by him!

 

How to recover confidence…

Have you ever read something so good, so skillfully subtle and thoughtful and emotional and striking and shocking and beautiful, something that pulled at your mind and heart so softly and strongly that you wonder how it can possibly exist? That makes you wonder if it even does exist in this same, perfect way for anyone but you? This, so far, is how I feel every time I read Sebald… Each time, he leaves me wondering about my reason for writing, my motivations for trying, when I’ll never be able to have such an impact, such mysteriously amazing skill.

But on the other hand, it gives me something to aim for, and be inspired by. If I can summon even a fraction of the strange, wistful, surreal, nostalgic, dark, unearthly feelings his books give me into one of my own writings, then I’ll consider that a life success.

Dead Souls: more shitty rich people

I read Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol recently, and found it quite agreeable, as the narrator would say. The story features an enigmatic land owner named Chichikov, who, at the beginning of the story is a stranger in town who everyone finds intriguing. He travels around to all the landowners in the area, and attempts to buy their ‘dead souls’ from them. These are the dead peasants who have not yet been updated in the census as being dead, and thus the landowners will still have to pay taxes on them. Chichikov wants to buy, or take possession of the dead souls in some way, for an unknown reason.

The first part of the novel is various landowners being difficult in various ways, and not wanting to sell him the dead souls. It’s funny because, the dead souls do them no good, and in fact will cost them money, but when someone comes along and wants to buy them, they immediately become suspicious and greedy, and try to get more and more money for this thing that they should just be happy to get rid of. It made them all seem like really pathetic, desperate people, since they already have loads of money and yet are drooling over the prospect of a few more rubles.

The idea, too, of it being ‘souls’ they are bartering over added to the flavor. None of the characters really considered the peasants as anything more than objects to be bought and sold. Even the the idea of trading dead souls, which at first seemed to them odd and unnatural, became okay if they could make some money off it.

In the end, even Chichikov, who has been the most ‘agreeable’ character in the story, is seen to be a slime ball who only cares about how he can make money. He is caught trying to forge a dead old woman’s will so he can get her inheritance, but is able to bribe/call in favors from his friends in order to get out of it.

This story was unfinished, and at several points it will cut off with ‘several pages are missing’ or ‘here, a page is torn out.’ And the end of the novel just cuts off mid sentence. However, the idea is mostly intact, and I didn’t find this to detract from the book as a whole too much.

An interested read, and recommended for fans of Russian literature.

Too many books

I keep buying them. There will be a sale on kindle, or I’ll buy one book thinking I’m going to read it next, then get another one instead… many reasons. But it’s led to me having more than a dozen books waiting in line to be read.

If only I could read faster! But if I did learn to read faster, would I still absorb the same information, and still experience the writing in the same, vivid way?

What I really need is a way to stop time for everyone but me. I’d sit here in my little bubble of causality in a frozen world and read and read and read.

Book catch-up #3 The Unparalleled Borges

I read Labyrinths, a collection of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, and I can’t overestimate how amazing these stories were. I could probably write a post about every story, but I’ll stick to a few standouts.

The Library of Babel: A library that contains not only every book ever written, but every possible arrangement of words/letters/pages that can exist. Those who wander this library search for a book (which must exist) that catalogs all the other books in the library. Though, if one were to find such a book, how would you ever know it is accurate? The narrator, who is writing his life experiences, is aware of the pointlessness of his own writing, since it must already exist somewhere in the library…

This story made me think about the reason behind writing, and the reason behind reading. Why do we feel this drive to read and write, when everything, almost by definition, has been done and done and done before…

The Secret Miracle: A writer with an unfinished drama in verse that he’s been trying to complete for years, is arrested by the gestapo and sentenced to death. Leading up to his execution, he prays and prays to God to somehow give him time to finish his book, it is the only thing he regrets, that he couldn’t finish his book. The time comes, and he is led out to the firing squad, but just before they fire, time freezes. The writer is still aware within his frozen body, and can think as normal, but everything is frozen. He takes this as God’s answer to his prayer, and begins composing the end of his story (it is in verse, so easy for him to memorize.) After a year of this, he finally completes his drama, and after choosing the perfect, final line, time starts again, and he is shot to death.

This story also made me think about the drive behind our desire to write, even when writing things that no one will ever read. What is the cause of this desire to create, even in a void?

The Zahir: The Zahir is an object that generates obsession in whoever sees it. The Zahir can be any object, or sight, in the world. In this story, it is a coin received as change by the narrator after he buys a drink. It slowly overwhelms his mind. First he begins thinking about money and coins in general, the history of various types of coins, the meaning of money, how a coin can symbolize free will since it can be changed into anything… etc etc. But soon, his thoughts narrow to that specific coin. He sees it in every dream, and soon during waking hours all he can think of is the coin. As he is writing the story, he predicts that soon his mind will be useless, and he will become a vegetable, his thoughts only directed at the coin and nothing else.

This story made me think about how anything can become an obsession or a fixation in certain people. A mind can be destroyed this way in realty, by drugs, or love, or other addictions.

The way Borges puts a magnifying glass on real human characteristics and turns them into fantastical weirdness is so great, and like no other writer I’ve yet read. I recommend to anyone! A must read.

Book catch up #2, good ol Nabokov

Whenever I’ve read something boring or confusing, or just plain bad, I read some Nabokov as my next, cause it’s guaranteed to be good. This time I read Pnin, and as always, it was beautiful, funny, and just lovely.

Pnin is a Russian living in America, and teaching Russian at a college. He is absent minded in a humorous, lovable way–the story starts off with him on the wrong train, and all other kinds of mistakes occur, on his way to give a lecture. Pnin was written at the same time as Lolita, and was a sort of break from the darkness for Nabokov. Pnin is the polar opposite of Humbert, and is the most likable, identifiable, and purely good character Nabokov has ever created.

As in every book I’ve read by Nabokov, this one also has an unreliable narrator. However, the narrator is not Pnin himself, but someone telling us about Pnin, the identity of who we don’t learn until the end of the novel. Unlike Humbert, who paints himself as amazing in every way, this narrator paints Pnin as clumsy, oafish, and silly. We learn over time though, that the narrator doesn’t have the best memory, and many things are contradicted by Pnin himself when the two finally meet at the end of the story.

This was an enjoyable, smiling kind of read, and even though I didn’t pick up on what was going on until the end, I enjoyed it just for the writing itself. Nabokov always makes me smile, but in this one it was almost constant.

Book catch up #1, Hemingway, Hawingway

I’ve been reading a lot of books and not posting about them! So here’s the first of some ‘what I’ve been reading’ catch up posts:

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway: I read For Whom the Bell Tolls a while back, and was underwhelmed, though parts of it did make me feel, and the end did stick with me. So many people love Hemingway so much, I thought I’d give him a second shot. I picked ‘TSAR’ because I heard it mentioned a couple times as Hemingway’s best.

Well, again I was underwhelmed, and mostly bored until the end. I think perhaps I just don’t get the appeal of Hemingway. The stories are so simply told, and the prose so simple and basic, and ‘surface level’. For me, I get a lot of my enjoyment of reading from the prose, so even if there are not exciting things happening, I can enjoy the words for themselves. Perhaps I’m missing subtexts or something, but Hemingway’s writing just doesn’t appeal to me in that way. So when his stories are moving slowly or simply forward, it’s much easier for me to get bored and stop paying attention than if I were reading a different writer who writes beautifully even when nothing is ‘happening’.

I think, he’s just not for me.