Jonas David's Blog, page 7

The Pastor by Hanne Orstavik

Hello wordpress my old friend, it’s time to write blog posts again…

By the end of this novel I felt that it was a perfect, pristine picture of a depressed and empty person. And I loved it.

My first impression of the book was how appealing the physical design was. It is not your normal book shape, but is very short, nearly square. The grey and black textured surface is eye-catching but not loud, and is wonderful to touch and hold. The words inside match the short, grey, unassuming shape of the exterior.

Liv is a pastor who doesn’t know why she’s a pastor. One day she suddenly doesn’t want to study economics anymore and drops her notebook in a puddle in the rain and walks into a theology class. From there she ends up studying a Sami (the indigenous people of Norway) uprising in the 1850s, and reading/interpreting the words of a pastor from that time.

The novel is very internal, consisting entirely of Liv’s scattered thoughts. From one paragraph to the next, or sometimes within the same paragraph she can suddenly be back in another time, in another place, either remembering the friend she lost, or back in the snow on a dark night in the 1850s.

The tone of the book is so steady, like a drone, in a way that perfectly captures the numbness of depression. Everything is internal and muddled and ultimately empty. The tone and flow of words never shift no matter what is happening. It is just like the landscape of northern Norway, where the story takes place: grey, flat, cold, dripping, still, white, blank, unchanging, relentlessly blank.

Liv seems unable to connect with anyone around her. Despite telling herself and the reader that she wants to ‘bind a wound’ she seems oblivious to those hurting right next to her. She multiple times is unable to speak, to connect with someone right there waiting for her to reach out. She can only see, feel, or care about her own pain, and this same behavior is what caused the tragedy that blacks her recent past.

Something about the prose just drew me in, and I was dragged along in the steady flow of words, like a cold river dragging me under. It is so subdued and flat, but it builds on itself. It burrowed into me, and left me feeling a strangely nostalgic and a bit morose about the inevitability of life’s unchanging and unchangeable factors.

This skillful piece of writing will stay in my mind for a while, and I’ll be checking out Orstavik’s other books in the near future.

“The sky was just there, high above, and seemed so irrelevant, so ethereal and fleeting. I prefered the ground, its flatness. Firm soil…”

Trieste, by Daša Drndić

I read this book back in May, and I have had to get some distance from it before I could write about it. It was very affecting, upsetting, and disturbing, as one might expect a book with such subject matter to be.

The book follows the life story of Haya Tedeschi, whose son was taken from her by German soldiers in WW2, 62 years prior. The story opens with her waiting to be reunited with her son, who she hasn’t seen in all that time, and searching through a basket full of memories–photos, letters, news clippings–while waiting. Through these memories, we get the life story of Haya, leading up to the theft of her son and the holocaust, and beyond.

The story is told in a documentary style that reminded me a lot of W.G. Sebald’s books. As characters are introduced, each one is given a footnote with a brief history of their life–where and when they were born, what they did, where and when they died. This happens so often that whenever I saw a new name I would get a little shot of intrigue, ‘ooh, who is this?’ I’d think.

As the story gets more grim, and things take darker and more terrible turns, there are still the footnotes, telling me the life stories of everyone I come across.

Until, that is, I reached the middle of the book, and slammed into a fine-print wall of names. A list of 9000 Jews who were killed in one specific concentration camp. The effect was astonishing.

Up until that point, every name contained a story. I had been conditioned very carefully by the author to think ‘oh, who is this?’ whenever I saw a new name. Now, I’m overloaded with names and my mind is thinking for each one “Who is this? What did they do? Who are they?” And there are so many, dozens of pages of names. All erased, with no story left to tell. I’ve never been more affected by a list of names in my life.

The effect is even more powerful because, leading up to this list of names, I had become deadened to the sheer volume of murder that took place. Numbers such as 100,000 dead here or 200,000 dead there had become common. So to see the sheer scope and seemingly unending length of a list of ‘just’ 9000 names allowed me to, for a moment, understand just how much life was truly lost, how many stories had truly been erased.

But this book was not done with me yet.

After I’d barely managed to keep from bursting into tears at a list of names, the following section contained another list: a list of nazis, and their life stories–which of course, were perfectly preserved, since so many of them lived a full happy life.

Each nazi would have his childhood described, his joining of the nazi party, the atrocities they committed (some made me physically ill to the point where I had to stop reading for a while) and finally their sentencing. Most of them were aquitted, some received three or six years, often released early.

The contrast of the nazis life after the horrors of the holocaust was so boggling. It was like everyone wanted to pretend it was just a dream, a terrible nightmare. So many nazis just lived on like nothing had happened.

I will never forget certain images this book put in my head. I won’t try to describe them here, but I will never look at or think about this horrible moment in history the same way again. This book has made it real to me, instead of just a list of numbers and facts. It is now and forever real, unbearably real.

By hand part 2

It’s been a couple months since I posted about a certain author that I was fascinated with, and how he wrote constantly in journals by hand. While this may be common for many of my favorite authors (such as J.A. Baker and his 6000 pages of journaling which were condensed later into the 200 page book, The Peregrine) most of the authors I read were living before the widespread use of the computer, and Mircea (the author I most recently posted about) is alive and writing today, and still he chooses to write by hand.

It is also shown in many studies that writing by hand activates specific areas of the brain, and in general engages the brain much more than typing does. While I’m not sure if this is the scientific reason or not, it makes intuitive sense that it should be so: typing has been with us for only a breath, while humans have been writing with ink and pens of some form for nearly 5000 years. Though, in the depth of human existence, 5000 years is also barely a breath…

Whatever the biological reason, it seems important for a writer to write by hand. If not their fiction, then certainly their daily thoughts. So, I have been. And this is the reason I have not posted here in nearly three months.

I bought a nice notebook and a nice pen, and have been enjoying it. There is something freeing about writing something you know no one is going to read, except your future self. I like Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s take on it, in his Solitary Walker he mentioned at one point that he was writing for his future self, so that years later he could read back through what he’d written, and feel not so alone, because it would be as if he was conversing with someone else, his old self. Of course, when he was writing that he was not expecting it would be read by millions of people hundreds of years later.

In the end, I’m writing with a pen and paper more often now, because it seems like something the best writers do. I am trying to emulate this aspect of them, whether it is cause and effect, or coincidence, I don’t know. I guess I’ll find out after some years of doing it, whether it’s improved my writing at all.

Either way, I’ll be sure to enjoy it.

By hand

I recently came across this interview with Mircea Cărtărescu, the author of my most recent favorite book: Blinding. And I was stunned to find that his elaborate, beautiful, overwhelmingly stunning masterwork of prose was written by hand, in a journal, and barely changed from its original state:

When we had those very pleasant talks in The Hague together, I told you that I always feel embarrassed when having to discuss my crazy method of writing, because I know that nobody believes me. Even I have a hard time believing that I wrote a 1,500-page novel, over fourteen years, by hand, and that the manuscript, gathered in four big notebooks, is as clean as if I copied it, page by page. Better stated: it’s as if the text has always been there, but covered over by white paint, and my only work is to erase that paint, revealing the manuscript beneath. Fortunately, I have my notebooks as proof.

I simply can not imagine writing by hand, without the ability to fuss with sentence structure or constantly replace words. However, a lot of his way of writing and thinking about writing does resonate with me. I too have felt that I’m discovering a story that’s already there, and that the act of writing is not one of creating, but of putting down the words that are supposed to be there already.

I write just one or two pages a day, yes, only in the morning, and I never add or take out anything. But what is important is that I never have a plan or a story in mind. Each page is revealed to me at the moment I start to write. Each page could (and does) change everything. This is the only way that I can write, for writing is not a job for me, nor an art, but a faith, a sort of a personal religion. To continue writing I don’t need to know where I’m headed, only that I can do it, that I’m the only one who can.

I have this same kind of outlook whenever I write. I can only write very little at one go, and I never have a plan. It is encouraging to think that slow and steady really can get you to the end. Two pages per day is, what, 600 words? Less? That is not a monumental number to achieve every day (even though I don’t).

I also am never really sure why I write, other than for personal reasons. Maybe I could call writing my faith as well…

This is a very interesting article even if you’ve never read his books, check it out!

Blinding, by Mircea Cărtărescu

It will be hard to describe this book in words that do it justice, but I will try. In short, this is the most dazzlingly hallucinatory, horribly beautiful, stunning, weird, surreal, and searingly memorable book I’ve read in years. It has vaulted it’s way easily to land among my top ten, possibly top five favorite books ever.

Cărtărescu is a Romanian novelist, poet, short-story writer, and literary critic, who is currently a lecturing professor at the University of Bucharest. His prose and poetry have won or been nominated for dozens of awards, many international. Judging by this one book, they are very well deserved.

What’s Blinding about, then? That’s hard to say. It’s part memoir, part family history, part historical fiction, and part pure hallucinations and dreams. It ranges from Bucharest to New Orleans, from the 1800s to WW2 to present day, and across many subjects. Here’s just a smattering of the wild scenery: a group of Bulgarians crossing the frozen Danube river, beneath which they find giant frozen butterflies which they dig up and eat… an entire village getting high on milk of the poppy and hallucinating an undead army and demon attack… the narrator’s time in a hospital where he endures electric shock therapy for his paralyzed face… and so much more, endlessly more.

However, it’s not the subject matter that is so impressive, but how it is written. How everything is described in such a visceral, vivid way. For example, this description of silence:

A whistling silence vibrated the crystal chandelier in the stairway for over an hour. The nuns, seated together on a plush bench near the door, looked through the window at the back of the next house, loaded with purple clusters of Japanese lilac. It was a tense, mental silence. There were currents of silence freezing the air in the hallways, just like those sometimes emitted by the ocean, at a frequency of eight cycles per second, which irritate the hypothalamus unbearably and make entire crews of sailors hurl themselves into the sea, leaving their sponge-covered vessels drifting, sails mangled by the winds, prow and stern paced only by seagulls

Or this moment, a few pages later:

It took a few minutes for Fra Armando to notice how odd the southward rushing waters looked. The twilight-colored river had turned to blood. The Friar followed the dizzying rush of lenticular red cells, the size of loaves of bread, the amoeba-like gliding of the white cells, transparent enough to show their darkened nuclei, the snaking spiral worms that must have been malaria germs, the unusual fluorescence of lymph, the currents of glucose and protein. Fascinated and deathly tired, the Friar suddenly sensed that everything was alive, that everything lives, and that the universe does not at all operate like clockwork. Instead, it is a malleable architecture like the human body, a temple of skin, a basilica of scratches, a cenotaph of snot, with no right angles or durable materials, where the person creates his dreams, thoughts, and illusions, his time and his language like a cell secretes a hair or the crystal horn of a nail. And still, the least important cell in the universal body receives, through angel hormones and neural visions, the imperious commandments of God.

Or this snippet from an impossible journey down into the earth below New Orleans:

We descended further and further, careful not to crush the translucent newts in the puddles where we stepped, and not to snag our hair on the horrible blind cave spiders of the caverns. We passed through a hall shaped like a cistern, half full of green water, through a hall with walls completely covered in fur, through a hall like a freezer, of thin, white crystals, through a rectangular hall of tile, with broken urinals on one side and, on the other side, pipes with the vestiges of calcium-crusted faucets. The Albino would sometimes say something out loud, and every time he spoke in the dripping silence, his voice sounded so brutal and obscene that it stabbed our stomachs with a sour flood of adrenalin. His colorless skin, pale eyes, and cotton hair made him seem like one of those depigmented beings in the depths of the earth, of the same lineage as the wingless insects, the crustaceans fanning their tactile organs over wet stone, and the ragged, famished bats …

These are all taken from within the same dozen or so pages. And all 450 pages are like this–every page, non stop. I could have taken some beautiful, stunning nugget from almost any one page.

By the time I was 15% through, I already felt there were several moments that were so impactful I would have been happy if they were the climax of the whole book. After that, I lost count. The entire book is a continual climax.

If those quotes were at all intriguing to you, I strongly suggest you take a look at the sample on Amazon, and see if you are not immediately roped in like I was. Though the writing is dense, and full of new words, (I looked up dozens) even so, it reads like a thriller. Something about the sentence structure just drags you along, heart pounding, eyes racing across the words.

If you end up being a fan like me, you are in for a bit of frustration. Though the book, to me, was satisfying on its own, there are two more in the series which have not been translated into English. This one was published in ’96, and then translated into English in 2013. It’s been 9 years, and the second one was never translated (it has been into Spanish and French, but not English), meaning it likely won’t be any time soon. This probably is because the first one wasn’t enough of a success in the English speaking world to warrant doing the other two.

Maybe, if I can cause a surge in popularity of this book, some other publisher will pick up the second two… not likely, but it’s fun to hope!

Otherwise I’ll just have to keep working on my Spanish, and maybe in a few years I’ll be fluent enough to read the second two in the Spanish translation!

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

I believe that Helen Macdonald could be for the life sciences what Carl Sagan was for astronomy and cosmology. There is so much wonder, joy, curiosity, and passion packed into these essays, but also sorrow, nostalgia, and pain at the loss of so much life around us.

The subject matter varies widely, from many species of birds and trees, to boars, ants, deer, hares, fireflies and more. And each journey into the intricacies of nature is paired with personal moments or epiphanies from Macdonald’s own life.

Every essay moved me, or was memorable in some way. Several brought me close to tears. If you have even the slightest interest in nature or animals or insects, this book will magnify it by 100.

But it is also an upsetting read. As Macdonald herself says near the end of the book: “Increasingly, knowing your surroundings, recognising the species of plants and animals around you, means opening yourself to constant grief.” Be prepared, too, to have your awareness of the death of the natural world magnified, and to feel that impotent sadness hang heavy in your gut.

Just as Sagan brought up a generation fascinated with black holes, nebulae, and the workings of the deeps of space, Macdonald’s book inspires us to find fascination in our own backyards, the beauty in the world right before our eyes and ears and fingertips. A world that seems to be ever more quickly vanishing.

A sliver of silver

Last night I looked at the waxing crescent moon through 8x zoom binoculars. It was the first time I’ve ever looked at the moon through any kind of device.

The number of things I’ve never done is startling to me sometimes. I just turned 39, and have always been aware of the moon. That pearly gem hanging above my head often distracts me while driving, or walking. I’ll interrupt conversations to say ‘look, the moon!’

But somehow it never occured to me to look closer. The technology of binoculars and telescopes has been around for hundreds of years, and is becoming ever more common and affordable. But despite this it never entered my mind to try to look at the moon with anything but my own eyes.

I was given a pair of binoculars for my birthday, and have been looking at birds and treetops. The view has made these things so much more real to me. I notice birds everywhere now, and I had no idea pine trees were so laden with cones on their upper branches. And last night, I pointed my new lenses at the moon.

It’s amazing what a simple 8x zoom will show, even on that little slice of light that is the crescent moon. I could see clearly that the moon was a sphere in shadow, and I even saw different textures and shapes in that shadow. The edge of the sphere was aglow with brilliant white light, illuminating the grey, pockmarked surface. We all know what the moon looks like, but seeing with my own eyes was so much more potent.

I imagine being among the first people to look at the magnified moon–to realize that this was not just a light, but a place. To think, for the first time: we could go there…

Looking at the moon has made it solid, even though I already knew it was there–made it huge, even though I already knew its size.

I must do more looking at things.

The VVitch: Horror done right

A movie like this is something that happens only once or twice per decade. Ever so rarely, the stars align and a brilliant writer and a brilliant director, (in this case, the same man, Robert Eggers,) and a cast of brilliant actors all decide to work on, of all things, a horror movie.

But those are still not the only conditions for lightning to strike. All these talented people must be working on an unheard of title, one that is not part of a franchise, and not featuring any huge names, thus keeping creative control in the hands of the creatives, instead of investors obsessed with crowd-pleasing and money-making.

When these rare circumstances are met, a gem can be produced.

I think it’s a shame this was marketed as a horror movie. While it was chilling, and unnerving, and made me feel more scared than any movie in recent memory, it is not what people expect when you say ‘horror.’

Audiences have come to expect a jump-scare every five minutes, screaming, gore, a scary monster, and lots of deaths. ‘Horror’ movies are the kind people put on with a group of friends and watch while chatting and joking and smoking and drinking, only checking the TV with half their brain to see if something shocking or scary is happening. I know I’ve done this kind of movie-watching myself, and there are plenty of movies designed for that experience. The trailer for The VVitch seemed to promise just that kind of movie.

But to many people’s disappointment, and to my extreme enjoyment, The VVitch is a different kind of movie. It’s the kind meant to be watched with full attention, by yourself, or with a select one or two other quiet and focused people. The music and the scenery build an ambiance, the ambiance builds a tension, and the characters convince completely, and draw you in–but none of this is possible without the viewer’s full attention. If you are looking away, chatting with your friends, answering your phone, chasing your kids–then you might be left with the impression that not much happened.

It might sound like this is some kind of abstract art-movie. That is not the case. There is a clear, easy to understand plot. There are well defined, understandable characters with different desires and feelings–it’s very easy to get what’s happening. The only thing you might miss out on, if you aren’t paying attention, is the fear.

If you watch it like I did, alone, with headphones on, in the dark, you’ll be surprised that some people were not scared, or were even bored. Only 15 minutes into the movie, something so horrible happens that my mouth was hanging open, and I was thinking, “are they really doing this?” But looking back on it, almost nothing was shown. Everything was implied. And this is how fear works: if you can’t see something, your own mind fills in the gaps in the most terrifyingly creative ways. No film that actually shows it could ever match that fear.

And yet it seems that these memorable moments, though shocking to me, just flew right by other people. When I was googling to find out where the movie was filmed, (the forest was so striking I wondered where it was,) google suggested some search results, which are apparently very commonly searched questions: ‘what happened to the baby in The Witch,’ and ‘what happened at the end of The Witch.’ That these are such common searches left me confused and worried for the average person’s mind.

But when audiences have become so used to the average Hollywood movie, which explains what is happening at every moment, through constant dialogue where the characters say exactly what they are doing and why–maybe I should expect that people will be confused by a movie that shows instead of tells.

And so much effort and research is put into the showing, from the title itself, (the ‘VV’ is because ‘w’ was not in common usage at the time the story takes place,) to the costumes, to the dialogue (much of which was taken directly from letters written in that period.) Even the supernatural events were the result of study, and attention to detail.

But all this artistry is meaningless to someone who goes into the theater (ah, remember theaters?) expecting traditional horror. How many times have you been fooled by a trailer? It’s a frustrating feeling that is all too familiar for many people, and its root cause is the same problem that ruins or hides so much great artwork today: money.

In a perfect world the purpose of a movie trailer would be to let viewers know what kind of a movie it is, and give a little taste of it, so that anyone interested can go watch it. In reality, trailers are designed to get as many people into the theater on opening night as possible. They are designed to make the movie seem appealing to the biggest audience possible, regardless of if it has any reflection of the real content. It doesn’t matter if you like it, only if you buy a ticket, because profit is everything.

This kind of ‘mass appeal’ drivin attitude to trailer creation can often cause the people who would actually enjoy the movie to miss out. Based on the trailer alone I never would have bothered with The VVitch. I only watched it after hearing the opinions of some people whose taste I respect.

So, if you are like me and thought “great, another ‘violin ghost’ movie,” I would encourage you to give The VVitch a shot. It is not for the faint of heart, and it kept me up late the night I watched it. It is scary, but it is also many other ‘s’ words like skilled, sophisticated, smart, subtle, slow-burning and surreal.

Creating a Podcast

Have you ever read my posts and thought to yourself, “this is nice, but I wish I could listen to these read by an AI voice instead”?

Well, now you can!

I have created a new podcast where you can listen to my posts. There are very few up there so far, as I am just trying this out to see how it works.

So far, I am finding it surprisingly easy, and the voice only sounds odd in a few situations.

You are probably wondering why I wouldn’t just use my own voice, and the answer is: it would be a huge amount of work.

It would take hours to make the recording and get it just right, not to mention I don’t have a studio quality microphone or a soundproof room, and am not a professional narrator.

With text to speech the voice is automatically at the exact correct volume, with no breathing or swallowing sounds to cut out, no overly loud p’s or t’s, and no background noise to worry about. Perfect studio sound quality. I only need to spend perhaps an hour or less on each episode listening to make sure it sounds correct, and making any needed changes.

One funny change I had to make was to write ‘red’ instead of ‘read’ when I wanted it pronounced in the past tense. Also I had to add many commas in unnatural places to make the voice pause appropriately. Even after that, though, I still had to edit the file in Audacity to insert pauses.

And all that was still miles easier than trying to record myself reading it.

So far there are three episodes of varying lengths: 4 minutes, 8 minutes, and 18 minutes, and using different background music and a couple different voices to see which ones work best, and what lengths/voices people prefer.

If you would like to listen, you can try an episode here, and also linked in my blogroll:

I would appreciate any feedback. I will probably try converting some of my short fiction into audio episodes as well.

We’ll see what happens, and I hope you enjoy!

The Blind Owl, by Sadegh Hedayat

Certain stories really stick in my head and haunt/influence me for years. This could be one of them.

The story of how this book was translated, told in the preface to the book, was an interesting read in itself.

Apparently the story was banned in Iran for many years, and there were several censored and heavily edited versions circulating. The translator claims this translation as the definitive, and most close to the original from what we can tell.

One thing I found very interesting, and a bit worrying, was the decision of the translator of the previous version to change the text so much.

In the hand-written original version, Hedayat used dashes in place of a large portion of the punctuation. I would guess about 50% of the time, wherever a period, comma or semicolon could have been, there was a dash. The previous translator, apparently, decided to remove all the dashes and just replace them with whatever punctuation he thought should have been there…

To me, this seems just, absurd, and extremely arrogant. The dashes, as I read it, clearly seemed intentional. They added a chaotic feeling, and made the narrator seem erratic and unstable. It seems blindingly obvious to me that this was the author’s intent. And if the translator took such liberties with the punctuation, what else might he have changed?

Noori (the translator for the version I read) went on to describe his philosophy for translation, and why he prefers ‘foreignization’ over ‘domestication’ when translating.

Many translated works are ‘domesticated’ for the country where they will be sold. Phrases and terminology are chosen which will best match the words and ‘flow’ that the designated country is expecting.

This, I suppose, makes sense on a marketing level. It’s always in the interest of money-making to water things down as much as you can for mass appeal. But, it is still just so sad and strange to think about. Why would I, knowingly choosing to read a book written by an Iranian, why would I expect or want that book to read like it was written by an American?

Thankfully, Noori prefers what he called ‘foreignization’ when he translates. Foreignization is where, he says “an effort is made to preserve the source language and culture by use of language or techniques which may be unfamiliar to the reader” in this way, it is the reader who travels to a foreign land when reading the book, rather than having the book brought to them in a domesticated or assimilated form.

With all that out of the way, I was ready to read the actual book, which was only about 80 pages long. They were quite a potent 80 pages. I can understand why they caused such an uproar and why this is still being read 85 years later.

I can’t quite tell you what the story is about, other than the narrator is an opium addict and it is difficult to tell what parts of the story are real, hallucinated, or metaphor. It seems to be a love story, or maybe a story of obsession, or maybe one of guilt. Whatever it is, the overall impression it gave me was so striking and memorable, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it for weeks. It is already starting to bleed into my own writing.

There was so much unsettling, visceral weirdness packed into so few pages. I will likely need to read this again to understand it. Though, maybe it is not meant to be understood, and only to confuse and unnerve you with the constant repetition and seemingly building pattern. I got the impression I was trapped in a repeating-but not quite repeating-loop. A cycle that kept changing slightly whenever I thought I had it figured out, but not changing enough to break the pattern completely.

Give it a try if you want something dark, surreal, and beautiful.