Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "proust"

Piperno’s The Worst Intentions (Europa Editions, 2007) has been compared, with some justification, to Ph. Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. In fact, Piperno’s novel is better. As a big reader of Proust (I had read all the volumes of A la Recherche… by the time I was 22, and wrote my BA thesis on it) I can say that this is the closest equivalent to Proust’s masterpiece. I usually don’t like such comparisons because they are rarely founded, and even when they are, they indicate that the author of the “equivalent” is no more than a talented epigone. But what makes the comparison to Proust justified in this case is not only the fact that Piperno has deeply absorbed the work of his predecessor—a French scholar, he is the author of a work of literary criticism, Proust Anti-Jew—but also the fact that his novel is extremely contemporary. It is an updated version of Proust in the sense that it gives us a remarkable portrayal of Italian “high” society from the fifties until 2001. The snobbery of this society, while reminiscent of the old-fashion mannerisms of Mme Verdurin’s and Mme de Guermantes’s inner circles, is at the same time very contemporary. Piperno’s snobs are universal because any high-school student who wishes to be “popular” can recognize himself/herself in them; and yet, they are so…Italian. Never before have I read a novel whose protagonists are so concerned with appearance, especially fashion.

Another Proustian element of the novel is the construction of desire (with its corollary, jealousy and/or envy). Daniel, the half-Jewish narrator—who later becomes the author of a successful book with a provocative view on the Jews—is hopelessly in love with the most beautiful, the richest and most popular girl in his school, Gaia. Gaia is a cross between Nabokov’s Lolita and Proust’s Odette—inaccessible (though, as in Proust, it turns out that she is inaccessible only for the narrator, and quite accessible for the others), very desirable and very shallow (the narrator compares her to Britney Spears).

What I find amazing about The Worst Intentions, a novel written in long, complicated, Proustian sentences (translated with sophistication by Ann Goldstein), is that it was a best-seller in Italy.

Mihail Sebastian (1907-1945) was one of the interwar European writers who were deeply influenced by Marcel Proust, in particular by the jealous ruminations of his protagonists, and the idea that we can never know the truth about another person, which was expressed by portraying a given character through various points of view that created a fluid and elusive “truth.”

The Accident has as a backdrop Bucharest’s (Romania’s capital) cosmopolitan life in the 1930s, when artists, lawyers, businessmen and bohemians rub elbows in bars until two am, go to the same receptions and parties, and spend their winter vacation at Predeal and other ski resorts in the area.

The main character, a dejected, melancholy young lawyer, suffering of some kind of mal de vivre, is trying to heal from a painful relationship. Like Proust’s objects of desire, the woman he is obsessed with is a mysterious puzzle made of many sides shown to the reader alternately, without nonetheless revealing her “secret.” The protagonist is offered a chance to free himself when he meets literally by accident (that is, as the result of an accident) another woman who will teach him how to ski.

The novel’s best pages are the descriptions of the mountains in winter, and the exhilarating sensation one experiences while skiing. A captivating novel and a good translation.

War and War by László Krasznahorkai (Trans. from the Hungarian by George Szirtes. New Directions, 2006)

László Krasznahorkai is not an easy author. I am saying this as a lover of Proust (with whom LK has in common those long, twisted sentences) and of Sebald (with whom he shares a gloomy mood and the ability to write fiction by creating a reality-effect via, for example, photos of real objects; incidentally, Sebald was one of the first writers to recognize LK’s genius). But what Krasznahorkai doesn’t have in common with Proust is the latter’s “soft” side, his ruminations on the human heart, and his repetitive love triangles in which are rooted most of the dramatic conflicts in In Search of Lost Time. In fact, in LK’s world there are few women, which may be one of the reasons I find him not always very pleasant to read. But when he does portray women, the portraits are compelling, and perhaps not accidentally one of the most engaging—for me, at least—parts in War and War is the part in which the protagonist falls under the spell of a gorgeous stewardess.

I always believed that to present a novel trough its plot means not only to impoverish it, but to misrepresent it, and this is all the more true for War and War. But, for those interested, here is an attempt: Korin, who works in a records office in Budapest, and who has a PhD in history, finds a manuscript that is so beautifully written and strangely unintelligible that he decides to abandon his entire life, burn all his personal documents, save for his passport, and leave for “the center of the world,” New York. Initially, it is not clear what the relationship between this extraordinary document whose events take place several centuries ago in Italy, and contemporary New York is, and why Korin chooses New York as the location from where he launches the document into eternity via the Internet (when he could do that from anywhere in the world) and where he eventually commits suicide, but, toward the end it appears that the relationship is symbolic, New York being the center of a world system whose beginnings are sketched in the manuscript.

The inadequacy of framing the discussion about a serious piece of literature through a “plot description” is obvious here because the novel is not so much about what happens to Korin as it is about the manuscript. The manuscript tells the story of four friends who travel to Venice—which is described as the city of peace, that is, as a combination of beauty and intelligence—then to Genoa, the city whose genius consists in having invented “the exchanges and credits, the banknotes and the interest, in a word, the borsa generale,” that is, the very foundation of the world we still live in, in which we are no longer dependent “on an external reality, but on intellect alone.” In other words, the invention of the credit and the banking system (which has led to Wall Street) has “spiritualized” the world in the sense that it has made it more abstract. (LK’s reflection on this process of abstraction is concerned only with the notion of money, but it would have been even more interesting to read his thoughts on cyberspace).

The main idea of the novel—which is not spelled as such, but transpires in the very first scene when Korin is attacked by a mob of young thieves who want his money—is: money equals war/violence. As a reflection on war and peace, LK’s title is a deliberate rewriting of Tolstoy’s famous title. Peace is the greatest invention of humankind, says Krasznahorkai. If Venice is the city of peace, Genoa, the city of money, is the city of war. If, in Tolstoy’s world, humanity lived between war and peace, in Krasznahorkai’s world (the world of the new “spiritualized” order) we are caught between war and war—hence, no possibility of hope; hence, the protagonist’s suicide.

But the most powerful aspect of LK’s novel is the unfolding of his enormous sentences, an unfolding best described by the author himself when he comments on the manuscript’s style: “all part of a single monstrous, infernal, all-absorbing sentence that hits you…unreadable…insane…[and yet] extraordinarily beautiful…” Once again, we have to thank George Szirtes for rendering into English this extraordinary beauty.
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...