Michael Lieberman's Blog: Mike Lieberman's take on reading and writing, page 4

Launch of THE LOBSTERMAN'S DAUGHTER

Thanks to all those who came to last night's launch and signing of THE LOBESTERMAN'S DAUGHTER. Tomorrow I sign books at the Praeclarus Breakfast Club (closed event). At the urging of out of town friends, I hope in the near future to put up a podcast or a video which captures my remarks about writing the book.

"The Holocaust at Home"

"The Holocaust at Home" is the memorable phrase that Marci Shore, writing in the June 5, 2014 NYRB, uses to capture the sense of an amazing new book about Jewish life in Ukraine (Jeffery Veidlinger: "In the shadow of the Shtetl, Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine." Indiana Univ. Press). Veidlinger and Dov-Ber Kerler interview contemporary Ukrainian Jews in Yiddish—they say that using Yiddish helped subjects to recall emotional details—about their current lives and how the Holocaust has shadowed them. What emerges, as Shore summaries, is a completely new focus on how the Holocaust felt to victim and survivor. The transport trains, gas chambers and crematoria — the Holocaust of record — are replaced by tales of children forced to jump to their deaths in freezing rivers, adults shot and pushed into trenches, and latter the luxuriant growth of weeds and scrub over burial mounds. This was a Holocaust conducted by locals, and later, after the war, survivors returned to their towns and had to live and work among the perpetrators.

A Poem for Memorial Day

"For the Union Dead" is Robert Lowell's tribute to Col. Robert Shaw and the black regiment he led. He and many of his men died near Charlestown, South Carolina in 1863.

FOR THE UNION DEAD
Robert Lowell (1917-1977)


The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles,
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steam shovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking lots luxuriate like civic
sand piles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin-colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse, shaking

over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

The monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its colonel is as lean
as a compass needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die—
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small-town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year—
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets,
and muse through their sideburns.

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
showed Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, "the Rock of Ages,"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessed break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez and THE LOBSTERMAN'S DAUGHTER

Next Wednesday (May 28th at 5:45 pm) when I talk about THE LOBSTERMAN'S DAUGHTER at the Jung Center and sign copies, I will discuss my debt to Gabriel García Márquez and Magical Realism. There is a hidden tribute to Gabo in TLD that I didn't appreciate until I put up yesterday's post. Ah, the unconscious.

Salman Rushdie's appreciation of Gabriel García Márquez

The tribute in the New York Times Book Review of April 21 called Gabo one of the great writers of the twentieth century and defended him against a wave of Latin American critics (e.g., Roberto Bolaño and Juan Gabriel Vásquez). People have focused on the "magical" in magical realism and forgotten the "realism," that the technique is not a form of fantasy or escape but a way to vivify reality. Gabo was grounded in the everyday as few writers are: he earned his living for many years as a reporter (I have mentioned NOTAS DE PRENSA in another column). And his postings from the battleground of the human heart in ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE or LOVE IN A TIME OF CHOLERA are as detailed and accurate as his columns about the streets of Bogota. Quoting Ian McEwan, Rushdie says that no writer since Dickens has been so widely read and loved. And rightly so.

Goodreads giveaway of THE LOBSTERMAN'S DAUGHTER

Thanks to all of you who helped make my Goodreads giveaway of THE LOBSTERMAN'S DAUGHTER a real success. On my way to the post office to send books to the winners. I'm grateful for your support.

A book I loved: Brian Kenneth Swain's SISTINA

Over this last weekend I read an advance copy of Brian Kenneth Swain's new novel and loved it. It will be out in the late summer/early fall. DON'T MISS IT; it's a terrific read. In a few words the book is an ecclesiastical thriller set in the Italy of Michelangelo and the present. I hesitate to tell you much more (I hate spoilers) except that the novel is well-imagined, well-plotted, and well-paced. I especially appreciated the well-paced aspect of the novel. There's plenty of intrigue, but the novel is spacious and we learn a lot about painting frescoS, the inner world of the Vatican, and daily life in monasteries—and also about power, ambition, and faith. A full review will follow as we approach publication.

LOUIS MENAND ON JOHN UPDIKE (New Yorker April 28, 2014)

Like so many New Yorker book reviews, Menand's review of Adam Begley's UPDIKE (Harper) is more an essay on the subject than an actual review of the book — which is a good thing since Menand is a deeply thoughtful, engaging writer. (His 2002 THE METAPHYSICAL SOCIETY: A STORY OF IDEAS IN AMERICA is a daunting analysis of late nineteenth and early twentieth century thought which won the Pulitzer Prize in History.) Full disclosure: as a slow reader, I am unlikely plough through 756 pages on John Updike.

Updike's four Rabbit novels (which I have read) capture the sweep of middle class / upper middle class protestant American life in the twentieth century, and it is for these he will be remembered. According to Menard, he remained grounded in his boyhood life in Shillington, PA, and in spite of a Harvard education (summa cum laude), a year at Oxford studying art, and an experience in New York as a New Yorker staff writer he never felt comfortable with the persona of writer / intellectual. He preferred to live the suburban life of golf, dinner parties, and adultery, which are the stuff of much of his fiction. Updike had trouble writing about what he did not experience or see — a problem, which has led people to (mistakenly) identify him with his characters and ultimately limited his range. Besides novels he wrote poems, short stories, essays, and criticism — and, in the wry quip of David Foster Wallace, published every thought he ever had.

Andrés Neuman: TAKING TO OURSELVES

I just bought this short novel by the youngish Spanish-Argentinean writer whose star in the English speaking world is in ascendency. By rough count he has published five novels, six collections of poetry, and four collections of short stories—all in Spanish. TALKING TO OURSELVES has recently been released in English; his only other book in English is TRAVELER OF THE CENTURY. TTO was highly praised in the NYT Book Review, and he was "discovered" by Roberto Bolaño, himself a wunderkind (who died much too early). It looks like a great read, if only I could find the time.

Movie Review: UNDER THE SKIN, based on Michel Faber's book of the same title

Bottom line: You're gunna luv it if you are a Jungian and interested in myth and the unconscious. If not, stay home unless you want to swallow the described plotline and see a creepy film.

Scarlett Johansson stars in Jonathan Glazer's adaptation of the book. It is a luxuriously slow moving film filled with anima figures, Sirens luring men to their deaths, Circe figures, the dark oceanic depths of the unconscious, and even a wounded Eurydice struggling and failing to emerge—and whatever else you choose to project onto the darkly appealing apparition of the Johansson character, half dominatrix and half victim, a femme fatale from the dead. Set in Scotland, the noir landscapes and seascapes are worth the price of admission. This is not the standard summary of the movie, but I'm just sayin'.