I didn't see eye to eye with this at all. In fact I'm having as much trouble reviewing it as I did reading it. First problem was the dense overwroughtI didn't see eye to eye with this at all. In fact I'm having as much trouble reviewing it as I did reading it. First problem was the dense overwrought prose and its constant striving for profundity. Second problem, the leaden dialogue. Third problem, the relentless preponderance of telling over showing. Fourth problem, the scant half-baked female characters, fifth problem, the author relentlessly and self-indulgently showing off esoteric knowledge.
A marriage between a black American woman and a German Jew who has escaped the Nazis and their three mixed race children is a premise loaded with dramatic tension. Yet this is a novel almost entirely bereft of dramatic tension. The novel begins with Powers telling us over and over how talented his hero is and how wonderful is his family. The family scenes especially are sticky with cloying sweeteners. I soon got sick of Powers showing me how much he knows about music and singing. After a while it got as boring as anyone pedantically showing off knowledge of one subject. Often novels are praised for how breezily they wear their research; the opposite is true of this. Just when you think he's got the singing over and done with everyone bursts into song yet again like we're at some kind of feelgood West End musical and we get another four pages of hyperbole prose. Another problem was the German Jewish father who might have been funny as a caricature of the mad scientist if there was such a thing as comedy in this novel. If as a German Jew who has lost his entire family in the Holocaust he wasn't sufficiently charged with 20th century gravitas he's also working on the atomic bomb. However, his Jewishness plays no part in the novel; none of his children seem the faintest bit interested in this part of their heritage and his presence begins to have the same effect as the prose - the constant overreaching for profundity. His main contribution is to give the novel it's structure - the best feature of the book. At one point he squabbles with and falls out with his father-in-law over who has had it worse, the European Jews or black Americans. That was like someone with lung cancer arguing with someone with bowel cancer over which is the worse fate.
So while Luther King is inspiring a nation and black American culture is making enormous headway in establishing its identity our two brothers have taken up residence in the white man's ivory castle of classical music. Powers tries to offset this by making the sister a black panther but she, potentially the most interesting character, remains a shadowy figure throughout the novel, a device rather than a living character. Powers layers in countless obscure musical and physics ideas as motifs but for me it all came across as emperor's new clothes elaboration. Does anyone, I wonder, really understand what he's getting at half the time with all the stuff about harmonics and wavelengths? You could say it's a very intellectual novel which is rarely clever. It's also a very masculine novel. The female characters arouse little empathy. The last 100 pages were better when it gets more real, focusing on the sister's attempts to start an inner city school but ultimately a single Marvin Gaye song says more to me about race than this entire novel. ...more
If you garnered your notion of the USA solely from literature you'd probably end up thinking anti-establishment terrorism was a widespread phenomenon.If you garnered your notion of the USA solely from literature you'd probably end up thinking anti-establishment terrorism was a widespread phenomenon. You might even feel Edgar Hoover wasn't such a nutjob as he appears. The other novel I'm currently reading City on Fire takes up this theme as have countless others I've read - books by DeLillo, Roth, Pynchon, Letham, Franzen spring immediately to mind. In fact, there are probably more novels on this theme than deal with the infinitely more influential and important civil rights movement. Perhaps because most American writers are white. Anyway, this is just an observation.
Eat the Document introduces us to two young lovers who are sick and tired of the Vietnam war and the ineffectual protests. They decide to take meaningful action by planting bombs in the homes of the various chairmen of culpable corporations. There are four narrative threads. The Mary thread provides the novel with its narrative drive and is the most successful. After the bombings Mary and Bobby have to separate and change identity. The Mary thread is a compelling dramatization of a woman forced to change her identity and live on the fringes of conventional society. The Henry thread, there to provide an outlet for a more obscure philosophising on the theme, for me was the least successful, but it doesn't occupy much space so can easily be forgiven. Then there's the Jason thread which takes the form of the journal of an alienated teenager most of whose rebellion is expressed in the form of a wilfully obscure music taste. (The role popular music plays in revolt is a constant and edifying theme). Finally, there's the Nash thread. The link between Mary, Jason and Nash will be cleverly kept a mystery until late in the novel.
Lots to love and admire about this novel. She's been compared to DeLillo and though her writing falls well short of his inspired prose there are similarities, most notably in its depictions of the extreme forms feelings of alienation can precipitate....more
This is a very nudge nudge wink wink kind of book. Very self-consciously clever and a little bit pleased with itself. It reminded me at times of someoThis is a very nudge nudge wink wink kind of book. Very self-consciously clever and a little bit pleased with itself. It reminded me at times of someone who goes on the dancefloor to send up the whole concept of dancing, someone playing up to an audience of fellow scoffers. How amusing you find this depends largely on your mood. Dancing can look like a ridiculous pastime; on the other hand it can also exalt the human form to its quintessence. As can, in my view, traditional storytelling that deploys no experimental devices. And this is where the subjective comes into play. Though The Waves is probably my favourite novel of all time I'm not a great fan of experimental fiction. I'm very happy not everyone tried to write like Woolf. I enjoy my conventional novels as long as they're well written and make me experience to the full a new world.
Collections of short stories are harder to rate than novels. With every new story you go back to the drawing board. I didn't warm to the last story in this collection and it made me forget how much I did enjoy a couple of the others.
A recurring theme of the stories is the unloved woman, the woman who feels she deserves better (but, in Williams' case, who can laugh at herself). We've got plenty of historical precedents of women ill-treated by men or fate (not all of whom can laugh at themselves, it's true) - Dorothea in Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, Tess, Lily Briscoe, The Daughters of the Late Colonel, Eva Trout and Bridget Jones spring immediately to my mind. In other words it's a topic that has received a lot of airtime. I wasn't convinced Williams added anything new to the argument.
However, if you enjoy language punning and smiling at the absurdity of human relations you'll probably love these stories…...more
I was enjoying this until I realised the author was writing a different novel to the one I wanted to read, was following characters I wasn't interesteI was enjoying this until I realised the author was writing a different novel to the one I wanted to read, was following characters I wasn't interested in. There were clues early on that this was going to go off the rails when an overwrought narrator kept interrupting the wartime narrative to speak in the first person. However, these interludes were short so it was easy to ignore them and hope for the best. What interested me initially was she focused on two characters who were potentially dangerous to the Jewish family at the heart of this novel. Almost always in Holocaust novels the author concentrates on the good guys and makes little effort to depict the bad guys with any insight. They're just plain evil as if that's all we need to know. For a long stretch of this novel I thought the author was going to give us the bad guys. Marta is the housekeeper of a wealthy Jewish family in the Sudetenland. She's having an affair with the pernicious foreman of her employer's fabric factory. She's not a bad person but she's resentful, uneducated, emotionally unstable, easily influenced and clearly dangerous to the wellbeing of the Jewish family that employs her. Most of the considerable tension of the early part of the novel is provided by the volatile whims of these two characters. We're dealing with the banality of evil.
Then at a certain point a lot of melodramatic domestic stuff happens - the mother, who now takes over from Marta as the villain of the piece and is incoherent throughout the book, sleeps with a Nazi and Marta sleeps with her ward's father. The novel's focus undergoes a sea change. This becomes still more evident when the narrative abandons the family and instead follows the young son on his journey to England as part of the kindertransport programme. Here I utterly lost interest. The tone became sentimental, the artistry clumsy. There then follows a long section in the first person that reveals the entire wartime narrative is artifice. I'm afraid I didn't find this clever. I found it annoying. A very cheap trick. The novel became mainstream cinema - no matter how much bad stuff happens the end will make you feel a bit better about everything.
There's a scene early on in this book where a group of youths beat a Jewish tailor to death and I wondered why authors never try to get inside the heads of these characters. It's easy to imagine the good guys. Far more challenging would be to investigate the bad guys. The bad guy in this novel simply disappears when the plot no longer needs him. He's nothing but a convenient plot device to add tension....more
This novel about the experiences of an Irish private during WW1 didn’t really engage me until about the half way point when it did massively improve.This novel about the experiences of an Irish private during WW1 didn’t really engage me until about the half way point when it did massively improve. Firstly, I felt the author bluffed his way a bit through WW1 – sacrificing detail to abstractions, which meant I never quite felt myself in the boots of a private on a WW1 battlefield. And the grandiose biblical (Hemingwayesque) prose style dwarfed the characters for me, turned them into puppets which maybe was clever as what else were all those young men who lost their lives in that daft war? Like Days without End the characters were for me the weakest part of the novel. Again, Barry chooses as his focus a good-natured blank canvas of a character, Willie; again, he tends to idealise and sentimentalise relationships. That said, in the second part of the novel, I did begin to warm to Willie’s relationships with his male mentors – his father, his commanding officer, his Sergeant Major and Father Buckley, the chaplain. He also has a sweetheart who inflicts on him a kind of Old Testament punishment for a misdemeanor which shows brilliantly the gulf between her domestic reality and his nightmare frontline reality. As a backdrop, the novel also dramatises the Irish rising for Home Rule. This was nicely done. However, I’m not sure it really added anything to my understanding of WW1 or the Irish problem. Essentially, it’s a story about one young man’s loyalties and loves with a thunderous historical backdrop – rather like Days Without End in other words.
I enjoyed it, but I don’t think it’ll live long in my memory. ...more
Fabulous storytelling and narrative voice. The excitement of this novel told in feverish lyrical prose is unrelenting. We get an intimate first-hand aFabulous storytelling and narrative voice. The excitement of this novel told in feverish lyrical prose is unrelenting. We get an intimate first-hand account of the plains wars with the Sioux, the civil war and the lawlessness of the settler towns in the wild west. There’s barely a page in this novel where you’re not fearing for the lives of the novel’s three central characters who form a misfit family – two male lovers and their adopted Indian child. The surface of this novel is dazzling.
Beneath the surface it wasn’t perhaps quite so successful. There’s so much action in this novel that the characters barely have time to talk to each other which means we don’t get to know them very well. And the narrator doesn’t do nuance where his friends are concerned. He’s unremittingly generous. Therefore, we learn little about his companions except that they are flawless human beings, deserving of our full sympathy. In this respect I couldn’t help comparing it a little unfavorably with Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang – another novel narrated lyrically by a semi-educated outcast with lots of exciting plot but also with some great character development – something this novel does lack. For example, the Sioux girl the two men adopt has little more personality than a domestic pet. She adapts to her new life like a domestic pet as well, as if she has no long-term memory. She’s there to make us feel more protective of the characters and though this works as a device one never really sees her or believes much in her. The depiction of the Sioux in general was rather lazy, expedient and erroneously cliched. Barry invents a chief who behaves how the plot needs him to behave. (I’ve read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and watched the excellent TV series Into the West and as far as I recall the real chief at that time would have been Red Cloud who was a lot more savvy and honorable than Barry’s rather slapstick Caught-His-Horse-First.
However, these are small gripes as Days Without End is a riveting read from start to finish. For those who’ve already read and loved this I’d recommend True History of the Kelly Gang. ...more
The Weight of Ink clones AS Byatt's Possession. Academics on the trail of a hidden narrative footprinted in a slow reveal of discovered manuscripts. FThe Weight of Ink clones AS Byatt's Possession. Academics on the trail of a hidden narrative footprinted in a slow reveal of discovered manuscripts. Firstly, I ought to point out I wasn't a massive fan of Possession. I enjoyed its mischievous elaboration of standard romance fiction but found most of the characters flimsy. This too in many ways is standard romance fiction within an ambitious framework but with less, if any, mischief.
It begins with our two academics, Helen, a sour ageing spinster and Aaron an obnoxious self-regarding playboy. Needless to say, they don't get on. However, it's perhaps too telegraphed from the beginning that this conflict will resolve itself in a crowd-pleasing fashion. Possibly the part of the novel I most enjoyed was an extended flashback to Helen's youth when, despite not being Jewish, she volunteers to participate on a kibbutz in Israel where she falls in love.
A bigger problem for me was the subject of their investigation, Ester. Ester is the scribe of a rabbi blinded by the Inquisition in Spain. She arrives in London after her mother and father die in a fire at their house in Amsterdam. After a while we become privy to Ester's thoughts. She's not buying the conventional notion of God as exalted mail order service, but I suspect most maids and washerwomen thought along similar lines in the privacy of their own minds. We're talking about a period in history when Christianity was as zealous and unforgiving in its doctrine as the Gestapo. To think few committed heresies in the privacy of their own mind is like believing every single German in the 1940s believed the Jews should be exterminated. Ester as pioneering philosopher and feminist just didn't hack it for me. A novel which succeeded much better on this theme is Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of all Things because Gilbert convinced me her heroine did have an extraordinary mind. I didn't buy Esta's extraordinary mind. There's a sense towards the end that neither did the author and so shoehorns in a new lead to potentially give her far more historical importance. I was more intrigued by her wild mother and amorous grandmother who are both given short shrift. (There's the ghost of another novel prowling through this novel which the author chose not to write but which I suspect may have been the better option). Philosophy during the heyday of Christianity not alchemised through art was hardly the most creative medium for a busy mind and it's hard to get excited by any of Ester's ideas. I couldn't help feeling a more compelling subject for her once she had taken exception to the conventional Jewish notion of God would be to question the nature of Jewish identity bereaved of its religious structure, especially since as a Jew she and those close to her are continually persecuted. Instead, she's arrowed into hair-splitting theological technicalities which are hard to get excited about. In short, she seemed to me too much a construct with not enough identifiable humanity to her.
There's a lot of very good writing in this book but sometimes I found the author guilty of insecurely overstraining for profundity. It was also a little too safe and formulaic for me. I didn't hate it but neither did I love it....more
Anne Michaels’ poems confirm what her novels imply – that she is a diehard romantic. For her everything comes down to love. All her best lines are aboAnne Michaels’ poems confirm what her novels imply – that she is a diehard romantic. For her everything comes down to love. All her best lines are about love. Her characters find identity in love. I’m no authority on poetry so I’ll just say I enjoyed most of these poems a lot....more
This is literary fiction with big black bold capitals. Sometimes literary fiction can be defined as telling a story through oblique methods, filteringThis is literary fiction with big black bold capitals. Sometimes literary fiction can be defined as telling a story through oblique methods, filtering it through more than one prism. Done well this can be an ingenious device that opens up multiple levels of the story, a way of making the present answer to the past, one narrator finding clarity in relation to another. Not done so well and it can come across as pretentious obfuscation, sterile auditing or simple hubris, like a pole vaulter choosing to open his competition at a height he has never in his life jumped. For me this novel was a slightly uneasy balancing act at times – straining just a bit too hard to be unerringly profound, sagging at times under the weight of its relentless clutter of forced symbolism.
At the heart of this novel is a fabulous story with compelling characters and big important themes. It’s conventionally written and it’s supremely powerful as narrative. We are given a piece of Canadian history. The Woodman family found a timber and ship-building empire on an island where Lake Ontario meets the St. Lawrence River. This involves cutting down all the island’s trees and changing the topography of the landscape. The pursuit of material riches by successive members of this family will do catastrophic damage to the ecology of the island. The author peoples a microcosm of manmade environmental damage with tremendously engaging characters and conflicts. But the author gives this story another existence. How it reaches us in the modern day. And all the problems for me were with the modern day characters, all of whom seemed like constructs rather than living plausible people.
The novel begins when an artist on a retreat discovers the body of a man frozen in ice. Anthony Woodman, it turns out, had Alzheimer’s and returned home. He was a landscape geographer; the artist who finds him is a photographer who imaginatively reconstructs how landscape might once have looked. Anthony’s lover, Sylvia gets in touch with the artist after reading about the body preserved in ice in the newspaper. She’s essentially an unhappy housewife but to make her more interesting, more profound, she’s given an unnamed mental health condition – a kind of combination of OCD and agoraphobia (her real problem, if you ask me, is she doesn’t have a sense of humour). She builds texture maps for a friend who is blind. Basically we now have three people engaged in an almost identical (and wholly obscure) occupation, the first sign of how overcharged this novel will be of symbolical synchronicity. Less really is often more. The multi-layering of the same motif can be a form of insecurity rather than a sign of unanimity of purpose. Often there was a lack of subtlety in the design of this novel as if the author was continually seduced by images she couldn’t bear not to insert even though they duplicated other images. I could never fathom out how these texture maps worked or why there was a blind character in this novel, except that we equate blindness with spiritual profundity and spiritual profundity seemed the author’s default setting in this novel. (It’s likely Anthony Doerr got some of his ideas for All the Light from this book – blindness, the models, agoraphobia, except he uses them for purposes of dramatic tension and not as somewhat hollow emblems of spiritual complexity). When Sylvia goes to see Jerome, the artist, we learn about her affair with the dead man. Another problem I had was that the author never acknowledges her depiction of romantic love is essentially adolescent. Sylvia’s pious descriptions of her exalted relationship with Andrew is merely the experience all of us have when in love. I needed a bit more irony here. She’s describing what’s essentially a commonplace experience but as if she’s been singled out for some rare and historic achievement. At this point I was asking myself why does this novel need Sylvia? Or if it does why not simply portray her as an unhappy housewife who finds salvation through love – why does she have to have this affliction that sets her apart as otherworldly? At this point this novel really needed to be brought down to earth for me. Her husband, the only down to earth character in the modern part of the novel, is merely sketched in as a pantomime villain. For one thing the presence of Sylvia determines that the story at the heart of this novel reaches us through notebooks, a hackneyed device. Broadly speaking, the novel is about our vain attempts to preserve the past. The presence of the notebooks contradicts this premise.
Anyway, we then get by far the best part of this novel – the account of the Woodman family. The narrative here takes the form of a conventional historical novel (it resembles in form no notebook I’ve ever seen so the notebook motif seems gratuitous). In this part of the narrative we get the sprightly humour and mischief that was missing in the over-earnest overcharged modern part of the novel. We get characters we can identify with who are likeable and, more importantly, plausible unlike the thematic constructs which serve as characters of the modern part.
Finally, I realise this is a harsh review because there was much more to like than dislike about this novel and I’m going to read another of her novels. It would be easy to imagine her in a creative writing class with Michael Ondaatje as her teacher but ignoring his advice not to get led astray by arresting images or clutter her narrative with symbolical signposts....more
I’ve read all three of Nicole Krauss’ previous novels and one thing they all have in common is the writer is well concealed behind all the formal artiI’ve read all three of Nicole Krauss’ previous novels and one thing they all have in common is the writer is well concealed behind all the formal artistry. In this new novel of hers there’s a character called Nicole speaking in the first person with an intelligence at the height of its powers. So the first exciting thing about this was the feeling of intimacy with which Krauss seems to speak her mind.
There are two narratives here. The writer Nicole is struggling to write a new novel and is about to split with her husband; the parallel narrative, also about a lost character who runs away to Israel, is perhaps the story the writer is struggling to bring into existence, though they never once obviously connect at any point. Both characters are undergoing break downs; both struggling with the form their lives have taken. Both trying to reconnect with a purer self within. Form itself is one of the themes of this novel. As is the idea of the double lives we all live. In this sense the Nicole of the narrative is both Nicole Krauss and not Nicole Krauss. Kafka too will get to lead a double life in this novel. Krauss in this book focuses on the unlived double life we all sense we’ve forgone for one reason or another.
Both Epstein and Nicole meet mysterious strangers who lead them into what might almost be called alternate realities. Nicole is told an extraordinary story about Kafka. That he staged his death in 1924 and lived out a kind of afterlife in Israel. Eventually she will be in possession of a suitcase of his lost papers. Epstein is told he is a descendent of King David. Both narratives build to fabulous denouements. I especially enjoyed Nicole’s epiphany. There were shades of Fellini’s brilliant 8 ½ in the Nicole narrative, the quest to find a new form of inspiration in the annals of memory. And there was some fabulous absurd humour in the Epstein narrative. It’s not difficult to follow the various threads of this novel; but it’s hard to work out what Krauss intended to convey as a whole. The big picture, how the two narratives related to each other, left me scratching my head. Both narratives could probably stand alone as novellas without losing much, if any, significance. I didn’t feel one was feeding the other with vitality or a reciprocal deeper understanding. At times it felt like she was sloughing all the artifice involved in writing a novel, opening a window directly onto the mind’s struggle to compose narrative – perhaps exemplified by the sense that the coalescing of two disparate narratives felt forced and flimsy. It’s perhaps an act of mischief on Krauss’ part that she structures the novel as if in subordination to convention’s laws of order which both Nicole and Epstein are eager to escape from but that this structure seems more like a smoking mirror than robust intricate engineering.
In a nutshell, it starts really well, shows some signs of huff and puff towards the middle and winds up brilliantly. It feels like a laboured novel rather than an inspired one. Perhaps cathartic in that she is breaking with her reputation, moving onto new ground, which I found exciting. Don’t expect another History of Love. There’s no whimsy, no attempt to charm the pants off the reader in this novel. It still fascinates me who most influenced who in her marriage with Jonathan Safran Foer – the similarity in tone and subject of History of Love and Extremely Loud is too uncanny to be coincidence. I have a hunch he influenced her more except she bettered him at his own game (which must have been galling!) Personally I’ve always found more depth in Nicole’s books. And this was the case again in their post-divorce books. Forest Dark for me is more poetic and honest and courageous than Here I Am....more
Whatever happened to editors? I once read a biography of Max Perkins, editor to Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, among others. The deal back thWhatever happened to editors? I once read a biography of Max Perkins, editor to Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, among others. The deal back then seemed to be that a manuscript arriving at the offices was 70% done. Perkins then gave his 10% and the final 20% was a collaboration of author and editor. Nowadays it often seems editors do little more than hunt out typos. If Foer had had a Max Perkins – essentially to curb his excesses, something Perkins did very well with Tom Wolfe – this could have been a truly fabulous book. Instead I found it a novel of dazzling vignettes but flawed sustained artistry. Essentially there are two storylines going on here – the breakup of a marriage and the call of the motherland in crisis. So we get a personal identity crisis and a religious/national identity crisis. I was never convinced these two narratives organically coalesced. The fictitious war in the Middle East and subsequent investigations into religious/national identity always felt like a separate block of marble. It’s called upon to give more breadth to all the deft litigation of the microcosmic family world of the first part of the book but for me felt stuck on with adhesive tape. The fictitious war can easily be seen as a somewhat forced attempt to give largesse to what’s essentially a family melodrama.
It was difficult not to read this novel in part as a dramatization of the end of his marriage with Nicole Krauss. And as such I’d say Foer has grown up quite a lot. Jacob is a television screenwriter, a sort of Hamlet without the poetry, mired in mediocrity and ennui; Julia, his wife, is an architect who has never built any of her designs. “Dad can be such a pussy,” says Sam, the oldest son. “But Mum can be such a dick.” The children are virtually always wiser (and funnier) than the adults in this novel. Foer has always been good at doing children and the children here are the stars of the show. The problem I had with him before was that the worlds he created for his children were themselves a bit childish, sentimentalised, favouring charm over depth. Jacob, the lead male character, shares many characteristics of Foer the novelist, not least of all a tendency to shirk or ironicise deep feeling. At one point in the novel Jacob accuses himself of “turning half his marriage into stupid puns and ironic observations”. That, for me, is a pretty good critique of Foer’s first two novels – brilliant in part but always marred by a juvenile stand-up comedian within who can’t shut up. This novel though provides the children with a very grown up world without much sentimentality.
The first half of this novel is given over to the breakup of the marriage, the aftermath of the moment you realise that you love your children more than you love your spouse, and provides a wealth of brilliant insights into the mounting resentment of an estranged couple, the fall into self-righteous pettiness which often heralds a period in which the children become wiser than the adults. The children are wiser and far more worthy of respect than the adults throughout this novel. The first two hundred pages are fabulous – Foer’s best achievement to date. Then the war arrives. It arrives awkwardly. At first appearing more like something happening in Other Life, the virtual world where the oldest son spends much of his time. The question it throws up isn’t very interesting to me. E.M Forster answered it in one sentence. Granted there are added nuances asking an American Jew to sacrifice his home life to help prevent the annihilation of the state of Israel. But it’s still one of those worst case scenario what if questions, like Sophie’s choice. Extreme case scenarios rarely lead to interesting debates.
The war and the ultimatum it provokes seems like the wish fulfilment of Jacob’s father’s fantasy world. He’s a right wing blogger who belligerently identifies himself first and foremost as Jewish. He would disagree with Forster. He’s also the weakest character in the novel, the closest to caricature, and so when he takes over the novel’s central discourse you fear the worst.
The last fifty pages are devoted to Jacob, the second weakest character in the novel, and felt very sketchy. When the children left the novel, the novel slowly fizzled out. 3.5 stars....more
I was excited about this to begin with but it soon began to feel like a vehicle without an engine that Auster was pushing ever uphill.
If we live onlyI was excited about this to begin with but it soon began to feel like a vehicle without an engine that Auster was pushing ever uphill.
If we live only a small part of our inner life externally, what happens to the rest? Unfortunately Auster doesn’t address this intriguing question in any kind of stimulating way though you’d think a novel about a character living four parallel lives would. How much of fate comes from within and how much comes from without? Unfortunately Auster doesn’t address this intriguing question in any kind of stimulating way either though you’d think a novel about a character living four parallel lives would.
I’ve got a lot of time for Paul Auster but I’m afraid I found this a self-indulgent and ultimately pointless novel. I wasn’t a great fan of Life after Life but Atkinson’s novel on a similar theme is much more fluid and interesting structurally than this. It’s also immeasurably more outlandishly playful. Atkinson’s heroine becomes a downtrodden bullied wife in one version; assassinates Hitler in another. Auster’s hero, by contrast, goes to Princeton in one version; Colombia in another. Maybe that’s truer to life but it hardly makes for gripping dramatic tension. And yet Auster is quite happy to employ melodrama as a deciding factor in creating crossroad moments – a murdered father, a car crash resulting in the loss of thumb and first finger - except his melodrama leads to banal distinctions. Atkinson, like the film Sliding Doors, identified the crossroad moments when a fate might change course; Auster doesn’t – he uses accidents rather than choices to define the fate of his character. Things happen off-screen and differently from one life to another for no apparent reason: an uncle makes a bizarre decision, the father makes completely different life choices for no apparent reason with far reaching repercussions in one life which he doesn’t make in another. In this regard, Ferguson is like a puppet operated by his male family members.
Auster’s hero is perhaps the biggest problem. I was never convinced he was sufficiently intriguing as a character for a 200 pg novel, let alone an almost 900 pg one. The sixties should be fascinating but Ferguson is like some throwback to the 1950s. Though this novel is waterlogged with the minutiae of 60s news items and memorabilia there’s no mention of LSD, of rock music, of hippy culture. Ferguson loves baseball, basketball, Bach and beer. He’s not a child of his time. Therefore the decade begins to become irrelevant and it’s a bit baffling why so much energy is spent in trying to recreate it. I assumed at least one version would send him to Vietnam or prison to provide some real dramatic contrast. Nope. Instead the cliffhanger is whether Ferguson will become a novelist or a translator of poetry. Gripping stuff! At the heart of this novel is a colossal failure of imagination on Auster’s part – he can’t imagine himself as anything but a writer. That said, I agree with Auster and not with Atkinson – that if we had four cracks at life they wouldn’t be significantly different – but for that very reason this all becomes a very pointless and long winded exercise.
The other problem is you also get three or four lives in a computer game and after a while this began to become as predictable and repetitive as a computer game. Whatever happens isn’t sufficiently consequential to sustain interest. There’s not much at stake when you get four rolls of the dice. So what if he dies in one version? It’s actually a relief because it was hard work trying to remember the thin distinctions between one life and another. At least, we now had one less nuanced account of his love life and literary aspirations to retain in memory. (This novel would be a good test for evaluating how prone you might be to dementia.) And to be honest I didn’t understand why things turned out differently in the various versions. Because his father dies he becomes gay? That seemed to me a crass piece of reasoning. In one version his cousin Amy finds him irresistible; in another she’s sexually indifferent. I never had a clue why. My feeling was Auster didn’t either. That his main motivation for writing this was to lavishly indulge in nostalgia for his lost youth. Then why not just write a memoir? To add insult to injury he deploys an utterly lame post-modernist trick at the end, trying to cajole us into believing the whole thing has been the height of cleverness.
After this, Jane Smiley’s dreadful Some Luck and Murakami’s rambling dead end 1Q84 I’m now going to think very hard before reading any novel over 700 pages....more
There are loads of reviews of this so I'll stick to some observations.
It's probably the first novel I've ever read that made me think about death eveThere are loads of reviews of this so I'll stick to some observations.
It's probably the first novel I've ever read that made me think about death every time I was within its pages. I'm not sure that's a recommendation! Great achievement though to set an entire novel in a cemetery and create something that on the whole is upbeat.
Though the novel is universal in its reach, its heart and soul are very much American, in much the way Mantel's Cromwell books are quintessentially English. I don't know enough about Abe Lincoln to understand all the political nuances of this novel. Because essentially this is a political novel, a celebration of liberal thinking and its pivotal conviction that every individual warrants the same share of political generosity. Thus among the characters we have the marginalised of society - the black slave, the homosexual, the abused woman - all striving to find a place in the ghost world in which they find themselves. (I enjoyed the most the reverend who doesn't know what he's done wrong to warrant his exclusion from heaven though, disappointingly, this thread is completely dropped.)
People have spoken of its musical composition and I'm thinking especially of Fionnuala's fabulous review and though I don't have much musical knowledge I could sense the truth of this observation. Except, as in the case with music, it did allow me to drift off while reading at times. This led me to realise that the voices themselves weren't perhaps as emotionally engaging as they might have been or there were perhaps too many of them. This novel has been praised for its originality but there are a lot of similarities with Woolf's The Waves in construction. Voices without a grounding narrative master of ceremonies seeking to reconcile disappointments and failings in relation to a death. It's been a while since I've read The Waves, but I still have and will always have an extraordinarily vivid sense of five of its six characters (Jinny eludes me a bit). This isn't true of Sanders characters most of whom I'm already struggling to recall in much detail. Also, the final reconciliations in Lincoln in the Bardo were perhaps just a bit too pat and lacked the thought-provoking depths Woolf achieved. The black slave riding off free on a horse towards the end even recalls Woolf final passage in The Waves: I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!" ...more
Every night on the news borders loom large as a controversial and often explosive theme. People crossing them illegally, people thwarted by them, peopEvery night on the news borders loom large as a controversial and often explosive theme. People crossing them illegally, people thwarted by them, people incensed that controls aren’t tighter. Borders are what define us and also what hold us back. A Sea of Straw is a novel about both legislative and metaphysical borders, about a world in which freedom of movement is denied.
It’s 1966, the summer of love. Jody, married with a young child, is recuperating from pneumonia in Portugal where she falls in love with Ze, an artist. The novel begins as she’s about to leave and she and Ze are making plans for the future. The novel dramatises the oppressive political and social forces that then stand in their way, like border guards. Portugal, in a time-warp, is in the grip of a totalitarian regime where the Gestapo-like secret police patrol every corner. The dictator, Salazar, we learn, has never been abroad. Basically his government is a prototype for what many far right parties are currently clamouring for all across Europe. Though not an activist himself Ze has many friends who are militantly opposed to the fascist regime. He’s also about to be drafted to fight in Portugal’s colonial wars in Africa. In other words he has virtually no freedom of movement.
Jody, on the other hand, returns to Lancashire faced with the challenge of extricating herself from her loveless marriage and acquiring autonomy. England may be in the midst of a cultural revolution but Manchester seems dour, backward and rife with stifling prejudice, especially contrasted with the vivacious colour and sensuality of Lisbon – the irony of this contrast is portrayed really well. Jody has to face a different, more ostensibly benign kind of censorship and secret policing.
The novel alternates between the experiences of Ze and Jody. In terms of dramatic tension the Portugal sections have the fraught atmosphere of a WW2 novel, except, of course, we’re learning about a different and largely ignored period of history. It’s an incredibly informative account of what was happening in Portugal in 1966-67 but dramatised rather than told. It’s written with love and a painterly attention to detail, the work of a romantic sensibility which reminded me of the wonderful Shirley Hazzard who sadly died this week.
It also must be the first post anti-Brexit novel! ...more
It was the teenager rather than the adult in me that enjoyed this. Arcadia is a novel brimming with mischief, a kind of YA romp featuring stories withIt was the teenager rather than the adult in me that enjoyed this. Arcadia is a novel brimming with mischief, a kind of YA romp featuring stories within stories, time travel and alternative universes. As I understood it, the novel is like a dramatised archaeological dig in search of the beginning and the end of its own story.
It’s not going to be easy to summarise the plot premise but here we go: Professor Henry Lytten, a retired Oxford Don, nurtures the ambition to write a novel about a rural arcadia called Anterworld. He has compiled pages and pages of notes but never quite managed to forge his extensive notes into a story. Angela Meerson is a researcher in a dystopian future who has created a portal to parallel universes except it turns out to be a time machine. She travels back to the 20th century where she meets Henry and steals his ideas for Anterworld which she uses as a kind of prototype for her continuing quest to create a parallel universe. The portal is hidden in Henry’s basement. A young girl called Rosie accidentally enters the portal while looking for Henry’s missing cat and finds herself in Anterworld. Her arrival plays havoc with the elementary rules of causation previously existent. Meanwhile Angela’s employer sends a man into the machine to find Angela and arch villain Zoffany Oldmaster, who wishes to employ Angela’s discovery for his apocalyptic ends, is hunting for Angela’s daughter who is a renegade in the new society where emotion is forbidden.
The most fun part of the book is Anterworld where the storyteller is the most revered figure in society and the Story is what gives everyone’s lives order and meaning. Pears has lots of fun here weaving in literary references, most notably Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the frivolous but wise tone of which he employs throughout his depiction of this rural feudal world.
The prose is simplistic as is the depiction of relationships. There’s no psychology, no insights into what makes people tick. The descriptive writing is very generic, almost lazy. Detail is often ignored or sketched in with a single brushstroke. All Pears’ creative energy is channelled into the design of this book, which is very clever. You could say the most fundamental art of the storyteller is to work out where a story begins and where it ends. Pears ingeniously keeps us guessing where his story begins and ends until the last chapter.
Just as you sense some authors haven’t yet written their best book – Zadie Smith? - you feel others have already written their masterpiece and no mattJust as you sense some authors haven’t yet written their best book – Zadie Smith? - you feel others have already written their masterpiece and no matter how many more they write they will never quite top it. Nicole Krauss with The History of Love springs to mind. As does Chabon with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. I’d be amazed if he ever tops that. Moonglow doesn’t but nevertheless it is a thrilling and highly distinguished achievement.
First of all, think of your own favourite grandfather and try to put together a narrative of his life. I’m sure you’ll soon realise some defining “facts” have never quite been verified, that there are conflicting reports of certain events, one or other of which you choose to believe to suit your own narrative, that there’s a fair bit of hearsay colouring his story and there are blanks you yourself have endeavoured to fill in. It was fitting I read this together with Orlando, a high spirited pastiche of the pretensions of all biography. Moonglow is purportedly a memoir of Chabon’s grandfather but it reads like a highly sophisticated novel. Often while reading I found myself thinking, no one surely could have a grandfather this interesting, so tailor made to be the hero of a novel. The same was true of his grandmother who, it will turn out, has created a fictitious self to survive the fallout of her wartime experiences. That misted twilight realm between fact and fiction is where this book mostly operates. It makes you think a lot about memory, its expedient ordering principles, its white lies and its hindsight stocktaking and balancing of the books. The other hugely impressive facet of this book is its structure. Chabon’s grandfather is dying of cancer when he narrates haphazardly to his grandson his memories. Chabon resists any temptation to write a chronological account of his grandfather’s life. Instead it’s as if he mirrors the non-linear laws of memory’s treasure hunting determination to find meaning and order.
Like I said the material he has to work with is the stuff of any novelist’s dreams. His grandfather’s role in the Second World War is to find the Nazi rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun, before the Russians do. When he learns of the thousands of slave workers deployed to build the rockets his intention is to kill Braun. He marries an Auschwitz survivor. She is as compelling a character as the grandfather and their marriage is depicted with moving though unsentimental tenderness. When she has a breakdown his anger is such that he tries to kill his boss, for no reason except to vent his rage, and is sent to prison. He has a lifelong obsession with rockets and space travel, a talent in this field too. “The rocket was beautiful. In conception it had been shaped by an artist to break a chain that had bound the human race ever since we first gained consciousness of earth's gravity and all its analogs in suffering, failure and pain. It was at once a prayer sent heavenward and the answer to that prayer: Bear me away from this awful place.”
Annoyingly I watched a documentary about the hunt for the Nazi rocket scientists a month before starting this. I can’t now remember if Michael Chabon’s grandfather was mentioned. No doubt in my memory of the programme he will eventually play a starring role. Often fiction can come so much closer to defining truth than facts. ...more
I finished this today, the day Elena Ferrante’s identity has reportedly been revealed. I confess I feel a bit guilty now because while reading this thI finished this today, the day Elena Ferrante’s identity has reportedly been revealed. I confess I feel a bit guilty now because while reading this there were several times I found myself wishing I knew how much was fiction and how much autobiography. I wondered this because it struck me that when Lila disappears from the pages so too does the electric charge Ferrante’s writing has. Ferrante writes well about Elena’s initiation into university life, the Milan literati, Italian political unrest, about marriage, child rearing, and infidelity but not markedly better than lots of other writers. The best parts of this book were when Lila returned. For me, no Lila, no party. And Lila is absent for a lot of this book. So I couldn’t help wondering if Lila, Ferrante’s muse, is a real person. Did she luck out as an author in having such a compelling brilliant friend or is she an inspired invention of Ferrante’s? It doesn’t really matter but I was curious.
If this disreputable journalist/culture - yet another indictment of how misplaced and trivial investigative journalism has become. How about spending your time and energy on uncovering secrets of corruption and conspiracy in governments and multi-national corporations, guys, instead of harassing a writer? - is right then it turns out these Neapolitan novels are even more a triumph of imagination than perhaps they would have been perceived were they a literary transcription of Ferrante’s personal experience. Because we discover Ferrante, though born in Naples, moved to Rome when three and had a German mother who fled to Italy to escape the Holocaust. It always struck me that the descriptions of Naples were quite generic – could have been Bari or Palermo or Reggio Calabria or even Rome minus an occasional ocean. The same is true in this book of Pisa and Florence where Elena finds herself. I never really felt she was in Pisa or Florence. She could have been in any Italian university town. The settings were perhaps Ferrante's way of concealing her tracks.
Ferrante was always going to have a problem keeping her anonymity because of the apparent intense realism of her work - you can't help wondering how much is true while reading her. The irony for me is that these books were never about Naples, or at least specific to Naples. In fact it doesn’t surprise me at all that she never lived in Naples for long. And yet it’s the depiction of Naples that has caused a lot of the fuss. They are about the difficulties women face to achieve autonomy and identity in any milieu where men still often have the final word – as such they could be set in Bagdad or Birmingham, Rome or Nairobi. It’s interesting that in Italy many have claimed her books were written by a man and even now there’s talk they were written by this translator’s husband. Would even that matter? It says a lot about Italy which, though I’d argue is not generally misogynistic, does tend to be chauvinistic – the disparagement of women more an intellectual insecurity than an emotional distaste). Were her books written by a man it’d certainly be a phenomenal achievement because Ferrante, whoever she is, will probably go down in history as one of the very best exponents of unravelling the inner lives of women.
So, yep this was really good too, though not quite as good as Book Two. Interestingly and for the first time Elena isn't always likeable in this book - often you feel because the wise and inspirational influence of Lina is not at hand. And it ends on a real cliffhanger and I’m annoyed I didn’t already buy the forth book cos now I have to wait for it to arrive.
I only hope Ferrante doesn’t stop writing now that her privacy has been so crudely invaded. ...more
A biographer doesn’t need to possess the same level of intelligence, eloquence, wisdom or imaginative reach as her subject because biography is essentA biographer doesn’t need to possess the same level of intelligence, eloquence, wisdom or imaginative reach as her subject because biography is essentially telling, not showing. A novelist, on the other hand, cannot convincingly create a character who is more intelligent, eloquent, wise or more imaginatively complex than she herself is because there will come times when she has to prove it. These make-or-break moments will often arrive in the writing of dialogue.
The author states that “much of what we think we know about the Fitzgeralds comes from unreliable sources or has been spun into half-true myth. My mission was to set the record straight.” But then she proceeds to do exactly what she’s complaining about and takes the myth making to a whole new level. And of course she’s more of an unreliable source than the people she’s referring to. I would argue her statement that the popular perception of Zelda has reduced her “to being only an edgy flapper, or only an unstable, jealous spouse, or only a pathetic, "insane" drain of her husband's creativity and life” is wholly unfounded. The popular perception of Zelda is much more complex and fully formed than that. And yet this is the treatise Fowler seeks to disprove in this novel. To do this she sanitises Zelda, whitewashes all her excesses, dumbs her down. She makes her reasonable, domesticated, conventionally likeable and the victim of the insensitivity of others. She exaggerates her talent, as an artist, a mother and a woman which, ironically involves trivialising her brilliance. She gives us conversations that never happened – thus revealing herself as a completely unreliable source. And, like I said, there’s a big problem when an author tries to put words into the mouths of people who were much more brilliant, eloquent and intelligent than she herself is. The belittling process begins here. This is how Zelda herself writes Scott’s dialogue in her own novel Save Me the Waltz - "If you would stop dumping ash trays before the company has got well out of the house we would be happier.” That’s sophisticated dialogue – there’s psychology and wit in it. You can imagine it as something Scott actually said.
And this is how Fowler writes Scott’s dialogue – “If not for my blood, my sweat and my – my- determination, you’d be nobody special, just another aging debutante wasting away the years somewhere in Alabama. It’s my life that made yours worthwhile! And yet all I get is selfish ingratitude.” The less said about that the better. Poor Scott gets these misogynist clichés dumped on him throughout the novel, like the literary equivalent of canned boo’s. Scott was eloquent after all – no one would deny him that. It’s impossible to imagine him capable of the crassness Fowler attributes to him in every argument he has with Zelda.
Perhaps I’m simply taking this novel too seriously. Really, it’s little more than fluffy light entertainment. And perhaps I wouldn’t have taken it so seriously had I not read and then taken issue with the author’s declaration of intent in which she clearly aspires to creating a historical document. Her mission is “to set the record straight.”
Most pointedly of all, the author gets round the very tricky problem of depicting Zelda’s madness by ignoring it. The irony is, were Zelda capable of writing such a rational grounded account of her own life she wouldn’t have been Zelda; she would have been someone else. She completely leaves out some of Zelda’s most infamous stunts – like trying to wrestle the wheel from Scott and drive the car over a cliff with her young daughter in the back seat. You can’t come up with a reasonable explanation for that so she ignores it.
She also greatly exaggerates Zelda’s talent as a writer. "The swing creaks on Austin's porch, a luminous beetle swings ferociously over the clematis, insects swarm to the golden holocaust of the hall light. Shadows brush the Southern night like heavy, impregnated mops soaking its oblivion back to the black heat whence it evolved. Melancholic moon-vines trail dark, absorbent pads over the string trellises.” This excerpt from Zelda’s Save Me the Waltz is like something from a teenage self-published author. Scott has taken a lot of flak from feminists for his reluctance to have this book published. No doubt he was irritated she was encroaching on his territory – that’s just human nature - but perhaps he also wanted to save her from the savagery of criticism he assumed would follow? Zelda could write some fantastic one liners – “I’m much too proud to care – pride keeps me from feeling half the things I ought to feel.” - and was capable of insights of absolute brilliance but that doesn’t make her a novelist.
Of course another huge problem is Scott wrote about Zelda so much that there are many instances when Fowler is describing scenes he has written beautifully into his books and needless to say she never comes out of these comparisons well. Zelda herself wrote some of these scenes into Save Me the Waltz and even she did a better job. So what we have here is a massive act of hubris on the part of the author. To write a convincing novel about Scott and Zelda you’d have to be as artistically gifted as they were.
Essentially the author uses simplistic contemporary doctrines to further a thesis she had arbitrarily formed before writing the novel. Feminism can be no less guilty than any other ism of seeing only what it wants to see in order to create a simplistic judgemental doctrine. Imagine if the tables were turned and someone wrote a novel positing the idea that Virginia Woolf stifled Leonard’s gifts as an artist. Or that he was responsible for Virginia’s madness. Blame isn’t as simplistically apportioned as Fowler would have it. Scott, by all accounts, was reckless, irresponsible, narccissistic, emotionally immature, fatally insecure but these were all traits he shared with Zelda. They were soulmates in the most classic sense. .
The ultimate irony is Fowler thinks she’s doing Zelda some kind of favour by writing this book. This is a daytime TV Zelda, a Zelda whitewashed into middle class respectability, stripped of her dark sorcery. If you want to read about the real Zelda Nancy Milford’s heartbreaking biography is excellent - Zelda.
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