Disappointment is a beautiful woman reading Ann Rand

The title of this blog post comes from one of the stories I have just finished reading. It's The Best American Short Stories 2011. One of my favourite reading events for the year – time-out with a 20 page short story that almost always leaves you transported in time and place and most importantly, wanting more. It’s like a perfect little entrée. I try to use it as a guide to new authors – to read more widely in the coming year. In this case I’d happily read any of the people featured in this anthology though I don’t think it was quite as startlingly good as the 2010 collection. And a quibble – last year’s edition featured a story from Jennifer Egan’s book A Visit from the Goon Squad which is arguably a novel. I felt a bit cheated encountering another piece from the same book, even though this is a classy bit of writing. It either falls into publication in 2010 or 2011, not both. My favourite stories were ‘Foster’ by Claire Keegan (you can read it as first published in the New Yorker, A Bridge Under Water by Tom Bissell, The Sleep by Caitlin Horrocks, Housewifely Arts by Megan Mayhew Bergman and another story by the fabulous Rebecca Makkai who has been anthologised in this series four times.

Series Editor Heidi Pitlor makes some general comments about the kind of short stories that American writers are producing. She says that each of the 2011 stories sustains its own momentum through “premise or language, character or even perfectly placed silence.” Geraldine Brooks, who was the guest editor of the 2011 collection, is forthright about what she encountered(or did not encounter) in whittling down 20 stories from 100.

"Enuf adultery!" "Foreign countries exist." "Consider the following: Caravaggio's Conversion of Saint Paul, Handel's Messiah, Martin Luther King. Why, if religion turns up in a story, is it generally only there as a foil for humor?" and on said humor: "There's so little. Why, writers, so haggard and so woebegone?"

I can’t really do each story justice here but there is a blogger who can. She is working her way through each story with a detailed review – very interesting and entertaining reading. Go to Claire Guyton’s Sideways Reviews. If this is too much info, there is a shorter but detailed review which discusses each story in some detail.

Dark and crazy

What little I know of life in Romania has been conveyed mainly by films until now. I have seen some splendid films including Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which I thought about a lot when I was reading The Appointment. In the latter film, an old man is carted from hospital to hospital in the course of one night, getting sicker and sicker as doctors keep refusing to treat him and send him away. The plot line of The Appointment is not dissimilar. The main character (unnamed) is on a tram journey across town which lasts the course of the book. She has been “summoned” by the authorities for interrogation; this trip is just one of many already taken. The journey in the story allows for the character to reflect on her life while adding a kind of forward impetus to the narrative. We are keen to find out what will happen to her as we linger in the surreal and muddy waters of life under the Ceaucescu regime.

It’s a hard book to read. There is nothing desirable about her life and awful things happen to most characters. As occurs in toxic regimes (and this applies to workplaces as much as cultures and countries), people behave very badly toward one another when there is fear and scape-goating around. Or they drink to escape or have nihilistic or abusive sex. All of these elements pertain in this novel. I can’t say that I enjoyed reading it but it provides both a sense of truth, and some very fine writing. Take the following for example:

“The water squirted and gathered around the tree trunks in shallow pools, full of drowned ants. The earth drank slowly. Then Grandfather said You go out for a walk and the world opens up for you. And before you've even stretched your legs properly, it closes shut. From here to there it's just the farty splutter of a lantern. And they call that having lived. It's not worth the bother of putting on your shoes.” (p80)

This novel was written by Herta Muller who emigrated to Germany in 1987, two years before the Ceaucescu regime was overthrown. She accurately captures the way in which the individual is made powerless by the state in writing: "there's nothing to think about, because I myself am nothing, apart from being summoned." One reviewer, Costica Bradatan, wrote: “Müller's work is political not in any superficial way, but in the more profound sense of literature as bearing witness. ‘Bearing witness’ is just the right phrase – it doesn’t make it an easy read but it does make the narrative compelling. It reminds me of the novel I read earlier in the year set in Libya (In the Country of Men). In that case, the author made the politics more palatable by telling the story through the perspective of a small boy. I liked that novel a lot but I’m glad that Muller didn’t try to make it easy to read. Like the ride with Mr Lazarescu, you kind of need to endure the awfulness and the craziness. I guess the other obvious comparison is anything by Kafka, but I haven’t been in that territory for a long time.

Bradatan also writes:

"There is a Romantic misconception that terror has always to be impressive, fierce and appropriately Luciferian – in other words, that terror is nothing if it is not spectacular. However, that's rarely the case in real life. As Czeslaw Milosz excellently put it in The Native Realm, “Terror is not … monumental; it is abject, it has a furtive glance, it destroys the fabric of human society and changes the relationships of millions of individuals into channels for blackmail…That's why Herta Müller's work is so important: It maps out, with surgical precision, this mediocre yet sinister face of European totalitarianism, which is something that has been largely unaccounted for."

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Waste

Hard to get away with a book narrated by a boring man. Brevity helps. But so does the cleverness of the ideas in it. It’s almost a novella and reminded me in so many ways of On Chesil Beach as well as The Getting of Wisdom. It is about memory and ageing – not surprising topics given Barnes’ age. It’s a topic that resonates a lot for me lately – I too am feeling the synapses snapping in the breeze. On the weekend I saw The Iron Lady, which also concerns itself with this topic. In that film we see things partly through the now-demented eyes of Maggie Thatcher. However the perspective in that film aims to be more omnipresent than is the case in The Sense of an Ending.

I love a novel with an explosive letter – it reminds me of letters that have had lingering impact in my own life. It’s divided into two parts which comprise the set-up – youthful Tony Webster – friends, first love relationship and the payoff – when Tony is in his comfortable 60s. He is a man who thinks he has escaped damage, who has got through life by deliberately limiting his horizons. The opposite of “no pain, no gain”. The letter is a trigger for Tony to re-think his understanding of events – it is like the carpet has been pulled out from under his feet. He is forced to recognise that: ‘What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you witnessed."

It made me wish I’d kept more diaries, to wonder what has been lost in my head through the vagaries of time and what I have not remembered accurately. To wonder whether I’d limited my horizons too much. Note Websters sad, sad comment "I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and succeeded – and how pitiful that was."

One reviewer described it better than I can:

“More important, Barnes makes one look back on one's own life to ponder what parts of it have been fabrications, those necessary fictions created to cast ourselves in a better light, to spare ourselves the knowledge of our own shortcomings, short-sightedness and bad behaviour.The cleverness resides not only in the way he has caught just how second-rate Webster's mind is without driving the reader to tears of boredom but in the way he has effectively doubled the length of the book by giving us a final revelation that obliges us to reread it. Without overstating his case in the slightest, Barnes's story is a meditation on the unreliability and falsity of memory; on not getting it the first time round - and possibly not even the second, either. Barnes's revelation is richly ambiguous.
And this is appropriate, for such a slyly subversive book.”

I also found this in an interview with The Guardian:

"In Nothing to Be Frightened Of, his family memoir cum meditation on mortality, Julian Barnes admits that he and his brother disagree about many details of their childhood. His brother, a philosopher, maintains that memories are so often false that they cannot be trusted without independent verification. "I am more trusting, or self-deluding," writes Barnes, "so shall continue as if all my memories are true."

The title is abstract and obscure – I really struggled with what he was alluding to – and then found this in a review by Geordie Williamson:

“The Sense of an Ending: a grey, grim, near-perfect novella whose title,
borrowed from Frank Kermode's 1967 classic of literary criticism, suggests a creative extrapolation of that volume's thesis. Since we are born into the middle of things (and die in much the same place), suggested Kermode, the stories we tell about ourselves serve as consolatory structures, falsifying origins and ends to grant order and meaning to that which has none.”

This is a clever book – it is deceptively simple but caused me to think a lot about my own life. There are some funny bits - he would have had a lot of fun writing the driving scene with the enigmatic ‘Fruitcake’. But in the main, it’s just sad.

PS: Good YouTube clip about the cover design...

When did the Holocaust become The Holocaust?

I had strong and contrary reactions to the opening of the novel The Street Sweeper. It’s because of how it opens with two story trajectories – of black civil rights in America and of Jews and the Holocaust. The positive reaction was to the opening scene with Lamont, the African American man who has just got out of prison and been able to find a placement in a job – against the odds. He is catching a bus to work and is full of anxiety – compounded by the fact that a Hispanic man gets on the bus angry with the driver who is apparently running late. Lamont is the only other man on the bus and feels under some pressure to try to end the argument between to two men. This is very good writing – full of tension, visually strong, interesting in its exploration of the expectations and values circulating in this busload of low-socio-economic individuals. I immediately started to care about Lamont.

The second reaction was more wary. Adam is an untenured historian at Columbia who is about to lose his job because he hasn’t published anything for a few years. A credible situation. What I initially struggled with was the idea that he would therefore want to end his long-term relationship with his girlfriend Diana. She wanted kids. He felt that he could not provide for a family in the short term and broke up with her. I didn’t quite believe it even though it seemed to connect with an old preoccupation of Perlman’s – that was initially a significant part of his novel Three Dollars – the pressure on the man to provide for the family.

Then I thought of M, a friend of mine. About 22 years ago, he announced that his then girlfriend J was pregnant, that they would get married and that he was renouncing his former life. He sold his record player and extensive record collection (and maybe lots of other things) as a symbol of this new road he was taking. It felt sacrificial (with a tinge of martyr). It seemed like he felt that he needed to be a different kind of person if he was married with a child and a mortgage. I didn’t really understand it then but the strength of the ‘fork in the road’ feeling for him was obvious. At the time I thought that maybe he hadn’t thought of J as being “the one” but they are still together.

So this was Adam – making dramatic gestures because of this sense of what men should offer. The book is only slightly about this of course – it’s about lots of things and I liked it a lot. What it is about is racism – in many forms. Perlman covers a LOT of new ground. Even though this is a book which deals with the seemingly familiar events of the Holocaust, there is a lot of new material that I was unaware of. In an interview with Jane Sullivan, Perlman said he was inspired by a number of key things:

“One was a poetry reading Perlman attended, where he heard poems from
Greetings from Sloan-Kettering, a posthumously published book by Abba Kovner, a
cancer patient who had been a Jewish partisan during World War II. Another was a
radio documentary he chanced to hear about David Boder, a Chicago psychologist
who had gone to Europe just after the war and had done something quite unheard
of at the time: he had recorded interviews with Holocaust survivors. Perlman
listened to the last interview Boder conducted. He broke off speaking in Yiddish
and the woman he was interviewing was in a flood of tears. Perlman says: ''For
the first time, he lost control of his emotions. He said to this woman, 'Who is
going to stand in judgment over all of this and who is going to judge my
work?'''That was another question the author had to answer, Perlman decided.
Only he changed the man's name to Henry Border and the question to, ''Who is
going to judge me?'' because the man's voice ''was dripping in guilt. What was
this guy so guilty about?''

The radio show was This American Life (my favourite podcast) – and the episode Before it had a name. The name of that episode is derived from the idea that the Holocaust is a term of only recent widespread usage and understanding, – before we knew the Holocaust as the Holocaust – before people realised the enormity of what had happened to the Jews (I am not sure here about when that realisation did strike the world – and to what extent people and governments buried knowledge of it – not sure when everyone knew what the Holocaust was – I have grown up with it as a concept in recent history. Wikipedia says this:

The term holocaust comes from the Greek word holókauston, an animal sacrifice
offered to a god in which the whole (holos) animal is completely burnt
(kaustos). For hundreds of years, the word "holocaust" was used in English to
denote great massacres, but since the 1960s, the term has come to be used by
scholars and popular writers to refer exclusively to the genocide of Jews. The
mini-series Holocaust is credited with introducing the term into common parlance
after 1978. The biblical word Shoah, meaning "calamity", became the standard
Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s, especially in Europe and
Israel. Shoah is preferred by many Jews for a number of reasons, including the
theologically offensive nature of the word "holocaust", which they take to refer
to the Greek pagan custom.”

I digress. It’s easy with this novel – there are lots of little bypaths that are worthy of exploration. For example, I would like to know heaps more about the civil rights history which we get a glimpse of – the de-segregation of schools, the resulting riots, the intake of African Americans into the union movement, the silence about the roles of black soldiers in WW2, the uprisings in Auschwitz etc etc. I can’t do these justice – read the book. It’s very interesting reading about a period that I know little about. This creates a strain for the writer – he needs to tell us a lot and I sometimes felt that it was a little didactic – “I’m glad you asked” was the kind of tone – especially over the pages to do with black history. Worth putting up with this though – it’s a great story – based on a degree of personal connection. Perlman had relatives who disappeared in the Holocaust – his great-uncle Rafal Gutman had a prestigious job in charge of Jewish education in Warsaw at the outbreak of war. The Nazis said he could stay as long as he provided them with a list of Jews to be transported. Gutman refused and committed suicide.

I felt that Perlman had taken some risks in writing about two uber-politically laden narratives. You can get in a lot of trouble in this terrain. However he is so clearly guided by the desire to put “Tell everybody what happened” (as the brave and doomed Auschwitz prisoners urge). I felt swept up in the merging stories. I will read more about the themes of the novel and I’m sure it will resonate for a long time.

Horror of adolescence

Little Star – a horror story or a deeper book about adolescence? Or both those things. I first accessed the novelist Lindqvist’s work with the film Let the Right One in - also a horror narrative which is also about adolescence.

In Little Star, Lindqvist traces the lives of two girls – both outsiders in Swedish society. Theres, abandoned as a baby, is a very fine singer with some developmental issues. Theresa is an overweight, lonely, bullied child. The novel explores what they do with their feelings of alienation and to say more about the plot would be wrong. I think the writer is extremely good at getting inside the head of these disaffected girls. He says that he thinks that the main flaw in many horror films is that he can’t identify with the main characters. Lindqvist ensures that we empathise with the character of Theresa, and to a lesser extent Theres, at the same time as being disturbed and alienated by what they do. He said that he tries “to combine both those things, that the child is the protagonist, the one we are following, the one that drives the tale forward, and at the same time being the one that you have to watch out for.”

What he delivers is not new or unique but it is interesting. This novel doesn’t work as well for me as the film of 'Let the Right One in' did, but it was a great thing to read in the bright light of a summer Christmas at the beach. A few brooding teenagers around at Waratah Bay but none with obvious homicidal urges.

It’s worth reading a little of what the writer had to say about his work in an interview on the Constructing Horror website:
“But then I think that many horror films and horror storytellers dig deep into the hole that is their own childhood to reach a more original fear. A fear that is nameless. As an adult we can rationalize out thoughts. This is that, and that scares me where that doesn’t. But as a child the stuff out there in the dark or that strange noise under the bed could be anything. If I want to conjure up something that is really scary, an image of something really horrible, then I almost always have to go back to my early years to find a description of that fear. And I think these are emotions and fears that many who write, or work with horror use in their work.”

Interestingly, what I think he really nails are the real and practical fears of childhood and adolescence (regardless of those that linger under the bed) – the question of fitting in, of friendships and of connection – or lack of it. This is the real horror of that period of life.



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Bad girl, good boy?

Patti Smith begins Just Kids with a formal old-fashioned kind of language. The voice unsettles – it’s not what I expected. Soon after she departs Chicago for New York, that voice disappears and what replaces it is a frank and honest contemporary feel. Her story is beguiling – she leaves badly paid factory work and the shame of having a child out of wedlock in search of something more akin with who she is – a potential artist of some kind. Her mother – who thinks she will probably end up waitressing, gives her a pristine new waitress uniform and a pair of white waitress shoes which Smith abandons after a couple of hours of this kind of work. She’s not a snob about what she does though – the book has a humble tone.

Smith arrives in New York and almost immediately meets Robert Mapplethorpe. They connect as fellow ingénues and wanna-be artists. Actually Mapplethorpe is probably not an ingénue – but she initially presents him as a gentle beautiful artistic boy. She says: "We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl ¬trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad."

They arrive in New York at a very dynamic time – 1967 (is there not a dynamic time in this city?) and gradually began to move in the same circles as a whole lot of artists and musicians. For the first half of the book, there is no mention of her being a practising musician though she certainly loves music and references artists like Dylan. Staying at the Chelsea Hotel for a while, she mentions contact with Jimi Hendrix, Grace Slick and Janis Joplin and wrote poems/ songs for some of these people. Much of the book is devoted to exploring the relationship that she has with Mapplethorpe - their struggle to make art, the fun they had, and the beginning of a clash in values as Mapplethorpe begins to work his way through the social set in New York.

The writing describing their activities is lovely – aesthetes who value the visual, who try to add beauty to the spartan rooms they inhabit, who express part of their identity through what they choose to wear. The image of the book released in the America is worth looking at (It's the one shown here) – Mapplethorpe and Smith dressed up for an excursion to Coney Island. Also worth looking up the very beautiful image that Mapplethorpe took of Smith for her first album, Horses - speaks for the essence of the book and their relationship - and the times.

One reviewer describes the book at embodying the spirit of Smith’s song Elegie written for Jimi Hendrix and that it was written “in a strong, true voice unencumbered by the polarizing mannerisms of her poetry.” True. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with her. And him.






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