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1Q84 – Haruki Murakami

1Q84

Haruki Murakami

Translation: Jay Rubin, Philip Gabriel

Alfred K. Knopf

Hardcover, 925 pages

Moons and Recollections: A Novel to be Savoured

*

“The wind rushed between the branches of the zelkova tree, making a piercing howl, like the coldhearted breath leaking out between the teeth of a person who has lost all hope.” (p. 750, 1Q84)

*

Out of the (metaphorical) corner of my eye as I was reading 1Q84, I was noticing that Haruki Murakami’s new novel was not getting universally positive reviews. I didn’t read the reviews, and I won’t until I finish writing this, but as I moved from page 300 to 400 to 500 I wondered if maybe it was the sheer length that was turning other reviewers off a bit – perhaps along with Murakami’s tendency to describe apparently plot-irrelevant incidents in a cool and detached but very detailed manner, such as how exactly a character prepares his meals from the washing of the vegetables to the stir-frying of the shrimp. I’ve noticed since I first encountered Murakami’s writing in  Norwegian Wood that he has a thing for describing food preparation, and in 1Q84 there are also drawn-out descriptions of traffic jams, apartment buildings, rooms in extended-care facilities, train rides, and interior monologues … especially interior monologues: “Should I do this?” “I wonder what would happen if I did that?” “Maybe that other character is thinking such and such.” That kind of thing.

In this 21st-century world of ours, where most experiences that we tune into have been created with our increasingly short attention spans in mind, it can be difficult to read a novel that is 925 pages long, in which most of the activity is about as dramatic as one’s own daily life (an illusion, but it seems that way). We are being trained by digital media to consume events quickly quickly quickly, so we can get on to the next. Murakami does not let us do that. He starts off slowly, and he continues slowly. We want to say, “Hurry up! Hurry up!” But Murakami does not, and gradually, gradually we slow down too.

We are drawn in to the mysterious world he has created, where there are two moons, and a beautiful young best-selling author who seems to come from another world – not our world, not even Murakami’s fictional world, but another one. Gradually the two main characters, whom we thought we might not even like that much for the first two hundred pages or so (although we could not stop watching them anyway, to see what would happen to them next) begin to draw us in, to appeal to us. We feel increasingly affectionate towards them and want them to overcome their (serious and even potentially fatal) problems. We want them to be happy.

The plot is straightforward enough: Tengo and Aomame, both rendered social outcasts as children by the peculiarities of their parents, met and connected on a very deep psychic level in elementary school but were separated soon after. They never forgot one another. Now, at the age of thirty, the two of them end up – for very different reasons that may or may not be connected by an omniscient or non-omniscient overseer – in a parallel universe in which they (still both in their own ways social misfits) seem to have been given one final opportunity to reconnect.

The parallel universe is the one where the young writer comes from. Her real name is Eriko Fukada, but she is known as Fuka-Eri. She is just 17 and she has written what appears to be a fantastic tale called Air Chrysalis, which has been submitted to a well-regarded literary competition. There, Komatsu, the respected editor who supervises the competition, recognizes Air Chrysalis for its compelling and utterly unique voice and narrative, but knows it needs rewriting.

“The overall plot is a fantasy,” he says, accurately describing the writing of the author who invented him as well as Fuka-Eri’s, “but the detail is incredibly real.”

Komatusu asks Tengo, one of the readers for the competition – he is now a math teacher and an aspiring novelist – to improve the writing of the novel so that it will win and, making a decision the ethics of which will bedevil him for months to come, Tengo agrees. He meets with Fuka-Eri who also agrees to the scheme, but almost lackadaisically, as though she doesn’t really care.

Aomame has a different set of ethical questions to wrestle with. She is a highly tuned, self-trained, physically fit killer-for-hire. Not only does she commit her murders without leaving a single trace that the victims died of anything but natural causes, she only kills people who have been vetted and judged to be deserving of their fates by “The Dowager” – a wealthy, careful woman with a judicial agenda that is based on her own daughter’s abuse and death. Aomame’s victims have committed heinous crimes who, without Aomame’s intervention, would never have been brought to justice. But Aomame’s latest assignment in the bizarre two-moon world causes her even more difficult questions than the ones Tengo needs to face.

As the novel gradually unfolds, the question arises as to how much of Air Chrysalis is true, and how much of it is fiction. For a long time, the chapters alternate between Tengo and Aomame, and we recognize that there is a connection between the two, and that their experiences in the world they’ve unintentionally entered are bringing them closer together. But how? Where did the young author come from, and why is she so emotionless and uncommunicative, almost robotic? Was it some traumatic incident in her childhood? Did she even have a childhood? And who is the mysterious but obviously very powerful, even super-human, latest target of Aomame’s deadly talents? Could he have come from the world Fuka-Eri has “invented”?

At the centre of the novel (as if within a chrysalis) there comes the novel within the novel, Air Chrysalis itself, and when we come upon it, it is like a mysterious hard evil Norse myth in the midst of all that detailed, almost dispassionate prose: bright and black and shining and primitive—and scary as hell. The eyes of a dead goat glitter in the moonlight and small creatures march in a line out of its mouth to begin their dark work. Adding to the ominous impact of the story is our growing suspicion that every word of it is true – including the parts that Tengo added. That changes everything. Echoes begin to bounce off the apparent realities in the two-mooned world in which Tengo and Aomame have found themselves, threatening to prevent their ever reconnecting.

Murakami’s writing is only simple on the surface. His sentences and paragraphs twist and turn with apparent ease and before you know it, deliver judgment as accurately and chillingly as a weapon filed to a sharp point by Aomame. Like this:

“Unease and expectation and fear scattered to the farthest corners of the spacious classroom, and hid themselves in the room’s many objects like cowardly little animals.”

Or this:

“The clouds continued to scud off toward the south. No matter how many were blown away, others appeared to take their place. There was an inexhaustible source of clouds in some land far to the north. Decisive people, minds fixed on the task, clothed in thick, grey uniforms, working silently from morning to night to make clouds, like bees make honey, spiders make webs, and war makes widows.”

Reading him is a process and experience. You immerse yourself. You give him the freedom to tell you details you don’t think you really want to know – details so apparently irrelevant you wonder why he didn’t edit them out  – but gradually you realize he is not being self-indulgent. He is building an entire world, and it has you in its grip.

The worlds he creates are as familiar as they are strange. When I read Murakami, I am usually aware of cultural differences between Japan and Canada, but this time I also noticed many similarities: how our health-care systems operate, the climate, the procedures required for doing things like renting an apartment or transferring funds from a deceased parent to the hands of the surviving child. An apartment in which Ushikawa, one of the novel’s least appealing characters, hides out for a while, as he too attempts to puzzle through the stories of Tengo, Aomame and Fuka-Eri, could quite easily be found anywhere near where I live right now:

The dark corridor inside had that special odor you find in older apartment buildings. It is a peculiar mix of smells – of unrepaired leaks, old sheets washed in cheap detergent, stale tempura oil, a dried-up poinsettia, cat urine from the weed-filled front yard. Live there long enough and you would probably  get used to the smell. But no matter how used to it you got, the fact remained that this was not a heartwarming odor.

Those who hunt through literature for themes, leitmotifs and symbolism will have a field day with this novel. Decades of field days, in fact. One of my favourite recurring images is the extended metaphor of passages, closed and open: stairways, comas, the town of cats, the mouth of the dead goat, vaginas, the chrysalis. If I were to write a review that did any actual justice to this novel, I would need to write at length about this and many other issues that the novel is obsessed with:

  • religion (a major theme in this novel — cults, witnesses, gods, acolytes: there’s even an immaculate conception)
  • recollections – individual and collective memories – their validity, their power
  • music — Janáček’s Sinfonietta is a recurring piece, but Murakami loves music and the characters are also treated to a wide range of other, mainly Western music, particularly jazz
  • justice – Is Aomame’s vigilante justice right or wrong? Are Tengo’s contributions to Fuka-Eri’s novel justifiable, given the result?
  • truth and apparent truth – “Learning the truth would just hurt you. And once  you do learn the truth, you end up having to take on a certain responsibility for it,” Ushikawa tells Tengo

The novel is set in the year 1984 – deliberately, it is clear, for the echoes of Orwell’s novel by that title. However, it is also a handy year in which to have set this story, because easy solutions to the mysteries that each of the characters is attempting to resolve – right down to the most basic, which is Tengo’s and Aomame’s search for one another – cannot be addressed with DNA testing, cell phone calls, police surveillance or internet connections. Even photos must be taken on film and printed.

There are so many memories from this novel that will last as long as my own memory lasts (I hope. I don’t have time to read it again. Although I’d like to. Right now, in fact. Maybe I will) – the comatose father, the train rides, the house in the mountains where Fuka-Eri lives with her foster father, the television fee collector, the town of cats. I feel as though I’ve been there, but have become disoriented on the journey – I don’t understand exactly where I’ve been, and I know that it was fantasy, but the detail made it real.  That is Murakami’s power.

“If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation,” Tengo’s father tells him. Not everything in 1Q84 can be explained, and it doesn’t need to be.

Part mystery, part fantasy, part romance, part allegory, part everything and anything, IQ84 is in sum a literary tour de force that will have readers and critics talking for a long, long time.

2 Comments
by Mary W. Walters on April 16, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Mary W. Walters on April 16, 2012

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Freedom – Jonathan Franzen

 

Freedom

Jonathan Franzen

HarperCollins Publisher Ltd.

Hardcover, 562 pages

*

Freedom: The rope with which Franzen’s people hang—or save—themselves

One of the many strengths of the great 20th century novelist John Updike was his ability to create gripping, funny, dramatic, heartbreaking, thought-provoking fiction out of domestic relationships involving ordinary people. In this, Jonathan Franzen is a worthy successor and his newest novel, Freedom, has in the minds of many reviewers already accorded him lofty status among the younger fiction writers of the new century.

Freedom concerns the lives of the members of one small family—Walter and Patty Berglund of Minneapolis-St. Paul and their two children Jessica and Joey—and that of the musician Richard Katz, Walter’s best friend since university. After arousing our curiosity with a reference to Walter’s fall from grace twenty years later, the novel opens in the mid-1980s, when Patty and Walter—part of the cutting edge of the revitalization of a central St. Paul neighbourhood—are doing their best to raise their two children perfectly. Their parenting efforts are conducted under the disparaging scrutiny of their neighbours, who feel that Patty in particular is far too earnest and focused on her children—especially her son.

Franzen opens with one of the book’s many funny-because-they’re-so-true lists, in this case concerning the kinds of details that young parents of the Berglunds’ demographic were obsessed with in the Eighties:

[… W]hat about those cloth diapers? Worth the bother? And was it true that you could still get milk delivered in glass bottles? Were the Boy Scouts OK politically? Was bulgur really necessary? Where to recycle batteries? How to respond when a poor person of color accused you of destroying her neighborhood? Was it true that the glaze of old Fiestaware contained dangerous amounts of lead?

But despite how we can relate to the Berglunds’ efforts to “get it right” as parents and community members, we soon share not only the neighbours’ disdain for Patty, but also their subsequent schadenfreude when her precious and precocious teenaged son moves in next door with the only family on the block that even Patty looks down on.

As he proved in The Corrections, one of Franzen’s great strengths as a writer is his ability to remind us not to judge anyone exclusively on the basis of their behaviour. In the second section of the book, we become privy to a memoir that Patty has written in an attempt to heal a depression that began with Joey’s flight from home. We begin to appreciate how she first came to live in the Twin Cities with Walter, with no connection to her family on Long Island or even her friends from university. We learn how her dysfunctional passage through adolescence and young adulthood drove her to the good intentions that have now begun to derail her life and those of her children and her husband. We find ourselves unexpectedly in her corner – and, in my case at least, also admiring the facility with which Franzen can write from a female, first-person point of view.

As the Berglund story continues to unfold, we are also offered the opportunity to see the family’s little world from various other points of view as Walter, Joey and Richard Katz take their turns as protagonists. Katz, like many artists, can love only in the abstract; he may be a song-writer but his real-life relationships with human beings, not to mention with such words as “loyalty” and “honesty,” are precarious at best. The close connection between the vastly different Richard and Walter is important to both of them, but it is complicated by an attraction between Richard and Patty that can only lead to trouble. How this attraction destroys the Berglund family unit becomes the plot’s driving force, leading straight through to the novel’s unexpected and successful conclusion.

Franzen’s choice of the word “freedom” as the title of the novel provides an intriguing thread as the plot unfolds, for it is during their moments of  freedom – sometimes offered to them by those closest to them, sometimes taken, sometimes merely the result of their having too much time on their hands – that each of the characters in turn makes decisions or takes steps that alter their lives permanently. Occasionally the choices they make are ones that enrich their lives, but more often the consequences are negative and far-reaching. Thematically, Franzen also seems intrigued by relationships between people who are in love with people who are not in love with them, and what happens when the objects of their affection stop fighting and succumb.

As Updike did before him, Jonathan Franzen is capturing an era, detailing its public upheavals and personal concerns in ways to which readers can easily relate—at least those of us who have been (white) middle-class adults since the century began. Freedom is a long book, much of it focused on personal minutae, and it is a testament to Franzen’s talent that its pace rarely lags. Inasmuch as fiction writers can contribute as much as their non-fiction colleagues to the chronicle of the times in which they live (which obviously is true), Franzen is a worthy contributor to ours.

2 Comments
by Mary W. Walters on February 13, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Mary W. Walters on February 13, 2011

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The Act of Love – Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson
The Act of Love
Penguin Canada, 2009
Softcover, 308 pages

The Masochist: Inside Out

 

Well, here is a peculiar situation. I have just read a book I didn’t much like, one that left me with somewhat ambivalent feelings about the man who wrote it. But that book has also tempted me to read more works by the same author: I’m fairly sure I’ll like his others better.

The Act of Love is the tenth novel and 14th book by British writer and academic Howard Jacobson. My interest was piqued by an interview I read last fall with Jacobson about the book, and I was surprised I hadn’t heard of him before. He is an award-winning author whose 2006 novel Kalooki Nights was long-listed for the Man Booker prize, and he’s a regular contributor of opinion pieces to major British newspapers. According to Wikipedia, his propensity for creating fictional doppelgangers of himself and for writing comic novels involving Jews have earned him comparisons to Philip Roth.

The protagonist of The Act of Love is the singularly unsympathetic owner of an antiquarian bookshop in the Marylebone district of London by the name of Felix Quinn. Felix has come to believe that the search for pain is fundamental to human nature, deriving his evidence primarily (and at some times more convincingly than others) from the literary and visual arts. He also believes that of all human activity, love offers the most opportunity for pain, and he sets out to explore his own masochistic tendencies by turning himself into a cuckold. In the depths of misery, jealousy and humiliation he is certain he will find fulfillment.

“No man has ever loved a woman,” he insists, “and not imagined her in the arms of someone else…. No man is ever happy—truly genitally happy, happy at the very heart of himself as a husband—until he has proof positive that another man is f***ing her.” [asterisks mine]

Previously unlucky in love, Felix has managed to win the sophisticated, aloof and beautiful Marisa away from her first husband—partly thanks (he says) to his exceptional ability to carry on an intelligent discussion, and partly because he knows the location of the neighbourhood’s best restaurants. Marisa is so lovely and so self-possessed that one would think that the very fact of being in love with her would in and of itself have been enough to bring Felix to his knees in exquisite agony. However, he discovers that the usual piquancies of married life will not be enough for him when, during their honeymoon in Cuba, Marisa falls ill and is attended by a physician who touches her breasts in Felix’s presence as part of the examination. This sets Felix off on his marital mission (or obsession)—one that eclipses all of his other interests—which is to secure the perfect lover for his wife.

After a few false starts, during which Felix leaves the selection of the lovers to Marisa, he decides that a man named Marius, whom he has previously met at a funeral in Shropshire and who has now come to live in Marylebone, will be the ideal instrument to assist in his own betrayal.

“He was handsome, if you find high and hawkish men handsome. As a non-predatory man myself, I felt intimidated by him. But that’s part of what being handsome means, isn’t it: instilling fear.”

Felix is no voyeur: he has no interest in actually seeing his wife physically engage in the act of love with another man; rather he gains his pleasure (or at least the pain that masochists define as pleasure) first by imagining and later by hearing Marisa relate the intimate details of her passionate afternoons with Marius.

“I ceded preference to Marius. I liked following him. It satisfied my sulphurous desire to be demeaned, the last in a line of obscene pursuit—Marisa laying down her scent, Marius tracking her, and I trailing in the rear of them both, like a wounded dog.”

How charming.

The perambulations Felix must go through to bring this relationship to fruition (according to the rules he has invented for his game, Marius and Marisa must fall for one another of their own accord) would surely be enough to discourage most mortals, even the obsessive ones. But Felix takes as much pleasure from the challenges of accomplishing his mission as he does in its achievement.

As his scheme gradually unfolds, Felix regales us with a list of his literary and artistic predecessors—which includes not only those with clearly masochistic perspectives, such as Georges Bataille, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and the artist Pierre Klossowski, but also the less obviously complicit—Vladimir Nabakov, James Joyce, George Eliot and Charles Dickens to name a few. Felix even argues at some length and with a fair degree of success that Shakespeare’s Othello was driven by a lust similar to his own (‘“I had been happy if the general camp had tasted [Desdemona’s] sweet body,’ Othello says”). And yet we feel that the most appropriate fictional counterpart to Felix’s efforts to deploy Marisa and Marius in the fulfillment of his twisted fantasies can be found in Dr. Hannibal Lecter (to whom he also refers)—for his erudition as well as his cruelty. Felix Quinn is so intelligent and sly, and so manipulative, that we suspect that he may even be aware that he is a literary invention himself, and be looking forward to assuming a position of prominence among the great sexual masochists of world fiction.

Felix is a highly unreliable narrator. He keeps readers on our guard, constantly forcing us to step back from the tale to assess whether the information he conveys to us is something he could actually know or not. By the end of the novel we are so uncertain of our footing that if Felix were to tell us that the entire affair he has so carefully engineered between Marisa and Marius had been a fabrication (and indeed, he does hint that this may be the case), we would not doubt him for a moment.

Well, at least not at first. Later, maybe we would. Later still, maybe not again.

As uncertain as we may be about the reliability of the stories Felix tells us, The Act of Love is a novel, not a reality show, and we never feel (as we might with a newer or less talented writer) as though our ambivalence been achieved with anything less than deliberate manipulation on the part of the author. Furthermore, as unpleasant as Felix is, Jacobson has created a highly sympathetic character in Marisa: beyond her beauty, aloofness and betrayal of her husband is an obviously kind and conscientious person, a woman who protects those she loves even from her own pain. It is not easy to create a sympathetic character through the eyes of an unsympathetic one: it takes talent to do that.

The scope of the philosophical deliberations into which Jacobson invites us are also tantalizing. Among the moral issues we consider as we read The Act of Love is whether Marisa’s willing participation in the betrayal makes Felix less of a scoundrel for having engineered it. Further, we wonder whether Felix should still be defined as a masochist if he has facilitated the affair…does he not thereby become a sadist? Finally we ask ourselves whether Marisa’s relating the details of her dalliances in Felix’s ear, because she knows it gives him pleasure, does not transform her betrayal into its own act of love.

The questions and issues Jacobson raises are intriguing on artistic as well as ethical levels. At one point, Felix asks us to consider whether some of the great novelists have not been masochists. He compares himself, for example, with Thomas Hardy who first creates the lovely, trusting, innocent Tess—and then defiles and destroys her.

Ultimately, the formality of Felix’s prose and his endless self-analysis create such a distance between him and the reader that we feel no empathy or even sympathy for him, nor do we experience any satisfaction when he is finally discovered and handed his just desserts. But Jacobson is a writer of no small talent and interest. His narrator is very funny when he’s not being repulsive, and there is a way in which this entire novel can be read as a black comedy — a twisted mockery of romance.

And so, although in the end I wasn’t all that keen on The Act of Love, I’m glad I read it. Next I think I’ll try Kalooki Nights.

2 Comments
by Mary W. Walters on July 15, 2009  •  Permalink
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Posted by Mary W. Walters on July 15, 2009

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Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates

Richard Yates
Revolutionary Road
Vintage Contemporaries, 2008 (original copyright 1961)
Softcover, 355 pages

Abandon Hope

The back cover of the 2008 edition of Revolutionary Road features a blurb by Kurt Vonnegut, in which he declares the novel to be “The Great Gatsby of [Vonnegut's] time.”

Unfortunately for readers of Yates’s book, the mid-Fifties did not hold a candle to the Roaring Twenties in terms of the pleasures that accrued to the voyeur. At least in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel the excesses and hare-brained escapades of Daisy and Tom Buchanan, not to mention Jay Gatsby himself, gave us some relief from the necessary consideration of the emptiness of their lives.

In Revolutionary Road, by contrast, the lives of the protagonists amount to an unrelieved stretch of monochromatic dullness from the first page to the last. Their story made me wonder (not for the first time) how partners in any marriage ever manage to raise a family, socialize with other couples, remain faithful to one another, stay employed for long enough to secure their pensions, and grow into states of gracious elderhood without flinging themselves from high places in the face of the absolutely devastating boredom that must distinguish at least 90 percent of their waking hours.

Not that this observation is without merit, of course: life can be deadly dull, predictable and mundane, even (or perhaps especially) for the truly gifted and extraordinary. Just as, even for those who expect nothing, it can have moments of high drama, excitement, satisfaction and even joy. In all lives there is a blend, and that Richard Yates chose to present the horrors of ennui nearly undiluted brings me up against the morality not so much of his characters or his novel, but of him.

In brief (as many of you will know from the movie, which I have not yet seen), Revolutionary Road is the story of a young couple—April and Frank Wheeler—who launch their marriage under the delusion that they are vastly superior intellectually and in every other way to their contemporaries. She is an actress in the making, he is languishing almost ironically in a dead-end job with a company that once employed his father—which must mean, by his own definition, that it is far beneath his dignity. The Wheelers view their newlywed circumstances as temporary: when their gifts are recognized by a grateful world, they will soar free of all things mundane and live rich and interesting lives. Never for them the tedium of “the American dream,” which they superciliously envision as a home in the suburbs and a pair of children.

But then April and Frank conceive a child, and before they know it they are beginning to resemble that couple they have always despised. They even have a boy after the girl: how much more American-dreamlike can it get? The inevitable next step in the erosion of their vision is the purchase of a house in Connecticut in which to raise their children. The name of the street encapsulates the desperate bleakness of their lives, and forms the title of the novel.

Frank and April manage to sustain their illusions for a little while longer after moving to Connecticut by attaching themselves to Shep and Milly Campbell, fellow residents of their new neighbourhood—who (for the sake of the friendship, one suspects, and not out of any real conviction) are willing to go along with the conceit that they are all meant for better things. The two couples spend their evenings and weekends drinking together and dissing the other residents in their community. But when they put on a little-theatre play which turns out to be so bad that people start leaving at the intermission, reality begins to insinuate itself—first between the Campbells and the Wheelers, and then between Frank and April.

Once they begin to realize that they are no different (read “better”) than any other couple, the only recourse that remains to the Wheelers (aside from facing the truth) is for each of them to believe that as individuals they must be superior to the other. That new conviction seals their fate, causing both of them to start making decisions that have nothing to do with preserving their marriage. (Preserving the larger family seems a non-issue: throughout the novel: the Wheeler children are almost irrelevant. They appear onstage from time to time as needed, but Yates makes no effort to engage our sympathy for them. “From a distance, all children’s voices sound the same,” April observes coolly at one point.)

Before they are through (and when they are through they are truly and utterly done) both Frank and April manage to debase themselves and to betray not only their marriage but their friendships and their pasts.

I cannot think of another book I have read whose setting, characters and plot were so completely, almost terrifyingly, depressing—and that includes Under The Volcano and The Road. At Grand Central Station at the end of his commute one morning, Frank looks around himself , contrasting his life (which has suddenly and temporarily been brightened and energized by an utterly unrealistic and foredoomed plan that he and April have hatched to escape it) to those of the others he sees around him:

How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their gray-flecked crew cuts and their button-down collars and their brisk little hurrying feet. There were endless desperate swarms of them hurrying through the station and the streets, and an hour from now they would all be still. The waiting midtown office buildings would swallow them up and contain them, so that to stand in one tower looking out across the canyon to another would be to inspect a great silent insectarium displaying hundreds of tiny pink men in white shirts, forever shifting papers and frowning into telephones, acting out their passionate little dumb show under the supreme indifference of the rolling spring clouds.

Many years ago I read On Moral Fiction by John Gardner, in which he argued that the writer has an ethical responsibility to push away the chaos that distinguishes so much of human life. Revolutionary Road fails to meet one basic requirement I have since developed as part of my own literary theory, which is that major characters who are doomed must at least be given a way out—and given at least an option to accept it or decline it. April and Frank have been given none. Their fate is sealed by the world in which they live, and they are not bright or imaginative enough to save themselves from it.

My reaction to Revolutionary Road may sound to some as unaware and witless as telling Phillip Larkin to “cheer up.” They may see this novel as a contribution to the “slice of life” variety of literature, and be satisfied with that. Not me. Yates’s writing (unlike Larkin’s) is not of a calibre to lift the story above the mundane world that it describes, nor does the novel provide the reader with any perspective or at least wry wariness that might serve as a tool for addressing his or her own reality.

Long after I finished reading the desperate tale of Frank and April Wheeler, I continued to ask myself whether the stultifying and horrible dilemma in which this couple found itself (which is, keep in mind, no more or less than the reality of many marriages) even merited the attention of a novel. I do not believe it did.

7 Comments
by Mary W. Walters on February 10, 2009  •  Permalink
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Posted by Mary W. Walters on February 10, 2009

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White Noise – Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo
White Noise
Penguin Books, 1986
Softcover, 326 pages

Laughing all the way to the end

 

Recent comments about White Noise (first published in 1984) have pointed out Don DeLillo’s prescience in relation to the acts of terrorism and environmental disaster—even school shootings–that have riddled American history in the interim. I contend that if you try to list every possible potential cause of death and you have a great imagination, you are certain to sound as though you can predict the future. As they say, even clocks that have stopped ticking are accurate twice every day.

Not that DeLillo should be in any way compared to a stopped clock. If anything, the writing in this novel can best be described as “timeless,” dealing as it does with the ultimate ironic quandary of all thinking humans—i.e., how our awareness of our own mortality can overwhelm our attempts to fully be alive.

A friend of mine bought White Noise for me in 1987 and it’s been sitting on my shelf ever since. I felt no reluctance to read it—I always thought I would. I just didn’t get around to it till now. (I have quite a few books like that: fortunately for my relationship with her, the same friend didn’t give all of them to me.)

When I finally did start to read DeLillo’s eighth novel (he’s published six more since), I regretted that I had left the pleasure so long—but it is hard to stay regretful when you are enjoying yourself so much. DeLillo is a wonderfully funny writer and several times I had to stop reading White Noise on the bus because I was afraid my bursts of laughter might irritate (or alarm) my fellow travelers. But he is also insightful and compassionate, and his deep love for the characters he has created—quirky though they all are—is one of the great strengths of this novel.

Jack Gladney, the novel’s protagonist, is a professor who has cleverly created a scholarly niche for himself by establishing the first Hitler-studies program at a U.S. university. Jack is also the custodial parent of three offspring from his previous four marriages (which included two to the same woman). He and his fifth wife, Babette, are raising these three and two of hers, and all of the children, like Jack and Babette themselves, are masterful fictional creations. I grew particularly fond of Heinrich, Jack’s 14-year-old son, who in typical fashion for his age defeats every opinion his father ventures with his deadly adolescent capacity for fact-retention.

The long-suffering Babette (“tall and fairly ample. There is a heft and girth to her”) stoically trudges through her days, mothering the children, looking after Jack, trying to tame her figure by running up and down stadium steps every morning, and teaching old people how to keep their balance. (Which occasions one of my many many favourite one-liners in this novel: “We seem to believe we can ward off death by following the rules of good grooming.”)

Babette is being watched very closely by her daughter, Denise, who believes her mother is popping mood-altering pills. The girl nags Jack into investigating what Babette might be taking, which leads him first to attempts to get some of the drug for himself, and then to examine her relationship with her “pusher”— adding another whole dimension to this intriguing plot.

First and foremost, this book is about death and all the subtle ways it can sneak up on us: Jack and Babette are both obsessed with mortality in general, and specifically with which of them will die first. But the novel is also about the white noise of the title. The tv and radio are always on, always providing a backdrop to the routine of the Gladney family—from the drama of breaking news to the inanity of commercials. Those same media focus the family’s alarmed attention during the central event of the novel—which is the accumulation of a black cloud of deadly chemicals over Iron City following a train accident. In that pre-Internet era, the citizens of Iron City are evacuated to makeshift accommodations just outside of town with little real sense of what is happening to them, how serious the risk may be, or how far the the danger extends.

During the crisis, Jack is exposed briefly to the vapours from the poisonous cloud: the potential effects on his health seem to be largely unknown but are much theorized, and everyone in authority seems to agree that at some point in his life, Jack is going to die. His new mortality may differ very little in actual substance from his mortality before the toxic exposure, but his fears of death are mightily compounded–and that makes a big difference.

There are so many quotable quotes in this book that there was no point in copying them all down. I’m sure it is more pleasurable anyway to simply re-read the novel every couple of years and let those brilliant thoughts, observations, and witty lines rise up toward you and surprise you once again.

However, I did find one entire passage near the end of the book so delightful—and so typical of the wry knowledge and humour that distinguishes White Noise, that I reproduce it here in part. It is spoken by a nun who, Jack Gladney discovers, does not believe in God. In response to Jack’s amazement that members of religious orders may not be believers, she says,

Hell is when no one believes. There must always be believers. Fools, idiots, those who hear voices, those who speak in tongues. We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible. You are sure that you are right but you don’t want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools. We are your fools, your madwomen rising at dawn to pray, lighting candles, asking statues for good health, long life.

It is no wonder White Noise was recently named one of the top works of fiction of the past 25 years in a poll by the New York Times. It is powerful, brilliant and courageous—not to mention funny as hell.

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by Mary W. Walters on January 17, 2009  •  Permalink
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Posted by Mary W. Walters on January 17, 2009

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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin
Vintage International/Random Books, 1997
Softcover, 607 pages

Sinking Deep into A Murakami World

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle starts out as a mystery story. Its protagonist, Toru Okada, 30, has just left his job in favour of lounging around the house, performing a few domestic duties and thinking about what he should do with his life. He is roused to action only reluctantly by the disappearance of his cat (which is named after his detested brother-in-law Noboru Wataya), but his investigative initiatives take on more purpose and direction when his wife Kumiko also disappears.

As Kumiko’s absence extends from days to weeks to months, Toru attempts so sift the facts surrounding her departure out of a series of surreal encounters with people who may or may not have information that he needs—including an anonymous siren who attempts to seduce him on the phone; a clairvoyant named Malta Kano who wears a red vinyl hat (and her sister Creta, who was once “defiled” by Wataya); a bright but emotionally detached 16-year-old neighbour, May Kasahara, who is responsible for a recent motorcycle accident that killed her boyfriend and slightly injured her; a henchman of Wataya’s; a man with no face; and a lieutenant named Mamiya who comes to Toru’s house bearing a gift for him from Mr. Honda–an old friend of Kumiko’s family who has just died.

Gradually Toru learns that Kumiko, to whom he has been married for six years but from whom he has been growing more and more estranged for reasons he does not understand, is alive, that she has left him by choice, and that she refuses to return. He resolves to get her back, a decision that requires him to dig deeply—gradually excavating a good deal of her family history—to find out why she left. Toru’s oblique, Zen-like journey to restore his marriage ultimately forces him to learn to recognize himself and Kumiko in a variety of guises, to take on no less a challenge than the wresting of good from evil, and to attempt to learn on an individual basis a few of those lessons of history that seem to elude civilizations as a whole.

*

The war stories Mr. Honda and Lieutenant Mamiya tell Toru Okada are central to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Toru thinks of them at first as though they were “fairy tales,” but in fact these sections of the book have a realism to them that sets them apart in tone and quality from the frame of the story–the surreal present-time search by Toru for Kumiko. The stories Mr. Honda and Lt. Mamiya relate are vivid, difficult to read, and unforgettable.

During the war, Mr. Honda was a noncommissioned officer with the Kwantung Army. He lost most of his hearing in a battle against the Russians at Nomonhan, on the border between Outer Mongolia and Manchuria. Later in his life, he became a fortune-teller—his talents for prognostication having been apparent even during the war. During several visits to Mr. Honda’s home early in his marriage, visits that occurred at the insistence of Kumiko’s father, Toru not only became steeped in details about a Nomonhan—a battle the Japanese had fought with great bravery and ferocity but had ultimately lost—he also received a personal warning from Mr. Honda to be “careful about water.”

When Mr. Honda dies, he leaves a request that Lt. Mamiya, with whom Honda had worked on a secret mission during the war and subsequently stayed in touch, deliver a wrapped box to Toru Okada. This turns out to have been a pretext (the box is empty) which facilitates Mamiya’s continuing the war story that Mr. Honda has begun. The story reveals truths about Kumiko’s family to Toru that he could not otherwise have learned, and thereby indirectly helps him solve the mystery of Kumiko’s disappearance.

One of the most dramatic incidents Mamiya describes involves his being left for dead at the bottom of a dry well by a Russian soldier during the mission in Manchuria. His description of what it was like to spend 24 hours in that well, and to assume that he would die there, haunts Toru (and the reader) for the remainder of the book.

Now and then, I heard the sound of the wind. As it moved across the surface of the earth, the wind made an uncanny sound at the mouth of the well, a sound like the moan of a woman in tears in a far-off world.

But after a cold, desolate night, suddenly “the light of the sun shot down from the opening of the well like some kind of revelation. […] The well was filled with brilliant light. A flood of light. […] The darkness and cold were swept away in a moment, and warm gentle sunlight enveloped my naked body.”

Toru is, in fact, so overcome by the imagery—in all its spiritual and redemptive, if fleeting, glory—that he climbs down into a dry well at an abandoned house at the end of his own street as part of his search for the truths about himself and Kumiko that he is unable to discover on the surface of the planet.

Haruki Murakami is a brilliant writer. His imagination is apparently both boundless and utterly grounded, giving his fiction layer after layer of meaning and reverberation. His deployment of precise detail creates a realistic atmosphere out of the most bizarre and unlikely circumstances – not only when he is depicting scenes of war in excruciating detail, but also in conveying the bizarre and almost unbelievable minutae of a mundane if ludicrous life: such as the day Toru goes to work with May Kasahara, who is employed by a toupee company, and spends the entire afternoon helping her count the number of men entering and leaving a subway station (A) who are really bald, (B) whose hair is very thin, or (C) who have lost a little hair.

When the Mistukoshi clock across the street signalled four o’clock we ended our survey and went back to the Dairy Queen for a cup of coffee. It had not been strenuous work but I found my neck and shoulders strangely stiff.

With this kind of carefully rendered detail we are able to imagine each scene clearly, so how can we possibly doubt the basic premise of the oddball situations in which Toru becomes involved? On every page of this long and fascinating novel, Murakami uses detail to build a credibility that ultimately sustain a whole world of increasingly improbable circumstances. On both superficial and metaphysical planes, these circumstances lead, gradually–and perhaps surprisingly–to an entirely satisfying conclusion.

*

In his lassitude at the outset of the novel, Toru begins to notice a bird that makes a wind-up sound in a tree near his house, and connects that bird in his mind to a stone bird near the dry well in the abandoned house at the end of his street. Soon after that he is implicated in the bird imagery himself when May Kasahuri begins to call him “Mr. Wind-Up Bird.” In stellar post-modernist fashion there is a novel within this novel that is also called The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but Murakami avoids the cool ironic distance that characterizes so much post-modernist literature; we are connected emotionally to Toru through his despair over his lost love. He cares about Kumiko, and we care about him.

Like some other great works of literature I can think of—Under the Volcano, Faust and Possession, for example—The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is like a deep, mysterious, often-frightening dream. It cries out for some sort of Jungian interpretation, and leaves the reader changed, unable to leave it behind. Like those other books as well, because of the power of this novel’s enchantment, the connections it makes with the darker parts of the reader’s own psyche, and the meaning it casts on the world outside its pages, there is something enticing and even exciting about the inability to shake it off. Like a strangely seductive nightmare that is founded on moments of real terror, the temptation is to pick it up once more–right now—to re-enter the dream again.

* * * * *

(Note: I have just finished reading Haruki Murakami’s newest book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir. If you are a novelist or a runner—or, better yet, both—you will love it.)

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by Mary W. Walters on December 13, 2008  •  Permalink
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Posted by Mary W. Walters on December 13, 2008

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Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me – Javier Marías

Javier Marías
Tomorrow In The Battle Think On Me
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
The Harvill Press, 1998
Softcover, 311 pages

An Inconvenient Death

First published in Spanish by Editorial Anagrama in 1995, Javier Marías’s ninth novel (third to be published in English translation) is attracting word-of-mouth attention a decade after its release in English. Last winter, I received recommendations to read it from two friends who do not know one another, both of whose tastes in literature I respect.

Now I pass the recommendation on to you.

While Tomorrow In The Battle Think On Me is not a simple read, it is a compelling one. Written for the most part without paragraph breaks for dialogue, the book comprises more than 300 pages of fairly dense text, to all of which the reader needs to pay close attention or find herself marooned mid-page wondering where she is. Not only does Marías create a stream of consciousness for his narrator, his narrator also invents them for other characters in the book—and then refers back to those invented imaginings, leaving the inattentive reader to need suddenly to start flipping back through pages and pages of text to find where the perspective has changed.

Fortunately, attentive reading of Marías’ writing brings innumerable rewards.

One of the reasons this novel is so compelling is its set-up. Here is the opening sentence:

No one ever expects that they might some day find themselves with a dead woman in their arms, a woman whose face they will never see again, but whose name they will remember.

With this thought, the narrator, Victor Francés, embarks on a serious (well, perhaps at times only semi-serious) reflection on the host of ways in which one may die at an ignoble and perhaps even embarrassing moment in one’s life, and how the news of such a death may be greeted by the people who knew the now-deceased, depending on how they felt about that person.

We learn, very gradually, detail by detail, how Francés (just now it seems from the way the story is recounted, just a bit earlier this evening) was about to make love to a beautiful young woman, Marta Téllez —how they patiently passed the time until her small son finally went to sleep, how they made their way to the bedroom and into the bed, how they began to undress one another, and then how she began to feel unwell. Soon afterward, she died.

This has turned into a very difficult situation for Francés. He knew the woman very little; her husband is away in England: What is he to do? Whom should he notify? He’d prefer to simply flee, but if he leaves the apartment without telling someone, what will happen to the child?

The convoluted set of circumstances that are precipitated by the death of Marta Téllez turn Tomorrow in the Battle into an intriguing mystery novel that is also a poetic and philosophical exploration of (among numerous other issues) the perplexing forms that life, death, memory and love can take— not to mention the ins and outs of Spanish government bureaucracy.

Tomorrow in the Battle is a book that focuses our attention on connections. Francés is obsessed, for example, with the relationship that he imagines exists between people who have slept with the same people – with his connection, therefore, to Marta’s husband, and with his relationship to the men who have been with his own wife since their marriage came apart.

It is a book about the reliability of memory: at one point Francés—now not having slept for several days—encounters a prostitute who resembles his ex-wife, whom he hasn’t seen in months, and he begins to wonder if perhaps it is his wife. He offers her money, she takes it, he engineers a quiet moment in his vehicle so that she may earn the money he has given her—still not certain if it is Celia or not.

And it is a book, of course, about vengeance and accountability and—less predictably—the vicissitudes of fate.

Tomorrow in the Battle is an engrossing read, not only because of our curiosity to find out what happens next, but because of the compelling nature of Marías’ use of detail—the slow way he reveals each thought, each scene. Immersed in the narrator’s increasingly edgy stream of consciousness we lose, as he obviously has, the ability to tell the difference between the significant and the insignificant detail:

His [Déan’s, Marta’s husband’s] face grew even more sombre, his energetic chin turned away as if in flight, his beer-coloured eyes glinting wildly as they had when he had left the restaurant and Téllez [Marta’s father] wouldn’t let him pay the bill, but we were not lit now by the greenish light of a storm, only by electric light and, outside, fog which, in the city, looks yellowish or whitish or reddish, it depends.

Marías has been acclaimed by reviewers around the world, and he has been tagged for a future Nobel Prize in the pages of Guardian Books. His novels have won nine international awards, been translated into 34 languages, and sold at least five million copies.

I think he should be even better known. So read this book. If you like it, pass the word along.

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by Mary W. Walters on September 22, 2008  •  Permalink
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Posted by Mary W. Walters on September 22, 2008

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The Enchantress of Florence – Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie
The Enchantress of Florence
Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2008
Hardcover, 356 pages

Mostly Bewitched, But Also A Bit Bewildered

 

I am an enthusiastic fan

I am an enthusiastic fan of Salman Rushdie’s writing. I have read most of his novels and many of his essays. In my estimation, he is one of the top five fiction writers in the English-speaking world, and the publication of his latest novel is an event I greet with credit card extended: there will be no waiting for the paperback for me.

Consequently, when I say that The Enchantress of Florence is not Rushdie’s greatest book, my assessment is based on a whole different measuring system than I would apply to almost any other writer. I have no doubt that this man’s grocery lists are of superior literary quality to much of the writing being published today, and my remarks are offered in that context.

The six pages of bibliography at the end of this novel, which is Rushdie’s tenth, indicate the amount of research that went into The Enchantress of Florence. The resources that have been consulted span subjects from the obscure to the panoramic—Italian witchcraft, the Medici, the Renaissance, the history of India, the Ottoman Empire, the reign of the Mughals and the life of Amerigo Vespucci being just a few examples.

This reference list may also suggest the source of the novel’s most significant flaw: there is just too much unanchored detail in this book. Those of us who are not steeped in the history in which Rushdie has immersed himself (which, at least in the Western world, must include most of us) frequently find ourselves politically and even geographically adrift. The construction of entire paragraphs out of details that are basically irrelevant to the plot do little to draw the reader in:

“[Akbar] also sprang by direct descent from the loins of the man whose name was Iron. In the language of his forefathers the word for iron was timur. Timur-e-Lang, the limping iron man. Timur, who destroyed Damascus and Baghdad, who left Delhi in ruins, haunted by fifty thousand ghosts. Akbar would have preferred not to have had Timur for a forebear. He had stopped speaking Timur’s language, Chaghatai, named after one of the sons of Genghis Khan…” (etc, etc)

I do not expect to be a passive participant when I am reading, and I often have atlases and other references at hand so that I can better understand the context of a novel, but in this case I would have been grateful for some help from the author: the weaving in of a few explanations regarding the physical extent of the Mughal empire (at its peak in the mid-1500s, which includes the time frame of this novel, it encompassed 1.5 million square miles of the Indian subcontinent), historical connections among the Turks, Persians and Mongols, the history of contact between European royalty and the Mughals, and a few other bits of background would have been a help. And where in the world was Sikri, the city that Akbar built, which is where most of the “present” time frame of the novel takes place? (I know the answer now. I recommend that you find it out before you start to read.) A map or two would have also been most welcome.

The need to wade through paragraphs

The need to wade through paragraphs of historical detail which offer all of the excitement of the “begats” in Genesis may be a chore that is reluctantly assumed, but it is also one that is forgiven each time we come across an example of Rushdie’s flair for the evocative, of which there are hundreds in this book. Take his description of emperor Akbar’s longing for genuine intimacy. Akbar is the central character of this novel—a man so powerful, Rushdie tells us, that despite the fact that his name means ‘great,’ it was considered no redundancy to call him “Akbar the Great.”

After a battle in which Akbar kills an opponent with whom he might under other circumstances have enjoyed a stimulating conversation, he reflects on the isolation his eminence has conferred upon him. He considers the joy he would feel were he able speak of himself in the first person singular rather than the formal “we,” or to be addressed informally by others. “Might that little word, that tu turn out to be the most arousing word in the language?” he wonders. “‘I,’ he practiced under his breath. Here ‘I’ am. ‘I’ love you. Come to ‘me’.”

In those few sentences, the reader gains an appreciation not only for Akbar’s almost mythic stature and the loneliness to which it has condemned him, but also the extent of his longing to be loved by someone who is his equal. Akbar has gathered around him the most brilliant and talented men as his advisors, and the most beautiful and interesting women as his wives, but he remains a man without intellectual or visionary equal. Even Jodha, the woman he loves most in the world, the “scholar of his need,” is unable to appreciate, much less satisfy, his longing for fundamental intimacy—which is ironic since the emperor has invented her.

Jodha embodies Akbar’s concept of perfection—“She was immortal, because she had been created from love.” She haunts the corridors of his palace, freed by her provenance from the confines of the women’s quarters but also utterly alone, ignored by the rest of the court when Akbar is away at war, envied and hated because of her pre-eminence in his affections when he is at home.

Into this situation

Into this situation comes a man from the west who calls himself the Mogor dell’Amore, the mughal of love, who claims to be the emperor’s uncle. To support his claim, he begins to relate the story of the Enchantress of Florence, aka Lady Black Eyes (aka Qara Köz, aka Angelica)—a woman with superhuman powers who was considered the most beautiful woman in the world, and was beloved by a succession of powerful rulers and worshipped by entire populations.

Qara Köz was a magician and a temptress and clearly her powers have extended beyond the grave for, as the story of Mogor progresses, everyone in Sikri falls under the spell of the Enchantress. Even Akbar’s love for Jodha is fatally compromised. Furthermore, in the Mogor, the emperor believes he may have found a man who, unlike his sons, will be able to provide him with a trustworthy and appropriate successor. (“His sons would grow up into glittering heroes with excellent moustaches and they would turn against him, he could already see it in their eyes. Among their kind…it was customary for children to plot against their crowned sires, to attempt to dethrone them, to imprison them in their own fortresses or on islands in lakes or to execute them with their own swords.”) This kind of thinking about the Mogor does not contribute to peace in Akbar’s kingdom, of course, and it ultimately leads to power struggles, wars and the devastation of Akbar’s wondrous city.

It is a hallmark of Rushdie’s narrative style that magic realism meets myth meets history in a way that allows the reader to catch glimpses of the possible through the gauze of the fantastic. In one scene, the kingdom’s pre-eminent vocalist is badly burned when he sings the song of fire—the Deepak raag—so beautifully that he causes the lamps to burst into flames. “In the ecstasy of the performance he hadn’t noticed his own body beginning to show scorch marks as it heated up under the fierce blaze of his genius.” The magical is always deliciously inseparable from the real, and both metaphorical and concrete interpretations come together seamlessly. In the case of Jodha, not only are we uncertain whether the other members of the emperor’s court actually see her or whether it is merely Akbar’s power which causes them the desperate need to do so, we also understand that it doesn’t really matter one way or the other.

This is a book about

This is a book about the nature of love, but it also reflects deeply on the importance of narrative. The redemptive, transformative and even life-saving power of storytelling is a subject that has intrigued Rushdie in the past, and he returns to the theme again and again throughout this book. When the Mogor is imprisoned in a dungeon, we are told that “he felt his story slipping away from him, becoming inconsequential, ceasing to be. He had no story. There was no story. He was not a man.” The sign of his return to life and health is the return of his voice. The ability to tell story is essential, Rushdie suggests, to being human and alive.

Not only does Rushdie explore the power of story, he also shows by example how powerful a strong narrative can be. Although the novel’s multiplicity of facts are (I am sure) historically correct, those same details also so successfully support the metaphorical and magical aspects of the narrative in such a way that they all come together with a satisfying chunk at the end—like the grooves and tongues in a solidly constructed cabin.

Rushdie’s strengths as a story-teller and a writer are everywhere in The Enchantress. He is open-minded, wise and visionary. He is hugely intelligent, of course: trite is not his currency. He deals in larger issues (“Maybe there was no true religion,” Akbar considers. And later, he says, “Only when we accept the truths of death can we begin to learn the truths of being alive.”)

In The Enchantress of Florence, as always, Rushdie is the consummate feminist. His female characters are strong, resilient, inventive—even inspiring to the female reader, which is always a nice bonus in a book by a male writer. Whether they live in 16th-century Florence or 21st-century New York, Rushdie’s women always take a firm hand in deciding their own fates.

As Sir Rushdie himself has stated recently to the press, he’s also funny: “When [Akbar’s aunt] Gulbadan started climbing the family tree like an agitated parrot there was no telling how many branches she would need to settle on briefly before she decided to rest.”

His writing appeals through its liberal perspectives, its powerfully strong characters, and the way he makes words dance. But perhaps what I like best about Rushdie’s writing is its energy. It is always clear that he is excited about his story, and that he exults in the challenge of getting it down for us to read. In his role as author, he is as enchanting as is Lady Black Eyes.

By the way

By the way, each chapter in The Enchantress of Florence takes as its title the chapter’s first few words. I like that idea. It draws the reader in.

In fact, I like a lot about this book. (More, now that I’ve reread sections in order to write this essay than I did before I started!) But if you are afraid of reading Rushdie, as many people are—perhaps concerned he will be too difficult—don’t start here. Read The Ground Beneath Her Feet, or Shalimar the Clown. They are better introductions to the innumerable pleasures of reading Rushdie.

The Enchantress of Florence is a book for those already held in Rushdie’s sway. These are the readers who are prepared to pick away the inessential threads until they find the tapestry. The tapestry itself is marvelous, and more than worth the effort.

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by Mary W. Walters on August 24, 2008  •  Permalink
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Posted by Mary W. Walters on August 24, 2008

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Netherland – Joseph O’Neill

Joseph O’Neill
Netherland
Pantheon, 2008
Hardcover, 256 pages

Creating The Centre That Holds

I loved Netherland. Joseph O’Neill is a master of the craft of fiction at its most magical—not in the way of John Banville or Doug Self, for example, by calling attention to his own talents at prestidigitation, but by making them invisible. The insights of Hans van den Broek, O’Neill’s narrator in this novel, into the lives of family and friends, as well as those for whom he must imagine lives—his co-workers and his fellow denizens of the Chelsea Hotel, for example—are brilliant enough to cast light on the experiences of all of us, as are the webs he weaves to show how all lives in all times may be connected to one another in unexpected ways.

In essence, Netherland is a story about a man whose wife leaves him in the physical and emotional upheavals that follow the events of September 11, 2001 in New York City. Van den Broek was born in Holland, where he grew up in a relatively bucolic setting, doted upon by his mother, becoming, among other things, an avid and—we gather—fairly skilled player of the complex, drawn-out game of cricket. His wife Rachel is a native of London, where as an adult van den Broek has established a solid career in equities analysis. They have moved together to NYC on the only kind of lark that could meet the requirements of a financial analyst–both of them are capable of earning excellent livings, they can afford to live where they want to live (TriBeCa), and NYC is not so foreign to them that they are unable to easily adapt. But then dawns the morning of 9/11 and by day’s end everything that is not dead or destroyed is fractured—including the relationship between Hans and Rachel. Their apartment is near Ground Zero, and they move into a suite in the Chelsea Hotel during the ensuing clean-up; it is from those quarters that their fractures become palpable, and Rachel decides—for political as well as emotional reasons—that she must leave New York.

Rachel takes their son back to her parents’ home in London; Hans stays in New York, hoping his family will return and everything will go back the way it was, and in the meantime flying back and forth for unsatisfactory visits to London every other weekend. He lives out the times between his trips in a state of rage at Rachel and his circumstances, and a kind of fog (a “neverland,” if you will) in which the importance of the family, career and future he has so painstakingly constructed collapse into meaninglessness. By happenstance rather than design, he becomes part of a pickup team of primarily West Indian cricket aficionados, who bring their own rules and expectations for the game –most of which are substandard according to van den Broek’s “old world” expectations for space and greenery. Based on their mutual love for cricket, and despite their vastly different childhood associations with it, van den Broek develops an odd friendship with a Trinidadian umpire named Chuck Ramkissoon, a doomed blend of small-criminal-mindedness, charm, and overwhelmingly naïve optimism regarding his potential to attain fame and fortune on American soil.

I have read several reviews of Netherland that described it as reflecting a post-9-11 world view among North Americans and Britons that is characterized by despair if not utter hopelessness. These reviewers interpret the dissolution of the narrator’s marriage, and its subsequent resumption on vastly different terms (less passionate, more resigned)—not to mention his ‘descent’ into disillusionment with the American Dream as personified by Ramkissoon—as reflecting a resignation and diminishment of expectation on the part of thinking society as a whole.

I disagree. While it is true that this novel portrays a new way of looking at reality than has traditionally been the case in my experience, either in the real world or in literary fiction, to me the perspective fashioned by its author is full of hope, and grounded in reality rather than strung by fragile threads on airy dreams. The confrontation during which van den Broek speaks the “truth” about Ramkissoon, calling him on his fabrications, dishonesties and fantasies, his ultimate return to the U.K. (which coincides with his relinquishing of the personal promises of self-realization that were offered by New York City)–even his obvious patience in waiting for his partner to resume her relationship with him—suggest that over the course of the novel, Hans van den Broek has attained a maturity that is strong enough on which to build a future.

Much of Netherland is about the game of cricket, and it is a credit to the genius of O’Neill’s writing that a reader can approach the book knowing nothing about the game, hear the narrator sigh mid-explanation about how tired he is of trying to explain it to everyone and give up the attempt, and finish reading the novel still not know anything much about cricket, but have enjoyed the whole book anyway. In that way, it reminded me a little of Field of Dreams vis á vis baseball. I can see a film that will satisfy popular interest coming out of Netherland as well, but this is a far more important book in terms of where we are as a society right now than Field of Dreams ever tried to be. In Netherland, for the first time post 9/11 I have read a book about the disaster that exploded in New York and shook every corner of the world, and seen not only what we’ve lost, but also what we’ve gained.

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by Mary W. Walters on July 5, 2008  •  Permalink
Posted in Fiction, Literary Fiction, novel
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Posted by Mary W. Walters on July 5, 2008

http://marywwaltersbookreviews.wordpress.com/2008/07/05/netherland/

Sexing the Cherry – Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson
Sexing the Cherry
Vintage (Bloomsbury) 1990
144 pages, softcover

Robust, With A Fruity Aftertaste

I am not going to delve into the public controversies that have characterized much of the life of Jeanette Winterson since the launch of her highly successful first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. What I’ve read about her years in the wastelands of literary popularity (most of the 1990s, apparently) make me fairly sure I agree with the perspectives that got her into trouble, and I surmise that her attitudes toward her writing (roundly criticized as sounding ‘vain’) reflect my own toward my writing—and any true artist’s toward her work. (If one doesn’t utterly commit to working as hard as one can—no matter what one is creating—if one doesn’t therefore take huge pride in what one has accomplished, and if one does not believe one is able to make a difference to the world through all that effort, what is the point?) I guess it’s just not career-enhancing to actually say that in England, any more than it is in Canada.

I am not going to compare Sexing The Cherry to the works by Winterson that preceded or followed it, as I haven’t read them yet. I am also not about to undertake an analysis of inter-textuality in Sexing The Cherry, because I missed most of the references: well, except of course for the references to the story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses which is right there in the book, and a few bits and pieces from other sources toward which the author kindly points us.

Instead, twenty years after its publication, and about fifteen years after a friend recommended it to me, and about six years after I bought it on AbeBooks and about five months after reading it, I’m just going to tell you what I think about this novel.

I like Sexing The Cherry a lot. It’s lyrical, magical and mystical. It spans centuries and continents, and sails over oceans to fabulous far-flung places— even sails right out of the temporal and physical and into fairyland sometimes. It rummages through, shakes out and displays the wonders and capacities of a life of the imagination. It tells the truth. It contains the kinds of memorable passages you want to copy into your journal or email to your friends because they speak so directly to your life or theirs. It’s a splendid interweaving of traditional narrative with experimental techniques, including a segue near the end that jams off into the future like a tipped mast, unexpectedly and yet satisfactorily, not to mention the mid-book side-trip into the tales of the aforementioned princesses.

Most of Sexing The Cherry takes place in London in the mid-1600s. It was a busy time for the sort of British history that would need to be recorded, what with a civil war, the usurpation of the throne by Oliver Cromwell, the beheading of King Charles I, the Fire of London, and the Great Plague which ended just prior to the restoration of the monarchy. But this novel is really about love, and specifically the love between a boy and his adoptive mother. Dog-Woman finds the child she names Jordan on the riverbank, takes him in and raises him (with the occasional assistance of the self-described witch next door). Dog-Woman is an unlovable creature—smelly, massive (so large that she has been compared to a mountain range) and hideous, with broken teeth and deeply pocked skin—who has, until she finds the child, kept herself safe from hurt by staying away from love. But she falls in love with Jordan, head-first and damn the torpedoes, as only a mother can.

The neighbour hag warns Dog-Woman that the boy will break her heart—and he does, but only as every child must do his mother, by growing up and leaving home. He continues to love Dog-Woman for his entire life, no matter where he is, and knows that the love is reciprocated—which is the difference between maternal-filial love and the romantic kind that dooms Jordan to years of longing when he falls for the most independent and interesting of the Twelve Dancing Princesses.

There’s quite a bit of fruit in this novel. The plot’s precipitating event is the introduction of the banana to England by Thomas Johnson in about 1633: as soon as Jordan, then aged three, sets eyes on this exotic treat, he is ensnared by curiosity for the marvels of the world beyond London—which in those days meant he was destined to leave family behind for years at a time. When he was ten, he met John Tradescant—gardener to the king and raiser of cherries—who would ultimately lead Jordan off to sea and the discovery of worlds that included, among other wonders, the pineapple.

On the basis of the pleasures of reading Sexing The Cherry, plus the reviews and essays I’ve read about Winterson, I am tempted now to read Oranges, and Written On The Body (a later early work that also won the author much acclaim), then to skip over what came out during the 1990s and resume her opus with the.powerbook. Assertive and lyrical both at once: she is my kind of writer.

1 Comment
by Mary W. Walters on May 3, 2008  •  Permalink
Posted in Fiction, Literary Fiction, novel
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Posted by Mary W. Walters on May 3, 2008

http://marywwaltersbookreviews.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/sexing-the-cherry/

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