Pavese and Machado de Assis (#NovNov)

Cesare Pavese's The Moon and the Bonfires

The 'Eel'--we never learn his actual name--left Italy's Piedmont early in the Fascist era for America. He was an orphan, raised by a poor family for few lire the state handed over and the free labor he could provide. He didn't have much to hope for at home. He lives rough in the US, working as a milkman, in a diner, but eventually makes good running some sort of agricultural supply company in California. Twenty years later, 1950 or so, he returns to his native ground. Has he come to stay?

The locals certainly hope so: he could marry! He could buy a farm! But really he just wants to look at the old places and see some old acquaintances. Maybe the person he most wants to see is Nuto, and he does; Nuto came from a better set-up family, and is now, by the standards of rural post-war Italy, well-off. The 'Eel' looked up to the older Nuto before he left. Nuto worked with the Communist resistance during the war, and retains his Communist sympathies; that doesn't earn him any friends in rural Piedmont in 1950. 

The novella is rather slow-burning--surprising in a novella?--and it takes a while before we get to the dramatic plot elements, which happened during the war and are reported by Nuto. But it's mostly an atmospheric work, I thought. I was most touched by the Eel's relationship to young Cinto, a near orphan, whom the Eel sees in himself at that age.

The moon and the bonfires are representative of local superstition:

"What is this valley for a family that comes from the sea, who nothing about the moon and the bonfires?"

I was amused that the Eel lived near El Cerrito in the East Bay ("the Cerrito road") when he was in California, where I also lived in the first half of the 90s.

Pavese never went to America, and instead was in internal exile during the Fascist era, but was known for his translations from American literature (Moby-Dick, Gertrude Stein). He committed suicide shortly after this novella came out in 1950.

152p, plus an introduction by Mark Rudman, translated by R. W. Flint

Machado de Assis' The Alienist

"Dr. Simão Bacamarte, a son of the gentry, and the greatest doctor in Brazil, Portugal, and the Spains," has returned to Brazil. "'Science,' he said to His Majesty, 'is my sole employment; Itaguaí is my universe.'" There's no keeping him in Lisbon.

The story is serialized in a Rio de Janeiro newspaper from October of 1881 to March of 1882. But the events, we're told, took place 'long ago.'  

Bacamarte is interested in a scientific study of insanity. (Alienist is a nineteenth century term what we would call a psychologist.) He convinces the town to allow him to set up an insane asylum. Well-to-do patients will be paid for by their families; the indigent will be treated at a low cost borne by the city. Bacamarte can make discoveries. Such a great and dignified scientist! The city is thrilled at first.

But Bacamarte starts finding a lot of insanity. A lot. He is accused of doing it for the money; he repudiates the payments and does his work pro bono. A rebellion is started by a barber, which gets a groundswell of support, but not quite enough, and rebellion is a form of insanity, isn't it?

But Bacamarte is sincere in his studies, and he eventually realizes that if everybody's insane, then nobody is. What to do? He veers in different directions, finally coming to what might have been the only sensible solution all along. (Think Chekhov's 'Ward No. 6'). But while Chekhov can be funny, there's a real zaniness in Machado de Assis not present in Chekhov. (And anyway this story is a decade earlier than Chekhov's.) 

Is this a political allegory? I dunno. Probably. One chapter in my translation is called 'The Terror'. Funny and thought-provoking.

90p. in my Pushkin Press edition, with other stories. Translated in 2022 by Daniel Hahn. Marcie at Buried in Print also read it this month but in a different translation. 

I finished both of these a week or two ago, but I suddenly realized I'd better get going if I was going to squeeze them in for Novellas in November this year. Thanks to our hosts!

A Note from Wisława Szymborska

 

A Note

Life is the only way

to get covered in leaves,

catch your breath on the sand,

rise on wings;

 

to be a dog,

or stroke its warm fur;

 

to tell pain

from everything it's not;

 

to squeeze inside events,

dawdle in views,

to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

 

An extraordinary chance

to remember for a moment

a conversation held

with the lamp switched off;

 

and if only once

to stumble on a stone,

end up drenched in one downpour or another;

 

mislay your keys in the grass,

and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;

 

and to keep on not knowing

something important.

 

-Wisława Szymborska

(tr. Claire Cavanagh and Stanisław Baranczak)

 

This is from Wisława Szymborska's book Moment of 2002. Szymborska was born in 1923, died in 2012, and won the Nobel Prize in 1996. It's not her only poem titled simply, 'A Note'. She's an old favorite of mine--sharp observers might notice I've used the photo before--and I didn't search that hard. But I got both my Covid booster and flu shot this morning and I'm feeling a bit done in. 

 

 

A Charlie Chan Pairup (#NonFicNov)

 

Week 3 (10-16 November) Book Pairings: This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. Or maybe it’s just two books you feel have a link, whatever they might be. You can be as creative as you like! Hosted by Liz.

I reread the first Charlie Chan mystery The House Without a Key a couple of weeks ago for the #1925Club. It reminded me there was a book I had wanted to read since I first heard of it:

 

It was really good! 

Huang first tells the story of Chang Apana, the Honolulu detective, who inspired the character of Charlie Chan. Apana was born in Hawaii to Chinese immigrant parents who went back to China when he was young. But Apana returned to Hawaii with an uncle, and then stayed. He worked as a cowboy, a house servant, the enforcer for the newly enacted statute against animal cruelty; then when the Honolulu police force was officially constituted, he became the only Chinese detective on the force. He seemed to have been good at all his jobs.

Huang then tells the story of Earl Derr Biggers. Biggers had grown up in Ohio to a middle class family. He worked as a journalist and had already become a successful author. But when in 1925 he published the first Charlie Chan novel, those earlier successes could no longer compare. Biggers wrote six Charlie Chan mysteries but died young of a heart attack.

Then there were the movies: there were three early movies, which went nowhere. In all of them Chan was played by a Japanese actor; it was only when Warner Oland (a Swede!) took on the role, they became a success. That's his picture on the cover lower right. (And Chang Apana in the upper left.) Oland's Chan was a huge success even in China, where he was mobbed when he made a publicity trip. And the Chinese were perfectly capable of scorning series they didn't like, such as those around Fu Manchu.

And Huang goes on to talk about the reception of the Charlie Chan character, and that was in some ways the most fascinating. Biggers admired the actual Chang Apana; they met a few times and their respect was mutual, and he intended Charlie Chan to be an antidote to all the Yellow Peril arguments of the time. But Chan talks in that pidgin: how can he be an admirable figure? Well, Huang demonstrates how it could be a whole lot worse. And Chan in the novels is competent and willing to stand up to prejudice when he sees it. Still in the 80s and 90s Chan was viewed as a stereotyped Asian whiz kid, or worse a yellow Uncle Tom, and nothing but cultural appropriation to boot.

Is that all he is? Of course, he is, partly. But Huang reminds us that much of American art comes about from a collision with somebody else's half-understood culture. This is perhaps most obvious in music (though not Huang's topic) and he rightly notes we'd have to give up a lot to achieve that sort of purity of the past.

Huang's includes a little of his own biography, which is fascinating. He was a student, majoring in English, at Peking University in 1989, and went to camp out in Tiananmen Square. But before the tanks rolled in, his parents lured him home by sending a telegram that his mother was dying. (She wasn't.)  Nevertheless he decided to emigrate, worked in lowly jobs in the US, until he decided to go back to school where he got a Ph.D. in English. As of the writing of the book (2010), he was teaching at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Huang clearly enjoys the Chan mystery series himself; he ends the book with a two page list of Charlie Chan aphorisms. Can't resist a few:

Hasty deduction, like ancient egg, look good from the outside. 

Man who flirt with dynamite sometime fly with angels.

Murder like potato chip--cannot stop at just one.

Some heads, like hard nuts, much better if well cracked.

Mind, like parachute, only function when open. 

I felt like it really added something to my earlier reread of the first Charlie Chan mystery. Does that mean I'm about to go reread them all? Careful examination reveal clue: bookmark in second volume of series!

If you have access to the New York Review of Books, the original review which caught my attention is here.