Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World (#1949Club)

"...this endless return of chains, this rebirth of shackles, this proliferation of suffering..."

Ti Noël is a slave on a plantation in Haiti twenty years before the Haitian Revolution. Due to his expertise in horses, he goes with his master to the town to select a new breeding stallion for the farm. There he sees wax heads in a barber shop representing the king and other nobility in a barber shop; next door he sees similarly garlanded wax heads of pigs at the butcher's shop. They look the same to him.

In the next chapter Ti Noël is leading the horse at the mill and his fellow slave Macandal is feeding in the sugar cane when Macandal's arm is caught between the millstones. Ti Noël stops the horse at once and cuts the traces, allowing him turn the stones back, but it's too late: there's nothing to be done but amputate.

But the symbolic violence of the first chapter and the accidental violence of the second are only precursors to real deliberate violence. Macandal leads an early and unsuccessful revolt; he is burned at the stake in 1758. Ti Noél later meets Bouckman, who brings news of the French Revolution, and who helps start what will be the successful Haitian revolution, though Bouckman himself is killed by French troops in 1791.

Alejo Carpentier was born in 1904 in Switzerland to a French father and a Russian mother, but the family moved to Cuba shortly after his birth where he was mostly raised. In 1927 he escaped Cuba after protesting the dicatorial government of the time, and settled in France. In 1939 he returned to Cuba. In 1943 he made a trip to Haiti where he saw the sites described in his novel. Again after the war he felt it safer to leave Cuba and settled in Venezuela until the Cuban Revolution when he returned once again. In 1966 Castro appointed him ambassador to France. In 1977 he won the Cervantes prize; he died in 1980.

During Carpentier's trip to Haiti, he saw what he named 'lo real maravilloso', the 'marvelous real' in the world, and encorporated it in this, his second novel. It's often considered a precursor to magical realism, and it does seem clear to me that Garcia Marquez was in fact reading Carpentier. One aspect of the marvelous real for Carpentier is voudou: we as readers don't doubt (mostly) that Macandal was burned at the stake, but we're teased, at least for a bit, with the thought that he transformed himself into something that could fly away, and this was widely believed at the time.

The Haitian Revolution was successful, resulting in the second independent country in the New World, but still maybe it was not a success. 

Ti Noël's owner flees the revolution for Cuba, but once there falls apart financially and psychologically and loses Ti Noël while gambling. Ti Noël eventually wins his freedom and decides to return to Haiti, where he is immediately re-enslaved by Henri Christophe, the black king of half of Haiti. Now an old man, Ti Noël is forced to carry bricks to a mountain top to build the Citadel Laferrière: 

 

The kingdom of Henri Christophe does not last and finally Ti Noël is free, but he does not live long himself to enjoy that freedom.

Macandal, Bouckman, Henri Christophe (I used the spellings given by Carpentier--spelling as you can imagine for the time, was not well-defined) are all historical figures. I had not realized that Pauline Bonaparte (Napoleon's younger sister) was in Haiti during their Revolution, but at the time (1802) she was the wife of Leclerc, the French general who was tasked by Napoleon with re-enslaving the Haitians. She and her husband both appear. 

The Kingdom of this World is novella lengath, and lyrically written, though still easy to read--I read it in a day in a translation by Harriet de Onís. There is apparently another later translation. The edition I read includes a useful introduction by Edwidge Danticat, the Haitian novelist and memoirist. I've read one other novel by Carpentier, The Chase, which I enjoyed, but this I thought a masterpiece. 

"In the Kingdom of Heaven there is no grandeur to be won, inasumch as there is an established hierarchy, the unknown is revealed, existence is infinite, there is no possibility of sacrifice, all is rest and joy. For this reason, bowed down by suffering and duties, beautiful in the midst of misery, capable of loving in the face of afflictions and trials, man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in the Kingdom of This World."

It's the week of the 1949 Club! Hosted by Simon and Kaggsy. I have hopes of reading a second before the end of the week. If I'm very ambitious, I might reread one of (both great!) Nelson Algren's The Man With The Golden Arm or Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails.

 

"Yikes!"...Anne Carson

According to her agent, "Yikes," was her first word on hearing she'd won the Nobel Prize. More decorous than Doris Lessing's first words on the same sort of occasion...

Autobiography of Red (1998) is a verse novel about Geryon, the red winged cattle-herder slain by Herakles as the tenth of his twelve labors. The story was alluded to in the usual places: Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book IX about Herakles, or Hesiod's Theogony, but it was retold from Geryon's point of view by the poet Stesichoros (c. 630 - c. 555 BCE) in his Geryoneis, now mostly lost. It's this version that Carson retells, expands, and adapts.

She begins with a short essay on Stesichoros. "He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet." Then come her tranlations of the fragments of Stesichoros that come from the Geryoneis:

XI. Right

Are there many little boys who think they are a

Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the

Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded him

Joyfully

 

That's already less translation than adaptation, though there is a dog Geryon is fond of in the Geryoneis.

Then a few short 'appendices' about Stesichoros, mainly his more famous (but also largely lost) poems about Helen, culminating in the Palinode.

The main story is moved from archaic times to the present. It's told in 48 episodes.  

 

In the first couple of episodes, we've already learned Geryon doesn't like going to school:

 

V. Screendoor

 

His mother stood at the ironing board lighting a cigarette and regarding Geryon. 

---

Outside the dark pink air

was already hot and live with cries. Time to go to school, she said for the third time.

Her cool voice floated

over a pile of fresh tea towels and across the shadowy kitchen to where Geryon stood at the screen door

He would remember when he was past forty the almost dusty medieval smell of the screen itself as it

pressed its grid on to his face. She was behind him now. This would be hard if you were weak

but you're not weak, she said and neatened his little red wings and pushed him out the door.

 

That was picked a bit at random as an example, though it is one of the shorter episodes. They all work that way, with a single sentence to open, followed by an anecdote.

 

Geryon becomes a troubled gay teenager. His mother is roughly sympathetic; his older brother has no patience for him. He meets Herakles, with whom he has sex. "Geryon you know we'll always be friends." Not so in the original. He and Herakles travel to South America to see a volcano: 

We are amazing beings,

Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire.

And now time is rushing towards them

where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces,

night at their back.

 

That ends the main part of the story--Herakles has not killed Geryon--though there's a final interview with Stesichorus.

 

I was just writing about her later work Nox the other day and mentioned she was in the hunt for this year's Nobel Prize. I honestly didn't think she would win, but I'm pleased she did. (If I'd put a fiver on her at 33-1 I could have had a nice dinner out to celebrate...) I opined the other day that Autobiography of Red would be a good place to start with Carson, and having just reread it, I still think that's true, though she's written a lot of good books, notably Eros the Bittersweet or Nox.

  

September Wrapup

I've been reading plenty, but not blogging much. Oh, well... Here was my month's reading:

Thrillers

Hammond Innes/The Trojan Horse

Brits dueling with Huns in World War II. A great one, I thought. More here. 

E. Philips Oppenheim/The Great Impersonation

Brits dueling Huns in World War I. I was under the impression this was one of the greats, but just so-so for me. The politics are, of course, archaic, but I was expecting that. Maybe I read too many mysteries/thrillers/spy novels, but I also saw the final surprise twist a mile away.

My first Oppenheim. And I really wanted to like this one better because of the great George Starbuck poem:

Said

Agatha Christie to

E. Philips Oppenheim,

"Who is this Hemingway,

Who is this Proust?

 

Who is this Vladimir

Whatchamacallum, this

Neopostrealist

Rabble?" she groused.

 

Prydain

 

Lloyd Alexander/Taran Wanderer

Lloyd Alexander/The High King

Lloyd Alexander/The Foundling and Other Tales

Prydain is a disguised Wales. High fantasy for a younger audience. The High King completed the series of five and won the 1969 Newbery Medal; the stories came after. (I read the first three novels in the series earlier.) Based on Welsh mythology, with a strong dash of Tolkien, of coure; Taran is assistant pig-keeper for the oracular pig Hen Wen. He fights evil in the form of sorceresses, undead, and a dark king. Pretty fun stuff, with maybe Taran Wanderer being my favorite.

 

I could have read the series as a kid, but didn't know of it until I saw it on Lark's blog.

 

Poetry

 

Anne Carson/Nox

 

This may be more -ish than actually poetry. The genre is sort of undefinable. About the death of her brother and her half-failed attempt to translate Catullus 101, which was about the death of his brother. Just now I think this is her masterpiece, though I'd still start with Autobiography of Red. Lithub the other day quoted her odds of winning the Nobel Prize this year at 33-1. She'd be a good choice as far as I was concerned.

 

Shakespeare/Measure for Measure 

 

Saw a superb production of the play a week ago here at Crow's Theatre, and reread it before going. 

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside

In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice

That's either Claudio's idea of a Dantean hell, or an ordinary spring day in Toronto, I'm not sure which... 

 

Criticism

 

Philip Lopate/On Sontag

 

From 2009. Quite solid if you're interested in Sontag. He likes the things that are good and dislikes the things that aren't.

 

Lopate is a novelist and essayist. He's got a new book out about Washington Irving, and I was reading a review. That review said his new book was just OK, but to see Lopate really shine in literary criticism, you should read his book on Sontag. So I did.

 

Emily Eakin/The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory

 

Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Althusser, etc.  Eakin's book came out this year and is a good introduction to deconstruction and other French literary theoretical constructs. Her approach is mostly biographical rather than theoretical, and includes some autobiographical material about her own expericnce of Theory. Unlike quite a lot of actual French theory, it's readable.

 

She says she was influenced by Sarah Bakewell's At The Existentialist Café, and it shows. (Which I think a good thing.) If you liked Bakewell, you'll like this--it could be thought of as a sequel.

 

W. E. B. Du Bois/The Souls of Black Folk

 

My spin book was Du Bois' Autobiography, and this will show up in that upcoming post. This is on the Modern Library best non-fiction books of the 20th century, and deservedly so. 

 

Other Novels

 

Lidia Jorge/The Wind is Whistling in the Cranes

 

Jorge won the Camões Prize earlier this year--a lifetime award for writers in Portuguese, similar to the Cervantes Prize for Spanish writers. This came out in Portuguese in 2002. Sort of a three generation family novel, with a white property-owning family, and a black family of Cape Verdean immigrants, but told out of order. I tried to write about it but it didn't come together. It was interesting, but I didn't love it.

 

Martin Hansen/The Liar

 

A Danish novel that came out in 1950. The war is over but not forgotten or even forgettable. Johannes Lye is a schoolteacher on an island that is inaccessible in winter due to sea ice. Lye is not an accidental name; he's not to be trusted.

 

Qntm/There Is No Antimemetics Division

 

A sci-fi novel that came out this year that's been getting some buzz. I'm not much of a sci-fi reader, but I liked this pretty well.

 

This books still around the house:

 

 

Both The Great Impersonation and The Souls of Black Folk come from Project Gutenberg.

 

And next month? I've mostly finished my spin book, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois. There's also the 1949 Club coming up, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy. 

 

I'm looking at Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World, but, heck, that's still a week away, and everygthing could change... 😉

 

 

Hammond Innes' The Trojan Horse

"As a criminal court barrister you will know my name. You will, therefore, realize how urgent it is that I see you."

Paul Severin, as he introduces himself, or maybe Frank Smith, or Franz Schmidt, is wanted for the particularly grisly murder of his partner and is now on the run. He forces his way into the office of Andrew Kilmartin, a noted defense lawyer. But he doesn't want to turn himself in and go to court. The case is more complicated than that.

It's London, early in 1940. Germany has invaded Poland, but France and Norway still stand. The Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union has started.

Schmidt (as he's usually called in the book, though Franzie to his daughter) is an engineer of genius and he's discovered a new alloy both light and strong that will revolutionize airplane engines. He's a Jew who was born in England, but mostly grew up in Austria, and got out only after Anschluss. Germany wants that alloy and Schmidt doesn't want to give it to them. He was framed for that murder, he says. But the Nazis have agents in high places and he can't go to jail.

This was a mystery/spy thriller with lots of good chase scenes. That's Kilminster emerging from the London sewers into the Thames basin (fortunately low-tide) after being captured and pursued. In the final chase there's a shipment of military cargo, including the prototype airplane engine, supposedly on its way to support Finland, but the bad guys plan on sending it to Germany instead. The final showdown starts in Norwegian territorial waters. This chase involves two British destroyers, both German and British air support, and a tank blasting away onboard that ship.

This was the first Hammond Innes I've read and I thought it was really good. Do you know: did I just happen to hit one of the best or are they all so good?

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Golden Age (1940).  Body of Water.

Daryl Hine

Perpetua Dormienda

Another day, another power outage

Rolled across the sky and through the dawn,

Bringing as well obscurity and outrage,

Thousands of darkened houses and big trees down.

 

Another and another and another

Circuit failure, when the borrowed power

Of the storm, lightning's domestic brother,

Flickered and fell to bits hour after hour!

 

This morning has been as if it not had been,

The world scrubbed clean, the sky a spotless blue,

And all the pointless vacancy between,

Not so much lived as thoughtlessly slept through.

 

-Daryl Hine

 

Daryl Hine (1936-2012) was a Canadian poet born in British Columbia. He got a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, was the editor of Poetry magazine for a decade, and taught at various Chicago area universities. He lived in the Chicago area with his partner, Samuel Todes, a professor of philsosophy at Northwestern University.

 

A Reliquary and Other Poems was Hine's last book and came out in 2013 after his death. 'Perpetua dormienda' - 'to be slept forever', roughly - is an allusion to Catullus 5, the one that begins, "Let us live, Lesbia, and let us love" and ends in an uncountable number of kisses. Lines 5 and 6, though, remind us, "quum semel occidit brevis lux/nox est perpetua una dormienda." Peter Green translates as: "once our brief life's quenched, there's only/one unending night that's left to sleep through." But Hine is not (quite?) feeling so dark as all that: the storm has left "the world scrubbed clean, the sky a spotless blue," and while the morning may have been lost 'thoughtlessly' that doesn't sound necessarily so bad.

 

I've been meaning to post a Daryl Hine poem for a while, and I pulled a book off the shelf this evening, and this was the page it opened at. (Sortes Vergilianae!) We had a serious storm recently, with golf ball sized hail and 'big trees down,' so it seemed to fit. Our power was out for about ten hours, but was back by the following morning, so I couldn't (alas!) sleep it entirely away.

August Wrapup

I was reading that AI companies have burned through their vast piles of cash and have started to borrow to keep constructing data centers. Fully a third of the all-time visits to my blog came last month. (I'm sure I'm not the only one seeing such statistics.) Silicon Valley is going into debt just to read my blog? This is a bubble whose finances are going to make 2000 and 2007 look like a church pancake breakfast. 

Literary Fiction

Roberto Bolaño/The Savage Detectives

Third time I've read it. Still has that air of sweet melancholic remembrance.  

Colson Whitehead/The Intuitionist

He came to Toronto promoting his most recent novel, the conclusion of his Harlem trilogy, Cool Machine. At some point the library will deliver it to me. In the meantime I read this, his first novel. Black passing as White and Black acceptance into a White job world in a somewhat surreal take on elevator inspection.

Virginia Woolf/Between the Acts

More here.

Genre Literature

Margery Allingham/The Crime at Black Dudley

The first Albert Campion story, just with less Campion. Pretty good, but not the best. More in the mode of thriller Campion than mystery-solving Campion.  (Which generally I don't mind.)

Robert Barnard/A Little Local Murder

Documentary radio program comes to town and everybody wants to be on it. One person won't... 

Lloyd Alexander/The Castle of Llyr 

High fantasy with a Welsh-ish setting for a younger audience. I've since finished the series (of five, then there's a volume of stories). More to come. 

Helen MacInnes/Prelude to Terror

More here. 

Poetry

Shakespeare/Othello

I saw a superb production of Othello in Stratford, Ontario, and reread the play in advance. No more of that...

Matsuo Bashō/Narrow Road to the Interior

The early Japanese travel writer and author of haiku.

Literary Criticism

Morten Høi Jensen/The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of the Magic Mountain

A biography of Mann during the years he was writing The Magic Mountain (1913-1924) together with criticism of that novel. Very good if you're interested.

Also...

I read about 800 pages of Montaigne's complete essays in M. A. Screech's translation  (roughly 2/3rds). I should finish it this coming month.

For the Commonplace Book

"I consider it immoral to avoid the discomforts of indolence by writing one bad book after another."

    -Thomas Mann, via Jensen. (He was thinking of his brother Heinrich.)

 

"It is time to begin thinking about a masterpiece."

    -Letter of Thomas Mann to Heinrich, via Jensen.

 

"And therefore, Reader, I myself am the subject of this book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain."

    -Montaigne, "To The Reader", tr. M. A. Screech.

 

"If it is to do us any good, learning must not only lodge with us: we must marry her."

    -Montaigne, tr. Screech.

 

"I am not prepared to bash my brains for anything, not even for learning's sake, however precious it may be. From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honourable pastime."

    -Montaigne, tr. Screech.  

 

"My hand is so clumsy that I cannot even read my own writing."

    -Montaigne, tr. Screech. (I can be Montaigne in that!)

 

"Malum consilium est, quod mutari non potest!" [It's a bad plan that can't be changed!]

    -Publilius Syrus, my translation.

 

"Etiam innocentes cogit mentiri dolor." [Pain will compel even the innocent to lie.]

    -Publilius Syrus, my translation. (A statement against torture.) 

 

"Truth for us nowadays is not what is, but what others can be brought to accept."

    -Montaigne, tr. Screech. Things haven't changed that much. Sigh...

 

The books still around the house:

 

 

"Potare et spargere flores/Incipiam, patiarque vel inconsultus haberi." [I'm about to start drinking and scattering flowers, even though I admit I'll be considered a fool.]

    -Horace, Epistles, I.v.14, my translation.

Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts

"What's the object of this entertainment?"

"The funds are to go to installing electric light in the church."

 

A pageant of English history is being performed as a benefit on the lawn of Pointz Hall. Miss La Trobe has written the texts and organized the actors. The Olivers--a new family in the village; they've only owned Pointz Hall for a hundred and twenty years--have offered their lawn, or the barn should it turn wet.

The pageant begins with a prologue; then there's an Elizabethan episode, a pastiche of a Restoration comedy, and finally the Present Day. The real story--that of the villagers--happens between the acts? So it would seem.

 

But it's also taking place on a June day in 1939, and is between the acts in another sense, act one and act two of the great world conflagration. That afternoon seems peaceful, nothing to worry about but the weather, but the play is interrupted by a droning aircraft and the failure of the gramophone to provide music; neither the girl who recites the prologue ("England am I") nor Queen Elizabeth ("Eliza Clark, licensed to sell tobacco") are able to remember their lines. In the audience, Colonel Mayhew keeps wondering, "Where's the British army?" because, of course, you can't tell the history of England without the British army. The implication is it will return all too soon.

 

The confusion of the actors is mirrored in the confusion of the audience. That morning before the pageant, Bartholomew Oliver, patriarch of the Olivers, terrified his grandson George with a rolled-up newspaper, and the boy runs off crying; Bartholomew now thinks he's the grandfather of a crybaby. His son, Giles Oliver, a stockbroker in the city, is attracted to the overripe Mrs. Manresa; they go off alone to the greenhouse at one point. The introduction observes that Manresa is a generic name for a Jesuit novice house (from the town in Spain) but is also a near-homonym for man-raiser. Giles, who spotted a snake with a toad half-eaten and stuck in its mouth, walks around with blood on his shoe from stomping the pair to death. Isabella Oliver, Giles' wife, thinks of her husband as handsome and the father of her children, but is attracted to Rupert Haines, a gentleman farmer of the area; it leads to nothing. "It made no difference his infidelity--but hers did."

 

William Dodge, whose name people can't remember--"I'm William"--is a homosexual; he's disdained by the men, but Mrs. Swithin, old Bartholomew's widowed sister, shows him around Pointz Hall; Isa Oliver feels a near mute sympathy with him. Will the young crybaby George become William? Or will he become part of Britain's army? 

 

The pageant itself is poetical, but so is the text it's embedded in. Just on the first page, there are the following alliterations: 'the county council', 'gobble in the gutter', 'a cow coughed', 'substance and succulence', 'a swan swimming'. Woolf, as Miss La Trobe, gets to write the verse of the pageant, and the Restoration comedy, with its classism and Lady Harraden's failed plot to marry off her niece and keep the money in the family. But between the failure of the actors to remember their lines, the failure of the technical contraptions to work, and the failure of the audience to put aside their own distractions--and this before cell phones!--Miss La Trobe thinks:

"It was a failure, another damned failure! As usual. Her vision escaped her."

This was Virginia Woolf's last novel before her suicide in March of 1941 and was published only after her death. Leonard says in a headnote that it was substantially completed, though it was likely Virginia would have made some changes when it was in proof.

I suppose nobody thinks this one of the greatest Woolf works, but I still thought it was very good. So what is the object of this entertainment? It's possible there are a few too many objects for something that's basically novella length. The Years was swift and spare in its telling; this even more so. The introduction in my edition, by Linden Peach, a professor at the University of Wales, suggests that Miss La Trobe's sense of failure mirrors Woolf's own at the time. Maybe, but I think that a sense of failure is inherent in the attempt to create; it never completely goes away, and even the chronically depressed Woolf knew this. Miss La Trobe also thinks:

"Hadn't she, for twenty-five minutes, made them see? A vision imparted was a relief from agony..."

That could be the most we can hope for. 

 

 

Basho

 

Whenever winds blow

the butterfly finds a new place

on the willow tree

 

A Dutchman arrives

to view cherry blossoms

from his saddle

 

A lovely spring night

suddenly vanished while we

viewed cherry blossoms

 

Nothing in the cry

of cicadas suggests they

are about to die

 

With no umbrella

in cold, early winter rain--

ah, well! So be it! 

Being useless,

my daydreams are disturbed

by noisy warblers

 

-Matsuo Bashō (tr. Sam Hamill)

 

Bashō (1644-1694) was a Japanese poet and travel writer, famous in his own day. (Write me a poem, Matsuo Bashō, and he frequently did.) I recently finished this collection--very good! A mix of poems and travel writing. I was a bit surprised how his travels felt quite like a modern tourist, off to see temple complexes or areas of great natural beauty. Of course the one time I got to see something in Japan, I went and saw a temple complex.

 

These are just a random few of the haiku in the volume, ones that appealed to me. You'll notice that in Hamill's translation they're not particularly rigorous about the 5-7-5 syllable system, but the introduction suggests that Bashō himself wasn't particularly rigorous either. They do show the typical haiku structure: an observation of a natural setting with a turn in the third line.  

 

 

It's Number 18 and that means... (#CCSpin)

 The Autobiography by W. E. B. Du Bois:

It's subtitled "A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of its First Century' and he wrote it when he was ninety. He died in 1963 at the age of ninety-five, and the book first appeared in English in 1968 for what would have been his hundredth birthday.

 Du Bois was first African-American to earn a Ph. D. from Harvard (in Sociology) and did post-doctoral work in Germany, where he impressed (and was impressed by) Max Weber. He was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples, and edited their house magazine The Crisis. His most famous early book is The Souls of Black Folks. He eventually, though, gave up on the U.S. as unfixable, and died in Ghana. 

Should be a fascinating read. Did you know him or the book? Did you get something good? 

Othello

 

Othello, Act V, Sc. ii, l. 337 ff.

Othello:  

Soft you; a word or two before you go.

I have done the state some service, and they know't;

No more of that. I pray you, in your letters

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice; then, must you speak

Of one that loved not wisely but too well;

Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,

Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,

Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdu'd eyes

Albeit unused to the melting mood,

Drop tears as fast the Arabian trees

Their med'cinable gum. Set you down this:

And say besides, that in Aleppo once,

Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk

Beat a Venetian and traduc'd the state,

I took by throat the circumcised dog,

And smote him thus.

 

-William Shakespeare

 

Othello has just learned that he has been bamboozled by Iago; he'd killed Desdemona, who had been perfectly true to him, and had attempted to have Cassio, his lieutenant, killed for sleeping with Desdemona, a thing that never happened. With 'And smote him thus' he stabs himself in place of the Turk, and dies two lines later. Iago has just murdered his wife Emilia, in front of magistrates and the audience, and is about to be hauled off to jail, torture, "the censure of this hellish villain."

 

We saw Othello on Tuesday at the Stratford (Ontario) festival in a very good production. Evan Bullung as Iago and André Sills as Othello (both 12 year Stratford veterans) were superb, and did a convincing job of the tricky scene (Act III, sc. iii) where the insinuating Iago turns Othello from trusting, infatuated husband to victim of the green-eyed monster (also a line from this play...)

 

I like to reread a Shakespeare play before seeing it on stage and did this time, too. It's not like I've ruined the suspense--and I find it helps to have the language in my head when I hear it played. 

 

Don't worry--it wasn't all tragedy. We also saw the musical Something Rotten while there... 

Classics Club Spin #45

 

What will I next read? Only the owl knows...

It's the 45th Classics Club spin and this will be my 25th spin. You've seen the rules before so straight to the list of books:

1.) Frances Burney/Evelina

2.) Willa Cather/Lucy Gayheart

3.) Willa Cather/Sappho and the Slave Girl

4.) Nella Larsen/Passing

5.) Sinclair Lewis/Elmer Gantry

6.) Jack London/The Iron Heel

7.) Jack London/Martin Eden

8.) Walter Pater/Imaginary Portraits

9.) Harry Mark Petrakis/A Dream of Kings

10.) Leslie Marmon Silko/Ceremony

11.) Edgar Wallace/The Four Just Men

12.) Eudora Welty/Delta Wedding

13.) Andrei Bely/Petersburg

14.) Mikhail Bulgakov/The Heart of a Dog

15.) Joachim Machado de Assis/The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

16.) Benito Pérez Galdos/That Bringas Woman

17.) Dee Brown/Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

18.) W. E. B. Du Bois/The Autobiography

19.) R. L. Stevenson/An Inland Voyage

20.) Gotthold Lessing/Nathan the Wise 

 

On Sunday August 16th the number will be revealed. 

 

Which look good to you? Which have you read? 

Helen MacInnes' Prelude to Terror

Colin Grant is an art critic. He's recently moved to New York City to work at the Schofeld Gallery. A woman in the art world he knows approaches him on the behalf of millionaire art collector Victor Basset. Could he buy a painting at an auction in Vienna on Mr. Basset's behalf? The painting is a river scene by Salomon von Ruysdael of 1642. It might go for a $200,000, but Basset is worried he has a rival and if it were known Basset was bidding the price would go up.

There's an additional complication. The owner is a Hungarian national who wants to get out of Hungary (this is the 1970s) with this painting that the government would cheerfully confiscate if they knew about it. So for both those reasons it all needs to be hush-hush.

Of course it's Helen MacInnes so there are more complications than that...

This is the first of three spy novels by MacInnes which feature Robert Renwick. He's in Vienna working on a money-laundering scheme run from Eastern Europe. The money's being used to finance terrorist activity in the West. (The Red Army Faction had been in the news in the 70s.) 

I thought this was one of the better MacInnes books. It is fairly dark for MacInnes, though. This is her first novel after her husband Gilbert Highet died. Grant is a widower still in grief when it starts; if you know MacInnes, you won't be surprised that as an American dragged into a spy story, he will be involved in a romance. It doesn't pan out in this one.

It's possible I read this when it came out--both my parents were MacInnes fans--but if so I didn't remember it.

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1978). Painting. Is that a von Ruysdael river scene on the left of the cover?   

Ed McBain's Shotgun

"Oh, how they hoped for an original slaying once in a while, a well-conceived murder instead of these sloppy run-of-the-mill crimes of passion that were constantly being dumped into their laps. Oh, how they longed for a killer who would knock off somebody with a rare untraceable poison, Oh, how they wished they might find a body in a locked windowless room, Oh, how they wanted somebody to scheme and plot for months on end and then commit the perfect homicide, which everyone would think was suicide or something." 

"Meyer and Hawes got all the interesting cases."

Carella and Kling are called in when two bodies, a man and a woman, are found by the milkman making his morning rounds. The milkman liked the Leydens--she gave him a cup of coffee when he collected the bill, she didn't have to do that--and he seemed like a very nice man, only he had to travel a lot, missed his wife. "It scares you, you know?"

The first cops on the scene are happy to call it domestic trouble, murder-suicide, and wrap it up at once. But Carella sees through that. (Kling is busy throwing up--he's still new to the 87th--and murders--in this one.) 

Both the victims have been shot in the face, which must mark particular hatred on the part of the murderer. Some sort of creep? (Beyond the usual fact that murderers are creeps, of course...) Carella and Kling are on the track of somebody who meets girls in bars.

McBain's stories often look like they're some sort of random violence--or some sort of creep--but in the end the solution is much more Sherlock Holmes-ish than that--untraceable poison, locked room--and this is no exception. Shooting somebody in the face might be a mark of particular animosity, as they speculate at first, but it just might also be a trick to make indentification difficult, especially for people who've never been fingerprinted...dental records are of no use...and our first cops are happy to think this was suicide or something...

Cotton and Hawes' case is a woman who's stabbed with a bread knife. Was that more interesting? I wouldn't have thought so, necessarily. But it turns out connected to Carella and Kling's case, and that's definitely another sign of a classic puzzle mystery.

Not the best McBain by any means, but a satisfactory entry.

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1970). Two People 

 

Robert Desnos' Landscape

 

Landscape

A version 

I dreamt of loving. The dream remains, but love

is no longer those lilacs and roses whose breath

filled the broad woods, where the sail of a flame

lay at the end of each arrow-straight path.

 

I dreamt of loving. The dream remains, but love

is no longer that storm whose white nerve sparked

the castle towers, or left the mind unrhymed,

or flared an instant, just where the road forked.

 

It is the star struck under my heel in the night.

It is the word no book on earth defines.

It is the foam on the wave, the cloud in the sky.

 

As they age, all things grow rigid and bright.

The streets fall nameless, and the knots untie.

Now with this landscape, I fix: I shine.

 

-Robert Desnos (tr. Don Paterson)

 

Bit of a random pick this evening. I like it, I think, but I'm also still thinking about it. Your thoughts?

 

Robert Desnos (1900-1945) was a French poet. He was associated with the Surrealists as a young man, but broke with André Breton over Breton's support of Communism. During the war he was a member of the French Resistance, and was captured in 1944, with his ultimate destination Theriesenstadt. He survived the war, but had contracted typhoid as a prisoner, and only survived it by a month, dying in June of 1945. This is from the last book of poetry published during his life, Contrée of 1944.

 

Don Paterson is a contemporary Scottish poet. This translation (or version) first appeared in Poetry in the April 2006 issue.

 

Random? Well, I'm rereading Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. There's a lot of young people talking about poetry in it...

"One night, a girl whose name was Marguerite and whom I wanted  to sleep with started to read a poem by Robert Desnos. I didn't know who the fuck Robert Desnos was, but other people at my table did, and anyway, the poem was good, it got to you." [271]

I was a bit like the speaker in that passage, and I didn't know who Robert Desnos was...but now I know a bit more. We don't ever learn which poem of Desnos, but there doesn't seem to be much Desnos in English on the web anyway.

 

The French, if it's helpful:

 

Le Paysage  

J'avais rêvé d'aimer. J'aime encor mais l'amour

Ce n'est plus ce bouquet de lilas et de roses

Chargeant de leurs parfums la forét où repose

Une flamme à l'issue de sentiers sans détour.

 

J'avais rêvé d'aimer. J'aime encor mais l'amour

Ce n'est plus cet orage où l'éclair superpose

Ses bûchers aux châteaux, déroute, décompose,

Illumine en fuyant l'adieu au carrefour.

 

C'est silex en feu sous mons pas dans la nuit,

Le mot qu'aucun lexique au monde n'a traduit

L'écume sur la mer, dans le ciel ce nuage.

 

À vieillir tout devient rigide et lumineux,

Des boulevards sans nom et des cordes sans nœuds.

Je me sens me roidir avec le paysage.

 

-Robert Desnos

 

 

 

Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins

 '"Why should people give a damn about what I think, what I feel?", Henri said. "My little personal stories don't interest anyone, and history, the big story, isn't in my opinion a fit subject for a novel."'

That's Henri Perron (a character in The Mandarins) who hasn't figured out how to encapsulate history in a novel, but Simone de Beauvoir has managed a pretty good job of it.

There are two conflicts that drive the novel that interlock with each other. The first is politics.

The Mandarins begins at a party that first Christmas in 1944 after Paris has been liberated. The war isn't over, but its end is in sight. With the US and Soviet Russia looking so dominant, what will happen to France? 

Perron had founded a Resistance magazine L'Espoir during the war; his friend and mentor Robert Dubreuilh had written for it. Resistance members had distributed the magazine; some had died in doing so. The fate of the magazine is one of the main drivers of the novel's plot. Dubreuilh creates a new left wing Socialist movement, non-Communist but still hopeful of establishing a Popular Front with the Communists. He wants L'Espoir to be the house organ for his new movement.

Perron is in general agreement with Dubreuilh's politics, but feels that L'Espoir should remain independent. If he isn't able to say what he thinks, he's going to lose some of his audience, he fears, and his fears prove true. Dubreuilh manipulates him into supporting his movement; Perron is no longer viewed as truth-telling; the magazine does lose readers and becomes dependent on deep-pocketed donors with agendas.

Then the first reports of the Gulag start to arrive. Can Perron truly say nothing?  But if he reports on it, even with the hope of correcting what he sees as (excuseable) Soviet excesses, is a Popular Front still possible? Maybe he should just abandon politics? Go back to writing novels. But World War III feels close.

(One can ask was a Popular Front with Soviet Union under Stalin even possible after World War II? The character Scriassine says no.)

There's a second set of conflicts that also drive the novel; unsurprisingly (it is Simone de Beauvoir) it's the relationship between the sexes.

Both Perron and Dubreuilh are married at the start of the novel. Paula Perron could sing and used to do so, but she felt she could never be Edith Piaf. Now she's let her entire life be absorbed in promoting Perron's purported greatness. But Perron has fallen out of love with her during the war when they were generally separated, and he's no longer convinced of his own greatness. He tries to convince her to take an interest in singing again, or in something other than himself, but are his encouragements genuine? Or just selfishness? He's not entirely sure himself. In the meantime he has affairs.

Anne Dubreuilh is a psychoanalyst with a thriving practice of her own. She and Dubreuilh are no longer sleeping together, but she still finds him intellectually stimulating. But the war's over! She's still young! Pleasure is possible! After five years of chastity, she has a one night stand, with Scriassine, but it's not very satisfying. But the door is open.

With the end of the war travel again becomes possible, but nobody has money. Perron gets an offer to go to Portugal for a French cultural agency. Nadine, the Dubreuilh's daughter, desperate to go anywhere, convinces him to take her as his secretary; they become lovers.

Then Anne Dubreuilh gets an offer to go to a psychoanalysis conference in New York, with a subequent lecture tour. She hems and haws--she can't leave her husband, her daughter, her patients--but in the end she does go; in Chicago, she meets the writer Lewis Brogan, who becomes the great romance of her life.

What happens politcally? What happens romantically? Well, I can't tell you that, of course... 😉

The novel is structured in alternating chapters. It starts with third-person narration with Henri Perron as the focus character; the other chapters are in first person as written by Anne Dubreuilh. 

The novel is often called a roman à clef, though de Beauvoir didn't like that as a description. But if so, Henri Perron is Camus, Robert Dubreuilh is Sartre, Anne Dubreuilh is de Beauvoir herself, Scriassine is Arthur Koestler, and Lewis Brogan is Chicago novelist Nelson Algren, who is also the dedicatee of the book. But Dubreuilh is twenty years older than Sartre, Camus was much less sympathetic to Communism than Perron, de Beauvoir and Sartre didn't have a daughter. She does however say in her autobiography Force of Circumstance that Lewis 'is the one who approaches closest to a living model.' When Anne says to Lewis, "Why are all your best friends pickpockets, or drug addicts, or pimps?" that does feel very much like Algren.

Henri Perron says at one point: 

"If you spend the best days of your life trying to communicate with others, it's because others count..."

The novel came out in 1954 and won the Prix Goncourt for its year. I read it in the English translation by Leonard Friedman of 1957. 

It's a book off my Classics Club list:

and is my visit to Paris this July (hosted by Emma at Words and Peace):

 

 

 

Dream Song

 

Dream Song #14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,

we ourselves flash and yearn.

and, moreover, my mother told me as a boy

(repeatingly) 'Ever to confess you're bored

means you have no

 

Inner Resources. I conclude now I have no

inner resources, because I am heavy bored.

Peoples bore me,

literature bores me, especially great literature,

Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes,

as bad as achilles, 

 

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.

And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag,

and somehow a dog,

has taken itself & its tail considerably away

into mountains or sea or sky, leaving 

behind: me, wag.

 

-John Berryman

 

I'm not especially bored at the moment, great literature does not bore me, but I do love this poem, which is pretty great literature. There's a new volume of Berryman, Only Sing, 152 Uncollected Dream Songs out recently, and I was reading a review of it, which brought me back to my favorite of the original dream songs.

 

John Berryman (1914-1972)  was an American poet. His volume 77 Dream Songs won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Henry is his alter ego, or maybe better, his Id, that shows up in the Dream Songs.

 

It was my Dad rather than my Mom who was likely to give me conventional advice of this sort, though there was never a line about Inner Resources that I recall. But: where's your vim, vigor, and vitality?

 

 

 

Layla Erbil's What Remains (#EuropeanReadingChallenge)

i've no idea why i'm telling you all this my dear readers

i can't know

i feel like i should know everything

before putting my other foot in the grave [208]

Laylâ Erbil's verse novel of 2011 was published by Deep Vellum last year in English translation. 

Lahzen is our narrator; she's an elderly woman of the secular, political left living in Istanbul. She's remembering the events of her life and of Istanbul, her home. She doesn't tell us her story in chronological order, but reflecting backwards on it. There are several recurring themes.

The first is her childhood. She grew up in Fener, also known as Phanar, the once Greek neighborhood on the Golden Horn, the European side of Istanbul. In her childhood, she had Greek, Jewish, Armenian friends. Rosa, the Jew, broke her pencil in half one day when Lahzen had forgotten hers; an act, she tells us, promising forty years of friendship. But in September of 1955, state-sponsored riots against homes and businesses drove out the non-Turks. Rosa's family goes to Israel. Lahzen remembers Greek songs, and songs in mixed Turkish and Greek. Her sister, her aunt go to Orthodox churches to perform magic with candles for good luck. The multicultural Istanbul of her youth is gone, and she misses it. A copy of Marilyn Monroe's skirt from the famous photo over the steam grate remains in a shop window in an arcade:

all that remained

was marilyn's pleated white skirt

in hristo usta's shop window

its white now blotched with purplish rot

the keys to the shop window

remained with hristo usta who fled to athens

do you think he'll come back

one day

you never know

they miss it here [210]

A second thread involves the deaths and disappearances during the years of the military dictatorship in Turkey. As she herself was a leftist, some are people she knew; some are just news items. Her second husband Sabit was in jail, but was eventually released. (There was an earlier husband who was good-looking and had a motorcycle, but oh, well, maybe not such great husband material.)

What it means to be a good person in such a world is a recurring thought for her; she often turns to Kierkegaard, and in particular Kierkegaard's retelling of the story of Abraham and Isaac (in Fear and Trembling):  

...yes we can defend søren as someone who was trying to make the best of the world's fear of raging hellfires in those times; in a sense his love was harmless. he said "how does one become a good christian, that's always been my priority." in his day and age that was what it meant to be a good person. [159] 

In the present her relationship with Sabit is difficult. While he was in jail, she had an affair with his best friend Zeyyat, and maybe she's still a bit in love with Zeyyat. Is Sabit holding that one time infidelity over her head? A bit.

What remains at the end of a life in such a place? History and stones.

The book is billed as a verse novel. I can't comment on the verse, and largely didn't feel it. Probably my limitations, but who knows? Traduttore, traditore. Though it feels like the three ranslators (Ersan, Spangler, Wyers) knew what they were doing. I know nothing about modern Turkish poetry. Mostly I read it as oddly punctuated and capitalized prose, but even as that I quite enjoyed it.

what could the content of the text

be

other than

the writer in her own way

struggling to capture the truth

knowing that it cannot be captured [27]

 I first came across the book here.

 

Dorothy Sayers' Whose Body

"He was so upset, poor little man. He'd found a dead body in his bath."

Mr. Thipps, "the little architect man who's doing the church roof", goes to take a bath in the morning, but there's a dead man in the tub, naked except for a pair of pince-nez. Nobody he knows, he swears. "Uncommonly awkward for him."

That same evening, Sir Reuben Levy disappears. He's a successful financier, with plenty of business enemies in the course of things, though he's considered a sweetheart by his family and domestic staff.

Are the two cases connected? Well...

Parker of Scotland Yard is assigned the Levy case, suspects they might be, and wonders if this unknown corpse is his man. But the dead man was not Sir Reuben Levy.

And Lord Peter Wimsey offers himself to help with the case of the dead man in the bath.

This is the first of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries and comes out in 1923, though we learn he's been involved in an earlier case. that of the Attenbury Emeralds. He took to crime-solving to help with his shell shock after World War I, and turns out to be good at it.

And are the two cases connected? Of course they are.

I've read a bunch of the Lord Peter Wimsey stories before, but not all of them and not this one, I think, all out of order. It is a series that benefits from reading in order, and I might go through the series. It certainly starts off well.

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Golden Age (1923). Piece of Furniture: Bathtub.  

Virginia Woolf's The Years

 

     "All talk would be nonsense, I suppose, if it were written down," she said, stirring her coffee.

     Maggie stopped the machine for a moment and smiled.

     "And even if it isn't," she said.

     "But it's the only way we have of knowing each other," Rose protested.

  

The Years was the last novel completed by Virginia Woolf during her life, and came out in 1937. It was the biggest financial success of her lifetime, though I have to imagine Mrs. Dalloway has sold more copies now. It's the story of the Pargiter family across three generations. Colonel Abel Pargiter, who served in India, and his wife Rose, are the parents of seven children; they form the core of the novel, though there are also cousins and family friends.

 

The novel is arranged in ten chapters, each labelled with a year. The longest are the first, 1880, and the last, 'The Present Day,' presumably 1936 or so, just before the novel appears. In 1880, we meet the seven children--Eleanor, Morris, Milly, Edward, Delia, Martin, and Rose. Mother Rose has been bedridden for years, and may finally be dying, and we see the children's (and husband's--who keeps a mistress) reaction to their mother's imminent death. Delia, the rebellious one, thinks it's time for her to go; others are more uncertain, but it's true Rose the mother doesn't have much of a life by then. At the end of the chapter, after a couple of dream-haunted days of collapses and rallies, she dies.

 

The other year chapters all take place on a single day, and are built around a meeting of family members. In 1891, it's the day of Parnell's death, the advocate for Irish Home Rule; Colonel Abel goes to visit his brother and sister-in-law for his niece Maggie's birthday. Abel, perfectly content in his imperialism, had no use for Parnell, but admires his sister-in-law's emotion at the death. In 1917 Maggie, now married to a Frenchman René (Renny), hosts Eleanor for dinner; German air raids on London occur that night. 1918 sees the day of the armistice; we follow Crosby, the Pargiter nurse and maid, now pensioned off, in the shortest chapter; she's annoyed by all the celebratory guns going off. In 'The Present Day', Delia and her husband Patrick, throw a party; all the surviving family members appear; there's a dance and dinner, and the party ends at dawn:

"The sun had risen, and the sky above the houses wore an air of extraordinary beauty, simplicity and peace."

So it's a family novel, but if so, it's quite different from what you might expect; it's impressionistic in its style, sketch-y, even, so long as you don't imagine that as a derogatory adjective. It's half the length of Buddenbrooks, for example, and avoids scenes that might have been expected: Charles, one of Maggie's children, dies in World War I, but we only learn that obliquely and long after the event.

 

Woolf conceived the novel after she'd given a lecture 'Professions for Women' in 1931:

"When your secretary invited me to come here, she told me that your Society is concerned with the employment of women and she suggested that I might tell you something about my own professional experiences. It is true I am a woman; it is true I am employed; but what professional experiences have I had? It is difficult to say." 

That set her to thinking and she initially imagined a novel-essay about the Pargiter family, a blend of essays about the status of women mixed with fictional episodes. That book was reconstructed after her death and is available, titled The Pargiters, but I haven't read it. In the end, though, the essays became her book Three Guineas and the fictional episodes became the novel The Years. That initial conception is still visible; in the first generation, there aren't many possibilities for women: Eleanor ends up looking after her widowed father, only becoming a great world traveler after his death; Kitty, a cousin, whom  Edward Pargiter loved and wanted to marry, marries instead a great lord and lives that lifestyle; Delia, in that first generation but somewhat younger, becomes a suffragette and is sent to prison for her agitation. It's only in the third generation that real professional possibilities open up for women: Peggy, Maggie's daughter, becomes a doctor, though it doesn't seem to make her very happy.

 

But a schematic essay-novel is not the novel Virginia Woolf has given us (though the idea of it definitely colors the criticism from what I've seen). Several of the male characters are also well-rounded, particularly Abel, the patriarch, and North, Peggy and Charles' brother, who also served in World War I, but then went to be a farmer in Africa.  Like any family novel of multiple generations, it's interested in the passing of time, and 1880 to 1935 are a time of great changes in England. In 1880, tea is being made with a spirit lamp and people travel in horse-drawn carriages; in 1936, the flash and circle symbol of the British Union of Fascists is graffitied on walls, and Eleanor discusses traveling by plane (though she doesn't).

 

It's also very good on family relations. As aunt and niece suggest in that opening quote, there's never perfect understanding or communication. During that final party, Edward, by then a professor, quotes Sophocles, but refuses to translate:

"It's no go, North thought. He can't say what he wants to say; he's afraid. They're all afraid; afraid of being laughed at; afraid of giving themselves away. He's afraid too, he thought, looking at the young man with a fine forehead and a weak chin, who was gesticulating too emphatically. We're all afraid of each other, he thought; afraid of what?"

And yet that's not the whole of the story either; again as that opening quote suggests, there is communication. North dances with a girl at the party, asks her for a date, she accepts. The next generation? Another way in which this would be unlike Buddenbrooks. This is a family with a decent amount of good will toward each other--not true of all families-- even if they don't always articulate it. The party is a success; it, and the novel, end with 'simplicity and peace.'

οὔτοι συνέχθειν, άλλα συνφιλεῖν ἔφυν

-Sophocles, Antigone, l.523 (Antigone speaking) 

And what was it Edward was unable to say in English? Elizabeth Wyckoff translates as, "I cannot share in hatred, but in love."

 

Nothing of Virginia Woolf's is exactly unknown or ignored. As I noted, you can easily enough find the novel The Pargiters she decided against giving us. But when I first was reading Virginia Woolf, thirty years ago or whatever, I read Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, Orlando, the Common Reader series, etc., but it didn't occur to me to read The Years. I don't know what bit of received opinion I picked up that I didn't need to read it, but it was wrong. 

 

This was my spin book for Classics Club Spin #44, and a very good spin it was!