Charlie Chan (plus a November wrapup)

Not Pictured: Yunte Huang's Charlie Chan

Charlie Chan

As threatened in my NonFicNovember post, I did carry on. When I first read the Charlie Chan mysteries about 25 years ago, I read them out of order as I happened to find the books. This time I read them in order. Not essential, but it does add something. Each one refers back to the events of the previous novel or even further back.

The first one has less of Charlie, but he was the most popular character, and fans wanted more of him in the books. Biggers supplied. There's not that much Hawaii, though, which I hadn't really thought about--only two and about a half of the books are set there. In the second, The Chinese Parrot of 1926, Charlie Chan has agreed to carry some pearls to the mainland for a friend; there's murder done in the valley near Bakersfield. In Behind That Curtain (1928) he's gotten as far as San Francisco on his way home when he's lured into another mystery. It's the former head of Scotland Yard who's murdered in this. Finally he's back home, when the movie star Shelagh Fane comes to Honolulu only to get murdered in The Black Camel (1929). A tour group is circling the world in Charlie Chan Carries On (1930) and a first murder occurs in London--"murder like potato chip--cannot stop at just one"--there's four dead (including another Scotland Yard man) by the time the tour group arrives in Honolulu. Charlie boards the ship with the tour group as it departs and has solved it by the time they reach San Francisco.

Biggers did live in California at the time, and only got to Hawaii a couple of times before his early death. 

I just finished today the last one The Keeper of the Keys (1932), which is set in Truckee, California, on Lake Tahoe. Just across the border from Reno, Nevada, land of quickie divorces, which is an important plot element.

I'm not sure how much read the Charlie Chan mysteries are these days. There's plenty of casual racism (alas!) in Golden Age mysteries, anti-Semitism, anti-Black, etc., but it's an astonishingly a-historical reading to think these books are anti-Chinese. Prejudice exists in them; Chan confronts it when he sees it. Biggers was by his lights trying to improve the situation. In Keeper of the Keys, a number of Anglos are ready to dedicate a statue for benefits of Chinese immigration to California. Major Yammerton suspects and I would agree that the anti-Charlie Chan feeling is due more to the movies than the books, but Huang thought even the movies were defensible (and clearly liked them himself). Are they? I haven't see a Charlie Chan movie since I was eight and they came on after the Saturday morning cartoons. But thanks to the Major, I'm now aware they can be found at YouTube.

Novellas in November

I read two: Cesare Pavese's The Moon and the Bonfires and Machado de Assis' The Alienist. Blogged about them here. 

Pynchon

I reread Gravity's Rainbow and have subsequently finished rereading Vineland. Shadow Ticket is on the stack. Pynchon post coming soon? Well there is the Doorstoppers in December challenge going on:

Literary Criticism

I read Robert Boyers' memoir Maestros and Monsters about his relationship with Susan Sontag and George Steiner. Boyers is the founding editor of the little magazine Salmagundi and knew both Sontag and Steiner for years in that context. It's a defense of literary criticism for a readerly, but non-specialist audience (me) as well as being amusingly gossipy about both of them, who could be quite difficult in person. I've read or reread most of Sontag pretty recently. It made me want to go read those Steiner books I haven't read.

MARM 

I also reread Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin for Buried in Print's Margaret Atwood Reading Month, though I didn't finish it until this month (so it didn't make the picture). It would be another doorstopper, though...

That was my month of reading. Did you take part in any of the November challenges? For December, in addition to any doorstoppers, there's also Dean Street Decmber, which I hope to read something for.

A Displaced Person's Song

 

Chuck says, I just love the names in this: Pointsman, Slothrop, Borgesius

If you see a train this evening,

Far away against the sky,

Lay down in your wooden blanket, (*)

Sleep, and let the train go by.

 

Trains have called us, every midnight,

From a thousand miles away,

Trains that pass through empty cities,

Trains that have no place to stay.

 

No one drives the locomotive,

No one tends the staring light,

Trains have never needed riders,

Trains belong to bitter night.

 

Railway stations stand deserted,

Rights-of-way lie clear and cold,

What we left them, trains inherit,

Trains go on, and we grow old.

 

Let them cry like cheated lovers,

Let their cries find only wind.

Trains are meant for night and ruin

We are meant for song, and sin.

 

-Thomas Pynchon

 

Another song from Gravity's Rainbow. In the novel, it's the time after V-E Day, but before the zones decided on at the Potsdam Conference (17 July - 2 August) have been implemented, and there's just one Zone. (Though for Tyrone Slothrop there's really only ever just one Zone.) People are trying to get home--either their old home, or whatever the new one they might be forced to will be.

"It is a Displaced Person's song, and Slothrop will hear it often around the Zone, in the encampments, out on the road, in a dozen variations." (p. 283)

I finished my rereading a couple of days ago. I won't actually try to say anything about the novel, I guess, but I did think about the poetry in the book a bit more this time.

 

(*) My edition, the second printing of the original paperback edition, really does say wooden, but woolen seems more likely...though maybe it's wood from the sides of the boxcars? But the observer is presumably not in a boxcar. A 'wooden blanket' also suggests a coffin, but maybe that's just me?

 

One of the those sad little Parisian-sounding tunes

Love never goes away,

Never completely dies,

Always some souvenir

Takes us by sad surprise.

 

You went away from me,

One rose was left behind--

Pressed in my Book of Hours,

That is the rose I find....

 

Though it's another year,

Though it's another me,

Under the rose is a drying tear,

Under my linden tree....

 

Love never goes away,

Not if it's really true,

It can return, by night, by day,

Tender and green and new

As the leaves from the linden tree, love,

  That I left with you.

 

-Thomas Pynchon

 

Pynchon is famous for the songs he embeds in his novels. Like a stage musical, people break into song at all times, sometimes motivated, but not always. Here apprentice witch Geli Tripping is accompanying herself on a balalaika when our hero (?) Tyrone Slothrop first meets her. (p.289 in my edition.) A lot of the poems/songs are contextual--whenever Major Marvy's Mothers, an American military detachment chasing Slothrop appears, they approach singing obscene limericks--but this one felt like it could stand on its own. It reminds me a bit of Heine.

 

Pynchon's a bit in the air these days and I'm rereading Gravity's Rainbow. I saw One Battle After Another, the new film by Paul Thomas Anderson, last night--quite good, I thought--based on Pynchon's novel Vineland. And the old wizard has a new novel out this fall, Shadow Ticket, but I haven't read it yet. How much of the old Pynchon am I going to reread before I get that? I'm not sure, but clearly some.

 

The post title comes from the introduction of the poem: "...Slothrop heard a girl singing. Accompanying herself on a balalaika. One of those sad little Parisian-sounding tunes in 3/4..." 

Pynchon's V.

"Stencil has stayed off Malta."

Ever since I've been signing up for the European Reading Challenge, there's been these two big historical/encyclopedic novels that turn around Malta I've been thinking about rereading. It turns out this is the year for one, V., Pynchon's debut novel. (The other is Anthony Burgess' Earthly Powers.)

Part of the resistance was I'm not sure I'm capable of saying anything about either one.

But let's see. First, the story: the novel has two interlocking plot lines. One in 1956, (the present, roughly; the novel comes out in 1963) and the other in a series of discrete moments from 1898 to 1943. The protagonist of the present is Benny Profane, in his early 20s, child of a religiously mixed marriage (Jewish/Italian Catholic), born in New York City, recently having served a hitch in the US Navy, but now at odds and ends. (Which things, I think, are basically Pynchon himself, except Pynchon's mix is Episcopal/Catholic, and he grew up further out on Long Island, not in the city itself.) The other timeline is the result of an investigation by Herbert Stencil into a woman V., possibly Veronica Wren, who was, as a teenager, caught up in the assassination of a British spy in Cairo in 1898. Herbert's father is Sydney Stencil, a British Foreign Service agent/spy. V. may (or may not) be Herbert's mother. 

Benny is a schlemiel, and is constantly at war with objects: alarm clocks don't wake him; flashlight batteries fail; at one point he tries to rappel down the side of a building and is left hanging upside down. Benny has (imaginary?) late night conversations with a crash-test dummy: they're soul-brothers of a sort, individuals whom the powerful mechanisms of the modern world are out to damage, possibly destroy.

But une guerre contre les objets is the honourable position; the alternative is V., gradually turning herself into an object, glass eye, false teeth, artificial leg. This conflict is Pynchon's theme.

"'I detect allegory in all this,' she said.

'No,' said Slab. 'That is on the same intellectual level as doing the Times crossword puzzle on Sunday. Phony. Unworthy of you.'"

There are moments when it feels like a schematic message novel--Pynchon's message would definitely be humanist, anti-machine, admirable--but the novel escapes allegorical reductionism by a deliberate fudging. V. is not just symbol of the dehumanization of people into objects in the 20th century. (Appropriate as that might be, with the ultimate dehumanization being nuclear annihilation. 1956 is the year of the Suez crisis, important to the novel, and of Hungary. War seemed closer.) But V. is also the woman Veronica Wren, maybe somebody's mother, who's capable of falling in love. (Though not with Sydney Stencil.)

The novel's also funny, or at least I think so:

"Mountebank is a dying profession; all the good ones have moved into politics."

Pynchon is also famous for his zany song lyrics, which can be found in V., although I think he gets better at this as he goes along.

Pynchon also gets better at female characters--though never great--and the women are thinly realized in this, with Benny Profane's sometime girlfriend Rachel Owlglass being the best-drawn of the lot. From Pynchon's (wonderful) introduction to his collection of short stories Slow Learner (1984):

"Modern readers will be, at least, put off by an unacceptable level of racist, sexist, and proto-Fascist talk throughout this story. I wish I could say that this is only Pig Bodine's voice, but, sad to say, it was also my own at the time. The best I can say for it now is that, for its time, it is probably authentic enough."

Pynchon is writing of one of his stories in Slow Learner, but Pig Bodine is a character that also shows up in V., and it's also kind of true of the novel.

Still, I find it a pretty great novel. And it reaches its climax on Malta. Stencil had stayed off Malta; I had, too; but no longer.

You could even call it a classic...

which I've read a few times:

I guess I can treat myself to a new copy. 😉