This isn’t new news, but Seattle is going to have another book festival: Seattle Bookfest. It has been a while since we’ve had one of these and it is always good to support local authors, which is what my quick glance over the schedule caught. It is good to see Paul Doyle is leading this effort. It is a while since I’ve seen his name associated with literary enterprises.
Month: September 2009
Among Thieves – A Review
Mez Packer’s Among Thieves
Briefly, the plot follows four characters. Pad and Andy are friends and drug dealers. They make good money but they soon fall out and would not have much to do with each other, but Andy owes the IRA 25,000 pounds and needs Pads help. They try different schemes: passing counterfeit money in Spain; smuggling drugs into England. Nothing works correctly because Pads hates Andy too much. Jez is in the middle of every plan, always getting the raw end, but adding some edge to the story. Finally, Ahmett narrates the story of his flight from Albania, which seems unconnected, but at the very end of the novel connects all the points of the story.
What makes Among Thieves a weak novel is the unfocused plot. While a crime novel could be less plot driven, Among Thieves seeks complexity in the plot, but what occurs is not complexity but lethargy as Pads complains about Andy getting his girl or telling us how jealous he is that Andy might sleep with one of his drug couriers. Instead of tension, you have the sense of listening in on high schoolers gossiping. No, not all drug dealers have to be hardboiled toughs, but winers are tedious.
A second problem is Ahmett. Most of his narration is about his escape from Albania and has nothing to do with the central plot. While the twist at the end of the book links him to the story, the long sections of his life only serve to slow down the intrigues between Pads and Andy. In a novel of intrigues, each part must heighten the intrigue otherwise the book ceases to be intriguing .
The one bright spot in the novel is Jez who brings an energy to the narration that is often lacking when Pads narrates. It is obvious the Packer can create interesting characters and knows how to give them life. Perhaps in her next work the characters will be more consistently interesting.
While reminiscent of Train Spotting and Snatch, Among Thieves has neither the dark introspection of the former nor the well plotted story of latter; however, it does fit squarely amongst the British crime genre of the last 20 years.
Rupert: A Confession – A Review
Rupert: A Confession
Pfeijffer successfully combines the two elements the obsessive and the unreliable to create Rupert. Rupert is on trial for something what it is isn’t clear, but what ever it is Rupert feels the need to explain his innocence in great detail. The detail, though, is not a counter argument of the facts, but a brief history of his affair with Mira and the days after. Rupert, though, is a pervert and he’d gets more pleasure in going to a peep show than actually having sex wit his girl friend. He is also quite graphic when he describes his encounter in the peep show and his dreams, and it is an obvious tip off that Rupert, despite his claims to the contrary, is not completely aware of what a courtroom nor society in general thinks is proper behavior. Telling a court that you are stalking an old girlfriend and still love her only suggests madness and violence. As the novel progresses Rupert becomes more obsessive, yet each time he makes the claim it is obvious he is only becoming more unhinged, losing grasp of the boundaries between desire and stalking.
The trial is the perfect contrasting device for the unreliability because Pfeijffer can let Rupert’s story, his obsession, flow naturally in Rupert’s voice. At first Rupert seems a little strange, but not manically obssesed, just a lonely man in a permissive country. As he goes farther into his story, though, it becomes obvious that what he is narrating is probably not true. The distance between how he has behaved in earlier scenes contrasts too heavily with the behavior he claims at the end.
Rupert: A Confession is a tense novel. The coming expectation of some great misdeed flows throughout the novel and over the last 30 pages the question is, is this what landed him in jail? To say what happened would ruin the novel, but the sense of coming disaster animates the book and keeps his obsessions from the tangential. Another source of the tension is the constant fixation of sex. Titillating, as Publishers Weekly said, is the wrong word for the seedy depths that Rupert visits as he seeks to fulfill his fantasies. Had his fantasies with Mira been reality and the reality non existent, the book would be titillating. Instead, coupling the violence and sense of foreboding confront the reader with questions: what happens when eroticism you are enjoying as a spectator (the reader) turns dark? Does it turn the former experience into a mistake, something shameful, or are they two different things? Ultimately, does using the surrogate, Rupert, for some distant enjoyment place one in the same dark peep show where Rupert first shows his obsessive side?
Rupert is also an architectural novel. Pfeijffer uses the city and the spaces within it as a way to distance Rupert from greater human contact. Rupert sees more in the city, its squares, its buildings, and can understand them better than the people in them. He knows how to analyze, not how to connect:
Fredo square is not like that, but it does its best. When it’s on form and happy because it’s being kissed by a sultry summer evening, it can mirror the perfection of the Palio. Then it can stop looking and smile like a brushing bride who embraces you and is grateful and all is well. She stretches herself out comfortably on the soft bed of the humming city, blissfully certain that she is loved.
Towards the end of the novel as Rupert is trying to find Mira in the winding streets of the old part of town, he blends the language of the erotic with the architectural, removing any humanity from Mira and turning her into an object. At the same time, though, the complex eroticism previously mentioned returns, because the city as Rupert sees it is truly erotic. The architecture becomes the reflection and the shape of the inhabitants, and as such is both beautiful and ugly, and in Rupert: A Confession, also a place for shame and titillation.
Rupert: A Confession is a brief novel, but in its 130 pages Pfeijffer is able to master one of the more difficult things in fiction, the unreliable narrator, and that makes it well worth the read.
Ten Days In A Madhouse by Nellie Bly – A Review
What shocks one generation can seem so tame to another, or in those shifting ironies of time what seemed natural is now the shocker. Over the last 100 years in the United States that shifting shock has most often come with the changes in race and gender relations. But the shifts have also come in the way mental health is approached and some 120 years since its publication Ten Days in a Madhouse is a reflection of those changes and while some part of the writing may seem dated or at best a piece of history much like Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives
Briefly, Ten Days in a Madhouse is Nellie Bly’s (Elizabeth Jane Cochrane Seaman) account of her ten days in a madhouse in New York in 1887. Bly, in an act of stunt journalism that wold make her famous, pretended to be mildly insane so she would be sent to an asylum to see first hand what one was like. To begin the process she goes to a rooming house and one night she stays up all night staring at the wall. The stare fest alerts her roommate and scares the homeowner and the next day she fixates on her lost trunk and insists on finding it. At the same time she continually talks about too many foreigners and never having worked, which both seem strange to the working class people she is rooming with. These three things are sufficient for her to land before a judge and eventually in the madhouse where she endures the arbitrary and vindictive rule of the nurses who are little better than street toughs. At the end of ten days a lawyer from her paper the World secures her release.
What strikes a modern reader are two things. The first is the obvious arbitrariness of the commitment and cruelty of the nurses. For the women who are trapped in the asylum there seems to be no way to escape. They have no way to demonstrate their sanity and some are quite sane, only having suffered what might now be diagnosed as a bout of depression after a traumatic experience or a nervous breakdown. To say one was sane was to say one was insane. Many of the women Bly encounters should not be in the asylum by modern standards and it easy to see the asylum as yet another version of Kafka’s Trial or Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The second area of discord is what Bly takes as normal. She continually winks at the reader, which is mostly stylistic, but then throws in comments that say she is worried about her hair. In a piece of serious journalism it seems a little strange. Yet her preoccupations tell as much about what is normal as is strange. And the reversal comes in how she characterizes women. In the world these events take place women are delicate and there is a continual paternalism.
Given these discords the book can seem at once a Guild Age curiosity and an annoying reflection of time thankfully past. What makes the book valuable is not so much what Bly was reporting, but what she thought of it. There is an earnestness that is not jaded, even though she is doing a stunt, and her solutions for fixing the asylums are hopeful if vague. In her conclusions you sense a belief that these problems are easily fixable if they are just addressed. Though her language is a bit more cluttered, she writes clearly and it serves well to show those shifts in attitude of the last 120 years. In those shifts, too, you can see how arbitrary the care of the mentally ill can be. In reading the book, one should not come away smug, but reminded.
Death in Spring – A Review
—Men who are eager to kill are already dead. (pg. 99)
To distill Mercé Rodoreda’s Death in Spring
Composed of a series of short, enigmatic chapters narrated by a villager, the novel follows the course of the narrator’s life in the village from youth to death. The events he narrates are not singular, but repetitive, ritualistic, and without beginning and end. This is not a novel of they did, the singular, but they would do, the repetitive. The sense of the repetitive is what makes the novel haunting, because there is no leaving the village. And the narrator wants to leave, not because of one threat in particular but the constant sense of threat.
To understand what makes the village different, all one has to know is how they bury the dead. Instead of burial or cremation, a tree is cut open in the shape of a cross and the bark is pulled away. The dead (or nearly dead) person is placed in the tree and is covered over with the bark again. Later, when the person has spent some time there they put cement down the mouth to keep the soul in. The burials are not necessarily by choice, either. Instead, the function as one of many violent rituals that keeps the village eating itself with violence.
In the village, too, is a prisoner. Why there is a prisoner isn’t explained, but he is an object of ridicule and curiosity and when finally released he is unwilling to move from where his cage once was. Its as if the cycle of violence and control becomes so natural that even a prisoner who might want to be free, is uninterested in freedom.
Amongst the culture of communal control, Rodoreda creates a mythology from the natural world: bees that are at once free, yet are scavengers too; a river that runs under the village, not only giving life to the village but also giving it another means to violence. All of these images create a sense of an Eden that is not quite Eden. It is that sense of beauty just out of reach that makes the novel so arresting. One particularly gruesome practice will illustrate how the book mixes all these elements together.
I wanted to see the Festa, so I went. The villagers had gathered near the river, on the esplanade by the canes that whistled because it was windy. Tables and benches had been built from tree trunks. The horse hoof soup was already boiling in large cauldrons, and standing beside each pot was a woman who was removing scum with a ladle and throwing fat and lumps of cooled blood on the ground. For a funeral Festa, they killed horses and pregnant mares. First, they ate the soup, then the horse or mare, and then a morsel-but only a small piece because there wasn’t much to go around-of the little ones the mares were carrying inside them. They made a paste with the brains; it helped digestion. They peeled them, boiled them in a pot used only for brains, cleaned them, and then chopped them to bits.
The novel could easily seen as an allegory of post civil war Spain. Between the mix of conformity and quasi-religious practices that celebrate violence all marks of Franco’s Spain. The novel, too, can be a more generalized allegory of violence and conformity. With either read, the novel with its clear images, sparse narration, and fantastical landscapes is clearly a brilliant novel of a great story teller.
Clarice Lispector Review in New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books has a long review essay by Lorrie Moore that also draws on some of her other works.
This Side Of Paradise – A Review
The problem with coming of age stories is that once you have come of age and look back at what may have been a small fraction of a life, it may seem just a pacing moment in the larger picture of a life. Moreover, it is such a specific event that others have no way to relate to those brief experiences. And explaining those moments to someone younger who has no idea of the little preoccupations that obsess one is at best a tepid history lesson. There are exceptions, of course, but the average coming of age novel will always seem so powerful to those who lived it and years latter just be a puzzle: did someone actually care about this?
This Side of Paradise
Besides the tiresome speculations on philosophy and psychology the book never really says anything. Sure it is a rejection of the previous generation and part of it seems to fit within the Lost Generation literature, but nothing really happens. The protagonist leaves the university and goes on to life having one final showdown with a rich man in his limo. What is actually bothering the protagonist is lost in vague generalities. While the book does have a few Dreiserian moments of seediness, it never gets beyond the specifics of a boy in 1918.
Perhaps Fitzgerald was a writer who needed to experience what he was writing about. The themes of the era are only briefly mentioned at the expense of frat boy pranks and so he had to retreat to the philosophical, the only thing he may have known. Unfortunately, pop psychology or philosophy, even if it comes from Nietzsche reflects more about the fleeting preoccupations of youth than philosophy. Occasionally, his descriptions are worth the slog: when describing an overweight character he says he was ” a trifle too stout for symmetry;” when describing a friend he says he was “an occasion rather than a friend.”
Had Fitzgerald not written The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise would be just another of the forgotten books he listed in his own book.
New Quarterly Conversation with News from the Empire Review
The Quarterly Conversation just published issue 17. It includes my review of Fernando Del Paso’s News from the Empire. There are some other interesting articles, too. Definitely worth the look.
Inglorious Bastards – A Review
Along with John Woo, Quentin Tarentino made violence chic. Sure there was graphic violence in film, just watch some Peckinpah. The difference is with Tarentino the scenes of violence are dovetailed with the humorous insider jokes, the one who understands that the song playing in the background signifies something and that the composition of the scene is from this movie, all of it more concerned with style. Which is not to say that re-imagining style creates new ways of looking at a genre or an aesthetic. However, with Tarentino style is the aesthetic and violence is the tool. A movie like Kill Bill is the perfect format for such re-imagining because it plays on already generic conventions of the samurai and cowboy. Each genre uses violence as primary element and re-imagining them slightly, but still squarely withing the genre at the same time making fun of the genre and celebrating it.
With Inglorious Bastards, though, Tarentino moves into the war movie genre. Again he attempts to rework a genre but this time his efforts are misplaced because instead of reworking the tropes of war films such as the green solder or the selfless soldier who jumps on the grenade, he injects the sadistic violence of Reservoir Dogs into World War II. Even within the work of Tarentino that kind of violence is not light hearted, but in Inglorious Bastards it is and it lends a certain approval of violence as fun. Granted the targets are Nazis and the perpetrators are Jewish, but even as Tarentino shows in Kill Bill, vengeance is complicated, filled with conflicting emotions. While Tarentino captures the cinematic sense of a group of soldiers, each with his own heterogeneous personality, any complexity he may have shown in Kill Bill is missing. Instead, the film is more like Dusk Till Dawn: pure shock for shock’s sake. In a zombie movie that doesn’t matter, but in a war film it isn’t enough.
Tarentino brings a righteous indignation to the war against Germany, something that is often missing unless the film focuses on the Holocaust. Yet the complexity of it is lost and instead of looking at the violence in its starkest terms, as one might in looking at the war against Japan with all its savagery, the Nazis are either brilliantly cruel or just willing fools and the American soldiers are more or less untouchable. The result is a film that places the savagery in the hands of the good—the Americans—and places all questions of methods outside review. Tarentino has created a very black and white view of the war, albeit graphic and witty, which has more in common with the Sands of Iwo Jima than Flags of Our Fathers or Letters from Iwo Jima, two films that show the savagery not as a game, but something troubling.
Ultimately, Inglorious Bastards, with its re-imagining of the end of World War II is pure Tarentino: style as substance. Inglorious Bastards is more concerned with the fun of vengeance than saying anything that we haven’t already seen in other war films.
By The Firelight 