KCRW’s Bookworm has an excellent interview with Uribe and Cristina Rivera-Garza about their new book Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction (Dalkey Archive). It is an interesting conversation about the state of Mexican fiction, especially for post Boom authors. One of the good things about the book is that it is bilingual, a rarity in fiction. It is definitely a book worth reading and an interview worth listening to.
Author: bythefirelight
The Baader Meinhof Complex – A Review
The Baader Meinhof Complex as the name implies is as much about the psychology of the Baader Meinhof Group as it is about the events. Not knowing much about the time it is hard to say how accurate the film is to the events. It does portray the unrest in West Germany of the late 60’s and early 70’s well and which is reflected in some of Fassbinder’s films, especially in The Lost Honor of Katarina Blum. The more interesting take of the film, though, is not the historic, but the motivations of the group. What was it that drove them and how did it manifest itself if their actions?
The film makers make clear that they see the group as well intentioned ideologues who could not control what they were: free loving anarchists from the 1960’s. The anarchism in their personal lives leads to mistakes in their actions. They are undisciplined terrorists and while they can plan out bank robberies well, they can’t plan out the next steps. And when they are arrested those who follow cannot plan any better. It doesn’t mean they are the Three Stooges of terrorism, because they managed hijackings and the German Embassy raid in Stockholm. It means they had no plan after the action. What happens when you reach your tactical objective?
The Badder Meinhof was good at achieving the tactical, but not the strategic and eventually the movement died out. However, it was not because the police were particularly cleaver. They caught group members, but were not able to stop new members from starting following after the group. Badder Meinhof dissipated as the times dissipated, as the politics that drove the original members changed.
It was also the seeming patience of the police that stopped the gang. The film makers show a scene where the head of the terrorism squad says, we must understand their motivations. It doesn’t make those motivations right, but it is the only way to defeat them. When he says it those in the meeting with him are resistant and it is an obvious criticism on the American War on Terror, which has posited a with us or against us mentality that has seemed to block analysis the movie posits. Yet the film also makes it clear that the German legal system was not able to handle the group adequately, since its processes were based on the idea that the accused will want to fight their charges. Instead the group makes fun of the case and spends time in their prison cell planning escapes.
Ultimately the questions The Baader Meinhof Complex grapple with is how do you stop terrorists? And how do you do it without destroying your society or creating more terrorists. The movie has no answers, but the skilled acting and film making make this and excellent film.
Epiphanies, Kazuo Ishiguro and the Best One Line in a Review for Sometime
Troy Jollimore’s recent review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new book Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, had one of those brilliant one liners that can some describe a whole class of fiction well. He writes, “Characters in contemporary fiction often suffer from Multiple Epiphany Disorder.” It is a line that sums up so much of contemporary short stories. The problem I have with the epiphanies is people seldom have them and when they do they seldom follow them. Moreover, it makes the fiction read like your 7th grade report about the field trip so that story really seems to have ended this way: I learned that… It is refreshing to see a writer avoid such nonsense. I think part of the problem is young writers are taught to have epiphanies. I remember I was. Someday, maybe, that vogue will disappear, but for now we at least have Ishiuro’s stories.
New Hanan Al-Shaykh Book, The Locust and the Bird Reviewed at Barnes and Noble
Hanan Al-Shaykh finally has a new work available. It has been sometime since Only in London came out and I was quite excited to hear about the new book. The Barnes and Noble review is mixed, but I will be reading it none the less. The book is part biography and part novel and does sound interesting, especially in view of her complete works in English. As with many foreign language writers she isn’t mentioned too often, but with 6 or 7 books in English now she is one of the best translated Arabic writers.a
The novel’s only significant weakness is its sluggish pace. Inevitably, the poetry-filled yearning characterizing Kamila and Muhammad’s years apart begins to grate after a while. And al-Shaykh’s decision to chronicle Kamila’s countless attacks of jealousy and insecurity proves exasperating, repeatedly miring the story in protracted nothingness. Equally unoriginal is Kamila’s realization that married life with Muhammad is not all bliss, what with children and domestic chores multiplying almost unabated.
Of course, there are exceptions. Occasionally, al-Shaykh will inject a surprisingly powerful element into descriptions of her mother’s long days and quotidian duties, as when she depicts Kamila’s disturbing (and successful) attempts to miscarry, a ghastly homegrown solution to unwanted pregnancy. And after Kamila is widowed, al-Shaykh poignantly has her express her newfound anxiety: “During our marriage, my endless pregnancies and exhaustion had left me isolated from friends and relatives. I’d seen the world through his eyes. After his death, it was as if I started out all over again.”
What really matters, however, is al-Shaykh’s major twofold achievement with The Locust and the Bird. To begin with, she has written a stirring but never hagiographic account of a woman — her mother — who defies almost every major societal and religious stricture governing women’s behavior in her time. Yet al-Shaykh also manages the remarkable feat of unpretentiously capturing a character’s philosophical relationship with art. A close reading of The Locust and the Bird reveals that — perhaps counterintuitively — young Kamila does not in fact live vicariously through film; she pointedly refrains from transmuting her hunger for the real yet elusive man she loves into a complacent satisfaction with the honeyed images of romance flitting before her eyes. Indeed, far from allowing films to become her life, Kamila emerges from the theater spiritually refreshed but further impelled to achieve her dream. And that, aside from being a profound notion al-Shaykh deftly encapsulates in literary form, is probably both the wisest and healthiest approach to art.
Reading Fiction at the Hugo House
It has been years since I’ve gotten around to reading something in public. Usually, readings are either poetry centric, which makes sense since it is a short format and you can get a lot of people cycling through the stage and you don’t have to concentrate too long on any one thing. Or the reading feels like some sort of comedy fest. Again, poetry lends it self to this. Even if you write 3000 word, 5 minutes translates to a fourth of a story. If I had fifteen minutes…well you do the math.
I did decide after reading for five minutes, getting a few laughs were they were expected, that the real role of these readings is not to air out your latest piece, which I’m not so sure really matters without feedback (this is Seattle so there’s none of that), but to practice acting out the readings. Back before TV and perhaps a little too much seriousness, even great authors like Dickens would give dramatic readings of their works. Too few do that now. But if you are not writing a novel of ideas, why not. At least it will be entertaining. We will see how that works out in practice next month.
Horacio Castellanos Moya and the Political Novel at the Quarterly Conversation
Tirana MemoriaScott at the Quarterly Conversation has written an excellent article about Horacio Castellanos Moya and the new political novel. It is a good introduction to his work and is worth a read in part because it charts not only an interesting history of the development of the political novel, but of Latin American political novels. The nexus of his argument is here
As with Senselessness, the shape of She-Devil’s political conspiracy never becomes very distinct. Trapped within the narrator’s paranoid consciousness we can only guess at its actual dimensions, and any objective reality of an actual conspiracy is never confirmed. Part of this is simply the fragmented distribution of political power in a modern society—the fact that even a president can’t have full information on everything being done by a government. This fragmentation of power is something that Moya elegantly fuses with the development of his plot and his character as he marches his protagonists down each alley one at a time, closing certain threads of investigation even as new ones are introduced.
Yet the more significant part of this is due to the protagonist’s mind, which changes subtly but powerfully throughout both of these novels. What Senselessness and The She-Devil in the Mirror are doing is bringing the unreliable first-person novel to a modern Latin American context. What for Ford Madox Ford was primarily a story of infidelity in inter-war England, and for Kobo Abe was about existentialist malaise in mid-century Japan, and for Walker Percy was about the alienation of the individual in a radically mediated society, and for Kazuo Ishiguro was a story of classism in contemporary England, becomes for Moya a story of the great political subconsciousness that seethes through life in 21st-century Latin America. Each of these writers shares an interest in portraying the space between objective reality and human subjectivity. Fundamentally, they are interested in what happens as the human mind attempts to piece together a reality, though it lacks the necessary information to do so. As the diversity of these writers’ output shows, the dramatization of this gap is a very malleable tool: an individual’s quest for objective truth can interrogate realities about the cultures that range from a bottom-rung operative in a Latin American state on the verge of failure to a wealthy, privileged gentleman in a European nation at the height of empire. What is most characteristic about these novels is that vital facts about the culture each is set in are bound up at the deepest levels with the narrators’ own gradual realization that there is no such a thing as an objective reality. The process of self-discovery is contingent on comprehending one’s cultural context.
I would also add that having read Tirana Memoria I know that he doesn’t always approach reality in such dark terms, even when he is writing about a coup. He is also willing to inject humor and play games with the perception of reality only in the most oblique terms. Tirana Memoria uses one of the most straightforward sounding narrators, who scarcely hints at the deep rejections of a verifiable truth. If the book is ever translated into English, perhaps we will have a more complete picture of his work.
Il Divo – A Review
The Italian film Il Divo is one of those films where not knowing the history behind the story makes it difficult to understand what is going on. The need for background knowledge makes an already cryptic movie even more cryptic and though not impossible to understand it leaves one, despite the informative title cards interspersed through out the story, puzzled at best.
Il Divo is the story of Giulio Andreotti who was the Italian Prime Minister several times between the 70’s and the early 90’s and whose links to corruption and organized crime lead to his mafia trial in 1992, where he was found not guilty. The film covers all of those things, but in atemporal snipits so that it is hard to know what happened when and why. Il Divo is not a movie that tries to explain what he did, but suggest what he did. It is a movie that looks on the events from the outside, as might a reporter. Events, then, if unknown, stay unknown. For the outsider to Italian history the collection of characters who meet, but don’t seem to incriminate themselves leaves one uncertain as to the point of showing the characters. While the technique of showing what is only known make reportorial sense, that when it comes with so few explanations, the film looses some of its impact. Which is not to say the film is bad, just that without the backgrounding one is bound to be confused.
Toni Servillo who plays Andreotti is one of the bright spots of the movie, even for one who knows nothing about Italy. He walks like a nerdy Nosferatu, shoulders hunched, taking small gliding steps, backing out of rooms and turning on his heals to change direction. Apparently this is an accurate portrayal of Andreotti and it is fascinating to watch him inhabit the character. The way he speaks, too, is strange: not a dominator, but strategizer.
What one comes away with after watching the film is a complete amazement that Italy functions at all. There is scene after scene of corrupt meetings, politicians giving away things to voters, and, of course, assignations. You don’t have to know Andreotti to know something is wrong with all of that.
Il Divo is a mixed movie, one that doesn’t require a specialist’s knowledge to enjoy, but it sure will help.
Borges and His Precursors
Letras Libres‘ August issue included three stories that influenced some of Borges’ most famous stories in Fictiones. The stories are a fascinating look into Borges process of thought and creation and worth a look for any fan of Borges. While the stories are available on-line in Spanish, they are not on-line in English. However, two are more or less easily available in reprints, while a search for the third on the web will easily bring up a result. The three stories by Borges are the Library of Babel, Perrie Mendard Author of the Quijote, and the Shape of the Sword.
Of the three, the precursor to the Library of Babelis the most interesting. Written by Kurd Lasswitz, the Universal Libraryis a mathematical exploration of a library that contains every possible book, those with errors, those that we know, and the billions of others that do not exist now. What sets the story apart from Borges is the idea that there is some sort of true volume by each author, whereas Borges focuses more on the metaphysical complications of a library that has every possible book. Both stories authors posit intriguing ideas on the shape of ideas, but for Lasswitz the library he envisions is a mathematical monster, one that would be so large that laying the books end to end would take two light years to get from one end to the other. Even though Lasswitz sees it as finite, in practice it is an infinite library. For Borges the intrigue is more in what happens if the library already existed, how would knowledge exist. He goes one step beyond Lasswitz, one step beyond the reader’s history with true volumes, and reflects on more than the mathematical possibilities, but the ontological possibilities.
The precursor to Perrie Mendard Author of the Quijote has the most Bogesian changes. Corputby Tupper Greenwald is the story of a professor who so loves King Leer that when he finally takes the time to write his own play, what he creates is an exact copy. Greenwald’s protagonist is more of a lost man who has so imbibed a work he is unable to differentiate himself from the work. The story is psychological more than literary and it suggests that the professor has become senile. Borges, on the other hand, places the focus of the story less in the copying of the Quijote, and focuses on the interpretation, the way a work is understood through time. When the narrator of Perrie Mendard Author of the Quijote describes the book he changes the terms of interpretation so that what in Cervantes’ day was considered a medieval way of writing, in Perrie Mendardbecomes a briliant exposition of criticism. Even though they are the same text, the interpretations have changed. Corput, while interesting, is no where near as interesting as Perrie Mendard Author of the Quijote.
The final story, Shape of the Sword, I won’t cover here but is based on W Somerset Maugham‘s the Man with the Scar.
As in reading Boccaccio’s Filocolo before reading Chaucer’s the Franklin’s Tale, or reading Plutarch before reading Shakespeare, reading the sources of Borges will not diminish the quality of invention in his stories, but will magnify them.
New Words Without Borders
A new Words Without Borders has been published, focusing on international journalism:
This month we present eyewitness accounts from around the world. In the spirit of the great Ryszard Kapuściński, our contributors record far more than just the facts, blending genres and filing dispatches from both political and literary frontlines. From the killing fields of Cambodia to the swarming streets of Tehran, on the ground and in the trenches, the writers here chronicle the news of the world with artful urgency. See how Nanni Balestrini, Karl-Markus Gauss, Gébé, Elham Gheytanchi, Peter Fröberg Idling, Wojciech Jagielski, Erwin Koch, François Vallejo, and Abdourahman Waberi deliver news that stays news
A New Unpublished Bolaño Short Story
60Watts, a relatively new Spanish language literary journal, has published an as yet unpublished short story by Roberto Bolaño, El contorno del ojo (The Contour of the Eye). The story was presented at a literary contest in Valencia in the 80’s so Bolaño could earn some money. Perhaps it is good. I haven’t had time to read it, not translate anything from it.
You can read the story at 60Watts and read a short article in La Vanguardia, all in Spanish.
Seattle Bookfest, October 24-25, 2009
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.
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.
To Live or Perish Forever – Stunt Journalism and Reporting – A Review
The term stunt journalism first came into usage after 1887 when Nellie Bly wrote Ten Days in a Madhouse where she had impersonated a mad woman to get a patient’s view of a madhouse. The stunt made her famous and did bring the story to a public that didn’t know how bad the madhouses were. Since then journalists have occasionally used stunt journalism as a means to get at a story they might not otherwise get. However, the stunts have also become a end in themselves, as in the work of Hunter S. Thompson who reveled in becoming the story. The stunt journalist, though, always has something over the journalist who just sends in the 500 to 1500 word story. They have the adventure of the story and it is that adventure, whether real or manufactured by inserting one’s self into the story, that can make a stunt journalist’s work exciting and often compelling.
The risks to this kind of journalism range from distorting the story to weak prose and they are something that Nicholas Schmidle in his new book To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan
If you answer both then you have the book, because it is both and that is its strength. Part history, part journalism, part danger tourism To Live will depress with its endless problems, some known, others seldom reported. Of particular note is the ethnic tensions between the Punjabis, Pushtus, Balochis, and Sinds. Lost in the reports of the Taliban in the Swatt Valley are the constant tensions that have racked the country and which the government seems to have little interest in stopping when riots flare up. From what Schmidle says it is a wonder that Pakistan still exists. Add in the Taliban and the ever present state security services who seem obsessed with looking good and thwarting India, and you have the most dysfunctional state. What you hear in the news is even worse on the ground.
Schmidle offers some interesting reporting on the Taliban and the collapse of the traditional power structures in the tribal areas, noting that the Taliban are not a new form of the old tribal system, but a replacement that exterminates any opposition, including the tribal leaders. Yet despite the danger and the brutality, Schmidle meets with fundamentalist leaders and brings a humanizing face to them. He doesn’t do it because he believes in them nor trusts them, but to show how they could gain so many followers despite their positions that are so inimical in the west.
The friendships, too, are part of the adventure. He is honest in describing his feelings and in this sense the book is very good. But the question about what is a stunt and what is reporting still remains. Any act of reporting puts oneself if the story, even if peripherally, but does the story behind the story over take the story? In To Live occasionally it does, but in the I centric world of media it certainly is a light touch and no where near as purple as Dexter Firkins Forever War. Schmidle has managed to write a solid account of his time in Pakistan and if the story is subsumed in his story it is only because those are the demands of the solitary journalist.
By The Firelight 