Maybe its as a relation of a PI (a Pinkerton Man) or just someone steeped in noir, I find the reworking of the detective story fascinating. In Icíar Bollaín’s Mataharis the detective is no longer the tough loner, instead she is a searcher, at times disillusioned, but in control, or at least close to controlling, her private life. I say she because in Mataharis the detectives are three women, one a young devote to the detective arts whose only goal is to be a detective, one a mother coming back to work after having children, and one a middle aged woman, a veteran, who is in a loveless marriage. Most of the work the agency they work for does is following the lovers of their client’s spouses and, of course, catching them cheating. The work, though, doubles back on the women and each finds that what they do is not just a job, but a way of perceiving the world. The young one finds she can’t betray the strikers she’s been set to spy on, and she sacrifices her career for them and the leader who she has grown close to. The mother finds that her work makes her think the worst when her husband begins to act like he is cheating. And the veteran finds in watching the failures of others that her marriage one of habit, not love, is not worth keeping going. It is the interplay between the motifs of the detective, loner, cynic, and the women who have that edge in the sense that the everyday, the suspicious husbands, the failing marriages, makes them suspicious, and yet from those struggles they move on. If the motive of the typical noir detective is to survive, but live on, or so it seems, in much the same manner—the static existence of the hard boiled—Bollaín’s characters use the events to grow and change.
Author: bythefirelight
Micro Fiction or Star Trek Fiction (sp)
I always find it fascinating when Star Trek can inspires literary art that really has nothing to do with sci-fi. A few weeks ago, or was it a month now, La Jornada published this bit of fun.
2.- Su cuerpo llega mal acomodado: debe caminar con las orejas, hablar por las uñas, orinar por la nariz, ver por las nalgas, fornicar con un pulmón, escuchar por un ventrículo, sudar hacia el interior, defecar dérmicamente, pensar con los cojones (algo que a muchos nos sucede).
His body arrives in bad shape: he has to walk on his ears, talk with his fingernails, pee trough the nose, see trough his ass, listen with his ventricle, sweat inside, defecate trough the skin, think with his balls (something that we men do).
Horacio Castellanos Moya Interviews
I was on the Talpajocote blog and found links to some interviews with Horacio Castellanos Moya. Each are ten minutes long and worth watching.
In the first, from a Spanish TV station, he talks about how he traveled around Central America when he was young, hoping that the country would become democratic and eventually gave up and moved to Mexico. He returned to El Salvador 10 years later, but left again, disillusioned. He also talks about Tirana memoria his latest book. He mentions the title comes from something a character at the end of Donde no estén ustedes says, which along with Desmoronamiento, is part of a trilogy. He describes what he sees as the focus of the book is: the growing liberty and awakening of a woman while her husband is in prison, as if his imprisonment is her liberation.
In the second, more literary, but a little bit more difficult to understand, he talks about how he sees Mexico as the capital of Meso America, and Salvador as one of the small provinces of the area. Central American and Mexico are not as different from each other as Central America is to South America. He also mentions that a lack of literary tradition in El Salvador has led him to use the language itself as tradition. It is liberating, because unlike a Mexican of Argentinian he has no wave of tradion he rides on. Instead he can search the world over for what he wants to use as an influence, such as Thomas Bernhard.
Ana María Matute in El País
Ana María Matute has a new book out and El País has given it a great review. If you have never read her work, she is definitely worth it. Her sparse short stories are excellent. Her name often comes up around Nobel time (although that may just be in Spain). If you are unfamiliar with her, the description from the article is a great synopsis.
Aunque perteneciente, cronológicamente, a la llamada generación del medio siglo, con cuyos más destacados miembros comparte determinados trasfondos temáticos (la Guerra Civil española, la desolación como paisaje moral de los años de posguerra, la rememoración de la infancia como irreparable pérdida de la inocencia edénica, y el descalabro humano reinante en una sociedad en la que los más débiles sucumben bajo la impiedad de los poderosos), la escritura de Ana María Matute siempre se ha regido por un talante despegado de las consignas tanto ideológicas como estéticas de la época.
Although she belongs, chronologically, to the mid century generation, whose most well know members share certain thematic overtones (the Spanish Civil Way, the desolation as moral voyage through the years after the war, the child’s memory as the irreparable loss of an Eden like innocence, and the reigning human misfortune in a society where the weakest succumb to the impunity of the powerful), the writing of Ana María Matute has always been marked by a talent not tied to ideologies but the aesthetics of the era.
Mexico’s Bestsellers for 2008
The LA Times has a list of Bestsellers in Mexico for 2008. Mostly they are are imports from the US (3 different Stefanie Myers books) and histories of Mexican Politics. Only one book really caught my eye and that is Jorge Volpi’s El Jardín Devastado.
Labyrinth of Solitude – 50 Years Latter
As Scott at Conversational Reading noted, there is a long review of the 50th anniversary of the Labyrinth of Solitude in Letras Libres for those of you who can read it, it is worth the time. If you only read English, I’ll give a quick summary. I haven’t read the book since I was in college at The Evergreen State College in Olympia where I took a class on e quarter (at Evergreen this means my only class of 16 credits for ) called Mexico Since the Revolution. Labyrinth, along with classics of Mexican fiction by Rulfo, Fuentes, Azuella and Yañez, and more anthropological titles like the outdated Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico were on the reading list. In this context Paz, though unique in his approach, did fit within a tradition, which the article makes clear.
Alejandro Rossi, the author, first talks about the publishing history of the book. In its first run it only did 3000 copies and it took another ten years for a reprint to appear, not unlike Rulfo’s Pedro Parama. It wasn’t until the masquers of the students in 1968 did the book gain a wider readership outside of writers. The book first written at the end of the forties, was written in a period of great activity and followed Eagle or Sun, a book of poems which also explores, in part, Mexicanness. (It also includes the wonderful My Life With The Wave)
Rossi goes on to talk about the how Paz used Plato’s conception of the cave to frame his argument. Men crave societal relations which they find in the cave, but to gain insight one must leave the cave, which, of course, breaks the relationship. When the man comes back to the cave he is now an outsider, but through the outsider status they can help lead the group, since they now have special knowledge. Using this metaphor, Paz saw Labyrinth as a way to examine, or leave the cave, of society. What makes this approach unique, is that Paz writes a book that is not academic.
Rossi covers several salient points, but most important for Paz’s relation to Mexican intellectual history of that time, is how Paz sees Mexican History and its relation to the mythic solidarity of the past. (This article was difficult to translate so my apologies if it seems a little choppy.)
La nostalgia de la comunidad no es el anhelo sentimental por una comunidad cualquiera, no, tampoco es la nostalgia de Platón frente a la polis de su época, no, se trata de la nostalgia de la Edad de Oro, que sería precisamente la edad sin máscaras, el sitio, entre otras cosas, donde se da el verdadero amor, el amor sin velos, el amor que es lo contrario del amor rodeado de convenciones, se trata del amor revolucionario, una idea que le viene del surrealismo. […] Pero siempre que habla de autenticidad, piensa en la Edad de Oro. Y la Revolución Mexicana es para Octavio el momento de la sinceridad histórica, sería el momento de la recuperación de este ser original que él intenta descubrir en El laberinto de la soledad. Y dentro de la Revolución Mexicana será el zapatismo el que más se acerque a la autenticidad anhelada. La Revolución restablece el tiempo original, la Revolución busca la fundación de un tiempo mítico anterior.
The community’s nostalgia is not a sentimental longing for whatever community, neither is it the nostalgia of Plato facing the polis of his era, no, it is about the nostalgia of the Golden Age which would be the age without masks, the place, among other things, where they give each other the true love, the love without veils, the love that is the the opposite of the love that is surrounded by conventions; it is about the revolutionary love, an idea that comes from surrealism. […] But always talking about authenticity, you think about the Golden Age. And the Mexican Revolution is, for Octavio, the moment of historical sincerity. It would be the moment of regaining the original being that he wanted discover in the Labyrinth of Solitude. And within the Mexican Revolution perhaps is Zapatismo, the thing closest to the longed for authenticity. The revolution reestablished the original time; the revolution searched for the foundation from a previous, mythic time.
Although Paz does not idealize the Revolution, he does see in it a mythic narrative for Mexico, much as he sees forging of relationships between the Indians and the Spanish through the Catholic church. It is a search for something within the history of Mexico, not something to bring from the outside. These ideas are not unique among those of his generation and there is a desire to fashion something new and unique from the recent past, a breaking of the pre-revolutionary, more Eurpoean, with the more Mexican. Paz, himself, does not see Zapata as the ideal, it is the communal ideals tied up in Zapata that create a national myth and joins the Mexicans in Plato’s cave together.
I’m not sure what Paz thought of the national myths himself, but he does write about them in Eagle or Sun (the title refers to the Aztecs, and by extension, Mexico itself). Taken together, they form a mythic ideal of Mexico, which was also being written by Rulfo in a darker manner.
I don’t know if I’ll read Labyrinth of Solitude again, but the article made me think it was time to look at it again.
New New Zealand Writing – Elizabeth Catton
The Outing is just a brief story, no more than 1500 words, but it is a fun read with a dark and sharp humor. The story, in its briefness, naturally leaves much unsaid, but that briefness is just enough to lead the reader into the richest of questions, those that expand the story and are the logical outgrowth of well drawn characters. In the story, one of the characters takes great pride in telling pedophilia jokes. You don’t know much more about the character and as I put the story down I thought, what does this say about the character? It is that kind of opened question that makes the story more than just a series of jokes.
Amitav Ghosh On The CBC
Tirana Memoria (sp)
Tirana Memoria
Horacio Castellanos Moya
Tirana Memoria is the latest novel by the El Salvadoran novelest Horacio Castellanos Moya, who also published a translation of his novel Senselessness (Insensatez) in English this year. Tirana Memoria, although fictional, is about the 1944 overthrow of General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez and takes place over a month and a half period when a failed coup led to reprisals which ultimately led to the general strike that forced the general to flee the country. Part diary, part convicts-on-the-lam narrative, it alternates between comedy and tension as the characters elude the army and the police and attempt to survive post coup repression.
The novel opens as Haydée, the wife of Pericles, relates in her diary that Pericles has been taken to prison again. Pericles is a newspaper editor known for writing essays opposing the government and imprisonment is nothing new. Haydée writes of going to the prison each day to have lunch with him and bring him daily necessities like cigarettes. She is an upper class woman and even though she doesn’t like going to the prison, she has become used to the daily task. However, she is not a political person and all she wants from her visits are to see her husband and find out when he will be released. She is so unpoliticized and accustomed to his imprisonment that when she thinks Percilies will be released she goes to the hairdresser so she will look nice for him. The sheltering has created a woman who, though dedicated, is not consciously aware of the dangers, almost as if the constant imprisonments are part of an annoying game. She has an almost naive sense of entitlement and only midway through the novel when her political consciousness has awakened does she begin to understand what has shaped her.
Nunca he participado en política por iniciativa propia, sino que siempre he acompañado a Pericles en sus decisiones, con la absoluta confianza de que él sabe lo que hace y por qué lo hace, y con la certeza de que mi deber es estar a su lado. Así fue cuando decidió convertirse en secretario particular del general luego de que éste diera el golpe de Estado que lo llevó al poder, o cuando dos años más tarde aceptó la embajada en Bruselas, o cuando decidió romper con el Gobierno y regresar al país, o cuando debimos salir hacia el exilio en México. Iré a la reunión donde doña Chayito con este mismo espíritu; en cuanto pueda hablar con Pericles le contaré sobre ello y seguiré sus dictados al respecto. Admiro a mujeres como Mariíta Loucel, que luchan en primera fila por sus ideales políticos, pero ella es de origen francés y tiene otra educación. Yo me debo a mi marido.
I have never participated in a political event by myself. Instead, I have always gone along with Pericles decision’s with the absolute confidence that he knows what he is doing and why, and with the certainty that my duty is to be at his side. It was this way when he decided to become the general’s general secretary after the coup that brought him to power, or when two years later he accepted the position of ambassador en Brussels, or when he decided to break with the government and return home, or when we had to leave for exile en Mexico. With this same spirit I will go to the meeting with Doña Chayito. As soon as I can talk to Pericles I will tell him about it and will suggest he give his respects. I admire the women like Mariíta Loucel that man the barricades for their political ideals, but she is French and was raised differently.
Not only does the entry describe who Haydée has been and what she believes her role is, it gives one a sense of who Perciles is. Their relationship, despite his politics, is quite traditional and she has spent most of her life raising her family and supporting him. In the entry, too, one can sense a timidness in the changes she is beginning to experience. By the end of the novel she will begin to use her privileged status to slip through cordons of soldiers who might otherwise stop someone not as well off, and deliver funds to the strikers. But when she writes this she still has more to learn.
While Haydée narrates the happenings in San Salvador, her son Clemen and nephew Jimmy try to flee the country. Clemen is a drunk and wastrel who in a rash moment exuberantly backs the coup while on the radio. He even goes so far to insult the general and now is a wanted man. Jimmy, on the other had, is a captain in the army and had led a soldiers against the government during the coup. Now they are both fleeing, hoping to escape to Honduras. At first they are hiding in the attic of a priest’s house. It is obvious from the beginning they do not get along and Clemen, so used to drinking and doing as he pleases, is unable to sit quietly in the attic and wait for darkness. They argue constantly and the fights form the comic relief of the novel. In the most comic section of the novel, they take a train dressed as priests and Jimmy who is always calm attempts to give confession to a soldier while Clemen holds his rifle. As they continue to flee North the arguments increase until they almost kill themselves in contest between the the spoiled kid from the city and the hardened soldier. If Haydée is just beginning to find something she did not know she had, Clemen is the opposite. He cannot even go one day without a drink and as you learn towards the end of the novel his inability to suffer for even just a moment will lead him to support what he opposed at first.
The contrast between the two narratives not only breaks up with multipul voices what could have turned in to monotonous diary entries, it highlights a divide between the more worldly and cynical Clemen and Jimmy, and Haydée who not only finds a new political voice, but can represent the voice of the country as it rebels against the general. Clemen and Jimmy are two poles of the same idea: a certainty in the way the country should be run, for Jimmy a the point of a gun, for Clemen as a playground for the wealthy. Although different, the certainty leads back to the same assumptions about power where some sort of strong man will make everything better; what ever better is. Haydée, on the other had, is change, but is an amorphous change, because she has no plan. How can she? She has never had the opportunity to work out her ideas. And in the same way, the country rises up against the General, some because he is a blasphemer, some because he is ruining the coffee trade, but there is no plan beyond the coup.
Castellanos Moya plays a bit of a trick on the reader because he ends the first part of the novel on the day the General flees the country. The reader is left with the euphoria of success and if not careful could assume that everything will work out for the country. But there are too many unanswered questions about the future and one only has to look at El Salvadoran history after the coup to realize euphoria never lasts long. The euphoria at the end of the section, becomes fleeting and like the history of so many failed governments, the ideas that motivated the rebels quickly dissipate and the old animosities return. When Haydée writes, God has heard our prayers, you have to wonder if he really has.
So far everything I have mentioned occurs in the first part which makes up the bulk of the book There is, however, a 30 page coda set in 1973. At first it seems a strange addition and, maybe, a bit lazy because Castellanos Moya reviews the the lives of the major characters in the intervening years. Yet despite the awkwardness of the device, there is one very important feature: Pericles speaks for himself. Until the the second part, Pericles is the image Haydée creates in her diary. It is a powerful image, yet an image that lacks real depth. Haydée describes her affection for him, but she doesn’t describe him: what he believes, why he does what he does. Yet he is ever present. All the reader can really know is he has gone to prison many times for his beliefs, which sounds admirable, but what are they? The last section confronts the reader with the true Pericles and asks what character did you create in absence of information? Is it like this man? Since reading, to some extent is projection, the second part does a raise an interesting questions.
Tirana Memoria while not covering new ground in the Latin American novel is a good addition, as Javier Fernández de Castro has mentioned, to the genre of the Latin American strongman. With its different voices and deemphasis on the strongman himself it expands the genre and centers it anxious uncertainties of the ruled. I hope the book makes it into English
Year in Reading Hermano Cerdo Style
Hermano Cerdo is publishing a year in reading much like the Million’s. It is in Spanish, of course, except the Diaz piece, but the most enteresting thing is how many of the readers mention English language books (not translations), not just Spanish Language books. This is a little different from the Millions and gives it an interesting feel.
Castellanos Moya on Words Without Borders
Words Without borders features a blog post by Horacio Castellanos Moya. In the post he describes the death threats he received after the publication of Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador and forced him to stay away from El Salvador for years.
Multi-Dimensional Chinese Poetry
I’m still working my way through fascinating Su Hui poem, but it is an interesting idea.Written to be read left to right, right to left, up and down and diagonally, David Hinton has attempted to not only translate, but recreate the diagrammatic poem in English. This is a case where the translation looses something, not for the work of the translator, but because the two language systems are so different.
The Fifty Minute Mermaid – in the TLS
The TLS has a review of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s book The Fifty Minute Mermaid, which sounds at the same time funny, magical, and yet subversive. It is published in a side by side edition in English and Gaelic and sounds fun.
after she had stumbled across the greatest discovery of all – something even more profound than sex – / by which I mean mascara
My family history is Irish and I have always wanted to learn Gaelic and as a teenager thought I actually would. Perhaps, still, along with Arabic I still can. Until then, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s will have to suffice.
Kafka’s Workplace Writings
When I think of reading something like Kafka’s workplace writings (he was in the insurance trade; how much more boring could it get) I get the chills and think, thank goodness I’m not a literary scholar. I’m sure it has some value, but I’d rather hear a 30 minute interview give me a survey than read it. Maybe someday someone will want to analyze all the code I’ve written, if it still works…talk about ephemeral.
Murray Bail at The Quarterly Conversation
There is a review of Murray Bail at The Quarterly Conversation. I’m always leery of comparisons to Borges because they seldom turn out to be true. The writer always has the intellectual elements, playing with texts, playing with the notions of knowledge, yet they lack the precision and the dedication to the narrative that is in itself a precise search and is part of the play, especially the works that come from Ficciones and The Aleph.
That said, Murray Bail sounds interesting and how often do you a chance to see the Aussie view—of course, you could settle for Australia.
Amanda Michalopoulou in Context
Dalkey Archive’s magazine Context has a good interview with Amanda Michalopoulou. She talks about I’d Like and it sounds as interesting as I have heard. I can’t wait to read it, although I have a couple more books lined up before it. She said a couple of interesting things.
Characters are the vehicles of ideas, but they have to work as characters. If not, you’re writing theory, not literature. The idea behind the characters in this book is that family can be a mechanism of oppression. I guess all my characters feel very clearly that they are obeying other people’s wishes. Writing can be a true act of disobedience, so the desire the younger sister has to write these stories down is a step towards salvation. I believe that writing can and should do that: save characters who are suffering, and, possibly, their author as well.
And later
Helping people to be alone in a room, alone in the world, and yet surrounded by so many human beings inside their head. This is one of the greatest joys in life. And I say this as a reader now, not as a writer.
Bolanomania
El País has a proud review of Bolanomania, or as they say is should be written, Bolañomanía. Mostly it marvels at not only the breadth of great reviews in traditional press, including Oparah, but at the cultish praise and excitement in the blogosphere.
[…] la novela de Bolaño está beneficiándose de un insólito “boca a oreja” promovido desde medios muy diferentes. Las cinco estrellas que le han concedido los lectores de Amazon son el trasunto más comercial de la avalancha de opiniones favorables en la blogosfera, un hecho sin precedentes para un libro en español, aunque Bolaño ya fuera considerado un “autor de culto” en círculos minoritarios desde la publicación de Los detectives salvajes. Y es en esos ámbitos donde es mayor el poder de atracción y la influencia del escritor chileno, cuya literatura, como ha afirmado Rodrigo Fresán, posee un extraño efecto movilizador entre los jóvenes, que es con quienes mejor conecta. A ellos se dirigen los apresurados apuntes que, desde diversos medios, lo presentan perfunctoriamente como “un rebelde literario ejemplar”, una “respuesta posmoderna a García Márquez”, o resumen apresuradamente de sus años de formación como los de un “vagabundo, trabajador manual y drogadicto que trabajó intermitentemente en Chile, México y España”.
[…] Bolaño’s novel es benifiting from word to mouth promotion in different media. The five star reviews that the Amazon readers have given the book is just a the most commercial image of the avalanche of favorable opinions in the blogosphere, something without precedence for a Spanish language book even though Bolaño was already considered a cult author since the publication of the Savage Detectives. It is in this sphere where the attraction and influence of the Chilean, whose work, as Rodrigo Fresán has stated, possesses a strange power to mobilize the young who he has connected with the strongest.They write the hurried notes that, through different media, present him as “a model literary rebel,” a postmodern answer to García Márquez,” o a hurried summary of his formative years as a “vagabond, manual laborer and drug addict that worked intermittently en Chile, Mexico, and Spain.
It is obvious that there is a desire to have English speakers read a little more than the boom, as great as it was. And I concur.
Khirbet Khizeh
Khirbet Khizeh
S. Yizhar
Khirbet Khizeh has a controversial reputation in Israel and when reading it you can understand why: it questions the legitimacy of pushing Palestinians out of their homes during the 1948-49 war. Even to use the word push suggests I have taken sides, but it is Yizhar’s position and his moral stance, one who’s ambiguity is not in the actions of the participants, but in its oppositional position to the many histories that suggest Palestinians fled without any provocation, that make the book complex criticism.
The novella follows an Israeli army unit at the end of the war as they remove civilians from Palestinian villages. There are no grand battles, no moments of heroism, it is just the tired slog of at the end of a war. The unit comes upon one village; they shoot at it for awhile to chase of the inhabitants; then they enter it and round them up to put them on trucks to send them away. At another not one bullet is shot at the unit, instead the villagers leave peacefully, expecting, as the narrator says, to return home. Yet it is obvious that the unit is clearing the village so that the Israeli’s can have it and populate it in the future. The action is not for survival—it is a land grab. Even the most common place desires are a chance to show how the war has ceased to be about survival and instead of altruism each time the soldiers come upon something of value, an horse, a hoe, a shovel, he suggest that they would like to send these items home, except now that the war has gone on so long it doesn’t seem that important anymore.
Yizhar captures the tension between what the villagers have lost, not only in physical terms, but spiritual, and how the weight of the destruction, fatigue, and tired greed has now become a sense of resignation among the troops.
Walls that had been attentively decorated with whatever was at hand; a home lined with plaster and a molding painted blue and red; little ornaments that hung on the walls, testifying to a loving care whose foundations had now been eradicated; traces of female-wisdom-hath-builded-her-house, paying close attention to myriad details whose time now had passed; an order intelligible to someone and a disorder i which somebody at his convenience had found his way; remnants of pots and pans that had been collected in a haphazard fashion, as need arose, touched by very private joys and woes that a stranger could not understand; tatters that made sense to someone who was used to them—a way of life whose meaning was lost, diligence that had reached its negation, and a great, very deep muteness had settled upon the love, the bustle, the bother, the hopes, and the good and less-good times, so many unburied corpses.
But we were already tired of seeing things like this, we had no more interest in such things. One glance, a step or two were enough for the courtyard, the house, the well, the past and the present, and their attentive silence. And although there might be an abandoned pitchfork or a fine-looking hoe, or a good, and valuable, pipe wrench, momentarily enticing your to pick it up and weigh it in your hand, as one might in a market or a farmyard, and things that ought to be in their place, and even stirring and urge, incidentally, to take the motor from the well and the pipes, five inch, and the beams from above, and the bricks from below, and the wooden boards (we could always find a use for them in our yard) and send them home, there was such a tickling pleasure in getting such easy benefit, in getting rich quick, in picking up ownerless property and making it your own, and conquering it for yourself, and plans were already being made, right away, and it was already decided what was going to be done with almost all of these things at home, and how it would be done—except that we had been in so many villages already, and picked things up and thrown them away, taken them and destroyed them, and we were too used to it—so we picked up the fine looking ownerless hoe, or pitchfork, and hurled it down to the ground, if possible aiming it at something that would shatter at once, so as to relieve it of the shame of not being of use—with real destruction, once and for all, putting an end to its silence.
Khirbet Khizeh is not about heroism, it is about the mechanical grinding of war, not in the sense of front line action, but its uncontrollable nature once it has been set loose. The soldiers are not particularlly cruel, although they often say things such as, “they don’t even have blood in their veins, these Arabs,” and brag they could hit running villagers with the machine gun if only given the chance. The soldiers often speak of who started the war, which wasn’t them, and the expulsion is deserved and that certainty gives them license to steal. Throughout the novella, you have the understanding that no matter how right the war was, the war has become corrupted. They have become inured to the war and if they had away to differentiate between theft and combat at the start of the war (although it doesn’t seem so) they have long since lost it.
The narrative voice adds to the ambiguity and conflict between the defensive war and what the soldiers have become. Most of the novella is written in first person plural and gives one the sense of unit cohesion, of a an army united. Not until the last quarter of the book does the narrator become an I. The switch from we to I signals the arrival of not a moral actor, but the conscience who until now has reflected the fatigue of the soldiers and has not separated himself from them either. Now, though, the the narrator begins to wonder if what they are doing is justified and the change in tense is jarring. But it is a conscience that comes from a unit, a conscience that is enmeshed in a war. The narrator raises the question—do we have to do this—with his unit and Moshce, the leader. No one has a solution and so Mosche says get moving on to the next job, and the conscience that has just appeared is again subsumed back into the war. It is too much to expect the narrator to become a rebel, because he is part of the unit. War may allow one to question, but the imperatives of war are hard to escape.
When writing about war it is easy to over indulge in metaphors that put a barrier between the actual and the figurative. What exactly is hell? I don’t know, but if anyone but Sherman says war is hell, I’ve learned nothing. Khirbet Khizeh, though, takes a different approach. It is impressionistic and figurative, but never in describing combat (there is almost none). Instead, it describes the natural in terms of the beautiful fatigue: a tired mind’s memory of boredom and fatigue. The passages render the boredom into something physical and it give it a visual strength.
Now that we were going down the slope again into the body of the village along one of the lanes, wondering if it were wide enough for the jeep to pass through, and prepared for any kind of surprise that might come our way, as the stillness of the village closed in around the last house in the row, and the houses, still pent up within the walls of their courtyards, apparently breathed as they always had, only with a new astonishment, with the same woven tapestry of generations line by line and thread by thread, with an abundance of fine detail, the reason for each one of which may have been forgotten long ago and dissolved into the general appearance of a structure fixed in its form, like the bustle of ants to raise up something, grain upon gain, which, the larger and more complete it grew, the more shamefully its lack of purpose was laid bare, gradually exposed, and the disgrace of its end, weeping for the oblivion because of what had happened to it: instantly its condemnation was decreed, and very soon, here and there, the first curls of smoke would hesitantly rise, accompanied by curses because everything here was so wet and nothing would catch fire.
Khirbet Khizeh is one of those unique war novels (although it has the same feel as the movie Kippur ) where the absence of actual combat can still raise still deep and troubling issues that, in what seems cliché to say, still haunt us.
Slumdog Millionaire
Slumdog Millionaire
In a cliché filled movie, what is the cliché that finally makes you realize you’ve just wasted your $10? For me it was when the three orphans were working the trash pits of Mumbai and a stranger in his VW bus gives the kids Cokes and takes them to his orphanage. Oh, no, its Dickens, I thought, and here comes Fagan. Until that moment the movie was moving along just fine, maybe a little scatological for me, but it had an interesting visual style. Now, I’ve got nothing against rewrites of Dickens, and since the world stills has more than a few Dickensian cities a reworking of Dickens is to be expected. And I was willing to give it another chance, but as the movie went on, it only got worse. The most peblen of the clichés, of course, was the lovers (two of the three former orphans) running to each other through traffic choked streets. The stupidest was the final embrace in the train station. Not only a cliché, but it made no sense since the slumdog had just won who wants to be a millionaire. I think the love of his life could have found him at the TV station. The best cliché, though, was the third orphan’s end. In a fit of remorse the third orphan, a hit man, fills a bath tube full of money in the his boss’s house. When the boss, a cartoonish supervillain, and his henchmen break in to kill him, he shoots his boss while the others kill him. It was something straight out of John Woo but sillier. So much for Dickens 2008.
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
David Halberstram
I have often found that popular writing about war falls into two broad types, each with its own constituents who want to see something of themselves reflected in it. On is the soldier’s history, the history of a unit, or even an army, but emphasizing the experience of the soldier, what the combat, food and weather were like, all the while describing the individual acts of soldiering, some pure survival, some that are called bravery in retrospect, but were just one soldier looking to protect the rest of the unit. The soldier’s war is the easiest one to turn into silly heroics, done right, though, it can describe not only the actual experience but what it is that binds soldiers together long after the war and gives them an unchangeable loyalty to the unit they belonged to (I think EB Sledge’s With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa is the best example). Often at the end, though, you have a sense that if it weren’t for this one private, or this one company, the whole war would have been lost.
The other I often see is the strategic or political history of a war: who were the generals, what political constraints did they have. While these can have elements of the soldier’s war, more often the books seem to be interested in finding what made the subjects so good, or so bad, or so something that one can understand how the war was one or lost. Of course, the better books will paint a much more complex picture where you may wonder how anything was accomplished (David Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, can easily give one that impression). So many times, though, I’ve come away from a history of a way and thought, that general was some genius, even though not everyone can be a genius.
I mention these two broad types, because The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War has both of these elements and it makes for an excellent history which outlines some of the more salient moments. Yet is far from a complete history of the war. While no book can be the complete history, there are large gaps that made me wish he had stuck to either the political side of the story or the soldier’s. Each one part he relates is excellent and the detail he goes into on some encounters is impressive, but at other times, such as the Marine evacuation from the Chosin Reservoir, some incidents receive just a paragraph.
Halberstram had a particular story he wanted to relate about the Korean war and the gaps point as much to his focus as much as the parts he relates. It is not so much the war he wanted to document, but the transition from the victor of World War II and reluctant super power to an anti-communist state willing to pour billions of dollars and thousands of lives into preventing the expansion of communism. Korea forced the United States to modernize the Army, develop new strategies, and break with the World War II notion of unconditional surrender and settle for stalemates and containment. Moreover, it was the beginning of the rightward turn within the country and the rise of virulent anti-communism with the likes of McCarthy that was not only an ideological position, but a political tool to differentiate Republicans from Democrats and the New Deal.
With the change in political circumstances and the bad generalship due in large part to generals more interested in politics than sound strategy, particularly MacArthur and Almond, the war became the harbinger of all that was to go wrong in Vietnam. For Halberstram the war may have resulted in the development of South Korea and helped put together a sound defense establishment, but it also helped create the environment where no leader dare appear weak on communism. No leader would be able to analyze communism in subtle terms as George Kennan had and see the Vietnam War as an anti-colonial war , instead of the steady march of a monolithic communism. For this folly, for this inability to separate foreign policy from internal politics, the United States would suffer the Vietnam War, the policy making origins rooted deeply in the political battles of the Korean War.
Halberstram makes a compelling case and as I think about the political histories of war it is amazing that anything ever turns out even remotely like the participants planned.
By The Firelight 