#48: Herzog, by Saul Bellow

You never know with Saul Bellow. His book are about agitated, distracted people and when you read them, it sometimes puts you into an agitated, distracted state. That’s what they do to me, anyway. I didn’t much care for Mr. Sammler, of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, nor for Henderson of Henderson, the Rain King. (I’m just noticing how typical it is for Bellow to put his main characters’ names in the titles of his books.) Their struggles didn’t really engage my imagination. But The Adventures of Augie March had a kind of wild music, and Humboldt’s Gift was just amazing. The latter is a fictionalized account of the life of poet Delmore Schwartz, and it led me to James Atlas’s biography of Schwartz. It took me months to get Schwartz’s ghost out of my head.

Herzog is the quintessential Bellow book. Its main character has the requisite distraction and self-absorption, yet he also has Augie March’s antic humor and energy. We are alternately annoyed and amused by Herzog as he struggles to hold on to his sanity after some rather significant personal setbacks.

Specifically, Herzog’s wife, Madeline, has thrown him out and has taken up with his erstwhile best friend, Valentine Gersbach. I should back up a bit: Moses E. Herzog is a writer and academic who had some early success but has since stalled. Herzog seems to enjoy a greater level of fame and affluence than you might expect from such a resumè—a level more in line with, say, a successful novelist.

Madeline is a spoiled high-strung beauty with “issues.” They move to a remote area in the Western Massachusetts Berkshires, where their only friends are a local radio host, the aforementioned Valentine Gersbach, and his wife. As the Herzogs’ relationship begins to fray, Gersbach becomes a kind of go-between, offering solace to both partners. The entire entourage eventually moves to Chicago, where matters come to a head when Madeline tells Herzog that the marriage is over and he needs to get out immediately. A few weeks later a friend informs Herzog that Gersbach is Madeline’s new lover.

So that’s the emotional trauma that has put Herzog out of alignment. Whatever Herzog was before, he is now the hero of a Saul Bellow book, which is to say that he has locked eye contact on himself in the rear-view mirror to the extent that he fails to avoid the traffic in front of him. That’s a rather unwieldy metaphor, but in fact Herzog does manage to have such an auto accident in the course of his adventures. Herzog fears he is losing his mind. He doesn’t make scenes or see people who aren’t there—about the craziest thing he does is accept an invitation to spend a weekend with a friend on Martha’s Vineyard, and then escape out the back way and head back to New York a half hour after arriving. But we accept, for sake of argument, that Herzog is not his usual self.

Over the course of 350 pages Herzog makes the abortive journey to the Vineyard, spends an evening with his latest girlfriend, the ridiculously obliging Ramona, flies to Chicago where he gets in a certain amount of trouble, and finally returns to his house in the Berkshires. But the real action is in Herzog’s head, where he is mentally composing letters to just about everybody he has ever know, along with a few politicians, and even a couple of historical figures. Maybe this epistolary focus is supposed to demonstrate Herzog’s derangement, but this particular habit of mind seems very normal to me. I have on occasion tried to explain myself to myself by imagining that I am having a conversation with somebody. In fact, my real-life conversations cannot hold a candle to the ones that happen in my imagination.

Herzog is generally addressing serious intellectual issues in his mental missives, and your opinion of this book might hinge on whether you think his ruminations are pretentious twaddle, a la Woody Allen, or genuinely profound and even charming. Here he is composing a mental letter to one Dr. Vinoba Bhave, whom Wikipedia tells me was “an Indian advocate of nonviolence and human rights.” In the following the italicized words are part of the letter, and the non-italicized parts Herzog’s thoughts as he composes the letter.

Dear Dr. Bhave, he began again, I read of your work in the Observer and at the time thought I'd like to join your movement. I've always wanted very much to lead a moral, useful, and active life. I never knew where to begin. One can't become Utopian. It only makes it harder to discover where your duty really lies. Persuading the owners of large estates to give up some land to impoverished peasants, however ... These dark men going on foot through India. In his vision Herzog saw their shining eyes, and the light of spirit within them. You must start with injustices that are obvious to everybody, not with big historical perspectives. Recently, I saw Pather Panchali. I assume you know it, since the subject is rural India. Two things affected me greatly - the old crone scooping the mush with her fingers and later going into the weeds to die; and the death of the young girl in the rains. Herzog, almost alone in the Fifth Avenue Playhouse, cried with the child's mother when the hysterical death music started. Some musician with a native brass horn, imitating sobs, playing a death noise. It was raining also in New York, as in rural India. His heart was aching. He too had a daughter, and his mother too had been a poor woman. He had slept on sheets made of flour sacks. The best type for the purpose was Ceresota.

There is pride, naivete, and a kind of silly sentimentality in this, but there is also compassion and wit. It’s hard not to be on the side of a guy who ends his interior monologue by noting the best type of flour sack for improvised bedding. In fact, amid all the tumult, it can be hard to realize just how funny Bellow can be:

Old women from Eastern Europe with dyed hair and senseless cameo brooches had easy access to his affections.

If I knew more about Saul Bellow’s politics and life I’m sure I’d find plenty not to like. But I think one of the reasons people write novels is to salvage some essential part of themselves. Every novel is a kind of suicide note.

#47: Shantytown, by Cesar Aira

Cesar Aira is an Argentinian writer know for writing short, strange novels. And writing lots of them. He has his fans, including Patti Smith in the New York Times and Geoffrey O’Brien in the New York Review of Books. (Both links are to reviews of Aira’s short story collection, The Musical Brain and Other Stories.)

I picked up Shantytown, which was the longest Aira novel I could find at 160 pages.

Surprise! It’s a short, strange novel. It’s set in Buenos Aires—I found some of the streets on a map—but it doesn’t really feel like it takes place anywhere on this planet. Aira’s main character, a large rather diffident man named Maxi, roams the city streets in the afternoons, helping various homeless families move their overloaded shopping carts along. Maxi never feels quite real, we perceive him the way we might perceive the main character in a superhero movie. He’s unassuming, disconnected, unreflective—a physical presence with minimal affect.

Other characters come along. A web of mystery and intrigue is established. The plot is precise, intricate. The characters are all just a tad outlandish, exaggerated, unreal. They all seem to be from the Uncanny Valley. Again, the effect is like a superhero movie. The book is garish, yet flat. That’s not meant to be disparaging—I’m pretty sure it’s an intended effect.

As I was reading Shantytown the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico came to mind—those flat yet fantastic city landscapes. It was startling, then, to find the painter’s name in O’Brien’s review of Aira’s story collection: “He has been likened to a remarkably wide range of writers—Sebald, Kafka, Bolaño, Calvino, Nabokov, Murakami. Duchamp and De Chirico have likewise been invoked, and Aira himself has mentioned Roussel and Borges…”. Quite the name-check.

I think it would be best to read Aira in bulk—maybe two or three novels over the course of a week. Or maybe that story collection would be the thing. I remember how much I enjoyed reading Alvaro Mutis’s seven short novels about Maqroll the Gaviero in a single volume. What would it have been like to read just one of those works on its own? I don't know whether it's me, or certain writers, but sometimes a small dose just isn't sufficient.

#46 My Struggle, Book 3, by Karl Ove Knausgaard

(See earlier posts on Book 1 and Book 2.)

In Book 3 we read about the author’s childhood on the island of Tromøy, in southern Norway. He lived there from the age of six until the age of 13. The book reads like a straightforward memoir and there is none of the time shifting between the recent past and the more distant past that we find in the first two volumes. Perhaps as a consequence, there is also none of the grown author’s anguish and intense self-reflection. Which isn’t to say that there is no anguish or self-reflection, just that they are the recreated emotions of the young Karl Ove, and not the more immediate emotions of the man writing the book.

It’s hard not to be aware of how great the discrepancy is between the minute and detailed account of day-to-day activities we find in this book and what any 40-year-old man can actually remember about any given day from his childhood. It’s a recreation and not a factual account—like a dinosaur skeleton recreated from various bits and pieces dug out of the ground. Ninety percent of it must be conjecture.

Childhood as actually lived is made up of wonder, fear, boredom, shame, and excitement. I don’t know what the percentages are for any given person, but for Karl Ove there was no lack of fear and shame. The main cause of Karl Ove’s fear was his father, and here we encounter what might be called the agenda for volume 3, if not for the entire series. If Knausgaard senior—he is the only character who is never referred to by name—was half the prick that his son makes him out to be then it is perhaps fitting that his cruelty is now exposed to the world. Here is Karl Ove “helping” his father cut some wood in the wintertime;

I paced backward and forward, backward and forward.

"Stop doing that," Dad said.

"OK, but I'm freezing cold!" I said.

He sent me an icy stare.

"Oh, you're fweezing, are you?" he said.

My eyes filled with tears again.

"Stop parroting me," I said.

"Oh, so I can't pawwot you now?"

"NO!" I yelled.

He stiffened. Dropped the ax and came toward me. Grabbed my ear and twisted it round.

"Are you talking back to me?" he said.

"No," I said, looking down at the ground.

He twisted harder.

"Look at me when I'm talking to you!"

I raised my head.

"Do not talk back to me! Have you got that?"

"Yes," I said.

He let go, turned, and put another log on the block. I was crying so much I could barely breathe. Dad ignored me and kept on chopping.

Later that evening, “Dad” is incensed when Karl Ove refuses to come down and watch the soccer match on TV and eat candy—a special family occasion. Dad forces him to come down and then:

He had bought a bag of glacier mints and a bag of English chocolate toffees. The toffees were my favorite, but the glacier mints were good as well. As usual, he had the bags next to him on the table. Now and then he threw one to me and Yngve [Karl Ove's older brother]. Today he did the same. But I wouldn't eat them; I left them untouched in front of me. In the end, he reacted.

"Eat your candy," he said.

"I don't feel like them," I said.

He stood up.

"Now you eat your candy," he said.

"No," I said, and started crying again. "I don't want to. I don't want to."

"Now you EAT them!" he said. He grabbed my arm and squeezed.

"I-don't-want-any … candy," I gasped.

He seized the back of my head and pressed it forward, almost down to the table.

"There they are," he said. "Can you see them? Eat them. Now."

"OK," I said, and he let go. Stood over me until I had unwrapped a chocolate-coated toffee and put it in my mouth.

It’s funny and sad at the same time. The father has looked forward to sharing a joyful experience with his son, perhaps to make up in part for his earlier cruelty. But the son’s childish insistence on denying his father that joyful experience leads to additional cruelty.

Knausgaard’s uncle and other relatives on this father’s side have not been silent about their indignation, not so much about this volume as about volume one, which depicts his father’s squalid and early death from alcoholism. (The alcoholism was not a factor during the time frame of volume three.) There may be some viable defense for the man. Maybe the son’s accounts are not entirely unbiased. But I had no trouble siding with the son, perhaps because of some similarities in our childhood circumstances.

Just about everything else in the book—Tromøy and its residents, Knausgaard’s childhood friends and their parents, and the rest of his family—is depicted with considerable warmth and in loving detail. As for himself, Knausgaard taps easily into his own childish self regard, but also shrewdly shows the vain, conceited boy his schoolmates knew. Young Karl Ove is repeatedly outraged that he is not more popular, considering that he gets the best grades in his class—well, in some subjects, anyway. In one episode, thirteen-year-old Karl Ove is favored by one of the prettiest girls on the island, a triumph he quickly squanders by springing on her his ambition to break the “longest kiss” record recently set by an acquaintance. Fifteen minutes of locked lips take their toll. Karl Ove gets the record, but loses the girl.

Anyway, three volumes down, three to go. I read somewhere that Knausgaard toned down his “take no prisoners” approach to autobiography after the public reaction to volumes one and two. Only in volume six, which is more than twice as long as any of the others, does he once again remove all the filters. I look forward to volume six, but if volume three is any indication, I will enjoy volumes four and five as well. Knausgaard also recently published an interesting article on the recent mass killing in Norway (and other mass killings by disaffected young men) in the New Yorker. You can find it here: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/the-inexplicable.

#45: War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

Yes, War and Peace. Not so much a book to most people as much as a trope for something too ponderous to bother with. An anvil made of words. I’d devoured it as a teenager and then read it again in my 20s. This time it sort of underwhelmed me.

I’m always amused to read negative reviews of great classic on amazon.com. Joyce, Bellow, Faulkner—there’s always a few shrewd customers who “see through” the pretentious incomprehensible drivel that all the professors and pretenders have fallen for. These folks have nothing to learn from anybody about anything. Am I joining the club?

I don't think I'm saying I no longer like War and Peace—just that it’s apparently not the kind of thing that’s clicking for me right now. Looking back through this blog I seem to have a bit of a problem with 19th century novels in general. I think I must be a bit too infatuated at the moment by more recent themes. Or maybe I’m just more of a philistine than I used to be.

But one thing that has always irked me about this book is Tolstoy’s obsession with his theory of history. Tolstoy states and then restates this theory throughout the book, and then devotes the final 40 pages to a kind of extended essay on the theme. His point is that history is not the result of the actions of “great men,” but the sum of the historical forces acting on an event, including the myriad thoughts, emotions, and actions of everyone present. In the case of Napoleon’s invasion of Russian in the summer of 1812, Napoleon’s army was like a fire that consumed all of its fuel; the ensuing winter was like a steady drizzle that extinguished what was left of the fire. Strategy, courage, and firepower had very little to do with it. The Russian general, Kutuzov, had the simple insight to just let these things happen.

War and Peace almost functions as a museum of the 19th century novel, with a duel at dawn here, an innocent heiress seduced by a rake there, and then over there a young soldier swindled at cards. It is the Ikea of novels, and we walk its circuitous path gazing at tableau after tableau. It tells the story of a group of wealthy Russian families in the time of the Napoleonic wars, between 1805 and 1820. In each of these families there are one or two people who are central to the narrative: Natasha and Nikolai Rostov (sister and brother), Marya and Andrei Bolkonsky (also sister and brother), and Pierre Bezukov. All of these people are rich, but in War and Peace rich is normal. They also all have titles, like Prince or Countess. But they are not particularly spoiled or decadent for the most part, they just happen to have estates and servants. We mostly see them working and praying and striving. They are earnest and never condescending—at least not consciously so.

These central characters are all trying to discover how they should live their lives. They have their various talents and flaws, and they all struggle for love and fulfillment, and all run up against shocks and disappointments. For Tolstoy, the individual is always striving toward some kind of transcendence and in War and Peace when a character is wounded or witnesses death it is often the shock required to annul his (or her) fear and anxiety and to see life as a beautiful but perhaps meaningless spectacle that somehow inspires selfless love.

When later authors write about war they typically depict it more savagely. The confusion and the smoke are still there, but now there is also blood and shit and stench, a wasteland of destruction where things either blow up or fester. Not much opportunity for transcendence.

So then, Count Leo, tell me how can war be random and meaningless at a historical level, but so effective a means to insight and even transcendence for individuals? And you call yourself a great novelist. And then there’s Isaac Newton—optics, very nice, gravity, well done, but alchemy? C’mon Isaac. From where I sit, it’s all so obvious.

#44: Preparation for the Next Life, by Atticus Lish

Welcome to America in the 21st century; more specifically, to the community of Flushing, Queens, near the eastern border of New York City. In Flushing, three lives intersect.

Zou Lei is a young illegal immigrant from western China; she is half Han Chinese and half Muslim Uighur. We don’t know the full details of her journey, but she has crossed over from Mexico and made her way to the I-95 corridor, where she will work 15-hour days in motels and restaurants for way less than minimum wage, living in flops provided by her employers and traveling to and from work in vans. Early in the book Zou Lei is arrested in an immigration sweep and spends several months in jail before she is, by some whim of fate, released. Zou Lei is the dust beneath your feet, the lowest of the low, a slave for whom no master is responsible, working as hard as she possibly can just to stay alive. But by any measure she is the most fortunate, healthy, and successful of the book’s three major characters.

Brad Skinner has just returned from three tours of duty in Iraq, where he has just barely managed to avoid being blown up on multiple occasions; his only close friend has not been so lucky. He has seen and done things that trouble him greatly. He has no friends, no place to go, and his most significant possessions are a loaded pistol and a duffel bag full of prescription medications. Skinner (as he is called) can barely negotiate the purchase of a meal, let alone a job. He has a few thousand dollars left from his army pay. Is there any way for such a person to survive?

In the early part of the book we watch Zou Lei and Skinner alternately, careening through the international bazaar that Flushing has become. I recognized all the street names because I grew up in Flushing 50 years ago. Back then it was a lower-middle class neighborhood of Italian, Irish, and Jewish families. Today it is the crossroads of the earth, the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in the most ethnically diverse county in the United States. I would no more feel at home in the Flushing of today than Ben Franklin would in the Philadelphia of today.

When Zou Lei and Skinner connect, they feel a joy that neither they, nor we, could have expected.

They were surrounded in neon and headlights, striding through the darkness, going in and out of darkness and light among the Chinese signs and lights, Skinner almost shouting. Asians went around them. Zou Lei was marching with her arms crossed across her chest and her hair blowing around her face and she was laughing.

It’s funny story!

I’m like, no, dude!

This animal.

I’m like, do not do it! I’m like, think again!

Their combined momentum moved people out of the way. Or people didn’t move and Zou Lei and Skinner went around them and rejoined on the other side, Skinner saying:

I’m like, take a breath!

— continuing to talk through the silhouettes of people like paper targets who got between them.

I like it when Zou Lei says "This animal"; I'm not sure exactly what she means, but clearly she shares Skinner's exhilaration and is doing her best to adopt his tone. Will they be able to maintain this connection? The odds are steep. Skinner is like an abused animal; his mind is locked in the past and he is barely aware of his circumstances. He can’t really function--it’s a miracle that he has been able to make this human connection.

It’s only on rare occasions that Skinner can rouse himself to even be aware of Zou Lei's presence, usually after she has jolted him back to the present by provoking him in some way. They talk of marrying. But then the third major character makes his presence felt—Jimmy, the son of Skinner’s landlord, who returns from prison. Jimmy’s not a wholesome guy, and as his path skirts and crosses those of the other two, we know where the story is headed just as we know what will happen in that scene from The Birds where the man is standing next to his car at the gas station, lighting his cigarette, and getting ready to drop his match as a puddle of gas grows around his feet.

So there you have a plot summary of sorts. It’s a powerful story, and I think it gives us a true and not very encouraging picture of what “disadvantaged in America” is like. But Preparation for the Next Life has a lot more going for it besides this grimly realistic depiction, and that is the commitment, power, and intensity of the writing. To start with, there is a kind of furious intensity evident in the book’s every sentence. Lish’s Flushing is as specific and detailed as Joyce’s Dublin:

The man who gave her the DVDs took care to avoid arrest. He would not give her his name, so she couldn’t rat him out if she got caught. All she knew about him was that he was from Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province and people from Wenzhou knew how to survive. On the phone, he would say to meet him in the doorway and she would go to the place he meant. He would drive up in an Expedition, his ball cap on sideways, and give her the goods. He looked like a manager from a Chinese factory in wintertime — all dark clothes, down vest, fingerless gloves, smoking Mild Seven cigarettes. His face was lopsided, the result of ingesting pesticide as a child, which gave him the knowing look of someone who wasn’t going to be fooled again.

Not just a manager from a Chinese factory—a manager from a Chinese factory in wintertime. We get the make of the car, the brand of the cigarettes. We even learn about an incident from this man’s childhood. This man who is merely walking through the book for a single paragraph.

There are scenes, incidents, and itineraries that we just know must have been recorded by the author as he walked the streets of Flushing, because no one could ever just sit at a desk and imagine the world in such documentary detail. We get an inventory of the streets and the people who occupy them. I can open this book to just about any page and find a passage like this one:

After she had showered, dressed, and brushed her wet hair, he took her to Fratelli's for pizza. While they ate, he reached across the orange table, trying to reach for something of hers. It felt like a particularly dark night. He settled for her elbow. She was using both hands to hold up the triangular pizza slice, which kept buckling in the middle, like a corpse being carried to a helicopter. He held her elbow, watched her chest move as she performed the functions of life - breathing, eating.

It's just the pills.

I know. You are a young strong man.

Today everything was weird.

The sweet sharp pain that foreshadows weeping visited him again in the throat and eyes. He put his head down, glanced sideways at his reflection in the vertical mirrored strips that covered the wall of the pizza parlor. His eyes looked like someone had sprayed roach spray in them, an allergic response. He thought of chafed, reddened mucous membranes after the friction of sex.

Pizza buckling like a corpse being carried to a helicopter.

The book is relentless throughout, but towards the end almost every chapter seems like an epic in minature that I would read in a state of rapt agitation. In one, Zou Lei, having escaped from a rape attempt and unable to find Skinner, takes the subway to somewhere in south Queens and then starts walking. She has escaped without her shoes so she begs a pair of flip flops from a merchant. She walks into the evening and then into the night. We see everything that she sees, including street names and landmarks, so I could follow her on a map, up through St Albans and Jamaica all the way to Great Neck, which is where she is when the sun comes up. Fifteen hours, thirty miles. The flips flops disintegrate along the way. Why is she walking? Because she has physical energy, but nowhere to go.

I remember a couple of ill-advised hitchhiking trips from my youth, and the notion of being alone on a road at four in the morning resonates with me. But Lish is as indefatigable as his character and the scene unspools before our eyes:

For some time thereafter, she walked in a state of half-awakeness past things she half-perceived. Francis Lewis Boulevard. The Belle Aire playground. A black woman thin as an African with dyed blond hair prowling on a traffic island. A sprinkler was whisking in the grass. The public restroom door was open and you could see the sink and stall. Two cars drove by booming rap. She passed the on-ramp for the Grand Central Parkway. She passed the Satya Sanatan Dharma Mandir, a place of worship. A spiked iron fence. The Creedmoor Psychiatric Facility — the buildings set at random angles, an iron gate left open. She could see weeds in the asphalt like rice paddy squares. It looked abandoned. Ambulances parked in a fleet. A section of the fence hit by a car. Beneath the mercury lights, she saw a shadow that didn’t belong to her and looked around to see who was following her, but there was no one there.

I don’t read enough current fiction to know if this book is as exceptional as it seemed to me. I’ve refrained from looking at published reviews until I could finish this post—the exception was the New York Review of Books review, by Cathleen Schine, from which I learned about the existence of Preparation for the Next Life. Looking back at that review now, I see that I have adopted its tone:

The book has the boundless, epic exhilaration you expect to find only in a writer as mighty as, say, Walt Whitman. It is a love story, a war story, a tale of New York City in which familiar streets become exotic, mysterious, portentous, foul, magnificent. Some of it reads like poetry. All of it moves with a breathless momentum.

So, that’s two votes in favor.

#43: Number 9 Dream, by David Mitchell

One of my favorite movies of all time is My Neighbor, Totoro, an animated film by Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki. It’s a magical fantasy tale but the painted backgrounds are realistic and detailed enough to give you a distinct sense of place, that place being the lush countryside of southern Japan. Parts of David Mitchell’s 2001 novel Number 9 Dream happen to inhabit that same southern landscape:

The sun switches on as we cross the Shimonoseki Bridge. So much distance and height compared to that hot iron lung the world knows as Tokyo. Cargo ships and ferries to Pusan and Shanghai line up in the port. I am back on Kyushu soil and maybe that is why I am smiling. Broken fences, wildflower breakouts, unplotted spaces. Kyushu is the run-wild underworld of Japan. All myths slithered, galloped, and swam from this part of the country. The farther south you go, the more people think for themselves. Governments in Kyoto and Tokyo forget this at their peril.

The hero of the story is Eiji Miyaki, who has come north from the mist-shrouded forest island of Yakushima, to find his father in Tokyo. The book is very much a coming-of-age story that provides all sorts of adventure and romance as Eiji learns about his past and comes to understand and accept his fate. There is guilt over a drowned twin sister, an alcoholic mother who seeks forgiveness, and a father who refuses to show himself.

Mitchell is an organized, professional, ambitious writer with a particular bag of tricks. His novels have fancy titles (example: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet) and fancy premises, skipping backward & forward in time. I prefer to catch a writer of this type before all the machinery is up and running—Number 9 Dream was Mitchell’s second novel. There have been several more since. I also happen to love the John Lennon song that Mitchell borrowed for his title.

In Number 9 Dream Mitchell conjures the digital animators of his imagination to refract the story through different sorts of “alternate universe” filters. These chapter are like little acid trips distributed through the text. The first is Eiji’s Walter Mitty fantasy world, in which he imagines all sorts of exotic cinematic variations on his situation. Next is the video game universe, complete with lavender clouds. Finally there is the Goatwriter universe, which is as bizarre as it is disorienting. This universe is populated by intelligent barnyard animals, including a literary goat who has the unfortunate habit of eating his own work, and a very maternal chicken. This section was where Mitchell’s imagination may have gotten the better of him—it was jut a little too freaky, and a little too distant from Eiji’s story, for me at least. It was like when you’re listening to a radio station in your car and then suddenly you’re listening to a different station because you’ve come to the point where that station’s signal is stronger than the original station’s signal. And then the two stations trade back and forth for a while.

Strip away all the special effects and we’re left with a young man and his quest. Eiji smokes a lot of cigarettes, tries a few different jobs, and eventually finds himself a girlfriend. He decides to give up on Dad once and for all and to give Mom a second chance. I found Eiji’s story compelling enough, but I’m not sure David Mitchell did.

#42: We, the Drowned, by Carsten Jensen

Had this book on loan and decided to read it while recuperating from surgery to correct a deviated septum. I wanted something that I could read for long stretches without brain fatigue. My expectations were not that high—the fancy cover graphics and dramatic title suggested something designed to appeal to college students. Something epic and mythical—like Game of Thrones, maybe, but in a single volume.

= = = =

The jacket copy for this book makes it sound like a cross between Moby Dick and Hawaii, with a bit of Treasure Island thrown in. It’s a Danish novel that covers a hundred years (1845 - 1945) in the history of Marstal, Denmark, a real town that was at one time famed for sleek fast sailing vessels that quickly conveyed goods around the world—the FedEx of the 19th century. Today it’s mostly a well-preserved tourist destination—Rick Steves is a big fan.

The book is written in the collective first person (the “We” of the title) so the town could be said to be the narrator, or rather We, the Drowned could be said to be the autobiography of Marstal. The focus of the narrative passes from a mid-19th-century sailor to his son to that son’s stepson. It gives us wars, around-the-world journeys, fortunes made and lost, and even a murder or two. The author might have had One Hundred Years of Solitude in the back of his mind.

It’s a commendable work, full of incident and color, though it does get repetitious at times and can drag in spots—the author has a tendency to identify with his characters in a self-indulgent way. Also, the book has a kind of “tall tale” feel to it—for example, characters reappear by fantastic coincidence on a regular basis. Somehow, the author’s historical mission—to write the real life history of Marstal—doesn’t quite meld with his penchant for the fantastic. The result is sort of the literary equivalent of a Johnny Depp movie. Which is what I might have been watching if I hadn’t been reading this book.

#41: How to Live, or, a Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell; Montaigne, Essays (Book I)

Montaigne has been on my radar—I’ve been encountering his name in articles and books for years. I was curious. But as a spoiled and lazy reader, I lack to fortitude to take on a 16th century nonfiction writer without some sort of assistance. Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live, or, a Life of Montaigne was the ideal stepladder. No less a scholar than Bruce Springsteen would endorse this assessment—he recently name checked Bakewell’s book in the New York Times—see for yourself (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/books/review/bruce-springsteen-by-the-book.html).

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (to give his full name) was a near contemporary of Shakespeare, and while there are indications of explicit borrowings from the French writer in the younger English writer’s work, it’s the sum of the intellectual inheritance that really counts. As Sarah Bakewell writes:

When Montaigne writes, “We are, I know not how, double within ourselves,” or describes himself with the incoherent torrent of adjective “bashful, insolent; chaste, lascivious; talkative, taciturn; tough, delicate; clever, stupid; surly, affable; lying, truthful; learned, ignorant, liberal, miserly, and prodigal,” he could be voicing a monologue from [Hamlet]. He also observes that anyone who thinks too much about all the circumstances and consequences of an action makes it impossible to do anything at all—a neat summary of Hamlet’s main problem in life.

No one with any sense would write a plain vanilla biography of Shakespeare today. The facts are too few and they have been out in plain sight for far too long—second-best bed, etc. More is known about Montaigne, but Bruce Springsteen does not want to use his valuable time reading anyone’s conventional biography of Montaigne either. What shrewd writers like Stephen Greenblatt (author of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare) and Sarah Bakewell do is mix biography with a tracing of the author’s influence through history. The results are like catnip to semi-ambitious New-Yorker-reading persons like myself. Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (which I wrote about earlier in this blog ) rolls the Roman poet Lucretius together with 15th century Italian scholar Poggio Bracciolini and then shows how Lucretius’ ideas carried forward through Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to Giordano Bruno, and, yes, Montaigne. Bakewell’s book is every bit as lively and deft in spinning its web of connections; it’s a little bit crisper, too. It’s like that great college course you could never find in the catalog. Among the latter-day Montaigne enthusiasts identified by Bakewell are Friedrich Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf.

So what is the deal with Montaigne? His “essays” (a word originally meaning “tests” or “attempts”) are examinations of what he feels to be universal in his personal experience. It was not a new thing to write about yourself, but it was new to write about yourself not to document what makes you exceptional but rather what makes you typical. Bakewell says it better:

This idea—writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity—has not existed forever… Montaigne created the idea simply by doing it… Montaigne presents himself as someone who jotted down whatever was going through his head when he picked up his pen, capturing encounters and states of mind as they happened. He used these experiences as the basis for asking himself questions, above all the big question that fascinated him as it did many of his contemporaries. Although it is not quite grammatical in English, it can be phrased in three simple words: “How to live?”

Montaigne writes about the everyday and the exotic: dreams, manners, customs, and cannibals. He even writes about thumbs.

I was so entertained by Bakewell’s book that I decided to tackle a bit of Montaigne myself: Book 1 of the essays (there are three), covering the first 300 pages of Donald Frame’s modern translation. The brilliant bits were there, but so were rather long, wheezy Polonius-like stretches of advice on piety and moderation.

But Montaigne is endlessly quotable. Here’s one that I flagged:

Fortune does us neither good nor harm; she only offers us the material and the seed of them, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies as it pleases, sole cause and mistress of its happy or unhappy condition.

This is very close to Hamlet’s sentiment: “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” But then Montaigne reinforces the idea with a clever metaphor:

External circumstances take their savor and color from the inner constitution, just as clothes keep us warm not by their heat but by our own, which they are fitted to foster and nourish; he who would shelter a cold body with them would get the same service for cold; thus are snow and ice preserved.

He is full of anecdotes drawn from his reading:

Amasis, king of Egypt, married Laodice, a very beautiful Greek girl; and he, who showed himself a gay companion everywhere else, fell short when it came to enjoying her, and threatened to kill her, thinking it was some sort of sorcery. As is usual in matters of fancy, she referred him to religion; and having made his vows and promises to Venus, he found himself divinely restored from the first night after his oblations and sacrifices.

This is from a section in the essay “The Power of the Imagination” that deals with psychosomatic episodes of impotence. Throughout, Montaigne’s personality is very much in evidence. In this way he is the exact opposite of Shakespeare. They both wrote about what it means to be human, but with Montaigne the thought goes through himself, his mind and body are the lenses through which he sees the world. Whereas with Shakespeare, the method is purely dramatic—he creates people out of his imagination and uses them to tell us what he knows. Harold Bloom would have us believe that these fictional creations are so real that they no longer quite qualify as fiction. It’s a clever bit of hyperbole but in the end it’s like the theory of intelligent design: it says “this is beyond our understanding,” and uses that as an excuse for any kind of nonsense.

With Shakespeare, I tend to side with the critics who believe that even the one ostensibly autobiographical work, the sonnets, make more sense as a set of dramatic exercises than as a peek into his personal life. The dark lady is not more or less real than Viola or Ophelia, except she is a watercolor sketch, where they oil paintings.

We read different explanations for why we know so little about Shakespeare the man: for example, that his work was not seen as anything extraordinary, just the workaday output of a professional entertainer. People of his time might not have seen the point in writing about him any more than people of our time would see the point in writing about the people who create television scripts. Others believe the man never even existed, which certainly moots the matter of biographical detail, though only by replacing one mystery with an even bigger one; it’s amazing how far people will go just because they lack information—call it phantom author syndrome.

But I have my own theory, which is that Shakespeare had an aversion to being talked and written about and so avoided the limelight and discouraged others from writing about him. He wouldn’t be the last writer who ever tried to efface himself: Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger come to mind. Part of the motivation for these later writers was no doubt to escape the distractions and distortions of fame, but they may also prefer to not have the work judged by its author—as we would certainly do with Shakespeare, if we had the chance.

#40: My Struggle, Book 2, by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Book 1 of My Struggle gave us two extended episodes from relatively early in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s life. Book 2 skips backward and forward in time and deals with the more recent past. Knausgaard is keeping us a bit off guard—we aren’t always quite sure where we are in the stack of nested memories. The fact that the chronological distance between the telling and the tale has decreased can also be a bit disorienting, because whatever distance there is is not enough to confer a proper sense of retrospective—this cannot be an older wiser man writing about his younger self. If the author is in fact any wiser it’s because he is writing and contemplating rather than acting. Who isn’t a bit wiser when they aren’t actually functioning in a social situation?

There’s a kind of convivial hum to Knausgaard’s writing that I enjoy very much. His books are good company, largely because he’s writing about everyday life. He’s talking about the kinds of thing we talk about with our friends. I wonder if the real Karl Ove Knausgaard is such good company? I would suspect not; I would also suspect that Karl Ove is of the same opinion.

Knausgaard is actually a seething, uncomfortable, impatient man (according to Knausgaard the author at any rate), and when he is in a social setting he is always wishing he could be home writing. He has a confidence and clarity as a writer that he lacks as a man. His bold experiment is to escape from his life only to return to it on the page. He goes out through the front door only to stand in the bushes and look in through the window. He escapes from his life in order to write about nothing else, with the paradoxical intention of making it as real and immediate as possible.

I, for my part, never looked forward to anything except the moment the office door closed behind me and I was alone and able to write. Especially now that after six years of failure I had finally got somewhere and I felt it wouldn’t stop here, there was more. That was what I longed for, this filled my thoughts, not Linda and Vanja and the christening in Jølster, which I took as it came. If it was good, fine, then it was good. If it wasn’t good, well, then it wasn’t good. The difference did not matter much to me. I should have been able to categorize the argument in this way, but I couldn’t, my feelings were too strong, they had me under their control.

What must Knausgaard’s wife (Linda, herself a writer) think of all this? I believe they are still married and recently had a fourth child. He as much as tells us he finds his family a chore. But as soon as he gets behind that closed door, where is his mind? With his family, recounting everything he has seen, thought, and felt. And it isn’t pure narcissism because he doesn’t write only about himself—other people, friends and family, have substance on the page. Perhaps not as they would wish to be seen, but with weight, depth, and nuance nonetheless.

Here he is on choosing a DVD at the video store:

I ran my eye along the row. When I bought films it was always with the idea that they should broaden my horizons. They should have their own special imagery I could assimilate, or forge a relationship with places whose potential I hadn’t considered or be set in an unfamiliar time or culture. In short, I chose films for all the wrong reasons, because when evening came and we wanted to see one of them we could never be bothered to watch two hours of some Japanese event from the 1960s in black and white, or the great, open expanses of Rome’s suburbs where the only thing that happened was that some stunningly beautiful people met who were fundamentally alienated from the world, as tended to be the case with films of that era. No, when evening came and we sat down to watch a film we wanted to be entertained. And it had to be with as little effort and inconvenience as possible. It was the same with everything. I hardly read books anymore; if there was a newspaper around I would prefer to read that. And the threshold just kept rising. It was idiotic because this life gave you nothing, it only made time pass. If we saw a good film it stirred us and set things in motion, for that is how it is, the world is always the same, it is the way we view it that changes. Everyday life, which could bear down on us like a foot treading on a head, could also transport us with delight. Everything depended on the seeing eye. If the eye saw the water that was everywhere in Tarkovsky’s films—for example, which changed the world into a kind of terrarium, where everything trickled and ran, floated and drifted, where all the characters could melt away from the picture and only coffee cups on a table were left, filling slowly with the falling rain, against a background of intense, almost menacing green vegetation, yes—then the eye would also be able to see the same wild, existential depths unfold in everyday life. For we were flesh and blood, sinew and bone, around us plants and trees grew, insects buzzed, birds flew, clouds drifted, rain fell. The eye that gave meaning to the world was a constant possibility, but we almost always decided against it, at least it was like that in our lives.

"Are we up for Stalker?” I asked, turning to her.

In a book of essays this would be thought provoking; in a novel about everyday life, juxtaposed to day care and cigarette breaks, it is a revelation. It’s conversational in a way that is always just a little beyond our ability to articulate in real time, and probably also just a little beyond any real acquaintence's willingness to stand there and listen.

Well, there are still four volumes to go. Most are in the 300-600 page range; volume six, though, is 1300 pages. If I live long enough, I’ll get there.

Meanwhile, here is one last long quote from volume two, which gives us Knausgaard’s explanation of his objective in My Struggle:

Over recent years, I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought, this is something someone made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories. It had got out of hand. Wherever you turned you saw fiction. All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs, and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news in the press, TV news, and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not. It was a crisis. I felt it in every fiber of my body, something saturating was spreading through my consciousness like lard, not the least because the nucleus of all this fiction, whether true or not, was verisimilitude and the distance it held to reality was constant. In other words, it was the same. The sameness, which was our world, was being mass-produced. The uniqueness, which they all talked about, was thereby invalidated, it didn’t exist, it was a lie. Living like this, with the certainty that everything could equally well have been different drove you to a despair. I couldn’t write like this, it wouldn’t work, every single sentence was met with the thought: but you’re just making this up.

I actually don’t believe any of this for a second. “Actually happened” is meaningless, because “reality” only matters insofar as it makes a difference in our lives. It matters to me whether the people I know are still here when I wake up tomorrow, and it matters to me whether the plane I get on next month has been correctly inspected and maintained, but as to whether some chain-smoking Norwegian is making up stories or telling me exactly what he thinks happened in his life, I really don’t care. But he cares, and it seems to have driven him to write some very interesting books, so I say “Rage on, Karl Ove.”