#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.”

#39: From the Mouth of the Whale, The Blue Fox, and The Whispering Muse, by Sjón.

These are three separate books, but they are short books, with quite a bit in common, and it feels more natural to discuss them collectively. That’s how I first read about them, in a wonderful review entitled A Magus of the North, written by novelist A.S. Byatt for The New York Review of Books. It was one of those “you must read this” reviews, and it would probably be a better use of your time to read Byatt’s review than to read whatever follows here. The review begins: “Every now and then a writer changes the whole map of literature inside my head.”

I’ve been reading a few Scandinavian authors in recent years: Sjón, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Isak Dinesen, Halldór Laxness. I’ve noticed two dominant trends—there are the intensely realistic family dramas, novels, plays, and films that put people and relationships under a microscope. This theme runs from Ibsen, through Ingmar Bergman films like Scenes from a Marriage, to Knausgaard. But then there is the fantastic element: Dinesen’s gothic tales, Knut Hamsen. Some writers can do both: Dinesen and Bergman alternated realistic works with more mythopoetic ones. Maybe these two modes aren't quite as distinct as I'm assuming, or maybe opposites can meet at either extreme. Laxness’s Independent People presents a vivid picture of sustenance farming at the edge of the Arctic while also making room for a few ghosts and spirits.

I’m generalizing a bit, and your blogger is presuming on what is in fact a pretty marginal acquaintance with Scandinavian literature—I’ve never actually read any Ibsen. I do have one real credential, however—one week in 2009 I fought my way, sentence by sentence, through Hans Christian Andersen’s Grantræet (in English, The Fir Tree) in the original Danish. Grantræeet is the 48-hour autobiography of a Christmas tree, from envious and expectant outsider, to centerpiece of the celebration, to trash. Unlike the lesson texts and simple newspaper articles I was mostly tackling at the time, Andersen’s writing was full of strange and exotic words, and the weirdness of the tale combined with my very unsure renderings of the sentences to create a kind of child’s consciousness. What could be alive? What could a tree think? What does this word mean? Is this a metaphor? I felt as though I were looking up at this very brief fairy tale; it loomed. (Another story I enjoyed in Danish featured Scrooge McDuck. You can read about it here.)

Andersen would obviously belong in the fantastic camp of Scandinavian writers. And so quite clearly would Sjón. Sjón is a modern-day disciple of Ovid—he deals in transformations. In the short novel The Blue Fox, a man shoots a fox and then stuffs it in his jacket. Later, when the hunter is trapped in a cage after barely surviving an avalanche, the fox revives and begins a conversation with him. In The Whispering Muse, a sailor on a modern trawler speaks in the voice of one of Odysseus’s sailors at night. He reveals that he has spent the majority of the preceding 20 centuries in the form of a bird.

Sjón writes in the third person, but always in the voice of his characters. The narrator of From the Mouth of the Whale, for example, is a 17th century man, and he speaks to us with what strikes me as a very convincing recreation of a 17th century mind, where shrewd and rational observations mingle with bits of myth and superstition:

Last winter I was as solitary as Adam in his first year in paradise, though the island in winter is nothing like that delightful place. It is cold and bleak and one does not venture out of doors except to empty one's chamber pot, and not properly even then; one merely opens the door a crack, just wide enough for the pot. I was more like a wretched mouse in its hole than a man created in God's image. As little and hunched as the rat's cousin, not ramrod straight, proudly surveying my domain like Adam. Ah, yes, Adam was tall and held his head high. That way he could see over the whole world, for he was bigger and heavier than his living descendants, just under thirty yards in height, and with such a head of hair that his locks cascaded like a waterfall over his loins. He was the largest living creature that God had created from earthly clay. And all through that year as he walked the Earth alone, his massive body was being fired and glazed by the sun like clay in an oven. All growth was new: the trees put down roots, sprouted, then dropped their leaves and stood naked for the first time. The swans rose honking from the moorland tarns and heard their own voices for the first time. The bee alighted on the dwarf fireweed and quenched her thirst with fresh honey before buzzing in flight to the next flower cup. It had never happened before. Everything was new to the eyes of the man and he was entirely new to himself. Molded by the Master from the four elements, as they combine in the Earth, he was closer to his origins now than he ever would be again. His blood was still diluted with seawater, there was gravel in his flesh, roots crept along his sinews and muscles, the seed that quickened to life in his testicles was thick as spider silk and foamy as sea spume. Thus he strode across the world and wherever he looked he saw to the ends of the Earth.

This is every bit as rich and weird as Grantræeet.

Sjón has collaborated with Björk, and is the lyricist on several of her compositions, including the ethereal Jóga. According the Byatt, Sjón has also written a trilogy set in the time of World War II, which hasn’t been translated into English yet. I’ll be looking for it.

#38: Dusk, by James Salter

Dusk a book of short stories. It seems to me there are two types of short stories—the kind that pack in so much information that they read like condensed novels, and the kind that achieve an effect, strike a balance, with the minimum of words and explicit exposition. Haiku stories. The author drops you into the action with no scene setting or preamble. You take in details, assemble a picture in your mind, understand as much of what’s going on as possible, and then it’s over. After reading a volume of such stories, it can be difficult even a day or two later to remember anything much. You work to fix each story in your mind as you’re reading, and just as you get it into focus, you are on to the next.

Dusk contains stories of the second, ephemeral type, and after the first reading I didn’t retain much. Were it not for the self-imposed obligation of writing this blog, it would have vanished from my consciousness like a dream. But now I am in the process of re-reading it, and I am seeing things I had not seen earlier. For example, there is one story named “American Express.” It’s about two New York lawyers who maintain a close friendship for 20-something years. They pull off a coup professionally when quite young and become rich. In the second half of the story they travel to Europe and stay on indefinitely. The time is mid-to-late 20th century—perhaps 1952 to 1972. Of the two, Frank is the clever and dynamic one, and Alan more the sidekick. Over the course of just 21 pages Salter does a number of deft things to make these two individuals real to us. He sketches details, but never fills them in. Information is provided in indirect, often surprising ways. Significant biographical facts are jumbled together with precise, seemingly random observations and details in a way that startles and stimulates the reader. Here is a very long excerpt that deals with one of Frank’s more significant romantic relationships:

As it happened, they never knew the girl at the reception desk with her nearsightedness and wild, full hair. They knew various others, they knew Julie, they knew Catherine, they knew Ames. The best, for nearly two years, was Brenda who had somehow managed to graduate from Marymount and had a walk-through apartment on West Fourth. In a smooth, thin, silver frame was the photograph of her father with his two daughters at the Plaza, Brenda, thirteen, with an odd little smile.

"I wish I'd known you then," Frank told her.

Brenda said, "I bet you do."

It was her voice he liked, the city voice, scornful and warm. They were two of a kind, she liked to say, and in a way it was true. They drank in her favorite places where the owner played the piano and everyone seemed to know her. Still, she counted on him. The city has its incomparable moments—rolling along the wall of the apartment, kissing, bumping like stones. Five in the afternoon, the vanishing light. "No," she was commanding. "No, no, no." He was kissing her throat. "What are you going to do with that beautiful struma of yours?"

"You won't take me to dinner," she said.

"Sure I will."

"Beautiful what?"

She was like a huge dog, leaping from his arms.

"Come here," he coaxed.

She went into the bathroom and began combing her hair. "Which restaurant are we going to?" she called. She would give herself but it was mostly unpredictable. She would do anything her mother hadn't done and would live as her mother lived, in the same kind of apartment, in the same soft chairs. Christmas and the envelopes for the doormen, the snow sweeping past the awning, her children coming home from school. She adored her father. She went on a trip to Hawaii with him and sent back postcards, two or three scorching lines in a large, scrawled hand.

It was summer.

"Anybody here?" Frank called.

He rapped on the door which was ajar. He was carrying his jacket, it was hot.

"All right," he said in a loud voice, "come out with your hands over your head. Alan, cover the back." The party, it seemed, was over. He pushed the door open. There was one lamp on, the room was dark.

"Hey, Bren, are we too late?" he called. She appeared mysteriously in the doorway, bare legged but in heels. "We'd have come earlier but we were working. We couldn't get out of the office. Where is everybody? Where's all the food? Hey, Alan, we're late. There's no food, nothing."

She was leaning against the doorway.

"We tried to get down here," Alan said. "We couldn't get a cab."

Frank had fallen onto the couch. "Bren, don't be mad," he said. "We were working, that's the truth. I should have called. Can you put some music on or something? Is there anything to drink?"

"There's about that much vodka," she finally said.

"Any ice?"

"About two cubes." She pushed off the wall without much enthusiasm. He watched her walk into the kitchen and heard the refrigerator door open.

The sentences give us information but they also imply a thousand different things. When Salter writes “It was summer,” we feel the scene shifting, we know time as passed. After this transition the relationship of Frank and Brenda (all of a half page old) takes on a new tone, a hint of cynicism and evasion.

And then there is the sentence “She would do anything her mother hadn't done and would live as her mother lived, in the same kind of apartment, in the same soft chairs.” What kinds of things would Brenda do that her mother hadn’t?—its an absurd statement that tells us more about Brenda’s determination and nerve than it does about what either woman might or might not do. But then there are those soft chairs, attaching themselves to the tail of that otherwise dramatic sentence. To me they suggest the inertia of living and money and becoming our parents despite ourselves. We try to define ourselves by opposition to our initial circumstances, but eventually we avail ourselves of whatever makes life comfortable—like a soft chair.

But this isn’t even Brenda’s story—she is present here for two or three pages, and then later on for two more.

Elsewhere we meet another of Frank’s lovers, a Mrs. Christie, who is also his client. Mrs. Christie is recently divorced and would like to find somebody new. Here is an episode that Mrs. Christie relates to Frank:

He didn't know what it was like, she told him. Not long ago she'd been introduced to someone by a couple she knew very well. "We'll go to dinner," they said, "you'll love him, you're perfect for him, he likes to talk about books."

They arrived at the apartment and the two women immediately went into the kitchen and began cooking. What did she think of him? She'd only had a glimpse, she said, but she liked him very much, his beautiful bald head, his dressing gown. She had begun to plan what she would do with the apartment which had too much blue in it. The man—Warren was his name—was silent all evening. He'd lost his job, her friend explained in the kitchen. Money was no problem, but he was depressed. "He's had a shock," she said. "He likes you." And in fact he'd asked if he could see her again.

"Why don't you come for tea, tomorrow?" he said.

"I could do that," she said. "Of course. I'll be in the neighborhood," she added.

The next day she arrived at four with a bag filled with books, at least a hundred dollars worth which she'd bought as a present. He was in pajamas. There was no tea. He hardly seemed to know who she was or why she was there. She said she remembered she had to meet someone and left the books. Going down in the elevator she felt suddenly sick to her stomach.

Salter is like Miles Davis, there are sweet lyrical bits that come out of nowhere, transition that are graceful and odd at the same time, melodies that seems to start in the middle, provocative silences. Frank and Alan are improvisers too. Like the story in which they exist, they never seem to look forward. They are without obligations, responsibility or meaningful connections. (It’s hard to say whether they are connected to each other, or just juxtaposed.) Their existences, over the course of 20 pages, seem to dwindle and attenuate. They go to Italy and Frank sees a schoolgirl in her uniform across a town square. He talks her into going for a ride with him and then they are lovers and she is traveling with the two of them in Italy. How old is she? we wonder. Alan says he is going home and Frank, to prevent this, agrees to share the girl with him.

The other Salter book that I wrote about in this blog, Light Years, also ends with an older American man taking up with a much younger Italian woman. Both stories take on a rather sad bitter quality, a sense of life’s vitality at an end. Somehow I imagine Frank commiting suicide eventually. There is no tangible suggestion of this in the story, but that’s the thing about Salter—you’re his collaborator as much as you are his audience. Sometimes he tells you how to fill in the gaps, and sometimes he doesn’t.

#37: My Struggle, Book 1, by Karl Ove Knausgaard

My Struggle is a six-volume autobiographical novel by Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard. It was written between 2008 and 2011 and is being translated into English at the rate of about one volume a year.

To read My Struggle is to share the author’s life as it unspools across the page. You are in his head as he remembers events from his life. The various episodes sprawl across 50, 100, or 200 pages. There is nothing extraordinary about these narrative segments, except that they are never marshaled toward a tidy conclusion. They are a kind of texture or fabric, a state of mind.

Since reading the first volume I have been thinking a bit about the experience of sharing an author’s life in this way. And it made me think of…dogs.

Some people are dog people. Two of my three siblings have hardly ever been without a dog throughout their adult lives. My third sibling and I, on the other hand, are not dog people. I like dogs, but then I imagine standing in a cold rain with a bag on my hand.

I imagine that a large part of the attraction, for many dog people, is to have a certain kind of sympathetic companion consciousness—specifically a silent one. You can talk to a dog, you can adjust your mood to match your dog’s, or even change your dog’s mood to match yours. You can be kind or cruel, or both by turns. You are not alone when you are with a dog, but you will never be contradicted or criticized. Your consciousness stands unchallenged.

Reading biographies is a bit like owning a dog. Or rather, it’s a bit like being a dog. Especially with autobiographies. In this case you, as the reader, are on the silent, receiving end in the relationship. You attach yourself to the master personality, you share its emotions, experience what feels to you like a kind of companionship—but the dialog is strictly one-way. You can’t participate in the action the way a dog can, but you can understand more. You know you don’t have to love the subject/author, but most of the time, you sort of do, because you’re traveling along with him or her, silent and constant.

If you’re the kind of person who mostly reads to gain information or to learn as much about the world as possible, My Struggle might not be the right book for you, because Knausgaard has not had an especially eventful life. He’s in his mid 40s, and I don’t think he’s ever lived outside of Scandinavia—I can’t be entirely sure, because I’ve only read volume one so far. He’s been married twice, has three kids, and hasn’t done anything else worthy of note other than to write books.

So why am I so completely hooked? I think it’s because Knausgaard’s life harmonizes with mine—his circumstances, his attitudes, his fears, his talents, and his faults—all are comparable to mine. Comparable in the literal sense of “capable of being compared.” (“His talents?” you say? “What have you written, sir, other than this blog? “Nothing much. But a failed talent is a talent nonetheless. A little more intelligence, a little more dedication, a little more spiritual depth, and who knows?—you could be reading my autobiographical saga.)

Volume Two will be out in paperback in a few weeks, and I’ll be reporting back after I read it.