One of my favorite authors, and also one of the most frustrating, is Thomas Pynchon. Clearly a genius, but for every Gravity's Rainbow there is a Vineland, for every Mason & Dixon, there is an Against the Day. Actually, I shouldn't badmouth the latter, as I have yet to read it past the first 150 pages. One storyline is compelling, but another is so excruciating that I had to put the book down. Anyway, I now present for your enjoyment and argument a few short notes I have made over the years on some of Pynchon's work.
Slow Learner
Five early stories, with some of the same rambunctiousness of Pynchon's later novels. The only story that particularly feels out of place is "Under the Rose", a foray into John Buchan territory - a real yawner. "The Secret Integration" and "The Small Rain" are perhaps the most successful stories. The remainder seem to have something essentially Pynchonian missing, but of course they were written as the author was finding his voice. Pynchon's introduction attempts to put these stories from the late 50's - early 60's into perspective, and acts as a sort of apologia for the deficiencies of the stories. Necessary reading for the die-hard fan only.
The Crying of Lot 49
A short and readable novel by Pynchon, with a characteristic blend of paranoia, zany humor, and pathos. Oedipa Maas and a supporting cast try to decipher an underground postal network with roots in the Italian Renaissance. Entertaining but ambiguous: is Trystero a real conspiracy, or a practical joke being played on Oedipa by her ex-lover? Pynchon has spawned many imitators since this novel's 1966 publication, but seen as a product of its time, it is a lively and intriguing cultural document.
Gravity's Rainbow
Almost 900 pages of rocket equations, 1940's hepcat slang, surreal visions, druggie humor, occult arcana, homoerotic fantasy, orgies, tenderness, paranoia, coprophagia, chemical formulae, colonial American puritan theology, and a guest appearance by Mickey Rooney. Threads of meaning come through in a story that shifts time, voice, and focus. Catalogues of depravity and broad slapstick, like Rabelais on acid. Gravity's Rainbow, for me anyway, is a slow read - dreadfully slow in places - and one knows that much has been missed in a casual read. The story of priapic Tyrone Slothrop and his unique connection with the V-2 rockets that blitzed London in the Second World War is ultimately a dark cautionary tale of the dangers of power and technology. My next reading will be accompanied by Weisenburger's indispensable A Gravity's Rainbow Companion, an essential roadmap to this complex novel.
Mason & Dixon
I loved this rambling, rollicking, daffy funhouse mirror of an 18th century novel. Weird and anachronistic, it is also one of the sweetest and clearest of Pynchon's works. The general outline follows the work of the famed surveyors of the Maryland/Pennsylvania hinterlands, but the personalities and adventures recounted here are classic Pynchon. The duo smoke hemp with George Washington (as Martha bakes up cakes to satisfy the munchies and a slave does a fair imitation of a Catskills comic), receive recreational shock treatments from Ben Franklin, converse with a talking dog, dodge an apparently psychotic mechanical duck, and befriend a Chinese feng shui master as they clear the path between the Penn and Calvert estates. This path, it is revealed, serves as a conduit for a vast, ancient, and unnameable telluric force. There are Jesuit conspiracies, lost souls, giant cheeses, and tender loves lost and found. Mason and Dixon are drawn in comic contrast, but they are complementary in their humanity and ultimately quite sympathetic figures. A grand, fun, and, in the end, wistful novel.
P.S. One of my favorite Pynchon websites, Spermatikos Logos, is at http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
The Hatred That Does Not Die
The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945
by Lucy Dawidowicz
The single minded effort of the Nazis to annihilate European Jewry remains one of the most brutal, incomprehensible events in the history of the world. The consolidation of power by a group of extremists, who plotted and carried out murder on a massive scale, was accomplished precisely because no one thought such a thing to be possible. The destruction of the Jews was one element of Hitler's dream of transforming, with atavistic zeal, the social fabric of Europe and Asia. Dawidowicz's book, exhaustive in scope, attempts to deal with this by looking first at the history of German anti-semitism from its beginnings, through its 19th century renaissance, to its carefully plotted policy under Hitler. She then examines the Jewish response to the Nazi threat, conditioned by a centuries old cycle of active, then dormant, hostility.
The cunning of the Nazis in making a rhetorical call for the destruction of the "Jewish vermin" a historical fact is well-known, but it cannot be adequately explained without a metaphysical understanding of the potential for human evil and depravity. Arendt famously wrote of the "banality of evil" - the institution of bold laws and regulations, so clear in their intent as to be incomprehensible are described, but can we today, while recognizing the brutality of the Nazi leadership and the intoxicating power of its functionaries, truly understand the complacency of the German populace as they see a significant section of the population quickly being deprived of their most basic human rights?
Dawidowicz deals with the death camps only in an appendix, perhaps because their story is so familiar. She focuses instead on the formation and maintenance of the ghettos of Poland, in essence a different, urban sort of concentration camp. The institutions established by the Nazis for control, such as the Judenrat, ingeniously served to break the Jewish spirit by degrees. The misplaced optimism which rationalizes that things that are horrific cannot get worse only collapses when the trap has already sprung, and no hope remains.* The brave resistance in the Warsaw ghetto, doomed by its lateness, is well documented, and an attempt to rationalize the ghetto mindset is hard to accept by later generations who, with hindsight, see the enormity of the tragedy. But we draw back, unable to comprehend the evil and suffering that - even after Stalin, Cambodia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Darfur, etc. - has never been equaled.
*I am sadly reminded of the film "Schindler's List". After each encroachment and degradation, the constant refrain is "it can't get any worse" or "the worst is over". Alas, fatal optimism!
Postscript: I read this book in 2000, and it was a rather old book even then, having been published in 1975. Despite a plethora of Holocaust books since that time, I believe Dawidowicz's book is worthwhile reading. For a number of years, I read several works relating to the Holocaust, including the excellent memoirs of Primo Levi and Elie Weisel. I recall an acquaintance asking why I was so interested in this, since I "wasn't Jewish". Leaving aside the banality of the question, I respond now that I believe the Nazi program was an example of a successful and horrific enterprise - the manipulation of public consciousness to allow for the perpetration of an absolutely evil agenda. Unfortunately, the potential for such manipulation and abuse did not end with the fall of the Nazi Regime. In the words of Herman Goering, interviewed at Nuremberg:
Naturally, the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
An Interpretation of Faust
The legend of the alchemist and magician Johann Faust has been around for centuries, and has been retold in various ways, from the sublime works of Goethe to the ridiculous manifestations of Hollywood (see the Pacino scenery-chewer "Devil's Advocate"). This evening I enjoyed a film by Czech director Jan Svankmajer which explores the Faust legend through the words of Marlowe and Goethe, and through the techniques of live action, puppetry, and claymation.
Set in the present day, a Czech man follows an enigmatic map to a subterranean theatre, where he re-enacts the story of the doomed magician with the help of various puppets (including a very funny jester) and shape-shifting demons. There are echoes of other stories of magic gone awry (the Golem, the Sorcerer's Apprentice) to give a bit of added interest. With apologies to Goethe, there is no redemption for Faust in this version - he is run over by a driverless car, and a wild-eyed old man makes off with his lower leg, presumably to replace the leg he previously had to throw into the river to fend off a black dog.
Quite imaginative and entertaining: I look forward to seeing other films by this director.
Set in the present day, a Czech man follows an enigmatic map to a subterranean theatre, where he re-enacts the story of the doomed magician with the help of various puppets (including a very funny jester) and shape-shifting demons. There are echoes of other stories of magic gone awry (the Golem, the Sorcerer's Apprentice) to give a bit of added interest. With apologies to Goethe, there is no redemption for Faust in this version - he is run over by a driverless car, and a wild-eyed old man makes off with his lower leg, presumably to replace the leg he previously had to throw into the river to fend off a black dog.
Quite imaginative and entertaining: I look forward to seeing other films by this director.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
In Search of Lost Time in the Piedmont
For years, I knew Cesare Pavese mainly through his diaries - a seemingly bottomless pit of existential despair and suicidal thoughts. To discover that he killed himself only a few months after the completion of this novel hardly comes as a surprise.
The Moon and the Bonfires is a sort of backwards look - a longing for a past that was brutal, yet somehow tenderly regarded. The narrator begins his life as a foundling in the Lower Piedmont, taken in by a family of dirt-poor sharecroppers not out of affection, but because he provides an extra set of hands, and because they can count on a yearly stipend of 5 lire for his upkeep. As a child, he works for his daily bread and the opportunity to sleep in the barn with the animals. He later ends up working for a more prosperous family, and is fascinated by their life of comparable privilege.
Following his mandatory military service, the narrator ships out to America, where he makes his fortune. He finds himself rootless in America, and so after the war he returns to survey the aftermath of fascism in the Piedmont. He meets up with his old friend, the tight-lipped Nuto, a partisan who plays a semi-mute Virgil to his Dante. Providing background to what happened during the war, Nuto is a Marxist who sees no reason for optimism. When the narrator finds, on his old farmstead, a lame boy who is a mirror of his younger self whom he hopes to inspire to cast off his poverty and drink in the wider world, Nuto sees no point in fostering such futile dreams. Yet Nuto takes pity when the boy's father goes mad and murders his family, burns the farm to the ground, and hangs himself from a tree. It is only by the narrator's gift, a penknife, that the boy is able to defend himself and avoid his family's fate. Nuto takes the boy in to help him learn a trade, and pledges to work with the narrator to better his life.
Much of the novel is taken up by reminiscences of the fascinating daughters of the prosperous landowner, yet even they cannot persist in their idyll. They all come to tragic ends, and the murder and cremation of the youngest, Santina (who may or may not have been a fascist agent), is the culmination of the novel.
In the local folklore, bonfires lit on the feast of St. John help to regenerate the world. In his essay "Pavese and Human Sacrifice" Italo Calvino notes Pavese's interest in the idea of blood sacrifice and purification by fire, learned through his reading of Frazer's The Golden Bough. The burning of the farmstead and the cremation of Santina (ostensibly to keep her body from being defiled) are the signal events of this novel - modern sacrifices in an endless cycle of madness and regeneration - private holocausts in a poor and obscure corner of the Piedmont, under a cold and uncaring moon.
The Moon and the Bonfires is a minor masterpiece of fatalism.
The Moon and the Bonfires is a sort of backwards look - a longing for a past that was brutal, yet somehow tenderly regarded. The narrator begins his life as a foundling in the Lower Piedmont, taken in by a family of dirt-poor sharecroppers not out of affection, but because he provides an extra set of hands, and because they can count on a yearly stipend of 5 lire for his upkeep. As a child, he works for his daily bread and the opportunity to sleep in the barn with the animals. He later ends up working for a more prosperous family, and is fascinated by their life of comparable privilege.
Following his mandatory military service, the narrator ships out to America, where he makes his fortune. He finds himself rootless in America, and so after the war he returns to survey the aftermath of fascism in the Piedmont. He meets up with his old friend, the tight-lipped Nuto, a partisan who plays a semi-mute Virgil to his Dante. Providing background to what happened during the war, Nuto is a Marxist who sees no reason for optimism. When the narrator finds, on his old farmstead, a lame boy who is a mirror of his younger self whom he hopes to inspire to cast off his poverty and drink in the wider world, Nuto sees no point in fostering such futile dreams. Yet Nuto takes pity when the boy's father goes mad and murders his family, burns the farm to the ground, and hangs himself from a tree. It is only by the narrator's gift, a penknife, that the boy is able to defend himself and avoid his family's fate. Nuto takes the boy in to help him learn a trade, and pledges to work with the narrator to better his life.
Much of the novel is taken up by reminiscences of the fascinating daughters of the prosperous landowner, yet even they cannot persist in their idyll. They all come to tragic ends, and the murder and cremation of the youngest, Santina (who may or may not have been a fascist agent), is the culmination of the novel.
In the local folklore, bonfires lit on the feast of St. John help to regenerate the world. In his essay "Pavese and Human Sacrifice" Italo Calvino notes Pavese's interest in the idea of blood sacrifice and purification by fire, learned through his reading of Frazer's The Golden Bough. The burning of the farmstead and the cremation of Santina (ostensibly to keep her body from being defiled) are the signal events of this novel - modern sacrifices in an endless cycle of madness and regeneration - private holocausts in a poor and obscure corner of the Piedmont, under a cold and uncaring moon.
The Moon and the Bonfires is a minor masterpiece of fatalism.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)
I read most of Hermann Hesse's major works way back in High School (I was the odd kid wandering around with "unrequired reading" on top of the abhored textbooks). His novels appealed to my interest in eastern philosophy in general and Buddhism specifically, yet even then I feld that books such as Siddhartha and The Journey to the East were rather simplistic in their approach to eastern thought. I don't remember much about Steppenwolf, other than I had a greater appreciation for it than I had for the other works. Later, when I read Brecht, I thought some of his works had echoes of Steppenwolf (or was it the other way around?).
Hesse comes back again and again to the question of whether one should seek an ascetic path or, to paraphrase Blake, to approach the palace of wisdom by the road of excess. In his own life, Hesse seems to have tended towards the ascetic, although his writings sought to transcend the dualism. The Glass Bead Game is longer than Hesse's other novels (it was originally envisioned, per the Mann/Hesse correspondence, as a series of novels, or a multi-volume work) but the themes are the same. Hesse prosletyses for vegetarianism and meditation, but the duality of the meditative vs. the active life remains his subject.
The bulk of the novel takes place many centuries hence, in the province of Castilia, a mythical place where promising youth are taken for education and where the ritualistic pastime is the Glass Bead Game. The novel describes the early life and education of Joseph Knecht, who rises to the exalted position of Magister of Castilia. But Knecht has a crisis, and the life of splendid isolation, governed by ritual, becomes unbearable for him. He leaves the intellectual yet barren life of Castilia in order to go into the world and make his own small mark. He promptly drowns in ice-cold water. Tragically, swimming was one of the practical arts not studied in Castilia.
Hesse is not, regrettably, a first rate author. The vignettes of life in Castile are interesting, if somewhat stilted, but Hesse's concerns and his expressions of them seem to be a restatement of themes from his earlier novels. Hermann Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature following the release of this book.
Hesse comes back again and again to the question of whether one should seek an ascetic path or, to paraphrase Blake, to approach the palace of wisdom by the road of excess. In his own life, Hesse seems to have tended towards the ascetic, although his writings sought to transcend the dualism. The Glass Bead Game is longer than Hesse's other novels (it was originally envisioned, per the Mann/Hesse correspondence, as a series of novels, or a multi-volume work) but the themes are the same. Hesse prosletyses for vegetarianism and meditation, but the duality of the meditative vs. the active life remains his subject.
The bulk of the novel takes place many centuries hence, in the province of Castilia, a mythical place where promising youth are taken for education and where the ritualistic pastime is the Glass Bead Game. The novel describes the early life and education of Joseph Knecht, who rises to the exalted position of Magister of Castilia. But Knecht has a crisis, and the life of splendid isolation, governed by ritual, becomes unbearable for him. He leaves the intellectual yet barren life of Castilia in order to go into the world and make his own small mark. He promptly drowns in ice-cold water. Tragically, swimming was one of the practical arts not studied in Castilia.
Hesse is not, regrettably, a first rate author. The vignettes of life in Castile are interesting, if somewhat stilted, but Hesse's concerns and his expressions of them seem to be a restatement of themes from his earlier novels. Hermann Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature following the release of this book.
Monday, December 03, 2007
Wolf Solent
In this novel by John Cowper Powys (1872-1963), Wolf Solent is a 35 year old Englishman, living with his mother in London and leading an obscure life as a History instructor at a small school. At the beginning of the novel he is on a train back to his childhood home of Dorsetshire, at the invitation of a local Squire who need assistance in compiling a scandalous history of the vicinity.
Solent is, to say the least, a hyper-sensitive individual. He wants to get away to the country, away from aeroplanes and the nuisances of modern life. Since childhood, he has lived a mostly interior life occupied with his own peculiar "mythology", but he wants an authentic, sensual existence. His life is overwhelmingly an interior affair, and much of the book is taken up with the turbulent thoughts in Solent's head as he wanders the Dorset countryside, burying his face in the local flora and inserting himself into the lives of the locals.
Wolf's father, who died some 25 years previously, was the local rogue, dying in the neighborhood workhouse with "Christ! I've enjoyed my life!" as his last words. William Solent had an open extramarital affair with Selena Gault, the ugliest woman in town, and fathered at least one illegitimate child, now a woman to whom Wolf forms a strangely affectionate attraction. He also has a strangely affectionate attraction to her betrothed, but that's another thread in the fabric of this story. Wof appears determined to follow his father's footsteps, releasing himself from the suppressed life he has lived with his mother. On the train, he fantasizes about seducing the local girls,"white as a peeled willow wand", among the elder-bushes.
He wastes no time falling for Gerda Torp, the young beauty who is the daughter of the local headstone carver. His erotic sensibilities are influenced by the unseen existence of a photo of Gerda suggestively straddling a headstone in her father's yard, and by her uncanny ability to imitate the whistles of the blackbird and plover. No sooner has he bedded her in a pile of bracken in an old cow-barn, with a promise of marriage, than he meets his true soul mate in the form of the introvert Christie Malakite, who lives a circumscribed existence immersed in works of literature and philosophy, above her father's dirty book shop. Oh fate!
Wolf's obsession with Christie and the imminent collapse of his personal mythology as his life becomes intertwined with those around him forms the bulk of this massive book. In the hands of Thomas Hardy, this would have been a pretty straightforward affair, but Powys has a lot of words in him and is not afraid to use them. The novel is dense with descriptions of Wolf's interminable walks and the vegetation that he encounters. Life in its vegetative ripeness and its inevitable decay permeates the book. And under the fertile ground is the death's head of his father, grinning sardonically at the foolish indecisiveness of his son, a Yorick mocking Hamlet. The arrival of Wolf's mother, not one to let the apronstrings become overstretched, complicates matters: Wolf is as much Oedipus as Hamlet.
The supporting characters are a queer lot: Squire Urquhart, a nasty old man whom Wolf tends to see as evil incarnate; the tippling homosexual parson, Tilly-Valley; Jason Otter, the sensitive poet who seems to know Wolf's motivations better than he does himself; Christie's incestuous father; Urquhart's valet, whom Wolf imagines naked in his dirtiness; and Bob Weevil, whom Wolf suspects of cuckolding him. There is also Redfern, the deceased former secretary of Urquhart, in a shallow grave in the cemetery and over whom most of the male characters share some unshakeable obsession.
Powys imagined his book as illustrative of the necessity of opposites and an examination of "the whole mysterious essence of human life upon earth, the mystery of consciousness." My edition is one of the older Penguin Modern Classics, not the more recent volume with A.N. Wilson's introduction, so I don't have the benefit of Wilson's insights. I get the whole "necessity of opposites" thing, as well as the underlying vegetation/sexuality (dark, moist, hidden) thing. I suppose I enjoyed it, but really, this book is like "Twin Peaks", only with a lot of tea and no dancing midgets.
Wolf Solent was the first of Powys' novels, and generally regarded as his best. He is not easy to slog through, and God knows I've tried. Among his other works are A Glastonbury Romance (which I hope to read before I die, but not too soon), a massive Autobiography, and a self-help book called The Philosophy of Solitude. I enjoy dipping into the latter two volumes from time to time but I can really only take him in small doses. He was truly an idiosyncratic writer and, despite a life lived mostly in the United States, a true English eccentric.
Solent is, to say the least, a hyper-sensitive individual. He wants to get away to the country, away from aeroplanes and the nuisances of modern life. Since childhood, he has lived a mostly interior life occupied with his own peculiar "mythology", but he wants an authentic, sensual existence. His life is overwhelmingly an interior affair, and much of the book is taken up with the turbulent thoughts in Solent's head as he wanders the Dorset countryside, burying his face in the local flora and inserting himself into the lives of the locals.
Wolf's father, who died some 25 years previously, was the local rogue, dying in the neighborhood workhouse with "Christ! I've enjoyed my life!" as his last words. William Solent had an open extramarital affair with Selena Gault, the ugliest woman in town, and fathered at least one illegitimate child, now a woman to whom Wolf forms a strangely affectionate attraction. He also has a strangely affectionate attraction to her betrothed, but that's another thread in the fabric of this story. Wof appears determined to follow his father's footsteps, releasing himself from the suppressed life he has lived with his mother. On the train, he fantasizes about seducing the local girls,"white as a peeled willow wand", among the elder-bushes.
He wastes no time falling for Gerda Torp, the young beauty who is the daughter of the local headstone carver. His erotic sensibilities are influenced by the unseen existence of a photo of Gerda suggestively straddling a headstone in her father's yard, and by her uncanny ability to imitate the whistles of the blackbird and plover. No sooner has he bedded her in a pile of bracken in an old cow-barn, with a promise of marriage, than he meets his true soul mate in the form of the introvert Christie Malakite, who lives a circumscribed existence immersed in works of literature and philosophy, above her father's dirty book shop. Oh fate!
Wolf's obsession with Christie and the imminent collapse of his personal mythology as his life becomes intertwined with those around him forms the bulk of this massive book. In the hands of Thomas Hardy, this would have been a pretty straightforward affair, but Powys has a lot of words in him and is not afraid to use them. The novel is dense with descriptions of Wolf's interminable walks and the vegetation that he encounters. Life in its vegetative ripeness and its inevitable decay permeates the book. And under the fertile ground is the death's head of his father, grinning sardonically at the foolish indecisiveness of his son, a Yorick mocking Hamlet. The arrival of Wolf's mother, not one to let the apronstrings become overstretched, complicates matters: Wolf is as much Oedipus as Hamlet.
The supporting characters are a queer lot: Squire Urquhart, a nasty old man whom Wolf tends to see as evil incarnate; the tippling homosexual parson, Tilly-Valley; Jason Otter, the sensitive poet who seems to know Wolf's motivations better than he does himself; Christie's incestuous father; Urquhart's valet, whom Wolf imagines naked in his dirtiness; and Bob Weevil, whom Wolf suspects of cuckolding him. There is also Redfern, the deceased former secretary of Urquhart, in a shallow grave in the cemetery and over whom most of the male characters share some unshakeable obsession.
Powys imagined his book as illustrative of the necessity of opposites and an examination of "the whole mysterious essence of human life upon earth, the mystery of consciousness." My edition is one of the older Penguin Modern Classics, not the more recent volume with A.N. Wilson's introduction, so I don't have the benefit of Wilson's insights. I get the whole "necessity of opposites" thing, as well as the underlying vegetation/sexuality (dark, moist, hidden) thing. I suppose I enjoyed it, but really, this book is like "Twin Peaks", only with a lot of tea and no dancing midgets.
Wolf Solent was the first of Powys' novels, and generally regarded as his best. He is not easy to slog through, and God knows I've tried. Among his other works are A Glastonbury Romance (which I hope to read before I die, but not too soon), a massive Autobiography, and a self-help book called The Philosophy of Solitude. I enjoy dipping into the latter two volumes from time to time but I can really only take him in small doses. He was truly an idiosyncratic writer and, despite a life lived mostly in the United States, a true English eccentric.
A Few Miles of Bad Road
Umberto Eco has a new book called On Ugliness. Good review in the NYT Book Review yesterday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/books/review/Finnerty-t.html
Looks like an ideal Christmas gift.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/books/review/Finnerty-t.html
Looks like an ideal Christmas gift.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Neglected Books
I have added a link to a wonderful site called Neglected Books. I like to think that this is the site I would have created if I had the proper time, energy, and erudition.
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Independent People
For anyone bracing themselves for long cold winter nights, Halldor Laxness's Independent People makes good reading. I actually read this book in December 1999, outside on the deck of our home in suburban Maryland, late at night with a pipe and snow falling all around. This is probably the optimal method for reading a book set in the isolated frozen wastes of Iceland.
Independent people is the story of an obstinant Icelandic sheep rancher's struggle for independence against time, the elements, family responsibility, and an evolving economic system. For Bjartur, nothing is as important as his land and the sheep upon it, for in his thinking, the land represents true freedom. Wives die, children are lost, and eventually the ranch itself comes to ruin as a result of Bjartur's inability to see beyond the tip of his nose. As with most pioneers, there is a certain insanity in him, and a mad touch of the heroic.
One feels that Bjartur survives a harrowing ordeal in the frozen wasteland (as his wife is dying in childbirth at home) not by heroism, but by the fact that he is so single-mindedly obsessed with his dream of independence that he simply does not consider the fact that he should not be able to live through the night. The tale is a tragic one - for all its simplicity, Bjartur's dream is crushed in the end by his inability to adapt to a changing world. The other characters, especially the girl Asta Sollija, are drawn with depth and care. There is a touch of the comical in this novel, but there is mostly - almost unbearable in parts - tragic sorrow in the life of this man and those he dominates.
I was fortunate to find and read an English translation of this book some years ago. I see that a more recent edition is now available. Pleased to know that it is back in print.
Independent people is the story of an obstinant Icelandic sheep rancher's struggle for independence against time, the elements, family responsibility, and an evolving economic system. For Bjartur, nothing is as important as his land and the sheep upon it, for in his thinking, the land represents true freedom. Wives die, children are lost, and eventually the ranch itself comes to ruin as a result of Bjartur's inability to see beyond the tip of his nose. As with most pioneers, there is a certain insanity in him, and a mad touch of the heroic.
One feels that Bjartur survives a harrowing ordeal in the frozen wasteland (as his wife is dying in childbirth at home) not by heroism, but by the fact that he is so single-mindedly obsessed with his dream of independence that he simply does not consider the fact that he should not be able to live through the night. The tale is a tragic one - for all its simplicity, Bjartur's dream is crushed in the end by his inability to adapt to a changing world. The other characters, especially the girl Asta Sollija, are drawn with depth and care. There is a touch of the comical in this novel, but there is mostly - almost unbearable in parts - tragic sorrow in the life of this man and those he dominates.
I was fortunate to find and read an English translation of this book some years ago. I see that a more recent edition is now available. Pleased to know that it is back in print.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Book Notes on LibraryThing
For anyone out there who might enjoy my writing on books (rather than my leftie rants), you may be interested to know that I have begun to cross post some of my book notes from this blog to my LibraryThing catalog (accessible as "reviews" on the Makifat profile page). I am also posting shorter reviews of books read that I have written in my notebooks, but which I have felt aren't substantial enough to note on this blog.
The LibraryThing cataloging continues, slowly and surely. I should pass 3000 books sometime tomorrow, but there is still a long way to go until I have entered my entire library.
The LibraryThing cataloging continues, slowly and surely. I should pass 3000 books sometime tomorrow, but there is still a long way to go until I have entered my entire library.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
The Manuscript Found at Saragossa
As a student in the early 80's, I saw a film at the local art house that was quite unlike anything I'd seen before. It was foreign, black and white, and featured (in addition to scantily clad temptresses) seemingly innumerable stories within stories, a narrative Chinese box, all in a quite fantastic vein. The name of the film escaped me for years, but it remained as a tantalizing memory. No one I spoke to seems to have any recollection of the film, and I wondered if it had been a dream after all.
A few years ago there was a new translation of a book entitled The Manuscript Found at Saragossa by Polish author Jan Potocki. This novel is comprised of interlocking stories within stories, gothic and surreal. Set in Spain's Sierra Morena mountains in the early years of the 18th century, the intricate stories make generous use of the elements of hermetic and kabbalistic teachings, as well as Islamic history and the horrors of the Inquisition.
Potocki knew the detailed history of the time and sprinkled his narrative with actual persons and events. He created in this novel a subterranean twilight world, where secretive Moorish sheiks hoard incredible wealth and scheme for the continuance of their hereditary authority in the hidden realm.
Van Worden, the narrator, is manipulated throughout to serve the purposes of a distant relation, the Sheik of the Gomelez. He accomplishes this through tests of character, through the intricate web of stories (including the tale of the Wandering Jew, a popular gothic motif - see also Melmoth the Wanderer and Eugene Sue's eponymous novel), and through, not least, the erotic attractions of two nubile Moorish princesses. A recurring episode pertains to some criminal corpses, hanging near a crossroads, that seem to be resurrected with an almost comic consistency.
The disparate narratives weave together in the final pages. Van Worden learns the object of his manipulation, but is greatly rewarded for providing an heir to the Sheik. The object of the Sheik is a plan for Moorish world domination, a foreshadowing of the anti-semitic and discredited "Protocols of the Elders of Zion". Conspiracy theorists, alas, have always been with us.
And of course, while reading this novel, back in 2001, my mind was struck by similarities to a film I had seen many years before. The film? The 1965 production of "The Saragossa Manuscript", which I now own on DVD. Both the book and the film are wonderfully imagined works of art.
A few years ago there was a new translation of a book entitled The Manuscript Found at Saragossa by Polish author Jan Potocki. This novel is comprised of interlocking stories within stories, gothic and surreal. Set in Spain's Sierra Morena mountains in the early years of the 18th century, the intricate stories make generous use of the elements of hermetic and kabbalistic teachings, as well as Islamic history and the horrors of the Inquisition.
Potocki knew the detailed history of the time and sprinkled his narrative with actual persons and events. He created in this novel a subterranean twilight world, where secretive Moorish sheiks hoard incredible wealth and scheme for the continuance of their hereditary authority in the hidden realm.
Van Worden, the narrator, is manipulated throughout to serve the purposes of a distant relation, the Sheik of the Gomelez. He accomplishes this through tests of character, through the intricate web of stories (including the tale of the Wandering Jew, a popular gothic motif - see also Melmoth the Wanderer and Eugene Sue's eponymous novel), and through, not least, the erotic attractions of two nubile Moorish princesses. A recurring episode pertains to some criminal corpses, hanging near a crossroads, that seem to be resurrected with an almost comic consistency.
The disparate narratives weave together in the final pages. Van Worden learns the object of his manipulation, but is greatly rewarded for providing an heir to the Sheik. The object of the Sheik is a plan for Moorish world domination, a foreshadowing of the anti-semitic and discredited "Protocols of the Elders of Zion". Conspiracy theorists, alas, have always been with us.
And of course, while reading this novel, back in 2001, my mind was struck by similarities to a film I had seen many years before. The film? The 1965 production of "The Saragossa Manuscript", which I now own on DVD. Both the book and the film are wonderfully imagined works of art.
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