”The Porpoise" by Mark Haddon - a review of sorts

 

“The Porpoise“ by Mark Haddon:

Life is fragile and nothing can be taken for granted. - This motto might as well apply for this novel. It is a gripping adventure, a fast paced narrative, a stunning telling of a multi-layered tale. It is full of beautiful prose and themes of love, cruelty, abuse and family. It stretches the mind with metafictional structure and references to Greek Mythology and Shakespeare. 

This contemporary story mirrors the ancient legend of Antiochus, whose incestuous love for the daughter of his dead wife was discovered and threatened to expose by the young adventurer Appolinus of Tyre. Much later it inspired Shakespeare to write his play “Pericles”. 

Starting with one of the most fast-paced fulminant beginnings I have encountered for a long time, this novel wanders between genres: Fantasy, tragedy, Greek mythology and adventure. In imaginative vivid detail the mythology is pulled into the present with intertwined narratives about fathers, daughters, mothers and men who threaten them. 

In its quick wanderings from realism to epic to family tragedy and back again the book is a bravado act of storytelling, an astonishing feat. The use of language is dazzling, beautiful in its descriptions of places, landscapes, people, situations, complex emotions. It is full of love and cruelty in many forms, again showing that man is wolf to man, its own worst enemy. 

The novel is clearly fueled by the love of storytelling but it is not only a metafictional game but also a bow to the power of literature, its ability to touch and alter our lives, to consume us for a moment and transport us to a different reality. It is simply a great joy to read!

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”The Reading List" by Sara Nisha Adams - review

 “The Reading List” by Sara Nisha Adams:

In London, Wembley we meet elderly citizen Mukesh, grieving and recently widowed. Mukesh has yet come to terms with a life bereft of his beloved wife and struggles through his days, not knowing how to fill the void.

And there is Aleisha, a 17-year-old summer-job librarian who has to deal with a family of her own, her mother with mental problems and her beloved brother always at work to care for the family. Aleisha discovers a list of novels that she’s never heard of before and impulsively decides to read every book on the list and also persuades Mukesh, her customer at the library, to join her on the journey.

Mukesh and Aleisha struggle through life, often endure hardship and loss but also find joy, new fulfillment and friendship. Books help them on their way to navigate through many intricacies of life and family. 

This is a book about books. It is a look on how reading can benefit, soothe or even alter your life. It is a quiet, sometimes thoughtful view on a community in London Suburbia. It has its touching moments and as a debut novel it certainly deserves praise.

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"To Paradise" by Hanya Yanagihara - review

 “To Paradise“ by Hanya Yanagihara:

This is an impressive, unusual read, an emotional brilliant novel that spans three centuries and paints three versions of an America quite different as we know it. It is a big picture, a novel with a grand scope and an abundance of all-human themes: love, the definition of family, gender, identity, race, shame, need, loneliness and loss and, always, the faint hope and promise of an utopia, a paradise we all long for.

The book is set into three sections between which there are unclear but existing connections. In its three sections which straddle three centuries the novel centers around Washington Square in New York City and plays out three very different stories. Sometimes it feels that there are three books in one, each told in a different voice and mood. Most impressively in the end, though, after having read all and formed an all-over image, I felt it as just one book, one novel that explores recurring themes in variations of perception and possibilities. The recurring themes deepen in substance and gain richness and meaningfulness by each section. 

At times, especially after the end of a section, a feeling of frustration set in, because by then I had established a feeling of caring sympathy and understanding, a connection with the protagonists. To be deprived of the knowledge and left in uncertainty of their fate was frustrating. But as I moved on through the book all works out in the end and I was left baffled but grateful for such a great reading journey. This is quite an emotional book but never does it come close to kitsch and it felt great reading it, its situations, its people, its emotions all clear and honest.

The first section paints a version of an 1883 America, New York. In accordance to the era this section of the book feels in part almost like a novel by Henry James. New York is part of the Free States where people may marry whomever they love. Restriction comes not in form of morality but in form of social status and discrimination. Here we meet David, the young sensitive heir of a very distinguished family who does not do what is expected of him and resists an arranged marriage to a much older man, searching liberty elsewhere with his love, even at the cost of loosing his family and the risk of failing. 

In the second section we meet David, a young Hawai’ian man who lives together with his older, wealthy partner in a rich, beautiful house on Washington Square in a New York of 1993. The AIDS crisis is at its peak, each and everyone is affected and for the first time an awareness, a foreboding of catastrophe induced by a virus hits the people. There is love, wealth, squalor, indulgence and depravity, but there is also much suffering, helplessness and loss. Through David, the young Hawai’ian, we learn of his troubled childhood in Hawai’i, we learn about the fate of his father and family, we learn about some of the history of Hawai’i and of some of its people in search of the old and presumably, better Hawai’i, another paradise lost and not found again.

To me the third section proved to be the most intense. It plays in an America of 2093 and while at first it felt like so many other dystopian tales it soon evolved into a touching, frightening, enlightening picture of what our society could become and how easily democracy as we know it can mutate into something inhuman and totalitarian. Here in 2093 we meet Charlie, a survivor of one of many deadly pandemics that flooded the planet since. Because of the side effects of the medication she received and which saved her life, she nevertheless lost much of her lively personality and lives, at first together with her grandfather, a formerly rich, famous, influential person, then later in an arranged marriage with her husband, in an apartment in an old grand house on Washington Square. Through her we slowly get to know and feel what this America has become and that her grandfather used to be one of the architects that transformed society in response to the overwhelming threat of the virus. We not only learn of her story but of the story of her grandfather as well, of his life with his husband and their son and how he, like everyone else, strived only for happiness and security for his family.

What makes this section so special is that in regard to the pandemic of the last two years it is so easy to imagine how society could change from ok to worse to bad to totalitarian. It shows how easily a society which considered itself open-minded and liberal, looses its thin civilian varnish and under pressure and deadly threat looks for scapegoats to blame and deprives minorities of their long fought-for rights and recognition, thus returning to a condemning, prejudiced morale of 200 years ago.

Each section yields numerous pleasures and many gripping moments and I truly enjoyed reading this book. The author does not offer a firm conclusion nor a definitive answer to many questions but in this she is in accordance to our times which can’t be easily sketched with a few definitive strokes. Above all Hanya Yanagihara, though, in this work of emotional genius, shows again a masterly understanding of what it is to be human, to live and love and what it is that binds us to each other.

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”The Children Act" by Ian McEwan - review

 “The Children Act” by Ian McEwan: 

As in many of Ian McEwan’s books this one, too, pivots around one single, central event and its reverberating ramifications. 

One evening Fiona Maye, a prominent High Court Judge (addressed as “My Lady”), known and respected for her intelligent precision and sensitivity, has to deal with catastrophe as Jack, her husband of 25 years, loving, caring, faithful, announces that he wants one more amorous adventure in his life before he gets too old. He feels that their relationship has deteriorated to that of siblings, loving and sweet, but lacking any excitement. After the ensuing argument he leaves her for a much younger woman.

Fiona meanwhile is called onto an urgent case which demands all her energy and attention. Her case over which she presides and has to dispense judgement is that of a 17-year-old boy, close to 18 but legally still not an adult, yet. He suffers of severe leukemia and refuses, for religious reasons any blood transfusion which most likely would save his life. Adam is a beautiful boy with an artistic, sensitive, intelligent soul who seems to have a grasp of what awaits him. Fiona visits him in hospital and then decides against his and his parent’s wishes, allowing the hospital to treat him and thus saving his life. The visit not only changes Adam’s course of life, it also has an unexpected affect on Fiona, her decision has repercussions, which throw her into confusion and self-doubt. I liked the intensity of the tensions which arose between this unlikely pair, a middle-aged, distinguished female judge and a dying, sensitive boy.

The novel offers an interesting, enlightening view on how difficult dispensing judgement can be, how possibly desastrous and devastating a sentence, once spoken, can alter lives forever. McEwan shows the human dimension revealed by legal dilemma.

McEwan, in all his mastery paints a hugely enjoyable, tender portrait of Fiona's marriage, rendering in detail small gestures, rich of meaning and understanding, the way a cup of coffee, for example, is steered across a table as a peace offering. 

I liked this short novel, it is full of interesting moral questions, rich with evoking the altering power of art, poetry and, most of all, music.

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”Saving Beauty" (”Die Errettung des Schönen") by Byung-Chul Han - a short introduction

 “Saving Beauty“ (“Die Errettung des Schönen“) by Byung-Chul Han:

As the last book of a colorful variety of 58 books I read this year, which all were novels, this one is not. It is a collection of 14 short essays of the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, a cultural theorist and lecturer at the University of the Arts, Berlin.

In them Han deals, in short sentences and a precise, concise prose, passionate and engaging with the concept of beauty in today’s consumer culture. Han paints a dystopian picture of our society and how it lost track of beauty.

Han argues that beauty has lost its edge and has been turned into something merely smooth and pleasing, like the impeccable smooth surface of a smartphone, Brazilian Waxing or the sculptures of Jeff Koons. The smooth has become the signature of the present. Anything that is not positive has fallen victim to the need for a fast, unobstructed flow of information and capital. Han paints beauty as having declined from being inextricably linked with the sublime, to the empty, self-centred notion it has now become.

Why do we find smooth things beautiful today? The smooth does not hurt. It does offer no resistance but produces instant Like and gives immediate pleasure. Beauty in its smoothness has become central to the subject, in an almost autoerotic way. It embodies today's positive society. Because of this smoothness the encounter with true beauty fails, the charm of beauty is lost. True beauty, being strange and different, being something of the other, always must contain something negative and obscure. In place of the beautiful steps the pleasing. The alterity or negativity of the other and the alien is eliminated altogether. But negativity, being an invigorating force of life, is also an integral part of true beauty. 

Only what is not smooth can free the self from its narcissistic cocoon, from permanent self-affirmation and narcissistic mirroring. Without negativity, without the injury it inflicts, there can be neither poetry nor art. Thinking only is provoked as a result of the experience of the negativity of the injury. True beaúty also has to inflict pain.The kind of beauty which is a consequence of aesthetic distance is lost in a culture dependent on images of rapid effects and affects. For Byung Chul-Han beauty is not a momentary glow, but a silent afterglow. The refinement consists in the reluctance. 

Han ultimately separates the fundamentally different forms of the beautiful based on the attitude we adopt towards it: there is something beautiful that is easy to have and smooth and that confirms our auto-eroticism. And there is something beautiful that only cautiously reveals itself to the viewer.

The crisis of beauty today consists in the fact that beauty is reduced to its givenness, to its use or consumer value. In order to make it more readily and easily consumable it has to be smooth and without friction and negativity. 

In order to save beauty, Han argues, we have to reunite it with the sublime and return to it the negativity of the other. The saving of beauty is the seeing and thus the saving of the other. We affirm the differences, the alienness of the other and thus save beauty. And we are saving ourselves from the grip of consumerism. Beauty needs the difference of the other, and a ‘contemplative distance’ that allows us to linger, to plunge into and thereby, to lose ourselves and experience the sense of our own finitness.

This collection is not a structured, congruent or consistent look on beauty and its role in our contemporary society. Han does not present a closed theory of beauty, rather he strings together interesting, insightful, surprising fragments and leaves it to the reader to piece them together.

 -Byung-Chul Han (b. 1956) studied metallurgy in Korea, then philosophy, German philology and catholic theology in Freiburg and Munich. He is a lecturer and teacher of cultural theory at the University of Arts in Berlin. -

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”A Gentleman in Moscow" by Amos Towles - review

 “A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amos Towles:

At the end of a year of avid reading I happened upon a book which in its tone if not its subject is a little different from what I am usually drawn to and I came upon it, as so often is the case when something lasting and remarkable happens, by sheer happenchance. A bit of an unusual novel for me, but it proved to be perfectly suited for the time of year, Christmas being just underway, New Year not far, the passing of the year, as is natural at such times, closely and vividly felt.

The book took a short while to persuade me to stay with it but in the end it succeeded. I think it is the ultimate book to read in a quarantine/lockdown.

The time is 1922, the place is Moscow, the main protagonist is Count Alexander Rostov, an aristocrat of the finest order, a real fine gentleman of the old school. He is sentenced to life-long house arrest in Moscow’s finest Hotel, the Metropol, by a Bolshevik’s tribunal for writing a poem deemed to encourage revolt.

Slowly we become immersed in his story and his world, which consists, naturally, of an aristocratic past and his slow accommodation to his new life sentence in the grand Hotel. Here he learns to live life at its fullest, regardless of the circumstances, here he discovers the depths of humanity in all its shades, varieties and colors. Cozy and warm inside the Metropole, a whole separate world exists. 

We watch with the Count, who has lost his family, his possessions, his social standing, as everything he loves about Russian life is systematically uprooted by the new regime. The chill of this is certainly felt but for the Count and his friends at the Hotel the passage of time is observed as a ”turn of kaleidoscope“ or a magic lantern that throws its images on the wall, much as in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. 

Count Rostov is a man of impeccable personal standards and refined taste, an aesthete and bon-homme par excellence. He is a follower of routines and rituals and in possession of a kind, wise heart. He is eloquent and an insightful observer of live and people. Unlike many other novels about Russia this one does not linger on the dreary life and ubiquitous pain of the Russian people. There is the looming threat of the political regime, but politics mostly stay lurking in the shadows and don’t come to the fore.

The tale is elegantly rendered and clever, the prose is, congruent with the times it depicts, a little antiquated but nevertheless precise, poetic and, as is the whole of the book, very very charming. Spread across four decades the tale is brimming with personal wisdom, philosophical musings and charm. It is a stylish novel befitting a stylish gentleman and its tone is light, easy with gentle funny digressions, winning in its mannered but at the same time very pleasant ways. There is a wonderfully charming and colorful cast of characters. 

There are themes of romance, parenting, loyalty, friendship and survival. There is suspense, family drama, food, art and wine. There always is humor and in these times of quarantine the book shows that maintaining connections with people you like and love is the main force with which to keep sane. 

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“Intimacies“ by Katie Kitamura - review

 “Intimacies“ by Katie Kitamura:

A mysterious novel about a woman adrift in her own life and a new city. A story which constantly asks: Where do I belong? It is a tale that at first seems to be all too familiar but soon morphs into something bewilderingly strange.

After discovering that her new boyfriend Adriaan is a married man with a family, the narrator, a young woman interpreter who recently moved to The Hague to start a contract job at the International Court, feels that “the appearance of simplicity is not the same thing as simplicity itself“. This feeling extents to almost every aspect of her life, personal and professional.

Very little do we know of the narrator’s life or history. She came to The Hague by way of New York, her father has just died and her mother has returned to Singapore. Her age and ethnicity are never precisely mentioned. Despite this little information we slowly begin to establish a connection with her.  

We are offered an interesting insight into the inner workings of the International Court, we get a sense of how it is to constantly maneuver between meanings and languages and furthermore we form the impression of both the importance and the futility of the International Criminal Court. We learn that the Court primarily prosecutes crimes against humanity in African nations, becoming an "ineffectual" instrument of "Western imperialism”. 

At her work in the Court, responsible for translating legal proceedings for the defense of a genocidal former heads of state who is accused of cruel injustice against ethnic minorities, she and the accused develop a predator-prey dynamic, with the narrator simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by the accused's ruthlessness and absence of remorse. 

Despite her skill and discipline “great chasms between words, between two or more languages“ open up without warning. There seems to be a strange dichotomy of presence and absence simultaneously at work.  “Interpretation can be profoundly disorienting,” she reflects, “You can be so caught up in the minutiae of the interpreting act, in trying to maintain utmost fidelity to the words being spoken first by the subject and then by yourself that you do not necessarily apprehend the sense of the sentences themselves: you literally do not know what you are saying. Language loses its meaning.” 

Outside of work she looks for what anyone moving alone to a new city would be looking for, namely friendship and love. Cracks in her professional and private life open up and widen. A mugging takes place outside her friend’s apartment and she develops an obsessive interest in the victim, an antiquarian book seller. Her boyfriend Adriaan asks her to await his return in his apartment while he flies to Lisbon to divorce his estranged wife, but days become weeks and he stops texting and her sense of insecurity increases. The novel slowly acquires an uncanny atmosphere of threat though it is not clear where that threat originates. “I want to be in a place that feels like home,” she thinks but “where that is, I don’t know”. 

She keeps functioning apparently normal, does what everyone else does, she eats, works at her job, makes friends, maintains friendships but at the same time is adrift and unsteady. Her attentions are mostly directed outward, towards others, their lives, their problems, only rarely do her thoughts turn inward and when they do they heighten her sense of being lost and adrift. She often uses the words Intimacies or Intimate and seems to crave these conditions while being aware of their elusiveness. 

The intimate situations she is involved in are mostly described from an observational distance, she describes her friendship with her woman-friend Jana, talks of her relation with her boyfriend Adriaan, speaks of an intrusive approach of a man at a private party. Once she briefly reflects on her former family life, she meets the sister of the mugged book seller and the bookseller himself whom she later watches in intimate embrace with a woman not his wife. The strangest intimacy she develops with the accused criminal president at her work. In all these cases she mostly confines herself to just watch and describe. It is not exactly a voyeuristic view she inhabits but a cooly detached, almost scientific one.

We try to connect with her but her cool observant way makes it hard to establish a real emotional bond. Kitamura brings us into intimate spaces between people while keeping her distance.

This is a tale of the familiar inability to create a coherent narrative of our own life. The summary of the novel’s plot does not do it justice, there is more at issue than just the story, themes of duplicity, questionable morality, politics, sexual tension. Intimacies is a novel for the brain. In her cool detached tone Kitamura does not offer pre-configured easy judgement on moral questions. The right behavior, the sole and righteous position on complex issues is left to the reader.

In sparing, clear, assertive and straightforward prose, in interesting contrast with the complexity of her characters, and her quiet observational mood Kitamura creates a confounding, labyrinthine tale of someone in search of a personal narrative. And as we all know, within the labyrinth, there, at the heart, lurks a Beast.

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“NIGHT. SLEEP. DEATH. The STARS." by Joyce Carol Oates - review

 “NIGHT. SLEEP. DEATH. The STARS.“ by Joyce Carol Oates:

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.

               A Clear Midnight (from Leaves of Grass) - Walt Whitman - 

    

At almost 800 pages the latest intimate family novel by Joyce Carol Oates is a hefty monster, but quite an exhilarating, rewarding, interesting, gripping, spellbinding, heart-wrenching and thoroughly enjoyable one. The subject, which could be described as “the story of coming to terms with the death of a loved, revered and dominating family member”, is treated with warm feeling and the characters are painted with a credibility that rings very true. 

It is a brooding, pondering, thoughtful study of how people respond to stress and loss, a chronicle of a family, disrupted and then reconfigured, following the death of its patriarch. It also provides a condemning, accusing snapshot of contemporary American life, class and race relations and police brutality in the US at the end of 2010. It was written before the disturbing video of the death of George Floyd, a 46 year old black man who died as a result of being brutally restrained by a white police officer on May 25, 2020 in Minneapolis, has newly motivated the Black Lives Matter movement. 

Tragedy hits a white, well respected family. 

John Earle McLaren, known as Whitey, a rich elder successful businessman in Hammond, a small New York town, formerly its mayor, stops his car on the highway to intervene with two cops brutally treating a "dark-skinned" motorist. Not recognizing McLaren as a popular, respected citizen, enraged by his interfering, they knock him down, taser him and in consequence Whitey suffers a stroke and heart-attack and spends what’s left of his life in hospital and dies. A death which shatters all of his family as a whole and each family member individually in unforeseen ways. Grief can do crazy things to people. The novel accompanies each family member, after the death of Whitey, on their way to cope and come to terms with the tragedy.

Whitey loved each member of his family and in return was well loved and adored by each one. 

His widow, Jessalyn, has been the perfect  American wife and mother, a woman as if straight out of a Ladies House & Home Magazine, bestowed with wealth and a glamorous big house who never had to care an instant besides the “women“-tasks of being wife and mother. Her life has come to a standstill without sense, meaning and purpose and she plunges into isolated grief, then slowly emerges into a new life that includes a tentative new relationship with a man she has met at her husband's grave. Jessalyn, in all her innocence and development, is one of the very likable characters of the novel.

Of her adult five children, all of them brilliantly drawn characters, this can't be as easily said. None of them is emotionally adult and their father’s death puts a heavy strain on the fragile relationships of the brothers and sisters. 

The oldest son Thom, handsome, successful but also elitist and mean-spirited, married with children, runs one branch of the family business efficiently but struggles with family life and a true sense of living. He embarks on the task to revenge his father’s death by sueing the responsible officers and the police department of the town.

Even less likable than Thom is Beverly, the second oldest. Her marriage is stale and blemished, her teenage kids are disrespectful and egotistical and she is well on her way to become an alcoholic and drug addict. Furthermore is she a shocking bigot and a racist. She in particular is incensed that her “unworthy” siblings receive equal shares of the inheritance. She in particular is enraged by her mother’s “strange and unworthy“ behavior so soon after her father’s death.

Lorene, the third oldest, is probably the least likeable character in the book. She is a high school principal, the youngest ever in these parts. She is a single woman without attachment, overachieving, overreaching, competitive, mean, manipulative, narcissistic, hates everyone but herself, is intensely emotionally disturbed but undergoes a transformation that might lead to redemption.

The two youngest, some years apart from their older siblings and thus forming a natural bond, are the most sympathetic of the McLaren clan. 

Sophia, the prettiest and nicest, is lacking in self-confidence. She is a biological researcher increasingly dissatisfied with her work at the laboratory that involves experiments on live animals. Furthermore she struggles with an affair with an older, married colleague. 

The youngest son, Virgil is the black sheep of the family. Thom, Beverley and Lorene all feel but contempt for him and disapprove of his way of living. He is a local artist, lives in a sort of commune and his social life is an enigma to his family. He flirts with death and late but not too late discovers where love is leading him. He gradually allows himself to express the desire he feels towards another man despite believing his father would have been disappointed in him. His mother and younger sister Sophia love him.

Over the course of a year we follow everyone on their way to come to terms with the tragedy. Everyone handles it differently, not always good. Everyone encounters obstacles and everyone sacrifices something on their way to grow into their new selves. The greatest struggle for the three eldest children in the McClaren family is their prejudice towards lower class and non-white individuals. Much to the dismay of her children Jessalyn, after a period of hopeless grief, surprisingly recovers and finds new strength and meaning in a relationship with a non-white man.

All of the characters seem to walk on unsolid ground, they permanently shift in their ways and our evaluation of them is also based on unsteadiness. Which only makes them more real. In the end, everyone looses, gains or endures, some experience unexpected happiness and the tale ends, in spite of all the grief and sorrow, on a note of hope.

Apart from the main theme of loss and grief there are other themes as well. Sometimes it seems to veer off in the direction of a comedy, at other times more in the direction of a courtroom drama. There are many philosophical musings on life, love, death or the nature of art. The scope is large and not every strand of the story is successfully or satisfyingly resolved. But this, we curiously find, is not necessary, the novel works out fine as it is. 

Through inhabiting the (mostly) white character’s casual elitist and racist minds, showing their categorizing, evaluative automatism, Joyce Carol Oates exposes how prejudice, willful ignorance, racial and social discrimination is a common form of mind in contemporary America as well as the institutionalized racism in large parts of the American police force.

With this truly wonderful novel Oates once more reminds us of one of the great forces of Life: it’s unpredictability.

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“Bewilderment" by Richard Powers - review

 “Bewilderment“ by Richard Powers:

“Dad! Everything is going backwards.“ 

This frustrated outcry of a nine-year-old to his father is the summary of my emotional revelation after reading this book. Defeated by the stupidity of half of mankind all goes down. The ship is sinking. 

Theo Byrne is an astrobiologist who programs simulations of life on extrasolar planets in order for these simulations later to be used in scientific programs in search of life on other planets in the universe. One major part of his life is devoted to the amazement and bewilderment in the face of life’s stunning stubbornness to spring up in the most unexpected places and the beauty of it all. 

The by far bigger part of his life is devoted to loving and taking care of his nine-year old son Robin who, an intelligent, sensitive, endearing, warm and kind boy with capricious moods and predilections, not only struggles with the demands of everyday life and social interaction but also with coming to terms with the loss of his mother, who died 2 years ago in a car crash. The love between son and father has an emotional truth and vividness that wrings the heart.

Caused by one of Robin’s violent outbreaks the family’s equilibrium is threatened by the school authorities’ demand to put robin on psychoactive drug medication. In search for a better solution Theo turns to a befriended neuroscientist and enrolls Robin in a program of experimental neuro-feedback treatment. The recorded neurological state of mind which Robin is given as a model to learn and profit from is that of his deceased mother, Alys.

Robin’s situation improves tremendously and with the same zeal as his mother before she died, he actively engages in the preservation and protection of endangered species. This is when the story leaves the safe microcosmos of family and leads to frustrating and lastly devastating contact with the outer world of insurmountable obstacles, ruled by a political system driven by greed and economy and the unwillingness of people to face the truth. Son and father in the end loose all. 

“Oh, this planet was a good one. And we, too, were good, as good as the burn of the sun and the rain’s sting and the smell of living soil, the all-over song of endless solutions signing the air of a changing world that by every calculation ought never to have been.“

This is indeed a very emotional tale, sad in the end, but also full of hope and wonder at life itself, the beauty and immensity of it all and the tiny hope that someday something somewhere survives and thrives.

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“WILLNOT" by James Sallis - review

 “Willnot” by James Sallis:

“Fish die belly upward and rise to the surface. It’s their way of falling.”

This quote by André Gide might serve to describe this moment of realization, when reality isn’t quite what it used to be the moment before, when unnoticed, a rupture tore through its fabric and something isn’t quite right, something has shifted.

WILLNOT starts in the form of a suspense novel with four bodies found in a pit. We soon learn, though that this is not a suspense novel, it doesn’t follow the rules of one. What it is defies easy classification, it is genre bending.

There is no hunt, there is no whodunnit and after a while the four bodies get lost in oblivion, like rocks being thrown into a pond, mud swirled at first and then slowly settled. 

WILLNOT is an interesting puzzle. It leaves several questions unanswered by the end and surprisingly this is not frustrating or disappointing.

WILLNOT is a crime story only in pretense where in fact it is a wonderful reflective narrative about the dramas that play out in an American small town, a subtle look on many aspects of small-town life seen through the eyes of Lamar Hale, the local physician and surgeon, who has the gift to follow the souls of people into their past. 

“Life has to be lived in a forward motion but can only be understood retrospectively. “This quote from Kierkegaard illuminates the dilemma of Lamar Hale. He is caught between the future and the past, almost like a time traveler who is caught in an infinity-loop and this (and his profession) makes him a silent, attentive observer of the boundaries between life and death.  

Lamar is a decent doctor, thoughtful and compassionate, who lives together with his romantic partner Richard, a teacher, in quiet domestic circumstances while around them chaos in form of the town life, colleagues, patients, friends, acquaintances, a cast of memorable characters, revolves. It is a complex and nuanced environment, by terms world-weary and life-affirming. Lamar feels and makes us feel that there is a layer of a world beneath the surface, beneath appearance. 

The prose is reduced, nevertheless poignant and vivid with a shimmering rustic poetry and captures well the way people think, speak and interact. The tone often is noir-ish, snappy, sharp, laconic and interspersed with philosophical oberservations. Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and Adorno are mentioned, there are existential musings on life, illness, impotence and death.

Why are we reading? One answer to this is that in reading we get a sense of the lives we can’t or won’t have. 

WILLNOT is a book that gives us this sense. 

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"Crossroads" by Jonathan Franzen - review

 

“Crossroads“ by Jonathan Franzen:

In this excellent not to say, marvelous novel, a pleasure to read, Franzen stays true to his previous themes: the quietly disintegrating household which lives in stiflingly strained, existential distress and the dramas that are played out again and again in each new generation. Franzen paints a cast of warm vivid characters who reside in the respectable township of New Prospect, a city outside Chicago, Illinois. It is the year 1971 and on a single winter day shortly before Christmas, in a play of interwoven perspectives, the story unfolds. 

Here in New Prospect lives the family Hildebrandt, the parents, three sons, one daughter. The Hildebrandts are all isolated in self-absorbed worlds and terrified of their own irrelevance, they are lost and lonely, picking their way through the dark and often are a mystery even to themselves. Each one of them implicitly knows that punishment will be their fate for straying and sinning. Each one struggles “to be good” while strategizing what advantages this being-good could gain them. 

There is Russ, the household patriarch, the associate minister of the parsonage. The pastor, a man who for facades sake plays virtuous but inwardly is self-pitying, who is in principle progressive but in practice reactionary. Empathy is not his strength, either and he can’t help feeling that he is a man of yesterday, that he’s lost “the edge” and that the future belongs to, in his opinion, frauds such as handsome and charismatic Rick Ambrose, the pastor who succeeded in winning over from him the adolescent members of the church’s youth group Crossroads. Ever since that incident, after being humiliatingly ousted from the group, Russ spends his days hating him, which flavors everything about his job.

Russ’s relationship with his wife is, to say the least, difficult. The rift in their marriage becomes openly clear when Russ becomes infatuated with a young widowed member of his congregation and his wife moves out of their bedroom. Because he is in the business of penitence, Russ recognizes the certainty that he is a sinner, but then he is also so very holier-than-though that he finds a way to gain even out of his moral decay. Shame and self-debasement are his portals to God’s mercy.

There is Marion who, as her husband, stands at a personal and spiritual crossroads. She is a frustrated, overweight housewife, depressive and full of resentments, as tragicomic as these characters tend to be, her womanhood, her personality rendered invisible to her family behind a cloud of momminess. 

Educated as a Catholic she married her missionary Protestant husband and still knows the distinct Catholic feeling of guilt which to her is the inescapable consequence of sin. The arrival of Christmas, the images of red-clad Santas in the stores, sparks memories of a disastrous love affair in Los Angeles 30 years ago. In a scene between Marion and her psychiatrist she is transported back to her early 20s, where she had this toxic affair that landed her in a mental hospital, and now as her marriage splinters many of her then most extreme behaviors return. 

Marion is one of the most vividly painted characters and might well be the most memorable of the Hildebrandts. 

There is 15-year-old Perry, the Hildebrandts’ precocious third child, the real catastrophe of the novel. Blessed with an IQ of 160 and cursed with a growing drug addiction, he plunges more and more into the dark. Only shortly is Perry able to abdicate from drugs by participating in Crossroads, the youth group in which a “public display of emotion purchased overwhelming approval.” He muses that “Goodness is an inverse function of intelligence.”: “Even if you bring in God, and make Him the measure of goodness, the person who worships and obeys Him still wants something for himself. He enjoys the feeling of being righteous, or he wants eternal life.”

Some of the finest passages in Crossroads evoke Perry’s brightly burning intelligent mind in intensifying need of narcotics and quest for oblivion.

There is 18-year-old Becky, the only daughter, the pretty social high-school queen and cheerleader type. She joins the youth group Crossroads and thus deals her father a heavy blow of betrayal. Becky is not a member of her father’s church, and regards him and his faith skeptically. Becky has fallen in love for the first time and the object of her desire is a handsome churchgoing musician. Suddenly she realizes that “if she opened herself to the possibility of belief she might gain an unforeseen advantage.” A marijuana-induced encounter with God brings her closer to her boyfriend and farther from her family.

There is Clem, the eldest son, a student, who also struggles to retain control over his own life. While he and his sister Becky form a loving sibling relationship he is in difficult rivalry with his father. Clem is an atheist and moral absolutist, his solution to be good is that he needs to be and do the opposite of whatever his father, whom he considers to be a moral fraud, is or would do. Clem is coming home from college with a resolution that will shatter his father. In a bravura act of dichotomy, in a very intense setting he, while having intercourse, breaks up with his girlfriend who loves him in an “old-fashioned, romantic, totalizing way” and returns home for Christmas.

There is 9-year-old Judson, the youngest son, whom everyone likes but who doesn’t get as much attention in the book as the other members of the household. 

And finally there is the youth group Crossroads, with its tribal air and climate of performative truth-telling, its theatrical spirituality of trying to see God in the relationship between human beings. It seems like a harbinger of our modern social media world, “Love” is everywhere but empathy is hard to find, hugs are freely given but real connections are harder to come by. 

Crossroads breathes and evokes the air of the 70s quite well in its emotional dishevelment which strangely finds its similarity in our times. There is the same feeling of urgent expectancy. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that these are the 70s were it not for the absence of television and internet. The novel lives on the friction between conservatism and radicalism, Christianity and social activism, and hints that there might not be a solution, that life is full of hardship and that families are both an importancy and utterly, impossibly disastrous. 

All of the characters may seem small, manageable and unimportant but the inner lives of them are boundless. And it is exactly this quality, that in smallness such impressive humanity is hidden, that lends the novel greatness.

At first, Crossroads seems like a return to form. As in previous novels Franzen uses family drama to gesture at a global crisis. But thematically and in tone the novel proceeds and evolves beyond previous works. 

This is a novel about how to be a good person, a novel with a strong religious and moral presence. In this it is in the tradition of the 19th-century novel. Many of the philosophical questions have their origin in the moral philosophy of the German Idealism and are raised without cynicism or irony but in heartfelt seriousness. 

Franzen’s ambition seems to lie not only in mirroring society, but to return the individual readers to themselves by inviting them to find out how to answer and position themselves in regard to these questions. In taking an interest in the character’s trials and tribulations one finds it impossible not to be engaged by the most momentous questions of faith and morale - quite a Dostoyevskian move. 

 - If I do something good and selfless but at the same time do it also for personal reasons is it then truly good?

 - How can I proof to God and myself that my motives are pure?

 - Can a deed be bad if the intention was a good one?

Since there is no internet and hardly any TV, these questions appear pristine and unspoiled by irony, untouched by pop-culture, as if they have never been uttered or been trivialized before in countless soaps which make up our modern-day catalogue of narratives. This gives them a refreshing newness and sincerity. This is a world inhabited by people who seem like us but are an eternity of media evolution apart.

The writing is a marvel, it is brilliant and absorbing and throughout the book one has the safe feeling of being in the hands of a very confident storyteller and gratefully lets oneself being immersed and propelled forward in the story. This is family drama as high art. The illuminating of the inner lives of the characters is masterful. One of the most attractive aspects of Crossroads is its depth of moral and religious contemplation. It also shows that literature can still function as a vehicle to explore humanity’s most existential concepts. 

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“Lust, Caution" by Eileen Chanag - review (sort of)

“Lust, Caution" by Eileen Chang:

In the midst of the Japanese occupation of China and Hong Kong two people meet, for very different reasons, Wong Chia Chi, a young student active in the resistance, and Mr. Yee, a powerful political figure who works for the Japanese occupational government.

Wong Chia Chi earlier in her life fell in love with the theater, so that now, at the cost of her own life, she acts out in reality her stage role in a treacherous spy ring of wartime Shanghai. Chia Chi spends her days mixing with high-societal ladies who spend most of their time discussing jewelery and mah-jong. Occasionally she meets Mr. Yee for romantic reasons. Her real aim, her task, though is to lure Mr. Yee to a place where he can be assassinated. At the last moment she changes her mind, warns him and saves his life only to loose hers in the end.

While the prose is easy without being overly poetic I never really cared for any of the characters, no emotions were kindled nor any resonance evoked. There were far too many characters in this short novella and even while writing this review, I’m struggling to remember their names.

The plot, as an idea, is a good one but the handywork leaves much to be wished for. There is no suspense, no drive, the whole thing is quite boring to read. Suspicion about the publication sets in, all the pretty word hype accompanying the publishing of this novella seem now, after having read the book, just that: empty words meant to promote the book after the movie by Ang Lee, which is based on the story, was met with approval and success. 

I was not gripped.

I do understand, though how Ang Lee the film director, could make a good movie out of this foundation. There is much to find, fill out and explore in the concept, in the idea of the story. The novella did not exploit these possibilities and thus made only a meager construct. Luckily it was a very short novella.

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"Doktor Faustus" by Thomas Mann - review

 “Doktor Faustus” by Thomas Mann:

This is, among so many other things, a fictional biography of the composer Adrian Leverkühn, who devotes himself to the devil. It is a well-educated, wonderfully composed, profound and tragic tale.

In following all the stages of development of the old Faust saga Thomas Mann links them with the threats and problems of our (that) time, the turn of a highly and overdeveloped national spirit to archaic primitivity and cruelty, resulting in awful disaster. The time frame are the years from 1884 to 1945, roughly Thomas Mann’s period. The book is Thomas Mann’s last great novel and was first published in 1947. The original title at first publication was „Doktor Faustus - Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn“ - erzählt von einem Freunde”. (“Doktor Faustus - The Life Of The German Composer Adrian Leverkühn As Told By A Friend”). 

The work is suffused with Mann's moral despair over his country's complacent embrace of Nazism and can be read as an allegory of how it came to be and how it came into being that Germany sold its humanity and soul. 

Thomas Mann himself called his novel a book of life of almost criminal ruthlessness, a strange kind of transferred autobiography, a work that “cost me more and consumed me more than any previous one." This feeling, that this was something which really had his greatest interest, energy and sympathy, is noticeable throughout the book.

I bow my head in awe and humility to this book. It took me a long time to read it, not in actual hours but in the time to be right for me to want to read, to finally read, understand, reflect and lastly highly appreciate it. This book shows what literature is capable of, what heights can be reached and what achievements can be made, what literature as an art form should strive for. 

All is told by the third person narrator Serenus Zeitblom, the dear humanist friend and companion of the composer Adrian Leverkühn from childhood on. 

Through this friend, through reflective distance we get to know Adrian Leverkühn, a clever, aloft, proud spirit, isolated, brilliant, overreaching, someone who is too clever for almost any profession, the work of a composer included. Leverkühn is filled with the artistic urge for creating -  without any inhibitions, without any regards to tradition or history, ruthlessly. He is a radical in the utmost sense. Leverkühn, in a Faustian pact bargains, after having, almost willingly contracted syphilis, his soul and the possibility to love for achievement of 24 years of unparalleled grandiose musical accomplishment.

There could be noticed, if so wanted, an allusion to the fascist intoxication which befell the peoples on the political level of the book. Apart from the political, though, many other levels permeate this book:

There is the ostensible re-telling of an old, typical German myth. 

There is the aspect of the Künstlerroman which lets us follow the life of the artist. 

There is the aspect of a social novel, there is life, there is art, there is philosophy, theology, musicology. 

There is a very extraordinary attempt to approach and describe music, in Mann’s opinion the most typical German of all art forms, with the means of prose and poetry and expose its role in society. Throughout the book there are enlightening passages which read like theoretical essays on art. 

There is indeed so much in this book, not least very much wisdom, that I find it impossible to give name to it all. It is also Mann's profound meditation on the German genius - a genius torn between profundity and form, both on the national and individual level.

The prose is absolute magical mastery, a highly intelligent, exquisitely fine-tuned machinery of words, beauty and the German language. Mann's known mastery in sentence structure is one thing but here he sometimes drives his linguistic finesse to the point of self-parody which gives the text additional charm. More than once I had moments of benign bliss that made me proud and happy to be capable to truly appreciate German. (I hear there are good translations, nevertheless). 

Impressive, frightening the moment when the Devil first makes its appearance, even seen through the reflections of an intellectually well-educated mind formed by the 20th century. Mann plays with virtuosity the psychology, the archetypical fear, the existential inferiority, the wavering metaphysic and conveys with bravura the feeling of being at the mercy of something fatefully inescapable, of doom.

Mann had the talent to assemble grandiose themes, knowledge, education and drama and fabricate out of them a wonderfully light-footed text, always entertaining, never becoming a boring show-off of style. A great book, a timeless classic, maybe one of the last few.

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