”The Lie" by Helen Dunmore - review

 “The Lie“ by Helen Dunmore:

Two years after hostilities of First World War have ended Daniel, a young soldier, returns to his place of birth on the Cornish Coast, alone, without money, home or relatives. 

He is a shell-shocked survivor and his first-person account recounts the horrors of the trenches in France where he lost his closest friend since boyhood, Frederick, who perished alongside him in a shell-hole on the western front. 

In search for shelter he offers help and assistance to an elderly blind woman who soon after dies of pneumonia and, in fulfilling her wish, buries her in her own garden. 

He struggles to make a living in the aftermath of war, he works on the land, but is drawn deeper and deeper into the traumas of his past and the memories of his dearest friend and first love, now dead. Daniel has survived the war but the horror and passion of the past stay with him and seem more real than the quiet landscape that surrounds him. 

He also comes to the aid of Frederick's grieving sister Felicia, now a war-widow living alone with her infant daughter in the cold, grand house where Daniel once played with her and Frederick and had free access to a big library and the whole fascinating world of books. 

He has not told her the full truth of how her brother met his death and he hasn’t told the truth about the absence of the old woman and slowly the village people grow suspicious. 

I thought it a well written book, an often very touching narration, full of descriptive prose. Yet, I was left with no redemption, only a sad hopelessness and a feeling of great injustice.

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”The Colony" by Audrey Magee - review

 “The Colony” by Audrey Magee:

This is a brilliant, beautifully touching novel, a thoughtful play on the private and the political, of the impact of nature on life and art and the restrictions of tradition, of the war between classes, cultures and genders.

Two foreigners, one an English painter, the other a French linguist, separately travel to a remote Irish island. The one, following a romanticized notion much in the sense of Gauguin on Tahiti, wants to capture the island’s and the islanders’ beauty. The other also wants to capture beauty or rather, by way of recording the islanders' tales, preserve the beauty of a dying language. Each one claims the island as his discovery/ playground/ property. It comes as no surprise that they don’t like each other.

The novel begins with a chucklingly funny description of how the English painter, driven by cliche, stubbornly wanting it the old way, crosses the channel to the island on a self-made boat, a currach, oared by two Irishmen and gets violently seasick. This comical episode shines with all the wit and dry humour of the islanders and is a good introduction to their often stoical, sometimes fatalistic attitude.

As the two visitors are paying guests the household which hosts them, grudgingly tolerates both of them. In contrast to the often childishly complaining visitors the islanders possess a simple dignity, although their lives aren’t easy. Over the summer each of the women and men on the island, but also the visitors, are forced to question their values and desires. At the end of the summer the visitors leave and for some everything has changed.

The Colony itself is a community of the few remaining islanders on this piece of rock in the sea, three miles long and half-a-mile wide. They struggle, as they always did, in an ever repeating pattern from day to day, trying to make a living from their meager surroundings. There are mostly old men left in this community and widowed women who lost their spouses to the sea. The characters are drawn convincingly and as individuals in their own right and never drift off into cliches. There are many internal monologues which deepen the understanding of the main character's individuality.

Irish is the main idiom used, English understood by most but not all. The only young male left, James, aged 16, speaks English and doesn’t want to be called Séamus, does not want to become a fisherman and, through a slowly growing trust and friendship with the English painter, discovers and develops his natural aptitude and love for painting and art. James is encouraged to return with the painter to London, to become an artist in his own right, only to be brutally disappointed in the end and left behind because he, the apprentice, became better than the master. 

The titular colony serves as metaphor for broader conflicts. The many conflicts are overlapping, intersecting, merging or nestled within another: The conflict between the islanders and the visitors, the visitors themselves, between the islanders themselves, between the generations, between genders and between nations and languages.

Although the time set is when the Troubles in Northern Ireland were at their most violent and atrocities commonplace, the novel has a feeling of timelessness. 

Slowly themes of national identity, of colonialism and imperialism, emerge, the old rivalry between the English and the French, the English oppressing the Irish, the French oppressing Algeria. Purity in language, purity in culture is put into question. What is deemed to be cherished and preserved, what should be fought for and with what means, what should be accepted as doomed? The novel portrays Irish lives cornered by the dead weight of tradition. 

The deeply touching heart of the novel, though is the development of young James, trying to find his voice, purpose and destination, his hopes first raised and then left bitterly betrayed and disappointed. 

Interspersed with the narrative are short, coldly detached, fact-cool reportages of terrorist killings which lend the novel a threatening, dark uneasy undertow and prevent the reader of losing himself too much in a fairytale of a remote island. 

There is a beauty in the writing, the dialogues bring to life the fascinating characters, their points of difference, their attitudes and views on life. The prose is luminous and lyrical, a pleasure to read. How, for example an artist might think and feel in colours, forms and shades is rendered in eloquent and poetic prose. How everything seen is instantly perceived as a potential painting, with a title attached. Sometimes the text morphs into vertical columns of one-word lines, almost modern poetry, snatches of colors, emotions, light, sounds, smells. But even when the details of the trapping, killing and gutting of a rabbit are meticulously sketched it always is done so in a slightly distanced, detached voice. And there is always humour. 

There is a slow tension, ever moving to rise to a climax, but then climax never comes, all falls back in the end to how it was before. For some, though the world is altered. 

A truly remarkable, sincerely beautiful novel. It left me touched and, at the end, heart-broken for James. 

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”Long Day's Journey Into Night" by Eugen O'Neill - a slightly disturbing read

 “Long Day's Journey into Night” by Eugene O’Neill:

Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical play Long Day's Journey into Night is regarded as his finest work and is considered one of the all-time great classics of the 20th Century. It was first published in 1956 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957.

It is a family drama, an unrelenting tragedy in which each of its members – the father, the mother and the two sons – turn against each other and against themselves, driven by self-pity and self-hatred.

It takes place in the Connecticut home of the Tyrones and covers one day from around 8:30 in the morning to midnight. 

Every member of the family is addicted to something, the father and the sons to alcohol, the mother to morphine. 

In a spiraling conflict everyone constantly conceals their addiction, blames everyone else for their fate, resents all others, accuses and denies and occasionally shows half-hearted attempts at affection, encouragement and consolation. Within the strict confinements of their home they bounce between reality and illusion. Any statement by any party made might be contradicted or rendered meaningless a second later. 

A slightly disturbing read, albeit interesting. I am not tempted to go see a stage performance, though. 

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”The Light of Day" by Graham Swift - review

 “The Light of Day” by Graham Swift:

This is my second book by Graham Swift, well, actually the third, if you count 100 pages into his Ever After, which I laid aside for this one, The Light of Day.

As in Mothering Sunday, which I thought was a stunning little masterpiece, the events revolve around one single event which dramatically altered the lives of everyone.

We meet George Webb, a former policeman and now private detective who is on his way to visit a former client in prison, the woman for whom and in consequence for everyone, life turned bitterly and dramatically in a very unprecedented way. Two years before George Webb had an assignment to follow her strayed husband and his mistress, a routine job which catastrophically went awry and left everyone, including the detective, transformed for ever.

This could be at first glance a simple detective story but it is not. There is a building of suspense but it is towards an end we already know about. Much more it is about looking back on lives led, on decisions once made and on the possibilities of missed chances and how a life might have turned in a different direction.

In exploring his past George Webb finds himself on a path to self-discovery and love. This is maybe the true message of the book and a token of hope, that regardless of how late in life and regardless of how many wrong decisions we made and stray paths we walked, there lies still hope.

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"Mothering Sunday" by Graham Swift - review

 “Mothering Sunday” by Graham Swift:

A naked man getting slowly dressed. 

A naked woman coming down the stairs. 

From the very first line, which opens like a fairy tale (once upon a time…), I was captured by the masterly evocation and beautiful phrasing, the musicality of the language and the almost painterly use of emotive prose.

It is the year 1924 and Jane, an orphaned maid who works for the Nivens, an upper-class family, finds herself in the estate of the neighbouring estate of the Sheringhams, also old-money aristocracy. Because it is Mothering Sunday the house is conveniently empty. She is in the bedroom together with the young heir, Paul Sheringham, who has been her lover for years and is going to be married in an arranged marriage to another woman in two weeks time and they both know that this just had been, probably, their last time of intimacy.

Little is said, much is revealed. Not much happens but still a lot does happen. 

Mothering Sunday, in adding layer upon layer of revelations and memories over time, builds in complexity. It is more than just a story about crossing barriers like class or education.

It is a book full of sensual, contemplative, long lasting images which carry so much more than what they actually show. Little still lifes, rendered in minute contemplation and an adoration of the transcendence of their everyday banality. 

Sounds, outside, in the air, inside the house. 

Smells, of fruit, of grass, of body. 

Touch, tactile sensations like trickling fluid out of body cavities or bare feet striking cool tiles, of a breeze against skin, of the afterglow of sex.

Objects, who become laden and imbued with meaning and a life of their own, objects who seem to retreat and shrink back with an insistent stillness. Flowers, blooms, frozen like butterflies. 

Light on objects, light in rooms, light through windows, tree leaves, across lawns. 

Mothering Sunday is sensual, it moves the heart, it is a beautiful and precious gem. In just about 130 pages Graham Swift has rendered a little masterpiece. In its brevity it explores themes and mental landscapes which longer books sometimes cannot cover.

It is an ode to life, to youth, to ageing. It explores identity and the need of the search for a narrative, it tells of the value of experience and the power and doubt of storytelling. 

It is a powerful, philosophical and beautiful contemplation of the lives we lead and of the parallel lives we might have lead. As it moves from 1924 through the century it becomes also the story of a self-discovery. 

It is a thorough contemplation of life, of what the real stuff in life is, what counts, what is tale, fiction or reality. It is about books and literature, about words and meanings, about chances and missed chances, about finding your place in the world and finding a language with which to speak in it. It is a remarkably wise, life confirming and uplifting book. It gave me much pleasure.

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”Giovanni's Room" by James Baldwin - a review

 “Giovanni‘s Room“ by James Baldwin:

‘‘I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life”. 

So begins the tragedy in Giovanni’s Room, published in 1956. In a mastery of language in writing and an often confessional voice it recounts the tormented love affair between the American narrator, David, and Giovanni, an Italian bartender in Paris.

From the very beginning we learn that David has abandoned Giovanni, we know that David’s ex-fiancée Hella has left him and returned to the United States, we know that Giovanni has been sentenced to die under the guillotine and David is waiting for the morning to arrive when he knows Giovanni will meet his fate. 

I have read this book many many years ago, when I had been young and it might be due to my circumstances then that I read it differently from how I read it now. 

Back then the book was all about the right to love, regardless whom, in equality. And it was about all the shame and torture that accompanies following this conviction. Humans, in their love, are fluid beings and to be liberated means to love with the same level of freedom. This should be clear by now, in 1956 this truth had not been quite so evident. 

Now, though I think the book is not so much about a queer relationship, it is much more about what happens if one is so afraid of love that one finally cannot love anybody. I’ve read it now less as an affirmation of queerness than an exploration of how much suffering it causes to deny who and what you are and the way we damage everything, ourselves, our friends, our relationships, when we try to fit norms that don’t define us. The central subject of the book is still shame and the intricacies of sexuality and morality. And it is about the loss of dignity and the fear to be unable to meet the expectations of society.

There is an almost Jamesian quality in the prose, sparse and concise at one time and at other times beautifully poetic and philosophical, creating microclimates of emotions.

And as in The Ambassadors by Henry James, a young American in search of himself and his role and purpose in life moves to Europe, to Paris. Here he awaits the return of his departed girlfriend who moved to Spain in order to "find herself".

Unexpectedly he finds himself deeply immersed in a love affair with an attractive Italian barman and moves to live with him into his room. The room itself, a place of respite, situated on the outskirts of Paris, dark, confined and messy, becomes the metaphor for the clandestine and shame-ridden nature of their affair. It is both protective isolation and prison. 

As every traveler knows, the profoundest experience of understanding what home means is living abroad for the first time. One discovers, after leaving it behind, what home meant and what one has lost. As in The Ambassadors here, too Americans are placed under close scrutiny and in comparison to different cultures, especially the famous/ infamous American trait of happiness, this peculiar innocence they seem to possess, this belief that one can choose, without great sacrifice, cost or consequences, to be good and move through the world without causing harm. 

One of the book’s most famous lines about Americans come from Hella, the fiancée of David: “Americans should never come to Europe,” she says. “It means they never can be happy again. What’s the good of an American who isn’t happy? Happiness was all we had.” 

Giovanni to David proves to be the only person with whom he has ever felt a true, erotic and spiritual love. And yet, when his fiancée returns, David abandons Giovanni, even as he knows he wants to be with a man. He perceives this kind of love as a threat to his masculinity and just to keep himself grounded in normality he struggles through heterosexual relationships with women, leaving a trail of unhappiness for everyone. Feeling betrayed by his lack of honesty and the revelation that David can never love her with genuine feelings Hella finally leaves him. Giovanni, left behind devastated, commits a crime and is sentenced to death.

David is a character who will always protect himself even for the cost of love and happiness. He will attempt to risk a little but never too much. David is weak and cruel and filled with shame and remorse. Giovanni wants to live life to its fullest, no matter the cost to himself or anyone else. 

This book laments a lost and wasted love. To have read this book again after so many years has given me great joy. It truly is a remarkable and beautiful work of literature which seems to have gained with time and aged quite well.

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”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.

#robertfaeth, #painterinBerlin, #painting, #art, #bookblog, #bookreviews, #literaturelover, #poem, #poetry

"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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