Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "novel"

Forster’s Aspects of the Novel is being used in this country by most teachers of creative writing/fiction. While this is a book that has some interesting points, the biggest problem with it, or rather with using it in a class, is that its definition of a good work of fiction only applies to a certain kind of fiction: 19th century realist literature, in particular Anglo-Saxon literature. To define fiction in light of this very limited time and space, by using this one frame as some kind of universal frame, means to think that 19th century American/British literature is universal. It reveals that literature is not thought of as a concept that has changed over time. How can one write literature if one cannot even understand that the way we write is time-and-space specific—not in the sense that we have “different cultural values” (as the cliché would have it) according to the time and space we inhabit, but in the sense that the way we create always follows our understanding of time and space?

Forster’s interpretation of the tale of Scheherazade (in Aspects of the Novel) is the perfect example not only of Anglo-Saxon cause-effect logic but of a cultural appropriation of a tale conceived according to a different structure of thinking. Scheherazade avoided her fate, says Forster, because she has in her power the weapon of suspense; the king spares her life because he wants to find out what happened next. This is one way of looking at things. But one may actually say that the essence of the story of Scheherazade resides not in the “suspense” (i.e., the plot) but in a perpetually postponed climax. A story is here only the beginning to another story, which is itself a part in an endless chain of stories—a Borgesian labyrinthlike view rather than a linear structure underlying the logic of “next.” To think of this story in terms of “suspense” means to imagine a “resolution” of the “plot,” when in fact Scheherazade’s story is anti-climatic. Pleasure comes here from the constant postponement, not from the gradual movement toward an orgasmic ending, as in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. If Scheherazade’s story had been written by an Anglo-Saxon, it would have surely ended with a killing—either of Scheherazade or of the king. It is amazing that Forster can read the following sentence—which he considers the backbone of A Thousand and One Nights—as an example of his theory of suspense and of the universal power of “what’s next:” “At this moment [when the sun rose:] Scheherazade saw the morning appearing and, and discreet, was silent.” For me, this sentence is clearly built on the opposition between night and day; like in old creation myths—Orpheus and Eurydice, to name only one—the power of storytelling is directly linked here to darkness. The sentence tells us quite literally that the light of day kills the story. The power of telling comes from the mysterious dark of the night and not from rational daylight.

If I tried to summarize nahoonkara, I’d probably come up with something like this: a story told in the voices of several members of the Gerrull family, moving back and forth between mid-nineteenth-century Wisconsin and a mining town in late nineteenth-century Colorado. It would be a summary that wouldn’t necessarily inspire me to pick up this novel and read it, which goes to show that summaries don’t tell you anything about a book.

Even more than the (his)story of a family in a particular space and time, this novel depicts the chemistry and alchemy of a community. Surprisingly, the warmth with which it accomplishes this is not incompatible with the dreamlike universe of snow that emerges toward the end of the novel. In the town of Seven Falls snow falls for three months in a row and people start building tunnels in order to survive and move from place to place, thus creating an alternative, underground world where all the laws from the world above are abolished. This universe of snow that ends up covering the entire town is identical to the one Killian (the novel’s main voice) has seen, much earlier in the novel, in a trance induced by a mesmerist.

The novel has the flow of a rhapsody in which people and natural elements are equal characters. It requires the attention one needs to read poetry and it has the same entrancing power.

“All through the night, I held her close, hoping the pressure would solidify her, that the friction would smooth the rough edges, reshape the pieces that had not been abraded, but I was new to the ways of love, and I did not know that just because one soul wills something that intention cannot always cross the vast gulf to another.”

I should start by noting that I won David Schmahmann’s The Double Life of Alfred Buber as a Library Thing early reviewer. Usually, I can tell pretty quickly whether I like a book or not, but this was one of those rare cases in which it was not easy to form an opinion. This was, at least in part, because I read the bound galleys, which were in need of some editing. And the publisher’s comparison to Nabokov, which we’ve all seen before, may have on some readers (like myself) the opposite effect: “Oh, no! Another Nabokov?” Having said this, I should also add that it was clear from the beginning the Schmahmann is a serious writer.

The comparison with Lolita is justified by the narrator’s infatuation with a girl twenty years younger than he, and by a certain tone of the confession. But Buber’s Lolita is, of course, a creature of our times: she is a young prostitute in Thailand, and Buber is himself a very introspective, complex intellectual, who constantly analyzes himself and the others. He is, in fact, a Proustian character, a romantic, though an ironic one, of course. What saves Schmahmann’s novel from being a cheap thrill or a poor pastiche of Nabokov is the fact that his narrator is truly interesting (and I am using this word in its deepest sense); he has a mind and sensibility that stay with you long after you finish the novel. I am a reader who is interested more than anything in the author’s mind and sensibility, and Buber’s creator seems to me at least as intriguing as Buber. The novel has many paragraphs that are stylistically beautiful and it is, generally, intellectually engaging.

I had read Asleep, which was very good, but N.P. is more immature. It has in commun with Asleep a dreamy atmosphere, but in N.P. this atmosphere is more contrived. The novel is made mostly of scenes that take place in enclosed spaces--dialogues between the protagonists. This is a good premise, as far as I am concerned, but the problem is that the novel doesn't live up to its premise. One has the feeling that we are supposed to be fascinated with the characters and their incestuous relationships in the same way that the narrator is. We are told over and over how "weird" the characters are, and how uncanny "this all seems," but the fact is that the characters are far too normal. The descriptions of the hot summer are the best part.

A serious problem with this novel is the translation. In places, the translation is very awkward, and it's hard to tell how much of the blame should go to the translator, and how much to the author.

I can see why the author is such a sensation in Japan--there is an undeniable talent in these pages. She walks a fine line between serious art and pop culture, but in the end she is closer to the latter.

I read this novel a few months after having read Moya’s The She-Devil in the Mirror (New Directions, 2009), both translated by Katherine Silver. They are equally captivating, both written, at least in part, in the voice of a woman who, although apparently apolitical, ends up being, through her record (her diary in Tyrant Memory; her monologue in The-She Devil) an incredible witness to a crisis in a chaotic San Salvador. I should add that the author himself, born in Honduras but raised in El Salvador, has been living in exile as part of the City of Asylum project in Pittsburgh.

The events in Tyrant Memory take place in 1944, when the general leading the country with a dictatorial fist is forced to resign after weeks of political turmoil. The crime in The She-Devil is non-political, but the background is the chaos of post-civil war. Both novels have an immediacy that reminds me of Bolaño’s style in The Savage Detectives (though I confess I only managed to read half of that novel). Although Tyrant Memory doesn’t claim to adhere strictly to history, I couldn’t help notice the slight inadequacy of the word “Nazi” used by both the opposition and the general to insult each other. I doubt the word was used in this way in 1944.

Moya is a writer definitely worth reading, and his translator, Katherine Silver deserves, I think, as much praise as him for her outstanding translations.

An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori (Trans. from the German by Philip Boehm). New York Review Books Classics (2011).

Having read Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Snows of Yesteryear, I knew I was in for a treat when I bought An Ermine in Czernopol. Like his other books, this one too is largely autobiographical, though it is written as if it were a novel. No doubt, for the sophisticated Rezzori, the current distinctions between “memoir” and “fiction” would have been laughable. In fact, in Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, the narrator states that he doesn’t differentiate between reality and fiction, and often mixes things from other people’s lives with his own. The unspecified genre of An Ermine in Czernopol is part of its originality, and not simply because it mixes memoir and fiction, but because of the way it does so: written in an apparently shapeless way, the narrative seems to be nothing more than the writer’s random memories. For example, when he introduces a character and sketches the role (s)he will play in the story, he also tells us how that character will end. He is not concerned at all with what passes for one of the main rules of storytelling, suspense. At a closer look, however, it becomes clear that the each chapter is centered on a specific character. The shapelessness is only an illusion created by the author, who instead of unspooling a single thread has constructed his story in many layers.

Like Rezzori’s other books, An Ermine in Czernopol is set in his native province of Bucovina. Bucovina had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918 (a few years after Rezzori’s birth) when it was added to Romania, and it now belongs to Ukraine. The portraits Rezzori draws of the particular species of individuals living in the province of Bucovina in the 1920s are the best representation of his genius. Having lived in Romania—albeit at a very different historical time—I can testify that this species, for which wit was at the top of hierarchical values and “lowliness was never a fault,” is not simply a fantastical creation of a writer with great imagination: it does exist. However, the amazing world of Czernopol—with its mixture of Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, Russians, Gypsies, Romanians, and other ethnicities that are now extinguished, such as the Ruthens (most of them peasants who lived in a very traditional way)—has disappeared. Czernopol is a barely veiled version of Cernautzi (its Romanian name—Cernivtsi in Ukrainian, Chernovtsy in Russian and Czernowitz in German and Yiddish). In fact, in one instance the writer slips and calls the city by its real name. The city is brought to life with a descriptive power unequaled in anything else I’ve read.

The main character here being the city itself, the “plot” of the “story” is almost irrelevant. But there is a plot, which is narrated in the voice of a child (presumably, young Rezzori), though the voice doesn’t have the “innocence” one usually associates with childhood, but rather the wisdom and knowledge of adulthood. The child gains this knowledge in a series of narrations by other characters with whom he comes in contact. The pronoun used by Rezzori is “we”—a curious choice, which sometimes includes the narrator’s sister, Tanya, but at other times is hard to explain. Who is “we”? Its usage is reminiscent of the French impersonal pronoun on, which often appears in Proust (with whom Rezzori has much in common). Like Proust, Rezzori often starts a sentence by describing the feeling of his protagonist, and then turns it into a generalization about human beings. The grammatical shift (to “we” or on) allows the story to move from the particular to the universal, and thus to acquire the power of myth.

What could be called the book’s plot is what the child hears and patches together from the adults around him. Tildy, a major of Hungarian (and possibly German) origin, who had served in the Austro-Hungarian army and is now enlisted in the nationalist Romanian army, is the main character. He is the symbol of the now defunct Empire, but also of a system of values that are absent in Czernopol: honor and a high sense of justice. He also happens to be the ideal physical representation of what today we would call a role model for the child-narrator. A handsome, mysterious hussar, Tildy always acts in accordance with an aristocratic code of values for which the city of Czernopol, which only values wit and laughter, has no use.

The underlying social and historical context may be difficult for an American reader to understand because of the complicated ethnic relations in the Bucovina of that era. To oversimplify, Tildy is to a large extent the victim of Romanian nationalism. But, like all heroes, he is also the victim of something that belongs only to him (call it “greatness”) and sets him apart from the society in which he lives. Married to Tamara, a woman just as enigmatic as he, and who suffers, apparently, from a combination of depression and drug abuse, he challenges to a duel a series of Romanians who have insulted both his wife and sister-in-law. The latter is another fascinating character, a beautiful woman who, in spite of being married, is extremely “generous” to all the males in town. For defending the honor of these women, to the people of Czernopol Major Tildy is a fool without a sense of humor. To the narrator Tildy is a character from a vanished world who, in a town like Czernopol, can only meet a tragic end.

The final chapter, “Love and Death of the Ermine,” is masterly in the way it shows Tildy’s demise not as heroic but as pure grotesque. In a city in which the conflict between the hero and the others is a conflict between two systems of a different nature (justice, an ethical value, and wit, an esthetic value), the result can only be grotesque. And the only way the tragic could manifest itself in an amoral city (that is, a city that opposes to the idea of justice the idea of wit) is through the grotesque.

The chapter takes place in a cheap dive with the pretentious and ridiculous name “Etablissement Mon Repos.” Here, Major Tildy and his brother-in-law (a former Professor of Latin who is an alcoholic) drown their sorrows in the company of a young prostitute, Mititika (“the Little One”). The description of this prostitute, the mixture of cheapness and vulgarity but also of beauty and innocence, and of her interaction with Tildy is extraordinary. They fall in love, but this love is as grotesque as its setting. In the morning, as they walk together with the drunken brother-in-law who keeps quoting Latin authors, Tildy saves him from an oncoming streetcar with broken brakes and Tildy is killed. The novel ends, symbolically, with the scene of his body covered by the prostitute’s ermine coat, whose whiteness is soon soaked in blood.

Gregor von Rezzori may be the greatest writer you’ve never heard of.

Crusoe s Daughter by Jane Gardam (Europa Editions, 2012. First publ. 1985)

I had read The Man in the Wooden Hat (a sequel to Old Filth, both published by Europa Editions) and fell in love with Jane Gardam’s sensuous style. By “sensuous” I don’t mean “lavish” or “lush.” I simply mean that her writing has a strong capacity to evoke feelings and states, and thus, to appeal to our senses. There are few contemporary writers who give one (me, at least) that feeling of intense pleasure we used to have when we read as children, and Gardam is one of them. This may be because she was herself—as one can see from this novel—a child in love with reading. Crusoe s Daughter is a metaphor for someone (in this case, a woman) who lives in isolation and creates a whole universe in the same way Crusoe created his island and God the world. It is also a testimony to the narrator’s (and I assume, the author’s too) love for this great classic and for reading fiction, in general.

The narrative starts when the protagonist is six years old and, orphaned, moves in with her aunts in a remote yellow house by the sea, and ends when she is in her eighties. The novel’s best parts are probably those in which “nothing happens,” save for the everyday rhythm of life in a small fishermen’s village. The second best are the scenes taking place at the Thwaite villa (Mr. Thwaite is a Dickensian character who, initially, has a marginal role, but in the end—like in those early nineteenth-century novels that have inspired this book—turns out to be closely related to our protagonist). The descriptions of the artists and the poets who are hosted there are witty and funny, and the bohemian atmosphere is so vivid that one can’t help longing for such an idyllic place.

Jane Gardam is one of the wittiest and most talented writers writing in English today.

The Guinea Pigs by Ludvík Vaculík (Trans. from the Czech by Káca Polácková. Open Letter, 2011)

I was familiar with Open Letter’s commitment to translation, but I hadn’t seen their books until recently. I can now state that next to Archipelago Books (another publisher specialized in literature in translation) Open Letter publishes the most beautifully designed books in this country. The covers have a sober elegance that few books have in the current environment in which publishers seem to compete for the gaudiest packaging possible. Everything—the font, the covers, the description on the back cover—is tasteful. The only criticism I would have for the novel I recently bought, The Guinea Pigs by the Czech writer Ludvík Vaculík, is that the original publication date, 1973, isn’t specified in the author’s bio. The date is important considering that the author was one of the literary voices of the Prague Spring in 1968, and that the novel was written during that particular era in Eastern European history.

Written as if it were addressed to children, the novel uses this rhetoric strategy to explain the meaning of various “scientific” terms, and embraces a pseudo-scientific tone when describing the details of the narrator’s experiments on his guinea pigs. The narrator is a father of two young boys who works at a state bank in Prague, where he observes and participates in what for an American reader might be an act of sabotage of the bank. For an Eastern European reader, however, the narrator simply does what everybody else did at the time: steals from his workplace in order to survive. The description of the numerous absurdities of the Communist regime—which is never mentioned as such—combined with the dialogues between father and sons and the “objective” description of the guinea pigs create a hilarious effect.

The most intriguing aspect of the novel is the narrator’s relationship with his guinea pigs. Whether one reads the book at a literal level—as a novel about a Czech family in the seventies and its cute guinea pigs—or as a metaphor about a political system in which the citizens are treated like guinea pigs, The Guinea Pigs makes for a very entertaining (and educational!) reading.

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My video review of "Introduction to Sally" by Elizabeth von Arnim (British Library Publishing, 2023) https://youtu.be/KW2Odlz9y3U