Stuff I read

Nov 18

All apologies to Nick Hornby.....

I read some terribly interesting stuff. Mostly fiction and poetry, with a healthy smattering of histories (political, economic) and other non-fiction thrown in. But, yes, mostly fiction. And I love it. I am constantly smitten with book titles when I walk into bookstores, having spent many a happy hour curled up with a book or mag, in libraries, coffee shops and at home.

For instance, I can roll my chair over to the bookshelves (hells yes its plural) and open books by Murakami, Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor, Paton and Annie Proulx, just to take a few M's thru P's.

So what am I reading lately?

"Look Homeward, Angel" by Thomas Wolfe, published 1929.
Thus the extravagantly baroque tale of a Southern American family, spanning two generations. Its main beginning is with the birth of the protagonist Eugene Gant, and thus far, as I am still reading it, goes up to his seventeenth year. Its very much of a examination of the internal life and emotional struggle of Eugene, "He was in agony because he was poverty-stricken in symbols: his mind was caught because he had no words to work with". This situation becomes magnified as he grows older as he comes to grip with the weight of familial expectations and the bald fact that his own family does not possess the language to express their own feelings, "We do not want to call things by their names, although we are willing to call each other bad ones".

And what a family. The father who shortens the family name from Gaunt to Gant, who is Elizabethan in his drunken speech, works as a carver and seller of grave stones; the mother is almost mute in her expressions of love and support, opens a boarding house much to the eternal shame of her children; the eldest a dissolute drunk, the second son a stutterer who's real genius is emotional deflection, the eldest daughter who, when not enabling her father's drunken sprees, is blaming her mother for every conceivable sin, and so on and so on.

Surrounding all this internal tension is the external world, which beats with its own rhythm and heart. Nature surrounds and suffuses Eugene, and the pressure of its beauty sometimes drives Eugene mad,with the madness every boy goes thru. Its also in the description of the natural world that gives rise to some of Wolfe's best language, the lovely soaring cadences of praise of the world around us. "The day was like gold and sapphires: there was a swift flash and sparkle, intangible and multifarious, like sunlight on roughened water all over the land. A rich warm wind was blowing, turning all the leaves back the same way, and making mellow music through all the lute-strings of flower and grass and fruit.....The boy grew blind with love and desire: the cup of his heart was glutted with all this wonder". As is mine, when I read this. Wolfe's especial genius is getting us into Eugene's head, day by day, season by season, as the babe turns boy turns teen turns man. As he experiences the daily slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, alongside the unexpected joys and blessings that make existence worth living.

However, be forewarned. This is not a casual book. It demands of the reader one's full attention, along with easy access to a dictionary. It carries a rhythm that has long since vanished from American letters, so it can be heavy lifting until one gets the hang of its very particular and peculiar jargon. It really wasnt until about page 120 that I felt I was in it for good, and this is my second time around with this book. And I can only read a few pages at a time, 10-20 or so, before I have to put it down, and think about what I have been reading, as this is very deep stuff. Its also taken me a few months to read; I started this time this last July, but I am in absolutely no rush, as reading this is akin to eating rich, dark, chocolate: small bites here and there go a long ways. But I had to come back, transfixed as I was by sentences like this: "Eugene was now loose in the limitless meadows of sensation: his sensory equipment was so complete that at the moment of perception of a single thing, the whole background of color, warmth, odor, sound, taste established itself so that later the breath of hot dandelion brought back the grass-warm banks of Spring, a day, a place, the rustling of young leaves, or the page of a book, the thin exotic smell of tangerine, the wintry bite of green apples; or as with Gulliver's Travels, a bright, windy day in March, the spurting moments of warmth, the drip and reek of earth thaw, the feel of the fire."


Nov 29

'The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis' by Jose Saramago, published 1984, opens with a description of Lisbon, Portugal, as a grey anonymous city deluged by a constant rain. We are on a ocean liner tying up to the docks, and like a steady-cam film shot, showing first a crowd and then slowly zooming closer, we are not introduced to the titular character until he has disembarked and is going thru customs. The rain continues as a backdrop, suffusing the story with a liquid melancholy, until the reading of the narrative has taken on a watery quality of its own: it surrounds, seeps, moves to its own rhythms and threatens to drown. "When Ricardo Reis awakens, the room is plunged in darkness, the last glimmer dispersed on the windowpanes, in the mesh of the curtains. An enclosing heavy drape blocks one of the windows. There is not a sound to be heard in the hotel, now transformed into the palace of the Sleeping Beauty, where Beauty has withdrawn or never was." Surely, for it is 1936, neighboring Spain is about to be plunged into bloody civil war and all Europe stands on the precipice of holocaust.

What little we know of our protagonist is that he is back after a self-imposed Brazilian exile, 16 years long, he is a doctor, but doesnt seem to have any intention on setting up his practice and receiving patients. Instead he spends his time walking the chimerical streets of Lisbon, at times remarking on the historical events that occurred at various spots, "Doctor Ricard Reis reads.....near the place where a man was hanged, as everyone knows, almost two hundred and twenty-three years ago....They hanged a Genoese swindler who for the sake of a single piece of cloth killed one of our countrymen, stabbing him in the throat with a knife, then doing the same to the dead man's mistress, who died on the spot."

I am always struck by these works of overwhelming creativity. What is the deep well the authors draw from? What is their muse? As I am writing this I have a picture up on another monitor, a picture from the Hubble Space Telescope of a portion of the Veil Nebula, which is the remnant of a supernova. Even though the picture is a closeup of one arm of the nebula, the structure pictured spans lightyears; blown out in the supernova rupture, the structure has formed a tight spiral of gas and dust, colored by NASA to enhance our understanding....and yet, there is no understanding.  Yes, we can run spectrum analysis on the gases and minutely define what gases are there and why, and what was the chemical composition of the star before it blew itself apart, and what was its age. But, yet, there is something that is still beyond our understanding. The picture is stunningly lovely, a diaphanous gauze of swirling yellow, gold, red, pink and blue, on a black background speckled with stars. And I understand completely the forces that went into this...creation....and yet there is still the mystery, of not just why, but the sheer size and scope defies my best intent to wrap my conscience around it; its too big, too beautiful, and too far away.


Dec 8

Italo Calvino, the Italian fabulist writer, has a story of a halved-knight. "The Cloven Viscount" was published 1959, and is purportedly the story of Merdardo, a Viscount who was bisected cleanly in half by a cannonball during battle with the Turks. One half of the former whole Viscount manages to make it home to his castle where he embarks on a life of lavish evil, terrorizing the countryside and its denizens with his capricious acts of cleaving the living into two. "A group of servants was sent out through the countryside to follow the Viscount's path. The servants, hastening along, passed under a pear tree which they had seen the evening before loaded with tardy, still unripe, fruit. "Look up there", said one of the men; they stared at pears hanging against a whitish sky, and the sight filled them with terror. For the pears were not whole, but were cut in half, down the middle, and were still hanging on their own stalks...As they went on the servants met half a frog, still alive and jumping with the vitality of frogs. "We're on the right track!" and on they went".

And because this is Calvino, events such as the above are given the weight of truth. Yes, its a complete work of imaginative fiction, rather macabre in tone, with tongue firmly planted into cheek. So what I mean by these unrealistic events given the weight of truth, is that it strikes me that of the time that Calvino is writing about, late 18th century Italy, there were still published, and verbal stories circulating, that described the most fantastic of events, as being real; that the civilian populace was for the most part very isolated, with little knowledge of the outside world, the "fact" that a man could be cut in two by a cannon-ball and live, is taken as accepted, albeit unusual by the other inhabitants of the story.

But its also a essay on the inherent duality of human existence. "That's the good thing about being halved. One understands the sorrow of every person and thing in the world at its own incompleteness. I was whole and did not understand, and moved about deaf and unfeeling amid the pain and sorrow all around us, in places where as a whole person one would least think to find it." These words are spoken by Merdado's good half, aka "The Good 'Un". That's correct, the other half of the cloven Viscount has returned home also, although having spent his time doing good deeds along the way. The Good 'Un is as focused on doing good as the bad half is intent on doing evil. While the Bad 'Un spends his days dreaming up ever more elaborate methods of torture and death, the Good 'Un is working to not only heal the lepers but save their souls. "And he was forever among them, moralizing away, putting his nose into their affairs, being scandalized and preaching. The lepers could not endure him...But it was not only among the lepers that admiration for the Good 'Un was decreasing. "Lucky that cannonball only split him in two", everyone was saying. "If it had been done in three who knows what'd we have to put up with!" Thus the days went by at Terralba, and our sensibilities became numbed, since we felt ourselves lost between an evil and a virtue equally inhuman".