The Recognitions, by William Gaddis
Recipes for Sad Women, by Hector Abad
My Struggle, Parts I and II by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Zane Grey, and others
I've
hit the more-than-half-way point in William Gaddis's The Recognitions--I
was encouraged to push on after sailing (minus a week of the doldrums
mid-passage) through Carpenter's Gothic in just a few weeks.
Honestly, once you get acquainted with a handful of Gaddis quirks--like
figuring out who is speaking and separating dialogue from third-person
narrative--he mixes the two in his idiosyncratic paragraphs--reading Bill
Gaddis becomes much easier. I've been assisted in my comprehension
of The Recognitions thanks to Steven Moore's "Gaddis
Annotations"--on-line, free, and a very helpful labor of love. I
have mixed feelings about needing comprehensive annotations when I'm reading a
book, but I have to admit that I understood almost nothing of Ulysses
until I read it with Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated on my desk.
[e.g. "Boss Coker--Richard Coker (1843-1922)....12:196"]. If
you decide to try The Recognitions--and I suggest you do--use Moore or
else the Catholic Encyclopedia on-line--the first hundred pages are full
of arcane reference to Catholic theology, martyology, and Spanish
iconography. I have (felix culpa) some passing familiarity with
this material, but still needed annotations to make it through the first two
chapters. I also recommend a good volume of art history, (Janson will
do), an encyclopedia (Gaddis used the famous Britannica, 12th ed. for much of
his remarkable erudition), and of course the OED. Reading Gaddis also has
the advantage of making William Gass and Thomas Pynchon seem like walks in the
park, and he opens up many of the secrets of the writings of David Markson
(pictured below with Gaddis). What is The Recognitions
about? Jacket copy mentions forgeries (in art and life), and I accept
that, but on a deeper level I think Gaddis was after something more profound--I
think he was debunking Western civilization, not any one part of it, but the
entire history, structure, and all of the so-called rational aspirations of the
thing--from the moment Socrates heard about his wisdom from the Oracle of
Delphi to the commencement of the Cold War. The whole thing, in Gaddis's
view, was a sham. And who could argue with him? David Foster Wallace,
fond of footnotes, wrote a great novel, Infinite Jest, that was itself a
footnote to Gaddis.
One
of my pleasant discoveries of this past year was Hector Abad, whose memoir Oblivion
I wrote about in the spring. His slender book Recipes for Sad Women
cheered me over the holidays, full as it is of easy irony and graceful
wit. The conceit of Recipes is simple: sad women need medicinal
relief that can be supplied through the application of sympathetic magic.
Here's an example:
"You believe you
loved him once upon a time. To put it a better way, you loved him. But
now, just thinking of him gives you shivers, disgust. It was like loving
a warrior in armour from which emerges, all of a sudden, the weak, slimy jelly
of an abominable being....A sorceress of the high plains, a haughty bookish
sorceress once gave me the recipe for dissolving the unpleasant memory of a bad
past love affair. To cancel that ignominious memory, it would seem,
requires a return to savage rituals...You must acquire a slug, a snail without
a shell...Place the slug on top of a pastel-coloured lined handkerchief and
take a generous handful of finely ground salt, Throw the salt and watch how it
begins to writhe and while squirming to dissolve into nothing. Don't watch
anymore, tie the handkerchief closed and bury it twenty centimeters
underground. With the slug dissolved in salt that disgusting memory will also
fade."
Recipes
for Sad Women can be read in a couple of hours--it's
delightful and rich with deeper meanings about the losses that love brings and
how, in the end, there is no way to cope with heartbreak, except, perhaps, by
reading good books.
Speaking
of sad women, that's Linda Knausgaard, long-suffering wife of Karl Uve, he of My
Struggle, whose first two volumes I have just now finished reading, with
considerable astonishment at my perseverance. His ex-wife Tonje, and his
current wife, Linda, come in for some brutal treatment at his hands--their
physical attributes, their moods, and Linda's mental illness are all part of
Karl Uve's story. As a narcissist, he reduces the lives of other people
to the forms of his perceptions; his empathy appears to be limited to himself
and to his own tumultuous life. At one point, when he is in love with
Linda and she is not, it seems, in love with him, he cuts his face to ribbons
with a piece of broken glass. His "best" friend Geir (a real
person, as is everyone in the two volumes) is used by Karl Uve as an informal
confidant, drinking buddy, and perpetual ego-booster but never, it appears, as
a friend (we hear nothing of Geir's life). Karl Uve, let's face it, is
not an attractive figure; he'd have done well as a character on
"Friends"--he might be the brooding, self-flagellating nutcase from
some obscure north European country, say, Norway, who shows up in the coffee
shop, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and scowling at Jennifer Aniston.
And yet, dammit: there's something compelling about these books; there's quires
of dullness to be sure, and a kind of madness that couldn't be further from the
arcane richness of Gaddis or the relentless sanity of Abad, but when he's
writing well--on the effect that poetry has on a person for example--Knausgaard
is very good. I'm not sure what I'll do in May when volume three
is published; probably I will read it, just as I've watched nearly all of
"Breaking Bad" despite my reservations.
I've
just dipped into the third volume of Reiner Stach's Kafka: The Years of
Insight, which is must reading for any Kafka-lover (and who isn't that?),
and I want to commit to the other volumes (II is out; I is in the works) as
well as promise myself that this year I will finish Joseph Frank's monumental Dostoyevsky.
And I also wanted to make a top-five list of non-fiction works that I read this
past year, books that are worth a devoted fiction reader's attention:
1)
James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United
States, 1861-1865. Forget "My Twelve Years as a Slave."
Read this great work of scholarship instead.
2)
Kevin Jackson, Constellations of Genius: 1922, Modernism, Year One.
Worst book title ever, and a dubious thesis--modernism actually began in 1900
with Freud's Interpretation of Dreams--but a provocative book, full of
fascinating anecdotes. A little like Markson, with its brisk staccato of
cultural histories.
3)
Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy, Inc. The sequel to Alexis De Tocqueville's
hopeful classic. The story of the destruction of American democracy.
4)
Timothy Mitchell, Rule of the Experts. The history of neo-liberalism in
Egypt.
5)
Manning Marable, Malcolm X. I should have read this when it first came
out. Not just a biography of Malcolm, but of the American underclass.
As I get older I ask
myself--will I ever finish Middlemarch? (No) Shall I read (one final
time) The Brothers Karamazov? (Probably not). How about Peter
Nada's Parallel Stories? (I'll check with my doctor). And, will I ever
read all of Balzac, Zola, Trollope, or Zane Grey? (no, no, no, and why not)?
Happy
New Year!
Here's
the Steven Moore annotations for Gaddis.
Gaddis
is found in the Dalkey Archive. Abad in a lovely little Pushkin Press edition.
Knausgaard in Vintage (England) and Zane Grey in many places and formats. Start
with Riders of the Purple Sage.
George
Ovitt, (1/3/14)
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