Critics Be Damned

The Flying Camel and the Golden Hump by Aharon Megged

Pour ce que rire est le propre de l’homme.

   

                                 Rabelais

“Asking a working writer how he feels about critics,” declared English playwright, John Osborne, “is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.” So might have gone the epigraph to this witty, erudite, ever-surprising exploration of the age-old relationship between writer and critic.  

My first taste of Aharon Megged’s work was his novel Foiglman, and I was so impressed by the strange and melancholy tale of an Israeli historian named Zvi Arbel and his anguished, ultimately tragic relationship with Foiglman, a Yiddish poet and Holocaust survivor, that I’d bought up every book in his name. Among them (and the subject of this post) was the curiously titled novel, The Flying Camel and the Golden Hump. Set in an apartment building in 1980’s Tel Aviv, it tells the story of a writer named Kalman Keren who makes the horrific discovery one day that his arch-enemy, the literary critic, Naphtali Schatz, has not only moved into his apartment building but into the apartment directly overhead!

Keren, having just started work on what is to be his masterpiece (the book to end all books, the ultimus liber), in short, the translation into modern Hebrew of François Rebelais’ five interconnected scatological novels, La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel, suddenly finds himself paralyzed by the presence of this literary specter, this “Mr. Bookflayer,” this “degenerate descendent of Zoilus the Scourge.” It is too much for the hapless writer to believe: “Impossible!—I repeated to myself—the devil has tricks no mortal can imagine, but in the field of literature?! It’s inconceivable that he would think up an allegory like this, a literary critic living right above a writer, walking on his head, as it were. Especially a critic whose first book was a polemic against allegory!”

Brilliantly, the antipathy Keren feels for the critic is rooted, not in some harsh or captious review he’d received from the man, but in the unendurable fact that the widely esteemed Schatz never even acknowledged his last, most successful book, The Flying Camel of the Golden Hump, let alone reviewed it. “Twenty-eight articles written about this book of mine in six months after it was published. But Schatz—not a word!” It is a slight, a damnation, further compounded by the fact that the critic—now his neighbor—refuses even to greet him on the stairs. 

Stymied each day in his effort to make headway on his magnum opus by the machine-gun clatter of Schatz’s typewriter upstairs, and humiliated by the thought of the critic’s daily sewage gurgling past him through the pipes in the wall, Keren decides to exact his revenge upon the cocksure man, both by means of his disarmingly kind and sensuous wife, Naomi, who has made no secret of her interest in Keren and his work, and by viciously satirizing the man and every critic in Israel like him—the very tale this novel tells. Yet The Flying Camel and the Golden Hump is also the story of Keren himself—of his emigration from Romania, of his brief marriage and divorce, and of his life as a writer in Israel. Clever, allusive, punditic, it is delightful to read, a story, finally, about the wonder of wonders, that of literature itself.

Aharon Megged was born in Poland and came to Palestine at the age of six. He was a member of Kibbbutz Sdot Yam from 1938-1950, and later, a literary editor and journalist. He has been a pivotal figure in Israeli letters since the 1950’s.  His many novels, short stories, and plays reflect the complexities of Israeli society over the past fifty years.  He has won many literary awards, among them the Bialik Award, the Brenner Award, the Agnon Award, and the much-coveted Israel Price for Literature, 2003.  The Flying Camel and the Golden Hump is published by The Toby Press.  Check out their remarkable list at http://www.tobypress.com/.

Peter Adam Nash

House of the Dead in Bed-Stuy

A Meaningful Life, by L. J. Davis

 

     L. J. Davis's novel of absurdity, despair, and home repair--three topics linked in real life--reminded me at first of Kierkegaard's The Concept of Dred.  Lowell Lake of Idaho finds himself married and living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, working at a dead-end job as a technical editor, and drinking himself silly night after night.  Lake is the sort of person who drifts from one thing to another without volition, lacking energy, devoid of passion; he neither loves nor hates his wife, his job, or his life.  His existence is a fate he can neither embrace nor alter.  Although the novel is set in the middle 1960's--the Vietnam War unscrolls on television each night--Lowell pays no attention to politics or culture and appears to be one of those ethereal beings whose disconnection from the world  is absolute.  Davis uses scathing miniatures--Lake at home, Lake at work, Lake aimlessly wandering the streets--to convey his waifish "hero's" alienation from everyone and everything (to be fair, Lake's wife is herself a shadowy being about whom we know exactly three things: she's Jewish, has obnoxious parents, and wears a girdle--this is a one-man show). Inertness is the dominant theme of the novel's first hundred pages, that and a numbing sense of emptiness.  And, yes, Lake is annoying: he whines too much, drifts about in the way a pampered teenager might do, and refuses to "take hold."  In one witty section he notices, without a trace of feeling, that his wife is systematically throwing out all of his clothes and, indeed, during critical parts of the story, Lake must deport himself fully nude, like Adam, post culpa.  Lake is just the sort of self-hating narcissist one read about in the sociological classics of the 50's and 60's--The Organization Man, The Lonely Crowd, The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life.  We know that personal authenticity and identity were major American concerns in the 50's and 60's, perhaps even more so than today (it may not be an exaggeration to say that we've given up on the notion of authenticity and settled for spite).  I remember that my parents, who owned no more than half-a-dozen books, kept a copy of Norman Vincent Peale's longtime bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking on the coffee table, right next to a family Bible that was never opened. Everyone was trying, but without much luck.

"The relation of freedom to guilt is dread," wrote Kierkegaard, and this formulation might explain the American propensity for flirtations with meaninglessness indulged in by Lowell Lake and the millions of Americans who devour books like Peale's (or Billy Graham's, or the raft of other books designed to help us cope with our incredible good luck).  What can you do to fill up a life whose possibilities are endless?  You might finish up at Stanford (as Lake does) and hop in your car and drive anywhere--to New York!  And, back when such things were possible, you might rent a nice apartment, pick out a job from the many on offer, and commence a life whose luster quickly fades.  Is this all there is?  Perhaps we really believe the myth of "boundless freedom," or take our Whitman without irony--we sing of ourselves and celebrate ourselves, and worship our freedom without ever considering that dread lurks inside the bubble of self-regard we've constructed--our manifest destiny, our American melancholy. 

Kierkegaard gave up his fiance for obsessive writing about, well, his obsessions--sin mostly, and Christian identity, and the hypocrisy of his fellow Danes.  His books are one part Hegelian metaphysics, one part Christian apologetics, and more than one part melancholic self-examination.  But his mood, bleak as it may have been, was relieved now and again by flashes of wit and by an ironic sense of his own absurdity.  For this reason, after a while, I came to renounce the idea that Lowell Lake was a Kierkegaardian 'Knight of Faith' and began to see him as Dostoyevsky's Underground Man--"I, for instance, have a great deal of amour propre."  Lowell Lake might also have benefited from a slap in the face, or a kick in the pants.  But he's too obtuse to be humiliated; when his wife criticizes him, Lake misses the point, or fails to find an appropriate response: "Lowell opened his mouth, made a little sound, and closed it again for fear that nothing would come out but gibberish."  Post-modern psychology suggests that there is no fixed self, and no answer to the question "Who are we?"  But this is a bitter pill to swallow; our conviction that we are the voice in our head, the gestures we use to present ourselves to others, the poses we strike to gain acceptance is nearly impossible to overthrow.  The narcissist blots out the Other and refashions the world to suit his or her fantasies of the the self.  Or, maybe, he buys a rundown house in a decayed neighborhood and fixes it up.  Perhaps the American real estate fetish is the means through which a nation of self-regarding, anti-social egotists finds solace--in the House of the Dead.

So Lowell buys a house on a nightmarish block of Brooklyn.  A reeking, sewage-filled, ruin of a once-grand home--a metaphor, of course, for the ruin of the polis itself (this is the era of Jane Jacobs'  The Death and Life of Great American Cities), but for Lowell Lake the house is a chance at salvation--or authentication.  The problem is that he has to give up his wife and his sanity in order to rebuild his wreck of a house.  But as Kierkegaard was fond of reminding his readers, you must lose your life in order to save it, or, perhaps, you must take someone else's life, capriciously, without consequence, in order to find value in your own.

Here's Dostoyevsky: "We are oppressed at being men--men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man.  We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better."

And Davis: "It all meant nothing whatever to Lowell.  Standing in the parlor of a house no longer his, listening to the voices of people whose lives were closed to him forever, contemplating a future much like his past, he realized that it was finally too late for him. Everything had gone wrong, and he had succeeded at nothing, and he was never going to have any kind of life at all."

I can't say I enjoyed this novel, but I read it avidly, laughed once in a while, congratulated the (unfortunately) deceased L.J. Davis on his ability to pull off such a thing--a tragicomedy involving real estate--and vowed never to move again.

A Meaningful Life is published by New York Review Books, with an appreciative preface by the reigning novelist-in-residence of Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem.

George Ovitt (11/8/13)

Stalin's Quip

"The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks...and therefore I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul."

Stalin, to Maxim Gorky, 1932*

Josef Skvorecky, The Engineer of Human Souls

 

That's Maxim Gorky, Stalin's favorite writer. though there is a reasonably good chance that Stalin had Gorky killed, despite the writer's (late) support of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Gulag, and of Stalin himself.  Being killed by Stalin was by no means an unusual fate for a close comrade, and Gorky was fortunate in his years of preferment and his rescue from the relative artistic obscurity that preceded the 1917 Revolution.

Of course, writers and intellectuals can be co-opted to serve inhumane causes--think of Heidegger in his service to the Reich as Party member (from 1933 to the bitter end) and as Rector of the University of Freiburg; the tainted associations of Celine with the Occupation in France; the traitorous pro-Nazi statements of Knut Hamsun, the 1920 Nobel Laureate in Literature (his racism was deep-seated and makes disturbing reading still); or of Ezra Pound's stint as an apologist for Italian fascism, an episode  glossed over by the poet's admirers.  The human soul can be engineered in many ways, and it seems to me that Stalin's quip, with its odd juxtaposition of the mechanical and the metaphysical, states the simple truth--great writing reconfigures "souls," that is, persons as entities doomed to act out powerful ideologies, or, in a less deterministic way, "souls" as "selves," as unique and autonomous beings.  Stalin wasn't much interested in the latter, and Gorky's "socialist realism" was the opposite of art--it was kitsch suborned by power, the thinnest surface of an unreal world offered as homage to a madman.  Nor has art subordinated to power disappeared with the passage of its most notorious proponents--far from it.

Josef Skvorecky was born in Bohemia, in what was then Czechoslovakia, in 1924.  He was a contemporary, colleague, and friend of Vaclav Havel, Milan Kundera, Jaroslav Seifert, Milos Forman, and Bohumil Hrabal--playwrights, poets, novelists, and a filmmaker, all of whom labored under both German and Stalinist occupations, men whose "country was the Czech language," as Skvorecky put it.  Skvorecky left Czechoslovakia in 1968, after the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks, and began to teach at the University of Toronto.  He resided in Canada for the remainder of his life, publishing over thirty books and establishing, with his wife, the emigre press "68" in order to bring to light Czech literature banned during the dictatorship.  He died in January 2012, just a week after Vaclav Havel.

So how does one respond to oppression--to the terror of fascists or of self-proclaimed communists?  Does one commit suicide in despair at the death of civilization as Stefan Zweig and his wife elected to do? ("I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labour meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on Earth")? Does one fight back, with words and moral righteousness, in the manner of Alexander Solzhenitsyn ("So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth")?  Weapons are, of course, out of the question--the ideologues are too well armed. Another option in times of crisis--political or existential--is to deploy wit and irony, undermining the oppressor by pointing out his absurdity.  Kundera took this path rather directly, and Hrabal took it with great subtlety.  This is also the course taken by Josef Skvorecky in his major (in length, in capaciousness) novel The Engineer of Human Souls.  A serious tenor sax player, Skvorecky riffs effortlessly in Engineer among three settings--contemporary Toronto, where Danny Smiricky (Skvorecky's perennial alter ego) teaches American literature to mostly disinterested students; 1940's, Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, where Danny and his girlfriend Nadia work in a Messerschmidt plant and attempt, amateurishly, to sabotage the German war effort; and, finally, in the Czech emigre community in Canada, a viper's nest of spies and apparatchiks, of artists and writers, prostitutes and gamblers, all of whom assume that their life in Canada can be made to imitate life in their home country if they duplicate the intrigues with which they have always lived. The novel alternates scenes and themes and character focus and styles; hell, it violates every precept of MFA workshopping you could imagine--there's telling instead of showing, characters who aren't "rounded," flat patches that should have been edited out but which carry the theme of totalitarian absurdity in subtle ways, and no question that if Engineer had been submitted to a commercial American publisher it would have been rejected.  For all of these reasons I found it refreshing; it forced me to think yet again about how fiction prepares us to live with absurdity, especially political absurdity. Even in as mundane a setting as one's place of employment there are often reasons to retreat to the kind of belly-warming irony (like a meal of comfort food, saurerbraten and dumplings) Skvorecky serves up in his astute re-creations of our collective past, present, and future. 

That's the interior of City Lights Books in San Francisco, the very room, in fact, where I picked up my Dalkey Archive edition of The Engineer of Human Souls this past summer.  If you're reading this blog and ever get to America's most beautiful city, be sure to stop by City Lights.  There's an entire floor dedicated to poetry! But the best investment on that day in early August seemed to me to be a novel about how we ordinary folk can keep our sanity in the shadow of political systems that see the human soul as a problem in engineering rather than as the fragile repository of memory and dreams and desires it is. "Truth lies in the nuances," as Anatole France puts case, and, as we all know, the purveyors of systems--political, moral, educational--are nothing if not enemies of nuance.  Indeed, we have the misfortune of living in an age bereft of all that is subtle; ours is the "age of extremes" as Eric Hobsbawm put it, a sad time in which wit and feeling have given way to demagoguery--the age of Cruz and the Pauls and Boehner--those would-be engineers of our souls.

God help us.

"Come now let us consider the generations of man,
Compund of dust and clay, strengthless,
Tentative, passing away as leaves in autumn
Pass, shadows, wingless, forlorn, 
Phantoms deathbound, a dream.

(Aristophanes: Skvorecky's epigram)


A Dalkey Archive book, translated from the Czech by the wonderful Paul Wilson, to whom we owe many great works of Czech literature. A writer and a Canadian, a close colleague of Havel and Skvorecky and dozens of other Czech intellectuals, he is the author recently of Bohemian Rhapsodies.

George Ovitt (11/2/13)

*It is likely that Stalin stole this quip from Yuri Olesha. 

 

Hope and Nostalgia: The Yesterdays of Natalia Ginzburg

All Our Yesterdays (Tutti i nostri ire) by Natalia Ginzburg

“There is a certain dull uniformity in human destiny,” reflected the ‘great small’ writer Natalia Ginzburg, some years before her death. “The course of our lives follows ancient and immutable laws, with an ancient, changeless rhythm. Dreams never come true, and the instant they are shattered, we realize how the greatest joys of life lie beyond the realm of reality. The instant they are shattered we are sick with longing for the days when they flamed within us. Our fate spends itself in this succession of hope and nostalgia.” It is a tone—this weariness, this resignation—that permeates her fiction, which, while ever fresh and compelling, is like a sitting room at dusk. 

Her novel All Our Yesterdays is no exception, this otherwise straightforward tale drawn back and forth through the skein of her own rueful experience of life, lending it a somber, doleful intimacy that is the mark of Ginzburg’s work. As in the prose of Marcel Proust (whose work she greatly admired: she was the first to translate Du Côté de chez Swann into Italian) in which the past is meticulously re-created, Ginzburg is a miniaturist in her extraordinarily fine command of detail, in the charged, if distinctly unsentimental way in which she brings the past to heel. It is a detachment that seems to me a particularly Jewish, particularly Italian detachment, an ancient, all but visceral fatalism (one can feel the history in it, the darkness, the weight) cruelly compounded, in the author’s own lifetime, by the torture and murder, by the Gestapo, of her husband, Leone Ginzburg, and by the Holocaust itself.

Yet, as is the case with so many great writers, such brooding forbearance as Ginzburg’s is transmuted—through the powerful process of her writing—into fiction that transcends her own experience, so that, while dark, still very dark indeed, it is poignantly, often luminously so.

Set in Italy between 1939 and 1944, All Our Yesterdays is essentially a family drama writ small with great precision, then writ large against the jingoism, murder, and destruction of WWII, a war that steadily creeps its way toward the family, day by day, mile by mile, even deep into the southernmost reaches of Italy, where finally it engulfs them in its fury. 

The novel’s characters are sharply, memorably drawn—the housekeeper and de facto mother, Signor Maria; the wealthy and eccentric “uncle,” Cenzo Rena; the children: Anna, Giustino, Ippolito, and Concettina; and their sickly, cantankerous father, with his Goethe and detective novels, exacting his revenge upon the mad and degenerate nation that is Italy of the time by secretly writing his memoirs: “The old man used to laugh and rub his hands together at the thought that the King and Mussolini knew nothing about it, while in a small town in Italy there was a man writing fiery remarks about them.” It is an image that makes me smile. 

Widely considered the most important woman writer of post-World War II Italy, Natalia Ginzburg is an author whose works have long been savored by more solitary, world-weary readers for whom the pace of the telling itself—so patient in Ginzburg’s case—would be consolation enough.  Yet her stories offer the reader much more than that. To read one of her novels is to surrender oneself not only to a different tempo but to a different temperament and time. All Our Yesterdays is a deeply affecting portrait of the trauma and betrayal of war, an experience Europeans of Ginzburg’s generation knew altogether too well.

*Opening quotation from A Place to Live and Other Selected Essays by Natalia Ginzburg.  Translated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz and published by Seven Stories Press.

Natalia Ginzburg (1917-1991)was an Italian-Jewish novelist and playwright who studied  in Turin, where  she befriended many of the Jewish antifascist intellectuals active in the Italian resistance. Her first husband, Leone Ginzburg, a victim of the Nazis, died in a Roman prison in 1944.  She was friends with many of Italy’s greatest writers of the period, including Pier Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante. and Cesare Pavese.  Her best-known books include Family Sayings, The Little Virtues, The City and the House, The Manzoni Family, Valentino and Sagittarius, Family: Family and Borghesia, Two Novellas; and Voices in the Evening.  (Thanks in part to Jewish Virtual Library)

Peter Adam Nash

Polish Light and Polish Darkness

Dukla by Andrzej Stasiuk

Living in New Mexico, in the high desert, one becomes almost jaded by the daily spectacle of refracted light--mauve and magenta, fifty shades of blue ranging from the color of deep ocean to turquoise to an impossibly rich hue that creates the illusion that the brown prairie grasses and cacti have turned to gold.  Living for many years in the East, I'd not paid much heed to light--there was an approximation of daylight, and twilight, and then night--but the richness of light as the sun eases its way across the vastness of an empty sky--for in this place the universe is still geocentric--was something I'd not experienced, a visceral, jubilant vindication of the proposition that light holds mystical power, that it is the embodiment of the true, the good, and the beautiful.

And here's Andrzej Stasiuk, noted Polish writer, preoccupied with the effects of light ("I've always wanted to write a book about light"), born in 1960 in Warsaw, prolific and only now beginning to be translated into English (by Bill Johnston in the the case of the book under review).  I enjoy looking at author photographs and find Stasiuk to have an especially photogenic face.  But what drew me to the picture below is the endless, snowy, dirt track, a road to nowhere, or to the small town of Dukla--the Polish word means "mine shaft," of which there are more than a few in central Poland.  How can we think of Eastern Europe, now or in 1960, and not imagine roads like this one, perhaps clotted with tanks (of the Wehrmacht or the Red Army, rumbling East or West), and feel a kind of incipient terror, or a weariness at the predictability of history--the kind of experience reflected in Stasiuk's lined face and in his eyes, quite youthful by my standards, which appear to have seen it all.

Dukla is one of those unclassifiable books that eastern European writers seem especially adroit at producing--part travelogue, part memoir, part prose poem.  In it, Stasiuk investigates the effects of light on the landscape, on a small town and its residents, one of a thousand non-nondescript villages on the vast plain that is Poland and the Ukraine, the tragic plateau on which so much of European history has been contested.

In the town of Dukla, in the novella of that name that fills much of the book, in the short, poetic sketches of the town's rain and swallows and seasons, Stasiuk creates an impressionistic sense of quotidian life--the routine existence of an ordinary town of 2,000 souls which has, we know, stood at the crossroads of some of the twentieth century's great tragedies. Though politics are absent from the book, history is not, and one feels the weight of the past in the beautiful descriptions of ordinary things.

"This was how it was as I rode the train to Duka in April, the light continually summoning things into being and then annihilating them again with a cold, supernatural indifference.  The outskirts of Krosno were flat and industrial. Warehouses, sheds, lockups, general devastation.  There was something lying by the tracks. Maybe someone had been supposed to load it up and take it away, but now it wouldn't be worth the effort. Branch lines ran off amid low buildings. They were coated in rust...Sun-drenched walls, benches made of a handful of bricks and a plank, the glitter of green and brown broken glass, white bottle caps, colorful tongues of trash slithering down the embankments, and a girl of twelve in her mother's high heels pushed an enameled stroller that was fifteen years old."

Throughout the couple of days I spent reading Dukla, I thought of W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn, that unforgettable evocation of a dead landscape, of dying English towns whose ruins remind the author of the vaster ruins of the twentieth century. With Stasiuk the sense of surveying a landscape replete with meaning and linked to terrible events is similar, though he isn't quite like anyone I've read before. Stasiuk is a writer of poetic prose, a witness who possesses a sensibility that penetrates the landscape and illuminates it using the light that flows--from first sentence to last--throughout the book ("...the night slowly raises its dark backside...").  Sebald was the foremost of the saturnine romantics--akin to Blake rather than to Wordsworth--a dispossessed German whose rambles through the blasted landscapes of southeastern England were intent upon decay and loss, an observer pulled, inexorably, back to the greater ruins of war and genocide.  Stasiuk, a generation on, is more at ease in the small microcosm of Dukla, a Wordsworthian observer, but one who notes that the light of Poland illuminates scenes of devastation rather than of personal edification and recollection: 

"January was sunny and almost snowless. We were plodding along up to our ankles and Wasyl said, 'Look at them all in a huddle.' Before we reached them they flew off.  Crows, white-beaked rooks, ravens, chattering jays, and jays with their wings touched with pale blue. And some smaller kinds. In the place they took off from we found a deer. In place of its eyes it had red cavities in a smooth white frame of bone. Wasyl looked for the wound that had killed it, but the skin was torn in many places. Tufts of drab fur were scattered here and there. 'Maybe it dropped dead, maybe it was shot,' he said, and we walked back."

The last sentence of Dukla captured the mood of the book as a whole and made me think again of the great--what?--irony? cruelty? of having the sun shine on the wreckage of the world--a feeling I used to have as I walked on (rare) sunny days among the broken-down houses and factories of Philadelphia, a place I loved and lived in for many years, a kind of laboratory where one could observe how "free markets" and deliberate neglect would destroy, as surely as war, what was once vibrant and alive:  

"And if a weather front happens to be passing through, in the chasmic depths of the blueness long white clouds will show up. They look like bones, like a scattered and hazy vertebral column.  Because that's how things will be at the very end. Even the clouds will vanish and all that will remain will be an endless blue eye hovering over the ruins."

Yes, exactly.  The blue sky that hovers over our ruins. 



Andrzej Stasiuk operates, with his wife, a small publishing firm, writes, and breeds sheep in the small hamlet of Czarne, in the Beskids, in southern Poland.  His books are now becoming available in English and include Dukla, White Raven, Nine, and Fado.  Dukla is available from the good people at Dalkey Archive.

George Ovitt (10/25/13)

Jubilant Misunderstanding

The Following Story, by Cees Nooteboom

"Modesty hesitates to express metaphysical concepts directly; if one tries, one delivers oneself up to jubilant misunderstanding."  Theodor Adorno (Nooteboom's epigram)


What are the qualities of memorable books?

Most people would put plot or story above other qualities, and this is a reasonable viewpoint given
the origins of the novel as well as the nature of the its most immediate precursors--Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Troilus, Boccaccio's Decameron, Malory's Morte D'Arthur, Don Quixote (I suppose the first European novel, but I'm not sure how literary scholars classify Cervantes) and other early works which, in prose or poetry, spun out stories that were ultimately rooted in oral traditions.  Great fiction is full of memorable plots and many of us, myself included, were first seduced by stories rather than by the other attractions of great fiction.

And what are these other attractions?  For me, a memorable work of fiction must possess, in order of importance,  a brilliant style (and there are deep taxonomies of great writing unique to every serious reader); interesting ideas; characters who possess the qualities and failings of real human beings (hence, no science-fiction, fantasy, or, for the most part, genre books, aside from certain mysteries whose authors satisfy the other criteria of memorable fiction--there are many such writers).  A good story I consider to be a bonus--I love stories still, but not at the expense of style and ideas, and never at the expense of characters with whom I can live out my vicarious reading life.  I should say that I don't consider myself to be a snob in matters of literature or anything else--I have read a few bestsellers in my day and enjoyed them, and I'll read any book written by George Pelecanos, James Lee Burke, or Michael Connelly--but there are limits, and life is far too short to waste on Malcolm Gladwell, James Patterson, Nicholas Sparks, or, God help us, Bill O'Reilly (newly-crowned king of thanatonic history), just as it's too short to spend it drinking Budweiser or wine out of boxes.  'Quality' isn't just a word for what is better; 'quality' is what we search for in order to serve our deepest needs, in order to fill the emptiness in our intellectual, passionate, and appetitive selves, spaces whose filling allows us not merely to be entertained but to grow as persons, to become persons. 

That's Cees Nooteboom in his study.  Two weeks ago I'd never heard of him, or read a word he'd written.  My colleague Peter Nash came into my office holding a copy of Nooteboom's novel All Soul's Day, a book I hope he'll write about.  If Peter liked Nooteboom, I knew I would too.  I decided to read him at once and started with his Roads to Santiago, a travel book about, obviously, Spain, beautifully written, engaging, full of ideas.  Travel writing is a genre of non-fiction about which I am extra selective--I don't like guidebooks to places I'll never go--but Nooteboom's Spain was as much a place of the imagination as a destination in the world.  So it was with great anticipation that I purchased The Following Story, a slender novel published in 1991 whose story is odd beyond imagining (in a good way), and which bristles with interesting ideas, features a thoroughly unlikeable but unforgettable narrator, and, in the English version of Ina Rilke, is full of beautiful writing, some of which I'll quote in a moment.

The plot of The Following Story, once recapitulated, sounds "thin," as book-chat columnists are prone to say.  Herman Mussert, a disagreeable and even creepy former classics teacher and guidebook writer goes to bed in his home in Amsterdam and wakes up--of all places--in Lisbon, scene of his one great, passionate love affair, a brief, torrid romance with a fellow teacher, twenty years before.  The novel is almost entirely an interior monologue, Mussert's musings on his past, on his ill-fated adulterous affair, and his apparent nocturnal transference (how to describe such a thing?) from his home to a hotel in Lisbon.  Once in the Portuguese capital, if he is indeed there, Mussert thinks a lot about Pessoa, as anyone would, but of course his thinking about the great poet of shape-shifting reinforces the central idea of the novel--nothing is fixed, all, as Heraclitus believed and as Ovid demonstrated, is in flux. 

Anyway, not much to hang your hat on if you're a plot person.  Not a New York Times type of book for sure. But Nooteboom, who is some kind of genius at weaving intricate ideas and themes and references into a remarkably fugal construction--e.g. a reference on page 11 flows through the entire book, gathering momentum and resonance as more bits and pieces of the story arise--or, since Mussert loves Ovid above all writers (he is translating the Metamorphosis, which seems an especially pointless labor given the inimitable brilliance of the Golding translation, the very one Shakespeare morphed into some of the greatest stories in any language) perhaps one should see The Following Story primarily as a meditation on the notion of shape-shifting, Mussert as the hero with a thousand faces, the doughy countenance of Socrates shifted into the face of a scholar, a lover, a fool, and, finally, a tragic figure, a childless and unloved Lear. ("I had waked up with the ridiculous feeling that I might be dead...")

The most remarkable section of this thoroughly remarkable novel--so many ideas packed into 115 pages!--is the playful use of the ancient/perennial theme of water-crossing.  The novel ends with a small party of men from various walks of life--a priest, a journalist, a scholar--being escorted across some great unnamed sea; of course, one is meant to think of the Styx. In the midst of the journey a Chinese scholar, a victim of the Cultural Revolution, reveals to Mussert that the poet Qu Yuan, who antedated Ovid by three centuries, was also, like Mussert, banished, ferried across a river to an unknown land: 


I gaze my last upon the river bank,
The autumn breeze blows chill.
I halt my carriage here within the wood
My steeds beside the hill.
In covered vessel travelling upstream,
The men bend to their oars;
The boat moves slowly, strong the current sweeps,
Nearby a whirlpool roars.

I set out from the bay at early dawn,
And reach the town at eve.
Since I am upright, and my conscience clear,
Why should I grieve to leave?
I linger by the tributary stream,
And know not where to go.
The forest stretches deep and dark around,
Where apes swing to and fro.

The beetling cliffs loom high to shade the sun,
Mist shrouding every rift,
With sleet and rain as far as eye can see,
Where low the dense clouds drift.
Alas! all joy has vanished from my life,
Alone beside the hill.
Never to follow fashion will I stoop,
Then must live lonely still.

(From "River Crossing")

To cross to the other side: to love someone who doesn't, who couldn't, love you; to live in an imaginary world of heroes and gods but to find in their stories not heroism or divinity but pathos and tragedy; to be dead, or dying, and not to know it--these are the richly textured themes that bind The Following Story together and that caused me, immediately upon finishing the novel, to go back and read it a second time.  It turns out that I missed a great deal on my first reading. Nor did I appreciate as fully as I might have the beauty of the writing:

"Like Qu Yuan [Professor Deng (!) the Chinese scholar] now felt captive in a diseased era in which he did not wish to live, and then he had seen the wheels of change revolving once more and he had turned his back on the world and fled. He quoted [Qu Yuan]: 'I experienced calumny in the morning and expulsion the very same night.' Taking his poem as his only luggage, [Deng] had started walking until he reached a river, and thus he had left behind his life, like a discarded object on the shore. The water had weighted down his clothes; he had floated like a little boat and had waited for the wind to rise so he could embark on his great voyage.  Around him he had heard the water murmuring in all sorts of voices, very soft and gentle it had sounded. He gestured to [Mussert] with his arm, he had almost vanished already, as if he were made of a delicate, immensely old material, and you had made the same gesture and already got to your feet..."   

There's much more in this vein; hallucinatory writing, deeply poetic, psychologically astute, tragic in tone, without irony. 

Ideas, characters, hypnotic passages, scenes that linger in one's mind for days (the ending!)--and a bit of plot to hang the whole thing on--what a book!  It's a puzzle, a mirror, a pastiche of a thousand other books, a pendulum, an invisible city full of cabinets of wonders.

Ovid understood that the boundaries of the visible world are fluid--that gods and men and women move from one sort of being to another without, at times, knowing that they have.  And this kind of flowing from one state of being to another is, of course, exactly what great fiction accomplishes--as I read Nooteboom's remarkable novel I felt yet again the power of the great Buddhist idea of 'conditioned arising,' that 'I' am not anything at all but a momentary collocation of circumstances--a bit of memory, some sensations, unfocused desire--and that, in a moment, like the fall of Icarus, the momentary self disappears, makes way for the next and the next, and the following stories that each of us calls our life.

The Following Story, translated by Ina Rilke, is published by Harvest Books, the old Helen and Kurt Wolff imprint at Harcourt. 


For Qu Yuan (340-278 BCE) see http://www.shigeku.org/xlib/lingshidao/hanshi/quyuan.htm with a generous selection of poems by the "Father of Chinese poetry" 

George Ovitt (10/16/13)