REVIEW: The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick deWitt

Patrick deWitt’s noir Western The Sisters Brothers has been the talk of the literary town for the past year. I first heard about it myself just over a year ago, in an interview with Allison Saltzman, the art director at Ecco (an imprint of HarperCollins), over at the Caustic Cover Critic. As these things often go, the first thing that caught my attention was therefore the cover, because the book wasn’t even out yet. In fact, in the interview, Saltzman mentions that the book’s stunning cover, designed by Dan Stiles, did just that: it gave the novel attention that the publishers hadn’t expected. If the cover did help set The Sisters Brothers on its way to glory—shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and The Morning News Tournament of Books—then we should be thankful that it did, because this one’s a real treat.

The novel follows the ups and downs—both in their relationship and their encounters with the wild world—of the Sisters Brothers, a duo of hired guns, who are on a job to find and kill an elusive man called Hermann Kermit Warm. The stage is the American Western frontier: Oregon and California. The time is 1951: right in the middle of the Gold Rush, while the novel basks in the kind of explosive madness which it resulted in. The city of San Francisco, for example, grew in a few short years from a small settlement into a bustling city. In The Sisters Brothers, it’s a shady place, where men can get whatever they want—except the influx of money from the gold rush has made prices soar to four times what they are anywhere else. deWitt writes that, in the port, men abandoned the ships in order to go work the rivers: “The harbor, at first sight, I did not understand it. There were so many ships at anchor that their masts looked to be tangled impossibly; hundreds of them packed together so densely as to give the appearance of a vast, limbless forest rolling on the tides.”

What makes The Sisters Brothers a fantastic read is, first and foremost, deWitt’s careful crafting of narrative voice. The narrator in question is Eli, one of the two brothers, who speaks to the reader lucidly, clearly, and with a touch of deliciously dark humor. I was reminded of Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, where I found another picaresque story told in a remarkably distinctive tone. deWitt overcomes the particular difficulty of achieving a mid-19th century american feel to his narrator by reducing his use of contractions to a minimum, which gives the text just the right pitch of antiquatedness. And the other thing you’ll find in The Sisters Brothers is a good old story, which will make you want to keep reading just for the sake of knowing what happens next. I mean actual story here, not plot, because in fact the deWitt’s plot stretches a little too much, at times, to get a proper hold of every single element. Yet the use of a weaker plot devices—such as a diary left-behind in a hotel room for the protagonists to read, and even a supernatural gold-prospecting twist that most reviewers seem to overlook—is pardonable because this is no whodunit; it’s a western, a quest from point A to point B. It’s about who shoots who. Escapism and action at its purest form, then, which is nice to have once in a while in a book that’s also well-written (I once read someone call David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet “well-written pulp”— the same thing operates here, and I’m still note sure it’s a bad thing).

But don’t get me wrong, it isn’t all guns and plot holes with a few flourishes of language. The Sisters Brothers is also fascinating, thematically, for its exploration of doubles, beginning with the two brothers of the title. Eli (the narrator) is podgy, hesitant, prone to bursts of anger, and takes pity on whomever they encounter. His brother Charlie is slim, calculating, ruthless, and likes to drink himself into a stupor. But they are brothers, and there is therefore a similar core within them that they cannot ignore; Eli says: “Our blood is the same, we just use it differently.” The entire novel plays out a struggle of power between them: Charlie is the dominant brother, the boss, but he needs Eli, because together they form an impressive team. Even Eli’s persona is split into two: the inevitable result of being a natural-born killer who also feels remorse. Thus, as the novel progresses, Eli doubt his life as a criminal increasingly, and learns to deal with this second self, the one that expands out of his center when there is violence, turns him into an animal. In the end, the brothers are able to establish a new order between them as the novel draws to its conclusion. They shed the hard life of the gunman (and lose a limb, newfound allies, and a boss in the process) and make themselves anew. It’s a question of life and death. 

Double the Beauty: Experimental Canadian Modernism

Experimental writer or music star? Leonard Cohen in the 1960s.

It’s hard to say what kind of reputation Canadian literature has abroad, although I’m fairly certain the word “beige” must come up quite a bit. While it’s true that Canadian literature in English is very young (it’s hard to speak of great literary production in Canada, except for a few isolated cases, before 1940), I don’t think it’s any more boring than any other national literature. In fact, Canada has produced its fair share of first rate experimental writers, and a good deal of (post)modern stuff—and I’m not talking about Generation X. Literature that is experimental and modernist exists in Canada. You just have to look for it. After all, modernism demands a little bit of obscurity, a little bit of difficulty, in order to enhance whatever it has to offer. As Leonard Cohen would say: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

In Christian Bök’s remarkable poetry collection Eunoia, for example, every chapter uses only one vowel to tell a story, with minimal word repetition. The effect is hypnotic, magical: “Enfettered, these few sentences repress free speech. The text deletes selected letters…” (You can read chapter e (for René Crevel) in interactive format online.) If this isn’t experimental stuff, I don’t know what is. And it’s only a recent example. Even around 1960, when literature was edged toward the cusp between modernism and what critics now (ambiguously) call post-modernism, some budding Canadian writers burst onto the literature scene with exciting and original works, the likes of which had never been before—here or elsewhere. And they were writing about something they knew: Canada.

I want to talk about two of these books. The first is Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook, originally published in 1959. The back-cover of the hideous New Canadian Library edition tells us that this short novel is about “a small, tightly knit community in the B.C. Interior.” Well yes, and no. Watson’s book, which is sometimes called a prose poem, was created through a process of distillation. Watson intended to write about the violence and insensibility in British Columbia’s Cariboo country, where she had worked as a teacher. In writing her book, however, she gradually stripped away any definite sense of place, as much physical and emotional description as she could, and most of the characters’ histories. What you’re left with is a story in concentrated form, told in a sparse, elliptical language that makes you dizzy with potential meanings. By getting rid of the specifics, Watson makes her tale universal.

Despite its condensed style, the novel is heavy with significance. As soon as I finished it, feeling that I had missed a great deal, I flipped the book back to the first page and began reading it again. Someone once told me that you haven’t really read anything unless you’ve read it twice. This is particularly true of The Double Hook—never before had I felt that it was necessary to read a book a second time in order to understand it (I mean understand in the most basic sense). It’s only that time around that, having gotten past the search for “what happens next,” I started noticing things.

While there is certainly an aspect of difficulty to The Double Hook, as part of its modernist agenda, it also has a great deal to give, provided the reader is ready to work a little. For instance, Watson creates a subtle pattern of recurring imagery, borrowed from Ancient Greek and aboriginal mythologies, which gives her novel a rich, deeply meaningful texture. While the characters in the novel are thrown into situations that shake the community to its foundations, an old woman, supposedly dead, continues to stalk the creek for fish. Meanwhile, a trickster spirit, Coyote, stares and howls at them from the hills. This is the stuff of dreams. But The Double Hook’s highly focused language—so focused it nearly always misses the larger picture—renders its characters infinitely complex and fascinating. They feel real because the writing tells you very little but shows a great deal.

In the universe of The Double Hook, the sky is “tight as a rawhide” and the hills have “flat ribs.” Characters can hear “the sound of the cow’s breath in the dry grass,” and when they throw water into the dust they watch it “roll in balls on the ground.” You can feel the sweat, the craft in every sentence. Watson toiled for years on her novel and struggled to find a publisher for it. She eventually revised the book and managed to get it published with the help of Frederick M. Salter, a professor at the University of Alberta. (If you’re interested, you can see various documents relating to the novel’s original publication on the Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing website.) We should be grateful that Jack McClelland eventually recognized The Double Hook’s incredible power and was ready to give it a chance. The novel’s publication is now recognized as a watershed in Canadian literature.

My second example is another (often overlooked) masterpiece written by Leonard Cohen in the 1960s. Cohen, of course, is now a world-famous singer-songwriter, who has recently demonstrated that he’s still got it (and that he’s got less voice than ever) in his most recent album, Old Ideas. Cohen, who is also (and, perhaps, first and foremost) a poet, underwent a brief stint as a novelist in the sixties, during which he wrote The Favourite Game (1963), his Künstlerroman, or novel of artistic coming-of-age, and Beautiful Losers (1966), a sex-infused acid trip of incredible literary force.

While Beautiful Losers is very much a product of its time, it was also groundbreaking in many ways. Both in form (a linguistic tidal wave of broken chronologies, gripping prose rhythm, repetitions, and lists) and content (an accumulative exploration sexual behavior and religious defamation), almost fifty years on it’s still not the kind of book you come across very often. As much as Watson’s novel is condensed, controlled, and refined, Cohen’s book is encyclopedic, loud, and dirty.

The novel explores the twisted love triangle between an unnamed narrator (critics often refer to him as “I”), his childhood friend and sometime lover F., and his deceased wife Edith (who is also F.’s lover). Cohen also draws parallels with the story of Catherine Tekakwitha, the first Native American martyr (who will be canonized in 2012). Beautiful Losers is about construal, about imposing your own visions and desires onto someone or something other than yourself. It’s a powerful work—imaginative, poignant, and visually shocking—that grabs you by the gut and doesn’t let go until you’ve turned the last page. It’s also the kind of book you feel awkward about reading in public transportation (as I did on many occasions) because it’s riddled with explicit, graphic (and often unusual) sex scenes.

Like The Double Hook, it demands rereading—not so much to shed light on the subtext, but in order to properly sift through all the things that Cohen throws at you: sex, the history of religious colonialism, destroyed systems, sex, transformed bodies, pages without punctuation, manifestation of French-Canadian nationalism, a Danish Vibrator (D.V.) that comes alive and escapes into the ocean… You can’t help but search for meaning in all of this.

Hello, meaning? Are you there? Sometimes you think you’ve got it, and then there’s a page copied from a Greek-English travel dictionary and you’ve lost it again. But, like all great works of literature, you don’t read Beautiful Losers to catch its meaning (that would be putting it into a box, reducing it, ignoring the bits you just don’t get). You read it for the experience. Maybe that’s what the D.V. was trying to tell us.

It’s a great novel. These are both truly great novels. Disturbing and great. And Canadian.

My Year in Reading

I wasn't entirely sure what image to use at the top of his blog post to represent a year of reading and blogging. Then I found this beautiful flip book calendar, featuring a tree transformed by the seasons.

Most other book bloggers or book-related websites do some kind of feature on their best reads of the year in December or January, which is the traditional period to neatly tuck away what’s been achieved in order to move on to the year ahead. I love reading this type of list myself, but I find their number is growing exponentially and it’s easy to lose yourself in a deluge of interesting titles. I toyed with the idea of doing it myself over the holidays, but instead I decided to release a list of my years reading now, in the Spring, because it’s during the Spring, last year, that I began Book’s End with a post about book titles. That’s right, Book’s End is one year old.

And what a year it’s been! To be fair, I spent most of it reading for school—although there were pleasant discoveries in that domain as well. For example, I’ve been spending a lot of my time pouring over the short stories of three Irish writers for my undergraduate thesis: Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O’Connor, and Sean O’Faolain. I’m lucky to have chosen writers of such undeniable talent because I can honestly say that not once did I NOT feel like picking up one of their collections to read or reread a certain story. These writers are three masters of the short story form, and their works reveal many truths about human nature. I also very much enjoyed Bowen’s The House in Paris, which I studied in a class on the Uncanny last year. It’s a wonderful between-the-wars novel about displacement and inheritance. 

Thanks cdrummbks on Flickr for the image.

Other school-related discoveries include Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (a stunning, extremely well-wrought reinterpretation of a historical figure), Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley (a Canadian masterpiece I had never heard of before), Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook, Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers (you’ll hear more about these last two modernist novels very soon), Jean-Paul Sartre Les Mots (I thought this book would be dreadful but it turned out to be a bibliomemoir, a genre I’m very fond of), and Toni Morrison’s pitch-perfect Jazz, about Harlem in the 1920s. 

My reading this year was also enriched by my membership to Mr. B’s Year of Reading Delights, which means I got a new handpicked book in the mail every month until February. Because of my otherwise busy reading schedule, I didn’t get a chance to read all of them yet, but among those I did take the time to open, I thoroughly enjoyed Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, a hilarious, rambunctious Australian novel about a 19th century Tanzanian prisoner on a mission to paint and catalogue specimens of fish from the surrounding waters. This strange novel, which develops level after level of forgery, is also an exhilarating exploration of language.  I look forward to checking out the rest of the novels my bibliotherapist at Mr. B’s sent me, such as Robin Jenkins’ The Cone Gatherers and Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers.

In the last twelve months also went from living in Bristol, England (where I’d gone to study abroad for two semesters) to moving back home to Montreal, Canada. I made the dreaded voyage at the end of June, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch provided the transition between my life there and my life here. As I’ve said elsewhere, I planned to finish the novel in Bristol but ended up using it over there as a kind of manual to explore the British countryside, and finished it in Quebec as a way of easing myself into my old, normal life… It was my first time reading Eliot, and as these things go I read it mostly for the interweaving of plot and the descriptions of quaint English country life. It demands rereading in the future. 

As for other books I picked up myself (or that were recommended by G.) during the year, the ones I enjoyed the most tended to be a little bit ludicrous (escapism, anybody?). There was Jocelyne Saucier’s award winning Il pleuvait des oiseaux (It rained birds, as yet untranslated), which I got as a gift at Christmas, about old people falling in love in the woods of Northern Ontario. There was Bulgakov’s thrilling The Master and Margarita, which I read in the train over a trip in Italy that contained way too many hours of transportation. There was Umberto Eco’s brilliant The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, about an amnesiac who remembers only everything he’s ever read. These are very different novels, but they are united by their originality and distinctive voices. Here are books that come blazing into your life with their own aesthetics, their own logic. You must accept them on their own terms: that’s what makes for a remarkable reading experience. 

One regret I have about my reading year is that I didn’t get a chance to check out any new publications. Reading books that have been out for a while is a safer choice, but it’s also fun to be able to take part in what everyone’s talking about, like Julian Barnes’ Booker-winning The Sense of and Ending, or Murakami’s 1Q84 or (more recently), Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision. There are some books I’m really excited about that will be coming out in the next months, such as Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies (the sequel to Wolf Hall) and a new novel by Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth; hopefully I’ll be more inclined to pick up some reading material from the “hot off the press” pile at my local bookstore. 

School’s almost out, now, and there’s a daunting, exciting (and growing) pile of books on my bedside shelf (I realize I just said I was also looking forward to buying new books that will come out this year—it’s the paradox of my existence). Hopefully I’ll be able to spend the upcoming months with my nose between their pages. 

REVIEW: Your Face Tomorrow 1, by Javier Marías

Spanish writer and translator Javier Marías’ Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear (the first volume of a novel in three parts) came to me trailing its own clouds of glory. Lucinda, my beloved bibliotherapist over at Mr. Bs Emporium of Reading Delights, sent it to me calling it a cross between Proust and John Le Carré. The blurbs on the book itself (I have the British edition) are of the kind that are so emphatic in their appreciation that they couldn’t be anything but honest. “Nothing will stop me from devouring all Marías’s previous books” writes on critic, while another declares: “The next thing Marías deserves is the Nobel Prize”. Obviously, my expectations were quite high. Surprisingly, they were satisfied.

This is the novel's UK paperback cover (published by Vintage). It fits with the mood of the book much better than the US cover, especially since motorcycles do not feature in the novel...

Part of the novel’s charm emerges from its pure originality, which is also the reason why it cannot disappoint. Cross between Proust and Le Carré is right; Marías creates his own genre with Your Face Tomorrow — a plotless, murky universe of espionage, Oxford Dons, wartime tales, and undercover agencies. Even that could be déjà-vu, I suppose, if it wasn’t for the added element of Marías’ distinct style. The author is not showing off, he’s having fun. He’s writing from his guts, letting his pen go wherever it wants — or so it seems, because, in the dark work of Your Face Tomorrow, it is essential that you conclude your trajectories, and Marías always concludes his trajectories. This is no easy feat in a novel of digressions, as this one is; the story advances slowly, surely, but the structure of the narrative is built up like Russian dolls, with bits of story fitting into one another. There’s simply nothing quite like it. 

The story itself is about a Spaniard called Jacques Deza, the narrator, who is approached by a strange man called Bertram Tupra during a party hosted by a friend they have in common in Oxford. Tupra, it turns out, is the head of a special agency whose job it is, through the work of skilled, hand-picked agents, to conjecture large amounts of information about people by observing them closely for a very short time — things about them you could only find out if you’d known them for years. Deza is specifically chosen because he has this rare gift himself, a kind of instinctive judgement, the ability to know people incredibly well just by watching them, and begins to work for Tupra, watching videos and observing interviews with all sorts of people in order to find out how they would act when faced with a hard dilemma, if they are to be trusted, and what their values are. The larger purpose of this task remains a mystery, at least in this volume. 

Yet, the book is also about a lot more than that. Two of its characters were inspired by real people the author knew well. The first is Sir Peter Russel, who becomes Peter Wheeler in the story, a professor of Hispanic History at Oxford, a perfectionist and a hedonist of sorts, with a past as a spy for the MI5 and MI6 in the 1930s and 40s. (You can read the fascinating obituary of Professor Sir Peter Russell here to get a sense of the richness of the character). Through him and the party he hosts in Oxford, Marías cleverly explores the aura of this mythic university and the quirky characters who inhabit it (as he did in his 1992 novel All Souls), as well as the secret history of so many Oxford pre-war graduates who were hired as spies by the British government. The author’s own father also finds his way into the novel as the narrator’s father, a journalist during the Spanish Civil War who was imprisoned after Franco’s victory on the basis of lies told by a treacherous friend. 

Fever and Spear is a masterpiece: an intellectual thriller, an introspective page turner, a narrative experiment which burns its own unassuming, singular path through contemporary literature. Only a full school year and an undergraduate thesis will stop me from reading the other two volumes of Marías’ Your Face Tomorrow.

Javier Marías. Photo taken from Conversational Reading.

REVIEW: The Film Club by David Gilmour

Admit One: David Gilmour offers his son an entirely different kind of education in his heartfelt memoir, The Film Club.

I’d heard about The Film Club, written by Canadian writer and critic David Gilmour, through a friend who’d read it and recommended it to me. I told the friend in question I was interested, but soon pushed the book back in my head and forgot all about it, until I heard it mentioned again when the author was interviewed on a French morning show on Radio-Canada. Gilmour, an anglophone from Toronto, expresses himself wonderfully in French and must have charmed more than one listener that morning — and he did, my Mom called me a few minutes after the interview was over to tell me about it herself. I was leaving for a weekend at my family cottage the next day so I bought the book and read it over the weekend. It’s that kind of book. 

 The Film Club is a true story of Gilmour and his son, Jesse, who had lots of difficulty in school as a teenager, so much so that his self-confidence reach alarmingly low levels. Things couldn’t go on the way they did so Gilmour proposed a bargain to his son: he could drop out of school and continue to live in his house for free and obtain pocket money on the condition that Jesse watched three movies selected and introduced by his father every week (oh, and also not do drugs). 

There have been a lot of these kinds of memoirs in recent years where people try to get over something difficult by binge eating, binge running, binge reading, or bingeing on something in a way that is organized enough that it actually gives a new purpose to their lives. I’m sure it works well for all these people, but does it necessarily make a good book? Well, in this case, yes. What makes The Film Club so successful as a narrative is that it doesn’t simply enumerate all the movies watched by these two guys over several years. In fact, the movies are quite secondary. What Gilmour sets in the foreground is the relationship between the father and the son, and more specifically the absolute, unbearable love the father bears for his son. The film club in question became an opportunity for them to take a break from the torments of their lives and spend quality time together, during a period in a child’s life when time with your father is about the last thing you want to have, but potentially one of the most important things you need. 

That’s not to say we don’t hear about a few good movies along the way. Gilmour is a true film fanatic, and a wonderful guide into the world of cinema. He is careful never to kill a movie when introducing it, and always warns his son (and the reader) to look out for iconic scenes. From Truffaut’s Les 440 coups to Rocky III, loads of movies get their chance to shine, but as a whole they really do form their own kind of education. By the end of the experiment Jesse — countless movies seen and discussed, able to define the Nouvelle Vague, give precise examples of Hitchcock’s use of suspense, and name Bergman’s favourite cameraman — has received what certainly amounts to a degree in film studies. Of course, the battle against teenage rebellion is won in the end and Jesse also returns to school of his own accord. That’s the great thing about teenagers: they grow up. 

The other great thing about The Film Club is that it’s compulsively readable. Gilmour is a master of pace, and he intersperses the actual movie watching in the book with bits and pieces of his and Jesse’s life. The rhythm he achieves is pitch-perfect. Where he sometimes goes over the edge and risks losing the reader is in the emotional intensity and sensitivity of the son, who descends into very very deep black holes whenever he has girl problems, and eventually breaks one of the rules of the film club. Of course, as these things go, a father’s love (especially one ready to write a memoir about his son) is unconditional, and as memoirs go the plots itself is hard to criticize because, of course, the author can defend himself by saying that it’s all true. In the end The Film Club is another heartfelt and moving reminder that art can bring people together and change lives for the better. I sincerely recommend this book to fathers and sons everywhere, and anyone else who may get between them. 

 

REVIEW: Midnight in Paris

Midnight in Paris, the most recent film by Woody Allen, is about a writer who looks back on a mythical golden age: Paris in the 20s.

I promise I won’t make a habit of reviewing movies here, but when a movie is as literary as Woody Allen’s most recent addition to his already impressive oeuvre, I think a review imposes itself. Furthermore, I’ve been interested in the legendary era the movie deals with explicitly — Paris in the 1920s — for years, and can’t hold myself from picking at what Woody Allen did with the abundance of material we have on that mythic decade. The problem with any movie or book that now turns its attention to Paris in the 20s is just that: the era has become so legendary that little can be added to it without falling into the trap of further mythologizing a golden age that is already largely fictitious. What has greatly contributed to the popularization of Paris in the 20s is books like Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast or John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse, which are cleverly disguised as memoirs, but are in fact reconstructions of long-past events written in the 1950s and 60s.

Woody Allen approaches the subject of Paris in the 1920′s with characteristic humor in Midnight in Paris, but also by cleverly shifting the movie’s attention away from the 20s themselves (although that time and place is visited multiple times) and into the broader concepts of the Golden Age and artistic anguish. In my opinion, however, Allen takes his point about romanticizing the past and not enjoying the present a little bit too far — or perhaps he just repeats it so much that it loses its value. Indeed, if you haven’t caught on to the fact that the main character is nostalgic for a lost time (the only thing we know about the novel he is writing is that it focuses on a nostalgia shop), or obsesses over a fantasy of Paris as it was in the imagined golden age of the 1920s, you don’t need to worry because the movie will bang you on the head with it until you get the point. 

Still, the film soars in the scenes that take place in the past, in which the protagonist, on the stroke of midnight, is able to climb aboard a vintage car and travel back in time in order to party with the Fitzgeralds, tell T. S. Eliot that people in the future measure their lives with coke spoons, get advice on women from Hemingway, discuss rhinoceroses with Dali, and ask Gertrude Stein for an opinion on his novel-in-progress. Unfortunately the characters sometimes fall into caricature (especially Hemingway, who I’m pretty certain did not talk like he wrote), but that’s okay because we’re given access to this fantasy world through the eyes of someone from our time. We are, in effect, not really visiting Paris in the 1920s, but rather the cultural construct we imagine Paris in the 20s to be. 

Le Dome, in Montparnasse, Paris, circa the 1920s, was one of the favorite haunts of the Lost Generation.

Where the film fails more obviously in its believability is in the modern-day Paris scenes, especially in the exchanges between Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams, in a mixture of dead scriptwriting and horrendous acting. There are also quite a bit of loose ends in the dialogue, and like so many writers who are left to their own devices by the sheer force of their fame and age, Allen simply needs an editor to clean up the guns he leaves lying around and never fires. Luckily a beautiful Marion Cotillard, at once bouncy and mysterious, saves the day as a muse from the 20s who is obsessed with her own Paris golden age, la Belle Époque. The Paris of the 20s is also beautifully shot in dark interiors, glittering party places, and faded sepias (compared to a hot and bright modern-day city). I also liked Allen’s attention to detail in depicting the Lost Generation, since he gives us glimpses of Belmonte — the Spanish toreador Hemingway raves so enthusiastically about in Death in the Afternoon — and the shy Alice B. Tolkas, Gertrude Stein’s housemate and lover. Midnight in Paris is therefore a pleasant summer divertissement, especially enjoyable for its gorgeous parisian scenery and fun literary references, but for me it remains a little bit shallow. 

It's a good thing Marion Cotillard and her smoldering eyes made a remarkable appearance in the movie.

Eco the Memorious*

The UK edition of Umberto Eco's novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. The title is a reference to one of the comic books the novel's protagonist read as a child.

The Borgesian twist at the center of Umberto Eco’s novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is one of the most exciting premises I’ve recently encountered: after an accident, a man loses the memory of his entire life — his wife, his children, his job, his own name — but remembers with exactness all of the books he has ever read. The stunning opening pages of the novel are essentially a collection of various quotes from world literature, strung together into coherent paragraphs, just like the protagonist can only answer in quotations from author’s he has read when people speak to him when he first wakes up from his coma. In the middle of section of the novel, which makes its greatest chunk, the protagonist returns to the Italian country house where he spent much of his childhood, in order to sift through the souvenirs amassed there — old vinyls, comic books, schoolbooks, antiques — and try to hunt down his memories. The protagonist eventually finds evidence of a first love, which would’ve left a deep mark on him, and begins to follow its trail, down into the darkest pits of his being.

The novel is intensely readable and great fun. Like in The Name of the Rose, Eco uses the structure of the mystery in order to propel the plot forward with great skill. The protagonist — sympathetic, extremely well-read, a bit of a womanizer, and with gentlemanly tastes — is an able substitute for Eco, and a joy to spend time with. Through him and his reemerging into the material that made up his life — books, of course, but also things like newspapers, songs, and radio shows — the reader discovers and understands a lot about the rise of fascism in Italy, Catholicism, and how people lived through the war in rural Italy. When the protagonist finally recovers some of the memories, and is able to make sense of certain obsessions (for instance, he has collected quotes about fog all of his life). These final chapters are very moving, and portray Eco’s talent as a storyteller.

The cover for the American edition of the novel is a collage of some of the images featured in the book.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is a tremendous achievement because it encompasses so much material: numerous (almost numberless) quotations and references with which the text is riddled (there is an online wiki project to find them all) as well the images that accompany the them. Eco’s skill, as always, lies in the casualness with which he assails the reader with his incomparable erudition. The beginning of the novel is especially frustrating for the reader who recognizes, perhaps, one reference in ten, or twenty, aware that he is missing many many more. In the middle section, the material is essentially Italian, and although it’s all very interesting, here I found myself wishing I were Italian so I could recognize at least some of things he refers to. Yet, in all this, it is clear that Eco is not showing off — he’s only having fun. Eco gave a wonderful and very instructive interview in The Paris Review a few years ago, in which he explains that as he grows older, he remembers more, and things that he thought he had forgotten start to resurface. For Eco, reading is the key to developing a sprawling memory, and be able to live many lives. The perfection and detail with which he has constructed the life of one man in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is a gift to the reader, another life to assimilate. 

*The title of this post is a transformation of the title of Jorge Luis Borges’ story “Funes el Memorioso” — traditionally translated as the ungrammatical “Funes the Memorious”, because there is no adjective for “memory” in English — about a boy who, although incapable of having abstract ideas, remembers every detail of everything with frightful perfection. 

NYRB Classics

I’ve been following the exciting new titles published by the New York Review of Books for a few years, and now that I’ve finally read a few of their books I can confirm for myself that this is a truly exciting and necessary publishing house. NYRB Classics, specifically, specialize in the publication of lost classics, with an emphasis on discovery and difference: “The series includes nineteenth century novels and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, tell-all memoirs and learned studies, established classics and cult favorites, literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of.” The series has also published more well-known authors by giving exposure to the works on the fringe of their oeuvres. For instance, they’ve collected some of Mavis Gallant’s short stories under Varieties of Exile, The Cost of Living, and Paris Stories; they’ve also given a second life to Henry James’ late novel The Outcry and created a collection of his New York stories (edited and introduced by Colm Tóibín, who portrayed Henry James so beautifully in The Master), including the novel Washington Place.

I’m much interested in the literature related to Paris in the 1920s, so the first New York Review book I read was Memoirs of Montparnasse, by the Montréal poet John Glassco. Glassco, a McGill student, fled to Paris toward the end of that mythical decade and rubbed shoulders with people like Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and Ford Maddox Ford. The so-called memoir, originally published in 1970 — by which time Paris in the 20s had already become mythical, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast having been published in 1964 — was later revealed by critics to be in large part fictitious reconstructions. That does not change the fact that it is a compelling and very pleasant read. It’s also a rather sad story; as one of Glassco’s friends remarks in the book, he “arrived a little late” to the party that was Paris, bringing “a fresh vision to bear on a dying epoch”. Glassco eventually contracted tuberculosis and was forced to return to Montreal in 1931 in order to get treatment. The party was over for him, as well. As far as I know, the book was never republished after 1970, until NYRB came out with their edition in 2007. 

Another NYR books I read were Grief Lessons, which is made up of 4 plays by Euripides, translated (and with six excellent accompanying essays) by the poet/classicist Anne Carson. Euripides is always fantastic, of course, but these translations really breathe new life and and emphasize the twisted morals and sheer oddity of the worlds the fifth century Greek tragedian creates in his plays. The book includes some of the lesser known works, like Herakles and Alkestis. The final NYR book I read a few weeks ago (and unfortunately had to leave behind me in England) was Chaos and Night, a short novel by the French writer Henry de Montherlant, about a bitter old Spanish man, exiled in France after the civil war in Spain. It’s a sad, moving book about disillusion and old age, and the character’s ability to face the truth about his identity and his past.

The other two important aspects of NYRB, which makes it so recommendable, is that they do a lot of translations, like Chaos and Night, thus giving the English speaking world access to some outstanding material they wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to enjoy (we all know how rare that is, with recent statistics about the poverty of books in translations published in the US), as well as creating really great covers. Many of them have been showcased on the excellent Caustic Cover Critic — I particularly liked the article on Neil Krug photographs, one of which was used on a French crime novel by J. P. Manchette (the first one, bellow). I don’t usually like book covers that always reuse the same template, but in the case of NYRB, because they use such beautiful illustrations, I find the small square upper-center with the title and author is surprisingly effective in creating a cohesion in the design of the series, while allowing for interesting and aesthetic covers that look really great. I’ve put some of my favourites bellow, which also show off the wide range of the series in terms of genre.

NYRB are always looking for new classics to publish, and they’re open to suggestions on their website. If you think a great, long-lost work of literature — be it fiction, memoir, or other — needs to be rediscovered, drop them a line. If you’re the first to recommend the title and they publish it, they’ll send you a free copy!

Escapades in the Picaresque

Gabriel García Márquez is perhaps the grandfather of fabulist fiction, but the tradition goes far beyond his works of magical realism...

I find that lately I’ve been developing a soft spot for books that move away from the more traditional forms of storytelling — perfect plot arch, realistic descriptions, few narrative digressions, consistent characters, and so forth — and into literary universes that are altogether more fanciful. My readings have brought me to discover three such novels in the last couple of months, and I thought I’d share the pleasure with which I read them. All three of the books are quite famous, but they emerge from unique different traditions; still, they are all similar in their approach to certain artistic truths by their exhilarating stories and exuberant prose-styles.

The first of these books is The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov. It is, simply, a masterpiece. Written in 1938, two years before the author’s death, it was only published in 1967, Bulgakov’s works having long suffered at the hands of the Soviet censors. The novel, which meanders through the lives of a cast of vivid characters, follows the arrival of the devil in person (accompanied by a few of his hilarious henchmen) in a hot spring in Moscow, and his meddling in the affairs of Margarita, a beautiful, brilliant woman, and her lover, nicknamed the Master, who has written a novel about Pontius Pilate (the reader is also privy to three chapters from this novel, interspersed throughout the book). It’s a thrilling, sparkling ride, with an intrusive narrator leading the reader on with obvious relish. Thanks to Bulgakov’s powerful, elastic writing, the story is at once funny, fantastical, sexy, moving, and violent. A myriad of adjectives for the myriad of moods and sensations the novel provides with such perfection. 

The Vintage cover for The Master and Margarita, just as wild and wonderful as the novel itself.

The second book I read in the same vein was Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. I came to this novel with a certain amount of reticence, since I found everything I’d read by Woolf to be utterly depressing. Not so Orlando. It was a writer’s holiday for Woolf, who worked on the novel as a kind of joke for her charistmatic, bisexual friend (and sometime lover) Vita Sackville-West; it’s also a real treat for the reader, who gets the chance to experience a writer at the top of her game, writing on a rampage, free from the bonds of tradition. Orlando is the story of the eponymous character, who begins life as a man in the 16th century and then sails through the centuries until first quarter of the 20th century, changing sex along the way. Woolf often focuses on beautifully rendered moments of fancy, like “The Great Frost”, during which “birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground” and the Tames becomes a pleasure ground for the city of London, or the cloud that comes to rests upon the British Isles on the first day of the 19th century, altering “the constitution of England”:

The muffin was invented and the crumpet. Coffee supplanted the after-dinner port, and, as coffee led to a drawing-room in which to drink it, and a drawing room to glass cases, and glass cases to artificial flowers, and artificial flowers, and artificial flowers to mantelpieces, and mantelpieces to pianofortes, and pianofortes to drawing-room ballads, and drawing-room ballads (skipping a stage or two) to innumerable little dogs, mats, and china ornaments, the home — which had become extremely important — was completely altered.

 The tone is light, the writing carefree; Woolf is free as bird and can do whatever she likes, while creating an insightful satire of history and raising questions about the role of women in society. Orlando alone proves Michael Cunningham’s recent claim that Virginia Woolf was fun at parties, something many find difficult to believe. 

The original Hogarth Press dust jacket for Virginia Woolf's Orlando.

Last, and certainly not least, in this small list of fabulist fiction of mine is a very strange novel called Gould’s Book of Fish: A novel in twelve fish, by Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan. I have never read anything quite like it before. In the first section of the novel, we meet a male narrator, in modern-day Tasmania, who discovers in an old junk shop an original copy of The Book of Fish, a 19th century document filled with watercolour paintings of fish (which really does exist, by the way). What’s special about this book is that it’s also covered in writing; in a way it acts as the testament of Gould, the artist who painted all the fish, who was a convict in Van Dieman’s land. The narrator reads through Gould’s story, fascinated, but learns that Gould depicts only fictions in his Book of Fish, relating to people and events that never existed. In The Book of Fish, he recreates his own version of the penal colony in Van Dieman’s land, with a fake commander ousting the real one and establishing a Republic of New Venice, building a railway that goes nowhere and a great Mah-Jong Hall. When the book mysteriously disappears, however, the narrator decides to rewrite Gould’s story by memory, which makes up the eleven other sections. So the story we read is a recreated fake, even within the universe of the novel, and things get only worse from there. Like an intricate, tricky hall of mirrors, versions of fakery and artistic inventions are made to stare at each other in the face, multiplying the fictions into infinitely divisible versions. All of them are valid, but none of them are real. Truth is inconsequential in Gould’s Book of Fish; instead, the novel revels in the joyful possibilities of the counterfeit. There are echoes of Borges at times, for instance when Gould, reading the fictitious archives of the penal colony that another character has written, comes upon the very words he is now writing in a kind of mind-boggling narrative circularity. What keeps everything together is Flanagan’s mastery of language. His prose is exuberant and majestic — he uses countless metaphors related to the sea in order to maintain a coherence in imagery — and he is especially successful in crafting an original, provocative voice for his Gould, which gives the novel its energy and thrust. 

These are three excellent novels, which create exciting universes and really original reading experiences. In the wake of Téa Obreht’s Orange Prize victory this week for her imaginative novel The Tiger’s Wife, we should perhaps expect more of these fabulist pieces of fiction to emerge as a counter-movement to the realism that has been dominant for the last decades. Authors exploring new magical realism or the picaresque certainly have a strong tradition to rest upon and emerge from, and their books are bound to be interesting and altogether different, as these seem to be inherent tropes of the genre. 

Nothing but the Truth

A Widow's Story is the memoir Joyce Carol Oates wrote after losing her husband. What the book doesn't mention is that 13 months after her husband's death, Oates remarried. The question is: does it matter?

I should’ve mentioned Joyce Carol Oates in last week’s post about rapid book writing; Oates is well known — legendary, even — for her amazing productivity. Since the 1960s, she has published over 50 novels and 20 short story collections, and more than a dozen books non-fiction. And were talking about a serious, literary author (whatever that means), Oates doesn’t write trash; she has been nominated for and has won several highly respectable awards, like the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the O. Henry prize. In February 2008, Oates lost her husband of 47 years, Raymond Smith, who was an editor and publisher. Her last book, A Widow’s Story: A Memoir, details the months of acute pain and grieving she went through after her husband’s sudden death. The book was received tepidly by critics, and many of them latched on to a fact which they found immensely important: 11 months after Oates’ husband died, she was engaged to Charles Gross, a neuroscientist, whom she married in 2009. A Widow’s Story, published three years after her husband’s death, doesn’t mention her remarriage at all. 

In an illuminating article in The Millions, “Grief, the Cruel and Fickle Muse”, Bill Morris reviews A Widow’s Story by putting it into context with other so-called grief memoirs, like Joan Didion’s acclaimed A Year of Magical Thinking and Leonard (husband of Virginia) Woolf’s The Journey Not the Arrival Matters (his fifth volume of memoirs, which covers 1939 to 1969 — Virginia committed suicide in 1941). Morris remarks that the fact Oates doesn’t mention her remarriage in A Widow’s Story is a “major — and fatal — ommission.” He adds, a bit harshly, that Oates “has written the most dishonest kind of book there is – one that purports to serve up raw emotions but doesn’t have the discipline to stick to the facts or the honesty to reveal the most basic of truths.” In his review of Oates’ memoir for The New York Review of Books, ”For Sorrow There is Not Remedy”, Julian Barnes reaches a similar conclusion. He states that “there is something unhappy in the omission”. Barnes does not question Oates’s morals — if she is now happily married again, so be it —, he only suggests that “some readers will feel they have a good case for breach of narrative promise” in Oates’ selected, sanitized version of events.

JCO and her late husband, Raymond Smith, in 1972. Photo credits: Bernard Gotfryd, via Guardian.co.uk/books

Should knowing about Oates’ remarriage, something that isn’t included in the book, change the way we see and judge that book? I don’t have an answer to that question. The critics above, and some others, certainly think so. Joyce Carol Oates clearly thought not. She’s written in response of Barnes’ article, defending herself by explaining that A Widow’s Story “was not meant to be an autobiographical work, which would include many, many developments in the memoirist’s life subsequent to the early experience of widowhood, but rather an intimately detailed account of the raw, early weeks and months of ‘widowhood’”. Oates does not see her remarriage as relevant to a story that she wanted to be essentially about her intense experience of grief, because her new union having come to exist after the fact doesn’t change the intensity of that grief as it was being experienced. And yet, according to Bill Morris, Oates mentions in her memoir “that it took her a year and a half to erase her husband’s voice from their telephone answering machine”, by which time she was married to Charles Gross. Clearly, her book does leave the immediacy of experience and moves on to her (at least partial, as far as these things go) recovery. Oates’ has been a little bit naïve in thinking no one would make a remark about her omission, although perhaps she couldn’t foresee that critics would make such a big deal out of it.

The English world of letters probably has an issue with books that appear as memoirs but render only half-truths or blurred realities. James Frey was famously punished in public by Oprah, and all of her devotees, for having substantially exaggerated facts in his memoir of addiction A Million Little Pieces. The French, on the contrary, have made a veritable genre — auto-fiction — out of exaggerating their lives to make interesting books. Writers like Emmanuel Carrère and Catherine Millet do it all the time, except it’s written “récit“, not “autobiographie“, under the titles, and they get shelved with the novels. Memoirs, in English, are shelved with the biographies, are that means they’re non-fiction.

JCO and her new husband, Charles Gross. Photo credits: newyorksocialdiary.com

What Barnes calls “the narrative promise” is the pact that exists between writer and reader that whatever will be in the book is the truth, and nothing but the truth. But then, can the writer decide what is part of that truth? It’s her life, after all. It’s her memoir. She can recount events as she remembers them, as she wants to tell them, can’t she? It probably should be that way, but the rules of honesty and ownership are different in the world of publication. Readers like twists, and they like to know about things that may or may not be related directly with the content of what they’re reading. Does the fact that J. K. Rowling lost her mother, suffered from depression, and lived on welfare support  in the 90s change anything to the quality of the Harry Potter books? Probably not, but it certainly changes the way we understand the series within its broader context, and makes its success all the more impressive. 

Oates finishes her response to the NYRB with the following statement: “However, since nothing seems to arouse reproach in reviewers quite so much as the possibility that the memoirist is less miserable at the time of the writing and afterward than she was at the time of the experience about which she is writing, it is only sensible to include an appendix to remedy this, which I will hope to do.” It’s not an excuse or an assertive defense, only a half-hearted submission to the pressures of criticism. I don’t know if she’ll be doing the right thing in adding this “appendix” to subsequent editions, if she ever does, but she’ll certainly be doing what is expected of her. Unfortunately (or fortunately), that’s the way it works; writers remains slaves to their readers.