Anything is possible in the present tense

All I want on the screen, Arlo said, is the present tense. Anything is possible in the present tense. Failure and love and stillness and change.

He's an artist, Davi said. Artists are mercenaries.

What drew me to The Third Hotel, by Laura van den Berg, was the promise of walking in the footsteps of love (where did it go?), an attempt to retrace and delimit a relationship.

What hadn't registered with me when this novel first came on my radar was that it has horror story elements — but then what love story doesn't?

Her husband Richard was a horror film scholar; he recently died in a car accident. So Clare ventures to the film festival in Cuba on her own. And there he is. (Did he really die? Why is he here? Where do the dead go?)

Weird things happen in this book.

Visitors longed for not a dislocation of reality but an insulation from reality — yet these layers of insulation were supposed to be invisible, imperceptible. People did not like to be too sharply reminded of their status as tourists.

I've often explained to people that one of the things I love about traveling is the opportunity to become someone else — in a place where nobody knows you, you can be anybody. But conversely, traveling lets you shed the baggage of your everyday life, to become more yourself. I think about this a lot when I travel, and I hold both these things to be true. This is my dislocation.

The traveling self was supposed to be temporary, disposed of when it was time to go home — there, how could this self be held responsible? But maybe a person became even more themselves when away, liberated from their usual present tense and free to lie. Maybe travel sent all that latent, ancient DNA swimming to the surface.

Clare has a secret self, the one that goes on the road alone for work. She's not working in Cuba, but she gives everyone who asks a different name. (Who is she really? Does she even know?) She suspects her husband had a secret life too.

Clare struggled to imagine what, forty years into a life, would cause a person to suddenly change the way they walked. There were alien, interminable silences when she called from the road, and when she was home he took long, solitary strolls in the evening hours, a symptom that would eventually lead to his demise.

There's unease simmering beneath every page. I'll leave analysis of the horror-story tropes to the academics, but there's the thing about the order the girls get killed in, the girls are always killed. There's the girl who goes missing. There's Clare being followed, and Clare following. (Will Clare be killed?)

I liked the idea of this book more than the actual book. Clare's past didn't interest me so much as her present with un-Richard.

In the lobby of the festival hotel, a mural of a forest spanned the length of a wall. On her first night, in the middle of a reception, she found herself standing in front of that mural. She peered into the shadows, imagined the secrets living in there. She rubbed the green leaves. The paint was smooth, the treetops tinged with gold. She licked a tree and tasted chalk, feeling wild.

Is she crazy? Has she always been crazy? Did she kill him? What is past and what is present?

(Apparently this novel owes quite a debt to Yoko Tawada's The Naked Eye, which quite coincidentally I have queued up on my shelf. Stay tuned.)

See also
Entropy: What Quivers Under the Surface of Laura van den Berg's The Third Hotel

The Paris Review: The Vocabulary of Tourism: An Interview with Laura van den Berg

Tin House: To Thicken and Complicate through Linear Time: A Conversation with Laura van den Berg

Careerists always salute those who lack ambition

The Italian Teacher, by Tom Rachman, was unexpectedly engrossing. I knew absolutely nothing about it, hadn't even glanced at a plot summary, I don't know why — perhaps because from the moment I heard about it I already planned to read it. It's not about an Italian teacher at all. At least, not in any conventional sense.

So here's a book that was absolutely the right book at the right time for me. It gave me a great deal to think about, given some of my current circumstances.

There's the tension between art vs craft (in my own life, my chosen profession is the craft of editing, perhaps at the expense of the art of writing). There's what we perceive others' lives to be, and the reality of their lives behind closed doors. How we define art. How we define success. How we fight or fulfil others' expectations of us.

There's how we think our lives are going to turn out, and how far off the mark we end up. It's about what we become when we're not paying attention.

Careerists always salute those who lack ambition.

There's very little Italian about it, apart from the opening scenes. There's nothing "exotic" about it; it's Toronto and London. And the "teacher" aspect is incidental. This is a novel that surprised me repeatedly in where the plot took me and the insights it offered. I looked forward to my commute to see what came next.

It's also a book about art and the art world, and I have a soft spot for those. Determining the value of Art is to me an endlessly mystifying fascinating thing, a volatile algorithm weighing the work itself, its objective quality, sometimes the subject matter, the artist, the artist's personality and celebrity and reputation (and these are different things), whether the artist is living or dead, basic supply and demand, the perceived rarity of the work, the perceived interest in the work, the zeitgeist, et cetera.

There's the problem of what is art:

Potters get so exercised about art versus craft. But the older I get, the more I prefer craft. With craft, you know if a piece is right. It the pot so cumbersome that the farmer's wife couldn't lift it? Is my glaze poisonous? A pot is either correct, or it is not. Whereas art is never quite good or bad. Art is simply a way of saying "opinion."

And what is great art:

"If men were beautiful, Marsden, why is beauty always portrayed as a woman?"

"Because artists are servants of the rich, and the rich are men. They've always wanted their pinup girls."

"Great art is not a matter of sex."

"My dear friend! What else would it be?"

This novel is not about a great artist, as some plot summaries might have you believe. It's about his son Charles (otherwise known as Pinch), growing up in his shadow, waiting be be acknowledged.

The novel spans Pinch's whole life. We undoubtedly see far more clearly than he does the effect of his father on him, how overbearing — thoughtless and cruel — the father and how sad — pathetic — the son.

Nothing sadder than those who declare themselves artists when not a soul cares what they create.

Pinch does finally develop a secret life (I was rooting for him!). His motivations are complex (revenge against his father, vindication of his mother, personal fulfilment, financial security for the 16 other children fathered by the artist, spite against the world, et cetera), and it's debatable whether he achieves success in his project. You decide.

"Why impress anyone, if not the people you don't care for?"

Reviews
Chicago Review of Books: In 'The Italian Teacher,' Art Is Sex

Guardian: The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman review – great art and monstrous selfishness

Washington Post: The art of rebellion: The son of a famous painter tries to reframe his life

With his own artistic aspirations, he's constantly torn between exploiting his relationship to the famous man or proving that he can succeed on his own merits. In the end, Pinch can't do either, which is just the kind of slowly grinding humiliation that Rachman's wit captures so tenderly.

In interview on The Next Chapter with Shelagh Rogers:

I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem

Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them, I like the movies too.

And then,

Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it's all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love's life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person. That's part of personism. It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.

— from "Personism: A Manifesto," by Frank O'Hara.

Lucky poem.

Be gratified. Be the poem.

Mistress of my own text

Am I doing the right thing by telling stories? Wouldn't it be better to fasten the mind with a clip, tighten the reins and express myself not by means of stories and histories, but with the simplicity of a lecture, where in sentence after sentence a single thought gets clarified, and then others are tacked onto it in the succeeding paragraphs? I could use quotes and footnotes, I could in the order of points or chapters reap the consequences of demonstrating step by step what it is I mean; I would verify an aforementioned hypothesis and ultimately be able to carry off my arguments like sheets after a wedding night, in view of the public. I would be the mistress of my own text, I could take an honest per-word payment for it.

As it is I'm taking on the role of midwife, or of the tender of a garden whose only merit is at best sowing seeds and later to fight tediously against weeds.

Tales have a kind of inherent inertia that is never possible to fully control. They require people like me — insecure, indecisive, easily led astray. Naive.

— from Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk.

I am too naive. Weeds thrive in my garden, as do insects and vermin and fungi. What kind of mistress am I?

Normality — however messy — is far more comprehensible

"Furukura, you're lucky, you know. Thanks to me, you can go from being triply handicapped as a single, virgin convenience store worker to being a married member of society. Everyone will assume you're a sexually active, respectable human being. That's the image of you that pleases them most. Isn't it wonderful?"

It's the image the characters of this novel strive for. It's what most humans aspire to (or is it?).

Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata, is a quirky little book that I wish I'd liked more. I found it difficult to connect with — it's the wrong book for my headspace right now, despite it having interesting things to say. However, the novel's emotionlessness may very well be the point — the narrator is a 36-year-old convenience story worker for whom being human and acting naturally doesn't come naturally at all.

Furukura has spent most of her life trying to fit in, playing the role of a normal person, with varying degrees of success. Her job as convenience store woman, which she's held for 18 years, thrills her because it came with a manual. The training included facial expressions and tone of voice to use. She watches her coworkers, what clothing brands they wear, learns where they shop.

She's not stupid — she's perceptive and adaptable; simply, she can't rely on her own instincts regarding acceptable behaviour — this is something she studies closely.

The tone of some reviews is quite condescending toward the main character, and this bothers me. We need people to work in convenience stores. Some people are perfectly suited to working in convenience stores. Clearly such ambitionlessness is frowned upon in Japan and elsewhere. I wonder to what extent some reviews are coloured by this prejudice, therefore misunderstanding Furukura's drive and courage.

I find the shape of people's eyes particularly interesting when they're being condescending. I see a wariness or a fear of being contradicted or sometimes a belligerent spark ready to jump on any attack. And if they're unaware of being condescending, their glazed-over eyeballs are steeped in a fluid mix of ecstasy and sense of superiority.

The twist is that she meets someone, someone unlikable, even despicable. But it suits them both to be perceived as being in a relationship. They are establishing a "marriage" of convenience. They are relative equals in laying the groundwork of the relationship. Furukura initially treats him as a pet. Even though he's a jerk, part of me almost wants to this relationship work, to pull one over on Japanese societal expectations.

In theory, this is the kind of book I should be all over, so I am somewhat puzzled by my response to it. I question my own abilities at work, motherhood, etc. But for the most part, I have stopped caring about what people think. This is clearly not the case for Furukura, whose efforts are all aimed at acceptance. Also, I am fascinated by Japan's asexual generation, but I cannot relate to it in the least. So I found the novel quirky, but not funny, and a little bit off-putting. It sits uncomfortably with me, and I don't know if it's me, the book, or Japan, and I don't know if I'll ever get around to resolving it.

She's far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has lot of problems, then she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine. For here, normality — however messy — is far more comprehensible.

See also the review in the New Yorker.