Parsing

I particularly like Helena's hair when done up — braided to crown her — in the fashion of a medieval princess, and I tell her so. She takes offense at being called an evil princess.

I'm revelling in Helena's language lately. It is an endless source of both awe and amusement.

We no longer simply use language; we can talk about it.

Helena named her stuffed cat toy "No-one." I can't decide whether it's more weird or clever.

I've corrected Helena's "human bean" to "human being." "What's a being?" I'm not sure my explanation hit the mark. Days later we're talking about Batman, for some reason; she tells me he's human, but stipulates he's not a human being — because he doesn't exist.

From time to time I worry that her English isn't as good as it should be — some odd vocabulary choices, and still trouble with irregular verbs — but hey, I remind myself, she's completely bilingual! So what if she misses a conjugation here or there!

(Some errors are initially mystifying. I puzzled for some time over "He's not being have" (pronounced "hayv"), finally to realize she meant he's not behaving.)

I'm in no position to judge her French, but I suppose it must be similar. (Certainly for some time now her French is superior to mine. I almost trust her when she supplies a missing word or assures me that I have the correct construction.)

I've favoured reading English books to her only because it's far easier for me. At school, her books are in French, of course. Helena herself doesn't show a consistent preference for one language or the other. When she suggests a book to read, she does not readily recall what language it's in and has occasionally recalled incorrectly (my point being that the language in which it's communicated is secondary to the story being told).

So. Completely bilingual. Which has tremendously complicated the reading situation.

I explain that certain sounds are represented by these letters in English, but the same sounds in French use different letters. Times I've thought it was hopeless, and hoped it would sort itself it out. And it mostly has.

I'd say she can read now, finally. Helena won't say it yet, cuz she's a bit of a perfectionist, but she'll say it soon. In two languages.

Children do become bilingual easily, and scientists are starting to understand how:

"You're building a brain architecture that's a perfect fit for Japanese or English or French," whatever is native, Kuhl explains — or, if you're a lucky baby, a brain with two sets of neural circuits dedicated to two languages.

It's remarkable that babies being raised bilingual — by simply speaking to them in two languages — can learn both in the time it takes most babies to learn one. On average, monolingual and bilingual babies start talking around age 1 and can say about 50 words by 18 months.

Italian researchers wondered why there wasn't a delay, and reported this month in the journal Science that being bilingual seems to make the brain more flexible.

Helena's brain is flexible indeed; she plays with English, with French, and various combinations thereof. But bilingualism, and the problem of translation, brings its own class of errors.

Helena persists in flatting the kitty — the kitty likes to be flatted, we should all flatte the kitty. Flatter is to pet, but the English "to pet" just won't stick. We have French roots with English inflections.

Helena tells me a story, posits an alien, from another planet, "like March." Since the French month mars is March in English, quite logically she assumes the planet would be translated in the same way.

When something does not go according to Helena's expectations — be it a person's reaction, verbal or physical, or the work of the cat or of gravity — she regularly stops to remark, "C'était pas prévu." In recent weeks she's come to translate her commentary to English: "That was not prévu." And refined it further, "That was not previewed." I've explained that that simply doesn't sound natural in English, no one would say that, "preview" just doesn't work. With my input, she's modified her translation, and uses it often. "That was not foreseen." Which is just interminably cute coming out of the mouth of a 6-year-old.

Spare parts

I've taken quite a break from 2666, to break away from all the rotten death of part 4 (The Part About the Crimes), and just to be able to read something — finish something! — less than 1000 pages long. But I find myself starting in on the last volume (The Part About Archimboldi), and I'm wildly excited about this, I want to take notes as I go, things are gelling.

(Really, I shouldn't read more than one book, or maybe two, at a time. I'm no good at it, never have been. It makes me feel uncentred.)

(Especially when there's no time, there hasn't been any time, where does the time go?, my sister came to visit, and J-F went off for a camping weekend, and the kid and I play and play (she's off to day camp next week), and the weather's shitty rainy the whole time so we can't just go to the park where she'd play and I'd watch and read, we have to do indoor things, which takes a lot more ingenuity and patience, plus you have to clean up, meanwhile work is a little crazy, and there must be 83 loads of laundry to do, the closet shelving is falling down, and I think the bathroom is starting to smell, there's just no time.)

I am currently playing catch-up on the Infinite Summer project; I've re-read the first 80 odd pages of Infinite Jest, which I'd read a couple years ago, and some beyond, but I'm not quite up to schedule yet.

Also, for some reason I thought now would be a good time to finish up The Adventures of Amir Hamza, which I'm not even half-way through, and I can't begin to estimate just how many bathroom trips it might take.

So, between volumes of 2666 seemed like an excellent time to squeeze in some actual reading, of the kind where you actually get to close the book after a few days, maybe feel a faint sense of accomplishment in so doing.

Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Sun Over Breda, which, sadly, bored me, in the way that I'm just not into the minutiae of battle, no matter how glorious the language, but it was quick and it's over. (He's an interesting writer for being so visual. Very obviously he's knowledgeable about fine art and greatly inspired by it.)

And I closed Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night, which was nice — just in that kinship you feel with Manguel, that love for and comfort in books and libraries.

(I never did write about my brief encounter with him, my seeing him deliver one of the Massey Lectures. Apart from the lecture itself, which was fascinating and for which I still have notes lying around somewhere, he's a lovely man. He signed my book for me and I asked him what he was reading back then in November 2007: He smiled shyly and apologized before answering. "It sounds so pedantic." Locke's On Tolerance. Yes, for pleasure. But his face lit up in telling me he'd just finished the latest Reginald Hill, Death Comes for the Fat Man. Manguel highly recommends Dalziel and Pascoe: "You must start at the beginning. They're wonderful!" (I've never read them, but I might.))

And poetry! I'm making my way through a volume of Janusz Szuber, and while I can't say it gives me a sense of accomplishment exactly (poetry causes for me something more like befuddlement), my brain feels stretched in all the right places for it.

Things are gelling. I mean ideas are, in my head.

I whipped across the street to Indigo at lunch yesterday to hear Lewis Black, shilling for his latest book (Me of Little Faith). He didn't read from the book, but talked quite soberly (albeit entertainingly) about the craft of writing, his basic advice being, Just write. Don't think about it. If you start thinking, you realize it's crap, and so you don't bother to write it down cuz it's crap, you feel you have to think it through, and so you go have a think and before you know it you're napping, and you wake up and give up on the whole crap idea of writing. But if you write it down, at least you know where it might go, even if you have to rewrite everything to get there. Basically.

Also he noted that he thinks differently whether he's typing or writing longhand — a different process entirely. And then he answered questions for half an hour.

But about things gelling. I guess I mean associations are gelling. Cuz the whole time I'm listening to Lewis Black, I'm thinking about Infinite Jest. Particularly as Black rants about the fact that television and computers haven't been fully merged yet — it's the same screen!, the problem is money, they haven't figured out how to distribute the money they'd make yet — and I'm thinking teleputers! Wallace had the TP all figured out. And Black goes on about this human urge for entertainment, and really, whether you're flaked out on the couch watching Comedy Central or lolling away the afternoon reading Chekhov, it's really the same thing. And I'm thinking, yeah. And I think about asking Black for his thoughts on Wallace, but I realize I know next to nothing about either Black or Wallace to be able to gauge whether I might be on to something so I discard the impulse, but some kind of neuronal connection has already been made and I can't shake it.

Worth murdering a world

It occurred to him suddenly that she might even get up and leave him, go back to Snow's with her secret for the first comer who questioned her kindly: he had to conciliate her, they were walking out, he'd got to do the things expected of him. He put out his hand with repulsion; it lay like a cold paddock on her knee. "You took me wrong," he said, "you're a sweet girl. I've been worried, that's all. Business worries. You and me" — he swallowed painfully — "we suit each other down to the ground." He saw the colour go, the face turn to him with a blind willingness to be deceived, saw the lips waiting. He drew her hand up quickly and put his mouth against her fingers: anything was better than the lips: the fingers were rough on his skin and tasted a little of soap. She said, "Pinkie, I'm sorry. You're sweet to me."

He laughed nervously, "You and me," and heard the hoot of a bus with the joy of a besieged man listening to the bugle of the relieving force. "There," he said, "the bus. Let's be going. I'm not much of a one for the country. A city bird. You too." She got up and he saw the skin of her thigh for a moment above the artificial silk, and a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape — anywhere — for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.

"It's beautiful here all the same," she said, staring up the chalky ruts between the To Let boards, and the Boy laughed again at the fine words people gave to a dirty act: love, beauty . . . All his pride coiled like a watch spring round the thought that he wasn't deceived, that he wasn't going to give himself up to marriage and the birth of children, he was going to be where Colleoni now was and higher . . . He knew everything, he had watched every detail of the act of sex, you couldn't deceive him with lovely words, there was nothing to be excited about, no gain to recompense you for what you lost; but when Rose turned to him again, with the expectation of a kiss, he was aware all the same of a horrifying ignorance. His mouth missed hers and recoiled. He'd never yet kissed a girl.

— from Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene.

OK. Wow. I didn't think much of this book when I first cracked it open, but it got intense fast.

I feel so sorry for Pinkie! I mean, he's only 17. And his Catholicism is of no help to him at all. He believes firmly in Hell, there's evidence of damnation all around, but he can't commit to the idea of there being a God, because, well, I'm not really sure why, but things seem pretty hopeless.

I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say there's a murder committed in the early chapters of the novel, and the rest of book follows Pinkie (yes, Pinkie) as he tries to cover his tracks. Guilt, and possibly the first inklings of tenderness or love, is chipping away at his hardened gangster-wannabe exterior. But it's fear and paranoia that lead him on a reckless and devastating path.

[If you don't like spoilers, don't read JM Coetzee's introduction — thanks goodness I didn't till just a few moments ago.]

Oh, and poor Rose! She really believes he loves her! Reading what Pinkie recorded for her on the gramophone was like a punch in the gut. I can't bear to imagine how her life will crumble when one day she listens to it. Poor Rose... Talk about rose-coloured glasses!

Aside from Pinkie and Rose, there's a lot of pink in this book. Little shots of pink throughout the noir, a paler shade of the blood on Pinkie's hands that occasionally comes to surface. (His full name's Pinkie Brown.)

There are no words or dialogue that don't need to be here. It's a tight little novel about grim circumstances, complex characters grappling with the differences between right-and-wrong and good-and-evil, shown to vary according to age, experience, religion. Great book!

Gipsy girl

"I suppose I shall have to tell you," I said slowly. "I'm not ashamed of it. You can't be ashamed of something that just — happens to you. That's what he did. He was detestable — rude and ungrateful — but that I think I understand. It's like a dog that's been chained up — or badly treated — it'll bite anybody. That's what he was like — bitter and snarling. I don't know why I care — but I do. I care horribly. Just seeing him has turned my whole life upside-down. I love him. I want him. I'll walk all over Africa barefoot till I find him, and I'll make him care for me. I'd die for him. I'd work for him, slave for him, steal for him, even beg or borrow for him! There — now you know!"

Suzanne looked at me for a long time.

"You're very unEnglish, Gipsy girl," she said at last. "There's not a scrap of the sentimental about you. I've never met anyone who was at once so practical and so passionate. I shall never care for anyone like that — mercifully for me — and yet — and yet I envy you, Gipsy girl. It's something to be able to care. Most people can't. [...]"

— from The Man in the Brown Suit, by Agatha Christie.

I'd forgotten what a pleasure Christie is to read.

The part about Amalfitano

It's been some time since I read part 2 of Roberto Bolaño's 2666 (I'm near the end of part 4, and reading some books alongside this one). I made some notes as I went along (from which most of the below is constructed), but this section, to judge by the vividness of it in my memory, seems not to have made as much of an impression on me as The Part about the Critics.

While this part has more "story" to it, it's also somewhat more surreal.

Memory
Lola has assimilated what she learned from Amalfitano into her own memory. She believes the poet is a former lover of hers, but it was from Amalfitano that she first learned about him.

It's never clear if her letters to Amalfitano relating her history with and her meeting with the poet are complete fabrications, or whether any portion of it is grounded in her actual experience.

Amalfitano himself becomes increasingly unreliable as a narrator, casting double doubt on Lola's story.

Greek
A handful of allusions again in this section, again that I'm unable to make anything of.

- "Sometimes she [Lola] felt like Electra, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, wandering in disguise in Mycenae, the killer mingling with the plebes [...]
- Other times the mother of Medon and Strophius
- Pylades, Orestes stand for the faces of many men

Amalfitano and Duchamp
Amalfitano finds a book in his possession and goes through some mental contortions to place it. (I can relate: Imagine finding a book that you have no inkling how it got there! It would drive me crazy!)

On the front flap, the reader was informed that the Testamento geométrico was really three books, "each independent, but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole,' and then it said "this work representing the final distillation of Dieste's research on Space, the notion of which is involved in any methodical discussion of the fundamentals of Geometry."

Much the same could be said of 2666's first 3 parts, triangulating on Santa Teresa.

Amalfitano hangs the book out on a clothes line, in the spirit of a readymade conceived by Duchamp, who meant for the wind to go through the book and find (and deal with) its own problems or, as Amalfitano interprets it, to see if the book learns anything about real life.

It's Art, I guess, but I don't think Amalfitano's intentions are artistic ones, exactly. The act has the feeling of an I Ching. It seems to affect Amalfitano via osmosis, in that he starts producing drawings, quite unconsciously, diagramming, possibly, relationships between philosophers.

At which point it appears that Amalfitano is losing his mind. He considers that the voice in his head may be a product of telepathy.

Telepathy
Lola imagined she was establishing telepathic contact with the poet.

Amalfitano relates the voice in his head to telepathy and reads about the Araucanians, who had refined telepathy as a viable means of communication, as well as sending messages by the movement of branches.

Morini in his dream (in part 1) faced Norton "and she said: 'There's no turning back.' He heard the sentence not with his ears but in his head. Norton has acquired telepathic powers, Morini thought. She isn't bad, she's good. It isn't evil I sensed, it's telepathy."

Literature
Mostly I think this passage is funny:

One of the employees was a young pharmacist, barely out of his teens, extremely thin and with big glasses, who would sit up at night reading a book when the pharmacy was open twenty-four hours. One night, while the kid was scanning the shelves, Amalfitano asked him what books he liked and what book he was reading, just to make conversation. Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who in another life might have been Trakl or who in this life might still be writing poems as desperate as those of his distant Austrian counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential words, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and tench.

However. There's something going on here: refusing to take on literature (or reality?) head on.

Magic
There's a lot of magic in this book, in different forms. The magic of dreams, telepathy, superstition, art and literature.

Boris Yeltsin — "last Communist philosopher" — appears to Amalfitano in a dream, with wisdom to impart:

And he said: listen carefully to what I have to say, comrade. I'm going to explain what the third leg of the human table is. I'm going to tell you. And then leave me alone. Life is demand and supply, or supply and demand, that's what it all boils down to, but that's no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into the garbage pit of history, which in turn is permanently collapsing into the garbage pit of the void. So take note. This is the equation: supply + demand + magic. And what is magic? Magic is epic and it's also sex and Dionysian mists and play. And then Yeltsin sat on the crater or the latrine and showed Amalfitano the fingers he was missing and talked about his childhood and about the Urals and Siberia and about a white tiger that roamed the infinite snowy spaces. And then he took a flask of vodka out of his suit pocket and said:

"I think it's time for a little drink."

(This dream sequence really stood out for me, and weirdly, there's a bit in part 4 that I just read that makes reference to it: a highly respected serial killer profiler "dreamed of a crater and a man pacing around it. That man is probably me, he said to himself in the dream, but it didn't strike him as important and the image was lost." So I'm thinking it's not the identity of the man that matters so much as the existence of the crater (or latrine — Amalfitano considers that it may be a latrine), some void left by a force of destruction, something blatant, which still they circle, as if to stare into that abyss, or acknowledge it, would negate their existence.)

Summary
Lola spends her time circling the poet, daring to meet him only twice (or was it more than that? either way, I think my point stands). She seems always to be waiting for a sign (sign of her friend Imma) before taking action, or taking for signs some mundane thing to justify her action. Amalfitano has his own disconnect from reality, circling round his career, his daughter, the city he lives in without daring a head-on confrontation. Is he waiting for the book to give him a sign? Or the voice? Bolaño certainly is circling round the murders at Santa Teresa.

The epigraph of 2666 comes from Baudelaire: "An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom." I'm beginning to see what this means.

From nowhere

It's a disconcerting feeling to watch the blue arrow leave the road, the only road, on the GPS, watch the road drop out of the bottom of the screen, and know that you are that blue arrow, with no point of reference, moving, or not moving, across a vast plane of nothing, a screen that looks like it's waiting for images to load, a landscape that's waiting for civilization to tame it.

We stayed not long. Armies of insects laid in wait for us. Helena complained of the itching and I lifted the hair off her neck to inspect the damage. I had to stifle my horror at the trails of blood from the dozens of bites, trying not to alarm her.

The fish weren't biting at all.

Then it rained; it stormed. I slept, and read.

********

I finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson). I'm still puzzled by the decision to use this title for the translation over something more literally accurate (something like "Men Who Hate Women"); a marketing decision, no doubt, but curious that the English-speaking world should be deemed to have a unique sensibility in this regard.

It's a most interesting experience to have read this alongside part 4 of Bolaño's 2666, because really, they're both about men hating women, making the point about a certain kind of woman, foreign or transient, socioeconomically disadvantaged, psychologically predisposed to victimization — someone marginalized so that no one much notices her absence, any investigation would be half-hearted, no one much cares. This is our horrific reality (see Pickton).

********

The kitten came with us. It seems a good idea to accustom her to car travel at young age. She travels well.

Helena has renamed the kitten. Her name is now Action.

To defend its honour

The Angel's Game, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, is already destined to be a bestseller — it doesn't need my help in the slightest.

You should know: I hated The Shadow of Wind. I thought, and still think, it's one of the most overrated pieces of crap I've ever read. Sure, it starts of with a lovely bookish feel but it quickly fell apart for me: the characters, the plot, the language — everything about it was a bit too farfetched.

I don't know what possessed me then to accept an ARC of The Angel's Game. I fully expected to hate it. Though The Shadow is now but a shadow in my memory, I very clearly remember fuming about reading it and the time I was wasting reading it (while continuing to read it).

Maybe because my expectations were so low... I found myself loving this book and unable to put it down.

"You have more zeal than good taste, Martín. The disease afflicting you has a name, and that is Grand Guignol: it does to drama what syphilis does to your privates. Getting it might be pleasurable, but from then on it's all downhill. You should read the classics, or at least Don Benito Pérez Galdós, to elevate your literary aspirations."

"But the readers like my stories," I argued.

"You don't deserve the credit. That belongs to your rivals: they are so bad and pedantic that they could render a donkey catatonic in less than a paragraph. When are you going to mature and stop munching the forbidden fruit once and for all?"

I would nod, full of contrition, but secretly I caressed those forbidden words, Grand Guignol, and I told myself that every cause, however frivolous, needed a champion to defend its honour.

This book is full of exuberance. The reader is propelled forward because of (not despite) its Grand Guignol elements. While the plot does spin out of control (and the body count climbs), the author has much better control of his material here than in The Shadow. The writer knows he cannot do the reader's job. He is smarter to leave things unanswered and ambiguous than to supply tortuous explanations that couldn't possibly hit all the right notes. Those are the things this reader revels in.

One thing really bothers me: Isabella marries and has a child and never writes again. The headstrong girl who essentially stalked an author, who went to great lengths to extract a critique of her work and for writerly advice. She just stops. Her son becomes her everything. I don't know if this is meant to be realistic, or if this is the author's thoughtless brushing aside of the character once her purpose had been served. But it strikes me as wrong.

Incidentally, my sister went to hear Zafón a couple weeks ago. He came across as personable and had entertaining anecdotes to share regarding his first forays into publishing as a youth. He named a couple authors whom he reads, respects, admires: Joyce Carol Oates and China Miéville, the latter in particular for his defiance of genre stereotypes.

My final verdict: The Angel's Game was wonderfully entertaining and makes for a great summer read.

Shelved

Bedtime is altogether different with a new kitten in the house. For many weeks, Rosie has been confusing "bedtime" with "playtime."

Helena had hoped Rosie would sleep with her and would scoop her into her bed in the evening. But Rosie wouldn't settle down on command, and then it took far too many minutes to corral the kitty out of Helena's room, so now Helena doesn't even bother — she closes the door behind her to make sure no feline whips through her dreams.

Come my bedtime, Rosie is no better at settling down, but as I usually read for a while, it doesn't bother me too much. She circles the bed, surveils the territory, clears the corners of invisible predators, attacks my toes. She is curious about my reading material, and when my book lies open on the bed she creeps up onto the page as if trying to discern those strange markings. I remove her. The dance repeats itself. She eventually tires.

Last night was quiet. I read. When I turned over to turn off the light, I discovered Rosie was close by after all; she's found herself a comfortable niche among the mass market paperbacks.

Strawberry

I have a basket of strawberries hanging on my balcony. I am unreasonably excited about this.

As a teenager, many summers I picked strawberries on farms to earn some extra spending money (though having eaten a significant portion of my haul, this was hardly a profitable activity). But never have I grown my own berries.

This photo was taken a couple days ago. This morning Helena deemed the biggest of them had reddened enough.

Picked and eaten. The finest strawberry she's ever tasted!

Tomorrow will be my turn to sample one. A couple dozen more are currently in flower.

Goddamn phonies

Last weekend the kid had another birthday party to attend, obliging us to drive out to the burbs and exchange pleasantries with other parents with whom we have nothing in common except for our offspring being in the same kindergarten class (why do suburbanites send their kids to school at the end of our street? and why can't the downtown parents find fun, age-appropriate birthday activities for their children in the neighbourhood they live in?).

In those few awkward moments before we abandoned our children to the care of the unwitting parents who'd extended this invitation on behalf of their fresh 6-year-old, the conversation fumbled a bit, but being that there was a cinema complex in the mall in which we'd assembled, movies seemed a natural subject.

J-F mentioned he'd like to see the new Terminator movie, and I smiled in a kind of solidarity — it's certainly one of the coolest trailers I've seen in ages. Who doesn't love to watch the post-apocalypse?! Apparently, all the parents of my daughter's peers. We were promptly advised that the Star Trek movie is far superior — it's multilayered! — and were snubbed for the duration of the ritual smalltalk. J-F fails to understand their lack of appreciation, and has been fuming over this incident for days.

So it comes as a kind of vindication to learn that J.D. Salinger broke his public silence this weekend to share his fervour for the latest Terminator movie.

[Apparently he's developed quite a bit of literary material over the years, all of which appears to be "without a doubt the most personal and affecting body of Terminator fan fiction ever discovered."]

J-F can keep company with the likes of Salinger while the goddamn phonies pat each other on the back.

That subspecies of readers

The rooms in which writers (that subspecies of readers) surround themselves with the materials they need for their work acquire an animal quality, like that of a den or a nest, holding the shape of their bodies and offering a container to their thoughts. Here the writer can make his own bed among the books, be as monogamous or polygamous a reader as he wishes, choose an approved classic or an ignored newcomer, leave arguments unfinished, start on any page opened by chance, spend the night reading out loud so as to hear his own voice read back to him, in Virgil's famous words, under "the friendly silence of the soundless moon."

— from The Library at Night, by Alberto Manguel.

Summer reading issue

I've never really planned my summer reading before, but then, my child has never finished a school year before, so it happens that we're all of us going to take off some time together, and much of that time will be spent simply hanging out, some of it in town, and some of it at the cottage, and "hanging out" means I should have a couple books on hand, particularly since "hanging out" to J-F means fishing, and we all know I'm happier with a book in my hand not catching any fish than having a fishing rod in my hand and not catching any fish, and I just bought a chair for my "garden" (where "garden" means stone courtyard with a couple pots, a couple baskets) that has armrests large enough to sit a drink on, and a footrest, all of which adds up to it being a perfect chair to while away the summer in, reading. I really am unreasonably excited about this chair, and the prospect of reading in it, but oh well, and notice how I've barely mentioned the kid; I guess I expect her to occupy herself.

The Angel's Game, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I've essentially finished reading this ARC already, and will write more about it in a couple days. I fully expected this to drift into my "summer" reading, but I couldn't put it down, and, well, now it's done. (I thought Shadow of the Wind was grossly overrated. This novel, on the other hand, I enjoyed immensely.)

2666, by Roberto Bolaño. I'm trying to pace myself. I loved part 1, but I couldn't stop there. This put me ahead of the schedule for the reading group I'd happened upon. But while I subsequently ate up parts 2 and 3, I want also to consider them thoughtfully. I started on part 4, but as fate would have it, I was in no mood to read about gruesome murder details that day in the métro. So I've set it aside until I find a clearer mental space and the time to be able to write about it as I go.

The Sun over Breda, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. The further swashbuckling adventures of Captain Alatriste! I let out an involuntary exclamation of joy when I came across this at the bookstore last week. Obviously it was meant to be, meant for me, and meant for me now.

Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene. Being that everything I know about Brighton I learned form Patrick Hamilton, I thought I should broaden my education. Not that I'm particularly interested in learning more about Brighton. But I read an excerpt a while back, and was thoroughly wowed.

The Man in the Brown Suit, by Agatha Christie. Which remarkably I'd never read — I read dozens of Christie novels during my adolescence, but evidently not all — and I've been wanting to read ever since I saw that Doctor Who episode. Plus, I love the packaging.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson. Everyone who's read it, raves about it, including a coworker for whom I'll be using this as a test book, to gauge whether her taste in books is reliably compatible with mine or not. I had a hard time figuring out what trilogy exactly she was so crazy for, as the title of the first book in French is Les hommes qui n'aimaient pas les femmes (nothing about a tattoo there).

(I ordered these last three — Greene, Christie, Larsson — from Amazon. It's tough economic times: Gone are the days when "ship when entire order is ready" meant they'd probably send you the bulk of your order straight away anyway. This makes me nervous, as the order is awaiting the release of the Larsson in paperback, and estimated package delivery is a day into my vacation time, and I kind of have to convince the family that we really ought to stick around town for a day or two before we trek off into the wilderness, to ensure that I have books with which to trek off.)

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. Because it's the Infinite Summer! Which sounds way more promising than that infinite winter when I didn't manage to finish it! And! I'll be covering the same geographic territory while I revisit the same literary territory! Like it's fated!

(Interesting reading related to DFW: About designing the inside of a DFW book.)

There's not a chance (is there?) that I'll get through this list before I have to show my face at work again; but I'm racing through pages lately, and set to cross titles off the list before even my vacation officially begins. I am prepared to steal back the copy of Spook Country (William Gibson) I picked up for J-F if I have to. And provided I'm on home ground when the pile runs out, there's the Nelson Algren I've been meaning to get to...

There's a good list of paperbacks in time for summer in this weekend's Montreal Gazette, a couple of which I vouch for (Petite Anglaise, by Catherine Sanderson, and The Painter of Battles, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, although this one isn't exactly light reading), and a couple more which greatly interest me.

I also like the list in The Telegraph. (You'll find 2666 and A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, which I can't recommend highly enough, therein.)

What are you reading this summer?

BFF

On our walk to school in the morning, Helena very gravely tells me, "Mommy, you're my second-best friend now." I've been usurped.

"Me and Rosie, we do everything together."

Including growing up too fast.

A walk on the beach

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.

— from 2666, by Roberto Bolaño.

Economy of words

Last week I found a near-pristine copy of a 1974 editon of Words into Type.

I paid $10, at Cheap Thrills.

On December 27, 2004, someone bought this same book, used, at the Barnes & Noble in Burlington, Vermont, for $7 (USD), with a gift card, according to the receipt I found inside.

In 2000 (or was it a year or two earlier?) I saw the book, new, in a bookstore in New York City (or was it Washington, DC?), leading me to believe that in fact it wasn't so hard to find in the United States. I didn't have $48 (USD) to spare that weekend. I left the book on the shelf.

I have been looking for this book since 1996.

A quick search shows me that this book is more widely available (affordably) than once I thought (I swear I looked high and low when I first got Internet access in 1996, but I guess I gave up on that avenue of pursuit too early; I have carried this title over from one list to PDA to another over the years, and pulled the list out for reference in countless used book stores), but this does not lessen the joy I take in my great find.

Lots of grammar! Great indexing! Definitions of useful things like "apposition" and "cognate object"! Twenty-two pages devoted to the comma! What all those copyeditors said was true! This is the greatest reference ever!

How much is this book worth?!

The part about the critics

I'm greatly enjoying Roberto Bolaño's 2666.

By sheer coincidence, of which I have the luxury, I stumbled upon a bloggers' discussion, cohosted by Steph and Tony Investigate and Kiss a Cloud. I don't know who these people are, but they seem to love books, and have interesting ideas about this one in particular, and that's all good. I'll be checking in there as I progress to see what others make of this book.

I posted an excerpt and some comments a few days ago. Below are some of my thoughts, still relatively fresh, having completed part 1.

Archimboldi
The name is easily confused with Archimboldo, to Pelletier's outrage and horror we learn on the first page. His paintings are, in my opinion, grotesque, but inviting scrutiny.

By his early mention, Bolaño invites the reference. This book is having an effect similar to that of the paintings: surreal and weird, faintly beautiful, not what it appears to be.

Greek
— "Pelletier was more intimately acquainted than Espinoza with Mnemosyne, mountain goddess and mother of the nine muses."
— "...Espinoza and Pelletier believed themselves to be (and in their perverse way, were) incarnations of Ulysses, and that both thought of Morini as Eurolychus..."
— Pritchard to Pelletier, regarding Norton, "'Beware of the Medusa.'"

There are allusions here. Yeah, I have no idea.

Coincidence
Edwin Johns, the (fictional) artist who cut off his hand to use it in a self-portrait, relates an argument about coincidence.

"And as far as coincidence is concerned, it's never a question of believing in it or not. The whole world is a coincidence. I had a friend who told me I was wrong to think that way. My friend said the world isn't a coincidence for someone traveling by rail, even if the train should cross foreign lands, places the traveler will never see again in his life. And it isn't a coincidence for the person who gets up at six in the morning, exhausted, to go to work; for the person who has no choice but to get up and pile more suffering on the suffering he's already accumulated. Suffering is accumulated, said my friend, that's a fact, and the greater the suffering, the smaller the coincidence." [ed: Just trying to wrap my head around this... No coincidence because there's an enforced(?) structure, whether the natural structure of geography and physics, or the social/economic structure of scheduled workdays. The more order there is, the less chance for chance. But how is this suffering, exactly, apart from being at the mercy of all this order?]

"As if coincidence were a luxury?" asked Morini.

[. . .]

"Coincidence isn't a luxury, it's the flip side of fate, and something else besides," said Johns.

"What else?" asked Morini.

"Something my friend couldn't grasp, for a reason that's simple and easy to understand. My friend (if I may still call him that) [ed: Who's Johns's friend anyway?] believed in humanity, and so he also believed in order, in the order of painting and the order of words, since words are what we paint with. [ed: Wait a second. Being a painter, Johns actually paints with paint (and body parts). Is his friend a painter? or a writer? Is Johns simply being metaphorical here or is there possibly something more to it?] He believed in redemption. Deep down he may even have believed in progress. Coincidence, on the other hand, is total freedom, our natural destiny. Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don't know what they are. Coincidence, if you'll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In the hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion. The communion of coincidence and effect and the communion of effect with us."

Coincidence, then, is evidence of a God who doesn't care, who has no interest. (How is this different from there being no God at all?) But it's just a simile. Why invoke the simile if it's only to negate the vehicle?

Art
The story of Edwin Johns fascinates me. Could this personage and his claim to fame be based on a real artist?

Art is an act of self-negation. Johns certainly negated his painting hand. (Also: the only true representation of a thing is the thing itself.) Archimboldi is so negated as to possibly not exist at all.

Once in Mexico, Amalfitano explains to the critics the relationship between Mexican intellectuals with power. There follows a long and rambling yet beautiful passage, ultimately senseless, so Amalfitano admits, in which the shadows of the writers have slipped away, and this negates the worth of the intellectuals and their authority, or transmutes the intellectuals into something else entirely (reckless gods, or beautiful monsters, but pathetic all). (And here, when the intellectuals retire for the night, comes my favourite sentence: "The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible.")

Violence
The violence is jarring. My jaw dropped at an early instance, when the little gaucho is looking at the lady with the eyes of a bird of prey, and here there is an image so startlingly horrific (which I will not repeat here), and then it's gone, wrapped up, uncomfortably but dismissively, as if there is nothing threatening about this "clumsy young butcher."

Then there's the taxi incident. The cabbie wasn't entirely innocent, but surely he didn't deserve all that was brought down upon him. Pelletier and Espinoza have acted "out of character," but I think that's part of the point — we never know, often don't even suspect, what we're capable of, particularly if pushed or provoked, till it happens.

One of the critics commented that the cab driver, in calling the streets a labyrinth, had unconsciously quoted Borges ("I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London)"). Is that where the violence sprouts from? The cabbie feels he's being called an idiot, so he calls their woman a whore. Are they defending her honour, or their own authority as critics? Or does it stem from something else entirely?

There is more violence to come, I know. The above episodes really came out of the blue, with my primary response in both cases being, "What the hell just happened?" Presumably, subsequent episodes will follow in this pattern?

The dreams
Are creepy. And very realistically dream-like.

Morini
Morini really interests me because he's more an observer than a participant in all the events of part 1.

His fascination with Johns seems unhealthy. I'm not sure what it's founded in. Purely academic — philosophical — curiosity? Upon first hearing the story of Johns, "The urge to weep — or else, faint — persisted, but he restrained it."

I think it's this quality that saves Morini. Restraint.

Morini is all about critical detachment.

As a contender for Norton's affections, he detaches himself, and from his outsider's position he wins her.

Similarly, his interest in Archimboldi never consumes him to the point of dropping his real life to chase some crazy tale to Mexico. His interest remains professional and reasonable. He does, however, enable the others' obsession with Archimboldi, bringing word of his sighting to them. (Coincidence? Did he foresee how the others would react? Part of me want to believe that Morini is Archimboldi, but I don't think I can make this hypothesis fit the facts.)

Maybe Morini represents the reading audience: a bit perverse, voyeuristic, but reasonably so and with restraint (the one quality all the other characters seem to lack).

Summary
This is a lot of me having no idea, and raising (or repeating) more questions than I dare answer. But greatly enjoying the ride.

Gratuitous kitten picture

Under the tulips. Rosie likes flowers.

Dislocation

More about The City & the City.

Dislocation
Miéville on the nature of the cities and the sense of dislocation that accompanies detective stories, for their holes — not flaws — in logic:



Epigraphitization
"Deep inside the town open up, so to speak, double streets, doppelganger streets, mendacious, and delusive streets."
— from The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz.

(I read The Street of Crocodiles a couple years ago. It's rather surreal. And it's not surprising that it be referenced by Miéville.)

Machicolation
I have a special fondness for writers who use this word (and Miéville does) — machicolation — because it's a word I encountered and that stumped me in the spelling bee in grade 11, when I was asked at the last minute (well, with about 10 minutes to spare) to represent the school in a regional contest, and I don't think we even had rules regarding definitions and etymology, but I surmised the reader was mispronouncing "matriculation," which was the only word I knew that sounded remotely close to what I was hearing. Of course, I know exactly what it is now.

Linguisophistication
Miéville does some interesting tricks with vocabulary. Besźel and Ul Qoma each have their own language; words are also borrowed from English. At some point I half-expected this book to have a Clockwork Orange–like glossary of terms (which novel I read through without having realized there was a glossary, relying on my own sense of Polish to understand the Slavic-based argot), but the neologisms, however clever, were also very natural in context — no glossary required.

Spoliation
Some reviews and comments are up at Library Thing. I'm a bit concerned now that my own comments may spoil the discovery of the grand conceit for readers. Even though the condition of the cities, their relationship, is suggested in the descriptions and through word choice early on, it is only gradually revealed. But it is for the most part laid out within the "beginning" section of the book (although even at book's end, not entirely clear).

Separate and interminable suburbs

If all experience is more than the sum of its parts, is it in any way possible to reconstruct a semblance thereof by analyzing its constituents?

Of course there is.

Around this time, Pelletier and Espinoza, worried about the current state of their mutual lover, had two long conversations on the phone.

Pelletier made the first call, which lasted an hour and fifteen minutes. The second was made three days later by Espinoza and lasted two hours and fifteen minutes. After they'd been talking for an hour and half, Pelletier told Espinoza to hang up, the call would be expensive and he'd call right back, but Espinoza firmly refused.

The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier's call, as if both men found it difficult to say what sooner or later they would have to say. The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word fate used ten times and the word friendship twenty-four times. Liz Norton's name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word Paris was said seven times, Madrid, eight. The word love was spoken twice, once by each man. The word horror was spoken six times and the word happiness once (by Espinoza). The word solution was said twelve times. The word solipsism seven times. The word euphemism ten times. The word category, in the singular and the plural, nine times. The word structuralism once (Pelletier). The term American literature three times. The words dinner or eating or breakfast or sandwich nineteen times. The words eyes or hands or hair fourteen times. Then the conversation proceeded more smoothly. Pelletier told Espinoza a joke in German and Espinoza laughed, wrapped up in the waves or whatever it was that linked their voices and ears across the dark fields and the wind and the snow of the Pyrenees and the rivers and the lonely roads and the separate and interminable suburbs surrounding Paris and Madrid.

— from 2666, by Roberto Bolaño.

Although I treated myself to a copy of 2666 at around Christmas, I'm only just now getting over the the Bolaño glut I experienced at that time and getting past the intimidation this book carries with it, and getting on with it. To this point, about 100 pages in, I'm loving it, and finding it a much smoother (more cohesive and coherent) read than The Savage Detectives.

I have the 3-volume paperback version, slipcased, chosen with commuting in mind. It's beautifully designed! The image is a detail from Gustave Moreau's Jupiter and Semele, dark, brooding, and apocalyptic; the book title is a bold counterpoint (reminiscent of Wild West posters — Blackoak font?) in vulgar red.

From certain angles (well, most), the only visible writing is 666 (as pictured above).

I've been reading in the métro, and this book has garnered far more inquisitive glances from my fellow passengers than most, struck by its beauty or afeard of my satanic presence.

Elementary urban arithmetic

"Stick us to crowds," I told him. "And to crosshatching." More people, and where the two cities are close up they make for interference patterns, harder to read or predict. They are more than a city and a city; that is elementary urban arithmetic.

China Miéville is cool. His new book, The City & the City, also very cool. It's billed as an existential thriller. The thriller part I get; it's a police procedural with overtones of a political conspiracy. So far, so cool (even if not cool or thrilling, or heart-pumpingly horrifying, on the same level as the Bas-Lag books).

The existential part I'm still grappling with (in a good way). The cities, you see, Besźel and Ul Qoma, share the same physical space, grosstopically speaking. They're kind of quantum-state city-states.

The best I can wrap my head around it, it's like when you don't have cable TV and the reception is just plain shitty, and you get two pictures coming in on near the same frequency, and you can actually watch one or the other of the programs if you focus your attention just right.

There are physical, spatial difficulties associated with this set-up, for the cities' citizens, as well as for my own understanding of the concept. There are borders, checkpoints. And there is an independent authority, Breach, to keep breach of the rules to a minimum.

To complicate matters, throw in a mythical third city, the grail of the murder victim, and investigated online by Inspector Borlú in the forums at fracturedcity.org (which URL redirects users to the publisher's site).

"Orciny's the third city. It's between the the other two. It's in the dissensi, disputed zones, places that Besźel thinks are Ul Qoma's and Ul Qoma Besźel's. When the old commune split, it didn't split into two, it split into three. Orciny's the secret city. It runs things."

If split there was. That beginning was a shadow in history, an unknown — records effaced and vanished for a century either side. Anything could have happened. From that historically brief quite opaque moment came the chaos of our material history, an anarchy of chronology, of mismatched remnants that delighted and horrified investigators. All we know is nomads on the steppes, then these black-box centuries of urban instigation — certain events, and there have been films and stories and games based on speculation (all making the sensor at least a little twitchy) about that dual birth — then history comes back and there are Besźel and Ul Qoma. Was it schism or conjoining?

As if that were not mystery enough and as if two crosshatched countries were insufficient, bards invented that third, the pretend-existing Orciny. On top floors, in ignorable Roman-style townhouses, in the first wattle-and-daub dwellings, taking up the intricately conjoined and disjointed spaces allotted it in the split or coagulation of the tribes, the tiny third city Orciny ensconced, secreted between the two brasher city-states. A community of imaginary overlords, exiles perhaps, in most stories machinating and making thins so, ruling with a subtle and absolute grip. Orciny was where the Illuminati lived. That sort of thing.

So. This idea of the double (or triple) city, this crosshatched interweaving — really cool.

It's implied that Besźel and Ul Qoma are divided along religious lines, Jewish and Muslim, though on rereading certain passages, I can't be certain that the example of the DöplirCaffé with its side-by-side kosher and halal counters wasn't thrown out as an example merely analogous of the kind of coexistence there once was or might be hoped for or is occasionally illicitly achieved.

Regardless, it's clear that the two cities have very distinct cultures and political differences: separate languages, modes of dress, trade agreements. They are peopled by nationalists and unificationists, though mostly just by regular people.

Inspector Borlú once attended a conference on policing split cities. Budapest, Jerusalem, Berlin. To include Besźel and Ul Qoma in this class was an insult. The boundary between them is not a physical one described by our known spatial dimensions. This is not a matter of East and West. Besźel buildings occupy the same physical space as Ul Qoma buildings, each with their own architectural features. The separation is a state of mind, a citizen living in their own culture and simply refusing to see the other.

I've been thinking a lot about this as I walk the streets of my own city. While there are sections of Montreal that are distinctly French and distinctly English, I live and work in an in-between, and I live in that mixed city in a different way than do my francophone colleagues. We are so bound by our habits, if not our prejudices, to see the streets as having different cultural textures and colours. I've never noticed this café or that shop because they are not part of my English world; they are mere dark doorways I pass quickly by and pay no attention to. On other stretches of street, these dark patches may loom ominously. How you see your space is a trick of your mind as much as it is a function of your visual cortex.

Despite having cleverly used the laws of the two cities to his own advantage in terms of jurisdiction and played the natural tendencies and prejudices of their citizens, the murderer is found out eventually. Inspector Borlú achieves a unique status upon closing the case, a kind of promotion to working for a rather different authority. And I'd love to read about his further travails in topolganger policing.