New machine jihad

"You'll have nothing to rule."

"The New Machine Jihad does not need to rule. It needs only itself."

A thwarted kidnapping, a Japanese businessman who apparently runs his affairs yakuza-style, a Russian organitskaya boss. So far, so thriller.

Equations of Life, by Simon Morden, is set in the 2020s, some time post Armageddon. We don't know much about what happened. Nuclear strikes? Japan sank into the sea. There's a Cold War reference, which may or may not have anything to do with Armageddon times. So, vaguely futuristic, but still more thriller than sci-fi.

In fact, for the first half of the novel, there's very little of anything hinting of sci-fi going on. It's suggested when we learn Petrovitch is working on this little quantum gravity thing, and again when Oshicora-san reveals his pet project: VirtualJapan.

Our protagonist, Samuil Petrovitch, is 22 and has serious heart trouble. For a few pages I suspected this book might head in the direction of organ development and/or trade, organic or otherwise.

But no. Just the faintest whiff of science.

The cop on the case is old-school — rough around the edges, but effective when it suits his purposes to be. Then there's the amazonian nun who keeps turning up to save Petrovitch's ass.

The cast and their context, while not as fully realized as I felt they could be, were certainly compelling enough to draw me forward. It seems, however, that some of the history was previously developed in Morden's short stories, so when I say I feel like I was dropped in the middle of something, it's because I kind of am. This novel does stand up entirely on its own, though.

There's an awful lot going on here, and I had to flip back on a few occasions to keep things straight (but I'm not the most practiced at reading — or watching, for that matter — "action"; characters and events start to blur for me if the pace is too frenetic and the language is combat).

Also, I did roll my eyes a couple times in the early stages, when, for example, (I think it was) the ventilator fans "were ancient with age." As the story progressed, however, such linguistic rough spots pretty much vanished.

As far as I'm concerned, things start to get sci-fi at about halfway, when the new machine jihad begins to assert itself. And that's very cool. And then it gets really sci-fi in the final pages. And that's totally cool. And now I'm dying to read the next book in the Petrovitch trilogy (the books are being released the end of March, April, and May, respectively).

I can't stress how unsettling it was to be finishing up this novel last Friday, after having heard the news of the disaster in Japan. This is a novel in which Japan had sunk into the sea(!); the world is reeling from nuclear fallout, and London is overflowing with immigrant ghettoes. So. Yeah. Unsettling. Still. The whole VirtualJapan idea was really cool, and it's almost reassuring to believe that should any parts of our world be lost, they could be revirtualized.

This is a novel where actions speak louder than words, and that's fun, but I liked those bits best that slowed down and considered themselves.

"Is this what it's like, then?" she said, eyes closed, dreaming. "People like us, we think differently, don't we? We are different. We do all the things that others do. We go out to parties and concerts, we go to conferences and drink and talk, we play music and games and we laugh and cry. But when it comes down to it, we don't actually need anyone else. We're happy doing what we do and having obligations interferes with that. Does that make us selfish, or something else?"

"I don't know. To them, I guess it is selfish. Me? I just have such a monstrous sense of self, I don't need to feel love. I don't even feel lonely." He watched Pif's hair beads swinging slightly in time with her breathing. "Sometimes I wonder what it might be like. To be with someone, well, who isn't me. And sometimes I think we don't even need ourselves. What's most important is to find out whether we're right or not."

Despair, disillusionment, hell, reality

I like Murakami. I like that his books have libraries and music and cats, and people reading and listening and caring about cats. I love that the narrator of Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World has read Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge (a favourite of mine) three times.

But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return.

Was that so depressing?

Who knows? Maybe that was "despair." What Turgenev called "disillusionment." Or Dostoevsky, "hell." Or Somerset Maugham, "reality." Whatever the label, I figured it was me.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is definitely my favourite Murakami, but Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is a solid second.

Two stories, chapters intersected and running in parallel. They don't seem to bear much relation to each other at first.

One thread is set in a slightly altered almost-now. The narrator is a Calcutec; he processes data for the System, and is wary of Semiotecs; he doesn't have much of a past, but there's a Duran Duran song he keeps thinking back to. Then there's the end of the world — fairly idyllic, but as with most utopias (is this an afterlife?), something's a bit off — a true sense of self seems to be lacking. To enter the town, the narrator has to have his shadow cut off; he's assigned the job of "dreamreader" and he reads dreams by sensing them through his fingertips from animal skulls. The Calcutec has a skull too; the mad scientist who gave it to him is working on how the trapped soundwaves should enable you to reconstruct memories. Both narrators (the same narrator?) grow into awareness of their realities.

You almost don't notice how odd the plots are until you try to summarize them for someone else. Despite the weirdness, the mind-bendiness, the surreality of Murakami's novels, there's something simple and sincere, completely unpretentious, about how their told. It's honest.

"I don't understand." In fact, I didn't understand. On the whole, I'm a regular guy. I say I understand when I do, and I say I don't when I don't. I try not to mince words. It seems to me a lot of trouble in this world has its origins in vague speech. Most people, when they go around not speaking clearly, somewhere in their unconscious they're asking for trouble.

Which is why, usually, I don't say much at all. (Maybe this is why I'm an editor — ridding the world of trouble one vague sentence at a time.)

Matrix literature

My copy of The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise, by Georges Perec, finally arrived! This slim little volume is exquisite!

The title has been pared down a little from the original (l'art et la maniѐre d'aborder son chef de service pour lui demander une augmentation): the art and craft of approaching your head of department to submit a request for a raise.

(Some of the background I set forth here is covered in greater detail by translator David Bellos in his introduction to the book.)

In 1968, a computer company set the challenge for writers to use a computer's basic mode of operation as a writing device. The outline: a flow-chart, a simple algorithm, a decision matrix.

The flow-chart is reproduced on this volume's endpapers.

By its nature, the algorithm is well-suited to being experienced electronically.

Of course, it has Oulipoian roots, as an exploration of how mathematics can be used to generate literature. In fact, I'm sure we're all quite familiar with another, very popular style of "matrix literature," an experiment in which (A Story As You Like It), by Raymond Queneau, is available online. (Hypertext literature has come a long way since the 1960s. I'm currently working through one such "traditional print" example with Helena.)

Perec reused the material from the art and craft in chapter 98 (Réol) of Life A User's Manual, which upon the learning of said fact I immediately reread.

I don't recall it having such a potent effect on me the first go around, but this time it brought tears to my eyes. Remember the Réols? — the young couple with the extravagant, expensive bed purchased on credit. And it puts me in mind of, no doubt because I've been reading so many articles related to the release of The Pale King, David Foster Wallace and his maximalist approach to literature (did he ever read Perec's Life, I wonder), in which he does not excise the excruciating minutiae of our lives and minds. I see now that Perec does something similar in Life. The chapter concerning Réol — and it can be read as a wholly self-contained narrative — tells a story through a perspective entirely restricted to the management of Réol's finances. There's the logistical problem of fixing an appointment with his boss (which day of the week his boss is likely to be in a good mood, not distracted, and so on), but mostly it's utilities payments due, rent in arrears, groceries on credit, loans, percentages, meeting the requirements for the assistance plan, etc. There is nothing about the Réols' life — no chance encounters or romantic situations, no grand parties or disastrous meals, no anecdotes about their son. And yet, financial management is life, one version of their life, and it's a full story. With a beautifully poignant (and happy) ending.

The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is told in the second person. Story is secondary to the experiment.

either he thinks your idea is positive rich in possibilities worthwhile or he thinks it is stupid and will let you know in no uncertain terms that your logic is addled that's to say cock-eyed that's to say so devoid of understanding as to be close to either early-onset alzheimer's or congenital idiocy remember however that whether or not he calls you a nincompoop dimwit cretin nutcase crackpot woodenhead bananabrain dolt idiot or fool it comes to the same thing namely your plan will land in the wpb and you will return empty-handed to your desk while awaiting happier days it goes without saying that learning from experience you will improve your basic idea so when the day comes once again to talk with whole and open heart to your head of department he will be unable to dismiss you straight off as a nitwit so you allow yourself some months because one must always try to stack the odds in one's favour you swot up on the issue then when your plan seems perfect you go back to see mr x let's assume he's in

The text is, as is to expected given the structural constraint, repetitive and recursive, and the real-time computer-logic mood is enhanced by the lack of punctuation. (Also, it's set entirely in lowercase, but thankfully, and surprisingly, not in courier.)

I found it easiest to follow by reading it out loud. (In fact, I readily imagine the whole text being narrated and scored by Philip Glass à la Einstein on the Beach. Hey, Phil, give me a call, let's talk Perec!)

But there is a story! It's a little bit tragic even, but told with a light touch and great deal of humour.

The iterations come to be modified, and it's these variations in the phrasing that make for the funniest moments, unexpected as they are. Either they change as you reconsider them in light of all that has already occurred (the computer algorithm weights the possible outcomes and their likelihood of occurring as it acquires and learns to process the qualitative input from inside your head), or they change over time (the computer adds to the equation the actual fact of certain outcomes already having occurred).

It could be that all these thoughts pass through your neurotic head over a span of mere seconds when first you consider the possibility of asking for a raise. Or, this is a distillation of your entire career.

Either the employee is paralyzed by overthinking the situation and "we shall suppose to keep things simple — for we must do our best to keep things simple" never approaches the boss to ask for a raise; or the employees does in fact take action as governed by the logic of the algorithm, in which case years pass and the employee approaches retirement, without ever having asked for a raise. (The story does cover an approach and a request and a raise, but let's not complicate the point.)

I recommend The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise to those readers interested in experimental literature, but I suspect most readers will not find enough narrative thread to hold their attention for long. (On the other hand, it's short, and as an introduction to how a nontraditional approach to narrative can produce story it might serve you well alongside something like Calvino's t-zero stories, with which I see some similiarities in terms of the breakdown of processes into its smallest constituents, in a Zeno's paradox kind of way.)

If you have not read Perec's Life A User's Manual, I encourage you to read along at Conversational Reading.

Tomorrow marks what would've been Perec's 75th birthday.

To do
Approach the head of my department to submit a request for the transitioning of my role, and title, into Editor of Matrix-generated Literature and for the use of our proprietary decision support system to generate a novel in which the possible decision outcomes are not binary, but multiple and weighted and combined, where one can respond both a and b, or all of the above, to allow for the overlaying of choices and the "automatic" snipping and juxtaposition of appropriate segments of text, to tell a story about, say, a family's quest to acquire the perfect sofa, and while the daughter's preferences are considered they are of a different value than those of her parents, and the cat is also given due thought, all of which necessitates a careful study of how the sofa is used (playing video games, reading, napping, etc — each activity commanding different optimal bodily postures), how many people use the sofa over a given period of time to engage in those activities, and how many are likely to want to do so at the same time, budget of course being a key factor, but also available room, with an eye for spatial configuration of the entire room and allowing for the possibility of auxiliary seating (also to be determined through a similar decision matrix), no, no, it had better be more work-related, say, the design by committee and subsequent implementation of said design of the employee kitchen space, its general arrangement and furnishings, something like that.

Evil weeds

The subject of Egyptian literature came up at work today, because someone's reading something Egyptian, and he mentioned it to our Egyptian-Palestinian coworker when she stopped by my desk, thinking she might be familar with the author, but he couldn't remember the author's name, and she suggested Nahguib Mahfouz, cuz really that's the first (or only) name that usually comes to mind, but no it's someone else, and she went on a bit about having read Palace Walk, and not liking it, and how it quite surprised her, whereas I had read Miramar eons ago and the only thing I can remember about it is that it bored me, and she expressed some, hmm, let's say regret, about how she's not as culturally well-versed as she'd like to be wrt her heritage, and then we chatted kind of generically, about audiobooks, and locking yourself in the bathroom — away from family distractions — to read, and a bit about work.

And I remembered I had a book: Three Egyptian Short Stories, by Youssef Idris — a bilingual edition (published 1991 by York Press, and not readily available these days it seems). The Arabic language fascinates me, and I'd taken a couple courses, and somewhere along the way I'd plucked this slim little volume out of some bargain bin or other, my aspiration being to read it in the original language. (Hah!)

So I came home from work and went straight to my shelf. Maybe my coworkers will be interested in this book. But I should read it first (had I ever actually read it?). So I read it.

Three short, very powerful stories. Poignant. Just plain sad.

The walls were half-covered in blackness in the form of paint, while the other half was stained with gloom.

Reading these stories I'm reminded a little bit of Simenon, bleak and seamy. Not so sordid as Simenon; these characters are just miserable, and poor.

Henceforth, the square witnessed an eccentric and gloomy man, whose dry and dark face was ever frowning, who broke his silence occasionally with a stray and fleeting word, only to be dominated again by dead silence, whose trembling moustache had grown wild like a bunch of evil weeds.

The stories are "Farahat's Republic," "The Wallet," and "Abu Sayyid." I trust they are available in other collections of Idris's work. While the latter two stories are sad in a pull-at-your-heartstrings kind of way, the first story packs an existential punch.

[Perhaps I feel this way because I made the mistake of checking the news online this evening. While I try to keep abreast of world events, in a shamefacedly superficial way, smaller-scale stories, if I can call them that, to differentiate them from the big picture, make me want to cry and scream, and I avoid them. Kids stuffed in luggage, dead. Some guy on speed driving around with his wife on the hood. I like to think you can change the World. But you can't do a damn thing about the sick fuck who lives down the street.]

"Farahat's Republic" is about a police officer. Even while he betrays a rich inner life, the real crime, he states, is that the rabble at the station won't give him a minute's peace, bothering him with their "petty" squabbles.

And so I feel morally defunct and guilty this evening.

Idris was nominated several times for the Nobel prize for literature.

Sandwich guy

Every day (well, most days), sometime between 11:45 and about 12:30 (although on at least two occasions as late as 1:20), there's a guy in a ski jacket and tuque who walks briskly down the main aisle (on which I'm situated) between the desks at my office, with a big blue cooler slung across his back. He calls out, "Sandwiches," brusquely; sometimes as he's approaching, but sometimes you just hear the echo of it — you look up and realize he's already turned the corner.

It took me a couple of weeks to figure it out: the man actually sells sandwiches. And a little while longer before I actually witnessed a transaction.

What era are we in? I see them sell sandwiches from the cart on Mad Men, but I never thought I'd see anything like it in my working career.

After monitoring his comings and goings for a few weeks, I finally asked some coworkers about him. They rewarded me with a spreadsheet recording the times of his appearance over the space of a few months, about a year ago. It seems my predecessor gave him the moniker I was already using in my head, and my time-tracking observations were confirmed.

Sandwich Guy does indeed sells sandwiches; and they're pretty good, they say.

He's associated with Les Sandwichs Volants, but nobody knows definitively his relationship with that organization, or how he comes to traverse our office space on a quasi-regular basis.

There's on ongoing debate as to whether his service commands tipping, and it seems my predecessor believed firmly that it did not — which, it's alleged, may have a little something to do with his unreliability. Past a certain hour, you just can't be sure that he'll have anything left to satisfy your particular lunchtime needs, or that he'll show up at all. (Although, it's hard to know if they ever really attended to Sandwich Guy's behaviour before my predecessor drew attention to it.)

Today, was my first first-hand experience with Sandwich Guy. I tagged behind a few coworkers who were hoping to head him off before he sold out of goods at the other end of the office. Alas, no carrot cake for the translator, but the vegetarian was in luck, and so was I.

Only two meat sandwiches left. I considered roast lamb, but opted otherwise.

Rôti de porc tranché, mayonnaise, piments marinés, sauce piquants, tomates, concombres, laitue. On a foot of baguette. Delicious. For $5.50.

And he called me mademoiselle.

I'm sorry I waited till winter is almost over. I could grow to really like Sandwich Guy.

A vision of the superior sofa

The sofa was perfect for sleeping, Not too soft, not too hard; even the cushions pillowed my head just right. Doing different tabulation jobs, I've slept on a lot of sofas, and let me tell you, the comfortable ones are few and far between. Typically, they're cheap deadweight. Even the most luxurious-looking sofas are a disappointment when you actually try to sleep on them. I never understand how people can be lax about choosing sofas.

I always say — a prejudice on my part, I'm sure — you can tell a lot about a person's character from his choice of sofa. Sofas constitute a realm inviolate unto themselves. This, however, is something that only those who have grown up sitting on good sofas will appreciate. It's like growing up reading good books of listening to good music. One good sofa breeds another good sofa; one bad sofa breeds another bad sofa. That's how it goes.

There are people who drive luxury cars, but have only second- or third-rate sofas in their homes. I put little trust in such people. An expensive automobile may well be worth its price, but it's only an expensive automobile. If you have the money, you can buy it, anyone can buy it. Procuring a good sofa, on the other hand, requires style and experience and philosophy. It takes money, yes, but you also need a vision of the superior sofa. That sofa among sofas.

— from Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami.

The sofa Murakami's character stretches out on is leather and, I believe, white — a tasteful decorator shade of white. Not exactly my style.

The Sofa must've been one of our first major purchases as a couple some dozen years ago, and it was complicated. It took a lot of time, discussion, and compromise before we settled on the Kalahari model (no, that's not it pictured here), which struck a reasonable balance, within our budget, between style and comfort — comfort coming out slightly ahead.

These days it's formidably cat-scratched and discoloured, so now covered, but still comfortable, if a little too large for our living space, and a little too small to accommodate toute la famille at once. I love it and I hate it and it will someday in the not-too-distant future be replaced. But I will always recall the Kalahari with fondness.

Two shocking scenes

It seems I am capable of being the kind of person who reads more than one book at a time (not including the couple books it's taking me years to get through and which I will not consider abandoned).

Even while I promised myself I'd make a concerted effort to move through The Magic Mountain this winter, it turns out that the book I consider myself to be reading (ie, the one I'd name if someone asked, so whatcha readin' these days?) is too cumbersome to carry on my commute as it doesn't slide nicely into either my purse or my lunch bag, and even though I carried it with me a couple times anyway in my hand, basically I've had enough of that shit, I don't like carrying stuff, I can't handle the extra baggage, it doesn't sit well in my psyche, so it's become my at-home book to read, usurping Thomas Mann at bedtime, and I've had to start reading yet another novel but this one chosen specifically for its virtue of travelling well (so it be one of several I've amassed lately in digital format).

So I read for a few minutes this morning, my at-home book, with my coffee while the child breakfasts and I await my turn to shower. I don't remember what I fell asleep to, but the caffeine jolts me into realizing oh my gawd he's dead and decapitated and he's watching his body be torn apart by wolves. And with this thought in my head I start my day — walk the kid to school, head down into the metro, and open my other book.

There's something very zen about my metro book — the long probable-ascent of the silent elevator, the blank office, the idyll of the animals outside the gate, the labyrinth of caves. Time to go to work.

I read again on my way home. "He spreads wide my right eye with his fingers and pushes the knife into my eyeball." Ew. "The knife sinks into my eyeball soft and silent, as if dipping into jelly." This time I say it out loud. Eww. On the metro. People look at me. It's my stop.

I don't know how people can stand the intensity of more than one book at a time, when you don't know what happens next and you can't balance your choices for mood, or attitude, it's too much of a good thing, or at least, too much of a thing, I don't think I can go on like this.

Do-San

(Proud mommy moment #83,214.)

This weekend was the arondissement pre-qualifying taekwon-do tournament for the 34th annual Jeux de Montréal. It was Helena's first competitive experience, and despite a certain amount of stress, and, yes, even a few tears, Helena came away with two medals: gold for her pattern, and silver in (yikes!) combat.

A slightly strange experience, but mostly a good one. We'll see what the next level holds.

All in a week's work

Shop talk
I know the readership here to be smart and varied, so on the off chance some of you may actually be interested in this sort of thing, I'll mention this really interesting blog post the company I work for is promoting.

"This sort of thing" is business software, and the article addresses why so many enterprise resource planning systems fail; the researcher posits that it may be related to the professional allegiances and practices of the employees who use those systems.

If you have ever experienced (or indeed, been the victim of) the disruption of a company-wide implementation of the sort of system that's supposed to make you more productive, I encourage you also to participate in the survey that's discussed in the article.

Cat chat
I'm not a fan of Justin Bieber, but my daughter is, and I've come to terms with this — she will develop her own tastes; hopefully she will grow out of it (and someday soon!).

Now Justin Bieber reads The Cat in the Hat (via Dewey Divas). But not very well. He sounds dumb and bored.

While I can appreciate the attempt to promote literacy, or reading as cool, or the glory of pizza, I think this may backfire. This puzzling PR attempt brings him down another notch in my estimation. If the point is to sound like a (below?) average student being forced to read a text, well,... Is the point for millions of young girls to realize they read better than him? To realize that reading, for some people, is really pretty lame after all? He certainly doesn't bring a performer's verve to his reading. Does he even know what this story is about?

(Note: I couldn't actually watch it to the end. Maybe I'm missing Justin's spectacular finale?)

Life redux
For those who missed out on last year's group read of Life A User's Manual, by Georges Perec, and those of you eager to relive Life, a read-along is being hosted at Conversational Reading, starting mid-March and throughout April.

I'll follow the discussion, and as much as I still think about what an awesome wiki project it would be to annotate Life (and I do hope to dostart it someday), I expect I'll be occupied at about that time reading a Perec work never before translated, the soon-to-be-released The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise.

Hyperborean

The Sun Dogs were two well-built Brits or Scands in torn cashmere, and their gear consisted only of an electric cello, plugged into a compressed-air auxetophone amplifier that looked like a threatening tuba, and a Frying Pan amplified to the point of distortion. As soon as the room started to vibrate, and as a dark, ominous drone started to coil around the walls, it became palpably clear that this music directly linked one's eardrum to one's intestines and that it was, beyond good or bad, to be digested rather than listened to. It also had at times, under the murk, the repetitive, trance-like quality of Eskimo chant. This indeed was not without its effect upon intoxicated listeners, who swayed back and forth with the ebb and flow of the gravelly sound waves. The Sun Dogs' best song was called Hyperborean, and if Gabriel understood it correctly, it was a cryptic paean to snowcaine.

— from Aurorarama, Jean-Christophe Valtat.

It's kind of fun to be reading something with this setting when it's still so bitter cold outside. "April may be the cruellest month, but in North Wasteland, February was a tough bitch in her own right." The language is exuberant. I get the feeling he's trying to be more a China Miéville, but he's coming off like a Susanna Clarke. I don't mean for the comparison to be entirely discreditable, but there is a sense of being carried away by the language without there always being the substance to ground it. But that's OK; I like being carried away.

With a bare bodkin

Everything my daughter knows about Shakespeare she learned from watching Doctor Who. (And she's known it for a couple years already, since first that Shakespeare episode aired.)

She knows "To be or not to be," that he wrote comedies and tragedies, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," about the Globe Theatre, that he had a son Hamnet, who died, and that he wrote about witches. That may not sound like a lot, but it's enough to surprise grown-ups at brunch, and it's more than I knew at the age of 8 (it wasn't till grade 7 that I played the role of Polonius; although, there was that story we read in grade 2, about the girl who loved her father as much as meat loves salt, which sentiment was reason enough to disown her — oh, I loved that story). (Helena can also tell you about Charles Dickens, Vincent van Gogh, the destruction of Pompeii, and Madame de Pompadour, thank you, Doctor.)

This to say: I'm all for using popular culture as a vehicle to the classics. There's nothing so sacred about Shakespeare that a divide should be drawn to keep him unsullied. Let his blood mingle with the rest of our entertainments — let him be popular culture.

So I was thrilled to receive a copy of Kill Shakespeare, graphic novel, created and written by Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Cor, and drawn by Andy Belanger.



Think Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next world, only less tongue in cheek and populated exclusively by Shakespearean characters. The politics are of a more vicious time, and the characters' awareness that they are literary creations has a more metaphysically somber tone.

Kill Shakespeare, as you might divine by the title, involves a plot to kill Shakespeare.

As summed up in the foreword by Darwyn Cooke, "All of Shakespeare's 'creations' live in a kingdom ruled by their deity: the Bard himself. The good and evil forces within this kingdom are in a race to possess the Bard's mythical quill — the source of all power and life."

It starts off with a touch of Rosencrantz, a bit of Guildenstern (á la Tom Stoppard), and pirates! Then Hamlet's Act IV takes a different turn.

Before you know it, Hamlet agrees to do the bidding of Richard III, on the promise that his father be returned to life.

Oh, and, as the witches tell it, there's a prophecy about the Shadow King:

The father's gated shall open swing,
A welcome to the Shadow King.
The two shall clash and blood will pour,
And things that were shall be no more.

Soon enough, we encounter Falstaff (about which all I know is from the post-apocalyptic Mad Maxified version of Henry IV, part something, I saw staged, one high school field trip), and Juliet and Othello and Lady MacBeth, among others.

There's enough action, threats, blood, and double-crossing to equal any of Shakespeare's histories.

The artwork is expressive, but dark, almost unrelentingly so, like the pace, that I wish Hamlet might've dallied more with characters from the comedies. I suppose Shrewsbury is meant to reference Katherine, and there's a lovely Adriana, but if there were any further invocation of the Bard's lighter works meant to give respite, it was lost on me. (Also, I did have trouble keeping a couple of the characters straight, but then, I'm not a particularly practiced reader of comic books — or graphic novels, or whatever the preferred sensitive yet serious-while-unpretentious term of choice is these days.)

I'm not convinced the characters are true to the natures Shakespeare devised for them. I have to agree with Cooke in his encapsulation of Hamlet as "emo douche," and I'm not sure he'd really want his father back. And while Shakespeare's Juliet does show a great deal of strength and courage, I'm sceptical that she has it in her to rally the people behind her to rise up. (When I heard the people calling for Lady Capulet, I was sure they meant her mother.)

Also, I'm not entirely sure what the rules are: If you die in Act II or earlier, well, you're really dead, in this world too it seems. But if you don't die till the final scenes these new creators are OK with pretending those pages were never written. I mean: at what point are Shakespeare's characters plucked to populate this world? And what about Ophelia? But I guess Hamlet, at sea with R&G, beset by pirates, doesn't know about her yet.

So it may sound like I have a lot of little gripes with this work, but it's been a gripey kind of week, and I wouldn't take me too seriously on these points. The fact is: I ate it up, and I'm on the lookout for subsequent volumes.

It's original, and gives new life, and liveliness, to a set of dusty old names that not many people other than dead academics pay much attention to.

I can't wait till my daughter discovers this book on my shelf.

Official Kill Shakespeare website.

The creators of Kill Shakespeare are at the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC on February 15. (Really, Ivonna, you should go.)

Objects were quieter than people

"But why did you push the boy off the tower?"

He did something bad, Chuck began, the crossed it out. He tore something of mine apart and hurt its feelings.
"But only people have feelings," Dr. Finkelstein said, "not objects."

This was the most ridiculous thing Chuck had ever heard. Objects were quieter than people, maybe, but no less sensitive. The one big difference was that objects could not move. They weren't able to fake their feelings or hide them. It was people who could lie, people who could pretend. People could laugh like friends and then beat you up. People could say they were your dad and hit you. Sometimes the faces of people seemed unreal to Chuck, inhuman. They were like masks they wore over their real faces. Masks to show how old or how young they were. Masks to show how healthy or how sick they were. People could cry out of sadness or happiness or anger. But then they could smile for the exact same reasons. The strangeness of people went on an on and on. Objects, on the other hand, were mostly simple and good. Chuck was always kind to them — it was a rule. They needed his help to make it in the world. They had no one else to to look out for them. That was why he was so upset about the book. He had tried fixing it and had let it down. It gave off more light now than it had before. Why, then, had he taken it at all, he wondered? He was no more than thief and kidnapper. The book would be better off with anyone but him. He might as well give it away to a stranger.

— from The Illumination, by Kevin Brockmeier.

I'm at about two-thirds, and even though the stories are progressively looser, weaker, and despite the alimony thing, and also the health care system as described in the novel (maybe this is one of those US–Canada differences, but I know someone who lost a section of finger — granted, not a thumb, as in the book — and after rushing to the emergency room and some swift medical attention he was sent back home, so when she spends days, nights, in hospital, I wonder what kind of insurance plan she might have as a photo editor or archivist or whatever, it's never made entirely clear but it seems a decent-enough living, unless it's something the alimony checks after 4 years of childless marriage afford her, and physio — really? — why am I letting myself get worked up over these details? honestly, so often, stuff like this passes me by...), it's proving to be a sweet (but not saccharine), thoughtful read.

Its syntax pure

The busker in the metro tunnels this morning was strumming out Satie's Gymnopédies, and it made the walk from the station to work feel like some misty confusion.

I finished Ian McEwan's Amsterdam last night. Very enjoyable. And funny. Especially the bits in the editorial offices.

"On this paper 'hopefully' is not a sentence adverb, nor will it ever be, specially in a leader for Godsakes. And none..." He trailed away for dramatic effect, while pretending to scan the piece. "'None' usually takes a singular verb. Can we get these two things generally understood?"

Vernon was aware of the approval round the table. This was the kind of thing the grammarians liked to hear. Together they would see the paper into the grave with its syntax pure.

I've never worked on a newspaper, but I know these battles well, and I'm no stranger to the struggle to balance editorial integrity with profit, which theme is central to one of the plots.

Both the main characters are fairly despicable, for different reasons, and they deserve what they get. So it seems McEwan is hit or miss with me, and Amsterdam's a hit.

(Though, if we're talking editorial, The Imperfectionists was a far more engrossing read.)

I received a copy of The Illumination, by Kevin Brockmeier, last week, and the review in Salon had me eager to read it next. Even though already it makes me sad. (Not in a maudlin way, in a good way. ["'What's good about sad?' It's happy, for deep people.'"] But it seems Brockmeier's world is a little less illuminated in this respect: Divorced young women without children but with decent jobs collect alimony. Really? Still? The dust jacket buckles a little because it got snowed on. Sometimes I care about these things, sometimes I don't.

I've spent much of my day thinking I may never write anything like a novel, because, after an evening, yesterday, of his pouting and my not being able to say anything for fear of saying the wrong thing, I know such a novel would be full of the wrong things, to be taken personally.

Dervishes and elephants

A prophecy. Hoopoes, harem gardens, and spies, oh my! The Oracle of Stamboul, by Michael David Lukas. I llllooovved this book! I ate it up in a day, and that's even after I slowed down at about the halfway mark trying to make it last.

This was an electronic review copy (and one of the cleanest — read: typo-free — proofs I've seen in a long time), but I'm set on acquiring a hard copy to place on the shelf so that my daughter might someday stumble upon it.

It's simply magical! The kind of book that wraps you up and keeps you warm and sends your soul aflutter. Maybe I'm predisposed to liking it. It's set in Stamboul, after all, to my mind one of the most romantic settings on Earth (I must go there one day!), and I seem to be surrounded by talk of Turkey these days. Also, it's about a very charming and clever 8-year-old girl, and as I have one of my own, I happen to think they make for fascinating subjects. It reads like a fairy tale.

The author in his essay "Oskar and Eleonora" explains how this novel is a meditation on the nature of history:

I was most taken, however, by those writers whose work falls into the subgenre I like to call historical fabulism — José Saramago, Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie, and Italo Calvino — storytellers of the old school who add a pinch of magic to the stew of history. I was particularly moved by Saramago's novel The History of the Siege of Lisbon, in which a bored proofreader literally rewrites the history of Lisbon, and by Grass's The Tin Drum, in which a clairvoyant young German boy named Oskar Matzerath disrupts the traditional narrative of World War II by beating on a tin drum. How wonderful, I thought, this idea that a single act, a single person, might change the course of history.

Eleonora is born in inauspicious circumstances. Her mother dies in childbirth while her village is ravaged by the 3rd Division of Tsar Alexander II's Royal Cavalry. Her childhood is mostly a decent one, even though her stepmother doesn't believe in educating her too much (Ruxandra's no ogress, but she has her ideas about how things ought to work). Elenora's good-natured about it though, and sticks to her monthly reading allotment of only one novel (gasp!). At the age of 8, she makes her way to Istanbul (I won't tell you how), where she has a taste of a more privileged lifestyle. But tragedy — and adventure — befalls her again.

It's not exactly a coming-of-age story, although Eleonora does have some growing up to do. The book's a little bit Dickens, a little bit Roald Dahl, every bit enchanting. And the ending is, in my view, perfect.

Late in the novel we meet Fredrick, a journalist, who latches on to Eleonora's story: "This is exactly what the readers want. They want dervishes and elephants. Just look at Kinglake. Look at the Arabian Nights. People want Oriental color."

I suppose that's not true for all people. But it works for me.

I'm curious to see to whom this book is going to be marketed, and what audience for it will finally emerge. It has about it everything of a children's classic: orphaned child confronted with adversity, a special gift, and a prophecy to fulfill. (And the magical tone reminds me specifically of one of my favourites: Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess.)

I found the prose to be fresh and lively:

• "Hoopoes coated the town like frosting, piped in along the rain gutters of the governor’s mansion and slathered on the gilt dome of the Orthodox church."
• "drinks in every hand and in every drink a piece of ice reflecting the sun."
• "a small flight of cormorants swept over the water like marionettes"
• "As the morning insinuated itself into her room, Eleonora lay curled around herself like a dried tea leaf..."
• "...he had the aspect of a well-fed rodent and eyes the color of unripe grapes."

A number of reviews are critical of the book's slow pace, that nothing happens, but I don't understand them. I was completely entranced.

Excerpt.

Succumbed to a half century of forty-watt bulbs

I don't know how long I slept, because when I awoke in my solitary cell, of the many things I did not see, most conspicuously absent was a digital-clock radio. Go tell the time, in a sunless room, from shadows on the wall. For all I knew, I was Rudolf Hess rising and shining in Spandau, because if he's as crazy and subject to persecution manias as his attorneys purport, what worse thing could he wish on himself than to wake up as me? I lay in my narrow, lumpy bed, calmly aware that the thin, tufted mattress had crippled me for life. A dancer could have an airtight damage suit, but a non-professional such as myself, who simply preferred a healthy spinal column for personal reasons, had no case. I couldn't find the energy to turn my head. Had anyone, I wondered, ever been this tired? There was a recent collection of pictures in my head, vivid and meaningless. Claude throwing my bags into the rear of Charles's car. A hotel lobby ugly with paintings, hanging metal objects, and fluorescent light fixtures. A skinny, balding night clerk ignoring me and handing Claude a key. Claude unlocking a door and dumping my worldly goods on a green, blue, and yellow linoleum floor worn brown in spots.

All through the room, cracks and burns exposed an underlayer of barren brown that was spreading as though blight had struck the skimpy surfaces. A yellowish lampshade next to the bed had succumbed to a half century of forty-watt bulbs and displayed its diseased patches of brown. There was no question in my mind that whatever had afflicted the room was contagious and would get to me next.

— from After Claude, by Iris Owens.

I first heard of this book a few months ago during NYRB Reading Week. (You can read reviews at Bibiliographing, Shelf Love, and The Dewey Divas.)

It starts off with wit and self-assurance ("I left Claude, the French rat.). The Bell Jar, The Dud Avocado, Fear of Flying — it has a voice in this class of books. Feminist spirit. Self-examination.

But it didn't take long — just a few pages — to find that I didn't like Harriet the narrator) all that much. She's deluded and downright mean-spirited.

This makes for a fascinating train wreck of a read, but I have to admit I had trouble getting past my distaste for her character. I had to repeatedly remind myself that I was supposed to be enjoying this, in a jaw-dropping OMG-how-can-she-do/say/think-that kind of way, and stop getting worked up over Harriet's poor decisions. (This book is pretty much dismissed by the Guardian, where, curiously enough, it's reviewed by a man, and I can't help but feel that's a factor in their low opinion.)

Midway, the novel takes a turn for the weird and becomes a very different novel from the one it started out to be.

While the first section is spent mostly in Claude's apartment, warlike and reliving the past inside her head, the second section takes place in a room at the Chelsea Hotel, where it's all peace and love, and Harriet actually looks outside herself and finds her saviour, man. These two sections almost don't belong together.

I'm ambivalent about After Claude for lots of reasons. If you've read and enjoyed the novels of Plath, Dundy, Jong, then Owens may entertain you and will bring a 1973 complement to the lives of women depicted therein. If you've not read those other books, go read them first.

Montreal, London, Amsterdam

He watched his own vaporised breath float off into the grey air. The temperature in central London was said to be minus eleven today. Minus eleven. There was something seriously wrong with the world for which neither God nor his absence could be blamed.

— from Amsterdam, by Ian McEwan.

It was a little bit colder than all that in Montreal this morning, but as of this writing we're at exactly that — minus eleven — the projected high for the day.

I wasn't sure what book to be reading next. Wasn't sure I'd made the right choice when I left the house this morning. But the signs point to "yes." The coincidence of the settings is serendipitous.

With the first sentence the story starts, "with their backs to the February chill."

I like when the boundary between my reality and the fictitious one in my hand is blurred.

Intrusion

While I wait for Embassytown to make its appearance, China Miéville is publishing a web comic on his blog: London Intrusion.

Minimalist in terms of narrative, rather realistic as far as the images go, it's actually even scary. Hauntingly beautiful.

(Discovered via Biblioklept.)

A girl and her cat

"No one has any idea, do they, until they have children, what it means. It's all I can do just to keep up with the rush of things, the meals one after another, the food, let alone giving the children the attention they should have. I know that Emily is ready for more than I have time to give her, but she is such a demanding child, so difficult, she always has taken a lot out of me, she want wants to be read to and played with all the time, but I'm cooking, I'm ordering food, I'm at it all day, well you know how it is, there isn't time for what there has to be done, I simply don't have time for the child. I did manage to get a girl for a time last year, but that was really more trouble than it was worth, really, all their problems and their crises and you have to deal with them, she took up as much of my time as Emily does, but I did get an hour to myself after lunch and I put my feet up for a bit, but I did not find I had the energy to read, let alone study, no one knows how it is, what it means, no, children do for you, they do you in, I'm not what I was, I know that only too well I am afraid."

The child on her knee, two or three years old, a heavy passive child dressed in white wool that smelled damp, was being jogged faster now; his eyes were glazing as the world bounced up and down around him, his adenoidal mouth was open and slack, the full cheeks quivering.

The husband, passive but really tense with irritation — with guilt — smoked on, listening, frowning.

"But what can you give out when you get nothing in? I am empty, drained; I am exhausted by lunchtime and all I want is to sleep by then. And when you think of what I used to be, what I was capable of! I never thought of being tired, I never imagined I could become the sort of woman who would never have time to open a book. But there it is."

She sighed, quite unselfconsciously. She was like a child, that tall, solid, confident woman; she needed understanding as a child does. She sat looking inward into the demands of her days and her nights. No one else was there for her, because she felt she was talking to herself: they could not hear, or would not. She was trapped, but did not know why she felt this, for her marriage and her children were what she personally had wanted and had aimed for — what society had chosen for her. Nothing in her education or experience had prepared her for what she did in fact feel, and she was isolated in her distress and her bafflement, sometimes even believing that she might perhaps be ill in some way.

— from The Memoirs of a Survivor, by Doris Lessing.

This is a very weird little book. The Memoirs of a Survivor is described as a dystopia, and by Doris Lessing herself as "an attempt at autobiography." It reads like part fairy tale, part tract, a report from another time and place, not quite like a confessional diary as one might expect from the title.

It is never entirely clear what it is that's being survived, or who is surviving it. There's the girl, Emily, and the woman, the narrator, on whose doorstep she turned up, charged with being responsible for her. And Emily's cat.

While it's the girl who thrives in the outside world, the anarchic, back-to-basics conditions where she establishes herself as a kind of leader (or, at least, a leader's girlfriend), it's clearly the woman who's a survivor of Emily's puberty, teenage years, sexual awakening.

The girl and the woman are incomprehensible to each other, yet also the same. They're at a bit of a standoff. The narrator very sagely recognizes that we too were once children, once young and in love. Yet it's somewhat unsettling, however reasonable, for her to stand back, so detached, and watch Emily grow up, let her grow up all by herself.

Meanwhile, there's the world falling apart outside, we know not why, and the walls of the woman's apartment melting away to show her other realities, past and future. (We know Emily's mother, as excerpted above, only through these glimpses through the wall.)

If you've never read Doris Lessing, I don't recommend this novel as an introduction to her. But even though this novel is kind of all over the place, there are some lovely thought-provoking bits, about children, about growing up, gender politics, etc.

New York Times review, 1975.

I almost think this book's really about the bond between a girl and her cat. Which makes for a pretty remarkable story, really. (I say this as someone who has lately enjoyed a good deal of quality time with her cat; it feels like she's finally chosen me to be hers — we have an understanding, she and I.)

The mountain and the shortcut

The path was clear. From the metro station exit, around the corner, down the street, across the parking lot, through the alley, and it's the next building down, across the street. Then it snowed.

Since the first big snow back in December, I've had to cross a mountain to get to work. When they cleared the parking lot, they piled the snow in the back corner, blocking access to the alleyway.

That first day, I wasn't sure it was passable. But I found a path that had been trodden before me. Up and over.

The second day, I met someone coming the other way. Giggling and carrying a plate of cookies. High, I thought. I backed up a couple paces to let her pass and we exchanged some pleasantry. At last I came down on the other side, full with the uncertainty of fresh snow and giggling myself. Silly, slippery snow mountain.

The mountain has changed. The path is now a deep furrow, so narrow that, ironically, it's much harder to get a solid foothold. There is no longer a steady incline. A parking space has been reclaimed by carving into the slope. The way across is a plateau, but the step up to (or down from) it is treacherous.

This week in some stupid -30° weather, a colleague on the way out of the building asked if I knew about the "shortcut." Somehow, after 2 months of employ, I was finally deemed worthy of this secret knowledge, or maybe she just took pity on me in the cold.

Quick across the street and in through an unmarked industrial door beside a loading dock. Two levels of parking, eerily quiet given that most of the city is knocking off work at this hour. A stairwell and a narrow hallway wending back and forth. We exit beside a bank of elevators at the main front entranceway to the building. It's only appropriate that the occupant of the building be a major producer of video games.

Outside across a different parking lot, and now into the stock exchange building. More stairways before hitting the tunnels that join up to the metro.

I don't think it was shorter, but it was warmer for the length of two short city blocks (broken up by a block of the brisk outdoors).

No matter which path I choose on my way to and from work, it seems I choose my own adventure.

Bookstore

Today we went to the bookstore, me and the kid. Some ridiculous -20° outside, but we made this plan over a week ago, and and we've been looking forward to it.

I've long since (mostly) come to terms with the fact that Helena is not the sort of reader I hoped and expected a daughter of mine to be.

Confession: We do not have regular bedtime stories, and haven't had for years. If it wasn't fun, there didn't seem to be any point to it — more trouble than it was worth. There may not be a lot of support for this sort of strategy in the parenting books (although, I wouldn't know, not being the type to consult that kind of reference), but I think she's growing up to have a reasonable appreciation for books all the same.

We have the occasional evening or weekend afternoon, some spontaneous, some planned, full of books, mine and hers, and often cocoa, on my bed, and it is comfort and joy. And if she does not read every day, I think at least she remembers to make a special time for it.

Helena received a gift card for the bookstore for her birthday some time ago, and just last week was lamenting the fact that she didn't get the one book she really wanted for Christmas. So we made the plan to acquire it.

What's cool with second-graders these days and new on our shelf today: Geronimo Stilton: Le secret du courage!

There are days

As much as I love my new job, there are days... There are days I'd rather stay in bed. When it's cold, when the world outside is blanketed in snow, just a day, to rest and replenish myself.

"Momma," she exhorts, "go back to bed. Just look at it outside. You're in no condition for that. You're tired. You deserve to rest. You don't need to worry about me. I can take care of myself. I can go to school by myself. You should stay home today. In bed."

I smile. That kid can be really sweet.

"You deserve a day off, Momma. Really, go back to bed. Don't worry about a thing." She drives her argument home: "I've already arranged everything with your boss."

And for a moment, just a moment, my hopes are raised. For a moment I let myself think, Really?

About enough

"An attentive reader will always learn more, and more quickly, from good authors than from life. "

I thought I should say a few things about Enough about Love, by Hervé Le Tellier, set for publication in February. My review copy (in e-book format!) has already long since vanished into the ether. I read this back in October, and enjoyed it immensely.

Do I have anything more to say about it? It's proven to be mostly forgettable, but that shouldn't diminish the enjoyability factor. Reminds me a lot of Kundera — kind of philosophy lite, in a relationship-y context. The many reference to weightier works (including none other than Madame Bovary, which I was reading at the time).

[Of her husband, "Anna wants him to be more outgoing, more dazzling. She is actually less eager for him to be successful than for him to want to be successful." It's Emma and Charles all over again!]

On the extensive bookshelves against the far wall, literature rubs shoulders with psychoanalysis in peaceful conflict. Joyce mingles with Pierre Kahn, Leiris is shoehorned against Lacan, a book by Queaneau which has been put back in the wrong place — a good sign for a book — leans up against a Deleuze.

That's a lot of name-dropping. I won't pretend to know the first thing about half the figures Le Tellier mentions. He seems to do so with purpose, and the references do seem to bear some relationship on the plot and character issues at work, whether the nature of love, power politics, creativity, identity, destiny, whatever.

Thomas shakes his head. In these few minutes of his life, he can see a fork in his own destiny. That was the word Anna used in her last session, when she said, "I don't know whether Yves is my destiny." Coming from Anna, the word is ambiguous, somewhere between freedom of choice and the inevitability of fate.

Thomas does not believe in fate. He would have the power of speech and actions shape our lives. To him, that is the point of psychoanalysis, giving the analysand the strength to become the driving force in his or her own life. If the accident just now had actually happened, he likes to think that, against all the odds, he would have known how to play it right, to become one of the people Louise would lean on.

As a teenager, he had endless discussions about the elasticity of individual fates and History (with a capital H, as Perec used to say). The budding Marxist confronted trainee Hegelians. If Hitler had died in a car crash in 1931, would some inertia in the powers that be have doggedly set the war and the Holocaust back on track? Was Stalinism conceivable with a different Stalin? Who could have replaced Trotsky?

Other questions hover. Where did he stand in Louise's story? Did a lover have to turn up at this particular point in her life? Was he interchangeable? Thomas has no idea.

See the review at The Complete Review for a fuller notion of what's going on in this book, and this passionate endorsement.

Excerpt.

It's a romance novel, but with a very mature approach to love as it is among very real, and very smart, grown-ups. I can see myself picking up this novel again.

Simenon's bedrooms

So here finally is a Simenon novel I found less than enthralling. Three Bedrooms in Manhattan doesn't have any criminal elements to speak of — it's more of a romance — and I suspect this has a great deal to do with the fact that this novel on the whole just didn't work for me.

Why did he keep thinking about her? Why had he gone out? He had promised himself that one morning he'd be there in the hallway or on the stairs when she left. But every time, she managed to get up at seven sharp. She didn't need an alarm clock. She didn't bother to wake her friend. Combe never heard them talking in the morning.

Stray sounds from the bathroom, perhaps a kiss on the forehead for the man lying asleep, then she opened the door and slipped out. He imagined her searching briskly for a taxi to take her back to the station.

What did she look like in the morning? Could you make out the night's traces on her face, in her sagging shoulders, her hoarse voice?

That was the woman he wanted to see — not the one who got off the train, brimming with self-confidence, who then showed up at the studio as if she was just dropping in on some friends.

He wanted to see the woman at daybreak, when she went off alone, leaving the man asleep, selfish, stupefied, his damp forehead grazed by her lips.

He came to a corner that seemed vaguely familiar. A club was closing. The last customers were out on the sidewalk, waiting in vain for a taxi. On the corner two men who'd been drinking were finding it hard to say good-bye. They shook hands, pulled apart, then immediately turned back for a final confidence or renewed protestations of friendship.

Combe, too, looked like he'd been in a bar, not like someone who'd just gotten up.

But he hadn't been drinking. He was sober. He hadn't been out listening to jazz. He'd spent the night in the desert of his bed.

All this in considering the unseen woman who visits his neighbour. There are some lovely, moody, poignant bits (I mean, "the desert of his bed"!), and that spare, clipped language drew me forward, but I found Franҫois Combe to be completely abstruse. I don't understand him at all, and I can't believe the character was designed in this way to be so deliberately opaque. And I can't imagine any woman falling in love with him.

It's said that this novel is quite autobiographical; maybe my distaste for Simenon the man is colouring my reading. Perhaps Combe is not so different from Simenon's other (anti)heroes, but without the focus (or perhaps distraction) of some criminal or seedy element, some genuine evil or real meaninglessness (none of this lovelorn bullshit), he is less easy to bear. Less culpable, but less sympathetic. I just didn't get Combe.

An almost cosmic sadness

Despite the mildness of the air, he felt cold inside, and he searched fruitlessly for his tweed jacket or his raincoat. He had another lighter jacket in his suitcase. Going around to the back of the car, he opened the trunk, and his expression became one of stupefaction and dismay.

He was filled with a vast sadness that morning, an almost cosmic sadness. The suitcase was gone, but before its removal Nancy's things had been taken out of it — underclothing, sandals, and a swim suit lay scattered among the tools. The toilet kit, which contained among other things his comb, toothbrush, and razor, was also gone.

He did not attempt to think. He was just sad, and would have given a great deal to have things turn out less squalidly.

— from Red Lights, by Georges Simenon.

It's impossible for me to rank these books. Just when I think I've read the best Simenon ever, I read another one that's just as good.

So this one's a little different because of the American setting. There's an undeniable American feel to it: quintessential late-summer American suburban domestic. And Steve's a bit more of a jerk than the characters populating the other novels. Maybe this makes him more tragic too?

In brief, Steve and Nancy head out from New York to Maine, to pick up their kids from summer camp. Steve wants to stop for a drink (and then another) but that doesn't go over too well with Nancy. (Although, a lot of the not going over well is blown beyond proportion in Steve's head — she really doesn't say all that much. Steve gets the vibe from her presence, her look — from working himself up.) Steve's basically picking a fight with her, and being a big jerk about it, after building a case against her in his unspoken thoughts addressed to complete strangers, and in defense of a man's got a right to have a drink now and then if he wants.

Steve makes yet another stop, but when he comes back out from this roadside bar, Nancy's not in the car. And now things spiral totally out of control. Really. There's an escaped convict, and also a nosy telephone operator. Gripping stuff.

It's less a mystery than a psychological study of this couple with their petty squabbling. But Steve has issues too. For example, that his wife works and is relatively successful. (It's worth noting also that she would be less valuable as a wife if she were less good-looking.) He's emasculated, and drinking is one way to assert his manliness. But it all goes so horribly wrong.

But then there's redemption! (Of a sort, for Steve.)

We experience the goings on from Steve's (in my opinion warped and unhealthy) perspective, but I would love to read Nancy's side of the story! I can't decide if she's mature and realistic and at terms with her life, or pitiful. Someone should write that novel for me please!

On the shore

"What is it?"

"It's not something you can get across in words. The real response is something words can't express."

"There you go," Sada replies. "Exactly. If you can't get it across in words then it's better not to try."

"Even to yourself?" I ask.

"Yeah, even to yourself," Sada says. "Better not to try to explain it, even to yourself."

I won't try (too hard) to explain it (much). I read Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore over the holiday season, finally and having made some false starts on it over the last few months. I find reading Murakami demands a certain state of mind — sometimes the willed reading of him might bring this state into being, but sometimes it doesn't come so easy. That said, once I was in it, I loved it.

Murakami's not exactly a prose stylist, at least not in translation, but he does have the occasional way with words ("Her smile steps offstage for a moment, then does an encore"). He's more an idea guy. Thing is, I'm not really sure what the idea is.

Now, The Wind-up Bird Chronicles was pretty mind-blowing. Dream-like and trippy. But now that I "know" Murakami, his style of slipstream is a literary normal that I'm perfectly accustomed to. I mean, this being the fourth Murakami I've read, the edge is gone; it's no longer weird.

It's a lovely feeling, to be swept up in this surreality, the strange interconnections. I kind of wish I'd discovered Murakami decades ago — as a university student I'd have peed my pants with excitement to get my hands on his latest. But now, as much as I enjoy getting lost in Murakami's world (and make no mistake: I will read plenty more, and I'm plenty excited about 1Q84), I feel like I've been tricked — it just doesn't strike me as all that deep.

I'm not entirely sure what makes me say that, and I'm not all that sure what "deep" is. But take for example this idea: "People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues." It's just thrown out there in a casual conversation. Sure, the character doesn't say this in a vacuum; there's context, there are references to Aristotle, to Oedipus. But the idea itself is the sort of thing you could write volumes about; yet there it is, for the reader to latch onto, or not, for a paragraph or two, and that's pretty much the end of the idea. It doesn't exactly weave itself throughout the novel as a grand theme (unless you work really hard at analyzing the novel that way).

I suppose this makes it deeper than the books that don't even bother throwing that kind of idea to the reader, but it makes me feel teased and short-changed. Maybe, even, there are too many ideas, and they're all over the place, touched on lightly, and this upsets some literary order I keep in my head. Not that I'm averse to doing any thinking for myself, but Murakami lulls me into believing that I'm thinking when I'm not. I finish Murakami novels with a "What just happened?" feeling, not with regard to the plot, but with a question mark hovering over the (pleasurable) immersive experience of reading a Murakami novel: Why did I love it so much? Neat trick. I don't know how he pulls it off.

Do you love Murakami? Do you think he's "deep"? Or just beautiful?

Apart from the talking cats, and that a guy carried on conversations with the cats, my favourite part of Kafka on the Shore is the digressions on music. The book should come with a built-in soundtrack. Schubert. Beethoven's Archduke Trio. Haydn. (I had to make due with other Beethoven trios.)

They say writing about music is like dancing about architecture, which is hard to do well. I love that Murakami has characters talking about music, with interesting things to say about it, and naturally.

"That's why I like to listen to Schubert while I'm driving. Like I said, it's because all the performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of — that certain types of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally, I find that encouraging. Do you know what I'm getting at?"

The catastrophe of my personality

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

— from "Mayakovsky," by Frank O'Hara, in Meditations in an Emergency.

I first heard this bit of poetry quite recently, and it's probably the first I'd ever heard of Frank O'Hara, and I'm sure it's true for many people, when Don Draper recited it at the close of an episode of Mad Men.

It's not the first time Mad Men has inspired my literary pickings, and I'm sure it won't be the last, but something about this recitation made me gasp, and cry a little, and want to know everything about Frank O'Hara and the bar he sat in while writing it.

I think this stanza did all it could do for me, and then some — one beautiful television minute, lingering and working through my bloodstream. Weeks since I first saw it, I think about it every day.

But I ordered this collection for my sister straightaway (happy birthday Ivonna!), because, well, I don't know why. There is no emergency, no urgent need for meditation, not beyond the daily emergency of life. Not for her, I don't think, and not for me. It may be the coldest day of the year, that's all, and we should meditate some.

I think about becoming myself again.

New year, new books

Working my way through Simenon's romans durs, one by tragic one. Ordering them one by one, on an as-needed basis; otherwise, I fear I would glut on them, not sleep at all, perhaps drink myself to death, or just leave. Greatly relieved to discover that NYRB is issuing another one this year, so I don't yet have to fear running out.

Treated myself to Aurorarama, by Jean-Christophe Valtat, because it sounds breathtakingly lovely and weird, and I'm particularly enamored of the possibility to confront for myself the copyeditor's dilemmas therein. Seems I'm not yet in the mood for it, though.

After talking up the brilliance of China Miéville and of The City & the City in particular to various coworkers, I'm all in a lather over when there might be something more for me to read, and lo! Embassytown! Sounds like a sequel! But no! it's something entirely new!

Resolving also to finish The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann) before the winter is through.

That is all.

"Because you didn't have any"

My first Icelandic thriller turned out to be fairly thrilling. Tainted Blood, by Arnaldur Indriðason, was also published as Jar City. It's well-paced and has some thought-provoking aspects, not least being Iceland's nature as a closed community and how invaluable it therefore is in terms of things like genetic research, when traits and diseases can be readily mapped to geneological trees.

Detective Erlunder, the main investigator, is a fairly well-drawn character, with a complicated personal side, blah, blah, blah. His coworkers are more enigmatic, or more thin (at least in this first of the detective series).

It turned out that they were well suited, had similar interests and both wanted to make a beautiful home for themselves with exclusive furniture and objets d'art, yuppies at heart. They always kissed when they met after a long day at work. Gave each other little presents. Even opened a bottle of wine. Sometimes they went straight to bed when they got home from work, but there's been considerably less of that recently.

That was after she had given him a pair of very ordinary Finnish Wellington boots for his birthday. He tried to beam with delight but the expression of disbelief stayed on his face for too long and she saw there was something wrong. When he finally smiled it was false.

"Because you didn't have any," she said.

"I haven't had a pair of Wellington boots since I was . . . 10," he said.

"Aren't you pleased?"

"I think they're great," Sigurdur Óli said, knowing that he hadn't answered the question. She knew it too. "No, seriously," he added and could tell he was digging himself a cold grave. "It's fantastic."

"You're not pleased with them," she said morosely.

"Sure I am," he said, still at a total loss because he couldn't stop thinking about the 30,000-króna wristwatch he'd given her for her birthday, bought after a week of explorations all over town and discussions with watchmakers abut brand, gold plating, mechanisms, straps, water-tightness, Switzerland and cuckoo clocks. He'd applied all his detective skills to find the right watch, found it in the end and she was ecstatic, her joy and delight were genuine.

There he was sitting in front of her with his smile frozen on his face and tried to pretend to be overjoyed, but he simply couldn't do it for all his life was worth.

— from Tainted Blood, by Arnaldur Indriðason.

This passage is nothing much special — it's certainly not representative, nor is it particularly witty. I think it's quite weird, actually; it sticks out of this book like a sore thumb. And it is about all the insight we're going to get into the private life of Sigurdur Óli, Erlunder's partner.

But it made me kind of sad. And it made me think a little harder about what I would do for J-F for his birthday this year. Happy birthday, J-F!

The miraculous Matilda

Why didn't anybody tell me? Have you read Matilda? Have you read Roald Dahl? Are his other books any good?

The only other Dahl that I've read is The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. And the title story in that collection — what a wonderful story it was! I know squat about its narrative structure, blah, blah, blah, but what a great frickin' story! And when I read it, when I was 11, or maybe 15, it blew my mind.

So here's this Matilda, which I read earlier this week, charming for all sorts of reasons, the well-read eponymous heroine, her criminally thoughtless parents, the weirdly nasty headmistress, et cetera — it's all so sweet (I mean that in a Dickensian way) and funny. But then! [Spoiler alert!] Matilda develops paranormal telekinetic powers! Which is what put me in mind of Henry Sugar.

I know Dahl by reputation (oh, and that terrific Mr Fox movie). Henry Sugar was special, special to me, and I assumed it was unique among his writing. But this paranormal angle fascinates me. Henry Sugar had it, and so does Matilda. Is there more? Do the other books also feature similar uncanny abilities? Are they all this good?

Burnt-out

Has anyone ever seen a man smile at a woman as a woman smiles at the man she loves, fortuitously, at a bus-stop, in a railway carriage, at some chain-store in the middle of buying groceries, a smile so naturally joyful, without premeditation and without caution? The converse, of course, is probably true also. A man can never smile quite so falsely as the girl in a brothel parlour. But the girl in the brothel, Querry thought, is imitating something true. The man has nothing to imitate.

Not sure what possessed me to read Graham Greene’s A Burnt-out Case at this time. An examination of one man’s faith — in a leper colony — didn’t strike me as the cheeriest of reads. But perhaps I’m a bit like our hero Querry in this respect, fingering a sore.

Definitely in the mode of the Catholic novels, though not considered a major one, it’s somewhat lacking in subtlety. It’s a little too intensely moral (and in sharp contrast to Simenon’s indifferent amorality, which I’ve been gobbling up these last weeks) for my taste. However, it’s still quite worthwhile — it’s relatively short (also, available as an ebook), events take a very surprising turn toward the end, and Greene demonstrates some wonderful turns of phrase.

***********

(The Superior)
...suffering is something which will always be provided when it is required.

(Querry)
Sometime he read, sometimes he simply watched the steady khaki flow of the stream, which carried little islands of grass and water jacinth endlessly down at the pace of crawling taxis, out of the heart of Africa, towards the far-off sea.

...and a girl with a baby on her lap smiled and smiled like an open piano.

The Governor was a very small man with a short-sight which gave him an appearance of moral intensity.

(Rycker)
...he had passed from excessive amiability to dissatisfaction, the kind of cosmic dissatisfaction which, after probing faults in others’ characters, went on to the examination of his own.

(Father Thomas)
...fetching up a smile like a liquorice-stick, dark ands sweet and prehensile.

(Querry)
Boredom is worse in comfort.

(Doctor Colin)
“You’re too troubled by your lack of faith, Querry. You keep fingering it like a sore you want to get rid of. I am content with the myth; you are not — you have to believe or disbelieve.”

The snow was dirty

I finished reading Dirty Snow this weekend, and for a couple hours I walked around in a daze, like I'd been punched in the gut.

Can't put my finger on what it is that makes this book, and all of Simenon's romans durs, so ngaah (that's the sound I make when I'm punched in the gut).

The prose is spare — all the fat is trimmed. But it's not just the tap-tap rhythm, like heels clicking on the crusted snow, that's so evocative. It's all so empty feeling. Not exactly emotionless, there's plenty of hate and fear and wistfulness and sometimes love, even if Simenon doesn't tell you about it. How do I explain this? It's the emptiness of the abyss staring back at you.

I'm still reeling. I still have no idea what happened. Frank kills this man, a noncommissioned officer of the Occupation forces, pretty much on page 1, and you see him getting reckless and then it just gets worse and worse, and poor Sissy! It's unforgivable what Frank does to her. And then Frank's arrested and the book takes a weird turn.

Was he arrested for this murder? Or the other one? Or his crime against Sissy? Or the thing with the stolen watches? To do with his mother's business (she runs a brothel)? For consorting with the wrong people? Someone getting back at him? Who? Sissy's father? One of his mother's girls? One of Kromer's men? Kromer himself? The violinist on the second floor? Where does Monsieur Hamling, the inspector, fit into all this?

We spend the second half of the book detained, inside Frank's head, undergoing months of interrogation (by the Occupation forces), without getting anything straight. There's this faint glimmer of insight, maybe signifying love and redemption, but no, it's gone.

Dirty Snow championed by James Hynes as a better book The Stranger (Camus), with excerpt.
Afterword, by William T Vollmann, in which comparisons are drawn with Middlemarch.

This is my fourth roman dur by Simenon in just over 2 months. I'm bloody addicted. They are very frustrating — if you're the type of reader who likes everything tied up, if you need closure, then Simenon is probably not for you. The appeal for me, I think, lies in how lifelike it all is — not that life is so harrowing and bleak, but in the sense that we can't ever really know anyone, their motivations, what makes them tick. There is no omniscient third-person narrator to explain life to us.

I regret, a little bit, that I'm starting to learn a little bit about Simenon. Art and artist should remain separate, and I feel most strongly about this when I disapprove of the artist. While I'm about to order another batch of romans durs to feed my addiction, it turns out that I don't much like Simenon the man.

Simenon was accused of being a Nazi collaborator, presumably on the grounds of several of his works having been produced as films under the Nazi administration, and this is the reason for which he fled France in 1945, for America. (His younger brother was also accused of being a collaborator; he joined the Foreign Legion and was killed in Indochina.) Though he claims to have no ideology whatsoever, this casts a dark light on how he unfavorably portrayed Jews in his novels.

In the 1982 Radio Canada interview (link below), Simenon comes off as someone quite full of himself — he doth protest too much against the riches and the glory to be taken at his sincere word. Also, his account of his relationship with is daughter, not to mention with his wives and women in general, is somewhat disturbed. He claims to have slept with far more women than Casanova; that most of them were quite probably whores is a trivial point in his view. He's a bit of a jerk, really; and also creepy. Like M Hire, only more sexed.

Interviews
Radio Canada, Gérard Pelletier, 1960.
Radio Canada, Denise Bombardier, 1982.
The Paris Review: Georges Simenon, The Art of Fiction No. 9.

Simenon in Canada
La bonne quebecoise.
Simenon's cottage at Lac Masson.

You would never forgive yourself

It was lucky he hadn't finished his sentence. He had to get out of the habit of speaking pointless words.

He didn't know yet that everything he saw had its importance, and became a little more important with each day. You think "school." And you have a ready-made image of it in your mind. But in some cases, the tiniest detail might one day become so precious that you would never forgive yourself for not having looked at it more carefully.

— from Dirty Snow, by Georges Simenon.