Lost threads

The trumpet announced that life was beautiful, while the violin, barely keeping up, wept drunkenly that it was too fleeting.

In Red, by Magdalena Tulli, is one of the most difficult and peculiar books I've read in recent memory. I recall hearing about it upon the publication of the English translation — it's been on my list for a few years — I was sold on the promise of its poetic and fabular qualities. And this short book has plenty of that.

But I read it without really understanding it; I enjoyed parts of it thoroughly, but other parts simply mystified me. For a synopsis of the story, such as it is, you would be best served by reading the review at KGB Bar Lit Magazine.

In Stitchings it is always winter. It is a town with a port (and therefore northern). But it has salt mines (of which southern Poland has a few).

The jacket copy says it's set in an imaginary fourth partition of Poland, that it "retraces the turbulent history of the twentieth century." The third partition of Poland had divided its land among the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian empires, effectively wiping Poland off the map for 123 years, until the Treaty of Versailles restored Poland. This is the nonexistent Poland my grandparents grew up in.

In Red begins just before Archduke Ferdinand is assassinated in 1914, and war sets the town into motion, if you can call it motion. It's perpetual motion, without direction. The town's affairs, we're told, are interwoven with those of the Swedish garrison,

Its very existence should be regarded as an especially favorable sign, bearing in the mind that a Swedish garrison is better than any Russian, Prussian, or Austrian one, just as a Swedish partition is better than any other possible partition.

It's to Stockholm that the necessary documents are sent. So this then is an imaginary third partition, one that unfolded differently than the history books would have it. The third partition dissolved Poland, there was no territory left to partition; presumably the fourth partition happens after the country is re-established: But there is no Second Republic of Poland in this fiction. The hussars were dealt with by the Germans, and then the Austrian military police. The proclamation announcing the creation of the Kingdom of Poland was read by a German lieutenant.

This "new" country is not partitioned (it is not shared) so much as occupied, overrun, subsumed.

No one noticed exactly when the snowflake that appeared on Strobbel & Slotzki's products changed its shape. From that time on, each of its four arms was bent at a right angle, like the wooden rulers with which Slotzki was so prodigal.

In Red is not tracing the history of the twentieth century so much as recounting the Weimar years and the Holocaust.

According to the preview of an academic article in Translation Review

The story told here is the history of the imaginary town of Stitchings. The town's name in Polish, "Ściegi," meaning, literally, "stitches," is implausible as a place name and thus begs to be translated. While "Ściegi" has no particular cultural resonance, it is unfortunate that for the Anglophone reader "Stitchings" conjures up images of an English country town. Stitchings/Ściegi, chimerical though it is, experiences historical events that place it squarely in northern Poland, albeit in an imaginary fourth, Swedish, partition. This is clear in the Polish edition; the translation omits a specific reference to the historical partitioning powers...

All this to say: I have trouble piecing together the fictional history and fail to understand why Tulli felt it necessary to shift the historical context to include Swedish governance at all. (Can anyone offer me any insight?)

That said, In Red has several charmingly fantastical — and symbolic — elements.

The young lady whose heart stops beating but who refuses to die. The end of her hereditary line, does she represent Poland? Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła... Poland will not die.

The forgotten intended who unpicks her embroidery, the red silk threads scattered by the wind to mark those who would die. Are these the stitches that held the town together, the stitches that were pulled apart, partition after partition? The reality of the Polish spirit was strong enough for the country to regenerate after three partitions, but the fiction shows us that the failure to preserve the essence of Poland at this crucial time would be its downfall.

The magical reality slides into darkness. The tale of the diva who disappears. The typhoid, the starvation, the death, the living dead for whom there is no salvation. Denying the existence of the sea, of a port, of any exit.

Elsewhere
KGB Bar Lit Magazine:

The book is divided into three sections, each delving into the psyche of Stitchings and its attempts to deal with the chaos that befalls it. It reads like some sort of perverse fairytale, and whether through war and confrontation, through greed, or through drunkenness and debauchery, the citizens of Stitchings ultimately cannot stave off the literal and figurative winter that enshrouds them.

LA Review of Books, Politics and the Postmodern in Magdalena Tulli:

For all its immense charm, In Red is embedded in a vicious slice of Polish history, the period between World War I and World War II. The novel's political and social resonances should be abundantly clear. For whoever would visit Magdalena Tulli's shimmering cities must visit as well those forlorn cities of the dead, where strange traces — shoes, hair — are preserved in eerie effusion.

NPR (Jessa Crispin):

Magdalena Tulli is one of Poland's most celebrated writers, and with In Red there is much to treasure. She plays with the line between unexpected and quirky very well. Despite the more fantastical elements, there is nothing twee about Tulli. A gritty darkness shadows Stitchings, as the occupying German army marches in, or as the Hussars disappear in the night, or as drunken soldiers freeze to death in the snow banks on the way home from the brothel. There is desperation and poverty and starvation. She creates an atmosphere reminiscent of the dark Polish forests of older fairy tales, the ones with the high body counts.

The Quarterly Conversation

In Red is Tulli’s most conventional novel — which is not to say it could finally be described as a conventional work of fiction.

Excerpt.

Consciousness is a tragedy

"Consciousness is a tragedy. It leads the whole race away from perfection, causes it to fritter its efforts on individual and wasteful effort. Our lives as Consu are spent learning to free our race from the tyranny of self, to move beyond ourselves and in doing so move our race forward. It is why we help you lesser races along, so you may also free yourselves in time."

— from Zoe's Tale, by John Scalzi.

Zoe's Tale was a delightful, easy read, and it's not my intent to diminish it by calling it easy. Easy, like the living is easy. Reading with ease. A breath of fresh air after the darkness I've been lately immersed in reading.

A colleague recommended it (and loaned me her copy). I know Scalzi by reputation, and I can now say his reputation is well deserved. It's a good story with adventure and young love. I laughed and cried, and wondered how a middle-aged man can write a teenage girl so well; I barely recall being one, and times have changed, but I have a freshly teen-aged daughter who will have turned into Zoe within the year, I can tell.

Apparently this novel is part of a larger universe of stories, but it stands on its own. I would totally read more. (Did I just say "totally"?)

An unspace

This Census-Taker, by China Miéville, is short and creepy, and hints at a much larger narrative. Something small and intense that makes you ache for childhood and innocence. And truth.

I found no truth. Only vague impressions, vague questions.

Who is this census-taker? Is it the census-taker who comes asking questions? Or is the narrator referring to himself, the way this reader might speculate about the possible interpretations?

The epigraph, from Jane Gaskell. Houses built not for something, but against — the sea, the elements, the world, etc. Built with hatred. I think it makes this story one of social commentary. It's the father against the community, the community against him. Us and them. To which side does the census-taker belong? He is from the father's city, but maybe he kills him. He is bureaucrat, claiming authority, but one senses that the community would be against him. Where does the hatred come from?

I believe the father killed the mother. But I cannot know this.

What are his father's keys? His customers asked for "love, money, to open things, to know the future, to fix animals, to fix things, to be stronger, to hurt someone or save someone, to fly." He would sketch the keys, correcting the lines as his customers spoke. Is this magic or metaphor? A key that changes the weather.

What is the nature of the hole? This is where they tip their rubbish, but no one else disposes of their garbage this way. Is their rubbish different? Does this serve a sacrificial purpose?

As an adult, as he writes, now, he is an honoured guest. But I believe he's in prison. It must be prison. Why is he in prison? Could it be a hospital ward? There is a chandelier and a wasp and a typewriter. Could he truly be a visiting dignitary afforded the usual honours?

The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread that's only chance, failure, they're like grubs that die without changing. He said, you'll keep three books.

Is that an order for the boy, now a grown-up? Do others also keep three books? Is this a rule for census-takers? The first book is numbers, for everyone; this one sounds official. The third book is for its writer alone, the book of secrets. The second book is for readers; it is performance. Although it too may tell secrets cryptically. The second book is chronologically the third that he writes. Why is it called the second book? This story is that book. What secrets does it tell? It is a conversation with a previous book, that of his predecessor. Where is the place with the raised neglected rails where outcasts live? The hope became the hate.

His second book begins:

In
Keying, No Obstacle Withstands.

What does he know? In keying the keys of the typewriter. The magic of writing? The magic of his father's keys?

Just what is his mother's business in town? Is it really just trade? I believe it to be something more nefarious. Why does she trust the boy to the derelict children?

The bridge had been inhabited once but some ordinance had forbidden that practice, broken though it was by the parentless children who squatted collapsing derelicts between the shops.

Houses built on bridges are scandals. A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape, an unspace to link One-place-town to Another-place-town over a river or a road or a tangle of railway tracks or a quarry, or to attach an island to another island or to the continent from which it strains. The dream of a bridge is of a woman standing at one side of a gorge and stepping out as if her job is to die, but when her foot falls it meets the ground right on the other side. A bridge is just better than no bridge but its horizon is gaplessness, and the fact of itself should still shame it. But someone had built on this bridge, drawn attention to its matter and failure. An arrogance that thrilled me. Where else could those children live?

What was it the mother used to do? In an office, they were training her, she was doing papers for them.

Where is the father from? The visitor wanting a key calls him councilman. Why does the father want a silver flower, "something you give someone for running away"? For helping them run away, or as a reward for the thing accomplished?

The traveller who stays at the picture-house. Things went wrong with her boss, when finally she could read all the paperwork and realized things were off. What repeal is she asking after?

What are the mother's papers? "A description of a carved box that was supposed to contain a person's soul."

What happened to the orphan boy Drobe? Did he really leave? Or did the father kill him too? Was he victim of some authority?

What does the census-taker see at the bottom of the hole? I believe he kills the father. Who used to work for him? She took off with the records. The traveller? Could it be the mother? Who is the agent following him? Is that the traveller? Issuing forgeries of what? What is this census-taker's authority?

This second book is only a prologue. This census-taker is rogue.

Some Theories

The Critical Flame: The Mastery of Absences: China Miéville’s This Census-Taker

The missing pieces in his story are organically missing and are of are two basic types. The first is what adults refuse to tell children and they cannot find out for themselves. The second is what children do not think to ask, because they don’t have an adult’s understanding of people and the world. From the perspective of adulthood, the book’s chain of logic is painfully deformed; yet from the perspective of the boy narrator, the gaps seem rather infrequent. His world is full of effects for which he does not instinctively seek causes. Effects without causes are called miracles. The book shimmers with miracles, as childhood does.

Strange Horizons: This Census-Taker by China Miéville

Filled with mystery, suspense, and magic—and, above all, secrets—This Census-Taker is a lot more than you'd think at first glance. It contains many stories, and storyworlds, nestled inside each other. A lizard that spends its whole life imprisoned in a bottle is not just a powerful symbol, but also echoes a recurring motive from China Miéville's novel Kraken (2010). There are descriptions of trains and of people who have never seen the sea that remind us of Railsea (2012), and a derelict cinema much like the one inspired by London's Gaumont State building in "Looking for Jake." There are children's games like the one at the beginning of Embassytown, and there are many other recurring motives and personal favourites of the author's: Gaskell, banyan trees, sending lamps down sinkholes, angry birds, bats, trains, the sea.

Out There Books: Is This Census-Taker Set in Bas-Lag?

The city where the narrator’s father is from is a mystery in itself. [...] The next stage of the mysterious city’s history is the great census-taking, which we only hear about in very vague terms in this book. For some reason the city decides that it needs to send agents out into the world to find out where all of its citizens are. Sounds like the kind of paranoid reaction New Crobuzon’s government might have.

Seven Circumstance: Imprecision with purpose — This Census-Taker, by China Miéville

The book has a sub-theme of hatred which runs end to end — the boy for his father, his mother for his father, his father for his clients and for the foreign census-taker, the townspeople for his parents and for the wild beggar children. What the census does is to neutralize hatred-filled situations in the town, and in the country, and even in the neighbouring countries, by being a record of the situation stated as neutral, objective numbers and facts. By simply interrogating and documenting the world, the foreign census-taker allays the boy’s fear, and is himself immune to the town’s hatred and quite powerful. Of all the characters, he is the calm, considered, fearless one.

A dark tangle

It was as if dawn had been told to come quicker on that side, as if the greater emptiness of the streets sucked the light in. What watchers you noticed may as well have been dispassionate observers from some austere alternative, so opaque were their regards. Destitutes lying but not asleep under leaves in a graveyard, marking you from their locations, cosied up to the railings as if to give the dead their room. In a chair by her open doorway a woman waited for the sun and nodded as your escorts took you past. You cried out because something terrible clawed from her mouth, a dark tangle, as if something hook-footed was emerging from her and she didn't care.

"Hush," Drobe said. "We have to be quick and quiet."

To the east there are beetles the size of hands and their shells tell fortunes. If you boil them you can chew their dead legs, as did the woman, and suck out narcotic blood. But you didn't know that then.

— from This Census-Taker, by China Miéville.

It's a short book, 140 pages, I'm just past halfway. It's bloody terrifying. Not for any really tangible horror. It's slow, dense passages like the above, and suddenly their implications set in.

Goofball advice

"When you're worried about something," said Henry abruptly, "have you ever tried thinking in a different language?"

"What?"

"It slows you down. Keeps your thoughts from running wild. A good discipline in any circumstance. Or you might try doing what the Buddhists do."

"What?"

"In the practice of Zen there is an exercise called zazen — similar, I think, to the Theravedic practice of vipassana. One sits facing a blank wall. No matter the emotion one feels, no matter how strong or violent, one remains motionless. Facing the wall. The discipline, of course, is in continuing to sit."

There was a silence, during which I struggled for language to adequately express what I thought of this goofball advice.

— from The Secret History, by Donna Tartt.

Anything in it?

Thinking in a different language slows you down, keeps your thoughts from running wild. I tend to think it's true; however, I tend to invoke this ability only when my mind is already in a leisurely state, not pressed.

Library woes

A few months ago I rediscovered the library. I had in general thought the English-language selection of fiction pretty paltry. I mean, I'd always check if I was looking for something in particular, but it was often easier and more efficient to purchase a book online.

But then suddenly they had e-books.

Maybe they'd had them for a while. But suddenly they had selection. And I've been taking advantage regularly.

I decided I'd finally try out Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, and I placed a hold, and I waited and waited and waited, and meanwhile I decided to check out another novel, and wouldn't you know, the very next day My Brilliant Friend became available and was automatically checked out to me. So two novels, neither of them exactly slight. One at a time. I finished one, so started the other, the Ferrante, but felt I was running out of time. No problem, I'll renew the loan.

Not so fast.

Renewing digital titles works a little differently than renewing physical books from the library. When you renew a digital title, it doesn't extend your lending period. Instead, it lets you borrow the title again immediately after your current checkout expires (if there are no existing holds) or it places you on the wait list to borrow the title again as soon as possible (if there are existing holds).

And I realized: back into the queue I would go. I might be granted access to book 2 in the series before I could renew, and finish, book 1.

This put me in the position of rushing home from work, racing to the final 60-70 pages in just a couple hours, instead of spending a leisurely holiday weekend with it.

I did it. I finished it, just under the wire. A short while later, wanting to review a scene, the book was locked to me. Imagine if a physical book would just, poof, disappear, when the lending time was up.

I feel a little bereft. I didn't get to finish the book in my own time, on my own terms. I don't have full and proper closure on it.

I love the instantaneity of the digital library, and I love the interface that allows to me to keep lists and ratings. I hate just a little that I can't choose to return a book a day late.

Leading me by circumlocution

I was charmed by his conversation, and despite its illusion of being rather modern and digressive (to me, the hallmark of the modern mind is that it loves to wander from its subject) I now see that he was leading me by circumlocution to the same points again and again. For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt, reminds me hugely of my dead cousin Peter. Everything about it. Well, not everything. I mean, it's not the dead body at the beginning of book that reminds me of the deadness of Peter. But Peter's world was academic — and we connected. He was my favourite cousin, my closest — we were just a year apart.

We would talk for hours in theoretical terms about politics and the law, about literature and philosophy, about music and film, about artificial intelligence and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. We talked about how theory could be implemented in practice.

I wonder if he read The Secret History before he died.

It was funny, but people never seemed to notice at first glance how big Henry was. Maybe it was because of his clothes, which were like one of those lame but curiously impenetrable disguises from a comic book (why does no one ever see that "bookish" Clark Kent, without his glasses, is Superman?). Or maybe it was a questions of his making people see. He had the far more remarkable talent of making himself invisible — in a room, in a car, a virtual ability to dematerialize at will — and perhaps this gift was only the converse of that one: the sudden concentration of his wandering molecules rendering his shadowy form solid, all at once, a metamorphosis startling to the viewer.

Peter had that gift too.

His air of being moneyed. His cultivated persona, in how he wore his clothes and his hair, whom he was seen with and where, what he was seen to be reading and studying, what he was seen to be drinking, the drugs he did. How he would deem you with a glance for inclusion or exclusion. Yet he was charming. I wanted to be in his club — when I was 9 and visiting his family's cottage, hen I was 19 and hanging out in downtown Toronto. We all wanted into his club.

Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally believed to be, and this hermetic, overheated, atmosphere made it a thriving black petrie dish of melodrama and distortion.

Peter claimed his mother was prone to hysterics. I knew our grandmother had "episodes," but bloody hell, two world wars, a philandering husband, and exile from her homeland... hysterics seems like a perfectly reasonable response. So it seems reasonable too that one of the daughters might've learned that behaviour (my own mother tended toward melancholic). And I never figured out if any of it was true, or if his perception was the product of male entitlement, dismissal of the feminine, mommy issues, or simply drug-addled revisionist personal history. But then, I kind of think he inherited the hysteria gene himself.

I could say that the secret of Julian's charm was that he latched onto young people who wanted to feel better than everybody else; that he had a strange gift for twisting feelings of inferiority into superiority and arrogance. I could also say that he did this not through altruistic motives but selfish ones, in order to fulfill some egotistic impulse of his own. And I could elaborate on this at some length and with, I believe, a fair degree of accuracy. But still that would not explain the fundamental magic of his personality of — even in the light of subsequent events — I still have an overwhelming wish to see him the way that I first saw him: as the wise old man who appeared to me out of nowhere on a desolate strip of road, with a bewitching offer to make all my dreams come true.

Julian is a suspicious character. Well, they all are really. But him maybe more so. The professor. Because we don't know anything about him, yet he's an older authority figure — we have the sense he should know better.

This whole book is very Hitchcockian, I find. It's not about the crime; it's about the psychology of the people involved. Specifically Rope. But also Strangers on a Train and Shadow of a Doubt and others. In Hitchcock, it's about the idea of a perfect crime. In The Secret History it's that too, but it starts as something purer: simply, putting theory into practice.

The Secret History reminds me of the classes I never took, at the college I never went to, with the people I never knew.

I think I'm a modern mind, Peter was classical.

Ten reasons why we love Donna Tartt's The Secret History

Immersed in the things of before

Thus she returned to the theme of "before," but in a different way than she had at first. She said that we didn't know anything, either as children or now, that we were therefore not in a position to understand anything, that everything in the neighborhood, every stone or piece of wood, everything, anything you could name, was already there before us, but we had grown up without realizing it, without ever thinking about it. Not just us. Her father pretended that there had been nothing before. Her mother did the same, my mother, my father, even Rino. And yet Stefano's grocery store before had been the carpenter shop of Alfredo Peluso, Pasquale's father. And yet Don Achille's money had been made before. And the Solaras' money as well. She had tested this out on her father and mother. They didn't know anything, they wouldn't talk about anything. Not Fascism, not the king. No injustice, no oppression, no exploitation. They hated Don Achille and were afraid of the Solaras. But they overlooked it and went to spend their money both at Don Achille's son's and at the Solaras', and sent us, too. And they voted for the Fascists, for the monarchists, as the Solaras wanted them to. And they thought that what had happened before was past and, in order to live quietly, they placed a stone on top of it, and so, without knowing it, they continued it, they were immersed in the things of before, and we kept them inside us, too.

— from My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante.

I was slow to warm to this novel, to find its rhythm, it didn't have the urgency and desperation of The Days of Abandonment, or the abandon of The Lost Daughter, and I wasn't sure I was in the right state of mind, but then I had a brilliant porchetta and provolone panini, and I washed it down with a pinot grigio, and thought how funny it was to look back on childhood, cuz the only way to do it is through a veil of age. We're not good at knowing the before, except maybe while we're in it, and even then we either fail to recognize it or quickly forget. So I'm reading about a teenage girl and watching my daughter be a teenage girl, albeit nearly 60 years later than the novel takes place, and everything just clicks while I'm watching Helena's now, and recalling my own before, and reading Ferrante's before, Latin lessons and the other demands of school, declarations of love, friendship struggles and parent struggles, it's all very complicated.

School's out now, but last week during exams, one of the boys in Helena' class essentially followed her home. Two days in a row. And he told her he liked her. She was mortified. But when she was telling me, she was smiling at the fact that he told her to her face, not by text. All our befores are the same, but different.

I know Ferrante's point in the excerpt above is much bigger, I mean, we're not talking about a teenager's feelings, this is Fascism, Ferrante is saying something on the scale of Santayana, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Yet, we are talking about our neighbours and our day to day, how one of them wrote poetry, how one of them killed another man.

In typical fashion, Ferrante weaves something that feels dangerous — something familiar and slightly uncomfortable. I'm barely halfway through this first book of the Neapolitan quartet. Summer has just begun.

The science of food

I was thrilled to learn about The Food Lab: Better Cooking Through Science a short while ago, and I'm thinking this might be the cookbook for me, although for some months I've been bemoaning the fact that the book I want does not exist and steeling myself to do the research and write it myself. But maybe now I don't have to.

I want to know things like:

• When a recipe says to use a wooden spoon, is that because someone's grandmother used a wooden spoon, or is there something fundamental in the utensil's woodenness that improves either the contents being stirred or the way I actually stir? Can I use a rubber spatula?
• What happens if I don't wait for the oven to preheat to the required temperature? If I put something in earlier, that means it will take less time, right? How am I paying for it in terms of texture or flavour?
• The recipe calls for an egg at room temperature, but I just pulled it out of the fridge, and I can't wait. What does it change?
• What exactly is wrong with the way I stir-fry?
• Why are most recipes written so I can't tell what are the essential instructions and which ones belong to the "that's how it's always been done, with a wooden spoon in a glass bowl" ilk. How am I supposed to know what I can safely modify or ignore?

The author is director of Serious Eats, and if that's anything to go by, with such gems as Why Do I Cream Butter, and What Happens If I Don't?, this may be the answer to all my culinary quandaries.

I haven't had a chance to track down a copy of The Food Lab in-store so I can look it over properly. Is anyone familiar with it? Will it tell me everything I want to know?

We were light, so light. . .

There are some mysterious persons — always the same ones — who stand like sentinels at every crossroads in your life.

Who are these people? The same people, over and over, across the course of one's life? Or the same people standing across many people's lives? Are some people marked to be sentinels? Who is my sentinel who is here now, and who was there then? Am I someone's sentinel?

For Victor Chmara, the sentinel is the hotel reception clerk. It seems odd, but also not, that the narrator should remark on this while recollecting the summer he was eighteen. The clerk had made an appearance in his life ten years previously, just a compelling figure at the Tuileries. And probably never again.

Why do some people leave an impression on others? It is rarely felt mutually, always imbalanced, one party remember a moment of great significance, the other does not.

We spent lazy days. We'd get up fairly early. In the morning, there was often mist — or rather a blue vapor that freed us from the law of gravity. We were light, so light. . . When we went down Boulevard Carabacel, we hardly touched the sidewalk. Nine o'clock. Soon the thin mist would be burned by the sun.

Villa Triste, by Patrick Modiano, is a strange little book. The whole time I was reading this novel I was confused by what time I was in; what is the time of the narrator, what is the time he is recollecting? It was an eternity of a summer, but maybe only a few weeks. Reading it felt like watching Last Year at Marienbad; moments of clarity amid a haze of people, of comings and goings, and suddenly everything dissolves again.

We were floating. Our gestures were infinitely slow, and when we moved, it was inch by inch. Snail's pace. Any abrupt movement would have broken the charm. We spoke in low voices. The evening invaded the room by way of the veranda, and I could see motes of dust languishing in the air. A cyclist passed. I continued to hear the whirring of his bike for several minutes. He woo was advancing inch by inch. He was floating. Everything around us was floating. We wouldn't even turn on the light as the dark came on. The nearest streetlamp, on Avenue Jean-Charcot, cast a snowy brightness. Never to step out that villa. Never to leave that room. To stay where we were lying on the sofa or perhaps on the floor, as we did more and more often. I was surprised to discover in Yvonne such an aptitude for abandon. With me, that corresponded to a horror of movement, and anxiety about everything that passes and changes, the desire to stop walking on shifting sands, to come to rest somewhere, to petrify if necessary. But with her? I think she was simply lazy. Like algae.

The biggest mystery to me is the identity of the narrator. He calls himself a count, but we learn that he borrowed his name, and the story he tells as his past. A few years of his childhood in Alexandria. He assumes an air of familiarity among the luxurious surroundings, a fashionable spa resort. Has he been here before, or not? He had fled Paris, "convinced that the city was becoming dangerous for people like me." The summer of 62, I believe. The Algerian war is drawing to a close. A deserter? There must be more to it. He has only one tie, and passes himself off as a Russian count of precarious health. He is not the bored rich boy people take him for. But who is he? "Who would have ever thought of coming to look for me among these distinguished summer vacationers?"

At the hotel reception desk, I exchanged my 50,000-franc notes for the equivalent in bills of 500 francs, which I carried upstairs in a beach bag. I emptied them all out on the bed. She put all her banknotes on the bed too, and together they formed an impressive pile. We marveled at that mass of paper money, which we wouldn't be long in spending. And I recognized in her our shared taste for ready cash, I mean for money easily won, the wads you stuff in your pockets, the wild money that slips through your fingers.

His love affair with Yvonne is founded on illusions. She is a great beauty, and there is no doubt regarding the passion he feels for her. But to most readers it will be obvious as the fleeting passion of youth, fueled by circumstance, little more. She is an aspiring movie actress, but she is clearly of humble origins and a pretender looking forward to a brilliant season at the resort. (How does she afford this lifestyle?)

The eponymous villa doesn't feature till late in the novel; as a symbol, it is something small that becomes much bigger.

In fact, the Meinthe villa didn't exactly radiate good cheer. No. Nonetheless, at first I thought the adjective "triste" unsuited to the place. Eventually, though, I realized Meinthe had been right, provided you could detect something dulcet and crystalline in the sonority of the word. Upon crossing the villa's threshold, you pervaded by a limpid melancholy. You entered a zone of calm and silence. The air was lighter. You floated.

In the frame story, our narrator has returned to the town, twelve years later, wondering about the people who pass through our lives, perhaps deliberately trying to seek some of them out, but he maintains a fairly anonymous presence. Monsieur Meinthe, the "older" gay man who saw them through that summer is now thirty-seven, with more mysterious dealings than ever. Perhaps the narrator is marked as a sentinel on Meinthe's life.

This is the second Modiano book that I've read, and I'm sure to read more. Beautiful and strange. All melancholy.

The uncle made no move to turn the radio off, and since I didn't dare intervene, I heard a continuous crackle of static that eventually sounded like the rustling of the wind in eaves. And the dining room was invaded by something fresh and green.

Other people's babies

In her short essay "The Beginning of Misunderstanding," Rivka Galchen observes:

It's as if babies don't grow larger but instead smaller, at least in our perception.

Babies are all potential. Their acquiring the ability to communicate shatters this illusion of endless possibility. Their personhood is limited and delimited, made concrete. They become someone specific.

Helena is now very much someone specific. This fills me with relief, pride, astonishment, trepidation, and a little sadness. She's a teenager now.

Every so often, I realize she's grown, she's someone different. It's like I meet her anew, and have to reestablish a rapport; I have to get to know her all over again. Obviously, we don't continually restart from zero. But every day she's something more than the day before, and I spend the day identifying what the more is and determining how to deal with it.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Little Labors. The book's beauty is in its juxtapositions: Small things, like the orange snowsuit, nosy neighbours, The Pillow Book, and Lucille Ball's pregnancy. And big things, like women writers and a whole world of maternal anxieties and deeper truths.

Little Labors warped time a little for me, and made me meditative and introspective. Which is, in my view, one of the best things a book can do.

Reviews
Feministing
NPR
Slate

Lingua franca

I wave to the crowd, focusing on an imaginary space where my family ought to be standing. In these situations, I have to remember that I'm not a child who's won a prize; I'm an unpopular man whose contribution to humanity has been to diminish its worth. It's difficult to gauge the nature of the crowd. It's not exactly a mob. There are too many neutrals for that. But certainly there is a minority who would probably wish death upon me.

Lingua Franca, by William Thacker, is a terrifically entertaining novel.

Miles Platting is that blight upon humanity, founder of a successful agency called Lingua Franca. It specializes in branding. So Miles is busy partnering towns around England with corporate sponsors. (Miles lives in Stella Artois.)

His (kind of ex-)wife, meanwhile, is a high-school English teacher, a profession Miles left behind. So they have some pretty heated discussions about the importance of language, debating whether a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. And so on.

But one town's citizens don't take to being renamed after a frozen fish retailer. They stage a revolution the only way they can. They take back the language. Their ZipIt campaign promotes silence:

If you've ever visited the Sistine chapel, you'll know how much nicer it would be if everyone would shut the fuck up.

(I love that line, because it's true. I vividly recall the boom of the priest, Silencio!, failing to hush the multitudes.)

Language is this magical thing that's imbued with meaning and allows us to communicate. But it's also the source of miscommunication, and when misused can be meaningless. This novel is chock-full of linguistic theory, and takes sharp aim at marketing language and corporate practices.

This book brings to mind Tom McCarthy (Remainder and Satin Island) — about the same level of absurdity. Lingua Franca is more comic, a little less cerebral. It's clever, funny, fast, and fun.

I will definitely be watching for more from this author.

Reviews
Annabel's House of Books
The Bookbag
Little Bookness Lane
A View from the Balcony

Her fearlessness

From Little Labors, by Rivka Galchen:


My own little labor of 23 hours, now a work in progress of thirteen and a half years, is away on a school trip for a few days, so when I'm not working long hours, I'm reading little things.

This little book makes me unreasonably happy, just looking at it, all orange joy with pink and yellow, so small and tactile and easy.

I bought this book on the basis of having read Galchen's essay in the New Yorker, The Only Thing I Envy Men.

So it's about motherhood and the creative process, and the intersection and interruption of those things, their juxtaposition, and the ambivalence of feeling in Galchen's relationship to those things.

I'm surprised by how strongly I relate to this book, being that I'm no longer the mother of a baby, that that experience is not immediate. I want to buy this book for nonmothers to say, this is what it's like, but for mothers too, to say, remember?

It's about creation, and other things. Fresh and lovely.

The new always threatens the old

"Brilliance is rooted in a knowledge that is known to many, which a brilliant mind extends beyond the usual to new revelations."

"And genius?"

"Ah... genius is rooted in a totally new observation, as yet unknown, which the man of genius uncovers and which he alone has the capacity to extend to greater revelations — to new concepts. It's a very solitary state and one that carries great responsibility to see that the new concept is integrated into old experiences. That required not only genius, but charisma and celebrity to attract attention to the new thought, to convince that it brings a change that is nonthreatening, and to persuade not only to its application but to a total commitment. For the new always threatens the old."

A Man of Genius, by Lynn Rosen, is a serviceable novel.

I can't quite recall what the hook was for me in the early reviews and press releases. Maybe "Gothic suspense for lovers of Agatha Christie, Daphne DuMaurier, Gillian Flynn." I'll bite.

The story is about an architect and three women — two wives and a mistress — plus the lawyer tasked with executing his will. The books' several parts cover his life from these different perspectives. There's a mystery at the book's heart; although it's alluded to in the novel's opening section, the mystery doesn't really announce itself till about halfway through (if you're looking for a mystery novel, this one develops too far along for it be that).

Arguably the story is more about the women and their attraction to "genius," but sadly, I never saw any evidence of his genius, and I couldn't buy into their draw to him. Rosen might've learned from the fiction-writing MOOCs I'm enrolled in, to show not tell.

Perhaps I'm spoiled by having read so many good writers lately, with poetic sensibilities and philosophical outlooks and a clear love of language. A Man of Genius pales by comparison.

More than any plot or character, the real story of the book is that of its author. A Man of Genius is her first novel, written at the age of 84. If nothing else, I'm inspired to write a better book by the time I'm that age.

Interview with Lynn Rosen.

Fixed points

It is the café of lost youth not in the sense that I'm older now and I've lost my youth, nor that I lost my youth too by growing up too fast. This is the place where the lost souls come. A lost generation. Like every generation.

I know this place. I spent my twenties there. And in truth that café (pub, in my case) represents all these interpretations of lost youth.

I've always believed certain places are like magnets and draw you towards them should you happen to walk within their radius. And this occurs imperceptibly, without you even suspecting. All it takes is a sloping street, a sunny sidewalk, or maybe a shady one. Or perhaps a downpour. And this leads you straight there, to the exact spot you're meant to wash up.

The world Patrick Modiano weaves in The Café of Lost Youth is spell-binding. Time slows. Read a page or two on the commute and the walk across the neighbourhood is suddenly infused with new meaning. I move in a haze, embraced by the city, a stand-in for Paris, and I find myself looking for fixed points.

In this uninterrupted stream of women, men, children, and dogs that pass by and end up lost from sight among the streets, it would be nice to hold on to a face once in a while. Yes, according to Bowing, amidst the maelstrom that is a large city, you had to find a few fixed points.

Louki is the fixed point of this story, a young woman who frequents the café among the many writers and bohemians. Her identity is elusive, few know even her real name, but it is around her that the texts revolve.

Four sections, chronologically overlapped, with four distinct narrators, Louki herself one of them.

The opening section presents the café through the eyes of a student at École Supérieure des Mines. He dares not tell the clientele that he's a student though, for fear he'll be mocked.

At the Condé, we never questioned each other about our origins. We were too young and we didn't even have pasts to reveal, we lived in the present.

I remember wishing I had a past. I miss not having a past.

The second narrator is Caisley, who smokes American cigarettes and occasionally calls himself an art publisher. He seems to have connections on both sides of the law, and alludes to some shady dealings. This section tells of his stint as a private investigator, hired by a man whose wife has gone missing.

I had a habit of getting to know the lay of the land before jumping straight into the thick of things. In the past, Blémant criticized me for it and thought that I was wasting my time. Dive in, he told me, rather than running in circles around the edge of the pool. Personally, I felt the opposite way. No sudden movements, but instead a passivity and slowness that allow you to be softly penetrated by the spirit of the place.

Clearly he is penetrated by the spirit of the café.

In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and the lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. So we forge ties, we try to find stability in chance encounters.

Louki narrates the third section. She's a liar, but she's honest about it. Kind of the way Holly Golightly's a phoney, but a real phoney. In fact, now that I've made the connection to Breakfast at Tiffany's, I wonder if more couldn't be made of it — the need to run, the need to reinvent oneself. What fixed points does one navigate by then?

I was never really myself when I wasn't running away. My only happy memories are memories of flight and escape.

It is through Roland, the fourth and final narrator, that we process Louki's end. As Louki's friend and lover, he is privy to Louki's spiritual longing, her need for a guru.

I had the impression that since those days at Guy de Vere's, no time had passed. Instead it had stood still, frozen into some sort of eternity. I remember the text I had trying to write back when I knew Louki. I had called it On Neutral Zones. There was a series of transitional zones in Paris, no-man's-lands where we were on the border of everything else, in transit, or even held suspended. Within, we benefited from a certain kind of immunity. I might have called them free zones, but neutral zones was more precise.

Roland obsessed about the Eternal Return.

Time stood still for me reading this book. As if I had regained my neutral zone. Anything is possible.

I want to read it again. I want to be 20 again.

This book may be a fixed point.

Wining

I love wine.

I love drinking wine almost as much as I love reading books. Sometimes more. Of course, I often do both at the same time. One can also drink wine while talking about books. And eating fine things.

There was a time I wanted to know more about wine. I bought the occasional issue of The Wine Spectator. I attended wine tastings. I watched Sideways and Bottle Shock (which strengthened my anti-French sentiments). I read about wine. I drank wine while reading about wine. I even took a MOOC about The World of Wine: From Grape to Glass (new session starting soon!).

And I have watched every documentary about wine and wine-making available on Netflix. I have a particular fondness for Somm ("freshly opened can of tennis balls"), in which it is impressed upon me that in addition to amassing knowledge and cultivating a nose, the connoisseur must exercise imagination and execute deadpan delivery, and its recent sequel Somm: Into the Bottle ("I feel like a sommelier when I'm opening a $5 bottle of wine with a $300 corkscrew."), in which is extolled the inspired pairing of popcorn and chardonnay (I've been saying that for years. Duh, butter!).

I'm practically an expert.

And I realized something: the world of wine doesn't fascinate me nearly so much as the world of the wine connoisseur.

Don't get me wrong. Wine is delicious. There is no occasion that wouldn't be complemented by a bottle. But it should be deftly woven into the fabric of life. It's the connoisseurship that demands to be noticed, and it both delights and shocks and awes and leaves me aghast.

This morning I found some clickbait in my inbox, and fully baited, I clicked. The 8 Worst Mistakes Wine Drinkers Make. I'd like to take this opportunity to call bullshit. The biggest mistake is believing these are mistakes.

Let me address these point by point.

1. Filling your wine glass up to the brim — not a mistake
Don't be a wine hog, but no, there is nothing wrong with filling your glass. Of course, much depends on context. If you're there to "taste" the wine, perhaps you need to be seen swirling and sniffing. But if you're there simply to taste the wine, save yourself another trip across the room — pour yourself a tumbler full and enjoy it.

2. Holding your wine glass by the bowl — not a mistake
Yes, it warms the wine. But any wine worth its oak will withstand the minute temperature change. What's more important? Not feeling awkward. You feel the stem may slip through your fingers, you're tipping the glass, so you grip tighter, and now you're afraid of snapping the stem. (Maybe if you hadn't filled it so much it would be easier to hold.) Just be comfortable. Hold it whatever way feels right.

3. Buying wine because of the label — not a mistake
How else are you supposed to decide? Yes, I buy books that way too. There's a lot of useful information on the label, including region, grape type, and suggested accompaniments. And a vineyard's approach to marketing — traditional or innovative, subdued or flashy — can say a lot about its product.

4. Drinking the same old stuff — not a mistake
Yes, one should keep an open mind and try new things. But there's nothing — NOTHING! — wrong with standing by an old favourite.

5. Sticking to classic wine pairing rules — just a bit of a mistake
OK, this one I actually agree with. It's a mistake. Rather than classifying by red or white, try thinking in terms of fullness, fruitiness, or acidity. But hey, there's nothing wrong with a colour-coordinated palate either.

6. Drinking too fast — not a mistake
Examining every slow sip may be one way to learn about wine, but it's not the only way to enjoy it. It can be thirst quencher and a palate cleanser. Not every wine needs to be an education.

7. Dissecting wine on the initial pour — not a mistake
No, you shouldn't share your impressions with the waiter, but that first sip is different from all the other sips you will be taking. It's certainly worth considering, and you can even set some expectations by it.

8. Not using Vivino — also not much of a mistake
I've tried using this app, and it's failed to identify the half-dozen or so labels I've scanned. I'm not sure if this is due to poor recognition technology or if the database just doesn't include the wines available to me locally.

Currently drinking: Château Cazal Viel Viognier 2014, Pays d'Oc, France. Initial purchase based on the vaguely Florentine styling of the label. Subsequent purchases based on how tasty it is.

Do I sound like a wine snob now?

An innate bitterness at the heart of education

They said I was clever.

I see now they meant that I was bookish, and suited to becoming a learned woman. A learned woman is a very different object from a wise man. I have had no experience of life; how could I see all the traps, particularly the ones that looked most like my own choices, my own happiness? Keats did not warn me, and neither did Dickens. I did not find myself within their writings.

This is The Arrival of Missives, by Aliya Whiteley.

This is a very weird story. In a good way. You know I like weird.

Whiteley's 2014 novella, The Beauty, is one of the most original and unsettling things I'd ever read. So I was ready for this.

Whiteley's recently released novella, The Arrival of Missives, starts off making you believe it's something else. A coming-of-age story, set in the past. I couldn't be sure at first if it was the real past or an imagined past. There was war. It becomes clear that this was the Great War, but war is done now. The setting is gently bucolic. Only it's not. You can feel some darkness lurking there. The story unfolds in "the place where the plans of the old and young do not quite meet."

Shirley is expected to marry someone capable, who can run the farm as her father ages. But Shirley believes herself to be part of the new era, in which women will be recognized as having something to contribute to "the upward path of humanity." Shirley dreams of escaping the farm and going to college. She wants to be a teacher. She has cultivated an attraction to her own teacher.

Look how love coats me in a shiny slick that no grim thought can penetrate. It lights the dark, and distinguishes my being. I am set alight by it.

Teacher has a secret he brought home from the war.

It reminds me very much of Bro, the first part of Vladimir Sorokin's Ice Trilogy. (Which I very much admired, though I have not yet read the rest of the trilogy. Missives is shorter by far and a swifter read.) Only instead of the Tunguska event, here the catalyst is the shrapnel of war. But in both cases something alien takes hold and demands action.

There are multiple sets of missives in this story. One is Mr Tiller's letters to Shirley, from teacher to student, a madman grasping for a shred of humanity and kindness. Another is correspondence from the college — an invitation to an interview, and then a decision letter. Another is from the future. In many ways they are the same.

Everywhere there is nature; on the farm it is made orderly and profitable, but elsewhere it is a wild tangle. And everywhere there are boys and men, and I feel Shirley's trepidation and diffidence. This is still a world ruled by men.

This is a story of how the old ways of thinking embed themselves and harden. But Shirley "will not be a foot soldier for pale old men, no matter where they live or what pretty patterns they weave." Perhaps it also a story of how women are patient like water, wearing away at stone.

For love is not the high ideal of beauty, of sacrifice, of noble deeds and chaste embraces that I had imagined when once I dreamed of Mr Tiller. It is a dirty business, of wanting and struggling and making do, and being each other's comfort because the world is cruel and there are few who want to do right by you with no thought of their own needs.

With all the intensity of a schoolgirl's heart and mind.

Once I thought that a bitter teacher spoils a pupil; I wonder now if there is not an innate bitterness at the heart of education, which always comes with hidden meanings and a high cost.

I highly recommend The Arrival of Missives. Poetic and engrossing. Quietly weird and patiently feminist.

Interview with Whiteley at The Thinker's Garden.
Excerpt.

So have you found your happiness?

Yes, that bookstore wasn't only a refuge; it was also a step in my life. I would often stay there until closing time. There was a chair next to the shelves, or rather a tell step stool where I would sit as I leafed through different books. I wasn't sure that he was even aware of my presence. After a few days, without looking up from his reading, he would speak to me, always the same sentence: "So have you found your happiness?" Much later, someone informed me with great certainty that the one thing we cannot remember is the tone of a voice. And yet even now, during my bouts of insomnia I often hear that voice and its Parisian accent — the accent of the slopes — asking me, "So have you found your happiness?" And that phrase has lost none of its kindness or mystery.

— from In the Café of Lost Youth, by Patrick Modiano.

A personal anecdote of longing and regret

It's a relaxed morning, the kid's away, and I'm feeling good. Heading to work in my Gucci sunglasses. The scarf I got at a Paris flea market, only one cigarette burn hole in twenty-five years.

Through the park to the metro it's dog walkers, joggers, and a juggler. A ruggedly handsome juggler. He's mesmerizing. The path I'm walking shifts trajectory to follow my gaze. I have to keep correcting my course. Three balls, red white blue, red white blue, under the leg, he's juggling with his foot now, red white blue. I'm staring. He drops one, finally. I'm smiling.

"Beau sourire," he calls out.

And in a millisecond I imagine several possible responses, not excluding allusions to his dexterity, and all potential outcomes, most of them variations of lusty abandonment. But the voice of "reason" drowns out the murmurs: what is he doing juggling at the park at 9:30 in the morning?, he can't possibly have a job, when you start planning to vacation together in Turkey next year who's going to pay for it?

I'm passing him now; I turn slightly and give him a thumbs up. (What the fuck does that even mean?) He laughs, and I walk on.

************

I take a seat in the metro and open my novel, In the Café of Lost Youth, by Patrick Modiano. It makes me melancholy.

I took the envelope from my pocket and I pored over the pictures for a long while. Where was she now? In a café, like me, sitting alone at a table? Doubtless the phrase he had spoken earlier had given me this idea: "It's all about trying to create ties." Encounters in the street, in a Métro station at rush hour. We ought to shackle ourselves to each other at that moment. What connection can resist the tide as it carries you away and diverts your course?

************

The busker is strumming out Wicked Game; I hum along. He sings more like Barry Gibb than Chris Isaak; it feels purer this way, less animal, but more tragic. I walk the long tunnel out to the exit, imagining myself clinging to Sailor's snakeskin jacket. I miss being twenty.

************

Why did he laugh?

************

"Maybe he's a dentist," one friend suggests. "They work odd hours."

"Independently wealthy. He's just always wanted to master juggling. What's wrong with that?"

"Cirque du Soleil, obviously."

"Lots of people take Friday off."

Some of them call me an idiot.

************

We ought to shackle ourselves to each other at that moment.

I can't wait for Monday and the walk through the park on my way to work. True story.

Missed connection w4m, Parc Laurier, May 6, 9:30 am.

Funny business

My sense of humour may be broken. Or maybe sex offenders just aren't that funny.

He has made mistakes.
Baldy Conscience was a terrific mistake.
Baldy Conscience was a turbine of a mistake.
He was a tubular bell of a mistake.
A Chernobyl-fucking-cloud of a mistake.

Martin John, by Anakana Schofield, according to cover copy is "hilarious."

John Self in The Guardian says in his opening paragraph that it's funny, but never elaborates.

Emily Keeler at the National Post laughed out loud at "deeply troubling jokes," which make me wonder if the laugh might come as a reaction to the awkwardness of uncomfortable truths rather than as a genuine response to humour.

David Hobbs in The Globe and Mail barely touches on "the sense of humour that guides its dark comedy."

But he astutely observes:

Do we believe that Martin John is driven by rage, or do we believe he is trying to satisfy women, coats and himself? Should we believe either? Does his intent change his effect? Are we inside Martin John’s head, or someone else’s attempt to decipher him?

A reader's initial response may depend on whether she feels Martin John is primarily a sexual offender or afflicted by psychological disorder. Yet Schofield is more interested in the sense of unease produced as the reader tries to sustain either impression. The arrows punctuating the novel's blank spaces resemble Post-It flags reminding us to sign our names in a legal agreement, but each subsequent paragraph reminds us that we are assenting to something beyond our comprehension.

It's clear to me that Martin John is both a sexual offender and afflicted by psychological disorder — these are not mutually exclusive conditions.

Eileen Battersby of The Irish Times describes the novel as a comic tour de force, with plenty of gags.

Be warned: regardless of one's views on sexual deviants who prey on women and who also get their kicks out of sustaining a very full bladder, Martin John will make you ill with laughing but also guilty for smiling at a human tragedy, which it is.

Is Martin John a comedy? Possibly, in the sense that it breezily employs linguistic acrobatics to describe aberrant situations that rub up against social norms. It's entertaining, enjoyable (as a thing to read, despite its subject matter, and somehow (this is Schofield's magic) light even while deeply ambiguous. But I wouldn't call it funny.

Maybe I just need a different word for the kind of funny this.

About that ambiguity... So much of the narrative is related from Martin John's perspective, it makes me question not just the nature of his relationships with other character (are we given verifiably true accounts?), but the very reality of the other characters. Who is Baldy Conscience if not Martin John's bald conscience. Does he live in the house, as Martin John's "tenant," or in his head? What about his mother? Is she a continuing presence in his life, or is it all torturous memory that nags him through his days?

All this makes the novel puzzling, like Martin John's character, his motivations, his worldview are puzzling. But not exactly funny.

Perhaps because the verdict on the Jian Gomeshi trial is still fresh. Perhaps because I work with a recently paroled sex offender, even though I personally, not being a young, male aspiring hockey player, feel no threat apart from that to my moral sensibility. Martin John is no rapist (I don't think), but he should not be excused for unacceptable behaviour simply because it is lies on the milder side of the spectrum.

We do not give sufficient voice to society's victims, so it becomes uncomfortable to spend the length of a novel inside a perpetrator's head. I think we have too much sympathy for the devil. Very much a tragedy.

What steals your memories?

"Do you know what steals your memories?"

I look at him. Because it is a strange question, one that has no answer and many answers. The river of sleep take memories down in the murk and silt. Night and the darkness take them. Waking takes them. Or our own sadness. Or maybe it's the forgetting is like a spore of blight inside each memory itself, and the two cannot ever be separated.

The Chimes, by Anna Smaill, is about memory and about music.

It's poetic and mysterious from the outset. A little Dickensian, but it's not bustling with life so much as buzzing in your head.

The jacket description explains some of the Chimes world, but it's not till I was well past a third of the way through that the world became clear.

Simon keeps his memories close. It seems people have a hard time keeping memories in their heads; they transfer them to objects. Simon can access a memory by examining an object. If you lose your objects, you're in trouble.

When Simon comes to London, the gang he runs with uses music to navigate the city, the tunes describing the paths they take, helping them to find the objects of their hunt as well as helping them find their way home.

He sings and time stands still, as if he is walking on water. His voice is stark and true, and in it there are stretches of empty skies and a bright rime of salt.

It's common wisdom that with the right music, you either forget everything or remember everything. The Chimes takes this aphorism to its dystopic extreme. Personal music links closely to memory, but the public music of the Chimes issued by the Order has a dulling effect, to keep the masses in line.

The language of The Chimes is punctuated with musical terminology; movements are subito, lento, presto. The poetry of "the sunlight's pale violence" drips off every page.

On my palm is a nugget of Pale. About three ounces, and shined with soapy, idle gleam in the thin light, as beautiful as anything I've ever seen. It pulses with silence.

At times I wished it were a little less beautiful. The evil at the heart of this dystopia is clouded by the beautiful language. But maybe that's the point: the musicality can obfuscate the reality.

See last year's review in the Guardian.

In praise of short novels

I recently convinced several people to read Valera Luiselli's The Story of My Teeth, not by describing the main character or his story or explaining the concept behind the book, but by praising how short it was. As if its brevity was its greatest virtue. Perhaps it was.

Of course you can read it over the weekend! It's so short! Only 134 pages, according to my e-version. And all those blank pages at the front. The table of contents is longer than expected. An epigraph or two. Decorative leaves between chapters. Then there are photo plates at the end, and the translator's chronology, which can't be said to be part of the book proper, though it was my favourite part. The author's afterword, also not really part of the book, although arguably it's what gives the book meaning. Still, it doesn't count as story. And more blank pages. Bringing us down to maybe a 100 pages of novel. Who can't manage that?

In this way I "sold" a book I didn't really like (I admire and respect it — I just didn't connect with it) because I had nothing better to say about it. It's really short! And an impromptu book club came into being.

I've read a lot of short books this year. It's all that my time and attention can hold.

Short novels means less commitment, cuz I just don't have it in me these days. Short novels sustain my interest, in ways most 400-page novels just can't. I can slip from one genre to another. More variety. I'm sampling more authors. And I have a sense of accomplishment. I can still read and finish books! And I can convince other people to read them too. Short novels are so digestible.

Keep your memories close

I think about memory and what it is. Keep your memories close, people say. Say it to children as often as they can. Keep them schooled up in bodymemory from early on. Give them an instrument for their own. Get them prentissed. And make them mind their memories.

I think about what it means to keep them close. The tradespeople who live and work in the city and trade in the market, they keep them on their bodies at all time, in pouches or pockets. The moneyed guilds, instrument makers and such, have elaborate bandoliers, belts with many pockets. The strandpickers port theirs in stickwrap, rather than linen or leather. Even Harry who reads the weather, whose house changes with the tide and whose head is loose as muttering, still keeps his wrapped in whatever he can find, and pushes them in his old shopping trolley along the strand of the embankment.

But for all that everyone keeps them and coddles them, I tend to think most adults wouldn't know their own memories from anybody else's. Something in their eyes and how they greet you in the market. At a certain point in your life, it's like you have to choose what to keep.

— from The Chimes, by Anna Smaill.

Fates and furies, wings and egos

I went to a wedding a long time ago, the wedding of close friends (where, coincidentally, I met my then future but now ex-partner), which made a huge impression on me. I was both moved and puzzled by what the priest said. That a marriage is more than one plus one. There are three in a marriage: husband, wife, and holy ghost. I'm skeptical about the holy ghost bit, but it's clear to me that any relationship is larger than its parts. But as most marrieds will tell you, the sum maintains its integrity only so long as the parts maintain their individual identity.

Sometimes, indeed, that third entity, Marriage, does not swallow up the others so much as form its own separate whole, for better or for worse.

Their marriage picked itself up off the ground, stretched, looked at them with its hand on its hips.

Fate and Furies, by Lauren Groff, is about a marriage. First we hear Lotto's version, and then Mathilde's. Surprise: they're not the same.

The novel has been making a lot of waves since it was published last fall. Obama's favourite book of the 2015. But the hype is starting to dwindle. It's when the novel came back as a zombie in this year's Tournament of Books that I finally felt compelled to read it.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book while I was in it. I couldn't wait to get home from work and go to bed early so I could find out what happened next. I spent several lazy Saturday hours in my reading chair with it. I mostly loved it. It gets all playwright-y and stylized at the end of part one, and I skimmed through a lot of that — just not my cup of tea — but I was pretty invested in this novel and cared how it turned out. A couple weeks on, however, I'd say the honeymoon is over, the thrill is gone, and I'm starting to wonder what I saw in it in the first place.

Here's a great but spoiler-infested review by James Woods. I wholeheartedly concur. There's just one thing he gets wrong; when Lotto finds success as a playwright, Woods notes, "Thanks to his wife, Lotto never again scrubs a toilet or pays a bill," but I'm fairly certain he hadn't done either since he met Mathilde nearly a decade earlier.

"Huge thing's your ego. Awful that you weren't the only man for her. Girl scrubs your toilets for twenty-three years, you begrudge her the life she had when you weren't around."

Laura Miller in her commentary on the TOB zombie round proclaimed "Gone Girl is brilliant, a better novel than Fates and Furies" (which so much makes me want to go read Gone Girl, which movie I loved):

One thing I like about the pairing of these two books, though, is that it does highlight the degree to which I think Fates and Furies has been enjoyed by readers as a kind of satire. It’s got a privilege-assuming, rather spoiled golden boy of a husband who is completely oblivious to the reality of his wife’s life.

Given that most readers of literary fiction are middle-class women, I’d bet a lot that this is a reason for its success.

Much is made of the novel's structure. I like the idea of changing perspectives, but these are hardly parallel narratives. Mathilde's story chronologically picks up where Lotto's left off, though through flashbacks, they do cover much of the same ground.

There's something like a Greek chorus that intermittently comments on the story, sometimes filling in the past, sometimes telling us the future, sometimes waxing philosophical.

[The ones made for music are the most beloved of all. Their bodies a container for the spirit within; the best of them is music, the rest only instruments of flesh and bone.]

I'm not familiar with Greek mythology beyond the basics, so all that fates and furies stuff is lost on me. I'm guessing that much of the tragedy in this novel comes from the Classics, but it reads like an engrossing domestic drama regardless. At times the prose feels a little too abstracted from reality, but it's mostly beautiful.

Rachel was afraid that Mathilde, whom Rachel loved as dearly as anyone, was about to bust out of it all in a commotion of wings. Poor Lotto. Poor all of them if Mathilde left him.

Mathilde's childhood and youth, it turns out, is so thoroughly fucked up, though not unbelievably, that it's no wonder she shuts the door on her past and lives a disciplined life in accordance with a strict set of rules. Lotto, on the other hand, is thoroughly oblivious, but also not unbelievably, because men can be stupid.

Was their marriage successful? I don't know.

A bumblebee in a glass of beer

And they went on staring at him, examining this fat man who was too hot and had landed in their bar like a bumblebee in a glass of beer.

That's Dr Mahé, on holiday in Porquerolles. It gets under his skin — everything about the place, and especially a young girl. An irritation, an itch he needs to scratch.

It's been a while since I read a Simenon book. Maybe I'm out of practice. Maybe I've changed. The Mahé Circle was downright unpleasant. I mean that, of course, in the best possible way. It was intense and disturbing.

The sense of restlessness, malaise, agitation were palpable from the early pages. It made me uncomfortable. I was irritated with Dr Mahé, and with everything around me while I was reading this short novel.

The object of Dr Mahé's obsession is a mere child. I don't recall this type of scenario playing out in any of the previous romans durs I've read. So while Simenon's characters are hardly admirable, they are weirdly compelling, and the reading experience can be cathartic. Not so here.

Other Simenon characters are, if not sympathetic, at least pathetic. Not so with Dr Mahé. Am I being too harshly critical? I wonder if men find him more sympathetic than I do.

Arguably, Mahé is not obsessed with the girl per se (but he is!). It is the island, it is the languor, it is his childhood, it is some life outside of his bourgeois existence. It is the need to be noticed by his wife and his mother, the need to be respected by his nephew, the need to be accepted by the islanders. The need to catch that damn fish, claim his masculinity. But above all, it's the girl.

When he had married, he had not had like other men, who leave home, a feeling of freedom.

Arguably he is punished in the end. But I don't think he repents. I don't think he acknowledges how wrong he is. Metaphorically he finally gets the fish that got away, and that fish he was after was the negation of his actual reality.

I am fascinated by stories of those who walk away, why they walk away. This book, though — it's not about that. It's about the obsession. It's not about what he's walking away from, it's about what he thinks he's walking toward. I can't get over the wrongness of it being a barely pubescent girl.

Is that the point? Was that the point when it was written in 1946? Do men readers see it as the point? Certainly that's not what the reviews I've read center on. Is that because it's really not the point of the book? Is it because Simenon's primarily male audience (that's a big leap I'm making, an assumption with no facts to back it up) is as misogynistic as he was?

Maybe when I previously binged on Simenon it was a sign that I needed to walk away from my life. Maybe now that I'm in a better place, a better headspace, I no longer have the patience for the whining, or the dilly-dallying, or the quiet complacency. I just want them to get on with it. But not with too-young girls.

The writing: spare, psychologically perceptive, precise, and oh, so evocative. An infuriatingly good book.

Elsewhere
John Banville: Simenon's Island of Bad Dreams
Tony's Reading List: Review

Excerpt.

Georges Simenon's son Pierre will be hosting a literary brunch this weekend to talk about his father's works, part of the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival. (See the calendar for this and other Simenon-related events.)

Complexity and simplicity

"You're interested in time?"

"Complexity and simplicity," he replied. "Time was simple, is simple. We can divide it into simple parts, measure it, arrange dinner by it, drink whisky to its passage. We can mathematically deploy it, use it to express ideas about the observable universe, and yet if asked to explain it in simple language to a child — in simple language which is not deceit, of course — we are powerless. The most it ever seems we know how to do with time is waste it."

So saying, he raised his glass in salute to me, and drank it down, though I found suddenly that I was not in a drinking mood.

— from The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, by Claire North.

Surpassing the truth

After all, as Quintilian says, a hyperbolic is simply "a fissure in the relationship between style and reality."

I'd heard quite a bit about The Story of My Teeth, and I'd followed with interest its performance in this year's Tournament of Books, and spurred by the upcoming appearance of author Valeria Luiselli at this year's Blue Met festival, I read it.

It's a strange little book, which has it's own strange little story, but frankly, I don't understand what all the fuss is about.

I've actually encouraged a handful of people to read this. We'll make a night out of it. Hear what the author has to say. Adjourn for cocktails.

Its selling points: 1. It's really short. It clocks in at 134 pages, but there's front matter and back matter and decorative plates and really wide margins. 2. There are clowns. Well, that may scare some people, but I think it's a plus. 3. There are funny bits, where I smiled and chuckled (but no guffaws) — but hard to say if it's at all funny apart from occasionally being clever and pretentious or almost constantly parodic and hyperbolic.

On the whole, however, I didn't like it. Gustavo "Highway" Sánchez, is not very likeable. Not that I have to like a character to like a book. But the book did not connect with me at all, not the character, the story, the tone. There were glimmers of hope, in the humour, in the oddness, in the clowns, but it wasn't sustained. But it is a weird book, in a way that merits discussion.

The story, such as it is: Highway left his wife and son to pursue his calling. He's an auctioneer, who once bought at auction and had surgically implanted Marilyn Monroe's teeth. He returns to Mexico with a fine collection of... of objects, of collectibles, and in the course of auctioning of his collection of teeth, crosses paths with his grown son.

The thing about auctioneering — he creates value, by telling stories.

When Highway first began to recount his stories to me, I thought he was a compulsive liar. But then, living with him, I realized that it had less to do with lying than surpassing the truth.

There are some marvelous insights gleaned from several of Highway's esteemed relations...

Baudrillard:

I completely disagree with my second-uncle Juan Sánchez Baudrillard when he says that "Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth."

Dostoevsky:

I suppose my uncle Fredo Sánchez Dostoyevsky was right when he said that insult, after all, is a purification of the soul.

Foucault:

In other words, as my uncle Miguel Sánchez Foucault said in relation to something else, these men and women are "singular lives transformed into strange poems through who knows what twists of fate."

And my favourite cousin, Sartre:

I was certain that I had gone to hell. During the long family meals I had to endure in my childhood, my cousin, Juan Pablo Sánchez Sartre, who used to wear white plastic flip-flops and couldn't hold his drink, would inevitably tell us — around the time when the dessert was being served — that we were hell.

One of the more mysterious elements of the book is "The Chronologic," contributed by translator Christina MacSweeney. It is in fact my favourite part of the book, for the great puzzle it presents. For example, why include an entry to mark the date that Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. It presents an interesting framework for thinking about the story, a real-world level of narrative.

The Story of My Teeth stems from a commission to catalog an actual art collection, and was created in large part by collaboration. It was meant to be read aloud and in instalments. Audience feedback was integrated into subsequent drafts. The author's and translator's collaboration mean the resulting book is a further version of the original, not a strict translation.

The Afterword is more of an Artist's Statement, and for clarity's sake, I wish it were labelled as such. This book is like that odd installation at a gallery that you can't make heads of tails of, but you finally find the little placard an you read and you think it makes sense, but you read it again to make sure, but you're not sure, and you look at the art again and something clicks, but just for a second; it's somehow been made more acceptable even if it's not any less opaque.

The problem is: I'm not convinced art should work that way; it should stand on its own, not propped up by justifications. And for some reason, if that art should be literary — it's already full of words — I think it has less right to go outside of itself in order to communicate about itself.

In that sense, The Story of My Teeth "works" as a piece of art, an artefact, an experiment, but not as a real novel, in my opinion. But I do look forward to hearing the author, discussing the book with others, and having my ignorance dispelled.