...so the story essentially is in its form, the mode of its construction, the way it's laid out, its structural arrangement, from light to darkness, from hope to, you guessed it, hopelessness, like (hasty, sloppy, hurried writing, reader, granted, I recognize, but... no time, no time), OK, comrade, listen, the story is too beautifully conceived and, like, imaginatively narrated for me to be able to do it justice retelling it for you right now, but anyway, that's the gist of it, [from "Life Happened"]
Sentence, by Mikhail Iossel, is a collection of stories whose conceit is that they are each one sentence long. Some are shorter than the really long ones, in fact, they're not even full grammatical sentences, they're fragments, but I guess they all tell a story in their way. Each story sentences the reader to being in the narrator's 4-year-old head, or his 8-year-old head, being a Soviet-born and Jewish, native Russian speaker but English writer, or being in the old professor's seminar, or a train carriage, I think they're all the same narrator, a singular narrator (not multiple narrators each with their own tale to tell and coincidentally all having the same voice, and sharing the same essential biographical characteristics with the author).
Our narrator takes the bus down Sherbrooke Street, or comments on it being an unseasonably warm day in Montreal, and so on, I love that, I love reading about places I know, and I do love Montreal. Oh, this is autofiction, but I have to think for a minute, what other men write autofiction, I am so used to hearing the term applied somewhat derogatorily to women's writing (oh but of course Knausgård, he of all the accolades, I don't know if they're deserved or not).
Some quirks are language-based, of course he has a Russian accent when he writes "an insane some of money" (and I google this expression as written only to discover how disturbingly common it is, and I question my knowledge of English now, surely we talk about "a sum of money" or "some money").
I happen to be reading the one-sentence story "Crying," a kind of staunchly political (anti-Trumpian) — the narrator, or writer behind the anti-Nabokovian narrator, dollop-bombs politics all over the story (can it be anything but a political story?) — dream fugue with a Roy Orbison soundtrack superimposed over it, when I remember I wanted to watch Trump's address to the UN General Assembly, it's already underway when I turn it on, he's droning on about the evils of migration, blurring the line between legal immigration and other forms and he tells the UN "your countries are being ruined" and I wonder to whom is he addressing this remark, surely not to all 193 member countries, all being ruined by migration, so who exactly does Trump mean? He boasts about cleaning up Washington DC, "Your wife can walk down the middle of the street with or without you, nothing’s going to happen." Is he addressing the secretary-general? It's clear he doesn't mean women are safe, he means your property is safe.
This story occurs on November 7, 2024, in the aftermath of the US election of Trump, but also being the anniversary of the Russian revolution, and it's a little bit that was then, this is now, how different but the same, but so very different, do we ever find a better life.
Unimaginable
Imaginable is real, we know as much, but unimaginable is even more so, since most people end up living the lives they could not have predicted for themselves when they were little.
Why did I choose the Al Jazeera live feed over that of, say, CNN (OK, I rarely bother with CNN online anymore because it's too taxing to find real news amid puff pieces and sponsored links, so many pop-ups, and everything is video, not text, I can't find what I'm looking for, maybe it's changed lately, I dunno)? But after Trump's speech the broadcasters review some highlights and then move to other news in the world and I am struck to hear them talk about Israel's continuing genocide in Gaza, as opposed to its continuing strikes, or continuing war, and this heartens me a little, that some people are not afraid to speak the truth, it's a fucking genocide. The narrator remarks that "now the tsunami wave of antisemitism is rolling across the world again," and that's true but that doesn't tell the whole story, how can he tell the whole story in just one sentence?
Anyway, some great stuff in here, I can't decide if it's all a little too much in the end, like an old man rambling on a park bench and at some point you need to make your excuses and go sit on a different bench on the other side of the park.
for as long as your aching heart remembers and holds on to the pain of this rejection, the pulsating red-hot flower of a wound in your soul won't heal, and there is no greater desire than that of a wounded person for another wound, to quote Bataille, so perhaps you should maybe, like, you know, just a suggestion, fall in love with someone else, [from "How to Write Russian Sentence in English"]
I will pursue this reference, further investigate Bataille, it's relevant to my love story, all my love stories.
There's a story about leaving Soviet airspace, and one about living in a language other than your native tongue. Really all the stories are about those things, and "striving to express the inexpressible," which is a recurring theme these days (my living, breathing days), somehow Wittgenstein has seeped up to the surface, I never studied Wittgenstein, despite my area of academic interest. Wittgenstein was often invoked as a curiosity but never taken seriously, both in the philosophy seminars and in the linguistics lectures, but oh there was that Greek god in so many of my classes, he with the tousled hair and the sweaters, maybe it was always the same sweater (I see him now in my mind's eye, looking like a cross between my grade-school crush, who was actually Greek, and Derek, a designer I worked with decades later, in a confrontational stance with the metaphysics prof, his complete antithesis, who also wore sweaters, very likely the same sweater repeatedly, a cardigan misbuttoned, and while it may not have been stained, it gave off the air of being so — stained with his own effluences, magnified by his lecherous gaze upon the glorious youth of his audience — and with hair like Layton or Richler, but matted with grease, he was the size of both those men put together, I wonder where my fellow student is now, what has he grown into), he always brought up Wittgenstein, as if it were the one thing he'd ever read and understood and around which the whole world revolved, and all of us, even the profs would roll our eyes, but oh he was beautiful, years later I went to see the movie Wittgenstein at the Bytowne and I remember thinking it was kinda mind-blowing but also it didn't help me understand Wittgenstein at all. My sister gifted me a copy of Wittgenstein's Poker the year it came out (I think I made it halfway through, maybe I'll try again), but that didn't help either.
...yet toward the end, especially in the last few months preceding his abrupt fall into final stillness, some actually found it rather fascinating, in a limited way, to listen to his, uh, vocalizations, with their sheer whimsical meaninglessness, his fancifully and haphazardly esoteric verbal emissions, as ungraspable as the illusory fleeting shadow of some imaginary giant non-vulturous tropical bird's splendid multicoloured wing's passage, o life o life, google Gulag, google Gulag, a mixture of incomprehensible metaphors, striving to express the inexpressible, forever leaving the shore of the basic shared human understanding and transforming itself into a hermetic hermitic verbal cipher, wholly impenetrable first and foremost to his own disordered mind, a singular matter of extravagant guesswork and elaborate leisurely interpretations, vague surmises, groundless inferences, meaningless metonymies, all grading unmistakably in the heartbreaking direction of nonexistence, just a distant episode of a life thwarted and discontinued, full of senseless symbols and uninterpretable signs, sighs and silence. [from "Google Gulag"]
No comments:
Post a Comment