To be someone else

And why would you start writing again?

There are things we do without any reason of for the most trivial of reasons, I said: going out and walking along the road during the rush hour and looking at people in their cars; showing up in midafternoon at the box office of a movie theater or browsing in bookshops or sitting on a balcony watching people on their way home, and repeating to yourself in you mind, why am I doing all this? why today did I walk to a bookshop or go to a movie theater and just as I got to the door decide not to go in? We do thing that have no meaning or only acquire meaning over time, perhaps because deep down we want to change our lives at the last moment, when everything appears fixed, like those roulette players who one second before the close of bets nervously shift a tower of chips, from one number to another, and then bite their fingers; because we're searching for some kind of intense experience, or because we want to be someone else, yes, to be someone else, there you have your answer: I write to be someone else.

I think that's the passage that made me love this book, Necropolis, by Santiago Gamboa. At least, it's one that made me understand that I already did, and why. Maybe these questions are obvious to most people, but I find comfort and reassurance in hearing them voiced. It's why we write, but it's why we read too.

[Y]ou know, there's a sentence in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, which says: "Man is a fickle creature of doubtful reputation, and perhaps, like a chess player, he is more interested in the process of reaching his objective than in the the objective itself," I don't know if you remember it . . . I shook my head and Supervielle continued: that's what we were discussing, my friend, that simple yet profound way of reading experience, what drives a person to make one decision and not another at a specific moment? to get off a train, get on a boat, cross the street? What there is at the end of a life is irrelevant, it isn't the result that makes a life exceptional, but the path trodden, am I being excessively obscure? There are great lives that don't get anywhere, but what does it matter? That's not a paradox.

These are the questions that Simenon asks and which his characters answer in unconventional and often unacceptable ways — it's what draws me to him. Gamboa asks them in a context that's more intellectual and emotionally safer. Our narrator is attending the International Conference on Biography and Memory in Jerusalem.

Part 1 concerns the narrator's invitation to the conference, his journey there, and some of the goings on in and around the conference setting over its first days. This is interspersed with portions of one lengthy presentation at said conference, the story of Walter de la Salle, an evangelical pastor and founder of the Ministry of Mercy, told by José Maturana, ex-con and disciple, who is found dead in his hotel room a few hours after his presentation.

Part 2 gives us 3 more of the conference presentations: The story of two brilliant but "unambitious" chess players. The tale of a Colombian man hard done by and the revenge he exacts, this story bearing more than a little resemblance to The Count of Monte Cristo. And the porn actress's reminiscences.

Part 3 kind of disintegrates. There are story fragments, including a piece presented by the narrator as part of a roundtable discussion. But these stories are not fleshed out and we are distracted by the war raging through this city, the bombs that dirupt the conference proceedings. As one character puts it, "there are times when literature has to take a back seat."

There's something unsatisfying about the structure of this book. I found all of the stories and fragments compelling but felt real disappointment that they weren't given equal weight, that these stories were treated unfairly. (As opposed to say, Cloud Atlas, where the stories balance each other, at least by page count, although I didn't care for a couple of them at all.) There's no thread tying all the disparate stories together, apart perhaps from a tunnel motif (if you stretch some metaphors) and an appreciation for chicken sandwiches.

It's part of the point of the book, I think, that things unravel — the stories, the conference, life itself. Because while the stories may be fascinating, outside is real life. All the biographical accounts are embellished or borrowed or misremembered; distilled into a narrative, they are no longer real. And as in real life, some stories make headlines, and others do not get the attention they merit.

[I]t has happened too many times in the history of thought and culture that the genius of exceptional people is unrecognized because of the stupidity and limited vision of their contemporaries, but what can we do if we live surrounded idiots and simpletons?

It's not a conventional novel, but there's a lot for bibliophiles (of the sort who pack Zweig and Schulz on holiday) to latch onto.

Hurrah for Dumas!

Really. Dumas is wonderful. And great in bed.

I did finally finish The Last Cavalier late last year.

The first couple hundred pages moved swiftly, full of Napoleonic politics I couldn't always follow, but intensely gripping nonetheless. So much was I glutted, and confused, I had to take a break for a few weeks.

I hesitated to pick it up again — Dumas had exhausted me — but I did. To this point, the last cavalier, Count de Saint-Hermine, was a figure in the shadows as a Royalist and a potential threat to Napoleon, and about to marry into his circle, but circumstance whisked him away and he was left to languish in prison for a few years. On page 348, he is finally released, and with part 2, the adventure really begins.

Pirates, tigers, pythons, sharks. A girl who dies of love for him. Three hundred pages of completely unbelievable wild exploits. Dumas kept me up late; I rose sleepily cranky, dying to know what happens next.

I have 2 gripes:

1. The English translation is in desperate need of proofreading. I usually manage to turn off this part of my brain when reading for pleasure; it's rare that a typo pulls me out the fictional world I'm immersed in. Here I counted dozens of errors, and the magic of the story surely kept as many more from being noticed. A shame, for a manuscript whose publication is being marketed as important.

2. All who set out on this reading know the novel was "unfinished," that it might be in need of some editing, of tightening, of tying up loose ends. The volume is published with an appendix containing 3 chapters written by Dumas that don't directly follow from where the serial breaks off. That's fine; that's what happens when you die before you're finished. However, editor Claude Schopp took it upon himself to supply a conclusion to the episode that left us hanging. Scholar though he may be, familiar with all Dumas's phrasings and likely able to map all his plot developments and provide a very educated guess about where they might lead (besides being in possession of Dumas's notes), I think his 9-page addition was neither necessary nor right.

But. Great book. Delightful.

The characters in their exploits sometimes approach caricature. Their moral dimensions are at times simplistic, but there is no action taken devoid of one. Ultimately there's such fullness in Dumas's people, such joie de vivre in the telling, there is de la vie in what's told.

One thing that struck me. Dumas's character descriptions — of our beloved Count, but also of Napoleon, of Nelson, of advisors and friends — very often include a reference to age, expressing an awe that someone could accomplish so much, live so many adventures, command such respect and responsibility at so young an age. All so young! I notice, maybe, because I am becoming somewhat age-sensitive, marvelling at what others achieve by age 25 or 30. I suppose it's only natural old-man Dumas might obsess over such details, suprisingly only because he himself produced so much in his lifetime.

Some introductory comments.
Excerpt.

The most wonderful time of the year

It is. I keep reminding myself. Was. Has been. Wonderful.

I fully believed it a month ago, when the world first lay white at our feet, crowds bustled, and the air positively glistened with crisp anticipation. Then. Then came the mocking commentary: "It's the most wonderful time of the year," he'd singsong in a phony voice, eyebrow raised in irony. Mocking the good intentions, hardening the reality, hardening the icy crust around my heart.

And I started to hate bits of it. Obligations. Inanities.

I baked. With joy at first. I baked for escape at times. But mostly it was joy.

Now it's (almost) all over (we take the train home tomorrow) and I feel sad. I'm not sure why. Sigh.

I pass Helena a box of tissues. "I need just one Kleeneck, Mommy."

We travelled, ate, and drank. We played cards. I've read very little (after loving Dumas all through December, Bolaño bores me), written less, neglected friends.

I don't make resolutions. Never have. At least not the first-of-January kind. They are the early spring and the midsummer kind, the anyday resolution, to change, to shake things up, to just do something.

Except this year. I resolve to write. Daily. Not here necessarily. I mean, to write — for it to be shaped into something bigger. For some reason, even this makes me sad.

The stuff of my wintry days

Last week I woke up in a riding that holds the distinction of having elected to provincial parliament a member of Québec solidaire. I live among separatists, but communist separatists.

Helena starts using the cat voice, to put words in his mouth. The cat's words, though, are always few, mostly to do with the too-low level of his food bowl, or some invasion of his personal space.

The cat starts trying her bedroom first in the morning, finding her an easier target, more susceptible to his supersonic purring, the nibbling of extremities and the knocking-stuff-off-shelves ploy that over a dozen years I've become relatively immune to.

After I hennaed my hair, Helena conducts an examination and exclaims that I have two colours now: brun normale et brun "flash" (which, no, is not an established expression for describing hair effects, but I quite like it).

I read a few hundred pages of Dumas last weekend. I'm now at chapter 103? 104? Only about a hundred more pages to go!

I attended for the first time a parent-teacher meeting of which I was not the subject. I learn that my daughter is "super-intelligente" but very bossy, though remarkably, this has not cost her any friends.

Helena has finally — finally! — conquered the escalator. As a toddler she had no trouble stepping onto escalators, but then one day, she simply refused, gripped with fear. But like that, one day, we're suddenly past it.

Effective time management temporarily escapes my grasp. Not enough sleep. Little blogging. Cooking and baking, playing and reading. Wanting to do more, to do it all.

The snow! Isn't it beautiful?!

Cavalier attitudes

At long last I have arrived at The Last Cavalier, Alexandre Dumas's long-lost novel. On my shelf for almost a year already, I was somewhat daunted by this brick of more than 700 pages.

But read a sentence and you can't help but read the next one. How could I have stayed away so long from Dumas, he who sweeps me away with political intrigue and wild exploits? Plus, he's very funny.

At that moment word came to Bonaparte that the horses were harnessed and ready. He stood and asked Roland to pay. Roland dealt with the hotel keeper while Bonaparte got into the coach. Just as Roland was about to join his companion, he found Alfred de Barjols in his path.

"Excuse me, monsieur," the young man said to him. "You were beginning to say something to me, but the word never left your lips. Might I know what kept you from pronouncing it?"

"Oh, monsieur," said Roland, "the reason I held it back was simply that my companion pulled me back down by my coat pocket, and so as not to be disagreeable to him, I decided not to call you a fool."

"If you intended to insult me in that way, monsieur, might I therefore consider that you have now done so?"

"If that should please you, monsieur. . . ."

"That does please me, because it offers me the opportunity to demand satisfaction."

"Monsieur," said Roland, "we are in a great hurry, my companion and I, as you can see. But I will be happy to delay my departure for an hour if you think one hour will be enough to settle this question."

"One hour will be sufficient, monsieur."

Roland bowed and hurried to the coach.

"Well," said Bonaparte, "are you going to fight?"

"I could not do otherwise, General," Roland answered. "But my adversary appears to be very accommodating. It should not take more than an hour. I shall hire a horse as soon as this business is over and shall surely catch up with you before you reach Lyon."

Bonaparte shrugged. "Hothead," he said. And then, reaching out his hand, he added, "Try at least not to get yourself killed. I need you in Paris."

"Oh, relax, General. Somewhere between Valence and Vienne I shall come tell you what happened."

Bonaparte left. About one league beyond Valence he heard a horse galloping behind him and ordered the coachman to stop.

"Oh, it's you, Roland," he said. "Apparently everything went well?"

"Perfectly well," said Roland as he paid for his horse.

"Did you fight?"

"Yes, I did, General."

"How?"

"With pistols."

"And?"

"And I killed him, General."

Roland took his place beside Bonaparte and the coach set off again at a gallop.

The first 6 chapters are available online. I barrelled through them.

Poète impeccable, parfait magicien

Who in hell is Théophile Gautier?

"Posterity will judge Gautier to be one of the masters of writing, not only in France but also in Europe," attested Charles Baudelaire. So how come I've never heard of him?

Then one day not so long ago, his name crops up three times over the space of a few hours.

1. I've been wandering through Baudelaire this summer. I find that he dedicated Les Fleurs du mal to Gautier and that he regarded him as a great influence.

2. I pick up some brochures for the upcoming orchestral season, to bookmark those events that might be of interest to me. I notice that Les Nuits d'été are Gautier's love poems set to music by Berlioz. (Perhaps I will go.)

3. I receive an email informing me that NYRB Classics is releasing Gautier's My Fantoms.

The review copy I requested showed up shortly thereafter.

[In another instance of serendipity, while catching up on my blog reading I find that Imani has encountered Gautier: the lyrics, with music, and about the cycle.]

My Fantoms is a collection of 7 stories spanning Gautier's career. They are supernatural in their subject matter and vaguely erotic in their telling.

My favourite of the lot, from which I offer two excerpts, is "The Painter," for how it renders the artist's disposition, the artistic experience.

But as well as this, Onuphrius was a poet. There was no way in which he could ever escape his self-knowledge, and what contributed more than a little to his continual state of acute nervous excitement, which even Jacintha could not always control, was his obsessional reading. He read nothing but tales of legendary marvels, ancient chivalric romances, mystical poetry, treatises of the Cabal, German ballads, and volumes on demonology and witchcraft. In the midst of the bustling world of reality around him, he created from these books an inner world of visionary and ecstatic experience, which it was given to very few others to penetrate. From his ingrained habit of seeking the supernatural aspect, he had the ability to make the most ordinary, down to earth circumstance give rise to something weird and fantastic. You could have put him into a square, white-washed room, blank from floor to ceiling and with windows of opaque glass, and he would have been able to spot some uncanny apparition quite as easily as if he had been in a Rembrandt interior, flickering with uncertain light and awash with sinister shadows; such was the power of his mental vision acting on his physical eyesight to distort the straightest line and complicate the simplest object, like those curved or multi-faced mirrors which falsify everything placed in front of them, transforming them into grotesque or terrible presences.

The prose is dense in description, verging on florid, but real, and aspiring to surreal. There is poetry in every detail, a lust for life as Gautier's characters brush up against death.

Later in this story, the devil slices off the top of his skull:

This unexpected lobotomy did not seem to do him the least harm, expect that after a few minutes he heard a peculiar kind of buzzing above his head, and looking up he saw that all of his thoughts, no longer contained by the top of his skull, were pouring out in a chaotic stream like budgerigars fluttering from an open bird-cage door. All the ideal women that he had ever imagined to himself soared out of his head with their individual dresses, mannerisms, and modes of speech (though it ought to be said, in Onuphrius's defence, that they all looked like Jacintha's twin-sister); with them went the heroines of all the novels he had ever planned to write. Each of these women drew after them a cortège of lovers, some wearing heraldic tunics of the Middle Ages and others the top-hats and suits of eighteen thirty-two. After these came all the majestic, farcical, or monstrous human types he had ever dreamt up; then all his sketches for future paintings, set in every historical period and geographical location; then all his philosophical ideas, floating in the form of soap-bubbles; and finally, everything he remembered from his years of adolescent reading. All these continued to stream out into the air for well over an hour, until the whole studio was full, and the men and women walked up and down the room without the least hint of embarrassment, chatting, laughing, and arguing together and obviously feeling quite at home. Dumb-struck, Onuphrius could not think what to do with himself, and finally decided the best thing was simply to leave them at it, and go out of the studio.

The collection as a whole reminds me a great deal of Alexandre Dumas's Les Mille et un fantômes, or what I know of it. I'm delighted to learn that Dumas and Gautier travelled in the same circles — namely Le Petit Cénacle, a group of artists known for its extravagance and eccentricity — and I like to imagine they told each other ghost stories late into the night.

Théophile Gautier: Impeccable? Perfect? I don't know. But entertaining, sensuous, witty — yes. The man knows how to turn a phrase.

Links

...to reviews, in which other people have more interesting things to say than I do, and that should:
1. Convince me at long last to start reading Dumas's long-lost masterpiece,
2. Convince you to read Patrick Hamilton, and
3. Convince some doubters that Doris lessing is fully deserving of the Nobel Prize.

Dumas
A review of The Last Cavalier, by Alexandre Dumas, which is ready and waiting for me (What am I waiting for? — it's Dumas! Hurrah!):

Dumas, as Tolstoy said, was a 'novelising historian' rather than a historical novelist. He knew that fiction flourished in the margins of history, which is confined to obtuse and incorrigible facts; the novel specialises in the scrutiny of private lives, not public affairs.

Hamilton
Francine Prose gives a rundown of the intense and squalid Patrick Hamilton:

His ambivalence about his characters is frequently extreme; it's hard to think of another writer who so thoroughly despises the weaknesses of the very same men and women he so desperately and compassionately longs to save from themselves.

At times his view of humanity seems positively Manichaean. Half his characters are consumed by shame and regret while the other half feed on the tender, foolish emotions of the first half. He allows his characters to descend to a level of degradation so low that you might assume they'd hit bottom unless you'd read enough of Hamilton's work to expect them to sink further as they anguish over every major slight and minor decision.

Lessing
One review of Alfred and Emily, by Doris Lessing:

Alfred Tayler and Emily McVeagh are the writer's parents and this is a book of two halves — the first section is a novelist's game of might-have-beens: Lessing removes all the frustrations that circumscribed her growing up in Rhodesia, and gives Alfred and Emily the lives they wanted for themselves. The second section is another honest excavation of the lives they were all actually dealt. The gap is the one in which the writer has always lived.

And another:

But whenever she drifts too far from the subject, she returns to her two main themes: the eternal war between mothers and daughters, and the vital importance of women going out to work rather than suffocating at home.

An abundance of riches

Received last week, a box, a long time coming. Weeks went into considering what should go into it, weeks more into waiting.

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens. An audio CD, wherein the story is read by Hugh Laurie. When I opened the box and pulled this one out, I was devastated to see that it's abridged. I immediately searched out my original order — there must be some mistake; I clearly remember investigating this edition and never in a million years would I have opted for abridged. But clearly I did; I am unable to duplicate my research efforts — nowhere is it shown to be a 15-hour recording (and surely not abridged) except in my imagination, and everywhere labeled as the product I received. I only hope my frustration with abridgements is offset by having Hugh Laurie read this one to me. Although, currently Hugh Laurie succeeds only in reminding me of work, since at our New York meetings I met the company's chief medical director, who has cultivated and completely mastered a House-like persona — the look, the mannerisms, the gruffness. Also, this is my first audio book, not counting various radio-broadcast readings and in particular The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series, but I look forward to loading it onto the MP3 player — a technology I own but haven't really got a feel for — and forming a new habit, on those days when the metro is too crowded to open a physical book. I don't know how great my expectations are.

Captain Pamphile, by Alexandre Dumas. Because it's Dumas! Père Pamphile ran the establishment where Edmond Dantès celebrated his betrothal. I assume it to be the same Pamphile and this the book of his earlier adventures.

Ice, by Anna Kavan. On my list since I read Doris Lessing's endorsement of this phantasmagoria.

His Master's Voice, Stanislaw Lem. A project I'd like to undertake is to read Lem's opus. This on the basis of having read no Lem ever. My secret ambition, given enough drive, time, and smarts (or at least dictionaries), is to translate Solaris directly from Polish into English (the only English translation available came via French, and this is shameful), or set up a communal wiki-type effort to do so. But I'm thinking I should actually read some Lem first and see if I have an affinity for it before embarking on a project beyond my abilities.

The Sinbad Collection. Because it's Sinbad! Amazingly, the special effects are not nearly so laughable as I expected them to be. And with a 5-year-old at your side, the adventures are pure magic, again.

Big books

A challenge to sink my teeth into: Chunkster Challenge 2008.

I wasn't able to meet my own self-designed standards last year, but I better know my limitations for it, and I'm willing to play by more relaxed rules this time: 4 books of >450 pages, read between January 1 and December 20. (Hosted by So Many Books, So Little Time. Sign up before March 1!)

Ahem. My candidates:

1. Currently reading: The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction, by Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami (948 pages, including notes). This is the first book I started reading this year; I'm on page 162.

2. Up soon: The Last Cavalier: Being the Adventures of Count Sainte-Hermine in the Age of Napoleon, by Alexandre Dumas (751 pages, including appendix), received recently. I've read a bit of the introduction, and it's hard not to find the existence of this manuscript a little suspicious. Of course, this increases my enthusiasm for reading it — I'm determined to prove it's a fake.

3. The book I couldn't finish last year: Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace (1079 pages, including footnotes). I'll try again. Really. I left off at page 85. I may or may not revisit those first bits.

4. Something else. Maybe The Brothers Karamazov. Or maybe this is Pynchon's year. Maybe.

(Via.)