This bitter struggle between accuracy and vagueness

It was generally expected that Commandant Adrien Danglard would resolve the puzzle, partly because he was Adamsberg's longest-standing colleague, having spent years alongside him in a relationship which allowed for no concealment or precautions, and partly because Danglard couldn't stand Unsolved Questions. These Unsolved Questions cropped up at every turn, like dandelions, turning into a host of uncertainties, fuelling his anxiety and making his life a misery. Danglard worked ceaselessly to eliminate the Unsolved Questions, like a maniac who keeps trying to remove non-existent specks from his coat. The gigantic task usually led him to a dead end and then to a feeling of powerlessness; the powerlessness, in turn, drove him down to the basement of the building, where the bottle of white wine was concealed, the only thing that could help him deal with any Unsolved Question that was too thorny. If Danglard took the trouble to conceal his bottle so far away, it was not for fear that Adamsberg would discover it, since the commissaire was, by some supernatural means, perfectly aware of his secret. It was simply that going up and down the spiral staircase to the basement was sufficient of an obstacle for Danglard to postpone calling on his heart-starter until later. So he patiently gnawed away at his doubts at the same time as he shewed incessantly at the ends of his pencils.

Adamsberg had developed a theory running exactly contrary to the pencil-chewing, which posited that the number of uncertainties a single person can support at the same time cannot multiply indefinitely, and reaches a maximum of three or four. That did not mean that there were no more, but that only three or four uncertainties could be in proper working order simultaneously inside a human brain. Danglard's mania for eradicating them was therefore futile, since no sooner would he have resolved two Unsolved Questions than another two would take their place, and he would not have had to concern himself with these if he had had the wisdom to stick with the old ones.

Danglard had no time for this hypothesis. He suspected Adamsberg of liking uncertainty to the point of inactivity. Of liking it to the point of deliberately creating it himself, to cloud the clearest perspectives, for the sheer pleasure of wandering irresponsibly through them, in the same way he liked walking in the rain. If one didn't know the answer, if one didn't know anything, why bother one's head about it at all?

The sharp conflicts between Danglard's precise "Why?" and the commissaire's nonchalant "I don't know" punctuated the squad's investigations. None of the others tried to understand the core of this bitter struggle between accuracy and vagueness, but they all favoured one side or another. The positivists thought that Adamsberg dragged out investigations, taking them wilfully into the fog, leaving his colleagues trailing behind him without instructions or road maps. The others, the cloud shovellers — thus named after a traumatic visit by the squad to Quebec — thought that the commissaire's results quite justified the vagaries of the investigation, even if the essentials of his work methods escaped them. According to mood, or to the circumstances of the moment, which might inspire either jumpiness or relaxation, someone could be positivist one day and cloud shoveller the next or vice versa. Only Adamsberg and Danglard, the two principal antagonists, never varied their position.

— from This Night's Foul Work, by Fred Vargas.

Have I mentioned how much I enjoy Fred Vargas? This is the fourth book of hers I've enjoyed since last summer, and I think they're near perfect: delightfully odd and complicated and subtle characters, philosophical outlook and sly humour, and general I-can't-quite-put-my-finger-on-it charm. The stories are quite good too.

Forty rules

I had high hopes for The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi, by Elif Shafak, but it comes up short.

This is a story within a story. Modern-day Ella is unhappy in her marriage and she strikes up a correspondence with the author of a manuscript she's reading for work. It's his novel, about the relationship between a wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz, and the Islamic mystic poet Rumi, that is the heart of the book.

The forty rules are nuggets of wisdom, distilled by Shams from the Qur'an. The rules themselves do not exist historically — they are original to Shafak, inspired by Sufism.

This is a lovely window onto Islam as a religion of love. It's fairly simply told, but this veers toward simplistic, which is a shame; the material is so rich to be treated superficially.

Sadly, the writing is a little thin. The 13th-century story is told through the eyes of several characters; with every chapter there's a switch of narrator. While this helps to bring to light the many facets of our main subjects of interest (Shams and Rumi), the voices are insufficiently distinct to easily tell them apart or to cast any fresh perspective (apart from the physical one — different narrators occupying a different space and time) on them. I had trouble keeping track of them, but it barely mattered, so what's the point? (Cf the far more effective use of multiple narrators in Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red.)

I guess Ella's story is our way in to this "exotic" tale. But it takes up only a few pages, interspersed throughout the turmoils that Shams and Rumi suffer. There's no nuance to her. While I can relate to what she represents on some levels, her character does not live and breathe. The novel would be stronger without her. The American housewife simply doesn't ring true from the pen of the Turkish writer, and it feels like an artificial device for attracting a certain type of reader.

I didn't really like this book — mostly I think it's just not very well written. However, Shafak's rules offer plenty of food for thought. I've found myself talking about this book quite a bit, even though I wouldn't recommend it to anyone (there are richer texts in the world!).

I continue to ask myself: Is it true hypocrisy makes people happy, and truth makes them sad? What does it mean to not go with the flow, but to be the flow?

Laughable, maybe; but it is a way in.

One of the rules:

Live this life as light and empty as the number zero. We are no different from a pot. It is not the decorations outside but the emptiness inside that holds us straight. Just like that it is not what we aspire to achieve but the consciousness of nothingness that keeps us going.

Interview.

Solar inefficiency

My first McEwan (Saturday) was an intellectual seduction.

My second McEwan (Enduring Love)... it was love.

My third McEwan (On Chesil Beach), I was basking in the afterglow.

My fourth McEwan (Atonement) — I was confused and bit angry about it.

This, Solar, is my fifth book by Ian McEwan. I spent the first half of the novel deciding it was over, the love is gone. The second half had me reconsidering, that there might be something more substantial here, worth puzzling over and working through.

From the Guardian:

The genesis of the book was McEwan's journey to the Arctic circle in 2005 with a mixed group of scientists and artists to witness climate change at first hand. "I adored that trip," he says. "While the sculptors and painters did their thing, I just hiked around with whoever would come with me." Walking the frozen fjords with Antony Gormley he discussed landscape and imagination. At dinner there was "idealistic conversation about how we had to be different in our relations with government".

But just the other side of the door from the living quarters was a boot room. "It was chaos. There was no malice, but people were careless and would inadvertently borrow each other's stuff. Clothes and equipment there to save our lives, which we should have been able to look after very easily, would go missing, and I thought, for all the fine words and good intentions, maybe there was a comic inadequacy in human nature in dealing with this problem." Copenhagen confirmed his fears. "It was unprecedented for world leaders to be summoned by science. But it resulted in disarray and conflict with elements of Whitehall farce. So I thought that if I ever did get round to this project, I would want to write about a very flawed guy. Someone hopeless, or hopelessly self-interested."

Thus, Michael Beard, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, was born. He's not likable at all, and I don't think McEwan works very hard to make him in any way sympathetic. I couldn't bring myself to care what happened to him. Certainly Beard doesn't care much about anyone or anything — for all his abstract work in photovoltaics, I don't feel he ever really believes that climate change is a real problem. The point of him seems for us to be able to point and laugh at him, and puzzle over how a Nobel laureate can be so subaverage, so stupid, on so many levels.

Among other blunders he has to overcome, Beard makes some public remarks that immediately recalled those made by Larry Summers, President of Harvard, in January 2005:

There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference's papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the — I'll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are — the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.

Certainly it was a hot topic in that neighbourhood of the blogiverse that I frequented then. McEwan in his acknowledgements credits the exchange between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke, which was directly spawned by Summer's comments. (Hey, Ian, It's Edge.org, not Edge.com — this is why it's a good idea to have someone check your work.) This to say the character of Beard does have solid grounding in reality, even if it is unpopular and unpleasant.

As ever, McEwan is great with language:

The flight from Berlin was a typical failure. At the start, as he lowered his broad rear into his seat, barely two hours after a meaty Germanic breakfast, he was forming his resolutions: no drinks but water, no snacks, a green-leaf salad, a portion of fish, no pudding, and at the same time, at the approach of a silver tray and the murmured invitation of a female voice, his hand was closing round the stem of his runway champagne. A half-hour later he was ripping open the sachet of a salt-studded, beef-glazed, toasted corn-type sticklet snack that came with his jumbo gin and tonic. Then there was spread before him a white tablecloth, the sight of which fired some neuronal starter gun for his stomach juices. The gin melted his remaining resolve. He chose the starter he had decided against: quails' legs wrapped in bacon on a bed of creamed garlic. Then, cubes of pork belly mounted on a hill-fort of buttered rice. The 'pavé' was another of those starter guns: a paving slab of chocolate sponge encased in chocolate under a chocolate sauce; goat's cheese, cow's cheese in a nest of white grapes, three rolls, a chocolate mint, three glasses of Burgundy, and finally, as though it would absolve him of all else, he forced himself back through the menu to confront the oil-sodden salad that came with the quail. When his tray was removed, only the grapes remained.

I do wish I'd known before starting in that Solar is a comedy (though a tragic one, to be sure). (That'll teach me for not reading the jacket flaps!) Had I been so predisposed, I might've found it much funnier. As it was, expecting something serious, and even though I chuckled aloud at least twice, I never really found my groove with respect to the tone of the book. Maybe I just don't find McEwan funny. Or maybe it's a British thing.

(Part of me still thinks it's up the writer and his words and the way he puts them together to make it clear that it's meant to be funny or sarcastic or pompous or sincere, but the more it goes, the more I think there's some other ingredient that's beyond anyone's control. The reader's mindset definitely plays a role. This is perhaps why I'm finding Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain so delightfully funny, and why everybody in the office is cursing email for all the communication difficulties it generates.)

Despite my not loving it, I think Solar would make an excellent bookclub read. Beard's personal and marital failings, along with his social faux pas, not to mention the issue of climate change (and the role scientists, politicians, and artists ought to play), are great fodder for discussion. Oh, right, and the crime — there's a pretty big crime committed, which, even though it's pretty central, kind of gets glossed over. The ethics of that whole thing is also something to talk about. But see? There's all this interesting stuff — it just doesn't hang together well.

I wouldn't recommend this book to you if it's your first time out with McEwan, but if you've been around the block with him already, you may find things in it
that may deepen your appreciation of him.

Review.
Profile.
Climate change.
Digested read.

Chess

Chess Story (previously published as The Royal Game), by Stefan Zweig, is a great novella, with all the elegance I'm told the game itself possesses.

Chess fascinates me, but on some level, I feel I don't really know how to play. That is, I know all the moves, but I can't make the pieces dance the way I think they ought to. I played the very occasional game when I was growing up, with a cousin at the cottage, on game day at school. I sought out a few more games as an adult; my boyfriend du jour (well, three I can think of off the top of my head) would say he played, so we would, every other night for a week or two, and I was pathetic really, but eventually I'd beat him, and we'd never play again, and then we'd break up. I'd say these most satisfactory wins had more to with pig-headedness, somehow magically staring the board into submission, than with any kind of mastery of skill or insight.

(I can't possibly be very good; I still find it challenging to play.)

These days the kid is in chess club, so I'm learning terms and notation, and rules I never knew existed. I guess I'm also trying harder to see the art and philosophy of it, to know its mindset, to help her find a way in. I know that the possibilities on the board at any given time are finite. Certainly I cannot calculate them all, nor is there a need to — so many of them amount to being meaningless or inconsequential (it's not quite the same thing, is it?) that the relevant possibilities are significantly reduced. Still, I can only "think ahead" so far, and I'm in awe of the "instinct" some people seem to have for it.

Anyway. The book. The story is essentially a meeting of two players, two different types of player who come to the game via very unique histories. It's also very clear that psychology is a major element of the game — the very particular game that's the main event here, but also of their individual game styles.

One player is world chess champion. Of humble upbringing, he came to the game quite by accident as a teenager, and rather astounded everyone with his skill, because he was otherwise generally thought to be something of an idiot. He is criticized by some for his limitation of not being able to play "blind" — he has to have a board physically in front of him — and this betrays a lack of imaginative power. But it's a power game, isn't it? He bullies his way through, controlling the conditions, intimidating his opponent.

The other player also came upon chess quite accidentally. In confined circumstances a chess manual comes into his possession, and he spends his days, for months on end, poring over it. He has never played on a board, only in his mind.

I don't doubt, given the reference to the politics of Nazism, that there is some allegory here also, for the struggle between classes, or whatever else these two characters might represent, but that interests me less.

Right, so: 84 pages, absolutely gripping.

I first heard about this book from Richard: Thanks! I may search out some more Stefan Zweig. I admit I got a bit tired of hearing about The Post-Office Girl, and I still can't get excited about it, but I hear Beware of Pity is devastatingly good. Also, the recent screed against Zweig in the London Review of Books makes me want to read him more.

(According to Wikipedia, Chess Story inspired the 1960 Gerd Oswald film Brainwashed (Die Schachnovelle), as well as the 1980 Czechoslovakian film The Royal Game, neither of which seem to be readily available, but I'll keep an eye open for them.)

If this sort of book interests you, might I also suggest The Master of Go, by Yasunari Kawabata, which relates a real-life match of Go ("If chess is a battle, Go is a war."), pitting the upstart modern world against the traditional old guard.

At this point, my rambling here is almost as long as Chess Story itself. (Oh, I hope I haven't said too much and spoiled it for anyone.) Go read it.

Monomaniacs

All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.

— from Chess Story, by Stefan Zweig.

Bunga!

Being mom to a 7-year-old means I get exposed to a lot of crazy TV.

We've come to love iCarly. The show is fun and dynamic. It doesn't patronize or moralize to its audience. Often it's brilliantly weird and random.

Here's the funniest thing I've seen in ages. (Sadly, the video at this link cuts short the barrage of cabbages at the end. To see the full (unembeddable) clip, go to iCarly's cool web show highlights. This video is described as: "Fred meets iCarly — We have Fred HERE in our studio!!! And this is an ALL NEW Fred video featuring US!!!") I don't remember laughing so hard!

Mysterious inventions

I'd picked up The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares, some time ago, along with a few other New York Review Books classics, whose acquisition was in part inspired by the NYRB challenge I've been following with interest, but mostly, they're simply beautiful and very eclectic books that feel good, in your head and your hands. So it was after having chosen this title that I thought to look up the author and see if I ought to know more about this book before reading it that I discovered Sawyer spent an episode of Lost being interrupted while trying to read it. (Man, does he make reading sexy!)

There's not much I can tell you about this book. Jorge Luis Borges (to whom the novella is dedicated) in his prologue said that "To classify it as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole." A mere 94 pages of story, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it when I came to the end, but by now I've read it about two and a half times, and I find it hard to argue with Borges' judgement.

The story begins thus:

Today, on this island, a miracle happened: summer came ahead of time, I moved my bed out by the swimming pool, but then, because it was impossible to sleep, I stayed in the water for a long time. The heat was so intense that after I had been out of the pool for only two or three minutes I was already bathed in perspiration again. As day was breaking, I awoke to the sound of a phonograph record. Afraid to go back to the museum to get my things, I ran away down through the ravine. Now I am in the lowlands at the southern part of the island, where the aquatic plants grow, where mosquitoes torment me, where I find myself waist-deep in dirty streams of sea water. And, what is worse, I realize that there was no need to run away at all. Those people did not come here on my account; I believe they did not even see me. But here I am, without provisions, trapped in the smallest, least habitable part of the island — the marshes that the sea floods each week.

I am writing this to leave a record of the adverse miracle. If I am not drowned or killed trying to escape in the next few days, I hope to write two books. I shall entitle them Apology for Survivors and Tribute to Malthus. My books will expose the men who violate the sanctity of forests and deserts; I intend to show that the world is an implacable hell for fugitives, that its efficient police forces, its documents, newspapers, radio broadcasts, and border patrols have made every error of justice irreparable. So far I have written only this one page; yesterday I had no inkling of what was going to happen. There are so many things to do on this lonely island! The trees that grow here have such hard wood! And when I see a bird in flight I realize the vastness of the spaces all around me!

We don't really know what the narrator is doing on this island, but it soon becomes a love story, and then it's a mystery, and, well, I can't say much more. It's a slim novella, and the titular invention doesn't take hold (or at least become clear as having taken hold) till about half way through, but it's full of mood and mystery and musings on consciousness and the soul. And time. And memory. Love. Immortality.

Being a loyal watcher of Lost, I delighted in finding similarities between the TV show and this novella, and I couldn't help but read for clues to Lost's resolution. I'm fairly certain there is no answer to be found in these pages, but it's fun to draw parallels and theorize about the outcomes, to revel in the interconnectedness.

Consider:

- The action takes place on a desert island in the South Pacific.

- The island is rumoured to be the focal point of a mysterious, infectious disease.

- The narrator is a convict on the run from the law.

- He comes across a group of people, living in a civilized if somewhat anachronistic manner.

- He appears to be caught in a time loop.

- He considers the possibilities that these people are ghosts or aliens.

I highly recommend The Invention of Morel for literary Lost fans.

It's par for the course for me that the introduction is better saved for later. This one doesn't spoil the story per se, but it's more meaningful after having a sense of Bioy Casares' style and getting a feel for the way he transitions through seemingly different genres.

According to the introduction, Morel has become a kind of cult cultural touchstone; for example, it's referred to in the Argentinean film Man Facing Southeast (1985) as a possible inspiration for the eponymous man's story. (I repeat this here because that's one of my favourite movies of all time!)

If you don't want spoilers, don't read the Wikipedia entry on this book.

Introduction to this edition, by Suzanne Jill Levine.

Reading Group Guide.

Playing cards

J-F had asked me to pack playing cards, and, well, I forgot. On some level I was thinking, "Why would we need cards on vacation in Cuba?! There are other, better ways to spend our time."

On the whole, I think I was right. We survived the tedium of the airport; it was only once we'd reached our final destination, when we saw some people playing cards at a table in the hotel lobby, that he was reminded and he asked me, and I remembered that I'd forgotten.

On the whole, I was right. There was no time for cards. You don't bring cards to the beach, or poolside. "Free" time, "downtime," was spent napping or watching CNN. Time at the bar was spent talking. We talked. Quite possibly more than we have in years. It was only very occasionally that a lull would fall over us, and it was a comfortable lull, though one or the other of us might say, "Too bad we don't have a deck of cards," only half-heartedly meaning it.

It wasn't till the last day that we meant it.

On the last day, we check out by noon, with six hours to kill before boarding a bus for the airport. Relieved, emotionally and logistically, that this should be the first cool day we'd experienced. It was easier this way to not wish we were at the beach; easier also to wear jeans and sensible shoes. But it was early evident that we should do something more than quietly drink mojitos all afternoon.

We have 11 pesos (convertibles) to spare. We check the hotel gift shop. No souvenir playing cards, or playing cards of any kind. Against J-F's remonstrances ("We might really need another peso or two!") I spend one and a half pesos on a souvenir bookmark, for myself (I had to!). Two more pesos on a pack of Lucky Strikes to enjoy with another round of mojitos.

Let's check the gift shops on the strip. Dominoes everywhere, but no cards. (What about canasta? Doesn't the whole world love to play canasta? Didn't the Ricardos play canasta?) We've gone the length of the strip and into the town proper. We go into the shopping mall, which has more-regular stores such as locals (what few of them there are in these parts) might patronize. No cards at the grocery or the toy store.

We try a shop that's displaying an odd combination of children's books, stationery supplies, and souvenir trinkets. There's one pack of cards in a glass display case, locked. The cards are miniature (about half the size of usual). The fronts of the cards appear to be unspectacular. I believe the backs are marked "Cuba," but because of the angle I can't be certain. We have to ask for the price. About 6 pesos (~$7 Canadian).

The afternoon is near gone by now. We opt to save the pesos for a snack at the airport.

J-F spends the rest of the day fantasizing how we will defect to Cuba, open up a shop, a house of cards. (Certainly, his surname hints that he is destined for this life.) There will be souvenir cards with landscapes and landmarks, cards with beach scenes, cards with topless beach scenes, and cards depicting Che. Regular cards and miniature cards and novelty cards, for Cubans as well as for tourists.

The fantasy gets us back to the hotel, and through one last mojito. It carries us to the airport, and through a couple more hours of waiting. It rides with us all the way home.

It's a nice fantasy. We talk about it still, every day.

I learn now from The World of Playing Cards that, in Cuba, cards have been banned since the revolution.

My research into the matter has been fruitless. I find one document asserting that playing cards were quite popular after the defeat of Batista, and those featuring revolutionary leaders were traded much in the manner of cards with sports figures. A card with Commander Camilo Cienfuegos was more valuable than one with Castro (Camilo mysteriously disappeared later that year). I surmise that this fact may also play into the disappearance of cards from Cuba.

Cover story

I finished Sputnik Sweetheart, and I greatly enjoyed it.

But at about the halfway mark, I started periodically checking the back cover, thinking: this is not the story I thought I'd bought into. Not quite.

The back cover reads like this:

Haruki Murakami, the internationally bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, plunges us into an urbane Japan of jazz bars, coffee shops, Jack Kerouac, and the Beatles to tell this story of a tangled triangle of uniquely unrequited loves.

A college student, identified only as "K," falls in love with his classmate, Sumire. But devotion to an untidy writerly life precludes her from any personal commitments–until she meets Miu, an older and much more sophisticated businesswoman. When Sumire disappears from an island off the coast of Greece, "K" is solicited to join the search party and finds himself drawn back into her world and beset by ominous, haunting visions. A love story combined with a detective story, Sputnik Sweetheart ultimately lingers in the mind as a profound meditation on human longing.

Firstly, "urbane" — not so much. Perhaps what we see of Miu's Japan may be called urbane, but she would be the only character with any measure of polish. (However, her style is strong enough that I find myself suddenly wanting to buy fashion magazines; I want to be urbane.)

Jazz bars? None in this book. No jazz either, except for the Dizzy Gillespie glasses and a reference to Bobby Darin. I don't think that counts.

Coffee shops? I counted 3. None serve to provide atmosphere. Twice they are invisible backgrounds for a conversation — characters go in, they talk. I couldn't tell you the first thing about them — size, clientele, are they upscale? are there cigarette butts on the floor? brightly lit? quiet? I have no idea. (Oh, right. In one of these coffee shops, an Astrud Gilberto song is playing. A bossa nova. I guess that counts as a bit of jazz. But still, this is a coffee shop, not a jazz bar.)

The other instance, K tells us he stopped off at a coffee shop for around an hour and read a bit to kill some time before going off and doing whatever. A café in Rome and a couple in Greece also come into the story but only as incidentally as the coffee shops.

Jack Kerouac. OK. There's Jack.

The Beatles — none. There's one mention of Huey Lewis & the News, but definitely no Beatles. A fair bit of classical music though.

"A college student." This is a bit tricky. He was a college student back when he met Sumire, but that was 3 years ago. When exactly he realized he was in love with her I do not know. He covers the "college" part in, like, half a page. I'm not convinced this is an accurate representation of the story. Definitely merits rewriting.

"Classmate"? No. Fellow student. They met at a bus stop.

"[F]inds himself [...] beset by ominous, haunting visions." Count the continuing, pervasive sense that something bad has happened (with one scenario in particular returning to his mind). Count one haunting "experience" — "vision" is too sensorially narrow, and denies the plausibility of its actually having happened, which I believe it did. So I'd have to say "beset" is the wrong word here, and also "visions," and I'm not too happy with "ominous" either.

All of which has made me little bit angry. The whole description on the back cover is a shoddy piece of work.

It was a thoroughly entertaining novel regardless, but I'm a bit disappointed about the jazz bars. The promise of jazz bars was one of the selling points. I'd love to read about jazz bars, I thought, maybe while listening to some jazz.

(Haruki Murakami's website has a neat section that covers the music in his books.)

The book was lovely, though. Not nearly so rich as the The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. While Sputnik Sweetheart still messes with your sense of what's really happening, versus is this a dream or some alterreality, it's a pretty light read.

"You know, I've never thought I wanted to be somebody else," Sumire blurted out once, perhaps urged on by the more-than-usual amount of wine she'd imbibed. "But sometimes I think how nice it would be to be like you."

Miu held her breath for a moment. Then she picked up her wineglass and took a sip. For a second, the light dyed her eyes the crimson of the wine. Her face was drained of its usual subtle expression.

"I'm sure you don't know this," she said calmly, returning her glass to the table. "The person here now isn't the real me. Fourteen years ago I became half the person I used to be. I wish I could have met you when I was whole — that would have been wonderful. But it's pointless to think about that now."

Sumire was so taken aback she was speechless. And missed the chance to ask the obvious questions. What had happened to Miu fourteen years ago? Why had she become half her real self? And what did she mean by half, anyway? In the end, this enigmatic announcement only made Sumire more and more smitten with Miu. What an awesome person, Sumire thought.

The thing about Murakami books, you never do find out what happened to the cats.

The assassins

This book — Hashish, Wine, Opium — is one of the weirdest, sublimest little gems I've ever had the pleasure to stumble upon. It's four essays — three by Théophile Gautier and one by Charles Baudelaire — with a marvelous introduction (by Derek Stanford) that sets the historical, artistic context in which the essays were conceived.

Baudelaire makes the point in his essay, "Wine and Hashish: Compared as Means for the Multiplication of the Personality," that a dictionary tells you nothing about wine. (He quotes Lavater: "May God preserve those he loves from profitless reading!") You can learn the meaning of the word "wine," but you will learn nothing about the meaning of the thing itself.

Well, no need to do drugs yourself when you can refer to the decadents' accounts. Gautier describes the effects, in "Hashish," as occurring in three waves; here is his impression of the second, arguably most intense, phase:

Not more than half an hour had passed before I succumbed once more to the hashish. On this occasion, the vision was of greater complexity and even more astonishing. In an atmosphere of confused light, there fluttered a never-ending swarm of myriads of butterflies, their wings rustling like fans. Giant flowers with crystal cups, enormous hollyhocks, lilies of gold and silver, shot up and spread about me with detonations like those of fireworks. My sense of hearing had become abnormally acute. I could hear the very sounds of the colours. Sounds which were green, red, blue or yellow, reached my ears in perfectly distinct waves. An overturned glass, the creaking of an armchair, a whispered word, vibrated and echoed within me like peals of thunder. My own voice seemed so loud that I did not dare speak for fear of shattering the walls or of myself exploding like a bomb; more than 500 clocks were singing out the hour to me in their fluting, brazen or silvery voices. Any object brushed against would emit the notes of musical glasses or an Aeolian harp. I swam in an ocean of sonority in which there floated, like an island of light, motifs from Lucia or the Barber. Never had such beatitude flooded me with its waves: I had so melted into the indefinable, I was so absent, so free from myself (that detestable witness ever dogging one's footsteps) that I realized for the first time what might be the way of life of elemental spirits, of angels, and of souls separated from their bodies. I was like a sponge in the midst of the ocean: at every moment floods of happiness penetrated me, entering and leaving by my pores for I had become permeable and, down to the minutest capillary vessel, my whole being had been transfused by the colour of the fantastic medium into which I had been plunged. Sound, perfume and light came to me through multitudes of channels as delicate as hairs through which I could hear the magnetic current whistling. According to my sense of time, this state lasted some three hundred years, for the sensations came in such numbers and so thickly that true appreciation of time was impossible. The attack passed and I saw that it had lasted a quarter of an hour.

Gautier's entries appear to blend fact with fantasy; they bear the typical dreamlike quality of his stories.

It seems that in the mid-1800s, inspiration was a very serious concern, to artists and philophers, but also to scientists. Thinkers of various persuasions would engage in drug behaviour not in pure debauchery but as part of a thorough study of those elements that contribute to an aesthetic.

Baudelaire's account attempts to be a more objective account of the effects of wine versus hashish; it carries an authoritative tone and is sprinkled with anecdotes. He ultimiately comes down on the side of wine: it is profoundly humane, whereas hashish is anti-social (and in particular warns those whose "temperament is confined to the splenetic" against it).

Why ingest any substance at all when you can exult in such poetry as these men have to offer!

Impulse

Prompted no doubt by Kim's post on excuses for buying books, I woke up today itching to buy a book, and no good reason at hand. So what fortuitous timing that a store coupon should find its way into my inbox this morning!

As part compensation for muddling through a tedious project and part reward for doing so successfully (and part escape — because I wasn't quite finished with it yet), I walked out of the office this afternoon and into a bookstore.

I had a book in mind, kind of, but I found myself standing by the Haruki Murakami shelf, and though I'd had it in mind to check out a particular Murakami title next (later this year), my fingers set on Sputnik Sweetheart, and this is the book I pulled from the shelf and started reading, and left with minutes later.

The first 3 pages tell me it's about a 21-year-old college girl who reads Kerouac and wears Dizzy Gillespie glasses and falls in love with a married woman 17 years here senior.

I'd like to think it's about my 23-year-old self being in love with my 40-year-old self. She never read Kerouac, but if I am recalling correctly, my 23-year-old self would approve.

It all feels very right — it having been a Valentine's Day promotion, the book title featuring "Sweetheart," it being (at least a first glance) a kind of love story, and myself still basking in the afterglow of a vacation romance with Murakami (oh, and, hey! remember Sigue Sigue Sputnik? sigh) — that I should forsake Baudelaire, and Mann, and Casares, and take Murakami to bed with me tonight.

Atoning

I must be a philistine. I didn't love Ian McEwan's Atonement. And I feel terrible about it. This is the fourth McEwan book I've read, and I consider myself a fan, but I didn't love Atonement, and I prefer Saturday (and we'll see what else as I continue to read through his oeuvre).

There is much that is highly admirable in Atonement, but I simply didn't connect with it. After forgiving the fact that the novel is terribly predictable, I admit there are things about this book that are exquisitely beautiful — the story above all — and it brought me to tears.

(For a précis, see elsewhere. I'm not interested in reviewing the book so much as examining my reaction to it.)

McEwan has a deft way with some very complicated emotions, particularly not fully formed ones, inching toward being effable. And yet he is able to map them; he seems to know what parts of the emotion are common ground, what will be understood without being said, in order to describe the rest of it most simply.

Also, there were a number of wonderful maxims McEwan produced throughout the book. For example, "It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone."

I like this passage for conveying all the naive self-certainty of any reasonably smart 13-year-old:

These thoughts were as familiar to her, and as comforting, as the precise configurations of her knees, their matching but competing, symmetrical and reversible, look. A second thought always followed the first, one mystery bred another: Was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it, with a finger held up to her face? Did everybody, including her father, Betty, Hardman? If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance. But if the answer was no, then Briony was surrounded by machines, intelligent and pleasant enough on the outside, but lacking the bright and private inside feeling she had. This was sinister and lonely, as well as unlikely. For though it offended her sense of order, she knew it was overwhelmingly probable that everyone else had thoughts like hers. She knew this, but only in a rather arid way; she didn't feel it.

So why don't I love Atonement the way I'm supposed to?

I expected something epic (I don't know why). Instead: the first half covers the emotional life of little more than a single day. The second and fourth sections cover similarly slight slices of time, with only the third part describing the experiences of a couple weeks. There's a certain kind of stillness required for reading time treated in this way, and the words themselves couldn't draw me into that state. Maybe, simply, this wasn't the right time for me to be reading this book.

It's the first section, half the book, that sets the stage, that culminates in the act for which the atoning shall be done. The second section confused me. I'm still not entirely sure why it's there. It's Robbie in France, retreating to Dunkirk. Conditions are hard, and one might almost think Robbie is atoning, that this is his punishment. Robbie's been wronged, of course, but this section has the effect of making me forget. Rather than intensify his suffering, it serves to dilute it — he suffered war just as thousands of other young men did. Perhaps he would not have, had Briony behaved differently, but this fact does not elicit sympathy from me.

So then, finally, Briony gets on with her atoning, late in the novel, and this reassured me somewhat. (But as a writer, she's God: to whom does God need atone?)

I think Briony's rejection letter (at about three-quarters through the book — I'd just about lost hope) holds a clue to my disenchantment:

However, we wondered whether it owed a little too much to the technique of Mrs Woolf. The crystalline present moment is of course a worthy subject in itself, especially for poetry; it allows a writer to show his gifts, delve into mysteries of perception, present a stylized version of thought processes, permit the vagaries and unpredictability of the private self to be explored and so on. Who can doubt the value of this experimentation? However, such writing can become precious when there is no sense of forward movement.

Certainly Briony's initially submitted draft was improved upon, as it's clear she incorporated some of the other suggestions made, but I can't help but believe some of the observations might be equally well levelled at McEwan. "Precious" is a bit strong. But it feels too much like an exercise in style (and not being a fan of Mrs Woolf, it's an exercise lost on me). It lacks the ease and simplicity I've come to associate with his writing. Yet, the prose has a "floaty" quality (I'm sure that's a technical term), but in a heavy way, like a wet butterfly. It's not languorous but rather wilted in the heat. There's something like a surface tension, an anticipation — the thing can't move freely, but it won't alight, trying to keep a cool distance on the hottest day of the year. In this way it remind me a little Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, which I loved. So maybe this attitude is all very deliberate, but it feels at cross-purposes and doesn't work for me here.

**********

Days later, my opinion has softened somewhat. The several passages I've reread are quietly charming; they are not assaulting me with their pretensions.

However, I continue to believe that style gets in the way of the sincerity I've loved in some of McEwan's other books.

If you are among those who love this book, please, share with me why.

Wind-up

I love-love-loved Haruki Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicle, but I'm hard put to tell you why, beyond that it was so completely the right book at the right time.

Reading this on vacation yielded an additional dimension of pleasure: I had my own foreign, unspottable, strange-calling "wind-up" bird to provide a live soundtrack, winding up the spring of my reality on the beach. There's something extra unpleasant (in a good way) in reading about someone being skinned alive while mass tracts of my own skin are already falling away from my body and the sun continues to sear into my flesh. Time moves differently when you're in the sun by the sea, and you can lose yourself for hours at a time in your book — existence takes on a dreamlike quality, completely liberated from schedules, commitments, the ordinary; you move in a sun-drenched, alcohol-quenched haze. All this conspired to enhance The Wind-up Bird Chronicle in immeasurable ways.

What's it about? Well, it starts off with this guy, Toru Okada, looking for his cat, but before long, his wife is missing too. He doesn't spend his days actively looking for her (them) so much as he tries to grok what's happening, to come to terms with that slice of reality in which she (they) might've gone.

Then there are the women: the mysterious caller whose motives are unclear, though phone sex is one of her tactics; the Kano sisters, psychic consultants; a professional "healer"; and the teenage girl who lives a couple houses down (arguably the best developed character of the lot of them and the most instrumental to the narrator's awakening, quite possibly because she's the only one who's a real person, but maybe not).

In my books and stories, women are mediums, in a sense; the function of the medium is to make something happen through herself. It's a kind of system to be experienced. The protagonist is always led somewhere by the medium and the visions that he sees are shown to him by her. [...] I think sex is an act of . . . a kind of soul-commitment. If the sex is good, your injury will be healed, your imagination will be invigorated. It's a kind of passage to the upper area, to the better place. In that sense, in my stories, women are mediums — harbingers of the coming world.

— Haruki Murakami, The Paris Review Interviews, IV.

But women are not the only mediums in this book. There is a another psychic, an acquaintance, whose dying wishes include that a package be delivered to Toru Okada. And the war veteran who delivers the empty parcel, with his tales of Manchuria and Russians and Mongols, turns out to be more of a message in himself than he is a mere messenger.

There is not a lot of character development in this novel. They come as they are, and leave before you know it. They seem to exist only to provide Toru Okada with some reflective capacity by which to negotiate the reality of his own mind (whether it lies in a dream or somewhere else entirely), which seems to be a bit out of sync with that of his body.

Now I was enveloped by a darkness that was total. No amount of straining helped my eyes to see a thing. I couldn't tell where my own hand was. I felt along the wall to where the ladder hung and gave it a tug. It was still firmly anchored at the surface. The movement of my hand seemed to cause the darkness itself to shift, but that could have been an illusion.

It felt extremely strange not to be able to see my own body with my own eyes, though I knew it must be there. Staying very still in the darkness, I became less and less convinced of the fact that I actually existed. To cope with that, I would clear my throat now and then, or run my hand over my face. That way, my ears could check on the existence of my voice, my hand could check on the existence of my face, and my face could check on the existence of my hand.

Despite these efforts, my body began to lose its density and weight, like sand gradually being washed way by flowing water. I felt as if a fierce and wordless tug-of-war were going on inside me, a contest in which my mind was slowly dragging my body into its own territory. The darkness was disrupting the proper balance between the two. The thought struck me that my own body was a mere provisional husk that had been prepared for my mind by a rearrangement of the signs known as chromosomes. If the signs were rearranged yet again, I would find myself inside a wholly different body than before. "Prostitute of the mind," Creta Kano had called herself. I no longer had any trouble accepting the phrase. Yes, it was possible for us to couple in our minds and for me to come in reality. In truly deep darkness, all kinds of strange things were possible.

I shook my head and struggled to bring my mind back inside my body.

In the darkness, I pressed the fingertips of one hand against the fingertips of the other — thumb against thumb, index finger against index finger. My right-hand fingers ascertained the existence of my left-hand fingers, and the fingers of my left hand ascertained the existence of the fingers of my right hand. Then I took several slow, deep breaths. OK, then, enough of this thinking about the mind. Think about reality. Think about the real world. The body's world. That's why I'm here. To think about reality. The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible — a place like the bottom of a well, for example. "When you're supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom," Mr Honda had said. Leaning against the wall, I slowly sucked the moldy air into my lungs.

Murakami's prose is nothing special, not lyrical and poetic, nothing to swoon over. At times, particularly when physical descriptions and character backstory were being supplied, the language seemed decidedly unsophisticated. Murakami is no stylist, but the text is straightforward, and this may be a blessing in the conveyance of such surreal goings-on.

There is no clear delineation between dream and real life; they bleed into each other. The whole novel is imbued with that pleasant sort of confusion you feel when actual morning noises infiltrate the dream you're waking from. It hints at altered states of consciouness, alternate states of reality, but without overtly making a case for any such thing. It just is what it is, without always making sense.

Murakami excels at mood. And I can't put my finger on what that mood is. It makes me feel young. It reminds me of university days. Of staying up late and confessing secrets and dreams. When I was invulnerable, and more vulnerable than ever. When the meaning of life and of death and the essence of cool were palpable and coded into my circle of friends, that bottle of booze, and those song lyrics. When we actually talked, sometimes obsessively and usually genuinely, about the meaning of life. Not that the characters actually do this; they touch on this kind of behaviour in only the mildest way. My wise adult self wants to call Murakami out for relying on cheap supernatural thrills and being juvenile in his treatment of serious themes, even while I'm unable to identify any consistent themes (denying death, maybe; the power of mind over body?), yet The Chronicle speaks to some inner me, joyfully and forcefully.

(Some parts in their eeriness remind me of Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, but nowhere near as creepy.)

I'd recommend this book to almost anyone who doesn't mind if things aren't all tied up and neatly explained. (Because, frankly, I don't know what the hell really happened.) It's more than 600 pages, but it is a compelling and easy read. I've read only one other novel (After Dark) by Murakami, and a couple short stories, but I'd encourage you to jump right into The Chronicle, for it is very cool and weird.

I will be searching out more Murakami later this year.

New York Times review.

Excerpts:
The Zoo Attack
Another Way to Die

Coordinates

We return rested, warmed and sun-kissed.

I was surprised to discover that my two main choices in reading material shared the exact same colour scheme, featuring blue sky and fluffy white clouds somewhere around their middle, and both coordinated rather nicely with my bathing suit.

Spotted on the beach and around the pool: books by Barack Obama, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Marc Lévy (this last both in French and in German), and a few novels bearing that distinctive style of cover art that could signify nothing other than chick lit. The maid would gather literature left behind by guests and leave them by the elevator. I recognized only Fred Vargas (in German translation) among those authors.

I read all of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami, and loved every bit of it. Thank goodness my bookmark serves also as a a calendar so I could mark off the days and was not completely lost in time. I will tell you more about this later. (I considered leaving the Murakami book behind so other guests could enjoy it, but I'm pretty sure I'll be wanting to revisit portions of this book in the years to come.)

I started The Invention of Morel, and after loving page 1, for some reason I thought I really should read the introduction, as well as Jorge Luis Borges' prologue. I'm not sure why I did, because I have indeed learned that this is often a bad idea, as learnèd introductions often contain spoilers, and no matter how erudite they be I'd rather save the expert insight for until after I've had opportunity to make up my own mind, thank you very much. The intro in this case didn't spoil the book, but it did somehow spoil the mood.

So I turned to Ian McEwan's Atonement. I'm not finished yet, but I expect I will be before I get out of bed in the morning. It's not at all what I expected! I don't know why I anticipated something epic, but the first half of the book covers the events of a single household over the course of only a single day. There's no going back now, but I'm not sure I started this book in the proper mindset. It has, however, helped instill and maintain a certain kind of stillness since our return.

By degrees

It was -8°C in Montreal yesterday, with a windchill factor making it feel like -16°C. Today was bone-chillingly damp. In Varadero tomorrow, it should be 28°C, or 36°C with the humidity.

So I'm heading to the Tropicana, where there's a mojito with my name on it. Hasta luego!

Corruption anticipated

Hans gets an x-ray!

And Hans Castorp saw exactly what he should have expected to see, but which no man was ever intended to see and which he himself had never presumed he would be able to see: he saw his own grave. Under that light, he saw the process of corruption anticipated, saw the flesh in which he moved decomposed, expunged, dissolved into airy nothingness — and inside was the delicately turned skeleton of his right hand and around the last joint of the ring finger, dangling black and loose, the signet ring his grandfather had bequeathed him: a hard thing, this ore with which man adorns a body predestined to melt away beneath it, so that it can be free again and move on to yet other flesh that may bear it for a while. With the eyes of his Tienappel forebear — penetrating, clairvoyant eyes — he beheld a familiar part of his body, and for the first time in his life he understood that he would die. And he made the same face he usually made when listening to music — a rather dull, sleepy, and devout face, his head tilted toward one shoulder, his mouth half-open.

The director said, "Spooky, isn't it? Yes, there's no mistaking that whiff of spookiness."

— from page 260 of The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann.

Is it just me, or is "spooky" a funny word? It's just a bit unexpected, with a lightness of touch, just when it's getting all morbid; it stops you from taking it too seriously. This is the sort of thing that contributes to my sense that the Mountain is a funny book. Not exactly laugh-out-loud funny, but somehow joyous, gently mocking — of its characters, their conventions, and society as a whole.

I mean, "Spooky"! Not "eerie" or "frightening," not "ghostly" or phantasmal," not "weird" or "creepy." Spooooky.

I do not read German, nor do I intend to read a different translation of the Mountain for comparison's sake. I'm reading the translation by John E Woods, from Everyman's Library. Perhaps it's the jacket blurbs — "Woods captures perfectly the irony and humor" — that prejudiced me to read this book in this mood, to invest it with levity, defy the gravity of it. I very clearly hear Mann's tongue in his cheek.

I'm at page 315 this morning. Highlights of the narrative to this point include Herr Settembrini's humanist views, that as much as he most admires the mind, the body is a force to be reckoned with, with the aside that "absurdity is an intellectually honorable position"; and the encounter with Director Behrens and the review of the paintings he daubs in his spare time, with a discussion of how a physician's view of the body informs his art.

A most enjoyable read.

Temperature

Oh no! Hans bought a thermometer! Pretty much just a page after where I'd last left off. Not much secret what the rest of the book will be about then.

Hans felt like he was come down with a touch of a cold. It's like he wants to dismiss it, but he wants sympathy too, from all these people who are by far more severely ill than he. Maybe if he had a fever, he could justifiably say he was sick. But he buys a thermometer! The fool! The last ritual, which he'd resisted. He'd mocked the residents for taking their temperature 5 times a day. This resistance was his last thread to the normal life of the flatlanders below.

He has a body temperature of 99.7. And an eventual examination tells us... he's sick!

He is sentenced to 3 weeks of bed rest.

I must say, it's a neat trick of Mann's treating time within the narrative in a manner that reinforces the discourses on the nature of time, stretching and compressing...

An abnormal compression of time

Ultimately, there is something odd about settling in somewhere new — about the perhaps laborious process of getting used to new surroundings and fitting in, a task we undertake almost for its own sake and with the definite intention of abandoning the place again as soon as is it is accomplished, or shortly thereafter, and returning to our previous state. We insert that sort of thing into the mainstream of our lives as a kind of interruption or interlude, for the purpose of "recreation," which is to say: a refreshing, revitalizing exercise of the organism, because it was in immediate danger of overindulging itself in the uninterrupted monotony of daily life, of languishing and growing indifferent. [...] What people call boredom is actually an abnormal compression of time caused by monotony — uninterrupted uniformity can shrink large spaces of time until the heart falters, terrified to death. When one day is like every other, then all days are like one, and perfect homogeneity would make the longest life seem very short, as if it had flown by in a twinkling. Habit arises when our sense of time falls asleep, or at least, grows dull; and if the years of youth are experienced slowly, while the later years of life hurtle past at an ever-increasing speed, it must be habit that causes it. We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time, to rejuvenate, intensify, and retard our experience of time — and thereby renew our sense of life itself. That is the reason for every change of scenery and air, for a trip to the shore: the experience of a variety of refreshing episodes.

— from The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann.

One must remember that our hero is merely vacationing at the sanatorium. In all superficial respects he is fully integrated into the routine of the place — the meals, the rest cures (Hans is now expert at blanket tucking), the concerts, the lectures (and, by the way, he's still reading a paperbound book entitled Ocean Steamships), but some portion of his brain niggles at him, reminding him that he is to leave soon, which reminder comes mostly as a relief but seems also to be felt occasionally as a regret.

Hans seizes his last week to enjoy a flirtation with the door-slamming, sweater-wearing Madame Chauchat (who reminds him of a boy he knew at school). Presumably he feels the pressure of time running out and he would regret not taking some action, but the limits on his scheduled time here give him the excuse of indulging without responsibility, without long-term consequence, and with little embarrassment or guilt. What the hell, he's on vacation!

I'm nearing the end of chapter 4, at around page 200 of 854. Hans is anticipating leaving the mountain. What, then, could the rest of the book be about?

All inclusive

I need a vacation.

Sure I had a Christmas break, but 7 days in a small house with family members I see only a few times a year ends up being more exhausting than relaxing. (Let us not relive the 7-hour journey by car in the rain with the cat, or the return journey by train with just the child, who after days, weeks, of anticipation of our rail adventure could muster only expressions of tired and cranky. Let us not dwell on our mother taking to bed for a few days. Too much time cooking and cleaning, not enough time just being.)

In about 10 days' time, I expect to wake up to the sound of the ocean, with the only obligations facing me for the ensuing 7 days being to drink a mojito or two while sitting on a Cuban beach, exchange a word and a kiss with my lover, and maybe do some reading.

It's the first time I take a vacation of this sort — it's not "travelling" around the country, no high-intensity museum visits; it's not puttering about the cottage; it's not hanging out with family and friends. It's an all-inclusive beach resort vacation.

I expect to sleep, read, sleep, swim, eat, drink, read, swim, sleep some more, drink some more. I've agreed to do everything in my power to make it happen such that we see a baseball game.

It's the reading that worries me.

How many books is enough? Other vacations have never presented this problem. They were designed for doing other things. Books were for planes, trains, bedtime. But this vacation — it's almost meant for reading.

The following books were picked up in November, intended to get me through the midwinter deep freeze, before I'd decided to go south:

The Wind-up Bird Chronicles, Haruki Murakami, trade paperback, 624 pages.
The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares, trade paperback, 103 pages.
Memories of the Future, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, trade paperback, 256 pages.
Atonement, Ian McEwan, mass market paperback, 496 pages.

J-F has promised to bring in his luggage the copy of The Old Man and the Sea I got him for Christmas. This book has the most Cuban flavour of the lot.

Is that ridiculously too much? If so, which books do I cut? Is it enough? Do I bring more? Should I be deciding by page count? Am I right to be leaving The Magic Mountain behind (I'm only about a quarter of the way in) because I think it's too heavy (physically, I mean, as a hardcover). Is it better to have lots of little books or a couple big books?

Should I be bringing Chess Story (Stefan Zweig), or Sunflower (Gyula Krúdy)? How come The Girl Who Played with Fire isn't out in paperback yet? Is there something quintessentially Cuban I ought to be reading? Has anyone read The Halfway House, by Guillermo Rosales?

What if I run out of reading material? Can I get books in English (or French, or Polish will do in a pinch) in Cuba?

How do other people manage this stress?

Most uncold

"It all seems rather cold."

"Cold?" For once von Abt appeared lost for words. "Cold! All my work, all my art is based on this." He took a pencil from an inner pocket and leaned forward to draw a line as sharp as a razor cut on the nearest sheet of paper. "This is the first work of art: the woman who lies down." He looked from Viktor to Liesel, holding her gaze for moment longer than seemed polite. Then he went back to the sheet of paper and drew another line, a vertical cutting at right angles through the horizontal. "And this. This is the man who penetrates her. The result is the rectangular cross that underpins all my art. What could be warmer than that?"

Liesel took a cigarette and lit it, hoping it would distract her from von Abt's look, hoping she would not blush beneath his gaze. "Yes, Herr von Abt seems a most uncold person. Don't you agree, Viktor?"

The art in question is architecture. And Rainer von Abt is to design the titular space of Simon Mawer's novel, The Glass Room, for Liesel and Viktor, German Czechs, Viktor being Jewish by heritage but neither of them religious, a thorougly modern couple, free thinkers. Their children, Viktor later explains, are to be raised to be citizens of the world. They are throwing off the past, but life in 1930s Czechoslovakia presents other burdens. The house serves as a stage.

This novel was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize, so I'd heard a little bit about it in that context. (Interview with Mawer. Audio excerpt.)

I tend to shy away from feel-good overcoming-the-adversity-of-wartime stories, and stories about Nazis, both novels and films, because: 1. They're depressing, and the feel-good pay-off isn't big enough, or if it is, than the story must be unrealistic and contrived. 2. They tend toward sentimentalism, often fomulaically manipulating your heartstrings. 3. They've got nothing on reality, when I think of all my own parents and their families have been through. Tragedy abounds; it takes a special story indeed to declare itself uncommon and elicit any sympathy from me.

Anyway, the idea of this thoroughly modern house figuring as a central character won me over and I accepted a review copy. I'm very, very glad I didn't let this book pass me by.

John Self remarked that "as an account of Jewish suffering in Europe under the Nazis, it seemed particularly weak." I don't think it was Mawer's intent to supply one, and thank goodness for that, I say, as that story's already been told a million times. This novel is about a different kind of suffering, I think; the way your domestic life suffers when there's a war going on on your doorstep, the way your idea of the future suffers, and of the past. It also offers a spare but real glimpse of stressed relations between Jews and non-Jews in the context of marital strain from a gap in understanding.

I took The Glass Room away with me on my Christmas break, not really expecting to get much reading done, but it turned out to be so compelling, I turned to it as often as I could for a moment's peace away from family and general seasonal ado. It was terrific company, once the kid finally fell asleep, on the 6-hour train ride home.

At the house-warming party, Viktor quotes from André Breton's new novel, Nadja:

I shall live in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call, where everything hanging from the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where the words who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond.

So, you know, love, life, another woman, another woman, blah, blah, blah, but then here's this house that's all about openness, there's all this light and space, as if their lives will be plain to everyone, yet somehow, and this is the magic of its design, it supplies private niches. The house's residents, open to inspection, become more secretive. Where the house has no walls, people build figurative ones.

Somehow, while "the whole essence of the Glass Room is reason," messy, emotional humanity seeps in. Deception in the Glass Room is a new experience for Viktor, who once thought we should all live in glass houses. Hana called him a spoilsport for it: "Everyone loves deceit. Without deceit there would be no art."

I think that's a lot of what this book is about: Pretending toward an ideal, whether it be in art, architecture, politics, or daily life. The incompatability of the ideal with the actual. The gap between function and form.

The Landauer family flees as Nazi troops enter, to Switezerland, then further west.

Over time, the house is space made manifest, beauty made manifest, and hatred made manifest. A house, a work of art, a purity of form. (Maybe it needs — or we need — some level of deceit to function properly?)

Can a building be pure in a way a human being can't? I mean (this is me thinking out loud), how is purity of form/function different from purity of race? Does this building in some way remain pure? No, its purpose is continually distorted. It's as degenerate as most of us humans.

As we are often reminded, it just is. It's just a backdrop, or a stage, for humanity. Can the same be said for humans? We just are? We are just vessels for a bigger (inter)play of larger forces?

The Glass Room is the story of the house, but once the Landauers leave, the house loses something of its heart, even while something of the Landauers remains in it. (I should say "of Liesel" — I believe it was her house more than anybody's, built for her, an extension of her — it's she who, like the house, is open yet betrayed.) The house is a Nazi-run Biometric Centre, a laboratory, humans under examination. Then the Russians move in. Later it is an annex of the state-run children's hospital.

All the house's stories of its later years pale in comparison to its Landauer years of hope. The love triangle involving the physiotherapist, the doctor, and the journalist was a little predictably contrived to parallel the Landauers' situation, and I don't think you should be allowed to write a Czech doctor named Tomáš after The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But the story moves quickly through the house's twilight, sparing us the details.

Ultimately, the city takes ownership and restores the heritage building. Open to the public. Humans are not restored so readily.

A note on the language
The language is gorgeous. There are some striking images:

The view of "the cathedral with its hunched shoulders and its black spires exactly, Rainer said, like hypodermic needles."

"It was as though they stood within a crystal of salt."

"Her legs too are sheathed in black, as slick and lucid as oil."

Poetry. Every breath of it is loaded with erotic potential. I can't put my finger on how Mawer does this. A few faintly sexy images are repeated. Twice the mouth as arabesque — first Liesel's, than Kata's. Twice the sound of the slop of water like lapping cats. (Kata the cat.) Twice the reminder of the sadness that comes after coitus.

The narrative shifts between past and present tense. I couldn't quite figure out the logic for the shifts, but the alternation confronts you with a stark immediacy, then bathes the scene in a romantic haze. An adjustment of the lens.

A note on the house
The author notes that the house and its setting are not fictional, though they have been somewhat disguised. A little Internet research reveals that it was based on Villa Tugendhat, in Brno. (Although, until moments ago, I had little doubt that it was the Müller Villa. I'd felt a glimmer of recognition, something I might've seen in my meanderings through Prague.)

The house should be like by all. Unlike a work of art, which does not require anyone to like it. The work of art is the private affair of the artist. The house is not. The work of art is sent out into the world, without anyone needing it. The house fulfils certain requirements. The work of art is not answerable to anyone, the house to everyone. A work of art seeks to draw people out of their comfort. The house should serve comfort. The work of art is revolutionary, the house conservative. The work of art shows humanity new paths and thinks of the future; the house thinks of the present. Man loves everything that serves his comfort. He hates all that seeks to draw him from his customary and secure state, and all that constricts him. And thus I love the house and hate art.

— Adolf Loos, Architektura ("Architecture"), 1910.

Mawer assigns the house a fictional architect, though Loos is referred to throughout the novel, and its design clearly followed Loos' edict that ornament is crime. The architect of Villa Tugendhat was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Photo essay.

A note on the packaging
I love French flaps. And I love the cover art for the hardcover. But they don't come together. The black-and-white (or is it faintly sepia-tone?) photo on my trade paperback evokes a vague sense of the era but in this way it is indistinct from conventional overcoming-the-adversity-of-wartime stories and does the novel a disservice (that is, while it may prove successful from a marketing perspective, I think it serves a lie).

The artwork on the hardcover dust jacket, a futuristic portrait — hell, it looks like a man encased in a glass room! — is much truer to the spirit of the book. As the paperback stands, I wouldn't give it the time it deserves if I were browsing in a bookstore. But your mileage may vary.

Trailer.

Calendar

I think I bought the wrong calendar. I mean, it's 2010, so it'll work, but I put it up on the wall before going to bed last night, and this morning, walking into the kitchen and glancing over, it just didn't feel right.

The calendar purchase is a serious matter. We're talking about a $10 investment that you hang on your wall in a high-traffic area and you have to live with it, for a whole year.

(Yes, it has to be in the high-traffic area. The designated calendar spot, across from the kitchen. So I know what day it is. Really.)

I usually wait until the year has actually started (1995 was a notable exception), not only because calendars are by this time generally greatly reduced in price, but to give the year a few days, to get a feel for it, for its potential, for how it all might pan out.

(For a few years, my father-in-law bought us all calendars at Christmas. Even while I think the calendar choice is an intensely personal one, I didn't mind too much, I guess because I always really needed one. But I did think it was a bit weird, particularly once we were a family of three. How many calendars does a family need? Hang them in the bathroom? There's always the office, but that's a space whose calendar must meet stringent requirements.)

So yesterday at lunch I went on a calendar hunt. I seriously considered one, but discarded it — it would've put too much pressure on the year, bathing it in a flavour that rightfully belonged only to January. And I bought something else. The pictures are nice enough, suitable to the space, and all the days are there, but I don't think I connect with it. And now I have to live with it for a whole year.

Maybe that's alright. Maybe it'll keep me on my toes. Maybe it's the poke in the eye I need to remind me to look at things fresh. To remind me what day it really is.

Saffron grey

The epigraph that starts off Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron, by Jasper Fforde, is taken from Alfred North Whitehead and sets up its most interesting premise:

There is no light or colour as a fact in external nature. There is merely motion of material. . . . When the light enters your eyes and falls on the retina, there is motion of material. Then your nerves are affected and your brain is affected, and again this is merely motion of material. . . . The mind in apprehending experiences sensations which, properly speaking, are qualities of the mind alone.

Fforde's world this time is not to be found on library shelves or in nursery rhymes; it's a wholly new invention, taking as its foundation the light spectrum. Citizens are classed by what they see; that is, their station in life is determined not by the colour of their skin, but by the colours they are able to perceive. Heredity also plays a role in that colours can be mixed; offspring are generally expected to inherit the ability to perceive to a certain degree a mix of the colours of their parents (marriages between complementary colours are forbidden).

This is a parody of a dystopia, set in our future. The event that brought about this society is never specified, but there are a few references to the world and personages we know.

Every page sheds light on some absurdity, the structure of this society dependent on such rules. For the most part, the book plays as sheer entertainment, although there is the occasional glimmer of social commentary, where the danger of blind conformity to order is quite pointed.

But Shades of Grey is funny.

Suddenly my eye was caught by the figure of a man in his early thirties, standing in the shadows of the alleyway opposite. He was grimy and unshaven and had NC-B4 carved rather clumsily below his left clavicle — most scars were neat affairs, but his looked like a bad weld. He was also inappropriately naked and, while staring vacantly up at the sky, was actually peeing on his left foot.

"Stafford?" I whispered, a tremor of fear sounding in my voice.

"Yes, Master Edward?"

"There's a naked man in the alleyway behind us. I think it might be . . . Riffraff."

Stafford turned around, looked at the man and said, "I don't see anyone."

"How can you not see him? He's peeing on his own foot."

"Master Edward, you can't see him."

"I can."

"You can't. He doesn't exist, Master Edward — take Our Munsell's word for it."

I suddenly understood. The Rules, despite their vast complexity and extensive range, had no way of dealing with anything that had no explainable position within a world of absolutes. So instead of attempting to understand or explain them, they were simply awarded the status of Apocrypha and stridently ignored lest they raise questions of fallibility.

"He's Apocryphal?" I asked.

"He would be if he were there — which he isn't."

I understood Stafford's reticence. Admitting that Apocrypha actually existed was a grave impiety punishable by a five-hundred-merit fine. A whole range of euphemistic language had developed to refer to them, but no one generally did — a slip of tense could leave your hard-won merit score in tatters.

"I've never actually seen an Apocryphal man," I noted, unable to stop staring, "and, um, still haven't. Do you think they might all look the same — if they existed?"

"I've only not seen one," said Stafford, following my gaze to where the unseeable man was now pouring cooling water over himself from a water butt, "so I've no idea what one shouldn't look like."

The plot of Shades of Grey is at times a little unfocused, but the world-building is an extraordinary feat! It seems the spoons in my house go missing for entirely different reasons, thankfully, than those which brought about the spoon shortage in Fforde's world. (The version I read was colorized for spelling.)

I've read, and loved, all but one of the Thursday Next books; I read the first Nursery Crimes book and intend to read on. I'm pleased that Fforde is capable of stretching his creativity in this entirely new direction, and I look forward to reading further adventures set amid this colour-based society.

Metro

Today the metro is surprisingly spare. Everyone gets a seat. Revelling in the luxury of space, some people are resistant to moving their bag so that someone can sit beside them.

Earlier in the week, a middle-aged man laden with bundles stands in the aisle and becomes engrossed in the book the woman seated nearest him is reading. He bends and adjusts and draws his face nearer her shoulder. When a seat becomes available, he opts to stay where he is and wait for the page to turn. The train lurches and he loses his balance. He quickly retakes his position and finds his place.

Yesterday, a youthful trio with placards and open arms offer free hugs outside the metro entrance. No one takes them up on it. I consider it, but settle for a smile.

All she wants for Christmas...

... is her two maxillary lateral incisors.

She lost one before breakfast, due to the force of her tongue and talking too much. It'd been wiggling for only a couple days, but I think the front tooth needs the room to come in.

The one that's been dangling digustingly for weeks came out during a bedtime snack.

This entailed some complicated logistics. If two teeth are wrapped in one tissue, the Tooth Fairy may assume there's only one and leave compensation accordingly. But if packaged separately, the Tooth Fairy may find just one and leave. The eventual solution: two separate tooth packages elasticked together.

Thank goodness they fell when they did: A day later and the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus may have crossed paths, and that would be too crowded a night!

My new favourite Christmas carol

(Via BoingBoing.)

Octopus

"They do things which, normally, you'd only expect vertebrates to do."

Like tool use.

Check out the amazing video: "Underwater footage reveals that the creatures scoop up halved coconut shells before scampering away with them so they can later use them as shelters."