The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald

The strange thing about Sebald is the double voice I hear when I read it; there is the voice of the text - so clean and precise - and then a second, which is warm and fuzzy - the voice of an older man.  I've never read a book that I imagined so strongly as sound.

I love the way that Sebald writes.  Somehow his concrete descriptions swallow the metaphors and imagery, so that no matter how extraordinary they are I read them as muted, the tone smooth, sort of damp.  Like here: "He said that he could see things then with the greatest clarity, as one sees them in dreams, things he had not thought he still had within him, doubtless because he himself was small, but also because the shelves reached all the four meters up to the ceiling.  The light in the emporium, coming through the small transom windows let into the tops of the display window backboards, was dim even on the brightest of days..."

Here's another: "ever since I had once visited Munich I had felt nothing to be so unambiguously linked to the word city as the presence of heaps of rubble fire-scorched walls, and the gaps of windows through which one could see the vacant air."

The blurb on the back of the book says that Sebald had a "quarrel" with Proust (I can only assume that the word quarrel is meant to signify respectful disagreement - although, actually, it occurs to me that Proust would have had different feelings about memory if he'd had the kind of memories that Sebald writes about) and I have a note scrawled on page 141 of my book: "the quarrel is this: for Proust, memory brings completion, wholeness.  Sebald seems to see memory as destructive - almost an active force.  His precision may be an attempt to subdue memory, to tame it, order it, make it unnatural and foreign."

The book is really haunting.  Of course, not unlike Proust, it's an excavation - a search for lost time - an attempt to attach images, places, names to stories told by dead and dying friends.  To fill out details and gaps.  But everywhere, the people Sebald meets are passionately dedicated to the destruction of the past.  Destroying themselves (it's a book full of suicides), destroying the houses that sheltered the horrors.  But it doesn't do them any good, they can't escape.  They surround themselves with debris, like Ferber haunting the periphery of the rotting asylum, or the doctor eating the fruits of the abandoned garden.

The conclusion, at the end, is that the only thing worse than remembering is willing forgetfulness ("I felt increasingly that the mental impoverishment and lack of memory that marked the Germans, and the efficiency with which they had cleaned everything up, were beginning to affect my head and my nerves").

If you do not remember, you are contemptible...but if you do, you are doomed.

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

Foucault's Pendulum combines the worst qualities of chi-chi French films with the worst qualities of low-budget slasher flicks.  On the one hand, it takes a long time to go nowhere.  On the other hand, it's like putting that clichéd scene where the girl goes down alone into the dark basement wearing high heels on endless repeat.  You want to smack her upside the head and say, "If you don't want to die, down't go down there, stupid!"...Advice that the protagonists of Foucault's Pendulum could use.

The book explores the possibility that one or another of the secret societies generally believed to be mythical (or extinct) are, in fact, real and very powerful indeed.   Is it the Templars, the Rosicrucians, the Jesuits, the Jews?  Did they control all of history?  A handful of bookish nerds at a publishing house dedicate much, much too much of their time rifling through crackpot occultist books looking for answers.

The narrator, Casaubon, is dull and hard to like.  His posse of cowardly friends ditto.  His girlfriends are interchangeable, their characters undeveloped.  All the women in the novel, for that matter, are one dimensional stereotypes.  The enemy, the Templars or the Illuminati or whoever, are ridiculous.

The reader is reminded periodically throughout the novel that the protagonists' attempts to get to the heart of the secret society are foolish, that their discoveries are tripe, and that they, the bookish nerds, are insane.  Call me crazy, but giving away the surprise ending before the tension has started to build is not the best move.

Eco's obsession with list-making makes sense in the medieval-set thriller In the Name of the Rose.  Here, it's just annoying.  Adding the diary entries of Belbo, the editor who can't write well and knows it, into the text of the novel is tedious.  Most of all, the book is boring and has no real payoff.  It's more than half over before the plot kicks in, long after I stopped caring.

What a waste of some great one-liners.

NB: I wish I could go back and explain some of my damning comments a little better, backing them up with an example or two, or a bit of plot summary.  Unfortunately, I have no memory of reading Foucault's Pendulum, and this is all I wrote at the time.

I now know that Casaubon is the name of a particularly repulsive character in George Eliot's Middlemarch.  Yet I don't like Foucault's Pendulum any more than I did before.  Curious.

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy

One sentence review of Anna Karenina: Tolstoy is sending God a job application, in case he's looking for a replacement.  Thanks, Tolstoy.

Full review: When Anna jumped in front of the train, I was relieved.  I'd been waiting for her to die ever since the race when Vronsky killed his horse.  When I turned the last page, I felt more like I'd faithfully accomplished a painful duty than like I was saying farewell to a beloved friend.

I find Tolstoy to be smug and self-satisfied to the extreme.  Tolstoy and Anna Karenina were recommended to me left and right; I was told that Tolstoy really understood women, and sympathized with their tragedy - I was told that there is a special term for his kind treatment of these tragic characters, "Toylstoyan pity."  And I think the term couldn't be more apt - because this is the ugly kind of pity.  The sort that slyly places the pity-er in a position of superiority.  The pity-er gets to enjoy being better off than the pitied person and self-consciously meritorious about his/her bleeding heart.  Such a bargain.

I was constantly aware of Tolstoy's craft, of the author pulling the puppet strings behind the scenes.  Their behavior frequently struck me as unnatural and artificial, and I could only make sense of it as the the author showing off.  He says: see, this horse that Vronsky kills, - this horse is Anna!  He says: see, this ill-fated love affair of Anna's has a foil in the lawful union of Levin and Kitty, such good and loving souls!  He says: see, Anna and Stiva are brother and sister, and they make parallel choices throughout the novel!  He says, over and over again: look at how brilliant I am, with my parallel plotlines and foreshadowing!

I think that Tolstoy is convinced his characters deserve what they get - Stiva deserves financial ruin and disrespect, Anna deserves death, Vronsky deserves pity and death, and Levin and Kitty deserve a happy life in the country.  Tolstoy is happy with himself for having grasped and described human nature, content in his ability to properly penalize or reward the actions and motivations of mankind, summarized so neatly in his characters.

I kept that that every time Levin appeared in the book it was Tolstoy chortling, "Here's the way to go!  If only you others would follow suit!"  Indeed, Tolstoy, if only we could all be more like you.  Thanks for letting us know.

W by Georges Perec

The chapters in W alternate between a fiction about an imaginary island called W., devoted entirely to sport, and chapters giving an autobiographical account of Perec's childhood during WWII. Both stories are told in a very crisp, matter-of-fact tone, but the contrast between the two is striking.  We read about young Perec's shuffling about and hiding and the death of his parents, though not from his own point of view.  Meanwhile, it becomes increasingly clear that life on sport-loving W.  is a sort of filtered reflection of the concentration camps (it's a bit like Plato's Republic, too). And because the actual details of life on W. are new, the horror and disgust they provoke is fresh.  So although the tone throughout is emotionally detached, the two stories operate like a chemical reaction - while each is neutral in isolation, the combination of the two unnerving and horrific.

W is an experimental novel, but it's not cold or empty; the language is very simple and it was a pleasure to read, went very quickly.

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

I have never read a book so long that I hated so much.  The more I read, the more I hated it, and then I hated it because it would not end.

A lot of the ideas in it ought to appeal to me - the enmeshing of disease and love, the fleshly-spiritual cross currents, the discursive style - but I was totally unmoved.

I hated every last character in the book, and that didn't help; but many of Proust's characters are unlikable, and I love Proust.  I think the difference is that in the end, though Marcel can't respect people like the Verdurins, they nonetheless become heroic...they become larger than life.  I felt like all the people, all the events in the Magic Mountain, shrunk into dust bunnies, filth on the floor, something meaningless and a little repulsive.

I hated the endless descriptions of the natural environment.  I hated the endless philosophical debates between Settembrini and anyone.  I hated Hans Castorp.  I hated the endless repetition.  I do not know how many hundreds of times I read about the "excellent lounge chairs" or the "hearty meals" at the Sanatorium. I was reminded countless times how and when the patients wrapped themselves in blankets.  Eventually, every time I saw those details, I would be infuriated.

The only thing I liked about the whole book was Clavdia Chauchat.  She was magnificent.  I loved the way that Mann described her body, her movements, her hands, her eyes.  I loved her dialogue, her sly and suggestive slink.  I loved her name, and I love that she cruelly rejected Hans Castorp, because I would have, too.

NB: It's a few years now since I wrote this, and I have to say that there is at least one thing about The Magic Mountain that I recall with great pleasure.  Hans Castorp - a worthless sniveler if ever there was one - gets his clumsy mitts on an X-Ray of Clavdia Chauchat.  Of her chest I think?  He finds it profoundly erotic.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer

I really loved Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is structured very similarly, splicing together a contemporary narrative with another story set in the past, making the reader privy to both and to the richness of the connections between the two while the present-day characters in the book are deprived that knowledge.

In both cases, there's a search: in Everything is Illuminated, Safran Foer is looking for the place where his family is from.  In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a boy is looking for a lock to fit a mysterious key.  In both cases, the reader finds the journey (and even the eventual conclusion) to be satisfying while the seeker himself is frustrated.  In both cases, the style of writing is very similar - the narratives set in the past have the same frantic rhythm, the same delicate shades of magical realism, the same explosions of vivid prose.

Basically, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a very different book, but pressed in the same mould as its predecessor.  That's a little disappointing.  I had hoped Safran Foer had more potential to grow as an author.

I imagine I was seeing a very strong influence from two other writers.  Martin Amis, and in particular his book Time's Arrow, and W.G. Sebald.  Amis' book Time's Arrow is set during WWII and its trick is that time progresses backwards through the novel - it's not the telling of the narrative that's scrambled, it's the events themselves, reversing cause and effect.  One of Sebald's quirks as an author is his use of photographs.  Foer doesn't copy any phrase or image, but he uses their tricks without modification, and they still have the tone and function of their sources.  They fit, but feel borrowed, like they still belong to someone else.

Now, both Amis and Sebald have a very similar interest in urban, contemporary Jewish identity and WWII/Holocaust narratives.  Foer falls into the same category.  It makes sense that there's a connection, that Foer would find those other authors intruding on his own creation, but he is putting himself in danger of being overwhelmed by their inventions.

But I'm circling the book itself.  It's a really beautiful novel.  I didn't snap it up originally because I had heard that it was written from the perspective of a 10 year old boy, and I heard that it was about September 11, and I imagined a trainwreck.  I had heard true, on both counts, but it's no trainwreck.  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is full of details that are delightful, charming, funny; the boy is precocious and sweet, and his running commentary is never simple or dull.  His dad died in the World Trade Center, and 9-11 is not a political event in the book.  It returns 9/11 to what it was before it was co-opted by Bush et al, and I have to admit that it's been hard to remember the tragedy itself with all the baggage it's been carrying for so long now.  So Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a good reminder.

Nana, by Emile Zola

I ended up feeling pretty disgusted by Zola after finishing Nana.  The only other book of Zola's that I've read was La Curée - I read it during my semester abroad in Paris.  I don't remember the narrative arc exactly, but it's about an aristocratic woman who marries into the nouveau riche of real estate speculators during Haussmanization.  The woman - so went hte professor - stands in for the old Paris and so while developers mutilate the old city, the same thing happens to her.

Nana is a sort of opposite plot.  She is born a petite bourgeoise, becomes a prostitute, and slowly rises up through the theater to become a wealthy, coveted courtesan.  The book is amazing, fabulously written and rich and brutal..but nearly every character is corrupt, perverted, sick, and Zola describes Nana as the fly that passes the disease around.  She becomes a kind of Dorian Gray - a beautiful, desirable creature who absorbs all the filth around her and is ultimately destroyed by it.

At the beginning, I really liked Nana.  She was stupid but kind, unaffected, charming.  But she plays all of her cards wrong and burns her bridges - falling in love with a man who beats her, spending extravagantly and always beyond her means, embarrassing her patrons.  In the process she becomes crass, unkind, repulsive.  Of course she finally catches a horrible disease and dies, disfigured, her life of vice written all over her beautiful body.  An by that time there was some satisfaction in her death, some release.

But I hated Zola for writing these books where women, as symbols, suffer and die to pay for - or just embody - the sins of all.