The Daily Sabbatical

At some point I learned to repeat to my teachers that Greek tragedy is cathartic. It probably would have been better to have us read something that actually was cathartic, but I seriously doubt Sophocles would have fit the bill for a bunch of fourteen year olds. Sophocles doesn’t do it for me today either, and it’s the rare piece of literature that does. But every once in a while I become so enthralled with a book that it threatens to become transformative; I emerge from the reading as if baptised. This was my e experience with Yu Hua’s To Live.
As To Live begins, we hear from a narrator telling us of a time he was traveling across China in search of popular folk songs. During this trip, he encounters an old man badgering his tired ox while plowing his fields. The rest of the book is essentially narrated by the old man, Fugui, as he recounts his harrowing life story.
Fugui’s tale begins at his youth as an undisciplined aristocrat, literally riding the backs of prostitutes through his village, and then through much harder times, most of which can be traced back to his disgraceful behavior. This is, however, not a simple morality tale, for it is not as if Fugui is ever really born again–though he learns from his past, he has the human habit of forever discovering new mistakes to make. In addition, his life’s tortuous path is intertwined with the massive changes taking place in twentieth century china:the civil war between the nationalists and the communists, the Chinese Land Reform Movement, The Great Leap Forward and finally the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. So on the one hand you get an inspiring study of a character who is committed to life despite its difficulties, and a personal reflection of the impact of national level events filtered down to the “simple” lives of Chinese peasants.
Though the book was banned in China on its release in 1993, it has been named one of the ten most influential Chinese books of its decade, and was the source for a movie by the same name. (I haven’t seen the movie, but I certainly will.) Hua is one of China’s pre-eminent authors, and I plan to read every word the man writes. He’s that good.

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramaphone has been widely praised on both sides of the Atlantic. The author has been compared to Foer, Vollman, David Foster Wallace, Ondaatje, and no doubt many, many others. Me, I’m dropping it at page 66 as part of my new policy not to chase sunk costs. (See earlier post on that topic.) Those comparisons are absurd. No doubt something of the book triggered something in the minds of some reviewers, but that doesn’t establish similarity of any sort and pasting such comparisons on the cover seems tantamount to false advertising.
I won’t pretend to speak to the whole novel, since I didn’t read it, but pages 1-66 read like a bad translation–or rather a good translation of bad english. It was written in German by a Bosnian and then translated by Anthea Bell, so there is more than one explanation for the choppy style. The prose, which speaks in a voice of wide-eyed innocence, never really rises above that naïve style, which is no doubt an attraction for some, but I found it rather labored. The story follows a boy, whose mother is a Bosnian and whose father is a Serb, as he is exiled by war and sees the plum eating days of his youth become swallowed by war. Needless to say, this is the story of Stanišić as well.
Call me a cynic, but could it be that the sensation following this novel is fueled in part by politics? Tell me I’m wrong, but my copy is going back to Amazon.

There’s something about the feel of the New York Review Book Classics that assures you of a good read. The paper is of a thick textured stock, the covers are beautifully designed–I particularly like the fact that the inside of the covers is colored to match the palette on the outside–and the introductions are written by people who actually matter. There are so many little known treasures in this series–it’s like the Criterion Collection of paperbacks–that one wants to just own them all.
Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick was my most recent foray into the series, and it didn’t disappoint. In fact, it is one of those books that I know I will reread, in part because it’s one of those books I wish that I had written. Originally published in 1979, Sleepless Nights calls itself a novel, but it reads like a memoir or a series of reflective vignettes. The narrator is Elizabeth, and the scenes are from primarily from New York City and Lexington Kentucky–the latter Hardwick’s homeland, the former Hardwick’s home. (It’s tempting to take these as clues that our narrator is our writer, but other clues suggest that we should be wary of that identification.) There is no single plot to speak of, but the tapestry is woven too tightly to be a mere collection of stories. The main attraction here is the overwhelmingly engineered prose. The thoughtfulness of Hardwick’s style compares only to well wrought poetry. These are sentences meant to be savored like bites of a crème brulee or sips of port. They are rich on their own, and they flow one after another in a punctuated rhythm that leads the reader on more than the foregone contrivances of thrill or suspense could hope to accomplish.
I loved this book and will search out more from Hardwick. My words mean little, however, next to her prose, so I’m going to try supplementing the review with a pagescan. These are just two facing pages that give a sense of the style. I suggest you read more of the book by purchasing it.

pages 20-21

Snagged this from the Literary Saloon. The Secret Scripture, a recent fave, is on there. With any justice, it’ll win. (Though I haven’t read a single one of the other books.)
The List
* The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
* Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold
* The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
* From A to X by John Berger
* The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
* Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
* The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
* A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
* The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher
* Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
* The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
* Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
* A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

I first came across Brockmeier in the 2005 O’Henry Awards compilation which featured “A Brief History of the Dead,” the story. I was immediately excited: here was an excellent young writer who subtly bends literary fiction through the domains of genre fiction, in the vein of Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon and Kelly Link. Predictably enough, the story is about the afterlife. Perhaps disappointingly for some of the dead, this afterlife is really just like regular old life, but with the twist that one’s afterlifespan is determined by how long one is remembered by the living. This is all good–especially, one suspects, for the extroverted–until something begins happening on earth. The population of the dead city spikes–as huge numbers of people on earth suddenly die–and then plummets–as fewer and fewer people exist on earth to remember the dead. As people die, scraps of evidence indicate that a virus is wiping out the earth’s population, the result being that the dead are eventually to suffer the fate of the living.
This is an excellent story and an intriguing premise. It led me to buy the book by the same name, which came out in 2006, despite my worries that this gimick could drive a story but not a novel. Since the first chapter of the book is basically the story I had read, it wasn’t until chapter two that I discovered that my worries were unfounded. The second chapter finds us in Antarctica, with a scientist/explorer named Laura who appears to be stranded in her camp. It’s a sudden, disorienting break to enter the world of the living again, but Laura’s survival story gathers its own momentum in no time, serving as the backbone for the rest of the book which alternates between the two worlds. In the end, A Brief History has aspects of an adventure thriller with a tinge of metaphysics and existential reflection, all of which combine to make a very compelling package. (When I read a few sections to Lanie, she quickly became hooked, demanding that I read aloud whenever she was around.) There are criticisms that could be made of this book–at times Brockmeier seems to be looking for stories to fill his afterlife, and one gets impatient to return to the plight of our arctic adventurer–but the book works well enough not to dwell on the negative. I’ll be reading a lot more of Mr. Brockmeier, I suspect, and I’ll bet I’m not the only one.

The Secret Scripture, by Sebastian Barry, has got to be on a very short list for the best novels published this year. I will be shocked if it doesn’t receive several awards, and justice will have failed if it doesn’t bring its author a very large new audience. There are some books that favor a particular taste, but the appeal of some books is—or should be—universal. This is one of the latter.

Barry’s book follows two diaries: one written by a very old woman in an Irish mental institution and the other written by the institution’s chief psychiatrist. Their motives for writing dovetail: the patient, Roseanne, wishes to document her life before she passes on, and Dr. Grene wishes to discover why, exactly, Roseanne—who seems astonishingly sane and even uplifting—had been in an institution for most of her life. As Dr. Grene pursues his mystery, therefore, it is slowly revealed by his patient’s diary. This is an intriguing enough literary gambit, but as the doctor’s investigations develop, the reader is confronted with various conflicting accounts which make him an active decoder of the mystery. This is a delicate balancing act, but let’s set the stakes even higher. Roseanne’s story shows a particular corner of Ireland during its difficult twentieth century, shedding light on how internal factions had devastating and unpredictable repercussions within the private lives of the citizens. What’s more, Dr. Grene has his own travails with a wife who is herself mentally ill, and he winds up turning more and more to the inspiring Roseanne during his dark hours. And, there’s a satisfying twist to the story that I won’t spoil.

Needless to say, it is very difficult to pull this much off, especially in a relatively short book. Barry does it expertly, and with language that rewards rereading. Roseanne’s Irishisms are not overdone, instead they flower on the page, and the doctor’s more distanced poetry is no less compelling.

This book has everything. It’s a simple as that.

More lists! This one is bound to have many unread greats on it, especially for Anglocentric jackasses like myself. One through twelve below, and the rest here.

1. Raymond Queneau – Exercises in Style (Barbara Wright, 1958)

2. Primo Levi – If This is a Man (Stuart Woolf, 1959)

3. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa – The Leopard (Archibald Colquhoun, 1961)

4. Günter Grass – The Tin Drum (Ralph Manheim, 1962)

5. Jorge Luis Borges – Labyrinths (Donald Yates, James Irby, 1962)

6. Leonardo Sciascia – Day of the Owl (Archibald Colquhoun, 1963)

7. Alexander Solzhenitsyn – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Ralph Parker, 1963)

8. Yukio Mishima – Death in Midsummer (Seidensticker, Keene, Morris, Sargent, 1965)

9. Heinrich Böll – The Clown (Leila Vennewitz, 1965)

10. Octavio Paz – Labyrinth of Solitude (Lysander Kemp, 1967)

11. Mikhail Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita (Michael Glenny, 1969)

12. Gabriel Garcia Marquez – 100 Years of Solitude (Gregory Rabassa, 1970)

Diaz’s “The Brief and Wondroud Life of Oscar Wao” was easily one of the best three or four books written last year and it won the Pulitzer Prize to show for it.  Despite the fact that the action takes place mostly under the oppressive and horrifying Trujillo regime in the Dominican Repubic, and despite the fact that the titular Oscar is, poor thing, an socially uncomfortable butterball of a protagonist, the book is pure fun to read.  That’s not surprising when you get a glimpse of Diaz.  Below is an interview with him from Slate magazine.  The interviewers are as awkward as dropped eggs, but you end the video wanting Junot for a best friend.

In the past thirty-seven or so years, Art Garfunkel has apparently had some time on his hands.  I’d say he didn’t waste it.  He read over a thousand books in that period, clocking in at a little more than a book every two weeks.  Now that’s probably not going to break any records among book reviewers or academics, but I’ll bet it ranks among the best when it comes to celebs.  And these books aren’t simple fare.  You’ll find Proust, Rousseau and Tolstoy at the top of the list, none of whom were at a loss for words.  What list, you say?  Garfunkel has indexed all the books on his webpage.  So, if you want to make the next thirty-seven years of your life as much like Garfunkel’s as possible, I suggest you break up with your astonishingly talented partner and go get a copy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions.  That will leave you only one thousand twenty five more books until you can read Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons.  You can make a solo album in the meantime if you like, but that’s really really optional.

Found on ReadySteadyBook:

Flannery O’Connor:

I am often asked if universities stifle writers. My view is that they don’t stifle enough of them.