The Daily Sabbatical

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.

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.

Calling a book the Gone with the Wind of ____(insert country or region here) is a grand way to insure that I will never read it. I have never read Gone with the Wind, of course, which might seem to make me hasty in my attitudes, but I’d prefer to think that I’m being charmingly consistent. Fortunately I started reading Lampedusa’s “The Leopard” before I heard the windy comparison, and so a new book has jumped onto my list of favorites. I’d put this book on the rather short list of must-reads, somewhere, probably, near Ford Maddox Ford’s “The Good Soldier.” And no need to fear if you don’t read Italian: the translator of my volume, one Archibald Colquhoun, has done an extraordinary job. (And a good thing too for Archie, because with a name like that there are only about three career paths one can hope for, and being a translator is one. ) The language is natural and fluent, preserving a sense of rhythm as well as simple descriptive beauty.

Lampedusa (1896-1957) was the scion of an aristocratic Sicilian family that had, over the years, suffered a decline and loss of means so that the prestige of name was little more than that. An avid reader, he didn’t turn his hand to writing until he was 59—yes, there is hope for us all. With no small effort, he cranked out The Leopard (il Gattopardo) just in time to see it summarily rejected by a couple of presses before dying of lung cancer in July of ‘57—perhaps being a late bloomer is not so great after all. It was published to acclaim the year after his death, however, and won the Strega prize in 1959. It is now considered a classic of Italian literature.

The Leopard is primarily the story of a Sicilian prince around the time of Italian unification (c.1860). Prince Fabrizio Salina, based loosely on Lampedusa’s great-grandfather, is “The Leopard” and he receives masterly depiction that is neither overly sympathetic nor particularly disaffected. Existing, as he does, at a time when the old order is being replaced by the new, he is led to reflect on himself, his neighbors, and his country, and despite the fact that the Prince (and the narrator, who is privy to his perspective) often occupies an elevated and detached viewpoint that invites condescension, he is able to come to terms with the role of himself and others in a rather impressive stoical fashion. Witness, for example, the following paragraph, describing a sort of epiphany after the Prince finds himself at a ball where he feels utterly disconnected and rather full of loathing for those around him.

The two young people drew away, other couples passed, less handsome, just as moving, each submerged in their passing blindness. Don Fabrizio felt his heart thaw; his disgust gave way to compassion for all these ephemeral beings out to enjoy the tiny ray of light granted them between two shades, before the cradle, after the last spasms. How could one inveigh against those sure to die? It would be as vile as those fish vendors insulting the condemned in the Piazza del Mercato sixty years before. Even the female monkeys on the poufs, even those old boobies of friends were poor wretches, condemned and touching as the cattle lowing through the city streets at night on their way to the slaughter-house; to the ears of each of them would one day come that tinkle he had heard three hours before behind San Dominico. Nothing could be decently hated except eternity.

While this passage is more philosophical than most in the novel, it is indicative of the bonding between criticism and acceptance, distance and involvement that is one of the great successes of this book.

Reading The Leopard, I found myself often thinking of two of my favorites: Nabokov and Cervantes. Lampedusa has a sense of comedy that resembles each of those greats in different ways. While he doesn’t revel in the linguistic acrobatics in the manner of VN, he does use some of the same wry tricks. One of my favorites is his use of “narrative spoilers,” as when talking about a zealous young soldier one mentions off-handedly, as if tossing off just another descriptive clause, “all of this would be of great relish to his family when they watched him being lowered into the frozen ground a year later.” From Cervantes—explicitly, actually—Lampedusa replicates the Panza/Quixote repartee in depicting the prince’s relationship to the tenants of his land and his upstart neighbors. As in DQ one sees the absurdity and the wisdom of both parties in the process, and one’s laugh is both sincere and respectful of their plight.

This is already damn long for a post, so no need to go on. It can simply be said that I loved this book, will read it again, and will no doubt push it on my friends with the enthusiasm of a Mormon at the doorbell.

After struggling through Henry James’ “Wings of the Dove,” with its tortured sentences that often sound like overly literal translations from German, I needed to read something with substantially more killin’.   Morgan’s debut novel, “Altered Carbon” certainly fit that bill–though not all the killin’ involves “real death.”

Let me explain.  AC is set in the twenty fifth century when bodies can be donned or disposed of like a spring wardrobe.  The key to this trick lies in the fact that in the future everyone has a little device–a “stack”–at the top of the spine that stores all of the memories and personality data for that individual.  As long as that little buddy doesn’t get destroyed, therefore, the data from the stack can be used to “resleeve” an individual in however many biological suits he or she pleases.  If the stack is destroyed, that is “real death” and tears flow.

There are, to be sure, some very interesting philosophical questions here regarding personal identity, and Morgan flirts with them without getting too heavy handed.  It is never really questioned whether or not stack-survival is real survival, and perhaps that’s ok.  In fact, it is as if everyone in this world–oh, except for the Catholics, who are still around and don’t allow stack “resuscitation”–accepts and has internalized a Parfitian concept of survival.  (If you’re not familiar with the excellent philosopher Derek Parfit, you should check him out.  He’s as smart as they come.)  I would consider having my students read Altered Carbon, actually, were it not for the rather hardcore sex and violence that at times led even me to wince.

Although he sometimes falls into formula, Morgan’s story is compelling stuff.  He’s really thought through the implications of his future, and he doesn’t outfit it with idle bells and whistles.  The issues about survival, for example, play a key role in the plot, figuring importantly into the motives and possible motives of the key characters.  Which brings me to the plot.  This is basically a hard-boiled detective story set in the future, and the key crime involves the “murder” of a very wealthy man who is several hundred years old.  The wealthy have an extra survival safety net: they periodically have their stack files beamed to a remote location, so if their stack is destroyed, they can always just replicate the data in a new one and resleeve into a new body.  The trick, of course, is that they won’t remember anything that happened between their last data-backup and the destruction of their stack.  So, you have the possibility of a guy who was murdered, but who is around to hire a private investigator to find his killer, whom he cannot identify since his backup self doesn’t have the data from the time of the murder.  Pretty cool device.  The plot gets a little confusing at times, and is perhaps more complex than it really needs to be, but it is a good read.  This is sci-fi noir firmly in the Philip K. Dick tradition, so if you like that guy, you’ll probably dig this.