The Daily Sabbatical

I’m always tempted to break up my anally alphabetical ordering of books to create a special shelf of books that, to me, constitute lessons in writing.  These are not necessarily the best books–although they often are–but they are the books I feel I could read and reread in hopes of penetrating the secrets of their consruction.  They are the books that would signpost the way to the literary style I’d most like to emulate.    Body Snatcher by Juan Carlos Onetti would find a place on that shelf.

Onetti remains a bit of an unknown in the States, but one hopes that the surge of interest in Roberto Bolano will spur interest in some of his Latin American predecessors and contemporaries.  Onetti was born in Montevideo, but eventually fled to Spain after being persecuted by the Uruguayan dictatorship in 1974 for presenting a prize to a short-story considered pornographic by the powers that be.  His heroes number among mine–Knut Hamsun, William Faulkner, Celine–and his writing shows their influence.

Published originally in Spanish in 1964, Body Snatcher was translated into English by Alfred MacAdam in 1991.  It tells the story of the arrival of a brothel in a small town named Santa Maria–which is the setting of many of Onetti’s works.  The Body Snatcher of the title is Larson, a sort of pimp, who runs the brothel, but this story is not his alone.  It is also the story of Jorge, a boy in his teens who is having a strange but seductive relationship with the unhinged widow of his dead brother.  It is also the story of Father Bergner, who runs a complicated campaign against the moral deterioration of Santa Maria, and it is the story of Marcos, a gritty man of violence and indignation who keeps both sides guessing.  I say Body Snatcher is a story, but that’s only true in the sense that As I Lay Dying is a story about a burial.  Onetti’s style is the main attraction.  There are subtle tricks of narrative perspective and tormenting convolutions of language that are, to be honest, only poetic in retrospect.  It all fuses together, however, into something magical.

I love this book, and I hereby add Onetti to my list of heroes.  If the translators don’t get on it, I might have to learn more than get-to-the-bus Spanish.

Suite Francaise is worth reading if for no other reason than for the unique perspective it has on the second world war and the French occupation in particular.  The harrowing story of its author gilds the work with both authenticity and poignance.  Irene Nemirovsky was a Jewish, Russian born novelist who achieved great success with novels such as David Golder, which became a play and a movie.  She lived in Paris during the French Occupation, and decided to write a five volume work about what she was seeing.  Before she finished, however, she was sent to Auschwitz where she died in August of 1942.  The manuscript of the novel was kept by her daughter Denise who, believing it was simply a journal, didn’t read it until 1990 when she was about to donate it to a Frech archive.  It was finally published in 2004 where it became a bestselling winner of the Prix Renaudot.
The story of the novel has an undeniable Anne Frankish appeal, but unlike the Diary this book is written by an extremely talented, deeply reflective author with a mature understanding of human weakness.  Suite Francais is not written as a journal, but as a work of fiction in the vein of, perhaps, Flaubert.  It feels as though it could have been written when it was published, except for the fact that one can sense that its author had no idea how all of it would turn out.  There is no anticipation of an eventual liberation, no sense that France would come out of the war an autonomous nation, and no expectation that Germany would eventually lose the war.  It is not a sentimental, mournful document, however.  It is, in fact, a rather biting depiction of the hypocrisy and the frank materialism of a group of French citizens who would rather just be left alone.  The outrage we see is like that of a Orange County wife who discovers there are no more seats in first class, not the sadness and anger of a French patriot in danger of losing his country.
Despite the despicable behavior of many of the characters in this novel, Nemirovsky doesn’t just make them into objects of scorn.  She forces the reader to ask himself: Would I be any better?  What after all can one man do when his nation is falling? 
Suite Francais is not without its flaws.  Occasionally its characters become archetypes ala Dickens, but that seems to be the danger in a social novel.  In general, this is an elegantly written novel catches history in a candid moment and asks all the right questions.

This is a really good list.  Of course the fact that every man should read them doesn’t imply that not every woman should read them.  Many of these books I would recommend to anyone.  Raymond Carver, Blood Meridian, John Cheever, Revolutionary Road…how good can it get?  I’m a fan of a surprising number of there.

Thanks to Kerry for letting me know about this!

Man, this novel must be H-O-T.

Thanks to Boing Boing for this one.

Thanks to the panicky reactions of University of Texas professor Denise Spellberg, outrage about a novel depicting the life of Mohammed’s child bride Aisha has led Random House to nix its publication. I’m so pleased to see that Texas can now claim to be home to idiotic religious zealots of more than one stripe.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal today, Spellberg was asked to read the book for a possible endorsement. But:

But Ms. Spellberg wasn’t a fan of Ms. Jones’s book. On
April 30, Shahed Amanullah, a guest lecturer in Ms. Spellberg’s classes
and the editor of a popular Muslim Web site, got a frantic call from
her. “She was upset,” Mr. Amanullah recalls. He says Ms. Spellberg told
him the novel “made fun of Muslims and their history,” and asked him to
warn Muslims.

In an interview, Ms. Spellberg told me the novel is a
“very ugly, stupid piece of work.” The novel, for example, includes a
scene on the night when Muhammad consummated his marriage with Aisha:
“the pain of consummation soon melted away. Muhammad was so gentle. I
hardly felt the scorpion’s sting. To be in his arms, skin to skin, was
the bliss I had longed for all my life.” Says Ms. Spellberg: “I walked
through a metal detector to see ‘Last Temptation of Christ,’” the
controversial 1980s film adaptation of a novel that depicted a
relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. “I don’t have a problem
with historical fiction. I do have a problem with the deliberate
misinterpretation of history. You can’t play with a sacred history and
turn it into soft core pornography.”

This is absurd. It is a little hard to tell whether the quoted section of the novel was cited by Spellberg as one of the offensive parts or not, but it hardly matters. This is an example of an academic betraying the very intellectual freedoms the academy stands for. I’m sickened.

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.