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January
2009
The String of Pearls by Joseph Roth
We
met at Clare's to discuss this book, translated by Michael Hofmann,
which she had suggested. It's the story of the events which ensue
when the Shah of Persia, on a visit to Vienna at the end of the
nineteenth century, desires a beautiful countess and decides that
he must have her, and the knock-on effects on characters from various
strata of Viennese society.
I have to say we were more than a bit confounded by this novel.
Having read Hofmann's translation of the very psychological The
Reader, we were perhaps stupidly expecting something in the
same vein, and were surprised to find this a somewhat old-fashioned
omniscient tale. But we felt it was something about the novel itself
which was difficult to grasp. As the novel follows the chain of
consequences, the focus shifts from character to character, following
each to their ruin and then leaving him or her and moving onto the
next with an abruptness we found odd. Ann and I felt strongly too
that we were missing things - that there were references we weren't
getting, and possibly ironies and jokes. We had no idea whether
this were the fault of the novel or the translation or indeed our
own lack of historical background, but since this was after all
a novel about the tenor of Viennese society at the centre
of a crumbling empire, we found this frustrating. We were especially
suspicious of the translation when it came to the representations
of colloquial speech, which seemed awkward, and we wished that our
German-speaking member Hans had been there to advise us, and indeed
look at the original as he had with The Reader. Especially, though,
we kept not being able to visualise things: for instance, we imagined
the characters in Edwardian costume, but then suddenly there would
be an indication that a character was dressed in more modern clothes.
Clare
suggested that this was an effect deliberately created by Roth,
as an indication of the flux and confusion of the society being
portrayed. She suggested too that the abruptness of the changes
of focus between characters was a formal replication of the effect
on them of the disintegrating society. Nevertheless, she had to
agree that there had been something unsatisfying about it all. Every
one of us, it turned out, had been reduced to reading Hofmann's
introduction for clues as to how we should take this novel, yet
had found that it provided few, concentrating on the more superficial
tropes such as that of doubling and on teasing out the parallels
with strands in others of Roth's novels. So, still confounded and
unsatisfied, we dropped the subject of the book and turned to other
more gossipy matters.
February
2009
Chronicle in Stone by Ismail Kadare
Report
written by Clare:
Elizabeth was unable to be at the reading group meeting when we
discussed this book. Towards the end of the evening, after possibly
too much wine, I rashly agreed to write about our discussion in
Elizabeth’s stead. It is now near the end of May and I was
reminded in our May meeting of my promise. The tone was such that
I feel duty bound to try and write something. There was some acknowledgment
that ‘we’re not all experienced writers’ like
Elizabeth, so with that in mind….
Doug, who had chosen the novel, outlined the story of a medieval
city in Albania, with the citizens’ preoccupation with superstition
and witchcraft. The narrator is a young boy, son of a family whose
stone house has a central place in the community, having a well
in its cellar. The boy is shortsighted, but the hazy, running together
of experiences is more than visual. Features of the city, people
and events, are indistinct and the boy narrator’s preoccupation
with the macabre, bizarre, sexually unusual, convey a world through
a child’s eyes. We enjoyed the vivid characters, old crones,
the life of the city and the city as a character itself. We generally
agreed, though, that the language and perception was often that
of someone much older than Kadare’s narrator.
The political backdrop is of the Second World War and national resistance
movements. These impinge on the city and the boy’s experience,
as the military occupation of the city changes from Italian to Greek
armies several times. The transitions are almost comical: one group
marching out, southwards, as the other marches in from the north.
The changes in power seem arbitrary and disconnected from the life
of the city and its people. The first awareness of something going
on further afield, is the sight of aeroplanes passing overhead.
The boy narrator is in awe of a large aeroplane that lands by the
city, becoming almost emotionally attached to it. Yet this contrasts
with a sense the book conveys, of the ancient city and its people
being violently shocked into the twentieth century.
We moved to discussing Albania, its political and cultural characteristics
in this period, helpfully illuminated by Ann’s knowledge of
this region. One effect on me of reading this novel was to make
me curious about Albania as a country, its people and history, knowing
so little about it.
It was a generally well received book. I don’t remember anyone
registering dislike – just that observation that the linguistic
competence and maturity of observation were not consonant with a
boy narrator in his early teens.
March
2009
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
Jenny
suggested this novel about Roseanne McNulty who is nearing her hundredth
birthday in the Roscommon mental hospital to which she was committed
as a young woman, and her psychiatrist Dr Grene who becomes intrigued
by her as the hospital is made ready for closure and his own retirement
approaches. Jenny had been interested in the book because her own
aunt had been similarly committed for purely moral reasons and in
the same way had become so institutionalized that she never left.
The story is told in two alternating first-person narrations: the
secret memoir that Roseanne begins writing, in which she looks back
over her life and the tragic circumstances, rooted in political
and religious conflict, which led her to the asylum, and the journal
which Dr Grene begins at the same time to record his professional
progress - in particular his unsuccessful attempts to draw Roseanne
out - but which also lapses into a private memoir.
I think Jenny wasn't disappointed, and on the whole the group was
enthusiastic about this book. People found it a moving, indeed heart-wrenching
story, and most especially people loved the writing: Hans arrived
with his copy bristling with post-it notes marking sentences and
passages he especially liked. It's 'poetic' in that there is a lyrical
rhythm and it is profound and startling in its observations. Here's
Roseanne summing up a truth behind her own tragedy: '...history
as far as I can see it is not the arrangement of what happens, in
sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and
guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.'
Yet the prose is marked by the tics of the characters' psychology
as each tries to recall and make sense of their experience, stopping
and starting and questioning both their memories and expression.
Writing that Roseanne has clearly suffered great pain, and that
this 'actually gives her her strange grace', Grene then
comments: 'Now, that is not a thought I had before I wrote it
down.' In this way the memoir form of the book is unusually
dynamic: the journals are not merely vehicles for a story; the actual
writing of them moves the characters' development forward. And in
this way the book is about not simply Roseanne's particular story
- shocking and moving and tied up with the political history of
Ireland as it is - but the ways in which we process our own stories
and negotiate the aspects of them that are unknown to us.
I said that one thing I loved most about this book was its humanity
- the fact that Roseanne never shows bitterness towards those who
have wronged her, looking for humanity in even the near-inhuman
Father Gaunt, main perpetrator of her wrongs, and the way that both
she and Grene constantly reach for understanding. Everyone agreed.
Then I said that I did have one caveat about the book, which in
fact I was reluctant to mention because I loved the book so much,
and it was the same one that the judges had (unusually) admitted
to when awarding the book the Costa Prize: I didn't like the way
the revelation at the end (which I won't give away here) was achieved.
It wasn't convincing, I said, and Ann, Doug and John strongly agreed.
Jenny and Clare didn't quite agree, though, I think: they pointed
out all the aspects of the plot which explained the ending and meant
that it did all fit together. I said yes, it did all fit together
on the level of plot, but I didn't think it worked on the psychological
level: there were not enough pointers on that level to make me feel
'Ah yes, of course!' when the truth was revealed. Hans and Doug
strongly said that they felt that I'd got to the nub of it. In fact,
some people in the group hadn't actually grasped the plot connections,
and I think that this was why, because it wasn't backed up by a
psychological resolution.
Then Doug revealed that he hadn't liked the book nearly as much
of the rest of us, and this seemed to be because he found other
aspects of it unbelievable: the fact that Roseanne could have been
incarcerated merely on moral grounds and for the rest of her life,
and the appalling coldness and cruelty of the priest and her mother-in-law
who had put her there. There was now a chorus of objection: Jenny
referred back to her aunt, and Clare, who is a psychotherapist,
said that she had worked with women in such circumstances as late
as the seventies and eighties, and not even in rural Ireland as
in the book, but in England. I said that there were exactly parallel
stories in the Irish side of my own family, in which people were
excommunicated by priests and shunned by the family for similar
moral, political and religious reasons. In fact, I said, when I
had previously read Barry's earlier novel, The Whereabouts of
Eneas McNulty, in which a minor (though not insignificant)
character in The Secret Scripture takes centre stage, I
felt as though Barry had somehow heard about a particular member
of my own family. Thus I found myself in a very weird situation,
for me: it's usually Trevor in the group who appeals to life to
justify novels, and I who wag my literary finger and insist that
appeals to life are irrelevant because a book has to convince on
its own.
Indeed, I said, one of the things which moved me tremendously about
The Secret Scripture is that it picks up and makes central
an encounter in The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty which
there seemed strangely incidental yet remained one of my strongest
and most resonant memories of that book. Perhaps what is so moving
about the cross-novel connections which Barry creates is the way
that they formally demonstrate the marginalization of people and
their searing experience in a situation of political and religious
prejudice. And I must say that everyone in the group, none of whom
knew of the other book, was very intrigued by this connection.
And then, for the rest of the evening, we discussed the real-life
issues which the book and Doug's objection had raised.
April
6 2009
Austerlitz by WG Sebald
This
book, one of my favourites ever, was my suggestion for the group.
Narrated by a character who seems very close to the author - a favourite
technique of Sebald's, apparently (I have yet to read his other
books) - it features the first-person story of Jacques Austerlitz
as told to the narrator during a series of initially chance but
later arranged meetings from the sixties to the nineties in various
European cities and London.
A
lonesome and somewhat eccentric figure, Austerlitz is a university
teacher of architecture, and begins by sharing with the narrator
his fascination with railway architecture - it is in a railway station
that they first meet - and, perhaps more importantly, with fortresses
and the paradoxes within their design which always lead to their
failure as buildings of defence (and ultimate use as prisons). All
of this apparently inconsequential and potentially dry material
seems yet strangely resonant (although Clare in our group did not
find it so). Then on a subsequent meeting (at which point even Clare
became engaged) Austerlitz begins to talk more personally and relates
his affectless post-war childhood in Wales as the adopted child
of a Methodist minister and his wife. Here again there are resonances
which seem to float without meaning: Austerlitz's obsession with
the drowned village beneath a local reservoir and its tower, a local
man's tales of seeing ghosts, and Austerlitz's own childhood sense
of a dimension of life which remains invisible. It is only when
he is at boarding school and his step-parents are no longer available
for questioning (one dead and the other committed to a psychiatric
hospital) that he discovers his real name, Austerlitz, and thus
any inkling of his European origins, after which he fortresses himself
in academic studies and the obsessions with which, during their
discussions, the narrator - and this reader - become infected.
During years when Austerlitz and the narrator do not see each other,
Austerlitz suffers a serious breakdown which leads him finally to
set out to uncover his own origins which inevitably involve the
history of Nazi Germany and the Jews.
I told the group that I loved the book, and that I was stunned by
the original way it was written. Lacking chapters, it consists of
only three sections entirely devoid of paragraphs and which are
hardly noticeable as sections as they are divided only by asterisks.
Furthermore, long sentences sweep you from one subject to another
in a kind of stream of consciousness - one sentence, significantly
describing life in the Theresienstadt ghetto, is 11 pages long.
The book thus reads like a kind of dream with a dream's weird yet
urgent and incontrovertible logic and unanswerable emotional resonance,
carrying on the level of form the message that everything in the
novel is after all connected: Austerlitz's seemingly dry obsessions
turn out to be rooted, stunningly and vividly, in the past which
was first hidden from him and which later he failed for a long time
even to enquire into.
I said I thought the book was about memory and the repression of
memory, and that I thought that Sebald had found a new form to convey
them. There were murmurs of agreement and appreciation and Clare
and new member Jo said they had loved the book too. I said that
there was only one wrong note for me: I know very well that one
retrieved memory can open up other lost memories in turn, but it
didn't seem to me psychologically convincing that the moment Austerlitz
arrives back in his birthplace he so suddenly remembers his post-British
early childhood (up to the age of four-and-a-half) in such complete
and wholesale detail. I asked Clare, who is a psychotherapist, what
she thought about that, and she agreed.
Then Jenny, who had been very quiet up to that point, spoke up and
said that she hadn't liked the book. Others were stunned and demanded
to know why not. She said, Well, it's such a common story! Presumably
she meant the story of the kindertransport of which Austerlitz was
of course a part, and I countered that the book wasn't just about
that but, as I had said, about memory and repression and the way
we deal with loss and pain. Others came in and backed me up, pointing
out Austerlitz's signs of repression: his obsessiveness, his depression,
his inability to make relationships. Jenny said, But those are the
results of his sterile upbringing in Wales. Why didn't Sebald just
write about that, why create a whole elaborate device to tack on
the story of the Nazis and the Jews? Jo said, No, surely his problems
were caused by the replacement of his earlier happy childhood
with that sterile upbringing. Jenny said, But he had no memory of
that earlier time. I said, But that's the point: it was repressed;
his step-parents suppressed the truth, leading him to repress his
own memories. Jenny said, But why did it have to be to do with Nazi
Gemany and the Jews? And anyway, he didn't repress it, he went looking
for his past. I said, But it should have been pretty obvious which
way things pointed once he found out his name at the age of 16 or
so, yet it took him until middle age and a breakdown to face up
to that. As for her objection to its being a kindertransport adoption
rather than an ordinary one, I feel we didn't answer Jenny adequately
at the time: it would not be simply the memory of an earlier happier
childhood which Austerlitzwould be repressing, but the climate of
fear surrounding his upheaval, which a child of four-and-a-half
would pick up. Surely one of the main points of this book is how
we try to wipe history, and the way this is played out on the personal
level in this novel is extremely moving.
Everyone else in the group thought the book was amazingly moving,
and staggered that this could have been the case when the prose
style was so spare, even flat, and the story distanced by the double-narrator
device. In fact, I think there is something moving about this double-narrator
effect: there's a kind of double-exposure which underlines the novel's
theme of cloaked meanings and alternative possibe lives. At times
it's hard to remember which narrator is speaking: the ostensibly
objective narrator becomes identifed with Austerlitz, and along
with him the reader. In this way the concept of narratorial 'objectivity'
is challenged and at the same time Austerlitz's psychological state
is given a stunning 'objective' authenticity.
John said that he thought it was perhaps the most honest book he
had ever read, by which he meant emotionally honest, but Jenny retorted
that it wasn't honest at all, it was all device. And then it was
Doug's turn to stun us all by saying he wouldn't be reading another
Sebald novel. Why? we wanted know. He said that he had thought it
was beautifully written, but he could hardly say like the rest of
us that he loved it, he couldn't even say he liked it, because he
had found it so painful.
At which Jenny said again that she didn't like it at all.
April
23 2009
The Invention of Curried Sausage by Uwe Timm
Hans
suggested this book, which we all very much liked, after a German
friend had recommended it to him: we hadn't heard of it, but in
fact it's a bestseller and something of a modern classic in Germany.
It's short, a novella, and is told by a narrator who, like that
of Austerlitz which we
read last, seems very close to the author.
Returning
to his native Hamburg, the narrator sets out to prove that the popular
dish of curried sausage sold on German street-stands did not originate
in Berlin in the fifties as is generally accepted, but was invented
by his aunt's Hamburg neighbour, Mrs Brucker, who sold it on the
local square immediately after the war. However, tracking her down
to an old people's home and getting her talking, he learns far more
than the answer to this question - which was yes, she did invent
it - and the matter of how she came to invent it is withheld as
her poignant wartime story unfolds.
With a husband and two grown children away in the war, Lena Brucker
meets at the cinema a young soldier who, failing to leave her flat
next morning, becomes a deserter secreted by her there. When the
war ends very soon after his arrival, she can't bring herself to
tell him and inevitably lose him, and thus he becomes her unwitting
prisoner. It is only later, after this story has played itself out,
and Lena sets about making a postwar living for herself, that the
recipe for curried sausage comes to her more or less by accident.
Thus the search for the truth about curried sausage is a kind of
device, or even a McGuffin, for the unravelling of a more emotionally
complex tale, but, 'combining the farthest with the nearest' as
the narrator says it does, it is also a kind of metaphor for that
tale too: the coming together of two disparate people who would
not under normal circumstances do so, a woman reaching middle age
and a young man with a wife and new baby to whom he feels committed.
John suggested that it also operated as a way to make palatable
and approach a subject which is of great sensitivity in Germany,
since the denouement of Lena's wartime story, which I won't give
away here, hinges on the revelation to her of what had been happening
in the death camps. He said he also thought that the double-narrator
device which this book shared with Austerlitz was connected
with this: a way for the generation of Germans tackling this subject
in novels to 'distance' it and make it possible to handle. He thought
it was interesting too, and perhaps inevitable as a strategy, that
both these novels and The Reader
feature a younger narrator forging a relationship with an older
person who had been involved to greater or lesser degrees in these
events.
Everyone had good things to say about this book. People liked its
depiction of the ways that the extremities of war disrupt convention,
and in particular the portrayal of the tenderness yet toughness
of the unconventional relationship. They loved the little touches,
such as the two officers of the occupying English force turning
out to have Hamburg accents (and to be Jews), and the portrayal
of the postwar black market bartering. They were especially taken
by the book's illustration of the fact the people you least expected
turned out to be the wartime informers. Clare said that she was
amazed when she realized what a short time the two had been together
in the flat, as it had seemed to go on for ages, and everyone agreed
that this was an achievement of the novel: recreating the suspension
of time and reality for the two characters.
I said that I thought the book extremely well written, as far as
you could tell from a translation, or maybe you could tell because
the translation read so well. Clare then asked me what I meant by
well written. I said I meant emotional acuity or truthfulness conveyed
via apt language, and John summed it up better by saying that in
well-written prose there isn't a false note, which everyone agreed
was true about the prose of this book. I also said that one of the
things which struck me forcibly about the double narrator device
which seems to be a feature of these recent German books is that
it serves to subsume the ego of the author: all the emotional and
verbal acuity is handed by the author to a narrator, which I said
struck me as an act of great authorial generosity, and John wondered
if it were a function of the act of reparation which these novels
may be seen as.
We did find some false notes on other levels, however. While the
narrator reports Lena's story indirectly, thus giving himself room
for interpolation, it is nevertheless the story as told to him
by Lena, and on one or two occasions the novel swerves unconvincingly
from its own convention when we are presented with the interiority
of other characters. Some people said they had found themselves
wondering if it really were believable that the soldier, Bremer,
didn't guess that the war was over as he watched the road from the
window all day long. I said I had a slight doubt about the novel's
treatment of the business of the informers and people's knowledge
of the death camps: the novel seems to imply that people like Lena
were completely unaware of what was happening with the Jews (Lena
thinks back to a Jewish neighbour leaving with her case and how
nothing much struck her about it at the time), yet Lena lived more
or less in the Jewish quarter, and also, the novel seems to indicate,
people knew that there were informers informing on the Jews.
Doug said that the worst false note was right at the end, indeed
the very last word, when the narrator comes upon a scrap of paper
on which is one of the crosswords which Bremer whiled away his time
doing. One of the words filled in by Bremer is 'even though nobody
will believe me - novella'. Everyone cried out in horrified agreement,
and Doug said he'd thrown the book down at that final point.
Even so, we liked the book enough to forgive it any of its faults,
including this.
May
2009
Falling Man by Don DeLillo
This
book was chosen more or less by default: Jo, whose turn it had been
to suggest our next reading, failed to turn up, and, off the top
of his head, Doug tentatively suggested this because he'd just bought
it. Having read Panjak Mishra's Guardian
article on 9/11 literature I said I thought it was a book we
should perhaps read, and since we'd very much admired DeLillo's
prophetic White Noise, we
agreed on it.
We were very disappointed, and I found that the book bore out the
criticisms in Mishra's article. One of Mishra's main complaints
is that, as a study of the psychic effects on a bourgeois couple
after the husband Keith survives the twin towers, the book is a
retreat into the domestic, and thus away from the wider issues.
I'm not sure that such a focus, in theory, would necessarily carry
inbuilt failure in exploring the important issues, but we certainly
found that it failed here: we found the couple almost entirely unsympathetic
(with the exception that John thought the wife Lianne a fairly sympathetic
character), and the conversations between Lianne and her mother
Nina and Nina's lover almost shocking in their seemingly inappropriate
urbane novel-of-manners style - convoluted, arcane and indeed very
difficult to follow - and making it hard at times feel the urgency
or import of the twin-tower context even when they are discussing
the politics. We could see that there might be a political authorial
point here, that DeLillo is showing the inability of Americans to
absorb the reality of the situation, and indeed Keith's journey
through the novel seems to be one away from reality (into a life
of gambling), but the effect on us as readers was fatally ennervating.
(As Jo said to me in the cafe the week before the meeting, she didn't
care a hoot about the characters, and she wouldn't have gone on
reading if she hadn't been doing it for the group.) As a result
we found similarly ennervating the fragmented non-linear structure
and the glancing, cumulative prose which I felt should in theory
have been powerful as a depiction of the breakdown of bourgeois
American certainty.
For
a long time in our discussion we failed even to mention the fact
that each of the three sections of the book is concluded with a
piece which takes the viewpoint of Hammad, one of the 9/11 hijackers,
and the three together chart his progress from his initial conversion
to Islamism to the moment of impact. The fact that we omitted them
so long from our discussion is an interesting comment, I think,
on the ultimately bourgeois focus of the book, and once they were
mentioned, people didn't really know what to make of them. Mishra's
comment, in line with some other critics, is that the depiction
here is founded in unsubtle stereotype. Our group wasn't quite sure
what to think, but did find the depiction unconvincing (and someone
questioned the factual/historical accuracy of Hammad's geographical
origins). It's perhaps again an interesting comment on the failure
and pallor of the rest of the book that, even so, some said they
found these sections the most engaging and vivid.
If I understand him correctly, Mishra charges DeLillo with subscribing,
via this sterotyping and the 'Western'-centric focus of the rest
of the book, to a profile of Muslims as regarding 'Westerners' as
'other', while indeed colluding in a view of Muslims as 'other'.
I believe that DeLillo is striving hard to avoid this: there are
various tropes in the book which seek to break down such concepts
of otherness. Most obvious is the fact that Nina's German lover
has himself been a terrorist/freedom fighter (and argues the case
for Islamist dissatisfaction with the West). Then there is the moment
at the end of the book when the concept of 'organic shrapel' (in
which pellets of the skin of suicide bombers become embedded in
the flesh of survivors) is taken to a striking level when the body
and consciousness of Hammad morph in the moment of impact into those
of Keith in the tower. Such self-conscious tropes, however, are
at odds with the psychic centre of the novel, which is indeed 'Western',
forcing the 'eastern' into otherness, and in consequence, it seemed
to me, the sections concerning Hammad's story felt more like colonization
than the empathy which DeLillo may have intended. As Mishra notes,
most Muslims already live with a complex sense of their own Westernization,
rather than the polarization of which DeLillo feels compelled to
mastermind such a striking conversion in this final scene.
Meanwhile, on the less conscious level, it seems, an undercurrent
of polarization runs through the novel: Clare and I in particular
felt shocked by an episode in which Lianne hits the woman in the
downstairs flat purely for her insensitivity in playing eastern
music in the aftermath of 9/11. While there was some sense that
her behaviour was a kind of madness that had overcome Lianne (and
Keith suffers a similar 'madness' when he hits a man in a department
store for a perceived personal slight), there seemed too little
authorial indication that the true madness is that her sense of
injury and insult could only emerge from a sense of the music as
'other', and it was this that felt shocking.
And the street performance artwork mimicking the famous image of
the man falling from one of the towers seemed - apart from highly
unlikely: people thought that in reality the artist would have been
lynched by New Yorkers - yet another dislocation into artifice of
this urgent real-life issue.
Trevor was very late for this meeting, having double-booked, and
we had finished the discussion when he arrived. Since he so often
likes books others don't, we expected him to put up a defence for
it, but when we asked what he thought he lifted his hand and stuck
his thumb down, not exactly perpendicular but almost. And Hans had
the last word when he said that he had looked on the internet for
a real-life film of 9/11, and the very short one he had found he
left him a hundred times more profoundly affected than had this
novel.
June
2009
The Autograph Hound by John Lahr
This
meeting was a mauling, and a pretty unfair one at that, since most
of us hadn't even really read the book. Published in the early seventies,
it is narrated by its 1960s anti-hero Benny Walsh, collector of
autographs and busboy at the New York Wild-West-themed Homestead
Restaurant, a place frequented by top celebrities and so a source
of the choicest autograph pickings. Trevor had suggested it, as
he read it when he was in the process of dropping out of university
in the seventies, and thought it was absolutely fantastic.
Well,
we thought that as a book about an obsession with celebrity it sounded
good and, spurred on by Trevor's enthusiasm, we went away looking
forward to it. The first obstacle we encountered was that it was
out of print, and we all set about ordering it from ABE Books. Mine
and John's came back fairly quickly, the original British hardback
complete with glossy pink-purple dust cover, but unfortunately I
had only just started reading it when I left it in a taxi and we
had to order the book all over again. Granted I was coming back
from A & E in that taxi, having fallen and sprained my ankle,
which may have made me less than competent, but I can't help thinking
that the fact that I simply couldn't get into the book may have
had something to do with it too. And I know I was also not in the
best state for getting into a book, but not many other people in
the group could get into it, either, it turned out.
Most of us gave up and failed to read much more than half of it
- John giving up very soon after the beginning - and I'm afraid
we had a very hazy impression of what we had read. Clare did get
to the end but in such a fast, skipping manner that she had missed
the dramatic denouement which Trevor revealed to us. We wondered
why we had found it so hard to engage with. The critics' comments
on the paperback edition I finally got hold of praise the book for
its contemporary aphorisms, and we wondered if this was the problem:
that Benny's voice, and thus the novel, were so steeped in late-sixties
language and mentality that the book was simply dated (much of the
lingo, which seems to be authorially relished, now seeming old fashioned
or cliched; eg: 'See you later?' 'Not if I see you first.') Anne
also said, to general agreement, that the long lists of names of
celebrities which mean nothing to us now is de-focussing and distancing.
Trevor
groaned in disbelief. But, he said, the book was brilliant! So fantastically
written! I said, How could it be well-written if it doesn't draw
you in, or give you any sense of what it's all about? What about
the character of Gloria, for instance (a young actress Benny meets
early on and who eventually tries to get him to sell his autograph
collection to save himself from the pickle he ends up in)? It was
ages before I got a handle on her, I said, and at the start I pictured
a middle-aged woman. I argued that the reason for this was unfocused
prose which failed to realize Gloria: I had been left with the impression
that Gloria is simply not described early enough. Trevor could hardly
believe I was saying this, and argued that one of the great things
about the book was its vivid descriptions. After the meeting I set
myself the task of starting the novel again and reading it carefully
through to the end, and I found that Trevor was right: Gloria is
described by narrator Benny the moment we meet her, indeed in list-checking
detail, thus: The lady stands out like Mary Martin across a
crowded room... She's wearing a long dress down to her ankles, a
veil hangs from her hat. So why did I, and others, fail to
see her clearly?
The
language, along with the atypical clothes, put me off the scent:
that word 'lady', and the fact that Benny goes on to refer to her
(and characterize her) as 'the well-dressed lady'. But it's not
the language in itself. It's not that I simply saw Gloria in the
wrong light, but that I had a very strong sense of not really grasping
her. There are plenty of novels the language of which is now dated
but which we can read without trouble, feeling that we are getting
a true sense of the world being depicted. It seems to me the problem
is deeper and relates to the way we are meant to take Benny. How
significant is Benny's use of the word 'lady'? Are we meant to take
it as language of the era and not particularly notable, or are we
meant to see it as indicative of Benny's singular psychology - his
prudishness and sexual repression (he is 35 years old but worries
like a child about his own penis - which he calls 'it', he has failed
to detach psychologically from his mother, is clearly frightened
of any sexual relations with Gloria and refers coyly to horses lifting
their tails and doing their 'number twos')? Or is this dichotomy
- prudishness and arrested development alongside streetwise lingo
and sex dens - meant to be typical of the age (which I think it
may have been) and significanty so? There was huge (initial) disagreement
in our group about how we are meant to take Benny. Having read the
book properly now it's clear to me that Lahr intends Benny as an
anti-hero: he reveals himself as viciously racist and worse, if
also pathetically lost in a fantasy world. Yet those of us who hadn't
read much of the book had come away without any sense that were
we meant to see Benny in this light. Hans gave a list of objections
to the book which I don't recall specifically but which amounted
to the fact that he considered it juvenile, the very thing which
characterizes Benny with his stunted personality, his obsession
with celebrity, and his totemic belief in the power of autographs
of the famous. In other words, Hans had not seen any distinction
between the narrator and the author, and neither had I: I had even
come away with the impression that we were meant to see Benny as
cool. Those who had read properly to the end - Trevor, Jenny and
Doug - were quick to put us right, but all three - even Jenny, who
was irritated by the style of the novel - said that they felt sorry
for Benny, for his emptiness and his pathetic and doomed attempt
to fill it with celebrity.
It
seems to me that the problem is that by taking too much relish in
its anti-hero's mentality and language, the author fails to satirize
them enough - which is interestingly the complaint
made by James Wood about Zadie Smith's similarly titled novel (The
Autograph Man) on the same subject and theme.
I said
that I thought that the book's take on celebrity was dated too:
that nowadays people don't hero-worship celebrities so much as identify
with them and desire fame for themselves, a phenomenon fed by reality
TV. Some people strongly disagreed, citing the huge sales of Heat
etc (which, frankly, I didn't see as destroying my argument), and
that they definitely feel a bit in awe if they ever meet celebrities.
I also said that I didn't really understand this interest in celebrity,
which I don't, but I am very interested in the interest in celebrity,
and by the time I went home I was in danger of writing my own and
yet another novel on the subject...
PS:
In a somewhat ironic twist, after I lost our first copy John and
I each ordered a copy (so we ended up doubling up) and John's copy
turned out to be the original US hardback bearing, of all things,
the author's autograph.
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