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July
2010
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Hans
suggested this book because when his wife, who doesn’t normally
like crime novels, had tried it, she’d found she liked it.
He was interested therefore to know what the group members thought
of it, and since it has been such a phenomenal best-seller, along
with its two sequels, we were interested to know why, and chose
it over the alternative suggestion.
It concerns Swedish investigative journalist Mikail Blomkvist, editor
of the political journal Millennium, who is brought down by a capitalist
he tried to expose and as a result becomes involved with Henrik
Vanger, head of a business family with a shadowy past including
Nazism and the disappearance in the sixties of Vanger’s sixteen-year-old
niece Harriet who has never been seen again, presumed dead. Vanger
engages Blomqvist, who has had to leave his editorship, ostensibly
to write a history of the Vanger family but in reality to investigate
Harriet’s disappearance. He is helped in this quest by an
unconventional private investigator, the tough punk Lisbeth Salander,
a computer hacker and previous problem child who in her twenties
is still, according to the Swedish system, under state care.
It’s a long book – 538 pages - and one of the strange
aspects of its success is that it seems to be generally agreed (on
Twitter etc) that for the first 100 pages or so it’s pretty
boring, with lots of expositionary backstory concerning the court
case and the investigation which led to Blomqvist’s conviction
and downfall.
Well, the gist of the meeting was that everyone thought it was pretty
rubbishy but everyone liked it apart from John who found he couldn’t
read it, and me, although I have to admit that for the sake of argument
I was more negative in the meeting than I actually felt as outlined
on my Fictionbitch blog.
The first person to comment was Jenny, who has read all three of
the books, and who said she absolutely loved the character Lisbeth
Salander, and there were murmurs of agreement. In fact, I didn't
find Salander entirely convincing as a character, though I didn't
say this: there seemed inconsistency rather than complexity in the
way she was portrayed as streetwise yet now and then naive. Everyone
pretty much agreed that the book was poorly written, and that indeed
for the first 100 pages or so Larsson seemed to be learning, in
a very fundamental way, to write. There is far too much exposition,
much telling the reader instead of showing, and Larsson will suddenly
launch into a non-novelistic essay informing the reader about such
things as the Swedish state care system. Not to mention the author’s
relish in the tedious details of computers which may have been state-of-the
art at the time of writing, but which are now outdated. Although
people had said they liked Salander, they all agreed that there
was no real psychological insight in the book. And everyone, even
accountant Doug, agreed that the end of the book, which deals with
Blomkvist’s comeback and the details of the financial scandal
he finally does expose, is even more boring than the beginning.
I said that it reminded me of nothing so much as reading Enid Blyton
when I was a child, especially the way the food is described in
such painstaking and often inappropriate detail. I read out this
passage which occurs just after Blomqvist and Salander have escaped
from a torture chamber, Blomqvist himself having been tortured:
She helped him off with his clothes and propelled him to the
bathroom. Then she put on water for coffee and made half a dozen
thick sandwiches on rye bread with cheese and liver sausage and
dill pickles (my bolds)
and everyone fell about laughing.
As
I said on my Fictionbitch blog, this is probably the first book
we’ve read for the group that I didn’t find in any way
disruptive to my own creative writing process, and everyone agreed
that that was the point, it was meant merely as a diversion. Clare
said it was like chocolate, just something easy to swallow, and
Ann said she’d had some long train journeys recently and it
had been great for that, to pass the time. I said that that was
my objection, really: ultimately, I really didn’t want to
read a book just to pass the time, but for something much more fruitful;
to me it was a waste of time. John said I was precious, and from
the reaction of the others he was speaking for them too, but it
was really rich coming from him since he hadn’t even read
past page 50 or so. And Ann added that she’d liked reading
about the food and finding out about the things Swedes ate, and
the fact that they drank so much coffee, and others agreed.
Then Ann addressed the question of why this book, above other crime
thrillers, has been so very popular. She thought that certain crime
series are popular because they happen to hit particular chords
in the societies and times in which they are written, and there
was a fair bit of discussion about other crime writers members had
read. Jenny said that this book was about violence to women: indeed,
the parts that the book is divided into are subtitled with quotes
from Swedish statistics on violence to women, and the original Swedish
title of the book was Men Who Hate Women. I said that in fact it
ticked several of our current concerns to which the theme of violence
towards women is somewhat subsumed: corruption in big business,
the Nazi past with which we continue to be obsessed, and big-brother
surveillance and computer hacking.
But I didn’t think it actually really addressed these issues,
not on the psychological level I want from novels (in spite of what
some critics have said about Larsson’s anatomization of the
mind of a serial killer). What for instance, was Larsson saying
about Nazism? (I can’t explain any further without giving
the plot away.) There was a pause as people thought, and then someone
said, ‘Nazis are bad.’ And I said ‘Exactly. Nothing
deeper or more psychological than that.’
August
2010
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
This
book was my suggestion, a book I had loved when I read it some years
ago. It’s poet Sylvia Plath’s only novel, published
originally under a pseudonym and confessedly and verifiably autobiographical.
It opens during the fifties summer that the Rosenbergs are executed
for spying and first-person narrator Esther Greenwood, an A-grade
literature student, is working out an expenses-paid job on a New
York fashion magazine, the prize she has won, along with several
other aspirant young women, with her writing. Acutely aware of the
hollowness of the fashion world around her, disillusioned with her
long-term medical student boyfriend Buddy, and sensing that her
lifelong academic goals are equally hollow, Esther begins to be
cut off in depression, the ‘bell jar’ of the title,
eventually undergoing ECT and attempting suicide and becoming hospitalised.
The book is striking for its wonderfully imagistic, witty and energetic
prose, and moves at a great pace – the kind of book you really
can’t put down.
I told the group how much I had loved the book previously, but said
that this time I had a problem with it: I didn’t really know
how to take it. The first time I read it I had entirely identified
with Esther – apart from her suicidal impulses – but
on this occasion I was shocked to find that I couldn’t always
sympathise with her and indeed now and then I found I didn’t
even like her. For instance, after the opening line, which is so
striking that I had remembered it almost verbatim when I suggested
the book: It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted
the Rosenbergs… the prose moves instantly away from political
engagement to a self-obsessed focus on Esther’s own emotional
state: The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick. It’s
not the Rosenbergs who have her attention in this paragraph so much
as the idea of suffering electrocution herself, which, as Hans would
point out later, is fulfilled when her own first ECT treatment goes
wrong and she suffers great trauma. Indeed, she goes further in
distancing herself from the Rosenberg issue and painting it rather
as an unworthy and hassling trauma to herself: That’s
all there was to read about in the papers – goggle-eyed
headlines staring up at me on every street corner and the fusty,
peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to
do with me , but I couldn’t help wondering what it
would be like, being burned all along your nerves (my bolds).
It would be possible to read this as self-ironic, were it not for
the fact that we are clearly meant to take Esther’s depression
and later trauma seriously, and of course should. On the other hand,
there are clearly self-ironic moments: I decided I would spend
the summer writing a novel./ That would fix a lot of people.
There are occasions when we are clearly meant to laugh at, or at
least with, Esther: at the way, for instance, she eats with unladylike
greed at the Ladies’ Day banquet, and - embedded
as a flashback within this scene - the way she cons her way out
of taking a science course at college. But then we are not intended
to laugh at the consequences and underlying currents: a traumatic
food poisoning which symbolises the rot at the heart of this New
York world and prefigures the deeper sickness which Esther will
suffer, and the fact that, in spite of saying ‘I had to
laugh when I thought about [the chemistry course]’, she
admits ‘how scared and depressed’ she was about
it. The drop in tone made me see the episodes retrospectively in
a more serious light, which in turn, perhaps because of the earlier
levity, made me see Esther as potentially simply greedy and self-centred.
It seemed to me that my problem with knowing how to read the book
had something to do with the tone, but I wasn’t sure exactly
what. John put in here and said that yes, on this reading he had
found the first half too flippant for the grimness of the second
half. I wasn’t sure I agreed with this. I wouldn’t say
that the tone was ever flippant, and there are dark ironies I really
appreciated. For instance, when Esther begins contemplating suicide
she thinks that if you are going to jump off a building then the
higher the storey the safer, since you are more likely
to kill yourself, and that a gun is dangerous only because
you are most likely to bungle the attempt and end up living.
I said that I was also surprised to realize on this reading something
that I hadn’t noticed the first time, and which I have never
heard or read anyone noting: that this is a story of suppressed
grief. Esther’s father has died when she was a child, and
Esther says quite clearly, though somewhat briefly, that she began
to realize she had never been happy since she was running along
the beach the summer before her father died. Suicidal and living
with her mother, she visits the town she grew up in and her father’s
grave:
…my legs folded under me, and I sat down in the sopping
grass. I couldn’t understand why I was crying so hard.
Then I remembered that I had never cried for my father’s death.
It is immediately after this that Esther makes the almost-successful
suicide bid that lands her in a psychiatric hospital.
Having become aware of this theme, it seemed the real one to me,
but I felt it was somewhat subsumed in (and possibly, indeed, cuts
across) the more overt feminist theme. There is the depiction of
the brutality of male obstetrics: I thought it was just like
the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible
pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn’t groan
like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby
because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been.
Buddy’s mother is described as turning herself into a floor
rug for others to walk on, and there is a strong implication that
Esther’s depression is a reaction to the fact that in a world
in which she is expected to type dictated letters she wants to ‘dictate
[her] own thrilling letters’.
I wondered therefore how aware the author was of this theme of suppressed
grief, and if this is the source of an uncertainty I found in the
novel. At this point I had become curious to see what others had
written about the themes of the novel, and had done a brief bit
of Googling. I didn’t find any mention of Esther’s grief
about her father but was interested to find a fair amount of disagreement
in particular about the end of the novel. While Marjorie
Perloff sees the book as being about Esther’s need to
find herself in a world that divides women from themselves (she
quotes the extensive dismemberment imagery in the novel), and the
ending as Esther’s rebirth, Diane
Bonds argues that in fact at the end Esther dismembers herself
in order to fit into society (quoting the wedding imagery that appears
there). Personally, I feel that the ending is extremely ambiguous,
and also that it’s hard not to read into it the fact that
Plath did commit suicide not long after the book was written, which
adds to my sense of the uncertainty of the whole. Therefore, I said,
I would be interested in what the others in the group thought.
I was much briefer than this in my introduction and didn’t
quote chapter and verse as I have here, so I probably wasn’t
very convincing. Jenny said firmly that she had really liked the
book, and Trevor agreed. Trevor said, You want to take no notice
of that internet stuff, and said what he thought the novel was about,
but I’m really sorry to say that I can’t remember what
that was. I think he disagreed that the ending was ambiguous (one
or two people had agreed that it was), but I don’t remember
how he interpreted it.
Some saw the book as being simply about mental illness, I think,
including Hans who said, But there isn’t a feminist theme
in it, is there? I said, Well, what about the fact that Esther immediately
identifies Marco whom she meets at a party as one of those men who
hates women, and Hans said, Well there are men who hate women –
implying, I think, that Plath wasn’t making any particular
feminist point about this. Someone (maybe Trevor) pointed out to
me that Sylvia Plath would never even have heard of feminism, and
I said that that didn’t make her message any less feminist,
but I didn’t get the feeling that I convinced. Jenny said
that this book was taken up as feminist during the seventies and
eighties because it hit a chord, and I think she was implying that
its feminist slant was over-emphasised then. There was a fair bit
of discussion about mental illness and its changing treatment, and
changing definitions of depression and schizophrenia, which Jenny
as a sociologist knew a lot about.
Jenny said that when she read it in the seventies she hadn’t
liked it as much as everyone else, but that this time she had liked
it a lot because now she can see how it fitted in with something
which I think she called Symbolic Interpretation, which she said
was a theory very current at the time of the writing of the book.
She said that that thing about the Rosenbergs, for instance, was
a comment on the world around Esther (ie as opposed to the way I’d
analysed it). No one else knew what Symbolic Interpretation was,
and I asked her to explain. She said it was a way of looking at
the world in terms of symbols, and although I momentarily thought
I understood, I don’t in retrospect: it seems to me quite
simply that all writing is symbolic interpretation, although Plath’s
imagery is certainly heavily symbolic.
All these different interpretations were serving to emphasise my
sense of an uncertainty at the heart of the book. I asked people
what they thought of Esther’s mother, as Diane Bonds interprets
her as monstrous, which I hadn’t myself. Everyone agreed with
me: they thought the mother was simply inadequate and over-conventional,
and some even said that at moments they could feel sorry for her.
Trevor said again that I shouldn’t bother with internet stuff,
but I think it’s instructive that Bonds could interpret such
statements of Esther’s as ‘My mother wasn’t
much help’ as indicative of monstrosity, ie that this
may be a symptom of a difficulty in getting to grips with the tone
of the narration.
Ann said that she had enjoyed the book very much, but that she too
had had a difficulty in knowing how to read it. Mainly she felt
that it was just about impossible to read it without knowledge of
Plath’s suicide very soon after writing it, and impossible
to know how one would read it without that knowledge.
Jenny and Trevor said that they thought it was entirely possible
to read the book without injecting that knowledge into it, and I
felt that they thought it was wrong to do so.
Ann said, though, that she suspected that Plath's depression at
the time of writing had actually affected the tone of the book:
that the book was an attempt to rise above the situation with wit
and a resolution, but it was undercut by her continuing depression,
which also gives rise to the ambiguous ending. This, I think, hits
the nail on the head.
Trevor, though, reiterated that you could read it without knowing
about Plath’s suicide, and someone, I think Jenny, said, But
it’s brilliantly written! – which, having taken it for
granted, I had failed to say, and I quickly agreed, as did everyone.
People then spent some time talking about the bits they’d
particularly liked, especially the funny bits. Trevor loved the
bit about Esther thinking her finger-bowl was soup and drinking
it all up, the little flowers and all. Hans said he found it really
funny when Esther was walking around with a yellow scarf tied to
her neck, her first attempt at suicide, but was unable to find anything
to hang it on to, and other agreed. I said, But that wasn’t
meant to be funny, was it? And Hans readily agreed, as did the others,
and I said, Well, this illustrates that there is a difficulty with
the tone of the book.
Then Doug spoke up. He said that when he first read the book years
ago he thought it was absolutely marvellous, maybe the perfect book,
but that his reaction this time was far stronger than mine: he didn’t
like any of the people in it. I said, But aren’t they all
seen through Esther’s eyes? And he said, yes, but that’s
what he didn’t like, the sneery, snobby tone of the whole
thing - a quiet bombshell that more or less ended the discussion.
September 2010
Dirty Weekend by Helen Zahavi
Jenny
suggested this 1991 book in which a stalked woman, Bella, turns
stalker and takes revenge by killing a series of woman-abusing men.
It led to a pretty rowdy meeting in which there was a lot of interrupting
(and objections about interrupting) and I don't remember a particularly
coherent thread of discussion, more a series of statements of opinion
and remarks.
Jenny said it's her favourite book ever and that she often re reads
it. She loves it for its political message about masculinity, and
she particularly loves the language which is both poetic (in its
stark repetitiveness) and funny (there's a lot of narratorial punning)
and it always makes her laugh, although she doesn't like the end
quite so much as she finds that disturbing. She feels that it's
a book that was really written out of its time, and that it may
have had more impact if it had been published in the seventies or
eighties.
Some people were looking a bit dubious as she was saying all of
this and then there were one or two doubting questions, none of
which I can remember, before Jo said strongly that she didn't like
the book at all; she had found it utterly horrifying - that moment
when she smashes the first man's head with a hammer, all those horrible
details, ugh (and Jo put her head in her hands), and how on earth
could Jenny find it funny?
People pointed out that it was full of puns, though most people,
especially Hans, thought they were groan-worthily awful, and Hans
quoted perhaps the worst, the narrator's comment: Ask not for
whom the Bella tolls. Clare said she had found Bella's own
repartee (in the various conversations with men she has throughout
the book) witty, although I said I hadn't been that comfortable
with it, finding it rather forced. Trevor said that he had thought
the humour was great - the book had been a great read - and one
thing he really liked about the book was the way it shifts from
viewpoint to viewpoint, sometimes even halfway through a sentence
or paragraph. This point wasn't taken up, but in retrospect I think
it was a significant observation since the book is enacting and
playing with a shifting of viewpoints and identities by moving Bella,
the femme fatale, into the avenging central position usually held
by a male character.
John commented that Jenny's response to the book was a rather sociological
one, and Jenny agreed and said it was bound to be, as she is a sociologist.
I then said that the problem is that you need to bring to the book
those sociological understandings and read it as an iconic parable
about masculinity, a tongue-in-cheek subversion of film noir. Interpreted
in that way the book is brilliant. The trouble is that if you don't
look at it in that way - and clearly some people hadn't, and indeed
I hadn't, either, when I first started reading it - then you have
a reaction like Jo's. I said that my problem with the book was in
fact the jokes, though Trevor objected to my saying that there were
jokes, so I probably should have more accurately referred to the
jokey, punning tone. I found that it distanced me from Bella's plight
as a victim at the start of the novel and at most of the points
where she was threatened by the men. In fact, I usually have a problem
in any writing where violence is treated with any kind of comedy.
In direct contrast to Jenny, I found the end of the novel far more
persuasive, when the jokey tone is dropped, which allows you to
identify with Bella under threat. It seemed to me that while the
satirical aspect of the book is consciously political, it's less
politically dynamic than the later moment which has the power to
move the reader on a deeply emotional level - indeed, it is the
power to move emotionally that is the political power of fiction,
in my opinion.
Jenny then said that I should let someone else speak and went on
to say more herself, but I was too shocked at being accused of hogging
the debate to grasp what she then said, although I think this was
when she objected that she could identify totally with
Bella's sense of threat at the start of the novel.
People asked Hans what he thought, as so far he hadn't said much,
and he said that he'd had a problem with the novel because it seemed
to imply the feminist statement that he'd heard only recently, that
all men were rapists. Jo joined in and agreed and reiterated how
horrible she had found it and also questioned the morality of it,
since the protagonist only took on the characteristics of men that
the book was meant to be critiqueing. I said I was interested to
hear Hans's view, as my problem with the kind of feminist strategy
this novel employs is that, by seeming to imply that (ie that all
men are rapists), it alienates men. Jenny explained that that notion
had come from Susan Brownmiller who hadn't meant it literally (although
it was true that other feminists had interpreted literally): Brownmiller
was saying rather that all men were in a position to rape. I agreed
and said yes, all men have the choice to use their masculinity against
women, a choice women don't generally have, and what this book is
doing is pointing that out by turning it all on its head. Jenny
said, rightly I thought, that the book is not about men but about
masculinity. You are not meant to identify or sympathise with Bella
in her scourges; you are simply meant to see that she takes on masculinity
(and I can see that this is the point of the distancing humour).
At this point people seemed to me to begin to become more positive
towards the book. Clare said that she had found it very engrossing
and that it read like a poem and an allegory or fable, and also
that it was rather like a Greek tragedy, and people agreed. Someone
pointed out that not all the men in the book are masculine and rapists
or killers, and someone else, I think John, pointed out that it
is the two who are not who give Bella both permission to take on
masculinity and the phallic means of revenge, the flick-knife and
the gun. Ann pointed out the strange stilted and artificial flavour
of the meeting with the first of these, the maimed Iranian counsellor
Nimrod, and it was agreed that this was a deliberate setpiece in
which he operated like a kind of fairy godmother, granting Bella
her wish.
Jenny and I pointed out that throughout the book Bella addresses
a darkening series of male abuses of women, beginning with the voyeur
and ending with the serial killer. John commented that Bella progresses
through various states of revenge, moving from the status of victim
to avenger of her own wrongs, through superhero saviour of another
woman, to finally saviour of all women by despatching a serial killer.
Someone picked up on the title of the book, Dirty Weekend,
which refers to the fact that Bella's revenges take place over the
course of a single weekend, but which as Jenny said usually implies
a sexual coupling (thus graphically illustrating the conflation
of sex and violence in masculinity). I said yes, that connection
is borne out by the fact that in the final scene Bella's attack
on the serial killer is narrated in terms of sexual congress.
Someone demurred that it was hardly realistic that Bella was able
to do some of these things: there she was suddenly able to drive
a car (the phallic symbol she steals for herself from her abuser
and drives into him) like some kind of pro. But others of us said,
It's not meant to be realistic (and, in a pointed reference to its
fim-noir subversion, the narrative consciously states that this
scene happened like something out of a film).
At which point Hans said he was starting to think better of the
novel...
Ann said that her main thought was that Jenny was right in saying
that the novel was of an earlier time (even than its publication),
and that our attitudes to the problem of masculinity/femininity,
and our ways of addressing it, are now more subtle.
Finally, Trevor said he thought it was wrong to put all these feminist
and so forth interpretations on the book: as far as he was concerned
it's just about people, and a really good read.
October
2010
The Leopard by Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
I'm
writing this in December as I've been so busy working on promotion
for The Birth Machine, and I'm afraid that by now my memory of the
meeting is sketchy.
Written in the nineteen-fifties by a minor Sicilian prince, the
book is set in Sicily and primarily in the two years following Garibaldi's
May 1860 landing on Sicily's south coast, which kick-started a revolution
in the south and strengthened the Risorgimento, the movement for
the unification of Italy and the destruction of the feudal system.
The novel concerns Fabrizio Corbera, Sicilian Prince of Salina,
who must come to terms with these social changes, and towards its
end moves forward to 1883 and his death, and finally to 1910 and
the fate of his children. I hadn't had time to read the book by
the meeting, and it may have been me, but I came away from the meeting
with the impression that this was essentially the story of a love
affair and a marriage: Don Fabrizio's daughter Concetta is in love
with his orphaned and favoured nephew, the charming and wily Tancredi,
and for a time Tancredi appears to be returning her affection. However,
once he claps eyes on the beautiful and nouveau-riche Angelica,
he decides to marry her instead. By the end of the novel and 1910,
however, Angelica is a widow, and in their old age the two women
have become friends, something which Jenny said she really relished,
and where she felt the novel, which she had found rather hard-going,
became more interesting and enjoyable.
In fact, when I came to find time to read the book I discovered
that the story of Concetta, Tancredi and Angelica is an aspect and
consequence of a much wider story, that of the ways, both politically
and psychologically, Prince Salina handles or fails to handle the
social changes taking place around him.
Opinion in the group was divided. Jo, who had suggested the book,
and Doug both loved it, mostly for its vivid descriptions of the
oppressive Sicilian climate and the plush and faded palaces. Clare
agreed about the descriptions and was impressed by the symbolism
- she mentioned in particular the precious grafted peaches which
Salina's gardener has grown and which Tancredi, without asking permission,
has ceremoniously delivered to Angelica - but Clare was sorry, she
just couldn't stand Don Fabrizio himself, she thought he was just
an awful person, so sexist and bossy, which made her dislike the
book. As far as I remember, Jenny and Ann found the book heavy going
with its old-fashioned prose, though Ann was interested to find
out about the politics of the period. I don't think Mark was keen,
though as far as I remember Trevor liked it, and John was divided
between the two groups, having found the book heavily historical
without being very enlightening if you didn't already know the history,
though he too found the symbolism interesting, mentioning the broken
legs of the Salina heraldic leopard on a keystone.
Personally, although I would say the book was not an easy read with
its dense prose and ponderous pace, I loved it for the delicious
irony with which all of the characters and the political situation
are portrayed. A direct literary descendant of Machiavelli's Prince,
Don Fabrizio is an arch pragmatist - he deeply regrets the breakdown
of the old order but sees the necessity of accommodating and absorbing
the new, developing the philosophy that 'everything must change
in order to stay the same'. He grieves the dilution of his aristocratic
line but sees the inevitability of his penniless nephew's marriage
into the bourgeoisie and thus works to enable it. Aptly he's an
amateur astronomer with a wide view of that large picture, the heavens.
But unlike Machiavelli, di Lampedusa ironises that pragmatism. A
big man respected and feared by all including his family, Don Fabrizio
is yet a touchingly ridiculous figure. He's so big he inadvertently
breaks things; he performs mental acrobatics to convince himself
that he's in charge of situations, nowhere more comically than the
scene in which the priest, Father Pirrone, inadvertently enters
for an audience as he is emerging naked from the bath:
...he hurried to leave the bath expecting to get into his bathrobe
before the Jesuit entered; but he did not succeed, and Father Pirrone
came in at the very moment when, no longer veiled by soapy water,
not yet shrouded by his bath sheet, he was emerging quite naked,
like the Farnese Hercules, and steaming as well, while water flowed
in streams from neck, arms, stomach and legs, like the Rhone, the
Rhine, the Danube and the Adige crossing and watering Alpine ranges...
[Father Pirrone] stuttered an excuse and made to back out, but Don
Fabrizio, annoyed at not having time to cover himself, naturally
turned his irritation against the priest. "Now, Father, don't
be silly; hand me that bath-robe, will you, and help me to dry,
if you don't mind... And take my advice, Father, have a bath yourself."
Satisfied at being able to give advice on hygiene to one who so
often gave it to him on morals, he felt soothed... When the peaks
and slopes of the mountain were dry ... the Jesuit sat down and
he began some more intimate moppings of his own.
Pragmatic he may be, but the Prince's aristocracy is doomed, and
right from the beginning the prose signals this sense of doom: cicadas
make a 'lament' that is like a 'death-rattle', a drinking well is
also a 'cemetery' for corpses, the oppressive sun of the Sicilian
summer is 'a deep gloom'; the ladies' ballgowns arrive from the
dressmakers in cases 'like coffins'. Tancredi, the main agent of
change for the family, is 'black and slim as an adder'. Ironically,
however, the revolutionary spirit is also diluted: Tancredi begins
as a follower of Garibaldi, but ends up an officer in the Piedmontese
army despising the rebels. In one non-ironic moment Salina explains
the political inertia as a result of centuries of invasion and the
oppressive climate:
Sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate
anyone who tries to wake them... our sensuality is a hankering for
oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death...
The novel is ultimately despairing, I found: the truce, indeed loving
friendship, between Angelica and Concetta is founded on a pragmatic
repression of the past, but that past is briefly revived and Concetta
must face the fact that she has lived with a personal legacy of
emptiness echoing the wider political impotence that the novel portrays.
November
2010
Carry Me Down by M J Hyland
Because I have been so busy lately with promotion for The
Birth Machine, Ann has kindly written up our
November reading group discussion of this book. Here is her report:
Carry Me Down, by M.J. Hyland, was John’s choice
for the book group to read. He had heard the author talk about her
major influence, Peter Handke’s novella The Goalkeeper’s
Fear of the Penalty, which employs a plain, factual mode of
storytelling, and was curious to read this novel. The book is written
in the first person and relates a period, (about a year?), in the
life of eleven-year-old John Egan and is set in 1970’s Ireland,
although this time period is not made explicit. When the story opens,
John and his parents are living with his paternal grandmother in
Gorey, a rural town in County Wexford. The family have been exiled
from Dublin for lack of funds, with his father ostensibly studying
for the entrance exams for Trinity while his mother works in a local
shop and makes puppets. It is clear from the beginning that John
Egan is a child who feels ‘out of place’ and a ‘misfit’
both at home and at school – he is tall for his age, is obsessed
with the Guinness Book of Records and becomes convinced that he
is able to detect lies, recording all those told him in The Gol
of Seil. The unravelling events of the story form a narrative circle
by which family relationships drive them back to Dublin into a council
flat in an out-of-town multi-story block of flats and then back
again to Gorey at the end. The first person narrative implies that
we are meant to view this circle of events through John Egan’s
eyes.
John introduced it as a novel with a beginning, middle and end,
with an over-long middle – the section in Dublin - and was
not too sure what to make of it, asking the question -was the ending
happy or not? John and Elizabeth felt that it was a deliberately
symbolic happy ending – implying closure for the family and
allowing it to move forwards. Doug and I disagreed, feeling that
the ending was very ambivalent, while Jo took the implication of
the ending further, suggesting that the sequel to the novel would
be more interesting as, for her, John (the book’s protagonist)
was clearly still troubled and his behaviour would get worse. This
led to a general feeling that there was little plot to the book
– a theme introduced by Trevor – it merely related a
series of unfolding events, but we wondered where the plot (as such)
was going, leading or saying. Or was nothing meant to happen and
the whole piece created as a symbolic circle? Doors and openings
were touched on – were they symbols of future happenings and
sequels? Many events in the book being related through closed doors
– such as John and his grandmother discussing his father while
the latter is behind the door. Then we all began to wonder if we
were all trying to read scenarios into the story that simply were
not there? Were we looking for symbols when in fact there were none?
A gender divide emerged, with the men in the group noting the total
absence of adolescent hormones that they felt totally unconvincing.
This was something missing in a portrait of an adolescent boy, making
it unrealistic. Trevor and Mark considered this particularly disconcerting
as they both felt themes of Oedipal sex were implicit throughout.
Alternatively, Elizabeth and Jo, both mothers of boys, felt that
that one aspect of adolescent change, where affection and distance
co-exist and alternate, was realistic. Was the (quite gruesomely
described) killing of the kittens at the beginning of the novel
a symbol of this withdrawal, indecision and ambivalent parent-child
relationship? I think an indication of our uncertainty about this
was the subsequent discussion on whether the kitten killing was
realistic – were kittens really killed like that? I suspect
that this discussion would not have occurred if the narrative and
characters had convinced us. Our lack of conviction here revived
the question of whether we were trying to read too much into the
novel. Were signs really being positioned along route, while the
easy prose enabled a fast read so we missed the signs? Why did we
think there should be signs and symbols and should there be any
if the story is in fact being related by an eleven-year-old?
Most of the group appreciated that a sense of menace was skilfully
created, but that it often promised more than the actual event that
subsequently occurred – such as towards the end when John
Egan attacks his mother. I was so convinced by the prose leading
up to the attack I thought he would murder her, and thus make the
story more dramatic – harking back to Jo’s conviction
that the sequel would be more interesting. Nobody, however, found
the novel a difficult read, the prose being far easier and far less
dense than that of The Leopard, our previous read, but we remained
divided. Most felt the book was too long, but Mark and Trevor voted
for it, with Doug and Hans disliking it. Jo and I remained ambivalent.
One issue that all (as I recall) felt was that John Egan was such
a non-engaging protagonist. Did he suffer from autism or Asperger’s
syndrome or not? As Mark Haddon has shown in A Curious Incident
of the Dog in the Night Time, (read previously by the group), this
should not affect a writer’s ability to engage the reader
with characters. Hyland’s character was repellent, and none
felt we believed him or would want to support him.
This indecisiveness meant that we took to asking questions about
what was absent in the book. Where was the local priest and the
role of the Church? This was 1970’s rural Ireland –
and Hyland includes a single nun as a minor character? Why was John
Egan an only child? Was the creepy teacher Mr Roche a potential
abuser or was he a saviour? Would social services and the psychologist
really behave like that? That we ended up asking all these questions
suggests that we were so unconvinced by the characters and their
lives, that we ended up looking for what we felt should have been
there instead. Clare had not finished the book and our discussion,
sadly, did not convince her to so.
The more lively and passionate discussion of the evening was the
one that segued from Carry Me Down – which involved
Samuel Beckett and Waiting for Godot. I cannot remember
the content here – as everyone started talking at once ……!
This report was written by Ann.
December
2010
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West and
Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion
Mark
suggested comparing these two novels which deal with the American
Dream as experienced by the players at its Hollywood heart, the
West dealing with Hollywood's very early days and the Didion with
a period, the late 60s, when it had become characterised by emptiness
and ennui.
This was a large meeting (very cosy under Mark's huge Christmas
tree and candle-lit mantelpiece), but it turned out that only four
of us had managed to get hold of the Didion, so the communal discussion
focused on West's The Day of the Locust. First published
in 1939, it concerns Tod Hackett, an artist who has been headhunted
as a Hollywood set and costume designer, but who retains an objective
eye on the illusions and pretensions of the place and its inhabitants,
and plans a huge Biblical-type painting in which the hordes fly
from a Hollywood on fire. To this end, he 'collects' characters
to include in the painting - the would-be starlet and prostitute
Faye (after whom, while understanding her shallowness, he lusts),
her ex-music-hall-entertainer and now bit-player father Harry, the
depraved wheeling-dealing dwarf Abe Kusich, the cowboy extra, the
insufferable child actor and his unpleasantly pushy mother, and
Homer Simpson, the awkward outsider who becomes unsuitably entangled
with the rest of them, and thus, although sent there by his doctor
for his health, one of those who in Tod's view (and that of the
third-person narration) have 'come here to die'. The novel consists
largely of a series of tableaux or set-pieces in which each of these
specific Hollywood types reveals his or her situation and personality,
but culminates in a stampede fueled by mass disappointment and resentment,
echoing the concept of Tod's painting, and ending indeed in a death.
The group was unanimous in liking the book. While it was clearly
of mainly historical interest, depicting a very specific moment
in Hollywood's history - a time when the countryside was still nearby
and Hollywood was still a place of hope, however illusory - the
book was also prescient in envisioning its future. Everyone relished
the vivid depiction of the characters, and the satirical narrative
viewpoint. People spent some time recounting what they'd liked:
the descriptions of people constantly dressed as if playing parts,
the houses designed like fairytale film sets, the fact that Faye
and Harry never stopped acting - Harry acting and putting on a show
even as he is dying, a moment that Trevor really relished.
There were one or two criticisms: several people found boring a
long cock-fighting scene, and couldn't see the point of it (someone
suggested that the injured bird constantly flinging itself into
the path of its aggressor was symbolic of the Hollywood hopefuls).
Ann pointed out that the third-person narrative is a little uncertain:
initially it is established in Tod's viewpoint, but it switches
suddenly to that of Homer and then back again, at least twice. Trevor
said he thought this was fine, but Ann, John, Mark and I felt that
it wasn't done in a way that seemed entirely controlled. It was
generally agreed that while enjoyable and notable for its comment
on the Hollywood of the time, the novel lacked the linguistic and
structural integrity of its contemporary, Fitzgerald's The Great
Gatsby (which we discussed
previously).
The four of us who'd read Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays
- Ann, Mark, John and I - then talked to the group about it. It
concerns Maria, a beautiful Hollywood actress married to the once-promising
film director who gave her her first break (a film in which, significantly,
she played the victim of a gang rape). The book begins with her
ruminations in the psychiatric hospital where she is now a patient
and then switches back to the events that led her there. It's a
story of drugs, alcohol and wife-swapping, and an amorphous sense
of failure: at its start Maria's marriage to Carter is in trouble,
though in no clear-cut way - the summer she left Carter (the
summer Carter left her...) - and their small daughter Kate
is incarcerated in some kind of hospital for an unspecified neural
condition. Maria is now finding it hard to get work: ...trouble
was something no one in the city liked to be near. Grieving
Carter who has absented himself filming in the arid Nevada desert,
and conducting a secret affair with the married and thus rarely
accessible Les Goodwin, Maria is already unhinged, spending her
days endlessly driving the Los Angeles freeways. The crunch point
comes when she discovers she is pregnant and the child could be
Les Goodwin's. Carter issues an ultimatum: unless she has an abortion
he will take custody of Kate. From this point on Maria becomes an
impotent puppet in other people's plans, as the horrific abortion
is arranged for her yet Carter drifts further away, and as Les Goodwin
drifts away too, preserving his marriage.
All four of us were completely bowled over by this book, by its
evocation of a cultural ethos and of Maria's state of mind via spare,
rhythmic prose and short sections providing vivid and telling filmic
glimpses. As Ann said, there's so much white space on the pages
and what Didion doesn't say is as important as what she does. To
the surprise of the others, we four said that we found it the far
superior book.
One of the great ways that this book differs from the West is in
its internal, psychological nature. It's an anatomisation of the
deeply psychological effects of a world in which amorality rules,
and where there is no acknowledgment of consequence and cause and
effect. Nothing applies, says Maria at the start of the
novel: To look for "reasons" is beside the point.
One may as well simply accept the chips where they fall, 'play it
as it lays'. It is an attitude she has been forced to adopt, but,
ironically, she goes on - only because she has been asked to by
her carers, she says - to describe a childhood and background steeped
in a loss likely to induce the kind of yearning that Hollywood famously
encourages yet thwarts. Two significant moments in the novel indicate
the depth of the sense of loss and consequence she is forced to
repress. Post abortion, Maria and Les Goodwin manage a rendezvous,
but it is pervaded by a sadness signaling the end of their liaison.
On the drive back they convince themselves that the causes were
circumstantial: They mentioned everything but one thing: that
she had left the point [her aborted child] in a bedroom in Encino.
Towards the end of the novel Maria is told by BZ, the husband of
her friend Helene, that Carter is sleeping with Helene. Presumably
in response to Maria's facial expression, BZ comments that she's
'faking herself' if she cares, if it makes a difference who is sleeping
with whom. Eventually Maria assents, but not before she has confessed:
'It makes a difference to me.' And subsequent events -
the events that will end in Maria's institutionalisation - indicate
that BZ too is more affected than he will admit.
In his introduction to the American edition we all had, David Thomson
suggests that there is a flaw in the novel, taking his cue from
a Paris Review interview in which Didion confessed to a prior indecision
about whether to tell the story in the first or third person, finally
plumping for first person for the present-day frame and an intimate
third person for the backstory. He suggests that the more insightful
institutionalised first-person Maria is closer to the author than
the passive Maria of the third-person backstory, and sees in this
a discrepancy. Personally, I disagree that this is a discrepancy
(and think this shows the dangers of writers talking publicly about
the trials of their process). It seems to me that the Maria of the
first-person frame is in the process of freeing herself from the
psychology of the backstory. She is no longer drugged; she is putting
that past behind her: she refuses to see those past players when
they visit her. And, while she denies the usefulness of looking
back on the past for 'reasons', glance back at that past she does,
at which it unfurls in all its cause-and-effect vividness. Insightfully,
Thomson points out that the novel opens up the nature of film
narrative and what the concentration on exteriors does in the way
of Novocain-ing internal things. I would add that it is also
paradoxically an enactment of the potential healing power of story.
The four of us were so enthusiastic about this book that others
immediately wanted to borrow it, but when I asked for my copy back
from Jenny in order to write this report, she said that it hadn't
grabbed her: she'd enjoyed what she'd read (about half of it) but
hadn't felt compelled to go on with it and had fancied reading 'something
trashy', the latest Le Carre, instead.
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