One-Way Street

Where I Would Go, What I Would Read

Where I would go if I lived in New York City and had a viable babysitting option: the Open Roads: New Italian Cinema festival at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. From the (admittedly) limited selection of Italian films I've seen over the past few years, it's been my impression that the Italian cinema is in something of a creative slump; Gianni Amelio's L'America was the last great Italian film I saw. But GreenCine's James Van Maanen has an enthusiastic dispatch from the Open Roads festival.

Where I will be if I can manage to stay up past 10:00 on a weekday, which doesn't happen much lately: The DVD release party for David Kraus's film Musician on June 11 at the Hideout. Details at right, in the "Keep in Mind" section.

What I would not be reading even if I read German, and won't read when it gets translated into English: Charlotte Roche's novel Feuchtgebiete (Wetlands). The debate in Germany about the novel says more about the uneven political development of that country that the topic ostensibly examined by the novel: women's sexual empowerment as a feminist practice.  These discussions invariably go nowhere--remember when Madonna tried to do something with the topic back in the Nineties, only to come across as annoying and self-serving? Or the embarrassing academic debate about Annie Sprinkle around the same time?

Where I would go if I still lived in Philadelphia: The newly opened Center for Architecture, created by the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Tourists go to Philly for the colonial-era landmarks, but it's really a nineteenth-century city. Modern architecture is a mixed bag, to say the least, mostly because Philadelphians don't really like it. They're lustily booing the recently-built Kimmel Center, which doesn't deserve all the abuse it's been getting. (Local architects, including Robert Venturi, produced lame designs for the new music hall, so out-out-town architects had to be brought in.) If you discount the twentieth century, though, the city's architecture is beautiful.

Where I would go if I had money to burn on a plane ticket to San Jose: No, not the WWDC08, although that would be cool, too. The 01SJ digital arts festival. The promoters are trying to create an American version of the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria.

What's coming to me whether I like it or not: NeoCon! I can hear the rumble of a hundred thousand Manolos already.

What I'm going to buy when I walk to Borders on my lunch hour because it's (finally) nice out: Not really sure yet.  Update, 12:32 PM: Aborted! It started to rain as soon as I stepped out of the building. I knew two consecutive hours of nice weather was too much to ask. I was going to look up a copy of Dominique Fabre’s The Waitress Was New, based on Bud Parr's review in Chekhov's Mistress.   

Changing Gears for Summer

For a while I've been thinking about making some adjustments to the form of this blog, and the summer is a good time to do it. I'm still enough of an academic to feel the pull of its seasonal rhythms, and the summer is when I used to search for new material about which to read and write. I would also explore new ways of presenting that material. Finally, the summer is when I would really get down to work on longer-term writing projects--or at least I vow to. I have a couple of those to finish, too, so I need to divert some time and energy to those projects.

So first I'd like to swipe an idea from Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution and present a "What I'm Reading" list, expanded to include what I'm listening to as well.

Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev. Reading Unforgiving Years has inspired me to read more from this neglected modernist. 

Charles Lloyd Quintet, Rabo de Nube. A live recording of one of the masters of avant-garde jazz. The quintet features Jason Moran, a personal favorite, on piano.

D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film. A look at the digital future of the cinema from a major voice in film studies.

Rem Koolhaas, S M L XL. Actually, I'm re-reading this for an essay on the generic city. For the same project I'm also looking at Mutations.

Unforgiving Years

For a brief period in the 1920s, Soviet culture was among the most dynamic and creative in all Europe. During a visit to Moscow in 1927, Walter Benjamin remarked on the "improvisatory" nature of post-revolutionary Russia. But even during Benjamin's visit the lights were starting to dim. By the time Stalin consolidated power in the early 1930s, Soviet culture was well into its extended Socialist Realist phase, with its beaming factory workers, overflowing wheat harvests, and tractors that look like they're about to burst into song.

But what if Soviet culture had retained its creativity throughout the 1930s? Victor Serge (real name: Victor Lvovich Kibalchich) certainly would have been one of its literary stars, and he would have been much better known today.

That we have any Serge novels, let alone the seven he managed to publish, is something of a miracle. He lived a tough life. Born to penniless anti-czarists in Brussels, Belgium, Serge watched his younger brother starve to death. His first career choice was being an anarchist. That career ended with a four-year term in a French prison. His second career as a Soviet agent based in Berlin concluded with an ill-considered decision to join the Trotskyites' battle against Stalin. In 1928 he fled the USSR for Paris, where he began his third career, as a writer.

Serge's tense years in Paris dodging Stalin's murderous agents formed the bases became the basis for Unforgiving Years, his last novel, written in 1947 and first published in France in 1971. The novel, like all his novels, was written in French, and it's available for the first time in English in a translation by Richard Greeman. The action opens in the weirdly calm days before the outbreak of World War II, when Parisians were preoccupied with lurid crimes and adulterous affairs. Serge's hero is known by various names, but the narrator calls him D. We meet him immediately after he has decided to quit the Soviet secret service because he's lost faith in the communist revolution. Unfortunately for D, it was no easier to quit Soviet intelligence than it was to quit the Mafia. He knows he's doomed, but he sticks around for a few days trying to persuade two women, Nadine and Daria, to escape the French capital with him.  Nadine reluctantly agrees to leave with him, but Daria flatly refuses, partly because D is prone to anguished and confused ruminations on his own principles--not a good quality when the history's bloodiest conflict is starting to ignite. Serge depicts D's thought process with a prose style that combines the energy and conviction of agitprop with the refined inventiveness of high modernism. The default viewpoint is third person, but the point of view can switch at any time, such as when D asks himself,

What is "conscience"? A residue of beliefs inculcated in us from the time of primitive taboos until today's mass press? Psychologists have come up with an appropriate term for these imprints deep within us: the superego, they say. I have nothing left to invoke but conscience, and I don't even know what it is […] I'm behaving almost like a believer. I cannot do otherwise: Luther's words. Except that the German visionary who flung his inkwell at the devil went on to add, "God help me!" What will come to help me?

The big newspapers don't have a conscience (he had bribed them often enough, through savvy intermediaries, to know that) and the little ones don't count. The big writers wouldn't believe me.

Here both idea and self are disintegrating. The abrupt conceptual shifts (from Freud to Martin Luther to newspapers) mirror the pronoun shifts (us, I, he, me). The idea of a conscience has suddenly ceased to have any substance, and yet D clings to it like a lifeline. Years of covert identities have dissolved D's  present self, a process that mirrors his own statelessness and the coming historical catastrophe.

After the first section, the narrative itself fragments into pieces. The second section follows Daria's journey from an isolated Kazakh village to the siege of Leningrad. The third section strikes even further afield, covering the final battle for Berlin. This section is the most unexpected and perhaps explains why Serge had such trouble finding publishers and readers during his lifetime: Serge, a dedicated Bolshevik, sympathizes with ordinary Germans to a degree that can get mawkish at times. Serge rewrites the Nazi period in Germany as a class struggle: ordinary Germans suffered greatly, while wealthy Germans survived the war with their properties and their political connections intact.

The final section sorts out the final fates of the main characters, whose storylines sometimes get lost in the historical shuffle. Despite their ontologically reduced states, D, Nadine and Daria embody the idea of humanism, which endures, but just barely. Serge died in Mexico shortly after completing the novel, physically and emotionally exhausted. Yet, he seemed made for strife. He was like a raw nerve experiencing some of the darkest episodes in modern history like a raw nerve. It's as if he couldn't live in peacetime. Unforgiving Years is Serge's most personal novel in the sense that it's about a mind under the stress of war, looking for core beliefs while facing the existential void.

One Last Genius

The biographies of philosophers rarely make engrossing reading.  The life of the mind may be rich in ideas but poor in narrative action. One of the more dramatic moments of a philosopher's life tends to be   his first appointment to a university teaching appointment. Here the life of Theodor Adorno fits the mold: his Habilitationsschrift, in which he tried to make Kierkegaard sit down with Marx, was rejected by the faculty of the University of Frankfurt, now known as the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität. (Walter Benjamin's Habilitationsschrift was rejected by the same faculty a few years later. He eventually published it as The Origin of German Tragic Drama.) But Adorno's formidable networking skills served him well, and he eventually landed a job at Frankfurt. 

Although Adorno's comfortable world soon collapsed around him, he did enjoy a collegial lifestyle pretty much no matter where he lived. His friendships were the central dramas of his life. They contrasted with his writings--magisterial, uncompromising, rigorous, and lugubrious in the extreme. This is why Detlev Claussen focused more on the former than the latter in his Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius. Claussen treats biographical chronology like Adorno treated tonality: rejecting it as a false totality, a residue from an earlier, more violent time. Instead, Claussen tracks Adorno's life through his friendships. Adorno was precocious and self-confident in everything he did, including forming friendships. An early tutor was Siegfried Kracauer. Soon after reading Ernst Bloch, then one of the German-speaking world's best-known thinkers, Adorno tracked him down and introduced himself. He did the same for Alban Berg and, even more aggressively, for Arnold Schoenberg.

Adorno's most famous friendship was with Walter Benjamin; the friendship was also representative of what it was like to be Adorno's friend. Eleven years Benjamin's junior, Adorno swooned over Benjamin when they met in 1923. By the 1930s, when Benjamin was struggling to make something out of the Arcades Project under the pressure of isolation, poverty, and impending war, Adorno was safely ensconced in New York after lingering in Nazi Germany for an unseemly length of time.  Adorno arranged for what little financial support Benjamin had, but he also caustically rejected Benjamin's early drafts of his Baudelaire essays and his ruminations on the philosophy of history. Adorno had few encouraging words to say about Benjamin's most enduring work, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."  Benjamin sunk into despair with each letter from New York bearing Adorno's unforgiving and absolute judgment. Adorno's early admiration for Benjamin's paralogical thought gave way to a ruthless self-certainty.   The wife of Max Horkheimer, Adorno's most consistent friend, once declared, "Teddie is the most monstrous narcissist to be found in either the Old World or the New."

Everyone disappointed Adorno--Kafka, Proust, Schoenberg, the Western world.  His epochal gloom can reach almost comical depths, such as when he was moved to write, "even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen without the shadow of terror." For all the scrupulous subtlety of his thought, he could be crudely fixated on an idea, such as his animus against identity. In Negative Dialectics he defined ideology as "the hunger of the lion for the antelope." Then he leaves it pretty much at that.

However, one can't read Adorno without soaking up at least some of his more powerful ideas. If you can get past the nagging feeling that he wouldn't approve of you, either, you can learn a lot. One of my guiding principals about modern art and architecture comes straight out of Adorno: one can't build a building or paint a painting as if the twentieth century never happened. One of his most potent ideas is that aesthetic form is itself political. One doesn't have to side with the workers to produce valid art. For Adorno, the freedom of the artwork mocks the unfreedom of life in a bureaucratized society. One of his ideas still has widespread currency: his concept of the culture industry. Adorno was the first to point out that leisure was really just the flip side of work, and that even the most homespun cultural objects were saturated with mass market ideas.

We now roll our eyes at Adorno's fussy absolutism. It's possible, we've learned, to watch America's Funniest Home Videos without paving the way for fascism. But when you feel a pang of conscience while watching the audience howl as some hapless performer gets booted off the stage on American Idol, Adorno says from the grave, "Now you know what I was talking about."

Unaccustomed Earth

Last week Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, rocketed to the top of the New York Times' Best Seller list. It's since been knocked down to the second spot by an empty book by Mary Higgins Clark, but Lahiri's brief appearance on the top of the hardcover fiction list was startling and gratifying, offering some degree of hope for serious American fiction, even as the stories themselves invite both pleasure and skepticism.

Lahiri is best known for her Bengali background and a prose style that makes you hold your breath. The foundation of the style is the eccentric syntax of Indian immigrants, which Lahiri gently parodies from time to time. "We are very much appreciating," declares a young Indian girl who has been in the United States for a week or so. Lahiri takes the trailing verb pattern and refines it into a literary style that's at once poised and constantly self-correcting. Here are three samples, all taken from the collection's title story.

How freeing it was, these days, to travel alone, with only a single suitcase to check.

Ruma feared that her father would become a responsibility, an added demand, continuously present in a way she was no longer used to.

The sight of her father's rental car, a compact maroon sedan, upset her, freshly confirming the fact that she lived on a separate coast thousands of miles from where she grew up, a place where her parents knew no one, where neither of her parents, until today, had set foot.

The style is more expository than colloquial, and for all its elegance, it isn't very expansive. It works best when it is focalized on her second-generation, upper-middle-class immigrants. The weakest story in the collection, "Nobody's Business," is told from the point of view of a hapless American graduate student with a crush on his Bengali housemate. Not coincidentally, the story is also the most emotionally overwrought. There's no older Indian figure in the story to calm things down and offer a clarifying perspective. There's no figure upon which Lahiri can build her elegant sentences.

The style perfectly fits characters like Ruma, the heroine of "Unaccustomed Earth," who has left soulful Brooklyn with her American husband and young son for the arid Seattle suburbs. Ruma's large house and stay-at-home mother lifestyle are frictionless but incomprehensible to her. It isn't until her widowed father comes to visit that she can begin to examine her life through someone else's eyes. Relaxing one evening after dinner her father looks around his daughter's home and declares, "This is a nice house, Ruma." From this point forward Ruma and her father feel much more comfortable in their chosen lives.

Comfortable, but not especially happy. If they never wholly embrace American culture, Lahiri's characters also can't return to India. The Chouduris, who immigrated to the US during the optimistic New Frontier days, return to live in Bombay for a while. They return to Massachusetts, where they settle into an International-style home. The home is the most important setting for "Hema and Kaushik," the stories that make up the second half of the collection. The Chouduris' home is an alien, trans-cultural space where the cultural and generational clashes of immigrant families play themselves out most starkly. Lahiri's distinct style returns in full force here after fading during some of the middle stories in the collection. Hema and Kaushik share the narrative chores, re-enacting Lahiri's characters' need to see their lives through the eyes of other people exactly like them. Hema is a blushing pre-adolescent when Kaushik and his parents return from Bombay, and she worries constantly about how  her American teeny-bopper life will look to the older boy. For his part, Kaushik undergoes a rough re-entry into American culture, so he keeps his distance from Hema's family, with their careful balance between the Yankee and the Bengali.

The intertwined stories of "Hema and Kaushik" offer plenty of room for Lahiri to stretch out her sentences and even indulge in a little humor. It's worth reading to this section to dissipate the feeling I had at certain points that Lahiri is the Gish Jen of the 2000s, auditioning for inclusion in the Heath Anthology of American Literature. Jen's biography is almost identical to Lahiri's, and so are her settings and her themes. Lahiri's prose style is more refined, but, unlike Jen's Chinese immigrants, Lahiri's Bengalis never seem to work, so they seem more cloistered and flatter. Lahiri's strength isn't characterization. Her Anglo characters are invariably blondish, and her Indians reticent. It takes a while before they appear to be something more than props in a well-worn cultural conflict.

But there are moments when Lahiri offers a glimpse into a world many of us have never seen before. One such moment takes place when Kaushik takes his new stepsisters to Dunkin' Donuts, leaving his new stepmother alone in the sleek modernist home for the first time. "'I will be safe alone, in this house?'" she asks. Kaushik is "stunned that it would be the first time, nearly laughing at her." A veteran of the immigrant narrative, Kaushik retains his ability to be surprised at the incongruence, and the optimism, of American life.

On the Lam in Queensland

I have few rules about reading, but I do have a rule against reading novels either narrated by children or told from their point of view. Too often these narratives are melodramatic when they're not trite as they labor to generate some poignancy as innocent childish eyes gaze upon the foibles and corruptions of the adult world. If, as someone once said, the title of every novel is "Lost Illusions," then the title of these novels should be "Third Grade Was the Best Time of My Life."

I don't have a rule against reading novels set in the 1960s, but I am wary of them. In fiction and in film the 1960s are less a period in history than an alternate universe where all of our cultural and individual possibilities remain open. History has delivered us from the decade's bad hair but never delivered the untrammeled self that the decade promised.

So I never should have given His Illegal Self a second look. It's a 1960s novel (well, pretty much--the action takes place in the early 1970s) and it's a child point of view narrative (again, pretty much--the focalization cuts back and forth between a child and an adult). But His Illegal Self is written by Peter Carey, for whom the loss of innocence is something exotic. The most alive characters in Carey's fiction are the guilty ones.  Rather than being cast out from edenic nature, they are trapped within it. Neither work nor language offer an escape. His heroes are inarticulate petty thieves who pick off the detritus of civilization before escaping back to a febrile and half-rotted landscape at the furthest reaches of the known world.

The typical Carey hero in Illegal Self is Trevor, an illiterate orphan living in semi-tropical squalor in the Australian brush. He's so determinately self-made he seems to have invented a hippy identity entirely independently of the rest of culture. By turns vaguely menacing and absent-mindedly nurturing, Trevor is a fascinating character to watch. When we first meet him he's a leering drifter, but eventually he carves out an off-the-grid paradise, where he spends his days lounging around amongst his bountiful harvest of squash and root vegetables, secure in the knowledge that the global security apparatus can't find him.

We observe Trevor through the eyes of Dial and Che, Americans who have landed in Australia for reasons that are never sufficiently explained. Che is the eight-year-old son of two high-level operatives in the Students for a Democratic Society. He's been under the care of his Upper East Side grandmother almost since birth. Dial is hired to escort Che to his renegade mother in Philadelphia. For reasons apparently to do with his mother's underground life, Che is told that Dial is his mother, and Che infers that she's taking him to see his father. Many things go awry, and Dial never returns the boy to his grandmother, his legal guardian. The opening chapters of the novel are taunt and suspenseful, but the plot motivations are a bit blurry. After some twists and turns, Dial and Che end up in Australia, where Trevor picks them up on the road to some town no one would ever travel to.

Carey is Australian, so the sojourn to from 63rd Street to Down Under makes  sense on that level, at least. What the Australian setting lacks in narrative plausibility it more than makes up for in descriptive richness. The Queensland bush allows Carey to deploy a language replete with exotic symbolism. It's a land of fierce ants and menacing vegetation, yet a single kitten is regarded by the locals as a threat to the continent's entire ecosystem. Dial is thrust into this strange world with American dollars sewed into the hem of her skirt and an eight-year-old Park Avenue kidnap victim in tow. Dial is short for dialectic (a Harvard joke), and the Australia of Illegal Self seems to have eluded the historical dialectic. The hippies Dial and Che come to live among are sullen, paranoid refugees from modernity, protesting the Vietnam War by not shaving their legs and wearing natural fibers. Other than that, they have no apparent plans, nor are they conspicuously creatures of the Flower Power generation. Carey integrates period details with unusual skill. No one says groovy or call the police fascists any more than is strictly necessary.

The bulk of the novel concerns Dial and Che as they endure their time in this lush but hopeless landscape, waiting to return back to the United States. Che wants desperately to be reunited with his father, who is hiding out in the United States, so his time in Australia seems like an interlude, a means to an end. But Carey's narrative voice works on the reader until seems to be a dead end, a brief walk on the wild side, turns out to be something unexpected. Che's illegal self is his most adult self, and his story is the successful escape from childhood.

Other Colors

Orhan Pamuk is now world famous as a widely translated novelist, a Nobel laureate, and as the rumpled conscience of Turkey, so it's easy to imagine that he always had the supreme self-possession he demonstrates in his public appearances.  But as he reveals in Other Colors, his collection of essays and a short story, twenty years ago he was the disheveled bum his mother always feared he would become. At that time he was struggling with The Black Book, his postmodern puzzle narrative, and as the labyrinths of signs and symbols grew more complex and his grooming habits lapsed, the act of writing grew more pleasurable.  During breaks from the work Pamuk would roam Istanbul, a murky, black-and-white world of sodden streetscapes and peeling palaces, while "clutching a mangled plastic bag and wearing a cap, a raincoat that was missing a few buttons, and ancient gym shoes with rotting soles. I'd go into any old restaurant or lunch counter and wolf down my food, casting hostile looks about me." He wore his "air of ruination," proudly, even haughtily, while suffocating in the "small literary world" of insecure, distrustful republican Turkey, infected by a dark mood of resigned despair for the great past.

If Other Colors advances a unifying argument, it's that Istanbul is the perfect literary city. It boasts a palimpsest of historical narratives, excellent coffee, and an unthreatening literary establishment. Add a heavy-handed judiciary and a pack of tetchy fundamentalists and it's a few quick steps to establishing an international reputation for high-minded defense of humanist values. American novelists may worry about getting priced out of Williamsburg, but Pamuk had to contend with Article 301. Guess which struggle resonates worldwide.

Born and raised at the border between Europe and the Middle East, Pamuk's elective affinities are for writers on the fringes of the Western tradition. The most influential figure for Pamuk is Dostoevsky. Pamuk identifies with the Russian's "familiarity with European thought and his anger against it, his equal and opposite desires to belong to Europe and to shun it."  Pamuk looks on approvingly as Dostoevsky writes of his disgust at Russian intellectuals who "seize upon an idea just arrived from Europe and believe themselves privy to all the secrets of the world." Similarly, in Pamuk's Turkey European ideas were manna to "half-witted, mediocre, moderately successful, bald, male, degenerate writers." Pamuk devotes an entire chapter of Other Colors to describing his pleasure at throwing away books written by these Euro-identified writers.

But Pamuk is loath to take sides, and he has no more patience for the self-appointed guardians of Turkish identity than Dostoevsky had for the Slavophils of his day. Pamuk's best-known novel, My Name Is Red, portrays a mighty and fabulously wealthy Ottoman Empire about to be brought to its knees by perspectival painting. The Turkish Republic has always vacillated in its political and cultural relations with Europe, and Pamuk's great theme is Turkey's uneasy relationship with Europe: the anti-European, indiscriminate nationalism in Turkey on the one hand, and on the other, Europe's historical fear of falling under the sword of Islam.

And yet, Pamuk distances himself from these grand cultural and historical themes, even as they animate his novels. (His next novel should be called Disavowal.) In a speech reprinted in Other Colors Pamuk says he has no interest in politics because Turks get so worked up about them.  As he tartly reminds them, "most of us entertain contradictory thoughts simultaneously." Few authors are able to entertain contradictory thoughts as well as Pamuk. Few authors have been as compelled by circumstance to do so.

Reading Pamuk requires some negative capability as well. He's one of my favorite living writers, but I've never read anything by him that wasn't simultaneously engrossing and a bit exasperating. He can turn a boyhood fondness for hot dogs into a parable for self-fashioning in a repressive society, but there's an uncharacteristic sense of uncertainty in the narrative voice. In full novelistic voice Pamuk can make the color red speak, but the essayistic hot dog tale shows signs of senescence.  Other Colors is worth reading because Pamuk is a great novelist and a profound thinker about cultural contradictions, but he's not a great writer of the self. And this is precisely what makes him so important.

Archive Fever

Every year brings another pile of books on Walter Benjamin. As one might imagine, these volumes are of uneven quality and usefulness, but one new book stands out from the crowd. Walter Benjamin's Archive, a companion book to a 2006 exhibit in Berlin, presents samples from the vast number of notebooks, photographs, collectables, postcards, and manuscripts Benjamin left behind when he died in 1940.

Each chapter of Archive focuses on a different aspect of the archive. The most interesting chapter examines his notebooks, including his date book pictured above. Notebooks are now more of a metaphor than an everyday working tool--the MacBook Air is essentially a $3,000 Moleskine--and cheap digital storage allows us to see writing as almost infinitely extensible. It's surprising, and a little touching, to see Benjamin writing in his tiny, precise script over every square centimeter on every scrap of paper he could lay his hands on. He owned some Moleskine-like leather-bound notebooks, but sometimes he resorted to writing on both sides of a doctor's prescription pad.

The longest chapter in the book focuses on Benjamin's notes on his son's language acquisition. Benjamin's interest in children (another chapter is devoted to his collection of Russian toys) is one of the most incongruous aspects of his character. It's hard to imagine Hegel following his children around, recording their every utterance, as Benjamin did with his son. This section isn't especially interesting, except for the glimpses it offers into Benjamin's chaotic and troubled home life. Benjamin records, without a hint of self-consciousness, his son Stefan imitating his father by stomping around their Berlin apartment, yelling at everyone to be quiet because Daddy is trying to work.

The children's language chapter, as well as some of the brief and somewhat haphazardly assembled last chapters, expose the limits of the book's origins as an accompaniment to a museum exhibit. The edition's four editors were clearly primarily interested in rummaging through Benjamin's published work to find rubrics through which they could display the material in the archive. The book doesn't follow the familiar outlines of Benjamin's themes. The Trauerspiel book, for instance, is barely mentioned, and neglected altogether is Benjamin's early involvement with youth movements, which may explain his later interest in children. Still, Benjamin himself would have appreciated a representation of his career as a collection of things.

There's at least one unexpected gem in the book: a page from Benjamin's notes for the original essay on the Paris Arcades. (Disclosure: I did my dissertation on the Arcades Project, so I'm interested in everything to do with it.) Michael Schwarz explains Benjamin's working methods for the Arcades Project, which eventually grew to include 10,000 notes, most of them quotations from obscure nineteenth-century sources. A few pages of notes are reproduced, and another chapter contains Germaine Krull's evocative photographs of the Arcades, but otherwise the sampling from Benjamin's largest project--and his most intense exploration of the idea of the archive--is disappointingly slim.

But Walter Benjamin's Archive succeeds in conveying Benjamin's life-long interest in allowing things to speak for themselves. The Surrealists and the Baroque allegorists taught Benjamin to search for the buried life of culture, to pay attention to all those things we once thought were essential but later forgot about. By showing us two poles of Benjamin's life--the stable organization of the collection on the one hand, and the spontaneous, constantly evolving text of the notebook on the other--the book illustrates the drama of the life of the mind lived during a time of madness.   

Lost Paradise

If this genre doesn't already exist, it should be invented. One possible name could be the European Waking Dream Novel. The exemplar of the genre is Italo Calvino. Other writers working in it include W.G. Sebald, Alain Robbe-Grillet in certain of his moods, and Jean Rhys in her more sober moments. On the fringes of the genre are Malcolm Lowry, Orhan Pamuk, and Günter Grass. Among younger novelists Stéphane Audeguy writes in this mode, and Roberto Bolaño lived in Spain long enough to soak up its influence. Perhaps the foremost living practitioner of the genre is the Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom, whose latest novel Lost Paradise was translated from the Dutch by Susan Massotty last year.

So what is the European Waking Dream Novel? It hovers between realism and fabulism, but without the febrile imagination of Latin American Magic Realism. Novels in this genre are set in real places in the current day, but descriptive details are kept to a minimum. The tone is typically inquisitive, but in a mild, at times timid way. The Waking Dream novel is a realism that patiently waits for reality to reveal its other face. A crucial ingredient of the form is an explicit literariness in one form or another. Sometimes the main characters are readers (the classics teacher in Nooteboom's The Following Story) or they're writers (all over the place in Bolaño). Combine the elegant, precise realism of Ian McEwan and the bookish puzzles of Jorge Luis Borges and you've got the basic idea.

Milton's poetry is a prominent leitmotif in Lost Paradise. There are angels and wounded bodies, hints of the divine and very terrestrial notions of good and evil.  There are even some direct quotes from Milton. The opening scene takes place on a very unmiltonian space: a small commuter airplane chugging across Europe. The narrator furtively watches a fellow passenger read a slender novel--just like the one Nooteboom's reader holds in his hands. Casually, as if he's Brad Pitt recognizing himself on the cover of People magazine, the narrator informs us that the woman is, in fact, reading the same book you're reading, "a book out of which she is about to disappear, along with me."

Lost Paradise, like the divine itself, is split into two parts. The first half of the book is feminine and New World. It tells the story of two Brazilian women:  Alma,  a recent victim of a brutal sexual assault in São Paulo, and her less damaged friend Almut.  Alma travels to Australia on a spiritual quest  for an Aboriginal paradise known as the Sickness Dreaming Place. Her friend tags along, looking to have some fun and get laid. Not surprisingly, her friend's hedonism annoys Alma, but Almut's defense is brilliant. Almut shrugs off a one-night stand with a wind surfer by reminding everyone, "I'm Brazilian."

The second part of the novel--the masculine, Old World part--is another quest narrative that is also subdivided into body and spirit. Nooteboom likes to place in his novels at least one bookish, middle-aged man with too little to do. In this case it's Erik Zondag, an Amsterdam short story writer who gets bored with his own work and decides to devote his time to writing about other writers. A life of rarefied contemplation has left him fat, so he travels to a spa in Austria, where he's reacquainted with Alma, whom he met at a literary festival in Perth, Australia. Erik attends the festival on business, while Alma and Almut are there to make a quick buck by dressing up as angels. When he sees these fetching Brazilian angels Erik's fallow imagination springs back into life. Years later in Austria he recalls his first meeting with Alma during a "crazy night" on an Australian beach, cavorting with angels who have been "expelled from paradise," as Alma points out. Sitting in his Alpine redoubt but hearkening back to a moment when he touched something larger, something threatening and redemptive, Erik reconstructs an image that exemplifies the dreamy realism of a certain strain of European fiction: "There, where the water ended and the land began, she stopped and threw her wings around him. He could not see her face, but he ... felt her soft and yet surprisingly hard wings as they held him captive."

Modernism and Its Discontents

In his magisterial new book Modernism: The Lure of Heresy the intellectual historian Peter Gay makes some puzzling claims. Most comprehensive accounts of modernism divide it into at least two strains, one that saw something to retain in Western culture, and another that wanted to trash the whole thing and start all over again. But Gay claims that "liberalism" was the '"fundamental principle of Modernism."  Surely by "liberalism" Gay can't mean the way the word is currently used and abused in the United States. Gay is a historian, so perhaps he's referring to the eighteenth-century uses of the word to mean "open-minded" and "unorthodox." This early sense would accommodate André Breton's remark that "the simplest surrealist act consists of dashing into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can, into the crowd."

There was a whole brand of modernism that was all about exploring the limits of unorthodoxy. If you want an overly vivid demonstration of this tendency, just watch, if your castration anxiety will allow you, the first scene of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's Un Chien andalou in which a man slits a woman's eyeball with a razor. But the modernist movement also includes the decorous T.S. Eliot, the fey artificer Andy Warhol, the dreamy mythologizer William Butler Yeats, and the solemn demythologizer Walter Benjamin. None of these people would be comfortable being labeled a "liberal" as the term is currently used. Benjamin certainly would have sneered at it as inadequate to what he was trying to do.

The second questionable claim Gay makes is his assertion that World War I inspired "few striking innovations in high culture." True, the most innovative artworks of the first two decades of the twentieth century were created before hostilities broke out: Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (1913) and Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), but the most insouciant artwork of the century was created at the war's sour peak: Duchamp's Fountain (1917). Irish literature before the Great War was Yeats and John Millington Synge; afterwards it was James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Ezra Pound spent the pre-war years tinkering with Symbolism and the fustier reaches of romanticism. After the war Eliot overturned everything in English poetry with The Waste Land. By comparison, the Second World War was aesthetically barren. Abstract Expressionism, the most original post-war movement, owed a considerable debt to interwar painting, while John Cage was Dada with a piano.

Then there's the great modernism/post-modernism divide. Gay argues that modernism eventually ran out of gas, then sold out.  Duchamp's Fountain and L.H.O.O.Q. (pictured above) are now art museum gift shop items. The theater of the absurd has been picked apart in heavily-footnoted Ph.D. dissertations.  Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein threw up their hands at any political commitment and reveled in the cheesier aspects of popular culture.  The last warhorses of antagonistic modernism are Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez. Among younger authors cutting edge lit is now about losing your memory.

But in his epilogue--maybe Gay wants us to see post-modernism as an epilogue to modernism--Gay pays a visit to Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim and sees in the brash curlicues signs of modernism's old anarchic energy. But in general, modernism "has had a good long run," Gay sighs, but now it's pretty much over with. Whether he's right or not is the subject of another book.

Alain Robbe-Grillet

Alain Robbe-Grillet died yesterday at age 85.  The startling thing about that announcement was not that he had died, or even that he was still alive, for he had so long outlived his historical moment. No, the astonishing thing was that he was 85 years old.  Even though his entire aesthetic arose from a sense of exhaustion with the conventions of the realist novel, I always think of him as being young, if only because he was a youthful enthusiasm of mine. The year after I graduated from college, I read Robbe-Grillet's Topology of a Phantom City and was dazzled, so I read The Voyeur, Jealousy, and The Erasers in quick  succession after that. My increasing boredom was mitigated by the aura of faded cool about the entire new novel project. I knew that nobody wrote like that anymore, and it wasn't hard to figure out why.  At the same time, it was clear why people started to write like this in the first place.

The nouveau roman was itself a passing phase, a rebellion against Gide and Proust, but instead of madeleines we get tomatoes.  Few authors before him were as fixated on individual objects as Robbe-Grillet.  In most novels an apparently insignificant detail will stand out because it serves a plot function.  For instance, in The Great Gatsby Tom Buchanan and Gatsby suddenly change cars; an apparently pointless turn in the plot will eventually have serious consequences.  One of the most famous passages from The Erasers is a description of a tomato in which the attention to detail is an end in itself.  "Above, a scarcely perceptible accident has occurred: a corner of the skin, stripped back from the flesh for a fraction of an inch, is slightly raised." 

What is this description mean?  Nothing, of course, unless you want to consider the tomato a kind of metaphor for the objectification of human labor under capitalism. Writing at the dawn of structuralism, Robbe-Grillet combines two preoccupations of the 1950s: phenomenology and textuality.  Despite all of his extreme labors, language is never adequate to the thing perceived.  At the same time, language isn't doing what we would ordinarily expect it to do in a novel -- things like create unique characters and advance a compelling plot. And yet, Robbe-Grillet's style is a world unto itself, an exotic and sometimes creepy world reduced to an elemental conflict between object and id.

The id doesn't name anything; it merely points to things.  Robbe-Grillet's work does the same thing. There is something oddly abstract about his things, even his tomatoes. For all his celebrated precision, there's a certain vagueness and uncertainty about his prose.  He's often saying "or so it would seem," "perhaps," or "as has already been said."  In Robbe-Grillet there's a breakdown in the capacity of language to resolve the opposition between the universal particular, the general in this specific.  Everything, in other words, that the aesthetic is supposed to do. 

This is because his novels are drained of individual quirkiness, all the peculiar ways we reveal ourselves by the way we make sense of things. Robbe-Grillet anticipated the French poststructuralists' skepticism about our ability to give form to our experience. Although when really pressed on the matter, most of the French poststructuralists had a hard time giving up the concept of the human altogether.  The failure of Robbe-Grillet's work to become something other than an historical dead end is precisely the persistence of the human.  The aesthetic can't be reduced to perception or to language or to structure. You don't have to read The Phenomenology of Spirit to realize there has to be a unique individual in there someplace doing the work of taking and impressions and putting them down on paper.  Otherwise, we fall into the trap that Robbe-Grillet fell into: instead of creating things in themselves, he made them ghostly ciphers for the human. There's nothing particularly nouveau about this.  Rather, it is terrifyingly old.

Rainwater for Dinner

Like a lot of readers, each year when the Booker Prize nominees are announced, I vow to read the most promising of the bunch, if not all five of them. This is the first year I actually read one, and I didn't get around to it until it had already won. I picked up Anne Enright's The Gathering only because it was awarded the Booker; the descriptions didn't make the book seem particularly appealing. Tragic death, dysfunctional family, an author known as a gloomy stylist and embraced only by a few stalwart readers of literary fiction--The Gathering didn't seem like a novel I should bump up to the top of my reading list, especially during a Chicago winter that's gloomy enough on its own. But with the lack of a compelling new release out there, I decided to give it a shot. I'm glad I did.

Here's the story in a nutshell: a thirtysomething Irishman is fished out of the sea off Brighton, dead after a carefully arranged suicide. His sister, our narrator, is put in charge of bringing the body back to Dublin so that the entire Hegarty clan--nine surviving children and a doddering mother--can mourn in their tetchy way. Veronica, the narrator, remembers her dead brother Liam as a lovable pain in the ass. His entire life is a series of wrong turns and bad decisions. He seems biologically fated to be miserable. Teenaged fecklessness develops into adult alcoholism and eventual self-annihilation.  His one redeeming quality is his loyalty to his sister. They're allies in the eternal war amongst the Hegartys. After his death, Veronica is entirely alone, despite her decent, if remote, husband and her lovely daughters.

It's a testament to the prickly lyricism of Enright's prose that Veronica comes across as a likable character. Veronica is a hard one to love. She's terrified of male sexuality, which makes rough going for her husband. Besides Liam, the only family member she retains any affection for is her grandmother Ada, who is as negligent a parental figure as Veronica's witless mother, but Ada has charm and a dim glamour. Veronica really only loves the dead and the near dead. She forms a mini crush on her brother's young English mortician. She seeks out the mass grave where her uncle, an inmate at an insane asylum, is buried. Veronica's soul is so constricted she finds some of her most profound solace in airport hotels.

Her other form of solace is drudging up the past, and most of her work as a narrator involves  scanning her memories to figure out why her brother stuffed stones in his pockets and threw himself into the sea. I won't give away the secret origin of Liam's stubborn loserdom.  The novel turns on Veronica's recovered memory of a traumatic event in her brother's life. This is a creaky plot device, although Enright hedges her bets by having Veronica admit she may have imagined the entire episode--an equivocation entirely consistent with Freud's own remarks on recovered memory.

While Liam's unhappiness has a defined origin, the explanation for Veronica's unhappiness comes not from a single traumatic event, but from her own voyeurism--to use another careworn Freudian concept. As a girl Veronica watches, and imaginatively extrapolates from, scenes between Ada and her grandmother's landlord. The disgust Veronica feels at their flirtations, but never articulates, is the resemblance of her own marriage to the middle-aged sexuality she gazes upon. Substitute the landlord's petty business dealings for Veronica's husband's business ventures and Ada's parttime work sewing costumes for the theater for Veronica's arts degree, and you have something narrowly psychological but also something more broadly social and historical.

The dramatic tension of The Gathering arises from the clash between an older sentimental miserablism and a contemporary Irish entrepreneurialism. It's the "Da drank his wages, so it's rainwater for dinner again" school of Irish storytelling updated for the EU economic boom, but--and this is crucial--stripped of sentimentality. Veronica tools about the Dublin suburbs in a Saab while her husband toils obscurely in his business. In his later years Liam seemed stuck in the past, "a kind of hick" compared to his progressive siblings. The nastiest of the Hegarty boys has matured into a successful businessman and family man. The scene in which Veronica nurses her grief and anger by drinking white wine at sunrise while parked in her Saab pretty much sums up the novel's historical conflict.

Veronica navigates between a chaotic past and a dishearteningly affluent present with her bitter but fair heart. She can crack jokes about Catholic saints and take a pot shot or two at the English.  She also has enough perspective to realize that a few shared cigarettes between brother and sister aren't enough to base an entire life on. In her own begrudging way, Veronica finally comes to terms with her grief and stands ready to embrace her present, credit cards in hand.

Listening to the Twentieth Century

Last night while riding the CTA's Purple Line home I was hoping to finish Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century as the train pulled into the Noyse station in Evanston.  I was denied a catchy opening, though, as I finished the epilogue as the train approached the much less mellifluous Dempster station.  The point is I made it all the way to the last word of this long book.  I've always found it difficult to sustain interest in discussions of works with which I am not familiar, and Ross's book is full of them.  I could have gone to my grave without encountering Harrison Birtwistle in print or on record. Now I have, and I also know Benjamin Britten ducked out of the 1968 premier of Birtwistle's Punch and Judy to look for a drink. Ross is a good writer, but not one who has much of a gift for metaphor, so he relies heavily on recondite music terminology in his exegeses. He will discuss chord changes and shifts in keys as if we had any idea what a D minor cord sounded like, or if we did, we could pick it out among the first violins amidst a symphony orchestra in full cry.  Other than frequent trips to Wikipedia and regular visits to Ross's helpful website, I don't really have any advice on how to follow along. My own rudimentary musical education helped a little, but not much. I had a brief career as a trumpet player (grades five through nine) playing a largely classical repertoire, so my experience with classical music forms was both intimate and partial. Key changes meant an irritating change in valve fingering. I couldn't understand why Mozart wanted me to play the ugly-sounding B flat, when F sharp sounded so much better. (As you can see, as a sixth-grade honker, my range was pretty limited.) Surrounded by noisy brass in the back of the orchestra, it was hard to hear much less appreciate how D-flat major resolves into E major.

Ross's stated intent is to tell the history of the twentieth century through its music. You're probably not going to learn much about twentieth-century history that you didn't already know, but it's a novel experience to review the last century with classical music as its center. The controlling irony of the book is that classical music has been at the periphery of Western culture since World War I. Ross begins his narrative with the performance of Richard Strauss's opera Salome in Gratz, Austria on May 16, 1906. Strauss was accompanied by Gustav Mahler, the other "titan of Austro-German music," which, in 1906, essentially meant all serious music. Salome is a weirdly erotic opera—at one point Salome kisses, wetly, the severed head of John the Baptist—but the Austrians loved it. It was probably the last time an aggressively innovative classical work was met with immediate popular acclaim. In 1913 it took Parisians about a week to adjust to Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. But by 1973, Steve Reich's Four Organs could only provoke one old lady to whack the stage with her shoe in an attempt to stop the performance. As they became more acclimated to the new music, audiences became more indifferent. Ross himself struggles to maintain our interest as classical music got shunted to the cultural sidelines in the middle of the century. Reading about Strauss and Shostakovich getting bullied by their authoritarian governments isn't much fun, and even Ross's powers of description start to falter when distinguishing between obscure Europeans fiddling with twelve-tone rows in the 1950s and 1960s. This period is summed up the by the title of Milton Babbitt's 1958 essay, "Who Cares If You Listen?"

The story doesn't pick up again until the 1960s, when rock acts like the Velvet Underground, Brian Eno and, yes, the Beatles start adopting some of the tropes of American composers like Reich and Philip Glass, who themselves had checked out of Adorno's "Grand Hotel Abyss."  (Adorno is a major villain in Ross's story.) As classical music embraced rock, jazz, hip hop, and world music in the last decades of the twentieth century, it reintegrated itself back into the center of Western culture. Classical music is correspondingly harder to get one's hands around, and, as a result, Ross fumbles a bit in wrapping up his account. Osvaldo Golijov, my current favorite contemporary composer (I highly, highly recommend his Oceana and Ainadamar [photo above] and his soundtrack is by far the best part of Coppola's Youth Without Youth), gets two short paragraphs—this after a whole chapter on the creepy Benjamin Britten.

A good critic makes you want to read or watch or listen to a work he or she is discussing. A great critic makes you want to listen in the same way they do. Ross fits in the second category of critics. It's impossible, I think, to listen to music--any music--the same way after reading The Rest Is Noise. You may not be able to pick out triads, but you'd have to be tragically closed-minded to not hear something transformative in Schoenberg and Messiaen. Ross is the only music critic who could induce me to listen to Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck, then re-listen to Lou Reed's "Heroin."  As Ross teaches us, the twentieth was that kind of century.

My 2007

This isn't a best of list. I wouldn't pretend to have read or seen or listened enough to designate anything as the best of its kind.  Rather, I've put together an idiosyncratic list of the books, films, buildings and technologies that I learned the most from in 2007.

Santiago Calatrava, The Chicago Spire. (Also here and here and here and here.)  Calatrava's 2,000-foot twisting tower is a high risk, high reward proposition. It could be the point around which the entire skyline coheres--what the Sears Tower was supposed to have been but never was. Or it could be an overweening presence that Chicagoans will be faintly embarrassed about, like an impulse purchase that we later regretted. Or it could be something in between, like the fat-man-in-the-bathtub renovation of Soldiers Field that we've learned to live with. Whatever it turns out to be, the Spire is emblematic of a renewed sense of architectural daring in the birthplace of modernist architecture.

The Kindle. Tech nerds have already dismissed Amazon's ebook reader based on a quick glance at Engadget (one wag said the Kindle looked like it was designed by the prop manager for Space 1999), but avid readers love it--at least those who have been lucky enough to get their hands on one. The furious debate about the Kindle has revealed how we read in 2007. It turns out that a lot of people are already reading on screens. It also turns out that people want to read more than books on an ebook reader. They want all the disparate material they read on a PC--HTML pages, PDFs, emails, Word documents, blogs--on a device that's as portable and easy on the eyes as a hardcover book. The Kindle has the potential to be not just the first commercially successful ebook reader, but an extension of the Internet as the new center of the public sphere. In other words, the Kindle isn't the death of the book, as some have feared, but the means to turn the Internet into a book.

John Armstrong, Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination From the Great German Poet. This was the year I started reading Goethe seriously, and he stands out from the vein of post-romantics, modernists, and post-modernists I usually read not just in the awe-inspiring equipoise of his prose and poetry, but in his exemplary life. Michel Foucault and many others have pondered how to break down the barriers between art and life, but Goethe actually did it. No wonder Nietzsche cited him as one of the prototypes of the Übermensch.

Daniel Kraus, Musician. Continuing with the theme of art and life, Daniel Kraus's documentary on the Chicago jazz musician Ken Vandermark is a clear-eyed look at the reality of a working artist's daily life. Most profiles of artists in the media arise from the appearance of an artwork and, as a result, tend to be little more than extensions of the publicity apparatus. Kraus's film doesn't try to get to the "real" person behind the work. Instead, Kraus takes a sociological approach by showing the prosaic struggles necessary to maintain a career as a creative artist in the early twenty-first century. And Kraus doesn't neglect the art: Musician also conveys the power of Vandermark's performances.

Michael Thomas, Man Gone Down. Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was more fun to read, and Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End struck closer to home,  but Man Gone Down was the most moving novel I read all year. None of these novels were flawless: Wao had structural gaps, End resolved itself with a creaky plot device, and Man could have been 50 pages shorter. But each was distinguished by its narrative voice: Diaz's logorrheaic free indirect style, Ferris's innovative second person, and Thomas's realist first person. But of the three I think Thomas's novel will turn out to be the most influential and enduring. Plus, Thomas understands the vernacular of the tradition in which he's working better than Diaz or Ferris. Lots of novelists have tried to emulate the nineteenth-century novel form, usually by foisting all kinds of colorful minor characters upon the reader in misguided imitation of Dickens. Thomas takes an entirely different tack, combining Richard Wright with William Dean Howells--existentialist dread with a keen appreciation of New York City as spectacle. Man Gone Down is about seeing and invisibility as well as the city as a place of constant threat and unsuspected opportunity.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Berlin Alexanderplatz. Okay, so this is a DVD release of a made-for-TV miniseries, but Criterion's DVD package is a major event in the film world nevertheless. (Besides, this has been an extraordinarily busy year for me and I haven't seen nearly as many films as I wanted to. DVDs have pretty much been my cinema for 2007.) Fassbinder's 15-hour adaptation of Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel is demanding on several levels, not the least of which is Fassbinder's manic dramatic sensibility.  In its eccentric, excessive ambition, Berlin is one of the touchstones of modernist European cinema. Because of its formidable length and poor video transfers, it's never been accessible to a wide audience. The Criterion DVDs solved the poor video transfer problem, at least.

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise. I'll have more on this book in a future post--I'm nearly done reading it. It could have been called Everything You Want to Know about Modern Classical Music But Were Afraid to Ask Lest You Have to Sit Through a Clanking, Screeching Avant-Garde Work for Four Orchestras and a Barking Dog. This book has made a lot of "best of" lists because Ross managed to execute the daunting task he set before himself--tell the history of the twentieth century through its music, and make the history a pleasure to read. More importantly, he makes us actually want to listen to those unloved experimental pieces from classical music's post-Stravinsky period.

The Bad Girl

The good boy-bad girl theme has already appeared in one major novel this year--Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao--and now it appears in another one, Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl. And while these novels couldn't be more different in tone, both use malevolent fate as a major thematic and plot element. In Oscar Wao it's known as fukú, while in Bad Girl it takes the form of Flaubertian Naturalism.

The bad girl of the novel's title is known by a variety of names, one of which is Madame Arnoux, a not-so-subtle reference to Flaubert's Sentimental Education, another story of a doomed love set in a time of political and cultural turmoil. Vargas Llosa's Boveryesque fascination with Flaubert is well known. Vargas Llosa even wrote a book about his obsession, The Perpetual Orgy. Vargas Llosa and Flaubert both have a rage for the real. They both want desperately to create worlds in order to dramatize their own refusal to participate in the real one. But as a writer, Vargas Llosa is no Flaubert--Vargas Llosa's sentences lack the French master's crispness, he doesn't have Flaubert's unwavering faith in art, and his women just aren't as sexy as Emma Bovary or Marie Arnoux. Vargas Llosa tries to emulate Flaubert's pitilessness and can't pull it off. He's too grumpy.  This makes for a novel that's warmer than any of Flaubert's major novels, but one that's imbued with a sense of artistic retreat.

The Bad Girl begins in 1950 with the appearance of the proto-Emma as a fifteen-year-old flim-flam artist, a poor Peruvian girl trying to pass herself off as Chilean. Ricardo, the narrator, falls instantly in love with her, but she keeps her distance, partly to preserve her own mystique, and partly because he's too much like her. Ricardo is an orphan, while the bad girl might as well be. Both escape Peru as soon as they can to set off on a journey of self-definition. Ricardo settles in Paris and becomes a translator for UNESCO and other world government agencies. The bad girl sniffs out the most rakish men she can find and marries them. Her husbands range from a suave French diplomat to a Japanese gangster. I half expected her to show up as Mick Jagger's wife. Between marriages she returns to Ricardo for some high-toned booty calls that leave him as miserable, and as clueless, as ever. For the sin of disavowal of his desire--the bad girl is merely a substitute for some other desired object, perhaps a more vivid being of his own--Ricardo suffers the punishment of the damned: the repeated frustrations of the exact same desire. The bad girl, for her part, succeeds more than her countryman because, like Emma Bovary, she knows that the preservation of one's own desires can be an end in itself, but at the price of hastening one's death.

Sartre once said, "Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you." The central couple in The Bad Girl are flung out into the world without the stable identities of traditional cultures. From the arrival of the mambo in Lima In 1950 to the drugs and promiscuity of Swinging London of the 1960s, cultural history appears in the novel like a force of nature: trends manifest themselves out of nowhere and then fade away. Ricardo and the bad girl regard the cultural changes like crafty provincials, appropriating what they can use, whether they understand it or not. And yet, at a deeper level, the old paradigms of errant feminine sexuality and repressed male idealism work to nail the Peruvians to their fates. They are free, but only to fail.

The Public Sphere Goes Paperless

I've written in this space before about my conditional enthusiasm for ebooks. Today Amazon announced its new ebook reader, the Kindle. Based on a breathless Newsweek article, I placed it on my Amazon wish list. I still have some questions about the device, but the prospect of having instant access to Amazon's catalog without taking up more shelf space at home is tantalizing, although I know it's also an invitation to bankruptcy.

In his wide-ranging Newsweek cover story on the Kindle, Steven Levy clearly thinks he's happened upon a history-changing device, and he may be right, although it may have more impact on the history of electronic devices than on the history of reading itself.  He points out that the Kindle appears to resolve some of the problems that have dogged the Sony Reader. The Kindle has a wireless connection, offers a connection to an established bookseller with a huge inventory (although the backlist will take a while to come online), and allows full-text search and annotation. On the other hand, the Kindle is still black and white (evidently color E Ink is still a ways off) and it's pricey--$400.

And the Kindle is an electronic device intended to replace the printed book, a proposition that people are making a bigger deal out of than they should be. One commonly-voiced objection to ebooks is that they're not immersive, as if oblivion were the goal of all reading. Does Amazon's ebook reader offer the same immersive experience as a print book? Theoretically, yes, depending upon how old you are. As several people have pointed out, a computer screen is already the primary mode of reading for people under twenty or thirty. That ebooks will play a major role in publishing and reading seems beyond dispute at this point; the only question is how quickly, and how deeply, they will penetrate the market for books in the United States. Will the Kindle do the trick? Will it be the iPod of books? Without seeing the device, it's hard to venture a guess. Maybe.

Levy realizes that speculation about ebook technology has moved on to questions of reading on a screen to writing itself. Writing will change, and so will the public sphere itself. "Readers will read in public. Writers will write in public," is the slogan of digital text advocates, including the people at the Institute for the Future of the Book, who run the terrific if:book site. Levy quotes Bob Stein, the head of the Institute, wondering aloud about the future of the model for authorship that has existed since the Renaissance: a lone writer cut off from his or her readers until the work is finished. The discussion doesn't start until the work is published.  In the new model, readers will be able to meddle while the work is in process. The public debate will begin on day one of the writing. As Levy has it, "the notion of author as authoritarian figure gives way to a Web 2.0 wisdom-of-the-crowds process." In a lot of ways, that day has already arrived, too. Then again, I wonder why people want an ebook reading experience that is immersive while demanding that writers open up their processes. 

The reason why the Kindle is such a big deal has less to do with the fate of the book, which is just a technology, albeit an incredibly important one, than with the nature of the Internet as a medium for writing. Breakthroughs in online audio and video get all the publicity, but the digital revolution in writing is even broader and more profound. The Internet now has a near monopoly on the public sphere as a realm of open debate about culture and politics. The free exchange of writing became all the more inevitable when two major print media outlets, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, either eliminated or scaled-back their paygates. The public sphere is quickly going paperless. It's also encroaching more upon the private sphere than perhaps any other time since the late 1700's. In this context the Kindle is merely riding the wave, rather than on its leading edge.

Too Much Fire in the Blood

Irène Némirovsky's "new" novel Fire in the Blood opens with a scene out of a Euro-fantasy book by Peter Mayle or Frances Mayes: a engaged young couple gather with the bride's family around a fireplace in an isolated farmhouse in Burgundy. The mother of the bride recounts the story of her courtship, while an old family friend, our narrator, looks on approvingly. The reminiscences send the young couple floating dreamily into marriage. Forty pages into their marriage, the young husband, now a young father as well, is discovered floating face down in a river. Suspicion falls immediately on the wife's lover.

Némirovsky worked on Fire in the Blood--along with her better known, and more fully imagined, novel Suite Française--virtually up to her internment and execution in Auschwitz in 1942. Fire in the Blood was known only as a typewritten fragment until recently, when a suitcase full of Némirovsky's manuscripts was discovered. The manuscript was 30 pages of densely written text, with hardly a cross out. The novel reads like a first draft, unfortunately.  Némirovsky was clearly a confident writer, and Fire evinces some of the power and empathy of Suite Française. Both novels have a palpable sense of incompletion, but the multiple storylines of Française float nicely on an historical current, so the gaps are less troubling. Fire is a bitter, crude tragedy, offering to the reader the same maimed comfort as the narrator enjoys in his old age.

Fire is set in a permanent autumn populated by gloomy, reticent, hidebound farmers working some of the most beautiful land on the planet. Ceaseless toil, wartime casualties, and prodigious wine drinking mean the men have short lifespans, leaving the young women to make hasty marriages with hard-bitten men decades older than them. Constricted horizons and chaleur du sang lead to all kinds of bad object choices, which the narrator observes first with wise equanimity and then, startlingly, with drunken anger. The murder of the young husband is only the first rupture in the placid, self-satisfied lives of the main characters. We have a pretty good idea who killed him, and one of the nicer touches of the novel is Némirovsky's treatment of the farmers' code of silence that prevents the murderer from being brought to justice, or even named out loud. We become complicit in the cover up, but our own complicity is disturbed by the disquieting revelations to come.

It's too pat to claim that Fire in the Blood shows the hidden underside of the rustic European fantasies of Mayle or Mayes, for Némirovsky was herself a sophisticated urbanite with pastoral fantasies. Frankly, her gently ironic yet romanticized vision of the lives of her Burgundians is the primary appeal of the novel. A hard day's work in the lovely countryside concluding with a bottle of burgundy wine and a rustic stew, then a book by the fireplace--what a life! Who cares if you're surrounded by adulterers and murderers. Of course, eventually the ideal pastoral life shows its underside: torpidity of the body and an imagination that feeds only upon itself. This underside finds its expression in the novel's overcurdled plot and odd forgetfulness, as a major plot element is neglected at the end. Slight and uneven, Fire in the Blood is nevertheless a difficult novel to put down, or to forget.

Cloudspotting

The story related by Stéphane Audeguy's beguiling novel The Theory of Clouds begins with the moment humans stopped looking at the clouds as harbingers of divine will and first saw them as objects of scientific inquiry. The story concludes in the present day, when global warming means clouds are once again forces of mythic violence.

The telling of this story of disenchantment takes place in a small private library in Paris owned by Akira Kumo, a Japanese fashion designer with cloud problems of his own. He tells the story of the modern theory of clouds to Virginie Latour, a cloud-like character who seems unaffected anything that happens to her. Ostensibly Virginie has been hired to help Kumo catalogue his vast collection of books about clouds, but she actually functions as his amanuensis. It's through Virginie that Kumo's story unfolds to a tragic end.

The story begins with a British Quaker named Luke Howard, a contemporary of Goethe. Howard, a real person, was a member of the last generation of people who could balance religion and science. Howard conferred on clouds the names we still use: stratus, cirrus, cumulous, and so on. Soon after opening his eyes to clouds as material things to be classified and understood rationally, Howard retreated back in to his fierce religion, his vision so clouded that he doesn't recognize Goethe when he sees him.

Luke Howard initiated the serious study of clouds, and he was also the first person to lose his mind to them. The next figure in Kumo's narrative is a fictional artist named Carmichael, modeled after John Constable, who spent a year painting clouds. A solitary figure in the Romantic manner, Carmichael goes insane trying to capture clouds' protean forms. The doomed Romantic painter is followed by Richard Abercrombie, a fictional late Victorian with a vast family fortune and an empirical cast of mind. Abercrombie confidently ventures off to an expedition intended to photograph every kind of cloud in the world: "No one, as yet, had set off to look at the infinitely changeable landscape of the clouds, in all the latitudes, over every ocean and every mountain." Abercrombie gets halfway around the world before his gaze turns earthward to the inner atmospheres of all the women in the world. The record of his expedition is a book of pornographic scribbles. It's the last addition to Kumo's collection of books, and its logical end.

The only story Kumo does not relate to Virginie is his own story about clouds, which he had repressed and only comes to discover through his exercise in the Enlightenment mania for cataloguing. When Kumo happens to discover that he's actually much older than he had long believed, his own cloud story presents itself in all its madness. As a young boy in Hiroshima he and his sister take a brief swim in a river before school. Kumo watches his sister dress on shore, dives for a moment, and resurfaces to find his sister literally vaporized by Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on August 6, 1945. Kumo is traumatized by the sight of the mushroom cloud, only to patiently recreate the experience many years later in his Paris library. When his story is complete--when he has properly plotted out his life within the larger plot of the Enlightenment's obsessive attempts to master nature--Kumo throws himself from a library window. It's left to Virginie to scatter his ashes in a megastorm over Hampstead Heath, a sort of holy ground to the cult of clouds.

Audeguy's narrative voice, rendered with consummate skill by translator Timothy Bent, is a pleasurable combination of the historian crossed with the fabulist: one half Thomas Pynchon, one half Jacques Barzun. The novel is a classical framed story, this one centering around a recovered trauma. Usually I dislike the vulgar Freudianism of recovered trauma stories in which a character's inner torments are magically resolved when a childhood memory is brought to consciousness--think of Pat Conroy's execrable novel Prince of Tides, along with Barbra Steisand's utterly absurd film adaptation. And while Kumo's forgetting of a huge chunk of his life seems implausible, Audeguy manages to make the device work by seamlessly integrating Kumo's story with the stories of all the other men who have gazed for too long at the fullness of the sky, only to see what's missing inside themselves.

Update: Paul W. Tibbets Jr., the pilot of the Enola Gay, from which the Hiroshima bomb was dropped, died today.

Who Is the Real Raymond Carver?

Tess Gallagher, Raymond Carver's widow, is trying to publish a collection that "sets the record straight" on Carver's short fiction. Gallagher claims that Gordon Lish, the editor of Carver's most famous book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, pared Carver's prose so close to the bone as to make it unrecognizable. In effect, Lish created a new author marketed under the name Raymond Carver. Gallagher claims that the real Raymond Carver wrote "expansive, life-affirming stories."

So who is the real Raymond Carver? Lish's editorial interventions are so extensive that he could be credited with inventing Carver's famous style, and in that sense, he invented Raymond Carver the writer. In the photo above, taken from the New York Times story, Carver even looks a bit like Lish (at lower right). Since the early Modernism of Joseph Conrad and Henry James, a writer's style has come to express many things, inclu