I do not remember the last book I enjoyed so much I did not want it to end. With age, experience, and a certain level of skepticism I find I am able to maintain a certain distance between myself and a book. I may enjoy the story thoroughly. I may be able to appreciate the author's craft. But lose myself in the author's world? That almost never happens.
I'd never heard of Timothy Findley until a friend loaned a DVD with a documentary about him. He is a best-selling Canadian writer, a former actor, and the author of eight previous novels. I thought that what he had to say about writing, his own and others', was fascinating so I requested Pilgrim and The Piano Man's Daughter through an inter-library loan. I am afraid I found The Piano Man's Daughter, while exquisitely written, not sufficiently engaging enough to hold my attention. It seems to be a family saga set in the first half of the 20th century and I didn't find their lives interesting enough to read on. My failure, I admit freely.
Pilgrim is something else. It begins with a man called Pilgrim (family name? first name? we never learn) hanging himself in his London garden on April 17, 1912. His valet-butler Forster finds the body, cuts it down, calls the doctor, who pronounces Pilgrim dead. Six hours later Pilgrim revive although he's had no pulse and has not been breathing. This latest suicide attempt has failed.
The action shifts from London to the Burgholzli Psychiatric Clinic in Zürich where Pilgrim's friend, Sybil, Lady Quartermaine, has brought Pilgrim for treatment. Clearly he is insane. He believes he lived through the sack of Troy, knew Saint Teresa of Avila, painted La Gioconda, is friends with Henry James, Oscar Wilde. Because his history is so unusual and his accounts of his past life so vivid, Carl Gustav Jung becomes his doctor.
Is Pilgrim simply a exceptionally vivid fantasist? Or is he what he claims to be, someone ageless and sexless who has lived for more that four thousand years, cannot die, but wishes to die? Jung's own life—his relations with his wife Emma and his colleagues at the clinic, his thoughts and dreams—are affected by his interactions with Pilgrim. Who is Sybil Quartermaine? How can Forster rescue Pilgrim from the clinic?
As I said at this start of this, I didn't want Pilgrim to end. I was with Jung wanting both the comfort and security of my marriage and the sexual excitement of mistress. I was caught by Pilgrim's stories of his past, his frustration at being unable to die. Pilgrim is almost 500 pages, but for me it wasn't enough.
Monday, January 28, 2013
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt
The subtitle of Swerve is "How the World Became Modern," which actually over-promises somewhat. It's actually the story of how Poggio Bracciolini found a manuscript copy of Lucretius' poem, On the Nature of Things and some of the consequences.
To convey the significance of the poem, Greenblatt, who is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, has to explain the significance of the poem, which means explaining something about Epicurus, the rise of Christianity, the world in which Poggio was born and lived, and some of the reactions to and effects of On the Nature of Things. These involve Thomas More, Giordano Bruno, Montaigne, Galileo, even Thomas Jefferson.
We know virtually nothing about Lucretius other than his poem, which he apparently wrote sometime before the birth of Christ (Lucretius, St. Jerome reports, was born 94 BCE). The poem was known in the ancient world. Fragments of it have been found in the ruins of Herculaneum, which was destroyed with Pompeii in 79 CE.
It was not a poem for a Christian—or pagan—world. It denied that the gods (or God) had anything to do with the creation of the world or with human activities in the world. It denied any kind of afterlife, no heaven, no hell. It denied Original Sin and therefore God's forgiveness. It argued that everything—rocks, trees, animals, humans, clouds, stars—absolutely everything is made of invisible particles. These elementary particles are eternal, and while infinite in number they are limited in shape and size. They are in constant motion. Lucretius noted that dust motes in a shaft of sunlight in perfectly still air are moving; we now call this Brownian motion. Everything comes into being as the result of a swerve.
These were not ideas the early Church fathers wanted read and studied and they did their best to stamp them out along with all traces of Epicurus' thought, on which the poem is largely based. Much of the stamping out of ancient books was done by insects, fire, and monks who wanted the vellum for another purpose. Given how much we've lost—only seven of Aeschylus's 80 plays, only seven of Sophocles' 120—it's a miracle that On the Nature of Things survived.
Poggio was humanist and a scribe who became the pope's secretary. When his boss, the pope was disgraced and deposed, he went on a book hunting trip through monasteries in central Germany where he not only found Lucretius' poem in 1417, he had the wit to have it copied and the copy sent home to Florence, where it began to affect the thinking of other humanists. Today, of course, Lucretius' ideas seem almost self-evident; that a Roman poet could have them more than 2,000 years ago seems extraordinary.
Because Greenblatt is comfortable writing about both the early Christian and the Renaissance worlds, Swerve is a lively and fascinating account of the poem, what we know about it, and Poggio Bracciolini who managed being branded a heretic despite his finding and copying a profoundly heretical book, lived to be 79 years old, dying in 1459.
To convey the significance of the poem, Greenblatt, who is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, has to explain the significance of the poem, which means explaining something about Epicurus, the rise of Christianity, the world in which Poggio was born and lived, and some of the reactions to and effects of On the Nature of Things. These involve Thomas More, Giordano Bruno, Montaigne, Galileo, even Thomas Jefferson.
We know virtually nothing about Lucretius other than his poem, which he apparently wrote sometime before the birth of Christ (Lucretius, St. Jerome reports, was born 94 BCE). The poem was known in the ancient world. Fragments of it have been found in the ruins of Herculaneum, which was destroyed with Pompeii in 79 CE.
It was not a poem for a Christian—or pagan—world. It denied that the gods (or God) had anything to do with the creation of the world or with human activities in the world. It denied any kind of afterlife, no heaven, no hell. It denied Original Sin and therefore God's forgiveness. It argued that everything—rocks, trees, animals, humans, clouds, stars—absolutely everything is made of invisible particles. These elementary particles are eternal, and while infinite in number they are limited in shape and size. They are in constant motion. Lucretius noted that dust motes in a shaft of sunlight in perfectly still air are moving; we now call this Brownian motion. Everything comes into being as the result of a swerve.
These were not ideas the early Church fathers wanted read and studied and they did their best to stamp them out along with all traces of Epicurus' thought, on which the poem is largely based. Much of the stamping out of ancient books was done by insects, fire, and monks who wanted the vellum for another purpose. Given how much we've lost—only seven of Aeschylus's 80 plays, only seven of Sophocles' 120—it's a miracle that On the Nature of Things survived.
Poggio was humanist and a scribe who became the pope's secretary. When his boss, the pope was disgraced and deposed, he went on a book hunting trip through monasteries in central Germany where he not only found Lucretius' poem in 1417, he had the wit to have it copied and the copy sent home to Florence, where it began to affect the thinking of other humanists. Today, of course, Lucretius' ideas seem almost self-evident; that a Roman poet could have them more than 2,000 years ago seems extraordinary.
Because Greenblatt is comfortable writing about both the early Christian and the Renaissance worlds, Swerve is a lively and fascinating account of the poem, what we know about it, and Poggio Bracciolini who managed being branded a heretic despite his finding and copying a profoundly heretical book, lived to be 79 years old, dying in 1459.
Monday, December 24, 2012
People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry
I am not a fan of true crime. But I am endlessly by Japan. The subtitle of People Who Eat Darkness is "The True Story of a Young Woman who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo--and the Evil that Swallowed Her Up." Richard Lloyd Parry, the author, is the Tokyo bureau chief of The Times (London) and has lived in Japan for most of his adult life. His book is extraordinary. Both Publisher's Weekly and Time magazine picked this as one of the ten best books of 2012.
The story begins when Lucie Blackman, a 21-year-old former British Airways flight attendant who was working as a bar hostess in Roppongi, disappeared in July 2000. Months later the Japanese police found pieces of her dismembered body in a cave southwest of Tokyo. By the time they found Lucie's body, they had a suspect in custody and eventually he was tried, a trial that lasted more than five years.
Parry spent ten years researching and writing the book. He interviewed Lucie's parents, her younger sister and brother, her Tokyo roommate, friends of the family, Tokyo police, Roppongi bar owners. We learn about Lucie (she worried about money and thought she could pay off her debts working in Japan), her family (her parents had divorced and had very different reactions to Lucie's disappearance), her sister (who badgered the police and British Embassy to do something), about the Roppongi bar scene, about the history of Koreans in Japan, about Japanese police procedures, and about Japanese criminal courts.
We learn, for example, that because the Japanese regard flight attendant as a high status job, Japanese reporters and the public could not understand why Lucie would give it up to become a bar hostess. We learn that criminals are expected to show remorse and, in fact, if they give their victims financial compensation they may actually be able to reduce their sentences.
Because it is true, the story is not neat. Parry writes includes events that no mystery writer could get away with; they are too preposterous. The people involved don't follow the public's expectation of, say, how the father of a missing daughter should act in a press conference. At one point, Lucie's father gets sucked into a con by a guy who manages to extract $10,000 from him before the con falls apart. Lucie's mother consults psychics and Parry quotes some of their "information," none of which was close to the reality.
Because it is true, it has no tidy conclusion. Lucie is dead. The man accused of her murder is in prison, but not for that crime. Lucie's sister has attempted suicide. Her mother has remarried. Her father is a pariah. Japan remains one of the safest countries on earth.
The story begins when Lucie Blackman, a 21-year-old former British Airways flight attendant who was working as a bar hostess in Roppongi, disappeared in July 2000. Months later the Japanese police found pieces of her dismembered body in a cave southwest of Tokyo. By the time they found Lucie's body, they had a suspect in custody and eventually he was tried, a trial that lasted more than five years.
Parry spent ten years researching and writing the book. He interviewed Lucie's parents, her younger sister and brother, her Tokyo roommate, friends of the family, Tokyo police, Roppongi bar owners. We learn about Lucie (she worried about money and thought she could pay off her debts working in Japan), her family (her parents had divorced and had very different reactions to Lucie's disappearance), her sister (who badgered the police and British Embassy to do something), about the Roppongi bar scene, about the history of Koreans in Japan, about Japanese police procedures, and about Japanese criminal courts.
We learn, for example, that because the Japanese regard flight attendant as a high status job, Japanese reporters and the public could not understand why Lucie would give it up to become a bar hostess. We learn that criminals are expected to show remorse and, in fact, if they give their victims financial compensation they may actually be able to reduce their sentences.
Because it is true, the story is not neat. Parry writes includes events that no mystery writer could get away with; they are too preposterous. The people involved don't follow the public's expectation of, say, how the father of a missing daughter should act in a press conference. At one point, Lucie's father gets sucked into a con by a guy who manages to extract $10,000 from him before the con falls apart. Lucie's mother consults psychics and Parry quotes some of their "information," none of which was close to the reality.
Because it is true, it has no tidy conclusion. Lucie is dead. The man accused of her murder is in prison, but not for that crime. Lucie's sister has attempted suicide. Her mother has remarried. Her father is a pariah. Japan remains one of the safest countries on earth.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain by Lucia Perillo
So many books, so little time. So how do you decide what to read next? My answer: Recommendations by friends and family (word-of-mouth); reviews; new book by an author I know; old book by an author I've discovered; a classic I've manage to avoid until I was old enough to appreciate it (I've begun dipping into the Essays of Montaigne); a title related to Japan; and—given this time of year—Top 10 Books of the Year lists.
Which is how I happened to read Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain a collection of stories by Lucia Perillo, her first such collection. It was one of Publishers Weekly's top 10 of 2012. Perillo has published five books of poetry, one of which, Inseminating the Elephant, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In 2000, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She is married, lives in Washington state, and has MS. She talks about her poetry and her background in a 2099 interview that is available on the web.
Perhaps because she is a poet, Perillo's language is extraordinary and yet she does not seem to be showing off. Her sentences don't shout, "Look at me! Look at me!" But here's the first paragraph of the book's first story, "Bad Boy Number Seventeen":
"Don't tell me about bad boys. I've seen my black clouds come and go. Coming they walk with their shoulders back like they've got a raw egg tucked inside each armpit, and they let their legs lead them. Going, you can count on the fact that their butts will cast no shadow on those lean long legs. You can't compete in the arena of squalid romance if you're one of those guys shaped in the rear like a leather mail sack: you're automatically disqualified. That's just the way it is. I didn't make the rules."
Among Perillo's characters are an addict trapped in a country house who becomes obsessed with vacuum cleaners and their door-to-door salespeople...a young woman whose older sister has Down syndrome...and an elderly surgeon living in an elder housing development whose neighbor commits suicide. Some of the stories sound like downers, but Perillo's humor and insights into (and comments on) the human condition not only redeem them, but make them resonate with wisdom.
The fourteen stories are all so strong I had to stop reading for a time, concerned that Perillo's voice would sneak into my own writing. On the other hand, they were so strong I had to finish the book. Thank you, Publishers Weekly. And I envy those of you who can look forward to the pleasures of Perillo's book.
Which is how I happened to read Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain a collection of stories by Lucia Perillo, her first such collection. It was one of Publishers Weekly's top 10 of 2012. Perillo has published five books of poetry, one of which, Inseminating the Elephant, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In 2000, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She is married, lives in Washington state, and has MS. She talks about her poetry and her background in a 2099 interview that is available on the web.
Perhaps because she is a poet, Perillo's language is extraordinary and yet she does not seem to be showing off. Her sentences don't shout, "Look at me! Look at me!" But here's the first paragraph of the book's first story, "Bad Boy Number Seventeen":
"Don't tell me about bad boys. I've seen my black clouds come and go. Coming they walk with their shoulders back like they've got a raw egg tucked inside each armpit, and they let their legs lead them. Going, you can count on the fact that their butts will cast no shadow on those lean long legs. You can't compete in the arena of squalid romance if you're one of those guys shaped in the rear like a leather mail sack: you're automatically disqualified. That's just the way it is. I didn't make the rules."
Among Perillo's characters are an addict trapped in a country house who becomes obsessed with vacuum cleaners and their door-to-door salespeople...a young woman whose older sister has Down syndrome...and an elderly surgeon living in an elder housing development whose neighbor commits suicide. Some of the stories sound like downers, but Perillo's humor and insights into (and comments on) the human condition not only redeem them, but make them resonate with wisdom.
The fourteen stories are all so strong I had to stop reading for a time, concerned that Perillo's voice would sneak into my own writing. On the other hand, they were so strong I had to finish the book. Thank you, Publishers Weekly. And I envy those of you who can look forward to the pleasures of Perillo's book.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Things You Should Know by A.M. Homes
This is a collection of eleven stories by an author I'd never heard of (or whose existence penetrated my consciousness) until I read a favorable review of her most recent novel, May We Be Forgiven. By the time she'd published this in 2002, she'd published four novels and another collection of stories. According to Wikipedia, she "currently lives in New York City with her young daughter. She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia University, the New School, and NYU. She currently teaches in the creative writing programs at Princeton University. In April 2007, she stated in the Washington Post, 'I've dated men and I've dated women and there's no more or less to it than that.' In an interview with Diva magazine she said, 'I am bisexual, but I wouldn't necessarily define myself that way.'" (N.B.: I've just checked the Wikipedia links for these quotes. They take you to the publications, not to the articles with the quotes. An "A.M. Homes" search on the Diva site, has no results.)
All but two of the stories are told in the present tense. Several of the narrators are male. They vary in length from three pages to more than thirty. They are all engaging, some—as is inevitable in any collection—more than others.
In "Georgica," the narrator, a young woman, cruises a nighttime summer beach, watching couples have sex through night-vision goggles, and harvesting the sperm left in the condoms to inseminate herself. Baldly describing the story in this way makes the narrator sound extreme, but within the story, what she's doing seems natural and reasonable.
That story has relatively little dialogue (compared to others in the book). Homes' dialogue is wonderful. Here's a piece of a scene in which the adult daughter comes from New York to visit her elderly parents in Washington.:
"Is she here?" She hears her mother's voice across the house.
"Hi Mom," she says, and her mother does not hear her. She tries again. "Hi Mom." She walks down the hall saying Hi Mom, Hi Mom, Hi Mom at different volumes, in different intonations, like a hearing test.
"Is that you?" her mother finally asks when she's two feet away.
"I'm home."
He mother hugs her--her mother is smaller too. Everything is shrinking, compacting, intensifying. "Did you have a good flight?"
She has never flown home. "I took the train."
"Is Ray back?" her mother asks.
"Not yet," her father says as he puts two heaping tablespoons of green powder into a glass of water.
"Where did you meet this Ray?"
"Your father left his coat at the health food store and Ray found it and called him."
Her father nods. "I went to get the coat and we started talking."
"Your father and Ray go to vitamin class together."
"Vitamin class?"
"They go to the health food store and a man speaks to them over a video screen."
I am delighted to have found—or been pointed to—Homes, both for the pleasure that her stories have given me and for the lessons I believe I can learn from them. I now look forward to reading more of her work.
All but two of the stories are told in the present tense. Several of the narrators are male. They vary in length from three pages to more than thirty. They are all engaging, some—as is inevitable in any collection—more than others.
In "Georgica," the narrator, a young woman, cruises a nighttime summer beach, watching couples have sex through night-vision goggles, and harvesting the sperm left in the condoms to inseminate herself. Baldly describing the story in this way makes the narrator sound extreme, but within the story, what she's doing seems natural and reasonable.
That story has relatively little dialogue (compared to others in the book). Homes' dialogue is wonderful. Here's a piece of a scene in which the adult daughter comes from New York to visit her elderly parents in Washington.:
"Is she here?" She hears her mother's voice across the house.
"Hi Mom," she says, and her mother does not hear her. She tries again. "Hi Mom." She walks down the hall saying Hi Mom, Hi Mom, Hi Mom at different volumes, in different intonations, like a hearing test.
"Is that you?" her mother finally asks when she's two feet away.
"I'm home."
He mother hugs her--her mother is smaller too. Everything is shrinking, compacting, intensifying. "Did you have a good flight?"
She has never flown home. "I took the train."
"Is Ray back?" her mother asks.
"Not yet," her father says as he puts two heaping tablespoons of green powder into a glass of water.
"Where did you meet this Ray?"
"Your father left his coat at the health food store and Ray found it and called him."
Her father nods. "I went to get the coat and we started talking."
"Your father and Ray go to vitamin class together."
"Vitamin class?"
"They go to the health food store and a man speaks to them over a video screen."
I am delighted to have found—or been pointed to—Homes, both for the pleasure that her stories have given me and for the lessons I believe I can learn from them. I now look forward to reading more of her work.
Friday, November 23, 2012
Tokyo Stories edited by Lawrence Rogers
Tokyo Stories: A Literary Stroll translated from the Japanese and edited by Lawrence Rogers contains 18 short stories by both famous authors (Mishima Yukio, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Kawabata Yasunari, Nagai Kaifu, Natsume Soseki) and less famous--at least to me. Two writers, Ikeda Michiko and Inabe Mayumi, are translated into English for the first time. Rogers is a professor of Japanese at the University of Hawaii a Hilo, and he provides useful introductions to the book as a whole and to each story, a glossary, and suggestions for further reading.
The stories are all set in the twentieth century, and are organized by Tokyo districts. So for example the first six stories are all set in central Tokyo, the next eight in the shitamachi, the "low city," the more raffish district of bars and theaters.
I think there are two problems in translating from the Japanese--and I'm writing here as one who is translating contemporary Japanese fiction for his own entertainment. First, English acts as a veil or fine screen between the reader and the original. I sense that literary Japanese carries nuances and implications that are either impossible to express in English or that lose all their effect when we do find an English equivalent. I suspect it is a rare translator who is so fluent in both languages that he or she can inhabit the consciousness of the Japanese writer and has the skill to find the identical spirit in English. Which leads to the second problem.
I suspect that, as a translator, I run the original through my consciousness so that what comes out sounds very similar to everything I write. I'm not skillful enough to convey each Japanese writer's unique style. I think that Rogers is skillful enough, which makes this collection exceptionally rich and varied. The stories are all different, different lengths, different situations, different different times, but all set in Tokyo. They include, as the jacket says, "a story of an all-too-brief affair in a burned-out Tokyo, an unsettling tale of high politics and possible blackmail, and reminiscences of childhood. The narrators and protagonists are diverse, among them an Asakusa streetwalker, a lonely apartment seeker who simply wants to keep her cat, and a self-obsessed young man casting off his devoted lover."
As an introduction to (or picture of) Japanese culture from the inside, the Tokyo Stories are fascinating and enlightening.
The stories are all set in the twentieth century, and are organized by Tokyo districts. So for example the first six stories are all set in central Tokyo, the next eight in the shitamachi, the "low city," the more raffish district of bars and theaters.
I think there are two problems in translating from the Japanese--and I'm writing here as one who is translating contemporary Japanese fiction for his own entertainment. First, English acts as a veil or fine screen between the reader and the original. I sense that literary Japanese carries nuances and implications that are either impossible to express in English or that lose all their effect when we do find an English equivalent. I suspect it is a rare translator who is so fluent in both languages that he or she can inhabit the consciousness of the Japanese writer and has the skill to find the identical spirit in English. Which leads to the second problem.
I suspect that, as a translator, I run the original through my consciousness so that what comes out sounds very similar to everything I write. I'm not skillful enough to convey each Japanese writer's unique style. I think that Rogers is skillful enough, which makes this collection exceptionally rich and varied. The stories are all different, different lengths, different situations, different different times, but all set in Tokyo. They include, as the jacket says, "a story of an all-too-brief affair in a burned-out Tokyo, an unsettling tale of high politics and possible blackmail, and reminiscences of childhood. The narrators and protagonists are diverse, among them an Asakusa streetwalker, a lonely apartment seeker who simply wants to keep her cat, and a self-obsessed young man casting off his devoted lover."
As an introduction to (or picture of) Japanese culture from the inside, the Tokyo Stories are fascinating and enlightening.
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Interview with the writer
Samantha Holt, another self-published author, maintains an interesting blog in which she interviews other writers.
She interviewed me by e-mail recently and has now posted the results, which you can find here. I thought her questions about my book and about writing were interesting and I tried to answer them seriously.
Enjoy.
She interviewed me by e-mail recently and has now posted the results, which you can find here. I thought her questions about my book and about writing were interesting and I tried to answer them seriously.
Enjoy.
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