I remain a little freaked out by Ben Ehrenreich. The Suitors definitely didn't get any less strange as I finished it. Which is not to say that it isn't really good and intriguing and all that - because it is! - but dude, it's a bit of an emotional roller coaster.
Suffice it to say that not only is every character flawed, but they are deeply, deeply so. Drunk with lust, gluttony, avarice - all of the deadly sins, in fact. And while the motley crew that form Penny's kingdom (formerly Payne's army) love one another, they will betray that love in a moment to get closer to Penny, and will blame anyone - including Penny herself - who pierces through her defenses.
I wish Ehrenreich had written more about Bobby, Penny's son, a preternaturally solemn child growing up in a sea of anarchy. And he eventually takes to the sea. He reminded me of Gunter Grass's Oskar, in The Tin Drum, carrying more meaning than his little body could possibly hold.
Anyway, what this all makes me realize is that I should read (or re-read - have I read it before?) The Odyssey.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
The Suitors, or Acid Trips with Homer
(No, not Homer Simpson, although that would be interesting too.) I want some of whatever Ben Ehrenreich was smoking when he wrote The Suitors, a modern retelling of The Odyssey. It's a timeless, placeless setting, in which there are sidewalks and cars and televisions, but sometimes there are no phones and people run around naked. Oh, and creating a moat and filling it with sewage when you can't find crocodiles makes sense. And there are chamber pots. And a band of free spirits (although that's too high-minded a phrase) who spend their days loving and gamboling and huffing paint thinner. Until our modern Odysseus Payne comes along and conscripts them into his dream.
What is his dream? Well (and it sounds a little something like some presidents we know):
And now he gets them started on his arsenal. And then the looting and the wars. And coming up, the War.
And you wonder, what binds Payne and Penny together? And why are you willing to continue to spiral downward with them?
What is his dream? Well (and it sounds a little something like some presidents we know):
...the everlasting glory of a nation founded on the vital principles of freedom and opportunity, of the responsibilities that accompany good fortune, the sacred obligation to boast of one's virtues and display one's wealth for all to see, and thereby, he said, spread freedom to the farthest corners of the globe [...] A free people always wins.
And now he gets them started on his arsenal. And then the looting and the wars. And coming up, the War.
And you wonder, what binds Payne and Penny together? And why are you willing to continue to spiral downward with them?
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Angelica, or The Perils of Parenthood
It seems appropriate that on Father's Day (happy day to all the dads, including mine who is on the 5 right now) I get to blog about a father-daughter relationship. And a father-mother one. And a mother-daughter one. Oh, and the mother-daughter-ghost one. And the spiritualist. And the maid, and ...
Anyway, Arthur Phillips has shown he likes to write mysteries. Not of the whodunit kind, but of a deeper, where is the truth when everyone can see only their own experience of the truth? variety. Even in his first novel, Prague, he employs multiple viewpoints to get at a wider sense of expat Budapest. (Siel has been reading about subjective reality too.)
In Angelica, Phillips goes all out - and shows how entirely people create their own truths. And with each retelling (there are 3 1/2) of the haunting of the little girl and her mother - possibly by the spectral manifestation of the father's sexual appetite - sympathies shift and misunderstandings are laid bare. And still any objective truth remains elusive. As a grown Angelica finally laments:
Anyway, Arthur Phillips has shown he likes to write mysteries. Not of the whodunit kind, but of a deeper, where is the truth when everyone can see only their own experience of the truth? variety. Even in his first novel, Prague, he employs multiple viewpoints to get at a wider sense of expat Budapest. (Siel has been reading about subjective reality too.)
In Angelica, Phillips goes all out - and shows how entirely people create their own truths. And with each retelling (there are 3 1/2) of the haunting of the little girl and her mother - possibly by the spectral manifestation of the father's sexual appetite - sympathies shift and misunderstandings are laid bare. And still any objective truth remains elusive. As a grown Angelica finally laments:
If each of the players performed his own unconnected drama, then it is only in the intersection of those dramas that my life can be seen, through the latticed spaces where light can pass between three stories laid over each over. And yet when I lay these stories atop each other, no light does pass and no space remains. All my knowledge consumes itself.
Friday, June 08, 2007
House of Meetings, or Wanting to Kill Yourself
As I mentioned in my earlier post (below), Martin Amis' House of Meetings is a downer. The main character has returned to Russia to die. First revisiting the prison camp where he spent over a decade, a time where he protected his brother even while hating him for having the girl he loved.
The love triangle never really explodes, as I had expected, but that just makes the reading all the more tortured. God, this is a sad book. One of the characters explains, about pity:
Thus it is only fair that Amis evokes the reader's pity as well. These poor broken souls. They are fucked up, and you can't really sympathize with them. But you can pity them.
My understanding of Derrida was pretty paltry, but I remember a main point of my professor's being that Derrida eschewed the center in favor of the marginalia, that it was that edges that had the most meaning. I thought of this when considering House of Meetings. The novel's center - what happens on a fateful night at the eponymous House - is ultimately less than what surrounds it at the edges. What is supposed to have the most meaning may in fact have the least.
Or maybe not. If you've read it, or read other Amis, let me know what you think.
The love triangle never really explodes, as I had expected, but that just makes the reading all the more tortured. God, this is a sad book. One of the characters explains, about pity:
She understand, and she pities me. In the end you finsih with self-pity. It's too tiring. You want someone else to do it for you.
Thus it is only fair that Amis evokes the reader's pity as well. These poor broken souls. They are fucked up, and you can't really sympathize with them. But you can pity them.
My understanding of Derrida was pretty paltry, but I remember a main point of my professor's being that Derrida eschewed the center in favor of the marginalia, that it was that edges that had the most meaning. I thought of this when considering House of Meetings. The novel's center - what happens on a fateful night at the eponymous House - is ultimately less than what surrounds it at the edges. What is supposed to have the most meaning may in fact have the least.
Or maybe not. If you've read it, or read other Amis, let me know what you think.
Monday, June 04, 2007
Misery a la Russe
In September 2004, a group of Chechen rebels took more than 1200 hostages - many children - in a school in Beslan, Ossetia. When all was said and done, almost 400 lay dead. (It's a testament to the Russianness of this all that I almost wrote "400 souls were lost.") And as a Russian historian, perhaps I expected tragedy. And it was that weekend, walking by the Russian embassy on Wisconsin Ave., that I saw the memorial wreaths and burst into tears. Painful, impotent tears.
These memories came back to me as I began reading Martin Amis' House of Meetings, a gulag novel. Damn, I was expecting old tragedies, not recent ones. But the narrator has traveled back to Russia, to revisit his prisons and perhaps to repent, right as the siege occurs. Thus it has a place in the letter - which comprises the novel - he writes to his step-daughter Venus. And Amis' narrator has the same dull dread I had:
Although this leads me to my biggest quibble with the novel thus far. A gulag survivor who eventually escaped to America. Who is old and cranky. Of course he has issues with Russia. And of course he will generalize about his land - Russians and Westerners have been doing it for centuries... the Russian soul, the Russian craving for centralized authority, etc. But Amis does it too much. He spends too much time opining on the deficiencies of the Russian people. It gets old.
I'm much more interested in his characters. The narrator, back in the late 1940s and '50s, is a cipher of sorts. A survivor. A war hero stripped of his heroism. Not a big thinker. He kind of makes me think of Gleb in Cement, a major socialist realist novel. His little brother, Lev, is an intellectual, a dreamer who survives by stubbornly holding to principal. Oh, and he's the one that got the girl. The love triangle is bound to explode - we've already learned as much. It's just a matter of biding our time to find out how.
These memories came back to me as I began reading Martin Amis' House of Meetings, a gulag novel. Damn, I was expecting old tragedies, not recent ones. But the narrator has traveled back to Russia, to revisit his prisons and perhaps to repent, right as the siege occurs. Thus it has a place in the letter - which comprises the novel - he writes to his step-daughter Venus. And Amis' narrator has the same dull dread I had:
And why is it that we are already perparing ourselves for something close to the worst possible outcome? Why is it that we are already preparing ourselves for the phenomenon understood by all he world - Russian heavyhandedness? For what reason are our hands so heavy? What weighs them down?
Although this leads me to my biggest quibble with the novel thus far. A gulag survivor who eventually escaped to America. Who is old and cranky. Of course he has issues with Russia. And of course he will generalize about his land - Russians and Westerners have been doing it for centuries... the Russian soul, the Russian craving for centralized authority, etc. But Amis does it too much. He spends too much time opining on the deficiencies of the Russian people. It gets old.
I'm much more interested in his characters. The narrator, back in the late 1940s and '50s, is a cipher of sorts. A survivor. A war hero stripped of his heroism. Not a big thinker. He kind of makes me think of Gleb in Cement, a major socialist realist novel. His little brother, Lev, is an intellectual, a dreamer who survives by stubbornly holding to principal. Oh, and he's the one that got the girl. The love triangle is bound to explode - we've already learned as much. It's just a matter of biding our time to find out how.
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Lost City Radio
Sad. I am feeling sad right now. Why? Not sure, but I partly blame Daniel Alarcon.
Such a pretty day, so I went out to walk some errands, and ended up drinking chai at Synergy Cafe. Which is where I finished Lost City Radio by the aforementioned Alarcon, a Peruvian transplant to Oakland.
The novel is set in the capital city of a nameless Latin American country, still recovering from a bruising civil war. The central theme of the novel is memory and the struggle to remember against an authoritarian government that is determined to disappear the past. Towns are renamed (actually, renumbered) and the missing seem to number in the tens of thousands.
In the midst of this Norma hosts "Lost City Radio," a weekly program that allows people to share their memories of missing loved ones, and reunites a lucky few who lost one another in the war and mass in-migration to the city. Oh, and Norma also has her own missing: her husband, who disappeared in the jungle shortly after the war ended and who may have been working with the rebels. But he, he remains nameless.
Alarcon weaves together tales from Norma, her husband, the child that appears at the station one day, his cowardly teacher, and a man who ruined other lives and had his own ruined all by accident. They run forward and backwards in time, and you're often trying to place yourself. Is this the present? Right after the war? Before the war? In its midst? City or jungle? The effect is disorienting, but so in many ways are the characters' lives.
What struck me most was the way that simple actions in the novel trigger a string of events that had unforeseen and tragic consequences. And Alarcon shows us the consequences well before delving back to the causes. The cumulative effect is powerful, and troubling. Or, like I said at the beginning of this post, sad.
Such a pretty day, so I went out to walk some errands, and ended up drinking chai at Synergy Cafe. Which is where I finished Lost City Radio by the aforementioned Alarcon, a Peruvian transplant to Oakland.
The novel is set in the capital city of a nameless Latin American country, still recovering from a bruising civil war. The central theme of the novel is memory and the struggle to remember against an authoritarian government that is determined to disappear the past. Towns are renamed (actually, renumbered) and the missing seem to number in the tens of thousands.
In the midst of this Norma hosts "Lost City Radio," a weekly program that allows people to share their memories of missing loved ones, and reunites a lucky few who lost one another in the war and mass in-migration to the city. Oh, and Norma also has her own missing: her husband, who disappeared in the jungle shortly after the war ended and who may have been working with the rebels. But he, he remains nameless.
Alarcon weaves together tales from Norma, her husband, the child that appears at the station one day, his cowardly teacher, and a man who ruined other lives and had his own ruined all by accident. They run forward and backwards in time, and you're often trying to place yourself. Is this the present? Right after the war? Before the war? In its midst? City or jungle? The effect is disorienting, but so in many ways are the characters' lives.
What struck me most was the way that simple actions in the novel trigger a string of events that had unforeseen and tragic consequences. And Alarcon shows us the consequences well before delving back to the causes. The cumulative effect is powerful, and troubling. Or, like I said at the beginning of this post, sad.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
