Every Unhappy Family

Freedom - Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

The opening lines of Anna Karenina came into my mind unbidden after I read the final page of Freedom. It occurred to me that there is something tragically beautiful in the tale of an unhappy marriage. Tragic, obviously. But there's real beauty there too. In the misunderstandings and the fears left unspoken, or spoken backwards. Why is there so much poetry in it?

Anyway. I liked this novel quite a bit more than I expected. I liked The Corrections, and this promised to be pretty similar (and was!), so I'm not sure why I was surprised. But I was all the same. Maybe I just didn't think I was in the mood to like something that received so much hype.

But Franzen writes the type of novel that tends to lower all my defenses. It is big and sprawling and delves deeply into the inner stories of most - if not all - of its characters. (Why do we not really get to know Jessica Berglund though?) Benefitting from something approaching omniscience, we get to see the bigger picture that the characters can't. And to wonder if it will become clear to them. And if such a thing really matters.

I suppose it is to be expected that I would think of Tolstoy, as Patty's experience of Natasha Rostova guides her thinking about fidelity to her husband. (Franzen - or Patty at least - provides a very different reading from my own about the triangle(s) of Natasha-Pierre-Andrei-that other jackass.)

I made a couple other notes, mainly about amusing cultural references like Conor Oberst, but nothing of great note. I am sorry to have forgotten a few of the other themes I had wanted to touch upon. The trouble with big books, I guess.

Wrapping Up: Peace, after War

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

Volume Four & the Epilogue

How much do I love that Tolstoy writes a two-part epilogue almost 100 pages long? (Not a lot actually. It's so him, and that I love, but if I were his editor, part two of the epilogue would be long gone.)

Volume Four is mostly about what happens to the French (and Russian) armies after Napoleon occupies Moscow and then up and leaves, retreating all the way back to France, army in tatters. Tolstoy has a LOT to say about this, and about what caused the retreat, and how the Russians "won" by losing. This all can be mostly summed up here: "Only unconscious activity bears fruit, and a man who plays a role in a historical event never understands its significance. If he attempts to understand it, he is struck with fruitlessness."

This also gives him a chance to do what he seems to love best, which is to make fun of historians. He also shares his opinions on doctors, and on "intelligent" women - who are juxtaposed with "real women, endowed with the ability to select and absorb all the best of what a man has to show." (Yes, I almost threw my book across the room here.)

But you forgive Tolstoy. Because he is big and expansive, creating a whole world that is larger than life. Sometimes when I think of him, I think of Whitman.

Other things happen too. There are a few major deaths, a couple marriages. The epilogue takes us into the future and lays the groundwork for what I understand was the original plan for W&P: understanding how the Decembrists (not these guys) became the Decembrists.

I was dissatisfied with how it all worked out when I read it at 17. This time around, I get it more. It somehow seems more appropriate and right. I don't really begrudge the characters their actions anymore, although I wish I could have seen the alternate world where you'd get my happy ending. It probably wouldn't have been especially happy, after all.

And the last of the Twittering, where it's clear I lost a lot of steam:

• Turns out that if your sister is engaged to a dude, it's not okay for you to get involved with the same dude's sister.
• On the other hand, if then that guy were to die....
• "The war was being conducted against all the rules (as if there existed some sort of rules for killing people)."
• "But pure, perfect sorrow is as impossible as pure and perfect joy."

Volume 3: The Big Battle

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

Volume Three

This whole section is pretty much the lead up to the Battle of Borodino and the resulting (despite a result that has to be considered a draw) Russian retreat past Moscow, ceding the ancient capital to Napoleon. In the midst of long philosophical musings by Tolstoy about how war is outrageously crazy but wheels get set in motion and none of us can really do anything about it (no matter how the history books later spin it), our characters recover - or don't - from the upheaval that ended Volume Two, they seek revenge, they move around and seek places where they feel at home.

Pierre, a la Forrest Gump, ends up right in the middle of the Battle of Borodino. Because of course he does.

Some things that happen in these 300 pages...
Tolstoy waits until page 603 to call war "an event .... contrary to human reason and the whole of human nature." [By the way, based on the complexities with which he describes people and human nature, does he really believe this?]

Tolstoy explains that the Russians fleeing Moscow essentially led to Napoleon's retreat and humiliation. He counters this act of patriotism to "the killing of children to save the fatherland." ... I would love to know what Tolstoy would have to say about the Soviets in World War II (aka The Great Fatherland War).

And all this, according to my Twitter feed:
"Everyone wished more to listen than to speak." This seems unlikely. Also, for Tolstoy, unusual.

We *think* we have free will and all, but really we are just cogs in some big master plan of fate. Even Napoleon.

Also. it's really easy to pick out evidence after the fact to justify your interpretation. This is why historians are lame.

It's kind of amazing how much I like Tolstoy considering how annoyed I get by half of what he says.

Chaotic Battle of Borodino today in #WandP. Reminds me of this poem: http://www.poetry-archive.com/s/grass.html

Tolstoy takes two pages to say: Correlation does not equal causation. (This is why #WandP is 1215 pages long.)

At the end of Volume 3, Moscow is burning, Pierre is in jail(ish), but the love story might be back on. Yay?

More tweeting Tolstoy

What I had to say about Volume 2, in 140 character snippets...

I know you haven't been missing my #WandP tweets, but they are back anyway.

Love & death are capricious.

Also, "Vera's observation was correct, as were all her observations; but, like most ... this one made everyone feel awkward."

Russian nobles can be really depressing. And Masons have a bunch of wacky rituals.

"She was in that highest degree of happiness when a person ... does not believe in the possibility of evil, unhappiness, and grief."

Tolstoy, did you just call the military sanctioned idleness? OH SNAP.

I am trying to picture how fat Pierre Bezukhov is supposed to be. Having trouble.

The end of Volume 2 of #WandP is like reading a train wreck. Why is everybody so vain/proud/foolish/sexually-frustrated/etc?

And now I'm in a bad mood. Thank you Tolstoy.

The saga continued (and delayed)

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

Volume Two

I don't have a lot to say about V2 right now. I waited a week before blogging, mainly because I've been busy, but also because this section has such a downer ending.

It's been years since the skirmish, and everyone has grown up more. The emperor and Napoleon are pals, mostly. Pierre's marriage is going about as well as you'd expect, Andrei has given up on everything, Natasha is hmm, mostly indescribable, Nikolai is kind of a hotshot. And there are of course a bazillion other characters.

And then there's this reversal of sorts, that opens up the possibility of some sort of happily-ever-after. As if Tolstoy would allow such things. And then you spend about 200 pages feeling the same sense of dread that Natasha's family seems to feel. And, since I'm doing a terrible job with this post, I'm just going to quote this description of Mama Rostov(a): "Her maternal intuition told her that there was too much of something in Natasha, and that because of it she would not be happy."

And by the way, this time reading, I have a lot more blame to spread around. Everyone's at fault. Everyone.

Russian! Books! Stanford!

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them - Elif Batuman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

This book has a whole bunch of things I love:

• A regular New Yorker contributor as author
• Lots of talk about my alma mater and professors I knew
• Russian books and Russian history
• A good sense of humor

Once upon a time (sometime late 2000 through 2001), Roz Chast did a cartoon for the New Yorker that was a series of "thank you" cards to Ralph Nader for playing spoiler to Al Gore. I remember this well because my ex-boyfriend was apoplectic about this. As a result, I never see her work without thinking of that. And here she is, with the cover design, this of lots of wild-eyed readers and one manic, dancing book. But all of this is besides the point because...

Elif Batuman is delightful. Is it obnoxious and conceited to say she reminds me a little bit of myself? Her comical accounts of the "adventures" of the subtitle are interwoven with consider detail and exposition about lots of random facts about literature, history, geography, etc. She passes up few teachable moments.

I found myself laughing aloud several times while reading this book (which is a collection of essays about her adventures in undergrad & grad school as a student of Russian literature, many involving travel), and when I tried to explain what was so funny, it didn't translate. So I'm not sure it will here either, but here are a few of my favorite moments:

On Derrida: Elif is "someone who likes to keep to a minimum her visits to Planet Derrida--that land where all seemingly secondary phenomena are actually primary, and anything you can think of doing is an act of violence, practically by virtue of your having thought about it using some words that were also known to Aristotle..."

"Babel in California" is chock full of awesome, particularly picking up Babel's surviving partner and their daughter, working with Hoover, and other daughter Nathalie Babel's speech as rendered by Batuman.

Also this moment, which manages to contain a deeply-held belief and be hilarious at the same time:

...one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can't do that, what's it good for? On these grounds I once became impatient with a colleague at a conference, who was trying to convince me that the Red Cavalry cycle would never be totally accessible to me because of Lyutov's "specifically Jewish alienation."
"Right," I finally said. "A s a six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew."
He nodded: "So you see the problem."

Older Russian women have a great perspective on the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

An Uzbek janitor giving Elif's boyfriend sex advice, because it's unthinkable that she would be childless at 24. The "husband" must be doing something wrong.

Utterly amazing quote by Tolstoy (too long to post in full) about that misty half-understanding of poetry in a foreign language... "once I deciphered its true meaning, there were many cases in which I missed the poem I had invented..." - this is a feeling I have about songs all the time.

A couple things I liked less: Batuman doesn't have much nice to say about Orhan Pamuk. This hurts my feelings a little bit, but okay. And at one point I found myself troubled by how often she recounted held truths, most often of foreigners, in ways that made them clearly and patently ridiculous. Then I realized the foolishness wasn't endemic to that culture itself, but rather to all cultures, or all held and unquestioned truths.

I'm really just scratching the surface. This book was tailor-made for me. But if you like Russian literature and/or have dealt with being in grad school in the humanities, you might also find it filled with fun.

Tweeting Tolstoy

During my reading of Volume One, I also shared regular thoughts on my Twitter feed. Here they are... (hashtags removed except where integral to the tweet)

"If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy" --Isaac Babel

Feeling far more sympathetic to Pierre Bezukhov than I remembered.

If Prince Andrei turns out to be like Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites, I'm going to be pissed.

I imagine it comes as no surprise that I think War < Peace.

Andrei Bolkonsky is maybe not as awesome as I remember. (I think this is going to be a major theme of my #WandP tweeting.)

chai at Panera and #WandP (Napoleon is winning.)

The aftermath of battle: "All this was so strange, so unlike what he had hoped for."

"He was sincerely beginning to believe in his extraordinary kindness and his extraordinary intelligence..."

"... the more so because, deep in his heart, it had always seemed to him that he really was very kind and very intelligent."

The thought of battle makes soldiers emo. Also? Apparently the emperor is like Jesus or something.

Battles make for all sorts of confusion. And overblown prose. Thus ends Volume One.

Peace > War

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

Volume One

I was all aflutter when this translation came out, and it took me awhile (a year or so) to actually purchase it. And then it took me even longer to read it. I've mentioned before that I read W&P right after high school and fell dramatically in love with it. But how would I feel 13 years later?

So here I am this summer, reading this translation. Marveling at all the French. (Apparently P & V's decision to leave so much of the original French, which I think it probably justified, caused some amount of controversy.) When I committed to this big book (1215 pages before the appendix and endnotes) I decided I would serialize my reading. There are four volumes and a (two-part) epilogue. Attaching the epilogue to Volume 4, it makes for about 4 chunks of 300 pages each. I'll be interspersing this with lighter - or at least other - reading. (For example, on my plate right now: essays about being a 20-something female.)

I remembered that Tolstoy cut back and forth between "peace" in Moscow & Petersburg, and "war" out in Austria or wherever. I remembered finding war significantly less interesting. This has not changed. The homefront has women! and gossip! and romance and intrigue. The soldiers on the other hand are mostly just riding around being melodramatic and daydreaming about glory. Seriously, I found myself nodding off multiple times during battle scenes.

I did not remember that the novel starts back in 1805, years before much of the main action. I forgot that we meet Natalya Rostov(a) as a coltish tween. I forgot that before I had an irrational excuse to dislike Pierre, I might have actually found him charmingly inept and adorable, the way I do now.

But of course I remembered the epic scope of Tolstoy's world. And the ways in which he was so generous with detail. No one is an afterthought.

I'm looking forward to Volume 2.

Characters I Love

Memories are slippery, so I can't be sure exactly how dramatic this moment actually was, but I remember sitting, at 17, in a waiting room at Kaiser. I was there with my grandmother for some appointment or other, and I was reading War and Peace. (Isn't this how everyone spends the summer after their high school graduation?) Anyway, I had a thing for Prince Andrei. In fact, I'm looking forward to re-reading the book just so I can see how he holds up over a dozen years. And so there came a moment where another character acts in a way that will hurt him, and I exclaimed, to the whole room, "You whore!" Um, that was embarrassing.

Anyway, he's not the only character I have gotten too close to. And if you add in tv shows and movies, I am over-empathizing with characters all the time. But he's still the one that matters the most.

And now, reading Infinite Summer, I find myself (like Avery Edison) liking Hal Incandenza just a little too much. And fearing for him. Avery says anxious, and since I have such a close personal relationship with anxiety, it goes without saying that that's the best word for it. I just... I want it to be okay. But I don't think it will be.

I've always liked to root for the bad guy and tried to create antiheroes where they didn't exist. And I was down with my ex who, we joked, only liked movies where people died at the end. And yet.... A co-worker was telling me something he heard about ways in which women conceive of fairness differently than men. And really, when it comes down to it, as much as I don't want to be like everyone else, man do I crave the happy ending. I want things to be the way they are supposed to be. Which isn't always happy per se. But is the way I feel like it should be. It's unoriginal perhaps, and quite possibly is pretty unhealthy, but it's me.

All that said, I can't imagine DFW giving me what I want. And probably I'd respect him less if he did.

The Master Bedroom

The eponymous room of Tessa Hadley's novel was hard for me to envision, but apparently was a monster that ran along an entire side of what seems to have been a big English manor. It's also where Kate and her mother - whom Kate has moved home to care for - were both born. And more, but that comes later.

It's always strange when you come across a New Yorker short story in a novel, but it particularly threw me in this case because the story pulled from a plotline that stretched across the whole novel, rather that grabbing a chapter in whole.

I liked this book, because I found it touching how tentatively the characters reached out to one another. And also because the characters were mysteries, to one another but more importantly to themselves. But that said, The Master Bedroom was also deeply flawed. The mystery that makes a character intriguing also means that you never get to know them quite well enough to understand their actions, or at least to understand why their actions are incomprehensible. The teenaged Jamie is particularly unknowable, even as he seems perhaps the most adult of the bunch, and that's in some ways especially infuriating.

In the end though, the novel was sweet. And quick to read. And poignant. Like wrapping oneself in a warm blanket. And sometimes that's enough.

(oh, and one last thing. I loved how Kate describes Jamie on first meeting him: "Kate wouldn't have minded him in one of her classes: a Tolstoy type, not a Dostoevsky type, who were two-a-penny.")

War and Peace and Sex

This week's LA Times Book Review brought a few happy discoveries:

New translations of War and Peace. Tolstoy's tome is in my all-time top three, so the idea of new, updated interpretations thrills me. Plus, one of them (by Andrew Bromfield) is of an early draft of the novel, a shorter one, and one in which my favorite character appears to meet with a less tragic ending.

The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta. Reviewed by Carolyn Kellogg, formerly of LAist. She notes that this book is getting lots of review attention. And speaking of, I heard Perrotta on last week's New York Times Book Review podcast.

Him Her Him Again The End (!) of Him

[Exclamation point mine]

It happens rarely enough that I'm always a little giddy when it does happen. It? you ask. It is one of my favorite reading experiences, namely reading something that makes me laugh or otherwise react aloud. This is particularly amusing (to me) in public.

Aside: the summer after I graduated from high school, I read War and Peace, because I am a big nerd. I was utterly in love with Prince Andrei - we had a deep emotional connection. Anyway, I am in the waiting room at Kaiser, accompanying my grandmother to one or another appointment, and I get to the part where Natasha betrays him. (I'm a little fuzzy on the specific plot point, but I remember a definite sense of betrayal.) How dare she! This is Prince Andrei! So I manage to recall that I'm in public, so my cry of "You hussy bitch!" turned into some sort of strangled grr. (And I still have very strong feelings about how Tolstoy used and discarded this dream man of mine.)

But I digress. On Sunday, after a trek to the Hollywood Farmers Market for reconnaissance (Festival coming up!) I stopped by Groundwork for some iced tea and started reading Him Her Him Again The End of Him by Patricia Marx. (Hmm, I wonder how you punctuate that?) Suffice it to say that in the short time I was there, I stifled laughter several times.

This book is hilarious. It's unsurprising, seeing as how Marx wrote for The Harvard Lampoon and Saturday Night Live. Her heroine is absurd and witty and neurotic and intelligent and ridiculous, and all those things. Like an unabashedly imperfect cousin of Blue Van Meer. While "studying" at Cambridge (but mostly finding ways to procrastinate) she also fixates upon the archetypal preening intellectual, whose all-consuming ego makes him sexy. And over ten years he comes and goes, and strings her along, while she tries with varying levels of success and effort to do something with her life. And deal with a cast of wacky parents, bosses, friends, and colleagues.

But I wanted to share some of my favorite quotes. So despite the growing length of this entry...
*When her father badgers her about making a will: "I was beginning to think that either he knew something I didn't or that he was planning to kill me."

*On we, the reader: "I hope you are not getting fed up with me because, as it happens, I think I'm beginning to like you more and more. You're a good listener. Plus, I bet you have a winning way of turning the page."

*On Eugene, the pompous lover: "he believed that the later work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was derivative of Eugene's early work, which was an audacious theory, in my opinion, since Eugene hadn't entered Lacan's field of work until Lacan was dead."

None of these play as well out of context as they do on the page. (Boo.) But I hope you can read this entry and see how a steady stream of digressions and non sequiturs is exactly my kind of thing. If it's yours too, check out Patricia Marx.

Sweet Suite

After finishing Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise, I decided I needed a few days to mull over what I wanted to write here. But then I waited too long, and I have to return the book right after work. So here is my capsule review:

This novel is gorgeous - the descriptions are so lush, and the people are real even as they are archetypes. (I also loved the scene in which the cat goes exploring, arriving back at his owner's bed seconds before an air raid.) The juxtaposition of love and life with invasion and occupation is fascinating and very moving - the French were not innocent in their loss to the Germans, but nor should they be held fully accountable for collaboration. There were so many shades of grey.

But what makes the book truly amazing is the story of its genesis. Nemirovsky was a well-known writer in France before the war, a Ukrainian Jewish refugee from the Soviet Revolution. She wrote the novel essentially contemporaneously with events, and while struggling to survive. A losing battle, it turned out; she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz in summer 1942. Her husband followed her a few months later, but her two daughters lived, hidden, with her notebooks.

In the 1990s, they revisited the notebooks, which were previously too great a source of pain, and discovered that in addition to notes and a journal, there was a full-fledged novel taking shape. Suite Francaise is only the first two sections of what was to be a full "suite" of France during the war and occupation, a difficult task for Nemirovsky, as she did not know France's fate. After the body of the novel, the book includes Nemirovsky's journal and notes, laying out a rough sketch of her plans for the future parts. One guiding light was Tolstoy and War and Peace, which should give you a sense of why I liked this book so much.

Anyway, it is stunning. Purely stunning. I will be looking for more of her work in translation (or possibly even in the original French).

Meme, or, How I Learned a New Word Today

Until this afternoon, meme was one of those words (like trope and singularity had once been) that I vaguely knew but mostly dismissed as pretention. Until I got tagged by greenLAgirl, accused of falling for a pyramid scheme by Michael, and figured it was time I got an official definition. Hooray for Dictionary.com which built on Michael's expanded definition of "chain letter/thought virus" and explained that a meme was from same Latin root as "mime" and is "a unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another." Like a gene, except of ideas.

Anyway, but I believe I was tagged to talk about my literary tastes, not my fondness for etymology. So, without further ado:

A book that changed my life
The Fall of a Sparrow, by Robert Hellenga. Friends have challenged this one, but I read it at the exactly the right moment, in the right place.

A book I’ve read more than once
Emma, by Jane Austen. Possibly my all-time favorite book.

A book I’d take with me if I were stuck on a desert island
I am leaning toward Tolstoy, and War and Peace for the epic sweep. But I would also consider The Bible (King James), since I haven't read much of it and I'd have the time to consider a lot of stories.

A book that made me laugh
Anything by Helen Fielding - I am particularly fond of two that I know made me laugh aloud in public: Cause Celeb and Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination

A book that made me cry
A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving. That book tore me apart inside.

A book that I wish had been written
My dissertation? It was going to be on life behind the lines (i.e. where they sent all the promising students and most of the government) in Soviet Union during WWII.

A book that I wish had never been written
So many books have inspired hatred and violence - I could choose one of them. But I won't, because I don't seem to be able to find it in me to wish a book unwritten.

A book I’ve been meaning to read
I've had Herodotus' Histories on the backburner since I got through half of it the first week of my graduate program. Also at least 30 others.

I’m currently reading
In addition to my pile of New Yorkers, I have begun Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee.

Mr. Library (better known to some as the voice behind Vibes Watch) has graciously consented to be tagged. And I am realizing that my blogroll is pretty limited. So.... help me build it up, yo. I recognize that Rahul is probably above this, but just in case, I'll try tagging him too. As well as HH, whose i8 I just discovered. Will you come to LA and cook for me?