Reading 2666 by Robert Bolaño – Week 3

The assignment for this coming week was to read to page 159 which brought us to the end of “The Part About the Critics”. Thank god. I was getting really tired of the critics.

Guess what? Liz Norton ditched Pelletier and Espinoza and ended up with …. Morini. What a surprise. Not. He was the only one who treated her like a person. Why wouldn’t she prefer him even if he was wheelchair bound?

We did end up in Mexico finally. Searching for the elusive Archimboldi. We didn’t find him. Well, of course we didn’t find him. If we had found him the novel would be over.

Morini didn’t go to Mexico, he said his health wouldn’t permit it. Liz didn’t really want to go to Mexico and she left first. Pelletier and Espinoza were determined to go and after Liz left them they stayed on for a while.

In Mexico City they get a lead on Archimboldi having visited a northern Mexico city named Santa Teresa which is near the United States border. The closest American city with an airport is Tucson. (I have no idea if it is a real place, I suppose I should look that up, but I assume it is.) [ UPDATE: According to Matt at the official read site:" Even though we know that Santa Teresa is a fictionalized version of Ciudad Juárez, Bolaño has relocated the city from the state of Chihuahua (just across the border from El Paso, Texas) to Sonora." I wonder why he felt it necessary to create a fake Mexican location when all the other locations are real?]

Then Espinoza remembered that the night before, one of the boys had told them the story of the women who were being killed. All he remembered was that the boy had said there were more than two hundred of them and he’d had to repeat it two or three times because neither Espinoza nor Pelletier could believe his ears. … But not over a short period of time, thought Espinoza. From 1993 or 1994 to the present day … And many more women might have been killed. Maybe two hundred and fifty or three hundred. No one will ever know, the boy had said in French …

“So who’s guilty?” asked Pelletier.

“There are people who’ve been in prison a long time, but women keep dying,” said one of the boys.

The specter of these dead women does hang over the remainder of the time that the characters spend in Mexico. Espinoza especially thinks about it while he becomes somewhat obsessed with a young girl who sells carpets in the market place. (She’s a fairly likeable character and we end up meeting her whole family. Espinoza ends up treating her like a whore – complete with making her dress up in garters etc. I’m really glad to leave these characters behind.)

It is the day after hearing about the dead women that the two men find out by e-mail that Liz Norton, who is already gone, has “chosen” and has chosen Morini. (Interestingly, Liz Norton left before Espinoza and Pelletier found out about the women but in her e-mail she references the ongoing crimes in Santa Teresa.)

Norton found Santa Teresa unbearable and couldn’t wait to leave. Once Espinoza and Pelletier get this e-mail they can’t bring themselves to leave for quite a while. Bolaño intersperses descriptions of their days between excerpts of Norton’s letter.

The only part of this that I really found interesting was what caused Liz Norton to decide to choose Morini.

When Liz Norton returned to London from Mexico she happened upon an art retrospective of the painter Johns. At the retrospective she learned that Johns was dead. Norton found this very upsetting and she called Morini. Morini was not surprised because he already knew about Johns’ death. Morini told her that Johns died by falling into a Swiss ravine. The way Morini told the story it isn’t clear whether it was a terrible accident or suicide.

By the way, I intentionally wrote the above paragraph in a way that replicates how I “hear” Bolaño’s style. Obviously it isn’t exact but it’s how I hear it when I read. That’s why I say that his style is easy to read. But not that interesting. At least not from my perspective. it’s very much narrative interspersed with only occasional dialog and a lot of the dialog isn’t really dialog it is a character expounding on a subject. Real people don’t talk the way Bolaño has characters talk in this novel and I don’t know if that’s because it is a translation or if that is just the way he writes.

Anyway, the painter Johns came back into the story and became the turning point for Norton and Morini so I was glad I paid attention to him last week. And what dd Morini and Norton do when she arrived in Italy unexpectedly and announced she was staying with him? They talked. No sex; lots of talk. Of course she ended up with him.

You may have noticed that I don’t have a whole heck of a lot to say about this section other than about plot elements. There were a lot of dreams in this section. I find I don’t really care if they meant anything. They were pictures into the state of mind of the characters at the time so in that way they were effective. But, like real dreams, they are essentially unexplainable.

The search for Archimboldi wasn’t really very interesting and I always knew they wouldn’t find him. And Bolaño’s style and structure wasn’t really interesting except how he dragged out the contents of Liz’s email so that it seemed to last several days in the lives of Pelletier and Espinoza.

The next part we are to read will take us through the complete second part of the novel which is called “The Part About Amalfitano”. I’m looking forward to it. Amalfitano was introduced this week. He is also an academic, teaching at the university in Santa Teresa although he is a refugee from Chile. The three academics look down on him and are very smug around him. It is clear, however, that Bolaño means for us to take him seriously. He talks about serious things in his own world. He also seems very sad. He also doesn’t put Archimboldi up on a pedestal.

So far Amalfitano is the only really interesting character that has been introduced, in my opinion. I’m giving this novel through the second part before I judge it though. I feel that’s fair with a novel this long. But I admit that I keep thinking that I must be missing something about this novel. So far nothing that has been posted at the official read site had made a light go on for me. Adam Roberts over at The Valve has just announced that he is going to read it and blog about it. Maybe that will give me more insight.

I’m beginning to suspect that Bolaño’s point might be that there doesn’t need to be a point to a novel. Just read and enjoy. As he said about Liz Norton very early on “For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths, as Morini, Espinoza and Pelletier believed it to be.” I never found Norton to be a very sympathetic character but that was because we were constantly seeing her through the eyes of Pelletier and Espinoza who seemed determined to impose on her a depth of character. They wanted to interpret her in the way that they interpreted the novels they read. They could not simply enjoy being with her; they had to understand her. And yet their quest for understanding led them no closer to understanding her.

In much the same way as their search for Archimboldi came to nothing. Pelletier tells Espinoza at the end “We aren’t going to find Archimboldi” but then says he “And yet … I’m sure that Archimboldi is here, in Santa Teresa.” It was, he thought, the closest they were ever going to come to him. And in the same way, they didn’t discover Liz in Mexico although they could have. It was the closest they were going to come to that.

Family Album by Penelope Lively

All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.  So said Tolstoy.  In Penelope Lively’s novel, Family Album, one of the characters asserts that all families are screwed up, more or less.   The question is whether the family in this novel is more screwed up or less screwed up than average.

Over the years I’ve read many novels written in the “memoir” style in which an adult character looks back on a childhood that looks perfectly normal from the outside but which was horrible in some child abusive way.   When I first began reading Family Album I thought that it might be one of those novels.  I was mistaken, although I believe that Lively intended for me to be mistaken.  

I believe Lively intended the reader to be taken down the path of murky memories expecting to find something terrible at the end, only to find themselves confronted with nothing terrifying and, mostly (but not wholly), normal.  How did Gina get the knocked out at her eighth birthday party?  What did take place in the cellar?   Why does Ingrid still live with the family?   It’s all presented as a bit of a mystery but in the end none of it is very mysterious.  Well, the bit about Ingrid does turn out to be odd and is the taboo subject of the family.  But we find out about Gina’s party and the cellar in due course and find nothing odd there.  At least, I didn’t.   

The novel is the story of a family.  I don’t believe we are ever told the last name of the family but there is Charles the father, and Alison, the a mother and six children: Paul, Gina, Sandra, Katie, Roger and Clare.  And Ingrid, an au pere, who lives with them.  

When the story opens the children are grown and Gina, in her late thirties,  is bringing her boyfriend home to meet her parents.  They still live at Allersmead, a big old Edwardian house, as does Gina’s brother Paul, who can’t seem to get his life together.   Ingrid also still lives there with them, strange though that sounds.   The rest of the children are grown and scattered around the world. 

I expected that the story would be centered around Gina and Philip’s visit and involve many flashbacks as Gina slowly told Philip the story of her life.   That was my first mistaken assumption.  The visit is just a weekend visit and the story moves on.  Philip is intrigued by Gina’s family because he grew up in a small family so he asks many questions.  Gina’s answers seem evasive but it isn’t clear why she should be evasive and, eventually, she does answer him.   Since the reader is let into Gina’s actual memories we can confirm that, usually, there is nothing “there” there.  There is no real reason for her to be evasive.  Then Lively starts to bring in the other siblings and let us in on their memories.

Lively is writing a novel that is partly about how people’s memories work and partly about how siblings communicate and learn things within a family.  What family members think is important to talk about or focus on and what gets past them.  And how it finally becomes too late to easily bring up a subject because it has always been that way and has always been accepted as normal.  It is also an exploration about what it does and doesn’t mean to be a family. 

Lively expertly switches time and perspective throughout the novel showing us life at Allersmead through the eyes of everyone except, perhaps, much from the perspective of Charles.  At one point Katie, who lives with her husband in the States, is visiting her brother Roger, a pediatrician in Canada.  They are  reminiscing about a family holiday in Cornwall when they were children. 

They contemplate an August that is dead and gone, but not so at all, shimmering in their heads, and presumably other heads, an assemblage of fragments, of sea and rock and sand and faces and voices, things said and done, things seen and thought.

What they realize is that each remembers the same period differently.  Neither is right nor wrong, they just each remember the period differently.  Katie remembers it as “one commotion after another” but Roger remembers it as “an amazing summer” when his scientific nature was allowed to bloom.

He says:

That’s my point, you see.  Your Cornwall evidently was not my Cornwall.  Nor I suppose was anyone else’s.  Mum’s.  His.

This seems right to me.  My sister AB and I often joke with our younger sister CB that she grew up in a different family.  That’s because she remembers things we don’t and doesn’t remember things we do.  This seems natural since there is seven years difference between us.  My mother’s youngest sister regularly doesn’t remember things that her older sisters remember.   We all laugh when, in the middle of some story my mother is telling, my aunt says “Well I don’t remember that.  Not at all.”

In the novel Philip thinks that Gina is intentionally not remembering important things.  Gina confesses that she doesn’t often remember when she found out about big things because it wasn’t as if her parents sat the children down and told them big things.  The children just figured these things out over time.  And that seems right to me too. 

Philip wants to know about life at Allersmead because it must have been so different from his own childhood, just as Roger’s Chinese-Canadian fiance Susan is fascinated by what he can tell her about his childhood.  Roger finds it astounding that Susan would find his childhood exotic.  Gina, who travels often to war torn zones in which many children are displaced, realizes that children simply accept their situation as normal because that’s all they know.   They can’t dredge up details because days run together as “normal” days.

Gina thinks of childhood at Allersmead.  Sheltered, privileged.  But sharing that universal attribute of childhood:  the Allersmead world being the only one they knew, they could not conceive of an existence that was otherwise.  Until, of course, they grew up a bit and looked around and saw that families come in other sizes and shapes, that not all homes have a cellar and a kitchen table that seats twelve, that other parents are different but still recognizable as parents.

Evidently, a family with six children in the 1970’s was an aberration in Britain unless you were Catholic (which this family wasn’t).   Gina and to a lesser extent the other siblings seem to think the mere fact of their size was an oddity.  It was hard for me to relate to that because I grew up with so many friends who came from large families, families with 8, 9 or 14 kids.  Of course they were Catholic in a fairly Catholic city so no one really noticed. By the seventies there were fewer big families, but six kids was certainly not an aberration.  Today it is cause for comment but still not unknown.  

It was also hard for me to figure out exactly why Gina, especially, seemed to think that their childhood was aberrational, at least in terms of their daily lives.  But the fact that I couldn’t completely understand why she felt that way didn’t make me not understand that she felt that way.    

I do think Lively was trying to show that children remember things but not necessarily the way they really were because children simply didn’t have all the information necessary to put life into perspective at the time.   By foreshadowing things in a suspicious way and then having them turn out to be not so suspicious Lively is able to make it all the more believable that for years none of the children thought the taboo subject was odd.   

For instance, in the first chapter Lively insinuates that something bad may have happened in the cellar.   After that there are little references to the cellar but, after a few chapters, she has one of the characters remember what happened in the cellar.  It turns out that the children played down there and creating imaginary adventures, including enacting James Bond plots and playing house.  They also had a game of forfeits in which one sibling would order another to do something or suffer the forfeit.  Like, eat a spider. 

Being siblings, they could create imaginary worlds without needing a lot of communication – which put any non-family playmate at a disadvantage.   And the type of house they played certainly was a result (if not a reflection) of their upbringing.  Gina especially seems to think that all this playing was enjoyable but perhaps a little odd. 

Maybe there were psychological conclusions that could be drawn by how the children structured their games (certainly Gina and Paul, who always played the parents seemed to later think it reflected their views of parenting) but none of it seemed particularly outside the norm to me.

In fact it brought back a lot of memories.  I was only one of three children but I had a lot of cousins.  My dad’s family lived very close to us when I was growing up.  One of my dad’s brothers, who had three boys,  lived three houses away from us.  We all went to the same grade school.  Because we had the same last name and lived on the same street teachers (and some students) regularly thought we were siblings.    Three other cousins close to us in age also lived close by and went to the same school until I was about 8 years old.   Then another uncle who had 9 kids moved in right across the street from the school yard.   So I always had family around me.  And we played differently with them than with non-family friends.  When one of my cousins from up the street would come over to play he and I and my sister AB regularly played make believe games combining family events with television program plots.   Especially Bewitched, for some reason.  We didn’t regularly do that with non-family friends partly because it was harder because they just weren’t on the same wave length with us.

My little sister CB was relegated to supernumerary in these shows, being too young (as Clare is in this novel).   But later she would spend lots of time playing at another aunt’s house with two girl cousins.  Years later the three of them admitted that they always played house and in their story the parents were always dead and the oldest “sister” had to go out to work to support the younger two.   She did this by getting on her mother’s exercycle and cycling away to “work”.   Nobody thought that was weird.  Maybe a little too much reading of The Boxcar Children, but not weird.  Nobody thought that they “felt” orphaned in their families.

And both of my sisters, AB and CB, spent hours in my parents’ basement playing with the Fischer Price Little People, setting up towns and making up stories.   Sometimes (very rarely) I’d go down for a while.  But I certainly wasn’t the sister who would suddenly decide to RUN upstairs as fast as she could and lock her little sister in the basement laughing at the sound of crying coming from the other side of the door.   ( In fact sometimes I was the nice sister and opened the door, a fact which seems to be forgotten by both sisters.  Although admittedly it was usually because the crying was interfering with my piano playing or reading and not because I felt sorry for her.)

Basements and cellars are great places to play because they are away from prying parent eyes.  And kids aren’t always nice to their siblings.  But there is nothing nefarious about it.

So none of the play acting in the cellar struck me as odd. But I did understand how, by it’s nature, this play was exclusive to the siblings and excluded the rest of the world.

Yes, the taboo subject was a bit odd, but not in a way that physically harmed any of the children.   And the reader is let in on the secret at least half way through the novel so it isn’t a surprise to be sprung on us at the end.  What we want to know is how the siblings figured it out, what conversations between parents they overheard, when (if ever) they started feeling out other siblings about it, when did they just drop it and figure no one was ever going to mention it out loud?

And the underlying reason why none of the siblings felt they could talk about it was partly at least so that one particular sibling would not be singled out and feel hurt.  Lively never says this but it is clear.   It is only when that particular sibling decides to admit to having long time knowledge of the secret that the other siblings (with relief) can talk about it.  

In the end I didn’t think, on average, that this family seemed any more screwed up than any other family.  And I’m pretty sure that was the point.

I enjoyed this novel.  It is short (less than 250 pages) and a quick read, but it leaves a lot to think about.

Reading 2666 by Robert Bolaño -- Week 2

For the coming week we are supposed to have read up to page 102 in the Group Read of 2666. (Yes I copied the above “Bolaño” from the site to get that little squiggly thing above the n. Windows Live Writer should give us a way to make it ourselves.)

I can’t say that I have any great insights into this novel at this point but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing in a novel this long. It would be like having great insights into your typical 300 page novel at about page 30. On the other hand, the introductory remarks said that RB wanted to publish each part of the novel separately. If so, I’m more than halfway through what would be the first novel (novella?).

It isn’t like anything I’ve ever read before. I can’t at this point compare it to other long novels I’ve read.

I still think it isn’t that difficult to read. I mean this in a very simple sense. It is certainly a difficult novel to understand. But the physical act of reading isn’t difficult. The structure, while it contains some flashbacks, isn’t confusing. In some ways it has been too linear, too much a history of the relationship of these four academics in chronological terms. The lookbacks mostly occur only when one academic needs to be filled in on something that occurred when all four weren’t together. Sometimes I’ve felt that the story hasn’t really started yet. These pages have had the feel of background and I keep expecting that, at some point, we will reach the present and the story will begin. I’m ready for the story to begin.

I haven’t found the vocabulary difficult although the official read site has a post with a glossary so maybe some people do. In terms of a basic who, when, where, why and how I’m not spending any time trying to figure out the who, when and where. I consider that a mark of a novel that is an easy read; being able to focus on only the what, why and how is a luxury. In Hillary Mantel’s novel, Wolf Hall, I spent a lot of time working on the who because of her (apparently intentional) ambiguous use of the pronoun “he”. I’ve had trouble keeping track of who in the Russian novels I’ve read simply because the characters use multiple names. In science fiction novels the where is often unclear. And sometimes the when. Not in this novel. And the what is only unclear in the larger sense. There is no lack of clarity about what each character is doing at the time.

I wonder if other readers have had trouble with the where and when. The group read site has a person keeping track of locations and another keeping track of chronology. Maybe locations become more important later in the book. Maybe this is one of those novels that, when you get to the end, you must immediately re-read simply for structure and not plot elements. But so far I haven’t been confused, while reading, about where they were or when it was.

In short, these second 50ish pages went by almost as fast as the first 50 pages. I did, however, find myself flipping ahead a couple of times to see where my ending point was going to be. I’ll get to that later. And I can’t say at this point I like or I’d recommend this novel. But, again, we’re 100 pages into a 900 page novel.

Early on in this 50ish page segment, the Italian, Morini, decides to visit Liz Norton in London. Morini is not sexually involved with Norton, unlike the other two scholars Pelletier (the Frenchman) and Espinoza (the Spaniard). Morini is in bad health, he has multiple sclerosis, and he is in a wheel chair. He was involved in an unspecified accident that was referred to in the first 50 pages but never described.

That part went by fairly fast for me. Morini is my favorite of the four scholars and I think RB wrote him with that intention. Although I suspect that he only seems deeper than Pelletier and Espinoza because RB lets us into his mind less often than he does with Pelletier and Espinoza. Morini does, however, seem to have more common sense than Pelletier and Espinoza.

Norton has now broken off her affairs with Pelletier and Espinoza and they are even more obsessed with her than before. They are also intrigued by a new man who has appeared in her life. For pages (and pages and pages and pages, it seemed) they obsessed over him and what his relationship with Norton was. Finally they spill their guts to Morini who very sensibly suggests that they ask her. Truthfully, Morini is my favorite simply because Pelletier and Espinoza seem to me to be so transparently unreliable. Whenever the author is omniscient with those two I figure we’re being led down the wrong path. The author is seldom omniscient with Norton and is less omniscient with Morini. But he spends time describing Morini. The way Morini’s reactions to events are portrayed seem either more natural to me than the reactions of the others or, if not natural, worthy of investigation.

I find myself completely bored with Norton. I think that’s because I don’t trust Pelletier’s and Espinoza’s view of her (and their views are always sexual, whether they are thinking of her sexually or wondering if she is thinking of someone else sexually). I thought that when Morini finally visited London we would see the real Liz Norton. I don’t know if that happened. But, in any event, when she is with Morini she seems less interesting than him.

There were only two incidents in this segment that intrigued me. First, while Morini visits Norton she tells him the story of a painter named Johns who cut off his own hand, had it embalmed and incorporated it into one of his art works. Johns is now committed in an asylum. Toward the end of the 50ish pages Pelletier and Espinoza visit Norton and tell her that Morini has become obsessed with a painter named Johns who is in an asylum. They do not realize that Morini heard the story of the painter from Norton. Morini, with the aid of Pelletier and Espinoza, tracked down the painter and visited him in the asylum.

They describe the entire odd experience and how Morini disappeared without saying goodbye and didn’t appear for a long time. They were quite worried about him. Norton tells them that he came to London to tell her his theory about the painter. (She also tells them that she promised not to reveal this to anyone; so she is breaking that promise to Morini).

I have no idea if this part of the story has significance. While I was reading the part where Norton tells Morini the story of Johns (and Morini feels sick to his stomach as he listens) I didn’t find it that interesting although I found Morini’s reaction interesting. But I found it intriguing that Morini would actually track down Johns and I found his reaction to him intriguing. But as I say I don’t know if it has any significance other than as a look into Morini’s psyche.

It’s hard to know what, if anything has any significance, in this novel.

The other incident that intrigued me was a brief discussion that Pelletier and Espinoza had with the new mysterious man in Norton’s life. He tells them to watch out because she is a Medusa. They try to interpret this in their usual scholarly “let’s over-think this” way. Medusa was the only one of the Gorgons who was human and, therefore, could be killed, and if Norton is a Medusa they should feel sorry for her. When Medusa died the winged Pegasus sprang from her head and Pegasus is a symbol of love. I won’t go into the whole theory but let’s just say that it makes them feel tender toward Norton and sure that they are the key to her happiness. Or at least one of them is.

This is one reason I find them unreliable. Yes, all of these things are part of the Medusa myth. But Pelletier and Espinoza are obsessed with Norton and will interpret anything about her in the light that is best for their relationship with her. I found it striking that they didn’t even begin to consider the most obvious meaning.

A Medusa would be a danger to them because she would turn them to stone. Metaphorically. In reality their obsession would mean that they would cease acting – they would become unable to go forward with whatever they were working on. And in fact that is what happened to them. For a very long time they stopped doing much about Archimboldi and simply skated on their reputations. They obsessed about Norton. Each obsessed about his relationship with Norton. Each obsessed about the other’s relationship with Norton. Then Norton dumps them and they obsess about the new guy and her relationship to (or with) him. The story slowed down to a crawl. It was like it was turning to stone.

Of course there are other interpretations. But they didn’t even really consider that Norton could be BAD for them. They also didn’t consider the interpretation that the only way to really understand Norton is not to look directly at her (her looks, her direct actions, her direct words) but to look at her indirectly. In other words, not to take her at face value. (Perseus defeated Medusa by looking at her in a mirror while he slew her. That way she couldn’t turn him to stone.) I don’t know if that’s a good interpretation because not enough about Norton has been revealed. She may, in fact, be a very simple person and her glamor (in the true sense of the word) may be something they have imbued her with because of their own competition.

And the whole thing might mean nothing because we know next to nothing about this mysterious man and he may just have been saying something he thought was insulting to Norton.

Other than that I found nothing too intriguing in these 50ish pages.

By the end we have finally gotten to Mexico, but only through a story related to the scholars about a person who met the mysterious Archimboldi there.

I was less tolerant of this 50 pages than I was with the first 50. There was a lot of ink expended on Pelletier’s and Espinoza’s obsession with Norton and, as I’ve said, RB hasn’t given me enough about Norton to understand this obsession. She seems ordinary and boring to me in all ways except that she was willing to carry on affairs with two friends simultaneously. And that just made me think she had bad judgment. Combine that with her story of her unhappy marriage to someone she describes as abusive and the obnoxious way that she allowed the mysterious new man to treat her in the one scene where they are together and she seems to have really bad judgment when it comes to men.

In any event, she isn’t actually in the many pages that are spent describing the obsession of Pelletier and Espinoza. RB spent pages (and pages and pages) on a long (I assume) digression about how they go whoring once she breaks up with them and the different effects this has on them. It was around this time that I started looking to see how many pages were left in this assignment.

I’ve never found stories of men’s obsession with sex and thoughts of women as sexual objects that interesting. I get even less interested in men’s thoughts about women they are using as sexual objects but whom they think they are interested in as a person. I can only get through this type of story if the writing is beautiful. I was, for instance, bored by the subjects of many of John Updike’s novels but I read them for his prose. A wonderful use of the English language will make me read novels about subjects that don’t personally speak to me (and not being a man, this subject just doesn’t speak to me).

In this case I have no idea if the writing is beautiful because this is a translated novel. As I said in my previous post the style seems clunky. So I really, REALLY hope that this entire novel isn’t going to be about the internal workings of the mind of men in the midst of sexual obsession. I think that’s why Morini seems interesting to me. If he has a sexual obsession it isn’t at all apparent.

At the main group read site, there is an interview with Lorin Stein, the editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux who edited the translated versions. The last question and answer concerned me:

MB: Without going into too many spoilers, but looking at all the plotlines and characters, what would you say is the overall theme or main idea behind 2666? What is Bolaño trying to achieve here?

LS: If there’s an overall theme or main idea, I don’t know what it is. The murder of women in northern Mexico is clearly central to the book. More generally, 2666 strikes me as preoccupied with death–specifically, with the fear of death. One’s own death, the death of people one loves. That fear erupts throughout Bolaño’s work. It is a kind of existential terror. In most of the books it’s an undertone. But in 2666 those murders make the fear concrete.

No overall theme or main idea. In a 900 page novel. Not a good sign.

I am enjoying some of the posts on the official site and I suspect I will enjoy them more as we get deeper into the novel.

It’s still Winter?

It’s bitterly cold again and we got a light dusting of snow overnight. Thank goodness it’s almost February and the shortest month of the year. I know we have six more weeks of winter but by March, with the light at the end of the tunnel beginning to show, I have a much better attitude toward winter.

To remind myself that summer will come again, here’s a summer picture from a couple of years ago. This was the first time Truman met his “cousin” Max. Now Truman is as big, if not bigger, than Max. And he loves the snow.

It’s going to be a long couple of winter months without much on TV to watch. Glee doesn’t come back until April. Stargate Universe doesn’t come back until April. And now Dollhouse is over.

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Where Do You Read?

A while ago Charles Simic wrote:

As a rule, I read and write poetry in bed; philosophy and serious essays sitting down at my desk; newspapers and magazines while I eat breakfast or lunch, and novels while lying on the couch.

He finds it more difficult to find a “regular” place to read history or comedy.  After all, if one is reading a history of Stalin, one doesn’t want to be too comfortable.  And if one is reading a laugh-out-loud comedy one doesn’t want to necessarily be around other people no matter how otherwise comfortable one might be.

Simic also must read with a pencil in hand: preferably a stub of a pencil so I can get close to the words, underline well-turned sentences, brilliant or stupid ideas, interesting words and bits of information, and write short or elaborate comments in the margins, put question marks, check marks and other private notations next to paragraphs that only I—and sometimes not even I—can later decipher. 

I was thinking about this as I was reading my 2666 “assignment”.  I was thinking maybe I should make some margin notes.  I generally don’t.   I didn’t even do it much when I was in school.  I prefer to keep notes separately and, then, only if I’m planning on going back to them for some reason.  Otherwise I want to just read without the distraction of notes.   Lately I’ve taken to sticking a small pad of post-it notes in the front of my books and just sticking them on pages I want to go back to later.  Sometimes I can’t remember why I marked a particular page but most of the time it’s a pretty good system.

My grandma was different.  She was a great reader until she reached the last year or two of her life.  And she would pass along books with pencil-written notes in the margin where she would vigorously disagree or agree with an author.  Or where sometimes she would just mark sexy passages.

I should have kept some of those books.

Reading 2666 by Robert Bolano

A few weeks ago I said that I was considering doing the group read of Robert Bolano’s novel 2666. I’m not sure why. It wasn’t as if I had been dying to read it. I knew nothing about the author or the novel except I knew that it won an award (I wasn’t sure which one) and I had a vague idea that it was about murders in Mexico. But even though I’m on hiatus from my own reading groups the idea of reading a novel at the same time (and same pace) as a group of other serious readers appealed to me.

I gave it some thought and decided I would read the novel along with the group but I would not officially participate. I could change my mind about either one of those decisions. (Yes, I have issues with commitment. You aren’t telling me anything I don’t know about myself.)

So first I finished An American Tragedy, which was the big novel I was currently working on. I needed to do that so 2666 could be my “work read” at lunchtime. Then I went out and got the novel. It is big. My paperback version is 898 pages long. (This would be the perfect time to try out a Kindle but apparently it isn’t available on Kindle.)

I didn’t read the back of the book so I still don’t know what it is about. The cover art is some strange religious looking imagery. There is a label on the front that says it won The National Book Critics Circle Award.

The group read begins the week of January 25 and the group is supposed to have read through page 51 by the beginning of that week. So I took it to work with me last week to read during lunch if I could. I ended up having two days free for lunchtime reading and that turned out to be plenty of time.

I thought before the whole group discussion starts I would post my initial thoughts so I could later compare them with what other people thought.

1. I flew through the first 51 pages. Compared to Tolstoy and Dreiser this is an easy read. I’ve been thinking about why and I can’t quite put my finger on it because the story is not as straightforward as theirs were and the writing style is also not as straightforward. Truthfully I think it’s because there are no chapters. I find chapters to be natural stopping points and sometimes I stop when I could very easily go on. Tolstoy has a lot of short chapters. Dreiser also had a lot relatively short chapters. RB has no chapters (I can’t make that little squiggly mark over the “n” in Bolano so I’m just going to call him RB).

2. For many pages I wondered if I had been confusing this novel in my mind with another novel because it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with murders or Mexico. But finally, on page 43, one of the characters (Morino) read an Italian news story about killings in Mexico. It is a two paragraph aside and so far has gone nowhere. I have no idea how the story is going to even get to Mexico since so far it is taking place in Europe.

3. The story (so far) is about academics studying an obscure author and I’m a sucker for stories about academics studying authors. This may be why I’m finding it an easy read.

4. I’m not sure I like RB’s style but I can’t decide if it is him that is the problem for me or the translator. I tend to stay away from books in translation and one reason is because of this very question. On the one hand, I think he was going for a somewhat conversational style. The narrator is not a character, yet the authorial “voice” is that of someone verbally telling a story. And just as people telling a story verbally ramble all over the place and have run on sentences and begin lots of phrases with the word “and” …. so does RB. I’ve never read any of his other works so I don’t know if this is typical of his style or if he chose it for this novel. Maybe this will become clear in the commentary for the group read.

An example: There is a sentence that starts on page 18 and I think it doesn’t end until page 22. It is a summary of a story that is told by a visitor and listened to (with bated breath) by the academics. It works perfectly in so far as that is how people really relate stories that they heard to someone who wasn’t there. On the other hand, I read novels because I’m looking for a bit more formality than I get in my everyday life. I found it annoying to a certain extent and I remember thinking in the middle of it that I certainly hoped this wasn’t going to be a regular occurrence. I assume this is RB and not the translator.

Another example: In one paragraph the word “paltry” is used twice and in neither case is it a word I would have chosen. “They spent the free time they had, which was ample, strolling the paltry (in Pelletier’s opinion) sites of interest in Augsburg …” “… Morini wasn’t in the best of health this time, but rather in paltry health …” I probably wouldn’t have noticed the first paltry if the second hadn’t occurred two sentences later. Paltry health? Is this RB? Or is this the translator?

I dislike when word choices and structure choices get in the way of my enjoyment and twice in 51 pages is a lot for an award winning novel.

5. I really dislike the way RB writes women so far. There aren’t many women but there is one key woman character, Liz Norton. The peripheral women characters seem very stereotyped in a male nightmare or fantasy type of way (there’s even an older German woman with a Marlene Dietrich body. good god). Liz Norton has already become an object of desire for two of the other academics and she is carrying on an affair with both of them with full disclosure to the other one. Maybe men think this makes a female character interesting but so far I think it just makes her a stereotypical male fantasy. Add to that the discussion about the familiarity or not by the two other (otherwise boring) academics’ participations in a menage a trois and familiarity with the works of the Marquis de Sade and – well it all just seems like a fantasy created for a novel. We’ll see if RB redeems himself by doing something unexpected. If he doesn’t, this is going to be a real problem for me because my eye rolling is interfering with my reading.

By the way, the plot so far concerns a mysterious German author named Archimboldi (which, yes, doesn’t sound German) who is the object of study of the four academics. Archimboldi is, apparently, still alive but mysterious in more than a JD Salinger kind of way. No pictures, etc. RB has spent pages of detail going through the history of how these four academics (French, Spanish, Italian and British) began studying Archimboldi and got to know each other and become friends (and lovers). Lots of detail on all the conferences they attended and papers they gave. But although that could be dull I thought RB managed to make it work. Again, I have no idea how any of this relates to murders in Mexico.

6. I don’t know why this is called 2666, which doesn’t bother me. That will become clear (I assume). What bothers me is that I don’t know how to pronounce it. I realized this when I told someone I was going to read it. Do you pronounce each number: Two Six Six Six. Or is it Twenty-Six Sixty-Six? Or Two Thousand Six Hundred Sixty Six? Or Two Thousand Six Sixty Six? Or Two Six Sixty Six? You see the problem? Again, I assume all will become clear. But an online reading discussion isn’t going to clear up THAT point unless someone decides to write about it.

I look forward to reading the discussions next week. And despite my complaints about it, I’m still looking forward to the next 50 pages.

It’s Complicated

I went to see another movie over the holidays.  It’s Complicated is a traditional romantic comedy except that it is about old people.  Which is kind of nice since I’m starting to classify myself as an old person.  

Meryl Streep’s character, Jane, and Alec Baldwin’s character, Jake, have been divorced for ten years and she thinks she is finally over it and starting to feel “normal”.   It is clear at the beginning of the film that she is not.   Her friends tell her she needs to date someone but her head is just not there.  This is beautifully presented when her architect and his partner come to present the plans for her new home addition.  Jane’s focus is completely on the man that she knows (the ‘safe’ man) despite the fact that he keeps telling her that Adam (Steve Martin) has done all the work.   It isn’t clear at that point that Adam is a single man but that doesn’t matter.   Jane is not open to new people especially new men.

The film is the story of how Jane opens herself up and starts to take chances.   As I said, it’s simply a romantic comedy but I liked it.  I laughed aloud a lot.

All three of the lead actors (Streep, Baldwin and Martin) do a good job, especially Martin who plays Adam in a very understated way.   This makes it all the funnier when Adam and Jane get stoned and Martin gets to use some of his old crazy act.  Baldwin isn’t really much different than his character on 30 Rock but that didn’t matter.   Streep is, as usual, perfect. 

The writers gave Jane three girl friends because … well because three must be the magic number for girl friends in movies.   I say this because Mary Kay Place was almost completely unused except in reaction shots so I wasn’t clear why she was needed.  But no matter.

Jane and Jake were also given three children and they were fine.  But the oldest daughter’s fiance, Harley (John Krasinski), almost steals the movie.   It is hard to do that and play a character that is “perfect” but Krasinki pulls it off.   He is the son-in-law and brother-in-law that every couple would want and he makes this clear without ever being given anything to do that any son-in-law/brother-in-law character is ever given to do in a movie.   And Krasinski pulls off the comedy perfectly when Harley inadvertently discovers Jane and Jake are having an affair.

There isn’t really much to say about this movie, no deep analysis necessary.   It isn’t by any stretch of the imagination multilayered.  This is a film that says that no matter how old you are you are still going to sometimes act and think like an insecure teenager.   A point that is driven home (not subtly) at the end when Steve Martin’s character has a wonderfully adult reaction to a bad turn of affairs and Meryl Streep’s character, in a bit of shock, says something about how adult the conversation is.  

It worked for me. It is what it is and does what it does very well.  If you are looking for a romantic comedy to see in a theater, go see it.   Or wait for it to come out on DVD.   Or both.

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

Last Saturday, after a full morning and early afternoon of running errands, getting my haircut and all the other Saturday things I usually do, I settled down to read as much of An American Tragedy as I could before it was time for bed.   I decided that enough was enough and I needed to finish it.   I was a little more than half-way through the novel.   By 11:00 that night I had finished.  

One of the problems that I’m finding with reading Really Long Books is that by the time the novel ends I feel ready to move on and not spend more time thinking about it.   In this case, throughout the novel I felt like there was a lot to say but now I’m past being able to say it in any coherent way.

Here, then, are my perhaps incoherent and certainly jumbled thoughts about this novel.

The world is a better place with the invention of a safe, (mostly) reliable, easy, (relatively) inexpensive form of birth control like the pill and, indeed, almost all the problems in this novel could have been avoided if the pill had been available.   Roberta would not have gotten pregnant and Sondra could have had a sexual fling with Clyde, tired of him and dropped him when she figured out that they would make a terrible match.

I’m sure there are moralists who would say that all the problems would have been avoided if no “pre-marital sex” would have occurred.   Sure.  But this is the real world.    Sex happens.   Dreiser knew that and didn’t shrink from it.

I’ve always thought that the religious aversion to pre-marital sex has its roots in the same practical considerations that produced the rule against eating fish on Fridays.   And this novel bears that out.  Take away the availability of the pill and the equal rights movement that brought changes in the workplace, a girl who has sex without the “protection” of marriage is more likely than not going to get pregnant and be unable to support herself and her baby.   This is still true in many parts of the world.   It makes sense that faced with a world where the pill is not invented, the best way to help girls avoid this very bad situation is to try to change behavior.  The availability of the pill changes that reality.  Too bad the moralists didn’t change too.

Of course, moralizing against sex doesn’t really change behavior, which is what Dreiser shows.  And of course consequences never matter if you have enough money to avoid them.   They never do.    Another way to look at the novel is to say that all the problems would have been avoided if abortion had been safely available to all instead of just to the wealthy who had connections.   Compare the story of Roberta and Clyde with the story of Clyde’s lawyer who has much sympathy for Clyde because of his own past.

For once, in his twentieth year, he himself had been trapped between two girls, with one of whom he was merely playing while being seriously in love with the other.   And having seduced the first and being confronted with an engagement or flight, he had chosen flight.  But not before laying the matter before his father, by whom he was advised to take a vacation,  during which time the services of the family doctor were engaged with the result that for a thousand dollars and expenses necessary to house the pregnant girl in Utica, the father had finally extricated his son and made possible his return,  and eventual marriage to the other girl.

A thousand dollars in the 1920’s (or earlier).  I can’t even begin to imagine what that is in today’s terms.   But where there is money there is always a way.   Of course no one would have had need of an abortion if the pill had been available in the first place.  And anyone who thinks that making abortion illegal will make it disappear should read this novel.  It has always been available but not to all.   Even when it was illegal.

Another way to look at it is that Roberta wouldn’t have needed to even consider an abortion if there had been other options available to her.  If, for instance, a society that prohibited abortion had, instead, services available to help pregnant women give birth without stigma and either raise their children or give them up for adoption.  But that didn’t exist for Roberta.  The stigma was great and would devolve on the entire family.   And there were no services available.

Girls who got pregnant and were abandoned by the men who were integral to that process were left on their own or to the mercy of their families.   It says something good about Clyde’s mother that her own daughter, Esta, could turn to her for help in the same situation and Clyde’s mother did help her.  I never completely understood why Roberta felt that she couldn’t turn to her own mother who certainly had no resources but, then, neither did Clyde’s mother.  The only difference I can think of is that Roberta was never forced to totally face her situation because Clyde was always there for her to think she could turn to even though she knew he was unreliable.  Clyde’s sister Esta was left high and dry and, perhaps, was forced to acknowledge to herself that she had nowhere to turn.

Of course, all of this could have been avoided if Clyde had followed the rules of the workplace.  There would have been no sex if there had been no fraternizing.  I thought it was interesting that Dreiser created a factory that had strict rules against fraternizing with the girls (which many did) and in which there is no “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” to show that no one followed these rules.   He gave Clyde no “out” and in many ways the situation is similar to what goes on today with supervisor/supervisee fraternization rules that arose out of sexual harassment law.   But  Clyde flat out broke the rules.    And Clyde knew he had issues in looking to have a woman in his life based on his experience in Kansas City, and he knew that if his uncle found out he’d be fired and lose his best hope of advancement in this society, but he was still unable to stop himself.

Of course the real problem is Clyde.   I thought Dreiser did a good job of creating a character that I never really liked but never completely disliked.   Dreiser even made the death of Roberta ambiguous as far as Clyde’s intent went.  Mostly I felt that Clyde was weak willed and somewhat naive while at the same time begin somewhat grasping – which I think is what I was supposed to think.   He certainly isn’t someone I would want to go out of my way to associate with; on the other hand I recognized him.   I know that I do associate with people like him (male and female). 

I liked that Dreiser didn’t make Clyde a lothario who seduced Roberta by sweeping her away.  I like that he created a realistic situation in which both are attracted to each other and biological urges get the better of Roberta’s common sense.  It seemed very realistic to me and I never thought that Dreiser treated the character of Roberta with anything except respect.  Although Clyde has his bad points Dreiser made sure it was realistic that Roberta would fall for him and think he was better than he was.  He also didn’t make her perfect.  She is the one who chooses her new boarding arrangement in the knowledge that it may lead to something.  She does think of Clyde as her ticket out even while she does genuinely like him and is genuinely attracted to him.  Roberta is a real woman, in many ways much more real to me than Sondra who of course isn’t real to Clyde either.  He never sees her as she is.   The situation between Roberta and Clyde and between Clyde and Sondra is obviously meant to be parallel.  It highlights the differences between being a man and being a woman on the lower social end of the relationship.  It also highlights the difference between being a woman with money and resources and being someone in Roberta’s shoes.  Is there any doubt that Sondra’s family would have taken care of everything if Sondra had found herself pregnant? 

I also liked that Dreiser took his time with the few months of Roberta’s pregnancy.  This is a long book and it covers Clyde’s entire life (short though it is).   But Dreiser intentionally slows down the pace once Roberta discovers she is pregnant and the novel begins its slow, inexorable way toward the terrible conclusion.   

As with most tragedies, I have a hard time relating to the tragic figure.   That seems right to me; tragic figures bring about their own demise through their own weakness, their own tragic flaw.  It is easy to be scornful of them.  I never really liked Hamlet.  Where Dreiser succeeds with Clyde is in showing how one bad decision leads to another bad decision.  The reader can be yelling “STOP!” but Clyde is on the path and will not be able to stop himself.

In some ways, although Roberta is the victim, I had an easier time relating to her as a tragic person which I’m not sure Dreiser intended.  She too was brought down by much of the same flaw that Clyde had:  she saw him as a path to upward mobility and she was not capable of standing firm against her own biological urges.   The real tragedy of Roberta is that she finally saw herself clear of him … and then discovered she was pregnant.  She could have made a better life for herself that was based on the reality of her situation  if this fling had just been a learning experience.  But the fling brought on the pregnancy which led to her death.   I liked that Dreiser had Clyde’s mother, near the end, think about the fact that Roberta was also to blame for the situation she and Clyde found herself in because she had free will and she could have chosen not to become involved with Clyde. She made choices along the way and many of them were bad choices.  Of course, she had no choice over her own demise.

As far as Dreiser’s actual writing style, I found it slow going.  In a way, it reminded me of Tolstoy.   The translators Pevear and Volokhonsky admitted that Tolstoy is known for having a “clunky” style and they didn’t try to smooth it out in their translations.  Dreiser’s style is clunky too.  And, like Tolstoy, he gets inside his characters’ heads and lets the reader in on the sometimes incredibly dull decision-making process whereby a character spends pages deciding on a course of action only to have another character show up and suggest something entirely different and the first character finds himself swept along in a direction he never intended.    But also,  like Tolstoy,  Dreiser finds the essential truth in his characters which makes them essentially timeless.  This novel may have been published in the 1920’s but the characters can be found today on the streets of any major city.

And like Tolstoy’s War and Peace the ending was just a little too drawn out for my taste.

I admit that I read the later portions that described Clyde’s  trial so fast as to be almost skimming.  I dislike most novels that describe trials.   In order to catch my interest they need to be told not from the point of view of any participant but from the view of an observer – as in To Kill a Mockingbird.   Everything in the trial needs to be new and not rehashed.    But that’s my own personal issue.  I imagine that when the novel was released the trial portion was seen as a sensational part of the novel.    The parts where Clyde is in the death house brought me back into the novel and I thought were rendered very well.

On the whole I’m happy I read this novel.  I can see why it, and not Sister Carrie, is held up as the Dreiser novel and why it is considered a classic.   But I liked Sister Carrie better.  In the same way that I liked Anna Karenina better than War and Peace even though I understand the importance of War and Peace. 

Making the List

In December there was a to do when certain “best of” lists didn’t include many women authors. Lots of writing about it. Much of it interesting.

In an Op Ed in the Washington Post, Juliana Baggot talks about why this might be. She notes this:

What's interesting, however, in the Publishers Weekly list is that the books are not only written by men but also have male themes, overwhelmingly. In fact, the list flashes like a slide show of the terrain I was trying to cover in my graduate thesis, when I wrote all things manly -- war, boyhood, adventure.

Lydia Netzer stirs the pot and responds.

She notes:

As December wanes, it's the traditional time for women everywhere to scan the names on the "Best Books" list, realize they are woefully underrepresented, and complain.

But, she says, complaining gets you nowhere and, she thinks, Baggot is right to examine why this is happening.

While Baggott and others call out a sexist bias, Baggott goes a bit farther, asking why this imbalance in artistic recognition exists. Too often feminists and other axe-grinders reel around shaking their little fists and saying "This is bad! Bad list!" Then they totter away, ending the train of thought in comfortable outrage. But this isn't about morality, or whether something is right or wrong. This isn't church, and we don't get points for being right. It is what it is. The interesting question is "Why is it the way it is?"

Baggott suggests the lists favor men because they favor male themes: "war, boyhood, adventure." She says that she was discouraged, early in career, from writing about motherhood, a female theme, because "it would be perceived as weak." So, maybe the reason women aren't "Best of" is because they don't write about "Best of" things.

I have to agree with Baggott's theory.

At first I thought that Netzer was going to say that “Best of” themes aren’t necessarily the best themes, they are just themes that are more likely to get you on the “best of” lists. I thought she was going to tell the women who care about “best of” lists that they need to learn to play the game. Which I think is very practical advice. But she goes further.

Netzer examines three theories one can have about the list:

The list is real. The numbers are what they are. As I see it there are three possible explanations:

1. The list is sexist, purposefully oppressing women. The solution in this case would be, I guess, to burn down the list. Make a new list. Get those bastards. This seems kind of weak and paranoid.

2. The list is false, reflecting a lame and lingering cultural bias that is on its way out. The solution is to wait. After all, we didn't count the black writers, or the South American writers. It will all come around, given more time. I guess this is what I would like to believe.

The third possibility is more alarming than the others, because it is the simplest explanation, and therefore the most viable:

3. The list is right. The things that women write about are neither culturally nor historically significant, and the books that women write are not the best books.

Yes, she is being intentionally provocative. And at first I chafed at the idea in number 3. But I keep coming back to her next point which is very much based on the work of women in the last decade:

Baggott mentions the deification of Faulkner, Chekhov, Hemingway. I have to ask: In the last decade, what woman would you put up against these giants? Maybe there were moderns that could carry the torch -- Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, or others from the 20th century: Harper Lee, Willa Cather, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison. But now? Where is my Gertrude Stein? Who can stand up against Junot Diaz and Khaled Hosseini and Kazuo Ishiguro? Is it really supposed to be Alice McDermott?

Netzer concludes in a very practical vein which goes back to where I originally thought she was going – there are “best of” topics. They may not be the best topics in your opinion but they are the topics likely to get you on a “best of” list:

The lesson of the list is that nobody's going to do us any favors. We're not going to get prizes just for showing up and writing our little books. Girl books are great; I like to read them and write them. But if we're writing girl books, we're not getting on "Best of" lists, and that is the reality. Do with it what you will.

There’s something I like about this attitude. It is realistic. Personally, I don’t think getting included on someone’s “best of” list means a hill of beans as far as merit goes. There are lots of very good authors out there, not only women, who don’t have a large readership and are never going to catch the attention of the people who make “best of” lists, at least “best of” lists that anyone cares about.

But being on a “best of” list probably does mean something in terms of book sales and financial remuneration. And, lets face it, it probably does mean something in terms of having a work that will last in the consciousness of the public. It doesn’t mean it will one day be deemed a classic; but at least it brings the book to the attention of the people who might decide to teach it and thereby make it a classic.

So if it is important to a woman to get on the “best of” list, start writing the type of thing that gets picked for a “best of” list and stop writing the stuff that doesn’t.

This seems very practical to me.

But at the end, when she softens her advice a little, she again got back to that nagging question she had asked above. Speaking of novels about motherhood she says:

Yeah, motherhood is important, we wouldn't be here without it. But we wouldn't be here without eating either, and I don't see a lot of cookbooks winning Pulitzers. Maybe it's not about writing about "man themes" but about human themes. Maybe it's not about pandering to the list, but evolving, as a gender, into people who address the important stuff, the big stuff: death, war, sex, adventure, as it pertains to women and men.

Evolving as a gender. Where is our Kite Runner she asks?

Personally I wouldn’t put Khaled Hosseini on a par with Faulkner and Woolf either. But I get what she is saying. He does paint on a large canvass.

Everything I read tells me that women make up the vast majority of readers. And the ranks of would-be writers are full of women. I read a lot of women authors. And I enjoy much of what I read. But I do think that most of the time, even when the women is writing about what I think is a culturally or historically significant theme, the women paints on a small canvas.

I compare a novel like Brick Lane to A Thousand Splendid Suns. I consider both of those novels to be stories of individual women and novels about political situations. Although I thought both authors succeeded with many things in their novels I wouldn’t elevate either of those novels to “great” novel status. But I do recognize that the (male) author of A Thousand Splendid Suns decided to work with a broad canvass while the (female) author of Brick Lane chose to work on the small canvass. It is almost as if the (male) author of A Thousand Splendid Suns told his tale to a large audience gathered in the living room while the (female) author of Brick Lane told her tale to the women in the kitchen shelling peas. I felt that Hosseini expected that men and women would read his tale of two women in Afghanistan where I felt that Monica Ali assumed that mostly women would be reading her novel.

I was thinking about this as I was reading Ted Genoway’s current piece in Mother Jones: The Death of Fiction. That’s a somewhat misleading title. He’s really writing about the death of literary magazines. He compares the situation that editors of Lit Mags in years past face compared to the situation today.

Consider this: When Wilbur Cross was elected governor of Connecticut in 1930, an unlikely Democratic victor in an overwhelmingly Republican state, his principal qualification was his nearly 20 years as editor of Yale Review. Indeed, Cross essentially invented the modern quarterly when he reshaped the sleepy review to more closely mirror The Atlantic in its discussion of current events alongside literature and criticism. While preparing to take office, he was in correspondence with Aldous Huxley, Sherwood Anderson, and Maxim Gorky about their contributions to the next issue. In fact, through four successive terms, Cross never left the helm of Yale Review—publishing John Maynard Keynes on microeconomics and Thomas Mann on the threat of Nazism—at the same time he was pushing back against legislated morality (such as Prohibition) and enacting tougher child-labor restrictions. When the New York Times asked how he found time to read manuscripts and review proofs while performing his responsibilities as governor, Cross deadpanned, "By getting up early in the morning."

Cross could do this because the number of submissions to a Lit Mag at that time was manageable. Then everyone began writing. Submissions increased. Creative writing programs proliferated across the country. Universities started new Lit Mags and Journals to publish all these new writers. And yet. And yet their circulation was and remained tiny. No one was reading them.

Consider this for a moment: If those programs admit even 5 to 10 new students per year, then they will cumulatively produce some 60,000 new writers in the coming decade. Yet the average literary magazine now prints fewer than 1,500 copies. In short, no one is reading all this newly produced literature—not even the writers themselves. And with that in mind, writers have become less and less interested in reaching out to readers—and less and less encouraged by their teachers to try.

My emphasis, not his. Genoway doesn’t fully develop, in my opinion, this idea of writers becoming more insular in what they write about. And he doesn’t focus primarily on women writers. But I found the idea interesting and I’ve been thinking about it in conjunction with Netzer’s comment about writing “culturally and historically significant” works.

Genoway points out that, as the topics that authors were writing about became less commercial (more insular) the commercial outlets for short fiction dried up. Magazines that would regularly publish short stories pretty much stopped including fiction. I’m not sure if there really is a cause and effect here. I remember when Glamour Magazine published short stories but it might be that it wasn’t a problem with the stories that caused them to stop but, rather, a different profit model. In any event:

One would think that the rapid eviction of literature from the pages of commercial magazines would have come as a tremendous boon to lit mags, especially at the schools that have become safe harbors for (and de facto patrons of) writers whose works don't sell enough to generate an income. You would expect that the loyal readers of established writers would have provided a boost in circulation to these little magazines and that universities would have seen themselves in a new light—not just promoting the enjoyment of literature but promulgating a new era of socially conscious writing in the postcommercial age. But the less commercially viable fiction became, the less it seemed to concern itself with its audience, which in turn made it less commercial, until, like a dying star, it seems on the verge of implosion. Indeed, most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues—as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism.

That’s my emphasis, not his. Again, he doesn’t really develop this thought about the content of the fiction. But it brought to mind Netzer’s advice to women writers who want to be on “best of” lists (and as the editor of a lit mag, Genoway is the kind of person whose opinion is representative on these types of lists).

So how do you write a ‘culturally and historically significant novel’ or short story that shows you give ‘two shits about the world”? Got me. I’m not a writer. I do know that writers are told to “write what you know”. And I’m reminded of the latest John Irving novel in which his literary main character scoffs at that advice:

What bullshit was this? Novels should be about people you know? How many boring but deadeningly realistic novels can be attributed to this lame and utterly uninspired advice.

Irving is, of course, writing a novel that has lots of characters based on people he actually knows and experiences he actually had. But I think there is some truth in his character’s scoffing. Everything you write about doesn’t have to be based on your experience; some of it can be things you imagine.

And if you can imagine living in town different than your own or having a job different than your own why can’t you imagine your characters are caught up in a “culturally and historically significant” event?

Again, it doesn’t personally matter to me in my reading if a novel is on a “best of” list. That’s not what this is about. But “best of” lists do exist and getting on them does matter to many women authors.

And I do find that I applaud the idea of reading more books by women that are the equivalent of War and Peace. Or even The Kite Runner. Or today’s equivalent of To Kill a Mockingbird. I would like to read more novels written by women that may have strong women characters but that also intend to start a political discussion that is not only a political discussion of issues that concern primarily women. I like the idea of reading women authors writing about what Netzer calls "the big stuff."

Flappering?

Booking through Thursday asks:

Do you read the inside flaps that describe a book before or while reading it?

I think I can safely say that I’ve never read the inside flap of a book while I was reading it. What would be the point? I mean, if you’re that confused by the book that you think reading the synopsis on the flap will set you straight … well, there is something wrong with the book. Or with you.

But before I read … it depends.

If I know I’m going to read the book (a favorite author or I’ve seen good reviews or its been recommended by lots of people) I never read the flap. I don’t want spoilers. It used to be that if I was just browsing in the library or bookshop, looking for something new, I would read the flap. And sometimes I still do. But these days I mostly just read the first five pages. If it grabs me I choose it; if it doesn’t I skip it.

More Jane Espenson

Jane Espenson and Tim Minear appeared at the 2009 Creation Entertainment Serenity L.A. Con (I’m not sure exactly what that is) to talk about the television script writing process.   I’ve said before that Espenson is one of my favorite television writers.   You can watch it here:

Jane Espenson has written for shows including Ellen, Gilmore Girls, The O.C, Angel, Firefly, and Dollhouse, among many others. She is especially proud of her work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and on Battlestar Galactica, where she wrote episodes, co-wrote the Emmy-nominated webisodes, and wrote and produced the BSG TV movie "The Plan." Jane is currently Executive Producer of "Caprica," the Battlestar prequel series set to premiere on Syfy in January of 2010.

The whole presentation is broken into six segments and takes about an hour.    

Looking at the list of shows she’s been involved with, I really wish a worthy successor to Gilmore Girls would appear.  I still haven’t seen any of BSG, although a close friend and her husband are now hooked watching it on DVD and tell me I should watch it.   Presumably it won’t be necessary to have watched it to enjoy Caprica, since Caprica is a prequel. I’m hoping it will be available on hulu – the pilot is.  That’s how I see Stargate Universe.   And Sanctuary.   If not, I may have to visit Truman when it’s on.  Lucky I know a dog with cable.

Regional

Sarah Bryan Miller recently had a post up at the St. Louis Post Dispatch in which she responded to a question asked by the New York Times Art Beat Blog:  How does an orchestra earn its status?

The discussion was occasioned by the gift of $85 million to Cincinnati arts groups by a put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is patron named Louise Dieterle Nippert. Wakin, reporting on this, got a storm of reaction over calling the respected Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, one of the major beneficiaries of the gift, a “regional orchestra.”

Why, SBM wonders, are orchestras as good as Cincinnati’s and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra classified as regional when they regularly play better than orchestras in the ‘Big 5’.   She made me chuckle:

The New York Philharmonic is the only symphony orchestra in the United States older than the SLSO; it’s in the center of the American artistic universe, and it can have its pick of players. But I’ve heard the NY Phil play like absolute pigs, reportedly because they collectively detested the conductor. (”It’s hard to play well for a conductor you don’t respect,” said a freelancer friend who sometimes works with them. I dunno; when I was a professional singer, that attitude wouldn’t have washed - and most listeners are going to blame the people producing the wrong notes, not the guy with the stick.) I can’t imagine the members of the SLSO pulling a stunt like that.

I love irreverence toward the New York Philharmonic.    

I don’t get too worked up that the SLSO doesn’t get as much recognition as orchestras from larger cities. It makes it easier to recognize the people who really know what they are talking about from the poseurs.  For instance, I’ve never been a big fan of Alec Baldwin and had no idea he was a classical music fan until I read this New York Times piece about his love of classical music and his relationship with the New York Philharmonic.   And even as  I was reading I wasn’t really sure how serious I was taking it until I read this:

Asked about his favorite performances, he rattled them off: “The Solti Mahler Ninth. Any Copland with Slatkin when he was in St. Louis. I like the Mahler cycle that Tilson Thomas did.”

And I realized he was serious.   Because SLSO recordings of Copland from back in the 80’s are fabulous.   I have a hard time listening to other orchestras’ interpretations of Copland because I think Slatkin’s are the gold standard.

People who really love a type of music always know who can really play it.   Worldwide fame isn’t important; playing famous venues isn’t important.  It’s the talent that counts.  It’s like back in the 20’s when white musicians knew that Louis Armstrong was a huge talent even though he wasn’t allowed to play certain venues because of racial segregation.  They would go to his venues after hours and jam with him.  Because they knew how good he was.   It’s the same in the classical music world.  

SLSO has a CD out right now, a recording of John Adam’s Dr. Atomic Symphony.   It is getting critical acclaim.  It seemed that the SLSO fell off of many people’s radar after Slatkin left but now the radar is picking up a bleep. (Full disclosure:  I hated the Hans Vonk years and even cancelled my subscription, I was so bored during those years by what they were playing.  So I can’t blame anyone too much for ignoring SLSO during those years.)

Maybe I’d just rather be a big fish in a little pond than a little fish in a big pond, but I don’t really see any downside to being one of the best “regional” orchestras in the world.   As long as the word “best” is out there.

Dollhouse: Getting Closer

To the end, that is.

Spoilers under the fold. And if you haven’t watched it yet I strongly advise you to not click through.

Click for More

Gifts

 Booking Through Thursday asks:

What books did you get for Christmas (or whichever holiday you may have celebrated last month)?

Do you usually ask for books on gift-giving occasions or do you prefer to buy them yourself?

Yes, I did get books for Christmas and I got bookstore gift cards.   I always ask for books but I don’t mind getting gift cards and choosing them myself.   This year my favorite little independent bookstore sent out an email reminding us that we could make an online wish list, which I did.    Which made asking for books easy – I just gave everyone the web address.

The other day I was reading someone’s book blog (I wish I could remember whose) and the blogger mentioned that she had was trying to work through “reader’s block”.  That phrase kept coming back to me and I realized that I’ve felt like I’ve had reader’s block for a few months.   Ever since I was sick this summer, in fact,  and I couldn’t read.   Oh sure, I’ve read since then.  I finished War and Peace.  But it hasn’t felt fun and pretty much everything has felt like an assignment.

That’s why I took a break from all of my reading clubs, so I wouldn’t have any actual assignments and I could read what I wanted.  But I haven’t wanted to read much of anything.

I’m currently reading Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy which I’ve been working on for months now.  It was my “work” book that I take with me to the office.  I read it during lunch, but it’s been to busy to have lunch for a couple of months.   And now that it gets dark early there is no reading at stoplights.   At night I just don’t feel like picking it up when I’m at home even though I’m enjoying it when I do find time to read it at lunch.

I’m reading Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure, a very small book that is entertaining.  I started it six weeks ago, read to about the middle and haven’t picked it up since.  

That’s why I thought I’d ask for more books for Christmas.  Maybe new fuel on the fire will warm me up a little.

First, here was my current stack of books that I’ve bought but still not read:

 

It’s a good selection including the bottom book which is AS Byatt’s new novel and a couple of Roman mystery novels by Steven Saylor. 

I also have a stack of books that people have lent me that I haven’t gotten to yet:

Again, a pretty wide selection ranging from a Harry Potter “add on” book to a non-fiction book about the Cardinals. 

Here’s what I got for Christmas, either directly or with the book cards I got:

 

The new Margaret Atwood novel, Julia Child’s memoir, a novel by Penelope Lively that appealed to me when I read the review, the Simon Mawer novel that was nominated for the Booker and a novel by Jane Gardam because I’ve been running across her name lately and when I asked the bookseller she gave me a thumbs up on her.

So hopefully out of all of these books I’ll find something I want to read.  And if not, there’s 2666.   And the library.