Modiano's first three novels, published when he was 22, 23 and 25. Very different feel to this work than later, "more mature," work. This feels frenetModiano's first three novels, published when he was 22, 23 and 25. Very different feel to this work than later, "more mature," work. This feels frenetic in comparison, angry, a different style, infused with direct and indirect references to other authors. Later work is more minimal, for sure....more
PS: I listened to this book, unable to get it from my library and (as of then) unwilling to purchase it, but then I ordered it and waited 2-3 months tPS: I listened to this book, unable to get it from my library and (as of then) unwilling to purchase it, but then I ordered it and waited 2-3 months to see it in paper. It was worth the wait and increased my pleasure and appreciation for the book, as--to increase the impression that this is a rich and serious and scientific biographical text--there are illustrations--etchings he calls them--throughout by William Strang, of bones, carefully identifying aspects; map, buildings, portraits of charactershand drawn letters, several kinds of type, and so on.
Poor Things (1992) by Alistair Gray, published with lots of important awards it might on some level make fun of. No, I have yet to see the recently acclaimed film version, but a friend recommended the film to me, and you know, like most of you would, I said, I’ll read the book first. Never had read any Gray.
My first reaction, early on, when I saw it that this looked like a Victorian memoir, set as it is in Glasgow in the late 1800’s, but as I began to read I asked myself a question: Is Alasdair Gray crazy? Answer: Yes, crazy like Laurence Sterne (author of the eighteenth century masterpiece of invention, Tristram Shandy). Crazy like Joseph Heller, who wrote Catch 22, or Jaroslav Hasek, who wrote The Good Soldier Svejk, screaming hilariously satirical tragedies about war. Manic crazy stories, Rabelaisian critiques of the rich and powerful and stupid. But this one is about gender and capitalism as well as stupid politicians and the male-dominated medical profession, lies, fiction, and yes, Victorian gothic literature. And a nod to Glasgow of the nineteenth century, once a great city.
Think: Frankenstein meets Fanny Hill, I thought early on, because this scientist makes a girl out of disparate body parts. So, Frankenstein, Pygmalion, Lars and the Real Girl (or an AI romance [or sexbot] story you can think of). Dr. Godwin (God, for short) Baxter makes Bella, who early on is described as possessed of Erotomania (or what we also used to call Nymphomania, which means--shame, shame, in a woman!--that she likes to have sex), so that is actually funny and deliberately meant to be read as sexist early on (I'll explain later), thus the Fanny Hill frame, but then it turns all Stepford Wives (meaning a critique of men making women into their sex toys) , and maybe Erica Jong Fear of Flying (meaning, more feminist), and then, well, I’ll get to some of it.
So, Dr. Archibald McCandless marries Bella, and largely narrates the first version of the story, meant to make himself look loving and honorable (but nevertheless condescendingly sexist), but Bella tells her own very different (though much shorter) version in the end, a renunciation; yeah, she gets the last word.
“You, dear reader, have now two accounts to choose between and there can be no doubt which is most probable.”
And Bella (a.k.a. Victoria McCandless) becomes a doctor serving mostly women and the poor, and becomes a leftist anarchist, or Fabian (think: George Bernard Shaw) socialist. And a writer of her own story.
“Dear God I am tired. It is late. Writing like Shakespeare is hard work for a woman with a cracked head who cannot spell properly.”
“Many lives and limbs have been lost, McCandless, by excluding women from the more intricate medical arts."
“She said she wanted to help little girls, mothers, prostitutes. He said this was a good idea because at present almost all who worked with these people had different sexual organs from their patients.”
“If medical practitioners wanted to save lives,” said Baxter, “instead of making money out of them, they would unite to prevent diseases, not work separately to cure them. The cause of most illness has been known since at least the sixth century before Christ, when the Greeks made a goddess of Hygiene. Sunlight, cleanliness and exercise, McCandless! Fresh air, pure water, a good diet and clean roomy houses for everyone, and a total government ban on all work which poisons and prevents these things.”
“The other world improvers point out that parliament is an alliance of monarchs, lords, bishops, lawyers, merchants, bankers, brokers, industrialists, military men, landlords and civil servants who run it to protect their wealth AND FOR NO OTHER REASON.”
It’s a faux academic text, too, with lots of references, footnotes. And as in some eighteenth or nineteenth-century novels, there’s pausing to address the reader, there’s a suggestion that you “skip the next six pages,” ala Tristram Shandy, there are characterizations of chapters--this is my shortest chapter, this is my longest chapter, and so on. Crazy fun political romp/screed. Yeah, I'll probably see the film. A great book....more
Since I am generally a completist, and had read all previous eight volumes of Chester Himes’ Harlem Cycle series featuring Coffin Ed Johnson and GraveSince I am generally a completist, and had read all previous eight volumes of Chester Himes’ Harlem Cycle series featuring Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, I finally got my hands on the ninth, Plan B, which was published in French in 1983 and published in English in 1993. The series is set in the sixties and focuses on Harlem, seen through the perspective of two angry, frustrated and sometimes violent black detectives. The action is often raucous, profane, hilarious, insightful, rough around the edges with flashes of brilliance and offense. I read them in part because I had read Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series set in LA which was said to be in part inspired by Himes: Books that explore a range of black experience in the context of crime. And Himes was always on my tbr list; I am only now (2024) getting t him, and he's great, on the whole.
Himes began Plan B in 1967-68, but it was never completed. He wrote what I thought to be the completion of the series, Blind Man with a Pistol, in 1969, and both books have some similar themes, so I think of Pistol as a somewhat tamer view of the late sixties civil unrest than Plan B. Neither of these books are really detective fiction, though both include Coffin Ed and Gravedigger. Working with Himes’ notes that describe the intended ending of Plan B, Michael Fabre and Robert E. Skinner “finished it.” Himes died in 1984, having worked, in his waning years, in declining health, to complete it, but he came up short, and many feel he may never have really decided how to finish it.
Plan B is a pull-out-all-the-stops apocalyptic novel describing a violent black uprising or revolution inspired by his reading the news from France about the late sixties riots, and other racial violence, such as the killing of Rev. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. In an interview, Himes said he had wanted to "depict the violence that is necessary so that the white community will also give it a little thought, because you know, they're going around playing these games. They haven't given any thought to what would happen if the black people would seriously uprise."
The book is apocalyptic--uber-violent, including lots of killing and sex. War is societal breakdown, and this is all about that. It begins with a chapter ending in a angry killing by Gravedigger of a pimp, and another early chapter depicts the chaos that might defy American textbook depictions of post-slavery “Reconstruction” as a kind of chaotic destructive occasion of rage on the parts of both Southern Confederate whites and freed slaves.
2024 brings us a film seen as shocking but not unrealistic, Civil War, but that film is a relatively tame vision compared to Plan B. The book details the efforts of community leader Tomsson Black to ignite violence in Harlem in order to create a radical change in racial relations. Whites do counter-attack, as one might expect, so thus it becomes all-out war.
If you are easily offended, do not even consider reading this book, because it is meant to offend. And shock. Himes uses humor to deflect criticism in his earlier books in the series, but there’s not much humor here. Mostly rage. But there are some remarkable passages in it, to be fair. Some brilliance, and lots of disorder, within a big outrageous mess that comes close to what I think Himes intended it to be, his masterpiece, though he also doubted anyone would actually have the courage to publish it. Percival Everett says it, even unfinished, or finished by others, is one of his three best books.
Himes loves Harlem and its people, but the whole series is a solid indictment of a society that created Harlem in the first place, a place of poverty and despair and fraudulent preachers and drug addicts and all.. So for inspiration for violence Himes loved Faulkner, but it reminded me of some Cormac McCarthy works at their most racially violent. Dystopian fiction. But worth a look if you take a deep breath and hang on.
I don’t know how to rate it, frankly. Some parts are 5 stars, no question. Some of it seems indefensibly nihilistic, by far his darkest vision of the world. And he never finished it, so can you say it is a great book? Kafka wrote some unfinished novels we now call classics, but none of them such as Plan B where Himes destroys the very world he set out to create in his series. Crazy book. Maybe a kind of warning? I guess today I’ll say 3 stars....more
Put Out More Flags (1942) is an often very funny satire by Evelyn Waugh about a bunch of silly, upper-middle-class Brits not quite facing the coming wPut Out More Flags (1942) is an often very funny satire by Evelyn Waugh about a bunch of silly, upper-middle-class Brits not quite facing the coming war (WWII). I understand that many of the characters appeared in other Waugh books, including the mc Basil Seal, who is one hilariously annoying nitwit with a self-serving edge. I laughed aloud at times, and enjoyed it thoroughly throughout, though it may not be quite the best book I have read from him, but it is still funny and relevant to today. And as a picture of naivete facing disaster, at the advent of the Blitz, it could be a group of apolitical, naive twits from any country.
And don't you just love that title: What do the upper-middle class do to prove they are patriotic? Put Out More Flags!
Basil Seal is in his early thirties, and without work or direction. He is having an affair with a rich married woman who--like his mother--bails him out on a regular basis. And there are many other women with whom he has had affairs. He's a fun guy, a party guy. Mum wants him to get a good cushy job in the coming war that might set him up for some kind of “future,” but of course no person in this class wants to actually go into combat, nuh uh! Basil weasels himself into the Ministry of Information, specifically Military Security, though he knows nothing about these things and none of us would trust him with buttering our toast, much less helping with military security. One thing Seal is assigned to do is to help find support for refugee children, so when he finds three brats, he uses them to extract money from people who pay him not to be forced to house them.
Plenty of artists and intellectuals, who talk a great game, get satirized, including an avant-garde artist, Poppet Green, and two poets, Parsnip and Pimpernel, meant to be W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, who both left the country at the war’s outset for the U.S. Waugh makes fun of many blowhards who insist they know that Hitler will never attack England, and so on. They called it the Bore War, or the Phony War, in 1939.
But of course things get more serious very quickly when Hitler goes all in and Neville Chamberlain declares war, and all the buffoons have to finally begin shutting up. Even Basil seems to change his tune, in a way; as he says to his mother,
“There’s only one serious occupation for a chap now, that’s killing Germans. I have an idea I shall rather enjoy it.”
Uh oh! Watch out, Hitler! Basil's coming!
A funny book in our time of endless war. Bertie Wooster with a more serious political edge....more
Evelyn Waugh’s Handful of Dust (1934) is ranked # 34 on the Modern Library list of 100 Best Novels in English in the Twentieth Century. I might quibblEvelyn Waugh’s Handful of Dust (1934) is ranked # 34 on the Modern Library list of 100 Best Novels in English in the Twentieth Century. I might quibble with that ranking, but I thought it was excellent, nevertheless. Early on Waugh gained fame as a High Literary satirist, then he converted to Catholicism, and then later he come back to satirical form again. This book came a couple years after his conversion, though there was no real theological turns in it.
Handful of Dust reminded me a bit of a book most of y’all probably have never heard of, The Blood of the Lamb, by Peter DeVries, where the funny protagonist turns crazy with grief over the loss of a loved one. In Dust, the mc, Tony Last, a sort of boring country squire, also in a different way “loses” a loved one; in both stories the mcs spin out of control. That layer of emotional realism, drawing on the fact that a similar thing happened to Waugh, sets the book apart from his satires. There’s an undercurrent of seriousness under what could still be described as satire.
And then it gets crazy, because Our Hero Tony, in the chaos of his domestic life, goes to South America, specifically to the Brazilian jungle, where he gets sick, lost, and held captive by a crazy guy who insists Tony read him all the novels of Dickens. Surreal? Nightmare? Funny for sure on some level, though there is pathos here, too. Waugh, in similar domestic chaos, also had gone to Brazil, where he met a crazy guy he imagined might force him to read Dickens to him forever. Waugh did not have that happen to him, exactly, but he did publish a story out of his time there, “The Man who Liked Dickens,” which he later expanded to explain how the mc got to Brazil in the first place, drawing on more of his life complications.
I really liked it. The more I read about Waugh (or am reminded of info I once knew) the less I like him as. a person, but his writing in the 3-4 books I have skated through--Scoop, The Loved One, Dust. . . is excellent. ...more
The Loved One (1948) by Evelyn Waugh is a short satirical novel about the designer funeral business in LA, seen in part through the British expat commThe Loved One (1948) by Evelyn Waugh is a short satirical novel about the designer funeral business in LA, seen in part through the British expat community there that he also satirizes. Well, he also satirizes the film industry, and, well, everything, and it’s really good. Maybe not quite as funny as Scoop, because the idea of designer funerals, and pet funerals, seen in 1948 as So California-ludicrous, is now--like designer water or anything else designer--sort of an acknowledged part of American fringe lunatic culture (now, no offense to people leaving their millions to their dogs . . . I want to avoid hate mail here. . .).
Dennis Barlow keeps secret his job at the Happier Hunting Ground, an upscale pet cemetery and funeral parlor; when someone close to him dies, he visits Whispering Glades, a similar service for humans. There he falls in love with the cosmetician Aimée Thanatogenos and meets the senior mortician Mr. Joyboy (those names, right; it is not exactly P.G.Wodehouse level silliness, because Waugh is such a great literary writer, but this is silly for sure), whom Aimee is in love with. Romantic rivalry among morticians!
*Funny: Barlow having to curate the funeral of a dead parrot.
*Funny: Ms. Thanatogenos agrees to marry Barlow until she discovers the poems he has been writing were by Tennyson and Poe, something he assumes no Americans in LA would know anything about. Well, they don’t, but someone tells her.
I like this maybe at the 3.5 rating level, but will keep it at 3 to distinguish it from what I deem to be far superior works such as Scoop and Handful of Dust. The satirical territory of the USA/LA here was mined by many others very well, of course, such as Nathaniel West and Sinclair Lewis, but this is still well and cleverly done.
Related pet cemetery film: Gates of Heaven ...more
"I think it is a very promising little war"-- Lord Copper, the London Beast Executive Editor, in Scoop
Scoop (1938) by Evelyn Waugh is a satire about j"I think it is a very promising little war"-- Lord Copper, the London Beast Executive Editor, in Scoop
Scoop (1938) by Evelyn Waugh is a satire about journalism and colonialism. I know Waugh and Graham Greene were journalists and friends and both wrote satires/critiques of journalism and colonialism. I thought of Greene’s The Quiet American and (especially) Our Man from Havana as I read this, as both are decidedly literary fiction and deeply satirical in similar ways.
Scoop made the Modern Library (1999) list of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century written in English, coming in at #75. And I had never read it. Waugh’s Handful of Dust was #34, and Brideshead Revisited was #80; Greene’s only novel to make the list is Heart of the Matter. Lists are such fun to quibble about.
William Boot, a sometime contributor of notes to one of two major London newspapers--The Beast; the other is The Brute--is mistaken for a better known novelist named John Boot and handpicked by the editor to fly to the fictional country Ishmaelia in East Africa to cover a civil war. He knows nothing of the war, nor of journalism, really, and does no research to find out what’s really going on. “What’s a news network?" he asks an actual journalist. He’d never even flown in a plane.
When he gets to Ishmaelia he finds several journalists who drink their way through days hoping to get the “scoop” on a war they neither know nor care about. One of the points of the novel is that even if there is little news happening, the world's media descending on this country requires that something happen (or they invent something to happen) to please their editors and owners back home. And so yes, they will create news. One central joke in the book is that the clueless Boot with the help of a woman actually does create a scoop, earning him high praise in the world papers, knighthood, a banquet in his honor.
Of course some people at The Beast realize that the wrong Boot was sent, and that neither deserve knighthood, but hey, let’s hire them both at exorbitant salaries AND knight them, what the hell. It is a terrifically written satire on the politics and culture of an African country, on the ridiculous pomp and uselessness of British officials abroad. Everything gets satirized, basically, but a send-up of the newspaper business is its central subject.
What did Waugh know about East Africa? In 1930 he flew to Ethiopia as a journalist, sending back reports on the coronation of Haile Selassie.
One line satirizing Boot’s purple prose style was quoted for decades: “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole. . .” An environmental magazine named itself The Questing Vole in honor of this bad writing.
Need a laugh? I highly recommend it! On to Handful of Dust and The Loved One, which I also had never read!...more
Jean: “there has never been a present or a past. . . It felt like a dream. This often happened in that period of my life, especially after nightfall .Jean: “there has never been a present or a past. . . It felt like a dream. This often happened in that period of my life, especially after nightfall . . . Everything gets jumbled in your mind, past, present, and future; everything is superimposed.”
The Black Notebook (2012) was first published in English in 2016. It bears all the signature marks of his fiction: Melancholy, uncertain danger, and the fading echoes of lost love. Mystery, noir, melancholy, the past, memory, The Occupation.
It’s fiction, but if you know some of Modiano’s life, there is some question as to the auto-fictional nature of the narrator and/or main character. For instance, in this book the main character’s name is Jean, which is Patrick’s first name, and Jean is a writer who has published several novels. And in keeping with the trade, Jean kept a black notebook that he looks back into after decades.
So a writer’s notebook is usually just jottings, random notes a scrap of conversation, so in a way it’s like fading memory itself, that you try to use to piece together past experience. So what is the difference between a story, history, chronology, all formats for capturing experience? Notebook jottings are more like refractions than reflections, shards. So Jean finds much of what he wrote down in the notebook as fragmented, but some of it is intriguing. A woman, Dannie, is mentioned, a mystery, and he’s off to see if he can see if it takes him somewhere useful.
Dannie, seen fifty years later, is described as “no more than a spot of light, without relief, as in an overexposed photograph. A blank.” She had various aliases, connected to a seedy gang in Paris, where Modiano has lived for decades. Jean and Dannie live together for a time a fleeting relationship, one of many over any one’s lifetime. Dannie may have been involved in some criminal activity, but as with anyone seen from fifty years later, there are increasingly more questions than answers. You can never recapture the past. It exists like a dream. He strives in all his books to weave “bits and pieces from the past” into a story, without pretending to know things he cannot.
Is there anything new Modiano adds to his collection of fictional reminiscence"? Maybe not, but every so often I like to go inside his head and experience his rich sensuous search for the past....more
"I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind m"I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni’s room."
I had never read this classic novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), James Baldwin’s second novel, set in Paris where Baldwin himself had lived as a kind of expatriate. It’s in some ways all too familiar, a sad elegy of a period, post-war, and a story of one gay man’s anguished self-discovery, a l;ate twenties coming-of-age kind of story (sometimes people come to know themselves later). David isn’t sure what kind of life he wants to live; he doesn’t know who he is. He thinks he wants a wife and family and home and conventional, acceptable life in America, where it is illegal to be gay. But this is not his real concern--what if I’m gay??!!-- because until he meets Giovanni, he does not know he has a choice to make. I have reread and taught The Fire Next Time and others again and again, but I think it was Ilse’s brief review that led me to just read this through, finally. It’s pretty wonderful, a lyrical, anguished heartache of a story.
And what is it like to be David, loosely engaged to Hella, and in love with Giovanni? It’s to be in denial of his essential self:
“Elation and dread suddenly tinge the unraveling of all of his loosely conceived relationships.”
David knows he must eventually marry Hella and return to America and make babies with her get a job. The straight life insists he go home. But what to do about his “one time fling,” Giovanni? Giovanni meets Hella, introduced as David’s fiancee, and later Giovanni screams at him in despair:
“You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying moralities. And you--you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look, look what you have done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is this what you should do to love?’”
“‘Love him,’ said Jacques with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?’”
By the end, we are sure Jacques is absolutely right. Powerful experience. ...more
The Bookshop (1978) is one of two novels I have read from Penelope Fitzgerld. There may have been more I read, but The Blue Flower is the first one I The Bookshop (1978) is one of two novels I have read from Penelope Fitzgerld. There may have been more I read, but The Blue Flower is the first one I read. This one I read around the same time, and so this is a reread. In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop - the only bookshop - in the seaside town of Hardborough.
“A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.”
The town doesn't really want a bookshop, especially a thriving bookshop, so and all that disruption of the town "culture" entails. But there are some readers in the town, advocates:
“I have read Lolita, as you requested. It is a good book, and therefore you should try to sell it to the inhabitants of Hardborough. They won't understand it, but that is all to the good. Understanding makes the mind lazy.”
A short, subtle tale with a touch of lovely bittersweet to it. It made me think of all the censorship today. You can go all over this country and not see a bookstore, in town after town. Fitzgerald was herself a bookshop owener, so the details of the shop feel real for a good reason....more
England Made Me (1935) is Graham Greene’s second novel, also released in the states as Shipwrecked, though neither title makes obvious sense to me. GrEngland Made Me (1935) is Graham Greene’s second novel, also released in the states as Shipwrecked, though neither title makes obvious sense to me. Greene’s book is a kind of castigation of global capitalism and the British class system, featuring a twin, Kate, and her brother Anthony. Kate works for (and sleeps with) one of the richest people in Europe, Krogh, who is planning on moving into the American market even as the foundation of his empire seems shaky.
Greene had reviewed George Soloveytchik’s The Financier: The Life of Ivar Kreuger for the Spectator in March 1933, and based the character of Krogh novel on Krueger, setting his story in Stockholm, with lots of visiting English tourists and ex-pats such as Kate and Anthony, and a slimy journalist Minty, following Krogh around for “breaking news.”
Well, in sort of noir fashion, everyone is deeply flawed and unlikable in this book. Minty will write gossip on Krogh for any rag, if the price is right. He’s a graduate of a posh school, Harrow, and has a run-down apt, and has broken his last tea cup. Anthony is a serial liar, to rival our own Santos. Anthony would lie about the weather if you were both looking at it together.
“Anthony can’t open his mouth without lying.”
Kate sleeps with Krogh though the only person she loves is her loser/liar brother, about whom there are undertones of incestuous attraction. The book’s first line has Kate waiting for Anthony in a pub: “She might have been waiting for a lover.” They see themselves sometimes as an "old married couple."
Anthony doesn’t like it that darling sis Kate sleeps with Krogh, and Kate hates the shabby English woman, Loo, that Anthony sleeps with. No love here to be seen. Krogh is only good at money; paranoid about public opinion, not good at relationships. There's a critique in here of his architectural and artistic tastelessness.
Also in noir fashion, Greene is so hard on his characters it borders often on satire. How could a liar such as Anthony get to be the bodyguard for Krogh? He shoots well in shooting galleries at carnivals. He’s Kate’s brother, sure, but what a terrible bodyguard. It’s almost predictable he’ll reveal Krogh’s “short-term loans” scam secrets to Minty. And, uh, pay for it, instead of getting paid.
I liked the opening, but this is a decidedly “minor’ novel of Greene, which is to say it is still good, written by one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. He plays around with stream-of-consciousness writing, memory writing, too: “Anthony, near Marseilles, father dying, the electric light burning until seven in the morning, under a heavy sky, the nurse reading, the kettle boiling. . .” He’s always oxymoronically aphoristic: “Those we love we forget; it’s the ones we left behind that we endlessly remember.” ...more
“What I found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany's. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; “What I found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany's. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there.”
"All literature is gossip"--Triman Capote
I thought I had once read Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, that was adapted into a film featuring Audrey Hepburn as the book’s main character, Holly Golightly. The film is great, but has a very different tone than the book. In the book we remove the implication that Paul, our narrator and one of many admirers of Holly, is gay, as was Capote himself.
In the film, George Peppard has some chemistry with the irrepressible and adorable Holly, who in the film makes “the little black dress” iconic. The film is a fun romp, with sparkling dialogue. In Capote’s original novella Holly is darker, if not exactly Holly Godarkly. Holly in the book is a “wild thing” that lies her way into semi-starlet status, though there is an implication that she may even be a prostitute (or say, call girl?); she’s somewhat more politely referred to as “an American geisha,” sleeping with anyone and everyone who could help the cause of her rise to fame and fortune.
Holly’s real name is Lula Mae Barnes, we later discover, (illegally) married at fourteen to Doc Barnes in Tulip, Texas. An American (attempt at a) success story, ending in a series of messes (including criminal ones) she refuses to acknowledge as serious, lying and scrambling her way to the wealthiest man she can find.
"Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell," Holly advised him. "That was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky."
“You call yourself a free spirit, a 'wild thing,' and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”
If we do not quite achieve the adoration of Holly in the book that we do in the film, we are nevertheless fascinated by her American dream and what she does to try to attain it. If we don’t admire her, we still find her interesting, written with such flair and apparent ease by Capote:
“And since gin to artifice bears the same relation as tears to mascara, her attractions at once dissembled.”
So I am thinking of what aspects of this novel might be a reflection of Capote’s own life. Holly came from the South to reinvent herself to gain fame and fortune, as to some extent Capote himself did, the once-neighbor and friend of Harper Lee. He very much damaged if not destroyed his friendship with Lee over the amazing critical and popular success of To Kill a Mockingbird. Capote was viciously jealous of his friend’s sudden fame and fortune, which she notes was “unforgivable” for him. He was the real writer, surrounded by Manhattan socialites and artists!
This book could also be seen as a kind of tribute to his mother, too, who was born Lillie Mae Faulks. Truman himself was born Truman Streckfus Persons, changing his name to Capote following his mother's marriage to Joseph Capote, a Cuban businessman. So it's all reinvention, though this is not a rare thing for humans to do as they grow up, evolve.
Capote wrote this book, that I will call great, but then toiled for many years on his masterpiece, In Cold Blood, which is nothing like this book at all, a true crime murder story. But later he was working on a novel he intended to be his greatest, publishing three chapters of it in magazines. This story, like Breakfast, focuses on Capote’s lifelong fascination with up and coming socialites, starlets, shining women, taking their lives and lightly fictionalizing them, which led to the destruction of his reputation in New York, documented variously but most recently in Capote's Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era.
“There are certain women,” Truman Capote wrote, “who, though perhaps not born rich, are born to be rich.” Capote adored these women, recorded their stories, wrote them in his “fictions,” destroying them in certain ways in the process, and in turn they, unified, turned on him and destroyed him.
As I quoted above, Capote wrote that "all literature is gossip." But didn't his mama tell him that engaging in gossip can sometimes come back to bite your behind? It didn't seem to in Breakfast, when he may have been writing lovingly about his mother through Holly; it didn't seem to in Cold Blood, where he got deeply into the psyches of the two murderers he interviewed for years, but with these--"his"--women, it surely did....more
PS, 10/7/23: I saw the Nicholas Roeg film adaptation last night with some family members. One thought it was too slow, another thought it was brillianPS, 10/7/23: I saw the Nicholas Roeg film adaptation last night with some family members. One thought it was too slow, another thought it was brilliant but slower than it had to be, and I just thought it was brilliant. Perfectly paced! Begins slowly, sure, but it builds! The ending sequence is amazing, just breathtaking. The (very bright) color red throughout the otherwise rather muted Venice kind of gives the sense of haunting in so many ways. The buildings, the public artwork, crumbling from humidity, as the Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie characters are haunted by their grief. The psychic dimensions of the film are chilling. An unsettling film with much beauty in it, much to talk about.
Original review: I have been reading/re-reading Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel, vaguely connected to a ghost lit course I am teaching and, well, it's approaching Halloween month, and I saw there was an audio version of her "Don't Look Now," a short story I had never read, though I saw the 1973 (and saw it in 1973!) film adaptation by Nicholas Roeg, (with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) that frightened me, so I read it and liked it very much. I'm alone here in the house, and . . . what was that noise. . .? Who can be on my back porch at this time of the evening?! Why is the damned light bulb suddenly burned out?
In Don’t Look Now, a married couple, John and Laura, holiday in Venice, recovering from the death of their daughter [in the short story she had recently died of meningitis; in the film she dies at the opening of the film by drowning]. They are in grief, but John is hoping they can in some ways use the holiday to "get over" this dark period. His wife Laura is in shaky emotional shape, unsurprisingly. He wants to get it behind him, handling grief a little differently. [In the film, John, an art historian, is assisting with the restoration of a church as well as being accompanied by his wife as an escape from England for a time].
In a restaurant, two older women approach Laura to say they had a vision of a girl--the couple's daughter--behind them. One of the women, blind, claims psychic capacities that John is skeptical about, especially since she claims that the dead daughter is warning them of the dangers of Venice now, since a murderer is still at large. John is also especially annoyed by the blind woman since she feels he has psychic capacities himself. He thinks this is ridiculous, but the blind woman insists they must get out of Venice as soon as possible, as one of them may come to harm. [In the film John realizes from the first that he has some kind of prescience, but seems in denial about it]. This makes John angry and upset, but within hours they receive word that their son, in a boarding school, has fallen ill. Maybe this is connected to the old women's warning? They agree to go back home, Laura immediately, John the next day.
Then some things happen I won't reveal, but the ending I recall from the film, one of the best endings of a film I can recall, just as good as in the original text. So this is a horror story--one dabbling in the occult, and/or psychic powers, that is also, in part, like My Cousin Rachel, founded in grief. But I mean, come on, Daphne, why pile on more emotional trouble on a couple grieving their lost daughter?! And on us, too! I suppose it's just to see if we can take it? Powerful, scary, intimate, accomplished.
PS: Laura in the short story and film seems comforted, even relieved, by the blind psychic's report of her daughter, though she seems to have no psychic capacity at all. Her skeptical husband, however, has from the first some prescience about his daughter, and should have acknowledged the dangers he was aware of going forward.
PPS: The title of the story has to do with something John says when he sees the two women looking at and whispering about them: "Don't look now. . ." but in Roeg's film he never sys this, though the idea of vision is deepened and enhanced. You may be seeing the color red everywhere after seeing this film. In the film--not the story--the daughter is wearing a red raincoat or slicker, so it is everywhere in the film subsequent to that, mentioned by no one....more
"She knows more about herbs than anyone I have ever met"--Rachel's Italian friend Rinaldi
Oh, I loved My Cousin Rachel (1951), by “Rachel: My torment.”
"She knows more about herbs than anyone I have ever met"--Rachel's Italian friend Rinaldi
Oh, I loved My Cousin Rachel (1951), by Daphne du Maurier! First time read, and I have also seen the great 1952 film with Olivia de Havilland and Richard Burton, a classic. Rebecca (1938), her classic, is better than My Cousin Rachel, but this is still great, with some similar vibes. I’ll say this is 4.5 to just distinguish it from Rebecca, but I really really liked it. Her short story, “The Birds” was adapted into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, too, and Nicholas Roeg made Don't Look Now based on another of her stories. Du Maurier is great at creating moody gothic historical romances, mysteries dense with lyrical foreboding, horror/thrillers arising often out of grief.
24-year-old Philip Ashley runs a Cornwall estate on behalf of his older cousin Ambrose, whom he adores, though Ambrose is in Italy now, where he meets their cousin Rachel, and marries her. But alas, the otherwise healthy Ambrose gets sick--brain fever--and dies. Philip is suspicious, on the basis of letters he got--too late--from Ambrose, warning Philip about Rachel.
But Rachel comes to Cornwall and changes Philip’s mind, and in fact almost everyone’s mind. So sweet, so beautiful, and she knows so much about plants and gardening. . . and herbs.
“How soft and gentle her name sounds when I whisper it. It lingers on the tongue, insidious and slow, almost like poison, which is apt indeed. It passes from the tongue to the parched lips, and from the lips back to the heart. And the heart controls the body, and the mind also. Shall I be free of it one day?”
Everyone loves Rachel; that is, except neighbor and childhood friend Louise:
"How simple it must be," she says at one point, "for a woman of the world like Mrs Ashley, to twist a young man like yourself around her finger."
But you know, Louise is jealous, she loves Philip, and there is so much to like about Rachel! What does she know?!
And so. . . young Philip hands over all of his inheritance--money, property, jewels--to Rachel, based on the argument that she had been married to Ambrose, and so she deserves it! And he has a point. But he also loves her. On his twenty-fifth birthday, when everything comes to him, he gives her everything he has, and he then asks Rachel to marry him! Does she accept? I'm not gonna say. .. but
Insert song: “It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to. . .”
So this is a “did she do or not?” mystery, where you basically agonizingly see the train wreck coming, with your guts twisting all the way, unable to stop that train. Lots of great secondary characters, great gothic location, great main characters, and a great resolution! One might criticize the book on predictability, but it's not that kind of mystery, really. Nor was Rebecca. These are books about dread. Highly recommend it/them.
PS: The 1952 film leaves things almost ambiguous about what happens, at least as far as Philip sees it. And a narrator finally asks you to decide what you think. But I already had decided, because I had just read the book and that ending is clearer. I still have not seen the 2017 Rachel Weisz film version....more
I took a look at this because I like many people know someone close to me who is addicted to drugs, and I also have been reading a few dozen noir bookI took a look at this because I like many people know someone close to me who is addicted to drugs, and I also have been reading a few dozen noir books. I was aware of this book and author in the seventies but never read it or him. Donald Goines served in the Air Force in Korea from 1952-55, where he became a heroin addict. When he got back he stayed on heroin pretty much until he and his wife were murdered in 1974, but for many of the early years he was, besides being a "dopefiend," he was also at different times a pimp, a dealer, a thief.
So you want authenticity in your hard case novels? You want to look into the abyss (from the relatively safe place of your living room)? Here ya go! Dopefiend (1971) was Goines's first novel, inspired by Iceberg Slim's autobiographical account of his life as a pimp, and it sold well, coinciding with the controversial "blaxploitation" films and books of the seventies. Like these films, stereotypes abound, though you can maybe argue that Goines was being both autobiographical and anthropological in his depiction of the drug world, where almost everyone is lost in the effort to constantly score drugs, women, and any other "items" to sell. Sex and violence abound.
The central figure is a dope dealer, Porky, who ensnares all sorts of people such as a young couple, Terry and Teddy, out of their comfortable middle-class life, and her pregnant smack addict friend Minnie. There's an element of moral preaching here, a warning, though as I said, Goines wrote all of his liofe while addicted.
Is it a "good" book? I can say it is both rather conventional--I feel like I know almost everything that happens in the book, no surprises--and is one of the nastiest books I have read, with a few details I wish I could unsee. Goines published sixteen novels about "the life" in the space of 3-4 years before he was murdered, though the critical reception was low. Dopefiend is definitely sensationalistic, filled with salacious details and a clear idea of the technologies and business ends of drug dealing and using. But in its sympathetic portrayal of Terry, the once "good girl" who worked in the department store her mother had worked in for twenty years, turning tricks to get her next high, it has its humane moments.
I wouldn't recommend it to a general reader, but if you have a hankering for a junkie novel in the tradition of William Burroughs, Jim Carroll, Nelson Algren, or Herbert Selby Jr., "enjoy."...more
Update 11/28/23: I just reread this book with my ghosts class, and liked it even better the second time. 8/25/23 I saw again Peter Weir's film based oUpdate 11/28/23: I just reread this book with my ghosts class, and liked it even better the second time. 8/25/23 I saw again Peter Weir's film based on the book, and liked it very much, filled with sort of romanticized langorous, ethereal girls in white, like swans. An unknowable mystery. Then things seems to slowly fall apart. . . . but no, I have not seen the 2018 tv series yet. Would like to see at least some of it for a contemporary reading of the story.
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) was published by Australian author and artist Joan Lindsay at the age of 70, her most celebrated achievement, its reputation enhanced by Peter Weir’s (1975) adapted film. Lindsay went to a private girls’ school, and she sets her novel on Valentine’s Day, 1900, when a group of twenty girls and two governesses from the Appleyard College for Girls have a picnic at Hanging Rock.
The novel, that Lindsay says was in part inspired by Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, involves the mysterious disappearance of four girls and one of the governesses as they climbed to get a closer look at the peak. The story, that opens on Valentine’s Day, has undercurrents of eroticism and the supernatural. Some of it is homo-erotic, some of it is hetero-erotic--there are subtle suggestions of intense connections and crushes between and among the girls, and two young men who watch the girls cross a stream to make their ascent are also part of the story.
“At every step the prospect ahead grew more enchanting with added detail of crenellated crags and lichen-patterned stone. Now a mountain laurel glossy above the dogwood's dusty silver leaves, now a dark slit between two rocks where maidenhair fern trembled like green lace.”
“Born fifty-seven years ago in a suburban wilderness of smoke-grimed bricks, she knew no more of Nature than a scarecrow rigid on a broomstick above a field of waving corn. She who had lived so close to the little forest on the Bendigo Road had never felt the short wiry grass underfoot.”
Hanging Rock operates (as peaks will sometimes seem) as a kind of phallic/sapphic symbol in this undercurrent of desire, though you can see this in photographs of the Rock (well, see below for the wikipedia page, but none of these work as well as the peaks Weir chooses for his Hanging Rock images). The final image is almost too on the. . . nose? peak? as a symbolic image in conjunction with the Headmistress and her eighteen whalebone corset stays.
As a book that seems to me consistent at times with the late sixties when it was written, we see in every paragraph the natural world--and Hanging Rock possibly the same for a “million” years--juxtaposed with the frilly layers of clothing the girls wear almost as a defense against the naked, pulsing world the school protects them from. Our being cut off from nature seems part of the point of the books:
“The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”--Wordsworth
“Insulated from natural contacts with earth, air and sunlight, by corsets pressing on the solar plexus, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and kid boots, the drowsy well-fed girls lounging in the shade were no more a part of their environment than figures in a photograph album, arbitrarily posed against a backcloth of cork rocks and cardboard trees.”
The supernatural elements are few and sparely shared--the coachman’s watch has stopped at 12 when they get to the picnic grounds, and hey, so has the watch of one of the governesses! How strange! The uncanny is present in this tale, as the house (maybe I should say this is a spoiler alert for a book fifty years old?) and the Appleyard (such a wholesome name, with healthy fruit!) College itself slowly crumbles (and yes, there is a touch of the gothic in this tale, The Fall of the House of Usher is referenced here). What gets referred to as the “College Mystery” expands--as one expects--as parents remove their girls from the school, as employees quit, and as a steady stream of dire (but not improbable) events happen. The story tacks back and forth between the two men who are involved in the search and the college (and I know what you're already thinking, amateur sleuths, but most of what happens operates in the unknown, sorry).
Lindsay wrote the book as historical fiction with a documentary feel to it, with pseudo-documents from the case, but thousands of people (embracing fake news) asked her until her death if the novel was based on actual events. She was coy about it, refusing to answer directly. I was reminded of tales related to alien abduction (one theory that has attached itself to the story), the Bermuda Triangle, The Loch Ness Monster and there's a reference to a ship mystery, The Mary Celeste, in the very last line. Lindsay actually wrote a last chapter that explained much of the mystery away, but her editors wisely talked her out of it. There have been many subsequent publications trying to “get at the truth” of what happened there at the Rock.
And yes, because I using this book for a course on liminal spaces and ghosts--there is a ghost, and appearances of the dead in dreams, and there are other metaphorical ghosts to consider as the tale proceeds. The missing girls themselves "haunt" the school and the living.
Odd that the author Joan Lindsay would barely survive a car crash less than two years after the publication of her book . . . the revenge of the novel? Mysterious and strange: mwah ha ha!
I thought it was terrific and highly recommend it.
Ps: Two good student observations: 1) one student mentions the resemblance in this book to The Ice Castle, which we also had read, where a girl wanders off into the natural world as the Appleyard girls do, and 2) a connection between these ineffable girls and Jefferey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides. We can/will never know these girls!
A statue of Miranda at Hanging Rock, Victoria (right! a statue of a lost fictional character to further encourage the notion that there were actually girls lost there!):
I had no idea what this book was about when I decided to listen to it but I knew Daphne du Maurier was a good writer. She wrote Rebecca, and "The BirdI had no idea what this book was about when I decided to listen to it but I knew Daphne du Maurier was a good writer. She wrote Rebecca, and "The Birds," the basis for Hitchcock's film So Frenchman's Creek (1941) is historical fiction, a romantic adventure set in the seventeenth century. I understand du Maurier found an old house in Cornwall, and it ignited her imagination.
Dona is an aristocrat, married, with two kids, living in London. Hubby drinks too much, gambles too much, and travels everywhere, is not bright or engaging, leaving Dona home, bored. She wants to live. While he is gone for an extended trip she takes the kids and a governess to this exotic place on the river, where she one day meets. . . . A PIRATE!
But he's not just any pirate, not scuzzy and foul and crude, but a man who is well educated, reads poetry, is a gourmet cook, and likes adventure. You can see how this book might have been popular in the sixties; said pirate drops out of society to captain a ship and rob the rich and gives a portion (say, a tithe) to the poor. Oh, and of course he is handsome and exciting and loving, where tubby hubby is dull and selfish.
They fall in love, duh. Like now. Like yesterday, already. He teaches her to fish, in her petticoats and expensive ruby earrings. And she participates in an actual robbery of a ship, cool! Adventure! And when the hubby and his gambling and drinking pals come to capture the pirate and hang him, dressed as a cabin boy, well, more adventure! And not much of any reference to actual sex, as this is 1941, but it is romantic adventure, use your imagination, it's even better.
Points to du Maurier for making it (somewhat) difficult to approve of this story. While she is off adventuring--with the first and only love of her life, we learn--she leaves the kids with the governess, feigning illness. Hmm. She coulda made it easier for us to approve of the affair by making her childless, but nope she takes a more difficult way, and I like that. But hey, let's forget about those pesky kids for awhile, this is ADVENTURE!
I guess I won't give away what happens in the very end, but I found it surprisingly entertaining fun. Literary romance, well-written! And romance, not realism, with a touch of feminism, you might call it, since in the seventeenth century or even 1941 you would have a difficult time as a woman becoming a pirate, argghhhh! ...more
"I am not a good character. I am quite simply not a good person."
I have this feeling I might have liked this curmudgeon of a book moreThe Misanthrope
"I am not a good character. I am quite simply not a good person."
I have this feeling I might have liked this curmudgeon of a book more had I read 2-3 more of his other novels first. Yes, this is my first Thomas Bernhard book (I think!). It's a kind of rant against many things he hates, and a kind of homage to his friend, Paul Wittgenstein's nephew. That was the hook for me, as I love Wittgenstein as philosopher (especially the zen-koan-like Philosophical Investigations) and I am intrigued by his personal life--the wealth, the mental health issues, the brilliance, the madness. But I thought it was less about Paul than Thomas.
The book is called a novel, but it is widely described as autobiography/memoir or some combination of the two. The opening is a focus on Thomas, in a sanitarium for tumors (he died at 58 at a life time of lung illnesses), and Paul, in a psychiatric wing nearby (though they rarely see each other, as Thomas does not want to see his friend in decline, it's too depressing for him). I am somewhat influenced by having read an article about a book by Bernhard's brother, who referred to him as a lifelong "demon" in his life. Thomas said the center of their friendship was great talks about music, and castigating everything from psychiatry, the literary life, literary awards, the German press, to "ignorant" Viennese people, and so on. They hate walking, nature, the country.
I'm told Bernhard was at his best energetic and entertaining and at his worst nasty, but in this book there are only reported conversations, zero dialogue at all. I am interested in the meditations Bernhard writes about the world of health vs. the sick, something that both he and Paul suffered with their whole lives. Both were mad and ill, in different ways. Both were sort of capricious snobs with very low views of human nature. I did like the award story where the presenter knew nothing about him; that was funny. In spite of what I say here I read it straight through--100 pages, all without paragraphing. I sometimes like to read about misanthropes, as in Moliere, or Celine, but he abandoned his friend near the end because he had become "grotesque," an ironic description to make for a man who was himself ravaged from disease all his life, also in and out of hospitals.
So, Ilse and other Bernhard fans, what's your favorite Bernhard?...more
I love the ambiguity in this short story by DH Lawrence. I am sure I read it decades ago, but I both read it and listened to it. Listened to it first,I love the ambiguity in this short story by DH Lawrence. I am sure I read it decades ago, but I both read it and listened to it. Listened to it first, on a walk and thought it was pretty much a straight-up romance. But when I read it, I slowed down, and found it to be much more complicated, ripe for discussion, useful on the topic of whether Lawrence was a misogynist, I guess (I vote no, decidedly).
The story is about Mabel, a horse-dealer's daughter, and her three rough brothers. Dad has died and they are in financial ruin, and they split up as a family. Jack Fergusson, a doctor from out of town and more middle-class circumstances visits during this time and notices Mabel waiting on her brothers, saying nothing. He watches her when he is there. She will have to move, as well. The men are sexist jerks, and she is alone, isolated.
Later, Mabel goes to her mother's grave, near where the doctor lives. He watches her from his window. She goes down to the pond and walks slowly into the water and disappears. He rushes out, and to make a short story shorter, rescues her and carries her back to the house, removes her clothes and wraps her in a blanket until she awakes. If you really want no spoilers, stop reading this review now.
When Mabel awakes she is not sure what is happened. Did she lose her mind? It appears in her despair and grief she was committing suicide. He doesn't know. He doesn't really know her but he has been watching her, and likes her. She's that ethereal mystery, she has seemed vulnerable to him because of the male dominance in her house. Then she says to him, seeing he saved her and knowing he has watched her, "You love me." He denies this, even to himself. He had no inkling of loving her, he thinks. But then, over time, he agrees he does love her and things go on quickly from there.
Questions remain: Was she suicidal, temporarily mad? Is she trying to manipulate him to marry her? Is it possible there is this moment between two lonely people where they have found each other? All she knows is her bully brothers; is he different, an escape for her from the patriarchal world? Ambiguous. anguished, maddening. I really liked thinking about it these last couple days, that you could interpret it in various ways, but having just read about a similar act--she going into the water--of a young girl in another story, The Discomfort of Evening, by Rijneveld, I shuddered.
“It was very late and everyone had left the café except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In th“It was very late and everyone had left the café except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the day time the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference”--the opening lines
"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" first published in 1933, Is one of my favorite and one of Ernest Hemingway’s--one of the great masters of the short story, in particular-- most despairing and yet most achingly beautiful stories, featuring an old man who comes in every night to drink himself to closing, and one waiter who reveals he is sympathetic to him. If Hemingway has any moral intent in the story, it is to have us see the old man through the older waiter’s eyes.
Two waiters, alone late, watch the old man, and discuss his recent suicide attempt. The younger waiter is not sympathetic--why commit suicide? He has enough money--wants him just to go home, so he can go home to his wife. They watch the streets as “a girl and a soldier went by in the street. “ The older waiter notes that the old man’s wife is now gone. This focus on grief and love relationships just may be part of the unsaid under the “iceberg” of the story.
What is it that drives the old man to despair? Maybe it is just the generalized depression that many feel: “ What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too.”
The younger waiter may point to another underlying societal condition for what the old man is experiencing, the sudden invisibility of the elderly:
Younger waiter: “I wouldn’t want to be that old. An old man is a nasty thing.” Older waiter: “Not always. This old man is clean. He drinks without spilling. Even now, drunk. Look at him.”
The older waiter seems to understand the old man; he cares: “Each night. I am reluctant to close up because there may be someone who needs the cafe.” And later: "’I am of those who like to stay late at the café,’ the older waiter said. “With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night.’"
The older waiter thinks to himself a sort of nihilist Lord’s Prayer, or existentialist, Our nada who art in nada, that comes close to the end of the story., as he himself goes--alone--to his bed. A prayer of despair? Well, as with Beckett, he is still praying, at least. Then the punch in the gut finish, as we now walk home with the older waiter, who may not be so different than the old man:
“He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.”
Indeed and alas, many do. A story of acknowledgement for these times, with so many in despair.
James Joyce once remarked: "He [Hemingway] has reduced the veil between literature and life, which is what every writer strives to do. Have you read 'A Clean Well-Lighted Place'?. . . It is masterly. Indeed, it is one of the best short stories ever written..."
I agree, and maybe pointedly, on this, my seventieth birthday.
Thanks to the Short Story Club and Leonard for the focus this week on this terrific story. I got the message from Leonard and read it through. ...more
Loading...
