|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0140029753
| 9780140029758
| 0140029753
| 3.98
| 527
| 1966
| Aug 25, 1983
|
None
|
Notes are private!
|
0
|
not set
|
not set
|
Feb 03, 2023
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0099511541
| 9780099511540
| 0099511541
| 3.43
| 522,112
| 1899
| Jul 01, 2008
|
it was amazing
|
Ship of Fools The narrator of the framing story tells us early on who is present on board a yacht sitting immobile in the Thames (a river of commerce a Ship of Fools The narrator of the framing story tells us early on who is present on board a yacht sitting immobile in the Thames (a river of commerce and pleasure!): the Company Director, the Lawyer, the Accountant, Charlie Marlow, and the unnamed narrator himself. The narrator seems to represent us, the audience. Marlow does the talking. The group could almost be the executive that runs a trading company, although what unites them is the bond of the sea: "Besides holding our hearts together through long periods of separation, it had the effect of making us tolerant of each other’s yarns - and even convictions." And so it is that Marlow (twice removed from Conrad, Mr. Kurtz being thrice removed) comes to tell his tale of the time he once turned fresh-water sailor for a bit. Bent on Conquest More used to the sea, he had to go upstream to an ivory trading post in the Congo, the Central Station, a (view spoiler)[(just one?) (hide spoiler)] heart of darkness, by sailing up a river that is "fascinating - deadly - like a snake." Ships sailed to Africa and elsewhere once, bent on conquest: "Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him - all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. "There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination - you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate." For all the romance of empire, it was heartless and brutal: "They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force - nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind - as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness." Perhaps they were equally blind to their own darkness? [image] Conquerors and Colonists Marlow differentiates between conquerors and colonists. But he also sees his own group as different from past colonists: "Mind, none of us would feel exactly like this. What saves us is efficiency - the devotion to efficiency." The first adventurers and settlers were often brutal: "Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame...bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire…the dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires." Now, more modern colonists were supposedly building businesses. Slightly Flatter Noses It's at this point that Marlow makes his most revealing comment, at least one that establishes a context for the rest of his story: "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much." This is perhaps one answer to charges that Conrad (or at least Marlow) is somehow racist. He explains empire and colonialism in terms of misappropriation of the property of other races. No Sentimental Pretence On the other hand, Marlow suggests that it (or something) might be justifiable in some circumstances: "What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea - something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to." So, what is justifiable, and what is it exactly that might justify it? Is he appealing to some greater authority? Is it God? Religion? Civilisation? Trade and commerce? Capitalism? Improvement? [image] Savages and Scoundrels Marlow frequently refers to negroes, niggers, half-castes, savages, cannibals, and scoundrels. What can be inferred from this? At one time, he even refers to himself as being "savage" with hunger. There's a sense in which the scarcity of food, the desperation of subsistence living makes all people, even white colonists, desperate. They could even be savage with greed. Still, he assesses the Congolese honestly: "Fine fellows - cannibals - in their place. They were men one could work with, and I am grateful to them." Marlow recognises that they are "not inhuman". One was "an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler." Stately and Superb They are capable of improvement, even if they have a different sense of time, no concept of change and progress: "They still belonged to the beginnings of time - had no inherited experience to teach them as it were." They still did things the same way they had always done. From their point of view, there was no need to change, let alone any need for improvement. Equally, the word "savage" isn't always pejorative (etymologically, it derives from a word for a wood or forest). Marlow says of Kurtz' mistress: "She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress." A savage could be magnificent, stately, noble, superb. They didn't need to be improved in order to make deliberate progress. They just happened to live in the untamed wilderness, in the wood, in the forest, in the jungle. Fantastic Invasion It's time we met Mr. Kurtz himself. Like everybody else, Kurtz was in the Congo to make as much money as quickly as possible and get out: "I had immense plans." There was no unselfish belief in an idea worth bowing down before. Only, the Congo changed him: "...the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude - and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core…" Hollow Man So, apparently, as T.S. Eliot would later acknowledge, Western Man is hollow. Yet, for a while, the darkness of Africa allowed Kurtz to rise above his nothingness: "He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings— we approach them with the might of a deity,’ and so on, and so on. ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,’ etc., etc. From that point he soared and took me with him." He had become a Nietzschean Superman in the wilderness. Yet how was that different from madness? "His soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad. "I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself." But Which Brutes? For all the talk of savagery, it is the Europeans who are un-grounded, here and at home. In his madness, Kurtz writes "Exterminate all the brutes!" and famously declares to Marlow, "The horror! The horror!" Yet, by this time, it's arguable that he has turned around and is commenting on European Man, ostensibly Civilised Man, and the underlying brutality of his delusions, not the "savages" around him. Bent on improving others, he has discovered he is the one most in need of improvement. But he might also have realised that it's European brutes who are most in need of extermination. [image] Artist: Matt Kish, illustration of "Heart of Darkness", page 085 http://www.spudd64.com/hod2_codes/hod... Something to Say It's left for Marlow to judge Kurtz: "This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up - he had judged. ‘The horror!’ "He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth - the strange commingling of desire and hate. And it is not my own extremity I remember best - a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things - even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot." Just as Kurtz looked into the universe, he saw himself. And so, later, inevitably, Marlow learns that "Mistah Kurtz - he dead." Some Knowledge of Your Self Now, for Marlow, home again, life is conformist, grey, deluded, pretentious, inauthentic and insincere. On the Thames, finally, at the conclusion of Marlow's tale, no longer idle, the yacht seems to resume its course "into the heart of an immense darkness". The heart of darkness is ours. Not Africa's, not the savages'. It isn't the darkness of the wilderness. It's the darkness of the self. Kurtz just happened to confront his in the wilderness, in the midst of the incomprehensible. However, the incomprehensible is just as much inside as outside. "Droll thing life is - that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself." "Mistah Kurtz - he dead" "Remember us - if at all - not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men" T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men". ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
May 03, 2015
not set
|
May 03, 2015
not set
|
May 04, 2015
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1453225005
| 9781453225004
| B07B69DF5K
| 3.47
| 22,209
| 1973
| Sep 03, 2013
|
None
|
Notes are private!
|
0
|
not set
|
not set
|
Oct 10, 2014
|
Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||
| 1930974280
| 9781930974289
| 1930974280
| 3.74
| 2,005
| 1982
| Oct 01, 2003
|
really liked it
|
Formal Review My more formal review of this novel is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... Overview The purpose of these notes and comments (and Formal Review My more formal review of this novel is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... Overview The purpose of these notes and comments (and they are really nothing more than that) is to help build a picture of the intellectual, cultural and political context and subtext of this unique and uniquely Australian novel, so that readers not familiar with the landscape or culture of Australia can get some additional insight into the novel. Despite or regardless of its Australian origins, the novel transcends national boundaries. Hopefully, a discussion of the following issues will help unlock the merits of the novel beyond the beauty of its writing. Location The narrator refers to the remote central districts (presumably of Victoria). (4) The only coastal city mentioned is Melbourne. The Individualism of the Narrator and the Plainsmen The narrator develops a belief that only he can interpret the plains: "I recall clearly a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret. (3)" This individualism seems to be something he developed from proximity to the plainsmen. They don't value a common belief. They are not trying to create an agreed tradition: "Listening to the plainsmen, I had a bewildering sense that they wanted no common belief to fall back on: that each of them became uncomfortable if another seemed to take as understood something he himself claimed for the plains as a whole. It was as though each plainsman chose to appear as a solitary inhabitant of a region that only he could explain. And even when a man spoke of his particular plain, he seemed to choose his words as though the simplest of them came from no common stock but took its meaning from the speaker’s peculiar usage of it. (9)" This individualism is reflected in their use of language. There is a sense in which even the words, the signifiers, are individual, rather than social. Needless to say, the signified is peculiar to the individual plainsman. The plainsmen are not collectivists. The community of tastes and values is seen as a virus that can be contagious to the individual: "I saw that what had sometimes been described as the arrogance of the plainsmen was no more than their reluctance to recognise any common ground between themselves and others. This was the very opposite (as the plainsmen themselves well knew) of the common urge among Australians of those days to emphasise whatever they seemed to share with other cultures. A plainsman…would affect to be without any distinguishing culture rather than allow his land and his ways to be judged part of some larger community of contagious tastes or fashions. (9)" The individualism of the plainsmen seems to be opposed to the tradition of mateship and egalitarianism in Outer Australia. The Plainsmen The narrator meets up with a group of plainsmen in the bar of the hotel where he is staying. They are townsfolk. They are different from the Landowners. Unlike the townsfolk in the coastal cities, they are all referred to as "intellectuals and custodians of the history and lore of the district." Two Intellectual Movements Historically, at first, there were two intellectual movements among the plainsmen: * the Horizonites (15); and * the Haremen (15). These groups emerged out of a "cautiously expressed manifesto signed by an obscure group of poets and painters". (27) This could be an allusion to the role the Surrealist Manifesto played in the early stages of Modernism. Horizonites The Horizonites are identified in terms of a more metaphysical approach to culture: "They may well have intended no more than to provoke the intellectuals of the plains to define in metaphysical terms what had previously been expressed in emotional or sentimental language. (28)" They are less concerned with actuality. Their art contains: "…few renderings of actual places on the plains (29) "What moved them more than wide grasslands and huge skies was the scant layer of haze where land and sky merged in the distance. (29)" "Talked of the blue-green haze as though it was itself a land – a plain of the future, perhaps, where one might live a life that existed only in potentiality on the plains where poets and painters could do no more than write or paint. (29)" Their pivotal art work is the poem, “The Horizon, After All” (27). There could be some allusion to the use of the concept of the "horizon" by Husserl. Their colour is Blue-green. Their political party is the Progressive Mercantile Party (which aims to "establish new industries and build railway lines between the plains and capital cities".) (36) It is possible that this party might be based on the Australian conservative coalition. However, this could be overly simplistic, especially because the Haremen political party does not equate obviously with the left-wing Australian Labor party. The Horizonites consider themselves to be men of action (35) They think of themselves as "true plainsmen, ready to push back the limits of pasturage into regions too long neglected." (35) Their polo team is the Outer Plains (sea-green uniform). Haremen The Haremen are named after a marsupial plains-hare: It is noted for its stubborn foolishness (31): "It was obliged to cling for safety to its barren surroundings; to persist in seeing the shallow grass of the plains as a fortress against intruders.” (32) The Haremen "wanted the people of the plains to see their landscape with other eyes; to recover the promise, the mystery even, of the plains as they might have appeared to someone with no other refuge." (32) Their pivotal art work is Decline and Fall of the Empire of Grass. (30) Their colour is weathered gold or yellow (32) Their political party is the Plains First League (“Buy Local Goods”). (36) The Haremen insisted that "they were the practical ones, contrasted their own realistic plans for closer settlement with their opponents’ grand plans for populating a desert." (35) This party does not seem to relate to the traditional Australian left. Instead, it seems to anticipate more conservative, nationalistic Australia First-type parties. There even seems to be a suggestion of a White Australia policy, which was embraced by the Australian Labor Party in its early stages. Their polo team is the Central Plains (yellow uniform). Third Intellectual Movement Later, a third unnamed movement starts. It is described as a "new absurdity". However, its tenets are not identified in any detail. This movement ironically unites the other two in opposition: "They discredited it finally on the simple grounds that it was derived from ideas current in Outer Australia. (33)" It sounds existentialist. Overview of Three Intellectual Movements The three intellectual, cultural and artistic movements can possibly be differentiated on the following basis: * Metaphysical/idealist vs * Naturalist/Realist vs * Existentialist. These are very approximate summations of the movements, and could well be totally inaccurate. However, they might start a discussion of the substance of Murnane's writing on these issues. I also feel that these concerns place him within a Modernist tradition, rather than a Post-Modernist tradition, even if he explores metafictional concerns. Secret Societies After the decline of these intellectual and political movements, two secret societies formed. Murnane doesn't give much detail about these societies, other than to say that they engaged in brawls. It's not clear whether or how they were aligned with the above movements. It's possible that they crossed boundaries. Brotherhood of the Endless Plain This society elaborated a scheme for "transforming Australia into a Union of States whose seat of government was far inland and whose culture welled up from its plains and spiraled outwards." The Union would incorporate Outer Australia. This is closer to the type of federalism that Outer Australia did embrace. League of Heartlanders: This society proposed a separate Republic of the Plains. The Republic would exclude Outer Australia. Thus, the continent of Australia would be split into different nations. Landowners The great landowners "kept aloof from politics." They come across as powerful mandarins to whom the other plainsmen kowtow. They engage the townsfolk to provide cultural services to their families. The processes by which they select plainsmen to provide these services resemble the grants process adopted by the Australia Council (formerly the Arts Council). While the process must ultimately be subjective, a whole bureaucracy surrounds the administration of the financial support. A Post-Structuralist Diversion Many artists would argue that decisions of the Australia Council are not solely made on merit. As far as I am aware, it took Murnane many years of unsuccessful applications before he received any funding. He did however receive an Australia Council emeritus award in 2008. The other recipient that year was: Christopher Koch The Chair of the Australia Council’s Literature Board at the time was Dr Imre Salusinszky, who wrote a critical study of Murnane in 1993: Gerald Murnane The monograph was based on interviews Salusinzski conducted at the University of Newcastle: https://www.flickr.com/photos/uon/330... This news item mentions a Film Australia documentary called "Words and Silk", which was made by Philip Tyndall: http://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/fin... http://www.innersense.com.au/mif/tynd... Salusinzski has been described, perhaps unfairly, as "an ultra-Right political columnist for the Australian". He was an editorial adviser to "Quadrant", a conservative literary and cultural journal similar to "Encounter" (some might recall the allegations that the funding it received from the Congress for Cultural Freedom was sourced from the C.I.A.). He has been a lecturer at Yale University, I gather, while on a Fulbright Scholarship. He is keenly interested in the Canadian critic Northrop Frye and the French philosopher/critic Jacques Derrida, and has written about "Yale School" Post-Structuralism, which is reflected in many of the interviews found in this text: [image] Salusinzski was born in Hungary. This might explain Murnane's decision to learn Hungarian late in life. Murnane has quoted the title of an essay by Derrida in one of his own essays. However, I suspect that he doesn't have much time for Derrida, and might have first learned about him from reading the Times Literary Supplement, rather than from Salusinzki. Despite the fact that Salusinzki has played a large role in promoting Murnane, I am not sure whether Murnane endorses everything Salusinzski says about his work. I have a fleeting recollection that I might have read that the two had fallen out. For an example of the Culture Wars that occur in Australia (mentioned in my other review), see the transcript of the debate between Peter Craven and Ken Gelder below (note the centrality of Gerald Murnane): http://overland.org.au/feature-peter-... Ken Gelder wrote a monograph on David Ireland, who I would juxtapose against Gerald Murnane as an explorer of the Australian psyche, although not to the exclusion of either. Peter Craven is a prominent Australian literary critic. He co-founded the literary magazine, "Scripsi", with Michael Heyward, who is the publisher at Text Publishing, which has re-printed works by both Murnane and Ireland under its "Text Classics" imprint. Heyward also published a book on the "Angry Penguins Hoax", which is the basis of Peter Carey's "My Life as a Fake". The Temperament of the Plainsmen The narrator identifies a "basic polarity in the temperament of the plainsman: anyone surrounded from childhood by an abundance of level land must dream alternately of exploring two landscapes – one continually visible but never accessible, and the other always invisible even though one crossed and recrossed it daily." (45) The Seven Landowners The first dialogue in the novel appears at pages 61 to 75. It consists of snippets of conversation or speeches by seven Landowners. There is a continuity to their views on the subject matter. However, it might also be possible that each Landowner has discrete views. I didn’t really pursue an attempt to determine these views after re-reading the dialogue a few times. One issue is the complexion, pallor or colour of the skin of the plainsmen, especially their ideal woman including their wives and daughters. They place great value on white skin and delicate golden tans. The complexion of the women is preserved by the use of silk blouses and parasols, which provide a screen between the real world and the object of a male’s love. (view spoiler)[Silk recurs in Murnane's fiction, also being associated with the silk jockey shirts, caps and colours worn by jockeys in his favourite hobby of horse-racing. (hide spoiler)] This practice is recorded in a 200 stanza poem called ”A Parasol at Noon”. Ironically, the poem captures ”the posture of men forever looking into the distance.” Like their vision of the plains, the features of the object are never quite distinguished. It remains an unreachable ideal. Another goal of the plainsmen is the exploration of the plains and what lies beyond. The seventh Landowner remarks, ”a man can know his place and yet never try to reach it.” Ironically, despite the narrator’s own journey of exploration, he takes up a role with this Landowner. Words and Film The narrator’s film [“The Interior”] will be ”the story of this man’s search for the one land that might have lain beyond or within all that he had ever seen…the Eternal Plain…What distinguished a man after all but the landscape where he finally found himself?” For Murnane, the quest of the artist, like that of any man, is to find himself: ”Every man may be travelling towards the heart of some remote private plain.” For the narrator, his film will be ”concerned with memories and visions and dreams, …and the last sequence of ‘The Interior’ would bring to light the strangest and most enduring of my dreams.” The novel is necessarily made of words. However, the narrator’s task is to make a film. Ironically, the plainsmen have ”a scant interest in films and…claim that a camera merely multiplied the least significant qualities of the plains – their colour and shape as they appeared to the eye.” What matters to them is the narrator’s words, ”a form of writing…which came near to defining what was indefinable about the plains.” They are interested in what lies beyond the light of the plains, which happens to be darkness. Ultimately, Murnane believes that man must be the source of his own light. What lies beyond man’s own light is darkness. The Australian Cultural Cringe For a long time, Australia had a cultural cringe, an inferiority complex about its own intellectual and cultural status. Indeed, it’s arguable that we still have one. In the 60’s, many writers and artists left the country to seek inspiration and recognition overseas. Examples of such expatriates are Germaine Greer, Clive James, Robert Hughes and Richard Neville. Politically, this was a conservative period. Many people on the Left would argue that, only when the Whitlam Labor Government was elected in 1972, was there a cultural resurgence and a greater self-confidence in our creativity. It meant a lot to Australia that Patrick White won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, even if many of the Left hadn’t read or liked his novels up to that point. Not only did we consume more local talent domestically, but we exported it as well. However, equally importantly, with greater self-confidence, we opened up to new ideas from outside. We had always fed off British and American culture. However, we were now more open to European culture, including Continental Philosophy, which contributed to the radicalization of University Arts Faculties. The Role of Gerald Murnane Gerald Murnane, who has recently been considered a possible recipient of the Nobel Prize, stands adjacent to, but not wholly within, this recent tradition. He has consciously never travelled outside Australia, even though he has read widely and recently learned Hungarian in order to read that country’s literature. Still, he has played a major role in addressing the cultural cringe, at least at a personal level. Apart from his teaching roles, I would argue that he pursues his goals individualistically and idiosyncratically. In ”The Plains”, he journeyed into Inner Australia, not just to find what was there, but to turn his back on what was in Outer Australia, i.e., the urbanations on the coastal fringe. By heading towards the centre, I suspect he was better able to see and understand Outer Australia in his rear vision mirror. I don’t think he feels much in common with the Australian culture he is witness to. This is not necessarily to denigrate him or Australian culture. I would say he has to be one of the most self-contained writers and artists anywhere on the planet. It doesn’t matter that he looks beyond the horizon and sees darkness. The important thing for him and for us, is that he looks within and finds light, and he harnesses that light, so that those of us, particularly Australians, who are willing might be enlightened. Strange Bedfellows For as long as Murnane continues to write, I’m confident that he will build on the personal vision he has constructed. To the extent that this brings him success, it’s possible that many academics in Australia will jump on his bandwagon. In my other review, I’ve argued that there is an element of hoax in the novel. If I’m wrong in this opinion, it is at least a declaration of independence from those who would claim him as their own (e.g., post-structuralism and post-modernism). This isn’t meant to detract from the uniqueness and distinction of his writing. I think that in this novel he is playing a game with his audience in the same way that Nabokov played with his readership. For all of his earnestness, I suspect that this solitary man, Gerald Murnane, is also a Great Australian Ratbag. I admire all of these qualities in him. SOUNDTRACK: Neil Diamond - "Solitary Man" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ql4Ii... Johnny Cash - "Solitary Man" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OVHn... ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
Jul 08, 2014
not set
|
Jul 10, 2014
not set
|
Jul 19, 2014
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0316291161
| 9780316291163
| 0316291161
| 3.88
| 53,610
| Nov 10, 1969
| Sep 01, 1998
|
it was amazing
|
CRITIQUE: Prologue A woman stands at the end of a deserted quay and stares out to sea. She is waiting for a novelist to return from a voyage to America. CRITIQUE: Prologue A woman stands at the end of a deserted quay and stares out to sea. She is waiting for a novelist to return from a voyage to America. His ship comes into view. She sees him. He sees her, too. She will feature in the novel that he will one day write about what he saw from his point of view. Historical Fiction Superficially, “The French Lieutenants Woman" appears to be a work of historical fiction set in England in the period between 1866 and 1869. However, it can also be read as a post-modern pastiche of a Victorian-era novel written 100 years later. Metafiction The implied narrator/author says that he is writing this account in 1969. He self-consciously makes choices about the construction of the novel in the body of the novel. He also offers three alternative endings. Thus, it qualifies as a work of metafiction, even if the author, John Fowles, would subsequently deny that he was a post-modernist. After all, it was modernists who pioneered metafictional techniques. White male American post-modernists were equally reluctant to embrace Fowles as a post-modernist, not just because he was English, but because his novel broke the cardinal rules of their art form – despite its use of metafiction, it was popular and commercially successful, it had an intriguing plot, and it was made into a film starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. To them, Fowles wasn't an author “like us". He was a true individualist. He didn't want to run with their herd. [image] Meryl Streep in the film of the novel The Narrator in 1969 The narrator is one of the omniscient kind (though more mischievous than godlike). From time to time, he refers to someone who might have been spying on the characters (like a peeping tom). However, the fact that he lives in 1969 means that he could not physically have been present to observe the events that occurred in the nineteenth century (even if at one point the narrator shares a train with Charles Smithson). These events occurred in his imagination, and were the product of creative decisions he made. Nevertheless, he allowed his characters some freedom of choice in what they did. How the narrator describes these characters and events reflects the views of a person who lived in 1969, even if the narrator might equally have been a product of the author's imagination. Thus, the novel presents the Victorian era through a perspective of the twentieth century. If we read the novel in the twenty-first century, we add a second successive lens through which to view the narrative. There is no guarantee that we would read the novel and draw the same conclusions as a person who read it in 1969. There is much in the novel to think and write about. However, what remained interesting to me throughout the novel was what I could infer from the title itself. French Libertinism It was significant that the woman was owned or possessed by someone, and that that someone was French. The Frenchness hints at the extent to which the novel anticipated or described the anti-Gallicanism that motivated Brexit. For centuries, England and France had been at war and despised each other's cultures. France was ostensibly Roman Catholic, and England Anglican (Church of England) or Protestant. Socially, despite the influence of Catholicism, France was libertarian, while England was more puritanical. Sexually, the English viewed the French as lusty, libidinous, licentious libertines. The English labelled syphilis as the French disease, while the French labelled it as the Neapolitan disease. You named your afflictions after your enemies. The chief male protagonist, Charles Smithson, has spent six months in his early adulthood in Paris, “The City of Sin", where he used the services of prostitutes. At the time, it was quite common for English men to engage in sex tours of France and Europe, whatever their marital status. He returned to England “a healthy agnostic", if a somewhat serious man. The chief female protagonist, Sarah Woodruff, has fallen in love with a French merchant naval officer while she was employed as a governess. Soon after, he returned to France, and has never returned. It's widely suspected in the local Dorset community that she had lost her virginity to the French lieutenant. The perception is that she has fallen victim to a nasty French libertine, and she is ostracized, made an outcast. Ever since, she has lived with her shame, confident that she will never marry, have children, or enjoy happiness. Yet, like Emma Bovary, she still dreams of these things. [image] I imagined Sarah as looking more like Sally Hawkins (as Anne Elliot in "Persuasion") than Meryl Streep Conventional Ownership and Possession The second inference from the novel's title is the fact that Sarah is viewed as owned or possessed by the French lieutenant. This ownership is analogous to a conventional Victorian marriage, in which the husband owns or possesses his wife, like a chattel. Marriage marks the end of a woman's freedom. Sarah seeks a relationship in which she can retain her own freedom. However, she suspects that her reputation will prevent her from finding a husband, and her shame (and moral and social norms) will preclude any other type of relationship. Charles’ Parisian exploits have made him equally sceptical about the concept of marriage, even though he’s engaged to be married to Ernestina Freeman, the daughter of the wealthy owner of a retail emporium. Ernestina is a typical Victorian girl/woman: she is pretty; “The favoured feminine look was the demure, the obedient, the shy.” Having met Sarah, Charles becomes dissatisfied with the prospect of marriage to Ernestina. He is obsessed with Sarah, and sees her as a like mind and soul. Her shame is nothing to him. In his mind, they both crave freedom. Beyond the Pale: "I Wish to be What I Am" Paradoxically, Charles wishes to make Sarah “his wife" (the language of ownership and possession is unavoidable in men). Sarah, on the other hand, has moved one step closer to freedom, beyond the pale, and has no desire to retreat: “I wish to be what I am, not what a husband, however kind, however indulgent, must expect me to become in marriage.” "Upon the Salt, Unplumb'd, Estranging Sea" Ultimately, Fowles has mapped out the arena upon which the battle of the sexes will be played out:
In this far vaster battle, each gender would struggle to assert its own humanity and authenticity. To this day, as in the novel, the two genders continue their struggle “upon the salt, unplumb'd, estranging sea" that separates them. VERSE & WORSE: Kissing in the Bracken If you thought you heard two lovers Kiss in the bracken by the brook, Though you know you shouldn't do it, Still you just want to have a look. All you really need to do is Peruse the pages of this book. SOUNDTRACK: (view spoiler)[ Lesley Gore - "You Don't Own Me" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTpvi... Lesley Gore - "You Don't Own Me" [Live] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDUje... Derek and the Dominos - "Thorn Tree in the Garden" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Drofk... "There's a thorn tree in the garden, if you know just what I mean..." The Only Ones - "Another Girl Another Planet" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKuc3... "I think I'm on another world with you, with you I'm on another planet with you, with you." Lou Reed - "Modern Dance" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxDFu... Bettie Serveert - "Roadmovies" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjQ7x... Lucinda Williams - "You Can't Rule Me" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dCgu... (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
Jul 14, 2020
not set
|
Jul 27, 2020
not set
|
Apr 04, 2014
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0679410430
| 9780679410430
| 0679410430
| 3.88
| 870,936
| Sep 1955
| 1992
|
it was amazing
|
One, or An Other Story about Humbert Humbert They entered the novel at night, by stealth, and took up position on the sixth floor of the Book Depositor One, or An Other Story about Humbert Humbert They entered the novel at night, by stealth, and took up position on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building. Then they waited for the morning to come. Only one of them was armed. The others had come along to lend moral support. They had never been involved in a character assassination before. If the truth be told, they were a little nervous. They surveyed the roofs and windows of the adjacent buildings. They were pretty sure nobody was watching. Nobody was there to watch. Everybody was downstairs, lining the streets, waiting for the Mardi Gras floats to pass, happy, cheering the contestants they liked, remaining silent or jeering the ones they didn’t. The one opened his case, took out the parts of his rifle, and assembled it with practised precision. The last item to be put in place was the telescopic lens. He lifted the rifle to his shoulder and looked through the lens. The first thing he saw was the streetscape below. Then he scrolled to the right until he saw the T-junction around which Humbert and Dolores would come. He didn’t have to wait long. Three minutes. Perhaps it would have taken another two minutes for their open limousine to reach the point where it was closest and the line of vision was clearest. The one had rehearsed everything the previous weekend. Twenty seconds later, one of them whispered, "Now! Now!" The tension had been too much. Without removing his eye from the lens, the one smiled. It was a signal that the others took for permission to relax. The one knew what he was doing. He had done it before. He would do it again, although they didn’t know that at the time. Another forty seconds later, the one dropped the rifle from his shoulder. One of the others asked, "What are you doing?" The one didn’t answer. With a single deft action, he removed the silencer. He placed his left elbow on the window ledge, lifted the rifle and pushed the barrel between the drawn curtains. He only waited ten seconds more. He found Humbert’s head through the lens, then thought better of it, even though he had planned his course of action methodically. He lowered the rifle a fraction and fired the first shot into Humbert’s heart. If Humbert’s perverse story was to be believed, that was its lifeblood, its source, its origin. It was a direct hit. Humbert didn’t explode. In this way, at least, it was all a bit disappointing for the one’s audience. His head nodded forward, then slumped backwards, though Humbert still seemed to be alive, wondering what had happened, what did his author have in store for him? Surely, it wasn’t’ going to end like this, with a bang? The blood pumped wildly out of Humbert’s heart, though it was mainly invisible to this audience, held in by his vest, barely staining his pressed white business shirt. Humbert’s head tilted forward slightly, as the life fled his limp body. The one could still see his face. His next shot tore into Humbert’s left eye. The third shot was aimed for his right eye. Up to this moment, nobody on the street could tell anything untoward had happened. Even the sound of the rifle shots had been less than expected, drowned out by the carnival music and crowd noise. With the third shot, Humbert’s head finally did explode, propelling a slurry of brain and blood and bone fragments, willy nilly, over Dolores and her pretty pink floral dress. She took off her heart-shaped glasses and looked up, until she seemed to detect the windows in the Book Depository Building. Only she ever appeared to see the one and the others who were peeking tentatively through the windows on the one’s left, so as not to be in his way. She kept her silence though. There were still forty seconds remaining. The one didn’t wait to witness the commotion. He could watch it on TV as soon as he got back to his hotel room. He had three bullets left. He turned and faced the door of the apartment. He looked at his watch. Twenty seconds, ten seconds, five seconds. The door smashed open, even though it was unlocked and could have been pushed open. "What have you done?" The man was alone, older than the one expected, paunchier. He could imagine his sly, intellectualized grin as he sat at his desk, composing his lecherous words in the comfort of his deceitful monogamous relationship. "How dare you!" Was it a challenge? Was it a question that the one genuinely wanted to be answered? No response came. Nabokov simply continued his approach towards the one. With the same efficiency with which he had dispatched Humbert, the one fired the remaining three bullets into the author. They were all aimed for the heart. Nabokov fell backwards onto the floor. He grimaced in pain as his hand reached for his bloody red chest and he realised his time had finally come. The one noticed Nabokov’s eyelids start to descend. He put his rifle down and knelt beside Nabokov. With his left thumb and forefinger, he separated Nabokov’s eyelids and stared into his eyes, watching as all sign of life escaped them. Eventually, the author was dead. It was time for each of them to turn their back on the novel now, safe, and come back to reality. Life for the one, for the others, could resume as intended, as normal. The one had righted another wrong. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jun 15, 2013
|
Jun 14, 2013
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0140027629
| 9780140027624
| 0140027629
| 3.92
| 21,532
| 1946
| Jan 1968
|
really liked it
|
The World of Gormenghast "Titus Groan" is a work of fantasy constructed in a painterly manner without much obvious concern for narrative dynamism. First The World of Gormenghast "Titus Groan" is a work of fantasy constructed in a painterly manner without much obvious concern for narrative dynamism. First, Mervyn Peake builds the static grey stone world of Gormenghast Castle, then he populates it with Lord Sepulchrave (the Earl of Groan) and a few key members and servants of his family, and finally bit by bit he permits them to interact. The world of Gormenghast has a Gothic solidity about it. It has been built from the hallowed ground up out of both stone and ritual. Like the castle, the people have become ossified with a feudal respect for blood and stock, the meticulous preservation of heritage, the precise tabulation of experience, the unquestioning observance of tradition, the strict adherence to precedent, the absolute primacy of obedience. The Royal Family is weighed down, oppressed and darkened by both its status and its stasis. Theirs is a world of melancholy, depression and schizophrenia. Into this world come two forces of change. An Heir on the Side of Caution All Royal Families are perceived as eternal: "The course of this great dark family river should flow on and on, obeying the contours of hallowed ground." However, for all of its apparent durability, the life of a Royal Family must be a cycle. The sovereignty of the realm must accommodate the death of the sovereign. The King is dead, long live the King. So to witness the birth of a new member of the Royal Family is to experience an essential part of the seamless (albeit sometimes unseemly) transition of sovereignty from one generation to another. The first force of change is the birth of Titus Groan, the heir to the throne, although at the end of this the first volume in the series, he is only two years old, so he features more as portent than as participant. One Less Glorious Revolution A cycle, by definition, revolves, and each cycle represents a single revolution. However, all sources of power are subject to the possibility of revolt, a different, involuntary revolution. Enter the second force of change, Steerpike, a rebellious seventeen year old, bent on some kind of mischief. When we first meet him, he seems motivated by his own contentment. The females see in him a capacity for the observation, tenderness, love and reverence they crave. He contains not just the promise of his own happiness, but theirs as well. However, in the eyes of one of the Earl’s servants, happiness represents "the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt." Steerpike appeals to the Earl’s daughter, Fuchsia, with the assertion that equality is the "only true and central premise from which constructive ideas can radiate freely and be operated without prejudice. Absolute equality of status. Equality of wealth. Equality of power." These are the hallmarks of socialism. Yet, he seems to have a different political manifesto for each audience. He promises the Earl’s disentitled and disgruntled twin sisters revenge, power, glory and the throne. Steerpike preys on pre-existing weakness, inadequacy, envy, jealousy, hatred and rivalry. He is practised in "the art of personal advancement and deceit". He is a consummate manipulator and opportunist, a teen-aged but true, Machiavellian. His one goal seems to be to insinuate himself into Gormenghast and the Family Groan at a moment of maximum vulnerability and pull them down around him. Glacial Prejudice This is the world of Gormenghast: "Things are bad. Things are going wrong. There’s evil afoot." The plot moves with the beauty and silent force of a black Gothic glacier. However, as it passes, apparently imperceptibly, it gouges the surrounding landscape and leaves it changed forever. The novel is not for everybody, but if you’re patient, if you’re prepared to slow down to glacial pace, you’ll find it has much the same impact on the reader as the landscape. You will be lifted up, moved and deposited somewhere fantastic and remote. And you will never forget the experience. VERSE: [After and in the Words of Peake] Abiatha Swelter's Masterpiece I am the great Chef Abiatha Shwelter, Hish Lordshipsh' cook, Who'sh cooked in all hish castlesh And shailed on all hish shipsh Acrosh sheven shlippery sheas. My enemeesh, imaginary And real, they all do shay That I'm thick and hairy, An evil hard-hearted monshter, Though, in truth, I'm just a fairy Who wants to be a shongshter. Sho, come my pretty vermin And diligentshiumsh, Hearken up your earsh, And have a little ship Of thish drink that'sh Mosht entranching. It'sh shure to help you Lishen ash I shing To you my shong, It's a gorgeoush Little ditty and a Dirgeoush mashterpeesh. And while you're at it, My ghastly little fillets, Pleash gather all around me, Tashte thish food scheleshtial. Itsh shecret ingrediensh Are baked in fat and greash. On the morrow you will shmell The flowersh of such Monstroush flatulench That you won't forget, Forever or for long, Schwelter's famoush Housh of Shtench. A Little Brother for You, My Pretty They say, you'll find her, Fuchsia, Atop a steep winding stair, Inside a windy attic, Sitting on a high-backed chair. From there she looks down below, Beneath tangled inky hair, Upon a panorama, Rooftops, towers, battlements. Though her imagination (A flame that burns true and free) Conjures up her own image Of a land she wants to be: A world of pearls and tendrils, Of exquisite essence rare, Of lavender and glory That is far beyond compare, Yet she finds a brush with which To paint on this quadrangle Of diminished canvas, Stretched tight across her easel, A picture of alley-ways Pranked with little knots of folk, Whose voices rise through the air, Telling tales of how they woke To witness the christening Of the next heir to the throne Of the castle Gormenghast, Her new brother, Titus Groan. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jun 13, 2013
|
Jul 21, 2013
|
May 19, 2013
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 067972303X
| 9780679723035
| 067972303X
| 3.48
| 3,644
| 1973
| Jul 17, 1989
|
it was amazing
|
"Fame Puts You There Where Things Are Hollow" (1) This is often regarded as one of DeLillo's lesser novels. However, I can't agree. It continues and an "Fame Puts You There Where Things Are Hollow" (1) This is often regarded as one of DeLillo's lesser novels. However, I can't agree. It continues and anticipates the subject matter for which he has become famous as well as his clipped and precise writing style. If you're uncertain whether this book might be for you, I urge you to read at least the first chapter (three pages), if not also the last two chapters. The first chapter in particular contains some of the best and most exhilarating writing in DeLillo's career: "Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic." Don't you love phrases like "somber renown" and "erotic terror", not to mention "rueful nostalgia" and "convergent destinies"? DeLillo is great at personalising and emotionalising abstraction. Here, he does it within a framework that could well be a Tarantino film. John Travolta could play rock star Bucky Wunderlick, and Uma Thurman his girlfriend Opel Hampson. There's much speculation that Bucky is derived from Bob Dylan, who dropped out of the mainstream after a motorcycle accident in 1966 and then recorded "The Basement Tapes" (which weren't released officially until 1975). At times, Bucky reminded me of John Lennon after the breakup of the Beatles (except Bucky's American) and Lou Reed after the breakup of the Velvet Underground. I think of the Velvets, because Bucky's unnamed band's third album is described as noise (as was "White Light/White Heat"). (2) Ultimately, however, DeLillo's portrait of Bucky is so complete we don't need to worry about his inspiration. Bucky is an archetypal rock musician circa 1973. To the extent this is a rock 'n' roll novel, and a good one at that, it's broader significance lies in the fact that the music industry at the time was a microcosm of capitalist society at large. Bucky walks away from his audience, a crowd, the public, his legend, his fame, his celebrity at its peak. Just as David Bowie turned his back on Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and their legion of fans in 1973. Like his fans, Bucky has lost his sense of identity in the crowd. He and they have become manifestations of "mass man", none of them any longer an individual with authenticity and integrity. Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide On stage, Bucky had already started to rebel against his status. His music had become mere noise and was played at such volume that it alone could almost kill or injure members of the audience. Still they worship him all the more. Their secret wish is that he too will die, preferably onstage and by his own hand, in their presence, a rock 'n' roll suicide. Remember that this novel was published in 1973, just a few years after the premature deaths (3) of Jimi Hendrix (1970) and Jim Morrison (1971). The audience expects the performer to take them to a place of greater danger, to the edge of the void, where death is possible, if not probable. Music, experienced in a crowd, confronts us with the experience of our own death or the experience of mass apocalyptic death. By walking away and breaking the pact with his audience, Bucky seeks out silence, an absence of or escape from language (which is itself the vehicle for social manipulation and control). He escapes, in order to become an individual, a private man, again. His departure is a quest for revolutionary solitude. Know Your Product The middle chapters concern two packages and the products within them. One product is "The Mountain Tapes" (Bucky’s primitive recordings of 23 unaccompanied, almost imbecile songs recorded soon after his escape). His manager is desperate to release the tapes and get Bucky out on the road again. The tapes are yet more product that will satiate the musical appetite of his audience and the financial appetite of his corporate backers. The other product is some massively strong drugs that have been stolen from a secret U.S. Government installation, where they have been developed to "brainwash gooks and radicals". They affect the language sector of the brain. A number of groups are trying to get their hands on the drugs, so that they can distribute them within the so-called counterculture. At various times, Bucky has the packages with him in Opel’s apartment in Great Jones Street. He receives many visitors looking for one or other package. In the end, they both get stolen, the tapes by his manager, the drugs by a faction of the Happy Valley Farm Commune. "A Return to Prior Modes" Bucky’s manager convinces him to go back on the road. However, in the last chapter, in a scene reminiscent of "Infinite Jest", the Happy Valley Farm Commune prepares to kill Bucky or force him to commit suicide, (view spoiler)[although he actually takes a sample of the drugs and survives, speechless, wordless and wandering the streets of Manhattan, thus missing the chance to tour the Mountain Tapes: "This was my double defeat, first a chance not taken to reappear in the midst of people and forces made to my design and then a second enterprise denied, alternate to the first, permanent withdrawal to that unimprinted level where all sound is silken and nothing erodes in the mad weather of language. Several weeks of immense serenity. Then ended...It's just a question of what sound to make or fake." Although Bucky is still alive, he is survived yet again by rumours that circulate amongst his followers. Meanwhile, he reconstructs his own language, starting with the word "mouth": "Soon, all was normal, a return to prior modes." (hide spoiler)] NOTES: Note 1: From the lyrics of the David Bowie song, "Fame" Note 2: The name of Bucky’s management company is Transparanoia Inc. I was never sure whether his unnamed band was also called Transparanoia. Note 3: Hendrix and Morrison were both 27 at the time of their deaths. Bucky is 26 during much of the novel. SOUNDTRACK: (view spoiler)[ The Doors - "When the Music's Over" (Live in 1968) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7KRV... John Cale - "Heartbreak Hotel" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6cU9... The Saints - "Know Your Product" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qatJH... Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxWS1... PJ Harvey - "Big Exit" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P94y1... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4kTM... Captain Beefheart - "Abba Zaba" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTo7O... Allen Willner - "Pee Pee Maw Maw" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfqrh... Tom Waits - "Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkOMi... Something For Kate - "Transparanoia" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiEVZ... The Jam - "That's Entertainment" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-H0u... "Two lovers missing the tranquility of solitude" Luna - "Great Jones Street" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBVi-... Featuring Sterling Morrison on guitar (hide spoiler)] October 26, 2016 ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Oct 17, 2016
|
Oct 26, 2016
|
Mar 13, 2013
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0199238294
| 9780199238293
| 0199238294
| 3.95
| 341,213
| 1925
| Oct 04, 2009
|
it was amazing
|
Who Dared Seize Him? Ever since first reading this novel in school, I've assumed the word "Kafkaesque" described an aspect of society analogous to livi Who Dared Seize Him? Ever since first reading this novel in school, I've assumed the word "Kafkaesque" described an aspect of society analogous to living under a totalitarian state. For much of this thoroughly enjoyable re-read, I persisted with this view. However, when Joseph K. is arrested with no apparent justification, he is more surprised than an inhabitant of a fascist state. He asks: "Who could these men be? What were they talking about? What authority could they represent? K. lived in a country with a legal constitution, there was universal peace, all the laws were in force; who dared seize him in his own dwelling?" You'd think that, with all the hallmarks of a modern civilisation in place, you'd be free from the risk of arbitrary arrest. A natural reaction is that it might be a joke. However, it's not funny for very long, certainly not for the twelve month process K. must endure. [image] Officials on High Apart from the apparent absence of a reason for K.'s arrest, the atmosphere isn't as oppressive as I recalled. It's inexplicable for K., yet somehow routine and unremarkable for everybody else. It doesn't evoke an outcry (except, understandably, from K.). It's as if this turn of events is uncommon, but it could still happen to any of us at any time. Not because we live in a totalitarian state, but because we might have committed a crime. But what if K. doesn't believe he has actually done anything wrong? K. isn't incarcerated pending trial. For all the empty formality of the Law, everybody he deals with is meticulous in their observance of etiquette. They're amiable, courteous, helpful and apologetic, not to mention sometimes obsequious and solicitous. Whoever is wielding this power, exercising this authority, is wearing velvet gloves: "I don't in the least blame them, it is the organisation that is to blame, the high officials who are to blame." Only he can't find any trace of these high officials. He only ever seems to encounter lowly officials. Still, power is exercised and punishment occurs at this level. One official says, with a hint of the banal: "I am here to whip people, and whip them I shall." The Danger of Indifference All the power that is exercised against K. makes him wonder whether (like Mersault would later do in Albert Camus' "The Stranger") he should remain indifferent to his plight. However, here, K.'s uncle warns him that he will have no chance of proving his innocence if he is submissive. He suggests that he flee the city and come to the country: "I only made the suggestion because I thought your indifference would endanger the case..." A Free Man in Chains Joseph K.'s only crime seems to be that he is a free man, going about his own business. He is a risk assessor in a bank, presumably someone educated, an intellectual of sorts, a free thinker. Early on, he says, "A man can't help being rebellious." Eventually, he reflects that "it's often safer to be in chains than to be free." My Confession After a while, I started to deliberate whether the novel was about authority and authoritarianism at a more generic level than the State. So, what is it that places chains on mankind? The Courts just serve the Law. Is the Law wholly rational, or does it serve some other authority? Whose justice does it dispense? "The Court is quite impervious to proof...You must remember that in these Courts things are always coming up for discussion that are simply beyond reason, people are too tired and distracted to think, and so they take refuge in superstition." In the Cathedral Bit by bit, as the novel progressed, I questioned whether Kafka's real target was the authority that religion has over our lives. The penultimate chapter occurs in the Cathedral. Some of Kafka's language sounds almost biblical: "The Court makes no claims upon you. It receives you when you come and it relinquishes you when you go...You see, everything belongs to the Court." Yet what got me speculating most was sentences like this: "Whatever he may seem to us, he is yet a servant of the Law; that is, he belongs to the Law and as such is set beyond human judgement." It mightn't have been possible in the original German, but if you substitute "the Lord" for "the Law" (or "the Court") in these sentences, the result suggests that the greatest claim to authority is that of religion (even when it often claims to be above the Law). Is God the unseen higher source of authority and the Church the organisation behind K.'s arrest? Was it God's churchwardens who dared to seize him? Is life an ongoing trial under God's Law? Original Sin If this speculation has any legs, then "The Trial" might be concerned with the concept of original sin. Is original sin a crime with which each of us has been charged without our knowledge, without any proof and without any guilt? "In the end, out of nothing at all, an enormous fabric of guilt will be conjured up." Free Will By extension, if the idea of original sin derives from God, are we deluded in clinging to the concept of free will, when God sits above us all, exercising ultimate control, pre-disposing us to sin? If so, the Trial might be a metaphor for the supernatural process of God looking over and judging us every moment of our lives, until we are granted permission to enter Heaven. Ultimately, K.'s only crime seems to be the individualistic pride that makes him cling to free will and prevents him submitting to God's will and law. But in the eyes of the Lord/the Law, it is the greatest crime there is. (view spoiler)[ God Works Through Trials "2 My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, 3 Knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience." James 1:2-3 "Thank You Lord (For the Trials That Come My Way)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQztF... A.K.A. The Barrister's Song (hide spoiler)] [image] The Throng of Gossip I've always thought of this novel as a five star achievement. Re-reading it, I've realised that what convinced me of its status was probably the power of Kafka's vision and ideas. What struck me this time was the quality of the writing. For all the claustrophobic abstraction, Kafka grounds the novel in evocative and descriptive prose. There's even a bit of humour: "Down the whole length of the street at regular intervals, below the level of the pavement, were planted little general grocery shops, to which short flights of steps led down. Women were thronging into and out of these shops or gossiping on the steps outside. A fruit hawker who was crying his wares to the people in the windows above, progressing almost as inattentively as K. himself, almost knocked K. down with his push-cart. A phonograph which had seen long service in a better quarter of the town began stridently to murder a tune." ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
Jul 16, 2015
not set
|
Jul 19, 2015
not set
|
Feb 16, 2013
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0140238107
| 9780140238105
| 0140238107
| 3.63
| 4,006
| 1994
| Nov 01, 1995
|
really liked it
|
CRITIQUE: Imaginary Memoirs The first person narrator of "The Master of Petersburg" is Coetzee's imagining of Fyodor Dostoyevsky as he might have been i CRITIQUE: Imaginary Memoirs The first person narrator of "The Master of Petersburg" is Coetzee's imagining of Fyodor Dostoyevsky as he might have been in October, 1869, immediately before he started writing his third novel, "Demons". The Master is living in Dresden, when he is summoned back to St. Petersburg after the sudden death of his stepson, Pavel Isaev, on 12 October. He soon begins to inhabit Pavel's lodgings, haunts and psyche in an attempt to comprehend their shared life and fate and to solve the mystery of his cause of death (suicide or murder, and if the latter, by whom? The police or his insurrectionary acquaintances?). The relationship between the Master and Pavel hasn't always been amicable. The Master's journey is designed not just to learn more about Pavel, but to reconcile the two of them, albeit too late to make any difference during his lifetime. His immediate goal is to recover Pavel’s private papers, which have been confiscated by the police. Just as the Master learns things about his stepson, he learns what Pavel thought of him, as well as learning more about himself by way of introspection. I haven't read any of the biographies of Dostoyevsky, but there appear to be some parallels with actual events in Dostoyevsky's life in the lead up to 1869. However, this is not the point of the novel - to record actual events with historical veracity. Instead, it's a vehicle with which Coetzee can speculate on the writing process used by Dostoyevsky, as well as which Coetzee can utilise to kickstart and structure his own creative process. Towards the end of the novel, the Master sits down at his writing desk and starts to compose chapters about his experiences in the style of "Demons". In a way, Coetzee returns to and taps the spring that gave life to Dostoyevsky's novel. The aim is to see Dostoyevsky's world with his eyes, if this is at all possible. These are "imaginary memoirs, memories of the imagination." Fathers and Sons: Foes to the Death For Coetzee, the Master is symbolic of Russia itself. If we can understand one, we can understand the other. Pavel represents the legacy of both. A student, he had joined a group of anarchists led by the demonic Sergei Nechaev, who urges him to overthrow the government in the name of justice. When the police examine Pavel's personal papers, they find a list of targets for assassination. The Master questions whether the police actually killed his son or whether Nechaev arranged his murder, because they might have fallen out over the composition of the list. When the Master meets Nechaev, they retroactively become rivals for Pavel's soul; father figures and foes in the quest to determine his future. This is not the only rivalry: the Master and Pavel are rivals with each other. Each just wants to be loved and respected by the other ("Father, why have you left me in the dark forest? Father, when will you come to save me?"), but they lock horns in a perpetual power struggle. In the Master’s parallel world, he starts to see himself with Pavel’s eyes. If the Master can find out what Pavel really thought of him, perhaps he will understand himself better. He recognises that this journey of self-recognition might entail even more pain and hurt than the loss of his son that initiated it. A Russian Life The Master reveals no apprehension: "I am not here in Russia in this time of ours to live a time free of pain. I am required to live - what shall I call it? - a Russian life: a life inside Russia, or with Russia inside me, and whatever Russia means. It is not a fate I can evade." Nechaev senses the Master’s opposition to his radical political agenda: "How can you abandon Russia and return to a contemptible bourgeois existence?" The Master starts to understand the psychology of Pavel’s motivation for revolution: "Not the People's Vengeance but the Vengeance of the Sons: is that what underlies revolution - fathers envying their sons their women, sons scheming to rob their fathers' cashboxes?" Nechaev describes it to the Master: "Your day is over. Only, instead of passing quietly from the scene, you want to drag the whole world down with you. You resent it that the reins are passing into the hands of younger and stronger men who are going to make a better world..." "Revolution is the end of everything old, including fathers and sons. It is the end of successions and dynasties. And it keeps renewing itself, if it is true revolution." Idealist Fathers, Nihilist Sons In Konstantin Mochulsky's biography of Dostoyevsky, he explains that "nihilist sons are immediately linked...with idealist fathers." Here, the policeman Maximov asks: “Why are dreamers, poets, intelligent young men like your stepson, drawn to bandits like Nechaev?” The Master responds “I do not know. Perhaps because in young people there is something that has not yet gone to sleep, to which the spirit in Nechaev calls. Perhaps it is in all of us: something we think has been dead for centuries but has only been sleeping.” The Master experiences both anger and grief: "He can no longer deny it: a gap is opening between himself and the dead boy. He is angry with Pavel, angry at being betrayed. It does not surprise him that Pavel should have been drawn into radical circles, or that he should have breathed no word of it in his letters. But Nechaev is a different matter. Nechaev is no student hothead, no youthful nihilist. He is the Mongol left behind in the Russian soul after the greatest nihilist of all has withdrawn into the wastes of Asia." The Master contrasts Nechaev with the generation before himself: “The [Decembrists and the men of 1849] were idealists. They failed because, to their credit, they were not schemers enough, and certainly not men of blood. Petrashevsky...from the outset denounced the kind of Jesuitism that excuses the means in the name of the end. Nechaev is a Jesuit, a secular Jesuit who quite openly embraces the doctrine of ends to justify the most cynical abuse of his followers’ energies.” In an earlier pamphlet quoted by the Master, Nechaev explains the psychology of an insurrectionist (in the vein of Bakunin): "The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no interests, no feelings, no attachments, not even a name. Everything in him is absorbed in a single and total passion: revolution. In the depths of his being he has cut all links with the civil order, with law and morality. He continues to exist in society only in order to destroy it...He does not expect the least mercy. Every day he is ready to die." The Master adds, "Extremists all of them, sensualists hungering for the ecstasy of death - killing, dying, no matter which. And Pavel among them!" Dostoyevsky subsequently explored these views in greater detail in “Demons”. [image] The Writer as Chess-Player Coetzee is equally interested in the writing process. The following description applies to the Master’s relationship with Pavel’s landlady (Anna) just as much as it does to the relationship between writer and reader: “He feels like a chess-player offering a pawn which, whether accepted or refused, must lead into deeper complications. Are affairs between men and women always like this, the one plotting, the other plotted against? Is plotting an element of the pleasure: to be the object of another’s intrigue, to be shepherded into a corner and softly pressed to capitulate? As she walks by his side, is she too, in her way, plotting against him?” Coetzee’s novel is intricately plotted and word-perfect. There is a sense that, sentence by sentence, we’re being transported through a maelstrom of emotion toward a more profound appreciation of both Dostoyevsky and revolutionary Russia. Date of Review: March 5, 2016 ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Feb 21, 2016
|
Mar 05, 2016
|
Jan 27, 2012
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0394177681
| 9780394177687
| 0394177681
| 3.78
| 324
| 1970
| Jan 01, 1972
|
really liked it
|
A Three-Fold Revolution At a macro level, "Project" is about the fate of the city, the body and the novel. All three represent a corpus, society, order A Three-Fold Revolution At a macro level, "Project" is about the fate of the city, the body and the novel. All three represent a corpus, society, order and convention (including narrative convention). Over the course of the novel, all three are subjected to some form of revolution: destruction, break-down, fragmentation, disarticulation, dis-integration or deconstruction. We observe a cutting up of the natural order, an overthrow of repression, perhaps even (but not necessarily in relation to the role of women) liberation. Like a film, what is cut up is then re-assembled into a new whole, in this case, the novel. Yet, somehow, the result is alienating. Why is it so? If it can be done with film, via editing, why can't it be done with the novel? Why are our expectations of the novel different from those with respect to a film? Is it the visualisation of the subject matter that makes film easier to digest? What about a novel that mimics a film? Rape, Arson and Murder The political revolution has already occurred by the time the novel commences. We see its aftermath. The natural order has been overturned, only it has been replaced by disorder, rather than a new order. Like detective novels, pulp fiction and B-movies, the subject matter of the novel, the immediate consequence of its revolution, is rape, arson and murder (a triad of crimes, this time). Just as the world revolves, it is revolting. Each crime is a destructive force. Each involves the colour red by way of revolution, fire, bruising and bloodshed. Robbe-Grillet as author stages this revolution for us to watch. He turns us readers into voyeurs and peeping toms, who look or gaze through the keyhole, or use a phallic key to open the door and seek entry to the forbidden room, where all of the fictive action takes place. Ironically, the person behind the revolution, the person giving the orders (that supplant the natural order) is Frank, on the one hand, the name of someone who tells it as it is, on the other, perhaps a name indicating a Frenchman, but then perhaps also the author, who might also be a director or a writer/director/producer. Rehearse/Repeat/Retake/Cut The novel is drenched in the language of film and theatre. It's labelled a "project" as if it's a treatment or a proposal for a film. On the other hand, the project could merely anticipate what might occur, by design or otherwise. It's structured as a rehearsal, a repetition (the French word "répéter" means both rehearse and repeat). There is a sequence of scenes, both original shoots and retakes, separated by judicious cutting. When the revolution does finally come, however, like good actors and good audience members, we will know what to expect and what to be prepared for. The spectacle will be better for the rehearsal. We implied readers even appear in the novel as interrogators, endeavouring to clarify what has happened, to explain inconsistencies, to recapitulate scenes we didn't quite understand. We are seated and present in the theatre of operations, not just as audience members or witnesses to the crimes, but as contributors to the development and appreciation of the creative work, this filmic/theatrical novel being constructed, apparently, in front of our very eyes. It would be nothing without our gaze. The City New York is the locus of the revolution. It has to be, because it is (or was, in 1970, when the novel was written) the global symbol of commerce, the centre of world trade (hence the lure of the World Trade Centre for terrorists). Because of its status, it is also the centre of advertising, the creation of modern [faux- or fake] aspirations, dreams, fantasies and mythology. Madison Avenue tells us, as objects, how we should look, as well as telling us, as subjects, how we should look at the objects it has created for us. It is where the dominant gaze is fabricated (well, at least, alongside Hollywood, which after all is just Manhattan's backlot). If you want to question or overthrow the dominant gaze, then the revolution has to start in New York. The Body The bodies in the novel are invariably those of women. They are subjected to graphic violence, rape and torture. The language mimics that of crime fiction and pornography. Fiction mimics the underbelly of society. Womanhood is portrayed as the virginal white skin which is made bloody red, just as Mallarmé sees a blank sheet of white paper as something pure and virginal that will be sexualised and invaded by the author, enabling it to be read. Still, sexual violence is present. Does that make the novel or the author misogynist? Is the fiction entitled to stand alone, apart from its author? [image] The Novel The revolutionary violence in "Project" is not just its subject matter, but a description of the very process of writing itself. The project is not just the fictional project within the text, it also defines the process by which the text is created. Robbe-Grillet's project was to overthrow narrative convention, the natural order of fiction. He did so by appropriating the conventions of popular art forms and circumscribing or circumventing them. Discrete passages look like they could have appeared in crime fiction, but cut up and reassembled, they take on another form. The whole is different from the parts. While we can admire Robbe-Grillet's ambition, I can't say that it makes for an enjoyable read. The writing is word perfect, the sentences and paragraphs short and sharp and economical, like detective fiction. However, there are no chapters or other signposts that mark transitions. The editting is so subtle, it's seamless, and frequently it's hard to know when one scene has ended and another has commenced. As a result, it's quite possible to finish the novel and not have a clue what was going on. Nevertheless, as a whole, it's captivating and draws you back to the first page, so that you're tempted to read it again with greater understanding and appreciation. Is this making excuses? I don't think so, but the novel is clearly not for every one. In a way, it's like a formally innovative film. We watch it the first time, trying to get comfortable with the narrative device. On our second viewing, we relax and enjoy the detail and the significance that we missed the first time. The first viewing is just a rehearsal for a repeat visit. Not everybody will want to do this, but those who can be lead into temptation and who make the effort should be rewarded. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
Mar 16, 2014
not set
|
Mar 22, 2014
not set
|
Apr 01, 2011
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0141182849
| 9780141182841
| B01BITGGGS
| 3.61
| 23,203
| 1977
| Mar 30, 2000
|
really liked it
|
Less Poetry! Most of the stories in "Delta of Venus" were written under a quasi-Oulipean constraint: they were commissioned by a collector of erotica w Less Poetry! Most of the stories in "Delta of Venus" were written under a quasi-Oulipean constraint: they were commissioned by a collector of erotica who specified, "Concentrate on sex. Leave out the poetry." Anais Nin initially complied. However, she admits, "I began to write tongue-in-cheek, to become outlandish, inventive, and so exaggerated that I thought he would realise I was caricaturing sexuality." Back came the response, "Less poetry." The collector was looking for explicit, clinically precise description of sexual activity. Pandora's Box Nin duly complied, within limits, and what we read on the page is the result. However, notwithstanding the brief, she wrote with a simple, economical elegance that qualifies as both literature and erotica. The intrinsic quality of her writing couldn't help but intrude. Nin was trying to escape "the clinical, the scientific, which only captures what the body feels". She wanted to go beyond the flesh into the senses and the heart, and via them into the essence and ecstasy of a sexually voracious woman: “I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from a man's and for which man's language was so inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored.” [image] A New Language Apart from any erotic appeal, what's stimulating about "Delta of Venus" is the sense that we're witnessing the invention of a new language. There's also a different perspective on sex. Only one story is written in the first person. As a result, in the remainder, "they" are doing this to each other, and therefore it's implicitly "you and I", "we", doing it, not an implied male "me" doing it to an implied female "you". While the reader might be gendered, the writer allows us to witness both aspects of the one act, the two sides of the one coin. We don't automatically adopt the perspective of the male, we don't look through the peep-hole of the male gaze. This Little Kernel The stories as a whole focus on a woman's "sex", the vulva, the delta of Venus (the goddess who was "born of the sea with this little kernel of salty honey in her, which only caresses could bring out of the hidden recesses of her body"). For all the anatomical detail, much attention is still given to the surroundings within which sexual activity takes place and fantasies are realised: "Just as you felt like making love on top of my fur bed, I always feel like making love where there are hangings and curtains and materials on the walls, where it is like a womb. I always feel like making love where there is great deal of red. Also where there are mirrors." The characters are realistically drawn, not just caricatures, and we accumulate enough biographical detail over the course of the stories to feel we know them as well as any protagonists in literary fiction. We just know more about their sex lives. Into the Groove Whether inevitably or by design, more and more lyrical sentences slip past the embargo on poetry. Here are some of Nin's interjaculations that I noted on my journey through her sensuous world: "His decisiveness in small acts gave her the feeling that he would equally wave aside all obstacles to his greatest desires." "Talking together is a form of intercourse. You and I exist together in all the delirious countries of the sexual world. You draw me into the marvellous. Your smile keeps a mesmeric flow." "The first time I felt an orgasm with John, I wept because it was so strong and so marvellous that I did not believe it could happen over and over again." "She marvelled at the continuity of their exultation. She wondered when their love would enter a period of repose." The Exquisite Torment of the Ecstatic Wound Then there are descriptive phrases like these: "ripe for the final possession...the sensitive opening...the little cry of the ecstatic wound...the core of her sensations...the shadowy folds of her sexual secrets...all the fluids of desire seeping along the silver shadows of her legs...a connoisseur, a gourmet, of women's jewel boxes...that first tear of pleasure...this gradual and ceremonious courtship of her senses...[an orgasm that] came like an exquisite torment...the full effulgence of their pleasure..." Even if some of them sound familiar from more recent porn or sexually explicit fiction, what is special is that the style was created or appropriated by a woman for a woman's purposes over and above the male commission and the Oulipean constraint. Some of the artist remains in the output. This is a ground-breaking and thoroughly enjoyable collection of stories. More stories from this period were published in the sequel "Little Birds". [image] Footnote: "L'Origine du Monde" For anyone familiar with Courbet's "L'origine du monde", the last story contains an interesting allusion: "Courbet...painted a torso, with a carefully designed sex, in contortions of pleasure, clutching at a penis that came out of a bush of very black hair." This version of the painting might well be apocryphal. However, whether or not it ever existed, it's a metaphor that gives equal weight to all comers in the contest documented by Nin's stories. SOUNDTRACK: Madonna - "Into The Groove" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52iW3... ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 11, 2015
|
Aug 15, 2015
|
Apr 01, 2011
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0575065664
| 9780575065666
| 0575065664
| 3.47
| 107
| 1998
| Jan 01, 1998
|
really liked it
|
CRITIQUE: Fictitious Compendium This 1998 novel is structured as a compendium of articles, essays, interviews, reviews and stories about the fictitious CRITIQUE: Fictitious Compendium This 1998 novel is structured as a compendium of articles, essays, interviews, reviews and stories about the fictitious female English rock guitarist, Jenny Slade. It's fiction masquerading as non-fiction (masquerading as fiction). It's also post-modernism masquerading as modernism. Overall, the novel doesn't quite know what tone to adopt. Like many other rock 'n' roll novels, it's a strange brew of earnestness and humour (maybe one person's earnestness is another one's comedy), without knowing exactly where to settle:
The same can be said for the novel itself. [image] Post-Punk Goddess Bob Arnold, Jenny Slade's number one fan and the publisher of "The Journal of Sladeian Studies" (he's that dedicated), describes Jenny as a Post-Modern Guitar Goddess. Jenny Slade could almost be a cross between the much later David Mitchell characters, Elf Holloway (keyboardist and lead singer) and Jasper de Zoet (lead guitarist) from 2020's "Utopia Avenue". In a series of long strange time-travelling trips, she meets influences like Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson, and Frank Zappa, and gives them creative, personal and career advice. Unfortunately, without a mentor, her own career slides into decline:
Eventually, Jenny must settle for being an influence on others through her recorded work, her only protection against ephemerality. SOUNDTRACK: (view spoiler)[ Zepparella - "Dazed and Confused" [Featuring Gretchen Menn on Guitar] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Cfol... Zepparella - "Dazed and Confused" (Live at Hard Truth Distillery, Nashville, Indiana on June 3, 2023) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB6v-... Zepparella - "Whole Lotta Love" [Live in 2013] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMp9z... Zepparella - "Whole Lotta Love" Jam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEeq_... Zepparella - "Whole Lotta Love" [Live at Guerneville] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYIo5... Gretchen Menn - "Oleo Strut" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1GHf... Lemon James - "Purple Haze" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Exp0R... Alla Tarabrina - "Purple Haze" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xmyty... (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
Dec 21, 2023
not set
|
Dec 23, 2023
not set
|
Apr 01, 2011
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| B006C8U1PS
| 3.37
| 38
| Nov 12, 1987
| Jan 01, 1955
|
liked it
|
CRITIQUE: 1938 This novel of political espionage is set in France in the years 1938 and 1953. In pre-war 1938, the chief protagonist, Barney Sand, is the CRITIQUE: 1938 This novel of political espionage is set in France in the years 1938 and 1953. In pre-war 1938, the chief protagonist, Barney Sand, is the 14 year old son of the American ambassador to Spain. While fleeing to France, they meet a partisan called Jacobi, an American who had fought in the Spanish Civil War as a member of the Jefferson Battalion, one of the International Brigades set up by the Comintern. Jacobi appraises Barney in these terms:
However, it soon becomes apparent to readers that Jacobi has misjudged Barney as an individual, if not his privileged situation. 1953 In post-war 1953, Barney still lives in Paris, but works as a journalist for an English language newspaper. Unbeknown to his peer group, his politics have become more left-wing liberal. His editor assigns him the task of interviewing the same Jacobi, who in the intervening period has been the leader of the Communist Party (presumably the PCF), but has recently been expelled from the Party. Jacobi was regarded as an idealistic political theorist and not adequately pragmatic for the times. The Party believes that the editor will pass the record of interview with Jacobi on to the CIA, although Barney isn't aware of this. Most of the novel (14 out of 16 chapters) describes the clandestine arrangements by which Barney is introduced to Jacobi, in the safe home where he is being held. Readers have to wait a long time to meet 1953-era Jacobi. Even when we do (in the penultimate chapter), we don't learn much/ enough about him, except that he has grown sceptical about the role of the Communist Party:
Barney gets only a limited opportunity to speak to Jacobi, who tries to discourage him from getting involved with the Communist Party:
In Jacobi's opinion, Barney is too individualistic (and selfish) for the Party. They already suspect him of being an American intelligence agent. His employment as a journalist is supposedly just a front for his espionage activities. [image] The author in his writing studio (Source: Jill Krementz) "Paris Review" While the novel is an interesting and competent work of fiction, it bears some resemblance to Peter Matthiessen's own youthful experience in Paris, where he co-founded or "invented" the "Paris Review" as a cover for his two year role as a CIA agent spying on left-wing American expatriates. (1) FOOTNOTES: (1) See the Charlie Rose interview in the soundtrack below. Matthiessen's politics became more left-wing liberal over time. SOUNDTRACK" (view spoiler)[ Choeur de l'Armée Française - "Le Chant des Partisans" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gczvc... Leonard Cohen - "The Partisan" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs5hO... Cream - "Politician" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOPDz... Charlie Rose Interviews Peter Matthiessen https://charlierose.com/videos/15312 See 15:13 to 17:20 for the discussion of (the youthful folly of) his CIA activities. (The whole interview is fascinating.) (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
Dec 05, 2023
not set
|
Dec 12, 2023
not set
|
Apr 01, 2011
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||||
| 1864482982
| 9781864482980
| 1864482982
| 3.75
| 8
| unknown
| Jan 01, 1998
|
really liked it
|
CRITIQUE: In the City There is a sense of hyper-realism at play in "Capital: Volume 1", even if it doesn't necessarily qualify as "hyper-real" in th CRITIQUE: In the City There is a sense of hyper-realism at play in "Capital: Volume 1", even if it doesn't necessarily qualify as "hyper-real" in the Baudrillardian sense. At the heart of the novel is a concern with life in the city (a capital city? a city of capital?) - well, actually, it's a tale of a town and a city, if not two cities: one Brisbane (1) (where I currently live), the other London, which I have only visited on holidays (three times, at the time of writing). These cities have some similarities now, despite their profound differences. Until the end of the nineteen-seventies, Brisbane was still a country town (I remember when "Rolling Stone" was banned by the state government as a subversive magazine), but it managed to grow into a modern city in the nineteen-eighties. Its youth accomplished this, partly by modelling itself on British music, film and culture. It also revered New York and L.A. as archetypes, to which I'd add Detroit. Escape from the City The alternating Brisbane scenes in "Capital" (one of which is actually set in a second-hand record store in Sydney) seem to occur between the late nineteen-seventies and the late nineteen-eighties, when student life consisted of hippie share houses, vegetarian food, dope, sizable record collections (housed in makeshift timber cabinets or on the floor), and part time jobs (required to fund the rent, dope and record collections). The London scenes in Macris' novel are set somewhere between 1991 (when Sergei Bodrov's 1989 film, "Freedom is Paradise", was released in London - Macris includes a capsule review by film critic Tony Rayns in "Time Out") and 1997 (when the book was published). Brisbane (or Australia) is a place from which Macris' protagonist wants to escape, even if it is only for the purposes of a holiday and "overseas travel" (2). The city he wants to leave hasn't yet changed much from the small town of his childhood. After finishing university, he gets jobs at the Commonwealth Department of Finance (a nine week vacation job - it's all he could stomach), and the Pancake Manor (where some of my friends worked, if they couldn't get a job at Rocking Horse Records in Adelaide Street, or JoJo's upstairs on the corner of Queen and Albert Streets), so he can save money for his overseas travel. Going "to the City, to See the Temples" The protagonist's father frequently drives his two sons into "town" (or the city) to see "the temples" - Brisbane's only five or six remaining stately buildings. The rest of Brisbane, especially the suburbs of tin and timber houses, barely survived three or four decades. It lacked history and context. London, on the other hand, was always an enormous magnet for Australians - we couldn't wait to get there, to see its temples, to experience what was left of the "swinging sixties", or to participate as musician, artist, writer or audience in the pub rock, punk, new wave, post-punk, synth-pop, or Britpop scenes that were promoted by New Musical Express ("NME"). (3) London venues were where you could find temples to these secular gods. London is the home of the protagonist's particular hero, David Bowie. Through much of the novel, tracks from "Diamond Dogs" or the 1976 compilation album, "Changesonebowie", are playing. Going Underground Macris' protagonist (known only as "the man in the fawn trench coat") makes a fictional, almost Joycean journey on the London Underground between Russell Square and King's Cross stations. He's anxious to get out of the crowded train, so he can meet up with a friend at a pub, before going to see a film in Islington (perhaps, at the Everyman Screen on the Green). The protagonist consumes music and film like other people acquire retail goods. Outside the train, on the platform, the station is a meta-real microcosm of modern capitalist society. There's a horde of commuter/ consumers standing impatiently on the platform, using their undesired waiting time to read the advertising on the hoardings attached to the station walls and the underground tunnels. The commuter/consumers are surrounded by, and have to walk through, the indulgences, excesses and detritus of mundane capitalist consumption: "the discarded crisps and hamburger wrappers that skid along the tunnel floor; the advertisements for foot powder, eye drops, Israeli holidays and police force recruitment [that] adorn the tunnel and platform walls..." An empty bottle of Lucozade is kicked around and rolls down the stairs, frustrating and tripping up an elderly woman with multiple plastic bags of shopping. Capital is valorised, objectified, exchanged and transferred around, all on the London Underground. Time and Space Oddity Several commuters are captured step by step, motion by motion, frame by frame, as they walk up or down the stairs into or out of the station. Like stop motion photography, repetition is fundamental to their individual and collective portrayal. Each one is a composite of their separate steps, motions, and frames, like Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" or Gerhard Richter's "Woman Descending the Staircase". [image] Marcel Duchamp - "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2"[Source:] The winds of economic and cultural change blow through the tunnels of the station, anticipating how capitalism will change people's lives in the near future. The soundtrack is Bowie's dystopian album, "Diamond Dogs". A female Japanese postgraduate student at London School of Economics listens to her husband's Walkman on her earphones -
People, commuters, consumers, the masses, all of us are disoriented in a mass transit continuum. "A Split Second of Delirium" The wind blows a speck of grit into the Japanese woman's eye, causing her temporary distress. Fortunately, her husband is there to help remove it:
Macris seems to imply that his generation is still able to find intimacy, romance and love beneath, and in the underground of, capitalism, partly because of the soundtrack pop music and culture affords it. [image] Gerhard Richter - "Woman Descending the Staircase" [Source:] FOOTNOTES: (1) Disclosure: I knew the author's sister in the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties, and once met him at a party at her house in Highgate Hill/ Dutton Park. He hadn't written this novel at the time, although, remembering him, I bought my copy at a bookshop in Adelaide when it was first released in 1997. (2) Likewise, the Go-Betweens (the most heavily careerist of Bris Angelean bands) couldn't wait to get out of Brisbane (to make it big - always their main concern [music was just a vehicle for achieving fame, like their idols, the Monkees]- in Melbourne, London, New York, or LA/Hollywood) in the early eighties, when the bravest act was to stay, rebel, create and play. (3) In those days, NME was a weekly print newspaper/ magazine, that took three months to get to Australia, before it could get distributed by newsagents. (4) She's listening to Morrissey's "Piccadilly Palare", a song about homosexual male prostitution. David Bowie and Morrissey are signposts to the underlying bi-sexual and homosexual sub-themes of the novel. [image] The cover of Morrissey's 1990 single, 'Piccadilly Palare'. Source: SOUNDTRACK: (view spoiler)[ The Go-Betweens - "Cattle And Cane" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi4DT... David Bowie - "Space Oddity" (2019 Mix) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptVbk... David Bowie - "Rebel Rebel" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U16Xg... David Bowie - "Modern Love" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhVct... The Eagles - "Hotel California" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BciS5... "This could be Heaven or this could be Hell" The Jam - "In the City" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcK5G... The Jam - "Going Underground" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE1ct... Morrissey - "Piccadilly Palare" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFNHY... "Off the rails I was and Off the rails I was happy to stay Get out of my way... The Piccadilly Palare Was just silly slang Between me and the boys in my gang Exchanging Palare You wouldn't understand Good sons like you Never do." Sweden - "Animal Nitrate" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7mEB... Art Of Noise - "Moments In Love" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cen22... Marcel Duchamp - "Nude Descending a Staircase" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t48ic... Analysis - Marcel Duchamp - "Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QI7P... Analysis - Gerhard Richter - "Woman Descending the Staircase" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb8s4... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3dz8... Steven Sebring - "Nude Descending a Staircase" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU0ou... Simple Minds - "Thirty Frames A Second" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_brfu... Simple Minds - "Theme for Great Cities" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJDx-... David Bowie - "D.J." (Moonage Daydream Mix) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HXbs... (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
Sep 12, 2022
not set
|
Sep 18, 2022
Sep 18, 2022
|
Apr 01, 2011
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0571195709
| 9780571195701
| 0571195709
| 3.51
| 5,771
| 1998
| Jan 18, 1999
|
really liked it
|
A Joke Followed by an Intimacy After reading Milan Kundera's "The Joke", I returned it to the shelf, and looked for something short to read next. Happi A Joke Followed by an Intimacy After reading Milan Kundera's "The Joke", I returned it to the shelf, and looked for something short to read next. Happily, I found it next to my Kunderas. I thought "Intimacy" might continue some of the themes about relationships that had interested me in "The Joke". After finishing it, I discovered a 2001 interview with Kureishi in the Guardian in which he revealed that he had been reading "The Joke" that very morning. In some ways, Kureishi was to the 90's what Kundera was to the 80's. He seemed to define the Zeitgeist. At least if you were male! He had a David Bowie-like rock star persona. He could get away with almost anything. "All Couples Have Troubles" I read "Intimacy" in the space of a day, well less actually, more like the time it took the Australian cricket team to knock out their first innings in the Ashes test in Nottingham. It's a novella rather than a novel. My copy was 150 pages long, but broadly spaced. No sooner had I started it than it was over. At one level, it's an indulgent rant. It's written in the first person. The narrator (Jay) is a narcissistic Oscar-nominated scriptwriter, who's about to leave his family the next day. Inevitably, it's difficult to dissociate Jay from the author. If it's difficult now, it was certainly a lot harder when the book was first published. It was clear to all that the novel was based on Kureishi's relationship and break up with his partner and mother of their two children, Tracey Scoffield. "Some People Read Books Endlessly" So what can you say almost 20 years later? Kureishi writes with amazing precision about relationships from a male's perspective. You could be quite charmed listening to Jay, thinking he had a special sensitivity. However, after a while, you realise that his precision is almost surgical, and that he wields a scalpel capable of making a neat, clean cut in human flesh. Jay studied Plato, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Marx, Freud, Sartre, Camus, Ionesco, Beckett and "other poets of solitude and dread". His interests bridge philosophy and psychology. However, all this study fuels his belief that he knows people and relationships better than anyone else. Well, he knows what's good for him. And this is what he imposes on those around him. "Not Every Match Burns Bright" Beneath the hipster facade is a viciousness, not unrelated to his taste in music: "A lot of punk. It was the hatred, I think, that appealed." Contrast this with his partner: "Susan, who is four years younger than me, thinks we live in a selfish age. She talks of a Thatcherism of the soul that imagines that people are not dependent on one another...Fulfilment, self-expression and 'creativity' are the only values." In other words, creativity had given some people a way out of conformist, pre-60's nine-to-fiveism, but it retained the egotism of the previous more material, more analogue, less digital version of capitalism. "Some Couples Live in Harmony, Some Do Not" Jay also takes a pot shot at women's politics: "She is of a disapproving generation of women. She thinks she's a feminist but she's just bad-tempered." It's as if Jay isn't a spoiled prat, he's just a very naughty boy: "Susan would say that we require other social forms. What are they? Probably the unpleasant ones: duty, sacrifice, obligation to others, self-discipline." These are Susan's words. Perhaps, some of us will recoil from what they imply? But, really, aren't they the sort of thing you say when you start to think in terms of needs other than just your own: the needs of a couple, the needs of a family, the needs of a peer group, the needs of a community, the needs of a social and political movement? From the perspective of the Left, Jay confesses, "We were the kind of people who held the Labour Party back." It's as if Jay's kind of egocentricity tends to subvert any collective, whether of two or two billion. "You My Dear Don't Have Any Manners" Jay loves their two boys, aged five and three, he says he'll be sad to leave them (really!), but they're not enough to commit him to any sort of family unit, not enough to make an effort. He can't will himself into the relationship: "You cannot will love, but only ask why you have put it aside for the time being." He pretends that he can turn off his love for his children, and that they will be there for him when he's ready to revive a relationship with them, when they are more mature and can understand his needs. He says something that many of us who have been in a relationship that didn't last can understand: "I didn't want to love Susan, but for some reason didn't want the clarity of that fact to devastate us both." Yet, you have to wonder whether the failed lover inside the author does want the public, written record of this fact to devastate: "It is a lovely day for leaving." How could it not devastate somebody? "Still, It's Sad to See Everything in Tatters" This is the true significance of the novel, as a work of fiction, but also as an implied comment on an actual relationship. The book might be named after intimacy, but it doesn't sing its praises. Instead, it reveals intimate details in order to expose and compromise them, in order to snuff out whatever flaming beauty was ever there. It's about the longing for intimacy and love, and how angry we can be when they're snuffed out, lost, rejected, left. Intimacy and love can simply dissipate before our very eyes. With no effort at all. Which is often the cause. I couldn't believe some of the things Jay said, they were so clinically brutal. You could see them coming, and you'd wonder whether he'd restrain himself, but in the end I was glad that they weren't left unsaid. We wouldn't know the truth, otherwise. The thing is, Kureishi does it accurately enough to condemn the 1990's era male (who hasn't changed that much) out of his own mouth. For all the aspersions he casts on Susan, it's her words that have best stood the test of time. She anticipated an era when, after the indulgences of the three decades that followed the 60's, we eventually had to grow up. They are, of course, words that Kureishi wrote, or at least selected and recorded from his real life experience. If it was the latter, then at least he had enough acumen to know what words expressed Susan's truth. And therefore ours. SOUNDTRACK: Marianne Faithfull - "Why'd Ya Do It?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mvAM... Lou Reed - "Tatters" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZYwe... Lou Reed - "Tatters" [Live at Montreux on July 12, 2000] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUH8V... ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
Aug 06, 2015
not set
|
Aug 07, 2015
not set
|
Apr 01, 2011
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0142004146
| 9780142004142
| 0142004146
| 3.80
| 17,453
| Mar 23, 1989
| Jul 27, 2004
|
really liked it
|
Kripo Noir Homage The first volume of Scottish author Philip Kerr's "Berlin Noir" trilogy (later expanded to 14 novels) is an immaculately conceive Kripo Noir Homage The first volume of Scottish author Philip Kerr's "Berlin Noir" trilogy (later expanded to 14 novels) is an immaculately conceived and executed homage to the pulp fiction of Raymond Chandler that deserves praise as a work of literature in its own right. The main difference between the originals and the homage is that, in “March Violets", the setting is transposed to 1936 Nazi Germany just as the Berlin Olympic Games are about to commence. The writing is word-perfect. There's enough wise-crackery and sexual bravado for the private investigator Bernard Gunther to remind you of Philip Marlowe, while the Nazi context gives you a close perspective on corruption, crime, detection and punishment in the early Third Reich. We even get a snapshot of life in Dachau:
Death seems to come as a relief from the privations of life in a concentration camp. Authoritarian Respect The plot is subtle, and both needs and rewards close attention. There are numerous law enforcement and paramilitary authorities (e.g., the traditional police force, Kripo; the SA; the SS; and the Gestapo; all of which mark out their territory and perpetuate an uneasy rivalry.) Nobody can be trusted, whether in law enforcement, politics, the Nazi Party, business or the community. You can see how and why people were cheated out of their basic human rights, and became obedient subjects of a totalitarian regime. They just put up and shut up. Anybody who objected or complained was either shot or shipped off to a concentration camp. Paradoxically, authority was everywhere, but genuine respect for authority was non-existent. [image] SS officer in black dress uniform Is That An Envelope in Your Pocket? [An Homage] I’ve worked as a private investigator, ever since I resigned from Kripo. My resignation wasn't entirely voluntary. I had to leave, because I was tired of playing second fiddle to the Third Reich. In my line of work, there's nothing I hate more than short, fat, badly educated millionaires, especially ones with tall, beautiful, blonde wives. Herr Hermann Six satisfied all of these criteria, even if he didn't necessarily satisfy his wife, Ilse Rudel, the actress. I have no reason to believe he did (or didn't) satisfy her, it's just that when a woman's husband brags about satisfying her, I automatically disbelieve him. I suppose I could have asked her, but we didn't have much time, and we had better things to do. Ilse was the reason Herr Six summoned me to his mansion one afternoon in June, 1936. From the outside, it looked like a museum or a public art gallery. I couldn't live in a place like that, even if it was rent-free and the maids ran around ready, willing and naked. Herr Six wanted to pay me 25,000 Marks to prove that Ilse was having an affair. It was a lot of money back then. It would have paid off all of my debts, and funded my lifestyle for several years. Even so, I was reluctant to take on the case, at least until Herr Six told me that they didn't cohabit, and Ilse actually lived in a separate apartment in Potsdam not far from the UFA film studio. Anyway, I decided to accept his proposal, at which point he opened the safe behind his untidy desk (it was as big as a billiard table) and removed an envelope, which when I checked it, contained payment in full in cash. He asked me when I could start the job. Normally, I would respond that I'd start when I'd spent the first half of my fee, but I didn't think we'd have the same sense of humour. It was bad enough that, evidently, we had the same taste in women. Before I had the chance to enquire about Ilse's address, there was an insistent knock on the door of the study we were in. We both turned around at the same time, and before he could respond, a woman who I knew to be Ilse entered the study. I had already seen all of her films, and didn't need to be convinced that she was the most beautiful woman in Berlin. She was even more impressive off-screen and in-the-flesh. Herr Six looked her up and down in the same manner I had, perhaps mimicking me, and said, “Very convenient timing, Ilse. Can I introduce you to your new security consultant, Bernard Graye.” She smiled and responded, “Hello, Bernie.” At the same time, she shook my hand. Her hand was as firm and soft as I imagined her breasts would be. I had some inkling of what they were like, because I could see the pressure they exerted on her transparent flesh-coloured blouse. Her nipples projected like two rivets on the hull of a Kriegsmarine battleship. Herr Six returned to the safe and withdrew another envelope, presumably containing cash, and handed it to Ilse. She asked, “Do I have to pay Bernie out of this?” He shook his head, and said, “I've already taken care of Herr Graye. You needn't worry your pretty little head about that.” It was my turn to speak: “Herr Six, could I impose on you to book me a taxi, please?” Ilse intervened before he had time to respond. “Where do you need to go, Bernie? Perhaps, I could take you for a ride?” “Thank you, Frau Six. I live about 100 meters from Potsdam Hauptbahnhof." “Good. You're on my way and within walking distance.” “Well, I'm glad that's all sorted,” said Herr Six. “These arrangements have turned out to be much more convenient than I anticipated.” Ilse sat in the back of her Mercedes with me. Only then did I realise that she had a driver. I repeated my directions for him, and we got on our way. No sooner had we left the kerbside than Ilse moved closer to me and sat in the middle seat. She saw my smile, and reciprocated with her own. This looked like the beginning of a beautiful friendship, as they say in Casablanca. When we turned right at the end of the street, she almost fell over me, and her head rested on my shoulder, where it remained, until I lifted her jaw and kissed her lips. I was confident the driver couldn't see us...I was directly behind him, and hopefully his head-rest obscured his vision. Ilse kissed like a newly-wed wife trying to negotiate a higher monthly allowance than she received as a starlet beloved of the biggest production company in town. The journey to Potsdam seemed to take less time than the standard forty minutes, not that I scrutinised my watch. When the driver stopped outside my building and I prepared to get out, Ilse said to the driver, “Thanks, Rudi. You can go home. I'll walk the rest of the way.” We both got out of the car, and watched it move slowly off into the sunset. I put my arms around Ilse and pulled her closer to me. When our hips touched, she sensed my erection, before clasping it with her hand like a butcher checking a sausage for quality control purposes. Then she asked, “Well, are you going to invite me up for a drink?” Once inside the lobby, the elevator seemed to take a lifetime, both to arrive on the ground floor and to get to my apartment on the fourth. We continued to practise our kissing technique, until the lift stopped, and Ilse waited for me to lead the way to my door. Today was the day my cleaner normally visited, so I was desperately hoping my apartment would be presentable. It had been a bit of a mess when I left for work this morning. We walked along the hallway towards the lounge room, where the cleaner had left on a lamp next to the lounge suite. Ilse removed her blouse as we walked, and handed it to me, while she reached for my other hand. She seemed to be looking for my bedroom, before I'd even poured her a drink. She turned her back on the lounge room when we got to the end of the hallway, and pouted her lips for me to kiss. As I reached towards her, I noticed a black uniform in the chair in the far corner. I didn't remember leaving it there this morning, nor do I recall ever owning an SS officer's dress uniform. I pulled away from Ilse and had a closer look. Not only was there a uniform, but there was a young man in it, holding a pistol, which as far as I could tell, was pointed at my head. “Herr Graye,” said the officer, “Thank you for turning up so promptly. We weren't sure how long I’d have to wait. Frau Six, I presume, welcome to you, too.” She turned to face him, and he stood up to greet her, as if he already knew how important she was, not just some woman in the arms of a private detective, as topless as Venus de Milo. I doubt whether Herr Six had warned the SS officer that he might see the intimate side of Frau Six, but he had definitely caught us, if not in the act, then immediately before the act. I hoped that this would suffice for whatever his evidentiary purposes might be, and that he wouldn't deprive me of the contents of the envelope in the pocket of my jacket. After all, I had clearly proven what Herr Six had engaged (and paid) me to prove. Besides, the officer probably had his own envelope. SOUNDTRACK: (view spoiler)[ Ute Lemper - "Lili Marleen" (live in October, 2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji7K2... June Tabor - "Lili Marleen" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lWDY... Marlene Dietrich - "Lili Marlene" (German) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7heXZ... Marlene Dietrich - "Lili Marlene" (English) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnv2Z... Hanna Schygulla - "Lili Marleen" https://youtu.be/naK6RFRJ-Is (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
May 13, 2020
not set
|
May 18, 2020
not set
|
Apr 01, 2011
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 3.95
| 99,338
| 1955
| 1999
|
really liked it
|
CRITIQUE: Triple Ripley Binge I first read this novel just before I saw the Anthony Minghella film in 1999. FM Sushi and I have just watched the Netflix CRITIQUE: Triple Ripley Binge I first read this novel just before I saw the Anthony Minghella film in 1999. FM Sushi and I have just watched the Netflix series and the film three times in succession. We had a mild disagreement with respect to the series about the cinematography. She preferred the colour photography (believing it more sympathetic to the lushness of the Italian landscape, and the furnishing of the hotels and mansions), while I loved the black and white photography, almost as if it was intended to absorb and highlight the noir features of the architecture, the streets and laneways, and the crimes. Homoeroticism These aspects of the series shouldn't affect the reading and interpretation of the novel. However, both the film and the series draw attention to the homerotocism implicit (or explicit?) in the novel. Marge, who is Dickie Greenleaf's girlfriend, regards Tom Ripley as asexual, as if he doesn't have sufficient personality, charm or drive to conduct a heterosexual (or sexual) relationship. However, soon after meeting Dickie, Tom starts to wear some of Dickie's clothes and shoes (at Dickie's invitation). Later, he wears Dickie's rings. This is Tom's way of expressing admiration for Dickie's taste, while Dickie gladly accepts Tom's admiration (until he starts to question whether there is something perverse at the heart of his admiration). There is something irregular in Tom's admiration. Not only does he venerate Dickie's taste, but he wants to receive some reciprocal approval or appreciation from Dickie:
The Aesthetics of Homoeroticism I have long had a theory that homosexuality is informed by an aesthetic desire for (or admiration of) the ideal form of one's own gender (as opposed to the gender of the other, or the other gender). To this intent, Tom finds some of his own sexuality in Dickie. His (Tom's) response is to copy or imitate or impersonate Dickie, in the belief that Dickie has the wealth and station to do it so much better than himself. [image] Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley in Netflix's "Ripley". Money and Freedom Tom ultimately covets "Dickie's money and his freedom". Tom wants to escape his working class background, so that he can live the life of an authentic, middle or upper class American. He wants to switch from being "a cringing little nobody from Boston" to "[a hero,]...a living, breathing, courageous individual". Believe Me Tom can never quite achieve true authenticity, because (as was the case with his life in New York) his aspirations are built on a foundation of fabrication and forgery. Likewise, he can't achieve his ultimate goal, which is to fit into Dickie's high society, to be credible, and to be believed. In order to do so, he must learn to craft his stories convincingly. He has to learn to "be calm and sure of himself" and his story has to "be unassailable". Like Patricia Highsmith herself:
SOUNDTRACK: (view spoiler)[ Ripley Soundtrack 2024 - "The So Called Memories (By Myself for a While)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HMKz... Ripley Soundtrack 2024 - "Dickie's Ring" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOhSs... (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
Apr 22, 2024
not set
|
May 04, 2024
not set
|
Apr 01, 2011
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||||
| 0395500761
| 9780395500767
| 0395500761
| 4.15
| 9,713
| 1967
| Mar 01, 1989
|
it was amazing
|
My review of Trout Fishing in America is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... My review of Trout Fishing in America is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Oct 26, 2016
|
Oct 26, 2016
|
Mar 28, 2011
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0399107800
| 9780399107801
| 0399107800
| 3.21
| 34
| 1970
| Jan 01, 1970
|
really liked it
|
CRITIQUE: Fictionalised Memoir (as Novel) This a lightly fictionalised memoir of the childhood and mid- and post-Factory life of Warhol actress and supe CRITIQUE: Fictionalised Memoir (as Novel) This a lightly fictionalised memoir of the childhood and mid- and post-Factory life of Warhol actress and superstar, Viva (fictional family name, Janet Susan Mary Hoffmann, and fictional stage name, Gloria), professing to be a novel. The novel is well constructed - it contains both first person and third person perspectives (in different fonts) on Viva's peer group in the late sixties underground, as well as transcriptions of ostensibly taped conversations with friends like Willow (Edie Sedgwick). She says she makes the tapes "just in case there's anything worth remembering." Their worth is questionable - without the tapes (and the novel itself), they are forgettable and probably would have been forgotten. The conversations are mainly about violence (drug-fuelled intimacy frequently leads to abuse), sex and drugs (no rock 'n' roll or Velvet Underground, unfortunately). It's like sitting next to a table full of hippies (or hipsters) talking about themselves in a cafe. Part of you wants to keep listening, entranced, while the other part wants to turn up the music or walk out. "It's All About Sex" Gloria comes from the family of a hypocritical Catholic doctor and his wife (Viva's father was an attorney). When asked by a friend what her book will be about, she replies, "It's all about sex, of course." Her fictional father is extremely critical of her lifestyle, films and novel, as is her sister: Her sister:
Her father:
There are about thirty characters in the novel, all of them pseudonymous versions of real life actors, models, film-makers, artists and chantreuses. Some characters are easier to identify than others (Olga = Nico, Dylan Zimmerman = Bob Dylan, Jerrod Ibiza = Joe Dallesandro, Fred seems to be Paul Morrissey, Fred Morris perhaps Gerard Malanga). While the novel has dated since I first read it sometime in the eighties, it is still interesting, and a must-read for Warhol completists. [image] Viva Superstar in “San Diego Surf” Source: The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh See here, for Diane Arbus' photograph of Viva at Home (warning: explicit, topless). SOUNDTRACK: (view spoiler)[ Velvet Underground - "Venus in Furs" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awzai... Velvet Underground - "All Tomorrow's Parties" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkDJc... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M88Ca... Andy's favourite song off the first Velvets' album The Velvet Underground and Nico - "Sunday Morning" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cWzx... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhbyj... Lou Reed - "Walk On The Wild Side" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsVLI... Lou Reed - "Walk On The Wild Side" [Live in 1974] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S05Jr... Dave Stewart + Vanessa Paradis - "Walk On The Wild Side" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLaq5... John Cale - "Hallelujah" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gi3J... Bettie Serveert - "Stephanie Says" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIBy2... Joseph Arthur (with Reni Lane) - "Stephanie Says" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMuFk... Patti Smith - "Gloria" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPO0b... Maria Callas - "O mio babbino caro" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1C8N... "At the original Factory, Billy Name put Callas on every day, all day long. I’m not exaggerating. We only heard Maria Callas." (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
Aug 30, 2022
not set
|
Sep 04, 2022
not set
|
Mar 04, 2011
|
Hardcover
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 3.98
|
not set
|
Feb 03, 2023
|
||||||
|
| 3.43
|
it was amazing
|
May 03, 2015
not set
|
May 04, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.47
|
not set
|
Oct 10, 2014
|
||||||
|
| 3.74
|
really liked it
|
Jul 10, 2014
not set
|
Jul 19, 2014
|
|||||
|
| 3.88
|
it was amazing
|
Jul 27, 2020
not set
|
Apr 04, 2014
|
|||||
|
| 3.88
|
it was amazing
|
Jun 15, 2013
|
Jun 14, 2013
|
|||||
|
| 3.92
|
really liked it
|
Jul 21, 2013
|
May 19, 2013
|
|||||
|
| 3.48
|
it was amazing
|
Oct 26, 2016
|
Mar 13, 2013
|
|||||
|
| 3.95
|
it was amazing
|
Jul 19, 2015
not set
|
Feb 16, 2013
|
|||||
|
| 3.63
|
really liked it
|
Mar 05, 2016
|
Jan 27, 2012
|
|||||
|
| 3.78
|
really liked it
|
Mar 22, 2014
not set
|
Apr 01, 2011
|
|||||
|
| 3.61
|
really liked it
|
Aug 15, 2015
|
Apr 01, 2011
|
|||||
|
| 3.47
|
really liked it
|
Dec 23, 2023
not set
|
Apr 01, 2011
|
|||||
|
| 3.37
|
liked it
|
Dec 12, 2023
not set
|
Apr 01, 2011
|
|||||
|
| 3.75
|
really liked it
|
Sep 18, 2022
Sep 18, 2022
|
Apr 01, 2011
|
|||||
|
| 3.51
|
really liked it
|
Aug 07, 2015
not set
|
Apr 01, 2011
|
|||||
|
| 3.80
|
really liked it
|
May 18, 2020
not set
|
Apr 01, 2011
|
|||||
|
| 3.95
|
really liked it
|
May 04, 2024
not set
|
Apr 01, 2011
|
|||||
|
| 4.15
|
it was amazing
|
Oct 26, 2016
|
Mar 28, 2011
|
|||||
|
| 3.21
|
really liked it
|
Sep 04, 2022
not set
|
Mar 04, 2011
|
Loading...
