A Tale of Two Cities: Day 3

I really appreciate the fact that Dickens doesn’t waste time on the mundane.  A Tale of Two Cities is so intricate and so jam-packed with character and story and inter-woven lives and deaths and plots, he barely has time to waste on things like weddings.  I, for some naive reason, assumed that when Lucie and Darnay finally got married about halfway through the book, that there would be a scene describing it.  When it arrives, Dickens packs all the characters into a chariot, sends them to church and then announces that Lucie and Darnay were married at said church and the characters return home for breakfast.  Amazing.  This guy knows when to elaborate and knows when to keep his mouth shut.  Yes, he focuses entire chapters on seemingly small instances but they are of such importance.

Example: Soon after the wedding, when Lucie and Darnay head off on the first 2 weeks of their Honeymoon, Dr. Manette, Lucie’s father and former prisoner, relapses into his primal, uneducated state that he was in at the beginning of the novel, 6 years ago, before he met his daughter.  He locks himself in his room, speaks to no one and makes shoes.  Shoes for a young woman.  After 9 days he emerges, as Dr. Manette, confused and unaware that 9 days has passed.  Manette and Lorry (his representative, confidant and part-time caretaker) enter into a ten-page psychological discussion whereupon Manette explains and justifies his fugue state.  Just from this discussion and the juxtaposition of Manette as civil being and Manette as prisoner we learn so much about this character, and the mental state of Man in general.  The Doctor reverts to this state to survive.

To think, Dickens wrote this in 1859, when Sigmund Freud was 3 years old.  The Merck Manual wouldn’t be published for another 40 years.  What amazing insight!  Manette is not just a living creature that has ideas and beliefs but his entire being and personality is shaped by his surroundings and life experience.

A Tale of Two Cities: Day 2

Alright, Dickens, you are starting to make sense.  Sometimes I can really be simpleton… I’ve been wading around in post-modern-meta-literature for far too many months and my brain has been a little unfocused.  It has taken me over 100 pages and countless footnotes but I am starting to see why people think Dickens is such a big deal.  He is a master.  Crafting little bits of information, building up a plausible and livable Paris, dropping characters in here and there and then fast-forwarding five years where we pick up with the same characters in London.  This is the mess that is the British Judicial System circa 1780.  This is what the upper-class think about George Washington and the burgeoning United States.  And back to Paris, where we get a greater understanding of the abuse of the peasants and are reintroduced to a character we spent a brief moment with five years and 100 pages ago.    A nasty French aristocrat who is bound to make a difference in 100 more pages… I get it.

A Tale of Two Cities is, so far, one of the most well-crafted and well-written novels I have read in a while.  In his preface for the novel, Dickens mentions that the idea for the story first came to him when he was acting in a play with his children.  I do not know if Dickens had much (if any) previous acting experience but it is very interesting to see how much theatricality he interjects into his narration of A Tale of Two Cities.  He speaks of characters as if they were actors (upon life’s stage, dare I say?), and hints at theatrical terminology here and there.  It is not overdone, it is very subtle and well-placed.  Or maybe I’m looking into this too far.

Call me Johnny-Come-Lately on this one, but, man!  What the Dickens!

A Tale of Two Cities: Day 1

I am well versed in dramatic literature from the ancient Greeks to present day.  I know the Beats.  I know the Futurists.  I know Camus (not so much Sartre).  Vonnegut.  Bolano.  Some Steinbeck.  Some Hugo.  Some Melville.  I must admit that my literary education is fairly lacking when it comes to the classics.  Part of it is lack of trying and part of it is fear.  Yes, I stare into the face of Ulysses and Moby Dick and I wet myself.  Goethe makes me uneasy and for some reason the word Dickens puts me to sleep.  I assume it is just ignorance and laziness but I am trying hard to correct this and I swear that by December 31st 2010 I will have finally conquered my Joyce fear.

Or not.

I’ve been slowly making my way into the world of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and while I tell myself that “it’s just really hard to get into,” I know that is bullshit.  The only other Dickens I have read is A Christmas Carol (in middle school, I believe) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood which hardly counts because it is unfinished.  A Tale of Two Cities is a little slow-going to get to the main story, I suppose, but none of it seems superfluous or rambling.  I think.  Perhaps my general lack of knowledge of the time period (and therefore my constant flipping to the appendix to read the explanatory notes) is what is slowing me down but I have had this problem before.

I am going to make it through this book, if it kills me.

A Tale of Two Cities meanders a bit at the beginning but as the second book starts, things start to make more sense.  The first book is a bit of a prologue, giving us a few characters, the climate, location and a vague sense of direction.  It also gives us that famous opening line, which Dickens uses to set the stage and remind us that he is writing a history.  The second book (which is the largest of the 3 books) begins to add more characters, develop London a little better (both geographically, historically and socially) and move towards the lives of Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton, who, according to the back of the novel, are the central characters of the book.  I couldn’t tell you for sure, I have yet to meet them.  Although I assume Darnay is just around the corner…

Still Life With Woodpecker: Day 2

I do most of my reading in partial darkness, not out of any desire to be enveloped by the world of the book or some passion I have for isolation, darkness and reading but because I have to.  At work, where the lights are low and everyone must be whisper-quiet (actually completely silent but whisper-quiet sounds better) and at home where I either read while someone sleeps next to me or in the Den of Conflict (I just today found out that my old name for it “The Den of Confliction” was not appropriate because “Confliction” is not a real word) where there is very poor lighting.  Because of this darkness (and the onset of Winter, I suppose) books sometimes have a powerful (negative?) hold on me (tend to annoy me?).

Still Life With Woodpecker started off with a very powerful grasp on me.  Then as I crossed through the middle of the book, the grasp slackened.  Was it the Darkness or was it an increasing annoyance with Tom Robbins and the character of The Woodpecker?  I’d say the latter.  At times, Still Life reads like a Dan Brown novel: you can’t tell if the author is feeding you true information mixed in with false claims (and the ridiculously short chapters that read like a movie script (also similar to The Time Traveler’s Wife (another book I could discuss at length while claiming I love but for some reason I only have bad things to say about)) also helps summon the nauseating spirit of Brown) or if it is all bullshit.  Just when Robbins was really growing on me, as was the character of Woodpecker, the book got preachy and I got annoyed.

The middle portion of the novel starts to read like otherworldly Anais Nin.  We have very sexually-charged romance, deeply intimate and erotic details of Princess Leigh-Cheri and Bernard’s encounters and overall, a strong burning sense of desire.  Lust.  Love.  What is love without lust?  And of course, how to make love stay?  The details are not off-putting or vulgar.  They help build the romance between Leigh-Cheri and Bernard while propelling the imagery and meaning of the Moon (love, women, fertility, menses, aliens?) .  The book turns vulgar when Bernard’s outlaw beliefs start developing.  Perhaps this intentional (but Robbins has made Bernard so cool while he has also spent so many years developing his own “cool” literary persona) but it starts to come off as immature twaddle.  And the book.  Began.  To drag.  For me.  And it seemed like the story had been bogged down in this left-wing idealist diatribe from which we would never escape.

And then things got weird, and I moved into the light.

The final third of the novel is not so much Nin as it is Vonnegut (although still a lot of Brown going on here).  We get this science-fiction world (which has stood in the background, politely, the entire time) slamming into the world of the novel.  We get a half-cocked theory about an ancient interplanetary race of redheads and their attempts to influence and forward mankind, to what end, I am not sure.  The novel begins to pick up (become interesting again and not dragging as much) as Bernard (a very worthy inspiration for Tyler Durden in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club) becomes less present and Leigh-Cheri moves back as the sole-focus of the story.  Maybe Robbins is a little too cool for me.  We’ll see.

Still Life With Woodpecker: Day 1

I’ve been meaning to read Tom Robbins for quite some time.  No.  I’ve been aware of Tom Robbins for quite some time but never really had a desire to read the man.  In my mind he was lumped into a giant mass that consisted of, among others, Christopher Moore and Katherine Dunn (who I have read in the past, however).  Still Life With Woodpecker was given to me last Christmas as a gift and now, a year later, I find myself finally reading it.  The blurb on the back of the book did not make it very inciting at all and the brief bio of Robbins on the final page reads:

Tom Robbins , maverick author of eight  juicy, daring, and sagacious novels, is one of those rare writers who approach rock-star status, attracting SRO crowds at his personal appearances in Europe and Australia as well as in the United States.  He lives primarily in the Seattle area.

Congratulations, book!  You have made me not want to read you!  But you can’t judge a book by it’s back cover and “About the Author,” now can you?  We first get Robbins in (presumably) his own voice talking about his new typewriter, a Remington SL3, which has to be able to tell the story that needs to be told.  We get urgency.  We get a definite style and tone.  And we get a sense that Robbins is…cool.  I can picture a renegade hunched over a typewriter, pulling cigarettes from a box of Camels and sucking on the essence of Anais Nin ( very impressive name to drop the first page of your first page…).  The story comes hard, it comes fast and it comes weird.  We are dropped into a world that is our own but is not quite our own.   I wouldn’t call it fantasy or even speculative fiction but Robbins offers us as our main characters a dethroned European monarchy living in a run-down mansion in Seattle.  He gives us aliens attending a conference on the environment.  An noble outlaw terrorist who (and this is over 20 years prior to the events of September 11, 2001) can break out of jail and purchase plan ticket to Hawaii under an assumed name.

The plot and world are slightly absurd but the ideas are real.  Robbins rails against birth control, the Vietnam war, and victimization while examining how to make love stay.  The guy can write.  There are numerous amazing passages in the first third of the novel that really impressed me or made me grin or wish I had a pen so I could underline them.  Robbins is quite meta at times (a prefix I was sure I had eliminated from my vocabulary a couple years ago but for some reason have been using in almost every other post it seems…): mentioning his own name in the body of the story and referencing his Remington and the general writing of this story in the interludes that are stuck in between the “Phases” of the book (there is a lot of lunar imagery and talk going on here and I’m not quite sure if I have pinned it down yet).  But it comes off totally natural when considering the strangeness of the world Robbins has created for us.

As long as Woodpecker stays cool, I’ll enjoy it.

Hunger: Day 2

Upon concluding Hunger I can clearly state that while there there is a lot of influence on Fante here, there is also a lot of difference.  Fante is a sentimental writer.  Ask the Dust is very American.  Very sentimental.  When stripped down, it is a romance.  Hamsun is not interested in romance (sex, yes) and not only shies away from sentimentalism, he seems to loathe it.  Hamsun is not here to get sentimental on us or moralize from a middle-class second-story window.  He is here to describe “the whisper of the blood and the pleading of the bone marrow.”  Hunger.  Desire.  Dignity.

The Writer is a very introspective man, so introspective and aware of himself, in fact, that it comes off as insanity.  As the story pushes forward and the writer sinks deeper into poverty, pain and inability to write, he becomes more introspective and understanding as himself as whole.  He lets his unconscious float to the top whenever it pleases and this drives him to play tricks on people, invent fictional people and hunt them down and, most notably, give away his money and possessions (as before, more on this later).  This deeply intimate knowledge of self and the trade-off between conscious actions and unconscious urges  sometimes comes off as madness and yes, “madness” “madman” “insanity” and “lunatic” are used with increasing frequency as the novel goes on, first by The Writer himself and then by other characters (none of which are developed at all) but is the writer truly going mad?  Or is he merely a genius.  If he is mad, then Hamsun has created a very compelling psychological sketch of a brilliant, sentient lunatic, infinitely more fascinating that Gogol’s amusing (and not much more) Madman.  But I still believe that The Writer is not insane, merely a genius treading the fine line between the two.

Back to my question from yesterday: “Why does The Writer compulsively give his money and possessions away when he clearly needs them as much if not more than the people he gives them to?”

Well…

It seems to be a matter of honor, of dignity in the face of destitution.  The Writer clearly believes in a God but does not live his life based on some learned, religious moral code.  Yes, he has a moral code, but it is one that he has created from bits of religion, society, and cultural norms…one that he believes to be true.  Honor above all.  Desires are shameful.  If a man does not have honor, his good name, what does he have?  Yes, it all sound a bit Greek…even a bit Japanese (and it seems Hamsun was familiar with the Greeks, or at least was accidentally invoking them) but The Writer has a brief flash of error towards the end.  After giving away a fresh ten-krone note (anonymously mailed by Ylayali) he finally begins to regret this habit.  He demands free food from a cake-seller he donated money to earlier, calling it an advance payment and states “Enough is enough, a man can die, you know, from too much pride…”  So he does not succumb to his Hubris.  Instead, he sets sail away from Christiania, away from his Hunger and despair.  Not that it is a particularly “neat” or “happy” ending, it is a very open-ended conclusion.

On the relationship with Ylaali:

Completely unromantic.  Purely sexual.  Nothing like the relationship between Arturo and Camilla in Ask the Dust (although I am not entirely sure why I was expecting that (yet there is a brief scene in Hunger in which the writer goes to a cafe that is very reminiscent of a cafe scene from Ask the Dust)) and one can hardly call it a relationship.  It is more of a series of encounters (the whole novel is really a series of encounters) that end poorly for The Writer (again, everything ends poorly for The Writer, although Hamsun has crafted it well enough to not come off as a repetitive cycle).  She represents a Desire and when The Writer acts upon this Desire, he feels he is acting without honor (upon reflection, that is.  In the moment, he wants nothing more than to kiss her and see her breasts).

If one were to take a biographical look at Hunger (which is just as easily said as done, considering it is autobiographical) it would be very hard to pick out the person Hamsun was going to become later in life.  He became a strong advocate of Nazi Germany, going so far as to send his Nobel medal to Goebbels in 1943.  There is none of this present in Hunger.  None that I was able to glean from a first reading, anyhow.

Hunger: Day 1

Like any late bloomer, I read Bukowski in college, Fante the summer after completing my degree and now Hamsun several years later.  At this rate of moving backwards in time to discover the root of it all, I’ll be studying the Greeks as I lay dying.

Upon reading the first fourth of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (Sult) (although I’ll continue to call it Hunger and not Sult because I think that is a little too pretentious.  It’s like referring to Dr. Strangelove as How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.  The only book I feel one can truly get away with using the original foreign title is Le Petit Prince.) I can’t help but be reminded of John Fante’s Ask the Dust.  Both are debut novels.  We have a young starving writer who cannot pay rent living in a new city.  He occasionally sells a piece, makes some money but cannot hold onto it (more on that later).  He obsesses over a strange woman he does not know.  His hunger drives him to possibly immoral actions (or at least to contemplate them) which upsets his deeply religious beliefs and background (although there seems to be more guilt with Fante’s Catholic Arturo Bandini than Hamsun’s Christian Protagonist).  He also lies about his past and social standing to others, trying to seem better off or more noble than he is.  He speaks very eloquently, often when discussing simple matters that do not require the flourish of a writer.

All of these descriptions perfectly fit Fante’s Arturo Bandini and Hamsun’s unnamed protagonist.  Fante seems to have more of a story going in Ask the Dust while Hamsun is merely interested in exploring the psychological side of his unnamed main (semi-autobiographical) character (herein referred to as The Writer).  If Fante never read Hunger I will eat my copy of Ask the Dust.  But Bandini and The Writer are not the same character at all.  When Bandini makes a couple bucks on a story he pays his rent, buys some new clothes, expensive cigars and drinks and other selfish things.  When The Writer gets a few krones (either from selling a story or pawning his waistcoat…is it too pretentious if I continue to say “waistcoat” instead of “vest”?) he gives them away to people just as bad off as he is or, astoundingly, people who are better off than he is, so he can appear to be well-off.

Why this compulsion?  When The Writer sees someone who might need a little help, he immediately thinks of giving them money.  A few pages into the book The Writer runs into a man on the street who asks for a little money for some milk.  He says he has not eaten since yesterday.  We have just met The Writer and already he is hungry, so it is safe to suspect that he has not eaten in some time either.  The Writer heads straight to his “Uncle” at the pawn shop, sells his waistcoat for one and a half krones (all the while telling the shop owner that the reason he is selling is because it has become too tight), returns to the man and gives him one krone, keeping a half krone for himself.  He then buys himself french bread and cheese, eats it all and feels ill.  Why?   I still have yet to figure this one out yet.  Is the Hunger making him mad?  Can he not stand to see his fellow man suffer?  Does he not feel worthy of material possessions?  At the end of part one The Writer is given ten kroner for a newspaper piece.  I’ll have to find out what he does with it.

I am also intrigued to see where Hamsun takes The Writer’s pursuit of Ylayali.  I am sure it is nothing like Arturo Bandini’s relationship with Camilla but I hope there is something there.

End of I.: Day 2

As expected, the final chapter of Stephen Dixon’s End of I. packed a bit of a wallop (although maybe not the wallop of the ending if I.) and helped solidify the theme of change and more importantly, loss, that Dixon is dealing with in the novel.  At first it seemed like End of I. was primarily tackling interpersonal relationships.  There are amazing portraits of not only I. but the people in his life.  His wife.  An old friend.  An ex-girlfriend or two.  Nothing happens in the book, per-say.  It is a portrait.  Or a series of portraits.  Or perhaps, more accurately, an examination of a series of portraits.  But one man’s interpersonal relationships is not the only prevailing theme in this book.  Loss.

Boiled down and story by story (save 2 minor stories that perhaps deal with a loss of innocence) here is what End of I. told me:

Friend: The story of I. encountering death for the first time.  The loss of a good childhood friend.

Breakup: Simple and what it sounds like.  The loss of a girlfriend.  The end of a relationship.

Mother-in-Law: Loss of solitude, space, quiet time while accommodating the life of anther person.

Go: The end of a marriage.  Losing a wife but not to death or the crippling disease that has colored her entire adult life.

Pain: Loss of I.’s own health, becoming seriously ill and losing control over life.

Brother: The death of a mother and also a father.

Daughter: I. worries about losing his children to illness or stranger-danger.

Three Novels: The exploitation of an ex-girlfriend’s loss of her sister and shortly after, her mother and father.

Wife: Losing the crutch that helps you fall asleep.

End: I. gives up his New York apartment, his youth, his life as he knew it to raise his family and care for his wife.  The new tenant quickly becomes a close friend.  Then dies.

As I wrote that quick list it occurred to me that I. fears losing control.  He is not a very assertive man yet he loves to be in control of his life.  He loves caring for his ailing wife and has an obsession when it comes to where his teenage daughter is.  Maybe I. isn’t in control of very much at all, which is why it is so painful to lose the control he has over his wife’s life (bathing her at this time, turning her in bed at this time, preparing her for bed this way…) when he himself becomes seriously ill and needs to hire a professional to care for both of them.  But I would not call I. a control freak.  He does go on power trips and let his power over his loved ones go to his head.  He just wants to be in the steering wheel of his life, like all of us do.

If you can hack through the style, man, good book.

End of I.: Day 1

Wherein Burnt Face Jake continues his pursuit of short story collections and concludes Stephen Dixon’s saga of I.

Almost.  End of I., much like I., cannot simply be called a collection of short stories.  In fact, I would not call it that at all.  I would call it a novel.  Because Stephen Dixon does.  And it does tell a complete story of I., although the reader would certainly benefit from having read the previous entry in the saga as well as the unofficial second entry (originally titled 2 (which lends support to the idea that I. is not pronounced “eye” but “one”), which was rejected by McSweeney’s, subsequently rewritten, retitled Old Friends and published by Melville House in 2004 (which I have not read)).  In fact, one might nor fully appreciate End of I. without first having read I. or perhaps one would enjoy End of I. more if they had not read I. It is entirely possible that these books are a sort of “you like whichever one you read first” situation because they are so similar.

Again…

Dixon gives us the same thing in this book as he did in I., the same slice-of-life portraits of an aging writer who loves his family more than anything, flies into horrible rages with seemingly little provocation and constantly writes and re-writes his supposedly auto-biographical short stories.  However, with this novel he takes the most frustrating parts of I. and exploits them to their fullest.

Example:

One of the devices used throughout both books is the narrator and protagonist, I., writing the story you are reading.  He stops, restarts, changes details, restarts, rewords, restarts ad nauseam.  Ond boy, oh boy does Dixon do this a lot more in End of I. than he did in I. If I. is a brush with meta-fiction, and exploration of the form, then End of I. is full-blown exploration and, perhaps, exploitation of meta-fiction.

Perhaps Dixon is doing this to show I.’s age.  This is a sequel.  I is getting older.  Perhaps he is starting to lose his touch or his grip with his creative projects.  Perhaps the words don’t come as easily as they once did.  Is he getting more confused?  Having a hard time remembering details?  It is entirely possible but since I have yet to reach the end of End of I. I cannot quite make a call on this…

One thing I have noticed after reading half of the book is that many of the stories chapters in this volume deal with single, personal relationships in I.’s life.  The first volume dealt with I.’s relationships but also told long stories about events in the protagonists life.  In this book we get the chapters: Friend, I, Mother-in-Law, Brother, Daughter, Wife.  Six of twelve chapters titled and discussing I.’s relationship with a single person.  I am very curious to see what happens in the final chapter, End, because I’d like to know what becomes of I.  I am quite emotionally invested in this character even though Dixon’s writing style often frustrates me.  I am not expecting a neat conclusion, the book is not chronological, but the final story chapter in I. was so gripping, involved and emotional I can only hope that Dixon ends this book on a a note just at powerful.

Diary of a Madman and Other Stories: Day 2

“Diary of a Madman,” “The Nose” and “The Overcoat” all deal with life in the city.  The tragedy and absurdity of living in a harsh city as a lower-level civil servant, a cog in a machine.  ”How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich” and “Ivan Fyodorocich Shponka and His Aunt” deal with slightly higher class citizens in the country and the absurdity of their lives.

Before I continue I would like to note that the number of offensive remarks towards Jews in Gogol’s stories is striking.  It starts off with a few minor mentions of “a Jew” or mentioning a Jewish character in passing but by the time you reach the end of the collection Gogol’s anti-Semitism is pretty cut and dried.  Hardly anything jumps out at a casual modern day reader more than his anti-Semitism and his fixation on noses (which were considered hilarious at the time).  Characters are either shoving snuff up their noses, losing their noses or the narrator is mentioning somebody’s nose every other page it seems.  I won’t venture any farther to link the two, I don’t think there is a connection, but… what?  It can be a little off-putting at times.  Gogol does a fine job satirizing his country and the people in charge of it but at the same time I can’t help but picture a giggling dandy (not unlike Byron) writing to no end about noses as a thinly veiled reference to penises.  But I digress.  I apologize for editorializing.

“How Ivan Ivanovich…” is quite possibly the funniest story in this modest collection.  One word summary: Two grown men take each other to court because one called another a goose.  While the bloated egos of the two warring neighbors provides enough to laugh at, nothing captures the spirit of the story like the letters of complaint Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich submit to the court.  These letters not only give us a deeper understanding of how each character actually feels but also exemplifies Gogol’s view of the legal and judicial system of his time.  The Ivan’s letters read like schoolyard finger-pointing not dissimilar to our current “I am going to sue you!” attitude.  For this one, Gogol uses a segmented storytelling technique (a technique he also employs in “Ivan Fyodorovich… and “Diary”) to perfection.  Each segment is laid out with its own miniature conflict and arc.  The segments end in cliffhangers and seem almost like a serialized story in a literary magazine.

“Ivan Fyodorovich…” has its high points and it’s low points.  The narrator starts the story off by letting the reader know that he is about to relate a story.  Unfortunately, The Narrator has a poor memory and cannot remember how the story ends.  The story begins, it progresses and then it ends with the sentence “Meanwhile Auntie had hatched a new plan which you will learn more about in the next chapter.”  Funny?  Yes.  Hilarious?  No.  Ahead of its time as far as meta-fiction goes?  Extremely.  I see Gogol’s narrator in this piece to be very similar to Daniel Handler’s Lemony Snickett narrator in the Series of Unfortunate Events books.  Gogol’s narrator (in this or any other story with a third person narrator) is not directly involved in the action of the story like Snickett is but the narrator shapes the foundation of the story.  Yes, this is true for all narrators but Gogol does it in such a way that the reader is constantly reminded that he or she is being told a story.  Gogol also plays around with the unreliable narrator (especially in “Ivan Fyodorovich…”) so subtly that the reader is slow to doubt the supposed truths he or she is reading.

In the end though, Gogol’s stories all end in a very Russian way: Characters either die or go insane.  Sometimes you get the pleasure of both.