All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses (Everyman's Library, 1999)
by Cormac McCarthy
USA, 1992

A coming of age story set in 1949, All the Pretty Horses follows sixteen year old John Grady Cole and his seventeen year old childhood friend Lacey Rawlins on a horse ride out of small town Texas and across the river into Mexico in search of work as cowboys in Coahuila state.  Along the way, trouble finds them in the person of an even younger boy named Jimmy Blevins, whose propensity for not thinking, bad luck and maybe more than a little touch of evil will play out with tragic consequences for both the riders and some of the people who cross their path.  While I'd wondered what it'd be like to read a McCarthy novel that was more conventional than Blood Meridian, I found All the Pretty Horses just as absorbing and gritty as its in-your-face predecessor.  Of course, I was wowed once again by the novelist's descriptive flair.  This Juan Rulfo-like bit, live from a Mexican holding cell, is typical of McCarthy's ability to paint a scene with a minimum of well-chosen brushstrokes: "They could hear sounds from the distant village.  Dogs.  A mother calling.  Ranchero music with its falsetto cries almost like an agony played out of a cheap radio somewhere in the nameless night" (161).  I was also smitten by the very cadences of the prose: "She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow" (140).  Finally, in a novel dominated by and large by laconic figures attempting to make some sense out of loss, I appreciated the space McCarthy afforded his characters to engage in philosophical digressions on subjects as varied as the souls of horses and the ubiquity of violence in Mexican history--"In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments.  Those whom life does not cure death will.  The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even when we will not" (238)--not to mention the virtuoso dream sequences and the naked emotion of this scene where John Grady realizes that the end of his love affair with the seventeen year old Alejandra is just another life lesson in the apparent randomness of things: "He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake.  He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations.  What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits" (256-257).  An understandable fear and not only for a sixteen or seventeen year old, no?  Ace.

Cormac McCarthy

The Balkan Trilogy: 3, Friends and Heroes

The Balkan Trilogy: 3, Friends and Heroes (NYRB Classics, 2010)
by Olivia Manning
England, 1965

Unlike many other novels I've taken a fancy to, I spent much of The Balkan Trilogy trying to isolate what it was that made Olivia Manning's writing so appealing to me beyond the vagaries of plot.  If you'll permit a silly analogy, just what was the mystery ingredient in her page-turning curry?  Unfortunately, I have to admit I've failed.  In Friends and Heroes alone, for example, Manning displays a flair for description in her evocation of the flood-lit Parthenon as "a temple of white fire hanging upon the blackness of the sky" (675); an unexpected Flaubertian turn when Harriet Pringle and a would-be lover consider the romantic possibilities open to them during a lull in the war: "As they looked at each other, a voice said 'Love me.'  Harriet did not know whether he had spoken or whether the words had formed themselves in her mind, but there they were, hanging in the air between them, and conscious of them, they were moved and disquieted" (742); and near the end, with Greece about to fall to the Germans, even some trenchant war reporting-like insight into the fortunes of war in a scene in which we read that two English soldiers with muddy bandages on their heads are "exhausted, but it was not only that.  A smell of defeat came from them like a smell of gangrene" (884).  Although this is all fine writing in my book, I'm as aware as you that it's a major cop-out on my part to label Manning "a versatile writer" just because I was too engrossed in Friends and Heroes' plot, characterizations and its spectacle of a marriage embarked on and then deteriorating in excruciating slow motion "under the shadow of war" (692) to be able to identify the one secret weapon amidst Manning's formidable bag of tricks.  I surrender.

Olivia Manning (1908-1980)

The Street Kids

The Street Kids [Ragazzi di vita] (Europa Editions, 2016)
by Pier Paolo Pasolini [translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein]
Italy, 1955

I knew this was going to be a tough slog in a way when, near the end of the first chapter, Marcello gives Riccetto a hard time for rescuing a swallow that'd been drowning in the river during their swim: "'Why'd you save it,' Marcello said to him.  'It was fun to watch it die!'"  What I didn't know going in was how unpredictable and vital the young Pasolini's prose would turn out to be.  The faces of two older neighborhood boys, for example, are likened to "exhibits from a museum of criminals, preserved in oil" (39); a fat woman and her companion are described in terms of two different types of cooked fish--"her face like a boiled fish, and beside her an ugly little nobody, maybe her husband, with a face like a fried fish, poor devil, who was sobering up" (112); and elsewhere, this slice of life from the Via Taranto where "the fresh breeze, which would make a face go white and blue, like fennel, every so often shook the rows of sleepy, consumptive trees that, on either side of the street, rose with the façades toward the sky over San Giovanni" (141).  In short, I loved taking in all of Pasolini's painterly exuberance even if The Street Kids' Rome, or at least the poverty-ridden "apartment blocks, the evacuees' houses, or the skyscrapers" on the city's postwar periphery (182) = more the canvas for a crucifixion than such loving brushstrokes might lead you to believe.  An Old Master in the age of Italian neorealism!

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975)

The 2020 Argentinean Literature of Doom

Since my on-again, off-again blogging schedule doesn't allow much room for error and there hasn't been a single ALoD event that went the distance in about four or five years, I've decided that 2020 might be an OK to subpar year to experiment with the 2020 Argentinean Literature of Doom for a full year or while supplies last.  You're, as usual, invited.  As those new to the event might not yet know, "the ALoD was originally inspired by two great posts by Tom of Wuthering Expectations that you can read about here and here and was at least partly dedicated to testing Roberto Bolaño's thesis that a 'strain of doom' evident in post-Borges Argentinean belles-lettres was due to the noxious influence of one Osvaldo Lamborghini and his art terrorist pals (César Aira, take a bow)."  While that original idea still amuses me enough to recycle the pertinent boilerplate, all you would need to do to participate in the 2020 Doom experience is to read and review at least one piece of fiction written by an Argentinean author, read and review at least one nonfiction work on Argentina, or watch and review one film that falls under the same general criteria at some point either this month or in any of next year.  I'll post links to your reviews, if there are any, each month or to mine, if there are any, at the same time although I naturally reserve the right to lose interest in the event or blogging at any time as occasionally happens.  Until then, glad we talked!

Doomsters

Richard, Caravana de recuerdos

Amanda, Simpler Pastimes
Amateur Reader (Tom), Wuthering Expectations
Caroline, Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat
JacquiWine, JacquiWine's Journal
Juliana Brina, the [ ] garden
lizzysiddal, Lizzy's Literary Life
Silvia, Silvia Cachia
???

Alejandra

Alejandra
De Virna Molina y Ernesto Ardito
La Argentina, 2013

"Me olvidaba de decirte que la Maga de Rayuela me hizo recordarte en algunos relámpagos".

Ivonne Bordelois, carta a Alejandra Pizarnik

Alejandra, un documental sobre la poeta maldita argentina que trató de "escribir la noche" antes de suicidarse a la edad de 36 años en septiembre de 1972, me fascinó.  Mezclando entrevistas con los amigos y familiares de la poeta con trozos de sus obras, cartas y entradas del diario, los cineastas Virna Molina y Ernesto Ardito nos presenta con un retrato íntimo, si deprimente, de un ser aparentemente nacido para perder.  Me sorprendió saber, por ejemplo, que la futura escritora tomaba anfetaminas desde muy niña a causa de preocupaciones sobre el peso.  Si no está claro que esto fuera la causa de su infelicidad como una adulta, ya llama la atención a las dificultades de entender su vida interior, sus impulsos autodestructivos y, por extensión, su arte.  Molina y Ardito hacen un buen trabajo para no tomar partido.  En un momento, leemos las palabras de León Ostrov, el psicoanalista de Pizarnik: "Mi primera impresión cuando la vi fue la de estar entre una adolescente entre angélica y estrafalaria".  En otro, leemos una carta al psicoanalista escrita por Pizarnik: "Hago el amor con la poesía, músculo a músculo".  El resultado es un film revelador y, correctamente, multidimensional en cuanto a su punto de vista, enriquecido por muchas hermosas fotos a pesar de la angustia en su núcleo.

Virna Molina y Ernesto Ardito

Enlaces

Alejandra
(documental completo)

Alejandra

(with English subtitles)

The Thing on the Doorstep

"The Thing on the Doorstep"
by H.P. Lovecraft
USA, 1937

"It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer" (341).  If it's also true, as I think I've read somewhere, that Lovecraft's conception of a successful supernatural tale hinged on the art of credibly relating something that couldn't have happened, then props to him for that doozy of an opening sentence and the preposterous but entertaining piece of writing that follows.  A Poe-like tale of madness, serial demonic possession and/or both, "The Thing on the Doorstep" waylaid me, the Lovecraft neophyte, with both its odd antiquarian bent and its loving appeal to local flavor (for example, the reference to "Cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases lead down to abysses of nighted secrets" [349], so laughable out of context, is perfectly convincing here in the fussy secondhand telling by the unreliable narrator).  For non-New Englanders or at least those less enamored of a Weird New England setting on its lonesome, there's also an appreciably obsessive attention to metafictional detail evident in things like the allusion to one Justin Geoffrey--"the notorious Baudelairean poet" who "died screaming in a madhouse in 1926 after a visit to a sinister, ill-regarded village in Hungary" (342)--whom a footnote informs me is a character Lovecraft borrowed from Robert E. Howard's 1931 short story "The Black Stone."  That touch struck me as almost Borgesian, in fact, in terms of its sheer bookish fun.  Rating: PG for pulpy goodness, of course!

Source

"The Thing on the Doorstep," the title tale from The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), appears on pp. 341-365 of said collection.

The Balkan Trilogy: 2, The Spoilt City

The Balkan Trilogy: 2, The Spoilt City (NYRB Classics, 2010)
by Olivia Manning
England, 1962

Guy and Harriet Pringle are still trying to stick things out in WWII Bucharest for most of the dramatic second act of Olivia Manning's The Balkan Trilogy--to my mind, simultaneously a less showy but a more addictive read than its predecessor in terms of writing and plot--but the inexorability of events in The Spoilt City makes it abundantly clear that that will only be a matter of time: "Stay, and you will see a country die" warns one character with a healthy dose of gallows humor and even more predictive precision (314).  In sketching Romania's fall at the hands of first the amateur homegrown fascists and later the pros from Nazi Germany, Manning is deft at portraying the changing fortunes of major and minor characters alike as well as the futility of the situation more generally--Harriet, musing about the Drucker trial in which a wealthy and formerly well-connected Jew is imprisoned on trumped-up charges as a way for the state to rob him of his assets, here resignedly observes that "no one doubted the innocence of this friendless man, but that factor did not bear discussion.  No one could help him.  He was a victim of the times" (381).  Elsewhere, the significance of being a victim of the times is also brought home to gregarious British expat Yakimov when, on a fact-finding visit to Cluj, he hears from "an important-looking Jew" that a two-year old Romanian passport is now just "a ticket to a concentration camp" and then is told by an old German acquaintance of his that the time for westerners to flee the country is now.  Right now.  But to where?  "Europe is finished for you, of course.  North Africa will go next.  Perhaps to India.  It will be some time before we get there" (426 & 438).  The point, belabored as it may be in my telling of it, is that Manning's novel would seem to have no right to be as entertaining as it is even without the world at war momentum swing midway through The Spoilt City in which we learn that "the blitz on London has begun," "suicides were occurring daily" and German officers in Bucharest were beginning to be hailed by the locals as "these conquerors of the world" all in less than 25 pages of high adrenaline prose (467, 474 & 491).  How Manning arrived at her storytelling achievement, in that light at least, is a bit of a mystery to me.

Olivia Manning