The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009)
by Muriel Spark
Scotland, 1961

Considering the ridiculous # of times I've put off hooking up w/reputed brainy vixen Muriel Spark despite the enthusiastically proffered introductions of high class book pimps like Frances of Nonsuch Book and Séamus of Vapour Trails, I guess I only have myself to blame for this long-overdue admission: man, am I smitten...in terms more properly suited to this quick-reading but thorny morality tale set in 1930s Edinburgh at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, what I'm trying to get at is that I found The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to be a superb, surprisingly complex novella that actually manages to live up to its massive hype with a spare, low-key style and an unpredictability that feels organic rather than forced--and even though Spark's authorial voice was every bit as recognizably distinctive as advertised ("flattening their scorn beneath the chariot wheels of her superiority," on page 56, will have to serve as the soundbite du jour), I so enjoyed the rest of her prose while immersed in it that I was variously reminded of Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten for its unconventional but intensely felt characterization, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse for a deft but devastating fast-forwarding storytelling technique that's used on occasion throughout the work, and Marguerite Duras' Moderato cantabile for the novelist's complete command of her material amid a stripped-down economy of scale...of course, perhaps the easiest way for me to xmit my newfound appreciation for some of the more aesthetically fetching aspects of Spark's contempo classic is to contrast her high degree of difficulty portrayal of the title character, a charismatic and influential teacher who will suffer a betrayal less for her "experimental" pedagogy or for being an open admirer of some of the fascist changes taking place in 1930s Germany, Italy, and Spain and more from the personal animus of a couple of moral fascists including one from within her inner circle, with the light touch evident in this miniaturized portrait of one of Brodie's impressionable young students: "Eunice Gardiner discovered the Industrial Revolution, its rights and wrongs, to such an extent that the history teacher, a vegetarian communist, had high hopes of her which were dashed within a few months when Eunice reverted to reading novels based on the life of Mary Queen of Scots" (87-88).  Intellectually speaking, a hot date.

Muriel Spark (1918-2006)

The Tragedy of Fidel Castro

The Tragedy of Fidel Castro [A tragédia de Fidel Castro] (River Grove Books, 2012)
by João Cerqueira [translated from the Portuguese by Karen Bennett and Chris Mingay)
Portugal, 2008

"A novel," it says on the front of the book, "alternative history," it says on the back--and who am I to quibble over such a contradictory pair of descriptions?  Lightweight but frequently laugh out loud funny novelization of the history of the surprisingly little known war between JFK and Castro that was mediated by Fátima, Jesus, and, in a scene-stealing cameo, the devil.  While the garish cover and a couple of translation infelicities (the expression "hawks and doves" is repeatedly translated as "falcons and doves," the modern U.S. poor are apparently unironically referred to as "peasants," both of which sound strange to these yanqui ears) probably don't do novelist João Cerqueira any favors, that's too bad because the guy's comedic sensibilities deserve a wider audience--although perhaps the less said about the absurdist plot the better.  Still, it's hard to complain about the gentle ribbing that the bearded characters Castro ("He was always a crook, a hypocrite.  Why does he have a beard in that tropical climate?" [162]) and Christ ("He sat down for his first supper since his last" [134]) take from the clean-shaven Cerqueira or about the medieval barber like bloodletting perpetrated on Castro's Cuba ("Pharmacies empty of medicine, attesting to exemplary levels of public health" [21]) and on churchgoers suffering under "the stony gaze of the malevolent beings imprisoned in the granite of the church walls" ("Resigned, they left the church with little will to reflect upon why some lambs were mystical while others were roasted in the oven with jacket potatoes" [67]).  For readers who like to mix their political satire with their theological satire, there's also a nice two-paragraph disquisition on how "the second coming of Christ was different from the first [other than] that it occurred in another historical period."  Among the similarities: "Women continued to have more faith than men despite being excluded from religious functions; the many religions never agreed on the majority of metaphysical and political matters, despite being in agreement that sex is a great sin; [...] prodigal sons returned home when their money ran out."  Among the differences: "People now fled by plane instead of by donkey; [...] the price of treason was below thirty coins; [...] and people now considered cousins and siblings to be different from each other" (125-126, ellipses added).

João Cerqueira

 

Thanks to the author and his publisher for providing a review copy of what was often a very amusing book.  To keep the Portuguese comedy/realism theme rolling, I'm happy to note that I'll be reading Eça de Queiroz's 1878 Cousin Bazilio [O Primo Basílio] next.

Angle of Repose

Angle of Repose (Penguin Classics, 2000)
by Wallace Stegner
USA, 1971

Considering the degree to which the award-winning American novelist and nonfiction writer and self-proclaimed "westerner for life" [xiii] Wallace Stegner is revered in certain circles today, a disinterested observer might well suspect that John Leonard's 1972 New York Times smackdown of Angle of Repose as "a Pontiac in the age of Apollo, an Ed Muskie in the fiction sweepstakes,"  while undeniably a great piece of trash talk for anybody old enough to appreciate the period insults, is probably a bit harsh in its condemnation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.  However, I'm not so sure that Leonard wasn't on to something.  There is, to be fair, plenty to like about Angle of Repose even if its sprawling, 557-page multigenerational family drama set in various places in the 19th and 20th century American West and Mexico tends to wear mighty thin at times.  I enjoyed, for example, Stegner's fine eye for the surprising but perfectly observed detail ("the hand that held the lines were freckled like tortillas" [173]), his evocation of place and space on both a local and a grand scale, and his curmudgeonly emeritus history professor Lyman Ward's ongoing interrogation of the nature of historical sources (here, musing about his taciturn grandfather's probable response to a key event early in his marriage):  "Or I suppose that is what he felt.  The fact is, I don't know.  He is the silent character in this cast, he did not defend himself when he thought he was wronged, and he left no novels, stories, drawings, or reminiscences to speak for him.  I only assume what he felt, from knowing him as an old man" (223).  In a work that's been both praised and vilified for its uncredited interpolation of first-person historical sources lifted from the letters of the 19th century western writer/illustrator Mary Hallock Foote, though, I found it all too ironic that what should have been the most real life character in this ambitious historical fiction hybrid felt like the most fictional of all regardless of how much her high maintenance ways, her "Quaker 'thee'" grating talking quirk (333), and her quest to bring Eastern civilization to the uncultured West might have mirrored the historical reality.  More to the point re: Stegner's artistic choices, I also felt really let down by the way this initially unpredictable novel of place eventually devolved into a rather pro forma tale of two dysfunctional marriages.  In other words, I'll have to get back to you on whether "a Pontiac in the age of Apollo" actually tells it like it is or is really more like coded 1972 speak for "Jodi Picoult called, and she wants her fucking book back."  Disappointing.

Wallace Stegner (1909-1993)

The underwhelming Angle of Repose was read as part of a conversation with the mighty Séamus of Vapour Trails.  His review can be found here.



Woodcutters

Woodcutters [Holzfällen] (Vintage International, 1988)
by Thomas Bernhard [translated from the German by David McLintock]
Austria, 1984

Vienna is a terrible machine for the destruction of genius, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, an appalling recycling plant for the demolition of talent.  All these people whom I was now observing through their sickening cigarette smoke came to Vienna thirty or thirty-five years ago, hoping to go far, only to have whatever genius or talent they possessed annihilated and killed off by the city, which kills off all the hundreds and thousands of geniuses or talents that are born in Austria every year.

(Woodcutters, 56)

Even though it sometimes seems as if apocalyptic kvetcher Thomas Bernhard might be something of a one-trick pony for his unhinged but been there/done that monologic book-length rants, what a trick--and what a pony!  Woodcutters, the much ballyhooed centerpiece of the writer's so-called arts trilogy, finds the post-Karl Kraus Austrian king of mischief administering a world class beating to the Viennese theater world and its champions and, by extension, lamenting the myriad ways even non-actors and non-artists preference dishonesty over honesty and pretense to reality in their personal dealings.  Who: an unnamed narrator, observing it all from the vantage point of a "hideous" Viennese apartment's wing chair while partaking of copious amounts of expensive champagne.  What: a dinner party from hell, an artistic dinner designed to impress the hosts' status-conscious and/or otherwise shallow friends, with a late-arriving and pretentious actor from the Burgtheater starring as the guest of honor.  When: sometime in the 1980s, around midnight on the evening following the funeral of a friend of many of the dinner guests.  Where: at the Auersbergers' home in the Gentzgasse in Vienna, a place that the narrator hasn't visited for years and wishes he hadn't visited now.  Although a perfectly chosen Voltaire epigraph ("Being unable to make people more reasonable, I preferred to be happy away from them") starts the anti-social ball rolling so to speak, as usual it's Bernhard's agreeably disagreeable narrator who dishes out most of the comedic fun and/or punishment ("To serve potato soup at a quarter to one in the morning and announce that a boiled pike is to follow is a perversion of which only the Auersbergers are capable, I said to myself" [100]).  On a related note, here are three amusingly class-conscious examples of Bernhardian wit that show how the narrator targets the bourgeois, the petit bourgeois, and the proletariat in his indictment of virtually all of Austrian society.  On the talented musician turned social climber and drunk Auersberger:  "His attempts at upward mobility into the aristocracy came to grief even more pitifully and calamitously than [his wife's].  It was, as I know, his life's ambition to be an aristocrat, nothing less: the sad truth is that he would rather have been a witless aristocrat than a respectable composer" (83).  On the gifted writer turned conformist has been Jeannie Billroth: "I found myself sitting opposite the Virginia Woolf of Vienna, this creator of tasteless poetry and prose who has never done anything throughout her life, it seems to me, but wallow in her petit bourgeois kitsch.  And someone like this dares to say that she has surpassed Virginia Woolf, whom I consider the greatest of all woman writers and have admired for as long as I have been competent to form a literary judgment--somebody like this has the temerity to assert that in her own novels she has surpassed The Waves, Orlando and To the Lighthouse" (100). On the wannabe aristocrats who have to sell off land in the country to maintain their sham artistic lifestyles in the city:  "Where there was once a copse or a thicket, where a garden once blossomed in spring and its glorious colors faded in the fall, there is now a rank growth of the concrete tumors beloved of our modern age, which no longer has any thought for landscape or nature, but is consumed by politically motivated greed and by the base proletarian mania for concrete, I thought, sitting in the wing chair" (86).  "The base proletarian mania for concrete" may be a hard line to top, but what does the narrator have to say about the theater world itself?  Hmm, should I opt for the crowd-pleasing option on pages 16-17, the one that speaks about the guest of honor as "the personification of the anti-artist...the archetypal mindless ham, who's always been popular at the Burgtheater and in Austria generally, utterly devoid of imagination and hence of wit, one of those unspeakable emotionalists who tread the boards of the Burgtheater every evening in droves, wringing their hands in their unnatural provincial fashion, falling upon whatever work is being performed, and clubbing it to death with the sheer brute force of their histrionics"?  Or should I close with that nice, unsettling funeral option from page 57 instead?  Yes, I think that's just the ticket for this crowd--hope I guessed right:

What a depressing effect the funeral at Kilb had on me, for this reason more than any other!  I thought, watching these people from a wing chair.  What depressed me was not so much the fact that Joana was being buried as that the only people who followed her coffin were artistic corpses, failures, Viennese failures, the living dead of the artistic world--writers, painters, dancers and hangers-on, artistic cadavers not yet quite dead, who looked utterly grotesque in the pelting rain.  The sight was not so much sad as unappetizing, I thought.  All through the ceremony I was obsessed by the spectacle of these repellent artistic nonentities trudging behind the coffin through the cemetery mud in their distasteful attitudes of mourning, I told myself as I sat in the wing chair.  It was not so much the funeral that aroused my indignation as the demeanor of the mourners who had turned up from Vienna in their flashy cars.  I became so agitated that I had to take several heart tablets, yet my agitation was brought on not by the dead Joana, but by the behavior of these arty people, these artistic shams, I thought, and it occurred to me that my own behavior at Kilb had probably been equally distasteful.



Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989)

The Keeper of Lost Causes

The Keeper of Lost Causes [Kvinden i buret] (Dutton, 2011)
by Jussi Adler-Olsen [translated from the Danish by Lisa Hartford]
Denmark, 2007

Just so you know, I read this book so you wouldn't have to. Idiotic but yeah, OK, still a nominally entertaining thriller--at least until the second half of the thing when the resolution of a sensationalistic but terribly uninterestingly depicted crime begins to take one dopey wrong turn after another as if guided by a defective black market storytelling GPS which only wants to drive you further and further down Implausible Lane.  The chemistry between burnt out Danish cold case detective Carl Mørck and his enthusiastic new assistant, Syrian immigrant Hafez el-Assad, is fine as far as these things go, but clunky dialogue and an unerring eye for the most farfetched and hamfisted of genre devices make Adler-Olsen a writer I'll prob. try and avoid in the future.  But why take my word for it?  People who suspect that maybe I just woke up on the wrong side of the reviewing bed today can judge for themselves based on the following faux tough guy lowlight from pages 238-239:

"If  your investigative work is as limp as your dick, you might as well leave right now," she snarled.

Her reaction was surprisingly fierce and provocative.  So it probably wasn't the corridors of management that she frequented, Carl thought, drawing his face away.

"My brother was all right.  Do you hear me?" she went on.  "And if you want to make any progress in what you're farting around with, I advise you to remember what I just said."  Then she patted him on the crotch and stepped back.  It was a shocking metamorphosis.  Suddenly she seemed gentle and open and credible again.  It was a hell of a profession he'd gotten himself involved in.

He frowned and took a step toward her.  "The next time you touch my equipment, I'm going to puncture your silicon boobs and then claim it happened because you resisted arrest after threatening to slug me with one of your brother's ugly trophies.  When I slap the cuffs on you, and you're waiting for the doctor as you stare at the blank white wall of a prison cell in Hillerød, you'll dream about taking back that pat you gave me.  Shall we proceed, or do you have anything to add regarding my nobler parts?"

Jussi Adler-Olsen

Vida de monstruos. Espacio, violencia y ficción en la obra de Roberto Arlt

Vida de monstruos.  Espacio, violencia y ficción en la obra de Roberto Arlt (Contratiempo Ediciones, 2010)

por Zenda Liendivit
Argentina, 2010

Un ensayo académico, escrito por una arquitecta e investigadora independiente anteriormente afiliada con la Universidad de Buenos Aires, sobre la función del espacio en la obra de ese malandra Roberto Arlt.  Aunque Vida de monstruos por cierto no es un buen sustituto de la lectura de Arlt, sí es muy útil como una aproximación al estudio del espacio urbano en la obra del escritor.  Me gustó, por ejemplo, cómo Liendivit describe Arlt como un novelista que "actúa como un detective en busca de pistas para rearmar la escena de un crimen que se cometió con anterioridad pero que, sin embargo, no tiene del todo el signo negativo.  El crimen es, por supuesto, la propia Buenos Aires, y en extensión, la metrópolis moderna" (33).  También me gustó cómo la autora situa a Arlt dentro de una Buenos Aires que "es crimen, verdugo y víctima" a la vez (34) por medio de su propia escritura; conozco las novelas y un puñal de los cuentos de Arlt, por supuesto, pero esta cita de una de sus Aguafuertes porteñas ("Existe la sociedad") para mí fue nueva (47):

Yo creo que la sociedad o "nuestra sociedad" (la de ellos, no la mía) existe para los que creen en ella.  Pasa con esto lo mismo que con aquellos sujetos que toman cocaína.  En cuanto probaron ese alcaloide, dicen con el tono más lleno de suficiencia que puede conocerse:

-Hoy todo el mundo toma cocaína.

Y todo el mundo, como es natural, son ellos y cuatro gatos.

Dado que Vida de monstruos es un trabajo brevísimo, supongo que yo hubiera preferido ver más datos sobre el panorama histórico porteño en aquel entonces y menos énfasis sobre los estudios de la ciudad tomado de la perspectiva de la literatura comparada.  O eso o más tiempo con los escritores argentinos.  ¿Por qué?  Aunque entiendo la importancia conceptual de un paralelo entre la Baires moderna de Arlt y la Berlin moderna de Döblin, a mí me parece que Liendivit luce más cuando versa con los porteños.  No sabía, por ejemplo, que Ezequiel Martinez Estrada había aseverado "que no hay posibilidades de un Baudelaire o de un Whitman, en Buenos Aires" porque "la ciudad...es destructora de poesía" (111).  Además, me encantaron las comparaciones de Arlt con Borges a lo largo de la obra.  Aquí se puede ver una sobre el uso del lenguaje y el actitud de ambos escritores hacia "la literatura official" (53):

Con el recurso de Babel, [Arlt] confunde al idioma, lo mezcla, lo subvierte, lo vuelve indócil y extranjero para los antiguos proprietarios mientras recluta nuevos fieles que como él, desconocen patria, linajes y herencias.  Así como el lunfardo construye a su manera el mundo carcelario, con sus códigos, complicidades y exclusiones, el cocoliche, la mixtura de voces extranjeras con el español antiguo y el lenguaje aportado por la técnica así como la mala sintaxis fundan una Buenos Aires definitivamente singular y sobre todo intraducible.  Arlt realiza el proceso inverso de Borges (que escribe bien, para ser traducido, leído y comprendido afuera), interrumpiendo la conexión que aspira la modernidad y singularizando lo que está destinado a la normalización, o a la universalización.  Arlt no busca le reproductibilidad de su obra, porque esto lo convertiría en aquello que ataca, sino que ésta impacte, como las bombas de su admirado Di Giovanni, en las vidas de sus víctimas-aliados para despertarlos del letargo, de cierta idea de destino prefijado que él lucha por esquivar a fuerza precisamente de demoliciones y subversiones (54-55).

Si uno esté de acuerdo con Liendivit sobre este punto o no, lo interesante acerca de la comparación es cómo nos recuerda de la particularidad de Buenos Aires como zona de transición en la vida temprana de Arlt y Borges.  Una metrópolis en vías de formarse sí.  Pero también una ciudad donde los extranjeros "representaban casi el 50% de la población total de Buenos Aires a mediados del década del '10", según nos dice la autora, y "no sólo portaban costumbres e ideas extrañas sino, y principalmente, constituían peligro de contaminación lingüística" (51).  Si el lenguaje es el poder y la obra de Arlt claramente rechaza el idioma "oficial" y la supuesta alta cultura de su ciudad natal, qué ironía que aquello "peligro", en la forma de un hijo de inmigrantes llamado Roberto Arlt, un día sería el sujeto de un ensayo como lo de Liendivit.  ¡Vamos, una sonrisa!

Zenda Liendivit

El pozo

El pozo (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2005)
by Juan Carlos Onetti
Uruguay, 1939

El pozo [available in translation as The Pit], sometimes compared to Sartre's La nausée and Camus' L'Étranger but I'm not going to go to the existentially Frenchified there since I won't be talking about uplifting non-South Americans on the blog anymore, is probably the bleakest, most claustrophobic, most unsettling Onetti I've read to date.  In any event, it would make an absolutely sensational gag gift for any of your magical realism-loving retrograde friends.  Eladio Linacero, on the brink of turning 40 and somewhere between being just extremely anti-social and an utter nihilist, decides to set his life story down on paper one night because he's read somewhere that all men ought to do that once they hit that magical age.  Finding the life story pretext a bore once he's started, he impulsively changes course and decides to pen his "memorias" ["memoirs"] (4) or "confesiones" ["confessions"] (31) based on one real-life event from his teens and the recurrent dreams that it's inspired since then.  "No sé si esto es interesante" ["I don't know if this is interesting"], he confides at one point, "tampoco me importa" ["nor does it matter to me"] (11).  Whether the narrator really means all he says or not (he later equally convincingly affirms that "me hubiera gustado clavar la noche en el papel como a una gran mariposa nocturna" ["I would have liked to have pinned the night to the paper like a grand, nocturnal butterfly"]) (31), people who have read Onetti before will no doubt guess that, the ambiguously life-affirming riffs on writing as an act of creation of its own universe aside, much of the desperation and sordidness that follows is uncompromising, unpleasant, but written with real verve: kind of like a circa 30-page x-ray of a damaged, emotionally stunted, and all too troubled soul haunted by loneliness, personal failures, and the desire to find a measure of understanding from a fellow human being in a world he doesn't believe in.  On that note, why is the novella called The Pit?  Well, just how sympathetic are you to unsympathetic characters?  I believe both questions are related--and answered--in the uncomfortable aside below (18):

He leído que la inteligencia de las mujeres termina de crecer a los veinte o veinticinco años.  No sé nada de la inteligencia de las mujeres y tampoco me interesa.  Pero el espíritu de las muchachas muere a esa edad, más o menos.  Pero muere siempre; terminan siendo todas iguales, con un sentido práctico hediondo, con sus necesidades materiales y un deseo ciego y oscuro de parir a un hijo.  Piénsese en esto y se sabrá por qué no hay grandes artistas mujeres.  Y si uno se casa con una muchacha y un día se despierta al lado de una mujer, es posible que comprenda, sin asco, el alma de los violadores de niñas y el cariño baboso de los viejos que esperan con chocolatines en las esquinas de los liceos.

[I've read that the intelligence of women stops increasing at the age of twenty or twenty-five.  I don't know anything about the intelligence of women nor does it interest me.  But the spirit of girls dies at that age, more or less.  And it dies for good: they all wind up the same, with an annoying practical side, with their material necessities, and a dark blind desire to have a baby.  Think about this and you'll know why there are no great female artists.  And if you get married to a girl and one day wake up next to a woman, it's possible that you'll understand, without revulsion, the souls of the rapists of little girls and the drooling puppy love of the old men who wait on high school corners with boxes of chocolates in hand.]

Source

El pozo can be found on pages 1-31 of Volume I of Juan Carlos Onetti's complete works, Obras completas I.  Novelas I (1939-1954), edited by Hortensia Campanella (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2005).  It's also available in English as part of a twofer, The Pit & Tonight, in a solid translation by Peter Bush (London: Quartet Books, 1991, 1-29).