Robert Walser: The Assistant/Der Gehülfe (1908)

This cute novel is more Swiss than Switzerland: it is simple, down-to-earth, unpretentious and not ambitious. It is a story with strong autobiographical elements, about a young man who starts working as an assistant to an independent inventor, Tobler, who is trying to make a name for himself in business. The dynamics in the book are based on the relation of the young man with the family Tobler, which is progressing, and the work of Mr. Tobler, which is regressing. We follow this for about 5 months. It is a book that takes on such a rhythm, that it become perfectly normal that every now and then more than a full page is dedicated to describing how wonderful the summer (or autumn, or winter) day in question is, and how beautiful the nature is. The simplest things – the everyday afternoon cup of coffee in the garden – are described as pinnacles of joie de vivre, and are lauded in baroque language. Mentioning the language brings me to a point I did not get. Namely, all the characters in the book speak in a very exalted Hochdeutsch, or high German. At the same time they are relatively common people – the assistant himself (his name is Joseph Marti, just for the record) has no education at all, Tobler is an engineer and as such the only educated person in the book, but at the same time the only one that speaks ‘normal’ German, Tobler’s wife is a housewife and she speaks as a character from Jane Austen. In addition, the period in question is the beginning of twentieth century. If we know how Swiss people speak today, it is hard to imagine that Swiss lower middle classes spoke such elevated German a hundred years ago. Perhaps I’m missing some important point here.

All in all, a every enjoyable work. Its philosophy is also enjoyable and worth thinking about. In Walser’s own words, it is a ‘cut-out’ of Swiss everyday life – and this is exactly how it is. By no means is it a trivial work. It is a worthwhile testament to the time, and to the mentality of the people, which takes more than a century to change. The lack of happy ending adds to its weight, in my view.

A wonderfully written book with many warm moments. Sounds like a collection of events and stories that your grandfather might have told you. If possible, as always, it should be read in the original language. Walser’s short short stories are also worth looking at!

George Orwell: 1984 (1949)

Writing a review on 1984 is no easy task, and would require the write-up of a whole book in itself. In fact, Mr. Orwell covers so many pertinent topics that each one of them, in relation to the novel itself, would require a book to be written on it. The issues can all be found in philosophy textbooks: State, War, Peace, Language, Thought, Love, Hate, Knowledge, Consciousness, Unconsciousness, Power, Weakness, Work, Human Nature, Nature, Freedom, Alienation, Slavery, Torture, to name only a few.

It would do the book no justice to write a general review on it. Some of the abovementioned topics would find themselves lost and unaddressed, which would be aberrant. That is the reason why this piece focuses on an interesting question that can be formulated in several ways: “does thought need language?” or “does language shape thought?” or “could Newspeak succeed in suppressing certain thoughts or feelings that could be detrimental to the Party?”

Newspeak as a language is probably the only language that does not evolve, but gets reduced to fewer words every time a new dictionary is put together. The aim of the Party in that effort, is not only to restrict language, but also to restrain thought, and alienate the people Oceania to a point where certain thoughts become impossible because ‘inexpressible’.

The notion of linguistic determinism as defined by B. Lee Whorf around 1956, the idea that thought is determined by language, seems to be the basis on which Mr. Orwell designed Newspeak and its principles in 1984. But can it truly be that everything we think is shaped by the language we speak?

It might be, if we restrain language to what the French call la langue. That is, the Newspeak language, the English language, the French language, etc. In that sense, if the meaning of the words in a certain language is restricted, then it becomes difficult to express anything outside the meaning of those words. Therefore, if the word ‘free’ in Newspeak can only be used in a sentence like ‘this dog is free of lice’ (as mentioned in the principles of Newspeak), then freedom cannot be expressed with the abstract connotations that Oldspeak allowed.

On the other hand however, if we consider language in its other form, meaning the ability, through one medium or another, to express oneself, then Newspeak, English, French, Sign Language, become mere media of communication. If we follow this idea, it then becomes possible for two people in Oceania to develop a ‘language’ (understood only by the two of them) that would allow them to express ideas, feelings, or thoughts that are real, but not ‘externalizable’ if one limits him/herself to Newspeak. Language expresses thoughts or feelings, but does not shape them. That is the reason why Oceania needs a Thought Police to make sure that language laws are enforced, and to use different means such as torture and constant watching, to make sure that the people of Oceania are, and remain alien to certain feelings. If we study the meaning of torture, alienation, and power in relation to 1984, we will find that this makes perfect sense, but it would require several other essays.

Michel Houellebecq: The Elementary Particles (1998)

Here we deal with one of the most controversial modern authors.  Mr. Houellebecq (good name for a spelling bee) has gained considerable attention by shocking the public with his nihilism, pessimism and explicit treatment of many themes, including sex, interpersonal relations and religion.

Mr. Houellebecq did a pretty good job, although I was getting progressively more disappointed as I progressed with reading the book. First third of the book, let’s say, led me believe I was holding a masterpiece. The plot follows two brothers and their miserable (to say the least) childhood. At the same time the time period that surrounds the events is discussed on a sociological level. Also (and this I specially liked!), he takes an even  wider scope by commenting on their lives with the clinical language of a biologist. So he could for example say, after describing something that befell the boys: behavior like this or that is also encountered in larvae of the species Thrombidium holosericum, continuing to explain how actions of children resemble those of the mentioned larvae. In doing this he examines his protagonists and their lives as a biologist examines mice, or butterflies, or larvae or, when he wants to compliment them, monkeys, and this is truly a great part of the book. The notion that people are special and wonderful and God’s chosen creatures is… well, let’s say not so much of a leading concept in Houellebecq’s work.

Then something happens and the comparisons with primitive animals unfortunately disappear from the book. This happens about the time when the two brothers reach maturity.  Sociological commentaries are also reduced, and place is made for a huge amount of sexual commentary. I suppose this is what people find shocking. I don’t find it shocking , I find it boring. Do you really care about every time one of the characters masturbated?  Sure, the frustration and general bleakness of a person’s life can be portrayed effectively by a scene of lone, desperate onanism, but things need to be done with good taste and measure.  Later in the book he goes on to describe orgies and sex parties that his protagonists participate in and this is supposed, I guess, to be a discussion on increasing sexual consumerism of our age. Why? What is the point and what did he want to say?

There is a lot of biology, science and medicine in his writing. The writer himself was schooled as an agronomic engineer and worked in computers for a part of his life. The biological part is effective (my favorite part of the book). Medical commentaries are not very persuasive and sometimes nonsensical, if not plain wrong. The scientific commentaries make the backbone of this book and his writing in general, it seems. Sometimes he touches upon neuroscience (and this is something I know a little bit about) and those commentaries are on grade-school level. Besides, they are often wrong. More often he wants to write about molecular biology, and one of his main concepts in cloning of humans (in The Possibility of an Island as well, I think). At the end of the book he makes a series of complex philosophical, physical and biological conclusions that are supposed to lead to some theory that led to cloning of people, and this led to a better society because the clones were not burdened by social norms. I don’t know what to make of this. Did I get it wrong? If I did not – I’m sorry Mr. Houellebecq, but this is too complex of a concept to be a basis for good SF anti-Utopian thought. Huxley and Orwell had simpler and better ideas. I still have to read The Possibility of an Island, though.

As far as ideas the book is fresh, loaded with different aspects and perspectives, and has large potential to awake serious questions in the reader. As far as writing is concerned, it is not that good. Mr. Houellebecq doesn’t know how to write dialogues. It seems he knows this and he avoids them, but when he does take up writing a dialogue it is a disaster. He puts his own ideas into the mouths of his characters in a way that is artificial and that cannot be believed.

All in all this a good book – it moves the reader. I am used to, I would dare saying, and I am inclined towards nihilistic visions in literature, but this book managed to bother me. I do not see it as a work of nihilism, I see it as a work of realism, but still… one cannot stop from asking: is there really nothing in life that is worth living? Is really every moment and every human relation fake, is really everything we do misery and suffering?

According to Mr. Houellebecq, it is even worse than that.

Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things (1997) vs. Raymond Chandler: Farewell, My Lovely (1940)

The art of simile

(Or: why is humor essential to writing and life)

Mr. Chandler is a genius of style. Certainly his language is not beautiful, nor does he have any of the poetic qualities of Shakespeare or Faulkner, but he is the unprecedented king of cool cynicism that is adorned by most ingenious, funny and entertaining similes that I have read so far. Those who know him need no further explanation, those who know him and don’t think that he is a genius have no taste, and for those who still haven’t read him I will provide a selection of favorite quotes from Farewell, My Lovely, in just a few lines. Before I do that, let me try and explain why humor is so essential to everything and why it is deadly to take oneself too serious, like Ms. Roy did in her unfortunate book.

One can laugh out loud at almost every page by Chandler, and he is not even trying. He is merely trying to tell another one of his detective’s (Philip Marlowe) adventures and to describe the world he moves in – the world and the atmosphere that will become known as hardboiled criminal genre or the noir genre, referring to films that arose from these books. The main character is the kind of guy that is awoken in the middle of the night by a phone call notifying him that his long-year partner has been shot on assignment, after which he lights a cigarette without a word, bathes, shaves, dresses in a three-piece suit with a tie and a hat, and arrives thus at the crime scene as cool as a summer breeze, an unavoidable cigarette dangling from the corner of his lips. The detectives in these novels and films approach every problem in life, from near-death situations to (unavoidable) romantic disasters, with similar amounts of excitement and enthusiasm. Not only are they cool, they are also sarcastic to the core and insanely funny, mocking and exposing the stupidity of human condition in every social structure and layer that they come in contact with. And I don’t think that anyone ever did this better than Chandler.

To explain the title of this paragraph – I intend to compare passages of Chandler’s similes with passages by Ms. Roy. I have chosen Arundhati Roy for the comparison because she is not a very good writer, but not only because of that. The God of Small Things, her only novel to date, published in 1997, received a million bucks in advance by Harper Collins in England. The book sold great and she received the Booker Prize at some point. I picked it up because I sought an answer to the question: how does a million-dollar novel look like? At first I was enthusiastic, and much so because of her descriptions and similes which are quite original, one has to admit, and I thought – wow, this is really good. However, I got as far as page seventy, and that was after fifty pages of hard work. I think of it now as pretentious and boring and of her writing as badly-tempoed, with many short, staccato sentences that are way to many to have any favorable effect of the overall impression. In every other paragraph she tries to offer a piece of worldly wisdom phrased as a refrigerator door magnet aphorism. And so I concluded – to earn a million bucks it is essential to study the aphorisms on housewives’ refrigerator doors. One should not be completely negative – Roy has a remarkable eye for details, and a nice ability to incorporate Little Things (the title of the novel is really appropriate) into the big story.

Here, I will quote one of her passages and compare it with Chandler because she tries to create original, novel descriptions. On page 20 she says:

• “She was eighty-three. Her eyes spread like butter behind her thick glasses.”

That is not so bad. It works – it is a good idea for a simile and it conveys the picture. What is bad, however, is the opening paragraph of the second chapter, found on page 35:

• “However, for practical purposes, in a hopelessly practical world… it was a skyblue day in December sixty-nine (the nineteen silent). It was the kind of time in the life of a family when something happens to nudge its hidden morality from its resting place and make it bubble to the surface and float for a while. In clear view. For everyone to see.”

Everything is bad in this paragraph. First – it has no meaning. She is trying to lock the naïve reader by imposing that she knows everything about ‘times where hidden morality floats,’ a concept that is not only immature, but also nonexistent. Maybe someone can explain to me what those moments in life might be, because I haven’t the faintest idea. ‘Hopelessly practical world’ is a phrase that a mature sixteen-year-old would consider childish, and the ellipsis that follows it is nothing but a disaster. In the same sentence, saying that ‘the nineteen is silent’ in December sixty-nine is a feeble attempt at appearing alternative and original, but is an unfortunate a waste of ink. The use of  ‘skyblue’ to describe a day needs no comment, I think.  Two short sentences that conclude the paragraph are her staccatos, which are fine, but not when used as often as she does it. Two pages after this particular catastrophe, there lies another total wreckage (p.37):

• “Estha had slanting, sleepy eyes and his new front teeth were still uneven on the ends. Rahel’s new teeth were waiting inside her gums, like words in a pen. It puzzled everybody that an eighteen-minute discrepancy could cause such a discrepancy in front-tooth timing.”

Who cares about what she says here? And ‘words in a pen…’ I knew several aforementioned teenage girls that were turned on by intellectual types and ‘profound’ talks about literature and philosophy (they were not the prettiest, needless to say) and who were perfectly able to coin a cheap phrase like that. Even at that time I found it unbearable, and the only reason I would remain in such a conversation is the utter lack of alternatives or, plainly put, desperation .

I could go on forever, but I won’t. What follows is a selection of some of the best parts from Farewell, My Lovely. I won’t comment on them, because it would be a sacrilege to do so. They are told in first person, the person being, of course – Philip Marlowe.

Page 241:

• “I walked around and tried to see if anybody walked behind me in any particular way. Then I sought out a restaurant that didn’t smell of frying grease and found one with a purple neon sign and a cocktail bar behind a reed curtain. A male cutie with henna’d hair drooped at a bungalow grand piano and tickled the keys lasciviously and sang Stairway to the Stars with half the steps missing. I gobbled a dry martini and hurried back through the reed curtain to the dining room. The eighty-five-cent dinner tasted like a discarded mail bag and was served to me by a waiter who looked as if he would slug me for quarter, cut my throat for six bits, and bury me at sea in a barrel of concrete for a dollar and half, plus sales tax.”

Page 48:

• “There was a cornflower in the lapel of his white coat and his pale blue eyes looked faded out by comparison. The violet scarf was loose enough to show that he wore no tie and that he had a thick, soft brown neck, like the neck of a strong woman. (…) His blond hair was arranged, by art or nature, in three precise blond ledges which reminded me of steps, so that I didn’t like them. I wouldn’t have liked them anyway. Apart from all of this he had the general appearance of a lad who would wear a white flannel suit with a violet scarf around his neck and a cornflower in his lapel.”

Page 41:

• “They had Rembrandt on the calendar that year, a rather smeary self-portrait due to imperfectly registered color plate. It showed him holding a smeared palette with a dirty thumb and wearing a tam-o’-shanter which wasn’t any too clean either. His other hand held a brush poised in the air, as if he might be going to do a little work after a while, if somebody made a down payment. His face was aging, saggy, full of disgust of life and the thickening effects of liquor. But it had a hard cheerfulness that I liked, and the eyes were as bright as drops of dew.”

Chandler does not try to be original – he is original. I’m positive that he lived more-or-less the way he wrote and that his own outlook on things was the same as his character’s. He did not sit down and come up with endless sarcastic remarks that make me laugh so much. They were in his head every minute of the day – they were his own thoughts, his way of thinking.

What separates the two people discussed here is the absolute lack of humor on one side and constant desperate attempts at creating great, poetic, wise passages, and limitless sarcasm on the other side, sarcasm that probably made Chandler entirely unbearable as a person, a friend or, heaven forbid, a family member. But a price sometimes needs to be paid.

Chandler’s is probably not more than pulp literature – but it’s awesome. Roy’s is a waste of paper and I can only take solace in the fact that she hadn’t written since (she probably can’t) and that she had dedicated herself to being some kind of spokesperson for some cause of some sort.

Some kind of women’s rights movement or something.

Something like that (the full stop silent)

Amadou Hampaté Bâ: The Fortunes of Wangrin (1973.)

This is one of the great African novels. As a novel, I do not think it is great. As a document, it is great.

Undeniably, there are great parts in it. The legendary character of Wangrin is interesting, complex, historically and politically relevant, and entertaining. Wangrin is an educated Nigerian man of endless intelligence and cunning, employed as translator for the colonial French. His ambition for fame and wealth knows no limits, but neither do his abilities.

What impressed me the most in the book is the complexity of Wangrin’s relations to his environment: he tricks and exploits the local people (“his people”) as much as he exploits the “white” people, but he does it all for a good cause, and in a way that most people turn out satisfied. Except for Count de Villermoz who ends up in court because of Wangrin’s machinations, all the “whites” are satisfied with Wangrin’s service, although he is the one making administrative decisions for them and secures various benefits for himself. The “blacks” are enchanted by him because he is the protector and benefactor of many, especially the weaker ones, poor ones, women and the sick. On the other hand, the “blacks” that become his enemies and that he restlessly cheats on, are the ones that are morally corrupt. In this sense, his actions, almost always illegal and devious, can be seen as morally just. As many great men before and after him, he ends up drinking himself to death, undeniably a worthy way of ending one’s work on earth.

More than anything else it is a book on early colonialism. It is a mature and realistic work, in that it presents Wangrin, a caricature of a man caught in this tumultuous times, as someone who finds ways and tricks to deal with both, the colonial French, and the local population. The time of colonialism is not presented as a great disaster that descended upon the Nigerian people. In this book it is merely a given historical occurrence that people had to deal with. This is for me the best aspect of the book. In doing this, Bâ makes a much stronger point, a much more believable one, on the problems of colonialism. The problem is not that the French were ruthless slavemasters who whipped their subordinates, the major problem was that they were regular people who ruled these vast areas of Africa with certain ideas (that were not bad, perhaps), but that they were ill-informed, under-educated, with limited knowledge of local customs and languages, and that in general thet were unable to have an productive impact on the lands. This is why over the decades the relationship between the colonialists and the colonized was an increasingly complex one, a love-hate condition that was marked by lack of understanding and insufficient communication.

The above is what I gathered from the book, and the book only, I wish to make no pretense at knowing anything about Africa or colonialism.

A short note to the style and writing: It is old-fashioned, and I mean this in a negative way. The language is rich, but the way the plot develops reminded me of two books: Voltaire’s Candide and de Sade’s Justine. The comparison with de Sade is entirely inappropriate, I know, but this is purely talking style here. Similarly, Candide and de Sade’s heroine go from one adventure into another, without a real meaning or motive (ok, de Sade’s heroines might have had certain motives…) or purpose, the only purpose of their adventures being that it enables the writer to make a certain point. Adventures in Justine are somewhat different to those in Wangrin, though, it needs to be stated.  This is not real writing, not in this (or last) century – not in my opinion at least. Anyway, as I understood from Mr. Bâ’s biography, he was primarily an ethnologist , and secondarily a writer.

All in all: a great work, indispensable for students of Africa and dispensable for students of style.

Roberto Bolaño: The Savage Detectives (pub. 1998, eng. trans. 2007)

The Book

The Savage Detectives is about literature. It is about poetry, but also literature in general. It begins by painting the milieu of young ambitious poets in Mexico City in the early seventies, and, as time passes, expands its storytelling scope reaching California, Spain and France,  Austria, Izrael, Rwanda and Liberia. Surprisingly, the characters are not sent on travels in South America. It ends in the Sonora desert in Northern Mexico, which is the center stage of 2666.

The plot is loose and it is told much like The Part About the Crimes from 2666. It uses single vignettes to tell different stories from different angles. In 2666 endless murders are described in great detail, which is a fascinating feat in obsessive and morbid storytelling, but  the same technique is used in Savage Detectives in a far more interesting way. The central characters of the book are two poets Arturo Belano (the similarity with the author’s name is impossible to disregard)  and Ulises Lima, founders of an (I assume fictional) underground movement called Visceral Realism. Their lives, adventures and travels are told in these vignettes, always in first person, from the perspective of dozens of different people: friends, poets, writers,  lovers, admirers, random people that came across their path…by everyone but themselves. All of these people are involved with poetry in some way and to some extent, and they are used to depict the multitude of different roles that literature can play in people’s lives.  They begin as promising poets with a decent following and end up abandoned by everyone, their movement ridiculed and outlawed by Mexico’s literary establishment. They remain unpublished and broke as hell. Still, they never sway from their path and their convictions and they never stop searching for the woman that they imagine to be the only true poet in the world. At the very end they find her, in the Sonora desert. The only poem of her’s that we get to see is made of three lines – a straight line, a wavy line and an even wavier line. Utter insanity, and perhaps a suggestion by the author that the whole thing is to be taken symbolically.

The book is a great metaphor for something all of us went through (although I tend to question weather the book is a metaphor.  It might be a fictionalized autobiography. It is known that Roberto Bolaño lived his life much like he describes it in this book.) Many of us had dreams of becoming rock stars, writers, actors, dancers, at least in our early teens. As soon as the time of university admissions arrived it became clear who remained true to the ideals that were so fervently elaborated upon during the first debouch evenings, and who decided to swap the career of a heavy metal guitarist for the wild world of accounting. Bolaño’s characters have their ideal of poetry and they follow it wherever it takes them.

They are the “true poets”. The path of the poet chose them, they did not choose the path.

The plot develops, as we said above, in a seemingly endless and unrelated series of stories, some of which are truly amazing and entertaining. How can you not like the character of Heimito Künst, a mentally-impaired neo-Nazi thug from Vienna, who came to Izrael to spy on “secretive Jewish atomic bomb production”, and who meets Ulises Lima in a Beersheba jail?  Still, I personally like the stories themselves in 2666 better, because they are more diverse. Here, almost everything is centered around poetry. The book is never boring, not for a second, and Mr. Bolaño remains for me one of the best writers, but I prefer the epic scope and vastness of his last book. I think I will re-read 2666 many times, whereas I am not so sure about The Savage Detectives.

Still, he and his (I presume most widely read?) book are an amazing literary phenomenon, a star, a beacon…whatever. The man must have been a very, very special person that lives on through his work.

Not like there is any other way to live after death…

Or to live in the first place.

The Translation

This novel, as well as 2666, was translated by Natasha Wimmer, who is an excellent translator. Her English flows effortlessly and naturally, captures the  atmosphere, and is at other times playful and entertaining. Nothing worse than a weak, stiff translation.  At the moment I am reading some of Camus’ novels and essays and that is exactly the problem I have. Such books are a waste of time – one cannot be sure if the writer is bad (I guess in Camus’ case we can assume that is probably not the reason), if he is deliberately trying to achieve some effect, or if the translator screwed up.

Luckily, we have good access to Roberto Bolaño’s world(s). Here is a link to a nice article on the importance of Natasha Wimmer’s translations for Mr. Bolaño’s fame in the non-Spanish speaking world.

Stendhal: The Red and the Black (1830.)

This classic novel is considered to be one of the greatest novels of all time, and one of the  defining works of realism.

It is indeed a good book. I figured it is comprised of two major aspects that intertwine – sharp social criticism and detailed psychological accounts of relations between characters.

Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, a young ambitious dreamer from a poor family, spends several years on his quest for glory, in several different settings – and Stendhal uses this scenario to satirically dissect different aspects of the French society of his time. He is not satisfied with making fun of clerics,  villagers, and provincial aristocracy. He goes on to expose the substance-less lives of high Paris aristocracy, painting it as a cesspool of boredom and proper form. Sorel dies at the end, at the age of 22, and it is just as well. He served his cause – to reveal (to himself and to us) the infinity of human idiocy at all levels of society, that is only masked by taking on different forms. Reading the novel I repeatedly asked myself how could this man (Stendhal) have lived another day after the publicaion of The Red and the Black in France of his time? He ridiculed every existing social structure! Surely they were all less than delighted with him. Such uncompromising bravery is indeed a mark of great men, and great writers. Writing suffers under calculation and compromise.

The parts where hundreds of kinds of glances are described between Julian and his two lovers are very long. Too long, I’d dare say. And no one can tell me that in reality all these kinds of glances exist – a desperate, furious, jealous, joyful, cold, inviting, uninviting, et cetera, ad infinitum et ad nauseam, glances. These emotions are signalled by hundreds of  nonverbal cues other than just gazing at someones eyes, aren’t they? Or was it different then?

The inner monologues of his characters are good, funny and, as I understand, a milestone in the history of literature.

A nice, nice work that takes some good will and ambition to get through.

FS2009

Haruki Murakami : Dance Dance Dance (1984.)

It is an exception that I relinquish a book before coming the end, especially if I am interested in a writer like I was in Mr. Murakami. I did not read anything else by him, I had the best intentions and no prejudice. On the contrary, I was intrigued by his popular success.

But it did not work and I was forced to say to myself, after reading about a 100 pages in one sitting: there must be something better I can do with my time.

The introduction of the plot was boring. Why would I care about someone who’s dreaming of a hotel, even if there are hints of a woman that were intended to intrigue us? I kept reading because of the ‘noir atmosphere’ which I am a big fan of: single thirty-something guy, a writer,  sits in bars drinking whiskey and thinking of a woman and the life he had. Jazz music all over the place. Some disaster happened to him and we want to know what it was. Cool.  Some of Mr. Murakami’s stylistic ideas were fresh and interesting so I thought – why not finish it?

When the plot started developing I saw why not. The scene when the writer ‘connects’ with the receptionist in the bar, and when she decides to tell him about her event on the 16th floor of the hotel is the most implausible and  artificial passage I have read in a while. As if he thought the same thing after reading what he blurted, Mr. Murakami adds a feeble explanation to her dialogue, as to why she decided to confide in a stranger. Disaster. Brother, some passages cannot be saved. There is a world of good to be found in using the ‘delete’ key on the keyboard.

But I kept going. Until the Writer himself had an episode like the receptionist described. Dude, do we really need to have a page-and-half long description of the darkness, after he exits the elevator on the damn 16th floor? Is it not enough to say: it was pitch dark? I think everyone can understand this, without elaborating how exactly it is dark. It worked for hundreds of years and truckloads of literature. But not here. After finding his way out of the best characterized darkness I ever read, the Writer enters a room where some magical goat person awaits him. The goat’s dialogue is made of words that are joined without spaces (e.g.whatafuckingawfulbook!) which is visually intriguing but a waste of time to decipher.

Shame we are not in the  visual communications undergraduate class, isn’t it?

On the following pages the platonic relationship between the writer and the receptionist unfolds, in the way that she keeps going in and out of his hotel room, without a word and without much meaning to her actions.

He goes on to describe the city as (I have to quote!):

“All I saw was gray. A sump of city slushed with sunken souls.”

What the hell does this mean? Why would any soul be sunk in that moment? Jesus. If there is something I hate, it’s artificiality and pretentious autoeroticism in writing.

In a few instances in the 100 pages the Writer, who’s journalist,  says that writing for the newspaper is same as shoveling snow. Well, Mr. Murakami…

(I don’t want to be unfair. Is this maybe an exception to his large body of work? Maybe someone can suggest a better read by him?

Anybody…?

Maybe the translation was bad? It was in English, by Alfred Birnbaum, for Vintage. I really don’t know.)

Stephen King: On Writing (2000.)

King’s “A Memoir of the Craft” served as inspiration for the title of this blog. I have read it years and years back, I think when it first appeared (2000.) The price on it is in Irish pounds, so it must mean I got it in Ireland. I forgot almost all of its contents, but not  its motivational and inspirational value for a person interested in writing.

The other day I picked it up and I was astonished with several things:

1. How humorous it is – I burst out laughing more than a few times, which rarely happens to me while reading.

2. How basic and down to earth it is. Also, it is  revealing of the  craft which is, after all, a job like any other. Maybe a job a bit more fun than working at a register in the local supermarket, but hey, I’m sure one could find some that would argue for the supermarket.

3. Proudly – I realized how some of his principles are already alive in my budding routine. More importantly, also some beliefs. Resentment of writing courses, purpose of vocabulary, meaning of grammar and philosophy of work, to name a few. This gave me immense self-assurance.

It is a combination of an autobiography and a set of surprisingly practical down-to-earth advice on writing. Unfortunately it’s very short – the part on writing is less than 200 pages long. This serves to cut down the bullshit – to paraphrase the great man whose choice of words is sometimes less than traditionally poetic.

I have never read another book about writing and I do not intend to (although I probably will end up reading on or the other at some time) because I feel that reading about writing for a writer is much like reading about running for a runner: a largely useless waste of time.

Still, since King is the King, and since he does posses a certain authority and experience on the subject, this book is worth the time – because of the good advice and his own impeccable style that flows like water (do you know how some people, swimmers and such, feel more natural in water than out of it, and some – present company included – never stop wondering why they ever jumped in in the first place? That’s how I feel reading King. The man is himself when he is writing. Everything else is unnatural to him, I dare to speculate, or at least uninteresting. And why would he want to do anything else?)

I wanted to quote parts of the book in this post, but I won’t. I’ll open a section with some great excerpts soon, insh’Allah, and there will be quite some King in there, I’m sure.

It was the most entertaining and motivating read in a long time!

Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

I read this classic by the Czech novelist in Croatian translation by Nikola Krsic.

It struck me as one of the few masterpieces of European literature that is intensively exposed and promoted on the shelves of American bookstores – fortunately for the American audience. See my note on “Americans and the Nobel” on this site to read about why this is an exception, rather than a rule.

It is a timeless piece of writing that focuses on two eternal topics which intertwine and influence each other – love and politics. It’s set in Prague in the late sixties, a tumultuous time of the Prague spring (a government attempt to liberalize the then communistic Czech Republic) and the ensuing occupation  by the Russian military forces. In this setting, the lovestory of a prominent Prague neurosurgeon and intellectual Tomáš, a dedicated womanizer, and a country girl Tereza, develops.

Mr. Kundera tells the story of their encounter, relationship and marriage, which serves him as background to openly approach the important questions that we will never answer and that drive all art, and to dissect them in the tone of a philosophical tractate. What is love, sex, what is the relationship between the two, why we attach to other people, what is science, what is marital dedication, jealousy, emotions, dependence, balance of strength in a relationship, influence, protection, support. Amongst the brightest gems are Mr. Kundera’s thoughts on history and its development, and on the position of individual in history. This seems to be a prevailing obsession in his work.  In this novel, he talks about the Russian occupation of Prague, as his hero descends, stepwise,  from scientific glory into the position of a village general practitioner, window cleaner only to, in the end, abandon Prague entirely and move to the countryside with his wife and their dog.

The Unbearable Lightness of Writing

The style of the novel is best characterised as “The Unbearable Lightness of Writing”. Many divisions of the book, in seven parts, numerous chapters (sometimes under a page long) and frequent paragraph brakes, make for a light, breezy and entertaining read. Highly intellectual and profound, at the same time the book is devoid of linguistic perversion and reads as any empty-minded love story.

In my opinion, precisely this is what makes for a great piece of art. A person of limited literary/intellectual ambitions can enjoy it, same as a serious, dedicated reader, an intellectual, a scholar of politics or philosophy. This property (multiple layers in one work)  seems to be shared by many great works and is not limited to literature.

This book is a must and there is no excuse for not reading it.