The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,900 times in 2010. That’s about 5 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 4 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 23 posts.

The busiest day of the year was January 20th with 52 views. The most popular post that day was Roberto Bolaño: The Savage Detectives (pub. 1998, eng. trans. 2007).

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were stumbleupon.com, en.wordpress.com, WordPress Dashboard, mail.yahoo.com, and whitesnails.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for the savage detectives analysis, robert walser, michel houellebecq, savage detectives analysis, and herztier.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Roberto Bolaño: The Savage Detectives (pub. 1998, eng. trans. 2007) April 2009
3 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

Herta Müller: The Land of Green Plums/Herztier (1994) February 2010
8 comments

Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things (1997) vs. Raymond Chandler: Farewell, My Lovely (1940) June 2009
6 comments

George Orwell: 1984 (1949) September 2009
1 comment

Michel Houellebecq: The Elementary Particles (1998) July 2009
3 comments

The core of his brilliance is simplicity. His stories exist for the sake of themselves, and not only does the author renounce trying to spice them up, but he also doesn’t even try to make the plots interesting by adding twists or turns or tension. In 2666 he has some amazing scenes and characters, and this led me to believe that he had led an eventful life that gave him this material. He did indeed have an eventful life, but that is not enough. In this collection, his characters and situations are neither interesting nor exotic, and still he is great. They are common episodes from lives of common people: son and father going on a vacation, a poet traveling to some school in the middle of nowhere to give a few classes, a writer who just sold a book and decided to travel around France for a week, a guy visiting a childhood friend. They are entirely unassuming plots written in an even less assuming style.

Characters in his stories and books are mostly writers and poets. I found this slightly annoying at first, I considered it a sign of weakness and inability to write about a milieu other than his own, but I learned that your characters profession is not that relevant. A master like that writes about life, and his writing is life – weather the characters are writers or boxers or priests by profession is a secondary issue.

What he achieved is the complete disappearance of borders between life and writing. He perfected observation of things that revolve around him, and he perfected such a simple style that it can hardly be called a style at all. Only a person to whom writing comes as natural as breathing can write like that. In this perfect style he wrote about what he lived, saw, heard, and read. Another point is that he cares about his characters. He is not arrogant towards people, he does not place them beneath him and try to explain their actions like some superior being (a common occurence with writers). He observes people with respect regardless of how little they and their problems might be in the eyes of someone else. He is sincere in doing this, and that is why we cannot stop reading his texts – because we start to care as well and we want to see what happened with these people.

He must have been a man of great patience and strength. We are lucky to have several of his books – judging by the way he led his life it was not impossible that he could have renounced publishing altogether.

What strikes me as remarkable is that it is a predominantly visual novel. Dr. Bulgakov writes like a movie scriptwriter. It seems important for him that the cities in question (Jerusalem in time of Pilates and Moscow in the 1930ies) are conveyed graphically and that the plethora of characters is just as vivid to us. Many scenes feel more like scenes from a play translated to prose than scenes of a novel. It is understandable that parts of the novel took shape in the author’s head as theatre pieces, since Dr. Bulgakov was an active dramatist. At the same time and in spite of all these descriptions, The Master and Margarita is easily the fastest-paced book I had read in a while, and this is saying a lot for a book written in the 1930ies. A reader can go through its 400 plus pages in a few days, feeling refreshed after every reading.

Satan’s adventures in Moscow are hugely entertaining and imaginative. Several scenes, most notably the Satan’s bal, remind me of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch. The story of Pilates and the execution of the ragged Ha-Nofri (Jesus) are beautiful. The supposed author of the story of Pilates, The Master, and his love affair with Margarita, is just as pretty and romantic. The stories do not intertwine in regular intervals, they intertwine exactly as they should to keep the reader stuck in Bulgakov’s world.

As hard as I tried I could not come up with a single objection to the style and the delivery of the novel – so I ended up wondered a bit about the meaning, or the thoughts that could’ve driven the writer. In a way, it seems it is a religious novel. It opens with the conversation between the poet and his editor, who are both hard-core atheists. Not only do they deny the existence of God, they also deny the historical existence of Jesus. After only a page or so, Satan presents himself and joins their conversation. After another page or so the editor is decapitated by a streetcar and the whirlwind that is this novel begins. The rest of the novel seems to serve as a response to their opening conversation. However, I do not get the feeling that Dr. Bulgakov is religious. Firstly, his main protagonist is Satan, and he is the almighty. He interacts with the ‘other side,’ with Jesus and his gang, by means of messengers, and they exchange information and decide together on what to do. Not only does he, his entourage, Jesus, and the rest of the usual deities have eternal lives, but also a bunch of other people including Pilates. At the end of the book, The Master and the Margarita are also awarded immortality. Margarita’s maid is, upon her own request, also given powers and made into a which. All of this gives me the feeling of someone who is playfully using some motives from the history of Christian religion, rather than being pious and respectful about religion.

One can imagine Bulgakov having a similar conversation about atheism himself, and at some point having a thought enter his mind and ask him: ‘What if Satan come here and proved us wrong?”

What followed such an unfortunate (for him, fortunate for us) thought was 11 years of hard work on his masterpiece, and the harsh destiny of being sanctioned by the regime and not living to see one’s work published.

So, what is Hezrtier? I was reading it in original German. Ms. Müller is an author of Romanian descent. Similar to Franz Kafka (forgive me for mentioning these two people in the same sentence), she was brought up in a German environment and her mother tongue is German. Ms. Müller was oppressed by the Ceauşescu regime, she emigrated to Germany where she married and where she became (so we are told) a successful author. Herztier is about a woman oppressed by the regime in Romania and who, at the end of the book, flees to Germany. How is the story told? It is told in a series of details, rarely do we get to see the big picture. For example: the writer, when her characters and brought to Securitate offices for questioning, doesn’t write about the reasons for this, or what exactly transpires during the questioning, or what effect it had on her characters. She writes about the police commissioner’s dog and his bold head. This  approach needn’t necessarily be that bad, in itself. Unfortunately – it is. Surely, rarely does something big happen in life. Life is a series of more or less significant details that shape us, what we do and who we are. Accordingly, if we accept this, we can go on to claim that it is a great gift to actively look for these details, like a detective, and to store these little symptoms of different conditions for later use in writing. A person, situation, feeling, just about anything, can be described more vividly with a single well-observed and well-placed detail than with many paragraphs of trying to contain the illusive. Great masters of effective usage of details are Raymond Chandler and John Le Carré. If you’ve read them, you know what I mean.

But to narrate a whole book in such observations, many of which are failed, incomprehensible, meaningless, tedious… Even if they weren’t one should not deprive a book of its layers. Details are details. They are not the story, not the dialogues, not the psychology, not the political-historical background. What better example than the title itself: Herztier. Herztier translates as ‘Heart animal’ or perhaps ‘animal’s heart.’ ‘Heart of an animal?’ Anyway, in reading the book, one wonders what this signifies. Every now and then the author mentions, as her main character interacts with her grandmother or mother that her Herztier is found, or lost, or something like that. But what does this mean? Reading such passages, and there are many and not only confined to odd neologisms, I was genuinely physically repulsed. For God’s sake, this means nothing! It’s some random thing some woman is saying to make herself  interesting and insightful. But the line between being a mastermind detective of life (again: Chandler, Le Carré, Roth) and bored person saying random things in not a thin one, and it should be easy to separate the two. Ms. Müller’s sentences are ultra-short, just like her paragraphs. I have no strong standing on this. Her sentences seem too short but it hard not to be biased,  considering how strongly I dislike her entire approach. Some good stuff has been written with simplistic means (McCarthy). The book is short, which made it possible for me to finish it.

Now, someone here is seriously wrong. Either it’s me or the Nobel committee. I don’t think it’s me.

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!

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.

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.

(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)

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.