Showing posts with label novel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label novel. Show all posts

18.8.22

Book Review: A Tangled Mercy by Joy Jordan-Lake

In this post, I write a review of the novel A Tangled Mercy by Joy Jordan-Lake. Warning: spoilers are included in this review. 
Cover of the novel Tangled Mercy by Joy Jordan Lake
I Had Read Octavia E. Butler Recently
I had recently read Octavia E. Butler's novel Kindred. It's also a story that goes back and forth between past and present, and it's also about piecing together clues about family relations, enslavement, and how Black protagonists resisted their White enslavers. Butler's novel is about a Black novelist in 1970s Los Angeles who goes to the past in 19th century Maryland. This novel is about a White graduate student from Boston who travels to her mother's hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. I mention this because it shows my reading trajectory and how I picked up this book. Also, the novel, as the author states in an interview, took her twenty years to write, and through the course of its development takes on many twists and turns. As you will see. 

Kate Drayton — Graduate Student from Boston
In A Tangled Mercy, Kate Drayton is the protagonist. But I found myself decreasingly interested in her. She's found herself in her deceased mother's hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. The novel is long, though. About four hundred pages, and it spends at least three hundred pages slowly revealing how Kate and her family's lives are interwoven with the events of an enslaved blacksmith named Tom Russell from 1822. And it ends — spoiler alert — with an explosive current event. All of the events, how they all fit together into one story, is a bit confusing, and I had to read certain parts twice, stop reading the book, put it down, and do some online background reading just to puzzle out what was happening. 

The novel plays into the historical events of a slave revolt that occurred in 1822, called the Denmark Vesey Rebellion. The novel juxtaposes Kate's narrative with the third-person story of Tom Russell. In my mind, the Kate chapters had a female voice and the Tom chapters had a male voice. We find out that Tom Russell was hung and shot for being part of the revolt. As I said, I did get confused at this point, because this sticking point, Russell's death, is put forth as possibly not ever happening — and that Tom might have survived. Spoiler alert: he didn't survive. But I will leave it to you, the reader, to figure out his legacy. 

Historical Events are Interconnected — But What Does it All Mean?
So there is a lot of historical backdrop here, the AME church in Charleston where the riot originated, the story of how Charleston became the port of entry for half of the new world's enslaved population, and lots of other details the author obviously had done tons of research to mine for a novel. But I found myself losing interest in Kate's ambiguity; her, mission. And more interested in the novel's minor characters. I liked the character of Gabe, a young boy she befriends. He is funny, quirky, and often has the right answers to what's going on around him. 

I did like literary references in the book — and I laughed out loud when Kate and Scudder Lambeth are stuck in his pick-up truck discussing William Faulkner and Southern Literature. The character of Scudder, Gabe's uncle, is so much more eloquent than Kate. And the story offers a would-be love story that made me tear my hair out. Just go there! I thought. But perhaps it was not meant to be. Although Kate quotes Faulkner, I don't think she got the idea that the past seeps into the present. By the way — I do want a spin-off novel about either Gabe as a woke kid in South Carolina or about the subtle poetic genius of Scudder Lambeth.

And I liked how the city of Charleston is portrayed as a Southern town of secrets, gossip, and the like. My gripes were minor — like if you're going to dive into the ramifications of racial tension in America, go all the way. When Kate talks with Gabe and his father, both Black characters, she seems so tentative that it's like, OMG — get over your white fragility. But then I realized that's probably a realistic depiction. 

Because A Tangled Mercy is not about the experience of being Black in America, however, it doesn't purport to be (although it does include Black history, as seen through Kate's eyes, and the third-person narrative about Tom Russell). It's a story about a woman who doesn't trust others, is fragile, and is trying to become woke. It's a story about familial disappointment, failure, and other adult worries and anxieties. As, that, the story is fairly decent. Kate Drayton reminds me of very articulate, educated people who are so caught up in their search for truth that when they discover something special, it's hard for them to see it. Even when it's right in front of their face. 

Hints at Racial Tension Simmer Beneath the Novel's Historical Charm
I am not sure if certain plot points were included in later drafts — for example how Gabe is portrayed. I get that maybe including the bit where Gabe is thought to have a firearm in his pocket — and a policeman overacts — it's based on the lived experience of being Black in America — I thought the story could have explored this issue more deeply. Those elements seem forced and it felt misplaced, here. All American Boys by Jason Reynolds does a much better job at exploring this topic — and it also includes different point-of-view chapters. And while Lake, in her novel, alludes to Trayvon Martin, a boy who was gunned down when the skittles in his pocket was mistaken for a gun, it is an actual current event, its allusion in this novel confused me about the themes the novel wishes to convey. Why does the novel include these references? But why does it not go further?

I'd like to have seen Gabe's experience more, his point-of-view, rather than just being that intelligent, gifted kid who helps Kate gain clarity. Also — the novel alludes to an incident in 2009 when the Black historian Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested for trying to gain access to his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Someone called the cops because they thought he was a burglar. The novel mentions the incident, but Gates's name is not used. I appreciated the reference to current events, but it seemed a tangential mention and made me wonder what the book was trying to say. 

The Novel Includes the 2015 Charleston Shooting
Now, I do want to say that when I read the novel, I did not realize that it includes events from the 2015 Charleston shooting, when a white supremacist, Dylann Roof, walked into the basement of the church and gunned down nine church members who were participating in a bible study: The Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd, The Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Tywanza Sanders, Ethel Lance, Susie Jackson, Depayne Middleton Doctor, The Rev. Daniel Simmons, and Myra Thompson

I had to stop reading the novel, at this point and read about how Joy Jordan Lake had decided to include the event. It seems that Lake had written her novel before the shooting; but, if you did not know that, you would have been surprised to see that Lake mentions the AME church, from the beginning, because it is the same church where the Vesey revolt was planned, and it is the site where the shooting took place. And the pastor has the same last name, Pinckney, that Lake uses in the novel. Lake was alarmed by this and almost didn't publish her novel, on that June day in 2015. Also, the murderer, Dylann Roof, knew of the importance of the church, which is why he chose it. 

Lake says that her original manuscript was not the final product. The novel went through a lot of changes after the shooting. She almost abandoned the project altogether. But she decided to include it on the advice of her publisher. I mention this because if you did not know this backstory, like me, it'd catch you by surprise. And then, it made sense why Lake had included those references earlier, to Trayvon Martin, and Louis Gates, Jr — in relation to Gabe.

Also, Lake chooses to have Gabe witness the events of the church shooting; in reality, there is no evidence of a boy named Gabe at the church that day. So it made me wonder how much of Gabe was in the first draft of the novel, and how much the character changed after the Lake changed it because of the events of 2015. Gabe is a witness to the shooting in the novel, so we the reader, have a enactment of events, down to Roof's description, and details of the massacre.

Anyway — there is a lot to unpack here. I started a novel thinking one thing, and by the end, it became something else. Entirely.

I give the book three out of five stars. It aims for eloquence, but ultimately fizzles at putting a finger on the pulse of real events.

6.7.18

Advice on Friendship from Charlotte's Web

“The quickest way to spoil a friendship is to wake somebody up in the morning before he is ready.”

- Charlotte, from Charlotte's Web by E.B. White

4.3.18

Book Review: Absolute Brightness by James Lecesne

Absolute Brightness is a young adult novel.  
Absolute Brightness
by James Lecesne


Paperback, 352 pages

Published May 31st, 2016 by Feiwel & Friend
My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I am reviewing the gay YA novel, Absolute Brightness by James Lecesne.

The Amazing Life of Leonard Pelkey
In the late 90s, James Lecesne raised awareness about gay teen suicide. He wrote a novella that was adapted into a short film about a precocious boy who feels rejected by his family and attempts suicide - only to be rattled back to his senses by a cute candy striper at the hospital. This was back in 1998. Trevor lives. Almost as a counterpoint, in Absolute Brightness (2016),* James Lecesne tells the story of a teenager, Leonard Pelkey, who is murdered in Neptune, New Jersey. 

Leonard is characterized as a nice, talkative fourteen-year-old boy. When he first arrives at his aunt's house - to move in - he is met with derision by his cousin, Phoebe, who is also the narrator of the story. Leonard seems oblivious to the fact that Phoebe does not take to lightly to his fashion decisions - pink and lime-green capri pants and a "too small T-shirt." However, for Phoebe, Leonard was "way too different." And it is this aversion to difference that Lecesne grapples with in this book.


Leonard has all the Packaging of a Gay Stereotype
While he is never outright labeled as gay, Leonard carries all the packaging of the gay male effeminate stereotype. He is characterized, in the novel, like Dorothy - "more the type to be heading toward a place like Oz, as in The Wizard of." He never gets there. And the novel turns directions.

1.1.13

The Best Novels I Read in 2012

Top Ten Novels Read in 2012
1.       Lionel Shriver. The Post-Birthday World .  2007. 528 pp.
I was intrigued by the storytelling. Shriver is da bomb.
2.       Lionel Shriver. We Need to Talk About Kevin. 2003. 400 pp.
About a high school shooting, it is a dark indictment of American mores.
3.       William Trevor. Felicia's Journey . 1994. 240 pp.
Stepping into this novel is like stepping on a hot plate with set to slow burn fuck up.
4.       Don Delillo. White Noise.  310 pp. 1985
Written over twenty years ago, this novel may be too ironic to still matter.
5.       Lionel Shriver. A Perfectly Good Family: A Novel  305 pp.
Southern family, a house, sibling rivalries – and the death of parents!
6.       Norton Juster. The Phantom Tollbooth. 1961. 272 pp.
Very clever novel about how to overcome boredom and to think for oneself.
7.       Terry Pratchett. Hogfather (Discworld, #20) 1996. 448 pp.
Ho Ho Ho. Death cracks me up. An alternative Christmas story for sure.
8.       Lindqvist, John Ajvide. Let the Right One In. 2005. 513 pp.
Child murderer(s), bullying, girl vampire, pedophilia and Sweden. Chilling.
9.       Joyce Carol Oates. Zombie 1995. 181 pp.
The ending is fucked up. Pair it up with Shriver’s Kevin and Trevor’s Felicia.
It’ll make for good CGI film-making and the time travel makes sense. Sorta.

Honorable Mentions

George R.R. Martin. A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1) 1996. 693 pp.
   The names are fun. And maps! Surprisingly easy to follow.

Neil Gaiman. American Gods . 2001. 632 pp.
   Gaiman wants us to like his villains. I don’t mind.

Lonely Christopher. The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse 2011 190 pp.
   I was not stunned by this mess.

Charlaine Harris. All Together Dead (Sookie Stackhouse, #7)  2006. 323 pp.
   Don’t hate me but Allan Ball does a better job.

Neil Gaiman.Neverwhere 1996. 370 pp.
   Great concept: a world under London. Feels like Pullman. It isn’t.

Phillip K. Dick. The Simulacra. 1964. 214 pp.
   Sorry. I was not liking this paranoid regurgitation. Not Dick’s best.

Phillip K. Dick. Paycheck and Other Classic Stories 1952. 432 pp.
The one about the robots and the dude who builds a replica of his hometown are the best of the stories.

Shriver, Lionel. The Female of the Species 1987. 416 pp.
   I’d rather a story about the Masai then Gray and her failed trysts.

   The book is lackluster and I’d suggested Homer instead.

Daisuki Igarashi Children of the Sea, Volume 1 (Children of the Sea, #1)  Unknown date. 320 pp.
Too bad I read this book from left to right first! Duh. Read it from right to left.

Great set of books: I loved the description of food. I hear there is a Hunger Games cookbook.

1.2.12

On the Experience of Reading Novels

What is the experience of reading a novel? 
The experience of reading novels is a solitary one. While it is common to hear authors read from their newly published books at signings or to listen to a novel on tape, these are subsidiary experiences of the novel that I relegate to the category of performance rather than reading. Orality is to the epic what solitude is to the novel. The Greek epics the Iliad and the Odyssey were not meant to be read silently to oneself but were told out loud and spun by a storyteller as part of an oral musical performance. Prose fiction did not begin with the novel; Satyricon was written centuries before Moll Flanders. Scholars debate as to what constitutes the first novel  is it Cervantes’s Don Quixote, or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, or is it Richardson’s Pamela, or DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe?  I think the answer to this question lies in the shift between reading publicly versus reading as an internalized experience. The epics were meant as univocal expressions of storytelling governed by the principle of archetype and standard mythological rendering. Often the plot was well known by the hearers.
Reading Novels is Not Exactly the Same as Going to a Play 
Ancient Greek theatergoers who attended Sophocles’ production of Oedipus Rex were well aware of the plot. And this is true even for Shakespeare. Midsummer Night’s Dream, while certainly not lost in an individual reading, the dramatic form, like the epic, is meant to be performed, not read. The point of storytelling has been for centuries a ritualized experience and not at all adumbrated by individuality or an experience with everyday particularities. To read a novel once is an individual experience and to read the same novel twice is yet another distinct reading. Even movies, another modern discovery, are more akin to public storytelling than what happens when I read a novel. Reading as an individualized personal experience is a modern discovery. Augustine, for example, was shocked to discover Ambrose reading to himself. In the West, reading has been considered mostly a public act. Those who owned books were either the clergy or the very wealthy. Books were proclaimed rather than read. The correlation between introspective thought and reading troubled Augustine because he did not equate reading with individuality. What we consider the modern novel is instantiated by introspection and was only made possible broadly by the invention of the printing press which made books cheaper and more easily accessible to the masses.
Novels Deliver the Particulars of the Everyday
Novels are heavily entrenched in the particulars of everyday life, such as bathing, doing the laundry, eating a sour grape off the vine, making love on an unmade bed, reflections on the banal and the mundane, and so on. The novel lingers in the details of everyday lived experience. The novel is a repudiation of the epic form’s dependence on universals. Once we are inside a novel we are wrapped up in a world of particulars. Like Pip, in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, who traces his fingers over the particular raised letters of his dead parents' names inscribed on their tombstone, to conjure an image of what they must have been like, either stout or tall, fat or grim, we do the same when we read a novel, trace our fingers over the individual characters, in their instantaneous contingencies in order to trace out a life, to search out a proper name for universal life, to match both life and literature.

2.1.12

What Happens When I Read Novels (Inspired by Reading and Proust and Freud)

When I read novels I do not see images when I read. 
I may see an image emerge in my mind’s eye after the reading has been done, but during the reading itself, I read in black and white without images. I've been reading selections from Proust's Swann's Way. What I conjure in my mind's eye of Marcel dipping a madeleine cake into a cup of tea anticipate images. Novels do not generate images. They anticipate.

Reading Novels is a Similar Cognitive Experience to What We do When Dream
What we do when we read novels is similar to what happens to us when we dream. Freud calls the dream image a rebus (p. 276); in this way, I think he is correct. If there is an image in the novel it is more akin to a rebus, a hallucination of loosely strung together spectral thoughts. 

Free Association of the Imagination When Reading Novels
We free associate when we read a novel; what comes before our mind’s eye are parts and pieces that do not form an entirely thought together whole. In the novel's image, like the dream, parts stand for wholes. Novels are constituted by their love for particularities. Epics and grand eloquent drama are the stuff of another art form; they form archetypical images. Novels are a unique art form in that they work similarly to the way our minds work. 

In the Novel-form the Individual is Privileged 
Novels arose as the predominant art form because they privilege individual experience over grand narrative; the mundane and the banal are championed in the novel over the hero trope and archetype. It is not the photographic image that is desired in the novel, but rather, what we see in the novel is the recognition that the mirror is broken; we see in the novel a skewed mirror and we call it real.

1.1.12

Books I Remember Reading in 2011

I didn't keep an official list for 2011, but here is what I recalled from my fragmentary mental database. Also listed is my best and honorable mention in three categories: novels, philosophy, and history and culture. I am thinking I need to read more science-related books in 2012!

Novels
The best novel I read in 2011 is Home by Marilynne Robinson. Honorable mention goes to Remainder by Tom McCarthy. 

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
  • Apart from the American Gods series, this one retells the story of the spider god Anansi. Expect charming Gaiman prose! B+
The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace
  • His Master's thesis turned novel, Wallace goes all Wittgenstein and ponders the limits of language in novel form. A-
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
  • Read this book only because I felt like I need a fictional introduction to Brooklyn. While the novel centers on two boys' friendship in and around the Boerum Hill neighborhood, I found the novel to be evocative of the borrough as a whole. Wasn't too much into the invisibility theme, however. B
The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust
  • Volume Three of Proust's Recherche corpus exudes with haute-bourgeoise shenanigans -- will Marcel just get a boyfriend already! The more mature of the volumes, in my opinion -- but equally as funny. A
Home by Marilynne Robinson
  • The most beautiful and tragic novel I read this year. Shame I never read Gilead. I am working backwards. Agreeing with a critic (I forget who), Robinson creates a classic American tragic hero with Jack. A+
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
  • First saw the BBC version. Loved it. London's Tube never seemed more inviting. And scary. One thing I love about Gaiman is the way he tells a story and his attention to quirky details. C+
Remainder by Tom McCarthy 
  • Reminded me of Synecdoche, New York. Wonderful book nonetheless. Think: what if I could externalize my inner thoughts? This is the book's philosphical premise. A
Something Missing by Matthew Dicks
  • Dicks wanted to write a great American novel but he failed. Or. It's just a nice romp into benign criminality. You decide. C-
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
  • The Combray section all by itself is justification enough to read this book. Kisses, memory, and a sweet piece of cake ... ahhhhh. A+
Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust
  • If Swann's Way is about Marcel as a child, WBG is about blooming adolescence -- I guess. A-
Philosophy
The best philosophy book I read in 2011 was Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage by Stanley Cavell. Honorable mention goes to Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview by Jacques Derrida.


Essays by Michel de Montaigne
  • I didn't read every one of the essays, but I recommend the Apology for Raymond Sebond. My favorite quote: "How do I know I am not playing with my cat but in fact, it is my cat playing with me?" A+
Francis Bacon: the Logic of Sensation by Gilles Deleuze
  • A readable Deleuze. In fact all of his "art" books are more readable than Anti-Oedipus, etc. You have to read this book with Google Images handy (or a monograph of Bacon's paintings) or the book does not make as much sense. B-
Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview by Jacques Derrida
  • Derrida speaks eloquently about legacy and mortality. Nicely done interview. The Last Interview is to Derrida what the Phadeo is to Socrates. A+
Must We Mean What We Say?: A Collection of Essays by Stanley Cavell
  • The best essay is the one on modernity and art. Cavell writes as if every sentence is its own stand alone work. He is said to be our new Emerson. Hmmm? I am thinking of giving him serious consideration for 2012. A
Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage by Stanley Cavell
  • Writing a paper on this book linking it with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Should be fun. This books does serious philosophy with classic American comedies from the 1930s - 1950s.  A+
The Republic by Plato
  • Never actually sat and read this from Socrates's first words to the end in order -- mainly because when I did read it as an undergraduate it was cut up in pieces. Bad beginning made right. Now I done read it. Check out the last book. A+
Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality by Sigfried Kracauer
  • Classic book on film theory. B+ 
The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film by Stanley Cavell
  • Unusual book. I think I need to read it again to fully understand. The section on silence and film is brilliant as well as his meditation on Joan of Arc. A
History and Culture
The best in History and Culture goes to Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida by John Forrester. Honorable Mention goes to Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.
    Are You Considering Psychoanalysis? by Karen Horney
    • Usually I avoid book titles that double as questions, but Horney's classic introduction text helped me to conceptualize psychoanalysis from the point of view of an analysand. Perhaps a bit dated, but helpful nonetheless. B+
    Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography by Jason E. Powell
    • Not a straight forward bio, but rather serves both as a survey of his work interwoven into a sort of love song about a life. Written from the perspective of a disciple rather than a distanced critic. A-
    The Painter of Modern Life by Charles-Pierre Baudelaire
    • This book is a gem. A must read for anyone seriously interested in aesthetics. Baudelaire does a reflection on painting that I feel corresponds to how we can think about film. A+
    The Rise of the Novel: Studies in DeFoe, Richardson and Fielding by Ian Watt
    • The first chapter is a bit of philosophizing about the novel and its relationship (or lack thereof) with realism, while the rest of the book positions the novel form historically within the context of the mass production of books and the emergence of a reading middle class. B+
    Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida by John Forrester
    • To write a book on psychoanalysis is difficult enough, but Forrester rises to the occasion by linking together seemingly effortlessly Lacan, Derrida, and Freud into a cohesive structure that makes this book a pleasure to read. Forrester's chapter on Freud, Breuer and Anna O. is exceptional criticism. I love how he interweaves the theme of gossip and psychoanalysis throughout the text.  A+
    Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern
    • Got hooked on Halpern's twitter feed and anticipated the book. Not as funny as the twitter posts that started the whole thing, mainly because the books attempts a cohesion that loses the ephemeral nature of tweeting. Good effort though! C-
    Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
    • Wow. What can I say? I loved every page of this book. Besides the reason why Jobs is famous -- Apple, Pixar, iPads, and whatnot -- the book reveals a man who is certainly binary, both impassioned and cruel, visionary, but pig-headed. Now when Jobs's wife comes out of mourning, the world will come to know the other half of Steve. A+
    We Boys in Love: Teenagers in Love Before Girl-Craziness by Jefferey P. Dennis
    • Thought this book would be more of a literary criticism, but rather I found Dennis frames the adolescents in the films too rigidly through this idea that homosociality is more real when divorced from sexual desire. The book writes about homosociality in these great films, which by themselves are ripe for cultural criticism, but at the end of the day, Dennis says nothing substantial. C
    Shout Out:
    I would like to say thank you to the Brooklyn Public Library and the New York Public Library for providing me with access to most of these books, both in print and Kindle editions, when available! Go Public Libraries!

    Proust, the Photograph, and Chance in Literature

    Involuntary memory is a chance
    happening precipitated by an object
    Voluntary and Involuntary Memories
          For Proust, time stands still, ”As though there had been no time there but seven o'clock at night” (p. 59). A memory like this is not a memory of the intellect, for Proust, a voluntary memory  a memory likes this preserves nothing of the past. To capture an involuntary memory is a chance happening precipitated by an object. Proust likens it to reincarnation, of souls lost in some inferior being  does a touch, a taste bring them out to play? I think for Proust the soul is a prison yearning to reach out beyond its own limits -- this desire for transcendence is a desire of the human soul but the sheer will is not enough. 

    Adoration of the Material World
    Proust adores the material world; he has faith in the world because it offers a promise. The past is hidden beyond the realm of the intellect. The material world promises a portal to that hidden realm. But the key is not readily accessible. Proust's heaven is in the immanent reality of the material world. Proust's object is a material signifier  something like the effects of literature, “of which we have no inkling” (p. 60)  only chance. I come back to this passage: “it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves die" (v. 1, p. 61).  What Proust calls “chance” Barthes call the punctum. Art depends largely on chance  this is what Proust means by involuntary memory. Every photograph is an imprint of the world. But not every photograph evokes something akin to what the madeleine cake did for Marcel. Why? It is not the cup, the cake, the photograph itself that constitutes the structure of the involuntary memory  it is the self's response to the world, both hidden and open, governed by chance, in which we hope to light upon something called truth before we die. The experience of involuntary memory is an "unremembered state" (v.1, p. 61). Neither the novel nor the photograph holds the memory inside of itself; the memory is "unremembered" by a chance encounter. 

    Comparing Barthes's Unary Image with Proust's Habituation
    What Barthes calls the "unary" image," Proust would call habituation. What Barthes thinks of as the prick, the punctum, of the photograph is not far from how the Recherche confronts the problem of photography. Why does Swann prefer the daguerreotype of Odette? But Marcel disparages the Kodak snapshot? Why does Marcel study the photograph of Berma in bed, but is disconcerted by a photograph of Gilberte? Marcel cannot stand the vanity of his grandmother in wanting to have her likeness taken, but he concedes that his feelings are complicit with his own fantasy of a good night's kiss. The photograph promises a "supplementary prolonged encounter" (v. 3, p. 99). What is troubling about the photograph is the way it unsettles us.
    A Cruel Trick of Chance
         In a "cruel trick of chance," Marcel sees his dead grandmother as a photograph (v. 3, pp.183-185). In this scene, the theme of the photograph is introduced without the actual presence of a photographic object. The grandmother appears "as a photograph." The grandmother is not there; she is absent, but Marcel perceives her similarly to a photograph, a spectral object, however, something akin to an hallucination or to a dream. The nodal point of the novel and the photographic image is the anticipation of an image not fully seen; for as Proust says, "We never see people dear to us except in the animated system, in the perpetual motion of our love for them, which, before allowing the images that faces present to reach us, seizes them in its vortex and flings them back upon the idea we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it" (v. 3, p. 183). What is striking here is that Marcel curses "the cruel trick of chance" that conjures up the image of his grandmother, as if his eyes were a photographic plate. Even in the moment that he sees his grandmother, a spectral image of her, sitting on the sofa  it lasts only a moment  he does not know her. "I who had never seen her save in my own soul, always in the same place in the past, through the transparency of contiguous and overlapping memories .... I saw [the spectral image of my dead grandmother] sitting on the sofa beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, day-dreaming ... an overburdened woman I did not know" (v. 3, p. 184).

    30.12.11

    Disparagement of the Photograph in Proust

    Man Ray. Harper's Bazaar, November 1936.
    The Unkind Treatment of Photographs in La Recherche     Photographs are not treated kindly in Proust’s Recherche. In the “Mother’s Kiss” episode in the Combray section of Swann's Way, there is a humorous account of why photographs ought not to adorn the walls of Marcel’s room — for his mother found in them “vulgarity and utility” (v.1, p. 53). The sheer fact that a photograph is reproducible, that another child could have the same photograph hanging in his or her room as some other kid seems scandalous to Marcel’s mother’s aesthetic taste. A photograph is “common” since it can be reproduced mechanically. The photograph is vulgar since it “captures” objects in the world only to reproduce them as commercial banalities. The photograph does not get under the skin of everydayness. Photographs reveal nothing more than the banal surfaces of things and do not penetrate any deeper. To put it another way: the novel is concerned with animating reality, not the banal apprehension of reality.
    According to Proust Photographs Point to Vanity     Proust also links photography to vanity. Saint-Loup takes a photograph of Marcel’s grandmother. Noticing she puts on her best dress for the occasion, Marcel reports he feels annoyed at his grandmother’s childishness in wanting to appear her best, a fact that surprises him for he had always imagined her to be freed from vanity (v. 2, p. 500). Proust is echoing the idea that “having one’s likeness taken” is offensive to a pure concept of beauty that ought to look deeper than surface appearances. However, Proust’s aversion to photograph goes deeper than a moralistic stance against vanity. It is not an ethical deprivation which is at stake in the photograph, but rather, what Proust seems to deride is the distraction the photograph promotes and the aura of unreality it promotes. Marcel is annoyed that his grandmother will sit for Saint-Loup to have her likeness taken but she will not spend time with him, a theme that can retrace itself back to the young Marcel in Combray waiting for his mother to arrive with the long-awaited kiss. The photograph gives a false promise, one of deferral, the promise of halting time, anticipation in the guise of distraction.
         Take for example the magic lantern: an analog for the disparaged photograph which is linked to the mother’s kiss episode in Combray. It is important to note the unsettling feeling aroused by the magic lantern at the start of Proust’s masterwork for it serves as a prelude to the disparagement of the plastic arts throughout the work along with a distanced awe and astonishment. Where Proust disparages he also obsesses. Where photographs are mentioned in Proust, even in passing phrases, metaphors, or allusion to photography, there is often the anticipation of themes we are more familiar with in Proust, the anticipation of a kiss, questions of real and unreal, the sensory world and the world of ideas, insight versus mere appearance.
          Placed over his bedside lamp, the magic lantern entertains the boy Marcel by a show of several points of multi-colored light creating a luminous kaleidoscopic effect that evokes both the camera and the cinema, appearance, and reality, dark and light, all of which make Marcel uneasy. The iridescence is too much. Like light pouring through stained glass, the child’s magic lantern creates a “supernatural phenomenon of many colours,” causing an unreal effect to superimpose itself on the familiarity of Marcel’s childhood bedroom in Combray. Marcel is both awed and discomfited by the parade of lights the magic lantern produces, as it illuminates a story outside of Marcel’s own experience, thus limiting access to an inside inner experience. The magic lantern produces an unreal effect that shakes Marcel, the budding writer, and puts into question his desire to create uniquely and inwardly. “But my sorrows were only increased thereby, because this mere change of lighting was enough to destroy the familiar impression I had of my room …” (v. 1, p. 10). Proust’s point is to show how the luminous photographic and kaleidoscopic effects of the magic lantern discomfit and unrest the artist’s -- the novelist’s -- ability to capture reality. The magic lantern, and by extension, the play of light that is the photograph, an inscription of light on paper, is set against what novels can do, viz., what Proust feels he can do as a young artist, as a novelist.

    15.8.11

    First Sentence of a Failed Novel

    Do you have failed first sentences of novels you tried to write? Here's one:

    Her skin was chalky white, but Patrick thought she was rosy. Amelia was stretched out on the bed, beneath the mosquito netting.
    Please share your own failed sentence in the comments section:
    Image source: the new yorker

    Quote from Don Quixote

    Henry Caseroti, Cock-A-Doodle-Doo, 2010
    Every cock crows on its own dung hill
    Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote

    12.7.11

    Book Review: A Thief, A Girl, A Moral


    Something Missing
    Book Review:
    Something Missing: A Novel
    by Matthew Dicks
    Broadway Books © 2009
    304 pages

        Matthew Dicks’s first novel begins with the careful machinations of a professional thief cataloging the contents of a person’s refrigerator: “A gallon of milk, long since expired, cold cuts, opened jars of jam, tomato sauce, a carton of eggs, and, in the door, what Martin had predicted: salad dressing.” After the first hundred pages, I felt like I was reliving the book The Boy Who Could Not Stop Washing. We quickly learn that the protagonist, Martin Railback, is an anti-social, neurotic sophisticated thief. He thinks nothing of taking a person's liquid plumber but agonizes over a dropped toothbrush in a toilet. Crazy guy that Martin Railback.
         Martin has a cleanly strategic work week that includes breaking into the homes of at least a dozen homes a week stealing stuff. He stakes out the homes of upper middle class home dwellers in Connecticut who would make for good unsuspecting victims of his kleptomania. No single people. No children. No people with roomies. Only married couple without children. He systematically absconds objects people will least likely notice to go missing. Martin is no ordinary thief. For example, he has been stealing Liquid Plumber and Parmesan Peppercorn salad dressing from the Pearls for a decade, along with the occasional pearl necklace or bowl hidden in a dusty corner of the house. Martin goes through great pains to determine whether an item will go missing or not. I don't want to adumbrate his meticulous steps he undergoes to determine whether an item is steal-able or not. It is ammusingly exhausting and Dicks does a fine job of bringing us into Martin's world.
           The odd thing about Martin is that he not only steals from people; he is a first class creeper. He notices his clients’ (the name he gives his victims) idiosyncrasies, the kinds of toothbrushes they use, whether or not they lift the toilet seat when they go to the bathroom, even the contents of their journals, e-mails, and grocery lists. Martin is the ultimate voyeur, which makes him creepy in most people’s estimation. Dicks attempts to make him likable, even adorable at times. I found myself hoping he would not get caught as a thief when in one scene he is trapped inside a client’s home when they arrive before he can make an exit.
        The novel reads at a quick pace. The first quarter of the book introduces you to Martin’s burglar lifestyle and gives background to how he became the kind of person he is. We quickly learn his anti-social habits. He has a crush on the waitress at the diner he frequents for breakfast but he never asks her out on a date. He has one true friend, Jeff, who does not know of his daily break-ins into people’s homes. He lives in his deceased mother’s house where he stores the objects he steals behind refrigerator panels and inside sofas. He doubles on Ebay as a chic Northeastern woman who has a penchant for handbags. In one of the novel’s funnier moments, we learn how Martin uses Ebay to sell off his client’s unmissable stuff.
        Right away we are led to believe that Martin is not an ordinary thief. I did not find myself hating him for his thievery simply because he seemed to steal only out of a sense of odd moral principles. He never stole items from his clients that they would miss. In this regard the novel seems to be a criticism of middle class America. Martin’s clients are people who work many hours a week, have amassed a large amount of cash, buy plenty of things, but do not have the time to enjoy what they buy. The Steinway piano that sits in the living room unplayed without an open music book, or the wood burning stove that no one uses, or the extra set of diamond ear rings that go unnoticed. The novel appears to be saying that Martin steals out of a high moral standard. As if his thievery suggests the hypocrisy of a middle class that buys stuff that could be used to support others (and they would not notice the loss). But Dicks never brings the novel to moral indictment of the upper middle class. We only know that Martin does not care for dogs, the very rich (because they do notice when their stuff goes missing), and general disarray. In fact instead of moral disdain, Martin acquires a bizarre intimacy with his clients even though he has never met them.
        The novel encourages us to root Martin on in his search for intimacy and love. Not finding the love of his life with the diner gal, Martin seems destined to find love with a client, or at least we are led to think so. I won't spoil the plot but suffice it to say this book enters boy meets girl territory. Why begin a novel that promises to be a critical rapprochement with American middle class values with the formula of a brazen romance. I wanted more class struggle and less amour between burglaries.
        the best scenes are the voyeur moments Martin has with his clients. He seems more at ease with the migh-have been moments in his life than real in your face person-to-person encounters. Dicks wants his Martin Railback to be both a quriky neurotic and a lovable boy next door. I don't completely buy it. In perhaps the most moving passage from the novel, Martin overhears a client speak of the sadness she feels of never having received a single rose from her husband. Martin crafts an anonymous letter to the husband suggesting he buy his wife a rose tomorrow. At this point the novel shifts in timbre from film noir espionage to the reverse of Gyges’s Ring. Instead of doing the immoral act when no one is looking. Martin turns out to be the hero who does the good despite the fact that he breaks the law for his day job. I thought the novel presented the character of Martin as too glib and neatly OCD. It never seemed to me that Martin ever questioned the rightness or wrongness of things in a searching, palpable way. His neuroticisms easily aroused him to make a quick buck from his svelte thieving as well as create delusions about his relationship to his clients.
         The novel kept me in its quasi-ethical grip until about three quarters through. By the last hundred or so pages I felt the author had become too self-aggrandizing and his character appeared to don hero wings without sufficiently revealing what made him tick. The book ends too neatly on the premise of another book to follow.
     B-

    2.3.11

    Book Review: The Broom of the System

    Ornate Language / Simple Language
    David Foster Wallace does a grand job of showing ornate language and its simple substitutes. Who is better, Mr. Bloemker, with his arcane, long, jargony way of speaking, or Lenore, with her simple quips phrasing what he meant to say in two or three words?
    Lenore Beadsman's great-grandmother Lenore Beadsman goes missing in David Foster Wallace's novel The Broom of the System and this is the conversation between her and the nursing home director, Mr. Bloemker about her great-grandmother's whereabouts:
    [Mr. Bloemker:] "What I have been able to determine is that at some point in the last, shall we say, sixteen hours some number of residents and staff here at the facility have become . . . unavailable to access."
    [Lenore Beadsman:] "Meaning Missing."


    [Mr. Bloemker:] "Yes."
    . . .
    Bloemker took a deep breath and rubbed a gold eye with a white finger. In the air around him a whirlpool of dust motes was created. It whirled. 


    [Mr. Bloemker:] "There is in addition the fact that the resident whose temporary unavailability is relevant to you, that is to say Lenore, enjoyed a status here  with the facility administration, the staff, and, through the force of her personality and her evident gifts, especially with the other residents -- that leads one to believe that, were the mislocation a result of anything other than outright coercion on the part of some outside person or persons, which seems unlikely, it would not be improper to posit the location and retrieval of Lenore as near assurance of retrieving the other misplaced parties."


    [Lenore Beadsman:] "I didn't understand any of that."


    [Mr. Bloemker:] "Your great-grandmother was more or less the ringleader around here."


    [Lenore Beadsman:] "Oh."
    source: Wallace, David F. The Broom of the System. New York: Penguin Books, 2004, 34; 36. Print. Italics and brackets are my own.