Fictional Biography – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.18 DISASTER WAS MY GOD by Bruce Duffy /2011/disaster-was-my-god-by-bruce-duffy/ Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:02:16 +0000 /?p=21532 Book Quote:

“Newcomers are free to condemn their ancestors. We are at home and we have the time.” ~ Arthur Rimbaud

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (OCT 13, 2011)

I was in my late thirties when the poet Arthur Rimbaud first crossed my horizon. It was Jim Harrison, the American writer, who brought him to my attention. In his memoir Off to the Side, Harrison writes, “I think that I was nineteen when Rimbaud’s ‘Everything we are taught is false’ became my modus operandi.” Harrison continues, “…Rimbaud’s defiance of society was vaguely criminal and at nineteen you try to determine what you are by what you are against.” I admire Harrison a great deal. If he liked Rimbaud, if Rimbaud was the man, then I needed to know more. I discovered that the poet had influenced a good bit of the music of the ‘60s and 1970s, that Morrison and Dylan and a host of others had cited his authority. Of this time, Patty Smith writes in her recent memoir, Just Kids: “’When I was sixteen, working in a non-union factory in a small South Jersey town,” she writes, “my salvation and respite from my dismal surroundings was a battered copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, which I kept in my back pocket.” His work, she concludes, “became the bible of my life.”

Further, I discovered that the term infant terrible was essentially coined to describe him and that, not only the writing, but the life lived was breathtaking.

I bought Rimbaud and dug in. But try as I might, he was lost on me. There was no fire there. The revolution was dead. I’d come too late to the poet. To Harrison’s point, to Patty’s point, Rimbaud was a young person’s game. To the mature reader, discovering him for the first time, his genius, well, it is obvious, particularly in the context of history; but he does not speak intimately to the older reader, does not influence to the degree of life changing, at least not to this reader. That the right book must find the reader at the right time, was never more true.

Louis Menand has written that a feature of modernity is that “the reproduction of custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence.” Like all ground-breaking endeavors, a visionary must come along and shatter tradition, setting a new standard and creating something that did not exist previously. In the modern tradition, the past is defined against the new, not incorporated into it. In the arts, in particular, the visionary becomes the genius-hero, an immortal. (“What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself,” said Beethoven. “There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.”) Though he did not touch me in a visceral way, Rimbaud nonetheless did not fail to impress. That the poet visionary-genius Rimbaud was a child prodigy, almost unheard of in literature, makes for good copy. (“He was,” writes Mr. Duffy, “that rarest of rarities and oddest of oddities–a prodigy of letters.”) That after producing his art and while still a young man, he renounced his genius and broke with society, fleeing to the African desert, some say running guns, seems a more likely creation of Hollywood than history. But it is history, and a rich history at that. That is the vein Mr. Duffy so deftly mines.

“I called to my executioners to let me bite the ends of their guns, as I died. I called to all plagues to stifle me with sand and blood.
Disaster was my god.”

Disaster was my God is a fictionalized biography of the poet Arthur Rimbaud’s life. The literature resulting from that early life is here too, not as exegesis, but rather as a compliment, an illuminating accent. In a note to the reader, Mr. Duffy explains his intent: “In a life as enigmatic and contradictory as Rimbaud’s, the more I considered the facts, and the many missing facts–and the more I studied his blazingly prescient writings and poems–the more I found it necessary to bend his life in order to see it, much as a prism bends light to release its hidden colors.” The poet’s life lends itself well to this technique. It is a vivid rainbow. Mr. Duffy’s technique succeeds wonderfully.

The outline of his life is nothing short of remarkable. Rimbaud created his ground-breaking art in a five year period, while in his late teens. (Victor Hugo called him “an infant Shakespeare.”) At age sixteen or seventeen, at perhaps the height of his powers, he left his village of Charleville, his middle-class upbringing, his sister and mother, and traveled to Paris, at the invitation of Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine. “Come, dear great soul,” wrote Verlaine. “We await you; we desire you.” The older Verlaine, married and a father, fell under the boy’s spell and the two began a torrid and public affair that scandalized Paris. (It is unclear whether Rimbaud was homosexual, or simply a provocateur–likely the latter.) Eventually the two separated, driving Verlaine to wit’s end, shooting Rimbaud. The young poet is slightly wounded and Verlaine consequently spent two years in prison.

Leaving Paris, Rimbaud began a life of adventure, traveling widely, giving up–even renouncing–his writing. He undertook the life of a businessman and explorer, ending up in sub-Saharan Africa. He was 24 when he settled in Harar, Ethiopia, working as a merchant. In 1891 he developed a problem in his leg which would ultimately force him out of the desert. He was carried across the desert on a gurney, his savings strapped to his chest in a special vest, shotgun at his side, surrounded by hired mercenaries. The leg was amputated in Marseille but the cancer soon spread and he died, in the company of his sister Isabelle, in Marseille at age 37.

“I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed – and the great learned one! – among men.”

Mr. Duffy has rich material here and he makes the most of it. He builds his narrative on the premise that Rimbaud and his mother Vitalie had a love-hate relationship, a dynamic that spurred in Rimbaud both his creative life and his peripatetic life. Indeed, the letters of Rimbaud to his mother include many suggestions that a great tension did exist. For instance, Rimbaud writes to his mother in December 1882 from Aden, Yemen: “I just sent you a list of books to send me here. Please don’t tell me to go to hell! I am about to reembark into the African continent for several years; and without these books, I will be without a heap of essential information. I will be like a blind man…” Subsequent letters find him pleading with his mother for supplies and support. Mr. Duffy’s premise is largely successful–”It was you, Mother,” he has Rimbaud’s sister say, “you who made him a foreigner in his own home.” The mother opens the book and ends it; she is the impetus, even the muse, of genius–though it is lost on her completely, in Mr. Duffy’s iteration.

Early on, Mr. Duffy asks, “…how a poet prodigy of almost unfathomable abilities could willfully forget how to write. How could such a man disable a style and unlearn ageless rhythms–stubbornly resist, as one might food and water, words and their phantom secrets…..in short, could a poet of genius systematically erase his own life–unwrite it? How? To what conceivable end?” It is a question that cannot be answered. The subject is gone, the analyst’s couch can never reveal the answer. This is where the novelist’s art comes in. Drawing on the life, the history, the writing and a good deal of imagination, Mr. Duffy fills in the gaps. He does it with much enthusiasm and verve. One gets the impression that he truly loves his subject, that he wants in a bad way to reveal a profound secret of this genius. But of course the secrets have all gone to the grave. Hence the art.

Late in the novel, Mr. Duffy puts these words into the mouth of Verlaine: “When Rimbaud was a child, or still a young man, he could believe in his dreams, could pretend, could be seduced by his own make believe. And remember, as Rimbaud saw it, and naive as this might sound, he had not been sent to earth merely to write poems but to change the world–quite literally. He actually thought that, he really did, and for while I suppose I did, too.” They say that a society has no culture until the poets show up. Rimbaud showed up and set culture on it’s ear, creating a new culture out of whole cloth. He did, indeed, change the world. He set a generation upon a new path–and does still. That is the job of the immortals.

“I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a seer; you will not understand this, and I don’t know how to explain it to you. It is a question of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. The sufferings are enormous, but one has to be strong, one has to be born a poet, and I know I am a poet…”

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 5 readers
PUBLISHER: Doubleday (July 19, 2011)
REVIEWER: Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on  Bruce Duffy
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

]]> EVERYTHING WAS GOODBYE by Gurjinder Basran /2011/everything-was-goodbye-by-gurjinder-basran/ Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:26:32 +0000 /?p=21412 Book Quote:

“The sun struck his body at an angle that reduced him to a thin black shadow lined in molton gold and yet when he looked back at me I could make out his smile. It was electric. He motioned for me to follow, but I refused, preferring to sit on a nearby rock, the tide splashing against me as he rushed into the surf. Watching him disappear and reappear in the water, I squinted against the twinkling light that reflected off the water until my sight was infrared. ”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (OCT 3, 2011)

In her debut novel, Everything Was Good-Bye, Gurjinder Basran tells the story of one happy-unhappy family, seen through the eyes of Meena, the youngest of six sisters. Set against the backdrop of suburban British Columbia, Basran paints a richly coloured portrait of a close-knit Punjabi community, caught between the traditions of “home” in India and their Canadian home, where their community is surrounded by a predominantly white, rather laid-back English-speaking society. With an impressively confident approach to a complex subject matter and a lively and engaging writing style, the young Indian-Canadian author explores the emotional turmoil, faced by a girl/young woman like Meena, experiencing the two cultures intimately. Traditional family values are assessed against the young heroine’s need for independence and emotional fulfillment.

From a young age Meena is an astute observer of her surroundings, expressing her thoughts and feelings more easily to her private notebooks than to any one person. Her subdued, hard-working mother, a widow since Meena’s early childhood, appears to be in a state of permanent mourning. The traditional customs and rituals that sustain her physically and mentally, also provide her justification for her strict treatment of her daughters. Speaking little English herself, she insists on Punjabi spoken; she demands of her daughters the traditional obedient behaviour that makes them acceptable as future wives and her constant concern is to find “good” husbands for her daughters, meaning that they are somebody with a good income and, very important, a professional designation, such as a lawyer or a doctor. Love? That may come later, or not.

By the time we share Meena’s intimate musings on her life, all sisters, except one, have or are about to be married according to the traditions. Harj, her favourite sister, was expelled from the family after being falsely accused of misbehaving by one of the many “aunties.”

The aunties, a kind of informal morality police, assume the responsibility of monitoring the young people’s behaviour in public, reporting without delay, when they observe, for example, when a girl alone is talking to a boy. Meena and Harj used to make fun of these aunties, whether related or not, referring to them as the IIA – the Indian Intelligence Agency. With a few evocative sentences, Basran expressively captures the characteristics of different aunties and others in the community: some speak deliberate “Bombay British” (showing off), others are FOBS (Fresh Off the Boat) or DIPs (Dumb Indian Punjabs)… Her sense of humour and irony is conspicuous, revealing an attractive mix of intimate knowledge of and critical distance to such reality. For example, one so-called auntie, claims to visit India every year, “to look for the latest fashion”…”Our styles here,” she explains, “are a year behind.” Nonetheless, while India in her mind is “very progressive,” she prefers to “keep the customs and traditions of Hindustan, of our India” here in Canada. This somewhat twisted logic that may well contribute to undermining any adaptation of Punjabi customs to those of their chosen home country, creates fundamental problems for Meena.

While the young people are not allowed to voice an opinion at extended family gatherings, they realize that they are left with few options as regards balancing the old and the new. Some rebel and are expelled from the comfort and security of the community, others pay half-heartedly lip service and play the “obediency game” at a superficial level, yet, others submit and suffer quietly… Meena, watching her mother’s seemingly unending grief, but also her sisters’ marriages, is increasingly questioning the meaning of love, marriage and family:

“I hated the ritual of belated mourning. We existed between past dreams and present realities, never able to do anything but wait. For what, I didn’t know…”

In her other reality, that of school, university and later in professional life, Meena encounters much ignorance and insensitivity vis-à-vis her and her background. Being reticent herself, she cannot easily explain her life and is usually treated as an outsider. As can be expected, she finds it easier to open up, emotionally and intellectually, to young people, who, for whatever reasons, also feel like outcasts in their respective communities. Liam, one of her classmates, is one person, who can “pull her out of herself.”  Wandering the countryside and beaches around Vancouver, their developing friendship is touching in its innocence, fragility and complexity. Having to resort to secrets and lies at home, she feels pushed into a dual existence. And there is Kal, her gentle childhood friend…

Whether, over time, she can detach herself from the strictures of her traditional upbringing and how she will handle any future decisions for her life, moves the narrative forward in very affecting and, at times, surprising ways. As we accompany Meena’s exploration of a rainbow of emotions – from love, physical intimacy and happiness to loss and pain. Basran’s expressive language takes on additional lyrical qualities when she expresses her heroine’s deep feelings. In the end, what are family values? Can they adapt?

Not wanting to give any spoilers, suffice to say that I was captivated by Meenas’ voice in conveying her reality, her life between two worlds, the growth beyond victimhood. One could quibble over small details, such as lacking clarification of some Punjabi terms and, possibly, the brevity with an element of stereotyping when describing the non-Punjabi environment. Yet, these are not serious flaws. Basran, is without doubt a new author to watch. With Everything Was Good-Bye, Gurjinder Basran was a semi-finalist in Amazon’s 2008 Breakthrough Novel Award and the winner of the 2010 Search for the Great BC Novel.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-5-0from 23 readers
PUBLISHER: Mother Tongue Publishing (October 2, 2010)
REVIEWER: Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Gurjinder Basran
EXTRAS: Interview on YouTube
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

 

]]> THE EVOLUTION OF BRUNO LITTLEMORE by Benjamin Hale /2011/the-evolution-of-bruno-littlemore-by-benjamin-hale/ Sun, 26 Jun 2011 16:38:00 +0000 /?p=18818 Book Quote:

“ZIRA: What will he find out there, doctor?
DR. ZAIUS: His destiny.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (JUN 26, 2011)

Consider the big questions. For instance, what does language afford us? Is self-consciousness and all it implies (self-reflection, guilt, joy…) embedded in language, daresay a function of language? Why do we create art? Nature or nurture, what shapes us? How is love possible? Where does rage come from? Cruelty? What are we to make of the animals, those we imprison, those we consume, the beasts we love as companions? What, indeed, does it mean to be a human being and can it, whatever it might mean, be fully realized? Now, take these questions and a bunch more just like them, and wrap them up in a narrative so unique and compelling, so rich as to bring transparency to the questions. Then shape the story around a unique voice that ranges from the mindlessly inarticulate to the Mensian complex. If you can imagine experiencing all that, you have a sense of what this book affords the adventurous reader.

This is the story of Bruno Littlemore, chimpanzee extraordinaire. Rather, more properly, as the first-person narrator tells us, this book “contains the memoirs of Bruno Littlemore, as dictated to Gwendolyn Gupta between September 9, 2007 and August 8, 2008, at the Zastrow National Primate Research Center, Eastman, GA 31024.” And what a memoir it is.

Bruno, we are informed, grew up in the Primate House of the Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago. He was the scion of Fanny, who was raised in the zoo, and Rotpeter, a chimp who had been rescued from the Congo jungle after watching “his mother and father murdered and subsequently devoured.” As a small chimp, Bruno was delivered to a the University of Chicago’s behavioral primatologist, Dr. Lydia Littlemore. He recalls the meeting early in the book. “I will begin with my first significant memory, which is the first time I met Lydia. I was still a child at the time. I was about six years old. She and I immediately developed a rapport. She picked me up and held me, kissed my head, played with my rubbery little hands, and I wrapped my arms around her neck, gripped her fingers, put strands of her hair in my mouth, and she laughed. Maybe I had already fallen in love with her, and the only way I knew to express it was by sucking on her hair.”

He quickly grasps the complexity of evolved consciousness. “I am Bruno,” he declares. “I am an animal with a human tongue, a human brain, and human desires, the most human among them to be more than what I am.” And yes, as he states, he falls in love with his keeper. Does that imply what we think it does? Well, jumping ahead, yes, they have sex, assuming your mind raced there. Bruno takes evolutionary steps, learns language, creates art, walks erect and of course has sex. This is a coming-of-age memoir, ergo sex is discovered. Inter-species relations might put some readers off, understandably. However, in the context of understanding the measure of humanness it cannot be avoided. Hale manages this territory with aplomb. But, not to get derailed, there is love here too. Lydia removes Bruno from the captors and takes him home to further her research. He has demonstrated a capacity for intelligence beyond the norm and she is convinced he is the subject from which careers are launched. That is, before she is as smitten by him as he is by her. “Of course I was in love for all the vainest and greediest reasons,” writes Bruno, several years later. “I climbed down from that tree to spend the rest of my life running from the yawning darkness of animal terror toward the light of fire stolen from the gods, and like you, I remain in a state of constant pursuit, never quite escaping the darkness nor ever reaching the light.” This is no ordinary chimp obviously.

Bruno finds creative relief in art. He paints. He exhibits. He becomes known. But as enlightened as Bruno is, he cannot repress his more beastly urges. His outbreaks eventually cost Lydia her job. Their relationship breaks into the news and they are scandalized. They escape to the compound of a wealthy animal-rights couple in Colorado. Eventually they return to Chicago where Lydia falls ill. Bruno, left to his own devices, plunges solo into the world of humanity. He travels to New York, is befriended by Leon, a Falstafian character of brilliant, yet dubious talents. Together they produce Shakespeare’s Tempest. But circumstances intrude and Bruno must escape, returning to Chicago. Picaresque as his journeys might be, the weight of his adventures at times seems unwieldy, as if they might all fall in upon themselves, so dense and allusion-filled they seem.

Returned to Chicago, Bruno’s last act of unbridled rage occurs when he discovers that his primate sibling, Céleste, is being subjected to animal experimentation. He commits murder and lands in jail. Ironically, it is his voice, his command of language and story telling which, like Scheherazade, saves him. He is an animal, after all, and should be “put down.” But he saves himself–and his story. Nine years after committing the crime, 24 years old and hairless, his face surgically altered (he wanted a human nose), he dictates his memoir.

This book is compelling every way you consider it. It is rich in philosophy, ideas, notions, questions and preponderances. Yet, as practiced in the best of the literary tradition (yes, this book, from Dostoevsky to Nabokov, stands tall), the ideas are carried along on a narrative stream which twisting and turning is wildly entertaining. The writing is gin-clear and elegant. (You’ll want to have a dictionary handy.) This is a first novel. What a debut for Mr. Hale, a truly wonderful and heretofore unknown author.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 50 readers
PUBLISHER: Twelve; First Edition edition (February 2, 2011)
REVIEWER: Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Benjamin Hale
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:The Descent of Manby Kevin DesingerLove in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet

Bibliography:

]]> THE TRAGEDY OF ARTHUR by Arthur Phillips /2011/the-tragedy-of-arthur-by-arthur-phillips/ Fri, 24 Jun 2011 12:39:34 +0000 /?p=18498 Book Quote:

“If you think it’s him, it sounds like him,” Arthur says to his sister; “if you think it’s not, it doesn’t.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUN 24, 2011)

The very first thing I did after finishing The Tragedy of Author – Arthur Phillips’s ingenious faux-memoir – was to Google to see what was true and what wasn’t…only to find that much of Phillips’s traceable past has been erased.

Did he really have a gay twin sister named Dana, a scam artist father who spent his adult life in prison, a Czech wife and twin sons of his own? Methinks not. What I do know is that Arthur Phillips shares his birthday with the Bard himself, that he was born in Minnesota, and that he is indeed a writer to be watched very carefully. Because what he’s accomplished in this novel – er, memoir – is sheer genius.

Arthur Phillips – the character – is an unreliable narrator if there ever was one, and points it out in various excerpts. Right from the start when he says, “I have never much liked Shakespeare,” we feel a little off-center. The book is, after all about the ultimate Shakespeare scam: his neer-do-well father, at the end of his life, shares with Arthur a previously unknown play by Shakespeare titled The Tragedy of Arthur and entices him to use his Random House connections to get the play published.

To say his connection with his father is complicated is an understatement. Arthur Phillips, memoirist, reflects, “His life was now beyond my comprehension and much of my sympathy – even if I had been a devoted visitor, a loving son, a concerned participant in his life. I was none of those.” Now he wonders: did his father perform the ultimate con? If so, how did he pull it off? And how do the two Arthurs – Arthur the ancient king portrayed in the “lost” play and Arthur the memoirist – intertwine their fates?

It’s a tricky project and Arthur Phillips – the novelist – is obviously having great fun with it. At one point, he urges readers to, “Go Google the van Meergeen Vermeers…Read James Frey’s memoir now…We blink and look around, rubbing the fairy dust from our eyes, wonder whether we might have dreamt it all. Once you know it isn’t Shakespeare, none of it sounds like Shakespeare. How could it.” But somehow, it does.

The play is reproduced in its entirety in the second part and indeed, it reads like Shakespeare (I read all of his major plays in grad school and have seen many of them performed). It’s absolutely brazen that Arthur Phillips could have mimicked Shakespeare so successfully and with seeming authenticity.

So in the end, the theme comes down to identity. As Phillips the memoirist writes, “So much of Shakespeare is about being at a loss for identity being lost somewhere without the self-defining security of home and security, lost in a shipwreck, confused with a long-lost twin, stripped of familiar power, taken for a thief, taken for the opposite gender, taken for a pauper, believing oneself an orphan.”

And, as Phillips the novelist knows, it’s also a trick for perspective. The play, the novel, the memoir, the scam can equally be said to be “about a man born in Stratford in 1565 – maybe on April 22 or 24, by the way — or about an apocryphal boy king in Dark Ages England or about my father or his idea of me or my grandfather or Dana in armor or or or.” Just as Shakespeare may or may not have written his plays – according to some anti-Bards – so might this new one be a fakery, written by Arthur’s fictional father. There is layer steeped upon layer steeped upon layer in this book. It’s audacious and it’s brilliant. Arthur Phillips convincingly shows us just how easy it is to reinvent a play, a history, or ourselves with just a few sweeps of a pen.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 43 readers
PUBLISHER: Random House; First Edition edition (April 19, 2011)
REVIEWER: Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Arthur Phillips
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:The Song is You

Another book had us fooled:

Incident at Twenty-Mile by Trevanian

Bibliography:

]]> DOC by MARY DORIA RUSSELL /2011/doc-by-mary-doria-russell/ Tue, 24 May 2011 13:38:52 +0000 /?p=18160 Book Quote:

“Things happened. He reacted. Sometimes he took a rebellious pride in the cold-blooded courage of certain unconsidered deeds; just as often, he repented of his rashness afterward. There is, for example, nothing quite like lying in a widening pool of your own blood to make you reconsider the wisdom of challenging bad-tempered men with easy access to firearms.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirsten Merrihew  (MAY 24, 2011)

Doc relates how it might have been during 1878-79 when Dr. John Henry Holliday lived in Dodge City, Kansas. “The Deadly Dentist” who later gained fame or infamy, depending on perspective, for “pistoleering” along with the surviving Earp brothers at the O.K. Corral, saved Wyatt Earp’s life in Dodge first. Earp is said to have credited Holliday with saving him, but apparently didn’t share details, so history isn’t sure of the facts. But this novel presents its own story of how it might have happened.

While in Dodge, Holliday also met “Big Nose Kate,” who would become his common law wife. As for earning a living, his ability to practice his profession was limited by the chronic, wracking cough of his consumption (tuberculosis) — few wanted their faces so close to his, but Doc imagines scenes in which Holliday gets Wyatt into his chair and fixes the other man’s supposedly marred smile for him. To afford his fancy clothes, a long residence in the best rooms of the local hotel, and additional high-spending habits, Doc (as he told folks to call him) dealt faro and took part in other high-stakes card games at night. He’d come West from his native Georgia in hopes that the drier air would improve his lungs, but the dust irritated them further and he drank bourbon in large quantities to “calm” his coughing, often imbibing to drunken unpredictability. A cultured Southern gentleman by upbringing, Doc allowed the coarseness of the West to shape his habits to a degree, developing even before he arrived in Dodge, a shady reputation. But he also retained an appreciation for literature and music, and this novel portrays him as a man concerned with justice for all, even a Chinese…and young black man whose suspicious death Doc was determined to lay on someone’s moral account.

Author Mary Doria Russell, best known so far for her philosophical science fiction hit, The Sparrow, uses her prodigious talents for clear and sometimes very beautiful prose to speculate on a very different subject, but just as she brought readers into Father Emilio Sandoz’s reality, she now brings us into Doc Holliday’s happenstance. Clearly, Russell would like to dispel some of Doc’s outlaw reputation, for she writes on the first page of the first chapter,

“At thirty, he would be famous for his part in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. A year later, he would become infamous when he rode at Wyatt Earp’s side to avenge the murder of Wyatt’s younger brother Morgan. To sell newspapers, the journalists of his day embellished thin facts with fat rumor and rank fiction; it was they who invented the iconic frontier gambler and gunman Doc Holliday. (Thin. Mustachioed. A cold and casual killer. Doomed and always dressed in black as though for his own funeral).”

As though to balance the scales, Russell’s story quotes a hotel bellhop in Glenwood Springs where Doc Holliday died in November, 1887 at age 36: “We all liked him. He bore his illness with fortitude, and he was grateful for the slightest kindness. Doc was a very fine gentleman, and he was generous when he tipped.”

In her concluding Author’s Note, Russell takes on the obvious question: “Arriving at the end of historical fiction today, the modern reader is likely to wonder, ‘How much of that was real?’ In this case, the answer is not all of it but a lot more than you might think.” That sounds reassuring. However, the fact is that Doc begins Holliday’s life by proposing an historically questioned premise, namely that he was born with a cleft palate and that his physician uncle repaired the outer damage when John Henry was only two months old. Some historians insist that such an operation successfully concluded at such a tender age would have made medical journals. However, no record can be found, so they doubt the veracity of the claim. Some even doubt that Doc ever had a cleft palate at all because pictures of him as an adult, sans moustache, don’t reveal an upper lip scar. So, one can wonder whether Russell decided to use disputed biographical “facts” in order to create more sympathy for the man or to at least portray him with one more strike against him than he actually overcame when she writes he learned to speak properly despite the unrepaired split palate inside his mouth.

For its own reasons, Doc also may have misrepresented Holliday’s long-term but intermittent lover, Mary Katherine Harony ( aka “Kate Elder” or “Big Nose Kate”) as a prostitute. According to some historians, there is no real proof that Harony was. Perhaps, she might have been mistaken for another hooker Kate in town. Or, she could have been cat house madam without herself servicing the customers. Or, she may have been a working girl for a time and then given it up. No one seems certain. Perhaps Russell chooses to make her an “independent” prostitute even during her up/down relationship with Doc to, in part, illustrate further the egalitarian side of Holliday that the author also brings out in other ways. Regardless, this novel seeks to portray the “seedy” sex trade of the West in a softer light, expressing a sense of empathy for the women who made their way in life by selling their bodies (after all, few other opportunities were open to unmarried women out West). The reader gets to understand Russell’s version of Kate and see why she vacillated between Doc and other men. One reason is that Doc couldn’t hold onto his earnings, and Kate felt the need to have her own stream of income. Whatever the truth, Russell shows a Kate who kept coming back to Doc:

“…She knew how to calm him after the dream, how to steady him while he coughed until his throat was raw and his chest burned. She knew how much bourbon was enough to help him catch his breath, and she knew how to make him forget, for a time, his mother’s illness and his own.

“Afterward, she always asked, ‘I’m a good woman to you, ain’t I, Doc?’ He always agreed. When he fell asleep again, she felt the satisfaction of a job well done.”

Doc isn’t just about Holliday and Kate (who, it must be included, like Holliday, was educated in the classics and languages, and that may have been her greatest attraction for the dentist/gambler/gunfighter — she could stimulate his mind too). The novel provides an overview of many of the residents of Dodge: the lawmen, the politicians, the men of commerce, the non-whites, a few Jesuits, the women, the toll gate family, the horses, etc., giving the reader a peek into this rough-and-tumble western town. This fictive recreation is a strong point of the book as we see the complex social, economic, and political pressures that made law and order elusive and justice raw and hard.

The other strength is the novel’s humanizing of Doc Holliday. Although, as mentioned, history can’t provide us with material to back up all of Russell’s contentions, still it is fascinating to see the seemingly contradictory character she presents: a man who stubbornly struggled against his lung disease for 15 years before finally being overcome, a man who didn’t usually start gun fights but would finish them, a man who played heavenly music on pianos when they were tuned correctly, a thoughtful man concerned with justice, a man who was fast with a gun.

However, the novel’s concentration on Doc’s time in Dodge also has its downside. The reader should not expect any in-depth retelling of the Tombstone confrontation or Doc’s subsequent ride by Wyatt Earp’s side. Russell deals with the early and later parts of Holliday’s life in quick packages at the beginning and end of the book, and the bulk of the narrative tends to get a little repetitive as Doc went about his gambling, coughing, a dab of dentistry, fighting with Kate, etc. There is some plot, but arguably there could have been more had Russell permitted herself to begin in earnest in Dodge and then move on to Tombstone and beyond.

Doc is a novel I’ll remember because it describes the Wild West and its survivalist mentality while also illuminating the civilized, decent motivations and actions that those who came to live there brought with them and did not surrender. Violence by nature and man was a fact of life, but human kindness, honor, and sacrifice shone through too. Doc Holliday was a suffering man who adapted somewhat awkwardly to the West, but he did retain some of the gentlemanly, cultural roots his mother had instilled in him. Russell’s Doc is a product of her imagination, but the author may have come closer to his true self than others — biographers, filmmakers, novelists — have.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 285 readers
PUBLISHER: Random House; First Edition edition (May 3, 2011)
REVIEWER: Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Mary Doria Russell
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

And another Western character reimagined in fiction:

  • Etta by Gerald Kolpan

Bibliography:

Sci-Fi:

Historial:

]]> CARIBOU ISLAND by David Vann /2011/caribou-island-by-david-vann/ Tue, 18 Jan 2011 15:37:48 +0000 /?p=14760 Book Quote:

“In the beginning, Irene thought. There is no such thing as a beginning.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JAN 18, 2010)

This is a richly absorbing and dark, domestic drama that combines the natural, icy world of the Alaska frontier with a story of deceptive love and betrayal. If Steinbeck and Hemingway married the best of Anita Shreve, you would get David Vann’s Caribou Island. His prose is terse and the characterizations are subtle, but knifing. Like Shreve, his characters are saturated with loneliness and disconnection with their lives, with each other, in a pit of misperception, despair and exile, in a conflict of selves that beat each other down. The topography and remoteness of this “exclave” state, a place non-contiguous physically with its legal attachment (of the US) serves as one of many metaphors to the attachments exemplified in this story.

Virginia Woolf, while attempting to write the life story of artist Roger Fry, observed: “A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as one thousand.” Although this is a novel, not a biography, Vann’s characters are desperately attempting to grasp, hide and reinvent themselves, trying to fill impossible voids, reconcile the past. The author explores the links between memory and myth, the gray area between real and idea, the notion of identity, and the truth of self-deception. There is stoic Irene, haunted by a childhood of abandonment; her cruel, mulish, and spineless husband, Gary; their (often) oblivious daughter, Rhoda; and Rhoda’s puerile and feckless fiancé, Jim. Minor characters (such as their taciturn, alienated son, Mark) move through the novel and accelerate the anxiety and self-destruction of this quartet of refractory souls. They unconsciously use their mates to mirror and shadow what is desired, lost, forgotten, or never was. Vann creates a circle of repetition and insularity in a vast expanse of territory, a terror of the self at its most heinous and human.

“…if they could take all their previous selves and nail them together, get who they were five years ago and twenty-five years ago to fit closer together, maybe they’d have a sense of something solid.”

Gary is insisting on building a log cabin in the isolated Caribou Island, pulling Irene into this last-ditch retirement dream, rife with poor planning and ripe with the unspoken threat of finally leaving her. Thirty years ago he brought her to Alaska from Berkeley, another time that he tried to create an idyllic life from an idea, and failed.

“The momentum of who she had become with Gary, the momentum of who she had become in Alaska, the momentum that made it somehow impossible to just stop right now and go back to the house. How had that happened?”

“Gary was a champion at regret…Their entire lives second-guessed. The regret a living thing, a pool inside him.”

Thirty-year-old Rhoda is devoted to Jim, (who is a decade older), in an almost frantic state to get married to a man who doesn’t really love her, on the precipice of repeating her mother’s mistake. Meanwhile, Jim is on a quest to redefine himself, to combine two opposing lifestyles.

Vann does a spectacular job of engaging the reader gradually into this blistered turmoil of dissolution. The climax was compelling, creating a circle, a literary architecture of repetition. However, as penetrating and irresistible as this form was, I had a problem with the outcome. I felt that he sacrificed authenticity for symmetry. I cannot go further without giving spoilers.

Despite my vexation with the ending’s credibility, I was gripped by the power of this atmospheric story, the characters, the exquisite pacing, and the infinite amount of quotable passages. It took me a long time to remove myself from this moody, nuanced tale.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 76 readers
PUBLISHER: Harper (January 18, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: David Vann
EXTRAS: Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Also, see our review of a T.C. Boyle novel:

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

]]> THE BOX: TALES FROM THE DARKROOM by Gunter Grass /2010/the-box-tales-from-the-darkroom-by-gunter-grass/ Tue, 09 Nov 2010 23:53:17 +0000 /?p=13508 Book Quote:

“But that is not enough, or too much, for all of you. Yes, children, I know: being a father is only an assertion, one that constantly has to be corroborated. This is why, to make you believe me, I must lie.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (NOV 9, 2010)

Nobel laureate Günter Grass has made a career out of fictionalizing the past in order to be better believed. His first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), used an autistic dwarf named Oskar as a magic-realist alter-ego commentator on the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Some two dozen books later, Crabwalk (2002), his most recent novel, reviews the same period together with the Soviet occupation of East Germany, under the guise of a fictionalized family biography. In this, a writer (though not Grass himself) uses the web to research the sinking of a ship in which his mother was one of the few survivors, while at the same time observing the internet activities of his neo-Nazi son. Shortly after that, in Peeling the Onion (2006), Grass turned to true autobiography, attempting to explain his own activities as a member of the Hitler Youth and soldier in the Waffen SS in the last year of the War, a fact that he had kept hidden for sixty years.

Hidden but not forgotten; if Grass lied about his life in factually objective terms, his entire fictional oeuvre has been an attempt to find metaphors for his own responsibility and that of his countrymen towards their common past. In his latest work, The Box, he combines autobiography with magic realism in an oblique view of his entire life as a writer, though without strong political or moral overtones or, frankly, much interest.

Although the book is subtitled “Tales from the Darkroom” and looks a little like a set of nine short stories, it is in fact a continuous series of vignettes. At different times, in different cities, various groups of Grass’s eight children (by several different mothers) meet to reminisce about different phases of their childhood. Each child is the principal narrator for a different chapter, though there are no quotation marks, and various other voices weave in without clear attribution. The focus of their memories are the pictures taken by Marie (Mariechen), a family friend and possibly their father’s lover, on a prewar Agfa box camera. Damaged in an air raid, it has the capacity to record things not as they are, but in terms of the stories they contain. A snapshot taken near Checkpoint Charlie shows the escape of the woman who would become the author’s second wife. A series of pictures of the family dog Joggi imagine him riding the subway on his own all across the city. Landscapes taken near the Danish border on the Baltic coast reveal scenes from the Thirty Years War. It is a very clever analogy for the way in which an author collects motifs from all around him and tells stories about them. When the stories are shaped and focused, the result can be great fiction, but when we get only the fragments without the shape, the result is merely self-indulgent.

I am writing this two days after hosting my daughter’s wedding. The house has been full of family members telling stories about the past. It is an enthralling celebration for those who share our common links, but for someone visiting for the first time it can be overwhelming and even alienating. At least that’s what I felt reading this book. A number of other Nobelists, curiously, seem to have turned to fictional autobiography in their late works; both Kenzaburo Oe and J. M. Coetzee have been mining their lives in this way for some years. But though autobiographical, Oe’s The Changeling also addresses the whole postwar history of Japan. Coetzee’s latest book, Summertime, not only says something equally important about South Africa, but creates a gallery of characters that are as rich as any in his novels. The family members in The Box, however, are little more than disembodied voices, reflecting a father figure — storyteller, creator, puppet-master, or director — who remains in the shadows nonetheless, writing to exorcise his own demons. Here are the final words of the book; if only Grass could have put his point so eloquently in the 200 pages that precede them!

“A quick exchange of glances. Partial sentences chewed and swallowed: assertions of love, but also reproaches, stored up over the years. Now the lives portrayed in snapshots are called into question. Now the children have reclaimed their real names. Now the father is shrinking, wants to vanish into thin air. Now the suspicion is voiced in whispers: he, and he alone, was Mariechen’s heir, and has the box stashed away somewhere, like other things: for later, because something is still ticking inside him that has to be worked through, as long as he is still here.”

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 25 readers
PUBLISHER: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (November 10, 2010)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Günter Grass
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

*Referred to as the Danzig Trilogy

Nonfiction:

Related:

Movies from Books

]]> CHALCOT CRESCENT by Fay Weldon /2010/chalcot-crescent-by-fay-weldon/ Fri, 15 Oct 2010 14:56:30 +0000 /?p=12936 Book Quote:

“I will be sorry to leave this life, as soon I must. It is so full of wonder, as well as horror. A surprise around every corner and the pace is hotting up.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (OCT 15, 2010)

Two things about British novelist Fay Weldon: she will always be controversial and she will always be relevant. Known primarily as an author of female-centered books, Weldon –who just turned 79, by the way, worked in advertising at one point in her career, and she also wrote the screenplay for the 1980 version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. In 1998, Weldon, called a feminist novelist for decades, came under fire for her comments on the subject of rape. In 2001 Weldon once again became the subject of controversy with her novel The Bulgari Connection when it was revealed that she’d been paid 18,000 pounds to quote the jeweler at least 12 times. How’s that for product placement? After some initial waffling came Weldon’s great get stuffed response: “Well they never give me the Booker Prize anyway.”

Chalcot Crescent--Weldon’s 29th novel (her 30th if you count Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen) is a bit of a change of pace. Weldon’s characters are predominantly females struggling to survive in a male dominated society, and while these women should, of course band together to form a cohesive, formidable alliance, they more often than not devolve into rivalry and squabbling as they battle over men–the so-called spoils. In Chalcot Crescent, Weldon’s world of 2013 offers a tableau of a slightly different sort. Yes men still rule, but it’s the faceless sinister monolithic government–the true enemy–and the ultimate patriarchal society–in charge of a world that’s gone horribly and believably awry. Is this science fiction? Perhaps–although I think the world of Chalcot Crescent is too close to the truth for that. Instead it’s the sort of Weldon-dabbling we see in the futuristic The Cloning of Joanna May (1989) and the alternative realities of Mantrapped (2004).

Weldon tells the reader that this book is the story of her lost sister “set in an alternative universe that mirrors our own.” With Weldon’s characteristic humour, the novel’s protagonist, Frances now aged 80, is a once-successful, now-penniless writer living in Chalcot Crescent while her loser sister, Fay–a writer of cookbooks has hightailed it to back to New Zealand. Holed up in her Chalcot Crescent home, surrounded by foreclosures, Frances hides from the bailiffs who are about to turf her out of her house and presumably onto the street. Trapped inside her home, she describes a world that’s gone to hell:

“Then came the Labour Government of 1997 and the Consumer Decade–as it is now called–and by 2007 the house next door to me sold for £1.85 million. Then came the Shock of 2008, the Crunch of 2009-11–when house prices plummeted and still no-one was buying–then the brief recovery of 2012, when at least properties began to change hands again, though our friendly European neighbours became less friendly, the US embraced protectionism and the rest of the world had no choice but to follow. And then came the Bite, which is now, and with it a coalition and thoroughly dirigiste government which keeps its motives and actions very much to itself. And though a few major figures in the financial world went to prison, the nomenklatura still ride the middle lanes, have their mortgages paid for them and do very well, thank you. The rest of us are presumably moving to the outskirts: fifty years on and we are back to where we began. I reckon I had the best of it.”

With the economy in a permanent state of emergency, the NUG (National Unity Government) is running the country. Rules, regulations, and rationing control everything–from an intermittent water supply to CCTV. Everyone is supposed to eat a rather suspicious manufactured substance called National Meat Loaf, vegetarianism is ridiculed, and home grown-produce is taxed by Neighbourhood Watch programmes. People who’ve lost their homes in the economic downturn disappear and are relocated to the nether regions of the “outskirts.”

Frances goes back and forth in her descriptions of the past and the present, and as she types her story into the computer (hoping to sell a book if there’s enough paper), she plays with the idea that some of what she’s writing is fiction. She details her major relationships and the lives of her rather disappointing children as she rode the wave of economic affluence to its disappointing conclusion. With numerous marriages, second spouses, lovers and stepchildren, it’s all very complicated. For Weldon fans, reading Chalcot Crescent is very much a pathway through the author’s life and work–the incidents, the loves and the hardships; it’s all here, or at least the parts that Weldon wants us to know about are here, and all treated with her characteristic humour. But apart from the witty and wicked exploration of Frances’s past, there’s also Frances’s present; Amos, Frances’s favourite grandson, a member of the radical breakaway group Redpeace is part of a guerilla composed of members of Frances’s family. While Redpeace plots direct action against the government, Frances is relegated to dotty-old-lady status by her monkey-wrenching grandchildren.

Chalcot Crescent may read like a science-fiction fantasy, and depending just how you feel about the state of the world, reading the novel may be an uncomfortable experience at times. Weldon’s world is not so far removed from reality. Most of us have seen the gutting of the American and British economies, and the subsequent beginnings of a new peasant class. The novel also dabbles with notions of agent provocateurs and Redpeace–a supposedly radical group that’s allowed to exist in plain sight. Again there’s that idea of Weldon’s relevance. Even as I confess to a certain disappointment in the novel’s ending, I suspect that Weldon is much cannier than her critics acknowledge. I was rather hoping for a Shrapnel Academy style ending, but instead as Guy Debord would say, even the most radical gesture will eventually be Recuperated.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 2 readers
PUBLISHER: Europa Editions; Reprint edition (September 28, 2010)
REVIEWER: Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia Page on Fay Weldon

British Council biography of Fay Weldon
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Contemporary women authors:

Margaret Atwood

Joyce Carol Oates

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

]]> THE CHANGELING by Kenzaburo Oe /2010/the-changeling-by-kenzaburo-oe/ Mon, 16 Aug 2010 20:51:55 +0000 /?p=11166 Book Quote:

“Now forget the dead, forget even the living. Turn your mind only to the unborn.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (AUG 16, 2010)

Fractal designs, such as used to be popular twenty years ago, have the property that any part of them replicates the whole in miniature. If you zoom in on even the tiniest detail, you can reach an understanding of the entire shape. This analogy occurs to me after reading The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe, a late work by the Japanese Nobel Laureate, and so far the only thing by him that I have read. Where most novels have a linear narrative behind them, this one reads as a series of one-sided conversations, thoughts about literature and other arts, buried memories, and some bizarre incidents — all generally minor in themselves, but each seemingly endowed with immense hidden significance, each a clue to some overall design that only gradually emerges as the various details replicate and mirror one another.

Despite its abstract content, the book is easy to read and its framework simple. Kogito Choko, a celebrated writer, is listening to some tapes sent him by his brother-in-law Goro Hanawa, once his childhood friend and now a famous film director. At the end of one of the cassettes, Goro remarks “So anyway, that’s it for today — I’m going to head over to the Other Side now. But don’t worry, I’m not going to stop communicating with you.” Immediately after, Goro throws himself out of the window of his high building. Kogito (an obsessive thinker, aptly named by his father from the phrase “cogito ergo sum”) engages in months of conversation with the dead Goro, playing snatches of the tapes, stopping them for his own response, and then continuing to hear his friend’s answer. When his wife suggests he needs to get away, he accepts a guest professorship in Berlin, where Goro had himself lived a few years back.

As an example of Oe’s method, take the chapter in which Kogito is being interviewed on television in connection with the Berlin Film Festival. There is a long section about how he gets to the interview, or almost doesn’t get to it: crossed wires with the person picking him up, confusion at the hotel where this is taking place, description of the technicians setting up the equipment in the hotel ballroom, the physical arrangement of the chairs, backdrop, camera, monitors, all in obsessive detail. And then, without further preamble, Kogito is shown a number of film clips on the monitor: samurai fighting off a peasant army, and a modern game of rugby football. He recognizes it as scenes from a book he had written, entitled Rugby Match 1860. In the novel, he had used the battle and the game as metaphors, but he intrigued by the decision of these filmmakers to film them literally, with an acute feeling for the Japanese atmosphere. He is told that what he has just seen is the only footage from the project so far shot, but the “young filmmakers” have run out of money; would he be willing to concede them the rights for free? Kogito’s translator warns him that he is being ambushed, but he agrees, and the chapter ends.

The core of this chapter, I believe, lies in one of its smallest details, the samurai film clip. Certain aspects of it reflect other images we encounter involving Kogito’s father, who appears to have been something of a philosophical leader of an ultra-right-wing movement opposing the Japanese surrender to the US. Kogito’s own politics, on the other hand, are liberal, so perhaps he is the Changeling of the title? (Or one of them, with Goro.) One begins to see that the whole novel is about change. In the background, there is the reconstruction of Japanese society after defeat. But this is worked out in terms of ideas — translation between languages, translation of one medium into another (writing into film or opera), and perhaps (as the example above would suggest) the handing over of ideas from one generation to another.

The fractal metaphor works on the personal level as well. From what I can gather, this novel reflects themes from every other book that Oe has written, and these in turn reflect the author’s life. His brother-in-law was indeed a famous film director, Juzo Itami, who committed suicide in a similar way. Like the fictional Kogito, Kenzaburo Oe has a son who was born brain-damaged, barely able to communicate in words, but who eventually found success as a composer. All Oe’s novels contain such a character, and the writer has spoken of his aim to give his son a voice denied to him in life. While the composer-son plays a relatively small role here, Oe shifts the relationship back a generation, as Kogito tries to understand the legacy of his own father and the huge changes between the Japan of his time and that of the present. The themes of rebirth and the passing of the torch between generations become clear only at the very end, but after so much mind-play they bring a lovely touch of simple human emotion. (Translated by Deborah Beohm.)

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-5-0from 5 readers
PUBLISHER: Grove Press; 1 edition (March 16, 2010)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Kenzaburo Oe
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: More Japanese writers:Huraki Murakami

Ryu Murakami

Natsuo Kirino

Bibliography:

The Flaming Green Tree Trilogy:

  • Until the Savior Gets Socked (1993)
  • Vacillating (1994)
  • On the Great Day (1995)

Nonfiction:

]]> SUMMERTIME by J. M. Coetzee /2010/summertime-by-j-m-coetzee/ /2010/summertime-by-j-m-coetzee/#comments Mon, 01 Feb 2010 03:24:52 +0000 /?p=7594 Book Quote:

“Best to cut yourself free of what you love – cut yourself free and hope the wound heals.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (JAN 31, 2010)

Summertime is the brilliant new book by J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003. This book is part novel, part fictional biography, part memoir, part alternative history, and an obituary for a living writer. Its essence is the imagined life of John Coetzee from 1971 – 1977 as gathered by a biographer who may or may not be Coetzee himself. The basis of the biography consists of interviews with a few people who knew the author, and fragments from the author’s journals.

This book is both ambiguous and a page-turner. It is a mystery about the essence of a man or perhaps his imagined self or alter-ego. We see Coetzee through the eyes of female lovers, relatives, colleagues and unrequited loves all interviewed many years after his supposed death. All of these people paint a similar picture of Coetzee as a bland man, socially inept, unassuming, diminished in some emotional capacity, and lacking passion. Is this who Coetzee was or is this a self-deprecatory construct? Is this bland, diminished man the author stripped of his art? Can any artist be viewed separately from his art? Clearly, Coetzee, stripped of his art, is only a cipher. The book weaves interlocking aspects of Coetzee’s personality with ever increasing subtlety. Is the fictional Coetzee the “real” Coetzee’s homunculus or is it a shadow of the real self?

Coetzee lives with his father and both are closed men, emotionally guarded, at times antagonistic towards one another. Coetzee’s father is a disbarred lawyer who now works as a bookkeeper. Coetzee is said to have gotten into trouble in the United Stated during the Vietnam war and was deported back to South Africa. The two men live simple, apparently boring and vacuous lives together. Both have been displaced and are socially isolated.

Coetzee’s first journal entrees speak to his dissatisfaction with living in South Africa. “How to escape the filth: not a new question. An old rat question that will not let go, that leaves its nasty suppurating wound.” He writes of the borderlands, murders followed by denials and how he feels soiled by all this. He has conflicted and complex feelings about the corrupt leadership in Africa and the violence correlative with the new apartheid.

The first person interviewed by the biographer is Julia, a therapist with whom Coetzee had a brief and relatively dispassionate affair. Julia describes Coetzee as “scrawny, he had a beard, he wore horn-rimmed glasses and sandals. He looked out of place, like a bird, one of those flightless birds; or like an abstracted scientist who had wandered by mistake out of his laboratory. There was an air of seediness about him, too, an air of failure.” It is she who seduces Coetzee and she questions her motivations as “he had no sexual presence whatsoever. It was as if he had been sprayed from head to toe with a neutering spray.” Further, he is not a good talker. She perceives John as incapable of love and self-absorbed. “Sex with him lacked all thrill” and had an “autistic quality.” At one point, John brought her a copy of his first published book, Dusklands. She was not impressed with it but “simply surprised that this intermittent lover of mine, this amateur handyman and part-time schoolteacher, had it in him to write a book-length book and, what is more, find a publisher.”

Julia is very surprised at John’s need to write and his belief that books give meaning to life. John wants books to provide him with immortality. Julia is more pragmatic. Rather than continuing to write, she recommends that John find a good wife. She uses her therapeutic background to analyze John’s books which she views as having a recurrent theme of the woman not falling for the man. “My guess, my highly informed guess, is that it reflects his life experience. Women didn’t fall for him – not women in their right senses. They inspected him, they sniffed him, they even tried him out. Then they moved on.” She finds it very odd that a man who is hardly capable of intimacy makes his living writing books about “intimate human experience.”

The biographer interviews John’s cousin Margot about their annual family get togethers. In his family group, John is like a “lost sheep” and his relatives, except for Margot, view him with disdain and disapproval. His family are Afrikaners but, since John has been schooled outside South Africa, he is no longer accepted as one of their own. He is viewed as odd, bookish and stuck up. Margot is puzzled that John has learned Hottentot, a Khoi language, all of which are considered dead languages. John states that he’s “interested in the things we have lost, not the things we have kept.” Margot wonders who John can speak to with these languages. He answers, “the dead . . . who otherwise are cast out into everlasting silence.”

Like Julia, Margot sees John as without male aura. “She cannot think of him as a man.” She considers him a failed man and a failed son, unable to decide what to do with his own life and incapable of caring for his father. ” He doesn’t have plans. He is a Coetzee. Coetzee’s don’t have plans, don’t have ambitions, they only have idle longings.” John longs to be a writer and to set his father up in a home separate from his own. Like Julia, Margot thinks John would be better off having a wife. However, she doesn’t think any woman would have him. Julia and Margot both feel a responsibility for John but are weighed down by his inaccessibility and melancholy.

Further interviews ensue. One is with a woman with whom John had an unrequited love and who detests John to the point that she feels stalked by him. The other two interviews are with his colleagues at a Capetown university. One of these colleagues is male and the other is a woman with whom John had an affair. The woman who despises John talks about how unsuited John is for marriage and describes him “like a man who has spent his life in the priesthood and lost his manhood and become incompetent with women.” She acknowledges that he might have been a decent writer but he still “was not anybody.” At any rate, she did not read his books. With John’s male colleague, similar descriptions of his personality come to light. He’s described as a mediocre teacher, reserved, a misfit, incapable of intimacy, and socially inept. This colleague makes a striking point – – “It seems strange to be doing a biography of a writer while ignoring his writing.”

All of these interviews take place in the background of a changing South Africa and point to Coetzee’s conflicted feelings about the struggles that his country is facing. “He accepted that the liberation struggle was just. The struggle was just but the new South Africa toward which it strove was not utopian enough for him.” He yearned for a “coloured” South Africa where everyone was ethnically the same but again he feels outcast with his Afrikaner heritage and history. His female colleague and lover says, “I think he was happiest in the role of outsider. He was not a joiner.” She talks about John’s Nobel prize and acknowledges that he must have earned it. However, she is not a fan of his writing. “He had no special sensitivity that I could detect, no original insight into the human condition. He was just a man, a man of his time, talented, maybe even gifted, but frankly, not a giant.”

Mr. Coetzee has painted a fictional alter-ego, a self-deprecatory memory, or perhaps a fictional being. Regardless of the historical truth, this is a provocative and extraordinarily important book by one of our greatest living writers. It is about the paradox of art and the artist, about the man who creates great art and who, without his art, is of no great importance. Is it about John Coetzee? In some sense it must be, as he is the author. How much of it is fact? We may never know, but that doesn’t matter, as the book itself is a work of enduring art.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 42 readers
PUBLISHER: Viking Adult (December 24, 2009)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AMAZON PAGE: Summertime
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on J. M. Coetzee
EXTRAS:
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of: Disgrace

Bibliography:

Fictionalize autobiography:

Essays:

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