Immobility-- Maybe

So, what did I glean from Daniela Crăsnaru's The Grand Prize and Other Stories? It's taken me a while to finish the collection, so even with notes, some of the earlier tales are a little hazy. Nevertheless, there's a semi-frequent theme here of missed opportunities, whether past or present, left unresolved and/or unaddressed thanks to personal inertia. Said lack of movement isn't always something for which we can hand out easy condemnation; in "The Grand Prize," for example, the protagonist's allowing a mistake to go uncorrected probably had a lot to do with legitimate fear, and permitted him to save himself in the end-- in terms of practical living conditions and lack of hassle from the authorities. The faded husband's inability to extricate himself from an unpleasant marriage in "Mr. Eugene" in part reflects his acknowledgment that he's the one responsible for getting into this situation in the first place-- and for bringing someone else along for the ride. And then there's the good husband of "About Happiness," undergoing the unsolicited realization that he has and will continue to accept a state of not-joy.

George Romney, Sketches for Languid and Prostrate Figures

We can all probably relate to being stuck, and to not knowing how-- and/or being too fearful-- to escape the situation. But is the inertia Crăsnaru describes merely individual? Are we supposed to see some larger national/cultural characterization here? I'm not familiar enough with Romanian history, especially of the post-1989 variety, to know whether I'm justified in posing this question. But when large numbers of people have a difficult, more or less common past (or even present) to face, it would be surprising if a good percentage didn't just feel like submitting to the way things are or have turned out, instead of, midway through life, making a brave foray into something completely different and assuredly uncertain.

Definitive leaps or breaks, such as the one in "The Fallen Cork Tree," may result in brief outbursts of new, even if frustratingly confusing, life-- outbursts which might also be followed up by inexplicable catastrophe. Asserting yourself to achieve just one individual thing beyond the average, as in "The European Mechanism," could culminate in the earth--or your own invention--rising up and swallowing you.(1) And so maybe it really is safer to stick to the uninspiring and predictable, to cheat yourself out of something grander in favor of a degree of security and the bits of enjoyment you can pull out of the smooth flow of foreseeable events.

The responsible thing to do would be to undertake a bit of investigation on this author: find some interviews, find some other commentary, see what her intent was. For now, though, I'm satisfied with what I've got, and feel more compelled to move on to other things. Maybe I'll cheat myself out of a variety of insights due to my own literary inertia-- but the possibly great thing about being phlegmatic in this instance is that I'm unlikely, years hence, to fall into bitter reverie and regret about the Googling I didn't do. We can hope, at least.

(1) With this particular story, though, I have to wonder what sort of commentary on striving to be part of "Europe" might be present. Especially with the semi-mysterious figure who encourages our man to go ahead with his project and his desire to claim himself as a stand-out individual, this tale has echoes of an industrialized, un-bloodthirsty Macbeth.

As Usual, the Book is Better

Jack Kerouac. Courtesy Tom Palumbo.

I'm sort of straying from the reading path here and offering my two cents on the recent film adaptation of On the Road. As one of my favorite books (and given the fact that I was a Kerouac junkie in my twenties), it was with an odd, eager trepidation that I looked forward to viewing the thing. That low-grade sense of dread came from the conviction that this book simply should not be filmed-- not necessarily because it's some sacrosanct piece of mid-century Americana, but because I can't think of a way to do cinematic justice to that weird mix of poetics, action, and camaraderie.

As expected, the celluloid (OK, I guess it'd be more accurate to say "digital") version was a pale reproduction of the pen-n-paper original. Much of the casting was weird (except for Viggo Mortensen as Bull Lee/William Burroughs) and the dialogue stilted (again, you have another problem there with the transition to film: actually making moving, visible characters talk like a book is a risky venture). What I will say the project added to all the written encapsulations of the Beats and those who tried to follow in their footsteps is some evidence of the toll all these men and their kicks took on the women involved with them-- and the ways in which a solid portion of these partiers didn't really take women as much more than vessels to attend to their sexual and sometimes financial needs. The film did do a good job of bringing some of these ambiguities to the fore, so I'll at least applaud it for that.

Still, I'd advise anyone to stick with the book.

Other works that fall into the hands-off category, where movie directors are concerned? Hopscotch (Julio Cortázar), Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace), The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen-- although I think this one's already under contract, or has had the rights bought, something). Anyone have any other thoughts on books that should stay books?

A Brother in Style?

Courtesy David Shankbone.

There's a shout-out on one of the preliminary, "rave reviews for the author" pages in George Saunders' Tenth of December from David Foster Wallace, which expresses the late great writer's admiration for Saunders' work. After having devoured this volume, I find the inclusion of DFW's quote entirely apt, not only because the book is just plain solid and deserves to be praised, but also due to the fact that I see a certain kinship in the two guys' writing: the way they deliver a story, the way in which an everyday conversational style acts as the vehicle for mind-blowing outcomes.

Take "The Semplica Girl Diaries," for example. The first time I read it, in The New Yorker, I was astounded at the way the narrative moved from casual chuckles at the protagonist's slightly goofy, if well-intentioned, passage through life, to an alarming end in which said protagonist has become aware of just what such an earnest, if blinkered, approach to existence might lead to. I was left with the same feeling-- of not having seen any of the dread coming, and of awe at how the hell the author pulled that off-- that I experienced upon finishing DF Wallace's "Oblivion."

Too, there's a shared ability to understand the logical conclusions of contemporary absurdities, from medicalizing humanity to marketing (someday, I'll look more closely into the contrasts and similarities between, say, "Escape from Spiderhead" and "My Chivalric Fiasco" and DFW's "Mister Squishy" and Infinite Jest).

But I don't want to allege that one author is or was imitating the other, or that each could be the other. Nope; the pieces each man writes/wrote is definitely his and not the other's. I would have liked to have witnessed a conversation between the two, though, to see if any personal affinity, rivalry, or anything else were present. For now, though, I relish the prospect of diving into all the other Saunders tales I've been missing out on-- and seeing whether, after I've imbibed all that reading, my initial vision of authorial kinship still holds.

Disappointment, Impotent Rage, an Uncertain Future

So, Alain Robbe-Grillet's Snapshots, more or less a collection of scenarios and/or hints of stories shut down before they've begun to unfold, was a mixed bag. Up until this point, I'd been a big fan of the few curious worlds of Robbe-Grillet I'd delved into: endless loops of possibly-hallucinated sameness, jealousies and suspicions broiling just under calm and stylish surfaces, muted intrigues. But this little volume wedged a nagging seed of doubt in my head-- or maybe more my heart, really, but more on that later.

The "snapshot" nature of these separate scene-descriptions wasn't what disappointed me; I knew I was in for brief flashes of settings that sometimes made me feel as if the guy had published a bunch of old writing exercises. With an author of this nature, though, even those snippets succeeded in having something haunting and/or vaguely menacing about them-- a real feat, when you're limiting yourself to short bursts. I did often think that poetry would have taken his (sometimes) excessively detailed material and disposed of it much more effectively and efficiently-- but enjoyed the sensation that these vignettes were prototypes for something like Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine, that triumph of nitpicky description for description's sake.

So, overall, fine. Until the last snapshot ("The Secret Room"), a lingering gaze upon a post-sacrificial scene, all predictably fascinated with the subdued "milkwhite" embodiment of female sensuality, a few pages of misogynist soft porn justified by-- and probably accepted due to-- its preemptively defensive label as "art." I just couldn't stomach what the back cover so blithely described as Robbe-Grillet's "interest in the sado-erotic," as if some guy's hobby of imagining and publicly aestheticizing gender-based cruelty was just as legitimate as bowling or woodworking. And if this interest is just peachy keen, why not tout one's fascination with snuff films, which really amount to a less beautified, less ritualized celluloid enactment of words put down on paper?

Emmanuel Benner, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

I'll engage the argument that such literature-- or maybe just this piece-- has nothing to do with some sort of malign desire to dominate one gender or the other, with the plea to compare reception of just these sorts of works, along with any number of staged rape scenes, or B-spectacles of scantily-clad babes being chased by psycho-killers, with that of 2005's Hard Candy. Soon after it came out, I wrote an account of what it was like to watch the film, which includes what we believe to be a teen girl castrating a pedophile, with men who, after recovering from the pained sympathy-pretzels they'd twisted themselves into during certain scenes, were outraged at the movie's gall-- and even more so at my observation that now they knew what it felt like to be subjected to cinematic and literary rape scenes and have your objections dismissed as an insensitivity to artistic license. Centuries-long artistic portrayal of women's victimization as women (from any number of forays into Leda and the Swan to A Clockwork Orange)? Acceptable. One film that depicts punishment-as-attack-on-manhood? Blasphemous. Maybe Deliverance served as a gateway here-- but since the sexualized violence there wasn't being committed by a woman, we could all go away feeling disturbed and then get on with our lives.

There's not much more I can say about my reaction to "The Secret Room;" if I haven't conveyed my injured outrage by now, I won't be able to do it by drawing out my justifications. And so the question that's accompanied my disgust is: How does (or does not) this particular snapshot change my feelings about this author? I've gotten to know more about his work, yes, and so I'm suffering from a lessened delusion about what his overall oeuvre contains-- one of those nice "growing experiences" we're all supposed to be so happy to have. And how much does or will it matter, especially since what were acceptable assumptions at the time Robbe-Grillet was writing have changed since his pieces were published? Knowing Henry Miller was a dirty old man whose stories were heavily populated by a lot of slime didn't change my appreciation for his mind-blowing word craft and ability to set a scene; Mason & Dixon made me forgive (and then some) Thomas Pynchon for The Crying of Lot 49's hovering paternalism.

At least in the immediate aftermath of "The Secret Room," my love of The Erasers is unchanged; I wouldn't mind a repeated round of disorientation thanks to The Labyrinth. But it might take a while before I'm willing to return to any of those mysterious worlds-- and as They say, you can't go back home (or in this case, to a familiar story and the feelings it evoked) again.

An All-Clear in the End-- But Not the One You Were Expecting

I will probably never understand why it takes me so long to get my head back on straight post-vacation. If nothing else, it's at least a sign that I had an excellent time, and was thus able to forget everything real-world related. At any rate...

Out Stealing Horses: wow. While it didn't take the turn towards disturbing teen relationships I suspected it might, it did offer plenty of unexpected occurrences and things for both narrator and reader to ponder. Had an American author taken on this story, there probably would have been a great deal more pained self-examination and a years'-long process of recovering from the self-torture an abandoned kid might have imposed upon himself, at least until some therapist-figure convinced him he wasn't to blame for anything.

It's precisely that lack of striving for a state of psychiatry-approved equilibrium that I value about this book. There's almost a stoicism to it; a confrontation of restless ghosts, but one that just lets them come up and show themselves, receive the requisite amount of attention they demand, and then recede back into the far corners of memory, probably only until they start feeling neglected again. And the narrator's awareness of what some might call faults-- his ambiguous feelings towards various family members, for example-- is present not in the activist mode of envisioning steps on the ladder of "well-being" to be climbed and conquered, but simply as self-awareness, and that's that. Even the question that rose up in my mind-- whether it's preferable to live through a solitary existence without any outside connections, or to get through that same state of being knowing that there's a slew of people out there who love and care about you, but whom you keep at a safe distance-- really didn't matter in the end-- because the narrator probably wouldn't have seen it as a relevant question. He's ended up at the place he's ended up, he can't do anything about the past but acknowledge it, and now he'll get by as simply as he can, period.

Other than being a solidly good book, Petterson's work is also a reminder (especially to a standard American public convinced of the universal desirability of its brand of individual "happiness" at all costs) of what travel, face-to-face interaction with non-locals/-co-nationals, or just written exposure to someone else's thoughts should do: remind you that there are multiple ways of looking at things-- and maybe, following on that recognition, that you can at least investigate some of those paths before stressing out about adhering to the one you've been assigned.

Unease of Different Sorts and Probabilities

Two chapters into Out Stealing Horses (Per Petterson), and I'm already wondering if this thing's going to take a turn I didn't expect. Admittedly, I stopped reading last night at one of those perfect points that, after having neatly brought to an end a sudden onslaught of weirdness, lets you sit with it, not introducing anything else until you feel like embarking on the next chapter.

I'll refrain from spoilers, but at this point, I'm not sure whether the protagonist's childhood memories will stick to recounting a more-or-less standard golden age, or whether something his friend's just done will take this thing into one of those formative extended situations that makes a clean break with a kid's childhood and pushes him into a more complex, less rosy-cheeked world. My sister and I did grow up with lots of boys as playmates, and although we all engaged in a wide variety of stupid dares, everyday cruelties, and general injustices, I've never been able to recognize in all that the occasionally sadistic joy some literature and films allege young boys take in death, destruction, and intimidation-- something portrayed in a particular episode of this book as well.

Photo by nottsexminer.

Again, it's too early to make any pronouncements-- but in its low-key look back at past events, it's gripping so far.

What I'm afraid is going to be all too gripping, and not in any sort of good way, is Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. I saw Alexander speak a little over a year ago on the multiple, often race-based horrors meted out by the US justice and penal systems, and so I know what I'm in for-- not only in terms of content, but (and the following is positive) a really clear, concise presentation of something no one wants to think about. What I'm hoping is that giving myself fuller exposure to and information about a situation I'm already aware and beyond ashamed of will push me into actually doing something more than reading-- and just telling others to read the book. I've barely begun with this one, though, and so I suppose I can take comfort for a short while in the fact that I'm arming myself with information that will allow me to proceed more efficiently and effectively.

And as for the periodic sadisms represented by our cultural products, mentioned above? I'm guessing Alexander's book will be exposing a lot of those-- just more than periodic, perhaps more subtle and definitely more severe, and probably being dispensed by the very people we're expected to believe work against such goings-on.