TRISTANIA, or A Superior Norweigan Product

And so, in a stunning turn of events, I failed to finish Kristin Lavransdatter. Since I can't do a post on a book I haven't read, I bring you instead the epic, hauntingly beautiful sounds of Tristania. Like Kristin Lavransdatter, Tristania is from Norway. Beyond that, they have absolutely nothing in common.













Norwegian Gothic metal > Norwegian medieval dramz

Teaser Tuesday

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two "teaser" sentences from somewhere on that page.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from. That way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!
• Please avoid spoilers!

The Story of Zahra by Hanan al-Shaykh
Page 143 - I could never ask them whether it was that war had become a habit for them, a part of their daily routine; or how they could move about in the empty city at night and see all that destruction. Didn't they realize how, in the yard of the building opposite, trucks stopped to unload stolen goods?

2009 End of the Year Meme

I found this on Savidge Reads.

How many books read in 2009?

Hmmm. Kind of a tough one to answer because I usually don't tally my books. I'd say it's around 40-45 novels, plus several essays, short stories, and poems.

How many works of fiction and non-fiction?

All fiction! Except for Agnès Humbert's Résistance (memoir), which is very surprising because I read a ton of history books last year. Luckily, I got Luc Sante's Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York for Christmas, which looks like it's going to be a great read.

Male/Female author ratio?

Uh-oh. I've been meaning to do a post on this. According to LibraryThing, my library is 70.83% male and 29.17% female. And I am female. I have no clue how this happened. So, suffice to say, the great majority of books read this year have been by men. (I'll try to work this out later.) I did, however, read the following female-authored novels:

Suzane Adam, Laundry
Hanan al-Shaykh, The Story of Zahra
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
Michelle de Kretser, The Lost Dog
Titania Hardie, The Rose Labyrinth
Agnès Humbert, Résistance: A Woman's Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France
Zola Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Alta Ifland, Elegy for a Fabulous World
Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
Mercè Rodoreda, Death in Spring
Cecilia Samartin, Vigil
Joanna Scott, Follow Me
Sigrid Undset, the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy (books 1 and 2)
Fan Wu, Beautiful as Yesterday

Yeah, that's it. EPIC GENDERFAIL.

Favorite book of 2009?

Just one? Laundry, Oryx and Crake, and The Historian. Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and The Savage Detectives. Jorge Volpi's Season of Ash. Thomas Glavinic's Night Work. Hermann Hesse's Demian and Steppenwolf. Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let the Right One In. Jáchym Topol's City Sister Silver.

Least favorite?

Titania Hardie's The Rose Labyrinth. Or, as I like to call it, Mary Sue and the Super Friends v. the Ugly Americans. Which sucks, because it really started out quite good. But, alas:




Any that you simply couldn’t finish and why?

A couple, unfortunately. Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes was so lush and descriptive I couldn't figure out half the time what Bradbury was actually describing. And, uh, Kristin Lavransdatter. Yeah yeah yeah, I know I was one of the few who made excuses for Kristin, shaddup.

Oldest book read?

This was not a year for old books. Hesse's Demian, written around 1919.

Newest?

Gert Jonke's The System of Vienna isn't really a new book per se, but the English translation just came out in December 2009.

Longest and shortest book titles?

The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain is probably the longest. Demian, Laundry, and 2666 all tie for the shortest.

Longest and shortest books?

Longest: 2666, at 893 pages hardcover. But since it's divided into five separate books, Kostova's The Historian is probably second, at 642 pages hardcover. At 107 pages, The System of Vienna was the shortest novel, unless you count Death in Venice as a novel.

How many from the library?

Very few. I'd say around four.

Any translated books?

MOST OF THEM!

Most read author of the year, and how many books by that author?

This was the year of the German Modernists. I read Demian by Herman Hesse, fell in love with him, and went on to read Steppenwolf and The Journey to the East. I read Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, fell in love with him too, and went on to read an entire volume of his novellas and short stories.

Any re-reads?

Night Work and portions of 2666, including the entire "The Part About the Critics."

Favorite character of the year?

Harry Haller in Steppenwolf.

Which countries did you go to through the page in your year of reading?

My favorite question! With all the translated fiction I read, I'm going to answer this in terms of what countries the authors are from. So here we go: Australia, Austria, Britain, Canada, Chile, China, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Germany, India, Israel, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Spain (including the Catalan region), Sweden, Switzerland. Mostly European, unfortunately. That'll be my New Year's resolution: more books from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. So far, I've got Lebanon and Sudan lined up!

Which book wouldn’t you have read without someone’s specific recommendation?

It wasn't really a recommendation per se, but I probably wouldn't have read Follow Me if Joanna Scott hadn't been one of my English professors at the University of Rochester. And what do you know, I ended up loving it!

Which author was new to you in 2009 that you now want to read the entire works of?

Hermann Hesse! Thomas Mann! ROBERTO BOLAÑO!

Which books are you annoyed you didn’t read?

I'm kind of annoyed with myself for not finishing Kristin Lavransdatter with the rest of the read-along but . . . oh, hell with it.

Did you read any books you have always been meaning to read?

Laurel K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series. And yet, the silly urban fantasy books keep getting pushed aside by Serious Stuff.

The Labyrinth

"The human heart has never accepted the idea of total evanishment from the earth. We have always wanted to leave at least a particle of ourselves, at least a brief mention in a requiem prayer. We want to at least scratch our names on the dungeon wall before we are led out to the execution."




The great thing about used book sales is that you sometimes uncover the most fascinating, quirkiest, obscure, or otherwise unusual books. The Judgment Day Archives by Andrei Moscovit, pen name for Igor Markovich Yefimov, was one such find. Yefimov is a Russian-American writer and philosopher who has been living in the United States since 1978. He is also the founder of Hermitage Publishers. The Judgment Day Archives was initially released Arkhivy Strashnogo Suda in 1982; Robert Bowie's English translation came out in 1988. The jacket copy compares it to Bulgakov's Master and Margarita and promises a "heady brew of espionage, mysticism, political satire, and philosophy, laced with romance and earthy humor." Well, I thought, Bulgakov's been on my TBR list for literally years now and this one sounds like a sure winner!

Leida Rigel is an Estonian-Russian scientist with an interest in faith healing and shamanism whose underground research has been suprisingly successful. It has also led her to be stalked by a pair of KBG agents who have succeeded in making her a paranoid near-wreck. Then their higher-ups get wind of a mysterious corporation, known only as the Enterprise, and its interest in a defrocked Orthodox priest, Father Averyan, known for his heretical sermons regarding the resurrection of the dead on Judgment Day. Averyan believes that it will be man's descendants, not God Himself, who will perform the resurrection (via cloning or some other as-of-yet-unknown technology), and who will also judge each individual according to their own mysterious but enlightened standards. The KGB sends Rigel to work for the Enterprise, who see in her research a chance to make big bucks by bringing Father Averyan under their wing and opening the Judgment Day Archives. For only $3,000, a tape or video recording of your life story, and a frozen vial of your blood, you too can guarantee yourself a front-row seat to meet your maker one fine day in the future!

To further secure Leida's cooperation, the KGB has kidnapped her son Ilya. They enroll him in the Soviet army but have promised Leida that they will send him to a gulag or one of the uranium mines if she tries in any way to resist their instructions.

The Judgment Day Archives, therefore, certainly has the makings of a great satire on the interaction and intersection of business, politics, and religion. The roundabout plot is there: Yefimov is highly effective at entrapping poor Leida in a Kafkaesque labyrinth, in which powerful forces beyond her control continuously pull her in multiple directions and crush any glimmer of free will. When not being terrorized by Agents Yarishev and Mysheyedov, Leida is chained to her post at the Archive, caught between the overblown capitalism of the Enterprise and the religious fervor of the Archive's mission. She exists suspended between opposing forces exerting a kind of equilibrium. The only tangible thing left is her daily fear for her son's safety.

If Kafka portrayed bureaucracy as an omnipotent force acting under its own cryptic rules and carrying hapless humans along with it, Yefimov brings this worldview to its obvious conclusion: that the control which society's external forces (which also include the state, corporations, and organized religion) exert over the individual can be likened to the mysterious hand of God.

Leida refers to her KGB pursuers as the "all-knowing ones" who follow her every move and have memorized her habits. The strategies of Umberto Fanzoni, the Enterprises's head honcho, are compared to his old gambling habits. Now, instead of chips, he assigns his employees and subordinates the role of "pawn" in his many corporate games. "To force the metaphor a bit," one character explains, "I feel excited when the Big Chess Master picks me up with his fingers and moves me to another square. After all, as long as the game goes on, the pawn experiences life to the full." But several months of Father Averyan's holy acquaintance has forced Umberto to consider something new. "You know," he says, "I've become so accustomed to moving people about, like chess figures. And now I've suddenly begun feeling as though someone were moving me. In some grandiose game, a game I have no control over." One of the central questions Yefimov seems to be asking here is, what can we do to exert our own will? What can we hold onto admist all the powerful influences surrounding us?

Yefimov answers that it is love. Here, it is Leida's love for her family that keeps her going, and her love for her son that enables her to finally break free.

Of course, as a satirical novel, The Judgment Day Archives is also pure farce, taking each situation to its fullest realization in the hopes that comedy will ensue. (For the Archive to be successful, everyone has to move the United States, which, as we all know, is just about the only country in the world where you can take an innovative scientific idea, turn it into a religion, and make millions off it.) Not being familiar with contemporary Russian literature, I am guessing Yefimov was aiming for a tone similar to that of Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night, which featured a cast of absurd characters and a plot full of bizarre twists. But where Vonnegut succeeded, Yefimov falls flat. Or seems to - when reading a translation one must always keep in mind that these really are not the author's original words. Still, I had the impression of a narative trying to rise above simple iteration of events, becoming a parody of real life, and ultimately being hilarious in its sheer ridiculousness.

But it never quite succeeds. Yarishev and Mysheyedov, for example - are they supposed to be evil bastards, hilariously evil bastards, or caricatures just too over-the-top to be taken seriously as evil bastards? Is Father Averyan a good soul who simply wishes to uplift his fellow man or is he drunk on the power of his fellow man's belief in him? Has the Archive really become a genuine, top-down, mind-controlling cult or is it basically just a harmless money-making machine that becomes dangerous only when people willingly invest too much faith in it? Although the story moves along quite smoothly, it just feels that something is lacking. That quality of satire is just not there.

I find myself referring back to The Wall in My Head anthology and Dubravka Urgesic's essay, "The Souvenirs of Communism." (Interestingly, I just noted that I referenced Mother Night in that review as well. Catch-22 is another intriguing thematic comparison to The Judgment Day Archives.) Urgesic contends that works of literature dealing with Communism in a humorous manner rarely achieve critical success in the West. We just don't have that grasp of its inherent incongruity: "Western readers did not have the feel for communist everyday life, the author's humor was not understood, the linguistic subversion left them cold, and the absurd and grotesque aspects of the totalitarian world remained opaque to them." Now obviously The Judgment Day Archives deals extensively with the absurdities of religion and capitalism as well, and there is arguably no country where such things are exhibited more often than in the United States. I got that but . . . I'm sitting here going "meh" because something never clicked with me. And I'm kind of smacking the keyboard because I can't quite articulate what it is, which makes me feel like I'm failing as a reviewer.

I liked the book well enough and it had some well-written passages, but . . . *thud*

Sunday Salon

Happy holidays everyone!

I got 6 new books for Christmas, plus this one as an early Christmas gift, which I will be featuring on this blog over the coming weeks. But first I have to finish Andrei Moscovit's The Judgment Day Archive. It's a Russian novel written in the late '80s, when Moscovit was living in the United States as a political émigré. I picked it up back in November at a used book sale.

I cannot find ANYTHING on the Internet about it. I mean, I can find a few places selling it (Amazon and a few second-hand book dealers) but I can't locate any reviews or commentary. It's like the Novel That Doesn't Exist. Like something you'd find in the Cemetery of Lost Books. Maybe it's my version of Lux Aterna!

Actually, I doubt it. It's an interesting book with some great passages, but as political satire and dark comedy it really falls short. I don't think it ever made much of a splash.

But luckily my Christmas book acquisition was not over yet! My brother gave me a $20 Barnes & Noble giftcard, so I ordered this on Christmas Day:

A vampire novel I've been wanting to read for some time now. And speaking of vampires:

I got this today at Target, where I had gone to buy some Christmas storage boxes. I had heard of excellent post-Christmas sales but had never actually taken advantage of one until today. This is the complete first season of True Blood, on sale for $17.99 instead of $49.99. WOW! Now I'm going to have to watch it, plus the complete first season of Lost my mother got for Christmas, all of which is going to take a considerable chunk out of my reading time. (And to think, just last week I was bragging about how I rarely watched TV anymore.)

What books (and DVD's) did you get for Christmas/Hanukkah?

Merry Christmas to All!

CHRISTMAS GIFTS!

Look for these books on my blog over the next few weeks!


French writer Soupault (1897-1990) was a prominent member of the Surrealist movement until he was expelled in 1926 for refusing to toe the party line. This short novel appeared two years later and was translated by American poet William Carlos Williams the year after that. It follows the wanderings of a nameless narrator who sees Paris "for the first time" through his obsession with a young streetwalker and who witnesses the aftermath of a grisly crime.

In his first book, freelance writer Sante tours the underside of Manhattan's underclass circa 1840-1919. Clarifying his territory, he notes that "New York is incarnated by Manhattan (the other boroughs . . . are merely adjuncts)." Sante's bad old days are populated with lethal saloon keepers, thieves, whores, gamblers, pseudo-reformers, Tammany Hall politics, crooked cops et al. Capital of the night is the Bowery, center of the "sporting life"; bohemia encompasses the likes of short story writer O. Henry, a one-time embezzler from Texas, plus ethnic enclaves (with the Jewish and Slavic bohemians singled out as the most argumentative). East Side, West Side, semi-rural uptown, wide-open downtown, 19th-century Manhattan is presented as the realm of danger and pleasure. "The city was like this a century ago, and it remains so in the present," maintains an author who sees his Manhattan as seamy, seedy and sinister.

In Ajvaz's first novel to be translated into English, a Borgesian cohort of freakish creatures, talking birds and eccentric city dwellers lurk on the margins of an alternative Prague. An unnamed protagonist learns that a book written in an unearthly language is an opening to a dangerous world that is just around the corner from normal life. More and more frequently, the protagonist stumbles across scenes from the other city—he spies on an inscrutable religious service, is treated to a lecture on the subject of Latest Discoveries about the Great Battle in the Bedrooms. The city's inhabitants do not take kindly to his intrusions; he is pursued by weasels, shot at by a helicopter and nearly eaten by a half-man, half-shark. Meanwhile, overheard conversations dissolve into nonsense, elk are stabled inside statues and birds recite passages from an epic poem. Ajvaz's novel is a gorgeous matryoshka doll of unreason, enigma and nonsense—truly weird and compelling.

Paris Peasant is the first (and perhaps only) textbook of what the Situationists — strongly influenced by early Surrealism — nearly forty years later were to call ‘Psycho-geography’; the plumbing of the resonances of built spaces for the vibrations and sympathies that make love and play possible. In lovely, surprising and above all playful writing the man who went on to become a great Stalinist bore, churning out worthy novels in the cause of Party and Proletariat, celebrates the city as a place of happy and stimulating coincidences, encounters and inexplicable oddities. He offers us the urban world of mystery and possibility with its ambiguous teasing spaces, its public baths and parks with their constant invitations to nature and nudity, however respectable their outward appearence [sic].

One of the classic themes followed in this complex novel, translated from the Arabic, is cultural dissonance between East and West, particularly the experience of a returned native. The narrator returns from his studies in England to his remote little village in Sudan, to begin his career as an educator. There he encounters Mustafa, a fascinating man of mystery, who also has studied at Oxford. As their relationship builds on this commonality, Mustafa reveals his past. A series of compulsive liaisons with English women who were similarly infatuated with the "Black Englishman," as he was nicknamed, have ended in disaster. Charged with the passion killing of his last paramour, Mustafa was acquitted by the English courts. As he unravels his complicated, gory and erotic story, Mustafa charges the listener with the custody of his present life. When Mustafa disappears, apparently drowned in the Nile and perhaps a suicide, another door in his secretive life opens to include his wife and children. Emerging from a constantly evolving narrative, in a trance-like telling, is the clash between an assumed worldly sophistication and enduring, dark, elemental forces. An arresting work by a major Arab novelist who mines the rich lode of African experience with the Western world.

Banned in several Arab nations, this rich tale mesmerizes with its frank sexuality and scenes of war-torn Beirut. Zahra is a misfit mistreated by her mother, who brings her along to secret meetings with a lover, and by her father, a harsh disciplinarian who reacts angrily to her habit of picking at her pimpled face. She leaves her parents to stay with an uncle who has fled to Africa to escape being arrested for political activity. When his affection for her grows sexual, Zahra agrees to an unsuccessful marriage with his friend Majed. Eventually, she returns to Beirut, where "the war was like a weevil that had found its way into the heart of a huge bag of white flour and settled there," and begins meeting secretly to have sex with a man who may or may not be a rooftop sniper. A rotating first-person narrative gives everyone a voice; Zahra's is the most striking, but each character has memorable moments, as when Majed describes his adolescent arousal while reading Jane Eyre and seeing an illustration of the heroine kissing Mr. Rochester.

A special thanks to Richard and Caitlin for introducing me to some of these!

I also have a brand new Coach bag!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Christmas in Sarajevo

When he flew o'er Sarajevo
There were scars upon the land.
There were scars upon the people.
It was hard to understand.
And the deepest scars of all,
Which to humans are unseen,
But the angel could see clearly,
Were the scars upon the dreams.
Like Belfast, Barundi,
Rawanda, Palestine,
The only decorations here.
Had been awarded for their crimes.
And in the gardens where the children played,
Now soldiers only trod.
And stranger still, he heard some say
That they were killing for their god.
Now the angel had heard God speak many times,
And he had always paid attention.
But this killing of one's neighbor
Was something the Lord had never mentioned.
But as he neared the earth,
A recent battleground,
From among the ruins
He once more heard the sound.
It was a single cello
Playing a forgotten Christmas song.
And even on that battlefield,
The song somehow belonged.
And as he flew away,
The angle did take note
That where he found this music played
One always could find . . . Hope.

Read the story behind the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's "Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24" here.

For my other favorite Christmas songs, click here.

Wordless Wednesday

Wreaths made from old book pages, via Frances's blog. (Click here for more Wordless Wednesday.)

Teaser Tuesday

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two "teaser" sentences from somewhere on that page.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from. That way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!
• Please avoid spoilers!

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Page 73 - He was a thorough good sort; a bit limited; a bit thick in the head; yes; but a thorough good sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination, without a spark of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type.

Sunday Salon

A few Sunday Salons back, debnance discussed why she had gotten rid of her TV in 2003. She listed numerous reasons why this was the "best decision of my life," one of which was the freedom from irrelevant information regarding celebrities' latest bullshit. Me, I just naturally gave up on watching TV. It wasn't a sudden decision nor was it a complete one. I actually still have a TV in my room even though I rarely use it. But having grown up with the Internet, I find that I just can't abide by the passiveness of TV-watching. You have no control over what to watch. (If your show is not on or you don't like/have already seen the episode, tough.) You can't interact with anyone or anything - you can't comment on something you just viewed or send it via email or post it on Facebook. All you can do is sit and stare.

In other words: TV-watching turns you into a vegetable.

This topic comes up because I found myself unable to avoid the TV today. My brother, who is home from college, was cooking in the kitchen and had the kitchen TV blaring. So I went upstairs only to find that my sister was in the rec room watching TV with the home theater system on full blast. And guess what they were both watching? VH1's The Fabulous Life. Of the Hamptons. Of the World's Most Extravagant Heiresses. I couldn't escape.

I do not understand the appeal of those shows. All they seem to accomplish is making you feel resentful about all the stuff you don't have.

So I went to my room and turned on my TV. There was absolutely nothing on except for a marathon on Animal Planet of one of those "truth or fiction?" shows about mysterious creatures like the Jersey Devil and the White River Monster. I watched about two hours of this before I realized that there were better things to do.

Alas, I just couldn't get into Kristin Lavransdatter. I'm still not even finished with the second book and, having read a synopsis of the third one on Wikipedia, I'm honestly not looking forward to the third. It sounds like more epic dramz.

I have other books laying around I can read instead and I'll be getting new ones for Christmas. So things will look up soon.

The Savage Bolaño

And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man's memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy.





I have fallen in love Roberto Bolaño and he is dead. *weeps*

The Savage Detectives is my second Bolaño novel, following my participation in the 2666 read-along. It is a semi-autobiographical work, disguised as fiction, concerning the exploits of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, a wandering pair of ragamuffins who may be the last true poets on Earth. The sprawling narrative is book-ended by the adventures of a naive 17-year-old hanger-on in Mexico City in 1976; in between are hundreds of oral testimonies recalling the speakers' encounters with either Belano or Lima or both in Mexico, Spain, France, Austria, Israel, Morocco, and Liberia from 1976 to 1996. Beyond that, it a truly awesome story of literature, idealism, and life on the edge.

The Savage Detectives is regarded as one of the seminal works of contemporary Latin American literature. By the time of its publication in 1998, Latin American authors were divided between those indebted to the Boom generation of the 1960s - which produced an explosion of talent such as Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa - and those who rejected its influence. Bolaño fell in the latter camp. Many of the Boom writers depicted a region where the mythic past overlapped with the modern, oppressive present. Bolaño and his group, however, felt that García Márquez, et al were simply churning out exotic stereotypes - i.e. dictators, whores, magic - for foreign consumption. Furthermore, Latin America had changed. Democracy had taken root, along with globalization and the drug trade.

I find myself thinking of Isabel Allende, whose writing Bolaño described as "anemic" and compared to a person on their deathbed. It's been awhile since I've read her, but much as I've enjoyed her stuff, I can nevertheless see Bolaño's perspective. The House of the Spirits, written in the early '80s, comes across almost as a litany of Latin American tropes: the magic realism, the domineering patrón, the haciendas, the revolutionaries, the dictatorship. Same deal with the Eva Luna books. (Daughter of Fortune, meanwhile, was one of my examples of the "anachronistic feminism" found in many historical fiction novels.) After awhile Allende's novels all seem like variations of the same story. I'm not sure how representative she is of contemporary Latin American literature but I can discern a definite chasm between Allende, on the one hand, and Bolaño and Jorge Volpi, as post-Boom authors, on the other. Though much of Allende's fiction is concerned with politics and society, there is also that sense of whimsy that comes with magic realism - the quirky incorporation of paranormal tidbits into everyday life and the overall sense of detachment from reality.

(A question too big for me to answer: what role, if any, could gender play in this? Bolaño disparaged both Allende and Ángeles Mastretta, both of them famous for their strong female characters. Is it possible some of Bolaño's criticism of Allende comes from the more feminine themes of her works?)

Though Bolaño certainly can be said to take a "speculative" view of reality, his sense of the preternatural takes the form of conspiracy, of dark forces at work behind the scenes. 2666, says one review, "is another iteration of Bolaño’s increasingly baroque, cryptic, and mystical personal vision of the world, revealed obliquely by his recurrent symbols, images, and tropes. There is something secret, horrible, and cosmic afoot, centered around Santa Teresa (and possibly culminating in the mystical year of the book’s title, a date that is referred to in passing in The Savage Detectives as well)." Something I got from both Bolaño and Volpi's Season of Ash was a sense of humanity and our contradictory drives to both transcend and destroy. Whereas Volpi took a hardline realistic approach to his characters and their moment in twentieth-century history, Bolaño seems to suggest something intrinsic to society that eats it from within. 2666 is a big, black brick of a book. The Savage Detectives, though unmistakably Bolaño, is also something else.

Both The Savage Detectives and 2666 exhibit that undeniable element of the uncanny, although it's not so much "magical" or supernatural as it is atmospheric. "In it," says translator Natasha Wimmer of 2666, "the dread that flickers in Bolaño's earler fiction is concentrated, the essence made visible. If The Savage Detectives is a journey outward, then 2666 collapses in on itself." As Bolaño had been diagnosed with a fatal liver condition in 1992, both novels were written in the shadow of death. I don't know how he planned his works, but I saw 2666 as The Savage Detective's sequel. Lima and Belano's search for Cesárea Tinajero, a lost poet from the 1920s, and one of the few threads binding the overall work together, echoes the critics' search for the lost novelist Archimboldi. Lima and Belano even travel to Bolaño's fictional Santa Theresa (based on the real-life Ciudad Juarez) seeking her. A former acquaintance of Tinajero recalls her as a woman slowly going mad - not unlike Amalfitano - who offered a mysterious prophecy of "times to come" and the year 2600. Her cryptic drawings are even reminiscent of Amalfitano's weird little diagrams. And both works are international in scope, perhaps mimicking the recent forces of globalization whose seedy underside is explored in 2666.

At the same time, however, The Savage Detectives exhibits an exuberance and idealism utterly absent from 2666. Although, in typical Bolaño fashion, darkness and menace are very present, the work is also a celebration - of youth, freedom, creativity, nonconformity, of the bonds between strangers, and the passion for the written word. 2666 was like a punch in the face. The Savage Detectives, by contrast, feels like liberation, and an embrace of life in all its highs and lows. Comparing it to 2666, you wonder how much Bolaño's impending death clouded his viewpoint. "A vast pain is communicated, a blank-minded recognition of death, but nothing else," says one critical review of 2666. " . . . There is no doubt that in writing 2666 Bolaño was struggling mightily and bravely with that which is most terrifying. But his struggle was intensely personal - it was not artistic. The bleakness of Bolaño's vision radiates out, but so little understanding comes with it." I don't want to say 2666 is the more mature of the two books - in fact, its relentless focus on death, madness, and violence feels very one-sided when set against motley canvas of The Savage Detectives. But both novels do represent a development, of Bolaño as a writer and Bolaño as a human passing from health and independence to illness and its accompanying restrictions, and finally to death itself.

Being more familiar with Boom and Boom-style works - i.e. Allende, Vargas Llosa, Like Water for Chocolate - Bolaño, as well as Volpi, is definitely a departure from earlier literary styles. As evidenced by Allende, being stuck in one mode of representation really doesn't do the artist any good. It's been said before but I think it's worth repeating: the end of a life isn't always entirely tragic. Did Bolaño's health crisis ultimately lead him to a different perspective, albeit a darker one, as evidenced by 2666? What would Bolaño have written if he had lived?

I would've loved to know the answer to that. But, alas.



Click here for tuulehaiven's review.

Teaser Tuesdays

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two "teaser" sentences from somewhere on that page.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from. That way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!
• Please avoid spoilers!

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Page 313 - He was on the short side, and thin, and even then he must already have been close to fifty, but more than once I saw him stand up all alone to some of Congreesman Martínez Zamora's gunmen, saw how he looked them straight in the eye, never reaching for the Colt in his underarm holster, though it's true his jacket was unbuttoned, and I saw how the gunmen shriveled under his gaze and then I saw them back away, murmuring excuse me, mi general, the congressman must have made a mistake, mi general. An honest-to-God man if there ever was one, General Diego Carvajal, and a lover of literature and the arts, although he said himself, he didn't learn to read until he was eighteen years old.

Sunday Salon

This week was a great one!

I got a shout-out from Trapdoor Books for my review on their debut release, David Michie's The Magician of Lhasa. And Michie left a very nice comment saying that my review was the first one out and that he was very pleased with it.

My review for Gert Jonke's The System of Vienna was published by The Front Table on Wednesday.

I finally finished my review for The Wall in My Head.

I'm currently in the middle of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, which is starting to drag. It started out great but now it's just a bunch of random people talking about these two guys running around trying to start a poetry movement called "visceral realism." I'm not giving up on it but I sure hope it picks up again.

I've also gotten an early Christmas present:


A coffee table book called Art Deco: The Golden Age of Graphic Art & Illustration. I'm not allowed to actually have it until Christmas Eve, but I'll be sure to post my favorite pictures as soon as I get through it.

I've also distributed my Amazon wish list so hopefully I'll be getting some great books!

Kafka on the Wall

The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain
Various Authors
Various Translators
Open Letter Press
Words Without Borders
231 pages
November 30, 2009


Communist dictatorship . . . had its own rationality and motives, its own aims and purposes, except that these had nothing in common with normalcy, logic as we know it, or everyday life. (Judith Sollosy, "Reflections on Péter Esterházy's Revised Edition")

The Wall in My Head is an anthology of essays, poetry, short stories, images and historical documents from former citizens of the Soviet bloc, all relating to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of Soviet Communism. The release of both The Wall in My Head and Season of Ash, also from Open Letter Press, commemorates the twentieth anniversary of these historic events, and also, as Keith Gessen notes in his introduction, seeks to capture the tumultuous, upturned atmosphere of post-Communism, an era recently ended. "You can tell it's over because nobody wants to hear anymore about how terrible Communism was. Russians sure don't, and not just because Communism was all their fault." Like Season of Ash, The Wall in My Head depicts very recent history which nevertheless already feels distant, thanks to the radical changes that occurred in Eastern and Central Europe in the early 1990s.

The writers featured in the anthology, though they come from different national, cultural, and ethnic perspectives, share many common experiences. But what I focused on the most as I read through book was the theme set up by the opening piece, a selection from Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel. Kundera argues that life under Communism resembled a Kafka story, in which hapless humans are caught up in the mechanisms of a towering bureaucracy that operates under its own incomprehensible laws of unknown origin. Thus, a file buried in an office somewhere, Kundera explains, "takes on the role of a Platonic idea. It represents true reality, whereas man's physical existence is only a shadow cast upon the screen of illusion." Land-Surveyor K. from Kafka's novel The Castle, for instance, exists only because of an obsolete, mistakenly-filed order; indeed, Kundera goes on, K. is actually the shadow of an error in the file, and therefore has no right to exist even as a shadow.

K.'s absurd situation is highly comparable to the protagonist of the allegedly true story of an engineer in Communist Prague, who is reported as having made a slanderous remark about Czechoslovakia while in London and having further stated a desire to remain in the West. No one seems willing or able to retract the false report and the poor engineer is continuously referred to one department after another. The engineer then starts to wonder if his phones are being tapped and starts to fear for his safety until he finally can't take it anymore and actually does flee the country.

But while the engineer's tale may or may not be an urban legend - a bit of sensationalized modern folklore whose seeming veracity arises from shared societal fears and anxieties - many of the collected works of The Wall in My Head deal, each in their own way, with the institutionalized irrationalities of life under Communism. Beginning with Communism's basic premise: that it represents an evolutionary endpoint, the Utopian culmination of centuries of the worker's struggle for a just society. And so, as Rousseau once put it, the oppressed proletariat must be "forced to be free." In "The Road to Bornholm," German poet Durs Grünbein describes East Berlin's atmosphere leading to the fall of the Wall:

The reason for the upsurge was a bundle of unsolvable contradictions, from the miserable future prospects for most citizens (despite their undiminished historical mission), to the stagnation of an entire society (which knew progress only as an ideology) due to the erosion of all their members' self-confidence (lauded as the development of a mature socialist personality), down to lifelong imprisonment (in order to protect the people from themselves and their misguided wants). . .

. . . The sickness hidden behind it [the Wall], a deep identity crisis, was initially masked and later, denied. Since that time, a deceptively schizoid jargon, DDR language, had been escaping through the cracks in their rigid, inbred logic. The Soviet idea was so attractive that only prison architecture could preserve it. One day Rufus stumbed on two lines by Robert Frost, which to him summed up the whole paradox of the Wall in a nutshell: Before I built a wall I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out . . .

Most organized societies, of course, have their own incongruities and aspects that seem to deviate from common sense. Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is a brilliant exploration of this; Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night is another. But Vonnegut and Heller were obviously writing hyperbolic satire, whereas The Wall in My Head is equal parts realism (in the fictionalized pieces) and historical documentary. Absurdity stands out even more.

In a selection from his novel Imperium, we learn from Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński (with some exaggeration, naturally) that the Soviet Union was so obsessed with marking its borders that factories seemed to manufacture nothing but reams and reams of barbed wire, which deteriorated quickly under the elements and was in perpetual need of replacement. As such, it was virtually impossible to find in a Soviet shop any useful metal item such as a hoe, hammer, or eating utensil. And that's not even taking into account the logistics required in constructing and maintaining these barbed wire fences, from telephone calls and telegrams, to the orders constantly coming in, to the transportation of said wire, the bureaucracy involved, and the consequent neglect of other areas of Soviet infrastructure.

Though not everything that stood out to me was literally Kafkaesque, the very dissonance often felt closely related. East German activist Peter Schneider, in his novel The Wall Jumper, tells of the family of an influential Berlin Party member who were allowed to maintain their living conditions when the Wall was built. So the otherwise straight, monolithic Wall made a sudden zigzag around their house but abutted it so closely that the children were able to jump over and enter West Berlin whenever they pleased. In "My Grandmother the Censor" Marsha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist and novelist, interviews her grandmother about her post-WWII job at the Soviet Department of Control over Foreign Media, in which she was basically responsible for reading all printed materials that came into the Soviet Union from abroad and determining whether or not a given book or magazine should be banned. Sometimes, the grandmother recalled, she found that she admired certain writers, such as Harrison Salisbury from the New York Times. But to make a simple error in translation (in documents being forwarded to Stalin's office) or allow in anything deemed even the slightest bit subversive could be deadly.

I found myself wondering how these Communist Era officials thought they could possibly maintain control over such a stack of cards: an unstable structure built upon an unstable foundation. But then, according to Croatian journalist and essayist Dubravka Urgesic in "The Souvenirs of Communism," the character of life under these regimes is essentially inaccessible to the West, and for that reason, truly authentic Soviet authors never gained a foothold abroad. "Western readers did not have the feel for communist everyday life, the author's humor was not understood, the linguistic subversion left them cold, and the absurd and grotesque aspects of the totalitarian world remained opaque to them." If that is indeed the case, then I think The Wall in My Head actually comes close to recreating, in elegant and intimate detail for the Western reader, a world that literally collapsed overnight and has wholly transformed itself since.

Obviously The Wall in My Head is a very valuable primary source (I didn't even talk about the photographs and government documents embedded throughout the text) but, despite my love of history, I saw it in more literary terms. But the beauty of a multi-author work is that multiple viewpoints are presented, and I think every reader is likely to see something very different. And really, that's how reality is: everyone's perspective is unique, even when viewing basically the same thing.

Also recommended: Jáchym Topol's City Sister Silver

Click here for The Front Table's review.



This is Part I of the Vice Guide to North Korea. While certainly a far more extreme example of Communism than most of the Eastern Bloc ever was, this three-part video series is nevertheless a striking example of the Kafkaesque dictatorship. My favorite part was when the hotel staff tries to demonstrate to the host that there is indeed food in North Korea - by setting an entire empty dining room with sumptuous meals no one will ever eat. The host suspected that the same food was just brought out evening after evening. *Cue "Hotel California."*

Christmas Music!

Some of my favorite Christmas songs. Enjoy!



"Winter Wonderland," performed by Bing Crosby



"Breath of Heaven (Mary's Song)" by Amy Grant



"Sleigh Ride," the original recording by Leroy Anderson and the Boston Pops Orchestra

I've Been Published!

The Front Table, the online magazine of Seminary Co-op Bookstores (a small chain in Chicago), has published my review for Gert Jonke's The System of Vienna. You can read it here.

I have been slaving over this review for two weeks. Serves me right for choosing such a mind-bending book for my very first published review. But I did it, and I am very pleased with the results.

Between these folks and Trapdoor Books, I've been getting lots of love lately! Awesome.

Thanks Trapdoor Books!

Trapdoor Books, the publisher of David Michie's The Magician of Lhasa, has given a shout-out to my review. Trapdoor Books is a brand-new outfit and The Magician of Lhasa is their debut release. Part of their mission is to take advantage of the new opportunities offered by blogging and the Internet to enable greater interaction between authors and readers.

Mr. Michie was also kind enough to leave a comment to let me know how pleased he was with what I wrote. My review was very honest - I really want to learn more about Buddhism now. The stuff about reincarnation is really cool and I think I'd be good at meditation (which has some major emotional, mental, and health benefits).

And also: another thanks to Dreadlock Girl for hosting Saturday's Read-a-Thon! It was thanks to the Read-a-Thon that I was able to devote most of my day to reading and reviewing The Magician of Lhasa. I've had so much to do lately that I was worried I had fallen behind.

Again, thanks to all!

Sunday Salon and Read-a-Thon Wrap-Up.

It is now 12 noon on December 6. As with October's Dewey Read-a-Thon, I ended around 1:00 am despite all my best efforts to stay awake, which included four cups of coffee at 8:30. Apparently I am immune to caffeine.

Now for the Dewey Read-a-Thon, I totaled around 320 pages. Let's see how I did this time around!

286 pages of David Michie's The Magician of Lhasa (complete book)
+
116 pages of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives
______________________________
402 pages total

Not a huge difference, but it's an improvement.

Here are all of my posts:

START
Update #1
Update #2
Update #3
The Magician of Lhasa review
Update #4
Update #5

First off, a shout out to Dreadlock Girl for hosting the December Read-a-Thon! I would also like to congratulate my buddies Bitsy, Corina, Melissa C, and tanabata for their achievements, and also thank them for their continued support. And great job to fellow readers debnance and Sarah!

Here's to more Read-a-Thons!

Read-a-Thon Updated #5

Not sure how much longer I'm gonna last here. I'm getting pretty tired. But not too tired for this hour's mini-challenges!

Chick Loves Lit wants us to read the following statements and answer them using only things we can see from wherever we spent the most time reading today.

Name of the book you're currently reading:

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

Wanting most:

Clothes from the Express catalog.

Something you like to do besides read:

Listen to music on my Samsung MP3 player.

Fact about yourself:

I own a cell phone.

Activity you would be doing today if it wasn't for the Read-a-Thon:

Uh, my Denise Austin abs workout DVD. I'm usually very faithful (it's only 10 minutes a day) but all clearly all this reading has caused me to neglect my health.

Tif Talks Books has Book Libs! Grab your current read and one you have already completed, a writing utensil, and a pad of paper. Write down 10 words using the parameters below.

I've got The Savage Detectives and The Wall in My Head. The latter is an anthology of essays, poetry, short stories, and photography by Eastern European writers about the post-Communist period (from Open Letter Press and Words Without Borders).

1. Location: refer to page 3 of your current read.
2. Character Name: refer to page 7 of your current read.
3. Character Name: refer to page 18 of your current read and select a different character than #2.
4. Special Occasion: noted somewhere throughout the book that you have read thus far (i.e., holiday, birthday, milestone, etc.)
5. Action Noun: selected from page 57 of your current read.
6. Noun: selected from page 63 of your current read.
7. Feeling: selected from page 42 of your current read.
8. Verb: selected from page 100 of your current read.
9. Adjective: selected from page 124 of your current read.
10. Adjective: selected from page 82 of your current read.
11. Final Sentence: use the final sentence to your past read here.

~ The Savage Detective in My Head ~

Once upon a time in the land of a poetry workshop there lived Brígida and Ulises Lima happily ever after. Is that not how the story always goes?!? On the night before the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Brígida was sleeping peacefully when all of a sudden there was a snoring. She jumped out of bed to awaken Ulises Lima.

As both stood there, looking at the nuclear attack in their front room, they felt love. How could it be? Was it true? To be face to face with a nuclear attack was not possible. What were they to do?

With quick thinking, Brígida and Ulises Lima exchanged a knowing glance and stole.

From there, we may never know what happened in this story. It could be neglected. Or, it could be visceral. It truly is a mystery! However what we do know is this . . . . All eyes in the salon were upon us; the politicians and the diplomats in their dark suits, with their ties and their white shirts, were looking at us through the lenses of their spectacles, astonished and tense, the way you look when you are trying to see through a curtain.

THE END

Read-a-Thon Update #4

I've picked up Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives again for the first time in a couple of weeks. I got sidetracked with reviewing and had to set it down for awhile. Unfortunately it has a huge cast of characters and a complicated plot so I had to go back a bit to refresh my memory. So I haven't gotten as far as I would've liked to but I feel like I'm back in the swing of the story now.

It's been almost twelve hours since I started (I started a couple hours early) and I would like to thank all of my commentators for their support! Keep up the good work guys!

And now for this hour, Reads4Pleasure would like to know who your favorite character is, who your least favorite character is, and why.

Favorites

That's a tough one. I tend to focus more on great books rather than great characters. But Yossarian from Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is definitely one of my favorites. He's just so very sane and his world so very insane. Poor fellow.

Harry Haller from Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf is another. According to Hesse, Steppenwolf is about the problems of middle age but I totally identified with Haller and I'm only 24. Maybe I'm an old soul?

Jane Eyre from the Charlotte Brontë novel of the same name. She isn't wealthy or beautiful, but she is independent, intelligent, and knows how to stand her ground. Even today we still can't seem to write more great female characters like her.

Least Favorite

Henry Miller isn't really a character per se. But his memoir The Tropic of Cancer is written in novel form so I suppose he qualifies. It is the most disgusting, violently misogynist book I have ever had the displeasure to read. If I could, I would slap him.

English Major's Junk Food would like to know what your favorite classic is. Provide quotes!

I have several favorite classics but Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in particular has some really great, dramatic passages.

"She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.

"She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced us. Her long shadow fell to the water's edge. Her face had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve. She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose. A whole minute passed, and then she made a step forward. There was a low jingle, a glint of yellow metal, a sway of fringed draperies, and she stopped as if her heart had failed her. The young fellow by my side growled. The pilgrims murmured at my back. She looked at us all as if her life had depended upon the unswerving steadiness of her glance. Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky, and at the same time the swift shadows darted out on the earth, swept around on the river, gathering the steamer into a shadowy embrace. A formidable silence hung over the scene.

"She turned away slowly, walked on, following the bank, and passed into the bushes to the left. Once only her eyes gleamed back at us in the dusk of the thickets before she disappeared."

Kurtz's death scene is one of the best death scenes ever.

"One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say a little tremulously, 'I am lying here in the dark waiting for death.' The light was within a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, 'Oh, nonsense!' and stood over him as if transfixed.

"Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:

"'The horror! The horror!'"

Read-a-Thon Updated #3

I haven't updated in four and a half hours!

Don't worry: I've been very busy. I finished David Michie's The Magician of Lhasa and got my review done. And then I took a nap. And then I had dinner. And then I won!

Now onto Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives!

And also: MOAR KOFFEEEE!!!11!1oneeleventyone!!

And now for this hour, Seriously Reading wants us to post our favorite book covers. Here are mine:

Victor Serge, Unforgiving Years

Michelle de Kretser, The Lost Dog

Roberto Bolaño, 2666

Shreve Stockton, The Daily Coyote