Archive for the ‘ Literature ’ Category
He is well-known known for his poetry (almost too well known) – but he also wrote The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
Section 17 (pages 19 – 23) is a ghost story as good as that any by any other writer. I hardly need say it is autobiographical or that it is extremely well written.
I am a writer in my own modest way. But writers like this dwell (they don’t really live) in another world. A world I am not sure I would want to be in.
The world has become more and more stratified – with more and more contrast in everything. Including books.
A statement like this will strike a cord with some of my readers – probably about ten percent. But will mean nothing to the remaining 90 percent.
In September 2009 The Glass Room was one of six novels shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.[1] It was named a best book of 2009 by The Economist, The Daily Telegraph, Financial Times,London Evening Standard, The Observer, and Slate.com.[citation needed] It was favourably reviewed by The Washington Post.[2]
This is a novel, but it is so realistic it seems historical. No wonder the family is so upset about it. It spends a lot of time on the secret extra-marital love lives of the husband and wife – which, like the rest of the book, are complete fabrications.
I was glad to see many other people, besides me, consider it good stuff. When I say many other people – I mean the ten percent I was speaking of.
But in the literary world this is the percentage that counts.
I have to warn you – this book is about people. About how people really are – not what we want them to be. This means it is not always interesting – because some subjects (such as adolescents and their problems) are no longer interesting to old farts like me.
Other than that, it is interesting – and even educational – in its own weird way – if you don’t mind feeling lost once in awhile – like Alice in Wonderland. Like that novel, it is intended to be educational – in a mildly subversive way.
Now that I have had my say – here is what Wikipedia says about it.
Like it says, it is literature – something most are not interested in. The audible version – which I am listening to – is good too. You can get your culture from your earphones – the easy way.
Joshua Prager is billed as a journalist, but he’s really a storyteller. Over a decade-plus career at the Wall Street Journal, where he began as a news assistant and worked his way up to senior writer, Prager excelled in writing enthralling tales that had one thing in common: They were about secrets.
Today, Prager is focused on a personal story: the 1990 bus accident that left him a hemiplegic at age 19. His new book, Half-Life, about the accident, explores identity and what it means to live a life changed in a single moment.
In my scheme of things – this is intelligent information. As opposed to the more common type – stupid information.
I got Jane Eyre from NetFlix. I’m not sure why I got it – but I must have though it was some kind of superior entertainment.
It was co-produced by the BBC – which meant it was one of their authentic productions – with elaborate costumes and sets. There are plenty of candle-lit nighttime scenes and stormy daytime scenes. Very atmospheric.
But it baffled me. What the heck was going on? I had to look it up on Wikipedia. It said it was primarily of the bildungsroman genre. That helped a little.
What it did not say I had to deduce for myself. Back then (in the mid-19th Century) people read – with a passion we cannot now imagine. And which the young of today have no idea of at all.
Translating this into a 21st Century movie is nearly impossible – but you have to give them credit for trying.
If you consider it an educational experience – an introduction to Victorian Lit – and have the time to familiarize yourself with the whole plot on Wikipedia.
You will enjoy it.
This is from the excellent translation by Lydia Davis – page 95.
—
What exasperated her was that Charles [her husband] seemed unaware of her suffering. His conviction that he was making her happy seemed an idiotic insult, and his certainty of this, ingratitude. For whom, then, was she being good? Wasn’t he himself the obstacle to all happiness, the cause of all misery, and, as it were, the sharp-pointed prong of the complex belt the bound her on all sides?
So she directed at him alone the manifold hatred born of her troubles, and every attempt she made to diminish that hatred only increased it; for her useless effort gave her another reason for despair and contributed even more to her estrangement from him. Her own gentleness goaded her to rebel.
The mediocrity of her domestic life provoked her to sensual fantasies, matrimonial affection to adulterous desires. She wished Charles would beat her, so that she could more justly detest him, avenge herself. She was sometimes surprised at the shocking conjectures that entered her mind; yet she had to keep smiling, hear herself say again and again that she was happy, pretend to be happy, let everyone believe it!
—
This is great writing. Something not easy to put into a movie – the format most people now seem to prefer.
If we believe in anything, we believe in Progress. And this belief has changed who are are. And our sense of what time is like – and what it means.
Progress, I hardly need tell you, means things keep getting better. Look at that definition carefully – it does not say people keep getting better – it says things keep getting better. Thing is a important world in English. I just looked it up in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged – and I was flooded with meanings – all of them important.
For my purposes I will define a thing as a product that that has been manufactured. The prime example being the automobile – the product that changed forever who we were.
Who we were was changing – we were merging with our things. And as thing-people we were much better than we were – we thought. When in fact we were much worse. Because our ability to be human was greatly diminished. I must spend some time belaboring that point – which has more implications than you may realize.
It means that the past is bad, the future is good – and the present does not exist. We are actually living in the future – successfully staying away from our selves in the present – the only place we can actually be.
And not only that. The future is not fixed in time – but a vague objective that is moving away from us faster and faster. Making us run faster and faster – trying to catch up. As the Red Queen (in Alice in Wonderland) remarked.
This was written in 1865 – when people knew intuitively what the Red Queen was talking about. Things continued to speed up until sometime in the 20th Century – probably sometime in the Fifties (and the advent of Television) - when they reached the breaking point. People can only stand so much speedup before they flip out.
We now live in a post-Modern – or post-Industrial – world. And we haven’t the foggiest notion where we are. We are in the grip of forces beyond our comprehension.
I don’t think they are beyond our comprehension – I work hard at comprehending them, and I flatter myself in thinking that I have somewhat succeeded. But vast majority are in the dark – and determined to stay that way. The analogy to Plato’s cave is irresistible.
They are in control – and I feel like the Stoics at the end of the Roman Empire. With the sky falling in around my ears.
Much to everybody’s satisfaction.
The woman I am referring to is Christa Parravani who wrote the book She.
If I had admitted to one-tenth of the things she does I would be dead of shame. But not her – she goes on blithely chattering about her misdeeds as though they were something to brag about.
And all her reviewers agree. She is being a brave woman, they say, by daring to tell all. Ground that Baudelaire covered much better.
But her readers are not likely to realize that. The 21 Century, they think, has produced something better (and unique) in her writing.
Personally, I am not impressed. A person without shame is not a person at all.
P.S. Now that I have listened to the ending of her book – about an hour later – I have say I am impressed. There is nothing like it. It was worth holding her hand through her long, dry struggles that never seemed to end.
As I mentioned previously in The Death of Hypatia, the book The Swerve has its good and its bad parts. The bad parts, which academics savaged, contains a facile description of the beginning of the Modern World – which I just wrote about myself in Poor Definitions.
Its good parts, which it treats as a diversion from the main story – is real history. The history, in this case, of Florence and the incredibly corrupt Papacy in the 15th Century.
If I were doing it again, I would listen to it and read it simultaneously. You need to hear the exotic sounds of the Italian words – which are different from any other language.
I would read (and listen to)
The parts where a text by Lucretius was found (the main story) you can safely overlook.
As a product of one of these myself, they always interest me – how on earth do they survive? The answer, as I knew for myself, is that they often do not – and and even the survivors are marked for life.
Most people want to know why I interested in such horrible stories. Their strategy is to forget their own childhood – or anything like it.
I was part of a men’s therapy group back in the Valley (Silicon Valley). And I was always amazed by the stories another guy told us about his childhood. I thought mine was bad – but it couldn’t hold a candle to his. He was a successful engineer in the Valley – but his personal life was a mess. This was such a common combination – it seemed normal at the time.
I listened to With or Without You: A Memoir - but never finished it. I am now listening to Her: A Memoir - and I think I will finish it, even though it is a much longer book.
Why? Because the last book has class - it is literature. Something that attracts me – even though it repels most readers.
The writer was an identical twin – whose twin died of an overdose. She had everything going for her – except what in a man would be called intestinal fortitude - a strong center.
I used to be a technical writer in Silicon Valley in California. Now I live on my Social Security in a beautiful valley in Costa Rica.
