Category Archives: Books!

06.13.16
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Tigers and Mirrors and Labyrinths: Borges 30 Years After His Death


(oddly fitting accompaniment to post)

30 years ago, on June 14th, 1986, in Geneva, Jorge Luis Borges slipped into one of his own infinite labyrinths, that terrifying maze without a center: death. The Argentine, one of the great writers of the century whose timespan he almost matched, was just shy of his 87th birthday. On his deathbed, one wonders, did he dream of walking on a riverbank, and coming across his younger self, and talking about the great mystery into which he was entering, treating his death as gently banal, and quoting Chesterton or an obscure Arabic medievalist? And did the younger self somehow have the same dream, that same night?

With Borges, such questions make sense. They are a reflection of his fiction, that great body of short stories, fragments of invented books, reviews of imaginary essays, tattered journals from explorers who never existed wandering lands that fall in the gap between myth and reality. They are tales of gauchos on the pampas and knife fights in dingy bars and Homer being found in the city of the immortals. They are about buying the memory of Shakespeare or seeing the tigers that inspired poets.

And they are about time. They deal with the way history repeats itself, with the same stories playing out time and again, in Greek corridors or South American battlefields. As he said, “It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha.”

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04.11.16
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Perkins and Wolfe, The Great American Writer

Charlie Pierce is good enough to point us to Genius, the story of Maxwell Perkins and Thomas Wolfe, coming this summer. It’s based on Scott Berg’s breathtakingly good book on Perkins, who was the editor for, among others, Wolfe, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald.  The movie’s title kind of gives me pause, connoting a teleological sort of biopic, and the trailer sort of hints at the same thing, but what the hell? We’re getting a movie about an editor, and that’s cause for joy. Hopefully, the trailer just hits the “high” points, with the movie being full of clips like below. It’s is a good look at the maddening process between writer and editor, even though it usually happens over emails and passive-aggressive chats.

What I have a feeling the movie is going to do is start a sort of conversation about Thomas Wolfe. In my opinion, he is the Great American Writer. This is different than the greatest American writer (Melville, though I’ll entertain arguments). Wolfe is gigantic and overstretched, flawed and brilliant, maddening and over-the-top and keenly sentimental and brashly cynical and full of a pulsing sense of certainty buoyed by the idea that everything is nonsense. He is always grasping at something huge and enormous even as you feel the ground slipping beneath his feet. There seems to be a fear that if there isn’t blazing certainty there is a hollow emptiness.

He isn’t a metaphor for America or anything. He is, first and foremost, a great writer. He captures the sadness of childhood and the passage of time better than nearly anyone (his only competition, to me, is James T. Farrell, about whom I should write more). I think during the conversation this movie will hopefully provoke there will be a large focus on his flaws, his “genius for the sake of genius” style, and the grandiosity of his vision. But I hope that doesn’t obscure how amazing he was at boring into the small moments, the painful slights that linger, the memories that turn and melt into every ounce of your soul, and the exquisite agony of having a mind. The Thomas Wolfe we should celebrate is a combination of good and bad impulses, of extension and retraction, and someone who tried to capture an overwhelming and uncertain land, sure of its destiny but unsure of its history, an endless experiment with no one in charge. Wolfe, however, was lucky Perkins was in command. His driving subject could use such a steady hand.

03.30.16
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Ostend: Roth, Zweig, and The End of Europe

When Belgium and the rest of the Low Countries fell to the Nazis at the outset of WWII, people around the world saw it in grainy newsreels, filtered impersonally through the impassive eye of a camera lens. As it trickled to us, through history, it got even more abstract, made distant and unreal by dint of black-and-white.

This wasn’t the case, of course, when Belgium was attacked by ISIS last week. We had instant updates, graphic color footage, and the tweets and personal videos recorded by thousands of smartphones. Those who weren’t there were safe and unharmed, of course, but didn’t have the comfort of distance.

Those attacks, and their personal immediacy in our lives, give a certain poignancy to Volker Weirdermann’s non-fiction novel (in the nice formulation of Independent reviewer Lucy Sholes) Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, And The Summer Before The Dark, translated excellently this year by Carol Brown Janeway. In it, a handful of great European writers, including two of the continent’s best, grapple with friendship, love, literature, alcohol, and the looming madness overtaking their homes, ready to burst forth everywhere, as they spend an uneasy summer in the once-idyllic beachfront town on the Belgian coast. Like with today’s social-media carried attacks, we see the end of one reality in an extreme closeup, with unflinching unease.

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03.25.16
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Newly Translated Gombrowicz Story Makes Certain People Happy

h/t Gregory D. Johnsen, Itinerant. 

Witold Gombrowicz by Bohdan Paczowski - detail.jpg

The Paris Review  has in its current edition a very short story by Witold Gombrowicz, the greatest modernist, translated for the first time to English, by Tul’si Bhambry. They were also kind enough to put it online for us cheapos.

It’s more of a ridiculous and minor tragedy than a great introduction to his works, but it does manage to touch upon some of his big themes: the way outside perception shapes and molds how we perceive ourselves, and the way we perceive that outside perception, and how our personalities are molded by a million competing pressures. Like in much of Gombrowicz, the physical appearance of the perceived changes, although in this case it is more a direct action rather than some kind of metaphysical mutation.

His work hits on a lot more themes, of course, and the tragedy of Polish history is always just around the corner, even though, as has been said of him, he might be the only major Polish writer of the 20th century whose themes weren’t explicitly Poland.  If you want a very basic summation, he is a comic writer whose ideas revolve around the crushing weight of being alive and aware in an absurd century. His books are uproariously funny and bizarre, terrifying and grotesque, with wild loops of language and phrases that take on a heightened tone of terror through repetition, as if they were in front of a mirror that bends at stretches in impossible contortions. The power of language is a driving obsession as well- the actual transformative power, as it ties in with the awareness that all we are is a collection of ideas about ourselves in the shape of words. But what happens if other people can control those words? If they start saying that you are a child, and everyone believes it, do you transform?

If you want a starting novel, his masterpiece is probably Ferdydurke, which as I understand is just as much a nonsense word in Polish as it is in English. I would probably actually start, though, with the stories collected in Bacacay. It is a great introduction to his ideas, and some of the scenes in the collection are adapted in other novels. Really, you can’t go wrong with anything.

However, his three-volume Diary is, in my mind, one of the great achievements of writing in the last century. Self-obsessed, at times impossibly narcissistic, with wild flights of fantasy, a keen look into the artistic experience, an exploration of the themes that obsessed him, a view of ex-pat life in South America, grudges, loves, creations, mythologies, allusions and illusions. It’s not just a view of a great writer: it is like immersing yourself in writing itself.