Year in Books - Part 1 (Fiction)

Following is pretty much everything I read in fiction this year. There were few more which I left incomplete either disappointed or postponed for future. First section contains masterpieces (Five out of five stars) followed by good book and finally a list of disappointments though still interesting books.

The Melancholy of Resistance (Laszlo Krasznahorkai): This Hungarian novel will certainly be the book of the year for me. I was aware of the events described in the book and had read about Krasznahorkai's style (long, serpentine sentences, paragraph-less chapters and no dialogues only monologues, everything I look for in a novel these days by the way) but I was still startled by it -- by its vehemence, its depth and complexity of vision, its humour, the satirical skill and the seriousness of Krasznahorkai's intent. It is not an easy book to read (it took more than three weeks of dedicated reading) and the subject matter and conclusion couldn't be darker and bleaker, it is almost like a three hundred page illustration of the philosophy of nihilism but it was still exhilirating. It is also one of funniest novels I have read in a while. At more than a few occasions I had to sit upright, fold the book, had a good laugh and then get back to reading again.

Krasznahorkai is still more known in the anglophone world for his collaboration in Bela Tarr's film projects, though Tarr himself remains a highly obscure and marginal figure in the international art house cinema. But still if you search on the internet you will get to read a lot of the movie Werckmeister Harmonies but very little about the novel. The back cover of the novel rather proudly carries enthusiastic endorsements from such eminent personalities like W G Sebald ("its vision rivals that of Gogol's Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing") and Susan Sontag ("An inexorable, visionary book by the contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse who inspires comparison with Gogol and Melville. Krasznahorkai’s novel is both an anatomy of desolation, desolation at its most appalling, and a stirring manual of resistance to desolation – through inwardness.") I also agree with Waggish's comment about Krasnahorkai's only other novel translated into English War And War which was published earlier this year. He says, "Krasznahorkai's achievement is to draw from the deepest, thorniest tradition of European novels, that of Musil, Bachmann, and Bernhard, and give it contemporary political relevance." The same can be said of this novel too. It eloquently reminds us of the grim political situation of the contemporary world, when the only choices that remain open to us are either the self-righteous fascism of Bush And Company on the one side and the anarchy and chaos of religious terrorists on the other. I really don't think I should add my own enthusiastic recommendation when such intelligent people have already done the same, but anyway I will urge you to read it, give this book the patience and effort it requires and you won't be disappointed. Krasznahorkai's official website is also worth browsing.


The Emigrants (W G Sebald): The Rings of Saturn was my favourite book of last year and this year it is The Emigrants. In between I have also managed to read Vertigo, Austerlitz and his two essay collections Campo Santo and Natural History of Destruction (so far as I could understand parts of it, unfamaliar as I am with most of modern German literature which is the subject of these essays). The Emigrants is I think my favourite book though The Rings of Saturn is perhaps the most ambitious and accomplished. It is an extremely painful book to read, the way Sebald plumbs the depths of unimaginable grief in his four "biographical" narratives about lives thwarted and wasted by arbitrary forces of history, I have never encoutered anything like it before.


The Loser, Wittgenstein's Nephew and Frost (Thomas Bernhard): I don't think I should bore my regular readers with more Bernhard enthusiasms. I am glad I discovered him this year. I am looking forward to reading his other books soon. If you have some doubts about how relentless pursuit of negativity can ever be meaningful you should get hold of some of his books.

The Radetzky March (Joseph Roth): Another death obsessed Austrian. The Radetzky March starts like a conventional nineteenth century realistic novel but you soon realize how everything that Roth describes in the book is filtered through his dark vision of history as a sequence of one destructive event after another. A dark masterpiece.

The Complete Short Novels (Anton Chekhov): This was a collection of five short novels all around a hundred pages or so that I read early this year. The emotional terrain and the style is the same he uses in his stories but I found these longer works more interesting. I specially loved the first two novels, The Duel and The Steppe. Rest are also quite good. Wonderfully evocative writing about lives wasted by melancholy, thwarted ambitions and all kinds of quiet desperation.

Eugene Onegin (Alexander Pushkin):Eugene Onegin is notoriously hard to translate. It famously ended the decades long friendship of Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. Reading it is frustrating in a way because you never know whose voice it is that is coming through. But still the wit, the character portraits and the psychological insights make it more than just worth reading. And if you, like me, are old fashioned and illiterate enough to prefer poetry with rhyming stanzas you will love it even more.

The Possessed (Fyodor Dostoevsky): A dark masterpiece from the great Russian master. It also contains a lot of really hilarious caricatures and is quite funny.

A Hero Of Our Time (Mikhail Lermontov): It is almost like an illustration and sketch of a self-consciously Byronic type. After reading it and Onegin I felt so close to these two heroes. I felt like going to a duel too but alas, we live in such philistine and shameless age! There are no duels anymore!!

By Night in Chile (Roberto Bolano): I am eagerly waiting for Bolano's The Savage Detectives which is getting published in April. It won all the major prizes of the Spanish speaking world a few years ago and it should create lots of news here too. By Night in Chile is a brisk and breathless read, a fantastic tour through the grim recent history of Chile. It is also sad and ironical in a way that Pinochet managed to outlive Bolano. But there is at least no doubt who history will judge more favourably.

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Saturday (Ian McEwan): We all think about most of the same things as Henry Perowne but we never quite manage to find words and sentences like McEwan does for his protagonist. The novel suffers only when McEwan decides to turn into a regular novel by introducing a presposterous thriller element into the plot in the last act. He could have kept it essayistic and it still would have been a great success.

Embers (Sandor Marai): Another very good Hungarian novel with lots of wisdom about love, friendship and life, though I thought it perhaps suffered in translation because it was a little inconsistent in its style and the prose sounded flat, plain and feature-less at places.

Enduring Love (Ian McEwan): How far a scientific view of life can go to? Ian McEwan analyses brilliantly in this novel about love and obsession.

First Love/Spring Torrents (Ivan Turgenev):Bitter-sweet love stories from another Russian master. I loved both of these novellas.

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (Mario Vargas Llosa): A grim political novel set in author's home country Peru, a fantastic portrait of a Trostkyist revolutionary. It is sadder once you realize that Mayta is not just an individual and isolated figure but also a type and a template.

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Never let me go (Kazuo Ishiguro): Ishiguro is a great writer but sorry, this was mostly mills and boon stuff. Reading it I also felt as if he learnt all the science in it by reading B-Grade sci-fi books. It is just a bundle of sci-fi cliches. There are moments of authentic emotion but they are not enough to salvage it. It is still a good timepass though.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark): Why is this book so famous? I found it so shallow and the writing was so plain!

Lust (Elfriede Jelinek): I feel bad about putting the only two women writers I read this year in the disappointment category but really I found this book to be written in an extremely cavalier style. She even mixes metaphors and in order to drive away cliches she drives away coherence too. I felt bad about it because I couldn't be more sympathetic to Jelinek's basic idea that Capitalism and Male Sexuality they both are dehumanising forces and they both work by commodifying human beings into property to be owned. But it really doesn't work at that level of feminist polemic either.

Solaris (Stanislaw Lem): I read it in less than ideal circumstances so it may be that I missed something. I found it extremely boring and this from someone who is a big fan of the movie adaptations, both by Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh.

Amsterdam (Ian McEwan): How did it win the booker?

Some Hindi Books: I had gone home to Patna in the summer and read some hindi books there. I wrote about some of them here. I wanted to write about some more hindi books but couldn't do it. It is so difficult to find the contextual information about hindi literature if you are away from the cowbelt (and even there it is actually very difficult) which is needed to fully understand any work. I hope more educated and informed readers would add more resources to websites like wikipedia and make it more easily avaialable to other people interested. Phanishwar Nath Renu's entry on the wikipedia for example has some information about him, I added and corrected a few things too. Will try to find something to write about later.

Year End Thoughts

As I was trying to compile a list of books I read this year (and I read enough to have a top ten list of books) I was thinking how I have spent the entire year inside my head thinking about things which have absolutely nothing to do with my immediate life, at least in concrete terms. Also how most of these books more or less were all unmistakably "dark". I didn't read a single book which made me "feel good" (in the conventional sense of the phrase), though I did feel elated in a different way after reading most of them. Death, Grief, Sadness, Homelessness, Separation, Melancholy, Isolation, Doom were things my mind was occupied with.

Also it is perhaps because of those books that I have spent most of the year in a state of calm, lucid and passive depression. Sometimes I felt the detachment and disinterest became a little too much, specially when it was interfering in my work and regular wordly duties but I managed to negotiate a middle path most of the time. But other times I religiously avoided talking to people, attending parties, get-togethers and almost every other social ritual, like going to movies with other people for example. This blog was more or less my entire existence as a social being.

I also felt extremely tired throughout the year. I don't know whether books were the cause or effect. Most of the time the only physical activity I felt like doing was holding a book in front of my face. Anything more was too much strain on my body. Sigh. I am now thinking about the new year. I am not going to make any new year's resolutions. I think I will have some more time with myself before going back to the normal life.

Year in Movies

The Indie Wire Critics poll of the year's best movies is worth browsing. In the top 20 I have seen The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, L'Enfant, Inland Empire, Army of Shadows, Half Nelson and Volver. I could have seen more and some of them didn't even require any extra effort (The Departed, The Queen) since they played in nearby multiplexes but somehow I just didn't feel like going. I think this year wasn't as good for movies as last year or perhaps I was suffering from movie (and general) fatigue. I rarely felt excited about any new release. Even from the above list only Inland Empire and Army of Shadows left some lasting impressions and managed to surprise me.

My best movie going experiences of the year were mostly of classics in new prints on big screen: The 35mm screenings of L'Avventura (which is also my favourite film ever) and The Third Man both of which were revelations even though I have seen both on DVD numerous times. I had never seen Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff and the French film Army of Shadows directed by Jean Pierre Melville before (it was released in the US for the first time this year) and was extremely impressed by both. I also enjoyed, for the few months I was in Bangalore during the summer, going to the collective chaos film society. Two most memorable movies were (on DVD projection) Bela Tarr's Damnation and 2046 by Wong Kar Wai. They were both very good and I was seeing 2046 for may be fifth or sixth time...

What else... as for DVD viewings I am still catching up with the classics I have not seen before. I hadn't seen any films by Danish director Carl Dreyer before for example and I found Day of Wrath and Ordet both simply astonishing. I liked them more than his more famous silent masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Other director who I discovered this year was the Hungarian Bela Tarr. Besides Damnation I have now seen Werckmeister Harmonies and Satantango too. All these films intially will feel as if they are deliberately designed to test the viewer's patience but I think it is beyond doubt that they are all works of a very serious and visionary artist, or rather I should use the plural "Artists" because the films are made in collaboration with the writer Lazlo Krasznahorkai and editor Agnes Hranitzky and they take joint credits for them. Tarr's style may look pretentious but after you have spent some time staring at his images his stylistic choices would start making sense. I am also currently reading The Melancholy of Resistance on which Werckmeister Harmonies is based and is simply one of the best novels I have read all of this year, or perhaps in the last few years too.

A few other films which surprised me with their intelligence (all of them French): Michael Haneke's Code Unknown (certainly the most important European filmmaker currently working) is a searing examination of the travails of a life in multicultural and (post)modern cities, in this case Paris. I had found Cathetine Breillat's Romance, an exercise in juvenile feminist provocation extremely silly and offensive but she more than made up for that in her film Fat Girl. Another film which really took me by surprise. Laurent Cantet's Human Resources reminded me of Fassbinder's Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven. Just like the Fassbinder's movie it brilliantly blends emotional family drama with agitprop politics. Simple, Heartbreaking and Brilliant.

Other honourable mentions:

The Head Scratcher of the Year: In Praise of Love by Jean Luc Godard. What was it that I exactly saw, that was the question which haunted me for many days after I saw that film. Was it like one of those poems which are not supposed to be understood or perhaps my faculties were still not as developed. Reading reviews didn't help either. Everybody was similarly sratching their heads.

The Headscratcher of the year alongwith a headache: L'Intrus by Claire Denis. I had such raging headache while watching it. My be I tried too hard understanding what was going on. Towards the end every note of the background score was like a hammer blow on the head.

The Most Disgusting and Offensive Piece of Trash: L'Humanite by Bruno Dumont. There was something in the film which really really rubbed me the wrong way. I have rarely felt irritated like it before.

The Most Boring film of the Year: The Puppetmaster by Hou Hsio-Hsien. I don't know how many times this movie put me to sleep. Every time before going to sleep I felt like shouting "MOVE IT" because the camera never moves in the entire film. I guess some people will similarly shout "CUT IT" while watching Bela Tarr's films but that depends on tastes.

The film I didn't finish: The Piano by Jane Campion. Boring and pointless. Even the excellent score by Michael Nyman could't convince me to complete it.

(And in keeping with the theme of this blog)The Melancholy Character of the Year: Gunnar Bjornstrand playing the priest battling with his doubts and other demons in Bergman's Winter Light. Simply brilliant.

I am hoping the new year will be better...

More from Melancholy of Resistance

Nothing energises me like a good dose of well-written misanthropy... Mr Eszter is taking a walk on the streets of his town and encounters filth on the pavement. this is what he thinks...

It was, after all, as if the earth had opened up beneath him, revealing what lay underneath the town, or, and he tapped at the pavement with his stick, as if some terrible putrescent marsh had seeped through the thin layer of asphalt to cover everything. A marsh in a bog, thought Eszter, the essential fundamentum of the place, and standing there for a while in vacant contemplation he suddenly had a vision of the houses, trees, lampposts and advertisement hoardings sinking right through it. Could this, he wondered, be a form of the last judgment? No trumpets, no riders of the apocalypse but mankind swallowed without fuss or ceremony by its own rubbish? 'Not an altogether surprising end,' thought Eszter, adjusting his scarf, then, having come to this neat full stop and considering his own investigations at an end, prepared to move off.

The book is quite dense at places. I have been trying to read up on the theory of "musical temperament" which I think is the central idea of the novel and most of it is totally Greek for me. One of the central figures in the novel Mr Eszter (who is taking a walk in the above passage), a figure almost out of a Thomas Bernhard novel, is obsessed with returning the musical instruments to pure tuning based on mathematical relations between the harmonics (he calls it "musical resistance"). The European classical music as it is practiced is based on "well tempered system" (one of which was invented by the musicologist Andreas Werckmeister) which doesn't follow this whole number approach. He then connects all of this to philosophy about "the existence of the platonic realm" or "the existence of the order in the universe." Mr. Eszter however only meets with miserable failure in his pursuits because Bach and Beethoven sound like "ear-splitting racket" on instruments tuned on "natural" harmonics. I think Krasznahorkai wants us to conclude that our universe is defined by disorder, chaos and anarchy and in political terms (it is primarily a novel about politics) it means that authoritarianism and fascism are the only way of imposing order.

I am yet to finish the book, around fifty pages are left. Will try to write more when I am done. I was reading about the music theory in the wikipedia but didn't really understand what it was all about. He gives some background in the book too but it was not enough for someone as ignorant about classical music as me. There is a brief monologue in the movie too which, needless to say, didn't make much sense to me either when I watched it.

from The Anatomy of Melancholy

I finally got my own copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy last weekend from a used book store. This is not the kind of book which one reads from beginning to end, just pick up a random chapter and read a few pages. It is funny in a strange sort of way. One extract from the book from the "third partition" dedicated exclusively to "Love-Melancholy"... (more here. the latin translations are from this edition of the book)

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Symptoms or signs of Love-Melancholy, in Body, Mind, good, bad, etc.

Symptoms are either of body or mind; of body, paleness, leanness, dryness, etc. Pallidus omnis amans, color hic est aptus amanti [pale is every lover, this hue beseemeth love], as the poet describes lovers: fecit amor maciem, love causeth leanness. Avicenna de Ilishi, c. 33. "makes hollow eyes, dryness, symptoms of this disease, to go smiling to themselves, or acting as if they saw or heard some delectable object." Valleriola, lib. 3. observat. cap. 7. Laurentius, cap. 10. Ælianus Montaltus de Her. amore. Langius, epist. 24. lib. 1. epist. med. deliver as much, corpus exangue pallet, corpus gracile, oculi cavi [the body bloodless and pale, a lean body, hollow eyes], lean, pale,-- ut nudis qui pressit calcibus anguem, "as one who trod with naked foot upon a snake," hollow-eyed, their eyes are hidden in their heads,-- Tenerque nitidi corposis cecidit decor [their sleep charm falls away], they pine away, and look ill with waking, cares, sighs.

"Et qui tenebant signa Phœbeæ facis
Oculi, nihil gentile nec patrium micant."

["And eyes that once rivalled the locks of Phœbus, lose the patrial and paternal lustre."]

With groans, griefs, sadness, dullness,

--"Nulla jam Cereris subi
Cura aut salutis" --

want of appetite, etc. A reason of all this, Jason Pratensis gives, "because of the distraction of the spirits the liver doth not perform his part, nor turns the aliment into blood as it ought, and for that cause the members are weak for want of sustenance, they are lean and pine, as the herbs of my garden do this month of May, for want of rain." The green sickness therefore often happeneth to young women, a cachexia or an evil habit to men, besides their ordinary sighs, complaints, and lamentations, which are too frequent. As drops from a still,-- ut occluso stillat ab igne liquor, doth Cupid's fire provoke tears from a true lover's eyes,

"The mighty Mars did oft for Venus shriek,
Privily moistening his horrid cheek
With womanish tears," --

--"ignis distillat in undas,
Testis erit largus qui rigat ora liquor,"

[Fire distills into water, witness the copious streams that bathes his cheeks;]

with many such like passions.

Thomas Bernhard in The New Yorker

Thomas Bernhard is getting a lot of attention in the English literary press these days or perhaps I have started paying attention. A long review-essay in the latest New Yorker has lot of details about his life and works and is a good introduction to both.

There is a deeper purpose to Bernhard’s apparent linguistic sadism. He seems to have taken Wittgenstein’s well-known dictum “The limits of my language are the limits of my world” as a personal challenge. Accordingly, he tried to expand the outer limit of his own language to the point where it could encompass even the most extreme forms of human experience.

Link via complete review.

Ruth Franklin is an editor at the new republic magazine and is a very good writer. I recently came across her article on Bernhard's compatriot and nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek. She is very harsh on her. She doesn't call her a commie and a pornographer like most of the conservative American press did when she won the nobel, but comes quite close...

Winter with Books

Antonia has put up a list of books for winter reading. I thought I will add my own here. I already have four or five books on my current reading pile and it will take up a couple of weeks at least to get through them but anyway here is my list...

Ingeborg Bachmann: Malina
Jaroslav Hasek: The Good Soldier Svejk
Ivan Goncharov: Oblomov
Stendhal: The Life of Henry Brulard
Stendhal: The Charterhouse of Parma (had left it in the middle the last time I picked it up. Will try to find a copy with notes and introduction this time. I was clueless about the historical background of the book.)

Too many novels! I will try to read more philosophy in the next year... and yes history and poetry too. I remember saying the same thing last year too.

from The Melancholy of Resistance

I am in the middle of the Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Hungarian novel The Melancholy of Resistance and really enjoying it. Though it deals with such subjects like apocalypse, end of the world and nihilism and its misanthropy runs really deep, it is also very funny, odd and gripping. That doesn't mean it is easy to read though. The long sentences and unbroken paragrapsh are disorienting and it is difficult to read more than twenty pages at one stretch.

Here is a sample sentence from the book. The narrator/author treats all the dialogues in the novel as stock expressions, as cliches. The quotes feel almost like a mark of contempt! It is like how Thomas Bernhard uses his "so-called's" and quotes too...

Of course, the person he most devoutly wished to remain ignorant of was Mrs Eszter, his wife, that dangerous prehistoric beast from whom he, 'by the grace of God', has separated years ago, who reminded him of nothing so much as one of those merciless medieval mercenaries, with whom he had tied that infernal comedy of a marriage thanks to an unforgivable moment of youthful carelessness, and who, in her uniquely dismal and alarming essence, summed up all that 'multifarious spectacle of disilusionment' the society of the town, in his view somehow succeeded in representing.

My favourite passage though occurs early in the novel. Mrs Eszter is sleeping in her bed and Krasznahorkai is describing the adventures of three rats in her room in the middle of the night. This goes on for almost three pages. This really had me in splits. Here is a small part..

And, as if they had been waiting for just this moment, as if this utter immobility and complete calm had been some sort of a signal, in the great silence (or perhaps out of it), three young rats ventured out from under Mrs Eszter's bed. Carefully the first slithered past, shortly followed by the other two, their little heads raised and attent, ready to freeze before leaping; then, silently, still bound by their instinctive timidity, they proceeded, hesitating and freezing at every few steps, to a tour of the room. Like intrepid scouts for an invading army apprising themselves of enemy positions before an onslaught, noting what lay where, what looked safe or dangerous, they examined the skirting boards, the crumbling nooks and corners and the wide cracks in the floorboards, as if mapping out the precise distances between the bolthole under the bed, the door, the table, the cupboard, the slightly teetering stool and the window-ledge--then without touching anything, in the blinking of an eye, they shot off under the bed in the corner again, to the hole that led through the wall to freedom. It was no more than a minute before the cause of their retreat became apparent, for their intuition had warned them something was about to happen and this faultless, naked and instinctive fear of the unpredictable was enough to drive them to the option of immediate flight. By the time Mrs Eszter moved and disturbed the up-till-then-unbroken silence, the three rats were cowering in perfect safety at the foot of the outside wall at the back of the house; so she rose from the very ocean bed of sleep drifting for a few minutes up into the shallows through which consciousness might faintly glimmer, and kicked off the eiderdown, stretching her limbs as if about to wake.

Inland Empire

Golden Globes nominations are out and not surprisingly David Lynch's Inland Empire is nowhere to be see, which is not really surprising to be honest. Lynch's film feels more like a video installation art rather than a full length feature film. Lynch surely won't win any new fans with it but his loyal devotees will not be disappointed. He is on the same track, it is just that he has taken a few steps forward, or deeper towards the "inland". All the familiar Lynchian tropes are there and one of the thing about watching it is identifying them, so you see red curtains, flickering bulbs, omnipresent buzz on soundtrack and hints about something mysterious and monstrous lurking in every nook and corner and then you nod in approval!

Perhaps the most written and talked about aspect of the film is that it was shot in digital video using a consumer grade camera. So the sensuousness and the texture of Blue Velvet or Mulholland Dr. is missing. Instead we get Lars von Trier like grainy look with seemingly adhoc compositions. It is jarring initially but you get used to it as the film goes on. There are though too many facial closeups throughout the film. I think he could have avoided it, somehow it didn't feel right, it just looked ugly.

I didn't say anything about what the film is actually about. Hmmm. That's tough, but let me try. There is this actress played by Laura Dern (the innocent blonde from Blue Velvet) who is acting in a movie based on a polish folk tale. There was earlier a german movie planned but the cast and the crew were mysteriously murdered. So anyway, the shooting starts and soon the reality and illusion, outside and inside start to merge and become inseparable. Lynch isn't interested in the familiar gotcha (hey, it was only a movie!) scenes familiar to so many film-within-a-film genre just like he isn't interested in hey-it-was-only-a-dream moments in his other narratives. He is interested in character's fractured subjectivity and its representation through innovative narratives. And yes, I forgot there is a family of people with talking rabbit heads who talk in non-sequiturs, there are a bunch of polish prostitutes and I think I saw a few monsters too, I am not sure, may be I was just dreaming!

Reviews by sharper and more intelligent people won't help either but you can try Rotten Tomatoes. Not surprisingly it has got lots of thumbs down. Though I was surprised to see the turnout at the ifc center where the film is currently running. I think only one person walked out before the end. Rest of them stayed through the end credit sequence too which features a wonderful song with some surprise guest appearances. The film is not getting a wide release. Besides New York, there are only a few cities and even there you won't find it anywhere near those ugly and monstrous multiplexes. (Full theatrical schedule here.)

A nice long interview of Lynch on Youtube. It is old and an hour long, other parts are on the right sidebar. He is a really goofy fellow (he says he gets his ideas from the "ether" where they float).

Not that busy actually...

Much as I hate my job, sometimes I think it is not so bad. Just these last couple of weeks when I was thinking I had lots of work to do, I don't know what happened, the work either took care of itself or perhaps I did something. It is almost back to normal now. Speaking in general, even otherwise it is the kind of job which never requires any serious intellectual application of any kind and even time and effort-wise it only occasionally makes its presence felt in my inner and private life. Most of the time it is just the same dull routine. Talk to people, do the work, and in general behave like an automaton! I find it amusing and sometimes surprising that someone like me, with this level of demotivation and detachment, has been able survive all this (though I must say it hasn't been too long yet!) I know, mere survival is not enough. May be I will find something that will spur me on, and who knows I might even find myself in the company of those deluded, crazy and philistine usurers in future with whom I am surrounded at work and who earn many times more than what I do now. (In case it is confusing, it is actually a bank where I work and I write software for a living.)

So what did I do at work today? Besides a few other things I read this article in the latest TLS by George Steiner on the nineteenth century German writer George Buchner, author of classic Expressionist play Woyzeck, the novella Lenz and other works. I have read only Woyzeck which is brilliant and one of my favourites. I have been looking forward to reading his other works but haven't got a chance to read any of it yet. It is not that great essay. Steiner is a very estimable and heavyweight literary critic but this article felt a little hurried. Still there is a lot of information and introductory material in there. I didn't know for example that Buchner died at the age of twenty three!

Werner Herzog's film adaptation of the play is brilliant in its own right too, not least because of Klaus Kinski's performance in the titular role, a role almost tailor-made for him to play. You can watch the introductory scene from the film on youtube.

Also via This Space I read this rather pointless article about fantasy in literature. Surely no reader of fiction can ever have problem with fantasy. I mean, that goes by the dictionary definition of the word 'fiction' itself! It is what you do with fantasy that matters. For example, you can either start a franchise and sell tie-in products with your books or else create genuine works of literature which engage with serious and difficult questions regarding reality, representation, truth, language etc etc. It's the same with Bollywood too. I don't have any problems with song and dance, melodrama or artificial colours. It is what you do with them. On one side there are people like Fassbinder and Almodovar and on the other people like Bhansalis and Karan Johars...

Also talking of fantasy fiction, Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Hungarian novel The Melancholy of Resistance is absolutely brilliant. It is not really a fantasy, even though it has some fantastical elements, it is more like a fable written in a remarkable style and a voice which is odd and extremely gripping at the same time -- very Kafka-like in tone and style. The book is full of long serpentine sentences and thomas bernhard style paragraphs which never seem to end. Also how he blends the reported speech with narration is very similar to bernhard. It is not easy to read, I have been reading it for the past one week and I am not even past the first hundred pages but it is worth all the effort. Will write more once I finish the book.

Finally this interview of Thomas Bernhard (thanks Bhupinder). As entertaining as ever!

Busy

Real life has intervened with all its messy and stupid irregularities so erratic (or no) blogging for some time. Will be back in a couple of weeks. Hopefully. In the meanwhile check out the trailer of Inland Empire... I managed to sneak off to a screening this Sunday and it was worth all the effort. (Will try to write something about it, though I think I really didn't understand enough, or actually I didn't understand it at all.)



The New York Times parental advisory says, "It includes adult language, partial female nudity, bloody violence and ubiquitous menace." Agree completely with the "ubiquitous menace." I think I almost missed the nudity part, it was a short and unimportant scene. For a nice scene, one of my favourite ever, you have to check out Lynch's earlier masterpiece Mulholland Dr. I had posted the clip here.

Advice from Pushkin

From Eugene Onegin, Translated by Charles Johnston

Whom then to credit? Whom to treasure?
On whom alone can we depend?
Who is there who will truly measure
his acts and words to suit our end?
Who'll sow no calumnies around us?
Whose fond attentions will astound us?
Who'll never fault our vices, or
Whom shall we never find a bore?
Don't let a ghost be your bear-leader,
don't waste your efforts on the air.
Just let yourself be your whole care,
your loved one, honourable reader!
Deserving object: there can be
nothing more lovable than he.

Though the Johnston translation is more famous, I liked this translation more. It is by James Falen (published in the Oxford Classics series). It is so disappointing and disheartening in a way when you read two translations side by side and see how different the two are. And that is when you don't know the original language. Even the meaning is different at a few places. Eugene Onegin is one of the most widely discussed texts when it comes to the theory of translation, mainly because of Nabokov's highly idiosyncratic translation and scholarly notes on the poem... Anyway here is the passage.

But whom to love? To trust and treasure?
Who won't betray us in the end?
And who'll be kind enough to measure
Our words and deeds as we intend?
Who won't sow slander all about us?
Who'll coddle us and never doubt us?
To whom all our faults be few?
Who'll never bore us through and through?
You futile, searching phantom-breeder,
Why spend all your efforts all in vain;
Just love yourself and ease the pain,
My most esteemed and honest reader!
A worthy object! Never mind,
A truer love you will never find.

Books on my bed and a meta-post

Someone asks me why my posts are always on obscure topics and if I had no desire to make my blog popular? Or that why I never mention the latest booker prize winner or write about the latest Bond film? Or why I never write about politics or anything related to India? That made me think specially because I never consciously decide what to write here. 99% of the time it is an impulsive decision mostly when I have just finished reading an article or a book or have nothing else to do. Mostly the post is just some paragraphs which stuck to my mind (which is how I decide the worth of a book, by the number of striking passages in it) and some assorted thoughts and facts about the book. If I try to write a comprehensive and systematic review or essay, it either never gets completed or else no one understands what I was trying to say in the end!

Then, how do I decide which books to read or which movies to go to? I don't really have an idea. But yes, there is definitely a sub-conscious bias against anything popular or mainstream. Some sociologist may explain this with some theory of alienation and I think that would be right. I have a full time day job and though I generally manage to avoid participating in social rituals, I still don't have a lot of time to spare on my hobbies. (I sleep a lot and of course, the inane complexities of modern life: just today I had to postpone going to New York to see the new David Lynch picture because of some stupid bureaucratic work.) It also means that there will not be enough breadth, there isn't just enough time and energy to do everything in life.

Finally coming back to India/Politics thing. It's not that I am an apolitical person, my politics would broadly be considered leftist, though by the standards of my radical friends I am still too much of a bourgeois. But I'll have to admit, the nitti-gritties of politics don't interest me, again some theory of alienation will have to come and explain this. I love Hindi language, which is my mother-tongue and my first language, but the reason why I don't write anything about Hindi literature is that I don't get a chance to read much of it. I am too far away from the cow-belt (or "gobar-patti" if you will)! In any case I think the idea behind any art or literature should be to let it help open your mind to new ways of looking at things, learning from foreign cultures and experiences outside your own and immediate. And I find even mild forms of cultural chauvinism intensely irritating and deeply disgusting.

So finally books on my bed (I don't use the desk for reading, I like going to sleep with my books!). So here they are (Two from Austria and Hungary each and one from Latin America):

Frost (Thomas Bernhard)
Kaddish for an Unborn Child (Imre Kertesz)
The Melancholy of Resistance (Laszlo Krasznahorkai)
Last Evenings on Earth (Roberto Bolano)
Five Women (Robert Musil)

All five of them look very interesting. I will try to put a few extracts or write something after I finish reading...

And yes I forgot Bollywood. Well, for all the talk of "new wave" or new type of bollywood films my contempt for Bollywood I think is complete and final. I find them irritating, silly and often deeply offensive and reactionary. I generally manage to avoid watching Bollywood movies whenever I can.

I love watching and listening to old hindi film songs though. In fact, that's what I am doing a lot these days. It is like the "chitrahar" of olden days. So here is one song in the memory of those days of Doordarshan. It is from the 1966 movie Love in Tokyo starring Joy Mukherjee and Asha Parekh. Md. Rafi is singing the song composed by Shanker Jaikishen. Basically the hero is pleading her to come to him because there is a fire in his heart etc etc...

Melancholy

Besides my other numerous circle of acquaintances I have one more intimate confidant—my melancholy. In the midst of my joy, in the midst of my work, she waves to me, calls me to one side, even though physically I stay put. My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known, what wonder, then, that I love her in return.
—Søren Kierkegaard (from Either/Or)

(Can't find Thomas Hardy poem saying almost exactly the same thing. Don't remember the words either.)

Anyway, two interesting links. First on the melancholy of Joseph Roth (specially in the context of his novel The Radetzky March). It is quite interesting. My reactions were very similar after I finished the book. The article has some thoughts on Benjamin and Kant too, the later of which I didn't really understand.

Another article on Melancholy and Aesthetic Theory. It looks like an academic article but is easy to read and quite informative.

More Kierkegaard quotes from the same chapter that the earlier quote comes from here. You will have a laugh at this one I am sure (and I love that last line):

Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy—to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. Therefore, whenever I see a fly settling, in the decisive moment, on the nose of such a person of affairs; or if he is spattered with mud from a carriage which drives past him in still greater haste; or the drawbridge opens up before him; or a tile falls down and knocks him dead, then I laugh heartily. And who, indeed, could help laughing? What, I wonder, do these busy folks get done? Are they not to be classed with the woman who in her confusion about the house being on fire carried out the firetongs? What things of greater account, do you suppose, will they rescue from life's great conflagration?

Update: Antonia points me to an interesting scholarly book on the subject called Saturn And Melancholy. I don't think there is an English translation, at least Amazon doesn't list one. I found a long and detailed piece in the TLS though which discusses the book (among other things). Amazon also informs me that I must have seen its reference not in the Understanding W.G. Sebald book but in The Noonday Demon. I also like its cover (whose painting is this I don't know)...

A Nasty Little German Love Story

I don't know what to make of Robert Musil's short story Tonka. I just finished reading it and I now feel intensely annoyed.

A young student of science from a well-to-do family starts a love affair with a Czech servant girl Tonka who is attending to his ailing grandmother. After the death of the grandmother he takes her off to Berlin and starts living with her (without marrying her). She soon becomes pregnant. But the problem is, according to the calender it couldn't be he who could have made her pregnant. And worse, he learns that she has contracted a venereal infection. So far the story is told in a boring, flat and conventional style but as soon as the student learns about it, the story plunges deep into his consciousness and it becomes fiendishly complex as he struggles with trying to come to terms with the reality and can't make up his mind about anything, whether anything is true or false, real or imaginary. Doctors rule out the possibility that he might have infected her and the girl persists with her story that she has not slept with any man. He can't decide between the either of the two. He spends the time with her until she gradually withers away and finally dies. All written in a disturbingly objective style, specially a couple of paragraphs where Musil describes her decaying body made for some deeply unpleasant reading. And in the end neither he nor us, the readers, get the know the "exact" truth. He just feels relieved after a sudden flash of memory passes him by and he thinks everything is over.

I am not much familiar with Musil's fellow Viennese authors Sigmund Freud and Arthur Schnitzler but I think the story covers the same territory as explored by those two writers. Here Musil is describing the dreams that the student has about Tonka (he even uses the word "transference" which has some Freudian connotation, I am not sure what that is, I just remember reading about it somewhere):

These ambiguous images made him feel a seemingly undefined, disembodied affection and more than human intensity of emotion, and it was hard to say whether these feelings were gradually detaching themselves from Tonka or only now beginning to be associated with her. When he reflected on this he guessed that this enigmatic capacity for transference and independence that love had must also manifest itself in waking life. It is not that the woman loved is the origin of emotions apparently aroused by her; they are merely set behind her like a light. But whereas in dreams there is still a hair'-breadth margin, a crack, separating the love from the beloved, in waking life this split is not apparent; one is merely the victim of doppelganger-trickery and cannot help seeing a human being as wonderful who is not so at all. He could not bring himself to set the light behind Tonka.

May be I am just a cold-blooded prude (though I prefer the word "stoic") but I have never really understood these ideas about diseased and morbid sexuality and all this obsession with sex that Freud and Co. think is so common and are part of normal human condition. May be the story says something general about human consciousness or sexuality but the only thing I am trying now is to forget whatever I just finished reading. I am now not going to pick up The Man Without Qualities anytime soon.

Links

Antonia points me to this great article about W. G. Sebald's life and early inspiration for his literary career.

Readers have sometimes expressed discomfort with this connection, accusing Sebald of inappropriately identifying with the Jewish victims of National Socialism, as if he, too, were an "exile" of history. The objection is misguided, however, for Sebald never forgot the distinction between the forced exile of the Nazi period and his own voluntary postwar emigration; his entire work offers an eloquent tribute to the memory and memorialization of that historical difference. However, his literary imagination naturally sought out points of contact and continuity. For his book about four aging "emigrants," he deliberately avoided the term exilierte, preferring instead the capacious and somewhat antiquated term ausgewanderte (literally, those who have "wandered" or "gone out") in order to include his own family history of emigration. The Jewish exiles of National Socialism are but one, admittedly central part of a much broader pattern of modern displacement reaching back to the French Revolution (with an implicit titular reference to Goethe's Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten) and the economic emigrations of both Jews and Germans from Central Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sebald's semiautobiographical literary work is thus premised on a dual identity: as the son of a Wehrmacht officer who bears witness to the victims of German violence, but also as a member of his grandfather's nonmilitary, emigrant family who identifies with these victims existentially.

The article is actually a part of biographical study of Sebald that the author, Mark Anderson, is working on. It is interesting how little information about his personal life is available. I was surprised for example when I read in the book Understanding W G Sebald that he was a very cheerful and lively person in real life. His books contain some of the most eloquent portraits of melancholic figures that I have ever encountered in literature, either as the narrators themselves or the people they talk about in the book. I hope I will get a chance the read the book.

Also there is another old article written by the same author on Thomas Bernhard which I came across recently. He has translated Bernhard's The Loser too.

Finally a link to "Kierkegaard Blog Carnival" which features my "review" of a Kierkegaard biography. I wrote the review without even finishing the whole book (it runs to almost thousand pages), but other links look good. I haven't read anything yet, but I am going to.

P.S. Anurag is now asking me to change the name of my blog to "Sebald and Bernhard."

Lust

My library has got the entire series of books published by the Oxford University Press on the subject of seven deadly sins. I was naturally only interested in the only sin I commit (and I am being honest here), that is sloth (though I prefer the word Melancholy or Acedia more) of which I wrote earlier (I was a little disappointed with the light tone of the book). Even when I am afflicted by temptations of committing two other sins, Lust and Envy, they are invariably, and it doesn't take too long either, subsumed into a larger, global weltschmerz and are thus taken over by the sin of melancholy! Rest of the sins, that is Greed, Gluttony, Anger and Pride, I have hardly ever known in my life, specially the first two. But then I saw that the volume on Lust was penned by Simon Blackburn, who is a professor of philosophy at the Cambridge University and a wonderful writer, I decided to pick it up. I am glad I read it because it is a wonderful, entertaining and very informative book.

Blackburn states his aims clearly in the introduction to the book. He says that lust has been unfairly victimized by philosophers and thinkers and his task in this book is:

[...]to clean off some of the mud, to rescue it from the echoing denunciations of old men of the deserts, to deliver it from the pallid and envious confessors of Rome and the disgust of the Renaissance, to destroy the stocks and pillories of the Puritans, to separate it from other things that we know drag it down, and so to lift it from the category of sin to that of virtue.

And by the end, I have to say, he valiantly answers all the objections and convinces of the virtuousness of lust. My own personal view on the subject is quite dark and pessimistic. I won't go into the details here but it is basically a mix of Schopenhauer and Proust's ideas. So did my views change after reading this book? Well, not exactly. But I am fairly open to reading heftier volumes on similar lines, may be I will be convinced before it is too late (youth is already fading fast!). As for now, the status quo of melancholy torpor will continue and I will continue to see the trickeries of the evil "life-force" (the Schopenhauerian will-to-live) behind every attractive face! And also the costs of getting into a "venereal strife" (Aquinas's phrase by the way, not mine) are just too much for a man of limited emotional energies like me :)

Anyway coming back to the book, Blackburn predictably starts with the Greeks who were the easily the most knowledgeable people on this subject. He discusses Aristophanes's myth which Plato discusses in his Symposium. Aristophanes said that originally each of us formed a unity with someone else, either androgynous or same-sex. In this state each individual had four legs, four hands and two sets of genitals. Unfortunately this gave them enough vigor to challenge the God Zeus, who in response to this hubris cut them half, separating the two. He says that erotic desire is nothing but manifestation of the awareness of this incompleteness and we are condemned to seek our lost "other". Plato then discusses the dialogue between Diotima and Socrates to explain how ideal love means love of beauty and love of good, which he means to be the same thing. Of course beauty here is the Platonic abstraction, an idea, not the physical beauty. He also discusses Plato's theory of Human nature (the image of two horses and the charioteer) and offers well-known objections to this theory. I won't go into the detail here.

There are some funny lines in his chapter on Stoics and Cynics:

The Cynics ("dog philosophers") thought that too much song and dance was made about the whole thing. Diogenes thought that sex was most conveniently dealt with masturbation, which is easier than relying on other people: as Oscar Wilde later said, "cleaner, more efficient, and you get to meet a better class of person." But Diogenes too the further shocking step of arguing that no shame should be attached to the act, and hence no shame attached to doing it in public, which he promptly illustrated by repeated street performances.

He then mentions that, "centuries later St. Augustine, quite capable of swallowing miracles in other contexts, rejected this account."

The best and funniest part of the book is the section when he deals with Christianity and the medieval philosophy, which actually demonized lust with really stupid arguments, unlike their Greek predecessors. He pokes some gentle fun on St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and other obscure thinkers who devised and invented weird rationalizations to keep lust away from human affairs. After a long survey he finally concludes:

Eventually we get to a ladder. Virginity is best. After that, matrimony without sex is fine, and next best is matrimony plus pleasureless procreative activity. Procreative activity accompanied by pleasure is pretty regrettable; but worst of, because it would turn your wife into a whore and your home into a brothel, is to act for the sake of pure sexual pleasure.

And also how it explains the essentially misogynist character of Christianity (and indeed other religions too):

Naturally it is short step from disgust at the sexual act itself to disgust at women for inciting it, for receiving the foul male seed, for inciting men to take part in the whole teeming, liquid, swampy business.

The part which interested me most was where he answers the charges of radical feminists and anti-romance polemicists like Andrea Dworkin or Elfriede Jelinek. He cites a paper authored by Martha Nussbaum, who is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, on the subject of "Objectification," in which she classifies different ways we reduce an individual to a thing. Her list contains seven items. First, there is instrumentality--using the other as a mere tool of one's purposes. Then, there is denial of autonomy--treating the other as not having a mind of their own, as lacking in self-determination. Third is inertness--treating the other as passive, as lacking in agency and perhaps also in activity. Fourth is fungibility--treating the other as interchangeable with objects of same type or other types. Fifth is violability--treating the other as lacking in boundary integrity, or as something it is permissible to violate, break-up, smash or break into. Sixth is ownership--treating the other as something that can be disposed of, bought or sold. Finally, there is denial of subjectivity--treating the other as something whose experiences and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account.

It is a very insightful list and after reading it, it doesn't take too long to understand the objections feminists have with male sexual desire and gender relations as they exist in society. Blackburn concedes that there are problems with lust here but manages to defend it quite well in the end. For example as for fungibility, we might be far away from the Aristophanes myth of the unique other for everybody, but there is something in desire which makes complete fungibility impossible. For example, the more the time one spends with one's partner, he/she becomes less and less fungible. He also cites Stendhal's theory of "crystallization", the process by which the subject assigns unique qualities to the beloved which exist only in its imagination. For more details here is the wiki entry.

For me personally, it is the last item on the list which is the most problematic. And here Proust comes into the picture. (Sadly Blackburn doesn't bring in Proust into the discussion here, though he discusses his ideas in a slightly different context elsewhere.) It is in the nature of desire itself to deny the other its autonomous subjectivity and impose one's own over the other's experiences. Solipsism comes with the package of Lust. Proust's novel contains dazzlingly complex and ultimately despairing analysis of this phenomenon of sexual solipsism, something that I understood very well, when I read it.

Blackburn skirts this problem by shifting the goalposts. He says that the goal of lust shouldn't be to bring in the merging of two different consciousness or some such abstract ideal. He cites a passage from Hobbes and says that reciprocation of pleasure is, and indeed it should be, the ultimate goal of lust (it is shallower than the ideal but it is the only thing we have got). He calls it "Hobbesian Unity" and explains it thus:

A pleases B. B is pleased at what A is doing, and A is pleased at B's pleasure. This should please B, and a feedback loop is set up since that in turn pleases A.

Hmph! This post has now become too long and my fingers are aching and I haven't yet come to Kant, Freud or talked about Stendhal (my favourite expert when it comes to the matters of the heart by the way). Or discussed the pros and cons of prostitution and pornography. May be some other time.

For now, since I have often been accused, not entirely unjustifiably I have to admit, of being a prude and of having a stiff upper lip when it comes to subjects discussed in the post, I am reproducing two risque paintings that Blackburn cites in the book. (The book contains photographs too.) First this painting by the medieval Florentine artist Agnolo Bronzino. It shows young Cupid cavorting with his mother Venus. The figures in the blackground are deceit, anger, jealousy, joy and fortune. More details on Wikipedia. Blackburn says that Cupid's posture is awkward because he is trying to hide his erection!



This is another medieval sketch illustrating the apocryphal story of Aristotle and Phyllis. I am sure Schopenhauer would have approved of this...

Ghost World

The subject of adolescent alienation is virtually a storehouse of cliches and sentimental moralizing but Ghost World, based on a comic book of the same name, manages to keep these miles away and tackles it without a single false or jarring note and in such a way that the whole thing becomes not only funny but also genuinely insightful, even moving in the ending. Enid and Rebecca have just graduated from high school and are basically female versions of Holden Caulfield. Enid, wonderfully played by Thora Birch is angrier, wittier and more misanthropic than her friend Rebecca, played by Scarlet Johansson (thankfully, unlike her regular roles she doesn't try to act "hot" here) who seems to have prepared herself better for the grown-up world (she is also prettier that might be another reason). They spend their time poking fun at both the go-getters as well as the losers that they see around them. They soon meet a fellow alienated loner, an eccentric old record collector, played with his natural dorkiness by Steve Buscemi, and soon the practical joke they play on him turns serious and all of them learn some vital lessons about life and about themselves in the end. Here is a sample review from village voice and more here.

The film also has a Bollywood connection which really amused me. The soundtack of the film features, rather prominently I think, a song from an old Hindi movie Gumnaam. It is called "Jaan Pehchaan Ho..." and you absolutely have to see it if you haven't seen it. It is a wonderful and an absolutely freak-out song. If you don't understand Hindi, don't despair. The song basically says, "If we could get to know each other, life would be easy" :)

Anyway, here's the song. I am sure, like me, you will also feel like giving the girl a good neck massage after watching it. I like the guy singing even more.

Sadly I don't remember much of the movie, though I remember watching and loving it many years ago. It is based on an Agatha Christie novel And Then There Were None (I didn't know about it until recently). Of course, in the best Bollywood traditions she goes uncredited. I haven't read the book, but I am sure she wouldn't have, even in her wildest dreams, imagined the character that Mehmood plays in the movie. And it is for his character and the song filmed on him, "Hum Kale Hain..." ("What if I am dark, I have a heart") that the film is most remembered now. I like this song from the movie too. It is kinda kitschy but nice.

And yes, the trailer of Ghost World here. I am spending a lot of time on youtube.

Thomas Bernhard Review in the Harper's

There is a very entertaining review written by Ben Marcus of Thomas Bernhard's novel Frost, which has recently been published in English, in this month's (November) Harper's magazine. Sadly the review is not online. It is also a very nice introduction to his work as a whole, though I think Marcus emphasises his negativity a little more than his unique style and voice and as a result it may drive away some of the potential but soft-hearted readers of Thomas Bernhard. Here is the opening paragraph of the review (I was thinking of copying the entire essay but it is too long, may be I will):

Thomas Bernhard, the ranting, death-obsessed Austrian novelist and playwright who died in 1989, was the ultimate Nestbeschmutzer, soiling his country with screeds against the landscape, the people, and their history. Not content with the limitations of his own mortality, Bernhard darkened his will with the dictum that his works could not be published or performed in Austria after his death, as if to suggest that his homeland was not even worthy to bathe in his hatred. Although Bernhard's executors have sashayed around his stipulation, his wrath has since matured into something far more universally toxic. In the end, Bernhard's concerns are not a single country and its political crimes but rather the sheer affront of life itself, what the Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran referred to as "The Trouble with Being Born."

Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, fellow countrymen of Bernhard's, reported on this trouble also, but in prose that was far more stately, tempered, and quite less given to spleen. Bernhard was altogether unconcerned with immunizing a reader against his surgical attacks on humanity, and if he made a blood sport of novel writing, he did it with a zeal and a gallows humour that is unrivaled in contemporary literature. His formally radical novels, which sometimes blasted into shape as a single, unbroken paragraph, were manic reports on such fixations as the futility of existence; the dark appeal, and the inevitable logic, of suicide; the monstrosity of human beings; and the abject pain of merely being alive. Bernhard's language strained the limits of rhetorical negativity: if his prose were any more anguished, it would simply transmit as moaning and wailing. Building interest in the grief experienced by people who look at the world and find it unbearable was a dark art of Bernhard's, and his characters do not resist the long walk to the death's door but run to it and claw at the surface, begging for entry. After all, says Strauch, the agonized painter in Bernhard's first novel, Frost, "there is an obligation towards the depth of one's own inner abyss," even if meeting that obligation destroys you.

A debut work of nearly unbearable bleakness, by a writer who would go on to produce some of the most nihilistic literature of the twentieth century, Frost, which was first published in German in 1963, is not so much a novel as a persuasive case against happiness, written in the relentless prose style that would become Bernhard's signature. An Austrian medical student accepts a perverse task from a teacher: go to Weng, where "the roadsides favour promiscuity" and "children fall into sudden fits of weakness," and clinically observe Strauch, the teacher's estranged brother. "Watch the way my brother holds his stick, I want a precise description of it," says the teacher. This is a perverse thing to want, particularly from someone who has not seen his brother in years, and it creeps towards suggesting that such cold, loveless interest from a family member has something to do with Strauch's miserable loneliness. It will turn out that other forces are bearing down on Strauch as well, and that misery happens to be one of his guilty pleasures. This is a man who excels at futility and unhappiness, and the performance of his grief will overpower every other spectacle in the novel.

Update: Few more excerpts from the review

A comparison between Sebald and Bernhard...

Bernhard's mortal impulses place him in the company of another contemporary German-language writer, W.G. Sebald. Both were perfect adherents to Kafka's credo to pursue the negative, because "the positive thing is given from the start." Each produced portraits of devastated characters, ruined by both circumstance and self-generated torment, but their techniques diverged in stark ways. Whereas Sebald built a tranquil moat around his characters' pain, Bernhard wheeled out the catapult and flung his characters into the fire, paying close attention to the sounds of their screams. In Sebald the emotion is buried under the veneer of manner and etiquette, and its repression and concealment create an exquisite pressure. We tiptoe around his characters and their elaborate denial, which, by its very banality, suggests to us extraordinary levels of pain that cannot be etched in language. They are so obliterated as to be beyond direct communication. Instead, they talk about the flora and fauna in wistful ways, they can reminisce dully, and we are left to infer the depth of their grief. Sebald promoted his credo of subtlety and indirection when he declared that atrocity could not be rendered directly in literature, a rule that would seem to stuff rags into the mouths of Bernhard's characters, who are so far from standing on ceremony that they may as well be crawling on their bellies through the dirt.

What does bind Bernhard and Sebald, beyond their instinct toward the inner darkness, is an interest in narrative techniques that moderate, and offset, the pain and anguish of their characters. Each frequently presents narrators whose chief function is to listen in on characters in pain, harvesting their suffering. Sebald's quiet narrators work like mollusks on the encoded confessions that come to them, and it's often the patience and curiosity of the narrators , or their simple drive to listen, that slowly draws in readers, until our own powers of detection and heightened and we can see the delicately buried signs of anguish. It is as though authorial choreography is not enough; an ally must be sent abroad into the text to witness the characters' wounds firsthand.

Bernhard, too, would prove to be obsessed with narrators who spy, effacing themselves in order to feed on a vaster world of feeling. In Frost, what keeps all of the madness and vitriol captivating is how elaborately it is mediated through the narrator, who breaks from direct quotation into stylized paraphrases, allowing the raw, spoken material from Strauch the refinements and range of literary prose. Strauch's consciousness is artfully parceled for us to sound both more deranged and more provocative than it would if we were to listen directly to his monologues. This is not your best friend's narcissism: boring and self-centered, repetitive, ignorant of its audience, Yet whenever Strauch worried his would for too long, the relentlessness of the wrath quickly becomes numbing and theatrical. It strangely loses its conviction.

And since I complained about his emphasis on negativity, I should add this para too where he explains why Bernhard is "uplifting and revelatory" (his focus is still on the content though):

If Frost is an apprentice work, a blast of raw feeling without the formal elegance of his later novels, it already heralds Bernhard's urge not just to look death in the face but to climb directly into its mouth and produce a fearless report of the architectural dimensions of a place that few of us care to imagine for very long. In writing that is remarkable for how close it takes us to our own ending, Bernhard is, finally, uplifting and revelatory, because he does not turn away from the most central and awful part of reality. His characters are so ruthlessly determined not to be fooled that they ruin themselves before our eyes. This is mercilessly honest work that shows the moral consequences of being highly alert to life, and it is terrifying to read. As the narrator of Frost says of his own report, "I could read the whole thing back, but I would only give myself a fright."

Mildred Pierce

"If there are more vicious quarrels in print than those in which these characters indulge their sadism I have not seen them. (...) That this is a novel that, once begun, will almost surely be read to the end is understandable, for it has in it the deep, slow pull of the ancient ooze where worms and serpents crawled; it reflects no codes, no restrictions, and none but the primordial necessities. It is a bath in sensation."

This is from a contemporary review of James Cain's novel Mildred Pierce. More reviews here.

I haven't read the book (it's not on the top of my list either) but saw the movie for the first time yesterday. Like all film-noirs of the time (on surface it is more of a melodrama, though of a very "un-family movie" type), it makes me wonder how did Hollywood lose all its viciousness? How did it become so tame?

Few Notes on The Radetzky March

Joseph Roth's novel has been praised by more than one nobel laureate so there is really no point in me adding my own enthusiastic recommendation (two thumbs way way up, btw). J M Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer have both called it a "masterpiece" while Joseph Brodskey, the Russian-American poet, said that "there is a poem on every page of the book." I will just add that though it is written by a comparatively obscure central european author, it is actually quite easy to read. (Just in case if you were wary of picking it up after seeing his name clubbed together with Musil, Mann or Kafka.)

I won't attempt to write a summary. Just a few thoughts after reading this otherwise very nicely written overview in The New Yorker of Roth's life and in particular this book. Joan Acocella in her essay says:

"Roth’s politics were not well worked out, and that fact underlies the one serious flaw of “The Radetzky March.” Lacking an explanation for the empire’s fall, Roth comes up with a notion of “fate,” and he bangs that drum portentously and repeatedly. I am almost glad the book has a fault. Roth extracted “The Radetzky March” from his very innards. This rather desperate, corny fate business reminds us of that fact, and counterbalances the crushing beauty of the rest of the book."

I think it was deliberate on Roth's part to keep the politics out of the narrative and quite in line with what he was trying to say in thematic terms. The novel, I felt, is a profoundly melancholic work, melancholic, in the Benjamin-ian or Sebald-ian (of Rings of Saturn) sense. It is not at all an objective account of a slice of life at a particular time or place or a fictional investigation into the historical causes of the demise of an empire. Otherwise, it could have easily become one of those tedious and pointless "historical epics". It is not an objective, realistic narrative at all. Everything is filtered through Roth's melancholic consciousness, so that he sees death everywhere from the very beginning. Whether it was the assassination of Archduke which precipitated the fall of the empire or something else, it doesn't matter. The point is, the empire and the social order was doomed like all empires and all social orders are. If it was not in 1914, it would have been a few years later. Same is true of individual lives too. Whether a life ends because of a particular disease or accident or it is because of the so-called natural causes (Bernhard style!) it doesn't matter. Life has to end, the cause is secondary and is assigned only in retrospect. The central truth is that everything has to end. Death is THE central fact of nature!

Also in this sense I think The Radetzky March resembles "the novel of ideas" more than the realistic Flaubert-Stendhal school of novel. (I also read somewhere that it is considered one of the best nineteenth century novels written in the twentieth century.) Indeed, if one reads it from a realistic novel perspective one will definitely get irritated with the repetitive metaphors, too many forced coincidences and a plot which is a little too tight for a "literary" novel. The dustjacket claims that Roth is "alongwith Robert Musil and Thomas Mann, among the greatest of the early twentieth century Central European writers." I think it fits better with a novel like The Magic Mountain than something like The Charterhouse of Parma. Roth may not be as sophisticated as Mann, but he shares many of Mann's preoccupations (e.g. the end of European civilization is one of the main themes of Magic Mountain too) and in the end, Radetzky March is far more moving, entertaining and gripping than Mann's novel.

I have copied some quotes from the book which will illustrate what I was trying to say. Also note that in most of the places death is spelled with a capital 'D'. My favourite is the fourth one.

"In those days there were a lot of men like Kapturak on the borders of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. They began to circle around the old empire like those black cowardly birds that ogle a dying man from infinitely far away. Dark and impatient, beating their wings, they wait for his end. Their slating beaks jab into their prey. No one knows where they come from or where they fly off to. They are the feathered brethren of enigmatic Death; they are his harbingers, his escorts, and his successors."

"He walked very slowly as if following a hearse."

"He calmly fell asleep, believing the worst was over. He did not know--old Herr Trotta--that fate was brewing bitter grief for him while he slept. He was old and tired, and death was already lurking, but life would not yet let him go. Like a cruel host it held him fast at the table becase he had not yet tasted all the bitterness that had been prepared for him."

"Trotta drank. The bare room grew homier. The naked electric bulb on its twisted wire, circled by whirring moths and swaying in the nocturnal wind, aroused fleeting cozy reflections on the brownish glass of the table. Gradually Trotta's disappointment mellowed into a pleasurable pain. He formed a kind of alliance with his grief. Everything in the world was extremely sorrowful today, and he, the lieutenant, was the midpoint of this miserable world. It was for him that the frogs were croaking so dolefully; the rueful crickets were lamenting for him. It was for him that the spring night was imbued with such a sweet, gentle sorrow, that the stars were so unreachably high in the heavens; for him alone their light twinkled with unrequited yearning. The infinite sorrow of the world fitted in perfectly with Trotta's misery. He suffered in utter harmony with the suffering universe. For behind the deep-blue vault of the sky, God himself gazed down at him in pity."

"Indeed, the appearance and the words of this strange district captain made them shudder. Perhaps they already felt the breath of Death, who was to grab them all a few months later--grab them by the throat! And they felt Death was breathing icily down their necks."

Literary Destinations

Some spur for a reluctant tourist like me. Via Bhupinder, a list of literary destinations across the world.

My favourite, Russia:

If you savor wine, you probably like traveling in France. If you appreciate good food, especially good food involving cured pork products, you're certainly drawn to Italy. If you love literature, however, the word-strewn, story-riddled, literary character-infested, continent-size country to which you most want to travel is probably Russia. It may be lazily regarded as "the East," but Russia's contributions are integral to the Western literary canon (as well as to the Western canons of music, dance and art). The universal themes of its greatest novels -- alienation, the individual's puniness against the forces of history, the struggle to invent a decent life, really bad weather -- make every reader feel Russian at one time or another.

I also want to go to Venice, with my copy of The Aspern Papers, Death in Venice and just in case I get bored with the two (they are quite boring, honestly speaking), I will have a DVD of Don't Look Now handy. The original novel I suspect will be too sub-literary for a noble enterprise like this!

Very disappointing that they left out Prague and Vienna! Two cities I really want to go to.

Werckmeister Harmonies Clip

The opening scene from Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies. See how he explains the phenomenon of solar eclipse with some poetic digressions towards the end. The whole scene is shot in a single cut, the original has a couple of minutes extra.



Have been meaning to read the Hungarian novel The Melancholy of Resistance on which this film is based, but haven't been able to lay my hands on it yet.

youtube has lots of clips from Bela Tarr's films. I particularly like this musical interlude from Damnation.

Sebald and Bernhard

from Understanding W G Sebald, before I return the book back to the library.

As discussed earlier, Sebald's brand of humour is rooted in exaggeration. And here too the influence of Bernhard, as well as (although less frequently cited) Bernhard's aesthtically "quiescent" fellow countryman, the aforementioned nineteenth-century novelist Adalbert Stifter, can be felt. As the literary critic James Wood observes, "for all the apparent quietness of Sebald's prose, exaggeration is its principle, an exaggeration he has undoubtedly learned from Bernhard." Likewise, the pessimism in Sebald's works Wood likens to Bernhard's, except that Bernhard's "principle of exaggeration" is applied more consistently to the grotesque, whereas Sebald's concentrates more commonly on the elegiac, although the grotesque is by no means lacking. Sebald acknowledges the significance of Bernhard for his literary life and refers to Bernhard's particular brand of literary "extremism" as "periscopic writing."

"paradoxical romantic axiom"

"The director gives his main actors very little to do. Since their job is to embody a paradoxical romantic axiom — lovers may die, but love never does — they are trapped within a narrow range of emotions. Ms. Weisz’s role is to glow and sigh, while Mr. Jackman registers various forms of anguish and desperation. The intensity of their feeling never breaks the surface, and the frame encases them like a vitrine. It’s hard to sympathize with their hunger to overcome death, since neither one is credibly alive to begin with."

--from the new york times review of The Fountain, the new film by Darren Aronofosky.

Also, I generally never look at the so-called "health" section of newspapers, but this article from NYT made some sense.

Volver

Just saw this wonderful new movie from Pedro Almodovar. It is not as good as All About My Mother or Talk to Her but still it is masterly. Almodovar's (tragi-)comic humanism felt a little too generous for me initially but I was soon won over. By the time film ended most of my misanthropy was dissolved away! It is full of surprises and filled to brim with genuine feelings. Don't read the reviews, just go if you get a chance.

Two thoughts. First, I had no idea that La Mancha, where the story is set, really existed in modern Spain, let alone it even had wind-mills! I always thought Cervantes had made up the wind-mills bit.

Second, this film I think would be a sharp turn-around for Penelope Cruz's image. She looks so "maternal" in the whole film that it will be difficult for me to imagine her doing "regular" things after it (let me indulge in some patriarchal mother-whore dichotomy here :)). I don't know how she or Almodovar did it, but the more he shows her cleavage in focus (and he does it a lot throughout the film) the more maternal she becomes...

Two images, one from the movie and the other, the "maternal" actress with the director...

The Radetzky March

"Back then before the Great War, when the incidents reported on these pages took place, it was not yet a matter of indifference whether a person lived or died. If a life was snuffed out from the host of the living, another life did not instantly replace it and make people forget the deceased. Instead, a gap remained where he had been, and both the near and distant witnesses of his demise fell silent whenever they saw this gap. If a fire devoured a house in a row of houses in a street, the charred site remained empty for a long time. For the bricklayers worked slowly and the leisurely, and when the closest neighbours as well as casual passersby looked at the empty lot, they remembered the shape and the walls of the vanished house. That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically."

The above passage sums up the theme of The Radetzky March quite well. The Great War, mentioned in the first sentence of the paragraph, is not just the first world war, but also a metaphor for death and the end itself, the death of the "old world", of order and of European civilization itself. It is beautifully written dark masterpiece. It is almost as if Roth were obsessed with death, death is mentioned on almost every second page of the novel, he sees death everywhere:

"The people in this area were the spawn of the swamps. For the swamps lay incredibly widespread across the entire face of the land, on both sides of the highway, with frogs, fever germs, and treacherous grass that could be a horrible lure into a horrible death for innocent wanderers unfamiliar with the terrain. Many died, and their final cries for help went unheard. But all the people who were born there knew the treachery of swamps and had something of that treachery themselves. In spring and summer, the air was thick with an intense and incessant croaking of frogs. An equally intense trilling of larks exulted under the skies. And a tireless dialogue took place between the sky and the swamp."

I am almost finished with the book. Will add more later when I am done...

Wong Kar-wai News!

The New York Times reports on his latest film "My Blueberry Nights," the shooting for which it seems is already over. It won't be like 2046 and the article says it is a "smaller, off-the-cuff film."

Mr. Khondji said that he and Mr. Wong had intended to adopt a casually alert, near-documentary style, using a small crew and natural light. But once they got under way, perhaps through force of habit, the shots became more stylized. Still, Mr. Khondji added: “It’s not as perfect as his last two movies. There’s no time for perfection.”