Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg

My parents  had five children. We now live in different cities, some of us in foreign countries, and we don't write to each other often. When we do meet up we can be indifferent or distracted. But for us it takes just one word. It takes one word, one sentence, one of the old ones from our childhood, heard and repeated countless times. All it takes is for one of us to say 'We haven't come to Bergamo on a military campaign', or 'Sulphuric acid stinks of fart', and we immediately fall back into our old relationships, our childhood, our youth, all inextricably linked to those words and phrases. If my siblings and I were to find ourselves in a dark cave or among millions of people, just one of those phrases or words would allow us to recognise each other. Those phrases are our Latin, the dictionary of our past, they're like Egyptian or Assyro-Babylonian hieroglyphics, evidence of a vital core that has ceased to exist but that lives on in its texts, saved from the fury of the waters, the corrosion of time.

Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon details the life of a middle-class family in northern Italy before, during, and after the advent of fascism. There's Natalia herself, of course, though she sort of disappears in the book, becoming the "invisible eyeball" of the text; her father, a chemist prone to outbursts of comic anger; her more diffident mother; her brothers, many of whom become mixed up to some degree in the resistance movement against Mussolini. It's a family that's unusual but not that unusual. You may not have a father who loves skiing to a fault, or who speaks in nothing but exclamation points, but you may recognize the rhythms of a family who are knit together by a series of phrases and quotations that emblemize, for each one, the experiences of growing up together. We may not have a mother who, as Ginzburg emphasizes, tells the same stories over and over again, but who among us does not recognize their parents by the little linguistic quirks that formed the environment in which we came of age? 

Family Lexicon has a strange relationship with the Mussolini years. Clearly they hit the family hard: many of them spent time in jail, and Ginzburg's brother was forced into exile in France; her own husband, Leone Ginzburg, died in one of Mussolini's prisons. But it's hard to shake the feeling that the advent of fascism is an unwelcome distraction from the true subject of the book, something that must be dealt with as an external force that saps the focus on the inner dynamics of the family and their various friends and hangers-on. Ginzburg's death is, at first at least, dashed off with a single line; only after reading several pages about the family's changing habits do we come to understand that the fascist government has ended; Mussolini has been hung from the Esso station somewhere out of the novel's sight. One result is that the book remains light and comic even in the face of the war, yet it never seems morally compromised, nor does the irony of the distance between style and setting become bitter or unpalatable.

It's hard to shake the feeling, too, that Ginzburg herself represents the same kind of problem for the novel. She manages to keep herself invisible for most of the novel, except by necessity: we learn much about the family friend Leone before Ginzburg lets it slip that they become married. In her preface, Ginzburg makes much of her fealty to the truth, saying that the thought of fictionalizing her family's story repels her. And yet, she writes herself out of the story in a way. We know so little of her desires or conflicts, and yet she manages to communicate powerfully the feeling of being swept away on the current of a powerful family environment.

Cuyahoga by Pete Beatty

My brother's stories are more apple cider. They are good to drink but you will not forget yourself entirely. Wholesome tales, without too many fricasseed widows. True mostly--I will not lie any more than is wanted for decency. Simple and moral, easy to grab, the better to encourage someone over the the head with. Not too quiet--you must not fall asleep. Let us have commerce and racing horses. Progress and the mastery of nature. Swap swords for axes and plows. Let us have tenderness but also a dash of cussedness and tragedy. All in the manner native to Ohio.

"Tall tales" emerged out of the country's first frontier: the woodlands of the interior and Midwest. Think Paul Bunyan, clearing the trees for civilization. Pete Beatty's debut novel Cuyahoga focuses on a tall tale character named Big Son, whose story is narrated by his brother Medium Son, also known as Meed. Big Son's deeds are legendary: he rastles Lake Erie, fells hundreds of trees at a stroke, and climbs a two-mile ladder to see what a cloud is made of. But Big Son lives, unfortunately, in a world that is becoming less myth, less frontier, and more civilization, and that's an uneasy place for a tall tale to live. Big Son wants nothing more to marry the love of his life, Cloe Inches, but how do you marry a tale? And who will give a myth a real job, and money to live on?

Big is the tutelary spirit of Ohio City on the banks of the Cuyahoga River. The book's larger plot focuses on the controversy between Ohio City and Cleveland over who will build a bridge over the Cuyahoga; Cleveland manages it first and sets the tolls. "Two Bridges or None" becomes the rallying cry of the Ohio Citians, and they enlist Big Son in building a bridge, which he does in a matter of days. But of course, Big's bridge is built more of myth than wood or steel, and it collapses in a grand tall-tale fashion. Big's problem is that once the frontier is gone, the figure from the tall tale is no longer needed. What Ohio City needs is industry, expertise, civilization--it needs, in a sense, realism. Beatty emphasizes this point with a funny aside about Johnny Appleseed, depicting him as a cider-swilling drunk unable to handle the transition from his an economy of small homestead orchards to the mass production of food. Big Son is not alone; the country is leaving its tall tales behind.

I was really impressed by Cuyahoga. It's a little scattershot and rambunctious, but it's shaggy quality well matches that of the tall tales that are its inspiration. Books that puncture the myths of the American frontier, even cheekily or ironically so, are not so unfamiliar, but I don't think I've ever seen someone do such a deep exploration of this particular aspect of American myth, perhaps because the time frame--that doldrum period between the Revolution and the Civil War--looms so little in the popular imagination. More than anything, I was impressed that Beatty is able to keep the bit going, and able to keep it from being just an interesting premise. The layers layer well: the jealousy of ordinary Meed toward his supernatural brother; a subplot about a devious grocer intent on blowing up the Cleveland Bridge; the various tall-tale figures and creatures, like the treacherous "night pigs." Facsimiles of newspapers and bulletins add to the story rather than seeming like empty exercises in period style, and the 19th century voice is just anachronistic enough to feel as if it speaks to modern ears.

What Cuyahoga revealed to me is that American myth didn't disappear; it just went underground. The devious grocer, nicknamed Dog, describes seeing General Washington as a young man: an emaciated, toothless figure. We made him into a god with our stories, Dog suggests, but perhaps we did worse: we sapped the vitality of the man by taking what we wanted from him. Big Son belongs to a passing era, and his tragedy is that he's unable, like the other myths of America, to transform or be disguised, or hide away in a story more appropriate to the cynicism of the day.

Human Acts by Han Kang

Twenty years lie between that summer and now. Red bitches, we're going to exterminate the lot of you. But you've turned your back on all that. On spat curses, the abrupt smack of water against skin. The door leading back to that summer has been slummed shut; you've made sure of that. But that means the way is also closed that might have led back to the time before. There is no way back to the world before the torture. No way back to the world before the massacre.

In 1980, the South Korean military brutally put down a student protest at Chonnam University in the city of Gwangju. Han Kang's novel Human Acts focuses on the victims of what's now known as the "Gwangju Massacre," centering on the killing of a middle school-aged boy named Dong-ho. The novel is arranged as a series of discrete stories loosely related to Dong-ho's killing, arranged chronologically so that they move bit-by-bit from the moment of the massacre to its aftermath and the possibilities of its memory; they include an editor facing the censorship of a new translation, a woman struggling with whether to tell the story of her rape and brutalization to an academic, and even Dong-ho's mother, who struggles decades after to make sense of her son's death.

Some of these stories are better than others. My favorite was actually the second chapter, which is narrated by the ghost of Dong-ho's friend, Jeong-mi, as he follows his body as it is disposed of by the military authorities. (Jeong-mi, one might think, would dispute the characterization of Human Acts that it begins with Dong-ho's death; the fact that Dong-ho faces the death of his friend before his own only emphasizes the persistence of the brutality that Han describes here.) Han describes Jeong-mi as only dimly aware of the other ghosts that cling to other bodies, and not able to interact with them; in death he is isolated and alienated, the possibility of solidarity rent asunder, as the military no doubt intends when they move to commit violence against a group of children and youths. Jeong-mi's chapter follows the first, which is set in a large warehouse where volunteers arrange the bodies of those killed so that they might be identified by their family. This, too, Han tells us, is a "human act," this regime of courage and care, as much as the atrocities.

Han keeps her focus tightly on the victims of those atrocities. The brutalizers in the military remain as faceless and nameless as movie stormtroopers, and Han isn't interested in contextualizing their deeds or giving their perspectives. There's a moral logic to that, but it left me wondering how such brutality was sanctioned in South Korean society; left unexplored, for example, is the way the massacre was justified with a familiar kind of red-baiting that associated the students with communist North Korea. In the place of dramatizing these dynamics, I felt that Human Acts lurched into a kind of history-book exposition that isn't entirely redeemed by authorial smoothing ("Through the newspapers, you witnessed the seemingly inexorable rise of Chun Doo-hwan, the young general who had been the former president's favorite...") Han is too skilled and too careful to veer into a sentimentalism about the power of the human spirit, or the importance of social memory, but my lasting impressions of Human Acts remained rather circular: brutality, in the end, is brutal. Oh, and I really hated the second person point-of-view that most of the book uses.

Monnew by Ahmadou Kourouma

Djigui didn't suffer from any illness, or enchantment, or poison, and no accident could vanquish him, finish him off. He had prayed too much, exposed too many sacrifices and offerings against those venal faults, permanently eliminating them from his destiny. Against Djigui there remained only Djigui. He had attained the immunity of those serpents on desert rocks who die only by suicide, by biting their own tails. His end was found in himself, in his fits of anger, his saliva. This truth was accepted by everyone, even the Toubab toubib of Soba. It was s cientifically established that, to prevent him from undoing himself, he had to be spared monnew, anger and shame, and if unfortunately they didn't manage that, the only remedy known on this earth was to bring to the feet of the AgeOldMan the person by whom the monne had come (in the Bolloda he was called the accursed one), on his knees, naked to the waist, hands tied behind his back, and let the AgeOldMan take a big nasty bite in the victim's occiput.

The word monnew means a great and powerful shame. For Djigui, the king of a fictional African country named Soba, monnew is found in the arrival of the white Frenchmen, called Toubabs, who have taken control of the country and made Djigui a vassal. At first, it seems as if Djigui's vassalage may be to his benefit. The French mostly keep away, and their selection of Djigui as king over all the competing groups and tribes of Soba cements his power in a way that his own prayers and sacrifices, his own years of constant warfare, never could. But the French are fickle, and soon Djigui's power is on the wane; they depose Djigui and turn to his rascally son Bema, but they cannot diminish Djigui's status and notoriety as the "AgeOldMan" of his people. Monnew follows the fictional African nation as it becomes more closely incorporated with the French metropole; after DeGaulle confers citizenship upon France's colonial subjects, they are even invited to send representatives to French parliament, but this, too, becomes a political powderkeg with Djigui at his center. By the end of his life, Djigui--who we are told reaches the age of 125--is witness to the the whole arc of African colonial history.

I found Monnew really fascinating. Kourouma, as I understand it, was a Malinke, the same ethnic group as the legendary Mansa Musa and Sundiata Keita, though he was from the Ivory Coast and not one of the West African countries where the Malinke are most associated today, like Mali and Senegal. One of the hallmarks of West African society is/has been the griot, the historian-storyteller whose facility with the oral tradition makes them a kind of poet-slash-official-recordkeeper. Djigui is surrounded by griots who support his struggle against the French by memorializing his deeds and those of his ancestors in their poetry. When his best griot is killed, it is as big a blow for Djigui as the death of his greatest general. The story of Djigui in Monnew is not just a story of continued degradation and shame, but a story of the growth of Djigui's legend; at the beginning, he is a struggling chieftain whose sacrifices seem to be barely heeded by the gods, but toward the book's end, he's been ennobled somehow by his significant place in the larger struggle between the Africans and their French conquerors.

Monnew reminds of Camara Laye's The Radiance of the King, another book about the collision of African powers and European colonials set in a fictional African country that is meant to stand in for a huge swath of colonized places and peoples. But Laye's book has the tight psychological focus of modern literature, whereas Kourouma's book reads more like one of those griot-poems: a sweeping epic that covers a lot of time and a lot of ground. The prose is richly ironic (it was an... interesting choice to translate whatever French or Malinke word the people of Soba use to describe themselves with the n-word in English) but it also has the unmistakable tenor of something translated from another language, and another worldview. It's so steeped in the context of pre-colonial West African society that there are many details I didn't quite get; but on the whole it felt like a real window into something that must be quite difficult to communicate to a "Western" audience.

With the addition of the Ivory Coast, my "Countries Read" list is up to 96!

The Little Hotel by Christina Stead

When Mrs. Trollope found that the bed was not for her, she went crying to her friend Madam Blaise. They were on good terms at that moment; and the next thing I knew was that Madame Blaise had moved her chaise lounge into Mrs. Trollope's room. I flew into a temper at that, and scolded them both. I was really furious. It's simple. To keep order in a hotel, everything must stay in the same place; and then there's the logic of equality. If one guest has new linen curtains, the other must have the best of the older curtains; if one guest has a plush new armchair, the other must have a cane lounge; if one has an extra table to write on, the other must have a footstool. I sometimes let Charlie fetch things from the attic or even from my own room to be sure of this equality; but I cannot allow others to make changes; I have a plan of it all in my mind.

Christina Stead's The Little Hotel is narrated by Madame Bonnard, the proprietor of an inexpensive hotel in the Swiss Alps. Her charges are more residents than guests, long term visitors who live the life of exiles. They are eccentrics, like the beautiful but dying Miss Chillard, or the wildly bigoted American Mrs. Powell. One madman claims to be the mayor of a city in Belgium; he sends Madame Bonnard and the other residents cryptic messages that are numbered as official documents for recordkeeping--Document 126 says that the coffee was particularly good this morning, etc., etc. I was a little sad to see the Mayor whisked out of the pages early on, to be replaced with characters whose eccentricities are a little more mtued.

Though narrated by Madame Bonnard, the true protagonist of The Little Hotel is Madame Trollope, an aging woman who is traveling with her "cousin," Mister Wilkins. In reality, the pair are longtime lovers, living more or less as husband and wife; though free of their former marriages, Mister Wilkins refuses to marry Madame Trollope or live openly as partners. He prefers the wink-wink artifice of it all, even though everyone at the hotel knows the deal. He also prefers to sponge off of the wealthier Madame Trollope, who, at the hotel, begins to lurch toward a breaking point. Is it possible for her to shake off Mister Wilkins, who really is a smug little creep, when she knows that the alternative is likely lifelong loneliness? What is the cost, The Little Hotel asks, of love?

The Little Hotel really has its charms. At times it approaches the heights of absurd misbehavior that make Stead's best novels so good, as when Madame Blaise complains about how her doctor husband pesters her with photos of diseased children--by producing a stack of the very same photos at dinner. Such is the world of The Little Hotel, where the residents revenge their own petty hurts and slights upon each other. There's something here about the nature of Europe after World War II; though they are nominally all supposed to get along--especially here in always-neutral Switzerland--the enmities of the American, British, and French residents toward Germans and Italians--form a powerful undercurrent. But the enmity that once sharpened the wits and feelings of Europeans no longer does; in fact, it seems to be an image of Europe slipping into a kind of bored senility, where resentments no longer have any national shape, but turn inward, toward the bedroom and the spirit. Or maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. More than anything else it seemed like a pleasant look into one of those communities where people are a little too close, and everybody would benefit from a nap or a nice walk. 

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.

Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio might be the ur-text of that dreaded contemporary beast: the collection of linked short stories. Set in a town much like the one Anderson grew up in in northern Ohio around the turn of the 20th century, Anderson's stories are linked by the presence of George Willard, a young teenager and the only employer of the local newspaper, who by virtue of his vocation is privy in a way no one else is to the private lives of Winesburgians. Winesburg is a conventional sort of place, an every-town; Anderson emphasizes this--I have no idea if intentionally--by naming every other character Will or Tom or some variation thereof. But the people that populate the stories are anything but unconventional; or, perhaps it would be right to say that they are conventional in that they reveal what eccentricities lie beneath the conventional surface of every small town dweller.

George is a sensitive man, a deep thinker. He is young, and coming into many revelations about himself and his place in the world. (The virtuoso passage above is George, coming to a realization about the role of happenstance in his life, and its brevity.) Like many sensitive men, he feels that he alone is sensitive, and feels more deeply than others. But Winesburg, Ohio suggests that everyone feels this way, as if they are a little too strange for the world around them. Some of the Winesburgians are genuine oddballs, like the savage proto-incel Wash Williams, who insists to George that all women are dead inside, or Doctor Reefy, who keeps a pocket full of balled-up papers and seems to have zero patients. Others are just anxious about being oddballs, as in the story "Queer," about the son of a unpopular shopowner who becomes obsessed with the idea that other people think he's weird. He flirts with a friendship with George, thinking the newspaper man can put his story right, but then pushes him away; convinced--for no reason--that George, too, thinks he's "queer," he rushes him in the night and attacks him--thus becoming the thing he fears.

I loved the stories in Winesburg, Ohio that deal with longing and desire. George pines for a small sequence of girls, each of whom pines for him or someone else; they are all in love with love, as the saying goes, but unable to really love or even see the objects of their affection. One of the most powerful stories is "Adventure," about a woman who believes her boyfriend when he tells her he will come back to marry her. She waits and waits, until she realizes that she has grown old waiting (old in 1910 terms, so, like, thirty) and rushes out naked into a rainstorm as a kind of cathartic release, or collapse. The story "Loneliness" captures a timeless truth when one character tells George, "I wanted her and all the time I didn't want her"--the great ambivalence of human connection.

Winesburg, Ohio sounds like it ought to be one of those dreary 19th century realist works, something on par with Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. (Though I do like those books, I think you have to admit they are a little tedious and unimaginative stylistically.) But it really stands shoulders above those; in places its quite strange and modernist-sounding. In other moments it resembles Willa Cather, who had just published her first novels when Winesburg came out in 1919. Like Cather, Anderson captures a time and a place--a small Midwestern town at the turn of the century--but the truths within feel as true as ever.

Picture by Lillian Ross

The sun had gone down and the light coming into the suite, high in the Tower, was beginning to dull. Huston looked as though he might be waiting--having set up a Huston scene--for the cameras to roll. But, as I gradually grew to realize, life was not imitating art, Huston was not imitating himself, when he set up such a scene; on the contrary, the style of Huston pictures, Huston being one of the few Hollywood directors who manage to leave their personal mark on the films they make, was the style of the man. In appearance, in gestures, in manner of speech, in the selection of the people and objects he surrounded himself with, and in the way he composed them into individual 'shots' (the abrupt close-up of the thumbnail scraping the head of a kitchen match) and then arranged his shots into dramatic sequence, he was simply the raw material of his own art; that is, the man whose personality left its imprint, unmistakably, on what had come to be known as a Huston picture.

In 1950, director John Huston set out to make a film adaptation of Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage. He was followed in his attempt by Lillian Ross, a veteran journalist from The New Yorker who wanted to see the process of making a picture from start to finish. If she had only waited a little bit (and had an expense account that would take her to Africa) she might have seen Huston filming the critical and commercial hit The African Queen, but The Red Badge of Courage turned out to be a flop, just as MGM chief L. B. Mayer expected it to be. But it wasn't a disaster, either--although it failed to make back its budget, it received good notices in the press, among a few detractors. It wasn't some big Fitzcarraldo-style fiasco, where the cast and crew were tortured by the grand delusions of an auteur. Though that might have made a salacious and readable novel, what Ross captures here is something much more subtle and enduring: the steady grind of the studio system, and the way that vision sometimes fails when transferred to celluloid.

The star of Ross' novel is Huston, the legendary director. Her Huston is determined and imaginative, but also practical and collaborative; he believes firmly in the movie he's making, even as he takes in the critiques of his entourage, including producer Gottfried Reinhardt and studio liaison Dore Schary. Huston is an artist, but he can speak in dollars and centers. Studio head Mayer is Huston's foil, a inveterate bottom-liner who extols the virtues of sentimental entertainment like Mickey Rooney movies. You want to hate Mayer, because he's so anti-art, but it's hard to come away from Picture unimpressed by his discernment; he knows that Red Badge will struggle with viewers in a way that Huston and his entourage can only admit when it's too late. Ross captures the voice of both characters in a way that makes them feel magnetic and real; she manages, too, to cut through the backlot lingo and give us a sense of the deeper motivations animating these men.

It's an open question, perhaps, whether Red Badge would have done better if Mayer and the studio had supported it or promoted it more. Reinhardt makes a number of last minute moves to "save" the picture from its middling early screeners, deleting some of the scenes cherished by Huston and adding a cheesy voiceover narration from Crane's novel. (Huston, swallowed up by The African Queen, has washed his hands of the whole thing.) I think, in the end, that Mayer was right, that the shapelessness of Crane's novel just wouldn't play for audiences of the time, but the last-minute editing process makes a double tragedy of the film, turning it into something that is both not a moneymaker and not the artwork that Huston had imagined. That's the story of Picture: not a failure, not an underappreciated masterpiece--just a hash and a disappointment.

Otter Country by Miriam Darlington

We are eye to wild eye; its face is armed with a startling array of walrus bristles. Its ears are larger than I expected, almost like a cat's, and its nostrils are visibly measuring my scent. There is nothing shy about this animal. I have got close enough to see five different sets of whisker around its face and under its chin. In its eyes I can see shock at what on earth I am, and at what I could be doing in its hunting ground. The live current in both of us prickles. When I do not move, it comes a little closer, huffs, then melts bodily into the water surface, leaving the shadow of a ripple and nothing else.

As a child, Miriam Darlington was obsessed with otters: otters in aquarium, otter skeletons in the natural history museum, and so forth. And who wouldn't? Few animals seem to combine the wildness and precociousness, the sheer charisma of an otter. But Darlington's obsession was confined to aquaria and museums because it's very hard to see a river otter in the wild; unlike their sea cousins who float happily in the harbors of northern America, river otters are secretive creatures whose sensitive powers of perception are rivaled only by their power to slip away and not be perceived. Otter Country is the story of a year in Darlington's life in which she vows to seek out the otter in the wild and learn its ways, a journey that takes her from Scotland to Wales to Cornwall and elsewhere in the British Isles.

Otter Country, it must be said, contains mostly scenes of Darlington not finding otters. Like I said, they seem to be quite elusive. They leave behind certain signs of their existence, like the feces, called spraint, they use to mark the paths of their territory, but by the time you see them, the otter has already disappeared again. It's all right, because Darlington is a talented writer of landscapes and a patient noticer of the natural world. Though she never makes this quite explicit, I got the sense that one of the great rewards of Darlington's otter search is that it forces her to pay closer attention to the world around her, to take in what one might not ordinarily notice. The otters are rare visitors, but there always trees and birds and things. When the otters do appear, the encounters are transformative: Darlington describes coming face-to-face with an otter while disguised as something like a hunk of tree branches. And of course these encounters last only seconds--small fare when compared with the months and months that Darlington spends searching.

Otter Country reminded me quite a bit of H is for Hawk, perhaps pointedly so. Darlington makes a push at the kind of intertextual literary quality that book possesses when she brings in a pair of otter books: Gavin Maxwell's accounts of raising African otters at his Scotland home (haven't read it), and Henry Williamson's imagining of an otter's life, Tarka the Otter (read it, liked it). Later, the book takes a more scientific-personal-essayish mold, as Darlington meets with otter experts about the significant ecological dangers that the river otter faces in the England of the 21st century. (Like the stories of many of the world's endangered species, it's one of great improvement and still-great risk.)

I'm not sure if I learned much about otters, and the book is quite intentionally very slow. But I did find it pleasant and purposeful, and like Darlington, I felt the enchantment of providence when the otters finally do show up.