Chasing Homer by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

I lost this book somewhere after finishing it. It's an appropriate fate, maybe. The narrator of Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Chasing Homer is constantly trying to disappear. We know nothing about him, not his name or nationality or age; all we know is that he's being chased. We don't know who's chasing him; he doesn't even seem to know who's chasing him, or even what they look like. He only knows that if they find him, they will kill him brutally. It seems beside the point to ask whether these pursuers are real, because it's a question with no relevance to the fear and panic that are the subject of the book. The narrator can't even stop to determine whether they are real. He must keep moving at all times. Time narrows; for him there is only the present moment, and the self narrows too, down to its barest and most animal elements.

The narrator moves vaguely south through Europe. He boards ferries that travel along the Adriatic coast. (It's not hard to imagine him moving due southwest from Krasznahorkai's native Hungary.) On one such ferry, he overhears a local berating a Japanese tourist couple about visiting a beautiful and secluded island. The local whips out a copy of The Odyssey and begins reading. This island, we quickly intuit, is supposedly the island of Calypso, where Odysseus himself was waylaid for years before his final push home to Ithaca. The narrator decides desperately to make his way there, imagining that Calypso's island might be his last chance to shake his pursuers. There's a funny reversal here. For Odysseus, Calypso's island was a trap, a distraction that kept him from getting home, but the narrator of Chasing Homer has no home. To be eternally waylaid, suspended, is the best he can imagine. The island represents, perhaps, the pause in the plot, the interruption of the forward motion of events that leads inexorably to death.

I thought this was fine. It struck me as very Beckett. It's the kind of book that seeks to capture a very singular feeling, and it does that very well. It eschews the realistic-literary belief that feelings should be incarnated in specific stories. At the same time, like the best of the "brodernist" writers, it winks at genre fiction tropes that have already become a little outdated. Chasing Homer is a kind of thriller, pared down to its barest essence--just as the narrator is pared down to his barest essence. It's a multimedia project that's interspersed with illustrations by artist Max Neumann. These illustrations are sketchy and flat, made of half-erased pencil lines and fields of thick black that capture the novel's reduction of the human. It's accompanied, too, by a music score by Miklos Szilveszter accessed by QR code that I haven't listened to because I lost the book. I thought the illustrations were also fine.

Divorcing by Susan Taubes

For a little while longer she tried to understand what induced her to abandon a more exciting, important pursuit just for lying in bed in this room, till she realized it was not a considered choice. She blundered into awakening. If she is still baffled, and even while getting on her feet with relative ease, struggles to recall by what tremendous effort she flung herself or was cast out of sleep, if this Wednesday morning seems so odd in its banality and part of her mind continues to dive for some deep reason it's because in the dreamer's world it had to make sense. Dream has its own time. While one is dreaming one does not know this of course; that it will end. In dreaming one assumes it will go on indefinitely, as in living--a reasonable delusion based on life experience: life goes on indefinitely until one is dead. Only dreams end. And in this respect loves and plays and stories are like dreams: they end.

Sophie Blind wants a divorce from her husband, Ezra. They are already living apart, Ezra in New York and Sophie in Paris, shuttling their three young boys between them. Sophie is already seeing other men, men who provide her with passions missing from her marriage to Ezra, but no more a possibility of permanence. Yet, Ezra is adamant that the marriage cannot end, refuses to grant the divorce, until the problem is solved--Sophie is killed by a car while crossing a New York street. Wait a minute, we ask--is this novel being narrated by a dead woman? Sure enough, in the very next chapter, we find ourselves within her consciousness as she lies in her coffin, being attended by her family, her still-husband, her children, each rewarded by her death by being more in control of her life and being than ever.

Divorcing is one of those books that rhymes unsettlingly with the author's life. Shortly after its publication to tepid reviews, Taubes took her own life by drowning. (Her body was identified, in another one of those lovely literary rhymes, by her friend Susan Sontag.) The sense of an eerie coincidence in Taubes' death is undercut by the fact that it was a suicide. Sophie is self-evidently a version of Taubes herself, also a Hungarian emigre to the United States and a daughter to a notorious psychoanalyst; in her suicide, perhaps, Taubes brought her life even further in line with that of the character she had created. This knowledge only amplifies the bittersweet fantasy of the dead narrator, who can hear as her life is measured and assessed, and who is called on by an angelic jury to make an accounting of it.

One of the strange things about Divorcing is that it moves backwards. It opens with Sophie's post-Ezra life, and her tragic death, and from there moves back in time to her young relationship with Ezra and her childhood with her father, the analyst. In a way, it's a novel that mirrors the process of analysis, moving deeper and deeper through layers of agglutinized time to what, one hopes, are the fundamental truths at the root of Sophie's ennui and despair. The logic is implacable and undeniable; as Sophie's father notes, the "new science" is incontrovertible because it "said that it was part of human nature to dislike and reject its view about human nature. You thought you were saying something against the doctrine or about human nature but in fact everything that was said in the doctrine was about you." In the same conversation, he notes that Sophie "was really in love with him and wanted to marry him and there was no point in denying it; that was part of her Electra complex to deny it." The narrative plumbs back father and farther, trying to explain Sophie, and pulls out this plum--her issues with men are, at root, Daddy issues. And yet the role of men--her father's carelessness, Ezra's domineering--are for their part absolved.

As it goes backward in time, Divorcing goes backward in style. By the end of the novel, Taubes seems to settle into a skillful but straightforward realism, abandoning some of the more avant garde touches that characterize the novel's first chapters: the structural and temporal shifting, the narration by the dead woman--this aspect of her point of view never returns or is reemphasized--and the loose play with genre and form: a long conversation between Ezra and her father, for example, is formatted in dialogue like a one-act play. A biography of Ezra is captured in Renata Adler-like vignettes. It might be said that the novel moves toward realism as analysis uncovers the truth; to me, we are meant to be reminded of the ways that realism, too, conceals and obscures, and that truth--and liberation, that goal which is reached for an not attained--requires new modes and styles from us. I think you can feel Taubes reaching for that, a literary mode that would free the spirit and mind from the cage of bourgeois marriage; that the novel expresses its own failures makes it doubly sad.

Iza's Ballad by Magda Szabo

Vince was here, so clearly that she didn't need to talk to him. She couldn't see him but felt his presence and it was as if this was the very opportunity her confused thoughts were waiting for. Slowly the darkness in her mind lifted. She didn't tell Vince how hard it had been waiting for him, and how impossible it was to describe the dreadful emptiness of life without him because Vince knew all that, and he wasn't going to say where he'd been and what he'd been doing. Strange how quickly he had become part of the new estate. There was nothing frightening or disturbing about him; everything was as natural as it had been throughout their lives together; it was just that he had turned into a house, a set of buildings, a light bulb. The strange thing was how easy it was to assemble him from such tiny fragments. How could a man turn into a building? What material might he be made of? It was a pity he couldn't speak and tell her what she wanted to know.

Iza's Ballad is about two women, a mother and a daughter, and how each of their lives is transformed the death of Vince, their husband and father. Ettie has been with Vince for most of her life, and his death leaves her life deflated, emptied out of its essence or being. She takes comfort in the practicality and judgment of their daughter Iza, who has decided to take her mother away from the old house in the village where she grew up and take her to live with her in modern Budapest. Ettie is grateful for Iza's ability to see clearly and act prudently when she herself is bewildered, but Iza's plan turns out to be a real stinker: there is no room in Iza's life for Ettie, and in Budapest she begins to waste away.

The setup might seem like it leads to comedy, as the old woman's country manners clash with the young woman's citified ways. But Iza's Ballad is not a comedy, and the small ways Iza unwittingly robs the old woman of her life actually seem more tragic because they are so small: the items not taken from the old house, the furniture taken but reupholstered, the cook who prevents the old woman from cooking meals. Ettie is hopelessly out of her element in Budapest and a danger to modern appliances; it's easy to be sympathetic to Iza, whose want to look after her mother is sincere. But as Ettie becomes more and more despondent, Iza's practicality begins to look too aloof, too suffocating, too emotionless.

Iza's Ballad is one of those books where the characters' histories must be laid out in every detail before the author is satisfied that they have become real. Behind the conflict between Ettie and Iza there are innumerable decades, centering, naturally, on Vince the husband and Vince the father. It seems that Vince had once been a judge in the small village, and had been removed and disgraced after standing up for some defendant (I was not totally clear on this) against the pressures of Nazified Hungary. To Iza, history like this is part of a past that modern Budapest seems to have left behind. To her ex-husband Antal, whose life has been entwined with Vince's and Ettie's as much as Iza's, this past must be preserved; so much so that he even buys the old house from Ettie and Iza when they move to Budapest. Iza's Ballad has a few minor characters like this, including Iza's boyfriend Domokos and Antal's fiancee Lidia, who have become so entangled with the family that they too deserve their own viewpoint sections.

Iza's Ballad disturbed me because it seems to recognize a fundamental and cosmic tragedy in what are common experiences: every couple must experience, to some degree, what Ettie goes through when Vince dies, and it's horrible. The tragedy is compounded by Iza's inability to understand it; her take-charge attitude is in the end, only a shield to keep her from feeling, but even if she were to marry Domokos, or return to Antal, wouldn't she, too, end up like Ettie in the end? And the novel's all the more disturbing because it refuses, as you might expect, to give Ettie and Iza a moment of reconciliation or mutual understanding. The disconnect between them is resilient, permanent, and perhaps more indicative of the way we relate to our own parents--or children--than we'd like to think.