The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

I have been trying to read The Goldfinch since Randy read it in August of last year, but the novel is a steep 771 pages which was too long to try to squeeze in while my school year was beginning. My school made it a summer reading option for one of my grade levels, so as this year finished up I decided to unwrap it. I did so without having read Randy's review, but I also remembered that around that time last year we were really focused on the question: what makes a great novel? My answer included the idea that "over and over a lifetime, a person can read it and get something different from it" which means I can't squarely put The Goldfinch in the Great Novel category, but I do look forward to reading it in a decade or so and seeing if it stands up to my test. I think it will and hope it does. 

(Semi-spoiler alert? I am only giving away what happens in the first 50 pages, which is less than 1% of this tome). 

The novel opens with a character in an Amsterdam hotel room indicating that his life has somehow gone awry after the death of his mother: "though everything that's happened to me since then is thoroughly my own fault, still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life. Her death the dividing mark: Before and After." Right here at the beginning, I've already become a little smitten with Ms. Tartt and her ability to take a character in a wholly unique scenario but express that characters feelings in a way that they are universal for the reader - we all have Before and Afters in our lives, even if the dividing line isn't the death of a parent. It then becomes apparent that the Amsterdam hotel is the start of a frame story, and we are taken to the day his mother dies. 

Theo, a teenager in New York, killing time with his mom before his expulsion hearing. They are in a museum so his mother, the art historian, can see The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius.

In Gallery 23 are people who will be connected together forever. Theo - the troubled teen - and Pippa - the redheaded violin virtuoso. Pippa's initial reaction to the painting is to ask concernedly, "It has to live its whole life like that?" (chained to the little bar) while Theo, who spends a lot of time with this painting, later remarks that "Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature - fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place." Their differing reactions probably say a lot about how these two young adults react to very similar circumstances - they are both in the building when it is bombed by terrorists and they both lose the person who loves them the most in the world.

The book follows Theo out of that gallery with the Goldfinch painting which he takes in shock as directed by a dying gentleman. At first he is too frantic about his mother to really realize what he has done, but eventually he becomes too scared to reveal his actions since his life is already in turmoil with social services and other issues. He reconnects with Pippa throughout his life, and she seems to have acknowledged the sadness and find some way to have a life while Theo doesn't even realize how he is a goldfinch tied to the painting the way the goldfinch is tied to the wall.

Probably the most skillful thing about the novel is the way Tartt is able to create a character who is compelling for almost 800 pages, especially because he's not very likable. He's emotionally distant from those around him, makes really bad life decisions, does some outright criminal things - and yet, I wanted to see what happened to him. I didn't want him to have a happy ending - he doesn't really deserve that, but I also didn't want him to have a tragic ending - he doesn't really deserve that either, and Tartt masterfully gives a satisfying ending that is not too perfectly tied up or justified.

The novel is also filled with characters who are absolutely loveable - Boris and Hobie and Pippa and Popper - so that may be what makes the text so compelling. As an audience, it's much easier to relate to Hobie, the goodhearted man who tries to do right by Theo, because we like to think of ourselves as goodhearted people who would try to do the right thing, even for a person who is sort of a screw up. 

The writing is top notch, of course, with characters throwing out these gorgeous lines such as: "People die, sure," my mother was saying. "But it's so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness."

It's also funny. I love my puppies to distraction, so when a character is reunited with the dog Popper, I adored how the characters interacted with Popper like he was a human. "Drive him around in back seat, wherever he wants to go...I will take him to the deli! For a bacon egg and cheese...we had a very nice nap together, the two of us...we ate a bacon sandwich." 

 My only complaint is that the frame that opens and ends the novel is never really explained. By the end Theo is directly addressing the reader and the writing process ("I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader"), but there is no explanation of why he is writing to a non-existent reader. I would have been fine with it existing as Theo's journals, but he does too many drugs to have written these cohesive journal entries. I would have been fine with it existing as an explanation or letter to a named reader, but he specifies that the reader is non-existent. It is a very very small complaint though, and does not stop the book from being very thoroughly recommended. 

Push by Sapphire

"Father," she say. "What's your daddy's name?
"Carl Kenwood Jones, born in the Bronx."
She say, "Whats the baby's father's name?"
I say, "Carl Kenwood Jones, born in the same Bronx." 
She quiet quiet. Say, "Shame, thas a shame. Twelve years old, twelve years old," ... 
She say, "Was you ever, I mean did you ever get to be a chile?" Thas a stupid question, did I ever get to be a chile? I am a chile. 








After reading Atonement I think I thought I was ready to tackle all the other horribly depressing books on my To Read List, and thus I picked up Push. It's a short first-person novel, so we as the audience are getting everything from Precious's perspective and in her voice. Many readers find the phonetic spellings and illiteracy to be frustrating or a bad attempt at 'keepin' it real' (as spelled in several 1-star amazon reviews), but...um....that's how some people talk? 

I spent four years teaching in a minority-majority urban school and her voice felt very true to me, particularly how she acts in class. One second she is refusing to follow directions and yelling "Mutherfucker I ain't deaf!" and when she refuses to leave the classroom she says "I ain' going nowhere mutherfucker till the bell ring. I came here to learn maff and yo gon' teach me" and then her internal monologue reveals, "I didn't want to hurt or embarass him like that you know. But I couldn't let him, anybody, know, page 122 look like page 152, 22, 3, 6, 5 - all the pages look alike to me. 'N I really do want to learn. Everyday I tell myself something gonna happen, some shit like on TV. I'm gonna break through or somebody gonna break through to me - I'm gonna learn, catch up, be normal, change my seat to the front of the class. But again, it has not been that day." Finally, when the other kids start acting up, she tries to keep them in line. "In fac' some of the other natives get restless I break on 'em. I say, 'Shut up mutherfuckers I'm tryin' to learn something.'" All of these are so true - teens talk that way, teens FEEL that way (that they will magically wake up and their problems will be solved), teens who are illiterate, and teens who are disruptive and failing and then defend you against other kids for seemingly no reason.

The subject matter is obvious from the first page, so I haven't given anything away. However, it is more depressing, more joyful, more funny, more uplifting, and more fucked up than these opening quotes indicate. 

Everything, from the description of the sexual abuse to the other people in the GRE prep course to the way that every system in place to protect children and women and poor people often makes it impossible for them to make real meaningful changes to improve their life situations in a permanent way...felt true. 

In contrast to the haters who feel like this book is trying too hard, promoting stereotypes, and glamorizing poverty and sexual abuse, I have to agree with Sapphire in this interview  where she says she felt she had to write this novel because "[she] had the intense feeling that if [she] didn't write this book no one else would" and that the story forces people to see "an obese black woman as a feeling, intelligent person, as a person who dreams, as a person who wants the things that [the audience] wants."

This novel moved me emotionally in a way that I haven't been moved in a long time, and I think it is a very important book, especially for anyone who thinks they want to work with someone like Precious in education or social work. 

Reynard the Fox by James Simpson

To this great feast all manner of animals came, for the King had announced it across the entire land.  There was more joy and happiness than was ever seen among the animals.  There were courtly dances, with bagpipes, trumpets, and all kinds of minstrelsy.  The King ordered so much food that everyone was plentifully served.  There was no animal, great or insignificant, who wasn't there, including many birds, and all who desired the King's friendship.

All, that is, except Reynard the Fox, the red, false pilgrim, who lay in wait planning how he could do harm.  He judged that his presence would not be appreciated.

I always thought Reynard the Fox would make a good subject for a novel--kind of like Watership Down, but celebrating malice and cynicism rather than pluckiness and derring-do.  Reynard was a medieval trickster figure in the French fabliau tradition known for terrorizing the court of a fictional animal kingdom.  Reynard's gift is his power of persuasion, and he never tires of using it to trick his peers into humiliation or violence.  Sometimes he tricks smaller animals into giving themselves up to be eaten, sometimes he does it for self-protection, and sometimes merely for fun.  Over the course of this book, Reynard...

• blinds the children of Isengrim the wolf by peeing in their faces
• rapes Isengrim's wife
• eats Chaunticleer the rooster's wife
• tricks Bruin the bear into getting the skin of his face torn off
• convinces the Queen to take the skin off of Bruin's paws as well, which he uses for shoes
• blinds Tybert the cat
• kills Cuwaert the hare, then has Bellin the ram put to death for the crime

...et cetera, et cetera, and in each case Reynard uses his gift of gab to insinuate himself into the king's favor, rather than serve punishment.  Reynard is part of a long tradition--perhaps more rightly said, a human inclination--of revering cleverness, even in the service of evil, and considering stupidity a deserving offense.  Reynard is cruel and Machiavellian, but the other animals are so dumb, venal, and greedy that we enjoy seeing them tortured.

This new version is James Simpson's translation of William Caxton's Middle English, which itself is a translation of Reynard stories from the Dutch.  Simpson's translation is very colloquial, and meant to reach a broad audience.  It's breezy, and appropriate for the slapstick tone of the source material, but it can be jarring.  At one point, Reynard to Isengrim: "What's up, Mr. Wolf!"  These stories are meant to puncture the pretensions of noblemen, and it doesn't quite work to have them talking like Encino Man outtakes, even though I see what Simpson was going for.

Ultimately, these stories tell an overarching story: Reynard goes from being hunted by the king to one of his closest advisors, all by the skill of deceit.  The message is a cynical one; Reynard is right when he says, "[w]hosoever intends to prosper in the world without composing a beautiful lie, without wrapping it and hiding it so that men take it for truth, won't escape servitude."  Whether or not things are any different today, I leave to your own discretion.

Fell of Dark by Patrick Downes

I see faces all over the place. In dust on windowpanes, in carpets, in plaster, and the branches of trees. In the folds of clothes thrown onto the back of a chair. A man’s death mask—open mouth, bullet hole in his forehead—shows up in the layers of a stone I keep in my pocket. I have a frowning man in a fingerprint.

Once I saw your face in my breath. It was a February night under a streetlight. I can’t count how many times since then I’ve looked for you in the mist.

My friend asked me to read this book; his friend had written it. It would have been awkward to review if I hadn’t liked it—but thankfully, I did. I don’t typically read young adult novels, not because they’re stupid or immature but because most of them seem like retreads of the same magical-child-hero narrative. I suspected at first that that’s what I was getting in Fell of Dark, which begins with the death of the narrator’s father, and continues with a number of quasi-mystical miracles, like the blood that only the narrator can see spouting from the invisible holes all over his body. But it never congeals into a story of heroism—not a typical one, anyway—or even something as relentlessly plot-driven as your Harold Potters and what have you. I can see that frustrating some readers. Maybe not young ones, but the kind of older readers who return to YA literature for its familiar comforts.

But it’s also the novel’s main strength. The plot, as it is, centers around two very troubled teens who trade long sections of narration. Erik is the one with the dead father, who bleeds, who cannot stop growing to gigantic proportions, who addresses a second person throughout his narration who, it is clear, he hasn’t met yet. Thorn is the angrier one, who loathes his parents, who are cruel to him because his sister died saving him from drowning:

I have this fantasy. My mother will come out of hell. My father, if he can’t come out, will die in his Gehenna. I want her to forgive me. I never wanted Salome, their shining star, my shining star, to turn into a seahorse. I want to stop feeling like a monster. Murderer. I want to have one voice in my head, mine.

The prose is lyric, but simple and shorn. It does a lot, I think, without ever trying to do too much. Something is sacrificed in the differentiation between the two characters, but they are in a sense meant to overlap. Erik and Thorn, we sense—and the jacket tells us—don’t know each other but are headed toward a meeting, or perhaps a confrontation. That confrontation, when it comes, is brief, violent, and almost entirely “off screen.” That’s a bold choice, and one that consciously refuses to engage with our expectations of plot, especially in a genre that can be so formulaic.

In some ways, Fell of Dark never came together for me. The episodic and dream-like nature of the twin narratives collide, but they don’t really cohere, and perhaps that’s by choice. But I enjoyed the novel’s strong and idiosyncratic voice.

Atonement by Ian McEwan

"Miss _____,

You're right about this book being hard to read but I whole-heartedly believe it will end up being one of your favorite novels. The prose alone is reason enough to read this. I sincerely hope you try. 

-_____

PS: I was wrong on the stairs yesterday, sometimes people surprise you! <3"







I made a mistake in 2008 and watched the movie Atonement not realizing I had the book Atonement unread on my bookshelf. After watching the movie, I promptly gave away the novel because I couldn't stand to read it. The topic hits me deep in my gut and it just hurts my heart. One of my first students was carrying it around, and I warned her it would be the most depressing read of all time. She read it, loved it, and passed it to me with the above note. 

Finally, this year I decided I thought I could stand to get through it. She is absolutely right about the prose. It is achingly beautiful as evidenced in this perfect sentence: 

"Their friendship had become vague and even constrained in recent years,  but it was still an old habit, and to break it now in order to become strangers on intimate terms required a clarity of purpose which had temporarily deserted them."

Without giving anything way, the story is about a little girl, Briony, who sees something she doesn't understand, and makes an accusation that she also doesn't understand. The book then follows her attempts at atoning for what she has done. It is clever and witty in a way that all literate people will adore: 

"Mention of 'a quiet corner in a library' was a code for sexual ecstacy." 

It captures the secret weird thoughts that I have always thought and didn't realize anyone knew that I thought quirky inner thoughts that some people might relate to: 

"Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment shoe would remember for the rest of her life - with gratitude, or profound and particular regret." 

I read it as quickly as possible because it is still the most depressing novel of all time, and it is not one of my favorites, but it is worth a read maybe? I'm conflicted. A student this year wanted to read it; I warned her it was sadder than The Road. She didn't believe me until she finished the book...then she said it was worse than The Road. She had to construct a lesson based on the text. Her activity for the class was trying to write an apology as Briony to the other characters which was an impossible act of frustration because some things you can't say sorry for. 

If you like achingly sad love stories, this is the novel for you. If you've seen the movie, you know exactly what you're getting into. 

Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess

'Life,' so went Quedgeley on, 'is in a sense all lies.  We watch ourselves act every day.  Philip drunk and Philip sober.  One is inside the other watching the other.  And so I am John Quedgeley and Jack Quedgeley and Jockey Quedgeley and Master Quedgeley, Justice of Peace, and all.  It is all acting.'  And WS saw that this was true, revolving it in the murk of the bottom of his cider-tankard.  Had he not himself watched WS and WS watched Will?  Where was truth, where did a man's true nature lie?  There was, as it were, an essence and there was also an existence.  It was, this essence, at the bottom of a well, of a Will.

"Is it true that Shakespeare was gay?"  I get this question a lot, as a high school teacher.  The answer isn't easy.  I talk about the sonnets, and the twin figures of the "dark lady" and "WH," and how all of the sex in the sonnets seems to have been saved for the former, but all the love for the latter, and I talk about the surprisingly romantic language that Elizabethan men used to talk about their friends.  I try to explain that "gay" was not a concept that would have made sense to Shakespeare.  My students, like lots of people over the past 400 years, find the erotic power of the sonnets difficult to deny, and they too want to have faces, names, and facts to ground the sonnets' complex attitude toward love and sex in a real life.  I like the ambiguity as it is, but I understand the impulse.

Anthony Burgess' Nothing Like the Sun is a creation of that impulse.  It imagines a young William Shakespeare--here called WS--as he matures and becomes a playwright and a poet, but with a special focus on his sex life.  Burgess' WS is what we might today call a pansexual; he likes anything and everything, from the older woman whose pregnancy traps him in a marriage he didn't want (Shakespeare's wife Anne Hathaway) to the teenage boy he tutors, though, when the boy's father finds out, he isn't a tutor for long.  He sees a black woman for the first time:

He turned, his heart near fainted.  Dressed in a fair loose gown of virtuous, though dirty, white, her shoulders and bosom glowing to the empty street, she leaned, her arms folded, at ease against the doorpost, smiling.  If Englishmen were white, he thought, then she must be called black; but black she could not in truth be called, rather gold, but the not gold, nor royal purple neither, for when we say colours we see a flatness, as of cloth, but her was flesh that moved and swam on the light's tide, ever changing in hue but always of a richness that could only be termed royal; her colour was royalty.

The dark lady turns out not to be black, or a dark-skinned white woman, but a Middle Eastern woman named Fatimah.  WS vacillates between his love and lust for her and that he has for his young patron, Henry Wriothesley--the most common guess for the "WH" the sonnets are addressed to--and rages when Wriothesley seduces the former with his wealth.  Things end badly and strangely--spoiler alert--when WS discovers that he has contracted syphilis.  The bitter and obscure works of Shakespeare's late life, Burgess seems to imagine, are a product of his disease and his deep disillusionment:

What is your great crime, then?

Love, love, and it is always love.  Not wisely but too.  Faimiah.  I will distribute copies of that sonnet after the lecture.  You can never win, for love is both an image of eternal order and at the same time the rebel and destructive spirochaete.  Let us have no nonsensical talk about merging and melting souls, though, binary suns, two spheres in a single orbit.  There is the flesh and the flesh makes all.

It's a cynical turn for the novel, and unsettling, but perhaps in thoughtful accord with Shakespeare's own writing about love and lust--"Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action."

In fact, I think Burgess does a pretty impressive job of capturing something of Shakespeare's spirit--not an easy thing to do--while retaining his own unique and modern voice.  Nothing Like the Sun, like A Clockwork Orange, is verbally dense and unapologetically challenging.  Burgess' vocabulary is cobbled together from Elizabethan and anachronistic sources--check out the word "spirochaete" above--and stuff that's just plain made up.  It doesn't sound like Shakespeare, but it shares Shakespeare's freewheeling and experimental method when it comes to language.  It succeeds in giving us an idea of what it might have been like to hear Shakespeare's words when they were written, fresh and new, rather than calcified by the past four centuries of adoration.

The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode

Let us take a very simple example, the ticking of a clock.  We ask what it says: and we agree that it says tick-tock.  By this fiction we humanize it, make it talk our language.  Of course, it is we who provide the fictional difference between the two sounds; tick is our word for a physical beginning, tock our word for an end.  We say they differ.  What enables them to be different is a special kind of middle.  We c an perceive a duration only when it is organized.  It can be shown by experiment that subjects who listen to the rhythmic structures such as tick-tock, repeated identically, 'can reproduce the intervals within the structure accurately, but they cannot grasp spontaneously the interval between the rhythmic groups,' that is, between tock and tick, even when this remains constant... The clock's tick-tock I take to be a model of what we call a plot, an organize that humanizes time by giving it form; and the interval between tock and tick represents purely successive time, disorganized time of the sort we need to humanize.

Frank Kermode argues that we are "men in the middest," that is, we find ourselves in the middle of things, at a temporal point that is really of no consequence at all.  The kind of time we experience is "successive"; it passes, without any kind of special meaning or organization.  But being "in the middest" is not so bad if we can convince ourselves that the time we experience has a special relationship to a beginning and an end; if we can define it in terms of the "tick" and the "tock" in the illustration above.  We're always expecting the apocalypse, he notes--think of Y2K, or Heaven's Gate, or the apocalyptic frenzy of 1666 (for obvious numeric reasons), or 2012--and for this reason we convince ourselves that we are living in special times.  But when the date of the apocalypse appears, the compulsion is so strong that true believers merely chalk it up to a mathematical error and calculate a new date.  The danger, he says, comes from when we let what is an obvious fiction become real for us, and he singles out authors like Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis for falling for exactly this kind of fiction in the form of mid-century fascism.

But The Sense of an Ending is a set of lectures on literary theory, not cultural theory, and so most of what Kermode writes about is how this need to occupy the space between the "tick" and "tock" appears in fiction.  One of the simplest and strongest claims Kermode makes is that there is a natural relationship between literary fictions and other fictions; the novels we write are not so very different from the way we think about time outside of them.  The most sophisticated novels engage in peripeteia--the falsification of our expectations of plot which make our fictions seem more realistic to us--but still, they satisfy our notions that the beginning, middle, and end progress in a logical, related, and meaningful way.  This is something all literary fiction does:

One remembers the comic account of this antipathy in Iris Murdoch's Under the Net, one of the few truly philosophical novels in English; truth would be found only in a silent poem or a silent novel.  As soon as it speaks, begins to be a novel, it imposes causality and concordance, development, character, a past which matters and a future within certain broad limits determined by the project of the author rather than that of the characters.  They have their choices, but the novel has its end.

I read The Sense of an Ending for my thesis, which was on ideas of time in the work of John Milton, and it really illuminated Milton's work for me.  Milton was a believer in apocalypticism; he really thought that Cromwell's ascent to power would usher in the thousand-year reign of Christ.  Cromwell's failures were intensely disappointing to Milton, and the need to make his own life fit in between the "tick" and the "tock" is everywhere in Milton.  The saddest, most powerful parts of work are about adjusting to the sense of being "in the middest," and the fear that the time which he lives through has no meaning or significance at all.  But Kermode's observations help make sense of all sorts of literature, and they are as incisive today as they were when they were published in 1965.

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

Some of you will have fine monuments by which the living may remember the evil done to you.  Some of you will have only crude wooden crosses or painted rocks, while yet others of you must remain hidden in the shadows of history.  You are in any case part of an ancient procession, and so i is always possible the giant's cairn was erected to make the site of some such tragedy long ago when young innocents were slaughtered in war.  This aside, it is not easy to think of reasons for its standing.  One can see why on lower ground our ancestors might have wished to commemorate a victory or a king.  But why stack heavy stones to above a man's height in so high and remote a place as this?

Axl and Beatrice are old, at the end of what seems to have been a long and happy marriage.  But they are not happy in their village, so they set out to find the village where their son lives, having left long ago for reasons neither Axl or Beatrice can remember.  You see, there is a mist that hangs over Britain, a fog of forgetfulness, which separate Axl and Beatrice from much of their history.  At the fringes of their marital bliss are a number of disquieting questions: without their past, how can they be sure they really love each other?  And what is it, exactly, that everyone is trying to forget?

Ishiguro has always been interested in repression.  In Never Let Me Go, it's the way that the clones participate in their own murder and exploitation by repressing the question of whether things might be otherwise.  In The Remains of the Day, it's Stevens' refusal to recognize many truths about his life: his boss' Nazi sympathies, his father's frailty, his own deep love for Miss Kenton.  In each of those cases, Ishiguro is never glib enough to suggest that things would be better if everyone were honest with themselves; both the clones and Stevens seem to desperately need their delusions.  The truth, for Ishiguro, may set you free, but it seems just as likely to destroy you.

The same is true for Axl and Beatrice, and all the inhabitants of post-Arthurian Britain.  As their memories return, piece by piece, filled in with the help of those they meet along their journey, it becomes clear that the country was recently ravaged by war between the Saxons and the Britons.  Though Axl and Beatrice long for their memories to return so they might fully understand themselves, the lifting of the fog threatens to rekindle an old enmity:

"How right to fear it, sir," Wistan said.  "The giant, once well buried, now stirs.  When soon he rises,as surely he will, the friendly bonds between us will prove as knots young girls make with the stems of small flowers.  Men will burn their neighbours' houses by night.  Hang children from trees at dawn.  The rivers will stink with corpses bloated from their days of voyaging.  And even as they move on, our armies will grow larger, swollen by anger and thirst for vengeance.  For you Britons, it'll be as a ball of fire rolls towards you.  You'll flee or perish.  And country by country, this will become a new land, a Saxon land, with no more trace o your people's time here than a flock or two of sheep wandering the hills untended."

Would we be better of, Ishiguro wonders, if we were to rid ourselves of history?  Does peace require the eradication of what we remember?

These are rich and complex ideas.  But Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day succeed insofar as they rely on the accumulation of everyday detail; we believe those stories because we see reflected in them the way the minutiae of our lives can serve as a distraction from larger, deeper problems.  Ishiguro's plain prose is suited to those stories.  The Buried Giant, on the other hand, feels painted with much broader strokes.  Its characters only rarely seem like real people; rather, they read as the fantasy archetypes they are.  It is difficult to care about what Axl and Beatrice, much less all of Britain, may have repressed because The Buried Giant is not a story about repression but an allegory of repression.

Ishiguro recently got into a tiff with Ursula K. LeGuin, who accused him of not sufficiently respecting the fantasy genre.  LeGuin's charge goes too far, but it has a kernel of truth: Ishiguro seems to have no real idea of how to harness the possibilities of fantasy, or how to build a world which is specific and real.  The Buried Giant, I'm sad to say, reads exactly like what it is: a fantasy novel written by someone who never really reads fantasy novels.

And that's a shame, because it's clear that Ishiguro is developing ideas here that are part of an entire life's work.  The small, private repressions of his other novels are transformed into a national crisis, and you can see him thinking in a new way about the social, political, and historical aspects of repression.  But if he wanted to write a novel that comments on the way that repression works in the world, I'd rather have had a novel about the world as it is.

For what it's worth, Randy liked it better than I did.

All the Stories of Muriel Spark

All over the Colony it was possible to hear the subtle voice of the grey-crested lourie, commonly known as the go-away bird by its call, 'go'way, go'way.'  It was possible to hear the bird, but very few did, for it was part of the background to everything, a choir of birds and beasts, the crackle of vegetation in the great prevalent sunlight, and the soft rhythmic pad of natives, as they went barefoot and in single-file, from kraal to kraal.

I've often wondered why Muriel Spark never wrote a novel about Africa.  She lived there for many years, first with her husband Solly, and then by herself when the marriage went sour, but her books never wander far from the London neighborhoods she settled in when she returned.  Having read this collection of all of Spark's short stories, I think it's possible that Spark felt that she said in them all that she had to say about Africa.

Her first story, "The Seraph and the Zambesi," was written for a contest.  In her autobiography she tells the charming story about how, dead broke, she had to borrow writing paper from an art shop, promising she would buy something if she won the contest.  She won, and she made good on her promise.  The story that resulted is admirably bizarre for a first stab at fiction.  In it, a group of English colonists try to put on a Christmas play, only to be foiled by the appearance of an objecting angel.  Other stories speak more directly to Spark's African experience: "The Curtain Blown by the Breeze" repurposes a story Spark heard from a fellow colonist who bragged about shooting a young African boy caught peeping at his wife during breastfeeding.  The best story in the book, and the longest, is "The Go-Away Bird," about a South African girl who hears in the bird's namesake call an exhortation to leave the Colony, and bounces back and forth between England and Africa.

Elsewhere, Spark seems to have used short fiction to indulge some of her wilder ideas.  There are loads of ghosts--one of the best in the collection, "The Portobello Road," is actually written from the perspective of a ghost who haunts her murderer with Spark's characteristic disaffection and glibness.  Sometimes Spark seems to be indulging half-baked notions for their own sake, as with "Miss Pinkerton's Apocalypse," a story about a couple who see an alien in a flying saucer, but which is actually a saucer, like for tea.  But sometimes these wild ideas pay off, as with one of my favorites, "The First Year of My Life," told from the perspective of an infant born during World War I:

Let me therefore get my word in first, because I feel pretty sure, now, about the authenticity of my remembrance of things past.  My autobiography, as I very well perceived at the time, started in the very worst year the world had ever seen so far.  Apart from being born bedridden and toothless, unable to raise my myself on the pillow or utter anything but farmyard squawks or police-siren wails, my bladder and my bowels totally out of control, I was further depressed but the curious behavior of the two-legged mammals around me.  There were those black-dressed people, females of the species to which I appeared to belong, saying they had lost their sons.  It was like the special pin for my nappies which my mother or some other hoverer dedicated to my care was always losing.  These careless women in black lost their husbands and brothers.  Then they came to visit my mother and clucked and crowed over my cradle.  I was not amused.

All in all, Spark's style, which leans toward the brief and brusque, is perfectly situated to the short story, and many of these stand up to her best novels.  Some are misfires, but most are canny observations about human nature whose plain style balance their tendency toward the supernatural and the macabre.  It's hard to imagine what might never have been written if she hadn't won that first contest.

Proust on difficult art

I enjoy complex and demanding art. I like puzzling through Joyce, Ligeti, and Wallace regardless of whether I understand everything or not, because there's something rewarding about the pursuit of that which isn't completely understood. I'm currently reading through Proust's massive opus, In Search of Lost Time--which, in spite of its length, isn't really hard to comprehend--and he expresses the feelings I get about more demanding works beautifully, if a bit verbosely. So I'm sharing it here, in hopes that someone else might connect with it as well.

Sometimes, before going to dress, Mme. Swann would sit down at the piano. Her lovely hands, escaping from the pink, or white, or, often, vividly coloured sleeves of her crêpe-de-Chine wrapper, drooped over the keys with that same melancholy which was in her eyes but was not in her heart. It was on one of those days that she happened to play me the part of Vinteuil's sonata that contained the little phrase of which Swann had been so fond. But often one listens and hears nothing, if it is a piece of music at all complicated to which one is listening for the first time. And yet when, later on, this sonata had been played over to me two or three times I found that I knew it quite well. And so it is not wrong to speak of hearing a thing for the first time. If one had indeed, as one supposes, received no impression from the first hearing, the second, the third would be equally 'first hearings' and there would be no reason why one should understand it any better after the tenth. Probably what is wanting, the first time, is not comprehension but memory. For our memory, compared to the complexity of the impressions which it has to face while we are listening, is infinitesimal, as brief as the memory of a man who in his sleep thinks of a thousand things and at once forgets them, or as that of a man in his second childhood who cannot recall, a minute afterwards, what one has just been saying to him. Of these multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing us with an immediate picture. But that picture gradually takes shape, and, with regard to works which we have heard more than once, we are like the schoolboy who has read several times over before going to sleep a lesson which he supposed himself not to know, and finds that he can repeat it by heart next morning. It was only that I had not, until then, heard a note of the sonata, whereas Swann and his wife could make out a distinct phrase that was as far beyond the range of my perception as a name which one endeavours to recall and in place of which one discovers only a void, a void from which, an hour later, when one is not thinking about them, will spring of their own accord, in one continuous flight, the syllables that one has solicited in vain. And not only does one not seize at once and retain an impression of works that are really great, but even in the content of any such work (as befell me in the case of Vinteuil's sonata) it is the least valuable parts that one at first perceives.

Thus it was that I was mistaken not only in thinking that this work held nothing further in store for me (so that for a long time I made no effort to hear it again) from the moment in which Mme. Swann had played over to me its most famous passage; I was in this respect as stupid as people are who expect to feel no astonishment when they stand in Venice before the front of Saint Mark's, because photography has already acquainted them with the outline of its domes. Far more than that, even when I had heard the sonata played from beginning to end, it remained almost wholly invisible to me, like a monument of which its distance or a haze in the atmosphere allows us to catch but a faint and fragmentary glimpse. Hence the depression inseparable from one's knowledge of such works, as of everything that acquires reality in time. When the least obvious beauties of Vinteuil's sonata were revealed to me, already, borne by the force of habit beyond the reach of my sensibility, those that I had from the first distinguished and preferred in it were beginning to escape, to avoid me. Since I was able only in successive moments to enjoy all the pleasures that this sonata gave me, I never possessed it in its entirety: it was like life itself. But, less disappointing than life is, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

In Vinteuil's sonata the beauties that one discovers at once are those also of which one most soon grows tired, and for the same reason, no doubt, namely that they are less different from what one already knows. But when those first apparitions have withdrawn, there is left for our enjoyment some passage which its composition, too new and strange to offer anything but confusion to our mind, had made indistinguishable and so preserved intact; and this, which we have been meeting every day and have not guessed it, which has thus been held in reserve for us, which by the sheer force of its beauty has become invisible and has remained unknown, this comes to us last of all. But this also must be the last that we shall relinquish. And we shall love it longer than the rest because we have taken longer to get to love it.