Revolutionary thought, from Michelet to Lenin

TO THE FINLAND STATION: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History by Edmund Wilson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Yesterday I devoted a pair of hours to a review of Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station, composing directly on the Goodreads review screen as was my habit. But when I was finally satisfied with it and pressed the button to “Publish,” the review vanished! Replaced by the sign-in screen for Goodreads. I won’t do that again. From now on, I’ll compose my reviews in Word, then post them — so if the link fails, I’ll still have my draft.

I won’t try to reconstruct my review. Instead, I refer you to the very good, thorough critique of this book by Louis Menand, in The New Yorker, March 24, 2003, The Historical Romance: Edmund Wilson’s adventure with Communism.

Menand will tell you how Wilson got the idea for the book and his many problems in writing it, including his changing attitudes toward the Soviet Union. Wilson, beginning this huge project in the 1930s, had got himself committed to an overly rosy picture of the Soviet Union, one that no longer convinced even him by the time he published the book in 1940. In his new introduction written in 1971 (a year before his death), Wilson tries to correct that rosy view, at least partially, quoting some very negative reminiscences by contemporaries of Lenin and making very explicit his disgust with Josef Stalin, who was barely mentioned in the original book.

 More important for contemporary readers, as Menand points out, is the success of this wide-ranging history of revolutionary thought in bringing together the ideas and the often tangled lives of those who developed them, from Jules Michelet to Vladimir Lenin. Wilson here is clearly emulating Michelet, whose histories of the French revolution he admires for making the past seem suspenseful and contemporary, viewing events (as much as possible) through the eyes of the people who were living them.

But the book is really historical journalism rather than philosophy, where Wilson was hopelessly incompetent — evident in his chapter on Marx and Engels’ concept of the dialectic. Menand writes,

“The dialectic was just the sort of high-theory concept that Wilson reflexively avoided. At the same time, he was not a man quick to concede his ignorance, and he devoted a chapter of his book to explaining that the dialectic is basically a religious myth (a characteristic exercise in journalistic debunking). Wilson had no idea what he was talking about. ”

Menand however does, and explains it in as good a two-paragraph exposition as you’re likely to find of this subtle and complex way of thinking. I recommend it. Here is Menand's summary:

The two-paragraph explanation [Wilson] gives of the term at the beginning of the chapter on “The Myth of the Dialectic”—the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model—is not the dialectic of Hegel. It is the dialectic of Fichte. And Marx and Engels did not name their method “dialectical materialism.” That was a term assigned to it by Georgi Plekhanov, the man who, after Marx’s death, introduced Marxism to Russia. Engels referred to the method as historical materialism.

Still, Hegel’s dialectic was part of Marx’s way of doing philosophy, and the use of the dialectic as a historical method is the strongest element in Marxist theory. In the broadest terms, it is a way of treating each aspect of a historical moment—its art, its industry, its politics—as being implicated in the whole, and of understanding that every dominant idea depends on, defines itself against, whatever it suppresses or excludes. Dialectical thinking is a brake on the tendency to assume that things will continue to be the way they are, only more so, because it reminds us that every paradigm contains the seed of its own undoing, the limit-case that, as it is approached, begins to unravel the whole construct. You don’t have to be an enemy of bourgeois capitalism, or believe in an iron law of history, to think this way. It’s just a fruitful method for historical criticism.

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Moscow: history and literature

After browsing around the monastery of St. Peter on the Hill (more divinity-powered icons), we paid hommage to a more recent summoner of magical forces, Mikhail Bulgakov, by a visit to Patriarchs Ponds, the opening scene of Master and Margarita, which Susana has been reading. From her descriptions (I haven't got into it yet), its miracles and black magic are even weirder than the stuff in the churches.

From there it was only a short walk to the Museum of Contemporary History (an oxymoron in its English translation — what the Russians mean by современной истории is "recent" history, since Alexander II - 1856-1881 — to today). Fascinating collection of objects and images, including film footage of battle scenes and troops in World War I, political rallies and fighting in 1905 and 1917 and following. All the explanatory labels were in Russian and we had only an hour before closing time, so I had hardly time to consult my dictionary for some of the more curious exhibit cases, but we didn't really need to to get the gist of a history we've long studied from other sources. It could all have been made much clearer with a better arrangement, and more information in other languages — Japanese tourists, for example, would surely be interested in the section on the Russo-Japanese war, a military and financial disaster for the Russian Empire that largely provoked the 1905 revolution. Still, the exhibits as a whole helped us imagine those lives and that history more vividly.

Then a longer walk to the twin bookstores at 18 Kuznetsky Most, where I was hoping to find a bilingual edition of some classical or contemporary Russian literature. But no. One store had only Russian, the other only foreign languge (mostly English), no bilingual editions in either. And no store clerk in either store who really understood English, so I was forced to exercise my pitifully minimal Russian. I remembered a book that had made a powerful impression when I'd read it in translation and decided to find the Russian text: Isaac Babel's "Red Cavalry".  And I made myself understood— I bought a 1986 paperback collection that includes not only the 34 very short stories in Конармия but also his Одесские рассказы (Odessa  stories). And to create my own bilingual experience, I searched on-line for a translation in some language I can read, and was delighted to discover on Kindle a 1928 translation into French on which Babel himself (who spoke and wrote French fluently) had collaborated. The translator seems to have known Babel well, and his introduction is a delight. More on that later — potom, as the Russians say.

Meanwhile, on another much in the news and people's concerns:
US-Supported "Good Guys" Firing Ballistic Missiles in Ukraine?

A context for literature

Making the News: Modernity and the Mass Press in Nineteenth-Century France by Jeannene M. Przyblyski
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

These ten essays tell not only about how the modern "news" paper came to be, but also how it shaped the conditions for the creation of the vast and expanding literature of 19th century France. Émile de Girardin (1802-1881) had a lot to do with both phenomena: he created the first paper which claimed to be nonpartisan (and thus called simply "La Presse"), cut the price in half (to the outrage of his competitors, one of whom challenged him to a duel for disloyal competition), and financed the publication mainly by filling the pages with advertising; he thus expanded circulation far beyond the privileged, monied élite, and gained the revenue to pay writers including Balzac, Sue, Gautier and a great many others.
Besides Girardin, a reader can learn here about Daumier's battles (through his caricatures) with Louis-Philippe and Louis Napoléon, and about such colorful journalists as Émile Pouget (1860-1931), who employed deliberately obscene and comical working-class vernacular to attack everybody in power.
What I missed was any discussion of the press during the Paris Commune (March-May, 1871), when over a score of new papers with enormous circulation flourished briefly, with editors including Jules Vallès (Le Cri du Peuple), Maxime Vuillaumine (Le Père Duchene) and Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray (author of the monumental Histoire de la Commune). There is however an essay by Przyblyski on the post-Commune manipulation of photographs and documents by Eugène Appert to contribute to the myth of the "pétroleuses", the crazed women incendiaries who supposedly created most of the destruction of Paris in the last days of the Commune — and who, if they existed at all, must have been very rare.


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For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov - NYTimes.com

Anton Chekhov

Marvelous! As though we needed this scientific proof — some of us have always known that good literature was good for us.

For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov - NYTimes.com

Canadian literary adventure with Atwood & Gibson

For info on this literary cum outdoors opportunity, click on Atwood and Gibson in the wild.

A view of Labrador, from Adventure Canada

I'd love to see Newfoundland & Wild Labrador, and I'm sure it would be a pleasure to spend some time with Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson. Sorry I haven't the time or money just now. As the announcement informs us, 

Novelist and poet Margaret Atwood is one of Canada’s best known, most prolific and most honoured authors. Among her numerous awards, she has won the Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and twice the Governor General’s award. With Graeme Gibson, she is co-chair of BirdLife International’s Rare Bird Club.

Graeme Gibson co-founded the Writer’s Union of Canada and the Writer’s Trust. He's a former council member of the World Wildlife Foundation and the chair of the Pelee Island Observatory. He is the author of several novels, as well as the bestselling Bedside Book of Birds and Bedside Book of Beasts.

Guess I'll just stay at home and read Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman (sounds delicious), or maybe The Handmaid's Tale or Surfacing, all of which are staring at me from my bookshelves. I don't have anything by her partner Graeme Gibson, though. Wild Labrador will have to wait.

Bir Cihan İki Sultan — first reviews

I just discovered last night that the Turkish translation of my novel A Gift for the Sultan is now being offered on the websites of more than a dozen Turkish vendors, including this one:

Bir Cihan İki Sultan (Timur ve Yıldırım'ın Mücadelesi) - Işık Kitabevi

And more importantly, this big chain of culture and entertainment media: D&R

And best of all, the first reviews have appeared.

As far as I've been able to work out with my Turkish-English dictionary, the review at the kitaplarix.com site is pretty positive.  They seem surprised that a Westerner can be so objective — at least, I think that's what this says:

Harvard Üniversitesi'nde ders veren Fox, Yıldırım ve Timur'un ölümüne mücadelesini bir Batılıdan beklenmeyecek kadar başarılı ve objektif yazmıştır.

The Turkish in the brief comments on other websites is too colloquial for me to make out — I can't tell whether they love the book or think it's a menace.  But at least the comments show that people are aware of and reading it.

Readers of the English version have generally understood the novel to be a romance about a Byzantine princess and an Ottoman brigand; the Turks are presenting it as a political and military history of the clash between two giants of their history, Timur (or Tamerlane) and Bayezid I (Yıldırım Beyazıt). That's all fine (those stories indeed are part of the book), but I hope some readers in both languages will appreciate the broader story that frames the others: that of the struggle of a great city against an anti-urban force bent on destroying it.

In the end, as the book can only hint at in the last pages, the resolution will begin 51 years later with the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans (A.D. 1453). The city will not just survive, but by its many subtle resources will transform the Ottomans into a cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic urban power, reaching from their capital in Constantinople to govern a tri-continental complex of subject cities (Northern Africa, Western Asia and Eastern Europe). Now that was one very powerful city. And still is, under its new name of Istanbul.

P.S.: One of my Turkish friends has given me a more accurate translation of the quote above:

"Fox, who is a lecturer at Harvard University, has written about Yildirim and Timur's to-the-death struggle in such a successful of objective manner that is beyond what we can expect of a Westerner." Or, ".... that could not have been expected from a Westerner."

I'm not and never have been a lecturer at Harvard University, but I studied there, so it's a pardonable error which may sort of locate me intellectually for a Turkish reader.

Top Ten Ingredients of Favourite Historical fiction - A Writer of History

Here's a thoughtful discussion, sparked by historical fiction author Mary Tod and continued in a whole series of lively comments.

Top Ten Ingredients of Favourite Historical fiction - A Writer of History

I think she's got a good list of the most common features of popular historical fiction. But I don't take it as a recipe for my own work, and I don't suppose any serious writer would. For me, the aims of re-imagining events of the past are, first, to learn something that might be useful in our future actions, and second, to understand better how things got the way they are. My novel about the 1402 Ottoman siege of Constantinople (A Gift for the Sultan) is really about how any great city draws on its most diverse resources when under tremendous stress, and also about how such a polyglot, multiethnic and territorially expansive system as the Ottoman Empire (with all its consequences down to the Balkan wars of the 1990s and Syria today) got its start.

Why Criticism Matters - Essay by Elif Batuman - NYTimes.com

This was fun to read. I admit I have scant knowledge of literary theory, though I have read some Jameson, and the reference here gives us much to think about regarding Proust and other French novels (our sometime collaborator Dirk will no doubt be interested), and the "negative criticism" of "neuro novels" is devastatingly amusing. What I found most stimulating of my own creative impulses (which could no doubt be alternatively explained in the language of neuro novels) was her interpretation of Freud's interpretation of dreams, as applied to fiction.

Why Criticism Matters - Essay by Elif Batuman - NYTimes.com

Yes, I suppose that criticism does matter, though not so much as the creation of the dreams.

Choosing what to read

Dirk van Nouhuys' essay on the novels that have stayed with him (this blog, 2011.9.28) has got me thinking about how I choose fiction to read. Dirk has no patience for those lists of the 100 or 1,000 or however many books "you must read before you die"(try Googling "books"+"before you die" for examples), as though there could be one list for everybody (and as though there were only that many possibilities). I too think such lists are silly, but since I know I'm never going to read more than a tiny sample of all that's worth reading, I need some way to guide my choices.

So, how do I choose? For starters, I always try to read the selections of my local reading club in Carboneras, which are usually good and always promote lively discussions (all in Spanish, which I review on my Spanish-language blog Lecturas y lectores). Beyond that I have two major criteria:

• The book promises to tell me something I really want to know, for example about a culture or a time or a place or a psychological experience, and/or 
• I expect to learn something I can use about the craft of writing. 

I'm most interested in books that do both. Thus, so far I've been less engaged by Cormac McCarthy (fascinating craftsman, but I don't much care for or need to hear his strange view of the world) than by, for example, Mario Vargas Llosa (another amazing prose crafter, but one who engages social issues that I do care about).

But even limiting my reading to books that do one or the other of those things, my actual reading is still largely a matter of chance: what I happen to have heard about and what I can get easily.

I'm not going to try to create a list like Dirk's, but if anyone is curious about the books I have found important enough to read and comment on, you're invited to take a look at my "Little Library of the Lair" Fiction Readings or, if you read Spanish, the different collection in my Pequeña biblioteca comentada.

On another note, I'm glad to see that some of my earliest work is still being cited by scholars. A recent example is this MA thesis by Javier Fernández (University of Georgia, 2004), which makes good use of parts of my 1979 book Working-Class Émigrés from Cuba (Palo Alto: R&E Research Publications, 1979; published version of my 1975 PhD dissertation), which must have been in his university library — it's pretty hard to get these days, but a recent query made me aware that it has also been a resource to other younger scholars working on issues including migration, Latinos, the Cuban revolution or racial and gender conflicts. (For more about this work, see my entry in Academia.edu, Working-Class Émigrés from Cuba.)

Unforgettables: D. van Nouhuys' 36 novels

Writer, translator and occasional contributor to this blog Dirk van Nouhuys here offers us a provocative way to think of what novels make a difference. His list of unforgettable works won't be just like yours, and isn't exactly like mine (though he and I agree that Fielding's hilarious and ever surprising Tom Jones is one that keeps us laughing and thinking), but it may give you another way of thinking of your own favorites.

(I've appended some of my questions to Dirk at the end, and maybe you will have more. Maybe we can keep this discussion going for a bit.)

***

Thirty-six novels I often think of

by Dirk van Nouhuys

From time to time lists circulate of the 100 best novels, or the thousand novels you must read before you die or the like. A while ago there was a list allegedly from The Guardian of the 100 best novels that was extraordinarily misconceived.  It included stuff by Aykroyd, very British but not that good, and included not only “The Works of Shakespeare” as a novel, but also "Hamlet” separately as a novel. I thought to myself: I can do better than that, but I didn’t see much point. Instead I decided to make a list of novels I often think of. I tried to use the criterion that I think of them at least once a month. I excluded novels by personal friends and also those I first read within the last five years. These aren’t all great novels; indeed some are no better than pretty good. Some of them are included for quirky personal reasons that I understand; some are included for reasons no doubt quirky and personal that I don’t understand.

I stretch the definition a bit. I include a couple of works in verse, but, hey, there have always been novels in verse and still are. I include a couple that might be counted as novellas. I include pairs that were published as two books each that I consider to be essentially one book each.

Where the title is in French I read it in that language at least initially; all other non-English books I read in translation.

Someone to whom I mentioned I was assembling this list asked me to annotate it, so I’ve done so briefly, also personally and quirkily. Questions are welcome.

What are we to think of the statistic that 40% of these books were published in the 65 years between 1839 & 1904?

 ---

Gilgamesh - Anon.  c. 800 BC

Unlike the Odyssey, where Odysseus’ character is fixed, this is a bildungsroman. The first hero of literature learns the meaning of friendship, that Eros is a civilizing force, the poignancy of death, accepts his mortality, and become a better king.

The Odyssey - “Homer” c. 800 BC

My father read it to me as a child, and I read it to my children. It shaped my idea of what it is to be a person.

The Tale of Genji - Murasaki Shikibu 11^th century AD

Embodies the role of time in human affairs in a way comparable in my reading only to Proust. I find the first sentence of the fifth volume the most moving in literature (but it will mean little to you unless you have read up to it, so there’s no use cheating).

Tom Jones - Henry Fielding 1749.

Perfect plotting, perfect characterization of a kind, lots of yucks. The comments of the author provide a basic course in creative writing, and much else besides.

Les Liaisons dangereuses - Choderlos de Laclos 1782

An artillery officer who wrote nothing else of note wrote this book to propagandize his theory that women should be allowed education. One of the cornerstones of the history of the novel. An epistolary novel, which gives De Laclos a wonderful chance to exercise a variety of styles and voices. A story of erotic vengeance. Full of provocative moral and gender relation questions.

Another novel, La Princesse de Clèves, by Madame de La Fayette, almost makes it on to this list on it’s own, but more because it is, so-to-say, the good twin of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, being the story of two extraordinarily high-minded lovers in a similar situation. It’s not widely known in English, but in France it is an icon. President Sarkozy’s recent scorn of putting questions about this novel in civil service exams provoked demonstrations and public readings (see article in The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/mar/31/princess-cleves-sarkozy-lafayette).

La Toison d'or - Théophile Gautier 1839

An idle rich Parisian youth wonders what to do with himself, decides he will fall in love, then wonders what sort of woman to fall in love with, and decides to love a Fleming. He goes to Bruges where he has an affair with a naïve lace maker partly because she resembles a Madonna in a painting. He brings her back to Paris and their future is not clear. I read this when I was about 14 and, oddly, for a significant period in my early life it strongly colored what I imaged romance should be.

The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas, père 1844

My father read this to me and I read it to my children. It's a potboiler really, but it sticks in my mind.

The Scarlet letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne 1850

It’s the images that stick, the letter, Pearl in the forest, Dimmesdale atop the town scaffold.

Moby Dick - Herman Melville 1851

It's the language, which gives Melville mastery over the world in a way few writers demonstrate. And, because the world is varied, it is the rich variety of language and style. The closest thing to Shakespeare in a novel. Is there an alternate universe in which Strabuck succeeds in persuading Ahab of his folly and they return rich with oil to Nantucket, where Ahab settles down with his wife and children and Starbuck opens a coffee shop?

Benito Cereno - Herman Melville 1855

This is more like Greek tragedy than any other work in prose I know

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy 1864

Whitney says, reading War and Peace is like visiting old fiends.

L'Éducation sentimentale - Gustave Flaubert 1869

I read this only after I was married and settled down, and realized it is the book I should have read instead of La Toison d'or.

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 1873-77

A few years ago I attended a talk by Wendy Lesser (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Lesser) about re-reading novels. She said that when she re-read Anna Karenina, she found herself feeling that Karenin was right. I was utterly appalled.

À Rebours -J K Huysmans 1884

This contrarian novel teaches me to keep my nose out of books[GF1] .

The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas hardy 1886

My favorite novel. Not the greatest, but the one that speaks, or spoke to me most. The template of a novel I should be working on instead of fussing with this list .

Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy 1895

In the beginning Jude, a farm kid with ambitions to education, is disconcerted to find that learning Latin is not merely learning a substitution code, one word for another, but involves a whole different way of thinking.  His recognition appeals to me because of some obscure misunderstanding I had about the world. The novel also contains the scene in fiction that is most horrifying to me[GF2] .

The Lady With the Dog - Anton Chekhov 1899

The spectacle of 2 lives wasted, also the background of a good short story I wrote.

The Ambassadors - Henry James 1903

"If he is to bask in the Jamesian tickle, nothing will restrain him and no other author will to any such extent afford him equal gratification." - Ezra Pound

The Golden Bowl - Henry James 1904

Tickled again.

The Dead - James Joyce 1914

The warmth of family, the snow of death, the quiet desperation of the protagonist's final reflections.

Victory - Joseph Conrad 1915

I read this novel when I was a freshperson in college. It taught me that a story, or a sentence in context, could mean more than was on the surface, and made me want to do for others what it had done for me.

Ulysses  - James Joyce 1918-20

I have read it several times including once in a semester class devoted to it and once in the 24 hours of its own time. You do something like that and it’s hard to get out of your head.

The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann 1924

Another book that taught me about things meaning more than they say. Also the sexiest heroine for me in literature. Also the terrible waste of war.

À la recherche du temps perdu - Marcel Proust 1913-1927

The thread spun by the Fates is not a monofilament but made of many fibers twisted together on the spindle of Clotho and the wheel of Lachesis. Only Atropos, with her shears, is binary. Proust discerns the fibers in our thin but multiplex life as no other author does. He makes real the complexity of living in time. It was only on the 4^th reading that I really understood why Swann married Odette. He also writes sentences that thrill me to my heels.

As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner 1930

Written before existentialism was widely known, this is an existentialist novel par excellence. Addie Burden allots to each of her children their own kind of being, and they live it out. With 15 narrators, it is an exercise in voices to rival Les Liaisons dangereuses. It is also the funniest book on this list except for Tom Jones.

The Sound and the Fury/ Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner 1929-36

Faulkner often writes with combined dread and admiration about stubborn people. The stubbornness of Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying drives the identity of her children; the stubbornness of her husband drives the plot. The Sound and the Fury & Absalom, Absalom! are about the heroic and self-destructive grand gestures of the living ghosts of the old south. We are all stubborn; it makes us who we are and keeps us from, from…from what? from something or other. The prose thrills me.

The Man Without Qualities - Robert Musil 1930-1942

When he began this novel, Musil, an engineer, calculated carefully, based mostly on the life span of his parents and grandparents, how many years he had to live. Unfortunately he died about 10 years earlier than planned. As a result, towards the end of the book it meanders into a copious estuary of printed partial versions, printed versions recalled, long clear alternative passage, short ambiguous alternative passages, sketchy notes, etc. Personally I think he had raised plot issues he could never have resolved, but that doesn’t matter because as a writer the multiplicity of shadowy outcomes is satisfactory in fact enriching.

Si j'étais vous - Henry Green 1947

This novel has problems. It’s burdened with Catholic mumbo jumbo by its convert author. The descriptions and characterization have a creaky 19^th century quality. Nevertheless it addresses what it might mean to become someone else more seriously than anything I know.

The Unnamable - Samuel Beckett 1953

The phenomenological effort of identifying these novels in my mind is not easy. I'd been working on this list, more off than on, for months before I realized The Unnamable belonged here. Like The Scarlet Letter it is the image I remember, of the protagonist, reduced to a torso in an urn outside a bar talking to bystanders (or perhaps not that). But it is also the prose, shorn, like the protagonist, of all excess. My wife suggested it was one of the novels on this list preoccupied with identity, perhaps, oddly, most like The Odyssey, with its final words: "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on,"

An Imaginary Life - David Malouf 1978

Exiled in a grungy peasant village on the Black Sea, Ovid, the worldly Roman author of the immensely influential poem, The Metamorphosis, finally learns from a feral child what change means.

Soul Mountain - Gao Xingjian 1986

Who is I? Is he I? Who else is I? Who is she? Is she one or several? What does the answer to that question mean to what I is? This fascinating tale of someone researching folk culture in China dissolves identity as cubism dissolves perspective. Utterly intriguing.

The Rings of Saturn - W. G. Sebald 1999

The most often read and praised of Seybold’s novels is Austerlitz. I love it, but think more often of this one, freed from plot compared to Austerlitz. The plot is that a guy walks around East Anglia and thinks about history. I hike though history with him at a walking pace, learning what it means at every step. The book it most resembles in my mind is another I think of often, indeed keep on my desk, which is not a novel: The Essays of Montaigne. A mind scanning the world, past and present together, and in doing so making it more precious.

Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper - Harriet Scott Chessman 2001

In it’s way this is like The Dead, a story of what mortality means in the context of family, exquisitely drawn with a bright eye and a knowing hand. Maybe I also like it because it lets me re-visit from another perspective the Paris of The Ambassadors, and visit there with another American family.

Double Vision/Border Crossing - Pat Barker 2003

A character haunts these two books. He haunts the lives of the other characters menacing, demanding love, and raising painful questions about what it means to be a member of society. He haunts me, as do the more or less inadequate responses of the other characters to him. Barker is the author of several haunting characters, Billy Pryor in Regeneration Trilogy, for example.

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro 2005

In a way this is an identity novel like Si j'étais vous, Soul Mountain, and The Odyssey. The question is what it means to be human. What haunts me is the heroine's perspective: cool, engaged, hopeless and optimistic. It is reconciliation, like Gilgamesh.

The Kreutzer Sonata - Margriet De Moor 2005

Beethoven wrote a sonata for Violin and piano and dedicated it to a violinist named Kreutzer. Beethoven was a quarrelsome fellow and soon fell out with Kreutzer so the dedicatee never played it. Tolstoy wrote a story in which, Ancient-Mariner-like[GF3] , a man in a train demands that his fellow passenger listen to his story of killing his wife because of his suspicion she had taken as a lover her music teacher, with whom she played Beethoven’s sonata. The married Czech composer Leos Janacek had a period of extraordinary creative flowering in his later years contemporaneous with his (probably unconsummated) affair with a young woman married to another man, which includes a string quarter he titled “The Kreutzer Sonata.” In De Moors’ novel the point-of-view character meets on a plane a blind critic who, Ancient-Mariner-like, forces him to listen to the story of his marriage with and suspicions of a woman who is in a string quartet that plays the Janacek composition. None of which fully explains the impression this book made on me. For one thing, I have always been interested in reading and writing about musicians.

There are some novels I used to think of this often that have fallen away.  La condition humaine by André Malraux for example. I thought about it often for decades, then re-read it a few years ago, still liked it, but that was enough. For decades the novel I thought of most often was Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme, but it faded for no clear reason. Likewise A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov. I note with interest however, that one of my very favorite movies, one I think of often, Claude Sautet's film Un Coeur en Hiver, I discovered only recently to be based loosely on A Hero of Our Time.

I wonder what will stay hanging around my mind this way. I'm sure I will still think of Soul Mountain as long as I think about novels; Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper and Never Let Me Go may fall away. But I never would have thought La Chartreuse de Parm would have fallen away.

I note that though I am an American, no one would mistake me for anything else, only six of these novels are American, eight if you count Henry James, and only one of those written in my life time, and that one set in 19th century Paris.  Since childhood I have been uncomfortable with America, and perhaps this represents an interest I have in establishing a broader base for myself than merely America, or perhaps just an effort to escape it.

Try this exercise. You’ll learn something.

---

 [GF1]Can you explain this remark?

 [GF2]Surprising comment. But then I barely remember the book, which I found tedious but not horrifying.

 [GF3]What was the Tolstoy story? Same title? Part of a collection?

Oh, go ahead and panic if you want to

A 6-ton satellite is about to crash to Earth in hours or maybe days, no one can say where, and our whole planet is about to be destroyed by some unstoppable force called "the markets," but hey! — don't panic. It's only the destruction of the world we're talking about, it's not like this was a matter of life or death. Except yours and mine, of course, but what does that matter on the scale of the Universe?

And, as the pilots of the demolition ships keep reminding us, we have had ample warning, at least 4 years' worth, enough time for our leaders first to deny that anything serious was happening, then to blame one another as things got worse, and now in the final stage to run around frantically waving their arms and doing things — like spending huge sums on failing systems — that negate what other leaders are doing — like cutting back on social investment to the point of strangling all economic life as we know it.

And I'll bet you thought A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was fiction. Now we see that all Douglas Adams did was to change the names to protect … well, himself, I suppose. In that radio and then book series, he called the pilots of the demolition ships "Vogons," the incredibly stupid but technologically empowered beings who believe they need to destroy the Earth to clear a path for a new interstellar highway. See? Just like what is really happening, except we call those incredibly stupid and technologically empowered beings that are destroying our world  "markets." And just as in the Guide, we eventually learn that the world destroyed was an artificial planet commissioned by super-intelligent mice as a highly complex computer to discover the meaning of life, the universe and everything — not the answer, but the question. Well, maybe they weren't really mice in our case. Super-intelligent cockroaches, could be. Or something. Or nothing. More likely, some not especially intelligent or foresighted humans thinking no farther than their immediate advantage.

Because yes, we can now see that what is threatened with imminent destruction — just ask Christine Lagarde if you doubt me — is an artificial planet, though only a few centuries, not tens of millions of years old. It is what we used to call the First World, until the other two self-destructed. (The Second, piloted from Moscow, by enormous internal tensions and its stubborn and futile battering of itself against the First World; the Third World by allowing itself to be absorbed into the fringes of the First one, where its denizens are still hoping to wriggle their way higher in the ranking.)

Yes, fellow First Wordlings about to be hit in the head by a failed 6-ton satellite, our world of self-feeding, self-destroying capitalist construction and consumption is fast coming apart and about to disintegrate entirely under the repeated and ever fiercer attacks of the markets that feed on it.

Of course, just as on the planet Magrathea, the infinite improbability drive may come into operation and something may save us. Let's hope so, because the European Union, the European Central Bank, the US Fed and the IMF haven't a clue, or else have clues leading them all in opposite directions. Or maybe that 6-ton satellite will hit one of us in the head and we won't need to worry about life, the universe, or anything.

Russian Women Prove It's Hip To Be A Babushka : NPR

Just listen to these voices!

Russian Women Prove It's Hip To Be A Babushka : NPR

And be sure to watch the YouTube video of these "babushki" — all of them in their 70s or 80s — performing for Eurovision.

I just read Ludmilla Petrusheskaya's latest collection of stories, which I described in my Goodreads review (of the Spanish translation) as "crime and punishment, with magic." Her characters include several бабушки (plural of бабушкa, "babushka"), mostly much sadder exemplars than these, but recognizably related. It's great to see these long-suffering widows enjoying themselves so hugely.

Someone Wot Writes...

A Gift for the Sultan is currently featured on Shalini Boland's blog,

Someone Wot Writes...

Shalini does a good job. The site is attractive and her questions are just the sorts of things readers will want to know. Check out her site for this and other new books.

(She is also giving you a chance at a drawing for her new vampire novel, Hidden. I'll bet the young Christian princess in A Gift for the Sultan would like it.)

Researching "Sultan"

A fellow reader in Shelfari and Goodreads asked me to describe my research process for A Gift for the Sultan. My best answer to the question is in the video I've posted on my Amazon author page (also on my website and on YouTube). But here's a summary.

I sort of went crazy on the research; I found the period and the real characters so fascinating that I read everything I could find, in all the languages I read (only three, unfortunately — neither Greek nor Turkish). I think I was able to read almost everything relevant (in English, French or Spanish) because I focused narrowly on just a few months of history, from mid 1402 to end of 1403, when the nascent Ottoman Empire was suddenly smashed to pieces (for a short but critical period).

The subject was completely new to me — all my previous books had been about Latin America. But I had learned to do research. I joined an e-forum of scholars on Turkey and another one for Byzantinists, and I was so obsessive in searching through the New York Public Library and the very good collection in the New York University library that there came a point where those scholars were asking me questions. I even discovered a pencil-written manuscript in the NYPL archives, on a 15th century Turkish poetess, and passed that on to a literary journal in Ankara that used it for its inaugural issue. There were times when I thought my whole project was insane and I put it aside for months at a time, but the research was fun and put me in contact with lots of intelligent people. And I'm so stubborn that I kept working on the prose until I got it right, at least as far as I could tell.

I'm glad that this reader was interested enough to ask. Thanks!

A love affair across the centuries

The Russian Orientalist Nicholas Martinovitch (1883-1954) fell madly in love with the object of his research, a Turkish poetess who had died, he believed, more than 350 years before his birth. I have just uploaded my essay on this peculiar love affair, introducing Martinovitch's monograph on the 15th century Turkish poetess Mihrî Khâtûn (or "Hatun" in modern Turkish), which appeared in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Turkish Literature (2004).

I had discovered Martinovitch's unpublished, handwritten manuscript in the New York Public Library, while researching background for my novel A Gift for the Sultan. Readers of that novel may recognize Mihrî's name: I used the full version of it, Mihr-u-Mah ((Persian for "Sun and Moon") as the flattering name that the Turks bestow on the young Christian princess who is in their charge.

You can read my brief introduction free on Scribd: A Love Affair Across the Centuries.

My novel A Gift for the Sultan is available in electronic (Kindle) or printed paperback edition from Amazon, where you will also find 8 customer reviews, all of them positive (including the one Amazon considered the most critical). It is also available as an e-book (all formats), at the same low price ($4.99), from Smashwords, where there are so far no reviews.