“A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father.”
—-Berg, by Ann Quin, opening line
Clarence Street Art Collective, The Cedars, Dallas, Texas
Ok, a while back I put together a reading plan. Next up on the list, decided by the roll of the die, wasBerg, by Ann Quin (I’m skipping the next Zola novel for a while). I started it a few days ago and stalled a bit – it’s a short novel, but dense and difficult.
But then I received notice that the Difficult Reading Book Club is starting back up and tomorrow, Wednesday will be our first get-together of the current round. In the past I have read with this group Gravity’s Rainbow, 1Q84, The Brother’s Karamazov, and Foucault’s Pendulum – difficult, but rewarding books all – I don’t know if I could have dug through all these alone. This time we are reading two books, both by William Faulkner – The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! I read The Sound and the Fury in college – about all I remember is how hard is was to get through and/because its unique structure and language. So I’m excited to read it again – with my accumulated decades and the help of the other readers.
However, that put pressure on my reading of Berg. I thought about abandoning it, but I had a few hours this afternoon, so I shut myself up with my Kindle and knocked it off.
Berg is an interesting book – very well written – with a very unique and difficult voice. Is it a good book? It’s right on the edge. With a book as idiosyncratic as this one – to me the ultimate test if if you care, if you give a damn about the characters. Otherwise all the literary gymnastics are just showing off.
In this case, I guess I ended up caring. Nobody is likeable. Everybody is crazy. The author struggled with mental health – she had a breakdown when she finished the novel and needed extensive treatment before she published it – and, sadly, she eventually committed suicide by drowning herself in a setting terribly similar to the novel.
The novel is not very long – I should re-read it and probably will after we finish with Faulkner. It’s worth it if you are looking for an idiosyncratic voice in literature. It is the kind of thing you will like if you like that sort of thing.
One side note I found. There actually is a film version of Berg, called Killing Dad – starring Richard E Grant as the son, Denholm Elliott as the father, and Julie Walters as the mistress, Judith. I have no idea how they would make a movie out of the words on the page. I’m not sure if I want to see it – it may spoil the images I have in my noggin from the text. It is available for free on Tubi if I change my mind.
“A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.” ― Paula Fox
Waco Downtown Farmer’s Market
Waco, Texas
Ok, so I’m off working on my Reading Plan. On the fiction, novel side the first one up was Desperate Characters by Paula Fox.
It sometimes takes me as much as a month to dig through a big, tough novel. There are all the Zolas – plus with my Difficult Reading Book club there has been Gravity’s Rainbow, 1Q84, Brothers Karamazov… and others – all long, difficult (but worthwhile) slogs.
I read Desperate Characters in two days. Reading the book blind, I didn’t realize it was written in 1970 – assuming it was newer than that. It is set in upper-crust New York (the protagonist is a literary translator – her husband a successful attorney) during the time when New York was being overtaken by crime, racism, and filth (like it might be again – that’s why it felt so contemporary).
Sophie, the translator, opens her terrace to feed a stray cat and the feline attacks and bites her. During the bulk of the story Sophie struggles with the thought she might have rabies.
The novel is set in a small, walled-in world – with walled-in characters. The title comes from Thoreau’s Walden quote “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I have been coming across that quote a lot lately… which is unfortunately not surprising.
One thing I want to do while I go through this reading plan is to hand write into my planner passages that resonate with me for one reason or another. I have always used my Kindle to highlight passages, store them digitally, but sitting down with a fountain pen and my precious dwindling supply of Tomoe River paper… gives them more meaning and imprints them on my fading gray matter.
I wrote down two quotes, one long one short. I’ll type them up here:
Desperate Characters, page 54
In this last year she had discovered that its discomforts, once interpreted, always meant the curtailment, or end of some pleasure. She could not eat and drink the way she once had. Inexorably, she was being invaded by elements that were both gross and risible. She had only recently realized that one was old for a long time
Page 75
There, she found two messages; one, written in chalk said: Kiss me someone‘ and the other, scratched with a key or a knife, said: Fuck everyone except Linda.
“Once, it was different. Once, people had homes and parents and went to schools. Cities existed within countries and those countries had leaders. Travel could be for adventure or recreation, not survival. But by the time I was grown up, the wider context was a sick joke. Incredible, how a slip could become a freefall and a freefall could become a hell where we lived on as ghosts in a haunted world.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne
Chihuly Glass (click to enlarge)
I have now read all the Borne series of books and stories by Jeff VanderMeer, pretty much – as far as I know… but the thing is I read them out of order. And I think that was a good thing.
But before I finished The Dead Astronauts I stumbled across and online short story/novela written about the same world – quite a bit earlier as it turns out – The Situation. This detailed a very strange world but told the story in a familiar way – the destruction of everything told as a story of corporate back-stabbing. I really enjoyed The Situation and that led me to check out The Strange Bird from the library and devour that short novel. It too told a strange tale but was written in a familiar style – that of a quest or journey. It was set in the same world and had a few characters in common with the other two works – enough to continue to increase my interest.
So, I bought a copy of the central novel in the series Borne – and finished it late last night. It was really good, a crackerjack of a novel. The most complete of the books, it explains a lot of what what mysterious and curious in the others… explains some, maybe not a lot, really, … and definitely not everything.
At the book club discussion of The Dead Astronauts someone describe Borne as a love story. And it is the typical girl finds odd plant in fur of giant bear, girl falls in love with plant, plant turns out not to be a plant but a ruthless killer, girl loses plant/killer, and finally girl discovers her love is something else entirely type of story. Yeah, it is a love story.
Having read it last it was inevitable that I would read it trying to ferret out the connections with the other works. The three Dead Astronauts from their own epynomous novel made an appearance in Borne but they didn’t do much probably because they were dead. The story of The Strange Bird and Borne are dovetailed – the identical tale told from two different points of view and in very different styles – the same characters populate both.
The Situation is a prequel to all the others. It contains the origin of the Giant Bear, Mord, along with other clues. In Borne, it is strongly hinted that Wick is the narrator of The Situation but I wasn’t absolutely sure. In researching this, I came across a graphic version of The Situation from Tor books – where Wick is named explicitly. Now I wonder if Scarskirt is the Magician from Borne and The Strange Bird. She is described as someone who “stared at reflective surfaces all day” which is a connection. I don’t know – but it’s fun to speculate. At any rate, click that link and look at the drawings – they are very good.
So now I’m done with Borne and I can get back to reading Zola. Except… now I’m thinking about VanderMeer’s Annihilation (I liked the movie) and the rest of its Southern Reach trilogy. We’ll see. So many books, so little time.
By the way, I’ve been reading rumors that AMC has optioned Borne for a miniseries. Wow, I have no idea how this goes onto the screen. It would be like a science fiction version of Game of Thrones… except on acid.
For he had no typewriter ribbon left and only fifty sheets of paper and he counted on the stabbing imprint of the keys to make an impression like a branding, and when he had used the fifty sheets, front and back, he would start again, typing over what he had already impressed upon the page.
—- Jeff VanderMeer, The Strange Bird
Bird, Scavenging along an Interstate Highway in Texas
Back in the olden days, the days when we did things, I would go to a book club in a bookstore on the other side of town and join a group that would read the same book and discuss it. It seems so long ago.
One book we read was Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts. I really can’t say I enjoyed the book – it was too, too difficult to read. I looked forward to the discussion. I was curious about what everybody thought – but the thoughts were jumbled. I asked, at the end of the evening, “Would anyone here have finished this book on their own – without the pressure of having book club?” The answer was a resounding NO.
Though I won’t say the book was enjoyable, it was interesting… and it was… haunting is the best I can come up with.
And when I came across an online short story written by VanderMeer – The Situation – I read it and wrote about it. It was another fabulous story but told in a more conventional way – not too difficult to get through.
And then… well, there’s this thing I do. I always like to have some short books laying around – something to read when I don’t have very much time, energy, or patience. What I do is I walk down the aisles of the library in the fiction section simply looking at the physical books. Then I pull the small and slim volumes out and see if they are something I might be interested in. This, again, was back in the olden days when there were libraries.
The last book like that I checked out – I looked at it and, surprise, it was another by Jeff VanderMeer – a short novel, novela really, called The Strange Bird.
And it, again was in a different style. It was a straightforward (though bizarre) tale told as a hero’s journey – like The Odyssey, or The Alchemist, or The Hobbit, or something like that. The protagonist is the eponymous “Strange Bird” – a creature that may have started out as a bird but had been manipulated in a horrific futuristic bio-tech lab – bits added from many different animals… and humans… fantastic properties and abilities… until what was left was an intelligent, damaged, powerful, fearful, beautiful, hurt and most of all – unique thing – the Strange Bird:
In the lab, so many of the scientists had said, “forgive me” or “I am so sorry” before doing something irrevocable to the animals in their cages. Because they felt they had the right. Because the situation was extreme and the world was dying. So they had gone on doing the same things that had destroyed the world, to save it. Even a Strange Bird perched on a palm tree on an artificial island with a moat full of hungry crocodiles below could understand the problem with that logic.
—- Jeff VanderMeer, The Strange Bird
Even though the styles are varied – the Strange Bird is a “Borne” novel and The Situation is a “Borne” novela and The Dead Astronauts is another “Borne” novel. They are set in a fantastic world established in the linchpin novel Borne by Jeff VanderMeer. This is a dystopian earth destroyed by the experiments conducted by The Company – a giant biotech conglomerate. The blasted world is left with the few remaining humans battling for survival with the genetic monsters created by The Company – now escaped and running amok.
There are characters and locations shared (though often at different times – different stages of their lives) – Charlie X, Rachel and her lover Wick (who sells drugs in the form of customized beetles that produce memories when shoved in one’s ear), the Balcony Cliffs, and especially the giant flying killer bear, Mord. Borne himself(herself? itself?) is mentioned briefly in The Strange Bird.
So, now, what choice do I have? I picked up a copy of Borne – will read it next.
“But, in the end, joy cannot fend off evil.
Joy can only remind you why you fight.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts
(click to enlarge) Mural, Deep Ellum Dallas, Texas
OK, it was Monday, the end of work, I was so very tired, I didn’t have my car with me, I had to get clear across town, if I really wanted to go there, it was cold, it was raining, it was dark, I thought about not going, I would get back home so very late, here’s how I would have to travel:
Maybe I shouldn’t have gone, today is the next day and I’m tired I didn’t get enough sleep last night
But I realized I had to go because the book was so difficult and so WEIRD that I had to find out what the others thought about it. Also, I had fought my way to the end of a tough read – I had earned the trip and the meeting.
I asked the group, “Would you have finished this if you weren’t in a reading group? If there weren’t other people shaming you into plowing ahead and getting to the end?” Everyone (and I mean Every-One) replied enthusiastically “Hell No!”
What do I think about difficult books? What do I think about WEIRD books? What do I think about books that stretch the envelope of what text can do? What do I think about books that play with illustration and typography in odd and confusing ways? (think House of Leaves)
I did say that, usually, I judge difficult and WEIRD books… in the end… by an emotional connection. I don’t care if the plot makes no sense I don’t care if there is a conventional resolution I don’t care if the theme is obscure(d) – but I prefer it if I have some kind of emotional connection or some sort of inner payoff at the end
With Dead Astronauts there was some (but not a lot) especially in the Sarah section and at the very end. Was there enough? Is Batman a transvestite? Who knows
Now, the next big question is should I read more VanderMeer? (I did really like The Situation – a protoBorne novella) Should I read Borne? (set in the same world as Dead Astronauts but different – the people in the group that had read it said it was character-driven) Should I read Annihilation?( I saw the movie without knowing it was from a book and thought it was very cool) Should I read the whole Southern Reach Trilogy (A guy sitting next to me said he really liked Annihilation but the sequels left him cold because they resolved too much of the mystery of Annihilation)
So Maybe I’ll read Annihilation and skip the rest of the Trilogy. I think I will read Borne.
But first… I have to read L’Assommoir – Have to keep troopering through my Zola project – and then, in March there’s another Wild Detectives Difficult Book Club project – we’re going to tackle The Brothers Karamazov (about six weeks of work)………………….
“It was always the same; other people gave up loving before she did. They got spoilt, or else they went away; in any case, they were partly to blame. Why did it happen so? She herself never changed; when she loved anyone, it was for life. She could not understand desertion; it was something so huge, so monstrous that the notion of it made her little heart break.”
― Émile Zola, Une Page d’amour
Une Page d’amour (1878) (A Lesson in Love/A Love Episode/A Page of Love/A Love Affair)
Le Ventre de Paris (1873) (The Belly of Paris/The Fat and the Thin/Savage Paris/The Markets of Paris)
La Joie de Vivre (1884) (The Joys of Living/Joy of Life/How Jolly Life Is/Zest for Life)
L’Assommoir (1877) (The Dram Shop/The Gin Palace/Drink/Drunkard)
L’Œuvre (1886) (The Masterpiece/A Masterpiece/His Masterpiece)
La Bête Humaine (1890) (The Beast in the Man/The Human Beast/The Monomaniac)
Germinal (1885)
Nana (1880)
La Terre (1887) (The Earth/The Soil)
La Débâcle (1892) (The Downfall/The Smash-up/The Debacle)
Le Docteur Pascal (1893) (Doctor Pascal)
The next one up was A Love Episode.
At this point I have finished the last of the books from the Mouret section of the Rougon Macquat books. The Rougon section dwelt mostly on the upper classes, especially on the mad ruthless speculation in L’Argent. Then came the Mouret branch of the family – middle class workers fighting to get ahead – and not always succeeding. Now, after A Love Episode I will move into the Macquat books – where poverty, drunkeness, and madness await. I’ve read four of these already – will have to decide whether to re-read them or not.
One characteristic of the last few books has been elaborate, extensive, florid, and detailed description. In A Love Episode this mostly consists of pages of description of the appearance of Paris out of the window of the protagonists suburban apartment. The changes in weather and light over the magnificent city reflect the inner turmoil that the main characters are experiencing.
It’s a short book, the easiest so far to read, that details… as the title suggests, a romance. The love story is between a beautiful young widow and the doctor that lives next door. He comes to her aid when her daughter falls ill. This is Paris, so the fact he is married is not an immovable obstacle, even though she is of sound moral character. The daughter, however, is sickly and very jealous, which leads to complications and, this being a Zola novel, an ultimate disaster.
A quick, fun, read… with a nice bunch of interesting characters – folks like those that you will still meet today.
“Albine now yielded to him, and Serge possessed her.
And the whole garden was engulfed together with the couple in one last cry of love’s passion. The tree-trunks bent as under a powerful wind. The blades of grass emitted sobs of intoxication. The flowers, fainting, lips half-open, breathed out their souls. The sky itself, aflame with the setting of the great star, held its clouds motionless, faint with love, whence superhuman rapture fell. And it was the victory of all the wild creatures, all plants and all things natural, which willed the entry of these two children into the eternity of life.”
― Émile Zola, La Faute de l’abbé Mouret
Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) (The Ladies’ Paradise/Shop Girls of Paris/Ladies’ Delight)
La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret (1875) (The Sin of Father Mouret/Abbe Mouret’s Transgression)
Une Page d’amour (1878) (A Lesson in Love/A Love Episode/A Page of Love/A Love Affair)
Le Ventre de Paris (1873) (The Belly of Paris/The Fat and the Thin/Savage Paris/The Markets of Paris)
La Joie de Vivre (1884) (The Joys of Living/Joy of Life/How Jolly Life Is/Zest for Life)
L’Assommoir (1877) (The Dram Shop/The Gin Palace/Drink/Drunkard)
L’Œuvre (1886) (The Masterpiece/A Masterpiece/His Masterpiece)
La Bête Humaine (1890) (The Beast in the Man/The Human Beast/The Monomaniac)
Germinal (1885)
Nana (1880)
La Terre (1887) (The Earth/The Soil)
La Débâcle (1892) (The Downfall/The Smash-up/The Debacle)
Le Docteur Pascal (1893) (Doctor Pascal)
The next one up was The Sin of Father Mouret (among other titles).
It was only a couple days ago that I wrote about The Ladies’ Paradise – but in actually, in the real world, I’m finishing up three books ahead – my episode has put my writing behind my reading.
One interesting thing about the Rougon Macquat novels is that even though they are about the same family (if very disparate branches of said tree) in France during the same period of time – the books are often very different from each other. The Sin of Father Mouret is particularly unique.
It is divided into three distinct sections. The first is a fairly dry (though interesting) depiction of a devout priest in a poverty-stricken rural area – hanging on by pure faith in a run-down threadbare church surrounded by a population with less than perfect spiritual lives. Eventually the stress (plus the inherited family madness that runs through all the books) causes him to crack and suffer a complete mental breakdown. He has complete amnesia and is placed in the care of a wild, almost feral, young girl that has the run of an old garden – a giant park run wild with ancient plants gone to seed. This place, Le Paradou is described in intricate detail – a place of unbelievable fecundity in the midst of a barren landscape – set off by a high stone wall. Comparisons with the Garden of Eden are obvious, along with the ideas of the knowledge of good and evil and of original sin.
Eventually, a glimpse through a gap in the stone wall brings Father Mouret’s memories back and he is faced with the choice of returning to his church or remaining in the garden.
The language and description of the couple’s life in Le Paradou is luscious, flamboyant, and prolonged. The contrast between life within the walls and without is so great it almost reads as being unreal. I took it that way – reading in as more of an allegory than as actual fact – and that made the book more enjoyable, in my opinion.
It is an interesting read. I have never soldiered through any book like it. A significant change of pace in the string of twenty books.
Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) (The Ladies’ Paradise/Shop Girls of Paris/Ladies’ Delight)
La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret (1875) (The Sin of Father Mouret/Abbe Mouret’s Transgression)
Une Page d’amour (1878) (A Lesson in Love/A Love Episode/A Page of Love/A Love Affair)
Le Ventre de Paris (1873) (The Belly of Paris/The Fat and the Thin/Savage Paris/The Markets of Paris)
La Joie de Vivre (1884) (The Joys of Living/Joy of Life/How Jolly Life Is/Zest for Life)
L’Assommoir (1877) (The Dram Shop/The Gin Palace/Drink/Drunkard)
L’Œuvre (1886) (The Masterpiece/A Masterpiece/His Masterpiece)
La Bête Humaine (1890) (The Beast in the Man/The Human Beast/The Monomaniac)
Germinal (1885)
Nana (1880)
La Terre (1887) (The Earth/The Soil)
La Débâcle (1892) (The Downfall/The Smash-up/The Debacle)
Le Docteur Pascal (1893) (Doctor Pascal)
The next one up was The Ladies Paradise.
The overall story is a very thin romance between a poor, country girl that comes to Paris and finds work in a new, rapidly expanding department store and the owner of the store. He is Octave Mouret, the relentless womanizer of the book before this one – Pot-Bouille. His desire to possess women has now metastasized into the need to dominate them commercially by creating a retail establishment that they cannot resist – literally a ladies’ paradise.
But the real protagonist of the story is the store itself – the eponymous Ladies Paradise. Large swaths of text are dedicated to detailed dreamy descriptions of the store, its wares, and the elaborate displays set up to show off the goods and lure in the women of Paris and, most importantly, to separate them from their money.
As the book progresses the store grows and grows, taking over building after building, until it dominates the area and all retail commerce. There is a heart-tearing description of the woeful ends of the various small shopkeepers of Paris – trying to scrape out a living selling cloth, shoes, or umbrellas – until they are inevitably ground under the heels of the behemoth growing through the streets – their owners are driven into bankruptcy, poverty, and madness.
The book was written a couple of centuries ago – but it is a story that is still going on today. We have all seen small businessmen destroyed by large corporate chains that offer lower prices, bigger selections, and spectacular shopping experiences. It is a story that could take place in the last couple of decades.
Except today, even those huge conglomerates are being driven out of business by a technology that Zola couldn’t even imagine – online shopping. Though, now that I think about it, The Ladies Paradise puts together a company of horse-drawn delivery vans, with advertisements plastered on the side, that resembles today’s fleet of Amazon-Prime vehicles.
This was an enjoyable tome in the series, though the long, detailed descriptions of ranks upon ranks of goods placed on sale went on too long for my taste – but probably necessary to drive home the point of the plot. It was simultaneously a record of the past, an reverse echo of the present, and a warning of the future.
“When younger, he had been fun-loving to the point of tedium.”
― Émile Zola, Pot Luck (Pot Bouille)
Pot Bouille, by Emile Zola
In September of last year (2018) I began the task of reading all twenty novels in Emile Zola’s Rougon Marquat cycle. There was a three month gap in this reading plan as I plowed through Gravity’s Rainbow with a reading group. But now I’m back at it – though not in too much of a hurry… I am reading other books too.
I finished The Conquest of Plassans (book number six) a week or so ago. It was an interesting read – especially how it began slowly as a story of small-town gossip and intrigue and built into a climax of madness, horror, and death. Now I am onto the seventh (in the recommended reading order), Pot-Bouille.
That title doesn’t translate to English very well. I’ve seen it as Pot Luck and other things. From Wikipedia:
The word pot-bouille is a 19th-century French slang term for a large cooking pot or cauldron used for preparing stews and casseroles and also the foods prepared in it. The title is intended to convey a sense of disparate ingredients, the various inhabitants of the building mixed together, to create a potent and heady mix like a strong stew. The impression is to hint at the greed, ambition and depravity which lies behind the pretentious façade of the outwardly well behaved bourgeois apartment block. There is no equivalent word in English to convey this. The closest English term would probably be an expression such as melting pot.
In the film The Life of Emile Zola, the novel’s title is rendered as Piping Hot.
So, I think of the book as being called “melting pot.”
It seems to be a complicated story about numerous residents in a multi story rental house in the center of Paris – most related to each other in one way or another. To help with the book I spent a few hours and complied a list of characters I could refer to… then discovered somebody else had already done it.
I’m on the road and working hard for the next week, but I should be able to find some slivers of time and finish the book. Then on to the next, Au Bonheur des Dames – a direct sequel to Pot-Bouille.
“The vision that had emerged from the invisible was returning to the invisible. It was no more an appearance that was fading away, having created an illusion. All is but a dream. And, at the peak of happiness, Angélique had vanished, in the faint breath of a kiss.”
― Émile Zola, The Dream
Next is Le Rêve (The Dream). It is a complete departure from the other books in the Rougon-Marquat series. Instead of complex, realistic stories – it is the simple, yet fantastic, romantic tale of an orphan girl Angélique, that falls in love with a wealthy nobleman. She is a descendant of the Rougon family – providing the tenuous connection with the rest of the books. Angélique does suffer from the mental instability of her kin, which provides a window into her obsession with the saints and the idea of a perfect romance.
I have to admit, though, I didn’t like the book very much. It starts out with a lot of promise, the young girl abandoned in the snow near a great cathedral in rural France – it’s a powerful image. But the story spends too many words in cataloging a parade of saints and the stories of The Golden Legend. It become tedious and not very interesting to a modern reader.
In doing research about the book, I did find something I really liked. There are a series of amazing illustrations for the novel by Carlos Schwabe. I was not familiar with the artist and looking around the web there are some really interesting stuff he’s done. I especially like the drawings he did for Baudelaire’s book of poetry, Les Fleurs du mal. Have to look into these some more.
Illustration for Zola’s Le Reve, by Carlos Schwabe
Carlos Schwabe, Spleen et Idéal (1896) from Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal
Carlos Schwabe, from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal
Bill Chance 