It’s because she wants it told, he thought, so that people whom she will never see and whose names she will never hear and who have never heard her name nor seen her face will read it and know at last why God let us lose the war: that only through the blood of our men and the tears of our women could He slay this demon and efface his name and lineage from the earth.
—-William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
Mural outside of Sandwich Hag, The Cedars, Dallas, Texas
And this week we started in on the second tome in our Faulkner journey – Absalom, Absalom!. I am now three chapters in. I had heard a lot of talk about how difficult a book it is – but after The Sound and the Fury I’m finding the second book quite a bit easier to read and understand. Now, there are sentences that run on for pages (although Ulysses by James Joyce has a 4,491 word sentence in a soliloquy, The Guinness Book of Records lists the longest proper sentence as one from Absalom, Absalom! at 1,287 words – I haven’t reached it yet), the story is frames within frames within frames, and the language (is wonderful) is difficult… For example I made a note of one phrase on page 53:
presbyterian effluvium of lugubrious and vindictive anticipation,
Ok… I know all those words… but I never thought of seeing them strung together in one place like that.
Oh. Seeing that phrase that I had highlighted reminded me of something. I bought a paperback copy of the book, plus a Kindle copy. I then discovered something I never knew about reading on a Kindle. I have been reading books on my Kindle for well over a decade – hundreds of books. During all this time I have been highlighting passages that I wanted to remember. Only this week did I discover that there is a web page:
That contains all the highlights (and notes) that I have made in all those books over all those years on all my devices. It’s pretty damn amazing. Looking through it is like going back in time. There are books in there I didn’t remember reading until I perused the feedback I input at the time – then it came rushing back.
I am now going through these highlights and hand copying the ones that still mean something to me into my commonplace book. Cool! Also a huge waste of time… but it is what it is.
Well… better go read. I’ve heard that chapter Four is a doozy.
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower bed. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.
—- William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, opening paragraph (Benjy Section)
The Difficult Reading Book Club – a group I belong to (we have read Gravity’s Rainbow, 1Q84, The Brother’s Karamazov, and Foucault’s Pendulum) – is now one week into Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. This week I read the infamous Benjy Section – the first part of the novel. Tonight we had a Zoom meeting to discuss (we will be meeting in person starting next week).
This is one of the most difficult hunks of text to read and understand. It is written in raw stream-of-consciousness from the mind of a severely mentally disabled man on his thirty third birthday. Benjy – is completely unable to understand the passage of time and his disjointed thoughts jump back and forth over a thirty-year span. It is amazingly difficult to figure out what is going one – Benjy knows what he sees – but he doesn’t know why. The text gives no context – you have to figure it out.
For example, read the opening paragraph above. How long did it take for you to realize Benjy is watching a group play golf through a fence?
I had an advantage, I have read the book before. It was almost fifty years ago – I was a mere teen – and had no idea of what was going on. However, I did understand what the structure of The Benjy Section was and, with that leg up, I was able to take notes and figure out most, or some, or a lot of what was actually happening.
The rest of the book is not as confusing and I look forward to reading it to understand more of what was presented. When I finish, I’m going to go back and re-read The Benjy Section with the knowledge gained in the others – it should make more sense then.
Oh, and The Sound and the Fury isn’t difficult enough for The Difficult Reading Book Club on its own – we will immediately jump into Absalom, Absalom!.
“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.
“Strange can be quite normal. Strange can just be the phrase ‘That is not important’ as an answer for everything. But if your son never answered you that way before, then the fourth time you ask him why he’s not eating, or if he’s cold, or you send him to bed, and he answers, almost biting off the words as if he were still learning to talk, ‘That is not important’, I swear to you Amanda, your legs start to tremble.” ― Samanta Schweblin, Fever Dream
Mural (detail), Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
So, the next novel in line on my reading plan was Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin. A very short novel, with few characters (though a unique take on point of view) I was able to read it in a day and a half.
It’s a horror story, with elements of the supernatural and environmental disaster in the forefront. It’s told as a conversation between a young boy (who is half someone else) and a dying woman – his summer-renting neighbor. The two of them, the woman’s young daughter, plus many other people, and most of the animals, in the area have been exposed to a toxin of unknown nature. The wealthy men of the neighborhood seem to be doing something that releases the toxin, but nobody knows for sure.
It’s a horrible illness – killing most in a few days and leaving the survivors disfigured and changed… somehow. A story told in an effective and interesting way about a mother’s worst nightmare.
But, I’m sorry, in the end the novel didn’t do much for me. I did read an English translation – and I could almost feel the subtlety of the original Spanish washed away off the edges of the paper. Spanish has words that English lacks, words for emotions and relationships that I may have been missing. The book held plenty of horror, dread, and mystery… is that enough? Does it need a payoff? A point? Even if it is short and only takes up a few precious hours of your life?
Probably not. Still, I wanted at least a bit more.
I see than Netflix has made a film out of this movie. I’m tempted… but I can’t see how this harrowing, yet thin, story would look in pixels and sound. I’ll probably watch it eventually, just not now.
OK, looking at the order I chose for my reading plan (chosen by the roll of the dice) – Is another Zola novel – The Debacle (the next-to-last Rougon Macquart novel)… but I’m not in the mood for another long novel… just yet. So it’s Berg, by Ann Quin next. Then on to Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World by Donald Antrim. A couple more shorter novels.
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” ― Oscar Wilde
(click to enlarge) Book With Wings, Anselm Kiefer, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
As I said the other day after I finished La Terre I wanted to evaluate my reading – set up a reading plan. I watched some YouTube videos on setting up a Reading Journal and on reading plans – and did some general web searches on the subject.
What I decided to do was to make some lists of books to read in several categories (I decided to stick, for now, to what’s on my Kindle – there are more books there than I could read in the few years still allocated to me) and then go from there. I chose six fiction novels that looked like the next six I wanted to read. I also started on lists for Self-Help (don’t judge) and for Writing categories. Next, I want to do lists of short story collections and general non-fiction. That should be a good start – I plan on having at least one current book from each category and I can pick and choose depending on my mood.
There is a reason I picked six fiction novels. I have been experimenting with dice... and I wanted to choose the order by roll of the die (six is better than eleven, the numbers from two die, because the odds of each number are the same and I didn’t want to mess around with ranking the books… maybe next time). So I went through my Kindle, listed out six that jumped out at me, and started to roll.
And, here we go:
1st book – Desperate Characters – Paula Fox – 152 pages
2nd book – Mobius Dick – Andrew Crummy – 320 pages
6th book – Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World – Donald Antrim – 192 pages
You will notice a plethora of short, modern books on this list. I wanted a change from Zola… though The Debacle is on the list (almost done with the series).
And yesterday, I started in on Desperate Characters – reading a third of it in one day. It is a jump from the grand scope (in space and time) of Zola’s naturalistic social prose to the focused crystalline details of the more modern novel. It is so compressed, so focused on seemingly random details and thoughts of the characters. Very modern, very New York.
Fun.
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” ― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
“And then there was pain and blood and tears, all those things that cause suffering and revolt, the killing of Françoise, the killing of Fouan, vice triumphing, and the stinking, bloodthirsty peasants, vermin who disgrace and exploit the earth. But can you really know? Just as the frost that burns the crops, the hail that chops them down, the thunderstorms which batter them are all perhaps necessary, maybe blood and tears are needed to keep the world going. And how important is human misery when weighed against the mighty mechanism of the stars and the sun? What does God care for us? We earn our bread only by dint of a cruel struggle, day in, day out. And only the earth is immortal, the Great Mother from whom we spring and to whom we return, love of whom can drive us to crime and through whom life is perpetually preserved for her own inscrutable ends, in which even our wretched degraded nature has its part to play.” ― Émile Zola, The Earth (La Terre)
La Débâcle (1892) (The Downfall/The Smash-up/The Debacle)
Le Docteur Pascal (1893) (Doctor Pascal)
La Terre was a long (500 plus pages) book, but not too difficult – there were fewer characters and their relationships were a lot less complicated than in, say, Nana or Au Bonheur des Dames.
The connection to the rest of the Rougon-Macquart novels is Jean Macquart. He is the brother of Gervaise from L’Assommoir and Nana’s uncle. Jean is a drifter, an army veteran, who gives up being a carpenter to work as a field laborer in a vast wheat-growing area known as La Beauce. He stays for a decade and becomes part of the territory, although the people there never view him as one of their own. It reminded me of Germinal where a Macquart (Etienne Lantier, Jean’s nephew) show up and in desperation finds work and tries, unsuccessfully to become part of the community.
Most of the plot revolves around the family of the elderly farmer Fouan who is forced by age to divide his meager lands among his three children. There is a fourth, young daughter, Françoise, who becomes involved with Jean Macquart. The plot is obviously inspired by King Lear where jealousy, greed, and treachery among siblings leads to madness, disaster, and death.
Things do not end well.
And hanging over everyone in the book is the fear of vast quantities of cheap American Wheat starting to flow across the Atlantic and reduce the price of agricultural products so much the French farmers are facing doom. My family comes from wheat farmers in Kansas – to me that was an interesting fear and description of the vast Midwest plains of endless grain and mechanized agriculture.
The book is not as well known as some of Zola’s other work – but it is unquestionably a masterpiece. It took me too long to start and too long to get through, but it was very good, although depressing and not very kind to the idea of man’s ultimate goodness. There are no heroes in the book, not really even Jean himself – though he may be the only character that the reader won’t decry as evil.
So on to the next… only two to go. I do think I’ll take a break from Zola for a bit…. My Kindle is filling up, I need to sit down with pen and paper and work through a reading plan – organize my fiction and non-fiction… I’m be back to you with what I decide.
I am old enough to remember the early 1980’s – with 20% interest rates, hyperinflation, and terrible joblessness. It wasn’t fun. It feels like that right now.
The historic Renner School House, in Dallas Heritage Village, with the skyscrapers of downtown rearing up in the background.
I am old enough to remember the early 1980’s – with 20% interest rates, hyperinflation, and terrible joblessness. It wasn’t fun. It feels like that right now.
Simon Tisdall claims that this fear is already condemning Ukraine to one of the ‘forever wars’ that, on the campaign trail in 2020, the American president pledged to end.
“She alone was left standing, amid the accumulated riches of her mansion, while a host of men lay stricken at her feet. Like those monsters of ancient times whose fearful domains were covered with skeletons, she rested her feet on human skulls and was surrounded by catastrophes…The fly that had come from the dungheap of the slums, carrying the ferment of social decay, had poisoned all these men simply by alighting on them. It was fitting and just. She had avenged the beggars and outcasts of her world. And while, as it were, her sex rose in a halo of glory and blazed down on her prostrate victims like a rising sun shining down on a field of carnage, she remained as unconscious of her actions as a splendid animal, ignorant of the havoc she had wreaked, and as good-natured as ever.”
― Emile Zola , Nana
Nana, 1877 (oil on canvas) by Manet, Edouard (1832-83)
La Débâcle (1892) (The Downfall/The Smash-up/The Debacle)
Le Docteur Pascal (1893) (Doctor Pascal)
Now there are only three to go. I’ll finish before September, so it will have been a four-year reading project – which seems nuts – but I have read a lot of other books too. I just keep coming back.
Nana is one of the best known of the series, and is one that I read first, years ago. No problem in repeating it, though, I remembered very little and the translation I read this time was superior and not as bowdlerized.
We first saw Nana in the amazing L’Assommoir – she was the laundress Gervaise’s beautiful, precocious, and trouble making daughter – who at the end of that novel was living on the streets and introduced to the life of a prostitute. Here she has continued down that path until she was the untalented but frighteningly sexy star of the theater – appearing practically naked in a production called La blonde Vénus, and creating a scandalous shockwave through Parisian society – one that nobody really recovers from.
Nana is a force of nature, a being of pure sexuality and no common sense that destroys everything and everyone that comes into contact with her.
With this subject matter it was going to be a racy book – but I was surprised at its frank sexuality. For example, I didn’t remember the plot thread of lesbianism that ran through the story from the first time I read it, years ago. This theme might have been edited out – or I might have simply missed it – probably a bit of both. There are a few scenes of raw sexuality – such as the passage where Nana spends time admiring her nude image in a full-length mirror while her lover waits in bed. Really heady stuff.
The book starts out slow – there are the numerous crowd scenes that Zola is known for – effectively written but a bit of a slog – so many French names – until you get to know the characters. An online character list was a big help. After a few chapters the pace picks up until, near the end, Nana is destroying another man in almost every other paragraph.
So, all in all, a rewarding read. I can see why it is near the top of the Zola canon – a little too flamboyant to be with the classics like L’Assommoir or Germinal – but still…
Now I’m excited… on to La Terre. Seventeen down – only three to go.
“Science gains from it [the pendulum] more than one can expect. With its huge dimensions, the apparatus presents qualities that one would try in vain to communicate by constructing it on a small [scale], no matter how carefully. Already the regularity of its motion promises the most conclusive results. One collects numbers that, compared with the predictions of theory, permit one to appreciate how far the true pendulum approximates or differs from the abstract system called ‘the simple pendulum’.” ― Jean Bernard Léon Foucault
Ice Sculpture
Let me look back… it was October 1 of last year when my Difficult Reads Book Club began plowing through Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. One of the reasons we chose that book was because it was a bit shorter (a mere 642 pages) than the other’s we have tackled (Gravity’s Rainbow – 770 pages, The Brothers Karamazov – only 586) and we planned to be finished well before Christmas. There were some delays… COVID related, death in the family, which delayed the schedule and we didn’t get to the end until the New Year.
It was not an overly popular book and a good number (most) of my fellow readers dropped off before we reached the conclusion. I stuck it out, however… and am glad I did.
The book was not at all what I expected. I thought it would be a thinking-man’s Da Vinci Code – but it turned out to be more of a satire on the genre than a homage. Humberto Eco was asked about the popular book:
INTERVIEWER: Have you read The Da Vinci Code?
ECO: Yes, I am guilty of that too.
INTERVIEWER: That novel seems like a bizarre little offshoot of Foucault’s Pendulum.
ECO: The author, Dan Brown, is a character from Foucault’s Pendulum! I invented him. He shares my characters’ fascinations—the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.
I like the idea that Dan Brown is a character from the book. It fits (except that Foucault’s Pendulum was written first).
So the book kept surprising me. I’ll admit I skimmed a lot of the center sections – they were a long, long list of various obscure (and not-so-obscure) semi-supernatural groups from history and explanations of the fictional connections between them. I understood the point right at the beginning, but there were hundreds of dense pages to make sure that point was driven home.
All through all of this, I could not imagine how it would all end. And it ended in a way I could never have imagined. There was a climactic scene of insanity and bizarre violence that answered no questions at all. It was fun. Then there was a final section of quiet nostalgic contemplation and an slight sense of almost closure – with plenty of mystery remaining.
It was a thought provoking book – I’m not sure if it was worth the effort – but I haven’t read anything remotely like it before (and doubt I ever will again).
So now we’re taking a break – I’m catching up with some of my other reading – and then we’ll decide on our next project. We are thinking about a selection of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish novels (The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974) and one other) – which sounds good to me. I’ve read Left Hand when I was a kid but remember little about it.
“I love the smell of book ink in the morning.” ― Umberto Eco
Half-Price Books Clearance Sale, Market Hall, Dallas, Texas
It’s that time again, my Difficult Reading Book Club has started to tackle another tome.
It started with Gravity’s Rainbow. I saw this sign, a couple of years ago, at The Wild Detectives bookstore in Bishop Arts. We met there (a bit of a trip for me) every Wednesday evening for several months as we slogged through the difficult, but fantastic, book together.
Sign at The Wild Detectives bookstore, Dallas, Texas
I’m not sure how I think about the whole Zoom meeting thing for book club. I miss the one-on-one, of course. But it is such a long trip to the book store, and there is something interesting about the dynamic of talking to those little heads in boxes. I think everybody being at home, in a place they are comfortable, makes the conversation interesting. Still….
And now we’re doing another. Last night we had our kickoff meeting (no reading yet) for Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum.
I’m stoked. I have never read Eco before – though I bought a copy of The Island of the Day Before and prepared to read it a couple decades ago – never started. There are some familiar faces in the Zoom and some new ones. Some of the folks are particularly interested in Kabbalah – and are reading it for that reason. We discussed conspiracy theories in the opening meeting (as an icebreaker everyone told their favorite conspiracy theory -mine was that Any Kaufman faked his own death).
We discussed challenging vocabulary and decided that each meeting each person is to bring a word they learned from that week’s assigned reading. We discussed reading translations vs. books written in English.
Bill Chance 