Jean Raspail's "The Camp of the Saints": Book Review

Recent flotillas of refugees from Africa and Syria caused a few bookworms and pundits to name-check this 1973 novel. Liberals practically put "scare quotes" around a mention of what they term a racist screed. Conservatives may praise it as a "classic." I knew of it way back via the maverick Garrett Hardin's perspective; he appealed if in different aspects to both ends of the political spectrum.

It popped into my mind the other day so I sat down and read it. It took two sittings. Raspail, as here translated by Norman Solomon, has a feverish, testy style that Michel Houellebecq, in his formative years in France, I suspect may well have come across. However, as Houellebecq's mordant fiction gains the same condemnations in bien-pensant right-thinking and left-leaning circles as Raspail's book, readers familiar with H. may find an encounter with R. bracing, infuriating, or baffling.

Raspail is credited on the blurb for The Camp of the Saints as a prize-winning author in his native land. Yet this novel flails from the get-go. The end of the story, or near it, jumbles up chronology. The sneering tone of the misanthropic narrator, the overabundant detail, the cardboard characters, the fact you don't care about anyone in the entire storyline: Raspail has scores to settle, but whether you'll be cheering him on or chasing him away depends not only on your own ideological bent, but your tolerance (a theme put through the wringer herein) for prattling. Raspail has it in for his countercultural era of the slightly aging hippies and the faux radicals of the early 1970s. He also despises the press, and some of the admittedly best barbs come as his narrator skewers the posturing.

I thought of the New York Times, for instance, when I found a similar send-up of earnestly PC journalists, who lambaste capitalism and despise corporations and capitalism in the same pages whose sponsors are those fat cats, and whose underwriting, so to say, supports the fulsome claptrap.

The key criticism, as Hardin reminded American readers decades ago, is that the "lifeboat" (here not symbol but story itself, multiplied all over the ocean as refugees set sail for Europe and the rest of whatever is the Western world circa 1973) cannot hold everyone. Either the rich have to share, and become poor themselves as such largess will not balance but tip over everyone into poverty, or they have to defend their realms with force, and "contempt" as Raspail later put it, lest they lose it all.

Odd tangents speckle this work. Clement Dio, a preening poser of the Third World solidarity his own bloodline allows him to capitalize on in more ways than one, is the best of a bad lot. But Raspail's mouthpiece hates worker-priests (back when there were enough clergy to go around), and the Dominicans (not for once the Jesuits) come in for comeuppance. Funny that one Benedict XVI reigns. Along with the Church, the unions, the press, and the military all get their turn at this "roast."

Yes, Raspail makes some points early on about the hypocrisy of the West, the implosion of its value system in a secularizing (well, not quite as it's still France in the post-Vatican II guitar mass phase) and skeptical society, and the contradictions inherent in the post-colonial world supported by the five (now more like six and a half) billion whose labor and losses prop up the seven hundred million whites. "The Last Chance Armada" makes a few at first hesitate but the pressure to welcome the human tide from over the sea leads many addled or idealistic Westerners, guilt ridden and excited to expiate their sins of neglect and greed, to proclaim "We Are All From the Ganges Now" as the first wave from India crests and others then join the exodus to the Northern Hemisphere, at least the wealthy part.

The narrative, such as it is, lurches through scenes of the army, a strange tangent with Benedictine monks, the chattering classes, a token couple from the working class, and those in factories and offices who find, as all anticipate the Easter Sunday mass landing of the sordid ships and their cargo, the early advantages taken by those in France itself who have earlier emigrated, and who maneuver their own prospects, eased by the care or fear taken by their "host nation," as it capitulates to them too

Interesting idea. Promising set-up. Fumbled execution. Fizzled climax. Ho-hum resolution as the narrator and Raspail seem too wearied or jaded to bother carrying on after so many pages of rants.
However, the relevance of this scenario cannot be gainsaid. Look at headlines. (Amazon US 6/5/17)

Emmanuel Carrere's "My Life as a Russian Novel": Audiobook Review

 
I am reviewing the Audible version read by the always elegant Simon Vance. The audiobook's performance, as usual by Vance, is excellent. He relates the erotic content with verve, and the emotional trajectories with sensitivity. He captures Sophie's tone as well as an array of Russian men.

As for this first entry of what has become a growing shelf of "nonfictional novels" by Emmanuel Carrere, the benefits and drawbacks of this format emerge. You feel the difficulties Carrere puts "himself" in, but you also note his privilege, his holidays to Corsica and the coast at will, and despite his claims of working as a writer, the elevated position he has as the son of the esteemed "perpetual secretary" of the Academie Francaise. While his difficulties in love will find a reception among any who have dealt with passion, desire, frustration, and betrayal, whether this immersion into what seems like a description transcribed in "real time" weighs down the book past its halfway mark. It's all quite "French" as well as Russian.

Carrere over nearly nine hours hearing his plaints grows, after a promising start investigating "the last soldier of WWII" in a desolate Russian town, tedious for a listener. Simon Vance's talent keeps the listener steadily aware, but despite his skill, the material becomes interminable. Carrere integrates true to the title his detailed ups and downs in love with Sophie, but as the narrative progresses past his own search for his Georgian-born grandfather in the former Soviet Union, it becomes experimental. Sophie becomes the recipient of an overly clever paean from her lover, and while this is "novel" in a different way I have not found in any other fiction or fact, it serves to extend the complaints of Carrere himself.

It's difficult to feel sorry for him. The climactic scene back in the Russian town is expressed powerfully. But then the denouement unravels as Carrere packs more revelations in, and the book seems to fight its own ending. Maybe it does not want to die either. The Russians often seem as props for his own egotistical compulsions to make a film, to write about this to further his career, and the writer-as-writer and filmmaker-making-a-film setups have long outworn their welcome. Carrere does not appear to be aware of this, except when he admits in an aside near the conclusion: "If this was a novel..." One finishes this due to the dexterity of Simon Vance more than the text from Emmanuel Carrere.

All the same, his brief statements about the Gospels and the setting he shows of Russia, however limited in this ca. 2002-2006 span, makes me wonder about the subsequent installments in what seems to be a successful genre for Carrere of integrating his life into the lives of others. So, that is some measure of success. Carrere himself comes off as preening, but there's no denying his "way with words" and his narrative ambition. (Amazon US 4/7/17)

Bernard du Boucheron's "The Voyage of the Short Serpent"

Yes, that title is symbolic. This short novel can be read in a sitting. It takes a mock-medieval style to report, from alternating and eventually contrasting narrative voices, what happened on an episcopal mission commanded by the Pope to reclaim the Norse lapsed into heathenry in faraway Greenland.

It's more of a conceit than a full-fledged work. Hester Velmans' translation may capture the starched, satirical, and savage qualities of the original French, but the effort feels fussy and overly stylized in English. So does the effort to which the author strains to capture the tone of a chronicle or correspondence, given the friction of the attempt to counter the wiles of the Inuit, here titled "publicans," who lure the dwindling Norse into their seal-hunting, sexually suspect and sinful mores.

A few good lines show the potential. Early on, frostbite claims victims on the bishop's ship. Having been forbidden to eat their own rotting flesh to survive, one shipmate rebels. "One of them replied that the season was not Lent, and proceeded to devour his own toes." I admit I liked some of the dour and deadpan recitals of increasing woe, as the rescue attempt to scare and shame the Norse back to Christian fidelity, compared to the odd temptations of dissolute abandon among the natives, lure the Catholic contingent into their compromises, to survive in New Thule increasingly hostile threats. (Amazon US 11/25/16)

Michel Houellebecq's "Submission": Book Review

While the release of this book in its original French will be inevitably tied to the article about its author, Michel Houellebecq, featured in Charlie Hebdo the week of the Parisian murders of its staff and other innocents last January, the novel itself merits attention.

Readers of Houellebecq's previous fiction will recognize familiar elements. The discontent of his early middle-aged, educated, ornery French narrators in Whatever and The Elementary Particles repeats. The unease in {Platform} that lust brings to those with sagging bodies and ebbing desire persists. The longing for an escape from a declining European culture returns after The Possibility of an Island with its utopian fantasy, and aesthetic debates dramatized in The Map and the Territory.

After this newest novel's French publication, critics sought to blame, once again, its satirical author. Inevitably, Soumission entered the bestseller charts in first place. Some on the left regarded its themes as needlessly provocative. Many called them racist, appealing to baser instincts among French nationalists. Taken by English-language audiences at more of a distance, these issues may recede.

If treated as another in a series of Houellebecq's jabs at coddled liberal sensibilities, Submission loses some sting. Houellebecq proves rather, once again, he delights in the novel of ideas. He places his narrators within unbearable situations. We then watch them try to wriggle free. Within a French situation where the thought-police seek to patrol the sensibilities of all who reject secular platitudes as much as they may religious ones, the topics Submission investigates enrich its suggestive title.

Suffering from "andropause," our forty-something narrator encounters the steady decline of literature, values, culture and his libido. The teller of Submission is an expert on J. K. Huysmans, who over a century ago startled an earlier French readership with decadent novels, considered "sodomitical" and Satanic. Like Houellebecq, Huysmans' erudition enhanced his fiction's barbed, bohemian contents. Unlike Houellebecq, Huysmans began a gradual conversion to Catholicism; he eventually lived, if in less than austere style, as a lay oblate attached to a Benedictine monastery. Houellebecq had drafted this novel with a template of a protagonist emulating Huysmans' path; this story becomes in the revised version we have its sub-plot. Meanwhile, the main plot dramatizes French Islamization.

For an acerbic author regarded as unsentimental, Houellebecq begins this novel with a tender, if bitter, homage to the power of literature. It channels for the living the voices of the dead. Directly, by no other means, a reader can enter by a book into the mind of its creator, the spirits of the departed.

The narrator loves this quality. In his dissertation on Huysmans, he sums up an outlook in common with Houellebecq. "Even as he grew to despise the left, he maintained his old aversion to capitalism, money, and anything to do with bourgeois values." The professor avers that "the only thing left to people in their despair was reading," but that solace is chosen by far fewer than in Huysmans' era.

Instead, much of the initial action in this fiction, concerned more with lofty concepts than realism or politics, takes place in languid dialogue or heated exchanges between the narrator and a louche colleague at the University of Paris, Steve. The protagonist spars with him often, in "that odd ritual,. part buggery, part duel" that is "conversation between men." When the teller is jolted enough by the violence breaking out as the far-right spars with Islamic factions during the Presidential primary, the empty rural roadscape he sees, static on the radio, a clerk shot dead at a convenience store, feels less real and more contrived. It is akin to horror as glimpsed in a J.G. Ballard novel, drained of emotions.

After all, Houellebecq detaches himself from his narrator--and through him. He leaves enough of the Huysmans-driven plot to move him along, as he attempts a retreat himself at a Catholic monastery. But this fails. He has no deep contempt for his former "fellow believers" who cling to the Church. Rather, he blames "laicism" and "atheist materialism" for the death rattle of Western European values. This critique carries more weight in France than in the U.S. Despite Lorin Stein's flowing translation, readers of Submission distant from the issues that divided France after the Charlie Hebdo shootings and those limits or liberties of freedom to mock any religion may feel that this novel's impact fades.

What international readers, who may be baffled by the dense if understandable references to French media pundits and political maneuvers, are left with is a more classic contribution to a French model. The narrator who employs satire to comment on his homeland from abroad, reporting from a fabled or foreign land, emerges. As Montesquieu's Persian Letters or Voltaire's fiction transported French concerns to imaginary lands, to sidestep censorship and clerical reaction, so Houellebecq places his nameless narrator within a French polity a few years into the future. In Submission to counter a threat by Marine LePen and National Front, other French parties cast their lot with the Muslims. We hear far too little about what follows in practical terms. This lack weakens the novel's impact. Yet the tale-teller laments, typically, the loss of the ability to admire women, now that so many are veiled.

The indulgence granted such a sly teller of edgy commentary enlivens comparisons between French and Muslim mores. Late in the story, the scholar's supervisor--who has converted to the faith that has bought the Sorbonne with Saudi money and rewarded those faculty who give in--links "woman's shamanism to man, as it is described in The Story of O, and the Islamic idea of man's submission to God." The appeal of bonus brides as recruited from two or three female students from the realm of Islam, who are the few remaining who enroll in literature classes at the University of Paris, beckons the narrator to contemplate joining the favored elite of Muslim converts. Huysmans' path diverges from those 120 years later in this French novel, but Houellebecq and his narrator agree. If he submits to God's call, this dissolute intellectual will find favor in the eyes of the pious, and the well-endowed.

We leave this predicament as the protagonist mulls over his choice. Will he embrace "a chance at a second life with very little connection to the present one?" He admits, "I would have nothing to mourn." Christian France is dying. With the nation under Muslim leadership, in a coalition with the Socialists and a center-right party, such are parliaments in a strange land of the near-future, those who wield power and issue paychecks have changed. At this point, the novel sidles away. Submission chooses to remain chary about the full force of such momentous transitions. It prefers to stay coy, and like the delights of the women hidden behind gowns and veils, it retreats into its own fantasy again. (Amazon US 10-20-15; Spectrum Culture 11-8-15 a few days before the [latest] Parisian massacres.)

"Barlaam and Josaphat/ In Search of the Christian Buddha": Book Review

Canonized unwittingly as St. Josaphat, a corruption of "bodhisattva," the Buddha, condemned as an idol worshipped by his duped followers, had his story transmitted after long centuries within the hagiography translated to convert the Japanese in the 1600s. So runs one of many twists in Barlaam and Josaphat, translated by Peggy McCracken and introduced by Donald S. Lopez, as a Penguin Classic. 

Gui de Cambrai (around 1220-25) adapted the story into French verse; McCracken renders it efficiently into modern English. Gui takes the core elements of the Buddha legend. 1) The prediction that the prince will be a saint or a king. 2) The ensuing protection by his father the king to keep him from the sights of the world. This ruse fails, as a series of chariot rides reveal mortality, sickness, age, and death to the coddled lad. 3.) Then, seductive women seek to dissuade the prince from his destiny and enlightenment as he vows to depart the palace for a life of asceticism. But first, to fulfill his duty, he fathered an heir, as a prince who is expected to carry on the royal family line.

What the medieval teller adds, Lopez in his brief introduction and McCracken in her 2014 edition (if short on footnotes) show, is an elaborate disputation between Greeks (ahistorically if entertainingly including Plato's brother and a nephew of Aristotle for good measure), Chaldeans, and pagans. They integrate fine stories in succession cobbled from ancient lore, and this transmission as with the larger storyline contains inherent interest for how this comes down through to the early eleventh century in Old French. We get clever glimpses into the culture, as when perverse sex earns condemnation in a comparison to chess. Those engaging in "a shameful game" allow themselves "to be mated from the corner." The hectoring narrator goes on: "The clerics were first to adopt it, and they taught the game to knights. The deed is base--anyone who would leave the clearing for the woods is like a base peasant." (100-101) Finally, the teller shakes free of the vice he despises, and the story later elaborates into a set-piece about the Crusades, with the characters off to a holy war. Another addition is the use of the disputation between the body and the soul, a medieval trope, to fit neatly into the frame-tale's theme of renunciation for sacrifice, and the leaving of one's family to seek a higher path.

This tale was one of many which told the Buddha's story with nobody suspecting this until the 1600s. While a chronicler of Marco Polo's journey caught on to a resemblance, modern scholars in the 19th century, investigating the sources for the misunderstood origins of Shakyamuni, or Prince Siddhartha, finally figured out the elaborate and entangled transmission gone haywire much later. Lopez, as a noted scholar of Buddhist reception in the West (see Prisoners of Shangri-La on Tibet and The Scientific Buddha for attempts to reconcile the historical Buddha with post-Darwinian science), is well-suited to convey these crossed messages. Joined by medievalist Peggy McCracken, the two seek to explain In Search of the Christian Buddha: How An Asian Sage Became a Christian Saint (also 2014) the origins of the tales told throughout the Middle Ages, as the Buddha's story was embedded into narratives and biographies which asserted often the superiority of non-Buddhist ideas.

The tale of Barlaam and Josaphat was one of many which told the Buddha's story with nobody suspecting this until the 1600s. A 1446 editor of Marco Polo's journey caught on to a resemblance. Then scholars in the 19th century, investigating sources for the misunderstood origins of Shakyamuni, Prince Siddhartha, finally figured out elaborate, entangled transmissions gone haywire.

Here's the basics. In Persia in the 8th c. a Muslim writer compiled Bilawhar and Budasaf.  Armies of Islam had begun entering northwestern India, the first home of Buddhism. They spread the stories westward. Arabic preserved some of the core tale's triple elements mentioned above. A century later, the Muslims conquered the Christian kingdom in what is today Georgia. Refugee monks fled to Jerusalem and turned the Muslim story into a Christian one, the Balavariani. A Jewish translator four centuries on took the story from Arabic and sent it west again, via Muslims, into Moorish Spain, where it would turn The Prince and the Hermit via Hebrew and much later, rendered into both German and Yiddish.

Greek and Latin stories, once attributed to John of Damascus in their beginnings, kept the idea that the prince learned about God from a hermit, Barlaam. This turned into stories as told in lives of saints, such as the very popular Latin Golden Legend or Legenda Aurea, by Jacobus de Voragine.

The authors err repeatedly on p. 139. While Franciscans are mendicants, they are not monks. Benedictines are not mendicants but they are monks. Additionally, the hagiographer of Ss. Barlaam and Josaphat and many others, Jacobus de Voragine (Jacobo de Varazze), was not a "monk belonging to the Benedictine preaching order" but a Dominican mendicant friar of the Order of Preachers.  Another aside: the book relies on paraphrases of the main texts and one loses some idea of their various styles, lengths, and flavor. Textual excerpts might have helped key in readers as to their strengths or weaknesses, cited more directly. Primarily summarized, the source texts discussed float past rather than sink in.

Back to the authors' main narrative, part of the spark of this tale comes when the stories of saints get sent to Japan by those seeking to win the natives away from Buddha to Christ. The irony is dealt with lightly by Lopez and McCracken, but it cannot be denied. Condemning idolators, the story of Josaphat is used against those supposedly worshiping false gods such as Xaca, the name garbled from Shakayamuni.

Subsequent thinkers, clued in bit by bit to such garblings, sought to deploy them differently. For some in the early 19th century, the discovery of the historical roots of Buddhism in India led them to propagate a bold claim. Buddhism and Christianity were purer as world religions open to all. Judaism and Hinduism were grounded in tribal identities, and not open to adoption by other peoples. Furthermore, the "Aryan" roots of Jesus who studied in the East were purported. Buddhism could be seen here as an attempt to detach Christian origins from Hebrew tribalism.

Others enticed by folklore found appeal in those three core stories repeated. They also liked the tale of three caskets in it, used by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice. Finally, another tale of women named as "geese" to a curious boy seeing women for the first time (cited in Boccaccio's Decameron) reveal intriguing tidbits, as elements of folk narrative dispersed across time and space into tales.

Still others saw in Buddhism a palliative to other faith. In it nestled human striving, and purer motives rather than superstitious, quasi-Catholic accretions. Some sympathetic to Protestant reform or humanist progress sympathized therefore with attenuated evidence of the antiquity and durability of the Buddha's presence over so many different times and places. On the other hand, those who liked to sneer at the Church found plenty of ammunition in the ironic canonization of St. Josaphat by Buddhist persecutors. Lopez and McCracken aver some of this guilt underlies the fascination recent scholars have had in the eager reception of this tale's provenance and message. Even if the trace elements of the Buddha's coming of age story are faint by the time they are detected by recent critics, the telling manner in which critical reception "seems to dissolve in the presence of the Buddha," a theme Lopez often analyzes, may account for--if not excuse--the appeal of a sage without priests, ritual, or dogma.

As Lopez repeats a phrase from his "scientific Buddha" book in 2013: "The goal of the Buddhist path is not creation but extinction." (37) The authors here conclude that the aim of Buddhism is not perpetuation of narrative or allurements of story, but a rejection of the pleasures of palace and princes. Separation from the enticements of this world is necessary. As the editors insist, for Buddhism, "The goal is to finally stop dying." (222) Flawed by change and doom, this world is not transcended as in Christian or Muslim terms for future reward but by renunciation of family, goods and attachment to all that would impede separation from its glittering delights. The Christian story of Barlaam and Josaphat sought to lure listeners away from the secular to the spiritual realm of the Church, and to ensure princes listening took care of pious hermits. But as Lopez and McCracken hint, these durable tales also sought to keep alive the very system that Buddhism seeks to put to an end.
(Both reviews edited and revamped a bit to Amazon US 7-28-14: Barlaam and In Search.)

William Alexander's "Flirting with French": Book Review

Learning French, even for a middle-aged Francophile, proves elusive. Its infamous pronunciation, its maddeningly gendered nouns, its elisions, its lack of syllabic emphases: William Alexander laments them all. Going on 58, after writing successful books on mad ambitions to achieve the perfect garden and bake the perfect loaf, he seems as well-suited as any driven autodidact for task three.

Most adults will never fully master a second language. Alexander's ambitions meet the obstacle most of our brains encounter when we try to learn a new language post-puberty. As he explains, once the neural networks have sparked childhood fluency, our valuable hard-wiring gets diverted so the brain can apply it to non-linguistic necessities as we mature. Our innate capacity which enables us to quickly attain our native language in infancy then fades; consider how even teens struggle with foreign conjugations and prepositions.

Alexander sums up linguistic theory and neurological research, but he finds that these cannot account for the other 8/9 of our body. Acting out French sentences, he shows, overcomes his brain's hesitations. Reading a play by Sartre or reciting into a microphone via Rosetta Stone stymie him. French evokes from Alexander emotions, impulses, and gestures, beyond vocabulary lists and conversational lessons. He wanders along this book's way to relate his correspondence with a pen-pal, his stints at total-immersion French environments, the history of French, the sly promises of machines such as Google Translate, and the daunting barriers to fluency.

Alexander plugs away. He claims to work, but from the obsessive attempt he documents, pursuing  French becomes what seems to me a full-time job. Inspired to overcome his mental block, with visual imagery he memorizes a thousand words in a children's bilingual dictionary; he strains this same memory, on the other hand, to recall common verbs while chatting with classmates. The yin-yang of advancing and regressing in language learning will comfort any student who has faced, for example, the clash of decimal and vigesimal (base-twenty) counting systems. He finds fresh examples, too.

"Soixante-neuf  is the last 'easy' number in French. Should you want to turn your lovemaking up a notch to seventy, you'll find there is no "seventy" in French. This is undoubtedly due to French frugality." One adds ten to sixty, and up to "sixty-ten-nine", before one hits eighty, as "four-twenties".

Metaphors beyond the most famous of French numbers also enliven his narrative. Alexander's lively chapter on colorful idioms entertains. To tie the marriage knot is rendered as putting a noose around your neck. Having a wet dream equals "to make a map of France". One suspects male-authored phrases so far, but anyone can find a stroke of good fortune. However, few of either sex, whatever luck comes their sudden way, may long for more than a linguistically evoked "ass full of noodles". Outside of a few (non-?) French in recovery, who would not acclaim the praise given a delectable glass of red wine? "C'est le petit Jésus en culotte de velours!" "It's the Baby Jesus in velvet shorts!"
 
Wine may well be prescribed for Francophiles eager to escape the rigors of battling French itself. Alexander's cardiologist asks about any new stress in his patient's life. "Well, I am studying French." Alexander avers near this book's conclusion that he has been learning a lot of French, but not "learning French". The latter goal may recede; his native-born teacher suggests after five to seven years, living in France, of course, he may get pretty good at it. Over thirteen months and nine-hundred hours, he drives himself on towards fluency. Complicated by his arrhythmic heart and a series of surgeries, the results of his sustained immersion will surprise him, at the end of this genial narrative. During to date only half the time Alexander spent, I've been cursing daily during my online French lessons, fifteen minutes or so each. That's all the patience I can summon. But Flirting with French gave me faint hope; as another middle-aged learner, who began during my first visit to Québec last autumn, I recognize in Alexander's story my own frustrations, magnified or diminished. (Amazon US 9-3-14; PopMatters 9-14-14; Author's website)

Laurent Binet's "HHhH": Book Review

This novel's curious title derives from the German initials of the phrase "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich." That is, Reinhard(t), Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, #2 man in the Nazi ranks, and "the Butcher of Prague." While Laurent Binet's topic may be very well-known among students of Middle European history, the Czech lands, and of WWII, the heroism shown by Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, one Slovak, one Czech, to fight for their nation against tyranny deserves retelling.

As with two recent, massive novels  influences this French author credits, Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones (which he disparages as "Houellebecq does Nazis") and William T. Vollmann's Europe Central, HHhH takes on a modern perspective, plunging a reader into the German mindset and the frenzy of the era, seasoned with a retrospective judgement upon the morality abused or rescued in WWII.

The difference? Binet chooses never to immerse himself into fiction. Most of these three-hundred quickly told pages (a fraction of Littell or Vollmann) treat the subject and how it defies the reversion to fantasy or imagination. That becomes Binet's obsession. Inspired by his two Czechoslovak figures, sent to England to train for their suicide mission behind enemy lines, Binet prefers to examine the historical record and to fill in the gaps, with some dialogue and invented scenes, but only when he cannot make the facts fit his tale. Fewer times, therefore, than expected, we learn how subsequent testimony by survivors accounts for both Nazi and enemy reactions, and from these, juxtaposed with Binet's reading and reactions, the novel slowly accrues.

Operation Anthropoid, as the English termed it with the Czechoslovak resistance, itself decimated under Heydrich, draws us into the antagonist. "It's as if a Dr. Frankenstein novelist had mixed up the greatest monsters of literature to create a new and terrifying monster." (99) Worse, for he kills not on paper but in person and through his minions.

How Binet conveys this may annoy some readers. He makes it personal, and mixes up his "visions with the known facts. It's just how it is." (105) But then, on the same page, he backtracks, and he admits his mistakes as he researches his storyline. He knows "fiction does not respect anything," but he also know that the drama inherent in his subject causes him to imagine what cannot be verified.

Real people are "both greater and more flawed than any fictional character." The chapters #250 + #251 prove gripping, even though--or because--I had visited the crypt in question and seen the place commemorated today in Prague. The climax shows courage amidst absurdity. "I think the world is ridiculous, moving, and cruel. The same is true for this book: the story is cruel, the protagonists are moving, and I am ridiculous. But I am in Prague." (320) In that city of a hundred towers, the power of the predicament that seven Resistance fighters choose in 1942 remains resonant, and poignant. Amazon US 9-25-13

Laurence Cossé's "A Corner of the Veil": Book Review

Very elusive, fittingly or ironically, about the actual proof of God that floors a few Casuists (read: Jesuits) and a French prime minister during the year before Y2K. The Parisian setting is underused, the characters probably stand ins for politicians or pundits that the original audience might recognize, and the tone's droll as you'd expect. Linda Asher's translation captures the worldly-wise ambiance of the original, I assume, and the results entertain.

Able to be perused (small size, big margins) in a single evening, the plot naturally keeps you guessing. As to the proof, the idea that God the Father is exposing Himself by imposing Himself upon man via Christ and the Spirit so people figure out (presumably) that the divine "becoming" permeates all of God's creation sums up the gist of the daring breakthrough. The difficulty is that Laurence Cossé teases us as she does the characters who try to penetrate the mystery of the document's contents. She, too, lifts up the veil's corner but she refuses to let us peek. We must watch others look inside.

This distancing, while it makes sense for her revelations, or their lack for the reader, may please some who wish like some in the pages not to know it all. The advantages of doubt articulated by prominent figures make for an intriguing meditation. I never thought of the shift that would happen if people could know God and how that might diminish rather than increase goodness.

You get some discussion of this scenario as the advisors in elite clerical and state realms battle over the social impacts of this proof. Cossé appears to believe that people would generally favor frugality and compassion, but she along with certain figures warns that brutality and cynicism could grow as "everything is permitted" in the calculating eye of some determined dissenters. I think she gives people too much credit for the positive aspects of a revelation like this, for in a secularized era, it seems many would not fall for this message from above, if theorized by one from below.

It may be a nod to popular sensibilities, but I am unsure the plot needed the thriller aspects that it enters later on. A Corner of the Veil reminded me in its substance, however coyly, of the Jesuit French maverick Teilhard de Chardin's immanent concept of the Incarnation entering the cosmos and the mentality of all created lives and souls. Curious why nobody among the learned mentioned this vision from a bold predecessor who met with his own censure from the powers that be. (Amazon US 5-20-13)

"The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1941-1956": Book Review

This second volume of letters "having bearing on my work" elegantly compiles Samuel Beckett's postwar correspondence. Limited as it is by his estate to literary contexts, nonetheless, with forty percent of his total letters published in over eight-hundred carefully edited pages, this 2011 title allows readers to follow Beckett as he matures. The often pleading, imploring frustration of a struggling Irishman trying to land a publisher for his poems and tales has faded. After his tense time working as a farmhand and for the French Resistance in the countryside, Beckett returns to Paris and then goes away to Ussy-sur-Marne to confront himself--and to create his breakthrough prose and drama.

As he had done in the first volume of his letters to Thomas McGreevy, so he opens up to Georges Duthuit from his new residence. Easing if not replacing the acerbic, dyspeptic tone of his youthful letters, he blends his unease into a mellower, if no less rueful, distillation of himself. He begins the sunset of the first day of June 1949 walking back to Ussy, accompanied or nagged along the road by mayflies. "In the end I worked out they were all accompanying me towards the Marne to be eaten by the fish, after making love on the water." 

This remarkable vignette exemplifies the quality of his insights. Like the first volume, the second teems with artistic and philosophical interests. A rare talent in both the novel and the play, Beckett's decision to enter into French as his primary mode of literary creation demonstrates his command of the idiom beyond his thirty years first in Ireland and then abroad. As the edition's French translator George Craig explains, Beckett made France his milieu. 

Ireland recedes, where his older brother and his mother lingered before dying. In another moving passage, he writes to Duthuit in 1948 after he watches his fading mother's blue eyes. "Let us get there rather earlier, while there are still refusals we can make." Here you can discern the powerful mood which will grace or unsettle Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. 

His visits back to Dublin appear to have caused less contention than those in the pre-war decade, yet he rankles at the censorship there and in London. When Godot was slated to appear on the West End in 1954, the Lord Chamberlain "got going." So, "coat" replaced "fly," "backside" replaced "arse," and "guts" replaced "privates." 

Such asides speckle Beckett's writing, to one person in his letters, to the few but discerning readers of his increasingly confident fiction, or his sudden exposure with the fame that he had courted for so long with so little success. Waiting for Godot was advertised in Miami as "the laugh sensation of two continents." Socialites walked out in droves.

Dan Gunn introduces this collection by noting its "rhythm of approach and withdrawal." One wishes more had survived, and that the lacunae of the wartime years had been replaced with evidence of his life, but the silence speaks for his and bravery as an Irish citizen working against fascism and under the threat of death. Such commitment provided Beckett with more equanimity and compassion in the difficult years during and after the war as he reconstructed his own life and career in France. 

Beckett comes to terms slowly with his celebrity, granted as he nears the age of fifty. Already sensing the diminution of his physical powers, ironically he enters into his literary prime in this second volume. He, who had urged so often others to read his works and to publish them, now begins to find himself elucidating or correcting others who seek out his advice.

Despite his French allegiance, he remains Irish. Craig as a fellow countryman senses the Irish-English persistence in Beckett's phrasing, and its pitch to the breath and spoken word rather than the semicolon or period. He castigates silly critics of Godot: "Like a lot of seaside brats digging for worms people are." 

Within whichever language he chooses, Beckett finds himself agonizing over the right word, the key phrase. In the struggles documented here, he separates his voice in French, with its discipline and narrower range, from his native English, with its temptations to wander. Either way, this annotated and durable edition attests to his skill, his fluency, and his humanity. (Edited to 600 words 6-1-13 for Slugger O'Toole As above 2-17-13 to Amazon US)

"The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940": Book Review

The editors began this project around 1985. Changes in ownership of Beckett’s works, negotiations over publication of his correspondence, and the winnowing down of 15,000 letters to 2,500 to be reprinted in four volumes, along with another 5,000 from which excerpts would be used for annotations, demonstrate the care with which this endeavor has been compiled. Beckett may be the last major writer to have his correspondence extant in an entirely non-electronic form. The range of his letters, two-thirds written in English, 30% in French, and 5% in German, attests to the cosmopolitan range and erudite ambition of his determination to imagine himself, early on, into a literary life.

Fehsenfeld and Overbeck explain how they sought a middle way between the minimalist editorial approach of Richard Ellmann for James Joyce’s letters, and the maximalist approach taken by John Kelly for W.B. Yeats’s letters. Restricted to reproducing those letters that drew directly upon Beckett’s writings, the editors nevertheless seek a liberal interpretation of this control. They explain how their first examples display Beckett’s desire to connect to correspondents. He delivers less information, and more solidarity, or intimacy, as he tries to forge a literary career – and to keep his distance from one.

As Beckett’s confidence grows, and as Murphy finally gets published after nearly two years of rejections, his language takes flight. Their content and style soar like kites, above his cities. His words may relax, energize, or recoil. No wonder “rectal spasms,” as the editors note, characterize the physicality of later 1930s letters, with analogies between the act of writing and primal, raw functions within the body.

He begins with coiled frustration. “I am looking forward to pulling the balls off the critical & poetical Proustian cock” (36). His monograph on Proust he regards more as duty than pleasure. He struggles to separate himself from his fellow and elder Irishman in Paris. “Sedendo et Quiescendo” to Beckett “stinks of Joyce in spite of most earnest endeavours to endow it with my own odours” (81). He then promises an editor at Chatto & Windus a scatological comparison to the precise shape of his bowel movements.

Thomas McGreevy received many of the letters included here. They speak of Beckett’s indolence: “even if I succeeded in placing something and getting some money I don’t think I would bother my arse to move.” (158) He would rather lose the world for stout “than for Lib., Egal., and Frat., and quarts de Vittel.,” (159) he tells McGreevy in May 1933. Yet Beckett wonders why Man of Aran lacked any poteen, and soon he spends more time in London, looking toward Paris rather than Dublin for his future.

A year later, he tells Morris Sinclair of his fears, that “no relationship between suffering and feeling is to be found,” and any joy comparing his own fortune to those with less “begins to look deceptive” (204). He observes himself as if “through a keyhole,” and feels at a distance well away from his own self. “Strange, yes, and altogether unsuitable for letter writing” (205).

He finds the attitude that will infuse his mature work. In Autumn 1934, he informs McGreevy that the dehumanization and mechanical nature of the artist extends to the portraits he studies so intently: “as the individual feels himself more & more hermetic & alone & his neighbor a coagulum as alien as a protoplast or God, incapable of loving or hating anyone but himself or of being loved or hated by anyone but himself” (223).

Still, humor lurks. A spider has two “penes.” The “Kook of Bells” gets a nod. T.S. Eliot spelled backwards stands for toilet. Beckett contrasts the art, plays and concerts he views with English literature. It remains mired in “old morality typifications and simplifications. I suppose the cult of the horse has something to do with it”(250).  He tires of vices and virtues. This mood may, in Spring 1935, account for his difficulties with Murphy. After analysis with Bion, Beckett rages to McGreevy. “If the heart still bubbles it is because the puddle has not been drained, and the fact of its bubbling more fiercely than ever is perhaps open to receive consolation from the waste that splutters most, when the bath is nearly empty” (259).

Yet, he watches the old men as kite flyers at Kensington’s Round Pond that autumn, and he observes them in his letter with the same detail that will enrich his novel. He tells McGreevy of a friend’s comment: “‘You haven’t a good word to say except about the failures’. I thought that was quite the nicest thing anyone had said to me for a long time” (275).

Tedium shrouds 1936. Working for his brother back in Dublin tempts him briefly. “I am thinking of asking Frank does he want stamps licked in Clare Street. Though I fear my present saliva would burn a hole in the envelope” (320). He informs McGreevy: “I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them”(362).  Frank asks him after Murphy is turned down again:

‘Why can’t you write the way the people want’, when I replied that I could only write the one way, i.e. as best I could (not the right answer, not at all the right answer), he said it was a good thing for him he did not feel obliged to implement such a spirit in 6 Clare St. Even mother begins to look askance at me. My departure is long overdue. But complicated by owing them £10 apiece (366).

Beckett cannot please possible publishers. “Do they not understand that if the book is slightly obscure, it is because it is a compression, and that to compress it further can only result in making it slightly obscure?” (380). He vows that his next work will be “on rice paper with a spool, with a perforated line every six inches and on sale in Boots” (383).

He roams Germany, refining his fluency, in early 1937. His letter to Axel Kaun in German represents a breakthrough. “It is getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears like a veil which one has to tear apart for me to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it” (518). While this exchange is well-known, within the contexts of travel and growing unease as the Continent’s fate entangles with his own uncertain future, this letter gains resonance. In 1936 he had noted how at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, “all the lavatory men say Heil Hitler. The best pictures are in the cellar” (384). He shifts from London to Paris to Dublin, unsettled.

Recovering from the 1938 attack upon him by a Parisian assailant, Beckett contemplates an offer from Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press to translate Sade’s Les 120 Journées de Sodome. He hesitates, not wanting to do the predictably censorable work anonymously, but reluctant “to be spiked as a writer” (604). He as always needs the money, but the project fades away. His later letters document the rejections given to Murphy, and Beckett’s reluctance to stay in Ireland. “All the old people & the old places, they make me feel like an amphibian detained forcibly on dry land, very very dry land” (637).

Even in 1933 he felt an “unhandy Andy” around his family. Frank suffers his own malaise, “with the feeling all the time in the not so remote background that he is strangling his life. But who does not” (369). In 1938, Beckett learns from his brother that their mother is ailing. “I feel sorry for her often to the point of tears. That part is not analysed away, I suppose,” he tells McGreevy. From Paris, he “returned to the land of my unsuccessful abortion,” but only to “keep my mother company” before he goes back for good “to the people where the little operation is safe, legal & popular. ‘Curetage’” (647).

For Beckett’s own intimacies, this compendium remains discreet. Lucia Joyce and Peggy Guggenheim garner proper mention. Beckett stays reticent regarding his relationship with Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil. He introduces her to McGreevy in 1939 as “a French girl also whom I am fond of, dispassionately, who is very good to me. The hand will not be overplayed. As we both know that it will come to an end there is no knowing how long it may last” (657).

By June 1940, Beckett wonders about their fate, “provided we are staying on in Paris.” He tells Marthe Arnaud how “Suzanne seems to want to get away. I don’t. Where would we go, and with what?” (683). He concludes, c/o the painter Bram Van Velde, with a characteristically resigned, yet defiant set of images and thoughts. As those around him await the Nazi occupation, Beckett cites Murphy, and mixes his own predicament with that looming over the recipients of his final letter.

Under the blue glass Bram’s painting gives off a dark flame. Yesterday evening I could see in it Neary at the Chinese restaurant, ‘huddled in the tod of his troubles like an owl in ivy’. Today it will be something different. You think you are choosing something, and it is always yourself that you choose; a self that you did not know, if you are lucky. Unless you are a dealer (683-684).

Presciently, an advance notice about More Pricks Than Kicks in The Observer opined: “Mr. Beckett is allusive, and a future editor may have to provide notes” (210). Notes expand here. Each letter earns footnotes; profiles of recipients total fifty-seven. Works cited, an index, and George Craig’s French and Viola Westbrook’s German translation prefaces supplement the letters. Contributors credited by the editors fill thirteen pages.

This is the first of four projected volumes. The diligence of those who have assembled this compendium attests to its thoroughness. Spot-checking, I could find only one small slip, an indexed reference that lacked a referent. The immense labor of Beckett, building up his own talent, is matched by the scholars who present his early correspondence, or at least a third of what remains, to an attentive audience. 

[P.S. As above, in html/pdf in Estudios Irlandeses 6 (2010): 183-185. Edited down and then expanded again for a different crowd at  Amazon US 2-17-13.  As is my Amazon review the same day of "Volume Two: 1941-1956"]

Bruno Portier's "The Flawless Place Between": Book Review

This novel dramatizes the bardo passages from death into afterlife and then rebirth from the teachings known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Bruno Portier, a documentarian turned ethnologist, tells a tale both straightforwardly linear in some sections, and post-modern in its cyclical and fragmented structure in its middle sections, as the protagonist Anne's fate after a motorbike goes off of a cliff in the Himalayas leads to her own entrance into the worlds beyond.

Gregory Norminton translates Bardo, Le Passage, from 2009 fluidly. It's noteworthy that the title in the original implies the French audience may be familiar with this term already, while the English-language audience encounters a more poetic evocation of the "place between." The version's not quite flawless. A few glitches remain, one in the footnoting and a couple in botched phrasing. But overall, this imaginatively depicts what happens to Anne before the accident and after. Interspersed we find the plight of her lover, Evan, and the intervention for the couple by Tsepel. As a Tibetan, this old man speaks aloud to Anne the text of the Bardo Thödol Chenmo, the "liberation by hearing in the after-death transition" meant to liberate the departed one's entanglement from the mental projections that keep one locked in the cycle of death, liminality, and rebirth.

This review will not give away much more, as the chapters following the bardos of the moment of death, of reality, and of rebirth possess inherent fascination and uncertainty of what will happen next remains this novel's strength. Portier enters the last beats of the heart and the first glow of the womb with equal imagination. Relationships past and present emerge little by little, revisited and revised as their repetition sharpens their meaning for the one caught up in the passages beyond this life.

Portier's patterns reminded me of the 2010 film by French-Argentinian director Gasper Nöe, Enter the Void. This presents a bolder, rawer vision compared to Portier's, yet readers of this poignant story may be prepared better for the raw depictions of this cinematic assault which takes one into similar spiritual terrain. Fans of that daring depiction of the bardo stages may compare the gentler, quieter upheavals undergone by the book's similarly distraught and confused characters, as death descends.

The book offers a brief introduction summing up the TBoD  and a short bibliography. It needed more inclusions. I'd add to the Fremantle-Trungpa and Thurman translations and Sogyal Rinpoche's Tibetan Book of Living and Dying of the Bardo Thödol the full edition of liberation teachings composed by Padmasambhava, revealed by Terton Karma Lingpa, translated by Gyurme Dorje, edited for Penguin by Graham Coleman and Thupten Jingpa as The Tibetan Book of the Dead: the First Complete Translation. Also, for beginners, I recommend a handsome version by Martin Boord and Stephen Hodge, The Illustrated Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Reference Manual for the Soul. Finally, Richard Gere's audiobook recital of the Fremantle-Trungpa can be an appropriate way to listen to the teachings, in the way closest to that of Tsepel within the action of this thoughtful novel.

Putting these esoteric and challenging manuals of advice into a short, vivid tale represents a fine endeavor to widen their impact. An author's note mentions that Portier is working on a sequel. I look forward to it. (Amazon US--and British--8-3-12)

Michel Houellebecq's "The Map and the Territory": Book Review

Michel, appearing in his own fifth novel, has his artist-protagonist Jed Martin's father say of their creator: "He's a good author, it seems to me. He's pleasant to read, and he has quite an accurate view of society." He later's "a loner with strong misanthropic tendencies; it was rare for him even to say a word to his dog." His anodyne, but dryly witty summation characterizes the feel of Houllebecq's streamlined, yet often curiously detailed, fiction. I've admired his previous fiction, "Whatever,'' "Platform," and especially "The Elementary Particles"; "The Possibility of an Island" tried to be too ambitious, but it remained readable and thought-provoking as the first three novels. (All reviewed by me.)

Gavin Boyd's translation keeps the hermetic, slightly antiseptic feel of Houellebecq. For all his detail, here lavished upon the art world as well as the vagaries of male power and female "plenitude" marshaled as how our third millennium's establishing its time-tested control over we weaker consumers, he remains distant even as he digs into how we create, buy, sell, and ruminate, in everyday language and coolly observed branding. Transport, cuisine, shopping as in earlier novels earn his scrutiny and inclusion in efficiently conveyed prose. Naturally, the evolution of European sensibilities via the visual arts within a networked, high-tech world is discussed, in the academic tones of an historian. Therefore, the author's delivery usually keeps you at a safe remove from Jed--Houellebecq shrinks from predictable emotion or facile melodrama. He likes to stand back from indirect narration via Jed to adapt a stance of an art curator or critical scholar.

Taking photos of Michelin road maps, Jed finds a perfect title for their exhibition--"The map is more interesting than the territory." Typically for Houellebecq, this opens up a rigorously factual, while speculative, novel of ideas. Jed's efforts tie into making the French countryside "trendy" for the first time since Rousseau. Jed's relationship falters; after setting up background, Houellebecq in part two returns to the novel's opening.

Jed goes to the airport town of Shannon in Ireland (and then to his place in his native land) to meet and to arrange a sitting to paint Michel. He takes along a Samsung camera to shoot him first, a mechanism oddly described in typical terms, and ten years' gap shifts forward and back in expected form for this novelist. Damien Hirst, Bill Gates, Jeff Koons, and Steve Jobs pop up, subjects of other sittings. So do discussions of William Morris, Le Corbusier, silicone breasts, and Tocqueville. As in earlier novels, suicide of a loved one looms large as a revelation for the main character; his anomie and midlife ennui are juxtaposed with success by bourgeoisie standards. "Sexuality is a fragile thing: it is difficult to enter and easy to leave." Upending what you'd expect?

Well, I will leave part three to you. Suffice to say it's clever if not that unexpected, given it's from a French intellectual au courant not only police procedurals but with textual theory. (Amazon US 12-20-11)

Jonathan Littell's "The Kindly Ones": Book Review

This thousand-page novel documents the increasingly unhinged perspective of sound and fury as told by a gay SS officer blackmailed into serving the Reich. This he does with admirable if oddly fervent loyalty.  Zelig- or Candide-like, he's propelled from France to Ukraine to Stalingrad to Berlin to Hungary to the Baltic and back to Berlin as the war implodes.

Translated from French smoothly by Charlotte Mandell, this award-winning novel baffled many reviewers for its moral ambiguity and Nazi minutiae, but for me, it proved a rewarding and insightful read. I liked the Caucasus exegesis of languages and how the Nazis tried to figure out who was Jewish "by race" and who by "culture" adopted in ways that linguistic analysis supposedly would betray. However, the scholarship invested overall in this very hefty novel may weary many long before its inevitable, fatalistic, collapse in Berlin 1945. It  lapses into dream states that I found less engrossing and sometimes tedious, and it does seem a book stuffed with three times the detail needed to show the author's familiarity with every grade of German military rank and endless discussions between the brass and the officers about strategy and tactics and who's titled what.

Unfortunately, this results in my ranking of three stars, as parts reach the heights ("Air"), while unrelenting military minutiae drags this down, It's difficult to expect even a ranking official would clutter his memoirs with such conversations and asides, unless this shows his altered state, but this does not compel you to turn pages, in a book nearly a thousand pages. The final, clunky even if logical by Aue's distorted perspective, scenes at the Berlin Zoo invite disbelief, after a novel that requires lots of suspension of belief.

However, there's redeeming value. A lot of critics denounced its ethical shortcomings, but Max Aue (a name redolent of some symbol) succeeded in stating very early on his rationale. If the State one must serve is made up of ordinary folks, some will find themselves on the wrong side of history, then as now, not by a chosen career path or personal preference, but by the pressures of bureaucracy and the exigencies of the moment that pressure people into acting. Not all victims are good and not all executioners are evil, Aue reasons.

The State, both sides agree as do we, must exist, must call its male citizens to take lives in its name and its female ones to serve its demands. Free will vanishes if a soldier is assigned to a concentration camp or mobile killing battalion: "chance alone makes him a killer rather than a hero, or a dead man." (592) We give up the right not to kill and our own right to life, if male, he warns, to do our wartime duty to our masters.

"The real danger for mankind is me, is you. And if you're not convinced of this, don't bother to read any further. You'll understand nothing and you'll get angry, with little profit for you or for me." (21) This passage needs to be remembered by anyone trying to make some sense out of what can be, in Aue's warped sense, a testimony sometimes drifting into narrated nonsense after he's wounded in the brain at Stalingrad's siege. "I was sinking into the mud while searching for light."

Earlier in the Soviet invasion, Aue realizes that a commitment to total war means to "resist the temptation to be human." National Socialism is explained as trying to glean the will of the "volk," by placing informants and spies among the people, as if to guide the Fuehrer towards fulfilling the German destiny. Aue despite his attempts to humanize the treatment of slave laborers and make the Jewish captives' situation slightly more endurable if before their doom nonetheless understands that his survival depends on obedience, "on a one-way path of no return, which everyone had to follow until the end." (141)

The grind of war does reveal itself and over hundreds of pages, the accumulation will either drive you away or suck you in, as is Littell's intent. Stalingrad's collapse gains vivid rendition. A Russian soldier is shot by a sniper: "The kid's shouts were boring into my brain, a trowel burrowing in thick, sticky mud, full of worms and messy life. I wondered would I too beg for my mother, when the time came?" (368-9)

Aue's complicated relationship with his sister, and the mother who abandoned them, makes for awkward scenes. Littell piles on a lot of heated material that may put off sensitive readers, and while for me this worked impressively in the "Air" section as the depiction of unsatisfied male desire, some readers appeared upset by Littell's inclusion of the seamier sides of sex, although to me this appeared precisely what Aue would seek out.

Metaphorically, among the heaps of research shoveled into this narrative, Littell shows his literary side. Dr. Aue tries at Stalingrad to read a dead soldier's entrails "to find traces of my past or signs of my future in them," as it all appears to become "an agonizing farce." (379) Recuperating from his injury, "Reason raised its skirt for me, revealing that there was nothing underneath." (436) "I was scraping my skin on the world as on broken glass; I kept deliberately swallowing fishhooks, then being surprised when I tore the guts out of my mouth." (511-2)

In the Invalides esplanade in occupied Paris, Aue sees workers plowing up its lawns to plant vegetables; he passes there a Czech-made tank with a swastika, near where "indifferent children were playing with a ball." (500) In a concentration camp, he finds the organization a "reductio ad absurdum" for everyday life, infected with "its absurd violence, its meticulous hierarchy," its rigidity and orders and submission. (622)

The weight of this book pushes the momentum downhill as the war constricts the freedom-as-slavery which Aue fought for to expand on behalf of the Reich. Mines worked by slaves, the death camps, the retreat as the Soviets pursue, the Baltic remnant of the Nazis and German civilians, and the fall of Berlin all gain intensity. The best scene is when a surreal children's army of German fanatics that surrounds Aue and his comrades as they hide from the surrounding Russians.

Before this, Aue flees to his old retreat, alone, to find his sister. He reflects amidst a frenzied, fevered chapter full of despair, lust, and anguish: "I hadn't yet understood the specific weight of bodies, and what the commerce of love involves, destines and condemns us to." (903) This allows the reader to see deeper into Aue's soul, such as it is, and works well. He wants to "blind this Polyphemus who made me Nobody." (908)

What succeeds less is the Keystone Kops-meet-Inspector Javert pursuit which descends into unbelievable devotion by a duo who hunt Aue down as Berlin crumbles. Littell appears to want us to ironically juxtapose the upholding of one law by the Reich's representatives while millions of others are broken, but this caricatured conceit never convinced me of its necessity, and this whole subplot remained tiresome. Even in a novel where the everyday duty of destruction takes over, the fictional duty of controlling a plot and streamlining its telling to keep to believable events in a necessary assertion of authorial command appeared to desert its post. (Posted 8-23-11 to Amazon US after eighty-five reviewers preceded me.)

James Miller's "The Passion of Michel Foucault": Book Review

When this critique appeared in 1993, it aroused controversy for its exploration of the S/M subculture that tangled itself with this French philosopher's entry into the hidden intersections of power with knowledge, the forced opening of what politics and the State occluded. I found it illuminating. I admired Miller's ambitions to combine an explanation of Foucault's formidably challenging thought with his personal quest to break free of convention by Nietzchean "limit-experiences." 

Miller's at his best when elucidating breakthrough studies such as "Discipline and Punish," and to show its shortcomings as well as successes: "a characteristic blend of nuanced analyses, authoritative references, and abundant documentation-- combined with fabulous images, bald assertions, and wild generalizations." (210) As for this work's reception by enraptured intellectuals in the 1970s, his audience sought "a critique of modern culture and society that avoided both the cruel materialism of orthodox Marxism and the conservative empiricism of most mainstream social science." (234) Yet, the book remained slippery, its archival sources limited, its claims bold. For Miller, he relates "the disturbing character of Foucault's critical perspective--hard to pin down, easy to feel." (235)
  
Miller shows the dangers of Foucault's approach as well as its successes, as with his acclaim initially for Khomeini's Iranian revolution. As with its secular French predecessor and then Mao's own campaigns, the tragedies caused sobered later observers, once the fervor subsided and the rhetoric dimmed. While Miller movingly recounts Foucault's LSD-inspired ecstasy in Death Valley and his approval of such means to an end, he also shows the predicament of one who entered the leather S/M culture of the City to his own peril.

Beyond "the fascism in us all," the forces that pinned down our own human potential for liberation from systems that crush our ideals and thwart our actions, those that celebrate power that suppresses hopes, Miller paraphrases the final mission of a post-Marxist Foucault: "the objective remained to rout the hostile powers pinning down the powers of the individual, somehow redeploying these powers without surrendering to the archaic phantasms that had infiltrated our speech and our acts, our hearts and our deepest, most unconscious desires, functioning as the most sinister type of fifth column." (244) 


In his sexual quest, Foucault sought in San Francisco's bathhouse scene a simalacrum of this wider pursuit. As Miller phrases it, to "perhaps even 'scratch' deeply enough to obliterate, however temporarily, 'the imprinted script of many millennia.'" (284) In summary, Foucault as he noted in 1982, shortly before his death, sums up a journey all of his readers might take: "The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning." (328)

While the narrative does wander about, and stretches of Foucault's personal life appear to be obscured under the research he conducted, you do get a survey of about every French (and often German) intellectual who mattered, for the past century, as many leading thinkers, directly or indirectly, intersected with and influenced Foucault. Miller explains well what Foucault took from his predecessors and contemporaries, even if Foucault's story gets alternately highlighted and diminished, at least in Miller's take on him: this is far more a critical study than a straightforward biography. 


Miller's postscript notes how his own endeavor, among many on the "progressive" left, was met with skepticism, as many supposedly tolerant types canonized Foucault as if a gay martyr, a patron saint. Miller refreshingly counters how, true to his subject, this study of Foucault prefers truth over assumption. He challenged "nearly everything that passes for 'right' in Western culture, including that upheld by so many of his disciples among the academic American left." This sort of slant, for me, enlivened and energizes this study.
(Posted to Amazon US 9-3-11)

"The Selected Works of Samuel Beckett": Review

Given two-thousand pages, seven major texts, thirty-two dramatic pieces, plays, thirty poems, three early stories, an early story collection, twenty more stories to total fifty-two, texts, novellas, three pieces of criticism: what can one add? This brief review surveys instead the value-added, the perceived advantages of this slipcased, four-volume compendium. These works are “selected” rather than “collected,” for they do not incorporate some untranslated poems and critiques written in French. Neither do they publish Beckett’s first novel, From Fair to Middling Women, nor his play Eleuthéria which he prevented from appearing during his lifetime, so by excluding what critics generally concur are decidedly minor efforts, they are not a “Complete Works.”

However, as series editor Paul Auster explains in the only commentary within all these pages, a six-paragraph preface, “the works on which Beckett’s reputation rests” are all here. This collection duplicates, at first glance, the hardcover editions (if with different artwork), commemorating the 2006 centenary of the author’s birth. They appeared in a limited (and soon sold-out as a tetralogy) press run. Therefore, I opened these paperbacks expecting to find the same contents in a more affordable version.

The press blurb for the box-set of these Grove Centenary Editions noted: “Typographical errors that remained uncorrected in the various prior editions have now been corrected in consultation with Beckett scholars C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski.” I assume these texts have been reprinted in paperback unaltered. This may be of passing interest to casual readers (if any exist for Beckett) but a few, especially in academia or who conduct research upon this most dazzling of modern authors—who succeeded at fiction, drama, poetry, and criticism equally, and in two languages—may need to know this notation. Earlier printings of Beckett’s work, often published in the United States by Grove, suffered from textual errors. Therefore, the scholarly community and the theatrical performers who energize Beckett may welcome these handsome volumes, designed in paperback with bold photos by Laura Lindgren, who created for the hardcovers minimal icons; these decorate the back of the paperbacks.

Unfortunately, Grove-Atlantic has not kept the introductions by noted contemporary writers which graced the hardcover versions. With more than a couple thousand pages already, why a few more could not be spared for these essays puzzles me. Colm Tóibín had introduced the earlier and Salman Rushdie the later novels; J. M. Coetzee had discussed the poems, short fiction, and criticism. Edward Albee prefaced Beckett’s drama. The loss of these contributions weakens the impact of this paperback set.

However, the abundance of what remains, Beckett unfiltered, direct, and freed from interpretative templates or critical constraints, proves welcome. Instead of many small volumes of many of these works, a reader may purchase this collection and have nearly all of what Grove-Atlantic keeps in print in one convenient container, rather than a small shelf of paperbacks, as most readers of Beckett had to accumulate over the past half-century in order to read this author’s prolific productions. Even in smaller anthologies by genre, Grove-Atlantic still gathers nearly all of Beckett in eight volumes. Ultimately, the reduction of his life’s work into these four uniform volumes with handsome typefaces and readable presentation (even if not on acid-free paper, another disappointment) improves upon the less attractive fonts and galley plates used for many Grove printings when Beckett’s works began to be issued by the same press decades ago. The scholarly editions may wait, but as with his correspondence which after a quarter-century of preparation and litigation has begun to be published, delay may be a consequence of contentions between his estate and those who (as with certain dramatic productions) seek more liberty.

The contents themselves have generated large rather than small shelves of reaction from critics and professors and actors themselves. Rather than adding to them here, any reader curious about this bold author, who confronts the Big Questions without Easy Answers, needs to return to the originals. Perhaps, cleared of even the short introductions by his followers that nestle in the hardcover editions, the paperbacks present Beckett as he deserves to endure: direct, compassionate, unflinching, and brave. (New York Journal of Books for 2-8-11 & & Lunch.com 2-20-11)

Gabriel Josipovici's "What Ever Happened to Modernism?": Book Review

This eminent English critic confronts those who would discard the modernist novel, whose heyday seems to have been 1850-1950. He challenges the realistic, the fantastic, and the mundane fictions acclaimed in the academy and the marketplace. He defends modernism as “coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities, and therefore as something that will be, from now on, always be with us.” The cadence of his phrasing exhibits the characteristic style of this elegant small volume.

Josipovici urges those who value literature over trends and theories to champion the cause of the lure of a fiction that addresses Max Weber’s “disenchantment of the world” as our predicament. Josipovici returns to Luther and Durer; they first articulated this discontented mentality. For the novel, one of its earliest examples, Don Quixote, pioneered this undermining of the reader’s expectations of solace within what lies between its satirical and picaresque pages. Cervantes imposes himself within the text “and turns it into something much stranger and more arresting, an exploration of the nature of novels and their ontological status.”

Instead of enchantment, modernism demands of its readers and viewers that they forget the artlessness or purported innocence of their stance. We must not halt before modernist creations expecting to see ourselves and our world reflected benignly or conventionally. We have to regard modernist works “as machines that secrete spurious meaning into the world and so muddy the waters of genuine understanding of the human condition.” Entertainment becomes banal. The rarified reader searches in modernism for meaning instead of escapism, even if the meaning escapes the diligent reader. Fictions are not reality, modernists caution their audience, and in this warning they seek to divert spectators away from the safety of an “inevitable production of plot and meaning” into a truer representation of our psyche and our perspective, one that cannot be altered after disenchantment as our mindset.

This proves a demanding book. Josipovici expects that one has pondered the works and watched the art he explicates. The pace hurries, all the way back to Euripides and Rabelais, then forward to Julian Barnes or Philip Pullman. While the professor does not descend into literary jargon, to his credit, he does speak as if in the seminar. A liberal arts education appears the prerequisite for what feels, in our less attentive age, an erudite, traditional work of scholarship grounded in the verities, if those of not a more leisured humanism than an anxious skepticism.

This restlessness quickens as our times approach through the texts discussed. At the “heart of the modernist enterprise,” Josipovici discovers “that which will fit into no system, no story, that which resolutely refuses to be turned into art.”

This vantage point may overwhelm the viewer. Why this reaction should be preferred to academically promoted “literary fiction”--let alone bestsellers and mass-market fare--however, becomes an unspoken assumption. This professor apparently expects any reader of this book to already have renounced, by the very choice of this university press title, any ameliorative comfort from the aesthetic.

Modernism demands seriousness. Its dogged insistence on collapsing the fixed distance between language and story, reader and viewer, makes it as advanced as those dramas that dismantle the “fourth wall,” those films that refuse the happy ending, those books that refuse the neat conclusion. Such productions alert us to their exposed construction. They deny the possibility of another language-game or aesthetic veil that we can sweep over the work. Josipovici argues that contemporaries cannot retreat back to innocence after such linguistic and artistic strategies have exposed the artificiality of that which once fooled us.

His English colleagues come in for the most contempt in the liveliest portion of this study. Josipovici castigates those critics who fail to understand “that what is at issue is reality itself, what it is and how an art which of necessity renounces all claim to contact with the transcendent, can relate to it, and, if it cannot, what possible reason it can have for existing.”

He lists three reasons why English criticism may “fail better” (to borrow a usage from one of his influences, Samuel Beckett). Its “robust pragmatic tradition” has slid into a “philistine one,” as British power wanes and American cultural and political hegemony expands. Next, our times tend toward a suspicion of pretension and a deification of the “profound.” Third, trendy novels cash in on the latest atrocity and rush to peddle it as if sanctified, worthier of attention than a detective thriller or a fantasy paperback among those who tell us and sell us what to read next.

Finally, Josipovici rallies us to re-read modernists. He directs us not only to Woolf but Wordsworth, who conjured up the powers of the Romantic poet to energize his paradoxical calling “in an age when art itself is in question.” Two centuries later, Josipovici convinces his reader of James, Eliot, and other contenders against the complacent norm “to go back and try to understand what they were up to as writers, not dismiss them as reactionaries or misogynists, or adulate them as gay or feminist icons.” His call to take authors and artists by their word, as it were, resonates in an era too eager to shelve creative works by segregation.

His final sentence revives the restlessness that pulses beneath the professorial stance. He tells us that we are all rootless now. We can ignore this condition of the modernist sensibility as “something which blinkers us.” Or we can take advantage of its perspective to sharpen “our vision.” While this elevated position may expose Josipovici to attack from academia, he appears resigned to remain at his post, proud of the cause he asserts as the most honest one.

While this can be a formidable book in its rapid treatment of complex novels and combative art, it respects a reader schooled in the classics, of a steadily and stealthily evolving modernism as far back as the classics. This ambitious scope may convince the searching student and educated reader of the inheritance that too many modern audiences discard in the name of the dictates of the latest cloddish report from suburbia or breathless account from an approved if marginalized constituency. Josipovici may find fewer consumers and critics among his attentive audience, but this reminder of what we have gained by the modernist assault on complacency may be welcomed. He offers a refreshing retro-radicalism. He rejects the vetted reading list, the neat niches in the bookstore, the carefully multi-this and cosmopolitan-that curriculum.

Posted to Amazon US 9-28-10 & Lunch.com 9-28 in a form that duplicates none of the above, which appeared 10-28 at the New York Journal of Books.