Author: Daryl L. L. Houston

Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

A few weeks ago, I wrote a review of Joe Meno’s The Great Perhaps that was less than favorable. Having failed to find much satisfying in that book, I thought I owed both Meno and myself a second shot and reread his short story collection, “Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir,” which I had read and enjoyed when it first came out several years ago. I’m happy to report that it holds up with age.

The physical book itself is a pleasure to hold. This perhaps merits mentioning in the days of the iPad and the Kindle. It’s a small, thin, square book — six or seven inches per per side — with spacious margins, comfortable line spacing, and the titles of the stories running vertically in the margin of right-hand pages so that you always know right where you are. Something about the book makes me want to call it a boutique book. It strikes me as one that wasn’t your average ordinary print run. So +1 for book design.

The writing in “Bluebirds” is easy. I don’t mean that it’s simplistic or lacks depth but rather that it goes down smoothly. It is easy but not necessarily light or lightweight. Or, it is even mostly very light but is light without being lightweight. It’s a hard distinction I’m trying to draw here. It reads, let’s say, like lightweight writing, but there is substance to it. I think this is probably a very hard thing to pull off, and Meno does it very well. It’s clear that he’s going for something similar in The Great Perhaps, but in the novel, the substance isn’t quite there. Where he tries to force the substance in the novel, he makes it seem effortless and exactly right in the stories.

“Bluebirds” is composed of seventeen stories averaging low-double digits each in page length (some a bit longer, some a bit shorter). Most of the stories are told in the first person, and they all seem like explorations of voice or perspective. The curious thing about this, to me, is that there seems to be something approaching uniformity of voice. That is not to say that the same voice tells all the stories, for it surely doesn’t, but even where there are clear sociocultural boundaries that would distinguish one voice or outlook from another in real life, the voices are often similar. It’s almost as if the various stories are being chewed up and retold to us by someone with a knack for turning a nice phrase (which of course they are). Whether this is Meno’s intention or is a lapse I can’t say. I like the voice and the easy way in which it tells the stories, so I’m comfortable with the similarity.

Meno writes about connection and about loneliness. Loss and loneliness and yearning run through all of the stories, and yet he avoids monotony by dreaming up wacky, quirky circumstances around which to drape the sadness (and occasional happiness, moments of real humanity and connection). It is a reflective book but not a melancholy one. I’m reminded very much of Daniel Wallace both for the sometimes fantastical stories and for the light way in which they both address dark subjects.

This is a good book, one that was given to me by a friend and one I’ll recommend to friends. It doesn’t require a significant investment of time to read, and for me, the payoff was phenomenal. It’s the sort of book that makes me want to write short stories. It’s not life-changing, but I’d go so far as to call it day-changing, for it’s a delight almost cover to cover. I’ll leave you with a few quotations that I dog-eared (only the first two are from the same story).

Junior, Carrie, and I went to the Olive Garden on Pulaski. We lounged in the fake Italian setting. We loaded up on bread sticks and free salad. We ate until we couldn’t speak. I thought, Olive Garden! You have saved us with your imitation Italian cooking!

I got this idea that for some reason I should be thankful for my father leaving. If my dad never left, my mom would never have gone crazy, and, well, my brother and I would not be living together and I would never have met Carrie, and this moment with my brother and me standing here like this would definitely never have happened. I was suddenly thankful for all of it, the comings and goings. I thought I would tell my brother about it sometime later when he wanted to talk about it, maybe, and I started to hope that this moment, this one here, would be the one we looked back on. It was too soon to tell, I guess, and we settled for standing there for a moment, watching the whole world take off and land.

There are some things that might make me angry, some things that are very wrong, and some things that are only for me — things that are very beautiful, full of beauty, like the old pistol and the tiger tattoo and the girl with the wig lit up by the sun. They are moments I refuse to share. They are moments I have never told anyone.

When I came back to the couch, Margaret was trembling. In the soft crook of her elbow, her pulse was beating like a hidden rabbit.

Birdie McCoy is a girl I make cry in third grade. When I do it, I doom myself forever. In the woods behind the elementary school, blue bows in her brown hair, her face red from a race, she is given a yellow ribbon for winning. I say, out of breath, “Who’s going to marry an ugly girl like you?” and she begins to cry quietly, for being faster than me, smarter, so small, so pretty. As she cups her hands over her eyes, I fall in love for the first time. Many years later I realize it is there, that moment, that dooms me forever. I fall in love with a woman as soon as she begins crying, which always, always occurs at the end of everything.

Concealment

Daryl L. L. Houston4 Comments

This is a book about concealment. From the very beginning, with the epigraph pointing to an elusive oasis of horror within a desert of boredom, all the way through to this week’s milestone, we’ve seen many instances of concealment.

Archimboldi’s history and person are concealed. Emotions and true feelings (consider Pelletier’s secret near-hope that Espinoza has gone down in a plane crash) are concealed. Edwin Johns’s real motivation for chopping off his hand is concealed. Evidence is concealed. And writing is used for concealment. Kessler speaks of this last at some length, and I’ve quoted it at length elsewhere and won’t do so again here. He speaks, in the same exchange, of people being inside or outside of society. The inside/outside pairing that I’ve explored elsewhere also seems to me to have something to do with concealment. Things go on inside jail that you wouldn’t expect, for example; they are concealed. Ansky’s manuscript is concealed, Reiter and company conceal themselves while watching the baroness and Entrescu have sex. The meaning of the book’s title has so far remained concealed. Examples abound.

In this week’s reading, the man from whom Archimboldi rents a typewriter says the following of authors:

He writes like someone taking dictation. His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of *concealment*. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter.

This resonated strongly for me with some earlier passages in which Florita (a magic flower of winter?) is portrayed as a sort of instrument or taker of dictation for whatever spirit or power is giving her visions of the murders. In the cases of both the seer and the author, Bolaño suggests that something like the vatic voice is at work. I love the comparison he makes, by proximity/association in the Florita passage, to the roles played by the ventriloquist and his dummy. The vatic voice is a funny thing, in that in work written in that voice, the identity of the real speaker is hidden. As you can’t know for sure whether the ouija board’s planchette is moved by a fellow-occultist or by the spirits themselves, you can’t know whether it’s the author/seer’s voice or some other, inspired voice that’s working. (Was Yeats hearing voices or was he just batshit crazy?) This too is a sort of concealment. The problem of concealment of the author (in general) in his or her work has stoked the fires of the intentional fallacy for ages.

On page 787, Bolaño says a bit more about concealment and art (and more):

Play and delusion are the blindfold and spur of minor writers. Also: the promise of their future happiness. A forest that grows at a vertiginous rate, a forest no one can fence in, not even the academies, in fact, the academies make sure it flourishes unhindered, as do boosters and universities (breeding grounds for the shameless) and government institutions and patrons and cultural associations and declaimers of poetry — all aid the forest to grow and hide what must be hidden, all aid the forest to reproduce what must be reproduced, since the process is inevitable, though no one ever sees what exactly is being reproduced, what is being tamely mirrored back.

This is a critical passage in the book, I think, for it ties together things like the inside/outside pairing (fencing) and concealment while also touching on problems in the academy, in government, in culture, and in the sort of mass reproduction a key product of which is poor factory workers in St. Teresa who become so much refuse. Let’s not forget that the St. Teresa murders themselves are largely concealed from the rest of the world.

In these late sections of the book, it begins to feel more literary to me. Bolaño is slowly beginning to pull a drawstring closed. It’s not tidy, but things begin to hang together a bit; themes and plots mingle more promiscuously. A typewriter-lender in the middle of the century (with its holocaust) says things that resonate very purposefully with speech acts and events across the world late in the century (with its smaller-scale holocaust), and there’s mounting suspicion that they’ll all wind up revolving somehow around Archimboldi (I suppose the suspicion is mounting; I read of such suspicions way back and just this week read of a desire for Archimboldi to make an appearance in St. Teresa). This is what literature does. It’s why, despite all the problems of this book, it is ultimately a good and an important book.

I’ll leave you with a couple more neat quotes about concealment, the first by Bolaño (p. 790) and the second by Matthew Arnold:

Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.

I knew the mass of men conceal’d
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal’d
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
I knew they lived and moved
Trick’d in disguises, alien to the rest
Of men, and alien to themselves–and yet
The same heart beats in every human breast!

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

Daryl L. L. Houston12 Comments

Of Katherine Hepburn’s death, Zadie Smith wrote the following:

Two days ago she died, aged ninety-six. I don’t know why I should be surprised, but I was, and when I found out, I wept, and felt ridiculous for weeping. How can someone you have never met make you cry?

I’m not the first to express a similar sentiment about the death of David Foster Wallace. There’s a crucial difference, however. His death, for those of us well outside of his intimate circle, was a very big surprise indeed. Still — Smith gets this part just right — to have felt so ragged after his death felt strange. I felt somehow orphaned.

Intimacy is concentric, and fortunately for those of us stuck in orbit on the outer rings surrounding the bright light that was David Foster Wallace, David Lipsky was admitted to a nearer circle during the final week of the book tour for Infinite Jest. Or, I should say, he was admitted to one slightly more interior circle and seems to have worked his way yet closer. And he recorded it all.

Just out from Broadway Books, Lipsky’s chronicling of a handful of days on the road with Dave (I’m going to call him Dave sometimes from here on out, because it makes me feel better and because the book made me think of him as Dave) might have been a savage, painful read. I expected as much, imagining myself with a box of tissue in a dimly lit room trying once again to work out how a guy like Dave could be gone and what the ramifications of that were for a know-nothing yutz of a no-talent hack like me.

With one minor exception in part of the afterword, Lipsky has avoided the maudlin, and instead of finding myself wallowing in the book and the sadness that attends the realization that its subject is no longer with us, I found it invigorating and validating and playful and fun and mostly delightful.

Lipsky gives us something of a soft landing in the preface, which provides just a teensy bit of background information before setting us gently on our way. The afterword he places curiously before the main body of the text, but even this turns out to be a considerate gesture, for Lipsky wants to leave us with the words of the living Wallace rather than sending us home from the journey with a meditation on his death. Read the afterword when you will, Lipsky advises us, at some break of your own choosing within the text.

I, being sort of rigidly conformist in some ways, chose to read the afterword last, and even that turned out to be an ok decision. For though there was that one crushing moment in the middle of the afterword, Lipsky leaves us with two wonderful things. First, he has given us a picture of Dave as a real live human being (with flaws, yes, but with many personalizing charms as well), which sister Amy had written that she hoped might happen. And second, looking back to a conversation about books as a way of seeking refuge from loneliness, Lipsky closes by saying this lovely thing about his road trip with Dave: “I’d tell him it reminded me of what life was like, instead of being a relief from it, and I’d say it made me feel much less lonely to read.”

This sort of escape from the loneliness of the inner self was, of course, one of Wallace’s projects. Late in the road trip, Dave says, of the particular edge good fiction has over other art forms:

And the big thing, the big thing seems to be, sort of leapin’ over that wall of self, and portraying inner experience. And setting up, I think, a kind of intimate conversation between two consciences.

I am in here.

I’ve listened to many interviews and readings Dave gave, and so I have something of an idea of what he must have been like to listen to. Yet in interviews and readings, people tend to speak in different registers than in everyday life. (I’m reminded of the distinction Dave makes in the grammar essay between time and place for saying “that ursine juggernaut bethought himself to sup upon my person” and “goddamn bear!”) One of the great pleasures of Lipsky’s book for me was his emphasis on Dave’s midwesternisms. They reminded me always that Dave was, mostly (especially after the first day or so of the trip), just a guy having a conversation. Taken in hand with the audio I had previously heard of Dave, they made Lipsky’s transcription seem real and alive. I felt as if I could hear Dave himself speaking the words. It was kind of Lipsky to have emphasized this for us.

Some have complained that Lipsky himself was too present in the text, that he peeks in with a too-high frequency with brief bracketed interpolations. I found the interjections helpful and well-meaning where others have found them self-serving and annoying.

The deeper into the book I got, the more pages I dog-eared, so that by the end, I figured I might as well just enlist the help of a strong friend and fold the corner of the whole book down on itself. The two men talk about movies, parties, fame, loneliness, the genesis of Infinite Jest, and much more, and it’s all riveting.

Lipsky’s book is a real gift. He brings us maybe one concentric ring closer to a sort of intimacy with Wallace, who sought in his work to learn how to leap over (and outward from) the walls of the self in which he was (we are) imprisoned. While Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself can’t help but remind us of Wallace’s death, it is most concerned with a pivotal point in his life, and it was — contra my fears — a real joy to read. Gaudeamus igitur.

Dismemberment

Daryl L. L. HoustonLeave a comment

A couple of months ago, I wrote about disembodiment. Tonight, I’ll give brief consideration to dismemberment, of which there is no shortage in 2666 without even counting all the severed nipples in the fourth part. First, a brief list taken from this week’s reading (some of these aren’t dismemberment precisely, but they’re disfigurings, at any rate, or catastrophic disabilities):

  • Reiter is shot in the throat and loses his voice for a while.
  • Ansky meets a soldier missing an eye and an arm (709)
  • A hunter is described whose sex organs have been torn off. He goes searching for them until at last he marries, at which point, having aged thirty years after being unmanned, he ages in reverse to get the thirty years back. Is there something of the Actaeon myth here?
  • There’s a curious episode with some indigenous people whom the Europeans believe to be cannibals but who actually take the European habit of shaking hands and making eye-contact to be a sort of threat of soul-rape. This isn’t exactly dismemberment, but gosh there sure does seem to be a threat of it, and it just feels related to me.
  • Reiter returns to his war buddies to find that Kruse now speaks as if he’s been castrated (738)
  • Reiter’s mother is blind in one eye.
  • Reiter’s father lost a leg and has some interaction with a sergeant who has also lost a leg.
  • Here’s a real stretch: There’s lots of talk of masturbation in this week’s reading. Can masturbation be construed to be a sort of almost imagined dismemberment of another person?

Some dismemberment  is to be expected, I suppose. It’s war time during this section, after all.

Still, some other body-wholeness or health issues occur to me.

Bolaño was dying as he wrote 2666 and in fact didn’t actually finish writing and editing the book (there’s supposedly a sixth part floating around somewhere). His terminal illness surely must have informed some of his impressions about death. Can it also have led him to focus on body/health issues, or do you suppose that was part of his project to begin with?

Bolaño writes a bit about art and body as well. We can’t forget Edwin Johns and his lost hand, of course, and what to me remains an open question regarding his real motivation for chopping off his hand. And then there’s Archimboldi’s namesake, Arcimboldo, about whom I wrote earlier with an eye toward the critics as a sort of composite character. As Arcimboldo composes some of his pictures as bodies made up of bodies, so Bolaño has made two big piles of bodies (at least two — the biggest or most explicit or pronounced being those of the Jews mid-century and of Mexican women late-century). And then there’s the matter of Bolaño’s health — perhaps worsened by the vagabond artist’s lifestyle he indulged in for much of his life? — and his own decision to switch gears in 1990 to write fiction rather than his beloved poetry, a decision fueled by a perception that he needed to be able to support his family, which he couldn’t do with poetry. Was Johns telling the truth after all, and betraying Bolaño’s own sense of having somehow sold out?

The final section of 2666 feels very mythological to me. It’s almost like a folk tale in tone and content at times. It tells the creation story of the man whose elusiveness set the opening part of the book in motion. Reiter is described as a giant many times, has a strange, counter-intuitive resistance to gunfire in spite of his height, and in fact has a mythology built up around him by the critics. He travels the world on adventures, is stripped of powers (speech) that he later regains, and even has something of an experience, in Castle Dracula, that one might liken to a trip into a labyrinthine underworld complete with a view of a chanting devil. He is awarded the medals of a hero.

As I contemplated the idea of Reiter/Archimboldi as a mythological figure, I tried to think of mythological figures who had been somehow disfigured. Cyclops with his one eye was, I suppose, born that way, but he bears mentioning because of all the one-eyedness in this section and before (blind justice, the mural of the winking saint). Another one-eyed figure were the Graeae, a set of crones (sisters to the Gorgons) who shared one eye and one tooth and whom Perseus outwitted. Prometheus had his liver perpetually torn out by eagles. Medusa, who has made a couple of appearances in Bolaño’s book, was ultimately decapitated, her head used as a weapon in future adventures. There are probably lots that I’m missing.

But the one that seems most relevant to me is Orpheus.  He was the son of a river god, and it’s hard for me to put aside the strange water associations Bolaño assigns to Reiter. Orpheus was linked more to community and to his disciples than to any one race or family; similarly, Reiter/Archimboldi, with his mixed-nationality name and his multi-national appeal, transcends boundaries of country and race. Orpheus was a great singer (and by extension poet) famous for his trip to the underworld to retrieve his wife, Eurydice. After failing to rescue her (he looked back into Hades before she had emerged and thus broke the deal), he became so despondent that he forsook all gods but Apollo, and when he went one morning to the oracle of Dionysus and began to praise Apollo, the female followers of Dionysus ripped him limb from limb. As his head and lyre bobbed down the river, he continued singing. Archimboldi’s final book (at the time of the story’s action, at least) will be called The Head, though I don’t think we know what it’s about. It’s an interesting title, given these little similarities between Orpheus and Reiter and the occurrences of art and disfigurement or dismemberment.

Consider also the story of Medusa. There are different renderings of the myth, but a couple of them suggest that she was actually very beautiful until she faced the wrath of Athena for defiling her temple by having sex in it. In one of the accounts, Poseidon desired Medusa, which angered Athena, who then allowed Poseidon to rape Medusa in her (Athena’s) temple, whereupon Athena punished Medusa for the defilement with the famous head of snakes and stony glance. I think it’s interesting to think of this story — relevant in a way to the murders in St. Teresa — with its ultimate beheading of a snake-haired head alongside that of Orpheus and his own decapitation: dismemberment of a woman for her uninvited sex set up next to dismemberment and subsequent immortalization of a poet for love of his wife, who died at the fangs of a snake.

Moby Dick

Daryl L. L. Houston12 Comments
Moby Dick group read prep

Well, there was pretty good response to my query about whether or not people were interested in a group read of Moby Dick. I’ve mentioned it a couple of times on twitter and Facebook as well and gotten a few encouraging responses. I had been waffling on whether or not to try to lead this thing, since I’ve been at this group read thing for nearly a year now, and it’s darned time-consuming for me. But I finally decided to go ahead and do the thing. And now I’m so excited I’m just about shaking in my skin about it. I’ve downloaded an audio version for potential listening to in the car and on the old elliptical machine. I’ve bought the authoritative text for this read and am poking into the end-matter as I have time. I’ve begun reading (and in some cases rereading) books about whaling and whales and Melville’s books. I’ve lined up a couple of neato bloggers who for the moment will remain nameless but whose participation I’m really excited about (not to diminish the efforts my siblings-in-arms already blogging here). And I’ve set a schedule.

Mark your calendar for May 24. That’s a couple of weeks after the 2666 read wraps up. We’re going to go pretty fast. I think that the longer a read goes along, the more fatigued people become. I know it’s been the case with 2666 (made worse by that big oppressive fourth section), and there are certainly parts of Moby Dick that some will find fatiguing or boring (though I find them fascinating). So this is going to be a 6-week whirlwind read. In the edition I cut my teeth on (the Penguin edition pictured front left above), that’s about 115 pages a week, or 16 pages a day. It seems like a lot, I guess, but the prose itself isn’t hard. If you were able to pull off 70 pages a week of Infinite Jest, this will be an absolute cinch. (And if people come at me with pitchforks and torches in the comments, I’ll consider stretching it out to an 8-week read instead.)

So there you have it. Bone up on your nautical lingo and get ready to chase the white whale. I’ll write a few more posts in preparation for the read in the mean time, but look for my post on the first few chapters on May 24.

If you’re already blogging for IZ and would like to be considered an official blogger for the Moby Dick read, please let me know one way or another so that I can add you to the about page when I make one. If you’re not a blogger for IZ but would like to be, please make your case in the comments (or if you’re too shy to make a case in the comments, at least leave a comment expressing your interest, and I’ll email you).

Castle Dracula

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

When I wrote about vampirism in 2666 about a month ago, I had forgotten entirely the events that take place at Castle Dracula in this week’s swath of reading. Or maybe there was some little synapse way back in the recesses of my brain that remembered, but it sure wasn’t something I had in my conscious memory. But sure enough, Hans Reiter gets shipped off this week to a strange assignment at Castle Dracula that culminates in let’s just say really impressive and ultimately at least slightly disturbing (or is it just humorous?) coitus complete with blood and chanting.

So why all the vampirism? And why this specific strange interlude, with its dream of cannibalism, at the castle of Dracula himself? In the comments on that older post of mine, it’s demonstrated readily enough that vampirism lines up rather nicely with the consumption of others, parasitism, etc., that’s so pervasive in the part about the crimes. It would be simple enough to allow that the Dracula interlude is just a solidification of the conceit.

But I think there’s more to it. Those who read along when we did Dracula this past October may remember that the author of that classic if really sort of disappointing text was Irish and that there are plenty of bits of the text that can be reasonably said to comment on the landlord debacle that Ireland is known for (I wrote about it briefly here). At the heart of that debacle was the misuse of poor people on the margins — outside of society, to use Kessler’s phrasing — by those within society. It kind of sounds familiar within our context, doesn’t it?

Further, consider how Bolaño lingers on the story of Benito Juarez earlier in the novel (I believe it’s in the section in which we first meet La Santa, and I assume that the city of Juarez, after which Santa Teresa is modeled, is named after this former Mexican president). During Juarez’s terms as president, Mexico was the subject of invasions by the U.S. and by France. Both nations had loaned money to Mexico for economical and political reasons, and both fought for influence in the country. Compare this to the history of Ireland, whose landlord problem arose as a result of England’s play to control Ireland for political reasons (it was a buffer from invasions by Spain and France). So yet again, we see pointers in Bolaño’s book to parallels with Irish history that happen also to be addressed, if obliquely, in Stoker’s book.

And then finally, at the end of this week’s section, we see the strange courtship of Reiter and Ingeborg in which we learn of her fascination with the human-sacrificing Aztecs and Reiter’s oath sworn by the Aztecs. Bolaño here is tying World War II and, by not very lengthy extension, the human sacrifice of the holocaust, back to the Mexico in which the heart of his story is centered. That one of Ireland’s most well-known writers couched the landlord matter in terms of cannibalism hardly seems tangential.

Someone who has a better head for history than I do may be able to provide additional color or nuance, but I definitely have the sense that Bolaño is using the vampirism in the story, and Dracula in particular, to tie together some of the threads he’s been unwinding pertaining to insiders and outsiders, parasitism and consumption of people, and a sort of larger parasitism of nations.

Fatigue, Mirrors, Inside/Outside, and a Theory

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

It’s been quiet around here lately, huh? I’ve got a bunch of things going on and, like many whose posts and comments I’ve read, have grown weary of the part about the crimes, so it’s been hard to get motivated to post. Even tonight, I don’t have it in me to write something obsessive or even particularly coherent. But I did want to make a couple of quick notes.

Bolaño is clearly doing something with the congresswoman and Norton. Both women wind up staying in a hotel room in Santa Teresa with one mirror by the door and another on the wall at the other end of the room. It seems likely (since this was a distinguishing characteristic of the room for Norton) that it’s the same room. And both — Norton in a dream — spend time trying to see themselves reflected in the two mirrors. Both are women who’ve had what vanilla folk like myself consider fairly racy sexcapades, and it seems reasonable (if not entirely charitable to Norton) to suggest that they’ve done so at times for personal, professional gain. Norton is associated in several places with the medusa, and the congresswoman describes the consumption of porn at the narcoranchos on page 628 in terms that bring medusa to mind. Norton furiously takes notes in her dream as the congresswoman establishes a detailed dossier on her missing friend.

It is Kessler who speaks, way back on page 267, about people living outside of society and how they’re perceived as expendable. He speaks of words used to avoid rather than to reveal, and he says that the crimes have different signatures and that everybody in Santa Teresa is outside of society. Kessler too is an outsider, of course, as is made all the more apparent by the pomp that surrounds his visit (the conversation described earlier in the book seems to be a follow-up visit a few years after the visit we’re told of late in the book). In my last post of any substance, I noted a number of instances of contrast between being inside and being outside. On page 609, the congresswoman bangs on the topic some more:

You think that from the inside you might change some things for the better. First you work from the outside, then you think that if you were inside the real possibiliteis for change would be greater. You think that inside, at least, you’ll have more freedom to act. Not true. There are things that can’t be changed from outside or inside. But here comes the funniest part. The really unbelievable part of the story (the sad story of Mexico or Latin America, it makes no difference). The part you can’t believe. When you make mistakes from inside, the mistakes stop mattering. Mistakes stop being mistakes. Making a mistake, butting your head against he wall, becomes a political virtue, a political tactic, gives you political presence, gets you media attention.

Here at the end of this part of the book, we have the congresswoman, who has become the ultimate insider, tracking one murder while Kessler, the ultimate gringo outsider, is brought in to provide support for the investigation. It’s an interesting contrast, if not one I can really do justice to.

And finally, a theory. It’s not at all clear to me how tidy the end of the section is supposed to be. The parts about Kelly Parker are drawn out and seem important by virtue of word count, but they also seem sort of patched in and just about random. Why all this detail about one case all of a sudden (and why the one about a woman who changed her name to a very American-sounding name?)? Is it gesturing toward a source for a lot of the crimes? I can’t help wondering if the implication isn’t that a lot of the women being found dead are women Kelly has hired as prostitutes for her parties, and that there really is a big central case to blow wide open if only the police would do some police-work. If so, I fear that it’s obvious and I’m coming across as a moron for proposing it as some ground-breaking theory.

Anyway, next week: Archimboldi.

The Little Engine that Could

Daryl L. L. Houston7 Comments

Even among those of us tracking various things over at bolanobolano.com, the fatigue of reading the part about the crimes is starting to take its toll. This is just a quick little note of encouragement for others following along who may also be growing weary. Just two more weeks until we’re out of the current pit of despair. I don’t remember a whole lot about the final section from when I read it a year ago, but I do remember that it was during that final part that I began to see why people thought this was a good book. Hold on for two more weeks, my friends, and things will get better. The best writing, if I remember correctly, is yet to come.

The Great Perhaps

Daryl L. L. Houston3 Comments

This is off-topic for the current group read, but as this is kind of my literature blog, the post goes here.

A few years ago, a friend gave me a short story collection entitled Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir, by Joe Meno. I haven’t read it in years, and — who knows? — my opinion of it may be different were I to read it again, but I do remember really liking it. The stories were short, little vignettes of what I remember as whimsical people telling sometimes folksy, sometimes improbable stories. The stories were simple and easy but engaging. Delightful is what they were. The book was a real delight to read. Ever since, I’ve had it in the back of my mind to read more by this guy. His books haven’t been at the top of my must-read pile, but a couple of them have been on my amazon wish list. For my birthday, I finally got one of them, his most recent, The Great Perhaps.

I suppose my expectations were high.

The first line certainly drew me in: “Anything resembling a cloud will cause Jonathan Casper to faint.”  Clouds of varying types (by which I mean not merely cumulus and cumulonimbus but supernatural and nuclear and inkish and rhinosceric) figure prominently in the book but wind up being, for me, an unsatisfactory and in fact a downright forced conceit. Meno tries to use clouds as a vector for making a point about complexity vs. simplicity, a dichotomy he he also touches on with references to evolution and a strange psychoanalysis of Casper’s fainting, seizing spells.

The story puts us in the midst of a family breaking apart. Jonathan Casper and his wife Madeleine are undergoing a second separation and career crises while their teenage daughters confront angst, in the case of the older, and a desire for fulfillment through a misplaced and overzealous religion, in the case of the younger. Everyone in the novel is searching for something, and no one seems to be anywhere near finding it. Naturally, by the end, they’ve found it, and it all ties back in neatly to the notion that oversimplification breeds unhappiness, that complexity is beautiful.

Although they all show development from the beginning of the story to the end, the main characters are all very flat. The obsessed scientist. The woman juggling a career and domestic life and being particularly successful at neither. The rebelling, asshole child. The child interested in nothing but religion. It seems to me not to be enough to show development of flat characters into slightly rounder, or at least more fulfilled, characters. Meno concludes that complexity is beautiful, but he declines to imbue his characters with any complexity. There’s very little satisfaction to be had here.

The book insists upon a few things that seem bizarrely naive or off key. For example, Jonathan Casper studies squid and nurses a hope of finding in their genetic makeup something to help him discover “a unified idea about why the world is the way it is, and where, as human beings, we truly come from.” This seems a stretch, but then Meno goes on: “In his search for the prehistoric squid, Jonathan is looking for a single, uncomplicated answer to the mystery of human life: there must be one somewhere, he is sure of it” (21). This strikes me as a feeble attempt to unify the strands of a story that, like the mystery of human life, may simply defy tidy unification. There are several such things in the book. They feel like feints, almost. They feel contrived.

Contrivance turns out to be the book’s primary flaw, I think. Fiction is naturally contrived. It’s the throwing together of characters and situations whose intersection makes a neat story. In the best fiction, however improbable the intersections or the situations (take wheelchair assassins descending upon a tennis academy, for example), it all feels somehow merited or forgivable or even wonderfully inventive. The Great Perhaps feels to me like something that began as a neat enough idea but whose central conceit required more buttressing than was optimal, done at last with weaker struts than were needed. It feels, in a way, like some of my own efforts at writing fiction, in which something fundamental collapses out from under me and I scramble to jam something in its place. It’s not half-heartedly exactly. It’s more as if whole-heartedly (over-heartedly?) but in service of something that simply needed rethinking altogether.

Meno does some interesting things formally in the book. Sections about Madeleine Casper are often in something like numbered list form. And Jonathan’s father — who appears in some of the best writing of the book, I think — writes one-liner letters to himself that are sprinkled throughout the text; these I found quite lovely.

The Great Perhaps concerns itself at least obliquely with war, and its most interesting sections, from the childhood of Jonathan’s father, take place in the very middle of the war. Meno mentions terrorism and war in the modern context (the action of the book takes place at the time of the Bush/Kerry election) and even makes what I imagine seemed to him like a dramatic reveal pertaining to that most horrific cloud of all — the mushroom — and yet he never really ties it all together. Had he done more with that complex, conflicted father and his experience of the war, I think Meno might have had a great book. As it turned out, I get the feeling he started with the central image of the mushroom cloud and worked backward to build up a weak set of stories to support a cloud motif that was more contrived than beautiful.

All in all, it’s inadequate. Not bad exactly, but inadequate. I like Meno’s writing, and this book doesn’t turn me off to reading his other books, but it did disappoint me in some of the ways that writers like Powers and T.C. Boyle — though considered good, serious writers — sometimes disappoint. I suppose there’s worse company for Meno to keep.

In and Out

Daryl L. L. HoustonLeave a comment

On page 506, I underlined the sentence “That same night, in bed in his cell, Haas said: the killer is on the outside and I’m on the inside” and drew an arrow to my own note: “There’s a lot of this contrast (in/out) in this part (at least) of the book.” Once I was finished with this week’s reading, I went back and did a very quick scan of the text to find a few of the instances of in and out or inside and outside that had jumped out at me. Here’s a brief (but not necessarily complete) catalog:

470: Of Estrella Sandoval (the girl whose murder eventually points back to Haas), her friend says that she went in and talked to Haas and was mad when she came out.

475: Haas’s desk is horseshoe shaped, an enclosure.

475: There’s a reference to a couple of kids boxing. A boxing ring is an enclosure (enclosing violence).

477: Epinfanio asks if he can come into Haas’s house. Surprisingly, Haas lets him in.

479: Haas invites policemen on a subsequent visit to come into his home, but they decline before arresting him.

480: Haas, in possession apparently of endless stores of energy, makes his interrogators, shut in a soundproof room with him, lose patience.

481: Haas is put in a private cell.

483: Inmates in private cells could go out into the yard or spend their days inside. Twice on this page we see the phrase “The first time he went out into the yard.”

485: Haas acknowledges that at some point he’ll have to leave his private cell, so that his “in” becomes another “in.”

486: There’s a reference to a labyrinth.

488: There’s another reference to a labyrinth and a couple of references to an abyss (to a prison, which is very much an “in,” built on the edge of the abyss). He also feels (in a dream) something sewn inside his mouth. My puzzler for the day: Is an abyss in or out or something else altogether?

490: “Here, to a greater or lesser degree, everyone is sensitive to what happens outside, to the hearbeat of the city, you might say… Then I asked him if he thought I had killed [the women] and the bastard said no, not you, gringo, as if I was a fucking gringo, which inside maybe I am… That here in prison they know I’m innocent… It’s like a noise you hear in a dream. The dream, like everything dreamed in enclosed spaces, is contagious.”

502: There’s mention of the changing of a city’s limits, a shift in what constitutes in and out.

506: “The killer keeps killing and I’m locked up. That’s an incontrovertible fact. Someone should consider that and draw conclusions. That same night, in bed in his cell, Haas said: the killer is on the outside and I’m on the inside.”

513: Elvira Campos wants to ask Juan de Dios Martinez more about the crimes, but “doing so would only deepen the relationship, lead them, together, into a locked room to which she alone held the key.

I’m reminded of a discussion way back in the part about Fate between two men in a diner. Steve highlighted the section a few weeks ago, but I’ll requote the pertinent parts:

The ones killed in the Commune weren’t part of society, whereas the woman killed in a French provincial capital and the murderer on horseback in Virginia were.

and

“All right, then,” said the white-haired man. “I’ll tell you three things I’m sure of: (a) everyone living in that city is outside of society, and everyone, I mean everyone, is like the ancient Christians in the Roman circus…”

As is often the case, I don’t have a tidy theory to assemble these fragments into, but it does seem to me that Bolaño is doing something with insider and outsider status (even among the critics, with the different cliques) in the book and that, in this week’s section including several scenes in jail, he adds some color to the vague dichotomy of insider/outsider by providing lots of examples of specific ins and outs.