the first gulp of beer …

Le Tour de France, c’est l’été (The Tour de France is summer) is one of 40 odd miniatures in Philippe Delerm’s collection La Première Gorgée de Bière et autres plaisirs miniscules*. In two pages Delerm brings together several ideas, feelings and moods around enervatingly warm and never ending summer afternoons in any household in any part of France. In the a background the television broadcasts monotonous scenes of cyclists in colourful lycra displaying the countryside, shot low down through buzzing wheels across fields of wheat stubble or from a helicopter as the peleton careens over village cobblestones between red-brown roofs. The buzz of the cicada outside the house, the ignored murmer of the commentators, the imagined rhonrohn of the bicycles’ tyres; all are in desultory harmony.

You may know, dear reader, that David Bowie’s Pin Ups album (on which you will find the hit ‘Sorrow’ with its shimmering  tremolo guitar-based production – not my favourite at the time but it stands up well in memory) is made up entirely of cover versions of a selection of songs from the sixties. The trick was to go somewhere away from London (rural France perhaps) and develop the arrangements without access to the originals, to give the recordings a chance to find their own new forms. (Marc Collin’s Nouvelle Vague travels a similar road – he makes sure that the singers of his bossa nova versions of 80s new wave songs have never heard the originals.)

It seems people have different abilities to remember things in books they read, different parts attract different people – some remember specific scenes, others quotes or aphorisms, some try to hang on to a mood from a story or book, some the storyline, others the intricacies of the argument, yet others the connections they saw then – and perhaps no longer can explain – with remote events, moods or phrases.

And so when seated last Tuesday on a stone fence in a tiny urban park on a balmy Sydney evening telling my friend about Delerm’s plasirs miniscules, the question is whether I was able communicate the mood by telling parts of the story, by describing the shape, by noting a phrase. In this varying attraction to pieces of the whole – better still when combined with partial memory of a work read long ago -  perhaps the reviewers’ originality can be found.

But that originality encounters and often succumbs to a stronger force: Taleb of The Black Swan makes a case that success in creative endeavours is pretty much chance, that the regard for a book, even the way in which it is understood and hence the audience it will likely find, can be set by the first few reviewers; later reviewers have trouble not to influenced by the original take – even if their point is to oppose the first approach.

And so the virtue in the Bowie/Collin remake approach; and the virtue in distance. But for some things the first mouthful is truly the most refreshing. Which is which?

* for a less idiosyncratic appreciation see eg http://alwaysthewit.blogspot.com/2007/05/la-premire-gorge-de-bire.html; or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Delerm.

the end of optimism

From a review of books by Judt and Mazower by David Herman

Something has changed in the way history is being written. The contrast between the postwar generation of historians, writing in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and many of today’s equivalents is striking. Whether they are writing about the Reformation or early Victorian England, the French revolution or modern Russian history, there is a new pessimism. Atrocities and massacres that were once marginal are now centre stage. A quiet confidence in stability and progress towards greater prosperity and equality has given way to a new uncertainty, a sense that all you can be sure of is the piles of corpses left by war and revolution.

health tolerates disintegration

I approached Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American with some excitement. I loved the first half of What I Loved; enjoyed The Blindfold and really appreciate the essays in In Defence of Eros. At it’s simplest it’s a novel of ideas about how the brain – memory, dreams, our sense of self – deals with loss and trauma. In an interview with Hustvedt Radio National’s Peter Mares gets to the heart of this idea:

Magda, who is Erik’s mentor in the book .. says that all of us go to pieces at one time or another, and that wholeness, the idea that we’re a whole person, an integrated person, is a necessary myth. In fact we’re fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being reasonably healthy.

Siri Hustvedt: …That is a statement out of my own inner belief about who we are as human beings. It is a form of translation of a very beautiful quote that is not attributed in the novel but it’s put in italics. DW Winnicott, the paediatrician and psychoanalyst, the Englishman, who wrote very beautifully about children who are separated from their families during WWII…in one of his books he said, ‘Health is not a flight into sanity. Health tolerates disintegration.’ I love this quote, and I think it is true. We have a tendency to imagine that being healthy or normal is some ideal form of wholeness, and I think it’s not at all. I think it’s a kind of resilience when we’re cracked up or beaten up.

The characters’ ever present weaknesses, foibles, less than honourable thoughts and actions, are one of the book’s strengths. It’s certainly refreshing to live in a world that honestly records as ordinary behaviour which in everyday life, if admitted to, would count as at least a failing of taste if not an immoral act; things that we all or almost all do but which one can talk about only with one’s psychiatrist (or perhaps in the anonymity of an online forum!). This ‘verisimilitude’ ought to warm me to the book and the characters – to promote identification rather than judging as a friend said. But for me it promoted identification AND judging which is ultimately depressing. I not only sympathise with Erik but empathise with him. And yet ultimately I don’t like him. Which may say more about my state of mind than anything else.

Another way of putting it, as one of my closest friends wrote to me in email: maybe there is nothing really to be decided about – and we just bumble from one thing to another doing the best we can.