grotesque

My preferred cover

With two matter-of-fact murders of prostitutes  and a mother’s suicide Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque is sold as a crime novel, at least in English, but she’s much more interested in crimes committed by families, and the Japanese education and class systems, as the more visceral attacks on human bodies.

The narrator – unrelentingly bitter, and unrelentingly unreliable – recalls only a few moments in her 40 odd years where she was happy for even an instant, and all but one of those celebrate nothing more than the cultivation of her single special skill, to manipulate.

She, and it seems most of Japan, is obsessed by the unfair power of beauty, realised for the purpose of the novel in the form of her sister, Yukiro, half Swiss, half Japanese. Our narrator shares these genes, perhaps, but not the resulting astonishing outward appearance. At around 11 years old she is forced to accept the power and disconcert of this creepy, awe-inspiring beauty. She decides her sister is a monster to be shunned, fled from, locked out of her life.

But slowly the reader is lead to suspect that the narrator is good at seeing monsters.

The cover blurb suggests that Yukiro and a high school classmate of the narrator later choose prostitution as a form of power. If so their choice – if ever that – is given declining rewards in a beauty-obsessed society.

[This is a post that ran out of puff .. there's a good review here]

the prime of life – the first 100 pages

Its not hard, after the first 100 pages of the Prime of Life, to see reasons why Simone de Beauvoir’s  autobiographical writing might be so well regarded. We witness the personal and intellectual development of a woman with a finely tuned self-awareness, a development marked by an inclination both to question and to oppose (the latter sometimes at odds with the former, as the older and wiser author implies from time to time about her younger self) and with a roughly focussed, and optimistic,  appetite for knowledge and experience. Places, people, books and films are celebrated for themselves but also for their impact on her seriously undertaken mission to think out her considered understanding of the world.

One dynamic is of her and Sartre developing their ideas, their persona and their personalities, and their being as a couple. She has strong sympathy, but not full agreement, with his unfolding project to

science, civilisation, economics and democracy in China

Something we don’t know know, here, is that in the first part of the last (20th) century people in the West were generally ignorant of the scores of technological advances made by China before about 1500. Now the  idea that ‘ It’s well known that the Chinese invented masses of things before they were known of in the West‘ is commonplace whether or not most people could name any; there is at least a general understanding that fireworks and spaghetti have their origins in China. Joseph Needham records an average of somethig like 15 major inventions per century from the time of Christ until 1500 years later*, including not just Bomb, Book and Compass (the title of a book by Simon Winchester, subtitled Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China), and the predecessors of the first two of these, gunpowder and paper, but also centreboards and multiple masts, segmental arched bridges, ephedrine, the decimal point, stirrups, the breast strap harnass, negative numbers, toilet paper; and there’s more: they discovered diabetes is associated with sweet and fatty foods (in the first century BC!).

Once the general outline of the creativity and power of Chinese technology is understood, two more questions arise.

are quotations the beginning or end of ideas?

The Counterfeiters, Andre Gide

Bernard: Laura, Laura you don’t love Douviers. You feel affection for him, pity, esteem, but that’s not love. I think the secret of your sadness (for you are sad, Laura) is that life has divided you; love has only consented to take you, incomplete; you distribute among several what yo would have liked to give to one only. As for me, I feel I am indivisible; I can only give the whole of myself.

Laura: You are too young to speak so! (p181)

Edouard (earlier in his journal): The man they (women) love is as a rule a kind of clothes peg on which to hang their love.

The Ancient Shore, Shirley Hazard

Neapolitans know that pleasure can’t be deferred for ideal circumstances. (p55)

The contemporary world grappled to its explanations, sets itself to ignore the accidental quality of our existence. (p14) (cf N N Taleb)

in or out of Europe

In Australia we have been trying to cut our last tie with Europe – our formal adherence to the English monarchy – for 15 years or so. In 1998 we temporarily lost our nerve, ostensibly over a squabble about what kind of republic to become. For a much longer time intellectual traditions on the periphery of Europe have conversely anticipated and often sought some kind of union:

For people like me , who live uncertainly on the edge of Europe with only our books to keep us company, Europe has figured always as a dream,  vision of what is to come; an apparition at times desired and at times feared. … A future but never a memory.  (Orhan Pamuk ‘Where is Europe’ Other Colours* 2007 p 190.)

What we share on the other hand is an ‘away from the centre’ consciousness. In an essay about Vargas Lhosa, Pamuk ascribes this, finding no other common bond, to Third World literature:

If there is anything that distinguishes Third World literature, it is not the poverty, violence, politics or social turmoil of the country from which it issues but rather the writer’s awareness that his work is somehow remote from the centers* where the history of his art-the art of the novel-is described, and  he reflects this distance in his work. What is crucial here is the Third World writer’s sense of being exiled from the world’s literary centers. [... an exile not cured by relocation to] ‘one of the cultural centers of Europe, for the writer’s exile is not so much a matter of geography as a spiritual state, a sense of exclusion, of being a perpetual foreigner.

No well-read Australian can read this without thinking of fifty years of cultural cringe, of writers hiding from, or playing to, their Australian-ness. For only a few Australian writers is it never an issue, an issue worn lightly or otherwise.

* The title is anglicised for the Australian edition but not the spelling inside..

narrowing choices (from 2004)

Susan Johnson Hungry Ghosts Picador 1997

He was of the generation that had indulged in a long, extended youth and which would have trouble coming to terms with the finite nature of life and its unfortunate habit of ageing the body and narrowing choices.

For Anne-Louise life was still a stream in which she was swimming upwards, bound for some unimaginable open sea. She supposed herself destined for happiness as if happiness were a beautiful landing where you stopped and got out, eternally harboured. (p 20)

It struck me that until this moment our troubles had been small, surmountable, that we suffered only bad tempers and yearning. We had possessed the arrogance of the lucky, believing misfortune to be something which happened only to failures, to the unlucky, people who had somehow rendered themselves powerless. I saw now that there was no such division between the blessed and the unlucky, merely life passing over us all. (p 128)

Good: yearning. Next sentence not so good – lucky and unlucky aren’t logical – the belief we are lucky and (others?) unlucky is a tautology;  she seems to hold it true while it is also the chimera she learns to un-know? I like this idea but think that it can be said better.

Same page:

… we were supposed to swim forever upwards, never intending to be swept down.   … this new unexpected diversion … The grief of life cleaved to me and I knew it had come for good, settling within me deeply, beyond light.

[These notes from 2004; the year my ever-progressing narrative definitively stalled! I've just found similar ideas in Simone de Beauvoir's account of her twenties]

seriously fragmented

As you’ll maybe know, I’m a big fan of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow; a magically serious book on the surface about late 20th century Turkey;  collusions as much as tensions between liberals and socialists and fundamentalists and lust and business and pride and history and isolation and fairy stories. It evokes many moods, two of them curiously like the fantastical plot twists of the Master and Margarita or the air of parallel reality in the scenes of the castle with beasts in Murakami’s Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

My last post was a celebration of Philippe Delerms’ celebrations of tiny moments of everyday life; and, perhaps related, I have been reflecting on – or rather justifying the brevity and idiosyncracy of -  my own miniscules,  these blog entries.  Comforting then to read Pamuk reporting his friend’s remark about Walter Benjamin: [His] oeuvre is, like life itself, boundless and therefore fragmentary, and this is why so many literary critics tried so hard to give the pieces meaning, just as they did with life. And every time I [Pamuk] smile and say, “One day I’ll write a book that’s made only from fragments too.”*

Fragments more than whole stories or argued essays are places from where sparks of association strike in the reader’s mind. Or in this case the author’s.

My first link is to the richness of Elliot Weinberger’s fragments -  An Elemental Thing for example – the text’s purpose being obscure, no plot or line of argument to guide it, the reader’s mind is challenged to make something of it but, if the challenge is accepted, free to move in many directions.

A second: one can’t help thinking of Taleb’s rails against storytelling/cause finding when we seek to mollify history and downplay the randomness of events.

* Orhan Pamuk Other Colours: Writings on Life, Art, Books and Cities p xi

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.

unordered black swan notes incomplete

The narrative fallacy.

” the way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favour experimentation over story telling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories.” p84

Nonlinear relationships are ubiquitous in life.

financial planners v charlatans

Nasim Nicholas Taleb is a money market guy with a talent for telling a story. He knows a lot about risk and a lot about our decision making biases. If we accept just a couple of propositions he puts forward, then one can see that a charlatan and a financial planner have many things in common – but they’re not the same.