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Sunday, August third, 2008
How little they must have known him, to address him and speak of him in this way. They take advantage of his death, his feet and hands are bound. They call him a despoiled lily, a lily like a girl stricken by typhoid fever, and use the adjective gentle. Such banality, dear God. Since gentle means noble, chivalrous, gallant, elegant, pleasing, and ubane, which of these would the poet have chosen as he lay in his Christian bed in the Hospital of São Luís. May the gods grant that it be pleasing, for with death one should lose only life.
Starting The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis so soon after I finished The Cave I am really noticing something about Saramago's pacing; the last half of the book really pulls you along in a rush, where the first half is much slower and more open to stopping, starting, jumping back to a few pages previous. I think I have had similar experiences with Blindness and Seeing, as well.
posted evening of August third, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, August second, 2008
Meanwhile the guest returns to the reception desk, somewhat out of breath after all that effort. He takes the pen and enters the essential details about himself in the register of arrivals, so that it might be known who he claims to be, in the appropriate box on the lined page. Name, Ricardo Reis, age, forty-eight, place of birth, Oporto, marital status, bachelor, profession, doctor, last place of residence, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, whence he has arrived aboard the Highland Brigade. It reads like the beginning of a confession, an intimate autobiography, all that is hidden is contained in these handwritten lines, the only problem is to interpret them.
The three books I have read so far by Saramago are all quite recent; now I am going back much further, to 1986's Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, one of the earliest of his major works. But it is instantly recognizable as the work of the same author based on his distinctive style and on his manner of expression -- I can't picture the construction "so that it might be known who he claims to be" coming out precisely that way from any other author's pen. This book is not translated by Margaret Jull Costa but by Giovanni Pontiero -- the similarity of voice gives me confidence in the abilities of both translators.I see Saramago's habit of deconstructing commonplace expressions coming through here, although the two examples I've noted in the opening pages -- "pay the fare" and another that I'm not finding now -- are not arresting in the way that I've found his later work. This book is set explicitly in Portugal, in Lisbon, unlike the anonymous countries and cities of his later books. I find that I have no preconceived image of Portugal! So I guess I will acquire one here.
 Oh! I see now that Blindness was also translated by Pontiero; I had forgotten.
posted evening of August second, 2008: Respond
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I read to the end of McGaha's Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk today -- it is a good book and I think especially useful to the non-Turkish reader (i.e. myself) approaching Pamuk's books for the second time, to clarify cultural and historical references that might otherwise be lost. Does a really good job of drawing out common threads in Pamuk's books which the disparity of voices and styles can obscure. In short -- I would strongly recommend it if you have read all or most of Pamuk's novels to date and are thinking about rereading them. It also makes brief reference to the forthcoming Museum of Innocence, which will be translated by Erdağ Göknar -- in his application for a grant to do the translation, Göknar says, the protagonist "comes from an upper-class Instanbul family who, after two failed relationships, goes on an obsessive journey in search of places and objects that remind him of his lost loves and that, once assembled, constitute the bulk of a museum of his obsessions" which is more than I had heard about the content of the book before now.McGaha ends by saying, Orhan Pamuk is only fifty-five years old and is at the peak of his creative powers. There is every reason to believe that his best work still lies ahead of him. I look forward to reading his novels for many years to come. which -- Wow! What a lovely thought! I can't wait for Museum of Innocence. (Which not that it means anything, but I'm finding kind of charming the parallelism between its title and Robyn Hitchcock's song, "Museum of Sex".)
Note: apparently Göknar's application did not pan out; Freely is doing the translation, which will be published in October '09.
posted evening of August second, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, July 31st, 2008
McGaha's observations about My Name is Red mostly just reinforce my own thoughts about that book, so not a lot worth posting about this chapter. He included a couple of details in his summary that I totally don't remember and may not have gotten when I was reading the book, like the Erzurumis strangling the storyteller, and the storyteller's chapters dividing the book into sections; good stuff to look for when rereading. A great line: Pamuk has said he had so much fun writing My Name is Red that his "inner modernist" kept wagging his finger and reminding him that he was a serious writer and needed to be intellectual and literary. Also I found really interesting, McGaha's discussion of how My Name is Red is similar to, and opposite to, The Black Book.
posted evening of July 31st, 2008: Respond
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Monday, July 28th, 2008
I was meaning to ask, what lessons can I take from The Cave? It is very clearly written with a pedagogical slant; it seems to me like Saramago intends for me to apply it to my own life. And I want, instinctively, to do so. But how? I guess I wouldn't say the lesson of Thelma & Louise is, running away and driving your car off a cliff is the appropriate response to an abusive relationship; but then I don't recall thinking of Thelma & Louise as a movie with a moral; and also an abusive relationship is not a problem that I have to deal with. Whereas here, it would be easy to say that the moral is, running away without plans, without regard for how you're going to support yourself or lead your life, is the appropriate response to alienation from the natural world caused by capitalistic expropriation of our experience of life, by the replacement of dreams with advertisements; and there is certainly room for the claim that this type of alienation is exactly the problem that I have to deal with. So where does that lead me except to running away, a solution that I've not found to be reliable in the past? The answer, I think, is that I should not focus on the final chapter of the book so much -- that I should look at Cipriano's style of living throughout the book as worthy of emulation, and treat the conclusion as a promise that if I live my life with this sort of honor and self-respect, I'll find connection and happiness. Which is at least a worthwhile self-deception.
posted evening of July 28th, 2008: Respond
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No amount of sweetness today can diminish the bitterness of tomorrow.
Saramago has been telegraphing the lesson of the book -- that the public who resign themselves to the easy, isolated world of The Center, who choose for themselves/allow to be chosen for them mass-produced plastic dinnerware over Cipriano Algor's pottery, are blinding themselves to the beauty of reality in the same way as Plato's troglodytes -- pretty clearly and strongly, beginning early in the book and getting quite explicit toward the end. And that's not even a particularly new point -- it would be difficult for me to come up with names of books where I've read this kind of thing before but it seems pretty commonplace to me. So in a way, the book should seem sort of like a train wreck, grinding inexorably toward a conclusion you already know.And yet: somehow that is not at all what the experience of reading the book is like. It is not only beautifully written, it is also surprising for all you have a pretty good idea going in, what the general structure will be. When Cipriano says, "Those people are us," my impulse was to say "Well duh" -- but when he says a few sentences later, "You must decide what to do with your own lives, but I'm leaving," my reaction was one of palpable relief. Saramago has crafted his story well enough that I am included in its ups and downs almost despite myself. I'm a little torn about the ending. It has a certain Thelma & Louise quality to it that feels like it might be less true to the characters than is the rest of the novel. I see Saramago called deeply pessimistic, and there is a lot of darkness in the world of his books; but this ending is so optimistic that I would call it romantic.* And, well, in a way I guess I'm grateful to him for that. I'm glad my memory of the novel will be of Cipriano's and Marta's and Marçal's rebellion from The Center, of Cipriano's and Isaura's tears of reunion rather than of Cipriano's bleak, lonely tears. I'm not sure how this affects the philosophical message of the book though -- if the only way you can rebel from The Center is to turn to romantic fancy, how much real hope is there?
 * The ending of Blindness is also, certainly, hugely optimistic; but the darkness of Seeing keeps me from thinking of the first book as romantic.
posted evening of July 28th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, July 27th, 2008
Well this is a little surprising: in discussing the translations of The Black Book, McGaha very strongly recommends Güneli Gün's translation over Freely's later reworking. Wow! I didn't know much about Gün's translation besides that I'd heard it was unreadable -- and I know I had a lot of trouble with her translation of The Black BookThe New Life. But McGaha's recommendation, and his side-by-side comparison of the two treatments of the first paragraph, makes me want to find out more.
posted afternoon of July 27th, 2008: 2 responses
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Saturday, July 26th, 2008
So I'm reading the third chapter of Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk (which concerns The Silent House) and thinking, the family name Darvinoğlu sounds awfully familiar -- was it the name of one of the characters in The Black Book? And then I start reading the fourth chapter, which concerns The White Castle, and get to the following passage, which makes the scales fall from my eyes:
It was Don Quixote that inspired [Pamuk] to present his own novel as an old manuscript found and translated into modern Turkish; once that was decided, it occurred to him that it would be amusing to have the manuscript found in the archives at Gebze and translated by none other than Faruk Darvinoğlu, the historian of The Silent House.
Oh! So the characters I was wondering about in the winter have earlier roots. Wild -- I wish The Silent House were available in an English translation.
McGaha also says that some critics faulted Holbrook, in her translation of The White Castle, for including the references to The Silent House without any explanation -- this seems a little weird to me. I can't see how she could have provided any explanation within the text; maybe an afterword should have been included. Doesn't seem like it would have made a huge difference in the reading experience.
posted afternoon of July 26th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, July 25th, 2008
It is not worth describing what Cipriano Algor thought about because he had thought it on so many other occasions and we have supplied more than enough information on the subject already. The only new thing here is that he allowed a few painful tears to run down his cheeks, tears that had been dammed up for a long, long time, always just about to be shed, but, as it turned out, they were being reserved for this sad hour, for this moonless night, for this solitude that has not yet resigned itself to being solitude. What was truly not a novelty, because it had happened before in the history of fables and in the history of the marvels of the canine race, was that Found went over to Cipriano Algor to lick his tears, a gesture of supreme consolation which, however touching it might seem to us, capable of touching hearts normally not given to displays of emotion, should not make us forget the crude reality that the salty taste of tears is greatly appreciated by most dogs. One thing, however, does not detract from the other, were we to ask Found if it was because of the salt that he licked Cipriano Algor's face, he would probably have replied that we do not deserve the bread that we eat, that we are incapable of seeing beyond the end of our own nose.
A dog licking tears from the face of a crying human is a central image in Saramago's work, as much as I've read of it so far anyway. And it is touching -- the other times I've read sequences like this, they have touched me as symbolizing the depth of connection between the dog and his master. But another way of looking at it that is occurring to me now, is how painfully lonely, to be weeping in a place where there is no other person present.
 (The clause after "truly not a novelty" strikes me as funny in a sort of self-referential way -- it could be rendered, "What was truly not a novelty, because it had happened before in books I have written,...")
posted evening of July 25th, 2008: 4 responses
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Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
Sylvia comments that the King and the Duke's plan to perform a Shakespearean exhibition (featuring the balcony scene, with the King as Juliet, and the sword fight from Richard III, and the King doing Hamlet's soliloquy) reminds her a lot of Moominsummer Madness. And I think she's on to something; Jansson could very well be referring directly to this scene. That's assuming Huckleberry Finn was translated and available in Finland in the early 20th C., which seems to me like a reasonable assumption. An interesting moment was explaining to Sylvia why it would probably not be a good idea to read Huckleberry Finn out loud while we were on the airplane flying to California.
posted evening of July 23rd, 2008: 2 responses
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