READIN

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008

🦋 Disappointment

Remember how Sylvia and I differed on the merits of the Despereaux movie as compared with its book? Well on the subject of The Golden Compass we're more in agreement -- the book is a gem, the movie not worth the time spent watching it. Sylvia's review: "Whoever directed that movie, they didn't make it good."

For about the first half of the movie, I was thinking about writing a long post detailing every divergence with the book and for each one, explaining how it was to the detriment of the movie. But better I think, to tell what these differences have in common: in every case, the mystery in the book is discarded and replaced with clear, dry explication. Ambiguities are absent. What I loved about the book was Lyra's development from total innocence -- here at every step of the story she connects the dots like she had been expecting the solution all her life.

And maybe the worst offense is not to show Lord Asriel's treachery -- the whole ending was trimmed off, I guess because the movie was running over-long -- without this the story doesn't go anywhere. It's funny in a way -- I guess I think of the merits of this movie as being about the same as the merits of Despereaux, a fun visual romp with some sentimentality, and nothing like greatness -- but I would never recommend it the way I would recommend the mouse movie. It ought to be a great movie, a majestic movie. Falling short of that, it is not worth bothering with.

posted evening of December 31st, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

🦋 Supper

Last week, Saramago posted a Christmas Message:

Several years ago, no less than in 1993, I wrote in the Lanzarote Notebooks several words which were the delight of some theologians from this part of the Peninsula, especially Juan José Tamayo, who since then has generously given me his friendship. They were these: "God is the silence of the universe, and man is the scream which imparts sentience to this silence." I recognized that this idea was not poorly stated, with its "quantum satis" of poetry, its gently provocative intention and its subtext that atheists risk much in venturing onto the rough paths of theology, even those that are elemental. In these days when one celebrates the birth of Christ, another idea has occurred to me, perhaps even more provocative, it could even be called revolutionary, which can be enunciated in just a few words. Here. If it is true that Jesus, at the last supper, said to the disciples, showing them the bread and the wine which they found on the table: "This is my body, this is my blood," then it would not be illegitimate to conclude that the innumerable suppers, the Pantagrueline gluttonies, the Homeric bellyfuls with which millions and millions of stomachs have risked the dangers of a fatal bout of indigestion, would be nothing more than multitudinous copies, at the same time actual and symbolic, of the last supper: believers nourish themselves with god, devour him, digest him, eliminate him, until the next nativity, until the next supper, with the ritual of a material and mystical hunger forever unsatisfied. Let's see now what the theologians say.

I didn't know about the Cuadernos de Lanzarote before, this looks like just my cup of tea.

posted afternoon of December 30th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, December 29th, 2008

🦋 Book

Saramago is starting his next book. He knows what the title will be, but he's not telling:

I am turning to a new book. When, in the middle of a conversation, I let fall this news, the inevitable question is put to me (my nephew Olmo asked me last night): and what will the title be? The most convenient solution for me would be to answer that I don't have one yet, that I have to get to the end in order to decide between the possibilities which are going to present themselves to me (assuming that they are going to) over the course of the work. Convenient, without a doubt, but false. The truth is that not even the first lines of the book had been written and I already knew, since nearly three years beforehand, what it would be called. Someone could ask: why this secrecy? Because the word of the title (it's only one word) contains, by itself, the complete story. I usually say that whoever doesn't have the patience to read my books, should pass his eyes at least over the epigraphs, because then he'll know the whole thing. I don't know if the book I'm working on will bear an epigraph. Maybe not. The title will suffice.

In other news, I'm thinking the best way for me to learn Spanish might just be to practice reading. Specifically I'm going to practice reading blogs like Saramago's and Jorge López', and find some more Spanish-language blogs to read, and reading the Bible.

Hi to any new readers showing up from Edmond Caldwell's Contra James Wood project. I don't have anything against Wood -- wouldn't really have recognized the name prior to reading Mr. Caldwell's piece -- but the criticism seems (at first reading) well-founded.

posted evening of December 29th, 2008: Respond
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🦋 Focus

75 pages in I find that What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire? is starting to come into focus, starting to cohere. I am finding it frustrating not to know things like how old Paulo was when his father died, when he was committed to the hospital, how old he is at the point in time when he's telling the story, ... But the book seems to work best if I just read and allow these details to emerge in their own due course.

Speaking at the ceremony where Lobo Antunes received the Juan Rulfo award this year, Robert Weil said, "Lobo Antunes presents life just as the brain really perceives things." This seems wrong to me -- the stream-of-consciousness in in this novel is just as much an artifice as is the structure of more conventional prose. It seems like it will be an interesting artifice, certainly, if I can ever get my head around it; for now I find it worrying, like I am not going to be able to recall the plot points when I need them a few hundred pages hence, when they are being presented in such a chaotic fashion.

posted evening of December 29th, 2008: Respond
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🦋 Ohne Bücher verfaulen die Freuden

"Without books, joy rots away."

-- Elias Canetti,
The Human Province: Notes 1942 - 1972

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981; in his speech before the Nobel banquet, he said, "Heute, seit Hiroshima, weiss jeder, was Krieg ist, und dass jeder es weiss, ist unsere einzige Hoffnung." -- "Today, since Hiroshima, everyone knows what war is; and that everyone knows this is our only hope."

posted afternoon of December 29th, 2008: 4 responses

Sunday, December 28th, 2008

🦋 Narrative?

Lobo Antunes does not use standard construction of language in What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire? -- the story is being told in an extremely cryptic sort of stream of consciousness. I am interested in knowing whether there is a story being told. I know there are characters because Paulo (the narrator) refers to them by name and I can piece together what entity each name refers to even without the help of the Dramatis Personæ at the front of the book. There is a setting -- Paulo is in a psychiatric hospital in Lisbon, and is thinking about Lisbon. There appear to be events as well -- he returns again and again to a scene of himself laughing leaning against his father's coffin, and to (I think) his intake interview at the hospital, and I'm assuming for now that these things happened in the world outside his stream of consciousness.

But Lobo Antunes is giving me precious little to hold onto in justifying that assumption. The work is reading much more like poetry than like a novel. I am wishing for a supporting framework of some kind that would allow me to make sense of Paulo's ravings. Particularly it would be nice to have some syntactic clues: some paragraphs begin with em dashes, which appears to indicate a character is speaking; but some other paragraphs which do not begin with a dash sound a lot like dialogue as well. Some paragraphs are italicized, but there's as yet no clue how these are different from the non-italicized text.

posted evening of December 28th, 2008: Respond

Friday, December 26th, 2008

🦋 Dedications

What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire? is dedicated to the Renaissance poet Francisco Sá de Miranda, who Lobo Antunes says supplied the title of his book. Interesting! Sá de Miranda's work does not appear to be available online so tracking down the source is going to take a little legwork. The book is also dedicated to "Marisa Blanco for her pitiless friendship".

Aha! Found the sonnet in question, courtesy of blogger Gonçalo Figueirdo Augusto (whose blog incidentally shares its title with another of Lobo Antunes' novels -- and which he also publishes in English):

Desarrazoado* amor, dentro em meu peito,
Tem guerra com a razão. Amor, que jaz
E já de muitos dias, manda e faz
Tudo o que quer, a torto e a direito.

Não espera razões, tudo é despeito,
Tudo soberba e força; faz, desfaz,
Sem respeito nenhum; e quando em paz
Cuidais que sois, então tudo é desfeito.

Doutra parte, a Razão tempos espia,
Espia ocasiões de tarde em tarde,
Que ajunta o tempo; em fim, vem o seu dia:

Então não tem lugar certo onde aguarde
Amor; trata traições, que não confia
Nem nos seus. Que farei quando tudo arde?

posted evening of December 26th, 2008: 2 responses

🦋 Now I really want to read Coetzee

Jorge López has been recommending Coetzee since I've been reading his blog; nothing has made me as interested as this sentence, from his review today of Disgrace: "It [Coetzee's narrative style] is able to create personalities so lovable, their complexity and imperfection make it difficult not to feel a sensation of identity." I'm happy to see this trope of identification with a novel's characters invoked. Adding Disgrace to my list, moving Elizabeth Costello up in priority.

posted morning of December 26th, 2008: 2 responses

Wednesday, December 24th, 2008

🦋 Saramago so far

So here are the books I've read by José Saramago in the order I've read them, with a brief reaction to each and a note about where it falls in his career:

1. Blindness: This absolutely spectacular, powerhouse book took my breath away. It was published in 1995, about 13 years into Saramago's status as an internationally recognized novelist, and seems to be regarded as a major part of the reason he received the Nobel prize.
2. Seeing: This book requires fairly close reading. I think that the combination of this book with Blindness (to which it is a sequel) is far greater than the sum of its parts; the worldview of the two books together is immensely more complicated than of either one by itself. The book was published in 2004, six years after Saramago had won the Nobel prize. I have read reviews which characterize it as Saramago coasting, a minor work; I think they are wrong.
3. The Cave: This book does not have the fireworks of Blindness and Seeing. It is a book on a human scale, a cottage rather than a skyscraper. I loved it -- it cemented my view of Saramago as a consummate artist of human characters. It was published in 2001.
4. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis: This book is very different from the previous three. It is the most intensely "literary" work of Saramago's among those I have read -- it is concerned with how literary representation of reality works. It was published in 1986, the second novel Saramago published after Baltasar and Blimunda, which appears to have marked his entree to worldwide recognition.
5. Death with Interruptions: I found this book disappointing. It is brief but not, I think, worth spending your time on for any reason other than completeness. It was published in 2005.
6. The Stone Raft: Hugely thought-provoking. This book opens up many avenues for further investigation (and makes me ache to travel to Spain and Portugal). I'm still not sure quite what it is about. It was published in 1986.

What's next? I'd really like to read all of his books that are not on this list, with maybe my top priorities being The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and All the Names. If The Elephant's Journey is published in translation before I get to either of those, it will certainly be at the top of the list. For now I am going to try and broaden my Portuguese palate a bit by reading Lobo Antunes' What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire?.

posted afternoon of December 24th, 2008: Respond

🦋 That mouse

So Sylvia and I watched Despereaux this rainy Christmas Eve afternoon. I am finding this kind of funny: I, who did not like the book, thought the movie was better than the book; Sylvia, who liked the book (and who liked the movie better than I did) thought the movie was not as good as the book. That makes it seem to me like a pretty middle-of-the-road movie, worth recommending to people who need some movie to watch with their kids over the long vacation but not to anybody else -- fun but not that fun.

The movie was different from the book in a huge number of plot points but contained the same essential story and the same moral (the transformative power of apology -- this lesson is my primary complaint about the book). Sigorney Weaver's narration sounded just about exactly how I picture Kate DiCamillo sounding. And, well, the sanctimonious voice of the narrator is my other big complaint with the book -- so the movie matches the book for its drawbacks. On the other hand, it's got cute animation (with minor but noticeable continuity problems) which is fun to watch and diverting. It's got big names (Ms. Weaver, Dustin Hoffman, Matt Broderick, Kevin Kline...) on the marquee. I think if I hadn't been so pissed-off at the book for being lame, I probably would have really enjoyed the movie.

posted afternoon of December 24th, 2008: Respond
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