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Readings
I like to read, and I read a lot of books -- the primary impetus for starting this site was to give myself a way of keeping track of what I am thinking about the books I am reading, and to remember the thoughts as time passes.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
It was a lot of fun, and enlightening, listening to Orhan Pamuk reading from Museum of Innocence last night at the 92nd Street Y -- he seemed a little nervous at the opening of the reading but was soon in his element. The big news of the evening came after the reading, when he and George Andreou (his editor at Knopf) had a short conversation about his books and about writing; he indicated, with reference to the lecture series he just got done with delivering at Harvard, that he was planning to publish the lectures as a short book on the art of the novel.
With respect to the art of the novel, one of the points he made -- this was in response to a question about his judgement of the upper-class Istanbullus' consumerist "Westernization" which Kemal is reacting against -- was that "Ethics in novels is a dead end.... Novels do not operate properly if we are strongly interested in passing ethical judgement," which seems to tie in nicely with my idea that this novel works much better as a character study than as an indictment of Kemal. (Along these lines he had noted while reading from chapter 43, that he had responded to a journalist's query about Kemal's "obsessive" behavior by noting that he had never used that term in the book, because "Writing a novel is going inside a person and rejecting labels, is making everyone seem normal," only to be looking through the book later and spot the line, "After that night we had both become resolved to the fact that I was never going to get over my obsession.")
All of the passages he read were from the first half of the book, and were only the past-tense storytelling with the present-tense curating edited out. He mentioned this during the interview portion of the program, without (it seemed to me) really justifying it -- he said something like he did not want to confuse the audience with that -- whatever... He also made no mention, nor did Andreou, of the museum he is building in Istanbul. This all seemed strange to me. He closed the reading with a passage from chapter 56 about "the first Islamic porn films," in which "the 'love scenes'... mixed sex with slapstick, as the gasping and moaning proceeded with ludicrous exaggeration, as the actors assumed all the positions that could be learned from European sex manuals bought on the black market, though all involved, male and female alike, would never remove their underpants."
When he was reading from chapter 44, in which Kemal roams the back streets of Istanbul searching for Füsun, while "it never crossed my mind that I would remember these hours as happy ones," Pamuk made reference to a Turkish literary tradition of the "East-West novel", which plays out between traditional Islamic culture and modernized, cosmopolitan culture -- I was glad to hear him talking about this since it's been in my mind a lot as I read this book -- however it was also a useful counterweight to hear him saying, as he did several times over the course of the evening, that Museum of Innocence is primarily "a book about how it feels to be in love," though not a romantic novel.
Buscaba inútilmente la forma de soportar el dolor, daba vueltas por la casa, me daba un baño muy caliente, me acostaba, me volvÃa a levantar, daba un paseo, me dejaba caer sobre el sofá, de nuevo fatigada...
Soledad Puértolas, "Masajes"
I'm not at all sure how to translate much of this story -- it is only the second thing I have read in Spanish without a translation available to help me flesh out what the meanings of the words and constructions were. I'm understanding it only in a pretty rough, impressionistic way, the images are quite out of focus. This makes the impact of the words as words stronger in a way, the sound of the language a larger proportion of the experience: and I'm really struck by the shift in tense here between me acostaba and me volvía a levantar -- "I was walking around the house, drawing myself a very hot bath, was putting myself to bed, I got up again, I was going for a walk, letting myself fall on the sofa, suddenly fatigued..."
Many of the constructions in this story seem strange to me and hard to make sense of -- this is contributing certainly to the fuzziness of my reading experience.
It's just really hard for me to match up subjects and objects and tenses in this sentence -- I get that she's saying she was troubled by the phone call (which was mentioned in the last paragraph and is definitely the subject of Me inquietó) -- "It disturbed me and had just, most of all, been bothering me, because (?) it made me be hanging from the hour and from the silence of the room and to imagine, before hearing it, the noise of the ringer making its way towards me." (Or something like that.) El ruido del timbre abriéndose camino hacia mí is a particularly nice image, provided I am reading it correctly.
I'm sort of happy to find an author that I like but am not heavily invested in to practice this kind of language comprehension on... I am also thinking Goytisolo will fit the bill in this way.
"Her friendliness, her interest in me, bore a note of artificiality, falsehood, as if someone had convinced her she needed to act like that. Or simply like when somebody is hostile and antisocial from the cradle, or somebody has a particular ability for languages or for electrical work." -- None of the entities separated here by or's seem to me like they can sustain that kind of relationship with one another.
↻...done
I struggled for a long time to convey for the Museum of Innocence this sensation of being caught in a dream. The condition has two aspects: (a) as a spiritual state, and (b) as an illusory view of the world.
(a) The spiritual state is somewhat akin to what follows drinking alcohol or smoking marijuana, though it is different in certain ways. It is the sense of not really living in the present moment, this now[*]. At Füsun's house, as we were eating supper, I often felt as if I were living a moment in the past. Only a moment before we would have been watching a Grace Kelly film on television, or another like it; true, our conversations at the table were more or less alike, but it was not such sameness that invoked this mood; rather it was a sense of not abiding in those moments of my life as they were occurring, experiencing these moments as if I were not living them.
Kemal's desire to paint his life as an allegorical failure, to excuse his behavior as part of a symbolic quest, is becoming more and more a forefront element of the novel. Chapters 67 through 72 are where we finally see him enunciating it. Here Kemal and Faridun are filming Broken Dreams, Füsun and Faridun are splitting up, Kemal is teaching Füsun to drive...
Also nice, from chapter 68 -- Chico Marx makes a guest appearance:
Some stains on a few of the straighter butts come from the cherry ice cream Füsun ate on summer evenings. Kamil Efendi, the ice cream vendor, would trundle his three-wheeled pushcart through the cobble-stone streets of Tophane and Çukucurma on summer evenings, shouting "Eye-es Gream!" and ringing his bell; in the winters he would sell helva from the same cart.
* (Though contrast that with a few pages back, "Sometimes I would forget Time altogether, and nestle into 'now' as if it were a soft bed," where he also is trying to conjure this "spiritual state.")
posted evening of November 7th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about Orhan Pamuk
Looks like a pretty fun movie actually... too bad about the subtitles. Director and screenwriter is Halit Refiğ.
The book is written in 1901, censored and not published until 1923, then filmed (in reality) in 1965 and (fictionally) in 1981. (Filming began on May 17, the day before my 11th birthday!)
posted evening of November 6th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about The Movies
The proper way to read Pamuk's novels is to identify fully with the characters. It is easy to get off the right track and see this book as being a moral indictment of Kemal but better to sink into the warm bath of hypocrisy and self-deception which is his mind.
In chapter 67 Feridun is suddenly coming into himself as a character rather than a prop, and is making a movie based (unspokenly, partly) on Füsun's affair with Kemal and with reference to a novel by Halit Ziya -- I believe the novel in question is Kırık Hayatlar -- and the complexity and cross-purposes of the various layers of self-deceit both are practicing here are pretty stunning.
...An allegorical reading of Kemal's story, in which he is striving to throw off his cosmopolitan self and return to true Turkishness, might be part of the story he is telling about himself -- a way to distance himself from responsibility for his actions and obsessions.
Here's something very strange -- it looks like Kırık Hayatlar was made into a film about 15 years before Kemal and Feridun started working together. It seems a little weird that Kemal is not mentioning this, it's not the kind of detail I would expect him to elide.
(Today Isabella of Magnificent Octopus has a review up of Museum of Innocence -- a positive and thoughtful one, and she mentions this blog in a complimentary light, which makes me feel flattered and happy -- take a look!)
I would like every visitor to our museum to find these outings as pleasant as I did, so I shall go into some detail here. After all, isn't the purpose of the novel, or of a museum, for that matter, to relate our memories with such sincerity as to transform individual happiness into a happiness we all can share?
This line (from chapter 60) works on a couple of levels. Yes it is a purpose of novels and museums (not "the purpose", but of course Kemal is single-minded) to establish a collective consciousness, and a collective happiness is one facet of that. But this novel is not about Kemal's happiness, it's about his un-happiness, his fixation on becoming happy and becoming authentic, which fixation is leading him farther and farther away from happiness and authenticity. So when he says he wants us to appreciate the pleasure he felt from the outings with the Keskins, behind that is what role these outings play in his unraveling.
In this week's NY Times Magazine, Negar Azimi takes a look at the Museum of Innocence Orhan Pamuk is constructing in Istanbul. Pamuk says, "My novel honors the museums that no one goes to, the ones in which you can hear your own footsteps."
I happened today on Borges' essay on "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" (thanks for the link, Dave!) -- Douglas Crockford has put a parallel translation of it online on his web site, it's not clear whose translation he's using. Great fun to read, and it includes a list of the types of animals which I'm pretty sure is included as a fragment in Book of Imaginary Beings:
These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge*. In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into:
belonging to the Emperor
embalmed
trained
piglets
sirens
fabulous
stray dogs
included in this classification
trembling like crazy
innumerables
drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
et cetera
just broke the vase
from a distance look like flies
Wilkins made an early attempt to create a universal language -- some of his work An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language is online in facsimile here; Borges also references some other early attempts, Johann Martin Schleyer's Volapük, Giuseppe Peano's Interlingua, and Bonifacio Sotos Ochando's Lengua universal. (Pedro Mata's Curso de lengua universal, referenced by Borges, is online in its entirety at Google Books.)
*Wikipædia notes that the truth of this attribution is open to question. Laszlo Cseresnyesi of Shikoku Gakuin University wrote a post on LINGUIST-l in 1996 discussing the Celestial Emporium. "The responses I have received leave no doubt
that I'd better give up on the search for the
Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Creatures
(and stop pestering my colleagues at the Chinese
Department). However, I believe that one cannot
prove the non-existence of a book conclusively,
and I have had no chance to follow all the
conceivable leads in a major library."
I was exuberant at the thought of beginning anew, and greatly soothed by the consolations of life in a yalı, so much so that during the first few days I convinced myself that a rapid recovery was in prospect. No matter what amusements we'd partaken in on the previous evening, no matter how late we'd come back, and no matter how much I'd had to drink, in the morning, as soon as the light began to stream through the gaps in the shutters, casting its strange reflections of Bosphorus waves onto the ceiling, I would throw open the shutters, each time amazed at the beauty that rushed in, that almost exploded, through the window.
It suddenly struck me this evening that Pointe-Courte has a lot in common with this portion of Museum of Innocence. I'm wondering now how much a comparison of Noiret's character with Kemal would work, how much provincial France in the 50's "is like" Turkey, the provinces of Europe, in the 70's. I'll be watching Pointe-Courte again on Thursday (Mark and Woody are coming over!), will keep that thought in mind.
Sometimes I felt that my happiness issued not from the possibility that Füsun was near, but from something less tangible. I felt as if I could see the very essence of life in these poor neighborhoods, with their empty lots, their muddy cobblestone streets, their cars, rubbish bins, and sidewalks, and the children playing with a half-inflated football under the streetlamps. My father's expanding business, his factories, his growing fortune, and the attendant obligation to live the "elegant European" life that befit this wealth -- it all now seemed to have deprived me of simple essences. As I walked these streets, it was as if I was seeking out my own center.
I am growing more confident about this reading: dissolute Kemal is the cosmopolitan, westernized Turk; his longing for Füsun is a longing for his Ottoman roots, what he imagines to be his authentic self. This is very interesting coming from Pamuk, who self-identifies as European, who has said repeatedly that Europe is Turkey's future. The longing for Füsun is destroying Kemal, that's clear enough. But she is herself a character, with her own needs and desires; how does her identification as authentic Turkishness play into her character? And does that make Sibel (also a full character in her own right) a personification of Kemal's cosmopolitan identity? Is Kemal being presented as dissolute because he cannot fully embrace that identity?
(Like with Snowa couple of years ago, I want to draw an easy parallel to American cultural identities. But again it seems like that is too easy and risks missing the point.)
Looks like a pretty fun movie actually... too bad about the subtitles. Director and screenwriter is 
