Thursday, January 13, 2005
Saturday, December 18, 2004
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Tom Waits "Real Gone," Paul Westerberg's "Folker," the Clash "London Calling" reissue CD reviews (scroll down)
Villages by John Updike. Alfred A. Knopf. 321 pages. $25.00
There is surely no writer alive who can gush over a vagina as effusively as John Updike; every joy-trail is sacred, unique, and fires up his prose with an extra boost of rocket fuel. In his classic short work "One's Neighbor's Wife," in the collection Hugging the Shore, the pubic similes pour out like a flood-tide: "My pussy is the color of earth, of fire, of air shuddering on the vein of a rock by the side of a stream, of fine metals spun to a curly tumult..."
That was over twenty years ago; in his latest novel, Updike proves that at 72 he can still fly to Mars and back on a snootful of musk. "Two gauzy waves met in a coppery crest down the middle of her mount," we read of Faye, her dampness "less of a sauce, more of a glaze," her vulvic grip having "something infantile about it, something heartbreaking, like a child's sly, hopeful question." There's also Stacy, with a "wet goatee between her skinny thighs," Alissa with the "infinitely soft, furry, moist socket," its "livid wrinkles looking like lava folds," and Phyllis with her "mucous warmth." One thinks of gynecological lab reports as written by Eugene Delacroix.
Where Updike's men are self-involved, dick-centered jerks, he always approaches women on his knees: "Husbands are superfluous, dutiful adjuncts to the busy interaction of women." "Women are shining moon-creatures, who hurt us when they withhold themselves, and again when they don't." "How little men deserve the beauty and mercy of women!" "Though we speak of a man possessing a woman it is she who takes possession."
Loving physical details and hard-sell, condescending sensitivity; yes, we're in Updikeville, where the field of middle-class adultery can never be plowed up too often. The book is a recitation of the author's clichés; not exactly boring, but it does induce a rather high degree of fatigue. It's Updike on autopilot, but it does actually land somewhere.
The bulk of the story can be dispensed with easily: it's a series of florid sex scenes from the life of Updike's typical protagonist, Owen Mackenzie, a successful software developer in the early years of computers, and an aging philanderer. Married for the past twenty years to his second wife Julia, his memories focus on what he's learned from both the women in his life up to this point and the places he's lived -- more former than latter, as the title conceit proves rather awkward.
An only child who has been babied from birth, Owen has a need to be coddled and taken care of that makes him attractive to women, who always seem to be there when he needs them. The key relationship for most of his life is with Phyllis, a math whiz he meets when they're both at M.I.T., and a character who grows in interest as the book goes along. Together they settle down for a long-running marriage of conventional suburban hypocrisy: she raises the kids, he brings home the bacon and bags babes on the side. Every woman Owen meets seems to know what he wants and it doesn't take much work for them to hand it over. (One cute coworker even gives him her panties beneath a stack of business papers.) The sex throughout is plentiful, occasionally icky ("his semen puddled above her breast like an explosion of snot") and repetitive: Owen is "thumpingly erect," or has a "thumping climax" or receives the "blood-thump of release."
The book's own consummation is a long time coming: after 250-some pages of friction, it gains conflict, and it soars. As the Mackenzie marriage literally crashes and burns, we find ourselves back in the company of the great modern American novelist of marriage, the master who wrote the four Rabbit books, Marry Me, and the Maples stories. Owen, the perpetual adolescent and lucky beneficiary of sexual escapades which took little or no effort to get prodded along, now finds himself having to choose between two women, Julia and Phyllis, both of whom want to save him from the other. Painful decision, painful consequences, and Updike's eye for the effects of divorce on domestic life is as pointed as ever: "To be an adult is to be a killer. Pacifists and non-combatants are just fooling themselves, letting others do the dirty work."
More than that, Updike's perennial religious vision brings this lumbering story into focus. Updike provides Owen with his own thoughts on sex and faith, and it cooks up the kind of dark night of the soul American fiction doesn't serve anymore: "At three in the morning, our brains churn within the self, trying to get out of what we know to be a sinking ship. But jumping out of the self is not a Western skill. The walls of the skull stay solid, sealing us in with our fears."
I hardly expected to finish this succession of dreary porn tableaux reminded of just how sharp, wise and truthful this writer can be. Villages is a disappointment and a blessing; it's a brilliant misfire.
There is surely no writer alive who can gush over a vagina as effusively as John Updike; every joy-trail is sacred, unique, and fires up his prose with an extra boost of rocket fuel. In his classic short work "One's Neighbor's Wife," in the collection Hugging the Shore, the pubic similes pour out like a flood-tide: "My pussy is the color of earth, of fire, of air shuddering on the vein of a rock by the side of a stream, of fine metals spun to a curly tumult..."
That was over twenty years ago; in his latest novel, Updike proves that at 72 he can still fly to Mars and back on a snootful of musk. "Two gauzy waves met in a coppery crest down the middle of her mount," we read of Faye, her dampness "less of a sauce, more of a glaze," her vulvic grip having "something infantile about it, something heartbreaking, like a child's sly, hopeful question." There's also Stacy, with a "wet goatee between her skinny thighs," Alissa with the "infinitely soft, furry, moist socket," its "livid wrinkles looking like lava folds," and Phyllis with her "mucous warmth." One thinks of gynecological lab reports as written by Eugene Delacroix.
Where Updike's men are self-involved, dick-centered jerks, he always approaches women on his knees: "Husbands are superfluous, dutiful adjuncts to the busy interaction of women." "Women are shining moon-creatures, who hurt us when they withhold themselves, and again when they don't." "How little men deserve the beauty and mercy of women!" "Though we speak of a man possessing a woman it is she who takes possession."
Loving physical details and hard-sell, condescending sensitivity; yes, we're in Updikeville, where the field of middle-class adultery can never be plowed up too often. The book is a recitation of the author's clichés; not exactly boring, but it does induce a rather high degree of fatigue. It's Updike on autopilot, but it does actually land somewhere.
The bulk of the story can be dispensed with easily: it's a series of florid sex scenes from the life of Updike's typical protagonist, Owen Mackenzie, a successful software developer in the early years of computers, and an aging philanderer. Married for the past twenty years to his second wife Julia, his memories focus on what he's learned from both the women in his life up to this point and the places he's lived -- more former than latter, as the title conceit proves rather awkward.
An only child who has been babied from birth, Owen has a need to be coddled and taken care of that makes him attractive to women, who always seem to be there when he needs them. The key relationship for most of his life is with Phyllis, a math whiz he meets when they're both at M.I.T., and a character who grows in interest as the book goes along. Together they settle down for a long-running marriage of conventional suburban hypocrisy: she raises the kids, he brings home the bacon and bags babes on the side. Every woman Owen meets seems to know what he wants and it doesn't take much work for them to hand it over. (One cute coworker even gives him her panties beneath a stack of business papers.) The sex throughout is plentiful, occasionally icky ("his semen puddled above her breast like an explosion of snot") and repetitive: Owen is "thumpingly erect," or has a "thumping climax" or receives the "blood-thump of release."
The book's own consummation is a long time coming: after 250-some pages of friction, it gains conflict, and it soars. As the Mackenzie marriage literally crashes and burns, we find ourselves back in the company of the great modern American novelist of marriage, the master who wrote the four Rabbit books, Marry Me, and the Maples stories. Owen, the perpetual adolescent and lucky beneficiary of sexual escapades which took little or no effort to get prodded along, now finds himself having to choose between two women, Julia and Phyllis, both of whom want to save him from the other. Painful decision, painful consequences, and Updike's eye for the effects of divorce on domestic life is as pointed as ever: "To be an adult is to be a killer. Pacifists and non-combatants are just fooling themselves, letting others do the dirty work."
More than that, Updike's perennial religious vision brings this lumbering story into focus. Updike provides Owen with his own thoughts on sex and faith, and it cooks up the kind of dark night of the soul American fiction doesn't serve anymore: "At three in the morning, our brains churn within the self, trying to get out of what we know to be a sinking ship. But jumping out of the self is not a Western skill. The walls of the skull stay solid, sealing us in with our fears."
I hardly expected to finish this succession of dreary porn tableaux reminded of just how sharp, wise and truthful this writer can be. Villages is a disappointment and a blessing; it's a brilliant misfire.
Wednesday, November 03, 2004
Thursday, October 21, 2004
Homeland Insecurity
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. Houghton-Mifflin. $26.00
The premise of Philip Roth’s new novel is a real grabber: it’s America in 1940, and Charles A. Lindbergh is elected President. The flying ace and notorious Hitler pal quickly puts the country on the road to fascism; genteel anti-Semitism becomes government policy, outright hatred gains social approval, a homegrown war against the Jews is on, and eight-year-old Philip Roth and his family find their lives ruptured from within and without.
Told in the form of a fictional memoir, The Plot Against America is both a deeply personal nightmare, an imaginative reflection on how history chooses its events, angels and devils, and a kind of indirect (if not literal) reflection of life under George W. Bush -- and something short of a success. It is a wind-up toy that proves a lot easier for Roth to start than to stop, a good idea that goes only so far and then quits, a novel of alternate history that is all pumped-up with purpose and finally stymied by a lack of ambition.
No question, Roth invests himself deeply in the family story at the heart of the book, tapping into a rich well of childhood memories and paying a somewhat ironic homage to life in Roosevelt’s America, where life, he assures us, was just hunky-dory for the Jews. “We were a happy family in 1940,” the author tells us. The Roths live in a Jewish neighborhood in Hillside, New Jersey, all the men have jobs, all the women are devoted homemakers, and work more than religion “identified and distinguished our neighbors.” Philip's father, Herman, is an insurance salesman for Metropolitan Life, his mother Bess scrimps and saves, and they all make do about as well as any other local family. The idea of establishing a homeland in Palestine is completely foreign to them; the only one who cares about that is a raggedy old man who comes by every month with a collection box, who “seemed unable to get it through his head that we’d already had a homeland for three generations ... America was our homeland."
But, long before the worst happens, there are cracks in this rosy picture. Herman gets the offer of a promotion but turns it down because it will mean moving to a Gentile neighborhood where, he knows, his family will be outcasts. The American homeland isn't the friendliest place for Jews, which soon becomes even more apparent on the national stage, where the democratic vision of Roosevelt -- willing to wage war against the threat of Hitler -- soon gives way to the isolationist rhetoric of Lindbergh. In the new administration, Hitler becomes our ally in the cause of anti-communism, and the tide quickly turns for Jewish life in America. Lindbergh's Cabinet has a new department, the Office of American Absorption, whose "Just Folks" program tries to mainstream Jewish young people into good old Southern Christian right-thinking American life. The country also gears up for a new Homestead Act, where participating companies relocate Jewish employees and their families to Kentucky.
The Roths and their neighbors are torn between beating the opposition and joining them. As the moral center of the family, Herman is determined for the family to stay rooted to its culture; his wife's sister, Evelyn, becomes the lover of a respected Jewish leader who serves as Lindbergh's all-too-willing cultural stoolie. Also standing at polar opposites in the family are Philip's older brother, Sandy, who is recruited into Just Folks and comes home a convert, and Herman's troubled nephew Alvin, who impulsively goes to Canada to fight the Nazis, and returns home as a grim, sickly, emaciated paraplegic -- and a living reminder of the threat of their own destruction.
On the national level, the change in administration carves out some different roles for the great figures of the 1940s, and there's some truly spirited casting in Roth's realigned history. Walter Winchell, the premiere gossip columnist of his day, is Lindbergh's fierce opposition, along with New York Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia and (in a reduced role) Roosevelt himself. There are, also, odd, dissonant echoes of events to come: presidential pardons, the mob madness following the Rodney King verdict, and the emergence of our current president. It doesn't take a lot of guesswork to see a subtly crafted critique of Bush's America in Lindbergh's, where tensions are torqued up by suspicion, paranoia, and gross government interference in the name of national security.
Great stuff? So far as it goes, yes, but Roth's imagination peters out toward the end, when he sets matters a-right with a fairly ridiculous plot twist. He cuts and runs for an obvious reason: if you really take this plot to its logical conclusion, you're talking about a full-scale domestic holocaust, and a book that raises larger aesthetic questions than the more modest ones Roth seems to have in mind. You end it with the vague unsettling feeling of an opportunity lost, that here was a chance for a grand Rothian dystopia. What we have instead is a disappointment: a what-if that coulda-been.
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. Houghton-Mifflin. $26.00
The premise of Philip Roth’s new novel is a real grabber: it’s America in 1940, and Charles A. Lindbergh is elected President. The flying ace and notorious Hitler pal quickly puts the country on the road to fascism; genteel anti-Semitism becomes government policy, outright hatred gains social approval, a homegrown war against the Jews is on, and eight-year-old Philip Roth and his family find their lives ruptured from within and without.
Told in the form of a fictional memoir, The Plot Against America is both a deeply personal nightmare, an imaginative reflection on how history chooses its events, angels and devils, and a kind of indirect (if not literal) reflection of life under George W. Bush -- and something short of a success. It is a wind-up toy that proves a lot easier for Roth to start than to stop, a good idea that goes only so far and then quits, a novel of alternate history that is all pumped-up with purpose and finally stymied by a lack of ambition.
No question, Roth invests himself deeply in the family story at the heart of the book, tapping into a rich well of childhood memories and paying a somewhat ironic homage to life in Roosevelt’s America, where life, he assures us, was just hunky-dory for the Jews. “We were a happy family in 1940,” the author tells us. The Roths live in a Jewish neighborhood in Hillside, New Jersey, all the men have jobs, all the women are devoted homemakers, and work more than religion “identified and distinguished our neighbors.” Philip's father, Herman, is an insurance salesman for Metropolitan Life, his mother Bess scrimps and saves, and they all make do about as well as any other local family. The idea of establishing a homeland in Palestine is completely foreign to them; the only one who cares about that is a raggedy old man who comes by every month with a collection box, who “seemed unable to get it through his head that we’d already had a homeland for three generations ... America was our homeland."
But, long before the worst happens, there are cracks in this rosy picture. Herman gets the offer of a promotion but turns it down because it will mean moving to a Gentile neighborhood where, he knows, his family will be outcasts. The American homeland isn't the friendliest place for Jews, which soon becomes even more apparent on the national stage, where the democratic vision of Roosevelt -- willing to wage war against the threat of Hitler -- soon gives way to the isolationist rhetoric of Lindbergh. In the new administration, Hitler becomes our ally in the cause of anti-communism, and the tide quickly turns for Jewish life in America. Lindbergh's Cabinet has a new department, the Office of American Absorption, whose "Just Folks" program tries to mainstream Jewish young people into good old Southern Christian right-thinking American life. The country also gears up for a new Homestead Act, where participating companies relocate Jewish employees and their families to Kentucky.
The Roths and their neighbors are torn between beating the opposition and joining them. As the moral center of the family, Herman is determined for the family to stay rooted to its culture; his wife's sister, Evelyn, becomes the lover of a respected Jewish leader who serves as Lindbergh's all-too-willing cultural stoolie. Also standing at polar opposites in the family are Philip's older brother, Sandy, who is recruited into Just Folks and comes home a convert, and Herman's troubled nephew Alvin, who impulsively goes to Canada to fight the Nazis, and returns home as a grim, sickly, emaciated paraplegic -- and a living reminder of the threat of their own destruction.
On the national level, the change in administration carves out some different roles for the great figures of the 1940s, and there's some truly spirited casting in Roth's realigned history. Walter Winchell, the premiere gossip columnist of his day, is Lindbergh's fierce opposition, along with New York Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia and (in a reduced role) Roosevelt himself. There are, also, odd, dissonant echoes of events to come: presidential pardons, the mob madness following the Rodney King verdict, and the emergence of our current president. It doesn't take a lot of guesswork to see a subtly crafted critique of Bush's America in Lindbergh's, where tensions are torqued up by suspicion, paranoia, and gross government interference in the name of national security.
Great stuff? So far as it goes, yes, but Roth's imagination peters out toward the end, when he sets matters a-right with a fairly ridiculous plot twist. He cuts and runs for an obvious reason: if you really take this plot to its logical conclusion, you're talking about a full-scale domestic holocaust, and a book that raises larger aesthetic questions than the more modest ones Roth seems to have in mind. You end it with the vague unsettling feeling of an opportunity lost, that here was a chance for a grand Rothian dystopia. What we have instead is a disappointment: a what-if that coulda-been.
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
Sunday, October 10, 2004
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Sunday, August 22, 2004
Best American Crime Writing, 2004 review, Free Times, Aug. 18, 2004. (A dead link until the webmaster fixes it, but trust me, it got published.)
Sunday, August 01, 2004
Saturday, July 31, 2004
Saturday, July 17, 2004
Sunday, June 27, 2004
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Bringer of Monsters
Old Man Goya by Julia Blackburn. Vintage. 256 pages. $13
Goya by Robert Hughes. Knopf. 429 pages. $45.00.
Francisco Goya: A Life by Evan S. Connell. Counterpoint Press. 272 pages. $26.00
In the Abu Ghraibs of 200 years ago, they didn't have digital cameras; they had Francisco Goya. In "Disasters of War," the great series of etchings that wouldn't be published until 40 years after his death, the 19th Century Spanish master chronicled his own country's war with Napoleonic France with the kind of unstinting realism that skirts the unreal; these pictures of piled corpses, orphaned children, people either impaled on trees or with their dismembered parts swinging from them, are so bloody as to seem hallucinatory. "The sleep of reason brings forth monsters" reads the caption of his most famous etching, in which a slumbering artist is bedeviled by bats and owls, and the words are as true for Goya as they are for the age he lived in. The world we see in his paintings -- particularly those he created following a mysterious mid-life illness that left him permanently deaf -- is one where madness and cruelty are very much the normal order of business.
Aside from his war reportage (which may well have been entirely imaginary) Goya had a genius for nightmares in general, due in no small way to the tumultuous public and private worlds he lived in. Besides the war, the tortures of the Inquisition were still dragging on after centuries, and the painter's deafness seemed to unleash a raw and enigmatic imagination that had only been hinted at before.
"Goya is throbbing in everything around me," a young Eugene Delacroix wrote in his famous journals, and he isn't alone; Goya's art seems to affect people personally. His latest crop of biographers often seem to regard Goya the way Goya regarded his work: like a fever dream to be exorcised.
For her Old Man Goya, occasioned by the impending death of the author's artist mother, Julia Blackburn actually goes to the effort of plugging her ears with wax to approximate Goya's deafness. In the introduction to his own book on Goya, the art critic Robert Hughes says an auto accident forced him into facing his subject, who in turn served as a kind of impish muse. Laid up in the hospital with a prosthetic brace screwed into his leg, Hughes would dream of Goya mocking him: "Not only could I not do the job; my subject knew it and found my inability hysterically funny."
This kind of personal attachment between biographer and subject doesn't come highly recommended, as there is always the chance of a narrow or biased approach. On the other hand, there is the example of a third recent biography, by the novelist Evan S. Connell; sane, detached, pristine and, compared to the other two, pretty thin gruel.
Blackburn tries to see Goya, tries to feel his spirit at a bullfight, to hear him in the enigmatic captions to the etchings – which are "a way of talking to himself and anyone else who wanted to hear what an old deaf man had to say." As other critics have, she senses his deafness in compositional terms, noticing the thickness of the walls, the sheer sense of brutal silence that the paintings communicate to a viewer, as well as the noise: "a great hollow booming reverberation like a mixture of thunder and human voices."
Her book is a captivating, intimate and sometimes overreaching account of one artist trying – through research, travel, and force of imagination – to immerse herself into the life of another. Hughes' book, on the other hand, is an education in itself; whatever tricks Goya's emissary from beyond might have played on him, he didn't keep him from delivering one of the liveliest and immensely entertaining portraits of an artist I've ever read.
Written with the same conversational elegance he brought to his great PBS series of a few years ago, "American Visions," Hughes explains in captivating detail both the political, social and historic milieu of Goya’s world, and the particulars of his craft. He richly and often hilariously recreates the Bourbon world of Goya's employers, the revolving door of one dunderheaded Carlos after the next, and his fascinating description of all the hard work that goes into etching makes the results that much more stunning.
More than all this, Hughes is a great viewer. Looking at Goya's "Picnic on the Bank of the Manzanares," he writes of how the fetching orange-seller "is pointing offstage in a fairly unmistakable gesture of invitation: buy my oranges, says this maja, and you get something else to peel, though not necessarily for free." In another famous portrait, where the pretty little son of a duke has a bird on a string while a pair of cats watch nearby, Hughes sees a sly comment on the class system: "The price of privilege is unremitting tension, for birds as well as people." He points out how in Goya’s famous etching of "Sleep of Reason" an owl becomes a symbol not of wisdom but of stupidity, offering the sleeping painter "an artist’s chalk in a holder -- the better to draw incorrect and misleading interpretations with." With "Bandit Stripping a Woman,'' the averted face of a rape victim denotes the complicity of the viewer: "And from whom is her face hidden? You. Whose gaze does she fear? Yours. She does not want you to see. She is stricken by shame at your gaze." Goya's "Dead Turkey" is for Hughes a still life that is truly still: "Perhaps the world is full of dead turkeys, but not one of them could be deader than Goya’s. It may not stimulate appetite, but there is no doubt that it promotes as much sympathy as any other corpse in art." Goya is similarly attuned to the vulnerability of the body, and Hughes is right there with him. Hughes' own damaged leg can't be far from his thoughts when he's looking at Goya's depiction of a matador gored through the thigh: "A horn that pierces the inner thigh, angling upwards and exiting through the lower buttock, is almost certain to sever the deep femoral artery, causing a fatal loss of blood that no tourniquet can stem."
Connell's book, which actually goes into the personal life of Goya perhaps the best of these three books He fills in the picture some more, and capably explores the lasting mystery of whether Goya did or didn't have a fling with the subject of his famous Naked Maja. He also spends rather more time with Goya's family life than Hughes and raises -- and just as quickly retracts -- the possibility that Goya was bisexual. But where Hughes is so riveting on the art and so richly detailed and alive regarding all the complex personalities involved in Goya's world, Connell is either patchy or bland, and his writing lacks fire. He seems to fear getting too close to his subject, whereas for Hughes there's no choice in the matter. Hughes tears through Goya's life and art like a ball of fire: a great teacher delivering a world-class course on a great artist.
Old Man Goya by Julia Blackburn. Vintage. 256 pages. $13
Goya by Robert Hughes. Knopf. 429 pages. $45.00.
Francisco Goya: A Life by Evan S. Connell. Counterpoint Press. 272 pages. $26.00
In the Abu Ghraibs of 200 years ago, they didn't have digital cameras; they had Francisco Goya. In "Disasters of War," the great series of etchings that wouldn't be published until 40 years after his death, the 19th Century Spanish master chronicled his own country's war with Napoleonic France with the kind of unstinting realism that skirts the unreal; these pictures of piled corpses, orphaned children, people either impaled on trees or with their dismembered parts swinging from them, are so bloody as to seem hallucinatory. "The sleep of reason brings forth monsters" reads the caption of his most famous etching, in which a slumbering artist is bedeviled by bats and owls, and the words are as true for Goya as they are for the age he lived in. The world we see in his paintings -- particularly those he created following a mysterious mid-life illness that left him permanently deaf -- is one where madness and cruelty are very much the normal order of business.
Aside from his war reportage (which may well have been entirely imaginary) Goya had a genius for nightmares in general, due in no small way to the tumultuous public and private worlds he lived in. Besides the war, the tortures of the Inquisition were still dragging on after centuries, and the painter's deafness seemed to unleash a raw and enigmatic imagination that had only been hinted at before.
"Goya is throbbing in everything around me," a young Eugene Delacroix wrote in his famous journals, and he isn't alone; Goya's art seems to affect people personally. His latest crop of biographers often seem to regard Goya the way Goya regarded his work: like a fever dream to be exorcised.
For her Old Man Goya, occasioned by the impending death of the author's artist mother, Julia Blackburn actually goes to the effort of plugging her ears with wax to approximate Goya's deafness. In the introduction to his own book on Goya, the art critic Robert Hughes says an auto accident forced him into facing his subject, who in turn served as a kind of impish muse. Laid up in the hospital with a prosthetic brace screwed into his leg, Hughes would dream of Goya mocking him: "Not only could I not do the job; my subject knew it and found my inability hysterically funny."
This kind of personal attachment between biographer and subject doesn't come highly recommended, as there is always the chance of a narrow or biased approach. On the other hand, there is the example of a third recent biography, by the novelist Evan S. Connell; sane, detached, pristine and, compared to the other two, pretty thin gruel.
Blackburn tries to see Goya, tries to feel his spirit at a bullfight, to hear him in the enigmatic captions to the etchings – which are "a way of talking to himself and anyone else who wanted to hear what an old deaf man had to say." As other critics have, she senses his deafness in compositional terms, noticing the thickness of the walls, the sheer sense of brutal silence that the paintings communicate to a viewer, as well as the noise: "a great hollow booming reverberation like a mixture of thunder and human voices."
Her book is a captivating, intimate and sometimes overreaching account of one artist trying – through research, travel, and force of imagination – to immerse herself into the life of another. Hughes' book, on the other hand, is an education in itself; whatever tricks Goya's emissary from beyond might have played on him, he didn't keep him from delivering one of the liveliest and immensely entertaining portraits of an artist I've ever read.
Written with the same conversational elegance he brought to his great PBS series of a few years ago, "American Visions," Hughes explains in captivating detail both the political, social and historic milieu of Goya’s world, and the particulars of his craft. He richly and often hilariously recreates the Bourbon world of Goya's employers, the revolving door of one dunderheaded Carlos after the next, and his fascinating description of all the hard work that goes into etching makes the results that much more stunning.
More than all this, Hughes is a great viewer. Looking at Goya's "Picnic on the Bank of the Manzanares," he writes of how the fetching orange-seller "is pointing offstage in a fairly unmistakable gesture of invitation: buy my oranges, says this maja, and you get something else to peel, though not necessarily for free." In another famous portrait, where the pretty little son of a duke has a bird on a string while a pair of cats watch nearby, Hughes sees a sly comment on the class system: "The price of privilege is unremitting tension, for birds as well as people." He points out how in Goya’s famous etching of "Sleep of Reason" an owl becomes a symbol not of wisdom but of stupidity, offering the sleeping painter "an artist’s chalk in a holder -- the better to draw incorrect and misleading interpretations with." With "Bandit Stripping a Woman,'' the averted face of a rape victim denotes the complicity of the viewer: "And from whom is her face hidden? You. Whose gaze does she fear? Yours. She does not want you to see. She is stricken by shame at your gaze." Goya's "Dead Turkey" is for Hughes a still life that is truly still: "Perhaps the world is full of dead turkeys, but not one of them could be deader than Goya’s. It may not stimulate appetite, but there is no doubt that it promotes as much sympathy as any other corpse in art." Goya is similarly attuned to the vulnerability of the body, and Hughes is right there with him. Hughes' own damaged leg can't be far from his thoughts when he's looking at Goya's depiction of a matador gored through the thigh: "A horn that pierces the inner thigh, angling upwards and exiting through the lower buttock, is almost certain to sever the deep femoral artery, causing a fatal loss of blood that no tourniquet can stem."
Connell's book, which actually goes into the personal life of Goya perhaps the best of these three books He fills in the picture some more, and capably explores the lasting mystery of whether Goya did or didn't have a fling with the subject of his famous Naked Maja. He also spends rather more time with Goya's family life than Hughes and raises -- and just as quickly retracts -- the possibility that Goya was bisexual. But where Hughes is so riveting on the art and so richly detailed and alive regarding all the complex personalities involved in Goya's world, Connell is either patchy or bland, and his writing lacks fire. He seems to fear getting too close to his subject, whereas for Hughes there's no choice in the matter. Hughes tears through Goya's life and art like a ball of fire: a great teacher delivering a world-class course on a great artist.
Wednesday, June 02, 2004
Eventide by Kent Haruf. Alfred A. Knopf. 320 pages. $24.95
Depending on your point of view, Kent Haruf's 1999 Plainsong was either a majestic triumph of rural realism or just one more cornball saga of people in small-town America struggling to get by.
Set in Haruf's fictional terrain of Holt, Colorado, the book's main two interlinking stories were about abandonment and protection, with solid, decent men in both cases taking care of the weak and the vulnerable. Tom Guthrie, a high school teacher and farmer, tries to raise the two sons left to his care by their slack and selfish mother. The McPheron brothers, Harold and Raymond, a couple of aging, salt-of-the-earth cattle ranchers, find themselves taking in a new tenant, the pregnant high school waif Victoria Roubideaux.
Truly, all this had the makings of very sappy stuff, and the Guthrie story even carried with it a strong whiff of To Kill a Mockingbird, as Guthrie's ethical refusal to give a passing grade to the star athlete in his American History class puts his own children at risk. But Haruf followed very much of an it's-the-story-stupid approach; he kept events pared to the essentials, and he took real no chances with the narrative, as if to explore this land with any psychological depth might lead to the slough of sentimentality. The closest Haruf ever got to any kind of a metaphor is in the close attention to the birth of cattle, mainly to underscore the vulnerability of new life in a hard world, for both people and animals.
We return to that scene -- "every living thing in this world gets weaned eventually," Guthrie will point out to his sons -- and a lot else in this sequel, where the plain folk of Holt continue to tough it out against the elements, both natural and social. Death strikes early; as Harold and Raymond struggle to contain an enraged bull, Harold loses his life and Raymond gets seriously injured. Victoria, who had moved with her baby, Katie, to Denver to attend college, drops everything to come home and nurse Raymond back to health. Raymond, facing the prospect of life alone, develops an interest in Linda May, his hospital nurse. A life in the company of Harold and blackbaldy cattle have made him a little too slow on the uptake where women are concerned; it will take another love interest, the social worker Rose Tyler, to initiate the old boy -- or at least it looks like an initiation -- into the mysteries of sex.
At the end of Plainsong, Guthrie has a knock-down drag-out fight with the family of Russell Beckman, the star athlete who kidnaps and terrorizing his two boys, and the book ended with an indication that the two parties would see each other in court. It doesn't happen; Haruf has lost interest in the Beckmanns, if not in showing us small children getting kicked around by a vicious bully. This is the story of Joy Ray and Richie, luckless children of the pathetic Luther and Betty Wallace, who are living in a trailer when Betty's wastrel uncle Hoyt Raines decides to move in. Betty and Luther, besides being irresponsible, are completely spineless around Hoyt, who takes a sadistic pleasure in beating the two children within an inch of their lives.
Two other families of deserted or neglected children are brought into focus as well. There's the single mother Mary Wells, aimlessly raising a pair of girls, Emma and Dena, both of whom are mostly left to fend for themselves. The girls make friends with a neighbor boy, DJ Kephart, who is taking care of his sick and alcoholic grandfather, Walter.
Although the book is anchored by the story of Raymond's recovery, Haruf's interest is with the children of this world, the Joy Rays and Emmas and DJs who can only fend for themselves and may or may not make it. Their caretakers have long since resigned themselves to misery and the easy way out -- fates the children themselves may or may not escape.
This is not an ineffective book. But while Eventide has the same narrative pull as Plainsong, there's more stickiness in the details; there's something a little more condescending in Haruf's approach to these characters, and a number of the scenes seem lifted from movies. The story never runs out of steam, but it begins to seem manipulative and misty-eyed where Plainsong kept an agreeable distance. The material is a good deal more emotional and Haruf, like the Holt farmers, milks it for all its worth.
Depending on your point of view, Kent Haruf's 1999 Plainsong was either a majestic triumph of rural realism or just one more cornball saga of people in small-town America struggling to get by.
Set in Haruf's fictional terrain of Holt, Colorado, the book's main two interlinking stories were about abandonment and protection, with solid, decent men in both cases taking care of the weak and the vulnerable. Tom Guthrie, a high school teacher and farmer, tries to raise the two sons left to his care by their slack and selfish mother. The McPheron brothers, Harold and Raymond, a couple of aging, salt-of-the-earth cattle ranchers, find themselves taking in a new tenant, the pregnant high school waif Victoria Roubideaux.
Truly, all this had the makings of very sappy stuff, and the Guthrie story even carried with it a strong whiff of To Kill a Mockingbird, as Guthrie's ethical refusal to give a passing grade to the star athlete in his American History class puts his own children at risk. But Haruf followed very much of an it's-the-story-stupid approach; he kept events pared to the essentials, and he took real no chances with the narrative, as if to explore this land with any psychological depth might lead to the slough of sentimentality. The closest Haruf ever got to any kind of a metaphor is in the close attention to the birth of cattle, mainly to underscore the vulnerability of new life in a hard world, for both people and animals.
We return to that scene -- "every living thing in this world gets weaned eventually," Guthrie will point out to his sons -- and a lot else in this sequel, where the plain folk of Holt continue to tough it out against the elements, both natural and social. Death strikes early; as Harold and Raymond struggle to contain an enraged bull, Harold loses his life and Raymond gets seriously injured. Victoria, who had moved with her baby, Katie, to Denver to attend college, drops everything to come home and nurse Raymond back to health. Raymond, facing the prospect of life alone, develops an interest in Linda May, his hospital nurse. A life in the company of Harold and blackbaldy cattle have made him a little too slow on the uptake where women are concerned; it will take another love interest, the social worker Rose Tyler, to initiate the old boy -- or at least it looks like an initiation -- into the mysteries of sex.
At the end of Plainsong, Guthrie has a knock-down drag-out fight with the family of Russell Beckman, the star athlete who kidnaps and terrorizing his two boys, and the book ended with an indication that the two parties would see each other in court. It doesn't happen; Haruf has lost interest in the Beckmanns, if not in showing us small children getting kicked around by a vicious bully. This is the story of Joy Ray and Richie, luckless children of the pathetic Luther and Betty Wallace, who are living in a trailer when Betty's wastrel uncle Hoyt Raines decides to move in. Betty and Luther, besides being irresponsible, are completely spineless around Hoyt, who takes a sadistic pleasure in beating the two children within an inch of their lives.
Two other families of deserted or neglected children are brought into focus as well. There's the single mother Mary Wells, aimlessly raising a pair of girls, Emma and Dena, both of whom are mostly left to fend for themselves. The girls make friends with a neighbor boy, DJ Kephart, who is taking care of his sick and alcoholic grandfather, Walter.
Although the book is anchored by the story of Raymond's recovery, Haruf's interest is with the children of this world, the Joy Rays and Emmas and DJs who can only fend for themselves and may or may not make it. Their caretakers have long since resigned themselves to misery and the easy way out -- fates the children themselves may or may not escape.
This is not an ineffective book. But while Eventide has the same narrative pull as Plainsong, there's more stickiness in the details; there's something a little more condescending in Haruf's approach to these characters, and a number of the scenes seem lifted from movies. The story never runs out of steam, but it begins to seem manipulative and misty-eyed where Plainsong kept an agreeable distance. The material is a good deal more emotional and Haruf, like the Holt farmers, milks it for all its worth.
Friday, May 14, 2004
Wednesday, April 07, 2004
Sunday, April 04, 2004
Thursday, April 01, 2004
Masters of Death by Richard Rhodes (old review; I may have linked it before, but I couldn't find it and neither could someone else who was looking for it.)
Saturday, March 20, 2004
Thursday, March 18, 2004
Sunday, January 25, 2004
Friday, January 23, 2004
Saturday, December 27, 2003
Holidays in Hell
Platform by Michel Houellebecq, translated from the French by Frank Wynne. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.00
Somewhere in the middle of Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, an argument breaks out among visitors to a hardcore S&M club over whether torture and humiliation are normal aspects of human sexuality. "It’s completely disgusting," says one voyeur, an artist who has gained some fame for his own revolting exhibitions. "...But it’s precisely what is disgusting in the human animal that interests me."
Ditto the author. Like his previous novel, the 2000 The Elementary Particles, Platform is a shallow, contrary, moralistic, pornographic, and oddly powerful novel of ideas; a story of the pursuit of self-gratification that is also a sour reflection on freedom, and what amounts to a no-win battle between democracy and fundamentalism.
The protagonist, Michel Renault, presents himself as a middle-age bureaucrat with tastes and ambitions to match. A glum little man who works as an accountant for the French Ministry of Culture, his job is to finance contemporary art exhibits whose meanings elude him: "I maintain the disinterested attitude appropriate to an accounts manager," he tells us. "Questions of aesthetics and politics are not my thing." For all his self-effacement, Michel is not the type of fictional character who parades his unexamined life for the reader’s smug enjoyment; he’s too smart and self-conscious for that. During a vacation, he looks at himself wearing jeans and a Radiohead T-shirt: "My anxious bureaucratic face clashed horribly with what I was wearing, and I looked exactly like what I was: a forty-something civil servant on vacation, trying to pretend he’s young; it was pretty demoralizing." The closest he ever gets to a human relationship is his daily visit to the local porn shop (“Watching pussy in motion cleared my head”) or, if need be, hiring a prostitute.
Michel is so jaded by his admittedly passionless existence that not even the murder of his estranged father -- at the hands of the jealous Muslim brother of his father’s girlfriend -- moves him beyond an initial blast of spite. His inheritance does, however, allow him to take a vacation to Thailand, which proves something of a revelation; everyone there, like him, basically wants sex. They see the usual sights and indulge in the exotic foods, but basically they all want to connect, however briefly, with another human -- whether a call girl, a stripper, a masseur or each other. As Michel well knows, sex becomes increasingly difficult to acquire as you age; luckily for him, there’s the young and beautiful fellow tourist Valerie, who hooks up with him after the trip is over and proves to be at least as devoted to the pleasure principle as he is.
Valerie, an executive with the travel firm that arranged the trip, has what Michel can’t seem to find in anyone else: the power to give pleasure unselfishly. When she moves from her up-and-coming firm to working at a major resort industry, Michel inspires her with the idea of setting up a worldwide business based entirely on sexual tourism -- resort hotels in poor or underdeveloped countries where local prostitution is allowed to flourish. As Michel explains it, it’s pure supply and demand: wealthy westerners with everything in life but a good lay meet poor people with nothing left to sell but their bodies. For neither Michel or Valerie is profit the sole motive; they want the world to have what they have -- as well, presumably, as the sheer stamina to blow, lick, wank, fondle or bang each other on every other page. As the resort idea proliferates, it eventually thrusts both of them into the line of fire against radical religious terrorism.
Here, of course, is the nub of the problem in the modern world – a freedom-loving progressive society at war with Dark Age theocracies who are only modern in their weaponry. Echoing both Machiavelli and the Marquis de Sade, Houellebecq’s novel-length suicide note suggests that the Western triumph over religious terrorism won’t be any victory at all. Chattering away at full trot as only a drunken Frenchman can, Houellebecq sees the freedom to pursue pleasure as a meaningless substitute for God -- even one you believe to be dead. Pleasure is so limited and people are so faceless as to be mere repetions of each other; any life, especially the good life, is basically just one agonizingly long dry hump. As Michel puts it, "Anything can happen in life, especially nothing."
Like its predecessor, Platform arrived in this country on the heels of considerable controversy in the author’s native France. Where the earlier novel alienated both liberals and conservatives with its weird stew of reactionary politics and sexual excess, the new one was cited in a case where the author was charged with slandering Islam -- which you can apparently do in France, of all places -- in some comments he made in an interview. As could perhaps be predicted, the only thing the case achieved was to make Houellebecq a cause celebre among the international literary community.
It also, to my mind anyway, raised some question as to what Houellebecq’s aggressors were thinking. It’s easy enough to spot the scattered lines that might give offense -- "Muslims on the whole aren’t worth much," Michel says at one point -- but it’s just as easy to respond to them: Michel is frankly a racist, and he hates Islam because, at either end of the book, Muslims kill people close to him. The things he says aren’t supposed to be taken as a true reflection of the author -- or are they? Are the concerns of the fictional Michel all that different, in essence, from the author Michel – who changed his given name after his mother converted to Islam? In a stirring defense last year in the London Guardian, Salman Rushdie rightly said that a novel has a right " to be considered on its own terms … If novelists can't depict Nazis or bigots without being accused of being Nazis or bigots, then they can't do their work properly." Still, it’s the kind of question you often find yourself asking with Houellebecq, who has no interest of coming down on the right, humane or conventionally correct side of anything.
Houellebecq’s nihilism isn’t the deep, rich, full-roast Nietzschean brew; it’s cranky, petulant, and so by-the-numbers bleak as to be almost quaint -- had the titles not already been taken, he could have just as well called the book Nausea, No Exit or The Fall. But despair for a world that edges ever closer to its own destruction never really goes completely out of style and Platform, like The Elementary Particles, is a book of and about its time. For all its sloppiness and pages of goopy sleaze, it has a power that’s hard to shake -- you sense a book that has its sweaty fingers on the pulse of the beast of the apocalypse. It’s easy to dislike, hard to dismiss, and impossible to put down.
Platform by Michel Houellebecq, translated from the French by Frank Wynne. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.00
Somewhere in the middle of Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, an argument breaks out among visitors to a hardcore S&M club over whether torture and humiliation are normal aspects of human sexuality. "It’s completely disgusting," says one voyeur, an artist who has gained some fame for his own revolting exhibitions. "...But it’s precisely what is disgusting in the human animal that interests me."
Ditto the author. Like his previous novel, the 2000 The Elementary Particles, Platform is a shallow, contrary, moralistic, pornographic, and oddly powerful novel of ideas; a story of the pursuit of self-gratification that is also a sour reflection on freedom, and what amounts to a no-win battle between democracy and fundamentalism.
The protagonist, Michel Renault, presents himself as a middle-age bureaucrat with tastes and ambitions to match. A glum little man who works as an accountant for the French Ministry of Culture, his job is to finance contemporary art exhibits whose meanings elude him: "I maintain the disinterested attitude appropriate to an accounts manager," he tells us. "Questions of aesthetics and politics are not my thing." For all his self-effacement, Michel is not the type of fictional character who parades his unexamined life for the reader’s smug enjoyment; he’s too smart and self-conscious for that. During a vacation, he looks at himself wearing jeans and a Radiohead T-shirt: "My anxious bureaucratic face clashed horribly with what I was wearing, and I looked exactly like what I was: a forty-something civil servant on vacation, trying to pretend he’s young; it was pretty demoralizing." The closest he ever gets to a human relationship is his daily visit to the local porn shop (“Watching pussy in motion cleared my head”) or, if need be, hiring a prostitute.
Michel is so jaded by his admittedly passionless existence that not even the murder of his estranged father -- at the hands of the jealous Muslim brother of his father’s girlfriend -- moves him beyond an initial blast of spite. His inheritance does, however, allow him to take a vacation to Thailand, which proves something of a revelation; everyone there, like him, basically wants sex. They see the usual sights and indulge in the exotic foods, but basically they all want to connect, however briefly, with another human -- whether a call girl, a stripper, a masseur or each other. As Michel well knows, sex becomes increasingly difficult to acquire as you age; luckily for him, there’s the young and beautiful fellow tourist Valerie, who hooks up with him after the trip is over and proves to be at least as devoted to the pleasure principle as he is.
Valerie, an executive with the travel firm that arranged the trip, has what Michel can’t seem to find in anyone else: the power to give pleasure unselfishly. When she moves from her up-and-coming firm to working at a major resort industry, Michel inspires her with the idea of setting up a worldwide business based entirely on sexual tourism -- resort hotels in poor or underdeveloped countries where local prostitution is allowed to flourish. As Michel explains it, it’s pure supply and demand: wealthy westerners with everything in life but a good lay meet poor people with nothing left to sell but their bodies. For neither Michel or Valerie is profit the sole motive; they want the world to have what they have -- as well, presumably, as the sheer stamina to blow, lick, wank, fondle or bang each other on every other page. As the resort idea proliferates, it eventually thrusts both of them into the line of fire against radical religious terrorism.
Here, of course, is the nub of the problem in the modern world – a freedom-loving progressive society at war with Dark Age theocracies who are only modern in their weaponry. Echoing both Machiavelli and the Marquis de Sade, Houellebecq’s novel-length suicide note suggests that the Western triumph over religious terrorism won’t be any victory at all. Chattering away at full trot as only a drunken Frenchman can, Houellebecq sees the freedom to pursue pleasure as a meaningless substitute for God -- even one you believe to be dead. Pleasure is so limited and people are so faceless as to be mere repetions of each other; any life, especially the good life, is basically just one agonizingly long dry hump. As Michel puts it, "Anything can happen in life, especially nothing."
Like its predecessor, Platform arrived in this country on the heels of considerable controversy in the author’s native France. Where the earlier novel alienated both liberals and conservatives with its weird stew of reactionary politics and sexual excess, the new one was cited in a case where the author was charged with slandering Islam -- which you can apparently do in France, of all places -- in some comments he made in an interview. As could perhaps be predicted, the only thing the case achieved was to make Houellebecq a cause celebre among the international literary community.
It also, to my mind anyway, raised some question as to what Houellebecq’s aggressors were thinking. It’s easy enough to spot the scattered lines that might give offense -- "Muslims on the whole aren’t worth much," Michel says at one point -- but it’s just as easy to respond to them: Michel is frankly a racist, and he hates Islam because, at either end of the book, Muslims kill people close to him. The things he says aren’t supposed to be taken as a true reflection of the author -- or are they? Are the concerns of the fictional Michel all that different, in essence, from the author Michel – who changed his given name after his mother converted to Islam? In a stirring defense last year in the London Guardian, Salman Rushdie rightly said that a novel has a right " to be considered on its own terms … If novelists can't depict Nazis or bigots without being accused of being Nazis or bigots, then they can't do their work properly." Still, it’s the kind of question you often find yourself asking with Houellebecq, who has no interest of coming down on the right, humane or conventionally correct side of anything.
Houellebecq’s nihilism isn’t the deep, rich, full-roast Nietzschean brew; it’s cranky, petulant, and so by-the-numbers bleak as to be almost quaint -- had the titles not already been taken, he could have just as well called the book Nausea, No Exit or The Fall. But despair for a world that edges ever closer to its own destruction never really goes completely out of style and Platform, like The Elementary Particles, is a book of and about its time. For all its sloppiness and pages of goopy sleaze, it has a power that’s hard to shake -- you sense a book that has its sweaty fingers on the pulse of the beast of the apocalypse. It’s easy to dislike, hard to dismiss, and impossible to put down.
Wednesday, October 08, 2003
Sunday, September 21, 2003
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
Wednesday, September 10, 2003
Friday, August 22, 2003
Thursday, August 21, 2003
Saturday, April 19, 2003
Thursday, April 17, 2003
Wednesday, April 09, 2003
Saturday, April 05, 2003
Artist of the Missing World
An interview with Kazuo Ishiguro
Part II
Yemassee: I found When We Were Orphans both similar to your previous novel, The Unconsoled, and different. Both have protagonists who are faced with a kind of obstacle course toward reaching a goal, which only seems to recede further away. But Orphans is a good deal more earthbound. Was it a conscious move on your part, to do something where the surfaces are a little more solid?
Ishiguro: I guess so. The Unconsoled, I decided, would kind of take place in this dream-logic world. I didn't necessarily see the need to carry on setting all my books in that dream world. To some extent, I'd probably had enough of it. I spent about four years immersed in that dream world. A lot of people just couldn't make head or tail of The Unconsoled, though I'm gratified to see that over the years here in England people seem to be coming around to it, reading it again and so on. When my book came out here in April, a lot of the reviews spent a lot of the space talking about The Unconsoled, so a lot of people wanted to write about that book as well as the new book. It was a book that baffled a lot of people, frustrated a lot of people, made a lot of people angry. In a way, I wanted to talk about some similar themes through a completely different kind of technique, using a relatively fast-paced story.
Yemassee: When We Were Orphans struck me as quite cinematic. The action of the book was so exterior. It moved at a very rapid pace.
Ishiguro: I used plot in this book perhaps more than I've used it before. Even books like The Remains of the Day, which is a pretty accessible book, is not very plotty. This is the first time I had a go at a traditional plot, if you like, and there's a kind of traditional denouement at the end, when Uncle Philip appears at the end and says what happened. To some extent, it began as an idea to do a kind of pastiche of a certain kind of adventure story or detective story of that time. I didn't really have that much heart in terms of wanting to do a full-blown pastiche. That kind of faded away a little. But when I started the book I did have this notion that yes, it should actually contain a plot. That wouldn't be the most important thing about it, but there should be a kind of mystery, and it should actually have a proper resolution, you should actually find out what happened to people. It just came with the territory. It was this kind of book I was writing.
Yemassee: Do you find Christopher markedly different from your other characters? In this book, unlike some of your others, the evil is less inside the character than outside him, threatening to engulf him.
Ishiguro: He's in quite a different position from people like Stevens the butler [in The Remains of the Day] or the artist [in An Artist of the Floating World]. Those earlier characters are certainly people who are trying to come to terms with something. They're trying to come to terms with ideals that took them somewhere they didn't want to go, and they realize that perhaps it is too late now to redeem their lives. They've given the best they had to something they didn't want to support. It's all about their struggle to come to terms with what's happened. That's not really Christopher's battle.
That character who looks back and very painfully comes to terms with a less than flattering reflection of himself -- that was a character who did fascinate me in the earlier part of my writing career. But after The Remains of the Day I felt I had covered that fairly thoroughly. I finished The Remains of the Day in my thirties and somewhere in between my mid-thirties and the time I hit 40, I think there was something about the way I viewed life in general that that way of looking at life didn't appeal to me much anymore. In a way, it's kind of a young man's way of looking at life, that you set out with a set of principles, political views, whatever, and then you go out there on the playing field and you use these principles as a guide and at the end of the game you see whether you've done well or not.
In a way, books like The Remains of the Day were written with that assumption in mind, that you measured your life toward the end by how well you stuck to your ideals and you may well find, because you didn't know enough or the world was too complicated a place, you took a wrong turn here or there, but you can see a clear road down which you've come, and perhaps you can identify the wrong turnings. I think somewhere along the way, after I'd finished The Remains of the Day, that pattern of how one views one's life didn't really ring true for me anymore. I thought things were perhaps not as controlled as that. Laterally, I've become much more interested in the fact that a lot of what we do is beyond one's control. We're often motivated by completely irrational things, and we often choose our vocation, who we associate with, who we live our lives with, who we marry according to some crazy irrational scenario, of wanting to fix something that can never be fixed.
An interview with Kazuo Ishiguro
Part II
Yemassee: I found When We Were Orphans both similar to your previous novel, The Unconsoled, and different. Both have protagonists who are faced with a kind of obstacle course toward reaching a goal, which only seems to recede further away. But Orphans is a good deal more earthbound. Was it a conscious move on your part, to do something where the surfaces are a little more solid?
Ishiguro: I guess so. The Unconsoled, I decided, would kind of take place in this dream-logic world. I didn't necessarily see the need to carry on setting all my books in that dream world. To some extent, I'd probably had enough of it. I spent about four years immersed in that dream world. A lot of people just couldn't make head or tail of The Unconsoled, though I'm gratified to see that over the years here in England people seem to be coming around to it, reading it again and so on. When my book came out here in April, a lot of the reviews spent a lot of the space talking about The Unconsoled, so a lot of people wanted to write about that book as well as the new book. It was a book that baffled a lot of people, frustrated a lot of people, made a lot of people angry. In a way, I wanted to talk about some similar themes through a completely different kind of technique, using a relatively fast-paced story.
Yemassee: When We Were Orphans struck me as quite cinematic. The action of the book was so exterior. It moved at a very rapid pace.
Ishiguro: I used plot in this book perhaps more than I've used it before. Even books like The Remains of the Day, which is a pretty accessible book, is not very plotty. This is the first time I had a go at a traditional plot, if you like, and there's a kind of traditional denouement at the end, when Uncle Philip appears at the end and says what happened. To some extent, it began as an idea to do a kind of pastiche of a certain kind of adventure story or detective story of that time. I didn't really have that much heart in terms of wanting to do a full-blown pastiche. That kind of faded away a little. But when I started the book I did have this notion that yes, it should actually contain a plot. That wouldn't be the most important thing about it, but there should be a kind of mystery, and it should actually have a proper resolution, you should actually find out what happened to people. It just came with the territory. It was this kind of book I was writing.
Yemassee: Do you find Christopher markedly different from your other characters? In this book, unlike some of your others, the evil is less inside the character than outside him, threatening to engulf him.
Ishiguro: He's in quite a different position from people like Stevens the butler [in The Remains of the Day] or the artist [in An Artist of the Floating World]. Those earlier characters are certainly people who are trying to come to terms with something. They're trying to come to terms with ideals that took them somewhere they didn't want to go, and they realize that perhaps it is too late now to redeem their lives. They've given the best they had to something they didn't want to support. It's all about their struggle to come to terms with what's happened. That's not really Christopher's battle.
That character who looks back and very painfully comes to terms with a less than flattering reflection of himself -- that was a character who did fascinate me in the earlier part of my writing career. But after The Remains of the Day I felt I had covered that fairly thoroughly. I finished The Remains of the Day in my thirties and somewhere in between my mid-thirties and the time I hit 40, I think there was something about the way I viewed life in general that that way of looking at life didn't appeal to me much anymore. In a way, it's kind of a young man's way of looking at life, that you set out with a set of principles, political views, whatever, and then you go out there on the playing field and you use these principles as a guide and at the end of the game you see whether you've done well or not.
In a way, books like The Remains of the Day were written with that assumption in mind, that you measured your life toward the end by how well you stuck to your ideals and you may well find, because you didn't know enough or the world was too complicated a place, you took a wrong turn here or there, but you can see a clear road down which you've come, and perhaps you can identify the wrong turnings. I think somewhere along the way, after I'd finished The Remains of the Day, that pattern of how one views one's life didn't really ring true for me anymore. I thought things were perhaps not as controlled as that. Laterally, I've become much more interested in the fact that a lot of what we do is beyond one's control. We're often motivated by completely irrational things, and we often choose our vocation, who we associate with, who we live our lives with, who we marry according to some crazy irrational scenario, of wanting to fix something that can never be fixed.