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3 march 02

The Slave, Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1978

Isaac Beshevis Singer's The Slave is going to stay with me for a long time. This is one of the best books that I've ever read, and one of the most eye-opening. In all of my education and years of reading, I never became very knowledgeable about world religions, even Judaism. (That's going to change one of these days.) I know the very basics, but was happy for the challenge that this novel presented. The story is so engaging, and so detailed, that I found myself consulting the dictionary to better understand terms for Jewish prayer books, religious items, and articles of clothing.

The Slave takes place is 16th-century Poland during a series of religious wars that results in the horrifying torture and death of entire Jewish communities. Jacob is a slave in a peasant Christian village, having been captured after the burning of his former home, Josefov, and the torture and killing of most of its villagers. Over the course of a few years, he begins to fall in love with his master's daughter, Wanda.

However, Jacob is an extremely devoted Jew in both spirit and practice. Having no religious books to study, he nonetheless spends his days reciting prayers and psalms, and resorts to engraving hundreds of Jewish laws onto stone tablets from memory.

One night, a band of traveling Jews arrives to reclaim Jacob from his slavery, requiring that he leave the village (and Wanda) immediately. This is really where the story begins, because it is at that point you realize what you're in for. The Slave starkly illustrates what happens at the crossroad of religious dogma and human nature. It is one man's lifelong battle for righteousness in a Medieval world that is still entrenched in the Dark Ages.

I can see myself re-reading The Slave at some point in my life. It's a wonderful, fast-moving, at times horrifying, story. The writing is brilliant, in part because Singer himself oversaw and collaborated on the translation. With good reason, this is the book for which Singer is best remembered. You get the feeling that this is a story he needed to tell, and it's one that I would recommend for anyone from high school onward. Again, I'm stunned that I was never exposed to this work in college. I should have been.

Favorite Passages:

...what was intelligence worth if you didn't have luck? p. 30

The cowherds also had their autumn celebration....For the most part, they were a crippled, half-mad crew with scabs and elflocks on their heads and rashes on their bodies. Shame was unknown to them, as if they had been conceived before the eating of the forbidden fruit. p. 50

What was the purpose of Creation? Free Will! Man must choose for himself between good and evil. ..A father may carry his child, but he wishes the infant to learn to walk by itself. p. 71

[Jacob] had not tasted meat in all the years of slavery and the idea of feeding on God's creatures now repelled him. Mean and fish were both eaten customarily on the Sabbath, but the food stuck in his throat. Jews treated animals as Cossacks treated Jews. The words "head", "neck", "liver", "gizzards", made him shudder. Meat in his mouth gave him the fantasy he was devouring his own children. On several occasions he had gone outside and vomited after the Sabbath dinner.

"No, Jacob, all men are alike...Women have only one use for them. A child must nurse and doesn't care if the breast belongs to a peasant or a princess. Men are like children." p. 156

False birth pains sometimes precede the true...Each generation had its lost tribes. Some portion always longs to return to Egypt. There are always frightened spies, Samsons, Abimelechs, Jethros, Ruths. The leaves drop from the tree, but the branches remain; the trunk still has its roots. Israel's lost children live in every land..Heaven writes the story and only there is the truth known. In the end each man is responsible only for himself. p. 236

24 february 02

1993 Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon

I cannot believe that I'd lived this long without reading a Toni Morrison novel, and I plan on reading more. From what I can gather, Song of Solomon is the definitive Morrison work, and I think it's an excellent place to begin.

Spanning the 1930's-1960's, and based primarily in Michigan, Song... is something of a grail quest, though more subtle than most such epics. Macon Dead has escaped poverty and successfully buried his tragic past from his children. A successful black property owner and entrepreneur, he makes every imaginable effort to shelter his own family from lower-class blacks in the community--even if they are his own family. Milkman, his son (so named because his mother breast-fed him well past infanthood), has other ideas. Growing up feeling as though he doesn't quite belong--to either his family, or any segment of his community--he begins searching for "his people". Finding answers on the other side of the tracks, he follows hard-won clues throughout the country to get his past back.

When people talk about American stories, and American authors, Toni Morrison needs to be at the top of these lists. While Song of Solomon happens to tell one American-African family's story, it's not just a "black" novel. Every notable character is fully developed, both men and women, with a strong sense of compassion for the most flawed of them. She writes with sensuality, spirituality, and injects elements of magical realism as Milkman uncovers his roots. There is nothing that could make this book better for me. I don't want to see the movie, and I don't need a sequel. I suspect it will stand on its own for generations long after this one.

Favorite Passages

". . . You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still. It moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow." pp. 40, 41

"Beauty shops always had curtains or shades. up. Barbershops didn't. The women didn't want anybody on the street to be able to see them getting their hair done. They were ashamed."p. 62

"Now, after more than a dozen years, he was getting tired of her. Her eccentricities were no longer provocative and the stupefying ease with which he had gotten and stayed between her legs had changed from the great good fortune he'd considered it, to annoyance at her refusal to make him hustle for it, work for it, do something difficult for it. He didn't have to pay for it. It was so free, so abundant, it had lost its fervor. There was no excitement, no galloping of blood in his neck or his heart at the thought of her.

She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make? p. 91

"You're like all women. Waiting for Prince Charming to come trotting down the street and pull up in front of your door. Then you'll sweep down the steps and powie! Your eyes meet and he'll yank you up on his horse and the two of you ride off into the wind. Violins playing and 'courtesy of MGM' stamped on the horse's butt. Right?" p.97

They believed firmly that members of their own race killed one another for good reasons: violation of another's turf (a man is found with somebody else's wife); refusal to observe the laws of hospitality (a man reaches into his friend's pot of mustards and snatches out the meat); or verbal insults impugning their virility, honesty, humanity, and mental health. p. 100

...her maturity and blood kindhip converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection. It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when she dragged herself off to bed, having spent another day without his presence, her heart beat like a gloved fist against her ribs. And in the morning, long before she was fully awake, she felt a longing so bitter and tight it yanked her out of a sleep swept clean of dreams...

The calculated violence of a shark grew in her, and like every witch that ever rode a broom straight through the night to a ceremonial infanticide as thrilled by the black wind as by the rod between her legs; like every fed-up-to-the-teeth bride who worried about the consistency of the grits she threw at her husband as well as the potency of the lye she had stirred into them; and like every queen and every courtesan who was struck by the beauty of her emerald ring as she tipped its poison into the old red wine, Hagar was energized by the details of her mission. She stalked him. Whenever the fist that beat in her chest became that pointing finger, when any contact with him at all was better than none, she stalked him. She could not get his love (and the possibility that he did not think of her at all was intolerable), so she settled for his fear. pp. 127, 128

It occurred to her that although men f*ucked armless women, one-legged women, hunchbacks and blind women, drunken women, razor-toting women, midgets, small children, convicts, boys, sheep, dogs, goats, liver, each other, and even certain species of plants, they were terrified of f*cking her--a woman with no navel. p. 148

First off, she cut her hair. That was one thing she didn't want to have to think about anymore. Then she tackled the problem of trying to decide how she wanted to live and what was valuable to her. When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world? p. 149

"It's a bad word, 'belong'. Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn't be like that. . .You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't do you? And neither does he. You're turning over your whole life to him...if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself." p. 306

1982 Gabriel García Márquez: Love in the Time of Cholera

When I spoke to some people over New Year's about this project, several of them (men and women) recommended this book over One Hundred Years of Solitude. Not having read the latter, I'm going to hold judgement, but I am glad that I followed their advice. Love... is the story of Florentino Ariza, a poet who spends fifty years longing for Fermina Diaz, who unceremoniously dropped his love to marry Dr. Juvenal Urbino. Florentino never marries, instead sleeping with hundreds of women, notably widows. Over the years, he keeps a multi-volume journal of his thoughts and experiences in these efforts to momentarily push Fermina to the back of his mind. His unrequited love for her always returns, as urgent as the day it began. Furthermore, the course of his love parallels the course that cholera takes throughout Columbia for as many years.

For some time, I've believed that very few of us know what love in its most unconditional form is all about. Why should we, when most of the lovers we're presented aren't older than 35? The great beauty in Love... is its tender focus on the characters in late life. Never jarring, never pat, it's simply one of the most unusual and beautiful novels I've ever read. I wish more people created such worthwhile art with a complete lifetime in mind, not just the first third of it.

Favorite Passages

They had just celebrated their golden wedding anniversary, and they were not capable of living for even an instant without the other, or without thinking about the other, and that capacity diminished as their age increased. Neither could have said of their mutual dependence was based on love or convenience, but they had never asked the question with their hands on their hearts because both had always preferred not to know the answer...

Life would have been quite another matter for them both if they had learned in time that it was easier to avoid great matrimonial catastrophes than trivial everyday miseries. But if they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good. p. 17

Dr. Juvenal Urbino knew that most fatal diseases had their own specific odor, but that none was as specific as old age. He detected it in the cadavers slit open from head to toe on the dissecting table, he even recognized it in patients who hid their age with the greatest success, he smelled it in the perspiration on his own clothing and in the unguarded breathing of his sleeping wife. p. 40

He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. p. 106

...he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. p.165

...she was the only one who earned a living with her body, but she did so at her pleasure and without a business manager. In her day she had enjoyed a legendary career as a clandestine cortesan who deserved her nom de guerre, Our Lady of Everybody. p. 171

"If we widows have any advantage, it is that there is no one left to give us orders." p. 324

"We men are the miserable slaves of prejudice. . .But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about. p. 330

For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death. p. 345

3 january 02

I gotta admit--I struggled through these next two books. I'm reading some easier, more interesting stuff now. This is building character, right?

Herzog, Saul Bellow, 1976

I think I made a mistake in choosing Herzog as my introduction to Saul Bellow. Some of my friends later recommended his short stories. At a future time, I hope to give him another chance with either those, or another novel.

Herzog certainly isn't a bad book, but it is difficult to follow, as there's not a clear narrative storyline. Edward Herzog is a middle-aged intellectual professor who is enduring the failure of his second marriage. To cope with the compounding failures of his life, he writes letters--to his wives, his therapist, his friends, and people who have wronged him in some way, supposed or real. The novel, then, is a weaving of these letters and what rolls around his mind--failures, hopes, and plans.

If you do read Herzog, take note of some of Edward's philosophical viewpoints, and detailed observations. These are the gems of this book. I think the point of this is simply that it was written. It is, if nothing else, challenging.

Soul Mountain, Gao Xingjian, 2000

I also (finally) finished Soul Mountain. It's kind of hard to know what to say, but I'll start with this: I'm learning a valuable lesson in doing this project. Just because a book, movie, or other work of art has won the most prestigious of awards does not mean that even a smart guy off the street will think it's good. I think we know that this is true with movies and music, but books have a smaller audience, so any discussion of their greatness takes place just under the mainstream radar. Does that make any sense?

Here's a synopsis: In 1983 Gao Xingjian was diagnosed with lung cancer, the disease that had killed his father. At the same time, he was threatened with arrest for his counterrevolutionary writings and was preparing to flee Beijing for the remote regions of southwest China. Shortly before his departure, however, he received a second set of x-rays that showed no cancer at all. Having received this news, he began the a journey that would lead him to the sacred mountain of Lingshan.

If I may be so bold, I don't think that Soul Mountain is a great book, at least in the English translation. Even for an educated reader who can appreciate a more avant-garde or surreal narrative, it's puzzling. The narrator "splits" from I to you, and then to another, "she". I found this book most manageable when I let go of my conventional narrative expecations, and let myself be carried along on the trip. As a travel journal, the stories he tells are worthwhile, filled with striking images, characters, and histories. I also think the narrative breaks have a lot to do with the translation. Not reading Chinese, I can't say for sure.

If nothing else, Soul Mountain is a good here-and-there read for its imagery and lessons in Chinese culture and history. As an American who takes my freedom of movement for granted, I can't help but appreciate a man who would take such an arduous journey.

5 september

Independent People, Halldor Laxness, 1955

I became aware of Independent People, and Laxness' importance to Iceland, just before I visited there in 2000. Putting it on my "to definitely read" list, I finally picked up a copy late last year, and immediately wondered why this book has been out of print in the United States until just a few years ago. Set in the early twentieth century in (what I believe would be) rural southern Icelend, it chronicles the struggles of Bjartur, a sheep farmer who has finally purchased his own farm after 18 years of working in servitude.

As I think is the case with many of the Nobel selections I've chosen, I find myself having to be very careful not to project my American-ness onto the characters. Bjartur of Summerhouses is fiercely independent. He has worked too hard for too long to accept anything from anyone. Whether it's something for the basic health of his family (like a milk cow), or a proper education for his daughter, Asta; Bjartur won't accept favors without a fight. His tendencies are not, however, entirely heroic.

What the reader begins to realize is that Bjartur is an emerging captialist in a heavily socialist society that (successfully) believes that it takes a village to do virtually everything. He aims to prove them wrong, or at least to prove that he is beholden to no one. Bjartur has moments of great heroism equivalent to those of the old Norse epics. His life is complicated, and made more so by his resistance to compromise. Out of this arises some comic moments, such as the circumstances that land him on a reindeer down a raging river.

Part of the joy in reading Independent People lies in having visited this unusual, stark, beautiful region of the world. Regardless of whether you've seen the landscape or not, if you enjoy beautiful writing, this novel will top your list of favorites. This is poetic prose, the stuff that you don't want to read quickly, the passages over which you linger and save in the back of your mind. Some of the details also struck me as very funny. For example, it's pretty well-known that Icelanders really like their coffee. For example, after Bjartur's first wedding,

It was then time to think of coffee. . .The party seemed for a while to be lacking in fire, but each faithfully and noisily swilled his four to eight cups of coffee, while here and there could be hear the crunching of raisin seeds.

I don't know about you, but I can't say I've ever been to a wedding where everyone was bent on getting all jacked up on eight cups of joe. Yikes.

Read this book. Read it for a perspective and experience you won't get from any work of American literature. Read it for the beauty and vibrant autheticity. I hope that, someday soon, we begin to see this book on more high school reading lists. I can't believe that it's flown under my radar for so long.

A Favorite Passage

Consider love in its perfect form, in its unconditional sacrifice, its affinity with all that is loftiest and most magnanimous in the soul of man. Consider the force it opposes to everything evil and impure. Consider the power of love, how the hovel is transformed into a palace, how chill winter becomes radiant summer, how poverty itself becomes a very bed of roses.

The Immoralist, Andre' Gide, 1947

Among the authors I was most excited to read during this project, Andre' Gide was toward the top of the list. From what I'd read about him, his books were regarded much the same as some of Gustave Flaubert's and Vladimir Nabokov's works--two authors whom I'm happy to read and re-read whenever I get the chance. At the time of its publication in 1921, The Immoralist caused immediate controversy for its protagonist's somewhat perverse abandon in living.

Michel is a frail, scholarly young man, having completed his studies in the Classics. He has published some well-received works on his historical theories, made his father proud, and now holds a prestigious post with a respected university. He marries Marceline, a lovely, intelligent woman with whom he falls in love after the marriage.

During their (long, enviable) honeymoon across Northern Africa, Michel develops tuberculosis. A frail man to begin with, he nearly dies. With the steadfast attention of his wife, he gradually recovers not only his physical health, but a renewed sense of life. Abandoning his previously safe, comfortable life; Michel gradually begins to live two different lives. On one hand, he remains deeply in love with Marceline. When he is away from her, however, he entertains more perverse thoughts. The beauty of Gide's writing is that he allows the reader's imagination to wind between the lines. The novel's strength lies in its subtlely, and what is not said.

Upon his recovery, Michel and Marceline embark on another long trip, and end up back in Africa. While there, Michel abandons his studies and research, and allows his mind to take him where it will. His fantasies run amok, and enter the realm of taboo--even to someone of today's modern sensibilities. Reading The Immoralist can be as uncomfortable as the reader allows. Gide guides us to the edge with his subtle, tantalizing clues. The rest is up to the reader.

One thing that I've noticed already in the list of Nobel laureates, is the number of people who have written "search for self" narratives--Gide, Hesse, and Gao Xingjian, to name a few. On one hand, I wonder how narcissistic it is for us to find this type of literature so intriguing. On the other, I think that at some point, we are able to simply empathize with these protagonists, instead of absorbing their experiences as part of our own stories.

Especially for fans of good French fiction in translation, particularly Flaubert, I highly recommend this book. In fact, I look forward to reading more of his work when I complete the Nobel Reading Project. I just hope all of the translations are as good as the Vintage version.

Favorite Passages

I did not yet suspect how great an influence that chidhood morality exerts upon us, nor what mental habits it forms. .

I cared for a few friends. . ., but actually prized friendship rather than friends; my devotion to them was great, but it was a craving for nobility; in my heart of hearts I gloated over each fine feeling. Moreover, I knew nothing about my friends, as I knew nothing about myself. .

"You have to let other people be right," was his answer to their insults. "It consoles them for not being anything else." .

"I have so little that nothing you see here belongs to me; not even, or especially not, the bed I sleep on. I have a horror of comfort; possessions invite comfort, and in their security a man falls asleep; I love life enough to try to live wide awake, and so, even among all my treasures, I cherish a sense of the precarious by which I provoke or at least arouse my life. I can't say I love danger, but I love a life of risk, I want life to demand of me, at every moment, all my courage, all my happiness, and all my health."

"Envying another man's happiness is madness: you wouldn't know what to do with it if you had it. Happiness isn't something that comes ready-made, to order." .

A land liberated from works of art. I despise those who can acknowledge beauty only when it's already transcribed, interpreted. One thing admirable about the Arabs: they live their art, they sing and scatter it from day to day; they don't cling to it, they don't embalm it in works. Which is the cause and the effect of the absence of great artists. I have always believed the great artists are the ones who dare entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?. . . .

The Lion and the Jewel, from Collected Plays 2, Wole Soyinka, 1986

Ugh, I thought. I have to read plays. Bleck.

I'm not a fan of reading plays. I always figured that they're meant to be performed, and thus better received that way. Once I completed The Lion and the Jewel (the first play in this collection), I am now hopeful that Shakespeare isn't the only playwright whose writing is easily appreciated.

I am a fan of the African literature that I've been able to find. Several years ago, I picked up a copy of the Norton Anthology of African Poetry that remains one of my favorite volumes. Now, having read Nigeria's Wole Soyinka, I again wonder why more African literature isn't studied in schools. Or, why at least...oh, a NOBEL PRIZEWINNER... wasn't taught at MY high school. Grumph.

The Lion and the Jewel is the story of old traditions and new institutions as they fight for power in one small Nigerian village. Sidi, the "village belle", has recently been photographed for a glossy magazine with a large and reputable circulation. Seeing her own beauty for herself, she vainly carries the magazine everywhere, and begins to weild her newfound fame over the village chief, Baroka. Baroka, meanwhile, has not taken a new wife for two years. At sixty-two, he is beginning to feel old and fearful of his fading virility. Lakunle, the village schoolteacher, represents the assault of new ways in the village. In love with Sidi, he relentlessly pursues her with promises of a better life through intellectual development. He will make her his equal, instead of paying the traditional bride-price.

I wasn't prepared for the climax, and then the final twist in this short but compelling play. Yet another instance in which my American sensibilities left me completely blindsided by the events of this play. Which is, I suppose, one of the many reasons I ought to read these selections in the first place. I've crossed another border. The weather is fine. Wish you were here.

Favorite Passages

Baroka to Sidi: The proof of wisdom is the wish to learn
Even from children. And the haste of youth
Must learn its temper from the gloss
Of ancient leather, from a strength
Knit close along the grain.

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