Comedy in a Minor Key

How do you do dispose of a body you aren’t supposed to have in the first place?

That is the central problem for Wim and Marie, an average young Dutch couple who agree to hide a Jewish man, Nico, during the Nazi occupation. And then he dies.

Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key is a slim, somewhat simple novel that easily shows the anxiety and issues arising from having someone in your house that you aren’t supposed to have in your house. At first they think that they can do it without anyone knowing, including family and the cleaning lady. But slowly – purposefully and accidently – a lot of people end up knowing. Through it, they come to learn that many of their own circle that they thought they knew well were also concealing secrets – which end up helping them in the end.

What I liked most about this novel is the averageness of its characters. Wim and Marie don’t take Nico in out of some high purpose…there isn’t any moralizing about “the right thing to do,” or Schindler’s breakdown (“I could have done so much more!”). They do it because it has to be done, out of some vague sense of duty to their country. Someone asks them and they say, well sure. And Nico is so ordinary himself…a single perfume salesman, parents are dead, and no real relatives or importance. As much, I suppose, as any person could be said to be unimportant.

That Nico died in such an ordinary way underscores this. There is a sense that he didn’t need to go into hiding just to die from an illness; he went into hiding so he could live - so the three of them could come out the other side. That comedic irony, as well as the simple way in which his disposal is bungled (a mere oversight of a monogram and a laundry tag on a pair of pajamas) is what makes this novel almost humorous. It has a slapstick, Waiting for Godot quality about it. One review I came across called the novel’s subject the “goofy, quotidian kindness that is one possible response to violence.” The everyday-ness of the novel, the, “yeah, sure we’ll do that” is what’s amazing. There aren’t many light-hearted novels on this subject.

Comedy in a Minor Key is a small novel that doesn’t deal with any of the larger issues that I have come to expect in a story of occupied Europe. It’s about muddling through and figuring it out as you go along. But perhaps its publication in 1947 is a reason for that – it takes decades to truly process the totality of such a disaster. At this point I could start to go on angrily about our expectations of the 9/11 novel by extension, but I’ll save that for another post. It’s perhaps the ordinary stories that often come first, the stories that would be familiar to most people. The overarching epics that make us proud to be humans – in spite of what we humans sometimes do to one another – seem to come later.

Enduring Love

Sometimes in my life, I get feelings about things. I don’t mean everyday coincidences, such as the fact that today I e-mailed a consultant about grass (my life is so exciting, I know), and it turns out he was on the job site at that moment looking at the grass. That’s a coincidence.

By feelings, I mean connections between people, often before they are aware of it themselves. I often am able to pick up when a person likes someone else…not obvious flirtations, but those secret things we don’t always like to admit. The way they throw a snowball, or the slight, so easy to miss twinkle in their eye at the mention of the person’s name.

Once, I don’t remember the situation, but I shared a very personal story with a friend of mine. There was some subtle something in the way she reacted to the story, and I thought, I think she (yes she) is in love with me. Months later…maybe four or five months later, she tells me that she is in love with me. Here was the rest of the conversation:

“I know.”
“You know?”
“I’ve known since November.”
“But I didn’t realize it until March.”
“I’ve known since November.”

I usually try to keep these feelings at arms lengths, especially when there is a desire for them to be correct. So I try to ignore them, and let things go where they go. And also because every now and then I seem to be off.

In Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, Jed Parry gets it very, very wrong.

I loved the first few paragraphs, setting up the story:

The beginning is simple to mark. We were in sunlight under a turkey oak, partly protected from a strong, gusty wind. I was kneeling on the grass with a corkscrew in my hand, and Clarissa was passing me the bottle – a 1987 Daumas Gassac. This was the moment, this was the pinprick on the time map: I was stretching out my hand, and as the cool neck and the black foil touched my palm, we heard a man’s shout. We turned to look across the field and saw the danger. Next thing, I was running toward it. The transformation was absolute: I don’t recall dropping the corkscrew, or getting to my feet, or making a decision, or hearing the caution Clarissa called after me. What idiocy, to be racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak. There was a shout again, and a child’s cry, enfeebled by the wind that roared in the tall trees along the hedgerows. I ran faster. And there, suddenly, from different points around the field, four other men were converging on the scene, running like me.

…I’m holding back, delaying the information. I’m lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible; the convergence of six figures in a flat green space has a comforting geometry from the buzzard’s perspective, the knowable, limited plane of the snooker table. The initial conditions, the force and the direction of the force, define all the consequent pathways, all the angles of collision and return, and the glow of the overhead light bathes the field, the baize and all its moving bodies, in reassuring clarity. I think that while we were still converging, before we made contact, we were in a state of mathematical grace. I linger on our dispositions, the relative distances and the compass point- because as far as these occurrences were concerned, this was the last time I understood anything clearly at all.

What were we running toward? I don’t think any of us would ever know fully…it was an enormous balloon filled with helium, that elemental gas forged from hydrogen in the nuclear furnace of the stars, first step along the way in the generation of multiplicity and variety of matter in the universe, including our selves and our thoughts.

We were running toward a catastrophe, which itself was a kind of furnace in whose heat identities and fates would buckle into new shapes.

One of the men running was Jed Parry. Our narrator, Joe Rose, has an odd encounter with him when one of the people trying to hold down the balloon is lifted up and eventually falls to his death. Jed asks Joe to pray with him there over the body. Joe refuses, disgusted at this reaction and leaves. In the middle of the night, Joe receives a phone call from Jed: he knows that Joe is in love with him, and he just wanted to call and let him know that he was in love too. So it begins.

Jed follows him – staking out his apartment, interpreting the movement of curtains for signals from Joe. And Joe’s wife Clarissa misses all of this. Jed hides when he sees her coming, and his handwriting is close enough to Joe’s that Clarissa thinks Joe is making it all up. Until he tries to kill them.

I thought the book got off track when Joe goes to find Jean (widow of the man who fell), and she asks him to find the girl that must have been in the car with her husband. She believes he must have been having an affair with whoever left the scarf behind. This plot line was then seemingly forgotten about to return to the original plot – so wholly forgotten that I had to go back and make sure I didn’t skip a chapter. It is introduced again at the very end for what seemed like no purpose. After thinking about it, the purpose obviously was to give a non-psychotic twist on the case of getting it wrong. Jean believes – based on evidence she interprets – that he husband was having an affair. In actuality, he had picked up an illicit hitchhiking couple who flee the scene when it takes its deadly turn.

In the end, I don’t think that I particularly cared for Enduring Love. I think I really enjoyed the Jed Parry/Joe Rose story…maybe “enjoyed” isn’t the word. I was freaked out, kept interested. But the other portions of it seemed superfluous. I thought for certain that when Rose looked into the mysterious scarf left in the car, he would find another reason to fear Parry. Instead, he found what amounted to a strange and unnecessary feel good ending – or at least feel good in context. The end, generally, all neatly tied up, was really just feel good in context. And I suppose that that is where my disappointment lies. Not because I didn’t want it to end well for Joe and Clarissa, or anyone else, but it seemed both rushed and dragged out at the same time. I found myself skimming through conversations on Keats to find out what Parry was going to do next.

So, something like The Mustache is happening here with my reaction to the book. It was, as a whole, just ho-hum...the ending like a deflating balloon (pun intended). The ideas that the novel presented and explored, however, were interesting and disturbing. McEwan writes, “No one could agree on anything. We lived in a mist of half-shared, unreliable perception, and our sense data came warped by a prism of desire and belief, which tilted our memories too. We saw and remembered in our own favor, and we persuaded ourselves along the way….believing is seeing.” How much do we see about the world, and our relationships, simply because we believe it? How much of the stuff we see as symbolic, or “meaning something” is just coincidence? What’s disturbing here is to see those pattern-seeking tendencies we have as humans blown up into something deadly. And where is the line between generally reading evidence and drawing a wrong conclusion, and just being certifiable? Probably somewhere around the time you start following someone around. Creepy.

Summer 2011 Soundtrack

It's been a crazy summer. Here are the lyrics:

--Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before

--Check this hand cause I'm marvelous

--I don’t know what you mean to me, but I want to turn you on, turn you up, figure you out, I want to take you on

--You’re standing in the places…that bring to mind traces of a girl that I knew somewhere/I just can’t put my finger on what it is that says to me watch out, don’t believe her…And if your love was not a game, I’d only have myself to blame…

--Is it my turn to wish you were lying here...

--I see your lips moving but I don't hear nothing/Everybody talking like they really wanna know about us

--Do you feel what I feel? Can we make it so that’s part of the deal?

--What if you could smile? What if I could make your heart ignite just for a while?

--You might think that I’m crazy but you know I’m just your type…if I said my heart was beating loud...

--Give me everything tonight, for all we know we might not get tomorrow (Is it weird that I think this song is sooo incredibly sad?)

--I never dreamed that I'd meet somebody like you...

--There ain’t no reason you and me should be alone tonight/I need a man who thinks it’s right when it’s so wrong…

--And now I know just why she keeps me hanging around/she needs someone to walk on, so her feet don’t touch the ground/but I love her…

--He’s a wolf in disguise, but I can’t stop staring in those evil eyes

--You’re so hypnotizing/could you be the devil/could you be an angel? You’re not like the others…

--Can’t believe you’re taking my heart to pieces

--At night you hang about the house and weep your heart out, and cry your eyes out, and wrack your brain…you sit and wonder how anyone as wonderful as he could cause you such misery and pain

--Child of the wilderness, born into emptiness, learn to be lonely…learn to find your way in darkness

--One begins to read between the pages of a look...I saw you coming back to me.

--In this world, if you read the papers, you know everybody’s fighting with each other…so if someone comes along who’ll give you some love and affection, I say get it while you can

Naive.Super

It’s funny how a casual mention of a novel in an article can lead one to a very creepy reading experience.

I saw this article on The Millions two weeks ago, which notes Erlend Loe’s Naïve.Super. After noticing the shipping time on amazon, I marched myself to the library and filled out the interlibrary loan request. Book came on Thursday, I started to read it yesterday and finished it this morning.

My first impression of the novel – as I was reading it walking through the library parking lot – was that it would be cute; right up my alley. As I started to read it seriously, though, it began to feel a bit derivative – a little too much like a combination of Wittgenstein’s Mistress (in structure), and a hero from the Jonathan Safran Foer/Jonthan Letham/Mark Haddon mold. Though that really isn’t fair, since Naïve.Super was published in 1996, and the quirky, neurotic and/or autistic characters were all created (or published) in the decade after. So maybe they are the derivative work. Don’t know. I just feel like I’ve been encountering this voice quite a lot.

But then on Sunday came the moment where I had to put the book down. This feeling had been slowly creeping up on me, but I didn’t catch it – identify it – until this moment:

TV is a good thing. I ought to watch TV more often. I get pleasantly diverted. I can’t quite tell whether the thoughts I’m having are my own or if they’re coming from the TV. Animal programmes are the best. David Attenborough explaining that nature is intricate and that it all fits together. Wasps that navigate according to the sun. they know what they’re doing, the wasps. They know a lot better than I do.

OMG this person is just like me.

Yes Yes Yes on David Attenborough. Does anyone else do this – watch nature documentaries for perspective – to feel that everything is just part of the grand parade of life? Or is it just me and this unnamed character? Is that where the feeling of derivation came from – not from Foer or Lethem or Haddon, but from my own head? I think, really, it’s a combination. Still. FREAKY.


This character is having something of a quarter life crisis. He quits college and moves into his brother’s apartment while his brother is in New York. He’s going somewhat crazy, and finds comfort in throwing a ball against a wall, playing with a hammer-and-peg set, and reading about the universe. I do that too – read about the universe that is – when I’m feeling out of sorts. Nothing, really, is more comforting for me than the stars and string theory. Have you seen the Google Sky Map app? These last few months I’ve been looking at it a lot, just moving my phone around and seeing what I’m surrounded by whether I can see them or not. Does this sound strange? Maybe. But you should try it sometime.

This is that feeling that was creeping up on me. I have never encountered myself in a novel as much as I have here. And that’s really, really freaky.

II.

“I think he’s got problems with time himself, but that he still hasn’t found out. One day he’ll be the one who hits the wall.”

Things have been weird for me the last few months, though they are working themselves out. I’ve learned a lot about myself, and a lot about how I deal with other people, and how my own limits and suspicions both protect me and hinder me.

I think quite a lot. I have very few waking moments during which I’m not thinking about anything; and usually those few moments of “quiet” are interrupted by someone asking, “what are you thinking about?” Perhaps I’m most deep in thought when I look like I’m not thinking. And vice versa. Sometimes this is a problem – when I need that quiet and am unable to get it within my own brain, or when the constant din goes off the rails and the only respite is to listen to AM radio from Quebec – the more static the better. Perhaps that makes me sound crazy.

It’s taken me most of my life to understand that not everyone thinks as much – or about the same things – as I do. That not everyone is as concerned about what the universe is expanding into, or if hell is a state of mind can you think yourself out of it? And what is color and does it exist objectively? (I don’t believe that it does – I’m a color subjectivist...there are others out there with me on this one. People smarter than me and you.) When I talk about these things which genuinely interest me and sometimes keep me awake at night people mostly just stare at me. Or tell me I think too much.

Well, damn it (here’s where my frustration of the last three months comes out…) maybe I think just the right amount. I should start telling people, “Maybe you don’t think enough.” Maybe the world would grind to a screeching halt if it were filled with people who think as much as I do, but most people could probably use a little more sincere reflection on themselves and the universe and their place in it.

So in this little crazy tornado, I came to realize that thinking too much isn’t necessarily a problem. It can be, but it isn’t necessarily. I’m not an extrovert. I never will be, and it’s silly of me to try to pretend that I am or could be - or even that I understand extroverts. I don’t. I’ve given up. But by giving up on trying to be what I’m not, I’ve accepted (at least a little bit) what I am. My personality certainly has its downsides, but it also has its upsides. And I wouldn’t give one inch of my ocean of contemplation for one more extra of extroversion. Somehow Naïve.Super brought that home.

A parting thought from Loe’s too-familiar-for-comfort novel:

“There is no time. There is a life and a death. There are people and animals. Our thoughts exist. And the world. The universe, too. But there is no time. You might as well take it easy. Do you feel better now? I feel better. This is going to work out. Have a nice day.”

:-)

Anagrams

"Life is sad. Here is someone."


I've said before that things are weird. I don't know how else to describe my life right now. Just weird. (Getting better, though, a bit.) I'm always particular about what books I read when, in what mood, but when things are like they are now, that selectivity is heightened. I cannot read just any book, and I will flit between ten or more books until I find the one that feels just right. For that reason, in times like this, I find myself going back to my happy places: Kerouac, Ondaatje, The Virgin Suicides,The Great Gatsby. The English Patient has been calling to me like a siren in the last few months, but I have had to resist the temptation. I know what happens when I read that book...despite what some may believe, sometimes I really do know what's best for myself. I'm not always into self-sabotage.

Anagrams was a test for me. I would pick it up, read a few pages, and put it back: "Not now." A few days later, I would pick it up again and read a few more pages, and put it back. "Not now." Well why not now, damn it? Because it's too upbeat? I want to say, yes, too upbeat, but to call this book upbeat is, well, to be Kristin I suppose. Turns out, I needed this book.


I'll admit, at first I thought I got this book. I became slightly more confused with each chapter…ok, so Benna teaches geriatric aerobics, AND teaches art history at a community college, AND is a nightclub singer. And Gerard teaches aerobics to kids AND is a nightclub singer AND in a rock opera version of Dido and Aeneas...hard economic times, you know? (FYI...Dido and Aeneas are EVERYWHERE for me right now.) It all, sort of, made sense in my mind...first Gerard must have been Benna's student, married with a daughter, then gotten divorced and started up with Benna, and eventually moved into her apartment house. Then they broke it off, but still drink near beer together every morning. But then I get to the second part, and Benna says that her friend Eleanor is imaginary. Wait – what? And where did this daughter – who is also imaginary – come from? At first I thought this was one of Benna's witticisms, because it seemed the type of quip she would make. But I kept going, and it was clear she was serious. So, I had to look it up. Duh! Sometimes I read into things too much ("I'm cool? What does that mean?") and sometimes I accept too much at face value. There must be a middle ground somewhere that I just cannot seem to find.

So here's what's really going on: Benna teaches poetry at a community college. She makes friends with Gerard. She has an affair with one of her students. She has an imaginary friend Eleanor, and an imaginary daughter. This is all learned in the second half of the book. The first half of the book is a series of short stories, really, about people named Benna and Gerard and Eleanor, etc. in parallel lives, essentially. It's derivative of reality, or nonreality since Eleanor is imaginary anyway.

The writing was amazing. Yes, this story is desperately bleak. Benna is so lonely and isolated that she makes up imaginary children. But it's funny as hell. I get this humor. I could have written this. Well, not really, but three quarters of it is stuff that would come out of my own mouth. Even in the depths of despair, sometimes, I cannot help but be sarcastically funny. Here are some examples that I underlined. (I underlined a lot in Anagrams.)

• "Yes, well," said Gerard, attempting something lighthearted. "I guess that's why they call it work. I guess that's why they don't call it table tennis."




• Eleanor and I around this time founded The Quit-Calling-Me-Shirley School of Comedy. It entailed the two of us meeting downtown for drinks and making despairing pronouncements about life and love which always began, "But surely…" It entailed what Eleanor called, "The Great White Whine": whiney white people getting together over white wine and whining.




• "I think a few well-considered and prominently displayed uncertainties are always in order."




• "...Remember: It's important not to be afraid of looking like an idiot." This was my motto in life.




• Aeneas shouldered his guitar and riffed and whined after Dido throughout the entire show: "Don't you see why I have to go to Europe?/I must ignore the sentiment you stir up." Actually it was awful. But nonetheless I sniffled at her suicide, and when she sang at Aeneas, "Just go then! Go if you must! My heart will surely turn to dust," and Aeneas indeed left, I sat in my seat, thinking "You ass, Aeneas, you don't have to be so literal."




• Things, however, rarely happened the way you understood them. Mostly they just sort of drove up alongside what you thought was the case and then moved randomly down some other way.




• No idiocy was too undignified for me.




• I didn't want my life to show.




• He also has a cold, and has pulled the hood of his sweat shirt up over his head and tied it. "You look like the Little League version of The Seventh Seal"




• ...feel my heart fluttering. It's a Tennessee Williams heart. A bad Tennessee Williams heart. I don't know what to say. The music urges love on you like food.




• "I've never put much store by honesty. I mean, how can you trust a word whose first letter you don't even pronounce?"




• It is as if our separate pasts were greeting each other, as if we were saying, This is how I have been with other people, this is how I would love you. If I loved you. Everything always seemed to boil down to boil down to Rodgers and Hammerstein. Off you would go in the mist of day and all that.




• You have a choice," she told her class. "The whorish emptiness of lies or the straight-laced horrors of truth."




• "You made her up? You made up an imaginary daughter?"
  "Of course not," I say. "What, you think I'm an idiot? I made up a real daughter...I don't go around making up imaginary daughters...That would be too abstract. Even for me."

Shawn has been showing more of an interest in what I'm reading; I know why he's doing it and I really appreciate it. And he's asking me about this book that I will not put down, and why it's called Anagrams, and what it's about. As I'm trying to describe it, and how it's a bunch of stories about the same people, but not the same people, etc., and he says, "like Mulholland Drive?" YES. THANK YOU. EXACTLY LIKE MULHOLLAND DRIVE. Except funnier. But the basic idea of doppelgangers living tangential lives is the same.

So, why did I need this book? I can't explain it. I love Benna. I love Gerard. I love Eleanor. I want a friend like Eleanor, who would yell out of cars at joggers, "Hey, go home and read Middlemarch." In college I had a friend who would have done something like that, but it wouldn't have been about Middlemarch. No, seriously, I need someone in my life who will yet at random people at George Eliot. Who will know who George Eliot is to begin with. That is why I needed this book. Thank you, Lorrie Moore.

A conversation on The Great Gatsby

SHAWN: what is the Great Gatsby was about? 

KRISTIN: A guy named Gatsby, but that wasn't really his name. 

SHAWN: What happened to him?

KRISTIN: He died. 

SHAWN: How did he die? 

KRISTIN: He got shot. 

SHAWN: Who shot him? 

KRISTIN: His mistress's husband's mistress's husband.  He thought Gatsby was having an affair with his wife; but it was Gatsby's mistress's husband that was having the affair with his wife.

SHAWN: That's complicated. 

Poetry Friday

I've been thinking about Dido and Aeneas today, so here's some lyrics from Purcell's Dido's Lament.

When I am Laid In Earth

When I am laid, am laid in earth,
may my wrongs create
No trouble, no trouble in, in thy breast.
Remember me, remember me, but ah!
Forget my fate.

Still Life

Maybe two months ago, I saw the film Brief Encounter. I was devastated. But i've been feeling devastated a lot lately. Things are weird. But Brief Encounter...I haven't been able to get away from it. Last week, I think it was, I couldn't take it anymore and bought the Noel Coward play it was based on - Still Life. It arrived today and I couldn't not just sit down and read it. Which I did immediately, ignoring everyone.

This is a play of restraint. Alec and Laura meet when she gets something in her eye at the train station and he (a doctor) helps her get it out. One accidental meeting, and then another. And before long they are in love. But they're both married with children. (In the movie Laura says, "I was happily married until I met you" or something like that.). In the end, he and Laura agree it's best if Alec moves with his family to a new job in Africa. At their last meeting, a silly gossip friend of Laura's shows up, and Alec and Laura can only shake hands.

There were many parts that got me...one in particular that is so personal right now I won't quote it just so I can keep it to myself. But here is one that I'm willing to share:

ALEC: ...Please know that you'll be with me for ages and ages yet - far away into the future. Time will wear down the agony of not seeing you, bit by bit the pain will go-but the loving you and the memory of you won't ever go- please know that...I love you with all my heart and soul.

LAURA: I want to die - if only I could die.

ALEC: If you died you'd forget me - I want to be remembered.

LAURA: Yes, I know.

This play is a comfort to me right now- there's so much going on. I will carry this around with me for awhile...physically and emotionally.

Poetry Friday

A long time ago, I was doing a series called "Poetry Friday." I've been thinking about starting it up again. While going through my blog files and drafts and things, I came across the following post I never published from 2008. I've been thinking about this poem lately, so I figure what the heck - I'll post it now. Without further ado, the reinstitution of Poetry Friday...on a Monday.



I know I said that I wouldn't often post my own poems (which I don't write anymore), but today I am going to again. I happened to catch "The Universe: Parallel Worlds" or whatever it was called on the History Channel on Tuesday night. I wish I understood physics/astrophysics/ cosmology. But what they were talking about reminded me of a poem I wrote 8 years ago. The basic premise is here described by Max Tegmark in a 2003 article for Scientific American:

"Is there a copy of you reading this article? A person who is not you but who
lives on a planet called Earth, with misty mountains, fertile fields and
sprawling cities, in a solar system with eight other planets? The life of this
person has been identical to yours in every respect. But perhaps he or she now
decides to put down this article without finishing it, while you read on.

"The idea of such an alter ego seems strange and implausible, but it looks as if we will just have to live with it, because it is supported by astronomical observations. The simplest and most popular cosmological model today predicts that you have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the 1028 meters from here. This distance is so large that it is beyond astronomical, but that does not make your doppelgänger any less real. The estimate is derived from elementary probability and does not even assume speculative modern physics, merely that space is infinite (or at least sufficiently large) in size and almost uniformly filled with matter, as observations indicate. In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere. There are infinitely many other inhabited planets, including not just one but infinitely many that have people with the same appearance, name and memories as you, who play out every possible permutation of your life choices."

Here's the poem:

Infinite Amount of Chances
"If you accept that the universe is infinite, then that means there's an infitite amount of chances for things to happen...if there's an infinite amount of chances for something to happen, then eventually it will happen - no matter how small the likelihood." - Alex Garland

Am I with you now?
Can you feel me kiss you goodnight?
Sleepwalking I stumble into your bedroom

Infinately we are together - you and I
In the darkness of every star's a sun with planets
Makes you feel small

Out there you are holding my hand thru periodic sadnesses
Somewhere at sometime you were or will be allowed to love me -
I will be allowed to love you

Infinity is a button on my calculator
And tonight I am lost and alone
Knowing one day you will find me
No matter how small the likelihood

Professor Unrat

Lately, I seem to be knee deep in German or German-related books. Bust be something in the German literary psyche that's calling to me lately. Don't know what else it could be. So, for that unknown reason, I recently lighted on Heinrich Mann's 1905 Professor Unrat, made famous by Marlene Dietrich's breakout performance in the film adaptation, The Blue Angel.

Unrat, which translates into something close to "garbage" - my version translated it as "mud" - is a tyrannical professor, vilified by his students and former students who insist on tormenting him constantly. He hates - HATES!!!! - being called by his nickname, and will seek out everyone that calls him that and mete out whatever punishment he can. They shout at him in the street, mocking him everywhere.

His arch nemesis is a student named Lohmann, who actually makes a point never to call him "mud" - he's above it somehow. One day, Lohmann turns in his notebook after an exam and Unrat notices a poem tin it addressed to an actress, Rosa Frohlich. Boys in the school are not supposed to be dilly dallying at theaters, and so Unrat sets out to catch Lohmann and his two accomplices. Unrat searches the town for where this infamous Rosa may be, and he eventually finds her at the Blue Angel. His goal is simple: bring down Lohmann by catching him in after-hours dalliances with a woman of low-repute. But that's not what happens. Rosa, instead, catches Unrat.

The students know what's up, and because of it Unrat completely loses control. He eventually is forced to leave his post and uses all his money catering to Rosa. Lohmann resurfaces, Unrat tries to kill him and really just ends up stealing his wallet. As he runs down the street, he is like always tormented with insults. Unrat's unwavering righteousness - his need to ruin those who have mocked him - is excellently portrayed. A very powerful story.



Though I love The Blue Angel (which is why I cannot help posting the clip at the bottom - her expressions in the German version are much better than the English), the motivation behind Unrat is completely different between film and novel. Though at first he really is interested and flattered by Rosa (called Lola Lola in the film), in the novel his undoing is his absolute desire to ruin everyone and he is able to do so via his relations with Rosa. In the film, it's his devotion to Rosa/Lola herself that is his undoing without mention of his overriding obession. That just gets him into her dressing room. Both work and both knock your socks off, but for different reasons.

With that, here you go:

Wittgenstein's Mistress

I'll be honest. This abandonment of the reading desert is not without its catalysts. By far not. It's been spurred by a whirlwind in my head, the kind that makes me want to shut myself off from the rest of the world and listen to AM stations out of Quebec with a lot of static. It's been part injuries and illnesses and potential illnesses – my own and others –overbooking myself, and living with a toddler who is intent on driving me absolutely bonkers for an hour and a half about eating breakfast (or, really, pretending to eat breakfast…and dinner, and every other time I try to feed him), and then asking for a bear hug and a kiss. Maybe also that for a month or two, my part of the world suddenly assumed Seattle's climate, without the perks of a really great scene and coffee shops on every block, and now suddenly it's Louisiana.  It's part other stuff too.

Usually I feel this way in the fall and early winter even numbered years, but for some reason here I am in spring of an odd numbered year. Which is disorienting in itself. I always look to books for bearings, but strangely, the books I look for are fractured themselves. Now is not the time for funny, or upbeat. (Do I ever do upbeat, though?)

I tried to read Wittgenstein's Mistress last year (of course, in the fall/early winter of an even numbered year), but it didn't work for me at the time. Sometimes you have these things. So I've been flitting from one book to the next lately (literally with piles stacked next to my bed of maybe 15 books), but this time WM stuck. It's fractured, too, and feels like a cocoon. Which is what I really need right now.

Kate, the narrator, contends that she is the last person alive – or at least as far as she can tell. We have to take her at her word for it, because she's all we've got.  Every review I read for the novel said we are "lead to believe" that Kate was the last person, leaving me to expect some clues in the end that she really was just insane.  Yes, some devastating things happened to Kate (the death of her child, etc.) and some of these reviews suggested that with that devastation, Kate lost it and therefore we cannot take her word for the state of the world.  It's possible, of course, but there isn't anything particular hinting one way or the other.  We can take her at her word, or not.

 

WM doesn't have a plot.  The idea that she's the last person alive is just the starting point for Kate's thoughts.  This isn't a story about she is became the last person alive, or how she has dealt with being the last person alive.  It's Kate, alone, in a house on the beach perhaps a decade or more after she stopped looking for other people, typing her disjointed thoughts, which are not about her life but about philosophy, art, music and the Trojan War.  This may seem odd, but I thought it was perfectly normal.  When you're disjointed – as one might be if one were the last person alive, or, of course, if one is crazy enough to think one were the last person alive when really one isn't – these are the types of things that may come up.  Sometimes, in such situations, it's much, much easier – and more soothing, more calming – to think of facts, to think of things completely unrelated to anything, independent of you, the feeler, instead of focusing on what is happening in that moment that has made one feel disjointed. Here, Markson perfectly captures what happens to our brains when we – ok, I – feel isolated and alone.  It's perfect pitch.

 

What's most amazing about WM is that it works even if you don't know anything about Wittgenstein (though it works much better if you do).  Though I read The Odyssey, I haven't read The Iliad, or many of the other ancient Greek works that are referenced here – that would have heightened my understanding, but it worked even without it.  This novel made me want to put away Arabian Nights and get my Bulfinch's Mythology out again. 

 

I loved this book.  It was everything I expected it to be, which is often not the case.  I'm sure that when once again I get to another fall/winter of an even numbered year, I will pick it up to find my bearings in the color of the cat Kate saw at the Coliseum.  

 

 

 

The Great Gatsby

There are some books that it’s difficult to write about, not for lack of things to actually say about it, but because writing about it feels like exposing the innermost reaches of one’s core. There are a handful of books that make me feel this way, The Great Gatsby being one of them. I’m not sure that there is a book that I feel more connected to – that I feel is more personal to me and my own story; only The English Patient comes close. The Great Gatsby feels like a road map of my own heart – and heartache. It’s hard to know where to begin in this review, because it is so intertwined with my life, I don’t know how to tell the story of The Great Gatsby without telling my own. This isn’t a “review” of the novel. This is my story of The Great Gatsby.

I have to take a big breath just to begin.

Gatsby came to me in 10th grade Honors English. I was 15. A romantic 15. I had already been in love twice. The third time came when I was 15…it had probably already arrived by the time we got to Fitzgerald (though #3 was really just trying to recapture #1). Perhaps you may think I’m being melodramatic, to say that three (out of four!) of the times I have been in love with someone occurred by the time I was 15, but looking back even now, as I approach 30, it’s true. There were two other times – at 18 and at 21 – when I thought I was in love, but in hindsight I know that I wasn’t. But if those first two times I fell in love were not love, than I don’t know what love is. (Do not cue Foreigner here). This was the lens through which I was reading Fitzgerald – three unrequited loves, and only 15 years old!

When I was 12, I fell in love for the first time. The person I fell in love with was much older than me. I don’t know if he ever even knew I existed, though I made every attempt possible (in the pre-internet days when I couldn’t cyber-stalk him) to make myself noticed. I was a non-entity, as 12-year-olds tend to. That whole situation has colored my entire life since. I will go no further into details. But I was an incredible fool (“colossal vitality of his illusion”). I was reading Romeo & Juliet for god’s sake. I believed that if only I had enough faith, if only I tried hard enough, IF ONLY, we would be together. I believed we were “meant to be” in a way that only an innocent child can believe such a thing and not be incredibly creepy. And you cannot argue with a 12 year old who is convinced of something, especially one as stubborn as me. (“It was an extraordinary gift for hope…”)

When I realized it wasn’t going to work out the way I had planned, there I was – Gatsby reaching out to the green dock light across the Sound. There I was, setting up my entire life so that this person would happen to someday show up at my party. That is where Gatsby really began for me, where he entered my life. I was Jay Gatsby before I ever knew of him.

I’ve been revisiting the novel in the last few weeks, reading it to Brendan at night as he falls asleep. This might be close to the tenth time I’ve read this novel. I find myself tearing up at certain passages. Though this book has always moved me, something about reading it out loud, 17 years down the road, has brought tears to my eyes more than once. I can feel Gatsby’s longing over the years…I can feel his heartbreak that hot afternoon at the Plaza. I mean that I can literally feel it. My heart is breaking for him as I write this. And in a sense, breaking for myself at 12 at the same time. The images from The Great Gatsby have become part of my own personal mythology.

Here are some of the quotes I’ve underlined in the book over the years. Some are fabulous sentences, some evocative images and some have just spoken to me as if Fitzgerald just got it. It’s the best I can do in terms of a review.

• It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.




• On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages alongshore, the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby’s house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn.




• The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.




• The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.




• A pause; it endured horribly.




• He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity.




• Daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.




• No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart. (My.favorite.line.from.a.novel.ever.)




• But the rest offended her–and inarguably, because it wasn’t a gesture but an emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented “place” that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village–appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.




• He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: “I never loved you.” After she had obliterated three years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house–just as if it were five years ago.




• “I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.”
  
  “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
  
  He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
  
  “I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.”




• He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was. . . .




• Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.
  
  "You always look so cool,” she repeated.
  
  She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw.




• ”An Oxford man!” He was incredulous. “Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.”




• But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.




• There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered.




• He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him.

I appreciate a good book, a well written book. A book that sucks you in with its language and paints for you a world that you know, or don’t know; gives you a new light, or illuminates an old one. But then there are books that speak to you – that feel as if they were plucked secretly out of your heart. In Gatsby, it seemed as though Fitzgerald had beautifully rendered in poetry my own experience. To feel that someone gets what you’re going through so much that they can turn such pain and despair into something as magnificent as Gatsby is an amazing, amazing feeling. When I was younger, Gatsby was a comfort, providing a kindred spirit – a story, a despair, a drive, that I was intimately familiar with. Now it serves as a reminder of and connection to some core self that has been wrapped and buried under layers and layers of years and experiences I once never could have conceived of.


Once upon a time, when I was 12, I had a nightmare that I still vividly recall 17 years later. This person I was in love with was visiting – not visiting me, but back in the area. This person was “20 minutes away,” and I couldn’t get to him. No one would drive me to where he was. There was my chance – if I could only get there – and I couldn’t. It’s a feeling of complete and utter helplessness…one’s future is waiting just out of reach, and you just cannot get to it.

Last year I heard through the grapevine that this person was coming back – literally 20 minutes away. And I could have easily found my way back into that situation, once again seeking out the opportunity to say, “Does my name mean anything to you? Did you ever know that my life revolved around you, and that its trajectory is entirely because of you?”

Inside of me, my 12 year old self is always tugging at my sleeve, still looking for answers that at 29, I know will never come (“He’s afraid, he’s waited so long”). And to some extent, I don’t know that I want to know the answer. The likely truth would no longer be helpful. But she – the little lost girl still cowering inside me – still seeks those answers.

I thought about taking that next chance to find answers, if only for her, in honor of who I once was. But my life is at a good place now and I do not want the emotional implosion that always comes along with these questions – from opening up these old wounds again. At some point, I had to take Gatsby as a lesson rather than a reflection. At some point, I had to learn to ignore the green light. The light will always be there, since it’s myself – my past, the life I once believed I would have but never did – that is glowing across the Sound. But I have learned that I don’t need to stand at night and reach out to it. At some point, I had to just turn around.

Gatsby pursued Daisy, believing he could go back into the past and fix it, only to have reality shoved in his face at the Plaza that hot, hot day. (A day that feels more palpable, more real to me than any day I’ve ever read of in fiction.) For me, in the end I decided not to try once again to find answers, since I know what they will likely be. All of this is kept in a tightly closed box inside me, and I now prefer to keep it that way. That chapter of my life is best not reopened.

I found out that he had a baby girl recently (and gave her a dumb, dumb name). I felt nothing. At last, I realize, it’s behind me.

The Piano Teacher

So. The Piano Teacher was not AT ALL what I expected. What I thought was going to a teacher/pupil love affair story turned into something much darker, much stranger than I ever imagined.

Erika Kohut is a piano teacher in her mid-30s. She’s drab, maybe frumpy, exacting and particular. She has no friends, she has no life besides music. She was trained to be a successful concert pianist, but was never much more than mediocre and so became an instructor at a conservatory in Vienna. From the outside, she is a picture of respectability. But after work, she roams the seedy districts, visits peep shows, and engages in a variety of other voyeuristic activities.

Erika lives at home with her creepy, domineering mother with whom she often has hair-pulling fist fights over what time she came home and what dress she bought. Did I mention Erika is approaching 40? And that she and her mother sleep in the same bed, despite the fact that Erika has her own room? Mrs. Kohut has always believed her daughter was the best – or at least did everything she could to convince Erika of it – and has constantly been disappointed with her daughter’s inability to realize her full potential. She wants to keep her daughter all to herself.

And then along comes Walter Kelmmer, a handsome, blonde engineering student who is also a talented pianist and taking lessons with Erika. Walter sees a challenge in Erika and begins to pursue her. He thought he bargained for a woman who was just waiting for someone like him to come along and help her loosen up, I suppose. He didn’t want anyone to know of his affection for his teacher for fear it might hurt his reputation with the other ladies – especially those his own age. But he had no idea what he was in for.

Erika catches on that Walter is interested, and while at first it sort of serves as a joke between her and her mother, she eventually begins to see the possibilities. In a moment of jealousy, she puts shattered glass in the pocket of someone she thinks Walter is also interested in (another student). Because, you know, that’s what normal people do, right? After a good start in a bathroom, the “relationship” gets on a strange trajectory when Erika writes Walter a letter detailing all the, ah, peculiarities she has been saving up for.

Walter reads the letter and keeps asking, “Are you serious?” But oh yes, she is – she shows him the box of accoutrements.

I don't want to give the rest away, because I was pretty surprised by the ending, and by what lead up to the ending. I didn't see any of that coming. Nor had I seen Erika's box coming. Nor, I suppose, had I seen The Piano Teacher coming.

The novel to me to revolved around power – who had the power. Mrs. Kohut wants to maintain absolute power over her daughter, but isn’t able to. As the authority figure in the relationship, one would typically conclude that Erika has the power in her “relationship” with Walter. As the male, Walter feels he has the power. Erika believes that by allowing Walter to believe he is in the power position, it will really be her. She tries to set the rules of the relationship with her letter, giving him the physical power but on her terms. And Walter does what she asks, but of course it doesn’t turn out to be what she wanted. Walter knew that would be the case, and of course with that knowledge, and with his act, he felt that he was in control. And with her final act, Erika has put herself back in control. Sort of.


Something about the text was a bit odd, with its drawn out and sometimes awkward metaphors; at times I wasn’t sure if that was the fault of the translation or the original text. Things like that can get extremely annoying and distracting, but I didn’t find it so in this case. The descriptions are lengthy, though there wasn’t a point where I wanted Jelinek to get on with it, and despite the graphic depictions of everything, I never found myself rolling my eyes. In 1988, the New York Times reviewer saw Erika’s violent fantasies as having been concocted by the author just for the shock value. I didn’t get that at all. Nothing seemed out of place, and I never thought to myself that something seemed contrived to get a reaction, in the way that American Psycho did.
What struck me, at least for the first two-thirds or so of the book was how little happened, without it seeming like nothing was happening. The bathroom scene isn’t until more than half-way through, and it isn’t until the last 50 pages that any action really gets going. It reminded me of real life - the fact that the overarching story of ourselves and the events that make up those stories are really few and far between. That the majority of our lives are mundane and average. Perhaps that's why I didn't feel that the long descriptions or the lack of action for most of the novel was out of place. It felt like reality.

I’m still not sure what to think about The Piano Teacher – as in I’m not sure if I liked it or not. I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed it, but I found myself not wanting to put it down, which should say something. I was surprised by the ending; I was surprised by lead up to the ending; I was surprised by Erika, which again is saying something. The novel was made into a film in the last decade, which won a number of international awards. I don’t think that I want to see this novel visually, though. Reading it was enough for me.