Proust's sublime beings:

A recently encountered sentence in the fourth volume of Proust's A la recherche:

"...therefore one meets in polite society only a few novelists, a few poets, of those sublime beings who speak precisely about what one should not talk about."

Proust, p. 215 in Vol IV, Sodome et Gomorrhe (nrf, my translation).

This volume focuses on sexuality and some of it is decidedly dark. The inevitable suffering makes me a reluctant reader at times.The protagonist has a skewed relationship with a young woman, which involves lies of a various kinds.The writing grinds along and reading can be hard work.


But in the early part of the book - I have not finished it yet - Proust describes a meeting between two ageing homosexuals in a beautiful sequence of images: a man leaning against a door post, looking out from his workshop into a courtyard as another man passes by, who is a rich aristocrat with a reputation to protect. Their eyes meet and each recognises and desires the other. A slow dance ensues between them, a pavane where desire and fear are in conflict. The fear emanates from the lie they are obliged to live in 19th century Paris, the risk they are taking in reaching out to each other in a public place, in the light of day.

Consider the hands that write this letter

by Aracelis Girmay

Consider the hands
that write this letter.
The left palm pressed flat against the paper,
as it has done before, over my heart
in peace or reverence
to the sea or some beautiful thing
I saw once, felt once: snow falling
like rice flung from the giants' wedding,
or the strangest birds. & consider, then,
the right hand, & how it is a fist
within which a sharpened utensil,
similar to the way I've held a spade,
match to the wick, the horse's reins
loping...

Go to poets.org for the rest of this poem
it's worth it .

Aracelis Girmay was a finalist in the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for her collection Kingdom Animalia published by BOA Editions in October 2011. Her first book of poetry was entitled Teeth and published by Curbstone Press in 2007. She is an assistant professor of poetry at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. Her current interests in poetry include poetry of the Americas, contemporary African American poetry, and poetry of the "political imagination."

A Swedish critique

Reading my way through the crime decalogue of Sjöwall and Wahlöö, the famous Swedish writers, creators of police detective Martin Beck. This latest reading spree was triggered by finding the first volume in a bookshops' discount bin on a pavement in Picton. (Fortunately, Wellington's central library has most of the others, recently republished by Harper Perennial).

Many emotions are swirling around us here at the moment as people we care about suddenly lose their jobs and are in financial trouble. So I escape briefly into this other world. I have read five books so far, without analysing very much. It is a relief that they are both intelligent and light.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö were a wife and husband team. Their aim was to provide an accurate description of police at work (what is called 'police procedural') while also depicting Swedish society and its problems: they were communists and readers may often themselves siding with the common man, the worker struggling to makes ends meet whereas rich insensitive folk live it up.

Given what is happening in the world economically, their point of view seems pretty accurate to me: destruction of the middle classes, while a vast proletariat is created which exists purely as a market for the goods and services churned out by the wealthy one percenters. A return to the social structure of the Victorian era.

The Occupy movement had a point, even though their efforts were disjointed and lacked clear goals.

Added some days later : Read their last book in the Martin Beck series, The Terrorists. Some parts of it read like a political tract, but it is still a page-turner. And their last word is 'Marx'.

A poor review

A stupendously inane review of James Wood ‘s latest book The Fun Stuff and Other Essays (Jonathan Cape, 2013) appeared in the Dominion Post’s your weekend supplement  of March 16^th, by someone called Chris Humphreys whom I was unable to track down online.

A truly embarrassing performance, particularly as NZ has so many people who are able to do better:  the staff and many of the students at Victoria's International Institute of Modern Letters and those at English Lit departments in universities across the country.

Humphreys writes:

 “One gets the impression that not only has he [Wood] read a novel several times over…”
Note to Chris: many people with an interest in literature may read the books they admire several times.

 “…but that he has read everything written about that particular novel" - Wood is an eminent literary critic and it goes without saying that he will have read widely.  

Chris, you might yourself benefit from looking up what others have written about this book. 

“…the entire absence of an agenda…” So naive, Chris, like a schoolgirl with a crush.  It is unlikely that Wood sees himself 'without an agenda'. We all have a point of view and tend to have an agenda derived from it. 

There is more - worse? - including the title of the review. It is appalling. Ignorant, uneducated, presumptuous.

An extraordinary book

I've spent the last two months lying limp on the sofa for most of the days and the nights, and was able to read as much as I wanted to, all meals brought to me on a tray.  I have not had the licence to read this much before and by a stroke of great luck, the right book presented itself. An extraordinary book: Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane.

I have no links to Ireland. My background includes a similarly complex political situation, which descends periodically into mayhem and violence. I am aware of the dangers of over-simplification and lacked the patience to learn about the intricacies of the Irish conflict. I was unsure I'd be a good reader of this book.

My friend LS was visiting and she picked it up and read the first page. I saw her disappear into the book, right in front of me, from the first sentence onwards:  "On the stairs, there was a clear, plain silence". Very encouraging.

The novel has three parts, each divided into two chapters and each chapter subdivided into short vignettes which have brief sharp titles, mostly single words, like the crack of a whip: Stairs, Feet, Mother. Sometimes the title was longer and I wondered why.

The narrative was enthralling - both the story on the surface and the constant feeling that something else was happening underneath. I wanted to dig, to discover what was hidden, tantalising. The narrator in the book is himself 'enthralled'. The reading of this book was almost a parallel experience - powerful and a bit scary. Sometimes I could hardly breathe.

I read the book over and over, analysing and dissecting what I was reading, and I found that as I became more aware of the meaning of the words, it became almost like a reading of the Bible, the Torah - though not in a religious sense. I have been trained in Biblical exegesis and this text seemed to require and reward a similar approach. The words are fluent and gripping, and when you look again, a second or third time, you come to realise how intentional they are, how purposeful the structure of the sentences. Everything is crafted, down to the minutiae. For instance, things happen in twos in this book: two chapters for each part, people moving in twos - not couples as such - words such as the word labyrinth and others, occurring twice. A sentence repeated in the form of a mirror image. I am not sure why.


Seamus Deane is the general editor for James Joyce's work at Penguin, and wrote the introduction to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The trajectory of the Portrait  is similar to the one in Reading: a gifted young man growing up and gradually distancing himself from the important figures of his childhood, until he leaves home altogether. The labyrinth appears in Portait as well, in the family name of the main character Daedalus. In the introduction to Portrait, Deane explains that in Greek Daedalus means 'cunningly wrought'. This is one of my favourite quotes from Reading (p. 43):

"...I felt as if we lived in an empty space with a long cry from him ramifying through it. At other times, it appeared to be as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the heart of it."

Finally, here is how the Wikipedia entry for this book introduces it:
...The book won the 1996 Guardian Fiction Prize and the 1996 South Bank Show Annual Award for Literature, is a New York Times Notable Book, won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize and the Irish Literature Prize in 1997, besides being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1996. It has been translated into 20 languages.

Names in novels - a view according to Echenoz

I enjoy the names Echenoz gives his charactes in Big Blondes (1997, translation with occasional clumsiness by Mark Polizzotti, The New Press) (Les Grandes Blondes, 1995, Editions de Minuit) and while checking whether one in particular was a total fiction or existed in reality (Personnettaz - so weird, and yes, it is a real name), came across a review in Liberation entirely dedicated to this topic, which you'll find here (in French). Echenoz compiles lists of names he likes as he comes across them, before he may need them. They may not always be the names of actual people: he finds them anywhere - in the train or on the entrance to a factory.

He says: "Reading Henry James' Notebooks, I was struck by the list of names he kept in reserve."
He likes names that work in several languages and over several periods, that have belonged to a variety of people - Arbogast (the heroine's family name in Big Blondes) was the name of a bishop in the 5th century, a general under Theodosius [Roman emperor, 347-395], a French mathematician in the 18th century and the name of the detective in Psycho. First names matter too - they add something, though he says that he is incapable of explaining why the sexy active girl in Big Blondes is called Donatienne, an uncommon name - the name came to him and that is who she was - no question.

Each name is different from all the others and conjures up a specific personality: the reader has no difficulty in remembering who they are.

In Echenoz's following book, Piano (also translated by Polizzotti) one finds that he has been unable to let go of two of the names so carefully chosen and that they reappear, one of them with a wink to his previous incarnation. That book was reviewed in the Independent.

I shall write more when I've finished reading Big Blondes - about the use and practice of irony, which ties in with Vila-Matas' book about Never any end to Paris...

Not a biography

Echenoz's book about Emil Zapotek is called Courir in French and Running in English, with the subtitle Un roman - A novel, published in 2008 by Editions de Minuit, Linda Coverdale's translation appearing a year later under the imprint of The New Press.

It is the story of Zapotek and of Czechslovakia and its people, during a difficult time. Emil Zapotek loved running and loved his country. He was the fastest man on earth (long-distance) for some 6 years or so, winning many Olympic medals. Gentle Emil often smiled and found it hard to say No to people's requests. He saw himself as an ordinary man and remained matter of fact and humble despite his success, becoming a most loved figure in Czechoslovakia.

Like most people of my generation, I recognise the name Zapotek from my childhood. He was world-famous. The Czechs seem to have the rare ability to produce wonderful people, and to recognise and honour them. I am thinking of another Czech hero, Vaclav Havel. Apart from that, I am not very knowledgeable about the Czechs.

When the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in the 50s, and put a stop to the Prague Spring (this was Dubcek's time), Zapotek, then in his forties, spoke up at a protest rally and said that the URSS should be boycotted at the Olympics in Mexico (I remember that happening). He was stripped of his rank as a colonel in the Czech army, lost his job, was banished from Prague and sent to work in a dangerously radioactive mine. After he had been there for some six years, the apparatchiks thought it would be a good idea to humiliate him by giving him work as a garbage collector in Prague. 

The crew he was assigned to refused to let him handle the garbage, and he simply ran behind the truck, while the people hung out of the windows applauding him and bringing the garbage to the truck themselves, so that in the end the authorities recognised their failure and made him a filing clerk somewhere obscure...He had a loving wife called Dana. During the time in the mine he managed to escape three times to visit her in Prague.

This is a story about a person who existed, yet Echenoz describes it as a novel. There is no reference to his sources. He has chosen to leave out many things. There are no years/dates, no listing of the times Zapotek achieved, no clear description of his training method - we learn that the next person to finish a race took 20 minutes longer, or that he was the first man to run 20 km in under an hour...Echenoz calls him Emil - the name Zapotek only occurs 3 times in the entire book, the first time on p. 80 (out of 122). The other names are his wife's, those of a few other runners, and of a couple of statesmen. Also: no quotation marks for speech. There isn't much speech anyway.

The story unfolds chronologically, with few flashbacks. The language tends to be calm, moderate. The words everybody, everywhere are used often - the word everyman seems to be waiting in the wings. This is how good an ordinary human being can be.