My book review project is meant not as a project to “review” books but solely to reassess what I take away as a visceral reaction to a book. No need to intellectualize it or analyze it. Just a quick reaction. It is just my attempt to take something away from a book after reading it. Pure impressions. Sound bytes. The first book is Dangerous Laughter (2008) by Steven Millhauser.
This is a collection of 13 stories divided into 3 quite distinct parts.
The first section of the book recreates dreary, small-town, teenage existence not unlike the world created by Sofia Coppola in The Virgin Suicides. The story, “Dangerous Laughter,” is particularly effective in this respect in its recreation of a town in which groups of adolescents get together and laugh in “laugh parties.” One girl gains such notoriety that her whole being is defined by her ability to laugh. When the trend switches to other forms of entertainment, this girl tries to revive the “laughter parties,” but eventually dies in a laughing fit.
The Second Section, "Impossible Architectures," seems to follow Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities or a potential fiction by Borges about architecture. The first story of this section, "The Dome," imagines the trend of plastic domes in which residents can be outside in the always perfect weather atmosphere created by the domes. As you can imagine, the domes get bigger and bigger. One of the results is that things in the world like trees or hills that once towered are now dwarfed by the Dome. This is the New Miniaturism. The Dome thereby abolishes Nature. Or, at least, nature as we knew it. The world becomes an artifice. The Dome represents the triumph of the consumer society because, as its detractors argue, it has transformed the entire country into a gigantic mall. At a conference in Oslo, architects and engineers dream of a transparent globe which would surround the entire earth.
The last story of this section, "The Tower," imagines a village that builds a tower so high as to touch heaven. It is so high that it takes many generations to climb to the top. There is a hierarchy of those that live at the bottom and those that live in the middle and the top.
The last section of the book, “Heretical Histories,” imagines new dimensions for science and invention. “A Precursor to the Cinema” is the apocryphal biography of an artist/inventor whose paintings achieve such a level of verisimilitude that they come to life. His invention/show, The Phantoptic Theatre, allows viewers to actually walk through the paintings.
“The Wizard of West Orange” is about an inventor, a wizard, who invents a device that records and reproduces the sense of touch. Like a phonograph, the haptograph works by the principles of mimicry and invention. What makes it beautiful, as the narrator-librarian in the wizard’s laboratory notes, is the new combinations of sensorial experiences which break through the frontiers of touch. The invention is destroyed in an assistant’s rage which leaves the narrator to wonder if the wizard really wanted the invention to hit the market or not, anyway.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Milan Kundera: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Instead of writing my dissertation I should have just directed my readers to Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which touches on a lot of the same themes but in a much more eloquent manner.
This novel has everything that literature should have; it is a book about love and memory, a book with angels and demons, and a novel with poetry. Milan Kundera is a Czech writer who left his country to escape from the communist government that was in place until 1989. He currently resides in France. Early on in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, one of his characters states: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” This seems to be the plight of all those who have left something—a land, a lover, a situation. In contrast to this treatise on memory, Kundera points out the sensuality of laughter, referencing Parole de femme to point out: “To oppose male sexual desire, which is devoted to the fleeting moments of erection and thus fatally engaged with violence, annihilation, and extinction, the author exalts, as its antipode female jouissance—gentle, pervasive, and continuing sensual pleasure.”
Kundera goes on to philosophize on poetry and laughter in his chapter on Litost, really a theory on poetry, which he suggests comes to our aid when we cannot escape litost, an untranslatable Czech word that refers to a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery. It is usually experienced by youth because older people are more accustomed to the imperfection of mankind and the sight of one’s own misery.
Another tangent from Kundera’s work is his theory on variations. While a symphony is an epic voyage into the infinitude of the exterior, from one thing to the depths of another, the variation leads into the infinitude of the interior world. It is the voyage inward. The infinite of largeness is what Beethoven became obsessed with later in life and the variation became another medium for him to explore this infinitude. The composer only uses the essentials to dig a shaft leading into the interior of the world. This leads to Kundera’s observation: “Man knows he cannot embrace the universe with its sun and stars. Much more unbearable is for him to be condemned to lack the other infinitude, that infinitude near at hand, within reach.” We can never get to the perfection we pursue in our work or spirit. And that is what is beautiful.
Kundera’s novel is a book of variations on laughter, love and forgetting. Forgetting Prague, mostly, and all the demons that came with it together with the angels that made it bearable.
I’ll leave you with this thought: “Whoever wishes to remember must not stay in one place waiting for the memories to come of their own accord! Memories are scattered all over the immense world, and it takes voyages to find them and make them leave their refuge.” This is my theory on lost subjects/losers, a whole dissertation's worth, in a nutshell.
This novel has everything that literature should have; it is a book about love and memory, a book with angels and demons, and a novel with poetry. Milan Kundera is a Czech writer who left his country to escape from the communist government that was in place until 1989. He currently resides in France. Early on in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, one of his characters states: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” This seems to be the plight of all those who have left something—a land, a lover, a situation. In contrast to this treatise on memory, Kundera points out the sensuality of laughter, referencing Parole de femme to point out: “To oppose male sexual desire, which is devoted to the fleeting moments of erection and thus fatally engaged with violence, annihilation, and extinction, the author exalts, as its antipode female jouissance—gentle, pervasive, and continuing sensual pleasure.”
Kundera goes on to philosophize on poetry and laughter in his chapter on Litost, really a theory on poetry, which he suggests comes to our aid when we cannot escape litost, an untranslatable Czech word that refers to a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery. It is usually experienced by youth because older people are more accustomed to the imperfection of mankind and the sight of one’s own misery.
Another tangent from Kundera’s work is his theory on variations. While a symphony is an epic voyage into the infinitude of the exterior, from one thing to the depths of another, the variation leads into the infinitude of the interior world. It is the voyage inward. The infinite of largeness is what Beethoven became obsessed with later in life and the variation became another medium for him to explore this infinitude. The composer only uses the essentials to dig a shaft leading into the interior of the world. This leads to Kundera’s observation: “Man knows he cannot embrace the universe with its sun and stars. Much more unbearable is for him to be condemned to lack the other infinitude, that infinitude near at hand, within reach.” We can never get to the perfection we pursue in our work or spirit. And that is what is beautiful.
Kundera’s novel is a book of variations on laughter, love and forgetting. Forgetting Prague, mostly, and all the demons that came with it together with the angels that made it bearable.
I’ll leave you with this thought: “Whoever wishes to remember must not stay in one place waiting for the memories to come of their own accord! Memories are scattered all over the immense world, and it takes voyages to find them and make them leave their refuge.” This is my theory on lost subjects/losers, a whole dissertation's worth, in a nutshell.
Nicole Krauss: The History of Love
Written in a deceptively simple prose, this is the story of a Polish man who emigrates to Chile to escape the Germans and writes his only book: The History of Love. Krauss’s novel is the story of the discovery of this work and how it came to light years later, when the original writer of The History of Love is on a trek to find the muse of his work. Little does he know that his book shaped lives and transformed little histories.
One of the ruminations on love involves a comparison with painter Giacometti’s idea that “sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.”
Another passage of note is on “The Birth of Feeling,” part of the history of love: “The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it—just to name it—must have been like trying to catch something invisible. (Then again, the oldest feeling in the world might simply have been confusion.) Having begun to feel, people’s desire to feel grew. They wanted to feel more, feel deeper, despite how much it sometimes hurt. People became addicted to feeling. It’s possible that this is how art was born.”
One of the ruminations on love involves a comparison with painter Giacometti’s idea that “sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.”
Another passage of note is on “The Birth of Feeling,” part of the history of love: “The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it—just to name it—must have been like trying to catch something invisible. (Then again, the oldest feeling in the world might simply have been confusion.) Having begun to feel, people’s desire to feel grew. They wanted to feel more, feel deeper, despite how much it sometimes hurt. People became addicted to feeling. It’s possible that this is how art was born.”
Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle
This is one of the sci-fi writer’s greatest works. Set in an alternate reality 1960s America that imagines what would have happened if Japan and Nazi Germany had won World War II, we see San Francisco as a curious outpost for the Japanese as they are in control of the Western United States. Somewhere in Wyoming a man in a high castle blasphemously wonders what would have happened if Churchill and the Americans would have won and writes a best-seller cult novel that imagines all the possibilities. What is amazing about Dick’s work is that even in the crazy world, that he creates, where citizens religiously consult the I Ching as a sort of horoscope, everything seems so plausible and so close to our own world. This is great science fiction.
Bret Easton Ellis: Lunar Park
Have you read or seen American Psycho?
Lunar Park is narrated by the writer who wrote American Psycho, the psychological thriller/slasher satire that graphically portrayed murders by an extremely wealthy Manhattan businessman while satirizing the American culture of greed and self-centeredness that characterized the 80s. The key words in the last sentence are “narrated by” because Lunar Park functions as sort of a journal of the author in the way that it blends reality with fantasy thereby creating a satirical investigation of the act of writing fiction while also lambasting American suburbia in a way that illustrates just how creepily we live. Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of American Psycho, returns to haunt the author that created him. In order to resolve his issues with the psychopath, the author must break down a number of walls that stand between fiction and reality. And he does this in a terrifying, gruesome kind of way.
This novel should be respected, if nothing else, for the fine prose that leaves the reader turning the page. This is not necessarily a “page-turner” but a novel that flows and leaves the reader wanting to know what turns up next.
Lunar Park is narrated by the writer who wrote American Psycho, the psychological thriller/slasher satire that graphically portrayed murders by an extremely wealthy Manhattan businessman while satirizing the American culture of greed and self-centeredness that characterized the 80s. The key words in the last sentence are “narrated by” because Lunar Park functions as sort of a journal of the author in the way that it blends reality with fantasy thereby creating a satirical investigation of the act of writing fiction while also lambasting American suburbia in a way that illustrates just how creepily we live. Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of American Psycho, returns to haunt the author that created him. In order to resolve his issues with the psychopath, the author must break down a number of walls that stand between fiction and reality. And he does this in a terrifying, gruesome kind of way.
This novel should be respected, if nothing else, for the fine prose that leaves the reader turning the page. This is not necessarily a “page-turner” but a novel that flows and leaves the reader wanting to know what turns up next.
Junot Díaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Oscar Wao is a Dominican-American youth who could very well become the first Dominican to die a virgin. A die-hard sci-fi, role-playing game nerd, Oscar Wao unearths his family roots in the Dominican Republic and a curse that seems to plague all Dominicans and even all Latin Americans but especially his family and Oscar Wao himself. This curse, the “Fukús Americanus,” is, according to Díaz, the Doom of the New World.
Fukús, both small and large, follow Oscar Wao’s family from the Trujillo-age Dominican Republic in which his mother lived to New Jersey.
The novel weaves a number of quotes from Tolkien novels, Dungeons and Dragons, X-men and Watchmen comics, among a number of other sources that seem anomalous with a young Dominican together with a history of the Dominican Republic, particularly focused on the horrors of Trujillo, one of the most savage dictators in memory. Oscar’s mom experiences these horrors.
The coolest character of the novel is probably Oscar’s sister, Lola. She is a smart, rebellious punk/gothic/activist who cares deeply about her girl-troubled brother. Together with Oscar, they unravel the past of their mother, who is suffering from cancer.
The only downside to this novel is the first hundred pages. For some reason, the narrator seems bogged down with trying to establish a “street cred” rather than just telling a story. The slang seems real forced and becomes too crude to handle at some points. After the first 100 pages, the narrator really finds a rhythm and tells a whopper of a story while seamlessly intermingling street language and a fine prose that leaves the reader wanting to turn the page in the hope that Oscar’s life won’t be as brief as the title promises.
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