Melancholy Beauty: ‘The Hour of the Star’ by Clarice Lispector (translated by Giovanni Pontiero)

It is hard to know where to begin with this review.  ‘The Hour of the Star’ is a novella that is so short and so full of perfectly crafted sentences and images, my strong temptation to fill the blog post with quotations is tempered by the knowledge that this would end up in me copying out a ridiculously large percentage of the book itself.  The title isn’t far off, it doesn’t take much more than an hour to read Lispector’s melancholy masterpiece.  Attempting to describe it is only ever going to be clumsy, imprecise and shabby by comparison.

I suppose a good place to start is with the book’s titles.  The first page gives a long list of possibilities with ‘The Hour of the Star’ appearing second after ‘The Blame is Mine,’ and above other equally brilliant phrases that are a haunting introduction to the novella, from ‘I Can Do Nothing’ to ‘She Doesn’t Know How to Protest.’  The list would appear playful and coy if it wasn’t for the sense of despair it evokes, an uncomfortably mixed tone that is continued as the story is narrated by an intrusive narrator, the author Rodrigo S. M.,  describing his creative struggles in capturing his protagonist in print: ‘Nobody desires her, she is a harmless virgin whom nobody needs.  It strikes me that I don’t need her either and that what I am writing could be written by another.  Another writer, of course, but it would have to be a man for a woman would weep her heart out.’

The emotions conjured up by the self-conscious narrator are constantly fighting with those evoked by his creation, an immature woman who is both intensely pitiable and yet problematically pure in her acceptance of her stunted existence.  If it is difficult to establish a relationship with the patronising and sympathetic, hostile and loving narrator, how much more so to pin down Macabéa, the ‘star’ of the novel, introduced to us as ‘inept.  Inept for living.’  Abused, monumentally lonely and desperate for affection, we see her torments from the outside (because she never recognises them as such) and are welcomed into her painfully modest joys.  Simultaneously complex and simple, her message is, for me, one of both hope and despair: ‘She wasn’t aware of her own unhappiness.  The only thing she desired was to live.  She could not explain, for she didn’t probe her situation.  Perhaps she felt there was some glory in living.  She thought that a person was obliged to be happy.  So she was happy.’

There is an overt social message in the book; it is clear that Macabéa is one of so many ignored lives in society, and the unfairness and inhumanity of her situation is never excused through her own acceptance of it.  Equally powerful however is the way Macabéa emerges as a character in her own right, evading her narrator as he ties to pin her down and never giving the reader the comfort of a conclusive understanding of her motivations or inner life.

This is likely to be my only contribution to the 1977 book club (hosted kaggsysbookishramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book) and I only managed it in time because it really is extremely short.  In terms of quality though, I can’t imagine many better books can have been published that year. ‘The Hour of the Star’ is a true timeless classic and I am so pleased that the club finally pushed me to read and review it.

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First read from the Man Booker International Prize longlist: ‘The Impostor’ by Javier Cercas

It’s that time of year again: the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist was announced (16 books and the only one I’ve read so far is The Ministry of Utmost Happiness), followed immediately by the Man Booker International Prize longlist (13 books and I hadn’t read any of them).  The only way to calm my panic at so many books and so little time was to see what might be on the shelves at the local library and hope for the best.  Of course, I do own a copy of the wonderful Han Kang’s long-listed ‘The White Book’ already, but I know how powerful and raw her writing is and so I’m saving it for the right time.

Instead, I wanted to try something completely new for my first look at the International Prize longlist and the library delivered by offering up Javier Cercas’s ‘The Imposter’. I’m aware that I haven’t read much Spanish language literature and I’ve read even less from the county of  Spain itself.  I also couldn’t help but notice how many of the books selected seem to play genre games as they self-consciously flip between fiction, memoir, biography.  If I liked ‘The Impostor’ it could be  both my entry into Spanish literature and the mind-sets of the judging panel for this year’s prize.

‘The Impostor’ is the combined story of the author as he struggles, researches and writes his biography of Enric Marco, the Catalonian who became a celebrity survivor of deportation and incarceration only to be revealed as a liar and fraud in 2005.  Cercas writes as if his topic is familiar to his audience, a flattering assumption about the international knowledge of the English language readers who will hopefully pick up the book following its nomination.  Personally, I’d never heard of Marco or his story before, but then the insider view of a new culture and country is exactly why I love The Man Booker International Prize.  ‘The Impostor’ is a deeply Spanish book; For Cercas, the reason Marco was able to pass himself off as a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp and even become the president of the Amical de Mauthausen, the main Spanish association for survivors of Mauthausen can only be explained through his relationship with the nation’s sense of self and memory:

Marco invented a past for himself (or embellished or gilded it) at a moment when, all around him in Spain, almost everyone was embellishing, or gilding up, or inventing a past; Marco reinvented his life at a moment when the entire country was reinventing itself.  This is what happened during the transition from dictatorship to democracy in Spain.  With Franco dead, almost everyone began to construct a past to better face the present and prepare for the future

Along with presenting his subject as a metaphor for national identity, Cercas also explicitly looks at the responsibilities of story tellers in society.  He discusses how Marco can be seen as a modern Don Quixote, that most famous Catalan madman, while comparing himself as the author of a non-fiction novel to Truman Capote writing ‘In Cold Blood.’

It’s a lot of unreliable storytelling, philosophical musing and cultural analysis to fit into a single book.  Possibly the best praise I can offer is that it never gets bogged down in its own arguments.  Frank Wynne’s translation conveys the most complex ideas about the nature of memory, fiction and national identity with clarity and precision, never letting the messiness of real life seep into the style of the writing.  In the short term, it’s made me eager to read more of this year’s longlist (I’m especially looking forward to Saadawi’s ‘Frankenstein in Baghdad’).  In the long term, it’s brought home how much I’ve been missing by not seeking out more Spanish literature.  Let’s forget what I wrote earlier about panicking over reading lists, please let me know what Spanish books I should read and review so that Cercas won’t be the sole representative of his county on my blog for too long.

Classic Science Fiction: ‘I Robot’ by Asimov

As the recent silence on my blog demonstrates, I’ve been suffering from something of a reading slump.  As all experienced readers know, the only way to combat such misery is to wait it out, holding on to the hope that the perfect choice of books will suddenly rekindle the old magic.  Thanks to a judicious mixture of non-fiction, genre reading and staring into space, things are slowly getting back to normal and I’m going to celebrate by reviewing a book has been staring at me reproachfully for weeks, waiting for me to spread the word.

Asimov’s ‘I Robot’ is a series of short stories, which, taken together, provide a ‘history’ of robots from the early stages of their development to an imaginatively realised robot-controlled future.  Given that a certain amount of my day job involves computers (including a real world engagement with what developments artificial intelligence might bring) it was delightful to immerse myself in Asimov’s twentieth-century presentation of the future of technology.

The robots in the book are exactly what you see on the cover, humanoid, gesticulating and emoting beings who are best understood by our ‘robopsychologist’ narrator.  The set-up is beautiful in its simplicity; at the heart of robopsychology, and of each story, lie the famous three laws:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction allow a human being to come to harm
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law

The drama in the stories comes from seeing how robots, and humans, navigate these rules.  The additional bonus for 21st century readers is that we can always replace the word ‘robot’ with the word iphone and so turn futuristic sci-fi into attractive nostalgia.  Even the most dystopian and most forward-looking story somehow brings a measure of comfort to anyone concerned about the place of technology in our own world. Reading ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’ during the last year has allowed me to escape into past, but ‘I Robot’ goes one better with it’s ability to transport the reader to a version of the future as imagined by the visionaries of the previous century.  It also contains a drunk robot singing Gilbert and Sullivan while trundling round in circles, and I’m not sure classic science fiction gets much better than that!

A very full year: ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’ (part 3 – winter) by Anthony Powell

I realise I am late with this, and trying to use the recent terrible weather as an excuse for thinking it’s still winter isn’t entirely convincing. Maybe I should claim instead that the somewhat languid pace of the Dance sequence has affected my reading and reviewing pattern. Its narrator, Jenkins, has never been the most proactive literary character, but as the modern world catches up with him in his old age, the books become even more bewildered in their attempts to record post war and swinging Britain.

The fact is that I had no idea what to expect when I started ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’ in spring 2017. All I knew was that it was a long novel cycle, themed according to the times of the year. I certainly didn’t expected to love the opening volumes as much as I did. It could have been that their combination of snobbery, stupidly long cast lists and sarcastic humour gave me the perfect escapism for 2017. Now I have come to the end of the series, I have also realised that I found something hugely appealing about the passivity with which Jenkins views the world. This may be why my favourite seasons were Spring (the school years, university and the start of a professional career) and Autumn (the army). Jenkins is so far from being an active agent in his own life that things work beautifully when the events around him are, through necessity, out of his control. I’m also aware I don’t share his taste in friends, so the enforced companionship of these books inevitably pleased me more than the tedious description of time spent with his artistic heroes in the Summer and Winter sections.

Even without claiming them as favourites though, the winter novels still contained enough spiky humour and deadpan observations to make them a fitting conclusion to the project. There is much to relish in learning how Jenkins’ battered and ageing generation deal with post-World War II austerity (‘Books do Furnish a Room’), the Cold War (‘Temporary Kings’) and hippy cults (‘Hearing Secret Harmonies’). As always, the determinedly unimpressive Widmerpool is wonderful whenever he appears while the pleasure of encountering familiar characters increases with each successive novel.

I’m sure Jenkins (and Powell) would approve of my melancholy at the realisation that I will never again be able to enjoy this book without knowing the gruesome ends of so many key characters.  Fortunately, also like them, I see books a lifelong companions and fully plan to return to the series in a future year; based on previous experience, I’ll be sure to chose one when I’m in need of heavy-duty escapism.

Les Misérables and Les Mystères de Paris: a comparison

When raving about ‘The Mysteries of Paris‘ last week, it was clear there was an elephant in the room, because when you describe thousand plus page novels using characters to explore social issues in 19th century Paris, no-one thinks you’re talking about Sue’s little-known melodrama.   My excuse is I wanted to stay on topic and the review didn’t feel like the time to explore Sue’s novel in the context of Hugo’s classic.  Instead, I thought I would devote this post to a proper comparison of these two mighty tomes.

The elephant in the room (Gustave Brion’s illustration for ‘Les Miserables’)

 

	Les Misérables	Les Mystères de Paris
Length	1,232 pages (Penguin Classic paperback)	1,392 page (Penguin Classic paperback)
Date Published	1862	Published serially, 1842-1843
Characteristics of the hero	Philosophical Has superhuman strength Sometimes struggles to do what is right Born poor, attained riches, learned through suffering Tries to do good to everyone Father figure to heroine	Philosophical Has superhuman strength Always does what is right Was born a prince, suffered through being married to an evil woman Dispenses justice, rewarding the good and punishing the bad Father figure to heroine
Characteristics of heroine	Abandoned by mother Abused as a child Good looking Devoted to father figure	Abandoned by mother Abused as a child Beautiful beyond measure Devoted to father figure
The good poor	Three of the four volumes of the book are named after essentially virtuous people who suffer poverty: Fantine (whose ultimately descends into prostitution), Cosette (who is abused as a child) and Marius (who refuses financial assistance from his family). They are all GOOD, and most of them are rewarded. Other examples of the good poor are the children who happily run around the streets of Paris in implausible, but very attractive, playful innocence.	There are plenty of good characters in the book, they would rather starve than steal, and are at the mercy of the rich and the bad poor alike. All are very conscious of right and wrong and the importance of maintaining high moral standards, of working all the time, of not complaining and of not asking anything of anyone. A way of recognising the good poor is that they are rarely disfigured, often sing, love plants and trust the hero in everything he does.
The Bad poor	There are also BAD poor people in the book, such as the couple who abuse Cosette. They are consistently and gratuitously evil at every opportunity and are especially good at feigning poverty in order to get money from others.	Not all the poor characters are good, some are bad and they can be recognised through their disfigurements (tending to be missing eyes and, in extreme cases, noses).   Poor bad people do the bidding of rich bad people, but they also make up evil schemes of their own.
Setting	A historical Paris that was being destroyed as Hugo was writing. Paragraphs are given over to mourning the loss of historical streets and alleyways. Also, key scenes take place in a nunnery.	Set before Napoleon III got started with he re-design of Paris, the book is filled with dark alleyways of the criminal quarters of the town. Also, a key scene takes place in a nunnery.

As you can see, the novels do share a lot of similarities, but there is a crucial difference.  ‘Les Misérables’ is a classic that everyone has heard of, containing a fairly small cast of memorable characters and some major historical set-pieces.  ‘Les Mystères de Paris’ is an extremely silly piece of popular fiction that is now all but forgotten.  On a personal level, there is another difference: despite all my best intentions, I’m afraid I still like Sue’s melodrama more than Hugo’s tragedy.  The evident nonsense of the plot ends up making the excessive characters and endless coincidences entertaining rather than irritating, while the laudable ethical underpinning is at least as strong as in Hugo’s most polemical paragraphs.

As far as I know, I’m alone in my preference.  I don’t mind – according to Wikipedia Sue’s novel actually sparked a whole genre of ‘city mystery’ books in the mid-nineteenth century – I’m off to Project Gutenberg to see how many might be available in English for me to look forward to in 2018.

Addictively Silly: The Mysteries of Paris by Eugène Sue (1842-43)

The Mysteries of Paris begins in the dank alleyways of the Parisian underworld.  A mysterious stranger ‘darted with hasty step into the Cité, that labyrinth of obscure, narrow, and winding streets which extends from the Palais de Justice to Notre Dame.’  That may not sound much like the Parisian streets we know and love, but this book was written before Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, which involved demolishing such medieval (and easily barricaded) streets to make way for beautiful avenues and boulevards.  It doesn’t matter though, this book is set in what will always be a fictional Paris, one in which princes wander round incognito rewarding the deserving poor, criminals delight in fiendish plots and virtuous coquettes sing and smile all through their fourteen-hour work days, sustained by happy thoughts and meals of bread and water.

The book is massive; it was published serially in 90 weekly sections and the penguin paperback edition is close to 1,400 pages long.  Personally, I was engrossed throughout.  As far as I’m concerned, our hero out-swashbuckles the three musketeers put together, while the heroine is so beautiful, perfect and pure she goes through the boring-Dickens-passive-heroine phase and right out the other side.  By the end I found myself genuinely caught up in the suspense of where her story could go and how much further Sue could push her angelic characteristics without everyone near her just spontaneously combusting from proximity to her general amazingness.

Possibly the most charming thing about the novel (though it’s a tight field) is the moral imperative that underlies it.  Sue was hugely concerned with the plight of the urban poor and while his characters are laughable and his plot absurd he does have a message to share.  His descriptions of poverty are shocking and, in their details, frighteningly believable.  His polemics against the hypocrisy of legalised prostitution and the enforced squalor in which the artisan class lived are as heartfelt as any passages in ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists,’ and turn a guilty pleasure into an important and still relevant read.  In some parts, anyway.

I know that bloated nineteenth century melodrama is a hard sell, but if you were looking for a doorstop of a book to indulge in over winter, I heartily recommend ‘The Mysteries of Paris.  It’s every bit as sensational and overblown as the promotional poster suggests, but you can always pretend its seriously historical and socially aware fiction if anyone asks.

 

Isolated and Hidden Away: ‘The Drinker’ by Hans Fallada

A couple of years ago I read the wonderful ‘Blood Brothers‘ by Ernst Haffner, a book which explores the desperate underbelly of interwar Germany.  ‘Blood Brothers’ shows the reader life at the bottom of a society on the edge of collapse, and it was only translated into English in 2015 – the assumption being that English-language readers were not going to be receptive to historical German presentations of their society in the first half of the twentieth century.  The man who changed this idea was Hans Fallada, whose 1947 novel ‘Jeder stirbt für sich allein’ was published to popular and critical acclaim in 2009 as ‘Alone in Berlin’ (in the UK) and ‘Every Man Dies Alone’ (in the US).

Although the reading projects I’ve embarked on through this blog may make it seem like my book choices are structured and organised, this is actually rarely the case.  I’ve not yet read ‘Alone in Berlin’ and so seem be approaching this body of works backwards, with the little-known Haffner as my introduction to his famed and prolific contemporary.  Based on a friend’s recommendation (and generous gift buying!) ‘The Drinker’ is my gateway to Fallada’s intimidating and bleak oeuvre.

‘The Drinker’ traces a man’s descent from conventional stability and success to addiction and misery.  The mixture of self-knowledge, self-destruction and delusion makes for compelling reading.  Take this reflection on family quarrels near the start of the book:

The first few times I still felt quite ashamed of our lack of restraint, and when I noticed that I had grieved Magda, that she was even going about with tear-stained eyes, it hurt me almost as much as it hurt her, and I swore that I would be better.  But man gets used to anything, and I am afraid that perhaps he gets used quickest of all to living in a state of degradation.  The day came when, at the sight of Magda’s red-rimmed eyes, I no longer swore to behave better.  Instead with mingled satisfaction and surprise, I said to myself: “I gave it to you properly that time!  You’re not going to get the upper hand of me always with that sharp tongue of yours!”  It seemed horrible to feel that way, and yet it seemed right, it satisfied me to feel so, however paradoxical that may seem.  From there, it was only a short step to the point when I consciously sought to hurt her.

Our protagonist is not always so clear sighted about his actions or motivations.  I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but it is generally read as broadly autobiographical and was actually written in an encrypted notebook when the author was locked away in an insane asylum.  Towards the end it explores ideas familiar to anyone who’s read ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ but in a setting which reminded me of books set in Nazi concentration camps as well as American and British stories about incarceration.

Translated by Charlotte and A L Lloyd, ‘The Drinker’ is short, powerful and impressive.  It is both funny and tragic, at its best when the protagonist is most aware of the ‘paradoxical’ nature of his relations with others and with himself.  I have, of course, added ‘Alone in Berlin’ to my reading list, while ‘The Drinker’ can join Zola’s ‘L’Assommoir’ for another classic about addiction and outcasts.