Recently in The well-told story Category
 I didn't know what to make of what Borges makes of Jews. My first
impressions did not accord with the assessment of academic Evelyn
Fishburn, who wrote, Borges' philosemitism is not at issue here: his credentials in this respect must satisfy all but the most paranoid. Well call me paranoid. Philosemitism
didn't occur to me when I read the following description of "Aaron
Loewenthal" in Borges' short story, "Emma Zunz" (from his 1949
collection, The Aleph): Aaron Loewenthal was
in the eyes of all an upright man; in those of his few closest
acquaintances, a miser. . . . The year before, he had decorously
grieved the unexpected death of his wife - a Gauss! who'd brought him
an excellent dowry! - but money was his true passion. With secret
shame, he knew he was not as good at earning it as at holding on to
it. He was quite religious; he believed he had a secret pact with the
Lord - in return for prayers and devotions, he was exempted from doing
good works.
Fishburn doesn't quote this rigidly stereotypical character description in her discussion of "Emma Zunz," but she does say: The
story is placed almost entirely within the confines of the Jewish world
of Buenos Aires around the year 1922 and includes scenes of
embezzlement, prostitution, lies, betrayal and cold-blooded,
premeditated murder, thus opening up the social and moral range of
Borges' Jewish imaginary.
"Thus opening up the social
and moral range of Borges' Jewish imaginary"? Is Fishburn somehow
suggesting that Borges is immune to common anti-Semitic stereotypes of
Jews that cast them as embezzlers, liars, betrayers, cold-blooded
premeditated murderers (blood of Christian children in the Passover
matzoh), etc.? Without in any way suggesting that depictions of Jews
should be immune from the full range of human behavior in which they
(and all groups of humans) engage, I can't see anything laudatory about
Borges descending to depict Jews consistently with anti-Semitic
stereotypes. That said, I do not think Borges is anti-Semitic. As J.M. Coetzee writes of Borges in The New York Review of Books, Englishness was one part of Borges's self-fashioning, Jewishness
another. He invoked a rather hypothetical Sephardic strain on his
mother's side to explain his interest in the Kabbalah, and, more
interestingly, to present himself as an outsider to Western culture,
with an outsider's freedom to criticize and innovate.
Much
as Borges might have been an example of the much-loved Jewish
stereotype of the "self-hating Jew," much more likely (in my opinion)
is that he extended to Judaism the same openness, curiosity and delight
that he obviously shows in Islam and other traditions of long lineage
in which he found interesting engagement with large questions of
theology, time, existence and reality. Rather than being an
expression of anti-Semitism, I think Aaron Loewenthal is simply a
function of Borges' generally weak skills at characterization. In
Borges' quick sketches, readers find many characters capable of grand
action and exhilarating thinking, but very little in the way of deep
psychological and emotional portrayals. (Indeed, Fishburn votes for
Emma Zunz herself as being Borges' most fully fleshed-out character:
"his only moderately developed character is female; also Jewish,
manipulative and murderous; and uniquely pitiable"). This being the
case, I think that when Borges reached for a character description of
Aaron Loewenthal, he defaulted to the "Jewish miser" stereotype. So
ingrained was this stereotype into the world in which Borges lived that
his invocation of its broad form may have seemed "right" to him as a
description of a Jew. I doubt seriously that Borges even recognized in
Aaron Loewenthal an anti-Semitic stereotype. All the same,
whether Borges was philosemitic or merely interested in Kabbalah (and
even if he was prey to the anti-Semitic stereotypes of his day), I
don't recognize myself, as a Jew, or as a Jewish woman, in Borges.
What Borges makes of Jews, however thought-worthy, doesn't strike me as
Jewish. (Image of Borges' El Aleph from Antiqbook.com)
 In a previous blog post, I focused on the explanation given by Jorge Luis Borges, in his introduction to The Garden of Forking Paths, about why he hadn't written a novel: It is a laborious madness, and an impoverishing one . . . the madness
of composing vast books. . . . The better way to go about it is to
pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a
commentary on them
My prior post was occupied with the second half of Borges' remark: that imagining vast novels and commenting on them is better than writing them. But, with extended reflection, I think the first part of Borges' statement may be more revealing: his conviction that novel writing is laborious and impoverishing madness. Certainly, I agree with him. Writing novels has consumed the better part of five years of my life; the work wholly exhausts me; I don't think anyone who knows me intimately would argue too strenuously that I'm sane; and I'm teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, having succeeded in never having earned a dime from my fiction writing. Still, my guess is that Borges was referring to some other "laborious," "impoverishing" and "mad[dening]" aspects of novel writing. I take my cue from this passage in his story, "The Writing of God": [T]here is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe; to say "the jaguar" is to say all the jaguars that engendered it, the deer and turtles it has devoured, the grass that fed the deer, the earth that was mother to the grass, the sky that gave light to the earth.
Here Borges offers an extraordinary conception of a word, one that departs from our common currency. Each "Borges word" has almost unimaginable weight and resonance. The more "Borges words" one strings together, the more propositions one advances, the heavier and more unwieldy the work becomes, the more the universes conjured by each word clang against one another, creating cacophony and undecipherable complexity. To write a vast tome from such components is truly laborious; hauling each "Borges word" into place must be on par with positioning the stone blocks that comprise a pyramid. And the task is also impoverishing - to the language. The vibrancy of each word is overshadowed, damaged and cramped by the presence of so many other words, by the weight of so many other universes. Borges was not exaggerating to say that composing a novel with "Borges words" would be maddening. And, although Borges didn't mention this corollary, to read a novel composed of "Borges words" might be a similar laborious and impoverishing madness. Reading a Borges short story is so demanding that I read each of his stories twice . . . before I go back and "reread" them again. The weight and resonance of an entire Borges novel might very well reduce me to my atomic constituents. Luckily - however much Borges described his choice as that of an "inept" and "lazy" man - Borges knew both his power and his métier. He spared me atomic disintegration and gifted me untold hours of pleasure in his stories, a balance that I can only describe as a prudential and laudatory use of "Borges words." (Image of Jorge Luis Borges from The New York Times)
 Explaining why he'd never written a novel, Jorge Luis Borges remarked, It is a laborious madness, and an impoverishing one . . . the madness of composing vast books. . . . The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.
Not just books, or imaginary books, either. Borges is a compulsive summarizer and commentator. No text, real or imagined, seems too short to merit this treatment. He opens his six-page story, "The Dead Man," by saying, "I do not know the full details of [Benjamin Otálora's] adventure; when I am apprised of them, I will correct and expand these pages. For now, this summary may be instructive." Nor does he restrict his commentary to a sentence here and there. More than half of his barely five-page page, "Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden," is commentary on an anecdote about a barbarian who switched sides while sacking Rome. And while Borges' commentary constitutes the story in the foregoing example, his commentary seems to reverse the meaning of the story in the case of "Averröes' Search," transforming the tale from one of discovery into one of failure. Borges offers a potential rationale for his inveterate commenting in, "The Immortal," at the end of which he appends a "postcript" [sic] to a text allegedly slipped into the last volume of Pope's Iliad. Acknowledging that the text's veracity has been questioned because it quotes or plagiarizes from other texts, Borges remarks: To my way of thinking, that conclusion is unacceptable. As the end approaches, wrote Cartaphilus [the author of the text found in Pope's Iliad], there are no longer any images from memory - there are only words. Words, words, words taken out of place and mutilated, words from other men - those were the alms left him by the hours and the centuries.
What else is commentary but "words taken out of place and mutilated, words from other men"? To quote the words of other men (or the imagined words of other men) and "mutilate" them by placing them in another context, arguing with them, juxtaposing them against other words, complicating their meaning, burnishing or adding to their facets, is to engage in the act of commentary. And for Borges, the raw materials for that commentary - the words - were "the alms left him by the hours and the centuries": his inheritance from history. At this juncture, I'd like to offer my commentary on Borges' habit of commenting: his impulse is not so much like that of a fiction writer, but of a blogger. Fiction writers are interested in stories: plots and characters. Borges is interested in analysis. Borges - because he's Borges - manages to make stories out of analysis, but his success doesn't transform his approach from one of a commentator into one of a fiction writer. Nor does that fact that Borges is sometimes commenting on or analyzing imaged texts make his methodology suitable for fiction: just as a law student arguing a moot court case is practicing legal techniques, not fiction writing, so Borges is acting the part of commentator, not author. As Rivka Galchen says in her New York Times essay on Borges, he thought of himself primarily as a reader; writing was just among the most intensely engaged ways of reading. . . . To love a text: isn't that just to find oneself helplessly casting about for something to say in return?
"[W]riting . . . [as an] intensely engaged way[] of reading" - that's why I blog about books. When I finish a book, I want to deepen, heighten, round-out and complete the experience by writing about it. "[H]elplessly casting about for something to say in return" to a book is a good description of my blog. In this light, Borges' stunning innovation is that he appears to have invented book blogging before blogs existed. Not that this technological gap really matters. If Cartaphilus can chat with Homer eleven hundred years after he wrote the Odyssey, then Borges can blog before blogs - or the Internet, or even personal computers - were invented. In my analysis, Borges' stories, properly understood and contextualized, are blog posts. Likewise, Borges' books are compilations of his posts - he may be the world's first blogger to have landed a publishing contract. And in this post, I am imagining Borges' blog and (imaginarily) hyper-linking to it. Check it out, folks: once you read his posts, you'll want to leave a comment. (Image of Jorge Luis Borges from The New York Times)
 William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair should be a mandatory complement to any Jane Austen reading assignment. Focusing on the same social set in the same country and time period as Austen, Thackeray offers a view of the world depicted in Austen's novels that is less romantic, less hopeful and less moral than the perspective Austen proffers. Thackeray is also unrelenting. I'm a fast reader, and yet Vanity Fair claimed a month of my time. The extended reading period is odd. Without question, I enjoyed the book, and I found Thackeray's authorial voice entertaining. I loved the depth that Thackeray added to my understanding of social dynamics in Britain at the time of Jane Austen. And, as I passed the hours in Thackeray's company, I admired his wit, courage and antics. But the extent to which I dawdled finishing the book is testament to an inherent flaw: the plot didn't function. The plot is the engine of a novel. Just like an engine, a book's plot has to rev up to full speed. As the story progresses, plots should gather momentum like a toboggan hurtling downhill. The plot should pull the reader onto the toboggan for the plunge. When the plot functions, a reader should reach a point - somewhere between halfway and three-quarters of the way through - where he or she feels compelled to finish the book. With Vanity Fair, I never felt that compulsion. A major reason for that failure is Thackeray's unrelenting bitchiness. He is so unsympathetic to his characters that he has disabled the plot in two ways. First, he successfully persuades the reader that the characters in Vanity Fair are not worth caring about. Here, for instance, is Thackeray discoursing about Rebecca Sharp: Miss Rebecca was not . . . in the lease kind or placable. All the world used her ill, said this young misanthropist, and we may be pretty certain that persons whom all the world treat ill, deserve entirely the treatment they get. The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion . . .This is certain, that if the world neglected Miss Sharp, she never was known to have done a good action in behalf of anybody . . . .
(p. 8.) Of course, the world uses ill many good people who drink deeply and undeservedly from the cup of bitterness, but Thackeray early on dismisses any notion that Becky Sharp might belong in that category. Nor is Thackeray satisfied to pass condemnatory judgment on Becky, but he jumps up and down on the point: And, as we bring our characters forward, I will ask leave, as a man and a brother, not only to introduce the, but occasionally to step down from the platform, and talk about them: if they are good and kindly, to love them and shake them by the hand: if they are silly, to laugh at them confidentially in the reader's sleeve: if they are wicked and heartless, to abuse them in the strongest terms which politeness admits of. Otherwise you might fancy it was I who was sneering at the practice of devotion, which Miss Sharp finds so ridiculous; . . . - whereas the laughter comes from one who has no reverence except for prosperity, and no eye for anything beyond success. Such people there are living and flourishing in the world - Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless: let us have at them, dear friends, with might and main.
(pp. 70-71) "[L]et us have at them . . . with might and main"?! When an author recommends to his reader that he or she treat the protagonist thus, what can a reader do but comply? And since Thackerey harangued me into not liking - and therefore not caring about - his characters, I never became invested in the resolution of their stories. Second, Thackeray seems to have gotten so carried away being nasty to his characters that he neglected to plot adequately for them. For example, when William Dobbin wakes up his commander, Mick O'Dowd, in the middle of the night and demands leave so that Dobbin can attend to a personal matter in England ( i.e., Amelia Smedley's allegedly impending marriage), Dobbin's urgency generates momentum that Thackeray completely dissipates by failing to follow through on Dobbin's story line for more than a hundred pages. Similarly, after Becky's disgrace with Lord Steyne, she falls so thoroughly out of society that the end of the book can have no suspense with respect to her plot line: rehabilitation is impossible. A compulsive drinker and gambler, living in flophouses, chased away and stumbling from city in city in Europe, Becky has neither the means nor the motivation to restore her reputation. Thackeray has utterly gutted her plot possibilities both by casting her so low and by giving her a meager living from her ex-husband, Rawdon Crawley. A woman with a regular income may wish the income were higher, but if she can survive on it, she'll adjust to it - which is what Becky does. (By the same token, Thackeray ruins Becky's relationship with her son so early in the book that, by the end, when young Rawdon inherits the family money and title, reconciliation is unthinkable - yet another plot possibility for Becky eliminated.) Thackeray's plotting misadventure is interesting and surprising because, as an author, he's self-aware (and voluble) on the topic of effective story telling, authorial motive and pacing. Here he is, for example, on all three topics: I have heard a brother of the story-telling trade, at Naples, preaching to a pack of good-for-nothing honest lazy fellows by the sea-shore, work himself up into such a rage and passion with some of the villains whose wicked deeds he was describing and inventing, that the audience could not resist it; and they and the poet together would burst out into a roar of oaths and execrations against the fictitious monster of the tale, so that the hat went round, and the bajocchi tumbled into it, in the midst of a perfect storm of sympathy.
At the little Paris theatres, on the other hand, you will not only hear the people yelling out, "Ah gredin! Ah monstre!" and cursing the tyrant of the play from the boxes; but the actors themselves positively refuse to play the wicked parts, such as those of the infames Anglais, brutal Cossacks, and what not, and prefer to appear at a smaller salary, in their real characters as loyal Frenchmen. I set the two stories one against the other, so that you may see that it is not from mere mercenary motives that the present performer is desirous to show up and trounce his villains; but because he has a sincere hatred of them, which he cannot keep down, and which must find a vent in suitable abuse and bad language.
I warn my "kyind friends," then, that I am going to tell a story of harrowing villany and complicated - but, as I trust, intensely interesting - crime. My rascals are no milk-and-water rascals, I promise you. When we come to the proper places we won't spare fine language - No, no! But when we are going over the quiet country we must perforce be calm. A tempest in a slop-basin is absurd. We will reserve that sort of thing for the mighty ocean and the lonely midnight. The present Chapter is very mild. Others - But we will not anticipate those.
(p. 70). And, yet, "sincere" Thackeray's storytelling and pacing did not generate the momentum of Thackeray's "mercenary" brother in Naples. Whether the problem was that, in his enthusiasm for demonstrating his "sincerity," Thackeray went overboard - or whether Thackeray simply enjoys being bitchy too much to resist when necessary for the sake of the plot - the outcome was the same. Bitchiness can be diverting over the course of an evening - but after a month, it gets old. (Image of William Makepeace Thackeray from The Free Library)
 In his most recent novel, Generosity, Richard Powers expresses frustration at the role of the novelist: I'm caught like Buridan's ass, starving to death between allegory and realism, fact and fable, creative and nonfiction. I see now exactly who these people are and where they came from. But I can't quite make out what I'm to do with them.
Michael Dirda, writing in The New York Review of Books, quotes this passage, and then continues: He [Powers] confesses that he would really like to write the kind of story that "from one word to the next, breaks free. The kind that invents itself out of meaningless detail and thin air. The kind in which there's no choice like chance."
Dirda doesn't think much of Powers's aspiration - he calls it "more portentous than clear" - but I felt an immediate intuitive connection with Powers. Having just finished a novel, I am currently traveling around the world in a relaxed and unplanned way. Where am I going? Wherever my friends or family are - or wherever my curiosity takes me. When am I going? Whenever it's convenient for my friends or family to see me. How long will I be traveling? I don't know. What will I do afterwards? I don't know. Why am I undertaking such a journey? To this question, I have a solid answer: because I felt like it. I had a strong, un-ignorable sense that this trip was the right way to fill my time at this stage in my life. Up until now, I've passed my days in a highly self-directed manner. I decided what to do, and then I did it. I wasn't easily distractable (I'm not one of those people who goes online to look up the spelling of a word and ends up frittering away two hours on trivial explorations). For reasons that I can't explain, but which exerted powerful visceral force on me, I felt convinced that now I must change my approach. I must surrender self-direction and float, like a jellyfish, wherever the ocean currents take me. I must allow my life, from one day to the next, to break free; to invent itself out of meaningless detail and thin air. Rather than deciding what to do and then doing it, I must accept that there's no choice like chance. Powers' dilemma as a novelist is no different from anyone's challenge in crafting his or her life. Humans make sense of their lives in stories, and each of us is, in a sense, penning a lived novel with our life choices. Each of us is caught between allegory and realism, as we struggle to choose between actions that are symbolically meaningful and those that are practical. Each of us ping-pongs between fact and fable, as we select the bases for our decisions. Each of us struggles to keep creativity and non-fiction in balance in our lives. I have just written a novel that was more planned than anything I've previously written. I didn't allow myself the luxury of not "quite mak[ing] out what . . . to do" with my characters. Practical in the extreme, the novel was strategically constructed to sell. It's a fable that studiously ignores inconvenient facts; a creative act that required all the strength of a daily grind.  Like Powers, I felt some frustration with this process. But the character at loose ends by the end was me. And the story that I wanted to allow to break free was mine. For the sake of satisfaction in my life, and for the benefit of my writing, I needed to (re)invent myself out of everything in the world that I never allowed to distract me. Unscheduled time, chance, joblessness, disconnection from the rat race - these are the flotsam and jetsam of the modern world. I am discovering what stories they yield . . . while I swing from a tree. (Image of Richard Powers from Minnesota Public Radio website)
 Part of what makes literature "literature" - instead of, say, verbiage of the variety one finds in fine print, junk mail and street signs - is that it's in dialogue with other literary works. Mario Vargas Llosa's, The Bad Girl, wouldn't exist without Gustave Flaubert's, Madame Bovary, nor Jose Saramoga's, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, without the New Testament, but "past performance is no guarantee of future earnings" is impervious to any of the foregoing (to its - and our - detriment). Because of this dialogue, fictional books featuring fictional author-characters often provide examples of the fictional authors' work. A.S. Byatt wrote an entire oeuvre of Romantic poetry for the fictional poets Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash in her novel, Posession. The World According to Garp, to take another example, contains substantial excerpts from T.S. Garp's fiction. Without these excerpts, LaMotte, Ash and Garp might exist as characters, but readers would be without any idea of how they, as writers, participate in literary dialogue (although readers see how their creators, Byatt and John Irving respectively, engage in such dialogue). In creative writing MFA-speak, without these glimpses of LaMotte's, Ash's and Garp's creative output, Byatt and Irving would merely be telling us about their writing, rather than showing us. Perhaps surprisingly - or, rather, unsurprisingly, since Jonathan Lethem, in his New York Times review of 2666 notes that Roberto "Bolaño seems to make sport of violating nearly all of the foremost writing-school rules" - in 2666, Roberto Bolaño gives us a writer-protagonist sans examples of his writing. Benno von Archimboldi, the nom de plume of Hans Reiter, is a post-WWII German novelist who, by the late 1990's and early 2000's, is routinely nominated for the Nobel Prize. British and European critics are obsessed with Achimboldi - they fight academic battles over him in journals and at conferences. At one point in 2666, Jean-Luc Pelletier, a French von Achimboldi scholar, remarks that it was surprising, or that it would never cease to surprise him, the way Archimboldi depicted pain and shame.
"Delicately," said Espinoza [a colleague].
"That's right," said Pelletier. "Delicately."
(p. 143.) At another moment, Jacob Bubis, Archimboldi's publisher and a legendary editor, awakens his wife in the middle of the night to declare that they must publish Archimboldi's new novel. "Is it good?" asked [Mrs. Bubis], half asleep and not bothering to sit up.
"It's better than good," said Bubis, pacing the room.
. . . .
At the first light of day [Bubis] woke his wife again and made her promise that when he was no longer head of the publishing house, his euphemism for his own death, she wouldn't abandon Archimboldi.
"Abandon him in what sense?" asked [Mrs. Bubis], still half asleep.
"We have to protect him," he added.
(p. 815.) Such is the information with which the reader of 2666 must make do, on which basis - on which faith - the reader must accept Archimboldi, the character and the writer. My question is: why? Why create a writer of such towering importance - to literary history (in 2666's fictional world) and to the story of 2666 - and simultaneously deprive the reader of any inkling of this writer's literary works? Indeed, Bolaño goes farther than denying Archimboldi any opportunity to show readers his fiction and the dialogue it sparks with other literary works; Bolaño all but tells us that such dialogue is beyond Archimboldi. Largely unschooled and unread, Archimboldi grows up with a single critical text: Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region, from which he learns about seaweed. The only other book that Archimboldi reads during his formative years is Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival. How can a writer with such a sparse and scattershot familiarity with the canon produce literature? With Archimboldi, Bolaño seems to want to create a sui generis author - a novelist who comes out of no literary tradition, who owes no literary debts, who eschews literature as he conquers it. This conceit is obviously the stuff of myth, but perhaps it relates to the way Bolaño saw himself: a high-school drop-out, Bolaño (according to Francisco Goldman in his review in The New York Review of Books) "blame[d] gaps in his subsequent self-education on the layout of the shelving in bookstores that prevented him from shoplifting certain books." The authorial persona Bolaño cultivated (in the words of Benjamin Kunkel, writing in The London Review of Books) is one of "a writer . . . who writes as if literature were all that mattered, and at the same time writes in a distinctly unliterary way." That said, I don't believe that Archimboldi (intentionally or subliminally) is a cast in Bolaño's mold. For one thing, Bolaño, unlike Archimboldi, does not abstain from dialogue with literature; on the contrary, his work is rife with references to literary and other artistic works. Bolaño is not without literary forebears: he openly acknowledges the influence of - and withstands comparison to - Julio Cortázar (especially the novel Hopscotch) and Jorge Luis Borges. Bolaño's autodidactic education might have been scattershot, but it's anything but sparse; Bolaño's literary dialogue may be idiosyncratic, but it's at the core of his work - he couldn't write "as if literature were all that mattered" otherwise. For another thing, Bolaño apparently makes a habit of writing about writers whose work remains opaque to the reader. Kunkel describes Bolaño's story "Enrique Martín," the eponymous character of which is a giftless poet about whose poetry the narrator "speaks . . . only with pity and contempt." Similarly, in Bolaño's novel, The Savage Detectives, two poets go searching for a third poet, Cesárea Tinajero, whose body of work has virtually vanished. Archimboldi is simply one of many Bolaño writer-characters whose literary works remain (literally) unwritten. (Whereas Bolaño himself is the prolific progenitor of one book of poems, three story collections and ten published novels, along with at least two novels found among his papers at the time of his death.) Bolaño's choice to leave Archimboldi mute to literary dialogue is plainly more than an amplification of Bolaño's own (possible) personal myths . . . which is not to say that the choice is rational. Patterns that emerge across a writer's oeuvre are often not rational, but visceral, emotional, illogical or subliminal. My guess is that - consciously or unconsciously - the writer-without-an- oeuvre (of which Archimboldi is Bolaño's supreme example) served Bolaño as a symbol of mortality. To any fool who comforts him or herself with the thought that the human body will fail but the written word endures, Bolaño's oeuvre-less authors stand as a sharp reminder that, however much literature may be all that matters, the impermanence of life is a fact that overwhelms all other priorities and silences all dialogues. (Image of Roberto Bolaño from The Telegraph)
 Roberto Bolaño's 2666 is impressive beyond praise that can be offered in modern English. Like Milan Kundera, Bolaño's achievement is utterly unique and un-replicable. At 893 pages in the English edition (apparently over 1,000 in the original Spanish), Bolaño's feat in 2666 is perhaps beyond summarization. But despite its heft and ambition, I think Bolaño's accomplishment is straightforward: he's modern literature's consummate realist. Calling Bolaño a "realist" may strike those familiar with his work as odd. Bolaño, after all, began his writing life as a poet and, as Franscisco Goldman asserts in his New York Review of Books piece, Bolaño seems to have considered himself fundamentally a poet despite his turn to fiction writing. Indeed, reading 2666 (even in translation) evoked the active visceral engagement that usually only occurs with poetry: the book riled up my guts for irrational and inarticulable reasons, the way a poem might make me want to cry without knowing why. Because of Bolaño's power to tap into the subliminal and the unconscious, he might readily be termed a stylist, in the model of Anne Enright, whose The Gathering operates similarly, or W.G. Sebold, whose The Emigrants has been reputed to have like power (though I found it merely boring when I read it six years ago). And, unquestionably, Bolaño's writing classes him among the leading stylists of literature. But Bolaño distinguishes himself from the poet-stylist set in a significant way. Most poets and stylists transport the reader from reality: when their writing works, it grips the reader's viscera and pulls him or her into a realm that departs from the quotidian. The point of such writing is not to depict life realistically, but to evoke (and provoke) feelings, sensations and engagement. Whereas Bolaño uses poetic-stylist techniques to depict reality. Indeed, the reality that emerges from 2666 is more "real" than any other attempt at literary realism I have encountered. As Benjamin Kunkel, writing in The London Review of Books, says of a Bolaño short story called "Enrique Martín": You don't feel that Enrique Martín is a robust character inhabiting a well-made story; you feel - whether or not any real-life original ever existed - something perhaps more powerful and certainly, in fiction, more unusual: namely, that he is simply a person, and that instead of having a story he had a life.
Reading 2666, I didn't feel that I was inhabiting the world of a story: I felt that I caught in the sweep of 20th century history. Common themes and characters abounded, yes, but plot was only what I imposed on the events, and indeterminacy was the only honest conclusion. Composed of five sub-novellas, 2666 can be read in any order. I read it in the order in which the novellas were assembled in the English-language edition, but I'm going to read the book again in a different order. The conviction intrinsic in 2666's construction is the same truth that informs the modern construction of consciousness: however one looks at the facts, doubt must temper clarity because story-lines are imposed, not organic. To use literature as Bolaño does is a departure from the norm. His approach cannot be described as "escapist." My guess is that most people's realities are more escapist than Bolaño's literature. Nor does Bolaño's technique generate pleasure reading. The sub-novella, "The Part About the Crimes," in 2666 is almost unbearable to read - just as life is sometimes unbearable to endure. By depicting reality so . . . realistically, Bolaño has in some sense made the ultimate argument against realism: it's too intense. And yet, enjoyable or no, Bolaño's triumph is impossible not to admire or praise (however inadequate the English language is for the task). In taking reality and wrestling it between the covers of a book, where it stays and performs at the command of the conjurer and the whim of the reader, Bolaño has assumed the mantle of a god. A Greek god, perhaps - flawed and ambiguous and happy to muck around with humans - but the progenitor of one a hell of a branch of literature. (Image of Roberto Bolaño from The New York Times book review)
 I'm going to be reading more of Brad Leithauser's writing. Thus far, I've read only his criticism in The New York Review of Books, but he is also a novelist, poet and verse novelist. Obviously, a major talent (and did I mention MacArthur Fellow?). He is also a very polite critic. His NYRB review of Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs caught my attention with its opening paragraph: Lorrie Moore's novels are remarkable for the number of linguistic detours they embark on. Off in the distance, a plot is likely hatching. But its unfolding will patiently have to wait until the characters - nearly all of whom have a penchant for wordplay - have explored the far-flung implications of the language that entertains and envelops them.
"Remarkable" sounds good, but it could also bear less positive connotations ( e.g., remarkably misguided). That the plot is "likely" hatching evinces a positive attitude about what could be a serious failure ( i.e., if the plot didn't materialize). And what must be "patient" with Lorrie Moore is not the plot, but the reader, who like Leithauser (and this reader) "kept looking for someone [in Moore's novel] who didn't parse and pun." As Leithauser observes, Moore's fiction proceeds by "near misses": misapprehensions, mishearings, misidentifications, misunderstandings. An innocent utterance floats out into the atmosphere, which turns out to be a hazardous and transformative medium, everywhere subject to misinterpretation.
. . . .
It's rare in contemporary American fiction to meet a writer so preoccupied with this sort of linguistic dissonance.
The reason for such rarity, I submit, is that stories don't proceed by linguistic "near misses": they proceed by action. The action can be physical, emotional or psychological, but it cannot be solely linguistic. (As Leithauser notes, "poets are another matter." In a sense, poetry is by definition linguistic action: the rhythm of the language stirs our viscera.) The weakness of Moore's approach is plain in her plot, which Leithauser (even with his critical delicacy) highlights. "I turned skeptical, and a little feisty" when the protagonist, Tassie, and her boyfriend break-up (a scene which also caused me grief), Leithauser admits. "Pesky questions of plausibility arose again" when Tassie accidentally poisons her roommate, Leithauser continues. But worse awaits - "an utter suspension of suspension of disbelief," in Leithauser's words - when Tassie climbs into her brother's coffin. To some extent, Leithauser excuses these problems with the explanation that [m]any writers who are led by the ear, as I think Moore is, have little facility for visual detail. But she has an arresting gift for the one-line imagistic simile or metaphor.
While this statement may be true, the plot of A Gate at the Stairs fumbles, not because Moore has little facility for visual detail, but because she's trying to power a plot with linguistic acrobatics - puns, similes and metaphors - instead of action. Moore's is not a methodology worth replicating. Over 322 pages, the experience of verbal-shenanigans-in-search-of-the-plot-in-the-distance is, even for the patient reader, remarkable. (Image of Brad Leithauser from Johns Hopkins University website)
 I wonder if anyone else has the experience of wanting to visit a place in exact proportion to the awfulness of its description. I no sooner hear that a location is subject to such severe flooding that it can only be accessed on alternate Thursdays from October 1-12, and that, upon arrival, the locals will serve me a dish of fermented yak intestines, and I think: I have to go! I can't hazard a guess as to how and when I drank from the tainted well from which this peculiar response springs, but I can attest to the pain it causes those who care about my well being. For those of you thinking of describing your hells on earth to me, you'll do my mom a favor if you shade your account along the following lines: "Oh, Brazilian favelas? They're lovely. Quiet places where people sit outside on cleanly swept streets, drinking tap water and playing wholesome card games, like Go Fish." Gerald Hanley's Warriors pushed my "must go to hell on earth" buttons. Warriors is a memoir of Hanley's experience being posted in a variety of remote areas in Somalia during World War II. The isolation was extreme, and he suffered many deprivations of food, intellectual stimulation, companionship, pay, etc. His colleagues were committing suicide with a frequency that would have been impressive in a looney bin that'd run low on its meds. So searing was his experience, that the first paragraph of his book asserts that, it is in solitude that one can best understand that there is no solution, except to try and do as little harm as possible while we are here, that there is no losing and no winning, no real end to greed or lust, because the human appetite for novelty can only be fully satisfied by death.
(p. 7.) Yet, despite his success in conveying viscerally the reality of his misery, I can't resist being charmed. He makes the insanity he confronted sound so appealing: After the Somali troops under his command mutinied for the third time (they hadn't been paid in almost half a year), he gave an order that they could only mutiny on Fridays. "They took it seriously," he reports (p. 13). More on his troops: Like white troops without cigarettes, they talked about ghee all day and night, but unlike white troops, held conferences about it, drew up statements, compiled measurements of the ghee they had not had, and must expect from me when the time of ghee came again, and some of them would come trembling with fury to me about the ghee, after having worked each other up over the camp-fire.
(p. 156-57.) Then there was the case of the sleepwalking girl, staggering across the village in the dark hours, past curfew, because the elders had summoned her by means of magic. "I gave [the matter] meticulous examination and was satisfied it was magic," says Hanley. "I had to tell the askaris [the soldiers] to let this girl walk in her sleep whenever she was called, until the end of the curfew." (p. 113.) Or the case of one of his colleagues who was trying to broker a peace between rival chiefs ready to send their tribes to war. Beaten down by fruitless negotiations that rehearsed decades-old arguments that had been as useless then as they were now, and watching the chiefs depart to summon their warriors, the colleague said, "'Remember that it is the elephant asleep in the long grass which defeats the greatest men." He had no idea what he meant . . . and told me he had said it cynically, out of weariness, exhausted anger, but the chiefs stared at him, exchanged glances with each other, and nodded, went on nodding, and sat down, saying, "let us thrash this matter out again. That is a splendid thing you have said."
(p. 154.) And, speaking of saying splendid things, how about this "genealogy" insult hurled by Hanley's cook at his servant: "'Son of a sick hyena, grandson of a noseless thief, descendant of vultures, father to be of a hermaphrodite baboon, filth and refuse untouchable, animal without religion' - and so on." (p. 168.) I love it! I want to go! Sadly, the Somalia of World War II doesn't exist anymore, and the one that currently occupies the horn of Africa is so explosive that breathing next to it is a hazard. But never mind the impossibility: Hanley's hell is on my list of places to visit. Why? Undoubtedly, Hanley's storytelling skill and compelling authorial voice is part of the reason. A good storyteller draws in the audience, even as he or she is saying, "Go away." Go away, forsooth! I want to know why I should, tell me more . . . But even crap storytellers inspire my wanderlust: I've heard perfectly foul storytellers recount information about Senegal, Egypt, Indonesia, Thailand - half the globe, really - and I still want to go. Hanley would understand. As he says towards the end of Warriors: There is an enormous difference between the man who emerges from a safely ensconced segment of society, and the one who is flung into a world in which the shovel is waiting for him. I recommend the latter to all as a far more exciting world to be thrown into.
(p. 201.) (Map of Somalia from the UN website)
 When I admitted in a prior blog post that I felt a teeny-bit let down at the end of Wolf Hall because of the novel's dialogue, I was not telling - I must confess - the whole story. In fact, the plotting also didn't satisfy, but I wanted to address that issue in a separate post because my plot-wise complaints are not directed at Hilary Mantel. They are directed at history. History - like individual lives - doesn't unfold in a neat, plot-ready chunks that move from initial provocation, to thickening, to climax, to smug resolution. While the role of the historical novelist is to shape history, so that the reader can partake in some semblance of the traditional joys of a plotted tale, history (and I feel confident that no one has made this observation before) isn't silly putty: you can't stretch it around however you like. If the escapades of Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII don't fit neatly into the traditional three act structure of Western plots, then your historical novel isn't going to have a traditional three act plot. Hilary Mantel surely excelled herself with her plotting of material. Stephen Greenblatt, writing in The New York Review of Books, points out that the events she covers, including her choice of ending Wolf Hall in the wake of Thomas More's execution, track Shakespeare's treatment of the same topic. Mantel has probably received shabbier compliments. But to my taste - and I admit, I harbor a bias in favor of strong plotting - Wolf Hall's plot didn't build enough momentum to carry me through the 650 pages. One problem was that it was weighed down by numerous sub-plots that will presumably be fleshed out in Mantel's upcoming sequel - chief among them being the fates of Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had a secret wife and daughter. Another drawback was that Wolf Hall was weighed down by numerous sub-plots that were resolved within the text, but didn't seem to advance the overall plot. The in-depth treatment of the Holy Maid, for example, eats up twenty pages, but what do we get? Additional insight into the character of Thomas Cromwell; a foretaste of the trial awaiting Thomas More; an inkling of what the Inquisition in England looked like; a sense of the insecurity Henry VIII felt about his legitimacy; but how do any of these points advance the plot? Four hundred and eighty-four pages into the book, I was expecting the plot to be tightening, not loosening its belt and expanding. But perhaps my expectations are unwarranted. My guess is that Hilary Mantel covered the Holy Maid episode because it happened. Because it's history. And history (to say nothing of Mantel) doesn't give a damn about my plot expectations. Reading Wolf Hall gave me a new appreciation for the challenges of writing a historical novel, as well as the realization that I am not - contrary to past (unintended) mis-statements - currently writing a historical novel. The Celebration Husband, my soon-to-be-completed-in-draft-form fourth novel, which is set in East Africa during WWI, is a novel that takes place in the past; it's not a historical novel. The events described didn't actually happen. For the record, the events described in The Celebration Husband conform to a traditional Western plot. I (not surprisingly) do give a damn about my plot expectations, and the actual historical facts were too scattershot to stick with. This is why I'm a fiction author: I like silly putty. (Image of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn from The Mirror)
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