Novella a Day in May #17

May 17, 2018April 29, 2018 / madamebibilophile / 15 Comments

The Final Solution – Michael Chabon (2005, 127 pages)

An elderly once-famous detective has retired to Sussex to keep bees. Sound familiar? The detective is never identified by name, but it’s reasonable to assume he’s Sherlock Holmes.

“Even on a sultry afternoon lie this one, when cold and damp did not trouble the hinges of his skeleton, it could be a lengthy undertaking, done properly, to rise from his chair, negotiate the shifting piles of ancient-bachelor clutter – newspapers both cheap and of quality, trousers, bottles of salve and liver pills, learned annals and quarterlies, plates of crumbs – that made treacherous the crossing of his parlour, and open his front door to the world.”

Chabon is brilliant at capturing the frailties and fears of old age and fading faculties:

“The memory of the taste of scotch was in his mouth lie the smell of burning leaves lingering on a woollen scarf. But the cords that held him together were so few and threadbare that he feared to loosen them.”

“Over his bearing, his speech, the tweed suit and tatterdemalion Inverness there hung, like the odour of Turkish shag, all the vanished vigour and rectitude of the Empire.”

It is 1944, and the old man is asked to investigate the disappearance of a parrot, which has been reeling off lists of numbers of great interest to various shady persons. The parrot is the only friend of a mute Jewish boy, and shortly after it disappears a lodger at the same premises of the boy is found murdered.

The old man relishes the opportunity to use his much-lauded skills again. Yet while it is a mystery novella, this is not the main point of the story. Rather it is about how some things are so huge – wars, the Holocaust – they defy reason and straightforward explanation. Answers can be comforting, but sometimes they are not there to be found.

“A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man’s mind, shivering, catching in the glints and surmises. It was the deepest pleasure life could afford, this deductive crystallisation, the paroxysm of guesswork, and one that he had lived without for a terribly long time.”

“Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.” (Gertrude Stein)

February 20, 2018 / madamebibilophile / 22 Comments

Last month Kaggsy wrote about enjoying Pistache by Sebastian Faulks. It sounded good fun, do head over to her Bookish Ramblings & read Kaggsy’s excellent review. In this year of my book buying ban (still in effect & being adhered to, much to my utter amazement) I’ve put my name on the waiting list for Pistache at the library, and managed to hunt down two pastiche novels in my TBR mountain.

When I was doing my English degree, there was much talk of post-structuralism, post-modernism, post-lots of things I didn’t really grasp (which I would mention in essays hoping my tutors didn’t question me too closely on them – a flawed strategy as it turned out). How I wish I had read Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy then, because he takes notions of post-whatever, such as the instability of meaning, the non-specificity of language, the fragmented self, and uses them to weave a fascinating pastiche of the hard-boiled detective novel. I realise I’m not doing him any favours in this summary but trust me, it does work. It’s done in a humorous way, and there’s enough of a narrative to pull you along, although at times my brain hurt trying to think through all that Auster was discussing.

In the first story, City of Glass, Auster begins by questioning his role as author:

“ ‘Is this Paul Auster?’ asked the voice. ‘I would like to speak to Mr Paul Auster.’

‘There’s no-one here by that name.’

‘Paul Auster. Of the Auster detective agency.’

… ‘There’s nothing I can do for you,’ said Quinn. ‘There’s no Paul Auster here.’”

There is of course a ‘Paul Auster here’ – his name is on the cover – but exactly where is a matter of debate. Quinn, the writer in City of Glass, is mistaken for Paul Auster and finds himself impersonating a private eye:

“Private eye. The term held a triple meaning for Quinn. Not only was it the letter ‘i’, standing for investigator, it was ‘I’ in the upper case, the tiny life-bud buried in the body of the breathing self. At the same time, it was the physical eye of the writer, the eye of the man who looks out from himself into the world and demands that the world reveal itself to him. For five years now, Quinn had been living in the grip of this pun.”

So, multiple identities, multiple meanings, utter confusion. Quinn locates the man he has been asked to find, someone who spends his days wandering the streets, picking up junk and re-naming things:

“I have come to New York because it is the most forlorn of places, the most abject. The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal. You only have to open your eyes to see it. The broken people, the broken things, the broken thoughts….I find the streets an endless source of material, an inexhaustible storehouse of shattered things”

Throughout this and the two stories that follow, Ghosts and The Locked Room, Auster explores how people are ‘shattered things’, how easily identity and the language used to construct it fall apart. For him, unsurprisingly, this is all bound up in the storyteller’s art:

“We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same way we did when we were young. We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person inside the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.”

The trilogy was originally released separately but I think it works best read together. The stories interweave and reflect each other, and so build on the sense of a ‘fractured whole’ being reflected in the structure of the book we hold in our hands. It may be that “these three stories are finally the same story”, but they are different enough to enrich each other and at no time did I feel my attention wavering. It’s a great achievement: stories that deconstruct the very thing they are made out of – language – and yet still hold together.

“Each sentence erased the sentence before it, each paragraph made the next paragraph impossible. It is odd then, that the feeling that survives from this notebook is one of great lucidity.”

Secondly, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon (2007), an alternative history detective novel. Chabon takes the idea that a settlement for Jewish refugees is provided in Alaska during the Second World War (an idea was proposed but rejected in 1940) and this has developed into the metropolis of Sitka. Policing this city is Meyer Landsman:

“According to doctors, therapists, and his ex-wife, Landsman drinks to medicate himself, tuning the tubes and crystals of his moods with a crude hammer of hundred-proof plum brandy. But the truth is that Landsman has only two moods: working and dead.”

The first of those two moods is under threat: Sitka is going to become part of the USA again and no-one is sure what will happen when it does but they’re fairly sure it won’t be good (reading this in post-Brexit Britain, it took on a whole new resonance):

“On the first of January, sovereignty over the whole Federal District of Sitka, a crooked parenthesis of rocky shoreline running along the western edges of Baranof and Chichagof islands, with revert to Alaska. The District Police, to which Landsman has devoted his hide, head, and soul for twenty years, will be dissolved. It is far from clear that Landsman or Berko Shemets or anybody else will be keeping his job. Nothing is clear about the upcoming Reversion and that is why these are strange times to be a Jew.”

“Strange times to be a Jew” is a recurring refrain throughout the novel. Landsman lives in a seedy hotel and is investigating the murder of fellow resident Mendel Shpilman. Spilman was a drug addict and also the son of the most powerful organised crime boss and local rebbe, from whom he was estranged. As he undertakes the investigation Landsman manages to annoy absolutely everyone, from the powerful crimelords to his ex-wife and boss, Bina. Chabon has fun with the form, but doesn’t go overboard on the pastiche of hardboiled crime. He employs colourful turns of phrase:

“The space recently occupied by his mind hisses like the fog in his ears, hums like a bank of fluorescent tubes. He feels he suffers from tinnitus of the soul.”

But The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is always its own story and not a gimmick-laden creative writing exercise. Chabon is exploring ideas of identity, home, belonging and justice alongside an appreciation for Raymond Chandler.

“For the first time the traditional complaint, tantamount to a creed or philosophy, of the Sitka Jew – Nobody gives a damn about us, stuck up here between Hoonah and Hotzeplotz – strikes Landsman as having been a blessing these past sixty years, and not the affliction they had all, in their backwater of geography and history, supposed.”

I don’t rate this quite as highly as other novels by Chabon that I’ve read – it was a bit overlong and I think it could have been 100 pages lighter, but still an ambitious and interesting work and I’m glad to have novelists like Chabon are around, attempting to do something different.

To end, trying to come up with a pastiche song that’s bearable was a tough call. In the end I chose The Divine Comedy, who offer pastiche of several things all at once. I opted for Something for the Weekend as I think it references Cold Comfort Farm with the repeated reference to ‘something in the woodshed’ and so is the obvious choice for a book blog:

“My school days were the happiest days of my life; which should give you some indication of the misery I’ve endured over the past twenty-five years.” (Paul Merton)

September 6, 2016September 8, 2016 / madamebibilophile / 24 Comments

It’s back to school time, kids. Who’s excited?

So I thought I would look at novels about teachers. Firstly, Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller (2003). Narrated by Barbara, an older, unmarried teacher heading towards retirement, it tells the tale of another teacher, Sheba Hart’s, affair with a pupil. Sort of. Barbara purports to be doing so, but we don’t know what happened, because Barbara does not really know. Instead, what we have is an intense character study of Barbara, and her relentless campaign to work her way in Sheba’s life.

“I simply went on with my life – reading my books, preparing my meals, changing my sheets – quietly certain all the while that, sooner or later, she would wake up to my importance in her life.”

Sheba is open and naïve to Barbara’s machinations, making it easy for Barbara to engineer a friendship. Sheba’s horrible, destructive secret is the perfect leverage Barbara needs to wheedle her way into Sheba’s life further:

“For most people, honesty is such a unusual departure from their standard modus operandi – such an aberration in their workaday mendacity – that they feel obliged to alert you a moment of sincerity is coming on. ‘To be completely honest,’ they say, or ‘To tell you the truth,’ or ‘Can I be straight?’ Often they want to extract vows of discretion from you before going any further. ‘This is strictly between us, right?…You must promise not to tell anyone…’ Sheba does none of that. She tosses out intimate and unflattering truths about herself, all the time, without a second thought.”

Notes on a Scandal is a brilliant character study. Heller feels no need to make her protagonist likeable, but Barbara is so very believable in all her contradictions and complexity. She veers between sharply observant and utterly deluded, a compelling mix for a narrator.

“Any sexual arrangement existing outside the narrow channels of family newspaper convention is relegated to a great, sinister parenthesis of kinky ‘antics’.”

“As Sheba’s unofficial guardian, I have certain obligations that I cannot shirk”

She is a horrible snob who views almost everyone with utter disdain at best; a cynical cruelty at worst:

“St George’s is the holding pen for Archway’s pubescent proles – the children of the council estates who must fidget and scrap here for a minimum of five years until they can embrace their fates as plumbers and shop assistants.”

Yet, as Zoe Heller explains here, she has a sympathy for Barbara, for her loneliness and the desperation that evokes. She behaves despicably, but is motivated by a great sadness, and unarticulated sexual longing, which means it is hard to condemn her without reservation.

“I have sat on park benches and tubes and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.”

Notes on a Scandal was made into a film in 2006, starring Cate Blanchett as Sheba and Judi Dench as Barbara, directed by Richard Eyre. Playwright Patrick Marber wrote the screenplay and changed the ending, but it stayed true to the tone of the book and I thought it was an effective adaptation:

Secondly, Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon (1995) which was recommended to me by David Bowie. It follows a weekend in the life of Professor Grady Tripp: adulterous, permanently stoned and struggling to find an ending to a 2000 page novel he’s writing called Wonder Boys. As a young man he’d wanted to be a writer and has even been moderately successful:

“I’d read Kerouac the year before and had conceived the usual picture of myself as an outlaw-poet-pathfinder, a kind of Zen-masterly John C Fremont on amphetamines with a marbled dime-store pad of lined paper in the back pocket of my denim pants. I still see myself that way, I suppose, and I’m probably none the better for it.”

Understandable in an adolescent, this self-image easily becomes pathetic in middle-age, of which Grady is all too aware:

“Here I was, forty-one years old, having left behind dozens of houses, spent a lot of money on vanished possessions and momentary entertainments, fallen desperately in and abruptly out of love with at least seventeen women, lost my mother in infancy and my father to suicide, and everything about to change once more”

The change is due to Grady’s wife having left him and his mistress, Sara – the wife of his boss – being pregnant.

“For me the act of marriage has proven, like most other disastrous acts of my life, little more than a hedge against any future lack of good material.”

Things are about to change, but first Grady has to get through a weekend with a suicidal student James Leer, who wears a coat which “emitted an odour of bus stations so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse” and his old friend and editor Crabtree, who is determined to sleep with James and wants to read Wonder Boys, which Grady has assured him is finished. What follows is a farce involving dead dogs, squashed snakes, stolen vintage jackets once worn by Marilyn Monroe, and car theft. It is a comic novel but I didn’t find it laugh out loud funny, more wryly amusing despite the broader elements. Grady has no illusions about himself but neither is he self-pitying, and as he blunders around trying to piece his life back together I did find myself rooting for him.

“Terry Crabtree gazed at me with such an air of cool and unconcerned appraisal he was no longer generally seeing me, his oldest friend, in whom all the outlandish promises of life and every chance for glory intimately and anciently adhered. He was seeing only the pot-addled author of a bloated, boneless, half-imaginary, two-thousand page kraken of a novel”

Chabon has a pithy turn of phrase which I greatly enjoyed:

“It wore an oddly crooked grin – almost as if a muscle in its cheek were paralysed – and a little black eye patch over its left eye. I liked that. I wondered if I had it in me to produce a baby with a piratical air.”

“She was a natural blonde, with delicate hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives.”

But he doesn’t allow these to overwhelm the narrative in order to prove how clever and witty he is. All in all, an entertaining, well-observed read.

Wonder Boys was also adapted into a film, in 2000, starring Michael Douglas as Grady Tripp and the incomparable Frances McDormand as Sara. I saw it when it came out & to be honest it has much faded in my memory, but from this trailer it looks like a faithful adaptation: