CSL to honour Jackie Robinson

 Mort Halbman would be thrilled
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Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I see this novel in three parts. Part one is an elegant meditation on the experience of sixtyish photographer Paul Rayment, whose leg has been amputated in the aftermath of an accident in which his bicycle is struck by a car. Paul's frustrations with his incapacities and the healthcare system, and his ruminations on what it means to exist on the edge of a watershed 'before and after' moment in his life are movingly rendered. Intimations of mortality are hinted at by the name of the accident site, Magill Rd., which if you've studied a little Russian you know means 'grave'. There is a section in which Paul considers the possibility that he may have actually crossed over to an afterlife: "If dying turns out to be nothing but a trick that might as well be a trick of words, if death is a mere hiccup in time after which life goes on as before, why all the fuss? Is one allowed to refuse it - refuse deathlessness, this puny fate? I want my own life back, the one that came to an end on Magill Road." (p. 123) But soon he is ushered back to earthly existence by a devoted Croatian caregiver named Marijana Jokic, a restorer of art by training and restorer of body and soul by profession. Paul is smitten. It's not hard to see why the 'cared for' would fall in love with their caregiver since the relationship is based on unique intimacies and vulnerabilities. How can you not love the person responsible for essentially bringing you back to the land of the living? Paul's problem now is what, if anything, to do about it, especially considering that Marijana is married with three children. The wheels start to come off, in a matter of speaking, when Elizabeth Costello enters the picture; thus begins the novel's second stage. Mrs Costello, is a well-known novelist who literally barges into Paul's life inexplicably knowing everything about him, including his past, the events surrounding the accident, his infatuation with Marijana, and the nature of his most innermost thoughts, feelings and sub-conscious motives. She seems to know everything except how Paul's story will end which is apparently what keeps her around, as much against her own will as her subject's. Fans of Coetzee will recognize the name Elizabeth Costello as the titular character from his 2003 novel. This shift in the story - one in which the challenges of Paul's physical rehabilitation are shunted aside - comes off blatantly as a device. Paul himself begins to see it this way, suspecting that he's being used as the model for a character in Costello's next novel. And so the story inside a story, the story about the nature of storytelling, the stories we tell ourselves etc. starts to nudge out the initial narrative. At this stage, I wanted to launch the book against the wall because I get annoyed with writers who play that game. To my mind it serves to distance the reader from the characters, and draws attention to the author's infatuation with his enterprise. But Coetzee being Coetzee, he knows how to keep the reader reading by gradually turning the plot screws, in this case stemming from two sources; Paul's offer to pay for Marijana's son Drago's private schooling and the way it rips her family asunder, and a second Marianna (said to be the one with two n's), a young blind woman with whom Paul has a kinky tryst arranged by Mrs Costello. As the novel moves into its final third Coetzee adds a few twists with a fall in the bathtub and his protege Drago apparently stealing from him, but by this time the author has let the tensions slacken and the narrative becomes spotty, interrupted by ponderous lengthy expositions by the Costello woman. Coetzee starts to emphasize themes related to displacement, (immigrant displacement, Paul's displaced love for Marijana, whether there is any such thing as authenticity in the world anymore). Near the end, Paul wonders again if he has passed through a portal into an afterlife, and the reader feels that sort of uncanniness and disconnection too, which, even if it is the author's goal, tends to undermine the story's emotional impact. The heartwarming ending flirts with something Disney-esque and isn't completely convincing. This novel was Coetzee's first after winning the Nobel Prize, and one senses, with all the wordplay and cleverness, he might have been a touch too distracted by expectations.



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Were the Shakespeare plays actually penned by a Jew?

This interesting piece posits that the character of Shylock may have actually been the creation of a Jew.  

The Last Great American Writer

What, then, is a serious, literary writer today but a kind of ghost, haunting the information/media wasteland Stephen Henighan has dubbed the afterlife of culture? Every literary bio is a ghost story.

In this interesting review by Alex Good of a biography of David Foster Wallace he seems to be making the point that there is no last great American writer.  There are few second acts in American literature, and in our time many of the first acts have been remarkably brief. One of the hot new names contemporary with Wallace was, according to Max, Mark Leyner. I had never heard of him before reading this book. Meanwhile, is any member of the "brat pack" of Conspicuously Young Authors - Jay MacInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz - read today? (The fourth "official" member of the pack, Mark Lindquist, isn't even mentioned here.) Elizabeth Wurtzel (who Wallace tried, unsuccessfully, to bed) seems to have vanished without a trace. Even among Wallace's acolytes the process of dynamic obsolescence is working in overdrive. How many people can name a David Eggers novel after A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and this despite the fact that he continues to receive excellent reviews? The painful fact is that by the time he was 40 Wallace knew in his bones that his fifteen minutes were over, and indeed said as much.

But isn't the best writing, writing we call 'literature' that rises to the level of art by definition supposed to defy this process he calls 'dynamic obsolescence'? Maybe Wallace understood something that added to his despair. That today's culture is one in which there is no distinction between high and low, everything is mere 'product' and therefore nothing lasts. Or rather in our democratizing digital culture everything lasts equally, serving to accelerate the process of devaluation and the transforming of all creativity into so much clogging expendable cultural detritus. Maybe Wallace understood (what Warhol understood before him) ie. that in this hyper-proliferized environment it is the iconic persona that lasts in our culture, and the surest way to safeguard a lasting legacy - one beyond the alloted 15 minutes - was, not in the work one produced, but ironically, in dying tragically young. 

The de-legitimization of art

Sheila Heti argues that this is what's happening in America. Or as she eloquently puts it ...that this activity is privileged, narcissistic and childish; something permitted to those at university, maybe, but even then, a bit far-fetched as an activity of real importance. Certainly to be put away – along with the other “childish things” – once one becomes a man...A funny thing is that much of this criticism came from very smart people in populous American cities, where (it is implied) the more mature, less narcissistic, and less privileged thing to talk about is money. Money is a conversation for adults. Art, for undergrads."

Seems to me that what she's picking up on in this compelling, passionate essay is a pervasive ignorance that exists particularly among the 'educated' and wealthy. I know it sounds strange to call the so-called 'educated' ignorant, but it's true in a society that defines education in narrow terms. There is no doubt that we are the most educated society that has ever existed, at least in terms of producing individuals holding university degrees. But we are also the most blinkered. We stream our children early, and promote specialization because it affords the best potential for translating acquired skills into high-paying careers. "Money is a conversation for adults" because it's the one subject most every adult has the capacity to talk about. It does not require 'specialized' knowledge the way art does. Heti's essay made me think about a time when the wealthiest in society could talk about art, and needed to. In fact, talk of money was considered uncouth. The wealthiest considered being educated in the arts absolutely essential, as a critical component of taste, prestige, status, awareness and intelligence. It was also an important aspect of noblesse oblige, the responsibility of those few who could afford to be patrons of the arts to support this greater good. Today this role is fulfilled by governments and universities. When I think of the chasm that exists between wealth and knowledge (responsibility, awareness), Duck Dynasty comes to mind, a TV show about a millionaire family of yokels who seem to epitomize the ignorance Heti is talking about. The Robertson 'clan' wears the 'yokel' emblem with pride; a backwoods family that drives Cadillac Escalades and lives in mansions, who are rich enough not to care less about life beyond the boundaries of the swamp. They represent an anti-elitist credo that is elitist in its own ironic way ie. they own all the symbols of American success without being affected (read: tainted) by outside cultural influences, thereby supposedly retaining authenticity. The thrust of Heti's main argument is that knowledge of art is essential for knowledge of life in the broadest possible sense, because art speaks for the pockets of our culture and our hearts that the mainstream, commercialized world does not want to hear about; art elbows its way in. It’s about balancing – about justice. It allows our deepest grievances and sorrows to take centre stage. Art is an example of human freedom and striving. It defines and stretches our humanity, it clears the world of convenient lies, it touches the loneliness that plagues us all and replaces it with fellow-feeling. It creates models of possible worlds in opposition to the worlds we live in, which we cannot imagine our way out of without art.

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut


My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Vonnegut is always a unique, and undeniably curious read, compelling in ways that defy the standard literary experience. For many, he's an acquired taste, heady as opposed to emotionally rewarding. His concerns in this absurd, satirical, dystopic tale about an author's quest to document the events surrounding the founder of the atom bomb's last day on earth, are as large as they come; the contemporary political, social, cultural and religious landscape. And as a satire he walks a fine line between a narrative that is hard to take seriously (characters are caricature, plot and dialogue carry little veracity) and an underlying message that is deadly serious. You never know whether to laugh or cry and I spent most of my time doing neither. I shook my head instead. As the story shifts to the tiny Carribean island of San Lorenzo, and with the injection of faux-spriritual Bokonist aphorisms, the novel began feeling somewhat dated, recalling a time when Cold War ideology ruled the decisions of regimes and men, the US supported South American dictators in a bid to stave off Soviet expansionism in the Western Hemisphere, and the threat of a world-ending nuclear war peperpetually hung in the air. Then again, the ideological machinations of leaders still appear to hold sway, as the disastrous effect of three decades of neo-conservative fiscal policy in the US has shown. But is this a novel we're talking about? Well, yes and no. That's just the kind of book Cat's Cradle is. When you want to talk about the book it's not actually about the book.




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A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole


My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Three and a half stars.

This novel reads as if Moby Dick were written by the staff at Mad magazine or the National Lampoon. The whale in this case is Ignatius Reilly, an obese, slobbering, slovenly, self-centered, uncouth, pretentious, over-indulged, utterly incapable, clueless, ne'er-do-well and unemployable buffoon. A verbose Bluto (from Animal House) with a degree in medieval philosophy, a walking disaster zone who talks like an Oxford Don, if you can imagine that. The action reminded me of the 1972 Barbara Streisand - Ryan O'Neal comedy of errors What's Up Doc? a film in which an initial miscue triggers a series of other mishaps and misunderstandings affecting a variety of characters tangentially connected, including Ignatius, his long-suffering mother, an incompetent police officer, the owner of a pants manufacturer, a strip-bar owner and her black employee. The New Orleans setting is fittingly over-the-top for this kind of social satire of American excess and vain overindulgence, where the crazies are running the insane asylum. Favourite parts were Ignatius's masochistic penchant for rushing to see movies he knows are pure shlock. He relishes chortling at the overdone, trashiest parts and hurling insults at the screen, just as we can't help ourselves from flocking to the theatres to consume the over-hyped substandard cultural garbage that supports the entertainment industry. Although there are plenty of laughs the reader detects a pervasive underlying seriousness and sadness. Where this novel lacked was with Ignatius himself, who is so pathetic as to be unsympathetic, and whose lack of evolution can not be forgiven. The tone of underlying sadness comes from the fact that the author committed suicide over a decade prior to the novel's publication and it's impossible not to read the novel as his helpless plea to be rescued from himself, which is exactly what happens to Ignatius in the end. There is no redemption, only excuses, and the goddess Fortuna driving the bus to hell.




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