The Old Capital

The Old Capital - Yasunari Kawabata

This 1962 novel counts among his later novels. However, unlike The Lake or The Sleeping Beauty, The Old Capital is not shot through with sexual obsession and perversity.

Instead, it examines the failure of Japanese people to preserve their traditional culture against its vulgarization by modern Japanese buying and selling, i.e., ephemeral beauty embattled by trashy changes.

It also looks at how delicate love between men and women, parents and children can be. People who don't know much about Kyoto mountains, districts, streets, and temples may be confused as to what is being described is a shrine or a festival or what. Also, emotional responses and reticence by the characters may be obscure by readers unfamiliar with the Japanese cultural value of hinting and beating around the bush.

I think that for Japan-savvy readers, this novel, which even has a couple of laughs (amazing for Kawabata), is more accessible and enjoyable than Thousand Cranes and Snow Country.

Back to the Classics #11

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020.

Classic by a Woman: This book was published in 1941 to universal praise. Virginia Woolf described Rebecca West as “hard as nails… a cross between a charwoman and a gipsy, but as tenacious as a terrier, with flashing eyes… immense vitality… suspicion of intellectuals, and great intelligence.”

Black Lamb Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia – Rebecca West

In 1936, novelist and critic Rebecca West travelled to Yugoslavia, because the assassination of its king in 1934 made her realize that she knew nothing about the southeast of Europe. This state of ignorance was intolerable to her, a powerful intelligence with a mighty pen. Having read a stack of books about the Byzantines and the Turk in Europe, she returned in 1937 for a more extensive journey. It took her about two years to write this book and its length – about 1200 pages – made her worry that nobody would read it.

In fact, this masterpiece has never gone out of print. It is not only a travel narrative of the highest achievement, but also a close examination of Balkan ethnography and history, and a meditation on the human condition in terms of the rise of fascism in the modern era. This, on Luigi Lucheni, the Italian anarchist and assassin of Empress Elisabeth of Austria in 1898:

It was indeed most appropriate that he should register his discontent by killing Elizabeth, for Vienna is the archetype of the great city which breeds such a population. Its luxury was financed by an exploited peasant class bled so white that it was ready to send its boys into the factories and the girls into service on any terms. The beggars in the streets of Vienna, which the innocent suppose were put there by the Treaty of Trianon, are descendants of an army as old as the nineteenth century. Lucheni said with his stiletto to the symbol of power, ‘Hey, what are you going to do with me?’ He made no suggestions, but cannot be blamed for it. It was the essence of his case against society that it had left him unfit to offer suggestions, unable to form thoughts or design actions other than the crudest and most violent. He lived many years in prison, almost until his like had found a vocabulary and a name for themselves and had astonished the world with the farce of Fascism.

Whacha gonna do about me, indeed a question still with us today.

Anyway, one writer was probably right in observing “Probably misclassified as a work of travel literature, the book has a curiosity, seriousness, and depth of insight that make it more akin to such classics of ethical reportage as Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom than to anything attempted by Bryson or Theroux.” Indeed, saying Black Lamb Grey Falcon  is a travel book is like saying Anna Karenina is “about Russia.”

Reading History

Last night I thought about what I read a long time ago and came up with these.

First: The Comics and Charlie Brown books, that is, collections of strips

Elementary School Years: I don't remember that I read much except I read a lot of comic books (that's why I am cool about graphic novels now - been there, done that). I remember reading ghost stories and Howard Pyles' Book of Pirates (excellent illustrations in the flowery Maxfield Parrish-type style). Civil War stories, too.

In about 1965 or 1966, the first grown-up book I ever read was Louis Armstrong's autobiography Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans.

High School Years. I did not read regularly but I read all kinds of stuff. At 13 or 14 I remember reading a fistful of Dickens' novels and all the James Bond novels. I read Gone with the Wind (so I never have to read another romance novel). I read a couple of Irving Wallace novels (so I've never read James Michener ; I decided if I want history I'll just read history)

High school was the only period in which I often read the book after I saw the movie. For instance, In 1972, at 16, I read The Godfather and A Clockwork Orange (that sent me to a couple of Burgess' novels which I didn't really get). Other examples are The Exorcist, The Day of the Jackal and Slaughterhouse 5 (That sent me to all over Vonnegut's writing).

Then, I also read a lot guy adventure stuff like The Sand Pebbles by Richard McKenna and The Eiger Sanction and The Odessa File and those hare-brained violent novels of Robert Ludlum (that's why I don't read James Paterson and others like him, been there, read that), but I also read Ross MacDonald, Raymond Chandler, and other hard-boiled writers.

College: I read contemporary best-selling fiction, the only period in my life when I did that: Looking for Mr Goodbar, Ragtime, Burr, and novels by Philip Roth. I think I had some yen to understand mainstream culture.

Since the 1980s I let books find me and read what falls into my lap.

Ashenden, or The British Agent

Ashenden, or The British Agent - Somerset Maugham

This collection of short stories are based on his experiences as a spy during WWI.

Prospective thrill-seekers are clearly warned off in Maugham’s introduction. He says, "The work of an agent in the Intelligence Department is on the whole extremely monotonous. A lot of it is uncommonly useless. The material it offers for stories is scrappy and pointless; the author has himself to make it coherent, dramatic and probable."

The stories here have verbal dueling and furious thinking but are without car chases, gun play, or stuff blowing up. The fantastic characters would be familiar to readers who like John "Greenmantle" Buchan, such as the Hairless Mexican, femme fatale Giulia Lazzari, and hardcore Teuton Mrs. Caypor. In contrast to the earnest tone of writers like Buchan and Graham  "The W Plan"  Seton, Maugham writes in his usual amused tone, always tolerant of flawed human nature.

I’ve read a lot of Maugham’s stories and novels and I think, in terms of characterization, dialogue, and Maugham’s favorite themes (like abused love a la Of Human Bondage), these stories rank with his best like Cakes and Ale, The Narrow Corner, and The Razor’s Edge.

Finally, for those into history of genres, with these stories Maugham unwittingly invented the genre of sophisticated espio-fiction, which Eric Ambler and John Le Carre, among many others, later did so well.

The Dirty Thirties in the US

The American Earthquake - Edmund Wilson

This is a collection of nonliterary essays, such as vignettes of life in the Big Apple in the Jazz Age and reviews of concerts, art exhibitions, movies and Ziegfield Follies' productions.

In 1932, the worst year of the Depression, Wilson traveled around the US as a reporter. So this collection is comprised mainly of essays that came out of that journey. Critic Alfred Kazin argued that Wilson "is not a reporter but a literary artist driven by the historical imagination - like Henry Adams and Carlyle."

It is a portrait of a time when "the whole structure of American society seemed actually to be going to pieces."

Who would get into this book: readers interested in the Jazz Age, readers into Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, or those who want to know about the childhoods of members of the Greatest Generation. Wilson's unapologetic and frank style is for people nostalgic for columnists like H.L. Mencken who would bluntly describe regions of the US as "backward." For instance, for people who know Dearborn and FoMoCo, there is a brutal take-down of Henry Ford and his minions like Sorenson.

Back to the Classics #10

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020.

Classic with a Place in the Title:  Le petit homme d'Arkhangelsk was first published in French in 1956. Archangel is an old port city in the far north of European Russia.

The Little Man from Archangel – Georges Simenon

In a small provincial town where he sells old books and collects rare stamps, everyone knows Jonas Milk. In his early forties, of Russian-Jewish origin, he has always been a part of the market neighborhood, as he follows his daily routine from his shop to the cafe opposite. Married to the beautiful Gina, nearly twenty years his junior, they form a mismatched couple, but their neighbors wink eloquently, fully knowing her parents pressured the delinquent girl  into  marriage to the 40-year-old virgin so they could get some peace and quiet. Gina herself had warned Jonas off, but, of course, he didn’t listen, giddy with the sense his narrow life was going to change.

Life changes, as it always does, one fine day, out of the blue, when Gina disappears, taking with her several priceless stamps that Jonas knows she can’t sell because all the dealers know Jonas has priceless stamps and would call the cops. The neighborhood, however, notices Gina’s absence and, being the cunning merchant shits they are, become suspicious. Jonas, embarrassed that his tolerance of her serial cheating will become public knowledge, evades questions, claims Gina went to Bourges. Could the plump little man from Archangel, seeming harmless, have killed his wife? Poor Jonas, living in cocoon alive but not living is silently  shunned, accused by mere rumor of a crime he did not commit.

A reader could examine this novel as a typical existential critique of a life cravenly lived. But there’s also Simenon’s close examination of small social circles, in this case a humble neighborhood. Furthermore, we have another example of Simenon’s stock character – the little man, the ordinary guy, socially integrated in a certain milieu, but who, confounded by fate, victim of bad luck, of malice, of ignorance or of his own anxiety and depression, sees himself little by little banished from the only society he knows.

As in his other psychological thrillers, Simenon sets this novelette in a limited number of dreary spots: the dusty smelly bookshop, the cafe, the market. As always with Simenon, there are lots of smells: espresso, vegetables, armpits. The action happens inside the main character, in the darkness of his soul, where the most secret, the most frustrated, the most shameful feelings hide. What is fascinating in this story is that we are witnessing, on the one hand, the intimate drama of Jonas giving his assent to irrational ideas, but also his dismayed resignation the breakdown of communication and shattering of assumptions that cause to snap the wires that connect his brains and his sense of self-preservation.

Granted, it may not be the most cheerful reading in our days of outbreak and ennui. But this is a story rich in an atmosphere, without false twists, moving towards a painful conclusion.

Holy Cow!

Holy Cow! - Sarah Macdonald

This 2005 book is about her adventure in India. For the sake of love, Sarah moves to New Delhi. This, in spite of the fact that she detested the country on a previous trip there.

This book delivers just about everything a reasonable reader can expect from a travel book. As an expatriate memoir, it tells of her struggles with the culture and the ultimate drag, getting really sick in another country. It’s part chick lit because space is devoted to a “problem relationship.”

In the travelogue, she tells about journeys around India and Pakistan and in the confession, she tells about her spiritual journey, a.k.a. finding herself. The book is a primer, too, as a guide to the diversity of religions in India.

On the downside, the writing kinda clumps along in places, a shrill tone sometimes creeps in, and the frank honesty about India could be interpreted as a slap in the face. But these are quibbles alongside her insight and humor about her unique experience in a culture that we general readers ought to know more about.