May19

The Tango Singer, by Tomás Eloy Martínez

by obooki on May 19th, 2012
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I picked this up because I felt a little weighed down by the other books I was reading and wanted something light instead, some easy to read. The Tango Singer is certainly that, it slips by in that simple style of many a modern novel. But unlike many a modern novel, it’s also an interesting book.

The plot: an American post-graduate student goes to Buenos Aires to track down a legendary and unrecorded tango singer.

On his travels, he discovers Buenos Aires, its present, its history: the murderous past of its dictatorships, the present financial and political meltdown. The novel is set in 2001/2002 – at the beginning, as he’s leaving the United States, he mentions, in passing, the 9/11 business, before the novel descends into its real political concern, the economic and social collapse of Argentina, which comes to pervade the novel’s background. (Europeans could no doubt do well with reading this). Not merely is he obsessed with tracking down his tango singer, but he ends up living in the house where Borges’ Aleph resides and attempts to find that too. There’s a lot of Borgesiana in this novel.

As you’d expect with a South American novel, it’s often hard to decide what’s fact and fiction. Indeed, so scanty is my knowledge of Argentine history, I didn’t even bother. He could, I suspect be making many things up. I got the same impression reading his Santa Evita. To that novel, I felt, this one compared well: for a start, it’s shorter; which in my mind is a good thing, since many passages in Santa Evita seemed to go on far too long. This only happens a few times in The Tango Singer, most notably in the section which some people kidnap a corpse (does Tomás Eloy Martínez always have a kidnapped corpse in his novels? it seemed a bit shoe-horned into this one).

I’m sure I had more to say, but I forget it now.

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May17

Obooki’s Sexennial Survey of the Literary Scene

by obooki on May 17th, 2012
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As readers may be aware, Obooki doesn’t have much time for contemporary English literature; he doesn’t have a good word to say about it. But perhaps, too, it’s crossed your mind (as it has Obooki’s) that this is just prejudice; for what recent books, after all, has he read? Perhaps many of these highly-praised works he’s heard about – works which simply everyone is reading – really are the masterpieces they are claimed to be; – perhaps they do indeed demand to be read and re-read.

So, to challenge preconceptions, we have Obooki’s Sexennial Survey of the Literary Scene. This is how it works: I find the cheapest charity shop I can; there I buy ten or so examples of the very best in contemporary literature (for these books are so good, people are always spreading the word by passing them on to other people through charity shops); these I take home and for each book I read the first 50 pages; if I find no merit in the book at that point, I lay it aside and start on the next one; if I am enjoying it, I am quite entitled to continue on to the end; then at the end I give all the books back to another charity shop.

That I’m going to like any of these books is of course highly unlikely. I’m certainly not coming into this project with an open mind. But even in my purblind state, I’m still capable, I like to think, of some discernment. In the last version of this, six years ago, I did finish one book. Here are the writers from that project:

  • Tibor Fischer
  • Jeannette Winterson
  • Magnus Mills
  • Kate Atkinson
  • Don DeLillo
  • Sebastian Faulks
  • John Banville
  • Ali Smith
  • Julie Myerson

(Yes, another useful side-effect of this project, is that it will supply me with another six years’ worth of Aunt Sallies, with which to beat contemporary literature).

(It’s true, in between then and now, I’ve read the odd book in the same manner – out of competition as it were: Tom McCarthy, Lee Rourke and Philip Roth come to mind – all with a similar result).

So, any recommendations? – Remember, we are looking for much-heralded masterpieces which there’s little chance I’ll like. – Oh, I don’t know, something like Jonathan Frantzen’s The Corrections. – I believe I still have something by Safran Foer left over from the last edition. And probably I can already throw in Steven Hall.

I think the reason it’s taken me six years to get back round to this is that, amusing as all this sounds, none of it fills me with any pleasure. It’s a chore I feel I need to go through so I can maintain the opinions I maintain; – so I can’t be accused of being, for instance, one of these complacent bloggers who disparages everything apart from Beckett, Blanchot and Kafka, when it transpires those are the only three authors I’ve read.

Oh yes, August – that’s when I’m doing this.

(This list from The Millions provides some good ideas – though with an American-bias, while I’d rather wanted an English one; the writers I’ve read on it certainly have to a man failed to impress – and it reminds me I’ve also got The Road somewhere).

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May14

Locos: A Comedy of Gestures, by Felipe Alfau

by obooki on May 14th, 2012
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There’s a nice essay at the end of Locos by Mary McCarthy, which is a sort of summing-up of most of my thoughts on the work by someone who’s paid a bit more attention. It’s particularly astute, I feel, in its observation that the one thing that hasn’t truly withstood the test of time are the clumsier metafictional elements – Alfau’s constant complaints, in the first half of the book at least (he seems to forget about them in the second half) that his characters are beyond his control – a familiar enough post-modernist conceit, I’m sure you’ll agree, but this was published in 1936 (i.e. about 40 years before the social conditions existed whereby our artists were able to interpret the world this way) – though maybe it’s because, as always with this conceit, one feels the artist protests too much; that in reality he’s perfectly in charge. A better conceit – and one less popular in later times, perhaps – is that one where the author seeks to trick his own characters into situations they wouldn’t have otherwise got into, for the purposes of his own designs.

Like a few books that I (Vila-Matas) and others (Bolaño, Sebald) have been reading of late, Locos is full of references and puzzles; but in Alfau’s world these are all self-contained. The work is a series of short stories, which can be read as entirely separate entities, but which are really interlocking. (Alfau the narrator complains, on occasion, when one character makes an appearance in the wrong short story). Indeed, taken on their own, the stories can appear quite trivial, but taken as a whole they construct a marvellous world of their own, the events in some stories becoming only truly explained by trivial asides in others. One can lay aside the post-modern conceits above, but the conceit which really works in this novel is the distinction – or lack of it – between characters in the work and characters in real life: that there is this real world in which the author Alfau exists, and where he meets people and to whom things happen, and this real world inspires the characters and the events in the stories – and that the artist’s creation is a blending of this reality and imagination, where real characters are bent to artistic purposes, often to the extent that because of this the characters themselves become inconsistent, their relations are mixed up, the time sequences are mixed up. A lot of this I admit I only sensed in my reading (for I am a bad and forgetful reader), but Mary McCarthy also had a couple of examples (of the: but wouldn’t that make her her own mother? variety); and it does all seem to be part of the plan, as also does his subtle use of symbols – most of which passed me by. I suspect there are many hidden things in this text.

Why was Alfau’s work ignored on publication and until recently neglected? – Was he before his time with his post-modernist games? Perhaps – in the Anglo-Saxon world at least: it feels quite close though, for example, to Unamuno. But I wonder if his problem wasn’t more than he was a Spanish writer who wrote in English (he moved from Spain to New York). Because the novel reads like a Spanish novel that’s been translated into English: it’s set in Spain; it explores the Spanish character. We know how little the English-speaking world cares for foreign novels (though they may have done more back then); but at the same time, of course, because he wrote in English and got nowhere in the English-speaking world, he was lost too to the Spanish, who might otherwise have better appreciated him.

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May05

World on a Wire, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder

by obooki on May 5th, 2012
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Fassbinder directs a sort of proto-The Matrix science fiction film (shot for German TV in 1973), as the blurb on the back says. And yes, that’s pretty much it, if you can imagine The Matrix being directed by Fassbinder: i.e. rather than car chases and gun- and flying-martial-arts-based action, the actors stand around talking a lot and occasionally descend into a German cabaret-style demi-monde. But it’s not just The Matrix it seems a forerunner of, but pretty much every sci-fi film about an alternative reality or artificial identity you’ve ever witnessed: Bladerunner, Total Recall, Inception. (On the latter, the scene where the hero descends into the simulation artificial reality they’ve created, and is brought back by some prompt which they create in that reality – surely that’s Inception in its entirety – and the different levels of existence too).

And yet, I don’t think we should credit it with too much. After all, there’s more to sci-fi than films and this reminded me most perhaps of all those Stanislaw Lem stories I’m always reading: the ones which have mad scientists who create machines that believe they’re human-beings. And in some ways – because there’s a lot of talking in it, because it manages one thing which most sci-fi films never do, which is to become obsessed with ideas, just as sci-fi in its book-based medium does, the sense of watching it comes a lot closer to that sense you get from good sci-fi (well, from Lem anyway) of just the sheer volume of clever ideas being thrown at your mind.

Oh, wait a minute! – it seems I’ve only watched half of it. So that cliff-hanger it ended on was merely that, a cliff-hanger before next week’s episode. (I was imagining that 2nd DVD just had some extra features). I suppose I better make another coffee and watch the rest of it.

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May04

Le Bonheur, dir. Agnès Varda

by obooki on May 4th, 2012
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Having struggled with and given up on Le Pointe Courte and then watched a few reasonable shorts, perhaps it was a surprise to find something rather wonderful directed by Agnès Varda. This is what French cinema should be: a few (usually young) couples have a variety of relationships with one another, all shot in a simple, casual manner (like early Godard, like Truffaut, like Eric Rohmer).

At some point while I was watching this, I suddenly found myself wondering, I bet this film has an 18 certificate – and was rather amused to find it did. – And why did I suspect it would warrant it? – There’s certainly no trace of violence in this film (unless you mean violence of the emotions, but even that is – how shall we say? – mostly off-camera). Sex then? Well, in a sense. – In the sense, that is, that you never actually see anybody having sex at all. – So what? It must be the nudity. Well, possibly so; there are certainly naked people in it, and naked in the way only non-Anglo-Saxons can be naked in a film – that is, as if were an entirely ordinary state which people might occasionally find themselves in. There isn’t even – as you might find in many a European arthouse film – any full frontal nudity. We see nothing below the waist.

OK, so maybe it is the nudity, but I’m almost tempted to suggest that it’s given such a certificate because the people in the film find such remarkable joy in being in love. This is again peculiarly European – and particularly French, I feel. In Hollywood (though various exceptions come to mind, like, say, Woody Allen, who is, after all, an honorary European), love is either connotated with violent impassioned sex – that is to say, some sort of lust; or it is a matter of sentimental romance (like I imagine occurs in all those romantic Hollywood films I never go and see). But rarely do you get the sense of that joy which comes from merely being in the same room as the one you love, of lying about naked for pointless hours on end etc. etc.

Rather like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (directed by her husband), Le Bonheur doesn’t follow the conventional pattern of the romance. Happiness (bonheur) is only going to be obtained through some form of suffering. It may be that the boy gets the girl in the end (as we’d all been hoping), but one comes away feeling that that’s not quite what we were meaning by our expectation. I imagine this is why Le Bonheur is considered Varda’s most controversial film; to me, it seemed perfectly normal, a depiction of the way things are.

And then there are the two children. They must be about two or three, I really have no idea. Early on I was thinking, that’s absolutely remarkable that you can get such young children to act like that – the interaction between them and the main two actors is truly extraordinary; it’s as if they genuinely take these actors to be their mother and father, they seem so comfortable with the situation. – It was only later I watched the interview at the end with Varda, in which she pointed out that the two actors were in fact a couple and that these were their children. And this is a thing I’ve found with Varda so far (who slips between fiction and the documentary): that there’s very much a family feeling about her films, as if people become her friends in life, and it’s through this friendship that the idea for the film germinates and becomes reality.

Plenty more Varda to come: my library has two box-sets worth, and there’s another twenty films or so (many of them shorts) on mubi, none of which seem to overlap very much.

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