Reading diary: April 2010

More quick reviews. But before that, I should mention that this blog is now proud to be in the directory of Filipino Book Bloggers. I invite you to visit the site and link to many enthusiastic book reviews by bloggistas from the Philippines.

APRIL 2010

19. Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard

"It is the the misfortune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not to be able to authenticate itself," says Barthes. For that we may need images and photographs to certify the text. Barthes's reflections on photography offer some subversive theories on the persistence of images in the imagination. In the end, however, the writer's memoirs provide a surprisingly affecting portrait of a man coming to terms with his personal loss.

20. Piercing by Murakami Ryū, translated by Ralph McCarthy

A book for the faint of heart, that the heart may skip a beat, or several beats, and then resume its life of pumping. A send-up to the psycho killer setup in movies and books, Piercing is transgressive fiction at its creepiest. And yet it's very funny. That funny-scary combination must be one of the hardest to pull off but Ryū is criminally accurate in puncturing the reader's ready expectations. He is a serial novelist who aims for the kill. I'd like to be victimized by his other books.

21. Paris Trance by Geoff Dyer

Paris is a moveable feast. It is a place for finding love and of losing it. In this novel we find two couples struggling with circumstances of their own making. It's like The Sun Also Rises for the 1990s in which the once-hippie lover will ask at the end of the affair, "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

The book escapes the bathos of nostalgia and ennui by embracing them. The drifting ways in which love ebbs and flows are well told by George Dyer, who lately have been known to produce some hybrid novels of journalism. This novel is of the traditional sort. But it's crisp in its portrayal of longings and loves as it is.

22. An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira, translated by Chris Andrews

Aira is an incandescent talent. This novella is beautiful, poetic. The episode just ended too soon. The book's theme is the creation of a masterpiece, and it's very near producing one itself. It unfolds like a canvas of lighted landscapes here traversed by artists in the making.

What I love about An Episode and the other Aira I've read (Ghosts) is that you keep reading the books even after you finished reading them. They linger in your mind like a flash of lightning or something. The story ends with always the maximum impact. In between the flashes of brilliance are musings of the poetical nature.

Ghosts is a bit longer in length. And I think it is just as well made if not better. Aira is a puzzle-maker. I asked myself after reading each of the books: What the hell was that all about? Yet it all made sense in the end. As if the abrupt way the story ended is the only possible way to end a story already unhinged from its frame.

23. Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Jaime Deza, the protagonist of this novel, has this power of reading people. His mentor, an old man, is the same. They can know people's history and psychology and what they're capable of just by observing them and hearing them talk. Nothing happens much in this the first volume of the story. What is certain is that by the end of the third volume, someone will be betrayed and will pay the price for "careless talk." This is ultimately a spy story, but it's James Bond in the role of a psychologist.

Marías is Marías. His characters talk and talk and think and think. They can be repetitive and exasperating. Very few paragraph breaks and sentences that go on and on and on and on. Some beautiful insights into telling stories and the capacity to betray others with a single word.

I’m bracing for less talk/more action in Act II (Dance and Dream). But I wouldn't be surprised if the spies still battle with their minds here. Dance and Dream is proving to be another mental bloodbath.

"Air War and Literature" (W. G. Sebald), 2

In "Air War and Literature," Sebald was trying to account for the unexplained disengagement from reality of the works of German literary writers right after the second world war. Self-righteousness, pedantry, insensitivity - these can be leveled against this attempt to recover some forgotten memory, soul, or conscience that was left in the ashes of ruined shelters and buildings. Why bring out to the surface what has been safely kept from sight? Given Sebald's high standing in contemporary literature - achieved through the publication of a series of radical novels which broke new genre grounds while essaying the stories of melancholic survivors of history and atrocity - his arguments cannot be easily dismissed. His persistence on the matter brought discomfort and provoked a critical examination of literature that has so far come out in Germany in the past half-century.

Sebald identified some consequences of his perceived literary self-censorship and selective amnesia. One is the lack of masterpieces. There is a clamor for the “great German epic of the wartime and postwar periods.” The economic miracle in Germany is another possible consequence. As if the citizens became conscientious traders and miracle workers to cover for their ruined livelihoods.

Whereas recounting “truthfully” is an activity that requires soul-searching, it is still not antithetical to hanging one’s own head in guilt. A neat explanation is impossible. Should the victims insulate their selves or express open grief? Sebald was right to refer to psychoanalytic explanations of the mental stress experienced by victims, but it is such a confounding phenomenon that his quotations are hardly definitive. One of the implicit causes of the breakdown of collective memory is the legacy of an unorthodox worldview. The assumption is that forgetfulness is a fruit of fascism: a lewd legacy of totalitarian regime.

A potential weakness of Sebald’s line of thinking is a pedantic critique of trauma and guilt as originators of desensitized mental state. One of the causes he gave is the shared guilt by the Germans to the holocaust. They cannot complain of massacre because their kind has done similar terrible crimes. This is the default “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” principle which in this case cannot be easily abstracted for its complex psychological nature. The causes and the effects of violence, cruelty, and evil may be so interchangeable that one does not know where one begins and the other ends. This is the bane of modern humanity.

* * *

Sebald decried the lack of German masterpieces yet failed to mention the novels of Günter Grass, notably The Tin Drum (as Hydriotaphia commented on the previous post). This novel is widely read and considered a masterpiece. It also contains scenes of the aftermath of bombings, as the critic Ruth Franklin pointed out. This elimination of Grass by Sebald speaks volumes. It can only mean that he does not subscribe to Grass's aesthetic representation of suffering.

Grass himself was critical of Sebald. He said in an interview with The New York Times that he welcomed books about the Allied bombing such as the one written by Jörg Friedrich (Der Brand, or The Fire):

But he agreed less with W. G. Sebald's essay, "Air War and Literature," published [in Germany] in 1999 and in English [in 2003], in a collection called, "On the Natural History of Destruction." Mr. Sebald, who died in 2001, argues that postwar German writers ignored German suffering during the war. "The novels of Henrich Böll and Wolfgang Koeppen deal with these things," Mr. Grass said. "If I had met Sebald, I would have asked him, 'Why don't you write a book about it?' "

The novelist did write something. In "Air War" itself, he provided a summation of what happened during that time. His problematique begins with a sweeping diagnosis: The Germans have abdicated their role to provide a credible witness to history’s errors. To correct this, the novelist has to produce his own version of the events with graphic details culled from the diaries of survivors. The novelist maintains that a synoptic and artificial view of the bombings are needed because eyewitness accounts are either unreliable or clichéd. In producing his own synopsis of the bombing, the novelist is reliving an un-witnessed carpet-bombing, enacting his own repressed history, reading the silent documents from the archives, and ultimately satisfying his own hunger for truth. He is lighting a new fuse, creating another possibility, and surviving his own firestorm. His means are his ends.

GIVEAWAY: Totto-chan

It's the middle of the month, time for another giveaway. Here is what's at stake.

Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window

by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi

Translated by Dorothy Britton

Illustrated by Chihiro Iwasaki.

Please note that this giveaway is open only to readers in the Philippines.

The book is not new but the pages are in very good condition. It has a fold on dust jacket and front cover. It's a mass market paperback, with dust jacket.

Learn more about this book from the publisher's page.

The rules are too simple. Just drop me an email. Subject: "Hello, Totto-chan". Include your full name and your full mailing address (within the Philippines only). One address per reader, one reader per address. A winner will be chosen from the entries using a random number generator.

The deadline is midnight of August 31st, local time. I'll update this post and announce the winner here.

Good Luck!

UPDATE (Sept. 2): Congratulations to Faye of Dasmariñas City.

"Air War and Literature" (W. G. Sebald)

On the Natural History of Destruction is W. G. Sebald's first collection of literary criticism to appear in English. (A few more essay collections of his are scheduled for release in the next two years.) The first essay, called "Air War and Literature," is an edited version of a lecture first delivered in 1997, the so-called "Zürich Lecures," which was published in German magazines and in book form in 1999. Its controversial subject polarized its readers and listeners.

Sebald's criticism is primarily directed against the German writers and their inability to write about air bombings in WWII Germany. Sebald is concerned about the interplay of memory and history, the role of writers in times of crisis, and their moral/ethical obligation to bear witness to destruction.

"Air War and Literature" is written from the perspective of a literary writer and a German citizen. It is a condemnation of a kind of literary silence hanging over the German literary scene in the post-war years. Sebald's poetics abhors the willed forgetfulness of writers who did not produce literary works on the subject of bombing raids and the total destruction of several German cities. He partly ascribes it to a form of cultural defect, not only of writers but of readers as well (from the foreword):

[W]e Germans today are a nation strikingly blind to history and lacking in tradition. We do not feel any passionate interest in our earlier way of life and the specific features of our own civilization … [W]hen we turn to take a retrospective view, particularly of the years 1930 to 1950, we are always looking and looking away at the same time. As a result, the works produced by German authors after the war are often marked by a half-consciousness or false consciousness designed to consolidate the extremely precarious position of those writers in a society that was morally almost entirely discredited.

* * *

The trick of elimination is every expert’s defensive reflex.

The essay's epigraph came from Stanisław Lem’s Imaginary Magnitude, a novel consisting of introductions to non-existent science fiction books. In the context of "Air War," it implies a discourse on fake or unwritten literature, those existing solely in the mind of the author.

The irony of illustrious writers (the "experts") withholding information is not lost here. Sebald is highlighting the grave sin of omission that the experts committed by neglecting to produce lasting works of art that flesh out the plight of the German victims. For Sebald, it was tantamount to the erasure of history, or a cleansing of the past collected in a silence that was as deafening as the detonation of bombs. Sebald points out the glaring gap between literature and historical truth that constitutes an undeniable ethical and moral failure of individuals and the nation.

Heinrich Böll's novella, Der Engel schwieg (translated as The Silent Angel by Breon Mitchell) was singled out as a rare exception to a handful of works that focused on carpet-bombing. It was only published 50 years after it was written, presumably because its gloomy subject was not suitable to the time.

(Note that there are notable non-German works which depicted the same subject. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five contains a harrowing aftermath of the air raids in Dresden. The entire book treated the subject in a metafictional solution that was itself a symptom of its inability to confront hard reality unless a certain authorial distance or narrative playfulness was adopted. The air war was also touched upon in one of the volumes of memoirs by the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard (collected in Gathering Evidence). He gave a powerful, if brief, description of air bombings during his childhood.)

Other writers and historians have written on the subject but Sebald found their efforts incompatible to the gravity of the subject. Their documents and studies “did not alter the fact that the images of the horrifying chapter of our history have never really crossed the threshold of the national consciousness” (p. 11).

The trick of elimination: The publications “seemed curiously untouched by the subject of their research, and served primarily to sanitize or eliminate a kind of knowledge incompatible with any sense of normality.” Skewed normality is yet another by-product of the “order-loving minds” of the Germans. But why? Why do German writers, almost wholesale, held back their human stories? Isn’t it uncharacteristic of wronged peoples to keep silent and endure their suffering and still emerge from the “war of annihilation without any signs of psychological impairment”?

(To be continued)

Reading diary: March 2010

First off, I would like to thank Aloi over at guiltless reading for ... [drumrolls ... ] a blog award!

The recipient of the award is supposed to do the following*:

1. Thank and link back to the person who gave you this award.
2. Share 7 things about yourself.

* Modified, as per the recipient's prerogative. I opted not to pass along the award as I will also give them to some of the persons who already received them. All one need do is look at the right hand side of this page to see my blog roll. Every one of them, 30-plus links and counting, deserves to receive the Versatile Blogger Award.

Here are seven things about myself: (i) I'm a six-footer. (ii) I teach maths and physics in college, part-time. (iii) I have extreme allergy to dust and smoke. (iv) I love lato seaweed. (I mean, eating them.) (v) I don't drink coffee, except at a café-bookstore near my place. I like it mocha. (vi) I hardly watch television at all. I prefer listening to local news radio. (vii) Favorite movies: Mars Attacks!, Ghost in the Shell, Black Hawk Down, Kurosawa Kiyoshi's films, Outbreak, The Thin Red Line, Gallipoli, The English Patient, The Lord of the Rings, Good Will Hunting, Unbreakable, and Children of Men.

Back to regular program, on what I've been reading these past months.


MARCH 2010

15. The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo

First published in 1906, The Book of Tea was written by a Japanese in the English language. Which makes me wonder if something still got "lost" in translation. Actually the book has something to say on the matter:

Translation is always a treason, and as a Ming author observes, can at its best be only the reverse side of a brocade—all threads are there, but not the subtlety of colour or design. But, after all, what great doctrine is there which is easy to expound? The ancient sages never put their teachings in systematic form. They spoke in paradoxes, for they were afraid of uttering half-truths. They began by talking like fools and ended by making their hearers wise. Laotse himself, with his quaint humour, says, “If people of inferior intelligence hear of the Tao, they laugh immensely. It would not be the Tao unless they laughed at it.”

There you have it, the book is full of these philosophical insights. It's more than a go-to book on the art of tea preparation. It also deals with still-fresh perspectives on art appreciation, on art and meditation. The flavor of this book is so natural it is like partaking of a cup of tea itself. Tea with dollops of poetry.


16. If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents by Gregory Rabassa

A memoir by wunderkind translator Gregory Rabassa, the book details his childhood intimations of a facility for languages and his initiation into the art of translation. It also describes, lovingly, his various relationships to authors he translated, the background information on the books he worked on, and his candid estimation of each of the author or book. What makes the book very palatable to me, other than Rabassa's priceless interactions with diverse writers, is the inside stories in the process of translation The book is priceless in this score.

You can view Rabassa's sterling résumé here.


17. Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Murakami Haruki, translated by Alfred Birnbaum

This is Haruki's fourth book in order of original publication in Japanese. He is as silly as ever. What sustains the reader here is the mystery. I think his style best fits speculative fiction like these. The reader will need to swallow the red pill of make-believe and voluntarily suspend his irritation.

I'm reading Haruki's early books in chronological order in order to get some context for the latter books, particularly The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, both of which I abandoned reading after being put-off by the style. But I recognize that there is something there, beneath the pedestrian prose.

I was surprised that I ended up liking A Wild Sheep Chase and this book (to a lesser extent) when all the while I'm trying to resist them. Maybe by the time I brushed up again with the longer works I will finally "get it" (if there is something to get). Or have an INKling of what Haruki is trying to say (if he's trying to say something). I have a suspicion he's just messing up with me.


18. Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews [reread]

Among Bolaño's prolific outputs, Nazi Literature is of unique standing. It's considered to be an explosion of his "objective" or journalistic style. He is an "influenced" writer, in the sense that his bookish erudition shows through in each of the write-ups of the "Nazi writers." I've written several blog posts about this book already. You can access them by typing "Nazi literature" in the search bar on the upper left corner of this blog.