If I looked out my window right now, I would see finely groomed vineyards and the rolling mountains of Lubéron. But I can’t see that landscape right now, though I’m looking straight at my window: the green wooden shutters are pulled shut, and all I see is my table lamp reflecting in the glass windows locked tight —electric light, even though it is midday. I have to work by electric light because it is the middle of the day: because it is 38 degrees and Dora Maar’s stone house stays naturally cool if the inhabitants spend the day in darkness. So I have to imagine the landscape instead. And think about books.
#55 in 2023
Dang, Percival Everett, were you ever pissed off. While regular people pound out ranting e-mails, your revenge is Erasure, this scorching, funny, all-over-the-place book. The story in a nutshell: a Black writer who has written a lot of books (hm, who might that be?) is infuriated by the success of ghetto literature, which he considers racist, and so writes a parody book, which, to his horror, and to his joy (because he makes millions), becomes a runaway bestseller. Erasure is a novel-within-a-novel careening around a structural funhouse.
I find myself sadly a stereotype of the radical. It is the case, however, that not all radicalism is forward looking…. Epiphanies are like spicy foods: coming back, coming back.
The professor-writer-protagonist Thelonious "Monk" Ellison is sick of the world, especially the publishing world, which assumes that Black people are not brilliant and not educated. While in the barely literate parodic novel-within-a-novel, the anti-hero’s babies are called Aspireene, Tylenola, Dexatrina, and Rexall, the rest of Erasure performs erudition, throwing Hitler, Rothko, Oscar Wilde and Everett’s bugaboo, Roland Barthes, into the narrative kitchen sink.
Wittgenstein: Why did Bach have to sell his organ?
Derrida: I don’t know. Why?
Wittgenstein: Because he was baroque.
Derrida: You mean because he composed music marked by elaborate and even grotesque ornamentation?
Wittgenstein: Well, no that’s not exactly what I was getting at it. It was a play on words.
Derrida: Oh, I get it.
The story includes an affecting subplot which became the second time in the same number of months that I’d read a book about a mother with Alzheimer’s. I guess this is a thing.
#56 in 2023
It’s sheer coincidence that this is the third Graham Greene novel that I’ve held in my very hot little hands; it is the first one that is barely ever funny. And who’s surprised: it was written in 1941, when Greene became chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service station in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
The Ministry of Fear is a tense thriller set in London during the Blitz, the eight months during which Germany dropped bombs on that city. The Blitz is by far the main character: Greene shoves you smack into the reality that Londoners experienced then, a reality mostly forgotten now.
The awful thing about a raid is that it goes on: your own private disaster may happen early, but the disaster doesn’t stop… A warden called from the street, ‘Is anyone hurt in there?’ and Rowe said aloud in a sudden return of his rage, ‘It’s beyond a joke: it’s beyond a joke.”
A man with a guilty conscience wins a cake at a village fête, and cakes are rare, since eggs are hard to get, and said cake is dangerous, since it contains a secret.
This is one of those wrong-place-wrong-time books where the hero has no idea why terrible things are happening to him, but boy, is he in trouble.
My favorite director ever, Fritz Lang, made it into a movie in 1944, though he changed the plot quite a bit. Also I’m a sucker for anything involving a seance.
#57 in 2023
There are a lot of dead people in this book, as well as severed left hands. Maybe that’s why I only half-read Yukito Ayatsuji, The Decagon House Murders, 2020 —so shoot me (with your right hand). Or strangle me, or burn me alive, which is more in keeping with this book, which is not my cup of poisoned tea. However, for some people, mystery novels are a perfect form of escapism. The characters and plot are so unreal that you can’t take the bloodshed seriously. The novel is more like a game than a book, and your task is to figure out who is the murderer.
The setting — Japan — and the fact that this book started a whole trend in Japanese literature also sets it apart. And I was charmed by the way that all the characters had nicknames taken from the famous mystery writers. So there’s somebody called Ellery, someone called Poe, someone called Agatha, you get the picture. They go all by themselves to a deserted island where one by one…
One of the sleuths is a Buddhist priest, who says:
My father is over sixty, but still full of energy, so the only time I can recite a sūtra for the dead is when someone dies in a detective novel Im reading.
A lot of sūtras went into this one.
#57 in 2023
Every day by 10 AM it’s too hot to leave the house here in Provence. Il fait trop sacre bleu chaud. That’s why the 600+ pages of Wade Davis, Into the Silence: the Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest, provided sheer relief, because no story could be more full of snow and lethal low temperatures.
I cannot put this book into a nutshell. No nutshell is big enough for trudging into nothingness. Like forgotten compasses and waistcoats and ice axes that fell out of a climber’s hands, I can only drop clues.
The base camp of this book is World War I: all the British, Australian, and Canadian climbers were survivors of its wanton destruction. Most of them had seen hundreds of men die and thousands torn to shreds before they were 28 years old. Which is why, Davis argues, they could face the bombastic hardships of mapping and climbing Everest ‘with a discipline long ago honed in terror’. This not a blinkered tale: Davis pays minute attention to British colonialism, Tibetan politics and Tibetan beliefs, and gives the hundreds of struggling porters names whenever he has them.
The climbers were priggish, weird, loudmouths, introverted, obsessive, as well as inventive, polyglot, strong, extraordinary, mad. Nobody would listen to the maligned Australian, George Finch, when he insisted they needed oxygen and he was not invited to the last ascent for purely petty reasons. And I felt for the guy who got homemade fudge from his wife in England, in the MAIL, while camping at some godforsaken height. (Think of the mailmen.) And then there’s the story of the photographer who built a darkroom in the snow. And… and…
Like me, the hero of this book, George Mallory, always lost stuff and was technically incompetent. In 1921 he risked his life for three weeks to take photographs of the mountains in driving snow blizzards and when he climbed back down, they found that all the photos were ruined because he inserted the plates back to front. My kind of guy. Mallory is the one who, when asked why climb the Everest, replied ‘because it’s there’. He said it because he was irritated, not because he was a poet. On his third attempt, he perished not far from the peak. He’d forgotten his flashlight in the tent. Oh dear, forgot the spoiler alert.
Younghusband: If I am asked: What is the use of climbing this highest mountain? I reply, No use at all; not more than kicking a football about or dancing or playing on the piano or writing a poem, or painting a picture…The accomplishment of such a feat will elevate the human spirit. It will give men a feeling that we really are getting the upper hand on the Earth… (1920)
#59 in 2023
I’d never heard of Glenway Wescott or his novel Apartment in Athens, and I bet you haven’t either, though his contemporaries thought this would be one of THE novels of World War II. Sadly, it sank into oblivion. Maybe it was missing thrills and chills; instead Wescott picks apart the psychology of occupation. The setting is defeated Greece; the Athens the tourists don’t know today, one wracked by hunger, peopled by beggars and cadavers. The Helianos family is forced to lodge a Nazi officer called Kalter and a tragedy unfolds. Mr. and Mrs. Helianos and their kids can’t escape the claustrophobia of living in a defeated country, not knowing whether their tormentors will ever leave, being forced to bend themselves out of shape simply to survive, and learning that compassion for the enemy is their undoing.
Mrs Helianos’ eyes were bright with hatred, her dry lips whetting one another, her body restless with hatred shaking the old kitchen-cot. The major took no notice of any of this.
It was often at the back of her mind, hatred: something she had never experienced before, something mumbling and snarling and talking to itself
She was as ashamed of weeping as of hating.
Wescott was a gay writer born into privilege who hung around the monied set in Paris in the 1920s. Apparently he picked up the tale of the novel from a Greek Resistance fighter. He lamented that he himself didn’t really have his own stories to tell — that all he knew was sexual love and family relationships. Apartment in Athens is set in 1942-43; published in 1945, it was the last novel Wescott ever wrote. What a shame.
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Right now I’m reading W ou le souvenir d’enfance by Georges Perec because I’m in France and I have to practice my French (merci, Martha). I can only manage a couple of pages at a time. It was on the shelf of the extensive library at Maison Dora Maar, so, logically, I’m also reading the memoir Finding Dora Maar by Brigitte Benkemoun, together with the essay collection Bright Unbearable Reality by my esteemed neighbour-in-the-swelter, a fellow fellow in residence, Anna Badkhen.
I wasn’t in the mood for Jack Handey, The Stench of Honolulu.
It’s 6.30 pm; maybe the temperature has dropped? No: 37 degrees.
But if I opened the window….
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Coming soon:
Featured Author: Percival Everett, American Desert, 2004
Second Latest Saved: James McPhee, Coming into the Country, 1977
The Random List: Elizabeth Kai Hinton, America on Fire: the untold history of police violence and Black rebellion since the 1960s, 2021
John Ghazvinian, America and Iran: a history, 1720 to the present, 2020
Aleksander Wat, My Century, 2003
Peter Ho Davies, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself, 2021