booklit

Having intended, at one time, to read the books of Philip Roth in order of publication, a brick wall was soon hit with second book, Letting Go, Roth’s first novel proper and still his largest to date. It just went on and on, never serving up the satisfation of progress. Now, with that reading goal abandoned, it’s open season on Roth. But where to begin? In the end, I went for The Breast (1972), a thin slice of Roth that would hopefully whet the appetite for some more. Which it has.

The Breast is the first book in a trilogy involving Professor David Kepesh and is an extended short story that pays homage to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Where Kafka’s classic follows the experiences of the unfortunate Gregor Samsa as he, following uneasy dreams, wakes to find himself changed into a large beetle, Kepesh, thanks to a suspected “hermaphroditic explosion of chromosomes, wakes from a coma to find himself turned into a female breast.

…a mammary gland such as only could appear, one would have thought, in a dream or a Dali painting. They tell me that I am now an organism with the general shape of a football, or a dirigible; I am said to be of a spongy consistency, weighing in at one hundred and fifty-five pounds (formerly I was one hundred and sixty-two), and measuring, still, six feet in length.

Quite why Kepesh has found himself transformed is very much an irrelevance — he simply has, and how he deals with it is the subject of the book. It’s to Roth’s credit that he takes the initial idea and runs with it, ticking off the possible thoughts that someone in this predicament may encounter and doing so in a serious, contemplative manner.

 Alas, what has happened to me is like nothing anyone has ever known: beyond understanding, beyond compassion, beyond comedy, though there are those, i know, who claim to be on the brink of some conclusive scientific explanation; and those, my faithful visitors, whose compassion is deeply felt, sorrowful and kind; and there are still others — there would have to be — out in the world who cannot help but laugh. And I, at times, am one with them: I understand, I have compassion, I see the joke.

Although his situation is ridiculous and consciously invites laughter, the comedy of The Breast comes not from Kepesh but from those around him. He mutters lewd requests to his nurse who talks over him, never acknowledging his advances; his doctor tries to move his life on as if nothing has happened, and his father, a retired innkeeper now wasting his days working the phones for his brother’s business, seems almost oblivious to the changes that have come over his son:

He comes to visit me once a week and seated in a chair that is drawn up close to my nipple, he recounts the current adventures of people who were our guests when I was a boy. Remember Abrams the milliner? Remember Cohen the chiropodist? Remember Rosenheim with the card tricks and the Cadillac? Yes, yes, yes, I think so. Well, this one is dying, this one has moved to California, this one has a son who has married an Egyptian. “How do you like that?” he says, “I didn’t even know they would allow that over there.” Oh, Dad, I think to say, wonders never cease…

As one may expect, a large breast isn’t going to do much moving around and so the narrative is, for the most part, internalising punctuated with recollections of memorable scenes. Beginning with the question of ‘why me?’ Kepesh’s journey continues logically until he tries to convice himself that he’s mad, that he’s in a mental ward. The question of sexual frustration, that human desire for sex that can never be sated, is a major part of Kepesh’s struggle — being an organ incapable of orgasm is a nightmare. But the pain of adapting to the transformation seems all the more tolerable when faced with the alternative:

…having been terrified of death since I was two, I have become entrenched in my hatred of it, have taken a position against death from which I cannot retreat just because This has happened to me. Horrible as This is, my oldest and most heartless enemy, Extinction, still strikes me as even worse. Then you will say, maybe This is not so horrible after all. Well, reader, you say that, if you want to. All I know is that I have been wanting not to die for so long, that I just can’t stop doing it overnight.

All around Kepesh are people intent on staying within the blandness of life. His girlfriend isn’t sexually adventurous, his doctor ignores the magnitude of events, and his father hovers over smalltalk. When pondering his situation, Kepesh questions a “churning longing” to be  –

…utterly and blessedly helpless, to be a big brainless bag of tissue, desirable, dumb, passive, immobile, acted upon instead of acting, hanging, there, as a breast hangs and is there.

– and this nicely captures the idea of accepting the daftness of life and just getting on with it. This is what Roth is scrutinising in The Breast, and he successfully milks it for all it’s worth.

Try as I might, I’ve never connected with Saul Bellow’s prose. My first attempt was The Actual, his penultimate work, and his shortest. A few pages in and I was lost. Then, The Adventures Of Augie March, the novel that signalled his worth as a writer: after reading the opening page repeatedly, I knew I couldn’t continue through the whole book doing so, and abandoned it.

There’s something about Bellow, though, that makes me persist. It’s probably the perception of him as one of the best American writers, what with other writers citing him as their favourite. By not reading him, I’m surely missing out; in reading him, I’m more than likely missing the point. In order to grapple with the beast it seemed a logical idea to dismiss his better known novels as an introduction and to head back to the start, to Dangling Man (1944), under the impression that his earliest work may offer a way in to his style before it solidifies him as that great American writer.

Dangling Man is the journal of Joseph, a young man who resigned his job at a travel bureau seven months before, expecting to be drafted into the army, instead finding himself ‘dangling’ due to complications that he describes as “a sort of bureaucratic comedy trimmed out in red tape.” Rather than get a job for now - “As a 1A I could not get a suitable one, anyhow” - he opts for staying at home, living off his wife’s wage, rarely venturing out, and with little company other than his own thoughts, all jotted down.

In loneliness and bureaucracy, there are echoes of Kafka’s The Trial, and a Joseph caught up in it all confirms the nod. Bellow, however, is not so concerned with the situation of bureaucracy, instead using it as the springboard into a mildly philosophical story about destiny.

Six hundred years ago, a man was what he was born to be. Satan and the Church, representing God, did battle over him. He, by reason of his choice, partially decided the outcome. […] But, since, the stage has been reset and human beings only walk on it and, under this revision, we have, instead, history to answer to. We were important enough then for our souls to be fought over. Now, each of us is responsible for his own salvation, which is in his greatness. And that, that greatness, is the rock or hearts are abraded on.

Admittedly, as stories go, Dangling Man is short on incident, given that Joseph rarely leaves his room, but there are a number of great set pieces as the frustration of living within one’s mind - and Joseph’s mind, given his journal’s literary references and philosophial meanderings, is highly intelligent - takes its toll and cracks appear. It may not be a metamorphosis in the mould of Gregor Samsa, but the once easy-natured man he was has found himself prone to violent outbursts.

There is nothing to do but wait, or dangle, and grow more and more dispirited. It is perfectly clear to me that I am deteriorating, storing bitterness and spite which eats like acid at my endowment of generosity and good will.

In all his wanderings - physical and mental - Joseph’s problem is destiny. Unable to live up to the lofty expections of his making and “unwilling to admit that I do not know how to use my freedom” he not only seeks, but needs solace in the Army, where he need not think for himself. At the beginning, Joseph’s choice to keep a journal, in “an era of hardboiled-dom” is a seen as contrarian to the mores of society:

Do you have feelings? There are correct and incorrect ways of indicating them. Do you have an inner life? It is nobody’s business but your own. Do you have emotions? Strangle them.

The journey from individual thinker, an outcast from society, to one willing to strangle his own self is an interesting premise. Where one would expect - perhaps because it’s clichéd - to see someone fight for their individuality, Dangling Man talks of belonging. In reading it, and understanding it to a degree, and even quite enjoying bits of it, I find that I may just see the case for belonging myself - to those that praise him, that is.

Midnight Classics, as far as I can tell, was an imprint of Serpent’s Tail reserved for publishing forgotten works of pulpy noir and psychedelic fiction. A number of titles were put out in the late 1990s, each boldy declaring that the book was ‘a Midnight Classic back in print’, and all written by authors long forgotten. Names like Gavin Lambert, Stewart Meyer, Rudolph Wurlitzer, and David Goodis. Another was Horace McCoy, probably the best known of the lot.

McCoy’s name has already appeared on booklit where, after a tentative treading of the toes in American noir, with James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, it was suggested in the comments that next up should be McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935). Never one to knock back a recommendation (although always one to never get round to reading it) I bumped it up the list, while all the other titles waiting their turn muttered and cursed under their breath.

With horses in the title, I’d long assumed, wrongly so, that the novel was a western of some description. Instead, the novel’s milieu is quite the reverse of the open range, and a new one on me, the claustrophobic world of the dance marathon. Popular in the 1920s and 1930s, these shindigs brought kids disillusioned by the Depression together to dance, for hours on end, chasing the carrot of prize money dangled before them.

One hundred and forty-four couples entered the marathon dance but sixty-one dropped out for the first week. The rules were you danced for an hour and fifty minutes, then you had a ten-minute rest period in which you could sleep if you wanted to. But in those ten minutes you also had to shave or bathe or get your feet fixed or whatever was necessary.

Although mostly flashbacks, the novel begins in the here and now, by outlining its outcome, that of the sentencing of Robert Syverton for the murder of Gloria Beatty. It’s clear to Syverton that the judge means to make an example of him, especially given that the best line of defense he has is that he was “only doing her a personal favour”:

The Prosecuting Attorney was wrong when he told the jury she died in agony, friendless, alone except for her brutal murderer, out there in that black night on the edge of the Pacific. He was as wrong as a man can be. She did not die in agony. She was relaxed and comfortable and she was smiling. It was the first time I had ever seen her smile. How could she have been in agony then? And she wasn’t friendless.

I was her very best friend. I was her only friend. So how could she have been friendless?

Robert and Gloria have come their separate ways to Hollywood, chasing the same dream. Opportunities, however, are few on the ground, and they enter the marathon dance:

‘Free food and free bed as long as you last and a thousand dollars if you win.’

‘The free food part of it sounds good,’ I said.

‘That’s not the big thing,’ she said. ‘A lot of producers and directors go to those marathon dances. There’s always the chance they might pick you out and give you a part in a picture…What do you say?’

‘Me?’ I said…’Oh, I don’t dance very well…’

‘You don’t have to. All you have to do is keep moving.’

During the dance tempers fray, exhaustion sets in, and the contestents find themselves exploited more and more in the name of entertainment. Robert dreams of being back outside, away from the confines of the ballroom, but in writing the desperate situation of this small dance McCoy holds up a mirror to the America of the time, where life itself is punishing and people try to scrape a living against all the odds. The whole narrative is studied with throwaway lines from Gloria, with nothing to live for, wishing she were dead.

‘It’s peculiar to me,’ she said, ‘that everybody pays so much attention to living and so little to dying. Why are these high-powered scientists always screwing around trying to prolong life instead of finding pleasant ways to end it? There must be a hell of a lot of people in the world like me - who want to die but haven’t got the guts - ‘

Even though we know the outcome, McCoy still manages to build up tension in his story. The continued sapping of the dancers’ will through exploitative tasks and the sheer exhaustion they feel builds up crests of conflict that see the dancers regularly whittled down. To this slow burn plot kindling is added, where chapters are preceded by snippets of the judge’s sentence, each in a typeface a little larger than before, serving well the build up of tension.

Loose on description, heavy on dialogue, the novel sets a fair pace, without being a marathon itself, and when its end comes the death of Gloria is treated unsentimentaly, as befits the hardboiled genre. The ending is powerful, for what it is, and I daresay it’s one that will stick in the mind for a long time to come, but there’s the feeling that there could have been more, that McCoy could perhaps have explored the existentialist nature of his narrator, if even just for a few pages here and there, just to get a little deeper inside Syverton’s head. At the same time, the casual enquiry of the book’s title, in context, carries all the weight needed, and it’s the unanswerable nature of the whydunnit that ensures the book’s durability.

There are a number of novels out there that people are expected to have read at some point in their youth. Not to have done so is, in a word, shameful. This is the position that I’ve found myself in with J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye (1951), a copy of which I bought many years ago, perhaps even twelve, when I was the same age as its infamous narrator, Holden Caulfield. That copy has sat unread on my shelves all that time, its pages yellowing.

Part of the reason I’ve not read it is that I thought I knew it already.  What with its famous opening, the defiant nature of Holden Caulfiend, and a slim understanding that the novel concerned, to some degree, Caulfield’s younger sister, what more was there to know? Loads, apparently, especially on realising the book wasn’t about baseball. What forced me to finally take the book off the shelves is that it’s a universal reference point for so much fiction employing a youthful narrator shaking his fist at the world.

Having mentioned the opening to the novel, it seems only fair to show it, acknowledging the immediate strength and attitude to Caulfield’s voice:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

Although novels had long moved from the verbiage of the serial novel, Salinger is quick to show that this is no payment-by-the-word affair, but that of a person with their own ideas of what the story should be. Salinger maintains the consistency of the voice through almost two hundred pages, but what’s most interesting is who Caulfield is addressing. At first it appears he is speaking to us, the reader, but as the opening paragraph rolls on there are references that suggest this isn’t just any old tête à tête between book and reader. References to his brother visiting him once a week in “this crumby place” and and going home, but not for a while yet, hint at what’s going on, but as the novel progresses the truth becomes clear.

The Catcher In The Rye sees Caulfield reflecting on an event that happened to him the year before. He begins at Pencey, his preparatory school, in the lead up to Christmas. He won’t be coming back after the holiday, having flunked all his subjects save English, and a letter has been dispatched to his parents back home in New York. After a few altercations with fellow students, a plan forms in his head:

I’d decided what I’d really do, I’d get the hell out of Pencey - right that same night and all. I mean not wait till Wednesday or anything. I just didn’t want to hang around any more. It made me sad and lonesome. So what I’d decided to do, I decided I’d take a room in a hotel in New York - some very inexpensive hotel and all - and just take it easy till Wednesday. Then, on Wednesday, I’d go home all rested up and feeling swell…I sort of needed a little vacation. My nerves were shot. They really were.

Even though Caulfield is a year older, and seems more calm and collected than the younger self he describes, there is a sense that he’s never being fully honest with us. It’s to be expected from someone who says he’s “the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life.” At one point, early in the story, he discusses the way he acts, and although the lies he tells us about telling to others at times sound absurd, the down to earth believability of this are deliberately ambiguous. Truth or not, the sad thing is that while he thinks he’s deceiving others, he’s deceiving himself about why he does it: for attention.

I was sixteen then, and I’m seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I’m about thirteen. It’s really ironical, because I’m six foot two and a half and I have gray hair. I really do. The one side of my head - the right side - is full of millions of gray hairs. I’ve had them ever since I was a kid. And yet I still act sometimes like I was only about twelve. Everybody says that, especially my father. It’s partly true, too, but it isn’t all true. People always think something’s all true. I don’t give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am - I really do - but people never notice it. People never notice anything.

In my misconceptions of The Catcher In The Rye being about baseball (although a baseball glove does feature), I’d assumed that the title referred, in some way, to playing baseball in a field of rye. Simple, I know. I was surprised, however, to see, as the story makes clear, that it’s another classic American novel, like Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men, taking its title from a Robert Burns poem, in this case Comin’ Thro’ The Rye, a poem that calls for self responsibility without busybodies interfering. It’s a reference to an image Caulfield has of children playing in a field of rye near a cliff where he is there to catch them as they fall, something he misinterprets as to do with the preservation of his sister Phoebe’s childhood, a misunderstanding that leads to epiphany.

That The Catcher In The Rye is often seen as a novel best read in one’s youth is perhaps true in part. The wise words of a teacher, coupled with Caulfield’s realisation showing he is on the path to adulthood, is geared for that age group. The masterly control Salinger shows in his anti-hero’s voice, a casual, limited vernacular, capable of expressing (and suppressing) a great deal of content and experience. Growing up is painful, and Caulfield’s as good a guide as any. But as an adult, the enjoyment of the book is not in its lessons but its allusions, tone, and its character, all satisfying, and nary a whiff of didacticism making the novel feel like a life lived than one taught. In talking about books, Holden says it best:

What I like best is a book that’s at least funny once in a while. I read a lot of classical books like The Return of the Native and all, and I like them, and I read a lot of war books and mysteries and all, but they don’t knock me out too much. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.

Ah, Salinger: he doesn’t write, he doesn’t call. Perhaps that’s why.

Following on from a recent review of Albert Camus’ L’Étranger at Mookse, I was struck by something read in the comment - that Camus took his inspiration from an American crime novel. Now, I’d heard of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), was aware it had been adapted for the screen, but still knew nothing about it. In all honesty, when I thought about it, all I could recall was a Sesame Street spoof from the Monsterpiece Theatre series with Alistair Cookie.

That the title, at least, had ingrained itself in culture made me curious enough to read it, my previous indifference to Camus’ acclaimed novel aside. In preparing to do so there was the feeling, not having read much crime fiction before, that it would be best to understand what ‘hardboiled’ meant in relation to the text, to get an angle on it. Interestingly, I came across a quote by Raymond Chandler, himself a name from the hardboiled stable, calling Cain “a Proust in greasy overalls”, amongst other things.

The Postman Always Rings Twice was Cain’s first novel, following on from a collection of essays, and is arguably one of the most important crime novels of the 20th Century. Where most crime fiction would follow the detective, Cain’s novel throws out such characters and instead zooms in on the people that matter most: the criminals and their victim.

Much of the action here takes place at the Twin Oaks Tavern, “a roadside sandwich joint, like a million others in California” run by Nick Papadakis, commonly referred to as the Greek, and his attractive young wife, Cora. It’s the presence of the latter that leads the narrator, a drifter called Frank Edwards, to quickly change his tune about the ubiquity of such joints.

Then I saw her. She had been out back, in the kitchen, but she came in to gather up my dishes. Except for the shape, she really wasn’t any raving beauty, but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.

The speed of the prose is exhilarating, for having only just spotted Cora a couple of pages into the book, they have a furtive relationship cooked up in little more than a few pages of terse dialogue, a relationship simmering with so much steam that when she implores him to ‘Bite me! Bite me!’, you believe she means it. It’s what the moment will do for you.

I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.

Relationships built to last were never meant to have a third person and in all this, marriage or not, the Greek falls foul of the nefarious plans of wife and her beau. Once again, Cain’s performance in all this is high octane approach to his prose and it’s a matter of mere pages before the couple are plotting his death so as to ensure she . Over-plotting is more apt, for the meticulous detailing of the perfect murder unravels due to an unforeseen - and unforseeable - cicumstance, becoming a botched operation. Thankfully, the Greek remains blissfully unaware of the conspiracy around him. It’s only when they get up the courage to have a second attempt at dispatching him, on a road trip this time, that the novel’s greater complexity kicks off.

She got in, and took the wheel again, and me and the Greek kept on singing, and we went on. It was all part of the play. I had to be drunk, because that other time had cured me of this idea we could pull a perfect murder. This was going to be such a lousy murder it wouldn’t even be a murder.

Prosecutions, accidents, murder, blackmail - all these comes together in a lattice of twists and turns that solidify the novel as a whole, even if a passage on the ins, outs, and bucking of the legal system proved a tad confusing for this reader. Even when Cain has seen his characters go through hell and back he delivers a final twist that, to be honest, was probably more of a twist at the time of publication. Likewise, in a day when sexual content in a book barely causes the batting of an eyelid, the tame nature of the sex in The Postman Always Rings Twice, what was once considered controversial, makes it hard to gauge objectively the impact of its force.

It’s easy to see what Chandler meant when describing Cain in greasy overalls as there’s a certain roughness to the prose, although the colloquial style feels right here, feels believable. This is Cain’s strength, that he can get to the heart of people, capture their basic impulse, and make a wider story from a  patchwork of dialogue and snappy sentences. While the novel’s effect may have worn with age, there’s no denying that in The Postman Always Rings Twice Cain delivers, which is more than can be said for the postman, who doesn’t even make an appearance. Not in person, anyway.

One of the most famous works by the French writer, Raymond Queneau, is Exercises In Style (1947), a fiction with the slightest of plots. So slight, the whole story can be summarised in a few sentences, and it wouldn’t be a spoiler to say that the narrator boards the ‘S’ bus, spots a minor conflict between one man - noting particularly his long neck and odd hat - and another passenger, spotting him again two hours later getting advice on a button for his overcoat. Yes, that slight.

It’s not, however, the story that matters as much as the conceit of the book. As the title implies, the book is a series of experiments, taking the same story over and over and presenting it in no less than ninety-nine different ways. To other writers it seems there’s a certain attraction to it, what with some well known writers translating and adapting the book to their own tongue, notably Umberto Eco (to Italian), Patrik Ouředník (to Czech), and Danilo Kiš, to (Serbian).

In her foreword, the translator Barbara Wright notes that the idea came to Queneau after attending a performace of Bach’s The Art Of Fugue. (”What particularly struck Queneau about this piece was that, although based on a rather slight theme, its variations ‘proliferated almost to infinity.’ It would be interesting, he thought, to create a similar work of literature.”) She also notes that although he stopped at ninety-nine exercises, a later French edition went on to list a further 140 potential exercises.

Each exercise comes with a title descriptive of the stylistic challenge. These offer up a range of different ideas, many representing linguistic ideas such as parachesis, with others forcing more wide ranging constrictions, such as the consistent use of metaphors, colours, or medical terms. One such exercise, Retrograde, tells the story in reverse:

You ought to put another button on your overcoat, his friend told him. I met him in the middle of the Cour de Rome, after having left him rushing avidly towards a seat. He had just protested against being pushed by another passenger who, he said, was jostling him every time anyone got off. This scraggy young man was the wearer of a ridiculous hat. This took place on the platform of an S bus which was full that particular midday.

In the production of so many variations Queneau has obviously had a great deal of fun and the humour flows through the whole book. The premise of Precision has the story told with an over the top level of detail (”In a bus of the S-line, 10 metres long, 3 wide, 6 high, at 3km. 600m from its starting point, loaded with 48 people, at 12.17 p.m…”) while the brilliance of Homeoptotes is in the repetition of a single sound (”On a certain date, a corporate crate on which the electorate congregate when they migrate at a great rate, late…”).

When the exercises work with a simple idea the effect can be witty and varied enough to maintain interest. However, there are times when the exercise looses any sense of coherence and it becomes hard to wonder at the benefit of writing in that particular style. A series of exercises presenting the story in permutations of letter seems meaningless and undecipherabl, like in this opening paragraph using permutations of two letters:

Ed on to ay rd wa id sm yo da he nt ar re at pl rm fo an of us sb aw is ou ay ma ng ho nw ne se wa ck oo st ng lo dw an wa ho ea sw ng ri at ah th wi la ap ro it dt un sa he me.

Even if an exercise confuses, and some certainly do, the brevity of them ensures that a new idea is just a page turn away. One of the longest, Opera English, presents the story in two acts with all the pomposity of the art, while one of few flirtations with poetic forms sees, in Haiku, the story told in the most concise of details:

Summer S long neck

plait hat toes abuse retreat

station button friend

The exercises in this English translation sometimes adhere to the French originals, while others deviate from the mould. It would, as Wright notes, be a futile task to translate to English, an exercise already in English, and in this she is also party to the fun, freely lifting, as she admits, from Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners for an exercise in a West Indian dialect. As an example of Oulipo, it’s no wonder that Exercises In Style was the work Queneau most wanted to see translated - the potential for literature like this, in any language, helps achieve the proliferation almost to infinity that he initially set out to do.

In writing Exercises In Style, the hurdle in how to end it, to ensure a robust ninety-nine, must surely have been entertained by Queneau. After repeating the same story for page after page, be it as a sonnet, antiphrasis, or the triptych of prosthesis, epenthesis, and paragoge, it needs an acceptable conclusion and Queneau delivers a welcome twist, just the thing for an exercise titled Unexpected. Understandably, the book doesn’t add up to much, but as a document of how tackling a subject from myriad angles opens up a story to countless possibilities, it is indispensible.

Following on from a recent post by dovegreyreader, I spotted a copy of Clarice Lispector’s The Hour Of The Star (1977) in Waterstones, knew I recognised the name from somewhere, and picked it up. Of course, The Hour Of The Star isn’t its only name, indeed there are a further twelve suggested titles, including I Can Do Nothing, .As For The Future., and The Blame Is Mine. Take your pick.

In this novel, written in the year of her death, Lispector uses the guise of a male writer - Rodrigo - to tell a story that “could be written by another…but it would have to be a man for a woman would weep her heart out.” Said story involves the sad life of Macabéa, a character borne from a face spotted one day by the narrator. From this glimpse arises an interesting novel of contrasts and the need for Rodrigo to put down in writing the story of this imagined girl, a story so immediate he even declares, “I am writing at the same time as I’m being read.”

From the off, Rodrigo addresses the reader of The Hour Of The Star with his concerns about writing. In a philosophical tone he discusses how his novel can never truly have a beginning, using a grander scale to illustrate his point:

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I do not know why, but I do know that the universe never began.

Things soon settle - in an unsettled way - as he agonises over the story to tell, supplementing concerns with apologies (”Even as I write this I feel ashamed at pouncing on you with a narrative that is so open and explicit.”), and all done in an engaging, urgent style.

Macabéa, the girl, is the main character in Rodrigo’s novel’s. Her introduction is repetitive, or at least his mentions of her, and the cyclical nature of this erratic mind - the opium-drunk narrator of Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl came to mind - tells us perhaps one time too many about Macabéa’s mental make-up. About how she lives in the here and now. About how she has little ambition beyond being, despite her frailty and ugliness, Marilyn Monroe. And about how, such is the emptiness of her existence, she doesn’t know what it is to be happy or sad:

As the author, I alone love her. I suffer on her account. And I alone may say to her: ‘What do you ask of me weeping, that I would not give you singing?’ The girl did not know that she existed, just as a dog does not know it’s a dog. Therefore she wasn’t aware of her own unhappiness.

But her life is not wholly without incident. She has a job as a typist (”she was so backward that when she typed she was obliged to copy out ever word slowly, letter by letter”) and acquires a bizarre butcher-loving boyfriend along the way. One by one the novel’s tiny cast flits in and out of her life, each experience leading on to an unexpected conclusion that proves to be more shocking to narrator than his creation.

The Hour Of The Star’s joy is in reading the parallel threads as we learn of the narrator and watch him create his character with each page turned. Macabéa, our uneducated lead lead, blunders through life without a care having limited conversations and understanding. She can’t help being who she is, for it’s outwith her control. The blame can rest easily with both her upbringing and Rodrigo. On the other hand, our tortured narrator is educated and knows that he can intervene in Macabéa’s tale but, as the alternative titles allude, doesn’t. For this, he takes to defense:

As for the girl, she exists in an impersonal limbo, untouched by what is worst or best. She merely exists, inhaling and exhaling, inhaling and exhaling. Why should there be anything more? Her existence is sparse. Certainly. But why should I feel guilty? Why should I try to relieve myself of the burden of not having done anything concrete to help the girl?

Make no mistake, The Hour Of The Star, is a novella in which very little happens and while it may, at first, feel repetitive, hypnotic is more apt. A second sitting, with knowledge of later events, certainly rewards, and credit is certainly due to Giovanni Pontiero, for his vibrant translation. And such brilliance gives a taste of life in a Brazilian slum, only to remind us that tragedy is everywhere, especially ahead of us.

It sometimes seems that there’s a precocious streak running through French literature with authors garnering literary respect at young ages. Françoise Sagan springs to mind, publishing Bonjour Tristesse in 1954 at the age of eighteen. As does Florian Zeller who has novels and plays to his name despite still being in his twenties. Now, much to my delight, there’s Raymond Radiguet who, between the ages of sixteen and eighteen wrote The Devil In The Flesh (1923) , having it published when he was twenty, the age at which he would die of typhoid, leaving one other novel, a play, and some poetry to his name.

That The Devil In The Flesh has an air of the autobiographical adds a further layer of tragedy to the life of Radiguet, as this is a novel where, for all the love and happiness the narrator professes within, the wheels are set in motion so that it couldn’t end anywhere else but on a tragic note.

The story opens during the final year of the Great War, with our unnamed narrator, a fifteen year old schoolboy, whose parents “disapproved of relationships between the sexes” and so he finds himself drawn to similary precocious schoolmate, René, due to their “common contempt for the other boys of [their] age” as they “regarded [themselves] as men”. But this friendship soon falls by the wayside when our narrator meets Marthe Lascombe, an eighteen year old woman with a fiancé on the front line:

…since I was sure I would never see Martha again I tried hard not to think about her, with the result that I thought of nothing else.

They do see each other again, however, and a friendship develops, although the narrator openly admits to having designs on Marthe:

I asked her to show me a photograph of her fiancé. I thought he looked handsome enough. But sensing already the importance she attached to my opinions, I was hypocritical enough to say that he was very handsome, but in such a way as to give her the impression that I was not very convinced and was saying so only out of politeness. This, I thought, would plant a seed of doubt in her mind, and at the same time win me her gratitude.

With time, Marthe’s fiancé becomes her husband and the more time he spends away allows the narrator to usurp his home, manipulating Marthe until, the closer they become, and unsavoury thoughts soon pervade:

At any other time to desire the death of her husband would have been little more than a childish piece of wishful thinking; it now became almost as criminal as killing him. I owed my new found happiness to the war; I hoped the war would now complete its task. It must commit the crime for me, like a hired assassin.

But regardless of their love, it makes them miserable, Marthe reproaching the narrator for allowing her to marry so that she could be with him, although their coupling would never have happened without the marriage as he’d never be able to call upon her at her parents’ house where she’d otherwise be living. And as their relationship - a badly kept secret in itself - rolls along, things take a turn for the scandalous when Marthe falls pregnant and all around them support and friendship dwindles, eventually leading the narrative to a final, tragic conclusion.

For one so young, Radiguet displays a mature understanding of love and relationships and the twisted logic that underpins them, the likes of which only first hand experience could bestow. His prose captures his narrators concerns from his position on the verge of maturity, growing up before his time; the inner conflict mirrored in the confusion of a world on the verge of peace. And despite all the morals of the age, Radiguet’s paean to love shines and inspires empathy regardless of what one feels is right or wrong about the situation.

The Devil In The Flesh is an accomplished piece of fiction, its all too believable story enhanced with a remarkable wisdom and punctuated with images that capture the essence of a doomed relationship as it makes the slide from happiness to tragedy. And that its author was so young when it was written makes one wonder how far, with more years and novels under his belt, Radiguet could have taken his legacy.

It has been a couple of years since I first read Italo Calvino, picking up his wonderful if on a winter’s night a traveler on a whim and being captivated by its self-referential opening sentence. In the time since I’ve had a couple of half-hearted stabs at reading more (Invisible Cities and Mr. Palomar) but I’ve never really engaged with anything else. So, picking up The Castle Of Crossed Destinies (1977), I had my fingers crossed that it would be third time lucky for a resurrection in my Calvino interest.

The book is formed from two previously published collections, one named after this book, the other named The Tavern Of Crossed Destinies. In each Calvino delivers a series of short tales inspired by the laying out of tarot cards in horizontal and vertical patterns, interpreting them into the story, and with a print of each card, as they are evoked, running down the margins. It’s a wonderful idea, but despite its innovation I was never fully hooked.

The book is told within the frame of a disparate bunch staying a night in a castle and telling their stories through tarot cards, for they are mysteriously mute. The first series are based off tales, as Calvino thankfully notes in the afterword, from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, which I would never have guessed. As it’s a literary experiment, the first two were solidly structured, while those that followed were given up to fate. After all, what matter the cards that fall? Especially when, as Calvino expertly illustrates, each of the seventy-eight tarot cards offers up a multitude of interpretations:

The narrator, in fact, had begun arranging other cards in a new row, beside the first, on the left; he set down two cards, The Empress and the Eight of Cups. The sudden change of scene disconcerted us for a moment; but the solution quickly asserted itself, I believe, to us all, and it was that the knight had finally found what he had been seeking, a wealthy bride of high lineage, such as we saw depicted there, a crowned head, indeed, with her family shield and her insipid face - also slightly older than he, as the more malicious amongst us surely noted - in a dress all embroidered in linked rings as if to say, “Marry me, marry me.” An invitation promptly accepted, since the Cups card suggested a wedding banquet, with two rows of guests toasting the couple at the end of the festooned table.

So what this first set brings to the page is a gathering of Renaissance archetypes - the alchemist, the knight, etc. - and in the end all these stories overlap, leading to a larger number of permutations of the cards as yet untold. The second section follows suit, this time interpreting the cards as they land on the table as a palimpsest of classic tales: of Faust; of Oedipus; de Sade’s Justine. And from there, onwards, as Calvino tries to tell his story, and further still into an entertaining take on Shakespeare’s tragedies - Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth - all told from the same cards.

As an experiment, the concept works well and brings innovation to fiction, but as a work of fiction, despite the lovely translation by William Weaver, it’s a lack-lustre affair. The wow factor has gone by the end of the first collection and one can thank the fates that the author didn’t make good on his notion to pen a third installment. But it’s great to see how Calvino works his way from a single image and ascribes several meanings to it, as if he’s tossing a coin and calling tales every time.

Joyce Carol Oates is one of those authors who seem to have a book out every year and, with forty years’ worth of output spanning novels, short stories, plays, essays, poetry, and more, it feels strange never to have read anything by her. And then there’s the writing under pseudonyms, too - she’s practically monopolising literature; and she’s picked up a number of awards along the way.

So why haven’t I read her? Well, it may be something to do with the titles of those novels: Man Crazy, Middle Age: A Romance, and Missing Mom, for example. But it turns out, as her Bram Stoker award suggests, that Oates is perhaps more protean than I first thought.

So, then, to Black Water (1992), which is out of print in the UK, but still cheaply available, although I picked it up from my local library. The poor thing hadn’t been checked out for quite some time. Was it that bad? Actually, no, as it happens.

Kelly Kelleher, a twenty-six year old woman, is out for a drive with a tipsy political figure referred to only as the Senator. They’ve just left a Fourth of July party and are headed somewhere a little more secluded. But, as fate has it, they speed off down a closed road and, before the Senator can react, they have skidded off the road and find themselves in black rushing water, the car listing on the passenger side. It’s okay for the Senator - he escapes. But for poor Kelly, it’s time for her young life to flash before her eyes. And so it does, the narrative flowing between a series of flashbacks and those final panicked moments of knowing you are about to die:

She was drowning, but she was not going to drown. She was strong, she meant to put up a damned good fight.

If the premise sounds familiar, then it’s because Oates has lifted it almost wholly from the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969, where Ted Kennedy escaped his car when he drove off a bridge, leaving twenty-eight year old, Mary Jo Kopechne, to drown. Personally, I was unaware of the incident until doing a bit of extracurricular research on Black Water, and being ignorant of the historical basis, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t an issue. For one, Oates has changed the name, so it’s a story. Right? Secondly, it’s setting is after the Gulf War. And finally, what matter are facts when what’s on offer here is Oates’ imagination, as she invents her own version and supposes what it must be like to be that young woman in the final moments of her life as:

…the water splashed and churned about her mouth, foul-tasting water not water, like no water she knew.

Black Water’s style varies throughout, the flashbacks being detailed assessments of the burgeoning relationship between Kelly and the Senator; the manic passages in the sinking car, for want of a better phrase, being prose poetry, producing a sense of the ramblings, assurances, and fears within Kelly’s mind.

Since the drowing can only occupy so many pages, the rest are taken up by Kelly’s life. We learn about her parents, her schooling, her job - all this in order to give us someone to care about. Not so that we care about her, but so that we have a figure to jeer in the Senator. The sheer arrogance of the man as he abuses Kelly’s confidence in him (her thesis was on him; he’s single, she’s obviously interested in him, so why not?), and, in the aftermath of the incident, is concerned only with this career highlights the arrogance of power and the versions of truth that we are fed:

…so there was an instant’s shocked silence and then Ray said, “Dead–!” more an inhalation of breath than an expletive and then he said, quickly, “Don’t tell me over the phone! Just tell me where you are and I’ll come get you,” and the Senator was sobbing now, furious and incredulous and aggrieved, “The girl was drunk, and she got emotional, she grabbed at the wheel and the car swerved off the road…”

Black Water, as a novella, is certainly an interesting piece although I don’t think I overly enjoyed it. Sure, its prose was frenzied and fun - even if I was reading about a woman drowning - and its repetitive nature understandable, give that it reflected the wandering thoughts of Kelly as it came to new subjects, washed off, returned. But there was just something that didn’t catch my interest, probably the American politics aspect. It was worth going off-road for, but didn’t make the splash I wanted.