booklit

When Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was named laureate for the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, I was like many others in wondering who? His standing in English speaking nations, save for a couple of low profile translations in the States, was practically non-existant. And this is an author who has published over forty books since his 1963 debut. It’s been a frustrating wait, then, for publishers in the UK to rush release some backlist titles into print. No doubt translators up and down the country are soldiering away at more of his works.

The citation of Le Clézio, by the Swedish Academy, described him as “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization”- a soup of intrigue, hinting at so much while retaining a cryptic aura. Having looked at the rereleased titles, Terra Amata (1968) seemed to best fit the citation. In fact, it doesn’t so much fit as describe it.

Terra Amata concerns itself with life on earth. It’s the story of Chancelade, looking at his unremarkable life and capturing all the detail and adventures he overlooked.

You’d never done playing all the games there were. A prisoner on the flat face of the earth, standing on your two legs with the sun beating down on your head and the rain falling drop by drop, you had all these extraordinary adventures without really knowing where you were going. A pawn - you were no more than a pawn on the giant chess-board, a disc that the expert invisible hand moved about in order to win the incomprehensible game.

The narrative drops by special points in Chancelade’s life, following from young boy to old man, then pushing beyond. We see the young Chancelade playing in the garden, God to a number of beetles. (”When the boy realized that he was the potato-bugs’ god, with absolute power of life and death over them, he decided to act.”) and teaching them a lesson. We experience his father’s death, follow his sexual development, witness him becoming a father, and ache with his old age.

Le Clézio’s delivery is a hyperreal tour de force, lush and dense, designed to obverload the senses. His focus is on the minute, regularly picking up on grains of sand, pebbles on beaches, and insects in their nests, inverting the microscopic worlds they inhabit to cosmic concerns. Questions of life and death occur, Chancelade occasionaly wrestling with his own mortality, echoes of which appear in the cigarettes he regularly smokes:

It was a perfect action, beautiful as a play. A tragic action. It had a beginning, when the spurting flame met the cigarette. A development, with unity of time, place and action. And when the cigarette was finished, the same hand that had lit it put it swiftly to death, crushing it against the side o the ashtray. And it was really rather as if you were dead yourself, extinguished, suffocated in your own ash, your inside quietly spilling out of your skin of torn paper.

What’s interesting about Le Clézio’s prose is that he is able to capture a new slant on looking at things. In life, everything is an adventure to be embraced full on. He sees objects strewn around as potential communiques between other entities - between men, animals, and the inanimate forces of nature. There’s a language in everything, and we see Chancelade explore this idea in some brief, yet tedious, episodes of Morse code, sign language, and a babelian stew of words.

While much is made of our time on earth, and how little we fully appreciate it, Le Clézio goes beyond humanity, exploring tens of thousands of years ahead to an enjoyable section in a museum, speculating about how we will be remembered, surprisingly quashing humankind’s achievements in favour of guesswork from archaeological digs, much like the conjecture about the real Terra Amata site in France.

Maldec man seems to have lived in communities, in tall concrete houses divided into rooms. His was essentially a working and fetishist civilization. Wars were frequent and deadly, as is proved by certain burial-places recently discovered. These wars were probably due to to racial or religious differences. The civiliation of Maldec man was also ritual, nationalist, and based on the family. It thus belongs to the polymorphic pre-desertic period, which lasted about 5,000 years. It may be that Maldec man was contemporary with the beginning of the great drought which occurred at that time and which caused his civilization to disappear.

Terra Amata, while living up to the aforementioned citation, is perhaps overlong. At just over two hundred pages, it easily feels like three or four hundred. The detail Le Clézio plunges into is often startling and wondrous, but there’s the feeling that he’s retreading the same ideas on occasion, just presenting them differently. There’s a metafictional thread running through the novel, especially evident in the prologue and epilogue, which brought to mind Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, but doesn’t really bring much to the story itself.

Where Terra Amata succeeds is in holding up a candle to the possibilities of nature, to the potential of life. You may as well use it since you are going to lose it anyway, is the message. Big questions are asked, with no answers forthcoming. Who needs answer, though, when the possibilities are endless? So endless that…

… on the other side of infinity there may be a world just like this one only as if reflected in an enormous mirror: a world where light is black and ants are white and the earth is soft and the sea hard as a slab of marble. A world where the sun is a sooty dot in the sky and volcanoes belch torrents of muddy ice. A world in which you start by dying and end by being born, with the clock-hands all turning frantically backwards. And somewhere in the middle of a big town built downwards into the earth there lives a man perhaps with eyes that look inwards into his head. And perhaps this man has a strange name that can only be said by stopping speaking. Edalecnahc.

While Terra Amata can be reduced to two words - carpe diem - it works because it carries with it the force of infinite experiences. Le Clézio may be an “author of new departures” but he’s also the author of new arrivals on my book shelves.

With the recent Olympics in Beijing, and partly inspired by the way book stores used this event to cram their promotional shelves with Chinese fiction, I thought it would be good to read a book from China since I hadn’t done so since enjoying Bi Feiyu’s delightful The Moon Opera. Given that the many of the headlines, especially in the lead up to the games, centred around the world tour of the Olympic torch being regularly threatened by protestors, a book that dealt with the subject of their protests sounded good. That would be Tibet, then.

Having never stepped foot inside Tibet - I’m sure most protestors haven’t clocked up the Air Miles either - my ready image of it is probably no different to that of others: of a quiet, meditative mountainscape disturbed only by the wash of monastery bells and Buddhist chants soft on the breeze. It’s the perfect postcard, this Tibet we want to see, and perhaps always will see unless we have experience it for ourselves.

Such is the point of Ma Jian’s Stick Out Your Tongue (1987), a slim volume of short stories that, as he notes in his afterword, sought to cut through the idealism of Tibet and give the people back their humanity. Banned in China as a “vulgar and obscene book that defames the image of our Tibetan compatriots”, it led to Jian’s exile from China. In a way exile may have been welcomed, as it was China that initially drove him to Tibet:

As my bus left the crowded plains of China and ascended to the clear heights of Tibet, I felt a sense of relief. I hoped that here at last I’d find a refuge from the soulless society that China had become. I wanted to escape into a different landscape and culture, and gain a deeper insight into my Buddhist faith.

For Buddhist faith, where else but Tibet, because:

In Tibet, religion permeates every grain of earth. Man and God are inseperable, myth and legend are intertwined. People there have endured sufferings that are beyond the comprehension of the modern world. I am writing down this story now in the hope that I can start to forget it.

What’s for sure is that if Jian can begin to forget the events told here, the reader certainly won’t. Each story follows a loose progression through Tibet, with Jian mentioning the people, stories and traditions he encounters, each told in a matter-of-fact style, such as the sky burial in the opening tale:

The burial master hacks all the flesh from the corpse and slices it into small pieces. He grinds the bones into a fine powder and adds some water to form a paste. (If the bones are young and soft, he will thicken it with ground barley.) He then feeds the paste, together with the flesh, to the surrounding hawks and vultures.

By not moralising over what he sees Jian allows the reader to form their own opinions about Tibetan societies on topics such as death, poverty, incest, and more, with the author noting in his afterward, “my idyll of a simple life lived close to nature was broken when I realised how dehumanising extreme hardship can be.”

In showing this darker side of Tibet, Jian still manages to keep a fine balance, offering up descriptions of the landscape, all mist and mountains, that bring the region to life:

The mountain was silent. Hawks and vultures sat perched on the summit. In the valley below, ribbons of mist rose from Yamdrok and rolled into a single sheet that slowly covered the entire lake. The mist thickened and spread, rising and falling like the chest of a woman breathing, drifting higher and higher until it veiled the blood-red sun.

That such inhumane acts occur in this beautiful place only hammers home the effect of the stories in Stick Out Your Tongue. The question, though, is to what extent it is all true. Yes, it’s fiction, but there’s a sense of travelogue here, and the afterward readily discusses what drove Jian to Tibet. But, as the author says, his account is not without the possibility of being unreliable:

From a distance, the wastes of the high plateau had a hypnotic beauty. But after I had trudged across them for days on end, the emptiness became stupefying. I lost all sense of reality and travelled as though in a trance. In the thin mountain air, it was hard to distinguish fact from fantasy. My mind was tormented by visions of Buddhist deities and memories of home.

In one of the stories there is a young lady, the focus of many a tossed stone, and when she sensed someone watching, “and didn’t throw anything at her, she would stick out her tongue in greeting.” As a greeting it may well be, but the title of the collection comes from the feeling of being “empty and helpless, as pathetic as a patient who sticks out his tongue and begs his doctor to diagnose what’s wrong with him.” In this book, Tibet sticks out its tongue, in greeting and in illness, allowing us into its postcard world, but unable to form a definite prognosis.

Don DeLillo is an author I’ve been wanting to read for some time but have never got round to, for two reasons. The first, stupidly, is that his novel Underworld sticks in my mind as too large to entice me to read him just yet, despite there being plenty of other novels to choose from. And the second? Well, he’s considered heavyweight in the world of American letters, past and present, so - like Saul Bellow, who I never get far with - I considered myself not yet ready for him.

Not so, it seems, although I did choose a novella as my entry point. The Body Artist (2001), on reading internet scraps, is not typical of DeLillo’s work in that its canvas isn’t wide reaching but, instead, contained. Minimal, even. And, in keeping things minimal, the plot is fairly thin on the ground, too, preferring to tell the story of Lauren Hartke, a performance artist; and doing so with a fine display of writing that charts her grief, mixing in a thread of metaphysical intrigue.

The Body Artist begins with a wonderful scene where Lauren and her husband, the thrice married film director, Rey Robles, have breakfast in their rented coastal home. Over the course of this meal, described in intimate detail, they concern themselves with mundane things, such as shaking the orange juice to loosen the pulp, studying the newspaper, and turning the radio on and off…and on and off. And through all this there are stuttered conversations as they half-hear each other because they are struggle to break away from their own thoughts:

She took a bite of cereal and looked at another story. She tended lately to place herself, to insert herself into certain stories in the newspaper. Some kind of daydream variation. She did it and then became aware she was doing it and then sometimes did it again a few minutes later with the same or a different story and then became aware again.

But what Lauren doesn’t realise is this is the last she’ll see of Rey as, as the obituary following this opening chapter states, he dies of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head in the apartment of his first wife. The rest of the novel investigates Lauren’s grief, taking us deep inside her head where it seems she’s most comfortable.

With the story being this thin, DeLillo needs to generate interest somehow and he does so by having Lauren discover a young man holed up in a little used room of the house. As to who he is, she doesn’t know, and any attempt to address this is complicated by his speech being out of time, flitting from mimicked snatches of conversations between her and Rey to the words she has yet to speak in a voice that is “reedy and thin and trapped in tenses and inflections, in singsong conjugations”.

Where The Body Artist starts off as a delight it soon slides to a steady stream of Lauren’s mind working away at the nature of time and reality and, to be honest, I was lost. Bored and lost, yet this is probably the author’s intention as, in a journalist’s take on Lauren’s latest performance, I feel like part of her audience:

The piece, called Body Time, sneaked into town for three nights, unadvertised except by word of mouth, and drew eager audiences whose intensity did not always maintain itself for the duration of the show. Hartke clearly wanted her audience to feel time go by, viscerally, even painfully. This is what happened, causing walkouts among the less committed.

They missed the best stuff.

Thankfully, I was committed despite not truly “getting” The Body Artist, perhaps because I never felt it was well concluded and my mind would wander from all the philosophical content at crucial moments. The best stuff was the prose, which certainly wasn’t missed, even if I didn’t know what the hell it was all saying. But despite all the temporal discussion, I still think I enjoyed this novella and believe that I may yet get something from it. With the benefit of time, of course.