August 28, 2011 · 2:32 am

The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?: The unexpected play(fulness)

For some reason (let’s call it 20-something-too-little-sleep-and-too-much-wine, and not what it is, which is my terrible memory) but I didn’t remember Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? was a play, until this weary-reader delighted in finding a slim volume on the self and not another (as was feared) 500 page tome (no doubt each page of the 500 page novels I’ve made my way through have been worth it, but I’m just saying, at this point in 10-10-12 I’m taking my slim volumes where I can get ‘em).

Whatever the other outcomes of this reading project might be, I do hope I continue to read more plays, as my heretofore monogomous-with-occasional-cheating relationship with fiction may be (may have been) keeping me from some gems.

The Goat is probably meant to be absurd. If I knew more about drama I’d be able to tell you about the school it belongs to, the history it’s drawing on, the playwrights its responding to, but I have no idea. What I do know is that the play follows Martin and Stevie’s relationship when Stevie discovers that Martin, her husband of 30 odd years, has started to have an affair with a goat – Sylvia – and that he loves Sylvia just as much as he loves her. There’s some other plot details that likely enhance or complicate the thematic questions – things like their son, Billie, and his apparent homosexuality; or, Stevie’s penchant for breaking every material object the two own – but I gave my full attention to the goat-loving, and so have little to say about other, likely no less punchy, symbolic events. 

I have to say that The Goat gets at the heart of (what I understand to be) the confusion for both people in any once-monogmous-no-longer relationship: for Martin, the confusion of how it might be possible to love two souls at the same time with equal vigour and devotion; for Stevie, how her partner could equate their love with anyone (anything) else, how he could degrade its singularity. That the play uses a goat to explore this confusion and sadness only exemplifies the already inherent absurdity of adultery – the impossible to square realization that while love is not finite and it might be given in excess to more than one person, it is nevertheless accepted by individuals who might feel entitled to its exclusive privilege. What difference a goat or another woman? Who is Sylvia, really, but a placeholder for every diversion that alerts us to the precariousness of monogomous devotion? The necessity to consider, if not to reconcile, our investment in singular attachments with boundless love?

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August 27, 2011 · 3:55 pm

A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True: Sentimental

                          Brigid Pasulka’s first novel, A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True, alternates two chronological settings by chapter. The “long, long time ago” follows Pigeon and Angelicia in Poland just before and during World War Two in third person omniscient, and the “present” is narrated in the first person perspective of ‘Baba Yaga’ (a poorly explained nickname with little apparent significance). It isn’t until a good way into the narrative that the relationship between the two chronologies becomes clear, and even later into the narrative that the relationship between Angelicia/Pigeon and Baba Yaga is explained. I suspect this mystery is meant to be intriguing; however, for this reader it was only frustrating and confusing.

Perhaps I missed the pay-off of the big reveal of how the two story lines relate because I was preoccupied with working out how the writing in the ‘long long time ago’ sections could be good, while the writing in the ‘presen’t could be terrible. What circumstances allow the same writer to simultaneously write well and write terribly? I’m going to hazard that it’s point of view that got in the way. The first person sections couldn’t sustain the kind of magical, fairytale quality aimed for (and achieved!) in the “once upon a time” of “long long ago,” and instead fell somewhere between dull and convoluted. Without the motivation to care about Baba Yaga I found myself plodding through her chapters, waiting to return to the intrigue and romance of the world war two narrative. And when the two chronologies eventually merge (as we know from the beginning they are bound to do, because it is that kind of story) the whole thing falls to pieces, as Pasulka can’t seem to find a unified point of view to allow the merged chronologies to read as anything other than stilted.

So… what did I find redeeming? I suppose there’s something to be said for a narrative that takes a longer view of history and introduces readers to the temporal scope of suffering experienced by ordinary villagers between the outbreak of World War Two and the fall of the iron curtain (do we capitalize Iron Curtain? Maybe it ought to be Iron. Curtain. Or Iron! Curtain!). Makes me think of the new history out – Bloodlands – that aims to capture just this kind of prolonged suffering. In any case, I admire the ambitious scope, even if I find the writing itself terribly uneven and without a decided thematic focus (rather a frustratingly contradictory thematic interest: is this a book about breaking from the past? about making choices? about confronting and learning from history? about accepting the immeasurable affect/effect the past has on individual decisions in the present? about the need to commit to one’s history or the need to disavow it?).

(Or are all of my disparaging remarks a consequence of my current scepticism about soul mates?)

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August 24, 2011 · 2:08 pm

Norweigan Wood: A Sexy Tale

    I only very recently learned about Haruki Murakami, which is scandalous on a number of counts, not the least being he is a Big. Deal. The Guardian describes him as “among the world’s greatest living novelists,” friends who worked at book shops report his books “flying” off shelves, and colleagues who don’t read – ever – know of his work. So. There you have it, self-proclaimed “reader” that I am, I can still be blind to bestselling and award winning sensations. Of course now that I have read Norwegian Wood I’ve started to see Murakami’s name all over the place – in The Globe and Mail this morning! It all makes me wonder what other brilliant novels are hiding in plain sight, obscured by my dedication to all things Can lit and my haphazard method for choosing what to read. All this to say I’m glad I morphed a category of 10-10-12 to allow for books recommended. It now becomes incumbent upon you to look after the breadth of my reading…

In any case, the book itself: I wanted very much to like Norwegian Wood. It had all sorts of things a good novel might have – sex, sadness, suicide (take that alliteration snobs!). For awhile I thought it might be the overwhelming sadness of the story that kept me from fully committing to the narrative, but by the end of the book I’d realized that I just didn’t believe the protagonist, Toru. Despite first person narration, I never felt like I had a good explanation for why Toru felt or acted the way he did. The emotional thrust of the narrative are Toru’s relationships with Naoko  and Midori, but I was never convinced that Toru felt much of anything for either of them, despite his claims to the reader and to the women that he loved them. 

That said, the novel has some great sexy scenes (and so the basis for the recommendation) that I’d reread if they weren’t also pretty sad. Speaking of, the novel does sadness very well, which feels like an odd thing to praise a novel for, but there you have it. A sadness born of the unwitting loneliness of all three characters who try, mostly unsuccessfully, to reach out to other people, only to find that relationships of all sorts are complicated by unrealistic or unacknowledged expectations, personal limitations, and the ambient circumstances of lives led. I suppose on the metatextual level I found the narrative itself a lonely one – reaching out to this reader, but finding another instance where feeling cannot be adequately conveyed and so reasonably shared.

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August 20, 2011 · 8:08 pm

Tropic of Cancer and Angels and Demons: A Tale of Two Plots Divided

      Suppose you had to justify to someone why you read. Asked to account for the hours you spend sitting still with words, how might you respond?

I read to take the offer of the author to follow a narrative and witness the experiences of characters. Whether I then use those experiences to inform my own understanding of the world seems to have more to do with the narrative itself than with the reading as an activity, but the best books do seem to demand this kind of reinterpretation of my own existence. I read because I love the startling surprise of an expression I’ve never encountered before, the abundant and obvious beauty of great writing. I read, too, for the solitude and quiet afforded by the activity, the temporary vacuum that seals me within a narrative. 

Out of peculiar circumstances I find myself writing about Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons in the same blog post. The two seem strange bedfellows – Miller routinely held up as a master of literature, Brown decried by the literary folk for terrible writing – and were it merely a measure of writing quality, I’d agree, the two are most dissimilar. However different, the two books arrived for me at a moment in time when I needed to read: I needed a plot that could distract me, and I needed writing that might inspire a belief in possibility. By a measure of need both Miller and Brown’s books are “good,” in that they provided, in their very different ways, exactly what this reader required.

That my momentarily uncertain mind could be captivated by Miller’s narrative that holds at least a diffident view of plot and chronology, speaks to the punch of paragraphs that demand recognition as utterly beautiful.

For necessary relief from my own thoughts I turned to Brown who unapologetically burdens his text with cliches, mixed metaphors, conventional and predictable characters, but nevertheless manages to offer a plot that allows the dulling of introspection. That this should be viewed as a “good” may strike you as immoderate (or perhaps immoral), but it is, nevertheless, a function of reading I occasionally crave and which Brown delivers.

In terms of writing quality its something of a crime to compare Miller and Brown. So I won’t. I’ll instead give snippets from each to make clear that while both are “books” they are not, in some sense, the same kinds of texts (oh yes, I’m invoking a ‘high’ and ‘low’ art paradigm, and if this comparison does not bear out the validity of such a distinction, we’re different people).

Miller:

“the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured – disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui – in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off. All the while someone is eating the bread of life and drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides a way in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is pale as water. And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige of relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by slaughter, ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open. And so I think what a miracle it would be if this miracle which man attends eternally should turn out to be nothing more than these two enormous turds.”

Brown

“Through the tempest of emotions now coursing through her blood, a single word tolled like a distant bell. Pristine. Cruel.” or this one “She found an inexplicable refuge in his eyes…like the harmony of the oceans.”

Had I read Angels and Demons last year you’d be reading a very different review. So rather than recommend one book or the other, as is my custom, I’ll instead hope that whatever it is you might read next will fill the precise and present need you have as a reader, knowing as I do that the needs of readers change.

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