Feature Film Friday!

This one’s only 20 minutes long. The work of a German-speaking Jewish Czech writer, told through Japanese animation. I give you Franz Kafka’s “A Country Doctor:”

From the Pen of T. Coraghessan Boyle

-copyright Hanna Lippmann, Berlin

The New Yorker’s got a story by T. Coraghessan Boyle up for free. The ending isn’t much to write home about, but there are a few precious gems for the language lovers out there. (I’ve always wondered what the word was for that stuttering, staccato downshifting sound an 18-wheeler makes as it blows past you on the road- apparently it’s “blatting.”) All highlights are mine. They’re just the phrases that sunk especially deep:

A truck went blatting by on the interstate, and then it was silent, but for the mosquitoes singing their blood song, while the rest of the insect world screeched either in protest or accord, I couldn’t tell which, thrumming and thrumming, until the night felt as if it were going to burst open and leave us shattered in the grass.

If it hadn’t been for the dog, we might have slept right on into the afternoon, because we’d been up late the night before, at a club called Gabe’s, where we’d danced, with the assistance of, well, rum and two little white pills Mallory’s friend Mona had given her, until we sweated through our clothes, and the muscles of our calves—my calves, anyway—felt as if they’d been surgically removed, hammered flat, and sewn back in place.

I handed her a coffee and the Life section of the newspaper. Time slowed. For the next hour there were no sounds but for a rustle of newsprint and the gentle soughing suck of hot liquid through a small plastic aperture.

It was hot. Grasshoppers flung themselves at the windshield like yellow hail. All you could smell was tar.

The sheep were right there, right in the yard, milling around and letting off a sweaty ovine stink… 

It was a French film about three non-specifically unhappy couples who had serial affairs with one another and a troop of third and fourth parties, against a rainy Parisian backdrop that looked as if it had been shot through a translucent beach ball.

The heat never broke, not even after a series of thunderstorms rumbled in under a sky the color of bruised flesh.

Read the whole thing here.

What They Were Reading: Robert Frost

On the Fiftieth Anniversary of Robert Frost’s death, the Christian Science Monitor has dug up an old Top 10 list that he provided to the Massachusetts Library Association in 1934. Below are his ten all-time favorite books, and here is the article with relevant quotes and explanations:

1. The Odyssey, by Homer
2. Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe
3. Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
4. The Tales of Edgar Allen Poe, by
5. The Oxford Book of Verse
6. Modern American and British Poetry
7. Last of the Mohicans, by James Fennimore Cooper
8. The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope
9. The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling
10. Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Book trends

So, what are we looking at here? No, it’s not a heart-beat—or maybe it is, in a way, come to think of it. What we’re looking at is the Google search trend for the phrase “The Great Gatsby.” This doesn’t reflect the raw number of searches, but rather a relative scale where 100 represents peak search activity and everything else is relative to that peak. I’m amazed, looking at this chart, that it’s so perfectly seasonal: low-points in June, July and August, and high points in March, April, May. Summer vacation and end-of-year exams, obviously.

I imagine any book regularly taught in highschools will follow the same kind of cyclical pattern. Here’s “Catcher in the Rye:”

Here’s “Romeo and Juliet:”

And here’s “Huckleberry Finn:”

What is the take-away from all of this? Well, some books are taught earlier in the year than others, based on their peak months, and we seem to be teaching less of them than we used to. And most importantly, if you want a big spike for your book you basically have two choices:  sell the rights to Hollywood (Gatsby), or die (Salinger).

A Rambling Riff on Remembrance in Swann's Way, by Marcel Proust

It’s been a year since I read my first bit of Proust and started putting down a few random thoughts that came out of the experience, so it’s hard to remember exactly what I expected as I prepared for my first real excursion into his work. I suppose I expected to be daunted and discouraged- maybe even defeated before finishing. But I was hardly prepared to be so totally swept away as I was by Swann’s Way , the first novel in his 7-volume masterwork, In Search of Lost Time .

After all, what could a modern reader possibly have in common with Proust, his narrator, or Charles Swann, that monocled dandy of the Belle Epoque whose story takes up the bulk of the novel? As it turns out, a helluva lot more than I thought.

It wasn’t the plot that knocked my socks off, or even the wonderful prose, but Proust’s thoughtful plunge into memory. I found that some of my own memories flickered to life again as Proust worked the billows on the embers of his own forgotten past. He writes with such precise detail, that the reader is almost forced to participate in his narrative and his memories, rather than play the role of mere spectator.

As someone whose childhood home has recently been gutted by new owners, and whose elementary, junior high, and high schools were all razed and rebuilt before it even occurred to me to go back in search of memories, I found myself deeply moved by the narrator who wanders the Champs-Elysee in search of old haunts, and who closes his book with the following agonizing lines:

“…how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed. …The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”

It’s been exactly one hundred years since he first published those lines, and they are as true today as they must have been in his time. Almost from the outset, Proust introduces us to the concept of Involuntary Memory, the possibility of an unbidden reminiscence triggered by unexpected sensations that carry some magic of our former years. The most famous of these experiences is the episode of the Madaleine:

“And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory- this new sensation having had me on the effect which love has of filling me with a  precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savors, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?...

“And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of Madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea.”

This first involuntary memory, conjured by a few drops of tea, soon gushes into a torrent of childhood memories that come flooding back to the narrator. He spends entire sections of the book detailing the most minute episodes of his boyhood. In doing so, he reminds us that for the child who experiences them, they are anything but minute and insignificant.

In one early example he recounts the angst of being sent to bed without his routine kiss goodnight and the anguish that follows as he waits for his mother to leave the party downstairs and come up to correct the injustice. (Spoiler alert: she never comes!) This small vignette stretches for pages and pages, but never becomes boring. Before the reader knows it, he is no longer a spectator, but a participant. He feels the same angst as the kiss-deprived narrator, because he can no doubt remember certain similar childhood agonies that seemed, at the time, to stretch out forever.

For me, there’s a memory of being inadvertently locked out in the snow by a housesitter/babysitter who didn’t realize that ‘kindergarten me’ couldn’t reach our doorbell or produce a decent knocking on our massive oak front door. How long was I left out in the cold? It’s impossible for me to say. But it can’t have been a short time, since my repentant baby-sitter made reparations by way of a paint-dot coloring book that you transformed with a wet paintbrush- a childhood wonder I don’t think I’ve seen since that trauma. What I do  know, is how long it felt . And that is what Proust makes you feel again.

There’s a mathematical explanation for all of this, of course. A five-year-old has only lived 1,825 days, so each day he experiences makes up .055% of his young life, whereas a thirty-five-year-old has lived 12,775 days, and each of his days only comprises .0078% of his ever-lengthening existence. But whether you put stock in that theory or not hardly matters. Proust doesn’t concoct explanations or posit theories, he simply plumbs the depths of his memories and invites you to do the same, reminding you what it was really like to think with a five-year-old brain.

When he seizes on a memory he wrings from it every last drop of life for the reader. And just when you think he’s ready to move on, he picks up the carcass and helps you suck the marrow right out of the bones. It’s fascinating, fascinating stuff.

Yet some of the memories are fleeting, and still pack all the punch of his lengthier diversions. He describes a memory of watching the play of sunlight on distant bell-towers that seemed to slide from one side of the road to the other as his carriage wound its way along a crooked country path. I couldn’t help recalling my own sense of wonder, gazing through the windows of my family’s station wagon and watching the world zip by on an endless reel. For Proust the magic lived in the ever-shifting church steeples; for me it lived in the telephone wires that dipped and jumped between the poles like the live current they carried.

Later on in the book he writes beautifully about Swann’s coming across a brief musical phrase that gave him no end of pleasure— as if it had been written specifically for him. He explains Swann’s almost frantic search for the name of the piece and the composer, and his aggravating inability to dig up the source and have it played again for him:

“Swann could learn nothing further. He had, of course, a number of musical friends, but, vividly as he could recall the exquisite and inexpressible pleasure with which the little phrase had given him, and could see, still, before his eyes the forms that it had traced in outline, he was quite incapable of humming over to them the air. And so, at last, he ceased to think of it.”

Who can’t relate to the nagging itch of a half-remembered tune? If you can call up some lyrics, sure- even a couple measly words can lead you to paydirt in the age of search engines and YouTube videos. There are a handful of songs, overheard in European grocery stores 15 years ago, that I’ve been able to track down in this way; artists like Scooter or DarioG, that I never would have heard replayed on American radio stations in a lifetime of listening. But what if there are no lyrics? What if all you can do is hum incoherent pieces stupidly to the few people who might miraculously know the answer, and do this for years at a time with no success?

Here again, Swann’s experience called to memory one of my own. My mystery phrase was hidden in the middle of the the Intermezzo Sinfonico from Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. For me, the section from 1:28 to 2:30 is about the most sublime and moving piece of music ever written. And I say that knowing full well how ridiculous it is for a thirty-five-year old of my generation to use the word sublime. Have a listen:

Years of fruitlessly checking “best of” classical music compilations and trying to whistle people into some vague recognition of my mystery tune had prepared me to never hear it again. And then one day I did  hear it again. And my relief at finding it again, at putting a name to it, and being able to play it at will was mirrored exactly by the character of Swann:

“But tonight, at Mme. Verdurin’s, scarcely had the little pianist begun to play when, suddenly, after a high note held on through two whole bars, Swann saw it approaching, stealing forth from underneath that resonance, which was prolonged and stretched out over it, like a curtain of sound, to veil the mystery of its birth—and recognized, secret, whispering, articulate, the airy and fragrant phrase that he had loved.”

I could go on, but this is already the longest “review” I’ve ever posted. I haven’t even touched on the story, or the pinpoint perfection of some of the prose. But those aren’t the reasons I would recommend this book in the first place. Swann’s Way  may have a certified “yawner” of a plot, but it’s an absolute thrill-ride for the memory. I’d recommend it to anyone with a past. It’s no wonder Proust is mentioned again and again as an influence by writers from Virginia Woolf to Jennifer Egan.

Take it for a whirl:

Another month in the Can

Right about the time I was lamenting the latest “100 Best” list yesterday, this little website quietly stacked its 16^th month in the Shelf Actualization archives. With the average lifespan of a blog sitting right around two years, we promise to give it our best over the next 8 months or so before we shut it down.

Just kidding. (I hope.) Anyhoo, above are the authors we've covered lately. Now on to the 5 most popular posts from this past month:

• Number 2
• Conan the Literarian
• Paris, by Time Machine
• Review: Nemesis, by Philip Roth
• Jonathan Franzen on the Overrated and the Underappreciated

And the many-splendored search terms that led some of you here:

• Image of big merchant ship  >>  We’ve covered the merchant marine here
• Sperm whale habitat map  >>  So big it should’ve made Ahab’s quest harder
• Nanhsuchou  >>  The Good Earth, found!
• Boat that inspired old man and the sea  >>  Well, at least the harbor
• Huxley Smolarski  >>  A question of plagiarism, or just bad luck?
• Taller than Robert Wadlow  >>  Our ode to the short story
• Call me Ishmael Fourth Wall  >>  One way to open your own book
• The Punishment of X4  >>  Appropriate now that Mad Men is back
• Broken meats  >>  Shakespeare, the great hurler of insults
• Animal House where are they now  >>  An early post on Turgenev and Belushi

Thanks for stopping by. Keep coming back!

Another 100, Another Controversy

The Guardian has come out with another Top 100 list. But they aren’t just limiting themselves to the last hundred years or the last century. No, their claiming to have the list of the 100 Greatest Novels of all time. Yikes.

There are some predictable old-school entries, like Don Quixote and Pilgrim’s Progress, but I’ve actually only read twenty-one of their hundred (giving myself credit for In Search of Lost Time , even though I’ve only read the first installment of that seven-volume monster.) There are also, as you can imagine, some head-scratchers. That’s right, Roald Dahl’s The BFG  is one of the Guardian’s Top 100 novels of all time. As is Wuthering Heights —excuse me…   sorry…  had to go puke.

E.B White makes the list, but John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy don’t. Hemingway’s only entry is a short story collection, Men Without Women . I dunno, we’ve looked at these lists before, and there are always flaws. The whole point seems to be not so much the cataloguing of worthy titles, but the generation of reader responses.  

Meh, I don’t have the time for that crap. I’d rather go read something.

Not quite fictional geography

It’s rare that I’m pulled into a book simply because of it’s cover (don’t judge a book and all that crap…). But I’ve been intrigued by Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins  ever since I first laid eyes on it. That’s a gorgeous book. One of these days I’m going to have to pick it up and give it a whirl.

According to the first few pages on the Amazon preview, the action opens in the “brutto  fishing village of Porto Vergogna,” a fictional sixth, cliff-side town along the famous Cinque Terre section of the Italian Riviera. The book’s own, hand-drawn map puts the imaginary village just south of Riomaggiore, where you'll find nothing but boring, scruffy-looking hillsides sloping into the water. 

But before you give up on visiting this little piece of book-cover-paradise, I thought I’d point out that that mesmerizing cover image is actually a shot of Manarola- the 4^th of 5 real-life villages running north to south along the coast.

Thomas Jefferson's "canine appetite" for reading

Sharing a phone-pic from the DeMarest family museum visit this past weekend. What you see here is Thomas Jefferson’s first stab at pioneering the “tabbed browsing” experience we’re all familiar with on modern internet browsers. This rotating book stand contraption, of his own invention, allowed him to quickly switch between 5 different open books and to satisfy his self-described "canine appetite" for reading.

As someone who generally reads a two or three, if not more, books at any one time, I am in awe of the man’s ingenuity.

Oh, and that little ceramic piece to the left? That’s Jefferson’s inkwell, in the shape of Voltaire’s head, naturally. Pretty cool, huh?

Review: Babylon Revisited and Other Stories, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

One of my goals for this year was to knock off one of the handful of books that I’ve started but never finished.

Now, I love me some F. Scott Fitzgerald. I zipped through The Great Gatsby , This Side of Paradise , and Tender is the Night – all three. But the only short story collection of his that I’ve tried, Babylon Revisited and Other Stories , had me snoozing before I finished the first story. Maybe because the tales are so long (they have 6 or 7 chapters apiece.) But when I happened upon the audiobook at my local library, I thought it must be a sign to give it another go. Here's my second appraisal.

The sentence-level writing is, of course, first-rate. But I think I identified the problem I’d been saddled with earlier: the collection is simply pretty boring. I found that I couldn’t really identify with the bulk of his characters- most of whom seem to be uppercrust, Mid-western, young men on the margins of high-society, who are in love with unattainable, snobbish girls. That kind of story is perfectly fine, and he’s done it well elsewhere, but I get bored with the repetitive nature of it.

Fitzgerald is said to have been conflicted over a lot of his stories. He felt like he was whoring himself out for a magazine paycheck rather than concentrating on producing his best work all the time. But I’m not going to dwell on the bad (The Diamond as Big as the Ritz is a highly-sensationalized, pulp-fiction tale that was hard for me to swallow) or the boring (see previous paragraph,) I’d rather talk about a couple I really liked.

“The Ice Palace” is all about cultural differences and assimilation between North and South in America. A southern girl dissatisfied with her sleepy, southern town, decides to marry a northerner. Her first foray into northern society as his fiancée raises some red flags for her and the tension builds slowly, but when she gets left behind and trapped in the labyrinth of a Winter Carnival ice palace, everything becomes clear, and she retreats to the South. Unlike some stories in the collection, things actually happen in this story— it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And it packs enough emotional action to keep you thinking long after you’ve read it.

There were a couple others I enjoyed, but the title story is the coup de grace. “Babylon Revisited” is a brilliant, heart-wrenching tale that lays bare the wasteful decadence of the Jazz Age. In the aftermath of the market crash and too much out-of-control drinking and debauchery in Paris, Fitzgerald shows you the slow transformation and rehabilitation of the main character, who is ready at long last to take back custody of his daughter and to start a new life in Prague. That is, until some of his old friends come crashing in at the last minute to prove that there are some demons you can never quite get away from. It’s sad and brutal and wonderful. And the internet tells me it became the movie “The Last Time I Saw Paris.”

Most of this collection was just okay. I probably wouldn’t have crossed the finish line if some audiobook voice talent hadn’t read it to me. But those two stories really redeemed the collection for me. You may as well check’em out.