obooki’s page

#2 Daniel Clowes - Justin M Damiano

This is a graphic short story. - I don’t know much about graphic novels in general. My best friend likes them and tries to talk to me about them; and I feel compassion for him since he’s not able to communicate to me what it is he finds in them which touches his soul. - So the truth is I couldn’t really say what the merits and the demerits of this graphic short story are. The ideas contained in it are perhaps anathema to me: a young film-critic pretends to like art-house cinema to impress a girl (seriously, if his love of films is so shallow, how come he became a film-critic?). He writes a bad review of a film by a director for whom he’d previously written a good review. Moment of epiphany and stuff.

The drawing seems pretty simple, but I’ve no criteria by which to judge it. - I liked the fact that the hero’s thought were often superimposed on the speech-bubbles of the other characters so that you couldn’t read them. Then again, for all I know, this might be a hackneyed commonplace.

#3 A L Kennedy -Frank

I liked this story - which is no surprise, since in these projects it always seems to be A L Kennedy I like the most. In fact, she’s the only one of this type of writer whose works I’ve ever read - or feel I’ve wanted to read - outside these little projects of mine; - though the particular short story collection I’m on at the moment I’ve left aside for a while (perhaps a year), so maybe I’m not all that enthusiastic.

Still, there’s something about Kennedy’s tales - something very dark and troubling and horrific, which makes her work seem striking (particularly amongst other works of even mediocrity and tone) and idiosyncratic. They are different too in that they’re often charged with emotion: - it may for a time be withheld and restrained, but usually it is intense and it is destroying these people from within. I like her strange, disturbing world. - All I would complain about in this is her odd abnormal usage of words, which - while trying to attain, no doubt, to a poetic prose - breaks up the rhythm of her writing for me: - “a pounce of bad weather “, “the drops legging down”, “the tiles were fairly smooth, but still confused his fluid into throwing out fine liquid spines”, “he removed his hat and then settled it back on again” - which I just find irritating in a Tibor-Fischer way.

#4 ZZ Packer - Gideon

Amiable style, short, moment of epiphany, nothing much to say, by the book, not of any interest.

#1 David Mitchell - Judith Castle

Oh God, it all comes back to me! (Is no other country’s fiction as dreadful as ours?) Why am I putting myself through this again? Can I not learn from past mistakes?

This is the worst opening story imaginable. This is everything I’ve come to expect from literary fiction: its central character is a dull worthless mediocrity whose thoughts never vary from the banal; she leads us ramblingly through the pointless trivia of her everyday existence; nothing happens; no emotion is conceded - it is just implied at the end by some phoney use of symbolism; - and the whole thing is told in the kind of light-hearted manner which evades any demand to have itself taken seriously.

Oh yes, it’s a clever work Mitchell’s created for us - but, true to form among contemporary writers, its cleverness is all hidden and in order to reach it and understand it we have to wade through such a wearisome tract of trivial occurrences and jejune observations that I find an 18-page story turning into an epic struggle against delight and pleasure.

Here’s an example of its subtle cleverness: - the heroine phones up someone on a mobile; the person on the other end replies:

“Who is this and where the hell is who?”

To which the heroine thinks:

What sort of actresses doesn’t know her whos from her whoms?

To which, of course, the reader thinks: - no, Mitchell, you’re wrong: - that she is using a relative pronoun at the end of the sentence is certainly grammatical incorrect; but this woman on the phone is surely correct in his use of the nominative case here because this is clearly an example of apposition … oh, no, i see: - it isn’t Mitchell’s misunderstanding of the rules of English grammar at all; he is actually trying to evoke the imbecility of his narrator’s thought by this passage: - I mean how goddamn clever is that!

By which time, of course, Mitchell has successfully impressed upon the reader that the thoughts in his own head and far more interesting than anything he’s likely to find in the pages of this book: - and if he isn’t a complete fool, at this juncture the reader goes off and does something more useful with his life. - That is, if the whole business of the artifically constructed cleverness of this passage doesn’t annoy the hell out of him so he can’t any longer concentrate on living.

Character, apparently, is created through such facile trickery, along with long boring monologues of listed trivia such as (taken almost at random):

“I sat back down and sipped Marion’s excellent coffee. She replaces her machine every year, whether it needs replacing or not. Mummy used a percolator only once in her life. She put three filters in instead of one, and the kitchen floor was flooded.”

“So I manned the till and started sifting the morning’s post: three invoices; one tax form; two CVs from great white hopes after Saturday; a letter informing the recipient that he has won a mansion in Fiji via the lottery - for every blatant scam, there are a thousand halfwits who refuse to understand that nobody gives money away - and a postcard from Barry from Grainge-over-Sands, the asylum-seeker’s detention centre of the soul.”

I’m not interested, Mitchell; - it isn’t interesting. (Though I did wonder whether “two CVs” was meant as a clever play on words: which thought, carefully engendered in my brain no doubt, only again succeeded in distracting me from the “narrative”).

But seriously, if you’re going to write a story about someone who is dull and uninteresting - that goddamn everyperson who is so often the hero of your wretched novels - please, please include something, anything, in your work that might make it a joy for the reader to read it.

This is going to be hell, this exercise.

(The thing is, having read about 1/3rd of Cloud Atlas, I believe Mitchell is a talented writer and that he is deliberately wasting his talent by writing such empty banalities as are contained in every sentence of this story).

Yes, once again Stephen Mitchelmore, “the greatest litblogger in the history of litbloggering”, has employed his wonderful analytico-critical talents in making the remarkably astute observation that I, Obooki, am a philistine (or at least an implication thereof). - Still, it’s an improvement: - last time I was a “middle-brow philistine”; - but now I’ve been promoted to “illiterate philistine”. (I’m glad he continues his fascination for the meanings of words, as in his profound discussion of the shift of meaning of the term “literary” recently, in which of course he made no effort to sneer at anyone).

This was all to do with an off-the-cuff accusation I made on a Guardian blog suggesting that Kafka was influenced in his habit of masturbating by Gogol. Obooki is, of course, sorry for making any such absurd claim and apologises for the scholarly offence it may have caused. He should perhaps have quoted the offending passage from Yu Ta-Fu’s famous short-story Sinking which he’d had in mind, to give his own quotation some necessary context (he was thinking of doing this, but got bored). A contemporary of Kafka, Yu Ta-Fu is here discussing his hero’s habit of masturbation in a thoroughly open manner (perhaps the very sort of open manner of someone modern like Kafka who was always so upfront about sexual matters in his books and probably the first person ever):

“Every time he sinned he felt bitter remorse and vowed not to transgress any more. But, almost without any exception, the same visions appeared before him vividly at the same time the next morning. All those descendants of Eve he would normally meet in the course of the day came to seduce him in all their nakedness, and the figure of a middle-aged madam appeared to him even more tempting than that of a virgin. Thus once, twice, and this practice became a habit. Quite often, after abusing himself, he would go to the library to look up medical references on the subject … One day he learned somewhere in a book that Gogol, the founder of modern Russian literature, also suffered from this sickness and was not able to cure himself to the day of his death. This discovery comforted him somewhat, if only because no less a man than the author of Dead Souls was his fellow sinner. But this form of self-deception could do little to remove the worry in his heart.”

These lines, which he’d only read a few days’ before, stayed in Obooki’s mind, since he’d been thinking a lot recently about the comparison between Kafka and Gogol’s work - but it wasn’t until he read the article in the Guardian that he was taken by the fanciful idea of Gogol’s influence on Kafka’s onanistic tendencies.

As it happens, Obooki has recently been thinking of writing a post derived FROM HIS VERY OWN THOUGHTS on the subject of the similarities between Kafka and Gogol. Now, of course, he almost feels he shouldn’t bother - not after his argument has been so elegantly destroyed by the brilliant Mitchelmore with his one quotation from someone VERY FAMOUS AND AUTHORITATIVE.

Nonetheless, though he decided to put off his own wild project of applying HIS OWN IDEAS to the question, valiant as ever, Obooki took it upon himself to try for once the remarkable “Mitchelmore mode of criticism” - namely, to quote from the works of the VERY FAMOUS AND AUTHORITATIVE, as if that’s an argument for anything.

Firstly, though, we’d like to take a look at the SINGLE QUOTATION Mitchelmore employs, which he claims shows how the VERY FAMOUS Milan Kundera (WHOSE WORD SHALL BE GOSPEL) manages “to distinguish Kafka from earlier writers like Dickens and Gogol despite superficial likenesses”:

“Masterful as they were at analyzing all the strategies of love, nineteenth-century novels left sex and the sexual act hidden. In the first decades of our century, sex emerged from the mists of romantic passion. Kafka was one of the first (certainly along with Joyce) to uncover it in his novels. He unveiled sex … as a commonplace, fundamental reality in everyone’s life. Kafka unveiled the existential aspects of sex: sex in conflict with love; the strangeness of the other as a condition, a requirement, of sex; the ambiguous nature of sex: those aspects that are exciting and simultaneously repugnant.”

Now, maybe it’s just me, but there’s something about that first sentence which strikes me as QUITE BREATHTAKINGLY UNTRUE. Or am I to suppose that Kundera has never read Flaubert, Zola (trial for obscenity), de Maupassant, Lautremont, Dostoevsky, George Moore (trial for obscenity), Strindberg, or even (God forbid) Gogol - let alone slightly lesser lights such as Eca de Queiroz, Amelie Skram or 500 OTHER FRENCH WRITERS- and let alone THE ENTIRE CORPUS OF WESTERN AND EASTERN POETRY. - And so, if we laughed at the first, we laugh at the second sentence; - and then we realise in the third sentence that everything THE GREAT KUNDERA is saying is nonsense since he descends to employing that old saw of the critic wishing to praise THE GREAT WRITER: - viz., to claim that he was THE FIRST to do something.

So this is what we have: - a blatantly exaggerated and untrue claim about Kafka’s originality in portraying sexual matters as against “nineteenth-century novels” to back up the argument that Kafka only has “superficial likenesses” (though what is more superficial than sex) to Gogol and Dickens.

(To be fair, I’m not about to argue that Dickens didn’t have hang-ups about portraying sex in his novels; - though, to be fair to Dickens, he didn’t just stop at sex but also had plenty of hang-ups about portraying romantic love as well.)

Anyway, here’s the “Mitchelmore-style” argument by quotation - though I feel it only fair, since literary criticism is just a childish game, to hide all my sources (or perhaps, who knows? - I just made them up). This is just Gogol’s influence on Kafka (I don’t feel up to doing Dickens as well, and I certainly can’t be arsed with Dostoevsky; - well, maybe just a bit; - and I can’t be bothered with exact textual parallels either - these are well documented in various academic exercises):

General Statements:

“Actually there is nothing idiosyncratic about Kafka’s genius; in form and content, he belongs to a special order of the urban grotesque, with its roots in German romanticism of the early nineteenth century and in Russian and English realism of the middle decades.”

“There is growing evidence, however, that Kafka was a synthetic writer, that his greatest works were built on frames supplied by other authors, and that he was original in the best sense, in his development of the latent tendencies in older forms.”

“Or they [Kafka’s works] can, with equally good justification, be classified within certain literary traditions, be related to Kleist, Dickens, Gogol, Dostoevsky and others.”

Gogol’s Influence:

“Its [The Metamorphosis’] basic method, that of psychological fantasy, had been anticipated by Hoffmann in the early 1800s; its blend of fantasy with urban realism began with Gogol and Dostoevsky in succeeding decades; and its central situation, that of a son locked in his room and abhorred by his own family, was first devised by Dickens at mid-century. In effect, these writers formed a literary trend, which Kafka brought to full fruition or perhaps brought into being with his story, as he synthesized and clarified the latent form. To trace the origins of The Metamorphosis is to establish the existence of this trend, to place Kafka well within it, and to link him especially with two other masters of the genre, Dickens and Dostoevsky, who provided the immediate sources for his story.”

“Along with Gogol and Hoffmann, then, they have jointly produced a special kind of fiction, urban in genesis and grotesque in form, whose function is to express and transcend the pressures of a bureaucratic and commercial age.”

“The reader of Russian literature will be familiar with a similar technique in Gogol, especially in “Dead Souls”. It is not out of the question that Kafka, who knew Gogol well, modelled his technique on Gogol’s grotesque practice.”

Gogolian motifs:

“Gogol too was familiar with bureaucracy, having served for a time as a government clerk in St. Petersburg. But, instead of suppressing his experience, he used it to depict the insignificant lives of office drudges.”

“The loss of a nose would shake anybody out of his complacency, but not Major Kovalev - poshlost incarnate.”

“This allows him to connect Gogol’s work to a more general Russian “philosophical tradition” regarding the self, a tradition which grows out of Eastern Orthodoxy and the thought of Skovoroda, finds its first literary expression in Gogol, and is later developed by Dostoevsky and Bakhtin.”

Gogol’s Dead Souls and The Nose can be seen “as parables that illustrate the ‘possibility, or rather the impossibility, of explanation’.”

“If _______’s thesis is correct, only now after having assimilated Joyce, Kafka and the surrealists are we prepared to savor Gogol’s peculiar qualities. He was an obsessed man, an explorer of the demonic and the irrational, and his methods were those of poetry. Accordingly _______ ignores Gogol’s plots and his scanty social documentation, and analyzes his dream symbolism, his use of metaphor and simile, and above all the devices by which his ‘peripheral characters’ give texture to the background”

Dickens’ influence (a few quotes):

“Gregor Samsa is not simply the young Kafka, as critics often hold; he is also the young Dickens, the young Copperfield, even the balding Golyadkin, who wants to dance with Klara Olsufyevna, all synthesized into one regressive hero.”

“Indeed, at every point in the story, in his distaste for his job, in his disturbance of the family, in his strongly Oedipal feelings, and in his passive acceptance of defeat and death, he resembles a Dickens hero. In confronting guilt incarnate, he resembles the passive clerk Golyadkin, who lacks the conscious criminality and pride of later Dostoevskian sinners; but this very absence of awareness is essentially Dickensian, and helps to underline Kafka’s debt more exactly. In Dostoevsky he had found a conscious and direct preoccupation with mental illness, a fruitful way of exploring the “lower depths” of human personality. But such knowingness was less suitable to his purpose, in the last analysis, than Dickensian naivete; though it established the depth or level of exploration, it failed. to provide him with his point of view. For Kafka was a projective not an active stylist; he saw the world as Dickens saw it, through the eyes of a hapless child, still blind to the outward proofs of inner sickness.”

A different influence (suddenly):

“Kafka’s surrealistic “parables” are more akin to mediaeval allegory than to nineteenth-century naturalism.”

I thought Mitchelmore would like this one:

“_____’s suggestive reading ultimately removes Gogol from the realist or romantic camp, and places him instead into a hitherto unclassified tradition of writers such as Kleist, Kafka and Nabokov, who all realized with Kant that a noumenal world exists but that it is not accessible to our understanding.”

A vast difference:

“The “Diary of a Madman” is not simply the story of a poor insignificant clerk who is driven insane by the frustrations and humiliations received from the ranking figures in a powerful bureaucratic machine. Popriscin is not a passive Akakij Akakievic who can vent his anger only by a fantastic return from the dead. His evenings are spent not in copying documents for his own pleasure, but in writing a diary to justify himself and wreak his vengeance upon the world.”

Gogol on Sex:

“Sofi is unattainable, as courtly ladies should be. All Popriscin can do is gaze upon her (the Gogolian theme of voyeurism), lie on his bed dreaming of her (the repeated entry, “for the most part I lay on my bed,” with its suggestion of masturbation), and remain silent.”

“Humiliated by the drab realities of his everyday existence, the clerk attempts to correct them by associating himself with a dignified world and, when that fails, by proving himself sexually, if only in fantasy.”

“It is important to notice that Popriscin’s hidden guilt about sex comes to the surface: he associates sexual attraction with evil, with the devil himself.”

I couldn’t be bothered with all the myriad Dostoevsky stuff, but still:

“So Kafka (having picked up quite a few pointers from Dostoevsky) suffers representatively for us all”

“sometimes it seems unavoidable to infer that Kafka and his preoccupations crawled full-grown out of the “dark cellar” of Notes from Underground”

And, getting a bit more to the heart of the superficial similarities, by a writer who frankly kicks Kundera’s fucking arse:

“A poor man is robbed of his overcoat (Gogol’s “The Greatcoat”…); another poor fellow is turned into a beetle (Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis)—so what? There is no rational answer to “so what.” We can take the story apart, we can find out how the bits fit, how one part of the pattern responds to the other; but you have to have in you some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answer to sensations that you can neither define, nor dismiss.”

“In Gogol and Kafka the absurd central character belongs to the absurd world around him but, pathetically and tragically, attempts to struggle out of it into the world of humans—and dies in despair.”

“The beauty of Kafka’s and Gogol’s private nightmares is that their central human characters belong to the same private fantastic world as the inhuman characters around them, but the central one tries to get out of that world, to cast off the mask, to transcend the cloak or the carapace.”

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Works not consulted in writing this article due to idleness, impossibility of instant access and failure to have learnt the correct foreign languages include:

• Kafka and Gogol - by J F Parry, German Life and Letters
• Gogol’s Parables of Explanation: Nonsense and Prosaics - Gary Saul Morson
• Gogol and Kafka - by Victor Erlich
• Kafka, Gogol and Nathanael West - by Idris Parry (which makes me think I should write a book about the influence of Kafka on The Simpsons)
• Franz Kafka “Die Verwandlung” - by Peter Beicken (which includes a section on literary relationships and influences which “primarily stresses the roles of Gogol and Dostoevski as Kafka’s literary models”)
• Categories of the Grotesque: Gogol and Dostoevsky - by R.S. Struc, Proceedings of the Comparative Literature Symposium: Franz Kafka: His Place in World Literature

I was very saddened and shocked to discover that our doggerelist and fellow-blogger cynicalsteve passed away earlier today. His was one of my favourite abstract and disembodied voices, and I shall miss him greatly. With his wit and his continual good humour, he brought together a wonderful community of doggerel afficianados and other assorted members of the public which it’s been a privilege to have shared in.

I’m going to leave comments off on this entry since I get far too emotional about these things; - please pay your respects on his blog.

I had to visit relatives at the weekend and happened for once to read part of a newspaper - not a usual Obookian activity. It was The Telegraph (well, this was the Welsh valleys!) and, to give the lie to constant claims I hear on the internet, that literature (especially foreign literature) is not given space any longer in the broadsheets, there were 5+ pages on Kafka, and another devoted to Halldor Laxness. - Well, ok, the 5 pages on Kafka were a reprint of an essay by Zadie Smith which had previously appeared in The New York Times and which I’d already read (sc. glanced through) on the web. Touted in the paper as a radical revisionism, it contains statements that are nothing new and which no one is likely to find controversial or too much fault with (Thirlwell / Z Smith - I find myself wondering, EngLit-educated as all our writers are these days, whether they aren’t better at being critics than novelists, being as they often are - knowing, all too knowing) - at least until we get to section 2.

Now, it must be said I’m no great critic of Kafka: I don’t know so very much about his life, I haven’t read the Begley biography, I haven’t read much Kafka apocrypha - God, let’s face it, I haven’t even read all his novels: - so here I’ll be employing the Proustian method of literary analysis and looking into my own soul to understand a writer of genius.

Here we go then: having spent section 1 arguing we should not be taken in by the Kafka of legend - the writer without precedent, the prophet of alienation and bureaucratic holocaust - and admit that Kafka was an ordinary, mundane fellow who lived a pretty successful bourgeois life [ed. and wrote dull, derivative books], she then says:

Impossible to believe Kafka was in love with poor Felice Bauer, she of the “bony, empty face, that wore its emptiness openly…. Almost broken nose. Blonde, somewhat straight, unattractive hair, strong chin“; Felice with her bourgeois mores, her offer to sit by him as he worked (”in that case,” he wrote back, “I could not write at all”), her poor taste in “heavy furniture”

because, no doubt, the great writer Kafka would have better taste than that (but - as is well known - taste in women is as unpredictable and as inadmissable of argument as taste in literature); and then ZS’s next line:

For Kafka she is symbol: the whetstone upon which he sharpens his sense of himself.

goes straight back, I feel, to the supposedly disavowed mythic Kafka and the view [note to acquaintances] all too common about writers, that the world is mere material for them and they are incapable of true participation: - Kafka only pursues this woman, only desires her perhaps, because she represents a bourgeois existence which at once attracts and repels him. But I can’t help feeling that, when

Kafka frantically pursued Felice, and then he tried to escape her, Begley writes, “with the single-minded purpose and passion of a fox biting off his own leg to free himself from a trap”

what we have here is nothing more uncommon than a man desiring a woman and being so driven to extremes by that desire that he’ll go as far as to propose marriage to her, without at first considering quite how such a future life-style might impinge upon his leisure activities - this then, the event drawing near, occurring to him - and the consequent application of mind rather than penis, with the idea of extricating him from the problem. (Of course, if he’s a writer, he will usually at this point console himself with the idea that it would make a great “plot” for a story). No, I don’t believe that she is a merely literary exercise for Kafka.

But really what annoyed me about the piece was the following section, where ZS accuses Kafka of misogyny and excuses him at the same time through a relative sense of changed times and how it was different back in the day and we have to accept this. So when a man’s life is torn apart by his inability to reconcile his love with his method of living (his two desires: Felice and writing), and is driven to utter such bitter comments as:

“Women are snares, which lie in wait for men on all sides, in order to drag them into the merely finite.”

ZS comments that,

It’s a perfectly ordinary expression of misogyny, dispiriting in a mind that more often took the less-traveled path … Kafka’s mind was like that, it went wondrous fast—still, when it came to women, it went no faster than the times allowed. Those who find the personal failures of writers personally offensive will turn from Kafka here

But no, I don’t turn from Kafka here [ed. I’d probably got bored long since] : I make an imaginative leap, perhaps, to attempt to understand why Kafka might utter such a line in such circumstances; I consider moments in my own life when perhaps I’ve felt bitter about something, and that bitterness has caused me to think not entirely along the moral guidelines of my, or somebody else’s, age.

[Insert picky point about ZS’s incorrect usage of literary term “synecdoche”, no doubt being employed here to impress readers of her rhetorical erudition]

And thus when we get to a comment like:

Kafka’s ideas about women and his experiences of them turn out to be different things …  No, women did not drag Kafka into the finite … Kafka told his diary that the only way he could live was as a sexually ascetic bachelor. In reality he was no stranger to brothels.

we can now perhaps easily solve these seeming paradoxes: a) no, they weren’t; b) he only feared it and avoided it; c) attending brothels is hardly the same as a commitment to a bourgeois marriage and can be safely undertaken without much long-term consequence upon one’s literary activities.

There then follows a very strange argument, seemingly by both Begley and ZS, largely inspired I should think out of a fanatical anti-Brodism, that Kafka was better off working a 12-hour shift and it would in no way have helped his writing / mental health if he’d been given some sort of annuity to concentrate on his writing alone. (Funnily enough, my manager told me I needed a job to structure my life when I was in the middle of quitting it; my reply, “Possibly, but in that case, I think - all things considered - my life would be better without structure”). Begley argues:

It is rare that writers of fiction sit behind their desks, actually writing, for more than a few hours a day. Had Kafka been able to use his time efficiently, the work schedule at the Institute would have left him with enough free time for writing. As he recognized, the truth was that he wasted time.

and ZS agrees:

The truth was that he wasted time! The writer’s equivalent of the dater’s revelation: He’s just not that into you.

Yes, I feel I waste my leisure time too - possibly everyone does (and remember, Kafka didn’t have a TV or Playstation) - but it doesn’t exactly counter the argument that if Kafka didn’t have to work at all, he would have been happier and more productive (to be fair, Brod did know the fellow) - and I must, of course, compare him Proustianly, because now that I’ve cut my hours to 21 hours/week, it hasn’t helped me any - there is still the dispiriting thought of work pervading my existence and which I use as excuse not to write: - so perhaps it is the other way around: perhaps it isn’t that working would enable Kafka to “preserve some of his self-esteem” in his “fallow periods”; perhaps it’s that not working would not let him use the excuse any more. (I see no difference in the validity of the arguments, at least - but on a personal level, I’d go with the second).

Or maybe I should read the Letters to Felice, or the Begley, eh?

(And why does everyone constantly have to point out how “funny” Kafka was? - Surely such a truth would be self-evident! - Just read The Burrow, or The Wall of China)

I thought I’d read Sergeant Getúlio, since João Ubaldo Ribeiro just won the Premio Camões (even though it was this year restricted only to Brazilians* - which I suppose would be the equivalent of restricting the Booker only to the English), and it was lying there in my pile of short novels.

Well, I enjoyed it a lot. It’s told through the vision of the eponymous Getúlio in a stream-of-consciousness style (of, I suppose, the Faulknerian variety), though drifting between voiced and unvoiced thought. The plot: Getúlio is a police officer who’s captured a political opponent and has to bring him back to the city to receive justice; on the way he becomes involved in various gun-fights and betrayals. (This was in fact almost entirely similar to a Bollywood film I watched about a year ago - I forget the name - except of course the Bollywood film had a few songs in it). There is a lot of violence and torture in the book, which we’ve noticed has been a prevalent motif of the Latin American books we’ve been reading lately. In the first half the character of Getúlio comes across as amoral and sadistic: I felt the author was wanting the reader to be left in opposition to the narrator, just as in another work I read lately, Vallejo’s Our Lady of the Assassins; - and yet as the book passes on, as he is betrayed and his friends are killed, Getúlio gradually begins to become a more noble figure, determined to carry through his purpose no matter what the cost or however futile the end result. The stream-of-consciousness shoot-out as seen through Getúlio’s vainglory and heightened braggadocio at the end is a particularly enjoyable set-piece.

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*Actually, from what I can gather through my very poor Portuguese, it was the jury who decided that they were only going to consider Brazilian writers this year.

I might do a little series on a few of the less well-known writers of the Prague Spring, which, in literature at least, took the form of a little Czech boom in the late 60s / early 70s, propelling writers such as Milan Kundera, Josef Skvorecky, Ivan Klima and Bohumil Hrabal into the English-speaking consciousness, and - for a time at least - introducing a few others, who’ve since perhaps been more or less left behind (Ladislav Fuks, Ivan Vyskocil, Vladimír Páral, Vera Linhartová, Ludvík Vaculík). Like Hrabal, Vaculík chose to stay in Czechoslovakia, and he seems to have suffered for it (nothing of his was published there for 21 years after 1968).

The plot: a clerk works in a bank, has a wife, two children, buys a succession of guinea pigs, and comes to believe that there is a strange conspiracy going on where he works (though precisely what the intent of this conspiracy is, or what he believes it to be, is never made clear). The books comes alive in the absurd, sarcastic conversations our hero has with his children, but even more in his fascination for the behaviour of his pet guinea pigs: he becomes obsessed with these small creatures, and when everyone else has gone to sleep, starts conducting increasingly sadistic experiments on them. - Yet, even though I greatly enjoyed the passages of animal behaviourism, this book of only 168 pages has taken me more than a year to read - and often, in that time, I’ve felt that perhaps I would never finish it. (Even today, just ten pages from the end, it took a lot of willpower to settle myself down to the task of completion).

What the meaning is of the events in this book does not seem clear: - no doubt it is not meant to be. I was reminded of the same sense I felt reading Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita: - that, just as you are feeling an analogy to life under an oppressive regime is becoming clear, the book slips away again and the meaning is lost. - Of course, the obvious parallel (as I later read in the introduction) is Kafka: - set in Prague, works as a clerk, strange dark forces in operation - I guess I should have picked that up (or perhaps over the course of the year it did occur to me and now I’ve forgotten it); - but what strikes me as even more similar to my readings of Kafka though is how uninteresting I found it: - the ideas are interesting, the central conceit, certain passages; but as a whole I’d rather read something else: - that is to say, I feel better to have read it (or even a summary of it) than actually to be reading it. I’m left wondering now if this is to do with the irreducibility of meaning in these works; - but then the Russian strand of this tradition - your Gogols and Dostoevskys and Bulgakovs - I greatly enjoy. There is something, though, which alienates me - something which I find great difficulty in placing.

There was a story I read somewhere about a famous baseball star in America who used to complain that reporters were misrepresenting interviews he gave them when they edited them for their newspapers; so the journalists decided to avenge themselves by reporting his interviews strictly verbatim and in doing so made him come across like a fool.

For years now, I’ve followed tennis (at first, because I used to gamble large amounts of money on it; now only out of habit) and the governing body, the ATP, who demand players always give post-match interviews, maintain a similar verbatim practice. I’ve always wondered why.

This is Nadal on finally losing his 38 game winning streak to Djokovic yesterday:

“I think he wants to be No. 1, too, no? But right now, first of all, I am not yet No. 1. Second, I played a very good tournament here in Cincinnati, semifinal, and after winning in Toronto is almost perfect. So I played my best summer hard season in my life, so I am very happy for that. Today he played unbelievable in the first set. In the second, I felt well, in some moment I felt I was playing better than him. Finally, he beat me. He had the break at five-all. So I just congratulate him because he’s playing well. You know how tennis is. Probably I wasn’t at my 100% condition. During all this tournament I didn’t play my best much. Today I think in the second set I played better than the days before, so happy for that because I end the tournaments with good feelings.”

And on becoming #1:

“Well, there are so many different things, no, so difficult to compare. But when you win Roland Garros it’s in the moment, no? It’s, I don’t know, very emotional. Right now I know I going to be No. 1 and I’m very, very happy to be No. 1. Be No. 1 always is, I think, is a present for a lot of work in the past, no? So that’s satisfying me a lot. But for be No. 1 you only can be No. 1 winning Roland Garros, Wimbledon, so…

“I am very happy but at the same time, my goal is continuing be there (at No. 1). So my goal is continuing be there Olympics and US Open, so no time for enjoy.”

And just to demonstrate it’s not just people who are operating in a second language, here’s Roddick on withdrawing from the tournament:

“I mean I’ve been feeling fine. I got in practices yesterday and the days before. I fell asleep last night. I was pretty tired. I fell asleep and woke up and I still had the lights on in my room. I just kind of passed out. I think when I did, we’re guessing it was in had the wrong position or whatnot. I woke up this morning and something in my neck and kind of any activity is causing it to flare up. I went out and tried to warm for about five minutes at about 5:00. I mean, we’ve been getting treatment all day. You asked what was leading up. Went to a chiropractor and we had Doug work on it. We’ve had kind of everyone take a crack at it today.

“Tried to hit at 5:00; didn’t go so hot. Went out for some more treatment. Tried to take some painkillers and whatnot. You know, I thought I might be able to give it a go if it didn’t get any worse. My second or third serve in warm up out there just got definitely worse, kind of just to the point where it’s tough to move my head right now.”

I always find them hilarious, but also they manage to convey something of the players’ character which is missing from the dull relentless prose of the journalist (as it is from the literature derived from that same wretched school).

Well, I seem to be over my reader’s block now; - it didn’t last long. It was probably Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It which did it* (I’ll put up a review in time): - a getting-back-to-basics type of work, I guess. Thanks for the ideas (both here and on World Literature Forum - though the latter not necessarily directed at me): - I can see complex post-modernist work might have worked too, or a classic work, or a favourite re-read (though I’ve never yet gone down this line in my life). I also think that the quest I’ve been on for over a year or so, of reading works by writers I’ve never read before (occasioned by a sense of there being just too much out there of which I’m ignorant) might have contributed: - it does mean I end up reading a higher degree of the mediocre. A further conclusion I’ve come to is to stop putting off works for puritanical reasons: - it is very deep in my psyche to avoid works I know I’m going to enjoy - unfortunately this isn’t merely something confined to literary pursuits. I shall learn to indulge myself more often.

I can’t help though now thinking that there might have been another cause, or at least a parallel, for my reader’s block, because the sense that fiction is worthless and not worth reading reminds me a bit too much of the nature of clinical depression (the sense that life is worthless and not worth living). Not that I’ve been feeling particularly depressed: I just thought the analogy was an interesting one.

*solved it, I meant (not caused it)

One of the books I’m reading at the moment, in my non-fiction mood, is David Birmingham’s A Concise History of Portugal (in the Cambridge Concise Histories series, which I’ve been collecting for a while). This follows on from William Atkinson’s A History of Spain and Portugal, which I thought I’d read first to get a more general overview of the area; - this latter book I’m hoping will fill in gaps, solidify ideas in the mind, and concentrate a bit more on the modern period. (I’m amazed though so far how Portuguese history is intertwined with British history - a love/hate relationship if ever there was one: - but seemingly, while you could easily tell the history of Britain without once mentioning Portugal (I certainly don’t recall it ever being mentioned), you could never tell Portuguese history without constant reference to Britain).

The reason though why I’m reading Portuguese history (apart from my long-term goal of reading through the whole of world history) is because one day I was looking at the first page, thinking of reading, an Antonio Lobo Antunes novel, and I realised I didn’t know any of the political context he was talking about - and I felt to myself I owed it perhaps to the author and my appreciation of his work to learn something about it.

Later, while I was already well into my history reading, I bought José Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, the opening words of whose prefare are: “José Saramago suggested in a recent interview that … The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis might be fully appreciated only by somone who is Portuguese. In effect, the novel demands considerable knowledge of Portugal’s history and culture from the stirring times of glory and empire up to the first ominous chapters of dictatorship under Salazar.” - So I felt pretty pleased with myself. - On the other hand, maybe I should also be reading Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet first as well.

I do get into these long chains of books however: for various reasons to be explained later, I wanted to read Machiavelli’s The Prince and Discourses, but I felt that, better to appreciate them, I should first read:  JCL de Sisimondi’s A History of the Italian Republics, Vincent Cronin’s The Flowering of the Renaissance, Christopher Hibbert’s The Rise and Fall of the Medici, the first ten books of Livy and Aristotle’s Politics (by way of philosophical contrast). - Needless to say, it’ll take me a long time to get around to Machiavelli.