Sun, 29 Aug 2004
Life’s what you make it
The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon
£5.99, Vintage (1996)
Oedipa Maas is executor of her ex-lover’s will, only she’s stumbled upon a centuries-old conspiracy, only in doing so she might actually be following the unwritten desires of dead Pierce Inverarity after all. Her life-sick husband accepts all with passivity while her new lover spurs her on. Philatelist Genghis Cohen and ex-Buchenwalder Dr Hilarius give her hints but actor Driblette holds the key, or is it with beatnik Mike Fallopian or even seventeenth century playwright Richard Wharfinger? Behind the real and cardboard scenes, Trystero’s network of illegal postal employees waits, bides its time, provides a service for the disaffected dropouts and the suicidal… or does it exist at all?
Frank Kermode, with his usual extremity of reaction (a trait I heartily admire), called Lot 49 “the best American novel I have read since the war”. Such Leavisite evangelism suggests he’s been neglecting a lot of other books. But Lot 49 is undeniably powerful, powerful with that graceful ease and poise that ballet dancers spend a lifetime perfecting. The dizzying car-crash of verbal gags, sinister happenings and bizarre all-American characters do suggest that somewhere in this rich fruit-cake mess is hidden the Great American Shilling.
It’s gorgeous to read, once the emetic splurge of the first chapter has settled down into a relaxed, swinging stride of dialogue to rival DeLillo, streams of consciousness and event that would raise an Irish eyebrow or two, and significations that Eco would kill for. And all the ideas and events in Lot 49 are so loosely, casually tied together that almost any (re)interpretation can be laid over them. Look on the web and see that everyone’s done it: it’s a hallucination, it’s an allegory of the Nixon era, of McCarthyism, of the Cold War, it’s meant to be real, it’s a conspiracy against Oedipa, her lover has faked his death and is pulling all the strings….
And the twist is that none of these interpretations matter as much as the novel’s polymorphism. The recasting of reality as imaginings and back again is an old trick of such stalwarts as Philip K Dick, but while Dick convolves he also makes apparent the layers he is playing with: only Pynchon can convinces you that maybe he doesn’t mean it, or doesn’t care, or it’s all throwaway, or it’s all entirely earnest and pointed and he means it after all. Like the spin of a roulette wheel, where this all stops Pynchon only knows and—reclusive, shy, and probably directing his post through other means—he ain’t telling.
posted at: 20:28 |
path: / p / pynchon_thomas |
permanent link to this entry
Thu, 27 Oct 2005
The rest in pieces
Life a User’s Manual, by George Perec
£7.99, Vintage (2003)
All human life is a collection of definite locations, and the lists of possibles that surround each definite. There is the country, town, street and house in which you were born, with rows and rows of roads either side, specks of other cities dotted around it, and other nations clinging to the borders that circumscribe your own. There are the contents of your room, your scrapbooks, your letters and your own head, each a localized summary of you, staggering its cluttered way through life. Thus the whole of humanity might be found in the history, contents, layout and occupants of, for example, an apartment block at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier. The overlapping lists and structures might somehow reveal some greater story than the sum at each overlap, a thread that binds the whole together.
Such is the premise of this, Perec’s magnum opus, where the interlocking lives and corridors of a nine-story apartment block provide a matrix from which to generate the whole world. There’s no real plot arc—or it might be better to say that there are many, as each of the largest apartments in the block warrant multiple entries spread over the book—but stories are told and exchanged, and interlock, and reference each other and complement each other as the book develops. The contents of the cellars and the state of each item of junk’s disrepair are told as lovingly and carefully as the coupling “currently” taking place between two tenants, or the murder of another’s daughter and son-in-law.
It’s difficult not to be astonished by the work Perec has put into this book. It has an index and chronology, the former including Triptolemy (Greek grammarian, seventh century), Franco Bahamonde (Spanish dictator, 1892–1976) and the National Union of Foresters and Woodcutters (Australia). All the stories are seamless and microscopically detailed in themselves, and the strands of the central plot—bored millionaire Bartlebooth decides to make a work of conceptual art out of his life by painting 500 watercolours, have a carpenter make them into jigsaws, reassemble the jigsaws and have them turned by a tame chemist back into blank, memoryless sheets of vellum: but his jigsaw-maker confounds him, and he begins to lose his sight, and time is running out—assemble so slowly and heartbreakingly that it’s like watching your own father grow old before you. Life, Perec is telling us, is like a jigsaw, a complex puzzle, where each piece must sit in its rightful place like apartments in an apartment block, that only the fortunate can assemble and understand in the few short years we’re given.
But Life, like life, is incredibly difficult to follow or indeed appreciate on the grand scale, and doesn’t really work as a whole novel. This is a collection of short stories, themed and interrelated, and should ideally be read as such. It was all written twenty years too early for the technological platforms that would have done it genuine justice as the perfect, flawless hypertextual work of art that so clearly strains here against the boundaries of the pages of a simple, linear book. But even though we clearly need Perec now, it would be churlish not to be glad of what he wrote back then.
posted at: 17:08 |
path: / p / perec_georges |
permanent link to this entry
Tue, 02 May 2006
Winter is slumber and sprung is rhythm
Snow, by Orhan Pamuk
£7.99, Faber (2005)
Poets ought to be be first against the wall when revolution comes. In Snow, ominously, Turkey’s favourite export/exile is visiting the tiny border town of his youth when an apocalyptic fall of snow precipitates a bloody take-over by romantic Republicans; yet he alone is most able to deal with the machinations and demands of the one-time actor who leads the revolutionary forces. While all he wants to do is marry his childhood sweetheart İpek and carry her back to Frankfurt, poor Ka finds himself negotiating with Blue, the outlawed Muslim “terrorist” and lover of İpek’s sister, covering the spate of suicides of young headscarved women, and performing his poetry immediately prior to the bloody coup, the details of which recall the theatre siege in Moscow back in 2002. Suddenly it’s not enough that Ka should leave the town happy and in love; he must ensure he is alive and well at the same time.
The task Pamuk has set himself is to blend politics, poetry and religion in the same novel. Far more novelists have failed than have succeeded in this task in the past; in a sense, like the axes of the snowflake Ka uses to construct his nineteen-pointed book of poems, these three topics seem to shun each other’s company, especially nowadays that religion seems scarcely a subject on which one might wax lyrical and yet be scared of making political. But we needn’t worry. Snow is a wonderful book, missing its central pivot of Ka’s last writings but, as if to compensate, studded with gems of “found” poetry, often of great significance when measured against the religious and political upheavals in Kars. Pamuk brings some of these closer to our attention in chapter titles: “Do they have a different God in Europe?” “It is not poverty that brings people like us close to God.” “The difference between love and the agony of waiting.”
With the geometry and symmetry inherent in each snowflake, Pamuk has crafted a novel of such balance and poise that it occasonally treads the fine line between intricacy and affectation. His characters make complex pronouncements—often in an apparently simplistic way, like country folk dispensing their rough-hewn, doubt-at-your peril wisdom—but this manages in a sense to communicate the non-western aspects of life in Kars rather than undermine the realism of the story. Ka accretes a web of politicking and intrigue that informs both his poetry and his plans for a future with İpek. The symbiotic dance of media and the small societies it influences and is influenced by is accurately and cleverly choreographed, with the preprinted papers deciding on one future, Ka another, yet often a third, subtler plot twist undermining them both.
Even in translation, where we lose such hints as the assonance in Ka/kar/Kars/karmak (the poet’s name/snow/the town’s name/to mix or shuffle) the links and allusions are still rich and rewarding. It’s impossible to overestimate the sheer number of details which Pamuk presses together in this book: it’s a timely novel, reminiscent in its ponderous, beautiful structures of Chekhov or Dostoevsky; or, perhaps more appositely, the unique six-sided fractals that permeate the novel.
posted at: 21:12 |
path: / p / pamuk_orhan |
permanent link to this entry
Wed, 07 Mar 2007
Nothing worth having ever trickles down
Vineland, by Thomas Pynchon
£8.99, Vintage (1992)
In his classic of the genre, The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon provided us with the perfect postmodern novel: to be committed to postmodernity is to constantly attempt to pull one’s narrative up by the roots, demolishing established certainties. In this climate of endless renewal, the heroine of Lot 49 finds herself utterly adrift from notions of an independently viable history of facts, as her life skips from onepossible explanation to the next.
The postmodern pragmatist might claim that the roots of a story need not always be hacked at until one comes free (inevitably in anticipation of the next binding). Instead, any prop that doesn’t yield to the first half-dozen blows can be counted on to be as much a support as an encumbrance. In this spirit, Pynchon’s Vineland attempts to apply postmodern techniques to a story anchored to an inescapably real timeline. Pynchon takes us on a whirlwind tour of Reagan’s United States, flitting from washed-up sixties throwback Zoyd Wheeler, through his free-spirit daughter Prairie and her goth-rock boyfriend Isaiah-Two-Four, out into Mafia parties, Weather-Underground assassins, two Phlegyas-like car-repair men and a mountainside retreat of fighting nuns, to the hidden players of Zoyd’s ex-wife and her one-time lover and CIA fixer Brock Vond. In the background are the usual Lynchian flights of fantasy, irrelevant (and sometimes needlessly irreverent) plays on words, and complexities only half-hinted at in an attempt to destabilize the reader.
The demolition of one point of view after another is employed here to heighten the disillusionment that many—Pynchon probably included—felt in 1980s America, with its brash ignorance and the triumph of “surface” that it heralded. But, in the light of Lot 49, this use of the narrative trick feels more like an abuse, cheapening the many-voice premise by making it work instead towards unravelling a series of gotchas and personally received wisdoms. It doesn’t help that Pynchon’s voice is wildly uneven, as if he’s not certain whether he’s trying to skit Don Delillo, John le Carré, Jonathan Franzen, Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alice Walker or Gore Vidal; he spends a few pages in the voice of one before either getting bored or letting his mind wander, at which point he takes up another’s. This might be intended, once again, to demolish the preconceptions of… you get the picture, but ultimately it smacks of poor editing: a misjudged prank played on the reader, whose patience wears thinner as the story progresses.
It’s a shame because there’s so much to like in Vineland. Pynchon has a deep, intuitive understanding of the flowering of the media age. In his portrayal of TV as “the tube”, with semimythical “Tubal” victims and the mythical-yet-real, walking-dead Thanatoids, and in the revelation of characters’ understandings as strata of photographs, experiences, memories, more photographs, music and the moving picture, he deconstructs the self and its dependencies on the culture that surrounds it. This climate of instability especially favours Prairie Wheeler, as she stands admirably in for her mother’s ever-absent, supposed complexity. But when the limits of the reader’s patience is tried by one character setting up yet another clunking, pointless pun of which they themselves are unaware—about the occurrence of the mathematically “natural number” 2.71828… sounding “natural” to them—it’s clear that the real irony is that, if Vineland read naturally, developed naturally and had a natural, classical story arc, it would actually have been a better book.
posted at: 21:25 |
path: / p / pynchon_thomas |
permanent link to this entry
