– Shatov, Demons, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky is so great. I started Demons a few months ago and now I’m coming back to it.

I knew it would be have to be something that I wouldn’t be too tempted to read during the day, thus defeating the purpose of reading it before I go to bed. And so, for my first book, I have selected C.S. Lewis’ “Out of the Silent Planet,” this first novel in Lewis’ space trilogy, which means I have another two books in the queue if I like this one.

I’m only 8 chapters in, so I’m reserving judgment for now, but so far, so good. Au revoir Earth; hello Malacandra.

As I mentioned in my previous  post, it’s a short book, but it works well as a short book — I didn’t feel like it should be longer at all. It predates The Bros K by about 20 years, but many of the themes are the same. (You’d think there was some kind of cultural revolution happening in Russia around that time …).

In some ways, the themes are age-old. Arkady and his friend Bazarov come back to their small home town after living and attending college in the “big city” (St. Petersburg). They have new ideas. They’re nihilists. Naturally, Arkady’s father feels out of touch, while his uncle just feels pure hatred toward Bazarov, who is Arkady’s mentor and thus is the origin of Arkady’s new nihilist ideas.

As I was reading the book early on, I wondered where the author’s sympathies would lie: with the fathers or the sons? The answer seems to be neither (though perhaps it leans a bit toward the fathers). Instead, the novel ends with Arkady’s father marrying the girl he has had a child with (a progressive idea) and with Arkady marrying a lovely girl he has met since returning home (a traditional idea). And Bazarov, the nihilist-scientist who resents the power of love, particularly in relation to himself (over the space of a month or so he falls in love twice and is rejected twice), dies after contracting typhoid from a corpse he is examining for the purpose of medical research. Though the book does not really treat Bazarov with contempt, the ending kind of speaks for itself.

I’m about a third of the way through. It is pretty short — only about 200 pages.

My initial reaction: you know it’s going to be good when two of the four main characters are “nihilists.”

In other (non-related) news, with the 00s coming to a close, I have been watching movies on a number of “best of the decade” lists. Slate magazine has a great feature that collects and combines several “best of” lists. (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” which I really, really liked, is the top-rated movie; “There Will Be Blood,” which I really, really didn’t like, is number 2.)

Watched so far:
Amelie
Pan’s Labyrinth
Mulholland Drive

Still to come:
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days
Memento
Rushmore (this is actual a 90s film; I just like Wes Anderson)

Okay, so I have been reading. But I’m way off track as far as novels go. And I’m supposed to have “Under the Volcano” read for book club by December 4. And I haven’t started (though I suspect I’m not the only one…).

In any case, I don’t think I’m on track to read 17 books this year — at least not 17 in their entirety. (Another confession: I didn’t finish The Master and Margarita, though I did really like it. Still 40 pages from the end. Maybe I’ll finish it one day.) I feel a bit like a failure. Oh well. Maybe I’ll read a lot over Christmas …

In the coming days and weeks, I will be reading:
Demons – Fyodor Dostoevsky and
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov

But The Cellist of Sarajevo does deserve some discussion, so here goes:

This book certainly had some strengths. The setting was very skillfully described, I thought. The setting, more than anything, made the book feel alive. The book was also relatively short. (Hmm… when I’m counting that as a plus, you know it’s a bad sign…)

The thing is, I didn’t love the book but it also wasn’t all that bad. I did find myself annoyed by some of his techniques. For example, the overuse of rhetorical questions. Paragraphs of them. On almost every page.

The characters, while interesting, didn’t feel very different from each other. The thoughts had by each person could have been swapped and you wouldn’t know the difference. The book would have been much better — and would have offered a more complete view of the situation — had the author included a more diverse cast of characters.

My last complaint — I’m not sure if it’s really a complaint — has to do with the author himself. Is it really fair for a Vancouverite to write about something he has never experienced, in a land where he has never lived? How could we possibly expect to get a genuine take on the seige of Sarajevo from someone who just wasn’t there? I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter at all. Maybe it is possible to write beyond your own experience. But I can’t help but think that there’s a reason why creative writing profs advise students to “Write what you know.” (Incidentally, Mr. Galloway is a creative writing prof…)

Reading Camus and Kafka for inspiration. Currently: “In the Penal Colony.”

It’s part of a longer collection that I bought at Powell’s Books in Portland while on a Mars’ Hill trip a few years ago.

Ah memories.

I also bought a book of Diane Arbus’ photographs and A Complicated Kindness.

Three books I have enjoyed thoroughly.

I pick this one (the Kafka collection) up relatively often. It has both short and long stories, which makes it easy for me to find something to suit my timeframe and mood.

STILL TO COME: The Cellist of Sarajevo

The White Hotel book cover

Last night, at approximately 11:30 pm, I finally finished The White Hotel.

Where to begin… well, first I feel it’s necessary to offer some background. So, courtesy of Wikipedia:

The White Hotel is a novel written by the English poet, translator and novelist D. M. Thomas. It was published in 1981 …

Introduced by Sigmund Freud, the book’s first three movements consist of the erotic fantasies and case-history of one of his female patients, overlapping, expanding, and gradually turning into almost normal narrative. But then the story takes a different course with the convulsions of the century, and becomes a testament of the Holocaust, harrowing and chillingly authentic. Only at the end does the fantasy element return, pulling together the earlier themes into a kind of benediction.

The book begins with a long poem, full of erotic imagery and near-incoherent description. Following this is a prose version of the story that we learn is written by a young woman who is a semi-successful opera singer who comes to Sigmund Freud for analysis as she suffers from acute psychosomatic pains in her left breast and her womb. Her character and the pseudonym Anna G. might draw on examples of real case studies (Freud’s “Wolfman” also appears as a peripheral character in the novel), but the novel is indeed fictional. Thomas lets the reader in on Freud’s analysis, as well as his ambiguous feelings towards his patient. At several stages, Freud is ready to throw up his hands and tell her that he won’t continue his treatment as he feels she is not forthcoming enough to make any real progress. He always relents, however, because he senses that “Lisa” (the opera singer’s real name) has enough redeeming attributes to warrant his time.

As the novel progresses, the reader learns more and more about Lisa’s past and the seminal childhood incident (occurring when she is 3-years-old and vacationing with her parents in Odessa) that estranged her from her mother, and more particularly, from her father. This provides the central motif of the novel as well as Lisa’s Cassandra-like ability to see the future through her dreams and her imaginative powers.

The average rating of this book on Amazon.com is 4 stars (out of 5). I don’t know what I would give this book. The book is graphic and intense. After reading the first half, I took about two weeks off and had a hard time bringing myself back to the novel, even though I had passed the sex-therapy sections.

The book is unusual in its construction (among other things). It’s one of these “pomo” books where it’s divided into parts — six parts plus a prologue — that attempt to form a coherent story. In this way, I am reminded of Divisadero (and, my dear readers, you may recall that I was not particularly fond of said literary technique). Too often it results in a choppy narrative that does not really hang together at all.

In my mind, this book could really be divided into three parts: illness/crazy sex dreams/therapy (sections 1 to 3), post-therapy life, love, and horrifying death (sections 4 and 6), and dreamy-afterworld postlude (section 6). The first section hangs together as a strange yet coherent whole. Section 2 is a prose retelling of the poem that comprises section 1. Section three is an interpretation of Sections 1-2 and describes the therapy Lisa undergoes to become well.

Section 4 shifts towards happier days. Lisa has recovered, is able to love again, and, after receiving some correspondance from Freud, feels that she is now able to reveal some important details she held back when she was undergoing therapy. Among other things, she reveals that she is Jewish and the real reason why she could not consummate her marriage was because she knew her husband and his family hated Jews.

Of course, at the end of the novel [SPOILER ALERT], in what proves to be a truly awful and unexpected — from both the characters’ and the reader’s point of view — scene, Lisa and her adopted son, Kolya, are brutally killed for being Jewish, bringing Lisa’s fears and her neurosis full circle. The horrific hallucinations she once had while making love to her anti-Semitic husband are acted out; her earlier loss of a child through miscarriage, for which she blamed herself, is revisited in the death of Kolya, despite her best efforts to keep him (and herself) alive. It does indeed appear, as Freud points out, that she has some kind of psychic gift.

In the dreamy-postlude, Lisa journies to “the white hotel” of her dreams, which has become a “refugee camp” for those who have died. She encounters her mother, they talk, etc.

So where I am going with all this?

I suppose I’m hesitant to pass judgment because it’s generally just not my kind of book. At the beginning and the end, it nearly straddles the line of TMI-harshness. In that sense, it was quite hard to read.

As I alluded to above, I’m also not particularly keen of books that do the whole pomo let’s-incorporate-lots-of-different-kinds-of-writing-and-different-narrative-voices-and-people-will-think-it’s-really-deep thing. I think I complained about this a bit while reading The Stone Diaries. When did it become so “awesome” to write this way? What happened to good storytelling — storytelling that doesn’t need these kind of “devices” to seem clever? Bah.

At least I can say that this format generally worked with this book.

Anyways, I wouldn’t say this book is recommended reading — unless you’re into Freud — but I’m also not saying it was bad.

NEXT UP: The Cellist of Sarajevo

AFTER THAT: Who knows? I just picked up four new books from the “free pile” in my building, plus I’ve got a bunch more sitting on my shelf. I’m thinking something dark and Russian … Dostoevsky, perhaps. Any suggestions, readers?

As for Book 13 … I can’t find a used copy of The Cellist of Sarajevo, it’s all out of the library (and there’s over 100 requests), and I hate buying books new unless I’m pretty sure I’m going to like them and want to keep them. I sold a few books of mine this week and was disappointed by how much money you can actually get for a book. (In case you’re wondering, at Canterbury Tales in Kits, 10% of the cover price if you want cash, 20% if you take in-store credit.) I suppose I’ll just have to bite the bullet and buy a copy … unless anyone has a copy they can lend me? (cough)

Ah well.