I’ve just released The Last Bookshelf, a book of essays about those few novels that remained on my shelves after the great purge. I’ve written about the novels before here in the blog. Those posts, however, have been revised and corrected, and also much expanded, hopefully for greater clarity and usefulness. In the latter stages of this project I had the assistance of a kindly editor, Eve Chambers, who provided a wealth of feedback and suggestions, for which I am very grateful.
The Last Bookshelf is available from Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions.
Delirio is not a long book, but it took me a while to finish it. For one thing, it’s in Spanish and my Spanish is just so-so. But even aside from that, it’s a difficult book to decode. There are multiple and sometimes mystifying shifts in time, speaker and point of view. At first I thought that these changes could easily have been more clearly signaled by using more paragraph breaks and more punctuation. Gradually I came to love the style for being just the way it is and I saw that the addition of more formatting marks would have only got in the way. Thank goodness, though, that all those unbroken passages are just a few pages long.
Certainly the novel is worth the effort. It is set in 1980s Bogotá, which was of course one hell of a place and time. Within the relatively small country of Colombia, there were a half dozen armed revolutionary groups, a vast and violent cocaine industry, and a heavily armed national security force that largely made its own rules. The U.S. partially funded this force and also firmly supported the small group of oligarchs who ran the Colombian government. The government was only nominally democratic and in fact was only nominally a government at all since it was never quite clear how much Colombian territory they actually controlled at any one time. It seemed that no part of the country was safe from terrorist attacks and crime was rampant. Surface travel was especially risky, as many major highways were controlled by armed brigands of one kind or another. A number of good-sized cities were safely accessible only by air.
But of course life went on. And life on the personal level is what Delirio is mostly about. One of the main characters is a man named Aguilar. Aguilar used to be a university professor, but his university has shut down due to political turmoil. He’s now working for Purina, distributing bags of dog food. He lives in a middle class area of Bogotá and is married to Agustina, who is some years younger than he. This is Aguilar’s second marriage. His ex-wife and their two sons live in another town. The novel begins when Aguilar returns home from a business trip. Agustina isn’t home when he arrives. Instead he gets a message from a man whose voice he does not know informing him that his wife is in room such and such of a rather nice hotel and that she needs him to come immediately to bring her home. When he goes to the hotel room, he finds that Agustina has fallen into madness; it seems to Aguilar (and I am directly paraphrasing the text here) that she is lost inside her own head, living on a parallel plane, which is quite nearby, but which is inaccessible. When she speaks, it is as if her words are in a foreign language, one that is vaguely familiar to Aguilar but which he cannot understand.
The chief narrative drive in the story comes from Aguilar’s attempts to find out how and why this has happened, and especially to discover what transpired while he was absent. It is a kind of detective story and as the book goes on, we begin to understand more and more about Agustina and about the roots of her madness. But Aguilar’s detective efforts are not the only source of information. We learn much more from other voices telling other stories, stories connected to Agustina’s family history. One of the speakers is Agustina herself, remembering her childhood. Another is Midas McAlister, her former lover. Others are members of her family, including her mother’s older sister and her German immigrant grandfather, Portulinus.
For the first third of the novel it was hard for me to see how all the disparate voices could be connected, either to each other or to the mystery of Agustina’s madness. As the story went on, my reading of it slowly changed. As the main stories each came to their climax, the connections between them became clearer and more powerful. At the same time I began to feel that the story was not really about Agustina, but rather about madness itself, the many forms that it can take, its long relation to wealth, power and privilege, and how it so often includes a connection to sexual repression. This novel begins with interesting characters and is carried forward by what its characters do and say, but it ends up somewhere else, somewhere with a different kind of truth. This is not a book called Agustina; it is a story about Delirio.
Restrepo was 54 when Delirio was published in 2004. By that time she was firmly established as a teacher and writer. But she didn’t start out that way, and what little I know of her early life I find both fascinating and instructive. Laura Restrepo was born in Bogotá in 1950. She was the elder of two sisters. Her father, despite having left school at age 13, had come to own a successful business–one that required or at least allowed long periods of residence abroad, during which his wife and daughters accompanied him. The family’s constant travel meant that during the time when most children would have been in elementary and middle school, she received little formal education. Instead, her father was a believer in the educational value of literature, history, architecture and art and made the effort to expose his daughters to all these as they travelled. He also encouraged reading and in an interview Restrepo remembered being much influenced by three of his suggestions: William Saroyan, John Steinbeck and Nikos Kazantzakis.
At fifteen Restrepo returned with her father to Bogotá and attempted to earn a high school diploma. Despite being far behind her peers in almost every formal subject, she obtained her diploma–the first person in her father’s family to do so. During this time she rebelled against her father’s controlling ways and broke off with him. This was the last time she saw her father as he died just a few years later. Restrepo went on to earn a university degree in Philosophy and later an advanced degree in Political Science.
Restrepo had become a Trotskyite during her time at university and for a period of roughly nine years, when she was in her mid twenties and early thirties, she worked as a socialist activist, first in Colombia, then in Spain and then in Argentina. She then returned to Bogotá and began working as a political journalist, most notably for Semana, a weekly review of politics and current events.In 1983, Belisario Betancur, the president of Colombia at the time, added Restrepo to the high level commission that would attempt to negotiate peace with the M-19 guerrillas. The negotiations were difficult and the atmosphere highly charged. As the process went on, Restrepo become increasingly skeptical of the government’s true motives and intentions. She began receiving death threats and had to flee to Mexico, where she lived in exile for six years. During this time she left off journalism and began writing fiction. She was finally able to return to Colombia in 1989, which was also the year her first novel was published. Since then she has written nine more novels. She was a Cornell University Professor-at-Large from 2007 to 2013 and for several years was an adjunct Professor at the University of Seville. She had resided for various periods of time in Colombia, Mexico, Spain and the United States.
It is worth noting that Delirio is set in Bogotà in the 1980s, a time when Restrepo was tapped to help negotiate with M-19 and also a time when the single most powerful person in Colombia was Pablo Escobar. Restrepo’s first book about this period was also her first published work. It was published in 1986 and focuses on the M-19 negotiations that the author had been a part of. Though technically a novel, its main purpose seems to have been to expose to the world some of what went on behind the scenes in that process. The book’s title is generally listed as Historia de un entusiasmo (Story of a Fascination) but other sources show it as Historia de una traición (History of a Betrayal). Delirio, which was published almost twenty years later, deals only very generally with revolutionary terrorism and makes no specific mention of M-19. It does, however, touch on some of the more complex relationships between the government in Bogotà and the drug lords in other parts of the country. One of the pleasures of Delirio is that Pablo Escobar, though seemingly far away from Bogotá, is a major force in the lives of some of the characters. Escobar himself has a few scenes in the novel and threatens to steal the show.
I can’t help thinking of Restrepo as having been seriously plugged in to this era, as having been a participant and not just an observer. This gives Delirio credibility and an unusual sharpness. This comes from our strong sense that many of these characters and their histories are based closely on some of the people Restrepo personally knew, people whose actual stories she learned. I have no hard evidence for this; I could well be deluded. But many readers have suggested that Restrepo’s general intentions as a novelist are often at least quasi-journalistic. She wants us to know the truth about events.
I don’t mean to suggest that Restrepo feels that the truth about events is the only thing that matters, that it is somehow more important than the personal or inner truths that constitute our deepest understanding of the world. On the contrary, I think this later sort of truth is exactly what she is after. She insists, though, that the truth of events is where we have to start. She reminds us that there are things we may not want to face, and also that in both the public and the private spheres there are those who are tenaciously committed to lies and deception, mostly with an eye toward enlarging their own privileges and devaluing even the most basic rights of others. You need to get past all the bullshit, says the old Trotskyite, and see it for what it is. And for that you need to pay attention. As Aguilar tries to discover what precipitated Agustina’s descent into madness, he remembers how in days gone by he had often failed to really listen when Agustina talked about her past, about things that happened in her family or with her old friends. He remembers one particular time when he ignored her and just continued with his reading. And now events have overtaken him. Now it seems too late.
In public and in private, ain’t that just the way it goes.
My previous post on this topic concerned issues surrounding the book’s origin: the identity of its author, the many variant texts, and the mysterious discovery of the final forty chapters–twenty-five years after the appearance of the first eighty. Scholars have developed various theories that they have tested using various techniques. They have done historical research; they have drawn a conclusions from textual discrepancies; and some have used computers to perform stylistic analysis in an attempt to determine the probability that the various sections were all written by the same author. I call that examining the text from the outside.
Now let’s go inside. Let’s see how the book itself addresses the topic of how it came to be. The very first sentence of Chapter 1 is the following question: “What, you may ask, was the origin of this book?” What follows is fantastical and a little convoluted. It’s worth looking at, though, this story told by a text about itself, because it’s only partly about where the book comes from. Its more important purpose is to give clues to the book’s larger meaning. The story begins in the first five pages of Chapter 1 and is only taken up again in the last few pages of Chapter 120. The opening of Chapter 1 is really quite wonderful. It’s mysterious, but still concise and clear. How much of this goodness comes from Hawkes? How much from Cao Xueqin? How much from Gao E? How much from all the various other editors and commentators? Ha-ha-ha. Maybe somebody knows, but I don’t.) In any case, only if you do not have the real text in front of you, should you even bother with my condensed version in the next three paragraphs.
The story started a long time ago when the Goddess Nü-wa was engaged in repairing the sky. To make her materials, she melted down a great quantity of rock and created 36,501 large building blocks. She used 36,500 of them in her work, leaving one unused. It remained, all on its own, at the foot of Greensickness Peak in the Great Fable Mountains. Having been made by the goddess, the block had magic powers; it could move about and could grow or shrink to any size. Having been the only block rejected, however, the stone felt unworthy, and spent its days feeling lonely and depressed. Then one day two figures approached, a Buddhist monk and a Taoist. They sat down to talk near the block, which had shrunk itself into an attractive size and shape and made itself translucent. The monk saw it, picked it up and began speaking to it, telling the stone that he would cut some words into it and then take it to a special place, “a luxurious and opulent locality.” When the stone began asking questions, the monk brushed them off, saying “You will know soon enough.” The monk slipped the stone into his pocket and he and the Taoist set off for parts unknown.
Long, long after these events, a Taoist called Vanitas passed through the same area at the base of Greensickness peak. He saw a large stone on which there was a long inscription. Vanitas read the inscription and learned of the stone’s creation by the goddess and about how a Buddhist mahasattva and a Taoist illuminate had taken it into the world of mortals where it lived out the life of a man. The inscription went into great detail about the conditions and events of the man’s early life. There was also a quatrain:
Found unfit to repair the azure sky, Long years a foolish mortal man was I. My life in both worlds on this stone is writ; Pray who will copy out and publish it?
Vanitas responded to this question by telling the stone that although the story was certainly interesting and might merit publication, it lacked moral grandeur, especially since much of it concerned the affairs of females–their follies, their insignificant virtues and their trifling talents. The stone strenuously rebutted these arguments and Vanitas stopped to think. He then gave the book a careful second reading. (Ah yes . . . the careful second reading!) He saw that it was a true record of real events and decided to copy it out and look for a publisher. The manuscript passed through many hands and had many different titles. Someone named Cao Xueqin–we are told–worked on it for a long time and changed its name to The Twelve Beauties of Jinling. A later annotator changed the title back to the original one. At the end of this section we read this:
Pages full of idle words, Penned with hot and bitter tears: All men call the author fool: None his secret message hears.
So that’s a quick summary of the first five pages of Chapter 1. The chapter continues for fourteen more pages and deals with many other topics. I remember from my first reading that the whole of opening chapter seemed very busy, but also vague and purposeless, semi-transparent. I found it very difficult to remember. The chapter starts in a mythical landscape where a goddess is making giant blocks to repair the sky; it ends in a provincial town in imperial China where a man named Feng Su is rousted out of his modest home just before bedtime and taken away to be examined by the local magistrate. This radical transition from divine to mundane occurs gradually and quite magically, as if by sleight of hand. Which is all well and good, but what does it all mean and where in the hell is this novel going?
As it happens, sandwiched between the goddess Nü-wa and the farmer Feng Su there are matters of great importance; themes are announced, themes that only come clear much later. I’ll mention only the central one, the matter of Zhen Shi-yin and his vision. When we first meet him, around the middle of Chapter 1, Shi-yin is middle-aged and is living a modest but comfortable life with his wife and young daughter. He is a scholarly sort and quite unambitious. One hot summer afternoon, as he is just about to drift off, he overhears a monk and a Taoist talking outside his window. Their conversation fascinates him and eventually he dares to speak to them. In answer to one of his questions, the monk hands him a stone with the words “Magic Jade” engraved upon it. As Shi-yin bends to examine it more closely, the monk snatches it back. He and the Taoist then depart through a large stone archway. At the top of the arch there is a sign proclaiming it to be an entrance to The Land of Illusion. On the columns of the arch are two more lines of writing. On the first is written “Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s real.” On the other column, the words say “Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real.”
Following the occasion of this vision or dream, terrible things happen to Shi-yin, including the loss of his house by fire and the disappearance of his only child. He and his wife are forced to move in with his father-in-law, a crafty and unpleasant fellow named Feng Su. A little later Shi-yin wanders off in the company of an apparent madman and disappears. (All of this and much more–and we’re still in Chapter 1!) But never mind the details. The main thing–for many readers, not just me–is that the table has been set, a theme has been announced. The messages on the two columns in Shi-yin’s vision are not exactly meant to enlighten, not at this point; but they are meant to provide an outline of the larger stage upon which the drama will be played.
Eventful as it is, Chapter 1 makes no direct reference to what the novel’s main story might be. And guess what? Neither does the equally eventful Chapter 2. If you’ve read my previous post, where I made such a fuss about the Jia family, you might be wondering what any of this has to do with them. Well, it’s a meandering road to the Jia mansion, but in Chapter 3 the reader finally gets there and then pretty much stays there for a long, long time or at least for the space of many, many a page. There is time to follow the thoughts and passions of dozens of vivid, complex characters who exhibit a vast range of human characteristics and behaviors. It’s hard, at first, to figure any of these people out. The story comes from so far away in time and Westerners always have a hard time with the seeming indirectness of Chinese culture. But in such a long novel, there’s plenty of time to figure it out. Pretty soon we come to see that the characters are dealing with the same joys, sorrows and mysteries that we deal with. We see that the varying strategies that they choose are a lot like ours, just different enough to make it interesting.
If there is any center to this swirl of characters, it must be Jia Bao-yu, a young man born with a jade in his mouth. He’s a complex and unusual young fellow who sometimes seems strange to everyone–to his family and friends, to his servants, and to us readers who are witnessing it all. But his romantic situation as he comes of age is immediately recognizable; the contrast between Dai-yu and Bao-chai is a variation on a universal theme; and the resolution could not be more melodramatic. Great stuff.
Eventually, once we get past all that, we come to the end: Chapter 120. That’s where Shi-yin reappears. Remember him? He’s not wandering anymore but lives in a small thatched hut near a rustic ferry crossing. He meets a younger man whom he knew long ago and invites him into the hut. In the course of their conversation, the younger man asks, “But if Bao-yu is a person of such a remarkable spiritual pedigree, why did he first need to be blinded by human passion before he could reach enlightenment?” Shi-yin smiles and answers, “Even though I may seek to expound on this, I fear you may never be able to understand it fully. The Land of Illusion and the Paradise of Truth are one and the same.”
Shi-yin’s fear is justified. The idea that Illusion and Truth are the same is not something that any of us are likely to fully understand. We know that truth and illusion are different. We are not always certain about which one applies, but we know very well what each of the term means, or at least we think we do. And yet how often it happens that the two suddenly change places, or worse, seem both to apply at once. In Chapter 117 there is a scene in which Bao-yu’s mother is speaking to him about a certain holy man who has been disturbing the peace of the household. Here’s Minton’s translation of part of their exchange:
Lady Wang turned to Bao-yu: ‘Well–where does he live?’ Bao-yu smiled enigmatically: ‘His abode is, well . . . far away and yet at the same time close at hand. It all depends on how you look at it.’
The Land of Illusion and the Paradise of Truth are one and the same. That’s what it all means, this ridiculously long and messy book . . . if it means anything.
In my previous post, I promised that my next one would provide some final thoughts about this work. That was a ridiculous promise. This is a long road; it may never end. Still I must take a few steps. The novel has issues of origin, authorship and provenance that cannot be ignored. These are on two levels. First, there is the question of the origin of the physical text that we have before us. When was it written? Who wrote it? Who may have edited it? Is this the final form that the author intended? Readers and scholars are often interested in these questions, especially when the answers are not straightforward, as is the case here. Secondly, the story itself makes claims about its own origin and how it came to be. These claims are only a very small part of the novel, appearing only in Chapters 1 and 120, but they frame the novel and purport to explain a great deal of what goes on. As a reader, you have to decide what to make of them. These claims are weird and sort of mystical, so let’s not deal with them right now. Instead, let me talk about the first question, the text viewed from outside.
How did the text of a novel come to exist? We don’t usually ask that question. The answer is usually simple–at least as far as we can know. And even if it isn’t simple, is it worth bothering about? That is, is this knowledge critical to understanding and enjoying a novel? I want to say that it is not, because after all the text that one has is the text that one has, no matter its provenance. And yet these issues draw me in; they become part of my reading experience. And of course, other than wasting our time on such issues, what would we rather be doing? Driving a steam locomotive? Wading in a cool stream on a hot day? Having a sudden epiphany that shines a great light on what once was dark? Maybe, but these activities are unavailable me at this particular moment, the one that is elapsing here and now. So I’m stuck. I have learned, though, that in the case of this novel there is a huge rabbit hole down which one may plunge and I have neither the time nor the ability to explore it very far. Hence I will be satisfied, to provide this very much simplified account, knowing that for those who are interested, there is much more to be discovered.
Let’s start with the more or less clearly known. The five books that I have been reading were all produced in England by Penguin Books between 1973 and 1986. The five books tell one continuous story. These volumes are all in English, but the story they tell was originally written in Chinese. Volumes 1-3 were translated by a man named David Hawkes. Volumes 4-5 were translated by another man by the name of John Minton, who happened to be Hawkes’ son-in-law. The Chinese texts that the translators used, they say, were originally produced in the latter half of the 18th Century in what is now Beijing. According to Penguin, the author of Volumes 1-3 was someone called Cao Xueqin while Volumes 4-5 were co-authored by Cao Xueqin and another person called Gao E. (Remember that in Chinese the family name comes first, followed by the given name. So Xueqin and E are first names.)
Sound okay so far? Sure. But this glosses over the fact that Gao E was much younger than Cao Xueqin and it is generally accepted that they never met. Records show that Gao E was a scholar, writer, and government functionary who lived from 1740 to 1815. We have fewer recorded data about Cao Xueqin. We know that he died in 1763 and that when he died he was said to have been working tirelessly on a long novel for at least the previous ten years. It is also generally agreed that Cao Xueqin was his literary name while his original given name was Cao Zhan. We do not know exactly when he was born nor do we have any written records about who his parents were. But there is some compelling indirect evidence that he was a member of one particular Cao family, evidence so compelling that everyone who looks into it–zillions of readers and scholars at this point–comes to pretty much the same conclusion.
Here’s how it works. The fictional world of The Story of the Stone is centered on a large, well-off family named Jia who live in Beijing. The main character’s grandfather was very closely connected to the Emperor and held high office. During the grandfather’s time one of the Jia daughters became a Royal Concubine and the family became wealthy and powerful. The novel gives a detailed description of this wealthy lifestyle–buildings, gardens, clothing, jewelry, and entertainment. But the events of the novel take place a few years after the family’s peak. The grandfather is gone and his sons are not his equals in prestige or ability. Though the family remains wealthy, they are living beyond their means. As the novel progresses, their difficulties become more and more serious until eventually they face ruin. Through it all, the novel presents a detailed portrait of a complex generational and economic hierarchy. It seems to most readers that there is way too much here for anyone to simply invent, that whoever created the fictional Jia family must have had some intimate connection with a real family that he used as a model.
Meanwhile, in the real world of early 18th century China, historical records show that there was a large, well-off family by the name of Cao. The patriarch of the family had been the Emperor’s boyhood friend. As an adult he remained a close confidant and was promoted to high office, serving as the Emperor’s eyes and ears in the important city of Jiangning (which later came to be called Nanking and is now called Nanjing.) One of the Cao daughters was married to the Prince of Jiangning and the Cao family became wealthy and powerful. When the grandfather died, his sons also held high office but were not his equals in prestige or ability and the family’s fortune declined. Though they remained prominent, their debts mounted. After the old emperor died, the new emperor seized all their lands and property and the clan’s days of wealth and influence were abruptly ended. Surely, we all think, Cao Xueqin was one of these Caos. He must have been thinking of his own family when he created the Jias.
One difference between the fictional family and the real family is that the Jias live in Beijing while the Caos spent their glory years in Nanjing. But this is interesting because while there are dozens of passages that indicate that the novel is set in Beijing, there are also one or two rather confusing scenes that would only make sense if the action were occurring in Nanjing. Very untidy. Might the author himself have got confused? Or, might he have written an early version of the novel that was in fact set in Nanjing and then changed his mind? In that case he would have needed to go back through everything that he had already written and change all references to Nanjing so that they pointed to Beijing. But in a novel this long, what a task that would have been! It seems plausible that he might have missed a few, which would explain the confusing passages in the text that we now have. And so, to a certain extent, these textual errors lend further support to the idea that Cao Xueqin must have been thinking of the real Caos when he wrote about the fictional Jias.
So how was Cao Xueqin related to the more famous Caos? Scholars have looked at the Cao Family Annals, which is a contemporary record of the names of all the Caos for several generations. They were expecting, given the author’s great familiarity with the internal workings of the family, that Cao Zhan, aka Cao Xueqin, must have been a part of the innermost circle. Oddly enough, there is no mention in the Annals of anyone named Cao Xueqing or Cao Zhan. Oops. Very untidy. But we’re only getting started…
Cao Xueqin died in 1763, but The Story of the Stone wasn’t published until 1792. What happened in the meantime? A few years after 1763, hand copied manuscripts of the novel began circulating among the literati of Beijing and eventually appeared for sale in book shops. The copies were not all identical; there came to be several versions of the story in circulation. All of them, however, ended abruptly at the end of Chapter 80, just in the middle of the major plot movement and with none of the major issues resolved. Everyone who read the story was left wanting more.
Now fast forward to 1792, twenty-nine years after Cao Xueqin’s death. That’s when someone named Chen Weiyuan published a 120-chapter version. He explained that several years earlier he had obtained an original rough draft version of the final forty chapters as written by Cao Xueqin himself. Chen further claimed that because it was in such rough form, he had enlisted the help of his friend Gao E to edit it and make it presentable. Together, they put the whole of the Story of the Stone into complete and final form. Do we believe this account? Many scholars do not. They doubt the existence of the rough draft that Chen Weiyuan and Gao E claim to have found. It was apparently never shown to anyone else and Chen never really explained how he had come to obtain it. It is easy to suspect that the forty new chapters were simply forged in order to cash in on the demands of an eager market.
This suggestion of fraud is plausible; certainly it is not any less plausible than Chen’s story of fortuitously discovering of a long hidden manuscript by a long dead author. As a reader, when I compare Volumes 1-3 with Volumes 4-5, I see definite differences in pacing, subject and style. The focus in the latter volumes is less on the young people and more on their elders. The action is fast and furious. There is less poetry. But these changes have already begun in the latter half of Volume 3. It’s pretty much what always happens when the world comes crashing down. It could easily have been the original author’s intention all along. And the mystical end frame in chapters 119 and 120 is quite consistent with the mythical beginning frame in chapters 1 to 3. One of the translators, David Hawkes, notes that when Cao Xueqin died, he left a young widow, quite possibly an illiterate one.* Perhaps the author had made a draft of all 120 chapters and had then begun to heavily revise it. When he finished revising the first 80 chapters, he might have thought that those were good enough to begin circulating them among his friends while he continued to revise the final 40. But then perhaps death intervened. Hawkes speculates that the 40 rough chapters remained in the widow’s possession for many years, until somehow or other they became available and made their way into the hands of Chen Weiyuan. I like that story. That is, I like it because it’s nice, not because I think it surely must be true. The fact is that here we have yet more untidiness. I can’t clean it up, so I’ll just have to let it go.
*Few Chinese women could read or write during that era. But many of the female Jia cousins are exceptions to this, including several of the main characters, who are well versed in the classics and also excellent poets. Was the situation similar in the Cao family? We don’t know. But what if it were? What if the reason that the names Cao Zhan and Cao Xueqin are not found in the annals is that they were both pseudonyms for someone else whose identity was deliberately obscured. Could that someone else have been a woman? Well…no, probably not. There is a lot of counter evidence. Nice story though.
After the great purge, my 32 linear feet of books was reduced to just 52 inches. Six of those remaining inches, more than ten per cent of my entire library, was taken up by just one novel. Before we get on to considering it as a work of literature, let’s take a minute to have some fun with its physical reality. My Penguin Classics edition consists of five paperback volumes. Volume 1 is titled The Golden Days. It includes a 32-page introduction by the translator, 488 pages of text, a seven-page appendix, and a six-page list of characters that includes 191 names. Volumes 2 and 3 run to about 600 pages each; Volumes 4 and 5 each have around 400. All together, the five volumes add up to 2,558 pages–2,335 pages of core text and another 223 pages of prefaces, introductions and appendices. There are roughly 440 named characters.
We can see, then, that this is not a reading project to be undertaken lightly. Besides being long, it has a lot of characters to keep track of, most of whom have names that are difficult for non-Chinese speakers to pronounce. But wait, there’s more. The novel was published in the middle of the 1700’s and concerns the fortunes of a wealthy Peking family during a period of time a few decades earlier. Early readers of the story would have been familiar with such families and with the cultural milieu within which they operated. Presumably, they would also have had familiarity with Chinese history prior to the 1700’s. This would have helped them grasp the significance of the many historical and literary references in the novel. For the rest of us, the world of the novel is so far away from us, both in distance and in time, that it might as well be another planet.
Ah…but the key here, as with so many things in life, is perseverance. If you spend enough time in this novel, you’ll find that it teaches you the things you need to know. The translator’s introductions and appendices are helpful. (There is even a basic guide to Chinese pronunciation, so that when you tell your friends that you’re reading a book by Cao Xueqin, you’ll be able to pronounce it Tsao Shueh Chin, thus increasing everyone’s confusion.) Another help is that the original Chinese names of the servants have been changed to English words that are roughly equivalent. That means that whenever you see names like Starbright, Patience, or Ripple, not only will you remember them a bit more easily, but you will also get partially clued in to the person’s status.
Mostly, though, the novel will teach you what you need to know by plopping you down into the domestic life of a wealthy family in 18th Century China and just letting you watch things unfold. Much of the story centers on a group of teenagers, an age cohort drawn from several branches of the family, all of whom are living within the very large family compound. The author was himself a member of a wealthy family, a family that lost its wealth at just about the time he came of age. It is clear that vast chunks of this vast novel are based on his memories of carefree, golden days spent with his siblings and cousins in the time before the debacle. The description of these golden days is quite detailed and does not move swiftly. Volume 2, for example, which is titled The Crab Flower Club, has 550+ pages of text, but covers only a nine-month period in the life of the Jia family. And while events are told in mostly chronological order, individual episodes–of which there are literally hundreds–are often not directly connected to the episodes that come immediately before or immediately after. This can be a little overwhelming. The first time I read all five volumes, it took me a year and a half to finish, mostly because every four hundred pages or so I would give up in disgust. Yes, yes, yes,” I wanted to say to the author, “This is all fine, but who in their right mind would possibly care?” I seemed to be doing way too much work and making so little progress.
There are two sides to this. The first difficulty is density. The novel is broken into 120 chapters, but these breaks are somewhat arbitrary. Most chapters actually consist of more than one scene. Like the chapters themselves, these always occur in chronological order, but they are not always unified by character or theme. So, as you read along, the novel actually resolves itself into several hundred discrete pieces. And every piece needs care, for while they seem to be about very little, unpacking them is hard work. What we come to understand is that no matter how minor the crisis may seem, it must be resolved with a careful eye on a balance of personal emotions and strict conventions. The hierarchies in which the characters move are the great determiner of all actions, but positions in the hierarchy are never fully fixed. A character’s status (face) is often at risk and negotiation of status, both overt and covert, is constant. Overall harmony is both absolutely required and obviously unobtainable. The world of the novel is a pressure cooker always threatening to explode. The sheer volume of personal enmities, cliques and cabals is daunting.
The second difficulty is what I want to call triviality. So many things happen, so much dialogue is spoken, so many feelings are exposed, and all to no great consequence–or so it seems. Much of the first half of the novel concerns an endless round of genteel social gatherings, which range from the highly ceremonial and to the very informal but which do not advance any particular story arc. The menus, the seating arrangements, the clothing, the kind and quantity of food, the appropriate guest list, extracts of conversations–all these are presented in some detail. But what then? The event occurs, the chapter ends, and we forget that party, only to start all over with the next. We read what are essentially the detailed minutes of a meeting of the teenagers’ poetry club. We learn about the romantic entanglements of minor characters who appear only in one or two episodes in the whole vast saga and then disappear. We read about lots of minor illnesses and lots of teen angst. And then, out of nowhere, a servant character that we never really met before is driven to a sudden suicide by some careless remarks made by a character that we do know. And a bit later on, another minor character that we have never met before gets beaten up for having made homosexual advances. At first, it wasn’t clear to me what I was supposed to make of these lurid intrusions. But as I said before, the novel eventually starts to teach you what you need to know. In my case it took about 1400 pages, but eventually I came to understand that the novel is primarily three things: besides being a memoir of a golden time, it is also a classic boy-girl-girl love triangle and an extended demonstration of the nature of human reality. But more on that later.
Actually, at somewhere around 1200 pages, there’s a change in tone and things get a little more serious. For one thing, certain of the more sensible characters begin to worry about the family finances. Over their long years of prosperity, the family has developed expensive personal tastes as well as the habit of maintaining a lavish public façade. Such expenses are very rarely questioned. At the same time, the working age males devote themselves to a variety of pursuits, none of them particularly remunerative. The family has started living off its capital.
And then there is a potentially serious problem concerning one of the important male members of the family who has chosen to take a second wife. There is nothing culturally wrong with having a second wife, but, like everything else one does, it has to be done according to convention and only with the knowledge and ostensible approval of the entire clan, including, of course, the first wife. In this case, the besotted husband knows that the woman he has chosen is problematic, so he has decided to skip the approval process and marry her in secret. With the help of one or two other male family members, he has arranged to install the new wife in a separate house outside the family compound and is trying to keep the whole arrangement from ever coming to the attention of the rest of the family. As it happens, his first wife–the one he’s not telling–is the formidable Wang Xi-feng, the woman whom the all-powerful matriarch has delegated to manage day-to-day household affairs for the whole clan. Xi-feng is very smart, very capable and utterly lacking in scruples. As we would say today, her husband and his enablers haven’t really thought this through. Such incompetence bodes ill for them and for the family in general.
But enough! I need to get back to my reading. When I’m done, provided that it is my fate ever to be done, I’ll post again with a final appreciation.
Poor Ricardo Somocurcio, in love with an amoral adventuress, who both enjoys and despises his devotion and who does not hesitate to inflict emotional harm in pursuit of her own self interest. Their series of passionate encounters, spaced years apart, provide him both joy and suffering and her with a bit of bemused comfort–or something. The episodes end badly for Ricardo and after each one, he swears off her forever. And yet, when eventually they meet again…
Love is a piano dropped from a fourth story window, and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.–Ani Difranco
When love is not madness, it is not love. –Pedro Calderon de la Barca
For most of us, romantic love is a pretty big deal. Most people understand that it is both emotional and physical but not very rational. Hardcore hedonists and hardcore moralists have attacked this notion from their different directions, but thousands of songs and stories have affirmed it. The Bad Girl is just one more. But Mario Vargas Llosa is a merciless writer; so if you haven’t read this one, let me warn you, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
When we first meet Ricardo, he is a teenager growing up in 1950’s Lima. In the magical summer of his fifteenth year, a new girl appears on the scene. She is different from the other girls and mesmerizes everyone with her vitality, her scandalous mambo moves, and her exotic accent. Ricardo falls for her in a big way. When he can afford it, he takes her to movies and to a place called The Little White Shop for tea and pastries. They stroll together around the streets of Miraflores and sit beside each other on the beach. They hold hands; he kisses her cheek, her ear, and her neck. And once, her lips brush briefly across his. Soon, however, after a surprising revelation, the two are separated.
His parents having died in an accident when he was twelve, Ricardo is being cared for by his aunt. His dream is to leave Peru and live in Paris. When he was younger, his farther had given him books by Paul Fèval, Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas. Those books, he says, “filled my head with adventures and convinced me that life in France was richer, happier, more beautiful, more everything than anywhere else.”* He convinces his aunt to let him take French lessons at the Alliance Français in addition to his English lessons at the Instituto Norteamericano.
When next we meet Ricardo, he is managing, just barely, to live in Paris. He has a Peruvian law degree but struggles to find work. A Peruvian friend who works in a restaurant helps him out with occasional leftover food. The friend is part of a group of radicals who plan to bring a Castro-style socialist revolution to Peru. Soon Ricardo meets the bad girl again, then loses her again.
Soon afterward, Ricardo finally finds work as a translator/interpreter. He throws himself into his work and tries to forget her. But of course he does not, because he is in love. He stays in love, just barely, even as he finds out just how bad the bad girl can be. He makes a few friends, buys a small apartment, and obtains a French passport, but always feels rootless, no longer Peruvian but never really French. In his work as an interpreter he travels a great deal. Millions of words pass his lips, but none of them are his. He sometimes wonders who he really is. But that’s only when the bad girl isn’t around. When she is, the issues are generally much more serious. For better or worse, that’s when he is most alive.
It is Ricardo who tells us the story, which is all in first person. I suspect that most readers are going to identify with him and have sympathy for him. He may be a romantic fool, very unwise. But what is wisdom, really? And what else exactly was Ricardo ever meant to do? Arguably, the bad girl is an even more interesting character. Hers is an incredible story and as we get to know her, we see more and more clearly how she goes wrong, but less and less clearly how she might have gone right.
I know of at least one reader who objects to the implausibility of the whole thing, not only the love story but also certain mechanics of the plot. I don’t argue with that, but for me it has little importance. I loved the details of places and times and the wealth of interesting secondary characters. The Bad Girl is a wonderful book, well worth keeping around, at least for a little while.
Orhan Pamuk’s fictional worlds are a little more complicated than David Weber’s. In the Honor Harrington books, an omniscient narrator tells us about the hero’s ongoing battles for the cause of decency and justice, qualities that can almost always be clearly discerned. Her manifest virtues earn her admiration and respect from all sides, eliciting fear and loathing only from a few truly evil galactic scumbags. In the place where Pamuk’s characters live, no one is omniscient, decency and justice are harder to find, and very little of anything can be clearly discerned.
The hero of Snow is Ka, a young Turkish poet. Ka has just recently returned to Istanbul from Germany, where he has spent the last few years in lonely exile. He had fled to Germany after getting into trouble with the Turkish government for engaging in what they considered subversive political activities. He has felt safe in returning partly because the political situation is a bit different now; the very conservative but also very secular government has become somewhat less concerned about leftists like Ka and more concerned about the rise of the Islamists. (This is the period that we now know was the run-up to Recep Erdoğan era.)
Ka still believes in what he calls “human rights, freedom of thought, democracy and related subjects.” But he also sees now that much of Turkish leftist political discourse on these topics consisted of repeating “the wild simplifications of so many well-intentioned but shameless and slightly addled Western intellectuals.” Ka is also in love, or more precisely he is in love with the idea of being in love, with a beautiful woman named İpek. Ka knew her in Istanbul when she was married to a friend of his, a fellow social activist. Now Ka has heard that İpek is divorced and living with her father and sister at the other end of Turkey in the city of Kars. Ka travels to Kars, ostensibly to write an article about the head scarf issues there, but in reality hoping to convince İpek to accompany him back to Germany.
Ka arrives in Kars in a snowstorm. The snow continues to fall heavily and soon the roads and rail lines are closed. The main action of the novel all occurs during the next several days when the city is cut off from the world. Ka is intensely excited when he reconnects with İpek and between them arises a powerful sexual tension. Ka has been unable to write poetry for a year or so, but this new environment inspires him and he writes a whole series of new poems in his green notebook. But he cannot escape the political situation. The many factions in town–several of whom are quite willing to kill and/or die to advance their cause–begin taking steps either to use Ka for their own purposes or to thwart him what they imagine his purposes are. Though he longs to spend time with İpek, Ka can’t help getting involved in complex and violent political events. At first it seems that he is forced to be involved against his will. Once he is involved, however, he begins to think that he can be a player, that he can influence events for his own purposes. Oh yeah.
Snow is not easy reading. Every time I’ve read it I’ve come to a point somewhere in the middle when I’ve wondered if it was worth the effort. Other readers have told me they felt the same. So very much is going on all at the same time. So very many things don’t work out the way you expect them to or the way you wish they would. But as the book continues, as you gradually shed your expectations, you see that it all fits together, that Snow tells a fantastic story, both surreal and heart-rending. The characters are not like the ones you’ve met in other novels. In speech and in action their foreignness is shocking. But, as in all great literature, magic is afoot. A penetrating portrait of strange events in an alien context, something that at first seems interesting but irrelevant, suddenly begins to illuminate the darkness of other places and other times, including the reader’s own.
So, yeah, Snow is worth the effort. And it’s not the only kind of book in Pamuk’s large body of work. Orhan Pamuk is, as my friend Eve puts it, crazy as a coot, but he’s an impressive writer. I really liked The Museum of Innocence, a somewhat unusual love story, and Istanbul: Memories and the City, a beautiful and melancholy memoir of a mostly vanished cultural milieu. It is for their sake also that Snow was saved from the purge.
David Weber’s Honor Harrington books are set in a far distant future, a time when humans have spread out to settle on hundreds of other planets far, far away. The title character is an officer in the Royal Manticoran Navy, Manticore being an independent star kingdom comprised of a small group of planets that were settled a century or two previously. The series tells of Honor Harrington’s career, from her time in military academy, through her first assignments and then to her promotion to ever increasing levels of responsibility. In this far future, navies consist of spaceships rather than sailing ships; but Weber’s universe is very much analogous to that of C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series, which is set in Europe at the time of Napoleonic Wars. The first novel of Weber’s series, On Basilisk Station, is dedicated to Forester and it is surely no accident that Weber’s hero has the same initials as Forester’s.
The Honor Harrington Universe, as the marketers call it, consists of a large number of works, some of which are collaborative projects of various kinds. But the ones I have in my remaining four and a half feet of books are eight of the early Honor Harrington books, all written by David Weber himself and published between 1993 and 1998. The eight volumes take up a full eight and a half inches of shelf space. Zounds! How could I have saved so much Weber, when so much else went by the board? Well, basically they are great stories superbly told. The situations are complex and so are the characters. Also, the hero of the series has a pet: a twenty-pound, six legged, telepathic animal called a treecat that often rides on her shoulder. That’s really all you need to know. (But I’ll blather on a while anyway.)
Great adventure stories benefit from great settings and in creating this fictional universe Weber really covers the ground. For one thing, there are detailed discussions of military armaments and tactics. As the series progresses, new and more powerful weapons systems are being developed and deployed by Honor’s navy and also by her enemies. If you’re nerdy at all, you’ll find these discussions fascinating, especially as they relate, literally, to matters of life and death for the characters. These details also help prepare the reader to better appreciate Weber’s stirring and suspenseful descriptions of battle scenes, sometimes with our heroes outgunned and desperate, and sometimes with our heroes having a bundle of aces up their sleeves. Besides all that, Weber also wants us to understand the political and diplomatic context of military action, so the stories always include extensive scenes showing the thoughts and interactions of the civilian leaders as they strategize about how best to deal with their interstellar rivals. In this area, Weber covers the leadership of the both the good guys and the bad guys, giving great attention to the decision making of the bad guys and to the internal rivalries among them.
At this point I can imagine someone saying, “I’m sorry, but that sounds totally dull!” Ah, but that’s just the beginning. What Weber really cares about and what he spends most of his time on is character development. Beginning with Honor Harrington herself, Weber creates dozens of fully realized characters, all of whom have their own virtues and weaknesses, their own kinds of insight and their own kinds of blindness. Weber is interested in courage, both moral and physical, and in its opposite. And he is very interested in honor, something we don’t run into very much in the universe that we inhabit, at least not in the public sphere. But his characters also run the gamut of human behavior and psychology. He gives us high-minded idealists, cynical political hacks, weary pragmatists, nerdy technicians with unsuspected depths, devious plotters, religious fanatics, and a host of military types including useless blusterers, deadly tacticians, far-seeing strategists, raw recruits, small-time racketeers, and long-time NCOs who are martial arts masters, to mention just a few. It’s important to note that Weber’s characters often make mistakes. If they are lucky enough to survive, the smart ones always learn something, sometimes on their own, sometimes with the help of their friends. Weber’s characters must also deal with injustices from time to time, and–as in our world–some of these can be remedied and some cannot. The key to the success of these novels is that they’re only partly about politics or technology or war. They’re mostly about people, about the qualities that they bring to the table and how they interact with one another, with good intent or ill.
Weber provides these imaginary people with a massively detailed alternate universe in which to operate. It is not, of course, our world, but it is not so different either. Way back in February, when I looked at Vladamir Nabokov and John Hawkes, I noted that both of those authors wanted to be clear that they were not trying to represent the reality of this world but rather wanted to create new worlds with their own realities. The writer of science fiction and fantasy doesn’t have say that; it’s obvious that the world of the novels is different from our own. And yet, we find that the work of all these writers is jam packed with obvious analogues to our world and that many of these offer implicit commentary on our real world.
One such theme is Weber’s vision of the military virtues: courage, fighting instincts, analytical thinking, sacrifice, perseverance, honor and loyalty–both loyalty to one’s nation and personal loyalty to one’s immediate group. In our country, these virtues are somewhat out of fashion. It’s hard for people to admire anything military because in the last fifty years our forces have so often been used for distinctly non-admirable purposes. For me, it is a pleasure to be reminded of these virtues and to see them exemplified by soldiers in fictional situations that are less ethically challenged than our real ones.
Another matter of relevance to us is that Weber’s imaginary world is very much politically correct in many ways. It starts with the fact that Weber’s military hero is female and that most of his interstellar cultures are gender neutral. I haven’t counted, but my impression is that about half of his characters are men and half are women; certainly that is the case when we consider characters in positions of authority. Equality of opportunity and of achievement is a given. There are, in fact, a couple of planets in the Weber’s universe on which women are very much subordinate, but this becomes a major issue that plays out over the course of several novels as these cultures find themselves having to interact more and more with the mainstream interstellar culture in which equality and inclusion are the norm.
Also on the PC side, race is basically absent from Weber’s worlds. Skin color is mentioned here and there, notably in regard the royal family of Manticore who are very dark skinned, but in these worlds skin color doesn’t mean anything and racial issues as we know them do not exist. There are no LGBT issues either, but that’s because there are no LGBT people and such matters are never or very rarely mentioned. I’m not sure how PC that is! There is hardly any sex or romance of any kind in these stories, but there are a lot of marriages and all of them are het.
The many analogues between Honor’s universe and our own include religious fanaticism, rogue states, social welfare schemes, entrepreneurial capitalism both enlightened and not, and the difficulty of rational compromise among competing interests. Weber’s discussion of the varying political styles of his various star nations forms an implied critique a some of the nations of our own time and in so doing presents a kind of sanitized version of what we call democracy. Weber’s model societies, such as Honor Harrington’s home nation of Manticore, face some of the same problems we have. There are corrupt officials, dishonest business people, psychopathic criminals, and one or two aggressively imperialist star nation neighbors. Then too, voters in a democracy are not always reliably sensible and some portion of the population are gullible enough to believe the big lie.
But there are also certain problems that Manticorans don’t have to deal with. In Manticore there are no arguments about environmental pollution, no immigration problems, no racial issues, no crumbling infrastructure, and no history of having built their new society by destroying the native culture that originally inhabited the land. There is no unemployment and no mention of any citizens who are unable, for whatever reason, to be fully functioning and productive. Also, disease has been eliminated and natural resources are abundant. Manticoran citizens tend toward mild religious beliefs chiefly involving ethical behavior and tolerance. On the other extreme, Weber’s evil individuals and collectively evil societies are really, really evil and often succeed in causing a great deal of suffering. So it’s a great pleasure to see them defeated. No wonder you can lose yourself in one of these novels and then want to start right up with the next one. Weber’s world is clearly a nicer place to live than ours is.
Do these books have weaknesses? Hmm. Well, my only real complaint is the these eight novels together comprise 3,850 pages and that’s too many. There’s a little too much back story and quite a bit too much talking, especially in the later novels. You might have to skip a page or two.
Once the great purge was complete, my fiction collection was reduced to just twenty-seven novels. Three of the twenty-seven are by Haruki Murakami. Why this disproportionate number of books by one author?* Do I just happen to be crazy about Murakami? Well, kind of, but it’s also that in the latter stages of my reading career I have become more and more focused on foreign language novels. The peoples of the world are all so different and yet all so much the same, a lesson that must be learned and relearned. It is because of this that in the final six chapters of the After the Purge project, I will be discussing only one Anglo writer–and that one a cultural outlier in his way.
So what about Haruki Murakami? The great thing that strikes me is that his work is so absorbing, so difficult to put down, and at the same time so much of it is so quotidian, so unspecial. Murakami is one of the least poetical authors I know. The events that take place in the lives of his characters and the emotions that they feel are not really narrated in the manner of most novels. Rather, they are carefully and analytically described, as if each sentence had been prepared as part of an official report. Why is this not boring? It’s true that some interesting and extraordinary events occur in Harukami’s books, including magical ones, but even these are usually described in a spare, dry style. You could easily say that much of Murakami’s writing is–to use his word–colorless. So why is it that his books so quickly and thoroughly draw us in? Well, for one thing, the writing is often really funny. But that’s only a part of it.
Let’s look first at Norwegian Wood, the novel that made Murakami famous. Before NW, Murakami had published several earlier novels and had enjoyed moderate success. His 1985 book, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, had been a magical fantasy. Appearing in 1987, Norwegian Wood was much simpler, at least superficially, with no magical elements at all. It was something of a nostalgia piece, whose main characters were all college age students back in the sixties, twenty years prior to the year the novel was published. It was partly a portrait of that era and in it Murakami critiqued both sides of the classic sixties divide, that between student revolutionaries on the one hand and amoral careerist climbers on the other. But that wasn’t all. It was really about young love, idealistic and uncompromising. And it had sex in it. There wasn’t too much of it and it was more reported than narrated, but that was surely one reason that the book sold ten million copies in Japan plus two or three million more copies world-wide. And speaking of sales, the website Ranker.com (as retrieved on 7/11/18), lists Norwegian Wood as the 76th highest selling novel of all time. (Reaching for a grain of salt here? You wonder about their methodology? Never mind.) Wikipedia reports that world-wide sales of Norwegian Wood totaled about 12.6 million. For what it’s worth, that’s at least two million more copies than The Cat in the Hat, The Joy of Sex, or A Brief History of Time; but it is also roughly thirty-five million fewer copies than such true classics as The Bridges of Madison County, Anne of Green Gables, or The Hite Report. In any case, it is, as I have confirmed on rereading, a classic and sadly beautiful story in the coming of age tradition.
Published twenty-five years after Norwegian Wood, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is another Murakami book that doesn’t depend much on magical elements. It recycles the themes of youth remembered, but it is more focused on a single mysterious event, something that the title character has never understood and which he strives to come to terms with many years later. This book is distilled Murakami: no magic, no sex, very few cultural signifiers from either the past or the present, and no final answer to the central question. It is a quest novel consisting of some not particularly dramatic events and some potentially important conversations that don’t always seem to move things along very much. But there are waves beneath the surface, events that are neither explicit nor explainable, currents powerful enough to move the reader as well. (The word that can be spoken, says the Tao, is not the true word.) Like other Murakami protagonists, Tsukuru is indeed rather colorless in some ways, but not so colorless as he thinks he is. He has the reader’s sympathy immediately and constantly; the fact that we care so much about him is mostly what keeps us turning the pages, unable to turn away. The novel’s finale is both undramatic and unforgettable.
Kafka on the Shore is also a quest novel, but this is Murakami vivid and unbound, and I have to say that it is my favorite novel of the three. It has a younger but also quite sympathetic hero. The plot is picaresque, a fundamentally magical journey to escape an Oedipal curse; it rocks, rolls and rambles. The characters range from unusual to bizarre. There are a host of political and cultural references as well as several talking cats. It also features a Mazda Miata MX-5, a car model with which this writer is quite familiar and that Murakami himself is said to have owned.
Judging from my brief forays onto the Internet, Murakami is something of a divisive figure. Earlier, I wondered why his sort of writing wasn’t boring. Apparently, for some people, it is boring, as boring as all get out. Stultifying. Some call Murakami one of the most overrated novelists ever. Oh well. Count me on the other side of that divide.**
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*I have also kept three John Hawkes novels, but as I explain in my posting on Hawkes, that’sbecause two of them are really skinny (easy to keep and transport) and because they all have beautiful cover art. My Murakami books, on the other hand, are all fat and their covers are so-so.
**But though I did keep three Murakami novels, you may notice that 1Q84 was not among them.
In both these novels Louis de Bernières first creates a portrait of ordinary life in some sort of peaceful, out-of-the-way place. In Corelli’s Mandolin (1994) the place is a Greek island in the early days of World War 2. In Birds Without Wings (2004)it’s a village in southwestern Anatolia during World War 1 and its aftermath. In both places, we meet characters who immediately engage our sympathy. We see their struggles with issues large and small. From the older people we hear about past joys and sorrows. Their children live in a kind of eternal present. Young people slowly come of age and begin to find their way. The details are tender and beautiful and remind us how wonderful life can be. We see how the members of the community are connected to one another, how they squabble with each other one day and support each other the next. Political and social abstractions have little value to these people, while tolerance and mutual respect have numerous practical advantages. A cynic might ask how de Bernièresknows all this stuff. He didn’t live there in those villages. Shush. Never mind. You need to enjoy the miracle.
Especially you need to enjoy it because at some point de Bernièresis going to change tack and tell you a about some other people, much more famous people, and what they were up to during those same years. These people are government leaders, actors on the geopolitical stage who are interested in conquest and control, people for whom political abstractions are extremely useful and for whom individual human lives matter very little. And then, inevitably, once we know a little about these people, de Bernières is going to tell what happens when the wars and the mass slaughters initiated by this group begin to affect the lives of the first group, those innocent ones, the nice people that the reader has come to love. It won’t be pretty. In fact, it will be awful. For some, it will be as bad as life can possibly get. Good people will die for little or no reason in an variety of horrible ways; others will be twisted into monstrous shapes or simply go mad. Some will survive, but all will suffer and none remain unscathed.
Sounds pretty depressing, eh? So why do I admire these two books so much? Because they are full of light. They are very funny and very romantic. That’s what keeps you reading and it’s also where all the light comes from. Plus you can learn some history from these books. You can learn about how a war that you’ve always known about had effects that you didn’t know about. And, amidst all this, you can learn about good and evil. That’s one thing that the light does; it makes it harder for evil to hide. It’s not that de Bernières provides some magic answer, an inspired way forward that will keep it all from happening again. No. But his stories can remind us what’s really behind the lies our leaders so often tell us, the fear, hatred, ego, greed and pure bone-headed ignorance that are normally what it takes to get a war started. The light can help us see understand where happiness and security really come from.
Of the two books, Corelli’s Mandolin is more immediately accessible, with unique and memorable characters, some broad humor, and an underlying historical setting that will not be totally unknown to most readers. Birds Without Wings tells of a lessor known and even more fascinating cultural milieu. Its philosophy is more nuanced, its ironies more open-ended. But both of these are books in the great tradition of novels. They are about individual people in very particular places and yet they also tell a story about everything else; they tell us how to live.
