Chekhov’s Mistess

Roberto Bolaño’s 900 page novel 2666 (which as far as I can tell takes its title from a line in Bolaño’s novella Amulet) will be released in English this fall, but it’s been out in Spanish since (I think) 2004. Last year Alex Rigola and Pablo Ley adapted the novel for the stage at Teatre Lliure and Festival de Barcelona. The play is 5 hours, presumably 1 hour for each section of the novel and looks wildly impressionistic, which is probably the only way to treat a novel that cuts across such a broad swath of characters and places. Rigola says of the production in a letter to Bolaño’s family:

“Evidently it seems impossible to try and sum up in just one phrase the whole scope of the novel’s 1124 pages. I also think it would be unfair to try and pare it down to a mere string of words and ideas like evil, dignity, parallelisms and coincidences, the imperviousness of human beings when faced by misfortunes they themselves have brought about, the world of literature (authors, publishers, scholars, critics), death, love, what we know and what we don’t know about people, suffering, the portrait of the society we are creating… We would always be leaving something out.”

You will find on the Teatre Lliure site a short highlights video, photos, and see attached (also available on the site) for a pdf with the letter above, an interview with Rigola on the production, and more.

I realize this is a bit of marginalia, but as a Bolaño fan it’s interesting to see such an ambitous work be made into a stage production.

Scott McLemee thinks Jon Swift is funny. I think Tao Lin is more Swiftian (read all the comments through Grayson’s) than Jon Swift.

via Olive Reader

From time to time I’m reminded of the day I fell in love with (so-called) classical music. Before that day I was a curious bystander. The music was Shostakovich’s 5th, a symphony said to have been written to bring the composer back into the good graces, to put it more summarily than the situation deserves, of Stalin, which it did. That idea made me uneasy. I bought a ticket to the NY Phil at the last minute from a women outside Avery Fisher Hall and settled in to a well situated orchestra level seat. The slow movement is what swept me away and by the time the last note sounded I was so visibly moved that the woman I had bought the ticket from (she had sold the ticket of a friend who would have been sitting next to her) told me she had overcharged me and gave me half my money back.

At play in my psyche then was the recent death of my mother at an early age from a brain tumor and Shostakovich’s music sent me to a nearly untouchable place where I could envision a middle ground between life and death. Beyond my sympathetic response I found in Shostakovich a musical and human response to the world of the twentieth century that remains compelling to me today. His music tells a story more resonantly than can be told in any other medium. His bravery subversive.

I’ve been slowing reading (on the train, where I frustratingly can’t listen to the music he’s writing about) Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise (the title perhaps refuting Hamlet’s dying words, “the rest is silence”). He writes of the premier of Shostakovich’s 5th:

“But the better part of the audience seemed to identify strongly with the symphony’s assertion of will – what Maxim Shostakovich [the composer’s son] called ‘the determination of a strong man to BE.’ Many listeners had already lost friends and relatives to the Terror, and were in a numbed, terrified state. Gavriil Popov said to Lyubov Shaporina, the founder of the Puppet Theater: ‘You know, I’ve turned into a coward. I’m a coward, I’m afraid of everything. I even burned you letters.’ The fifth had the effect of taking away, for a little while, that primitive fear. One listener was so gripped by the music that he stood up, as if royalty had walked into the room. Other began rising from their seats. During the long ovation that followed, Yevgeny Mravinsky, the conductor, held the score above his head.”

I think Maxim Shostakovich’s words, “determination” “Strong”, “to BE” sum up everything that I’ve found to be true of Shostakovich, particularly since his bravery wasn’t always clear to those around him or the public. While I don’t find myself listening to the 5th very much these days, his Cello Sonata op.40 is a piece I listen to all the time and easily one of my favorites.

to return in August.

I’ve always been drawn to Edith Wharton’s work, partly because of its astonishing combination of elegance and urgency, and partly because her world is so familiar.

Wharton and I come from similar backgrounds. I grew up with the rules that governed her: emotions were to be strictly controlled, pain was not to be acknowledged, and the rules of decorum were to be obeyed. I’ve always been fascinated by her unblinking exegesis of all this, the way you are when someone breaks the rules, the way you are when you read something and think, “What? Are you allowed to write about this?”

Wharton wrote about her world in a way that made it possible for me – and for all of us who come after her – to go into our own worlds still further, and to tease out the innermost reaches of pain and passion from the decorous woven fabric of our lives.

The following is excerpted with permission from the introduction to The New York Stories of Edith Wharton:

A writer’s world both shelters and confines, and she must write her way both into and out of it. She must form her own world, but it will always be part of the one that formed her. It will always be both beginning and end of her journey.

Edith Newbold Jones was born in 1862, in the family brownstone on West 23rd Street. Her forebears were Dutch, English and Huguenot – a long line of successful merchants, bankers and lawyers. They were well-established, and at the time of her birth, Edith’s family had lived in New York for nearly two hundred years. Old New York was an insular, tribal society, with a rigid caste system and a strict code of behaviour. The code of manners governed all aspects of behaviour, including frivolous ones of social comportment. At the core of this code, however, was a stern Puritan ethos of moral rectitude, self-reliance and a stoic disregard of pain. Edith learned the rules of this formal, restrained world, but she also felt the presence of another, unacknowledged one. This held emotions and ideas, and it seethed around her like an invisible mist. Wharton learned the power of the secret, forbidden realm, that the laws of decorum were set up to control and counteract. The conflict between these worlds – the mannered, mandarin one, and the passionate, uncontrollable one – would provide the central dynamic of her work.

Despite moving to Europe, Wharton never gave up her American citizenship, however, and her deepest literary and emotional connections always remained to her world – Old New York. Her first novel, a historical romance called The Valley of Decision, was set in Italy. When it was published, in 1902, Henry James had famously advised her: “Use the American subject! Do New York! There it is round you.” But New York was already Wharton’s subject; she had been “doing” it in stories for over a decade, and would continue throughout her career. New York was the center of her life, the place where she had struggled most ardently with conflicting claims of manners and passion, the place where her heart had beat most powerfully; where her soul had seemed most desperately constrained and her happiness most perilously at risk. In her work, New York received her greatest scrutiny, sternest criticism and deepest understanding. It was her greatest subject. In her New York stories, we find all of Wharton’s great themes: stifled passion and the suffocating soul; the conflict between idealism and pragmatism; the charged erotic constellation of marriage, adultery, divorce and betrayal.

One of the richest and most fertile themes in Wharton’s work was that of the complicated connection between love and pain. Wharton’s own romantic history was not happy: her first engagement was broken off, not by her. A second romantic relationship, disappointingly, did not produce an offer. Her marriage to Teddy Wharton was neither passionate nor fulfilling, and ended in misery. Her brief erotic engagement with Morton Fullerton was wounding. These experiences are reflected in her fiction: rarely are her central male characters both sympathetic andeffective. Those who are sympathetic are often passive or uncommitted; those who are powerful are often evasive and opaque, solipsistic or brutal. The presence of a subtle emotional sadism runs like a dark undercurrent through Wharton’s fiction. The same troubling theme is strikingly present in “The Dilettante,” written in 1903, long before her affair. Perhaps her most shocking story, “The Dilettante” is a subtle disquisition on cruelty. Thursdale, an idle and worldly bachelor, maintains an amitie amoureusewith Mrs. Vervain, an elegant divorcee. Cold, cynical and controlling, Thursdale considers their relationship, and the “emotional training” he has given Mrs. Vervain. As the narrative unfolds we learn of his decision to marry – though not, of course, the well-schooled Mrs. Vervain. He has found a fresh, untainted young woman. With sublime effrontery he asks his mistress to support his marriage suit, persuading the young fiancee of Thursdale’s worth. The lethal potency of the story arises partly from Mrs. Vervain’s intelligence and vitality: she seems to have deliberately chosen this ghastly thralldom, this humiliating emotional martyrdom. In return for it she receives only a cruel intimacy. Love is what she wants, but it is not offered, and she is too well-trained to make a scene.

Wharton wrote brilliantly right up to the end of her life, and “Roman Fever,” of 1934, just three years before her death, is one of her great stories. It is not a quiet rumination on mortality, but the summoning up of rage, stifled passion, and sexuality: a remarkable work for a woman of seventy-two.

Though the story is set entirely on a rooftop terrace in contemporary Rome, Old New York is a looming presence, and provides the background of “two American ladies of ripe but well-cared for middle age.” Friends since childhood, brownstone neighbours on East 73rd Street, now both widowed and the mothers of two marriageable daughters, the two sit decorously watching the sunset “…contemplating it in silence, with a sort of diffused serenity which might have been borrowed from the spring effulgence of the Roman skies.” Mrs. Slade thinks slightingly that her friend’s late husband “was – well, just the duplicate of his wife. Museum specimens of old New York. Good looking, irreproachable, exemplary.” Slowly, through dialogue and flashbacks, the two recall their young womanhood, inducting us into its secret sisterhood as they remember a common visit to Rome some twenty-five years earlier. If New York represents a moribund rigidity, Rome embodies a dark, charged vitality, worldly and unfathomable. The fever of the title refers to malaria, a fatal nineteenth-century disease and a real threat before the Roman marshes were drained. Fever was the ostensible reason for keeping young women inside during the evenings. The risk of illness was real, but so was the other, unspoken reason for sequestration – sexual adventure, with its terrifying consequences.

Seated overlooking a ravishing twilit view of Rome, with its “great accumulated wreckage of passion and splendor,” the women are carried by the march of memory, to the rising rhythm of animosity, through a landscape of jealousy and deception, illicit assignations, sexual thrall and unwed pregnancy. It is a virtuoso’s performance, and Wharton’s greatest story of old New York may be this one, set in Rome. Here Wharton reverts to her most enduring theme, the power of passion. It is passion that has driven the lives of these two decorous matrons, and it is passion that reveals itself anew, as they sit in the splendor of the Roman sunset.

Edith Wharton’s lifetime spanned the Victorian era, the First World War, the Jazz Age, and the Depression. It was a period of enormous transitions, and subject to the competing forces of conservatism and modernism. The great changes she witnessed are reflected in her work, against the backdrop of old New York. Wharton’s writing is difficult to place. She schooled herself by reading non-fiction: history, philosophy and scientific theory. This gave her a firm intellectual grounding and a rational, analytical approach to the world. She admired the novel of ideas, and the work of George Eliot and George Sand. Because of the elevated social circles of her characters, as well as the subtlety and nuance of her work, she has often been compared to Henry James, a mentor and friend. James was a very different sort of writer, however, and his vision was interior and more mysterious than hers. Wharton’s work had more clarity and directness, more boldness and drama.

Wharton wrote about the twentieth century, but, by her formal, ceremonial style and her belief in a moral order, she was linked inextricably to the nineteenth. The next generation of writers – Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald, among others. – shared a sense of post-war disillusionment, and they experimented with literary styles that reflected the fractured rhythms of the twentieth century. Despite her decorous style, however, Wharton is anything but prim. Her work is informed by candor, clarity, and a deep understanding of the great subversive force of the emotions. Perhaps only one for whom the life of the emotions has been so explicitly forbidden can truly understand the potency of that life.

Wharton’s work was overlooked for many years because of its awkward placement, stranded between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Returned now to its rightful prominence in the history of American letters, it offers a profound and moving reflection on desire and its consequences, on freedom and its limits, in American life. Her New York stories show Edith Wharton’s world as she knew it. They show the crystalline brilliance of Wharton’s literary style; they show the intellectual reach and the complexity of her mind. They show the courage, depth, and compassion of her heart. They show her to be one of our greatest short story writers.

“…But for far too long, those responsible for the greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy have ignored useful debate in favor of making false charges about flip-flops and surrender.

It’s not going to work this time. It’s time to end this war.”

With the release of his complete novels by Random House’s “Everyman Library” Flann O’Brien is getting renewed attention. Roger Boylan begins his Boston Review article…

“‘If we don’t cherish the work of Flann O’Brien,’ said Anthony Burgess, the late English novelist (he of A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers), ‘we are stupid fools who don’t deserve to have great men.’ Burgess can rest in peace on that score, at least. Flann O’Brien’s work is becoming about as cherished as avant-garde literature can ever expect to be, and not just among the cognoscenti. Flann O’Brien is chic…

If you subscribe to the New York Review of Books, you may also want to look at John Banville’s 1999 piece on O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds and Anthony Cronin’s biography No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien. Or really, don’t bother, just hop over to Dalkey Archive and pick up a copy of At Swim-Two-Birds and read that as soon as you can (save the bulky Everyman’s edition for the library) and be among the “chic.”

My Wordle

via Steamboats are ruining Everything who has one of Moby Dick

It’s easy to forget that one person’s summer is another’s winter as we hit the June solstice, so today’s links are dedicated to international literature, as though we needed an excuse.

Video: Americans in Paris reading Peruvian poets at Pierre Joris’s Nomadics

Last year, when I saw Eshleman read from his translations of Vallejo alongside the likes of Sam Shepard, I found Eshleman to be the better reader (owing, I suppose to Shepard’s overdramatization and Eshleman’s living with the poems for so long). At any rate, Vallejo’s Complete Poetry is in a bilingual edition, which, I can’t help but to notice is lumped with Zbigniew Herbert’s Collected Poems in the “Readers who bought this also bought” section of the Amazon page, so do yourself a favor and click on the “add both to cart” button.

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In the ‘this is why I love blogging’ department, my book giveway at MetaxuCafé led me to a conversation with Milan Ranisavljevic from Belgrade who blogs at While Sleepwalking. One of my favorite novels is Mesa Selimovic’s Death and the Dervish (thankfully available because of Northwestern University Press’s Unbound Europe series), which Milan also loves and probably most people in the world don’t know about.

I asked Milan about the local lit scene, which seems to be alive and well. Some of the authors he mentioned are better known like Milorad Pavic and Dubravka Ugresic, but even though Vladimir Arsenijevic’s “In the Hold” was written up in the NY Times (over a decade ago), I’d never heard of him before, as well as Zoran Zivkovic who Milan says is in the realm of fantasy but I might like if I like Borges. Another relatively well known author, whom I’ve mentioned here before, is David Albahari. I ran across Albahari’s Words Are Something Else in a used bookstore and bought it solely on the strength of the Unbound Europe cover and I keep coming back to it.

A couple of others Milan mentioned (who I may owe an apology to for quoting from an email without permission):

“I know Goran Petrovic is translated in French, German and Spanish but I’m not sure about English (his books are fantastic!);
Marko Vidojkovic is new wave, for my taste too urban, little too aggressive with quite politicized but his books are bestsellers in the region.”

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When I mentioned Daniil Kharms not long ago (who I thought was getting too much attention, if such a thing is possible) I asked if anyone could suggest some “post-perestroika Bulgakovs.” I didn’t get too many suggestions, but thinking about it led me to the ever excellent and obscure Words Without Borders site, which I discovered allows you to hone in on content based on country or language among other criteria (hats off to their smart Web developer Marc Stein). Here’s the Russian list to mine.

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Via litkicks I see there’s a new online journal Pratilipi which is in English as well as Hindi. It’s also available in print on demand.

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I hope to find 47 minutes on the longest day of the year to watch this film about Borges at UbuWeb. And, speaking of that great site, you may want to read the brief article about UbuWeb’s founder Kenneth Goldsmith at Bookforum

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On my path to being Bolaño literate I just read Amulet. In the beginning I was disappointed in what clearly seems to have been something like a prequel to Savage Detectives, but by the end I was sucked in, as usual. Early on I thought to read one Bolaño is to have read all Bolaño, but I’m beginning to think the opposite, that to read Bolaño is to read his entire work, a path that I am on.

Let me try this unfounded and perhaps even ignorant statement on you: Spanish language literature today is becoming the required reading for the literate class (whatever that is, but you know who you are) as Russian literature might have been in the 20th century, so instead of saying you’ve read your Dostoevsky for credibility (although you will have done that anyway) you will say you’ve read your Bolaño. Any comments?

Gaddis fans know Steven Moore’s work so might be interested in this interview by John Lingan at Splice Today (which I had never heard of before):

ST: Since it’s not yet published, could you summarize the thesis of your work in progress?

SM: It’s that the experimental, artsy novel that [reviewer Dale] Peck and others feel began with Ulysses actually began thousands of years ago, and that today’s experimentalists are continuing in that venerable tradition. The conventional, realistic novel that dominates the best-seller lists today is a very late development in the long history of the novel, not the novel’s default setting. So I begin at the beginning—ancient Egypt, “The Tale of Sinuhe” (c. 1950 BCE)—and show that all early fiction writers were innovative, making up the rules as they went along. At early stages in every culture’s history, literary theorists like Aristotle in Greece (and his counterparts in India and China) established rules and expectations for poetry and drama, but ignored prose fiction. Consequently, novelists were free to do whatever the hell they wanted, so I survey the results from around the world up to the year 1600 (right before Don Quixote, 1605). That’s where my Volume 1 ends, which is circulating among publishers right now. Volume 2 will begin with Cervantes and end with the most interesting novel of 2012.

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