The Books of My Numberless Dreams

I have several drafts on Wharton (whoops, missed that deadline), Silent Light (for First Magazine), Lydia Millet (that one was supposed to be an epic), A.L. Kennedy and others seething from neglect in the bowels of my dashboard (while I wonder what else I can do for Open Letters Monthly). There are many (many) print and online literary magazine issues languishing unread. (This never, never happens. If I read anything it’s my LRB and OLM.) I’ll offer no excuses only my apologies and this post which I just churned out in an effort to get the juices flowing.

My most recent novel read is The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. It’s a Booker winner so I heard about it but the prize plus the title emitted waves of tedium — I figured it featured some middle-aged don’s limpid natterings plus an affair with a fresh young student. This changed last year when I read Hollinghurst’s excellent TLS Commentary piece on Ronald Firbank. I thought his name sounded familiar and behold! he was the same Booker winner of that one book. Still wary I swerved and reached for his first novel instead The Swimming-pool Library and was amazed. Never had I imagined such an unabashedly sexual novel could at the same time be so “literary” — in this case simply meaning a book with complex themes, stimulating, morally ambiguous character dynamics, lovely writing, interesting set up of ideas, motifs and so on.

A lot can happen between 1988 when that book was published to 2004. If I had known that The Line of Beauty was so recent I might have skipped it for one of the 90s novels. (I held the impression it was a mid-90s novel for some reason.) Hollinghurst aged, mellowed, became wiser, a little less outrageous, more subtle, judicious, wilier, perhaps, likes to take his time, turn the wheel, build the moment with layer upon intricately built layer. Basically, it turned out to be the novel I dreaded. The sort of book that, I imagine, innocent hoi polloi buy in an effort to obey their betters by partaking in the superior literature of the day, only to have it lay on the nighttime table for half-a-year with the book mark at somewhere around page 110 holding up the latest Stephanie Plum and the new non-fiction sensation.

If I were a Henry James fan I may have loved this book, squeeing in delight at every big and small allusion. (Amateur Reader doesn’t think so.) Usually, I get a bit excited when a writer so consistently links his book to another’s, especially if it’s a classic one with which I am unfamiliar. Unless it’s Henry James whose books have always looked very long and sound very boring. (I was wrong about Edith — could be wrong about James…but have you seen the size of his books? I do it for Proust but he’s French. I’ll do a lot for French writers. And British Victorian writers but James is Edwardian, right? Missed it, old chum. Can we pretend his fiction is Edwardian for the sake of this post and my excuses? Isn’t he American or something? There, Americans don’t count, I go for the British.)

Nick Guest, the protagonist in Hollinghurst’s most recent novel, is a doctorate student in Literature at UCL writing an unfathomable thesis on James, his favourite writer. He graduated from Worcester College, Oxford where, despite his middle-class trappings, he managed to make friends with the handsome rower Toby whose uncle (on Mom’s side) is an Earl and whose politician father is similarly (though I think a less illustriously, title-wise) connected and very wealthy besides. The family likes Nick, so much so that they rent him one of the rooms in its London home, making him feel like one of the family. It helps that he can act as a vaguely defined guardian for Toby’s younger 19 year old sister who is clinically depressed and a bit wild besides: keep her from cutting herself, vet her boyfriends, assess and report on her general well-being, all the things a 21 year old is uniquely qualified to do. He is also a gay virgin and desperate to hook-up and indulge in much thought over pleasures.

Not much in the book happens as Hollinghurst covers three years of Guest in the Fedden household. Nick sleeps with some guys, is eternally conflicted about his existence in this upper-class lifestyle, oft disapproving and yet addicted to its sensual gifts and lifetime of ease. He sees through Gerald’s fake politician affability yet takes pride in being connected to Gerald in the first place. He wants to be true to himself and those around him but can’t quite manage it much of the time, probably because he’s not so sure what to make of himself. (I’m guessing my ignorance of all things Henry James is working against me here.) To be fair, the choice of sleeping mates is an essential structural point. At the beginning, in more innocent times (of limited opportunity), he puts aside a long-held crush for Toby and sends out a lonely heart letter to a Jamaican working class man in his late 20s. In the second section he’s made a leap and bags Wani, a beautiful, wealthy Lebanese millionaire (from his Oxford batch), a closeted gay whose debonair, effortless cool demeanour that the world admires is wholly owed to Cocaine Productions. In the third that’s done away with due to ex-lovers left and right succumbing to an “illness” that goes unnamed for most of the story. Each marks an evolution in Nick’s character to an extent.

The story’s historical backdrop colours the story heavily as well, something that only became obvious to me after I pulled myself out of Nick’s constant “OMG I’m so middle class + gay but I love all this sex+drugs+money+class privilege but oooh they can be so callous + self-delusional and I’m totes better than that haha but am I really, I’m so lost? lawks” loop. They’re in Thatcher’s England as the book starts out at around the peak of her popularity and ends after her last Tory win when her prospects begin to dim — all the while England’s unemployment numbers rises in the millions. As an upper-class Tory who treats his rural constituents as if they were extra-terrestrial visitors who must be humoured one realises how effectively Gerald’s status acts as blinkers. So his Thatcher-mania is almost redundant in that regard. There’s a scene near the end where Gerald is over-the-moon to have “The Lady” at his house for his wedding anniversary party — which doesn’t figure much for his poor wife must remind him that they will have the first dance not him and Thatcher — in which Hollinghurst has a jolly, slightly caustic old time describing all the plump, middle-aged Thatcherites following her around reverentially, patting their balding pates while eyeing her bounteous crop enviously, kneeling on the floor by her as she sits on the coach desperate to get in a word. It was too much like those deb balls you read in Regency romances or a parody of a Jane Austen ballroom scene except that our intrepid hero sees through it all and gleefully succumbs to it (even though he’s not a Thatcherite). Story of his life.

Homosexuality figures largely as well and lends the novel a furtive quality. Most of Nick’s upper-class society know that he’s gay they just politely ignore it except the rougher ones who take jibes at him in order to establish some imaginary superiority. It’s a shadow world that, unfortunately, is gaining more public attention because of AIDS. The landscape is trickier because Nick has a penchant for black lovers who aren’t fortunate enough to have millionaire Daddies to smooth over the race issue among his company. Wani has that but is supremely conscious of its less than stellar supermarket origins therefore he’s not going to make things worse by even implicitly acknowledging a relationship with Nick. Add this to Nick’s class issues and although his life seems charmed for most of the novel it’s more like he’s dancing on a precipice held up by sheer luck. And though his richer friends may be more secured Hollinghurst never allows that secure decadence to permeate the entire novel. It has a much more enclosed quality like a snow globe and around them things are harder, more precarious, less glamorous.

Rather, this is how the novel appears to me now as I turn it over. I assure you while reading it it felt more like trying to do the foxtrot hip deep in mud. I know it is a more complex novel that The Swimming-Pool Library , far more intricately built. There are untold things you could pick apart that I’ve not mentioned, including the musical allusions and the architectural references and close attention to buildings in particular, which carries over from TS-PL. No doubt critics would view Hollinghurst’s change in hero an advancement — from the rich, carefree, lusty, outrageous yet often judicious William Beckwith to the anxious, naive, smart but wilfull, middle-class Nick more liable to sink than sail and so therefore a tastier morsel for a good novelist. However, I prefer when Hollinghurst’s caustic humour and abandonment is closer to the surface, when he doesn’t draw the curtain on a sex scene early enough to make it “tasteful” and more palatable (I suppose). That writer appeared in The Line of Beauty but not early enough to save it. My interest in Hollinghurst still remains, though, and I intend to read all of his backlist so that should tell you something.

For more discussion on this book check out the Slaves of Golconda blog and forum.

Rereading The Stone Angel was a repetitive experience. My reactions moved along a similar trajectory to the first time when I knew nothing about the novel. The beginning, I thought, was nice enough but it did not promise much excitement. Doubt lingered as to whether this Canadian classic would prove to be much more than a decent read. Over time I became more aware of how the Hagar Shipley character had completely won me over. As I turned the last page my stomach was tense and filled with awe, anxiety, painful pleasure and the knowledge that I had reached another personal literary touchstone. My last had been William Blake and Ayi Kwei Armah in 6th form.

My other rereading experiences last year, for pleasure, held a wholly different quality, in part because they were 3rd or 4th rereads unlike The Stone Angel, my first. Lines in Jane Eyre and The Lord of the Rings echoed like old friends as I read along; and though my LOTR reread corrected me on or reminded me of several story details obscured by repeated viewings of the extended DVD editions, my sojourn was a comfortable one of familiarity. With the Laurence novel it was as though I had opened a new book.

That impression can also be explained by the fact that I am a different reader now, post-blog, compared to the early ’00s. I was not such an actively critical reader, keenly aware of the possibility of patterns and connections, or noticing prose style.

One response that carried over from the first read was my intense reaction to Hagar’s vulnerability as an elderly person dependent on others. She is 90 years old at the start of the novel. As the first person narrator, we are privy to each painful humiliation when her mind or body fails her — she who is a human realisation of her Scottish ancestor’s family motto “Gainsay who dare” — and she is forced to depend on her daughter-in-law Doris to dress her for bed, to take her to the bathroom, sometimes to remind her of where they are. When she accidentally falls it takes both Doris and Marvin, Hagar’s son, to lift her up, and then they speak in front of her, about her, “as though I weren’t here, as though it were a full gunnysack they dragged from the floor”. I don’t often come across such old protagonists in fiction, especially one whose elderly life the author gives as much attention to as the earlier past.

What struck me as new were the notable moments in the novel when Hagar recalls a hymn. They provoke the reader to consider how she lived her life in strict opposition to the reverent sentiments the hymns conveyed, the novel’s overall tragic irony.

The first came in Hagar’s first long recollection about her childhood. She was 8 and at church with her father who just heard his name called out in a list of major church donors. He remarked to Hagar “with modestly bowed head” that he, Jason Currie, and the lawyer Luck McVitie (called out first) must have given the highest amounts. Then they sang a hymn adapted from Psalm 121:

Unto the hills around do I lift up
My longing eyes.
O when for me shall my salvation come,
From when arise?
From GOD the LORD doth come my certain aid,
From GOD the LORD, who heaven and earth hath made.

Currie was one of the many Scots who travelled to Canada in the 19th century to make a new life for themselves and family in the prairies. He stressed his success in the merchant business as a self-made one to his family both to buttress his ego and to pass on that pioneering spirit to his children. He coached Hagar and her two older brothers, Matt and Dan, in their family history and exhorted them to expect no one but themselves to help achieve their own success. In any case, as one of the prominent town families in Manawaka, Manitoba, there weren’t that many others around who were fit company. Whatever religious ritual he indulged in was for tradition and public appearances. In childish trust Hagar described her father thusly:

Auntie Doll was always telling us that Father was a God-fearing man. I never for a moment believed it, of course. I couldn’t imagine Father fearing anyone, God included, especially when he didn’t even owe his existence to the Almighty. God might have created heaven and earth and the majority of people, but Father was a self-made man, as he himself had told us often enough.

Hagar took to that stubborn, ambitious egotism wholesale and in some moments it is clear that her father regrets that the two older sons were less dynamic and outgoing or that she had the misfortune of being born a girl. Her mother died in childbirth and, curiously, Hagar fixated on her as symbol of everything she did not want to be — passive, meek, weak and amenable — for look how she ended up. Instead, Hagar was haughty, proud, and loathed to humble herself to anyone whether it was to apologize for a mistake, for impulsively inflicted pain, to admit to a fear or to face such a weakness in others. Her constant refrain throughout the novel is “I never could.” She said it as if, for her, it was physically impossible.

Her older brothers, in physique and manner, were more similar to her mother. Dan, especially, was a sickly child but Hagar believed he faked illness more often than not in order to be pampered. It took unfortunately drastic circumstances to convince her otherwise. One day while playing with friends out on the ice Dan falls into an unseen hole and catches pneumonia. Hagar and Matt, conscious of their father’s acute sensitivity to public exposure, never think of taking Dan to the nearest house but bundle him straight home. Their father lectures and Auntie Doll tends to him and all seems well until the next day when his fever gets much worse and he becomes delirious. No adult is there with them so Hagar runs to get the doctor but he is out of town and, due to the weather, won’t be back soon. Their father is working late. Matt, probably recognising how serious things are, does not send for their father, for that isn’t who Dan wants. Apparently Dan had been calling out for his mother, who died when he was four. He still kept one of her old plaid shawls. Matt asks Hagar if she could wear it and pretend for a while that she’s their mother for Dan’s comfort. But she could not bring herself to do it. To even imagine herself as that frail, weak spectre, everything she rejected as wrong, to someone who had “inherited” that frailty “was beyond me”. She cried but she refused.

Matt does it for Dan and holds him as he dies. Through that and other hardships Hagar learned that there was no indomitable God keeping her and her family “preserv[ing] you from all evil”. And even if he was offering a helping hand she would refuse it for that would place her in submission.

In many scenes she rejects God and his expectations in favour of her own will. When, in old age, Doris called over Reverend Troy to talk with Hagar, her thoughts are dismissive and condescending, with the odd moment of pity for the intimidated minister.

“Sometimes, you know, Mrs. Shipley, when we accept the things which we can’t change in this life, we find they’re not half as bad as we thought.”

“It’s easy enough for you to say.”

“Oh yes, indeed.” His smooth face goes pink as a Mother’s Day carnation.

[…]

“Have you tried asking God’s help? Prayer can do wonders, sometimes, in easing the mind.”

So wistful is his voice that I’m on the verge of promising I’ll try. Then the lie seems not inexpensive but merely cheap.

“I’ve never had much use for prayer, Mr. Troy. Nothing I prayed for ever came to anything.”

“Perhaps you didn’t pray for the right things.”

“Well who’s to know? If God’s a crossword puzzle, or a secret code, it’s hardly worth the bother, it seems to me.”

“I only meant we should pray for strength,” he says, “not for our own wishes.”

“Oh well, I’ve prayed for that too, in my time, but I never thought it made much difference…I prayed like sixty when trouble came, as every person does…But nothing ever came of it.”

As her name suggested she is not counted among the tribe of Israel, God’s chosen.

The second hymn occurred later in the novel, this time in her old age, and she is the one who sang it. She learned, after noting the meaningful glances Doris and Marvin exchanged, and subtle hints from Doris’ pastor, that she was to be sent to a nursing home. To regain a moment of freedom she plans and successfully executes an escape to a beach where she spends two nights in two different abandoned buildings with only a small bag of provisions and a bucket of rain water. During this time she slips in and out of lucidity, mentally chiding Doris for keeping the heater too low. When she is cognizant she reproves Marvin for his tardiness in locating her. In an awkward, unsure moment at sunset she looks at how the sun’s rays hit the abandoned fishing equipment that surrounds her “filled with shadows” and sings a verse of “Abide with me”. (Full lyrics here.)

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

She gains no comfort from it, in fact, is bit embarrassed that she bothered at all. “I might as well be singing the directions from a knitting book, for all the good it’s doing me.” Hagar is no longer that “czarina” young girl secure in her place in the world and of her future. The hymn moves away from the triumphalism of Psalm 121’s “My help comes from the LORD/Who made heaven and earth” for the anxious plea behind “O Thou who changest not abide with me”. J.R. Watson’s commentary on the hymn that he wrote in The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study highlights almost too perfectly how it related to Hagar’s last days and how she and Henry Francis Lyte, the hymn writer, approached the circumstances in different ways.

Lyte was Scottish too and lived without a mother, in his case because his father separated from her and moved to Ireland with his son. Lyte never saw her again. His father also enacted a sort of separation from his son, only visiting him occasionally, and eventually presenting himself as his uncle and his new wife as Henry’s aunt. Watson asserts that this influenced Lyte’s work, coming through in his sensitive use of parental imagery with tender, protective overtones. “The Spirit of the Psalms” is considered Lyte’s best work, a collection which includes “Abide with me”. On that hymn Watson writes that

¹It is a reminder of the coming of darkness, of human loneliness and helplessness. In this situation, human beings become dependent on God, as a child looks to its mother or father when faced with the coming dark….The first lines signal to the reader that this is more than an evening hymn: it is a meditation on life, on its transience and its anxieties.

The bitter irony is that, even “with the coming dark”, Hagar strove to remain as independent as she could from everyone around her. And during her life she tried to wrangle those in whom she invested her affection into her ideas of them rather than make much effort to see who they truly were and wanted to be. She separated from her husband, Brampton Shirley, after about two decades and whisked her favourite son Johnny away to the coast in pursuit of the better life she thought he deserved, a move she never considered doing for her obedient, manageable Marvin who did all that she asked but was passed over. Johnny grew and went his own path which led him right back home to the old farm, wiped out by drought and depression, and his father. When Bram is near death Johnny tells her and she returns to confront an old, bowed man in whom little of Brampton Shirley remains. In a lucid moment in which he reveals feelings for her, feelings she somehow never discerned in all her years with him, she’s filled with a rage “not at anyone, at God, perhaps, for giving us eyes but almost never sight”.

What she did know and see was the “transience of life” but, although she seems to believe in heaven and hell, she fully expects to be sent to hell and one suspects that if God offered to forgive her she’d spit in his eye and reject his pity. Like Milton’s Lucifer — a comparison Laurence made in the novel — “To bow and sue for grace/With suppliant knee…/…that were low indeed,/That were an ignominy and shame beneath/This downfall”.

The last hymn occurs near the novel’s and Hagar’s end. Marvin and Doris find her and although she is relieved she cannot admit it and suggests with grim knowledge that no doubt they’re shipping her straight off to the prison of a nursing home. (A whole other essay could be done on the novel’s theme of imprisonment.) Marvin tells her that the doctor advised that it was too late for that she needed to be taken to the hospital. Hagar automatically complains about this prison change so Marvin, to end her complaints, reveals the (apparently dire) test results from the hospital that, from her reaction, are not unlike a death sentence.

In the hospital Reverend Trevor visits her for the last time while she is alive and, under pressure from her request, sings “All people that on earth do dwell”, (one of my favourites) based on Psalm 100. (Full lyrics here.)

All people that on earth do dwell,
Sing to the Lord with joyful voice.
Him serve with mirth, His praise forth tell;
Come ye before Him and rejoice.

At this moment Hagar has a kind of epiphany. She realises that, after everything, this is all that she had truly wanted “–simply to rejoice”. But because of her demonic pride it led her to a “wilderness” from which she never escaped. Her husband and favourite son Johnny had died, both of them not knowing how much she cared for them, how she was sorry, after all this time. And now she is alone.

One result of this is that she lies for the sake of her Marvin, bestowing a favour on him that she does not think, even now, that he deserves — as she likes to say, no one ever changes after any single moment of revelation — but the reader, with a clearer eye, knows is the simple truth. When he leaves the room a nurse says to him

“She’s got an amazing constitution, your mother. One of those hearts that just keeps on working, whatever else is gone.”

A pause, and then Marvin replies.

“She’s a holy terror,” he says.

For Hagar there is no better description. Even in her last moments she struggles to assert her will, her independence, her singularity, never giving, challenging everyone in so many ways to Gainsay who dare! Dylan Thomas’ famous poem that Margaret Laurence quoted at the beginning of the novel, seemed to have been written for Hagar Shipley.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

¹Watson, J.R. The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

January turned out to be psychological fiction month. The novels by Pierre Jean Jouve, Jean Rhys, Ana Clavel, Graham Greene and, most recently, Alberto Moravia, were all about their characters changing psychological states, whether they went from fairly good to bad or vice versa, were conflicted from the beginning, or started off questionably and descended from there. In some the writer charts the character’s life from childhood to the end of their life and/or the novel, for others he is already an adult: cynical, bruised, fatalistic, ironic.

Greene, in A Burnt-Out Case, had the plainest prose, a subdued, determinedly unflashy style which had an inviting simplicity he used to great effect. Dramatic, emotionally and thematically high stakes scenes were more memorable for the contrast. It often undercut Queery’s melodramatic pessimism, giving his sincere lamentations an adolescent, angsty tone I couldn’t help but chuckle at and to which the pragmatic monks and motivated yet cynical Dr. Colin responded in a patient (and in the doctor’s case sometimes impatient), no-nonsense manner. What it did best was to lay every character bare, warts and beauty spots, bulky egos, not presented all at once, but readily detected if one made the effort. A Burnt-Out Case was one of two in the lot that was written in the third-person.

So was Ana Clavel’s but in Desire and Its Shadow it provided little distance between her protagonist Soledad and the reader. In that respect she fell in with Pierre Jean Jouve Paulina 1880 and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea as intense, heady, emotionally charged and dramatic with a perilous edge. Clavel is at the headiest, steamiest end of the spectrum not only because her novel was more erotic but because she never departed from Soledad’s perspective and also seemed to be less in control of the novel’s intricate structure. Jouve, at the other end, switched narrative perspective, adopted different tones from the formal and distant, to the fervent, to resigned and subdued, and was master at every moment.

Wide Sargasso Sea fell in-between. In the novel’s three parts Antoinette Mason dominates the first and last and shared space with Rochester in part two. I’m tempted to conlude that that was done in deliberate contrast to her complete silence in Jane Eyre in which she is nothing but a monstrous, threatening figure. Wide Sargasso Sea‘s imagery had a more primitive, mythological strain that strongly recalled Daphne du Maurier’s “The Pool”, a short story. Antoinette, her mother and a few servants live on an ill-kept estate. The description of the grounds provoke images of an overgrown post-fall Eden from which the inhabitants weren’t expelled because remaining there was punishment enough. Antoinette never has the giddy monologues of Jouve’s young Isabella or Soledad’s extravagantly imaginative, adventurous inner world. What struck me most about her story was the ever-present tinge of melancholy, her quiet acceptance of isolation and rejection. And, of course, the reader who knows Jane Eyre is aware from the first word of her fate.

Moravia’s The Ghost at Noon (Penguin title), translated by Angus Davidson, is different specimen. It felt the most modern, closer to my reality because, although set in post-WWII Italy, Riccardo and his wife Emilia live in the city (Rome), drive cars, worry about the rent and similar mundane details. A Burnt-Out Case was modern too but set at a leproserie in Congo; Querry was a retired architect who, among other things, wrestled with the attention garnered because of his famous reputation, and though its all played out on a moral plane which is arguably something Moravia’s novel does as well…Riccardo, as a character, started out closer to the ground.

The Ghost at Noon is quieter too. I’m not sure what I mean by that, precisely. The main plot is the marriage’s breakdown and how in connection to that his perception of himself, his ideals, his entire world view changes, deteriorates, cheapens. Written solely from Riccardo’s perspective we are constantly privy to his thoughts and he is always thinking. In the middle of a conversation he will mentally break off to describe a memory that does not immediately appear connected to his present moment. So that all of those changes I mentioned are primarily presented and processed in his mind. The other novels are like that to a much lesser degree. Moravia creates this hyper lucidity by not depicting practically no significant external action. There is nothing to deflect our attention, no talking statues, ridiculous egotistical expatriates, trips to different islands that end in a cold attic. The single dramatic even that occurs near the end of the novel is overshadowed by one of Riccardo’s strangely realistic hallucinations during a boat trip that happened right before.

Riccardo himself is a rather impotent character, too, one who can only manage to adjust to or (try to) rebel against changes towards which others push him. That probably contributes to the novel’s quietness as well because, though he occasionally acts out, his more typical reaction is a bitter, brooding resignation.

The couple first lived in a lodge-house while Riccardo ekes out a living as a film critic at a second ranked newspaper and minor freelance assignments. What he really wants to do is write for the theatre. He sees himself as a prototype of the starved, refined intellectual who shuns the easy money of conventional trash and bourgeois lifestyle in lieu of something more elevated.

I had looked upon myself as an intellectual, a man of culture, a writer for the theatre — the ‘art’ of theatre, I mean — for which I had always had a great passion and to which I felt I was drawn by a natural vocation. This moral image, as I may call it, also had an influence on the physical image: I saw myself as a young man whose thinness, short sight, nervousness, pallor and carelessness in dress all bore witness, in anticipation, to the literary glory for which I was destined.

His wife was supportive, loving, and made the best of their living situation despite a deep desire to live in a place of their own, a desire Riccardo ascertains is closer to a passion near equal to theirs. She never expressed anything but a “modest displeasure” on occasion but he detects the issue’s importance to her and rents a flat beyond their means. The increase of financial pressure is partly relieved when Riccardo meets Battista, a film producer, around the same time and is hired as a script writer.

Riccardo starts out as a very sympathetic character. The poor guy seems to be trying his best and is so bewildered by his wife’s abrupt change in behaviour. He abandons his dream in order to fulfil hers, a move that embitters his world view to the point where he joins a political party solely out of discontent with his poverty and envy for those better off — an occurrence to which he never thought such a cultivated man as himself would be reduced. But there’s a scene in the first chapter, Riccardo’s memory of a dinner outing with Emilia and Battista, that establishes a sceptical distance which grows on the fuel of contempt. (That’s a much better title choice, btw.) It starts out irrationally, perhaps. The reader from the outset already know she’s going to read about a marriage in disarray due to the synopsis; in the moment it is less clear for Riccardo that he should have heeded his wife’s reluctance to travel with Battista in his two-seater while he hitched a cab (per Battista’s suggestion, of course). Doubt creeps in nevertheless and my responses become more and more mixed until I thought he deserved to be a cuckold (and worse).

To some extent its unfair because Emilia’s sudden contempt for her husband really does come out of nowhere. That’s obscured at the beginning because of that dinner outing scene and Riccardo’s subsequent attempts at reasoning out precisely where everything went wrong. One is prone to look for reasons and the reader, a little ahead, jumps to the same conclusions he does, ones that are initially rooted in concrete causes and eventually branch out until there appears to be no point to it at all. The first blatant sign that Emilia’s feelings have changed is on their first night in their new flat: she refuses to sleep with him on rotation of silly excuses (you snore, you wake up too early, we go to bed too late, the open shutters let in too much noise…). At that point Riccardo had yet to meet Battista. Throughout the novel, each time he confronts with a different or more fine-tuned reason for her feelings he sharply assesses her physical reactions, the light in her eyes, the way she turns her head, her hands, to know whether she’s being truthful.

Alongside this is an intriguing look at the film making business, intriguing because Moravia is rather scathing about the entire process and I have a mental association with Moravia and films. (I did not know why until I googled and saw that Jean Luc Godard and Bertolucci had adapted two of his novels for the screen, one of which I’d seen. )Riccardo becomes embittered by his job as a script writer because it offers no artistic control — all due is given to the director and he and the producer have final editing power — or satisfaction because he does made-to-order projects on committees in which he is usually the most talented (he says).

His second job from Battista, purported to be more serious fare, is an adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey. The neo-realist films currently being made, Battista opines, are too depressing, too fatalistic, not really “healthy” films for the populace. Look at the Anglos and their Bible movies — the Bible, now, there’s a “healthy” book and what is the Mediterranean people’s Bible? The Odyssey! He wants Riccardo to bring out the “poetry” of the book which amounts to a lot of spectacle, adventure, and bikini clad sirens. To help with the inspiration he and the director should stay at his Capri villa. (They both assume that Emilia is a recipient of the invitation.) The German director Rheingold, on the other hand, has treated the epic to a thoroughly Freudian analysis which, as he so accurately describes it, “takes it to pieces and then put it together again according to our modern requirements”. (Did you shudder at that? Me too. Laughed and shuddered.) It is all simply an inner drama of “conjugal repugnance” where Ulysses creates every excuse to avoid returning home to Penelope and everything in the epic is a “symbol of Ulysses’ subconscious”. He always speaks of it in private to Riccardo, in Rome and in Capri, as he intends to humour Battista until things move into his territory (the studio).

On a basic level the situation works as satirical take on film adaptations of literature, especially modern psychological takes on centuries old myths. (I found the approach similar to the recent take on Beowulf which Michael Drout expounded on in his review.) Of course, it doesn’t matter to Rheingold that he had to change part of the story for it to fit into his theory — that’s what it takes to make such “universal” texts relevant to contemporary audiences.

Things get more complicated when viewed in relation to Riccardo’s situation. And it becomes intimately so because Rheingold’s analysis of Ulysses’ character sounds strikingly similar to Riccardo himself. Instead of having Penelope’s suitors show up when Ulysses return they will instead be the indirect reason for his departure. Penelope is outraged at Ulysses’ mild, “civilized” response to the Suitors gestures. He does not want to cause a scandal and besides he knows that Penelope will be faithful so why should he make a fuss. Besides the gifts are nice so why don’t they just be reasonable about it. Penelope, characterised as the virtuous, traditional woman moved by blood and instinct rather than intellect — very similar to the way Riccardo thinks of Emilia — is first incensed at this and then contemptuous of such an unmanly response. So Ulysses leaves for the Trojan war — something a reasonable man would not voluntarily do if it was not necessary, per Rheingold — and on his reluctant return, to regain her favours, he resorts to the uncivilised act of violence.

I’m still juggling how to look at this. It’s tempting to take this as an inadvertently accurate take on the Molteni’s marriage, which I did for a while, until one recalls that Emilia’s contempt, or at least the first sign of change, occurred before the Battista problem appeared. Another part of Rheingold’s analysis was that for outsiders civilisation can look corrupt, ascribing this to Penelope, but that point fits Riccardo’s world view better. And in any case, isn’t this a critique we’re supposed to be making fun of? Things become even more entangled when one considers that Moravia’s novel itself could fit rather neatly into such a theory. Riccardo had stereotyped Emilia into that salt of the earth, peasant stock and there is Battista with his money, sports car and brutish physique.

In final answer to Rheingold’s Ulysses Riccardo recited lines from Dante’s Ulysses.

¹‘O brothers who have reached the west,’ I began,
‘Through a hundred thousand perils, surviving all:

So little is the vigil we see remain
Still for our senses, that you should not choose
To deny it the experience – behind the sun

Leading us onward – of the world which has
No people in it. Consider well your seed:
You were not born to live as a mere brute does,

But for the pursuit of knowledge and the good.’

It’s a poignant moment not only because he abandoned his ideals but that, there in Sunny Capri on Battista’s hospitality, a man who he respects but considers his intellectual inferior and the antithesis of his ideals, that he may not have possessed such strong ones in the first place; and worst of all is the probability that his last effort to regain them will be futile.

¹Taken from the bilingual edition of The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation by Robert Pinsky.

A common problem in getting reviews up here is that I may feel that what I put down is not detailed or informative enough, so I let it fallow. This method does not have an impressive track record; often as not I never get around to reviewing that book. I felt doubly burdened with Desire and Its Shadow because it’s an Early Reviewers copy, which made me feel obligated to give Clavel’s novel all that I could, especially since it was a  translation and published by an independent.

The problem is that the book was not well translated and the copy editors gave up about halfway through, forcing me to correct spellings, insert missing words and punctuation until I gave up in resignation. With a promising novel like that I would not have minded, would have even eagerly returned to the first page after finishing the last, except for the prospect that a second reading would make things no clearer, that all fault lay with the translator.

It was not a foregone conclusion because Clavel wrote a story dense with shadowy imagery, symbolic dreams, and many literary and Mexican historical references. It’s framed within Soledad García’s dreams. In them she is invisible in downtown Mexico city. She reacts giddily, at first, using the opportunity to shoplift a cloud photography book and play pranks on a traffic policeman, but becomes anxious as her inability to be seen by anyone (except a street person who she briefly meets), the uncomfortable sensation of being thoroughly looked through eventually unmoors her identity, her sense of her very existence.

Scenes from this world open the first three parts of the novel and comprise all of part four. In the first three the reader moves over into what would normally be considered reality at different stages of Soledad’s life: her father’s funeral from her childhood; her affair with Peter Nagy, a Hungarian photographer, at university; and her job at the Palacio de Belles Artes. Essentially, it is a bildungrosman, an intense, psychological portrait of a woman who is both highly imaginative, predisposed to retreat within her inner mental sanctum, and unsure, indecisive, continually struggling to figure out who she is and what she truly desires; and which of the desires are the least destructive.

Paulina 1880 is similar, for it is also a novel that long occupies a young woman’s mind from childhood, allowing the reader an intimate look at her struggles with conflicting desires. However, for all of Jouve’s language play, on a fundamental level once detects a clear, honed presence, the author’s measured control. That is in no small part due to Rosette Letellier’s and Robert Bullen’s excellent translation skills. Clavel’s novel cannot give a similar boast.

She also went much further in order to portray Soledad’s double personality. Paulina feels divided within herself, with one side of her never subdued for long before the other swings into dominance. Clavel externalizes Soledad’s division by giving her an alter ego. Lucía was the name of a doll her father gave her as a birthday gift when she was younger. As Clavel is wont, this is not revealed until a few chapters into the book. On the first page one meets Lucía in the guise of an imaginary friend. For much of that period Lucía appears to be Soledad’s bolder, more outgoing side, able to earn approval from a disapproving mother and aunt, or daring to go into Miguel’s bedroom, the older brother of her friend, Rosa, before going back to her Chinese vase in which she sleeps with a dragon.

Such moments are mild enough when she’s a child but become more disconcerting as she grows older and behaves as if Lucía was an actual human being able to interact with others. Lucía reminds Soledad of events (usually sexual adventures) that Soledad cannot recall until a young man’s wave on a street, or the sight of a tall glass tower jogs her memory.

Clavel constructs this second reality with an elaborateness that lends it verisimilitude. It is probably wrong to try and number them since they bleed over into each other. What I initially took for dream sequences in which Soledad’s insecurities and memories were represented by this invisible figure perched on top of a historical monument contemplating suicide, or a train of memories on which films of past moments are played (echoed later when Soledad’s path is blocked by a train before she first meets the carelessly callous Nagy), turn out to be the present — Mexico in the 80s. Here only a few persons can see her: a blind man who helps the illiterate fill out papers or send messages, a street performer, a member of a child gang, and a statue of General Leandro Valle, a respected figure in the La Reforma movement in which the liberals tried to hold out against the imperialist backed conservatives during Mexico’s early tumultuous independence.

Her first reality, while often written in a clear and comparatively mundane manner — moments I sought with relief –was also riddled with symbols and metaphorical language that hinted at her other netherworld. Soledad imagines her desire as a dragon in the vase, one that she tries to keep banked or avoid for fear of being devoured, for fear of her desire to be devoured. When she is more inclined to pursue but meets up on obstacles, its represented as a labyrinth that she must navigate her way through with the help of Lucía. On the other hand the vase is also a place in which she seeks sanctuary, or clarity, help, because Lucía is there. Soledad refers to her home as a “house of portals” which prompts one to think of it as a series of different entrances and the implication that simply walking through her house could be a journey of sorts.

No word is used as often as “shadows”, “darkness”, and its variations. It emphasises the meaning of Soledad’s name, “solitude”, and she is often seen to be sitting in her room in darkness, seeking the darkness of the vase, only lit by the dragon’s red glow. Her sexual relationships, at least the bad ones, are described in terms of “shadows of eclipses”. All of her friends in part four could be said to dwell among the shadows of society’s margins, wandering in alleys, quickly running to hiding places, living underground. Even her job at the Palacio de Belles Artes involves photographing certain sections of the subterranean paths that exist underground.

Really, if I were to go into even half of the ways or number of times Clavel resorts to such metaphor I could write up another essay. (I scribbled on a page, “I get it, god, shadows, darkness, penumbras, ok! you can ease it up.”) One would tend to think of it as something that represents murkiness, doubt, indecisiveness and so on, and for Soledad this is so, but offers a comforting seclusion as well. Conversely for Nagy, her first major love, a married man who saw her as little else but a photography subject and sexual object, it clarifies, it brings details into relief.

At his lecture Soledad enters just as he plunges the classroom into darkness to show some stills.

“Other photographers speak of light, I will speak of the nature of darkness. It isn’t light that defines objects, but the lack of it. Blind light, shadows create the range of colours. Volumes, textures, feelings emerge from cutting off light. Da Vinci said that shadows are more powerful than light…”

Arguably, another world is related in Soledad’s stories. She loves them, would often ask Peter in bed to tell her some, and one of her fondest memories is about her father doing the same (but err…under different circumstances, obviously). Soleded writes her own stories, for herself, short takes in which she may re-imagine, remap and reconsider her experiences. They complement the main narrative, often recasting certain moments into more abstract, symbolic fiction that work better at conveying her complex feelings about, say, her youthful (early teens I hazard) random sexual encounter with an older man; or they reveal important information obliquely referred to in the main, like the events behind Miguel’s, Rosa’s brother, death in a political riot. Clavel scatters these throughout, usually situating them fairly close to the relevant incidents.

What’s the point of all this relentless ambiguity? It may be that Clavel wanted to accentuate how words can come close but ultimately fall short of capturing reality, and how easily they can be manipulated to deceive through simplification and reduction. To be “realist” one needs complexity. Matías, the blind “professional scrivener” in part four tells Soledad

I return again to my taste for fairy tales, not for their happy, cohesive endings, but their prophetic symbolism…I think the fate of man didn’t begin so much with the expulsion from paradise but with the birth of language: the tiger ceased being that bag of muscle and bone with prodigious reflexes and became a word with which we grasped its fleetness and threatening reality. Well, when we don’t pay attention to words, the last redoubt where we may seize reality, when the dead of San Juan or those from ’68 can be counted on two hands in the official version, then we’re lost, as if filter upon filter were placed between us and the name of reality…those in command believe that anguish is exorcized with veils, falsehoods, lies.

I searched Google for other reviews of Desire and Its Shadow and luckily found Jane Elizabeth Lavery’s critique for The Modern Language Review Oct. 2007 issue. She helped to clarify my ideas and drag me down from the symbolic clouds long enough to pay attention the novel’s more concrete elements. Lavery had the advantage of reading the original Los deseos y su sombre (1999) and knowing more about Mexican literature.

For instance, I did not know that male Spanish-American writers so dominated the literary scene because the fiction of their female counterparts were seen as “light weight”. She highlighted the political and sociological — how Soledad struggled against her mother’s conservative ideas of femininity (one that dictated women should shut up before men’s superior judgement and not bother to attend university because, for women, it’s no good); the union strikes at government institutions and how the conservative establishment tried to infiltrate and interfere; and the low economic and social status of the invisible Soledad’s friends.

Lavery also introduced me to what appeared to an entirely different novel. She framed it to suit a psychological and feminist reading so she drew on scenes that had any gender clashes and whatnot. One of these was a scene in Soledad’s youth when a “Desconocido” brutally raped her. Wha!? What the heck is she…oh. That sexual encounter with a stranger that seemed to be her first. I assumed it was her first because she mentioned some moments of pain, but they came of as kind of metaphorical and….well you judge it for yourself:

In the dim light, Sol focuses on the disparate silhouettes of this girl and this man who leans forward to whisper something in her ear and at the same time kiss her on the cheek, who lifts the hem of her rather short dress, and puts his hand up it….

Before going on (the excited look on the man’s face, the girl’s shining eyes, the silvery coins he offers her all rush together), Soledad resists believing everything which will be determined by this scene. All right, she asks alone with her shadow, how many people have desperately gaped into the caverns of sex? For whom does the anguish of one’s own unknowns prove easy? Who isn’t a plaything of another’s desire? And above all, who doesn’t enjoy being so?

Here’s another passage, an excerpt from Soledad’s story of the event:

The man’s lip search me out again, his hairy mouth searches for my shortened breath and makes it even more laboured. I don’t know why his hands have so many pin-shaped fingers, and why the pain of feeling myself go beyond myself is something that has little in common with pain. I’m just a doll. Immobile, waiting in a dark station for the man to finish constructing a tunnel in me…Then I get dressed. But my body is still all a beating heart. I crawl to my bed before the dragon smells my steaming bloody. The coins remain in my hands. They’ve lost their splendour. Now they only cast their rays upon the flaming darkness of guilt.

Does any of that sound like “extreme sexual violence” to you? Is it…is the tunnel construction and “pin-shaped fingers”? If Jay Miskowiec managed to get that completely wrong, and there’s no reason to doubt Lavery, what else have I missed? Why am I even bothering to review the damn thing?

I still managed to discern the makings of a “highly sophisticated novel”, per Lavery’s description. The novel’s architecture alone was a marvel, positively baroque with the implication that in parts it was a little overdone. I haven’t even covered all of it, like the Greek mythology references, for instance. Soledad, the tale’s hero, was a satisfying mixture of potential, strength, and weakness, who would fail to rise to a particular courageous moment and try to seek some restitution. I’m still not sure what to make of part four, the realisation that she is presently invisible, perhaps even dead already, although not irretrievably lost. I’d make more of an effort to figure it out if it wouldn’t mean rereading sentences like this: “Unexpectedly now experts, his fingers knead with the will of a crumb that in the end drags from me a groan.”

Yeah, I have no fucking idea, either.