Marías -- new novel out this summer here

such a good passage on Marîas I have to steal it from Scott Esposito--

Adam Thirwell reviews Javier Marias’ newest novel. This is a good time to remind everyone that Marias himself approves of my long essay on the question of sexuality in his novels.

This makes for a reading experience that is sometimes urbanely sensual – one of María’s most brilliant riffs in the novel is an expanded meditation on the various implications of appearing with or without a bra in front of a stranger – and sometimes abstractly philosophical; or, maybe more precisely, sensual and philosophical, simultaneously. For the real pleasure is in the strange things his narrators do to the business of narration. Marías has discovered a unique form – even if he himself might deny the possibility of uniqueness in literature. He has a fastidious dislike of originality. In an essay he once wrote in praise of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, he admitted that he did not believe in the idea of literary progress. For everything in literature, he argued, exists in a state of timelessness: “Old and new texts breathe in unison, so much so that one wonders sometimes if everything that has ever been written is not simply the same drop of water falling on the same stone, and if, perhaps, the only thing that really changes is the language of each age”. But Marías is original; he cannot help it. And this originality derives from these ghostly first-person narrators, who possess an unusually double talent: for digression and transition. In a recent book of conversations, the composer Thomas Adès quoted Morton Feldman’s aphorism on Beethoven: “it’s not so much how he gets into things that’s interesting, it’s how he gets out of them”. And this is also true of Marías. Like Beethoven, he is a brilliant escape artist. His narrators can drift for giant lengths, and yet still re-emerge, calmly, on to the same stage, transformed by their reflections.

Or the Ambiguities

In Convictions J P Jones gives us a familiar sort of can't-put-it-down detective thriller and then gives it twists in unexpected ways that lift it out of the genre box and places it into the category of being something remarkable--a noir novel with profound meditative resonance.   I would borrow Melville's subtitle from Pierre and recast the title into Convictions, Or the Ambiguities. 

Tommy Baker is the experienced DC detective investigating a brutal, racist murder of a young woman.  He hails from West Virginia and is the Outsider/Other who does not, has never quite, fit into the Washington world of polarities and contradictions that fall along familiar black-white, north-south, upper-lower class lines.  Add in too the politics of a city that lives and breathes nothing but. 

Jones has crafted an incredibly tight, finely honed work of suspense, a reader's delight of tension and carefully unfolded revelations and turns.  Even though the crime gets solved, Baker feels loose ends remain and another murder happens, so the one story complicates into a different story and our expectations and comprehension must also complicate.  The resulting exploration of the certainties that drive each of the characters becomes quite satisfying and a genuine examination of what each means by truth, investigation, discrimination and justice.  

Robert Walser

Jakob Von Gunten by Robert Walser

One of the strangest books I've ever read.  The first book by Walser I've read.  I've seen his name over the years, especially recently, as interest in his work seems to have returned or grown.  Published in 1909 in Switzerland.  An English translation published in New York in 1969.  The New York Review of Books reprinted this translation in 1999.  Every thirty years, every sixty years?  Pretty good for an unknown writer.  Every writer's dream, to have your works in print one hundred years more or less later. 

Jakob speaks about his life in the home for runaways where he is being trained for a job in service.  Other students and friends, the husband and wife who run the school and we even see him going to visit his older brother in the city who is successful and well-off.  And after that, how can we say what the book is about and what the book does for us.  Nothing happens much.  And yet the tale has the appeal of dream and reverie, of private meditation, of great innoncence and great wisdom interwoven without visible seam.  And by the end there is a strange sense of both release and sadness and a touch of utter bafflement too.  What will happen to Jakob?  The father figure who runs the school offers to take Jakob with him off on adventures and possibilities.  The mother figure, Herr Benjamenta's wife, has died.  Jakob's best friend, the beloved Kraus, has gone off into his job.  But, again, the book's incredible power and magic are not really about all of this, quite.  The voice of Jakob as he writes his life, that is the achievement.  Somehow Walser has transposed growing up, the growing up story, and the family romance that Freud had in mind, into a boarding school series of episodes so that Jakob's dreamy telling captures us and holds us in its warm, forgiving outlook on human life.  I thought of Peter Pan as another variant of these themes---family life for adolescents transmuted through dreamlife and wonder how many scholars have studied the European fascination with dreams and dream-life at the turn into the twentieth-century.  

O'Connell's Every Art Wall

Susan Orlean's neat essay on Brendan O'Connell, the Walmart painter, is available only to subscriber's online.  I wanted to make a sort of summary of it in the following fashion. 

Orlean's phrases, my favorites

filled him with wonder

soft and luscious

cracked some essential code

changeful

non-growth industry

hapless bumbler

jittery, colorful abstracts

snoozy place

store's vastness

boulevard's of Paris

soaring infinity

deluxe experience

O'Connell's phrases, my faves

embracing downward nobility

Sanraedam-like religious space

Trying to find beauty in the least-

likely environment is kind of a

spiritual practice.

Creativity is like a virus.  It's

morphing all the time.

where the boundaries

can be.  

[also may 2008]