Karl Ove Knausgaard -- That Slow Storm That Blows Through Our Lives

Knausgaard   That Slow Storm

Here are the best passages in the wonderful Conversation Scott Esposito conducted with Karl Ove Knausgaard online and published in Tin House Summer 2014 Volume 15, Number 4: 88-105.

What I’m interested in are the feelings.  Not the thoughts or the reflections, they are wildly overrated.  But the complexity of feelings.  Everything we see, everything we think, everything we hear, all our experiences, are filtered through our feelings.  . . . . so what I tried to do was to get into the situations, into their concreteness and idiosyncrasy, and try to evoke the feelings from them, that slow storm that blows through our lives.  (104)

It has nothing to do with masochism.  It has to do with the thrill of the forbidden, crossing that line between what you are and are not supposed to do.  But I would say that it also has a comic element to it.  Writing involves irony, no matter what kind of writing--and by irony I mean basically the differences between the author, the writer, and the protagonist.  . . . . Something’s comic when it’s seen differently from the outside and inside at the same time.  And I do find this ‘I’ in these books comic---it wasn’t funny when it happened in real life, but the text gives everything a certain perspective, and that irony, that gap, that double self, it isn’t masochistic but deeply and fundamentally literary.  (105)

It’s the offspring, the in-between thing, the arrow that misses its target, that is the real thing.  (92)

I almost never let thinking interfere with writing, or at least, I try to avoid it.  (95)

One of the subjects of these books is the feeling of losing the world, that the world has changed into images of the world-- (96)

Monday night Feb 24 almost 5:30

Need to post a Midway Review because I’m past midway in Hollinghurst’s novel, The Stranger’s Child.  I’m on page 240 in the 435 page Vintager paperback.  Paul the bank clerk is fantasizing about having the school teacher, Peter Rowe, as a lover.  Peter and Corinna teach at the preparatory school for boys that occupies Corley Court, which was of course the childhood home of Corinna.  Paul is helping the arriving crowd park their cars for an event taking place at the school, or are they at the town square?  We are in 1967 and we started back in 19? 1910 perhaps.  So we are in the third or fourth of the five generations who are being portrayed. Totally enjoyable book, so exquisitely well-written that I read more slowly than usual and often pause and re-read just to be sure I’m getting details.  And to enjoy them once more.  Half-way into it, I realize that the most interesting quality about it is that even by now I don’t really know what the book is about. It is about the family, the families intertwined, in some ways by the great house itself, Corley Court, and it is about the passage of time, the generations, and history but history in the proper sense is very much in the far background.  With each section or book, Five of them, there is a shift to a character around whom the rest of the story revolves.  Paul seems to be the one in Book Three we have seen the most of, so far, although Peter also seems featured and the possibility of their romance or flirtation might be what will be the central even.  But even if it is, we know that in the next two Books, the saga will move onward, and exactly how and where we don’t yet know.  The pleasure in this reading feels at once very familiar---British novel of manners, sort of, and family-historical sweep, but again, sort of.  Hollinghurst discovers in here perhaps something as new-familiar as any other writer working today.  We could even place him favorable next to his younger generation Norwegian compeer, Karl Ove Knausgaard.  But where K has taken six volumes, Hollinghurst, the older master, has found how to do his tale in one volume of five slim near-novellas, linked. Even enwebbed.  In each section we enjoy a full portrait of the family as it works within the larger community, not of the nation but of the local region.  A rich cast of characters, memorably drawn in spare lines, and a narrator’s presence as enjoyable as any novel you can recall.  Many reviewers mention James.  Yes, but I have not read James in such a long while I can say I can see why but I won’t attempt to chime in on that point.  I have not read early Hollinghurst either.  I read his Booker prize novel, The Line of Beauty.  

Last Night:  Finished Sex is Forbidden.  Here is a short passage on page 251:

         The liquid swirled white and brown. Ralph was solemn, moving the heavy motor round and round while I kept the bowl still.  I could see the concentration in his jaw.  There was a veil of cocoa on his young man’s stubble.  Honey on a razor’s edge.  The heavy mix was lifting and falling in soft slaps.  Under cover of the noise, he asked: ‘Can I kiss you again, Bess?’

Ok, Parks, you win.  To explain how well placed, how well poised this seemingly small, unimportant little passage is would take half a book.  With Beth saying to herself “young man’s stubble” we see without yet fully seeing how much she has grown, is growing.  

Parks brings off the final fifty pages of the book with the aplomb of a magician, master of his repertoire of tricks. The book ends with all elements balanced and counterbalanced, maddeningly delightful in a romantic sit-com sort of way.  We smile, we are charmed, all our resistance has fallen, what a wonderful story of Beth growing beyond her recent spate of bad luck and tragic suffering.  How ready she is to embrace life more fully, celebrating by changing her name from Beth to Lisa.  Her temptation for a fling, the diarist Geoff H. is entranced by the ashram and plans to stay on as the sort of Server Beth has been for the past nine months.  They flirt with each other but they don’t give in.  Beth goes to help her mother after news reaches her that her dad has finally left his unhappy wife after thirty-one years of marital less-than-bliss.  Was the Dasgupta Institute helpful to Beth in helping her find her way?  How can she know, how can we know, it was something she tried and failed at and succeeded at and she left when life took her forward.  

Parks has a great knack for this kind of novel or story-spinning. The passage I quoted above shows this--the brilliant detail of the cocoa on young Ralph’s stubble, the inventiveness of the whole mini-scene in the larger scheme of the book.  Entertainment in our contemporary modes.  The Spectator blurb on the back cover says: “eminently readable” and “teases you” to the end.  Yes, it is all true, the book is like that and as I said sort of irritatingly so.  A set of captivating tricks and the satisfaction of finding out everything you hungered to find out about, once all of the keys are struck, the effect evaporates.  Quickly.  Too quickly. To whom am I anxious to say, You’ve got to read this book?  Can’t think of anyone.  

I worry today that I'm being too harsh here.  Maybe, maybe not.   

“But the true voyagers are only those who leave just to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons, they never turn aside from their fatality and without knowing why they always say: Let’s go!”  --Baudelaire

from Flaneur--suitable for this last week of waiting before we fly.  

9:30 pm  Now I have read every word in the whole issue #2 of Flaneur and I’ve even seen a brief interview with the publisher, Ricarda Messner, on YouTube filmed in Montreal which issue no. 3 will feature.  And I read an interview with Fabian Saul on Magculture.com/blog. Pretty satisfying reading experience.  Learned a bit about Leipzig, of which I knew nothing.  Through the fragments we glimpse history and people.  It helped or was just fun to look up places on the street on Google street view.  

Beautiful design work throughout.  Very enjoyable.  On Facebook there is a little window for suggesting an edit.  I could suggest Avenida Menendez Pelayo in Madrid.  Or Rue Viala in Paris.  Or --- I was trying to think of a street in Boston but I can't come up with one---the ones I think of are way too major.  It will be interesting to see what they choose for Montreal.  

Arapiles in Madrid could be good too.  Or Condesa de Venadito.  

Now I am on page 192 in Sex is Forbidden by Tim Parks.  I'm through the Middle.  And I have had the feeling for the past thirty or so pages that the Middle has been too long, too much Middle.

Will Beth accept and practice all the teachings of Dasgupta Institute, Buddhist practice and that way of dealing with life, or will she not?  Same question more or less for the older guy she has been stalking by reading his diary, GH.  We don't quite know his real name yet.  We have gotten more of her story and more of his story.  Both are going back and forth, back and forth, trying to decide, trying to find out, if they can really buy into, achieve, the teachings of the Buddhist practice preached in this ten day retreat.

My experience of the book has been ruined, of course, somewhat, by the fact that I read a little bit about it before I started it.  But it was that prior attention that made me decide to give it a look in the first place.  Parks has made some new statement in his life's work, or some Turn in his interpretation, his attitude, toward what stances he wants to take towards all of these big questions in life.  But the book now feels like it is trying too hard to dramatize the back and forth of indecision, of the confusions experienced in all such retreats and meditative withdrawals from ordinary life.  What we have underscored is the fact that we are reading, after all, a sort of tract or pamphlet and not so much a novel as we want to think we enjoy novels.  We are in the midst of a teaching fable, a novel-like koan, another imitation of one of the Buddha's teaching tales, or even those of Jesus.  We are being made to think, to search for meaning just as the characters themselves are searching for meaning, but we're more clear now that they are not characters but aspects of our own minds, our own selves, of EverySelf.  Beth, GH, woman, man, lives messed up, mid-way into their own trajectories, we are deep into spiritual reading, or what is a simulacrum of such for hip contemporary readers, but as lively as the writing is, as clever and with-it the descriptions of ashram detail and as inventive the life stories are, we feel delayed and blocked with each passing page.  Was this really the best way to present all of this?  Why not have started with the new position rather than re-enact the discovery of it, the journey of it?  However Parks in real life did go through major phases, major changes of view, can he effectively capture that in the style of this kind of fictional re-telling?  I am much more skeptical than I was at the outset, and I don't think that is what he wanted from me by the time I've gotten to this stage of the book.

About seventy-five pages to go.  I will enjoy them, the book is a pleasure, but will I smile in utter admiration.  I don't think so.  Come on, Tim, surprise me.

Now I am on page 192 in Sex is Forbidden by Tim Parks.  I'm through the Middle.  And I have had the feeling for the past thirty or so pages that the Middle has been too long, too much Middle.

Will Beth accept and practice all the teachings of Dasgupta Institute, Buddhist practice and that way of dealing with life, or will she not?  Same question more or less for the older guy she has been stalking by reading his diary, GH.  We don't quite know his real name yet.  We have gotten more of her story and more of his story.  Both are going back and forth, back and forth, trying to decide, trying to find out, if they can really buy into, achieve, the teachings of the Buddhist practice preached in this ten day retreat.

My experience of the book has been ruined, of course, somewhat, by the fact that I read a little bit about it before I started it.  But it was that prior attention that made me decide to give it a look in the first place.  Parks has made some new statement in his life's work, or some Turn in his interpretation, his attitude, toward what stances he wants to take towards all of these big questions in life.  But the book now feels like it is trying too hard to dramatize the back and forth of indecision, of the confusions experienced in all such retreats and meditative withdrawals from ordinary life.  What we have underscored is the fact that we are reading, after all, a sort of tract or pamphlet and not so much a novel as we want to think we enjoy novels.  We are in the midst of a teaching fable, a novel-like koan, another imitation of one of the Buddha's teaching tales, or even those of Jesus.  We are being made to think, to search for meaning just as the characters themselves are searching for meaning, but we're more clear now that they are not characters but aspects of our own minds, our own selves, of EverySelf.  Beth, GH, woman, man, lives messed up, mid-way into their own trajectories, we are deep into spiritual reading, or what is a simulacrum of such for hip contemporary readers, but as lively as the writing is, as clever and with-it the descriptions of ashram detail and as inventive the life stories are, we feel delayed and blocked with each passing page.  Was this really the best way to present all of this?  Why not have started with the new position rather than re-enact the discovery of it, the journey of it?  However Parks in real life did go through major phases, major changes of view, can he effectively capture that in the style of this kind of fictional re-telling?  I am much more skeptical than I was at the outset, and I don't think that is what he wanted from me by the time I've gotten to this stage of the book.

About seventy-five pages to go.  I will enjoy them, the book is a pleasure, but will I smile in utter admiration.  I don't think so.  Come on, Tim, surprise me.

Wonderful and beautiful snow day here in Center Central, New Hampshire.  

You’ve heard of Goodreads and of course book reviews on Amazon etc.

I’m inventing Midreads or the Midway Review——reviews of books when one is about half-way in.  I’m on page 92 of 278 pages of Tim Parks “Sex is Forbidden,”

the novel about the ashram where he supposedly changes his life and changes

the kind of novel he now wants to write.   By page 92 the book is humming along

nicely.  He clearly has written lots of books and is confident in every move the

book makes.  He’s got a clever set-up, Beth the woman who works as the ashram,

the newcomer visitor she is sort of stalking and secretly reading his secret and

forbidden diary, the other characters in the ashram, both permanent and visiting, the guru himself and his main disciple, the whole scene of people coming to find ways to deal with their terrible lives.  

Beth is funny and the book is bound to get funnier, we think.  She is plagued by

all the same human failings we all would have if we tried hard to get into the

devotedness of ashram life but just, finally, couldn’t.  She has tried, tries, to be

competely calm, meditative, simple, focused, mindful, charitable, in the moment.

But she can’t quite bring it off.  She hungers, again, for male relationship in spite of the ruined ones she has tried to move on from.  She loves the illicitness of reading the strange man’s diary, which she had found and keeps going back to

whenever the forbidden chance to do so presents itself.  His life as he writes it

in his diary book is a mess.  He scourges himself with remorse and confusion

about what to do next, who to try to be, who he wishes he had not been.  

Beth dislikes fat Marcia but is forced to help her and be kind to her.  She is 

learning a bit more about the saintly Mi Nu who lives apart in the bungalow

and not with the community proper.  Beth is not as much a mess as she thinks

she is, and we forgive her her faults more than she does so far.  

After I contact my website developer in Silicon V, I will finish this brilliant

midway review.   First I will get the website up and running, with all future rights in my name alone, all profits and tie-ins will link to my financial accounts, and then everyone can sign up, a new social media site will be born and people

will relish talking to each other about the books they’ve started but not yet

finished and they will feel doubly liberated to know they need never finish the

book to enjoy all the rights and privileges of MidReads and the MidwayReview.

I might eventually sell the rights to MidwayReview to the University of Chicago since they often use Midway as one of their tags for themselves.  

Tim Parks will have to keep googling his book to find out sometime in the future

just how much I liked it or not after I’ve finally finished it.  

all of the above copyrighted and registered to me; all rights reserved; all legalities certified and justified.  No poaching.  Only filty lucre and praise.  

Started Tim Parks’ novel “Sex is Forbidden” to see what his recent big change is about.  His true fans didn’t like it.  But so far it seems pretty ordinary and is starting to be funny---when our heroine, Beth, finally writes her own entry in the forbidden journal of the guy she is stalking in the meditation ashram.  

Read more of Hollinghurst yesterday and then re-read much of it last night to be sure I caught every nuance.  Am sure I did not, quite.  Have to be a Brit of his generation to catch more of it.  But he is exquistely good, Jamesean for sure and feels more lucid because contemporary.  Downton Abbey has helped me slide into Hollinghurst---same period more or less and formality and all that.  Britishness.  As foreign as every other foreign.  Somehow the tv show demonstrates that even more than novels do.  The pacing of the dialogue, the non-sequiturs that pass for dialogue and conversation between, among, characters.  American writers would just not do it that way.  Not sure if Julian Fellowes writes every single word.  That might be how and why it is so strange.  Liturgical really.  I’ve decided that--that Masterpiece T is not theater at all but liturgy.  Worship ritual.  If you don’t go to church every sunday morning, PBS gives you a virtual liturgical fix every sunday evening. 

Most interesting thing all day, few days ago, may have been in the Dunkin Donuts before the movie.  Twin brothers in their late 30s, each with neatly trimmed heavy black beard, talking Christian theology and church, the dominant twin lecturing the quiet twin about the true nature of Christian interpretation and worship.  Mentioned the Church of the Sepulchre and realized they meant the one in Jerusalem.  That and the fact that they looked Greek-American made me decide they were Greek Orthodox.  I think there is a large population in and around Nashua. Something rather touching about it.  “It is all still going on.”  

“In any reconstruction, it is always only what is pleasing that emerges, while that which genuinely existed eludes demonstration.”   113 Walser

“The author of the clown essay deserves recognition in my view because he takes seriously the good cheer that stems from immediacy.  I am just reading a book by a celebrated novelist who cold-bloodedly antagonized yet another celebrated novelist by one day writing him a letter that accused him of having a “sycophantic soul.”  In truth he merely envied him his open, carefree mode of artistic production.”   112 Walser

That carefree mode seems apt with regard to the work of César Aira.  

The Hare feels longer and “earlier” than other Aira books I’ve enjoyed.  I suppose I am staying with it more because I’m now, have long been, a “fan” and so I give him all the benefits of the doubt.  With Sergio De La Pava, though, I loved A Naked Singularity but had to finally speed through the end of Personae.  But I’m still a fan of De La Pava, too.  He writes in American English and he’s terrific.  

Been thinking about the start of interest in translated lit.  Catholic childhood in western Maryland, on West Virginia line.  Everything was in Latin in church so prayer books etc were Latin and English.  That must be the “source.”  Learned to sing Gregorian chant in college just a year or two before the Vatican did away with it.  La Salle college in Philadelphia.  Standard English major with a touch of French but not enough to do more than stumble through L’Etranger and barely make sense of it.  Married Virginia a few years later, however, and she was a Spanish major and since then she has taken me to Spain lots of times and in ’98 all through lots of Latin America.  

After a few weeks in a Spanish-speaking country I can get back into it but I’ve never had more than the present tense.  Zen Spanish I call it. Strange as to why I never fully dove in and mastered Spanish enough to read the lit.  We made money on our travels by teaching English conversation classes.  Then in my teaching at Plymouth State I fell into teaching the world lit, global lit, classes in translation.  Plus I started a course in Travel Lit that I taught for years.  Somewhere along the way I decided to make a positive out of “flaneuresque” reading and decided that translated English tends to have its own tics and textures of style and even thought.  By then I had found out more about Beckett’s whole project of going into French and back into English.  And by then I had more of a sense that staying in one language could be fully justified from various (bogus and possibly valid) angles.  I could tell too from reading Spanish authors in English such as Javier Marías just how good a translator Margaret Jull Costa is.  She also does Pessoa.  etc etc

One sideline:  we took our son to Spain when he was 10-11 for our longest stay there—16 months.  He became perfectly fluent and started correcting his mother’s use of the tilde—after she hung up the phone one day.    Fifteen years later he married a French woman and now has perfect French too.  He has a musician’s ear for it.  His wife speaks English, and German too.  Those darned Europeans.  Her mother is a German teacher.  

Virginia is a scholar of Ramon Maria del Valle-Inclán—Spain’s great Modernist writer— impossible, yes, to translate.  Joyce/Pound/Yeats/Pessoa rolled up into one.  Maybe that helped keep me from trying, or confirmed me in my laziness. I had never heard the word “flaneur” until I was maybe 45? or even 50.  But I was already a confirmed wandering layabout by then.

Saturday night now.  Read a review of Knausgaard in London review and a review of Tim Parks in NYRB.  Rupert sent the former and Phil sent the latter and I’ve written this to both.  

I hope Parks is deeply grateful for the long and very closely considered review.  I almost wonder if the review-essay is not better than the novel itself.  It is so detailed that I found myself having less and less interest in possibly ever looking at the novel itself.  And maybe it is an example of that old saw—damning with faint praise because while Walton does say (politely?) that Parks really does deserve a bigger reputation than he has had to date, he doesn’t rave about the current book in any convincing or persuasive way.  He finds it to be strange and after each detail he adds we say to ourselves, “even more strange than you had told us.”  And then there are the moments of comic relief, at Parks expense it seems, when we get the  details about the naked bodies and the place where I chuckled out loud: the paragraph about how the publishers don’t seem to know what to make of the book: “they quote a review optimistically describing it as a ‘fast-paced comic novel,’ a phrase in which only the word “novel” feels accurate.  More appropriate would have been the quotation from Schopenhauer that Parks used in his demolition job on Salman Rushdie: ‘The art [of the novel] lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life’—although you can understand why the sales department might have vetoed that.”

Finally, when I learned that Parks has lived in Italy since 1987 or something, I thought of your ex-pat friend who lives in France and I got off on an inner rant that goes like this:  sorry, any writer who lives the ex-pat life in some warm, picturesque or faux-toney place like Italy or Corsica or such, can no longer be considered a “serious” writer back in his native land and reviews of his work will be forbidden.  I thought too of Jonathan Carroll, American novelist who has lived in Vienna for years (after the peace corps maybe?).  Long string of novels published steadily over the years.  No one has heard of him but enough have heard of him somewhere (UK?) that he has a following, a core of readers, a publishing record.  

And my point now is?  A big journal like the NYRB should play some sort of game its own power and delusions and announce a policy of randomly publishing every so many years only manuscripts from the slush pile, review only books by self-published authors, find writers who have a miniscule reputation in a specific locale.  

Or some other such fantasy project.  Look up Ron Rash—for example.  North Carolina author—the voice of  Appalachia, winner of the Thomas Wolfe prize and of the biggest money prize for short stories.  

I guess Tim Parks does nail it.  What the heck do we want & wouldn’t it be better if we all took up Buddhist meditation.  

The review of vol 2 of Knausgaard is written by Sheila Heti.  She makes the mistake, in my mind, of building her review on a moment when she actually met Karl Ove K briefly and asked him briefly about a specific moment in the book and he replied Oh no, I made that up.  Why on earth would she believe him even if they were there in real life speaking to one another?  As a writer herself, wouldn’t she know that at any given moment, under any sort of momentary provocation an inquiry, a writer, a person, is liable to say anything for any zillion number of reasons.  Especially people in the arts, the performing arts, actors, writers, comics, poseurs, fakes, pretenders, interviewers, anchor people, spokespeople, shapers of public opinion and taste, journalists, etc.  And then for Heti to make a reviewer’s crisis-drama out of what is true, how can we trust Knausgaard in some other part of the work if he says he “made up” that poignant and telling detail about the orange peel and his father sweeping his hand through his hair.  We all really pick and choose by our own lights and moods when we want to be literalists and when we want to be mythologists and contextualizers.  And so do the writers we enjoy reading.  There is an item making the rounds on Facebook precisely about this, at least about the form of it, the form it takes, the basic trope.  A writer named Rachel Held Evans post an item on her site called “Everyone’s a Biblical Literalist Until You Bring Up Gluttony . . . ‘…Or divorce, or gossip, or slavery, or head coverings, or Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence, or the “abomination” of eating shellfish and the hell-worthy sin of calling other people idiots.  Then we need a little context.Then we need a little grace.  Then we need a little room to disagree.”

Same holds for the literary worlds, I think, and the ever on-going hand-wringing about fiction and non-fiction, truth in fiction and truth in life and truth in memoir or re-created narrative or on and on.  Tim Parks has found that taking up Buddhist meditative practice really won’t solve these questions any more than reading novels will do so.  Vonnegut told us that reading novels was the Western form of zen meditation.  

Rick Whitaker has taken a more extreme version of this anxiety to it’s logical and admirable point of perfection.  His new novel An Honest Ghost is a total mosaic of passages from other books, other writers.  I’m only about one-third of the way into it and I’ve begun to learn how to enjoy it more fully as I keep reading.  For one thing I’ve taken to, finally, almost restrain myself from constantly turning to the back of the book where we can find exactly who said that originally, what book each phrase comes from.  There is a loose and recognizable narrative that belongs to Whitaker as the originator of the book, the collector and arranger of the quotations.  But there are two books, or a bicameral set of experiences:  the narrative as poetic assemblage and the list of sources for each chapter.  The Chord and the Arpeggio.  Since the story is much about being gay, however, I find myself wondering if Whitaker has not re-invented a new/old kind of closet for himself, or for his characters.  With a perfect mosaic of other voices, we have no narrative voice telling the whole story.  Or at least not one that is much more available to us than the thin lines of grout between the tesserae will have be necessary.  I read Whitaker’s first book some years ago and I took a look at it again to refresh my memory.  It gives the reader the real pleasure of the narrator’s voice, a memorable voice, distinctive, complex, companionable, genuine.  I wonder now why Whitaker, so successfully public as a gay writer has decided to re-closet the narrative voice he is capable of creating, even if it is behind not quite a solid door but a curtain of shifting beads.  The “second” book listing the sources is fine as a variant of the old commonplace notebook:  Whitaker has read widely and deeply and you get to be surprised at times (I thought I was the only one to have read Kenneth Burke’s only novel, or 8 Gates of Zen by John Daido Loori).

But the “first” book, the story, is too percussive as tale.  Closer to music and poetry, prose poetry, poetic sequence.  That’s how I am now trying to keep reading the book.  Not sure I will or want to finish.  It has all the curiosity factor of a strange, found object, yes, and the appeal of an Oulipo sort of game, yes.  But as with a chocolate ice cream cone, after three or nine licks, the most intense excitement dies fast and one keeps eating just because.

My junior year at Maryland I started to think about grad school.  There was a youngish professor in the philosophy department who talked a little bit about it.  He wanted me to major in philosophy in grad school and I think he was from Northwestern.  He might have suggested that I look up departments and faculty members and such to shop around.  Again, I had no idea what it was all about or how to do it.  I finally decided I couldn’t possibly do philosophy.  I enjoyed his courses in people like Plato but other courses involved contemporary language analysis, lingusitics and epistemology and I could barely understand one third of any of it and wrote bullshit papers that managed to get Bs.  I guess I looked at Northwestern and then at Chicago because Dad had once taken the whole family on the train there when he went to a grocers' convention and I had faint and happy memories of that adventure in the Windy City.  Can’t recall where else I applied nor if I was accepted anywhere.  Some memory of asking a professor and having him say, well if you got accepted at Chicago that’s the place to go.  Might have been Duquesne in Pittsburgh, the other place.  I must have vaguely known that Peace Corps was an option after college but it was fairly new and I had no first-hand urging from anyone in that direction.  Plus in my mind it would have felt too much like joining a religious order again, missionary version.  

There was the clear mandate to keep a student deferment going somehow and a clear notion that I had no idea of what I wanted to do about anything.  I enjoyed the full year, four quarters, at Chicago tremendously even though I did feel like I had to run extra fast to catch up with all the bright shits from the ivies and other better colleges.  Funding ran out in some way after the year in Chicago for the masters so I looked for a teaching job and felt really lucky to get one at a small college downstate in Decatur, Illinois, Millikin University.  Miss Milner roomed next to me in a rooming house across the street from campus.  It was her second year at the college.  No clear memory of when we decided to get married, maybe late fall or early winter.  Colleagues at the college, we learned later, had a betting pool on us.  March of that year Virginia announced she had just gotten a full scholarship to go back to grad school at Chicago.  Her masters was from NYU in Spain.  I managed to complete one paper a year overdue and got my masters that spring.  But when she said she got this full fellowship I asked her why did she apply to Chicago.  I had been thinking about moving out to Berkeley—but had neglected to tell her that.  With her full funding it was Chicago we would go to.  I re-applied there for the doctoral program and managed to get a teaching job at the Calumet Campus of Purdue University, about an hour commute from south side Chicago.  First year back I taught there, then the year after I got into the doctoral program but with some partial funding so I must have borrowed some from my parents.  Two more years in Chicago and we both were at the end of university connected funding and it was Virginia’s “turn” to get a job.  New Hampshire and the rest is history.  There were zero jobs available in ’71-72.  I think she had an offer from a place in Kalamazoo or Kankakee, from a community college in the inner city of Chicago and from Plymouth State.  She had gone for the interview by herself, so I had never seen any of New England until we drove the VW bug and a U-Haul truck here.  I hated leaving Chicago because we had had a great time there.  And we really sort of told ourselves we would stay in Plymouth for two maybe three years max, have our degrees in hand and then most likely live out our days at Swarthmore or Skidmore, Oberlin or Antioch.  Some such toney liberal arts place even if we had never heard of it before then.  We didn’t want to go back to Millikin nor to any part of the midwest.  Harvard would call, surely.  

I’ve long thought that what prepped me for lit theory were all the religion classes in high school and first three years of college.  Later at MD I switched from theology minor to philosophy minor.  But back in high school, maybe even late grade school, those religion classes we would try to stunp the teachers with questions that tried to trick out every contradiction we could find in religious teachings.  If God knows all, how can we have free will?  If you spend your life murdering people and on your death bed you have a conversion and receive the sacraments can you still get into heaven?  Stuff like that.  Then in college more reading in theology.  Lit crit and lit theory in grad school then seemed a slightly weaker version of such speculative big think.  In fact I nearly got into a little trouble for plagiarism in one course because I cited some stuff from Aquinas in a paper and the prof called me in to his office to ask where I had gotten the ideas and passages and wanted to be sure I really knew about such things first-hand.  

I never took a course with Wayne Booth.  A friend said to me one day, let’s take an independent study with Booth next term.  Why?  I asked. I had heard of Booth but knew nothing about him and never had heard one could take an independent study with anyone.  Well, it would be different and fun, said the friend.  He went to ask Booth and later he and I and Marjorie G-- met with Booth.  He said he would meet with us once a week and asked what we should study.  He said he was working on a book and wanted to have us study either R S Crane’s work or Kenneth Burke’s.  I said I’d never heard of Burke and asked him who he was.  He said he was a critic who disagreed with the Chicago School and attacked them a bit and was also a bit unusual and difficult.  I said, Let’s study him and so we did.  We read one of his books called The Philosophy of Literary Form.  

Booth had been a student of R S Crane, high admired prof at Chicago who had died probably five years before I got there.  Crane led a small band of literary critics in the late ‘50s in a revival of studying Aristotle with an eye to using him to attack and correct the New Critics who held forth at Yale.  They got to be called The Chicago School.  They agreed with the New Critics in being sworn to studying only literary form (close textual analysis) and keeping off the table questions about history and biography.  Burke was “outside” all of these warring factions, partly because he was never situated at one of the big universities.  His power base had been New York where he worked free-lance for mags like The New Republis, The Nation, and earlier the very influential Dial.  Crane’s work was very dry, he was trying to make criticism be as respectable as scientific discourse.  Burke was much livelier and brought in the social sciences.  He essentially advocated subsuming the social sciences under the dominance of literary thought—a position which lost the battle over the long run.  He was definitely a literary thinker so I found it disheartening that his work was pretty much ignored by the literary world, especially as he aged, but got adopted big-time by the burgeoning social science wing of English departments at the time—Communications, which quickly broke away and became much more successful and wealthy.  

Burke started college teaching in the Depression to make some money.  He had left New York to be a farmer-writer in northwest New Jersey right at the time of the crash.  He taught one term a year at Bennington.  That’s where Sontag was his student.  I’m sure he was a big influence on her but I doubt he was the most powerful shaper of her career.  She was probably enrolled in the New York Jewish intellectual elite from the time she was in denim overalls by the age of eight.  But it was unfortunate that she turned to attempting to write fiction.  I think she didn’t try it until relatively late in her career but I may be wrong.  I never read her very much but I had the impression her first and biggest success was with books on critical thought, one especially called “Against Interpretation.”  

It’s amazing how susceptible we are, I was, at 22 when all this started to take place.  I did one paper for Booth and Burke that one Quarter (ten weeks).  He wrote on it—"ready to be published.”  That bowled me over and I had no idea what to do next.  It totally scared me.  I never went to him and said Tell me how to publish this, where.  I had no idea what I was doing back then.  We moved here, took ten years until I finally wrote the dissertation the year Va was pregnant with David and there was a full-time opening in English here and I had to finish the degree or be booted out.  Nothing like pressure.  At the start of grad school it was the draft, twelve years or so later it was getting a job.  

Fifteen? years later Booth writes (we had been in touch off and on) and says Hey I just re-read your dissertation because I’m giving a paper at a conference on the same topic.  It is really good.  Did you ever publish it?  Gee, why didn’t you say that fifteen years ago?   In other words back in our day there was no such thing as “mentoring” —and if you were as clueless as I was, and as lacking in ambition or drive or whatever, you had no “career.”  Well, I oversimplify but that’s basically it.  

Just yesterday Scott Esposito published his review of Personae in the Washington Post.  

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/personae-by-sergio-de-la-pava/2013/12/10/900406fa-5d23-11e3-bc56-c6ca94801fac_story.html

He really likes De La Pava and gives the book as glowing a review as possible.  He manages to describe more accurately than any other review I’ve seen exactly what all is in the book:  

quote

Like its predecessor, “Personae” begins with the investigation of a crime: Detective Helen Tame arrives at a Manhattan apartment where Antonio Arce, over a century old, has died. She eventually acquires Arce’s notebook, and in due time we read the impressionistic memoir at its heart, but only after meandering through excerpts from Tame’s scholarly paper on Bach and Glenn Gould, a short story about swimming out to sea, a two-act Beckettian play, Tame’s explanation of Arce’s death and two obituaries. The book’s final 50 pages — Arce’s memoir — take us from a suicide mission in the jungles of Colombia to a love story in New York City and feature some of the finest writing of De La Pava’s burgeoning career.

Split unevenly among Tame’s section, Arce’s section and an 83-page absurdist play, “Personae,” is united more by its themes than by any one narrative. The play is the strangest and most difficult part of this book. It involves several mental patients engaged in furious conversation. A gun is introduced in Act I and fired in Act II. There’s also a spearing, a gender change, a severed head and an eerie drumbeat that may herald disaster. In spite of all that, what looms largest is the play’s obsessively recursive dialogue, which opens with several pages of argumentation about what everyone’s name is.

This challenging play is balanced by the portrayal of Tame’s and Arce’s extraordinary minds. Tame, who begins playing the piano at age 5 and gives world-class performances at 20 before quitting to become a detective, comes across as a methodical and quirky cop. Similarly, Arce, a commando of superhuman strength and an exquisite writer, is nonetheless tongue-tied at the sight of a beautiful woman.

De La Pava presents characters widely separated by time and space and then shows us how they become drawn into one another’s lives, despite the odds. Most of all, he inquires into why people fight to comprehend others they barely know.

unquote

But even a die-hard fan has to concede defeat sometimes and Esposito does:  “But “Personae” is not completely successful.”  He gives a few reasons why, but not enough.  

At the end Esposito still praises the author he helped “find:”  “De La Pava is proof that experimental literature can be devilishly entertaining.”

In a review for the November issue of The American Reader, Esposito gives a very negative review of Marías’s Infatuations.  

Tuesday late afternoon

What a struggle to continue reading Personae to the bitter end.  I will take M.A.Orthofer, inThe Complete Review, at his word and say, ok, give it a B+ but I haven’t had such difficulty forcing myself to finish a book since plowing on through Salvatore Scibona’s The End.  

Why did I just not finish it, then?  Personae.  I did manage to skim the last five or six pages.  But, you know, you get so far in and then you just want to keep looking at the train wreck or whatever it is you’ve got in your hands between the front and back cover.  Besides, every so often the writing flashes and clicks, just as writing.  I wondered whether I was just old enough to have never played video games.  Was that it?  They guy is not clueless or anything.  He is doing something here, but what it is interests me less and less and less as I move through the book and then, last twenty pages? not at all.  Not at all.  Please God the third book will be as super fine as the first book is--everyone must read A Naked Singularity because it is just brilliant and funny and superb and unbelievable in all the splendid ways.  

Phil had noted a contradiction in the book---this passage on page 135

“Once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with.”

And a second version on page 233  “ What happened is the least of it.  It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten.  What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.”  

Maria Dolz is reporting this now as something she remembers Javier having told her when she had asked what happened to Chabert back on 135 of our novel.  But now Marías has Maria add “That isn’t true, or, rather, it’s sometimes true, but one doesn’t always forget what happened, not in a novel that almost everyone knew or knows, even those who have never read it, nor in reality when what happens is actually happening to us and is going to be our story, which could end one way or another with no novelist to decide and independent of anyone else . . . “  

But we know by now that Marías can allow his character Maria to disagree with what Javier told her about the nature of novels because by now we know that Javier’s claim is true, or rather his theory of why novels are important is by now firmly lodged in our consciousness as true and so now we can disagree with it a bit---enjoy hearing Maria disagree with it a bit as a way of emphasizing her reality to herself and her own meditations on her reality versus novelistic reality, all of which further underlines the great reality we have been giving to the novel we are still reading, whatever our own personal real lives are like.  

I looked up the idea of contradiction in The Infatuations and the first piece it found is a review in the Times by no less than Edward St Aubyn.  NYTimes August 8

He describes the novel so well and knows Marías’s work so well that I now despair saying much about it because if I do I will produce a very poor work of envy---the very motive and emotion that the novel depicts.  St Aubyn points this out so well:

quote  Few things attract evil’s indignation more than a Perfect Couple, whether it’s Adam and Eve or Miguel and Luisa. The particular form of evil that preoccupies Marías in “The Infatuations” (as it did in “Your Face Tomorrow”) is envy turning into betrayal. The definition of “envidia,” or “envy,” in Covarrubias’s dictionary of 1611 is quoted three times in “The Infatuations” (the reappearance of the same blocks of prose is another signature effect of Marías’s novels: prose aspiring to the condition of music, bringing back a theme, not in a vague or allusive sense, but in exactly its original form): “Unfortunately, this poison is often engendered in the breasts of those who are and who we believe to be our closest friends, in whom we trust; they are far more dangerous than our declared enemies.”  unquote

He notes too how Marías conveys great empathy toward the characters and great emotional generosity.  

quote

Such a high level of reflection and digression (let’s not even get into the amount of literary allusion) might easily become too cerebral, but Marías’s powerful awareness of indecisiveness and delusion is born not only of a speculative frame of mind but of a penetrating empathy. At one point the narrator gives voice to Miguel’s bereaved possessions, the clothes hanging in his cupboard and the novel with the page turned down and the unfinished medication in the bathroom cabinet, to consider what they might make of his death. This feeling of emotional generosity tempers the literary thinking, as do the scenes of pure comedy, like the Oxford high-table dinner in Marías’s novel “All Souls,” with its Buñuel-like degeneration of absurd formality into violence and contempt. 

unquote

Marías’s line about the possibilities a novel infuses us with could be the epigraph for every novel.

The musical style of the work St Aubyn notes well too :  “the reappearance of the same blocks of prose is another signature effect of Marías’s novels: prose aspiring to the condition of music, bringing back a theme, not in a vague or allusive sense, but in exactly its original form”

It is so good an essay-review I could just copy all of it out--one more big quotation for how it describes his style---

quote

Marías has pointed out that the Latin root of the verb “to invent,” invenire, means to discover or find out. His special gift is to bring these two processes, inquiry and narration, into a conjunction, making things up as he discovers them and discovering them as he makes them up. He never works to a plan, and so his prose stays close to the thought processes of a writer working out what to say next and responding to what he has, perhaps mistakenly, just said. “The Infatuations” goes on to explore the narrator’s relationship with the widow and with the best friend of the murdered Miguel. At first he appears to have been killed by a stray madman. The plot, several times changing our perspective on the murder, works very well as a thriller, but it is essentially a pretext for advancing the skeptical worldview embodied by the style.  

unquote

Skeptical worldview embodied by the style.  Seems a perfect characterization.  

Now we could privately debunk a bit just for the exercise.  If Marías is making fun of himself in the portrait of Garay Fontina, the obnoxious writer who is waiting to give his speech for the Nobel Prize, it could be further proof that he is, after all, one of those laureates whose whole trajectory is to win the laurels, in other words the star pupil driven to be the star-of-stars by-the-book, to win the A+ from the teacher, and not by genuine creative brilliance.  What he provides as high entertainment for this generation of readers may not be great literature at all but high-highness of entertainment---yet another variant of masterpiece theater---visible precisely in the supreme command he displays for doing the literary sort of thinking his father the philosopher would have both admired and thought not quite adequate for being not fully philosophical but a fallen literary form of philosophicalization.  Marías may have to suffer winning for literature and not philosophy because I guess there is no Nobel for philosophy.  

“Whatever else we may think is going on when we read, we are choosing to spend time in an author’s company. In Javier Marías’s case this is a good decision; his mind is insightful, witty, sometimes startling, sometimes hilarious, and always intelligent.”   StAubyn

I don’t know if St Aubyn knows that the Spanish consider envy to be their trademark deadly sin.  With that in mind, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what games Marías’s novel might be offering to his countrymen.  “Yes, I might get the Nobel, so I know you envy me or will envy me for this, even though you tend to think that I’m not really a Spanish writer but more of an English writer in Spanish costume.”  “If I don’t get the prize, you will envy me nevertheless simply because of the rumors that I might win.  So here is a set of tales of infatuations, or envies, to show how well I understand our national character and how much I count myself prone to the same dominant sin as the rest of you.”  No doubt there could be much more to it than this.  I need to consult with some Spanish friends who have read the book.  And who know the kinds of games Marías likes to play with his native readers.  

Also we must remember that Marías could have written the novel to the Swedes, to give them a game while everyone waits.  “Well, if you give me the prize, I just want you to know that I’m of good humor about it and not at all as conceited or obnoxious as that terrible writer of my own creation in the novel, Garay Fontina, would be.”  “If you don’t give it to me, rest assured I will not indulge the envy we Spaniards are so prone to, but will celebrate the winner with generous and intelligent goodwill.  After all in this novel I have shown how much fun we all have with even the rumors of Nobel prize-dom.”  

Thursday late afternoon---just
posted this on Facebook --- might be dumb to have done so.  

I was 19, freshman in college, second year in the monastery. Sunny afternoon. Came back from a jog around the grounds, as I approached the mansion, Chuck S ran along the house, saw me and yelled "The President has been shot.”

Thinking much less about The Infatuations but enough still to imagine re-writes that would tinker with the telling much more drastically.  Take out all or most of the literary gameishness.  Take out even Macbeth or maybe especially Macbeth.  Marías makes fun of writers who fill their books with historical info or local detail but his mode of referencing other literary works is just as pretentious at least potentially so, and just as filler-like in some ways.  Think of how Knausgaard would “translate” Marías’s story into something that fits into his narrative or novel.  

Tuesday morning around 10:30

“I only mention it as proof that even the most transient and trivial of infatuations lack any real cause, and that’s even truer of feelings that go far deeper, infinitely deeper than that. ‘ “ d-v  265

“and all feelings are idiotic as soon as you describe or explain or simply give a voice to them,”  266 

---------

by page 268 (of 346) I wonder if María will kill Diego--have him killed?  

“He knew exactly how I felt, the loved one always does, if he’s in his right mind and isn’t himself in love, because in that case he won’t be able to tell and will misinterpret the signs.”  269

“ ‘It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten.’  Perhaps he thought the same applied to real events, to events in our own lives.  That’s probably true for the person experiencing them, but not for other people.  Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting about in the same sphere, and then it’s hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention.  Everything becomes a narrative and sounds fictitious even if it’s true. And so he went on as if I had said nothing.”  (283)

“We do tend to believe things while we’re hearing or reading them.  Afterwards, it’s another matter, when the book is closed and the voice stops speaking.”  292

The novel finishes up in ways very different from what I thought.  So my imagination was way too American about the whole thing.

Brilliant, though.  As soon as I finished it I slipped it into the mailer, walked a block from the cafe to the post office and sent it off to Phil in Washington, DC.  

"Once you've finished a novel," says Díaz Varela to Dolz, "what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel's imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.”  

Dropping the book into the mail felt like I was getting rid of a virus or an infection.  It was such a relief.  I was glad I had managed to finish reading it in the time I had today with time to get it into the mail.  I was glad I enjoyed it so much even though what I had expected to be the final turns of plot or revelation did not happen.  But then as I drove over to the town where I was to pick Virginia up from her appointment, I realized that indeed the story had possibilities I had not yet considered and the pleasure was all the greater.  Diaz-Varela may have set into motion the events that killed Miguel but are we not sure now, as Maria herself seems not at all to be, that it is Louisa who had delegated the task to Varela.  Maria has been blinded by her infatuation with Varela.  She does not see as clearly as she thinks she does.  Louisa matches the woman in the Three Musketeers story, the woman hanged by Athos, Anne de Breuil, later called Milady de Winter.  

Why would it not work with genders reversed?  Louisa > Louis is married to Miguel > Michelle.  Louis and Michelle have breakfast every morning at the same cafe on Newbury Street.  Mark Dolzet, who works in publishing, also goes there every morning.  

Why even speculate in this way?  Is it homage or envy or both?  The book is wonderful and powerful.  Reviewer for the Guardian or Observer says it is Marías’ best.  Hmm.  Maybe.  Always skeptical of that sort of claim by reviewers.  

 What happened is the least of it. It's a novel, and once you've finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel's imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events do and to which we pay far more attention.

el enamoramiento -- the state of falling or being in love, or perhaps infatuation. I'm referring to the noun, the concept; the adjective, the condition, are admittedly more familiar, at least in French, though not in English, but there are words that approximate that meaning ...

Wednesday 11:17 in Concord at the Subaru dealer for an oil change.  Diving in to the Createspace site to continue work on the book.  Still rehashing Marías and thinking about whether to really undertake a re-write.  Can always start the book at once and write the book about writing the book.  Vanity publishing thy name is Jubilation! 

Sunday night Nov 17  

Rain and very warm.  Last night we saw the Julia Louis Drefus and James Gandolfini movie, Enough Said.  Pleasant enough but afterwards lots of flaws turn up and really it is not important enough to even talk about.  On Rotten the difference between critics--95% and audiences 82% tells the story and you can tell here who is closer to the truth of the matter.  Sweet movie and all that.  

Much more intrigued by Infatuations.  Learned one new phrase---to be “on a hiding to nothing”  --to be getting a victory of sorts but of not much importance especially given how much it has cost you---if I understand the phrase.  From horseracing.  

Anyway--enjoying Marías again after a session of doubt last night (when I was tired).  Especially so because what he does is so very far from the sort of novel Phil writes which even though he never took a writing course still has the earmarks of the way fiction should be in the American late 20th C mode. Whereas Marías presents works that would not last one week in the creative writing classroom, nor in the magazine or newspaper cultural Inbox.  The other thing is JM gives me the sense of wanting to do that---to write a book like this one even to copy it and “translate” it somehow, to pull out the frame of the story and embellish “my own” variations on it in my own language.  That is an old fantasy and I have even started to try it a few times years ago.  Could I make it even slightly work somehow? even as my first worst attempt to write fiction?  Now Phil’s book didn’t make me think these things.  His is about Cumberland and characters he made up and his voice is so familiar to me I know I can’t imitate it and I know I don’t want to, nor do I want to write a detective crime novel like that one at all.  Marías’s book, however, excites me to think of trying some sort of imitation.  Is that the response of readerly appreciation or something else, some things else?  Imitation highest form of flattery; flattery the highest form of envy?