WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD
Benjamin Labatut
Thursday 11 August 2022
Wednesday 6 July 2022
#73 REVIEW OF THE LAST SAMURAI
By TOM WELLS
The Last Samurai—Helen Dewitt
This is a novel I had to immediately re-read—Books I and II, anyway—in order to make sense of what at first comes off as a showy, self-indulgent, brain dump. Helen Dewitt, as the preface says, had written portions of fifty novels before she finally finished this 600-page mental heptakaihexathon, and it seemed as if she’d taken random snippets from all fifty and ladled them into this novel. It’s only when I re-read to the point where her savant son Ludo takes over the narrative at Book III that what goes before is not just intellectual exhibitionism. And is LOL funny instead of WTF exasperating.
American ex-pat Sibylla is a single mom living in London. She has a one-night stand with a married travel writer whose output she mocks by giving him the nickname “Liberace”. Nine months later, out comes Ludo, whom she determines when he reaches the age of two to spoon-feed one mental exercise per day in imitation of Yo-Yo Ma’s father. Ludo turns out to be an insatiably curious savant who by age three is reading The Odyssey in ancient Greek and, ironically, begging for more input than Sibylla has the time or patience for.
Sibylla herself possesses a deep well of knowledge, especially of languages, some as arcane as Aramaic and Sanskrit. She eschews a decent job in publishing or academia, partly because of work-permit restrictions, but mostly because of her disdain for the values that publishing and academia tolerate and even promote. She instead barely ekes out a living transcribing such periodicals as Practical Caravanning and Pig Fancier’s Monthly from print to digital format. To save money on home heating, she spends the days riding the Circle Line with Ludo, who sits in a stroller stacked with books ranging from Hop on Pop to White Fang to The Iliad, the last of which is a persistent source of judgment by fellow commuters about age appropriateness.
When she is not attending to Ludo or digitalizing “Have I Got News for You” guest periodicals, Sibylla escapes to her happy place, repeated viewings of The Seven Samurai. Akira Kurosawa’s cinematic masterpiece also serves as Ludo’s occasional baby-sitter and, to Sibylla’s way of thinking, paternal role model. She reasons that the film provides Ludo with not just one father figure but fifteen of them--the seven characters, the seven actors playing them and Kurosawa himself. Because Ludo’s relationship with The Seven Samurai is at best sporadic, Sibylla gains only the odd break from his unceasing barrage of questions, the most persistent of which is “Who is my father?” Like a mythological being, Sibylla sets Ludo a task before she will reveal the secret. He must, she says, “see what’s wrong with these things,” these things being Lord Leighton’s painting “Greek Girls Playing at Ball”, a cassette tape by the pianist Liberace and an unidentified magazine piece.
Sibylla’s challenge sets the stage for Ludo’s quest to find his father. He actually tracks down the travel writer Val Peters, Sibylla’s “Liberace”, early on in his search. Not satisfied with a father of such artistic and moral mediocrity, Ludo continues his search and winds up confronting five others--a child savant like himself who becomes an Amazon explorer; a Nobel Prize-winning astronomer and Robert Donat lookalike; an avant-garde artist who gifts Ludo a signed (and therefore valuable) work he paints with Ludo’s blood; a champion bridge player who is also an inveterate lothario; and a war correspondent intent on suicide as the only means of erasing the horrors he’s seen—all of whom have reason to believe they might have fathered Ludo.
Just at the point that Ludo ceases his search, he happens upon a seventh figure, the pianist Kenzo Yamamoto who, at a show Ludo in his early childhood saw with Sibylla, played “variations on variations on variations” for twelve hours before playing Brahms’s Ballade Op. No. 10 for seven-and-a-half hours, a reminder of Sibylla’s mother, who once played Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 in D minor forty-one times in a row as a protest of her father’s authority. Yamamoto has become a virtual recluse, making no recorded music because what he values he believes will never sell, reminiscent of Sibylla’s translation as an Oxford student of Aristarchs Athetesen in der Homerkritik, a work read by all of 49 people. Ludo persuades Yamamoto to cut a CD of the Brahms Ballade as a gift to the kind of person who rides the Circle Line every day, who believes everyone should want to see a Tamil syllabary, who thinks boredom a fate worse than death, who always wants things to be different. In exchange, Ludo offers to fund production of ten CDs with the sale of his art piece and teach Yamamoto to play “Straight No Chaser.”
And the final word of The Last Samurai? “Done.”
*****
#73 THE LAST SAMURAI - Helen De Witt
THE LAST SAMURAI
by
Helen DeWitt
What happens when a polymath searches for love.
#72 REVIEW OF THE ISLAND OF THE MISSING TREES
TOM'S REVIEW
The Island of Missing Trees—Elif Shafak
I suppose if I were an earnest, sensitive young adult--for example, one named James or Philip--I would love this book. But I’m a curmudgeonly 68-y-o Gruffalo and I can’t say I’m a fan. Too much explanation, not enough dramatization. Characters that are sketched, not painted. And, as with so many contemporary novels, the reliance on research as a cover for pedestrian prose and storytelling.
And then there’s that polymath, multilingual fig tree. It not only knows (impressively) the history of Cyprus dating back to the Hittites, but also (weirdly) the full back story of a parrot named Chico. Add to that the languages of not only humans (Turkish, Greek and English at the very least), but also birds, bats, butterflies, mosquitos, ants and all forms of flora. A narrative device that puts the “t” in “twee” and has Walt Disney spinning in his anthropomorphic grave.
The book takes place in two principal settings: 1960s-70s Cyprus, where the story centers on a pair of star-crossed lovers, the Greek science geek Kostas and the Turkish activist anthropologist Defne; and London, mostly nowadays. During the Cypriot Civil War of 1974, Kostas, in danger of his life, is sent by his family to the safety of the Big Smoke, but, as it transpires, not before he and Defne have consummated their love and—surprise! Well, actually no surprise at all, just one more in a series of predictable plotlines that add up to an above-average Hallmark/Lifetime movie.
** ½
Saturday 9 April 2022
#70 REVIEW OF CLOUD CUCKOO LAND
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
For the first hundred or so pages I thought, “This is a mere rip-off of David Mitchell,” who has made connected characters across continents and eons a hallmark. Yet, while the structure may be derivative, the treatment of the themes and characters is certainly not.
To say that Cloud Cuckoo Land is sprawling is the height of understatement. It spans three millennia from the distant past of the Greek fantasist Antonius Diogenes to the near future space journey of the child Konstance, weaving together additional stories of a 15th C. Bulgarian boy and contemporary Greek girl, a 20th C. gay American veteran of the Korean War and a 21st C. adolescent product of the dying American dream amid burgeoning violence in the name of a cause.
What separates Cloud Cuckoo Land from such Mitchell works as Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks is Doerr’s willing embrace of sentimentality without slush. Whereas Mitchell’s characters tend to be abstractions, Doerr’s are sympathetic flesh and blood. As in his breakout novel All the Light We Cannot See¸ Doerr has a deft ability to make the reader care about every character, even one as broken and convulsed as the eco-terrorist Seymour.
Stories, along with the translators, archivists and librarians who preserve them, are ultimately what this book is about. As the erstwhile tutor Licinius says to Anna, “Books, like people, die. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”
In writing a book as vast, riveting and ambitious as Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr has given it the hope of a deserved long life. As Diogenes writes in his epigram to his own Cloud Cuckoo Land, “Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you.” Not a treasure chest or a Pandora’s box or a genie’s lamp, but a book like this one.
*****
Tom Wells
#71 THE DEVIL'S OWN WORK- ALAN JUDD
THE DEVIL'S OWN WORK- Alan Judd
A flight of fantasy or not, about the cost of a creative muse
#71 THE DEVIL'S OWN WORK REVIEW
The Devil’s Own Work by Alan Judd
The last two novels I’ve plowed through are Lolita and Men and Women: the former, a fireworks show of wordplay, imagery and irony: the latter, a 1200-page verbal carpet-bombing that makes Ulysses read like One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. So, imagine my relief upon reading the first page of Alan Judd’s novella with a meticulous, spare style that jibes perfectly with the story’s unnerving creepiness.
The title comes from a sentence at the midpoint of the book when the narrator writes, “I do now believe that anything that confuses reality and unreality, or that attempts to equate the two, is the devil’s own work.” The observation grows out of the narrator’s general view of post-modern fiction’s embrace of “fictive realism”, but it also applies specifically to the evolution of the writings, first, of the venerated “Old Man” Oliver M. Tyrrel and, later, his protégé, Edward.
Yet, it also applies to the narrator’s own account. Author Alan Judd numbers among his six published works a biography of Ford Madox Ford, whose novel “The Good Soldier” contains what many consider to be the best example of the unreliable narrator in English literature. As Alan Judd’s more subtly unreliable narrator notes, “Contrary to what is often said, the everyday language we use for describing what happens to us is quite well suited to its purpose; it is—or can be made to be—precise. It is much more difficult to describe the half-world in which things half-happen, in which something may become visible only when it is looked for, audible only when listened for, present only when expected.”
The narrator’s language describing meals and meetings is nothing if not precise. On the other hand, his account of Edward’s triumphant career (in the eyes of the general public) and subsequent decline (in his own eyes and eventually the general public’s) is one of utter unreality, based on the discovery that Edward’s output is a product of a mysterious manuscript bequeathed by Tyrrel just before his death and the control exerted by the ageless consort Eudoxie. After all, this wild unreality must be real because as the narrator says in the opening line of the book, “I had it, you see, from Edward himself….” The result of the narrator’s mash-up of the real and the unreal to describe “the half-world in which things half-happen” is, of course, The Devil’s Own Work.
*****
ADDITIONAL BOOK: Griffin and Sabine
Griffin & Sabine by Nick Bantock
The most extraordinary flight of imagination since Antonius Diogenes’ Cloud Cuckoo Land.
*****
Tom Wells
Wednesday 12 January 2022
#69 REVIEW OF PEDRO PARAMO
#69 Review of Pedro Paramo
Tom Wells
Praised as the greatest work of Mexican fiction by the likes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes, this is a challenging piece chock full of theme, character, setting, mood and imagery but almost no plot. Juan Rulfo reportedly wrote a 400-page novel and then stripped it back to its barest essence. What is left are a series of snippets about the occupants of the town of Calamo, a once thriving pueblo driven by the cruel, megalomaniacal Pedro Páramo to ruin and dereliction, peopled mostly by apparitions, now literally a ghost town. Rulfo’s microcosm encompasses what I imagine to be the major themes of Mexican life and history: the thin line between the living and the dead; the brutality of those in authority and the collusion of the Church in enabling it; the bubbling undercurrent of violent revolution. My difficulty with the book is two-fold: by not knowing Spanish, I feel I am missing the doubtless lyricism of the prose; and by having lived all my life in quiet First World suburbs, I can only imagine the angry joylessness of the few at the top and the unremitting hardship endured by everybody else.
****
REVIEW #68 A RISING MAN
#68 REVIEW OF A RISING MAN
Tom Wells
Sometimes all you want is book that: has simple, prosaic sentences: transports you to another world but doesn’t take you out of this one; shows a certain level of research but not so much that you feel you should be able to construct an atom smasher or, at the very least, a ham radio. A Rising Man is just such a book. Set in Calcutta in 1919, it gives you a flavour of what it must have been like to be a policeman in the British Raj without immersing you in the ugly horrors of poverty, corruption and racism. After all, this is a book where the hero does all the right things, even as he fights a fairly mild morphine addiction (courtesy of His Majesty’s participation in The Great War) and the good guys triumph in the end. It’s what I call a good read. And sometimes that’s all you want.
***½
Tuesday 4 January 2022
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