No pianist for sure... Cynthia Ozick's "Henry James inspired" Foreign Bodies

Who leaves a grand piano in the middle of their cramped New York flat for almost half their life without even playing it? Well that would be Bea Nightingale in Cynthia Ozick’s excellent and illuminating Foreign Bodies.

It (that is, the piano) belonged to her former husband, and the metaphor of a dead weight weighing Bea down and a giant potential space in her life for maybe creativity or love or passion is really quite excellently conceived. 

I know I’m not meant to imagine myself into a book, but as a pianist the compulsion to play this imaginary piano in the pages of Ozick’s novel is overwhelming. What am I meant to do with that urge?

The storyline of the novel is rather complicated. We are led from America to Paris, then back again to New York, then back to Paris, then over to the west coast (to the owner of the piano), all in the vain attempt made by Bea’s brother Marvin to control her and his children. Marvin has already placed his wife in care, unable to deal with her mental well-being. In fact the scenes with the wife, although she is such a minor character, have stuck with me, strangely, the most of all. But the novel doesn’t really focus on Marvin; it has rather a patched-together perspective mainly dealing with Bea and her nephew Julian. This is partly told through letters between Bea and Marvin, which convey so brilliantly Ozick’s skill and character painting. I truly loathed Marvin!

What was unusual for me was that I very rarely have patience with characters who are unlikeable, yet with Ozick’s Foreign Bodies they are ALL frustrating and flawed. Somehow though Ozick compelled me to keep reading, and I even found myself enjoying the portrayals of such annoying characters.

Definitely one to re-read with time. Though probably not for all, as this excellent review by Kevinfromcanada makes clear with an apt use of metaphor.

Notes from an Exhibition

I borrowed a Patrick Gale from my lovely auntie a few years ago and it passed the test of sticking with me long after I finished it. So when I liberated another one froma charity shop last month I knew I was in for a treat.

Notes from an Exhibition is set not far from St Ives in Cornwall and follows the impact of an extraordinary artist, wife and mother and her manic depression. It is incredibly hard-hitting at times, and intense as you would imagine. Each chapter begins with a picture description – hence the title. Despite sounding perhaps relentless, the novel manages epic and even cheerful thanks to the flashbacks and all the artwork. I know it’s hard to write convincingly in fiction about the “abstract” arts of visual arts and music. Film is similarly challenged by showing skills: how annoying is it on screen when actors “perform” highly complex skills of playing an instrument/sing or are required to draw or hold a paintbrush? But Gale makes it work. Although I would say the picture descriptions at the start of each chapter can be a bit hit or miss, the way Gale describes the drawings Rachel makes as a warm-up to abstract work had me absolutely hooked.

  

Another novel I loved which also achieves the portrayal of artists, in the broadest sense, is Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music – which I devoured for its excellent portrayal of professional chamber music from the perspective of the 2^nd violinist in a quartet. Read it, if you haven’t already!

Coming up next: Stasiland.

Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Dunker

On the trail of obsession...

Any novel which features the UL tearoom has definitely got my vote. There’s something so wonderful about that place. The UL, full of academics and, in termtimes, students in various degrees of stress, offers really only one place to drink a cup of tea and eat the packed lunch before rushing back to a reading room. The atmosphere is somewhere between a strangely Communist canteen and a National Trust café. Don’t ask me why that mixture, but it feels distinctly communal and worthy at the same time.

Ah, I’ve been sidetracked.

To get to the point, Patricia Dunker’s first novel Hallucinating Foucault begins in the UL tearoom. The initial encounter between the PhD student and future girlfriend takes place there, or rather outside it smoking. This is a meeting full of clichés: PhD student has only just noticed “The Germanist”, as she is called throughout, but she has been watching the PhD student for weeks.

I don’t know why, but I’m going to have to admit something at this point which was completely my fault and which sullied my reading of the first sections of the novel. About 10 pages in my brain decided that the main character was a woman.

There was only something like one pronoun in the first few pages and I missed it. However the PhD student is a man and yes the relationship with the Germanist is a clichéd as first predicted from the chat-up line he uses. I don’t understand my disappointment at the main character being a man. Possibly it was due to my anticipation of the novel linked with the one-dimensional characters and plot at this point in the story. At any rate, I found the central relationship from the start quite implausible.

However, given the force of homosexuality in the novel, it is pretty key that the male PhD student protagonist prove attractive to the fictional writer Paul Michel. So I was wrong in my interpretation at the start, and it clearly couldn’t have been any other way. I did wonder though upon reaching the end, no spoilers I promise, whether the author had intended to make it ambiguous for a little while at the beginning…

To return to a review in a sense: I found this a strange novel that reads like a thriller and not the Bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel) that it is. Madness also features heavily, and the text is littered with Dunker’s clearly excellent knowledge of Foucault. My knowledge of French 20^th-century culture is so bad that I actually had to Google Paul Michel to assure myself that he was fictional. I think that proves how brilliantly he is portrayed.

The novel tackles questions of relations between texts (intertextuality being such a clumsy way of saying this!) and the writer-reader dynamic head on, taking these questions to their ultimate, extreme conclusion.

Given the progress down to the south of France later on, I was distinctly reminded of another coming-of-age story full of questions of mental health I read recently set on the Mediterranean - Tender is the Night. I’m sure Dunker is aware of the clichee of that part of the world being somewhere people retreat to and heal themselves.

So some advice on reading this: do not expect anything verging on realism, even though the text itself seems generally realistic. Do not expect all plot twists to be believable. Enjoy the clever philosophical questions and the questioning of sanity and obsession.

3 in 1

Oh deary me, having just checked my posting history, I found that my last update was a month ago on 11/11/12… That’s no way to cultivate a blog. It probably doesn’t help that the last month has been a time of change for me, but even so, I really didn’t think it had been that long since a post.

Right, so straight down to business.

In the last few months I’ve read several books worthy of reviewing. And I keep meaning to give them all their own posts, but have failed. So to ensure that my move into 2013 is not going to be weighed down with a long list of To-Do’s from 2012, I think I will give a brief review of each below, and then endeavour to move along.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami

A weird and wonderful book about a man deserted by his wife. This was my first Murakami and I absolutely devoured it. There are brutal scenes of awful violence (just to warn anyone) from the war in Japan and these are mixed with the alienation of the central character from the world around him. I would guess that critics generally say that the escalation of violence in the novel represents the estrangment from society. But to me it felt more like an important part of modern history which runs just below the surface of life in modern Japan.

My friend who lent it to me recommended it by saying that I would want to go and sit at the bottom of a well after reading it. Suffice to say she was right. Read it, really, read it.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

I was turned onto this book by the review, which I can no longer find anywhere! At any rate, it was a really interesting read.

A researcher heads out to the Amazon in search for her missing professor who has been researching specific new drugs. Once there though, things become much more complicated.

This is a difficult book to discuss without giving away large chunks of the plot. I’m trying to write carefully here.

The researcher finds herself with a tribe in the Amazonian rainforest where women are fertile until death. The questions this particular issue raises I found were poignant and stayed with me long after finishing the book. It is written as something of a mystery story, which kept me hooked and turning pages up until the very end.

I liked the writing even if the book itself seemed very plot driven (which isn’t normally my style). And I’ll be looking out for Ann Patchett again.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

I should have read this book a long time ago. And I didn’t. But I picked it up in a bookshop in September, with a vow to finally do so.

I’ve heard it mentioned in critical literature on gender identity whilst studying for my Masters, and so I had some inkling of the issues to be raised. I was also quite curious as to the reaction to the portrayal of Cal from the transgender community, and so have since read up on that as well online. I think what I’m trying to say is that, unlike my normal reviews, this one is entered into knowing some of the problems caused by Eugenides’ creation.

The story opens in a very self-reflexive way, invoking the power of the Muses to help Cal tell his/her history. If you do not like epic tales (a la Salman Rushdie or Guenter Grass) then this is probably not a book for you – at least this is what I think the opening is trying to tell you! (I for one liked the beginning)

Then the problems start.

Eugenides creates Cal by having his/her grandparents commit incest. I guess Eugenides at this point was more interested in including a small Greek community in the drama (where his roots are as well) than in pacifying all the critics of the book. I’m sure it could be argued that incest is such a taboo subject that however it is included there will be a gut reaction of disgust from the readers. All the same, I can see the critics’ point that it does to some extent demonise hermaphrodites as the product of this union.

If we can ignore this argument briefly, I did enjoy the section in Greece and coming to America. The depiction of the industrial age in American history was excellent. The epic nature of the book really comes home at this point – it does feel necessary for Eugenides’ story to move from the birthplace of tragedy to the great arena of the American Dream – I can really understand the story arch at this point.

I’m not sure quite whether the final sections of the book work quite as well. Obviously an analysis with a doctor is crucial to the plot (in New York) and Cal’s subsequent flight is fully understandable, but the steam has somewhat gone out of the book’s sails. With the reader aware from the outset that Cal is now living in Berlin, identifying as a man (due to the narrative itself being at times told from Berlin), the final coda from Berlin, feels not quite so perfectly timed as the rest.

Having read the biography of Eugenides’ (who also lived in Berlin) I felt that he had a built a story around his own circumstances as much as possible, and then fed into that the gender identity question. Maybe this is a successful technique for a writer who is not transgender to engage with this question. I think it was probably necessary for him. That doesn’t stop me feeling as if the story was slightly stilted by it. And then combined with the returning problem that I have with the creation of Cal from incest, this stopped me enjoying the book as much as I could have done.

The book was convention breaking, a real first for the mass market, for that reason I really recommend it. But readers should be aware of its limitations. A much more convincing look at the intersex debate (and the awful operations performed until very recently) can be found in “Mitgift” by Ulrike Draesner. But that’s just my personal opinion.

The scandal of mental health

Tender is the night

F Scott Fitzgerald

I will declare to start with: I picked this book because in a film I saw recently (the Squid and the Whale, very good actually, very moving breakdown of a marriage and the kids) the rather annoying university professor father goes on rather a lot about how it is The Classic by Fitzgerald.  And because I am drawn to such descriptions, I decided to try for myself.

I understand from glancing through the introduction by the academic (a strange economics based introduction actually) that there seems to be some dispute about the order of the text, but I know no more than this. Obviously that will have a massive impact on the first reading of the novel, and probably on my interpretation, but because I’d rather draw my own conclusions (and review) of the book first, I will leave Googling all of that until I have written this blog entry.

The plot revolves around an American couple in the French Riviera. They adopt a young American girl into their group, who has become a bit famous through some movies but is still very young, and then we follow this couple back through their own history and forwards into the future as their marriage breaks down. The young starlet leaves them behind and moves on with her career in the film industry, but her first love is always the husband, Dick. There’s a lot of discussion about the wealth of the wife’s family and Dick’s non-wealthy background.  And more importantly, the book dramatizes how Dick met his wife whilst he was a doctor at a mental retreat in Switzerland. Yes, that is it actually openly discusses mental health and the scandal of it.

The relationship between husband and wife is brilliantly drawn, and the book has sufficient breadth to show the picture over a longer time span. The depiction of the wife is convincing, as is the slow spread into middle age of Dick’s ambition, spark and intellect. It almost appears as she goes up he goes down in the world (see here for reference the disturbing film Poppy Shakespeare, which I saw on Channel 4 a few years ago, and which I can never forget).

The style of writing is sparse and beautiful. I had honestly forgotten how lyrically Fitzgerald writes, and it made quite a change to the previous book I’d been reading where I was so desperate to find out what happened that I read at breakneck speed. I found myself having to slow my reading speed here, just to account for one word I’d missed that gave the whole meaning to a sentence.

A few quibbles

I felt the focus drifted in parts of the book – why does the starlet open the novel, but then come to nothing really?

Is it me, or is it incredibly racist? The depiction of the blacks, including a savage murder at one point, left me queasy.