Re-reads

Momento Mori – Muriel Spark

Spark’s assemblage of mostly upper crust aged folk receive phone calls from an anonymous source that simply says “Remember you must die.” And they do die; most of those that don’t expire in the course of the novel are summarily put to rest in the last two pages. But this is not a dark book; it’s entertaining in a spirited way, and has a mordant humor. The writing is pretty much perfect, particularly the dialogue in the Maud Long Ward where the “Grannies” without money are housed. It made for enjoyable reading, though I felt that there should be a significant point. The only thing I can come up with is that Spark was showing people nearing death carrying on in the same petty ways they did all their lives. For example, wills play a large role, and are often changed (in one case, twenty-six times), based on shifting grudges and resentments. And the two most despicable characters wind up as major beneficiaries. Spark was only forty-one when she wrote this novel, and had, five years previously, converted to Catholicism – something that, she claims, greatly affected her writing (in Catholicism Death is the first of the Four Last Things to be remembered). While her characters on death’s doorstep don’t become wiser or more compassionate, neither, it seems, did Spark. When she died at age eighty-eight her will created a controversy. She and her son (an only child) had long ago broken off relations, and in her will she left him nothing. A final expression of spite? Though Mori comes close to a 4, I’m giving it a 3.

Stamboul Train – Graham Greene

Greene considered this“thriller” to be one of his “entertainments” (as opposed to his serious work, which usually had a religious theme). Problem is, it’s not very thrilling or entertaining. What succeeds is the depiction of the murky and ominous political atmosphere prevailing in Europe in the early 1930s (when the book was written). There are also some interesting characters in interesting situations, but most are not fully developed – or, in some cases, pretty much abandoned. Greene’s tendency was to ponder over weighty intellectual matters, which is anathema to a thriller. Too often I found tedium setting in. Anyway. . . One character, a businessman named Myatt, is Jewish – at times he’s simply referred to as “the Jew.” People can spot him as a Jew at first sight, and in many cases their reactions are highly negative. He seems somewhat stereotypical (eg., he’s “greasy”). He’s not a bad person – he acts generously toward Cora, a showgirl, to the point where she offers up her virginity to him. He also makes an aborted attempt to save her from peril. But at the end he’s forgotten her and his predominant interest is the closing of a business deal. Just like a Jew, right? Since I mentioned Cora (the virginal showgirl), she’s supposed to garner our sympathy, but she warrants a single summing-up word: unconvincing. I’m giving this novel a weak 2. (delete)

Rosemary’s Baby – Ira Levin

A book should be judged by how well it succeeds at what it attempts, and Levin has succeeded in writing a horror story that’s compelling and convincing. It’s done with an intelligent efficiency – the plot unfolds with momentum, and there’s not a boring page. Every character comes across clearly, every situation is constructed with logic. This is, simply put, damn good writing. Levin stated that he didn’t believe in the devil, and neither do I. So how can a book in which the Devil does exist be credible? Well, in a sense it isn’t. But I found Rosemary to be real and appealing, so I cared about the situation she becomes enmeshed in. To me the horror is the way people use her – evil exists in people. The worst of the lot is her husband; while the others act out of a belief, he sells Rosemary to advance his acting career. Her aloneness comes across with force, and at the end she’s emotionally and mentally broken. Roman Polanski did an excellent job of adapting this story to the screen. Many of Levin’s novels were made into movies because they’re so cinematic – that is, they embed real people in a fascinating plot that moves. 5

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont – Elizabeth Taylor

This novel is the best of all the books I’ve reread so far. There’s one primary reason: it got to me emotionally. It did so in a quiet way – no fireworks go off in this story of an elderly lady who takes up residence at a hotel that has a few permanent guests (all of whom are also elderly). The writing is perfect in a straightforward, unembellished way, but what matters are the insights into age (or, more correctly, the human condition) that are imbedded in the story. These insights are simple, but how seldom are they presented so clearly. If you want to know about the feelings of those near the end of life – a difficult stage, particularly for the ones who are alone – this book will show you. And it will tell you, even if you’re young, something about yourself. It isn’t depressing or dark; it has an engaging plot, and a host of characters you’ll get to know (and whose minds you sometime enter). Of course, Laura Palfrey is foremost, but there’s a young man who is very strong. We can understand why Laura develops feelings for Ludo. It’s not sexual love, but one based on an attraction to a person who is kind, handsome, lively, funny (“kind” comes first). A caring love. Anyway: read this book – it’s one of the few that really matter. As an author Elizabeth Taylor was burdened by her name’s similarity to that of some actress. Palfrey was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1971; Saul Bellow was one of the judges, and he dismissed it as “a tinkling tea cup novel . . . not serious stuff.” It’s an ignorant statement; there are no tinkling tea cups, and my entire review addresses the book’s serious nature. Maybe the lack of pretentiousness turned Bellow off. (V. S. Naipaul's In a Free State would win the award that year.) Taylor was fifty-nine when she wrote Palfrey, and she died five years later. 5

Hear the Wind Sing – Haruki Murakami (Japanese)

This will be a short review for two reasons: the novel was short and reading it was as easy as eating a bag of potato chips. The unnamed narrator is spending his last eighteen days before returning to college. He talks with his friend Rat, he gets halfheartedly involved with a girl who has four fingers, he drinks a lot of beer. Though his aimlessness may depict youthful ennui, it could also reflect an author with no purpose in mind. Supporting the latter theory are the many pages devoted to filler: long spiels from a radio DJ, lyrics of American pop tunes (“I wish they all could be California girls”), the life story of a dead novelist. In a two page “sequel” the narrator jumps ahead in time: at age twenty-nine he’s married, and he and his wife like Sam Peckinpah movies. And that’s about it. He says, “If someone asked me if I was happy, I guess I would have to say yes. Dreams are like that in the end.” I guess they are (whatever that means). This was Murakami’s first novel; he would go on to have international success. Though I haven’t been able to get into his more ambitious work, I enjoyed this. But if you put a bag of potato chips in front of me, I’d enjoy that too. Both are made up of empty calories, and though the novel has a sprinkling of ambiguity (to suggest deep mysteries hidden beneath the surface), that doesn’t slow down consumption. In his Introduction Murakami notes how “very easy” the novel had been to write and how little it meant to him; after he sent it out, he completely forgot about it. If it hadn’t been short-listed for a prize, he “most likely would have never written another novel. Life is strange.” Yes, it is strange. Some writers are committed, work extremely hard, and care deeply about getting even a shred of recognition.

Home Is the Hunter – Gontran de Poncins (French)

That this book fails is a shame, because it has a unique main character and a story that was worth telling. Jean is a cook on an estate; he sees his purpose in life as serving, and that includes keeping up the entire house and the grounds. This is an endless task, but he does it both lovingly and with vigor (he attacks a staircase with steel wool and wax, not content until each step glows). He can show love and kindness to the Monsieur and Madame, but to others (even his wife) he has no feelings. Jean is fecund, earthy, more of a creature (a hare, a carp, a beetle) or a thing (the waters of the lake, leaves, moss) than a man. His bond with nature is spiritual; that he’s an expert hunter is no contradiction, for do not all creatures kill in order to live? When Poncins presents these ideas simply, he’s effective: “For him, to Serve was everything. For forty years he had lived, magnified, lifted above himself by this one idea. There are people who in order to realize their greatness need a battlefield. He had found it in a kitchen.” Good, right? With a deft touch, Poncins said what was needed. But far too often he unloads a mass of verbiage that buries his point; the death of the Madame takes up seven pages, and becomes a meditation involving Nobility, Eternity, God. I won’t go into the plot; suffice to say it’s a tragic one and involves the loss of the old values. If Poncins had stuck to people and events this could have been excellent; instead, his ponderous etudes made it an ordeal to read. I continued to the end because I had admired two books by him. Kabloona is an account of his stay with the Eskimoes; Father Sets the Pace is a biography. In both he found the perfect approach which would serve his subject. But with Home Is the Hunter he uses his inarticulate main character, a man the color of the earth, to philosophize, and he does it in prose that is purple.

Polyglots – William Gerhardie
I liked this author’s first novel, Futility, but it had its faults, the major one being that it was futile to wait for something to happen. I hoped that in his second outing he would offer more than aimless people carrying on aimlessly. But – alas! – early on the narrator describes the book we are reading: “The next story I write will be a tragedy of people who imagine that certain things will happen: they imagine, and their drama is a drama of imagining. Actually, nothing happens.” This is a youthful affectation, and it has its pitfalls. Without a coherent plot Gerhardie needed a constant influx of new blood; midway through an already overpopulated novel we come to a chapter entitled “More Polyglots,” followed by “And Still More Polyglots” and then “A Nest of Polyglots.” I was reminded of a scene in a Marx Brothers film where people crowd into a closet until it’s stuffed to the point where it bursts and everyone comes spilling out. But there’s no bursting in this book; the continuous idiosyncratic chatter of eccentrics became tiresome, and when I quit reading it was with no regrets. The Neversink Library edition has rave reviews from the likes of Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and C. P. Snow. In 1925, at the age of twenty-nine, the author became the toast of London’s literary world; in his introduction Michael Holroyd writes that “At Oxford, the book became the young man’s bible.” Yet, in Gerhardie’s words, it brought in “something equivalent, in terms of royalties, to nothing.” He would live to age eighty-two; at his death in 1977 he was impoverished and seldom left his apartment. One wonders where his band of admirers were. Gerhardie has a streak of cynicism that, it turns out, was justified. A characters in Polyglots muses, “ How strange: people meet, and then part, then write letters, grow tired of that, forget – and then die.”

The Tenth Man – Graham Greene
In his Introduction Greene describes how, in 1983, he learned of the existence of what he recalled to be an outline for a film he had written in 1948 (the same year he did The Third Man). In going through an old diary he came across a synopsis of the plot: “A decimation order. Ten men in prison draw lots with matches. A rich man draws the longest match. Offers all his money to anyone who will take his place. One, for the sake of his family, agrees. Later, when he is released, the former rich man visits anonymously the family who possess his money, he without anything but his life. . . .” When Greene was sent the script he was surprised to receive “not two pages of outline but a complete short novel of 30,000 words.” He found this forgotten story to be “very readable.” It is, despite a few problems. In the prison section there’s much ado about a cheap alarm clock and an expensive watch; they show differing times, and the owners have a dispute about which is accurate; in the second section the watches play no part. Also, after those four dots in the original synopsis, Greene waffled on where to take his premise. His tendency to delve into moral conundrums is out-of-place, and the villain who makes a late arrival is weak. If Greene recognized these defects, at age eighty he couldn’t be expected to rework something he had done thirty-five years ago. So the book stands as an intriguing idea that doesn’t quite come off.

The Confidential Agent – Graham Greene
This is what Greene termed “an entertainment” (as opposed to his “serious” work), so one could expect that he would let up a bit on the gloom and doom. No such luck. Though he put a lot of effort into the prose, the scenes and the characterizations, the plot involves espionage, and here he’s unforgivably sloppy. H. – the confidential agent – is sent to London by his government (which is at war with rebels) to work out a deal for a critical supply of coal. Why they selected such a ninny is, for starters, baffling. H. has very important papers that authorize him to carry out his mission; for sixty pages he’s been guarding these papers with his life. When he leaves for a meeting at the house of the coal supplier, he “put the papers in the breast-pocket of his jacket and wore his overcoat fastened up to the neck. No pickpocket, he was certain, could get at them.” He enters the house, a servant asks “Coat, sir?” and he “let the manservant take his overcoat.” Later, when asked to show his papers, he finds that they’re missing; the servant had lifted them in that briefly described exchange. This feat of legerdemain is preposterous. Also preposterous is a scene in which H. breaks into a vacant apartment; before the police come knocking, he disguises himself (his most notable feature is his “heavy mustache”) by smearing shaving cream over his face. The only razor he finds is a small woman’s, and he goes to the door with that in his hand; the policeman comments on it: “Funny sort of razor you use.” H. says it’s his sister’s, the bobby leaves, and then we have, as with the papers, another magical disappearance: “He cleared the soap away from his mouth: no mustache.” That’s it? With a lady’s razor and with no preliminary clipping with scissors? I may seem to be nitpicking, but it’s incumbent for a writer working in this genre to make things plausible. And it wasn’t just incidentals that are problematic: so are all the villains that pop out of the woodwork. I stopped reading when H. is supposed to change from “The Hunted” (in the first section) to “The Hunter.” I spent a dozen pages with this now-dangerous man, and he was still dithering about.

Late Call – Angus Wilson
You’d think that an author who was knighted for his services to literature would do a better job of structuring a novel. The question of where things are headed arises in the prologue. It needed a revelatory force to warrant its length and intricacy, but when I finally realized who and what it was about it amounted to a mere over-indulgence in narration. Wilson can write well – his disconnected forays, if taken in ten page stretches, were lively enough to keep me reading. Also, in some of those stretches I connected with the main character. Sylvia Calvert is an elderly woman who retires from managing hotels and goes to live with her son and his three grown children; accompanying her is her unruly husband. What undermines Sylvia’s credibility are her inexplicable shifts in mood and attitude; in a space of twenty pages she goes from the depths of depression (immersed in “stunning misery” and “panic horror”) to being upbeat and competent. Such unsubstantiated flip-flopping (and it occurs with other characters) can only originate in the author’s wandering inclinations. Sylvia should be the focus, but Wilson shovels extraneous material into the maw of this novel like a crazed stoker. Secondary characters pop up like jack-in-the-boxes, do something outrageous or semi-insane, and then disappear. There’s a long section in which a mysterious old hunchbacked woman tells her life story to Sylvia (who, like me, is clueless as to its significance). Side-issues abound, such as her son’s efforts to save the town’s Meadow from development; her grandson is flagrantly homosexual (which nobody seems to notice) and one wonders when or if that will be an issue. Finally I concluded that my question of “Where are things going?” doesn’t apply to this haphazard book. At the close Wilson does make an effort to bring some order to the clutter. Sylvia, on one of her walks, saves a little girl’s life and is adopted by a family that immerses her in love; this plot contrivance belonged in a fairy tale. After weathering a series of crises, on the last page a chipper Sylvia contemplates a bright future of independence. A happy ending, unearned. Final note on Late Call: the author tried hard to avoid tags (“Sylvia said”); but, since the many voices aren’t that distinct, it’s often unclear who’s talking. Just another aspect adding to my annoyance.

The Precipice – Ivan Goncharov (Russian)
According to the notes on the back cover, Goncharov (the author of Oblomov) labored over twenty years on The Precipice, and the negative reception it got so embittered him that he never wrote another novel. I’m afraid this review will further his embitterment. The only major character I related to was the aunt, and this was because I admired her diligent concern with the business of running Boris’s estate. When she tries to involve him in his affairs he bluntly refuses; he has no interest in practicalities or material goods (though he lives in high style and never does a lick of work). He thinks of himself as an Artist, and though he has talent as a painter, composer and writer, it’s clear that he’ll never produce anything of substance. Mark, a social outlaw who quotes Proudhon and whose cynicism is all-embracing, refers to Boris as “half a man.” Then there’s the beautiful and mysterious Vera, who Boris falls hopelessly in love with at first sight. She steadfastly refuses to give him a grain of encouragement; all she asks is that he leave her alone. Spying and prying Boris suspects that she has a secret lover. The point at which I quit reading came when her lover’s identity is disclosed: it’s Mark. Of course it’s Mark! She certainly wouldn’t pick someone reasonable to fall in love with. In the first minutes of their encounter she accuses him of being wolfish, malicious and callous. He finds her words amusing. So did I. If he’s all these things, what attracts her to him? The overwrought depiction of tumultuous passions make this novel as dated as a “Perils of Pauline” movie (in which, come to think of it, precipices often plays a role).

The Temptation of Eileen Hughes – Brian Moore
The tension this thriller generates comes not from violence but from psychological forces in opposition. Eileen is a naive young woman who accepts favors, gifts and all-expense-paid trips from her employer and his wife. On an excursion to London she learns what’s behind the generosity: Bernard McAuley reveals his fanatical (though entirely platonic) love for her. Her rejection of him sets off a struggle of wills. While the workings of Bernard’s mind are very odd, they’re also convincing. I believed in his obsession and his sometimes frantic efforts to hold onto someone who wants no part of him. When he says “I will always love you,” these words are both sincere and creepy. His need makes him a pitiable figure; this wealthy, powerful man repeatedly demeans himself in front of Eileen. Despite the temptations (mainly money) dangled before her, Eileen’s determination to shake free never wanes, and as a result she grows into a stronger person. Mona, Bernard’s wife, turns out to be a calculating woman who, in exchange for a life of luxury, acts as an enabler for her husband. There’s a stretch when the book gets mired in plot contrivances (including an ill-conceived scene in which Eileen has her first sexual experience), but in the closing pages Moore rights the ship. Particularly effective is Eileen’s last encounter with Bernard; their meeting needed to have resonance, and it does. There’s a lesson embedded in this short novel: To be under someone else’s power is bad, but so is having power over another person.