Weights and Measures - Joseph Roth (German)

This novel is lightweight – it’s only 150 pages long – and the edition I have is midway between the size of a mass market and a trade paperback. Oh, you want to know about content? Well, there’s hardly anything to it. In a review of Roth’s The Radetzky March, which I liked very much, I described the characters as “muted” and wrote that they proceeded to their fates like “dumb animals.” The same can be said for W&M, yet it lacks the panoramic social aspect of March. We get Inspector Eibenschutz and little else. He’s supposed to be extremely unhappy, but he comes across as emotionally inanimate. The book is sloppily constructed; only near the end do we find out that the Inspector is thirty-six (all along I thought he was in his fifties). It’s also silly. Eibenschutz is obsessed by a gypsy woman (those gypsy women!); when she first appears “her dark blue-black hair led him to think of southern nights, which he had never seen but had possibly once read or heard about.” The prose is simple and precise, but in a self-consciously studied way; you know this when you’re constantly thinking, “How precise and simple!”

Immortality - Milan Kundera (Czech)

Kundera isn’t a novelist. He’s a thinker whose writing serves as a forum for his ideas. He has attained such eminence in the literary world that he can do whatever he wants; this shapeless grab bag of a book is what I’ll call philoso-fiction. In it the author plays a role, as does Goethe and other real-life figures from the past. The fictional modern-day characters are subordinate to Kundera’s larger aims, so they aren’t fully-developed. Free rein can liberate or lead to self-indulgence, or it can do both. Immortality may offer up a unique potpourri for the intellect, but it lost its luster for me (and it did have luster for a while). The overall perspective on human nature is a cynical one. An example: a woman is given the choice (it’s one or the other) of spending the next life with her husband of many years or of never meeting him again; her answer is “We prefer never to meet again.” (She phrases it as “we” because her husband is sitting next to her.) The point being made (with Kundera everything has a point) is that her love is an illusion, and with her answer she’s made to face that fact. Despite invigorating moments, I grew weary. The fictional side wasn’t holding up, and ideas that were intriguing and insightful were examined so rigorously that the freshness was leeched out of them. Plus I had my fill of Goethe; when he reappeared at the beginning of Part Four I called it quits. I did so with absolutely no curiosity, no regrets. I just wanted class to be over.

The Test - Pierre Boulle (French)

In France there’s a test youths must take to get their General Certificate. Or maybe the government has curtailed it due to this 1957 novel, in which it’s depicted as a scourge worthy of use by the Inquisition. Marie-Helen is uniquely unprepared to digest the work of the intellectual giants of the western world. She had lived in a Malaysian fishing village from age nine to seventeen; at that point she was kidnapped and returned to “her people” (white people). But she considered the villagers to be her people. Not only was she assimilated into their culture, but she was happily married. Boulle clearly believed that his heroine should have been allowed to carry on her life in Malaysia. Certainly she should! – all that happens after the kidnapping borders on the ridiculous. Her failure to pass the test leads to her breakdown, a number of murders and a suicide. The agony and despair the various characters feel is rendered in prose that would make a writer of Harlequin romances cringe. At first I thought the translator might be responsible, then I thought he might be partially responsible, but finally I put the blame on Boulle. How could a novelist whose work I’ve admired (The Bridge over the River Kwai, Planet of the Apes) come out with something as clumsy as this? I read those other books long ago. Was I lacking in discrimination? I find it reassuring that the edition of Kwai I have is from the Time Reading Program, and they made excellent choices. 

Life and Times of Michael K - J. M. Coetzee

Michael K is like Robinson Crusoe, yet his isolation takes place in the midst of war-torn South Africa. The opening sentence presents us with one factor that will separate him from others: “The first thing the midwife noticed about Michael K when she helped him out of his mother into the world was that he had a hare lip.” His life passes in solitariness, which he finds easier than dealing with people. At age thirty-one Michael is thrust into the turbulent world when he tries to return his dying mother to the place where she was born. After her death we follow his wanderings. I was involved with the problems he faced and his attempts to solve them, and the unadorned prose was effective in conveying facts. But Coetzee wasn’t satisfied with facts, nor with the character he had created. He wanted to impart a higher meaning to Michael’s existence. As a result, things go badly off course. First he has Michael reject life by rejecting food. Not only didn’t this ring true, but following a person’s loss of bodily substance wasn’t interesting. In a brief Part Two, Coetzee changes the point-of-view to that of a doctor treating the emaciated Michael in a camp; through this deep-thinking character the author tries very hard to inject significance into the situation. In the even briefer last section we return to Michael, but everything – particularly a sexual encounter – seems fabricated. Ultimately we wind up someplace murky and inconclusive. The path Coetzee chose to take – one in which he aimed for profundity – led to a dead end, both for the novel and for Michael K.

The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov (Russian)
I read half the book, often impressed, but I didn’t want to go any further. It didn’t seem worth the effort. (Much of that effort involved keeping the many characters, with their bewildering Russian names, in order.) The first scenes, with the devil arriving at the park, the Pontius Pilate story, the beheading, were very powerful – Bulgakov can make a scene attain a nightmarish intensity. But as the book progressed events were occurring at random, were unconnected and repetitious. I didn’t see any organization or restraint. Maybe this is the work of a self-indulgent genius, but he just tired me out.

Foe - J. M. Coetzee
This is a stylized novel of ideas. The ideas are abstract ones: the process of fictionalization, the nature of truth; and, mostly, the issue of slavery and freedom. It’s spared-down, with the landscapes and even the characters sketched in. The book is mostly one woman talking (or thinking). I wasn’t interested enough in the issues raised, and it’s difficult to relate to characters who don’t exist as fully-developed people. Finally, though still reading, my involvement in the story was almost nil, and at that point the book’s deficiencies came to the forefront. There’s an astringency to the writing that made it seem bloodless. The woman who tells the story does so in such an immaculately-honed prose that it’s unbelievable; how could she express herself like that, being who she’s supposed to be? The mystery of the girl who claims to be her daughter is never solved – just a perplexity, probably with a significance I couldn’t follow (but why would a mother deny motherhood, or why would a girl pretend to be a daughter?). The ending is murky. I thought the book was pretentious – but that can be intimidating. I suspect that Coetzee’s success (two Bookers and a Nobel) comes partly because he seems on a higher plane than most folks, a profound thinker, so people appreciate him to show that they too are profound.

Rates of Exchange - Malcolm Bradbury
Something different. The beginning, made up mostly of descriptions, moves very slowly, but the inventive prose held my attention. Then a plot starts unfolding, but still slowly. The conversations (and, boy, do the women in this book talk!) are bunched together in long paragraphs, so the pages are dense with words. The main character is extremely passive, saying (and thinking) little. Sound dull? It’s not – this is a funny book, partly a sex comedy in which even the cheap laughs work. And the inventive prose is in the Nabokov league. Bradbury can interest the reader even when he dispenses with plot and, to a degree (regarding Petworth’s passivity), characters. Near the end Petworth becomes more active, and I wasn’t sure I bought into the person that emerged. But when he’s betrayed and reveals his suffering, and, in small ways, his humanity and pain, I responded. The book closed on a strong note of pathos.

Disgrace - J. M. Coetzee
I respect this book, though it failed to reach the heights to which it aspired. For over a third I thought it was a great novel. Then it weakened, before recovering some of its power at the close. The lapse occurred after the attack on David and his daughter (a brutal, frightening scene); the action of the plot ceased and the two characters simply circled their situation. When things became static the book exposed itself to scrutiny. The bare style started to seem affected, with its suggestion of great depths of meaning. Also, people began to behave unbelievably – most notable was the daughter’s refusal to act sensibly (and not explaining her actions in any way I could relate to). Coetzee lost my sympathies to a degree, never to fully regain them.

Of Human Bondage - Somerset Maugham
I never finished this. The overblown writing (the word “agony” is used again and again) and the phoniness of emotions alienated me. There was no valid psychological reason for the relationship between Philip and Mildred – so much so that I became suspicious of the author. (What’s really going on?) Beware of novels with titles like this one’s.

So Long, See You Tomorrow - William Maxwell
As stated by the author, this book was an effort to expunge an ancient guilt. (Fiction as therapy?) It was effective in the first half, when the story was about the boy (Maxwell) and his close friend Cletus. Then comes a wonderful scene when the two, now estranged, pass in a high school hall as if they were strangers. At that point Maxwell takes the wrong path. He delves into the lives of Cletus’s parents, whose actions will be so disastrous to his friend. This exploration of adultery is a gloomy and repetitive stretch. The book becomes a conceit – the author presumes to be absolving guilt by giving Cletus understanding on the pages of this novel (he even presumes to go into the mind of a dog). This should have been a short story about a failed friendship. The ending should have been in that high school hall.

The Sound of the Mountain - Yasunari Kawabata (Japanese)
This is a study of a man contemplating the meaning of his life. Shingo is going through a lot in his old age, and he responds in a troubled, puzzled way. He’s afflicted by disturbing thoughts and dreams. What concerns him most is the relationship of his son with his wife (and his, Shingo’s, attraction to her). Kawabata stays firmly in the quotidian; much attention is given to nature – animals, what’s growing in the ground. The book has a fragmented feel, like a painting composed of many small strokes that, when one steps back, make up a whole picture. And yet the picture is not whole in the sense of being resolved. Kawabata presents the possibility of a resolution on the last page, but turns away from it. Life is not that simple, nor that pleasant. *