Re-reads

Pan – Knut Hamsun (Norwegian)

This novel is strange and perplexing. Not that it’s written in an obscure way – the prose is as clear as could be. But the main character —Thomas Glahn, whose journal we’re reading – feels and acts in ways that are inexplicable. He’s been living with his dog Aesop in a hut by an immense forest for two years, and his emotional bond with nature is extreme; it affects him in a deep, even rapturous way. But then he falls in love with a young woman – Edvarda – and, again, his feelings toward her are extreme. In the beginning she responds, but then she begins to withhold, then to give a bit. He’s emotionally pulled one way and then the other. The merest slight by her will cause him to go overboard, and when he’s angry he’ll do crazy things (such as shoot himself in the foot). The stage is set for tragedy – the “gift” that Glahn gives Edvarda when he leaves is truly shocking. Hamsun may have been responding to the glamorization in fiction of outsize emotions. He showed such emotions as being devoid of glamour, but rather a manifestation of a consuming madness.

The Job Hunter – Allen R. Dodd

This “Diary of a Lost Year” follows the travails of a NYC ad executive who finds himself out of a job. It’s not due to any lack on his part – in the course of this book he emerges as intelligent, creative, hard-working. But, due to some shifting in the upper ranks of the big corporation he works for, he’s deemed  expendable. This is a very readable account of his search for a position that corresponds to his experience and salary (though his expectations steadily lower). His search is actually a job in itself – he tells his wife that he labors ten hours a day to be a bum: pounding the pavement, eating at automats, making calls to prospective employers from public telephone booths. Corporate America can be a mean world for those looked upon as outsiders – he encounters a lot of callousness. What kindness and sympathy he finds comes from a cadre of job seekers like himself. This book first appeared in 1962 as articles written for a trade journal called Printers’ Ink, and it no doubt was read with a sense of trepidation. At the end our narrator finds a job, but not at the level (or salary) he was used to. Still, his new employers seem like decent, fair-minded people. His life style drops quite a few notches, but that’s OK (he realizes he had been living beyond his means). Though he’s found security, he’s left with a lingering suspicion – things are good now, but what if . . .

The Day of the Locust – Nathanael West

The setting of this fever nightmare is the underbelly of Hollywood, a place of cheap artifice populated by weirdos, grotesques, losers. Written 1939, it’s rough stuff even by today’s standards. Though today’s standards don’t apply, for the force of West’s vision is his own, and his skill is not to be duplicated. Tod, the main character, is fairly stable, though his sexual obsession with Faye is sick (a fact he fully comprehends). Faye, an aspiring actress, is a casually amoral user, and has an effect on every man she comes in contact with (if put on the screen – assuming her allure would transfer – she could be a sensation). Memorable characters swarm about the pages – and are often quite funny: Harry, the aging vaudevillian, who can’t stop doing routines even on his death bed; Abe, the pugnacious dwarf, always ready to dispense verbal or physical abuse. The book made me wonder about West’s state of mind. Though he doesn’t use overt gore or vulgarity, he seems to have a to-hell-with-it attitude, and he respects no limits of propriety. Was it written in anger, bitterness? This author of great talent received no financial compensation for his first three novels, and was stuck in Hollywood doing scripts for B- westerns. He died in a car accident shortly after the publication of Locust. He was 37 years old.

The Monkey’s Wrench – Primo Levi (Italian)

Faussone is a rigger – a mechanic who can do everything from weld a seam to operate a crane (and anything in between). This man with minimal schooling is so good at building things that he’s called to faraway lands (Africa, India, Russia) to work on the construction of a bridge or a tower. He tells of his projects to someone who is, clearly, Primo Levi. Faussone is a likeable and entertaining guy – a real individual emerges (though, being non-mechanical, I couldn’t understand most of the work he was describing). Levi is making a point: manual labor (as opposed to purely intellectual pursuits) can require a high degree of intelligence and creativity. He’s a chemist, and he tells one story in which he discovers the problem in some paint his company has sold. What Levi is contemplating in this book is abandoning his chemist job and becoming a full-time writer. Faussone responds with these words: “Excuse me for saying so, but if I was in your shoes, I’d give it some careful thought.” It’s better, he goes on, to do things with your hands; you can see your success, and, if you fail, you can fix it. This was good advice – which, of course, Levi was giving himself through his character. Levi, as writer, was not a novelist (Wrench, though classified as fiction, has no plot). What he wrote about in most of his books were his experiences as a prisoner at Auschwitz. Though these books have value as a testimonial, they made him relive an emotionally unhealthy subject.

The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi (Italian)
Of the three other books I’ve read by Levi, this is the first that deals with the ten months he spent as a prisoner in Auschwitz. I tend to avoid that subject. Levi, on the other hand, could not avoid it – it was the central experience in his life. Some of what he writes will be hard for survivors of the death camps to accept; he questions the veracity of their memories (his included) and writes that “the worst survived, the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators, the spies.” But dehumanized people – and in his analytical way Levi describes the process by which human beings were systematically reduced to animals – are not noble or brave or generous. Especially if they’re in a state of constant fear, hunger, exhaustion. For perpetuating the worst crime known to man Levi condemns not only those authorities who carried out Hitler’s agenda, but also the German civilians who were alive at the time. In the book’s last section he provides excerpts of letters he received from Germans after the publication of Survival in Auschwitz in Germany (it was written in 1947 but not translated into German until 1961). Though he had shown how fear ruled the lives of those imprisoned in the camps, he rejects the claim by Germans that they refrained from any form of resistance due to fear of retribution; he finds the silent (often complacent, in his opinion) onlookers also culpable. Levi died a year after the publication of this book. A coroner deemed his death a suicide, a conclusion that some dispute. What is known is that he fell three stories from the interior landing of his apartment house. Days before his death he had complained to his physician of dizziness. But there must have been a railing on the landing; surely the coroner took into consideration its height to determine if someone could have accidentally toppled over it. At any rate, I don’t think it was healthy for Levi to retire from his job as a chemist; when he devoted full time to writing he had one tormenting subject that he had to revisit. He tried to turn to others – notably (and quite successfully) in The Monkey’s Wrench – but he wasn’t a novelist. In The Drowned and the Saved he writes that a reason which would justify his survival is that he could bear witness. But, he notes, “. . . the thought that this testifying of mine could by itself gain for me the privilege of surviving and living for many years without serious problems troubles me because I cannot see any proportion between the privilege and its outcome.” I have a photo of Levi taken in the summer of 1986 (he died in April, 1987). He’s sitting at his desk, looking over his typewriter at the camera. I can use only one word to describe his expression: desolate. On the pages of his final book there are many references to suicide. And to survivor’s guilt. Ultimately, no one escapes Auschwitz.

The Hermit – Eugene Ionesco (French)
This “novel” is a conceptual mistake in which Ionesco mixes two distinct modes of writing. There’s the story of a man who retires from his job after coming into an inheritance; he moves to a new apartment, begins to settle in, etcetera. Though this unnamed narrator is able to interact with others, he’s solitary and idle – a bad combo – and is prone to anxiety attacks, which he turns to alcohol to ease. I found the account of the man’s daily existence to be fairly interesting. But we also get a heavy dose of his musings on life, death and the Meaning of It All. Or lack of meaning: he sees the world as an inexplicable void. A sample: “I would take on such dimensions that by occupying the entire space that one might refer to as existential, I would again find myself hard against the walls of the inconceivable.” As the book progressed this contemplative aspect took over and became bleak and frenzied; the man seemed to be going mad. But Ionesco had buried him under the weight of so much abstract thinking that I couldn’t relate to a human being. The Hermit was no longer a novel, and I was no longer a reader.

A World of Profit - Louis Auchincloss
There must be at least a few good novels among the thirty-two that Auchincloss wrote in his long life. This doesn’t happen to be one of them, and I won’t be embarking on a search for any winners. Not that Profit is bad – it’s a competent piece of writing, and I finished it. But I did so in a disengaged manner. I had high hopes in the beginning – there a was a plot, characters were developed, dialogue was lively. The first inklings of a problem had to do with motivation. The character’s emotions and actions didn’t ring true; they seemed to be playing roles in a contrived drama. I felt I was reading – for all its trappings of depth and intelligence – what amounted to the equivalent of a TV soap opera. The ending, in which all the dilemmas that had accumulated are left unresolved, wasn’t disappointing because I didn’t care very much about anyone. Auchincloss was born into a wealthy family, attended Groton and Yale, had a career at a prestigious New York law firm. (There’s an orderliness to his prose, probably an asset in composing a legal brief.) He draws from his background for his fictional subject matter, and I think his audience came mainly from the upper crust of society. He also produced over a dozen non-fiction works (the man was a compulsive writer); one is about Edith Wharton, who, like him, was a chronicler of the world of privilege. But in her best work she cared so deeply about her characters that they came alive for the reader. I wonder if Auchincloss realized what she possessed, and what he – at least in this novel – lacked.

Other People’s Trades - Primo Levi (Italian)
These essays are two or three pages long; many have a scientific subject, for Levi was, at heart, a chemist. What’s here is mostly enjoyable, though Levi sometimes goes over my non-scientific head. I don’t think he should have quit his chemist’s job to become a full-time writer. At the end of this book he admits that he finds nothing compelling to write about, and I couldn’t help but think of his suicide. Still, these pieces are not dark, and some offer up a hard-earned wisdom.

Viper’s Tangle - Francois Mauriac (French)
What we get is a letter a man is writing to his wife, to be read after his death. An interesting (though restrictive) format, but Mauriac uses it to promote his religious beliefs. The book is monotonous, tiresome and murky.

Flying to Nowhere - John Fuller
A concoction of images without form or purpose. Many of these images are bizarre and gross, but they’re rendered in a delicate prose; this mixture induces queasiness. If I hadn’t read good novels by poets, I’d say, after reading this one (or, rather, part of it), that they shouldn’t write them. The faults and difficulties I find in some poetry – particularly obscurity and pretentiousness – are evident even in the book’s title.

The Easter Parade - Richard Yates
Grueling, as is usual with Yates. The book follows the lives of two sisters, from youth to old age, but the narrative is lopsided; at first they’re given equal attention, then Sarah is pretty much abandoned. It becomes Emily’s story (which is one unhappy love affair after another); Sarah appears late in the book as more of a mess than she was when we left her. I found it all depressing, but I had little empathy for the two women; what should have moved me didn’t. Yates is an autobiographical writer, and it’s notable that the strongest episode involves a poet. I saw Yates in this character, observing himself through the eyes of Emily as she loses all love for him. This masochiostic portrayal stands out in a book that sometimes reads like a case study. I think Yates struggled with Parade; even the structure seems cobbled together, as if Yates were trying (and failing) to find the right path. Still, he makes his point again: Life is hard, full of disappointments and failure. This is another one of his tragedies of the commonplace, though he did it best in his first novel, Revolutionary Road.

Persuasion - Jane Austen
I never finished it; the interest wasn’t there. The main character, Ann, was too Miss Perfect. Maybe Austen identified with her and thus kept piling up the excellencies of character. Also, the prose is difficult in that you can lose your line of thought in its prolonged intricacies. The author has a good touch with humor, and she can satirize people’s foibles nicely, but there wasn’t enough of that and too much of the cloying Ann.

Let It Come Down - Paul Bowles
I had quite enough of Bowles when I finished this novel. He can do so many things well – create interesting characters, scenes, dialogue, mood. The exotic setting (Morocco) was especially good. Yet he can’t make sense of it all. He stays, at length, in his main character’s thoughts, but that mind is muddled from hashish. Bowles moves the plot along in fits and starts; he has people act in unlikely ways, abandons characters and lines of action which he’s spent much time developing. Bowles may be lazy or hashish-addled himself; at any rate, he seems incapable of sustaining logic. What he can do – and does often (I’ve read three of his novels and some stories) – is come up with some really repugnant cruelty at the end.

The Sixth Day - Primo Levi (Italian)
Levi is a chemist, and in this book he takes intriguing scientific ideas and develops them, making a quick, solid point and stopping. Almost all these pieces succeed in what they set out to do: they make one see the world in a fresh light. It’s not Levi’s aim to develop characters or plot, so the main lack of this book – for a reader like me – is its absence of people involved in situations I could relate to. Levi was not a novelist; the closest he came to writing one was The Monkey’s Wrench – and that’s wonderful.

The Sins of the Fathers - Lawrence Block
A private eye novel of the dark, brooding variety, about sordid matters. The writing is pared down, efficiently simple, but the first person voice is too unemotional. It comes across as artificial: the world-weary PI. Not that this book isn’t well done – it all works, even the revelation at the end is plausible – but I read reluctantly, not really enjoying it, not caught up in the events, and wondering if a guilty pleasure should be more pleasurable.

The Man Who Loved Children - Christina Stead
This unique novel sets its own standards and is driven by a passion that sweeps aside all reservations; I accepted its extremeness, its histrionic edge. The prose is initially difficult, but its intricate rhythms are accessible. In Stead’s portrayal of a weirdly dysfunctional family no one is wholly attractive, no one can be labeled as a villain; everyone is too complex to classify or dismiss. This novel sprang unbridled from the best place – somewhere deep inside the author. It’s a great achievement. *