Initial Review: We know so little of others. Barely we capture pieces of ourselves which can be cobbled together intoA review of second reading coming.
Initial Review: We know so little of others. Barely we capture pieces of ourselves which can be cobbled together into what we believe ourselves to be; the unified presence necessary to calculate and cope with with the underside of the unfurling wave of life's chaos.
The book opens upon a group of innocents, small sensitive children at a private school in the country. They take turns, perhaps in a game, naming what is happening around them. Would children speak in the perceptive elevation of poetics? The sentences are couched in, she said, or he said. Plain as...It could be what is in their minds; their unspoken thoughts. The group has been like a primordial cluster with the slight beginnings of tentative separations.
"Up here Bernard, Neville, Jinny and Susan (but not Rhoda) skim the flower beds with their nets. They skim the butterflies from the nodding tops of the flowers. They brush the surface of the world. Their nets are full of fluttering wings.'Louis! Louis! Louis!' they shout. But they cannot see me. I am on the other side of the hedge. There are only little eyeholes among the leaves..."
Their staid and structured lives parceled in prepared segments is disrupted as life seeps in.
Louis, surprised, is kissed by Jinny,while making himself invisible within the bushes.
The maid is kissed by a kitchen worker in the full dazzle of kitchen garden sunlight, "I saw Florrie in the garden," said Susan, as we came back from our walk, with the washing blown out around her, the pajamas, the drawers, the night-gowns blown tight.And Earnest kissed her. He was in his green baize apron cleaning silver; and his mouth was sucked like a purse in wrinkles and he seized her with the pajamas blown out hard between them. He was blind as a bull, and she swooned in anguish, only little veins streaking her white cheeks red. Now though they pass plates of bread and butter and cups of milk at tea-time I see a crack in the earth and hot steam hisses up; and the urn roars as Ernest roared, and I am blown out hard like the pajamas,even while my teeth meet in the soft bread and butter, and I lap the sweet milk..."
"Since I am supposed," said Neville, "to be too delicate to go with them, since I get so easily tired then am sick, I will use this hour of solitude, this reprieve from conversation, to coast round the purlieus of the house and recover, if I can, by standing on the same stair half-way up the landing, what I felt what when I heard about the dead man through the swing-door last night when cook was shoving in and out the dampers. He was found with his throat cut. The apple tree leaves became fixed in the sky; the moon glared; I was unable to lift my foot up the stair. He was found in the gutter. His blood gurgled down the gutter. His jowl was white as a dead cod-fish. I shall call this stricture, this rigidity, 'death among the apple trees,' forever...But we are doomed, all of us by the apple trees, by the immitigable tree which we cannot pass."
Their reprieve is too watch Percival, this savior figure, a student muscular, carefree, not wounded by the burden of self-consciousness. He is watched but not joined. The group watches but does not join. Each remains within their precious starlit moments, perceptions, remarks. The, he saids, she saids, take place only within their minds. We are not invited. We are thrust in and reside there. We hear character's reflections upon themselves, others, as well as events we have heard within another's mind. This is not a book about the inner consciousness of characters-which I love-but a book where the reader lives within another's consciousness. This is where the genius of Woolf takes realism to new heights. Science cannot take us within the experience of another person, the uncountable experiences of the progression of moments through the hours of a day, a night. Woolf has. I believe she meant this poetic prose to be read a sentence a day. Each day giving it time to settle and surface within a spectered prism to cup within one's hands and cherish.
Time passes easily within this book that is not a book when reading, which does not exist in any palpable form. As each get older and goes off, though only able to countenance the world through their mental existence as part of the primordial group, they become staid in their performance allotted to them of, philosophy, culture, attachment to nature, reason, love of the continuous flow of apt phrases, the crumbling of boundaries bringing about both fearsome and beatific images. They ride above life in a rarified atmosphere. Then news is received. The savior is dead. He has not risen. There had been a party to see him off to India. The trembles of fear of entering the world as adults haunts the party, their final separations. In India he died in a riding accident. Life, this world so inane in its appearances has flooded in with the concreteness, not of the remarkable-remark but the flow of guts and blood and...death.
This is not an event that can be assimilated within their scope of existence. As when life earlier interceded their thoughts and diction, it prevented them from taking any further step up. They settled into lives incongruent with natures never found, perhaps never sought, though congruent with who they seemed. The desperate awkward reunion arranged by Bernard in mid-life is a painful listening to all that is not in their lives and now will never be. The high and mighty, who disdained those all-to-ready to sacrifice the anxieties of philosophical searchings for the existence of hum-drum survival, found themselves trapped within the trophies of their once heralded self-heard speeches. Compromises quieted and unnoticed pass in isolation. Poor Bernard seeks himself, not the parts that respond to who he is visiting or to a particular situation. When alone all he can do is come up with phrases to label feelings, others, events which have or are unfolding, as Neville, sitting alone will pull another book down off the shelf. None, are able to see things as they are and therefore cannot see what is beneath or is waiting. They are removed by a layer of film of their own making. What they thought brilliance was defense. What they lacked was the strength to face the onslaught. Bernard sees the next morning the city awakening as a resurrection. Woolf goes on to show us what follows. What life is. What we are called to and why. In her precise, poetic prose she does not hesitate, she does not falter.
If allotted only enough time to read one last book this is the one I would choose. It is the only book I have read which so completely does not write but experiences the totality of life. All novels henceforth flowed and flows from this book. Each wittingly or unwittingly tries to gain its reach, its complexity, completion....more
The sheer length and depth of this work made it daunting yet each section even when woven and interwoven with other stories and characters were plain The sheer length and depth of this work made it daunting yet each section even when woven and interwoven with other stories and characters were plain spoken ("conversational," as Egger's said in his introduction), fascinating and inviting. This was not the voice of high layered poetics. Soon, without showing his hand DFW's words drifted into becoming mesmerizing. Without seeing a flicker of his eye a box sprung open and out flew all the pretensions that our culture offers up as life; goal oriented A-B linearity, the precision of logic, the false calls of fame, the hollowness of power and authority, consumerism, entertainment, status, pseudo intellectualism, religion, addiction, recovery, containment. Balanced with humor he removes one source of pretend comfort at a time while revealing the howling sadness of loneliness and regret. He leaves us stripped. It is his intention. He offers no resolution. That is what this book has been about for me. The very shape of the structure, the style, the incomplete stories and characters put me through a sweated fearful experience in the absence of resolution. Reading this book leaves little room for anything else in life. It is consuming. He flies as close as he can to the scalding bright heat of reality. By doing so DFW left open the possibility of rather than searching for comfort, to face ourselves and life unblinded, as Gately did in his hospital bed, with the hopes of an unresolved but fuller existence. Yes, for all of the above it is difficult but one of the great experiences in literature....more
The book is riveting. At times I wished I could leave its world. I was unable, a captive in the dense bleak circularity of emptiness seeking a fullnesThe book is riveting. At times I wished I could leave its world. I was unable, a captive in the dense bleak circularity of emptiness seeking a fullness always out of reach. Yet, when I neared the end I grew sad of ever leaving these haunted beings trying to survive within the web of fear. The narrator is a private detective hired to find the Queen of Whores. He enters the Tenderloin riddled with prostitution and drug addicts. At first they seem to fit easily within these labels. Our detective is emptied from within and hangs onto the memory of his suicided lover, his brother's wife. What he finds in the Tenderloin are children who had been horribly abused, abandoned, or born with crack cocaine sizzling through their minute veins. The selves they had were too painful and horror-struck to ever live with. Desperate and empty these children were forced to run away, traumatized and blind-eyed. Quickly they were picked up by predatory pimps and fed drugs. Given or adopting a name they walked the streets. They had to turn a trick, make the money, cop the next fix that would wipe out the horrors and fears they or no child could survive. Once addicted the drug itself required daily renewal, or a number of times a day so tricks must be turned or face the nightmare of withdrawal. The fear is amped-up by the ongoing danger of being beaten, robbed or killed. This particular group attached themselves to the Queen who provided protection, some sense of security, and a mystical reverence to believe in. Each prostitute could be given any name since there was no self to attach it too. Their only desire could be for the next fix to fend off the always threatening overwhelming anxiety and hell-fired drug withdrawal. Their vision could extend no further and their belief in their Queen was so vast that her suggestions became their physical placebo reality. Encased in an inescapable circle survival was their remaining instinct. Their only adequate attachment was to the Queen and that was acolyte to godhead, child to parent. Within this group of emptied souls, this Royal Family, distrust of anyone prevented any meaningful attachment. They related to each other from the backstage safety of veiled distance, the remoteness of anonymity. Served up into hell, they had no say over it.
The narrative shifts to different settings where others are whoring but it is no longer called such since they wear the costumery of, waitresses, sales-people, bail bondsmen, attorneys, judges, entrepreneurs. No social caste escapes. The spidered web of fear entangles all. The costumes and customs, hierarchies are different providing silvered and golden solvents to hide the addictions to, work, sex, status, pride, ownership, accumulation, power, food, intellect, etc., which money provides as shields. The process seems the same-but for the grace of god that could be me. It not only could but is in different forms to avoid our insecurities, fears, aggressions, to maintain the image we have conjured of ourselves.
We watch our detective as his search for the Queen becomes an obsession to heal his own bitter lonely emptiness. He is referred to as Hank, Henry, Tyler. He too has many names since he has none. However he is searching, believing a soul is within his reach, although he can only love-be attached-to what he cannot have. Where he can fit in is with the Queen's girls, women walking the street, the skank hotel rooms, alcohol, crack. In time he too prays at the feet of the Queen, hoping to merge with her through the ingestion of her bodily fluids, her placebo wizardry. They become a couple. His childhood dreams are answered.
As with all gods made false by our needy desires The Queen over time fades and the Royal Family splinters. This is one of the best rendering of time passing a reader can hope to experience. Time passing is one of this book's exquisite themes. Hank is left without. His Queen is gone, as is the old neighborhood of the Tenderloin. He is left to search for her but in time he searches in order to search, another addiction.
This is my first Vollmann. I read in some non-GR reviews he cannot write well. Whatever that might mean I thought this was the best example I have read of style dictated by content. This was the only way this story could have been written. The sentences are straightforward, easy to access even if their contents are not easily stomached. There is never a judgement, a prejudice. It is simply told. I was there stripped of all my comfortable preconceptions. I lived in those bars, hotel rooms, alleyways, on those streets. Yes, he is repetitive. If he wasn't I would have been disappointed. That is the existence of street life within the vicious circle of these women, within the life of junkies. Simply telling that would have flattened out the narrative and erased the vitality that makes this book pop. He showed it, he rendered it, I lived it. I now understand which is something far different, and I believe deeper, than acceptance or approval. Understanding others is where Vollmann has led me and for that I am grateful.
I am writing this review because I have just finished and writing is the only thing I can do at this moment. The book has shaken me where reading any I am writing this review because I have just finished and writing is the only thing I can do at this moment. The book has shaken me where reading any other book in the future has come into question. Maybe I should have waited till the heat simmered and collected my thoughts but this too would counter what I have just read, experienced and been shaken by. Let's start with the simple and easy and get it out of the way. The book is told in first person by a narrator who was not raised by parents or in a loving family. He has isolated himself, except for his man servant-also his greatest tormentor-from others, from what we call life. He lives off of little. This now being out of the way, the book starts with an unreliable narrator who goes through a world's breadth of feelings about himself. This is extreme. It is savage. This book is savage and meant to be. If you have a ,Savage, shelf this is the book to shelve there but alone, apart from others. On one level the story is about a man who was not loved, is not capable of love, friendship, and has shut himself away metaphorically underground. Who better to see the world through? These are not the eyes of an unreliable narrator. We are all to some degree unreliable narrators. I am. He is not. Without hesitation he faces within himself the onslaught of,fears, prejudices, envies, hostilities, brutalities,contradictions, the need for love, the need to protect against it, meanness, bitterness, hatred of himself and others. He finds safety only within his rooms. There he can fantasize himself as nobler and where he can act out his dreams of revenge. However, from the vantage point of his underground fortress he sees the dance of the world filled with its trite conventions and honors. The pathetic discourse taken for social life sickens him. He is no good at the game and has no interest in playing it. The problem sets in when he is snubbed, mocked for his poverty, lack of social standing, his poor job. At times he is compelled to act out his hostilities with wretched results. Outraged that those who threw their lives away at the trite, ridiculous party games could look down at one like himself who read, thought, led a higher, deeper life. He held a mirror up from his shabby rooms, not one that could be hung plumb on the back of a door, a wall, but one clearly at a precise angle that reflects the brutality of our species and the creatively refined ways we use to cover this over. We all act from a base, he says early on, and from that base,i.e; honor, an entire set of behaviors becomes justified. He acts from the base of reflection, intellectual perseverance, thought, and reason. These too are subject to the use of finery to cover the growls and animal snarls hissed within, underground. At the end he acknowledges he is a paradoxical character, too; that everything above ground is an attempt to become the average man and in essence is a defense. We would all like to be admired for our joinings, our costumes, the proper trainings of accepted behavior, the hopes for status and honors, and to be included. Possibly literature for its own sake is an answer. Also, he notes, this lover of paradoxes, cannot stop writing here, even though the story must end. Hopefully, he will continue from his underground sanctuary for all time to come. I am counting on it. ...more
This, his final novel makes it clear that all his works need to be read in their order as one edition leading up to his final life conclusion! A man cThis, his final novel makes it clear that all his works need to be read in their order as one edition leading up to his final life conclusion! A man caught within the depths of thought striving for something beyond his sight captures his heroic journey through his written words.
A different voice from the Hesse of my college days. No longer redirecting my compass eastward toward a spirituality with a promise to enlarge consciousness. This is a firm clear voice that looks back to arrive at an understanding. His own truth. One ground and distilled from a life of thought. But the voice wavers at times as the story foretold has a waver of its own.
Joseph Knecht is selected as a student of promise. As his achievements are recognized, much to his surprise and glee, he is selected to the highest consecration of the intellectually elite, Castalia. Supported by the government those enrolled or encumbered in Castalia have in some way sworn to dedicate themselves to maintaining its well ordered hierarchy. The hierarchy supplies Castalia with serenity, a static but comfortable stability, built to prevent any disordered flow of disruptive emotion while dedicated to a life of contemplation, research, study of any subject worthy of intellectual exploration.
Is there any other of us who earlier in life didn’t wonder, can’t I just get paid for thinking? Reading? Come on, there must be somebody else. Do I see a hand raised?
Joseph Knecht enjoyed learning for learnings sake. Due to this, his steadfastness, lack of any ambition where it came to a rise in status, was hauled upwards into the higher brackets of the hierarchy where his tasks were no longer oriented around his passionate love for teaching, teaching especially the young. As he left his friends behind in the world when he left for Castalia he now left his beloved profession. Of course he dedicated himself to his new duties, gradually rising to a position so lofty it can barely be discerned by the outside world, in its abstract ether; Magister Ludi. The Magister (Master) of the Glass Beads Game. The holy trinity exalted into blends of knowledge, philosophical thought, aesthetic creation, their intertwining, interweaving into the multitude of countless interstices. The games as drawn up in competition are archived. Abundant and frequently referred to, they are held with reverence. The Glass Bead games not only singles out the best players but insures the continous enlargement of consciousness, wisdom, knowledge.
The world wonders, as the intellectual elite of Castalia expects, what good is pure intellectual pursuit for the sake of pure intellectual pursuit? Castlia is repulsed by the sordid life of the working class with their lack of curiosity, non-questioning obeisance to the trifles of meaningless conventions and dully repeated jokes; their ant-like drive to follow whoever is in front of them in the long endless moving line to avoid any flint of individuality lurking around dark corners in danger of being lit.
Castalia readily points out, in the current twenty third century, it was properly born from the previous years of conflict and destruction evolving into a means of avoiding such an occurrence. Indeed there has not been.
Knecht himself isn’t positive what the connection is or if there is one. He and his colleagues, in their monk-like quasi religious life, having sacrificed any iota left of individuality to the order, preserving the knowledge of what to do and how to behave in all circumstances, the comfort of effacing stability, also follow what they are told. However, with the stamp of elite buried in their brow they are held and hold themselves in a higher status.
Do they contribute except for responses to papers written and studies summarized within their hallowed halls? The resounding answer within these halls is, of course we do. The pure pursuit of truth is always elevated to the highest. Besides, dealing with life in the world is a lower pursuit and one not worthy of following. Understanding that the world and its production enables Castalia to exist, does not alter their view. The world with its bustling jobs based on fear and ambition thinks the same of Castalia.
And where is Knecht?
Hesse’s skill as a novelist is shown in his ability to dramatize this rather than lecturing. The dramatization is furthered by attention to detail and the apt planting of narrative seeds barely recognized at first, then the enjoyment of its first lucid buds and flowerings thereafter.
Ha! The more I write the more there is to be said in this glass bead game of my own that I have created and fallen into. Let it be said this was Hesse’s last novel and its ending is immense. It was an honor to be in The Glass Beads Game presence, in the presence of Hesse....more
She lives in the squalor of emotional desolation. Not knowing or understanding herself she is disconnected from herself and therefore she is disconnecShe lives in the squalor of emotional desolation. Not knowing or understanding herself she is disconnected from herself and therefore she is disconnected from others. But there is more for as she tries to understand herself; place the amorphous shards and pieces together to free a whole person; to be who she is and who she is becoming, she is exquisitely vulnerable. Whatever boundaries she has are barely visible. Therefore everyone and anyone can invade and make her who they want. It is terrifying; a terrifying world where being disconnected is her only defense; to withdraw into her internal world. Here is where she can safely continue her observations, insights, brief flickerings of understanding. This epic battle where fear and anxiety rule.
What she begins to find is that what is meaningful in her world is not truly related to the everyday world of others. She experiences that others are willing to make vast sacrifices for comfort and to fit in. As she moves through the immaturity of her inner development into the hope of a wholeness, she is thought of as evil. She cannot deny that posing her ideas and points of view, her way of life onto these innocent others would be evil. They are content to not be in constant battle. They can be in the world even if narrowed. Why do that to them?
This is a book of journeys and internal heroism. Flipping from first to third person and back again it all works in expressing the inexpressible and why it is such.
She lives in the squalor of emotional desolation. Not knowing or understanding herself she is disconnected from herself and therefore she is disconnected from others. But there is more for as she tries to understand herself; place the amorphous shards and pieces together to free a whole person; to be who she is and who she is becoming, she is exquisitely vulnerable. Whatever boundaries she has are barely visible. Therefore everyone and anyone can invade and make her who they want. It is terrifying; a terrifying world where being disconnected is her only defense; to withdraw into her internal world. Here is where she can safely continue her observations, insights, brief flickerings of understanding. This epic battle where fear and anxiety rule.
What she begins to find is that what is meaningful in her world is not truly related to the everyday world of others. She experiences that others are willing to make vast sacrifices for comfort and to fit in. As she moves through the immaturity of her inner development into the hope of a wholeness, she is thought of as evil. She cannot deny that posing her ideas and points of view, her way of life onto these innocent others would be evil. They are content to not be in constant battle. They can be in the world even if narrowed. Why do that to them?
This is a book of journeys and internal heroism. Flipping from first to third person and back again it all works in expressing the inexpressible and why it is such.
He no more asked for these gifts than one asks for their eyesight or their height. No, this is incorrect. The gift part is wrong. Is crucial. He didn’He no more asked for these gifts than one asks for their eyesight or their height. No, this is incorrect. The gift part is wrong. Is crucial. He didn’t look upon it as being different. Different from who? His father, whose art was conning, swaying, basking in the illusion of his better self?
Through his life it went unquestioned, his existence was his work.; creating a line then following that line into further lines and into the creation it was destined to be. Done with that work he moved onto what beckoned next. He was the work. The work was him. It hadn’t occurred to him to commercialize what he had done since he was not part of that world; never had been; never thought about it.
So, it was easy for others to think of him as strange, someone foreign, a hermit or whatever other category came to mind to explain to them what was unexplainable; soothe the scratch at the back of their throat.
The Harland family was large as we skipped up and down through the generations as told not by Frank but by his nephew who is an attorney. This is not a first person account by the artist. The nephew is both distant and intrigued enough to make a narrator who can parse out the press of creativity from the existence of the everyday life lured into the swirls of conventions, expectations. He is not young enough to go announce to the world this parting of the cracked land leaving a large island for those who will toil without considering it, as what is necessary for the survival of the species. The other island is more of an isle where creativity ascends.
It seems strange to refer to him as Frank or even Harland. Compulsory it hems him in. His life rises above hemming and limiting. It isn’t that he does not care it is simply that the only thing he is allowed to care about due to his neurological swayings, the heat and yearning from his darting blood is his drawing and painting; the ascending line. This leads him as he ages to a hollowed out crag in the side of a hill on his family’s property. Barely he stakes out some shelter, a means of gathering, cooking simple food. He cares not for his health. The only one’s allowed into this carved out hermitage are a small group of art students from the local college who beyond the art have come to care about the artist as a friend and one who needs to be cared for? But in this hermitage he can work endlessly without the care for food or sleep. The other is our narrator who respects his uncles need for privacy but appears after a storm per se to help out. Death is always there but bodily death would be so much less than the death of his continued creative work.
Is this book a summons to the creativity lurking in most, threatening to burst out with its ample flame of colors and upend what we have thought of as our lives; scorching our aims and goals, dreams of a laddered climb but where the ladder turns step-less, and nightmares proliferated by the fears spawned by the shackles of an economy that can only exist if others fear failing, fear they are insufficient. The small island, isle, can be reached only by the fearless, a strength accorded to the few.
It requires much sacrifice but to reach the isle sacrifice no longer exists; only the work. An account so vivid that it plays through my mind now two weeks later. It enlarges its scope and the space is nameless as is the man in the hermitage and his work. Anything said in words will only limit what is limitless. These words also....more
This book is short though usually referred to as slim, at eighty eight pages. Its prose, rather than slim, deepens in ever reaching transcendental layThis book is short though usually referred to as slim, at eighty eight pages. Its prose, rather than slim, deepens in ever reaching transcendental layers never revealing intention. There is no trace of crafting it down or trying to say more. The allotted pages were precisely what this story called for and where it ended. It was created in the absence of the tools of the post modern trade. Its immediacy ran the length of the novel maintaining its tightened grip to the last word.
Each of Aira's words are important in this seamless narrative, thoughtful, crafted, quietly carrying the weight of its meaning. The story can be read with equal relevance, as in all excellent literature, in different ways. I will try to express my reading of it and not repeat reviews already written by more able goodreads reviewers.
After gasping at the sheer beauty of the landscape descriptions of lush vegetation, mountain passes, luminous skies, I watched Aira, lived with him through it, create a journey of an individual passing through the stages of art, battling through the passage into becoming an artist.
Rugenda, a disciple and friend of the landscape painter Humbolt, who himself had developed a revolutionary theory within the confines of landscape painting, began his journey with the younger German painter, Robert Krause, from Mexico to Chile and Argentina. Carrying the measurements and boundaries of civilization, the world with them they kept barometric records, estimated wind speeds with a sock of white cloth, two glass capillary tubes containing liquid graphite as an altimeter. Mercury from a thermometer suspended from a pole provided them light. Leisurely, they sought Humbolt's physiognomy of landscape, nature. Nature's perils and beauty, country dwellers and indians, their feuds and battles began the leaving of civilization behind and the entry into the wild. Rugenda's disfigurement due to a an accident propels his passage. The clear trails turn to sinuous dark pathways.They ride into the night appearing as shadows of giraffes, bats delicately brush their faces. Rugenda's disfigurement is lit by moonlight.
We descend on the trail with them, Rugenda traveling deeper into the sinews of the creative unconscious, its lurid dangers and promise of unspecified reward. I understood the risks and now let him go on without me. I watched him cover his disfigured face with a black veil, creating a pin-prick vision, an impressionist scope, as increasingly, without plan, he delves into himself, rising up, filling himself. The world seen through his eyes, through the mantissa veil, is new, disfiguring. Increasingly obsessed with work and his own vision leaving Humbolt's quadrants behind for an existence of search and discovery. Due to his disfigurement, his new vision through the eyes of his self, Rugenda is now the isolated artist removed and never able to return to his home, back into the the world he knew. Life is now created in its vivid rawness no longer requiring its veil as Aira has discarded his, to reach beyond the safety of boundaries.
The final scene is a haunted image of a lone artist removed from the world, embedded in his art as it creates itself beneath his hand. The image will be embedded within the reader and remain without any sign of receding.
an exquisite story of love without the word, love, mentioned. the narrative unfolds through letters from a woman to her love who is a political prisonan exquisite story of love without the word, love, mentioned. the narrative unfolds through letters from a woman to her love who is a political prisoner. less often is his reaction to her letters. one never knows which side of the political battle he is on nor does it matter. what matters is the love that is evoked, that is so palpable, as only berger can create. he is one of the finest, most honest writers writing today....more
one possible interpretation: one man's obsession with death taking the form of a great white whale that encircles and hunts him as he believes he is hone possible interpretation: one man's obsession with death taking the form of a great white whale that encircles and hunts him as he believes he is hunting it. the book can also be read for the enjoyment of its exalted language which i cannot imagine will be replicated again....more
a brilliant example of the joining of the sound of words, structural purity, aesthetic lushness and message. the polish of the prose by itself is worta brilliant example of the joining of the sound of words, structural purity, aesthetic lushness and message. the polish of the prose by itself is worth reading after reading, as well as the meaning they unleash if you listen closely. a great author at his best....more
I began this endeavor as an act of intent and willpower, jogging gear on, new running shoes, stretching exercises stretched. It certainly began that wI began this endeavor as an act of intent and willpower, jogging gear on, new running shoes, stretching exercises stretched. It certainly began that way. Swann's Way is an essential backdrop to Within a Budding Grove. I won't repeat here what I said about it in an earlier review. What needs to be said is that it is large in scope covering a segment of French culture at the time entombed within the confines of their conventions and social life, affording them limited access to a discovery of their own particular identity. This style of life, cliched and repetitive left them uncounted layers adrift from experiencing any substantial sense of reality. Feathered in their garments and social niceties they flitted from gathering to gathering to be seen, included and rise up some threaded ladder of airless social life.
Within a Budding Grove, after showing us Mme Swann, the former courtesan and obsessive love of Swann now transformed by coiffed maneuvers, the accoutrements of wealth, the gestures of status, brings our narrator to the train station in Paris saying goodbye to his beloved mother. The umbilical cord is but partially snipped since he will be traveling with his grandmother. The train takes him to the seaside town of, Balbec. Here Proust the master skillfully narrows the camera lens. We are not only dealing with a smaller landscape but less characters and a more pointed proposition. At Balbec I lived inside the narrator's maturing mind, saw through his eyes, felt the world through his senses, as in no other literary experience I have particpated in. Before I even knew I was giving up all the half mangled jogging and stretching metaphors, I slipped-was slipped-into the narrative with no real opportunity of escape. All of my Proust-breaks, the books I couldn't wait to read in--between no longer existed.
My reading of this book was captured by the narrator's-my-experience of his initial sense that the actual did not measure up to the imagined. Through his obsessive engrossment with a group of young girls, I experienced his maturing gaze splintering them off into individual young women, then seeing each change in different lighting, situations. As the narrative moves forward so does the constancy carried forth within each person, within the essence of each object, even the constancy of the inconstancy of where things begin and end. There are no simple solutions. Existence is to be experienced in all its confusion, moments of tenderness, brutality.
The genius of this book, of Proust, is that between and beneath the perfected structures of sentences, paragraphs, the seemingly writing for perfected writing's sake broils the contradictions and rampages of consciousness. Even in the seemingly endless descriptions and obsessive preoccupations, their actual construction is not, or not only, to be captured by the beauty and preciousness of language but the possibility that their existence, (at times to be plowed through or read so slowly time vanishes to moments which vanishes to...) are inserted for the reader to experience how the narrator uses-misuses-intellect, insight, to approach and withdraw from his all too human fears. Solitude is his only domain of meaning and it is yet to be seen if it remains so.
It turned out for me that this was not only a treatise on time, an elegant description of an inner life, and the fine boundaries of differing types of love but most important a narrative of experience. Beyond style Proust's mastery was to mine his perfected constructions with raw explosives. I can finally get back to other books but I admit that life would not be as rich if I had not read this vast novel which deservedly has lasted the rigorous tests of time. ...more
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