Bialik's famous poem HaMatmid describes the isolation and privation of the Eastern European yeshiva scholar. Dov Elbaum, like Bialik, went through theBialik's famous poem HaMatmid describes the isolation and privation of the Eastern European yeshiva scholar. Dov Elbaum, like Bialik, went through the elite haredi yeshiva system, and, like Bialik, struggled to adapt to it, lost his faith and found later fame as a writer. This debut novel, published in 1997 to critical acclaim, is written in a fervid internal monologue (except for a diary entry near the end) that attempts to reconstructs the argot of that hermetic world. (There are no published translations, and it is probably untranslatable.) Almost every sentence uses a Biblical or Talmudic simile and words without Hebrew roots are rare. The secular are חופשיים (libertines), students suspected of onanism or homosexual activities are מושחתים (corrupt), Mizrahim are פרענקים.
As the title implies, the story takes place within Elul Zman, the period leading up to the Days of Awe, over a period of about a week. The protagonist, Nachman, is nervous and guilt-ridden. His mother is ill, possibly terminal, and he has resolved to cut his ties with the friends who distract him from studying with jokes and gossip. To this end he undertakes a "speech fast" (תענית דיבור).
The book is claustrophobic to start with, and becomes more so as the tension within the yeshiva - as well as Nachman's guilt and repeated spiritual setbacks - piles up. Nachman is consumed by a quest for purity and physical cleanliness. The book opens in the mikveh, and Nachman continuously obsesses over his body: dead skin, sweat, bed-wetting, hangnails, acne, eczema, proper cleaning after defecation, and the inevitably doomed struggle of a fifteen-year-old against self-pollution. Nachman's tragedy is that, for all his spiritual aspiration, he lacks the one trait most important for success in his environment (obviously modelled after the Hebron Yeshiva where Elbaum studied): intellectual brilliance. He struggles to follow the shiur, and daydreams of coming up with a question the teacher will be impressed with. (There are some simple mistakes in citing Talmudic texts, which might be intentional?)
The gradually building intensity of the Days of Awe can be sublime and uplifting. For Nachman, overwhelemed by anxiety, trapped in a mission he can never succeed in, electively mute and probably suffering from undiagnosed OCD, they are a noose around his neck tightening each day. It's unclear to what extent this describes Elbaum's childhood experience, but he has invented a language to describe it, uncomfortable to read but compelling and wholly original.
PS I'm not sure why the cover looks like an Internet Ugly MS Paint drawing...
Merged review:
Bialik's famous poem HaMatmid describes the isolation and privation of the Eastern European yeshiva scholar. Dov Elbaum, like Bialik, went through the elite haredi yeshiva system, and, like Bialik, struggled to adapt to it, lost his faith and found later fame as a writer. This debut novel, published in 1997 to critical acclaim, is written in a fervid internal monologue (except for a diary entry near the end) that attempts to reconstructs the argot of that hermetic world. (There are no published translations, and it is probably untranslatable.) Almost every sentence uses a Biblical or Talmudic simile and words without Hebrew roots are rare. The secular are חופשיים (libertines), students suspected of onanism or homosexual activities are מושחתים (corrupt), Mizrahim are פרענקים.
As the title implies, the story takes place within Elul Zman, the period leading up to the Days of Awe, over a period of about a week. The protagonist, Nachman, is nervous and guilt-ridden. His mother is ill, possibly terminal, and he has resolved to cut his ties with the friends who distract him from studying with jokes and gossip. To this end he undertakes a "speech fast" (תענית דיבור).
The book is claustrophobic to start with, and becomes more so as the tension within the yeshiva - as well as Nachman's guilt and repeated spiritual setbacks - piles up. Nachman is consumed by a quest for purity and physical cleanliness. The book opens in the mikveh, and Nachman continuously obsesses over his body: dead skin, sweat, bed-wetting, hangnails, acne, eczema, proper cleaning after defecation, and the inevitably doomed struggle of a fifteen-year-old against self-pollution. Nachman's tragedy is that, for all his spiritual aspiration, he lacks the one trait most important for success in his environment (obviously modelled after the Hebron Yeshiva where Elbaum studied): intellectual brilliance. He struggles to follow the shiur, and daydreams of coming up with a question the teacher will be impressed with. (There are some simple mistakes in citing Talmudic texts, which might be intentional?)
The gradually building intensity of the Days of Awe can be sublime and uplifting. For Nachman, overwhelemed by anxiety, trapped in a mission he can never succeed in, electively mute and probably suffering from undiagnosed OCD, they are a noose around his neck tightening each day. It's unclear to what extent this describes Elbaum's childhood experience, but he has invented a language to describe it, uncomfortable to read but compelling and wholly original.
PS I'm not sure why the cover looks like an Internet Ugly MS Paint drawing......more
I beati anni del castigo (Sweet Days of Discipline) || Proleterka
A Catholic boarding school in Appenzell near Lake Constance, surrounded by the Alps.I beati anni del castigo (Sweet Days of Discipline) || Proleterka
A Catholic boarding school in Appenzell near Lake Constance, surrounded by the Alps. Among stultifying piety, the schoolgirls possess a dark energy, at times sad, hateful, jealous, bored, and cruel (the daughter of an African dictator, the principal's pet, becomes the class victim). The unnamed narrator falls under the spell of a new girl, Frédérique; a few months older but far more worldly. She claims to be a nihilist. They take long walks.
As in Coleridge's Christabel, what appears at first as Sapphic love is a feint: the dominant drive here is Thanatos, not Eros. In a short novella (under one hundred pages), people die of: terminal illness, car and plane crashes, fatal stabbing in a Cairo hotel room, and hanging. (All this is in the background - at the school, life continues at usual.) When they meet years later in Paris, Frédérique lives among the dead, in a room that feels like a grave. She then attempts to burn her mother alive.
Appenzell is a German-speaking region, and the narrator's mother - by letters from Brazil - wishes her to learn German. Jaeggy writes in Italian, but this polyglot book threads in sentences in French and German. And it feels to me - with its pessimism, misanthropy, and scorn for humanity - like a work of German literature, in the line of Thomas Bernhard, whom Jaeggy was friends with in Rome. (An internet search turned up this comparison of the two.) It is also vaguely autobiographical, as is Proleterka, the second book in this volume, which has a terrific opening line:
Sono passati molti anni e questa mattina ho un desiderio improvviso: vorrei le ceneri di mio padre. (Many years have passed and this morning I have a sudden desire: I would like my father's ashes.)
The book begins and ends in the first person, after the father's death. The rest is third person. The narrator is named only as « figlia di Johannes » (Johannes' daughter). Her strained relationship with her father is the backdrop for a cruise on a Yugoslavian ship (the name means "proletarian" in their language, possibly Croatian?) to Greece and Venice. The narrator considers Billy Budd, and his dying words, "God bless Captain Vere!" (A slightly more subtle literary reference is a character who goes to a Davos sanitarium and is then unable to leave.) An indelible memory of her father is his friendship with a man who strangled his mother, and Johannes' desire to vindicate him.
Once again, German is the language of family, guilt, repression. The word Tracht occurs repeatedly: literally traditional German clothing, but also a burden (« was man trägt »). Johannes' daughter covertly sleeps with a few of the Yugoslav sailors, whose lack of respect for her only adds to their appeal, the better to hasten the psychic death of the father whose actual death bookends the story. Before his cremation, she leans in to kiss him and puts an iron nail in his pocket, so that something will survive the fire.
Translated to elegant, spare Hebrew by Yaarit Tauber....more
I was gripped by this book, an incredibly well-done psychological thriller, but also repulsed by it. The narrator is a cold-blooded psychopath, and onI was gripped by this book, an incredibly well-done psychological thriller, but also repulsed by it. The narrator is a cold-blooded psychopath, and one squirms as he follows his destructive path in the world. He is an aesthete who wants admiring friends but does not really enjoy company. He viscerally hates women - the site of a female houseguest's brassiere hanging on a chair causes him disgust - although I may be inferring too much from what I know about Highsmith, a known misogynist, and also a lesbian (she only spent time with women because she couldn't bear to sleep with men). So this really hooked me but also made me feel polluted. There is a pretty surprising twist ending which the original film adaptation (Purple Noon, 1960) reverses, but is maintained in Anthony Minghella's 1999 version, with Matt Damon giving off perfectly creepy levels of earnestness and amiability....more
An-sky's classic play about a bride possessed by the spirit of the lonely young man who was obsessed with her in life. Obviously there is an element oAn-sky's classic play about a bride possessed by the spirit of the lonely young man who was obsessed with her in life. Obviously there is an element of fetishisation of the mysticism, superstition and baroque drama of the shtetl, but the story was based on similar ones An-sky recorded from old Jews in Galicia as its Jewish communities were battered and broken by the pogroms of the 1880s, the "Storms of the South", and by urbanisation and emancipation. It still retains the power to shock and is still regularly performed....more
It is commonly claimed (and I'd agree) - that Franzen is America's best current writer, and commonly claimed that this is his worst book - one he has It is commonly claimed (and I'd agree) - that Franzen is America's best current writer, and commonly claimed that this is his worst book - one he has even somewhat disowned. (It's a power move for a writer to say that one of their books is bad…) I actually enjoyed this one a lot, right until the last hundred pages or so in which (without spoiling anything) it took a somewhat dramatic turn, unravelled a principal character and submitted another to psychological torture and murder, which felt so unjust and pointless that I was unable to appreciate the main point of the novel, which was, I think, something about the apathy and dullness of 1980s America, whose citizens have become distracted by materialism and anomie and no longer care about nuclear war, civic engagement, or social justice. Young Franzen (he was 25 when this came out) intended to write a Pynchonesque "systems novel"; describing St. Louis on multiple levels, through the business elite, police force, ghetto, malls, youth culture, etc. and how all of these intermesh. I actually found the details about municipal ordinances and tax incentives enjoyable, adding a surprising level of detail that helped immerse me in the novel's main plot (a bizarre conspiracy by Indian expats to gentrify the downtown area via bribery, blackmail and other skullduggery). But with the exception of the main character, Martin Probst - a stock Franzen patriarchal archetype: dour, laconic, frugal, analytical, principled, Republican - most of the characters are flimsy and comical, and as the author moved on in his career he wisely shifted to his core competency, complex and claustrophobic portraits of family life.
Side point: after reading this I listened to some of this Franzen podcast, where a few writers analyse their love-hate relationship with the curmudgeonly 800-pound gorilla of American letters by reading all his books in order. On one episode the always brilliant Nell Zink mentioned an idea that she calls (following David Foster Wallace) "lexical genius", a fallacy writers believe: that knowing an exact term in the English language for everything in the world is valuable, or a substitute for genuine insight. She may be right, but this is also something I really appreciate in writers, and few do it well. (This book taught me the etymology of Velcro!) I remember first coming across it in this lovely scene in DeLillo's Underworld:
"Sometimes I think the education we dispense is better suited to a fifty-year-old who feels he missed the point the first time around. Too many abstract ideas. Eternal verities left and right. You’d be better served looking at your shoe and naming the parts. You in particular, Shay, coming from the place you come from." This seemed to animate him. He leaned across the desk and gazed, is the word, at my wet boots. "Those are ugly things, aren’t they?" "Yes they are." "Name the parts. Go ahead. We’re not so chi chi here, we’re not so intellectually chic that we can’t test a student face-to-face." "Name the parts," I said. "All right. Laces." "Laces. One to each shoe. Proceed." I lifted one foot and turned it awkwardly. "Sole and heel." "Yes, go on." I set my foot back down and stared at the boot, which seemed about as blank as a closed brown box. "Proceed, boy." "There’s not much to name, is there? A front and a top." "A front and a top. You make me want to weep." "The rounded part at the front." "You’re so eloquent I may have to pause to regain my composure. You’ve named the lace. What’s the flap under the lace?" "The tongue." "Well?" "I knew the name. I just didn’t see the thing." He made a show of draping himself across the desk, writhing slightly as if in the midst of some dire distress. "You didn’t see the thing because you don’t know how to look. And you don’t know how to look because you don’t know the names." He tilted his chin in high rebuke, mostly theatrical, and withdrew his body from the surface of the desk, dropping his bottom into the swivel chair and looking at me again and then doing a decisive quarter turn and raising his right leg sufficiently so that the foot, the shoe, was posted upright at the edge of the desk. A plain black everyday clerical shoe. "Okay," he said. "We know about the sole and heel." "Yes." "And we’ve identified the tongue and lace." "Yes," I said. With his finger he traced a strip of leather that went across the top edge of the shoe and dipped down under the lace. "What is it?" I said. "You tell me. What is it?" "I don’t know." "It’s the cuff." "The cuff." "The cuff. And this stiff section over the heel. That’s the counter." "That’s the counter." "And this piece amidships between the cuff and the strip above the sole. That’s the quarter." "The quarter," I said. "And the strip above the sole. That’s the welt. Say it, boy." "The welt." "How everyday things lie hidden. Because we don’t know what they’re called. What’s the frontal area that covers the instep?" "I don’t know." "You don’t know. It’s called the vamp." "The vamp." "Say it." "The vamp. The frontal area that covers the instep. I thought I wasn’t supposed to memorize." "Don’t memorize ideas. And don’t take us too seriously when we turn up our noses at rote learning. Rote helps build the man. You stick the lace through the what?" "This I should know." "Of course you know. The perforations at either side of, and above, the tongue." "I can’t think of the word. Eyelet." "Maybe I’ll let you live after all," "The eyelets." "Yes. And the metal sheath at each end of the lace." He flicked the thing with his middle finger. "This I don’t know in a million years." "The aglet." "Not in a million years." "The tag or aglet." "The aglet," I said. "And the little metal ring that reinforces the rim of the eyelet through which the aglet passes. We’re doing the physics of language, Shay." "The little ring." "You see it?" "Yes." "This is the grommet," he said. "Oh man." "The grommet. Learn it, know it and love it." "I’m going out of my mind." "This is the final arcane knowledge. And when I take my shoe to the shoemaker and he places it on a form to make repairs—a block shaped like a foot. This is called a what?" "I don’t know." "A last." "My head is breaking apart." "Everyday things represent the most overlooked knowledge. These names are vital to your progress. Quotidian things. If they weren’t important, we wouldn’t use such a gorgeous Latinate word. Say it," he said. "Quotidian." "An extraordinary word that suggests the depth and reach of the commonplace."
One of James' least-loved works, both as a novel and a play. I actually enjoyed it, but it does require some suspension of disbelief. The plot revolveOne of James' least-loved works, both as a novel and a play. I actually enjoyed it, but it does require some suspension of disbelief. The plot revolves around the mysterious murder of a child, a drama of abnormal psychology modelled after Ibsen. The trick (for me) was to mostly ignore these elements: these are regular James characters, subtle, sophisticated and passionate, caught in tragic circumstances. Obviously none of them are capable of murdering a child and covering it up. Taken literally, the plot is lurid and melodramatic; but as metaphor, it fits comfortably within the Jamesian wheelhouse....more
A well-executed pulp novel, noirish and melodramatic and gory as it should be. Hughes was writing when the Hays Code was beginning to seriously affectA well-executed pulp novel, noirish and melodramatic and gory as it should be. Hughes was writing when the Hays Code was beginning to seriously affect the film industry, and pulp novelists - often writing under pseudonyms - picked up some of the slack, writing about taboos such as strippers, serial killers, adultery, and female homosexuality. In line with this, Nicholas Ray's excellent film adaptation (with Humphrey Bogart as the lubriciously named protagonist Dix Steele) transforms the psychopathic serial killer into an innocent screenwriter who merely has an anger problem.
In some ways the Steele of the novel reminded me of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman (who wears a surgical mask and idolizes Donald Trump, truly a man of our times), but in a broader sense he represents a more common trope: that of Jay Gatsby and The Talented Mr Ripley, and even Stendhal's Julien Sorel, the amoral social climber overcoming a class handicap with equal parts sprezzatura and malevolent cunning.
If you wanted you could read Hughes' writing as a critique of the emptiness of the postwar American imaginary, a culture repressed by banal consumerism and hypocritical moralising. (Where more so than California, a blank canvas where people go to disappear and live lives of anonymous dissolution?) You could also read it along feminist lines, as did the editor of this edition, published by the Feminist Press at CUNY as part of its reissue of the "queens of pulp". I don't buy either. Hughes was undoubtedly a serious writer (her first collection of poems won the Yale Young Poet prize, whose later winners included Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery and James Tate) but wrote mystery and pulp novels for their own sake, for the sheer majestic gloom and existentialism of passages like
Brucie had died but no one cared, only he. All of them had lost so many, dear as brothers, as their own selves, they had learned not to talk about death. They had refused to think about death being death. Even in the heart’s innermost core where each dwelled alone, they did not admit death.
"Competence porn" somewhat, the tale of an orphan girl with rare chess gifts, captivating but still deep. I read most of it in one sitting, staying up"Competence porn" somewhat, the tale of an orphan girl with rare chess gifts, captivating but still deep. I read most of it in one sitting, staying up late. You don't need to know chess but it helps.
Contractually obliged to mention Zweig's Amok, though this is more anemic, dysthymic. Chess brilliance strongly correlates with madness; in this case not the rampaging type but a dull isolation insulated with drugs and alcohol. Tevis writes female characters really well. This book aces the Bechdel test and channels female desire with surprising skill and empathy.
Here is a good panel on the book with novelist Tobias Wolff and some other notables. Here is a real quote from the contemporaneous (male) NYT reviewer:
A more serious question implied by the story is whether a woman could be constitutionally equipped to be a world-class player. Chess is a game that requires extreme aggressiveness to be played at its best. Some have even argued that it re-enacts the Oedipal drama, with victory being achieved by murdering the king. How could a woman identify unconsciously with such a drama?
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