Category: Literature

What if you only remembered what you had read? In Umberto Eco’s latest novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna, the narrator Bodoni wakes from a stroke with no memories other than the cultural ones – what he, an antiquarian book collector, has read. The first two parts of this novel dramatize the personal (and its loss) in memory. What if memory were only a hypertext of associations like Bodoni’s memories? What makes a memory meaningful? What gives it the “mysterious flame” of immortality?

The novel draws its name from a comic book from Eco’s youth that was based on a novel She by H. Rider Haggard (1886). The narrator tries to recover his memory returning to his grandfather’s country estate in the town of Solara and reading through the adventures and comics of his youth. Eco uses this to trace Italian fascism through its impact on popular youth culture, reproducing through the novel illustrated images, especially comics, from his youth.

In the third and final part Bodoni has another stroke and in his coma trys to see the face of his first love, Sibilla (Sibyl). Eco is playing with myths, both those of comic books and the Greek ones of return. The Cumaean Sibyl leads Aeneas into the caverns of Hades to see his father just as Bodoni is led into the caverns of memory where he finds his childhood with his father. Bodoni, named after the type designer Giambattista Bodoni, seeks but cannot recover, the memory of his Sibilla – he has no way back. He is lost in the caverns of what can be read and can’t find his way back to the sun – Solara. The novel ends with the smoke of memory eclipsing that sun.

I feel a cold gust, I look up.
Why is the sun turning black?

Eco’s novel, like Baudolino before, also feels like it doesn’t know when to return. Both begin well and then get lost in antiquarian detail. Eco doesn’t know when to stop, when to return home and leave the loving details to others. Is this the curse of scholastic writers?
Continue reading The Fog of Memory: Eco and “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna”

Joanne, my hard cover muse, lends me books that win prizes (or almost win.) Veronica by Mary Gaitskill is one of the most brutal she’s lent me. Insight like Gaitskill’s into the slow death of women with AIDS is hard to put down. Like hepatitis it taints the Saturday you read the book. It frays the couch you lie on (yes, I know I should take off my shoes.)

Thanks to my colleague Joanne Buckley who buys hardcover novels, I just finished John Banville’s The Sea along with some of the others Booker nominees like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Reviewers like Michiko Kakutani in A Wordy Widower With a Past – New York Times are dissappointed in the choice of The Sea for the Booker prize over the other candidates and I think they are wrong.

Never Let Me Go is a light, though well written, work of “speculative fiction” (which is what Atwood wants to call “science fiction” with pretentions to high literature. The premise is not original, but the unfolding of the lives of the children cloned for organ donation is elusively written. At the end of the day it is neither particularly interesting speculation or convincing human drama.

Saturday is gripping in the beginning, but then languishes. I found myself jumping to the end. McEwan is again trying to write a literary thriller and he doesn’t quite have it. Give me Le CarrÈ’s pacing over McEwan.

The Sea on the other hand has the carefully crafted prose of Ishiguro hauntingly tripped-up by deliberate undigestible images and words. Banville is trying to go beyond smooth poetic prose by inserting disturbing anachronisms and physically repugnant images. For those of us tired of stylistics there is much to think about in The Sea.

Further, Banville succeeds at revealing precisely that polished, culture conscious, and uninspired academic who woud value crafted prose. The narrator Max is dealing with the failure of all his poise to make meaningful relationships in the face of death. Without being banal, Banville plots an educated man’s reflections simultaneously on when he came of age with his coming to terms with failed age. These reflections combine the petulant pedantry that comes with failure with a remained nose for the smell of others. A novel that will leave you flat and depressed for a weekend, but won’t leave you.

Joanne Buckley drew my attention to the poem To Autumn by John Keats (from The Poetical Works of John Keats, 1884). I was telling her of a Fall in Tuscany when I watched the clouds and wasps wipe summer off the hills.

The Globe and Mail has a story, Book buying up 23 per cent, report says by Rebecca Caldwell (Sat. April 2, 2005, R7) on a new report by Hill Strategies Research called, Who Buys Books in Canada (March 2005) which shows that spending on books rose 23% between 1997 and 2001. What is interesting is the size of the print culture business. Spending on books is about the same as movie tickets and newspapers. If you add magazines, newspapers, and books you see that print media dominates over other media.
Continue reading Who buys books in Canada?

The Question is not, he said, were you loved. Or did you love. Or did you love yourself. Or did you allow love to move you, though that’s a big one. Move you. The question, Rockwell, is did you get to be who you are. And if not, then why. What, my friend, is the big why. (p. 372)

The Big Why is a novel by Michael Winter about Rockwell Kent’s stay in Newfoundland during the war. It is well written, though I don’t understand why Winter doesn’t like certain types of punctuation. There is a thread about Newfoundland and the brutal marine life that is terrific (or terrifying) and a thread about Rockwell Kent (no relation) and his relationships with women. From the sounds of it, Rockwell Kent was a prick when it came to women (and one suspects that’s what Winter likes about him), but the narration by Kent doesn’t quite match the character described as if Winter were trying to soften Kent by letting a more senstive 1990s Kent narrate a 1940s arrogant artist.
The philosophical reflections, however, make this discrepancy worth it … are we who we are?

For more on Kent, see the Rockwell Kent Gallery and Collection, Plattsburgh.

Feersum Endjinn by Iain (aka Iain M.) Banks is the best sci-fi novel I’ve read in a while. Ian M. Banks is a Scottish fiction and science fiction writer. His sci-fi goes under “Iain M. Banks” and his straight fiction under “Iain Banks”. Feersum Endjinn is in that Brit dark fantasy/sci fi style of Mervyn Peake and later Pullman. It is tough to read with one narrator whose sections read in something like l33t speak. The world of Feersum Endjinn is an outsized castle where ruined rooms are broad fields or cities and there is a data corpus that anyone not too senior is implanted to be able to access. Citizens have multiple lives, both real and then virtual. Every page slowed me down with twisted insights or insights that twisted. Easily one of the most imaginative writers, though sometimes I worry M-Banks loses his plot in the display of wit and the fantastic. Just think about the title of the book.
Continue reading Iain (M) Banks: Feersum Endjinn

Margaret Atwood has come up with a device for remotely signing books to save her the trouble of early flights and mini-bar food according to stories like, Online answer to writer’s angst, (The Guardian, Charlotte Higgins, Jan. 8, 2005.)
The company she has founded to develop this device is called Unotchit (U No Tch It – get it?) While having a video conference with an author followed by some personal message (spell checked, of course) faxed to me might be OK, I don’t see how this will substitute for book-signing which is about presence – being close to the authority. Hell, a book is mediated authority, why would I want more of the same instead of a moment of real presence?
What’s interesting is how gentle bloggers and journalists are being with Atwood. It’s a stupid idea that says a lot about Atwood that none of us want to consider because we like her writing so much.

The Diagnosis by Alan Lightman is one of the best novels about information and philosophy I have read. The hero, who works for a company that just processes information (without apparently contributing anything – just quantity), begins to go numb in a way reminiscent of Socrates after he swallows the hemlock. Woven into the novel are the e-mail exchanges of the hero with his son who is taking a course online and a Socratic dialogue. The book is a “diagnosis” of a culture that has confused quantity of information processed with wisdom. It is Plato’s story of writing in the Phaedrus in novel form.
For an interview with the author see, identity theory | the narrative thread – alan lightman.
Continue reading Lightman: The Diagnosis

Each of us should be encouraged to accept his own diversity, to see his identity as the sum of all his various affliations, instead of as only one of them raised to the status of the most important, made into an instrument of exclusion and sometimes into a weapon of war. (p. 159)

In the same way, societies themselves need to accept the many affiliations that have forged each of their collective identities in the course of history, and that are shaping them still. (p. 160)

In the Name of Identity by Amin Maalouf is one of those reasonable books that seems obvious once read. A short book that makes a simple point about how identity is complex and we should beware how it is manipulated. Maalouf, who was born in Lebanon and now lives (and writes) in France, is particularly good on what it is like to be born elsewhere. “You can’t divide it (identity) into halves or thirds or any other separate segments.” (p. 2).
The other book is Persepolis 2, a graphic (comic) book about a young Irani woman who returns to Iran after studying in Austria (a story told in Persepolis 1). The work gently mocks both European and Irani culture. The book is partly autobiographical as the author, Marjane Satrapi, is Irani born, living in France.
Continue reading Two Books for Tolerance