Posts Tagged ‘Camus’

“The Tunnel” by Ernest Sábato

Sunday, March 4th, 2012

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In this, his first novel, Ernesto Sábato displays an assured hand in fashioning a fresh tale of obsession and murder. The pace of THE TUNNEL is uncommonly well controlled. There is no fat on the bones of its first-person confessional narrative. At 140 pages, divided into 39 chapters, the book can be read in one or two sessions. This I recommend. Uninterrupted attention to the diseased mind of the artist-confessor, Juan Pablo Castel, is the optimal way to experience Sabato’s own artistry.

We know from the opening pages of the novel and from the first encounter between Castel and María Iribarne that these two lovers are doomed to play out a fatal destiny. We expect the descent will be devastating. It is.

The affair begins with the traditional dance: tentative connections, daydreaming, high expectations, misunderstandings, jousting, furtive telephone calls. Looking back after his crime, Castel recalls “how we are blinded by love, how magically love transforms reality.”

It is chilling to come upon the first intimations of violence. Sábato is a master of the slow reveal. He is aware of how we, his apprehensive readers, are taking in and digesting the progress of the tale. I was struck by the teasing manner in which he parcels out dialog between the lovers, and how he uses their diverging temperaments (the overly-analytical Castel versus the elusive María) as a means to keep us off-balance. We want to hear more from María, in her own words, unfiltered by the claustrophobic, maddeningly selfish perceptions of the narrator. When she finally speaks honestly to him of her desires, during an escape from the city to an estancia by the ocean (“I can’t count the times,” she tells Castel, “that I have dreamed of sharing this sea and this sky with you”) — the emotional effect is powerful.

When first published in 1948, and championed by Albert Camus, THE TUNNEL was placed on the shelf with contemporary existentialist literature. It is true Sábato bows in that direction, as when Castel waxes philosophical:

“There are times I feel nothing has meaning. On a tiny planet that has been racing toward oblivion for millions of years, we are born amid sorrow; we grow, we struggle, we grow ill, we suffer, we make others suffer, we cry out, we die, or others die, and new beings are born to begin the senseless comedy all over again.”

But to the 21st-century reader chances are this will sound like window-dressing. Nowadays the philosophical takes a back seat to the psychological, which means THE TUNNEL becomes a case study. It is an examination — or, since the story is in the form of a confession, let us say a self-examination — by a man suffering through deep psychological trauma. Castel boasts: “My brain is in constant ferment and, when I get nervous, ideas roil in a giddy ballet.” Although he fancies himself a superior analytical being, we know better. Obsessive, vengeful, violently jealous, here is a man depressed, suicidal. His descent is plotted with steady skill by the author.

Notes: The paperback edition I read, no longer in print,  is covered with the striking a black and white photo (below). Penguin Classics is issuing a reprint edition in April, 2012, with an inferior cover (above) that does little to evoke the novel’s mood. A film version of  The Tunnel was released in 1988 to mixed reviews; Peter Weller plays the role of Castel, and Jane Seymour is María.

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“By Night in Chile” by Roberto Bolano

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

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“By Night in Chile” takes the form of a deathbed confession delivered by a Chilean priest, poet and conservative literary critic, Fr. Urrutia. The book’s principal challenge to the uninitiated reader is that it is set in a time, place, culture and political atmosphere unknown to all but a few American readers. An understanding of all the foreign details of the story, and a familiarity with the real life figures who pop up in the priest’s stream of memories (Pablo Neruda, Ernst Junger, General Pinochet, Marta Harnecker) are useful, without doubt. But such foreknowledge is not essential to an immediate enjoyment of the book, so long as you are the kind of reader who takes greater delight in experiencing a literary tour de force that draws you toward a readily understandable moral, a simple truth.

“By Night in Chile” is a bravura performance by Bolaño in which the author has found a distinct way to enwrap and deliver each recollection, each story within a story, each aside, each shift in time, each gruesome discovery, and each blow to the soul, that passes through the dying priest’s sometimes clear, sometimes feverish, mind. One reviewer cites as a defining characteristic of the book, this constant outpouring of side-stories, little morsels, poetry masked by prose. Some readers may find this “meandering” style off-putting, but others of us appreciate the strategy as Bolaño’s signature mode. For us it is an ever-surprising joy. I think the generative force of Bolaño’s communicative charm is the practice and spirit of an all-night “bull session” conducted in college dorms and in fact wherever the intellectually curious are assembled in strange new quarters for purposes of undergoing mind-altering training. If you are of a mindset or personality that typically avoided invitations to join in such sessions, you should avoid “By Night in Chile.”

According to available biographical details, Bolaño life was bohemian — peripatetic, but immersed in the social lives of other poets, painters, musicians, actors. One imagines him as a great talker and a great listener. In a moment of fantasy — never to be fulfilled, alas — I imagine a chance meeting of Roberto Bolaño and the painter/collagist Robert Rauschenberg. What amazing things would have flowed forth had those two spent an afternoon interviewing each other. In my dream I imagine hidden microphones and cameras capturing the sparkling flow of dialog, an outpouring which turns heavenward after I bring to the gentlemen a bottle of Jack Daniels, for RR, and a drug of his choice, for RB.

Literature has been enriched by the confessional form. Think of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” Camus’ “The Fall.” The confession is a hospitable device for an author interested in psychological exploration and revelation. A man unspools a story of some evil he witnessed or participated in, a sin that weighs upon him, a sin he now owns up to or, alternatively, seeks to justify. His speech ends with a request, express or implied, for the listener (the reader) to understand, to expiate. And yet, while the framework of “By Night in Chile” borrows from this tradition, the book is frustrating as a confession. Perhaps it is as much of a confession as the present era allows. The state of Fr. Urrutia’s soul at the close of his tale is, at least to me, uncertain. That uncertainty led me to trace my steps back to the beginning of the book, where I found the priest’s opening statement of purpose.

Then I understood this is a deeply religious tale, a profoundly moral story. The dying priest, who hoped he could convince himself he had committed no crimes, is by his own reckoning guilty of sins of omission. It is on page one that he reveals a simple credo. The reader, when first encountering these words, may dismiss them as a bromidic utterance, jejune, self-congratulatory. But when read a second time, after curling back from the novel’s end, the words shine clear:

“One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences, yes, one’s silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them . . . so one must be very careful with one’s silences.”

[Note: A slightly altered version of my review appears on Amazon here.  Superior reviews are found here and here.]

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Here comes a decade-long, Big Five-O party

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

A collective shrug of “Uh, who cares?” greeted the recent spate of 40th anniversary celebrations. Woodstock? Yawn. The moon landing? Snooze. The birth (arguably) of the Internet?  Feh.

But while these fortieth birthday parties fizzled, that won’t stop promoters exploiting all of the upcoming big Five-O shindigs.

In just a few weeks the calendar will flip to the year 2010.  As with any year, 2010 is an abstraction. Right now 2010 is content-free, sans emotional resonance, non-seductive. Yet our culture is at the mercy of a base-10 numbering system. The media, needing to fill time and space, will grab at mathematics: 2,010 is the sum of 1,960 plus the very marketable, “Hey, it’s been 50 years, so let’s get a party on!”  With box cutter knives in hand, the whole exploitive band of writers, commentators, filmmakers, sordid hangers-on, are all poised to attack the packed  boxes labeled “the ’60s.” Unpacked, their contents will be spilled across every available screen.

If I were asked to set the agenda for this non-stop orgy of baby-boomer nostalgia, I’d first remind my staff that the distinction of the 1960s was not so much its general calamities amidst general progress. That can be said of every decade in recent world history. What the ’60s was more “about” was something in the realm of feeling: a relentless pow! pow! pow! of special tragedies and triumphs of an intensely personal kind. To set up this theme, I suggest the festival begin on January 4 with a somber program devoted to Albert Camus. An odd choice? Perhaps; but hear me out:  It was on January 4, 1960, that the 46-year-old Camus, then at the height of his creative powers, a man immersed in the struggle for individual freedom in an absurd universe, met a violent death in a car crash. Surely this was a lesson for us, a warning to prepare for a decade-long reminder of an inescapable truth: Everything that grows holds in perfection but a little moment.

Which, on a happier note, will also set the stage for a 2017 program devoted to Twiggy.

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UPDATE (11-23-2009): Today, the New York Times reports that, to mark the 50th anniversary of Camus’ death, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to transfer the writer’s remains to the Pantheon in Paris, one of the most hallowed burial places in France.

“Noah’s Compass” by Anne Tyler

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

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I remember emerging from a New York City art museum some years ago after spending an hour looking at paintings in a Richard Estes exhibition. Estes is a photo-realist painter known for his meticulously detailed canvasses of urban environments. As I hit the sidewalk and walked to Penn Station, I noticed that the avenues, vehicles, buildings, sky — the entire city — looked different. I was seeing the world with more sharply focused vision, a carry-over from time spent immersed in Estes’ art. The most striking effect was my heightened awareness of the unique light that fills the streets of Manhattan.  It was a luxurious effect.

The same feeling comes over me whenever I finish a new novel by Anne Tyler. There is one difference, though. Tyler’s art engenders not only new perceptions of the everyday physical environment, but also a more generous understanding of human interactions, of personal relationships.

“Noah’s Compass” is relatively short, just 277 pages in the British edition that I read (published by Chatto & Windus; Knopf will release the American edition on January 5, 2010). There are critics who disparage Tyler as a play-it-safe miniaturist. They say she avoids grappling with the Big Themes of existence and death; she’s stuck in the quotidian. Yet Liam Pennywell, the protagonist of “Noah’s Compass,” at one point observes how “we live such tangled, fraught lives . . . but in the end we die like all the other animals and we’re buried in the ground and after a few more years we might as well not have existed.” Could this passage be a bone Tyler is throwing to the nay-sayers?  Perhaps.  I think the critics are tiresome.  What I am more sure of, and more interested in, is that “Noah’s Compass” finds the author in full command of her craft. Tyler shares with the Big Theme guys (authors such as Tolstoy, Joyce, Mann, Camus) a rare power to convey what it feels like to be alive.

One of the book’s pleasures is how its hold on the reader gains strength page after page. It starts in familiar Tyler territory, introducing a main character who’s living half a life. The story unfolds in comedia dell’arte fashion, as Liam is beset by the women in his life, who intrude upon and occupy his present as well as his remembrances.  Incidents range from tiny to grand, from equivocal to harrowing. Some leave wounds.  Complications blend the farcical and tragic. Inveterate Tyler readers will sense from the opening pages that Liam may — or may not — find himself in a different external state by the close of the tale. But he himself will be different, and we too. The book’s final chapter takes us to a pre-school for three-year-olds. Could there be a more suitable stage upon which to close out the narrative with a modest summing up?

There are no solutions to the mysteries of why people are the way they are. Life offers no answers. Yet there are, in Tyler’s universe, lessons to be had, more things for Liam to learn:

“It came as news to [Liam] that small children maintained such a firm social structure. They played consistent roles in their dealings with each other; they held fierce notions of justice; they formed alliances and ad hoc committees and little vigilante groups. Lunches were parodies of grownups’ dinner parties, just with different conversational topics. Danny held forth at length on spaghetti’s resemblance to earthworms, and some of the little girls said, “Eww!” and pushed their plates away, but then Hannah — first clearing her throat importantly — delivered a discourse on a chocolate-covered ant she’d once eaten, while shy little Jake watched everybody admiringly from the sidelines.”

What inevitably happens when reading the best of Tyler’s novels happened, this time, when I was half-way through the book. Tyler aficionados know what I’m talking about. You come upon a magical passage; read a perfect description of a person or place or encounter; listen to a precisely-pitched stretch of dialog; absorb a paragraph that expresses a sentiment often thought “but ne’er so well expressed” — and at those moments you think to yourself, How the hell did she do that?  Let me read that again. Let me mark these spots. But then you find yourself marking up every page. The exercise turns futile, redundant: the entire book is of a piece.

I love the Baltimore dialect (“let me skootch this footstool around”), the apt similes (“the marble treads were worn down in the middle like old soap bars”), and the Updike-like attention to detail. Here is Tyler describing a working-class neighborhood of 1940s-vintage cottages:

“There was an abundance of lawn ornaments — plaster gnomes and fawns and families of ducks, birdbaths, windmills, reflective aluminum gazing globes, wooden cutouts of girls in sunbonnets bending over the flower beds with their wooden watering cans.  Liam’s father’s yard had a miniature pony cart planted with red geraniums and hitched to a plaster pony.”

Rhymes, echos, and recurrences abound, usually in service to Tyler’s ever-wise examination of human psychology. Virtually everything has metaphorical significance. The tension of yes and no, true and false, is non-stop. This is life. On his first encounter with Eunice (who will become a love interest) Liam considers her behavior: “Either she was admirably at ease anywhere or she suffered from a total lack of discrimination.” Eunice’s habit of repeatedly calling new acquaintances by their first name is later echoed by another character, and as a reader you wonder, did one person influence the other, or was this something they shared in common from the start, and if the latter, doesn’t that suggest these two are better off remaining paired, not separated?

At points things veer toward the heavy lot of Job, as when a troubled Liam asks himself, “How had things reached such a state? But it wasn’t his fault. He honestly didn’t think he should be shouldering the blame for this.” This brings to mind the famous opening sentence of a famous Big Theme book: “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.” In Tyler’s hands, the serious is leavened with the comical; Liam comes across as a bit of a schlemiel. I was interested in Tyler’s handling of religion (one of Liam’s daughters is a born-again Christian). On the evidence of this book, I suspect Tyler herself is a skeptic. Although she loves her characters and watches admiringly over them from the sidelines, Tyler lets no one off lightly.  No one escapes unscathed.

Let me add, the final sentence of “Noah’s Compass” is perfect.

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[UPDATE (01-09-2010):  A revised version of this review is posted on Amazon, here.]

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Note: The book cover of the British edition is above. Below is the cover of the American edition. Neither image will make sense to the reader of the novel. Although Liam Pennywell has a grandson, no mention is made of the two of them going to the beach. Neither do I recall any episode in which a character, swaddled in a plaid blanket, reads from an old illustrated volume. Oh, well; both are pleasing covers.

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