Monthly Archives: May 2009

>Donoghue’s Elegant Criticism

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A couple of memorable fragments from Denis Donoghue’s On Eloquence:

Eloquence is memorable speech, but there is eloquence in a phrase in music, a line in a painting, a curve in a work of architecture or sculpture, a shot in golf or tennis.

and:

. . . the qualities of writing I care about . . . aesthetic finesse, beauty, eloquence, style, form, imagination, fiction, the architecture of a sentence, the bearing of rhyme, pleasure, ‘how to do things with words.’

The book was a pleasure to read. The inspiration came from Patrick Kurp at Anecdotal Evidence who thought well of the book.

>Robert Twigger is Blogging

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>Another contemporary English writer joins the blogosphere: Robert Twigger. Twigger writes frothy, funny non-fiction. I enjoy his books and admire (and envy) his boys-own adventures and  passion to live a meaningful life. This is the description from his blog:


Robert Twigger is a British author who has been described as, ‘a 19th Century adventurer trapped in the body of a 20th Century writer’. He studied Philosophy at Oxford University (after switching from Engineering). Later he spent a year training at Martial Arts with the Tokyo Riot Police. He has won the Newdigate prize for poetry, the Somerset Maugham award for literature and the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. He has caught the world’s longest snake- documented in his Channel 4/National Geographic film and book Big Snake; was the first person to cross Western Canada in a birchbark canoe since 1793; has hunted for Lost Oases in the Sahara desert and bona fide Zombies in Haiti.

Angry White Pyjamas, where Twigger tells of his participation in the demanding Tokyo Riot Police course, is droll and warm. 


Lost Oasis is less comical, about Twigger’s yearning for the ultimate desert trip, but contains a few brilliantly depicted characters. Colonel Ahmed  Ghali, tour leader of Twigger’s most memorable desert expedition is hugely reminiscent of Major Steele of the Gurkhas who lead one of my trips into the interior of Borneo.

>Authenticity of Translation

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>Translations make me uncomfortable. However accomplished the translator, it is their book you are reading, not the original writer. It is nevertheless the only way to access authors that need to be read, if you are unable to read the mother tongue.

Thomas Bernhard makes the point during an interview:

Doesn’t interest me at all, because a translation is a different book. It has nothing to do with the original at all. It’s a book by the person who translated it. I write in the German language. You get sent a copy of these books and either you like them or you don’t. If they have awful covers then they’re just annoying. And you flip through and that’s it. It has nothing in common with your own work, apart from the weirdly different title. Right? Because translation is impossible. A piece of music is played the same the world over, using the written notes, but a book would always have to be played in German, in my case. With my orchestra!

[Via A Piece of Monologue]

>Return

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>Back from another Landmark Trust property. Manor Farm above was home for the last seven days. The weather was English. We walked, threw stones on a pebble beach and discovered a couple of good second-hand bookshops.

Book purchases include US first editions of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (two volumes) and Stages on Life’s Way, both in fine condition.
Book consumption during the seven days comprised Robert Twigger’s amusing Lost Oasis (though not as funny as Angry White Pajamas), Denis Donoghue’s creative criticism On Eloquence and Sara Maitland’s A Book of Silence. The latter was an engrossing read.

>Eroticism in the First Modern Novel

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>What is the most erotic episode in a modern novel?

I am looking for subtlety here, nothing overt. 
My vote goes to an episode in Madame Bovary. It is the scene where village doctor Charles Bovary makes a house call to old Rouault, who has broken his leg. Once there he meets the daughter Emma:
As was the custom in the country, [Emma] offered [the doctor] something to drink. He refused, but she insisted, and finally asked him, with a laugh, to join her in a glass of liqueur. So she fetched a bottle of curaçao from the cupboard, reached down two tiny glasses, filled one to the brim, poured just a drop into the other and then, after clinking glasses with him, raised it to her mouth. As it was almost empty, she leaned right back to drink and, with her head tilted, her lips pushed forward and her neck taut, she laughed at finding nothing, while the tip of her tongue, poking between her beautiful teeth, delicately licked at the bottom of the glass.
She sat down and resumed her work, a white cotton stocking she was darning; she sat with her head bent over it, not speaking. Charles did not speak either. A draught of air from under the door stirred a little dust on the flagstones; he watched it slowly move, hearing only the pounding inside his head and the distant cry of a laying hen in the yard. From time to time Emma would freshen her cheeks with her palms, which she then cooled on the knobs of the huge iron firedogs.
The electricity generated by Flaubert in this passage is palpable. It is familiar to any of us (men) that have been victim, willing or otherwise, to a woman who is aware and able to use her sexuality. Charles did not have a chance.
I made the grave error of falling for Emma Bovary in my late teens. It set a high hurdle for the women I met in later years. Perhaps I met only one, the dazzling Irish Brenda, who was able to almost live up to the playfulness and coquettishness of Emma Bovary.

>Strauch’s Lament

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Gustave Doré - Don Quixote

Reading Thomas Bernhard’s Frost is exhilarating. My pulse races and repeatedly I must put the book to one side while I let the writing coalesce. This is the first Bernhard book I have read, though he has been in my library for a while awaiting chance discovery. I know I will have to read everything he wrote.

Thus far, Frost is the anguished and harrowing howl of the tormented painter Strauch:
“There was a time I would have thought it impossible for me to give in to myself so blindly,” says the painter. He stops, draws breath and says: “I could be in a good mood, after all. Why am I not in a good mood? I’m not bored, I’m not scared. I’m in no pain. I feel no irritation. As if I was someone else, just now. And there it is again: I’m hurt and irritated. Yes, it’s my own doing. See: all my life . . . I’ve never been merry! Never joyful! Never what people call happy. Because the compulsion to the unusual, the eccentric, the odd, the unique, and the unattainable, this compulsion has wrecked everything for me, and in the creative field as well. It tore everything up, as if it were a piece of paper! My fear is rational, orderly, itemised, there’s nothing low about it. I’m continually testing myself! You can imagine what it’s like, when you open yourself like a book, and find misprints everywhere, one after another, misprints on every page! And in spite of those hundreds and thousands of misprints, the whole thing is masterly! It’s a whole series of masterpieces! . . . The pain rises from below or comes down from above, and it becomes human pain. I keep banging into the walls that surround me on every side. I’m a cement man! But I’ve often had to hold on to myself behind my laughter.

>Less Chance Than Choice

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>The single rule I observe when deciding what to read next is to follow fiction with non-fiction. That way, characters stay where they’re supposed to. If I read two novels back-to-back, Beckett’s Celia from Murphy is liable to emerge as the innkeeper in Bernhard’s Frost.


That rule aside, serendipity and randomness determine my reading. A reference in Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory will resolve Thomas Bernhard’s Frost as my next fictional encounter. Meeting both a surgeon and an artist called Strauch in Frost may suggest Kennedy’s A Brief History of Disease Science and Medicine or Flux’s Matisse biography as subsequent non-fiction.
Frequently when reviewed from a distance, a structure emerges within contingency. Thomas Bernhard is an obvious choice after Beckett. The dark humour and repetition; the soaring, beautiful use of language make them seem natural bedfellows.
More deliberate choice comes from sweeping, passionate obsessions that follow a new discovery. Discovering Philip Roth, Nabokov and Flaubert for the first time concentrated my reading for months to a single author. This compulsion to read everything by a much loved writer is still present but I am able to pace myself differently.

>Thinking Through Language

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>Whilst reading Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory (A Very Short Introduction) I came across an intriguing linguistic theory:

… the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’, named after two linguists who claimed that the language we speak determines what we can think. For instance, Whorf argued that the Hopi Indians have a conception of time that can’t be grasped in English (and so can’t be explained here!). There seems no way of demonstrating that there are thoughts of one language that can’t be thought or expressed in another, but we do have massive evidence that one language makes ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ thoughts that require a special effort in another.

A Google search and a spare hour presents numerous conflicting messages about the theory. There are variants and a great deal that is open to interpretation. This analysis is one of the more concise and amusing.