Tag Archives: Leo Tolstoy

Between the Lines

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Chantal Joffe: Emily with Sugar I, 2016

How to read well amidst infinite streams of information and data? Arriving at the closing pages of a long book, Anna Karenina, in my case, feels like more of an achievement than it should, but it is all too easy to get distracted. Paradoxically, inhabiting the world of a long book is one of my favourite ways of spending time on this planet. This year I’d like to embrace the resilience found in the pages of long stories like War and Peace and Moby Dick. Slowly journeying between the extended anchor points of the opening and closing pages of long books, percolating through time, allowing the linearity of time to be dissolved. Less is more and more.

Anna Karenina gave me a richly varied cornucopia of bilious old men, strutting peacocks, beautiful women, awkward peasants, uncouth nobility, cattle, rural politics, scything techniques, abundances of a different type, but what lingers are the exquisitely and precisely rendered emotions. Beware of the green-eyed monster which mocks the meat it feeds on. In Anna Karenina, the Lord of Jealousy steps in, inhabiting the text as a fully developed character You might read any number of books on the subject but come to Anna Karenina to truly understand its malignant force.

This year begins with Clarice Lispector’s The Passion according to G. H., translated by Ronald W. Sousa. I’ve been unable to read beyond the first paragraph, which I reread, inscribe into two different notebooks and now into the internet. It recalls a passage I love from Michel Serres’ Thumbelina: I am sometimes unknown to myself and on display at one and the same time. I exist, therefore I am a code. I am calculable and incalculable, like a golden needle, plus the haystack in which, buried, its brightness lies hidden.

I keep looking, looking. Trying to understand. Trying to give what I have gone through to someone else, and I don’t know who, but I don’t want to be alone with that experi-ence. I don’t know what to do with it, I’m terrified of that profound disorganization. I’m not sure I even believe in what happened to me. Did something happen, and did I, because I didn’t know how to experience it, end up experiencing something else instead? It’s that something that I’d like to call disorganization, and then I’d have the confidence to venture forth because I would know where to come back to: to the prior organization. I prefer to call it disorganization because I don’t want to ground myself in what I experienced — in that grounding I would lose the world as it was for me before, and I know that I don’t have the capacity for another one.

Thank you to those that sent messages in response to my last post. Your interest is greatly  appreciated. It is always gratifying to know that these words travel through different conceptual worlds and times to enrich readers.

Scything Through Time

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Dostoevsky’s novels, wrote John Bayley, “are full of a stifling smell of living and littered with constitute daily reality,” as compared to Tolstoy who has, “houses and dinners and landscapes, ” which is a striking and nicely balanced comparison.

There is a singular scene in Anna Karenina which marked my transition from curiosity to a genuine fondness for Tolstoy’s story. The noble Levin scythes hay with the peasantry, transitioning over the course of the long day from a sense of detachment and to a more instinctual rhythm. It is a similar metaphor to Hamlet’s “the interim” as the place where contentment is found. As Tolstoy wrote elsewhere, “True life is not lived where great external changes take place.” It is a quite extraordinary scene and set my decision to read more Tolstoy, particularly War and Peace.

Normally at this time of the year I am brimming with plans for next year’s reading, but apart from wishing to read through those Shakespeare plays I’ve not read and more of Samuel Johnson’s Lives, I have few other settled intentions. “Age with his stealing steps / Hath clawed me in his clutch.” As I turn fifty-nine a deep sense of mortality is shaping what I read and I find myself turning more to those works of art that have eluded me to date. There is more urgency to try to read well. I read more books (87) this year than any other but feel that I read too much. With a handful of exceptions, the most profound and interesting reading this year was all older books.

Time’s Flow Stemmed feels a little rudderless at the moment but still appears to be of some interest if judged by 1,200 subscribers and 1,800 visitors per month on average, but I have no point of comparison. If any readers would like me to respond to specific questions about my reading life please either leave a comment or send an email. I still clearly feel a need to write into the internet as manifested by the occasional post here and my sporadic social media presence.

The Art of Failure

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Umberto Eco called translation, “the art of failure”, after all, didn’t he? And fail we must, with every syllable, insofar as the fact that we’re changing it all means, you know, that we’re changing it – but far better one great actor’s interpretation of Hamlet than never to see it performed even a single astonishing, imperfect time.

—Daniel Hahn (Catching Fire: A Translation Diary)

It is not always a lack of culture that lets down modern translations. Many translators work in material conditions which condemn them to producing poor drudgework, however competent and gifted they may in fact be. It is very hard to produce satisfactory literary translations while trying to live from them . . . A good translation is at one and the same time a labour of love and a luxury good. To translate is to pursue a passion (at times a costly one!); it rarely becomes a profitable activity.

—Simon Leys (The Hall of Uselesness)

Ay, there’s the rub! Read different translations of Proust, of War and Peace, of Cervantes, rather than not to read at all. But why read translations when the original is not Proust, not a masterpiece? I think of this a lot. Unless on those rare occasions that the translation is superior to the original (claimed of Moncrieff’s Proust and Baudelaire’s Poe)

Monsters

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Reading Middlemarch with no particular desire to finish reading Middlemarch brought home to me just how much I love reading what Henry James denounced as ‘loose baggy monsters’ or very long books (as defined, say, of more than five hundred pages).

I don’t think Middlemarch is that loose or baggy, quite the opposite in fact. It is a novel of immense discipline with a great deal of thought put into the architecture and the skeleton building. Nor do I think looseness is such a bad thing in a novel. Looseness gives one room to breathe, to slow down.

There is something in the psychological experience of burrowing into a long and expansive novel that is very special. That isn’t too say I don’t admire writers who can achieve the concentrated unity of an effective shorter novel, but all too often they rely overly much on plot, creating those tiresome “page-turners” that end up being exhausting and ephemeral. Besides, are monsters such a bad thing? The word stems from monstrum, something that upsets thought, that lives at the edge of reason, and that is an apt word to underpin the unsettling, time-shifting nature of a long, complex novel.

So I have in my sights some other monsters that I’ve not read before. This might be a year I read only another dozen books:

  1. Alexander Theroux, Einstein’s Beets
  2. Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories
  3. Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet
  4. Cora Sandel, Alberta trilogy
  5. Peter Handke, My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay
  6. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
  7. Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools
  8. Divine Comedy (Dorothy Sayers’ translation)
  9. Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries
  10. Thomas Mann, Joseph and his Brothers
  11. Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage (last four books to finish)
  12. Maybe more Nádas, or Tolstoy, or Weymouth Sands, or rereading Proust or Karamazov, or . . .

If you have a favourite monster I’ve not mentioned please drop into comments.

The Kreutzer Sonata

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Leoš Janáček, of all composers, makes me wish for greater technical knowledge of musical form, as his music never fails to provoke surprise. His late music is against the grain of anything else happening at the time. One piece that I listen to often is The Kreutzer Sonata, based on Tolstoy’s novella of the same name. Tolstoy’s novella was in turn inspired by Beethoven’s violin sontata (Op. 47 “Kreutzer”), which is invoked in the third of the four movements of the Janáček, with an edgy canon between cello and violin.

In a letter to Kamila Stösslová (Faber and Faber’s Intimate Letters: Leoš Janáček to Kamila Stösslová relate one side of his unrequited and obsessive love. They are intense.), Janáček wrote, “I had in mind the pitiable woman who is maltreated, beaten, and murdered.” Composer and violinist, Josef Suk, wrote that Janáček intended the composition to be a protest against men’s despotic attitude toward women.

It is an uneasy but beautiful piece, always a pleasure to see performed live due to its complexity. I was fortunate to see a fine performance this week by the Julia Fisher Quartet.