Multiple Reading Personalities

Look what came in the mail today…

11 textbooks (mostly Latin, Roman civilization and linguistics), 10 classics for school (Proust, Rilke, Gauthier, Modiano, Claude Simon, Georges Perec) and EIGHTEEN various books. THREE of which I paid for — the rest courtesy of my bookstore owner friend and from another friend, who works for a publishing house in Paris.

We used to be very close, but we lost touch for many years, and now have a very intermittent relation… So this came as a total surprise! For hours, I couldn’t stop giggling with the intoxication of knowing loved ones love you back. That, and new books!

The cats must have been feeling my happiness, because they invited themselves in the pictures instead of going straight for the empty box. Of course, they then disappeared in cardboard heaven.

Now all I have to do is decide where to start reading!

 “That is nothing, nothing beside your agony”

I started this first reading of the Iliad assuming I knew ”the story”. As it turns out, I didn’t, at least not exactly: the narrow scope of the tale (really just a few weeks, with a few days of combat making up the bulk of the text) surprised me. Most notably, I expected the death of Achilles, the ruse of the horse and the fall of Troy to be told, and was proven wrong.

At any rate, I am intrigued by the choice made here, and by its effect on the perception of the war. That a poem over 15,000 lines would only cover a few days in a ten-year span makes my head spin with the enormity of the war. This is reinforced by the bloodiness of Homer’s account, which I have mentioned in earlier posts: if that happened in just a few weeks, how can the full extent of the war even be envisioned? There’s something dizziyingly modern about handling such a major conflict by an extreme close-up on a turning point.

These few weeks Homer (I’m going to assume a Homer) focusses on are of course extremely significant: they begin with a fight between Achilles (the Acheans’ star warrior) and Agamemnon (their leader). Achilles knows that to win glory under the walls of Troy is to accept death in this foreign country; he has chosen honor, and goes ballistic when he feels that Agamemnon is humiliating him by taking away his captive Briseis. What is the point of his sacrifice if his statute is not safe? Through this incident, Achilles and Agamemnon both come across as violent, haughty, selfish and spiteful; it crossed my mind that maybe the nine years of siege and the constant immersion into a testoterone-fuelled environment were getting on their nerves… But the gods also prove quite worthy of these unflattering adjectives, the blood-thirsty gods of Homer, barely self-aware, driven by their instincts and emotions, modeled by their culture of honor.

Achilles avenge himself by praying to the gods to turn against his allies, that they might feel how great their need for him is; and the gods (especially Zeus, who loves him) consent. The tides of war turn in favor of the Trojans, at least until Achilles’ friend Patroclus is killed by Hector. Achilles’ fury explodes in awful massacres, culminating in the slaughter of Hector and the outrages inflicted to his body. The Iliad finally concludes with two burials, first that of Patroclus and then, after the gods have taken pity on Priam and commanded Achilles to give him Hector’s body back, that of the Trojan prince. The symetry of pain on both sides is prolonged by the now-unavoidable events the reader know must happen: because Hector is dead, Achille’s fate is to perish; because Hector is dead, because its most worthy defender has failed, Troy must fall.

After reading the Iliad over the course of a full month, there are two things that really stand out for me: one is the fury of battle, the halting rythm of the text then… yet all fights blend together, all names lie in a common grave. The other is a duo of quieter scenes that gave much of its emotional power to the epic.

The first of these two scenes is that of Hector’s last visit to his family in Troy, the tenderness and love he shows for his country and family, the sense of doom that is hanging over his head, and his choice to die trying to defend what he loves. Hector in battle is no more sensitive than any other man, driven by blood-fury and a burning desire for victory; but Hector in his hour of peace is the reason to feel that what is happening is a tragedy, not the Greek equivalent of a slasher movie with the gods in the role of the chainsaw. This scene is the reason I cried when Hector finally died.

The other scene is that of the dialogue between Priam and Achilles, when Priam leaves Troy to meet Achilles and ransom Hector’s body. The father and the killer of his son spend the night in close proximity, each brooding over their own loss, each responsible for the other’s, yet united in pain and perhaps in a sense of fate. Fear and anger will return, but this night is a truce, a lull in the violence of war, with both accepting the humanity of the ennemy at their side. I can’t quite articulate what moved me so much in this scene, but I visualized it more vividly than anything that preceded, without so much as trying, and it made me envision Achilles as a human being (instead of as a force of nature) for a few minutes. I don’t think this is indicative of his true nature, but it gave me a way to relate to him a little, and that’s quite a prowess.

I have to apologize, once more, for introducing a little dose of French here, but you have to understand: I am distraught.

Yes, I knew it was going to happen. That psychopath Achilles killed Hector.

I tried to push the moment as far back as I could, reading very very slowly, and even starting a new book despite my promises to myself not to start anything until I had finished the Iliad. But finally last night I just could not delay the inevitable any longer, and I read through the death of Hector. I was very stoic for a while, at least until Andromache started weeping, and then I started crying too. Such a weakling.

Oh, and the other book that I picked came from my first time volunteering with the Library sales team. It is a fun experience, and I got to feel very young, as the rest of the volunteers (except for one woman who must be well into her forties) are all sixty and older. They are very nice, and I am so happy I get to sit with a bunch of white-haired people to drink weak coffee and eat bad cookies at the morning break, and to listen as they are telling stories of things that had happened last week or 40 years ago. One woman told about how she sold her car to get a TV in the fifties — this is the same woman who reads at every single meal and comes to help the Library every week for four hours even though she has a bad back. I’m already feeling very fond of her. I was very excited when I got back home after this, and I think Chris thought I was a little crazy.

I can’t wait to go back next week!

“un immense oiseau de nuit qui les regardait de ses yeux de braise, et qui semblait accroché aux cordes de la lyre d’Apollon!”
“an immense night-bird that stared at them with its blazing eyes and seemed to cling to the string of Apollo’s lyre (translation found at Classic Reader)

The Phantom as The Red Death — illustration from Castaigne

This week-end was near perfect: Chris and I went to Kentucky with our friends B and G, going from Bourbon distillery to horse racetrack (where I bet on the darkest horse I could find, in honor of The Black Stallion – and won!), from city to nature, and from activity to long breaks at the motel. I finished the Phantom of the Opera just before we went to visit the Lexington Cemetery, a peaceful place of nostalgic beauty. Its atmosphere is perhaps one of the reasons that the Phantom finally settled into my mind as a tragic figure rather than the monster he also is. There were interesting parallels to Frankenstein, in the “if only his creator – or men – had been a little more merciful”…  (“peut-être l’eût-il été [un ange] tout à fait si Dieu l’avait vêtu de beauté au lieu de l’habiller de pourriture” — “), though in Leroux’s work there seem to be a greater fascination for the links between pain and genius, where Shelley seemed to have less sympathy for her creation.

The novel is both simple in its dynamics (a love triangle, a mystery to be solved) and ornate in its details; it mixes tragic romance with comedy, murder mystery and tragedy. It however never felt disorienting or labored thanks to fast facing, frequent comedic touches and what impressed me most – Leroux’s complicity with his readers. He shamelessly cultivates it by not only addressing them directly, but also including them in spirited mockery of some characters such as Mme Giry or the extremely secondary “juge d’instruction Faure”. How infinitely wiser, smarter, and better informed we feel! And how I wish Gaston was one of my friends, or even better, a coworker with whom to grab coffee and make fun of everyone else. Knowing full well, of course, that he’s probably had a few laughs at your expense too.

The story itself is that of the mysterious events that happened at the Opera between the time a director is found murdered and that a diva disappears with a viscount. The diva is Christine Daae, a young woman whose least secret is how her voice miraculously became more beautiful than any other; the viscount is Raoul, who loves her with all the stubborn passion of a man who cannot imagine anything beyond him; in-between them stands the long shadow of the Phantom, a creature of many talents and macabre taste who lives under the Opera. I must confess to liking him much better than that brute of Raoul (who is initially depicted as naïve, childish man, and who, like a rotten kid, throws jealous tantrums at the slightest provocation). The Phantom himself borders on the homicidal, and acts with a staggering mix of greed and disdain for others, but with such grandeur and such style that it takes incredible efforts to remember that this guy is a murderer and a torturer… I’m afraid I failed at it most of the time, and kept wishing for his triumph.

All in all, the Phantom was just delightful. Everything felt just right, down to the varied and colorful characters, down to the unrealistically sarcastic dialogue (“D. – Vous êtes superstitieux ? R. – Non, monsieur, je suis croyant” — “are you supersticious?” “No sir, I believe in God”). Leroux stops at nothing to entertain, not even at lifting lines almost straight out of Victor Hugo (“C’était l’heure tranquille où les machinistes vont boire”, “The peaceful hour where thirsty stage managers pass” switching the original lions with a more urban type of beast). Works for me.

Oh, and that ends my participation in the R.I.P. Challenge IV, I think, as I prepare to immerse myself in Proust for a few weeks!

Doing my blog tour today, so many books appealed that I started scribbling down titles on a piece of paper. I wasn’t really thinking while doing so, but when I reviewed the list later, I was amused to see within a few lines of each other Black Milk (a Turkish novel from Elif Shafah, on women’s relations to creativity, located in one of my favorite cities in the world – Istanbul), Black Juice (from Margo Lanagan, a writer I’ve been meaning to discover) and the anthology Black Water (an 1984 collection of supernatural stories Audrey Niffeneger mentioned in her recent Goodreads interview).

All these dark liquids somehow reminded me that I didn’t review Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls — a vampire book I read under the pretense of the R.I.P. Challenge. To tell the truth I haven’t much to say about it. It is the story of a young vampire searching for his family; he will have to choose between kindred creative/ tortured souls and his blood kin – vampires lost in blood and sex lust. 

I’m not a prudish reader, but the abundance of incest/ pedophilia was a little ridiculous and just killed any eroticism. I wasn’t shocked so much as bored – the worst thing that can happen to a story. The problem was compounded by the fact that the two characters I was most interested in (Ghost, a “sensitive”, and Christian, an old vampire) did not gain the depth I was hoping for. I really wanted to get to know them, and was really curious how their stories would intertwine. I also wanted to see a female character that wasn’t a thinly veiled plot device… In the end however, I didn’t get any of my wishes. So while not exactly bad (after all, I wanted something to happen, so I had some interest), the novel just didn’t feel substantial. I have a feeling I’ll forget it entirely pretty soon.

“As her sight glanced again upon the grave, she could not forbear enquiring, for whom it was prepared. He took his eyes from the torch, and fixed them upon her face without speaking.”

Strike 3 for the R.I.P. Challenge! The most authentic gothic novel in my reading list, The Mysteries of Udolpho is book-ended by scenes of simple happiness in the Gascony house of the Saint-Aubert family; in between these, much travel, much adversity and many preposterous twists and turns sprawl on the pages of Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 novel. There’s good fun to be had in dark castles and secret passages, among mysterious voices and ghostly apparitions, but there’s also a quantity of unnecessary devices and digressions. If a modern editor were to travel back in time and inform Radcliffe that more is not always better – and if she also decided to put in a good word for consistency in point of view – I believe I would be a perfectly content reader.

When we first meet Emily Saint-Aubert, she seems to have the perfect life: loving and wise parents, a comfortable house with a well-stocked library, a lovely park. Emily is her parents’ only surviving child, having lost two brothers a few years back (an information given by Radcliffe with amusing  offhand brutality:  after describing a charming pastoral scene, she mentions that Emily’s father’s “first interruptions to the happiness […] since his retirement were occasioned by the death of his two sons”). This last is an example of unnecessary information. Nobody in the novel cares, neither therefore does the reader, and the fact has no bearing on the plot. Why bother?

The first seven chapters are similarly protracted, and I frankly felt that they belonged to the back-story, or at the very least should have been summarized in one chapter. In jest, Emily’s parents both die, leaving her in an embarrassed financial situation, and she meets a young man, Valancourt, whom she is attracted to. That’s it for the plot – the rest is all description of nature, gay peasant dances (I kid you not) and philosophical musings. One of these asides was about Emily’s education, in particular about teaching her to govern her sensitivity (Emily’s father teaches her that “sentiment is a disgrace, instead of an ornament, unless it lead us to good actions” and illustrates his point with the example of “persons [who] turn from the distressed […] because their sufferings are painful to be contemplated”). This type of moral education, so obvious until the 19^th century, seems to have gone out of fashion with the emergence of the ideas of “teaching by example”, “letting children become themselves”, and probably with the idea that human beings are born good (merci Rousseau!). I for one feel that I would have benefited to be taught what to do with excessive sensitivity – or with laziness, vanity, discouragement, etc. – but I’m not sure how other modern readers would enjoy these passages.

So back to the action: it picks up when the now-orphaned Emily is assigned to the care of her aunt, Mme Cheron. A silly, insensitive woman who delights in having power over others, she immediately indulges her petty impulses by coming between Emily and Valancourt. She also marries an Italian nobleman of suspicious character, and takes Emily away to Italy. There, amid enemies sly or brutal, Emily will have to fight for her virtue and her happiness in settings ranging from magnificent Venice palazzi to a ruined gothic fortress in the Apennines (and more – it is the rare chapter that doesn’t involve some change of setting). Bucolic promenades finally give way to treason and supernatural apparitions. The story from this point on is convoluted and coincidental to the point of absurdity, but with such lavish imagination, the only way to not enjoy oneself is to be impervious to the genre entirely. Of course, in the end, reason (if not probability) and courage will prevail, the worthy will be rewarded and villains will be punished.

I think it might read Radcliffe again in the future, but with a slightly different approach. As a writer, she is able of surgical wit, especially when criticizing fashionable society (for instance: “Madame Clairval, though a woman of fashion, was far less advanced than her friend in the art of deriving satisfaction from distinction and admiration, rather than from conscience”, or “the party continued to converse, and, as far as civility would permit, to torture each other by mutual boasts”); this ability to encapsulate realms of meaning in a short sentence sometimes even shines through without irony, an even rarer gift (for instance, when talking about the process of falling in love, she mentions “the danger of sympathy and silence”). She is unfortunately also inclined to great enthusiasm and lengthy descriptions for all things nature and heroines “full of timid sweetness” – not my cup of tea. I might just skip these passages in the future, as I skipped a majority of the poetry - editing as I read, in a way.

I am under the charm of Homer, and I have to admit I didn’t expect the pleasure. I was dubious whether I would enjoy reading the Iliad for two reasons. The first and most minor one was the question of suspense. Of course (I thought - and have been proven at least partly wrong) I know what happens in the Iliad. Knowing where a story is going is generally not a huge deal for me, but it certainly doesn’t help if the writing is not sufficiently interesting to take me in.

And that leads me to main my worry: the Iliad is poetry, and I am reading it in an English translation (that of Robert Fagles). I started reading poetry in English only relatively recently (Dickinson first, a hideously frustrating experience, followed by Keats and then a translation of the Russian poet Akhmatova), and so far it’s been… I think the right word is sad. In my native French, the first book I really, really loved (after my Black stallion era, that is) was a collection of Verlaine poems plucked from my parents’ bookshelves. Other poets (Beaudelaire of course, but also Mallarmé or Eluard among others) captivated me at other times. I was also always fond of reading rhymed theatre, the perfectly balanced verses of Beaumarchais, Rostand or Corneille giving me immense pleasure. But in English? Almost nothing. A few tingles with Keats, but none of the overwhelming physical well-being that I associate with poetry. None of the intensity of feeling that the specific rythms of a tense or luscious poem will instill. Until now.

Homer is much more brutal than I expected; he is downright gory at times. Eyes burst open, brain matter splatters inside helmets, entrails cascade on the ground – repeatedly. He is also very visual, constantly weaving striking similes into his tale. Finally, the verse itself, at least as translated, is halting, rushed, constantly driving forward. Sentences are long (not many places to stop), but with constant breaks in their rythm paralleling the back and fro of the action. I think these three elements are helping me feel the epic more than decypher it.

I can’t help but hope that this will prove the “breakthrough book” that will help me learn to enjoy poetry in English. Wouldn’t I better enjoy it for what it is? I am trying to keep my hopes in check, but my mind is racing back to that volume of Keats and wants to go and try again… Try again…