“From your window, can you see the moon?”

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Excerpts, Fiction - Novella, Eileen Chang, Translation, NYRB Classics, The NYRB Classics Project, Karen S. Kingsbury

One of the first NYRB Classics I heard of—in tandem with John Williams’ Stoner—was Eileen Chang’s collection of novellas Love in a Fallen City. My bibliophilic enabler Aunt Anne sent me this book late last year, and it’s taken me this long to settle down and read it. And, you know, it was awesome.

For purposes of brevity [sorely lacking in my corner of the internet], this post is going to focus on the title novella. Which is, well, one of the best nerve-wracking, most quietly and dignifiedly tense love stories I’ve ever read. It mixes cultural mores of the time [turn of the century] with a classics cat-and-mouse trope. Everyone is at once impeccably mature and flawed.

Liusu is divorced, and family—who tends to highlight her uselessness, given her status—presses her to make herself useful once more. Through marriage, naturally. Enter Fan Liuyuan, rich and educated in Britain, scaring off all the young brides eager to catch him. It’s like [what I hear] Jane Austen [is all about], but certainly more compelling, with a more volatile relationship.

She could hardly believe it, but he rarely so much as touched her hand. She was continually on edge, fearing he would suddenly drop the pretense and launch a surprise attack. But day after day he remained a gentleman; it was like facing a great enemy who stood perfectly still.

How these two interact with each other, all the games, all the strategic teasing and withdrawal of affection, the little props and hints they throw each other, it all rings true, and with such an intense feeling.

One backdrop of their relationship: The woman’s place—“Basically, a woman who was tricked by a man deserved to die, while a woman who tricked a man was a whore. If a woman tried to trick a man but failed and then was tricked by him, that was whoredom twice over. Kill her and you’d only dirty the knife.” Okay. [In another novella, this tidbit: “In China, as elsewhere, the constraints imposed by the traditional moral code were originally constructed for the benefit of women: they made beautiful women even harder to obtain, so their value rose, and ugly women were spared the prospect of never-ending humiliation.” Just amazing, no?]

It’s status, yes, it’s the political climate of the time. But, you know, at the heart of the falling city is this solid love story that has the individuals involved the main source of conflict. Hell, one of the most poignant scenes in the novella, for me: when Fan Liuyuan, after a day of hide-and-seek, calls Liusu from his room, which shares a wall with hers. She picks up the phone and lays the receiver on the bedspread. In the stillness of the room, that most quiet of nights, his voice is so clear:

“Liusu, from your window, can you see the moon?”

She didn’t know why, but suddenly she was sobbing. The moon shone bright and blurry through her tears, silver, with a slightly greenish tint. “In my window,” said Liyuan, “there is a flowering vine that blocks half the view. Maybe it’s a rose. Or maybe not.”

And for a long time, neither talks. That charged scene, that scuttling courtship, an olive branch extended—as close as the two of them could admit that they felt for each other. Oh, I swooned. I pressed the book against my face, squealed, read the passage again, and swooned once more.

Also, in SashaLand, it’s not a love story if no one relents. Ladies and gentlemen, the relenting, in form of one of the best kisses I’ve ever read:

This was the first time he had kissed her, but it didn’t feel like the first time to either of them—they had both imagined it so many times. They’d had many opportunities—the right place, the right moment—he’d thought of it; she had worried it might happen. But they were both such clever people, always planning carefully, that they’d never dared to risk it. Suddenly it was reality, and they were both dazed. Liusu’s head was spinning. She fell back against the mirror, her back tightly pressed to its icy surface. His mouth did not leave hers. He pushed her into the mirror and they seemed to fall into it, into another shadowy world—freezing cold, searing hot, flame of the forest flowers burning all over them.

Thank you, and good night.

+ + + + +

Something personal. I want to scrawl this on creamy paper and hand it over to you. Because, you know, once again I’ve found in literature more of the words that come only as instinct to me at each end of our days together.

Here in this uncertain world, money, property, the permanent things—they’re all unreliable. The only thing she could rely on was the breath in her lungs, and this person who lay sleeping beside her. Suddenly, she crawled over to him, hugging him through his quilt. He reached out from the bedding and grasped her hand. They looked and saw each other, saw each other entirely. It was a mere moment of deep understanding, but it was enough to keep them happy together for a decade or so.

“Stories can wait.”

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Fiction - Short Stories, Classics, Excerpts, NYRB Classics, The NYRB Classics Project, Mavis Gallant, Russell Banks

In his introduction to Mavis Gallant’s short story collection, Varieties of Exile, Russell Banks offers us a quote from the other herself—

Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.

Banks, of course, offers the feeble, “But, trust me, these can’t.” As particular as the advice may come to readers of short story collections—among them, the odd creatures like me who merely take deep breaths in the pause between stories—the quote Banks pulls feels out of place, given the collective nature he selected for this NYRB Classics edition: The Gallant stories here are linked, in one way or another.

There are three sets or sequences to the stories—the first, about the adventures of Linnet Muir, trying to make her way into the world, when her refugee state and her gender are already two strikes against her; the second, the sisters Carette, growing up, loving, forging different lives; the last, of a male narrator [Banks stresses that there is a need to disabuse the notion that Gallant is cruel to her male characters].

What these three grand narratives have in common? One, they’re “Canadian stories,” as Banks dubs them—a matter of the characters’ nationality, we are informed, especially during a time when the very aspect of national identity for Canada was dubious. For another, their preoccupations: These are old-fashioned stories about people who were quite modern within the time they belonged. However, life seems to us pretty mundane and prosaic and seemingly trivial—but oh-so-oppressive in its politeness!—in Gallant’s world, despite the heavy cloak of formality, which is no doubt brought on by her strident tone and formalistic language. [There are strains of this formality, this scope and sometimes-glib omniscience in the stories of Alice Munro and Carol Shields, who both wrote a generation or two after Gallant, whom I both love madly.]

Again, linked stories, a generous survey. After the first two stories where you recognize the main character, you know where this collection wishes to take you, and you tag along. You can’t wait to see a life unfolding before you, told through stories [or installments] whose relevance was chosen with the author’s discretion. Think of the collection as three different novellas, told in episodes. After a while, well, of course these stories can’t wait—each of them is part of a specific arc!

Moving on. In theory, at least, I should have enjoyed Gallant. I’m certainly in awe of her—she is accomplished, this Grand Dame of Short Fiction. [Banks, too, addresses this, as Gallant “has mostly been viewed as a ‘writers’ writer’: “For what is a writers’ writer, anyhow? Merely one who honors in every sentence she writes the deepest, most time-honored principles of composition: honesty, clarity, and concision. So, yes, in that sense she is a writers’ writer. But only in that sense.”] So, yes, all that. Oh, I have admiration in buckets. But this reader didn’t have enough room to move, despite the expansiveness in the stories and the genius Gallant so clearly has—this reader just couldn’t feel it and fall in love and fall quiet.

Exuberance is beauty

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Fiction - Novel, Excerpts, Translation, NYRB Classics, The NYRB Classics Project, Gyula Krúdy

#128 of 2011 • Sunflower by Gyula Krúdy, translated from the Hungarian by John Bátki, with an introduction by John Lukacs. Published by NYRB Classics.

“Let’s wait for winter. The first, the second, the third winter… Let’s wait for monotonous evenings of this place, the courses of the moon, the howling-wolf nights. We’ll just have to make sure to wind the clocks each day, bury our memories, sit in tranquility by the warm fireside, play enough tric-trac, and never, ever write letters without each other’s knowledge, no matter how overcast the twilight.”

“I’ll be waiting for you.”

“Let crazy life rush headlong on the highway, for others; we shall contemplate the sunflowers, watch them sprout, blossom, fade away. Yesterday they were still giants, but now, in autumn, they are thatch on the roof.”

It was clear, right from the very beginning: this was unlike any other book I’d read before. Sunflower is a fever dream, violently romantic, lush and crazy and demanding and bewildering and beautiful. It’s language follows that dream logic, the metaphors swinging every which way, every mundane act elevated to hyperbole. And it’s dizzying collective of characters?

There is a woman, quiet and too-beautiful, and the two men who love her—one, a good-for-nothing lover hands long open to be granted her wealth, the other, an Álmos-Dreamer [a long line of lovers who have killed themselves for mostly unrequited love.] And, indeed, Andor Álmos-Dreamer kills himself for Eveline—but when Eveline rushes to his cooling corpse, he wakens. Of course he does. There is also Mr. Pistoli, a Casanova now firmly middle-aged, and all the baggage of his past loves, past marriages—three of them, his wives gone mad. Mr. Pistoli is in love with Miss Malvina Maszkerádi, the feisty, determined-spinster. Miss Maszkerádi is in love with a tree, and would like to stay that way, thank you very much.

Ah, but this is the best I can do, for now: Read Sunflower. Read it over weeks and months, it changes every time you return to it, and that is never a bad thing for something so charged with life and language and the strangest ways people decide to live and love. Read Sunflower, read, read, read. I know I will again, and soon, hopefully soon.

PS – I have Isabella of Magnificent Octopus to thank for leading me to this book. This is the review that clued me in on the possibility of a romance between me and this glorious novel.

PPS – A more coherent version of my dizzypants-love for this novel: The LA Times review by Arthur Phillips, which begins, “Maybe I should just write, “Read Sunflower,” and leave it at that.”

Victorine!

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Fiction - Novel, NYRB Classics, The NYRB Classics Project, Maude Hutchins

#139 of 2011 • Victorine, by Maude Hutchins.

Our Victorine is a strange one. She’s a bright-eyed adolescent, rapt and giddy with the secrets her body has just begun to disclose. And everything is hyper-eroticized, every brush with the world summons an arousal—it’s nearly ridiculous. Everything is sex! And not even necessarily a prelude to intercourse, mind you, but to a new and different heady sensation awakening within her body.

As she had lain for those few moments on her back, half naked, caressing herself, waiting for male co-operation, she had been, perhaps, neither good nor evil, just an anthropological specimen.

The Alice in Wonderland-like distortion to the burgeoning sexuality of Victorine works in its favor, convinces the reader of its credibility. Even when our proto-nymphet glances against possible threats—a bum! a creepily obsessive older brother who is nonetheless painted as those sensitive, be-lacy-hankerchief-ed souls—she comes out unscathed, because her wonder protects her from fear. Her preoccupation with how her body reacts makes everything fun, even harmless.

- – - – -

I am brazen enough to construct a theme out of three of my recent reads—John Cleland’s Fanny Hill and Panarello’s 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed [both discussed-ish here], and, now, Victorine by Maude Hutchins. The first two my brand me a closet pervert, but the addition of Hutchins’ coming-of-age story lends a point to it all: I am all about the awakening of young women’s sexual urges. Yeah, that’s it.

Brief thoughts on Monsieur Monde Vanishes by Georges Simenon

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Excerpts, Fiction - Novel, Georges Simenon, NYRB Classics, The NYRB Classics Project, Translation

My first Georges Simenon [or, as the coolest kids refer to him, just Simenon (like Madonna?)], and I liked it immensely: Monsieur Monde Vanishes, about Monsieur Monde who walks out of his life seemingly the very moment he wakes up from his droning existence, and what he did while he disappeared.

What compels people to leave? I could count the ways. But for Monsieur Monde, “There was no inner conflict, no decision to be reached, indeed nothing was ever decided at all.” He simply leaves. He withdraws 300,000 francs from his bank accounts, and just walks out of his life.

And the reader isn’t even privy to the entirety of his existential condition. Yes, we know he’s well-off, having salvaged the family business from his spendthrift father—but he feels like he’s just going through the motions. He hardly knows his son—and they live in the same house and work in the same office. His daughter appears in his life (and in the narrative) when she asks money from him, or when she’s raging that he couldn’t be found to ask money from. And his wife. When he wakes up in the morning, he allows her to pretend that he thinks she’s still sleeping.

It’s easy for us to feel that he’s unhappy, sure. Or, at least, that he’s resigned to his life being this way. But Simenon never stuffs motivation down my throat. For that, alone—me, having sat through countless workshop hours listening to chastisement about agenda and motivation—I like this book.

He was a man who, for a long time, had endured the human condition without being conscious of it, as others endure an illness of which they are unaware. He had always been a man living among other men and like them he had struggled, jostling amid the crowd, now feebly and now resolutely, without knowing whither he was going.

During his disappearance, he tries out new identities, if only by way of trying out new clothes (ready-made this time, egads). Oh, he’s adorable with his earnestness. And with his solitude, too. Monsieur Monde is clearly a hero, what with this new, necessary adventure before him. Yes, I liked him immensely, too.

Not exactly disappointments

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Romance Novel, Anna Campbell, Translation, NYRB Classics, The NYRB Classics Project, Tove Jansson

In this post: Thoughts on My Reckless Surrender by Anna Campbell [jump to A], and on Fair Play by Tove Jansson [jump to B]—two books I very much expected I would like—hell, I wanted to like them—but, well, just couldn’t.

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[A] • I like Anna Campbell, I really do. She was one of my great discoveries last year, with her Captive of Sin, and her book Untouched is one of the best reading of my year so far. Which is, you know, no pressure at all—especially since My Reckless Surrender, read in a ridiculously protracted time to make it last, is the last Campbell book in my shelves. Good lord.

My return to the book slowly devolved into mindless keening, also known as Romance Reader Reaction #0243, also known as She’s Not Worth All This Shit; Get Away From Her Now [also not-quite-shamefully known as item #0234a, or C’Mere, I Will Love You Better]. But I fought it, I fought it hard. Mostly because it was irrational, and the feeling’s intensity could have raised some alarms.

Okay. One of the things I like about Campbell is her willingness—her audacity, at times—to take risks. Risks, risks, risks. Rakes and harlots, and not only in name, abound her fiction. If you want angst, she delivers—angst that has, more often than not, stemmed from truly cruel acts of pathetic excuses for humanity. If you want sex, the novels have it in bucketfuls, and they’re never overpowering, they never stand as as-is smut: Here’s sex that furthers the relationship of the characters, even the respective self-discoveries of the H/h. Dude, Anna Campbell is the shiznit. For her risks alone—but, hell, she’s got crazy writing skills, not to mention the best ever characters, and the uncanny ability to make me hurt, dammit—she ought to be applauded. With more than a little fanaticism thrown in.

But, well, the risks in My Reckless Surrender—and, ergo, the book itself—just didn’t pay off. I mean, fine, I liked it, but the novel doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny and a rather painful contemplation once it’s put down. The elements were there, but it felt like the story and the heroine in particular got away from Campbell’s authority. Hell, I’ve seen Campbell’s control, and this here flagged a little. I think that the biggest Meh about this book was that it was, well, it was normal. Yes, well-written and affective, but normal.

In short: It’s a good, satisfactorily functioning, readable novel—but it’s just not as good as Campbell could have been.

* * *

[B] • This is my second encounter with Tove Jansson—I first read her widely recognized masterpiece [I paraphrase!], The Summer Book. Like that book, Fair Play is also a book about nothing in particular, and everything imaginable.

Both novels took me a lot of patience to get through, even the knowledge that I ought not dive into it without me being able to commit. [I’ve long thought that I love these kinds of books—the über-subtle, excavate-between-the-lines kind of fiction.] It was the latter Jansson book that had me wondering if I was up to this kind of reading. And, well, given that I’d long thought that I was a fan—no, that I lived for books where nothing spectacular happened, but a wealth of feeling and volatility occurred within the pages.

Jansson’s novel-in-vignettes would have thrilled a calmer me, I’m sure. Then again, with how busy things have been in real life lately, I was looking for something that would engage. And this book was a polite way to pass the time—hell, yes, there are numerous shades of meaning to be found in seemingly mundane exchanges. And I loved those little sparks. An example:

“Mari,” said Jonna, “sometimes you’re really a little too obvious.”

“Do you think? But once in a while a person just needs to say what doesn’t need to be said. Don’t you think?”

And they went back to their reading.

But there just wasn’t enough palpable tension here, none of that volatility. Just those occasional sparks in an otherwise calm going. It’s a rich premise, yes: Two women having spent nearly a lifetime together. We come to them after years of having gone through compromises and negotiations about their lives as artists, among many other things. I mean, for that fact alone, this would have been right up my alley. I should have fan-girl-ed the hell out of this. But do I feel like shrugging if anyone asked me how this book was?

Damn.