Worth murdering a world

It occurred to him suddenly that she might even get up and leave him, go back to Snow's with her secret for the first comer who questioned her kindly: he had to conciliate her, they were walking out, he'd got to do the things expected of him. He put out his hand with repulsion; it lay like a cold paddock on her knee. "You took me wrong," he said, "you're a sweet girl. I've been worried, that's all. Business worries. You and me" — he swallowed painfully — "we suit each other down to the ground." He saw the colour go, the face turn to him with a blind willingness to be deceived, saw the lips waiting. He drew her hand up quickly and put his mouth against her fingers: anything was better than the lips: the fingers were rough on his skin and tasted a little of soap. She said, "Pinkie, I'm sorry. You're sweet to me."

He laughed nervously, "You and me," and heard the hoot of a bus with the joy of a besieged man listening to the bugle of the relieving force. "There," he said, "the bus. Let's be going. I'm not much of a one for the country. A city bird. You too." She got up and he saw the skin of her thigh for a moment above the artificial silk, and a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape — anywhere — for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.

"It's beautiful here all the same," she said, staring up the chalky ruts between the To Let boards, and the Boy laughed again at the fine words people gave to a dirty act: love, beauty . . . All his pride coiled like a watch spring round the thought that he wasn't deceived, that he wasn't going to give himself up to marriage and the birth of children, he was going to be where Colleoni now was and higher . . . He knew everything, he had watched every detail of the act of sex, you couldn't deceive him with lovely words, there was nothing to be excited about, no gain to recompense you for what you lost; but when Rose turned to him again, with the expectation of a kiss, he was aware all the same of a horrifying ignorance. His mouth missed hers and recoiled. He'd never yet kissed a girl.

— from Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene.

OK. Wow. I didn't think much of this book when I first cracked it open, but it got intense fast.

I feel so sorry for Pinkie! I mean, he's only 17. And his Catholicism is of no help to him at all. He believes firmly in Hell, there's evidence of damnation all around, but he can't commit to the idea of there being a God, because, well, I'm not really sure why, but things seem pretty hopeless.

I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say there's a murder committed in the early chapters of the novel, and the rest of book follows Pinkie (yes, Pinkie) as he tries to cover his tracks. Guilt, and possibly the first inklings of tenderness or love, is chipping away at his hardened gangster-wannabe exterior. But it's fear and paranoia that lead him on a reckless and devastating path.

[If you don't like spoilers, don't read JM Coetzee's introduction — thanks goodness I didn't till just a few moments ago.]

Oh, and poor Rose! She really believes he loves her! Reading what Pinkie recorded for her on the gramophone was like a punch in the gut. I can't bear to imagine how her life will crumble when one day she listens to it. Poor Rose... Talk about rose-coloured glasses!

Aside from Pinkie and Rose, there's a lot of pink in this book. Little shots of pink throughout the noir, a paler shade of the blood on Pinkie's hands that occasionally comes to surface. (His full name's Pinkie Brown.)

There are no words or dialogue that don't need to be here. It's a tight little novel about grim circumstances, complex characters grappling with the differences between right-and-wrong and good-and-evil, shown to vary according to age, experience, religion. Great book!

Gipsy girl

"I suppose I shall have to tell you," I said slowly. "I'm not ashamed of it. You can't be ashamed of something that just — happens to you. That's what he did. He was detestable — rude and ungrateful — but that I think I understand. It's like a dog that's been chained up — or badly treated — it'll bite anybody. That's what he was like — bitter and snarling. I don't know why I care — but I do. I care horribly. Just seeing him has turned my whole life upside-down. I love him. I want him. I'll walk all over Africa barefoot till I find him, and I'll make him care for me. I'd die for him. I'd work for him, slave for him, steal for him, even beg or borrow for him! There — now you know!"

Suzanne looked at me for a long time.

"You're very unEnglish, Gipsy girl," she said at last. "There's not a scrap of the sentimental about you. I've never met anyone who was at once so practical and so passionate. I shall never care for anyone like that — mercifully for me — and yet — and yet I envy you, Gipsy girl. It's something to be able to care. Most people can't. [...]"

— from The Man in the Brown Suit, by Agatha Christie.

I'd forgotten what a pleasure Christie is to read.

The part about Amalfitano

It's been some time since I read part 2 of Roberto Bolaño's 2666 (I'm near the end of part 4, and reading some books alongside this one). I made some notes as I went along (from which most of the below is constructed), but this section, to judge by the vividness of it in my memory, seems not to have made as much of an impression on me as The Part about the Critics.

While this part has more "story" to it, it's also somewhat more surreal.

Memory
Lola has assimilated what she learned from Amalfitano into her own memory. She believes the poet is a former lover of hers, but it was from Amalfitano that she first learned about him.

It's never clear if her letters to Amalfitano relating her history with and her meeting with the poet are complete fabrications, or whether any portion of it is grounded in her actual experience.

Amalfitano himself becomes increasingly unreliable as a narrator, casting double doubt on Lola's story.

Greek
A handful of allusions again in this section, again that I'm unable to make anything of.

- "Sometimes she [Lola] felt like Electra, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, wandering in disguise in Mycenae, the killer mingling with the plebes [...]
- Other times the mother of Medon and Strophius
- Pylades, Orestes stand for the faces of many men

Amalfitano and Duchamp
Amalfitano finds a book in his possession and goes through some mental contortions to place it. (I can relate: Imagine finding a book that you have no inkling how it got there! It would drive me crazy!)

On the front flap, the reader was informed that the Testamento geométrico was really three books, "each independent, but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole,' and then it said "this work representing the final distillation of Dieste's research on Space, the notion of which is involved in any methodical discussion of the fundamentals of Geometry."

Much the same could be said of 2666's first 3 parts, triangulating on Santa Teresa.

Amalfitano hangs the book out on a clothes line, in the spirit of a readymade conceived by Duchamp, who meant for the wind to go through the book and find (and deal with) its own problems or, as Amalfitano interprets it, to see if the book learns anything about real life.

It's Art, I guess, but I don't think Amalfitano's intentions are artistic ones, exactly. The act has the feeling of an I Ching. It seems to affect Amalfitano via osmosis, in that he starts producing drawings, quite unconsciously, diagramming, possibly, relationships between philosophers.

At which point it appears that Amalfitano is losing his mind. He considers that the voice in his head may be a product of telepathy.

Telepathy
Lola imagined she was establishing telepathic contact with the poet.

Amalfitano relates the voice in his head to telepathy and reads about the Araucanians, who had refined telepathy as a viable means of communication, as well as sending messages by the movement of branches.

Morini in his dream (in part 1) faced Norton "and she said: 'There's no turning back.' He heard the sentence not with his ears but in his head. Norton has acquired telepathic powers, Morini thought. She isn't bad, she's good. It isn't evil I sensed, it's telepathy."

Literature
Mostly I think this passage is funny:

One of the employees was a young pharmacist, barely out of his teens, extremely thin and with big glasses, who would sit up at night reading a book when the pharmacy was open twenty-four hours. One night, while the kid was scanning the shelves, Amalfitano asked him what books he liked and what book he was reading, just to make conversation. Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who in another life might have been Trakl or who in this life might still be writing poems as desperate as those of his distant Austrian counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential words, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and tench.

However. There's something going on here: refusing to take on literature (or reality?) head on.

Magic
There's a lot of magic in this book, in different forms. The magic of dreams, telepathy, superstition, art and literature.

Boris Yeltsin — "last Communist philosopher" — appears to Amalfitano in a dream, with wisdom to impart:

And he said: listen carefully to what I have to say, comrade. I'm going to explain what the third leg of the human table is. I'm going to tell you. And then leave me alone. Life is demand and supply, or supply and demand, that's what it all boils down to, but that's no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into the garbage pit of history, which in turn is permanently collapsing into the garbage pit of the void. So take note. This is the equation: supply + demand + magic. And what is magic? Magic is epic and it's also sex and Dionysian mists and play. And then Yeltsin sat on the crater or the latrine and showed Amalfitano the fingers he was missing and talked about his childhood and about the Urals and Siberia and about a white tiger that roamed the infinite snowy spaces. And then he took a flask of vodka out of his suit pocket and said:

"I think it's time for a little drink."

(This dream sequence really stood out for me, and weirdly, there's a bit in part 4 that I just read that makes reference to it: a highly respected serial killer profiler "dreamed of a crater and a man pacing around it. That man is probably me, he said to himself in the dream, but it didn't strike him as important and the image was lost." So I'm thinking it's not the identity of the man that matters so much as the existence of the crater (or latrine — Amalfitano considers that it may be a latrine), some void left by a force of destruction, something blatant, which still they circle, as if to stare into that abyss, or acknowledge it, would negate their existence.)

Summary
Lola spends her time circling the poet, daring to meet him only twice (or was it more than that? either way, I think my point stands). She seems always to be waiting for a sign (sign of her friend Imma) before taking action, or taking for signs some mundane thing to justify her action. Amalfitano has his own disconnect from reality, circling round his career, his daughter, the city he lives in without daring a head-on confrontation. Is he waiting for the book to give him a sign? Or the voice? Bolaño certainly is circling round the murders at Santa Teresa.

The epigraph of 2666 comes from Baudelaire: "An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom." I'm beginning to see what this means.

From nowhere

It's a disconcerting feeling to watch the blue arrow leave the road, the only road, on the GPS, watch the road drop out of the bottom of the screen, and know that you are that blue arrow, with no point of reference, moving, or not moving, across a vast plane of nothing, a screen that looks like it's waiting for images to load, a landscape that's waiting for civilization to tame it.

We stayed not long. Armies of insects laid in wait for us. Helena complained of the itching and I lifted the hair off her neck to inspect the damage. I had to stifle my horror at the trails of blood from the dozens of bites, trying not to alarm her.

The fish weren't biting at all.

Then it rained; it stormed. I slept, and read.

********

I finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson). I'm still puzzled by the decision to use this title for the translation over something more literally accurate (something like "Men Who Hate Women"); a marketing decision, no doubt, but curious that the English-speaking world should be deemed to have a unique sensibility in this regard.

It's a most interesting experience to have read this alongside part 4 of Bolaño's 2666, because really, they're both about men hating women, making the point about a certain kind of woman, foreign or transient, socioeconomically disadvantaged, psychologically predisposed to victimization — someone marginalized so that no one much notices her absence, any investigation would be half-hearted, no one much cares. This is our horrific reality (see Pickton).

********

The kitten came with us. It seems a good idea to accustom her to car travel at young age. She travels well.

Helena has renamed the kitten. Her name is now Action.

To defend its honour

The Angel's Game, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, is already destined to be a bestseller — it doesn't need my help in the slightest.

You should know: I hated The Shadow of Wind. I thought, and still think, it's one of the most overrated pieces of crap I've ever read. Sure, it starts of with a lovely bookish feel but it quickly fell apart for me: the characters, the plot, the language — everything about it was a bit too farfetched.

I don't know what possessed me then to accept an ARC of The Angel's Game. I fully expected to hate it. Though The Shadow is now but a shadow in my memory, I very clearly remember fuming about reading it and the time I was wasting reading it (while continuing to read it).

Maybe because my expectations were so low... I found myself loving this book and unable to put it down.

"You have more zeal than good taste, Martín. The disease afflicting you has a name, and that is Grand Guignol: it does to drama what syphilis does to your privates. Getting it might be pleasurable, but from then on it's all downhill. You should read the classics, or at least Don Benito Pérez Galdós, to elevate your literary aspirations."

"But the readers like my stories," I argued.

"You don't deserve the credit. That belongs to your rivals: they are so bad and pedantic that they could render a donkey catatonic in less than a paragraph. When are you going to mature and stop munching the forbidden fruit once and for all?"

I would nod, full of contrition, but secretly I caressed those forbidden words, Grand Guignol, and I told myself that every cause, however frivolous, needed a champion to defend its honour.

This book is full of exuberance. The reader is propelled forward because of (not despite) its Grand Guignol elements. While the plot does spin out of control (and the body count climbs), the author has much better control of his material here than in The Shadow. The writer knows he cannot do the reader's job. He is smarter to leave things unanswered and ambiguous than to supply tortuous explanations that couldn't possibly hit all the right notes. Those are the things this reader revels in.

One thing really bothers me: Isabella marries and has a child and never writes again. The headstrong girl who essentially stalked an author, who went to great lengths to extract a critique of her work and for writerly advice. She just stops. Her son becomes her everything. I don't know if this is meant to be realistic, or if this is the author's thoughtless brushing aside of the character once her purpose had been served. But it strikes me as wrong.

Incidentally, my sister went to hear Zafón a couple weeks ago. He came across as personable and had entertaining anecdotes to share regarding his first forays into publishing as a youth. He named a couple authors whom he reads, respects, admires: Joyce Carol Oates and China Miéville, the latter in particular for his defiance of genre stereotypes.

My final verdict: The Angel's Game was wonderfully entertaining and makes for a great summer read.

Shelved

Bedtime is altogether different with a new kitten in the house. For many weeks, Rosie has been confusing "bedtime" with "playtime."

Helena had hoped Rosie would sleep with her and would scoop her into her bed in the evening. But Rosie wouldn't settle down on command, and then it took far too many minutes to corral the kitty out of Helena's room, so now Helena doesn't even bother — she closes the door behind her to make sure no feline whips through her dreams.

Come my bedtime, Rosie is no better at settling down, but as I usually read for a while, it doesn't bother me too much. She circles the bed, surveils the territory, clears the corners of invisible predators, attacks my toes. She is curious about my reading material, and when my book lies open on the bed she creeps up onto the page as if trying to discern those strange markings. I remove her. The dance repeats itself. She eventually tires.

Last night was quiet. I read. When I turned over to turn off the light, I discovered Rosie was close by after all; she's found herself a comfortable niche among the mass market paperbacks.

Strawberry

I have a basket of strawberries hanging on my balcony. I am unreasonably excited about this.

As a teenager, many summers I picked strawberries on farms to earn some extra spending money (though having eaten a significant portion of my haul, this was hardly a profitable activity). But never have I grown my own berries.

This photo was taken a couple days ago. This morning Helena deemed the biggest of them had reddened enough.

Picked and eaten. The finest strawberry she's ever tasted!

Tomorrow will be my turn to sample one. A couple dozen more are currently in flower.