The Half-Year of Paul Bowles

I wanted to title this entry "Bowles Movements" but found it too punny, even for me. Travels: Collected Writings 1950-1993 by Paul Bowles is a series of essays I wanted to read before jetting off to Seville & Marrakesh in late November, and somehow it took me the ENTIRE five to six months before my trip to accomplish this. As in, the back cover was finally reached with mere days until departure. Not that the book was boring -- dense, and a lot of repetition. And then within the 12 days I was on vacation, I plowed through all of Philip Roth's The Human Stain (no notes; liked it but left it in the Marrakesh riad). Suffice to say it's been an atypical year of reading.

First, I thought Bowles was British but he's American. Second, his essays tend to have more humility than the other, actually British Paul (Theroux; see Theroux's Great Railway Bazaar) and are a solid mix of introspection and description. "Now that in theory anyone can go anywhere, the travel book serves a different purpose; emphasis has shifted from the place to the effect of the place upon the person ... the story of what happened to one person in a particular place" (p.239-40). Generally, his essays strike a balance between introspection and expert witness, and he often acknowledges his otherness in Morocco. He reminded me of Peter Matthiessen -- same generation, also American, also enthralled with solitude and natural spaces ("the sublime" as per Alain de Botton):

"Once he has been under the spell of the vast, luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, whatever the cost in comfort and money, for the absolute has no price." (p.90; on the Sahara)

Yours truly, from the top of Ait Ben Haddou.

This quote really resonated with me at Ait Ben Haddou (above), which is a medieval-era fortress between the Sahara and the Atlas Mountains / Marrakesh. You stand at the top by the ruins of an old granary and the wind is coming at you in huge constant gusts and all you can see in any direction is mountains and desert forever, and you think about how for hundreds and hundreds of years this was a caravan stop and how many other people saw this before you and how many other people will see it after you. It's not even a National Park or anything: it just IS, along with the Berbers in their isolated rural villages. 

The middle and late essays in the series wax nostalgic as the initial impression of Morocco is changed by politics, technology and the slow march of time. What used to be authentic and inaccessible is now for tourism. This wasn't the foremost thought in my mind when I visited because the first experience tends to scream "HEY YOU'RE NOT IN AMERICA ANYMORE!" a la Bangkok and, I assume, any other major non-Western hub city. The appreciation/nostalgia for layers of a particular place require getting over the initial culture shock, which is difficult on a four-day jaunt. Bowles lived in Morocco for decades; you may as well as a lifelong New Yorker about the differences between the 1970s and today.

Not in America anymore; Jemaa el Fna at sunset, photo by yours truly.

Two favorite parting quotes:

"When you ask a question of a Singhalese who does not know English, he is likely to react in a most curious fashion. First he looks swiftly at you, then he looks away, his features retreating into an expression of pleasant contemplation, as if your voice were an agreeable but distant memory that he had just recalled and thought worthwhile to savor briefly." (p.52)

"Now, after traveling around the country, I know approximately as little as I did on my first arrival. However, I've seen a lot of people and places, and at least I have a somewhat more detailed and precise idea of my ignorance than I did in the beginning." (p.207, and the most important thing)

Bowles recorded rural Moroccan music for the Library of Congress in the late 1950s, including this one of Reh dial Beni Bouhiya:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkXjwYA7X-8

Other references for future exploration:
Charles Flandrau, Viva Mexico!
J.R. Ackerley, Hindoo Holiday
Peter Mayne, The Alleys of Marrakesh

Bottom line, worth picking an essay or three from the bunch otherwise you'll spend six months of your life reading this collection. Relevant reading for before/after traveling to Morocco. I'll be back for the Sahara some day. 

Art Mimicking Life: Villette & Charlotte Bronte

Before I dive into the meat and bones of this post (i.e., fangirling about Charlotte Bronte's Villette) I have to say that I hated Umberto Eco's Island of the Day Before. It sat on my "to read" pile for at least four years and there it should have mouldered forever. I skimmed the last 100-so pages and neither missed nor regretted anything. The main character was a stupid sap and the plot was thin at best, non-existent at worst. I read paragraphs of obscure pseudo-Latin nomenclature that made me want to close my eyes. I kept turning to the front and back covers to verify that yes, respectable people on this planet had favorably reviewed this book. But here is Will Self's review for The Guardian and IT IS GLORIOUS: "The machine I began to long for was one that would automatically read the novels of Umberto Eco, leaving me free to get on with my life."

Finally free of that nightmare, I got on with my life and turned to a trusted author who could revive my flagging reading spirits: Charlotte Bronte and her last novel, Villette. What a totally engrossing, emotional book! I laughed, I cried, I got scared. It's a book I enjoyed reading and would have kept reading for another 500 pages. Had I blogged immediately after, this post would have just consisted of "EEEEEE!!!". So, let's go about this in a more civilized way and briefly look at some parallels between real-life Charlotte Bronte and fictional heroines Lucy Snowe and Jane Eyre. Then deal with that infamous ending.

Brussels in 1868 (from www.thebrusselsbrontegroup.org)

Villette is narrated by Lucy Snowe, a poor independent woman who has taken an English teaching position in the French town of Villette. Here she is reunited with a handsome former acquaintance from her childhood, Dr. John Graham Bretton, and the ethereal, child-like Polly. Lucy is also introduced to the head mistress of the school, Madame Beck, and the literature professor Monsieur Paul Emanuel. The beginning of the book takes place in Lucy's childhood, with little Polly declaring her love for Dr. John, then a young teen. Things fast forward as Lucy moves on to a nursing position with elderly Miss Marchmont, then fast forward again when Lucy travels to Villette. Of course, Dr. John re-enters the story at this point and there's a whole setup with Lucy developing unrequited romantic feelings towards him. During this little subplot, I'm wondering "but what about crazy Polly" and beginning to notice the literature professor, Monsieur Paul. The second half of the book is where things really take off and Bronte is in absolute virtuoso mode. Lucy and Monsieur Paul's romance doesn't reach the desperate heights of Cathy and Heathcliff, but holy smokes it's a solid second place.

Pensionnat Heger where Charlotte studied in Brussels (from www.thebrusselsbrontegroup.org)

Nabokov advises readers to "identify not with the girl or boy in the book but with the mind that conceived and composed the book" (Lectures on Russian Lit).  Jane Eyre and Villette are distorted mirrors to Charlotte Bronte's personal life. Her autobiographical details are not critical to "understanding" either novel but help link them thematically, for example ...

There's family weirdness and tragedy. Both Jane and Lucy had abusive childhoods and strike out on their own as young adults. In real life, the Bronte's mother died early and the children were sent to a girls' school where two of them later died from illness. Charlotte later had multiple positions as a governess and also studied for several years in Brussels (the model for the town of Villette).

Gothic gloom! In Jane Eyre there is the mad wife in the attic, in Villette there is the ghost nun and Lucy's depression (likely informed by Charlotte's own depression at the recent death of her sisters). One critique is that in Villette "the madness is not split off from the central character" and this forms Lucy into a more complex and complete version of Jane (Imagining Characters, p.77).

Passionate and difficult men! Rochester and Monsieur Paul are two versions of the same character, based off Charlotte's professor in Brussels, Monsieur Heger. Dr. John is likely based off Charlotte's publisher, George Smith. The author's romantic feelings for both men were not returned. However, especially in Villette, we get some awesome sexual power dynamics and tension in the back-and-forth dialogues between Lucy and Monsieur Paul. They intentionally provoke each other, fly into rages, reconcile and then do it all over again because they love it. It's EXCELLENT. ("EEEE!!") Speaking of men, another great thing about Villette is that the reader doesn't suffer through a St John Rivers snoozefest subplot. Also see: Hark, a vagrant and Charlotte Bronte's classroom fantasy

Ok, so, SPOILERS! If you want to read Villette and don't know the ending, don't read the end of this post! 

My experience with the ending.

There's a persistent interpretation that the very end of Villette is a "double ending" and the reader gets to choose what happened. This is false. There are a handful of hints throughout the book that point to the true ending. 1) Lucy the narrator is an older woman, so the entire story is related after it has already happened and certain phrases are in a past tense where they could be in present; 2) the entire purpose of having Miss Marchmont in the book is so she can tell her tragic story about Frank; 3) when Monsieur Paul is away, Lucy calls it the "three happiest years of my life" (p.448).

So basically Monsieur Paul is finally on his way home across the Atlantic to where he has left Lucy yet-to-be-married but with her own school, then there's a huge storm and this happens:

Here pause: pause at once. There is enough said. Trouble no quiet, kind heart; leave sunny imaginations hope. Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror, the rapture of rescue from peril, the wondrous reprieve from dread, the fruition of return. Let them picture union and a happy succeeding life.
Madame Beck prospered all the days of her life; so did Pere Silas; Madame Walravens fulfilled her ninetieth year before she died. Farewell.

The End. We get no coda for Lucy or Monsieur Paul, and "let it be theirs" to conceive joy, "let them" picture a happy ending (but not her). I think I read this final paragraph, really the final three paragraphs, like ten times because I was so shocked. I've now mulled it over for the past week and it still breaks my heart. It's like if Rochester had burned down with his house and attic wife. It's not a "real life is hard" ending because it's still a kind of romantic tragedy and deeply within the world of the novel -- it's appropriate to Lucy's difficult life and story (and Charlotte's, considering the impossibility of a happy ending with Heger). But wow, that one hurts. Find more here: The Valve, Villette Chapters I-42: Farewell

Let's take it back to sunny with one of my favorite quotes/moments:

"And what did I say to M. Paul Emanuel? Certain junctures of our lives must always be difficult of recall to memory. Certain points, crises, certain feelings, joys, griefs, and amazements, when reviewed, must strike us as things wildered and whirling, dim as a wheel fast spun." (p.442)

Bottom line: Insta-cherish. Keeping this little book next to its sisters to be reread many times in the future.

Flaubert's Postmodern Parrot

Where to begin to unpack this book. After reading Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending last year I was anticipating a thoughtful read with Flaubert's Parrot and was not disappointed. The novel comes in just shy of 200 pages and revolves around the narrator's fixation on Gustave Flaubert as he copes  with his wife's suicide. Centrally, which exact parrot was used by Flaubert as a model for one of his books? I.e., the search for historical truth. Along the way Barnes experiments with form, uses literature to criticize literary criticism and tricks me into reading another postmodern novel. So there's quite a bit of ground to cover here, even with selective notes.

Why hello there, young Gustave! (Wikipedia)

I'm not a huge fan of random "experimental" sections in books and Barnes throws everything in: acknowledging the audience, biased chronologies, a Flaubertian dictionary, a collegiate exam and a chapter written from the perspective of poet (and sometimes Flaubert lover) Louise Colet. Does the narrator try different styles as part of his search for meaning/truth? Discuss.

The narrator remains nameless up to p.41 and, similar to Sense of an Ending, is unreliable. First he claims: "If you don't know what's true, or what's meant to be true, then the value of what isn't true, or what isn't meant to be true, becomes diminished" (p.77). Almost in order to remedy this within his own story he then follows: "Books are not life ... Ellen's is a true story; perhaps it is even the reason why I am telling you Flaubert's story instead" (p.86). And then: "When a contemporary narrator hesitates, claims uncertainty ... does the reader in fact conclude that reality is being more authentically rendered?" (p.89). It's as if the narrator is criticizing himself within the book. And note the concern for truth/authenticity.

The novel also touches on ye olde well of dark despair/cynicism. Regarding life: "After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment?" (p.165 and hello Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse). Regarding reading: "If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it's yours" (p.166). Reading a professional critical piece about a book isn't equivalent to reading the book.

"Why does the writing make us chase the writer?" (p.12) the narrator asks, and later answers: "Books make sense of life. The only problem is the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own" (p.168).* So instead of Ellen's biography or Geoffrey's autobiography, the reader is offered Flaubert's (removed even further; not making sense of the audience's life, or the narrator's, but a long-dead French author). Throughout the book we follow potential parrot-Flaubert connections that narrow down where the one true parrot may be, but end with uncertainty. The true parrot may be any of these or none of these, and it is impossible to know. Is there significance between Flaubert and all of his parrot-related pseudo-connections, or is it coincidence? The narrator (and reader) must come to accept ambiguity and the unknowable as the "truth" in the case of Flaubert's parrot and his wife's suicide.
*I would argue that through books making sense of someone else's life, by extension they may guide you to make sense of your own. Which goes back to the point that a personal reading is yours, versus the professional critic's.  

Returning for a moment to the 'chasing the writer' theme: Many readers, myself included, chase David Foster Wallace. On one level to understand how someone whose writing I connected to so strongly could be so depressed and commit suicide (i.e., to seek meaning), and on another level as an endeavor to possess the beauty of his writing (e.g., here is his autographed book, this writing mattered to me).

"Reading his 'memoirs' is like meeting a man on a train who says, 'Don't look at me, that's misleading. If you want to know what I'm like, wait until we're in a tunnel, and then study my reflection in the window.' You wait, and look, and catch a face against a shifting background ... The transparent shape flickers and jumps, always a few feet away ... Then there is a wail from ahead, a roar and burst of light; the face is gone for ever." (p.96)

Bottom line: You could probably write at least one dissertation on this book. Tough little nut to crack, curious to see if other Barnes books continue to tackle similar themes.

Relevant extra-credit reading: Flaubert's Parrot: fiction and literary criticism
Chase the writer here: Julian Barnes, The Art of Fiction No. 165

Magical Thinking & Walking the Woods

Two reflections on two reads:

1) After saying I had no interest in reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, I succumbed to the allure of the discount book bin and figured I would give Didion another shot, despite still not having read the ONE book of hers I was originally interested in (Slouching Towards Bethlehem). It was sad in a matter-of-factual way. I re-learned that privileged famous people grieve and suffer like the rest of us. I felt her loss even as she talked about multiple homes and Malibu beaches and Corvettes. And that pretty much sums up the extent of my impression.

(Apparently we loved her in 2015? How Joan Didion Became the Ultimate Literary Celebrity & Toward a Unified Theory of Joan Didion)

Bottom line: I'll continue to have a "meh / okay" reaction to Didion that will be either confirmed or rebuffed after Slouching Towards Bethlehem.


2) I zoomed excitedly through Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, subtitled "Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail." The book ended and I needed it to keep going for another 200 pages, or 2,000 pages. Returning to my last entry and thoughts on contemporary travel writing, Bryson avoids the "expert witness explaining the natives" trap through his humility and humor -- he's just a out-of-shape everyman who wants to try hiking the trail with his friend, and he happens to be well-informed about the trail's ecological history. There's no soaring rhetoric and little/no existential musings about nature or long-distance hiking ... and that's okay for this story. On a personal note, the book also rekindled a life goal of hiking the AT (section-hiking, not thru-hiking, let's be real). Thanks, Bill Bryson!

Bottom line: Awesome easy read, highly recommend even if you never want to hike the AT!

AT marker at Pen-Mar, photo by yours truly

Theroux's Great Railway Bazaar

In the 1970's Paul Theroux spent four months on an out-and-back railway journey across Asia from London. Then he published a book about it. The Great Railway Bazaar was fantastic and of course now I want to take an epic train journey too.

Accompanying map from The Great Railway Bazaar (1975)

Theroux's humorous, beautiful descriptions and the characters he meets along the way held my attention across the continent. I empathized with his impatience towards certain passengers, although honestly sometimes he came across as an asshole. I learned that Sri Lanka used to be called Ceylon and that Gokteik Viaduct in Myanmar was built by Pennsylvania Steel in 1900. Theroux's travel fatigue by the end of the book was spot-on and hilarious. Major parts of the book are "so 70's" (hippies, Vietnam) and I'm looking forward to reading the companion sequel, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, where he retraces his itinerary in 2008.

The only thing that gave me a sour-lemon-face about this book was the Western white male perspective and barely disguised sense of superiority, not unlike another famous book about taking an exotic journey in order to write about it (ahem, Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert). For comparison and contrast, I submit The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen.

In an excellent Boston Review piece, Jessa Crispin argues that today's travel writer "sells not only lovely prose and insights into a new land but also the lifestyle of the rootless and adventurous ... If your life is an aspiration, you are a beacon, not a human, and you talk rather than listen." For women travel writers, "the focus of attention is the self" compared to the prototypical male writer who is an "expert witness who explains the native." See also this LA Review of Books piece regarding travel writing as memoir.  The issue with travel writing as memoir is the writer assumes they are "the most interesting person in the room." Crispin argues that rather than explain or self-reflect, the travel writer should first engage and listen by passing the metaphorical microphone.

If I were to lay Crispin's gender comparison out on some sort of travel writer scale, where one end is Elizabeth Gilbert and Cheryl Strayed (female, internal) and the other end is Paul Theroux and British colonialists (male, external), in the middle I would put Matthiessen. The Snow Leopard manages to be equal parts spiritual and physical journey; the reader sees the beauty of Tibetan mountains and the grief of Matthiessen. As an added bonus, the native characters exist beyond caricatures and are integral to the story; the microphone is partially passed.

Crispin's "lifestyle of the rootless and adventurous" is crystallized in the opening of Bazaar: "That [head]cold made leaving all the easier; leaving was a cure: 'Have you tried aspirin?' 'No, I think I'll got to India'" (p.15). Four months later and Theroux's final train ride through Russia is fraught with psychological travel fatigue, followed by missing a Christmas flight home: "Fiction is pure joy -- how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction" (p. 379). I was about to argue that Theroux doesn't really present his story as aspirational, but then I recalled this quote: "All travel is circular ... the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home" (p. 379). In conclusion, here is inspired man Paul Theroux's Instagram account.

Bottom line: Admire the scenery and the writing, give side-eye to the white Western male perspective, then book your own railroad odyssey ASAP.

"The railway bazaar, with its gadgets and passengers, represented the society so completely that to board it was to be challenged by the national character. At times it was like a leisurely seminar, but I also felt on some occasions that it was like being jailed and then assaulted by the monstrously typical." (p. 235)

also mentioned: The Mezzotint by M. R. James

Norman Mailer, First Impressions

An odd first experience with Norman Mailer: very engaging, well-written book (The Naked and the Dead) that took me just about three months to read (why.) and seemed more like it was from 1970's Vietnam than 1948 WWII.  Also odd in that I didn't have any marginalia commentary.

Back in 1948, The Naked and the Dead  was considered a "powerful cultural attack on the sentimentality and heroic quality of wartime culture" (Saving Private Ryan and Postwar Memory, Bodnar), something that would only increase and magnify with Vietnam in 20 years. The majority of the book takes place in the tropical jungle and I really kept forgetting this was WWII. There's the "pointless mission" trope, comedic bureaucracy, the enemy as the victim and the non-heroic qualities of the main male characters. And just for good measure let's throw in religious and sexual subtexts (don't ask, don't tell circa 1940's). Bodnar writes that the characters are "consumed by personal quests of power and destructiveness" -- the same in war as in socioeconomic America. You could probably write an entire thesis on the trifecta of Cummings, Hearn and Croft, all of whom have since become stereotypical characters with bits and pieces in other war fiction (and probably non-fiction). 

Bottom line(s): As I was nearing the end of the book I was reading with a sense of dread and cliche: man, I KNOW what's going to happen next, but I need to read it anyway and it's not going to end well. In fact, it ended better than expected and not as expected. Some surprise twists and turns. The book definitely checks all the boxes for 'postwar critical fiction' but the writing was excellent and I look forward to reading something different by Mailer. Or, since this book was so prescient, what he has to say about Vietnam.