This is my first encounter with Banville as a novelist — I’ve read his commentaries before.
Banville said something about being compelled to choose betThis is my first encounter with Banville as a novelist — I’ve read his commentaries before.
Banville said something about being compelled to choose between Beckettian or Joycean heritage as an Irish writer, I don’t know if I grasp that restrictive sense of obligatory Oedipal struggle with your own literary fathers, but Banville ostensibly chose the Beckettian lineage, at least that’s what he said.
I haven’t read enough Beckett to appreciate what he meant, I immediately caught more echos of Joyce than Beckett from this book, there are other really obvious literary echos or fragments as well (Shakespeare, for example.) What I did catch are so obvious, so jarring, I think we are meant to pause as we notice them. I’ve since read articles online listing other literary (and visual arts) borrowings or allusions that I failed to catch.
Unfortunately, there’s no pleasure of recognition for me. I’m left feeling like I didn’t try hard enough to figure out what all these fragments are supposed to do.
The beginning of the novel seemed really promising, the poetic first paragraph is filled with significance, it seems to contain the whole novel in a few words, as though it is a Homeric epic, or Joycean epic in novel form. I spent the rest of the novel trying to find fulfillments for that imagined promise, I don’t think I found them.
The narrator is unlikable, and so is everybody else. The subject matter is dark and decidedly unpleasant. We’re looking at pathological obsessions with bodily decay, with death ... all wedded to erotic longings and sexual or intimate relationships. I imagine it’s a successful portrayal of the alienation someone might feel as they support and eventually lose loved ones to cancer. The Orpheus comparison is explicit and, well ... obvious.
I like the idea of resurrecting high modernism, I think I want the return of somewhat inaccessible and demanding literary arts, I really wanted to like this book and go on to read more Banville, I’m not sure if I’m sold on it yet. It did take me about 4 or 5 attempts before I started to like Joyce, I’m not sure if I will return to Banville 4 or 5 times. ...more
**spoiler alert** I never planned to read this, but heard a lot of negative comments about the book last year. So when I came a cross a copy in a UBS,**spoiler alert** I never planned to read this, but heard a lot of negative comments about the book last year. So when I came a cross a copy in a UBS, I grabbed it.
I can never tell whether these "traveling pairs" are imitating Dante or Quixote. In a sense Gilbert and Tamoagotchi are "obviously" going through "hell", and this hell is set in Japan. Right away you feel a bit awkward labeling another culture, another country and their landscape "hell". And yet, despite Gilbert's pretentiousness, Poschmann meant to make them out to be ridiculous fools, they're more like Sancho and Quixote than Dante. And yet, and yet, as it turns out, Gilbert's "guide" doesn't really exist, he's more like Virgil than a practical, well attuned Sancho. Either way, the book opens and ends with Mathilda, Gilbert's "Beatrice."
It's true that a lot of the contents can be culturally insensitive or down right offensive; the Japanese sidekick is more like Socrates' interlocutors who only ever nod and go along, they offer no real resistance and constantly prove Gilbert's sophistry to be "right" and superior.
And the main character is very easy to hate. He's not an evil guy: if he were evil, at least that would have been exciting or interesting. But he's just a boring brooding man full of negative judgements about others, about his partner, his colleagues, about strangers he encounters in another country, about another culture. He constantly nitpicks on little things and backs them up with elaborate "learned" justifications to feel superior about himself. That's not interesting, that's just insufferable. In an odd way you have to have sympathy for him -- I spend a couple of hours suffering him, presumably this character has to live with himself all his life. (Granted, he might not actually exist or suffer. But a girl can hope.)
I should point out I can speak and read some Japanese, I have spent time there, have seen various kinds of traditional theatre performance. I have also studied about that particular play, and the symbolism (and punning) of pine trees in Japanese culture. So when Gilbert went from ignorance-contempt to appreciation-absorption, I thought that was a very well done character-growth depiction, and not blithe, insensitive cultural appropriation.
So I don't hate the book the same way I don't hate Houellebecq - I suspect they are showing you why these characters are contemptible, I don't think these writers are justifying their offensive thoughts about the others (women in Houellebecq's novels, Japanese culture in this one). And they make you experience their (deserving) self-loathing: they don't just tell you they've dug themselves into their own hell holes from a third person POV, they show you how miserable it is to live and think and perceive and judge like them.
This is where it stings a bit: Yosa is presumably a ghost, or Gilbert's projection, an imaginary friend, a psychological coping mechanism. As Gilbert judges Yosa dismissively and with contempt, my contempt for Gilbert also grows in lockstep. (How can you be so uncaring towards someone on the verge of suicide?) Psychoanalyzing this pathetic Yosa as a waste of space is the only way Gilbert can come to face his own flaws. Where does that leave me, the reader? Should I also question my ... oh, I don't know, uncharitableness in judging Gilbert-in-crisis?
As I read Gilbert's insensitive manipulation of suicidal-Yosa, and read his blunt interior monologue over his immaturity and selfishness - as much as I find that disturbing, and judge him for it, I also find myself seeing with Gilbert - there is something incredibly selfish and manipulative about people who go on and on about (threatening, planning, communicating suicide). I've lost a lot of peers in my social circle to suicide in the last few years, the headcount reached double digits in the past few months. I'm overwhelmed, I'm only starting to realize I don't know how to begin to process or think about or talk about the pressure they put on the rest of us. And reading Gilbert coldly judging Yosa actually allowed me to acknowledge for the first time that I also have unspeakable, uncharitable, unexpressed thoughts about the dead whom my peers unironically call "martyrs."
In the end, Gilbert is able to terminate his self-inflicted exile from community and dreams of reuniting with Mathilda. I begrudge that! I silently hoped Mathilda would "divorce his ass" from page one, this is one happy ending that somehow manages to dissatisfy and disappoint.
For me, this is a psychologically burdensome read, not fun at all, but also thought provoking. (It also gave me a travel dream, which is itself rather disturbing.)...more
**spoiler alert** I love the wild, imaginative way Anna “makes sense of,” explains, phenomena in the world. At first I thought she’s being silly becau**spoiler alert** I love the wild, imaginative way Anna “makes sense of,” explains, phenomena in the world. At first I thought she’s being silly because she’s interacting with a young child; but then I started wondering if it’s a fantasy story, but then gradually I realize this is the story about a woman turning mad, told through her young daughter who was brought up to believe in fantastic, mysterious, mythical things.
So it’s a story about a child grappling with grief and the suicide of her mentally ill mother — but even as it turns dark, there’s lightness to it, the child’s way of making sense of things is still really creative, imaginative, cute, funny even, and yes, sometimes a little dark.
I adore how she originally thought the dog was her mother in new skin, imaginably as a way to cope with her grief. Through a wild turn of “reasoning,” she suddenly knows for sure that the dog is not her mother after all, she really is gone. Despite her childish inability to comprehend mortality, she’s still dealing with the loss, she’s evading it in some fashion, but also coming around to face it honestly.
I’m not sure what the last chapter is supposed to represent — that lost hour, rationally speaking it’s just a child’s confusion about the concept time zone made even more mysterious by her madly creative mother — that hour was some how “lost” but then, impossibly, “found”. In that recovered hour, she enters the lake with her mother, turning it into a murder-suicide.
What is that supposed to represent? One iteration of the eternal recurrence? Chance? That it could have been otherwise?...more
This is my first encounter with Bernhard, I should read more before I make any decisive judgment. I understand this is semi-autobiographical, but it’sThis is my first encounter with Bernhard, I should read more before I make any decisive judgment. I understand this is semi-autobiographical, but it’s unclear how much can or should be taken as direct, unconcealed confession.
Given how unpleasant the entire narrative is, you’d think it promises the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, especially since Bernhard likes to gloat about speaking truth to powerful institutions that sought to sugar-coat, to ennoble.
And yet, we are not told until the very end, that this exceptionally mad nephew of Wittgenstein, whose madness itself is exemplary and illustrious, is in the process of dying from the moment Bernhard met him. I can’t help but to feel suspicious — like the author arranged to conceal this from the readers till the end.
Readers might be tempted to inject a glimmer of hope based on the shocking fact that two misanthropes managed to nurture some kind of genuine friendship, a friendship more authentic than the pretentious circle-jerking social rituals out there. But even that turns out to be a one way exploitation, just another episode of a ruthless misanthrope consuming of what’s left of Paul’s strength.
Even Camus the celebrated absurdist turned to solidarity late in his (short) career; but Bernhard seems to scorn such escape towards hope. Being-towards-death is difficult, and facing death squarely every moment of your life is some kind of accomplishment, but what if it leads you to unrelenting bleakness, unrelenting angst, decline, and a turn-less one-way downward movement, dwindling towards nothingness? Is that kind of unflinching “authenticity” to be celebrated? (I suppose one does not get to choose.)
In some ways, the “triumph” in rejecting hope or any kind of levity reminds me of Beckett, except Beckett can be kind of funny sometimes, the situational irony is occasionally capable of evoking laugher, whereas Bernhard’s steady embrace of constant decline seemed to have surpassed even that. (Actually, I take that back...I suppose the award ceremony turned catastrophe is kind of funny!)...more
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