{ Thursday, January 1, 2004 }
2003 was not a particularly distinguished year for reading chez Caterina -- in 2002 I was, for some reason, reading better books, possibly because of more clearly stated ambition (an unrealized ambition, alas). Same thing in 2001. I wasn't particularly focused on anything this past year, and was reading a lot of utilitarian non-fiction. I was also making a lot of art. And eating goat cheese.
I'm not much of a reader of contemporary fiction, and am rarely tempted by The Latest Must-Read -- I haven't even gotten around to reading The Corrections or Middlesex or White Teeth yet, in spite of the fact of ownership. Occasionally I make myself read books that are the literary equivalent of wheat germ -- over Christmas I made myself read Crime and Punishment. It was an uphill battle, I kept wanting to drop it, and did several times. I couldn't stand it. The characters weren't actually characters, they were errant ideologies loosed upon the page. Character X believes Y and behaves in accordance with those beliefs, those beliefs dictates every action he takes. It was more akin to watching a game of billiards than reading a novel, and the book is completely unrelieved by style. Deep psychological insight my ass. While I suspect my opinion of Dostoevsky* might have been formed during the Nabokov mania of '90-'91 (of the many objects of Nabokovian loathing, Dostoevsky shares pride of place with Freud and jazz), actually reading some provided me with an acre of opinion. (I read The Idiot long ago, but don't remember a word.) I won't bore you by going on: Dostoevsky sucks. (/me cowers in the corner, awaiting blows). Interestingly, I detected a cousinage to Dickens, whom I admire, and who also, and more than occasionally, pops characters out of the injection mold of an ideological agenda. He's got the one thing that redeems him though: game. I mean, style.
The best books that I read in 2003 are these (I'm leaving out the art books, which is possibly a mistake):
- My Life by Lyn Hejinian. A classic of experimental poetry and perhaps THE great masterwork of parataxis. I'm being funny here. Seriously now: good stuff.
- Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. I attempt Gravity's Rainbow just about every year, like a failed and stubborn Hillary. I gave myself a break in 2003 and enjoyed this much sillier and less fraught romp.
- The Confusions of Young Torless by Robert Musil. OK, so I didn't get around to The Man without Qualities again, but I'm getting warmer, aren't I? I went on about this just after I read it, see the reading list page.
- The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan. Unalleviated creepiness, adolescent sexual obsession and pestilence in this, McEwan's first
booknovel. - Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marias. I read this, like every other lit geek, based on an article in The Believer, and dutifully bought every other book of Marias's that had been translated into English. As good as advertised.
In addition, I'd recommend some books that I'd already read: Three Paths to the Lake by Ingeborg Bachmann, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, The Complete Poetry of Emily Dickinson. Those last two are very well, duh but essential to me. And I'm still puzzling over my inability to warm to Virginia Woolf. I don't get it. I ought to love Virginia Woolf.
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* In college, I worked as the assistant to a linguist who claimed that the repeated inability to spell or pronounce a word indicated a violent refusal to accept the existence of the idea behind the word. Thus Bush pere's inability to pronounce "Saddam" and "harassment" (Sad-Am and harris-ment), Bush fils's inability to pronounce just about everything, indicating a refusal to participate in anyone's reality besides his own, the ongoing cultural inability to settle on a pronunciation of "clitoris" and my own inability to spell "Dostoevsky" and "Schwartzenegger". The linguistics prof was right: I can't spell things I refuse to even acknowledge. I tried 3 spellings before I settled on "Dostoevsky" and am so indifferent to "getting it right" that I refuse to even look it up.
LINK | 10:12 AM | TB
There is no one correct spelling of a Russian name in English, since they're all transliterations (there must be a dozen variations on Chaikovsky). So don't sweat it.
As for "harassment," what on earth is wrong with the pronunciation you give? I presume it's the one the OED renders ('hær@sm@nt), and that's the only pronunciation the OED gives. If you say "har-ASS-ment," I'm afraid Bush Sr. would have you on the defensive if it came to a battle of the authorities. But I'll fight by your side, since I say it the latter way myself (in common with most Americans).
language hat | January 1, 2004 6:45 PMI'm with Daniel. Since (duh) it can't be spelled correctly with Roman characters I wouldn't obsess about it. I'm the only person I know who writes "Chaikovskii".
James | January 1, 2004 6:48 PMI just wanted to drop a note to say how I'm addicted to the fine content of your blog, despite my devotion to Bruno Schulz (your first post I came across was the one in which you explained your dislike of certain authors, him included). Anyway, I love your discussion of literary things...keeps me wanting to hump the stack of unread books that pile up around here.
A. R. Menne | January 2, 2004 12:45 AMAh thanks everyone for pointing out that there is no proper spelling of Dostoevsky. I feel absolved.
AM -- thanks for the compliment! After my first reading I was a fan of Bruno Schulz, after my second I wasn't any more. But I'm willing to revisit that opinion, since so many people I respect think he's great.
I visited your site too. Nice work, wow! I saw a big show of Remedios Varo in Mexico City once and was stunned. She's a favorite of mine. Your work is reminiscent of hers, and your graphite drawings, (while treating different subject matter) remind me of the work of Marlene McCarty. Something about the lightness. I don't know what scale your drawings are, hers are pretty big.
Caterina Fake | January 2, 2004 3:28 AMDo not discount Dostoyevsky until you have read The Karamazov Brothers - his last and greatest novel. It was my first book by Dostoevsky and I have been sleightly disapointed every time I read another.
Jesper | January 2, 2004 6:13 AMOh dear! Now I feel badly that I was so encouraging of Crime & Punishment when we spoke. And yet, I can't wonder if you might be on to something. I only read C & P once, probably ten years ago. And since that time I've tried to read both The Brothers Karamozov and The Idiot and failed to finish either one. Perhaps it was one of those books that worked well at the time I read it.
megnut | January 2, 2004 7:01 AMI just found your blog while researching "transitional space." Honest. I have to go to bat for "Crime and Punishment." I hated it the first time I read it, but the second time, 15 years later, gorgeous translation, and I really loved it. Is it possible that it's the translation? There's a relatively new one that just magnetized me.
Right now I am lumbering up "The Magic Mountain," wanting to love it more than it do.
Martha Garvey | January 2, 2004 1:36 PMmegnut, stick to your opinions.
kate | January 3, 2004 7:17 PMI first read C&P when I was 19. I picked up an uber-cheap version for something like 50 cents, along with several other cheap classic books in an effort to educate myself in the lit canon and give myself the education I never received growing up poor in a suburban tundra. And it was probably the worst translation I've ever read, with awkward sentences and, of course, too many references to eyes screwing up.
But I was with Raskolnikov from the get-go. Not because he reflected an ideology, or because he was "real," or because he was a good guy (far from it). My heart went out to this poor troubled soul, much as it did to the unnamed narrator in Knut Hamsun's Hunger (read years later), because he reflected an anger and desperation that I could completely understand. I understood then, as I understood now, that matching the world like a photographic plate was immaterial to ol' Fyodor. The novel functioned more like an existential fantasy, the threads later picked up (deliberate or subconscious) in sources as disparate as Jim Thompson, Philip Roth, William T. Vollman, Dorothy Allison, Henry Miller and the above-mentioned Hamsun, while posing a supreme philosophical predicament: what if frustration was allowed to teem over? Is it the individual or the causes that lead to the individual's socioeconomic conditions that are at fault? Does the guilt itself entail a suitable punishment to fit the crime? All of these are questions I still ask myself years later (and, as suggested by a few here, the distinction between the real and the philosophical is more delineated in The Brothers Karamazov and, I would add, Notes from Underground). But the difference between Dostoevsky and say, someone egregiously didicatic like Ayn Rand or Clifford Odets, is that Dostoevsky's "philosophy" is more intuitive, slung hard from the gut, downright ugly and contrarian in the face of genteel comforts.
These are not questions for everybody, particularly when they run converse to a person's belief structure or literary tastes. They reflect a reportage that is more ambitious and intuitive, rather than verisimilitudinous. I'm mystified why you would think there's a correlation between Dickens and Doestoevsky. There couldn't be two more antipodal authors. Dickens is more concerned with chronicling human behavior, using it to mine comedic gold with Alfred Jingle or examining the sacrifice of a fascinating turncoat like Sydney Carton, but he never offers any solutions for the terrible conditions that his characters subsist in. Dostoevsky dares to answer these questions and, in so doing, becomes the more ambitious and riskier of the two giants. The point of Dosteovsky is to dwell for a time in a world that may not represent 19th century Russia, but that is simultaneously guided by all too real concerns.
I suspect that this distinction may be what you struggled with. I had a similar experience myself finishing up Richard Powers' Gain recently, a book that I would have gushed over when I was 19 but that, today, I view as lacking a casuistic base for its convictions and the appropriate visceral teeth to confess its true feelings. The situation is confounded by the fact that Powers is a smart cookie and knows better than to engage in purple anticorporate theatrics. But on some level, I can advocate his extant proselytizing and get behind his ambitions. Because, above all, I understand that Gain is rooted in the same longings to expose that you see in a Sinclair Lewis expose. And I can grant him the benefit of the doubt, while not necessarily endorsing his grand vision (or lack thereof). But I can't say the same thing about some of the hash-slinging entertainers celebrated today for playing pop culture close to the hilt and throwing around irritating digressions about nothing.
Some books are like that, revealing greatness beneath the choppy waters. And it's up to the reader to find the gold beneath the silt, even if it means momentarily advocating an approach that runs counter to their own sensibilities. But then I've always enjoyed watching people shoot pool.
Ed | January 3, 2004 11:09 PM_The Cement Garden_ was IMac's THIRD book.
FIRST NOVEL , THIRD BOOK.
I HATED Dostoevsky, too. Couldn't stand Raskolnikov and his whining, couldn't stand Dostoevsky's long-winded "style". I read Crime and Punishment in high school (it counted as 4 books, but it should have counted as 10), hated it and then fell asleep through his "Notes From the Underground" in college. So I'm glad I have company. You may revoke my English degree now. :P
kim | January 5, 2004 6:11 PMI like the Frenchiness of "Dostoievsky", myself.
As for Dickens and him, I think you're absolutely right, personally. They've got in common (or rather Do took) characterization habits - find a repeated gesture or phrase and do it every other time the guy shows up. Only Di does a big old grand show with everybody invited, and Do has them all write in diaries out loud.
If you like plots, stay away from Brothers Karamazov, but if you like Fyodor, it's super yum.
PF | January 5, 2004 6:44 PMI saw on Frontline's documentary on the first gulf war that Bush Sr. pronounced Saddam as "Sad-dum" because "Sad-dum" meant "boy" in Farsi.
michael | January 6, 2004 10:39 AMI'd like to see your art that you made, if you wouldn't mind posting it. Best, Anne
Anne | January 7, 2004 8:27 PMHmm. A little harsh on D., methinks.
I mean, it's a matter of taste, of course. It's true that D's people seem to adopt ideas that tend to define them.
But I remember reading the Brothers K in hs, and *loving* just this. In a suburban world where life cosisted of getting into an ok college and getting an ok job and rasing ok kids, Dostoyevsky seemed so *different.* As I was still religious then, the Brothers K. especially served to help me think through the real difficulties of Christian faith. C&P is very focused on a characters who's moral question may be tricky to relate to . If you look at Brother's K, you'll find it's more interesting b/c of the variety of types of characters and problems and questions considered--still brooding and Christian, but more interestingly so. Some more sympathetic characters, too. You might well like it, even if C&P didn't suit you.
In a consumerist distopia like the Chicago suburbs , D was just the thing to get me thinking, and to give me license to take ideas seriously. Imho, it's not so much that D. describes characters who merely embody intellectual stances, as that he prefers to describe characters who take their thinking pretty seriously.
I'm not too sure how well it wears...I do reread Nabokov more than D.; but I can't bring myself to share Nabokov's dismissiveness. Actually, b/c I read a lot of Nabokov at the same time as D., I sometimes think of N. as another voice in D.'s universe. I think Nabokov was secretly bitter at the absence of an aesthete brother Karamazov, so he made himself into a bitter secret brother. His whole project was to articulate a way of being he felt had been unjustly excluded from the family.
In any case, I'm surely glad to have gone through a Dostoyevsky phase in highschool, instead of an Ayn Rand one (which seems to be the ususal alternative). :)
Mark
p.s. I like the Dostoyevsky/Powers comparison someone raised before. Yes, similar strengths and weaknesses, I agree.
I noticed that you read "Mrs. Dalloway" recently but you didn't leave a comment about it. What did you think? I'll admit I loathed it. Not only could I not follow the storyline, but when all was said and done, I just didn't care what it was really about.
Luis
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debt consolidation | June 1, 2006 6:21 PM{ Post a comment }
I wouldn't worry about the spelling; the publishers can't agree on it either. A quick glance at my shelves reveals that Penguin spells it Dostoyevsky, and Harper & Row opt for Dostoevsky. Take yr pick.
Daniel | January 1, 2004 12:59 PM