bibliographing

“That’s what Arturo Belano was like, a stupid, conceited peacock.”

2012-02-02T18:12:45Z

Putting together Tuesday’s post, I naturally spent some time skimming back through many of the narratives, especially the earlier ones. I wasn’t so much amazed at how much I’d forgotten, but at how little I’d realized the tightness and cohesiveness of the section. Tightness, ha, how many narrators are there again? Yet I’m serious.

Take Laura Jáuregui, probably most famous in the world of Savage Detectives quotes as the woman who describes “the whole visceral realist thing [as] a love letter, the demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight, something essentially cheap and meaningless.” Jáuregui certainly uses her interviews, conducted in January and May of 1976 and March of 1977, to lash out at her ex-lover Belano. But her comments on visceral realism and her telling of the story of their relationship and breakup foreshadow much of what is to come.

Before the visceral realists even exist, Járegui can tell their future—they will grow up. In January 1976:

And then other poets turned up, poets a little older than Arturo, none of them visceral realists, among other reasons because visceral realism didn’t exist yet, poets like Aníbal who had been friends with Arturo before he left for Chile and so had known him since he was seventeen. They were actually journalists and government officials, the kind of sad people who never leave downtown, or certain downtown neighborhoods, sovereigns of sadness in the area bounded by Avenida Capultepec, to the south, and Reforma, to the north, staffers at El Nacional, proofreaders at the Excelsior, pencil pushers at the Secretaría de Gobernación who headed to Bucareli when they left work and sent out their tentacles or their little green slips.

In the same interview, she also knows what will keep the group together for a while, and why their stories will intertwine for a while, but also why they will eventually drift apart and lose sight of each other:

[A]nd then we were together for several months…and then what happened happened, or in other words we broke up…and strange things started to happen to Arturo. That was when visceral realism was born. At first we all thought it was a joke, but then we realized it wasn’t. And when we realized it wasn’t a joke, some of us went along with him and became visceral realists, out of inertia, I think, or because it was so crazy that it seemed plausible, or for the sake of friendship, so as not to lose a whole circle of friends, but deep down no one took it seriously. Not deep down.

At the time I was beginning to make new friends at the university and I saw Arturo and his friends less and less.

By May of 1976, Jáuregui had moved far past being impressed with the visual realists (perhaps spurred on in this direction by her own outbirst at the end of her first interview?). At this point she openly derides them, but this passage is much more than just a knock on the group for acting childishly. The reason she notices their flaw, or the reason that it finally gets to her so badly, is because her own life is going in a completely different direction. Her new studies catapult her into “real adult” status several years before it happens to the others, but Jáuregui is just the first of the bunch to go down this road:

Why did I keep hanging out with the same people he hung out with for a while? Well, they were my friends too, my friends still, although it wasn’t long before I got tired of them. Let me tell you something. The university was real, the biology department was real, my professors were real, my classmates were real. …Those people weren’t real. The great poet Alí Chumacero…was real, do you see what I mean?, what he left behind was real. What they left behind, on the other hand, wasn’t real. Poor little mice hypnotized by Ulises and led to the slaughter by Arturo. Let me put it as concisely as I can: the real problem was that they were almost all at least twenty and they acted like they were barely fifteen. Do you see what I mean?

In March 1977, Jáuregui reports on her final meeting with Belano, when the two were already long broken-up. The two are clearly on separate sides of a deep chasm, on his side “countries like Libya, Ethiopa, Zaire, and cities like Barcelona, Florence, Avignon” and on hers studying and biology and money. Grown-up things.

At first I’d pretended I wasn’t interested in his plans, his talk, anything he had to say to me, but then I realized that I really wasn’t interested, that everything having to do with him bored me to tears, that what I really wanted was for him to go and let me study in peace. …I told him that when I was a biologist I would have the time to see those cities and countries, and the money too, because I didn’t plan to travel around the world hitchhiking or sleeping just anywhere. …I’ll travel when I have money. Then you won’t have the time, he said. I will have the time, I said, you’re wrong, I’ll be the mistress of my time, I’ll do what I like with my time. And he said: you won’t be young anymore.

This devastates Belano, and the encounter ends in one of Bolaño’s characteristic (it would seem) incidents of unresolved violence.

Jáuregui is not the only early narrator unimpressed with the young Belano’s travels—because, remember, these are some of the oldest stories about Belano too. Perla Avilés (the second narrator of the entire section; Amadeo Salvatierra is first and Jáuregui is third) is nearly as bitter as Jáuregui when she hears about “his latest adventures” from his sister after a chance meeting.

He had traveled all over Latin America, returned to his native country, suffered through a coup. …I imagined him lost in a white space, a virgin space that kept getting dirtier and more soiled despite his best efforts, and even the face I remembered grew distorted, as if while I was talking to his sister his features melded with what she was describing, ridiculous tests of strength, terrifying, pointless rites of passage into adulthood, so distant from what I once thought would become of him….

By this time, like Jáuregui’s, Avilés’s “life [had taken] a ninety-degree turn.” College, growing up—but you guessed that already.

On Bolaño, prose, and narration

2012-02-01T02:03:12Z

Selena’s post on The Savage Detectives pointed me to this New Yorker Book Bench blog post, an alleged “user’s guide to Bolaño.” I’m not sure if I’d say so much I “disagreed” with the post as that it “depressed” me; is there a word for some mixture of the two? And it might seem hard for me to disagree per se because I’ve only read two of the books discussed, but I sort of do.

Putting aside the somewhat bizarre first paragraph, a necessary lede, at first I am almost taken in by this nice “For Completists Only” shelf idea. As a sometime-completist, I think these would be very sensible shelves to have. But then, Giles Harvey accuses Bolaño’s prose of being “often as flat as old seltzer water,” giving this as an example of such, from The Third Reich:

Her sweetness, her charm, her soft gaze, put everything else—my own daily struggles and the back-stabbing of those who envy me—into perspective, allowing me to face facts and rise above them

Am I dazzled? No. But wait. Let me go on before I justify this.

Harvey goes on to say that “prose-flatness is not atypical of Bolaño” and that he was “a great novelist who was not a great writer” with “little interest in the sentence” and “disdain [for] Jamesian refinement and polish.” Now, this Jamesian refinement and polish is, let’s not forget, a particular type of “good writing,” not some mathematical proof of it. He goes on to give an example, I suppose, of just this polish, but which Bolaño gives to a “moral toad” of a narrator, proof of said disdain.

But then as Harvey goes on to recommend five of Bolaño’s best works, you realize: gee, he keeps talking about narrators, and what the narrator is like. And what the books sound like—not just what they are about, but everything about what they sound like—completely depends on what their narrator is like. The Savage Detectives is great because the “ebullient” young narrrator “is at once comic and poignant,” and, well, that means he sounds good.

So back to that first quote above. I don’t know anything about The Third Reich (truly, other than what I read in this very blog post). But I immediately assumed that the narrator was not Bolaño, because it never is, I mean it always is, but it never is, and by never being him that’s part of how it’s always him. I’ve only read two of his books, but I’m pretty sure I know this. Anyway, point is: who the hell cares if it’s “flat”? It’s whatever it’s supposed to be.

And this idea that there is normally some link between fine, “prince[ly]” prose and moral propriety seems unfounded. It’s not Vladimir Nabokov who writes most of Lolita, after all, it’s Humbert Humbert, ephebophile extraordinaire.

Separately, I cannot help noting my extreme disagreement/depression/disappointment with Harvey’s final warning about 2666. “The book is a desert of negative space,” he writes, “across which the panting reader will search in vain for the traditional pleasures of the novel: form, character, coherence, meaning.” It is what it’s supposed to be. Complaining about “The Part About the Crimes”: “The result is neither horror nor sympathy. It is exhaustion.” It is what it’s supposed to be.

What reader doesn’t long to be impressed by the effective?

Cutting out and clipping together The Savage Detectives

2012-01-31T14:50:16Z

Since I spent a lot of time thinking about exactly how the second section of The Savage Detectives worked—and who was reporting it, as discussed, for example, here, I decided to actually analyze the darn thing and try to figure some stuff out about it.

First, one possibly interesting observation that struck me as surprising but doesn’t seem super meaningful: other than the recurring presence of January 1976–vintage Amadeo Salvatierra, the interviews pretty much go in chronological order; there is exactly one non-Amadeo interview that is out of order (Joaquín Font, March 1977, page 222 in my Picador edition).

Back to the “substance” of this post. Something surprised me over the past few days, reading over others’ entries and comments for the group read—remarks here and there about a multiplicity of interviers, writers, listeners, whatever, in “The Savage Detectives” section. The thought had simply not occurred to me when I read it. Knowing me and knowing Bolaño, there’s probably a nicely hidden reason why the same person cannot have conducted all the interviews, but I decided, for this post, to go under my initial assumption: that one person (or perhaps one very small group of people, say, a duo) went to all the places and talked to all the people him- or herself. I believe that if you make what Nero Wolfe might call a few reasonable assumptions about this interviewer an interesting picture begins to emerge, so let’s suspend our disbelief and do it for a bit of fun.

Here is the story of the interviews, broadly and in chronological order: a long, in-depth interview is conducted in January 1976 with Amadeo Salvatierra in Mexico City. Further shorter interviews were conducted with a variety of visceral realist–types in Mexico City from March 1976 through May 1977, interrupted only by an entry made in early 1977 from a university in the American Midwest.

Starting in May 1977, the interviews take place in Europe: First in Barcelona, then in Paris, then back to Barcelona before finally hitting London (and, somewhat anticlimactically, Port-Vendres, France). By March 1979 we are back in Mexico City, which becomes like a home base from which isolated trips are made to various places where visceral realist–types live or have lived: to Tel Aviv in October 1979, to Vienna in May 1980, to San Diego in March 1981 (where two people who live together are interviewed during the same month, separately—by a friend, perhaps, who has come to visit?), again to San Diego in fall 1982 (with Rafael and Barbara each interviewed separately again). Things settle down and by now the interviews, all in Mexico City, are coming in at two per year, slow compared with the several-per-quarter rate of the late 1970s. Is the interviewer losing interest? Is it harder to get people to talk about the boys? Are the visceral realists harder to find? Does he just have too much else to do now—a real job, like Xóchitl, or a family?

Things are quiet, and the late 80s and early 90s are told in a few of the longer entries from characters we will never hear from again, like Andrés Ramírez, Edith Oster, and Daniel Grossman. Then there’s a trip back to Spain: starting with Mallorca in June 1994, and hitting Barcelona and Catalonia that same month, and later a book fair in Madrid that’s a whirlwind of tragicomedy. Then there’s nothing for over a year, followed by five months with an usual amount of travel: from Barcelona to Mexico City back to Spain then to Paris and finally back to Mexico, back to the graduate student in Pachuca who has never heard of Juan García Madero.

Note the fury of work in the early years. Mexico City is home, and the gang is almost all still here, with fresh memories. It’s easy to get hold of people who will talk for a few minutes about Belano and Lima, and the interviewer wants to talk about them pretty frequently.

The interviewer slows down around the same time as the rest of the gang, growing up, getting jobs, maybe selling out, or simply no longer caring about visceral realism. Barbara Patterson might get nostalgic, wish her life had turned out differently, and talk to the narrator about the romance she still feels for the 70s, but by 1982 she can only really focus on how much she despises Rafael Barrios. People have moved on.

In many cases, then, it simply seems like the interviewer is one of the group, or a hanger-on—perhaps a younger fan of theirs. But these jaunts here and there suggest purposely seeking of information about the boys—or do they? They are typically to universities or to cities with plenty of universities. Perhaps the interviewer has simply sold out by going into academia; the July 1994 Madrid Book Fair scene certainly helps suggest the possibility of a writer–academic. So perhaps he just makes the most of his opportunities at conferences to find the right people to ask about Belano and Lima—but that seems awfully convenient, doesn’t it?

When I look at the section like this, I see a pattern so similar to the one Belano and Lima followed: a wild youth in Mexico City followed by a move to Europe, all around Europe, because that’s what wild youths do. Then of course you eventually ended up home, became somewhat stable. For Belano, that happened in Spain, and for Lima, perhaps in Mexico City (but perhaps nowhere). But the interviewer doesn’t stop seeking—in fact he finds more and more disparate people to talk to.

Why would someone do such a thing? From the August 1976 interview with Manuel Maples Arce in Mexico City:

Do you think anyone is interested in stridentism these days? I asked Arturo Belano. Of course, Maestro, he answered, or words to that effect. My opinion is that stridentism is history now and as such it can only be interesting to literary historians, I said. It interests me and I’m not a historian, he said. Well, then.

Well, then, indeed. I find it interesting that the last interview, after the interviewer has really managed to nail down as much as could possibly be expected of Belano’s life (with María Teresa and Jacobo Urenda; Lima’s life, as always, has been harder to nail down but he does what he can with Clara Cabeza), is with student of the Mexico City–visceral realists García Grajales. That is, with the literary historian (or is he?) who is the only person in the world interested in exactly what the interviewer has spent his life interested in in his own way (as a friend? hanger-on? low-grade participant? bad poet? childhood friend?).

And here I think García Grajales’s denial of García Madero becomes a bit interesting, too. The interviewer somehow knows something about García Madero (like Belano and Lima somehow knew something about Cesárea Tinajero when they met with Amadeo Salvatierra). And García Grajales, who can have all “their magazines, their pamphlets, documents you can’t find anyplace” that he wants, hasn’t actually been there, known about any of it—he’s too young; it’s 1996, and he’s calling the interviewer “sir.” Why should García Grajales know anything at all about what happened in 1975–76?

This post’s title references, as I lazily did here, a line from Charles Kinbote’s foreword to the poem “Pale Fire,” advising the reader on how best to make use of his footnotes: “I find it wise in such cases as this to eliminate the bother of back-and forth leafings by either cutting out and clipping together the pages with the text of the thing, or, even more simply, purchasing two copies of the same work which can then be placed in adjacent positions on a comfortable table….”

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

2012-01-30T23:44:35Z

Since I didn’t wrap up reading The Savage Detectives until last night, I’ve stayed away, so far, from most other participants’ posts. One of the few I did read, because I could tell right away that she had stopped before the point I had already reached, was Dolce Bellezza’s lament that the second part of the novel, “The Savage Detectives,” put her off. In the comments to his own post on The Savage Detectives, Rise suggests that in some sense this middle portion is the novels version of 2666‘s “The Part About the Crimes”:some people will not make it through.

There was never any question of whether I would make it through “The Part About the Crimes,” though it did start to wear me out, and there was little question whether I would continue my race (compared to War & Peace, at least) through to the end of The Savage Detectives, either, but in the present case things seemed to get much easier as they went along. This is because the narrative surreptitiously changes from one, as Bellezza put it, about “the wild antics of teens who know no boundaries and have no goals” to one about a subtly different group of people, ones who have grown up and realized in many cases that “youth is a scam.”

The first part of the novel, which is really solidly about those wild kids and the crazy things they get up to, ends at New Year’s of 1976, when most of the principal characters are in their teens or early twenties (there are a few of an older generation as well, but this is the age of the core group of second-generation “visceral realists”). Then “The Savage Detectives” begins its stream of interviews or anecdotes: dozens of people, some recognizable either by name or by action from the first part of the book, recount their interactions with Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, the two visceral realist ringleaders, and their various friends and hangers-on. So, for events that happen pre-1976 we have two sources: Juan García Madero’s first narrative and those of the interviews that cast back to memories that old. For events that happen post-1976 we have one source: the interviews. And for events during that year itself we have again two sources: the last part of the book, another García Madero narrative, and those interviews that recount events of that year.

And for a while, the interviews seem to be concentrated right around the same time that Belano, Lima, García Madero and the prostitute named Lupe run off toward the Sonora Desert, the trip they make on New Year’s Day. Amadeo Salvatierra, 1976; Perla Avilés, 1976; Laura Jáuregui, 1976; Fabio Ernesto Logiacomo, 1976…1976, 1976, 1976, 1976…all different months, and not necessarily in order, unti finally in chapter 5 of this part of the book we get a January 1977. In my Picador paperback edition it takes from page 143 to 209 to go from ’76 to ’77, and until page 314 to reach 1980. The hold of youth is strong, and Bolaño arranges these narratives so that the creep of time is slow and subtle. It changes the gang—some of the original second-generation visceral realists stop writing poetry, stop hanging out, disappear from sight, or die. As they do, visceral realists who had seemed less important before are suddenly among the few remaining. No one cares about quite the same things they did back in 1975, though some might wish they did, and some might like to look back at those times as on fond (or at least bittersweet) memories.

Soon it becomes clear that many of our formerly wild teens have jobs—some even have “real jobs” and almost begin to settle down.

It is when the narrative reaches the 1990s that the aging process is more stark. Arturo Belano has been married and separated or divorced; he has a son; he is ill, probably terminally. Daniel Grossman is long back from Israel and now in a position to evaluate which of the young talents he and his friends worshipped in their teens amounted to much of anything, artistically speaking. Ulises Lima makes peace with Octavio Paz. And the current crop of younger writers is not the same as those born in the 1950s:

I’m not saying they don’t work hard. They work much harder than those earlier writers! But they’re also much more vulgar. And they act like businessmen or gangsters. And they don’t renounce anything, or they renounce what’s easily renounced, and they’re very careful not to make enemies, or to choose their enemies from among the defenseless.

There is one thread that keeps the second section constantly anchored not just to 1976, but to an elusive explanation of what Belano and Lima went searching for when they went to Sonora: Cesárea Tinajero. The interviews with Amadeo Salvatierra*, all taken in January 1976 and probably part of one very long conversation, interspersed throughout the novel, describe the first generation of visceral realists, of which Tinajero could be called the mother. Salvatierra was part of the Mexican avant-garde of the 1920s—a stridentist, it would seem—and he knew Tinajero in Mexico City, long ago. She’s like a ghost: she had exactly one poem published, in a magazine that seems to have only one surviving copy, Salvatierra’s. And Salvatierra is probably the only person left who can tell Belano and Lima about this woman, and show them her poem. He spends an entire night doing so, over mezcal and tequila, and explains a bit of what she was like and how one day she up and left for Sonora. Belano and Lima must find her, and the flight with Lupe makes for an excuse to do so—but no one knows who she is, there is no written record of her, no more poems. The trail is difficult to pick up.

Now, by the 1990s, just as Belano and Lima were interested in researching (and somehow paying homage to) the previous generation’s avant-garde, so is at least one contemporary Mexican interested in the second generation of visceral realists. Ernesto García Grajales, interviewed in 1996 at the Universidad de Pachuca, explains that “[i]n all humbleness, sir, I can say that I’m the only expert on the visceral realists in Mexico, and if pressed, the world. God willing, I plan to publish a book about them.” And he can give us a rundown of so many people who have dropped out of the narrative at one time or another, some of whose fates we know, some whose are less sure: Jacinto Requena, María Font, Ernesto San Epifanio, Xóchitl García, Rafael Barrios, Angélica Font, Luscious Skin, and so on. He’s even met Ulises Lima, who is officially back in Mexico City, although he’s never met Belano, and doesn’t even know what’s happened to him.

The interviewer, whose identity I will leave aside for now (this post is too long already), asks about Juan García Madero, who hasn’t yet come up.

Juan García Madero? No, the name doesn’t ring a bell. He never belonged to the group. Of course I’m sure. Man, if I tell you so as the reigning expert on the subject, it’s because that’s the way it is. They were all so young. I have their magazines, their pamphlets, documents you can’t find anyplace. There was a seventeen-year-old kid, but he wasn’t called García Madero. …The Mexico City visceral realists. Yes, because there had already been another group of visceral realists, in the 1920s. The northern visceral realists. You didn’t know that? Well, they existed. Although talk about undocumented. No, it wasn’t a coincidence. More like an homage. A gesture. A response. Who knows. Anyway, these are labyrinths I prefer not to lose myself in. I limit myself to the material at hand and let readers and scholars draw their own conclusions.

This interview is one of two contained in the last chapter of the second section of the book; the other is the final installment with Amadeo Salvatierra, the first line of which is: “Everyone forgot her, boys, except me, I said. Now that we’re old and past hope maybe a few remember her, but back then everyone forgot her and then they started to forget themselves, which is what happens when you forget your friends.”

I love Bolaño for his games and for his creativity, similar to my reasons for loving Nabokov, but it doesn’t make me any more able to unravel those games. It will surely take at least one more read (someday!) to continue working out the connections between the elusive Cesárea Tinajero and the elusive Juan García Madero, to come up with ideas about who has been doing all this research from 1976 to 1996, even to decide if there’s anything to decide about what Belano and Lima were up to all this time. Not to mention what’s outside the window.

Thanks to Richard and Rise for hosting this group read!

*His name means “God’s love saves the earth,” right? Now how’s that strike you?

Revisiting: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

2012-01-27T18:13:56Z

I’m not done yet with writing about War & Peace, but I needed a bit of a break—and one is required in any case, because this weekend is all about The Savage Detectives (no, I’m not done yet; yes, I will be all over this readalong by Sunday at the latest).

So I thought to reinvigorate my Fridays Revisitings a little bit—with Tolstoy! I have re-read the very short first chapter of Anna Karenina, the first Tolstoy I read (long ago, in high school). I remember a few plot elements, a few characters, and liking the novel overall, which at the time at least I took basically as a Victorian novel.

Revisiting has not led me to change that opinion at all, because two or so pages is hardly enough to do that, but it does show a bit how much my own mindset and prior experience with the author affect what I notice when I read. Anna Karenina opens, as is well known, with the line about the happy and unhappy families, but by the third sentence we know why the Oblonskys in particular are unhappy (and soon after, in what manner): “The wife had discovered an intrigue between her husband and their former French governess.”*

Prince Steven Arkadyevich Oblonsky wakes up, shortly after this explanation, on a couch in his study, to which he’s been relegated since his wife caught him out. He automatically reaches out for his robe, realizing as he comes to that it is not in fact there—because he’s not in his bedroom, because he’s been kicked out, because…

‘Oh dear, dear, dear!’ he groaned recalling what had happened. And the details of his quarrel with his wife, his inextricable position, and, worst of all, his guilt, rose up in his imagination.

‘No, she will never forgive me; she can’t forgive me! And the worst thing about it is, that it’s all my own fault—my own fault; and yet I’m not guilty! That’s the tragedy of it!’ he thought.

I was struck immediately—guilt and responsibility coming up right on the second page! And Oblonsky feels both guilty and not guilty at once. It’s his fault, but it’s not his fault; he’s responsible, but not. My first reaction is annoyance that Tolstoyan characters have so little sense of accountability, but my second reaction is to put things in a somewhat different light. Perhaps Tolstoy is just really interested in guilt, that understanding guilt is part of his project.

So what is Oblonsky guilty of and not guilty of? His wife “discovered” “his guilt,” meaning his affair, but what he really blames himself for, and deems not his own fault, is his reaction to that discovery: “he involuntarily (‘reflex action of the brain,’ thought Oblonsky, who was fond of physiology) smiled his usual kindly and therefore silly smile.”

‘It’s all the fault of that stupid smile,’ thought Oblonsky. ‘But what am I to do? What can I do?’ he asked himself in despair, and could find no answer.

It makes no sense, for Oblonsky, to blame himself for his own smile. But blaming his smile for something is perfectly all right!

*Quotes taken from the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation.

“All their assaults and attacks on each other caused almost no harm; the harm, death, and mutilation were caused by the cannonballs and bullets that flew everywhere through that space in which these men were rushing about.”

2012-01-26T13:24:41Z

I’m not sure it would be right to say that my coverage of War & Peace has really been “building” to anything, but let’s see what I can do with day four, bringing things out more to the “point” of the novel, which, as Greg Zimmerman noted back in December, “inasmuch as you can pinpoint a single point in a 568,880-word novel,” amounts to something like this:

The course of a battle is affected by an infinite number of freely operating forces (there being no greater freedom of operation than on a battlefield, where life and death are at stake), and this course can never be known in advance; nor does it ever correspond with the direction of any one particular force.*

Tolstoy accomplishes a few things with the war portions of the novel, including developing the story of Borodino as a turning point in the Napoleonic wars, and I think these are the most interesting and compelling sections of the novel in many ways (though they kind of break the idea of “novel” a little bit)**. His interest is big: in explaining the causes of the war, or, as he often describes it quite to my liking, the great movement of people across Europe from west to east followed by a great movement of people across Europe from east to west.

I also like that he’s a bit of a wrecker. The war sections are more anti-authoritarian than the peace ones (except where the peace sections touch on diplomacy), and Tolstoy is actively antagonistic toward received interpretations of historical events. “They were wrong in 1812, they were wrong a generation later, and they’re wrong now!” he insists, and successfully—he is grappling with some pretty standard issues of historiography, and he is right to reject the idea that we can simply say “Napoleon was a genius” and all is explained.

Unfortunately, I am not fully sympathetic to Tolstoy’s alternative view. He is a fatalist, and practically a Calvinist. As he drills down into the cause of each cause, further and further, he gets to a point where each individual who made up a part of this movement across Europe is an individual who moved across Europe, but he can’t stop there. He insists that these people had no choice—whatever they did was inevitable, just because. (Of course, it’s not quite “just because” for Tolstoy, it’s because of that stage manager he mentions once in a while. But he begins to seem more like an 18th-century Frenchman who believes he’s living in a clockwork universe than whatever he really is.)

But is there a point to this level of analysis? Here’s an example from the epilogue, where he does lots more philosophizing, and which I think illustrates two main things: Tolstoy’s ridiculous philosophical sloppiness, and the pointlessness of his obsessive exercise in cause-seeking.

A locomotive is moving. Someone asks: why does it move? A muzhik says: the devil moves it. Another man says the locomotive moves because its wheels turn. A third asserts that the cause of the movement is the smoke blown away by the wind.

The muzhik is irrefutable. In order to refute him, someone would have to prove to him that there is no devil, or another muzhik would have to explain to him that it is not the devil but a German who moves the locomotive. Only then, by way of contradiction, will they see that they are both wrong. But the one who says that the cause is the turning of the wheels refutes himself, because, if he enters upon the terrain of analysis, he must keep going: he must explain the cause of the turning of the wheels. And until he arrives at the ultimate cause of the locomotive’s movement, the steam compressed in the boiler, he will have no right to stop in his search for the cause.

First, the sloppiness. With hardly a breath after saying the muzhik is “irrefutable,” Tolstoy is ready to tell you exactly how to refute him! And the idea that by contradicting each other, the two muzhiks should both be convinced of their wrongness is also suspect. And even if the man who mentions the turning of the wheels “must keep going,” that doesn’t mean he “refutes himself”; naming a promixate cause before a more distant cause doesn’t refute the existence of the proximate cause. There can be more than one!

The second point is really about scope, appropriateness, and obsession. There are perfectly valid reasons out here in the real world to care only about proximate causes of events. Perhaps simply saying “the wheels move” is unhelpful, and moving on to the steam compressed in the boiler is important because without knowing that, you won’t be able to fix a broken locomotive. But Tolstoy is unsatisfied with explanations that stop anywhere short of the stage manager—whereas going as far as the stage manager is pointless most of the time, because all it gets you is “there’s no such thing as free will and everything is predetermined.” That might be the ultimate explanation of all things, but if the same one thing is the ultimate explanation of all things, it’s a bit of a conversation-stopper—and doesn’t do anything at all to help get the train running on time.

I’m not saying necessarily that I disagree with Tolstoy’s views on free will (we might disagree entirely about what’s virtuous and what’s vicious, but in some ways I’m a Calvinist myself), but that I find his insistence on this depth of inquiry often barren and sometimes depressingly immoral. Many things Tolstoy says about the Napoleonic wars help me understand them better, but when he ultimately concludes that no one involved was responsible for any of his or her own actions, it’s at best inutile and at worst a disgusting rejection of personal responsibility. We are not working at the stage-manager level, and at the human level personal responsibility is still real. As the consumption partner put it last night, “You may have been predestined to be an asshole, but if you were, guess what? You’re still an asshole, and it’s still my right to treat you like one.” Of course, this is simply the tangle of free will and predestination: if you’re damned, it isn’t actually your fault, but you’re still damned because you deserve damnation. You can choose, like Tolstoy, to spend a lot of time stuck in this tangle.

My question for the end of this post is how well we think Tolstoy accepts his own conclusions. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday of this week writing about some of the peace-based plots, mostly in terms of deserts. Without free will or personal responsibility, there can be no such thing as just deserts, though. If Sonya’s motives are impure, why should she be punished? She couldn’t have done anything about it anyway, and nothing matters because it was all inevitable. If Kuragin is a despoiler, why should he get his comeuppance? Except! Tolstoy can give it to them because he’s made himself the stage-manager. We lowly humans cannot understand why things happen because we aren’t privy to a whole other level of “reasoning,” i.e., the stage-manager’s reasoning. He has reasons we can’t even imagine for making us all do what he does, so things might not make sense to us, but we can trust that they make sense to him. And this is perfect for a novelist—exactly what novelists do, as I discussed with Tom in the comments yesterday. I think that Tolstoy does accept his own conclusions, and that the war and peace sections are meant to be analogous counterparts proving the same point, but as Tom says, “The analogy is useless!”

Of course, we could always question Tom’s claim that “I am in some important sense a real person!” But really, practically speaking, he is, and so am I, and so was Napoleon, and so were the hundreds of thousands of troops who followed him into battle, and killed other real people. And I’m willing to hold them much more responsible for all that than Tolstoy is.

*Quote from Greg’s blog, presumably from the Anthony Briggs translation he read.

**Don’t worry, there are still plenty of things I disagree with in the war sections. He’s a super dooper nationalist, for one thing.

Sonya and Princess Marya give until it hurts—but which one will give some more?

2012-01-25T13:55:51Z

Yesterday, in telling the story of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, I mentioned his sister Princess Marya. Marya is a bit unfortunate: she is dull and plain-looking, gets flustered easily, lives in worshipful fear of her father, and is bullied by her own companion, Mlle Bourienne. Marya is also extremely religious and devoted to the holy fools who regularly show up at her door (at the back door, that is, in secret from Prince Nikolai, who would make fun of them). She’s also an extremely nice and kind person—far too nice and too kind, if you ask me. I mentioned she was a spinster; Prince Anatole Kuragin does come knocking at her door, at the behest of his father (Princess Marya is a very wealthy heiress), but her face turns red and blotchy and there is simply no chance.

She has something of a counterpart in Sonya, a poor relation of the Rostovs (it’s unclear whether she shares their surname). As Princess Marya lives to serve her father, brother, sister-in-law, and later nephew, Sonya is constantly behind the scenes in the Rostov household making sure everything is moving along as it should. She helps Natasha, the old Count and Countess, little Petya—she’s a real “angel in the house” type. And she’s in love with the elder Rostov son, Nikolai, who shares her affections and promises, when he leaves for the hussars, to marry her one day.

Sonya is the perfect picture of constancy. Natasha, so often her companion, can’t understand how easily Sonya takes it all. And when one of Nikolai’s leaves ends in their falling still further in love, she only becomes more certain, more sure, more able to wait. Well, if Sonya refuses to suffer, surely Tolstoy will find a way to make her do so.

First, there is the unfairness of Countess Rostov. The Countess knows Sonya is blameless in all things, and in fact a very good person, but she wants Nikolai to marry a rich woman. This is important because the Countess’s own husband is in the process of leaving them all destitute—and instead of stopping him, or herself, or accepting the blame for ruining the family, she has determined that Nikolai will marry well, and thus Sonya needs to get out of the way. Nikolai is disgusted by the idea of marrying for money, in principle.

Tolstoy can fix all that by introducing Nikolai to Princess Marya (via the war, naturally), and although they don’t understand each other at all (a feeling Nikolai maintains for the rest of his life), they fall in love. Though he still considers marrying for money wrong, Nikolai is happy to be released from his engagement to Sonya (at his mother’s behest, of course) because he’s been easily convinced that with no money the two of them will face only hardship. So Sonya, the constant, loving Sonya, writer of hundreds of letters to her man in the hussars, is practically forgotten beside the saintly (and super-rich) Princess Marya.

I suppose you could just guess that Tolstoy liked to break up happy couples, but there must be some reason to break up this one and leave that one intact, or vice versa. It’s not just random entertainment here. So why can’t Nikolai and Sonya be together—what is Tolstoy able to do now that they’re broken up that he couldn’t do before?

There’s not much question of Nikolai being redeemed in the way Prince Andrei is. He’s a simple hussar without Andrei’s discontent to begin with, and even marrying Princess Marya isn’t enough for him to really understand her religiosity. The main effects of the Nikolai–Marya marriage vs. the potential Nikolai–Sonya marriage seem to be: the Rostov family is rescued from total financial ruin (which was not Nikolai’s, much less Sonya’s, fault to begin with), and the Countess never has to face her own responsibility for enabling her husband to ruin them; Sonya is pushed aside and becomes an invisible member of the Rostov household, never to marry; and Princess Marya, who ended up an old maid because of her own completely pathetic nature (stand up to your ridiculous father! and Mlle Bourienne!), does marry and have a family. These effects do not seem very far-reaching: swap one woman for another, and end up with some money. I’m forced to conclude the problem lies with Sonya.

Tolstoy helps me conclude this, as he likes to tell more than show, and when he tells of Countess Rostov demanding a letter from Sonya renouncing her engagement, this is what he (I mean, his narrator) says:

Sonya burst into hysterical sobs, answered through her sobs that she would do everything, that she was ready for everything, but promised nothing directly, and in her soul could not resolve to do what was demanded of her. She was to sacrifice herself for the happiness of the family that had nourished and raised her. To sacrifice herself for others was Sonya’s habit. Her position in the house was such that it was only on the path of sacrifice that she could show her worth, and she was accustomed to sacrificing herself and loved it. But formerly, in all her acts of self-sacrifice, she had been joyfully aware that in sacrificing herself she thereby raised her value in her own and other people’s eyes, and became more worthy of Nicolas, whom she loved more than anything in her life; but now her sacrifice was to consist in renouncing that which for her had made up the whole reward for her sacrifice, the whole meaning of her life. And for the first time in her life she felt bitter towards the people who had been her benefactors only so as to torment her the more; she felt envy of Natasha, who had never experienced anything like that…. And for the first time Sonya felt her quiet, pure love for Nicolas suddenly begin to grow into a passionate feeling, which stood above the rules, and virtue, and religion; and, under the influence of that feeling, Sonya, having been taught by her life of dependence to be secretive, involuntarily answered the countess in general, indefinite terms….

Sonya, that horrible, horrible bitch, wanted something for herself—and as soon as she realized it, she contaminated her “quiet, pure love” with passion. Even though everything she had ever done up to this point was good (and Tolstoy isn’t even really claiming here that it was all based on ulterior motives; Sonya really is good), the fact that her self-sacrifice was less than 100% pure makes it worthless. She was only sacrificing so she could gain something later! She was only sacrificing so that the people who supported her would continue to support and love and appreciate her! Horrors!

Princess Marya, on the other hand, was a true, pure self-sacrificer, who thought her life would amount to nothing because she had spent it all on sacrifices to others. That is to say: Princess Marya consciously chose to waste her life on devotion to an old man who didn’t appreciate her and a child she should never have been responsible for, making choice after choice knowing that she would likely not marry and not have a family of her own because of these decisions. Father Tolstoy is here to right this wrong for her, of course, because holy fools do take care of their own. And what of Sonya? By the end of the novel, she’s barely even seen as human. Everyone knows her feelings don’t matter, because she’s taken it and liked it for decades, and what else is new?

“[I]t made no difference to him, and it made no difference because something else, more important, had been revealed to him.”

2012-01-24T14:20:05Z

One of the better things about reading War and Peace is that it gave me the chance to exercise my plot-analysis muscles—that is, to try to dig down past the surface and see how Tolstoy’s gears were grinding away, trying to do whatever he was trying to do in the novel. He’s not, how shall I put it, terribly subtle about these things (though not unsubtle either), so it works well as a bit of an exercise piece, I think. Well, we can see about that at the end of this post!

Here I’d like to examine the story of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, one of the (many) principal figures in the novel, who figures heavily in both the “war” and “peace” sections. At the beginning of the novel, we meet Prince Andrei married to “the little princess,” a pretty woman he doesn’t seem to much care for and who soon dies in childbirth, leaving him a son, the little Prince Nikolai (as opposed to the old Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky, Andrei’s father). At the time, Andrei is out fighting in the first Russian campaign against Napoleon, at Austerlitz. On his return home with a wound, Andrei assumes an estate of his own, leaves his son largely in the care of his spinster sister Princess Marya (and employees), and drifts about, improving his estate but without much of a raison d’être.

A few years later, Prince Andrei meets the young Countess Natasha Rostov at a ball, and it’s clear the two of them will soon be engaged. It also seems clear that their engagement is ill-fated. With the old Prince Nikolai disapproving (the Rostovs are broke, if respectable), Andrei agrees to tour Europe for a year before the wedding. Everything is going swimmingly—Natasha might not be exactly happy about their separation, but she is devoted to Andrei in a way she has never been before (this is love; the others were just crushes) and there’s no question of her fidelity. Until! Enter Prince Anatole Kuragin, longtime and well-known womanizer, brother of the shiningest star in high society and, secretly, husband to a Polish peasant woman whose father (unlike others’) was clearly smart enough to know when to grab a shotgun. Kuragin has an amazing ability to turn Natasha’s head, beginning with a ridiculous scene at the opera (where Tolstoy would have you believe women in the audience end up topless by the second intermission*). Natasha breaks off her engagement to Prince Andrei and attempts to elope with Kuragin (who has not, of course, mentioned that he already has a wife).

Long story short: Prince Andrei is crushed but proud; Natasha tries to kill herself and spends months in a deep depression; Kuragin is run out of Moscow by his brother-in-law, a friend of the Rostovs, who helps hush up the whole affair as much as possible. And when the next Russian campaign against Napoleon rolls around, Prince Andrei is ready to go fight once more. At Borodino, he is struck by shrapnel, and in the field hospital, through intermittent bouts of unconsciousness, realizes that the man next to him, who’s just had a leg agonizingly amputated, is none other than Anatole Kuragin—the man who ruined his life.

Prince Andrei remembered everything [Kuragin's affair with Natasha], and a rapturous pity and love for this man filled his happy heart.

Prince Andrei could no longer restrain himself, and he wept tender, loving tears over people, over himself, and over their and his own errors.

“Compassion, love for our brothers, for those who love us, love for those who hate us, love for our enemies—yes, that love which God preached on earth, which Princess Marya taught me, and which I didn’t understand; that’s why I was sorry about life, that’s what was still left for me, if I was to live. But now it’s too late. I know it!”

“‘My God! What is this? Why is he here?’ Prince Andrei said to himself” as he realized who his neighbor was, and I ask the same question: why is Kuragin here? Which is to say, why is Kuragin in the novel at all? Briefly, Prince Anatole Kuragin is used as a sort of generic depraved character, with purposes half didactic and half entertaining, but his role in the novel becomes significant only when he becomes part of the Andrei–Natasha plot. Here, he is a pretty simple tempter (with Natasha, painted as somewhat naïve or sheltered, an easy mark), and you could say he simply gets his comeuppance (not only does he get his leg hacked off, he dies afterward). But why does he tempt her to begin with? Why break up the happy engagement of Prince Andrei and Natasha Rostov—they are in love, they are waiting to be together again, why are they not a right couple for each other? Here we have what is for me Tolstoyan hand-waving: Andrei has not yet found God, and, lacking peace, cannot successfully enter into marriage with Natasha.

But Prince Andrei will be redeemed by the end of the novel. He claims to know it’s too late in the field hospital, but he makes it to Moscow, and he makes it through the retreat from Moscow, which he makes with the Rostovs (by chance, of course). Natasha discovers him and spends weeks nursing him, until shortly before his sister arrives and he has accepted death. Too far above the cares of Natasha and Marya now, Andrei is upsetting to be around and then simply expires. Death is very much a part of the redemption, as well—it is the only real way to find peace.

So: the Prince Andrei storyline accomplishes principally the redemption of Prince Andrei. His redemption has the following side-effects: Natasha Rostov nearly has her reputation ruined, nearly dies, nearly sulks away her life hopelessly depressed, and loses a fiancé she is in love with; little Nikolai (who mostly exists for this purpose) is left fatherless and Princess Marya nearly alone in the world shortly after the death of her father; Anatole Kuragin (who only exists at all for this purpose) undergoes surgery without anaesthesia and dies in great pain; even old Prince Nikolai dies in pain because of the whole affair. Oh, and Prince Andrei dies too, of course.

So ultimately, we have this despicable chain of characters being used as means to an end, turtles all the way down. And this may sound like a somewhat common complaint, that characters are bad people, that they use each other, and that we shouldn’t like such people. So let me be clear: it’s not that Tolstoy’s characters are using each other, it’s that he‘s using them—grotesquely pulling the wings off flies, to prove that flies can only suffer.

Of course, this all fits in with Tolstoy’s fatalistic worldview. We are all players in a show we do not understand, stage-managed by an incomprehensible and mysterious God. Hmm, it looks like I’ve gotten myself into some ideas again!

Title quote from Vol IV, Part One, Chapter XV.

*”When the second act was over, Countess Bezukhov got up, turned to the Rostovs’ box (her bosom was now completely bared)…” Vol II, Part Five, Chapter IX of Pevear & Volokhonsky, and a line I’d like to check against a couple other editions.

A Tolstoyan “Christmas Carol”

2012-01-22T20:18:43Z

War and Peace is, you may have heard, quite a long book—and one about which, clearly, many things could be written. It encompasses multitudes: the daily lives of families like the Count Rostovs; the soldierly lives of Nikolai, Denisov and their comrades; the aristocratic lives of the circle of Countess Hélène Bezukhov; nearly a decade of the Napoleonic wars; and much more besides. It is also, clearly, a Great Work: it is epic (it encompasses multitudes), it is Tolstoy’s chance to teach us not only about these families but about the Russian people, and not only about the Russian people but its history, and not only its history but all of history, the science and study of history. That is to say, in addition to being a novel, War and Peace is a treatise on historiography—and on military science, for that matter, and on diplomacy, and probably plenty else besides.*

In other words, as I say, there is a lot to write about War and Peace, and I will write only a small part of it this week. I plan, or at least want, to write about Sonya and Princess Marya; about the death of Anatole Kuragin and the subsequent death of Prince Andrei; and about some language and translation issues. Aside from today, which is about clearing aside more personal business, that should easily wrap a week and I won’t have gotten to the smallest bit of what even I could say about this book.

But first, for that personal business. Twitter followers and readers of this earlier post on the novel are aware that this book was not the most fun of reads for me. Several friends, including David, have suggested having a look at other translations, and I wouldn’t say that the Pevear and Volokhonsky was a joy to read, language-wise, I don’t think this really accounted for much of my problem with the book (though I do still plan to look at other translations, for a few reasons). Several specific problems were discussed in that earlier post, and having finished the novel, I pretty much stand by them. But the overarching thing for me is Tolstoy himself. He writes this giant didactic novel and then, towering over it, tempts me to think about him instead of about the text. I really hate doing this. So I will get it out of the way for a moment today and then try to stick to the book itself for the rest of the week.

War and Peace is a very religious book, as Tolstoy was a very religious man, and ideals of Christian charity are very important to it. Instances of self-sacrifice are everywhere, as are instances where one party sacrifices a second to save a third, often without the second’s consent or knowledge. Giving, and doing right by dependents, and the obligations of the upper classes to the lower, the obligations to care for the poor or for religious adepts—they all come up again and again. None of this should be objectionable, and I began to think of another writer I’ve always loved who focused on similar themes: Charles Dickens. But where Tolstoy, even in his giving, seems somehow nasty, Dickens seems lovely and joyful and happy, as if spreading happiness (sometimes with wealth and opportunity) is a wonderful thing (and when he must spread sorrow, because there isn’t always a happy ending, Dickens is sad, because spreading sorrow is sad though necessary).

So I began thinking about where the differences come in, and thought of what a Tolstoyan “Christmas Carol” would be. I believe that if Tolstoy were to have written Dickens’s classic story, much of the beginning would have played out similarly. But the end—the moral of the story and the way the plot is completed—would be a bit different. Scrooge wouldn’t show up at the Cratchetts’ house with a goose for their Christmas dinner and Tiny Tim wouldn’t recover; Scrooge would arrive empty-handed to simply sit with the family and fast for the day, enjoying their suffering as Tiny Tim finally wasted away, rewarded by God with death and the peace only it can bring. That would be his happy ending, mind you. For Dickens, money can’t buy happiness, but it can sure improve upon a situation of poverty. For Tolstoy, money can only bring unhappiness, while the poverty that eliminates any choice of behavior is the happiest freedom and death the only true happiness available to humans.

I have very little time for this, or for the illogical extremes of Tolstoy’s fatalism (you may get more on that later). Tolstoy is simply hateful to me—a misogynist, but also anti-human, an advocate of perpetual earthly suffering. You note I say “an advocate”; he seems to almost revel in it. I mostly find this grotesque, I think. And it’s a constant frustration as I try to piece his project apart a bit to write about it, to think how much I dislike the project iself.

But there’s much too much to talk about not to do it, and now I’ve gotten a little venting out of my system, I hope I can make some of it sound at least a bit interesting. And perhaps this view is totally foreign to you, and this “Tolstoyan Christmas Carol” sounds completely off. It’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

*It is also, as is so much of Tolstoy’s work, a treatise on the importance of personally nursing your children. It took until the epilogue, but he managed to squeeze it in.

War & Peace: a plea

2012-01-04T01:04:18Z

So nicole is reading War & Peace—but y’all already knew that. You probably also knew that I’m struggling with it, but only in part because of its length. I’m struggling not to hate Tolstoy reflexively, to take the novel on its own terms, and to evaluate it in some sense fairly. And to that end, I thought I’d do a bit of a check-in post for some advice now that I’m just shy of page 700.*

Now, there is a lot I don’t like about Tolstoy (see here, for starters), but I don’t want to get into anything about his personal philosophy or hatefulness just yet, because with nearly half the book remaining I don’t feel like I can really say anything definitive about this yet. Who knows who will get his comeuppance in the next 500 pages? Not me, at least (though I suspect it won’t be who I think it should).

What I didn’t realize before is that I think I don’t like him stylistically. I have memories of reading Anna Karenina in high school and putting it squarely in the Victorian novel category, which I’ve always loved: lots of characters, lots of plot, lots to bite into. I wasn’t a very good reader back then, and who knows what I would find it I opened AK up again—because I expected to find something similar in War & Peace, but this thing seems almost premodern.

That’s one theory, at least, put forward by the consumption partner last night when I was explaining my issues with the book (which apparently were almost identical with the issues he remembers his brother complaining about when he read W&P way back in his freshman year of college). Tolstoy just cannot shut up. He has to tell you everything. And then he has to tell you again. And then probably a few more times. You know that saying about “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them”? Count Leo invented that shit.

I’m being vague. Here’s an example. Unfortunately, the best examples are long, because they involve some extended dialogue.

“I read our protest about the Oldenburg affair and was astonished at the poor wording of this note,” Count Rastopchin said in the careless tone of a man judging a matter that was very familiar to him.

Pierre looked at Rastopchin with naïve astonishment, not understanding why he was disturbed by the poor wording of the note.

“Does it make any difference how the note is worded, Count,” he said, “if the content is strong?”

“Mon cher, avec nos cinq cent mille hommes de troupes, il serait facile d’avoir un beau style,” said Count Rastopchin. Pierre understood why Count Rastopchin was disturbed by the wording of the note.

So, cut that second paragraph I quoted entirely, and cut the final sentence. What have we lost, and what gained? We already know Pierre, know that he would be naïve about diplomatic matters, and would understand his naïveté simply by reading his question to the count. But Tolstoy is almost unbelievably unsubtle. My question is: why?

That’s a serious question. Is he giving all this declarative information about characters’ intentions and psychology because the more subtle variant, leaving it all up to the reader to glean from other signs, simply wasn’t available to him, writing Russian literature when he did? I don’t think that’s right. Was it an intentionally adopted style—and if so, to what end? Is it an issue of translation—I’m working here with Pevear and Volokhonsky, and plan to compare certain things to several other translations, but have not yet done so—or is it also this awkward and bad in Russian? It’s all very strange, because no mediocre writer today would write this way at all. It violates everything about the “show, not tell” convention. Not that convention is necessarily good! But what was Tolstoy doing, doing this?

His need to beat you over the head with everything also results in what seems to me one of the great wasted opportunities in literature. You’ll note the French in the quote above (translated in P&V’s endnote as “My dear, with our five hundred thousand troops, it would be easy to have a good style.”); there is lots more where that came from. French was commonly spoken among Russian aristocrats for many years, and there is much social and political relevance in what language any person is speaking at any given time. Code-switching is very common, and there are instances where certain jokes or stories “must” be told in a given language, that sort of thing. The exact sort of thing, in other words, that you should be learning as you read through the novel (if you don’t already know it)—that the novel should be demonstrating for you. But instead, Tolstoy insists on letting you know not just which language people are speaking (which he does clumsily!), but also why. Please, stop telling me why everyone is doing everything!

Meanwhile, I keep coming back to that Nabokov quote I keep at the top of my right-hand sidebar, about yarn-spinners, teachers, and enchanters. Tolstoy puts all this stuff in that I don’t want, but he also leaves out so much that I do want—I should say, that I expect as a reader of novels. The novelistic detail that makes things seem more verisimilar than all this incessant explaining is sort of missing, though it’s hard to put a finger on what isn’t there. The enchantment isn’t there. In the VN sense of the term.

And so, dear readers who have ventured here or elsewhere with my friend the count: what is he doing? Is he doing it on purpose? Is it supposed to be good? Is it simply inaccessible to contemporary novel readers because of its distinctive style? Is it an echo of premodern histories? Is it a precursor of hysterical realism? Is it my own blindness, my own fever and spear? I want to do right by this baggy monster when I write about it for realsies, so help me out.

*I have to say, I never gave much credence before to the idea that authors should be mindful of a reader’s time and keep books shorter, but how in the hell am I almost at page 700 and there are still over 500 left (and it’s not that good!)?!?