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The 8 Best Nabokov Novels | Book Reviews by Massey

Posted in Vladimir Nabokov, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 19, 2013 | 7 Comments »

Which is the best Nabokov novel? Any ranking is subjective but the reasons behind a “best of” rank can be illuminating.  So I’ve given it a crack. Here is my personal list with notes, which includes a little cheating. Of the eight “best” Nabokov books on my list, you’ll notice only six are novels.

Lolita (1955)

Lolita - The Best Nabokov novelLolita is Nabokov’s best novel because it is the only book that synthesizes all his major characteristics as a writer:

(1) A love of language

(2) Delight in word play, patterns, puzzles, and games

(3) A highly intelligent, narcissistic-sociopath narrator

(4) A resilient victim who is  the center of Nabokov’s sympathy

(5) A pre-occupation with perception, consciousness, time, and memory

(6) A belief in fate and the existence of a great design behind what seem to be the random and irrelevant facts of ordinary life

(7) The conviction that art is a refuge from the assault of death

In addition, Lolita is the disturbing story of a successful child rapist. It features brilliant miniature portraits of postwar America – almost Vermeer-like in their lucidity – as well as a phantasmagorical climax that takes place in a fairytale nightmare land. Lolita is funny, harrowing, heartbreaking, and transcendent. It caused a scandal, was a critical and then a popular success, and made Nabokov a mint of money. As art and cultural phenomenon, Lolita excels.

Speak Memory (1966)

Speak Memory Nabokov - a best Nabokov bookNot a novel, but a memoir of Nabokov’s life from childhood to the moment he escapes France weeks before the 1940 German invasion – Speak Memory is a classic of autobiography that leaves most of Nabokov’s story untold.

Instead, it focuses on Nabokov’s most cherished memories of his family and friend; his youth in Russia and his young adulthood in Western European exile; on the natural world and butterfly hunting; on a recital of the Nabokov family’s august history and their liberal politics; on stories of Vladimir’s education and tutors and governesses, including the famous “Mademoiselle O”; on poetry; and more.

Through it all permeates the great Nabokovian pre-occupation and conviction that there is more than darkness before the beginning and after the end of life; that our living persists and this persistence is wonderful; and that the people we love won’t disappear into nothingness after death. You find this theme frequently in Nabokov, but its purest distillation is here in this great book. *

Pnin (1957)

Pnin a Best Nabokov novelProfessor Timofey Pnin is Nabokov’s most deeply comic and deeply human character, and his response to the incessant comic cruelty Cervantes inflicts on Don Quixote. The structure of the novel is slight and episodic (Pnin began life as serial pieces published in The New Yorker) and lacks the dazzling pyrotechnics of books like Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada. What Pnin offers instead is hilarity, enormous tenderness for the agonies of an ordinary life, and the danger of laughing at rather than laughing with Timofey; which is complicated by the fact that the arrogant narrator of this novel is not a Humbert Humbert or a Charles Kinbote, but Vladimir Nabokov himself.

Pale Fire (1962)

In terms of structure, technique, and pure virtuosity – and as a landmark of post-modern fiction – Pale Fire is Nabokov’s masterpiece. But it is a cold masterpiece.

The novel is constructed from a 999-line poem in rhyming couplets composed by one of the book’s characters (the Robert-Frost-like John Shade), with a forward, commentary, and index written by another (the extravagantly delusional Charles Kinbote).

The major conceit of Pale Fire is that Kinbote’s commentary has nothing to do with Shade’s poem, which creates a WTF experience for the unwarned first-time reader rivaled in English-language novels of the 20th century only by the “Benny” section of Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury.

Nabokov’s prose in Pale Fire is brilliant; there is no better example of “the novel as chess problem” in his work; and Charles Kinbote is the craziest if not the most dangerous of Nabokov’s narrators (although it is difficult to tell what is “real” and what is imagination in his novels).

However, the human tenderness in Pale Fire – frequently buried in Nabokov’s major works – is particularly difficult to find here. It exists in Shade’s poem, which tells the story of his unhappy daughter’s suicide, and the long grief of Shade and his wife over their lost. But this is overwhelmed by Kinbote’s monumental self-absorption and the intricate innovation of Nabokov’s design. Nabokov’s supreme novel for the mind.

The Gift (1937)

The Gift - a best Nabokov novelThe last and best of the novels Nabokov wrote in Russian, The Gift is a portrait of a young Russian writer, Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev, finding his way as an artist and falling in love with the woman who would become his wife.

Nabokov transforms this commonplace premise into a novel which is dense with detail, filled with examples of Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s writing, and convinced that fate is working secretly to assure the young writer’s happiness.

Nabokov’s powers of observation and description come to the forefront in The Gift, particularly since the novel, like many lives, is short on plot. This will please fans of modernism (if you like Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, I think you’ll like The Gift) but there are metafictional touches as well.

The novel features a 90-page chapter entirely devoted to a book by Fyodor called The Life of Chernyshevski as well as a generous sample of hostile reviews of it. Most especially, at the end, you see Fyodor coming up with the idea to write a book that will become The Gift itself.

Ada (1969)

Ada is Nabokov’s Finnegan’s Wake. Meaning that  you can see Ada as either the summation of Nabokov’s artistic vision which pushes to their limits his genius as an author, the form of the novel, and the abilities of the audience. Or you can see Ada as a deeply self-indulgent, over-intricate and deliberately obscure, reader-hostile mess.

I’m inclined to the former view, although I think Ada is a good example of the axiom that more is not always better, and even Nabokov fans will need to endure a fair amount of confusion, re-read the novel several times, or rely on expert help (such as Brian Boyd’s Nabokov’s Ada or the chapters in his biography of Vladimir).

Ada is occupied with the 80+ year love affair between Van and Ada Veen who are, as it turns out, brother and sister and which takes place on a parallel / alternative Earth sometimes called Anti Terra and sometimes Demonia. All seven of the Nabokov qualities are in evidence, plus a fair amount of literary parody as well as a few science fiction touches and other assorted material that will keep readers so inclined to puzzle out Ada happily at work.

Bend Sinister (1947)

Nabokov always insisted he was indifferent to politics, but Bend Sinister suggests he wasn’t indifferent to the cruelty governments inflict on individuals.

The novel takes place in the nightmare city of Padukgrad, run by the dictator Paduk and his “Party of the Average Man”.  Paduk wants Adam Krug, a renowned philosopher, to give a speech in support of his government. When Krug refuses, Paduk threatens his son, and the bungling brutality of Paduk’s thugs leads to tragedy.

In Bend Sinister, Nabokov focuses on Adam Krug’s love for his son and his cheerful contempt for the dictator Paduk, a childhood acquaintance. Although the novel takes place in a fictitious country, and feels like other Nabokovian worlds, Bend Sinister is an accurate portrait of the dynamics of the total state. What is fantasy, and what gives the novel its final punch, is when Nabokov reaches into the novel and mercifully saves a character from the suffering that state inflicts. (For a longer discussion of Nabokov and totalitarianism, see my post Tyrants Destroyed: Politics in the Novels of Vladimir Nabokov.)

Strong Opinions (1973)

Readers of this collection of interviews, edited to the last comma by Nabokov himself, could be forgiven for concluding Vladimir was even more arrogant and imperious than his reputation.

Nabokov does spank the hell out of just about everyone in Strong Opinions: Freud; a long list of “second rate” writers including Balzac, Dostoevski, Lawrence, Camus, Sartre, and Faulkner; consumers of “poshlost” or cheap, vulgar sometimes popular and sometimes exalted culture; Westerners duped by Soviet propaganda; members of any literary, social, or political group; fans of “general ideas” and “everyday reality” and “social interest” and “moral messages” in novels; Edmund Wilson and his grasp of Russian. The spanking goes on.

Nabokov does condemn cruelty and brutality in all its forms. He expresses a great sunny and personal happiness. And he provides useful facts, such as the pronunciation of his last name (“Na-bo-kov. A heavy open ‘o’ as in ‘knickerbocker’”) in his September 1965 interview with Robert Hughes. As complete a portrait of the public Nabokov as Speak Memory is a portrait of the private.

Related Posts

* Equal to Speak Memory as autobiography is My Mother’s House by Colette, which I also review on this blog.

Other “Best” Posts

The Best Hamlet Movies: My 11 Personal Favorites with Notes

The Best Pride and Prejudice Movies: My Notes on Three Versions

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“My Mother’s House” by Colette | Review of the Memoir

Posted in Colette, On Books, tagged , , , , , , on March 20, 2013 | 4 Comments »

Cover of Colette's "My Mother's House"In My Mother’s House, the French author Colette has pulled off one of the most difficult tricks in literature: she’s written a compelling memoir without having a compelling story to tell.

Colette offers readers no major events in My Mother’s House – no plot, no drama, and very little conflict. Instead, she presents a kaleidoscope of memories about her family, pets, neighbors, and the French village in which they lived.

Occasionally, she will relate an important family story. For example, Colette tells how her older sister abandons their family after her marriage and leaves their mother to stand in helpless agony outside of the house in which her estranged daughter has gone into labor with her first child.

But for the most part, Colette fills the book with incidental events and small details, such as how her father offered to teach a neighborhood woman the meaning of love for “six pence and a packet of tobacco” and how her mother intentionally distracted the local priest during his sermon “by swing[ing] her watch ostentatiously at the end of its chain”.

What makes the book more than a collection of brilliantly realized sketches, however, is its organization around the themes of love and death. My Mother’s House is infused with the knowledge that everything Colette loved from her childhood – her mother, her father, her brother, the beauty of her mother’s garden – have passed away.

In the chapter titled “Laughter,” Colette’s mother warns her husband not to try to die before her. Instead, Colette writes…

He did try, and succeeded at the first attempt. He died in his seventy-fourth year, holding the hands of his beloved, and fixing on her weeping eyes a gaze that gradually lost its colour, turned milky blue, and faded like a sky veiled in mist.

Colette’s mother follows her husband into death and Colette experiences other losses as well. She tells how the beauty of nature has ceased to move her the way it moved her as a child, and Colette describes how her own daughter, at the age of nine, will soon lose her sense of childhood wonder.

My Mother’s House gains much of its power from the force, clarity, and simplicity of Colette’s writing, which reads like the work of a master of English prose even though its translated from the French. Colette’s book also gains power from the passion that lies beneath her descriptions. Literature can be a furious bulwark against death, in which the writer refuses to accept that all she loves best in life – her mother, her family, the richness of her consciousness – will disappear.

In My Mother’s House, Colette has ensured they won’t. They remain vibrantly alive in its pages, which is perhaps the greatest accomplishment any writer can hope to achieve.

Notes on the Author. Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, one of France’s most respected writers, was born in Burgundy in 1873 and died in Paris in 1954. She wrote dozens of books, including the novels Cheri and Gigi; was elected to the Academie Goncourt; and was the second woman to become a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor.

Note from P.G. Massey: This was one of my earliest blog posts, published nearly a year ago. “My Mother’s House” is one of my favorite books and I wanted my newer followers to see my review.

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“A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess | Review of the Novel

Posted in Anthony Burgess, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 17, 2013 | 8 Comments »

a clockwork orange anthony burgess reviewAnthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange succeeds purely on the strength of its narrator’s voice – but what a voice!

The novel’s story is told by 15-year-old Alex who lives in a vaguely dystopian, vaguely futuristic country that seems to be Britain.  Alex can check off every item under the DSM definition of sociopath. He bullies his parents and friends. He brutally assaults people at random. He gang-rapes a woman, rapes two young girls, and kills an old woman while trying to burglar her house. Alex regards this as all good youthful fun. When confronted by authorities, he knows how to pantomime innocence or remorse. When punished, he laments that no one cares or feels sorry for poor Alex.

All this promises to make Alex pretty ugly company, but sociopaths are often noted for their charm and wit, and Alex  has these in aplenty – not to mention exuberance, intelligence, formidable powers of observation, and a passionate love of classic music.

He also has the advantage of “nadsat,” the famous Russian-influence English slang Burgess invented for Alex, which puts the violence Alex commits at a remove from the reader and lends it a fantastical, almost fairy-tale quality.

Burgess described A Clockwork Orange as a “jeu d’esprit” that he wrote in three weeks, and it certainly feels like a book created in a burst of white-hot inspiration and imagination.

And it is a good thing, too. Because the “philosophical” parts of the novel, for which A Clockwork Orange is often complimented, strike me as (at best) heavy-handed and (at worst) laughably obvious.

So the philosophical meditation part of A Clockwork Orange goes like this.

First, Alex runs around assaulting, raping, and murdering. Then he is sent to prison where he is subjected to  behavior modification that physically incapacitates him any time he thinks about committing violence.  Then he un-behavior modifies himself by jumping out a window. Then he decides it’s time to grow up,  find a nice wife, and have a cute baby.

Get it?

In case you don’t,  Burgess sprinkles handy hints throughout the novel. So there is a book within a book, also titled “A Clockwork Orange,” from which Alex helpfully reads a summary passage on how you shouldn’t turn men into mindless machines. There is also the prison chaplain, just before Alex goes for his behavior modification therapy,  worrying out loud to the young man:

Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

Burgess leaves us in no doubt of the answer to this question, and since he has created the world in which the question is asked, he gets to arrange his “facts” and “reality” to support his talking points. (Ayn Rand was a great one for doing that too.)

A Clockwork Orange is also noted for its satirical elements, and these were better than the philosophy, but not exactly revelatory. The police, politicians, Christianity, and what look like Communist intellectuals all get a good bracing spank and that was fine.

For me, one of the interesting things about reading A Clockwork Orange was how it compared and contrasted to Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock.

Greene’s novel features Pinkie, another murderous teenage British sociopath at the center of another “novel as meditation” – this time on the nature of sin and morality. Greene’s novel doesn’t deliver the same jolt of pure linguistic bliss as A Clockwork Orange, but it doesn’t bludgeon you with its themes either. It’s a close call, but I like Greene’s book a little better. I would fully recommend reading both, however.

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“Hamlet” Starring David Tennant | Review of the Film

Posted in On Movies, Shakespeare, tagged , , , , , , on March 7, 2013 | 11 Comments »

Hamlet David TennantBased on its reputation, I was expecting to like the 2009 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet, directed by Gregory Doran and starring David Tennant, much better than I did.

Every Hamlet rises or falls on the performance of the title-role actor, and Tennant had both strengths and problems. He has the perfect look for the part, and he nailed the Danish prince’s anxiety and snark. But when it came to exploring Hamlet’s anguish and rage, he fell back on acting BIGGER and LOUDER. As I result, I don’t think Tennant connected with full emotion to the part, so I didn’t feel much emotion watching him.

Another problematic performance was Patrick Stewart’s Claudius.  I liked his wise and even-tempered reading; however, Stewart’s usurper was so amiable that he failed to convince me he could kick a dog much less kill his brother, seduce his brother’s wife, and plot the treacherous murder of their son.

On the plus side, the women of the play were pretty good. Mariah Gale’s Ophelia was strong and self-possessed, even in madness where she was more angry than wounded. (Jean Simmons’ guppy out of water reading of Ophelia in Olivier’s movie version was a low point of Hamlet on film.) Penny Downie’s Gertrude was quite good, too, except for the Act IV bedroom scene with Tennant, when she seem to fight his big and loud with her own big and loud.

Also on the plus side, Doran’s Hamlet is funny. He seizes every opportunity the play allows to read lines as comic. This means Polonius really takes it on the chin, although I also enjoyed the utter bafflement Tom Davey’s Guildenstern projected whenever the dialogue didn’t require him to reveal a faint glimmer of understanding. (He gave Osric a run for his money. ) Good fun too were the expressions of impatience, disbelief, credulity, and exasperation the actors wore whenever anyone, not just Polonius, made a long speech. All the joking diminished the tragic punch of the staging, however.

Now, my quibbles. I have no idea in what time period this Hamlet was meant to be set. Tennant was the complete modern hipster. Horatio dressed like a middle-aged academic circa 1982. Claudius and Gertrude had the air of a rich mid-20th century power couple. Polonius resembled an Elizabethan courtier on dress-down day. Different soldiers carried weapons from vastly different centuries. If there was a point to all this variety, I missed it.

Finally, Doran cut roughly seven lines from “To be, or not to be”.  God knows there are vast tracks of Shakespeare – particularly in the history plays – which can be given the boot to everyone’s benefit, but editing Hamlet’s most famous speech accomplishes nothing beyond gratuitous shock value.

On my “best Hamlets” list, I’d put the Tennant version right above Ethan Hawke’s. You can read that column here.

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“The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz | Review

Posted in Junot Diaz, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 22, 2013 | 11 Comments »

brief wondrous life oscar wao junot diaz reviewWhen artists are really good, I tend to curse at them. G-dd-mn Jane Austen. G-dd-mn Beethoven. G-dd-amn Billy Wilder. Now I’ve got a new name on my curse list. G-dd-mn Junot Diaz.

The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao principally concerns its title character, his sister Lola, and their mother, although it does also tell the story of their extended family as well as that of its ostensible narrator, Yunior.

Diaz’ novel is that rare find – a work of current fiction that entirely lives up to its hype. The number of successful elements it delivers is simply ridiculous:

Big vivid characters that make a big splash on the page? Check.

Big vivid characters that are also richly imagined, convincing, and affecting? Check.

Multi-generational saga? Check.

Lots of sex but no sex scenes (thank you Junot!)? Check.

Healthy dollops of magical realism? Check.

Locations exotic to the typical American reader of literary fiction: hard scrabble New Jersey and the Dominican Republic? Check.

A narrative voice that is part gangster, part geek, and part grad student? Check.

A whole bunch of fanboy references to comic books, science fiction, and fantasy novels (oh god not again)? Check.

A great deal of untranslated Spanish dialogue, narration, and commentary? Check.

A third-world history lesson — in this case about the hyper-over-super-achieving sadistic Dominican dictator Trujillo and his thirty year reign of terror — much of which is told through jazzy footnotes? Check.

A story focused on the wild, uncompromising, irrational, destructive but all the same soul-sustaining power of love? Check.

A satisfying ending that unites all these elements in an organic whole that meets Nabokov’s definition of art, “beauty plus pity”? Check and check.

G-dd-mn Junot Diaz.

The only criticism of the novel I have is a flaw in the narrator which, as it turns out, isn’t a flaw at all. In the beginning of The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Yunior pushes the comic book/sci-fi/fantasy references so hard that they almost entirely obscure the character of Oscar.

I kept muttering, “I can’t see Oscar, Junot, because all these Lord of the Rings references keep getting in the way.”

But what I realized is that early in the novel, Yunior is a young man who writes like a young man: overly earnest, full of himself, self-absorbed, and inept. He matures as he ages, and his narration matures too, until it is much wiser, more self-aware, more observant and empathetic, and more rueful.

Yunior is also one of those (not uncommon) characters who are their author’s alter ego, to the extent that they often share their creator’s omniscience. Yunior describes many things in the novel which are simply impossible for him to know.

Diaz doesn’t give Yunior the excuse of being the fictional author of the novel. Instead, Diaz shimmers in and out of Yunior’s character, which I think gives the novel more depth, because Diaz keeps getting you to fall into the dream of the story, then waking you up from it.

That’s another element I should have put in my list. Well, I’ll check it off now and conclude with this: G-dd-mn Junot Diaz.

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“Django Unchained” by Quentin Tarantino | Review of the Movie

Posted in On Movies, Quentin Tarantino, tagged , , , , , on February 17, 2013 | 4 Comments »

Django Unchained by Quentin TarantinoWhat is the relationship of movies to reality? In a strict sense, there is no relationship at all. The world of imagination, and the conventions and techniques of movie making, exist entirely on their own terms and make their own reality.

On the other hand, I can’t think of any successful movie that does not deal with the truth, at the very least the emotional truth, of human experience. Music and painting can traffic in abstraction and succeed. But movies? Rarely if at all.

Between art and reality comes the great mediator, the artist, who imposes her or his vision on art and reality. Sometimes the result is a rare gift of sublime pleasure and transcendental insight bequeathed to us, the grateful audience, for all time.

And sometimes the result is a steaming hot mess, dumped in our laps, for us to clean up and figure out. Or not.

Ladies and gentlemen, in case you couldn’t guess, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained is irrefutably the latter. Whether it is a brilliant mess, or simply a mess full stop, is the question.

Django Unchained: The Obligatory Plot Summary

Tarantino’s latest movie primarily concerns Django, a slave played by Jamie Foxx, who is purchased and then freed by a German dentist and bounty hunter, King Schultz, played by Christoph Waltz.

Schultz initially buys Django because he can identify the Brittle brothers, who were brutal overseers at a plantation where Django was enslaved and who Schultz wants to track down and kill to collect the reward. After this is accomplished, Schultz frees Django, trains him as a bounty hunter, and decides to help Django find his wife, who has been sold to a particularly sadistic Mississippi plantation owner, Calvin Candie, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Django and Schultz agree on a plan to free Django wife’s which does not go smoothly, to say the least.

Like many of Tarantino’s films, Django Unchained is a movie about movies. His famous love of old B movies and exploitation flicks is again on overabundant display, in this case spaghetti Westerns and the 1975 movie Mandingo among others.

Also again, Tarantino demonstrates his inability to distinguish his A material from his B material, which is reflected in the movie’s 180 minute running time; in the conversations which spin on at length; in a story line that manages to be too busy and meandering at the same time; and in the climactic gun fights which continue long after real-world human beings would have run out of bullets and blood.

Complicating  Django Unchained, and making it more than a fan-boy exercise and a guilty pleasure (if watching Django is the sort of thing you’d call  pleasure) are its anachronistic sense of humor and especially the moments, which are not frequent but are significant, when Foxx’ Django and Waltz’ Schultz step out of their roles as “characters in a B movie” and into scenes that confront the lived horror and violence of slavery.

Even more complicating is Samuel Jackson’s performance as Calvin Candie’s head house slave, Stephen. Jackson makes Stephen an Uncle Tom so malignant, a character so utterly twisted by servitude and yet so utterly invested in the slave system, that he threatens to break the movie apart; similar to the way that Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice can bring the play to a dead stop (at least for modern audiences).

Django Unchained: Blazing Saddles with Blood and Vengeance

There were moments during Django Unchained when I swore I was watching a Mel Brook’s movie.

This was particularly true during the sequences when Django and Schultz visit a Tennessee plantation owned by Big Daddy, who is played by Don Johnson.

There is a long conversation where Big Daddy tries to instruct his slaves how to behave toward Django, who can’t be treated like a slave because he is a freeman, but who can’t be accorded the same courtesy as a white man. There is also an utterly inept Klu Klux Klan raid led by Big Daddy which Tarantino plays for laughs (and which is an example of Tarantino’s ubiquitous and happy indifference to historical accuracy, since the Klan was founded seven years after the movie is stated to take place).

Equal ridiculous are the clothes Tarantino puts on Foxx for him to play the role of Schultz’ “valet” as they visit Big Daddy’s plantation. Django is decked out in a sky-blue satin fop suit complete with knee breeches and an enormous white neck cloth tied in a bow.

But in these clothes, Foxx’ Django simmers with barely contained anger. He and Schultz have come to the plantation to find the Brittle brothers, the men who also savagely whipped Django’s wife.

At the plantation, Django finds two of the brother’s preparing to whip another young black women for the crime of “breaking eggs”. Ignoring the plan, Foxx shoots the first brother, then seizing the whip, beats the second brother into submission with a ferocity founded in authentic anger, then coldly shoots him as he lies prostrate on the ground.

A British critic noted that Jamie Foxx often seems to not be in on the movie’s joke during Django Unchained.

But I think the truth is that neither Django nor Foxx can accept – could make themselves tolerate, if they tried – that the movie is a joke because the experience of African-Americans under slavery in the United States was manifestly not funny.

This approach to violence is not consistent in Django Unchained. In particular, at the end of the film, Django enters a fantasyland of violent revenge. But the cycling between different attitudes toward violence in Django Unchained keeps demanding we try to reconcile its fake artifice and real truth (yes, I know the redundancy is redundant) while guaranteeing that we can’t.

Which is one of the reason I speculated the adjective “brilliant” might apply to the noun “mess” when discussing Tarantino’s film.

And Django isn’t the only character that complicates our judgments about the film.

King Schultz Gets the Joke in Django Unchained … Until He Doesn’t Anymore

In the beginning of the film, Schultz is a dapper, eloquent bounty hunter who is in the business of “selling corpses” as he cheerfully explains to Django.

Schultz may not necessarily enjoy killing men, but he clearly enjoys outwitting and outgunning them, and his good humor doesn’t obscure the fact that he kills ruthlessly.  (Schultz goes so far as to persuade Django to gun down a wanted man in front of the man’s young son because this is what bounty hunters do.)

In a similar way, Schultz is perfectly reconciled to the existence of slaves and slavery. He despises slavery, mocks those who engage in it, shoots slavers without compunction when it suits his purposes, and befriends Django against all the customs of the time, but at the end of the day, Schultz sees slavery is a nasty fact that doesn’t have very much to do with him.

Until he meets Calvin Candie, at least.  Candie owns Django’s wife, Broomhilda (played by Kerry Washington), and Django and Schultz agree that they will try to rescue her by pretending to be interested in Candie’s “Mandingo” slaves who Candie buys and trains to fight to the death for entertainment.

Schultz can barely disguise the horror he feels watching Candie relish a Mandingo fight, and Schultz is further unnerved the next day as he witnesses Candie taunt a slave who has been traumatized to helplessness by the three matches he’s been forced to fight, then has his dogs tear the man apart.

Still, Schultz retains his humor and his cool enough to carry out their plan, which is to persuade Candie to sell them Django’s wife. The plan goes awry but still succeeds. Candie discovers their intentions, but does sell them Broomhilda at an extortionate price.

Candie draws up the papers nice and legal, Schultz signs them, and then expresses his disgust and contempt for Candie. Candie, in return, demands Schultz shake his hand to finalize the deal.

Instead, Schultz shoots Candie and unleashes a series of events that threaten Django’s life and end in a bloodbath.  Just before he is killed in turn, Schultz apologizes to Django, “Sorry, I couldn’t resist.”

What was tolerable to King Schultz at the beginning of Django Unchained became intolerable to him at the end. The violence is “fake fun violence” until it isn’t. We are watching a “movie about movies” until we aren’t. And Tarantino keeps throwing questions at us faster than we can answer them.

Samuel Jackson’s Stephen is the Shylock of Django Unchained

In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock is the villain and an object of “amusing” abuse who refuses to play his role. He insists on his humanity so powerfully that he fatally disrupts the play’s comic and romantic storylines and sours us on the drama’s heroine, Portia.

For modern audiences, Shylock renders the drama almost unplayable. Shakespeare’s treatment of him so offends our fundamental principles that witnessing Shylock’s humiliation and punishment can only be painful; and since we are a willing audience for the play, it also delivers a sense of complicit guilt.

Samuel Jackson’s head-house slave Stephen plays a similar role in Django Unchained. In front of his masters and other white people, Stephen puts on a minstrel show (there really is no other phrase to describe it) that left me squirming in my seat and grabbing my head. And the fact that it was Samuel Jackson playing Stephen – an actor who I am used to see playing characters with power and agency – made it worse.

In the kitchen and servants’ rooms, Stephen was a tyrant every bit as sadistic as his master, Calvin Candie. Stephen also seems to hate Django, a free black man with power, even more than the whites do, and he conspires to think of a punishment for Django more harsh than anything the whites could think up.

Through it all, Jackson makes us feel that Stephen is still a man – not a character in a movie, not stock villain, not a comic type – but a man who has been horribly damaged by a long life of servitude.

At the climax of the movie, after Django has killed all the whites, he and Stephen confront each other in the plantation house. Django shoots Stephen multiple times, then leaves the old slave screaming in pain as he lights the fuse that will blow up the house and Stephen.

Is this justice? Is this mercy? Or is it Tarantino getting rid of a character no one wants to confront? Amid all the B movie artifice and random jokes, Tarantino asks a lot of hard questions.

Django Unchained – Mess or Brilliant Mess? You Decide

My judgment is brilliant mess because I believe as Chekhov believed, that the role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them; particularly since when people demand that art answer questions, what they really mean is that art should ask THEIR questions and offer THEIR answers. Thus it has always been with philistines, ideologues, and tyrants. That’s why tyrants don’t much like artists, and artists don’t much like tyrants.

I can’t tell if Django Unchained is the result of deliberate strategy, careless accident, unconscious inspiration, or a byproduct of Tarantino’s unrestrained enthusiasms, but whatever the causes – the results are challenging, disturbing, puzzling, funny, sometimes annoying. For me, that’s plenty.

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“Play It As It Lays” by Joan Didion | Review of the Novel

Posted in Joan Didion, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 8, 2013 | 12 Comments »

Play it as it lays Didion reviewAlbert Camus goes to Hollywood in Joan Didion’s celebrated 1970 novel, Play It As It Lays.

The story concerns Maria Wyeth, a 31-year-old movie actress of small distinction, as she suffers a vaguely defined emotional / moral / existential disintegration.

Nothing is going well in Maria’s life. Her marriage to a film director is falling apart. Her young daughter is institutionalized because of a severe psychiatric disorder. Maria is not working because – at least it seems to me – she is suffering from a debilitating combination of depression and anxiety. She terminates a pregnancy that results from an adulterous affair and is then haunted by the choice.  And through it all, Maria becomes more distant and indifferent, until she can no longer find any meaning in her life or the lives of the people around her.

Play I As It Lays is composed of 87 fragment chapters written in a elliptical style that largely focus on its characters’ external actions. Didion names Hemingway as one of her influences, and it shows.

Play It As It Lays and Camus’ The Stranger

One of my strongest reactions to Didion’s novel was how much it reminded me of The Stranger. (Spoiler alert, by the by.)

Both novels concern a character that sees life as essentially meaningless. Both characters commit a crime. In the case of Camus’ Meursault, it is the famous murder of an Arab man he encounters on the beach. In Maria’s, it is abetting the suicide of a friend  who shares her bleak view of life.

Meursault is imprisoned for his crime. Maria is confined to a neuropsychiatric hospital for hers, although whether this is the result of legal action or medical judgment or her own choice is not defined. Both are, overall, reasonably happy locked up.

Both Meursault and Maria Wyeth can be seen as monsters or truth-tellers. Both are viewed by other characters in their novels as selfish, self-absorbed, or evil (Maria addresses the question of evil directly in the opening sentence of Didion’s novel) although I don’t think Meursault and Maria are selfish as much as they are as indifferent to their own lives as they are to the lives of others.

Both seem to have one single authentic human connection: Meursault tenuously to his mother, Maria to her daughter Kate. Both novels have a desert setting (Play It As It Lays takes place as much in Nevada as Los Angeles). Both books are written in a clear, brief, terse, and unadorned style.

Both Play It As It Lays and The Stranger also possess a serious flaw, to my mind.

In Camus’ novel, it’s my nagging sense that Meursault commits the murder less from psychology or situation than from Camus’ need for him to commit the murder in order to advance the story. It’s a senseless crime, but it’s motivated neither by an irrational burst of emotion, or carelessness, or anything else I can see.

In Didion’s book, the flaw I see it that Maria Wyeth seems to suffer constant, intolerable emotional pain while at the same time acting with utterly indifference to her life.  These are mutually exclusive states of being. And while the exclusion doesn’t have to be absolute, I’m not sure Didion resolves the contradiction.

What is the nature of Maria Wyeth?

This is one of the more interesting questions a novel can ask about its main character and the best ones often answer it in unsettling ways.

Emma Bovary, for example, is a puzzling and off-putting and challengingly shallow literary character. Can we really take her as a successful simulacrum of a potential actual person? Because a profound occupation with the nature of humans and human life is the essential foundation of the novel, despite what theory geeks and academics might insist otherwise.

On first reading, I thought Maria Wyeth was a successful simulacrum because the novel is written retrospectively.

Play As It Lays opens with Maria in the neuropsychiatric hospital with all the book’s action already in the past. So the coldness and distance with which the book narrates Maria’s descent make sense: she’s simply withdrawn from pain that would otherwise have destroy her.

The novel’s quick shift from the first person in the first chapter to third person – “a third very close to the mind of the character” as Didion described it in a Paris Review interview – also makes sense because it makes the distance between Maria and her experience greater.

But on the other hand, Didion makes a very big deal out of Maria and “nothing” in Play It As It Lays. Maria asserts in the beginning of the novel that “NOTHING APPLIES”. She explains that  her doctors, about her, “will extrapolate reasons where none exist.”

Maria tells her ex-husband she wants “nothing” and feels “nothing’.  Maria says, in a return to the first person toward the end of Play Is As It Lays, “I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is ‘nothing.’”

On the last page of the book, Maria declares “I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what ‘nothing’ means, and keep on playing.”

I read all this and I said to myself, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Or is it brags?

Now it is possible that Maria Wyeth, the self-proclaimed Queen of Nothing, at the same time, and with equal sincerity, desperately wants to get out of the hospital, save her daughter, and live with her.  Quite possibly she wants nothing and feels nothing, except when she doesn’t. Holding mutually exclusive convictions is a human trait. In fact, it may be THE human trait.

It also human for a person to regard her experience, insight, and suffering as well as her resilience in the face of these, as unique and remarkable. Arrogance is another common human trait.

But I don’t see where Maria gets her arrogance. She is barely able to hold herself together in the novel from one moment to the next; and yet at the end of Play Is As It Lays, we are supposed to believe that Maria has faced and transcended the devastating truth of life nobody else has the capacity to see much less the strength to withstand?

I don’t buy it. I’m not convinced. And because I’m not convinced, that makes Maria, not a simulacrum, but a conceit. Simulacrums speak for themselves, but conceits speak for their authors. And Maria Wyeth does not speak well for Didion.

Let’s wrap up with a little subjective opinion

Part of my reaction to Play It As It Lays is informed by my response to A Year of Magical Thinking, which I thought was a fine book, and made me feel sympathy for what Didion suffered, but which also set my teeth on edge because Didion wrote about the deaths of her husband and daughter in a way that seemed to imply her observations and feelings were unique. (My father said to me spontaneously about the book, “Does Didion think no one else has ever lost someone they loved?”) We could ask a similar question about Maria.

Then also, I’m sensitive to the unspoken conviction among writers and readers that a habit of introspection and a (sometimes) talent for expression gives them a finer soul than normal people. These qualities don’t, although they are often the parents of a particularly offensive and repugnant form of vanity. In its negative form, this vanity will suggest that if you are happy, you aren’t paying attention.

Finally, there are few things I enjoy less than reading a book about rich white people who are self-importantly miserable. My reaction to these characters goes something like this. “If you have an untreated or under-treated or resistant-to-treatment mental health disorder, that’s one thing. If not, then please make some modest effort to unf*** up your life. It might work.”

Now that intemperate outburst may lead you to conclude I didn’t like Play It As It Lays. But I did. It was well written and challenging and gave me a good workout. I had an interesting conversation / argument with Didion as I read it. Can’t ask for too much more than that.

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“James Joyce” by Edna O’Brien | Review of the Biography

Posted in James Joyce, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 27, 2013 | 3 Comments »

"James Joyce" by Edna O'Brien | Review BiographyHypothesis: A genius is a person whose books we want to read and whose ass we want to kick.

That certain describes the James Joyce presented in Edna O’Brien’s brief, readable biography of the great Irish writer. O’Brien’s tone in James Joyce is more novelist than academic and that combined with the occasional Joycean flourish, the lack of footnotes, and the appalling bad behavior made me wonder, “Is this all true?”

In O’Brien’s biography, we see Joyce treating his family with contempt and his friends as servants and ATMs. Joyce’s marriage to Nora Barnacle seems to have been based primarily on erotic passion (their sex letters are monuments to skeezy) although they remained together for life and O’Brien does not tell of infidelities by either James or Nora.

O’Brien reports no evidence of Joyce having a relationship with his son Giorgio. Joyce is distraught over his daughter Lucia’s madness, although his insistence that her behavior was a sign of genius rather than insanity smacks of self-aggrandizement as much as denial. Joyce is devastated by the death of the father he ignored while the man was living. As far as we can tell from O’Brien, Joyce cared for no one else.

Through it all, Joyce carousels. And works himself to exhaustion and blindness creating the most significant works of English literature written in the 20th century. The books are worth the price of all this misery. But I’m glad I didn’t have to pay it.

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“My Antonia” by Willa Cather | Review of the Novel

Posted in Willa Cather, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 25, 2013 | 6 Comments »

My Antonia by Willa Cather Willa Cather’s My Antonia is one of those novels I saw as having faded into a genteel but deserved obscurity. Anything that struck readers in 1918 as innovative or shocking had long since become quaint, I believed, leaving little to command the attention of modern men and women.

So I was delighted by how good I found My Antonia. Much of my delight came from Cather’s quietly exquisite prose. Her descriptions of the natural world are masterful, although she does a pretty good job of making her characters and situations feel real and convincing, too.

Here is a sample from the narrator’s first impression of the prairie:

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.

My Antonia’s episodic structure – the novel is a collage of stories – has a pleasantly proto-modernist flavor (without the tricky syntax). The novel made me wonder about its relationship to Cather’s own life. And in the end, it delivered a grand thematic and emotional wallop.

I warmly recommend it. Here are some details.

My Antonia – The Obligatory Plot Summary

Cather’s novel takes the form of a memoir written by James Quayle Burden, a childhood friend of Antonia’s four years her junior, who arrives in the Nebraska town of Black Hawk on the same day she does. Jim is an orphan from Virginia who has traveled west to be raised by his grandparents. Antonia has immigrated with her family to America from Bohemia (the present day Czech Republic).

For many years, their lives run parallel to each other. First, they are neighbors on country farms situated near each other on a prairie just beginning to be brought under cultivation. Later, they are neighbors in Black Hawk where Jim has moved with his grandparents and Antonia has been hired as a cook and housekeeper. They are separated when Jim leaves Black Hawk to attend university and then settles down to a job and a marriage in New York City. Twenty years later, at the end of the novel, Jim finally returns to Nebraska and seeks out Antonia.

Despite the title, My Antonia is primarily Jim’s story and Antonia and her family can disappear for pages and even chapters at a stretch. The novel finds the time to tell the stories of the hired men who work for Jim’s grandparents; to talk about other immigrant families besides Antonia’s, especially other young farm girls who are hired to work for households in Black Hawk; to describe the residents and observe the culture of the town; and to relate the details of Jim’s love affair with one of Antonia’s friends, Lena Lingard.

Is Jim Burden Willa Cather?

In general, I think it is a bad idea to make inferences about a writer’s life from her novels.

One of the great advantages of fiction is that it allows you to tell readers everything and nothing about yourself – to be wholly candid and entirely private at the same time. And Willa Cather seems to have valued her privacy, considering how many of her private letters and papers she destroyed before her death.

Nevertheless, Willa does make it hard to resist the temptation to equate her with Jim Burden in My Antonia, even though Cather almost certainly intended us to see her as the “I” that appears in the introduction.

Both Burden and Cather moved from Virginia to Nebraska when they were ten years old. Both attended the University of Nebraska (although Jim ultimately earns his degrees from Harvard). Both settled in New York City although their lives are possessed my memories of the prairie. Both write their books, the same book as it happens, in their forties.

Both also admire the same women: the strong, self-supporting, and independent immigrant hired girls who – with the exception of Antonia – never marry or have children.

This brings up the inevitable question of whether Cather was a lesbian and transposed herself into Jim’s character in order to write inconspicuously.

I’m an agnostic on the “Was Willa Cather a lesbian?” question (if that is actually the right question). That she sometimes dressed as a man and used the nickname “William” at university, and that she lived for nearly 40 years with the editor Edith Lewis, are generally known and rather indicative facts.

Whether Cather had sex with Edith or other women is, to the best of my knowledge, unknown and I believe it is equally unknown what Cather considered herself to be, sex or no sex. Cather’s opinion is the only valid one in the matter, of course, and she is beyond the means of telling.

Which leaves the questions of what My Antonia meant to Cather a tantalizing mystery which gives the novel, to me, some extra shimmers of meaning.

My Antonia – The Great America Novel?

This is the crown that Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has worn for decades but I wonder if he didn’t steal it from Cather.

For all their differences, both The Great Gatsby and My Antonia are books profoundly occupied with the past and how happiness resides there rather than the present. They both locate the past in the Midwest and the present in New York City. They are both occupied with a woman from the past, Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby and Antonia in Cather’s novel. And they both derive their greatest emotional power by evoking the natural world of the new continent before it came to be corrupted by men and society.

In Gatsby, it is Nick Carraway dreaming on the last page of the novel of the “fresh, green breast of the new world” the Dutch sailors first saw when they arrived in America, and concluding, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

In My Antonia, this fresh world still exists during Jim and Antonia’s childhood, although it slowly disappears as they age.

Indeed, the great thematic arch of My Antonia is the parallel motion of Jim growing from child to adult, and moving from the natural world to the city. Jim spends his childhood on farms in Virginia and then the great unsettled prairie. As an adolescent, he moves into a small country town. As a young man, he goes the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and then Harvard in Boston. As an adult, he settles, marries, and works in New York City.

There Jim finds a world of money and machines, work and relationships as unsatisfactory as Fitzgerald’s characters found it. The difference is that for Jim his old life isn’t utterly irretrievable.

In the last line of the novel he tells us, speaking of himself and Antonia, “Whatever we have missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”

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“Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson | Review of the Novel

Posted in Marilynne Robinson, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 13, 2013 | 11 Comments »

Gilead Marilynne Robinson What is the purpose of fiction? If it is to imaginatively engage its characters – and by so doing strengthen the reader’s ability to empathize with real people – then Marilynne Robinson’s 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning novel Gilead succeeds brilliantly.

The novel takes the form of a long letter written by John Ames, a Congregationalist minister living in a small Iowa town during the 1950s, to his young son.

Ames, who is in his mid-seventies and suffering from a fatal heart condition, wants to leave his child a record of his life and a way for the boy to remember him after he dies.

Gilead is filled with the aching beauty that the jacket copy of every other novel promises, but few in my experience actually deliver. Robinson voices Ames’ great and genuine love for his son, and his sorrow at leaving him so soon, with a simplicity and directness founded on total conviction. Robinson doesn’t seem to have created John Ames. She seems to have been angelically possessed by him.

Robinson brings equal beauty and conviction to Ames’ expressions of his love for the Iowa prairie and his life in Gilead, even during the long decades of loneliness between the death of his first wife and child in his youth, and the second family he begins as an old man.

For those who think that a little bit of aching beauty goes a long way, Gilead also serves up a heaping portion of plot like a hearty Midwestern meat loaf.

This plot includes the story of his second marriage to Lila, a woman half his age who appears one Sunday in Ames’ church for the service.

She returns every week and Ames falls ridiculously and helplessly in love with her – ridiculously (he thinks) because he is an old man and helplessly because he can see of no way to approach her consistent with his moral convictions. So his relief and gratitude are immense when Lila tells him one day, “You ought to marry me.” What the town and his church think of this marriage is an interesting silence in Gilead.

Another plotline in the novel are the stories of John Ames’ grandfather and father. Ames’ grandfather was a fiery preacher and abolitionist who believed slavery was so great an evil that it justified violent opposition, and who fought with John Brown and with the Union Army. Ames’ father was an ardent pacifist, and the conflict between the two men extends into John Ames own lifetime and forms part of his story.

Most prominently, however, is the story of John Ames (Jack) Boughton, John Ames’ god-son and a child of his best friend. Jack is a charming ne’er-do-well who returns to Gilead after a many years absence.

Jack torments Ames’ by reminding the preacher of his inability to love the man who carries his name, by making Ames’ fear that his wife and child will fall victim to Jack Boughton after his death, and by provoking his jealousy.

All these storylines are presented episodically by Robinson. So readers who enjoy novels which present conflicts, development them through rising action, and bring them to resolution – the “I can’t wait to find out what happens next” model – may find Gilead slow. I found it enthralling from beginning to end.

Some readers may also find John Ames’ sometimes lengthy discussions of Christian theology dull. These discussions are perfectly consistent with a bookish minister educated in the early 20th century who has a great deal of lonely time on his hands. I liked them but I have a semi-professional interest in theology.

Related Content to Gilead.

I think those readers who enjoyed Gilead for its “aching beauty” will like Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I also think they will enjoy Colette’s My Mother’s House, which I wrote about here.

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