Greek Lessons

Hello Gentle Reader, 

After winning the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 with “The Vegetarian,” Han Kang, has become a permanent translated fixture in the English language. An appreciated literary star in the company of Bae Suah and Hwang Sok-yong. “The Vegetarian,” took inspiration from the line: “I believe that humans should be plants,” by the avant-garde Korean writer Yi Sang. What follows is the decision of a woman who decides to stop eating meat. This otherwise mundane decision will have dire and violent consequences for herself, husband and family. “The Vegetarian,” refused to be defined as either a surreal or horror novel, but it proved Han Kang was a master of the slow burn discourse and a cartographer of the interior. Subsequent works translated into English were equally engaged in themes of violence, memory, grief, and guilt. “Human Acts,” poignantly recounts the Gwangju Uprising of the 1980’s and the resulting massacre that took place. “Human Acts,” is a symphonic novel. An orchestral arrangement of voices each rising and adding to the cadences and chorus, recounting event, experience, and memory. Rather than focusing on the massacre itself, Han Kang traces the ripple effect of the events from those historical days through both a macro social lens and individual realities, providing a panoramic novel of different cadences blending into a symphonic narrative chorus detailing the legacy of the uprising and massacre on not only individuals or their families, but also, how it is incorporated into the social and political fabric of a society. In turn, “The White Book,” surveyed private tragedy. A vague composition that defies categorization, “The White Book,” is a psychological exploration of the nature of grief and guilt. At once a meditation on the colour white and its associative items, objects, and appearances in nature, such as: breast milk, swaddling bands, or snow; to the interior monologue of an unnamed narrator, a writer (much like Kang) wandering through Warsaw in a snowy evening. A treatise on memory, the unnamed stand in narrator for Han Kang, recounts the abrupt birth of her older sister, who died two hours later in her mothers’ arms. The narrative is an elegy of grief, guilt, and sorrow, which form a trio of shades of white tinting the narrative. In turn the landscape of Warsaw and its own history of ruin and destruction during the Second World War and rebuilding, becomes a metaphor for the death of the authors older sister and her own life made possible by her passing. Through each of her novels, Han Kang has proven herself to be an unflinching documentarian and cartographer of violence in all its incarnations – be it political or personal – in addition to being a writer of emotional resonance and skilled stylist, whose prose is lyrical and graceful as it is technical, eschewing sentimentality and sensationalism in favour of psychological insights and imagistic brilliance.

“Greek Lessons,” can easily be summarized as a simple story about two individuals maneuvering through the process of loss in a variety of forms. For the woman it is the loss of language, brought on by the death of her mother and loosing the custody of her son; for the man, it is the gradual loss of his sight, due to an inherent degenerative eye condition. The novel is interchanged between their two experiences and perspectives. The woman’s narrative presented in the third person. The man’s in first person singular. Their narratives intersect as they both involved in Ancient Greek language classes. Language is the bedrock and basis of “Greek Lessons.” Language is a writer’s bread and butter. Their tool and craft. Language is an ephemeral subject; shapeless and figureless, lacking physical substance and material, but an immediate and intricate component of an individual’s existence. From advertisements to marketing campaigns, traffic signs and street names, to business names, titles, emails, text messages; then the buzz and conversation of daily life. Language is a continual pulse of human achievement and culture. Always beating and flowing around individuals, and in turn evolving. Many writers have used language as the basis of their literary work, such as Nobel Laurate Elfriede Jelinek, whose linguistic vivisections examines how language creates, constructs, and influences reality, becoming a method of control and exerting power over others. Fellow Nobel Laureate Herta Müller in turn, exemplified how language is extorted, utilized and abused by authoritarian regimes to control and propagate ideological messaging, which run contrary to reality and lived experience; but also, how language can be subverted as a form of resistance, offering a precarious sanctuary. Language wielded by Han Kang neither vivisects its power structures or subverts authoritarian control; instead, language is violent intrusion and projection of an individual’s being:

“Now and then, language would thrust its way into her sleep like a skewer through meat, startling her awake several times a night.”

The woman has no driving interest in learning ancient Greek. The language has no utilitarian purpose or value as its extinct. She has no fascination or curiosity with ancient Greek philosophy or literature, which the lecturer often employees to provide context to the dead language’s evolution and exemplifying its complex grammar. No, the woman hopes that by learning ancient Greek she would once again reacquaint herself with her own language. This attempt is a replication of a previous success in its rehabilitative measures, when twenty years prior, the woman found herself exiled from language and verbal communication, only to be reintroduced to it when learning French. Perhaps ancient Greek interests her, because the language itself is considered dead. Its not spoken or utilized beyond niche environments, such as the class. This ritual then of summoning it forth from the river bank of oblivion, awakens the language from its seized silence and brings it back into the world in a hollow state. Parallels of the languages status as being extinct and the woman’s own hollowed out and shapeless existence can easily be deducted. 

Language for the woman has always retained a dizzying and psychological affect. Her therapist simplistically diagnosis’s her muteness in terms of traumatic experience brought on by the loss of her mother and custody of her son. She rejects this assessment. Language is more existential; with her inability to incorporate it and manifest it in verbal structures is a disconnect between physiological failure and neurological lapse. For the woman, language is inaccessible, not psychologically blocked. The woman, however, had an apprehensive relationship with speech. Even when she did speak, the woman’s relationship with act of vocalizing language were less then assured:

            “Even when she could talk, she’d always been soft-spoken.

It wasn’t an issue of vocal cords or lung capacity. She just didn’t like taking up space.  Everyone occupies a certain amount of physical space according to their body mass, but voice travels far beyond that. She had no wish to disseminate her self.”

Han Kang’s characters often engage in unorthodox and unique forms of rebellion, be it choosing to no longer to eat meat, or in this case participate in speech or inhabit language as a physical projection of one’s self. Perhaps silence is her way of retreating from society and the world. An attempt at self-imposed metaphysical segregation. There again, this may only satisfy her therapists hurried assessment. Throughout the novel, the woman remains locked in silence, but Kang fills the space with beautiful imagistic writing, both of the woman’s wanderings through Seoul at night, wandering to exhaust herself to sleep, and the few personal details that are laced through an otherwise interior distilled perspective.

If the woman’s narrative is adrift and shrinking from the world’s scrutiny; then the lecturer’s is filled with an attempt to continually appreciate and record the world as its presented before him, while his sight is still intact, as it gradually deteriorates. His chapters are full of memories rendered colourfully with vibrant detail; in addition to loss and pain, as well as the unrequited love for his ophthalmologist’s deaf daughter; the estrangement of his family; and how is own relationship with the written world will inevitably change once his eyesight is gone. Throughout the novel, the lecturer and the woman (one of his students) gradually waltz around each other, engaged in their own spheres of loss both physically and personally. In the lectures chapter, introspection and drifting images and rumination are abandoned in favour of an assured and consciousness first person narrative.

“Greek Lessons,” is a bold novel, one which tackles the notion of language as a daily occurrence; a linguistic digression on the nature of phonemes; the three different voices styles of the ancient Greek language; the syntaxial differences and complexities between ancient Greek, the Hangul alphabet, and the German language (the adopted language of the lecturer); but also, how language becomes both a state of self-realization – for the lecturer Korean becomes a homecoming – while in turn, language contorts and mutilates itself, to the point of self-inflicted estrangement, as in the case of the woman. Throughout it all is Han Kang’s beautifully etched lyrical prose is graceful as it is assured, beautifully captured and translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won. “Greek Lessons,” is a slow burn, returning to the themes of everyday violence and unorthodox rebellion for Han Kang, it also presents her as an extremely literary talent, capable of not just psychological insight, but also contemplative regarding linguistics and the nature of language as a defining feature of the human experience.

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read

M. Mary

Ismail Kadare Dies Aged 88

Hello Gentle Reader,

Ismail Kadare was a singular writer. A towering figure of European literature, Kadare’s reputation was built and fortified on a literary body of work which was as immense as Balzac’s and of unimpeachable quality; uncompromising in its allegory and critique of political injustices and dictatorships; while exploring the existentially horrors such dictatorships force upon its citizens, and their reality warping and corroding effects. Ismail Kadare was a unextinguishable beacon of light, whose pen became a necessary form of resistance against the Soviet endorsed communist regime of Enver Hoxha (before Hoxha broke ties with the communist superpower, while retaining its Stalinist principles), and the infectious paranoia such a society breeds. Ismail Kadare—be it willing or unwillingly—became the palpable hope of Albania, who withered under repressive policies of communism. To quote Ismail Kadare:

“Literature has often produced magnificent works in dark ages as if it was seeking to remedy the misfortune inflicted on people.”

Allegory and irony were Kadare’s greatest literary weapons. The ability to craft a compelling metaphor, provided Kadare enough ability to criticize Hoxha, while seemingly able to avoid punitive political recourse. Where other writers were arrested (and some executed), Kadare avoided the fate, though he was exiled to a remote village for a year. How, Kadare avoided political persecution, had often been a subject of debate and attack on the writer. It turned out, however, that Enver Hoxha considered himself a literary man, and while there have been reports that the former dictator did in fact order Kadare’s arrest and execution, he always spared him in the end, perhaps out of begrudged respect or literary appreciation. I suspect, it was more international renown in addition to literary merit that saved Kadare from imprisonment and execution. If Kadare’s reputation was not as stellar and his literary talents but a fraction, Hoxha would have done away with him. By the end of the 80’s though, Kadare fled Albania for France, and his international stature was now set in stone. For the past thirty to forty years, Ismail Kadare was rumored to be a future Nobel Laureate in Literature and a perennial contender, in addition to Milan Kundera, Chinua Achebe, and Philip Roth. In 2005, Kadare won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize, for a lifetime assessment of his literary work. Further international accolades include: the Princess of Asturias award in 2009, the Jerusalem prize in 2015 and the Neustadt international prize for literature in 2020. The elusiveness of the Nobel Prize in Literature, will be marked down as another missed opportunity for the Swedish Academy.

Today, Ismail Kadare died and Europe has lost not only of its towering figures, an institution of literary resistance and political discourse, but also a writer who is perhaps one of the few writers, who remained unabashedly a national writer. The kind of writer who captured and celebrated a geographical place. In his work, Ismail Kadare, celebrated Albania as an ancient and shackled nation, overlooked or ignored by the its European neighbours. In doing so, Ismail Kadare elevated the south-eastern Balkan nation to new literary heights, as Kadare promoted and encouraged many young Albanian writers, championing their work abroad.

Rest in Peace Ismail Kadare, you were truly one of the greatest writers of the past 20^th Century and early 21^st Century.

Thank you for Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 

M. Mary 

– XXIX –

If it is one thing cats have taught me: investing in indifference to others, pays dividends in peace.

Treacle Walker

Hello Gentle Reader, 

The 2022 Booker Prize shortlist remains the most resonant in recent memory. The two stand out novels of the shortlist: Claire Keegan’s “Small Things Like These,” and Alan Garner’s “Treacle Walker,” were exquisite cut diamonds, proving that reductionist prose is not akin to minimalist starvation. Instead, they were a testament to the principles of craftsmanship, technical brilliance, and lithe design. In complete contrast and revolt against the bloated maximalist writing parading itself as epicist in perspective (if only Atlas did indeed shrug, sparing everyone the slog and drudgery). Despite being the two standout novels with their principled executions, neither one received the Booker Prize, still they benefited from the nomination. In addition to their work, Claire Keegan and Alan Garner came to the forefront as two writers who entered the Booker Prize conversation as outsiders, and not conforming to the usual Booker Prize literary pedigree. Keegan is renowned as a master of the short story. Her two previous published collections “Antarctica,” and “Walk the Blue Fields,” were unanimously praised for their technical brilliance, further exemplifying that the Irish short story remained one of the most poignant portraits of the human experience. Keegan’s expanded short story turned novella “Foster,” remains a haunting and beautiful masterpiece of profound human tragedy and hope undercut by disappointment and reality’s uncanny ability to thwart expectations. Alan Garner in turn has built a magnified and solid career as a fabulist and folklorist, whose deep appreciation for Cheshire history and geography remain the defining bedrock of his work. Garner’s novels are renowned for their folkloric magic and fantasy, in addition to their cinematic pacing. Beloved by both children and adults in equal measure, Alan Garner is a literary chimera who refuses to acknowledge or swear allegiance to either canon, while “The Owl Service,” remains a classic novel that straddles the border between children’s literature and adult fiction, proving that literature maneuvers seamlessly between these two worlds and their divergent experiences, and that literature is not restricted or governed by age.

Alan Garner is a writer of place. Specifically of the Cheshire village Alderley Edge, where his family had settled since the 16^th century, and their family history had become interwoven within it. Folktales, myths, legends, and stories were inherited with each generation, mythologizing the landscape. Garner’s own upbringing was one of rural-working class (while the area has since become gentrified and suburban in Manchester’s sprawl). Garner proved to be a capable student, and as education entered the public sphere seeking to single and rise capable youth above their working-class backgrounds, Garner was provided the opportunity to study at a Grammar School, where his fees were waived because of his means-testing, and eventually studied at Classics at Magdalene College in Oxford. Education, however, proved to be a schism between Garner’s background and family and himself. Removed from the insular and provincial world of Alderley Edge, Garner was suddenly a castaway in the larger society and in turn world. At once emancipated and exiled. Writing, then became Garner’s way of reconciling these cultural and social divisions, at point returning home and remediating his new found academic worldliness with the hardscrabble working-class background and those old myths and folklore stories; and his new appreciation for history, research, narrative, prose and grammar, and the ability to transform and share the mythic world of Alderley Edge and the Cheshire landscape with a wider reading public.

While not being an individual who is necessarily fond of children – we often find each other at an awkward impasse of polite pleasantries and then courtesy, if albeit, abrupt departures – children can be compelling characters and narrators. For many works, they work and succeed on the character of their childlike characters. Be it the titular fool in the ornamental and baroque lavish and loquacious novel “Firefly,” by Severo Sarduy; or the delight and cheek of Kamal in Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, specifically “Palace Walk,”; or the rebellious Lullaby from the aptly named J.M.G Le Clezio’s novella, who engages in truancy and takes it upon herself to explore the world outside of the classroom, or all the other Le Clezio characters, such as the miraculously feral and fond Mondo, or Daniel in search of the sea. Childhood is not always one of innocence and sundrenched imagination. Patrick Modiano’s child-oriented characters who are at once abandoned to boarding school, family friends, or hired help, then adorned as an accessory or paraded around as a pet, before being left behind once more. In Alan Garner’s case, childhood is both a place of lonesome solitude and the last refuge. It’s a state of being, in which the real world remains at bay, and possibilities of imagination still hold some influence and sway. Garner, however, is no garden variety of fabulist. Impossibility is introduced via historical and arcane like measures, rituals, and objects. Whimsy and magical thinking are not in the repertoire. The strange manifests itself through the otherworldly and the historically unknown.

For readers who have been led to believe that complexity is exclusive to mammoth novels or dense uncompromising works of text, “Treacle Walker,” proves not only be the exception to this adage, but also a glowing example that complexity is not weighted by word or page count, but to the level in which a writer is able to refine and manipulate language into new startling forms of perspective; all the while providing commentary on complex themes and ideas. “Treacle Walker,” is a novel where language is layered and slightly obfuscated. The ‘Treacle,’ in question is not the sugared syrup of refined sugar of contemporary definition and understanding, but dates back to its previous incarnations, when treacle (or triacle) was considered an antidote. In the words of the titular rag-and-bone man, Treacle Walker, he advertises his ability to heal:

            “[. . .] all things. Save jealousy. Which none can.”

Joe Coppock, is a sensitive and creative boy whose childhood is punctuated with loneliness and illness. He wears an eye patch to help correct a lazy eye, and he’s been instructed to reduce his exposure to the sun. Time is marked by Noony, the midday train passing through, whose steam coils through the fields and meadows of Joe’s home. As for Joe, he spends his days reading comics, collecting bird eggs, and bone, which are curated in his museum. These otherwise carbon copy lonely days are interrupted by the arrival of the rag-and-bone man who announces himself in the yard:

            “Ragbone! Ragbone! Any rags! Pots for rages! Donkey stone!”

After a transaction of an old pair of pajamas and a lamb’s shoulder-blade, to the rag-and-bone man, Joe Coppock will find himself central to an adventure of strange events, as Joe in turn is provided a stone with a primitive image of a horse etched on its surface, and a treasure from Treacle Walkers chest, whereby Joe pulls a cup of a strange ointment. Treacle Walker, speaks in enigmatic aphorisms, turns of phrases, and general nonsense, leaving Joe to retort frequently: “Bleeding heck!” Garner is a cinematic writer, seamlessly moving the narrative through quick cuts and snaps of dialogue, his true flourishes come through in flashes of action, as seen in the following scenes when both the titular vagabond and Joe sit at the chimney space becomes a bewildering scene, as Treacle Walker plays a tune on a shin bone:

“a tune with wings, trampling things, tightened strings, boggarts and bogles and brags on their feet; the man in the oak, sickness and fever, that set in long, lasting sleep the whole great world with the sweetness of sound the bone did play.”

When Joe plays on the same bone he summons the harbinger of summer: the cuckoo; whose cries echo throughout the following narrative. Other instances include the sporadic assault of a: “hurlothrumbo of winter,” [. . .] “A lomperhomock of night.” Due to an affliction or perhaps application with or of glamourie, Joe Coppock soon finds that a routine childhood disability provides him the means in which to perceive the world as it is and what’s behind it. What follows suit are comic book characters who find themselves emancipated from their panels; an encounter with an Iron-Age bog man named Thin Amren whose even more cryptic than Treacle Walker, who he dismisses as a “pickthank psychopomp.” All of which transpires within 150 pages. What would otherwise be a breeze of a novel, is instead slowed down by the thicket of ideas and the language, which prunes anything superfluous while ensuring enough barbed complexity will demand full attention. the narrative itself, may describe itself as octane fantasy, but its firmly rooted in reality, and delights in neither being fantastical or parabolic while completely abandoning any notion of realism. Language and truly specific cultural elements are what make “Treacle Walker,” more alienating, such as understanding what a ‘donkey stone,’ is and their antiquated application. Or what it means when an individual does a shufti. This specific vocabulary and vernacular understanding with no context and no definition, can be otherwise off-putting for some readers, but after a bit of digging and understanding of the terms, it comes to enrich the narrative, firmly rooting it in its specific landscape and history, which Garner celebrates. Though ‘clanjandering,’ and ‘nookshotten,’ remain unknown and impenetrable. “Treacle Walker,” remains one of the most interesting novels to have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and while many parts of the novel flew over my head or the language ensure I never entered into complete comprehension, it remains a surreal and interesting read.

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read

M. Mary

– XXVIII –

Unfulfilled ambitions? Reminisces of paths and possibilities not taken? This is no tragedy. You just described in actuality, the kitchen sink drama of life. 

Jenny Erpenbeck Wins the International Booker Prize 2024

Jenny Erpenbeck wins the International Booker Prize 2024, with her novel: “Kairos.”

Jenny Erpenbeck is one of the most remarkable German language writers currently at work; whose novels reckon with and wrestle with the individual and personal histories and their relation to historical and sociopolitical moments, which change course and direction. Growing up in East Germany, Erpenbeck recalled with casual indifference that she was asleep when the Berlin Wall was in its initial stages of being torn down. While the world and the city partied at the conflux of the divided city reconciling, Erpenbeck was tucked in for the night, surrendering herself to tomorrow. For Erpenbeck, the Berlin Wall was merely the edge of the world for her, a mundane place where her family had outings or partook in picnics. The wall lacked the grimness depicted in western media. Throughout her novels, Jenny Erpenbeck maintains an accountancy of history and time, both in its historical developments and consequences, but also the personal and emotional driftwood, always at risk of being washed away or bowled over by the more substantial and transformative waves.

“Kairos,” her International Booker Prize winning novel is no different. With the dissolution of East Germany as the backdrop, Erpenbeck traces the disintegration of a love affair, between a young student and an old writer. Of course, the novel is not just a testament to the imbalances of love as power; the whirls of passion which inevitably burn themselves out; it provides testimony on the nature of art, power, and culture. If anything, “Kairos,” uses the love affair and its damaging ignition and turbulent end, as allegory of the end of an era, a nation, and a city. An era of immense gains and new found freedoms, undercut by the complete collapse and loss of an entire reality. The International Booker Prize jury praised, Michael Hoffman for his beautiful translation, by embodying the layered and eccentric language of Erpenbeck, with her run on sentences, but also expansive emotional resonance and vocabulary. It was marvelous to hear

“Kairos,” is a novel of intimate secrets and passions, but also the imbalance and cruelty of passionate love, while branching out and being infected by the historical and social changes of the time, which threaten to complete upend one’s own understanding and certainty on reality. “Kairos,” proves Jenny Erpenbeck herself to be one of the most important contemporary German writers at work currently writing today. This award also cements Michael Hoffman as one of the most important translators currently working, and this is the first time the International Booker Prize went to a German language writer and a male translator.

Congratulations to Jenny Erpenbeck, a very well-deserved award!

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read

M. Mary

Alice Munro Dies Aged 92

Hello Gentle Reader,

Few names are as lauded and admired in Canadian literature and the short story format as Alice Munro’s. There are few who are considered her contemporary or equal in master of the short story form, and those who are: pay tribute to their debt to Munro. Despite her gigantic status as literary icon, Munro, never appeared distant or celestial. There was no insistence that she was a regular and or normal person, she merely was, who also happened to be a magnificent writer. Munro’s warmth and graciousness are equally praised in addition to her literary achievement. As the “Master of the Contemporary Short Story,” as the Swedish Academy declared, when announcing Alice Munro as a Nobel Laureate in Literature (2013), Munro proved herself to be an incisive and psychological portraitist, whose narratives were less interested in parading fact and dissecting the narrative to its sequential events; instead, Munro evoked narratives and embedded them with a sense of joy undercut with an understanding of tragedy. Admired for her stories which celebrated the everyday and the common, Munro often seemed perplexed by this sometimes-unintended backhanded compliment. Her characters were housewives, chambermaids, civil servants, farmers. All in all, ordinary people; but their lives were extraordinary, full of personal heartbreaks, open secrets, private tragedies, moral hypocrisy (and decay), through the expansive and isolative Canadian landscape, and the often-puritanical Canadian small town, with its social scriptures and edifices. The short story structure also changed in Munro’s hands. Time, once reserved only for the novel, was employed in full in Munro’s work. Short stories were no longer limited in the temporal space in which they could cover, they were capable of moving decades into the future and backwards, providing a long view of the characters progressions through their lives, and all their successes and failings, providing a humanistic and extensive overview of a life. “The Love of a Good Woman,” opens with this narrative perfectly, providing a beautiful full circle portrait of a cast of characters and their private failings, misunderstandings, and even crimes. The extraordinary tragedy of the ordinary is also beautiful captured in Munro’s work. Infanticide, sexual exploitation, murder, domestic abuse, illness, these are no longer sensationalist themes or tropes, but are sculpted in beautiful and understated prose, completive void of ostentatious exaggeration, and are remarked with an almost blunt matter of fact recount. Having retired from writing in 2012 with her final collection “Dear Life,” the world has come to accept there will be no more Alice Munro stories in the future, but now with her death, its resounding clear that the world has lost one of its great psychological surveyors who celebrated and elevated the ordinary to extortionary heights. Who through hard work and dedication, with a strict adherence to form, finally ensure the short story got its overdue recognition as a literary form of equal respect.

Rest in Peace Alice Munro.

 
Thank You for Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 

M. Mary  

Paul Auster, Dies Aged 77

Hello Gentle Reader,

Paul Auster is one of the most well known and regarded postmodernists of American literature. Just as cerebral as Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo; Auster became famous for his pastiche and slipstream novels, defying the psychological and realistic narrative premises often associated with literary fiction, and playfully explored themes of identity, chance, coincidence, loss, grief, and one’s sense reality (or their perception of it) being altered, or becoming alienated from it. Styled, the Brooklyn Bard, and though regarded as a New York literary institution, Brooklyn, remained the haunting ground of Paul Austre, in similar fashion to James Joyce’s Dublin, Philip Roth’s New Jersey, or Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul. Brooklyn became immortalized in Auster’s literary universe through his “New York Trilogy,” (“City of Glass,” “Ghosts,” “The Locked Room,”) this trilogy of novels, not only infiltrates the noir mystery genre, but inverts the medium into a postmodern portrait, whereby the nature of identity and reality are deconstructed, examined, and left in a state of post-structuralist disarray. Identity and reality are not static elements in Auster’s work, its palpable, adaptable, and changeable. Throughout “The New York Trilogy,” identity is both lost and replaced. Identity in turn becomes an increasingly metafictional conundrum for the writer, whereby fictional reality and the intrusion of autobiography or reality can become difficult to delineate. The enduring appeal and success of “The New York Trilogy,” showcased the promise of an otherwise brilliant writer and foreshadowed a brilliant career. Auster did not disappoint. What followed suit was a brilliant and prolific literary career, with a variety of interests in different literary mediums, Auster continually returned to the pen and paper out of curiosity, interest, and enduring appreciation for the literary. Paul Auster was always that unique blend of late postmodernism, echoing sentiments of rockstar appeal for being new and exciting, while also being a writer whose literary depth defied superficial criticism challenging his credentials and charging him as an imposter. Throughout the 1990’s and early 2000’s, Auster remained a fashionable and hip postmodernist, never coming to rest on his laurels, and bask on previously treaded ground, and continued to produce on a novel a year, his last one “Baumgartner,” released just last year, and was heralded as a beautiful novel tracing the aches of memory and the spiraling delirium of old age, grief, and loneliness. Of his generation, Paul Auster, is perhaps the most accessible and enjoyable. What both endears and confounds, is perhaps the contrariness of his work. Auster’s language literary language is lucid and agreeable, never twisting itself into an esoteric code or enigmatic linguistic puzzle, but his narratives and plots delight in breaking and warping the conventions of narrative, much to the irritation of critics and theorists. Paul Auster’s death is an immense loss to contemporary American Literature. Truly one of the greatest postmodernist writers of its canon, an unequivocal and unapologetic practitioner of the form and style, while remaining a inherently American sensibility.

Rest in Peace Paul Auster.

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 

M. Mary

– XXVII –

Life exists between two opposing forces: the grief of homesickness and the cry for transience. Happiness is found in the provisional periphery, in anonymity.

Patricia Highsmith & The Enduring Allure of the Shadow

Hello Gentle Reader,

It’s been almost thirty years since Patricia Highsmith died, yet her literary legacy cuts a haunting figure. There have been a variety of film adaptions of her work, from Alfred Hitchcock’s watered-down version of “Strangers on the Train,” to the first adaption of the “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” rebranded as “Purple Noon,” and then once again made more famous with the 1999 film “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” which remains an audience favourite, despite not being the most accurate adaption of the novel. Then there was the film, “Carol,” an adaption of the classic lesbian novel, “The Price of Salt,” which was not only gorgeously shot and produced, but captured the rarely seen softer side of Highsmith. Of course there are the myriad of other adaptions: “Black Water,” “The Two Faces of January,” “The Glass Cell,” “The Cry of the Owl,” “The Sweet Sickness,” to name but a few. Then there is the plethora of theatrical and radio adaptions, which fail to be accounted for. These past two decades there have been two biographies of Patrica Highsmith, the first “Beautiful Shadow,” by Andrew Wilson was published in 2003; the second, “The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith,” by the late Joan Schenkar was published in 2009. In 2014 Joanna Murray-Smith’s play “Switzerland,” was produced and staged. “Switzerland,” imagines a fictional version of the well-known reclusive, misanthropic, bitter, and private Highsmith, who, secluded in her Swiss modernist bunker-like house, is visited by perhaps her most famous literary creation. In 2021, at long last the infamous Highsmith Journals were compiled and released for public consumption. Previously, they had only been quoted, analyzed, and presented via the biographies, where they took on a dangerous appeal. In hardcover form, the book is almost a thousand pages long and traces the years of 1941 – 1995. Now, Netflix has released a new adaption of Patricia Highsmith’s most famous literary invention: Tom Ripley, with their miniseries “Ripley.” All of which proves that Patricia Highsmith, be it her literary work, life and biography, journals, or character, continues to be the dry ice of inspiration, which we reach out to tantalizingly touch and recoil at not only the burn, but the lasting chill.

Patricia Highsmith remains an enduring and alluring figure for a variety of reasons. In discussing her literary output, critics agree that Highsmith has been (pun intended) criminally miscategorized as a crime writer or thriller writer; and while her works certainly revolve around criminal inclinations and devious acts; Highsmith was more concerned with the existential and psychological aspects of these mindsets. Crime novels, during Highsmith’s times were concerned with upholding the moral integrity and probity of good always overcomes the nefarious, dubious, and diabolical. They were cozy reads of an otherwise garden variety. Puzzles for readers to sniff out the killer lurking amongst the pages, while justice as a virtue would ultimately prevail. Patricia Highsmith in turn obliterated these concepts. First, Highsmith began to autopsy the placid normalcy of daily life, revealing layer by layer the festering filth and debauchery which lurked within everyone’s psyche. Thoughts people never spoke of. Be it threats of violence, or fantasies of murder, or compulsive obsessions. As “Strangers on the Train,” eloquently calculates that in desperation and debauchery, murder can change otherwise unhappy circumstances, be it the death of an unfaithful wife, or an oppressive father. Murder was no longer reduced to an unforgivable act of moral failing and falter, but evolved into a somewhat cooler arresting concept resembling a mundane transaction or basic commerce. When Agatha Christie caused an outrage and controversy with the twist ending of “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” Highsmith, a prolific alcoholic, quite literally said: “hold my beer,” and continued to push that literary envelope. Yet, Highsmith’s treatment of crime and murder went beyond a thriller novel’s usual resume and output. When Graham Greene styled Highsmith “The Poet of Apprehension,” it was with good reason, as Patricia Highsmith, was more interested in spelunking and analyzing the character traits of her otherwise placidly normal people who had finally begun to entertain and entreat their darker thoughts, fantasies, obsessions and desires. This is perhaps why throughout her lifetime, Highsmith had a warmer reception in Europe for her work, where they viewed her as an existential modernist, whereas in the United States of America, she was viewed a crime writer who broke the conventions of the format.

Patrica Highsmith’s character and life remain a fascinating display of mercurial contrary paradoxes. Both biographies of Patricia Highsmith (“Beautiful Shadow,” and “The Talented Miss Highsmith,”) agree she was a complex and difficult woman, which is further supported by her journals. Throughout her life, Highsmith was militant in her defense of her private life. Publicly, Highsmith presented a cold and aloof personality. Highsmith never married, and openly remarked on her preference for bestial company to that of people, going so far as to proclaim her distaste for others by being quoted:

            “My imagination functions much better when I don’t have to speak to people.”   

Solitude was preferable. The late sage of Suffolk, friend and frequent visitor Ronald Blythe, remarked she often grew tired of his company. Fun fact, both Blythe and Highsmith were gay, though they kept this part of their lives to themselves, and yet still they still initiated and attempted sex. The nature of her sexual preference, was a bone of contention for Highsmith. In her youth she attempted psychoanalysis to rid herself of her infatuation of women. It obviously didn’t work, as Highsmith would go on to have a laundry list of lovers who she intensely and passionately adored and desired, and then abruptly abandoned and discarded. A few turned up in her books as victims, brutally murdered, proving that Highsmith had no sympathies for victims. Still, after a lifetime of curating and assembling a public persona that was obviously cold, bitter, and warningly misanthropic, it came as a shock for readers to learn that Highsmith was not reptilian, but warm blooded. She did, however, remain cruel in the end. In her later years, Patricia Highsmith had carved out a home within the sunless Swiss mountains, which physically emancipated her from public life, and facilitated her solitary lifestyle, which she viciously protected like a brown recluse spider. Overtime, Highsmith’s misanthropy graduated to equal opportunity offender, where she would unleash onslaughts and tirades, regardless of venue and revel in the indignation. She was known to spew venom vitriol with equal liberty and without concern. Otto Penzler (a former editor and publisher of Highsmith, before dropping her) described her as:

“She [Patricia Higsmith] was a mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, unloving human being…I could never penetrate how any human being could be that relentlessly ugly.”

The late aged Patricia Highsmith is the most recognizable image of the author. Reclusive and unapologetically misanthropic, whose mean-spirited endeavors rivaled Olympic sporting events in both agility and testament to skill. What has since come about, is Highsmith was a mercurial and complex individual and writer, impossible to pin down and completely ungraspable. Forever shifting and ambiguous, with quicksilver changes, Highsmith defied concrete definitions and compartmentalization’s, and didn’t suffer those fool hearty enough to try to force her into any pre-conceived notion or expectation. To summarize Highsmith as being hardboiled and embittered, and venomously vicious when provoked or disturbed, overlooks her penchant for mordant humour, caustic wit, and unique insight into the consciousness of guilt, apprehension, and obsession. The truth is, Patricia Highsmith was amorphous. A shifting shroud of shade and shadow. One moment on the attack unleashing a torrent of racist and antisemitic remarks. The next, dreaming about some frivolous notion of domestic life with a woman she might love. At her best, however, she was hunched over her Olympia typewriter at her roll top desk, punching away at another novel or short story that delved into the abnormality and darkness of the human soul. Then the pendulum would swing back once again, whereby fueled by cigarettes and alcohol, Highsmith would once again recount, document, record, and scribble in her journals, be it an observation, idea, a list, fantasy, or any other notion. Highsmith loved and hated in equal vein and with the same intensity, often felt simultaneously as a singular experience.

While I haven’t finished the series, “Ripley,” just yet, I’ve enjoyed it thus far. It's a slow burn. Masterfully shot and stylish. The atmosphere is taut with apprehension and menace. The climatic confrontation between Ripley and Dickie is perfect. Ripley, never loses control, carrying out the act with meticulous cold precision. I have found it so disappointing in some reviews the fixation on the ambiguity of Highsmith’s famous American antihero, Tom Ripley’s sexual orientation. The infamous “clothes scene,” seems to have some viewers convinced that Tom Ripley is gay. For the record, Patricia Highsmith dismissed these theories long ago. Furthermore, the term ‘queer,’ when used in the show is not used in its new fashionably remediated format. It’s the old form carrying the tar and feather motivation such an insult was meant to invoke and incite, to purposefully denigrate an individual with no basis, into a category that defines them as somehow a corruption or mistake of nature, perverted and foul. Hearing the term used makes my fingers curl. The subject of Ripley’s sexuality is rather an unimaginative talking point in turn. Sex, much like con artistry, forgery or murder, for Ripley is merely an application or a tool, it is purely utilitarian. What is alluring and so enduring about the talented Tom Ripley, is his nebulous nature, completely chameleonic, shifting and adapting, measured and controlled. Ripley is the cuckoo bird or a changeling, the believable imposter. In the case of Dickie Greenleaf, there may have been adoration for the wayward prodigal son, as Ripley saw a cash cow which he could syphon and symbiotically leech off of. Its climatic conclusion was not the end for Ripley, it was only the beginning of an even more rewarding life. This is what is perhaps most compelling about Tom Ripley as a character, he's not outwardly deranged nor interiorly disturbed. Ripley (much like Highsmith) longed to be inducted and included among the elites. The two of them wanted a life of leisure and pleasure. The amicable good life. Ripley’s transformation is nothing short of Gatsby in its achievement.

Patricia Highsmith, never had the success in her native homeland of the United States. She was perennially shunned because she refused to subscribe and disseminate the virtues of justice and moral probity. Instead, Highsmith kept company with a more nefarious breed, plumbing the depths of the darker recess of the mind. Highsmith was the eclipse on the ideals of American justice, which she found not only hypocritical but puritanically misapplied. As a writer, Patricia Highsmith wrote as a dark mirror reflecting the hidden noctuary of the human condition, all the lusts, envies, greed, obsessions, strange desires, and all the devils clawing at the door. In existentialist fashion, she sought to bring readers face to face with these unacknowledged corners of our own consciousness. As a compelling character and individual, Patricia Highsmith strikes a profoundly complex figure, one who completely refuses to be captured in some neat portrait. Highsmith’s figure shifts unapologetically from the beautiful young woman of her youth, striking and gorgeous, to the gorgonized hardened gargoyle visage of her older years, which remains the most recognizable version to many readers. Her literary works remain compelling, dark glacier wellsprings which readers and writers often return to peer into the dark inky ice ridden depths, as if summon some new form of inspiration. Almost thirty years after her death, and Patricia Highsmith experiences an almost reoccurring sense of renewed appreciation, which was so lacking in her own lifetime. If anything, Patricia Highsmith has proven that there is an enduring allure to the shadow, the inscrutable and unknowable darkness of the human consciousnesses. As a writer, Highsmith was surveyor and spelunker of these amoral landscapes, exploring the depths of guilt, the thralls of obsessions, and conductor of the apprehension.

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 

M. Mary