Brief Thoughts On Recent Reads & Escaping the Grim Reaper of Writing

Sorrentino, Tove Ditlevsen, Tolstoy & Ugrešić

Hello, and long time no see! I know a week without me invading your inbox is nothing of significance to you, but to ME it is an ominous sign and a potential foretelling of more terrible things to come—what if the Grim Reaper of Writing has returned to kill my writing spirit for another year?

Over a month into this newsletter and I have essentially written thoughts on every book I’ve read this year. I didn’t go into starting it with that intention, my intention was more specifically to use this newsletter as a home to store my thoughts on the more memorable books I would read and to experiment with my own writing. I haven’t figured out how to do much of the latter which has been bugging me lately. As for the former, because I have such great taste I can’t help but read only memorable books which then makes me feel like I should write something about them all. The plight of being an amateur scribbler drawn to Great Literature.

Another intention I had when starting this newsletter was to move away from traditional reviews which have been the focus of my previous blogs/websites and embrace a more informal way of writing about the books I read. I think I have done that fairly well, but then I go and write 1,500 words on Dostoevsky’s Demons and Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry Cycle. I don’t regret this, those are both significant works that deserve to be written about for eternity. However, they are also both widely discussed and when writing more traditional reviews about Classics I always end up thinking “Better writers have written better words on this, what is the point of rambling for so long?”

Going forward I want to focus more on finding inventive projects to incorporate into this newsletter, and keep a steady distance from it being another review blog—there are enough of those written by people better at it than me.

Now, with that off my chest, let’s get down to business. All I do with my free time is read. Okay, and I watch an episode or two of Gossip Girl before bed, but all the rest of my free time is spent reading. Which means that in the week plus that I’ve gone between posts on here I’ve read quite a lot. So I am taking this as an opportunity to do the kind of Briefly Noted/capsule thought gatherings that I’ve wanted to primarily do on here. I’m not even going to grab copies of the books so I can look over parts and find bracketed passages to use—just going to throw some raw thoughts at you!

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (Yale University Press; translated by Marian Schwartz). Oh no, oh fuck! How do you go short on one of the classic doorstoppers?? Well, it’s easy enough when you don’t have many urgent thoughts on it. Don’t get me wrong, this is a great book that everyone with a bit of love for literature in their heart should read. The characters are incredibly complex, subtly developed, and Tolstoy masterfully weaves together all the narrative threads. But we all know this already. None of this is new. While being impressed by Anna Karenina as a work of art, I can’t say I felt very passionately about it. There is no one reason for this, it’s an instinctual thing and you can’t expect to fall in love with every masterpiece, but I do think I pinpointed a key factor—Nikolai Dmitrievich Levin. Modelled after Tolstoy himself, Levin is a moral and earnest man, and as a result of this he has a hard time in the book’s world of sin and hypocrisy. As a character he is wonderfully formed, but it is also painfully obvious that Tolstoy is partial to him above all else. Every section following Levin starts out well—Hey, we haven’t seen you for a while, Levin dude! Still having a hard time being a moral creature in an immoral world? We’ll hang out with you for a bit! But then his passages drag on for far too long, to where every time I felt myself thinking “I get the point! He’s doomed to dream of more but have to settle for less due to the world’s corruption and his frailties.” Anna and Vronsky with their primal urges that can only be satisfied by a complete severing with their responsibilities but doomed due to the tragic conformity rooted deep in them; Karenin with his love for order and decorum only to have all order, decorum and dignity stripped from him leaving him with only sordid self-preservation—these are the characters I yearned to return to when the Levin sections dragged on for too long.

The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić (New Directions, translated by Celia Hawkesworth): My first Ugrešić. Strange, often brilliant and sometimes uninteresting. The voice of the exile, a life in constant transition, forever trying to remember their past and homeland but because those no longer exist the memories become faded. Photographs, stray preserved objects, and art are all that keep the past alive. The Berlin notes section often feel like an unfocused litany of trivia, sometimes with little meaning to the book itself but likely with significance to those who have been there. The Angel section, surprisingly atrocious writing. A baffling isolated incident in an otherwise mournful and moving kaleidoscope of lost history.

The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen (Farrar, Straus, Giroux; translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman): An incredible trilogy of memoirs. So much of the talk surrounding them are focused on the shocking incidents of the third volume, and this makes the subtlety and contained introspection of the first two rather surprising. Ditlevsen writes about her childhood with a mature and un-sentimentalized distance, but instead of writing from an adult-looking-back vantagepoint she writes as if she is directly in the head of her past self and by doing this captures a melancholy innocence that feels deeply honest. In Youth we see the budding of a young writer, finding escape from her home life and grim jobs (she doesn’t attend high school) in poetry. The poems are bad but then they get better. Her finding an unsatisfying sort of independence coincides with the rise of Hitler. It’s easy to see why the final volume, Dependency, has been so widely discussed. While the events of the first two can be summed up very quickly, this one sees her become a successful novelist at a very young age, meander through multiple marriages, meet Evelyn Waugh, and become catastrophically addicted to drugs. This is all recounted with the same melancholy resignation that Ditlevsen approaches the endless series of disappoints in her childhood and adolescence. She lived a life where happiness was hard to come by and only found escape in her writing and drugs. The trilogy closes with her struggling to return to writing and in the process of recovery, and in spite of her tragic death being known there is a real power in seeing a woman who has endured so much approaching rebuilding the wreckage of her life with such strength.

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino (Dalkey Archive): A book about the hacks and sellouts of the New York art scene of the 1950s and 1960s. Is the writer (meaning narrator) a hack and sellout as well, or a brilliant yet neglected satirist of the Mary McCarthy and Joseph Heller mold? I think this depends on the reader (meaning you)—personally I found it to be a mix of the two, but with significant leanings towards the former. But this isn’t a criticism of the book. Sorrentino has inventively protected himself from criticism by making the narrator of his book a failed and possibly bad novelist. Each chapter follows a different character from the New York art scene: bad poets, groupies-turned-wives-turned-bad-poets, artists-with-potential-turned-bad-poets, good-poets-turned-bad-poets, etc. The connecting tissue is they are all shameless conformists willing to do whatever it takes to get recognition or money, whichever is easier. But the book is more clever than just another artists acting bad exercise. Sorrentino uses the limitations of the Art World Satire setup to explore the process of making art, and how embarrassingly artificial it often is. The narrator tells us that his characters are fiction, that he is making them up, but then he also tells us that he has spoken to them, seen them at parties, and also that he is cherry picking details from people he knows and throwing them into his characters when he feels like it. Of course, this is all true. The narrator thought he was Proust in search of his Robert de Montesquiou, but instead he ran into a bunch of vapid losers and all he is left with is the dregs of encounters and gossip and must try to make a book out of it. The affairs and unhappy marriages are rather monotonous. Sorrentino via his narrator is sardonic and disdainful of all the characters, but one wishes he would have let the two women who get their own chapters to be more than groupies and bedfellows. Sheila ultimately becomes a bad poet like Lou but her artistic failings aren’t given the same attention as the rest (arguably the most interesting woman in the book is a character stolen from another work—Lolita). Writing about bad art is where Sorrentino is at his best. His focus is the humiliations, compromises and corruptions of trying to be an artist, even going as far as to provide his characters with many bad poems and humiliatingly trite letters. For such a good writer, he is a scholar of failure.