Quarter Two Fiction

Impossible Germany

In the first quarter of the year, I spent a lot of time in Italy. In the second quarter, everything got very Faustian: self-obsessed narrators climbing their own Harz Mountains, leaving their lovers behind to wither in darkness.

Ok, it maybe wasn’t all that, but I read a lot of dark stuff at the end of spring, and while this summer hasn’t been filled with lightness so far (I think the first book I finished in July was Meaghan Garvey’s excellent memoir/travelogue Midwestern Death Trip, which is basically Faustian but with a self-destructive woman at the center instead of a man), I’m now deep into Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which, even though it’s about the decline of a family, is really about the whole family, not a protagonist who’s going to ruin everything for himself and everyone else. I know Buddenbrooks is going to end badly, but that’s not because of one person’s selfish decisions, it’s because of the selfish decisions of many people. It’s a refreshing difference!

---

11. Vehicle: A Verse Novel, Jen Calleja

The whole structure of this book wasn't paying off ~150 pages in; there’s no extra thematic punch from the setup of academics researching this maverick spy/musician. The book just could have been written in close third person through the maverick's perspective and then I probably would have finished it? Calleja has some interesting ideas about dystopia in 21st-century Britain, but she just spends way too much time scribbling around the margins instead of building anything memorable.

10. The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy

I bailed 150 pages in. I hope the reveal is that he's actually not in love with his sister, but I wasn't going to wait around and find out! After this one, I probably won’t ever read McCarthy again…more room for William Faulkner.

9. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller

For a book I couldn’t finish, I enjoyed this most of the time. But I had it checked out of the library for over a month and only read 200 pages, so I gave up on it and won’t check it out again.

Miller's plotless nihilistic ramblings are saved by his intelligence. For all the talk about getting drunk or throwing up or eating bad food or pooping in bidets or “chasing cunt,” he's mostly obsessed with beauty: Proust, Matisse, a beautifully constructed entrance to a an old building. The way he writes about what he loves nearly distracts from his near-constant racism and hatred of women. If this book had slightly more plot and slightly less hate, I could recommend it.

8. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung

It feels bizarre to call Jung a psychologist, because Freud, Adler, Skinner, Piaget, Beck, etc. would not touch most of what's in this book with a 10 foot pole. I haven't read any other Jung, and I probably won't, but the guy is much more of a literary theorist than a scientist, and I often liked him for that.

I can imagine that Kafka would be into the way that he describes his dreams, and the way he continually feels the darkness and violence of human animals seeping into his life. He's also just such a friendly, humble presence throughout this book. When he's describing why Buddhism is wrong about attachment, he's never contemptuous. When he's explaining why the afterlife is real, he's understanding about why most psychologists don't believe in it. Even in the chapter about his break with Freud, he seems fairly chill about it, and the letter that's included in this book from Freud shows that Sigmund was not chill about Jung rejecting sexuality as the basis for psychological problems and turning towards spirituality.

I just don't care much for his theological or anthropological reflections, and too much of this book is devoted to them. He pretty obviously projects himself onto Africa, India, and the Native Americans he meets. He fetishizes them in service of critiquing European and Christian culture, though he always circles back around to valorizing Christianity as the best way of thinking through psychological problems. He loves to use déjà vu as an exemplar of why his dreams are actually real (I dreamed someone died, and then they actually died) despite the obvious confirmation bias there.

I read this as a companion to Faust, and it does work well as a way to bring Goethe's concerns into the 20th century. Jung is the ur-New Ager, with all of the delights and problems that New Age philosophy in the 20th and 21st century brings. It feels likely that he'd be drinking raw milk and refusing vaccines and living in a stone tower without electricity if he was alive today, and I'd feel just as ambivalent about him, especially because he seems like a pretty unresponsive husband and father (he loves his family so much that he has to leave them for long periods and sit in a tower alone).

7. Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie

The writing was somewhat bloodless, and the characterization of the various characters is fairly weak. But the ending kind of justifies all of it! Somehow this had never been spoiled for me, and I won't spoil it for you, but there are certain kinds of stories that demand cold, efficient genre machinations, and this is one, because the characters in it are weighed down by grief, functionally zombified by the horror of what they experienced and what they are trying to do. So this doesn't make me want to read more Christie, because she found her perfect jewel box to set in perfect precision, and if these characters weren't this way, I would have found the whole thing pretty boring.

6. Call Me By Your Name, André Aciman

Aciman is obsessed with Proust. I read the first fifty or so pages of this and it sounds so similar to my multiple (failed) attempts to finish Swann's Way that I checked out the front of the book and saw that Aciman had written an entire scholarly book about Proust, and that he teaches Proust in New York City.

One either loves or hates the Proust style; I haven't yet loved it but I suspect I am just about getting to the age where I will. And that's probably what I both love and slightly resent about this book: the style feels a bit like classic Literature fan fiction. I'm (mostly) sure Aciman has great taste in Literature and doesn't spend most of his time reading all the kind of post-WWII American fiction that every author who gets an MFA at our institutions seems to be required to read. Call Me by Your Name doesn't sound like Hemingway, O'Connor, Carver, or Munro. It also doesn't sound like the alternative American canon of Barthelme, Pynchon and Saunders. It simply sounds like the classic literature of the early 20th century, with the content updated to the mid-1980's.

And so for people who rarely read that kind of literature, I can appreciate that this is a kind of revelation. If you mostly read genre fiction or 21st-century MFA fiction and then you saw the movie and cracked this book, I hope that your mind was kind of blown by Aciman's language. No one writes this way these days!

But for me, something about this writing eventually felt a bit thin; I could see through to him thinking about the plot and characters as something to solve for so he could get back to philosophical flights of fancy instead of integrating everything. There are a few too many moments here that feel like an exercise instead of a free-flowing exchange of ideas. There's too much about beauty rather than than being actually beautiful, especially in the last third of the novel.

5. Botchan, Natsume Sōseki

What a weird book! I don’t know if there’s a newer translation out there than the one from 1919, because Yasotaro Mori’s use of 1910’s slang and frequent omission (or misuse) of direct articles seemed like something that a modern translator wouldn’t do. On the other hand, this translation is (intentionally or not) often extremely hilarious, and there’s no doubt that some part of that is directly due to Soseki’s plotting and voice. Here’s one of the introductions to the character, from the first page:

Because of an hereditary recklessness, I have been playing always a losing game since my childhood....One of my relatives once presented me with a pen-knife. I was showing it to my friends, reflecting its pretty blades against the rays of the sun, when one of them chimed in that the blades gleamed all right, but seemed rather dull for cutting with.
“Rather dull? See if they don’t cut!” I retorted.
“Cut your finger, then,” he challenged. And with “Finger nothing! Here goes!” I cut my thumb slant-wise. Fortunately the knife was small and the bone of the thumb hard enough, so the thumb is still there, but the scar will be there until my death.

Totally insane. And at the end of the book, when the protagonist is torturing a particularly unpleasant colleague who kept him up all night on a nearly incomprehensibly plotted surveillance mission, he describes his confrontation with his colleague this way:

“I didn’t mean you. Sir. No, Sir, I didn’t mean you, sure.” He insisted on this brazen excuse. I happened to notice at that moment that I had held my pockets with both hands. The eggs in both pockets jerked so when I ran, that I had been holding them. I thrust my hand into the pocket, took out two and dashed them on the face of Clown. The eggs crushed, and from the tip of his nose the yellow streamed down. Clown was taken completely surprised, and uttering a hideous cry, he fell down on the ground and begged for mercy. I had bought those eggs to eat, but had not carried them for the purpose of making “Irish Confetti” of them. Thoroughly roused, in the moment of passion, I had dashed them at him before I knew what I was doing. But seeing Clown down and finding my hand grenade successful, I banged the rest of the eggs on him, intermingled with “Darn you, you sonovagun!” The face of Clown was soaked in yellow.

See? Anyway, you’ll enjoy this book just as much as any other beach read, and it also happens to be one of the only good books that came out in the entire year of 1906, so you’ll have that to hang your hat on, too.

4. The Story of a New Name, Elena Ferrante

Comparing anything to the Ferrante novels is basically unfair. As the New York Times noted, these books will almost certainly end up being classics of the early 21st century, like the Edith Wharton novels of the early 20th century. They are in some way a kind of combination of Proust and Wharton—impressionistic yet driven forward steadily by plot, pausing at stretches (like the beginning of this novel) to be boring (like life!), only to throw the characters back into the fire again (there is a literal bonfire that a book is thrown into, and it’s a fantastic moment).

If there’s a Faust in these books, it’s got to be Nino Sarratore, truly one of the most accidentally evil characters in literature. These are books about friendship between women written in the first person, but Ferrante’s so skilled that the male characters like Nino and Alfonso and Pietro Airota are all drawn just as deeply through her protaganist’s reflections on them. You believe that Lenu can get into their heads, just like she can get into Lila’s. Obviously if all you want is dude stuff, you won’t find it here, but there’s plenty of dude stuff!

3. Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In most quarters this would have been my favorite book. It’s still really good!

2. The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever

This book has sixty-one short stories in it and weighs in at 693 pages and about 600 pages of it are some of my favorite short stories in the English language and maybe the next fifty are very good.

"The Swimmer" or "The Enormous Radio" are anthologized everywhere, but he has seven or eight similar stories in this Pulitzer Prize winning collection that are nearly as good. Cheever is not just the poet of Connecticut. He's a chronicler of the post-war American species: newly rich, desperately happy, nearly always drunk. He loves the denizens of New York City a lot, but he loves the salaryman who knows his job (usually in advertising) in New York City is unimportant and his Connecticut house is nouveau riche and his commute on the train every day is too long the most. One version of this man also travels to Italy occasionally, where he only finds himself among the wreckage of a world that's older and poorer and realer than anything an American can summon up.

Other short story collections fade off, but Cheever's doesn't. One reason is that this collection isn't strictly chronological; he hides the weaker stories ("A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear, ""Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin," "The Geometry of Love") by placing them next to extremely strong ones ("Boy in Rome," "Metamorphoses," "The Swimmer"). The other advantage he has is that "A Miscellany" is the ~fortieth story in the collection. Nearly two-thirds of these stories are from the late 1940s through the 1950s, and there's not a single bad one. His output falls off in the 1960's, and the culprit seems pretty clear: all of these stories feel like they were written and edited by someone who was hungover the whole time, and drinking that much eventually breaks your brain.

1. Every Man Dies Alone, Hans Fallada

I definitely see the biographical fallacy as a profound problem, especially in the era of wan little husks of auto fiction, but Hans Fallada's teenage death pact with his friend Hanns Dietrich von Necker and his subsequent stints in sanitoriums throughout his life definitely help to explain some of the preoccupations of this novel: sexual deviance, pastoral purity hiding savagery, mental illness, and the grinding wheels of bureaucracy. In other words, this is a much weirder book than you might expect from the simplest synopsis: semi-famous German writer doesn't leave Germany during Nazism, writes ~600 page novel in a month-long burst of creativity about ordinary Germans trying to resist Nazism after war ends as an apology for his complicity in the regime, novel becomes famous after he kills himself probably because of his guilt about the regime and his suspicion that writing this novel won’t actually make him feel better.

This novel reads in that propulsive way that it must have been written, but it's not sloppy and the guilt that Fallada felt after WWII is subsumed into the writing: it’s not overly self-conscious. Fallada was able see through the way that Nazis promised a normal, happy life for all good Aryans, through to the rotten heart of fascism. He (thankfully) isn't asking for absolution for his role in supporting the regime by staying in Germany instead of leaving. Whether or not Fallada should have left Germany is the kind of question that Americans could have asked themselves many times since WWII. We've lived in a country that murders people all over the world (and in our own country) in the name of an nationalism that picks and chooses some lives for abjection. Who am I to ask Fallada to leave when I'd never leave the United States during Trump II, even if things got much worse than they’ve already gotten?

I loved Little Man, What Now?, which made Fallada semi-famous before WWII and which I bought at a bookstore in Berlin and read while I was there, and I thought this might have more of that book's warm, semi-comic tone. There are a few scenes here (mostly in the German countryside) that do have it. But the Holocaust makes comedy kind of impossible.

Immorality under fascism is banal. Small courage is still courage. Everything in German society was headed towards death, either by suicide or by genocide. "Heil Hitler" lurks under every surface (like MAGA). Being a Nazi (like being a Republican) is a blanket immunity from any immorality, because it puts the party member on the right side of history and justifies the cruelty, the corruption, and the censorship.
Fallada doesn't write any of the Nazis or Gestapo members as sympathetic, because they're not. He doesn't portray any of the members of the resistance as actually effective, because they weren't. But life does go on despite these these realities. As the bombs begin to drop on Berlin, I didn't think, well, at least some Nazis died. I thought: this book will be ending soon, and it could have been a hundred pages longer, and I would have still loved it just as much.