Tag Archives: literature

Find somebody who wants to be brainburned and use him, Pohl & Kornbluth, The Space Merchants

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Venus

“I say, ‘Find somebody who wants to be brainburned and use him.’ ” 101

The greatness of an artist is in his simplicity, Courtenay. You say to me: ‘Nobody wants to be brainburned.’ That is because you are mediocre. I say, ‘Find somebody who wants to be brainburned and use him.’ That is because I am great.

Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants, Chapter 11, 101.

The Space Merchants is some kind of rollercoaster thriller that reminds me of no book more than the Alfred Bester classic The Demolished Man. Except that the sense of peril in that sci-fi thriller is replaced by the breathtaking cynicism of The Space Merchants. Reading this mid–20th Century novel today, in 2013, I couldn’t help feeling that in the world of The Space Merchants, we are all totally screwed.

I read the book quickly, but it rewards quick reading; the Walker and Company edition of 1969 that I borrowed from the local dusty library wraps up at 158 pages, so you can finish it as I did in a single evening.

The above quote is probably not the most representative in the book, but what it does represent to me is the rainforest-like lushness of the book’s conceit, that if ad executives ran the world, the human race would be more miserable and more deluded than at any time in the past. The solipsism, clichéd phrasing, and instrumentality evident in the 43 words are what make me labor over describing The Space Merchants on this blog.

“The saddest thing in the world? A broken violin.”—Frédéric Dard, Le bourreau pleure

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‘L’objet le plus triste du monde ? Je crois que c’est un violon brisé. En tout cas, c’est la vue de la boîte à violon écrasée sur la route, avec les cordes de l’instrument s’en échappant, qui m’a le plus serré le cœur. Elle symbolisait l’accident plus encore que la jeune femme étendue en bordure du fosse, les doigts griffant la terre sèche et les jupes relevées sur des cuisses admirables.’

“The saddest thing in the world? I think it’s a broken violin. Certainly, seeing the violin case smashed on the roadway, with the instrument’s strings coming out, is what touched my heart most. It said ACCIDENT more strongly than the young woman stretched out on the side of the ditch, her fingers scratching the dry earth and her dress flopped up to show off her admirable thighs.”

— Frédéric Dard, Le bourreau pleure

What a rare treat it is to pick a book in a foreign language at random from a shelf in a friend’s mother-in-law’s home and read a first sentence like that one. I immediately asked to borrow it and finished the book on the bus ride home. (or The Executioner Cries) is from 1956, and reads like Jim Thompson’s The Getaway, set in Spain.

On a languorous Spanish vacation, the narrator runs over this girl, then fetches her back to his hotel. She recovers quickly from the accident. She turns out, however, to be amnesiac and can’t remember her name, who she is, or what she was doing in Spain, since she speaks French like a native. The narrator promptly falls in love with her and vice versa. Who is she? He traces her through the labels of her clothes to a suburb of Paris, discovers her identity and her past, and then, in best Thompson fashion, exits his own relatively conventional life to join her in the kind of twisted existential misery that could sour you permanently on the notion of “following your heart.”

On a cursory check, I don’t see Le bourreau pleure ever having been translated into English. Dard is best known for his San-Antonio series of spy novels, but this one also is still in print, fifty years after initial publication.

Fortuitously, I recently read this intriguing guide to how to write a novel in a weekend, authored by the legendary Michael Moorcock, famous for his Elric of Melniboné sword-and-sorcery novels and his bizarre and genre-defying Jerry Cornelius novels. Having last picked up a Moorcock when I was in high school, back in the 20th Century, I recall them as being completely impossible to understand or remember after having read, but lots of books are like that to me (a reason why I have such trouble working on this blog; imagine finding books to care about, week after week). Still, you have to give the fellow credit for figuring out a pretty simple formula for novel-writing.

The entire way through the Dard book, I am thinking of how it pretty much fits the model of the Lester Dent master pulp-novel formula, which Moorcock lovingly describes. You could call Bourreau formulaic, with the proviso that Dard uses the formula to the same frightening effect that Thompson did. Take the novel as a metaphor for life. Then reduce the novel to a formula, as in classic Lester-Dent pulp fiction. That’s life as we live it, most of us, according to a formula: one cup oatmeal, three cups coffee, and $2.25 for the subway to work.

Dard’s couple ends up fleeing to a broken-down old house outside an anonymous Spanish town, in a setting that resembles a Krazy Kat comic strip:

The loneliness of the place had something depressing about it. It didn’t exactly resemble Spain; rather it was like the Australian desert, something flat and infinite, with low, flat, black trees. Whose idea was it to have built such a tumbledown house in this desolate spot?…At that moment, I couldn’t stop thinking that if Hell existed, it would resemble where I was now living.

My question is this: who is really living in Hell, the character or the reader? Bourreau comes to its conclusion too soon afterward for the answer to be resolved.

“When we have the money, it’s right back on this road again”—Mr. Slaughter, R McCammon

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‘Now don’t think I have the slightest intention of letting him go,’ Greathouse said. ‘That would be a crime against humanity. But listen, Matthew: we can make him believe we’re in accord, and then when we have the money, it’s right back on this road again, across the river and on to put him behind bars. What do you say?’

—Mister Slaughter, Robert McCammon, Part II, Chapter 9

Idiot! Of course you say, “No!” Stop! STOP! Of course, he’ll say “OK” (or something less anachronistic).

Of course, this is where the book really starts. All 121 pages previous were just back-story, introducing the characters. Here’s where the protagonists make their choice to let out the insanity that the rest of the book—a serial-killer thriller set in Colonial New York—must by rights encompass. Why the author didn’t start right here, I don’t know. That would have made some kind of sense.

Did people say “crime against humanity” in 1702?

“The heavy breath of old unpolished teak, the freckled edges of the old mirrors, the lime-choked cisterns, and the chipped ceramic.” Sunetra Gupta, A Sin of Color

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‘I like a bit of dust,’ he replied, regretting that he had spoken so harshly to her, when she meant so well. But taking the frame from her hands, he saw that she has simply rubbed the dust into the corners; the effect was to him somehow obscene. And in that moment, he realized that he would rather that his whole life were left exactly as it was in that moment of terrible beauty when he realized that he loved her as he would never love any other woman, his brother’s wife, Reba. For since then, he had taken comfort in any form of desuetude: the heavy breath of old unpolished teak, the freckled edges of the old mirrors, the lime-choked cisterns, and the chipped ceramic. Decay had become nectar to Debendranath Roy on the day that he discovered that he loved his brother’s wife.

Once a mouse running over her bare feet had caused her to shudder so violently that Debendranath Roy had been crushed by the lushness of her displeasure.

The hot August nights stamped through her like herds of panting buffalo, and she woke feeling more drained and tired than when she had come to bed, dreading the rest of the day.

—Sunetra Gupta, A Sin of Color, Chapters One and Two

The story can’t help but emerge as if from a thicket, dappled with all kinds of turns of phrase, like the ones above. A Sin of Color is one of the more absurd books I’ve read lately but its absurdity, rather, the absurdity of the events which take place, is seen and raised by the vivid quality of its language and the light-filled way that the author approaches her characters. Have you ever wondered what happened to all those colorful characters who used to inhabit great literature of the past, like Bleak House and Tristram Shandy? Sunetra Gupta has found a couple and set them loose in this book.

What would you do if your uncle returned to the family manse after you had spent 20 years believing that he had drowned himself? The book I read before this one, Hari Kunzru’s Transmission, was also about failure, but many types of failure: systems failure, personal failure, failure to connect. A Sin of Color is about a kind of personal failure, as incarnated in the uncle, Debendranath Roy.

It’s Debendranath Roy’s unrequited love affair with his sister-in-law (see second quote, above) that makes sense of the whole situation. As illustrated in the first quote, it’s the kind of love whose existence makes everything else nonexistent, like an overly fatty candle throwing off sparks in a very dark room.

There is no game but golf and Al-Rahman is its prophet- Kunzru, Transmission

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‘Please,’ said Mr. Al-Rahman, when they finally caught up with him, ‘explain to me clearly what you can do for my business.’

‘Right,’ said Guy, trying to concentrate. ‘A question for you, sir. Do you think your employees are living the Al-Rahman brand in a holistic way? What does Al-Rahman actually stand for?’

‘We are a very old family, Mr. Swift.’

‘Sure, sure. But you know, at the moment Al-Rahman stands for—well, for golf. And that’s it. Golf is great, don’t get me wrong. But is it really something your people can get behind? At Tomorrow*, my team came up with a kind of banner heading about where we feel your company is at now. We think of you as “the faithful.” We have this great animation for the concept. You see this guy hitting a hole in one and it says in, like, your traditional Arabic calligraphy style, “There is no game but golf and Al-Rahman is its prophet.” ‘

There was a silence. Guy tried to fill it.

—Hari Kunzru, Transmission, page 171 of 2004 hardcover edition

For a book about failure in multiple dimensions, Transmission is kind of a success to read.

“Her worldliness applied to a very narrow band of the world,” Zoe Heller, The Believers

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via es.wikipedia.org

Rosa had some cause to regard herself as a worldly woman. As a child, she had broken bread with Daniel Ortega and sung freedom songs with ANC activists in Soweto and played softball with Abbie Hoffman. By the age of eighteen, she had seen both her parents arrested for acts of civil disobedience and had twice been arrested herself. Yet, in truth, her worldliness applied to a very narrow band of the world, and there were large areas of ordinary American life about which her impeccably progressive, internationalist upbringing had left her astonishingly ignorant. Until a year ago when she had answered Jane’s ad for a roommate on craigslist, her contact with bouncy, suburban American young women for whom cuddly toys were a meaningful expression of adult love had been negligible. And even now, twelve months later, most things about Jane—from the ‘Best Daughter in the World’ certificate hanging on her wall and the dog-eared library of Chicken Soup books lining her Pier One bookshelf to the holiday cookies she baked for Eric and the thrice-weekly, hour-long phone conversations she had with her concerned parents in Fort Lauderdale—posed an appalling anthropological mystery for Rosa. She approached all their interactions in the wary, squeamish manner of a schoolchild dissecting a frog.Happily, Jane’s natural obtuseness, enhanced by years of self-esteem training, had saved her from taking offense. Insofar as she noticed Rosa’s froideur at all, she attributed it to social awkwardness. Rosa, she had decided, was a shy girl, who needed bringing out of herself.

—Zoë Heller, The Believers, Chapter 12

“Opposites attract,” goes the cliché, but in the Hellerverse, opposites repel. In fact, everything repels; I’ve rarely read a book with so many unlikeable characters as The Believers. In this quote, Rosa, the daughter who has come home to New York after four years living in Cuba, expresses her bemusement about her roommate Jane, who works in public relations at Tiffany’s. Having once worked as a temp in a luxury-goods emporium, I am certainly ready to credit Jane with all the vapidity and inanity that Heller can muster. But the passage suffers from a lack of fixed references. The observation that someone with the certain kind of “worldly” background that Rosa has does not understand Jane doesn’t give the reader any particular insight into Jane.

On the face of it, I like the idea of a story about a woman like Rosa, a woman who has just come back from four years in Cuba in a state of disillusionment about the revolution, a woman who is living in a rented, underfurnished room in New York, watching her father spending six months dying in a hospital bed. I’m sympathetic to stories about women who have underfurnished rooms. Having read it through, however, I don’t think The Believers is that book.

It begins with a house. « Picture Book Report

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via picturebookreport.com

This drawing is so much more evocative than the painfully literal movie version.

“A face that seemed so sturdy as to defy even the devastating pickax of misery,” Balzac

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…Godefroid examined [the stranger] closely and was surprised at his exceptional thinness, no doubt caused by sorrow, and perhaps hunger, and very likely hard work. Each of these debilitating forces had left its mark on that face, whose withered skin clung tightly to the bones, as if baked by the fires of Africa. His high, looming forehead sheltered two steel blue eyes beneath its cupola, eyes as cold, hard, wise, and penetrating as the eyes of the savages but marred by two deep and very wrinkled dark circles. His long slender nose and proudly raised chin gave the old man a certain resemblance to the popular image of Don Quixote, but this was the face of a cruel Don Quixote, a Don Quixote without illusions, Don Quixote as a formidable figure.

In spite of this severity, the old man could not entirely conceal the fear and frailty that indigence confers on all its victims. These two afflictions had created something like cracks in a face that seemed so sturdy as to defy even the devastating pickax of misery. His mouth was eloquent and serious. Don Quixote was complicated by the President de Montesquieu.

 

Le grand vieillard hésitait à répondre; il voyait venir Mme. Vauthier; mais Godefroid, qui l’examinait attentivement, fut surpris du degré de maigreur auquel les chagrins, la faim peut-être, peut-être le travail, l’avaient fait arriver; il y avait trace de toutes ces causes d’affaiblissement sur cette figure, où la peau desséchée se collait avec ardeur sur les os, comme si elle avait été exposée aux feux de l’Afrique. Le front, haut et d’un aspect menaçant, abritait sous sa coupole deux yeux d’un bleu d’acier, deux yeux froids, durs, sagaces et perspicaces comme ceux des sauvages, mais meurtris par un profond cercle noir très ridé. Le nez, grand, long et mince, et le menton, très relevé, donnaient à ce vieillard une ressemblance avec le masque si connu, si populaire attribué à don Quichotte; mais c’était don Quichotte méchant, sans illusions, un don Quichotte terrible.

Ce vieillard, malgré cette sévérité générale, laissait percer la crainte et la faiblesse que prête l’indigence à tous les malheureux. Ces deux sentiments produisaient comme des lézardes dans cette face construite si solidement que le pic dévastateur de la misère semblait s’y ébrécher. La bouche était éloquente et sérieuse. Don Quichotte se compliquait du président de Montesquieu.

—Balzac, The Wrong Side of Paris (L’envers de l’histoire contemporaine), Part II, Chapter 3, translated by Jordan Stump

Do we still see our fellows in the same detailed way? I wonder if this kind of descriptive language, this way of introducing a character, still exists in the language of the present day. I know that it’s often easier to look for a shorthand metaphor, a kind of picture-word that’s worth at least five hundred other words; I’m thinking of this kind of description in particular:

The headmistress was a tall, slim woman who looked a little like Charles de Gaulle.

To me Balzac’s description reeks of the past, of a different way of looking at people, of close examination of appearance as a way to better understanding of character. This kind of quote takes those old saws about how “suffering was written on his face” and walks the reader through one such face: M. Bernard’s thinness as the result of hard work and sorrow and hunger, the forehead-as-cupola, the steely blue eyes, and the reference to popular views of Don Quixote.

The larger question is this: do people even look like M. Bernard any more, especially in novels?

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picture via flickr.com

“The sky is going all slatey like in a painting people say is important,” Terese Svoboda

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via flickr.com

The father comes up behind him. Furthest away the mother halts. They look up. The sky is going all slatey like in a painting people say is important. In the second they take to glance up, the rocketship retracts its legs and tail and plays dead.

—Terese Svoboda, “Leadership”

The best of Terese Svoboda’s words read themselves in your head like hearing a Steve Lacy line, perhaps from Only Monk, his solo recordings of Thelonious Monk compositions, all tight and ropy and in a single strand encompassing melody and harmony both, such as it is. They are quick and expressive and in every story in her collection Trailer Girl there is something strange, something you could call “modal” that comes about, like changing the harmonic structure of the story while the melody plays on, like listening to something new emerging out of the swamp off in the distance.

In “Leadership,” there’s a family: mom, dad, son. There’s also a rocket ship that lands on their lawn. Read the quote above, and see how in less than 30 words she’s drawn an entire poster in the Constructivist style, complete with dramatic lighting and a family unit.

Reduced rent was what the parlor floor got in exchange for letting everyone in the building roll through their window onto their bed, where they liked the light, though everyone entered snow-dusted or iced, and at any hour, often with them in it.

—Terese Svoboda, “Cave Life”

Though the sentence starts out practically and rationally to discuss household economy, the writer switches on the absurd lamp after the first clause. Then, there’s a nifty chiasmus, xy-yx, that tells you as much about the people who live on the parlor floor as their housemates. The elaborate construction, which seems to strand the phrases “they liked the light” and “with them in it” on their own little inaccessible semantic islands, signifies that something is bound to happen in the house, if only to resolve the tensions Ms. Svoboda has created in this single sentence.

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‘I’ll put them to fast for nine days with a sprig of thyme, then clean them till they spit with vinegar and salt,’ Derek Raymond, He Died With His Eyes Open

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via flickr.com

 

But this cold will pass. The woodlice will come out of the walls again with the spring rain; the snails will sail slowly through the young weeds on the path. There will be warm, wet mornings dark with cloud, and I’ll be out with my plastic bag and a stick to get a free dinner of snails, the petit gris. I’ll put them to fast for nine days with a sprig of thyme, then clean them till they spit with vinegar and salt, boil them out of their shells and cut the shit off them, then do a cold garlic butter with parsley and eat them off the special plates that Margo bought in the market. I shall eat them by candlelight and pretend it’s a dinner party. [Derek Raymond, He Died With His Eyes Open, Chapter 17]

…I soon found number eighteen; it was the door that banged in the dark wind and had a pile of costermongers’ garbage three feet high beside it. The door banged because it didn’t lock, and it didn’t lock because the traders used the street-level passageway for parking their barrows and empty crates. I stood at the foot of the stairs in the gloom for a minute, then got my flashlight out—where would anybody be in modern London without one? I looked for a push button to light the cement stairs that yawned in front of me; there was one, but it didn’t work. On the inside of the street door was a wire basket full of mail. It looked like disagreeable mail, the kind that arrives in buff envelopes, and evidently nobody ever read it, because it looked as if it had been there a long time. [Chapter 20]

‘But you weren’t prepared to try the famous knack on anybody else, were you? No, because anyone with any balls would have told you to fuck off, and you’d have burst into tears, just like you’re about to do with me. You’re like a sinister little boy, Eric; every time the beastly horrid sand-castle falls in you burst out crying and try and kick someone smaller than you are. I bet you think of yourself as the detritus of your society—it’s a good excuse for a wallow in self-pity. But all you are, Eric, is just a wanker.’ [Chapter 20]

I’m still working my way through Derek Raymond’s He Died With His Eyes Open, but I had to post these three, coming so closely on top of one another (all three within 20 pages) as they did, and each one so perfect in its own way. I’d unexpectedly come upon this Derek Raymond book at a different branch library, so after the week before last’s pleasure at reading How The Dead Live, I couldn’t leave it be but had to borrow it.

Aux escargots! To the first passage we go. How do you tell a poor man? He’s someone who can’t afford a long word. Out of the 128 words I’ve quoted, there’s only two of three or more syllables: vinegar and candlelight. It’s not the book’s narrator who’s talking, it’s the victim, quoted speaking on an audio tape he left behind. A regular clue.

But the only clue you get out of this passage is how exquisitely close his life is to the bone of subsistence, and yet how much pleasure he derives out of the search for nourishment. Even though his life (as described earlier in the chapter) has been reduced to cycling through one punishing task after another in order to ward off complete destitution, he still envisions waiting more than a week to completely prepare for a nice dinner. It’s left for the reader to decide whether he would actually let the little gastropods alone for nine days, or just skewer and roast them that first spring evening.

The second quote is delivered by the book’s nameless protagonist, a police officer (naturally). Describing the desolation of a squat through the mail that it receives is a stroke of genius, and to me a peculiarly English one; I can’t imagine Bill Pronzini’s nameless San Francisco detective nailing the exact color of envelope that “disagreeable mail” comes in, but the descriptor evokes for me both the desperation of the departed tenants to whom the mail is addressed, as well as the liberation of the current crop of squatters living there, who pay no attention to the mail basket because their names aren’t known to creditors, yet.

And the third quote I tossed in because you’re like me, and you always wondered what exactly a “wanker” was. Now we know, right?
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