Hiatus #3

Recently a friend of mine wrote me a message saying, "No Flying Houses in 2 months? What gives?"

Actually, it's only been about 45 days, but yeah, nothing since the big news about Mr. Salinger. In a sense, I have not added anything because I believe he deserved to be the top story on this blog for a long time.

But there is a more obvious reason--after The Magic Mountain hiatus, and then the Ulysses hiatus, we now have the Ada hiatus. Ada is about 600 pages long, shorter than the other two, but there have been other elements causing this delay: a 5 day trip to L.A., a 5 day trip to New York (occurring in 8 days), a 5 day stint of playing independent homeowner, an upcoming 9 day stint of playing independent homeowner, and law school research/decision-making--so almost half the time I have been busy (though it's not like I don't read on the airplane)--and besides that, I've been at work, and behaving in all sorts of ill-advised ways in my free time.

I am also working on novel #3 (book #5)--we are 9,000 words into it--and I hope to finish the majority by August.

I did pick up Kafka's Amerika while in L.A. and briefly considered reviewing that before Ada, but I only got through 20 pages and feel that the first review of Kafka on Flying Houses should be a more momentous occasion (i.e. not quickly thrown together while another half-finished book lies in state).

In summary, please forgive this lack of activity. One day maybe someone will pay me to blog and they can collect all the posts and put them in a book like "Stuff White People Like" and then I won't have to go on hiatus because this will be my primary means of income, not restaurant work. (cue Wayne's World line: cccchhhyeah! and monkeys might start flying out of my butt!)

The Original of Laura - Vladimir Nabokov

If The Original of Laura were as great as Knopf would like everyone to believe, then I would have read about it before last September, or October, or whenever, when I read that Wall Street Journal article about "Ghost Writers" and new books by Kurt Vonnegut, Nabokov, and Ralph Ellison.

I love Nabokov; I am one of his biggest fans. But it was a mistake to read The Original of Laura before the majority of his other work. Oh, I have tackled Lolita three times, Pale Fire once, Speak, Memory once, Bend Sinister twice, Laughter in the Dark once, Despair once, Pnin once, and several of his short stories out of the sixty-five in the collection I have of his--but Ada looms as the final masterpiece that I have yet to digest--and it will be soon.

But still, even with Ada sitting on my shelf, there are so many others remaining: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Invitation to a Beheading, The Defense (which seems boring--if it is about chess...), The Eye, Look at the Harlequins!, King, Queen, Knave, Transparent Things, and I am probably forgetting one or two others. I bet all of these are far superior to Laura, and yet it is Laura which will receive far more attention than anything he has done since Lolita.

Why is Laura such a hot topic? Well, it's the myth surrounding it, but let me clear something up, probably the only time I feel like I am being a good samaritan since my review of the Times New Viking album back when this blog started--this is more of an arts and crafts/board game "Let's Play Author!" than a real novel. When I checked it out from the library, I was like, whoa, that's thick. Some 270 pages, not a slight novel in the least--but there is all that talk about index cards, and how there are only 120 or so, and that comprises all of the text....

Okay, so the edition is beautiful, credit where credit is due. It goes for $35.00 and I would be shocked if they print this in paperback. It's the index cards that represent the majority of the publishing costs--they are lovingly re-created, and anyone interested in Nabokov's handwriting will love it.

But it was one of the most bizarre reading experiences of my life--every two pages would not contain even a whole paragraph. As if this weren't annoying enough, almost half the time, the next index card poses no resemblance to the previous one, which means the story has almost zero continuity.

Well, here is the myth that surrounds this volume and accounts for its popularity--Nabokov revivalism. Probably around the 30th anniversary of his death, his son Dmitri must have decided that it would be a good time to put a different sort of book into the marketplace. Basically, Vladimir was working on this at the time of his death, and he told his wife to burn the index cards if he never completed it. Well, she didn't, and years later, Dmitri decided it should be published, despite intimations from the man himself that the work was not up to code.

Dmitri's introduction to the volume is probably the best thing about it, because you get about five or six pages of memories of Vladimir, as he neared death, and it is quite alluring, for example, to read about how he once collapsed while hunting for butterflies, and his cries for help were laughed at by passerby. But Dmitri compares himself to Max Brod, publishing Metamorphosis and The Trial after Kafka's death, though Kafka instructed him to burn them. The Original of Laura is not Metamorphosis. No. Fucking. Way.

What is Laura about? Well, it seems to me to be a highly self-conscious (which makes it seem interesting for Nabokov lovers, but really it's not so much) meditation on being a novelist in love who has published a thinly-veiled story about a girl named Flora titled Laura--the novelist Philip Wild's wife--and Wild is dying, and while in the hospital, he methodically imagines each of his bodily appendages and organs being removed, which becomes a kind of ecstasy to him. That is it.

Now, some passages are pretty good, but they are never attached to anything else to make them stand out as "great." This is not a great novel, or even a good novel, or even a bad novel. It is not a novel. It is supposedly "a novel in fragments," and in the introduction Dmitri states that "despite its incompleteness, was unprecedented in structure and style," (xvii) and maybe I'm not reading closely enough, but it hardly seems like Nabokov intended for so many of these index cards to abruptly cut and move on to something completely unrelated.

If Nabokov had lived another year or so, Laura might have germinated into something truly wondrous, a volume that could fit alongside his absolute best work. It is true that the basic story could have been a winner. But I am sorry, I feel bad saying this because I want to like this book, and I like Dmitri--his writing style is clever enough as it is--but I really feel that Vladimir's wishes should have been respected.

Take out the index cards, shuffle them as the author probably did, read them aloud at a dinner party, and laugh about how "dying is fun." But don't expect to read a real novel. Here's looking forward to Ada, and another entry in the "most difficult books to read reviewed on Flying Houses" category.

Doctor Faustus - Thomas Mann

As far as reviews go, I feel it is appropriate to mention that a critic's knowledge of an artist's entire oeuvre is certainly indispensable when situating a work in a greater context. In the case of Thomas Mann, I have yet to read (and I greatly look forward to) The Buddenbrooks, or The Magic Mountain, or The Confessions of Felix Krull, or "Mario and the Magician," but I have read a collection of his early short stories and I did read Doctor Faustus, which is more than you can say for the vast majority of this current American populace. Little does it matter that Mann composed Faustus in California in the mid 1940's after escaping Nazi Germany. What Americans read German authors, even if they are amongst the all-time greatest, and only removed little more than a hundred years from Generation Y2K? Ambitious, literary Americans will embrace a Fitzgerald, a Hemingway, a Salinger, and they may even be brave enough to embrace a Kafka, but Mann is in different territory. To be sure, Kafka is far more famous, but to be sure, Mann is far more decorated. The Magic Mountain earned him the Nobel Prize when he was 54 years old. Faustus was published shortly after his 70th birthday. After reading only 750 pages or so of Mann's prose, I feel compelled to review his final book, so excited (and intimidated) I am to move forward into the rest of his oeuvre. I plan to read The Buddenbrooks next, immediately upon completion of my second novel, and to finish it before I begin my third. If you do not already realize that Mann has seriously changed the way I thought about writing, then you probably do not understand why I am writing anything at all in the first place.

I have read that Dr. Faustus was originally conceived as a short story, and then expanded into the 530 page epic it became. I have also read that in the first sentence of the novel, Thomas Mann meant to be providing a parody of his general syntax. Regardless of its parodic elements, I read the first chapter in a bookstore in Nantucket and decided that I must at once own this paperback novel. I would not finish reading it for another six or seven months, but once I made it through the 200th page, nothing else seemed to matter except finishing the book to see how it would end. And what an ending!

The novel concerns one Dr. Serenus Zeitblom, who has been moved in his elderly age to write a biography of his lifelong (and long deceased) friend, Adrian Leverkuhn, the famous German composer. The first 200 pages describe their early years together, and goes to great lengths to emphasize the importance of one of their instructors, Kretzschmar, apparently very influential to the young Leverkuhn. The beginning is extremely difficult because it often dissolves into lengthy discussions by the youthful characters on philosophy and Nationalism. Whether this sort of dialogue is believable or not, I cannot tell, but one thing for sure that I know is that people today are about one hundred times stupider than any single one of the many intimately-felt characters in this novel. I mean that they are incapable of communicating on the level of these characters. To look back on Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and consider the philosophical discussions in that text is to witness a century of reduction happening by a mere 20 years difference in age, and a different country in the midst of prosperity, as opposed to another country building towards a terrible climax.

As soon as Leverkuhn finishes his studies and begins living in boarding houses and going around with his new friend Rudolf Schildknapp, the novel begins to pick up and the scenes seem more carefully chosen. By the last 150 pages, barely anything is contained that is not absolutely essential and revelatory. In the first chapter, Zeitblom briefly mentions genius, and attempts to come up with a tidy definition of it. As the novel evolves, genius becomes its principle theme, and to get to the heart of why I find this book so essential, so classic, so deserving of canonization, to read Thomas Mann's reflections on genius is to sit before someone you can actually believe rather than thinking them boring and pointless. Genius may go unnoticed by peers and genius may be good for little in this age of great technological equalization (not!), but it still requires genius to be a successful artist, and Mann's portrait of Leverkuhn, as special a circumstance as it may be, gives one hope that greatness is not unreachable so long as all the elements are in their appropriate place.

Notable is Zeitblom's self-consciousness as a narrator. I do enjoy his digressions about how hard the book is to write, and about how he has been unfair to the reader by making some chapters too long, and his musings on the present condition of his home-state, which are obviously, chaotic and dismissive. The way he sets up the reader for what they are about to see is not only hilarious, but also very accomodating for all future readers of his, because these are really the only parts that don't require a degree to begin to understand. That said, most of the general plot of the novel is also rather simple--it is in the intricacies of Mann's language that most readers will be left in the dust.

Consider Chapter XXV, which Zeitblom opens up bombastically, stating that now, in this important 25th chapter, he will reveal Adrian's secret manuscript which he has kept concealed from the reader until the appropriate time. (It may be important for me to note that I have not read Goethe's or Marlowe's version of the same fable, and those familiar with it will intuit what the 25th chapter contains). Zeitblom exits as narrator, and Leverkuhn takes the reader on a 30 page fevered-dream/vision/hallucination which will directly lead to his artistic dominance over the following twenty-four years of his life. What Adrian must give up is not only his soul, but also the ability to love anyone else.

The final requirement of his agreement becomes responsible for arguably the most beautiful sections of the book. He begins courting one Inez Rodde, through the violinist friend of his Rudi Schwerdtfeger, and becomes part of a circle of artists, intellectuals, and bourgeois dilletantes interested in the pose of appreciating art. My personal favorite character is Frau Knoterich, who, besides sharing the same suffix as my surname, is a morphine addict who eventually converts her entire circle of friends to that same illicit practice. Mann's brief description of her practices in the throes of addiction alone show the kind of sensitive detail that all too many modern novelists would shelve in favor of shock value. But to return from the digression, the ending is arguably one of the saddest and most beautiful in all of literature.

It begins with the entrance of Neppo (or "Echo" as he calls himself), Adrian's four-year-old nephew who stays with him and becomes a cherished object to him and everyone that meets him. A tragedy slowly develops, and Adrian's exclamation to Zeitblom after everything has happened remains the only time I can recall that he shows any sort of emotion whatsoever. The effect is undeniable to any reader adventerous enough to stick with Mann through all the seemingly boring episodes of Adrian's sheltered emotional life. I wanted to cry, and I still want to cry when I think about that exclamation.

But the book would have no ending without the presentation of Leverkuhn's final symphony, the eponymously-referential "Lamentation of Dr. Faustus," which Zeitblom believes is his greatest work to date. Adrian invites all of his friends, nearly every major character in the novel to appear, to his home for the presentation of this magnum opus, and he "makes a scene," to put it simply. I tried to tell a friend of mine what happened in the scene but he stopped me, saying he didn't want me to ruin it for him. Yes, I do not want to ruin it for anyone, but it is such a good ending! It is hilarious, it is horrible, and it is totally perfectly the way the novel should end.

But it goes on even another chapter, to describe the circumstances of Adrian's later life. This too, must not be ruined, but I must admit I was suprised to see it continue on the way it did. Regardless, the final page of the novel was excellent, and Mann doesn't finish before he gets in his final word about Germany, which, considering the timing of the novel, seems rather accurate, but in hindsight, appears rather extreme, though not without its obvious point. On the back of the novel, the publisher states that Adrian's rise mirrors that of the Third Reich in Germany, but honestly I could not see the parallels, except for Zeitblom's personal musings on the status quo.

There are few times one has to read for absolute pleasure anymore, and while an ordinary reader may not derive much pleasure from the beginning of Dr. Faustus, if they are able to stick with it, to see the value in it, they will be vastly rewarded upon completing it (and perhaps may be forfeiting more than they realize).