| 6/27/16 Most of us remember Maupassant from his short stories such as 'A piece of string', with vivid descriptions of social pressures and human foibles. Bel Ami reminds us that his novels gave both a portrait of life in 19th century France but also insight into some more lasting themes in human nature. It is the story of Georges Duroy, a penniless ex-soldier who has come to seek his fortune in Paris after serving in Africa. By chance he meets a friend who is now a journalist, and who invites him to write a piece on 'Souvenirs of a solider in Africa'. It turns out that the friend's wife is the more talented writer in the family. Georges, who has little skill in writing, ultimately gets her help in putting it together and wins a place on the newspaper. We watch his skill develop in using others, both professionally and sexually (sometimes with the same person). In both realms, he has no regard for the other person. When seducing the wife of his boss, she murmured "I swear that I have never had a lover"; while he thought: "That is a matter of indifference to me." Ultimately, he runs away with the woman's daughter, and the distraught parents feel bound to allow them to marry to save the girl's honor. At the ceremony he spies yet another previous mistress in the audience, and wants her as well: 'Suddenly he saw Mme. de Marelle, and the recollection of all the kisses he had given her and which she had returned, of all their caresses, of the sound of her voice, possessed him with the mad desire to regain her. She was so pretty, with her bright eyes and roguish air!' He is now rich, professionally successful, and the husband of a beautiful young heiress. As Maupassant puts it, 'The people of Paris envied him. Raising his eyes, he saw beyond the Place de la Concorde, the chamber of deputies, and it seemed to him that it was only a stone's throw from the portico of the Madeleine to that of the Palais Bourbon.' Bel Ami describes what we would probably now call a sociopath. It is a reminder that people without conscience, who use others without remorse or guilt, are not confined to the criminal class, but are often quite successful. It may be some consolation that this success is usually limited to the outer world, and that inside they are driven by a hunger that can never be sated. |
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6/14/16
Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry's 1947 novel, has received some pretty hefty praise, considered by the Modern Library to be among the best English language novels of the 20th century, and described by one reviewer as 'one of the most powerful and lyrical statements on the human condition'. Set in 1938 in an imaginary mountain village in Mexico overlooked by two towering volcanoes, it is the story of one day in the life (and death) of the alcoholic ex-British consul Geoffrey Firmin. The Consul (and he is usually referred to in the book) has a checkered past, having been a naval officer on board a heavily armed ship disguised as a freighter, which the British used to entrap German submarines. It seems that the captured German officers had been thrown alive into the ship's boilers (one of the first of many references in the book to Hades), and Geoffrey was court-martialed, later exonerated and moved into the consular service in a remote location to get him out of sight. Geoffrey's wife Yvonne had left for the US a year earlier, and has now come back, hoping to patch up their marriage. She inadvertently arrives during the Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead. He is cold to her; it turns out she had been unfaithful to him, and for a year has been expressing her remorse in multiple letters, to which he has never responded. On this day he remains very unresponsive, continues to drink heavily, and ultimately dies in a drunken altercation with some apparently corrupt policemen. Under the Volcano has a progressive theme involving Hades, and at one point we learn that the ancients believed that Tartarus was located under the volcanic Mt. Aetna. Geoffrey likens himself sometimes to Dr. Faustus as well. He is deaf to Yvonne's entreaties, as he was to her plaintive letters (”Surely you must have thought a great deal of us, of what we built together, of how mindlessly we destroyed the structure and the beauty but yet could not destroy the memory of that beauty.") One does not get the sense of anger, but rather of self-absorption and self-destructiveness on the Geoffrey's part. This book has been praised for dealing with the human condition, by which I think reviewers have meant the way in which it makes the reader consider mortality. On the other hand, it has some weaknesses as a novel. We never really understand what had been happening in the marriage before the breakup; all we know is that Yvonne was unfaithful, and when she comes back a year later Geoffrey is cold and self-absorbed. It's never made clear what it is about his background that led to him being this way. I am a great believer in the dictum 'behavior doesn't occur in a vacuum', in other words, if he is like this now, it seems likely that he may have been like this earlier. Is it possible that Geoffrey's self-absorption and lack of giving, which are manifest during the Day of the Dead, were also present during the marriage, and contributed to its dissolution? The author doesn't give us any hint, and we are asked to accept his behavior at face value. At the end, Geoffrey, lying shot in the street, remembers graffiti someone has written repeatedly near his house: '“No se puede vivir sin amar.” As it happens, Malcolm Lowry who drank excessively since his teenage years, wrote this book in Mexico, where he had gone to try to patch up his own marriage. Perhaps he, too, was thinking that the real Hades comes from being unable to love-- and to forgive. |
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6/6/16Joseph Conrad's last complete novel, published in 1923, introduces us to Peyrol, a swashbuckling privateer and member of the infamous Brotherhood of the Coast for 40 years in the the Far East. He now returns to Toulon, a French Mediterranean port city in the Napoleonic era. Having gone to sea as a lad, without even a name of his own (the sailors gave him the name of the rich landowner of the small family farm he came from), he returns to the area from which he set sail all those years ago, still strong and in possession of a plundered secret treasure (after all, this is a sea story). He settles on a secluded farm, which is shunned by the neighbors because Scevola, the master, has a bloody history of zealotry during the French Revolution, having executed many suspected royalists. Also there are the lovely Arlette, a young woman scarred by the violence of the revolution, and her aunt Catherine. Peyrol finds peace here for many years, until ultimately it is disrupted by the arrival of naval Lieutenant Real, who entices the old rover into one more adventure in the war against the English Navy. (How many subsequent spy and adventure stories have we read in which the hero is reluctantly dragged out of his retirement for one more mission? This seems trite now, but may not have been when used by Conrad.) Here the story becomes a kind of reversal on a Tale of Two Cities; in this case, the French Peyrol tricks the Lieutenant and becomes the one to place himself in danger from the English. Ultimately we find the members of the farm family, sans the bloody revolutionary Scevola, talking kindly about Peyrol, and remembering his kindnesses as well as his ultimate bravery. Conrad implies that the physical place remembers him as well: 'the mulberry tree, the only big tree on the head of the peninsula, standing like a sentinel at the gate of the yard, sighed faintly in a shudder of all its leaves, as if regretting the Brother of the Coast, the man of dark deeds, but of large heart, who often at noonday would lie down to sleep under its shade.' The rover has finally come home. Conrad was a rover as well, having spent his life sailing the world. At the beginning of the book he placed this poem by Spencer: Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.
Interestingly, Conrad chose this same poem, which began his last book, as his epitaph. Perhaps this was his way as well, of finally coming home. |
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6/4/16
Isabel Allende's 2015 'The Japanese Lover' shares a theme with 'Love in the time of cholera'-- love sustained over half a century (see review posted on 5/28/16). But there the similarity ends. One of the main characters is Irina Bazili, a 23 year Moldovan immigrant in a Malcolm X t-shirt, who comes to work at Lark House, a San Francisco home for the elderly, which 'for some unknown reason from the beginning ... had attracted left-wing intellectuals, oddballs, and second-rate artists'. Here she comes to know and work for the octogenarian Alma Belasco, an accomplished painter and designer who herself had come to San Francisco as a child from Poland in 1939 to live with her wealthy relatives. Irina and Alma's grandson Seth soon become intrigued with the mysterious letters Alma receives, gardenias which arrive at her door every week, and her occasional disappearances, for which she packs her best nightgowns. As Irina surmises, there is a story here: of Alma's relationship since childhood with Ichimei Fukuda, the son of the Belasco's Japanese gardener. Twelve year old Alma is devastated when Ichimei's family is sent to a concentration camp after Pearl Harbor in 1941. Years later they are re-united, though only in a secret secret love, as Alma cannot bring herself to give up the comfort and privilege of life with the Belascos. Even as an octogenarian, Alma says that if she had to do it again, she would make the same choice, as she thinks love would have died among the relative hardships of living as a gardener's wife. Along the way we meet a variety of characters, including Alma's husband, Nathaniel, her cousin who has always seemed like an older brother, and who knew of the affair and kept quiet. When dying he reveals his knowledge and acceptance, since after all “Hearts are big enough to contain love for more than one person.” We also meet Samuel, Alma's older brother who had left 1939 Poland to join the Royal Air Force, and makes an appearance years later to relate an almost gratuitous tale of adventures and suffering in World War II. The main theme of the book seems to be to glorify a lifelong romance, that persists even after death. But it is a very qualified love, one that takes a back seat to the desire for the perks of wealth and easy living. It's true, writing today it may be hard to imagine the degree of racial prejudice the young lovers would have faced had they gotten together in the 1940s. Was Alma wise in knowing that it never would have worked, or was she selfish, in wanting to have it both ways? And how did Ichimei feel about the whole thing? We know little of him, aside from his deep love, and that he was a serene figure who loved gardening and painting. Indeed, for a central character in the book, he begins to feel more like a cartoon of an Asian, who we never get to know, and who we feel perhaps has been used. Similarly, one wonders whether Alma's husband could truly be as kind and understanding of her lifelong affair as he seems to be on the surface. 'The Japanese Lover' succeeds as a sweeping multi-generational story of the pre-war years until the present, but the kind of love it seems to glorify comes off as a little selfish and unfulfilling, and possibly destructive to the men in Alma's life. The book comes off not as a paean to the power of love, but to the power of the need to be loved.
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