Pornography and Obscenity

This 40-page tract by D.H. Lawrence, published in 1930 by Alfred A. Knopf, takes aim at the "dirty-little-secret" pornography of the day, those films and novels that no censor touches because of their patina of purity but which serve only to provoke an unhealthy sexuality -- specifically, masturbation. By contrast, Lawrence finds the healthy and open attitude toward sex found in, say, Boccaccio, praiseworthy. He blames the whole destructive attitude toward sex on the "gray ones" of the 19th century, "the eunuch century, the century of the mealy-mouthed lie." And he offers a forceful and philosophical argument against masturbation, an act which produces "nothing but loss." He laments its effects on culture: "The sentimentalism and the niggling analysis, often self-analysis, of most of our modern literature, is a sign of self-abuse. The author never escapes himself, he pads along within a vicious circle of himself." An exhilarating book.

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich

In seven biographical vignettes spread over a mere 135 pages, Danilo Kis delivers a wrenching indictment of the lengths to which ideology, in this case communism, can deform the human animal. The oblique form of the stories, in which a narrator grasps at incomplete and inconclusive biographical documentation, serves to deepen their meaning by highlighting the ambiguous motivations of the doomed and the randomness of their demise. Kis's tales are not without a wry humor, which makes them even more realistic and therefore more terrifying.

Paris Trance

Geoff Dyer's novel achieves the improbable by enticing the reader into caring about a callow, shallow character named Luke Barnes. Could Hemingway and Fitzgerald and their ilk have been as repellent in the Paris of the 1920s as Barnes and his pleasure- and love-seeking cohort are in the Paris of the 1990s? Possibly, but the earlier group was more colorful, literate, and creative. Dyer's crew is gray. He carries off, nonetheless, several striking scenes, including the death of a deer and a gang beating. And there is the sex. In Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Dyer achieved the near-impossible by writing sex scenes that were neither pornographic nor laughable. Here his scenes are similarly intense and graphically descriptive but in no way gratuitous or titillating -- just meaningful.

Fatuous Jonathan Franzen

On a video clip, the author says he wants to talk, through one of the characters in his novel Freedom, about "the elephant in the room" -- overpopulation. See, people naturally want to procreate, but overpopulation is either the cause or an aggravating factor of all of our problems. Someone should point out to him that the most jam-packed place on Earth, Singapore, is also just about the richest. Poverty is caused by many things, but the Malthusian view that overpopulation is at its root has not been seriously believed for decades. A writer who declares he wants to address "the elephant in the room" is pompous enough, but when the elephant is a dusty, stuffed relic, he makes himself ludicrous.

Horrible Jonathan Franzen

The New York types are falling over themselves to praise Jonathan Franzen and his new novel (cover of Time, rave by Sam Tanenhaus), but if an excerpt I read online is anything to go by, I'll let this parade pass me by. I actually couldn't finish the excerpt; it was that suffocatingly bad. A sample:

"In the earliest years, when you could still drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious, the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job, and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture ...

"There were also more contemporary questions, like, what about those cloth diapers? Worth the bother? And was it true that you could still get milk delivered in glass bottles? Were the Boy Scouts OK politically? Was bulgur really necessary?"

All of this seems expressly designed by Franzen to appeal to the very people who can logroll his product. It reeks of falsity.

I'll stick with my Honore de Balzac. At 15o years' distance, he knew more about people in the 21st century than Franzen ever will.

Andalusia

If Somerset Maugham went somewhere and wrote about it, it is doubtless worth reading about. His Andalusia, published in 1920 by Alfred A. Knopf, is an affectionate but hardly sentimental portrait of a people he deems both lazy and boisterous, thieving and generous, in a landscape he finds both dazzling and desolate. Through it all he sees echoes of the region's Moorish heritage and cause, primarily aesthetic, to lament its passing.

The End of Sleep

This novel by Rowan Somerville made me hungry for shish kebab. It follows a failed Irish journalist named Fin through a series of misadventures in Cairo. As funny as the telling is, Somerville also captures the sights, smells, and tastes of Cairo with a piquant vividness. Fin's hunt for the perfect kebab is undertaken to locate a Cairene friend in peril. The description of him masticating an aromatic cube of roasted lamb is literally mouth-watering. The book lands among the top rank of those of its type, as impressive as P.H. Newby's The Picnic at Sakkara.

The Driftless Area

A novel that can be read in one or two sittings earns favor. It shows that the author has a clear and direct style and the skill to achieve narrative velocity. This book could have been written by a slightly deranged Sherwood Anderson.

Coriolanus

Ralph Fiennes is directing and playing the lead in a film of Shakespeare's Coriolanus due out next year. I've been reading the play and watching clips from a 1984 BBC production starring Alan Howard in a literally hair-raising performance as the Roman general Caius Marcius (later Coriolanus). His colossal hauteur and disdain for the mob could strip paint. His mother, Volumnia, played in the Fiennes film by Vanessa Redgrave, reveals her nature plainly when she says that blood

"more becomes a man
Than gilt his trophy: the breasts of Hecuba,
When she did suckle Hector, look'd not lovelier
Than Hector's forehead when it spit forth blood
At Grecian sword, contemning."