Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Concrete
Thomas Bernhard's extravagant misanthropy, gift for aphorism, and luxuriant pessimism come into bloom in this 1982 novel about a musicologist whose attempt to write the definitive work on Mendelssohn becomes this biographical screed instead. It is not without its flashes of humanity and tenderness; some light finds its way through cracks in the concrete.
Friday, January 27, 2012
Public Enemies
The philosophy can be heavy sledding, but the biographical and literary discussions lighten the load in this exchange of letters between Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Levy.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Garden, Ashes
This largely plotless, biographical novel by Danilo Kis proceeds by means of dreams and indirect glances. The father is grandiose and manic; the son sensitive and worldly. Well-observed, complex characters are not always enough to sustain a novel. Here, they are.
Monday, January 16, 2012
The Physicists
Friedrich Durrenmatt's two-act play addresses the problem of scientific knowledge running ahead of the political and moral world's ability to integrate it. Three men in a madhouse believe themselves to be Newton, Einstein, and an interlocutor of King Solomon. Abstraction and absurdity are a potent mix.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
The Map and the Territory, Take Two
Here's my review of Michel Houellebecq's The Map and the Territory, published in the Tampa Bay Times:
Has Michel Houellebecq mellowed? The French novelist whose earlier works could strip paint with their scathing social commentary, explicit sex and crushing gloom takes up a brush instead in The Map and the Territory to paint a muted and glowing portrait of an artist.
Set mostly in the near future of around 2015, the novel follows the career of Jed Martin, a motherless, delicate and isolated French painter who makes his name, and the beginnings of his fortune, when he hits on the idea of photographing Michelin road maps. As the title of his exhibit explains, “The map is more interesting than the territory.” For Martin, beauty in art is secondary, although his photographs are hailed as such. Most importantly, he says, “I want to give an account of the world.”
That has also been Houellebecq’s work as a novelist, so when Martin needs text for an exhibition catalog, whom better to turn to than … Michel Houellebecq? The author winks from beyond the page when his fictional double first appears to modest praise from Martin’s father: “He’s a good author, it seems to me. He’s pleasant to read, and he has quite an accurate view of society.”
But it’s not all bouquets. At a meeting with Martin, the novelist “stank a little, but less than a corpse” and “looked like a sick old turtle.” Houellebecq complains that his life has become “one endless scratching session” because of his athlete’s foot. “I’m rotting on the spot and no one gives a damn.”
What could have been a gimmick is instead one of the most endearing aspects of this fascinating novel. Houellebecq and Martin become, as much as two isolated people can, friends. To pay him for the text, Martin paints a portrait of Houellebecq with wild voodoo eyes. It will eventually be worth 12 million euros.
Over the course of the novel the author sticks his nose into all kinds of subjects, from architecture, police work, bichons frises, gastronomy and the Pre-Raphaelites to euthanasia, consumerism (an “endless wandering between eternally modified product lines”), Audis and video equipment.
And Houellebecq hasn’t lost his touch with the one-liner. Martin finds one of his subjects as difficult to capture “as a Mormon pornographer.” A restaurant’s discreet waiters “operated in silence, as if in a burn unit.” Houellebecq himself (the fictional one) dismisses Picasso’s work as “priapic daubing.”
In a previous novel, Houellebecq wrote: “Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.” In this one, he writes: “It doesn’t amount to much, generally speaking, a human life.”
Houellebecq’s world is a gloomy old place, for sure, but there’s a measure of joy to be had in picking it apart and examining the pieces.
Has Michel Houellebecq mellowed? The French novelist whose earlier works could strip paint with their scathing social commentary, explicit sex and crushing gloom takes up a brush instead in The Map and the Territory to paint a muted and glowing portrait of an artist.
Set mostly in the near future of around 2015, the novel follows the career of Jed Martin, a motherless, delicate and isolated French painter who makes his name, and the beginnings of his fortune, when he hits on the idea of photographing Michelin road maps. As the title of his exhibit explains, “The map is more interesting than the territory.” For Martin, beauty in art is secondary, although his photographs are hailed as such. Most importantly, he says, “I want to give an account of the world.”
That has also been Houellebecq’s work as a novelist, so when Martin needs text for an exhibition catalog, whom better to turn to than … Michel Houellebecq? The author winks from beyond the page when his fictional double first appears to modest praise from Martin’s father: “He’s a good author, it seems to me. He’s pleasant to read, and he has quite an accurate view of society.”
But it’s not all bouquets. At a meeting with Martin, the novelist “stank a little, but less than a corpse” and “looked like a sick old turtle.” Houellebecq complains that his life has become “one endless scratching session” because of his athlete’s foot. “I’m rotting on the spot and no one gives a damn.”
What could have been a gimmick is instead one of the most endearing aspects of this fascinating novel. Houellebecq and Martin become, as much as two isolated people can, friends. To pay him for the text, Martin paints a portrait of Houellebecq with wild voodoo eyes. It will eventually be worth 12 million euros.
Over the course of the novel the author sticks his nose into all kinds of subjects, from architecture, police work, bichons frises, gastronomy and the Pre-Raphaelites to euthanasia, consumerism (an “endless wandering between eternally modified product lines”), Audis and video equipment.
And Houellebecq hasn’t lost his touch with the one-liner. Martin finds one of his subjects as difficult to capture “as a Mormon pornographer.” A restaurant’s discreet waiters “operated in silence, as if in a burn unit.” Houellebecq himself (the fictional one) dismisses Picasso’s work as “priapic daubing.”
In a previous novel, Houellebecq wrote: “Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.” In this one, he writes: “It doesn’t amount to much, generally speaking, a human life.”
Houellebecq’s world is a gloomy old place, for sure, but there’s a measure of joy to be had in picking it apart and examining the pieces.
Monday, January 2, 2012
Bookart #1
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