THE LAND AT THE END OF THE WORLD by Antonio Lobo Antunes

Is Antonio Lobo Antunes Europe's greatest living writer? The question is far from absurd, and the answer might well be 'yes.' (Of course, no one who suspects any other answer would bother to ask this particular question.) Since the death of Jose Saramago, Lobo Antunes is widely considered Portugal's GLW--and many Portuguese readers preferred him even during the Nobel laureate's lifetime. And when I consider the contemporary European literary scene as a whole, only a few other writers (Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Peter Nadas and the late W. G. Sebald come immediately to mind) have produced bodies of work comparable in beauty, originality and profundity to the novels of Lobo Antunes. So why is this other Portuguese novelist still something of a secret in the United States? Unfortunately, it seems that we American readers have only ourselves to blame. Grove Press published translations of Lobo Antunes' 1980s novels throughout the 1990s, and they are still in print and/or readily available on the used book market. Recently, both W. W. Norton and Dalkey Archive have published translations of 4 additional novels and a so-so collection of short nonfiction pieces (The Fat Man and Infinity). So as of this writing (and to the best of my knowledge) ten of Lobo Antunes' 21 novels are currently easily available in English translations by translators as distinguished as Gregory Rabassa, Richard Zenith and Margaret Jull Costa. Here's a list, with dates of original Portuguese publication:

• The Land at the End of the World (1979)
• Knowledge of Hell (1980)
• An Explanation of the Birds (1981)
• Fado Alexandrino (1983)
• Act of the Damned (1985)
• The Return of the Caravels (1988)
• The Natural Order of Things (1992)
• The Inquisitor's Manual (1996)
• The Splendor of Portugal (1997)
• What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire (2001)

That leaves 11 of his novels still untranslated, including all of his fiction since 2001 (quite a backlog) and, apparently, his first novel, 1979's Elephant Memory. But the ten translated novels should be more than enough to elevate Lobo Antunes to household name status among American readers. He should be as well-known as Garcia Marquez or Vargas Llosa and at least as widely read as Saramago, Sebald and Bernhard.

Fado Alexandrino is his breakthrough novel, the work in which the dark, claustrophobic monologue style of his earlier novels (an original combination of Dostoyevsky's Underground Man and Camus' The Fall, among other precursors) opens out into a symphony of interpenetrating voices and stories, but the grand Fado is also a few hundred pages too long to be a good introductory text. The best place to begin an exploration of Lobo Antunes' oeuvre is probably Margaret Jull Costa's recent translation of the novel known in Portuguese as Os Cus de Judas and which Costa chooses to call The Land at the End of the World. The Portuguese title is better: translating literally as 'the asshole of Judas,' it colloquially means 'the most godforsaken place imaginable'; an acceptable (but still unsatisfying because it loses the theological element) American English equivalent would be 'the asshole of nowhere.' In the present context, Judas's asshole represents both the remote backlands of Angola during Portugal's long colonial war and the dull, dreary, postfascist Lisbon of the late 1970s, which the narrator despises almost as much. The novel is easy to describe--a veteran of the Angolan war relates his experiences in 1970s Africa and Portugal in a Fall-style monologue--but in a Lobo Antunes novel (especially his earlier ones), the 'story' is always only part of the story. The real story here, the thing that impresses me so much that I want to read every word this man has ever written, is the amazingly beautiful, deeply thoughtful and utterly original prose style. Lobo Antunes' compulsively metaphorical prose combines with his profoundly materialist sensibility to constitute a style that might be best described as 'baroque lyrical naturalism.' Even his most eccentric lyrical flights remain anchored (for the most part) in the hard, resistant facts of the body and the world, the tragic realities from which Lobo Antunes, at his unforgiving best, refuses to contrive Saramagoesque fantastical escapes. It may be this very refusal of escapism at the heart of his surrealism that makes Lobo Antunes unpalatable for some readers; an imaginative exit is always more exciting and viscerally satisfying than the multiple no exits of reality. Other readers may be turned off by the Bernhardian obsessionalism with which he returns again and again, in novel after novel, to the African colonies and the Salazar dictatorship and the Portuguese Revolution and its aftermath and his generally negative view of the entire freaking world--but then again, those same readers might have advised Faulkner to get the hell out of Yoknapatawpha and stop whining about 1865. (My Faulkner comparison is entirely deliberate, for Lobo Antunes is yet another of those great 'foreign' writers upon whom the man known to some southerners as "Wiyum Fognuh" exercised a decisive influence.) Whatever the reasons, the undeserved American oblivion of Antonio Lobo Antunes deserves to end. He's not only the 'macho Saramago' and the Lusitanian Faulkner; he's also the Portuguese Norman Mailer and the closest thing his country has produced to a native Joyce. He is one of those rare writers with enough raw talent and original imagination to move the art of the novel several steps beyond where he found it. And that may be the most any novelist can hope to achieve.


Addendum: Here, copied from the otherwise scandalously lame Lobo Antunes Wikipedia page, is a seemingly complete list of all the man's novels. Those of us who don't read Portuguese are missing some intriguing-looking titles (Treatise on the Soul's Passion; Archipelago of Insomnia, etc.):

Memória de Elefante (1979) Elephant's Memory

Os Cus de Judas (1979) The Land at the End of the World (available in English)

Conhecimento do Inferno (1980) Knowledge of Hell (available in English)

Explicação dos Pássaros (1981) An Explanation of the Birds (available in English)

Fado Alexandrino (1983) Fado Alexandrino (available in English)

Auto dos Danados (1985) Act of the Damned (available in English)

As Naus (1988) The Return of the Caravels (available in English)

Tratado das Paixões da Alma (1990) Treatise on the Soul's Passions

A Ordem Natural das Coisas (1992) The Natural Order of Things (available in English)

A Morte de Carlos Gardel (1994) The Death of Carlos Gardel

O Manual dos Inquisidores (1996) The Inquisitors' Manual (available in English)

O Esplendor de Portugal (1997) The Splendor of Portugal (available in English)

Exortação aos Crocodilos (1999) Exhortation to the Crocodiles

Não Entres Tão Depressa Nessa Noite Escura (2000) Don't Go Through That Dark Night So Fast

Que Farei Quando Tudo Arde? (2001) What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire? (available in English)

Boa Tarde às Coisas Aqui em Baixo (2003) Good Evening to the Things From Here Below

Eu Hei-de Amar uma Pedra (2004) I Shall Love a Stone

Ontem Não te vi em Babilónia (2006) Didn't See You In Babylon Yesterday

O Meu Nome é Legião (2007) My Name Is Legion

O Arquipélago da Insónia (2008) Archipelago of Insomnia

Que Cavalos São Aqueles Que Fazem Sombra no Mar? (2009) What Horses Are Those That Make Shade On The Sea?

Sôbolos Rios Que Vão (2010)

Judging Books by Their Covers

I'm writing this post from a literary fortress walled with about five thousand books. Good books, great books, bad books, dirty books, clean books, crappy books, jungle books, city books, old books, new books, unread books, re-read books--and all are real books. By which I mean they're constructed from ink and paper, not bits and bytes. They are printed on pages identically cut and glued together or bound like submissive lovers. Now that death knells for the paper book are beeping and burping from every e-reader in the world, I've decided to skip the oblivion phase and go directly to nostalgic revival. Return with me now to a time before Kindles and Nooks. Remember how wonderful paper books were? How their batteries never ran down, how they could be tossed from high windows and still function properly, how you could drop them in the bathtub, fish them out, let them dry, and continue reading them (although they did gain a few new curves in the ordeal)? Remember the fetishistic feel of your thumb sliding across the upper corner of a page to pinch that skin-like texture between thumb and forefinger and lift, lift and turn, turn the page? Sontag didn't go far enough. Along with an erotics of art, we need an erotics of reading, something much sexier than any porn novel and with far more than fifty shades of gray. And one part of such an erotics must be an examination of the book cover as art. Since this art form seems destined for the dire fate of album covers (which reached a fairly high level of aesthetic value in the 1970s and 80s before the coming of compact discs fatally downsized the medium), I've decided to scan and share a few real book covers within easy reach of my writing desk.

We begin with Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul:

An early edition used one of Balthus's nymphets on the cover, but this is the cover image I will always think of when I think of Lolita. Barnaby Hall's remarkable photograph on this early 1990s Vintage International edition outdoes both Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne by giving us a Lolita of the correct age. This entire edition of Nabokov's novels featured great photos by Hall, all of them wonderfully appropriate. Here's Transparent Things:

 The design--more prominent here--is by Marc J. Cohen, who also designed Lolita. This cover is even better, and all of the Hall-Cohen covers are superior to the current Vintage run, featuring a series of photographs of paper shadowbox constructions by Chip Kidd.

I understand the reasoning (if anything, the foregrounding of trompe l'oeil artifice on these newer covers is too obvious to be truly Nabokovian), and they do function to illustrate an important aspect of Nabokov's aesthetic, but their minimalism clashes too jarringly with another important aspect of that aesthetic, its maximalism.

Turning from Vlad the Inscriber to James the Joyous, here's my favorite cover illustration for Ulysses. Again, it's from a Vintage International printing of the early 1990s (when the publisher was on something of a roll).

 Angela Arnet's illustration marvelously signifies Leopold Bloom, that man made out of Joycean words, as a literal man of letters with eyeglasses to read the title he spells. It's a clever and very Modern conceit, and its humanity contrasts with the oddly Soviet-looking artwork chosen for the Gabler edition, a Ulysses that makes me want to build a dam for Lenin:

All the New Directions covers of W. G. Sebald's novels benefit from a decision to design them as seamless collages of tinted versions of photographs from the texts. The covers are thus as enigmatic and thought provoking as the books they bind:

Compare this to the following UK cover of Sebald's Vertigo, which appears to have been created under the misapprehension that the book was a novelization of the Hitchcock film:

 

As an example of what is being lost forever with the death of paper books (and the trashing of vintage paperbacks), check out this perfectly lovely vintage Penguin paperback of Thomas Wolfe's short stories.

The design is perfectly understated (as Wolfe never was), the illustration perfectly grandiose and nostalgic (as TW often was). It's one of the prettiest old paperbacks I own.

At the other end of the artistic spectrum, check out the pulpy, sensationalistic cover Signet used to market a European literary novel (in translation, no less) to the 1950s American audience:

As another memento of a time when highbrow literature was available in cheap paperback form, here's the 75-cent Fawcett Crest edition of Sartre's The Words, marketed as a "famous bestseller," just like Peyton Place: 

Back to beauty. Here's another of my favorite covers, the intriguing High Modernist Nikolai Punin illustration for Antonio Lobo Antunes' Fado Alexandrino:

Completely different but equally effective is the gorgeous Wanda Wulz self-portrait looking off toward the spine of David Grossman's Be My Knife:

My award for most effective and aesthetically pleasing series design must go to the Library of America. Their signature basic black dust jackets with a significant but non-jingoistic red-white-blue stripe (which in Ashbery's case surely signifies both the poet's nation of birth and his French literary inheritance) and a small author portrait at upper right are both tasteful and ultra-cool. They are what the fashionable American writer will be wearing this season.

This 1970s Bantam paperback of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 is a good definition of 'groovy.' The nostalgic hipster in me prefers it to the posthorn covers.

Lawrence has inspired some very good covers, but this ca.1990 Bantam Classics edition is my very personal favorite. It encourages me to study botany:



I would prefer to see Rep. Paul Ryan's face on the cover of Bret Easton Ellis's misfired (in my opinion) satire, but this sober male model is very creepy indeed--and too big to fail.

The entire Modern Library Proust six-pack is beautifully designed, right down to the box, but the photo chosen for the Captive-Fugitive volume makes it my candidate for the sexiest literary book cover currently in print. Love that leg:

A breathtakingly beautiful color photograph distinguishes this recent edition of Naipaul's Indian travel book. Whoever chose this photo made an amazingly good decision.

The Viking Portable Joyce was the second Joyce book I ever owned--I purchased the Penguin Portrait as a teenager; its cover featured the same Berenice Abbot portrait of the author--and I will probably always visually associate his work with the cover image of a gull-crazed sky over choppy Irish waves.

Need I mention that this edition of Kundera's Laughable Loves is from the Seventies? Inside the sexy cover, I highly recommend the great short story "The Hitchhiking Game," a work of Kunderan existentialism. 

This Routledge Classics edition of Slavoj Zizek's Enjoy Your Symptom! appears at first to be unimaginatively spartan, austere, minimal--everything Zizek is not. But then we notice that thing (a specifically Lacanian 'thing') in the upper right corner. What the hell is that? Closer examination confirms that it's the lipsticked rim of a mouth opened wide to cry out its subject's ecstasy at the moment of ultimate jouissance. And it's more than that, of course: the tiniest hint of tooth at the top edge transforms it into another kind of 'thing,' a vagina dentata opened to engulf and destroy the author's phallic name, the ultimate nom de pere...and so on and so forth, until we find ourselves living in the end times.

...and another thing for BLOOMSDAY 2012

...because once I get started on the nacheinander and nebeneinander of Joycean thoughts it's really impossible to stop cold turkey (cue the Lennon tune) until I've remarked that the Modernists (a category I'll expand to include everyone from Manet to Philip Roth) have become far too fucking respectable in recent decades, haven't they? They've been mastered and doctored, syllabied and conferenced, MLA'd and IJJF'd, deluxe editioned, multiply translated, banned and boned (I don't even know what I mean there), presidential medalled and national treasured, and now we have a holiday (in puritanical Ireland of all places) celebrating a novel in which the central character does "love sticky" on a public beach. Hell, even that despicable asshole (and sometime great writer) Celine (not Dion, the other one) has been duly canonized--a fate he would surely have bemoaned and blamed on a cabal of les juifs. (To give the sorry sonofabitch his due, the WWI scenes near the beginning of Journey to the End of the Night are among the best war writing of the 20th (or any other) century.)

The Good Celine. Her heart will go on...

The Bad Celine. His heart never did...

Modernism, which hoped to be Henry Miller's gob of spit in the face of bourgeois culture, has become altogether too authoritative, academicized, anaesthetized, too much of an official commodity. (Too Dion, we might say, and not enough Celine.) The culture it was meant to gag has consumed it as easily as a handful of M&Ms. It's time to recover the pornographic scandal of Modernism, to be jolted anew by the multiple electric chair shocks of its new, to understand Ulysses as a work as indigestible as Brigadier Pudding's late night snacks, to see a Miro painting through the lens of the shit banquet scene in Pasolini's Salo (which was re-released by the Criterion Collection to coincide with the 2008 Republican National Convention, because timing is everything), to make Modernism obscene again, to recognize James Joyce as a man who never met a dick joke he couldn't work into the Wake, to read Proust as a guy who wrote 3000 pages and seven volumes so he could conceal from censorial eyes an explicit sadistic brothel scene hidden deep inside the final volume (surely the only reason the Recherche didn't suffer the fate of Ulysses and Chatterley is that no prudes made it to volume seven), to understand the haughty mandarin Nabokov as a punning 13 year-old boy who names a nymphomaniacal character "Dr. Anita Johnson." We need to recover the grand 'immaturity' of Modernism, as 'immaturity' is understood in Ross Posnock's wonderful, essential critical study, Philip Roth's Rude Truth, the title of which reminds me that near the beginning of Posnock's book he quotes from Roth's The Counterlife a character's 'countereulogy' for the Rothian writer Nathan Zuckerman. The passage can be read as a rude, ranting, impassioned lament for the sanitizing of modern art, so I'll quote it in full:

The deballing of Zuckerman is now complete...A sanitized death, a travesty of a eulogy, and no ceremony at all--completely secular, having nothing to do with the way Jews bury people. At least a good cry around the hole, a little remorse as they lower the coffin, but no, no one even allowed to go off with the body. Burn it. There is no body. The satirist of the clamoring body--without a body. All backwards and sterile and stupid. The cancer deaths are horrifying. That’s what I would have figured him for. Wouldn’t you? Where was the rawness and the mess? Where was the embarrassment and the shame? Shame in this guy operated always.Here is a writer who broke taboos, fucked around, indiscreet, stepped outside that stuff deliberately, and they bury him like Neil Simon—Simonize our filthy, self-afflicted Zuck! Hegel’s unhappy consciousness out under the guise of sentiment and love! This unsatisfiable, suspect, quarrelsome novelist, this ego driven to its furthest extremes, ups and presents them with a palatable death—and the feeling police, the grammar police, they give him a palatable funeral with all the horseshit and the mythmaking! The only way to have a funeral is to invite everyone who ever knew the person and just wait fore the accident to happen--somebody who comes in out of the blue and tells the truth. Everything else is table manners. I can’t get over it. He’s not even going to rot in the ground, this guy who was made for it. This insidious, unregenerate defiler, this irritant in the Jewish bloodstream, making people uncomfortable and angry by looking with a mirror up his own asshole, really despised by a lot of smart people, offensive to every possible lobby, and they put him away, decontaminated, deloused—suddenly he’s Abe Lincoln and Chaim Weizmann in one! Could this be what he wanted, this kosherization, this stenchlessness? I really had him down for cancer, the works. The catastrophe-extravaganza, the seventy-eight pound death, with the stops all pulled out. A handful of hairless pain howling for the needle, even while begging the nurse's aide to have a heart and touch his prick--one last blow job for the innocent victim. Instead, the dripping hard-on gets out clean as a whistle. All dignity. A big person. These writers are great--real fakes. Want it all. Madly aggressive, shit on the page, shoot on the page, show off their every last fart on the page. And for that they expect medals. Shameless. You gotta love 'em.

Philip Roth receiving the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama, 2011.

Bloomsday 2012

Bloomsday comes around again tomorrow like the lastfirst sentence of Finnegans Wake, and instead of adding a bit more to the Everest of verbiage occasioned by the novel, instead of saying again things that Hugh Kenner or Richard Ellmann already said 50 years ago, instead of pointing out that the Homeric intertexts, that Odyssey and its prequel at the arbitrary origin of Western literature, are already rather Modernist (belated, ironic, influentially anxious) in their tapestry of allusions to even earlier stories, tales, myths, legends; instead of remarking upon the climactic imagery of the "Nausicaa" episode and its queer reimagining in Kenneth Anger's Fireworks; instead of writing a post titled "Joyscrap" that attempts to think about the role of excrement in Joyce's works without ever referencing Bakhtin, Kristeva or Pynchon's Brigadier Pudding (TP's ultimate comment on the British palate); instead of any of that, I've decided to take it easy this Bloomsday and just link to some photos from my trip to Dublin a few years ago.

And if that's not enough, here's the gallery of all my travel photos and miscellanea that I've scanned in recent years. If you enjoy them, you will have enjoyed them; if not, not.

Apropos of nothing except a trip to my 'pictures' folder, here are three great images of writers influenced by Joyce (a category that arguably includes just about everyone who has written literary fiction since 1920): Hemingway, Georges Perec, and between them the man known to his French Resistance comrades as l'Irlandais, 'the Irishman,' Samuel Beckett (whose photo reminds me of Harold Brodkey's observation that Beckett's nihilism ended at the barbershop door; he had the best hair of any canonical male writer).

Transparency, Translucency, Opacity: Some Thoughts on the Continuum of Novelistic Prose

If the medium of prose can be likened to window glass, then the major genera of novelistic prose (popular, literary, experimental) might be placed on a continuum stretching from transparency through translucency to opacity. The overwhelming majority of the prose that people purchase and read, the prose of popular fiction, is carefully crafted to create an illusion of transparency. It seems a clear, flawless, almost invisible window through which the stories and characters are viewed. Transparent prose is the quintessence of 'slick shit,' even slicker than the glossy paperback covers that usually bind it. (I hasten to add that my use of the phrase 'slick shit' is not as derogatory as it may seem; it was the phrase the Epstein brothers used to refer to their Casablanca screenplay, a work I hold in quite high esteem.) Transparent prose flows like an undammed river, presenting no obstacles to readerly navigation. It is written to be safely and enjoyably consumed, and while it is not exactly the literary equivalent of Muzak (because it must successfully create an alternative world and transport the reader there, a function no one would apply to a canned instrumental arrangement of "In My Life"), it is undeniably the kind of prose most closely associated with commodification. All those rows upon rows of genre novels as superficially different and profoundly similar as breakfast cereals in a supermarket are written in transparent prose. The transparent is a plain style, eschewing complex sentence structures and figurative language, but not all plain styles are transparent. Hemingway and Carver, for example, are masters of translucent plainness, and Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans stands as a perverse masterpiece of the plain opaque. The prose of Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, and Thomas Harris (a trio I choose solely because they are the three best contemporary popular novelists I have read in recent years) can stand as exemplary of a prose that tends toward transparency as a Platonic ideal. James Ellroy would also be a good example, although in recent years his telegraphic style has tended to interpose itself between reader and representation, becoming a reductio ad absurdum of the truism that plainness can be just as mannered as complexity. It's not necessary to quote examples of transparent prose, because it's all around us. Open any bestseller and you will see it.

The prose of literary fiction--which I suppose can be defined as fiction intended primarily as an aesthetic object and only secondarily as a commercial one--tends to cluster around the translucent middle of the continuum. If the transparent is a pane of clear glass, the translucent is a tinted or molded window that "diffuses the light so that objects beyond cannot be seen clearly" (as Webster defines 'translucent'). Translucent prose calls attention to itself, becoming a visible barrier between the reader and the object it represents, a lens that distorts the object in the very act of making it visible. If transparent prose is as smooth as a fiber optic cable, translucent prose twists itself into barbs that tear at the reader's brain. In so doing, translucent prose retards the reading process, forcing the reader to notice the medium as well as its representations, the designs and patterns and flaws in the glass as well as the objects still visible beyond. Thus, it raises the questions of reading and writing as processes, makes unavoidable a sense of the novel as a constructed object, and, ideally, forces into consciousness the ideologically inflected decisions made by writers while writing novels and readers while reading them. The slick prose of popular fiction seems designed to forestall these three moments, to keep the reading process easy, fast, naive, and anything but (horror!) dialectical. Translucent prose tends to be dialectically unsettling, with the power to destabilize our received opinions not only of reading and writing but of the world and ourselves. Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Melville's Moby Dick, Joyce's Ulysses, the vast roman fleuve of Proust--these are the first works that come to my mind as masterpieces of translucent prose. We can always 'see' (in the Conradian sense) the objects that Faulkner or Joyce or Melville or Proust prose-poetically present to us, but we can also always 'see' (indeed, we can never help but see) the poetic prose that presents them. Thus are we teased into questioning the novelistic illusion that enraptures us. If you seek more examples of translucent prose, walk down the literature aisles of a Barnes & Noble (this may be your last chance; brick and mortar bookstores might soon be deader than Adorno). Hemingway, in his own minimal way, is as translucent as Faulkner (James M. Cain would be their transparent contemporary), but in general, translucent prose tends to lengthen sentences to the point of absurdity (Proust, Thomas Bernhard, Faulkner), to promiscuously compound subordinate clauses (Henry James, Proust), to revivify words you might never eye outside pagan papyri and obscure incunabulae inscribed for the perusal of callipygian queens (Joyce, David Foster Wallace, Alexander Theroux), to break up the reading process by means of footnotes, endnotes, parentheses (Nabokov, Wallace, Faulkner), to launch into seemingly endless catalogues of exemplary objects (Rabelais, Joyce, William Gass), to burst unexpectedly into metaphors as natural and abundant as white blossoms on an apple tree after an April rain (Proust, Antonio Lobo Antunes, Bruno Schulz).

If the outer limit of transparency is the purely instrumental prose of children's books (which seems translucently minimal to the mature eye), the endpoint of translucence would be an opacity through which not even the outlines of represented objects would be visible. Opaque prose approaches the condition of a window painted black. It seems to exist only as language on a page, without any recognizable referent. It enacts a disappearance of signified into signifier. I think of Finnegans Wake, Stein's The Making of Americans, Julian Rios's Larva, the later works of Arno Schmidt. None of these is perfectly opaque, of course (only Dadaist glossolalial poetry touches that ultimate Malevich black square), but in passages of each the signified seems to dissolve into 'pure' language. In a way, this is analogous to certain paintings by Picasso and Braque from the early 1910s in which the iconicity of the painted sign (the resemblance between an object and its painted representation) is stretched to the breaking point in a process more familiarly known as Cubism. Perhaps paradoxically, opaque prose tends not to Beckettian sterility but to platitudinous plenitude. It builds Great Chinese Walls of words, literary monuments that seem almost enormous enough to be visible from space. Beyond their walls we can barely see, and this very fact may lead us to suspect a Melvillean void on the other side of the pasteboard mask, an essential Derridean meaninglessness that all language conceals. And it's only a small step from there to the idea that all of this "free playing" of the signifier isn't free at all; it's a compulsive, hysterical defense mechanism. One might further remark that opaque prose silvers the back of the window, transforming it into a magnifying mirror reflecting the writer's already engorged ego back upon itself in an infinitely inflating, infinitely repeating series. It is a synthesis of the infinite and the infinitesimal, an enormous claustrophobia. (Which is not to say it can't be great fun to read. The Wake, for all its opacity, is laugh-out-lud* funny.)

* I'm letting the typo stand since it's perfectly Wakish, referring to the legendary King Lud of London, namesake of Ludgate. It is also, as Joyce the Joyous would surely have pointed out, related to the Latin ludere, to play (whence comes Huizinga's Homo Ludens and the various ludicrosities of postmodernism). And we musn't forget old Ned Ludd, apocryphal first luddite, who would be sledgehammering my Toshiba right about now--

Notes on Technology

Heidegger was an optimist. His adherence to dialectical form in the face of technology's challenge marks him, in fact, as a utopian idealist. The H-man is so enfolded in the forms of dialectical thought that technology (as he defines it) simply must contain, at the core of its essence, a dialectical reversal of the order of technology... But what if it doesn't? What if the core of technology's essence is a mass-anesthetizing black hole from which nothing emerges except profit?

The only question concerning technology asked by the present generation is, "What's next from Apple?" They seek not a mystical 'saving' force but a slimmer, faster iPad.

Wikipedia is positively medieval, a vast Gothic cathedral of information constructed by anonymous artisans. It departs from the medieval model only in this: the stonemasons of the Middle Ages did not permit village idiots to carve their capitals.

The real problem concerning technology is not that it alienates us from the transcendental good/god of Heideggerian Being, but that it alienates us from the mundane reality of ourselves and others.

"What the hell are you taking about?" the techno-utopian asks. "My computer doesn't alienate me; it connects me to the entire world." The fallacy here lies in the idea that communication and alienation are necessarily mutually exclusive. Your computer connects you to the entire wired and wireless world, but this 'connection' is, upon examination, a sentimental illusion generated to mask a purely electronic reality. Computers connect only to other computers, and the communication they enable is so radically disembodied that we can never be certain we are interacting with a human being at the connection's other end.

Maybe the other end of that chatroom heart-to-heart was a computer statistically programmed to give you the answers you desired, the digi-tech equivalent of the old Magic 8-Ball.

Time spent with a computer is time lost with an actually present human being.

If Derrida had not already existed to demonize the "metaphysics of presence," Mark Zuckerberg would've been forced to pay someone to invent him.

If you don't suspect that your computer is impoverishing your life, that life has probably never been rich enough for the difference to be noticeable.

The vast virtual world of online pornography throws the problem of technology into sharp relief. Every time we masturbate to online porn (and don't even try to pretend you don't), we give a corporation the keys to our psyches, we let the multinational that owns our internet service provider know exactly what gets us off, the exact image that produces the most intense pleasure of our physical lives. Now ask yourself: How much would an advertising firm pay for that database?

Online porn is the ultimate commercialization of jouissance.

Every improvement in communications technology is also a further refinement of totalitarianism. The Nazis burned books and distributed radios.

Just as the fatal weakness of student movements lies in the fundamental fact that they are student movements, drawing their membership from a temporary and transient population, the fatal weakness of online protest lies in its virtual quality. Real protest can only happen in the streets, where it will eventually be met with batons, pepper spray and bullets.

The problem with Occupy Wall Street was that they brought a computer to a gunfight. The next Occupation must prepare to defend its encampments the way those Egyptians in Tahrir Square defended theirs: militarily.

But there will probably be no "next Occupation." Occupy already appears destined for a small corkboard display in the Museum of Leftist Nostalgia.

The technological death of privacy is a disaster for the imagination. Those human mysteries that once teased us into imaginative thought are now posted on Facebook for the world to read. In our unmysterious interpersonal world, Tolstoy would be an engineer.

Where is the space for original sexual fantasy--the most imaginative exercise most human beings ever engage in--in a world where internet pornography is but a keystroke away, offering an encyclopedic array of fetishistic satisfactions?

Few things in our technowelt are more ridiculous than online arguments: impassioned, heated, but ludicrously slow-motion exchanges between strangers who exist for each other only as caricatures abstracted from their previous statements, as though the entire situation occurs only to confirm the postmodernist concept of the individual as a discourse construction. Safe behind fortress walls of mediation, the anonymous arguers hurl insults and frame bons mots they would never have had the courage or quickness to create in the heat of genuine human interaction (the face-to-face kind).

Online conversation is to real conversation what internet sex is to bareback fucking.

Rest assured, I fully appreciate the savage irony of writing these anti-technological notes on a blog.

The internet today is an ideal model of an absolutely corporatist world in which governments have withered away and corporations control everything (even access to the world) and dissenting voices are given relative freedom to rant and ramble only because this is still a model and not the real world... How long will this distinction hold?

The mass media discourse of American political culture, separating our political life into a manichean Liberal vs. Conservative opposition, serves the media corporations' ideological goal of concealing the truly dominant ideology of our time, corporate capitalism or, more concisely, corporatism. Corporations distract us with political circuses while they steal all of our bread.

The generation of Americans now coming to adulthood has never known a non-digital life. They are a generation so thoroughly technologized that they see technology not as a threat but as a basic fact of existence, an unproblematic condition. Like the ratio of oxygen to nitrogen in the air or the presence of salt in seawater, technology seems a natural thing that cannot be 'thought' as a problem. This is the true legacy of Jobs, Gates and Zuckerberg.

Does technology make us dumber? Socrates thought so (see the Phaedrus and beware its bottomless ironies) and the case can still be made. Information that can be immediately accessed online need not be learned, need not be internalized, need not become authentic knowledge, something deeply known. Just as the corporatization of the university is transforming it from a site of education to a place of vocational training, so the technologization of thought transforms knowledge into information, a distinction best understood thus: information is something we use; knowledge is something we are. Knowledge is the brick and mortar of our subjectivity; information always remains an object outside us, something used for a specific purpose and quickly discarded. The triumph of information is the death of human subjectivity.

What is to be done? I have yet to hear an answer to that question that does not strike me as hollow, sentimental, nostalgic, utopian. So here's my hollow, sentimental, nostalgic, utopian answer: I believe that in works of the imagination, works of art, we can find a privileged space for opposition to the hegemonic ideology of our time, a kind of Archimedes point from which that ideology might be shaken, moved, even--at a utopian vanishing point I dare not gaze at for fear of blindness--overthrown. I believe that art not only can but must be more than mood music for power (a phrase I steal from Robert Hughes's Shock of the New, betraying my Modernist bias). I believe that art can pierce us more deeply than intellectual argument because it directly attacks our senses. I believe that any artist who does not work toward this end is asleep at the wheel. I believe that both Nietzsche and Picasso, both Rilke and Freud, both Proust and Sartre, are great philosophers because they are first and foremost great artists. And I believe that any artist who works authentically will ineluctably create oppositional art, for authenticity is everything that corporatism comes to crush.

The liberation of the imagination. That old Romantic avantgardish song and dance. This, strangely enough, is what is to be done.

But for now, turn off your computer and love the one you're with.

P.S.: My opinions may be crankier than a Model T engine, but that doesn't make them wrong.

A Metaphor for our Time

"Reality is a cliche from which we escape by metaphor." -- Wallace Stevens, Adagia

And metaphor, as Stevens also knew, is the anti-cliche in which we capture reality. Metaphor brings together two disparate electrodes until meaning arcs between them with a light that burns and brightens.

A metaphor for the present crisis: Corporate capitalism has run off its rails, plowed across an open field and smashed into a suburban housing development, demolishing a swath of middle-class homes, but capitalism's ideologues stand idly by and insist, like good Brezhnev-era commissars, that the system is fundamentally sound. "What rails, comrade?" the CNBC apparatchik insists in his thick Boris Badinov accent, "Train is supposed to run on ground."

Some Supposedly Great Books I Haven't Read (yet)

To begin, allow me a brief orgy of lit-geek bragging: I've read Infinite Jest (every jot, tittle, and footnote), and liked it enough to title this post with a DFW allusion; I've read Ulysses (so many times I've lost count--8 or 9, I think, over the course of 20 years, and I've read individual chapters more often); I've read Finnegans Wake (once end oundly ounced; eat teaks aleavetime to ride its wheel [pardon my truly awful mock-Wakish]); I've read In Search of Lost Time (once complete in Moncreiff's English, and parts of Swann's Way in French while sardined into the coach cabin of a flight from Paris to Detroit); I've read The Magic Mountain, The Recognitions, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Gravity's Rainbow (twice), Against the Day, Underworld, You Bright and Risen Angels, An American Tragedy, and many, many other books that ill-read philistines like to think no one really reads. (And chances are, if you're reading this, so have you.) If you've ever wandered into the literary fiction or criticism aisles of a Barnes and Noble and picked up a wristbreaking volume and asked, "Who reads this shit?" I'm probably the answer to your question.

But enough literary dick-measuring. This post is about the widely acknowledged great books that, for one reason or another, I haven't gotten around to reading (yet), the canonical books that remain closed to me. Since I can't say anything of interest about them, a bare list must suffice:

• The Aeneid by Virgil
• The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
• Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
• The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
• The Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle
• The Changing Light at Sandover by James Merrill
• Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
• Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
• The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
• Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes
• JR by William Gaddis
• A by Louis Zukofsky
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

I know, I know...that last one raises your eyebrows, doesn't it? "He hasn't read Jane Eyre?! What the fuck?!!?" People are always surprised when I tell them that. It's my sleeved ace in games of 'Humiliation.' I still don't understand how I was able to acquire a B.A. in English without being forced to read Jane Eyre at some point by a Victoriana-enthralled feminist prof. My only answer is: Without god, all things are possible. (To paraphrase a character in another of these books I haven't read.)

Francoise Gilot and John Richardson on "Charlie Rose"

Charlie Rose justified his existence last night with a marvelous (as Mitt Romney might describe it) conversation about Picasso with John Richardson and Francoise Gilot. The entire episode can be viewed online at the show's website.Television this excellent is so rare on our American air that its infrequent appearances deserve praise in overplus. Of the artworks shown and discussed (currently on display at the Gagosian Gallery in NYC), the most interesting to me was a little-known oil from the early 1950s of Francoise wringing water from her hair: a loose, wet, drippy, contorted, Picassoan transformation of a Degas bather. If I had a fraction of Mitt Romney's money, I'd buy it off the Gagosian wall and repeat "Marvelous, marvelous" all the way home. Here it is:

Edmund Wilson strikes again

You can always count on a dead New York Intellectual for a quote that bears repeating. Terry Teachout (in an appreciation of the nearly forgotten writer Edwin O'Connor) just excavated this truism from the pen of Edmund Wilson: "a literary intellectual objects to nothing so much as a best-selling book that also possesses real merit."

Read today, the line takes on a poignancy that Wilson couldn't have intended, for he lived in an era when works of genuine aesthetic value (Salinger, Bellow, Pynchon, Mailer, Faulkner, Baldwin) commonly appeared on the bestseller lists. In fact, Faulkner's later, lesser novels were 'popular' enough to be Book of the Month Club selections, as was Richard Wright's Native Son. Difficult contemporary literary fiction from Faulkner to Sartre to Celine was sold in cheap paperback editions with sensational pulpy covers intended to appeal to a mass audience. (Imagine that: publishers marketing 'literature' to the working class...Those Mad Men weren't all bad. They realized that in the days before Fox News and American Idol, it wasn't unusual for working people to actually read books. I wish that aspect of those bad old days would return, but chances are slimmer than Pickens.) A glance at today's bestseller list shows how far we've come--in the wrong direction. Further evidence is provided by the fate of John Sayles' A Moment in the Sun, a big, bulging, authentically populist historical novel that should have won the Pulitzer Prize last year (quick, name the novel that did). Instead, it was rejected by the big publishers, and Sayles (who's not exactly Mr. Unknown Writer) ended up publishing it at McSweeney's (kudos to them). When I read the book, I couldn't help thinking that if it had been completed ca.1983, Random House or Simon & Schuster would've jumped on it, marketed it as "even better than Michener," and it would've sold millions of copies. It could have been a fine example of that increasingly spectral "best-selling book that also possesses real merit." Instead, it seems destined for cult status, at best.

Anyone who electronically laments the passing of the book or the culturally significant novel tends to meet with the typical 'technological utopian' reply, which I paraphrase: It's the best imaginable time to be a writer. Digital technology allows writers to self-publish in minutes and bypass the now-obsolete publishing industry. Stop your whining and start collecting the profits from your e-books. To which I reply in advance: Some kind of gatekeeping apparatus is necessary in book publishing, since we still live in a society in which anyone who is literate imagines he can 'write.' The trouble with throwing publication open to everyone is that everyone publishes, and works of Wilsonian 'real merit' tend to be lost in a Deepwater Horizon-size slick of pseudo-literate sludge. I'm not saying that online publishing is like pissing in the ocean. I'm saying it's like pissing in the Amazon. (And old Bill Burroughs told us about the dangers of that, didn't he?)

"Pynchon From A to V" by Gerald Howard

A citation in Ross Posnock's excellent critical study Philip Roth's Rude Truth led me to this 2005 Bookforum article by editor Gerald Howard, both a personal memoir of one reader's ingestion of megadoses of Pynchon and, more interestingly, a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes at Pynchon's publishers. There's quite a bit of little-known or previously unknown Pynchoniana here, including lists of rejected titles for V. and Gravity's Rainbow. James Ellroy readers will note that one of Pynchon's early titles for the former was Blood's A Rover, a Housman phrase Big Bad JE has since made his own. This very well-written article is required reading for anyone deeply interested in Pynchon. (The page uses a small font-size, so you may be forced to magnify to readability.)

In unrelated news, new posts on Mindful Pleasures have been nonexistent for the past few months because I'm concentrating on novel-writing (and re-writing...). Sometimes this goes quite well...and sometimes I feel as though my head is trapped inside a metal box lined with mirrors and I'm screaming at my own reflection for four solid hours at a stretch. So much for the pleasures of the writing life. No wonder Hem felt like killing bulls....Anyway, the writing continues and the books (plural) are coming...novels...big stuff....Stay tuned.

THE UNNAMABLE by Samuel Beckett

Thirty days ago I began what promises to be a year of our discontent (to put it mildly) with a reading of Beckett's The Unnamable, a decidedly dreary way to start a year that began drearily enough, with overcast skies the color of woodsmoke and tree-tearing winds blowing down frozen air from Guy Maddin Land. l'Innommable, as the author called it en Francais, is a complex, disturbing, unsettling little interior monologue that demands multiple readings. Most of the difficulty arises from the fact that Beckett builds his monologue out of contradictions that radically undermine the interior monologue form and images that assault that form's humanistic underpinnings. None of this, however, has deterred humanists from trying to recruit the work for their team, citing its closing cadence, "I can't go on, I'll go on," as a statement of existential affirmation in the face of absurd nothingness. This attempt to strategically confuse Beckett with Camus quickly founders, though, with the realization that The Unnamable ends with this phrase, that "I" does in fact stop--forever--immediately upon uttering it. The text thus ends not in affirmation but in another of the explicit contradictions that rhetorically define it. Indeed, one might go further and state that all of the text's contradictions culminate in this most unsettlingly terminal one, the fatal period and blank silence after "I'll go on."

The Unnamable is also another of those works (like Moby Dick and Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy) that makes much of post-structuralist literary theory seem redundant, little more than a prosaic (or deliberately obscure) codification of ideas presented more ably and accessibly by the earlier artists. Sam and Herman and Alain got there firstest with the mostest, and their works are still much better reads than those of Jacques D. or Jacques L. or even Michel F. (who was a good and lucid writer much of the time, better than his brethren) and Roland B. (ditto). Of course, this raises the question of how readily the "poststructuralist" aspects of these works would have been recognized if we were not reading them through the unbreakable lens of our knowledge of Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, et al. So the criticism and theory does seem necessary after all, if only (to borrow a simile from Northrop Frye) as a kind of hermeneutical scaffolding to be knocked away once the hard work of authentic reading is underway.

While reading The Unnamable I became convinced that this book would profit remarkably from a sensitive dramatic reading of the kind Joyce performed with a fragment of the Wake. This is a text that cries out to be read aloud... slowly... deliberately... with measured pauses between each phrase. The thought of Joyce also brought up the notion of Beckett's monologue(s) as a radically deconstructed 'revision' of Molly Bloom's--an idea to provoke a future re-reading.

A Private Tumor of the Soul

From George Steiner's very interesting Paris Review interview, a great epigram that ends with an image worthy of the third writer in Steiner's little list:

"How can you, after Proust and Joyce and Kafka and Faulkner, sit down and write a novel? I've never quite understood. Answer: you have to. And the you have to is a private cancer, a private tumor of the soul."

GNADENHUTTEN: AN AMERICAN VOICE by Brian A. Oard

The following is a short fictional monologue based on historical fact, a side-product of my current novelistic project:

My dearest Margaret (speaks Private Thomas Ord of the Pennsylvania militia after the massacre at Gnadenhutten in the Ohio country, March 7-8, 1782, a forgotten footnote to the American Revolution) I cannot write my dearest Maggie hand still shaking with rage and shame trying to remember O Maggie trying to forget my love the things I see in this wild land when we crossed the river and rode toward the village an Indian my age came running across brown winter grass still patched with snow in the shadowed places and seeing our guns cried Don’t shoot and smiled as at a joke Don’t shoot...I am a Christian... My father is a white man like you...My name is Joseph and his smile widens I am Joseph your brother and Bilderbeck riding beside me lowered his musket spat out a plug of tobacco said That so? raised the barrel flashing in sudden sunlight between clouds and fired into the smiling savage’s face we rode on trampling the body that twitched in the grass to the village called Gnadenhutten by the Dutch Indian-lovers who converted these savages finding the village abandoned and all the savages men women children in the field gathering winter withered corn and themselves withered sapling thin hollow eyed gaunt skin stretched tight as bookbinding over rigid skulls These people are starving Christy said and the Irishman Welch replied Aye, for white man’s blood. And if not a man then a woman or child’ll do, eh Wallace? And Wallace nodded agreement seeing nought before him but his captive wife and sons and hearing nought but the blood crying vengeance in his veins

Colonel Williamson called the Indians together Gather in the church yonder all of you he ordered them breathlessly fat face flushed with the effort of speaking We will transport you to Fort Pitt for food and shelter Williamson ordered two detachments to round up the neighboring Indians and waiting we grumbled at the colonel’s words I didn’t ride here to take prisoners Welch said and everyone agreed until Christy the preacher began Please, gentlemen. These are Christian Indians, no more harmful than a mouse in the field. The crime be not theirs and vengeance not ours. Twould be a sin to harm them... If they’re Christian Hindeman said we’ll send ’em to heaven and their souls’ll smile down on us Welch said Never figgered ye fer an Indian-lover, Christy, you with your woman still warm in the ground at their hands Christy said These are not the responsible parties. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord and Bilderbeck grumbled An eye for an eye sayeth the Book, isn’t that right, preacher? the men gathered round Christy threatening belligerent until Colonel Williamson came forward and calmed them saying Men, we are here for reasons larger than ourselves, our petty prejudices, fears and opinions. We have come to this howling wilderness to strike the flint of civilization on the stony ground of savagery, in this unforgiving darkness to light the lamp democratic; so in this spirit of democracy to which we young, we new, we first Americans have pledged our lives, our blood, and our sacred honor, let us decide this matter in a spirit democratic, Line up, men! Line up for a vote! Now let each man decide the matter for himself without demagoguery or coercion. Let each man who believes these Indians should live step forward now. Williamson’s face clouded when only a few militiamen stepped out of line That be all of you who vote for mercy? He sighed audibly Very well, men. You have made a Pilate of me, and I wash my hands of this affair. At sunup you may do what you will with the prisoners

The Indians imprisoned in the church informed of impending execution kept us awake all night with their praying and hymning until first light dawned and the killing began with the men and the boys taken to one one building for slaughter and the women and the girls taken to another and the eighteen who voted against removed themselves with Colonel Williamson to a spot below the riverbank where only the sounds of the killing could reach them O Maggie I was not of their number I saw Hindeman in the church rip two babes from their mothers’ arms and holding them by the ankles in each hand draw his arms back like Our Lord on the Cross and slam the babes together once twice three times until he dropped them to the floor heads broken like eggs and leaking brains I escorted prisoners to the men’s slaughterhouse and it was a gory scene Leet and Bilderbeck bloodied like butchers the floor sticky and smeared with red bootprints and Solomon Urie throwing his bloody rope around the entering prisoners and forcing them down kneeling on their backs on the floor while Hindeman or Leet did for them with a hammer and I remember walking the path of my dark red bootprints back to the church and back to the building again and taking the women to their slaughter with Welch and his tomahawk and his pile of bloody scalps tossed carelessly in a corner he trades them for whiskey I’ve heard I saw a young man scalped skull bared to the bone but still alive and somehow escaped running for the river across the grass down the bank into the freezing water and up the other side howling like an animal skull shining silver in the sunlight until the preacher Christy I later heard rose from the group of demurrers aimed his musket and fired at the buck bringing him down saying God have mercy on his soul. I would shoot a brokenlegged horse just the same I took an old woman to Welch’s building and Urie roped her since the men were all dead by now and held her facedown on the floor and Welch handed me a rock hammer saying Ye’ll be as bloodied as the rest of us and we’ll all meet in the same Hell and the old Indian woman begins reciting in English I shall not want and Urie calls out bloodyfaced Do her, man! and the woman He restoreth my soul and I raise the heavy hammer in both hands and Welch That’s it. Batter the bloody bitch and the woman Though I walk through the valley of the shadow and thinking savage savage savage I bring the hammer down and the woman Thy rod and thy and her skull gives way and warm blood splashes my cheeks and spots my spectacles O Maggie

FINNEGANS WAKE film and Samuel Beckett's FILM online

Among the wealth of interesting stuff at UbuWeb (a site I've just discovered) is a complete online version of Mary Ellen Bute's obscure ca.1965 film Passages From James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Also viewable online at the site is Samuel Beckett's inventively titled Film, starring Buster Keaton. In my brief initial visit, I also discovered--and listened to the zippy-paced first page of--a complete reading of Finnegans Wake performed by Patrick Healy. The 'Joyce Sound' page also features the soundtrack from the Strick Ulysses film and the well-known recording of Joyce reading from the Wake. Elsewhere on the site, visitors can watch Jean Genet's short film Un Chant d'Amour and clips from the later films of Orson Welles in the One-Man Band documentary. Check this site out.

Three Reasons to Learn German

There's an old European joke that becomes less true with every passing year: A person who speaks three languages is trilingual, a person who speaks two languages is bilingual, and a person who speaks one language is American. I'm an American who speaks English, French and enough Italian to make myself understood by silk-suited mafiosi on the Amalfi Coast (long story), but recently I've been regretting that my knowledge of German is limited to what I've picked up from old movies and reruns of Hogan's Heroes. (And let's face it, "jawohl, mein kommandant!" is not exactly a useful phrase in the Germany of today.) I've read most of the canonical krauts--Goethe, Holderlin, Trakl, Kafka, Mann, Grass, Celan, Sebald, Jelinek, Handke, Bernhard, et al--in English translation but now I'm frustrated by the fact that the following three major works of twentieth-century German literature have yet to be completely translated:

The Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss. Weiss is best known in the English-reading world as the author of that wild and crazy Sixties play Marat/Sade (which is still outraging Brits after all these years in a 50th anniversary RSC revival), but The Aesthetics of Resistance (a novel which can count W.G. Sebald among its admirers) is surely his prose masterpiece. A three-volume fictionalized account of leftist resistance to the Nazis (but that description hardly does it justice; it's like saying Sebald's The Rings of Saturn is a travel book), Weiss's book digresses into topics much further afield and begins stunningly with a description of the Pergamon Altar at the Berlin antiquities museum that cinematically 'pulls back' to show us the central characters walking and talking in and around the altar. It's a brilliant opening to a fantastic book, but unfortunately only the first volume has been translated into English. (And it's only available in a seriously pricey edition from the University of Chicago Press.) I hope translator Joachim Neugroschel and U. of C. Press intend to English the rest of this brilliant novel.

The History of Sensitivity by Hubert Fichte. This monumental nineteen-volume work of fiction and nonfiction (That's right, 19 freakin' volumes!! I guess the dude was pretty sensitive) is described on the flap copy of the Serpent's Tail edition of Fichte's Detlev's Imitations as "a dialogue with Proust's Remembrance of Things Past" that has "established [Fichte] as one of the great European writers of the twentieth century." Sounds like it's worth at least a partial translation, n'est-ce pas? Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any of these books in English.

Zettels Traum (Bottom's Dream) by Arno Schmidt. The magnum opus of one of the 20th century's most original writers, this 1334-page Finnegans Wake-influenced novel might just be the single most important German literary work of the last century not yet translated into English. John E. Woods, whose recent English versions of Thomas Mann have won great acclaim, is reportedly at work on a translation to be published in the near future, presumably by Dalkey Archive Press. I eagerly await it.

THE KINDLY ONES by Jonathan Littell

Many critics were much too kind to The Kindly Ones. Not only is Jonathan Littell's trainwreck mash-up of Ernst Junger, Gert Ledig, Georges Bataille and Aeschylus not a great novel; it rarely even rises above mediocrity. Littell's prose is bland and boring, and the narrative this toneless instrument is forced to carry achieves the rare feat of being both unimaginative and unbelievable. The prose (which I assume is as flat in the original French as in English translation--probably a safe assumption these days) might be defended as a deliberately bland narrative voice, an appropriately banal reflection of the evil banality of an SS bureaucrat's mind, but there are two major roadblocks on the way to this artistic justification: first, Littell's narrator, Maximilien Aue, is not a typical Nazi bureaucrat but an aesthete among the fascist elite, so one would expect his voice to be more florid, baroque, even Proustian; second, the opening line of the novel ("Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened.") suggests that what follows will be a novel 'spoken' in a recognizable, idiosyncratic voice, a la the voices of Humbert Humbert or Dostoyevsky's underground man. Instead, Littell quickly loses this tone, and the prose becomes a merely competent, workmanlike wordstream remarkable only in its Nilotic length. The fact that this is exactly the kind of unremarkable, transparent prose we find in popular fiction (and no, I'm not going to invoke Gide, Camus, Robbe-Grillet and 'degree zero' writing; Littell's effort isn't good enough to merit that defense) suggests the proper way to read The Kindly Ones. For this is not really a 'literary' novel at all; it's a work of genre fiction, a big, bloated, research-intensive historical novel of the kind James Michener and Leon Uris used to write. It's tricked out in literary drag--allusions, quotations, intertextuality, philosophical discussions--but barely hidden beneath these gaudy rags is a book that Slavoj Zizek might call the "obscene supplement" of Herman Wouk's War and Remembrance. And about the novel's oft-mentioned 'obscenity,' its sexuality and scatology, perhaps the best that can be said is that fascism as anal sadism is a familiar and questionable idea, and it hardly merits a thousand-page dramatization. (Reading this novel, one gets the impression that Littell believes the classic psychoanalytic interpretation of fascism is an original idea he thought up one morning while masturbating in the shower.) All of that said, when The Kindly Ones is read as a historical novel, it's not all that bad. The historical reconstructions are well done and utilize the latest scholarship, and the meetings and discussions among SS officers probably come close to the reality of Nazi evil in its banal, bureaucratic form. If readers can overlook all the poorly digested research that the characters disgorge like Aue's many vomited meals, it's a decent piece of historical fiction. But there's really no reason for it to be 975 pages long. It's not War and Peace; it's not even War and Remembrance.

W. G. Sebald at 17, a photograph of a photograph

From 8mobili's photostream on Flickr, here's a photograph of W. G. Sebald's 1961 blood donor card, containing a photo of the author as a 17 year-old young man. Since the only familiar images of Sebald show him in the last two decades of his life, there's a slight shock in realizing that he was once this moody-looking Bavarian youth.

INDIGNEZ-VOUS! by Stephane Hessel

This week of nationwide police repression of the U.S. Occupy movement, a reminder from Mayors Quan, Bloomberg et al that all repression is local, seems a perfect time to read Stephane Hessel's universal call to (nonviolent) arms. Hessel's tiny book--so small you can stuff it in your pocket where it will be safe when Billionaire Bloomberg's robothugs come to toss all your other books into a garbage truck--delivers a simple and important message that has already resonated around the world: Get angry...and then channel that anger into political engagement. As Hessel writes, "...there are unbearable things all around us...If you spend a little time searching, you will find your reasons to engage. The worst attitude is indifference. 'There's nothing I can do; I get by'--adopting this mindset will deprive you of one of the fundamental qualities of being human: outrage. Our capacity for protest is indispensable, as is our freedom to engage." If that passage sounds rather Sartrean, there's good reason for it: Hessel was influenced by Sartre (and Merleau-Ponty, and Hegel, and surely a host of others) during his long-ago Normalien years. Indeed, the nonagenarian Hessel has lived so long that he comes to us now like a revenant from a gone world, a time of authentic heroism (he fought with the French Resistance), unspeakable horror (he was tortured by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Buchenwald and Dora), and triumphant intellectual accomplishment (his father knew Walter Benjamin and was a translator of Proust). Hessel comes out of this past now fading from memory to myth with a warning that we not betray the spirit of the Resistance, not turn a blind eye to injustice at home and abroad, not follow the siren songs of consumerism and accumulation. There are no new ideas in his pamphlet--just good ones. The same might be said of many books that changed the world. It's not a manifesto but a call to authentic action, with the emphasis on authenticity. The Tea Party 'acts,' but its actions are transparently inauthentic, born of Murdochian misinformation, channeled by political demagoguery and funded by corporations. The current Republican presidential debates are little more than a Koch Brothers Muppet Show, a sorry parade of corporatist drones--let's see if any of them can talk while David Koch drinks a glass of water. Don't bother seeking authenticity there, especially not from the probable nominee, Mitt "Corporations are people, my friend" Romney, who if elected will be a worse president than George W. Bush. Domestically, a President Romney will act as corporate-raider-in-chief, and internationally he will resurrect Bush's foreign policy team to foment more international disasters. Anyone who liked Dubya will love Willard. Today, if you seek authenticity, look in the streets. It was there in the encampment at Zuccotti Park until Bloomberg turned the park into a police state: a utopian experiment in noncapitalist life, a reminder to the millions that there is another way of living. This is the message the millionaires find insufferable, and that's why the batons flew Monday night. In The Middle Mind, Curtis White writes, "We will know we have succeeded in saying something that matters when we are told that it won't be tolerated." On Monday night, Occupy Wall Street received the bluntest possible confirmation that what they are saying matters. It matters profoundly. It matters so much that in order to stop it Michael Bloomberg left his 'reasonable man' reputation in tatters and acted--as John Hodgman said on last night's Rachel Maddow Show--like a papier mache puppet in an anarchist parade. The Occupy movement, wherever it moves from here, is meeting Hessel's challenge.

A piece of Hessel trivia: Stephane Hessel's father Franz Hessel was involved in a very Parisian menage a trois ca.1910 with the painter Marie Laurencin and the writer Henri-Pierre Roche. Roche later fictionalized the relationship in a novel titled Jules et Jim, the basis for Truffaut's great film. Stephane, then, is the son of 'Jim.'