Julio Cortazar And Hopscotch

Even though it may sound arbitrary, I have always judged most fiction keeping Latin American writing as a benchmark. It is the works, as they say. It has the Rings Of Saturn and Cupid's arrows, it has things concrete and things abstract, and its influence notwithstanding, it has won new converts to reading.

Of all great Latin American writers, it is Julio Cortazar who is the most daring, the most poetic, for with him, writing reaches those rarefied heights wherein the missed arc of his thoughts notwithstanding, the sheer delight of his prose is unending. With Cortazar, prose becomes proxy for love, proxy for the usually unattainable bliss, for surreal heavens, for shade, for light, for magic and honey and colour, for near revelations, for heartache before and after pain, for new music, for old love. Cortazar's prose has a hum, it has music which of course some other prose too has, but it has jazz which is usually different, played on a rainy night, near a burning fire. Cortazar lifts the clouds from a dull page and gives it colour, gives it sheen, gives gloss, gives the page love, a different song.

And all these qualities can very confidently be found in his Hopscotch, a novel that has mesmerised me for long, ever since I saw the femme fatale on its cover, ever since I read the lush translation of Gregory Rabassa. I think the whole of Cortazar's fiction is one Hopscotch after the other, and as you get familiar with his methods, there are further surprises, more hops and further jumps.

Hopscotch is usually considered as an example of the genre of Hypertext, and even though I am more fond of conventional story telling, I have found Hypertexting as more suitable to explore the subtle and not so subtle psychological ways in which human beings interact with each other. In other words, this becomes a very good method for exploring memory and then attempting to differentiate it from desire, which has always been my own undoing, one obsession. To read and analyse any story randomly needs an act of faith from the writer, and once the reader is invited to participate in this exercise, in this game, the demarcation between figure and ground disappears, from the read and unread, from the character writhing on the pages to the reader struggling on it, from desire to action, from memory to desire, from longing to pain.

I wish I could read Spanish, just for this book, for La Rayuela, as it is called. Set initially in Paris, and then later on in Argentina, I have been a victim of the symbols of this novels, of the shimmering claws of the memory it evokes in me, of my own life, of my own La Maga, my own club. It will be pointless to paraphrase or summarise this novel, for even if I wanted to, I feel incapable of just doing that. Suffice it to say here that this novel tells us the story of a man who lives by indulging in intellectual myth making. This novel is an account of his stories but it is also about La Maga, his lover. He lives with his friends in Paris, involved in intellectual, poetic, musical and political solutions for the world. After his lover disappears, he returns to Argentina, looking for La Maga in a different person ending nearly insane. The novel can be read whichever way you want, from chapter 1 to 56 or from 73 to 1, though Cortazar has provided a table of instructions, in case of confusion or forgetfulness. He also advises the reader to ignore these instructions, if the reader so decides.

This novel is filled with literary references and with jazz. The prose is jazz like and the style extremely rich. This novel is Literature itself, abundant with style and it conveys a certain approach, a style of living, something which I was incapable of doing in a certain time, words, days and nights that just came and went, superficially touching the fingertips of poetry, and leaving behind only ash, only regret, only promise, stale aftersmoke. Hopscotch is a dream when you read it, and one wonders at the genius of its style. One can quote chunks of it, any time. The great Pablo Neruda wrote about Cortazar............"Anyone who does not read Cortazar is doomed. Not to read him is a serious invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who has never tasted peaches. He would quietly become sadder...........and, probably, little by little, he would lose his hair".

One must not hurry while reading Cortazar, for everything is turned upside down. We must sing or try to hum a bit of his song, his jazz. Hopscotch is a fascinating novel or text that one could read for years and never tire. How many books could you say that for?

Soma : Drink Of Gods?

The Gods have usually had superior drinks for themselves, the secret ingredients of which have generally not either been revealed to humans or even hinted at. For if everything was revealed, then the very source of such delights would get ravaged, as humankind bears testimony to such acts. One such drink that ancient Gods favoured in India was Soma.

I was surprised that a recent BBC documentary, ( The Story Of India, Michael Wood) traced the origin of Soma to Ashkhabad in Turkmenistan, where the tree or leaves that ultimately produce the drink were found millenia before. It seems that following a wave of migration, this tree might have been or its seeds transported first to Northwest Hindukush mountains by people who started calling themselves Aryans. After sometime, the Aryans moved eastward, down and along the great Indian river Ganges and the plant seems not to have survived, because of humidity. Thus some origin of certain practices like drinking Soma might have originated elsewhere, in Central Asia and adopted or taken away by migrants.

The great Rigveda mentions it and it seems its writers or those who collected the hymns actually would drink good amounts of soma, for it would allay anxieties, heighten perception and improve more intelligent thought. The Hindu God Indra, God of thunder and rain, was used to drinking huge amounts of Soma, but being a God, it seemed to affect him less than other ordinary mortals. The Greek Ambrosia might be the Indian Soma, though interestingly, Soma does not seem to have survived in later day Hindu culture. It is interesting to note the more Central Asian origins of Soma and its migration westwards, giving the entire region a common Godly drink, something for its present day sons to mull over! Soma also has got aphrodisiac qualities. It seems to contain poppy, cannabis and ephedrine, and the latter will naturally lead to more sympathetic effects, for I understand it has cardiorespiratory effects. Others claim that it contains amanita muscarina, deadly mushroom.

Soma seems to be hallucinogenic and no wonder it was needed for more delicate and heroic thought. The whole history of mysticism is one unending convulsion followed by another, perpetuated by deep thought and spurred by Ambrosia, Soma, hallucinogens and so on. I am not sure if intoxicants are allowed in the Hindu faith but it would be a paradox if it was not so, for awareness of Gods was enhanced through mediums like Soma in more godly times. I am not sure what Manna was composed of, God granting it to Moses and Moses to his puerile disbelievers. The mention of manna is there in the Quran too, as food providing sustenance for the Israelites in the morning and Quails in the evening. More modern research has suggested that manna might have contained magic mushrooms or be akin to Soma. These are however pure speculatory ideas. Imagine many a King or sage refusing a heavenly drink! It would refute the very idea of benevolent shadow hood of God on earth.

The partaking of Soma was generally led to lead to the flowing of the rivers of poetry and deeper understanding of the heart; making it known as the God of speech, the elixir of life. Substitute it for inspiration and we have the same theme, minus ephedrine, minus palpitations and minus real poetic worth. We all do need intoxicants from time to time, of ego, of pride, of money and little useless fame, of the jingle of youth and the promise of sun, of worth, of ambition, of sterile desire. It seems that the primeval Gods were cleverer, for they knew the source of inspiration, and being perhaps politically incorrect, they snapped at it and drank it. How interesting it would have been to live then!

To end, I was just wondering where the sources of strength and inspiration come from, and more celestial powers need them too. A poet needs rhythm and beauty in verse, a writer of prose needs besides inspired talent, patience. Writing thus becomes a heavenly kind of trade. And it is then that man, sundered and thrown down, guilty and helpless, looks at the moon, fills the cup brimming with Soma and picks up the pen.

An Extract From Juan The Landless: Juan Goytisolo

I haven't read this book yet but cannot resist to convey the magic of this prose. This is the beginning of Juan The Landless, part 3 of the Marks Of Identity trilogy by Juan Goytisolo. The first sentence is 6 pages long and I am quoting just a short extract. The splendour of this long sentence will convey the lush richness of Goytisolo's oeuvre and the complexity of its psychological motives.

***************

according to Hindustani gurus, in the superior phase of meditation the human body, purged of its appetites and desires, abandons itself with delight to an ethereal existence, freed from passions and vices, attentive only to a gentle flow of a time without end, as light winged as those soaring little birds of passage seemingly obeying only the soft and melodious inspiration of an invisible breeze and musically absorbed in remote contemplation of the sea: sensory stimuli and sensory excitations no longer have any effect on it, and immersed in the beneficent languor of an eternal present, it loftily disdains the absurd slavery of lustful pleasures, pure, svelte, airy,weightless, with the delicate fluidity of those clouds which at eventide enhance the majesty of autumnal landscapes, far from the world's feverish, frantic hustle and bustle: rising above the tyranny of pretty contingency and hence offering to the devout admiration of the vulgar the solemn and tranquil demeanour of the ascetic purified by his acts of penitence and his fasts, the smiling indifference of the Brahman martyr face to face with the preparations being made for his own death, the serene composure of the fakir gracefully reclining on his bed of nails: but the body that observes you from the corner of the table, from the bright coloured jacket of the Hi-fi record, appears to be proclaiming violently, in a shriek almost, that never, absolutely never, will it attain, even in the improbable case that this might have been a deliberate goal that it had set itself, to the superior phase of transcendental meditation, the austere but ineffable pleasures of the beatific contemplative life: neither an anchorite nor a fakir nor a Brahman: merely a body: an extension of matter in space: an offspring of the earth, to earth forever united: united of a tight neat line, a carefully confined surface, a lissome slenderness, a plethora of flesh, baroque splendor, an opulent and fruitful, bountiful, fertile body, solidly rooted in the inferior world that to a pair of feet which, though left out of the artistic composition of the portrait, give one every reason to believe that they are the equal of the rest in grandeur, prodigality, and excess: naked feet, doubtless, seeking the direct, symbiotic contact that draws forth from the primordial substance the life-force, the powers of generation: for a rich sap nourishes this body and sustains it, generously helps it to thrive, invents fabulous convexities: the confining edge of the low cut neckline can scarcely contain them and favours a vast unfurling of waves which, although concealed beneath the velvety suppleness of the fabric, nonetheless prove appetizing to the eyes of the judicious spectator: roiled, towering surfaces which, from the imposing chin line downward, descend with windmill-like fury to the frontal apotheosis: a double crest, a supreme sea swell that the fearful Antillean hurricane has catapulted to the dizzying heights of an incredible prominence: the fatal wave rising in awesome splendor moments before crashing down upon the disaster area and sweeping away with wrathful provision the habitations, chattel, towns, industries, crops of an area teeming with life, transforming it, in the wink of an eye, into a dreary and desolate quagmire, abandoned to the moans of the victims, the barking of dogs, the hovering of vultures, sacking by looters and the starving, and the eager though tardy zeal of well-intentioned international charity organizations.............................

Photograph

We fixed between us
to imprison a sunny sky,
a shimmering lake and a heedlessly dizzy afternoon.
A photographic memory that could
scatter my collection of silences.
Some paper that I could stick to my favourite wall,
some faces that stick to my soul,
like a primeval memory, Adam, sin and tree.

But a photograph is awfully untrue
and hopelessly facile,
saying "Yes" the faces smiled together
but set the sunny day free.
A sky, lake and an afternoon
that cannot be trapped on paper or drawn on stone,
memories that dispatch time into oblivion,
giving memory not time, claws
to rip open this seemingly peaceful night.

Juan Goytisolo

There are times when one, searching in vain or after howling at the moon in vain or after having discarded the poem that was written the previous night, searches again for words that come from a region that might be haunted, might be unreal or even deliriously sane or insane. And after such ethereal nights and days, after absinthe dreams, after vague notions of literary intoxication, after humid nights, cold days, surreptitious hours, minutes longing for hours, hours for days, after nights of boredom, days of torpor, after many many such existences, chance or design gives you new words, a new writing, a new writer. I am referring to a writer I just discovered 2 weeks ago, and having decided to read him, I immediately got hold of his trilogy called Marks of Identity. I am referring to the greatest living Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo.

Goytisolo is the quintessential writer. He lives in exile, he is an exile, he lives in the most fabulously named place called Djemaa el Fanaa in Marrakesh. He is a rebel, he writes novels, he writes like a poet, like an angel. He is not afraid of writing, he has written. Writing is not just an exercise, a craft, a literary activity for arts sake. Here writing is an affirmation, an act of morality, a position, a stance, a political act, a serene not always gentle act. It can mean violence or limpidity or both. But never correctness, never doublespeak, never facile dolor.

Goytisolo is described as being a poet and a prose writer, but to me he writes like a poet. He writes a poet's prose. However, I am just beginning to read the first part of his trilogy and will write in great detail after I finish this brilliant novel. Suffice it to say here that he writes in, believe me, sentences of such beauty, such matchless quality that I thought ...." he writes like Genet" and was surprised to know that he considers Genet a personal hero and a mentor. It was his encounter with Genet that might have led to his self discovery as a bisexual, even though Goytisolo was married, interestingly to Proust's neice, and refused to live in their home after her death, calling it a tomb. His attraction to Muslim culture could, like Genet be traced to political activism, anti-imperialism and his own sexuality.

At Guardian Books, Maya Jaggi has written an excellent review of his major works besides providing biographical details including his present living style, habits. Goytisolo left Spain and its political climate after Franco's dictatorship was in power because of his political and moralistic stands. His brothers are writers too. Thus he is at once a rebel living a rebellion. He is against the climates that foment dictatorships, consumerism, wars, sexual repression and homophobia. He has adopted Morocco as his abode and has fiercely celebrated Islamic culture.

As being loyal to both literary concerns and social ones, the commitment is both for craft and creed. An interesting study of his fiction has been done by Stanley Black, in his Goytisolo and the poetics of contagion. Black finds Goytisolo' encounter with Saussarean linguistics as an interesting phase of his stylistic development, something I am not conversant with or understand. However, Goytisolo's literary work is to be seen in conjunction with his critical and journalistic essays. A novel must concern itself with the reality of the national context in which it is written. Hence, the writer is not just an artist but an activist too. Apart from his trilogy, Goytisolo has written extensively, his memoir is considered a classic besides esssays, newspaper columns, war reportage and a collection of essays called Landscapes of War and a meditation on Love called Makbara.

A note of caution here.....Goytisolo is tough reading. There are monologues, third person narrations, poems and prose of ferocious intensity. This sort of fiction, writing is not meant for a cosy read or for getting acquainted with a new writer. It demands participation, as Black says...shaking the bourgeois reading pattern. The sentences run over pages, without any stops, just colons, occasionally semicolons, no capitals, paragraphs of, honestly, fantastic prose.

I will endeavour to quote him in these posts here but can only say that reading him is to invent a new language for oneselfIt is punishing but rewarding. A good review here.

Edinburgh Fringe Festival

I think that Edinburgh is perhaps the most captivating city in Britain and the reasons are not just architectural. Every year, usually in August, thousands of people descend into the Scottish capital for the most important cultural activities of the year, namely the Edinburgh fringe, the theatre and International film festival, the book festival, music, jazz and other literary and performing arts.

The weekend gone by, I was in Edinburgh to try and witness this phenomenon and partake of as many delights as I could. This was my second Fringe. For those unfamiliar with the city, Edinburgh has a more central European feel than other British cities. The castle nestles on the hill, and the famous buildings including the old assembly look like pictures from a wizard's painting. Down the hill, on the other side, runs the main artery in the city and adjacent is the Scott monument, my favourite Edinburgh monument. It is however the mile or so of cobble stoned street, called the Royal Mile, in the old city, that is the major haunt of tourists and festival buffs. It looks unreal, surreal, out of fiction even when you walk its famous walk and during festival times, it is besieged by artists doing free shows, revellers, rude performers, teenagers, lovers, musicians, beggars, and some serious art students looking for a deal or two in the numerous theatres staging known and not so known plays and dramas.

The main problem during the fringe can be what to watch and see. The major shows can be prebooked, some are usually sold out and some not so. One has to solve the logistic problem followed by the problem of torpor that can settle easily at times. It rained while I was there, making me and my choices sluggish but I did actually enjoy a couple of things I watched, including a play called Escape Routes, at Usher House. The lone actress forgot her lines once but I thought the play was well written and the references were topical. I watched a musical volcano played by the Lady boys of Bangkok, men dressed as women, very attractive women indeed. I did not feel squeamish when I thought some 'women' looked very attractive indeed. The next day I was at The Zoo, watching The belly dancer diaries, which was disappointing, as it included the usual cliches about Egyptian heat, culture, dust, flies and stereotypes. My worst choice was the circus of horrors, which I watched to relieve my self after I had seen a different take on Macbeth.

Edinburgh fringe is a cultural activity the likes of which is seldom doable in other parts of Britain. It has something for everyone, from raunchy, risque shows to arty plays and movies, a festival of music, stand up comedy, the famous and not so famous musicians, popular and underground culture, writers and academics, writers on the fringes of celebrity, not to speak of the real shows on the streets, corners and closes of Edinburgh. The town wears a festive look, notwithstanding ominous clouds, the usual rain and grey skies. The mist comes down from cal ton hill and seems to touch the rooftops. You look at the skies, the rain, and somewhere you see a piper playing his mourful dirge. There is an Ionesco play nearby, A Rosencratz and Guildernstern. You decide, throw the soggy cigarette down and rush to the nearest theatre. You are in time.

I could not attend The Book Festival, which this year included unknown and famous writers, including workshops about writers from Asia, a group of Bengali writers, including Joy Goswami from India and Selina Hossain from Bangladesh. there is ongoing focus on Indian and Chinese fiction, writers from around the world including John Pilger, Ian Rankin, Margaret Atwood and so on. The major themes are Slavery, War and Media, East and West, Genes and Society. The atmosphere at rain soaked Charlotte Square Gardens is quite bookish. The movie festival has its share of good movies too, featuring Bela Tarr, Judd Apatow to Gus van Sant. There are novel adaptations, controversial memoirs and so on. The retrospective has been dedicated to Anita Loos, a famous Hollywood screenwriter. Also showing this year was the whole of Berlin Alexanderplatz in its 15 and more hours of beauty.

This time around, by putting my palm on the outline of a hand on the Love test machine, I took the Love test. I was expecting a cool, clammy 2 out of 10, but scored a Hot 8! However, this is one test that I advise to be skipped.

Susan Sontag

The abiding quality of Susan Sontag's critical work is her interest in virtually everything. That she was so well read is obvious from her constant references to writers and other literary genres. However, what make Sontag's essays readable is her lucidity. In other words, the essays are approachable and not intimidating, and what is more interesting is that Sontag does not become vehement or shrill in her opinions. She voices concerns but does not preach.

I have very recently finished reading Against Interpretation , followed by Where the stress falls. I think I liked the latter more than the former. Also perhaps, the former belongs to a time and interests that I find too dull, inspite of hip-hop, drugs, Presley and The Beatles. In Against Interpretation, Sontag sounds too sure, too clever. In her own thoughts on Against Interpretation, she acknowledges a certain naivete, a certain lack of guile. Writes she in Thirty Years Later...'I was a pugnacious aesthete and a barely closeted moralist....my pedagogical interest got in the way of my prose' However, Sontag writes crisply and some sentences are eminently quotable.

In Where the stress falls, we read her reviewing Barthes, Walser, Pedro Paramo, Sebald amongst others, followed by a sweeping review of Berlin Alexanderplatz that I found very helpful, an essay on cinema, on dance and dancing, photography and amongst other essays her Sarajevo essays called Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo and 'There' and 'Here'. Included also is A letter to Borges.

The great stories are not only told in the past tense, they are about the past, writes Sontag. We see in these essays her yearning for reading and creating from the past, a tender prose and a melancholic vein. However, while I admire her prose which is simple and cautiously erudite, Sontag's prose never rises into the poetic, the breathless, the sublime. In her essay, A poet's Prose, Sontag differentiates between a prose writer and a poet. She calls a poet as a titre de noblesse. The prose of poets is typically elegiac, retrospective. It belongs by definition to the vanished past. Since she differentiates it so well, Sontag however eludes the definition herself. After reading these two collections, I admire her prose but find very little poetry. However, that is unimportant.

Sontag has an admiration for Europe, witnessed in her self-declared Europhilia, especially in her earlier writings. In the Sarajevo essays, she laments and points a finger at the French and British covert support for Serb aggression in Bosnia and declares the UN forces there as pro-Serb. She tries to answer the reluctance of writers and other intellectuals to take sides in Bosnia and cites reasons for those, pointing out the easily known fact that Bosniaks, being Muslim, were subject to prejudice. She declares that Europe has yet to be born: a Europe that takes responsibility for its defenseless minorities..........Europe will be multicultural, or it won't be at all.

Sontag writes great essays, whether you like her assertion that Naipaul's The enigma of arrival could even be compared to Sebald's style. By her own admission, she declares herself as being Jewish for two millenia and yet, she appears interested in writing and pointing out the carnage's that the Bosnian Muslims suffered. However, I am yet to come across any essays that she might have written in defense of the Palestinians, who have and are suffering the same holocausts that she writes against.

I do not know if I will read her fiction, but I won't mind reading her eminently readable essays.

Jorge Luis Borges

I must admit that I am a Borges fan. Cynical that I am, I won't say that for other writers. What didn't Borges write and what didn't he read! To be honest, his scope is baffling, the range of his interests immense, his erudition vast, his writing brilliant with that sadness, that sense of ever present loss that lifts greatness to sublime.

It has been 3 years now since I picked up his Selected Non-Fictions followed by his Selected Poems. To literature Borges brings that fundamental knowledge of the transience of things. He never raves and rants, there is a philosophical undercurrent in all his writings. People have come and gone, sometimes leaving something worthwhile, like literature, like an epitaph. Borges is the metaphysician for the senses, patient healer with words. His prose is never angry, often serene, mostly melancholic, generally concerned with metaphysical matters. From essays on the history of angels to the postulation on reality, from a defense of the Kabbalah to Muslim sufism, from detective fiction to Ulysses, Borges writes all. His film criticisms elevate this genre to an art, and his immense erudition is visible from his book criticisms.

Borges was a wide reader. In this book are includes his reviews on Meyrink, Faulkner, Huxley, Tagore, Lady Murasaki to his Library of Babel, which introduced me to his favourite authors including Cortazar, Lainez and Akutagawa amongst others. Borges stuns you with a lyrical essay on the history of the Tango and next comes Kafka, Pascal, Attar the Persian mystic genius. Borges' poetry is the refinement of the senses. The tone is one of a tranced rhythm, of speculative whispering, almost magic, nearly mystical.

Borges was born in Buenos Aires and is generally regarded as a 20th century literary genius. His fame grew outside Latin America and by the time of his death, he was a literary phenomenon. In 1955, he became blind and then mostly wrote poetry. He won numerous awards including the Alfonso Reyes prize. The translations by Esther Allen, Weinberger and other contributors are extremely brilliant.

Borges is a true universal writer for he read everything, from Western to Eastern Literature including religious and mystical texts. His creed was universal as opposed to pure nationalistic credo. This is easily reflected in his writings. Borges doesn't frighten with his literary zeal but works his magic in a hypnotic way. If only everone would read Borges!
I end this post with a few lines from his poem called Parting.

Three hundred nights like three hundred walls
must rise between my love and me
and the sea will be a black art between us.
Nothing will be left but memories.
Nights hoping for the sights of you,
................................, firmament
that I am seeing and losing........
Final as marble
your absence will sadden other afternoons.

The Arcades Project : Walter Benjamin

The Arcades Project is unlike any book I have read before but then it is unlike anything that one is likely to read. It has been over a year since I purchased it and I have read it intermittently, for this book needs attention, which is not always easy and concentration that is so hard sometimes. Such is the magnitude of this work that I find it hard to even describe it. I have not finished reading this work yet for after all, it took more than a decade to write it. It is Walter Benjamin's effort to write and critique, it is such an immense effort in academia, it is a towering achievement, a magnum opus.

Benjamin started this work in 1927 and carried it on till 1940. The present English edition runs over a thousand pages. published as Der Passagen-Werk in German, this fantastic work is a history, a study of 19th century Paris. It is a posthumously published work. The book is comprised of Convolutes, arranged alphabetically, followed by essays, additional files. He arranged the work in 36 categories like boredom, fashion, photography, catacombs and so on. This book defies categorization for it is actually a research project and I find it monstrously intelligent, unlike anything one can read. Thus this book is a challenge but an intelligent one. There are references to Baudelaire alone that run over 100 pages, in addition to his other contemporary writers like Proust, Adorno and so on.

An arcade in English is a passage in French and a Passagen in German. For those who have been to Paris, a passage basically connects two parallel streets and the passage has shops, cafes and other establishments that face each other. The passage is thus open at both ends and covered with glass and iron. Although arcades are found in other European cities, the arcades were invented in Paris and thus remain a Parisian phenomenon. Benjamin reads into the other a dialectic that suggests both oppression and liberation. For Benjamin, history is Janus, double faced. Since the arcades were created for profit, for economic purpose, they do not tell us of their underlying story. For Benjamin, this is nothing more than promoting commodity fetishism, the only interest being in the goods, at their face value. However, the arcades served the purpose of a burgeoning economy in the 19th century, reflecting the vision of some pioneering minds. He thus wants to offer the true history rather than the surface one.

The arcades also offer refuge from rain, cold, noise and give the passerby a chance to look at a dream in the shop windows, something distant, something that could be attained. The book itself is not a straight forward narrative but a collection of quotations, drafts, commentaries, mosaics, interpretations, ideas, discourses and passages of political, sociological and aesthetic and philosophical nature. Hence, it is not easy to describe this work. Benjamin quotes history to write history. Therefore, this book can only be read in short stints, for the enormous amount of literary references prevent the reader from more natural forays. This therefore becomes an encyclopedia of literature and philosophy and a minefield of variegated knowledge.

To understand Walter Benjamin's works, one needs to be more erudite and more patient than usual. For not only is he a genuine philosopher, he is too well read, like others from the Frankfurt school. His Marxism and his relation with Jewish messianism is not yet clear to me. It seems that he was quite close to Gershom Scholem, the Jewish theologian. Susan Sontag advises us to avoid giving Benjamin any ideological position while in Illuminations, which Hannah Arendt has forewarded, she thinks that Benjamin was a peculiar Marxist. At one time, he did contemplate emigrating to Palestine.There are so many allusions in this work that one finds some as Benjamin's own obsessions at times. This work thus asks for a more learned approach and a discipline while reading, for the text is obscure at times and not readily accessible.

I will endeavour to read this work occasionally for I sometimes wonder if I should but such is the fantastic allure of Benjamin's scholarship, the wide canvas of this work, the amazing literary quality and the unending knowledge in these pages that it would be unwise to not possess this book. I will try to quote excerpts from this work on this blog whenever I can. However, those familiar with Benjamin's other works and essays must understand that this is a truly phenomenal work unlike say his Hashish In Marseilles or other essays.

Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia

Even though Theodor Adorno was a philosopher, yet he wrote like a poet. It is a quality that few philosophers possess. Most philosophical writing is very arm-chair, erudite and tedious. Philosophizing and writing philosophy are thus different issues. To write is to affirm in a different medium while to speak and thus teach allows you to explain.

Adorno writes in a language that is accessible but not mundane, beautiful but not ineffectual, wonderful at times but never superfluous. Adorno co-wrote the Dialectic Of Enlightenment with Max Horkheimer and perhaps the language in that book is not entirely his. Yet his other works published as the Culture Industry, Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory might occasionally present difficulties to a lay-person like myself, who bravely ventures into the intricacies of the Frankfurt School. However, after the initial difficulties are dealt with, one finds Adorno rewarding, particularly when you allow yourself to follow him.

However, I would like to draw attention to this great collection of reflections on a damaged life, wherein Adorno writes like a tragic poet, occasionally far away from the hassles of Marxism and Commodity Fetishism. Dedicated to his friend Max Horkheimer, the book begins with an epigram, life does not live. The book is in three parts with small chapters, the first of which is called For Marcel Proust. The book was written in America, when Adorno was in exile, when he became known as Teddy. The book has numerous anecdotes, parables and aphorisms and mostly reflections on exile, on damaged lives.

The tone of this book is definitely pessimistic for Adorno feels that in this capitalistic chaos, life is permanently damaged. Writes Adorno in the dedication..........The melancholy science from which i make this offering to my friend relates to a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy, but, which, since the latter's conversion into method, has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life. With insights and reflections on marriage, divorce, on fish in water and on the dialectic of tact, this book is filled with aphorisms.The basic anxieties of his oeuvre are addressed as usual but the intensity of an argument is matched by the beauty of the prose.

It is well recognized that most of what Adorno wrote can be quoted or each sentence generally is a quotable quote and nowhere is it truer than this book. This is an unforgiving and an unforgettable book. And if all philosophy were written like this, I might consider a change in trade.
Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar, writes Adorno but then Minima Moralia has more.

The Voice Imitator : Thomas Bernhard

Of all Bernhard's novels that I have read so far, The Voice Imitator is perhaps the most unusual. For here, the ranting and raving is not as obvious, as relentless but somehow the spectre, the shadow that lurks in this short book is never less sinister, never less haunting.

Described as short stories, the voice imitator is more of a collection of anecdotes, reports, gossip, hearsay. Underneath, one gets the feeling that something more sinister than what one has understood lurks, as the stories or conversations, ( each never more than a page long and some just a few lines) work like parables, like scattered drops of bright wisdom. Those familiar with Bernhard's oeuvre will however recognise his usual acerbic wit, his acidic sarcasm, the subtle and unsubtle bite of his prose, and his usual themes. The stories concern 13 acts of lunacy, 20 surprises, 4 disappearances, 2 instances of libel, 18 suicides, 6 painful deaths and so on.

The beauty of these short stories is the thumping effect that they produce within a few lines. In other words, what an ordinary writer will do with a big tome, Bernhard achieves on a Page, and this is no exaggeration. As Peter Filkin writes, the voice imitator works as a mini-anthology of Bernhard's obsessions with murder, madness and the inability of language to capture, or relieve, the absurdity of life. The other characteristic of these stories is the way the events are narrated, for what is revealed in a few lines is not as important as what is kept hidden, which is not annoying but disconcerting.

Although I liked most of the stories, I will quote this one and enthusiastically recommend The Voice Imitator, especially to those who are well versed with his other works.

This story is called Moospruggers mistake

Professor Moosprugger said that he had gone to the west station in Vienna to pick up a colleague whom he did not know personally but knew only from correspondence. He had expected a different person from the one who actually arrived at the west station. when I drew Moosprugger's attention to the fact that the person who arrives is always different from the person we expect, he got up and left simply and solely for the purpose of breaking off and abandoning all contacts he had ever established throughout his life.

Poetry Is Like Water

Poetry is like water, colourless, it
leaves no space, no edges to touch
after the most recent pain has left, just left
me alone, just left me to think, of how common,
how dull, how alone my pain was.

Poetry is so dull, so listless, so deaf
to the hours I have, alone with words and
fathomless with memory, leaving no space, no edges to touch
after the most recent pain has come and left, just left
me alone, too thoughtless to complain,
a carbon paper sky.

Poetry has no speech even when it rises
like fever, like love, when it recedes
like fever, like love, leaving no space, no edges to touch
after the most recent pain has left, just left
me alone, amongst words too dull
to climb from the pages.

Weekend: Jean-Luc Godard

The word that best describes this movie is riveting. That it is such utter captivity, such immense satire is what makes this a cinematic experience worth remembering, a tour de force for the senses. We are aware as we watch it that this is a movie of ideas, one after the other, like chapters in a book, thrown incessantly at your face, relentlessly, savagely. That there are so many of them, with so little warning, that it becomes a trifle difficult to watch it, to follow it sometimes.

An almost anarchic couple, who would not mind killing each other, leave Paris on a weekend to claim inheritance by shady, almost immoral means. They get trapped in a traffic jam, almost a vision of hell. There are cars lying in heaps, bodies by the roads, blood on the roads, a couple playing chess and all these things seem to be going on inspite of themselves. we watch this couple flee armed people, french revolutionaries, immigrant Arabs delivering speeches till they get caught up in a revolutionary militia that cannibalises , ending in the woman eating a bit of her husband too, after the mother has been murdered for money.

This movie is a ferocious response against bourgeoisie values. only a new horror can spare us from bourgeoisie horror, we hear. Marx equated with Christ, Engels and Morgan and we understand that this is not satire for satires sake but a revolt, an artistic attack against commodity fetishism, against not the usual dreary montage of existential angst but a profound indictment of social anarchy against a background of consumerism.

With Godard, one knows that we are watching a movie made not just by a great artiste but an intelligent man, a director making a movie of ideas, like a Russian novel of ideas. It is a phenomenal movie, a great movie, one that lingers in the retina, and one that can be made sense of long after having watched it. It is nothing short of brilliance. It must be watched a few times to grasp its luminosity.

Code Unknown: Collage Or Art?

I was bored by Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher where the moment of suffering never comes. If Haneke creates characters that cannot or will not communicate, then one must suffer from boredom, because he is a fine film maker and we must learn to suffer. However, if the attempt is to existentialise alienation, make it an art, showcase it to show cultural and racial isolation, depicting difficulty in communication also, then Code Unknown, Haneke's deft collage movement is actually quite good.

There are some powerful scenes or movements in this movie. My favourites are the Boulevard scenes, the metro scene and Juliette Binoche in the theatre. Of course, this movie can only exist in its deft style but the characters are actually caricatures for if, if they actually tell their stories, then the facade of pseudo-communication, the ghetto existence of most European cities will simply explode. If Haneke strikes a kind of balance between different racial subtypes in this movie, he does not allow his characters to speak, for speaking would involve politics, politics to do something. The artists aim is not just to showcase suffering but to take sides and we do not know whose side he is on.

Any person worth his salt can have an opinion. All opinions, even relating to what coffee one drinks could be political. Most European cinema, under the guise of Art, has escaped from attempting to answer, to speak. To highlight all this xenophobia, racialism, boredom is to stultify the subject matter, for the crisis must be lived, the love torn to pieces, the tumour touched and then, only then can this heartache be led to its proper denouement. Otherwise, this movie is only poster pain, a moving collage.

However, to be fair, this movie has its moments too. It takes courage to stick a poster to a city wall in Europe these days. And Haneke, after all, is quite brave.

Ordet

It is hard not to think of Ordet without thinking of the end. For it is the end that most matters in this movie or so I think. To say that it is an extraordinary movie is to say the least. The images from this movie stay with you for these are not supposed to be ephemeral or even abstract but realistic, hard and sombre.

The movie is about a miraculous resurrection, set against religious doubt and hypocrisy in a farm house in a village in Denmark. The scepticism, religious fervour and lack of it is reflected in the principal household where the tensions simmer from frank disbelief to an almost insane religious grandiosity, somehow well played by an actor portraying a detachment from everyone, including himself and finally rescuing everyone, even from themselves, in the final scene that resurrects the daughter-in-law, the most affable person from the coffin, when she is about to be buried. The supposedly insane Johannes, the person who proclaims he is Jesus, claims reason in the end and magically breathes life into his sister-in-law. The last scene also brings together the other remaining jigsaw, that of the neighbouring tailor, who acknowledges his hypocrisy and his fanatic understanding of religion.

I was rather mystified by the ending but somehow not surprised for I thought I was watching not a movie about faith but a religious movie, a kind of toned down evangelism, a hushed preaching, a sophisticated call to arms. In the father figure, the head of the household, we behold a kind of a bibilical patriarch, with his unflinching and sometimes dour faith in God and yet who also has his doubts and drinks his cafe. He is waiting for a miracle and when he has nearly given up, after the resurrection he proclaims that this God and the God of old are the same.

I do not know what Carl Theodor Dreyer wants us to understand from this movie. If it is about faith, hope, belief in endless struggle, toil, and being truthful and good, then it is admirable. If this movie is about that sentimental belief in one's sin, redemption and all that never ending hypocrisy in man's ultimate destiny, then this movie simply crashes.

Apart from the ending, I believe that the interiors and the landscapes in this movie are breathtakingly melancholic, beautiful, subtle and understated to the point of oppressive brilliance. There is humour too, for when the pastor wonders whether Johannes' malady is due to love, his older brother immediately answers........."No, Kierkegaard". The hard outdoors, the wind, the menace of the interior of the house, the minimalist lighting at times and the constant pacing in and out of the rooms somehow matches the fervour in the souls of the main characters. Ordet is a great movie but the ending, miraculous that it is, and attractive as it seems, reflects despair rather than hope.

Lesson From The Kama sutra

I have never quoted any poem or any prose extract in great length, but I find this poem too irresistible not to do so, and it would be miserly not to share it with those who don't know Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet, the voice of freedom and a major world poet.

Wait for her with an azure cup.
Wait for her in the evening at the spring, among perfumed roses.
Wait for her with the patience of a horse trained for mountains.
Wait for her with the distinctive, aesthetic taste of a prince.
Wait for her with the seven pillows of cloud.
Wait for her with strands of womanly incense wafting.
Wait for her with the manly scent of sandalwood on horseback.
Wait for her and do not rush.
If she arrives late, wait for her.
If she arrives early, wait for her.
Do not frighten the birds in her braided hair.
Take her to the balcony to watch the moon drowning in milk.
Wait for her and offer her water before wine.
Do not glance at the twin partridges sleeping on her chest.
Wait and gently touch her hand as she sets a cup on marble.
As if you are carrying the dew for her, wait.
Speak to her as a flute would to a frightened violin string,
As if you knew what tomorrow would bring.
Wait, and polish the night for her ring by ring.
Wait for her until the night speaks to you thus:
There is no one alive but the two of you.
So take her gently to the death you so desire,
and wait.

Dilletantism And Blogging

A question that so called literary blogger's must continually ask themselves is the worth of their opinions expressed about the things that they write, this writer not excluded. Under the garb of criticism, a whole host of senseless twaddle finds its way in this medium, which though superficially alluring, is eventually jarring to the senses. Because one must write, one finds oneself getting immune to the superficiality of opinions expressed and even carried away occasionally by praise expressed herein, praise that sometimes helps flagging literary self esteem.

I found an interesting post on this subject, quite randomly I must admit, on the internet recently about this subject. Racquel Recuero has questioned whether blogging is actually literature? For every Swift and Johnson writing in the 18th century, a host of other writers wrote junk, he tells us. The new technology of blogging, he reminds us, has unleashed a geyser of sludge. And in the future, he warns, no one will read this sludge, written by drunken college students and ex-spouses. He describes the blog's mostly as rants, meanderings, neurotic, chaotic, lacking purpose and structure. He does not deplore blogging, only that he finds it is necessary to understand what worth it will have in the future. He is aware of why people might want to write but is sensitive to what they should be writing.

It is only bad literature that has made good literature great. Whether people burden us with weekend parties or the movies they rant about or whether it is some other reason to write, blog writing, mute and inglorious, can still support more ambitious efforts. Mercifully, he recognizes blog's as literature, but that is besides the point. I think he raises serious questions that blogger's need to address.

I find some literature blog's, read randomly on the internet, actually raving conversations rather than serious writing. The purpose, if these blog's have a purpose, must be to understand rather than to sermonize, to attempt to do so rather than base one's opinions on pre-conceived prejudices. It is exceedingly difficult for Europeans to actually understand the nuances in an Asian or South American literary genre and vice versa. To claim to actually get between the sentences would be a foolish thing to do. One must let the snow fall on one's shoulders, feel the icy winds of winter before one can call snow romantic, deserts beautiful and dusty plains dusty.However, language gives us a kind of unwritten license, poets have fancy, they imagine about countries not seen, faces not touched, loves not loved and out of that imagination we get true literature sometimes.

What matters is earnestness in writing and not expressing half-baked opinions about things not seen, without evidence, without knowledge. One must fall in love to understand the pain of this emotion. I do not exclude myself from these faults and sometimes wonder at my own temerity to write, but write we must, even if these blog's exist in an artificial nether no-world, at the crossing of true literature and chaotic mumbling.

Season Of Migration To The North

It has been a while since I have wanted to write about this fantastic novel by the Sudanese writer Tayeb Saleh. Two years and two readings apart, this novel can be described as seminal, a kind of a post colonial answer or a response to Heart Of Darkness, only that this novel is not an apology but a re-examination of exile and migration.

Born in Sudan, Saleh moved to London and wrote this short novel in the sixties, a work that has been translated into numerous languages. Saleh is a novelist and a poet too. This novel has for long remained a classic and has in the past been declared as the most important Arabic novel of the last hundred years. Since I can only read the translated novel, which is written so beautifully, one wonders as always at the original magic of Arabic. And surprisingly enough, the novel is written in a modern language, devoid of pretensions and unlike other Arabic novels that somehow do not follow the structure of the novel in the Western European sense.

The story, told by a narrator in flashbacks from his own life mixed with following the fortunes of Mustafa Saeed, who having returned back from England to Sudan previously, finds parallels between his and Mustafa's life. Whilst in England, Mustafa, having become Moozie, uses his exotic charm to seduce women in England and driving some to despair. He gets married and in a scene of sexual imagery and violent tension, he kills his wife and, and later when back in Sudan, Mustafa disappears mysteriously in the Nile following a flood, having been in and out finally of an unhappy marriage. The narrator too has returned to Sudan from England and his own reflections and experiences are revealed in spasms of emotions, in surreptitious and enigmatic ways.

This is a novel about migration, of self imposed exiles, of clashes of culture, of thought, language and feelings and the language of feelings. But the clashes are not just external, they are internal too, forcing one to question one's place in a new culture, and the place one has left behind or only thought to have done. One cannot belong anywhere because the battles are fought inside, the doubts are within, the pain of dislocation is inside. The narrator's grief is in not being accepted on his return and his not accepting and his inability to reject his new past, that of an ex-colonial country, wherein he remained an outsider too, always. The dialogue is between the colonized and the coloniser, only the tragedy of discourse is within the same person, now no longer a subject but newly subjugated by his own fears.

There is politics here but then even a love poem has its politics and we expect Saleh to exhume this colonial stuff but the exhumation is a subtle one, going on inside the narrator torn between his pasts. The murder of the English woman has been interpreted as a revenge against colonialism and I think it is a kind of response if not revenge, though Saleh has denied it. The style is hauntingly lyrical, calling it only poetry is an injustice. Says the narrator about his lover in England.............. when she saw me, she saw a dark twilight like a false dawn. Unlike me she yearned for tropical climes, cruel suns, purple horizons. In her eyes I was a symbol of all hankerings. I am south that yearns for the north and the ice. There is a sense of belonging always, of his torn identity between the North and South, and Mustafa's return to the North is an affirmation of new found confidence and freedom, of reversing the flow of people Southwards, of the joys of freedom and the restrictions of life in the North. It is the narration of what has been called counter flows to colonialism, a reversal of Conradian journeys into the Congo, a return back.

To say that this novel is important is only to undermine it. The debates it evokes are as vital now as when it was written. We have been warned these days of clashes of religions and civilizations, colour and sex and languages and of course power. Yet , the most subtle clashes and the only important ones are those that take place inside our minds, where all battles and clashes are decided.
The narrator is towards the end waking from his nightmare, and he decides, he chooses. I quote this final, beautiful paragraph from this beautiful novel......

All my life I had not chosen, had not decided. now I am making a decision. I choose life. I shall live because there are a few people I want to stay with for the the longest possible time and because I have duties to discharge. It is not my concern whether or not life has meaning. If I am unable to forgive, then I shall forget.

Stalker

Stalker, to put it simply, is the best movie ever made. It sounds like a tall claim, I know. However, if we look at it dispassionately, we realize that Stalker is more than a movie, it is a minefield of cinematic excellence, exploding when we least expect and rewarding on every new viewing.
Andrei Tarkovsky needs no introduction. Son of the Poet Arseni Tarkovsky, Tarkovsky made immortal movies in a mortal world, though amusingly this movie was shot twice, as the first original prints were lost in a mysterious fire. The second effort drained everyone, and it is a tribute to his grit, imagination and his entire cast.
What do we expect from a movie? Entertainment, passing a vacant hour or so, debate on crime, politics, social imagery? How relevant is an environmental issue to a man in spiritual torment or to people who have chosen to choose and oppose? What use drama, stories, immaterial plots of suburban housewives, infedility, war angst, remorse after killing people, emotional tripe for holocausts when new holocausts are being perpetrated every day? What use watching absurdism and existentialism on a screen, why allow ourselves to be sermonized, to be prepared, to be made malleable for propagandist emotional nonsense?

We need the stalker, in every sense, in every measure for cinema to flourish in our minds, for real spiritual metaphysics to bloom in our lives, for cinema to enhance and not impinge on our sensibilities, not drag us into the morass of cinematic illusions. Stalker brings into our ken not just technical excellence but spiritual cinema, food for lesser Gods and tormented mortals.
In a setting described as tranquil and desolate and peaceful and isolated, I watched Stalker again for perhaps the sixth time. Each new viewing of stalker rewards one with fresh insights into the complex imagery of this movie, and leaves one feeling emboldened to face one's demons.

Two men, a writer searching for inspiration and a physicist searching for empirical truth, employ a man, simply called the Stalker to lead them into an area called the Zone, where there is a room that grants one any conceivable wish. After reaching there, he shows and guides them to this room, with restrictions on how to actually get there, following certain rituals that the two men find baffling. They reach the room and the writer decides against wishing anything leaving the physicist wanting to blow up the entire zone and the Stalker aghast, dumbfounded and broken at their empty eyes and lack of faith. This is the bare story and seems quite simple. However, into this tapestry is woven an intricate pattern of illusions, allusions, religious imagery, symbolism, and metaphysical allegory.

Throwing the nuts
The stalker allows the two men to look for the room in the zone only by following a certain path that is free from danger, for one cannot offend the zone. The zone, the stalker warns is not for casual strolls, for it can punish if offended. The path is made safe by the nut throwing ritual, tied to a bandage, signifying safety. The procedure seems so medieval, so bizarre that from the point of view of the two men, the stalker could be insane. However, his warnings ring true for their is surreptitious fear in the zone where flowers don't smell, where damaged tanks and armoured cars lie broken covered with overgrown vegetation.
Tunnel scene
The tunnel scene is a heart-stopper, a cinematic rarity, a sequence that leaves one rattled and dumb, in mortal terror, but then all quest is uncertain, all search is madness. The tunnel has to be traversed for there is no easy path to the room, no short cuts. The harder the path, the reward is more, the benefits better. There is no scene in any cinema like the tunnel scene and I am not being flippant. The tunnel seemingly too long and narrow, goes more than into the room, it goes into our psyche's where fear lurks, where unfaith and faith jostle.

Stalker is a movie about the quest for hope and God, the most important question in all ages, about the absence of faith, about spiritual cogitations, about mental fatigue, about not knowing and believing. Mercifully it does not elevate faith or atheism into a glorious ideal but elevates search, the hunt, the quest for faith into a cinematic discourse as never sen before. Bergman's The Seventh Seal seems a child's attempt in a similar vein, though Bergman was a great director.

Stalker could only have been made in Russian by a Russian for Russia is in the East and the intense religious nature of this movie cannot be replicated in Western Europe and will never be achieved by Hollywood. The discourses, soliliquies, debates between the principal characters are a joy to watch and Arseni Tarkovsky's poems add and enhance the fervour and the aura of this movie. Alexander Kajdanovsky, who played the Stalker has succeeded in portraying the mystic fervour of a religious guide, not zealous prejudice or fanatic fascism but a spiritual torment, such as is commonly reported to be the experience of Muslim Sufi's or hermetic Sadhus. His performance elevates the art of acting to heights that can be achieved by only a few.

Stalker stays with you, with its iconic imagery, its haunting performances, its poetry, its drama, its fear, its beauty. Regarding the dog in this movie, I don't know why but I have a hunch.

The Book Of Franza: Ingeborg Bachmann

I must acknowledge that this post is not an attempt to write a critique of this short novella but an attempt to understand it, and in the process perhaps experience the poetry of words.
This is the first Bachmann novel that I have read and I am yet to decide where to classify it, for the style is neither excessively poetic nor mundanely dull, but a mixture of what I now feel are thoughts, fragments written on paper, elements of existence, without a a priori reflection. Just like how thoughts occur to us everyday, every single moment of our existence. The fascinating mix of memory and desire, regret and pain.

It is not possible for a reader without tools to understand any writer, any language without knowing the dominant, the consensual reality of that or any culture or any reality. Thus, perhaps after reading this novel or while reading it, I was wondering whether it is realistic to read a translation of Bachmann or any other writer? However, because we must, I feel there will be a permanent gap in my approach towards translated literature and this book is no exception.

Since there are different undercurrents running around the story of Franza, we must try to seek the answers from them. There is the large shadow of Nazi persecution, the haplessness of its victims to which, in a way that seems natural and logical to Bachmann, the supposed persecution of Franza is weaved. The narrator , alternating between what I thought was Franza and the other, equates the same persecution with the atrocities suffered by the Egyptians at the hands of the Whites, including the oppression of the Mummies by the whites too. There are references to historical events like the Suez Canal war, as if these are important elements to understand Franza's sickness. The events in Franza's childhood are clues to her mental state later on, her first love with whom she calls the Sire, perhaps her love for Martin, her brother, love incestuous.

There are heart warming times for me in this novel, things that happen that we don't even mention, out of fear. The young Franza kisses the sire as he drives away and then we have this beautiful passage........With that, Franza's first love came to an end, and she remained behind, with no afterglow, only dazed, the glow flickering out within her, as she stood amid the dust cloud that floated behind.......... And years later when she meets her sire and he doesn't recognize her, Franza remembers........ And no one stood anymore at the edge of a road, somewhere in Europe, feeling as if she would collapse while trembling, or simply stand there forever in a cloud of dust, as the four tanks rolled on- which could not be seen.

I am a prime example of post traumatic stress, Franza tells us, for there is no summer day upon which a noxious shower of rain does not fall, no night during which I am not obsessed, no forgetfulness that is not buried in freudian slips and meaningless babble. And later on, suddenly, Franza asks..........Why does one only refer to fascism when it has to do with opinions or blatant acts? The middle portion of the book finds Franza attempting to explain her married life with the Professor in disjointed fragments, images, words, hints. This is a difficult read as we are in and out of her past, present, her desires, her willingness to die, allusions, memories, desires, memories. Franza feels that she is a Papuan, robbed.

And then Bachmann writes.........The puzzle of my days is more important than the puzzle of my dreams, for you should understand that there is no dream puzzle, but rather the puzzle itself, the puzzle of days, the undetectable chaos of reality........ Then she writes about fear, how it cannot be charted, measured by a cardiogram. We reach the final denouement near the pyramids and then Franza dies, which one expects or even suspects. The book ends as if you expect it to tell you more, for we have just seen Franza only from the outside, without understanding her. But is not that what franza Fells us in the beginning, that it is not possible to understand anything, anyone?

The book of Franza is a difficult novel to understand and even read in one attempt, for there are techniques that the writer uses which surprise us and come upon us suddenly. How are we expected to know about Franza anyway? How can we actually even consider this attempt at understanding? I felt that there is a suppressed poetry inside this book, a poetry that sometimes seems broken, disjointed, I guess deliberately...........There is talk of fascism in relations but perhaps one must understand this from the point of view of both men and women, for fascism is not the prerogative of men alone.

This is a well written, sometimes beautifully written novel that is possible to understand only if we allow ourselves no mercy, for there are images in here that are universal, parting and heartbreak, treachery, sexual jealousy and the inability to express, to understand, to convey, to communicate, to reflect maybe but an inability to convey that reflection, that understanding. There is sufficient politics too, hints of oppression, of colonial sadism, sadistic oppression of the dead too, interwoven perhaps with Bachmann's vision of a world dominated by sadistic men, cruel husbands, loss and failure of love, misery in togetherness or just a pure impossibility in existing together.

I will end by these beautiful few lines from The Book of Franza.

You have to come down to the Nile with me some night. An enigma. During a night on the Nile, which I shall never experience, during a night on the Nile when there are no village lamps but rather the stars. On the Nile, the upper Nile. Far away from the shadowy years during which no stars hung in my mouth.....

This Night

This familiar night is here again,
after many days and many nights,
after many rains in midsummer wetness,
after another summer that just finished
even before it began.

I must say, I must say how I had waited
for that hour of infinite meeting, besides a dusty road
under a dark sky, in a place that was my own.
Where summers and winters were equally welcome,
equally romantic, equal peace.

And this music, Fingal's Cave, alien to my unmusical ears,
like a town bereft of rain, some old unsheltered woman
disowned by all, counting the stars against a stony sky
and losing it all, all again. This unmusic is my night,
and I hear it despite all this rain.

This is a different night, I must admit, night of poison,
of slow sleep. This pain, not pain is only memory,
only surmise, only regret, only deep regret.
This is the pain of having waited for and having lost,
a moment to rub deep into my eyes the faces of love.

On Owning Books

Buying and reading books are different activities but might seem similar. Buying and owning books are however entirely different. To buy a book, leaf through it, think and then buy it is one of the most pleasurable things to do. And perhaps not buying one, the lingering doubts that remain, the nagging images of the book covers in one's mind, what delights.... ...However, I must admit that I am a cover fetishist and I look unfavourably at a book that doesn't inspire thought, that doesn't seem odd or mysterious. A proven masterpiece fails to impress me if the cover is dull. An example being The Man Without Qualities, by Picador, front cover dull. One of my all time favourite front covers is Pale Fire, by Penguin amongst so many others. I know it sounds ridiculous but then some obsessions are.

Owning books, keeping them, treasuring them is a jealous activity. All reading is jealous, frantic and obsessional. I look at my books, these novels and poems, these unread philosophies as somewhat as my own peripheral existence, a kind of out of body, detached essence of my own being, and that is not being superfluous. Over the years, I have got out of the habit of borrowing books from a library. I forget to return the books in time, it is embarrassing, besides paying needless fines. I cannot read a book now if it is not mine. I must own it, it should be mine. It lingers in my hands as I touch it, I touch it for the effect of owning it, knowing that it is mine. This is not a book fetish, I must reassure.

Reading books is an aesthetic activity as well. It is nocturnal, and pleasurable usually in winter, when it rains, when my childhood snows accumulate. Outside the fresh hush of fallen snow, the hesitant crepitus of trodding feet on snow, or the wind at night, during long winter nights, pages transformed and reflected outside, panthers and monsters leaping out, some Dostyevsky, some other story. Summertime reading is not my forte but I try. I have never been able to read Dostyevsky in summer. I have read Genet, but it seems winter then.

Owning books is a kind of paranoia, a deep sense of disaffection, a helpless feeling in a transitory world. One can go back and think of times when a particular novel or philosophy meant so much. It brings back visceral memories sometimes, of people and times, of seasons and nights, for reading is generally a nocturnal activity. There are names and loves etched on familiar books, people associated who only visit us now in bizarre dreams. Old books, on shelves, near and in distant familiarities, even if dusty have an aura of memory and desire, my usual memory, my usual thwarted desire.

One can only, I can only give away my books to people who really care for the indiscreet and secret charm of the written word, to people who share this awful desire to read, to feed on ideas, the black white love of the written page. I don't usually share books out of miserliness, but when I do, I pray for the well being of these pages, usually paperbound. There are some crafty readers who are well read but don't ever buy a book. How can one savour a passage, a poem and not actually have it nearby? Does one have to part with all loves? Is seperation needed?

I can see my Pasolini Poems now, out in the corner, stacked amongst my other afflictions. I know there is a poem inside called Prayer To My Mother that I can read again, next to The Conference Of Birds by Attar that I must read. These stones don't sleep at night or rest during the day. They wait for me, when I am tired, unsure and not sure of anything.

Thomas Bernhard's Yes : Study In Antistudy

Thomas Bernhard's short novel Yes is another example of his ability to write the same story, recounted in a narrative that is neither less rhetorical nor less repititive as some of the previous works I have read so far. If this narration is to be considered a case study in depression, then it is well documented. At the same time, the over riding concerns of his tirades are as usual well written and sometimes too well.

The narrator , like his usual one, lives in isolation, forced on himself in a remote village. We are told that he is working on a scientific study, on antibodies. Here he comes into contact, after self imposed isolation of some months with a Swiss man and his Persian woman friend at the house of his friend Moritz. The meeting causes a refreshment of my hearing and of my whole mental state, by the manner of her speaking and thinking, which logically, gave rise to speech from thought and thought from speech. The preceding contactlessness, he tells us had progressively developed into a mental sickness. Meeting the Persian woman is just the right thing the narrator wants. He attempts to meet her at the local inn. He finds she is not ready. Women, no matter what kind, are never ready at any definite agreed time. They go out later for a walk in the nearby larch-wood. He realizes instantly that she is a person of intellect.

We are then told in some detail about the narrator's mental sickness, as he calls it, initially sporadic symptoms of illness and then finally as an illness and indeed as a severe illness. The arrival of the couple causes an attenuation of my state of sickness, naturally not a cure but a suspension....He tells us then that with each passing attack the illness had become worse causing him to feel powerless and helpless, partially with an inability to work, caused by my sickness and the frightful political conditions in our country and Europe had triggered this catastrophe as political conditions had deteriorated. He finds everything dictatorial, brutal and vile. We are then told of his abiding admiration for The world as will and idea and for Schumann and how he finds the Persian woman also admiring schumann.

So long as we have but a single person near us with whomwe can talk ultimately about everything we can hold out, otherwise we cannot. Meeting the Persian woman liberates him, as he suddenly decides to get outside and run away. It causes a clearing of my mind and head. Existence seems possible again. I was compelled not to reflect on myself. This is all atrributed to the Persian woman, as he informs us that he had missed a foreign language person all his life. For with the Persian it was possible to have a philosophical conversation. The present being no age for philosophy and there being no contemporary philosopher, he finds the Persian as philosophizing. On the second walk with her, he describes it as musical, philosophy being music, music philosophy.

The story ends in tragedy though usually Bernhard's stories start with one. We are briefly told of the possible reasons or there are hints here and there. There is a house to be built, there always is in Bernhard, and there is this woman, this time exotic, foreign language and Persian. There is no obvious incest, I am not sure if two walks in the larch wood constitute adultery. The woman has made a sacrifice for her Swiss friend and in fact given up everything. However, Bernhard says.....for the asian female it is no more than natural that she subordinates and sacrifices to the male totally and in the most unreserved manner. that sacrifice ensures to her a meaning to her life. I am not sure how Bernhard comes up with such a sweeping statement and how many Asian women he knew. There is somewhat a slight prejudging attitude here, even though he talks of her as regenerating.

I find Yes as funny as his other novels. The themes are depressing and yet we find them strangely funny. I think the narrator is not only depressed but also paranoid but then most of Bernhard's narrators are. The novel is well written, giving us expressions like work-prison and existential prison, and the quality of his ranting, which I find strangely musical is relentless. The fact that there are no philosophers left might reflect his admiration for Wittgenstein and we find the same obsessive rants against Austria which perhaps as a defense, might serve as his hidden love for his country. The narrator has political views and whether he is more ill than he actually lets us know is anybody's guess. The strangeness of this music grows on one, and I don't regret reading him.