Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934) 287p.

Brilliant, genial poetry. A bit of Celine mingled with American optimism.

Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies (2005)

I have heard almost only good critics from my friends about Paul Auster, so I was quite hopeful he would be more elusive than most contemporary books I have read or the books I read from the New York Times best sellers list. Well, The Brooklyn Follies might escape the Oprah level, but he does not escape the flaws of the American story telling tradition imo: extravagant plots, outrageous events, extraordinary individuals all wrapped up in a fast paced unraveling in a flat storyline where character development is an underrated writer’s skill. I did enjoy reading The Brooklyn Follies though, great vocabulary and witty plot, and I will admit to the fantastic last 5 pages that come close to classic literature. I felt depressed that he had to throw or force in the affair of Nathan Glass with Joyce Mazzucchelli, and that the outrageous characters with their outrageous lives (the porn star singer sect convert turned lesbian cousin, or the repressed homosexual turned philantropist art forger rare book dealer turned scamming savior who has a compassionate love relation with the Jamaican HIV positive play-back artist cross-dressing sweetheart, to name a few) were not more like normal people with deeper and more sensitive characters, but hell you fuckers this is the great tradition of American story telling where everything ends well anyway and where every body (especially the males) get their fantasy fuck in the end. Well, sorry for that, just to say that I appreciate books like Book of Disquiet or Man’s Fate or writers like Dostoewski and Bulgakov more. I am hopelessly stuck in the 19th and first half of the 20th century.

Mikhail Bulgakov, A Dead Man’s Memoir (1965) 167p.
Original title: A Theatrical Novel

Guy De Maupassant, Sicily (1885) 63p.

De Maupassant’s travel notes from his tour of Sicily are not a literary effort in the first place, but without a doubt meant as simple travel notes. In that sense it is not enlightening of a special kind to read his Sicily notes, and it is not interwoven with reflections or symbolic layers. But it can still stand the test of time to serve as a travel guide for those who plan to visit the island, or it is an entertaining report to read again for those who have recently visited and toured Sicily themselves as I did in 2007.

Andre Malraux, Man’s Fate (1933) 371p.

“The stupidity of the human race is that a man who has only one life is willing to lose it for an idea.
It is very rare for a man to be able to endure [..] his fate as a man. [..]
All that men are willing to die for, beyond self-interest, tends obscurely to justify that fate by giving it a foundation in dignity: Christianity for the slave, the nation for the citizen, Communism for the worker. [..]
There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman.
Perhaps love is above all means which the Occidental uses to free himself from man’s fate.”

La Condition Humaine, for many one of the classics in the modern literary pantheon and I would agree, is about the struggle to reconnect to the world we lost, to find humanity in our soul, to live with dignity a life that knows no morals, to accept a path in life and to rise above it. At the end of our way there is death, and our companion is solitude, the road is narrow and we walk it alone. We escape this fate of man and find companion in the forgetfulness of alcohol, drugs and paid women. Or we strive to transcend our civic meaninglessness by becoming gods, and die for a higher ideology that serves mankind. This we dream to believe, but we are but dust in the wind, fond of thinkat we chose the direction in which we are heading. This power of the will is struck dead in an instant, it does not carry the force of our fate.

The existential reflection in Man’s Fate is the deepest representation of man’s thought. His struggle however is to overcome this isolated position in the world by action. And it is the ideological conclusion that drives man forward despite the reality of his existence. Unlike Dostoevsky’s writing, there is no sympathy provoked by or in the characters of Man’s Fate. But this is only to enforce the message that Malraux’ writing bears, that man is detached from the world, from the other, and that in this miserable reality we search and struggle to reconnect ourselves. Some reconcile themselves with the pity minded path that this brings us to, others prefer a chance for all or nothing, inevitably leading us to nothingness. (more…)

Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), 71p.

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1959) 209p.

Okonkwa is the antagonist of Things Fall Apart. He is a strong man in Umuofia, one of nine villages of the Umuofia clan, widely respected for his achievements in war, his fearlessness for blood, and his strength. Throughout the book his strength dwindles. His strength is motivated by hate for the weakness of his father, he hates his weak son, he kills his strong surrogate son whom he kills because the clan requires it and is haunted by remorse. When he inadvertently kills a clan member he is sent to the village of his mother’s clan, to Mbanta.

Things Fall Apart is a plainly written novel in line perhaps with John Steinbeck or Graham Greene. The characters lack reflection and even their thoughts are rarely exposed, perhaps this is a stylistic element to only show strength and action. But it also makes the characters rather one sided, and it does not generate the love-hate ambiguity that classic literature is capable of bringing out. The novel is descriptive but never achieves great detail. The effect of this style is that the man Okonkwa and the Umuofia culture appear simple, not to say primitive, preventing the reader (the white reader in my case) to develop any heartfelt empathy or even sympathy for the characters. (more…)

Frits van Oostrom, Stemmen op Schrift, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Literatuur vanaf het begin tot 1300 (2006) 550p.

The Dutch Language Union (Nederlandse Taalunie) has endeavored on a unique project in the field of literary history, rewriting the complete history of Dutch literature from its very beginning in the 12th century to our time. The first of many tomes covers the era of earliest works in Dutch spoken language to 1300. Frits van Oostrom is not only an internationally renowned scholar in Medieval linguistics but also an acclaimed scientist, among other being the president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). But in my humble opinion his greatest achievement is being a small part to this fantastic effort to compile an encyclopedic overview of Dutch literature.

Van Oostrom’s contribution culminates in his closing argument for Jacob van Maerlant. Van Maerlant is one of the great names of the early era of literature written in the popular languages in Europe. What Dante is to Italian language and literature, Shakespeare to English language and literature, there the Netherlands and Belgium have Van Maerlant, at least Van Oostrom ends his majestic part. No doubt, he expresses and emphasizes the importance of a man, whom Van Oostrom has made it his life’s work to study, thereby placing some of his idleness in the same scale as his subject of study is weighed with. But we should not hold this against Van Oostrom, but to praise is heartfelt devotion to this cause, a cause that rises above the minor shortcoming of a single man. (more…)

The child Orhan Pamuk looks into the mirror on the wall and sees another Orhan, another boy just like him, somewhere in Istanbul. It is the opening scene in Istanbul, Pamuk’s memories. The scene refers to Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage, the moment in a child’s life that it becomes aware of its own subjectivity, representing a permanent structure in life. As such, it is the writer that awakes in the little boy Orhan Pamuk, as such it is the starting point of the order of the Imagination.

The Quest for Turkey in our time is not just a quest of Turks or Istanbullus, but as much a quest of the West. When Turkey seeks itself, it finds itself for a part in the West. When Europe seeks itself, inevitably a part of Turkey presents itself and its quest as we define our own borders. The influx of immigrants is not just a motion from the outside into Europe, it’s also a force set in motion within us. When Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in 2006 this was a recognition for Pamuk’s masterly literary works, but it was also acknowledging the West’s search to redefine itself. And not without coincidence, can we find a part of the answer to this search in Istanbul, or as it used to be known, in Constantinopel, the old center of the Roman Empire that reinvented Christianity and which held a magic appeal for hundreds of years to western authors.

In Istanbul, Pamuk’s words describe Istanbul, and he confesses in his own words: when I describe Istanbul, I describe myself, and when I describe myself, I describe Istanbul. Pamuk recognizes this himself explicitly and to the full extend, toward the end of his memories of Istanbul, a city literally divided by the Bosphorus, with one half laying in Asia, and one half in Europe. This literal spleen is by Pamuk described as the melancholy, or huzun in Turkish, that both dominates the city as himself. It is obvious that Pamuk cannot separate himself when he thinks of the city where he lived all his life. (more…)

Willa Cather, My Antonia (1918) 286p.

Since having moved to the US, I have been searching to understand the American soul. Of course, there is no single archetype that represents all Americans. But there are some books that capture an essential part of it, like Roth’s The Great American Novel. My Antonia is another one of those books that puts in place an element of the American puzzle.

Willa Cather writes in a descriptive style that is mostly void of existential reflections. In general this is typical of American literature, but what lacks is filled by sentiment, a sentiment of loss and sacrifice, of striving and resilience. (more…)