Category: Prose

More Baldwin: Whoever debases others is debasing himself

Posted on by Meryl in Prose

I was so impressed by The Fire Next Time, which I finished today, that I have to quote a few more passages.

This after Baldwin’s meeting with Elijah Muhammad, talking in the car to a young follower about the idea of black nation separating from the United States:

“On what, then, will the economy of this separate nation be based? The boy gave me a rather strange look. I said hurriedly, ‘I’m not saying it can’t be done–I just want to know how it is to be done.’ I was thinking, In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have. I didn’t feel that the things I had in mind, such as the pseudo-elegant heap of tin in which we were riding, had any very great value. But life would be very different without them, and I wondered if he had though of this.”

Later:

“If one is permitted to treat any group of people with special disfavor because of their race or the color of their skin, there is no limit to what one will force them to endure, and since the entire race has been mysteriously indicted, no reason not to attempt to destroy it root and branch. This is precisely what the Nazis attempted. Their only originality lay in the means they used. It is scarcely worthwhile to attempt remembering ow many times the sun has looked down on the slaughter of the innocents. I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. I think I know–we see it around us every day–the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads. It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp: Whoever debases others is debasing himself. That is not a mystical statement, but a most realistic one, which is proved by the eyes of any Alabama sheriff–and I would not like to see Negroes ever arrive at so wretched a condition… Continue reading “More Baldwin: Whoever debases others is debasing himself” →

Still relevant

Posted on by Meryl in Prose

I was inspired by the movie “I Am Not Your Negro” to reread a bit of James Baldwin. I find his essays every bit as lucid and apposite as I did in the late 60’s. Here’s a sample, in which he is talking about his adolescence:

“I certainly could not discover any principled reason for not becoming a criminal, and it is not my poor, God-fearing parents who are to be indicted for the lack, but this society. I was icily determined–more determined, really, than I then knew–never to make my peace with the ghetto but to die and go to Hell before I would let any white man spit on me, before I would accept my “place” in this republic. I did not intend to allow the white people of this country to tell me who I was, and limit me that way, and polish me off that way. And yet, of course, at the same time, I was being spat on and defined and described and limited, and could have been polished off with no effort whatever… Continue reading “Still relevant” →

An exemplary sentence

Posted on by Meryl in Prose

I just finished The Story of a Brief Marriage, by Anuk Arudpragasam. I can’t say I read the whole book–a painful though extraordinary tour de force that covers one day through the eyes and voice of a young man in a refugee camp in an unnamed country. I had to skim certain parts, despite the excellent writing.

This paragraph seems so true to me, so beautifully thought through!

“Conversation was a fragile thing after all, like a plant that grows only in rich, warm, nourishing soil. Just as the cells of the human body couldn’t survive above and below certain temperatures, just as human eyes couldn’t see above and below certain wavelengths of radiation, and human ears couldn’t hear above and below certain thresholds of frequency, perhaps there existed only a narrow range of conditions under which human conversation could flourish. It wasn’t that people in the camps didn’t want to talk, for human beings would always talk, if they had the opportunity. Continue reading “An exemplary sentence” →

The exemplary sentence

Posted on by Meryl in Prose, Uncategorized

I’ve been reading Tim Gautreaux’s work for years now, and recently finished his latest book, Signals: New and Selected Stories. His books deal with the everyday travails of the lower or middle class. This excerpt is from a story about a junk yard operator whose life if altered by finding a stunning, jeweled demonstration sewing machine with a needle with the engraved message: ART STITCHES ALL. You can read that story here. This paragraph occurs before the transformation: Continue reading “The exemplary sentence” →

from The Pigeon Tunnel

Posted on by Meryl in Prose, Uncategorized

Larry is reading The Pigeon Tunnel, a collection of memories by John le Carre. Over breakfast yesterday he read this excerpt to me about the transition from the Soviet Union to Russia, which made me laugh out loud:

…in 1993, criminalized capitalism had seized hold of the failed state like a frenzy and turned it into the Wild East. I was keen to take a look at that new, windy Russia, too. It therefore happened that my two trips straddled the greatest social upheaval in Russian history since the Bolshevik Revolution. And uniquely–if you set aside a coup or two, a few thousand victims of contract killings, gang shootouts, political assassinations, extortion and torture–the transition was, by Russian standard, bloodless.

Clive James, master of the exemplary sentence

Posted on by Meryl in Prose

Sentence DiagramIt’s always a thrill when someone I’ve just discovered, and therefore think must be obscure, turns out to be well known. This happened recently with Clive James, a poet, critic, and essayist whose latest book on DVD collections was recently reviewed in the NY Times.

I’ve been enjoying his Poetry Notebook 2006-2014. It’s full of lines like this in any essay about the strange idea that art should be somehow completely spontaneous, without any rigorous training in the craft of it:

“Even though nobody can expect to master, without years of practice, a performing art such as playing the piano, there will still be the wish that music itself might be composed by an ignoramous.”

An exemplary sentence

Posted on by Meryl in Prose

Sentence DiagramHow have I missed Dennis Lehane until now? I just read (according to the book jacket) his 12th book, The Drop. It’s a stunner.

It’s hard to know which sentences to quote. Here are a few. Chovka is a Chechen mob Boss. Bob is a quiet man, an underling:

“Chovka nodded. He was concentrating on his phone, texting away like a sixteen-year-old girl during school lunch. When he finished texting, he put the phone away and stared at Bob for a very long time. If Bob had to guess, he’d say the silence went on for thee minutes, maybe four. Felt like two days. Not a soul moving in that bar, not a sound but that of six men breathing. Chovka stared into Bob’s eyes and then past his eyes and over his heart and through his blood. Continue reading “An exemplary sentence” →

A Meal in Winter

Posted on by Meryl in Prose

This extraordinary little book is told as if a memoir, in very straightforward, matter-or-fact prose, which makes it all the more chilling. It is translated from the French by Sam Taylor. The basic plot concerns three German soldiers who no longer want to shoot Jews. They go to the commander, who is “a reservist like we were”:

“We explained to him that we would rather do the hunting than the shootings. We told him we didn’t like the shootings: that doing it made us feel bad at the time and gave us bad dreams at night. When we woke in the morning, we felt down as soon as we started thinking about it…” Continue reading “A Meal in Winter” →

Morning reading

Posted on by Meryl in Prose

I set aside David Lipsky’s review of Nabokov’s Letters to Vera in Harper’s to read this morning, and was rewarded by a truly elegant piece of work.  Lipsky doesn’t just review the letters, he provides a succinct and literate overview of Nabokov’s life, his work, his long marriage. “No marriage of a major twentieth-century writer lasted longer,” he quotes from Brian Boyd’s introduction. He manages to cull and quote gems from the 864 pages and relate them to the body of Nabokov’s fiction.

lolita1He notes the shocking intimacy of Nabokov’s work–“The hero takes a sleepy, eye-watering yawn–and the world ‘shivered and dissolved in the prism of his tears.’ …Nabokov’s people are constantly yawning scrunching, nose wiping, bug-bite scratching.”

He’s especially funny about the popular “hurricane” of Lolita, published thirty years into Nabokov’s literary career: “There were Lolita dolls, Lolita cartoons (arriving Martian: ‘Take me to your Lolita’), a Kubrick movie, a San Francisco drive-in serving Lolitaburgers.” And Eichmann–instrumental in the murder of (among others, Nabokov’s brother), who finds the book “unwholesome.”

veraThe essay was especially moving to me having visited the Nabokov museum in St. Petersburg–all those many title pages with hand-drawn butterflies dedicated to Vera. Continue reading “Morning reading” →

The exemplary sentence

Posted on by Meryl in Prose

Sentence DiagramHere are a few excerpts from the best book I read this month, The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

“Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much. I for one, am a person who believes that the world would be a better place if the word “murder” made us mumble as much as the word “masturbation.”

sympathizer“…no one asks poor people if they want war. Nor had anyone asked these poor people if they wanted to die of thirst and exposure on the coastal sea, or if they wanted to be robbed and raped by their own soldiers. If those thousands still lived, they would not have believed how they had died, just as we could not believe that the Americans—our friends, our benefactors, our protectors—had spurned our request to send more money. And what would we have done with the money? Buy the ammunition, gas, and spare parts for the weapons, planes, and tanks the same Americans had bestowed on us for free. Having given us the needles, they now perversely no longer supplied the dope. (Nothing, the General muttered, is ever so expensive as what is offered for free.)”

“My vocabulary was broader, my grammar more precise than the average educated American. I could hit the high notes as well as the low, and thus had no difficulty in understanding Claude’s characterization of the ambassador as a “putz,” a “jerkoff,” with “his head up his ass” who was in denial about the city’s imminent fall.

“I was a card-carrying American with a driver’s license, Social Security card, and resident alien permit. Violet still considered me as foreign, and this misrecognition punctured the smooth skin of my self-confidence…The flawlessness of my English did not matter. Even if she could hear me, she still saw right though me, or perhaps saw someone else instead of me, her retinas burned with the images of all the castrati dreamed up by Hollywood to take the place of real Asian men.”

“I was in close quarters with some representative specimens of the most dangerous creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit.”

 

 

An exemplary sentence

Posted on by Meryl in Prose

sim2Georges Simenon is known better for his Inspector Maigret novels than his darker, more literary “romans durs.” The latter present a bleak, existential universe without much pleasure. But the short who-done-its are restful to read. The world is orderly, and Maigret is in charge. The best thing about them, aside from the brooding, intuitive Maigret, is the occasional paragraph like this. It is dawn in Paris after an all night investigation:

“All around them, workmen were eating their croissants, still sleepy-eyed, and the early morning mist spangled their overcoats with moisture. It was chilly. In the streets, each passer-by was preceded by a little cloud of steam. Windows were lighting up, one after the other, on the different floors of all the houses.” Continue reading “An exemplary sentence” →

The exemplary sentence

Posted on by Meryl in Prose

Sentence DiagramI don’t read much non-fiction, but somehow the biography of Eduard Limonov made it onto my reading list.  Limonov is a Russian celebrity full of contradictions, poet, political antihero, bum, author–an interesting guy. The book is written by a French author, Emmanuel Carrère, and translated by John Lambert. Limonov grew up lower-middle class at the end of the Stalin era, the beginning of huge changes in Russia. This is from Carrère’s introduction:

“I live in a calm country on the decline, where social mobility is limited. Born into a bourgeois family in Paris’s Sixteenth Arrondissement, I became a bourgeois bohemian in the Tenth. The son of a senior executive and an eminent historian, I write books and screenplays and my wife is a journalist… from both a geographical and a sociocultural point of view, you can’t say life has taken me very far from my roots–and that’s true for most of my friends as well.

limonov“Limonov, on the other hand, has been a young punk in Ukraine, the idol of the Soviet underground, a bum, and then a multimillionaire’s butler in Manhattan, a fashionable writer in Paris, a lost soldier in the Balkans, and now, in the fantastic shambles of postcommunism, the elderly but charismatic leader of a party of young desperadoes. He sees himself as a hero; you might call him a scumbag: I suspend my judgement on the matter. But…his romantic, dangerous life says something. Not just about him, Limonov, not just about Russia, but about everything that’s happened since the end of the Second World War.

“Something, yes, but what? I’m writing this book to find out.”