July 15, 2010
From the Telegraph:"One American reviewer wrote of [Beryl Bainbridge]: 'The highest compliment I can pay Beryl Bainbridge is an admission that I’ve been reading her books for almost 30 years and still don’t quite know what to make of them. Her novels may be uniformly spare, but they’re hardly tight; each one seems as weirdly elastic as the whole slippery oeuvre.'”I feel that way, too. But I also feel that way about quite a few other fine writers, such as John Banville, Thomas Berger, Michel Tournier, and J. G. Ballard. Maybe it's a hallmark of truly original fiction.
Posted by Roger Boylan
July 14, 2010
Two hundred twenty-one years ago today, the Parisian mob stormed the Bastille. This, and the subsequent Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, constituted the third event of the French Revolution. (The first had been the revolt of the nobility, refusing to aid King Louis XVI through the payment of taxes; the second, the formation of the National Assembly and the Tennis Court Oath.) It's hard to find another event in all of history that had such far-reaching consequences, good and (mostly) bad. And yet France is still a
most agreeable and civilized country, and–as Theodore Dalrymple has pointed out in an article about the absurd French football squad–a country, despite all its historical traumas, "with a practically unrivalled history of
achievement in all the major fields of human endeavor."
Eh bien! Vive la France, malgré les Bleus.
Posted by Roger Boylan
July 13, 2010
Victor Hugo (1802-1885) lived on the island of Guernesey, where he wrote Les Misérables. His house, Hauteville, was a remarkable light and airy hilltop domain, with vast views of the Channel and his French homeland on the horizon.Nigel Richardson says:"Hauteville's secret doors, dark carved wood, chinoiserie, mirrors, and constant play of light and dark make it feel more like being inside a fertile imagination than a house."Oh, to be in exile there.
Posted by Roger Boylan
July 12, 2010
Alas, poor Harvey, I knew him. Shortly after Killoyle came out in
'97 I was on the road from Texas to Washington, D.C., to promote the book
at various bookstores in the nation's capital and nearby Virginia, and
had stopped on my first night at the Super 8 Motel in Hope,
Arkansas. After a sumptuous fried-chicken takeout from the local KFC,
just down the street from Bill Clinton's childhood home, I was lying on
my bed watching par-per-view when the phone rang and a raspy voice
mispronounced my name, inquiringly: I thought it was a crank call, and
it was, only the crank was Harvey Pekar, who was reviewing Killoyle
for some lefty-alternative rag and wanted to know what my bona fides
were for writing an experimental Irish novel. I stammered a reply, but
he wasn't really interested in what I had to say, being mostly
concerned with establishing to his satisfaction that I wasn't a phony
and a poseur like that guy Pynchon. We, or rather he, talked for about
an hour, then he abruptly said, "Thanks, bye," and hung up. In the end
he wrote a generous and highly idiosyncratic review that I still have, here.
There's more on Harvey from fellow-Clevelanders here,
and my pal Jim Hynes wrote an excellent review of Pekar's famous set-to
with David Letterman, here.
He was like a secondary character from a Dostoevsky novel, embittered
and mordantly humorous, and cynical only to the extent that he was a frustrated
romantic. RIP, Harvey.
Posted by Roger Boylan
July 12, 2010
News comes of renewed tribal riots in Northern Ireland, occasioned
by the traditional July 12 marches when the Protestant Orangemen go around with big drums jeering at the Catholics because Protestant King William of Orange defeated Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne on this date in 1690. Such news dismays but doesn't surprise. I've never really believed in the Peace Process. It's a good idea, but naive: tribalism is inimical to peace, and Northern Ireland is Europe's tribal Bantustan.Here's a memory of the place, excerpted from "Intimate Revenge," my essay on Northern Ireland:I remembered my first venture down the Shankill Road, a working-class Protestant enclave in Belfast; remembered how, as I attempted a casual saunter (mistake: only the hard men had the confidence to saunter), I became aware of sidelong glances that, I was convinced, could interpret my features as unmistakably Catholic, or alien in some way, although everyone I saw on the Shankill looked like me, and they were indistinguishable from the Catholics across the way on the Falls Road: pasty, doughy, hard-bitten, hungover. “Ey, where ya goin’?” inquired a boy, confirming my fears that, in a neighborhood where everyone was known, the news of a stranger’s arrival would spread like infection. “To the bus,” I replied, I knew not why, but hoped I sounded like a native—a Protestant native... But I fooled no one. “There’s no bus here,” said the boy, who shouted for others to take notice. Praise God at that moment there was a taxi. It was a Protestant taxi, of course (you could tell by the driver’s name on the door: Protestant “Sammy Wilson,” for example, instead of Catholic “Sean Kelly”), but the driver made no objection to driving me to the Europa Hotel, where I had a drink before taking the train back to Coleraine, with some relief. It was with even greater relief, mingled with horror, that I learned from that night’s TV news that a bomb had gone off in the Europa lobby about half an hour after I had left.
Posted by Roger Boylan
July 12, 2010
Oh, all right, well done. I was for the Dutch, but Spain deserved the win. The more so for their elegant play and the sense of unity it'll bring back home, no small consideration in a loose amalgam of Catalans, Basques, Galicians, Andalusians, etc., each region with its own language and parliament. Such an arrangement could be a formula for dissolution, Belgian-style, but the central idea of Spain has a greater hold on the collective imagination of its citizens than the idea of Belgium has on its: there's no "idea" of Belgium. And their soccer team is useless. So, anyway: Viva España, muchachos.
Posted by Roger Boylan
July 9, 2010
Clive James on the ongoing horror of "honor" killings in certain Muslim, Hindu, and/or Sikh precincts around the world and the wretched silence from Western feminists and liberals:"When a girl in a British Pakistani community is set on fire by her brothers, or has her face ruined with acid by a rejected candidate for the role of husband, we hear about it in the newspapers, although seldom for long; but in Pakistan such incidents aren’t news at all. They happen three times a day. They are part of the culture. It was news in Britain when, on July 14, 2006, in London, a gifted Pakistani girl (her name was Sumari) was slain by her father, brother and cousin. It needed all of them to do it, because apparently she had to be stabbed eighteen times. Her crime had been to disobey them, and she died of the proof that they had been well worth disobeying."Read the whole hair-raising article here.
Posted by Roger Boylan
July 8, 2010
If I had a single composer's works to have with me on the proverbial desert island, I would be torn between Beethoven's, Mozart's, and Gustav Mahler's; but Mahler would get the nod, by a whisker. He's a novelist in music who leaves nothing out, a John Cowper Powys of near-infinite, glorious sound. He was born 150 years ago; of those years he only lived 51. I've loved his work since the revelatory moment at age ten or so when I heard the Ninth Symphony for the first time. Here it is performed by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Hermann Scherchen conducting in war-torn, Soviet-occupied Vienna in 1950.
Posted by Roger Boylan
July 7, 2010
Zulfikar Ghose is a writer born in that part of pre-Partition India that is now Pakistan and who now lives just down the road from me, here in Austin, Texas. He is a fine writer, and pretty much sui generis, although elements of Rushdie and Garcia Marquez (and Beckett, and Joyce) can be detected in his novels, among which are such whimsical masterpieces as The Incredible Brazilian, The Triple Mirror of the Self, and Figures of Enchantment.
"I have no interest in the reader," says Ghose. "I never think of the reader. I don’t know who the reader is. In one’s earlier work there might be some images or expressions put there to please or make an impression on a particular writer friend, but in one’s later work the impulse comes from within the art where one writes in the company of the dead writers who become one’s most intimate associates. Sometimes I receive a letter from a reader who has liked a book; that is always gratifying, of course, but not as gratifying as the reflection that a sentence I have written would have pleased Flaubert or Proust."
Highly recommended. If I were the Michelin guide, and Ghose were a restaurant, I'd give him three stars.
Posted by Roger Boylan
July 7, 2010
Best luck to the Flying Dutchmen in the World Cup final. In Madison Square
Garden, in 1978, I watched their agonizingly close defeat by Argentina.
They lost 3–1 after two extra time Argentinian goals. Dutch champion Rensenbrink
struck the Argentinian goalpost in the last minute of regular time, with
the score 1–1. I watched it with a French-speaking Belgian, but he was entirely Dutch for the occasion. As was I. Lang leve de Nederlandse!
Posted by Roger Boylan
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