Frabjous Collideorscape

Vita Nuova by Bohumil Hrabal

2011-10-10T09:32:00.000-07:00

Vita Nuova, the second book of an autobiographical trilogy (the first is In-House Weddings, the third, Gaps), recounts Bohumil Hrabal's (1914-1997) life in Prague in the 1950s-70s or thereabout. Though a natural writer -- the stuff just "flows" from him -- the book showcases his struggles at accepting himself as an artist, and there are some tragicomic scenes where his poet friends chide him for not writing even though he is well into his 40s. The book is written from the perspective of Hrabal's wife, Eliska, nicknamed Pipsi (sorry, I'm not putting any Czech diacritics in the names -- then again, neither does Hrabal as described in Vita Nuova, when he types furiously -- usually on the roof of his house -- on a German typewriter with no diacritics).

Hrabal is never named in the book -- it is ostensibly a novel, not an autobiography. Pipsi refers to him as "my husband," and his friends call him "the doctor" on account of the law degree he received prior to WWII. The war, of course, figures prominently here, though only as a shell-shocked echo in the lives of Pipsi and the doctor. However, the book never descends into grimness or bitterness, as the doctor is full of zest for life, an elemental creature who's half man, half child. Hrabal's genius is picking his wife as the narrator -- this gives him the opportunity to really look at himself from an ironic distance, and his love of water, fire and beer, his moodiness, his habit of proclaiming bawdy stories loudly while in public, his constant pub-goings and other quirks of character are all related through his wife's by turn adulatory, loving, horrified, ashamed, disgusted, forgiving voice. Think of Molly Bloom at the end of Ulysses, but funnier and more coherent. And speaking of voice, there are no commas or periods in Vita Nuova, only the occasional ellipsis, though Hrabal does use caps to designate new sentences. At first this was a bit hard to read, but after a few pages, I appreciated this stylistic quirk because it lent the writing an amazing fluidity.

Hrabal is not well known in the U.S., and it's a shame. I'm a big reader, and have just "discovered" him after decades of heavy reading. Several films have been made from his books -- "Closely Observed Trains" won the 1967 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film -- and he is extremely well-respected in Europe. Stylistically interesting even in English translations, extremely funny and able to reach profound emotional depths, he deserves to be widely read and appreciated. Put aside Kundera and read Hrabal instead.

The Word of God

2011-09-04T04:14:00.000-07:00

This last gem from Thomas M. Disch was published shortly before he committed suicide in 2008. A bittersweet metafictional romp, with Disch taking the part of God/Writer, and an evil Phil Dick as one of the characters, the book made me laugh and wonder why I haven't read any other Disch books, though of course I've known of him for many, many moons.

Disch combines a love of high art (ballet, painting, opera) and campy science fiction tropes, blending it all with fine writing, humor and insight, as befits the godly guise he takes in this book. The evil PKD plot line is hilarious and revealing. Disch and PKD had a long love/hate history, combining public praises for each other's works with secret denunciations to the FBI (Dick claimed there were secret communist messages in Disch's novel Camp Concentration). This new -- for me -- angle on PKD shattered my veneration for the man a bit; it's good to know that he was human after all and could be petty (his works, however, are faultless and brilliant, for the most part (minus the clunky, hack prose style)).

The fun of the book is undercut somewhat by the bitter part of "bittersweet." It is quite evident that Disch is suffering. Old age, health problems, publishing woes and the Bush-era madness are the heavy weights tied to his ankles and, combined with the death of his life partner, weighing him down to an eventual suicide. Yet, through it all, he managed to produce this brilliant little book. Note to self: read more Disch.

David Albahari's "Leeches"

2011-08-02T14:23:00.000-07:00

I no longer remember how I came across this writer or why I picked up "Leeches," but upon opening the first page I was immediately attracted by the dense, all-one-paragraph text which reminded me of Thomas Bernhard. I am forever looking for someone who can match Bernhard's intensity and honesty, and Albahari comes close, very close. The book's no-time-for-a-breath format lends itself nicely to the atmosphere of paranoia that Albahari creates (though it does make it difficult to pick up the reading after a break -- I found myself turning back a page or two to catch up on my place in the narrative). The setting is the fractured remains of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, right before all hell broke loose, where nationalist fervor is running high and scapegoats are just plain running from the impending violence and the stifling political and (un)civil climate. The narrator, a lonely man who writes opinion columns for a magazine, spends his time hanging out with his friend Marko, smoking pot and talking, talking, talking. There's quite a bit of walking as well, and on one of these walks the narrator witnesses a woman being slapped by a man. This slap is an "event" in that it triggers the entire storyline, and we see the narrator chasing clues around the city, looking for this woman and some of the cryptic signs he saw on the streets as he was trying to catch up with the woman post-slap. He doesn't find her -- at least not yet -- but the clues keep piling up and the narrator turns to a few of the members of the Jewish community in order to untangle what appears to be a Gordian knot of Kabbalistic symbols and information. He is handed a book that keeps changing its text whenever he opens it; the book is about the Jewish community of Zemun, the Belgrade neighborhood where, from what I understand, Albahari himself grew up. I don't want to go into all of the details here -- it's a very, very good book, so I hope people will read it. The book places the attentive reader into a sort of trance, and the narrator's pain is quite palpable; as the country falls apart around him, the narrator falls apart as well. No element in "Leeches" is there by accident or simply as filler, and there is quite a bit of (almost) metafictional content about what it means to write, to use words. Very masterfully done.