Books this year: a book diary

 Molloy is part of Beckett’s Trilogy, three novels he wrote in French, which denoted a mature, experimental turn to his novels. Beckett is famous for his plays, but these three novels are considered experimental landmarks.

Which is to say that they sat on my shelf for a very long time. Everytime that I went to read them, I opened to Molloy, thumbed through, saw that it was a block of text, shut it, and put it off for later.

I finally forced myself through Molloy. I almost quit about 20 pages in, but pushed through. And I am infinitely glad that I did.

Molloy is comprised of two monologues, one by Molloy, the second by a detective named Moran. Molloy’s monologue spans the first 90+ pages of the book, and Moran’s is the second half.

What’s so daunting about the book is that Beckett has done away with many of the comforts of fiction, and stripped it to a bristling block of stream-of-consciousness. Molloy’s monologue is two paragraphs, with one lasting for over 90 pages. On top of that, Molloy is insane. This is not pick-it-up fiction, but a serious investment. But with the investment comes reward.

If you want studied, scholarly analysis of what Beckett is doing here, there are many internet resources. You most likely, if you haven’t read it, care little about his altering of character voice, his desire to reduce the first person to a point of simply consciousness; nor do you care about whatever his intentions were with stating something about language, about its inability to not introduce errors and intentional obfuscations. Maybe you do, but I have little interest in writing a second-rate lit paper. And when I say “interest”, I mean “ability.”

The book is worth reading, as opposed to articles about what it wants to achieve, because Beckett has one of the most razor sharp voices for our inner drive towards complete vegetation. There are images contained in Molloy that strike me as deeply as any in fiction. Not only that, but Beckett has an eye for the darkly humorous. Beckett is dark. Really, really fucking dark. After the hammering that is Molloy’s monologue, Moran’s quickly proves to be even more bleak, with the protagonist an abusive father, himself slowly going insane. But somehow this is tolerable due to Beckett’s imbuing everything with equal parts humor and dread. It’s a chocolate/peanut butter combo that runs through the book beautifully.

Beckett owes a lot to Joyce, as has been stated by others. Both monologues are similar, in a way, to Molly’s at the end of Ulysses. I think Molloy is more of an enjoyable read than Ulysses, however. Similarly, it is no surprise to me that Paul Auster edited Beckett’s collected works, as his City of Glass, part of it’s own celebrated trilogy, owes much of its final pages to Molloy. If Auster, Joyce, Markson, or Robbe-Grillet tickle any parts of you below the belt, then you probably have already encountered Beckett, and aren’t going at it ass-backwards like I am.

If you read only one 90-page stream-of-conscious paragraph this year, make it Molloy. I would easily say that it’s the most enjoyment I’ve gotten out of a book since 2666/One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The Subtle Knife is the second in the His Dark Materials trilogy, composed, along with The Subtle Knife, of The Golden Compass and The Amber Spyglass. I read the first book almost a year ago, and though I liked it, I have only now gotten around to book two.

Fantasy books are not usually my bag. Especially children’s fantasy that adults read. I haven’t read, monolithic in the fantasy genre, Narnia, Harry Potter, or the Lord of the Rings. I am missing the essential building blocks of the fantasy genre. So, why start with a second-tier series like His Dark Materials?

The reputation of the trilogy is that where Narnia and, to a lesser-extent, Lord of the Rings (from what I have read of them, and not in them) are Christian tales, His Dark Materials is an atheistic rebuttal. I would like to state that if I chose to read a rebuttal of a style before reading what it is refuting because of some minor confluence of deistic opinion, which at best might be mere surface agreement, I should be beaten about the town square and forced to carry a sign that reads “Jackass.” The sort of small-mind that can only stand that which agrees with it, and will seek it out in a manner that allows it to ignore what that material itself very well might be referencing, is so child-like and retarded as to appear crippled irreparably.

I chose to read His Dark Materials based on strong recommendations from both of my roommates. I have yet to run across as determined a set of personal advocates for the other classics of the fantasy genre, so I bowed in deference to their taste. If a similar fan of Lord of the Rings or Narnia argues for those series as convincingly, I will gladly go through them. I was particularly swayed by the fact that I will, in fact, cry upon finishing the trilogy. I am slightly atwitter about the prospect of having human emotions.

Any advocate of fantasy, however, must first leap through my own prejudices against the genre. I don’t know why, but for some reason the whole business has very, very little appeal for me. Usually, the very mention of goblin, orc, or dwarf will instantly repel me.

The Subtle Knife introduces a new protagonist to the story, and follows him for the first chapters, but does eventually continue the story from the first book. The opening chapters of The Subtle Knife are compelling, portraying a boy of twelve living in Oxford who cares for his mother who is, seemingly, schizophrenic. However, it becomes apparent that something really is after Will and his mother. The story of the Golden Compass was much more traditional children’s fantasy fair, full of heroic little girls, armored bears, and magical fortune telling compasses from the beginning. So, maybe that’s why it took me a year, despite the fact that I liked The Golden Compass, to get to the Subtle Knife.

Which is unfortunate, on my part, because The Subtle Knife is, in my opinion, a superior book to The Golden Compass. It seems like Pullman has given up any semblance of pandering to children. His language isn’t simplistic, and his concerns seem to be as adult as most fiction every strives for.

There is a certain level of enjoyment at how subversive Pullman will go. And as the story shifts into a possible plot to murder God, its tough not to take this back to the realm of its social context. But suppressing that, ignoring that this is a children’s book (or young reader, or whatever the fuck), we have a fantasy story where Pullman has upped the stakes by using very potent symbolic creatures to say something that directly relates to most people with any connection to Western religion. But ignoring the target-audience and potential massive disagreements with the author’s final thesis aren’t exactly small caveats to leap over.

Update: After I wrote this, I decided to do my basic research. Which is Wikipedia. And the article on Pullman kinda made me want to scream. He sounds like a douche. A gigantic douche, in fact. I think I’ll fully delve into the whole thing once I finish with the third book, so as not to shitstain my perception too much with his potentially being a gigantic a-hole.

Nadja is a novel, I guess, by Andre Breton. Although Breton, in the first pages, says that he believes fiction is dead. He wants to know who this painter was, or what that poet thought, not a fictional refraction. As such, Nadja is full of real names. And real places. And just to make sure we get it, there are photographs of the places, the drawings, and people mentioned in the book. Beyond that, how much of Nadja is genuinely true I do not know.

Written in 1929, Nadja is considered (at least according to the back jacket) “a surrealist romance.” However, it should be noted that this is a tad bit different usage of “surrealist” than is applied usually to literature. This isn’t surreal in the sense that Maldoror is surreal; dragons and eagles do not pick the eyes from whores and the whole thing never digresses into impenetrable prose blocks. This is surreal in that Breton was involved in the surrealist movement in the late-20s in Europe, and wrote extensively on it. His take on the “surrealist novel” is one that stretches the form, a bit, but is generally something that we can still approach as a novel.

The book follows dates in which Breton met up with a girl named Nadja in Paris. Breton was married, and the girl was a teenager. Even still, the book paints the portrait as a relationship that is non-sexual but romantic, and Breton as being open about who Nadja is with his wife. What I’ve read of the novel paints this a tad more surrealistically than my own reading; maybe I was doing it wrong. But I didn’t get the feeling that Nadja was a fictional being, someone non-existent in the world of the novel.

The book is at its most interesting, for me, in detailing Nadja’s visions, her scribblings and art work she created for Breton. The book, thin as it is already at about 160 large-font pages, includes several photographs, including these drawings, and photos of places, people, and art that Breton mentions. The photographs, aside from the art of Nadja, aren’t particularly fascinating or noteworthy.

Breton attempts a sort of philosophical novel, and comes close to achieving something that resonated with me. Ultimately, however, there wasn’t a huge “Oh, shit,” moment for me. Breton always seemed grounded; I wanted the book to take off into complete philosophy, or poetry, or something else. But it seems like Breton isn’t attempting to create an emotional connection with the reader. Which can be fine, it just requires a bit more complete understanding for the context of the novel. The thing is a quick read, and I may come back to it when I know a little more about what Breton was trying to achieve. But taken as it is, its brevity and occasionally touching turns of phrase about love are its main draw.