Someone named “Mauve,” a twenty-two-year-old male apparently based in India, sent me a Goodreads message and asked for book recommendations that matched the most famous films by David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Wong Kar-Wai, and another director whose name I didn’t recognize.
I responded “so you’re looking for books that are stylized and weird, with an edge of violence, but generally entertaining?”
He replied “bingo, sensei.”
I liked that he called me “sensei,” so I spent a few minutes scrolling through my “read” list and pasting links to my reviews of the small percentage of novels I’d read that sort of fit the bill.
It was a fun exercise that I found instructive since I was surprised how many novels were too literary, serious, or silly. Or weird novels that weren’t particularly entertaining or edgy. Or stylized but not particularly weird or violent or entertaining. It turns out, very few of the novels I’ve marked as “read” on Goodreads overlap on the Venn diagram in play. But those in the shaded sub-segments of the overlapping circles are absolute favorites.
“Mauve” thanked me and said he was an aspiring filmmaker and promised to read all the novels I recommended. He then asked if I’d read a novel as good as War and Peace and I recommended Joseph & His Brothers, the only contender really. I also recommended a few others that were great in their own way if not as ambitious as W&P or weird, stylized, kind of violent, entertaining. He said I was the only one who responded — he must have asked many others on GR the same question.
His question had come late in the afternoon when otherwise comatose at work and I was happy to take a break from editorial labor for a few minutes. Also it made me wonder why I recommend novels in general, why do I have such an evangelical instinct, why do I seek what I deem great and then share it?
Am I doing it for the obvious reason of spreading the word or is there something else going on related to ego (associating myself with greatness, elevating myself via evangelizing novels already widely considered undisputed champs, or novels considered long, boring, difficult, et cetera)? Or am I just trying to identify the standard, the goal, the high-water mark in an otherwise unquantifiable field like literature? Is there maybe a spiritual side to it, the identification of a personal canon to act as stand-in or 21st-century replacement for predecessors’ experiences submitting themselves to a degree to the existential authority of the supremely bookish Judaism (on my father’s side) and to a lesser extent but nevertheless obviously book-based Catholicism (on my mother’s side)?
I thought I would paste the links I sent to “Mauve” here but our correspondence was gone when I looked for it — “Mauve” apparently deleted his account. I immediately wondered who he really was, thinking he could be a “journalist” looking to criticize the sort of novels recommended by middle-aged men on GR. I’m not really all that paranoid about it — s/he most likely just disappeared for whatever reason related to consumption of psychotropic processed foodstuffs — but I did think it could be worthwhile to post my immediate impressions of the few novels I’ve read that meet Mauve’s shadowy criteria, so here ya go:
The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels
Ágota Kristóf (translated by Alan Sheridan, David Watson, Marc Romano)
The first part (“The Notebook”) was wonderfully effed-up reading: first-person plural (“we”) narrator and short chapters, studded with sensationalist psychoerotic gruesomeness, focused on super-smart sinister twins during wartime. Spareness plus unspecified time/space coordinates gave it a mythic/fabulist vibe. Two-hundred pages of controlled horrifics, albeit with maybe a bit of a guilty sense for me that this wasn’t quite “Waiting for the Barbarians,” “Blindness,” or “In the Penal Colony” — maybe I was more into it for the psychoerotic insanities than stuff about how folks endure the genocidal atrocities, enemy occupations, etc, that warp them?
The second and third sections fell way off from the first section, mostly I think because the awesome first-person plural point of view in “The Notebook” shifts to third person (“The Proof”), then first person (“The Third Lie”). Also, it turns out I must’ve really been swayed by the psychoerotic nastinesses in the first book because their lack in the other two I very much noted. I skimmed the last book, admittedly — not engaged by the writing (mainly) or the unreliable nature of storytelling subtextual schtuff. But still, the first book was 4.75 stars for me (at least) and some of the second one was not so bad either (3 stars?). Something else: it’s clear that the author also writes for the theater. The first two parts are so spare they’re practically scripts. Very little exposition, mostly dialogue, a few stage directions. Works perfectly for the very young, sympathetic, batshit narrator(s).
(The Lars Von Trier adaptation is gonna rock.)
Steps
Jerzy Kosiński
Have had this since 1997, a crusty old paperback taken for free or not much more from a neighbor’s yard sale. Read some in the past but never persevered to finish. Recommended for fans of dark, violent, realist fables. Call it skewed yet scarily/stuntedly straightforward post-traumatic stress syndrome lit? Sometimes like Kafka anecdotes but never even a smidge irreal (what seem at first like humanoids are simply humans), also lacking suggestion of a spiritual side? Sometimes like Jesus’ Son but without that hazy Christian glow. Heavenly reflection on earth is just the shadow of a rotten brown leaf. Sometimes like an evil Kundera with a long knife instead of philosophical exposition — at the end of a brief part, when the knife goes in, the whole thing seems to crystallize (sneaky starts, in general, and yowza sensationalist endings). Perpetuates stereotypes of the sicko post-war Old Country (fans of this sort of stuff should definitely check out The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels). Right away, ignorance and oppression dupes an innocent into beliving her liberator’s credit cards are magic. Decapitations. Gang rape. Crazy naked lady in a cage. Soccer team obliterated by artillery fire. Bored snipers take out strolling couples, a bored guy takes out the night watchman of an abandoned building. On and on, short psychically linked bits, carefully and cleanly composed, often told by a cold if not pathologically calculating post-war narrator. Sometimes italicized psychoanalytic-like dialogue. Suggestion of unspecified international atrocities provides sense of serious heft (ie, human condition significance) throughout, despite book’s general brevity. Literature of the “Oh the Humanity”- or “The Horror, The Horror”-type. A precursor to Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: Stories — read this after so many years because it’s mentioned in the DFW bio as an influence. A particularly vivid bit about a fast driver hired to do just that as business deals go on in the back. I’m interested in Kozinski’s others but not about to run out after them. Amazing this won the National Book Award in 1968. A very different literary world back then, huh? Will come back to parts of it now and again to retrace some unexpected “steps” . . .
Ghosts
Cesar Aira (Translated by Chris Andrews)
A patient, dense, even-handed/sane, attentive, purposefully naturalistic short novel populated by what seems like many undercharacterized characters milling about and talking in paragraphless dialogue as naked manly ghosts hover around and sometimes piss in arcs that produce rainbows with a metallic sheen. Excellent active ending: like a methodical, casually eddying river that suddenly accelerates toward its catarata. Aira really shifts from static dense atmospherics to electrified sprints. A tricky, shifty writer who throws changeups — that is, intentionally slows things down, manifests some serious density, so a faster sentence jumps out that much quicker in comparison: “He was letting his thoughts show in that gentle, docile way because sleepiness was overcoming him irresistibly. And both aspects of his excuse were reasonable, in a way. The mood of summery exhibitionism prevailing on the site, accentuated perhaps by the imperfect, deceptive repetition from one floor to the next, didn’t shock Patri (even she wasn’t that naive) so much as intrigue her. She’s seen the gang of ghosts shaking their sturdy members and aiming the jets of urine at the sky, showering it over the first-floor patio (their favorite place for this sport) until rainbows with a metallic sheen appeared in the siesta’s white glare. The day the big satellite dish was installed on the terrace, they spent hours doing it, perched on the edge.” Political suggestions re: Chile/Argentina I didn’t quite register enough to associate the ghosts or the building etc. But I liked how this sort of South American “magical realism” is concrete instead of verdant relentless fornicating flora and fauna, hyperbolically flowing prose saturated with the streaking plummage of a quetzal in flight — in this, the tone is stable gray, the surfaces of the luxury apartment building are concrete, the ghosts are covered in a sort of concrete powder/dust and pretty much keep their distance. You can tell this book by its cover.
Will add to this as necessary