Blog

Two novels of unrequited love and obsession (yearning?): one recently trendy, the other recently reprinted. 

Ali’s novel follows a Turkish man, Raif, who moves to Berlin after the WWII to learn about industrial soap production before he takes over his family’s soap factories. Raif is feckless and wastes most of his time until he stumbles upon a self-portrait in a modern art exhibition and proceeds to stare at it every day. Eventually he meets the woman in the portrait and falls in love despite her wish to keep distant. Their…situation continues but can’t end happily. If this sounds very similar to “White Nights” that would be accurate. 

I think I found this a little disappointing because of the amount of hype that it got 1-2 years ago. This feels like a variation on Dostoyevsky’s work altered to put the protagonist in a foreign country, it’s a little less existential and more emotional. I didn’t especially like “White Nights” 

“A Domestic Animal” was republished this year by McNally editions and follows Dick Thompson, a middle-aged gay man, who falls in love with his lodger Antonio, an Italian philosopher. Antonio is intelligent and charming which allows him to win over most people despite his poor manners. He grows dependent on Dick while keeping him at arms reach and never quite clarifying his orientation. He eventually takes up with a young woman who lacks the taste and relative wealth of Dick (or any features of his wife in Italy). While it’s clear that the situation can’t end happily for Dick he remains unable to break free. 

This novel mostly follows Dick’s internal monologue as his obsession grows. It serves as a psychological portrait of obsession as Dick bounces between infatuation, jealously, and misery. It’s not a happy book but it’s shockingly honest and realistic. Francis King is a very skilled writer and it’s a shame that his (many) novels have mostly fallen out of print.  

Maybe there isn’t much left to say about this nostalgic novel about the changes in British class and Protestant/Catholic conflict in Britain leading up to WWII. 

Charles Ryder is an Oxford student who becomes infatuated with a child-like, effeminate drunkard of a student named Sebastian. He spends some holidays with Sebastian’s family at the Brideshead estate. Charles meets Sebastian’s family, particularly his sister Julia and, eventually, his father who is living outside of his marriage in Italy. As Sebastian’s drinking becomes a problem tensions arise between the family and Charles. 

Charles, now married, becomes a painter and eventually falls in love with Julia, also now married, as his career is beginning to take root. Their relationship, and the downfall of their marriages, encompass the final part of the novel. 

“Brideshead Revisited” is a reflective novel full of nostalgia where everything seems to be painted in a warm light despite the general lack of almost anything positive happening without a lot of strings attached. None of the characters or their relationships seem happy and most of the character development is negative. This is perhaps most accurately considered as a warning about the dangers of nostalgia for the glory days (here the English nobility and their fancy estates) that no longer exist and were never quite what they seem to us now. The War seems to be both a jolt awake from the general unreality of this belief and also a reason to cling to some sort of world that we understand.  

A short novel centering around the 2021 English Channel disaster, Delecroix takes the recorded conversations between a sinking boat of asylum seekers and a French Naval traffic control operator who answered the distress calls but failed to take action. 

Delecroix writes with a distant, objective voice allowing the operator to argue with an investigator who is inquiring about the incident after the recordings were made public. The operator shows little remorse and maintains that she did her job in fielding a large number of distress calls but that she can’t be blamed for problems arising on an overcrowded dinghy with a bad motor experiencing difficulties in the Strait of Dover. 

Many of the operators comments (some taken from transcripts) are callous or cruel, indifferent or ignorant to the reason the migrants would be putting their lives in danger. She maintains that she’s a good mother and visits her parents regularly though she is going through some struggles as a recent divorcee. Throughout the novel she undergoes somewhat of a personal crisis in realizing that she is being criticized for failing to help refugees while no one is helping her. The central question being how much should a fairly average person have empathy for and assist in aiding those fleeing difficult situations in other countries? 

Delecroix, a Kierkegaardian French philosopher, provides no easy answers. He doesn’t espouse the “Works of Love” or bring religion into the situation. In fact he balances the public outrage with empathy for the operator whose role in the Navy unexpectedly ended up on the front lines of the extended migrant crisis in Europe. Delecroix provides reminders that we usually ignore more immediate crises to focus on the sensational and try to put blame on individual actions to avoid any personal discomfort. 

This novel, and situation overall raises questions: could the situation be avoided if the French had been more welcoming? Could the situation have been avoided if the British asylum program didn’t require application from within the country? Could the countries have collaborated on a solution to a dangerous crossing made by more than ten thousand people annually? Could international aid efforts have prevented large scale migration? Could the media have focused on the situation and humanity of the refugees rather than the difficulties of handling large movements of people? Could the Navy have provided more support for the sea traffic controllers who had to deal with panicked calls on every calm night? Could France be doing more for the people of northern France to ease the backlash among people who generally are less economically comfortable? Could people acknowledge and help those in need in their own communities? 

In ~100 pages, Delecroix asks the major questions of what one should do when confronted with injustice whether personal or global. This made me think about the Haitian immigrant situation in Ohio which I heard about from people in the area while hearing about the situation in Haiti from a missionary. 

Perhaps deserving of the Goncourt and/or International Booker. 

As I’m making my way through Olga Tokarczuk’s translated works I had assumes that BoJ would be the last considering that it falls close to 1,000 pages. But the mood struck in early May and I spent the past month reading this giant historical novel. 

Books of Jacob centers around the Frankist movement following the 18th-century Polish messiah-claimant. While Jacob is the central figure, he remains distant in the novel which is told from the perspective of those around him–including followers, supporters, adversaries, and those occasionally overlapping with one or two of the previous groups. 

We witness Jacob as a young scholar advocating for the use of the Zohar and against the Torah while gaining the support of a couple wealthy merchant families. He flees to the Ottoman empire due to clashes with the majority of the Jewish community. In exile, the followers begin practicing strange rituals and 1700’s polyamory (coordinated by Jacob).  

Later, a plan is developed to have his entire movement baptized which gains him patronage and the possibility of return to Poland. The plans starts to unfold until Jacob is betrayed by one of his closest follows and becomes imprisoned (although bribes make this tolerable). When the monastery where he is held becomes captured, Jacob is released and moves to Offenbach where a supporter allows him use of a castle. As he grows into old age, he continues his teachings but raises a militia and lives extravagantly at the expense of his supporters. The movement begins to shrink at this stage and barely continues after Jacob’s death, but threads of the movement were dispersed through high spheres across Europe. 

Like most of Tokarczuk’s writing, there are many plot lines occurring simultaneously which never fully come together (many being related only in location and not in time), time is somewhat warped, there are slightly misfit mystics, there is obsession, people maybe have too much time on their hands. This style makes for a challenging read at this scale and I’m not sure that I found it as engaging as her shorter works. A lot of time is spent hovering and in 3rd person to limited 1st person but things are relatively stagnant most of the time as the followers wait for the next step in their journey. There is a fable-like feel across the novel that, while appropriate, maintains some distance. 

This might be one that I respect for its ambition and research more than I enjoyed 

A 50% whole wheat loaf for this cool weekend.

After getting the urge to bend some strings again I sampled some Revstars and HSS Strats/strat-style guitars (the best of which was a high-spec Pacifica, surprisingly) but ended up liking this (discontinued) Meteora. It’s fun to be able to mess around with tones and effects and to have easily bendable strings.

I tend to pick up any of the McNally Editions that seem mildly interesting and I figured I’d give this one a go at the end of April when it was a bit rainy. 

“The King of a Rainy Country” follows Susan and Neale who are platonic partners trying to figure out if they can be attracted to each other despite their common homosexuality (this was first published in 1956). Susan takes a job at a bookstore only to find out it sells erotic books. Looking through one of them, she sees a photo of her school crush, Cynthia, who she had a complicated almost relationship with but never got closure. Trying to find her in London, she realizes that Cynthia is trying to become an actress in Venice. Susan and Neale drop everything and go to Venice as last minute tour guides to fund the trip. IN Venice they find Cynthia and meet a few other characters that provide some changes to their relationship. 

The real appeal of this novel is Brophy’s writing which has a certain command while seeming casual as if she were telling the story and meandering between topics and times. Very few writers can make this work without things becoming confusing but Brophy succeeds. That being said, this novel didn’t really grab me in any way–it was fine. 

As a side note, this novel has a lot of French ands a fair amount of Italian which makes it difficult to follow without some background knowledge. 

I have, for maybe ten years, wanted to read Huysmans’ “Against Nature” (À Rebours) since seeing it mentioned as a footnote of “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” This is considered to be the poisonous French novel that captivated Dorian and it clearly influenced Wilde’s writing, which seems quite clear. 

Huysmans writes of an ailing heir, Des Esseintes, at the biological end of the family tree that was too interconnected. Years of hedonistic living and escorts have left him in poor health so he resolves to move into the country to live a solitary life of intellectual beauty. Chapters here serve mostly to display Des Essientes’s cultured tastes on such topics as Roman literature, interior decoration, jewels, plainchant, liqueurs, painting (including the Moreau on the cover), and perfume. These fixations exist in contrast to what Des Essiente feels is cultural decline where nothing of substance in being produced and the world is becoming fixated with industrial modernism (American, nonetheless). Unfortunately, the high arts offer no escape from Man’s necessarily social being. 

This exists in the French tradition of brilliant novels that are terrible to read. This is tedious, with most of the interest happening in the introduction and at the end (maybe that’s the point). Huysmans posits that living through the senses is no replacement for living as social beings, even if that’s generally unpleasant. 

I re-read Dorian Gray after the Huysmans since it had been a while. For some reason I thought that this novel was clunkier than it actually is and was pleasantly surprised at how much I still enjoyed it (maybe a little more at being able to recognize the Huysmans references). 

Houellebecq writes of a Huysmans scholar (with plenty of references to À Rebours) working and existing as France elects an Islamic government through a compromise with the Left. Our protagonist, the nearly nameless François, a lonely professor disengaged from the world and mostly fixated on wine, cigarettes, and younger women (a Houellebecq novel, after all) is trying to avoid any issues while in the autumn of his intellectual life but must contend with the new government wanting to control higher education, putting him out of a job unless he converts. 

Like Huysmans, Houellebecq writes a work of cultural pessimism about a life that is chiefly composed of materialism and bureaucracy, with a few carnal delights mixed in to make life bearable. Despite being considered a luminary on the Decadent period, François mostly craves connection and some higher sense of meaning in a culture that no longer emphasizes such things beyond a personal brand. His chief conflict is between his general dislike of organized religion and his desire to age with a partner (even through an arranged marriage). Largely a cultural critique of a modern Europe that has nothing to stand for and would be unable to resist a modern equivalent Ottoman invasion. 

A bit of a tired rehashing of Houellebecq’s previous writing, a sub-par Houellebecq is still alright. 

Finishing off a bag of bread flour and using whole wheat for the rest (~70%). This is more whole wheat than I usually like dealing with but the dough was alright and the loaf feels pretty good–

In the same category as “A Room with a View”–some stuffy English ladies go to Italy on vacation but end up dropping their formality in the lush, blooming gardens and find love. 

Here, four ladies of different ages and means (but essentially all strangers) pool their money to rent a Tuscan villa for a month. Nearly nothing is coordinated ahead of time which leads to lengthy conflict over personal spaces and shared costs. Two of the women are particularly thorny: Lady Caroline just wants to be left alone and treated normally and Mrs Fisher just wants it to be the Victorian era again. Lotty holds things together with her enthusiasm while she and Rose worry about their unhappy marriages. The arrival of men, after much foreboding, shakes up the entire situation.  

This is a lighthearted, happy-ending story with low stakes drama. The writing is old fashioned in a good way as the book takes its time and doesn’t try to force anything. Not the greatest thing ever written, but a nice spring read while everything was blooming.