Paul Auster’s New York is not so much a place as a state of mind. Noir to the extreme; restless, haunted by the ghosts of characters from stories not yet written.
Paul Auster died on Tuesday; as his wife, Siri Hustvedt said (in an Instagram post embedded below): ” […he] never left Cancerland”. If you can’t get to Auster’s hometown rag – presumably one of the media entities no longer feeling bound by the norms of decency (to which I wonder whether the family have received an apology?) – there is some good reading here at The Guardian.
With a new feature, The Yale Review has become an even more wonderful place to go. Here, the announcement by Meghan O’Rourke of a weekly column called Annotating the Archives; archives that really are a treasure trove of 20th century literature and ideas, and which deserve to be brought to the fore and presented with perhaps a differentiated slant or emphasis – and by fine contemporary writers.
My blog entry below in which I write on Zadie Smith’s novel, The Fraud, ended before it should have. I did have a couple of things to say to do with the book’s end … well, two and a bit actually:
In the final chapter: As William Ainsworth lays dead on his study floor, he is already entering Eliza Touchet’s memory, and she knows not whether it will be as the truth or as a false memory, or if ultimately there is any difference. Will the real Ainsworth stand up, please! With William’s death comes Eliza’s last shot at freedom; he is now just one of the cast of characters imagined in her own secret manuscript with the title, The Fraud. Or will ‘dear William’, in death, be party to another fraud, or at least another’s truth?
From the Afterword: If one were to doubt her existence, it is useful to know that in 2009 Eliza Touchet’s 1842 edition of A Christmas Carol, signed to ‘Mrs. Touchet’, was sold at auction for the highest ever price for a Dicken’s work.
Apropos Dickens: In Chapter 29, the Ainsworths and Eliza Touchet visit the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park and later Mrs. Touchet reads Dickens and Horne’s review of the event in Household Words. Now this piece I have mentioned before (and here it is)! Eliza’s reaction to the article, in which the two good gentlemen hail to the hilt the virtues of western progress (machines) and mock the traditional ware (crafts) of the east, and which is contrary to her own aesthetic reception of the items on display, has the touchiness of all her interactions with Dickens (as given in Smith’s fictional rendering). (Why do I think with Eliza T., the Boz had met his match? And knew it!)
Zadie Smith’s latest work of big F fiction is anything but fraudulent but (The) Fraud is writ large on its cover and permeates the narrative – bold faced is the text even when writ small.
To my mind, a veritable romp of a read, but not one to be deconstructed to an allegoric tale of he who was once (and god forbid not future) American president as some – particularly on the other side of the Atlantic – would have it. I mean to say, contemporary comparisons and reflections are always warranted but, loathe as I am to repeat myself, Trump is far less of an aberration than many would have it – rather just the latest in a line of crooks and con-artists – yes, frauds! – who have, and in various incarnations and with various degrees of success, elbowed their way to center stage for times long and short. (Granted, an encore performance there did not have to be!)
The Fraud is Zadie Smith’s first foray into historical fiction, and she does it with aplomb, perhaps not with the absolute Leichtigkeit that she brings when her subjects occupy a space she so totally gets – the northern London suburbs, for example, and characters pulled from that landscape spreading their wings near and far. Here is a writer exploring what is, for her, new (literary) terrain. But I think she succeeds in constructing a 19th century tale that does not feel so distant in time nor in space, rather, has the immediacy of now; certainly, her main protagonist, Eliza Touchet, and those who rotate about her, and whether they be in London or the Home Counties, don’t present as somehow being stuck in a Dickens or Thackeray door-stopper but, instead, read as having the potential to be time-shifters in a Netflix show-stopper. (By the way, these two aforesaid gents I mention not by chance, but because they and others and most especially Eliza’s cousin, William Harrison Ainsworth, are of the cultural and social milieu from which the narrative springs. As a reviewer said, do keep Google at the ready, behind the Fiction are various degrees of Fact. There they are: those F words again!) The success of the novel may also have something to do with style; the post-modern realism in which Zadie Smith writes fits with the uglier, even brutal, side of the burgeoning global world and the intertwined strands leading from Andrew Bogle to the slave plantations of Jamaica and from The (Tichborne) Claimant to the still colony of Australia where England could still banish its unwanted or troublesome and make capital in the process. Suggesting that almost two centuries on, the ghosts of colonialism still haunt the global ambitions of both the once oppressed and the oppressors.
F(Rowohlt Verlag, 2014)
And F can stand for more than (just) Fraud. Recently, I read Daniel Kehlmann’s novel ‘F’ (Rowohlt, 2014), and I see now that, presumably on the back of his previous successes (especially this one) in the international market, it was indeed translated (Vintage, 2015). In any obvious way Kehlmann’s work, set in a contemporary German-speaking space somewhere (if specified, I seem to have missed it), would not necessarily have too much in common with Zadie Smith’s historical novel.
But then there are these damnable F words that call out to me to consider. And it is Fortunate for this comparison some words map quite nicely from German to English, and interconnected F words are prevalent in both languages. The now universality of Fake, for instance; after all just a shade of Fraud (or, is it, Freud?), or the other way around. And Fame and Fortune: Fortune-telling (show me the Future) and changing Family Fortunes for a Father and a Fraternity of three, each with a life defined by Finance and (non-) Fidelity, (not so) Fine Art and Forgery, Food and (feigned) Faith, This, again, is a novel about deception, the power of suggestion and, yes, Fälschung – about Fakery (or something more carnal) being afoot and other forms of Foolery.
And Fate. Towards the end of the novel, the mostly absent Father – he by whom the die was cast, Iacta alea est, and who casts his shadow from the first pages – says:
“Fatum” […].”Das grosse F. Aber der Zufall is mächtig, und plötzlich bekommt man ein Schicksal, das nie für einen bestimmt war. Irgendein Zufallsschicksal […”
“Fate” […] “The big F. But chance is a powerful thing, andsuddenlyyou find yourself living adestinythatwasnevermeantforyou. Some random fate […]”
F by Daniel Kehlmann; my own translation
An imperfect book, but an interesting (and often funny) novel in which Kehlmann uses his narrative talents to philosophize on the blurring of lines between that which is true and that which is imagined and that which is just plain false. At the time of publication almost a decade ago, I am not sure that the range of possibilities for bad players to prey upon a digitalized, connected world were fully understood, nor the repercussions; ‘fakery’ mostly remained still in the realm of the classical and obvious forms of deception – human beings telling human lies in very human ways; even a charlatan or trickster of whatever persuasion, peddling whatever their wares is but a sophisticated version of this. Now, a new breed of ‘mover’ – regionally or globally – is sowing seeds of discontent – or just after the next quick buck; harnessing digital technologies to open up new fields of activity beyond the obvious – and anybody can just as easily be the next perpetrator as the next victim.
And F is for Fiction. Two really good works of fiction, from two terrific writers. I think I am correct in saying they are friends.
Possibly Edith Hamilton (here her Wiki entry) is one of those extraordinary American women renowned only on their home turf and amongst those steeped in Classics education. Whatever, I only came across Hamilton by chance a few years ago whilst reading Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones in which the feisty young protagonist is given a copy of Mythology to read by a teacher, and finds solace in those ancient myths – and refuge from the cruel realities of poverty and despair in the Mississippi Delta.
Charles Darwin’s birthday (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) today! I know this because I have just listened to Sarah Darwin – a couple of greats of a grand up the ‘tree of life’ – inform me of such just now on Today. On this day then, the much lauded, often misunderstood – and sometimes maligned – ‘father of evolution’ has gifted to his extended and forever growing family, and contrary to birthday conventions, the books from his library – that inner sanctum of a every learned Victorian – at Down House, the Darwin family home in Berkshire.
Shaw’s piece has a lot of very interesting references; whether they are his own or come from Greenwalt I am not sure. For instance, Michael Crichton; I am of the generation that belatedly discovered a fascination for the Jurassic and recall being very open to the possibility of dinosaur DNA being preserved in fossilized mosquitos or the like – and was absolutely terrified of velociraptors. And I also took notice of those first reports – from not so very many years ago – that dinosaurs had, not only ‘beautiful plumage’, but colorful ones as well! Here are some nice pages at the University of Bristol, where some of the leading paleontologists in the field are stationed. And to stretch the powers of the imagination even further:
Then there are the long ago ‘fossil’ observations of one Athanasius Kircher, who I came upon during a reading of Daniel Kehlmann’s novel Tyll a few years ago, and his and Steno’s struggles to reconcile there observations in the natural world with their Christian faith. (I actually have in my possession at this time an academic collection of writings about Kircher which I may be inspired to dip into.)
And, in the not so natural world, Shaw mentions another abiding interest of mine: the struggle to come to terms with a colourful past that is contrary to the long accepted white aesthetic. New to me that a landsman should be one of those.
Thank God and every other god there is
That time is an aesthete
Who strips the colours from the Parthenon.
We are left, were it not
For the play of shadow,
With the acres and square miles
Of Fuseli’s white ghost-flesh
But it beats the polychromatic
Crap out of the Disneyland
That antiquity once was.
One may think we are talking about two very different things here – science and art, if you will – but Liam Shaw in the conclusion to his article says: ‘Like sculptures, fossils need curators.’ And, seemingly echoing the sentiments of Greenwalt, that, faced with ever newer technologies, ‘Extracting new information from old fossils is a question of knowing what to look for – but it’s also a question of knowing when to stop.’
During the UK leg of her book tour at the end of last year, Emily Wilson accepted the London Review of Books invitation to present her Iliad translation. And they found a wonderful discussion partner for her in Edith Hall. And complimented by a thespian pair conjured from amongst the embarrassment of riches which is the theatrical talent of a nation – Juliet Stevenson and Tobias Menzies. Stellar, I say! Such an evening could only happen in London.
