I don't do sequels. I do not like watching movies that have sequels. I will watch James Bond movies...but I don't think of them as sequels- but rather separate movies that all have the same main character, the same goes for the Pink Panther series. All of the rest though, I have no use for. With the exception of the Robertson Davies trilogies, the same can be said for books. Harry Potter and his friends are not something that I need to read about for 5 or 6 books.

However this week, I read a really interesting book called "March", by Geraldine Brooks. This book builds a story around the absentee father character from Louisa May Alcott's book "Little Women". I suppose you can think of it as a sequel-written by a different author, as it does have a bit of the same feel as the original, and there are common characters. The book delves into Mr March's transcendental philosophies, as well as his relationships with slaves- and his struggle to help free them.

Besides teach me about the civil war (most of which I learned from the movie Gone With the Wind), and further educate me on philosophies that are not always followed in this part of the world-this book helped me to change my opinion of sequels.

Not only was I glad to be in the head of Capt. March, but now I want to know more about why crusty Aunt March was so against him going to war, and I want to know how Mr Laurence made his money, and how John Brooks came to become Laurie's tutor - instead of doing something else.

You will notice that a lot of writers, read a lot of books. Why? Because reading is good for you. It gives your brain word nutrients, oxygen, and exercise. Going to a library is like going to an imagination gym. I try to read a little bit everyday. Sometimes, I am just too wiped out - but I do make a bit of an effort. I have a plan to read 50 books this year. I think I have finished 41 or 42, so far.

I once heard the novelist, Yann Martel say, "that for every book a person reads, a life is added to his own". I have not remembered that quote accurately, but I think I got the gist of it. Reading a book and sharing someone's imagination is a gift. It enriches our lives. It gives us moments of stillness. Something we all need. Our hands do not need to be busy all of the time. We should quiet our bodies, and awaken our minds. It's good for us. I will update this blog, on what I am reading - and what I think of the book.

This week's selection is Girl With A Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier. I just started this book the other night, when I was sitting in a noisy sushi bar - so I have not gotten far, but it is keeping my interest. At this stage, that is all I can ask. What are you reading? Let me guess. Since there is only 2 people who know about this blog. I am thinking one of them is reading something by John Irving - by the way Rex, he is back on the shelf - again- his books are too disturbing for me. And I think the other one is reading Robertson Davies - hopefully its come down off the bookshelf now. Am I right???

Toda esa modestia personal forma parte de la personalidad evasiva de nuestro tiempo. No sabes si eres un héroe o no, pero estás decidido a no averiguarlo jamás, porque te da miedo el peso que habrás de sobrellevar si lo eres y te da miedo la certeza de no serlo.

A verse

To live is - to fight possession
of heart and brain by the troll.
To write is - to sit in session
judging one's very soul.

Citado en Mantícora (1972), del grandísimo novelista canadiense Robertson Davies, (Ed. Libros del Asteroide, 2006, pág. 93; traducción de Miguel Martínez-Lage):

Una estrofa

Vivir es batallar con los trasgos
en las criptas del corazón y el cerebro.
Escribir es en cambio sentarse
y juzgarse a uno mismo.

The video for this thing is fun, with people such as Simon Sebag Montefiore, celebrated for his books about Stalin, admitting he's never read Wuthering Heights, which didn't stop him from winning the highest marks in a school class years ago for his paper on the Bronte novel.

The posts on this piece are even better. There are a lot of them, and several writers and books keep coming back as the most unread, and while I expected Joyce and Proust to pop up a lot, I was a little surprised to see Dickens come up repeatedly as someone readers pretended to read but assiduously avoided.

Joyce: As for Ulysses, which comes up often here, I've read it once and have almost finished reading it a second time. I decided to read it again because I couldn't possibly catch all the references, and many sections took very slow, careful reading to become clear.

But I loved it; there is a great deal of music in Joyce, both literal and in the way the language sounds, and I found it intoxicating. Few other books I can think of really put you in the sights, sounds and scents of a specific place like this one does, nor do many authors really give you interior monologues that are as accurate, that is to say, ambiguous, as Joyce does.

To me, it's an astounding achievement, even though there's quite a bit of it that's still obscure to me. Makes it worth reading again, to my mind. But I haven't tried Finnegans Wake (though the American Scholar had a good piece earlier this year about a Finnegans Wake reading group; maybe that's the best way to read Ulysses, too.)

Dickens: Great Expectations is my favorite novel of his, though I haven't read his favorite, which was David Copperfield, nor have I gotten to Bleak House. I have enjoyed Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, and his American Sketches. I love his work, though, and am looking forward to reading more (a good TV adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit whetted my appetite for that novel, so maybe that's next.)

Faulkner: He comes in for abuse in these posts, but I thought Light in August was magnificent. Like Joyce, difficult to read, but also like him, absolutely redolent of a time and place. I like to say, like the preacher's wife, "Now you see what I have bore," but no one seems to get the reference, so I'll stop. Haven't read The Sound and the Fury, though.

Austen: A frequent topic in the posts. I've only read Pride and Prejudice, which I enjoyed. Liked the Sense and Sensibility movie that Emma Thompson did, though.

Woolf: No one in the posts seems to like Orlando (again, a good movie, with Tilda Swinton); I didn't mind it, but I liked Mrs. Dalloway much better. I love the opening pages in particular, which also are steeped in a specific London.

Melville: Poor old Herman. Everybody in the posts seems to have ignored Moby-Dick, which I greatly enjoyed the second time around. During the first, I found the whaling and digressions really tedious, but now I like them.

This, too, is a deep picture of a particular culture alive at a particular time in American history, and it's fascinating.

Two other things about this little contest: Many of the works resisted here are long-winded novels of an earlier time, and because technology allows us to have much more immediate entertainment, the draw of these books for their diversionary value is much smaller than it used to be.

If you really want to read something like Moby-Dick, you have to plan it, you have to give it time, and you have to let it speak to you on its own terms. You can't demand that it interest you right away; many of these books aren't designed this way.

Henry James's novels, for instance, I find quite difficult to read because his characters speak what strikes me as nothing approaching actual speech even in late Victorian and early Edwardian high society, and he tends to spend great swaths of time mulling over very small events. But even with my distaste for his aspect of his art, I liked The Golden Bowl, tough as it was to get through (the movie's not bad, either).

It's not exactly my kind of novel, but some of the descriptive writing is astonishingly beautiful, and the overwhelming sense of erotic tension throughout makes it worth putting up with his longueurs.

The other thing worth noting is that many of the books we have read for classes, and even on which we have written papers, aren't in our conscious memory anymore and so have to be re-read. Most of the books I've mentioned reading here I read quite a while ago, and many of their details have gone into hiding in the deep recesses of my brain.

But I think good reading is often about re-reading; some of the greatest works of our literature require repeated encounters. If you're really interested in a painter like Cezanne, for instance, you'd do as Rilke did and go back again and again to study the paintings. You wouldn't hear the Beethoven Ninth just once, like it, and decide you never needed to hear it again. Same thing with great writing. Truly understanding it requires renewed acquaintance.

One last little postscript: Someone who posts on the Telegraph story says he or she is Canadian but ignores Canadian literature. That's too bad, because there goes Robertson Davies, one of my favorite writers.

Tempest-Tost, for instance, is a lovely summer read, and his next-to-last novel, Murther and Walking Spirits, is a good character study as well as a nifty historical fiction. And then there's The Lyre of Orpheus, which deals with a young composer. Davies was a terrific writer, and his fellow Great White Northerner is missing out.

Anyone out there want to 'fess up? Take a look at the story, the video, and the posts, and post here: What :"great book" haven't you read, and why?

Recently I picked up again a book that had a tally of two, but which I have not read since I was twenty; the title of this book is Fergus Lamont, by Robin Jenkins.  I am amazed to realize, as I am reading it again, that I failed to understand that it was meant to be a satire.  I kept the book because I found it so baffling and odd; seen in the proper light, however, it is brilliant.  I'm glad I kept it, and I'm also glad that I decided to rereread it.

2) Tonight at my writers' group meeting, one of the other members cracked me up by describing a character's sudden emotional epiphany as "He finally got hit with a clue-by-four."

And later on, I ventured a confident guess that the term for a vomit fetish would be "emetophilia."  Subsequent research proved me right.  It's a little alarming that this topic actually came up (so to speak) but oh well -- Art knows no limits.

Propped up against the base of the casino wall like an abandoned doll, the body was bulky in places, but still frail enough to look as if it might be carried along by a good wind. Electricity glossed over its mess of hair—kinked and matted strands of indistinct, artificial colors, clumped in all directions.

Er: it's almost right, but "electricity" feels wrong because it's not electricity but electric light that illuminates hair. This is a microcosm of Beautiful Children: it feels like it should be more right than it is. Clichés distract—someone "was bleeding like a stuck pig" and elsewhere a stripper named Cheri goes on "about character arcs and emotional journeys until the friggin' cows came home." Perhaps this is how the character would think, but the problem of how banal, uneducated characters think and speak versus the literary needs of the author is never really resolved*. If teenagers sound like teenagers they're often boring or vapid; if they sound like adults, they don't sound real. If there is a satisfactory solution to this problem, it is not obvious in Beautiful Children; in other novels it involves a "precocious" or abnormally literary narrator. Instead, Beautiful Children opts for long transcriptions of teenage argot that eventually had me flipping pages in a quest for substance. It was hard enough to find when a character thinks, "You cannot possibly fathom an end to your observations about the status of your physical decline, a final finality. Such things are beyond you, as they are beyond anyone; and yet the evidence permeates your days, unavoidably present, oozing from the southwestern decor of a master bedroom [...]" I can't see Robertson Davies going into such despair. Perhaps John Banville would, but much more artfully.

Banville and Davies, however, wrote many novels over the course of their careers, and, at least in Davies' case, his early novels were not as masterful as his later ones. Beautiful Children is a first novel that Bock says took 11 years to write and, presumably, publish, and I can't help but thinking he would've been better served to finish it or have otherwise built his skills elsewhere. Beautiful Children is not a bad novel and perhaps it is even good, but not 11 years good. It has an admirable range of cultural references, from Blake to The Outsiders (a "young adult" novel assigned to me in middle school) to visual media detritus. Like Richard Price's Ladies' Man, Beautiful Children heralds better things to come. Now that Price comes to mind, Lush Life covers ground not dissimilar from Beautiful Children and does it better. And he wrote it in four years. Bock said Beautiful Childrentook so long because it was an "ambitious book, and I just didn't know what I was doing for a lot of it." Many novels gestate for a long time, and he rattled some off: Catch-22 stayed with me, but there were many others. Alas, I don't think Beautiful Children will have the lasting power of Catch-22 or Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, another superb first novel. And in those novels, I doubt anything is "unceremoniously rejected," as something is at the beginning of 3.3 in Beautiful Children.

Bock seems to have better novels in him; in Seattle, he said, "[Beautiful Children is] a dark book, but I believe the darkness is there to illuminate some of the wonderful parts of humanity [...] also, I think there's some pretty good jokes in there too." There are, and he was wonderfully candid when someone asked why the dialog seemed so good and, by implication, authentic: "I have no idea." Although he elaborated, I suspect the real truth came first. Still, I'm not sure I agree with the premise of the question: sometimes the dialog clicked and sometimes not, like much of the rest of the novel.

In another answer, Bock said he used Ponyboy because he's an "iconic young adult character" and that he intentionally "recycles—Vegas is a place where they fake the Eiffel Tower and the great monuments of the world and turn them into casinos." There is "no end to the uses of pop culture," though he tries not to name drop. The recycling theme is heavy in Beautiful Children and perhaps a topic for some future graduate student. Today, someone looking for pleasure and depth could do worse than Beautiful Children—but they could do better. In "Books Briefly Noted," the New Yorker has its own take on the novel's problems, starting with praise and then moving to: "Yet [Beautiful Children] doesn’t quite achieve its intended emotional resonance; there is too much shaky dialogue and improbable Vegas kitsch (breast implants with candle-wax-filled nipples, for a pyrotechnic striptease), and the boy at the center of the plot is thinly drawn and so obnoxious that his disappearance is not unwelcome." I read "Books Briefly Noted" after writing the first draft of this post, and realized that I structure my commentary the same way the New Yorker did its.

I want to be more Catholic.

I study the saints, and I ask for their prayers. That cloud of witnesses is a resource for me and for you.

I'm reading a terrific novel by Robertson Davies this week while traveling to the Catholic Library Association meetings in Indianapolis: World of Wonders. The narrator is the author of two books on the saints, and occasionally talk of them sneaks into the telling of the story. I love this characterization from chapter 5:

"I had sought God in my lifelong, unlikely preoccupation with that fantastic collection of wise men, virtuous women, thinkers, doers, organizers, contemplatives, crack-brained simpletons, and mad mullahs that are called Saints."

I wish I had put it that well in my book, The Lure of Saints.

A really excellent novel which, although clearly lauded on publication nearly 40 years ago, seems to have become rather unfashionable over time. This, the first book in the Deptford Trilogy is narrated by Dunstan Ramsay, a teacher, who recounts his life experiences in an extended epistle to his former Head.

The root of a strange life lies with a snowball incident as a child and the consequences which flow from it for Dunstan, his best friend Percy 'Boy' Staunton and Mary Dempster who gives birth prematurely and seems to lose her mind as a result of being hit by the projectile intended for Dunstan. The guilt remains with Ramsay for the rest of his days and influences profoundly the course of his life and the consequences have equally dramatic effects on Boy and Paul Dempster, Mary's son.

The style is clear and direct but the twisting tale is full of surprises in a shifting landscape. Great stuff - can't wait to finish the next one.

As Jessa Crispin of Bookslut said during the panel on literary criticism that book/daddy moderated at the Texas Book Fesival in Austin over the weekend, the major review outlets keep reviewing all of the same authors, and few of the kinds of books and authors she likes were getting attention, so she started writing about them on her website.

Seriously. Who is writing about Robertson Davies, and who is commenting on B.R. Myers? Somehow I've never found a demand that I read The Name of the Rose, a novel that encapsulates why I read in the first place: to be so blown away that it's hard to discover where I should start writing. I linked to some of the other books that come close to that effect here.

Perhaps it's just the case that the greatest writers in the world are just not interested in writing moral fables. The greatest writers in other ages were - hence, Bunyan and Milton.

We live in a different moral climate and literature reflects that.

Just a thought. Tell me if I've misread what you wrote.

Davies addressed questions of how an author might be a moralist in this speech. Davies own understanding is that books of programmatic morality, with the two exceptions Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim's Progress are almost uniformly terrible. Anyone who, as a child, endured the Davey and Goliath cartoons while waiting for the "good" cartoons to come on will surely attest to the general truth of this statement. Seriously though, despite this, Davies still considers authors to be moralists in the sense that they deal in moral truths (I'm probably doing Davies a disservice here - read the original in his book, in fact buy his book). Even an author like Nabokov, who tries to be amoral is making a moral comment.

I haven't seen either I Am Legend or The Bucket List so you'll have to raise your objections with Andrew if you don't agree with his assessment of those films, but I've heard Christians find any number of fascinating movies to have some kind of religious theme or comment, Pulp Fiction, Magnolia, and Donnie Darko all come to mind. For what it's worth, you could see the first two Terminator films as a sort of redemption cycle (the third one and the TV show wreck that - but we all know that they were just the principles from the franchise cashing in). Good filmmaking, like all good art, often deals in the same themes as religion. That's probably why so many religious people are suspicious of art. I suppose it's somewhat banal to put it this way, but usually good quality filmmaking is something that ought to be intelligible to religion and religious people.

- Robertson Davies, "The Pleasures of Love," in Saturday Night (23 December 1961); reprinted in The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies (1990).

Who are the clerisy?…. The clerisy are those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime, but not to kill time; who love books, but do not live by books. As lately as a century ago the clerisy had the power to decide the success or failure of a book, and it could do so now. But the clerisy has been persuaded to abdicate its power by several groups, not themselves malign or consciously unfriendly to literature, which are part of the social and business organization of our time. These groups, though entrenched, are not impregnable; if the clerisy would arouse itself, it could regain its sovereignty in the world of letters. For it is to the clerisy, even yet, that the authors, the publishers, and the booksellers make their principal appeal.

Finding the word you've been needing for a long time without realizing it is a wonderful sensation and one that Word Court often tries and fails to elicit.

The rest of Harris' post is here. Its major weakness is propagating the tendency to divide bloggers and critics, amateurs and professionals, into an "us" versus "them" dynamic, which I continue to find silly. To be fair, Harris might just be reflecting his subject matter.

A recent review in The New Republic of Gail Pool's book, Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America, has helped reopen a hoary skirmish between those who see themselves as The Sacred and Professional Guardians of Literary Standards, and the rest of the unlettered rabble of pretenders who dare to express their views on what they read. James Wolcott is the reviewer and here is a teaser from his review, Critical Condition:

Long before bloggers became synonymous with damp mold and scurrilous invective, book reviewers were cast as the pox carriers and bottom feeders of the word business, tattooed with the rep of being bitter, envious parasites, cunning predators, or charter members of the Dunciad. They tore the iridescent wings off Romantic poets for sport, and crouched in the hills like hyenas waiting for Hemingway to falter. Insidious by nature, they fluff up authors' reputations in order to fatten them up for the sacrificial kill: the young slain for failing to live up to their early promise, their distinguished elders dragged by their whiskers into the lair of the spider-queen, Michiko Kakutani, to be eaten. Even the most scrupulous and fair-minded reviewer is considered suspect, a discount knockoff of a real writer.

It's a lively and enjoyable bit of analysis that has rightly received worldwide Web circulation, as has Pool and reviews of her book, including 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 - let's just say ‘dozens' of blog posts. Meanwhile, Pool's hand-wringing thesis (and this is admittedly a rather flip abridgment based on the Wolcott review) appears to be:

• Given that book reviews are declining in quality
• And given that book sections are decreasing in size
• And given that the internet is a cesspit of craven and shabby reviewing

We should therefore...

• Establish some sort of professional code of conduct that lays out better ways to pick books to be reviewed, reward reviewers, and develop technical competence.

Fair enough. But it's always seemed to me that the heart of this particular scrap is less about the 'How?' of reviewing books, and more about the 'Who?'

Academia has long asserted its robed and mortared authority as Keeper of the Canon, albeit often without consensus and mired in its own protracted internecine convulsions. Literary criticism ain't for the faint of heart. The multi-tiered mainstream media -- from the New York Times to Your Town Times -- also claim proprietorship as upholders of literary standards, but with varying impact and credibility. And of course at the bottom of the totem pole -- well beneath the dirt-line, in fact -- are we bloggers. Wolcott exhumes a passage from a New York Sun item on book bloggers written back in the spring of this year by Adam Kirsch:

In one sense, the democratization of discourse about books is a good thing, and should lead to a widening of our intellectual horizons. The more people there are out there reading, making discoveries, and advocating for their favorite books, the better. But book bloggers have also brought another, less salutary influence to bear on literary culture: a powerful resentment. Often isolated and inexperienced, usually longing to break into print themselves, bloggers -- even the influential bloggers who are courted by publishers -- tend to consider themselves disenfranchised. As a result, they are naturally ready to see ethical violations and conspiracies everywhere in the literary world. As anyone who reads literary blogs can attest, hell hath no fury like a blogger scorned. And the scorn is reciprocated: Professional writers usually assume that those who can, do, while those who can't, blog.

Bloggers, with their suspect motives and outsized chips on their sloped little shoulders, simply can't be trusted. And in some cases that may be true. But might it also be possible -- and not just 99-monkeys-typing possible -- that professional critics may have their own motives for attempting to discredit a class of laypeople that's been stealing some of the limelight to which they were formerly accustomed? I mean, have you heard?! Even mainstream media outlets have institutionalized blogging! Understandably, nervousness about the influence of bloggers is widespread and more than a few professional print reviewers are circling the wagons.

But perhaps an idea like that just makes me a conspiracy theorist.

At the end of the day the whole debate is really a bit silly and assumes the reader has little intelligence and few critical faculties of her own -- both when it comes to reading books, and reading reviews of books. Most of us in the reading trenches have been at this for more than a page or two now and we've honed our intuitions when it comes to books and book reviews.

The late great Robertson Davies, one of Canada's finest exports of the 20^th Century, weighed in on the whole business of writers, readers and reviewers in his 1960 essay, "A Call to the Clerisy," which is in his book, A Voice from the Attic: Essays in the Art of Reading. I think he still says it best and would in fact applaud the efforts of the book-blogging community today.

It is particularly displeasing to hear professional critics using the term ‘layman' to describe people who are amateurs and patrons of those arts with which they are themselves professionally concerned. The fact that the critic gets money for knowing something, and giving public expression to his opinion, does not entitle him to consider the amateur, who may be as well informed and sensitive as himself, an outsider. Admitting that there are triflers hanging to the skirts of the arts[,] it is generally true that we are all, critics and amateurs alike, members of a group which meets on a reasonably equal footing. The critics have their special tastes and firm opinions and are in some cases, more experienced and sensitive than any but the most devoted of amateurs. But they should never assume that it is so; they, of all people should know the humility which art imposes and avoid the harlotry of a cheap professionalism.

Hear, hear.

Davies argues for more influence from what he calls the ‘clerisy,' which sounds suspiciously like the blogosphere:

Who are the clerisy?.... The clerisy are those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime, but not to kill time; who love books, but do not live by books. As lately as a century ago the clerisy had the power to decide the success or failure of a book, and it could do so now. But the clerisy has been persuaded to abdicate its power by several groups, not themselves malign or consciously unfriendly to literature, which are part of the social and business organization of our time. These groups, though entrenched, are not impregnable; if the clerisy would arouse itself, it could regain its sovereignty in the world of letters. For it is to the clerisy, even yet, that the authors, the publishers, and the booksellers make their principal appeal.

Enough about who has the right to say this or write that -- I think I'll go read another book.

Robert Fulford: Books are things to be studied, judged rather than experienced. I think you once said that the heresy of the critic is that he is a judge rather than experiencer of literature.
Davies: Yes. [...] As for my own books, I hope that the readers will have to use their heads and be collaborators, which is a thing I stressed in that earlier book. They should be collaborators in creating the work of art which is the book.

I tend toward judgement, and my chief criterion for greatness is met when a book causes me to spontaneously stop judging and start experiencing. To be fair, I can't fully stop judging, but to the extent that my reading becomes more experience and less judgment I am inclined to like and love the book that induces this sensation. The best of Davies's books—The Deptford Trilogy, The Cornish Trilogy, The Cunning Man—all accomplish this goal. Cryptonomicon and Straight Man and Lord of the Rings achieve the same effect. I wish I could fully explain how and why they do, but part of writing about books is writing about the inexplicable. Criticism is an effort to reveal more of the mystery that can't ever be fully revealed.

To intersperse Elmore Leonard:

[Q:] There's this presumption that a book is somehow a higher form of art, of a higher form of expression, than a movie. Do you agree?
[Leonard:] I don't think the book is a higher form at all. Because most books are not very good. They're a chore to read.

Occasionally a worthwhile book is also a chore, but only very seldom, and usually because I don't understand it at first, as I didn't Romeo and Juliet when reading it as a high school freshman. Recently I described The Bad Girl with language that brings to mind duty. I think Davies felt similar to Leonard regarding bad books, or even books that aren't essential (essential meaning different things to different people, of course, which might make the debate more a semantic than one getting at underlying truth). Elsewhere in Conversations, Davies recommends reading fewer books but reading them with more depth and feeling.

I hope to read with more depth and feeling, and part of the reason I write is to find both. Paul Graham explains the process well:

Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.

Wow! I started the post writing about Robertson Davies, but along the way became more interested in the diversions than the original topic. And that is a good thing: one idea bumps into another, reminding me of something else, and off I go. I hope that is reading with feeling and intellect. The Elegant Variation, in discussing the maladies affecting book reporting, says "Too many reviews are dull, workmanlike book reports." I agree, and think that many books are dull and workmanlike, so perhaps the reviews reflect them. That's why I felt a sense of wonder at Davies' books, as well as Conversations: they are not dull and workmanlike, and I hope my writing isn't. After reading Mark Sarvas's comments, I've tried harder not to write dull, workmanlike book reports. Is it working?

I hope so. Davies wrote many reviews of varying quality, but he was also a man who knew good work when he saw it. Conversations is filled with criticism (in the bad sense) of academic criticism (in the sense of commentary). I've heard James Wood (a TEV favorite) and others I know I've read but can't think to cite at the moment say or write the same. So here's to them, and to Davies, and to reading, and to experience.

A El cinquè en joc la mort acompanya el protagonista al llarg de tota la novel·la (la mort i ressurecció del germà, la mort dels pares, la mort durant la Primera Guerra Mundial, la mort del seu amic); a Las vírgenes suicidas la mort és una protagonista més de la novel·la, una mort, a més, de causes inexplicades, inexplicables, una mort sense sentit; torna a aparèixer la mort a Effi Briest, però aquesta, com en el cas de les altres heroïnes adúlteres del xix, com a càstig; i, sí, a Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, on la mort no deixa d'aparèixer aquí i allà en tota la novel·la.

Segur que si anés revisant lectures anteriors m'adonaria que la mort hi és present sempre, com a cloenda inevitable que és de la vida, però mai fins ara havia tingut aquesta sobtada «revelació».

La primera lectura de l'estiu va ser El cinquè en joc, de Robertson Davies, novel·la de la qual s'ha parlat a bastament en premsa i en blogs¹ des que va rebre el premi Llibreter. La primera de l'estiu de manera involuntària: no l'havia reservada per a l'estiu, però vaig començar a llegir-la just en començar l'estiu —que no les vacances.

Afegiré la meva veu al cor de lloances de la novel·la i faré allò tan agosarat de recomanar-ne la lectura, però sense parlar-ne gaire: fa massa dies que la vaig llegir i la impressió inicial i tot el que llavors en podria haver dit s'ha esvaït. La novel·la és, m'ha semblat, un gran retret: el retret d'un vell professor d'història, en Dunstan Ramsay, contra les persones que el tenen per una persona avorrida que mai ha fet res en la seva vida. I comença amb un record, el record del Dunstan de deu anys sobre un fet que el marcaria per tota la vida —i que el portaria a creure que té una influència en el destí de les persones. Al llarg de la novel·la, Dunstan Ramsay explica la seva vida fins al moment de la seva jubilació, una vida marcada per una sèrie de fets tràgics i pel record d'una veïna seva, la senyora Dempster; la relació amb el seu amic Percy Boyd Staunton i les seves ànsies de poder, i la particular recerca de Ramsay en l'àmbit del santoral catòlic.

Però si ara, quan ha passat temps des que la vaig llegir, retorno a la novel·la és perquè en Dunstan Ramsay, el protagonista, explica que, de petit, havia treballat en una biblioteca; biblioteca en què va poder dedicar-se a llegir sobre els temes que més l'interessaven: l'estudi de la màgia, per exemple. Davies dedica força línies a descriure la biblioteca i les lectures del petit Ramsay —i per això la citació és un pèl llarga—, però tot té la seva explicació i la seva importància en el desenllaç de la novel·la.

[...] Havien suggerit que la biblioteca del poble obrís unes quantes tardes a la setmana perquè els estudiants més responsables poguessin fer-ne ús, però algú havia de substituir la bibliotecària, que durant el dia estava molt ocupada amb la seva feina de professora i que no estava precisament entusiasmada amb la idea de perdre gran part del seu temps lliure. Em van designar a mi i, tot i que no cobrava res per la feina, l'honor que me l'haguessin concedit era prou recompensa.Era una feina que m'anava admirablement bé. Tres tardes per setmana obria la biblioteca d'una sola sala, que era al primer pis de l'ajuntament, i atenia els estudiants que venien. Una vegada vaig experimentar el vertiginós plaer de trobar a l'enciclopèdia una dada d'utilitat per a la Leola Cruikshank, que havia de redactar un treball sobre l'Equador i no sabia si era a dalt o si era cap al mig. La majoria de les tardes no entrava ningú, o els que ho feien se n'anaven de seguida que trobaven el que havien vingut a buscar, i tenia la biblioteca tota per a mi.

No era pas una gran col·lecció; potser hi havia mil cinc-cents llibres en total, i una desena part devien ser textos per a nens. El pressupost anual era de vint-i-cinc dòlars, però gairebé tot es gastava en les subscripcions a revista que el jutge, que també era president de la junta, volia llegir. Les adquisicions, per tant, solien ser donacions procedents d'herències, i el nostre subhastador local ens donava tot el que no aconseguia vendre. Nosaltres ens quedàvem el que volíem i enviàvem la resta a la missió Grenfell, aplicant el principi que els salvatges estaven disposats a llegir qualsevol cosa.

La conseqüència de tot plegat era que teníem algunes obres ben estranyes, i les més estranyes de totes eren en un armari de la sala principal que teníem tancat. Hi havia un llibre de medicina amb un gravat terrorífic d'un úter desplaçat i un altre d'una varicocele, i el retrat d'un home amb uns cabells i uns bigotis esplèndids, però sense nas, que em va convertir en fervent enemic de la sífilis. Els meus tresors especials eren The Secrets of Stage Conjuring, de Robert-Houdin, i Modern MagicLater Magic, del professor Hoffmann; els havien arraconat per poc interessants —poc interessants!—, i tan bon punt els vaig veure vaig saber que el destí els volia per a mi. Estudiant-los podria arribar a ser prestidigitador, sorprendre a tothom, guanyar-me l'ansiosa admiració de la Leola Cruikshank i convertir-me en un noi de gran poder. Immediatament vaig amagar els llibres en un lloc on no poguessin caure en mans de persones indignes, inclosa la nostra bibliotecària, i em vaig consagrar a l'estudi de la màgia.²

Algunes coses no han canviat gaire, de fet: els pressupostos de la majoria de les biblioteques no arriben a les quantitats considerades mínimes pels estàndards bibliotecaris; la despesa en subscripcions a revistes és de lluny més alta que la despesa en llibres —i els editors, distribuïdors i proveïdors de revistes hi tenen molt a veure—; moltes vegades la gent dóna a les biblioteques els llibres que no ha pogut encolomar a algú altre —moltes vegades sense ni pensar que les biblioteques ni poden ni han d'acceptar tot el que se'ls dóna—; a les biblioteques universitàries és habitual que els usuaris amaguin els llibres que necessiten per estudiar —tota una demostració de solidaritat envers la resta d'estudiants—; els bibliotecaris continuem tenint la mateixa mala fama, i, per sort, hi ha una cosa que tampoc no ha canviat: continuem essent necessaris per trobar informació útil als usuaris de les biblioteques.

1. Sense cap voluntat de ser exhaustiu, que jo recordi n'han parlat a Llibròfags («La lliçó del professor Davies») i, en un context diferent, El Llibreter («El Premi Llibreter»).

2. Robertson Davies. El cinquè en joc. Tr. Carles Miró. Barcelona: Libros del Asteroide, 2007. xiv, 365 p. ISBN-13 978-84-935448-0-5, p. 41-43.

Technorati tags: lectures – El cinquè en joc ― Robertson Davies

—Robertson Davies

R.

Those parts are fabulous: finishing the trilogy leaves one with a sense of completeness, like finishing an excellent meal but not gorging. The books are realistic and yet steeped in the mythological. If this sounds like a difficult to feat, that’s because it is. And yet the blending of myth and commentary on myth into life is so smooth that the mythic overlay is never ostentatious. It is made explicit at times, but not in a way that seems like a lecture or, worse yet, a dissertation.

The books—though I do think of them as a single book than as parts—explain thought without being didactic, and their powerful story—they do tell a single story—allows the many quotable sections to flow without damming the work.

The skeptical but not cynical Dunstan Ramsay narrates and is the subject of, Fifth Business, but only narrates the third, World of Wonders. He is, among many other things, a teacher of the sort it would have been marvelous to have; Ramsay is never fanatical about anything but inquisitiveness, is serious and yet self-effacing, and possesses the quiet and stern humor mastered by the British, but perhaps also understood by their Canadian cousins. He felt a little like a provincial Gandalf stripped of overt manifestations of power but still possessing his wisdom—only Ramsay's is infused with irony.

Ramsay takes himself seriously enough not to be a fool but laughs at himself enough to know his own limitations. That’s probably the sanest way to go through life without being as utterly ridiculous as so many of us are.

The irony keeps him from being a joiner or true believer. It is impossible to assign Ramsay a conventional political point of view, for what he knows best is human nature, and political views are most often adapted to whatever is most convenient for their holders. The holders, meanwhile, are often unable to perceive themselves, and instead leave to the marginal characters of a society to speak, if not the truth, something close to it:

... like so many idealists, [radical party members] did not understand money, and after a meeting where they had lambasted Boy and others like him and threatened to confiscate their wealth at the first opportunity, they would adjourn to cheap restaurants, where they drank his sugar, and ate his sugar, and smoked cigarettes which, had they known it, benefited some other monster they sought to destroy.

This reminds me of someone I knew who would type his anti-corporate screeds on a Dell computer and defend his choice of a Volvo station wagon as being "less commercial." He did not perceive the webs that made him, like all of us, complicit in the schemes we disagree with. I do not approve of China’s record on human rights, yet I write this on a computer manufactured there, and I no doubt own clothes made there. China has benefited me—but I do understand the webs that the radical party members do not, and Ramsay, though he doesn’t say as much, probably does.

As such, Ramsay is not easy to co-opt. Ursula K. Le Guin, in receiving a recent Washington State Book Award , said: “most governments dislike [literature], justly suspecting that all their power and glory will soon be forgotten unless some wretched, powerless liberal in the basement is writing it down.” Governments dislike literature and idealists dislike money: Ramsay could believe both things and avoid being a fool by being observant.

That is his chief value as a speaker: the power of observation combined with self-reflection. David Staunton, fierce lawyer and uncertain man, narrates The Manticore, is also observant, but lacks Ramsay's inner ballast. Still, his therapy sessions illuminate much beyond his inner self, or even the lives of the principal characters from Deptford. As Dr. von Haller says: “The patterns of human feeling do not change as much as many people suppose.”

So they don’t: we read The Odyssey and see the pattern it set—or noticed—in many lives, whether our own odyssey is conquering nanotech or just getting to work in the morning. We see it today as we did then, just as our own history is seldom so exceptional as we might wish it. Much of Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence, which synthesizes his lifetime of studying Western culture, focuses on history’s repetition (or rhyming). The similarity of so much of human existence is more astonishing than the differences.

For one thing, the capacity for self-deception seems eternal. As David's therapist observes in The Manticore:

DR. VON HALLER: Yes, I think that would be best. You have got into your swing, and done all the proper lawyer-like things. So now let us get on."

MYSELF: What do you mean, exactly, by "the proper lawyer-like things"?

DR. VON HALLER: Expressed the highest regard for the person you are going to destroy. Declaring that you have no real feeling in the matter and are quite objective. Suggesting that something is cool and dry which by its nature is hot and steamy. Very good. Continue, please.

In other words, the way one wants to appear and present oneself is perpendicular to the way one is, and we accept the deception as a way of continuing to function despite contradiction. It’s much like accepting mythic narrative: the specifics of any life or story will not completely conform to the arc, but the arc remains nonetheless. Dr. von Haller specifically talks about lawyers, but she could just as easily discuss a myriad of professions, occupations, or people.

It has to be him. He’s old, but with his reported vegan diet, the flesh, I imagine, will be tender and sweet, and untarnished by the shit most of us eat most of the time. Tender but firm with it cycling muscles. ‘No, a crispy bit of tarragon-flavoured Coetzee would be good,’ I muse. And a red that has some depth, but is not too metaphysical; a deep but reticent, reluctant red.

One friend rolls his eyes at my predictability. Of course I would say Coetzee. My friend is a Paul Auster fan, see, but I cannot imagine that he would want to eat Paul Auster. Certainly, he would find gustatory joy in authors (he would even perhaps stray from the literary and tuck into some roast Nigel Mansell – with crackling), but I doubt Auster would be his eat of choice. I can’t imagine eating Paul Auster at the kind of gastronomic dinner I imagine with roasted Coetzee and tarragon.

Look, this is about eating, not reading, so I can imagine in a more casual moment having pastrami of Auster (that would be hot brisket of Auster, shredded), on rye, with the whole gamut of New York fixings and a sharp mustard. And, to make it better, an ice cold Coke (it has its uses).

The thing is, whenever a bunch of better educated readers (literary types) in Cape Town get together, they talk about food and wine and books and then Coetzee. Every literary conversation or conversation about literature held in Cape Town, I swear, has to include Coetzee – Why Adelaide? Is the cycling there better? How’s about that Eugene Dawn huh?

Okay, how do I make this a decently accurate sociological claim? It may not be that every literary conversation ends up with talk about Coetzee, but then they would not be literary conversations proper. In my book at least. The point is, in almost every literary conversation of which I have been part during the last ten years or so (a fair amount), with a diverse range of literary types, the talk always included or ended up with Coetzee.

Then a friend and I developed this theory: in a Cape Town literary conversation, from the most basic to the most sophisticated, most urbane, most wide-ranging ones, Coetzee will be a topic sooner or later. But we ourselves talked about him a lot, so it could be that the theory simply described our obsession and could not be a universal theory of literary conversation in Cape Town. By the mid-1990s, that kind of all-encompassing grand theory would in any case have been viewed with much scepticism and ridicule in (to post-structuralists) finally deconstructing Cape Town (my city is late in such stuff, but hey, note that I wasn’t welcoming these developments).

Furthermore, in these other conversations, of which we may have been part, and on which we based our theory, could it be that we were the ones to introduce Coetzee and thereby have always already tainted data? No. Other people were well capable of doing this without any prompting from Coetzee fans. Even people who hated him talked about him (You’ll know that ‘him’ or ‘Coetzee’ stand metonymically for his books, unless we are talking about eating him. Then we mean the mortal body and possibly the person).

So I thought I’d combine him absolutely. Make food out of him.

Some people hate him; I disliked Disgrace because it was so tight, I swear if one took one definite article out of it, the whole grand edifice would collapse. (I haven't read Slow Man yet, which makes me think of a slow-cooked man). So, some people hate him but it was something special to have him wander Cape Town; to see him come out of the Checkers with his small Checkers bag, in his neat trousers, sensible shirt and short, small leather jacket. You just knew that some masterpiece was going to be forming later as he washed and grated his carrots. Maybe he had some chillies in there.

I think he likes chillies. In ‘Meat Country’ he rhapsodizes about chillies and rice, a craving he has while cycling out in the Texan sun. Not, strangely, watermelon, cucumber, the watery vegetables, he says, but fiery chillies.

If I wasn’t going to eat him, I think maybe I’d cook him some rice and chillies, a great platter of it with roasted flakes of almond, and raisins, onion, pine nuts, cilantro, saffron. And the chillies: long fresh green ones, red ones, some sweet red and yellow pepper. More vegetable maybe. Thin slices of celery. Jullienne of carrot. Caramelised rosa tomato. To drink: clear, crisp water. It’s actually some years now that I have thought of that dish, ever since reading ‘Meat Country’.

And I think, but hey, what about stuffing him with all this stuff then roasting him. But then I wouldn’t use tarragon. I couldn’t, could I? With all that other spicy stuff, the tarragon would die.

I repeat this joke - cannibal, who to eat? - in a class for third years. By God, by now they should have a sense of irony. We had been talking about the Spanish and Portuguese in the New World, stories about native cannibalism. Then, striking a ruminative pose, I said: Mmm, who in the English Department would you eat if you were a cannibal? (Come on, this is a course in postcolonialism; you must be able to imagine native life, certainly.) What herb?

Silence. Then I say: No, I would go for Coetzee and tarragon. Some of them - the clever ones - laugh and shake their heads; some don’t know a fuck who he is; and some are mortified and shift uncomfortably in their chairs and splutter and say ‘Eugh!’ When they shake their heads, it’s not knowingly - here’s a weird lecturer pushing the envelope in comedy - it is clear they find it offensive.

I, of course, backpedal. Laughing, I insist: ‘Look, I’m not a cannibal. That’s what’s called a joke.’ I shake my head: ‘It’s a strange joke, that’s all.’ Back to the Spanish and Portuguese in the New World and metonyms and the disjecta membra and coercion and so on and so forth.

Some of you may think I am really strange, weird, ‘sicko’. But I am quite normal. I just sometimes still wonder what Coetzee would taste like, slow roasted, with tarragon.

And some of you may think I dislike the man. Why eat him? But I am actually a fan. A johnny-come-lately to his fandom, certainly, but a fan (except Disgrace, of course. And I think it's okay to disclose my adulation, now that he’s no longer here, in Cape Town, with his Checkers bag full of chillies). As a fan, I style some of my prose after his (except this piece of writing you are reading now, of course), or I invent a character 200 years old who says something and then footnote Coetzee and say how remarkable it is that, 200 years later, the novelist Coetzee will say something similar. But that was when I was trying to eat Borges.

Now Borges, that’s a culinary challenge. Old and stringy, but with an otherworldy (new world?) promise. Strong herbs and flavours are called for, but rosemary would be too predictable. Perhaps a few hours’ soaking in soya and honey, then roasted and served with gremolata. The lemon zest of the gremolata perfect with the honey. Yes. And since in his blindness Borges reminds me of fish, then perhaps a Sauvignon Blanc. But that, with the gremolata, might be too grassy. Anyway, that’s all up to the eater, rather than the eaten. Red or white, it’s up to you. But maybe the soya and honey is the wrong way to go. What about jugged Borges? I think we could still have the gremolata.

I can’t eat any author who did not make it into the twentieth century. That just seems wrong and carries with it all sorts of distasteful digging in the dark. Like Shakespeare. To stay in form, one would have to root around for recipes of the time, and who has time for that? But, in any case, I just have a sense of the dank and musty when I think of eating pre-twentieth century authors; like politicians, like crayfish, all who feed and scavenge in murky depths. No, no politicians and long dead authors.

But so reader, forgive me, I am working up an appetite. Who else would you eat? Carpaccio of pickled Kafka for starters or use him to make suasages for a gigantic charcoute, which will, naturally, include big chunks of smoky Southern Faulkner. Some purists may object to this, but once they taste the fusion of Southern barbecue with superior European sausage, they will finish the dish.

Robertson Davies... too old and hairy. Consenting adults may indulge in tidbits of powdery soft William Burroughs, but beware the after-effects.

Women authors, some might ask, where are the women authors? I hesitate here, troubled that the absence of women from my menu may mean that I am less fearless than initial impressions suggested; that, in the face of all manner of strange psychoanalytic innuendo, I steer clear of eating, say, Toni Morrison (shavings of her over a Vermouth risotto), Margaret Attwood (definitely soya and honey and sesame seeds, baked or grilled) or Jeannette Winterson (kebabs of her with pineapple, apricot, onion and so on and so forth. To drink, rum and coke). I mean, eating male authors may be a weird joke, some form of strange satire (not that there may not be read into it all sorts of strange psychoanalytic innuendo either), but eating women may have all sorts of problematic political implications, most dangerously dismemberment by me, a male author. And dietary laws can be complicated; interesting, but complicated, just see Coetzee’s ‘Meat Country’.

Which brings us back to our topic of conversation, as it does, as I have said. So, yes, I am a fan of Coetzee, and if I am not starting or having a conversation about him - Yes, but Coetzee did that already in Michael K and he did this in Age of Iron but his best novel must be Master of Petersburg and he would be good with tarragon - if I am not talking about him, I am not talking about him.

Who else might be good with tarragon? Rushdie? No. But Rushdie, tarragoned up and wrapped in bacon, then grilled. Vladislavic? Definitely. Consomme of Vladislavic with a hint of tarragon. Mellville? I can make exceptions vis-a-vis period, so... Melville, tarragon and then coated in a bland German mustard, baked for several hours at very low temperature, say 100 degrees Celsius. (I wonder what whale meat tastes like.)

As you can see, things get out of hand quickly with this eating business. Now I am thinking of whale meat, gobs of fat, blue-red flesh. The size of those muscles. Imagine, whale fillet with thyme, seared. But this, certainly, will get me into trouble.