Review: Cosmicomics

Cosmicomics
Italo Calvino
transl. William Weaver

“All these eyes were mine. I had made them possible; I had had the active part; I furnished them the raw material, the image. With eyes had come all the rest, so everything that the others, having eyes, had become, their every form and function, and the quantity of things that, thanks to eyes, they had managed to do, in their every form and function, came from what I had done. Of course, they were not just casually implicit in my being there, in my having relations with others, male and female, et cetera, in my setting out to make a shell, et cetera. In other words, I had foreseen absolutely everything.
And at the bottom of each of those eyes I lived, or rather another me lived, one of the images of me, and it encountered the image of her, the most faithful image of her, in that beyond which opens, past the semiliquid sphere of the irises, in the darkness of the pupils, the mirrored hall of the retinas, in our true element which extends without shores, without boundaries.” (153)


As one of my professors said, reading Calvino is a lot like drinking heavy cream: good and rich for some, too rich for others. I’m personally in a love-hate relationship with him, begun when I agonized over my first reading of if on a winter’s night a traveler only to be enlightened and amazed at the ending, at which point I re-read the novel on the spot. He’s a brilliant writer, though I can easily see how his style can be off-putting to some, and his imagination is boundless. I’m jealous of the ease with which he expresses his ideas. It takes me hours to wade through his prose, but for me at least, the reward is well worth the battle.

Cosmicomics, like much of Calvino’s writing, defies summary, but you can say it’s about the creation of a universe. The novel consists of short chapters that can stand as individual stories concerning the beginning of a nonspecific universe, playing with ideas of continuous creation, the expansion and contraction of matter, form and function, physiological evolution, etc. Each chapter begins with short excerpts from something like an astronomy textbook describing scientific phenomena like the Big Bang theory, steady states, redshift and the Doppler effect. The characters are named like unpronounceable mathematical formulas, the major narrator being Qfwfq and some minor characters being G’d(w)^n, Mrs. Vhd Vhd, Ayl, Lll, etc. The real power of the novel lies in these characters and their ability to imbue “dry scientific” ideas with a certain humanity.

Qfwfq tells stories that offer insights on theories, both correct and disproved, about the formation of the universe and the evolution of man, but he also sheds light on the human condition with his flaws and mistakes and his overwhelming love for life. He tells stories of life as a mollusk (i.e., the passage quoted above), life as a being evolved from fish into a more terrestrial creature, life as the last living Dinosaur after the dinosaurs have become extinct, and so on. Calvino’s characters play with atoms like marbles, create galaxies and race them through the universe, make bets on the outcome of events billions of years before they happen, fall into voids with no bottom, and are watched by the universe as they live their lives. Their reactions are what make the characters seem so human. When one of the characters sees a sign hanging on a distant galaxy saying “I SAW YOU,” he agonizes over a multitude of responses like “DID YOU REALLY SEE EVERYTHING OR JUST A LITTLE BIT?” or “LET’S SEE IF YOU’RE TELLING THE TRUTH: WHAT WAS I DOING?” or “WHAT OF IT?” He then struggles to show his best face all the time to the other galaxies that have apparently been watching him in a comic but very true and all-too-human display of concern for his appearance.

For me, the most interesting parts of the novel weren’t the characters that were pared down to interesting essentials. I was intrigued by the basic concepts that seemed to fuel each story—ideas about the act of creation and the response to change, if and how one goes on living when one is the last of one’s race and the existing races prove petty and low, and so on. The stories are almost archetypal, culminating in the final story with the passage quoted above, every man as a creator capable of (retrospectively) foreseeing events and justifying his act of creation, aligning form with function.

There really isn’t much more I can say about Cosmicomics. Like Calvino’s if on a winter’s night a traveler and Invisible Cities, this novel reveals its power through its ideas and its dense but gorgeous prose. Like heavy cream, yes—intense, at times mind-bogglingly difficult to read, but worth every word. Calvino’s a master, and his creativity is astounding. Another strong recommendation—along with Invisible Cities and if on a winter’s night a traveler—and I’ll be reading The Castle of Crossed Destinies soon, so expect a review of that (though I have to get through Borges’s Labyrinths first). Calvino and heavy cream are awesome. :-)

Damn, I'd forgotten how late I was posting this--merry Christmas, people! Hope you get everything you wanted! Me, I'm just wishing for some rest, the ability to relax, and a little peace of mind :-)

Review: A High Wind in Jamaica

A High Wind in Jamaica
Richard Hughes

"Grown-ups embark on a life of deception with considerable misgiving, and generally fail. But not so children. A child can hide the most appalling secret without the least effort, and is practically secure against detection. Parents, finding that they see through their child in so many places the child does not know of, seldom realize that, if there is some point the child really gives his mind to hiding, their chances are nil" (140).


I doubted it at first, but now I'm a believer: Golding's Lord of the Flies pales in comparison to Hughes's novel.

A High Wind in Jamaica, Hughes's first novel, basically tells the story of a group of young children, ages ranging from 4 to 13 (the focus being mainly on a 10 year old girl named Emily), who are captured by pirates en route from Jamaica to England. And as in Lord of the Flies the children--in order of increasing age: Laura, Rachel, Harry, Edward, Emily, John, Margaret--turn out to be more capable of remorseless violence and cruelty, more so than the pirates, who are actually portrayed as somewhat compassionate and kind.

Hughes's exploration of children's capacity for cruelty is striking in his illustration of the children's actions and thoughts. Hughes has an uncanny knack for understanding the often random, dissociated thought processes of small children, their associative leaps and the conversations that often contain most of their meaning in between the lines. The children's actions and thoughts are shown like this, with no explanation, which both complicates and facilitates Hughes's storytelling approach--it's sometimes hard to sympathize with the children since, as adults, we are unable to understand everything they say and do and think, but at the same time the believability of the children as young, innocent, but often completely indifferently cruel characters helps us get into the narrative. This is exemplified by Laura's actions when her brother Edward is being threatened by a pirate wielding an iron rod and when the pirate captain is beating her sister Rachel:

"When [Laura] tripped and fell, she roared till her bumps ceased hurting. Then, with no perceptible transition, her convulsions of agony became an attempt to stand on her head. This she kept up throughout Edward's flight up the stay, throughout the electric appearance of Rachel. During the latter's punishment, having happened to topple in the direction of the mainmast, and finding her feet against the rack round its base for belaying the halyards to, [Laura] gave a tremendous shove off--she would roll instead. And roll she did, till she arrived at the captain's feet. There she lay all the while he was smacking Rachel, completely unconcerned, on her back, her knees drawn up to her chin, humming a little tune" (198).

Worse incidents swiftly happen and just as swiftly pass out of the children's memory, among them quite a few significant deaths. I won't spoil the moments because, though Hughes doesn't rely on surprise, these moments are so elegantly crafted that they are surprising--like the children, the reader forgets, and rediscovers them towards the end when the grownups are attempting to make sense of things.

FYI, A High Wind in Jamaica isn't nearly as grotesque as much of the imagery in Lord of the Flies, so for those of you who don't like Golding's novel because of its overt violence and described gore, no worries. Hughes details maybe one or two violent images but leaves most of the incidents to the imagination of the children-characters and to the imagination of the reader. The ending is completely mundane and formal, and utterly horrific. Great book on the innocent depravity of children in certain circumstances. I highly recommend.

Hughes is a great author on the human condition, too. I also highly recommend The Fox in the Attic, a historical fiction novel set around World War II. It's the first novel I've read that involves Hitler as a character and doesn't turn him into a psychopathic caricature, but delineates his evil in a much more human and compellingly terrifying way. Hughes is a master of characters, and his WWII books are more evidence of it. I plan to pick up the sequel and its unfinished third part, The Wooden Shepherdess, while I'm at home so I can polish off the body of his work. He didn't write much, unfortunately; he was a very slow, methodical, and thorough writer. It's a pity he died before he finished the WWII trilogy. But the books he did write testify to his amazing ability to characterize people and shed insight on the human condition.

Review: Cronopios and Famas

Cronopios and Famas

Julio Cortazar
transl. Paul Blackburn

"INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO WIND A WATCH

"Death stands there in the background, but don't be afraid. Hold the watch down with one hand, take the stem in two fingers, and rotate it smoothly. Now another installment of time opens, trees spread their leaves, boats run races, like a fan time continues filling with itself, and from that burgeon the air, the breezes of earth, the shadow of a woman, the sweet smell of bread.

"What did you expect, what more do you want? Quickly strap it to your wrist, let it tick away in freedom, imitate it greedily. Fear will rust all the rubies, everything that could happen to it and was forgotten is about to corrode the watch's veins, cankering the cold blood and its tiny rubies. And death is there in the background, we must run to arrive beforehand and understand it's already unimportant." (25)

...I don't like prose poetry.

I read Charles Simic's World Doesn't End. I read Baudelaire's Paris Spleen. Pretty lines, interesting ideas, nothing that grabbed me and refused to let go. Julio Cortazar, however, has made of me a complete convert. His poems are witty, insightful, cleverly crafted, and brilliantly haunting. The poem I excerpted for you above hasn't left me, and I finished the book maybe half a week ago. I find Cortazar's prose poetry simply amazing.

The thing I found most interesting about Cortazar is that his language (judging by the translation, anyway) is very plain and down to earth, and as such gains the reader's trust. At times, Cortazar spends paragraphs detailing something as foolish-sounding as putting a single strand of hair down the sink, then immediately trying to find the hair by taking the sink apart--however, the reader's trust in him is such that she keeps reading, expecting his explanation or illumination of the exercise, which inevitably comes: if you should find the hair trapped in the drain before having to take apart the U-pipe etc., "think of the happiness this would give us, just the sheer astonishing realization of the efforts saved by sheer chance" (41).

In addition to the trust he compels, his descriptions of mundane activities are overwhelmingly beautiful without being overwrought (a fine line to play sometimes, you writers know what I mean). The first section of the collection, "The Instruction Manual," begins with a description of the daily morning routine, including lines like: "Go ahead, deny up and down that the delicate act of turning the doorknob, that act which may transform everything, is done with the indifferent vigor of a daily reflex. See you later, sweetheart. Have a good day" (3) and "Tighten your fingers around a teaspoon, feel its metal pulse, its mistrustful warning. How it hurts to refuse a spoon, to say no to a door, to deny everything that habit has licked to a suitable smoothness. How much simpler to accept the easy request of the spoon, to use it, to stir the coffee" (4).

Cronopios and Famas is very Borgesian in tone and style, whimsical but immersed in serious observation, suffused with humor. Cortazar breathes life into the "strange animal" that, in Charles Simic's words, is prose poetry. I highly recommend this book to anyone, fictionistas, poets, readers, whatever.

Review: The Master and Margarita

So I was thinking, I'm really getting too much reading done this term to not be reviewing what I'm reading so's y'all can decide whether or not you wanna dip your toes into the literary pool and sample some of the stuff on my academic and personal reading list. There's a lot of books I've read this semester that I've read and should share thoughts on (Jesus' Son, Invisible Cities, etc.) but since I just finished The Master and Margarita two days ago I figured I'd start with that.

The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
transl. Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor

"...and so who are you, after all?"
"--I am part of the power
which forever wills evil
and forever works good."
--Goethe's Faust

Like many of the great Soviet writers whose work I've been reading lately (e.g., Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam; Anna Akhmatova; Nikolai Erdman), Mikhail Bulgakov was also writing under the Stalinist regime in the 1930s. A crucial difference here is that Stalin liked one of Bulgakov's works, which may be a reason why the author wasn't arrested or forced into exile for writing novels likeThe Master and Margarita or Heart of a Dog, neither of which was published during his lifetime.

Master and Margarita was published 26 years after Bulgakov's death (Heart of a Dog wasn't published until 60 years after his death), and even then it appeared only in censored form. On a very simplistic level, the novel is purely entertaining: the story basically chronicles the series of events that occur when Satan and four members of his retinue appear in Moscow and begin haphazardly wreaking havoc. Bulgakov's humor is incredible; it's difficult to believe that he himself suffered under the constrictions of 1930s Russia but is able to easily poke fun at it and at himself. Satan, who in the novel is a tall swarthy gentleman by the name of Woland, has come to Moscow to throw a Spring Ball and has come with his servants: a wall-eyed redhead with a fang named Azazello; a garrulous jovial man in a cracked pince-nez and checks who goes as Korovyov or Fagot; Hella, a beautiful naked witch with a scar on her neck; and Behemoth, a large, talking, irrepressible black cat with a penchant for showing off and playing the clown. In addition to these characters, several minor characters pop in and out of the novel as they are killed, pranked by Woland and his crew, brought back to life, transported as far Yalta in nothing but their underwear, etc. Interestingly enough, the Master and Margarita do not appear until the latter half of the novel. Theirs is more a romance and a story paralleling that of Yeshua and Pontius Pilate than a comedy. Not that this is a bad thing; The Master and Margarita is absolutely wonderful from start to finish.

Most of the influence of the book comes from Bulgakov's own interest in religion and his passion for the opera, particularly Goethe's Faust, which he saw over 40 times. The name "Woland" is derived from the opera, and music and singing are common themes in the book. Margarita is a lot like Gretchen in Faust though certainly not as innocent and perhaps willing to take many more risks. The Master is more of an enigma, somewhat two-dimensional to Margarita's dynamism and robustness, but taken in context of the Pontius Pilate chapters he is certainly intriguing. I was particularly taken by Ivan Nikolayevich, a writer who gradually shifts from a silly author of bad poems to the traditional Russian folktale character Ivanushka. His slightly schizophrenic musings on his run-in with Woland and the incidents that have been occurring all over Moscow are not only hilarious but insightful into the novel and 1930s Russia. Bulgakov's first-person narrator is also refreshingly entertaining, wise in retrospect but forgiving (of most) of the characters in the novel, none of whom are even close to perfect.

I found it interesting that the narrative is peppered with glaringly obvious references to the condition of life in Stalin's Soviet Union. (No wonder the book didn't get published in Bulgakov's lifetime.) For one, the devil's successful arrival in Moscow seems founded on the fact that Communism has done away with religious belief; the Muscovites, who do not believe in God or Satan, have become for the most part corrupt and despicable and often deserving of the punishments and practical jokes that Satan metes out to them. There are two characters, both writers, Ivan Nikolayevich "Bezdomny" and the man who is simply called The Master, who write religious material and are criticized or publicly condemned for it. Even the slightest characters are wonderfully fleshed out, so much so that I found myself simultaneously sympathizing with Woland and his gang (particularly Behemoth--come on, how can you not love a Satanic jokester of a black cat?) as well as their confused victims.

"Well, as everyone knows, once withcraft gets started, there's no stopping it" (63). After Woland appears, superstition and deviltry take an active role, as does religion/religious philosophy. The Master, who in the novel is in a mental asylum, wrote a novel about Pontius Pilate that addresses the eternal conflict between black-and-white optimism in the form of Yeshua and pessimism in the form of the Roman procurator. Religion and themes of power recur in declarations like "[...] every kind of power is a form of violence against people and that there will come a time when neither the power of the Caesars, nor any other kind of power will exist. Man will enter the kingdom of truth and justice, where no such power will be necessary" (22). This sort of belief that tyranny will be deposed keeps popping up and becomes a specific theme among the writer-characters who are oppressed by Communist rule and the secret police. The issue of religion and religious belief, especially with regards to Kant, Manichean philosophy, and a little Zoroastrianism, pervades the novel and is done remarkably well. Bulgakov never once drills religion into the reader but makes a fine case for the existence of God and the Devil through his characters alone. Woland makes some fine speeches about religion, and he and Yeshua seem to have some kind of working relationship.

For the record, this is not a book about the supremacy of good over evil, or vice-versa. Woland is powerful, but Yeshua is at work as well and intercedes on behalf of Pilate and the Master and Margarita. Rather, I think the humanity with which Bulgakov endows the demons is amazing--I found myself slowly falling in love with Azazello, who is repeatedly described as having some deformity or other, a blind eye or a limp or a fang or all three at once. Once Margarita begins admiring his marksmanship with a rifle, and once he is seen interacting with his "friends" (co-workers at the very least), he becomes so sympathetic his flaws are forgotten. Of course, he turns out to be the demon of death and the waterless desert, Azazel, with a white white face and empty black eyes and a perfect body, but what can you do. Korovyov and Behemoth make a perfect team and paint the town red with their destructive antics.

The most interesting thing I pulled from The Master and Margarita is the notion that the greatest sin is leaving a job half-finished. This idea shows up in the characters of Pontius Pilate, who allows Yeshua to be killed without finishing a crucial conversation with him, and in the Master, who never finishes his criticized novel about Pilate and instead ends up in a mental asylum. Once he finishes the novel, both he and Pilate are to some extent free, though many other factors play into that. I just thought it was an interesting take on things.

Because of the everchanging background cast of characters, and the skill with which Bulgakov makes each one seem significant, it's difficult to summarize the story as a complete narrative. So I won't say any more, because if I get too far into the plot I'll spoil one or more of the things that happen to many of the characters. Buy it and read for yourself! The Master and Margarita plays with notions of religion, gives compelling characters, contains enough humor to keep me awake and laughing at 5:00 a.m. after 24+ hours without sleep, and has a touching love affair in it to boot. I think I've been largely incoherent in this so-called review, but I'd highly recommend this book to just about anyone. It's definitely a page-turner.

"...And the centuries surround me with fire."

Since this body
was forgotten
by the one who promised to come,
my only thought is wondering
whether it even exists.

--Ono no Komachi, Ink-Dark Moon, Hirshfield transl.


The dead man steps down from the scaffold. He holds his bloody head under his arm.
The apple trees are in flower. He's making his way to the village tavern with everybody watching. There, he takes a seat at one of the tables and orders two beers, one for him and one for his head. My mother wipes her hands on her apron and serves him.
It's so quiet in the world. One can hear the old river, which in its confusion sometimes forgets and flows backwards.

--Charles Simic, The World Doesn't End


Dreams used to come in the brutal nights,
Dreams crowding and violent
Dreamt with body and soul,
Of going home, of eating, of teling our story.
Until, quickly and quietly, came
The dawn reveille:
Wstawach.
And the heart cracked in the breast.

Now we have found our home again,
Our hunger is quenched,
All the stories have been told.
It is time. Soon we shall hear again
The alien command:
Wstawach.

--Primo Levi, The Reawakening, Woolf transl.


A hand moves, and the fire's whirling takes different shapes,
triangles, squares: all things change when we do.
The first word, Ah, blossomed into all others.
Each of them is true.

--Kukai, Ink Dark Moon, Hirshfield transl.


Clutching in my fist a worn year of birth,
Herded with the herd, I whisper
With my bloodless lips: I was born
On the night between the second and third of January
In the unreliable year of eighteen ninety something or other
And the centuries surround me with their fire.

--Osip Mandelstam, excerpted Hope Against Hope, Hayward transl.