Go Ahead and Laugh.

Carmen Sandiego is hottttt.

It's 3:30 a.m. right now, my weekend has been so mentally exhausting I crashed in my 20-person seminar at 6:00 p.m. and then again at 8:00, woke up at midnight, about to go back to bed... workshop submission still not done, but I'm a little woozy and unbalanced from weird caffeine intake (or lack thereof) today. I'm so brain-dead and tired I think I'm allowed to have some weird musings.

So I was fucking around online searching for a red trench coat and fedora--no, this is not an unusual thing for me--and got to thinking: 80s cartoon shows and video game media had some strikingly strong female characters grounded in intelligence and physical/moral strength. Seems like it should be the other way around, considering nowadays a lot of cartoon-character or video game women (granted, with exceptions) seem very physically stereotyped or play weaker/secondary roles to the male lead. Too brain-dead right now to think of many concrete examples, and now that I'm trying to think I'm just slowly horrifying myself at the sheer volume of anime-esque stuff the U.S. has assimilated. I guess Kim Possible is an awesome example of a strong woman character, even though personally I never liked that she was a cheerleader--but she pulls it off well, I guess, even if it does feel a bit cookie-cutter at times.

Maybe it's just that back when I was a kid and didn't know any better, Carmen Sandiego, along with a surprising number of her female henchmen, was the epitome of original "strong woman." Also, I was secretly in love with Carmen Sandiego and have been so since the third grade. (Seriously. If she were alive, I'd go gay for her in a heartbeat.) I mean, hey, she was damncool, and she didn't need to flaunt anything to pull off her coolness. She hid her figure under the trench coat and you only saw her face a coupla times in the cartoon series. And I mean, the basic premise for her ditching for a life of crime was that she was smarter than everyone at the mostly-male-run ACME Detective Agency. Looking back on it now, I kinda remember several of her female henchmen being billed as physically stronger than a lot of the men, some of them looking bulked-up and very butch in the dossier profiles (I think this was the "Where in the World" series?) Sarah Nade, the really butch punk-rocker, or those female "strong-women" who pulled off a lot of the capers involving hard physical labor. Bustin' up stereotypes left and right, man. And this was--1983? 'S pretty cool. Especially since the model for Carmen Sandiego was Indiana Jones, who's definitely high up on the Top 10 All-Time Coolest List.

Thing is, if you think about other prominent female characters of the time (and were there even that many...?) Daphne from "Scooby Doo" was very much the "delicate female," but Velma was very much the nerd so maybe that balanced out. Daphne very rarely participated in any of the conflict resolution, though, if I remember right... Judy Jetson in "The Jetsons" also just kinda seemed to be there as the random teenage girl character, though I didn't follow that religiously so I can't really say. Jessie from "The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest" later on is more the modern female, with an average bust and the same build as Jonny, but she tends to wear a lot of pastels and never puts her hair up even for the stickiest situations, though that might just be me being nit-picky.

Same for male chars, too--even the guys nowadays are sometimes stereotyped as super-macho or super-dorky. Again, floundering for concrete examples. I'll have to get back to this. But what happened to the more thoughtful or liberal or original/unique characters with a little bit of personality behind them? Back then emphasis wasn't so much on breast size or clothing style or ditziness or machoness; it took a little more to make a good character. Carmen and her henchwomen rocked the liberal/feminist agenda back then; Zack and Ivy weren't half-bad either. Jonny Quest (and I do mean the original 1986 one, although the Real Adventures wasn't so bad, and Jessie rocked) had a pretty good balance of physical/mental capability. Fuck, even "Captain Planet" had that one episode where Wheeler picks up a whore in New Orleans at Mardi Gras, and Linka goes off in a tizzy. But "Captain Planet" was chockful of overt stereotypes--Wheeler the apathetic, insensitive American for one, and Linka's reactions to his advances (she could be a bitch, but she acted like she liked it). Gadget in "Rescue Rangers" was pretty cool, but she got thrown into the distressed-damsel role way too many times. And speaking of Gadget, Penny in "Inspector Gadget" was awesome--a girl and a kid who pretty much solved most of the crimes going on and let Gadget take the credit. How cool is that?? And Punky Brewster... is annoying as fuck in retrospect, but I guess she did have her own thing going on.

And of course, before I get severely flamed, She-Ra was the coolest EV4H.

Of course, in terms of characters anyway, the 80s and before had a lot to apologize for. "Captain N"? That Ruby Spears Megaman cartoon? Super Mario? That Zelda spinoff? Okay, I admit to having watched all three out of sheer little-kid fandom, but Jesus H. Christ were they bad, bad enough that I knew they were bad at the time. But seriously, people. I miss those strong characters. In fact, I'll have to come back to this thought when I'm a little more rested and coherent.

Anyway. Carmen Sandiego is hot :-)

Celebrity Sighting #1

1:30 p.m., Claremont and 118th: I'm hurrying to campus so I can get one of the good seats for my lecture class, on the phone with Mom ranting about class and what will be my crazy-busy weekend. Feeling a little pissy and antisocial and hating humanity, and I haven't managed to down even half of the large coffee in my hand. So when I see the crowd of people on the sidewalk near the Barnard entrance I just angrily plow on through.

As I'm plowing through, I notice that most of these people have on headsets or are moving sound booms or cameras. Looks like the setup or removal of a film set. It begins to occur to me that maybe I shouldn't be walking through here, but you know, I've already come too far to go back, so I skirt people as best as I can while keeping a tight grip on my coffee. Almost run into some guy moving a sound boom, mutter an "excuse me" and dodge to the left, and then pretty much almost collide with Jesse L. Martin (Detective Green on Law & Order for all you non-aficionados, I think he was also in one of my fave X-Files episodes--the one about baseball, not to mention Rent and Timon of Athens on Broadway) and come perilously close to spilling said coffee all over myself and/or Mr. Martin. Thank God I am apparently not that much of a klutz. It does take me a moment to register who I just ran into though, at which point I blush, look like a moron, half-smile and apologize and turn around to continue onwards, to class... and stop just short of walking into Dennis Farina (in this scenario, Law & Order's Detective Fontana, but also of Snatch, Get Shorty, Manhunter, and Saving Private Ryan fame).

I can't say I get much into movies or star-worship or anything like that, but I have to say, Law & Order being one of the few television shows I religiously follow... I'm a teensy bit star-struck and happy right now :-)

Poetry: Mark Strand

Black Maps

Not the attendance of stones,
nor the applauding wind,
shall let you know
you have arrived,

nor the sea that celebrates
only departures,
nor the mountains,
nor the dying cities.

Nothing will tell you
where you are.
Each moment is a place
you’ve never been.

You can walk
believing you cast
a light around you.
But how will you know?

The present is always dark.
Its maps are black,
rising from nothing,
describing,

in their slow ascent
into themselves,
their own voyage,
its emptiness,
the bleak temperate
necessity of its completion.
As they rise into being
they are like breath.

And if they are studied at all
it is only to find,
too late, what you thought
were concerns of yours

do not exist.
Your house is not marked
on any of them,
nor are your friends,

waiting for you to appear,
nor are your enemies,
listing your faults.
Only you are there,

saying hello
to what you will be,
and the black grass
is holding up the black stars.

The Mailman

It is midnight.
He comes up the walk
and knocks at the door.
I rush to greet him.
He stands there weeping,
shaking a letter at me.
He tells me it contains
terrible personal news.
He falls to his knees.
“Forgive me! Forgive me!” he pleads.

I ask him inside.
He wipes his eyes.
His dark blue suit
is like an inkstain
on my crimson couch.
Helpless, nervous, small,
he curls up like a ball
and sleeps while I compose
more letters to myself
in the same vein:

“You shall live
by inflicting pain.
You shall forgive.”

The Door

The door is before you again and the shrieking
Starts and the mad voice is saying here here.
The myth of comfort dies and the couch of her
Body turns to dust. Clouds enter your eyes.

It is autumn. People are jumping from jetliners;
Their relatives leap into the air to join them.
That is what the shrieking is about. Nobody wants
To leave, nobody wants to stay behind.

The door is before you and you are unable to speak.
Your breathing is slow and you peer through
The window. Your doctor is wearing a butcher’s apron
And carries a knife. You approve.

And you remember the first time you came. The leaves
Spun from the maples as you ran to the house.
You ran as you always imagined you would.
Your hand is on the door. This is where you came in.

The Guardian

The sun setting. The lawns on fire.
The lost day, the lost light.
Why do I love what fades?

You who left, who were leaving,
what dark rooms do you inhabit?
Guardian of my death,

preserve my absence. I am alive.

(from the collection Reasons for Moving)

Review: Survival in Auschwitz

Survival in Auschwitz
Primo Levi
transl. Stuart Woolf

"[T]his was the sense, not forgotten either then or later: that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness[.]" (41)


I am not going to review this book in the sense that I've done the others. I find it extremely difficult to pick apart narratives that "bear witness": The Reawakening, Levi's so-called sequel to this novel; Hope Against Hope and its sequels, by Nadezhda Mandelstam; Orwell's Homage to Catalonia with its killer last line. Anyway Survival in Auschwitz is a book that I think everyone has, or should, read, because Levi's language is simple and does not overdramatize or preach; he merely tells the story of what he lived through as he lived through it, and if he does often muse on the inner workings of man he does so in an unobtrusive fashion. He isn't out for pity or catharsis. This is essentially a work written to forever fix a terrible incident in history.

I will say that as a book I found The Reawakening to be more powerful, and I'm sorry I can't quote concrete examples; I left that book at home over break. Read as a pair, I think Levi's real power is in the simplicity of his expression, which (as I've been told) the translation tends to needlessly spruce up with extra language and/or descriptors. (Actually, I've heard this translation isn't so good, and that it's best read in Italian, so if you know Italian, read it in its original form and get back to me on that.) The fact that the reader recognizes that Levi doesn't have some ulterior motive in his language or expression, that he isn't trying to wring tears or provoke guilt, contains some kind of raw power.

That and the fact that (though this comes across more clearly in The Reawakening) he never fixes the blame on anyone. His capacity for forgiveness--no, that isn't right; his ability to understand and to explain with an objective eye how both the Germans and the Jews had devolved under camp conditions to something less than human; his ability to refrain from pointing the finger at Germany and leaving blame out of the question entirely--is what lends the memoir its most striking power. You start reading expecting some hint of anger that you never find. And actually, I think, in Philip Roth's Shop Talk Levi admits that he had no "literary intentions" but had an intense wish to understand. He takes the scientific chemist's approach to a lot of the material without sacrificing any of the emotional power of his story.

His accessible contemplations on man and the ways "in which a man can be transformed or broken down and, like a substance decomposing in a chemical reaction, lose his characteristic properties" (181) are what made the memoir work for me. Read it. It does make you think.

Review: Lolita

Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns." (9)


I don't want to beat this dead horse again by gushing about how wonderful and brilliant Nabokov is. I recently read Pale Fire, another one of his amazing novels (perhaps better than Lolita), and his short story "The Vane Sisters," which if I remember right was initially rejected by the New Yorker because they failed to see the clever twist he inserted in the concluding paragraph. But I digress, and I haven't even gotten started.

For the past few days while I was reading this book, I was infatuated with a little girl named Lolita. I understood exactly what it was about nymphets that was so unbearably alluring; I knew why Lo's maturation would be a tragedy. The cover art of the book spoke to me. Nabokov paints Humbert Humbert's love and obsession in such a human manner that it is impossible not to sympathize with him for at least part, if not all, of the novel. The cover of the Second Vintage International edition 1997 includes a quote from Vanity Fair: "The only convincing love story of our century." I thought it was bullshit before I started reading; now, I'm inclined to agree. But here's the dead horse again, and here I am happily beating it. I'll move on.

So because I have a habit of discussing craft, I'll talk about that. I was most impressed by Nabokov's ability to pick such a dancing, whimsical writing style and remain true to it for the entire book, even during emotionally charged scenes where H.H. is clearly losing control--he still retains writing mannerisms such as word-play, name-play, associative literary leaps, etc. The murder scene, for example, or better still, the moment when Lolita leaves. I appreciated that Nabokov resisted the temptation to turn this story into a "claim of innocence" and left it simply as it is, the ultimate confession of taboo love given by a semi-trustworthy narrator who is in the end as human and pathetic as the next guy.

For me, the best moments of the book were where Humbert intentionally played with the reader's emotions and loyalties. I remember thinking as I was reading and wondering who the murdered victim would be: "Well, this guy's a creep, but he seems like a good guy, he isn't going to kill Charlotte, he isn't going to kill Lolita, he loves her." That thought was vindicated with regards Charlotte. Then on page 280, I realized how much more fickle I was compared to Humbert:

" "One last word," I [H.H.] said in my horrible careful English, "are you quite, quite sure that--well, not tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow, but--well--some day, any day, you will not come to live with me? I will create a brand new God and thank him with piercing cries, if you give me that microscopic hope" (to that effect).
"No," she said smiling, "no."
"It would have made all the difference," said Humbert Humbert.
Then I pulled out my automatic--I mean, this is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did. It never even occurred to me to do it. " (280)

I about had a heart attack when I read those last two lines. My immediate assumption, of course, was to trust Humbert and so I gullibly believed that he pulled out his automatic--and then when he corrected himself and addressed himself to the "fool reader," I realized that Nabokov was pointing out how easily the reader trusts and mistrusts a narrator, and how superficial my sympathy for H.H. was, and how precarious the whole Lolita situation had been all along. That moment was when I realized the full tension of the entire novel. It was a brilliant move on Nabokov's part. I don't think it was the only time he played a card like that, but this was the one that I found most striking.

I also enjoyed the word- and name-play a lot--I can't say I caught all the literary references, but his fun with words--e.g., "We had breakfast in the town of Soda, pop.1001" (220), and too many more to count--added another dimension to the novel, helped to humanize him, give him a personality outside of his love for Lolita. Also an impressive move on Nabokov's part, since otherwise it would be difficult to distinguish Humbert apart from Lolita--and even though he is almost always with her in the novel, his humor and means of expression give him a distinct identity.

My one qualm with the book was that, somewhere near the middle, I lost Humbert. We were no longer on the same page; he hadn't changed his obsession of course, Lolita did not speak much, and it was tiresome to see her in the same light through the same lens for most of the novel. To have her introduced that way, and to view her changing self that way, that was fine. It's a minor problem in light of the book's many strengths, and one that didn't detract from my overall enjoyment of the book. There was another distinct moment when I lost Humbert, I think it was the first or second time he slept with Lolita, or around the time he started having her on a regular basis, and her withdrawal became noticeable--at that moment I remembered that this was a sort of sexual abuse and not merely the boundless, unbreakable love Humbert made it out to be. Of course by then I sympathized too strongly with Humbert to pull back far enough to hate him. Another great move. To state the patently obvious, Nabokov really is a brilliant writer.

I do have to say, though, I think the most effective part of the book is the final paragraph:

"Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much a part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to live at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." (309)

Moved me almost to tears, that one. Not so much because I knew what Humbert presumably didn't, that Lolita died giving birth to a stillborn girl, although that affected me too, but because that last line just--oh. It got me. Especially because the entire novel up until the last paragraph is addressed exclusively to the reader, Humbert's sudden and unclear switch to addressing Lolita at the beginning of the last paragraph is highly effective. It was as though suddenly he was speaking to me with all the hapless, helpless, Humbert tenderness, love, and obsession he possessed throughout the novel. As the reader, I was privy to his confessions, and suddenly privy to the last recorded bald statement of his love for Lolita, addressed to Lolita, who would never read it as per his wishes.

Right, I'll stop beating that dead horse now. So, all in all, Lolita is a gorgeously written, wonderful novel, and of course I definitely recommend it. It really is one of those books everyone should read. What a perspective. What a way of writing.

Review: Atonement

Atonement
Ian McEwan

"The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all." (350-1)


Warning: spoilers ahead. If you haven't read the book, and want to read it without knowing how it turns out (not like this is an involved mystery novel, but there is one point that shocked me at the very end that I am going to have to give away here), then read no further. Come back when you're up to speed.

I was actually joking when I said I would try to talk about this book, but Christine expressed interest, so this is pretty much for Christine (Hi, Chris!), who I hope won't be put off by the very writerly perspective I took to this book, although this is a novel that facilitates that kind of perspective.

I didn't want to immediately show my hand by using the quote above, but I realized on flipping through this book again that not much of the language or insights jumped out at me (or at least I made no note of them). There were some beautiful phrases that I did mark--the description of a migraine as "a heaviness [in her brain], the inert body weight of some curled and sleeping animal" (60), the idea that "a story was a form of telepathy" (35), and several striking lines in Part Three concerning Briony's nursing stint: "What she dreaded, more than the removal of the dressing, was the look of reproach in his large brown eyes. What have you done to me?" (284), or "Every secret of the body was rendered up--bone risen through flesh, sacrilegious glimpses of an intestine or an optic nerve. From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew: that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended" (286-7). I finished this book a week or so ago, and the part about the injured French soldier Luc is still haunting me: not the language so much as the image of Briony talking to this dying man without realizing his condition, then loosening his head bandages only to discover that a large portion of his skull was blown off and his brain is exposed. That terrible moment when he asks her, thinking she is someone else, if she loves him, and she replies that she does, because "[h]e was a lovely boy who was a long way from his family and he was about to die" (292).

That aside, I wasn't compelled by most of the language, and I wasn't particularly interested in the story at first. McEwan begins Part One with little to no tension, and builds up the story very slowly. It's all necessary information, character introduction, etc., but it went too slowly for me and I almost lost interest near the beginning. I also personally had trouble with the metafictive aspect of the narrative; it was almost too self-aware even filtered through Briony's writing experience. I cringed in Part Three when she received the rejection letter--not because I felt bad that her manuscript had been rejected, but because the use of such a device seemed so trite. For a while I couldn't help but think that Parts One and Three were excuses or justifications for McEwan to write about writing--whether it's a politically viable tool, how much one should draw on those who came before, what constitutes a "good" story, and so on with the same old writerly questions. Not to say I didn't find his views intriguing, but I was drawn out of the story each time. Briony's revelation about writing "maturely" when she is thirteen; the fact that her rejected manuscript is about the fountain incident that is a major focal point of McEwan's novel; the fact that Briony's novel is at the end, as is expected, the novel McEwan has published.

This isn't to say I'm against literature with metafictive aspects. I just think it has to be carried off very well in order for me to completely buy into it. Successful examples include Nabokov's Lolita or particularly his Pale Fire, Cunningham's The Hours, Calvino's if on a winter's night a traveler, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (even if this book just primarily didn't work for me, though I appreciated what it was trying to do), much of Borges's work, etc. Less successful examples include Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies (such a great premise, though) and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. There're probably several others to add to both lists, but you get the general idea. I personally feel that the use of metafictive elements has to be extremely relevant to the novel as a whole, as it is in Pale Fire and if on a winter's night a traveler, both of which are specifically about reading and writing, the former through the use of a heavily and ambiguously footnoted analysis of a long poem, the latter through use of the second-person present. McEwan's writing about writing seemed almost superfluous to me except for two key points: Briony's devastating lie, and the novel's conclusion.

Even Briony's lie, though, is easily explained by other factors. She is a young impressionable girl; she lives in her thoughts whether writing or not; she saw the word "cunt" in Robbie's note and believed that Robbie was a madman, not knowing any better. Perhaps the ease with which she placed Robbie at the scene of the crime stemmed from her writerly habits. But I felt I could mostly blame her falsehood on environment, living in a house that is supposed to be prim and proper and rich when really it is filled with junk, and her mother Emily refusing to acknowledge her husband's infidelity. When dishonesty is a norm in the household, it's natural to assume it'll crop up in the kids. Still, I can see why McEwan wanted to implement the use of writing here, so I can take it. I also wasn't sure why the metafictive element was necessary to the story, since Briony physically goes to her sister and Robbie and admits she was wrong and expresses the desire to help. In-the-flesh forgiveness. That's all the story needs. Additionally, McEwan only explains the novel as an impossible attempt at atonement at the end of the book. Or maybe my problem was that I was too far ahead of him, and didn't understand why he wasn't revealing anything. I knew Briony was trying to be forgiven through her writing; I knew (through personal experience, heh) that it wouldn't work, it never does. As McEwan points out, "how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?" (350) The key for me was learning that Briony also knew it was impossible, and that that was the point. Suddenly her character made complete sense to me.

However, that last-minute enlightenment made the whole book worth it for me. I can't fault McEwan for placing it at the end, because there's nowhere else to put this detail: that despite Part Two, which chronicles Robbie's struggle to return home from the war, and Part Three, in which both Cecilia and Robbie appear as happy lovers living together, both of them are dead. As Briony admits on the second-to-last page: "It is only in this last version that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away. All the preceding drafts were pitiless. But now I can no longer think what purpose would be served if, say, I tried to persuade the reader, by direct or indirect means, that Robbie Turner died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station. That I never saw them that year. That my walk across London ended at the church on Clapham Common, and that a cowardly Briony limped back to the hospital, unable to confront her recently bereaved sister. That the letters the lovers wrote are in the archives of the War Museum. How could that constitute an ending?" (350)

...and then it clicked. And the book wound up very nicely with the first quote I have at the beginning of this review. This is what writing can do to alleviate what we go through; it is an impossible atonement because it can't bring forgiveness. But it may quiet something, and it may give something back. I don't think I can articulate it better than McEwan did, so I'll leave it at that.

Apologies for this long, rambling, senseless post. I'm tired and suffering severe writer's block, also this book has been bothering me as a writer and as a human being. It was rough (in a good way!) having to flip through it again just now. At any rate, I recommend this book, but just make sure you can get through metafictions and Part One all right. After that, the motivations are set up and everything moves along just fine.

Review: Castle to Castle

Castle to Castle
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
transl. Ralph Manheim

"Frankly, just between you and me, I'm ending up even worse than I started . . . Yes, my beginnings weren't so hot . . . I was born, I repeat, in Courbevoie, Seine . . . I'm repeating it for the thousandth time . . . after a great many round trips I'm ending very badly . . . old age, you'll say . . . yes, old age, that's a fact . . . at sixty-three and then some, it's hard to break in again . . . to build up a new practice . . . no matter where . . . I forgot to tell you . . . I'm a doctor . . . A medical practice, confidentially, between you and me, isn't just a question of knowing your job and doing it properly . . . what really counts . . . more than anything else . . . is personal charm . . . personal charm after sixty? . . . there might still be a future for you in the wax works, or as an antique vase in a museum . . . a few old fogies in search of enigmas might still take an interest . . . but the ladies? Your dapper graybeard, painted, perfumed, and lacquered? . . . Doctor or not, practice or no practice, the old scarecrow will stick in people's craw . . . If he's loaded? . . . well, maybe . . . hmm, hmm, . . . he'll barely be tolerated . . . but a white haired pauper? Take him away." (1)


If you must know, I am stuck with my writing right now, so I've decided to take some time out of my life to rant about this book, because in my humble experience it might just be the worst book I've ever come across. Unfortunately this book is at home in my basement, as I would not be caught dead with it in my room, so I will be unable to quote from it as extensively as I would like to. But this is probably better for you, dear readers, as the book is one giant elliptical sentence that not only never ends but has no point. Think of the most irrational, senseless person you know, then imagine him/her in a state of hysterical fury irately attempting to express hatred for everyone and everything. It's going to sound something like total incoherence, albeit with a lot of raw emotional hating power. That's pretty much the only thing this book has going for it--raw emotional hating power, that is--and even that gets old after 10 chapters of the same damn thing.

A little bit about it... this supposedly falls into the class of historical fiction, though it seems more like a glorified eloquent rant at its best and a raving diatribe at worst. I don't want to criticize Celine too harshly, as I haven't read Journey to the End of the Night, which is allegedly his "best work" (though compared to this, I think anything might be). I've also heard Death on the Installment Plan wasn't bad. I don't know for sure. I'd love it if anyone could qualitatively tell me that something Celine wrote is good, because I don't want to hate him as an author on the basis of one book but am finding it very hard not to.

The novel is autobiographical; Celine is the "I" who is a Nazi sympathizer and is yet destroyed by them during World War II. He describes his departure from France in 1944 and also describes, with bitter pleasure, the decline of the Vichy government in exile. The novel discusses his experiences at a castle in Sigmaringen, Germany, where the Germans installed remnants of the French collaborationist government after the Allies landed. Celine makes it clear from the outset that he hates everyone, especially publishers (especially his own). It's the first of a trilogy that runs much the same way. And that's pretty much it. Nothing really happens in the book except for him ranting. And yet the translation won a National Book Award and this novel is applauded for its dark cynical wit...

There were two defining moments for me in this book. The first was when I riffled the pages before starting to read it and was astounded to discover that it worked something like a flip-book animation with all the little ellipsis dots and the profanity and obscenity; it was like watching the word "fuck" ripple across the page like a little scurrying mouse. Quite aesthetic. The second, and perhaps more in-context, defining moment was the recurring image of what I have affectionately termed "the shit toilet."

That may seem redundant to many of you. Let me explain that Celine describes "the shit toilet" as he encountered it in this one inn where he stayed. The inn was infamous for the poor quality of its food and drink, which would immediately give the consumer an explosive case of diarrhea. However, during the war, people in exile like Celine and the Vichy people had to take what they could get. So there ended up being a large number of people desperate to piss and shit around mealtimes every day, resulting in long lines for the bathroom, mass panic and shrieking for the toilet usurper to hurry up, and people crapping their pants. The owner got so fed up of people clogging the toilet he refused to let them use it, so finally the people broke the bathroom door down and dragged the toilet to the top of the stairs, where they all proceeded to use it at one and the same time, bums vying for position, shit flowing everywhere and finally overflowing from the toilet and down the stairs so that you couldn't walk without essentially stepping in your own and/or other people's shit. A lovely image. It kept recurring. Other recurring themes included Celine's fervent desire that the Vichy government rape each other or get anally raped, that Jews would all die, and something about a woman with a riding crop and an old woman who was a patient of his.

Now, I grant you I did keep falling asleep when I was reading this book, mainly because the thought never finishes. It's like he's going somewhere, and then the train derails off a bridge into the sea, and then when you're waiting for an explosion it just floats around in ocean for a while and starts running on the ocean floor, and then it ends with a whimper and not a bang, not like you're expecting anything because your eyes are swimming from all the dots. Or maybe it's just me.

I'll say this for Celine: he can be damn funny when he wants to be, in a very cynical way, and I appreciated his humor. I also thought he had some very cutting insights on the worlds of politics and publishing. I didn't even mind that he spent most of the book raving, or that the ellipses never stopped. But I couldn't manage to stay focused when the book itself seemed to have no focus. That, I think, was its major and greatest flaw, and one I just couldn't get over. I still don't know how I managed to finish reading it.

I wish I had the book so I could quote and sound a little more rational in my hatred for this book. I do encourage y'all to pick it up at the library and flip through it, though, if only to be amused by "the shit toilet" scenes, or maybe to prove me wrong. And if anyone out there read and enjoyed this book, I implore you to post a comment here and explain to me why you found it enjoyable. In fact, I dare you to explain it. Bring it, bee-yatches ;-P