A Cruel Man Delighting in Flowers

This is the book that kinda started it all for me, as far as my memory allows that is. I can remember my dad reading me this in bed, using the drama of his voice to heighten the experience, and seeing the stark ink drawings---particularly of Grendal's dismembered arm---and just being in a state of delicious fear and wonder.



I must have been about 8 years old or so. I went on to Robert E Howard's Conan books and then, The Lord of the Rings, but I owe a lot to Sutcliff's rendering of this great poem.

I also managed to track down a copy of the same edition that was read to me for my own children.

'I’m to follow him there?’ the master asked anxiously, holding the bridle.

‘No,’ replied Woland, ‘why run after what is already finished.’

Such a fascinating clash of narration and character, story and story-telling, a kind of collapse of The Devils and Alice in Wonderland. I enjoyed its playfulness and its banal viciousness, in tandem, from the characters and from Bulgakov himself, but also the knife-like and capricious tenderness that emerges like a nervous blackguard hiding his ill-gotten gains so that he can return them with interest.

Interestingly, the namesake characters of the novel were the ones that least interested me. They sometimes come across as a little trite and archetypical, which I realize is part of their purpose for being there… Of the central characters, they are perhaps most emblemic of the author’s social/political Stalinist parody, of which must has been written elsewhere, so I will interest myself more with the story itself, of which there is still much of interest.

Well, but with sorcery, as everyone knows, once it starts, there’s no stopping it.

And this book is heavy on sorcery: both overtly in the narrative of the ‘unclean powers’, and also the sorcery of story-telling, whereby such things can be so effortlessly achieved. When Margarita doubts this to Woland how shows her that whatever’s written on paper and accepted as truth can hold fools firm.

And there is a story within the story, the story of Pilate, the great doubter and condemner of Christ, the man who questioned Truth. Reconciling these two characters, representing Truth and truth, and lie and Lie, becomes one of the chief themic charms about the story as a whole.

…here this philosopher, who had thought up such an incredibly absurd thing as that all men are good, was walking beside him, therefore he was alive. And, of course, it would be terrible even to think that one could execute such a man.

But also how heavenly and hellish interact. When both powers actually come face to face for only a brief time, where Woland (Satan) speaks to the messenger, Matthew Levi, regarding the fate of the master, Woland questions Matthew:

‘But why don’t you take him with you into the light?’

This would be presumed as his reward, to ascend to heaven and be at one with the Creator etc etc. But Matthew, on behalf of Him, responds:

‘He does not deserve the light, he deserves peace,’ Levi said in a sorrowful voice.

So there is war in ‘the light’, there is competing ideas, there is multiplicity, there is a kind of chaos that the master (the great literary artist) is tired of, and that has been recognized in the construction of his reward.

And, of course, we have the infernal crew themselves, who simply bounce off the page and into your room, and upset the furniture, break things, spout attitude, change sentiment on a whim and commit murder with no apparent pattern to their art. Oh, Behemoth:


The cat then stirred, jumped off the chair, stood on his hind legs, front legs akimbo, opened his maw and said:

‘Well, so I sent the telegram. What of it?’

And

‘...and, for all I know, Aristotle himself.’

‘Your king is in check,’ said Woland.

‘Very well, very well,’ responded the cat, and he began studying the chessboard through his opera glasses.

This book is worth anyone’s time to read for Behemoth alone. The energy when these guys occupy the stage is so great that they outshine the rest of the narrative to the point of aesthetic distraction. You begin to get greedy for their time. For then there’s Koroviev:

‘You’re writers?’ the citizeness asked in her turn.

‘Unquestionable,’ Koroviev answered with dignity.

‘Your identification cards?’ the citizeness repeated.

‘My sweetie…’ Koroviev began tenderly.

‘I’m no sweetie,’ interrupted the citizeness.

‘More’s the pity…'

And Azazello:

Then the red-haired bandit grabbed the chicken by the leg, and with this whole chicken hit Poplavsky on the neck, flat, hard and so terribly that the body of the chicken tore off and the leg remained in Azezello’s hand. ‘Everything was confusion in the Oblonskys’ home,’ as the famous writer Leo Tolstoy correctly put it. Precisely so he might have said on this occasion.

And, I must admit I really had to resist plowing through the master and Margarita, or the surprised Soviet officials trying-to-deal-with-what’s-happened bits, to get to more of them. Also, structurally, the book as a whole is a little haphazard, which is explained by its mode of creation, but still, you have to respond to what’s on the page in front of you, in the end.



These things aside, it was a wild ride, like being naked on the back of a flying pig, and where it lacked it made up for in sheer charm.

‘Imagine, Messire!’ Behemoth cried excitedly and joyfully, ‘I was taken for a looter!’

And that cat, devil take him, stole my heart…

‘Caligula’ 4.5 stars

CALIGULA: Ah yes … Now listen! I’m not mad; in fact I’ve never felt so lucid. I suddenly felt a desire for the impossible. That’s all. Many people share your opinion.

Caligula, a just ruler, returns from mourning his sister’s death with a new vision. And a request: that he be brought the moon. If he is the ruler, and his rule is law, then this must be done, or none of it works.

CALIGULA: [with sudden violence]: All it proves is that I’m surrounded by lies and self-deception. But I’ve had enough of that; I wish men to live by the light of truth. And I’ve the power to make them do so.


Camus takes the nihilism of his times and applies it to a totalitarian State authority; writing during the ascendancy of Nazism in Western Europe. The dilemma being portrayed is central to the existentialist project: once man gives up on the idea of Grand Narrative meaning to life (socially imparted self-delusion), is the inevitable end-point, is the logic of bald-faced truth, the path to nihilism/hedonism? 

Various characters in the play respond to Caligula’s ‘insanity’ in ways that can be considered representative of various segments of society, their approach for attempting to deal with this trauma of lack-of-meaning. Helicon, the bureaucrat, who hardly misses a beat; Scipio, the poet, who rejects it, but doesn’t know why, and eventually comes around to it, but doesn’t know why; Cherea, the scholar, who rejects it, and needs it destroyed; Carsonia, the lover, who lives with it and dies for it.

SCIPIO: Have you nothing of the kind in your life, no refuge, no mood that makes the tears well up, no consolation?
CALIGULA: Yes, I have something of the kind.
SCIPIO: What is it?
CALIGULA [very quietly]: Scorn.

Caligula is certainly not ‘insane’ but, like Meursault in 'L'Etranger', he could be considered socially insane, he has become untethered from ‘the other’ in the face of the impossibility of knowing it. He understands that he can’t live with this, that this is a broken method of living, just because it is living. He tells Carsonia that loving is the opposite of living, that it is the very antonym. It’s not an inconvenient truth that bothers Caligula, it is an impossible truth—the same as catching moons—but the impossibility of it, never acknowledged due to the sheer irresolvable tension of it in the face of social existence. 

 

 

[A reading of 'Caligula' in the final scene at my place during our Centenary of Camus Evening that certainly broke into full dramatic performance. Here, Caligula reads script while manhandling his 'lover']

So of course, Caligula must die, he does everything he can to assist the plotters in killing him, letting them go when they’re captured. He knows he can’t live with the impossibility of his existence; but he wants to live. When he’s being killed, stabbed in the face by Scipio and Cherea and others, his final words, as he dies, are: ‘I’m still alive!’ 

In the last moment of his life, as in every moment, he is fully alive, and that is his victory. 

‘Cross Purpose’ 4 stars

Camus uses a story of human tragedy taken from the news to illustrate the tragic absurd conditions of humanity. As a product of greed and avarice, an indifference to other people is developed to such a degree in the Mother and here daughter that they are capable of killing men in their sleep for their money; or is it the other way around? (There would be a way of reading these two characters as emblemic of first wave and second wave feminists respectively … but that might get Camus blacklisted, so I won’t pursue that…). Though both characters approach their denial and lack-of-certainty in different ways, they arrive at the same point. 

This is a very personal and heimlich (to be Freudian) take on the Absurd: which touches heavily on notions of personal identity and familial relations, but still very much in touch with universal condition.

 

 

 

THE MOTHER [in the same listless tone]: It only proves that in a world where everything can be denied, there are forces undeniable; and on this earth where nothing is sure we have our certainties.

Both collapse under the weight of certainty, something that have resisted for so long, but cannot avoid. 

THE MOTHER: But this world we live in doesn’t make sense, and I have a right to judge it, since I’ve tested all it has to offer, from creation to destruction.

Since the central plot device relies on mistaken identity—or at least, identity withheld—much could be discussed regarding how the play expores the Absurd epistemologically. Why does Jan withhold his identity? Why not say: ‘It’s I’? He goes through a few reasons, none of which sound that convincing—to the reader or his wife—like he’s fitting the pieces post-mortem. The mother asks herself the same question after they’ve killed him, but with a provision. ‘Oh why did he keep silence? Silence is fatal. But speaking is as dangerous; the little he said hurried it on.’ And the daughter, to the grieving wife, ends the argument later: ‘That in the normal order of things no one is ever recognised.’

No-one can really ever say ‘It’s I’ in any sort of meaningful way: all they can do is further their personal narrative with ‘the other’. Yes, it would have saved his life, but for how long? And for what purpose?

At the end, in the universe with the ever-present-but-ever-silent God, finally God answers the grieving widow imploring Him for help. The final word of the play is:

THE OLD MANSERVANT [in the same tone]: No.

‘The Just’ 5 stars

 

We now see the progression of the bleakness of Camus’ dalliance with nihilism into what will become The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt; summed up nicely with the chief of police talking to the condemned man:

SKOURATOV: You begin by wanting justice, and in the end set up a police force.

 

 

This was the play I expected the least from, and delivered the most. How is the killing of another man justified? Camus, again responding to reported events, whereby ‘terrorists’ refused to kill their target when he was accompanied by children, but carried out the bombing later successfully. 

Stepan is your future Stalinist: ‘Everybody lies. The important thing is to lie well.’ ‘Honour is a luxury reserved for those that have carriages,’ is another of his gems. Opposed in motivation to Kaliayev, who loves life over justice, but is prepared to kill and die, or even ‘die twice’, in order that others may live. To be ‘just’ is to get beyond the immediate actions to the overall effects. The ‘warmth’ of the world is not for these people. They have to be cold for the projected warmth of the future.

Dora, the heroine, and most striking of the characters of this play, and the most striking of all Camus’ female characters I have read, says this, and names the play: “Do you remember what summer is like, Yanek? … but no! … it’s always winter here. We are not of this world … we are ‘the just’ … There is a warmth in the world, but it is not for us … [Turning away] Oh, pity ‘the just’!”

Sounds a little self-indulgent? She’s got reason to be, just at that moment, and it’s affecting. Of all Camus’ plays so far that I have read (I have seen none on a stage: only stage versions of his novels…) this is the first one where I have actually felt and thought to myself, wow, I would love to see someone great performing that on stage. The others I have enjoyed, but I have potentially enjoyed them more as a reader of a play, as opposed to be in touch with the performance of it. And it was Dora, right at the end, that hit me in the guts. Right after Yanek (Kaliayev) has gone to his death at the gallows, with a hangman jumping up and down on his shoulders to snap his neck, after being offered a reprieve if he’d turn informer:

DORA: Then do this for me: let me throw the bomb … [ANNENKOV looks at her.] Yes … the next time, I want to throw the bomb … I want to be the first to throw it!
ANNENKOV: We don’t let women throw the bombs.
DORA [with a shriek] Am I a woman … now? [They all look at her in silence.]
VOINOV: Yes, let her.

This text is ironic and dark, but also beautiful. You understand the narrative inevitability of Kaliayev’s death, just as you do the Duke’s, and Kaliayev does to. He is Camus’ absurd hero, and he battles Stepov, the ungiving Stalinist; Dora, the lover; Skouratov, the Police chief; and finally, the religious Grand Duchess, the widow of them man he has killed, and while he doesn’t always win, he remains truthful. 

GRAND DUCHESS: But men are vile… You can either forgive them or destroy them. What else can you do?
KALIAYEV: You can … die with them.
GRAND DUCHESS: But you die alone … He died alone.

Both Skouratov and the Grand Duchess want to save him, but he refuses. In announcing her imminent arrival in his cell, he says to him:

SKOURATOV: First the police … and now … religion! You are being spoilt, aren’t you? But everything holds together. Imagine God without prisons! … What solitude!

Camus is no apologist for terrorism—he opposed the Algerian nationalist terrorist movement when his ideological pals seemed to be all for it—but he is trying to occupy these characters, and he does so authentically and powerfully. The thorny nature of Justice, the dynamic scope of its lens and framing, and how that interacts with Love—of fellow man and of sexual partner—is stripped bare in a very cold light.

 

‘The Possessed’ 3.5 stars

 

 

It was possibly a mistake and an injustice upon the play to read the novel it was based on ('The Devils') immediately before. Camus says in his foreword that he is ‘…well aware of all that separates the play from that amazing novel!’ and that he ‘…merely tried to follow the books undercurrent and to proceed as it does from satiric comedy to drama and then to tragedy.’ I assumed that Camus was going to select particular elements and characters to dramatize this ‘undercurrent’ for the stage, and had even predicted how he was going to do that, with what scenes, and what characters he might use and/or conflate; but, instead of merely an undercurrent, a very large percentage of the novel in narrative terms is squeezed into a three part script with 27 characters. Consequently, in Parts One and Three, it seems like everyone is in a great rush to get things done, and I even couldn’t help imagining them talking to each other really really quickly.

But what Camus does do is reinvent Stavrogin in a very interesting way, particularly in Part Two where the pace seems to slow and the characters seem to get a bit of collective breathing space. He becomes the struggling-man-towards-being-the-Absurd-Hero: to Kirilov’s reasoned suicide in the face of intellect-over-faith, and Shutov’s abject living in the face of faith-over-intellect. And all three headed for annihilation in their own ways. 

KIRILOV: Have you ever looked at the leaf of a tree?
STAVROGIN: Yes.
KIRILOV: Green and shiny, with all its veins visible in the sunlight? Isn’t it wonderful? Yes, a leaf justifies everything. Human beings, birth and death—everything one does is good

STAVROGIN: Don’t worry, I am a Christian. Or, rather, I would be if I believed in God. But… [He gets up.] …there is no hare.

SHUTOV: No hare?
STAVROGIN: Yes. To make jugged hare, you need a hare. To believe in God, you need a God.


Both Shutov and Kirilov were ‘disciples’ of Stavrogin: but Stavrogin, Shutov discovers, had been instructing them to completely opposite ends. While Shutov was being taught that ‘…the blind life-force driving a nation in search of its god is greater than reason and science…’, Kirilov was being taught the opposite.

SHUTOV: How could you tell him one thing and me the opposite?
STAVROGIN: Probably I was trying, in both cases, to persuade myself.

So just as teacher created pupils, pupils created teacher.

Stavrogin’s fall is more spectacular in the play; he hits a nihilistic rock-bottom.

STAVROGIN: I hate everything that lives on earth, and myself first of all. So let destruction reign and crush them all, and with them all those who ape Stavrgoin, and Stavrogin himself…’

Stavrogin loses faith in all things, while his vile do-badder ‘pal’ Peter Verkhovensky…

PETER: Filth and decency are just words. Everything is just words.

…still has faith in himself, and puts himself and his own interests above all.

How Stavrogin meets his end is quite different in the play also; it comes as a direct result of one of his numerous love interests … the only one left alive at the end of the play.

STAVROGIIN: I am capable only of negation, of petty negation. If I could believe in something, I could perhaps kill myself. But I can’t believe.
DASHA: [trembling]: Nicholas, such a void is faith or the promise of faith.
STAVROGIN [looking at her after a moment of silence]: Hence, I have faith…

So he fails to accept his Absurd condition, and falls into faith, and dies, but dies happy. Camus’ Stavrogin is a fascinating fully-inked man-in-crisis who is crunchingly flawed and achingly sincere; he reminded me sometimes of my impression of Kurtz in 'Heart of Darkness'. ‘Everything is foreign to me,’ he says. Doestoevsky’s Stavrogin is much more shadowy, particularly in relation to some ot the other vivid characters in the novel.

Camus’ calls Dostoevesky’s book a ‘prophetic book … not only because it prefigures our nihilism, but also because its protagonists are torn from the dead souls unable to love and suffering from that inability, wanting to believe and yet unable to do so—like those who people our society and our spiritual world today.’ And it remains so today. Camus’ play, for all its flaws, works very well in parts, but poorly in others, despite its content; Camus’ devotion to this ‘amazing novel’ maybe brings him undone. He wrote the play in 1953 or 54, but says in the foreword he had been visualizing it for twenty years, and it was touring in January 1959, after a six month run, when the company of actors were informed of Camus’ death in a car accident.

The quality and mastery of Dostoevsky’s vision, and his use of character and plot and pacing, are all on display in this marvelous work. It’s true that perhaps it doesn’t hold together as strongly as some of his other works; but it’s not true that this is a poor example of his work. In some ways, it exceeds all of them, particularly through voice and narrative instability.

There perhaps is some reticence to include it amongst the ‘greats’ due to politics and religion, both then and now. Dostoevsky, the author, is something that always seems to outstrip the pigeon-holer: even Dostoevsky, the man...


A genuine review of this book would be at least another book, and I would prefer to be reading more and writing other things… While I love Dostoevsky independently (as did the Frenchman of whom I shall now speak), my motivation to read this book now was to prepare myself to read Camus’ ‘The Possessed’, the play he wrote based on the novel, as part of my 2013 centenary celebration of the Frenchman (yes, I know he was born in Algeria...). So I will start with some general points and then discuss the book in terms of how it relates to Camus and his thinking.

Dostoevsky, through the character of his narrator, Mr G—v, is exploring a world in change: there are ‘new ideas’ everywhere. This was a liminial phase in Europe and western Asia that both men were living in, the real and the fictional. Politics was on the move, class structures were under assault, what to believe in was being problemised. (It’s still going on now, but in different ways and, mostly, less overtly violently on a grand scale.) Man, woman; master, serf; science, religion; and more so, on a larger scale, how we go about believing in things and what effects these changes (or lack-of-changes) would have on people and social life itself and on being moral. Many opinions get expressed in this novel, many of which could easily slip into contemporary discourse without much of a hitch (just add some pop culture references…) Particularly:

Half-science is a despot such has never been known before. A despot that has its own priests and slaves, a despot before whom everyone prostates himself with love and superstitious dread, such as has been quite inconceivable until now, before whom science itself trembles and surrenders in a shameful way.

And the terrible villain himself:



"On the other hand, the docility of schoolboys and fools has reached the highest pitch; the schoolmasters are full of bile; everywhere we see vanity reaching inordinate proportions; enormous bestial appetites … Do you realize how many converts we will make by trite and ready-made ideas?"

Mr G—v, our very all-too-well-informed-of-events narrator, certainly leans toward a rather traditional line, and his summings up, particularly the ones that he demands are the most true, are often a little fishy in terms of their reliability. As with any narrator, any time he or she is not directly present in events, even if they discuss which character informed them etc etc, there is room for playful doubt for the reader, and I would urge any reader to take this into account, as I'm sure would the author.

That the villains of the piece get their come-uppance we are fore-told by the narrator early on, but not the depths and nature of the villainy: Dostoevsky makes use of prolepsis on numerous occasions to lead us along. There is quite a body count: it would have to be the most violent of his novels I know of, and he handles violence interestingly, both in a visceral sense and a psychological.



As for Camus and Absurdism: there are two exchanges I wish to mention specifically, and both involve the moral suicide-intendee, Kirilov. Now, Camus’ first major work of Philosophy, [b:The Myth of Sisyphus|91950|The Myth of Sisyphus|Albert Camus|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347654509s/91950.jpg|21816839], has a famous first line:

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

Is life worth living: why/why not? Or, put earlier: To be or not to be?

Kirilov is planning to kill himself; why he is waiting, I shall not reveal for spoiler reasons, but he is fully and completely intending to do so. ‘Everyone who desires supreme freedom must dare to kill himself’ he tells our narrator in the first exchange I wish to talk about. When he’s discussing suicide as an option and they talk about pain, Kirilov brings up the example of a massive, huge stone, suspending in the air above your head, and makes the point that while you could be intellectually sure that releasing that stone on yourself would make death instantaneous and painless by such a large weight, you would still fear the pain that you know wouldn’t happen. And he likens this to the nature of God, or, if your prefer to be more contemporary, Grand Narrative Meaning of your choice (insert this wherever you see God too, if you like).

 

"He doesn’t exist, but He is. There’s no pain in a stone, but there’s pain in the fear of a stone."

God is there, like the stone, the maker of death and all things, he hangs over us (like Meursault’s sun on the beach in [b:The Outsider|15686|The Outsider|Albert Camus|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1356107957s/15686.jpg|3324344] too…). But He also isn’t there, not in any sensible way, in any sort of intellectual manner.

Much later, when speaking to Peter Verkhovensky, there is a further exchange relating to this problem:

"God is necessary, and so must exist." [Kirilov]

"Well, that’s all right then." [Peter V]

"But I know he doesn’t exist and can’t exist."

"That’s more likely."

"But don’t you understand that a man with two such ideas cannot go on living?"

Camus’ chief contribution to literature and ideas can be summed up as his effort to save Kirilov; to answer his question. Living with this Kirilovic tension is what his Absurd Hero does: not denying one in favour of the other, but charting the contradiction of being human. I am very much looking forward to now reading how Camus uses his own ideas to play with these dramatic features in 'The Possessed'.

There are other echoes of this tension even in the relationship between the socialist plotters and the nature of the existence of the Central Committee. The 'group of five' often worry that it doesn't exist, that it's 'mythical'. And I haven’t even touched on the fascinating moral drama of Stavrogin, or the rises and falls of the elder Verkhovensky, or Shatov’s bizarre role and metamorphosis, or many other things…



And ensure that you obtain an edition that includes Stavrogin’s Confession, which was suppressed at the time (you'll see why...). It really fills out the character of Stavrogin psychologically. In it, I found such a beautiful line that could have been written just for me. You know those lovely moments... Stavrogin asks the priest, Tikhon, if he has a problem with his atheism.

"On the contrary," Tikhon replied with unconcealed gaiety and good humour, "complete atheism is much more acceptable than worldy indifference."

I could almost believe in God if every priest I met was written by Dostoevsky. I’m pretty sure Camus would agree.

On the 21st—the day of publication of [b:The Communist Manifesto|30474|The Communist Manifesto|Karl Marx|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1311645363s/30474.jpg|2205479] in 1848—my family and I celebrate [a:Karl Marx|7084|Karl Marx|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1202410660p2/7084.jpg] Day as part of our Thinkers & Artists monthly program.

And for a book (extended pamphlet) written over a hundred and fifty years ago, it remains surprisingly contemporary in certain aspects of its social, economic and political thesis.

‘…a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and exchange is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.’

But of course in other ways, it remains trapped in history, such as in the way the proletariat exists now in relation to the bourgeois, and the further rise of the bourgeoisie through upwardly mobile grifting etc. The Frankfurt School writers and their further contemporaries went a long way to address these and other concerns, but it remains, at least aesthetically anyway, if not in thrust, a fascinating document, and provides great food for thought. In some ways, it is the teasing out of the anachronistic elements that can be the most enlightening.

But it also perhaps becomes guilty of one of its own charges: ‘…half-lamentation, half-lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future…’

Writing about your favourite and the most influential single book of your life—not that that means anything—is a little like staring into the sun, the same sun here in an Australian suburb as that of an Algerian beach: so I shall squint, if you don’t mind.



Firstly, Sandra Smith’s work is excellent. I have read all four English translations of L’Étranger that I am aware of (Stuart Gilbert, Joseph Laredo, and Matthew Ward being the other three. If you know of another, please let me know…) at least once over the years. Each has its own life, appropriately; which could be just as much to do with me as it does with the translation itself. I am learning French, starting this year, with the express intention of one day reading this book as the author wrote it. It’s a five year plan.

I have particular imaginings related to Camus’ writing this. He wrote this between 1939-40, but it was not published until the Spring of 1942 in occupied Paris.

This is a story about how someone lives. Meursault is an ordinary enough office clerk, with a strange kind of anti-social sincerity that the reader immediately encounters in the first two sentences, one of the most famous opening lines in literature. Meursault talks to us in a very candid manner, as if he’s talking to himself. As if, sometimes, he’s trying to re-assure himself. Is he a sociopath? No: he is aware of how people react to him, and he genuinely wants people to not be upset. But he also wants to engage with people clearly and openly. He is disinterested—in that kind of scientific manner—but not uncaring. His way of caring is to be honest. Most of all, it is to experience that he leans. He is a caring hedonist, a hedonist who wishes to experience pleasure, but doesn’t wish any more meaning be ascribed to it than the universe offers.

Which is none.

Marie: ‘A moment later, she asked me if I loved her. I told her that didn’t mean anything, but I didn’t think so.’



But he sees her pain, and responds as best he can. It surprises him when he answers genuinely and others are so surprised. He is capable of lying, and he does so several times, when someone is bothering him and he realises what they want to hear and so he gives them it so they will go away. But to people he cares for, he is himself.

When he looks at the world his descriptions of a plain Sunday afternoon are almost like a beautiful impressionist painting. ‘It was truly a Sunday.’ He likes smoking. He likes chocolate. He likes swimming and women. He tells the Judge in Part II: ‘One of the characteristics of my personality was that physical sensations often get in the way of my emotions.’

He shoots and kills a knife-wielding Arab on a beach. Later, in the courtroom, he says it was because of the sun. The ever present heat overhead, the inevitability of life, that-which-cannot-be-avoided-and-beats-down-on-us-all.

This was not before he stopped his friend from doing the same thing earlier. But:

The sky seemed to split apart from end to end to pour its fire down upon me. My whole body tensed as I gripped the gun. It set off the trigger.


…and it was then, with that sharp, deafening sound, that it all began.’ Until his on the way to the guillotine and ‘…it might be finished…

That journey is Meursault’s journey towards an acceptance of the Absurd: to put simply, Camus’ notion that human beings live in an essentially meaningless universe where they are compelled—as part of that ‘living’—to search for (and often demand) some sort of essential meaning.

It is not until his last outburst at a chaplain purges him of evil, and empties him of hope, that he can finally, for the first time, open himself ‘…to the tender indifference of the world.’ This indifference—tender indifference—is an understanding of how to live in that gap, to be happy, to allow for happiness, within that Absurd gap. He is happy on the path to death, and he is willing the participation of others in it, even if they are hateful.

Meursault is the '...only Christ we deserve.'

This begins my Camus’ Centenary year (he was born in 1913) reading list. I plan on reading even more widely than I have of his oeuvre this year, and revisiting some of his works, particularly if there’s a new translation I have not read. On the 7th of November, there will be a celebration at my house.

Now, reviewing a rescued-partial-first-draft manuscript turned into a book is a different kind of thing to other books. When you hover over the fifth star in Goodreads, it says ‘it was amazing’, so I am comfortable with giving this book five stars: I found it amazing. If I didn’t have the same relationship as I do with this author, who is my answer to the ridiculous ‘who’s your favourite author’ question when it crops up and is pressed on me, then perhaps—perhaps—it could be as low as three. I could imagine someone like me, if I was ignorant of this man, giving this book three stars: ‘I liked it’, in Goodreads star terminology.

You could weep, weep the bitter-bright tears of what-could-have-been reading this book. It is quite readable as is, and there are moments of bitter-bright beauty that makes you want to stand up out of your chair and just shake. It is, however, structurally raw and fragmentary. There are sentences that end with a footnote (written by the author in the manuscript) such as ‘develop this’ or ‘give the name of the trees’. There are footnotes to two empty square brackets saying ‘three illegible words’ that the editors, translator and daughter couldn’t work out. In my imagination, the blood from the car wreck is sometimes to blame… There are sometimes several pages of single paragraph text with rolling full page sentences that Camus would obviously have tamed (judging by his finished work), but, but, but … they fill the moment, the place, the people so beautifully; they etch themselves into you with their sheer pain and longing and love and demanding nature.

There is NO WAY a writer would wish this to be published on his behalf if he was alive to see it done. This should NOT be your first, second or possible even your third Camus read. It should be around the last. That’s when you’ll weep for it.

In the pages that were loose and found tucked into the manuscript, and in the Notes and Sketches, there are further fragments, some already used in the draft text, others remaining purely author notes to himself, the bones for the future draft material yet-to-be-written, never-to-be-written. ‘The study of the German officer and the child: nothing makes it worth dying for him.’ And an Arab terrorist character called Saddok who we never really get to meet. And the pursuit ‘from the clandestine editorial office’ (presumably in Nazi occupied Paris where Camus was involved with Combat) where he beats a man to death, or the ‘Conversation with the paratroop lieutenant’, where he’s dishing out threats before getting ‘the third degree’ for talking ‘too well’.

Damn, you wish the rest of this was written. DAMN. DAMN. I’ve never felt the loss of this man more acutely than when nosing through his notes like this.

The story is autobiographical, not an autobiography, which is an important difference of genre. I don’t think Camus would ever have been so blithe as to write something and claim it to be An Autobiography.

In a Hollywood world, this would be a rags-to-riches drama of a poor boy of an ignorant illiterate violent family making it to the big time with Nobel and global literary and philosophical renown. Camus would reject such a narrative outright, and Jacques (the Camus surrogate of the book) would probably spit in their faces. Camus holds them in higher esteem. When it came to choose between the correct political discourse of his moment, and his illiterate disabled mother, a mother who had been powerless to protect him from his grandmother’s abuse and looked on while he was beaten, then he chose his mother, and ostracism from the ‘riches’: he chose his ‘rags’.

‘Or else:
One cannot live with truth—“knowingly”—, he who does so sets himself apart from other men, he can no longer in any way share their illusion. He is an alien—and that is what I am.’

Camus feels his loss of illusion. It’s not something to celebrate or reject: it’s something to live with. This is the absurd. This is his departure from existentialism. You must live with illusion and the knowledge of illusion, because you have a car wreck coming, and that’s actually Real.

You couldn’t live with that, not completely.

Sergei Ivanovich suggests to Konstantin Levin (the fictional character most closely resembling Leo Tolstoy himself) early on in the novel that: ‘The chief task of philosophy in all ages has consisted precisely in finding the connection that necessarily exists between personal and common interests.’

And it is the central interest of this book. When the various relativist critics of Tolstoy’s oeuvre use glib assessments of his personal worldview that they feel are patterned into it, such as misogyny or didacticism, they are enacting and negotiating through their own version of this tension: for to be labelled a ‘misogynist’ is to enforce a common interest upon a personal one in a similar way as happens to the namesake of the novel: Anna Karenina.

She raves about you. … She says you’re a real heroine from a novel and that if she were a man she would have committed a thousand follies for you.

You will hear much in the way of this character, Tolstoy’s great heroine, as being a redeeming feature in his sea of outmoded political barbarism. While she is perhaps the chief protagonist of the drama---certainly the most dramatic moments of the novel centre around her---she is by no means heroic. Of all the focal characters, she most heavily fails to establish a liveable connection between her personal and common interests, so she is certainly a tragic figure; but she often comes off as a spoiled brat, so utterly full of herself and her entitlement that you can squirm.

Anna took a knife and fork in her beautiful, white, ring-adorned hands and began to demonstrate. She obviously could see that her explanation could not make anything understood, but, knowing that her speech was pleasant and her hands were beautiful, she went on explaining.

Tolstoy is far too great an author to create a focal character like Anna that could be so easily used as a gender politic rallying point. She is fantastic, in all her flawed humanity. The few pages where Levin meets her fully, and she wins him over, is a fantastic glimpse into how this character won Tolstoy over too.

‘…she was a bad woman. Well, what are these desperate passions! It’s all to prove something special. So she proved it.’ Vronsky’s mother (understandably perhaps) sums her up harshly. She was a bad woman. She cheated, she lied, she manipulated, she abandoned; and all for a love that wouldn’t last. Not in the format that she could understand it, anyway. So many of the blurbs and synopses say that Vronsky spurned her ‘Do I live? [Anna asks herself] I don’t live, I wait for a denouement that keeps being postponed.’ But Vronsky never spurns her. His love changes, and hers does also, but her demands on him, and life in general, of which she is the focal point, do not change.

I can only imagine how any modern film version will spoil this novel. Much more focus on the ‘We all want something sweet, tasty, if not candy, then dirty ice-cream.’ And less on the ‘All that day she had had that she was playing in the theatre with actors better than herself and that her poor playing spoiled the whole thing.’ Anna is a broken human being, not a battleship: at heart, she is not the strong woman but the frightened girl. Trotting out a society-is-to-blame excuse for her is facile and empty, which is what makes it so interesting, heartfelt, tragic and beautiful.

Anyway, this is a masterpiece by a master, and translated by the Peaver/Volokhonsky team masterfully I have to imagine, since if it were not, I would not have such a solid English-language impression of Tolstoy’s masterfulness…

This is interesting and entertaining epic heroic-fantasy: a mostly neat marriage between Tolkien-esque world-building and gritty Gemmell-esque realism. There is much to enjoy, from the various narrative focal points that are chapter driven, to the unrelenting pace and plot-movement. There’s enough in there for the traditional fantasy reader, and the dovetail-neatly-with-my-modern-progressive-worldview crew. Sure, you could quote material that would get up either camps nose—like, oh look, he’s a male writer and he’s writing as a pretty woman who notices her breasts as sexual things sometimes; or, ah, here we go, non-stereotypical big-strong-woman warrior who can kick arse or gonads—but Martin does his best to try and please everyone.

Which brings me to some problems.

For example, he does his best to try and please everyone.

The focal characters are full, internalised, and capable of movement; but you get the impression, sometimes, just sometimes, that they’re actors, going though the motions. Some modes used are quite repetitive, and so the character responses start to feel cardboard in quality.

I went through definite phases of engagement with this story, oscillating between really being ‘into it’ and feeling quite apart—but still being compelled to find out what-happens-next. This means that the storytelling event, I suppose, is successful, even when it’s at its worst: so an overall success.

I’m not sure if this compulsion shall lead me on to being a consumer of the series, however. It is a massive time investment for the time-poor when you think about all the books in the world that you could be reading. We shall see.

I am a person who has described themselves as a 'Religious Atheist' for almost ten years or so (perhaps in a deliberately incendiary manner on occasion, but I still feel with some accuracy...), so I was interested in reading this book. As a person who also describes themselves as a writer, I was worried he might have written the book I should have; one of the greatest fears of all who describe themselves as such. I am also a person who is in touch with the discourse of Philosophy, so I approached the reading of this book with some trepidation after reading about Alain de Botton and his rather 'self help' populist approach in his oeuvre.

So, let's start with negatives: this is a pretty superficial book. I has pictures. It glosses over many very complex issues for rhetorical affect, and in an effort to simplify. Every chapter, even the ones I tacitly agreed with, had holes you could drive the truck that struck Roland Barthes through. Some statements are too glib for my eleven year old daughter. Just for example, Protestants were not ignorant of how the physical realm impacted upon Christian worship, it was a recognition of the influence that was the core of their problem...

But ... on the positive side: I think Alain de Botton's project here is to engage the blithely intellectually lazy atheists into actually thinking about their lack-of-faith/belief systems. To pick the holes in his thesis is to actually make some very interesting connections and considerations. His introduction of Auguste Comte right at the end is wonderfully provocative. I applaud his attack on so many aspects of modern western secularism (if not his lightly reactionary politics), and would love to take on board many of his practical ideas.

If you identify as an atheist and want to read something against Richard Dawkins & co., this is potentially an interesting springboard.

Behan has an engaging style and plays around with such things as phonetic spelling in an interesting and creative way for genuine impact. The narrative flow is sometimes strangely truncated and other times heavily languid, which is where it loses star-value for me... Yes, this kind of approach marries up well with the very conversational mode [a:Brendan Behan|41348|Brendan Behan|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1286716301p2/41348.jpg] is operating in, but it leaves me with the feeling sometimes that I'm missing out on key elements of the story. I mean, if he was in front of me telling me the story, I'd be able to interject and say something like: 'C'mon, Behan, what's tha' ag'in? I wan' ta know more about tha' part on the beach, ya ___t.' And he could fill me in, and I'd be a happy man: the inherent problem with conversational writing vs. conversation...



However, there's plenty of interest, and much character to become involved in: the interplay between the 'types' of people---being a key theme here---is a fascinating aspect of the whole. The young Behan as IRA man remains radicalized to the end, but his mode of radicalization certainly shifts. He discovers much about how types of people use other types of people through the varied process of maintaining and enforcing typologies-of-people. His humanity and his brotherly love of humanity develops through a considered response to this: not a bland rejection, but a way of recognition of how these kinds of processes work as lenses upon experience.

A strong sense of character and place carries this novel, if a rather PC-read on religion and religious practice generally and a meandering plot that shifts gears a little like an old mountain man in his beat up ’57 Chevy pickup, going up a steep track the morning after Sunday drinks.

In my ‘10th anniversary edition’ I learn that there’s around 15000 words included in this edition that were cut due to editorial advice. If I was offered due recompense for my time, I believe I could make the same cuts with around 95% accuracy, and you’d end up with a better read. There are periods where this book is very put-down-able, but the moments where it isn’t still make it worth the four stars.

I’m an atheist but one who has a healthy respect for the Abrahanics and there humanising project. They were given short shrift here, which no doubt annoyed many of these kinds of theists, butt hey should be used to it by now, perhaps. It would be nice if they could be dealt with a little more intelligently, as maybe could the highly tenuous modern-pagan-esque retake on the Eostre deal: on a genuine research level she should have been suiting up with the newbies…

But, like I say, you can forgive all that for Shadow and Wednesday and there hangers-on. They are fantastic inventions and well worth the gamble to read and the gambol to read.

This book goes to the top of my how-the-hell-did-it-take-me-so-long-to-find-out-about-it list, being, as it is, a fore-runner to some of my most cherished speculative dystopic novels of all time: 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Slaughterhouse-Five... Yevgeny Zamyatin pre-dates them all: an original early 20th century Bolshevik.

It has a rawness about it, but an undeniably original style which stays perfectly in tune with the narrative focus of the story as it rolls along. It alternates between a mathematical rhythmic and a lyric melodic, sometimes mixing the two into orchestral... It can be both distancing and intimate, and targets these moods in a well-arranged plot-sensitive manner.

I'm not deliberately coming up with musical allusions here: it's how it sounds, and D-503 - the mathematician, One-State-champion protagonist - is very aware of sound and colour in the text.

Far from being trapped purely in the ideological realm of Stalinism, you could easily apply, for example, the terms and effects of 'The Operation' to a modern western liberal corpo-democracy: the manufacture of the perfect consumer-citizen. The technologies are differing (and often charming), as happens with speculative science fiction as it ages, but the effects remain the same.

An engaging, darkly humourous and appropriately fragmented story that holds its own in the youth-drug-culture genre, but manages to do more. We get an account of humanity under the influence of forces that it cannot understand and deal with adequately. It makes some very flawed and bitter and beautiful observations about all of us, how we aspire and how we exist in ourselves and with others.

The weakest parts are the italicised 'truth' segments of prose poetry where you end up getting impatient waiting for the characters to come back on stage.

I enjoyed an interesting ironic tension that developed through Candy and the narrator's relationship. You feel sympathy for them, and you want them to be together, and yet you realise pretty soon that the heroin is te thing keeping them together, so when they're tying to kick, in a perverse way, you celebrate thir failure, so that you can further enjoy them.

The sex is written well, apart from the occasional jarring expression, such as 'down there' as a vaginal description when things are really heavy and throbbing. Otherwise, it's dirty and harsh when it should be, and touching and beautiful when not. Althogh how you could manage to have the concentration to do that while giving the finger to a police helicopter I will never know...

The original plan was to read Homer’s The Odyssey, followed by Joyce’s Ulysses before Bloomsday 2012, but, time caught up with me and I was still with Odysseus having just landed back on Ithaca when June 16 rolled around… So next year, I am prepared.

 

It’s impossible and obscene to review a book like this, genuinely, other than to talk about your experience of it and what the novel means to humanity and storytelling as a whole.

This is not an easy-read, but it is literary art: it is art fashioned from words, in the form of a novel. And it is difficult to deal with. It is dealing with complex, difficult, perhaps impossible to reconcile characteristics of being human, and it is trying to render that onto a page with words. It is trying to do something that is beyond words, with words, these flawed building blocks of being human.

The problem with combining this form with this project is that unlike with other more immediate forms of art, let’s say, a great work of visual art that is wrestling with the same project, if you don’t appreciate it on that level, you only have to invest a couple of seconds, scan the paining, shrug your shoulders and then walk off. You’re not going to hold much of a grudge against it, and if someone who did appreciate it at that level asks you if you’ve seen it, you can still say, yes, I have, I liked the composition and its use of the colour red. You’re not going to say, no, I read the first fifty pages and threw it away. It’s crap. It’s artsy fartsy wankery. What? Are you saying I’m stupid? Well, fuck you, you’re pretentious…



Some art needs to be difficult. It needs to defeat you in some way. It needs to go past your limits so that you know your limits; or, to put it better, to know that you are limited. This novel will lose you. It will surpass you ... it did to me. That’s not a bad thing.

It’s not laughing at you. It’s laughing with you ... and at you ... and at itself.

This novel changed the narrative game. It moved human experience into new positions. Very few individual works of anything are in this category. Joyce’s project is, of course, a failure and absurd, but it soars all the more through the purity of its failure and its depiction of the absurdity of our condition, we story-telling self-aware animals doomed to die and know about it.

It is worth the effort to read it. Let it beat you. You need to be beaten as a reader sometimes.

On a final note, I was all ready to hate on Melbourne’s obsession with the Molly Bloom character while reading her famous soliloquy, the final chapter of the book, and had a few clever, snide sentences all ready primed for my review regarding the vague, Sex-In-The-City kind of emptiness I was reading into her. The last three or so pages hit me right in the guts with the subtle, building energy that only a true, absolute master artisan of story-telling is capable of.



I swallowed every sentence I had and sat quietly on the bench of platform 3 at Box Hill railway station, waiting for the 6:37pm Belgrave train to arrive, and it felt like I didn’t breath until it did.

Considering the distance between the modern reader and Homer, Fagles’ translation of Homer’s Odyssey is a very accessible easy-read adventure tale, that ay be light on direct action for some, but has definite narrative energy through its framed story-telling.

There is historical and cultural interest on a theory level, particularly in the often repeated oral-story-telling devices: when Odysseus is stressing about the occupants of a new unknown island he’s about to land on, for example, and is wondering if the occupants will be friendly or not, human or monster, the ‘eating of bread’ is a feature, placing the ability to produce bread as an intrinsically social and humanistic act: that those groups of people that are capable of this act are the kind that will also be moral and caring.

This is obviously a canonical work of literature, an example of how we began to understand ourselves and think ourselves into the human condition that we enjoy today, so much can be said about it on this level, and has been many times, including in the excellent introduction of this translation by.

Suffice to say, I enjoyed it on a number of levels, including purely its existence as a story, and its characters and how Homer, with maybe help form Fagles (I can’t read Ancient Greek), played with Odysseus ironically, like when the King and husband is telling of his time with Calypso, how he was stuck on this island paradise with a nymph whose beauty made Hermes weep, and forced to sleep with her every night, but yet he spent all day crying his grief on the shores of the island, beating his chest with outrage… on this island he was so firmly imprisoned upon that he could only leave when Calypso told him: ‘Hey, why don’t you just chop down some wood and build a raft, man?’