German angst on art and beauty

Book: Death in Venice and Other Stories


Author: Thomas Mann


Published: 1988 (Bantam, this collection); 1897-1912 (original story publication dates)


Pages: 263


Hoo, boy, does Thomas Mann ever have conflicting issues with his chosen profession.

He's this great chatty German with a keen sense of existential dread and how beauty (and lust disguised as high-minded appreciation of it) can wreck an artist especially easily. His character-to-character dialogue has that real-life rhythmic panic of "Oh fuck how much of what I actually feel should I say?", which is not something I expect to come across so clearly from a pre-modern writer. Snaps for him.


Or maybe his 1988 translator. That's a problem I have with translation; how much of the text is lost when it jumps languages? Witness Kafka's "bug" vs. "cockroach" vs. "vermin" opening. Maybe I should just learn German? 


But then I'd be the shitty translator and have no one to complain about but myself, and as Mann proves in his giant blocks of monologue on the nature of Art and the Writer's Role in it all, that is some boring-ass prose. It stops his narratives dead until the hunchback re-meets the lady who makes him feel the pang of being an outcast, or until the shopkeeper yells at the religious dude to stop waving that knife around because that won't make him take the obscene picture out of his shop window, or until the tubercular wife of a count stops playing the piano for a smitten writer. 


See? He's got some good stuff. You just have to get past his angst. I bet he was FUN when his writing was going badly.      

More plain good stuff

Book: The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

Author: Carson McCullers

Published: 1971 (this edition, Bantam)

These read as Flannery O’Connor light, as in these stories strongly remind me of that more famous authoress and her favorite tropes without making me feel quite as depressed about mankind. O’Connor’s hypothesis seems to be that all people are evil if you give them a chance; McCullers concentrates on pure oddness that still goes bad a lot of times but also has redemptive qualities that nobody knows what to do with.

There’s a detached air of mystery about all the characters, which include a tough country broad and her hunchback distant cousin (in the title novella “The Ballad of the Sad Café”), a young piano prodigy who has to deal with giant expectations that she can’t fulfill (in “Wunderkind”), a transplanted European music teacher with delusions of grandeur that bother the hell out of her new boss for reasons he can’t explain (in “Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland”—I call dibs on that band name), and a jockey who is losing his touch and gaining weight and frustrated to the point of violence about it all (in “The Jockey”).

They’re interesting stories mined from everyday life and told in beautifully simple prose. I can't get enough of that. 

Weirdness evolves

Book: Innovative Fiction: Stories for the Seventies

Authors: various

Pages: 224

Published: 1972 (Dell Publishing Co., Inc.)

The seventies, man. To me, they sound like Led Zeppelin, look like my parents’ faded high school senior portraits, and make me blink like I’m staring at a disco ball. I don’t know how much of the persevered nostalgia to believe; I wasn’t there.

But I’m most inclined to believe real time travelers like this collection of short stories, which have the authentic whiff of being written and published in the era. It’s interesting to see what qualified as innovative fiction from forty years ago, because to me, it seems like avant-garde prose shares a lot of the same underlying structural principles:

• Stream of consciousness narration that implies chaos and all its marginalia is important because it’s closer to the actual thinking process and thus a more authentic way of recording
• Screwing around with grammar, most notably making up new words and writing dialect phonetically
• Seemingly nonsense that represents a higher theme buried under stupid-sounding sentences
• Titles that crack me up (I’m going to start yelling, “Miss Euayla Is the Sweetest Thang!” [all emphasis and capitals and exclamation points the author’s] at random intervals to liven up my work of standing at a cash register)
• Multiple points of view that clash together like jagged pieces of glass to make the reader wonder what really happened and how

But just because authors play around the same way doesn’t mean they come up with the same thing, or even things that look remotely like each other. These stories still seem odd now, which means weird just keeps evolving. (Woo!)

Most of these stories I enjoyed on at least one level. Sheer absurdity carries a lot of them, like the first one “The Hyannis Port Story” about a guy who goes to install windows in a very vocally Goldwater-supporting house that’s right near the Kennedys’, and “The Jewbird,” which is about a talking bird who comes into a family’s house and starts integrating himself into the family before the dad decides he hates it and kicks it out. 

“Momentum,” the story I was most reluctant to read because it was presented in one big breath of stream of consciousness on two independent columns of each page that I had to zigzag both my eyeballs and brain through while still remembering the other side, surprised me at how touching I found it by the end. It’s about a guy going back to his college and trying to relive his glory days. This was the best example of how a weird structure can elevate a common subject; his rush of confessions and digressions revealed his nerves and mood swings right next to the everyday details that he had to pay just as much attention to in order to get through his visit.

A couple stories I just didn’t understand, whether I’m too removed from the political subtlties of the times or whatever a hobo in a wheelchair is supposed to mean as a symbol when he gets shipped across America in a big crate. Sometimes I just DON’T KNOW.

But that’s okay, because as weirdness evolves, so does your Constant Reader.

   

Dark tea-time of the soul

Book: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

Author: Douglas Adams

Published: 1987 (Pocket Books)

Pages: 306

Ah, humorous British sci fi. I will always compare you to Dr. Who. But don’t worry, Douglas Adams; I’m pretty sure you taught the Doctor a thing or two about looking adorably incompetent while actually knowing exactly what’s going on.

I found this paperback in my dorm’s “library,” by which I mean one of three bookshelves shoved into our common room along with the old (comfortable) furniture and boxy non-HD TV that nobody wanted out in the open. I went down there a lot of Friday nights last semester to soothe my raging weekend boredom and loneliness and also to watch The Soup.

A friend of mine introduced me to Adams in high school by lending me a giant paperback edition of all four (five?) Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novels. I loved them. I loved the absurdity-driven adventures and I loved the characters who seemed so human even if they were two-headed aliens and I loved Adam’s apparent delight in playing with logic—really playing, as in having fun with it and writing all this fun down in a way that only seem like random tangents until you get to the end of them.

He brought a lot of this to this book, minus a little bit of the wacky. This is a mystery about who killed a not-so-well-liked computer company CEO; was it his cellist sister, or her forgetful awkward boyfriend who writes music using intervals found in nature, or his old (very, very, old) professor who’s afraid to use his time machine apartment for more than petty magic tricks ever since he accidentally caused the extinction of the dodo, or the stupid magazine editor who loved his work but was pushed out of it when his dad the owner died, or the detective Dirk Gently himself while denying his psychic abilities and trying to tie everything in the world together while eating other people’s pizza? Or possibly the Electric Monk that’s programmed to believe everything?

SPOILER ALERT: It was aliens. In ghost form. Uh huh.

I liked this story, but my favorite part is the author photo, in which Adams is holding a tea cup and saucer and looking like he wants to shove said tea cup and saucer up the bum of whoever suggested it. I like to imagine him thinking, “I’M BRITISH WE GET IT.”