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. 

Pretty but not much else

Book: Come Together, Fall Apart

Author: Cristina Henriquez

Published: 2006 (Riverhead Books)

Pages: 306

It’s nice.

I wish I had more to say about this book. But really, “nice” is the only word that fits. These short stories and novellas are about relationships between lovers, families and, occasionally, a little bit, about the political upheavals going on around them. They’re all set in Panama, which is the most interesting thing about them and saves them from collapsing under all the symbolic weight placed on such light words. These are the kind of stories that are meant to Mean Something.

I’m talking like I didn’t like them. I did. I thought they were…nice. There’s that word again. They’re floaty and dreamy and don’t leave much behind but they’re nice to read.

A note on the tag “old books:” When I use that, I’m not necessarily talking about books written twenty or more years ago (although there are a fair number of those in my reading pile); I’m talking about books I’ve personally owned (one way or another) for at least nine months and have yet to read because of everything else that distracts me. This book is one of those, a small hardback priced at $2.99 from a warehouse sort of store in my college town that was labeled with a giant banner that just said BOOKS and contained massive amounts of discounted, well, books. I went into that store once or twice, went into spasms of glee, but now they’re closed, so no more from them.