Life in different mirrors - The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk

The narrator of Orhan Pamuk’s first book is a young Italian scholar who is captured by Turkish pirates. At Constantinople he is sold at auction, eventually passing into the service of a man who looks identical to him and is as eager to gain the sultan’s ear as he is to learn the ways of the West. The two men embark on an intense journey of self-examination, vacillating between equal forces of attraction and repulsion. Pamuk explores the complexities of these emotions in sentences which are equally nuanced and are rich with detail. The White Castle anticipates the themes of cultural identity and doubleness offered by the host of narrators in My Name is Red. That book’s detective story is replaced here with the story court intrigue, and, with only two main characters, this slimmer novel has a more intense focus on individual identity.

Out of a vacuum

The Emperor’s Children, by Claire Messud (Picador, £14.99)

For this thirty-one year-old, Claire Messud’s story of thirty-somethings in 2001 New York made for mortifying reading. Seeing something myself in each of the three main characters I was left wondering at the narcissistic vacuity of my own life. Was I like Danielle, a producer for PBS, who, in spite of an earnest desire to achieve greater, nobler things, makes when-liposuction-goes-wrong documentaries. Or was I more like Marina, paralysed in ever-forthcoming cultural commentary on how we dress our children, The Emperor’s Children Have No Clothes by a risk aversion created by paternal expectations and the suspicion that she is pitifully ordinary. Of course, wondering which character is one’s sembable is not the best way of reading a novel. It is, however, one taken by the novel’s critic, Julius Clarke, who reads his life through War and Peace and whom we meet not knowing “whether to be Pierre or Natasha, the solitary brooding loner or the vivacious social butterfly”. A dilemma, if not an approach, I can also understand.

Presiding over these three is Murray Thwaite, Marina’s father, liberal commentator in chief, and the novel’s titular emperor. Into his tranquil imperium in the manner of Tolstoy’s Napoleon (don’t worry, Julius will guide) comes Ludovic Seely, bent on a satirical revolution and the imperial denuding. In contrast to the main characters, Seely is singled out for his sense of purpose. Also recently arrived in Manhattan is the book’s real Pierre, the like-wise chubby, Bootie Tubb, college drop-out and supplicant at the throne of his uncle Murray for guidance in an autodidact’s quest for truth.

For 370 pages these characters conduct their military campaigns and love affairs against and with each other with about as much consequence as Anna and Vronsky would in the Manhattan Tom Wolfe saw as he channelled Lionel Trilling. “… Anna would just move in with Vronsky, and people in their social set would duly note the change in their Scully & Scully address books; the arrival of the baby, if they chose to have it, would occasion no more than a grinning snigger in the gossip columns.” All very amusing and to little apparent purpose; it is to Messud’s credit that we care about her self-avowedly vacuous characters.

In only 60 pages the novel’s characters have to deal with the negative shadow that has loomed since we learned that this is 2001. It is around 9/11 that the novel’s work takes place, but the introduction of this event is not a desperate attempt to salvage it from Wolfian irrelevance. Rather Messud uses 9/11 to contrast this and the daily vacuity of her characters with the incongruity of the historical event.

The knowledge that this recent event must feature in Messud’s book means that we move through her book wary of the asbestos of cliché. Such wariness is justified as while Messud avoids clichés around the actual event, she is guilty of some clumsy foreshadowing. Having established that we are in Manhattan in 2001, it is unnecessary to force our attention on a plane as it appears “to weave among the buildings, a light flashing between lights” in late July. By the time we get to September 9^th one character’s disfigurement in a nightclub is discussed in terms of the earth-shattering.

“It’s surreal. The kind of thing you can’t really believe happened to someone you know. You can’t believe he lived through that. I mean, it was early Saturday morning. Where were we, you know, while that was going on? At suppertime on Friday, it hadn’t happened, and now he’s scarred for life. It makes you think, doesn’t it?”

As much as such passages grate, they highlight the emptiness of hyperbole and, if they grate, they do so for a reason consistent with the idea that the historical event is incongruous. These people talk, I talk, as if anything out of the day-to-day is of historical significance. Life is lived from one day to another, and most of them are pretty much the same; a friend being disfigured is significant; language rises to the occasion. Having said this about the relatively ordinary, what language is there for the truly extraordinary? The point does not seem to me that language has been debased, rather that it was never sufficient. As a consequence though the extraordinary can only be described in the language of the ordinary and of earlier vacuities. The problem not only for Messud but any form with a sense of aesthetic decorum is that Marina’s hyperbole is in too close a proximity to events of genuine historical significance known not to catch in the airways like literary asbestos.

Despite these grating passages, it is just this everyday vacuity and its relationship to the historical event that Messud’s book explores and where its success lies. The difficulties her characters face in being extraordinary, of making a mark in what they perceive “are almost criminally uninteresting” times, are frequently given an almost Jamesian complexity.:

She, who had felt she saw so clearly that it hurt, had felt that the truth, crystalline, was, with Murray, granted her (though not through his help, or anything he did: but just by his presence; as though, indeed, he were but a part of her that had been lost, a magnificent Platonic epiphany repeated, and daily repeated: this, surely, was love!), felt, now, that the weight of emotion lay like a veil, a fine mist. No exchange, however simple, was untainted.

Here vacuity is given weight and depth. This is of no historical consequence, however grand or powerful the feeling, but in giving weight and depth to the historically inconsequential, Messud reveals the patterns and textures of her character’s consciousness, not as they are during the extraordinary, but as they usually are, as we usually are, among the day-to-day and ordinary.

The exploration of vacuity is a risky business over 400 hundred pages, and one which Messud does not always pull off. The benefit of Julius to the plot largely appears to be that he has read War and Peace. When Danielle is mystified by the intensity of his love affair, we are less so but instead wonder why it is there at all. But like Tolstoy in War and Peace, Messud’s book says something about history, in particular the incongruity of the historical event and its relationship to everyday life and preoccupations. Day-to-day experience suggests that history happens to other people. If it is the task of the novel to explore consciousness, how it veils and mists taint events then it is the banal vacuity that is of greater importance.

Trying to write an essay about “Pierre wandering after the fall of Moscow, about what it meant to be alone after an historical event”, Bootie finds that “he couldn’t imagine being in the middle of a historical event….” Bootie, like all Messud’s characters, will learn what it is to be in the middle of a historic event. Vacuities remain nevertheless. Most hypocritical is the need to mask that vacuity, the historical vacuity of daily life. To the extent that ordinarily we choose our roles, they are chosen in that vacuum, without regard to the historical incongruity. Messud both exposes and celebrates such vacuities.

The Saffron Kitchen, by Yasmin Crowther

When the orphaned Saeed arrives in London to live with his aunt Maryam, he sets off a series of events which forces her to confront the past she left in Iran half a century earlier. Difficult as Maryam may find this, she at least knows her past. Her journey upsets the complacent life of her daughter, Sara, as she learns about the woman who is her mother. Told in their alternating voices, Crowther’s debut novel is full of the colours and smells of metropolitan England and the mountains of Iran. But in the dislocated lives of Maryam and Sara, it is the cupboards of London which are “filled with henna, herbs, dried figs and limes” and the smells of the Tube that are found in the fast-growing cities of Iran. While Crowther’s attempt to evoke mood and place occasionally overwhelms her narrative, The Saffron Kitchen marks the collision between a past where choices were too few and a present where choice itself is taken for granted.

Book Review - Donne: The Reformed Soul, by John Stubbs

John Donne is, after Shakespeare, perhaps our most familiar poet of the English Renaissance. Yet his best known insight – “that no man is an island” – comes not from his poems, nor even from his sermons, but from his private meditations.

This is perhaps how Donne would have wished it. Despite the urging of his admirers, he felt that his early poems were “Satrique thornes … growne/ where seeds of better Arts, were early sown”. These were the poems of a young man observing the world as he tried to find his place in it, and whose career, first as a government administrator, and later as a clergyman, might be damaged by their erotic and satiric tone. Yet, as this new biography suggests, this private thought was the “great thought at the heart of Donne’s life,” and one by which we can understand the man and his poems.

For young man and elderly clergyman alike finding a place in the world was difficult. Born in 1572 to a Catholic family of saintly pedigree (the corporeal relics of his ancestor, Thomas More, were macabre heirlooms), he was part of a growing middle-class which sought to distinguish its sons from unruly apprentices with a university education. Despite diligence at Oxford, the Oath of Allegiance to the Reformed Church prevented Donne from graduating. After a spell at Lincoln’s Inn, where he was both studious and a frequenter of plays, writing those “Satirique thornes” in the bargain, he fought with the glamourous but ill-fated Earl of Essex against the Spanish. Surviving these wars, he seemed to find a place as secretary to Elizabeth’s favourite lawyer.

Yet Donne was not immune to exacerbating his ambiguous social position. The scandal of his marriage to Ann More without her father’s consent cost him his job and, briefly, his liberty. For fifteen years his talents were wasted as stigma mired him and his family in shabby penury. With the “Pseudo-Martyr,” ironically a treatise on Catholics who make their lives in England more difficult that it need be, he wrote himself into the clergy and rapidly ascended to the most prominent pulpit in the land as Dean of St Paul’s where he navigated the religious controversies the past Reformation and the coming Civil War.

Stubbs strategy of ordering the precarious complexity of his subject by treating him not as an island but as part of the historical mainland allows him tell “the story,” taking us from our familiar London and bringing to life the concerns of Donne’s. Thus, as much as he evokes the solace Donne found in letter writing and letters, which “more than kisses … mingle souls,” the adventures with Essex and the machinations of the court read with the pace of a good thriller, while comedy is to be found in Donne’s apoplectic father-in-law.

The portrait that emerges from this detailed research is one from which our multitasking, Ritalin-deficient age has much to learn, and Donne is presented much as we might wish to see ourselves: tolerant, socially responsible, progressive even, hardworking, while also possessed of the meditative resources to see beyond momentary personal circumstance.

But however apt Stubbs’ approach may be to telling a life’s story, it leaves him at a disadvantage when placing the poetry in that story. As much as his reading of “Love’s Exchanges” as a subtle protest against the torture practiced by the government Donne served fits with his general portrait, a lot depends on the suggestion that “it was possibly written during his [Donne’s] time as apparatchik”. While Stubbs acknowledges the difficulties of dating Donne’s poetry, with no argument to tie specific poems to specific times, significant aspects of his portrait, however attractive, are confined to possibility.

The question is do you buy the picture knowing that it may not be entirely accurate. For me the answer is yes. After rejecting the “Satirique thornes” of his earlier days, Donne urges that we “seek ourselves in ourselves”. Significantly this urging takes place in a verse-letter, and above all Stubbs’ biography is a profound commitment to writing as a process of knowing one’s self and knowing that we are not so many islands.

Book Review - The Road by Cormac McCarthy

This book had me waking my flatmate as I screamed in my sleep. Do not be put off such nocturnal trauma; this is a rewarding and vital book. The father and son at its centre are “pilgrims” and “mendicant friars” in the “cold glaucoma” of a sunless, wasted America. Scavenging the hopefully abandoned houses and stores of a more abundant age, decent shoes are their first priority after food. Two bullets, one apiece for father and son, are their material defence against the gangs of roadreapers who would rape the son and eat them both. Language itself is not immune to this destruction, “the names of things slowly following those things into oblivion”. Yet, however spare the language McCarthy uses to imagine the absence of God and words, his is of our abundant age. Through it he has created a tale whose fearful beauty offers a glimmering hope and reminds us that our civilization, any civilization, is as wafer thin as a “host” and as fleeting as words.

Spilling his seed on rocky ground – The Diviners by Rick Moody

Early on in Rick Moody’s The Diviners, action-hero-turned-movie-producer, Thaddeus Griffen, extemporizes the plot of a miniseries of the same title. From the departure of the Mongolian hoards from their drought stricken plains to the founding of Las Vegas, this quest for water is a multigenerational TV epic of love, mysteries, survival, and the quenching of a thirst which you, the putative viewer, share.

This epic tale is conceived by Griffen as he seduces and covers for his co-worker, Annabel Duffy, who has lost the script demanded by their donut-munching boss, Vanessa Meandro. Thaddeus views on the creative process in terms of pornography, and he suggests that Annabel stop working on the biopic of the wife of the Marquis de Sade and concentrate on the story that “gets you off [italics Moody’s]. The one where all the differences in the world, are obliterated in the reprise of the come shot of creation, the big grand unified come shot that made the conditions that made you and me and art and commerce and religion”.

"The Diviners" is Thaddeus’s come shot, though one suspects that he’s getting off on being drunk, on being charming, and generally on being Thaddeus Griffen. Other characters are only slightly less self-obsessed, but these too are propelled by Moody’s sustained exuberant prose which has the speed and punch of a pinball. Just be thankful this energy is contained within a book. So, as the rest of the world counts the chads in Dade County, we arrive in New York in the hands of a writer who can handle the PR girls, the recording artists, the dot-com bust, and a bipolar bike courier, all of whom want a piece of "The Diviners".

What follows in the 31 chapters, plus opening and closting titles, is a display of linguistic acrobatics as Moody jumps from style to style, bringing us new characters to the very end. Looking up from the somersaults, we see marriages break-up from the perspective of autistic children, childhood from the perspective of a group of dialectians who haven't quite left the schoolyard, and identity reconstituted as a patient emerges from her coma.

Meandro buys the Thadster’s story and, come the six page pitch to the networks, barely interrupted by paragraphs let alone the exec at the other end of the phone line, proclaims “The Diviners” to be “the perfect narrative representation of the thirst of the mass television audience”. There is something here for the hundreds of millions who just didn’t know how thirsty they were until those Mongol hoards tore into their living rooms, something for every group that feels disenfranchised by the media elites of the Northeast and the West Coast. This is, as Meandro puts it “a millennialist vision … a reconstituted Jesus strolling down Fifth Avenue, laying waste to readers of the New York Times”.

And herein lies the problem with Moody’s book. His book is about thirst for meaning and the vacuity of the televisual metaphor. Yet, having established that these are deliberately vacuous in order that they can be filled with anyone and everyone’s content (think terrorist soap-opera, think Lost) and so achieve the widest possible audience, he is stuck with it as his own deliberately bloated yet curiously flat metaphor.

Of course there are ironies in the divinational metaphor. In her list of parched wanderers of the deserts of meaning, Meandro omits those media elites of east and west, who see every possible spin-off and marketing scam to hustle the thirsty brethren of the American interior, but feel the thirst to be slaked themselves yet lack the struggle for survival of the metaphorical diviners and religious meaning of their religiously minded market. These media elites are the real subject of Moody’s book, but Moody refuses to explore them, and beyond abstract meaning, he cannot say what thirst possesses his Gawker-reading media bunnies. Instead, Moody borrows a technique more cinematic than televisual to offer up the cliché of his disparate and desperate characters engaged in the same activity. This is done so well you can almost here the elegiac soundtrack, and if you didn’t get the concept of redemption through shared interest, we’re talking Thanksgiving.

The interest in question is, of course, watching television, in this case the hit series The Werewolves of Fairfield County, in which the wealthy and leisured of Connecticut have mutated and breakout into lupine madness every full moon. In the midst of uncaring corpocracy they are forced to develop a moral code lest they be discovered in which the stronger look after the weak, the older look after the younger. In terms of meaning the werewolves have it all, a struggle to survive but also a dynamic sense of belonging. No pampered neurotics thirsty for a way of understanding the pain of their existence here.

Yet having felt a thirst and divined the quencher, Moody refuses to see what happens to the characters who he clearly loves and has made considerable effort to make us love after they slaked their thirst. Do they find God? Do they join the SLBC? Do they become werewolves? We never find out and they are abandoned so that we can breathlessly meet more new characters.

On the one hand, Moody is gesturing to serious issues: the divisions of the United States, the vacuity of our modern lives, and the thought that we might want something more than cars, bars, and moviestars. Yet, on the other, Moody's book is more about his exuberance and showcasing his undoubted stylistic ingenuity as are hastened towards Moody's come-shot of creation. The thing is if there is a come-shot, then it's only been a hand job.

Announcing the Vladimir Nabokov Reading Project

Le tout Manchester is reading celebrated Russo-American writer, Vladimir Nabokov. Le tout being, well, my neighbour, Ben, and John at the Cornerhouse (both Pale Fire), and Dr Biswell (Pnin). As a service to readers, The Manual is embarking on the Vladimir Nabokov Reading Project. Full attention will ensure that reader will be able to hold their own in literary conversations across the North West. This service is vitally needed as due to shortages of Pale Fire at Waterstone's, Mancunians were left without the supply of linguistic wonders which, delicate things that they are, is as vital to their lives as premium gin and cheap red wine.

First up is Pnin. The rest will follow, but The Real Life of Sebastian Knight will have to wait till I get my copy back from Luke. If you want to know more about Vladimir Nabokov or buy the books, you know were Wikipedia and Amazon are to be found. Better resources may follow as the project continues.

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

With Pnin we are introduced to Russian émigré, Timofey Pnin. Tenuously untenured at a New England college, he muddles through 1950s America with a variety of English all of his own. Mocked and loved on campus in equal measure, he has an acute sense of the ridiculous of the world and of himself. For Pnin sorrow is "the only thing in the world people really possess" and his planned courses will show that "the history of man is the history of pain". Alongside these bleak courseplans, we are treated two parties, a former wife convinced of her own glamour, the visit of her insular, wunderkind son, and Pnin's wonderful driving. As with much of Nabokov, there are dopelgangers aplenty causing Pnin (and us) to ask which is the genuine article. Anyone who knows himself to be fallible and slightly absurd will love Pnin, and will be grateful to Nabokov for making this invention a reality.

More blogs on Pnin

Read about Jim Story's encounter with a real life Pnin.