The novel I’m working on is heavy on the existentialism so I’m reading a lot of existentialist fiction. It’s the sort of thing my characters would read, as well.

First up was:

L’tranger by Albert Camus

-1- It gave on a queer, dreamlike impression, that blue-white glare overhead and all this blackness round one: the sleek black of the hearse, the dull black of the men’s clothes, and the silvery-black gashes in the road.

This is just a beautiful piece of description.

-2-He then asked if a “change of life,” as he called it, didn’t appeal to me, and I answered that one never changed his way of life; one life was as good as another, and my present one suited me quite well.

Such an existentialist point of view, and one with which I completely agree.

The bulk of the novel takes place over a few days at a beach and Camus really captures the sunlight and heat. Atmosphere is one of the areas in which I need the most work so I’m always on the lookout for people who capture it well.

-3- …the glare of the morning sun hit me in the eyes like a clenched fist
-4- It was like a furnace outside, with the sunlight splintering into flakes of fire on the sand and sea.
-5- For two hours the sun seemed to have made no progress; becalmed in a sea of molten steel.

And a few with which I agree:

-6- I could see that I got on his nerves; he couldn’t make me out, and, naturally enough, this irritated him.
-7- “Well, I rarely have anything much to say. So, naturally I keep my mouth shut.”
-8-As I usually do when I want to get rid of someone whose conversation bores me, I pretended to agree.

Number 7 up there reminds me of my favourite lyric of David Byrne’s:

You start a conversation; you can’t even finish it. You’re talking a lot but you’re not saying anything. When I have nothing to say my lips are sealed. Say something once, why say it again? –”Psychokiller”

As previously mentioned here, I’ve been reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbary. It’s from the fantastic Europa Editions , which consistently publishes little known (in the States) authors as well as uses the French flap binding that I’m in love with. Quality books in quality bindings–be still my heart.

But on to the review.

This book was written for thinkers, readers, writers, and anyone else who loves words and ideas and perhaps feels out-of-place in the world. As an avid reader, writer, and thinker, at times it seemed as though the book were written expressly for me. I can’t count the number of times I thought, “Yes, that’s exactly what it’s like!” in reference to a number of astute observations by our two protagonists–a young girl and a middle aged woman who have more in common than they know at the start.

A writer once observed, “The difference between real life and fiction is that fiction has to make sense.” Well, Muriel Barbery takes something that happens in real life but that typically comes off as contrived in fiction–the instant knowing a stranger is one with you–and gives it the certainty, without woowooness, of reality.

The ending is problematic for many people, and I can see why, but, as a writer, I can also see why Barbery chose to go the way she went. We can’t know if she chose to go that way because of practical reasons or for thematic reasons, but I chose to believe that her message was that once one reaches happiness–that is all one needs. That is the most perfect moment in one’s life.

Being that the entire book is about finding perfect moments, I can think of no better message to convey.

I’m still greatly enjoying The Elegance of the Hedgehog . Last night I had a dream I found a couple of hedgehogs and decided to keep them as pets. I can’t recall a book ever making its way into my dream before.

The story is about the families in a well-to-do apartment building in Paris, and is told from the point of views of two residents: a twelve year old prodigy and a intellectually vibrant but fiercely solitary concierge. (The only way to describe a concierge to the non-French is to say… um… they live at the entrance of the building and take note of who comes and goes. A sort of manager.)

Both the girl and the woman are far more than they seem outwardly, as they’re both far more intellectually alive than any of their counterparts.

But onto the quotes. These are from the little girl:

Apparently, now and again adults take the time to sit down and contemplate what a disaster their life is. They complain without understanding and, like flies constantly banging against the same old windowpane, they buzz around, suffer, waste away, get depressed then wonder how they got caught up in this spiral that is taking them where they don’t want to go. The most intelligent among them turn their malaise into a religion: oh, the despicable vacuousness of bourgeois existence! … I despise this false lucidity that comes with age. The truth is that they are just like everyone else: nothing more than kids without a clue about what had happened to them…
And yet there’s nothing to understand. The problem is that children believe what adults say and, once they’re adults themselves, they exact their revenge by deceiving their own children. “Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is’ is the universal lie that everyone is supposed to believe. Once you become an adult and you realise it’s not true, it’s too late. The mystery remains intact, but all your available energy has long ago been wasted on stupid things. All that’s left is to anesthetize yourself by trying to hide the fact that you can’t find any meaning in your life, and then, the better to convince yourself, you deceive your own children.

I love how European authors are allowed to be as bleak and grouchy as they want. It makes me happy to know someone is allowed to be.

…no one seems to have thought of the fact that if life is absurd, being a brilliant success has no greater value than being a failure.

Let us just say that the idea of struggling to make my way in a world of privileged, affluent people exhausted me before I even tried…There was only one thing I wanted: to be left alone, without too many demands upon my person, so that for a few moments each day I might be allowed to assuage my hunger [for knowledge/books] .

My mother, who has read all of Balzac and quotes Flaubert at every dinner, is living proof every day of how education is a raving fraud.

The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath’s fictionalized autobiography about descending into madness (depression). The first time I read it, though I’d dealt with depression a few times already, I still didn’t ‘get’ it. This time around I absolutely got it, for better or worse. The quotes I’m putting up are the ones that most accurately capture the experience of depression, from my point of view.

Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more.

I felt very low. I had been unmasked only that morning by Jay Cee herself, and I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn’t hide the truth much longer.

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

For me it was eight.

I started adding up all the things I couldn’t do.

Andrew Solomon talks about this in Noonday Demon–about how one begins to feel crushed by all the things one cannot do–even things one doesn’t want to do, but will never be able to.

One of the books in the series on depression I’m reading is William Styron’s Darkness Visible , which is his account of his own battle with depression. This bit describes some of the phenomena caused by depression:

But my behaviour was really the result of the illness, which had progressed far enough to produce some of its most famous and sinister hallmarks: confusion, failure of mental focus and lapse of memory. At a later stage my entire mind would be dominated by anarchic disconnections; as I have said, there was now something that resembled bifurcation of mood: lucidity of sorts in the early hours of the day, gathering murk in the afternoon and evening.

Styron’s experience of the gathering murk is dissimilar to the typical horrible-morning-fine-evening experience of most depressives.

What I like about this excerpt are the bits and bobs that come along with depression–memory loss, loss of voice, general confusion. It’s not as though depression messes up your life by making you think: Iamdepressed, Iamdepressed, Iamdepressed ad infinitum, therefore rendering all other thought impossible–it’s more of a dense fog, where no matter which way you turn you can’t find your way out. Then, whilst trying to find your way home, someone asks you questions and expects you to engage. I’m sorry, but this fog–as amorphous as it is–requires all my attention.

The Nightingale Papers by David Nokes (published by the fantastic Hesperus Press) is a delightful novel about the world of academics. I’m not normally a person for whom the word ‘delightful’ is a compliment, but this time it is a compliment and a big one at that. Novels about academics are some of my favourites– Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon and Changing Places by David Lodge are both excellent–and this one lives up to my somewhat high expectations.

The story focuses on a gathering of scholars of an eighteenth-century English poet, Madoc, in the somewhat decrepit house once owned by the poet but now the property of a religious order. One of the main speakers is to be the most famous of Madoc scholars, Reginald McWhinnie, but he’s nowhere to be found. It’s thought that he’d discovered lost bits and bobs of manuscript– and an American attendee, rather desperate to publish something…anything, believes those papers are hidden in the house in which they’re staying. Off she goes to snoop. And what does she discover?

She’s not the only conniving one–every character has one reason or another for getting up to mischief in this black comedy–an excellent satire of what goes on in the ivory tower. Done in a way that only the English seem capable of doing. Wonderful stuff.

Hesperus Press is one of my favourite publishers. Besides printing hard-to-find classics, they put out a lively selection of contemporary authors. This week’s Sunday Funnies is from The Nightingale Papers by David Nokes, a nuanced comedy about academics, reading and writing.

Quotes:

A group of literary critics is far more assiduous in unravelling clues, deciphering plots and analysing subconscious motives than any provincial constabulary.

He had long ago abandoned the idea that there was any point in reading books. Perfectly useless–that was their essential charm. He’d given up reading new books altogether. Someone, he couldn’t remember who, had recommended he read a novel by some Jewish chap. Turned out to be all about wanking. ‘Whacking-off’ he called it. Summed up modern literature perfectly. [My sentiments exactly about Portnoy’s Complaint.]

*’Not that there was anything particularly wrong with Marxism as a concept, McWhinnie grinned. It just didn’t work in practice. Much the same as you could say about Christianity; all right as a concept. I trust I don’t offend you,’ he tugged at his jacket-cuffs.
‘Not in the slightest.’
McWhinnie looked disappointed.

*For him scholarship had been a refuge: he valued literature not as a reflection of reality, but as an escape route from it. … [In literature] nature was methodised, the poet was always a prince, and the scholar found himself elevated to an all-powerful magus reducing the randomness of events to a dream of traditional order.

My current for fun reading is Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog , which would appear has been written especially for me. I haven’t connected so deeply with a book since William Nicholson’s The Society of Others , a wondrous allegory for life’s journey to find meaning.

Then I came across this:

I have read so many books.
And yet, like most autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gained from them.There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of nowhere, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading–and then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates, and no matter how often I reread the same lines, they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading, and I see myself as some mad old fool who thinks her stomach is full because she’s been attentively reading the menu. Apparently this combination of ability and blindness is a symptom exclusive to the autodidact. Deprived of the steady guiding hand that any good education provides, the autodidact possesses nonethless the gift of freedom and conciseness of thought, where official discourse would put up barriers and prohibit adventure.

Yup. Written just for me.