Bluestalking

Guardian 1000 Reads: Death in Venice by Thomas Mann [530]

 

    Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, 1912

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”

 

Death in Venice is a novella with a simple plot: aging composer  Gustav von Aschenbach - in his fifties, though he seems much older, bent over by melancholy verging on despair - has lost his artistic inspiration. Unable to write, over the course of several agonizing days he wanders the streets at all hours, winding up in unsavory districts where an unnamed menace lies - menace in the form of a sneering, redheaded man who never approaches him but nevertheless represents, or reflects, danger and potential doom.

 

Eventually, Aschenbach decides a change of scenery may help revive him, rekindling his lost artistic fervor, so he packs is bags and winds up in beautiful Venice. Only, when he arrives, and is ferried to the Lido by gondola (the Lido being a common landing point for tourists seeking lodging in the city) the gondolier is yet another redheaded, sneering man who all but kidnaps von Aschenbach, refusing to let him out elsewhere when the older man expresses trepidation about the gondolier's attitude and intention.

 When they arrive at the Lido, however, the gondolier disappears, knowing the authorities were there waiting for him, to arrest him for being the only gondolier in Venice without a license. Von Aschenbach has thus been taxied for free. It's a foreshadowing of things to come, of the sadness and longing yet to be, once again accompanied by the presence of a redheaded man.

After a few restless days in Venice, in which he still can't manage to settle, von Aschenbach is on the verge of leaving when he sees a beautiful young man: a man whose spirit and handsomeness begins to consume him. He becomes obsessed; he cannot look away.

Though they never meet, the young man is very aware of the attention he's drawing. No doubt he feels flattered. He makes himself visible, coming near von Aschenbach but only so near his features are clearly visible, never making eye contact or acknowledging his presence.

While in Venice a cholera epidemic sweeps through, killing and sickening residents and visitors alike. Yet von Aschenbach cannot leave the beautiful man. Then, the ending, but I won't spoil it.

 

Why a top 1000?

It's a powerful work about artists and their inner demons, beautifully written. That's the simplistic answer. Here's a bit of the background behind the story, from Wikipedia:

 

"Mann's original intention was to write about "passion as confusion and degradation", after having been fascinated by the true story of Goethe's love for 18-year-old Baroness Ulrike von Levetzow, which had led Goethe to write his Marienbad Elegy."

 

 

The degradation, no doubt, centered on the handsome young man's beauty and awareness of von Aschenbach's attraction, yet he kept himself aloof making the older man seem a fool.

Later, after the novel's publication, Mann's wife Katia tells the background:

 

"All the details of the story, beginning with the man at the cemetery, are taken from experience … In the dining-room, on the very first day, we saw the Polish family, which looked exactly the way my husband described them: the girls were dressed rather stiffly and severely, and the very charming, beautiful boy of about 13 was wearing a sailor suit with an open collar and very pretty lacings. He caught my husband's attention immediately. This boy was tremendously attractive, and my husband was always watching him with his companions on the beach. He didn't pursue him through all of Venice—that he didn't do—but the boy did fascinate him, and he thought of him often … I still remember that my uncle, Privy Counsellor Friedberg, a famous professor of canon law in Leipzig, was outraged: "What a story! And a married man with a family!"

 

I suppose if Katia was okay with it there's little else to be said...

 

Personal reaction:

Though overwrought at times, Mann's prose is gorgeous, his expression of despair and longing palpable. I'd planned to read it someday but I'm glad this project made certain I turned that vague intention into action.

I felt for von Aschenbach. Who among us hasn't been in his shoes? If you can honestly say you've never loved from afar and been rejected, I'd be shocked. But then, how easy it is to idolize those we'll never know, whose appearance and manner attract us but we'll never know their faults:

 

“Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes — who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the impression of disinterest either because of morals or because of a mental abnormality. Between them there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion and also a kind of tense respect. Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge.”

 

 

Adaptations:

 

• A film starring Dirk Bogarde was made by LuchinoVisconti in 1971. A second film, more freely adapted from Mann's novella, was Love and Death on Long Island   (1997) starring John Hurt as a middle-aged writer who becomes obsessed with a young actor portrayed by Jason Priestley.
• Benjamin Britten transformed Death in Venice  into an opera, his last, in 1973.
• It was made into a ballet by John Neumeier for his Hamburg Ballet company in December 2003.

 

Next Read:

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House by Eric Hodgins

Julian Barnes - A Life with Books

Julian Barnes - A Life with Books. Jonathan Cape/Random House, 2012. 27 pp.

[Personal copy.]

 

Novelist, essayist, Booker Prize winner and all around genius writer Julian Barnes published this tiny essay for charity. I found out about it and was able to buy a copy from 'cross the pond.

It's about what a little book weevil Barnes is, how he's been collecting since he was a very young man and all his trials and tribulations thereof and forthwith. It's adorable and darling finding out he's as book mad as all that, especially his admitting he looked through some of his older brother's books avidly, because there were nude drawings in the texts of Ancient Roman works!

Julian Barnes?

Yes, pets, Julian Barnes.

 

"Over the next decade or so - from the late Sixties to the late Seventies - I became a furious book-hunter, driving to the market towns and cathedral cities of England in my Morris Traveller and loading it with books bought at a rate which far exceeded any possible reading speed."

 

That sounds vaguely familiar...

 

"I bought with a hunger which I recognise, looking back, was a kind of neediness: well, bibliomania is a known condition."

 

Yes, yes it is!

And on he goes, for 27 pages of pure bliss. If you live in the UK it's only £ 1.99. For us in the Colonies, unfortunately, all the king's taxes of course make it much higher - $ 7.00 or so, I seem to recall pp but don't quote me on that. Mayhaps we should dump a bit more tea in the harbor, lads...

It's just such a joy. A complete and utter joy. Grab hold of one while you can.

 

 

 

 

First Love by Joyce Carol Oates

 

 

First Love: A Gothic Tale by Joyce Carol Oates, Illus. by Barry Moses. The Echo Press/W.W. Norton 1996. 86 pp    [Library copy.]

I'm a fervent fan of Joyce Carol Oates, though I'll admit I don't appreciate all her works equally. I hate to use the judgment "like," as it isn't professional in a critical approach to a book, so I'll say I partially appreciated 'First Love,' with a few reservations. (And I do wish more reviews focused more on criticism and not direct "like" or "dislike." Things are seldom so cut and dried, though I've been lazy in that exact same way myself, so I'm not without sin.)

Even considering my familiarity with her work, I find it difficult to write a review of 'First Love.' On the one hand it's delightfully Gothic, a twisty-turny little book with a bite. On the other the characterizations left me a bit hollow. Or, I should say, the characters themselves felt hollow, under-developed. Did she intend to keep her distance? Could be. If so, I don't feel it particularly worked. Perhaps she misjudged.

I know the theme of a near-incestuous relationship between cousins Jared, Jr. (the seminary student home from school due to his mental issues) and his 11-year old cousin Josie, is upsetting and some will dismiss the entire book due to their distaste of this part of the plot. But, in this case, I believe it was more an issue of ultimate control between the older and younger cousins, with sexual undertones, almost vampyric control actually. Yes, he stripped her naked and washed her and yes he called her "good girl, good girl" before drawing blood first from himself and then her, blood which he blended in ways I won't say. And yes, that's creepy. But that's the point; it was meant to be creepy, to illustrate what was either a mental illness or more a possession of the "Someone call an exorcist" kind. It could go either way. Or both, I guess:

"Mother said tartly, "Sick?' --- what's 'sick'? Who is 'well'? Do you imagine, if you or I were minutely examined, we would be one hundred percent 'well'?"

Good point.

Still and all, the most hollow character, who is very active behind the scene, is Josie's mother. She was beautiful, had left her husband, got a job and almost certainly had an affair. But we have only the barest knowledge of her.

And the religion: the different portraits of Christ, plus the symbolic snake, in this case both sexual and the traditional evil introduced into Eden - the black snake Jared, Jr. claimed to have transformed himself into, take that as you will. Not to mention the family legacy of the men becoming Reverends, and the italicizing of the "Reverend's house." Religion was all over the place, never seen as a positive thing but rather a force to be dealt with and accepted.

Overall, I would recommend the book to Oates fans as well as those into the Gothic. Others less attuned to books delving into evil you may want to give this one a pass. I'm still digesting it, myself, all 86 tiny pages of it. I debated between 3 and 4 stars for far too long, deciding on three for its incomplete coherence and somewhat undeveloped characters.

 

Blog Reviews:

Of Books and reading

Capricious Reader

 

Write of Way: How to Write a Novel, Pt 2: Borrow, Just Don't Steal

Plots, Plots, Plots!

When last I wrote we were discussing Freytag's Triangle, the classic framework for storytelling. At the end of the post I mentioned it's perfectly okay to borrow general ideas from other writers. In fact, all writers do it, if they realize it or not.

It's said there are only so many plots, anyway, right? Check this out, from Internet Public Library.  It gathers different opinions on how  many plots there actually are. Give it a study. See what appeals and take notes in the writing notebook I assume you all have. If not, I'll wait while you run get one. Yes, that one is good enough! And I like your sparkly pen.

 

Clearly, the answer to the plot question depends whom you ask but you can't copyright an idea. If you decide to write a book about face-eating zombies someone else can, too. They just can't steal your exact plot or characters.

However, you may get very close to character names and plot if you're writing a parody. The rules are much less stringent for that and you must also declare it's a parody in the title or on the cover, somewhere prominent. That you can do. Check the legalities for sure with an expert - a lawyer would be great - but parodies are exempt from a lot of the "rules."

You can also write an homage, or an updated version, of a work in the public domain - a work that's out of copyright. You may re-work the story, take the major plot points or framework, write a prequel or sequel, etc. Lots of writers do this with Dickens, Shakespeare, Austen, etc. If that's your thing, go for it. It's there and it's set up for you. Dig out a minor character and re-tell from that person's standpoint. Or add that person's backstory. Whatever. If no one owns the intellectual property you can play in that sandbox.

But you better make sure that sandbox is public domain. If in doubt, ask a librarian or a lawyer who deals in literary matters.

 

Deconstruction:

This is a whole 'nother animal, a more complex study of other authors' works. But here's the general idea: 

1).    As you're reading - and if you're aiming to be a writer you'd better be reading a LOT, or give it up now - in your favorite genre or genres, choose a book you particularly admire.

2).    Deconstruct the book. If possible, buy a cheap copy you can literally pull apart.

3).    Using Freytag's Triangle, label the sections with the corresponding points from the triangle.

4).    Study how the writer has or has not followed the Triangle.

5).    If you believe the book could have been arranged better, switch around the sections.

6).     Skim or read back through the book.

7).    Mark up the book. Literally edit it for anything extraneous. Is there a character who contributes nothing to the story? Are there unnecessary digressions, is there too much description we don't need to know? Get out the red pen.

8).    Now that it's bare bones, read the entire book over. Study what's left, what it is you still love about the book.

9).    Outline the book, as if you'd been the author but with your own changes. Write down, in that writer's notebook of yours, all the strong points you'd like to use later.

 

 There's your example of how one specific writer wrote one specific book, how he or she sweated it out, what worked and what didn't. Now do it again with other books you like, with ideas you may want to blend to make your own book, ideas you already have, maybe.

Find a book you love for the characters, one for the plot, one for the style, etc... You'll need background in all these things. Combine the best of the best into something you can call your own. Then you'll have your formula. Your personal Freytag's Triangle for your own book or books. There may come a day you won't have to do that anymore, when you'll just do it all automatically. Or you may need to do this between everything you write. Doesn't matter. You only need to please yourself. Oh, and hopefully a readership.

When you've done this a few times, and feel more confident, you'll have essentially taken a grad school course in writing. Heck, you'll be on your way to an MFA, without the overblown price.

 

This is so simple it's simplistic, as far as the whole principle of deconstruction goes but unless you're an English Ph.D. or a philosopher, what do you need it to be?

All you want is to pull apart a book and study how it was constructed. It teaches you how an author's mind works, how books are written. If you want to go into it more deeply, by all means do. There are loads of books out there on the deconstruction of texts. You can go into it as far as you'd like, tracing all the allusions, the philosophical origins, etc. If you're bent on writing a complex psychological thriller that's a great way to go about it.

This is a lot of work but it's probably a lot less frustrating than starting five different novels, liking none of them, getting depressed and wanting to give up. Any of this sound familiar? It does to me and the four or five partial manuscripts I have on various computers. You're taking a proven formula that worked, pulling it apart and studying it, instead of banging your head against the wall trying to reinvent the wheel. What's there to lose?

And, you know, you can do this with novellas, too. Or short stories. Or creative nonfiction/articles/essays... Anything. Whatever you want to write, in whatever genre, there are examples. Limitless examples, all crying out "Study me...."

I hope I've given you a thing or two to think about in your own writing. Wherever you are - unless you're making money and have status - I've been there. It can be pure agony. Let's suffer together, shall we?

 

For my Great Writing Weekend next month I'm already planning to get moving on a novella - start short, I say. Make it compact, then either shorten it for a short story, finish for a novella or extend for a novel. Just get that framework and outline going and run with it. I only have a week; I have to consider the best usage of my time.

For my next trick, maybe I'll do an online deconstruction. I plan to do it anyway, for myself. I'll think about it. After all, it could just come in handy for my August excursion...

 

 

Review: Dave Eggers - A Hologram for the King

A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers

McSweeney's; First Edition edition (June 19, 2012)

 

I'm not particularly an Eggers fan, or particularly not. I don't follow his work per se, though I dip into the McSweeney's site every now and again. Some of the stuff's snort-inducing hilarious, some scratch my head "Huh?" But it's true I simply do not understand humor of a certain variety. It's very pop culture-y, 30-something or whatnot and makes my head hurt. Most of the site's not like that but other parts evoke my fight or flight response. It's inexplicable but I know it when it scares me.

I also have the distinction of owning a copy of Zeitoun I picked up when one of my local Borders stores bought the farm. It's about New Orleans, I'm a southerner and Katrina's wrath hit me like  a punch in the stomach for its initial devastation, mind-blowing aftermath and the egregious immorality of the government's response to extend aid to the people. Or lack of response, I should say. But I haven't actually read it yet, so Hologram for the King's my first experience with his fiction, though I've read a few stray columns of his.

I don't even know why I read it. Nothing about Saudi Arabia appeals to me. Nothing about any place that's hotter than Hades appeals to me. Oh, wait. NOLA. But that's the South and I already mentioned I'm southern. We don't need to go back through that again.

How did it go? Very quickly, actually. Very readable, as the critics say: a backhanded compliment if ever I heard one, next to "The font was exquisite!" I liked main character Alan Clay immediately, partly because life likes to mess with him in major bummer ways so I think we could be related. (And since I'm southern, I could marry him, too. Rim shot.) Only, Alan maintains his center, his inner optimist, whereas I'd have taken the next damn flight out of the place before you could say "oil reserves."

Alan's a businessman who spends most of the book waiting to pitch his company's technology to the king of Saudi Arabia, for use in advertising and supporting the king's long-stalled project to build a new super-city/community - basically, it's acres and acres of sand sitting on prime seaside real estate, with only a couple finished and half-finished buildings to show for itself after sitting there for a couple of years. Only, the king is never in the country. Nor does anyone volunteer any information about the king's whereabouts - at least none that sounds honest or vaguely plausible.

Worse yet, he and his three-person crew are relegated to a tent - not the air conditioned building within sight of them - with failing a/c and wi-fi that dies a swift death the first day they're there. So, they're a tech company that can't access their own technology, sweating away in a tent with barely any moving air, no food and no way to get back to their hotel until the hotel's evening shuttle bus comes back to retrieve them. For week after week after week. But they can't not be there because no one knows when the king will show up. If he shows up and they're not there? Sometimes, my friend, there are no second chances.

I'm telling you. Next plane out if it were me.

Alan, justifiably frustrated, starts branching out, meeting some of the locals and other foreigners, building relationships. One of his new acquaintances is a driver named Yousef, a young man who receives racy text messages from another man's wife. Another man who keeps threatening Yousef's life, to the extent he has to check under the hood of his car for a bomb before he dares start it. And this is the driver Alan hires, because he sleeps too late to make the morning hotel shuttle out to the tent with the rest of his co-workers. Alan's perfectly aware of the danger, so why? Why? Why? Because Yousef's funny, personable, speaks English and is fun to be with. Plus, he's a local and can more easily decode the nonsense the Saudis are trying to feed him. And Alan has a few... Issues.

In the midst of all this, Alan has discovered a growth on the back of his neck. A large growth he's convinced has fused to his spinal cord and will kill him. So there's that, as well as his young adult daughter back, home who's wavering on the brink of not being able to afford her next year of college, her future totally up in the air. And Alan's ex-wife, Ruby, is less than no help at all.

Get the feeling this is one of those multi-plotline books? Because yes. Yes, it is. And a grand one, too. It's a romp, a crazy madhouse wild ride through Saudi Arabia, of all places. But it's not all comic, by any  means. Darkly funny, yes, but Eggers goes into a lot of detail about the sad state of the world, as well as Alan's own multi-faceted mid-life crisis, which I can pretty much guarantee will be unlike any other you'll encounter in fiction.

If you've made any sense out of this at all I'll frankly be shocked but let me give you one little piece of advice: read it.  It's good.

 

 

Sunday Salon: July 15, 2012 - Touch Not the Cat

 

 

 

 

 

Busy reading weekend if not a particularly remarkable week, otherwise. The highlight was taking the cat to the vet to find out if there's a medical reason he's "leaking" all over the place. Turns out kitty has an infection of the urinary tract - and how the vet took the urine sample I do not want to know.  All I can say is when they brought him back to the exam room he was so freaked out he attempted to hide in one of those tiny pull-out keyboard trays - the kind that's about a foot long by three inches high. He launched himself up like a rocket, compacting his body into the tray, haunches and tail hanging out. It took two of us to pull him out the first time.

THEN HE DID IT AGAIN.

The physics involved, my friends... I can't even go there. This is not a small cat. This is a 14 pound, spoiled rotten cat who pees in the house like a damn lawn sprinkler.

WTF?

All this - plus cat hair up my nose, down my throat and blowing across the floor like tumbleweeds - to hear Oliver needs a tiny bottle of antibiotic liquid, the cost of which is roughly equivalent to the price of gold per ounce. "The dose is small", the vet told me. "I'll have the tech come in and show you how to do it."

Okay. She shows me the syringe and tells me to fill it to one ounce. She doesn't do it for me, mind. She just shows me how, handing the box and syringe to me before bolting out the door. I pony up the $ 140, shove the cat back in his carrier, and it's on my merry way I am.

I got home and it seemed as good a time as any to go ahead and give the cat his medicine. After he's just had a nervous breakdown and all. What could go wrong? I filled the syringe to one, picked up the cat, cradling him like a baby and tried to stick the syringe in his mouth. After I wiped up my blood and found the cat again, it was round two: Oliver 1, Lisa o.  This time, in the blur of flying hair and drops of blood, he opened his mouth all the way and I squirted that medicine in for all I was worth. Good thing the family was home to tie a tourniquet around my bleeding stub of an arm. But hey, the cat's on the mend.

CAT, YOU ARE THE SUPERIOR BEING.

If all this doesn't work (and why would it, really?) the next thing it could be is "kitty stress," exhibited, apparently, via his preference for lying around the house on his back, like a bear rug, directly in the path of my Point A to Point B. I have to stop short rather than trample him, momentum taking me up and over, like a cross between a rag doll and a ballerina, landing when some part of my body encounters something sharp or otherwise unforgiving. Then I curl into a ball while I bleed and cry simultaneously. Looking on, the cat licks his crotch and leaves. I have spoiled his solitude. No doubt his having to drag ass out of the room contributes to his tension.

Thankfully, there's a cure for kitty stress, too. It doesn't even require a feline psychologist. It's a little something they call kitty phermones, phermones that promote kitty relaxation. Kitty weed, in other words. It's sprayable, or you can buy the sort you put in a warming thing in the electric outlet. Hell, if this works I'll be snorting the crap.

I was going to go on to talk about books after I quickly caught you up to date on Oliver but now, to tell you the truth, I don't even feel like it. I've exhausted myself. I was up late, hopped up on the rusty smell of blood. I didn't sleep much.

So I'm going to take a nap. Screw it.