Political Analysis Where I Least Expected It -- The Language of Passion

Still skirting around the novels of Mario Vargas Llosa, I found another one of his books of nonfiction; this one a collection of op ed pieces published in a Spanish newspaper in the 1990's -- The Language of Passion. (I love the Latin romance of this man who gives most of his books titillating titles this one, The Perpetual Orgy, The Bad Girl, The Way to Paradise, and then composes something completely unexpected and non-erotic.)

There are 46 essays in the book, covering a wide swath of then-contemporary issues. Many are Llosa's paeans to various artists, from Frida Kahlo to Bob Marley to Monet. His opinions on artists and other public figures that he holds in lesser regard are never scathing attacks, but well-thought critiques (except maybe in the case of George Soros, who in my opinion, deserves all this and more.) But there were three themes that appealed to me most: his continuing appreciation for literary criticism, his acknowledgment of the place of unwavering absolutism of all religions, and, unexpectedly, political analysis much more on point than what I encountered in P. J. O'Rourke's book.

First the criticism. In an article called Postmodernism and Frivolity, Llosa acknowledges the importance of Lionel Trilling. He concludes: "This generation regarded literature as a perfect testament to the ideas, myths, beliefs, and dreams that make society work, and glimpsed in literature the secret frustrations and impulses that explain individual conduct." And again to quote a sentence that sums up my drive to read on end: "... grew out of deep and sometimes heartrending experiences and real human sacrifices, and their true valuation must be decided not from the lectern but from the private and concentrated intimacy of reading, and must be measured by the effects and repercussions of reading on the private life of the reader."

In another essay, The Death of the Great Writer, I found another argument for my frustration with my book club's selections: " the book, stripped of its status as religious or mythical object, becomes a mere good at the mercy of the frenetic ups and downs ... of supply and demand ... the effect ... is the banalization of literature, since it counts now only as a product of immediate consumption, an ephemeral entertainment, or a source of information that expires as soon as it appears." And continuing, referring to the man who predicted all this would happen: "... we have reached level of grim degradation best anticipated by Tocqueville: the era of writers who 'prefer success to glory.'"

Llosa finds deconstructionism an anathema. He extols literature as the mental food of a small slice of society to: "... return to its former rigor, good prose, inventiveness, ideas, persuasive illusions, freedom and audacities that are notable for their absence in the great majority of books that now usurp the title of literature."

On to politics and government. In the piece called The Hour of the Charlatans, Llosa deals with the virtual reality created for the public by the mass media. "Real world events can no longer be objective. Their truth and ontological consistency are undermined from the start by the corrosive process of their projection as the manipulated and falsified images of virtual reality; these are the only images admissible and comprehensible to a humanity tamed by the media fantasy ... Besides abolishing history, television 'news' also vanquishes time, since it eliminates all critical perspective on what is happening: the broadcasts occur at the same time as the events ... and these events last no longer than the fleeting instant in which they are enunciated, then disappear, swept away by others which in turn are annihilated ... This vertiginous denaturalization of the actual world has resulted, purely and simply, in its evaporation and in its replacement by the truth of media-created fiction."

Llosa not only expands one's knowledge of South American regimes, but writes cogently on the impact of immigration in all countries, on his changing expectations of Israeli peace, and on the continuing sexual revolution, particularly when the advance of women runs smack-dab against "cultural" practices and religious dogma.

Llosa might have won the Nobel prize for literature, but his breadth of talents cannot be misconstrued to think that it is merely in fiction that he excels. I am almost done with Aunt Julia, but I'd rather think with Mario than laugh with him.

Election Reading: P. J. O'Rourke

To get in the mood for Tuesday, I read Don't Vote It Only Encourages the Bastards by P. J. O'Rourke. It got a fairly decent review in the New York Times a week or so ago, but I should have picked up on a populist innuendo when it was readily available from the library, despite being a recently published book.

I never read Parliament of Whores, nor any of PJOR's ouevre. Maybe I would type a couple of quotes for this review, had I not lent it to the man who sits next to me at work. He is a fan of Dave Berry and to some extent that is what this book is, an exclusively political, shallow opining of being a Conservative. I wanted something much more substantive and more analytical. Sound bites I can get on "harangue" TV. Putting them between the covers instead of on the screen does not add weight to the zingers.

I loved going to the Legislative Correspondent Association's annual show, the New York equivalent of Capitol Steps, and laughed raucously at satire jabbing both the Democrats and Republicans. PJOR can laugh at them all and probably at himself as well, but his audience is neither broad-based nor scholarly. The fellow next to me at work will read it and vote the bastards out but the guys down the aisle would never crack the binding.

Another Ellory: A Simple Act of Violence

Well, this is my third Ellory and alternating chapters with a stream of consciousness insight is definitely his signature style. This one would rank third of those I've finished, putting Anniversary Man first, A Quiet Belief in Angels second, and then A Simple Act of Violence.

ASAOV is overloaded with CIA intrigue from the Nicaragua/Oliver North drug financing era. In this mystery, the commentary chapters are from the major suspect in a string of murders in Washington DC. Perpetuating the bomb-fogging and misdirection of the CIA, John Robey is clearly guilty of killing his fellow agent and girlfriend. The others, well, you're not so sure. The detective, Miller, is coming back from an internal affairs investigation, cynical and unsure of whether he wants to continue as a cop. The frustration of these murders and the innumerable dead ends and interference from the FBI, judiciary, etc., don't seem to tip him one way or another by the end of the book.

Ellory is British and it is amazing how right on he is in describing DC, middle America and NYC. This is the last of his books in our library network, so back to Llosa and Madame Bovary.

The Style of R. J. Ellory

Found another marvelous murder mystery write whose stories I am compulsively reading: R. J. Ellory. The first of his I finished is A Quiet Belief in Angels. Ellory alternates stream of consciousness chapters exploring the thoughts of a main character with ones advancing the chronology of the plot. This format is also used in his book, A Simple Act of Violence, which I expect to finish later today and append to this blog post.

In Quiet Belief we follow the life of Joseph Vaughan beginning grammar school in rural Georgia where young girls from his classes are being brutally killed. Joseph is an observant smart boy who is encouraged to write by his teacher; he is also a champion of the community as he organizes a group of his peers, the Guardians, to protect the girls from attack. The story is set against the threats and engagements of World War 11 and depicts the fears and biases of his town as they citizens and law suspect a local rich German as the murderer.


Despite his heroics and talents, Joseph leads the life of Job, coming under suspicions himself as the murders continue even after the German's suicide, he loses his wife and unborn child in a tragic accident, he moves to Brooklyn to pursue his hopes to be an author and while he has an acclaimed first novel, his new love is killed similar to those from Georgia, and once again his is the main suspect. He goes to trial and is convicted and sent to Auburn. There after a decade of imprisonment, he begins to write again, penning A Quiet Belief in Angels, a recapitulation of the events of his life leading up to his conviction. His case is appealed, he is released and returns to Georgia to find the killer. And no, I am not going to divulge the ending.

What I liked about this book so much are three things: first, like Stansberry's The Confession, the stream of consciousness reflections are humanly ambiguous enough that Joseph himself remains a possible suspect despite his early age when the serial murders began. However these ruminations are much more poetic than the self-aggrandizing bravado of Stansberry's forensic psychologist. Second, Ellory's depiction of life in prison is much more frightening than Hugo's Last Day of a Condemned Man. Hugo is writing for prison reform and his book is a polemic of the societal effects of isolation of criminals versus their rehabilitation. Ellory, a former convict himself, writes from personal experience. He does not dwell on inmate on inmate brutality; he writes about the grinding down of the spirit and the soul. Finally, like The Anniversary Man, the writing has a wonderful fast pace, the plot twists and the words are lyrical.

Who Cares Who Killed Palomino Molero

I’m sorry Nobel Prize winner Llosa. This murder mystery would not even be nominated for an Edgar. It appears to be an exercise in a genre done for a lark or to use that type of story to continue your theme of corruption in the military and government. The local policemen are portrayed as buffoons, even the lieutenant who majestically seems to intuit the motive and criminal. Townspeople are even more stereotypical, frightened of strangers, seeing intrigue and plots beyond facts staring them in the face. The book is so short, it does not merit an analysis of structural devices or the use of language. I hope I find one of your novels I like. I don’t want to end up like that woman in the elevator yesterday who when I asked her which of your books she liked the best after she noticed me carrying The Perpetual Orgy to the library, said she didn’t like then at all … her husband did.

Though I Was Easing into LLosa

When someone wins a Nobel Prize for literature and I haven’t read his works, I attempt to make up this deficit. Rushing to Wiki to skim through the titles and themes of his oeuvre, I decided that novels of South American politics were not something I wanted to start with, especially with rereading A Hundred Years of Solitude for book club this month. So, I reserved several volumes to ease myself into Mario Vargas Llosa’s world.

I couldn’t have selected a more atypical and challenging beginning than The Perfect Orgy. Not to be confused with a topic like Isabel Allende’s Aphrodite, this book reads like a PhD thesis on the structure and technique Flaubert employed in writing Madame Bovary and the novel’s subsequent influence on other authors.

The book is divided into three major sections. The first is Llosa’s apologia for why he loves Emma Bovary so much, both as an unforgettable literary character and as a respite for his personal throes. Part Two has two subdivisions: Pen Man, is a series of questions and answers that investigates possible story sources and events in Flaubert’s life that influenced the content; and the much more analytical, parsing of the structure, The Added Element. Replicating most of the subtitles herein best gives an idea about the comprehensiveness and intelligence Llosa displays:
Things humanized and human beings turned into things
A binary world, including money and love and a masculinized Emma
The use of time – singular or specific, circular or repetitious, immobile or plastic eternity, and imaginary time
Variations on the narrator – the plural, omniscient, and singular-character
The innovative use of italics and the creation of style indirect libre

Finally in Part Three, Llosa acknowledges Madame Bovary as the First Modern Novel, for it containing the first anti-hero, the first use of interior monologue, and the first recognition that non-extreme topics/people are valid subjects.

This book should be a contemporary bible for literary critics. It made me realize that all my attempts to uplift book club discussions are still rather rudimentary and sophomoric. When one of the Slackers was over yesterday afternoon, the woman who wrote two mini-theses in graduate school on style including one on the use of circular time in comedy, I offered to lend her the book, renew it if necessary to make her feel like a fully mentally engaged student again. I told her that even though I am almost finished with my second reading of A Hundred Years of Solitude, I know now I have completely overlooked the role of the narrator and the construct of time advancing plot.

I certainly will expect Llosa to use such understructure in his novels and will aggressively try to spot them. I have started two other of his novels: a parallel fictionalized biography of Paul Gauguin and his grandmother (again a title that seduced me, The Way to Paradise) and a much more reader-friendly murder mystery, Who Killed Palomino Molero? Perhaps these two are not substantial enough to evidence a Bovary-like composition, but I will more consciously look for that.

Deadline Reading

I did it: I finished both of the murder mysteries that the main library gave me only seven days to read.

First finished was the Man Who Never Returned by Peter Quinn. I vaguely remember seeing a review in the New York Times book review and can’t remember whether it was favorable or not. It is however steeped in New York State history – a fictionalized attempt to solve the case of a missing person, namely Judge Crater who disappeared from the streets of NYC in 1930. Quinn is himself a former speech writer for two NY governors and fascinated by this legend through his father’s interest in the case.

The solution proposed by Quinn is both fantastical and possible, although once-removing the perpetrator from the likely male suspect to his daughter is a stretch. Quinn employees his series detective, Fin Dunne, to reconstruct the crime for a sensational headline in a new magazine to be first published twenty-five years after the disappearance of Crater.

Quinn introduces each chapter with a quote from Dante and forces his supporting characters to connect the literary reference to the progress of the investigation. It does not work. The tension and twists and political corruption is not Infernal. Quinn also intrudes too much in the story line by having his professional characters mock their Jesuit and Ursuline education, all the while evoking the talents of an author who must have been similarly well-trained.

The story is visual enough to imagine it being readily converted to a screenplay, but it reads as if it is slightly modified/plagiarized first hand police reports and adaptations of Depression era scandal sheets.

Much better and page turning is R. J. Ellroy’s The Anniversary Man. I don’t know how a book becomes a nominee for an Edgar or other murder mystery award but this should be on someone’s short list of candidates. From the introduction where Ellroy uses stream of consciousness to delve into mass murderer survivor John Costello’s mind and his succinct depiction of Costello’s life before the attack, the words sing off the page:

“ … Jersey City … always the smell of the Hudson; place looked like a fistfight, even on a Sunday morning when most of the Irish and Italians were dressed up for church … Costello’s father … standing out front of The Connemara diner – named after the mountains where his ancestors fished … and hauled their catch home after dusklight, and lit fires and told tales and sang songs that sounded like history before the first verse was done.”

Costello’s behaviors to cope with surviving are near psychotic. He has worked for over twenty years as a researcher for a NYC newspaper where he is quick to pick up a pattern underlying several seemingly unrelated murders of teenagers. He convinces his editor to draft a story showing that these crimes are re-enactments of ones from convicted mass murderers.

Ray Irving, the detective investigating one of these murders, leads an uncanny parallel life to Costello’s: alone after the death of his sweetheart, totally consumed by the work he does, a creature of habit in terms of where and what he eats and how little socializing he engages in. Seventeen people are murdered over the course of five or six months as the complicated relationship and suspicions between Irving, Costello and his editor Karen Langley play out. The tension of these relationships is almost as raw edged as the replication of the murders.

Here is a story with less apologia; the author knows he is mining true crime and using it to tell his story but it is not as contrived nor apparent as Quinn’s effort. As I raced through the last few chapters of a book almost 400 pages long, I was reverting to childhood postures of security, my shawl snuggled under my nose to be safe from the danger.

Irving may be the crime solver but it is Costello’s book. Costello’s terror-caused view of humanity and the inability to understand the motives of a mass murderer make the story all the more scary and real. His ability to live with the first hand knowledge of violence and its aftermath is a wonderful counterpoint to the more typical cop jaundiced distancing from the crime scenes’ victims.

Need to bump Ellroy up on my must read list. See already I am starting my 2011 list to read broadly and then everything written by a captivating writer. Ellroy fits the bill.

Quail in Rose Petals

Only have a couple of chapters left to go on my effort to reread One Hundred Years of Solitude for book club by the end of the month. Then, Mario Vargas Llosa goes and wins the Nobel Prize, first South American since Gabi and I decide I have to read him before the next get together as well. Checked out the availability of his books on the Internet catalog and saw that the main library downtown had a couple and walked there noon time on Friday. Alas, the ones I wanted were gone already, here with me thinking inner city borrowers were not likely to take out these novels despite the press. So I wandered over to the DVD section. For an affiliation of several libraries in two counties, each seems to have a wide berth in how it chooses to sort movie titles. At my library, everything is alphabetical by title, with only two small shelves dedicated to family night suitable viewing and staff favorites. At the main branch, all foreign made movies are sorted out separately. Strange though, they only stock the sleeves on the shelves and you have to get the actual disks at the check out counter. And you only get them for four days as contrasted to a week here in the suburbs.

So, I took out two foreign films: Like Water for Chocolate, in keeping with the Hispanic theme I have going, and Gabrielle, a French story set at the turn of the Century. First LWFC.

If I had a private stock of DVDs, I would add this to my make believe collection of favorite movies, right up there with Chocolat and Love in the Time of Cholera. Like the latter, this story is about first love. The story begins at a ranch in Mexico at the time of the last revolution. A woman gives birth to her third daughter, the daughter marked by tradition to remain an old maid, taking care of her into her old age. The father dies shortly after the birth of Tita when his friends tease him about not making sons and go to far telling him his second daughter is not his, thereafter succumbing to a heart attack. The girls live a quasi-idyllic life, except for the shrew that is their mother. When Tita is about sixteen, handsome Pedro falls in love with her. He is thwarted by Tita's mother who insists her fate as caretaker is sealed by tradition and Pedro marries the oldest sister only to be close to Tita.

Pedro is a cautious person who one day gives Tita a gorgeous bouquet of roses. Her mother grabs them from her and Tita uses them to make a feast worthy of Isabelle Allende's orgies: quail in rose petal sauce. All around the table, the family succumbs to the sensuality of a perfect sensory overload meal. The middle daughter, titillated enough to need a cold shower, runs off to join the guerrillas after they set fire to the bathhouse. Pedro and his wife and young son are banished to Texas. Life goes on, eventually Tita, like her counterpart in LITTOC, marries her physician. Decades later at the wedding of her niece, after the death of Pedro's wife, they become lovers, dying in the actual flames of their passion. Wow, what a story.

I've figured out that I love movies about unrequited love, love that lasts for years even through separations and "other lives." I also like stories where food is erotic. Chocolat fits that bill more so than other classics like Babette's Feast or that Italian movie where they make the huge timpani. Food and lavish table are showcased in Gabrielle, but this is a movie about the complete absence of passion.

Jean, a rich Parisian, married Gabrielle ten years previous to the start of the story. They live in a mansion in the City and entertain every Thursday, trying to create a salon of musicians, wits and other demimonde. The china, silver and food at their banquets are reminiscent of Scorsese's The Age of Innocence. However, their lives are all productions, stylized appearances where they both drift around the margins of their guests, not engaging in conversation be it gossipy or erudite. Jean comes home early the day after to find a note from Gabrielle that she has left him for another man. Within five hours, she returns home. The rest of the movie is a distanced conversation as Jean tries to intellectualize her motives and Gabrielle enhances her icy aloof facade to exact revenge. Neither character is admirable although the acting, costumes and scenery are superb.

What a contrast with LWFC. Gabrielle purposefully lives a life without love. Tita bids her time for one night of culminating passion. Maybe I should read Llosa's nonfiction study of Flaubert and Madame Bovary to rekindle a belief in Gallic passion to rival Latin devotion.

Tapped Out the Libaray Collection

No more Domenic Stansberry books at my library. Finished Chasing the Dragon and The Big Boom this weekend, both of them part of the Dante Mancuso series. CTD is the first with Dante who has been ordered by the Company to return to San Francisco from his stint in New Orleans, still susceptible to the bad habits he picked up there and and haunted by the violence he participated in. The Big Boom is a bit more current, with the boom being the bust of the tech bubble.

Actually, I think I am also tapped out on Stansberry. Not that I liked them any less, but that there seemed to be nothing new, nothing quotable in them. Looking back, I think I liked The Confession the best, as best crafted and scariest.

Not sure where my wandering eyes will take me next. Closing in on November, I have reserved some political satire and am still rereading A Hundred Years of Solitude for book club this month. Actually feel like a breather, wanting to race through seasons two and three of Mad Men.