The Possessed: The Angel’s Game

The Angel’s Game is the second in a four part series of books by Carlos Ruiz Zafon set in Barcelona and having as the theme, the importance and lives of books. The Shadow of the Wind is the first in the series but this volume predates its events, although it does introduce Senor Sempere’s bookstore and the Cemetery of Lost Books.

Here the main character is David Martin. When the story begins, he is a lowly , orphaned copy boy for a second-rate newspaper, where he gets the chance to fill in the back page with lurid crime fiction. Thus is born a successful writing career and the jealousy of his fellow workers. David is fired and begins to compose similar hack stories for a couple of sleazy publishers. His talents are nonetheless appreciated by one Andreas Corelli who makes him an offer he can’t refuse.

It was last week when I had just started reading TAG right after I was talking to a co-worker about losing and reclaiming one’s faith and the incomprehensibility of celebrity Scientologists, when off-handily joked that either of us should have established our own religion. The conversation/jesting ended and I returned to the book, only to have a serendipitous start to see that was the nature of the book Corelli wanted Martin to write – one that explored the human needs for religion and would proffer a new variation on the theme. Like Robert Johnson at his crossroads (and anticipating a rereading of Reservation Blues for book club next month) menacing Corelli, despite his angel lapel pin, is demonic.

Thus spake Corelli: “Are you not tempted to create a story for which men and women would live and die, for which they would be capable of killing and allowing themselves to be killed, or sacrificing and condemning themselves, of handling over their souls? What greater challenge for your career than to create a story so powerful that it transcends fiction and becomes revealed truth?”

And continuing his bargain: “What I want from you is the form, not the content. The content is always the same and has been in place since human life began. It’s engraved in your heart with a serial number. What I want you to do is find an intelligent and seductive way of answering the questions we ask ourselves, and you should do so using your own reading of the human soul, putting into practice your art and your profession. I want you to bring me a narrative that awakens the soul.

The book is much more occult than TSOTW and the dangers are otherworldly making the pace page-turning. But below the dangers, intrigue and threatening characters, Zafon is himself allured into writing an unforgettable book, one that teaches universal moral/religious principles be observing the actions and thoughts of men. In addition to Martin’s doubts and despairs, Zafon postures the research librarian Eulalia and the elder Sempere as two counterpoints to institutionalized dogma, believing in the life and nobility of ideas as housed in books.

Corelli, publisher of a firm named Lux Aeterna, like all memorable devils is most like the fallen archangel Lucifer from Paradise Lost. But his insights about “true religion” are not Miltonian. Rather than read like commentary on jihadists: “The first step for believing passionately is fear. Fear of losing our identity, our life, our status, or our beliefs. Fear is the gunpowder and hatred is the fuse. Dogma, the final ingredient is only a lighted match.”

Given the overload of witches, ghosts, haunted houses and gloomy, polluted Barcelona in the early 20^th Century, it seems inevitable that Zafon’s novel, like Dan Brown, will be adapted to the screen. It will be interesting to see how the demons of Hollywood and Vine adapt a story that is not anti-Christian and one that advances the life redeeming virtues of the written word.

The Importance of an Unforgettable Book – The Shadow of the Wind

In some ways, belonging to a book club has exacerbated my distrust of any novel that makes its way onto the New York Times best seller list (maybe with the wonderful exception of stumbling on The Monster of Florence last year). When the club members recommend those books they have either seen reviewed in the latest NYT’s Sunday insert or those prominently displayed by the library check out desk in the seven-day loan case, I mentally quiver, dreading another couple of days of wasted time.

So there I was delving further into my being relived youth, reconstructing Edwin Drood’s disappearance last week when I decided laying a four pound, 800 page tome on my stomach while reading in bed was not the most comfortable thing to do. I reached into the massive pending bill on the “unread” and picked up a lighter paperback, The Shadow of the Wind, that Bill’s Emily sent me in my goodie box of birthday presents. I opened it, and surprise, out fluttered Emily’s notepaper with her glowing, insightful recommendation. I started reading, and like her and her mother, was hooked.

I was not familiar with the author, Carlos Ruiz Zafon. WIKI mentions him as a writer of children’s literature with this story being his first venture into a genre that is part Great Expectations, part murder mystery/crime thriller, and most of all, a paean to loving books. Several of the books I have blogged on have been layered with the writer’s writing about writing. Zafon writes about reading. What an instantaneous match for a book devourer.

Zafron relishes independent book stores, sellers who purchase estate libraries, and readers who cherish the first book that appealed to them with all the ardor and bliss of first love. Daniel, the protagonist, son of a bookseller, discovers his favorite book, The Shadow of the Wind, in the cemetery of forgotten books. Like me, he then feels compelled to read everything else written by its author Julian Carax, a writer who seems to be not only out of print but one whose novels are relentlessly being destroyed. Set in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and WWII, the reader first suspects there might be something politically dangerous in Carax’s stories, drawing the wrath of military censorship. Soon a mysterious dark and threatening person approaches Daniel to buy the book. He hides it back in the cemetery’s winding corridors.

Although most of the back story deals with Carax’s early life, friends, school, and family, and how his time and place factors in the stories he wrote, Daniel’s quest to discovery the author’s past exposes him to corrupt policemen, disowning families, and friendships deteriorating into hatreds. Daniel is joined in his pursuit by a colorful character, Fermin de Torres. Echoes of Cervantes, Dickens and Flaubert, as well as more contemporary Spanish-speaking writers pepper almost every page. Time and place is reemphasized as Zafon includes a map to make a walking tour of the places in Barcelona depicted in the book.

Emily, I too loved the book and it was like finding it on a shelf of unappreciated novels. I loved the cross generational parallels of the story, the importance placed on family and friends, despite their dysfunctionality and tensions (how uniquely un-American). I will stop at the library tonight to pick up Zafon’s second , The Angel’s Game, which is a prequel to TSOTW, and the second in what will be a four part series.

Edwin Drood Ascendant Over Emma Bovary

When my Slacker fellow English major got all atwitter about my discovery of Llosa’s The Perfect Orgy and my finally reading Madame Bovary, I too fell into the nostalgia of reliving thesis topics and decided to revisit The Mystery of Edwin Drood and two of the more recent adaptations of the story: The Last Dickens and Drood.

First I reread Dickens after a hiatus of … no I don’t think I want to admit how many decades it’s been contemplated writing my magnum opus on it instead of sitting for comps, which is what I eventually ended up doing anyway. Because this novel is not capping off a course wherein I read oodles of Dickens, I have lost my sense of where it actually might rank against Boz’ masterpieces. In all honesty, on this reading, I found it pale. I don’t mean to diminish its dark themes, but more to comment on my not considering it a weighty work.

For a relatively new genre of murder mysteries, I have to expect that Dickens would not make the crime or the suspects transparent or even readily deduced. Jasper is villainous but is he the arch-criminal, acting alone only motivated by jealousy unleashed by opium. Nor am I comfortable with an interpretation that treats Drood as a polemic against drug addiction, as it is unjust to view Oliver Twist as a diatribe against child labor. These two scourges of the London poor are critically important time and place settings, but it is the characters that make Dickens unforgettable.

Like Elizabethan dramatists, Dickens overloads his novels with quirky supporting characters to make his crisply evil or tragic stars seem more believable when aligned next two folk an audience recognizes from daily living. With an unfinished story, it is almost impossible to decide which of these outer constellation characters will assume meteoric importance in the denouement.

And so I moved on to Matthew Pearl’s The Last Dickens. Like previous two novels about Holmes/Emerson/Longfellow and Poe, Pearl writes stories set in the 1800s as though he is a contemporaneous observer. As historical fiction, they are steeped in accuracy and these facts make the creative assumptions highly plausible.

Pearl uses his main characters, publisher James Osgood and bookkeeper Rebecca Sand as detectives attempting to find the missing six installments in Dickens estate. Motivating Osgood is the benefit to accrue to his company struggling against the nefarious Harper brothers and their cut-throat “bookaneers.” Another layer is added in having Drood based on true crime and the real world criminals intent on the ending never being made known.

It is an excellent book and all the minor players, be they based on actual people or literary devices, are tidied up at the end, an ending that is a highly-visual, fast-paced page turner.

Now I move on to Drood, a tome of about 700 pages that starts off splendidly, as a true story being retold by Wilkie Collins. I would have continued reading this story that immediately captured my interest, but for not wanting to lug a four pound book to read during my lunch breaks at work … TLD runs just under 400 pages and is much more portable. Already several of the sections found in Drood recur as facts and background in Pearl’s book, so it will be like reading the different version of weekly events from the perspective of my son and his girlfriend’s blogs.

Another Llosa -- The Way to Paradise

I don't think I would have finished this novel except that it read too much like my second passion after murder mysteries, that being biographies. Llosa alternates chapters between the lives of painter Paul Gauguin and his maternal grandmother Flora Tristan, famous in her own right as one of the first female socialists in France in the mid 1800s.

Both are rebels; are less than perfect parents; are possessed with wanderlust and a cause to be noted for something completely different than the prevailing mores of their generations; have painful diseases in middle age that results in their addiction to opiates.

Llosa uses many structural devices to move the story along -- changing the intervention and commentary of the narrator, especially in Flora's story and here too juxtaposing her current travels with those when she returned to Peru to try to get a piece of her family's wealth. His talents as a writer are transparent to the strong lives of the two characters and he rarely intrudes with judgments or any moralistic interpretations. As a result, the novel reads more like a documentary and the only quote worth ruminating on is only 40 pages or so from the ending when Gauguin is thinking back on those people who influenced his art. Recalling a Turkish artist, philosopher and theologian whom he read in his early career, Mani Velibi-Zumbul-Zadi: "... Color, according to him, was something deeper and more subjective than could be found in the natural world. It was a manifestation of human sentiments, beliefs, fantasies. All the spirituality of an age, and all its ... angels and demons were expressed in the values given to different colors, and the way color was used. That was why real artists shouldn't feel themselves bound to literal representation when faced with the natural world ... It was their obligation to use colors in accordance with their innermost compulsions, or simply their private whim ... " As an aspiring mercenary decorator, I recognized the need to express my feelings in colors and patterns that spoke primarily to me but also elicited a sense of contemporary style.

I also want to extend this definition of an artist's use of color to a writer's use of words. Palinuro in Mexico is a novel length poem, lush with startling similes and metaphors that would otherwise, and maybe still is, scandalous in its topics. More to come on that one.

Like all good biographies, the six degrees of separation comes into play as Flora encounters Karl Marx and Gauguin interacts with contemporary Impressionists.

Suggestible, With Proclivities – Emma Bovary

I finished Madame Bovary yesterday but gave myself a night to sleep on it, to ensure that I would write a review that might say something new after Llosa’s seminal criticism and that might also appeal to that Slacker member who regards the novel as her favorite. (I think my favorite novel from school days is Weathering Heights, a book I found on rereading for book club continued to resonate with me.)

Madame Bovary seemed almost a second reading after the thorough analysis found in The Perfect Orgy. With large sections quoted therein, I plot and progress of the story were familiar and yet captivating. Despite all of Llosa’s dissections of narration, time and grammar, I was oblivious to them as the story itself seduced me, in parallel with Emma’s own dalliances.

To me, Emma resounded with the echo of Paradise Lost. Emma is Eve. Not the happy creative sprite found in Mark Twain’s Diaries but one much more classically Old Testament. She was eminently susceptible to the sweet talk of the Serpent as personified first in Rodolphe and later in L’Heureux. Both of these men saw Emma as a woman to not such much corrupt as benefit from.

Although fantasizing about an alternate life of passion, she did not acting on it until Rodolphe decided to have her. Unlike the visual allure of the ball and the mental reveries of being a heroic, cherished fictionalized heroine, Rodolphe appealed to her through her sense of hearing. He sweet talked her over the hawking of the merchants and the absurdity of country fair prizes. He then made her life less sedentary by getting her out riding and away from her house. By nature, she was a thrill seeker and too readily became another in a line of Rodolphe’s conquests.

In her subsequent affair, Leon was the prime mover, again the one making the decision to seduce her. These were not relationships born of love or mutual lust. Emma was prey. Flaubert wrote beautifully on the eternal art of seduction but the story was larger: one that essentially contrasted comfort with boredom as they are confused in Emma’s mind. Her husband Charles was boring to her because his job took him away for most of each day, brought him home too exhausted to converse with her, and was so satisfied with his wife and child that he could not suspect anything intruding into his Eden.

L’Heureux was the most viperous of all Emma’s temptations. He tapped not into lust but into the guileless simplicity in her character. Living with boredom between affairs and designing a stage on which to perform her life, Emma compulsively redecorated the house and succumbed to Parisian styles; it was finances rather than flirtations that was her final fall.

A novel this old has to attract and mean something to a contemporary reader, without being deconstructed into meaninglessness. And so the story, Emma, and the other characters have to be identifiable in current society. The universality of marital unfaithfulness seems tawdry when screamed from today’s mass media yet the scandal sticks more to the fallen woman, even today. Emma was a woman alone. She had no mother, no close female friends, no neighbors to gossip with. Her reality was never tested; her fantasy raced unreined.

The men in the novel were engaged in the community and more importantly had attainable if challenging goals and plans. Homais, the pharmacist eventually got his Legion of Honor; L’Heureux expanded his usurious store into extensive property holdings and transportation routes. Leon post-Emma finished his schooling, became gainfully employed and married well.

Emma’s goals were hallucinations of intense rapture, goals that even when occasionally attained self-destructed when she supported their continuation by recreating the home life comforts she was otherwise oblivious to.

Widowed and impoverished Charles arose as the hero of the story. He was the one, true to his milieu more than his religion or his family, who created a peaceable home, tolerating Emma’s highs and lows as an undiagnosed manic-depressive. His tolerance and conformance made an environment that was like a conservatory, but one that Emma regarded as too confining for an exotic flower. Never did she realized that when Rodolphe seduced her during the award for best manure was being given to a local farmer, that she was being given the same line of “compost.” She never could appreciate the comfort of the predictable, ye boring.

Flaubert's language is perfect as exhaustively discussed by Llosa. Two quotes are my favorites. The first occurring shortly after the birth of her daughter condenses the story's entire theme: "A man is free, at least -- free to range the passions and the world, to surmount obstacles, to taste the rarest pleasures. Whereas a woman is continually thwarted. Inert, compliant, she has to struggle against her physical weakness and legal subjection. Her will, like the veil tied to her hat, quivers with every breeze: there is always a desire that entices, always a convention that restrains."

The other quote, that despite illustrating Flaubert's low opinion of the Catholic Church, I find to be the sexiest lines in the novel, at Emma's Extreme Unction: "First he anointed her eyes, once so covetous of all earthly luxuries; then her nostrils, so gluttonous of caressing breezes and amorous scents; then her mouth, so prompt to lie, so defiant in pride, so loud in lust; then her hands, that had thrilled to voluptuous contacts; and finally the soles of her feet, once so swift when she had hastened to slake her desires, and now never to walk again"

Should This Be My Last Llosa -- Aunt Julia and the Script-Writer

I double checked to see where this novel fell in the chronological order of Llosa's books because it reads like an author who has not yet discovered his forte. Thinking about how to describe it last night, I thought of a clothes line. Conveniently, Llosa can write a series of short unrelated vignettes (the wash) and just string them together by having the narrator and other main character work in a radio station writing news and soap operas, respectively. The script-writer is named Pedro Camacho and I guess this was one of Llosa's favorites as he mentions him in The Language of Passion. However, Pedro is not an unforgettable character per se, only through the clever tales he tells.

Which brings up my main problem with the book ... specifically, all the mini-stories scattered herein have practically no dialogue in them. Now, how can they be produced for radio without characters talking through the plot?

In addition, the novel is supposed to be hilariously funny. One convection Llosa uses is to have the characters from one soap opera move into another and those who have met untimely death or accidents return in other scenes resurrected and in full health but with slightly different careers. Maybe as a male, Llosa never spent his sick days watching American soap operas when drugged up with anti-histamines so the stories always got mixed up in the viewer's (my) mind.

The laundry line that is used as the device to support the short stories is Mario's crush on his aunt who is fourteen years or so older than him and divorced. (I just flipped over to Wiki again and this is extremely autobiographical as Llosa married his maternal uncle's sister-in-law when he was 19 and she ten years older.) Llosa recounts the scandal this brought on his family and the funniest part of the book is their traveling through the countryside trying to find a magistrate willing to break the law and marry an underage man.

After nineteen chapters of this unrequited courtship, elopement and setting up a household in Paris, chapter twenty begins: "The marriage to Aunt Julia was really a success and it lasted a good bit longer than all the parents and even herself feared, wished, or predicted: eight years."
With that Llosa dispenses with her without any hint of why they broke up or what the intervening years meant to him. As dismissive as he is to his ex-wife, Pedro reemerges when Mario returns to Peru for his annual visit as an office boy / errand runner for a failing scandal sheet newspaper. Pedro does not remember him, Lima is crowded with people from the country drawn to scant opportunity in the city, oh and by the way, Mario is married now to his cousin. Shades of 100 Years' incest?

I only have one more Llosa book in my pile, the one about Gaughin and his grandmother, and when I started it, it didn't grab me. Maybe his masterpiece is Conversations in the Cathedral and I should at least skim through it, but I think I am off South American literature for a while. Started Madame Bovary based on Llosa's fantastic critique of it and to meet my pledge to one of the Slackers who considers it her favorite book. It is like deja vu reading it because Llosa quoted it so extensively. So maybe like reliving her graduate school high points, I will go back to finish Edwin Drood and the recent book that writes an ending for it.