September 2018 book review

TIME REGAINED, by Marcel Proust
At last we come to the final volume of Proust’s masterpiece, in which our ‘hero’ (actually he is a monster as much as anything else) re-emerges into high society after a long, self imposed exile. He finds its denizens much altered by time, as we see in this brief excerpt, where Marcel finds it impossible to reconcile the fair-haired girl he had known in his youth, who was famous for her elegant dancing, with the massive white-haired old lady “making her way through the room with an elephantine tread”:

“... to have succeeded in giving to this waltzer this huge body, in encumbering and retarding her movements by the adjustment of an invisible metronome, in substituting - with perhaps as sole common factor the cheeks, larger certainly now than in youth but already in those days blotched in red - for the feather-like girl this ventripotent old campaigner, it must have been necessary for life to accomplish a vaster work of dismantlement and reconstruction than is involved in the replacement of a steeple with a dome, and when one considered that this work had been effected not with tractable inorganic matter but with living flesh which can only change imperceptibly, the overwhelming contrast between the apparition before me and the creature that I remembered pushed back the existence of the latter into a past which was more than remote, that was almost unimaginable...”

Hey, Marcel, people get old. Give ‘em a break. I look at myself in the mirror today and I see the same old git I have always seen. But then I look at a picture of myself taken in 1981, and the 2 images are, as above, almost impossible to reconcile.
           This revelation is what has come to be known as the “Proustian Moment” and is, I think, familiar to everyone. Not that it makes it any easier to bear...
           I promised myself this reading treat as part of my emotional recovery from the traumas I faced last year, and it has worked. For the second time in my life I have relished Proust’s sublime use of language, his dazzlingly witty dialogue and intricate dissection of the vagaries of time and memory. In his great novel Pale Fire (see next month’s review) Vladimir Nabokov, through his character Kinbote, says of Proust:

“...His huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream... adorable seascapes, melting avenues, light and shade effects rivalling those of the greatest English poets, a flora of metaphors - described - by Cocteau, I think - as a ‘mirage of suspended gardens’...”

Treat yourself royally, and see for yourself what a great work of literature looks like.

VERTIGO, by W.G. Sebald
A man goes on a tour of notable European sights; Verona, Lake Garda, his birthplace of “W”, in the heartlands of Bavaria and has a series of disturbing and hard-to-explain experiences along the way... Like this one, for instance, which takes place in Vienna:

“...On one occasion, in Gonagegasse, I even thought I recognised the poet Dante, banished from his home town on pain of being burned at the stake. For some considerable time he walked a short distance ahead of me, with the familiar cowl on his head, distinctly taller than the people on the street, yet he passed by them unnoticed. When I walked faster in order to catch him up he went down Heinrichgasse, but when I reached the corner he was nowhere to be seen. After one or two turns of this kind I began to sense in me a vague apprehension, which manifested itself as a feeling of vertigo...”

Vertigo is right. This book is one of the strangest, yet at the same time most beautiful, books I have ever encountered. You want to see it as a kind of nonfictional memoir, yet things keep happening, as in the above excerpt, which confound that prosaic notion. An astonishing piece of literature, which has no equivalent, except perhaps in Sebald’s other offerings. The real surprise is in how easy it is to read, despite the depths it plumbs...

AMERICAN GODS, by Neil Gaiman
A man known as Shadow is released from prison early so he may attend the funeral of his wife, killed in a car crash. On the way to his home town he is offered a job by a fellow-diner at a fast-food outlet who seems to have a supernatural knowledge of our hero’s life. The man’s name: “Mister Wednesday”.
          With absolutely nothing else going for him, Shadow agrees to accompany his new boss on his travels, performing such small tasks as his boss requires of him. There begins a bizarre journey into the American heartland, a heartland apparently peopled by mythical beings: gods, in fact. Gods brought with them by all the immigrants from all the lands of the Earth which now make up America. Forgotten now, but still real, and ready, in a kind of latter day Ragnarok, to do battle against the new gods, of money and greed, of interstate highway and urban sprawl...

Neil Gaiman’s Magnum Opus is a fascinating an intriguing read, funny, mysterious and terrifying by turns. I love a writer who can conjure an imaginary world, even one like this which is salted into the real one. On the whole, a worthwhile and satisfying experience.