Alice Munro: My Aunts Are Her Aunts

Re: Upon Finishing Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014, by Alice Munro. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.

I have never been to a place like Alice Munro.

She is more shakeable than the tremors we have here in southern California.  There is such a long memory here, in Ms. Munro, such a cold biting wind of a look down a wrong street, or a gaze over a wrong field, beneath a bridge, behind a gas station, because it's always taking you out of yourself, for now, then leaving you to deal with the flood of incidents, both regretful and splendid, loving and special, in your life, as interposed by Ms. Munro.

Her characters are lifted up and dropped down, like our anxious morning before a coffee, before the computer needs to be turned on and connect us to our desultory everydayness.  At night, I often have to exert strenuous concentration in keeping to the story I'm reading because all of a sudden a memory between sadness and charm will pop up, and I'll wish I had been a better kid at the time, or I hear a phrase of my mother,  or I see a moment on display of my father, and I ask How the hell did you get in here?

It's usually though where or when I regret my self.  You can't stop these things, you have to ride them out and come back to them later because you're reading Alice Munro and you love her.  You love whatever freezing dreariness of the Canadian bush you can get, whatever aching sorrow of Canada's own participation in the Great Depression, or World War 2, or racism, inequality, sexism, or brutality of mind that flourished(es) in the U.S.  Her conscience for her characters has made me unsteady on my feet. I wonder, can I walk and think about Alice Munro at the same time?

Her Aunts Are My Aunts.  I see the same people on her pages that I've know all my life, mostly from my mother's side of the family, the diversions of divorce and children born without benefit of clergy, or the ones who are too many and need to be given away.  I've heard it all.  And Alice Munro remembers her own and that reminds me. There is Aunt Betty, Aunt Alice, Aunt Lena, Aunt Rita, Aunt Tootie, and Aunt Gladys, all remnants of my mother's young adulthood, or more likely her girlhood.  Each becoming favorites of mine because they expressed, in my presence, nothing but compassion and love.

The lock against such exclusion has always bit my cheek, but I grasp around the corner and love them all the same. 

Just after midnight, when I call it a day, after a couple hours with Alice Munro, I don my CPAP mask and activate my machine to reduce the risk of heart attack due to sleep apnea.  I ask myself each night, after reading her stories, Alice Munro's stories, whatever have I just read.  What have I read?  What on earth was it?

I also recommend Alice Munro's Selected Stories, if to begin with.  You can't go wrong.

On Glory's Course, James Purdy's hilarious, venial, titillating, unpredictable, brilliant and gothic novel from 1984

I have just finished On Glory's Course, James Purdy's hilarious, venial, and titillating novel from 1984, filled with small-town intrigues somewhere in the midwest of the 1930s.  I've read House of the Solitary Maggot, Eustace Chisholm and the Works, Jeremy's Version, 63 Dream Palace, and The Complete Stories.  And believe you me, I am in total disagreement with the New York Times.  This book, On Glory's Course, is the best I've read of his, and his books are always unpredictable, brilliant, and gothic to say the least.

This is from the back cover:
  "Somewhere in the Midwest in the 1930s languished Fonthill, a boom town after the boom has subsided.  The town's fears and fascinations focus on Adele, a wealthy faded beauty who goes to the movies in the afternoon and surrounds herself with gentlemen callers at all hours of  the night.  This scandalous behavior, along with her search for the illegitimate son she gave up a birth, keeps Fonthill's tongues wagging.
"Only James Purdy could have created the world of Fonthill.  His marvelous array of characters, with their passionate but not quite erotic relationships, comic and kinky obsessions, and intertwined fates, are at once outrageously eccentric and disturbingly familiar." 

Perhaps you might find whispers and hints of Harry Crews or William Goyen or Barry Hannah, but I assure you Purdy is an original.

Consider this one diatribe from the Widow Hughes (Rosa), an aged eccentric but powerful old lady whose husband the Reverend Hughes was a lecherous preacher of the highest sort, as she addresses Adele [one of the two main characters] about a nasty old Judge Hitchmough who got Adele expelled from the most exclusive social club in town.  Please keep in mind Rosa and Adele are descendants of the town's oldest and wealthiest families.

Adele pulled out a cigarette from a jewel-studded holder and, without asking permission, lit it.  Then, when Rosa said nothing, she began to inhale and exhale loudly the thick Turkish smoke.
   "I could not let your Daddy look down from heaven and see you ousted by some little cattle-boat immigrant turned jurist, now could I?  Much as I disapprove of you, and let me digress here for a moment.  Cigarette-smoking I believe is right for you because you have spread your legs on the highways and byways so often I will not quibble with you over the tobacco habit.  Better smoke at your age than open your lips to even fouler practice...  

But to the point.  I could not allow old Hitchmough to best us.  He called me on the phone today, come to think of it, and told me in that bleating voice of his he was resigning from the club.  I replied, 'Judge, resignation is not quite the ticket here.  What I am about to say I say regretfully, as a Christian, but since you are not a Christian but a lawyer, God will overlook what I advise here.  Suicide is your only path to hone.  No, you heard me aright, Judge.  Resign, of course, but kill yourself immediately after.'"

"But I did not bring you [Adele] here to tell you how vile you are.  After all, you rehearse that day and night and are better acquainted with your sins than I could be if i watched you fro the alley facing your bedroom.  I want to give you something.

"Go along now my dear.  Don't kiss me, though, on your way out. I don't know where your mouth has been last.  And Dr. What's-His-Name recently told me half the town has syphilis in the catching phase.  You're welcome to those jewels, but don't thank me.  I know you're incapable of gratitude, but we are the last of the aristrats.  The river of hoi polloi is waiting for us to step down.  Our mansions and fields and farms and rivers will be overrun with their offspring.  They will tear everything beautiful and starlit to smithereens.  Go on, now, leave Adele.  I want to nap a while.  But Judge Hitchmough must kill himself.  He has not right to live.  Goodbye my dear, and enjoy your jewels and your young men."


Purdy, James.  On Glory's Course, New York: Penguin Books, 1984.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. (John Berger) Some excerpts from the novel G.

Two weeks ago I finished (with great satisfaction, and I recommend it to those who are willing to take chances with a slightly modified literary form) John Berger's 1972 novel, G.

G. is set in pre-First World War Europe, and its protagonist, named "G.", is a Casanova-like lover of women who gradually comes to political consciousness after misadventures across the continent. We're not invited to care about the philandering hero so much as grapple with the historical and philosophical reflections that Berger pegs to his pan-European escapades.


Rich and privileged, G. is free to travel. He was conceived four years after the death of Garibaldi in 1886, born in Paris, raised by an aunt and uncle in England. The events of European history swirl around G., counterpointing our view of his personal destiny. History in this book is often a matter of crowds, of Garibaldi's ragged army entering Naples in 1860, or the rioting workers in the streets of Milan in 1898, or the crowds of Bosnian nationalists, Italian Irredentists and Hapsburg soldiers in the streets of Trieste in 1915.

Part of the power and fascination of “G.” comes from this mixture of historical detail and sexual meditation—for at the intersection of G. and history is Berger's attitude toward heroism. G. is neither the public romantic Garibaldi, nor is he a private romantic like his friend Chavez, who in 1910 [was] the first man to fly over the Alps.

Sexuality is central to G., but in this book the timeless moment of sex must always be considered within the context of history. It was a piano-playing governess [who] awakens the lust that proves the keynote in a series of fragmented episodes set during the years before the first world war.

After the above summaries, what I really wanted to share with you are a couple of passages from the novel, which is what I usually do on this blog, right?

Observe.

"Slowly they lie back until their heads touch the counterpane. In this movement backwards she slightly anticipates him.

They are aware of a taste of sweetness in their throats. (A sweetness not unlike that to be tasted in a sweet grape.) The sweetness itself is not extreme but the experience of tasting it is. It is comparable with the experience of acute pain. But whereas pain closes anticipation of everything except the return of the past before the pain existed, what is now desired has never existed.

From the moment he entered the room it has been as though the sequence of their actions constituted a single act, a single stroke.
He bends his head to kiss her breast and take the nipple in his mouth. His awareness of what he is doing certifies the death of his childhood. This awareness is inseparable from a sensation and a taste in his mouth. The sensation is of a morsel, alive, unaccountably half-detached from the roundness of the breast--as though it were on a stalk. The taste is so associated with the texture and substance of the morsel and with its temperature, that it will be hard ever to define it in other terms. It is a little similar to the taste of the whitish juice in the stem of a certain kind of grass. he is aware that henceforth both sensation and taste are acquirable on his own initiative. Her breasts propose his independence he buries his face between them.

Her difference from him acts like a mirror. Whatever he notices or dwells upon in her, increases his consciousness of himself, without his attention shifting from her."

And then there's more...

[This piece involves the character of Beatrice, G.'s second cousin/governess to whom G.'s mother had sent him to England to grow up.  She had lived in South Africa for a short while during the Boer War.]  

"In Pietermaritzburg [South Africa] 

she saw a loyal Dutchman (loyal to the Queen) beating his kaffir servant.  As he beat him he made a noise in his throat like a laugh.  His mouth was open and his tongue was between his teeth.  His passion was such that he did not wish to stop until he had annihilated the body he was beating: yet however hard he beat it, he could not annihilate it.  From this arose the necessity of his cry which resembled a laugh.  His expression was like that of a small child deliberately shitting itself.  The servant, absolutely silent, hunched himself against the blows.

She could not explain her feelings to herself.  There is an historical equivalent to the psychological process of repression into the unconscious.  Certain experiences cannot be formulated because they have occurred too soon.  This happens when an inherited worldview is unable to contain or resolve certain emotions or intuitions which have been provoked by a new situation or an extremity of experience unforeseen by that worldview.  "Mysteries grow up within or around the ideological system.  Eventually these mysteries destroy it by providing the basis for a new worldview.  Medieval witchcraft, for example, may be seen in this light.

A moment's introspection shows that a large part of our own experience cannot be adequately formulated: it awaits further understanding of the total human situation.  In certain respects we are likely to be better understood by those who follow us than by ourselves.  Nevertheless their understanding will be expressed in terms which would now be alien to us.  They will change our unformulated experience beyond our recognition.  As we have changed Beatrice's."

Paragraphs one through four are courtesy of The Guardian, Wikipedia, and The New York Times.  Paragraphs of text (in Times Roman font) are quoted directly from the book, G. A Novel, by John Berger.  New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.

Mark's Books List of 2019

My friend Joe Savino remarked that this is the shortest book list of mine in many a year.  34 compared to 50+ in prior years.  But in my defense, several of these wonderful books are over five, six, sometimes over seven hundred pages.  Not an excuse, but a reason.  And whereas in the past, I augmented my list with audiobooks, listening them while on my lunch-hour walk, in 2019, I unfortunately did not take as many lunch-hour walks as in prior years. I let my job dictate my emotional and psychological equilibrium, or lack thereof.  I quote a great American crime novelist:"The workin' man don't get nothin' but older."  

Nevertheless, here's the list.  I've hyperlinked each title, so glide your curser over the title of the book and you can click away, and get taken to a review of it.

Brother Kemal and Happy Birthday, Turk! by Jakob Arjouni, two more reads into the underworld of Arjouni, who died age 49 in 2013, and his Turkish-German private investigator Kemal Kayankaya.  Good cocky mysteries.  

Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris is yet another hilarious recitation of the absurdity of life.  As usual, I guffawed out loud during much of this insane, Christmastime romp.  

Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell, “the best known editor at The New Yorker,” takes us to 1912 Illinois, small-town gentleness, and leaves you feeling that the afternoon is an actual character. Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant is a very good book of very good stories.  I’m looking forward to reading our other volume we have somewhere in the apartment, “Selected Stories of”.  Naturally there are six other books ahead of her.  

Death and the Penguin and Penguin Lost by Andrey Kurkov are two of my favorite books from 2019; Kurkov takes you along on a sometimes nerve-wrecking story but will endear himself to you before you know it.  The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown is an extraordinary story.  In the early decades of the U.S. in the Pacific Northwest, growing up in a broken home, working harder than one can ever imagine, this story about Joe Rantz, and the quest to make it to the 1936 Berlin Olympics is unbelievable.  I couldn’t get over how cold I felt while reading about Joe Rantz and his buddies rowing their brains out in the freezing weather around Seattle.  This is a marvelous and informative biography.

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles another of my gold-star reads for 2019, New York City in the 1930s, deep and complex.  The System of the World by Neal Stephenson took me forever to read last year, not because it was a drudgery, but because it is a huge book, its scope immense, and the intertwined stories of 17^th Century European politics, science, medicine, and swashbuckling are fantastic.  It concludes the Baroque cycle, three volumes of several books within each.  I loved it.

Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time by Hilary Spurting is a fascinating biography of novelist Anthony Powell, and his impact on many of our contemporary, modern British writers.  A Closed Eye by Anita Brookner is yet another book I digested with relish by the woman who brought me Leaving Home and The Bay of Angels.  “My idea of heaven is a nice cup of tea” and sitting reading a Brookner novel.

Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War by Adam Hochschild, it’s a hard book to read because I’ve read so much already about this war both in fiction and nonfiction that its innumerable betrayals and cruelties are such precursors, preludes in full to the Second World War, like the explosion of the universe from the big bang theory.

Autumn Light by Pico Iyer is as I mentioned in my posting about it a beautiful book.  I wish I had the time to reread it.   Independent People by Halldor Laxness, the Nobel winner for literature, is a thick uphill tragic story of the people of early 20^th century Iceland.  Nature is almost as cruel to the people as they are to themselves.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks is a very good book in the vein of Dan Brown or Joseph Kanon.  I recommend it for like-minded readers. 

The Turkish Gambit  and Murder on the Leviathon by Boris Akunin are my continuing pleasures of late 19^thcentury Russian murder mysteries, making you laugh or making you astounded by the brilliance of the ongoing adventures of  the Sherlock Homes-like Fandorin.

The Mystic Masseur and Guerrillas by V. S. Naipaul are two more ventures into the world of colonial Trinidad & Tobago.  The former novel is loaded with satire, the latter reminds you that white rule, capitalism, subjection of the poor found its way into every nook and cranny of the British Empire, even after Empire. 

When I began reading Wendell Berry I had no preconceived notions of his art, but having read four of his books in 2019, I have been left with inarticulate adoration of his prose and amazement of his social, economic, and roots-of-the-family scope.  Nathan Coulter; A Place on Earth; The Memory of Old Jack; and Jayber Crow.  Four books that are going to be difficult to let go of.

Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon is a page-turner, Second World War thriller that fits right into my Alan Furst or John Lawton canon.

The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne is a good book.  He covers a lot of ground so buckle up.

The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St. James, 1932-1943, edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky, is one of the most fascinating books ever.  The presence of some of the most powerful people of the middle 20^th century, be it political or artistic, and Ambassador Maisky’s ability to keep his head above the Soviet Union’s fanaticisms during WW II, is nothing short of brilliance.  He is so incredibly charming, even when being bullied by Churchill.

The Bastards of Pizzofalcone by Maurizio de Giovanni.  This was like reading a television crime series, only in Italy.  It was a fun diversion.   Blowing the Bloody Doors Off by Michael Caine cracked me up most of the time, but he feels it’s necessary to give the reader helpful hints and encouragements about show business in every chapter.  

Agent Running in the Field by John Le Carre, his latest, was quite good.  I am a proud and loyal admirer of le Carre and I am happy to know he won the Olaf Palme Prize for his contribution to democracy.

Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce by Colm Toibin is a fascinating book about Oscar Wilde’s father, James Joyce’s father, and WB Yeats’ father, each unique in his own right, one more interesting than the other, but it is a very good read.  

Uncommon Grounds by Mark Pendergast takes you through the glorious discovery of coffee and its development as an indispensible attachment in our lives; but it also shows you the limitless greed of men with money and land, and advertising and lawyers, until you are demolished by the suffering that has occurred to bring you that heavenly coffee, good to the last drop, combustion.

Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales by Oliver Sacks joins the other Oliver Sacks books I’ve read, and I haven’t read them all but soon I will, as a wonderful book.   Under Occupation by Alan Furst was my first and only disappointment in his oeuvre.  Fugeddaboudit.

The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco.  I knew I needed to read a book by Eco because I really liked the film of The Name of the Rose and my friend Theresa (who is a Brooklyn girl you know) liked the book The Name of the Rose very much.  So I chose The Island of the Day Before.  Half.  Just half of this effete intellectual snob's book was necessary.  The rest was a waste of my three-score-and-four life.

Autumn Light and Pico Iyer - rush and distraction as foreign words

I have posted a few times about the British essayist, novelist, travel writer, Pico Iyer. I never tire of reading his work, experiencing vicariously his travels all across the globe, or his memories from boyhood to yesterday. The most recent book of his I read (in August of this year) was Autumn Light, a book Publishers Weekly recounts as being about "aging, death, and family fracturing...seen through the lens of Japanese culture," with Iyer describing his and Hiroko's (his Japanese wife) "efforts to cope with her father’s death, her mother’s entry into a nursing home, and her estrangement from her brother." 

Although there is much given to reflection in this book, there is still a lot going on, stirring one's stomach juices not toward gastronomy but toward hopefulness, anxiety, isolation, you name it, it went on inside me. He tells us 90+ pages into the book, "Autumn is the season of subtractions, the Japanese art of taking more and more away to charge the few things that remain. At least four times as many classical poems are set in autumn and spring than in summer and winter."


I jealously read onward, as he compares the life he left in New York City with the one he's living now:

"There's no car to take in for a smog test..., no breaking news banner...from CNN. I take my watch off the minute I arrive in Deer's Slope [the neighborhood Iyer and his wife live]. I'll never have to be anywhere at 3:00 p.m., and when I pull back the door to the terrace and walk out for an hour with a book and a cup of tea, I feel as if "rush" and "distraction" are words in a foreign lexicon."


For Iyer, who was often referred to as Pico-san by his neighbors, adjusting to the culture of modern Japan was as interesting as it was trepidatious.


"For so long..., the local men seemed a kind of alien species impossible to get close to. Women were always welcoming; everyone from the older ladies in shops, who spoke to me in crystalline Japanese, patient and kindly, to the young girls at cash registers, deliberately chirpy and full of processional smiles, did everything they could to make communication possible."


His socialization with many of the men and women at the athletic club he visits daily is where the real friendship-making takes place. Mostly elderly men and women playing ping pong and other activities, they eventually become warm and inclusive, as they are  "Allowed to be human again--their responsibility formerly to protect their families by being away from them, is now to protect their families by being with them...."(pp. 78-79)


With his wife, trying to make sense of her brother's estrangement from the family...,

  "That time, little they showing children many pictures. Then ask: Which face happy? Which face calm? Which person you think beautiful?
  "One boy, he every answer perfect. So intelligent. Every answer correct. But then my brother show him two picture--'Which one beautiful?' And this boy choose one with very strange face. Not so gorgeous.
  "They so surprise! Little shock feeling. Then, test-finish time, boy's mother coming, take him home. She look exactly same face, so strange."
  She smiles back up at me. "Every kid, mother's face so beautiful." (p.92)


Waking from a nap, Iyer writes: "As I come to consciousness, she's waving incense all around, as in a church, and throwing open every window to the predawn chill--the way we'll fling out roasted soybeans in early February, crying, "Devil, go out! Happines, stay in!" then, dread moment, she puts on a recording of low-voiced Tibetan chants, and sits stock-still for 20 minutes, before hauling every spare piece of clothing she can find into the washing machine and whipping up in 8 minutes or less tonight's dinner. ...This from the woman who runs out of the room, hands clamped to her ears, whenever I put on Leonard Cohen...." (p. 93)

Pico Iyer, The Dalai Lama, Hiroko Takeuchi

Hiroko is a marvelously good-hearted, sweet, and kind woman. You can't help but love her dearly.  When Iyer tells her over the phone, calling from Marrakesh to say that he feels darkness everywhere, "she told me to put salt in my pocket." [For Hiroko], her whole country is for her a teeming network of chattering crickets and tutelary spirits and heavenly forces she has to appease and watch closely, as she might a boss." (p. 98)

the Heart Sutra

One morning, Hiroko dressed to go outside in the rain, sat on the bed and drew on Iyer's back with her index finger, then blew on the "characters" she made: "An impromptu Hiroko blessing, to protect me from all evil, copying a little of the Heart Sutra onto my spine before she puts on her shades and struggles into her tall black boots." (p. 98)



The book is full of meditations and remembrances, both by Iyer and Hiroko, by her father and by her mother. It's a wonderful book. Let me leave you with this:

"I marvel at the clueless kid I'd been, barely out of my twenties, wandering around Japan not knowing a thing and therefore seeing so much. It reminds me of the time last week when I had a revelation--change itself is an unchanging truth--so new and unlike anything I'd caught before that I had to scribble it down. A few days later, going through my notes, I found that I'd had precisely the same revelation, word for word, a year before. Eerily, on the same November day. Later, I came upon exactly the same "discovery" once more, in my notes from six years before." (p. 159)