A very good review from Derosaworld.typepad.com on General Mouse

 

A Good Short Story and A Great Short Story: The Professor vs General Mouse

Our college literature professors teach us that a good short story has a strong descriptive narrative about one event or moment in time. There are plenty of Hemingway short stories that can prove that theory.
But occasionally a writer can break that mold and you get Dorothy Parker’s The Big Blonde which seems to capture a novel-sized life in a few pages.
I read two short stories last week that also go for the ‘Hail Mary’ pass in terms of story arc. Roberto Bolano has a story in Harper’s Magazine this month The Ruin of Amalfitano (log-in required) which manages to track the downfall of a writing professor (Amalfitano) once he has met a young writing student named Padillo, as they share a demolition derby ride through life.
The other story is General Mouse, a tour de force written by Mark Zipoli. This story sets out to cover the life of a man who we meet bemoaning the super-sized dietary habits of Americans as he works keeping a Los Angeles Farmers' Market clean of garbage and trash.
The story unravels General Mouse’s amazing personal history overlaid with remembrances of things past from our shared history of Vietnam.
Bolano’s story is the ‘good’ story here, and is as wild as we would except from the author of The Savage Detectives. The highs, lows, sex and drugs of a Bolano story are on display as the trajectory of the professor's life changes after meeting the student who changes everything. It is a richly drawn character study that captures the fallout as the men's passions collide and mix to create a toxic nectar of which both men drink.
It is the scope of the story that is impressive. The reverberations of the friendship of these two men’s lives require Bolano to write of the aftermath of the final parting of Amalfitano and Padillo on the other minor characters in the story. We too, as readers are left changed after sharing the experience of their lives, and we are left wanting to know more.
The ‘great’ story here, is General Mouse, a story different in every way possible from Bolano’s except for the impact and the scope of what it attempts to achieve, a man's life story.
Mr. Zipoli manages to create a complete biography of a very complex, secretive and important person in the short story form, and we are lacking nothing at the end. We have experienced an epic novel.
General Mouse, whose real name is Anh Dung Tran, a 70 year old worker at the Los Angeles Farmers’ Market, empties the overflow of trash and garbage throughout the day passing judgment on the customers as he slips in and out of memories from his past; memories intertwined with the history of his home country.
...Nobody knew that he’d read history in Hanoi and studied at the Sorbonne; that he’d taken courses at Moscow University and learned Russian, English, French, and Chinese; that he read maps and had built bridges and swing traps, and dug tunnels; and launched spiked tree trunks into the air against the French and the Americans.

Nobody knew that he’d helped to make a French regiment disappear without a trace in the forests of Cao Bang province. The French colonialists, they never put their backs into it, he thought; we were just savages to those heirs of Voltaire and Danton...

All the revolutionary promises, betrayals and failures experienced by the East vs West satellite nations of the Cold War are played out in the mind, minefields and on the back of Anh Dung Tran.

The writing is truly mesmerizing as we are swept through a biographical, psychological and historical journey of General Mouse.

Tran's present and past, haunt the Farmers’ Market. This is truly a great American short Story.

Mark Zipoli is the author the novel The Long Habit of Living as well as other short stories. Please look him up, he may not be as easy to find as the ghost of Roberto Bolano, but his work is rich in texture and nuance of character. Mr. Zipoli is an author who lets you into the minds of his characters and what they share with the reader is worth volumes.

Review courtesy of http://derosaworld.typepad.com

 

Orhan Pamuk says #5 "The museums I visited in my childhood were joyless places infused with the atmosphere of a government office."

"The museums I visited in my childhood were joyless places infused with the atmosphere of a government office."

[So says Orhan Pamuk in the latest issue of Newsweek Magazine]

"Nevertheless, we still knew exactly what we were supposed to feel: respect for that thing known as “national history”; fear of the power of the state; and a humility that overshadowed our own individualities."

[Check out the full article at Newsweek Magazine here.

All photographs are courtesy of and copyrighted by Newsweek Magazine.]

Page 171 - At the corner of Seventh Avenue, ...I found myself approaching the stands of an all-night vegetable store, ...and spotted Sarah.

From the novel, page 171.

Chapter IX

At the corner of Seventh Avenue, above the entrance to the train station, a path I’d taken repeatedly so as to accomplish it blind-folded, I found myself approaching the stands of an all-night vegetable store, which I hadn’t noticed repeatedly, and spotted Sarah.

She was touching and handling various pieces of fruit before placing them into a basket, which she held close to her side.  She'd looked to me to be quite serene, pleased to be by herself, which she often was but wasn't often pleased by it.  She wore her day clothes, a bicolor dress of rose and gray, a continuum of her thirst for muted shades.

Photo courtesy of Mesut Ilgim
http://www.trekearth.com/members/mesutilgim/

I'd walked past the apples and the out-of-season melons and pushed through the hanging strips of plastic that kept the store's temperature moderately warm and which eliminated the need for formal portals and doors.  I'd walked up to her and stood at her side.

    "Playing the West Side homemaker?" I asked her.  I was happy to discover Sarah when she least expected me.
    "Don't step on that melon.  It's mine," she said.  "Where are you coming from?  Or will I be sorry for asking?"

(later on...as Walter and Sarah are walking home...)

We'd veered off the sidewalk. Sarah went into a small grocery store which was ready to close for the night. I'd inched my way closer to the store's front window, in order to see what Sarah was up to. A woman within came over to the window, untied a thin, nylon rope and let down a set of venetian blinds that cut off my visibility. She'd left me standing there, looking at nothing. I'd turned and stepped back onto the sidewalk and waited for Sarah. She'd emerged into the night with an open package of chocolate cookies.
   "These cookies are exactly like the kind my mother used to make," she cried, almost the epitome of cliché.
   "Are you hungry?" I asked her, resuming our journey homeward.
   "No," she replied. "I just wanted them. I love these cookies. But don't tell anybody about this; I'm not supposed to eat these anymore. I've become allergic to chocolate. Don't tell anyone I bought them." By which she meant don't tell Owen.
   "It's the memory, Walt," she cupped the package against her. "It's just the memory."

[My friend Theresa has an almost Upanishadic reverence for cookies, although cake is a wonderful thing, too...  Her love for her mother and the kinds of things her mother used to do, like cook and bake and play the piano, that brought great waves of comfort to Theresa, not only as a little girl but as a young woman as well, was/is inspiring to me.  I wanted to make Walter and Sarah secret sharers in their own right, and of course incorporate the value of memory as the glue which binds them:  And so I took something from Theresa's and my past, a simple visit to a Korean greengrocer and a stop at a small market.  Memory is oftentimes, in my household, one of the prized glories of the garden, the charm that holds friendships together, holds personalities together, even when the memory is "as heavy as a mountain."]

Through Sunset into the Raccoon Night - one of many excellent short stories by Barry Hannah.

There was a family in St. Louis I lived with, sleeping with their divorced mother.  ...The daughter, every day on the backseat of the car as she was taken to school, said, demanding: “Turn on the radio, please.”  The please just an irony in her mouth, in a flat, mean voice.  The mother obliged as if hypnotized, never pausing to find that rock-and-roll button for the brat.  One day I couldn’t bear it any longer, but when she was out of the car to school I did not attack.  Rather I started weeping because of the sadness of being around this hugely indulged vixen, and I knew love would die soon because I couldn’t stand the home life that made her possible.*

*[Excerpted from "Through Sunset into the Raccoon Night," in High Lonesome, by Barry Hannah.]

I finished the book yesterday and thought I should put it out "there" because Hannah is such a good writer, and he can make you laugh as well as push your head through a wall.  Sometimes we need that.

Here's another...

She came out into the driveway wailing as I’ve never heard a white person wail.  But you see a whole tree go over like that, and your grip on the universe goes.  A small mob of slackers came down the block and stood around the big tree over the Mercedes.  They grinned, sort of worshipping the event.  But the woods running down a hill to the east went into an exploding mutual collapse too much like the end of the world, and everyone fled back inside.

           All these old trees were like family in the act of dying; their agony was more terrible than the storm itself.  We had been confident, even arrogant, with them around us, I realized.  They’d been comforting brothers and sisters.  Now the town was suddenly half as tall.**

**["The Ice Storm," from High Lonesome, by Barry Hannah.]

John Cowper Powys Championship Page - #7 "What John and Mary really did was to make love like vicious children"

This is a sample of J.C. Powys’ natural world--it is that surrounding nonhuman electricity that becomes aware of human comings and goings.  It is just a small example of what glues me to his literature, what binds me to his mythology. 

“What John and Mary really did was to make love like vicious children; and this was due to the fact that they were both very nervous and very excitable but not in the faintest degree tempted to the usual gestures of excessive human passion.  The rationalism of analytic logic has divided erotic emotion into fixed conventional types, popular opinion offering one set of categories, fashionable psychology offering another.  As a matter of fact, each new encounter of two amorists creates a unique universe.  No existing generalisation, whether of the wise or of the unwise, covers or ever will cover a tenth part of its thrilling phenomena.  In one respect this love-making by Dye’s Hole was the most childlike that the spot had ever witnessed; in another it was the most cerebral.  The nervous excitement manifested by these two was so free from traditional sentimentality and normal passion, so dominated by a certain cold-blooded and elemental lechery, that something in the fibrous interstices of the old tree against which they leaned was aroused by it and responded to it.”

(The edition cited is A Glastonbury Romance, Woodstock, N.Y.: The Overlook Press, 1987, pp. 70-71)

Above views of the River Wissey, mentioned in A Glastonbury Romance, and the surrounding area for the "...certain cold-blooded and elemental lechery..." of John and Mary's lovemaking.

Foulden Bridge as mentioned on p.68.

I'd like to direct your attention to the Literary Norfolk website, in which JCPowys is mentioned.  The writer of the site or the entry had this to say:

"Another superb description of the river is to be found in John Cowper Powys' novel A Glastonbury Romance (1932). The novel, which is widely regarded as Powys' best book begins in Norfolk....  The book explores Arthurian grail legends. However, in one of the early chapters John takes a trip down the river with his cousin Mary....  The writing is of extraordinary quality."

For the section on the River Wissey click here.
For the section on Northwold (Norfolk) click here. 

Orhan Pamuk says #4: ...No one looked at the clock to tell the time.

An excerpt from Orhan Pamuk's latest novel, The Museum of Innocence.
Chapter 54.

From The Museum of Innocence:

  The illusion that is time--  ...No one looked at the clock to know the time, but they did spend a lot of time talking about whether it had been wound or not, and about how a frozen pendulum might be set in motion again just by touching it once....
  "Let it be.  Let it tick.  It's not hurting anyone.  It reminds us that this house is a house."  I think I would agree.
  So the wall clock was not there to remind us of the time or to warn us that things were changing.  It was there to persuade us that nothing whatsoever had changed.

    ...Even without our being aware of it, the clock always ticked in the same way. And when we sat at the table, eating our supper, it brought us the peace of knowing we hadn't changed.  That all would stay the same with us.  That the clock served to make us forget the time, even as it continually brought us back to the present, reminding us of our relations with others.

John Cowper Powys Championship Page - Post #6 - Why I Love Margaret Drabble and An Excerpt From "Maiden Castle"

Why do I love Margaret Drabble?  Let me count the ways, but first let's start with this, from The Guardian, August 11 2006: 
"The realm of John Cowper Powys is dangerous. The reader may wander for years in this parallel universe, entrapped and bewitched, and never reach its end. There is always another book to discover, another work to reread. Like Tolkien, Powys has invented another country, densely peopled, thickly forested, mountainous, erudite, strangely self-sufficient. This country is less visited than Tolkien's, but it is as compelling, and it has more air."

MAIDEN CASTLE

A summary of the novel:
"At the centre of the novel is the aptly named Dud No-man, a historical novelist widowed after a yearlong unconsummated marriage to a woman who continues to haunt him. Inspired by pity and his own deep loneliness, Dud takes Wizzie Ravelston, an itinerant circus performer, into his home and heart.  ...As the characters in Maiden Castle struggle with the perplexities of love, desire and faith - readjusting their sights and affections - it is the looming fortress of Maiden Castle that exerts the otherworldly force that irrevocably determines the course of their lives." (text courtesy of the Powys Society official website)


 
From p. 75 of the text, Colgate University Press edition, 1994:
     He knew well how frightened he was, for his fear totally transformed, as they stood there at the bottom of those steps, the normal processes of time and space.  His fear had the effect of making each single second, each tick of the eternal watch in the pocket of the Creator, transmute itself, like a vision in a magician's mirror, into a shifting impression that was composed of space as well as of time.  The "space" of this transmuted experience, this vision over which a psychological magnifiing-glass was being projected back and forth with every breath he took, was the trodden grass and clinging mud of the fair-field; but the time-element in these magnified fear-seconds extended itself so far beyond the present as to throw a magical desirableness over both a past and a future that were free from the engrossing panic of the moment.  He was even able, while his feet were still on the steps of the caravan, as much did the nervous fear he suffered extend the content of the passsing seconds, to tell himself a story about living in unruffled peace forever, with the "eidolon" of his wife visiting him daily while both Wizzie and Thuella melted into thin air.

[Photos:  Maiden Castle is the largest Iron Age hill fort in Europe and covers an area of 47 acres, a large area, equivalent to 50 football pitches. 'Maiden' derives from the Celtic 'Mai Dun' which means 'great hill'. It is situated just 2 miles south of Dorchester in Dorset. The earthworks are immense, some ramparts rising to a height of 6 metres (20 feet) today, they have previously been even higher.  Sometimes called The 'War' Cemetery--bodies of 38 Iron Age warriors were uncovered during an excavation in the 20th century. This is evidence of a Roman attack on the fort. One of the burials had a Roman spearhead embedded in the spine.  (Text courtesy of www.photographers-resource.co.uk, photos courtesy of BBC.)]

"...with the 'eidolon' of his wife visiting..."
(an eidolon is an image, idol, double, apparition, phantom, ghost
 of a person, living or dead)
Photo courtesy of Dave McAleavy, Glasgow, Scotland. www.mcaleavy.org