The Body Artist – Don DeLillo

inspirationalreads1 Comment

Book #45

Reviewer: Inspirationalreads

BA

Lauren Hartke is the body artist of the title.  A performance artist, she is married to film maker Rey Robles who shortly after we are introduced to him, drives to his first wife’s house and kills himself by way of gunshot wound to the head. Staying on at the rented beach side holiday house they had been temporarily living in, Lauren becomes mired in her grief, drawing in on herself, isolating herself.  Until one night she happens upon a stranger in the house with her, a stranger who happens to be able to speak in Rey’s voice and recall whole conversations between Lauren and Rey leading up to the day of his death.

So far, pretty straightforward.  Yet, this book is nothing of the sort.  Let me give you the first paragraph;

Time seems to pass.  The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web.  There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay.  You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness.  The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.

This leads in to the last morning that Lauren and Rey are together, their morning routine laid out in a seemingly pointless routine, familiar to many couples and yet not.  Because when Lauren bent

…she let out a groan, but not really every time, that resembled a life lament.

Or about Rey shaving;

“Why shave at all?” There must be a reason,” he said. “I want God to see my face.”

I really had trouble reading past this first part.  There is a forced feel about this mundane ritual that immediately left me cold.  A widely lauded post-modern author, DeLillo use of language is brought to bear heavily on this couples morning ritual perhaps to elevate it beyond what it was, but only inducing eye rolling in me.  But at just shy of 130 pages, I decided to push on and while the rest of the book improved for me, my opinion is a mixed bag.

The reader is delivered the news of Rey’s demise via a news article, perfunctory and concise, filling in a few more details of Rey’s life as per any regular obituary article.  But this is where the clear and straight-forwardness ends.  We are then plunged into Lauren’s grief, returning to her in their holiday home, the perspective flicking back and forth between first and third person.  The reader is privy to Lauren’s thoughts and like anyone’s personal thoughts, there are non-nonsensical leaps and turns that are dream-like and at times, hard to follow.  When a young stranger suddenly appears in one of the rooms in the house, his arrival is not startling, but inevitable her instincts having known there was someone always there.  This stranger, whom she names Mr Tuttle after one of her teachers, is childlike in appearance and capabilities but has the unnerving ability to parrot past conversations with Rey, mimicing his voice and his side of the conversation. I struggled to understand the significance of Mr Tuttle beyond the obvious; he is a representation of Rey one that Lauren can care for, nurse due to his childlike state.

Why shouldn’t death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach?

But his utterances are confusing too; repetitive and making little sense.  Is this to reinforce his childlike fragility?  He isn’t a total blank space for her to write Rey into, so again confusing and distracting in its oddness.

I went to have a look at some other feelings about this book from other readers on Goodreads, as I was feeling a little like a lot of this book went over my head and maybe my feeling of inadequacy led to my dislike of it.  However, there is the general feeling that it is deliberately vague and “hallucinatory”, leading to differing opinions of what the story actually is even among the literary reviewers.  While this appealed to some, I can not count myself among them.  I found the ideas and the tone of this book quite personal to DeLillo himself, a creation of art that is particular to his specific vision and thus making it not accessible to everyone, but then in leaving it to taste, not something that will be enjoyed by many also.  I did have to laugh at one reader addressing DeLillo as “you post-modern gargoyle of unmeaning“.  And I agree; I think his unmeaning was the undoing of my enjoyment.

Quote of the Week

Ms Oh WailyLeave a comment

Come out all you Douglas Adams fans…

“Beppu (n.)

The triumphant slamming shut of a book after reading the final page.”
― Douglas Adams, The Deeper Meaning of Liff

Have you a beppu in your life lately?

The Tree of Man – Patrick White

Ange - Tall, Short, Tiny & a Pickle5 Comments

Book #496a
Reviewer: Tall, Short & Tiny

The Tree of Man

 

A friend’s boyfriend recommended The Tree of Man years ago, when he found out how much I love to read. He wrote the name of the novel in the little notebook I carried for such purposes, and a few years later, I decided to try his suggestion.

From the moment I began to read White’s prize-winning novel, I was hooked.

It is an evocative, beautifully written novel, with descriptive passages that transport the reader directly to the heart of rural Australia. However, the narrative never detracts from the quintessentially simple, rural nature of the story; it only serves to describe the setting and its inhabitants perfectly. White has taken an ordinary, plain situation, and made it interesting and beautiful.

The imagery is fantastic; I especially enjoyed the way White described the intensity of bush fires, and was turning pages as fast as the flames ripped through the landscape. I also thoroughly enjoyed White’s use of language, with immensely appealing lines such like,

“…she began to feel sad, or chocolatey.”

White has the ability to describe the most mundane, ordinary things in a deliciously ordinary way that evokes such strong images, such as,

“She sat in an old cane chair, which creaked beneath her. The chair had been unravelling for many years but it was comfortable.”

This novel is about human endurance, about relationships (including friendships) and how they change over time. There is a recurring theme that in time, and with age, love is transformed into habit; I interpreted the line above about the cane chair as a metaphor for the love-to-habit theme. As the central characters, Stan and Amy Parker, move through their lives, there are many moments where their love for each other is questioned, yet they still appear strong. White writes,

“Habit comforted them, like warm drinks and slippers, and even went disguised as love.”

and Amy is often lamenting not loving someone enough.

For the most part, this novel was a real page-turner. About three-quarters of the way in, I felt as though the chapters were just filling in time until something inevitable happened, and didn’t enjoy it as much as. However, only a few chapters later, I was hooked once more, and felt the novel was back on track.

When a central character dies (I will not say who!), there is very little drama or fanfare about it, which feels natural because the novel is very much about the everyday. Perhaps it is also because the death of someone is expected, given that the novel begins with marriage, and goes through the (natural) progressions of life; while it is a sad occasion, I don’t think the novel would have felt complete with this happening.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Tree of Man, and it came as no surprise that this was the winner of The Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. I give it 4.5/5 stars.

Quote of the Week

Ms Oh WailyLeave a comment

Does anyone else have this problem?

“My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it’ll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It’s like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads.”
― A.J. Jacobs

The 39 Steps – John Buchan

Ms Oh Waily2 Comments

Book #743

Reviewer: Ms Oh Waily

T39SWelcome to the early world of the ‘spy-thriller’ and the inspiration for the first  ‘man-on-the-run’ films.

John Buchan wrote The 39 Steps in 1915 while convalescing with a duodenal ulcer.  It is set in 1914 in the lead up to World War I and puts mining engineer and general adventurer, Richard Hannay, on the run in the borders of Scotland.  There is a very good chance you will have seen Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the same name, which is loosely based on this story.

We first meet Richard Hannay three months in to his return to the Old Country from southern Africa.  He’s made his ‘pile’ out in Rhodesia and decides to return to England, but is disappointed from the very first and at the point we join him he is giving it one more day to find some reason to stay.

And reason he gets.

On returning to his flat one evening he is accosted by the man who lives in the top floor flat of his building.  The man asks to come in, and there begins Hannay’s introduction to pre-WWI espionage.  Franklin Scudder introduces a wild and barely plausible tale with the wonderful throw-away line,

‘Pardon,’ he said, ‘I’m a bit rattled tonight.  You see, I happen at this moment to be dead.’

While clearly he is not dead at this point, he shortly fulfills his own prophecy with a knife through the chest, pinned to the floor of Hannay’s flat.  Left with the choice of face the police and a murder charge, or follow up on the fanciful tale that Scudder tells him, he chooses to flee London and head to the remotest part of the Isles he can find – Galloway in the borders of Scotland.  Here we get to enjoy multiple run-ins with various local characters and watch Hannay bounce from one piece of bad luck to good, to incredulous, eventually back to bad luck and then to good.  Eventually we return to England, first to London and then to Kent and the mystery of the 39 steps is revealed.

It is certainly a dated work.  The language is almost Wodehousian, but not quite yet.  You find lovely words like aquascutums presumably from the business of the same name, and knickerbockers.  Despite the amount of pages devoted to Hannay’s scurrying around the countryside it is surprisingly still short enough not to get too boring.  By the time he finally heads south again, having eluded the spies chasing him, you are glad to see things moving on as his luck is nothing short of outrageous for most of the flight.

My volume was 174 pages long which I read comfortably in one day.  I am not a fast reader.  This is not complicated writing, nor overly descriptive in any way.  It is a bald adventure story where we learn almost nothing of note about the characters other than that which is required to move the adventure along.  I felt rather like I was reading the bridge between the Conan Doyle adventures of Sherlock Holmes and those of John Le Carre’s spymaster, George Smiley.  It was neither, in my opinion, of the quality nor graceful style of the other authors but there were elements of both clearly visible in the writing.  It had quite a few tinges of Victoriana, yet also looked ahead to what would eventually become the modern spy genre.

Buchan apparently called the style of his book a “shocker”, which dear Wikipedia notes,

He described a “shocker” as an adventure where the events in the story are unlikely and the reader is only just able to believe that they really happened.

I think Mr Buchan had a good handle on his writing.  It is a good and fair description of the story.  Barely believable, but just enough of an end-of-fingernail grip on reality to keep you reading until the end.

If you have a spare afternoon or evening and want to see the starting shoots of a genre, then this is the book for you.