La alcaldesa

La joven política by Manuela Carmena
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Este libro me encantó, en dos niveles: 1º, Manuela Carmena es un encanto de persona, cuya generosidad de espíritu es evidente en lo que dice y la manera de decirlo; y 2º, su experiencia como alcaldesa y cara y símbolo de una coalición electoral de tendencia pendenciera, hace especialmente valiosas sus reflexiones y propuestas respecto a los obstáculos estructurales para que la democracia realmente responda a las necesidades y los deseos del pueblo.
Su larga experiencia como abogada laboralista — empezada en los años de Franco y su represión — y luego como juez no la había preparado por las contiendas feroces entre facciones políticas, con sus insultos y descalificaciones, exageraciones y hasta mentiras que ya son costumbre conocida por los políticos más veteranos. Pero aguantó, y hasta hizo gestos importantes para fomentar un ambiente más cordial y productivo, por ejemplo, el invitar a los de los otros partidos a desayunar con ella en su oficina con sus famosas magdalenas (Carmena incluye las receta para sus magdalenas en el libro).
Pero lo que encontró más inaceptable y seguramente el origen de gran parte de las ineficiencias de nuestro sistema electoral era la férrea lealtad y disciplina que exigen los partidos, con el único objetivo de alcanzar el poder. Lo que se podría hacer para la ciudad con ese poder es de menor importancia; lo realmente importante es preservar el partido como organización y asegurar puestos pagados para sus miembros más activos y leales. Eso explica la tendencia de los voceros de la oposición de oponerse a toda propuesta del consistorio, sin contemplar una colaboración para mejorar la propuesta.
Sin embargo, pudo empezar algunos importantes cambios en la ciudad, En 2018, a pesar de todas las frustraciones,

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Time of the wolves: Germany, post WWII

Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich by Harald Jähner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Aftermath (original title: Wolfszeit, “Wolf Time,” 2019) is about the Germans in 1945-1955, recovering from the war, their huge and humiliating defeat, the destruction of most of their cities and production facilities, and their own conflicted consciences. Not surprisingly, most popular was the interpretation of themselves as “victims” rather than perpetrators of the terrible violence that not only killed millions of people but displaced even more millions of survivors. The sequels of the Ukraine war are going to be of similar scale, as we can already see with the millions of refugees, destruction of agrarian and industrial productivity, and the terrible losses of life. How the Russians are going to deal with it, and their own consciences if at least some of them acknowledge the evidence, …?
The war and the rapid collapse of the Nazi regime in 1945 altered the structure of all Europe — as will Russia’s current war on Ukraine. What had been the greatest economic and military power on the continent was now divided into four zones governed respectively by the French, the British, the U.S., and the Soviets. National boundaries were redrawn, so that much of what had been German became Polish, leading to expulsion or (more-or-less voluntary) mass migration of German speakers westward, to lands they had never seen before and whose dialects and accents were unfamiliar — and where they had no prospects for making a living.
“In the summer of 1945 about 75 million people lived in the four occupied zones of Germany. Some 40 million, far more than half of them, were not where they belonged or wanted to be.” (p. 39)
The hardship and misery in the destroyed cities induced the German self-pity mentioned above, their view of themselves as “victims”, and an utter lack of concern about the missing millions of Jews, even among those Germans (a minority) who accepted German responsibilty for the destructive war. Finding ways to survive — often by theft, frequently accompanied by violence over a precarious shelter or a fragment of bread in a bombed out city — and the abuses by the occupying forces, including house-breaking and rapes by barely-controlled Soviet soldiers — earned this period the label “Wolfszeit”, or “time of the wolf”, the ferocious monster of German folklore.
But it also inspired creativity and ingenuity of many Germans, sometimes in ways that contributed to the rebuilding of economy, production and even culture. Among the exceptional personalities that Jähner highlights are the now-famous writer and poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a creative capitalist as a child in the black market of Bavaria; the beautiful and daring actress Hildegard Knef, portraying women taking sometimes brutal control of their sex-lives — a scandalous departure from pre-war German mores; Rudolf Hernnstadt, a Jewish Communist journalist who established new newspapers in the Soviet zone; Hans Habe, “[t]he most glittering among” the German Jews (though he was actually of Hungarian origin) serving the U.S. occupiers — handsome, clever, pretentious and “highly efficient” at establishing newspapers to counter the lingering ideology of the Nazis; the famous author Alfred Döblin; pilot and sex-education popularizer Beate Uhse; and Heinrich Nordhoff, the “general” who got Volkswagen back in production.
Very clearly written and bristling with dramatic incidents, this book is necessary for understanding the Germany that emerged from its “wolf’s time” to become, this time in very different form, the great economic power it is today.

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 Thoth Writers Collective

We are six writers across two continents, from Spain to California, who collaborate via Zoom, e-mail, etc., to encourage one another and improve our writing —from interpersonal and gender dilemmas, global conflicts to myth. We take our name from Thoth, the ibis-headed god who introduced writing to the ancient Egyptians.

 

Jan Alexander, based in New York, writes both fiction and non-fiction that reflects how globalism and technology are changing everything, in good ways and bad. Her books include Ms. Ming’s Guide to Civilization (novel, Regal Publishers 2020); Getting to Lamma (novel); Bad Girls of the Silver Screen (with Lottie Da; nonfiction).  https://www.janalexander.com/portfolio-category/books/

 

Peter de Lissovoy is a writer and free-lance editor living in New Hampshire; besides his nonfiction memoirs of his days as a civil rights activist with SNCC in Georgia (The Great Pool Jump), his works include the novels Invisible Car Dealer; Wisconsin; Rita; Melusina; The Angels of Zimbabwe; and Feelgood: A trip in time and out: https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Peter-de-Lissovoy/e/B06XPRQ21X?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1649153619&sr=8-1

Geoffrey Fox, based in Spain and New York, is the author of the novels Rabble! A Story of the Paris Commune (2021) and A Gift for the Sultan (2008) and the short-story collection Welcome to My Contri (1988; augmented e-book 2017) --“This frequently powerful collection of short stories enters Latin America as if through the rickety back door of a burlesque house" NYTimes Book Review). His best-selling sociological work is Hispanic Nation: Culture, Politics and the Constructing of Identity (University of Arizona Press, 1997). https://geoffreyfox.com/

 

Karla Huebner is a novelist and professor of art history at Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, and author of Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic (art history, University of Pittsburgh Press), In Search of the Magic Theater (novel, Regal House 2022) and other works. https://www.karlahuebner.com/

 

Margaret C. Murray lives in the San Francisco East Bay with two dogs and a cat. She is the author of novels Sundagger.net, Dreamers, Spiral and Pillow Prayers. Margaret is a small press publisher and teaches From Heart to Paper Writing Workshops. Presently she is fine-tuning her upcoming fifth novel Deer Xing. See https://writewordspress.com/.

 

Dirk van Nouhuys writes novels, short stories, experimental forms, and occasionally verse.  He has a BA from the Stanford creative writing program and was minor pioneer of what later became the internet. He has published a book on Macintosh applications, and a translation of two Flemish novels, The Danger and The Enemy.  He publishes fiction regularly in literary and other magazines to a total of about 95 items.   http://www.wandd.com/Site/Publications.html. 

Comments on A Book of Memories by Péter Nádas

 

This novel is about people whose self-definition has been fragmented and rotted generation by generation by a totalitarian state. Perhaps a reader who had been immersed in the Soviet control of Eastern Europe would know this from the first page, but to a Western reader it at first appears a book about a neurotic guy with romantic and self-image problems. For us, the social depth of the origin of those problems gradually emerges over the first couple of hundred pages. 

 In December 1954, on the last day before winter break, as I recall, a sizable delegation of grim looking men showed up at our school. They arrived in huge black automobiles. They all wore dark hats. From our classroom window we saw the hats disappear in the doorway downstairs. All teaching ceased. We had to sit in silence. Footsteps echoed in the corridors, never just one but several pairs of footsteps, and then silence again. Some people were being led somewhere. Not a peep out of anybody hissed our most hated instructor, Klement, when somebody would stir to change position. The door opened. The janitor called out someone barely whispering the name. Footfalls. Then the waiting: will he come back? After a short while the student would come back, looking pale, and sidle into his seat, followed by our curious stares, and the door would close again. Trembling lips and ears rubbed red told us that something must have happened. Something was going on. But the most unlikely people were taken out; I saw no pattern, so I could draw no conclusion. 

 

 It is not an easy read at 705 pages. For the first 591 the nameless narrator recounts and ruminates on his life. At the time of the narrative he is in his late 30’s or so but lengthy flashbacks explore his childhood and adolescence. He is also writing a novel that seems to be set in the 19th century and interrupts the narrative here and there. The next 90 pages are a first-person narrative by a friend of his. A single, final chapter is a kind rough draft of the end of the protagonist's life, mostly in first person. The present-time story is of an unnamed Hungarian who is explicitly bisexual. He is living in East Berlin. The wall is still up. He works in an unclear function in a theatrical production where he is in a love triangle with an East German man and a prominent actress. "Love triangle" usually really means an acute angle with the protagonist at the apex, but this is a full-fledged triangle where each of the people involved is in love with each of the others because being in love with the other is part of being in love with the one and, well or badly, whether they love themselves. The narrative tension focuses mostly on the probability of his affair with the man breaking up. 

 The sentence structure differs in the different sections. Of course, this is a translation and I can only infer that something similar is true in Hungarian. The long first section contains frequent stretches of dialogue. Here’s one from a flashback to his adolescence: 

 

"But may I ask you how you found out about their plans, then?" 

"That's my business, don't you think?" 

"So that means you have your own little plans, right?" 

"Right." "And of course that's where you want to go." 

"Why not? I haven't decided yet." 

"Because you don't want to miss out on anything, right?" 

"I'm not going to tell you, so don't get your hopes up." 

"I'm not interested." 

"So much the better." 

"I'm an idiot for coming here." 

There was a moment's silence then very quietly and hesitantly, she said, 

"Want me to tell you?" 

"I couldn't care less. Keep it to yourself."

 It also includes vivid descriptions of action. The narrator pays lots of attention to physical detail of many kinds; in particular there are several erotic scenes, closely described but not very sexy. 

 I held his face in my hands, and he held my face in his, the gestures were identical, yet our intentions seemed to be at odds; it's possible that I didn't even mention my shame, didn't say it out loud, afraid that if I went further and said the word, I would have to be truly ashamed, because he would respond the only way he knew, with cold reserve and suggestive irony, with his perennial, exasperatingly beautiful smile, then my own embarrassment would spoil something that must not be spoiled at any cost, I could deprive my hand of the warmth of his face, of its movements, of the stumble’s crackle under my fingers, which I especially liked, though on our first night it had still elicited resistance from me, caused by the dread of the familiarly unfamiliar, the resistance that was also an attraction enticing me to cross the border between smoothness and coarseness on the face of a man, with my mouth to touch another mouth that was also ringed with stubble, to feel the same kind of strength from it that I was imparting to it, as if receiving back not his strength but my own "Why it's my father's mouth!" someone shouted in my voice on our first night when he leaned over to kiss me on the lips, and I could hear the scraping and blending of whiskers on our chins, the stubble on our father’s chins touching the smooth skin of our forgotten childhood selves! 

 A description of someone assisting the birth of piglets is almost unbearably vivid. 

 But long paragraphs, sometimes two or three pages long, of reflective thought by the protagonist, dominate the first 600 pages. These paragraphs lean heavily on what my highschool English teacher would have called comma faults and on semicolons where standard English practice would have periods. Phrases and ideas are often rephrased and repeated; a point is made three times where a more direct voice would have made it once. Em dashes often enclose tangential thoughts. The style of this narrator is not a mannerism of the author; rather it embodies the narrator’s fragmented state of mind and fragmented self. 

 Now if some unauthorized strangers were to rummage through my things and go over my papers. ... Well, this stranger, this secret agent would appear after my death to make out a report about me based on the papers found among my affects had often cropped up in my dreams; although he was faceless and of intermediate age, I found his immaculate shirt front, stiff collar, polka dotted necktie adorned with a glittering diamond pin, and especially his rather shiny frockcoat all the more characteristic and significant; with long, bony fingers he rummaged expertly through my papers, occasionally lifting a page close to his eyes, giving me the impression that he was near-sighted, though I didn't see him wearing eyeglasses; the pursuit reused a sentence here and there, and I noted with satisfaction that he derived completely different meanings from the ones I had hoped my sentences would imply; no wonder I had managed to fool even someone like him; after all, I made sure that my fleeting ideas, fragmentary thoughts, and hasty descriptions were jotted down so that my papers remained well within the bounds of middle-class propriety, counting also on the possibility that my dear old Frau Huebner[his landlady], taking advantage of my absence driven by simple curiosity, would likewise look through the pages piled on my desk; thus I became an unauthorized stranger to my own life, because of seeing myself as a criminal, a miserable misfit, I still wanted to remain a perfect gentleman in the eyes of the world, I myself became that shiny frock coat, and starched shirt front, and the tie pin, the irreproachably inane form of bourgeois respectability; secretly, and proud of my own slyness, I figured that if I used a private code when recording my accumulated experiences, then, since I possess the key, I'd always be able to open the lock of the code; but as might be expected, the lock turned out to be fool proof, and by the time I finally came around to open it, my hands trembling with anxiety, I simply could not find the keyhole. 

The section narrated by his friend is mostly in crisp sentences; the first quotation above is an example. The final chapter is in the form of a rough draft, the end of a life never resolved. Many flashbacks, not necessarily in chronological order, render painfully present the narrator’s childhood and adolescence. 

 Maybe it's fortunate, or unfortunate, that to this day I cannot decide what is better, knowledge or ignorance; no matter how much I tried to live their [his parents’] lies and find my place in the system of falsehoods, contributing to the smooth operation of the system's fine mechanism with effective lies of my own, and even if I could not see what it set it all in motion or what was covered up by what, still, over time I did gain some insight into the layers of deception;… 

 His father was an important prosecutor in the Hungarian government, and political power shifts eventually drive him to suicide. His parents, grandparents, and their friends live in a state of constant evasiveness joined by powerful bonds. His father and his mother are each involved in love affairs that are enmeshed in arbitrary and dangerous government structures. He is aware of them and his awareness contributes to his confusion about himself, his sexuality, and, even who his father is. As an adolescent, the narrator has intense and erotically charged emotional relationship with a group of friends, both boys and girls, which involve the sort of triangles described above. This part of book is Freudian in the sense that all the characters’ involvement with others and with themselves have an erotic pressure. 

All these people are deeply affected by the oppressive government. For instance the death of Stalin is a major event in all their lives. A friend of the narrator is shot and dies in his arms during the abortive Hungarian revolution in 1956. Fragments of the novel the protagonist is writing appear from time to time and are in effect another level of narrative, like flashback, something that occupies his mind. The novel is based on similar triangular relationship and the hero’s despair over resolving it, which leads to a murder. His account of his motivation is also Freudian in the sense that his acts are over determined. For many actions and thoughts more than one adequate motive is documented. Nádas often asserts that what really controls people’s emotions and actions is ‘the body,’ but it is not clear to me how the ‘the body’ is different from other sources of motivation. 

The protagonist is an unreliable narrator, not in the sense that we should not trust him – he is often painfully frank —, but in the sense that he does not trust himself. His dubiousness embodies the constant pressure of that society to manifest appearances not central to the self. The characters who suffer this are bitterly forced to be this or that, so that they can never commit themselves to a core self. This dubiousness is at the heart of the fragmentation. He does not endorse himself. He never believes in himself. So no core ever flourishes. 

 

The title evokes À la recherche du temps perdu. The constant state of inquisitive flirtation with a group of friends in flashbacks to his adolescence specifically suggests À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, but with no Elstir to guide them. Long passages when the protagonist and his lover, while not imprisoned, are cloistered in the lover’s apartment, including his scrutinizing his sleeping partner, suggests La Prisonnière. But whereas for Proust rediscovering the past, though it may be painful, is integrative, and forward looking, for our unnamed protagonist it is disintegration, a horror that destroys him.

Comments on Child of Light

 

I have to warn you that these thoughts are as much about me as about Madison Bell’s biography of Robert Stone and offer as many questions as answers. In several ways I'm not a very good person to comment on it. First, I'm not a reader of biographies. I can remember reading only four others in my long life: a biography of Duke Ellington for a high school paper; a biography of Mahatma Gandhi by Erik Erickson because of the time I was seeing therapist trained by Erickson; Maynard Solomon’s biography of Beethoven for a short story I was writing; Earnest Jones’ stately tome on Freud (which was stolen from me in a laundromat in Manhattan Beach). I’ve read hundreds possibly thousands of novels for each biography. 

 

The Ellington biography as best I can remember was a dutiful grind. I hated the Gandhi biography because at the time I hated Erickson’s thesis that people's lives divided into developmental stages (like Shakespeare's seven ages of man). In reading Solomon I wanted to get a feeling of what it would be like to know Beethoven. It worked for that, and much of his lore has stayed with me to enrich my listening. But there is something in me that wants to concentrate on what people offer us rather than what they do.

 Second, I was a long-time friend of Bob's and have my own ideas and feelings about who he was and its relation to his books. In full disclosure I read small parts of this biography in draft and corrected a few factual details. 

 This biography embodies extensive study of sources also depends on personal knowledge. Bell was a good friend of Stone’s in his later years and travelled with him. Among other things, Bell reports his own feelings about various matters Stone was involved in in real time, which lends vividness to perspective. Bell has also had detailed support from conversations and written material by Bob's wife Janice who is also a friend of Bell's and of mine. Indeed there is a way this is the Bob and Janice story.

 What if we had biographies of, say, Tolstoy or Hemingway, some written with substantial cooperation of the authors wife(s)? I guess they would be very interesting to compare. Maybe we do; I don’t know. If we had a biography of Shakespeare based on interviews by séance with Anne Hathaway, it would be wonderfully informative and widely read, but would not be the last word on Shakespeare. That is an unfair comparison because William and Anne lived largely apart while Robert and Janice were constantly enmeshed.

 Bell provides great detail about Bob's relations with various people he knew and their effect on his work both in a practical way and as source for his plots and characters; about his publishing contracts, which he tended to fall behind; about the interventions of his agents, but not so much by his editors; about where he travelled and whom with, and Bob travelled a lot; and about where he lived — Janice and Bob had a great many dwellings, sometimes two and even three at once. Bell keeps before the reader Bob's use of alcohol and other drugs. He recounts who went to bed with whom and to a certain extent Bob's thoughts and experiences relative to the Catholic Church and religion in general. Lots of information. As a friend more than I’m interested in. As a reader I feel there is more than enriches the experience, but I’m not quite sure what I would want to omit. For future scholars this is a gold mine.

 Travel is important to Bell’s image of Bob. The most fulsome accounts of his personal encounters with Bob come from time he spent traveling with him, and he always sees Bob as a potential traveller rather than someone who lived somewhere and occasionally travels. 

 Bob’s childhood is hard to describe briefly, but it involved a close but intermittent relationship with his schizophrenic mother, no involvement whatever with his father, and years in an orphanage. Bell carefully unpacks influences in Bob's childhood and adolescence, his mother's religion and his stint in a Marist high school, as sources for his interest in religion (see below). Bell also considers Bob as a commentator, almost a public intellectual, on the state of US culture in his lifetime. That's a little odd considering much of the action of his novels is set outside the United States. Indeed I remember Bob telling me a little before he wrote his last novel, which is set in the US, that he was tired of being considered an expert on countries he had spent a few weeks in. But Bell does not cite people as a source of Bob's perspective on the US. That fits his observation and mine that Bob was an autodidact. He knew a lot about literature and society, but not from studying under X or Y, but through reading and observing with intelligent, passionate attention. 

 The narrative is a straight ahead time line. Bell provides a useful analytical summary of each of his novels in turn and reports the circumstances they were written in. He points out relationships between Bob’s interests and events in his life and events in the novel or even structural and technical issues in the novel.

 One thing Bell points out is that, with one exception, Bob's novels have a river structure. That is, he begins writing about several characters with separate lives who gradually flow together in plot lines until all are involved with one another at the end. Reading the bio made me wonder why that was. I have a vague feeling some connection exists among his scattered dwellings, persistent travels, and diverse friendships, and the scattered plot lines that inevitably pull together, but I can’t put it in words. His endings, I want to add, are almost always bang up. By ‘bang up’ I mean violent, rapid, physical action often including gunfire and explosions. From my perspective these endings are the weakest part of his work. Carefully and deeply developed characters go up in smoke. 

 Reading this biography made me wonder what it was about Bob's personality or goals as a writer led to this kind of endings. Bell devotes a lot of attention to Bob's ambivalent rumination about religion, Roman Catholicism in particular, certainly front and centre in Damascus Gate, set in Jerusalem and peopled with a variety of religious fanatics, and A Flag for Sunrise, set in (unnamed) El Salvador with  important priests, nuns, and a protestant fanatic. I’m not sure it is as important as Bell suggests, but Stone told Bell and told me that he tended to talk about religion mostly with people who are particularly interested in religion. I am not one, so perhaps I am in no position to comment. 

 In trying to understand my feelings about this biography I reconsidered two long autobiographical novels I’ve enjoyed recently by/about writers. One is Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle. Like Child of Light, it is full of details, but they are details of a different kind. They are mostly accounts of things he did, like the ~ 150 pages it devotes to hiding a case of beer as a young teenager so he can sneak it to a party. It is also highly selective. Knausgård devotes thousands of pages to his relations with his second wife and children and barely mentions his first wife, for instance. Is selectivity what makes it a novel rather than an autobiography? Is it what makes it more interesting to me?

 The other is The Diaries of Emilio Renzi by Ricardo Piglia. I’ve read only the first of three volumes. It is a semi-true diary of a young man trying to be a writer in the lively intellectual and treacherous political world of 1960’s Argentina. Bell, appropriately, precedes in a serious and workmanlike spirit. Bell patiently builds his case; Piglia is free to scatter our thoughts. It has touches of magical realism; there are events that could not have occurred. (More than a hint of magic realism appears in Stone’s novel Bay of Souls, but neither Stone nor Bell really commits as to whether it is magic or delusion.) Why do I find it more fun and more stimulating than reading Child of Light? For one thing, I learn more because it is set in a different country. Although painful at times, overall it stirs a sense of joy. Renzi is constantly at play even when hard up to pay the utilities, betraying his lover, or, briefly, in jail. His feelings about reading and writing blend with those of real life — not something you see in Bell’s account of Bob. Is that a reason I find in more stimulating? 

 Both Knausgård and Renzi were deeply involved in painful struggles with their fathers, something denied to Bob.

 As Bell explains, many of Bob’s characters are prey to demons. They're crazed, haunted, uneducated, men and some women, who are at best thoughtless toward other people and toward their universe and at worst sadistic. Bob was a caring, warm friend and a thoughtful, well informed evaluator of the world. Of course you saw the shadows of his own demons through his drug use, peripatetic life, as well as through his creations, and he was not shy of acknowledging them. Perhaps they have something to do with the convergent and explosive endings. He exorcised them. Bob once told me that his favourite of his novels was Outerbridge Reach because the protagonist, a straight-arrow Annapolis graduate, is least like himself. He was proud of being able to create such a character. That book ends quietly with a drifting empty boat after the protagonist’s suicide.

Comments on Catching a Memory

Some of the pieces in this collection by Judith Shaw are stories in the sense that a protagonist faces tension and the tension is somehow resolved. Some are brief memoirs. Some, like many poems these days, are brief, intense descriptions of a person, place, or event. 

 The prose is tight, flexible, supple employing short to long sentences as appropriate. 

 One of the stories is about two sisters, one married to a childish, arrogant husband and how the sisters deal with him separately and as a team. The husband has vainly acquired a drawing by the renascence artist Guercino. Guercino is aptly chosen as if the character knew the author who was writing hm. His style is intensely realistic, his subject mostly people whose portraits appear in revealing light, whose faces, unlike many artist of his time, show particular emotion, but coolly. 

 Shaw is not afraid of esoteric references, to location: New York street corners; to Guercino; to someone undergoing a Kohutian analysis, to little-known culinary techniques. 

 The voice is both detached and intimate, like Guercino. 

 Where there is room to do so, the characters are fully conceived. You read about them like you read about people, not like stereotypes. They tend to be intelligent and educated.

 The stories are mostly about facing death, in one way or another, mourning, either the mourning of a person for a beloved who is dying or has died, or the mourning of a dying person for his (usually) life. Those dying are usually men who are important figure to those who mourn them, husbands or fathers of the mourners, who are usually women. Sometimes the mourning is drawn from an oblique angle, as in a woman seeking recontact with an old lover after the death of her husband, but mostly straight on, searchingly engaged.

 Less searching but illustrative, is a poem in reply to a poem by Richard Wilbur. Wilbur’s poem recounts how Don Quixote lets his horse decide where to go next, reveling in the fantasy that whatever course the horse chooses will lead to grandiose adventure. Rosinante heads for the barn. This is Cervantes’ usual trope of warmly contrasting Quixote’s grandiose visions with commonplace reality. Shaw’s response is about Quixote grieving for his fate.

 Another theme is separation in geography, usually between characters living in New York and those living in parts of northern California. The New Yorkers in California mourn for their lost environment. 

 The stories mostly focus on a single thread. My favorite, however, has the resonance of two strings. The point of view character is a New York woman enduring mourning in a Northern California coastal village, but the subject is the tenuous existence and final death of a local hippie waif. 

 The book is nicely designed and printed. This is quality reading material also in the material sense.

Comments on Edward St. Aubin's Patrick Melrose Novels

This work is painful, thought provoking, often wonderfully written, and very funny.  The plot is the life the protagonist. On the surface it is his struggle with various addictions, to find the capacity for love, and to be a better parent than his parents were. More inwardly is his struggle with himself, not in the sense of his self as an opponent but in the sense that you might struggle to contain and transport things escaping from a damp, torn, shopping bag. 

It has five parts published variously separately and together.

NEVER MIND, recounts a single day at Patrick's parent’s estate in France. Several characters are fully drawn as they work their way toward an evening dinner party. Flashbacks portray how Patrick’s parents married, and inform us about their upbringing, Patrick’s vicious father, David Melrose, and his relations with his important friend Nicholas. Bright and imaginative, five-year-old Patrick struggles to endure the searing cruelty of his father and the detachment of his mother drained of empathy by resignation. His father rapes him, but the party goes on.

BAD NEWS is a sort of combination of William Boroughs and Oscar Wild.

It recounts one day in New York where Patrick, 22, has gone to pick up the ashes of his newly dead father. Ensconced in the St. Regis money flows out of his credit card like water. Patrick is addicted to heroin in partnership with several other drugs. He spends much of his time trying to score, and much of the rest in drifting in and out of vivid hallucinations. He has lived in New York and stumbles from one social situation that begins in obligation and ends in flight to another including both poor dealers and rich socialites. He skirts an overdose.  Wonderful writing

SOME HOPE Patrick has rehabbed off stage from his addiction to hard drugs but drinks too much. He has become a barrister, with little attention by the author to his career, training, or work. The novel recounts the run up to a weekend house party, a little like those in various society novels such as Edith Wharton and the party itself. Before the party he takes a step by telling his friend Tony what his father had done to him. People feel good and bad, but mostly catty about who is going to bed with whom. The English upper crust sucks up to Princess Margaret (The Queen’s sister) who is vain, arrogant, and shallow.

MOTHER'S MILK Patrick is married. There is no explicit account of how they married or why he or his wife choose one another, but, because these characters are fully drawn, we understand. The novel begins from the point of view of his son Robert at the moment of his birth. In a way this paragraph sums up the series.  

He was an inconsolable wreck.  He couldn't live with so much doubt and so much intensity.  He vomited colostrum over his mother and then in the hazy moment of emptiness that followed he caught sight of the curtains bulging with light.  They held his attention.  That's how it worked here.  They fascinated you with things to make you forget about the separation. 

His younger brother, born later, is equally precocious, but more emotionally than intellectually.

MOTHERS MILK is in the painful tradition of heirs struggling over an inheritance. Patrick's mother has had a stroke and is miserable and semi-articulate.  A new-age guru is trying to con her estate. Patrick at once hates his mother, wants to respect her autonomy, and hates the con man. In the generation below Patrick we meet and see the world through his young sons. At his own level his wife has emotionally and physically deserted him in her desperate desire to be more real for her children than her mother was for her, and Patrick begins an affair with an old girlfriend.  His mother asks him to kill her.

 

AT LAST begins with Patrick rehabbing from alcohol, leads up to and culminates in his mother’s funeral. Patrick has a moment of self-control when he does not slip off to shack up with a self-destructive woman in his rehab group. As friends, relatives and foes trickle in to pay their final respects to his mother, the last figure in his father’s generation, Nicholas, dies.  In the end Patrick has a twinge of productive self-regard and decides to dine with his ex-wife and his children.

The characters particularly of the protagonist, but also other major characters: his father, his mother, his wife, his two young children, are widely and deeply, inwardly and outwardly richly portrayed. Several major secondary characters including particularly his friend Tony and his father's friend Nicholas, the philosopher Victor Moore and his wife Anne and others are fully explored characters although not inwardly portrayed.

It is also a society novel; the major characters are very well-connected. Their money comes from US capitalists as in Wharton’s The Buccaneers and Patrick’s aunt chas up her perennial project of writing a memoir, which she declares will be better than those things like Henry James and Wharton because it is true.

It is also a novel about how the adult arises from his or her parenting. The theme of Patrick's life is a struggle to deal with the extraordinary sadism of his father and the frozen empathy of his mother. Presentation of other characters, most of all his wife, dwell on how their parents have shaped them and their struggles to deal with it. Finally, we see in action Patrick and his wife as they deliberately or inadvertently shape their children.  

It is novel which takes childhood more seriously and explores it more ingeniously than almost any I can think of. What Maisie Knew comes to mind, but she is one child and these novels contain full portraits of three very different children. It is written first in from the perspective of Patrick as a child and then from the perspective of his two children, each precociously perceptive in different ways.

The perspective of psychodynamic therapy percolates everywhere. More than anything else it means that people's feelings about things draw their significance from the process of development of that person.

Drawing on the exploration of the perspective of children, Patrick's struggle to contain himself, and on its analytic perspective, this novel is preoccupied with consciousness.  So much so that there are not one but two major secondary characters who are professional philosophers writing academic works on consciousness, one in Patrick’s generation and one in his fathers. Consciousness is portrayed as, among other things: the perception of what goes on in a person's own mind, his/her awareness or empathy with what's going on in the mind of another, self, guilt, and as that something that ceases with death.

Partly in the precariousness of consciousness, death informs the novel. The events in the second and last novel are occasioned by the deaths of his father and then his mother. The approaching death of his mother over hangs the events of the third and fourth novel. The implication that Melrose may bet trying to kill himself by his drug use, and consideration of what killing the self means, permeates the second novel.