As I have been looking over the list of books I've read in Vancouver, I have to admit a lot of them were passable but not great, mixed in with a fair number of books that just weren't as good as I expected them to be. This later category definitely includes Dostoevsky's The Idiot and even de Quincey Confessions of an English Opium Eater, which I found awfully dry. I'm glad that I crossed off a lot of classics, but only a few of them really moved me. Still, part of this was my mostly focusing on books that I thought I could read once and then discard, so there is certainly some selection bias.
(To start off a bit more positively, I will mention the books that were the most enjoyable during my sojourn here: Joseph Roth's Hotel Savoy, Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24‑Hour Bookstore, Charles Baxter's The Book of Love, Michel Tremblay's The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant, Garcia Marquez's The General in His Labyrinth and Atwood's Lady Oracle. While I had a few strong reservations about Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy (mostly in terms of the sexual politics and some highly implausible coincidences), this was on the whole a rewarding read. And a lot of the Canadian poetry was good, but I won't go into that now. While I am only partway through them, Martin Amis's Other People and Iris Murdoch's Under the Net both strike me as quite promising, so that is definitely something to look forward to.)
I think I already mentioned how the Toronto Public Library has some odd policies towards fiction with far more novels locked up in their reference library than makes any sense to me. (In fact, for quite a number of the books I migrated from my VPL list, I'll actually have to get an alumni card and check them out from UT's Robarts Library!) That set me off on a quest to read Barbara Comyns and Molly Keane while I was still in Vancouver. While there is a good chance that I still have yet to read her best novels, I really struggled with a lot of Molly Keane's novels and just didn't enjoy them much. Of the ones I read so far, I liked Conversation Piece, Taking Chances and Two Days in Aragon. I didn't much care for Full House, Mad Puppetstown, The Rising Tide, Treasure Hunt or Loving Without Tears. So over half of them were disappointing to me in one way or another.
Now Treasure Hunt would have probably migrated to the other side of the ledger if the older relatives hadn't been such absolute spoiled brats, trying to undermine their nephew in his more than reasonable attempts to keep them all out of bankruptcy. I just don't find these monstrously self-absorbed characters cute in any way, and there are just so many of them in Keane's fiction. Typically it is the mother; Full House, The Rising Tide and Loving Without Tears all feature mothers who require absolute devotion from their children and have consequently emotionally crippled them (often far beyond what they suffered in the various wars that the eldest sons served in). The mother in Two Days in Aragon is much more toned down, which makes her and the overall book far more bearable and indeed pleasurable, the way it ought to be. (I suspect that there are no mother-figures at all in Devoted Ladies, which should make it a pleasure to read.) No question Keane had a major problem with her own mother, and unfortunately it tends to weaken her novels when she is essentially striking back at her by making the mothers so unreasonable.
Some minor SPOILERS ahead
Treasure Hunt actually started life as a play, so it isn't surprising that the dialogue is "snappy," but it still gets a little grating when everyone is trying to be witty. If anything, Loving Without Tears was even worse in that almost everyone sounded like they were trying out for Dorothy Parker's place at the Algonquin Round Table, even the supposedly simple Cousin Tiddley. I see what Keane was trying to do (the plot is actually not all that far off from the mis-matched lovers in Midsummer's Night's Dream) and there were flashes of a novel I would have enjoyed more (more of the Birdie character might have helped). But the negatives definitely outweighed the good: first, I found the dialogue quite grating, second, I found it impossible to care about these milksop children who had always buckled under to their mother (not unlike my reaction when watching "that Bucket woman" in Keeping Up Appearances where I usually switch off the telly in annoyance), third, I found it extremely implausible that Sally (the eldest son's finance) would have known Oliver (the current estate manager), and fourth, I thought that the ending was absurd with the mother spinning on a dime and becoming completely reconciled to the way all her schemes were defeated. Honestly, I think Keane started out with a good ear for dialogue, but her time as a playwright actually ruined her as a novelist. It made her dialogue too over-the-top for novels, and her plotting just got absurd in Treasure Hunt and Loving Without Tears. I do hope she returned to form in her final three novels, but I am prepared to be disappointed.
Now I am not really sure whether I should count these two or not as disappointments. I had been intrigued by Michal Ajvaz's The Other City and The Golden Age. They are the only two novels of his translated in English (from Czech) to date. While the earlier 20th Century novels from Central Europe or Mitteleuropa are often quite good (if a bit haunted by the loss of Empire), later ones seem a bit too haunted by the spirit of Kafka (or Kundera for the next generation of writers). I find they tend to be far too philosophical and not novelistic enough. (Certainly the mid-career and late Iris Murdoch novels tend to have the same problem.) I really didn't like Ivan Klima's Love and Garbage, and I think it could have been a great novel had it just stuck to the narrator's life on the garbage crew.
Ajvaz takes this philosophical lens and just runs wild with it. He is channeling Derrida and a bit of Lacan in the first half of The Golden Age. He theorizes some island which absorbed the European influence (rather than being wiped out as happened pretty much everywhere in North America). But where it gets weird (or rather unbelievable) is that they have a very cumbersome writing system but no money. Frankly, anywhere that had any European influence at all is going to have a monetary system. And is there a bit of razzing of Foucault in the idea that there is a king chosen to inhabit the castle part of the time but no one is even sure who he is, and while his proclamations are Delphic, there doesn't seem to be that much in the way of consequences, as the people are in tune with their natures and are self-regulating? I found this particular section very labored, as Ajvaz is setting up a situation where he tells the villagers about Kafka's The Castle, but they don't think it applies to their situation at all. Anyway, read a certain way, this whole thing becomes a weird Rousseauian fantasy of an island immune to European colonization that just happens to comply perfectly with other continental philosophy, such as structuralism (but of course would be completely unworkable in real life).
But it turns out this is just the set-up to opening up a near-mystical book. The Other City brings out its magical book within a few pages, but it takes 160 pages for The Golden Age to get to the point. On the island, they have a single book passed around the village and everyone can add pockets or pouches to the book that embellish or reverse what is already written. While Ajvaz claims to be highly influenced by Borges (and wrote some kind of academic treatise on Borges), I think he missed the main lesson of pithiness. In many ways, the actual books he has constructed here seem far closer in spirit to Italo Calvino than to Borges, who basically knew he would bore the reader by piling on incident on top of incident.*
I find both books pretty intolerable once they get to the magic book sections, and am just skimming them in order to return both to the library by the weekend. So I didn't really give either of them my undivided attention, but I also am no longer in the mood to read fantasy books where there are no "ground rules," so basically anything can happen once it is written in a book... There are no meaningful stakes in such a novel, even if they do kill off half the characters. Obviously, your mileage will vary, and certainly both novels have attracted some ardent admirers, particularly The Other City, which is shorter and structured more like a conventional novel. For me, they didn't live up to the hype, and I will be extremely unlikely to read anything else by Ajvaz in the future.
* As I've given it just a bit more thought: The Other City = Borges + The Never-Ending Story + Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 + Cronenberg's take on Naked Lunch + a sprinkling of Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, while The Golden Era = Borges + The Never-Ending Story + duBois's The Twenty-One Balloons + Derrida/Lacan/Saussure and other continental philosophers.
Of the two formulations, I definitely prefer the first one, but I still am not crazy about what I feel are a lack of ground rules in The Other City.
Edit: I might as well continue and wrap this up so I don't feel I have to come back to the topic. The Other City is definitely the better of the two books, but it still has no real internal logic. The narrator comes across this odd book that turns out to essentially be a portal into a mystical city that overlays Prague. Before he knows it, he tries to find out the secrets of this hidden city (maybe shades of Dark City?) and this young woman ends up setting him up where he is attacked by a shark that guards a tower -- some kind of land-shark? (All kinds of sea creatures seem to be haunting Prague.) He hears about a magic streetcar that whisks people away and they never return (though he hasn't found it by the halfway mark of the book**). He comes across a shop that sells items from the other city, and is given a magic potion that makes him levitate. (I guess one could say that Alice in Wonderland is just one thing after another and Alice never really learns all the rules of this place, but generally people don't claim that Alice lacks in dramatic tension. I would answer that Lewis Carroll actually did work out some logical rules that underlie Wonderland, even if they aren't all revealed. In contrast, this other city just seems to be illustrating chaos theory or some silly point from Lacan about how language and meaning is completely arbitrary.) After he meets a parrot trained to recite their holy scripture, there is some scene where the bed he is lying in becomes a limitless plane and then a mountain grows from it and he overhears a couple clambering over the mountain. So basically anything can happen -- the laws of physics are completely repealed in this place that sort of overlays Prague and there is just one random episode after another. I personally don't find this makes for a successful novel, though if one is imagining it as a prose analogue to Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror then it might be a bit easier to take.
** Is it really a SPOILER to say that the closing scene of the book has him deciding to live permanently in this other city, and at that moment the green streetcar arrives to whisk him away? I thought it was actually fairly predictable. I really did find this quite disappointing, and yet it was the better of the two books...
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