Thursday, October 19, 2017

"Van Gogh--The Life," by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith

Recently I saw an extraordinary animated film called Loving Vincent. It was animated in the style of Van Gogh's paintings, and it was constructed around the last days of Van Gogh and his purported suicide--I say purported" as the film casts doubt on whether the death was actually suicide. Well worth seeing, although you will find that its distribution in cinemas is very spotty.
The film prompted me to get the biography cited in the title of this post. It is a brick--heavy, 879 pages of solid text. It is a great achievement, I am sure, and it must have involved years of research.
I only took it out of the library to read the chapters on the final couple of months of Van Gogh's life and death, and it certainly provided a great deal of evidence that Van Gogh did not commit suicide but was shot accidentally in an encounter he had with a group of youths who were in the habit of teasing and tormenting him. One had a revolver that probably went off accidentally. Van Gogh's semi-admission that he had tried to kill himself was probably made to protect the youth whose gun had shot him.
The subject is of great interest in the biography, and there is a 12 page Appendix ---A Note on Vincent's Fatal Wounding.
So my reading was confined to the last chapters and it certainly provided a fascinating analysis of just how tormented a character Vincent was, especially in his relationship with his brother Theo, who died six months after Vincent.







Tuesday, October 17, 2017

"A Thousand Pardons," by Jonathan Dee

Jonathan Dee, another author whom I have by-passed although he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2010 for a novel. "The Privileges."
What can one say about "A Thousand Pardons"? Very well written, very well constructed, good length (214 pages), and an extraordinary insight into the complicated minds of the principal characters. An intriguing story of marital breakdown and the way the wife, Helen, establishes a new career in public relations and, coincidentally, meets up again with a complicated character from her schooldays who has become a famous movie star. We occupy the minds of the husband, Ben, and of the adopted daughter, Sara, who stays with her mother and has her own problems.
I felt somehow that the novel was, in a sense, 'old-fashioned,' and attractively so--a straight story of characters under a variety of strains, a plot development that kept one reading, and ultimately a satisfactory resolution--although I could see that resolution coming from a long way away.
Let's see what Richard Ford said about it: "...so witty and savvy and adroit and basically humane--as well as breathtakingly intelligent--that it shines beyond all categories on its astonishing merits."

In the light of that--maybe I have somewhat downplayed its merits.

Thursday, October 12, 2017

"Quartet in Autumn," by Barbara Pym



I recently read an article in The New York Times about the English author Barbara Pym. It described her as one of the most underrated English novelists and spoke highly of her talents. She was an author who had, as it were, passed me by. I noticed a novel of hers in the Library and checked it out. “Quartet in Autumn” had in its cover and inside blurbs a number of glowing appraisals.
Take John Updike: “ ...a marvel of fictional harmonies, a beautifully calm and rounded passage in and out of four isolated individuals as they feebly, fitfully, grope their way towards an ideal solidarity.” And an Observer review “..small in scale, “Quartet in Autumn” is on its own terms an exquisite, even magnificent, work of art.” Another review: “..a tale of almost musical perfection.”
And "..a softly compelling story of human dignity in the midst of hopelessness." Another: "tragic-comic themes of single people aging."
It is a wonderful work. Start it and you might sit glued and finish it in a sitting. It is not too long...just right, actually. Four colleagues work together in an office--though the nature
of the work is never revealed--each moving towards retirement and each leading their own, somewhat eccentric lonely lives, each unmarried or attached. It is an exploration of the minds of each of them--Edwin, Letty, Marcia, and Norman--and their relationships with each other.
I've said enough...highly recommended...if you can find a copy.

Monday, October 9, 2017

"The Dinner," by Hermann Koch

This is a terrific read...huge best seller in Europe, translated into god-knows how many languages. Start reading and you will have a hard time stopping. The author is Dutch, and the story is set in Holland, where the brother of the narrator is a popular candidate for prime minister in a coming election.
The novel is a first person narration, unreliable only in the sense that the narrator is very slow to reveal his own--what?--failures, peculiarities, mental problems: these emerge in the course of a narrative centered around an extended dinner at a fancy restaurant with his wife, his brother, and his brother's wife--a dinner that gets spun out over the novel, with much else going on besides the eating, including some diversions on topics of scorn for the narrator--for example, on the Dutch owners of second homes in The Dordogne. The back story that brings them together is the  realization that the sons of the two families--cousins--have committed an outrage involving a homeless person--much of which was recorded by a CCTV camera. 
A couple of quotes from reviews: "there is a bracing nastiness to this book that grows ever more intense..." That from a very praiseworthy review. Yes--the nastiness is there: but there is much that is bracing. 
And from another review : "It will not please those who seek the easy, the redemptive, or the uplifting in a narrative."

I just guess that if you start it, you will finish it.

"Bad Behavior," stories by Mary Gaitskill

This set of stories by Mary Gaitskill appeared in 1988, and since then she has published a number of other story collections and novels--none of which I have read.  As I had often seen her name mentioned on lists of best authors, I thought I would try something by her and start at the beginning.
The stories in "Bad Behavior" are for the most part, but not all, concerned with sex-work, as it is euphemistically called, and apparently it drew on certain experiences of the author. Frankly, I was torn between my somewhat prudish attitude towards much of the subject matter and my unbounded admiration for the writing. In a review in the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani expressed how I felt about Gaitskill's analysis of the inner lives and thought processes of her characters: "She takes a meticulously observed documentary tour of her characters' inner lives."
And Alice Munro wrote: "Stubbornly original, with the sort of rhythm and fine moments that flatten out when you don't expect it, these stories are a pleasure to read."
Worth a try if you have not already discovered her.