started, but not finished

Civilwarland in Bad Decline, by George Saunders
I read most of the short stories in this collection a week ago and already I'm having trouble remembering them. (I didn't get to the novella that takes up the second half of this small volume.) The writing is extremely flat and simple. No doubt there are good reasons for this — the world Saunders describes is stark and grotesque, his characters mostly boobs or sadists — but I find it hard to stay interested in flat writing. (Saunders's one stylistic novelty, the use of truly awful corporate jargon throughout his characters' interior monologues, was funny at first but then got boring.) And the plots were depressingly similar: they all involve a horrible, cartoonish accidental death. There's real misery in these stories — the characters hate their jobs, have no friends, get divorced — and in that context I didn't know what to make of the gruesome accidental death as the climax of each story. I was bored and bewildered. So I stopped. (Kaveri said the first short story was the best, and if I didn't like it I should stop. I soldiered on until I had read most of the stories, then gave up.)

Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky
Marion recommended this, and I eagerly went out and bought the French edition. Then I read Ruth Franklin's rather damning critique, and began to regret my purchase. But then I was still determined to read it, if only to practice my French.
I disliked it immediately. This is a novel in which a teenager goes into his room, slams the door and thinks, "I hate my family!" — and this counts as characterization. The mistress of a vain, selfish, snobbish writer sits on the floor gathering up the finished pages that he drops from his desk. And so on, one cliché after another. (So anti-semitism is only one aspect of her simple-mindedness.) Even the random observed details, contrasting the beauty of nature or the everyday concerns of people with the chaos of war seem drearily contrived, probably because the whole machinery is so creaky. (If I read the end of All Quiet on the Western Front fresh from Suite Française I'd probably be disgusted, even though I was very moved when I read it the first time.)
But I had read 97 pages, and was determined to finish at least the first novel in the volume (which consists of the first two of five projected novels on France at war, the ones Némirovsky completed). Then I re-read Franklin's review, and this sentence struck me:

There are many exquisite moments in Suite Française: the hypocritical generosity of Madame Péricand, her teenage son Hubert's reckless patriotism, the romance between Jean-Marie Michaud and the peasant girl who nurses him, and other indelible scenes.

I did not find the hypocritical generosity of Madame Péricand an exquisite moment; for me it was as revoltingly bad as everything else. If I like Némirovsky less than Ruth Franklin, I thought, I should stop. So I've stopped, as of now.

It was interesting to read Suite Française right after Atonement: one section of Atonement is set during the French collapse in June 1940. Némirovsky lived through it and McEwan didn't, but his description of the retreat is about a hundred times better than hers.

I was also reminded of Alice Kaplan's excellent analysis of the fiction of Robert Brasillach, another French anti-semite whose novels and journalism enjoyed great success in the 1930s. She writes that he has two modes, mawkishness and contempt, and never had the toughness of mind to achieve a synthesis. That's true of Némirovsky as well. Kaplan calls this the right-wing style (so did Kaveri, in another context!) and that makes sense to me.
Von Rezzori's Memoirs of an Anti-Semite also offered lots of insights into the mind of a reactionary, though he writes much better than Némirovsky, and turns the mirror on himself.

Recommendation

Antica Gelateria Fiorentina, via Faenza 2A Firenze

favorite flavor: Persian (rosewater, pistachios, with blocks of frozen cream)

Here's what they have to say for themselves in English:

A long ago, at the Medici's court, during sumptuos balls, it come the ice-cream made by the architect Buontalenti a persolality in the ice-cream history who has held his importance just to nowadays.

But they sure know how to make ice cream!

One of Ours
I often thought of Jacob's Room while reading One of Ours: both are about the boyhood and youth of men who will die in World War I. But whereas Jacob Flanders is a negative space, defined by the needs and desires of those who crowd around him and wonder what is the secret of one so blank and beautiful, Claude Wheeler is someone we get to know from the inside; unlike the maddeningly (apparently) self-sufficient Jacob, Claude projects his hopes and fears hither and thither, in the ardent and disorganized fashion of one whose education came too little and too late and who feels alienated from everything he grew up with. Claude seizes on the war as an escape from his unhappiness, as a source of meaning that is truly bottomless, that won't disappoint because war is incomprehensible.
One of Ours was published in 1923, one year after Jacob's Room, and it's a far more traditional novel in every way. While I love Jacob's Room, Cather's novel made me appreciate the costs of Woolf's denials: no, you shall not get to know the main character; no, the war had no meaning. Cather presents the excitement and the patriotism of her characters without anger, and sometimes comes close to endorsing it. In its strongest form the patriotism is francophilia — France as the opposite of Nebraska — which complicates the picture.

"On a cross at their feet the inscription read merely:

Soldat Inconnu, Mort pour La France

A very good epitaph, Claude was thinking. Most of the boys who fell in this war were unknown, even to themselves. They were too young. They died and took their secret with them, — what they were and what they might have been."

So far so good; Woolf does not write at such a low, relaxed pitch, but the sentiments are similar to those in Jacob's Room. Then Cather writes:

The name that stood was La France.

Woolf would never have written that, not even in the voice of a character. But the engagement with patriotism, with the idea that the war could have seemed meaningful to those who died in it, is rewarding and thought-provoking.

Like Fielding and Eliot, Cather passes judgment on her character: "He died believing his own country better than it is, and France better than any country ever can be."

But there's so much more to One of Ours: the painful, beautiful scene in which a father tries and fails to reject his daughter's suitor out of concern for him, not for her, is one I've read aloud twice already.

One of Ours may not be as perfect and as devastating as Lucy Gayheart or The Professor's House, but it's nearly as good, and certainly as good as O Pioneers!.

My friend Amber McPherson has been profiled by the BBC!!!

The link will be up for only two more days.

Names

Beecham > Beauchamp

Buford > Beaufort

Tolliver > Tagliaferro

The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth: this is the kind of book Dr. Casaubon was trying so hard to write ("A Key to all Mythologies"). It was fascinating to get to know the Near Eastern gods, whom I had previously encountered as mere faceless villains in the Hebrew Bible, and fascinating to come across traces of polytheism in the Hebrew Bible. The chapter on the epic of Gilgamesh as a source of the Iliad was especially moving. The book's length and critical apparatus may look intimidating, but in fact it's for anyone interested in mythology or philology. One had the thrilling sense that this is as far as we can go — West follows certain threads all the way to Sumerian literature, which is over 4000 years old. Beyond we'll never know.

Last summer I met a Palestinian, a translator by profession, who told me that the Hebrew word for grain or cereals, "dganim," is related to the Philistine god's name "Dagon." He was a god of agriculture and of the harvest. And the Hebrew word for "sun" is practically identical to the name of the Babylonian sun god. And one of the Hebrew months, Tammuz, is named after Dumuzi, the Sumerian goddess's Inanna's shepherd lover — analogues of Venus and Adonis, according to West.

I love Macaulay! Here he is reviewing Southey's Colloquies:

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Mr. Southey's political system is just what we might expect from a man who regards politics, not as matter of science, but as matter of taste and feeling. All his schemes of government have been inconsistent with themselves. In his youth he was a republican; yet, as he tells us in his preface to these Colloquies, he was even then opposed to the Catholic Claims. He is now a violent Ultra-Tory. Yet, while he maintains, with vehemence approaching to ferocity, all the sterner and harsher parts of the Ultra-Tory theory of government, the baser and dirtier part of that theory disgusts him. Exclusion, persecution, severe punishments for libellers and demagogues, proscriptions, massacres, civil war, if necessary rather than any concession to a discontented people; these are the measures which he seems inclined to recommend. A severe and gloomy tyranny, crushing opposition, silencing remonstrance, drilling the minds of the people into unreasoning obedience, has in it something of grandeur which delights his imagination. But there is nothing fine in the shabby tricks and jobs of office; and Mr. Southey, accordingly, has no toleration for them. When a Jacobin, he did not perceive that his system led logically, and would have led practically, to the removal of religious distinctions. He now commits a similar error. He renounces the abject and paltry part of the creed of his party, without perceiving that it is also an essential part of that creed. He would have tyranny and purity together; though the most superficial observation might have shown him that there can be no tyranny without corruption.
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It is high time, however, that we should proceed to the consideration of the work which is our more immediate subject, and which, indeed, illustrates in almost every page our general remarks on Mr. Southey's writings. In the preface, we are informed that the author, notwithstanding some statements to the contrary, was always opposed to the Catholic Claims. We fully believe this; both because we are sure that Mr. Southey is incapable of publishing a deliberate falsehood, and because his assertion is in itself probable. We should have expected that, even in his wildest paroxysms of democratic enthusiasm, Mr. Southey would have felt no wish to see a simple remedy applied to a great practical evil. We should have expected that the only measure which all the great statesmen of two generations have agreed with each other in supporting would be the only measure which Mr. Southey would have agreed with himself in opposing. He has passed from one extreme of political opinion to another, as Satan in Milton went round the globe, contriving constantly to 'ride with darkness.' Wherever the thickest shadow of the night may at any moment chance to fall, there is Mr. Southey. It is not everybody who could have so dexterously avoided blundering on the daylight in the course of a journey to the antipodes.

***

We despise those mock philosophers, who think that they serve the cause of science by depreciating literature and the fine arts. But if anything could excuse their narrowness of mind, it would be such a book as this. It is not strange that, when one enthusiast makes the picturesque the test of political good, another should feel inclined to proscribe altogether the pleasures of taste and imagination.