Reading Nabokov In...

The only Nabokov I had ever read was Lolita. Then in the space of a week I encountered two of his short stories. The first was a previously unpublished short story called “Natasha” in the recent Summer Fiction issue of the New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2008/06/09/080609fi_fiction_nabokov). It was written in 1924. The second was the New Yorker podcast of “Symbols and Signs” read by writer Mary Gaitskill (http://www.newyorker.com/online/podcasts/fiction). This story, the first Nabokov story to appear in he New Yorker. was published in May of 1948. The podcast (“Sign Language” 6/2/08) is especially interesting because Gaitskill discusses Nabokov and why she admires his writing. Hearing this discussion helped me better appreciate “Natasha” as well.

“Symbols and Signs” begins as an older Russian émigré couple travel to visit their son. It is his birthday and he is mentally ill and confined in a sanitarium. The journey is difficult and when they arrive they are not permitted to see him since he has recently attempted suicide. They return home disheartened, and late that night the husband decides that they must bring the boy home to live with them. As they discuss this they are interrupted by telephone calls. The first two are wrong numbers. The story ends as the phone rings for the third time. The reader is left to wonder whether this call is another wrong number or the hospital calling about their son.

When Gaitskill discussed this story she talked about the fact that in a great short story there is a second, larger story hidden behind and sometimes bleeding through the first. In this case there are hints that the damaged son is not the only heartbreak the couple has endured. The ordinary objects in the apartment suggest that this family has escaped the Holocaust and lost much of their family. Is the son's madness connected to these traumatic events?

“Natasha”, written when Nabokov was a young man, is also about displaced Russian émigrés, Natasha and her ailing father Alexey. They live in a modest apartment in Berlin where the girl cares for her father. Their neighbor, the aptly named Baron Wolfe, is infatuated with Natasha and convinces her to leave her father briefly for an outing in the country. Natasha and Baron live in both the real world and their fantasy worlds. Baron's involves his imagined travels to exotic places while Natasha's concerns her ecstatic visions. Even the father has visions, although his are more dark - he mistakes a luminous clock dial for the muzzle of a rifle. The story ends with Natasha's final vision and its collision with reality.

I think the larger story is the way in which the human imagination distracts (or protects? or hides?) us from harsh reality. Is self deception, in the form of spirituality or just tall tales, a part of the human condition that we all share?

A new edition of "The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov" will be published later this year. I'm looking forward to it.

What's in a Name?

Why would an acclaimed author of award-winning novels (awards including the Man Booker prize) choose to write other works under a pen name? More specifically, why would John Banville, author of The Sea which won the prize in 2005, be writing crime novels under the name of Benjamin Black? The Sea is a beautifully written work that we read as a group in March 2007. So when I read a publication announcement for The Silver Swan by Black/Banville I thought it would be a great choice: good writing and a good whodunit. Disclaimer: I am not well- or widely-read in mysteries much less crime novels.

But I can say now with certainty that if I had read The Silver Swan first, I never would have been interested enough to invest more time with this author for The Sea. If I were Banville, I would write these 2 types under different names, also. Is that being a literary snob?

The Silver Swan, set in Dublin, opens with the apparent drowning of a young woman. Quirke (does he have a first name?), the pathologist who performs the autopsy, has his suspicions. The chapters of his investigation alternate with those of the recent activities of the deceased Deirdre prior to her death and with those of Phoebe coincidentally (isn’t that always the case) the daughter of Quirke and an acquaintance of Deirdre. Are there clues that more accomplished readers of crime novels would have seen along the way to the resolution?

I was disappointed in the writing and could have done without the detail of the pornographic photographs but I will remember that Isadora Duncan, the dancer, died from having her scarf caught in the back axle of a sports car and broke her neck.

If you have a favorite mystery/crime novel author to recommend, please leave a Comment and I’ll try again. Or maybe I will revisit the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries of Dorothy Sayers and see if they are as I remember them from thirty years ago.

The Bastard of Istanbul

The outspoken, defiant Turkish writer Elif Shafak, has written books in both English and Turkish. The Bastard of Istanbul is her second English novel, a best seller in Turkey in 2006. Armed with degrees in International Relations, Women's Studies and Political Science from University in Ankara, Shafak is outspoken on the topics of feminism, Ottoman culture, political matters, and defiant of orthodoxy. This book brought her under prosecution by the Turkish government for "insulting Turkishness" under Article 301 of the Turkish Criminal Code. The charge was made because one character in her book characterized the 1915  Turkish massacres of Armenians as "genocide". Charges were later dropped.

Her contemporary novel concerns a vivid. quirky Turkish family of four sisters living together in Istanbul, with Asya the 19 year old daughter (the bastard) of one of the sisters,  who loves Johnny Cash and the French Existentialists. Enter their estranged brother who lives in Tucson with his American wife and Armenian-American stepdaughter, Armanoush.  Armanoush travels to Turkey in search of her Armenian identity, meets her stepfather's Turkish family there and Asya and Armanoush become fast friends. A secret is reveal that links the two families and connects them to the 1915 deportation and massacre of many Armenians, with ancestors described vividly through the voice of Armanoush.

Safak's women characters are colorful, quirky, and vividly described. She successfully brings together the culture clashes and differing viewpoints of the two households, vast differences between the sisters, and her description of the Turk's massacre of Armenians during WWI is unsparing and clear. It added a good deal to my limited understanding of this topic, from the Armenian viewpoint. The treatment of it's Armenian population is still not officially acknowledged by the Turkish government, which refuses to recognize this part of their past as "genocide". (Author Orfan Pamuk recently ran into similar conflicts resulting in his short term imprisonment over his criticism of the Turkish treatment of their Kurdish minority population.) Although the plot meanders a bit at times, it's a worthy book, a good colorful and compelling contribution to international fiction.  I certainly recommend it to any reader with an interest in contemporary Turkey and her very tangled and violent past.

Lillian's Odyssey

Amy Bloom's novel Away reminds me of the Odyssey. When the story opens in 1924 her main character Lillian Leyb has recently arrived in New York from Odessa, where her entire family was murdered in a pogrom. The early chapters tell the familiar story of a plucky young woman who uses her looks and her wits to improve her circumstances. She starts out as a seamstress in a successful Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side, but soon becomes the mistress to both the father who owns the operation and the son who is the handsome leading man. But the story, which is starting to sound like Sister Carrie, takes a sudden turn. Lillian begins an amazing journey that takes her across the United States and into the wilds of Alaska. Her harebrained plan is to travel across the Bering Strait and return to her native Russia. With maps sewn into pockets of her jacket and a will of iron she begins a journey that rivals Odysseus's struggle to reach Ithaca. Along the way, just as Odysseus encounters the Cyclops, Circe and the Sirens, Lillian endures many hardships and meets a host of unusual characters. She travels across the United States in the broom closet of a train with the help of some none too kindly porters. In the slums of Seattle she is rescued by an enterprising black prostitute named Gumdrop and becomes her unlikely lady's maid. As Lillian trudges through the forests of the Yukon Bloom gives us beautiful descriptions of the stark beauty of the remote landscape.

Bloom's descriptions of the kind and not-so-kind strangers Lillian meets on her journey are beautifully done. Even minor characters seem vividly real. Strangely, Lillian herself sometimes seems less accessible than the other characters. Her strength and her love for her daughter are obvious, but I often felt distanced from her emotional core. Maybe Bloom meant to represent the way Lillian was forced to shut down her emotions as a result of the horrible deaths of her family. Nonetheless, I admired and enjoyed this beautifully written story of Lillian's amazing odyssey and the power of her love.