Back on Thursday 10/3...out of the office for a few days.

“The Hit Men”

Leonard starts this essay by declaring, “I hope hundreds turned out yesterday at the PEN rally to support Salman Rushdie…It’s been a disgraceful week. A maniac puts out a $5.2-million contract on one of the greatest writers in the English language.” He goes on to chastise all those who spoke out against Rushdie. This group includes people as diverse as diverse as Roald Dahl (who recommended we destroy the books to “save lives”) and Jimmy Breslin (who described Rushdie as “a horrid writer.”)

I really like his commentary on Pat Buchanan who:

Suggested that [Rushdie] seek refuge among Nicaragua’s Sandinistas and allowed as how ‘the First Amendment…[is] the last refuge of a scoundrel’ – as if that amendment, the glory of our republic, weren’t precisely what protects the right of Buchanan to his swamp fevers, the privilege of such pips to squeak.”

New word: fatwa = a formal legal opinion in Islamic law.

New learning: The word assassin derives from the Arabic hashish (“hashish eater”). May explain Wilco lyric “I assassin down the avenue.” Link to the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot cut:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlxH9-TYseY 

“Salman Rushdie: Two Brown Men, Falling Hard”

Leonard’s review of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses or, as he writes, “let’s try to see the book through the bonfires of it’s burning” in reference to the outcry from some corners of the Islamic world.

Leonard describes the book as a “ ‘metafiction'…a grand narrative and Monty Python send-up of history religion and popular culture.” He calls Rushdie a “slyboots Author-God…with a cannibal grin.” Definitely has my attention.

After a long analysis of the text (that would serve as a great teaching aid for a literature class) , Leonard summarizes, “Rushdie lost control of his novel the way I’ve lost control of this review. The Satanic Verses lacks the ravening power, the great gulp, of Midnight’s Children and Shame. It bites off the heads of the heads of its characters instead of digesting their essences.” I will say that Leonard’s synopsis and excerpts from the novel are wild and compelling. Here is Leonard’s dead-pan description of a dram had by the main character, “Ayesha hears voice and, wearing nothing but a cloud of butterflies, leads credulous villagers on a pilgrimage to Mecca that ends in death by drowning.” Crazy.

I think I’ll try Midnight’s Children as my introduction to Rushdie.

Rushdie with his newly published novel in 1988:

New word: Bostan = Farsi for garden

New learning: In his defense against Islamic threats, Rushdie said the novel was “the fictional dream of a fictional character…and one who is losing his mind at that...[the novel] isn’t actually about Islam.” Leonard shows us earlier quotes from Rushdie that contradict this, “Actually, one of my major themes is religion and fanaticism.” Not that this justifies the Ayatollah’s contract on Rushdie, but probably gives us some insight into the meaning of the novel.

“Gabriel Garcia Marquez versus Simon Bolivar”

Leonard’s review of Garcia Marquez’s historical novel about Simon Bolivar, The General in His Labyrinth. Leonard spends several pages opening the essay with a short history of Bolivar’s life (“Permit me to educate myself in public”) and a short review of Garcia Marquez’s earlier notable work:

One Hundred Years of Solitude is “wonderfully encompassing.”

Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor is “journalistic.”

Chronicle of a Death Foretold is “a backwards murder mystery and send-up of romance novellas.”

Clandestine in Chile is an “odd little book.”

Love in the Time of Cholera is a “kind of Hispanic Cacoon.”

Autumn of the Patriarch (a book that Leonard hoped Labyrinth would “bookend”) is “still a masterpiece.”

Leonard seemed ready for greatness in the new book and declares, “Between them, Bolivar and Garcia Marquez invented Latin America.”

Ultimately, he’s disappointed  with his main objection being “…that Garcia Marquez has chosen to novelize the end of Bolivar’s life…omitting the beginning and the middle when the colors burned the brightest.” He sums up Labyrinth as “information instead of art.”

A younger,  more colorful, Bolivar:

I’ll take advantage of the opportunity to again quote the greatest first line in literature, from Solitude:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

New word: afflatus = a divine creative inspiration

New learning: “…the six chapters The Autumn of the Patriarch…mimic Bartok’s six string quartets.”

“Hemingway’s Women”

Leonard’s commentary on Hemingway is not flattering. Only few paragraphs in and you’re wondering why you’d ever read a Hemingway novel at all. Leonard describes Hemingway as an “American king-baby/boy-man on his way to a Nobel prize…” who was a serial husband (four wives) and psychologically (if not, at times, physically) abusive to his wives. Hemingway is quoted as calling his mistress Jane Mason (who jumped out of a window) to John Dos Passos, “…the girl who fell for me literally…” –nice guy.

He writes that Hemingway’s mother Grace was “only one of papa’s many mothers,” as all of his women were mother figures.

Leonard writes that Hemingway’s wives were “enablers” and goes on the write “There is something dangerously sick about ‘enabling.’ You victimize yourself.”

New word: Torquemada = Tomas de Torquemada, 15^th Century Spanish Grand Inquisitor (and noted sadist)

New learning: …from the Michigan Quarterly Review, “When she [Hemingway’s fourth wife Mary] became jealous of the young Italian Adriana Ivancich (the model for Renata in Across the River and into the Trees), he blamed Mary for his own dangerous flirtation, compared her to the sadistic Spanish Inquisitor-General and told her: ‘You have the face of a Torquemada.’”

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0043.206;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mqrg

Torquemada:

Always thought Hemingway looked like an ass in this picture:

“Mary McCarthy: R.I.P.”

In memoriam of Mary McCarthy who, Leonard reminds us, Time magazine called, “quite possibly the cleverest America has ever produced.” Leonard calls writes, “…she had the sharpest teeth at the tea party,” and this was before “tea party” meant what it does in the politics of the now. He writes “If her novels lack the generosity of great literature, they are full of everything else that counts…she read everything, and was indignant about everything, and, yes, clever about everything.”

Great quote from McCarthy about drawing on real people for characters in her novels, “What I do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.” I’ve never had plum cake, but the analogy works all the same. Never read McCarthy either. Will have to correct that sin of omission. Maybe I'll make A Bolt from the Blue my next project?

New word: Lycanthrope = werewolf

New learning: Leonard writes, “You must understand that I grew up reading The Nation, The New Republic and, especially, Partisan Review. (In this Southern California boyhood, I also subscribed to the Congressional Record so I’d have someone to talk to each afternoon when I came home from school).”…explains a lot.

Good article about McCarthy in the NYTs on the centennial of her birth (also a great picture, seems to capture the spirit Leonard was describing):

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/fashion/remembering-mary-mccarthys-style.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0