“Milan Kundera Wants to be Immortal”

Leonard’s review of the Czech author Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality (1990). After reading the essay, it’s still unclear to me whether Leonard liked the book (I suspect not)…but, in any event, still worth the effort to plough through the review to read lines like:

Surely cultures are their own feedback loop, susceptible to Chaos and Catastrophe Theory, capable of rearranging themselves in a hot flash after an idea or a bomb, like Islam, the Mafia or the party line.

Good quote from one of the lead characters, Professor Avenarius, who Leonard tells us is “the accused rapist and guerrilla tire-slasher”:

Humor can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some borders between the important and the unimportant.

New word: Einmal ist keinmal = Greman for “once is never.” Evidently a key to the theme of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera’s classic.

New learning: Lena Olin stared in the film version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Leonard tells us that she “did for bowler hats what Pythagoras did for triangles.”

“Günter Grass: Bad Boys and Fairy Tales”

Leonard’s walk through the works of Gunter Grass. He declares Grass’s Tin Drum trilogy a masterwork, but is both impressed and discouraged that the rest of Grass’ novels were so blatantly about his political experiences. Leonard writes:

Against the shameful fatherland…Gunter Grass-pariah, traitor, Dennis the Menace-sticks out his Tin Drum (1959). He will wash the taste of shame out of the mouth of the German language. This seems to me exemplary.

This essay is chock full of references that I don’t recognize. It would take me a week to even find them all in Wikipedia. If I need this depth of understanding of Germanic philosophy, history and folk ore to “get” Grass, I think I’ll have to pass.

Good Grass quote from Local Anesthetic (1969): Bring rational “doesn’t prevent you from being stupid.”

New word: Unsterblichkeitsbedurfnis = German for metaphysics.

New learning: Group 47 was a band of German writers (from both the East and the West) who met, briefly, after the war (in 1947)…Grass was a member.

Scary kid from the film version of Tin Drum:

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.”