Day: February 16, 2011

Vintage Bellow.

“Tolerance, as we now see, could be the cemetery of democracies, while secular concepts are their crucible.” One of several such theories that challenges the “neoprogressive reason” prevalent on both sides of the Atlantic a.k.a. leftism (in Europe) and liberalism (in the States) is the topic of this tome.

But cutting through these labels to delve into the foundations of various schools of thought, the author makes good efforts to shed some light and clear things up– and has the courage to call it the “new barbarism”. Powerful arguments for a new political and moral vision of our times.

I may not agree with everything, but it is certainly some thought-provoking fare.

The man can write– and make you think. Which is (one of the reasons) why he was awared the Nobel in Literature. Interesting essays, these, many from the late 60s onwards. I must admit, however, that I was drawn most to those that were concerning India.

More interesting is the coincidence of the latest book about his– or about him: the “authorized” biography by Patrick French titled ‘The World Is What It Is.’ Pico Iyer’s review of this book in Time magazine is interesting enough where I think I might check it out at the library.   What can and should be sacrificed in the name of art is apparently the predominant theme of the biography, and the answer, sadly, that seems to emanate is one’s own self. The price of art is high indeed.

But to come back to this book of essays, I was taken by a review on the back of the book by Margaret Manning of the Boston Globe, who says about Naipaul: “He is… the most splendid writer of English alive today… He looks into the mad eye of history and does not blink.”

Brilliant. Beyond the more well-known And Death Shall Have No Dominion and Do Not Go Gently Into The Night, my personal favorites are: ‘In The Beginning’ the last verse of which goes like this:

In the beginning was the secret brain.
The brain was celled and soldered in the thought
Before the pitch was forking to a sun;
Before the veins were shaking in their sieve,
Blood shot and scattered to the winds of light
The ribbed original of love.

Another one I liked is titled: Twenty-Four Years reproduced here in its entirety:

Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes.
(Bury the dead for fear that they walk to the grave in labour.
In the groin of the natural doorway I crouched like a tailor
Sewing a shroud for a journey
By the light of the meat-eating sun.
Dressed to die, the sensual strut begun,
With my red veins full of money,
In the final direction of the elementary town
I advance as long as forever is.

The man takes a word and breathes life into it. And then takes a few more, strings them together, and brings you to your knees.

Thank you, Dylan Thomas.

Self-restraint and equanimity are the two superhuman qualities exhibited by Lonoff, the great writer admired by Zuckerman. But does life really imitate art, or is the reverse also true? One of those few works of Roth that juxtaposes fidelity with frustration and makes fidelity win. In spite of itself.

As for the whole concept of the persecuted Jewish people and their incredulous history, well, Zuckerman can’t seem to be bothered to allow for his work to serve as a righteous representation of his people, and neither family nor friend succeeds in getting to make him see otherwise. Still, there is that little thing called the conscience that continues to chip away at him to the point that his fantastical fantasies involve conjuring up an Anne Frank-like Jewess woman who could offer him redemption if only she would be his for life.

Finally, Hope, Lonoff’s embittered wife has a thing or two to say about what it means to endure. For better or for worse.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is Nathan Zuckerman’s initiation into real life (aka, fiction) and the “madness of art.”

“When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she’s not around, other women must do.” That is Philip Roth’s theory that evidences itself in the persona of Nate Zuckerman. And how the women do do him!

The Anatomy Lesson has to be one of Roth’s bleakest but most hilariously profane works. He takes Zuckerman to a crossroads of truth and accountability, and the path that he takes to get there is dark to the point of but impossible blindness and a twisted reasoning that’s almost convincing– case in point being his views on pornography. Still, there is a redemptive offering to the saga of Zuckerman’s state of mind and being in that of his efforts to seek out a more meaningful vocation than that of being a writer, even if that means getting educated and trained to becoming an ER doctor! Nathan Zuckerman is his own best therapist and provides analysis and verdict in this manner on himself:

“Mr. Zuckerman…, you have opened the wrong windows, closed the wrong doors, you have granted jurisdiction over your conscience to the wrong court; you have been in hiding half your life and a son far too long– you, Mr. Zuckerman, have been the most improbable slave to embarrassment and shame, yet for sheer pointless inexcusable stupidity, nothing comes close to chasing across a cemetery, through a snowstorm… it appears, Mr. Zuckerman, that you may have lost your way since Thomas Mann last looked down from the altar and charged you to become a great man. I hereby sentence you to a mouth clamped shut.”

Just like a surgeon with a scalpel who can work wonders on the human body, we learn that Zuckerman with his pen can do the same on the human mind.

Refreshing departure from Roth’s recent (the past few books at least) haunted narratives of old age and experience to a story of a young man’s education in more ways than the academic– a story about inexperience, foolishness, arrogance, intellectual resistance, discovery of every sort, courage, error, vulnerabilities and chances.

Reminds me of someone. Reminds me of myself too…