about the book "Suite française" by Irène Némirovsky

Suite française pushes us gently, more or less, into Occupied France, 1940. We shuffle around with members of the upper, middle, and lower classes trying to escape and then settle under the Germans.

This book--alternatively titled Dolce and Captivité--is an incomplete draft of two parts of a war-time epic that the author, Irène Némirovsky, wanted to write. She would never finish.

Born in 1903 in the Russian Empire, Némirovsky fled the Russian Revolution in 1917 and eventually settled in Paris, France. She soon began writing, published a couple books, and achieved wide recognition as an author. But her Jewish ancestry remained an issue--enough so that French citizenship was denied the Némirovskys in 1938. Némirovsky, born Russian-Jewish,  converted to Catholicism in 1939; with the pressure on, she wrote for Candide and Gringoire, two magazines with antisemitic tendencies.

Nevertheless, by 1940, Némirovsky's books could no longer be published under the spreading occupation. She fled with her husband and two daughters to Burgundy; but in July 1942, Némirovsky, then 39, was arrested by French police under German authority. She ended up in Auschwitz and died a month later of typhus. Later that year, her husband, Michel Epstein, was gassed at Auschwitz.

So, given this backstory, the flaws in the draft Suite française are unimportant. I enjoyed most the domestic drama between a formidable woman named Madame Angellier, a young maiden, Lucile, and Bruno, a German soldier bunking with the women. This is the most developed thread of multiple story lines that Némirovsky never got to tie together. Lucile and the soldier kindle a romance that disgusts Madame Angellier, a proud woman already embittered by loss of family and national pride. In the final pages, the soldier bids the women adieu as he and the other occupying German soldiers are called away to the horrible war on the Eastern Front. Lucile makes her last pathetic request of the soldier:

"... I'm asking you, if you have any feelings for me, to be as careful as possible with your life."
"Because it is precious to you?" he asked nervously.
"Yes, Because it is precious to me."

And Suite française's narration considers,

How many Germans in the village--in cafés, in the comfortable houses they had occupied--were now writing to their wives, their fiancée's, leaving behind their worldly possessions, as if they were about to die?

In two appendices full of the author's notes and letters from various others in her life at the time, Némirovsky reveals herself to be a very complicated person, veering between philosophical musings, harsh political judgements, vain self-assessments, and composed fear. Némirovsky perhaps intended to indict the French for their lack of answers to the occupation, but what I read is far less localized, and quietly emotes on several universal themes. This is a worthy read.

the closing passage of "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning----

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

About "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" by Marshall McLuhan

As much as an intellectual can, Marshall McLuhan caused a stir when he proposed that "the medium is the message" in Understanding Media (1964), the thorough analysis of media--not its content but media itself and its effects on how we think and act and make culture. It's a big, heavy subject, and McLuhan chips away at it on a great many fronts. Too many. For me, Understanding Media reads like a brilliant, nearly consumed man's mind dump rather than an organized argument. Gets tiresome.

Not to mention that often terrible writing style so prominent in the 1960's when authors of all stripes employed a scientific-ish vocabulary, needlessly obscuring their ideas in the bid for legitimacy. (Lots still do this!) For example: "Clothing, as an extension of the skin, can be seen both as a heat-control mechanism and as a means of defining the self socially" (chapter 12). But sometimes one of McLuhan's many crackerjack wisdoms splash water on your face, like this gem: "Language extends and amplifies man but it also divides his faculties. His collective consciousness or intuitive awareness is diminished by this technical extension of consciousness that is speech" (chapter 8).

A thing on Paul Goodman's "Growing Up Absurd"

The full title, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society, explains it: this is writer and intellectual Paul Goodman's inventory of social ills leading kids to rebel, drop out, and be generally dysfunctional in the 1950s. Nothing escapes his criticism: poor city planning, the lack of meaningful work, kids' intellectually starved education, churches born of hierarchy and dogma rather than community--he calls out each and every failed institution and stunted revolution as he defends the angry and resigned.

I read Growing Up Absurd at the same time I took an interest in "Leave it to Beaver" reruns. Watching June Cleaver fret over young Theodor arriving home from school ten minutes late or Wally changing his hairstyle shows, I think, the kind of anxiety Goodman was responding to--anxiety egged on by starched social pundits in horn-rimmed glasses cautioning middle class parents about the troubled young man in the black leather jacket that might emerge from their own child. To these parents Goodman essentially says, Of course you don't understand them; they reject everything you've spent your life dealing with, negotiating, rationalizing, and accepting. And for good reason!

Goodman assumes the audience shares his progressive views, and some sections are confusing, as if written hastily. Plus, the negativity made this a pretty tough read. I found greater value in its being a historical document more so than spot-on social criticism.

A thing about the novella "Train Dreams" by Denis Johnson

Starting around the turn of the century, this fiction novella chronicles the adult life of northwestern laborer Robert Grainier. Denis Johnson's colloquial, often spartan prose endows Grainier and his story with simplicity. At this time the pace of change in life and society was gaining speed but Grainier, for the most part, remains insulated from all that in living his unexamined reclusivity from a woodsy outpost. But he isn't in hiding; in his life Grainier finds love, is found by tragedy; he comes to know the ache of time, the fury of nature; and from the margins he sees innovation and flirts with moral decay. Reading, we aren't driven by the plot or even the characters. Train Dreams feels like a writing exercise and succeeds with the down, diminished beauty of its prose.

Might be looking for more by Denis Johnson.

Something on Tom Perrotta's novel The Leftovers

With somewhere around 30 pages left, Perrotta's books usually end with a flurry of page turning, a race to what happens. Not so with The Leftovers. But what The Leftovers lacks in action, it makes up for with meaning and emotion. I've read every Perrotta book and although this one ranks low, his low is still high.

The story picks up shortly after a mysterious happening likened to the rapture in which half the Earth's population vanished in an instant, and in the quiet aftermath we watch a cast of characters deal with the loss best they can. One facet of loss that interested me was that of identity. The subtraction of so many peers seemed to leave people wanting for their own identities, as if they were only who they were with everyone else around to verify it. This suggests we're all social constructions.

Also missing are the identities of the vanished, most of whom are unsurprisingly canonized, honored at small parades, days of remembrance and the like. Likewise, relationships are recreated in the minds of the rememberers. One of the novel's characters, a teenaged girl named Jill, lost a childhood friend-turned-acquaintance but, in the friend's absence, the two girls are recast as best friends who were much more alike and much closer and more dear to each other than they had ever been before the rapture.

I don't know that identity was an issue Perrotta intentionally explored. Anyway, good book.

On Foucault's The Will to Knowledge

In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, The Will To Knowledge, Foucault dissolves the conventional wisdom that says sexuality has been repressed since the Victorian age. He argues instead that it began to flourish in the 18th century through discourse. Conceptually, sexuality came into being then as a social construct that has since permeated our lives. This flourishing began with the rite of confession and from there evolved and spread through the newly powerful institutions of science, medicine, and education. A general example: What was a simple debauchery before came to be identified as a specific perversion--and only one of many possible perversions--that evidenced any number of other sexual issues to be uncovered in the recesses of childhood memory and untangled in the psychiatrist's office and later echoed in the medical texts. Sexuality is a secret we tirelessly mine for truths about ourselves. Foucault doesn't deal in conspiracies. Rather, his are institutional analyses, demystifications of the larger issues and forces at play anytime we and our managers attempt reform and understanding.

This volume--or, at least this translation--feels less inspired than Foucault's earlier works, gifting us with fewer flourishes and specific citations. But the overall concepts are more accessible; for example, the recent history of family medicine and psychiatry are less foreign to casual readers than, say, the innards of the asylum. But my main criticism is this: Madness and Civilization excelled at painting a picture of what madness meant before the modern age took hold of it; The Will To Knowledge, on the other hand, gives us little idea of what sex meant to society prior to the Victorian era. Nevertheless, like any Foucault work, this is to be studied and enjoyed for its originality, insight, thoroughness, style, and potential. And I enjoyed this volume far more than I did the third volume, The Care of the Self.

On Percy Walker's The Last Gentleman

I had a longish review of The Last Gentleman but lost it through Google. So here's the shortened version:

Williston Bibb Barret was lost. With much help he discovered that his troubles belonged to man's condition and not to him alone. He found a future when he accepted one--in this case, the orthodox life of marriage, kids, church, and so on. Not as good as The Moviegoer but still very good.

Late mention: Derrida

Read one section of Derrida's brief Gift of Death. The essay discussing Abraham's move to sacrifice Isaac was very good. In the remainder, Derrida cross-referenced too much for me to appreciate. Also read some of Deconstruction in a Nutshell, a parsing of a roundtable discussion with Derrida held at Villanova in 1994. John D. Caputo, Philosophy Professor there, obfuscates everything, rendering the dense content impenetrable.

The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty

Currently reading The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty. The protagonist, Smithy Ide, loathes himself, but with an "Aw shucks" stripe. He alternates attempts at modesty with self recriminations. His intelligence and weight make his two favorite targets.

Smithy's obtuseness might reflect his stunted confidence more so than real stupidity. Time will tell, though, as he's clearly on an arc, at this point in the novel being halfway across the country on a bicycle trip.

This journey will no doubt lead him back to the skinny body he inhabited in his youth. Smithy's overweight adult body seems foreign to him. He negotiates his fat legs like they were a prosthesis and recoils at his gut as if he's found himself dressed in some sad Christmas sweater. Emotionally, he's no better off. He demonstrates zero self-awareness, often repeating things that other people say to him as if he is unsure he understood them and can't access his response.

This can be grating, in a way; Smithy's attempts to talk to Norma, a crippled neighbor woman who has lived trapped in her own house since about age ten, are nearly insufferable strings of non sequiturs, aborted statements, and long-suppressed confessions. I think these dialogs chronicling their budding love are meant to be touching. Somehow.

The book reads pretty easy but isn't all that enjoyable. Smithy operates off some deeply ingrained values and assumptions, and I wish he'd pause to consider this consciously. Anyway, holding out hope for a good twist.