Foreign countries

From page 257 of The Line of Beauty:

"[...] but it was only play-acting, the capable new persona that came with speaking in a foreign language."

Replace "language" with "accent", and you have the subject of my novel. I don't know whether to be disheartened; is it bad that the best novelist in the world can summarize my novel-in-progress in a single sentence? Does it mean that he has already explored the subject in countless unpublished novels, and found it an unrewarding one, about which nothing worthwhile can be said?

But surely this is too pessimistic. Maybe I can take it to mean, instead, that I am on the "right" track. It's almost as if Hollinghurst were my research advisor, and can only suggest research topics, i.e., subjects for my novel, by alluding obliquely to them in his own novels. I imagine us in an office together, sitting across the table from each other, he with his beard and the suggestive smile he wears on the dust flap of The Line of Beauty, me with a backpack, not bothering to conceal my lack of sleep. "Don't you think Wani 's saying 'Now there's a line of beauty for you!" is a little too legible? " I'll say. And he'll say "Don't quote bloody James Wood at me. "Legible"! Now don't let me see you until you've read my Bajazet translation."

Chopin's Ballade No. 1

Explained devastatingly by Rubinstein.

A note

From a novel I'm currently reading: "Six months later, when he was dead, I knew that life had been unfair to him.'' These lines were written in the eighties, but could have been written at any time in the past fifty years. They are the kind that make you want to say: what, you don't think that death can be the sole subject of a sentence? That the only way you can work in a (major) character's death is by referring to it in a sub-clause? The goal of such sentences is to avoid a certain sentimentality; but in doing so they lapse unavoidably into mannerism. Death is sentimental, and to pretend otherwise is to be a sophist, and a self-consciously literary one at that. Hollinghurst, as usual, is instructive when it comes to dealing with death:

It seemed Colin's car had gone out of control on the Brighton road; it was the six liter Craxton he'd had done up, he should have known the problem with it in the wet, with just a bit too much speed the tail swings round a bend, then you're spinning across the lanes; you might be lucky and cartwheel down a high bank and thwack to a halt in earth and grass; or you might five or six other cars light ruinous blows and come out shuddering and vomiting with terror but okay; or you might shimmer sideways, seem to hover for half a second alongside the blurred rain-sluicing roof-high tires of a twelve-wheeled juggernaut, then crumple under and be sliced to death.

[Later, at the funeral:]

I tried to sing, but was voiceless with tears, glancing forward to the awful box, which held what was left of my friend for the little while before we burnt him again.

The music teacher

The music teacher frowned. One of her students was looking outside the window and writing a novel. It was a long novel, and the music teacher waited patiently for her student to complete it. After a few minutes, she asked, If your majesty is done writing his novel, will he please hum the syllables Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni Sa? The student, who suspected he was a very poor novelist, said: That is MayamalavaGaula. Please, don't sing it in my presence. The music teacher said, What impudence! and hawked out a great gob of phlegm, which landed smack on the page on which the student was writing. The student said, Please don't hawk phlegm on my novel's pages. The ink tends to dissolve. At this, the music teacher was filled with remorse, and said: You are like my son, or at least, you are not unlike him. Yes, the student said. I am indeed not unlike your son. The student thought that `indeed' was an archaic word, and, wiping away the phlegm, made a mental note never to use it in any of his novels.

Who said?

When I was born, I was one-legged, and my father screamed at me. When I turned five, though, my father tore off his leg dramatically, in front of everyone. Here's my leg, he said. Use it well. I said, I don't want your charity, and threw the leg away. It landed near the fireplace; the maid servant, whose name is not important, used it to stoke the fire.

After that, I grew up. When I was sixteen I chose my first girlfriend, whom my father adored. He said, look after him well, he's my one-legged son. She dumped me then and there because she had thought that I'd had both my legs intact. See, my father said, this is what happens. Can I have your other leg now, father? He said, Perhaps.

Later, I became twenty-five. By then my father had already become thirty-six. He had only a year left to live. Father, I said. Now that you have only a year left to live, you will consider? No, who said? he asked, spittle trailing down the corner of his mouth. I have more than a year and three months to live. Besides, your stepsisters also need legs. What will become of them if I give you everything I have? Then, he wiped the rest of his spittle on my face and said, here, take this. I give you this.

I sold my body unsuccessfully for many days after that. No one would pay to sleep with me, because I was disfigured. Besides, I didn't have any money. One person was willing, then she asked me: Do you have any money? I said, no, I don't have money, I need money. She walked away in a hurry.

Unfortunately, I died before my father. It was a rainy day, and he had forgotten to dye his hair. He said, there goes a one-legged man. I wanted to say to him, you should have given me that last leg. But I didn't, alas, because I was dead.

"A certain aesthetic amazement"

It is a joyless, rather vacuous evening, and so I will quote Hollinghurst from memory.

I felt the poetry of the thing tonight, perched above the breakers and the dim phosphorescence of the returning foam. I knew nothing about this country; to me it was a dream-Belgium, it was Allemonde, a kingdom of ruins and vanished pleasures, miracles and martyrdoms, corners where the sun light never shone. Not many would recognise it but some would. I seemed to have lost Luc in it. It was his wildness that had brought me to him and now it had taken him from me away. I studied my situation with a certain aesthetic amazement.

This is late in the novel, when our protagonist, Edward, realizes he has lost Luc, the love of his life. Of course the scene is symbolic, but its symbolism is not subterranean, and does not wait to be unearthed by the prospecting hermeneut. Unlike Jhumpa Lahiri and her ilk, who leave a symbol to semaphore its meaning wildly but "naturally" in each of their stories (for example: Amit's marriage to Megan is Failing; Amit and Megan have to go to a party; Megan's dress is Torn; Megan asks Amit to stand close to her so the Rent Doesn't Show; towards the End of the Party, Amit and Megan begin to talk to Other People, and the Rent is Visible For All to See; therefore, The Rent in the Dress Symbolizes the Rent in their Marriage; but don't draw attention to it, please, keep it low, because it's natural, it could have actually happened, it functions on two levels, the realist and the "literary"), this one is appropriated by the narrator. Its function is not to reinforce a "theme" but to signal that the narrator understands his situation, and is thus more natural than the fake naturalness imposed by Lahiri's Creative Writing gyaan. (Deresiewicz on Lahiri: "The pieces in Interpreter of Maladies are crafted—no, machine-tooled—to within a millimeter of their tiny, calculating lives; their writing-handbook devices—the inciting event, the governing symbol, the wry turn, the final epiphany—arrive one after another, exactly on time, with the subtlety of a pit bull and the spontaneity of a digital clock." )

Which is to say

Conurb, in the nighttime, through a fog-thwarted pair of glasses. The muffled thrusts of a matchstick old-fashionedly held to a cigarette. The melodramatic glower of a passing pedestrian. The thrill of a looming streetlamp. Its being only a streetlamp. Breasts not offered but triumphantly half-brandished. Leaping, then, across an incontinent gulch, knowing, then, a thwarted peace, finding, then, a poster for a camp skit campily played down, its campy actresses laid campily out in a matchstick line; watching, then, a fiend, splashing unconcernedly by. The filtered fakeness of a not-yet-dawn. The anxiety of a future only half-glimpsed. The pedantry of this. The pedantry of this. The strand of hair that remains clutched. The concrete. The oreo-cookie.

Supplemental

As a sort of belated counterpoint to all the ranting and ill-will that frequents this blog, here's a stunning excerpt from Manu Joseph's Serious Men, which I accidentally purchased for my Kindle not fifteen minutes ago:

Ayyan saw a young couple come down the steps. "All well?" he asked. The boy smiled shyly. He was holding a travel bag. Ayyan knew that the bag was empty. It was a sign of love. In some rooms here, over a dozen lived. So the newly-weds slept on the illegal wooden lofts with the unspoken assurance that the rest of the family down below would not look up. Every now and then, incontinent couples went to cheap lodges in Parel or Worli carrying empty bags to pass off as tourists. Some carried their wedding albums too, in case the cops raided. They spent a day in a bed that was entirely their own and returned with fond memories of room-service and love.

(The only mis-step in the above paragraph is the word "incontinent", which, among other things, calls to mind babies in cribs and the odd Alzheimer-ridden octogenarian.)

To write movingly and yet at an unsentimental, perhaps even ironic distance about poverty in urban India; this seems to be Joseph's goal. His approach, insofar as a generalization about it is possible after reading a few pages, seems to revolve around the deftly placed simile: (about young women walking on Bombay's beaches) "Solitary young women walked hastily, as if they were fleeing from the fate of looking like their mothers." (further on, in the same paragraph) "And their new jeans were so low that their meagre Indian buttocks peeped out as commas." (The novel's first sentence, about our protagonist): "Ayyan Mani's thick black hair was combed sideways and parted by a careless broken line, like the borders the British used to draw between two hostile neighbors." We delight in these riches while being simultaneously concerned about their running out too soon. And the colonial simile: is it placed there purely as an ornament, or does it have a deeper novelistic purpose? We shall see.