The Montauk Reader’s Corner

A. B. Yehoshua is an Israeli author who has won prestigious awards in Israel.  He seems to like to write about multiple-generational and multiple-national groups of people traveling together for a single purpose.

In this novel, A Journey to the End of the Millennium, we find ourselves positioned on a former warship, now reconstructed for peacetime travel of a Jewish trader, Ben Attar, his two wives, his Arabic Christian trading partner, his Muslim Arabic Captain, his African servant, a Sephardic Rabbi from Seville, Rabbi Elbaz, and the rabbi’s son, along with a Muslim crew of sailors, and a pair of camels.  We meet them as they are on the verge of sailing down the Seine to meet with the Jewish trader’s nephew, a third partner, Raphael Abulafia and is repudiating wife, Esther-Minna.  To this list of characters you can add Raphael’s first wife and mentally challenged daughter, his brother-in-law and the Jewish communities of Paris and Worms.

Confusing? No? Yes!  But everyone in our small, intimate reading group said that this book was worth the struggle at the packed opening of the novel, to work through the hard read to gain the jewels embedded within a story that takes you back in time, but also asks you to consider the state of our relations with one another across gender, cultural and religious issues today.  Do we differ much from the characters in the story?  Do we communicate with any greater ease than back then when one had to choose between old Hebrew, new Hebrew, French, Arabic, German etc.

Basically the question is asked:  Can a man be repudiated for having two wives, by an European woman who has herself been married twice?  Ben Attar feels it is an easy case for him to make, which is why his has uprooted his two wives to make the long journey to where his nephew and trading partner lives, in a new city called Paris.

Through a series of trials, we move through Europe, at a precipice of history, when Christians are anticipating the return of Christ, their Messiah, during the Highest Holy Days of the Jewish religion, at a time when exotic cultures were encountering each other via the trading of Middle Eastern handicrafts, clothes and spices.

Will religion bind the north and south families together?  Will the cultures bound by trade allow for the exchange of ideas as well as commerce?  Will the physician who calls himself, Otto the First, who has repudiated his Jewish faith to meld with his Christian neighbors, express Yehoshua’s prophecy for the ages, as to which progeny will survive?

I enjoyed the uniqueness of the novel:  The places it took you to; The encountering of many people meeting for the first time, who wish to prevail, as to what is the moral course for humans on their journey.  I enjoyed the way Yehoshua’s presents this story.  What is the equality of relationships if men can have multiple wives, but women cannot?  What limits do we place on ourselves by the veils of our identities, gender, religious or national / cultural?  isn’t the most important part of our journey as human beings to be both successful and spiritually guided people, regardless of our religious and cultural perceptions?  Seen from the author’s perspective, we are all traveling together, making arbitrary separations between ourselves, rather than enjoying our unity as human beings on one planet.

Read the book.  Enjoy the journey.  We did, and we can pretty much assure, you will too.

Stacey Dee Maurer-Kramer

We were a small group that discussed this book: Sally McGraw, Stacy Kramer and myself, Susan Raymond the first week when a snowstorm kept people home; Sally,  Gerry Pleunnueke, Judy Tanur and myself the second week. We all agreed that this book did a good job of showing the world and life stories of Raj orphans. Sally loved the book, admitting that she loves reading about these times and people. The rest of us found the book readable, but not particularly memorable. Still, it did engender a lively discussion about the lives these people led and the burdens of colonialism on the colonists.

This book has many strong followers and is very popular in the UK. I know that some of the difficulty for me was the unfamiliar culture of Britain. Like The Secret Scripture, I felt I could have gotten more if I was better versed in the times and place. But for me, there was less to this book. I had not finished it by the end of the first week, and Stacy let me know that it was like an onion. I did finish for the second week  (the difficulty in finishing had to do with another reading commitment, not the book itself), and found that I would describe it to be more like an orange. Rather than going deeper into the issue, a little more was revealed in each chapter, so that a pivotal incident in the childhood of Old Filth himself is not revealed until near the end. The reader has the pleasure of piecing together the parts to make the story, a familiar and effective plot strategy. I suspect that the reason some of us had a lesser response to this book was the flatness of the characters–not because of the writing but because their lives were made smaller by their circumstances. They seem to be very competent and conventional people who do not go beyond the expectations of the empire. Perhaps, on further reflection, this book is a very important warning to us all.

Have you recently read something terrific? Something awful? Share your reading experiences here by adding a comment. We look forward to hearing from you.

Discussions are on Sunday afternoons at 12:30 pm in the Montauk Room.  If you have a suggestion of something you would like to read, please leave it in a comment. All suggestions are welcome.

February 24: Old Filth by Jane Gardam *Note the date has changed because of the closure of the library.

March 10: A Journey to the End of the Millennium by A.B. Yeshoshua

April 14: Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

May 19: Beyond Black by Hillary Mantel

June 23: The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble

July 21: The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

August 18: The Leopard: A Novel by Giuseppe di Lanpedusa

Six of us gathered to discuss this book, which was enjoyed by all. And yet, we all had a little difficulty with the ending—it seemed a little too pat, even though there was internal justification for the fact of the adopted son being the doctor who unwittingly cared for his biological mother. Stacy suggested it was a convention of the novel, think of Dickens. I wondered if I would have been more satisfied if we had been privy to a conversation where he tells her of the connection. I think that part of the problem for me was that I couldn’t quite follow it all because I couldn’t quite keep track of who was on which side in the Irish Civil Wars. I suspect such a conversation would have cleared other things up for me a little, as well—I still don’t quite get how the baby ended up in England. John Kane took the baby out of Roseanne’s arms and took him to the doctor but left her there? Maybe he called the medical help for her, but he did seem to abandon her. The McNulty’s knew it was Eneas’s baby and sent him to the English convent? I suspect it was part of the story around town that she killed the baby, but the episode is very cloudy to me. To her as well. Why should we know more?

Stacy started us off by describing Ireland—she spent her 19^th summer there, traveling around. She remembers Ireland as all green and gray, and Sligo as very gray, much as Barry describes it. And the ocean, she tells us, is as present there as it is here.

This is a novel about History. The history of Ireland permeates her life and is also reflected in it. She is a historian herself, and recognizes the difficulties of the discipline. At the top of page 55 she writes, “For history, as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guess held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth. ¶History needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man’s dominion of the earth.” Barry warns us that we will be confused, that we won’t know exactly what happened, because there is no such thing to know. I know he’s right. I just wish I was better at embracing the confusion.

We talked about what a good read this was, but I don’t recall mention of just what exactly we loved about it. Roseanne herself, certainly. Her buoyancy in the face of her terrible troubles. She lives seventy years alone, abandoned, really, and yet is seemingly not sunk in self-pity or melancholy. She remembers love. Sally McGraw pointed out this passage on page 22:

What did I see, what did I know? It is sometimes I think the strain of ridiculousness in a person, a ridiculousness born maybe of desperation, such as also Eneas McNulty—you do not know who that is yet—exhibited so many years later, that pierces you through with love for that person. It is all love, that not knowing, that not seeing. I am standing there, eternally, straining to see, a crick in the back of my neck, peering and straining, if for no other reason than for love of him. The feathers are drifting away, drifting, swirling away. My father is calling and calling. My heart is beating back to him. The hammers are falling still.

Who is that him? I think it must be Eneas and her father, and yes, even Tom. And Father Gaunt? And Dr. Grene? She knows love from all sides, and she knows that happiness is up to each one of us “cannot a man make himself as happy as he can in the strange long reaches of a life? I think it is legitimate. After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it (bottom page 11).” Her ability to love life, to handle and explore it even in the face of tremendous loss, buoys all her dear readers, I believe. There are angels and mysteries in this book. There is secret scripture. I leave you with one last quote, that expresses best for me what I loved in this book. But you need to read the whole book to get the true import of the novel. Here it is, from the middle of page 91.

To be alone, but to be pierced through with a kingly joy, now and then, as I believe I am, is a great possession indeed. As I sit here at this table marked and scored by a dozen generations maybe of inmates, patients, angels, whatever we are, I must report to you this sensation of some gold essence striking into me, blood deep. Not contentment, but a prayer as wild and dangerous as a lion’s roar.

I tell you this, you.

Dear reader. God keep you, God keep you.

We didn’t like this book much. Too much drinking. Characters with no sense of a place in the world beyond self-indulgence. Truly a lost generation, with no wisdom to offer us. And Hemingway seems antisemitic.

I was struck by the antisemitism in this book as I read it, and it nagged at me. What was Hemingway getting at? While I was reading, I ignored those responses. It was only at the group discussion that they resurfaced for me and I wondered if it was antisemitism on Hemingway’s part, or simply holding up the antisemitism of the time to the light. These characters who use Robert Cohn’s Jewishness as a reason to dislike him, who throw around the term kike, are unlikeable even if he weren’t in the novel. As the novel starts, the reader has some sympathy for Cohn, who is the early focus. By the end of the novel, he seems as lost as any of the others. I don’t know what Hemingway intended. I read that Cohn was based on a friend and that the story of the love triangle and the bull-fighting grew from a real incident in their lives. In real life, this character’s Jewishness was used as a fact against him by his expat friends and acquaintances. And yet, reading in 2012, it is the antisemitism repellent, not the Jewishness. There is no way to know what Hemingway intended. I suspect that the habit of judging a person’s actions based on religion was so natural to them all that he didn’t think much about it. It was perfectly acceptable in his world. And yet, he opens the novel with that story of Cohn and the difficulties he faced at Princeton solely because he was Jewish. Consciously intended or not, The Sun Also Rises shows antisemitism as petty and foolish. It doesn’t rise to more, because Cohn doesn’t rise to more.

At the discussion I struggled with the question, “does this book deserve it’s title,” and don’t remember that we answered it at all satisfactorily. I would love to read some comments expounding on it. That Sunday, I could only wonder at whether I should care that the sun ever rose on these folks. But on reflection, I am seeing it a little differently. This is the Lost Generation, the generation that suffered such trauma from the terrors of World War I. The title now reminds me of the feeling I had right after September 11, 2001. The birds were still singing, they neither knew of our great sorrow, nor did they care.

I find starting these blog entries very difficult. Who is the audience? Should I aim at those who were at the discussion, the reader of the specific book who wasn’t there, or the general reader? As I recall, my original idea was to keep the discussion going, but there have been almost no comments from anyone. But I remember at this discussion someone, I think Mary Ruth, mentioned that the book stayed with her long after she finished it. I am finding that true of our discussions too. In this case, I am particularly interested in the question of whether Claude bought the poison deliberately to kill his brother. Here is what the author said in an interview with Oprah:

I think it’s one of those things that can be interpreted a couple of different ways. But my take is that’s the moment [when he buys the poison] in Claude’s life when he has not yet given up hope of being a full person, a sound, good person. And he’s—what he’s encountered at this point is the ability to have death, which is the little debate that he and the old herbalist have about it’s not good to have the power of death but not the power of life. But I don’t believe that he—I believe he’s—he has a sort of darkness in him that draws him toward that. But he doesn’t know why, and he doesn’t have a specific purpose for it. Certainly not the purpose to go many years later—

This is from a conversation so it is not neatly done, but Oprah interjects “kill his brother” and Wroblewski says, “ it’s something he’s drawn toward. He might not know why…it would be a fascinating thing to have hold of.” It was the explanation I was naturally drawn to—I am interested in the way we are a product of our subconscious (maybe even unconscious) thoughts at least as much as our deliberate thoughts. And I am drawn to the idea of a single action, particularly one taken early in life defining our course. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” (“And that has made all the difference.”) So I was surprised when I woke up the next morning thinking about Judi Hamill’s sense that Claude knew what the poison was for when he bought it. She (and others) kept reminding us of the recognition that he worked very slowly and patiently. And I imagined this man, a scraper, the unfavored (it seems) second son, in a foreign land asked by his government to fight for an idea, tempted by this poison. The rain, I remember. The death of the dog. He saw its power and must have know its evilness. He takes it. At that point he succumbs to temptation. There is no turning back. And he knows, at some level, that his choice is bad. And the idea of the farm and his brother must be there, in him. Not a plan, but the seed. He doesn’t like it. He doesn’t do anything with it. Until. We don’t know why he came back then, Wroblewski clearly doesn’t know that. But. The opening scene is chilling. The rest of the book is the unfolding of that original action.

So I think now that in some important way, Claude knew what the poison was for, though he wasn’t certain he would use it. In spite of what the author says. Elsewhere, the author states that he wrote the book originally only from Edgar’s point of view, and didn’t want to know more than Edgar would know. He has expanded the book, but he is not the omnipotent author. There is plenty he doesn’t know and he has said so. And what I find fascinating, is that the book is ours now, to make as we choose. The reader takes the book and adds to it through his/her own sensibilities and experiences. We can argue (and I guess I like to) about various interpretations, but they are reflections of our own experiences. This is stating the obvious, but it deserves to be stated, I think. Each reading, each discussion, affects the vibrations the book makes in the world. Awesome.

There were a couple of things about this book that struck me, that weren’t mentioned in the discussion, and I would like to bring them up here. One was weather. I thought Wroblewski used it to effectively incline the reader to a particular mood. This was one of the things that reminded me of Lear. I leave it at that. The other was the wonderful section where Edgar is out in the wilderness. A wild man. Maybe a little like Claude, but without the evil impulse.

Wroblewski said elsewhere:
Another preoccupation of mine, [the first being dogs and their relationship to us] not unrelated to the first, has to do with the nature of wildness in the human character. We glimpse it in ourselves every day, from the surge of emotion that rises from nowhere to the flash of inspiration we can’t explain. Even memory itself, the very core of our identity, remains slyly feral, heedlessly retrieving all manner of incident and image, indifferent to whether its discoveries are burdens or gifts.

This is the core of the book that makes it fascinating for me. I felt unsatisfied by the sometimes rickety construction, especially at the end, but the architecture was strong. And the theme of that mysterious wilderness inside us, and the wilderness outside that both beckons and frightens compels me.

Maybe something new came up for you in reading this. If so, please click on the “No Comments,” (or maybe you won’t be first and there will be an indication that someone else commented), and leave a reply. We would all love to read what you think.

Neither Stacey nor I are able to attend this meeting. Stacey has sent her comments–find them below this paragraph. I have not finished the book and probably will not. I am not hooked and have a long list I want to get to. I want to say that I couldn’t help but compare this book to this year’s Pulitzer prize winner, Tinkers, a debut novel by Paul Harding. Tinkers also involves a dying person (in this case a man named, oddly enough, George) and scenes from a lifetime, but there the similarity stops. Harding is masterful in his moving from scene to scene and is clearly cognizant of stream of consciousness. His stories are detailed, compelling, and sometimes amazing. We are many times transported back into depression era New England, not through someone telling us what is remembered, but as if we are in the scene. And, I have to say, the stories from George’s life are so much more interesting than those from Georgie’s. The people are more real because they are more complex. And the ideas and feelings that are invoked are worth savoring. And now, for Stacey’s take.

My comments on Remembering the Bones
Well, the Frances Itani can certainly write.
The narrator, a woman who shares the same birthday as Queen E, lands herself in a
ravine, while she was on her way to an invitation only 80th Birthday celebration with
said Queen. She writes, rather late in the narrative: p. 236 “I must not dwell on my sorry state” but
she lies. She dwells and in a round about way, tells all about her, yes, you got it
dysfunctional family.
OK – there is mystery in the what is not said: Why does she refer to her “dad” as Mr. Holmes. Is it because she and her sister were
not his biological children? Or is it an indication of the distance she feels from her dad, who is crippled, emotionally challenged, one-eyed, and suffering from chronic liver
disease. Who is that woman Harry is hugging in the picture? Was that a first meeting? A last meeting? A story not shared during pillow talk with husband. The Harry Georgia hardly knew. Why do all the female characters have names that can be mistaken for male names? Gran Dan, Al-ly, Georgie(a), and of course, the FREDS. The Freds provide some comic relief, as a jovial, but often bickering couple, until you notice that Aunt Fred has a compulsive need to wash her hands.

Yes, even Shakespeare rears his head in this saga, as a backdrop of the education Georgie sort of had, but never amounted to the talents of her Grandfather, the Dr., who
was blown up in WWI, but left her a set of Dickens and Greyʼs Anatomy-the books she has most cherished, and provides us with the structure of the story – the bones.
Bones. Skeletons. The hardness that is our core being, holding up all the gushy stuff of organs and in this book MEMORIES.

It is a HERSTORY supreme. Georgiaʼs account, as she slips into death. Will the calvary arrive before she stops breathing. Will Case(another male-ish name) look for
her? Will Queen Elizabeth send out the Canadian Mounties?
Oh yes, there is also a celebrity tie. The metaphor of the Princess and the Pauper?
My favorite characters were Georgiaʼs husband Harryʼs reunited sister, Yerna, dancing on Sunday morning with her third younger husband to the religious songs, as their
worshiping ritual. Now a book about Yerna and Arman would have more interested me! There is the honeymoon from Hell, marrying a man who has polio fever on a trip they
could not really afford to take, and Georgia discovering she is a bit of a prairie woman like the other members of her family, a survivor.

The Long List of Tragedies:
Harryʼs Orphan years
Harryʼs polio
Life with Mr. Holmes
Granddad, the Doctorʼs Death
Death of Matt, the second child
Separation from her sister
How Case has decided to not have child/ren.

Oh, the joy was harder to come by:
The Memory of those flowers from Harry
The connubial joy
Case
Matt being born
Gran Dan for being Gran Dan
Uncle Fred for being Uncle Fred
Django jazz genius appreciated
Allyʼs artistic achievements
and how Georgia could remember the Bones.

Enough said.

See you next month:

Fondly,
Stacey

As those of you who were there know (14 in total), this book did not sing for me. At first I was taken in and wanted to know the characters better, but after 100 pages or so, I found that I was involved in an elaborate hunt that I lost interest in. The characters were interesting, but flat. I found the women in particular, one dimensional. In fact, I was surprised that no one mentioned this. They seemed there to be objects of desire, but not have characters beyond returning the love that was shown them. And, I found the gothic romances quite unbelievable. I understand grieving for someone, remembering them with desire, but I do not understand grown people essentially abandoning their lives for an adolescent passion ended by death. But, I am very glad I was at the discussion, and I came away with a higher opinion of the book.

I did love the Museum of Forgotten Books. So Borgesian. Borges, however, would have used it in a short story and the museum would have been at the center of everything. Here, it seemed to be a clever and romantic idea. I did appreciate the suggestion that Zafron was comparing a life to a book; that we are all relegated to that museum at some point. In this book and the next, Zafron is clearly tackling the problem of the intersection of life and literature. That is a very exciting undertaking for a reader.

I apologize for the sketchy, and even disjointed nature of this post. I wanted to write something, but clearly have not much to say about this particular book: I read it without too much pain, though I wanted to read something else, I enjoyed the discussion. The writing of the book was accomplished and the translation seemed good. I do wish I had gotten more of a physical sense of Barcelona, but I am grateful for the sense of life under Franco. Now, I want to get a post published and move on. I hope that you will add your own comments. I am certain they will be much more illuminating than mine.

I confess that I had abandoned this blog, not intentionally, but through daily procrastination. It started with a post on Hamlet that was interrupted that I found difficult to get back to. I had something planned to say that I was certain was brilliant, but I couldn’t remember what it was. I do have much of that post on my computer still, but am not going to share it now. I will say that I found that reading and discussion particularly edifying. I reread the play that time very slowly and with great relish, and much of that very familiar seemed new to me. I saw some of Hamlet’s motivation in a different light and shared it at the discussion. I remember that Fern did not agree with at least one of my new insights; I respect her knowledge and literary abilities and so I thought hard about what she said, but the play continued to come to me the same way, at least in August, 2009. I wonder what I will feel the next time I read it. I was left knowing that one of the reasons Shakespeare is so great is that he speaks to us differently depending on where we start from. There is no one way to read or interpret these plays. They contain so many worlds.

I have made another decision about my approach to writing this blog. I found it had begun to feel like a chore to write something up after each discussion, trying to reflect what was said while adding something to the discussion. The truth is, I like to write about what I read because in the process, I discover something new about the work and my response to it. So I am not going to adhere to a particular schedule, and I will probably write about books before the discussion. If you don’t want to know my opinions before the reading, it is easy to not read the blog. I would love to read others comments as well, as I am sure most of you would, so I encourage you to write comments. If you have some strong reflections on a book and would like to post on the blog, you can send me an email with your post, and I will put it up. I am not publishing my email address here, but if you are in the Reading Group, you should know it. If not, speak to me at the next meeting.

Because I have just returned from a ski trip and family visits, I have only just gotten the current book and read only a few pages. The next few weeks will show how I work out the use of this blog.

Good reading–Susan