The Hare with Amber Eyes - Day 10

Normally I would have raced though this book, but am reading small chunks at a time. Depressingly the theme of antisemitism grows and grows, dominated for me by what will happen when Hitler comes to power in Germany.  I find it incredible that despite the Emperor's enfranchisement of the Jews still there are open calls in the Reichstrat for Schusgeld - a bounty for shooting Jews. As the author says, after his Paris researches,

"It looks as if I am going to spend another winter reading about antisemitism"

And how true that is, despite the riches, the successes of the Ephrussi family and others like them, they are still outsiders to a rabid section of Europe. 

Then there is assertion in the book that suicide was a common among these rich nobility - and a list follows - three of Wittgenstein brothers, Mahler's brother - but I think this might be the literary equivalent of "Britons dead in balloon crash".  Add in the suicide of the Crown Prince after he had shot his mistress and you have every ingredient for a massive press ghoul fest. Just because they are the relatives of the famous the suicides stick out, but we know that suicide is one of the most common causes of death in young men even to this day. I want to see the figures!

There is in  fact an entire book on Suicide in fin-de-siecle Vienna, by John David Deak, but I can't get any more information. But there is this amazing passage from a book on Budapest, that speaks for itself!

The final chapter of this section, “Rites of Becoming Visible and Invisible,” is a magnificent exposition on metropolitan suicide and suicide attempts. Sadly, Budapest had the highest proportion of suicides of any European city, with figures for the period from unification until World War II averaging between 5.3 and 5.7 per thousand. In 1883, the Public Health Commission speculated that the city’s high rate of suicide was due to mental illness and imitative behavior, and encouraged journalists to exercise restraint in reporting suicides. Gyáni notes that while the commission may have been mistaken about the issue of mental health as a principal reason, their observation about imitation actually had some clout in reference to suicide attempts. Thanks to his close attention to visuality throughout the text, Gyáni’s subtle observation that many attempted suicides were efforts at becoming visiblein the crowd of metropolitan strangers is even more effective. Distressed people atop elevated sites, such as bridges or one of the city’s very few tall office buildings, thus made their “entourage” or fellow alienated people aware that their personal problems had become untenable. “Such gestures are, logically, more effective if they are spectacular,” he adds (p. 131). A fire chief’s report from 1927 indicated that such dramatic attempts had become almost routine, yet actual suicides got far less coverage in the press than the “unsuccessful” attempts atop a bridge. (Firemen even got a bonus for rescuing people atop the bridge.) Gyáni undertakes a social analysis of suicide statistics, concluding that those most likely to commit suicide were those who had least control over their destiny: domestic servants among women and industrial apprentices or officials among men. Those who were least socialized in making decisions for themselves, Gyáni speculates, were thus most likely to seek the ultimate extrication from their lot.  (My bold italics)

Metropolitan Identities in Fin-de-Siècle Budapest, from a review of Gabor Gyani. Identity and the Urban Experience: Fin-de-Siecle Budapest. Translated by Thomas J. DeKornfeld. Wayne: Center for Hungarian Studies and Publications,

Google, Google what did we know before Google?  Right now, using these figures, which may or may not be accurate, there are 5.3 to 5.7 suicides per thousand of population Budapest, late 19thh to early 20th century, and this is more than Vienna.  The suicide rate in Great Britain in 2011 was 11.8 per hundred thousand.  So the Budpest figure is incredibly high - equivalent to approx fifty per hundred thousand - or five times the rate in modern day Britain.  I take it all back - suicide was certainly much more common, although my italics in the quotation above assert that it was manly amongts servants, apprentices and officials, rather than the rich and famous. 

The Hare with Amber Eyes - Day 9

Writing this blog is subtly altering my process of reading.  Where I might have put the book down and left it to read something else for a while, I am reading everyday. And when I do read I try to read a chunk that will facilitate some kind of rounded writing for the blog.  The fact of writing about the reading makes me read more critically and more constructively  stops me rushing though too much too quickly. I read a short chapter last night - Zionstrasse - and am starting to read with a little bit of envy as well as interest   How convenient to be the scion of such a hugely wealthy and influential family, and inherit not only money, but art.  No wonder he has the time to wander about Paris and Vienna, no wonder he was able to be a potter. However these thoughts, while they flit through my mind at odd times ( a cliched description seems apt for a cliched resentment) are just dismissible trash.  It is possible to spend one's entire life enviously looking at others who have more, and slightly more satisfyingly looking at those who have a little less, and then guiltily at those who virtually nothing.  Of course we know this isn't they way to live any life, but it i surprising how much time my thoughts run up and down this little comparative continuum  comparing him or her with me, him with her and him. Comparisons, comparisons, fitting ourselves into the world.

The end result is that we tend to gravitate to those who are on a similar rung - or at least one of the same ladders. Partly by accident of place - if you can afford to live in this area, you'll have neighbors of a certain ilk.  Partly by job and progress - you mix with your work peers perhaps. Partly by birth and where you came from.  But somehow it seems to work that you choose to stay in contact with the people who you perceive to be at a similar level.  Nothing new or exciting about that. Exactly.  I probably have a bigger span of acquaintance than most, and it's sometimes its as uncomfortable spending time with someone who is hopelessly less well off than you as it is someone who is hopelessly richer or more successful. The singular thing that saves all this from a kind of same old same determinism is that sometimes you just connect with someone across all these gaps, and it works. Or it doesn't, because that spark isn't there.  And then there are the "same level" people as you who you keep in touch with out of comfort and habit ( as well as the ones with the spark).

The Hare with Amber Eyes - Days 7 & 8

Irritatingly I had very little time to read yesterday, and still less time to blog. meal out in the evening, went to see Cloud Atlas, which was very (over) long, so I didn't write yesterday and missed out on one day. This is two days combined, so I'll start with an indulgent rant. The BBC headline today is "Britons among ballon dead", as a hot air balloon has crashed in Egypt. What do we learn from this?  That the BBC believes its audience, above all else, is concerned with British deaths only, and these only if they have occurred in slightly bizarre or holiday situations.  It's another riff on the terrible dangers of going abroad, of not staying safely at home.

The Hare with Amber Eye author is walking around the Ringstrasse, marveling at the opulence and the architecture, mulling over the swelling Jewish population, (1863, 8000 to 145,000 by 1899), cognizant from his researches that Hitler painted all the buildings when he was a painting and architecture student. (The Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian empire gave civic equality to the Jews in 1867, many fled pogroms in other countries.).  But the undercurrents of antisemitism are still strong.  The flats hide behind the ornate facades, the richer Jews 'disappear' behind assimilation, says the author, of the feeling of the time. 

Then I come across this in a short story I was reading ( Uncertainty, by Kristine Kathyrn Rusch in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine), which is a timeshift story about the attempts of a group in the future to turn aside the use of nuclear weapons by either assassinating or saving Heisenberg (vis Heisenberg  and Bohr's strong friendship, working together before Fascism   the protagonists in Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen that attempts to dramatise their meeting).  The question is whether Heisenberg deliberately hindered or helped the Nazi bomb research.  But in the time conundrum story our protagonist meets another time meddler who comes from the other side, a Nazi sympathiser   And this was the part that struck me with its relevance to Austria, now, everywhere, every time.  Our heroine is simply incredulous that someone of her time could actually believe and espouse Nazy ideology. How can it happen? I feel the same - maybe in the ignorance of years gone by, but now, with access to all the knowledge and history we have how are people Nazis, fundamentalists, Jehovah's witnesses - I realise now that the list could go on and on.  People believe what they feel like believing, and often that isn't very nice. The banal understatement of the century. Britons among the balloon dead, jesus fucking wept, that is the level we're at in our main news channel, what hope is there?

The Hare with Amber Eyes Day 5

Quick obsessive entry to keep my blog up to one post every day. Away visint a friend this weekend, without access to a computer, and really can't be arsed to type in any more than web addresses on a Nexus.. need a detachable keyboard for that.  Read the last entry in the Paris log, before Charles Ephrussi packs up all his netsuke(s) and gives it as a wedding present to a relation (Japonaise was getting so passe).  the sinister undertone in this chapter was antisemitism again - specifically the Dreyfuss affair.  I'd always known about it, about Zola's j'accuse, but I didn't realise how intent the establishment was on arresting Zola after his banishment, and how widespread the antisemitism  was. I wonder how it was for ordinary people, Jewish or not.  Was it like the anti-Muslim sentiment here, now?  Can you compare them - because of course there is an antagonism between fundamentalist Muslim states and the West, whereas the Jews were victimised simply for being Jewish - and rich - though that didn't stop antisemitism  against poor Jews either, which seems to me to point out the nastiness of any prejudice.  There's no real logic to it.

On the internet, on Facebook ffs, I've sen a post of a scan of typewritten note (yes, typewritten) saying that asylum seekers get £x which, it maintains, is double what our pensioners get.  It is of course a pure scan, it's untrue - but people believe it.   I suspect it is propagated as a scan so that it is more difficult just to search for the actual phrases, and find out that it is a scam. Nasty stuff.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes - Day 4

I didn't read much yesterday, but the theme of the super-rich art salon continues. Charles was Jewish, so the insidious creep of antisemitism makes itself known in Renoirs complaints that Charles has hung Gustave Moreau near his own paintings. Renoir says of Moreau, it's "Jew Art".  On the internet today I have a look at Gustav's Galatee and it reminds me of sixties album covers - in fact very specifically,  King Crimson covers, and in especial the cover to In the Wake of Poseidon. Further "research" (research is just a euphemism for Wikipedia), shows that Gustave Moreau was regarded as a Symbolist painter and one of the precursors of Surrealism, so I don't think I'm that far off the mark.

It's a strange mix, high finance and art, although Charles doesn't do much of the finance, he is just a recipient of the family's huge wealth.  The antisemitism also manifest itself in financial scandals that are blamed on the Jewish banking families. The market crashes also demonstrate that perfidious banking and the making of money from money were uneasy and very fallible things even in the 1880s, with scapegoats always being sought.  But I don't think we have that association of blame with racial groups, at least not overtly anymore. 

It's good reading about this other world, and having the internet to hand to look up the pictures - but that does then beg the question of looking at the pictures for real. It seems easy to accept the digital image as the real thing, but it isn't.  I remember seeing Paul Klee's golden fish in a Hamburg art gallery, having only ever seen reproductions before, and being amazed by the tiny size of the painting, and the reflective shiny quality of the gold paint that he used.  This is one of the things that Edmund De Waal muses on - what it would be like to see all these Moreaus and Monets and Degas and Renoirs crammed into a little room with a vitrine full of netsuke.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes - Day 3

There's a fantastic passage  in a letter from Jules Lafourg, who is an artist helping Charles Ephrussi by indexing his book on Durer, where he says how much he loves working in Charles room - and then follows this explosion of description of the paintings (Pissaro, Manet, Degas, Renoir - you get the picture). It  gave me an imaginative insight into what Charles and his ilk were trying to do. All these art objects are there to be looked at, that's so startlingly obvious - the reason for restating it is because there is so much intensity in the collecting,  the planning and the looking.  We have so many distractions, ways of filling our lives with music, TV - films and programmes, radio, all on tap, available immediately.  They were creating this kind of rich experiential environment purely with paintings,  objects, drapes, carpets.  Imagine an evening at Charles Ephrussi's house, when there isn't a salon to go to , it's an evening in.  What do you do? You watch paintings, read books, fondle netsuke.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes - Day 2

In the 1880s in France boxes, no ship loads,  of (very) artistic tat (bibilots) were arriving in France, and the author's great grandfather, Charles Ephrussi   was up there collecting with the best of them, in this world of japonaise , salons, affairs and of course, Japanese porn (shunga -mainly sexually explicit prints, sometimes with fantastical creatures - he says that octopuses were often featured for their "sinuosity", by which I think he actually means having arms for every orifice at once ).

I begin to want to see some of the pictures he's talking about (and no, not just the porn, though that is worth a look, just type shunga into Google, but not perhaps at work. Shunga + octopus is weird - it's got a whole Wikipedia entry to itself). So there is this sumptuous picture of Manet's wife in Japanese costume, he wasn't just all muddy light and lilies then.  I should say that I'm reading with a little Nexus 7 beside me, the poor man's iPad, so I can look up things whenever I want without that heavy shift of the body from reading chair / bed to desk and computer.

There's this real sense of the voluptuousness of fin-de-siecle Paris - the tapestries and hangings, the collections of gold laquered Japanese boxes, the salons. All of it dripping with money.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes - Day 1

It's always difficult to find something to read after finishing something fairly classic - I realise that I had that feeling after reading Marquez even though i didn't care for it that much, it was great writing. So to go on to Nabakov was a an OK step, there wasn't any change down in gear. The Hare with the Amber Eyes, no disrespect to it, is a bit of a come down. It's well written, by someone who is used to paying a lot of attention to sight, line and detail (the author is a potter or ceramicist or something like that, it's meticulously researched, it's an easy read. It has a bit of an anodyne, rarefied and distinctly unconfessional autobiographical strand, as well as the family history.  I started reading it a while ago and put it down for something more exciting. I haven't yet skim read the bits that I have read, just plunged in again, and there is "enough there to keep me reading" . That's in quotes because I think I say it a lot, and have probably already written that exact phrase in an earlier blog.

The only thing is, is it worth the effort to blog about? Given that I'm blogging/writing about the process of reading, then it is. It will mean that I'll have to write about a real range of books, including some of the less than intellectual/ great lit. books that I love to slum it with. That does need an example. Well I guess Peter Hamilton would be one.(he's a science fiction / space opera writer of huge sprawling books, full of ideas and imaginative scope, but also full of characters with about as much depth as the the doppelgänger Rimmer in that episode of Red Dwarf where Rimmers "best self" appears - "smoke me a kipper for breakfast" and all that. What a shame though that I read the Hydrogen Sonata before I wrote this, because I rate Iain. M. Banks hugely.  Yes I would rate Excession above Lolita, above Love in the Time of Cholera, just because it has more scope, it isn't so knotted up in its own intellectual ribbons, and corseted by definitions of literature. Whatever that may mean. 

Nabakov's Lolita day 8

Finally finished the novel, and read Nabakov's afterword ( reminded me of TS Eliot's "explanatory notes on the Wasteland), then Professor Craig Raine's Afterword, and then the the fake Foreword again.  he's a clever bigger, Nabakov, no doubt about that. I would sum it up, in the reductionist way that you have to do when you are writing a short piece, as  ultimately about the destructive reflexivity of wanting/ sexual desire that is not reciprocated,  but forced on Dolores.  I find it strange that there are cribs and reviews that say the reader is drawn into sympathy for HH. I liked the language, I liked the sensuousness of the language, I liked some of the jokes and puzzles strewn through the book, but at the end I'm thinking, hmm time to read something else.  I'd rather read John Updike, though I will read something else of Nabakov's to give me a sense of perspective - it was, after all, hearing two of Nabakov's short stories read aloud that made me reread Lolita. IN the end though I feel short changed, unenhanced, if not unimpressed.

I like Elizabeth Janeaway's summation:

Humbert is every man who is driven by desire, wanting his Lolita so badly that it never occurs to him to consider her as a human being, or as anything but a dream-figment made flesh - which is the eternal and universal nature of passion.''
(New York Times Book Review, quoted by Erica Jong)

In fact the more I read that it does ring true, except perhaps for the rather purple phrase  "eternal and universal nature of passion" . 

Nabakov's Lolita Day 7

After this hiatus of time, after Dolore's escape, during which HH has shacked up with and abandoned another woman, he meets Dolores again, pregnant, asking him for money, she tells him who she ran off with.

 "the name that the astute reader has guessed long ago"

Irritatingly, and unastutely I have no fucking idea who she or Nabakov is referring to, but then I never was much good at chess problems either. There is a reference to Jean Harlow saying that she saw, at the Hourglass Lake, and the memory of this flashes though HH's mind, so it must be a clue.


 ‘two children, male and female, at sunset, right here, making love'

Nabokov, Vladimir (2012-07-27). Lolita (p. 100). Penguin Classics. Kindle Edition. 

Well Nabakov likes puzzles, I don't particularly. It is revealed a page or two on, Cue / Quilty, so there isn't too much suspense. 

The book is in the final stages now. HH drives off, full or murderous intent toward the man who filched Dolores from him.  We're back with his hopeless roamings, lost and stuck on the dirt road that connects highway X to highway Y, pulled out, stops in a small town full of neon signs that he misreads - "genuflexion lubricity" for "Gulflex Lubrication" on the garage.  We're always kept aware that for all his professions of love for Dolores, these are always eclipsed by lust - well not just eclipsed, his expressions of love are false and self justification  his dreaming of a world as he would like it to be, he wants a Lolita, not a Dolores.  This passage bears me out I think: HH is talking about having sex with her, feeling remorseful and full of love and affection, and then:


"all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again – and ‘oh, no,’ Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure – all would be shattered."

Nabokov, Vladimir (2012-07-27). Lolita (p. 325). Penguin Classics. Kindle Edition. 

They're all fake, his protestations of love. 

Nabakov's Lolita day 6

The middle text of Lolita is strange. HH, ever one suspects the unreliable narrator, tells of episodes over at least a year if not two. Lolita is growing, putting on weight, obviously desperately unhappy, and it's clear that HH is abusing her almost every day. It is not nice to read.  HH's p[paranoia is growing, we're rooting for Dolores escape. (Interesting that I name her Lolita in the previous sentence, - I've avoided doing that because that is HH's pet name , "Lo, Lola, Lolita" is his refrain, and I use her full name out of respect for the female character, so as not to get caught in his net of creepy justification.

Nabakov's Lolita Day 5

We're now in the runaway stage, HH has Dolores in his clutches, and through a mixture of threats and bribery, he is just managing to keep her on board. There's a lot of dark humour in what is a case of child kidnap, there's a balance of coercion over which HH is not going to step - he uses all the power of his adulthood, but Dolores is still a moody ordinary child.  The only picture you get of her is through the distorted lense of HH's completely self -obsessed vision.
The pastiche of all the attraction of the travel round 50's USA is part of Nabakov's joking around. Set off against this banal set of "Pine Lodges" , and ersatz log cabins built to mimic Lincoln's childhood home, his crimes seem more sinister, more worm like and insidious.

Nabakov's Lolita day 4

The Kindle obligingly says I am 38% way though the book now, the concept of page numbers not quite so reliable in this ear of digitally resized text. Although, should I wish to find that information is obligingly supplied by the Kindle app on my PC - page 122 of 352.

HH, in his fantasy - I'm pretty sure it is just his fantasy, has had his newly married wife run over by a car (OK it is a spoiler, but as Nabakov says, somewhere, if you're reading his novels just to know what comes next, you're not reading it right), and has taken Dolores off, and left her drugged in their hotel room, while he ruminates on his planned ravishment and rape of her. Let's make no bones about it, this is child rape he is planning.  So back to that question that keeps running through my mind -is this book justifiable (going beyond it seems to always make the top 100 books of the world in most surveys of that kind)?  Of course it's beautifully written and constructed. And it also tackles the issues of sexual desire, forbidden fruit, adult responsibility, what is legal and what is not.  Just as HH fades between outright fantasy and supposed justification (after all he says 12 year olds were fair game in other cultures at other times).  I think what Nabakov manages to do is suggest all these intertwined themes, to describe and delight in sexuality as pure sensuality, but still to keep us aware that HH is a thoroughly unpleasant and evil man who has put his gratifications at the centre of his solipsistic world. So there's your central moral standpoint - loud and clear. With that said, says this novel, we still have a world of desire, fantasy, in adults and in children, which we are all uncomfortable with and possessed by in equal measure.  Put simply, the sex and sexuality exists, it is fine, the abuse of power and influence exists, and that is what is most definitely not fine.

Nabakov's Lolita day 3

Racing on through, I've read the famous passage again, (which incidentally, most articles complaining about the sheer depravity of Lolita, reprint in full), where he manages to orgasm in his pajamas from the frottage of her sitting on his lap.  It's all a bit yukky and erotic at the same time - as I think Nabakov intended, everything is going on inside HH's head, and the reader is being taken for the ride.

I just put "why did Nabakov write Lolita?" into Google ( which, completely off the point, said "Do you mean: "why did Nabakov wrote Lolita?" sic.

In a demolition of a self published book, Solving Nabakov's Lolita Riddle  that says the key to Nabakov's Lolita is the fact that he was sexually abused by his uncle, the reviewer cites this quote from Nabakov:

"It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I’ve no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions. (SO 16)"

That fits with the chess problem comment I picked up from Wikipedia (see last blog post).  And kind of gets me nowhere, reduced to the colloquial, the unknowing. 

Another answer suggests (wonderfully) that Nabakov just liked writing, and was stimulated (perhaps the wrong word, perhaps the right word in this context) by Edgar Allan Poe's poem Annabel Lee.  Well both seem right, the second seems useful.

The New York Times obituary is good on Nabakov in general.

I'm not the only one to wonder why he wrote it. This compendium of reactions just about covers the whole lot from "wonderful" to "sicko paedo", with some intelligent comments inbetween.

Nabakov's Lolita day 2

It's an easy read most of the way,  if sometimes an uncomfortable one, but continually there are odd, very rare words, bits of French, lots of digs at psychiatry and psychoanalysis, pastiche .  As someone said in one of the reviews, he's written a pornographic novel without ever writing pornographically.  

We're never given any doubt that HH is a thoroughly nasty character, vis this bit of his thinking when his wife Valechka has told him she is leaving him 


"She had very vulnerable legs, and I decided I would limit myself to hurting her very horribly as soon as we were alone."

Nabokov, Vladimir (2012-07-27). Lolita (Kindle Locations 457-458). Penguin Classics. Kindle Edition. 

Like so much of his life this is an empty imagining, but we're given a clear indication that he might be capable of carrying through with it. 

I'm intrigued by what Nabakov made of this novel (after all he wrote it) - and the Google trail seems to suggest that he had a great affection for it.  he certainly wanted to publish it when he had written it. Most publishers of the day rejected it, so he was eventually published in France by an outfit that mainly published pornographic novels.

Of course there are as many justifications as condemnations in the reactions to the book: I am most in tune with Martin Amis's view that this is a view of a tyrant's world, entirely from the point of view of the tyrant. He goes on to say that this can be seen as an elaborate metaphor for the tyranny of Communist Russia, but I think that this is too fanciful.  It is a portrait of a tyrant, and if you read you undertake a mental complicity with the tyrant's world - but then you can step back. The book swings you in and out of these states - blissful prose, followed  by lists, like the list of Lolita's classmates,that force you to stand apart, thinking why this? But then, I thought, even if it was just a list someone somewhere will have done a semantic assessment of each and every name: the list explained!  Well thank you, Gavriel Shapiro, for doing all that work. But I can't help thinking that all that interpretation he has put in is rather like the statistical search for meaningful names and deaths that a certain sect claimed was the "secret" teaching of the bible, before proper statisticians pointed out that you could get very similar results from Moby Dick - correlation does not equal meaning (click here for this expose).

I found an odd quote from Nabakov, found in Wikipedia (of course) which goes someway to giving me a projected explanation for his writing Lolita:
"Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity."
(My italics)
I'm not sure what "splendid insincerity" means, but I feel it could describe the language and the art that has gone into portraying HH's obsession.

Nabakov's Lolita

I wanted to read some Nabakov after hearing two short stories of his read in New Yorker podcasts.  I have read Lolita many years ago, because, bizarrely it was on a shelf of books at the social work center that I worked at, but I rushed and skipped through it, and I don't remember much.
Immediately, in the first section there are coincidences  links to Marquez - of course they both deal in sexual transgressions, and I'm alert to similarities  picking them out for myself rather than there being any connection   Thus in my readers mind the fact that HH's first love, Annabel abruptly dies of typhus brings the love/ cholera image back.

There are very few similarities  otherwise - Nabakov's writing is just so exquisite, it has none of the baroque style of Marquez.  Externals are called in to being and then elided with the narrators internal state: 

"-But that mimosa grove – the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me..."

Nabokov, Vladimir (2012-07-27). Lolita (Kindle Locations 241-242). Penguin Classics. Kindle Edition. 

HH's biography injcludes snatches of his pastiche …
 Fräulein von Kulp
 may turn, her hand upon the door
; I will not follow her. Nor Fresca. Nor
 that Gull.

Nabokov, Vladimir (2012-07-27). Lolita (Kindle Locations 250-252). Penguin Classics. Kindle Edition. 
Nowadays any literary reference is at the mercy of Google, so with a bit of cut and paste I easily track down the reference to T.S. Eliot's Gerontian, and amazingly, because I thought Eliot was still in copyright - though this gutenberg collection doesn't have the Wasteland or the Four Quartets. Nabakov's Lolita is famously full of this kind of reference, so I'm obsessively googling stuff that i don't understand, or going on Kindle dictionary journeys from manque to mansard roof  a 4-side roof where the pitch steepens halfway down - some thing I cam across in  John Updike novel and forgot to look up, or did look up and promptly forgot again.

So let's see what I get for "Keats to Benjamin Bailey".  Well I get one of the real letters, with a first draft of the Human Seasons, and then, wonderfully, I get this:

On the Nabokovian Resonance of “The Proustian Theme in a Letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey”

Sam Slote

Trinity College Dublin

In this paper I examine the ramifications of doubling and repetition in Nabokov’s Lolita, with reference to Proustian notions of recollection, which are adumbrated in the novel at various occasions, such as Humbert’s claim to have written an academic paper titled “The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey.” I begin by tracing out the contours of what such an article might have been like and then I apply these points to a reading ofLolita.

And am I doing anything less self-referential? And, annoyingly I had to look up the meaning of "adumbrated " 

(1. To give a sketchy outline of. 2. To prefigure indistinctly; foreshadow.3. To disclose partially or guardedly.4. To overshadow; shadow or obscure.

Possibly the thing that caught Nabakov / HH's minds (see already I am confusing narrator and author) is the first line of the letter? "

When a poor devil is drowning, it is said he comes thrice to the surface, ere he makes his final sink  

There's plenty more in the latter that could be referenced, but I do have sense that maybe I should just read on, read on.

LiToC - the END (spoiler: don't if you really don't want to know how it ended)

Finally, the last twenty pages, which are quite moving and unsentimental, as Fermina and Florentino get it together on the river boat they are cruising on, finally turning round and flying the cholera flag so that they have the entire boat (plus crew) to themselves. The relationship is spiky enough, and the acceptance of how old and shriveled and wrinkled they are is not flinched away from.  So, yes , in the end Florentino (who despite his aggressive womanising, maintains that he saved himself a virgin for Fermina) gets his result, although he is saddened by the news that the schoolgirl he seduced has committed suicide. So there's enough moral ambivalence left for to go round for everybody.

What did I learn?  What did I gain? Will I read another Marquez?  Who knows.  I wouldn't buy another, and this one goes in the Oxfam pile.

LiToC Day 18

Only another 2o pages or so.  The love/cholera juxtaposition  the S/Z of the book is finely focused when Florentino calls on Fermina, but suffers a boiling gripe of the bowels such that he has to excuse himself, and shit himself in his carriage. His carriage man finishes off this delicate little passage with the observation, that that looked like cholera. Always a joy to be able to right "that that" in a sentence.  We're moseying down the main straight of the relationship now, and had I had the time, or perhaps the inclination, I would have finished the book off this morning.  And then what? Nabakov, it's got to be Nabakov.

LiToC Day 17

Florentino's obsession magnifies even after Fermina's decisive rejection on the the day of the old man's death (interestingly that's how I see him now - not as the urbane Dr. Urbino), and after her letter full of insults and rage. The epistolary wooing begins again, we're at a symmetrical point in their relationship  though the pages are full or references to age now - the widow who won't let Florentino see her naked now, the view of Florentino himself, the contrast with the young girl he has seduced who he keeps distant from.  The writing has a certain momentum now, it feels as if it is gathering itself for another great storm.

Again I'm tempted to rush the last pages - how long is it going to drag out? - but there aren't that many left, the writing is keeping my interest, so me and Marquez are jogging along to the denouement.

LiToC day 16

Urbino's affair - captures the illicit, fumbling hurrying excitement, again he's writing inflaming stuff for the times.  But the passage where Leoni Cassiani is described as waiting forever for the "the strong young man" who raped her is patently ridiculous fantasy.  What is he intending here? Is it satire or what. It's so baldly stated, so matter of fact, and yet it is part of the plot, the reasons why she does not succumb to Florentino's experienced seducers hand on her thigh.
Was it just to put one in the eye for the feminists of the time??

 I'm intrigued enough to type Leoni Cassiani into Google. Of course the first two results are fucking study guides, one of which introduces a 14 year old girl who Florentino seduces in his old age, who commits suicide when he rejects her.  Thanks very much for the spoiler, not that it matters that much - it's kind of on keeping with what i am investigating.  Interestingly the "study guides" don't mention the rape, in that long tradition of cribs and education that avoids anything it can't explain and sticks to the superficial stuff it can make comments about. Actually that's a bit unfair - later on one of the study guides asks students to discuss and think about "the problematic notion that a young woman, even a child, might enjoy being raped "  (my italics)

Here, in this the critical companion, the author,  Ruben Pelayo,  blathers on that LiToC "fares well under a feminist reading" - women in control of their sexuality, women bounding back from adversity , he says.

There is someone who takes offence, and says because of this , don't bother with this book on the beach - and I'm almost in agreement with her because the Marquez's passage is as crass as she describes it below::
http://www.featheredquill.com/reviews/romance/marquez.shtml

"At one time, Florentino considers pursuing his secretary, Leona Cassiani, and she him, but when she is raped on the beach by an unknown assailant who, we are told, provided her with the best sex she ever had, she no longer has any desire to bed Florentino Ariza. Instead, she walks the beach at night hoping her rapist will ravish her again. As a woman, I was insulted by this passage in the novel, a passage only a man could write. And I was shocked that Oprah Winfrey, a woman who has been so open about her own sexual abuse, could recommend a story in which a character felt this way.

Quill says: Don’t bother taking Love in the Time of Cholera to the seashore this summer; it’s one book you can leave on the shelf."

But, but, but, the review above is from the Romance section of "Feathered Quill" reviews who do say , I quote

 "Every reviewer is carefully selected based on their educational background, expertise, and dedication to reading a broad spectrum of genres. Our reviewers are consummate professionals who are committed to giving you, the consumer, an honest and all-inclusive appraisal, delivered in a timely fashion."

And they are a weird lot - well that's entirely wrong really, they aren't a weird lot, they're very homely and nice, and about 50% of them have a best companion dog / cat with a barfingly yukky name who helps them with their reading. Here's the link so you can see for yourself: http://www.featheredquill.com/aboutus.shtml

So where do i stand? Well I think Marquez's view of rape here is probably not intended to be taken literally, but there are no clues to support that really, it's just taking it on trust as so.  It seems a shame to reject the entire book, and the entire author's oeuvre because of one offensively worded piece.  It seems obvious that it will grate and offend anyone who has been raped, or knows someone who has.  It grates on my reading of the book. So I end up on the fucking fence, in an offended way.

I agree with this reader: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/339634766 .  there's lots of other similar responses, summed up as "Seriously?" , "Really?" "wtf is going on here?".

Of course there are clever academic twists on this theme: says Ruben Pelayo:

 "The best example of a triumphant woman and the antithesis of victim feminism is Leona Cassiani."

Because she isn't defined by the rape etc. etc.  And interestingly in a critique of the film of the book (The Hispanic Connection: Spanish and Spanish-American Literature in the Arts ...By Zenia Sacks Da Silva)  it is said that Leona says something that suggest some complicity in the rape.  As if that made it better, ffs.

So in the end I'm just left with my own response which is, loosely expressed, " Fuck you, Marquez, I don't know what you meant by it - whether you're some sad old misogynist or somehow your "art" lets you get away with it. I don't take it literally, I just don't understand it."

LiToC Day15

The story of Urbino & Fermina's marriage begins get fuller, and I begin to like them, and the book more.  We've got these stages:

• Courtship 
• Honeymoon
• Return from Paris, unhappy years living at the Urbino family home with his sharp tongued, repectable mother
• Another sojourn in Europe, where they become in love again
• The return from Europe on the matriarch's death, and a period of greater happiness.

It summed up on p224, saying that after 30 years they were like a "single divided being" The a nice passage about overcoming the "conjugal conspiracy" - rising above the petty hates and feuds that can arise when two people just share their lives in a marriage together without thought or depth, when they "loved each other best without hurry or excess".

It's a great paragraph setting out what a marriage could be, what it should be, and I like it for that, but somehow it lacks warmth, emotion, depth of feeling. It feels almost sentimental in this context.  I find it hard to see and picture either of them as actual people, they appear in the text as social shells, with inner lives for sure, but nothing I really connect with.

I've just got to the affair that Fermina scents (literally - she smells Miss Lynch's health on his clothes). It's another piece of repressed sensuality, as he palpates Miss :Lynch's full beauttiful body. But I've found that I am speeding over text and language that I should be reading more slowly. Partly it is because I need to go out and get some fresh air, common or garden ordinary reasons to stop reading, partly it is because, again it overflows with ripeness and eroticism that isn't, well, that erotic, it's too controlled maybe?  I haven't finished this passage - maybe it will become more compelling.

LiToC Day 14

Day 14 - so two weeks to read this book already and only on page 211.  The story now alternates between picaresque adventures with  Florento's widows and Fermina's unpicaresque non-adventures with Urbino.  We learn that Fermina pitied Florentino, that she didn't get on with her stiff in-laws, that she didn't get on with her husband after their honeymoon. I'm adrift in this narrative, going from small island to small island, a tiny tussock of words bunched in the thin earth like half-dead sea grass. Or something like that. I'm reading slowly, because I've decided not to speed read through to the end but to give the book proper attention. But I don't care about the characters, and I don't care for the baroque descriptions and vignettes of social life that keep the island hopping story going. 
As Fermina, the author tells us, realises, the world is composed of:

 "...atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words with which people entertained each other in society so as not to commit murder"

Quite. 

LiToC Day 13

one after the other the set pieces roll by.  Urbino meets Florentino, as a cyclone passes by and wrecks half the town (the latter  mentioned in passing in one sentence). Florentino has a realisation of the heart that they share the same obsession. I could go on, listing the events, more sparsely of course than Marquez does.  The weird winning of the Golden Orchid poetry prize by Chinese person, immigrants to the Caribbean looked down upon as all newest immigrants are, by everybody else.  Fermina gives the prize, reads the sonnet  So what, so what. Then the bizarre.  Florentino's new relationship with the woman who has to suck on a babies dummy to come. There's humour in the cat who scratches and bites at them as they topple on it in their first feverish bout of attempted sex - but I missed it entirely  in terms of any humour that is. I just thought back as I wrote this, and thought, well that's supposed to be funny isn't it?  Can't even crack a smile now.

This is the point at which I would usually give up on such a book - maybe speed read it to the end to see if it improves, but since I'm writing a blog about it I would like to finish that more than the book.  Somehow they both have to go to completion, and then I can get on to reading some Nabakov.

The there is the spell checker.  Google tells me that American english is all I've got :
American English:

Google Chrome is displayed in this language

This language is used for spell checking

English English, however:

Google Chrome cannot be displayed in this language

This language cannot be used for spell checking

Great. I can realize but I can't realise.

LiToc Day 12

Florentino continues to binge on unrequited love, while also seeking out other women whenever he can, able only to write love letters, still pouring his essence into declarations on behalf of others.  It's a strange kind of proxy life, slightly irritating to read. His meeting with Ausencia Santander recalls the earlier encounter with Rosalba, but this is a longer sensuality, that picks up again another portrayal of what he sees as the ferocious sexuality of women ( which is there in Fermina as well, despite her reserve). So where's it all heading? The writing's good enough to keep on ploughing through a text that just keeps my interest piqued.  Maybe I'm in the wrong mood or place for this kind of book. I think one of the problems is distance - I feel that I'm looking at this story in all its exotic picaresque glory though a telescope, enough to focus on the paragraph I'm reading but without getting any sense of a wider perspective. Put another way, I'm handling the beads of a rosary one by one, without much meaning attaching to the process, I'm just plodding on from page to page. Going up a long set of steps hoping that there's going to be something at the top. Page 182 now, my reading is slowing down.

LiToC day 11

Not much read today, but what little there was significant. Dr. Urbino's serious, and in a lot of ways admirable care, then seduction of his wife, not until three days after their actual marriage (her sea sickness intervened), is detailed in obliquely erotic language.  It's not porn it's fucking literature, I think - but then back  in the time, 1985, remember that nigh on thirty years ago, porn was still limited to top shelf magazines and VHS videos bought from the Friday-Ad, or seedy licenced sex shops. It wasn't mainstream, accepted, part of everyday life, so this was, even for this fairly recent time, thirty years ago, perhaps more explicit, especially in a Spanish culture fucked by Catholicism.  So, for its day it is a master piece of dissembled explicitness.  So it was mildly erotic to read, and of course, in literary terms in the novel it contrasts with the wild abandon of Florentino in his fling with Widow Nazeret, who feels like some kind of character from a sleazy Italian opera. (Why Italian, I don't know, it just sprang to mind).

So I'm  in a state of mild interest in what happens next, and mild discontent, because I might have to read through more sentences of padding , like the Captain of the boats woodwind concert as they sailed into the port of Caracoli.  It just feels like a tourist guide book insert. 

I'm sort of disenchanted with the book now, though it has great insights into the parallels between love and cholera ( I say blithely - what are they then?).  Well incontinence and a low recovery rate I suppose. I feel I am being literatured at, in a way that I don't feel when I read Dostoyevsky, who just tells the fucking story and makes his characters do the lecturing.

Reading LiToC day 10

I think I read a small snatch yesterday, seduced away from it by a book parallel translation spanish short stories, to the pictures to see Lincoln, made marmalade, studied Spanish, programmed, wrote, did STUFF all day. I'm at p146 of the Penguin edition, where Florentino's obsessional love turns to jealousy rather than just unrequited passion. So nearly half way through, and yes I want to know , at a very basic level, what happens next, I am enjoying the density of the writing now, but more than anything I like the consistent compression (e.g Fermina's chamber pot desires  mentioned earlier) and juxtaposition of images, love/cholera, sewage/ exotic surroundings. 

LiToC Day 9

I didn't read that much yesterday - I'm still enjoying the book I think, and I think I'd like to take apart what it means when we enjoy a book - must cover a multitude of sins from the luke-warm sudsy bath of whatever I read that gets near to Mills & Boon to the this is good, so it must be good to read, but I'm not sure I want to read it now.  I got to the latter end of the continuum with LiToC last night.  I wanted to read it, but also had a resistance to it, I wanted something more soapy and easy on the reading skin, this one is a bit, not abrasive, but faintly difficult to the touch, like you are running your hand over a  plank of wood and can feel the roughness, wary of a splinter that will surely rise up when you least expect it, or dusty rougher portions that don't feel nice to the touch.

Images from yesterday - the three bodies floating down the stream, one of them a girl, and their contamination of Armino's infatuation with Fremina.  And then of course, amidst the confining on the boat, the image of him  being grabbed and rode to orgasm in a dark sweaty cabin, before being ejected without identifying who it was he fucked - or who fucked him more to the point.  A good image for the solace of sexual release - "Sex without love may be an empty pleasure, but as empty pleasures go..." - Woody Allen (Love & Death).

An aside. That's weird - the Google blogger spellchecker has "fucked" in its dictionary, but not "luke" as in luke warm.  Why?? What happened to "luke". Beginning to suspect a bit of early onset here - maybe I'm wrong and it is spelt completely differently - nah, Word knows all about "luke". 
So he gets there - this long journey up the river and decides to return immediately.  It's like watching one of those TV series where you just know the character is going to do the wrong thing anyway and fuck it all up again, so an air of inevitability here.