Exit Ghost - Day 4, Day 5; Dirty Havana Trilogy Day 1

I'm struggling to find a voice that's appropriate to talk about Exit Ghost.  Finished reading it this morning courtesy of a snow-stopped day and lie in (everything stops around here when it snows). I want to read the rest of the Zuckerman novels for sure.  Come to that I want to read all the rest of Philip Roth.  There's some great railing against biographers of writers.  I agree with him. I read Clare Tomalin's biography of Thomas Hardy and, although I wanted to know more about Hardy, it really irritated me the way she dug and insinuated with her scabby dry biographer mole claws, trying to dig out the dirt and the sex in Hardy's life.  Not that I wasn't interested, but it was the way she shaped her dusty little researches into a sexy little mound, that might be true, might not be, all surmise and selling.

Biographies of politicians, of generals, of scientists yes - but of writers - well I guess I've read them, yes and still will.  But not the ones that are bending over backwards to get "an angle", that'll increase the £ and the $, and titillate as much as inform.

On to the next book, that I bought by accident thinking it was an author that had been read in the New Yorker Magazine - the Dirty Havana Trilogy - by Pedro Juan Gutierrez. No need to dig about in this author's biography for the sex and the dirt, it's all there in the fiction. There's a skeletal biography of him in Wikipedia, but his own website is great. It's a shame my Spanish isn't up to reading him in the original language. But it will be. Eventually.

Exit Ghost - Day 3

"But isn't one's pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen? Not for some. For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most."

The impressive paragraph that , being  constitutionally lazy, I typed the first five words of into Google hoping to find it already to cut and paste into my blog. (somehow typing all out wasn't an option, though it is a para I would have happily copied out in longhand in my moleskine notebook  if I'd been somewhere warm and sunny like Crete, away from the distractions of computers and the internet). Of course I turn up a whole page of reading blogs and reviews of Exit ghost who have all seized on this paragraph  Going to have to have a look to see if they're saying the same things as me.  Which they probably are, although I can't find many comments from the actual bloggers / tumblrs in the first page of reference.  

Well I have found one, and satisfyingly it's abit bollocks, in that that (that lovely construction again, with a third that only separated from the first two by a bracket) reading doesn't appear to me to be right. Here it is: 

"What Roth seems to be offering here is a defense of the whole Zuckerman project. If the way one conducts one's life is sometimes no more real than fiction, as Maria discovered in The Counterlife, then why shouldn't the "unlived" life be equally as real? And so Zuckerman himself, the "ghost writer" of Roth's fiction, becomes more real to the reader than his creator. The writer need not choose between life and art; he can live just as fully--if not more so- - through his creations."

(quoted from Permananet Groping - a long, and I mean long, review cum essay on the book)

You see I like the original quotation from the book because it says to me how - well no, I'm probably about to say the same thing, and I can't be arsed enough to change ti round enough to make it snottily different. It's not a bad quote about a quote after all. It's just a bit too laden dwon with reference to the "whole Zuckerman project". Whereas I think Roth is writing about the exquisite satisfaction and pain of creating a perfectly imperfect but deeply felt fantasy of what might have happened, what could happen, but never did or does. If that makes sense. It's like dreaming about your anima, wonderfully enveloping and fulfilling in the dream, a sweet memory when you wake, gradually fading as the everyday business of the day occludes your warm fuzzy happiness. You see I take at face value - probably shouldn't.

Exit Ghost - Day 2, The Riches

I'm reading Philip Roth at a pace because he is so good to read, but at the same time not too fast( as before in another post. I think, I moderate my reading speed in order to pay attention). I'm also reading other stuff, and writing too, and thinking, so this blog could indefinitely branch off into that avenue or this. I like cutting and pasting bits of my own work, randomly - well not that randomly - new stuff that I am writing - into the blog.  What I'm watching too. The Riches deserves oscars or emmies or something like that , or Eddie Izzard does certainly, just for inventing the word "buffer" - what grifters call the rest of us in our settled homes and jobs. Uneven plot but great writing in this series. Fantastic names - the "Riches" alerts us to the fact there will be great puns throughout, and they make their new home in "Eden Falls". 

One sleepless night, when Wayne/Doug is woken by the running teacher, and groans out to him "I'm a fraud", the teacher (good guy) says, "We're all frauds. This is Eden Falls", or something like that. The American dream has never seemed more unattractive. Or the grifter life come to that. You can see that people live in what they are used to, and don''t get along with what they're not. 

There's a universal truth for you. Give someone complete freedom, to do whatever they like, and it's like you set them down on a limitless plain, the horizons so big and faraway and full of distant promise, they just spin on the spot. Confine someone, however, to one of those narrow trails, up the side of the hill, working your way up or just traversing, but ever with an eye to the drop down below, and the mind is concentrated  you know what you've got to do.  You may moan and cry, but you make sure you put one damn foot after another on the path because diverting to the one side is the drop, to the other a climb up a steep, treacherous  loose shingle. At least the path's marked out, at least there are footprints to follow, at least you know other people have gone before you.  At least you know there is a destination?

Exit Ghost Day 1, Baba Yaga Starta

Philip Roth writes so clearly and, one of those words that I've never really understood in the context of writing, economically.  Economically rather than sparing which sounds a bit leaner and more desolate. Economically because he crams a lot into a few pages, just like, but not like, filling up a supermarket trolley to the brim for under £100, or driving so well that you make  a five hundred miles in a car on one tank of petrol. You can see that I take the unclearly understood metaphor fairly literally. His story of the Larry Hollis is compacted, without feeling crammed, into a few short pages, seamlessly woven into the main story. No, what am I saying, "seamlessly woven", what does that mean? I should say stitched in as neatly as a talented seamstress would sew something, something not really part of the original dress but something that accentuates and makes it look better than it did already. 

If this book were a TV makeover, Larry Hollis and his family would be the great accessory that makes the whole outfit work. It might be a cheap accessory, which wouldn't help the economic metaphor, or it might cost twice the price of the main item, but the main thing is that it works.


Baba Yaga first draft extract

Baba Yaga

You’ve sure heard told about the Yaga strip and the weirdnessess that came out of that old song and dance.  Classic frighten the children tales, but there’ substance behind all that menace. The NewGen that was meant o feed us all did, but there were some who took it down dark paths and then some. That’s always the way – it’s not the NewGen it’s the people who uses it, and they ain’t going to go away never. I don’t know where they come from –m well I do – you can see them brewing and in the making in the poor man cells and behind the rich man gates where love and affection are stifled and not valued for their own.  There’ s always new creation of the good and the bad just like the fizz of quantum particles in space o the animacula that they used o think sprang out of the mud. Good and bad and indifferent, though those that’s indifferent surely lean towards the badness unless they gets  a steer. And yes that’s what my story is about, because even in the bad parts of the strip there was goodness that came out of it, if only by the skin of her teeth.