A book to read, reread, and read once again

John Keats, born and raised in London, died almost exactly 200 years ago on February 23, 1821; he was twenty-five years old and tuberculosis killed him. He was the son of a London stable-keeper, left school at fifteen to train as an apothecary, and earned his license at age twenty-one. This allowed him to work as a pharmacist, physician, and surgeon, all of which he gave up to write some of the most celebrated poetry in the English language.

Anahid Nersessian was born and raised in New York City. She attended Yale University as an undergraduate and got her Ph.D in English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. After spending three years at Columbia University, she moved to Los Angeles, where she currently teaches in the English Department at UCLA on the unceded territory of the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples. She has published widely in scholarly journals as well as in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Public Books. She also founded and co-edits the Thinking Literature series at the University of Chicago Press. She is the author of The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life, Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment, and Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse.

She warns readers in the first sentence of Keats’s Odes that “If you’ve never read anything on Keats’s odes before, this book should not be your first stop. It is a collection of essays based on intimate, often idiosyncratic responses to the poems. In fact it is probably better to call them meditations instead of essays.”

I had never read anything on Keats’s odes before, so rather than begin with Nersessian’s thin, exquisite offering, I read Aileen Ward’s John Keats: The Making of the Poet, a sturdy biography that Nersessian calls her favorite. But while a biography can give you facts—Keats was short; his father died when he was eight; his mother remarried almost immediately then disappeared; he couldn’t read Greek; he was in love with a girl named Fanny Brawne; he died in Rome—it cannot explain the origin of or justify the power of the poetry. He astonished his friends with one of his first poems, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, with lines like:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken; 

Roughly speaking, says Nersessian, odes are “meant to celebrate something or someone, but because they are written from a place of emotional excess or ferment it’s easy for them to tip over into more private preoccupations.” In 1819, Keats wrote six poems that came to be known as the Great Odes: Ode to a Nightingale; Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Indolence, Ode on Melancholy, Ode to Psyche, and To Autumn.Because I came to Keats’s odes as a poetry lover but having never read them, I cannot, and will not comment on the quality, insights, or depth of Nersessian’s meditations. Rather I tried to hang on as she takes the reader on a personal and scholarly journey through the poems. In addition to the meditations on the poems, her book includes a useful introduction to Keats and his poetry, a useful bibliography at the end of each meditation, an index, and more. 

Which means that readers have not only Nersessian’s exceptionally interesting insights into the odes and personal experiences associated with them, they also have lists of related material (and why it relates to the poems) everything from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Helen Vendler’s The Odes of John Keats, to Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.

In an interview about the book, Nersessian says that “One of the most impressive things about Keats is that his poetry got so good so fast. He started writing when he was about nineteen, and a lot of his early stuff is pretty terrible. When he died six years later, he had written not one, not two, but a solid handful of the most famous poems in the English language, with lines—'A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ or ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that millions of people have heard somewhere even if they’ve never read them. The explanation, besides raw talent, is that he worked extremely hard at being a poet. As if he knew his days were limited, he wrote all the time, from short little songs to four-thousand-line epics, and he was always upping the ante, trying to make each poem better than the last one and being careful never to repeat himself or fall into old habits. Of course, if he had lived longer, his poetry could have gotten really bad again. Maybe he only had ten or so great poems in him—which is a lot more than most people.”

Keats’s Odes goes a long way to explain why the six are called the Great Odes and why they are still worth reading and discussing. And even if you have never read the Ode on Indolence or the Ode to Psyche, you will be rewarded by Nersessian’s considered thoughts about them. (I.e., Indolence “is a caricature of detachment, a super-satirical striptease. It tries—not very hard—to contemplate the curious in-between of desire and skepticism, a somewhat disreputable zone that will be more familiar to some of us than others.”) 

A book to keep, to think about, to reread, to use as a guide to an even deeper appreciation of the poems, and to read once again.

You can't leave Tokyo on a slow boat to China

I'm not sure what to make of Hideo Furukawa's short novel Slow Boat. In the last chapter (titled "Liner Notes: Writing about What I'm Writing About") the author says, "This book demands an explanation." The chapter titles are all taken from stories by Haruki Murakami. 

In fact the Japanese title of the book is 中国行きのスローボトRMX or Slow Boat to China Remix. You can find Murakami’s story translated by Alfred Birnbaum in The Elephant Vanishes (1993). In it, the first-person narrator remembers the few Chinese people he has a met: a proctor at a Chinese school where he once took an exam, a female Chinese co-worker he might have had a relationship with but managed to carelessly lose, and a Chinese acquaintance from high school with whom he briefly reconnects. It is a story of memory, missed opportunities or lost connections, and a sense of living the wrong life and aching for another.

The publisher’s bio says that Furukawa was born in 1966 in Fukushima, “and is highly regarded for the richness of his storytelling and his willingness to experiment; he changes his style with every new book. His best-known novel is the 2008 Holy Family, an epic work of alternate history set in northeastern Japan. He has received the Mystery Writers of Japan Award, the Japan SF Grand Prize and the Yukio Mishima award.”

The narrator of Slow Boat states in the book’s first sentence, “I’ve never made it out of Tokyo.” The rest of the book is a chronicle of his three failures to leave Tokyo, seasoned with interesting asides. For example on the first page, “The Japanese language is nothing but lies. Or maybe just chaos.” 

But if the language is nothing but lies (and let’s not be distracted by the fact we’re reading this in English), what is he telling us? Why are we reading him? He’s writing in Japanese because, “It’s the best language I have for writing down my experiences (or the contents of my brain).” That said, he tells us it’s 9:20 in the morning in December and he’s in Hamarikyu, a park where the Sumida River meets Tokyo Bay.

As a fifth-grade student in 1985 he would not leave his bed and was sent to an “alternative school for dropouts” in the mountains, which “kind of felt like summer camp,” but was still in Tokyo. A new student arrives. She’s “not a freak or anything, but stuffed into her tight little bra are the finest, fullest-formed sixth-grade boobs in the Greater Metropolitan Area.” They become friends, but at the end of the summer, he loses her.

When he is nineteen, he begins having sex with a girl who points out that her left areola is “a flawless map of Hokkaido.” Her right areola seems to be the map of another island, and when she identifies it and takes off for it, she leaves the narrator literally stuck in Tokyo. 

He starts a café (Murakami ran a coffee house and jazz bar) and when his chef is unable to work, the guy’s younger sister, a high school girl, fills his place. She is a genius with s knife. “When everyone else my age was holding a milk bottle, I was gripping my boning knife.” Her dream had been to join the family business, but one day her father told her “I know what you’re thinking—but forget it. This business is no place for girls. Believe me, you’ll never make it.” 

She does, in fact make it in the narrator’s café and they become successful associates and all goes well until the shop is smashed. The Suginami police “concluded that a large amount of ice broke loose from the undercarriage of an American fighter jet and fell out of the sky,” destroying the café, which the narrator’s insurance will not cover.

Because Slow Boat is a remix of Haruki Murakami’s structure and themes, the book feels more like an artifact than a story, a work artificially created rather than one that grows out of engagement with the world. It is difficult to suspend disbelief willingly and thereby be engaged knowing from the get go that these characters, these situations are inventions and the author doesn’t expect the reader to believe they are genuine felt experience.

What I do admire immensely about the book is David Boyd’s translation. He manages to maintain the narrator’s voice throughout, and it cannot have been easy. He also had to deal with dialogue and come up with an exchange like this:

“Listen to me, you little shit . . .” He’s looking me right in the eye. “I’m not some grunt making fast food by the fucking manual. Got it?”

“Ye—yeah, I got it . . .”

“Here. Try this, asshole.”

I would like to see the original Japanese if only to broaden my knowledge of the language and the translator’s art, but it does not seem to be available as a standalone book.

If your taste runs to the improbable (an areola in the shape of Hokkaido?) and the artificial, you will probably enjoy Slow Boat. And even if you do enjoy the improbable, I think Murakami does it better.

Positano and a meeting in it is enchanting

This is how Erica,  one of the two main characters in Goliarda Sapienza's novel Meeting in Positano, describes the town:

"Positano can cure you of anything. It opens your eyes to your past suffering and illuminates your present ones, often saving you from making further mistakes. It's strange, but sometimes I get the impression that this cove protected by the bastion of mountains at its back forces you to look at yourself square in the face, like a 'mirror of truth,' while this great sea, usually so calm and clear, similarly inspires self-reflection. That's why for decades now couples have arrived here thinking they're happy, only to break up after a few weeks—they'd been living a lie—or, on the other hand, why perpetually lonely people end up finding a companion here. . . ."

Positano is a town on the Amalfi coast south of Naples. It has existed since Roman times, was an important port during the Amalfi Republic (7th Century-1075), flourished during the middle ages, fell on hard times and was a relatively poor fishing village in the first half of the 20th Century, and began to attract a large number of tourists in the 1950s.

Meeting in Positano is set in the early 1950s and is narrated by a Goliarda who works in the movie business and who has come to Positano to scout locations. She meets Erica Beneventano, a lovely, wealthy widow who lives in a spectacular house and who is called "The Princess" by the positanesi. They become intimate friends, although not erotically intimate, and Erica shares her life story with Goliarda.

She was the middle of three sisters from a wealthy family. When her father loses everything in the 1930s, Erica and her sisters Olivia and Fiore have to go to work.  Erica finds a job in a Milan department store. "Since I was pleasant to look at and know how to pronounce the names of French perfumes, they put me in the cosmetics department." 

Her life unspools. She marries her father's ex-business associate Leopoldo who turns out to be a controlling Italian man. When Erica asks to take part in his affairs the way she had done before the marriage, "he said—not impolitely, but with a tone I had never heard before, decisive and cold like a steel blade: 'It's unseemly for a man to have his wife always in his hair.'" When Erica becomes pregnant, Leopoldo insists she have a Swiss abortion, which goes wrong enough she cannot have more children.

One more example of this family's dynamics. After Erica's father dies and the situation of the girls and their mother is grim, Erica thinks to turn to her uncle Alessandro, her father's brother who has been estranged from the family. A servant reports, "Alessandro was the only one of your relatives who wrote to me offering to help you all. I referred the message to your mother, but she just scolded me: 'Don't you see? That one has only popped up now to steal his brother's daughters. Don't you see that to him, it would represent the ultimate victory over his hated brother?'" 

Because the narrator and the author share the same name, are both in the movie business, and share the same interests, Meeting in Positano could almost be a memoir. The back of the book includes pictures of Positano, a useful afterward by Sapienza's husband, and a chronology of her life. She was born in Catania, Sicily, in 1924, moved to Rome in 1940 where she studied at the Regia Accademia d'Arte Drammatica. In the late 50s she worked with filmmaker Luichino Visconti (a relationship that the novel includes). She began writing in 1963. She finished Appuntamento a Postano in 1984, died in 1986, and the novel remained unpublished until 2015.

Brian Robert Moore's translation is smooth and natural. Here’s a description of a Positano baker/café owner: “I could never describe Giacomino’s voice—a sinuous wisp of smoke mixed with the whiteness of his jasmine flowers and the aroma of orange blossoms at sunset? A sound never heard before, incorporeal but precise. Perhaps it’s nothing more than the timbre that the angels must have had before the advent of the Christian era, in the time of Odysseus, and maybe even before . . . .

Goliarda Sapienza was enchanted by Positano and by whoever Erica Beneventano was in reality. A mark of Sapienza's craft is that she convinces that Erica is no more invented than is Positano. And because Sapienza was enchanted and because she writes so well, we are also captivated.

The premise is fascinating; the execution frustrating

Susan Hill uses an interesting premise in her 2012 mystery A Question of Identity. What if a murderer is caught, tried, and found "not guilty," given a new profession and identity, lives quietly for ten years, and then, driven by some unfathomable urge, begins killing again? Because he now has the experience of strangling three elderly women, he knows how to do it without leaving any clues. 

The killer has a distinctive MO. His victims are all elderly women who live alone. They are all strangled with flex wire, 21 or 49 micro woven stainless steel wires, supple enough it can be knotted. They are all posed seated in front of a vanity mirror. They have all had their toenails clipped. Otherwise, nothing links them. 

Hill, novelist, children's writer, and playwright was born in Scarborough, England, in 1942. She was educated at Scarborough Convent School and at grammar school in Coventry, before reading English at King's College, London, graduating in 1963 and becoming a Fellow in 1978. She published her first novel, The Enclosure, in 1961 when she was still a student. She worked as a freelance journalist between 1963 and 1968, publishing her third novel in 1968. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1972 and was a presenter of BBC Radio 4's "Bookshelf" from 1986 to 1987. In 1996 she started her own publishing company, Long Barn Books, editing and publishing a quarterly literary journal, Books and Company, in 1998. Since then she has written many other novels including The Woman in Black, a Victorian ghost story, that was successfully adapted for stage and television. Her recent novels include the Simon Serrailler crime novels; A Question of Identity (2012) is one of them.

Once again, the book raises the question of how realistic, how plausible should a novel—any novel—be? I think a novel can be plausible without out being realistic. I suspect there are plenty of fantasy and science fiction novels that are not realistic while remaining plausible (the quality of "seeming reasonable or probable"). If the author creates a convincing world—Middle Earth, Narnia, Oz, Wonderland—and does not violate the assumptions of that world, readers willingly suspend disbelief and engage with the characters.

My problem with A Question of Identity is that, for me, it is neither realistic nor fantasy. It is a police procedural filled out with a number of subplots involving almost a dozen characters, all of which are interesting, plausible, and realistic but which have virtually nothing to do with the crimes and their solution.

In contrast, the murderer is—again for me—neither interesting, plausible, nor realistic. Although Hill gives us his extensive italicized thoughts, we cannot even infer his motivation(s). Why elderly ladies? Why pose them? Why trim their toe nails? How is he able to live quietly for ten years? How does he get a personality transplant together with a new name, a new history, colored contact lenses, a new trade? He terrorized his first wife; no indication he abused his second. What triggered another round of slaughter? The answer that he's just a crazy person isn't good enough for a novel.

Also, would the agency of the British government that gave the murderer a new identity not help the local police when it comes to the staff's attention that their guy has begun killing again? Like tell the local cops the guy's new name so they can pick him up before he kills more? Not in this book. You might be able to get away without answering these questions in a true crime account, but fiction readers want, need more. 

I closed A Question of Identity annoyed. I thought the premise fascinating, the execution frustrating.