To start the new year, I'm recommending two books I enjoyed in the final days of the last one. The first, "Piranesi" by Susanna Clarke is simply the best fiction I've read since -- I can't remember. You may recognize her name if you read her earlier book, "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell."
I am partial to a little 'speculative fiction' along with my literary fiction, but Clarke's imaginative reach extends beyond any notion of genre. Her novel's nameless narrator -- "I believe I am between thirty and thirty-five years," he/she says -- is in the dark about everything. Piranesi's words betray him as the victim of abuse who thinks his master is the friend.
His situation exemplifies the skeptical philosophical trope that asks, “How do we know what we think we know?” If we were born alone, a stranger in a strange land, how would we know whether anything is ‘true’? or, real? The novel’s narrator is in this predicament.
And then this book treats us to the always rich hypothetical, unprovable (one way or another) but possible existence of other worlds. A speculative proposition, but hard, I would say impossible, to disprove by logic and reason alone.
Clarke's story begins with a human being alive in what to us is clearly an ‘other world,’ To the reader –
but not to him – his world
possesses a lot of resemblance to ours. And, oddly, he does not question this remarkable lack of knowledge about his own origins. Finally, his world include visits
by another human, whom he simply calls ‘the other.’ The other's brief, though regularly scheduled visits are accepted by Piranesi as a cardinal fact, along
with the tides, the weather, the seagulls, and the seemingly endless rooms of his otherwise solitary world filled with statues depicting human and animal forms.
From
this beginning, the novel opens its fan of complexities, including, of course,
the existence and agencies of our ‘real’ world. Very little is predictable in
this place. Every revelation is a stunner, helping to build a complex web of illusion over the haunting beauty of his world's material reality.
To
me, Clarke's new book is speculative fiction at its best.
The second book, "Borges and Me" by Jay Parini, is a less reliable pleasure. Here I think you could skim (or even skip) the first 50 pages. The memoir is the story of a young guy in the Vietnam era seeking to evade the draft, while writing an academic thesis and becoming a poet -- familiar ground, especially for my generation.
But when the author gets himself to Scotland the book gains some traction, and when Argentine storyteller, poet and master of all literature Jorge Luis Borges turns up in Scotland -- we're being told this unlikely visit actually happened -- the book takes off. Borges who is of course blind is both an oracle and a pain in the ass...
The author may have kept some good notes from that time, but even if he did I suspect he is "re-inventing" the shape of actual conversations prompted by the sites of their shared journey through the Scottish Highlands. I cannot imagine a memoir of events taking place a half century ago being written without relying on the technique of literary recreation. The encounters between the blind master for whom "the world is a library" and -- to take one example, the Loch Ness monster is Grendel, the embodiment of savagery in the Anglo-Saxon horror story "Beowulf" -- and the unself-confident American draft dodger grow in depth. They become two wanderers thrown together in unknown country, bumping against the limitations of their own visions.
By the end, the reader finds himself himself rooting for everyone, even though the issue of those ominous letters from the local draft bureau back home is left unresolved.
Still I liked his story, and identified with much of it.
I can't say that I -- or anyone has ever in actuality experienced Piranesi's challenges. But anyone who dreams can imagine them.
No comments:
Post a Comment