My American heroes Part Two
Jun. 25th, 2009 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chaniPart One about Daniel Mendelsohn
My second American hero is a genius whom it's difficult not to admire. I've been marathon-reading Richard Powers' s work for about a year now, starting with the widely and rightly acclaimed The Time Of Our Singing –I reread it after Obama won the American elections, which added to the emotions the story and the characters convey, and I've failed to post about it since then but I will some day because it deserves a post of its own–going on last Autumn with the wonderful The Eko Maker that convinced me that Richard Powers was one of a kind, and perhaps the best American writer alive. So I've decided to explore Powers' s bibliography before.
Galatea 2.2 destabilized me first because of its pseudo-autobiography side but eventually amazed me. Plowing The Dark was everything but an easy read. To say the truth, the novel didn't really catch my interest until p 238 (about halfway), despite some killer pieces that thrilled me here and there like little rewards to enjoy on the way.
The novel followed a double thread, like often with this author: At the turn of the tide – the late 80's and early 90's – as History may end, the world is on the verge of being changed, new fights begin and ancient wars remain.in the western Puget Sound, the Cavern–-a room that can become anything, is built by Virtual Reality researchers and disillusioned artists converted to the wonders of computer science; meanwhile in Beirut, an English teacher is held hostage. Two narrative threads that mirror one another until the distance vanishes and they merge in pure poetry.
At first the two plots although they had obvious connections seemed too different; above all, the Virtual Reality plot and its rather virtual-feeling characters didn't captivate me much, while holding me captive, the language barrier feeling even higher than usual. The hostage plot with its short chapters was a breeze of fresh air everytime it was its turn to move the story forward. I realised later that Powers must have done it on purpose. Taimur's tragic story in Lebanon gave him flesh while Adie and her workmates' journey in Seattle did feel wordy, data-filled and, at the end of the day, flat and cold...until it shifted. Also page 238 the Berlin Wall fell and broke my own defences against the Cavern characters as every Vi R worker provided their take on the event. From then on the magic worked and I understood the architecture of the novel better; I could make out connections and layers beneath layers; somehow I had broken through the wall. The book itself is like the Cavern that can create numerous universe, shelter infinite false-distances and contain world-wide places, actually it is like the Doctor's tardis: bigger in the inside!
As usual, Powers turns everything into meta, sometimes revealing it sometimes concealing it. Because of course there's much more in that book than an exploration of Virtual Reality provided by either high-technology and computing or imprisonment. Both plots tell us about Art and its purpose, about solitude, about modern disconnection, about love, about the sheer joy of reading, and the double-storyline provides a perfect looking-glass. It is also a way to revisit the old Plato's allegory reminding us that we often are still sitting in a cave watching shadows on a wall. At some point the novel becomes a retelling of the Arabian Nights, Taimur turning himself into his own private Shaharazade. And as everyhting merges, the story becomes about telling a story, about literature itself.
There's a key moment when Taimur Martin remembers a story his Persian mother used to tell his brother and him. I could quote much more from that fascinating novel but I think this one is relevant and I wanted to quote it today as events in Iran are a weight on everybody's mind. In Plowing the Dark it's a pure mise en abîme of the book, of both Adie's and Taimur's:
"She tells you her favorite again, the story she always had to give you from memory, out of her best Farsi children's book, lost in the violence of repeated exiles. She improvises, embroiders by word of mouth, adeeper archaelogy, the far-off lands even more suggestive in their state of ruins.
There was and there was not a great nature painter who painted a landscape so perfect it destroyed him. Each person who looked at the scene saw somehting different. But all saw envy, and all wanted what they saw. And those who wanted the painting most decided to kill the maker and steal the thing he made.
Each time she tells you, the story ends differently. Some trick of memory, either yours or hers. In one, the man's painted creatures warn him of the danger and foil the plot. In another, the painter's murder returns the beautiful landscape to overgrown weeds. In the ending that two small, stunned boys loved most, the painter evades his killers, who arrive at his house only to find the abandoned painting, now with a figure running through its farthest, faintest hills."
Now I'm reading a fifth novel of his. I've found the spring of his career, reached the spot where everything began, Richard Powers's literary debut: Three Farmers On Their Way to A Dance. I started reading it on Tuesday morning as I was invigilating a 4 hour Mathematics test. The writer I've come to love is already there: fantastic and creative story-teller; clever thinker and astute thought-provoker; novelist and multi-talented man with a background on Physics and an appetite for all things literature and music and science and language; gifted writer whose elegant and musical style makes you want to read out loud. It's a shame that such a brilliant novellist isn't more known over the world, especially over here in France. Perhaps he hasn't found a good translator yet. Anyway I can't imagine reading Richard Powers's novels in another language but his now.
I will review it when I'm done but so far I'm intrigued by Three Farmers On Their Way to A Dance. Everything starts with an old photograph showing three innocent young men on their way to a dance in 1914...
To end this already too long post here's a quote from the second chapter:
"In five seconds, the music–whether it is Bavarian Beer Hall or Viennese Woods–travels 5645 feet, the little over a mile that the three boys are from the site of May Fair.
Five seconds at eighty five quarter notes a minute means the waltz they hear is already two measures in the past. The few notes that do make it this far are long over by the time they make themselves known. Modulation replaces modulation; in two measures' time the song the boys hear is no longer the song being made. The boys have only outdated music with which to create a belated present.
The stars on a clear winter's night have perhaps novaed a thousand years back, but persist as an undeniable current event. The realities of the past become true only when they intersect the present. Then, only, do they become present, knwon, regardless of what has happeend to them since. Only when griefs sets in–grief, like sound, that varies with the temperature of the air–does the past in fact die."
My second American hero is a genius whom it's difficult not to admire. I've been marathon-reading Richard Powers' s work for about a year now, starting with the widely and rightly acclaimed The Time Of Our Singing –I reread it after Obama won the American elections, which added to the emotions the story and the characters convey, and I've failed to post about it since then but I will some day because it deserves a post of its own–going on last Autumn with the wonderful The Eko Maker that convinced me that Richard Powers was one of a kind, and perhaps the best American writer alive. So I've decided to explore Powers' s bibliography before.
Galatea 2.2 destabilized me first because of its pseudo-autobiography side but eventually amazed me. Plowing The Dark was everything but an easy read. To say the truth, the novel didn't really catch my interest until p 238 (about halfway), despite some killer pieces that thrilled me here and there like little rewards to enjoy on the way.
The novel followed a double thread, like often with this author: At the turn of the tide – the late 80's and early 90's – as History may end, the world is on the verge of being changed, new fights begin and ancient wars remain.in the western Puget Sound, the Cavern–-a room that can become anything, is built by Virtual Reality researchers and disillusioned artists converted to the wonders of computer science; meanwhile in Beirut, an English teacher is held hostage. Two narrative threads that mirror one another until the distance vanishes and they merge in pure poetry.
At first the two plots although they had obvious connections seemed too different; above all, the Virtual Reality plot and its rather virtual-feeling characters didn't captivate me much, while holding me captive, the language barrier feeling even higher than usual. The hostage plot with its short chapters was a breeze of fresh air everytime it was its turn to move the story forward. I realised later that Powers must have done it on purpose. Taimur's tragic story in Lebanon gave him flesh while Adie and her workmates' journey in Seattle did feel wordy, data-filled and, at the end of the day, flat and cold...until it shifted. Also page 238 the Berlin Wall fell and broke my own defences against the Cavern characters as every Vi R worker provided their take on the event. From then on the magic worked and I understood the architecture of the novel better; I could make out connections and layers beneath layers; somehow I had broken through the wall. The book itself is like the Cavern that can create numerous universe, shelter infinite false-distances and contain world-wide places, actually it is like the Doctor's tardis: bigger in the inside!
As usual, Powers turns everything into meta, sometimes revealing it sometimes concealing it. Because of course there's much more in that book than an exploration of Virtual Reality provided by either high-technology and computing or imprisonment. Both plots tell us about Art and its purpose, about solitude, about modern disconnection, about love, about the sheer joy of reading, and the double-storyline provides a perfect looking-glass. It is also a way to revisit the old Plato's allegory reminding us that we often are still sitting in a cave watching shadows on a wall. At some point the novel becomes a retelling of the Arabian Nights, Taimur turning himself into his own private Shaharazade. And as everyhting merges, the story becomes about telling a story, about literature itself.
There's a key moment when Taimur Martin remembers a story his Persian mother used to tell his brother and him. I could quote much more from that fascinating novel but I think this one is relevant and I wanted to quote it today as events in Iran are a weight on everybody's mind. In Plowing the Dark it's a pure mise en abîme of the book, of both Adie's and Taimur's:
"She tells you her favorite again, the story she always had to give you from memory, out of her best Farsi children's book, lost in the violence of repeated exiles. She improvises, embroiders by word of mouth, adeeper archaelogy, the far-off lands even more suggestive in their state of ruins.
There was and there was not a great nature painter who painted a landscape so perfect it destroyed him. Each person who looked at the scene saw somehting different. But all saw envy, and all wanted what they saw. And those who wanted the painting most decided to kill the maker and steal the thing he made.
Each time she tells you, the story ends differently. Some trick of memory, either yours or hers. In one, the man's painted creatures warn him of the danger and foil the plot. In another, the painter's murder returns the beautiful landscape to overgrown weeds. In the ending that two small, stunned boys loved most, the painter evades his killers, who arrive at his house only to find the abandoned painting, now with a figure running through its farthest, faintest hills."
Now I'm reading a fifth novel of his. I've found the spring of his career, reached the spot where everything began, Richard Powers's literary debut: Three Farmers On Their Way to A Dance. I started reading it on Tuesday morning as I was invigilating a 4 hour Mathematics test. The writer I've come to love is already there: fantastic and creative story-teller; clever thinker and astute thought-provoker; novelist and multi-talented man with a background on Physics and an appetite for all things literature and music and science and language; gifted writer whose elegant and musical style makes you want to read out loud. It's a shame that such a brilliant novellist isn't more known over the world, especially over here in France. Perhaps he hasn't found a good translator yet. Anyway I can't imagine reading Richard Powers's novels in another language but his now.
I will review it when I'm done but so far I'm intrigued by Three Farmers On Their Way to A Dance. Everything starts with an old photograph showing three innocent young men on their way to a dance in 1914...
To end this already too long post here's a quote from the second chapter:
"In five seconds, the music–whether it is Bavarian Beer Hall or Viennese Woods–travels 5645 feet, the little over a mile that the three boys are from the site of May Fair.
Five seconds at eighty five quarter notes a minute means the waltz they hear is already two measures in the past. The few notes that do make it this far are long over by the time they make themselves known. Modulation replaces modulation; in two measures' time the song the boys hear is no longer the song being made. The boys have only outdated music with which to create a belated present.
The stars on a clear winter's night have perhaps novaed a thousand years back, but persist as an undeniable current event. The realities of the past become true only when they intersect the present. Then, only, do they become present, knwon, regardless of what has happeend to them since. Only when griefs sets in–grief, like sound, that varies with the temperature of the air–does the past in fact die."