December 29, 2006
Digging with a Needle
The New Yorker has published Orhan Pamuk's beautiful Nobel Lecture, a moving statement about the significance of literature, by way of a memoir about his father. My favorite passages:
"The writer's secret is not inspiration -- for it is never clear where that comes from -- but stubbornness, endurance. The lovely Turkish expression 'to dig a well with a needle' seems to me to have been invented with writers in mind."
"I believe literature to be the most valuable tool that humanity has found in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors -- and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signs that dark and improvident times are upon us. But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for that is what literature is."
"When a writer uses his secret wounds as his starting point, he is, whether he is aware of it or not, putting great faith in humanity. My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble one another, that others carry wounds like mine -- and that they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that we resemble one another. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a center."
Posted by Michael Lowenthal at 05:03 PM
December 25, 2006
Road Trip
In an earlier entry, I passed along David Long's high praise for Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road. Now that I've read the book, I'll add my own two cents:
The book deserves high praise indeed. It's like no other that I can think of, turning the tradition of the great American road novel on its head -- call it the terrible (in the original sense: causing terror) post-American anti-novel. I'll admit that The Road is not going to be one of my personal favorite books, and may not be one I reread to study its craft (mostly because its craft is so tied to its singularity as a story), but the experience of reading it was overwhelmingly powerful, engrossing, thought- and awe-provoking. It swept me up in its unique atmosphere more than any other book in recent memory.
The novel is, as many have observed, biblical, apocalyptic, mythic, and yet McCarthy achieves these qualities with a prose style that is more spare and straightforward than he's used previously. Only rarely -- once every dozen or more pages -- does he resort to the kind of self-conscious neologistic superliterary narration that dominated his early books and that, in this new novel, jars by trying way too hard (e.g., "Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts"). In my opinion, the strongest passages in The Road, the ones I'll never be able to shake from my nightmares, are the simplest: a starving stray dog that is described as "A trellis of a dog with the hide stretched over it," or a ransacked pharmacy in which the characters come upon "A human head beneath a cakebell at the end of a counter. Dessicated. Wearing a ballcap. Dried eyes turned sadly inward."
Posted by Michael Lowenthal at 06:09 PM
December 24, 2006
Almodovar Returns
I've never before thought to compare Pedro Almodovar with Philip Roth, but having just seen his fantastic new film, "Volver," I was immediately put in mind of the novelist, who, in recent years, after a somewhat fallow period, has produced a hard-to-believe succession of masterpieces. Almodovar -- in a different medium, and with a wildly different sensibility -- is on a comparable streak. "All About my Mother," "Talk to Her," "Bad Education," and now "Volver" -- not a clunker among them.
One of the things I like best about Almodovar's work, and about this new film in particular, is its reclamation of melodrama. So many artists these days, for fear of being seen as insufficiently sophisticated or ironic, curl their lips at good old drama, and instead produce works of capital-A "art" so quiet that if they were trees and they dropped, you wouldn't hear a sound, even if you were standing beside them in the forest. (Oh, come on, allow me.) But "Volver," in the tradition of the telenovela, seems to relish its inclusion of adultery, homicide, incest, terminal illness, death-by-fire, and ghostly hauntings (among other brazenly contrived plot points). Freed from the concern that their story might not seem "realistic," the actors achieve performances that, beneath the screwball surface, are deeply touching.
Now I think I'll go back and watch "Bad Education" again.
Posted by Michael Lowenthal at 01:42 PM
December 12, 2006
I love History
I have just seen, and can wholeheartedly recommend, Nicholas Hytner's new film, The History Boys, about a group of Sheffield schoolboys preparing for the exams to get in to Oxford and Cambridge. The film is very, um, theatrical (which I mean both literally -- since it was closely adapted from, and features the same brilliant cast as, the Allan Bennett stage play of the same name -- and also as a coded term for super gay), and although some reviewers might find this a reason to quibble, I felt it was one of the film's many delights. The movie is talky without ever being dull. In fact, the best scene -- which I think qualifies as the best scene I've watched in any movie this year -- is a conversation between a student and his teacher in which they discuss the meaning of a Thomas Hardy poem. To give the context of the exchange would be to give away too much about the plot, but suffice to say that despite the bookish-sounding subject matter, the scene is absolutely riveting. I had big fat tears in my eyes.
Posted by Michael Lowenthal at 05:53 PM
December 05, 2006
Alice Munro's View
Alice Munro is probably my favorite living writer -- one of the few writers I'd drive almost two hours' distance for the chance to see her give a five-minute award-acceptance speech (as I did this summer, when Munro received the MacDowell Medal) -- so it was a thrill to read her new book, The View from Castle Rock.
To be sacrilegiously honest, I approached the book with trepidation, because when the title story was published a year or so ago in the New Yorker, I was disappointed by its seeming shapelessness. Or, rather, by the fact that its shape seemed straightforwardly dictated by the course of historical events, which, as any loyal fan of Saint Alice knows, is not how her stories commonly proceed.
But in the context of the new book, the two halves of which combine a pseudo-history of Munro's Scottish and Canadian ancestors with a series of close-to-autobiographical first-person stories, the title piece makes much more sense -- indeed, it contributes significantly to a scope that is moving precisely because of its historical sweep.
This strikes me as Munro's most reader-friendly and simply enjoyable book, the only one of her works (excepting her novel, Lives of Girls and Women) that is meant to be read straight through from beginning to end. Normally, when I read a Munro story, I have to wait at least a day -- usually a number of days -- before I can muster the mental space and emotional backbone to read another. But I found myself able to read two and three stories a day from this new collection. Munro's usual acrobatics of narrative structure mostly give way, here, to the forward momentum of events. And yet none of her characteristic depth and breadth -- nor her ability to expand and collapse whole universes of feeling within a single phrase -- are lost.
Munro's editor reports that she already has in hand four new stories toward the next collection. Thank heavens.
Posted by Michael Lowenthal at 09:09 PM
December 04, 2006
Double the Pleasure
This will seem self-serving (and I suppose it is), but I want to send out a big admiring thank you to Diego Lema, a photographer and model whose self-portrait adorns the cover of El Mismo Abrazo, the recently released Spanish edition of my first novel.
I love the cover (in which Lema serves as the image for each of the identical twins who are the novel's main characters), so I hunted around on the Web until I found some of his other work, and I'm really impressed.
Posted by Michael Lowenthal at 02:44 PM
December 02, 2006
Alma Mater
I've just returned from my 20th (gasp!) high school reunion, an experience that was giddily exciting, genuinely moving, and, as I said to one of my pals when it ended, existentially exhausting.
One of the reunion events was a tour of our recently refurbished school, Bethesda-Chevy Chase High, which now boasts an amazing high-tech language lab, a cyber cafe (?!), and a college-quality media center, in a glass case outside of which were displayed books written by a number of B-CC grads (though not, boo hoo, yours truly). This prompted me to do a little research, and I was astonished to learn of all the successful writers who have attended my alma mater -- especially given the fact that B-CC is a public high school. Here are some of my fellow alumni and their books (with a couple of best-sellers listed first, because that's what best-sellerdom earns you):
Tracy Chevalier ('80): Girl With a Pearl Earring, Falling Angels.
Laura Hilllenbrand ('85): Seabiscuit.
A. M. Homes ('79, although I'm not sure she actually graduated): This Book May Save Your Life, The End of Alice, The Safety of Objects, etc.
Julia Slavin ('77): The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club and Other Stories, Carnivore Diet: A Novel.
David Simon ('78): The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neighborhood.
Jennifer Toth ('85): The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City, Orphans of the Living, and What Happened to Johnnie Jordan - The Story of a Child Turning Violent.
Matthew Zapruder ('85): American Linden, The Pajamaist.
Alexandra Zapruder ('87): Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust.
[Cool side note: their grandfather shot the famous Zapruder Film in Dallas on November 22, 1963.]
Matthew von Unwerth ('88): Freud's Requiem: Memory, Mourning and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk.
Sarah Erdman ('92): Nine Hills to Nambonkaha: Two Years in the Heart of an African Village.
And, most recently:
Jennifer Gilmore ('88): Golden Country.
Finally, another cool side note: The co-founder and co-owner of Washington, D.C.'s best bookstore, Politics & Prose, is Carla Cohen, whose son Aaron attended B-CC at the same time I did.
How is it that our suburban public high school has served as such a nexus for all things literary? Is it something in the water? More likely, the amazing teachers. One of my own favorites, Ms. Nancy Gallagher, who taught my 12th-grade literature class, has been kind enough to attend my readings at Politics & Prose, in 1998 and 2002. I don't think I've ever been as nervous -- or as proud -- as when I spotted her in the audience.
Posted by Michael Lowenthal at 04:33 PM
