Category Archives: literature

The Venus of Ille (1837) – Prosper Mérimée

In search of le fantastique in literature and pygmalionism

Cover of unidentified audio book

Prosper Mérimée is best known for writing the opera Carmen made famous by Bizet, which has also been adapted to film by Radley Metzger, is featured here with a short story/novella about a statue that comes to life, a fantastic story.

“The Venus of Ille” is about an old bronze statue unearthed in the town of Ille, in the French Pyrenees. It is unearthed in the yard of Monsieur de Peyrehorade, a “very learned antiquarian.” He is quite taken with it, and in fact thinks more about it than about the upcoming wedding of his son. The nameless narrator is visiting Peyrehorade simply to look at the ruins in the area, but on hearing about the statue he is intrigued. Before he gets a good look at the statue he sees two townies throw a stone at the statue (while it was being unearthed it fell on the leg of a workman and broke it) only to have the stone thrower cry out in pain and say that the statue threw the stone back at him. The narrator laughs this away, but on seeing the statue up close he isn’t so sanguine. The form and body are magnificent, but its face is…not so magnificent. —http://www.geocities.com/jessnevins/vicv.html [Oct 20006]

The 1979 La Venere di Ille was made as part of a series of movies commissioned by the Italian TV station RaiDue focusing on the fantastic in 19th century literature. The texts were selected by the Italian author Italo Calvino. Mario Bava and his son Lamberto directed the film.

Excerpt

“Shortly afterwards, the door opened a second time, and some one came in who said, ‘Good evening, my little wife.’ Then the curtains were drawn back. She heard a stifled cry. The person who was in the bed beside her sat up apparently with extended arms. Then she turned her head and saw her husband, kneeling by the bed with his head on a level with the pillow, held close in the arms of a sort of greenish-colored giant. She says, and she repeated it to me twenty times, poor woman!- she says that she recognized- do you guess who?-the bronze Venus, M. de Peyrehorade’s statue. Since it has been here every one dreams about it. But to continue the poor lunatic’s story. At this sight she lost consciousness, and probably she had already lost her mind. She cannot tell how long she remained in this condition. Returned to her sense she saw the phantom, or the statue as she insists on calling it, lying immovable, the legs and lower part of the body on the bed, the bust and arms extended forward, and between the arms her husband, quite motionless. A cock crew. Then the statue left the bed, let fall the body, and went out. Mme. Alphonse rushed to the bell, and you know the rest.”

—http://frenital.byu.edu/merimee/works/TheVenusofIlle.html [Oct 2006]

Prosper Mérimée (September 28, 1803–September 23, 1870) was a French dramatist, historian, archaeologist, and short story writer. One of his stories was the basis of the opera Carmen. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosper_M%C3%A9rim%C3%A9e [Oct 2006]

The Marquise von O (1808) – Heinrich von Kleist

The Marquise von O (1808) – Heinrich von Kleist
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The Marquise von O is an 1808 novella by Heinrich von Kleist which was adapted to film by Eric Rhomer in 1976.

The Marquise von O is a novella by Heinrich von Kleist. The story begins with a marvelous single sentence paragraph relating how in a prominent town in northern Italy the widow the Marquise von O. places an announcement in the newspapers to the efect that she is pregnant and wishes the father of her child to make himself known to her, in order that she can marry him. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Marquise_von_O [Oct 2006]

The best British, Irish or Commonwealth novel from 1980 to 2005

Via Conversational Reading:

A recent poll in the New York Times named Toni Morrison’s Beloved as the greatest work of American fiction in the past 25 years. But what about over here? On the eve of this year’s Booker Prize, we asked 150 literary luminaries to vote for the best British, Irish or Commonwealth novel from 1980 to 2005: —Observer.Guardian.UK

Disgrace (1999) – JM Coetzee

Money (1984) – Martin Amis

Earthly Powers (1980) – Anthony Burgess

Atonement (2001) – Ian McEwan

The Blue Flower (1995) – Penelope Fitzgerald

The Unconsoled (1995) – Kazuo Ishiguro

Midnight’s Children (1981) – Salman Rushdie

The Remains of the Day (1989) – Kazuo IshiguroAmongst Women (1990) – John McGahern

That They May Face the Rising Sun (2001) – John McGahern

Hawksmoor (1985) Peter AckroydThe Old Devils (1986) Kingsley Amis

Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995) Kate Atkinson

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) Margaret Atwood

An Awfully Big Adventure (1989) Beryl Bainbridge

The Wasp Factory (1984) Iain Banks

The Untouchable (1997) John Banville

The Regeneration Trilogy (1991-95) Pat Barker

Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) Julian Barnes

A Long, Long Way (2005) Sebastian Barry

Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) Samuel Beckett

Possession: A Romance (1990) AS Byatt

True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) Peter Carey

A Perfect Spy (1986) John le Carre

Nights at the Circus (1984), Wise Children (1991) Angela Carter

Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Age of Iron (1990), Masters of Petersburg (1994) JM Coetzee

The Barrytown Trilogy (1987-91) Roddy Doyle

Gwendolen (1989) Buchi Emecheta

Birdsong (1993) Sebastian Faulks

The Beginning of Spring (1988) Penelope Fitzgerald

To the Ends of the Earth: A Sea Trilogy (1980-89) William Golding

Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983), 1982, Janine (1984) Alasdair Gray

Transit of Venus (1981) Shirley Hazzard

Ridley Walker (1980) Russell Hoban

The Line of Beauty (2004) Alan Hollinghurst

Never Let Me Go (2005) Kazuo Ishiguro

A Disaffection (1989), How Late It Was, How Late (1994) James Kelman

The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) Hanif Kureishi

English Passengers (2004) Matthew Kneale

The Life of Pi (2002) Yann Martel

As Meat Loves Salt (2001) Maria McCann

The Comfort of Strangers (1981), Enduring Love (1997) Ian McEwan

No Great Mischief (1999) Alistair MacLeod

Fugitive Pieces (1996) Anne Michaels

The Restraint of Beasts (1998) Magnus Mills

A Fine Balance (1995) Rohinton Mistry

Mother London (1988) Michael Moorcock

The Enigma of Arrival (1987) VS Naipaul

After You’d Gone (2000) Maggie O’Farrell

His Dark Materials Trilogy (1995-2000) Philip Pullman

I Was Dora Suarez (1990) Derek Raymond

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (2005) JK Rowling

The God of Small Things (1997) Arundhati Roy

A Suitable Boy (1993) Vikram Seth

Hotel World (2001) Ali Smith

A Far Cry From Kensington (1988) Muriel Spark

The White Hotel (1981) DM Thomas

Restoration (1989) Sacred Country (1992) Rose Tremain

Omeros (1990) Derek Walcott

The Passion (1987) Jeanette Winterson

In search of plotlessness

Metafilter has an entry on plotlessness.

I love Raymond Carver’s short stories because they’re complete and perfect without much happening in them, in terms of action and plot development. What I’d like to find is some novels that are similarly “plotless”? Do they exist?

There are Carver stories which are so good you HAVE to finish them, even though all that happens is someone goes to bingo, sees someone else there, goes home, feels sad and goes to bed. I’m looking for novels where the prime reason you keep on reading isn’t to see “what happens” but because you want to spend more time with the characters or the writing itself; ideally books where very little “happens” at all… metafilter, March 8, 2005

And Wikipedia has an article on slice of life story, which reminds me of the boredom and realism of everyday life and the kitchen sink drama:

A slice of life story is a story which has no real plot. Often it has no exposition, no action, no conflict, and no denouement, but an open ending. It usually tries to depict the every-day life of ordinary people. The term slice of life is actually a (more or less) dead metaphor: it often seems as if the author had taken a knife and cut out a slice of the lives of some characters, apparently not bothering at all where the cuts were made.

It has also been defined as an “episode of actual experience represented realistically and with little alteration in a dramatic, fictional, or journalistic work.”. —Wikipedia

Her stupid questions …

“Her stupid questions, which once had seemed to me the happiest proof of her love; her voice, which had once been capable of exciting me physically; her touch which had ravished me, all had only one effect and influence over me now—to enervate me. She became jealous, or behaved as if she were; there was scene after scene. I realized that I should have been devastated, but all I could feel was torture. Then she would kiss my hand, beg for forgiveness, we would rest side by side, and I was consumed by boredom. I ate oranges and was annoyed by the thought that I would have to get up in the middle of the night and go home. And as I held her in my arms, I was thinking of any other woman, longing for any other woman, a prostitute for all I cared, if only I could have kissed other lips, heard other sighs…”

If Schnitzler was a master of the playboy type, he was even more famous for his depiction of the woman with whom the playboy was so often involved, das susses Madel, “the sweet girl.” She is socially inferior and sexually accessible; he can buy her company with modest gifts. Each of the parties in this relationship is subject to a characteristic illusion: the young man pretends that there may be a future for their affair; the young woman tries to pretend that she is content with its impermanence. The break, when it comes, is likely to be awkward for the young man, painful for the young woman. Far from being the femme fatale of the fin-de-siècle aesthetic imagination, she is fragile and vulnerable. –via http://media.ucsc.edu/classes/thompson/schnitzler.html [Oct 2006]

See also: Arthur Schnitzler (1862 – 1931)

Don Juan

Les Exploits d’un jeune Don Juan (1987) – Gianfranco Mingozzi, after a novel by Guillaume Apollinaire

After the Death of Don Juan (1939) – Sylvia Townsend Warner
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Don Juan is a legendary fictional libertine, whose story has been told many times by different authors. The name is sometimes used figuratively, as a synonym for “seducer”. The best known version of this tale is probably Mozart’s 1787 Don Giovanni opera.

The Don Juan legend

The legend says that Don Juan seduced, raped or killed a young girl of noble family, and killed her father. Later, he came across a statue of the father in a cemetery and impiously invited it home to dine with him, an invitation which the statue gladly accepted. The ghost of the father arrived for dinner as the harbinger of Don Juan’s death. The Statue asked to shake Don Juan’s hand, and when he extended his arm, he was dragged away to Hell.

Most authorities agree that the first recorded tale of Don Juan is El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Playboy of Seville and Guest of Stone) by Tirso de Molina. Dates vary for the first publication of this, from 1620 to 1635, depending upon the source, although it appeared in Spain as early as 1615. In it, Don Juan is an unrepentant womanizer who seduces women by disguising himself as their actual lovers, or by promising marriage. He leaves a trail of broken hearts and angry husbands and fathers behind him, finally slaying a certain Don Gonzalo. When later he is invited to dinner in the cathedral by Don Gonzalo’s ghost, he accepts, not wanting to appear a coward.

Depending upon the particular rendition of the legend, Don Juan’s character may be presented in one of two perspectives, or somewhere in between: According to some, Don Juan was a simple, lustful womanizer, a cruel seducer who simply gets sex wherever he can. Others, however, see Don Juan as a man who genuinely loves every woman he seduces, and it is his gift to see the true beauty and intrinsic value which exist within every woman. The early versions of the legend always portray him in the former light.

Other Don Juan literature

Another more recent version of the legend of Don Juan is that presented in José Zorilla’s (1817-1893) “Don Juan Tenorio” (1844). The version is formatted as a play in which Don Juan is depicted quite villainously. The action starts off with Don Juan meeting with his old friend Don Luis and the two men recounting their conquests and vile deeds of the last year. In terms of the number of murders and of conquests (i.e. seductions), Don Juan out-scores his friend Don Luis. Outdone, Don Luis replies that his friend has never had a woman pure of soul, planting in Don Juan a new tantalizing desire to sleep with a woman of God. Also, Don Juan informs his friend Don Luis that he plans to seduce his future wife. Don Juan manages to seduce both his friend’s wife and Doña Ines. Incensed, Doña Ines’s father and Don Luis come to try and avenge their lost pride, but Don Juan kills them both, though Don Juan begs them not to attack, for he claims that Doña Ines has shown him the true way. Don Juan gets a little nervous when he is visited by the ghosts of Doña Ines and her father, and the book concludes with a very interesting scene of a veritable tug of war between Doña Ines and her father, with the daughter eventually winning and pulling Don Juan up into Heaven.

In Aleksandr Blok’s poetic depiction, the statue is only mentioned as a fearful approaching figure, while a deceased Donna Anna (“Anna, Anna, is it sweet to sleep in the grave? Is it sweet to dream unearthly dreams” ) is waiting to return to him in the fast-approaching hour of his death.

In the novel “La Gitanilla” (the she-gipsy) by Miguel de Cervantes, the character who falls in love with the Gitanilla is named Don Juan de Cárcamo, possibly related with the popular legend.

A play called Don Juan (Don Giovanni Tenorio, ossia Il Disoluto) was written in 1736 by Carlo Goldoni, famous Italian comic playwright.

In the novel The Phantom of the Opera, the name of the opera written by the Phantom is “Don Juan Triumphant.”

The famous Romantic Lord Byron wrote an epic version of Don Juan that is considered to be his masterpiece. It was left unfinished upon his death, but portrays Don Juan as the innocent victim of a repressive Catholic upbringing who unwittingly stumbles into love time and time again. In Canto II, for example,he is washed up shipwrecked on an island and is rescued by the beautiful daughter of a Greek pirate, who nurses him back to health: a love relationship develops. When her father returns from his journey, however, he is angry and sells Juan into slavery, where he is bought by a Sultan’s wife for her pleasure. Byron’s don Juan is less the seducer than the victim of women’s desire and his unfortunate circumstances. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Juan [Oct 2006]

Counter-Clock World (1967) – Philip K. Dick

Counter-Clock World (1967) – Philip K. Dick
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While the 1991 Time’s Arrow is very much the best-known example of reverse chronology literature, the idea had been explored previously by Philip K. Dick’s 1967 Counter-Clock World. [Oct 2006]

“Dick’s best books always describe a future that is both entirely recognizable and utterly unimaginable.” –The New York Times Book Review

Counter-Clock World is a 1967 science fiction novel by author Phillip K. Dick, in which time has started to move in reverse, resulting in the dead reviving in their own graves, living their lives in reverse, eventually ending in returning to the womb, and splitting into an egg and a sperm during copulation between the receiving woman and a man. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Clock_World [Oct 2006]

See also: reverse chronology in fiction – 1967 – sf-literature

The Man of the Crowd (1840) – E. A. Poe

Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul. —La Bruyère.

IT was well said of a certain German book that “er lasst sich nicht lesen” – it does not permit itself to be read. There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors and looking them piteously in the eyes — die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burthen so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged. —http://poe.thefreelibrary.com/Man-of-the-Crowd [Oct 2006]

The Man of the Crowd, telling of one who roams day and night to mingle with streams of people as if afraid to be alone, has quieter effects, but implies nothing less of cosmic fear. –H. P. Lovecraft in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1924-1927)

See also: 1840 – E. A. Poe – flâneur – crowd

Hopscotch (1963) – Julio Cortázar

Hopscotch (1963) – Julio Cortázar
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Rayuela (1963), translated into English as Hopscotch, is the most famous novel by the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar.

Hopscotch is a dazzling literary experiment that ranks among the most important novels written in Spanish in the 20th century. It has been highly praised by other Latin American writers including Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa or José Lezama Lima. The novel has an open-ended structure that invites the reader to choose between a linear reading or a non-linear one that interpolates additional chapters. Cortázar’s employment of interior monologue, punning, slang, and his use of different languages is reminiscent of Modernist writers like Joyce, although his main influences were Surrealism and the French New Novel, as well as the “riffing” aesthetic of jazz. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayuela [Oct 2006]

Biography —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio Cortázar [Oct 2006]

List of superlatives:
“The most powerful encyclopedia of emotions and visions to emerge from the postwar generation of international writers.” — New Republic

“A work of the most exhilarating talent and interest.” — Elizabeth Hardwick

“Cortazar’s masterpiece…the first great novel of Spanish America.”– Times Literary Supplement

“The most powerful encyclopedia of emotions and visions to emerge from the postwar generation of international writers.” — New Republic

Dictionary of the Khazars (1984) – Milorad Pavic

Dictionary of the Khazars (1984) – Milorad Pavic
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Much of the novel’s alleged power is embedded in the line, that compulsory author-directed movement from the beginning of a sentence to its period, from the top of the page to the bottom, from the first page to the last. Of course, through print’s long history, there have been countless strategies to counter the line’s power, from marginalia and footnotes to the creative innovations of novelists like Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Raymond Queneau, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino and Milorad Pavic, not to exclude the form’s father, Cervantes himself. But true freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer, where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text. –(Robert Coover, 1992) via New York Times [Sept 2005]

Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel is the first novel by Serbian writer Milorad Pavich (Milorad Pavi?), published in 1984.

There is no easily discerned plot in the conventional sense, but the book is based on an historical event generally dated to the last decades of the 8th century or the early 9th century.

Pavic often veers into his own style of playful, somewhat Borgesian fantasy. The novel might be a sort of metafictional false document, as the people and events in the novel are presented as factual.

The novel takes the form of three cross-referenced mini-encyclopedias. Due to its format as a dictionary, the novel may be read in any number of ways, rather than just front to back. This challenges readers to shun passive reading and become active participants in the novel, as they piece together the story from fragmented, and often conflicting, accounts.

The book comes in two different editions, one “Male” and one “Female”, which differ in only a critical paragraph. –Adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_the_Khazars [Oct 2006]