Leaving Tangier
Sep. 14th, 2010 06:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x_losLeaving Tangier sort of makes me never want to read a book again.
To work from first causes: we have a protagonist who, while his situation is sympathetic, manages to be thoroughly unlikable. He's a whimpering Raskolnikov minus the charm and interest.
But perhaps that's not actually the first cause--perhaps it's the prose itself, the manner of the story. There's modernist stylistic experimentation a la Call it Sleep or the Stranger, but that experimentation doesn't produce any real positive effect?
Jelloun refuses to give the reader scenes. He creates opaque tableaux that defy typical emotional investment, he dodges naturalistic dialogue. Another North African novel from a similar literary tradition, Season of Migration to the North, pulled similar distancing moves. It's more structural than just an issue of translation, however, and I've read plenty of novels translated from the French that just have a different texture. You are told and not shown EVERYTHING, and in dialogue that doesn't even make a pretense of sounding anything like human speech.
You can usually tell when a novel used to be in Russian, or French or what not--a flavor of the original is retained in the English text. This is more than that. If it's a statement on the unreliability of the Western narrative form, for him, or a product of that shared story-telling tradition I question what his novel gains from it, or what it was supposed to do within the literary tradition it's drawn from. The novel is a crafted product of education, training, and very Western precedent, and so I could understand gestures that challenged it, as long as they worked FOR this novel, established meaning in alternate ways. (The ultimate loyalty of the writer is of course to the work itself, and agenda is part of and furthers that, but work produced or composed in service of agenda can only be the shadow of its Platonic ideal.)
This is deconstruction rather than experimentation. It's demonstrative of a fundamental lack of faith in narrative, which is a terribly shaky foundation to build a novel on. The Virgina Woolfe-ish project of Shaping a Sentence that Fits Him (if we are to posthumously give her work the intersectionality it wants) isn't dishonorable, and I'd be interested in reading a result which didn't suck donkey balls and make me want to give up on reading and writing, because the writer obviously has. An idea can be worthwhile and it's realization utter shite.
The trick of switching between multiple narrators (either within one chapter or by dividing the narrative burden between speakers), at its best, as in the hours, gives you access to multiple perspectives on the same situations, allows your novel to travel to places a single point of view character couldn't take it, with more personalization than a traditional distant omniscient third person narrative. I love this sort of device, I use it heavily (if admittedly often clumsily) and I love books that employ it, like the Hours or Everything is Illuminated. Here though, I don't feel it works because of the aforementioned terminal distance of the writing.
(A woman who was using the seat next to me has abandoned a button with the Lion and Unicorn crest on it. It is lovely. If she does not come back to fetch it by the time I finish writing, I will keep it and sew it onto my Russian Guard winter coat, which is so heavy it tears off and is terminally in want of buttons.)
The conclusions about the fundamental infeasibility of migration seem childishly flawed to me, as a colonial, a member of a traditionally-migrant race, and a history major. This isn't a perfect American dream fantasy, just an acceptance of the process as ambivalent. Kushner's GORGEOUS speech via the Rabbi at Louis's bubby's funeral in Angels in America comes to mind: the great journey, the like of which we can never make again, precisely because it WAS so successful. We're part of a legacy of successful transposition, or at least of change that doesn't unmake, as Jews and Americans. And so is everyone else--look at the ethnic composition of England, so repeatedly alters with invasions and settlements. Migration is the whole nature of human settlement, and to whinge and cry because globalization and its attendant transitions are disorienting is fair, but should be seen with due perspective. Nothing is so unprecedented as to be incapable of contextualization--the world is older and more horrible than that. Nothing is so wretched.
The worst thing about this book is that you can almost see the structure of a good novel within it--a novel with the same events and essentially the same characters (but fundamentally different, because I hardly know these people, even the unlikable protagonist Azel--what would flushing-out even make of them?), that allowed to you enter into conversation with it as a reader, to feel with it. I could have loved that novel if he'd bothered to write it.
The ending is a blurry, masturbatory melange of characters that only a much better novel, where we were genuinely fond of or interested in his cast, could have possible earned.
I can't really tell whether the weirdness associated with gay sex in the novel is homophobic or purely sittuational--again, it's a problem of being told-not-shown. If I'd been around to SEE Azel's discomfort in having sex with Miguel, rather than just heard it as gossip, I might have been more sensible of his predicament. It's not a lack of imagination on my part, this book just doesn't even invite you to imagine anything. And I can't feel the sympathy the book insists I should for Miguel due to his Tragic Backstory. He's got a case of White Man's Burden in his penis and thinks this fundamentally power-imbalanced relationship isn't abusive, and expects love from it, and gets burned when the performing Arab doesn't want to cuddle? I'm... sorry? Except for how you're an idiot (or at LEAST v. v. thoughtless and in need of a privilege-check) who kind of deserves this?
FINALLY, let us speak of Butter Cookie the Seagull, who is a metaphor for everything I hate about this book. On page 4 a young girl who's destined to die from pneumonia she caught working in a shrimp factory nurses a sick seagull, who she names Butter Cookie. I have fallen in love with the fat, bobbing seagulls on the Thames, and call them Squeezy Birds because on looking at them I am seized with a compulsion to hug them until they squeak--not to hurt them, just to be Elmyra from Tiny Toons. Naturally I am All About Butter Cookie the seagull. I read this mention with interest--perhaps there is /something/ in this terrible book I could like.
The girl washes the sick seagull with soap, and sets him free. Turns out seagulls only float b/c they have oil on their feathers, which the soap has scrubbed off. The bird sinks like a stone. No more Butter Cookie. There's not a point to this annecdote, it's meant to ground in the general Life Is Misery, Especially Life In Morocco theme.
Fuck this book, and FML.
To work from first causes: we have a protagonist who, while his situation is sympathetic, manages to be thoroughly unlikable. He's a whimpering Raskolnikov minus the charm and interest.
But perhaps that's not actually the first cause--perhaps it's the prose itself, the manner of the story. There's modernist stylistic experimentation a la Call it Sleep or the Stranger, but that experimentation doesn't produce any real positive effect?
Jelloun refuses to give the reader scenes. He creates opaque tableaux that defy typical emotional investment, he dodges naturalistic dialogue. Another North African novel from a similar literary tradition, Season of Migration to the North, pulled similar distancing moves. It's more structural than just an issue of translation, however, and I've read plenty of novels translated from the French that just have a different texture. You are told and not shown EVERYTHING, and in dialogue that doesn't even make a pretense of sounding anything like human speech.
You can usually tell when a novel used to be in Russian, or French or what not--a flavor of the original is retained in the English text. This is more than that. If it's a statement on the unreliability of the Western narrative form, for him, or a product of that shared story-telling tradition I question what his novel gains from it, or what it was supposed to do within the literary tradition it's drawn from. The novel is a crafted product of education, training, and very Western precedent, and so I could understand gestures that challenged it, as long as they worked FOR this novel, established meaning in alternate ways. (The ultimate loyalty of the writer is of course to the work itself, and agenda is part of and furthers that, but work produced or composed in service of agenda can only be the shadow of its Platonic ideal.)
This is deconstruction rather than experimentation. It's demonstrative of a fundamental lack of faith in narrative, which is a terribly shaky foundation to build a novel on. The Virgina Woolfe-ish project of Shaping a Sentence that Fits Him (if we are to posthumously give her work the intersectionality it wants) isn't dishonorable, and I'd be interested in reading a result which didn't suck donkey balls and make me want to give up on reading and writing, because the writer obviously has. An idea can be worthwhile and it's realization utter shite.
The trick of switching between multiple narrators (either within one chapter or by dividing the narrative burden between speakers), at its best, as in the hours, gives you access to multiple perspectives on the same situations, allows your novel to travel to places a single point of view character couldn't take it, with more personalization than a traditional distant omniscient third person narrative. I love this sort of device, I use it heavily (if admittedly often clumsily) and I love books that employ it, like the Hours or Everything is Illuminated. Here though, I don't feel it works because of the aforementioned terminal distance of the writing.
(A woman who was using the seat next to me has abandoned a button with the Lion and Unicorn crest on it. It is lovely. If she does not come back to fetch it by the time I finish writing, I will keep it and sew it onto my Russian Guard winter coat, which is so heavy it tears off and is terminally in want of buttons.)
The conclusions about the fundamental infeasibility of migration seem childishly flawed to me, as a colonial, a member of a traditionally-migrant race, and a history major. This isn't a perfect American dream fantasy, just an acceptance of the process as ambivalent. Kushner's GORGEOUS speech via the Rabbi at Louis's bubby's funeral in Angels in America comes to mind: the great journey, the like of which we can never make again, precisely because it WAS so successful. We're part of a legacy of successful transposition, or at least of change that doesn't unmake, as Jews and Americans. And so is everyone else--look at the ethnic composition of England, so repeatedly alters with invasions and settlements. Migration is the whole nature of human settlement, and to whinge and cry because globalization and its attendant transitions are disorienting is fair, but should be seen with due perspective. Nothing is so unprecedented as to be incapable of contextualization--the world is older and more horrible than that. Nothing is so wretched.
The worst thing about this book is that you can almost see the structure of a good novel within it--a novel with the same events and essentially the same characters (but fundamentally different, because I hardly know these people, even the unlikable protagonist Azel--what would flushing-out even make of them?), that allowed to you enter into conversation with it as a reader, to feel with it. I could have loved that novel if he'd bothered to write it.
The ending is a blurry, masturbatory melange of characters that only a much better novel, where we were genuinely fond of or interested in his cast, could have possible earned.
I can't really tell whether the weirdness associated with gay sex in the novel is homophobic or purely sittuational--again, it's a problem of being told-not-shown. If I'd been around to SEE Azel's discomfort in having sex with Miguel, rather than just heard it as gossip, I might have been more sensible of his predicament. It's not a lack of imagination on my part, this book just doesn't even invite you to imagine anything. And I can't feel the sympathy the book insists I should for Miguel due to his Tragic Backstory. He's got a case of White Man's Burden in his penis and thinks this fundamentally power-imbalanced relationship isn't abusive, and expects love from it, and gets burned when the performing Arab doesn't want to cuddle? I'm... sorry? Except for how you're an idiot (or at LEAST v. v. thoughtless and in need of a privilege-check) who kind of deserves this?
FINALLY, let us speak of Butter Cookie the Seagull, who is a metaphor for everything I hate about this book. On page 4 a young girl who's destined to die from pneumonia she caught working in a shrimp factory nurses a sick seagull, who she names Butter Cookie. I have fallen in love with the fat, bobbing seagulls on the Thames, and call them Squeezy Birds because on looking at them I am seized with a compulsion to hug them until they squeak--not to hurt them, just to be Elmyra from Tiny Toons. Naturally I am All About Butter Cookie the seagull. I read this mention with interest--perhaps there is /something/ in this terrible book I could like.
The girl washes the sick seagull with soap, and sets him free. Turns out seagulls only float b/c they have oil on their feathers, which the soap has scrubbed off. The bird sinks like a stone. No more Butter Cookie. There's not a point to this annecdote, it's meant to ground in the general Life Is Misery, Especially Life In Morocco theme.
Fuck this book, and FML.
