paired readings

[ursula]

jinian linked recently to kate_nepveu's Paired Readings Page; the conceit offers a (perhaps more concise?) way to organize my thoughts on certain novels.

Here, then, are two pairs of books which I admire but don't like.

Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
White Apples, Jonathan Carroll

Each of these books has a protagonist who sleeps with incredible numbers of women because of his deep appreciation for every individual; the beauties (even the intellectual beauties!) of these women are described in lyrical lists. Each protagonist also has a True Love, one particular person whom he is fated for. The fatefulness of this love must in some sense counterbalance the infidelities, the small lies and the larger ones.

In my reading, the balance failed. I was genuinely sorry that the heroine went on loving the hero. Kundera-- consummate stylist-- drew me along anyway, but Carroll grated often enough that I eventually stopped reading altogether. The telling moment, I think, was a conversation that the lovers in White Apples hold. "What do you want most in the world?" one asks, quite early in their acquaintance; and the other responds, "To be understood."

The hero (our viewpoint character) thinks this is intensely romantic, uncovers some deep truth. But instead I was intensely irritated. That's in part an allergy to cliches; but also, I think, the response uncovers a personal set of romantic ideals which are not at all aligned with the ideals of either novel. I don't want a lover who understands me on a mystical, cosmic level. I want a man who will be my friend in mundane ways, who will tell me the truth about everyday things such as whether he's slept with most of the city of Prague, and who will treat me like a rational human being.

The Twenty-Seventh City, Jonathan Franzen
The Scar, China Miéville

Miéville has been justly praised for worldbuilding, but Franzen's St. Louis matches Miéville's floating city for detail so immediate that it leaves grit under your fingernails. I enjoyed each of these books a great deal until the very end-- I was eager to know what happened next-- and then when next did happen, I was frustrated and disappointed.

The plot of each book depends on a literal plot, put together by a woman with grand ambitions. This plotting drives the stories; our putative heroes and heroines don't even realize there is a plot for hundreds and hundreds of pages. These heroes are decent people-- not terribly imaginative or generous, but decent-- who are confused, misled, unhappy, a touch bitter. And meanwhile the plots grow tighter and tighter and more and disaster nearer and nearer--

And then things fizzle. The grand plots fail, but they fail as much through their own massive weight as from any effort of the heroes. And in the last shuddering moments of failure, characters whom we rather like die pointless deaths, deaths which are marked as Ironic with a capital I.

Both Franzen and Miéville seem to have intended a tragedy (Franzen's a tragedy in Death of a Salesman mode, while Miéville's more along the lines of Dickens; but tragedy either way). They don't produce tragedy, though. They produce anticlimax.

And in me, at least, they produced the sense that irony is more real to these writers than the characters themselves . . . That, even, the real goal was to jerk the reader around, on invisible puppet wires?

Comments

[glowing-fish.livejournal.com]

I read a book by Kundera. It seemed rather mediocre.
The language was interesting but it didn't actually go anywhere.