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Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
www.nemonymous.com
Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
CITY OF GLASS
1
“Since everything seen or said, even the slightest, most trivial thing, can bear a connection to the outcome of the story, nothing must be overlooked.”
Quinn, William Wilson, Max Work, Paul Auster
2
“He [Quinn/Auster] thought for a moment of Vermeer’s Soldier and Young Girl Smiling, trying to remember the expression on the girl’s face, the exact position of her hands around the cup, the red back of the faceless man. In his mind, he caught a glimpse of the blue map on the wall and the sunlight pouring through the window, so like the sunlight that surrounded him now.”
Virginia and Peter Stillman. The latter, aka Mr Sad, in white. A poet of some note. God/Dog. From his lengthy monologue…
“‘I am Peter Stillman. That is not my real name. My real name is Peter Rabbit. In the winter I am Mr White, in the summer I am Mr Green. Think what you like of this. I say it of my own free will. Wimble click crumblechaw beloo. It is beautiful, is it not?”
Peter Stillman’s father also named Peter Stillman: ‘He had a big head. As big as very big, which meant there was too much room in there.”
3
“There’s too much at stake here for me to leave it to chance.”
Virginia Stillman employs ‘Auster’ as private eye with an uncashable cheque made out to Auster. To safeguard Stillman the younger from Stillman the elder who is now free to create a new story from her backstory about him.
Her French kiss as an imprimatur of strength.
4 & 5
“For several moments he studied its blankness, wondering if he was not a bloody fool.”
About small boys brought up in isolation as told by ancient writers. What language would they learn? Quinn is set to avenge his own son called Peter to prevent Peter Stillman returning to harm his son called Peter Stillman?
“My name is Paul Auster. That is not my real name.”
6
“For utopia was nowhere – even, as Dark explained, in its ‘wordhood.’”
Henry Dark, as recounted in Stillman Sr.’s book Q studies in the lbrrary about pre and post paradise and diaspora westward fulfilling utopias; Christ, Milton’s ambivalence and equivocal words such as Satan; Locke and Rousseau, the ‘noble savage’ and double meanings like ‘cleave’. I can think of another such word fitting for this whole book so far: ‘ravel’. Biblical exegesis. And assonances like “…the papal bull of Paul III,…”, Babel and the fall of Towers (this being Paul Auster’s own prophecy in 1985 of the Twin Towers and the Baltimore Bridge in my own real-time yesterday!) Only some of the crucial elements needed strictly for my own red notebook’s aide mémoire, I fear.
“The story of the Garden, therefore, not only records the fall of man, but the fall of language. […] Tower of Babel stands as the last image before the true beginning of the world.”
7
“The effect of being Paul Auster, he had begun to learn, was not altogether unpleasant.”
Q waiting to follow Stillman Sr. From Grand Central when his train got in, Nantucket ignited backstory of Q, and Q sees someone reading his own written book by WW about MW, but Stillman x 2 doppelgänger quandary, and chooses old shabby shuffler instead of smart one. Aide memoire continues from my own red notebook.
8
“Wandering, therefore, was a kind of mindlessness. But following Stillman was not wandering. Stillman could wander, he could stagger like a blindman from one spot to another, but this was a privilege denied to Quinn.”
My mnemonic thoughts for my own Nemo Book….Auster as shell containing Q, the latter writing notes in his personal red Memo Book as he follows old Stillman, sometimes having to overlap words as palimpsest, because he had attention diverted from the previously blank pages to old Stillman who seems to be moving randomly through the streets of the city picking up and often keeping useless dirty and discarded objects from the pavement as if they were ‘found art’, a gauche process similar to my gestalt real-time reviewing, keeping both eyes upon the book being reviewed, whilst also trying to keep tabs on the review of the book. (Q’s thought of VS sexually.) Q wonders if he is wasting his time — as I do with my reviews — following this purposeless old man who seems no threat to his own son, until Q finds patterns-towards-gestalt in the maps of Stillman’s seemingly random walking, as if the latter recalls Henry Dark… patterns from Babel noise…
EL is Hebrew for God (see my very recent review of The Bird’s Nest by Shirley Jackson.)
“He [Q] arrived in a neverland of fragments, a place of wordless things and thingless words.”
9
‘Yes, Quinn. Q-U-I-N-N.’
The radiation of the word Quinn, and ‘umbrella’ as a thing, how stripping off bits of itself makes it something else? and HD for Henry Dark or Humpty Dumpty or, dare I say, today, HIGH DEFINITION? Words as semantic fields defined in Heaven?
Alice Carroll Wittgenstein meanings 3 rapprochements with S by Q or Auster outside S’s hotel, and at rock where Poe sat but no 4th meeting Stillman’s hotel stank but he’s gone the trail gone cold the words still radiate…
‘You see, the world is in fragments, sir. And it’s my job to put it back together again.’
“A large black man sat behind the front desk with his sleeves rolled up. One elbow was on the counter, and his head was propped in his open hand. […] He [Q] walked back to his apartment in a downpour, getting drenched in spite of his umbrella.”
10
“Everything had been reduced to chance, a nightmare of numbers and probabilities. There were no clues, no leads, no moves to be made.”
This is the meta of META in apotheosis. A precursor of all faith in fiction. Q now not following S, takes on the latter’s shuffle as if inured to still follow S. Q finds Auster to discover he is not a private detective but a writer, Auster to whom VS wrote the cheque believing A to be Q, A who turns out to know Q’s erstwhile poetry; A talks about many theories of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, eating oozy ham omelettes, and a boy with a yo-yo. I am Sancho Panza, I guess. All these being rambling notes for my red nemo book.
11
“A white wall becomes a yellow wall becomes a grey wall, he said to himself.”
VS’s phone is engaged, and Q precisely maps out the numbered roads of his red notebook route through NY, and I wonder if we drew designs of these directions, as he once did for the shuffling S Senior, what would we see? He also itemised the many tramps and buskers, some mad like me. Was the engaged phone Fate, as he continues his paid task of protecting S Junior.
And then, on the subject of madness, we have mention in this chapter of Baudelaire!
I once had a rhyme, concocted by myself, that became an earworm for me in the 1960s… I quoted it here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2013/09/30/the-light-is-alone-by-thomas-phillips/#comment-1113
12
“His bowels were another matter,…”
I don’t know how Q (ɋ) elbowed himself into the bin. An attritional chapter of notes about his 24/7 obsession, while cloud watching as well as being on alert for S Sr arriving at the alley where VS and S Jr lived (or have I misremembered despite this aide memoire of mine?), and Q’s small hour exploiting for foodstuff, with hardly any sleep, at one point using his red notebook as pillow. Enough time, months, even years, to make him look like Crusoe crucified, I guess, as he finally admits defeat and hears news via Auster — well he did create this book as its freehold author, so he should know! — what the newspaper reported about S Sr.
Meantime, leasehold narrator Q’s apartment turns out to be relet!
nullimmortalis Edit
13
“So many things were disappearing now, it was difficult to keep track of them.
The last chapter of the first part of the trilogy that I have just read for the first time. And I now know why this first part’s central ‘red notebook’ I called NEMO BOOK all those years ago when publishing ‘ Nemonymous’. It has been obvious to everyone all the time, except to me. The attrition of vanishment and then taken over by a new narrative force who visits Auster as a ghost-writer.
“…soon he [DQ] was able to eat no more than a bite or two before the darkness came back. He did not think of turning on the electric light, for he had long ago forgotten it was there.”
With pre-echoes of 2024 when one can write with the voice on a screen…
“He wondered if he had it in him to write without a pen, if he could learn to speak instead, filling the darkness with his voice, speaking the words into the air, into the walls, into the city, even if the light never came back again.”
“The last sentence of the red notebook reads: ‘What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook?’”
But I’m still a man.
Then the snow came.
nullimmortalis Edit
GHOSTS
First of all there is Blue
Perhaps I involuntarily prophesied this unread-until-today work by the blue bowl at the head of this page?
“But the present is no less dark than the past, and its mystery is equal to anything the future might hold.”
All characters have colours as names, Blue being a private eye similar to Quinn above who agonised over 24/7 surveillance duties, Blue now on his own, having been mentored by Brown, occupying a flat opposite his prey called Black whose face is covered in white powder, but why has he been asked to follow Black? — and Blue is bored and sees more and more details of life, and so much more I could report on. I feel as if I need to keep surveillance on this plot 24/7. It is that sort of fiction work… As well as Black reading ‘Walden’, Blue sees through his binoculars that “Black is writing in a notebook with a red fountain pen.” And the snow came, too.
I have read up to: “For Black is no more than a kind of blankness, a hole in the texture of things, and one story can fill this hole as well as any other.”
“He sees the notebook and says to himself, notebook.”
My notes: Blue thinks of his fiancée — as he solely concentrated on the current job that has overtaken him overseeing Black — building her body part by body part (except explicitly her elbows) in his mind, as the bridge in NY was once made when his father was born, and one of its dynastic architects, when ill in bed, was said to be “drawing elaborate colour pictures for the foreign workers who spoke no English so they would understand what to do next,…” And the icy cryology tale of father and son in ‘Stranger than Fiction’, alongside when he follows Black, as Q once followed S, street by street, fearing Black is set to jump off the same bridge but instead Black leads Blue to a bookshop where the latter finds an edition of ‘Walden’ published by a publishing firm called Black. (For me, as a child, my favourite publisher was Blackie & Son)
So far I have read up to: “There is something nice about being in the dark, he discovers, something thrilling about not knowing what is going to happen next.”
“He [Blue] notes that Black has his hand on her elbow, but that could just be a reflex, he tells himself, and probably means nothing.”
An elbow moment in literature ALWAYS means something, I have discovered.
Blue ’notes’ above.
My own notes continue:
Anonymous postal money order; lonely and fulfilled moods interchanging
“…watching for the postman to round the corner and come into view, pinning all his hopes on what Brown will say to him. What he is expecting from this letter is not certain.” …leading to disappointment at the reply from this retired mentor called Brown.
Orange Street, escape or prison, he knows Black is going nowhere now, so Blue feels able to wander away, to, for example, baseball match for Blue, slave monument, famous black baseball player, barman Red, lady in bar Violet, but he remains guilty vis à vis the future Mrs Blue.
Cinema, too. Two films, one with Mitchum the other Stewart, meaningful but less meaningful than the earlier elbow, I claim.
“…he is struck by the sharp clarity of the colours around him: the green grass, the brown dirt, the white ball, the blue sky above.”
“But still – silence is not a rewarding response, no matter what it means.”
READ UP TO: “…the darkness of this thought does not leave him.”
“But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.”
Immediately after having this stirred in Blue by the intractable WALDEN, he realised he has lost his final chance with the future, now not future, Mrs Blue!
Is Blue being followed himself, forced into this endless inactivity and self-enforced imprisonment spying on Black, and is White the man in a Halloween mask entering the Post Offive to the PO Box cubbyhole, and if so why did the rest of the customers not scream in alarm rather than laugh out loud in such a context? (My question, not the book’s)
“He must go on disrupting things wherever he can, a little here, a little there, chipping away at each conundrum until the whole structure begins to weaken, until one day the whole rotten business comes toppling to the ground.”
“From the very start he has been the man in the middle, thwarted in front and hemmed in on the rear.”
Walden book’s ‘double case’ trap?
I have now read up to the following apposite quotation from the book, describing my own life of self-imposed imprisonment within words, gestalt teal-time reviewing the truths in fiction…
“This is strange enough – to be only half alive at best, seeing the world only through words, living only through the lives of others.”
Blue considers the pointlessness of following Black who seems to spend his time writing a pointless book (a bit like ‘Walden’?) – or a bit like the one I am also following with these notes? Blue disguises himself as an old man pretending to be a tramp and is engaged in this role by Black in conversation, inter alia, about the brain of Walt Whitman (who once lived here in Orange Street) — Walt / Walden? — and Wakefield a character of Hawthorne, was it? Sometimes, my notes do not catch up with my accelerating exhaustion and memory loss, and the consideration of the brain in this section by Auster as a chamber pot of exhausted poo, seems what any writer might have to expect for the state of their brain when dead, even a writer like me who has filled it with all manner of such deep things.
I have read up to: “….but beyond this point it would not be wise to go.”
“If Black is finally resolved to break out of his hermetic routine, then why would he begin by talking to a broken-down old man on a street corner?”
Was ‘hermetic’ there intended as a crafty misnomer for hermitical? This is becoming a game of bluff and multiple bluffs between Black and Blue and the increasingly bruised reader or the reviewer of it who is only pretending to be reading this for the first time and who may be playing his own similar game with both of them. And I realise with mock-surprise [SPOILER ALERT] about something obvious in this ‘game’ of nip and tuck, that they may be following each other without realising it, both employed by White, though Blue now doubts the existence of White at all! And as he goes through another personal game with the colours to while away his time, I think of yesterday’s synchronous eclipse of the sun by the MOON in my own real-time….
I have now read up to: “There is night over New York, he says.”
“I’m getting there, Black says thoughtfully. But sometimes it’s hard to know where you are. I think I’m almost done, and then I realize I’ve left out something important, and so I have to go back to the beginning again. But yes, I do dream of finishing it one day. One day soon, perhaps.”
Is this Auster’s novel that seems taking a Sun’s Age to write or revise by the laws of Zeno’s Paradox? Or Blue’s notes on watching Black, or vice versa, and what happens when one of them visits the other wearing the earlier Halloween mask? Why has one personal pictures hung on his wall, the other not? Who blacks out and who talks plainly in black and white? Who is on the point of death and who in a state of Null Immortalis? But what of Chekhov’s Rule in mentioning a gun in fiction if not in fact. Which the play, which the rehearsal, which the reality? So ends GHOSTS. As a shadowy third’s, my still watching review of the trilogy will no doubt continue.
THIS REVIEWS CONTINUES HERE: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/2024/04/10/the-new-york-trilogy-2/