2009 – this edition LES FUGITIVES 2017
When I read this work, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
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.
2009 – this edition LES FUGITIVES 2017
When I read this work, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
.
2003
My previous reviews of Paul Auster HERE
When I read ORACLE NIGHT, my thoughts as aide memoire will appear in the comment stream below…
I had been sick for a long time.
“…the onrush of whirling colors – a blue scarf wrapped around a woman’s head, say,…”
…as if the woman stranger lived in a Shirley Jackson book, divorced completely from this book?
The man is 34 and has suffered illness in hospital and leaves, hardly better, to go back to his wife like an old man or someone with a prophecy of Long Covid. This new aide memoire of mine starts where that of The New York Trilogy left off, where a red notebook was important and now, on one of his solitary struggling walks, he buys a new blank notebook that seems to settle his nerves, as he listens to the near silent oasis of a stationery shopkeeper’s scratching pencil.
I have so far read up to…
“There were just four notebooks left on the pile, and each one came in a different color: black, red, brown, and blue. I chose the blue, which happened to be the one lying on top.”
‘The problem with writers is that most of them don’t have much money to spend.’
Blue Portugal notebook?
The character and backstory of the proprietor Chang of Paper Palace stationery shop. Ha ha ha ha.
I wonder if Chang is short for Change?
Read up to the following in the important first footnote:
“…the first Orrs in America had been Orlovskys. My grandfather had shortened the name to make it sound more American – just as Chang had done by adding the decorative but meaningless initials, M. R., to his.”
I shall now be reviewing this book alongside ‘Blue Self-Portrait’ by Noémi Lefebvre: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/04/20/blue-self-portrait-noemi-lefebvre-2/
Read up to: “…a man named Nick Bowen. He’s in his mid-thirties, works as an editor at a large New York publishing house, and is married to a woman named Eva.”
Elizabeth Bowen’s last novel was EVA TROUT, where she explicitly consoled her elbows. This is the narrator precariously starting to write in his blue notebook, with a story derived from The Maltese Falcon? Starting his life again in a world of randomness and chance deaths ?
Seems I forgot yesterday to transfer this from my cyber-notebook to this review or aide memoire….
=====================================
“As the story opens, the manuscript of a novel has arrived on Bowen’s desk. A short work bearing the suggestive title of Oracle Night, it was supposedly written by Sylvia Maxwell,…”
Absolutely two page-turning novels interweaving, one being written within the other. With inversions as well as similarities between them. As if competing like the two novels in Nemonymous Night? And a wonderful stub of pencil producing a long stylish Footnote 3 about the freehold narrator’s wife Grace “…looking into her eyes and studying the contours of her lean, angular body, that was what I fell in love with: the sense of calm that enveloped her, the radiant silence burning within.”
There is much about the women in these novels that reminds me of the physical as well as spiritual being of Elizabeth Bowen, including, in Sylvia’s, if not in Rosa’s, case, contemporaneity.
Read up to, as well as now written up to: “All in all, I had covered eight pages in the blue notebook.”
“…a prize relic from the 3-D craze of the early fifties.”
This is 1982. Footnote 4 has, for me, a stub of pencil tell us of Sidney Orr, the narrator, and his friendship with now age-haggard John Trause, an uncle figure to whom he is allowed to call ‘Gracie’, JT today suffering with phlebitis and JT thinking of his beloved late Tina’s brother Richard who was almost Tina in a kissable male form…
“…the chignon knot in Tina’s hair, the whooshing of her long yellow dress.”
Some telling of other writers telling a story of others telling a story? — with footnotes, and replicable blue Portugal notebooks, JT going back in time with 3D slides he had suddenly rediscovered, till the projector broke… a bit like an unfinished period novel? 1982 in 2024. “…supernaturally sharp.” I wonder if I shall live long enough to complete ‘Oracle Night’? Stick with me here, and we shall eventually see.
Then Orr’s nosebleed: “…the crimson of a mad artist…”
“Those notebooks are very friendly, but they can also be cruel,…”
I have so far read and written up to: “…you’re a little off in the head. And I’m just as off as you are. We write books, don’t we? What else can you expect from people like us?”
Read up to: “Break me in two, Sid.”
Sid Orr, the narrator, and Grace, after visit to JT, negotiating the dark of Brooklyn and a taxi, a conversation on colours, reminding me of this author’s GHOSTS, and Shirley Jackson’s inverse BLUE in much of her fiction. And a sudden marital debate leading to G’s erotic request above to the narrator when they got home. I note that in American English, COLOUR does not have yoU in it.
Cross-referenced with today’s section of the Lefebvre: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/04/20/blue-self-portrait-noemi-lefebvre-2/#comment-28380
“I didn’t have to approve of Bowen’s actions in order to write about them. Bowen was Flitcraft, and Flitcraft had done the same thing to his own wife in Hammett’s novel.”
Longest footnote yet, no. 6: de Kooning and Grace.
Notebooks about notebooks, novels, too.
Read up to: “Everything still had to be worked out concerning the plot,…”
“Kansas City was an arbitrary choice for Bowen’s destination – the first place that popped into my head. Possibly because it was so remote from New York, a town locked in the center of the heartland:”
A quote from another footnote, this is Nick Bowen’s escape (written about in Orr’s novel, or Auster’s?), while reading Sylvia Maxwell’s novel ‘Oracle Night’ about Lemuel Flagg, a means to help his escape, I am confused but delightfully so, so this aide memoire may be wrong even at a minuscule distance of time between reading and writing, and I can’t remember who Rosa was, including even the taxi driver today with a business card and odd telephone number about ‘history preservation’, and that may not even be an accurate quoted wording. Not forgetting the Hyatt Hotel disaster.
Aspects of Maxwell’s novel about Flagg remind me of Elizabeth Bowen’s HAPPY AUTUMN FIELDS here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/10/29/fuming-cataracts-and-null-eternal-snows/ or is it one of her other works I am thinking of
“How odd. I just noticed that the numbers go down in order, one digit at a time.”
This book was sent to me yesterday as a gift out of the blue by a friend who knew I was interested in listening, with my innocent ear, to the music of Arnold Schoenberg, a book where this composer’s portrait is said to be featured in it. I shall now be reviewing it alongside Paul Auster’s ‘Oracle Night’ here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/04/19/oracle-night-paul-auster/
Read so far up to: “Schoenberg’s face versus the Nazis’ face—“
An all-consuming monologue (“the unquenchable stream of observations and ingenious associations that flowed from me, each new idea more striking, subtle, singular and wondrous than the last”) taking us from the bellow of a moocow, the touch of an arm (its ‘elbow’ being, for me, in the ‘bellow’) and what is below a plane flight, later on ’autopilot’ in an exhibition of Third Reich Art in interface with visits to German cafés and her teaching an accomplished male pianist about playing a Mozart piano concerto when she claims to us not to know anything about music, as I don’t, either. And knowing nothing known about cars, too, like me.
I have been researching the Wannsee and Heydrich on 20 January 1942 overseen from the writer’s sororal plane, and Schoenberg’s position in the Nazis and Music syndrome. A context for this ever-compelling soliloquy that has word associations to die for. Theodor Adorno, Thomas Mann, Beethoven’s bust and howl, and I am, alongside the soliloquist’s crush, mesmerised, too, by the café pianist she describes, an alternate para-situation which makes me think of Dr Faustus and the Magic Mountain, and the aesthetics of music where contrast feeds on contrast to allow one to soar! And bovines to bellow from below! Read up to: “…and you’ll die of shame.”
Read up to: “…the cuckoos’ debut…”
Resonating with this very tuckoo’s moocow? Much hangs on the pianist, when arriving amid the soliloquist’s pent breath at sight of him, choosing a blended malt not a single. (Being mid-air in the blue, between earth and heaven, is, for a human being, sort of blended, too?)
Read up to: “…kept quiet so as not to disturb.”
“The pianist’s fingers practising in mid-air…”
‘Vision’ and ‘counter-vision’, point and counterpoint, phrase and ‘counter-phrase’, echoing my contrasts above feeding off each other, incapable to talk about music but ‘dying’ to do so, “still and temporary life with the natural memory of Schoenberg captured in paint.” Reading this soliloquy is increasingly like listening to his piano music, which I intend as a compliment, because I often listen to it out of innocent-ear choice not knowledgeable duty. Her sister and then mother-in-law, and tennis, bones and sinew, “the substance of my own body”, and I think of elbow again in this context, as there is the accompaniment’s touching of the pianist’s right knee which was the next best thing. Sorry how this aide memoire’s forced strain that it sometimes puts on the book’s “malleable” sinews or connections, but I feel this is in keeping with the strain on the body when playing a twelve-tone piano (whatever twelve-tone means!), even on a brain reading a book like this.
“…to leave the Earth and see it from the porthole, to see it and not be there, suddenly simply not be there.”
Read up to: “the blue’s chill negativity”
….which is preternatural following my reading of this section of Oracle Night a half an hour before just reading the next section of the Lefebvre: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/04/19/oracle-night-paul-auster/#comment-28379
Much on collective happiness, the narrator’s mother in law’s tennis club, the narrator’s unworkable marriage and Schoenberg refusing “the collective morals of musical happiness”, and the sororal mid-air flight arguably with a rugby ball as violin case, a violin bringing to my mind a pumping elbow!
Today I read about another self-portrait in a significant footnote of ORACLE NIGHT here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/04/19/oracle-night-paul-auster/#comment-28383
The multiple crossings and uncrossings of her legs, (because doing so with elbows is impossible in a similar way?) the pianist in interface with Schoenberg’s blue face, is the pianist seeing the soliloquist in the inner way the soliloquist believes he sees her?
Read up to “…like a tragic history.”
“….I took music seriously with Adorno on one knee and Mann answering him from the other one, with the pair of them on my wobbly knees and moreover the pianist who went on making me bellow in silence…”
From knees to bellow, this seems very telling, especially now in the context of all the violin playing “like a nutter” by her sister on a plane, and what do tennis and violins have in common, yes you guessed it! Thoughts about being an airplane pilot, too, bombs, terrorists, being a composer of music like Schoenberg’s &c.
The pianist taking her to the cinema where we have the equally telling popcorn scene, whereby I have now read up to…
“….digging about in the paper bag and raising handfuls to his mouth through the trailers, elbow on the armrest fulfilling the elementary function of a lever…”