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Compass, Mathias Énard

In 2019, I finished a book every day. I decided to do this when I noticed, a week or so into the year, that I had been keeping up a book-a-day pace, and decided that trying to keep this up for the remainder of the year would be a good goal. I won’t bore you with the set of restrictions and rules that I ended up developing for myself regarding what counts as finishing a book, what sorts of rereading were permissible, etc. As you can imagine, an exercise focused so completely on volume has some necessary drawbacks. I found myself seeking out short and manageable books when busy, afraid of starting a book that might require more than a single day’s worth of free time to finish. Eventually I worked around this instinct, by spreading longer books out over several days while also reading something short each day to satisy my (again, idiotic and self-imposed) quota. Some unexpected benefits sprung up, as they often do under formal constraints. For most of my life that I can recall, I’ve been worried that I’m not reading enough, in one way or another: either I’m not reading enough to meet my professional and artistic goals, or I’m missing out on too many interesting and fun books, or I’m just annoyed at myself for wasting too much time on twitter, wikipedia, etc. By displacing this formless anxiety with a very specific and measurable anxiety, I allowed myself for the first time some level at which my subconscious would relent and allow me to say that I had, at least for the day, “read enough.”

This year, I’m not holding myself to any such goal, which comes as somewhat of a relief. However, since last year’s constraint was relatively productive, I’m going to try an analogous project this year. Last year’s project was more or less private, and if I had given it up a few months in I would have been the only one to know. This year, as part of my attempts to increasing my writing production more generally, I’ve decided to write up what I think about everything I read this year, using this blog as a repository. I hope that doing this will force me into a slightly more active reflection on my reading, even if all I have to say is a pretty basic statement of opinion. The nominally-public nature of posting it on this site will, hopefully, force me to make my output readable, which would probably not be the case if I just kept notes for myself. The public-facing part of the idea is important for another reason: as some of my friends are probably aware, I’ve avoided making a Goodreads or anything like that for a long time, in part because I’m really afraid of the effects that placing myself in a Panopticon, even a sparsely populated one, might have on my reading choices. I really don’t want to end up choosing things to read based on what I take them to communicate about myself, rather than my interest in them or desire to learn something contained therein. So, I figure the best way to deal with this anxiety is to face it head on, while allowing myself the writeup format to offer some account of my choices, as a salve to said anxiety. Besides, if anyone decides to waste their time reading this, it would be cool if I got to recommend some interesting stuff to them.

The first thing I read this year was Mathias Énard’s novel Compass, as translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell. I’ve read this book once before and absolutely loved it, enough that I tracked down and read his novels Zone (also very good, if less “up my alley) and Street of Thieves (not as good, but maybe more exciting) before returning to Compass. The first time I read it, I was suffering some kind of fever and rushed through it in the span of two hours or so, barely stopping to take in the novel’s many attractions. The combination of illness and speed meant that I found lots of fun barely-remembered passages this time around, although I can’t say I was in optimal condition. I read it in the evening during my marijuana-assisted recovery from my New Year’s celebration, which seems fitting for a novel about an insomniac recalling his life through an opium cloud.

The most natural point of comparison, at least for me, is with Sebald. Like Sebald’s novels, Compass contains long digressions on various minor and major historical figures/events/locations/etc., consistently pointing out delightful coincidences between them. As in Sebald’s novels, these digressions or observations are often voiced in the text by someone other than the narrator, and provide an interesting opportunity for some reflections on intersubjectivity. The tone of decay, the love of the arts, the melancholic tone, all hearken back to Sebald. I’m quite interested, then, in the way in which the book turns out a wholly different experience than any of Sebald’s novels. Of course, we can explain some of this divergence as a difference in “tone.” Compass has more explicitly comic passages than any of Sebald’s work, and the narrator’s self-deprecation is placed much further to the fore. Placing too much weight on these features would be a mistake, I think; Sebald has a wonderful sense of humor, if a rather German one, and the narrator’s authority is regularly undermined in subtle ways throughout his novels. I’m thinking here of the section in The Rings of Saturn where Sebald is describing a desolate beachside resort town. The description is peppered with pictures of empty streets, depressing beaches, and so on. Only at the very end of the chapter is a picture of a bustling main street included, continuing where the frame of the earlier desolate-beach picture cut off. It’s a wonderful moment, and a great mechanism for slyly poking at your own narrator’s authority. Of course, Compass includes such subtler moments as well, going alongside the narrator’s more vocal self-doubt. So, again, the two look quite similar under a certain light (well, my light, as a Sebald obsessive and compulsive patternmatcher.)

But I already told you that I’m more interested in the differences! One easy way to explain where they come apart would be to slot Compass into the silo of “psychological novel”, perhaps specifically in the subgenre of psychological novels concerned with relationships. Meanwhile, we could call Sebald’s novels “novels of ideas,” and thus the two would be neatly separated. As you can tell, I don’t think such classification is a very good idea. Anyone who reads Compass can see that Énard has a whole lot of ideas, and the motion through these ideas and the interactions between them form much of the novel’s appeal. Similarly, Sebald is intimately concerned with psychological life, and distinguishing someone from him on the grounds of their having such concern seems misguided. Nevertheless, Compass really does “feel” like a novel about one man’s neuroses as they’ve played out across one long, stymied relationship, and (to stick with the earlier example) The Rings of Saturn really does “feel” like a novel about a set of cultural-historical figures as they’re brought into conjunction through Sebald’s strolling. I think this difference can be explained by something like the location of tension in each work (I hope you’ll forgive my sparse literary-critical vocabulary, by the way). In Compass, the driving tension of the novel is a certain failed carnality: Ritter (the narrator) has, in one sense, failed to unify his bodily attraction to Sarah with his appreciation of her mind and work, and his anxiety about this failure shows up everywhere. We see it in the insomnia that provides the pretext for the book, in his vaguely-defined but certainly-fatal disease, in his thoughts about his overbearing mother, in his enjoyment of the pleasures of the flesh on his travels… Often, his erudition shows up as a sort of cover or crutch for his anxieties about the vagaries of embodiment, as in one of the passages I posted on twitter, where the pain and impotent anger of the chronic insomniac is shown through some brief musings about Wagner, Schopenhauer, and Schopenhauer’s dog. The ideas out of which the novel is made form, I think, a supremely interesting structure through which the actual drama of the novel, Ritter’s mind and his reflections on and through Sarah, can play out.

Something close to the opposite is true in The Rings of Saturn. There, the narrator is much more physically mobile, trading the invalid’s bed for a good old English walking tour, although it is interesting to note that this tour is bracketed by the same nervous breakdown and hospital stay, which occurs both following the walk (in the order of narrative) and preceding the walk (in the order of textual presentation.) The people he meets, while interesting in their own right, never inspire a bodily response of any kind (erotic, fearful, aggressive) in the narrator. There is little narrative surprise: we are told from the outset that this tour ends with his hospitalization, and the manner in which this occurs is just as one would expect from reading the first ten pages or so. The excitement of the book comes almost entirely from watching Sebald’s narrator flit from topic to topic, in the process ingeniously showing the unexpected connections between his topics of interest. I was describing the book recently to someone as a fugue, in which Sebald’s various recurring topics (Thomas Browne, Borges, The Anatomy Lesson, etc.) float forward in new combinations, forming links which are almost invariably surprising and fascinating. To pull this off, it’s almost necessary that the actual narrative of the novel provides a sort of substrate on which to place these thoughts. For this reason, the thoughts themselves are allowed much more fluidity and eloquence than Ritter’s. Where Sebald’s narrator’s thoughts appear as a fluid sketch, with new forms arising at once out of his linework, Ritter’s thoughts feel at his most confident like the intricate detailing of an 18th century illustration, turning at his darker moments into the cramped crosshatching of an obsessive.

I hope this sheds some light on what I mean by “tension.” The excitement in Sebald comes from the way in which the narrator’s ideas collide, while the excitement in Compass comes from the way in which people – ideas and bodies included – collide. That was a disgusting oversimplification, but I hope you get the idea. To continue the musical metaphor I was using earlier for The Rings of Saturn, the pleasure of Sebald’s fiction reminds me of something I read once (can’t remember where) about the nature of “surprise” in classical music. I am anything but a trained music theorist, so apologies in advance for any errors I make in my very loose recalling of the author’s point. In classical music, much of the listener’s pleasure comes from the process of resolution, where dissonance is generated and then followed up by consonance in such a way that the dissonant moment “feels” “completed.” This makes surprise an odd duck, since the reason that such a resolution works is that it is in some sense formally expected. If the sound was really unexpected, it wouldn’t sound good at all! And yet, as anyone who has ever read program notes can tell you, classical music is often called surprising, and as anyone who has listened to it can tell you, classical music often is surprising. This surprise comes from the possibility of an “unexpected resolution”, a sounds that surprises precisely in the fact that it really works. This is how we experience The Rings of Saturn. We know where he is going from the beginning, and there is never any real question of “what will happen,” yet the book continually thrills us by moving from a theme back to an earlier one through a connection or observation that really, genuinely, surprises.

Compass does not have this same formal security, and the ending, while deeply satisfying, can make no claim to necessity. This, I think, might be why the labels of “psychological novel” and “novel of ideas” are so tempting for the two books. Ritter’s story is bound by the uncertainties of real life: the uncertainty of his remaining life, the uncertainty of how Sarah feels for him, and so on. The ending to such a story could never have the formal satisfaction of resolution. This wavering uncertainty is the hallmark of the psychological novel. Again, we can come to see the two as mirror images of each other. While The Rings of Saturn is a novel that uses one man’s walking journey as the gateway to a constellation of thought, Compass is a novel in which ideas become our signposts in the exploration of a single life. These are both great novels, and you should absolutely read them.

26 Stories, Machado de Assis

After writing the above, I decided to read some short stories by Machado de Assis, translated here by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson. The only work of his I’d read before was a dubious translation of Dom Casmurro that I took with me on a train ride. The train car was overly hot, the prose of the translation was stilted and dry, and my head was hurting. I did not make it very far into the book. So, I’m more or less coming to these stories fresh, with little to say about Machado de Assis or, really, Brazilian literature other than Lispector. I’m pretty tired and don’t have much to say about this book, so this should be a lot shorter than what I wrote about Compass. Several of the stories were evidently satires on a social world with which I am unfamiliar. I could tell that they were well-executed, and some of the comic moments still hit correctly, but I was unable to really get that thrill of recognition that really great satire can provide for one familiar with its target. Other satires, however, still hit their mark. The Devil’s Church is a classic story of the devil being outwitted, and holds its own with your “Devil and [Character]” staples. How to Be a Bigwig is hilarious, and The Alienist (which the back of the book calls a novella) is an amazing satire of scientific obsession, the social regulation of madness, and bureaucracy. Elsewhere he does fable as well as anyone, setting up a conversation between Prometheus and Ahasuerus at the end of the world or bringing Alcibiades back to life, only to kill him again by means of stodgy contemporary menswear. Basically, these are a lot of fun, go down easily, and are definitely worth reading. They’ve even inspired me to make a second attempt at Dom Casmurro, although this time I will be looking for a more modern translation…