Marie Ndiaye's THE CHEFFE: A COOK'S NOVEL (Tr Jordan Stump, Narr Edoardo Ballerini)

Cuisine is an art form that still resists duplication. A painting can be made into prints, as can a film; a book can be re-printed in a variety of formats but still with that original text. A recorded performance can outlive its performer(s). But a culinary artist's specialty? That can barely be approximated, a recipe published, yes, but is it the same when someone else, following mere written instructions that only poorly communicate the scents, sounds and colors occurring in the process, attempts to make it? Or if the chef/cheffe has to make it AGAIN long after he or she has grown tired of doing so, for, in order for a new person to experience this art, the artist has to create it all over again from scratch. Imagine Leonardo da Vinci having to paint that famous smile anew every time someone wanted to see it!

Then, too, there is a huge chasm between the appreciators, fans, of great or even just good, cooking, and those of any other art form. Only perhaps aficionados of pornography feel the same tinge of shame that lovers of food for its own sake either actually feel or know they are expected to feel; gluttony and lust are both among the seven deadly sins, after all. And making a meal for someone is perhaps as intimate as titillating them sexually, for in the realm of the art of cooking it's pleasure and not mere consumption of calories to sustain life, that is the object of the preparation and consumption of food. 

Which is all to say that the life of the woman known only as The Cheffe* in Marie Ndiaye's novel is more fraught with ethical and moral issues than it is with the kind of cutthroat competition and tests of skill and endurance that we more usually associate with the restaurant business, with the professional kitchen. Anthony Bourdain: The Novel this ain't. Though it has glimpses, perhaps, of Michael Pollan: The Novel. If Pollan had a creepy stalker trying to stage-manage his life from behind the scenes.

We learn of the Cheffe's childhood poverty and unpleasant early education, all the steps of her rise to prominence as that rare thing, a female chef in France, through the unctuous narration of one of her assistants, a man who would gladly have been her lover had she any interest in such a thing,  and whose feverish idolization seeks a kind of possession of her anyway. He claims to be the only person who ever really understood her at all, to have known her better than anyone else ever did, but of course it's the Cheffe emulation that lives in his head that he tells us about, even as he expresses complaints on her behalf about how misunderstood she was. Voiced by actor Edoardo Ballerini doing his best Jeffrey Coombs impersonation, his every word is fawning, admiring, exacting but also more than a little creepy. He's younger than his idol by quite a bit but there's still something Humbert Humbert-ish abouut him, though it's a Humbert who genuinely is, instead of just wants to believe so, the submissive in the relationship, as he constantly revels in her moral superiority to him, and of course her greater culinary gifts and her status as his employer. 

A bit comically, the narrator, who refuses to see a single flaw in the Cheffe, sees nothing but flaws in the one person who may know the Cheffe even better than he does: her daughter, who is almost exactly his age. 

The venom Ballerini imparts to descriptions, even casual mentions, of this daughter reaches levels of absurdity that perfectly complement the poetic adoration of his perfect goddess of a boss, only barely letting escape here and there any hint that maybe the daughter, whose greatest sin in his eyes is disloyalty to her divine mother, might have a story of her own to tell of the Cheffe that isn't quite so flattering.

Hilariously, he constantly accuses the Cheffe of speaking of her daughter with the exact same refusal to find fault that he uses to speak of her, never once noticing the blatant projection and hoping that we don't, either, always perfunctory apologizing for mentioning it and rushing to return to the subject of, not so much cooking itself as the sublime meditation and the moral universe in which good cooking can take place. He has no sooner stuck another knife into the idea of the daughter than he's off again expounding on the Cheffe's commitment never to waste ingredients or to disrespect either the animal a kitchen worker is dismemberment or the kitchen workers themselves.

The result is a bit of a stifling read, this account of an obsessed man obsessing about the object of his obsession, anxiously micro-managing our every impression or idea about what's going on, but it's still also such a glorious story of life and art and food that you keep reading, or listening, anyway. Truly, this is a book that will make you hungry, will tempt you to blow that diet you started in January while I was indulging in tamago sandos in Japan.

But we never get to enjoy the literary food porn for long before our narrator is yanking our attention away from the food like a stern host who is saving those dishes for more important visitors, even as he makes us doubt their existence; the Assistant goes down in my books with some of the all-time great unreliable narrators. By about a third of the way through the novel, his status as an unreliable narrator really starts to sink in; I found myself speculating that this whole story is a bit of slight-of-hand, meant to distract us (again I think of Humbert Humbert) from, perhaps, an actual crime or two,  and not just crimes of the heart on the part of our boy. Neither of the women of whom he so passionately speaks ever makes an actual appearance on stage, as it were. Both are just figures he manipulates as he tells the story, the one serenely engaging in various acts of creation and kindness in his memory, the other maligned and despicable in his present account. Is this really "a novel of cooking" or a heavily disguised confession? 

Have I just been reading too much crime fiction lately?

It would be interesting to someday read a counterpart to this novel that is more truly a character study of the Cheffe as she struggles for and wins her place in the still deeply sexist world of fine cuisine, with the tremendous pressure and discomfort of fame and being misunderstood through that fame, with the values of her dignified but bohemian parents who raised her in simple and, our narrator insists, strangely happy poverty but have no wish to benefit from her success. She overcomes these obstacles and more, but in this book we only see her indirectly, an elegant insect trapped in the amber of a dude's imagination. Which is maybe the whole point of this book. I bet Ndiaye herself has had a few guys like this narrator in her life. I think most of us have. 

Meanwhile, parts of the Assistant's strange post-Cheffe life have crept in. He seems to be sort of hiding out in a very posh retirement village he is technically too young to live in, spending wonderful days on various terraces in the kinds of endless parties that cannot but remind me of those in J.G. Ballard's High-Rise, a novel I did not expect to be thinking of in reading this book. A sub-plot involving an approaching visit to him by a suddenly announced daughter there becomes so prominent in the last quarter or so of the book that it starts all but breaking up paragraphs about the Cheffe without really seeming like it's ever going to have anything to do with the title character. Many reviewers have complained about all of this as an annoying distraction, a diminishment of quality on the part of critical darling Ndiaye, but if one understands that this is the story, not of the Cheffe but of another's hijacking of her legacy, all of this material snaps into place. The Assistant confides to us that he's never told his new friends and neighbors that he had a modest culinary career in the shadow of greatness and gloats over the pleasure he takes in being always given their own inferior efforts in that direction to try and how their condescending assumptions about his uneducated palate (more projection on his part, of course) amuse him. It all leads us further into the labyrinth of his telling of the Cheffe and her life as we wonder not only what became of her beyond those quiet late nights with him in the kitchen of her famous restaurant (a fait accompli from The Cheffe's earliest pages so this is not a spoiler), but how he came to retire so early and in such splendor. 

This is my second Marie Ndiaye novel, and my first read for my follow up to January in Japan, February from the French (I'm focusing not merely on novels from the nation of France, but from throughout the French-speaking world, so I couldn't call it February in France). If my public library were quicker about buying stuff I request, or I were more in funds, I would be in great danger of just letting this turn into Marie Ndiaye Month. It's a bummer that I can't. But I console myself that I've got some Virginie Despentes and Yasmina Khadra and Balzac and Collette and more on the pile. It should be a pretty great month here at Kate of Mind!

Michael Moorcock's THE LAUGHTER OF CARTHAGE

 Do I hate myself? Sometimes I'm pretty sure I hate myself. Or at least the imp of the perverse sitting on my shoulder really hates me, because I had the terrific idea that now, while Ukraine is dealing with a Russian invasion/occupation effort and state legislatures all over the U.S. are trying their hardest to roll back every bit of social progress our country has made in my lifetime and before, I somehow decided it would be an interesting time to read the rest of Michael Moorcock's sprawling, challenging and really hard-to-handle Pyat Quartet, also known as Between the Wars, being the continuing first person account of pretty much the whole of the 20th Century by a narrator so unlreliable as to make Severian seem like Walter Cronkite.

I first encountered the character of Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski , aka Colonel Pyat, back in 2015, back when The Former Guy was just an annoying game show host and we still believed in things like the political norms we'd come to take for granted like peaceful transfer of power and presidents getting to nominate and confirm supreme court justices no matter at what point in their terms vacancies occurred. The first novel in the quartet, Byzantium Endures, took Pyat from his birth in Kyiv on January 1, 1900 (Julian calendar), through the Russian Revolution and a little beyond. It introduced us to the thoroughly unsavory (as in self-aggrandizing, lying, womanizing, alcoholic, cocaine-addicted, anti-semitic, racist, paranoid, etc.) figure, first as someone the author (Michael Moorcock's self-insert-stand-in) met late in Pyat's life in London and to whom the author promised to see Pyat's memoirs into print, sight unseen, sure they'd be fascinating. But as the fictionalized Moorcock takes great pains to explain to us in a vast prologue to the text of the novel, Pyat's memoirs were really just a mess of ramblings in multiple languages, newspaper clippings, blueprints for inventions he claimed to have come up with first and other messy and barely legible ephemera, i.e. we're already pretty annoyed by the very idea of Pyat before we see a page of the novel's actual text. Furthermore, Moorcock took even greater pains to create a text as a sort of afterword to give us a glimpse of what the fictionalized Moorcock had to work with to produce the work in our hands, and it's a masterpiece of the kind we'd expect more from Philip K. Dick than Michael Moorcock. I compared it in my original review to Confessions of a Crap Artist and to that I still hold. Jack Isidore, eat your heart out.

Volume 2, The Laughter of Carthage, picks up more or less right where Byzantium Endures left off, in about 1920. After a long ship voyage as an exile/refugee from Odessa to Constantinople in which Pyat has shared a cabin with the future mother of Eternal Champion Jerry Cornelius but established a torrid shipboard romance with a widowed Russian Baroness, Pyat lands in Constantinople and starts debauching himself, continuing to see his Baroness, who hopes he'll run away with her and her exquisite daughter to Berlin, but also finding a young Romanian sex worker who is a dead ringer for his childhood sweetheart, Esmé, Pyat takes a while to get back to his career as an inventor.

Before we know it, though, he is rescued/taken prisoner after almost getting to try out his flying machine, in which all the parts, including a fuel tank and propeller, are strapped onto a human being, somewhere in Anatolia. Pyat bullshits his way into getting a free ride back to Constantinople, where all he has are lady troubles and a healthy dose of paranoia that Carthage (his synechdoche for, confusingly, both the Jews and the Muslims and, for good measure, the Catholics -- basically everybody who isn't "Byzantium", which, as he established in the first novel, he considers to be, basically, Tsarist/White Russia and whomever else he can convince himself is Protestant and White enough to be worthy of continuing to bear the Torch of Civilization) has never stopped pursuing him in the form of Bolshevik spies. Before escaping Constantinople, Pyat has to do some unsavory tap-dancing to avoid getting reported to the local authorities as a pedophile, ending by complicating his situation still further by convincing the Baroness that "Esmé" is actually a spy in whose trap he is haplessly caught. As he plots to "rescue" Esmé, the Baroness plots to rescue him, and it's all vintage Pyat. Whatta jerk. But there's so much worse to come.

Within a year I would become so famous the matter of one small factory and an insignificant municipal airport would seem a petty concern indeed. I had been given the opportunity to conquer the entire new world with my genius. A strong, scientifically advanced America would be the most powerful country on Earth. Once celebrated here, I would automatically come to influence the world. Then at last Russia, my old spiritual Russia, could be rescued from the Bolshevik scavengers. The steppe would grow green and beautiful again; the wheat-lands would bloom, the forests retain their tranquil profundity and the new golden cities would arrive, the cities of reborn Byzantium.

Such are our man's thoughts as he escapes from his latest collapsed effort to make his fortune from his "genius" invention of a slightly better airship and the development of Memphis, TN as the airship capital of the U.S., if not the world, rescuing the American South from its economic woes endured since the Civil War. Alarm bells should be ringing at this. And they should ring even louder when I tell you this scene takes place in 1922. And that our man Pyat's favorite movie is Birth of a Nation.

That's right, Pyat's new path to fame, fortune and influence is gonna be as a traveling rabble rouser for the second version of the Ku Klux Klan (hilariously exposed and lampooned by Robert Evans and friends as a proto-Multi-Level-Marketing grift in this episode of Behind the Bastards. Indeed, this second volume of Moorcock's most despicable anti-hero contains a murderers row of main characters from that podcast, with even Old Shatterhands and his creator, Karl May, getting name checked here. We could almost call The Laughter of Carthage "Behind the Bastards: The Novel" except it was published way back in 1984, likely before anyone involved with that show was even born. But I mean, Pyat even found the White House "disappointing" compared to the Klankrest in Atlanta, GA). But first we have a charming interlude in Europe, in which Pyat spoils Esmé rotten in luxury hotels, going to movies and clubs in 1920s Rome where he rubs shoulders with lots of actual historical figures who eventually become close friends/supporters of one Benito Mussolini, of whom Pyat already approves, of course, and then makes a stop off in Paris, intending next to join Mrs. Cornelius in England but only after he's extracted some profit for his genius airship ideas which, of course, come to nothing when "Carthage" strikes again and bankrupts the nascent airship company he and several French speculators have formed, and his French partners have all naturally made poor, innocent Pyat the scapegoat and never mind that he was living entirely off money he borrowed from an old friend from his Odessa days who, of course, has a disgusting homosexual crush on Pyat (never mind that Pyat is himself quite comfortably bisexual, and his joyful reunion with a Russian Prince from the first novel quickly turns into an affair as passionate as what he continues to have with the underaged Esmé, whom he has convinced everybody is his sister) and is thus pretty much yet another avatar of "Carthage", and it was only the extravagance with which he spent and "invested" his borrowed money (mostly on cocaine) that convinced the French partners that he was sound enough to trust with their capital and credit in the first place... 

Anyway, soon he has to get out of France quick, but can't swing a trip to England yet OR afford passage for both Esmé and himself to his next destination, the USA, where he pretty much repeats his French adventure except this time it's down in Memphis, and instead of escaping to another country to try again with his airship schemes (which again have blown up through no fault of his own), he falls in amongst the upper echelons of the Ku Klux Klan, who  bring him aboard a fancy paddle steamer on the Mississippi to give a special briefing to the colorfully hooded and gowned elite of the KKK about the dangers of Bolsheviks, Muslims, Catholics and International Jewry from his first-hand knowledge. His remarks are so entirely to the Klan's liking that he gets booked for repeat performances all over the country in the company of a formidable and sexy-yet-mature woman who chaperones him about the nation and fucks his brains out in train cars and hotels from coast to coast while he spreads his message of Peace and Love but only if you're "Byzantium." Along the way, Pyat manages to continue to learn nothing until this, too falls apart and he now has the Invisible Empire on his tail, another set of enemies that should be pretty hard to square as "Carthage" but he kind of starts framing them that way in his head anyway because Pyat and then, wonder of wonders, he is once again rescued by Mrs. Cornelius, who made her own way from Constantinople but also got sidetracked into the USA as part of a dance troupe of British Beauties entertaining in vaudeville-type theaters up and down California with the vague hope of being Discovered and made into a Movie Star, which is where we leave her and Pyat, who is absolutely convinced that he can make her dreams come true and never mind his track record on bringing his own fantasies to reality. Hey, he's only 22.

Many reviewers have complained that this second volume of the Pyat Quartet is not as interesting as the first, and they have a point in that Byzantium Endures is set against one of the most dramatic backdrops 20th century literature had to offer: World War I and the Russian Revolution. It also gave us genuine pathos in the stories of Pyat's mother and their neighbors, including the sad fate of Esmé the First, who only ever wanted to become a nurse and save the lives of Ukraine's brave fighting men, but, in Pyat's absence while he was off fighting and getting lost and getting conscripted as an agent by both sides at various times, got herself raped multiple times when the triumphant Red Army invaded and did what conquering armies do best in the early days of conquest. The Laughter of Carthage continues with the painstaking research and recreation of bygone days that made the first volume even more special, but replaces the drama with mere movement -- a picaresque -- in which we watch Pyat comically misunderstand his place in the world, the nature of his companions, and, as I said, fails ever to learn from his experiences, choosing at every failure to simply blame it on "Carthage" and shake his fist at enemies who barely know he exists.

Where the book, like its predecessor, succeeds enough to be worth the comparative tedium, though, is how brilliantly it achieves Moorcock's primary goal in telling us his ultimate anti-hero story here in our mundane real world: helping its readers to feel at last like they understand how capital H Hate happens, how people who seem perfectly ordinary and might even be ok to have a beer with once in a while are actually monsters who think the only people who count as people and deserve to share the Earth are able-bodied, well-educated, fair skinned, Protestant, cocaine-snorting fascists like Maxim Pyatnitski. It's an understanding that isn't pleasant to have, but is necessary for us in this dumb century -- a care package full of survival tips from the dumb century that came before it. Anyway, I really just want to see what kind of ridiculous adventures Pyat has had -- or believes himself to have had, or expects us to believe he had -- before he winds up a cranky old fart running a junk shop in Portobello Road. According to the blurb for the third volume, Jerusalem Commands, he's going to Egypt next. I'm down.

Olga Tokarczuk's DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD (tr Antonia Lloyd-Jones)

"Nobody takes notice of old women who wander around with their shopping bags."

With a title lifted right out of William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell" and a cranky old Polish woman spinning us a yarn that keeps wanting to devolve into just another cozy mystery except she just won't let it, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead feels like it was written just for me. I know I say that about a lot of books, but I contain multitudes you know?

Yes, I know, that's not from William Blake.

The cranky old Polish woman in question, and our narrator of questionable reliability, is an astrologer-cum-schoolteacher-cum translator-cum property manager named Janina, and she lives in a sparsely populated region of Poland so near the border with the Czech Republic that most of the time, if residents try to call emergency services, their call gets bounced to a cell tower in that other country and gets a recording in the Czech language. This makes said residents both frustrated as hell and very self-reliant, none more so than our Janina. Who hates that name but never really gives us one she'd prefer to be called, so I will christen her Crank.

Hey, it's very in keeping for how she addresses and talks about her neighbors. Very keen on thinking deeply about language, she hates the idea of personal names being meaningless sounds bestowed on a person by their parents before anything is known about us besides how many fingers and toes we have and if we've got a winkle. So her nearest neighbor is called Bigfoot, and her next nearest is Oddball, and her best friend and partner in translating William Blake into Polish is called Dizzy.

Lest I convey the very wrong idea that this is a charming and quirky story, though, well, it isn't. Crank is embittered as hell, embittered as only a passionate defender of animal rights can be when she lives surrounded by poachers, riders of noisy and polluting all terrain vehicles and bands of hunters who stride in formation through her beloved woods shooting in unison at pheasants and ignoring her pleas to stop and listen to her for just a moment.

Then one day, Bigfoot turns up dead, choked on a bone from a deer he'd poached*. And some other deaths occur. All with at least two things in common; proximity to Crank, and the apparent or explicit involvement of animals. Most want to chalk these deaths up as accidental; Crank thinks she's witnessing a string of animal revenge attacks that makes them murders! Who is right?

That's basically the plot of the novel. Interesting enough, but what makes it stand out is, of course, the prose, brought to very vivid but agonizingly slow life in the audio edition by Beata Poźniak**. "Winter mornings are made of steel. They have a metallic taste and sharp edges," Crank observes one morning, for example. There are tons of gorgeous little prose bombs waiting to explode in your head and realize that Tokarczuk and Lloyd-Jones are a hell of a team and Tokarczuk is definitely a Nobel laureate.

For me and my kind there are added bonuses, including a character (and possibly a love interest for Crank; it's nicely ambiguous) who is an entomologist deeply engaged in study of and efforts to conserve a bark beetle (which, yeah, people who know me know that I have a grudge against bark beetles for destroying so much of my beloved Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest, but it's really not their fault so much as human management policy's fault that they've run rampant there for decades, unchecked by the natural fire cycle and whatnot), and not just another character who is a mushroom picker but a whole society of mushroom pickers, so involved with one another and so organized that they throw a costume ball every summer right before the season for serious 'shrooming begins.

Finally, I want so much to gloat over how much I admire the last 20% or so of this book but it's really almost impossible to do without spoilers, which just kills me, but there you go. Drive that plow right over me, I dead.

And yes, I'm going to need to listen to this one again real soon, because it's that kind of book, one of my favorite kinds, that promises to be a very different read the second time around. Hooray!

*Having eaten my share of deer over the years, I cannot figure out what bone in a deer's carcass would be small enough for a man to choke on, but maybe it's a fragment? Either that or Tokarczuk and/or Lloyd-Jones think that deer bones are just like fish bones?

**Seriously. This is the first time I've resorted to bumping up the narration speed as I've listened. I found 1.30x to be adequate, but 1.0 was just too much as Poźniak draaaaaaaaws oooouuuuut allllllmost eeeeeeeveeeeeryyyyyy syyyyyyyyyyllable in her authentically Polish accent.

China Mieville's THIS CENSUS TAKER

As I've observed once or twice on this here blog, China Mieville is one of those writers whose work I buy just as soon as I hear about it, without knowing at all what it's going to be about, what genre he's messing with this time, or anything except NEW CHINA MIEVILLE. Were I a video game character, that would be the cheat code to make me drop my money on the spot.

(Except for Kraken, yo.)

This Census Taker gave me pause at first, though. It just seemed so unpromising once I read the description (after buying it, of course). A boy witnesses something traumatic and grows up with a deranged parent. That's too much like real life for a lot of people in this world. It's hot and yucky out and I'm living with chronic pain and no relief. Why would I want to read this thing?

Because China Mieville, I told myself. It's China. China has only let you down once. And everything else he has done has blown you away with awesome.

OK, self.

Quickly once I'd started reading This.Census Taker, I found myself imagining scenes from The Bed Sitting Room again (I found a few in-your-ribs references to that nutty masterpiece in Railsea) and realized I was pretty much just straight setting this book in that very messed-up world in my head. People are always asking the narrator's father to make keys for them, often keys to "open" impossibly abstract things. Then the boy watches dad go to work making them with various weird-sounding tools, polishing them with strange powders (of which he seems to have inexhaustible supplies) and then presenting them to his customers, who are never seen again. Do these keys actually work? Are they actually keys like we think of keys?*

Have I just seen one too many Yorgos Lathimos films?

Speaking of Lathimos and his artistic ilk, we have am unreliable narrator here, of a kind and quality that would do Gene Wolfe proud. This narrator, who warns us early on that he is writing a triple account of the story he's telling: one merely enumerating, in cipher, one "performing" for public consumption in collaboration with others of his kind, and a third meant to be kept absolutely secret. I have not, as of this reading, found the key (wink) to determine what passages are from what books, but perhaps the shift in narrative person has clues. Sometimes, you see, we get a pseudo-objective third person account of the Boy's childhood; sometimes he switches to first person. Sometimes this switch happens within a paragraph, which should be annoying, but isn't.

And this boy, who of course grows up to be This Census Taker, is a poor eyewitness with poor recall (like all humans, really), so we're never even sure if he is trusting himself, let alone expecting us to. Yowza.

Unfortunately, though, reliably or notThis Boy Who Becomes This Census Taker doesn't have a lot to say, and isn't interested in clarifying anything admit what he does say. There are hints that this is a post-apocalyptic setting, and that there are still some kind of lingering ethnic tensions going on (indeed, these census takers" job is specifically to count and collect narratives on everybody from the country that is the census takers' own point of origin. This is tantalizingly sinister, especially we face the possibility of a U.S. President who insists on creating a registry of Muslims, and not so he can market a halal version of his steak to them iykwim). Our boy has no knowledge of or interest in any of that, though, just wants to keep telling us about this thing that maybe didn't even happen. The effect is kind of like watching a really sophisticated and fascinating film but with a guy sitting in the seat in front of youth constantly getting up to shove his high school yearbook in his face, or something.

Ah, there, I've almost talked myself into hating this book, but I'm still kind of in the admirers' camp. But only kind of. I like the narrative experiment a whole lot; ditto the way this could fit into either a satirical or serious post-apocalyptic framework. But Mieville is capable of so much more, damn it.

Let's see what his next book brings.

*Especially since, pages later, the narrator refers to "keys" in the sense of typewriter or computer keys, as are arranged on a keyboard...

Gene Wolfe's PEACE

On the surface, Peace seems the most quotidian Gene Wolfe novel I've yet read, but the surface is never to be trusted with this guy. Oh, no. This is very likely the most elusive, occlusive and deceptive writer ever.

And this is -- and I say this as a passionate fan of all 12 books of Wolfe's maddening Solar Cycle but especially of the Book of the New Sun -- one of his most remarkably elusive, occlusive and deceptive books. And also, and this is probably because of its quotidian elements, the most tantalizing, because grounded in ordinary reality, mostly, and thus promises a certain possible relative ease of interpretation.

Not that it delivers on same. Or at least, not very much. Ahh, Gene Wolfe.

So on the surface this is just the regretfully nostalgic meanderings of an old man who lived an idyllic and improbable (to the modern reader -- c.f. how I felt reading Philip K. Dick's In Milton Lumky Territory) early 20th century small town in the American midwest, with all the Normal Rockwellian pastoral pleasures and soda shop scenes that implies. Albeit with a slightly sinister flavor, in that there's an awful lot of death and talk of death. And of course there's the way the narrative skips around in time, which may just be a dotty old man free associating but may also be a bit of a Billy Pilgrim-unstuck-in-time thing. And you can totally just stop there and read Peace as Gene Wolfe's Slaughterhouse-Five. But...

But then you notice all these recurring themes. How every single story that our man Alden Dennis Weer (usually called Den, one of the many onomastic clues that led good old Robert "Solar Labyrinth" Borski to spin out a whole involved theory about how Peace is Wolfe's version-cum-inversion of Goethe's Faust, with Den as Mephistopholes) tells or is told has certain repetitive elements that fractally echo other parts of the story that all relate back to Den's childhood sin of pushing a little boy down some very dangerous stairs.

And then there's that ending. Not since I first read Infinite Jest have I felt so compelled to go back to the beginning of a novel and read the beginning again because only now did I finally have the clue I needed to understand what was going on there. Except Peace is not over 1000 pages long. It's not even 300. You can read that in a night.

And Bog help me, I did. Yep. For the first time ever in my life, I read a novel twice in a row, with not so much as a short story, poem or internet article in between. And when I got to the end, even after hours and hours of figurative light bulbs popping and exploding over my head, I was still somewhat tempted to start again from the beginning*. But, as you'll see shortly, I have other reading and blogging obligations in the offing, and none of them allow for re-reading a novel almost as old as I am.

There. I almost read a book three times in a row. If that's not a ringing endorsement, nay, command, to drop everything and go read Peace at your earliest opportunity, what is?

*Neil Gaiman has famously observed that he only realized that Peace is a horror story on his second reading. And while elements of horror and ghost stories were noticeable the first time around -- I was especially seized by the theme of humans slowly turning to stone while they were still alive (there's even a mention of the Cardiff Man hoax! Hooray!) and the whole creepy carnival theme that springs up in the novel's second half -- I still don't read it so much as a horror story in the sense that term is usually used. The horror is that of guilt realized, of atonement rendered as impossible as redemption. Peace is simultaneously the most ironic and most perfect of titles for this book.

100 Books #48 - Elaine Dundy's THE DUD AVOCADO

A casual look over the blurbs and whatnot for The Dud Avocado might make it seem like its heroine is just a blonde* Holly Golightly amuck in Paris (our narrator even mentions Audrey Hepburn at one point). And sure, Sally Jay Gorce has things in common with that famous character: she is beautiful, seems a bit careless (especially about her love affairs), and has a tendency to show up for lunch in an evening dress for complicated and amusing reasons. But really, she is more like a Henry James than a Truman Capote/Hollywood heroine, except with even more going on upstairs.**

The Dud Avocado reads like a story told over a long and leisurely lunch by a sly older woman who has lived more than you have, but still, somehow, has kept the ingenue's breathless "oh golly" quality even as she shrewdly and candidly analyzes her possible errors, her weird sort of luck, the impression of herself she has given to others and her impressions of others, both on the surfaces and down in reality. She never goes so far as to break that fourth wall and directly address the reader, but that sense of her looking over the reader's shoulder as the pages turn (or the e-ink screens click by) is palpable. She never crowds us, having much better instincts than that (though she'll insist she doesn't, that she's really just blundering along, but don't let her fool you. Every word counts, perhaps most so when it most seems like it wouldn't), but she's watching our reactions under her carelessly perfect eyelashes.

She is, after all, an actress, and great actresses are not just good performers but powerful students of human behavior. Or, at least she is now, over that imaginary lunch. And she was then, too, in the story she's telling, but she wasn't so good at applying her insights, by golly!

Sally Jay has been turned loose on Europe in much the way her spiritual ancestor, Isabel Archer, was: an older male well-wisher wanted to "give her her freedom" (i.e., financial independence) to see what she would do with it. Sally Jay gets just two years of this freedom, after which she is expected, more or less, to make her own way, by marriage or perhaps a job of some sort where her intelligence and creativity an attractiveness are put to use; times have (sort of) changed since Isabel's inheritance set her free to be manipulated into marrying a fortune hunter.

But there's that pesky "sort of". Once Sally Jay sort of backs into her "first real relationship" she finds herself part of a circle of couples giving each other dinner parties and when her painter boyfriend learns that she can't cook, he gives her  "a wry sort of some-women-are-made-for-only-one-thing smile." She doesn't quite resent this, but that's partly because she is still free, although she's starting to see, at this point, an unappealing end to that freedom. "Here I was practically fresh out of the egg... and here was everybody telling me to stop drifting and start living in this world; telling me to start cooking, and swering, and cleaning, and I don't know what. Taking care of grandchildren." Italics Dundy's.

Because of course a young woman who hasn't allowed herself to be trapped in a life of domestic bondage can only be drifting. Even at the dawn of the sexual revolution (for of course, Sally Jo is sexually liberated -- how do you think she backed into that relationship. Ah, me).

But still, she is free, and free in a way that few people ever will be, ever again, in our age of Four Square check-ins and GPS-equipped everything: “Frequently, walking down the streets in Paris alone, I’ve suddenly come upon myself in a store window grinning foolishly away at the thought that no one in the world knew where I was at just that moment.” When was the last time you felt like that?

And that, along with the funniness -- the out-of-the-mouth-of-a-babe wittiness, the accounts of clumsiness, the unintended consequences of that will to say "yes" to every opportunity -- is what keeps this book bubbling along. You'll finish it in no time, but it will stay with you, for while it may look light and frothy on the outside, it's quite tart. And sharp. Mwee wappa.

Many, many thanks to Rob, the BardoRobot, for telling me about this book!

*Well, okay, for most of the story it's actually pink.

**Not to say some of Henry James' women are not very intelligent, it's just that we only ever see them from the outside, usually gracefully posing near a window or in a garden. Sally Jay tells us exactly what she's thinking about everything and everyone she encounters, puts everyone and everything in its place and never stands still.