Moving Beyond Mere Plot in The Painted Bird

I occasionally chart my progress though this reading list on Facebook and invite others to join me in reading the next book.  Once I finished Herzog, I made a blanket invitation to read The Painted Bird with me.  I noted that I had no idea what the book was about but that it was less than 250 pages in the version I had, so come play!  There were no takers, but then there never are, so that’s not especially noteworthy.  The thing that interested me was one of my friends’ responses: “Hooboy,” he wrote.  I asked  if he had read the book and what his comment meant.  He responded, “ Yea. I have not read the Painted Bird, but it's often at the top of ‘I want to be really really depressed, what should I read?’ threads.”  His comment made me both laugh and think.

The last time I had heard someone tell me that he didn’t want to read a book because he didn’t want to be depressed was in reference to Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.  If someone summarized just the plot of Grapes of Wrath, I don’t think I’d want to read it either.  Similarly, if before reading The Painted Bird, I knew that the story followed a child as he aged from 6 to 12 in the backwoods villages of a non-specific Eastern European country betting beaten, abused and molested while watching other get beaten, abused, and molested until the war ends and he is reunited with his parents only to discover that everyone is broken from the brutality of the war and no connection with anyone else can be made—if I knew that, I would not have dived energetically into the book.

But of course a novel is so much more than the outline of its plot.  In fact, with the exception of plot-twist-filled mystery stories, the plot is usually the least interesting part of any novel.  If you were to give a two page plot summary to 100 writers and asked them to tell that story, you would get 100 entirely different novels.  A novel is created by language, by characters and characterizations, by descriptions and the lack of descriptions.  It’s tone and perspective, sentence structure and attitude.  A book is never “about” its plot, and to dismiss a book because of its plot is to deprive yourself of some incredible reading, especially if you are talking about Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird.

The story is riveting from the outset.  Kosinski creates such a complete and absorbing world, that I wanted more and more, no matter how horrifying the events were to become.  And even when they were at their worst, the neutral tone and simple structure of the sentences and observations, presented through the eyes of a child who is no longer innocent but still far from experienced, all work together to create a visceral and intellectual punch that provides an impact without dragging me emotionally down.  There is, in short, nothing sentimental to gum up the works and bring the story down to an emotional morass.

The Painted Bird is a brilliant way to approach the horrors of World War II.  The war roils all around the action and is a constant presence even though we never witness a single battle.  The genocidal policies of the Nazis are given a grand context of hatred and meanness that is at the heart of the human condition, as Kosinski sees it.  The peasants of the villages that the narrator wanders between are no romanticized or idyllic figures.  The hatred of Jews, Gypsies, and other dark-haired peoples pre-existed Hitler’s rise, and the “science” of the Nazis that discussed brain sizes and attempted to prove the sub-human status of a large portion of the human race are predated by the superstitions of the villagers that can believe the narrator to be a vampire, that the very color of his eyes are proof that he can cast curses.

In a lot of ways, The Painted Bird is a re-telling of The Odyssey.  Odysseus has become a child wandering through the world looking for his home, suffering greater trials than the Greek hero could imagine.  The mist of mythology is replaced by figures of earth and clay.  When the boy finally reaches home, he’s not sure that he belongs even there, as if Odysseus, upon reaching Penelope, decides he is too changed to live the life he once did.  Like all the children in the orphanage, the narrator is scarred and broken.  The children are identified by their unique brand of destruction and brutality, carrying names like Tank, Flamethrower, Torpedo, and Sniper.  It’s an interesting indictment of war.  The war is certainly responsible for tearing all these families apart, for crushing these children and ruining their spirits, but the narrator’s adventures show that the brutality of the world exists even before war comes to the land, and it exists completely separate from the war.  War does not break humans; broken humans make war.

The question at the heart of the novel is this:  why do some people have the power to make others suffer and why are others made to suffer?  The narrator’s main quest is survival, and to survive he wants to discover the secret of how he can move from a sufferer to the other side of the equation.  He turns to Christian prayers, and when he feels that fails, he embraces the powers of the Evil Ones.  They too fail him, and he is left with Mitka’s philosophy of revenge: if you are made to suffer, make he who hurt you hurt equally.  It is this philosophy that leads The Silent One to kill hundreds in an engineered train catastrophe in order to kill one man who hurt and embarrassed the narrator.  The Silent One created his own holocaust and still failed to exact revenge on the one person he wanted to die.  Clearly, this is no way to conduct our human affairs. 

In recalling The Odyssey or one of the Brothers Grimm twisted tales, the narrative sometimes feels like a piece of folklore, and like folklore, it holds the seeds of truth about human motivations and nastiness.  No matter how much you might love your fellow man, you cannot deny the accuracy of the ugliness in this portrayal.  There is a ton to think about here.  There are beautiful and disturbing passages to roll over in your mind.  There is a lot to be upset about, a lot to want to change.  But there is nothing to keep you from reading it.

Hanging with Herzog

In my post about A House for Mr. Biswas, I noted that V.S. Naipaul created one of the richest characters that I had so far encountered.   But having now read Saul Bellow’s Herzog, I wonder if there weren’t something in the air in the early ‘60s that called for in-depth and epic concentration on a single mind and a single life.  Both Mr. Biswas and Moses Herzog are richly complex and conflicted characters, but whereas we encounter Mr. Biswas from the outside, watching his struggles, successes, and failures, we are brought into the very thoughts and questionably maddened mind of Herzog.  

Moses E. Herzog is a fascinating character!  Philip Roth, in his introductory essay to the Penguin edition of Herzog, beautifully describes him as having

an innocence as phenomenal as his sophistications,  [and being] intense yet passive, reflective yet impulsive, sane yet insane, emotional, complicated, an expert on pain vibrant with feeling and yet disarmingly simple, a clown in his vengeance and rage, a fool in whom hatred breeds comedy, a sage knowing scholar in a treacherous world, yet still adrift in the great pool of childhood love, trust, and excitement in things (and hopelessly attached to this condition), an aging lover of enormous vanity and narcissism with a lovingly harsh attitude toward himself, whirling in a wash cycle of a rather generous self-awareness.

All those contradictions coexist in Herzog, and Bellow allows us to feel them all first hand by employing a delicate mix of the first and third person narration.  Technically, the novel is written in the third person, but the narrator never veers from Herzog’s consciousness, and in fact he stays so close that the narration slips easily into the first person accounts and thoughts of our subject.  This movement between objectivity and subjectivity allows us direct access to the active tide of Herzog’s mind while giving us a firm reality to simultaneously hold on to.  We are in Herzog and above Herzog, within him and without him, a part of him and separate from him—and it is all a total joy to experience.  I can’t think of any fictitious mind that I would rather be submerged in.

What makes Herzog’s struggle so interesting is that he is an unanchored intellectual whose life has been falling apart but who seems okay with the disintegration:  “Considering his entire life, he realized that he had mismanaged everything—everything.  His life was, as the phrase goes, ruined.  But since it had not been much to begin with, there was not much to grieve about.”  How can you not love a character like that?

The scope of the novel follows Herzog for about a week of his life in the depth of his mental breakdown.  Some months before we find him, Herzog has taken to writing letters (both on paper and in his mind): “[H]e wrote endlessly, fanatically, to the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead.”  These letters intrude on the narrative with little prompting and even less fanfare, popping up and disappearing often without warning.  The reason for writing these letters, we are told early in the novel, is that  “Herzog had been overcome by the need to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends.”  A third of the way into the novel, Herzog is talking to his friend Lucas Asphalter about death, suffering, civilization, and reality, and he reframes why it is that he’s been writing letters:

The new attitude which makes life a trifle not worth anyone’s anguish threatens the heart of civilization.  But it isn’t a question of dread, or any such words at all . . . .  Still, what can thoughtful people and humanists do but struggle toward suitable words?  Take me, for instance.  I’ve been writing letters helter-skelter in all directions.  More words.  I go after reality with language.  . . . I must be trying to keep tight the tensions without which human beings can no longer be called human.  If they don’t suffer, they’ve gotten away from me.  And I’ve filled the world with letters to prevent their escape.  I want them in human form, and so I conjure up a whole environment and catch them in the middle.

These letters are a way to make sense of himself, his life, and the “reality” around him.  Herzog’s intellectual brain needs to take in everything and join it all together somehow, just has he has done in his scholarly work.  Throughout the novel, Herzog demonstrates an incredible knowledge of scientific, literary, and philosophical facts, and his intellect runs tirelessly over them.

In the end, what Herzog seems to be struggling for is a “grand synthesis.”  Near the end of the novel itself, Herzog is writing a letter to a Russian author whose work he admires, and he write, “’Synthesize or perish!’  Is that the new law?”  And indeed, that seems to be the pitch of his fevered mind.  At this stage in the novel, he is dubious of his abilities to achieve this synthesis: “Anyway the intellectual has been a Separatist.  And what kind of synthesis is a Separatist likely to come up with?”  But before this point, and throughout the novel, Herzog (and Bellow) play with all kinds of antitheses that seem to be in need of some healing syntheses:  there are concerns about what is the domain of man and what is the domain of woman, the Romanticists are pitted against the Realists, Herzog’s European feelings are held up in opposition to his brother’s American behavior, and Herzog’s emotional storm beats against the stoicism of those around him.  These are but a few of the recurring antithetical themes that play like individual melodies in search of a uniting symphony.  Herzog’s efforts, like everything else in his life, prove to be a failure, but like all the failures in his life, this one is hardly catastrophic.  In fact, it is sweet and beautiful and a gift to us readers.  He may not find the answer to it all, but he does find an inner peace, a moment when he had “no messages for anyone.  Nothing.  Not a single word.”

I had plans to discuss each one of the sets of antitheses above, but I see now that this post would be ridiculously long if I were to go on.  I will leave those essays for another day and most likely another person. 

This is my second Saul Bellow book, and while The Adventures of Augie March left me disappointed, Herzog has satisfied me greatly, filling my intellect, my sympathy, my humanism, and my love of a well turned sentence.  Herzog is by no means a quick read, but some things should force you to slow down and engage your mind and spirit.  This book is well worth the time.

The Novel That Came in for the Win

There are a number of reasons, I think, that John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold made it on to this list. 

First, the book marked a shift in the spy novel genre.  By the time Le Carre began writing his bestseller, Ian Flemming had already published seven James Bond novels.  The spy as international man of mystery was already a glamorous public figure.  Alec Leamas, the protagonist in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, is no James Bond.  He’s aging, he’s angry, he’s rough around the edges, and he never once draws a gun or uses a gadget.  There are no casinos, no femme fatales, and no mysterious villains with odd behaviors and plans to destroy the free world.  Everything about the novel makes spy work look like a dirty and unpleasant job.  When the book was published, it made huge waves and was hailed as a genuine look at the spy game in an increasingly tense cold war.  In spite of Le Carre’s protestations, reviewers treated the book as though it revealed dark secrets against the wishes of the intelligence community because the book got at some ugly truths.  The novel provided a much need counterpoint in the genre and set a new standard for spy stories.

Second, the book is short and sharp.  My edition is 225 pages long, and I read it in about three days, which is very quick for my slow-reading self.  But even in its brevity, the novel manages to make the reader not feel short-changed on anything.  The characters are quickly drawn, but they are full characters with the complete feeling of depth and a life that goes beyond the pages on which they are printed.  The relationships and exchanges echo in the deep well of a suggested past.  It may be only the illusion of depth, but as a reader, I never felt cheated.  In this same vein, the story moved quickly without leaving out needed details or leaving questions unanswered. While the prose didn’t send me running to Facebook to update quote after quote, it was sharp and controlled, admirably well written without ever seeming “beautiful” or pretentious.  Any more florid of a style would have been out of place with the moral landscape of the world Le Carre created.  And like the characters and the prose, the plot was deceptively simple too.  There were no twists and turns leading to an explosive climax, no red herrings leading Leamas down fruitless paths, no minor characters with their own agendas that interfere with Leamas’s objectives.  And once again Le Carre turns this simplicity into a strength, propelling his plot with a singular focus that is absorbing and compelling.  The one twist it gives is a whammy and more than enough to reward the reader.  At every turn Le Carre make simplicity a power.

Third, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a morally ambiguous mess, as one can only imagine intelligence, counter-intelligence, and matters of national security necessarily are.  Again and again we are told that the only thing that matters in the intelligence game is results.  The ends always justify the means.  If bodies of the innocent stack up on the roadside in order to protect the “greater good,” then so be it.  This all comes beautifully to a head in the penultimate chapter when Liz and Leamas argue over the roles they have played in this spy game.  Liz clings to her understanding of right and wrong as Leamas angrily attempts to explain the murkiness of it all.  He simultaneously rejects and embraces what he is saying, and we as readers are stuck in the middle with Leamas.  It is an ugly position to be put in, but one that we always knew was there.  The complications of the intelligence world are made plain and made to be felt, which is really all that any reader could ask for.  And this simple presentation of a complex situation is precisely why reviewers in 1962 felt that they were being given an inside look into something they were never supposed to see.   Even Le Carre’s portrayal of Liz and the British Communist Party is surprisingly gentle in the heart of the cold war.  The novel does not in any way endorse communism, but it has an understanding of the everyday people who embrace its on-the-face message of peace and equality.  And the criticisms it lays against the Party at the highest levels are equally laid against the leaders of the British intelligence community, as both powers are presented as ruthless and without a moral compass.  That too, I think, contributed to the book’s reception as an expose of ugly truths.

My only disappointment in the novel was the strain of sexism that ran through it.  Leamas shock at and distaste for any woman in a position of power (I’m thinking of Miss Crail and the presiding judge at the tribunal) are not subtle.  The female warden who is in charge of Liz is an unthinking and unquestioning buffoon of sorts.  And Liz herself is a rather sorry figure, even as she is the moral center of the novel.  At 23, she is alone and unloved, naively embracing the communist’s “historical inevitability.”  The only man for her is a 50-year-old gruff partner who offers her nothing emotionally, but to whom she devotes herself whole-heartedly.  She is, as Leamas says, “a frustrated little girl,” and that’s about all the respect she gets from anyone.

But for the short shrift given to Liz, this is a fantastic novel.

A Dance to the Music of Time - Book IX - The Military Philosphers

I have not read a lot of books about World War II, either fiction of non-fiction, and didn’t know what to expect heading into the three-part section of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time that dealt with the war years.  The novels up to book VII, which begins Britain’s involvement in the war, while ranging near and far in Nick’s travels into manhood, were mostly in the style of novels of manners, so I was interested to see if we were thrown into the thick of battle or if the style persisted.

Given that Nick and his friends were deep in their thirties when the war began, they were not placed anywhere on the front lines.  In fact, Nick worried about how he could enlist quickly given the handicap of his age.  Nick did manage to enlist, and after working in different posts in England through books VII and VIII came into the lasting position of his military career in Book IX, that of managing the attaches from first Poland and then Norway and Belgium.  These final positions had him stationed in London. 

As a result of these matters, Powell is able to maintain his tone and style even as the war rages on in the form of blitzes and the reports of those who have fallen.  Not only does it suit Powell’s style, but it’s also a fascinating way to recount the war.  Of these last three books, the second one, The Soldier’s Art, was to me the most enjoyable because we spent the most time with characters we had been following before the war broke out.  But this latest book, book IX, The Military Philosophers, was the most interesting from an historical perspective.  So little time can be devoted to the war in our history classes that we really only get the highlights of the big moments in the war.  I had never even given thought to the political relationship between the greater powers and those of the smaller countries on the side of the Allies.  Powell’s focus is always on the movement of time and people, so he does not spend a lot of time uncovering the lives and political nuances of the situation, and while his coverage is sufficient to let us know the general ins and outs of Nick’s life, I found the quick skim over the surface of things made it difficult to really submerge myself in the fiction.  Because we weren’t diving down, I found myself becoming impatient and wanting to rush through the chapters to find an encounter in which we could spend some time.

It can be tempting to rush through what seems like humdrum material in Powell’s books, and I needed constantly to remind myself to slow down for two reasons.  First, the prose is so beautifully constructed that it would be a waste to blow past the sentences in search of a chapter.  Second, Powell is writing something that is much larger than any one book, attempting to capture the very motions and patterns of life as we live it, which means things that are humdrum today can prove to be critical tomorrow.  Powell is not interested in wasting anyone’s time, least of all his own, and I have to believe that what is laid out for us here is important not only at the moment but also down the line.

Powell shows his power as an author most readily in his concluding chapters.  The final chapter of The Military Philosophers is not only the final chapter of this one book, but the final chapter of this trilogy on World War II.  The war’s ending is celebrated and the lives that were once pulled together begin once again to separate, and Powell takes his time beautifully gathering each thread and placing them together, revisiting once forgotten moments as Nick sorts his thoughts out about the last five years of his life.  It was a fantastic ending to three enjoyable, though at times tedious, books.