Tag: literature

Book Notes: Álvaro Pombo’s Gay Novel

~ Clarissa ~ 23 Comments

Contra natura – or “against nature” – is the magnum opus of the famous Spanish author Álvaro Pombo who finally decided to lay out his understanding of homosexuality after a lifetime of being openly gay. Pombo doesn’t write about the gays who imitate the heterosexual setup by getting married and setting up joint households. For those gays he has quite a bit of contempt because the kind of homosexuality that fails to embrace its unnatural (contra natura), anti-social dimension is, in Pombo’s eyes, pathetic and vaguely disgusting.

Pombo’s novel is about another kind of gays, the ones who are gay in order to avoid the complexities placed by women on the way to sex. That there is such a duality among homosexuals – the ones who want to be (or to marry) men who are like women and the ones that want a sex life free from female patterns – was a commonplace even in the prissy US 15 years ago. But now it’s all a big secret and we are supposed to pretend that the entirety of homosexuality can be reduced to the lifestyle embraced by Pete Buttigieg.

Pombo is blissfully unaware of political correctness and writes his novel to show what happens to the non-Buttigieg gays in old age. What do you do when you are 65, and your body simply can’t give you rapid-fire sex acts with a large variety of new partners? You have to buy the companionship of young men, Pombo says. You have to open yourself up to humiliation and abuse. To Pombo, that is perfectly fine. The gays, he says, should not be like the heterosexual

shit-eaters whom we have always envied and hated. Our purest connection is with failure, with marginalization and with death.

And that, Pombo believes, is fine. Gay men are the shadow of self-satisfied bourgeois propriety. They are a conduit to the darker, more painful and chaotic side of human beings, to the Dionysian rites of pleasure and pain that inspire non-reproductive creation. Instead of running down the streets in Pride parades, says Pombo, the love that dared not speak its name should now choose to not speak it in order to remain on the margins where, says Pombo, it belongs.

I am a heterosexual woman, and much of the novel’s text was hard for me to understand. It’s a beautifully written work of art. Pombo is one of the Spanish greats, having received every literary prize in existence, and deservedly so. But it took me far longer to read the novel because none of it was understandable to me or rooted in any sort of intuitive motivation. Which, of course, is the point.

I recommend the novel only if you are VERY open-minded, both from the left and from the right.

Carrère, Camus, and the Soviet Kommunalka

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

I finished reading Renaud Camus’s Enemy of the Disaster: Selected Political Writings. It’s an excellent book but there was something in it that shocked me. And it wasn’t a text by Camus. It was a letter written to Camus by another French writer, the mega best-selling novelist Emmanuel Carrère. I have written about Carrère here, if anybody needs a recap. In short, Carrère is a talentless hack and a Putin-loving lefty who accuses everybody of being a Nazi while praising actual, self-described Nazis like Eduard Limonov.

In his letter to Renaud Camus, Carrère chides the philosopher for his belief that there are way too many migrants in France. He says that if a horde (his word, not mine) of African migrants were to invade his apartment, he would not complain because such an act would bring about global justice. Carrère also says that the French have absolutely no right to live in France that supersedes the right of any recent arrival to live there. Not only does he find no validity in the nation-state, he seems unaware that such a concept even exists.

In response to Carrère’s fantasy of a horde of Senegalese and Afghanis moving into his beautiful apartment and exiling him and his family into one single room while they rubbish up the rest of the place, Camus, who is intellectually on a much higher level, responds that what Carrère seeks is the repetition of the Soviet kommunalka. After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, normal people were forced to accept families of uncultured peasants moving into their apartments. The owners would be relegated to one tiny room and would have to co-exist with drunk, chaotic, nasty lumpenproletarians who would blow their noses into the curtains and spit on the floor. If Carrère were at least a bit educated, he’d know that his dream was already put into practice and led to very bad results.

Carrère is very famous in France. His books sell amazingly well. He is considered a true intellectual authority in spite of being a very weak writer and a shallow person. The mega-well-read Camus, in the meantime, is banned, cancelled, and persecuted by the country’s legal apparatus for wrongthink. Another significant difference between them is that the untalented but rich Carrère is a Putinoid and the intelligent, massively banned Camus is pro-Ukrainian. This cannot possibly be any other way because birds of a globalist feather flock together, and Carrère has natural sympathies towards the aggressively neoliberal goals of Putin’s Russia.

Book Notes: Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

Emily Wharton’s relatives are horrified by her plan to marry Ferdinand Lopez. He is not a British gentleman, and the Wharton family is convinced that the marriage will be a disaster. Emily disagrees because Ferdinand is living like (or, as we would say today, identifies as) a British gentleman, and that’s just as good. Or is it?

To her horror, Emily soon discovers that living like and identifying as are not the same as being. A British gentleman is a historically, culturally and temperamentally circumscribed entity. Try as he might, Ferdinand cannot keep the pretense of being “just like” one but unfortunately he and Emily are already married, and she cannot escape.

Unlike many 19th-century authors, Trollope was a master at creating profound, nuanced and memorable male characters. The European novel is replete with interesting female heroines, which is not surprising since, in the 18th and 19th centuries, novels were written primarily for female audiences. We all know the names of Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Fortunata and Jacinta, Eugénie Grandet, Jane Eyre, Clarissa, Pamela, and many others. Of course, there are also Robinson Crusoe, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and Mauprat but one of them is a shipwreck, two are children, and the fourth you probably never heard of.

Trollope buckles the trend and gives us a large cast of complicated, strong, sometimes nasty and often deeply admirable men. In The Prime Minister, we once again meet my favorite male character of all times, Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium. Trollope was great at creating meaningful character names. You don’t need to think hard to understand the social and economic status of somebody called the Duke of Omnium who lives at Gatherum Castle.

In a previous post, I talked about Plantagenet Palliser when he was a young husband who goes to heroic lengths to save his marriage to a capricious, self-indulgent woman. In The Prime Minister, Palliser is now my age and holds the highest political office in the land. His wife is as emotionally incontinent and demanding as always and tries to meddle aggressively in the way the Prime Minister runs his government. He has to keep her lovingly at bay while preserving his sense of duty and dignity both in his marriage and his public career.

I cannot think of another author who wrote about male friendships, male mentorships, and male interests as much and as beautifully as Trollope. What it means to be a husband, a father, a brother, a colleague were the issues that he explored time and again in his beautiful, long novels. The world of Trollope’s books is long gone but what a fascinating world it was. I am not sure we have gained much by leaving it so completely behind.

Dmitry Bykov Today

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

I’m reading Dmitry Bykov’s biography of the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. I haven’t finished the book, so I’m not ready to say anything about it. I only want to comment on the author for now.

I wrote about Bykov several times in the past. He’s so talented that I actually buy his books of poetry. His are the only books of poetry I have ever bought in my life not for teaching or research but simply to read. I’m not a poetry person. It’s got to be absolutely out-there poetry for me to buy it.

Bykov is also a talented novelist and biographer with a voluminous output. He’s a real writer. And he can’t go back to Russia or ever get published there again. Imagine for a writer suddenly to lose his entire readership, his linguistic environment, his purpose as a writer. People in the past returned to Stalinist USSR because they couldn’t accept such a loss.

This isn’t an issue of financial necessity. Bykov is famous, he’s been invited to teach at Cornell. This is about not having any readers for his new books. This very long and massively researched biography of Zelensky is an example. People would go to jail in Russia, where Bykov was designated “a foreign agent”, for owning a copy. Jail times for posting something like “I want peace” in Russia have surpassed sentences for rape. A book about Zelensky would be considered treason of the highest order.

Bykov understands that his book won’t be read in Ukraine either because it’s in Russian and he’s from Russia. Nobody wants to hear a Russian perspective on anything. Bykov says it’s as should be, and I respect him for not pouting.

I’ll write about the book once I read it, which will be soon since my reading speed in Russian is stratospheric.

How Copyright Laws Killed Leo Tolstoy

~ Clarissa ~ 8 Comments

Leo Tolstoy’s intellectual journey brought him to a realization that works of art and ideas should not be privately owned. Tolstoy didn’t want to make anybody believe what he did. All he wanted was to share his own work with the world.

In the last three decades of the writer’s long life, he was driven by a single powerful wish. Tolstoy wanted to ensure that after his death, everybody who wanted to read his books could do so for free. He felt that most of the people in tsarist Russia who really needed to have access to his ideas might be too poor to buy the books. Time and again, Tolstoy expressed his wish to have the entirety of his creative production made available to the world. He published articles and official statements to this effect, he begged his family members and friends to respect his wishes and make this possible, he wrote several wills making this desire of his very explicit, and he filled several volumes of his diaries with worries as to whether he would be able to make the gift of his art to the world.

The copyright laws of the Russian Empire, however, made Tolstoy’s dream impossible. There was simply no provision among them that would allow people to put the fruits of their intellectual and creative labor into open access. Tolstoy’s lawyers told the writer that only an individual or a group of specific individuals could inherit his works.

The writer’s family and friends had no respect for Tolstoy’s ideas. Or they didn’t have enough of it to renounce the huge profits that ownership of the rights to his collected works would bring. Tolstoy spent the last years of his life feeling torn apart by his relatives and acquaintances who bickered and schemed for the right to inherit his work. At that point, Tolstoy felt horrified by the idea of possessing any private property. Thirty years before he died, he transferred all of his money and land to his wife and children. However, the idea that readers would be deprived of reading his books so that his dissolute and useless sons would be able to booze their way into the grave was intolerable to the writer. In vain did he consult lawyers and beg the authorities to allow him to dispose of his creative legacy the way he wanted to.

Eventually, the screaming matches between the hopeful heirs became so impossible for the ailing old man to stand that Tolstoy ran away from home. He felt that even one more day of listening to endless arguments about copyright laws and inheritances would drive him mad. All the writer wanted was to dedicate the last months of his life to peaceful contemplation of his journey towards God. This wasn’t meant to be. Ten days after running away from home, Tolstoy died.

The bickering over the rights to his work continued for decades after that.

Was Stalin Aware of Romeo and Juliet?

~ Clarissa ~ 13 Comments

I’m reading a new novel by Almudena Grandes, one of Spain’s leading authors. At the very beginning of the book, the narrator tells a story in which Stalin makes a reference to Romeo and Juliet. “This must mean the story is apocryphal,” the narrator immediately concludes. “Stalin couldn’t have been aware of Romeo and Juliet because his Russian was never very good.”

It is true that Stalin spoke Russian with a strong accent his entire life. This is not surprising since it wasn’t his language. However, poor knowledge of Russian has never prevented anybody from being familiar with works of Shakespeare. I have a strong suspicion that Shakespeare himself was not a fluent speaker of this language.

At the same time, having an accent, even a strong one, in no way precludes very high proficiency in reading in a language. Stalin was not only a poet, who in his youth managed to get published and even included into an anthology of best poetry in Georgia, he was also an avid reader, and not only in Georgian but also in Russian. His party nickname was “Koba”, after a character in a novel. After his death, Stalin’s huge personal library was recovered and is now available to researchers. Many a learned volume has been written on the extensive notes Stalin left in the margins of his favorite books.

It is important to remember, that even at the height of purges, Stalin almost never killed writers who wrote in Russian. He exterminated every single Ukrainian writer of note but Russian-language authors were cherished by him. Osip Mandelshtam, the greatest poet of the twentieth century in Russia (in my opinion) and a Jew, and Isaak Babel, another Soviet Jewish writer, were the only ones killed by Stalin. Mandelshtam wrote a poem criticizing Stalin and making fun of his appearance, and Babel had an affair with the wife of the NKVD chief. Save from these two egregious cases, Stalin protected Russian-speaking writers.

Stalin’s favorite writer, Mikhail Bulgakov (not a Jew and actually a notorious anti-Semite), wrote books that were very critical of the Soviet Union and also very complex in a truly Modernist way. Stalin loved Bulgakov’s work so much that he attended the performance of one of his plays dozens of times. He also protected Boris Pasternak (who was actually one of the greatest translators of Shakespeare into Russian. And a Jew). Pasternak’s name was put on a list of people to be arrested and Stalin himself crossed him off the list.

There is ample evidence that Stalin read very carefully every single work of literature that was nominated for the highest literary prize in Soviet Union, a prize that bore Stalin’s own name.

I’m not writing this to defend Stalin in any way. He was a bloody dictator and a horrible person. An ignoramus, however, he was not. He was an autodidact from an indigent family who spoke with an accent. None of these things, however, suggest that he was stupid or illiterate.