Albert Camus - The First Man

It's hard to think of 'The First Man' as a novel. It is the unrevised draft of the first few chapters of what would probably have been as grand an autobiography as there ever was. Camus confuses his fictional characters with their real-life counterparts and occasionally slips in their real names. Footnotes suggest that there were chapters that Camus wanted in another part of the novel or taken out altogether, phrases he wanted to expound on, settings he intended to describe in greater detail. The appendices accompanying the text frame a novel that would have gone on to cover another 2 decades of the author's life, up to the Second World War and his part in the French Resistance. I consider it a great pity that we shall never know.

What we do have, however, is probably as close as we come to knowing Camus as a person, or perhaps more accurately, as a child. Apart from the ideas that Camus as a writer, journalist, thinker has come to be associated with, this work is alive his response to the people and events he held dear. He does this with an honesty that, through 50 years and a changed world, communicates the dull ache of revisiting the images of a past already lost, of reconstructing a world through the eyes of the child still alive somewhere deep within himself. In the Algerian community of poor folk that made up his whole life as a child, he transforms derelict garbade-strewn corners into playgrounds, overflowing sewers are fountains delivering the rains of autumn, a "fritter" made from dough fried in boiling oil is a delicacy to be savoured, a football made from rags becomes a reason for life itself. Poverty is a powerful motif, or more accurately, a powerful determiner in Camus' past and never in The First Man does he shrink away from the details of what that poverty entailed.

Extremely moving are numerous Camus' reflections on his mother, in his eyes always beautiful and always distant. Through the anguished eyes of a child he can only watch as she, half-deaf and illiterate, sits as a model of patience through movie screenings and award ceremonies she cannot hope to understand. It is an affecting mix of sadness, helplessness and tremendous love that characterise his piety, and she, dignity personified, is perhaps the only subject on which the rambunctious, haughty, irreverent child finds himself incapacitated.

"In her life she had been to the cinema two or three times, had understood nothing, and it was only in order not to displease those who invited her that she would say the dresses were pretty or that the one with the moustache looked like a very bad man. Nor could she listen to the radio. And to the newspapers, sometimes she would leaf through those that were illustrated, would get her sons or granddaughters to explain the pictures, would decide that the Queen of England seemed sad, and close the pages to gaze once more out of the same window and watch the activity on the same street that she had been contemplating through half her lifetime."

And the basis for Camus' convictions later in his life.

"As for the wives, and Catherine Cormery, they worked without a break for the good reason that a rest meant poorer meals for all of them. Unemployment, for which there was no insurance at all, was the calamity they most dreaded. That explained why these workers, in Pierre's home as in Jacques's, who in their daily lives were the most tolerant of men, were always xenophobes on labour issues, accusing in turn the Italians, the Spaniards, the Jews, the Arabs and finally the whole world of stealing their work - an attitude that is certainly to those intellectuals who theorize about the proletariat, and yet very human and surely excusable. It was not for mastery of the earth or the privileges of wealth and leisure that these unexpected nationalists were contending against other nationalities; it was for the privilege of servitude."

Yet The First Man is not political. It is certainly not a polemic, for the Algerian cause or any other. If anything, Camus as a child celebrates and revels in the riches that the world reserves only for those who are in acute need. That wondrous exaltation, that most potent of stimulants, so much of which we suspect were already lost to Camus as an adult. And he captures those slivers of precociousness with vivid detailed feeling, when the world had felt so large and it was possible to delight in the simplest things.

"...it fed a hunger in them more basic even to the child than to the man, and that is the hunger for discovery... they felt for the first tie that they had existed and that they were objects of the highest regard: they were judged worthy to discover the world."

It is perhaps fitting that The First Man, raw, untouched, unrealised, inadvertently takes on the very characteristics of its protagonist. Perhaps fate then, is its true genius.

Elliott Smith - New Moon

By no means new, but Elliott Smith just feels oddly fitting music for the weather around here lately. Dark skies that promise rain but sometimes just brood for the length of an afternoon. 'New Moon' is not infused with the sullenness of Either/Or, and neither is it (relatively) upbeat like XO. For a compilation of demos and b-sides, half-realised ideas, it is probably apt that New Moon is often somewhere in between.

Unlike your usual collection of b-sides, however, New Moon is consistently as good as anything Elliott Smith released while he was alive. Most tracks on this 2-cd compilation were written in the early days of his short career, and do not yet carry the burdensome intonations of death, so prevalent in 'From a Basement on the Hill'. Some of the tracks glow with what approximates to warmth, or unbridled gaiety in Elliott Smith terms. 'Thirteen', not originally written by him, is a charming number about young love, has Elliott Smith crooning 'Would you tell me what you're thinking of/Would you be an outlaw for my love'. It had me in disbelief for a while, but once I got beyond that it grew to become one of my favourites. I think he was incapable of writing a song like that himself. The closest he comes is probably on 'See You Later', where he goes 'I got a choke chain/made out of nitrate/to keep your memory down', so you see, not a cheerful man.

There is also an early version of 'Miss Misery', the song he won an unlikely Grammy for. I like this version a lot better, breathy vocals, audible fretboard slides and all. The concluding line goes "cause it's alright/ some enchanted night I'll be with you", as opposed to what appeared on the released version, "do you miss me/ Miss Misery, like you say you do", which was really pretty lame.

Intermittently, Elliott Smith appears at the other end of the spectrum, in Riot Coming he is at once wavering and frustrated. Typically, he goes out with 2 guitar parts produced on a multi-track, whispery on the verse and wailing on the chorus. On this particular track he never sounds comfortable with the transitions, it's as if he isn't ready for his own anger.

Elliott Smith is one guy who sparks a lot of postulating, conspiratorially about the cause of his death (I've heard some pretty bad theories), but it is his body of work, neatly summarised in 'New Moon', which deserves the most comment. The formula to an Elliott Smith song doesn't sound complicated in the least - a couple of guitars, multi-tracked vocals, a minor key, a few lines about pills and stabbing your own heart, and yet, I haven't heard another musician like him. Who do you know can sing lines like "I'm a first timer/wishing I was someone else/when I see you by yourself", and sound perfectly sombre while at it? That's a real talent. 5 years after his death, his songs retain the power to inspire, comfort and unsettle. Sometimes when I'm alone with his voice in my head, it feels like he's beside me.

you toss an empty beer
not really as composed as you appear
eyes circling inside

Alice Munro - Open Secrets

Read this in the period just before I left for Taiwan in Sep 08. My second shot at Munro after 'The Beggar Maid', which to this day is one of my favourite collection of short stories. 'Open Secrets' is a bit different, in that the stories aren't related to one another in any way. Munro is the same though, still understatedly hard-hitting, master of that striking moment of significance born of unflinching precision and a distant type of compassion. She is the type of writer you wouldn't be doing justice to by opening to any page and reading a random paragraph. Her tone is consistently firm and level, and she is never verbose, withholding that crucial, revealing judgement. Yet the way she structures her stories, manipulating chronology, making relatives of disparate anecdotes, awakens in the reader an awareness of a shadow passing in the background, always just out of sight.

There are 8 stories in this collection, each one almost startlingly original. 2 I will pass comment on, although I remember that while reading it, I managed to find something different to like about all 8. 'Real Life' tells of a marriage that almost did not happen, and when it did there was no putting it down to affection or romance, but almost an accidental affirmation of the efforts of misguided onlookers. She is not your feminine heroine, but a pudgy, dour-looking woman who has lived with her brother all her life and takes the greatest pleasure from shooting groundhogs and rabbits. And he, "it was the way that Dorrie used her knife and fork that captivated the man". Enough said. A rural, pastoral life described in utterly bland tones, dealing only in common and ordinary observations, yet building up to a dense, finely constructed complex of ambiguities and unsaid truths. Any sense of the ungainly is illusory.

'The Albanian Virgin' by contrast, by contrast, is wild and vivid and fantastical. The story of a civilised, Western-educated woman who is forced to live within the strict cultural confines of an Albanian mountain tribe in tandem with the far more pedestrian life of a Canadian woman, embroiled in a marriage and an affair which she seems to stumble on quite unknowingly. These separate lives, put together loosely and only by chance, swirl fleetingly around one another, never touching, yet hinting almost mystically at an intricate intimacy. It is such fleetingness that fuels Munro's stories and packs them with unexpected punch. The ultimate brevity, the refusal to engage in excessive sentimentality, only adds to the humanity that is at the centre of all her stories because the reader has not been persuaded. He simply finds the loose ends, puts two and two together and comes up with a great deal more.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment

Alright just one more for tonight. Read this sometime ago but really want to write something on it.

In many ways we can see elements in Raskolnikov that mirror Dostoevsky's own life, yet there are key criticisms of his protagonist, and the ideas that he is a vivid representation of, that Dostoevsky raises, none too subtly. The word itself appears a couple of times in the text, but it is the notion of 'nihilism', that Dostoevsky puts the bulk of his literary heft behind, in extrapolating on its effects, and eventually denouncing it. Raskolnikov himself is its sword bearer, reducing Orthodox doctrine to a commodity of comfort for the 'ordinary' folk, as dichotomised in his published article. For those like his mother who cannot come up with any kind of original idea that might contribute to the progress of humanity, as if the incapacity were in their nature.

Yet though Raskolnikov is at the centre of the author's impassioned discourse against nihilism, the reader cannot but witness Raskolnikov's increasingly fevered monomania and experience genuine compassion. That he comes to condemn himself having realised after committing the deed of murder that he had not the strength to be like a Napoleon, or a Ubermensch with deference to the Nietzchean concept, that he comes to view his actions as absurd - "'Would a Napoleon go crawling under an old woman's bed?' they'd ask. 'Go on, don't be so stupid!", evokes a reader's sympathy for a man who finds himself irrevocably entrapped by the error of his intellectual and moral convictions. Also revealing is the love he bears for his mother and sister, his loyalty to them from start (where he prohibits Dunya from marrying Luzhin) to end (where he pacifies his mother in a Godly way, fulfilling his obligations as a son despite his complete complete denial of religion).

And that puts him some distance above the pallid indifference and pure ignorance that Dostoevsky weaves into his fabric of Russian society. Dostoevsky's portrait of St. Petersburg, a city befouled by debauchery in the drinking dens and disrepair in the ungoverned lives of the poor, is a setting almost hopelessly suffocating, constantly aggravating Raskolnikov's frustrations and suspicions. In the same way it drove Marmeladov to drunken incapacitation, Sonya to the depths of prostitution, Katerina Ivanovna to consumption and insanity. There is considerable evidence that all 3 individuals are in possession of a certain nobility of character, and yet in Dostoevsky's St. Petersburg all (with the exception of Sonya) succumb to the conventions of immorality, ignorance and cynical self-preservation. A striking scene significant in this respect is that of Marmeladov's funeral, where Amalia Ivanovna and Luzhin, in conspiring maliciously and criminally against Sonya, each reveal the utter dearth of moral relevance where the structures of society have all but broken down. It is no wonder that Kafka later claimed to have been inspired by Dostoevsky, all in the spirit of claustrophobia.

What intensifies the depth of feeling, the dislocation and the overall sense of a whirlpool in a storm, is the ease with which all the characters are provoked into hate, agony, fury or some other extreme of emotion, introducing a disturbing sense of desperation which permeates throughout. That coupled with the enduring image of death, introduced in the very first chapter, and perpetuated throughout the rest of the text, a motif that serves as an appropriate foil for the author's central concern, nihilism.

Yet emerging from this giant, headache inducing mess of negativity are some clear beams of insight, communicated through conversations between Raskolnikov and Dunya, and the intense psychological struggles between Raskolnikov and Porfiry Petrovich. A stroke of genius is a dream had by Raskolnikov in Chapter 2 of the Epilogue, in which he dreams of a world where an intelligent virus spreads the world over, and "never had people considered themselves so intelligent, and in possession of the truth as did those who became infected. Never had they believed so unswervingly in the correctness of their judgements, their scientific deductions, their moral convictions and beliefs."

I think increasingly I'm becoming suspicious of grand theories that posit any kind of ultimate truth. With regards to the book itself, it is easily one of my favourite ever, a work that encompasses so much of the 19th century, predicting and warning against the ideological struggles (and for what) of the 20th century. Emotionally, complex and involving. Intellectually, a showpiece.

a fashion of vertigo

And with that I'm back.

I have thought for a while about slowly feeling my way into writing again. It is something I enjoy immensely, one thing I learnt in the army about myself was my affinity with words, at least relatively speaking. There's so much I can think of writing, right now, but I don't feel ready to go into any heavy topics yet. So for now I will persist with writing my thoughts on the books, the music, films, and adding to the list live performances. I'd like to put in more effort than I have done so far, in view of the excess time that I'll be having.

My thoughts on life outside so far. It definitely feels like there is an obligation to get our lives back where they were heading before all this. I read a few days ago some of my exam scripts from Prelims in 2006, and some of my old writing, it's going to take some effort even to get back to that rigour of thinking. But army has left me with some lingering habits of thought and language, for one, and crucially, has also had some effect on how i approach and appreciate my place in the world. Not about to go into any kind of detail on that, but I will say, I do feel smaller now, but surer. I'm not really sure what this means yet with regards to the way I respond to ideas, but let's find out.

Ian McEwan - The Child in Time

Read this on Charmaine's recommendation and what a recommendation it turned out to be. My favourite McEwan that I've read so far. The type of book that will raise in you the question if writers plan each scene, with foreknowledge of the full implications that they will weave into their works a hundred pages on, from those foundational circumstances.

McEwan deals sensitively with his his themes of childhood and perception of time with great clarity, and in many surprising ways, invoking quantum physics and Einstein's relativity, the idiosyncracies and absurdities of the British government (along with the intelligence service), the moral and functional difficulties of legalised begging, to give some idea of McEwan's scope and vision. He ties this all in with the core of his novel, the proliferation of despair and chaos from monumental loss.

Yet even in the bleakest moments of Stephen's mourning, where at times he borders on insanity, and in portraying the utter absurdity of Charles' realisation of his 'inner life', McEwan's voice is compassionate, yet precise and unsentimental. The most melodramatic scenes in the book, of Stephen's desperation in clinging on to the vestigial phantoms of Kate's presence, are approached with a significant sense of detachment by the narrator, allowing pathos to reverberate as in a soundless vacuum.

I take from this book valuable perspective on how our impression of time is just that - an impression. Its passage can heal and give us space (obviously not meant to be a physicist) to find truth or acceptance, but it can also accelerate our sense of deficiency, promoting anxiety in its unstoppability (a word McEwan uses early on, he is my authority on this). Being entirely unsure as to the mechanics of time - whether it is an entity for entirely separate consideration from matter/space, whether it moves only forwards like we perceive or sometimes also backwards or completely at random - I can only admit to the unending possibilities of truth being more than can stand to present reason. Also I find that fascinating.

As to the relationship between child and parents, McEwan has this to say,

"perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born... It is difficult to step outside the moment on any given days and ask the unnecessary, essential question, or to realise that however familiar, parents are also strangers to their children."

I wish I knew my parents as people other than my mother and father, it seems right that as a legacy to their entire lives, their children should be able to remember them as complete human beings, capable of feeling and doing the exact same things that we do. That they had dreams of becoming people other than who they turned out to be, had other convictions than those they now harbour and struggled with all the same problems of a teenager phasing into adulthood, albeit in a different age.

But what moved me most was McEwan's loving take on the bond established between newborns and their parents. I've never been a big fan of the idea of having kids before, but McEwan managed to make me go 'aww' here, so, fair play to him.

"He fastened her woolen shirt, helped her into a thick sweater, and fastened her dungarees. She began a vague, abstracted chant which meandered between improvisation , nursery rhymes , and snatches of Christmas carols. He sat her in her chair, put her socks on, and laced her boots. When he knelt in front of her she striked his hair. Like many little girls she was quaintly protective toward her father. Before they left the flat she would make certain he buttoned his coat to the top."