"Happy Birthday" and "Imitation of the Rose" by Clarice Lispector. (1960, in Family Ties)

The Complete Short Stories of Clarice Lipsector, to be published August, 2015, translated by Katrina Dodson, edited and introduced by Benjamin Moser

My Posts on Clarice Lispector 

Stories 14 and 15 of 85

The short stories of Clarice Lispector I have so far read center on marriages and family life.  There are layers of meaning built into the sophisticated narrative method of Lispector.  I plan for sure to read and post on all of the stories.  For a while until I feel more secure in my understanding of Lispector's stories I will just be largely journalizing my reading of the stories.   Later on I will try to talk in a bit deeper fashion about the stories.

"Happy Birthday" is a really great story that would make a terrific thirty minute TV show.  An extended family whose members do not especially like each other has gathered for the birthday of the 85 year old mother and grandmother and mother in law to the family.  The family members are all trying to make an impression on each other.  It is a very anchored in Rio story with lots of local references. The grandmother just sits their in silence, but she is thinking how did I give birth to this worthless pack of idiots and why did my sons marry these terrible women.  In a scene both hilarious and terribly sad the grandmother has a great outburst in which she curses out the entire family.  

"Imitation of the Rose" is yet another story of a woman waiting for her husband to come home.  In this very interesting story the woman appears to have just returned from treatment for some sort of break down.

The editors did not provide the publication data on the stories so we are on our own with this.  We should not be.

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) was Brazilian journalist, translator and author of fiction. Born in Western Ukraine into a Jewish family who suffered greatly during the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, she was still an infant when her family fled the disastrous post-World War I situation for Rio de Janiero. At twenty-three, she became famous for her novel, Near to the Wild Heart, and married a Brazilian diplomat. She spent much of the forties and fifties in Europe and the United States, helping soldiers in a military hospital in Naples during World War II and writing, before leaving her husband and returning to Rio in 1959. Back home, she completed several novels including The Passion According to G.H. and The Hour of the Star before her death in 1977 from ovarian cancer.  - from New Directions Publishing web

Mel u

"El Verdugo" by Honore de Balzac. (1830, A Short Story, A Component of the Human Comedy")

" Balzac’s most remarkable characteristic is a sort of exultant reveling in every kind of human passion, in every species of desire or greed or ambition or obsession which gives a dignity and a tragic grandeur to otherwise prosaic lives. There is a kind of subterranean torrent of blind primeval energy running through his books which focusses itself in a thick smouldering fuliginous eruption when the moment or the occasion arises. The “will to power,” or whatever else you may call it, has never been more terrifically exposed. I cannot but feel that as a portrayer of such a “will to power” among the obstinate, narrow, savage personages of small provincial towns, no one has approached Balzac. Here, in his country scenes, he is a supreme master; and the tough, resistant fibre of his slow-moving, massively egotistic provincials, with their backgrounds of old houses full of wicked secrets and hoarded wealth, lends itself especially well to his brooding materialistic imagination, ready to kindle under provocation into crackling and licking flames."  John Powys

My Posts on Balzac

61/91

It is hard not to agree with John Powys, who came to view The Comedie Humaine as one gigantic work.  He saw Balzac as the greatest of all novelists.  

 In the quite brief "El Verdugo" we see the near total destruction of a proud small town Spanish family.   The story is set during the time of Napolean's occupation of Spain, during the Penisular war of 1807 to 1814 or so with France on one side and England and Spain on the other.  I so far have found all of Balzac's refrences to the wars of Napolean to be about senseless violence under commanders more cruel and ego driven than anything remotely like a patriotism based on a love for Napolean.  Balzac, as I learned from Stefan Zweig's Balzac, never served in the army but he had close friends who did and it is from them his very acute observations of military life are derived.  I see no admiration for Napolean in the 61 works I have so far read.

As the story opens, a French sentry fears he sees an approaching English fleet.  We then launch into what we almost always find in a Balzac story, an aristocrat seeing from a distance a beautiful pure looking  girl and deciding on first glance he wants to marry her.  In this story the girl is the youngest daughter of an important local Spanish family.  The family leads an attack on the French in which many French army men are killed.  The attackers are ultimately defeated. (Spoiler alert). The leader of the French sentences all the members of the Spanish family to be beheaded, with one exception.  The head of the family can pick one of his sons to be the executioner, El Verdugo, and that son will be allowed to survive.  There is much drama over this with all sons refusing at first.  The scene where the son  Beheads his younger sister, whom the French head officer is in love with, is the stuff of heavy melodrama.

We see the surviving son in later years, he wants only to die.  He is known the rest of his life as "El Verdugo".

"El Verdugo" is a decent story, OK maybe a bit heavy handed on the overwhelming sadness but for sure worth reading.  

Mel u

The Conformist by Alberto Moravio (1951, translated by Tami Calliope)

I offer my great thanks to Max u for the gift card which allowed me to read this book. 

My Prior Posts on Alberto Moravio

Last year I read and posted on two works by Alberto Moravio, Augustino a very well done novella centering on a preadolescent boy's reaction to his mother's seeming affair with a man at the resort at which they are staying and a novel I really enjoyed, A Woman of Rome, about prostitute. Recently  I received a publicity notice from Amazon saying the Kindle edition of his novel The Conformist is temporarily reduced in price from $11.95 to $1.95, providing me with the opportunity to read another work by Moravio.  

The Conformist, narrated in the first person, begins in Italy some where in the 1920s.  In a complex way, the novel is a commentary on the psychological need to appear "normal" and how this lead the narrator, and by proxy Italy, into a support for fascism.  The story line is fast moving and keeps you interested with regular shocking events.  We first meet the narrator at about age thirteen.  He encounters a man working as a chauffeur, a defrocked priest, who lures him to his employer's house with the promise he will give him a gun, something he badly wants.  The man, the boy suspected something was wrong but he really wanted the gun, attempted to force the boy into sex.  A violent event results from this.  I think we can perhaps take this as showing us the sexuality inherent in the submission to fascism, to a cult of the machismo leader.  

In the next segment the narrator is on his twenties, he wants most of all to see himself and be seen as others as conforming to the norms of society.  He has a dark secret he can never reveal.   He works as a secret agent for the fascist government.  He has a lovely fiancé any man would be proud to have.  As far as he knows she is at 21 still a virgin.  In a very shocking powerful development we learn that she also is keeping a very dark secret, one I never saw coming.  The narrator tries to conform to how a fiancé should act.  He plans a honeymoon in Paris and is given a sinister assignment by the fascist secret police which leads to at least two more very interesting surprising turns.  

I have not told much of the plot as I don't want to spoil the real enjoyment the plot provides.  It is also an acute psychological account of the drive to conformity. We are also see how the end of the war in Italy impacted society and the narrator with a final terrible twist of fate.  There are also well done sex scenes and detailed descriptions of the body of the narrator's fiancé I enjoyed reading. 

I greatly enjoyed The Conformist and hope to read more Moravia.

 

Alberto Moravia (1907–1990) was one of Italy’s greatest twentieth-century writers. Among his best-known books to have appeared in English are Boredom, The Woman of Rome, The Conformist (the basis for Bernardo Bertolucci’s film), Roman Tales, Contempt (the basis for Jean-Luc Godard’s film), and Two Women.  From The New York Review of Books webpage.

Mel u

"Hey, Taxi!" by Conrad Aiken (1925)

I was recently very kindly given a review copy of a very interesting book, The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken, to be shortly published by Open Road Media.  His name was vaguely familiar but I knew had never read any of his work.  One of the many great practical utilities of short stories is they can allow us to sample the work of a new to us writer without a lot of time commitment.  

I decided to read "Hey, Taxi!" because it was only a few pages long and I enjoyed the opening paragraph.  The story is narrated by a New York City cab driver,  then as now this calls for a"hard boiled", seen it all cynical persona.  It is the end of a long night shift and our narrator has just turned on the "off duty" light when a young woman, maybe seventeen hops into the back seat of his cab.  He cannot decide if she is just a country girl trying to act like a big city woman or a hooker.  At first he senses trouble, he does not want her accusing him of trying to seduce her but then again he can use another fare.  We also do sense he is not immune to the charms of down on their luck country girls pretending to be New York City street girls.  The fun of the story is in the interaction of the driver and the young woman and in trying to unravel the persona of the characters.  

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) was an American poet, novelist, and short story author, and one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century. His numerous honors include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award for Poetry, the Bollingen Prize, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal. Born in Savannah, Georgia, Aiken was orphaned at a young age and was raised by his great-great-aunt in Massachusetts. He attended Harvard University with T. S. Eliot and was a contributing editor to the influential literary journal the Dial, where he befriended Ezra Pound. Aiken published more than fifty works of poetry, fiction, and criticism, including the novels Blue Voyage, Great Circle, King Coffin, A Heart for the Gods of Mexico, and Conversation, and the widely anthologized short stories “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” and “Mr. Arcularis.” He played a key role in establishing Emily Dickinson’s status as a major American poet, mentored a young Malcolm Lowry, and served as the US poet laureate from 1950 to 1952. Aiken returned to Savannah eleven years before his death; the epitaph on his tombstone in Bonaventure Cemetery reads: Cosmos Mariner, Destination Unknown.   From The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

Mel u

"The Recruit" by Honore de Balzac (1831, A Short Story, A Component of The Human Comedy)

My Posts on Balzac

60 of 91

"The Recruit" is set in 1793, during the time of terror when thousands of aristocrats went guillotined in France.  One of the many things I have learned from Balzac is how aristocratic French tried to act bourgeois to avoid setting of retaliatory anger on themselves.  "The Recruit"'centers on an aristocratic widow with one son.  She is, of course, very beautiful and has some money so she has several suitors.   She moved out of Paris to a provenanal town, thinking the danger from the terror would be less there. She has a  salon where the leading local dignitaries gather.  The local magistrate tries to pressure her into marriage by suggesting if she does not give in to his proposal he may not be able to save her from the guillotine.  

Her son, of course incredibly handsome,  is the center of her world.  He has joined the army and she has recently gotten word that he may be on his way back home.  Balzac turns to a dramatic close to end the story on a very sad note.

"The Recruit" was fun to read and a good historical short story. 

Mel u

Juana by Honore de Balzac (1834, A Novella, A Component of The Human Comedy)

My Posts on Balzac

59 of 91

Juana is set during the Peninsular War.  Balzac does for sure type people based on their country, and in France, on their  province.  He, besides the French of course, employs lots of Italian settings and characters and secondly Spanish.  He especially seems to stereotype women based on where they are from.  Maybe to compare, just imagine the treatment of Latin American women in older American movies as somehow more "hot blooded" and more devious than American women.  This does get to be annoying but Balzac is hardly the only writer of this period to do this.

  I said before, even those works of Balzac that do not reach his full potential, all have at least a great segment or two.  A town in Spain has just been taken by a French lead regiment with mostly Italian troops.  One of the culture quandries I am picking up on Balzac is what was his attitude toward Napolean?  In this passage, in the translation of Kathleen Prescott, you can see his admiration of the details of Napolean's people management insights:

"In the marechal’s army was a regiment, composed almost entirely of Italians and commanded by a certain Colonel Eugene, a man of remarkable bravery, a second Murat, who, having entered the military service too late, obtained neither a Grand Duchy of Berg nor a Kingdom of Naples, nor balls at the Pizzo. But if he won no crown he had ample opportunity to obtain wounds, and it was not surprising that he met with several. His regiment was composed of the scattered fragments of the Italian legion. This legion was to Italy what the colonial battalions are to France. Its permanent cantonments, established on the island of Elba, served as an honorable place of exile for the troublesome sons of good families and for those great men who have just missed greatness, whom society brands with a hot iron and designates by the term “mauvais sujets”; men who are for the most part misunderstood; whose existence may become either noble through the smile of a woman lifting them out of their rut, or shocking at the close of an orgy under the influence of some damnable reflection."

The plot action turns on a army officer  becoming infatuated with Juana.  She is the youngest daughter of a long line of courtesans, living outside respectable society.  Of course she is conventionally beautiful. The romance is your standard Balzacian  story line.

Juana is interesting, the sections on the regiment are first rate.  

Ambrosia Bousweau 

Hard Times by Charles Dickens (1854)

About twenty years ago I read in publication order the novels of Charles Dickens.  Since I began my blog on July 7, 2009 I have reread and posted on Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and David Copperfield.  Hard Times was the tenth novel of Dickens.  It is his shortest novel also.  Lately I have read a bit of Zola and Balzac so I think I wanted to see how my old friend would compare to the French.  My basis of comparison is limited as I do not read French and am relying on old public domain translations.  

Hard Times is set in the imaginary city of Coke Town, coke being a fuel factories were at the time fired with.  It is a city of dark satanic mills.  Dickens' evocation of the sheer horror of the mill town is magnificent.  His portray of the mill owner who mocks all protesting workers as wanting to "eat turtle soup out of gold bowls" is as fitting then as now.  There is a complicated plot, involving a young orphan girl and the family she is adopted into. 

I am glad I reread Hard Times.  The characters do seem a bit less developed than those in some of Dickens' other novels and it is more overtly ideological than most of his other works.  The closing two chapters are marvelous. 

I hope to reread Bleak House this year.

Mel u