Memories of the Future by Siri Hustvedt

Memories of the Future by Siri Husvedt has lived with me for a few months now. The slowness of my reading is in no way indicative of any lack of enjoyment on my behalf. It is, however a thoughtful, intelligent read, that requires some active participation. Something I could only do when not completely exhausted after work or double-booked, triple-booked on the weekends.

My early feelings and thoughts about the book were contained in this post from last month - Starting a New Book... I won't repeat myself, so if you'd like a brief synopsis of the story, and a poem by Elsa, I'll wait here for you to catch up.

In this particular book, the book you are reading now, the young person and the old person live side by side in the precarious truths of memory

What the 23 yr old SH wrote and what the 61 yr old SH remembers are often two very different things. Hindsight gives a shape to what is shapeless as you live it.
The things that have stayed with her as important are not always the things she recorded in her journal. I am interested in understanding how she and I are relatives.
The story changes, adjusts to new experiences. Memory is not only unreliable; it is porous.
And sometimes there are shocks waiting in the wings to floor you. Sometimes memory is a knife.

This is the stuff I love. I even did a similar thing myself in my thirties when I read through my old travel journal from 1991. Even after a decade, the things I remembered were different to what I recorded at the time. I wrote another journal comparing my record with my memories. As I wrote, I was also being written.
I should hunt it out to see what it looks like twenty years later again.

We are all wishful creatures, and we wish backwards too, not only forward, and thereby rebuild the curious, crumbling architecture of memory into structures that are more habitable.

Sadly, though, somewhere after the halfway mark of Memories of the Future I lost my way. All the sideline stories (the crazy neighbour Lucy Brite, the story within the story that she wrote in her twenties...) stopped being interesting to me, even as they began to take up more and more of the story telling space. Every story carries inside itself multitudes of other stories.

It all got too much in the end - too rambling, too meta and curiously, not enough Elsa.

There was one brief passage towards the end about the Marcel Duchamp porcelain urinal debate, where ID, the Introspective Detective says,

The preponderance of scholarly evidence has long been on the side of the Baroness, you know. One, we have the letter Duchamp wrote to his sister, Susanne, two days after the urinal was rejected. It was discovered until 1982. In it he wrote. 'One of my female friends who had adopted the pseudonym Richard Mutt sent me a porcelain urinal as a sculpture.' Two we know that a newspaper reported at the time that the artist Richard Mutt was from Philadelphia. The Baroness was living in Philadelphia at the time. Three, we know that it wasn't until after the Baroness and Stieglitz were both dead that Duchamp assumed full credit for the urinal.... 

Duchamp stole it, all right. It doesn't even resemble the rest of his work.... 

Fountain doesn't fit in. But the museums haven't changed the attribution.

Marcel Duchamp, 'Fountain', 1950 (replica of 1917 original), porcelain urinal, 30.5 x 38.1 x 45.7 cm
Philadelphia Museum of Art 125th Anniversary Acquisition, gift (by exchange) of Mrs Herbert Cameron Morris,
1998-74-1 © Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP. Copyright Agency, 2019

Marcel Duchamp
Fountain, 1950 (replica of 1917 original)
porcelain urinal
© Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP. Copyright Agency, 2019

And as luck would have it, from the 27th April until 11th August my local Art Gallery of NSW is hosting The Essential Duchamp exhibition, with the urinal in question on full display. I wonder if the 'replica of 1917 original' is enough to cover his bases?

Favourite or Forget: Not a favourite in the end, but still keen to read more by Hustvedt.

Favourite Characters: IF IS and ID

Favourite Quote:

My first moments in my apartment have a radiant quality in memory that have nothing to do with sunlight. They are illuminated by an idea....I was twenty-three years old...

This took me straight back to my own 23 yr old self, living alone for the first time in a new town, starting my career, on the brink of my adult life, excited, full of anticipation and hope and plans and the love, the 'radiant quality' I felt for my first, slightly dingy, older style townhouse on the wrong side of the tracks.

Books in Books:

• Don Quixote 
• Balzac
• The Great Gatsby
• Proust
• Sherlock Holmes
• Gogol - Dead Souls
• Baudelaire - The Flowers of Evil
• Laurence Sterne - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
• Plato - Apology
• Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
• Socrates
• Smolett - The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle
• The Metamorphosis
• Chaucer
• Milton - Paradise Lost
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• Finnegan's Wake
• Simone Weil "imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life."
• Great Expectations
• John Ashbery
• Michael Lally
• Thomas Wyatt
• Shakespeare
• John Donne
• John Clare
• Emily Dickinson
• Thomas Moore
• Sylvia Plath
• Alan Turing
• Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
• etc - there were many more but you get the jist!

Starting a New Book...

So I've just started reading Siri Hustvedt's latest novel, Memories of the Future.

I'm inclined to anticipate enjoyment of Hustvedt's work thanks solely (so far) on my experience with What I Loved. I feel sure that I will be in for an intelligent, literary treat.

The first chapter has not disappointed.

Metafiction is the name of this game as Hustvedt's story explores a 61 yr old woman looking book on the journal written by her 23 yr old self when she first moved to New York to write.

In a curious, personal, twist of fate, there is a Don Quixote connection right from the start.

Within the journal of 23 yr old S.H. is another story about Ian Feathers (I.F.) - a man whose real 'life was lived in books, not out of them.' A man who took his passion for mystery, unsolved crimes and murder too far. A man who 'lived in a world built entirely of clues.' A man who wanted to live his life through the 'splendid' example of Sherlock Holmes (another S.H.). All good heroes need a sidekick - I.F.'s 'all-important confidante, his Sancho, his Watson,' was/is Isadora Simon (I.S.).

I love it when my book worlds collide, or perhaps, more elegantly, when serendipity steps in to allow one bookish experience to inform the next.

Memories of the Future is also ripe with books within books, or more accurately, poets and their poems.

John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest and Frank O'Hara. And The Great Gatsby, Balzac, Proust, Gogol, Baudelaire, Laurence Sterne and Plato just to name those referenced in the first 32 pages. But the one that has made several appearances and will obviously play a bigger role as the story unfolds is the Dada-poet/performance artist, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.

Who? I hear you ask.

According to the Poetry Foundation, she was a 'German-born avant-garde poet. Known for her flamboyance and sexual frankness, the Baroness was a central figure in Greenwich Village’s early-twenties Dadaism'.

Wikipedia describes her as 'breaking every erotic boundary, revelling in anarchic performance'.

Her friend Emily Coleman saw her as, 'not as a saint or a madwoman, but as a woman of genius, alone in the world, frantic'.

I'm very curious to see how Hustvedt will thread the Baroness' life into the rest of her story.
                     

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven by Holland Cotter

Fruit Don’t Fall Far
By Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven
Translated by Jill Alexander Essbaum

From Daddy sprung my inborn ribaldry.
His crudeness destined me to be the same.
A seedlet, flowered from a shitty heap,
I came, the crowning glory of his aim.

From Mother I inherited ennui,
The leg irons of the queendom I once rattled.
But I won’t let such chains imprison me.
And there is just no telling what this brat’ll...!

This marriage thing? We snub our nose at it.
What’s pearl turns piss, what’s classy breeds what’s smutty.
But like it? Lump it? Neither’s exigent.
And I’m the end result of all that fucking.

Do what you will! This world’s your oyster, Pet.
But be forewarned. The sea might drown you yet.

Not my usual poetic fare, but from what I have seen so far, a fair example of the Baroness' writing. And as S.H. says on pg 53, 'I returned to the sputterings of the Baroness because I regarded her as my archival rescue job, almost annihilated back then, and I wanted to protect her from oblivion with my voice.'

Jennifer @Holds Upon Happiness posts a lovely Poem for a Thursday each week. I enjoy sourcing poems from my recent reads to join in with her as I can.

Musings of a Very Idle Reader

One of the reasons I love readalongs is how they help me to get through a challenging book. They keep me focused and give my reading a purpose. The support of my fellow readalongers is an integral part of the process. But sadly, none of this is helping me get through Don Quixote.

It reminds me of my attempts to read Catch-22. The humour is amusing and clever to start with, but by the the half way mark (if not before), it just becomes tedious in it's repetitiveness. So many of my good friends LOVE Catch-22 and so many of my blogger friends LOVE Don Quixote along with a large number of authors that I respect and admire. What have I missed with both of these books?

I like to think that I'm an intelligent person, who is reasonably well-read and not afraid to tackle some of the heftier books when the mood strikes. So I saw the satire and the cleverness in both books, I appreciated the intentions of the authors, I enjoyed some of the set pieces and the themes but, ultimately, they didn't move me, engage me or entertain me. They left me scratching my head in bemusement.

With Don Quixote, I kept waiting for something different to happen, for some growth or insight. It never happened - well it certainly didn't happen in Part One.

I had heard that Part Two was a better read, with all sorts of exciting 'pre-post-modern metafiction', so imagine my disappointment when I quickly discovered that it was more of the same, but with parody...and more even poems!

The whole time I was reading DQ, I kept seeing and hearing The Cisco Kid and Pancho - the characters from a 1950's TV show that I watched in reruns during my 70's childhood. Every time Quixote said Sancho's name I heard Cisco's famous "ohhhh Paaaaaancho" in my head instead!

Just like the TV western, Don Quixote is episodic and full of copious amounts of frame stories...not my favourite form of literature. Perhaps I should have read one chapter a week, spinning each episode out with an anticipatory break in between?

I enjoyed the brief glimpses into life in rural Spain and watching the very first odd-couple literary pairing in action. But I failed to find much humour - there was ridiculousness and absurdity and some slap-stick, but nothing to laugh out loud about. Don Quixote was sad and mad, and Sancho ignorant and trusting, not figures I could poke fun at, or find it amusing to see others do so.

So reluctantly, and with some regret, I abandon the readalong and leave Don Quixote and Sancho to continue riding around the Spanish countryside in search of adventures and injustices to right. According to Goodreads, I made it to the 52% mark, which I think is giving it a fair go, in anyone's books!

Over the years, a number of authors have adapted elements of Don Quixote into their own work. These include Madame Bovary, The Idiot, The New York Trilogy and The Moor's Last Sigh. I attempted but did not like or finish Madame Bovary but I was sucked into Auster's mad, sad world in The New York Trilogy. I even read somewhere that Che Guevera modelled himself on the bumbling, grandiose idealistic knight as well!

Rushdie obviously loves it so much, he's having a second go at a Quixotic story. His new novel, due to published in September, is an even more obvious nod to his favourite novel, than the previous.

 The Jonathan Cape blurb says:

 Quichotte, an ageing travelling salesman obsessed with TV, is on a quest for love. Unfortunately, his daily diet of reality TV, sitcoms, films, soaps, comedies and dramas has distorted his ability to separate fantasy from reality. He wishes an imaginary son into existence, while obsessively writing love letters to a celebrity he knows only through his screen. Quuihotte's story is narrated by Brother, a mediocre spy novelist in the midst of a mid-life crisis, triggered in part by a fall-out with his Sister. As the stories of Brother and Quichotte ingeniously intertwine, Salmon Rushdie takes us ona wild, picaresque journey through a world on the edge of moral and spiritual collapse.

While The Bookseller, 8th March 2019, reveals that,

Quichotte tells the story of an ageing travelling salesman who falls in love with a TV star and sets off to drive across America on a quest to prove himself worthy of her hand. “Quichotte’stragicomic tale is one of a deranged time, and deals, along the way, with father–son relationships, sibling quarrels, racism, the opioid crisis, cyber-spies, and the end of the world.”

Rushdie has previously spoken of his enthusiasm for Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which was published in two parts in 1605 and 1615. 

In January 2018 he told the Guardian of his re-reading of the text: “On the one hand, the characters of Quixote and Sancho Panza are as beautifully realised as I remember them, and the idea of a man determinedly seeing the world according to his own vision, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, feels strikingly contemporary. 

“On the other hand, how many more times are the Knight of the Dolorous Countenance and Sancho going to get beaten up and left in pain in various roadside ditches? The ‘greatest novel ever written’ – I voted for it myself once – turns out to be just a little bit repetitive. To make the reading easier, I’m breaking it up and reading other books by other authors after every couple of hundred pages of Cervantes.”

I was rather thrilled to read, that even though Rushdie voted this the best book of all time, he still considers it repetitive and difficult to read. Sadly, even though I unknowingly used Rushdie's approach of reading Quixote by reading other books in between, it only served to make me feel more and more reluctant to pick it up this monotonous tome each time.

Honoré Daumier

It's not to late for you though.

If my miserable failure should inspire you or goad you into trying for yourself, please visit Nick's blog for details around the chapter-a-day readalong or Silvia's blog to enjoy the company of someone who could read Don Quixote every year and never get tired of it.

My earlier, more hopeful, Quixote posts.
Musings of an Idle Reader
Marcela

I'll leave Don Quixote and Cervantes now, with little regret. My curiosity to experience the first modern novel remains unmet, or at least, unsatisfied.

Catching clouds would have been more amusing.

Don Quixote - Marcela

I love this chick!
A lot.

Marcela rocked the #metoo movement 500 years before the first hashtag even existed! After reading chapter XIV and Marcela's marvellous take down, I feel sure there are reams of essays and opinions about feminism and Cervantes out there, and if I ever feel up to searching them out and reading them, I'll let you know!

But for now, let me give you an abridged version of Marcela's speech at Grisóstomo's funeral. It has been said that Grisóstomo, a shepherd, has died of a broken heart after being grievously spurned by the beautiful but cruel Marcela.

Heaven made me, as all of you say, so beautiful that you cannot resist my beauty and are compelled to love me, and because of the love you show me, you claim that I am obliged to love you in return. I know...that everything beautiful is lovable, but I cannot grasp why, simply because it is loved, the thing loved for its beauty is obliged to love the one who loves it....

According to what I have heard, true love is not divided and must be voluntary, not forced. If this is true, as I believe it is, why do you want to force me to surrender my will, obliged to do simply because you say you love me...?

I was born free, and in order to live free I chose the solitude of the countryside....Those whose eyes have forced them to fall in love with me, I have discouraged with my words. If desires feed on hopes, and since I have given no hope to Grisostomo or to any other man regarding these desires, it is correct to say that his obstinacy, not my cruelty, is what killed him....

If I had kept him by me, I would have been false; if I had gratified him, I would have gone against my own best intentions and purposes. He persisted though I discouraged him....

Let this general discouragement serve for each of those who solicit me for his own advantage...; let him who calls me ungrateful, not serve me, unapproachable, not approach me, cruel, not follow me...; I am free and do not care to submit to another; I do not love or despise anyone. I do not deceive this one or solicit that one; I do not mock one or amuse myself with another.

Marcela is no-one's damsel in distress, she's not interested in courtly love or tradition. She is no virgin goddess or shrinking violet. She is not bountiful Mother Earth or a tart. She does not need to be tamed or live up to (or down to) societal expectations.

The men in Don Quixote have created their own version of an 'ideal woman' - one not based on any fact or reality - their 'ideal woman' has become another fictional construct in a book full of fictional constructs. Is Don Quixote the first example of metafiction I wonder?

As I read this passage, I was reminded of Jane Austen in Persuasion when Anne Eliot says, “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. The pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything”.

Overnight I've been thinking about why a woman would chose a life of solitude in the mountains. tending sheep.

Lots of possibilities came to mind.

It could have been the life she was born into, therefore it's what she knows. Family tradition and duty and coming to love this way of life as an adult thanks to it's closeness to nature might also play a role in making this lifestyle choice. Marcela may naturally be an introvert who prefers her own company, and that of her family, most of the time. Perhaps, though, her excessive beauty has been the cause of much unwanted and inappropriate male attention all life and she has felt the need to withdraw from this intense, demanding gaze. To protect her virtue and her liberty, she has sought a life of solitude and peace away from the critical gaze, surrounded by the natural beauty of Mother Nature.

Like most life decisions, though, it is probably a complicated web, drawing in many threads of thought, emotions and unconscious desires. Bravo to Cervantes for painting such a strong, independent woman and bravo to Marcela for standing up for herself and creating her own life on her own terms.

#GoGirl

My previous post about Don Quixote:
Musings of an Idle Reader

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster

4 3 2 1 is a huge behemoth of a book that takes commitment and persistence to finish.

The first third of the book was absolutely stunning. I was nearly all the way through the first section of four chapters about Archie Ferguson, wondering when the four parallel lives were going to come into play, when I realised that I was already there. Being confronted with two conflicting stories about what had happened to Archie's father and his business caused me to completely reassess the previous chapters. Others may have worked out Auster's numbering device sooner but I was only reading a chapter a night before bed.

When I finally had my ah-ha moment, I doubled back to create a timeline for each life - where did each Ferguson live, what car did his mum drive, which cigarette brand did she smoke, what happened to his uncles and aunts and how did his dad's furniture business pan out? I thought I would never keep track of all the details.

However as we moved further away from the common story of Archie's origin, the four lives diverged so much that it actually became fairly easy to remember what was happening in each story and why.

Auster, well known as an adherent of metafiction, used his characters to play with his ideas about parallel lives at various times.

Archie 3 said early on,

The world wasn't real anymore. Everything in it was a fraudulent copy of what it should have been, and everything that happened in it shouldn't have been happening....but an unreal world was much bigger than a real world, and there was more than enough room in it to be yourself and not yourself at the same time.

Later on Archie 4 remarked,

there seemed to be several of him, that he wasn't just one person but a collection of contradictory selves, and each time he was with a different person, he himself was different as well.

All of the Archie's developed a few influential friendships and key interests (sport and literature in particular). They appeared in different ways and took different forms for each Archie.

The early years of the four Ferguson's were clever, fascinating and exciting writing. I was hooked.

I reached the halfway point of the story so quickly, I felt sure I would finish the rest within a week. A personal chunkster record! But then we hit Archie's early twenties and my attention and enthusiasm began to flag. I had been waiting for some 'big event that rips through the heart of things and changes life for everyone, the unforgettable moment when something ends and something else begins.' Just like Archie 1.

Instead, the stories had settled into just another coming of age story in America in the sixties.

I put the book aside for a couple of weeks to see if a mini-break would help.

It didn't.

I ploughed my way through the next four chapters of Archie, but failed to recapture my enthusiasm. Everything that had charmed me early on just annoyed me now.

Usually I love books that mention books that the characters are reading, but by the end of 4 3 2 1, Archie's huge reading list felt like nothing more than a whose who of classic and modern literature with no surprises and seemingly little relevance to the story. To discover that one of the Archie's was writing a book called The Ferguson Story added another metafiction layer, but failed to excite me.

I have worked and reworked this response to 4 3 2 1, and I'm still not happy with it. Like the book, I feel it is unsatisfactory and overly long. But an inadequate posted review is better than an unposted draft waiting for brilliance.

Perhaps that's how Auster felt too.

For another 4 3 2 1 review try My Booking Great Blog.

Brona's Salon

Brona's Salon is a new meme which aims to gather a group of like-minded bookish people 'under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine the taste and increase the knowledge of the participants through conversation.'

(wikipedia)

I will provide a few prompts to inspire our conversation.
However please feel free to discuss your current read or join in the conversation in any way that you see fit.

Amusement, refinement and knowledge will surely follow!

What are you currently reading?

I'm currently reading His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet. 

How did you find out about this book?

The Shadow (wo)man Booker group read and reviewed this book.

It was one that was generally enjoyed, with some reservations about it being worthy enough for a literary award. 

Why are you reading it now? 

I'm trying to read half the Booker shortlist before the big announcement next week. 

First impressions? 

Entertaining historical fiction with a metafiction touch - is this a memoir or not? 

What is real? What is fiction?
Is there such a thing as fictional true crime?

Metafiction seems to be a literary device that lots of writers are playing with right now.

I'm thinking of Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien with her book within the book, Elena Ferrante's ambiguous 'is it memoir is it real' Neapolitan tetraology, Michelle de Kretser's Springtime: A Ghost Story with its discussion mid-story about the nature of ghost stories, Kent Haruf's use of the same fictional town in all his stories and the referencing of his previous books in Our Souls At Night and Alain de Botton's use of footnotes to address issues brought up in his narrative in The Course of Love.

And that's just some of the books I've read this year that can be classified as metafiction!

Wikipedia describes metafiction as -

A story about a writer who creates a story.
A story that features itself as a narrative or as a physical object.
A story containing another work of fiction within itself.
Narrative footnotes which continue the story while commenting on it.
A story that reframes or suggests a radically different reading of another story.
A story addressing the specific conventions of story, such as title, character conventions, paragraphing or plots.
A novel where the narrator intentionally exposes him or herself as the author of the story.
A story in which the authors refers to elements of the story as both fact and fiction.
A book in which the book itself seeks interaction with the reader.
 A story in which the readers of the story itself force the author to change the story.
A story in which the characters are aware that they are in a story.
A story in which the characters make reference to the author or his previous work.

Have you read any metafiction books recently?

Which character do you relate to so far?

I'm not sure if relate is the right word, but I certainly feel empathy for Roddy's sister Jetta.

She has no rights, no protection but all the care and responsibility of looking after her family.

Are you happy to continue?

So far.

I can see Burnet building a case whereby the bullying, mean, officious Mackenzie Broad family got what they deserved (by being murdered), but it seems too neat and too obvious.
Is Roddy a reliable narrator?
The Macrae stoicism and acceptance of fate as being their lot in life feels a trifle overdone.
I'm enjoying the details of Scottish croft life - as bleak and as hard as it was.

Despite the topic, this is a fun psychological thriller read, but I can feel a bit of a drag creeping in.
I hope Burnet doesn't get bogged down or lose his way.

Where do you think the story will go? 

We know that Roddy killed the Mackenzie Broad's from the start. 

He didn't hide or deny what happened.

But is he covering for someone - his father? his sister?

I can see that his advocate is leaning towards an insanity plea - is this a ploy? Or a real concern about Roddy's mental state.
His journal currently presents a logical, thoughtful, intelligent man.