Monday 1 – Romance

Introduction

As I stated in the description of this blog’s format the subject for the month of February is love. I mean, why not? February 14th celebrates a Saint who we know very little about and so why not assist in perpetuating the concept of this being an awkward day/month for lovers.

Got to buy the Mrs. Something (not a vacuum cleaner). I may ask her out to dinner (you will not). I’m going to see if she’ll go to a movie with me (you will ask and she'll say yes). Is she thinking of me? (hard to say) We’ve been together only a few months; do you think jewelry is too much? (no).

Or: Valentine’s Day is stupid (I wish I had a reason to get dressed up). It’s a commercially invented holiday (not true – it’s been around for centuries in a relatively similar format as it exists now). I’m going to rent a movie (always starring Humphrey Bogart) and eat lots of ice cream (something with chunks in it). It was invented by Hallmark (not true). I will sit at a bar and drink her off my mind (does NOT work).

So love is the subject of the month and much of the writing done on the subject of love is not about jewelry, chocolate and dinner at a nice restaurant. In fact, much of it is about the loss of love, the pain of love, the destructiveness of obsession and a healthy fascination for anatomy.

We’ll start more innocently though, and work ourselves slowly to the whips and chains. Today the subject is “Romance.” Next Monday it will be “Unrequited Love,” followed by “Destructive Love” and eventually a little number I’m calling, “Your Way Or Mine?”

Oh, yes. I would make you wait for those noble offerings.

All three of this week’s books concern themselves with forms of romance, whether it be in setting, development or the actual literary movement. I begin with the most innocent of this month’s offerings.



Annam by Christophe Bataille. Translated from the French by Richard Howard. New Directions. $14.95. ISBN: 9780811217637. Buy it here and support The Devil's Accountant.

This is the first Bataille on our list for the month and really, the one you’d rather get to know. At the age of 21 Christophe Bataille won France’s Prix Du Premier Roman and has had three of his novels translated by Richard Howard for New Directions. All of his books are small in size and photographic in style. “Classically trained” is a phrase rarely used to describe writers but in Bataille’s case it would fit. His prose is perfect and that’s not hyperbole.

In exacting language Annam describes the lives of two French missionaries, a monk and a nun, as well as their fellow compatriots as they journey to Vietnam to spread the word of God. The only problem is that it is 1788 and in just 4 years France will be thrown in to revolution. The king will be overthrown and the church they belong to persecuted.

In three words: they are stuck. They make do however, and slowly begin to adapt to the customs and life of being a peasant in Vietnam. Catherine and Dominic (the afore mentioned nun and monk) are eventually the last of their lot. In time the rigors of living in the jungle and several brushes with death begin to erode the meaning from their vows and church. In time, they find each other beautiful and begin to realize that there is a virtue to life in the living and tasting of it.

They arrive at each other and in this arrival they find a new understanding of such banner concepts as patriotism and religion. The portion of this small book that actually contains a fully realized romance is slim, but just as romance is in the real world it is in the arrival that it is given meaning. The trials, tribulations and near death experiences test their trust in faith and eventually lead them to arrive in a more difficult form of trust to attain.

Trust in each other, which in turn leads to honest and unconditional love.


Hyperion by Friedrich Holderlin. Translated from the German by Ross Benjamin. Archipelago Books. $14. ISBN: 9780979333026. Buy it here and support The Devil's Accountant.

“I had nothing to give her but a soul full of wild contradictions, full of bleeding memories, nothing to give her but boundless love with its thousand worries, its thousand raging hopes; but she stood before me in changeless beauty, effortless, in smiling perfection, and all the longing, all the dreaming of mortality, O! all that the Genius presages of the higher regions in golden morning hours, it was all fulfilled in this one quiet soul.”

Just because a book lands itself here on this list of “Romances” does not mean the love described within is a totally successful one. Or one without pangs and longing.

Hyperion is a novel that bleeds and is not worried about your noticing the red stained cloth or joyful tear-streamed cheeks. It is uninhibited in that wonderful, thoughtful way that marks every superb work of high Romanticism. The “love” of this novel is both the literal woman remembered by Hyperion and the ancient Greek culture that he longs to see returned to his native land.

This is a book that would make Lord Byron get, well, verklemmt.

Completely epistolary in construction, Hyperion is a book that seeks to wrestle with invisible powers that inhabit the awakened mind. Concepts like beauty, truth and above all the relationship between hope and longing. Longing, and its illusive offspring hope, are the driving forces of this most lurid work. It is a visionary book, and like the Oracle at Delphi, Holderlin’s protagonist’s language is feverish and bordering on hallucinatory.

Holderlein sat next to the philosophers Georg Hegel and Friedrich Schelling (maybe not literally – they did share classes though) in college and for some time it must have seemed to him that he inhabited a world of giants. Holderlin never attained their kind of fame in his life but his poetry and writing would find its stride in a romantic philosophy that proved to be incredibly influential. It would be less concerned with idealism and instead find a rugged purpose in romanticism. This sentimental yet fierce classicism would eventually be an important influence to Friedrich Nietzsche and a subject often dealt with by Martin Heidegger.

Essentially this is a book for lovers of language. This unrhymed and unmetered book is arguably the closest to music that language can come without sacrificing communication to become song. As Nietzsche described it, the language is similar to “the beat of the waves of the troubled sea.” He compared it to an “uncanny dirge” and in its sorrowful lamentation of the diminished lives of modern men he found a useful fulcrum with which to set his eventual philosophies as purposeful lever.

All this talk of philosophers has hidden the fact that the majority of Hyperion’s letters are concerning his old flame: the adorable Diotima. She is described by Hyperion in beautiful language as both a vaunted Goddess of Philosophy and the quiet, very domestic love of his life. Hyperion remarks that, “A thousand times I have laughed with joy in my heart at men who imagine that a sublime spirit could not possibly know how to prepare a vegetable.”

The flattering language Hyperion bestows upon Diotima (and other of his acquaintances) is earnest and innocent. He is not offering flattery to them because they are not present. Some no longer exist on the physical plane of existence. He seeks nothing in return and this total lack of reciprocity proves Hyperion’s love as pure.

For all its mystical prose and ecstatic musing, lines like the one above are what allow Hyperion to ascend to greatness as a work. The writer has an equal understanding for the sublime sort of admiration one feels for a kindred soul who is luminous both when in action or at relative stasis. Hyperion can bellow to the heavens of his Love’s keen intellect and then privately confess his admiration for her cooking. Hyperion’s love, mind you, is both Diotima and the dreams he has of his beloved Greece.

One warning I might offer is that this is a novel of highly romantic sentiment. If you do not like life messy and unashamed then you might as well avoid it. Hmph…


The Enchantress Of Florence by Salman Rushdie. Random House. $14. ISNB: 9780679640516. Buy it here and support The Devil's Accountant.

In the waning days of the celebrity writer a master must influence their critics to have a positive view of their personality, much like a perpetrator of scandal must go on Larry King in order to find expatiation. If this is not done the clichés get leveled like lances and the writer’s offerings will have a tough go of it.

Salman Rushdie’s best writing is behind him. He is more interested in celebrity than writing and it shows. He has lost his edge and has become too intoxicated by western power brokers and no longer writes about anything politically important. I have heard each of these poor comments uttered about Rushdie. I may have made one or two of them not too long ago. I take them back if I did and challenge the critic who believes any of those sentiments above to defend such quickly formed pronouncements.

Rushdie’s newest work is strangely his most accessible and contains elements that should have awakened a broader interest from readers. He has made magical realism his strongest suit and this book is his most outwardly magical. I say “strangely” because it has met with some resistance.

The novel’s concern is essentially about a perverse sort of unconditional love born from romantic obsession. The setting is the plush halls of power in Akbar’s Mughal Empire and the Medici’s Renaissance Florence. Rushdie’s powers of description are on full display and so is his wonderfully didactic conveyance of history as impression. He is a writer that can make the above perversion seem delightful.

Keep in mind that Rushdie is his own creature and so instead of being pedantic or luridly fantastic he adds the realistic aspects of those possessed of tyrannical power, whether issued by decree, upheld by the might of their right arm or kept barely hidden under rustling silks. Few are better than Rushdie at describe the abusive nature of power, since he suffered a great deal from its misuse.

Enchantress is dominated by the politics of love, namely concepts of possession. The story begins with a woman who exists (literally) only in the presence of Emperor Akbar. She is possessed wholly by him. The Emperor is accustomed to having things exactly as he desires them and she is an absolute ideal: something from him for him and involving only him. His world is about to change.

A young Florentine man with fair skin and golden hair works his way into the presence of the Mughal Emperor. His claim is simple: that he is the descendant of a lost sister of the Emperor’s grandfather. He, a white man, is therefore the uncle of the Emperor and he goes by the less than humble title of Mogor dell’Amore. The Mughal of Love.

Typically this kind of temerity would promptly meet with the executioner’s trade. The story told is a fascinating one though, and the Florentine’s claims involve enough history familiar to Akbar and his relatives that it piques the Emperor’s interest. Then there is the matter of the woman involved in the story. The supremely beautiful Qara Koz, a sorceress known as Lady Black Eyes.

The Florentine’s tale sets the court aflame with resentment (the wives of Akbar) and admiration (everyone else). Koz’s beauty and mysterious story places her at points of very real history familiar to the Emperor and even his mother begins to be unable to doubt the verity of the Florentine’s otherwise impossible tale. Add to the story a lovely (nearly equal in beauty) lady in waiting, “The Mirror,” who serves as Qara Koz’s doppelganger lover and servant and you arrive at the total unmanning of the philosophic emperor.

He commissions the greatest artist in his land to illustrate the Florentine’s tales and in time the young painter becomes obsessed with Qara Koz as well. Magically, he paints her in a color and realism that none have seen before. The paintings and painter disappear eventually and a wonderfully Borgesian occurrence follows (I’ll let you read and find out).

In the story Koz changes hands with the tides of war, like some supreme jewel awarded the victor until finally arriving, this time because of love, into the hands of a Florentine warlord, the potent Argalia, slayer of Vlad Dracula and generally fearsome guy. Argalia is described in terms that strike one as being nearer to Japanese legend than Middle Eastern or Florentine. His is a lithe almost feminine form, which he houses in long white robes embroidered with his symbol: the lily. Tattooed from head to two with his symbol as well, Argalia commands a trio of giants named for the three musketeers and wields his blade with unequaled skill. He is a character that seems more like a denizen of a Michael Moorcock fantasy novel than a chief character of a work by Salman Rushdie.

That’s the charming thing about Enchantress. For all its political awareness, philosophical musing about imagination self-justification and understanding of the tyranny of power it has a wonderfully naïve sense of being a work of fantasy. It’s almost as if Rushdie decided to allow the metaphor to live slightly more than its source. The magic Qara Koz wields and the heroic capability of her lover, Argalia, lend the novel a wonderfully romantic aesthetic.

It is all grounded of course, especially by the population of renaissance Florence, which Rushdie paints with a wonderful earthiness. Particularly the charming figure of Niccolo Machiavelli (Rushdie does a wonderful job redeeming this often maligned figure whose name has always been synonymous with plotting, underhanded scheming). Machiavelli comes alive as a stolid genius surrounded by the average. He appears sometimes pitiful and almost always practical.

The entirety of Rushdie’s latest offering concerns itself with attraction, love and the powers held within them. All set before questions concerning reality and imagination. It is as much about the intoxicating nature of imagery as it is about a woman making her way in a world totally dominated by men, which she does very capably. Almost like a poison pill clause, those that objectify her meet with dark and usually bloody ends.

It is a work of romance in every sense of the term and this makes it a special book in Rushdie’s catalogue. His works have always been known for wonderful imagery, whether exotic or homey, but in Enchantress he has allowed himself a little more room to paint pictures for their own sake. Emotion too, seems to play a larger role, particularly a very somber understanding of frustration and desire.

I wonder, though won’t dwell on it, about the situation of this book. It was written so soon the author’s divorce from a beauty (model and actress, Padma Lakshmi) rivaling Qara Koz herself, that some material must have been dredged up from very personal sentiment. This could explain the dominant place of emotion in Enchantress as compared to the typically cerebral humor of his other works.

If you have a bit of a sweet tooth and do not mind the occasional historical obscurity then you will surely enjoy The Enchantress of Florence.


Next week: Unrequited Love. O my.