Twelve passages from books I read this year

Monet, Still life with eggs

This will be the last newsletter of the year, and as I did last year, I’d like to share some favorite passages, in no particular order, from a few of the books I read. I prefer this to doing lists and rankings, which feel a bit performative — but, of course, what about having a newsletter isn’t performative?

Edna O’Brien, Paradise

In which a woman on a beach vacation considers the shortcomings of her rich lover.

She was tired. Tired of the life she had elected to go into and disappointed with the man she had put pillars around. The tiredness came from inside, and like a deep breath going out slowly, it tore at her gut. She was sick of her own prediliction for tyranny. It seemed to her that she always held people to her ear, the way her mother held eggs, shaking them to guess at their rottenness, but unlike her mother she chose the very ones that she would have been wise to throw away. He seemed to sense her sadness, but he said nothing; he held her and squeezed her from time to time in reassurance.

Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August: An Indian Story (previously)

In which the disaffected protagonist Agastya contemplates the indignities of commuting via public transit:

A bus overtook him, with office-goers hanging out of the door like tongues out of canine mouths. I’d be one of them, he thought, I certainly won’t be paid enough for the amount of petrol this senile monster (he was driving his uncle’s decayed Ambassador) guzzles; and then nine every morning, he’d be rushing for a bus, lunch packet or tiffin carrier in hand, he’d queue up sweating at the bus-stop, but still stand all the way, in the stench of engine oil and bus-sweat, like the stench of that antibiotic capsule he had had in Madna when he’d been ill. And his questions would contract to whether he would be able to catch his most convenient bus, and whether he would get a seat on it; and the bus timings would be down on a slip of paper in his table drawer and would be embossed in his mind; any unannounced change in them would be cataclysmic, and his wonderful days would be those on which he got a seat both ways.

Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet: Justine

In which the narrator gets some frank career advice from a successful, unhappy novelist.

The rain cropped at the tin roof above us. I longed to go home, for I had had a very tiring day, but I feebly lingered, obstructed by the apologetic politeness I always feel with people I do not really like. The slightly wavering figure outlined itself upon the darkness before me. “Let me,” he said in a maudlin tone, “confide in you the secret of my novelist’s trade. I am a success, you a failure. The answer, old man, is sex and plenty of it.” He raised his voice and his chin as he said, or rather declaimed, the word “sex”: tilting his scraggy neck like a chicken drinking and biting off the word with a half-yelp like a drill-sarjeant. “Lashings of sex”, he repeated more normally, “but remember”, and he allowed his voice to sink to a confidential mumble, “stay buttoned up tight. Eternal grandma strong to save. You must stay buttoned up and suffering. Try and look as if you had a stricture, a book society choice. What is not permissible is rude health, ordure, the natural and the funny. That was all right for Chaucer and the Elizabethans but it won’t make the grade today—buttoned up tightly with stout Presbyterian buttons.” And in the very act of shaking himself off he turned to me a face composed to resemble a fly-button—tight, narrow, and grotesque.

E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

In which I select a few tidbits from this collection of bleak but savagely playful aphorisms, which may get its own newsletter:

The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.

*

Impossible not to resent those who write us overwhelming letters.

*

“Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?” — That’s what I’d like to answer to the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

*

What a bore, someone who doesn’t deign to make an impression. Vain people are almost always annoying, but they make an effort, they take the trouble: they are bores who don’t want to be bores, and we are grateful to them for that: we end by enduring them, even seeking them out. On the other hand, we turn livid with fury in the presence of someone who pays no attention whatever to the effect he makes. What are we to say to him, and what are we to expect from him? Either keep some vestiges of the monkey, or else stay home.

*

When we recapitulate the stages of our career, it is humiliating to realize that we have not had the disasters we deserved, the ones we were entitled to expect.

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“Amid your most intense activities, pause a moment to ‘consider’ your mind”—this advice is surely not offered to those who “consider” their minds night and day and who thereby have no need to suspend their activities, for the good reason that they engage in none.

*

“Truth remains hidden to the man filled with desire and hatred” (Buddha) … which is to say, to every man alive.

Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

In which an abject man decides to kick his family’s Christmas presents up the stairs:

He decided that he would open the packages in bed and that the way he would get them up to his bedroom would be to kick them up the stairs. Which proved to be a challence, because oblong objects had a tendency not to roll up a staircase but to catch on the steps and tumble back down. Also, if the contents of a padded mailer were too light to offer inertial resistance, it was difficult to get any lift when you kicked it. But Chip had had such a frustrating and demoralizing Christmas—he’d left a message on Melissa’s college voice mail, asking her to call him at the pay phone at the Dunkin’ Donuts or, better yet, to come over in person from her parents’ house in nearby Westport, and not until midnight had exhaustion compelled him to accept that Melissa probably wasn’t going to call him and certainly wasn’t going to come and see him—that he was now psychically capable neither of breaking the rules of the game he’d invented nor of quitting the game before he’d achieved its object. And it was clear to him that the rules permitted only genuine sharp kicks (prohibited, in particular, working his foot under the padded mailer and advancing it with any sort of pushing or lofting motion), and so he was obliged to kick his Christmas package from Denise with escalating savagery until it tore open and spilled its ground-newsprint stuffing and he succeeded in catching its ripped sheathing with the toe of his boot and launching the gift in a long clean arc that landed it one step shy of the second floor. From there, however, the mailer refused to be budged up over the lip of the final step. Chip trampled and kicked and shredded the mailer with his heels. Inside was a mess of red paper and green silk. He broke his own rule and scraped the mess up over the last step, kicked it down the hall, and left it by his bed while he went down for the other boxes. These, too, he pretty well destroyed before he developed a method of bouncing them off a low step and then, while they were airborne, punting them all the way upstairs.

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

In which the butler Mr. Stevens reflects, with some discomfort, that his new American employer may expect him to banter with him:

Over the following days, however, I came to learn not to be surprised by such remarks from my employer, and would smile in the correct manner whenever I detected the bantering tone in his voice. Nevertheless, I could never be sure exactly what was required of me on these occasions. Perhaps I was expected to laugh heartily; or indeed, reciprocate with some remark of my own. This last possibility is one that has given me some concern over these months, and is something about which I still feel undecided. For it may well be that in America, it is all part of what is considered good professional service that an employee provide entertaining banter. In fact, I remember Mr. Simpson, the landlord of the Ploughman’s Arms, saying once that were he an American bartender, he would not be chatting to us in that friendly, but ever-courteous manner of his, but instead would be assaulting us with crude references to our vices and failings, calling us drunks and all manner of such names, in his attempt to fulfil the role expected of him by his customers.

Gianfranco Calligarich, Last Summer in the City

In which the narrator, who is working at a magazine in Rome run by a bankrupt Count, abruptly becomes unemployed:

On the first day of fall that year came the letter that shut the office. I informed the count, who leaned on the piano and smiled. “Well, my friend,” he said, “what will you do now?” That’s all he said, although I should have known that for him it was a fatal blow. Two days later, as I gathered my papers, there was a knock at the door, and four determined-looking workmen loaded the piano on their backs and took it away. It was quite an effort for them to get it through the gate, and the old Steinway must have hit some corner or other because its voice rose from the street in a kind of death knell. The whole time the operation laster, the count didn’t leave his room, but when I shook hands with the countess, who was visibly moved, and walked out of the house, I saw him at the window, raising his hand and waving to me. There was something so uncompromising in his gesture that I responded in the only way I thought appropriate: I put my bag down on the pavement and bowed.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (previously)

In which a philosopher warns the hero, Hans Castorp (who has just been musing on the cruelty of society), of the dangers of letting oneself be a sanitorium patient for too long:

Settembrini listened, nodding. He nodded again when Hans Castorp finished his critical remarks for now and fell silent. Then he heaved a sigh and said, “I will not attempt to gloss over the specific forms life’s natural cruelty takes in your society. Be that as it may—the charge of cruelty is a rather sentimental charge. You would hardly have been able to make it there among your own people, for fear of looking ridiculous even to yourself. You have rightly left the making of that charge to life’s shirkers. For you to make it now is proof of a certain alienation that I would not like to see take root. Because a man who gets used to making that charge can very easily be lost to life, to the form of life for which he was born. Do you know what that means, my good engineer: ‘to be lost to life’? I know, I do indeed. I see it here every day. Within six months at the least, every young person who comes up here (and they are almost all young) has nothing in his head but flirting and taking his temperature. And within a year at the most, he will never be able to take hold of any other sort of life, but will find any other life ‘cruel’—or better, flawed and ignorant. You love stories—let me supply you with one. Let me tell you about a young man, someone’s husband and son, who was here for eleven months, whom I got to know. He was a little older than you, I believe—several years older in fact. He improved and was released on probation. He returned home and was received with open arms by his family—not just uncles, but a mother and a wife. He lay around the whole day with a thermometer in his mouth and paid no attention to anything else. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said, ‘You have to have lived up there to know how things really are. You people down here lack the basic concepts.’ It finally came to the point where his mother declared, ‘Go back up. There’s no living with you here.’ And he came back up. He returned to his ‘home.’

Jeremy Denk, Every Good Boy Does Fine (previously)

In which the author remembers listening to opera singers in their practice rooms at music school:

When I worked as an opera coach in grad school, I’d walk down the hall and hear dozens of singers in their separate rooms, practicing run-ups to famous high notes. There’d be a few unrecognizable words of Italian or French, a sentiment of love or woe or duty (it didn’t matter—they could deal with meanings later in life when they were professionals), and up they’d go, a young unknown voice making an assault on the fort of the old and famous Held Note, which would be tight, or wobbly, or (rarely) perfect. Anyway, all three options gave the same practice room result: if good, they’d try to reproduce it; if bad, they’d try to fix it. So almost every high note was cut off too soon (the moment they realized what happened) in mid-soar, like the cry of a chicken as the blade comes down. It was pretty funny to hear all that ecstasy, mass-produced then thrown away: all those holds, unheld.

Sheila Heti, Motherhood

The author reflects on how the world conspires to make all women into mothers, sooner or later:

The hardest thing is actually not to be a mother—to refuse to be a mother to anyone. To not be a mother is the most difficult thing of all. There is always someone ready to step into the path of a woman’s freedom, sensing that she is not yet a mother, so tries to make her into one. There will always be one man or another, or her mother or her father, or some young woman or young man who steps into the bright and shimmering path of her freedom, and adopts themselves as that woman’s child, forcing her to be their mother. Who will knock her up this time? Who will emerge, planting their feet before her, and say with a smile, Hi mom! The world is full of desperate people, lonely people and half-broken people, unsolved people and needy people with shoes that stink, and socks that stink and are holey—people who want you to arrange their vitamins, or who need your advice at every turn, or who just want to talk and get a drink—and seduce you into being their mother. It’s hard to detect this is even happening, but before you realize it—it’s happened.

Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

In which the narrator reflects on the consciousness of his abject protagonist:

Maybe the northeastern girl had already concluded that life is extremely uncomfortable, a soul that doesn’t quite fit into the body, even a flimsy soul like hers. In her little superstitious imaginings, she thought that if by any chance she ever got a nice good taste of living — she’d suddenly cease to be the princess she was and be transformed into vermin. Because, no matter how bad her situation, she didn’t want to be deprived of herself, she wanted to be herself. She thgouth she’d incur a serious punishment and even disk dying if she took too much pleasure in life. So she protected herself from death by living less, consuming so little of her life that she’d never run out. This savings gave her a little security since you can’t fall farther than the ground. Did she feel she was living for nothing? I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. Only once did she ask a tragic question: who am I? It frightened her so much that she completely stopped thinking. But I, who can’t quite be her, feel that I live for nothing. I am gratuitous and pay my light, gas, and phone bills. As for her, sometimes occasionally on payday she bought a rose.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: The Fugitive (previously)

In which the narrator realizes something important about the geography of his childhood:

As for intelligence, Gilberte was very shrewd, give or take a few eccentricities inherited from her mother. But independently of her intrinsic qualities, I remember how greatly she astonished me on several occasions during the conversations which we held while out walking. Once, the first time, by telling me that, “If you weren’t so hungry and it weren’t so late, if we took the path on the left and then turned to the right it would take us less than a quarter of an hour to reach the Guermantes.” It was as if she had said, “Turn left, then turn right, and you will grasp the intangible, you will reach the distant and unattainable goals of which on earth we know only the direction, and only” — something I had always previously thought of as all I could ever know of the Guermantes, and perhaps in a sense I was not entirely wrong — “the ‘way’ toward them.” One of my other moments of astonishment was to see the “source of the Vivonne,” which I had imagined to be something as extra-terrestrial as the entrance to Hell, and which was no more than a kind of square wash-tub full of bubbles. And the third time was when Gilberte said: “If you like, we could still go out one afternoon to walk toward Guermantes, but we could walk past Méséglise, it’s the prettiest route,” a sentence which overturned all the ideas of my childhood by revealing that the two ways were not as irreconcilable as I had thought.