Review: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I believe there are two types of people in the world: those for whom the past is like a well remembered movie and the present is all that is real; and those, like me, for whom the past is all that is real and the present is a loosely worn garment soon to be changed for another. That is a perspective I seem to share with Berie, the protagonist of this book. And perhaps that is part of why I like it so much. But that is not all.

Lorrie Moore's prose is fluid, poignant, and funny. More than once she made me laugh out loud, or pause to relish some marvelous description. She will at times suddenly disarm you, leading you somewhere soft and lyrical, only to stop you in your tracks with a surprising turn of phrase.

Passing cafés and restaurants, I walk through the bright glance of men in love, who, looking briefly away from the lover across from them in order to more perfectly form a sentence, unwittingly cast their gaze across my path like a light. And so, momentarily, to have accidentally caught their desire, swimming across the current of it like that, passing through, I feel loved, in a warm and random way, as if it were a rainbow, that old trick of light, or a place in a pool where someone has peed. There is a sweet, silent rot to it.

Wait. What? Everything was going, dare I say, swimmingly there. At first perhaps I thought the man's momentary gaze was going to be subverted because he would be distracted from his love, have his head turned by a pretty face -- how like a man, eh? -- but to her credit Moore did not shoot for the easy target. And with that menace safely past I was settling in to this rather nice description. For an instant "rainbow" made me cock an eyebrow, which lowered again with "that old trick of the light," but then before I could fully relax again I encountered the pee in the pool.

That stopped me dead. It seemed so out of harmony with everything that went before. But it was no mere gaffe, no sudden loss of touch. The current of love she swims through is a love felt for someone else by someone else. Her own husband does not love her and she knows it. So the love she feels for an instant is false, not for her, a trick of the light, a warmth that can only remind her of all that is rotten in her own life.

But Lorrie Moore's prose is also economical. The amount of story she packs into 125 pages without ever once seeming to rush or cram is astonishing. And after my remarks critical of first person narration in my review of The Goldfinch I feel it is only fair to say that here the choice of the first person is entirely successful.

Nicely done all around. A very good read.





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Review: The Goldfinch

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



To be honest right off, first person narration is something I find problematic and difficult, something too susceptible to the hothouse cleverness of writing school. That's not to say that a first person narrator cannot succeed. David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, Rebecca, and Lolita are only a few examples of where it succeeds quite well.

First person narration adds an extra layer of difficulty to the author's already difficult task: with a first person narrator not only does the story have to be interesting, but so does the narrator. An uninteresting narrator -- which is not at all the same as an unlikable or an unreliable one -- has great difficulty carrying the story. And The Goldfinch is a long and difficult story, not without flaws of its own, for a narrator like Theo Decker who is not very interesting to have to carry alone.

The pity is, that Theo is at his most intriguing as a child whose mother has been killed in a terrorist bombing, and whose runaway alcoholic wastrel of a father looms offstage like the bad plot device that he is. Once his father (predictably) returns to claim him and take him to (where else?) Las Vegas, Theo devolves into just another teenager with a bad plot device for a father. He drinks, he drugs, he steals. He's just like his father, and only he doesn't know it yet.

When Theo's father dies in -- yes -- a drunk driving accident, and Theo flees back to New York City, he does become somewhat more interesting again, but not that much. Even at the end of the book, once the plot has resolved itself and Theo has revelations about life and beauty, he simply must blather on about them like someone who has read The Brothers Karamazov too many times in the middle of the night in his dorm room. It's not that what he says is not worth saying or pondering. He just takes so long to say it.

I would have found Theo a frustrating character if someone else had been telling his story -- almost very interesting, but not quite; almost very likable, but not quite. But in the narrator, those qualities work against the book. He reminds me of Pip from Great Expectations, interesting and likable as a child, but dull and vexing as an adult. Because his excesses start so early, by the time he is an adult they are merely tiresome.

Now some, like Stephen King, have used "Dickensian" to describe The Goldfinch. There certainly are a lot of orphans, and characters like Hobie and Pippa and (in a strange way) even Boris could slip into Dickens' world. So far so good. But that's about as far as I think the comparison goes. The wealthy Barbour family are a case in point. They take Theo in after his mother's death, and seem about to adopt him when his father shows up to take him away. Some years after Theo returns to New York, he becomes involved with them again.

Now if Dickens had brought them back into the story, as he would have done, he would have done something with them that would not have been better left out. There would have been some astonishing, unexpected moment where you learned something heartbreaking that you'd never guessed. For example, in Bleak House, Lady Dedlock flees her home and dies because she fears her husband's reaction to discovering the indiscretions of her youth, but he is shattered by her leaving. He doesn't care what she did long ago; he just loves her and wants her back. You don't see that coming. But in The Goldfinch the Barbours return for no reason that justifies all the time the story spends on them. They're just there, rich and blandly dysfunctional.

The story does end better than I had begun to fear it would. I was never really expecting a happy ending, but by page five hundred I was dreading that the denial of the happy ending might be delivered in a needless act of authorial tyranny. I am glad to say that did not happen.

Despite all this the novel does have its good points. Hobie and Boris in particular are excellent characters, and Tartt does a good job of portraying Theo and Pippa and Boris at different ages. In many ways the most interesting thing about Theo is the way his style changes over time, to reflect that the character was supposed to have begun writing this story as a teenager and continued as he grew older. That's nicely done. The story works overall. It has some nice twists and turns, two of which made me laugh out loud.

And there are moments when the prose possesses rhythm and beauty:

"Down narrow streets we wandered, damp alleys too narrow for cars, foggy little ochreous shops filled with old prints and dusty porcelains. Canal footbridge: brown water, lonely brown duck."

So I would give this book a tough three stars, because I cannot give it two and a half or three and a half. There is much in here that is very good, but could have been great.












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Review: Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell

Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell by J.R.R. Tolkien

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have sometimes heard people remark on the sense of loss that is so prominent in Tolkien's fiction, and wonder where it comes from. It is convenient and probably not incorrect to point to his experiences in World War One and the deaths of all but one of his closest friends by 1918. John Garth's Tolkien and the Great War is a worthwhile read on this score, as is Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (though he never mentions Tolkien). But if you're familiar with The Lord of the Rings, you can't help but see how Tolkien fits in with the other writers Fussell discusses, who are far more famous as World War One writers.

But all of these men, whether Sassoon or Owen, Blunden or Tolkien, "walked eye deep in hell, believing in old men's lies," all lost friends, and together they all saw the world they shared pass away before their eyes. Much of modern literature first springs from the way this war shattered Western Civilization. The absurdity and alienation and uncertainties begin here. Tolkien's literary response to the War is quite different, but it is no less a response because of that. These connections deserve further scrutiny. But not here.

Yet before that for Tolkien there was already Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon literature, so much of which has a mournful tone. It runs through Beowulf like a cold stream. Right near the end of his commentary Tolkien coins the apt phrase "elegiac retrospect" (p. 351) to describe the poet's remarks on lines 1876-1908 of the translation (Klaeber 2231-71), which tell of the forgotten original owners of the dragon's hoard.  

This phrase so eloquently suits so much of what we read throughout the poem and in Tolkien generally that it is worth quoting the passage at length. One could do worse than to use this passage as a key to understanding how Tolkien evoked the sense of history and loss and high beauty that frets our hearts when we read his works. 

It is also characteristic of our poet (and of Old English as we know it as a whole) that the scene in the barrow passes at once into an elegiac retrospect on the forgotten lords who placed their gold in the hoard, and then died one by one until it was left masterless, an open prey to the dragon, 

But this is not inartistic. For one thing it occupies the 'emotional space' between the plundering of the hoard, and the curiously vivid and perceptive lines on the dragon snuffling in baffled rage and injured greed when he discovers the theft: lines which gain greatly from the concluding words of the interjected 'elegy': ne byð him wihte ðý sél *2277 ('no whit doth it profit him' 1918) -- the last word on the dragonhood. Also, of course, the feeling for the treasure itself, and the sense of sad history, is just what raises the whole thing above 'a mere treasure story, just another dragon-tale'.  The whole thing is sombre, tragic, sinister, curiously real.  The 'treasure' is not just some lucky wealth that will enable the finder to have a good time, or marry the princess.  It is laden with history, leading back into the dark heathen ages beyond the memory of song, but not beyond the reach of imagination.  Not till its part in the actual plot is revealed -- to draw the invincible Beowulf to his death - -do we learn that it is actually enchanted, iúmonna gold galdre bewunden *3052 ('the gold of bygone men was wound about with spells' 2564), in which the quintessence of 'buried treasure' is distilled in four words, and accursed (*3069-73, 2579-84). 

So this passage rivals the exordium on ship-burial (*32-52, 25-40) as that very rare thing, an actual poetic expression of feeling and imagination about 'archaeological' material from an archaeological or sub-archaeological period.  Many such existed in Scandinavia, and even in England in the eighth century, already ancient enough for their puprose to be shrouded in mist.  Here we learn what men of the twilight time thought of them.  And. of course, the writing and the elegy are good in themselves, and not misspent -- since the ashes of Beowulf himself are now to be laid in a barrow with much of this same gold (though much also is to melt in the fire, *3010-15, 2530-4), and pass down into the oblivion of the ages -- but for the poet, and the chance relenting of time: to spare this one poem out of so many.  For this, too, almost fate decreed: þӕt sceal brond fretan, ӕled þeccean: that shall the blazing wood devour, the fire enfold. Of the others we know not. 

(pp. 351-353)

And maddeningly, beautifully, somehow fittingly, that is where the commentary ends.  Pale, enchanted gold indeed that summons us to follow it we know not whither.  But the way is shut.

Now none of the material in this book, whether translation, commentary, Sellic Spell, or the two lays that come at the end were ever prepared or meant for publication. So we cannot fairly judge them as if they were. What we have in this book is more like all the material that Christopher Tolkien published in his History of Middle-Earth than it is like the translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Christopher Tolkien does his customary, outstanding job of sorting out the layers of texts and revisions.

The translation is thus far more of a scholarly exercise, making little or no attempt to rearrange the words into a word order more easily understood in Modern English, or to make the language and ways of thought more accessible. Old English is an inflected language in which word order is far more flexible than in Modern English; and in which idioms and modes of expression are entirely different than now. These are facts which anyone translating for publication must take into account, and changes must be made to transform the original into something intelligible for readers who are not experts in the original. So comparing it to the translation of Heaney (or anyone else) doesn't get us very far.

Now my Old English is not proficient or recent enough to allow me a worthwhile opinion on the accuracy of the translation. But I think it's safe to say I am in good hands with Tolkien. Reading it, for the reasons I mentioned above, is more of a challenge, but I often found that reading it aloud helped me find the proper phrasing for understanding what was being said.

The commentary I found fascinating and illuminating. I have read enough scholarly commentaries on texts in ancient languages with which I am familiar, and which have similar problems owing to the texts being preserved for centuries only in handwritten form by scribes whose understanding of the texts they were copying was imperfect at best, to be able to think that the commentary he offers is of a high quality. This probably surprises no one who knows what Tolkien did for a living, but I think it bears saying anyway. As I noted above, it is a great disappointment that the commentary ends well before the end of the poem, but I loved every syllable of what was there.

Another element in this book is Sellic Spell (meaning "strange tale"), which is a very interesting attempt to imagine both in Modern and Old English the story that lay behind Beowulf itself. It would be an intriguing exercise to set the two texts side by side and compare them in detail. Lastly there are two versions of a brief lay or song of Beowulf, one of which Christopher Tolkien remembers his father singing to him in the early 1930s.

On the whole this is a very good edition of Beowulf to have and use for study. The translation is, as I noted, a scholarly exercise, not as polished and finished as it would have been had Tolkien meant to publish it. I will say, however, that the more I read the translation, especially aloud, the more I like it.