Celestial Harmonies

There’s a special kind of despair that occurs when you’re on the fourth page of an 844 page tome and you realise that the author has elected not to use quotation marks.  Luckily, it seems that Peter Esterházy is just messing.  The quotation marks come back at some point.  I forget when.  To be honest, I utterly lost interest long before the quotation marks returned.  Celestial Harmonies tells the story of the Esterházy family, a sickeningly famous Hungarian tribe of counts who lost their fortune during the reign of communism. 

My main issue with the book is the same thing that I found with Oscar and Lucinda.  It’s the history of a family I know nothing about, but it’s worse.  Because the Esterházys are so famous in his native Hungary, Esterházy assumes we know about his family.  It’d be like reading a book, written by Prince William, about our royal family.  One presumes he wouldn’t go to the trouble of explaining just who his grandmother is.  It made the whole thing so difficult to read.  It also removes a lot of the foreshadowing that I’m sure is intended to be in the book.  Don’t get me wrong, there are so many other reasons that I didn’t like the book, but none of this crap helped.

Celestial Harmonies is split into two rough halves: Number Sentences from the Lives of the Esterházy Family and, Confessions of an Esterházy Family.  I hated the first section.  It’s almost four hundred pages of short vignettes that contradict each other and probably relate to something I’m supposed to know about but don’t.  Esterházy tells about 60 stories of his father’s death and his parents’ first meeting each.  I doubt very much whether any of these are true but there’s the implication that this kind of thing did happen in his family.  It’s mostly frustrating as the stories all contradict one another and they don’t get us anywhere.  We learn nothing that is true from the whole 400 page ordeal.  And this made willing myself to commit to the next 400 was difficult to say the least.

I was also super annoyed by the fact that Esterházy doesn’t seem to go too far into what it’s like to grow up with his name.  It’d be like one of the younger Kardashians saying that their surname is only good for the anecdotes that it has brought with it.  It’s just not true.  Growing up as part of a famous family affects people.  If I’m honest, Esterházy might have gone into this in far more detail than I’m giving him credit for.  By the time he, as a character, actually rocked up I was well into speed reading the thing just to get to the bloody end.

In all, I am disappointed with this book.  I loved history growing up and I really hoped that it would be a chance to get to know more about Hungary in a way that doesn’t involve a World War… or goulash.  Instead, the whole thing felt a bit smug.  In Celestial Harmonies, Esterházy is at times so deliberately self-deprecating that it feels fake.  It’s a bit like that time David Cameron said he ate a pasty at a train station or pretends to support Aston Villa (or West Ham); he’s smug not only because of the generations of entitlement but also because he’s nailed being one of the commoners.  He can relate to us, shouldn’t we be thankful, shouldn’t we be in awe of the Esterházys’ illustrious past.

I’ve now moved on to greener pastures, Marya: A Life  by Joyce Carole Oates.

Less Than Zero

The only thing I’ve read, in terms of fiction, by Bret Easton Ellis is American Psycho.  I must have been about sixteen or seventeen and had seen the film so decided to give it a go.  I was too young.  The only think that I really remember from the carnage of the plot is the tone of the entire book.  Patrick Bateman is blank.  He describes dismembering young women as though he were reciting a shopping list.  And that tone very clearly takes its roots in Less Than Zero.  It’s a fascinating read for so many and I’m so glad that I avoided the film version with Robert Downey Jr in the first throws of his fame.

The book’s brilliant.  It’s actually the sort of book that makes me a little bit sick.  Ellis was twenty-one when he wrote it and it’s brilliant and I wish I were that talented.  I’m only twenty-six, which I do acknowledge is by no means old, but I’m nowhere near being as just plain good as Ellis.  The bastard.  Luckily, though, I do get to enjoy his books.

Less Than Zero follows Clay, an eighteen year-old home for Christmas in Los Angeles after his first semester in an East Coast college.  He essentially hates the place, L.A. I mean.  Having left four months previously, Clay has attempted to make a clean break from his not-quite-girlfriend Blair, distant family and the drug fuelled parties of his friends.  The book is nearly two hundred pages of successive parties, drugs and semi-anonymous sex.  Clay refuses to pass judgement on any of his friends’ activities- even when they veer into paedophilia that he so clearly wants no part of.  That fact that one of his friends has slipped into drug addiction and sex work passes with similarly few consequences or emotional reaction from Clay.  The only thing that he gets any real joy from is counting down the days until he can leave L.A and the friends he so clearly despises.

One of the little things that I really appreciated about this book was the way Ellis only uses first names, or nicknames.  No-one, not even Clay has the privilege of a surname.  It makes the entire book wonderfully anonymous.  These could be any spoilt, rich as hell Hollywood brats.  On top of that, Ellis doesn’t bother to explain relationships.  It’s always, “And then I went to a party at Trent’s house,” or, “I went for lunch with Blair and Kim,” without telling us who these people are.  The only exception to this is Daniel, a friend of Clay’s from college who we’re only told about as he furthers Clay’s emotional isolation when he decides to stay in L.A. rather than return to school in New Hampshire.

Less Than Zero has done that wonderful thing of making me want to read more of its author.  My interest is thoroughly piqued.  Admittedly, that’s partially because I’ve read American Psycho too.  Both of Ellis’s books that I’ve read so far have protagonists who are complete moral blanks and I want to know if it’s his thing.  Are all his heroes so morally ambiguous and empty, or is it just Patrick Bateman and Clay?

I’m now on Celestial Harmonies by Peter Esterhazy.  I may be some time.

Written on the Body

I’ve been meaning to read Written on the Body for ages.  Jeanette Winterson’s one of those authors where I don’t even need to know what her books are about to want to read them.  This is actually pretty beneficial as a lot of her books don’t seem to be about anything much.  They, in my experience, consist largely of semi-philosophic, poetic musings on love and sex.  Written on the Body definitely fits in with Winterson’s oeuvre in this sense.

The plot, such as it is, follows an unnamed narrator through a string of girlfriends and recollections about past boyfriends until they meet Louise.  The narrator loves Louise.  Actually loves her; not in the way that Louise (correctly) identifies as a line trotted out as part of a well-worn path of seduction.  Louise knows the narrator better than that; she refuses to be loved as others before her have been loved.  Anyway, Louise is married.  Naturally things go about as well as you’d expect relationship-wise with Louise, especially after attempts to leave her ridiculously named, scheming doctor husband, Elgin.  I have issues with not thinking of marbles when I hear the word “Elgin.”  That aside, there’s also an unlikely cancer-based plot twist and the lovers are parted.  The rest of the book is the sex-musings and poorly thought out life choices born of missing Louise.

One of the things that I actually really liked about this book was Winterson’s choice to not give the narrator a gender.  Next to nothing is actually revealed about the narrator, they are a character written about through the people they love rather than in and of themselves.  They are defined through their partners.  It’s so refreshing.  There are very few books that treat gender and sexuality as irrelevant; even more than twenty years after it was written.  And it’s clearly not that Written on the Body doesn’t deal with ideas of sexuality, rather it treats any prefix to the word “sexuality” as irrelevant.  As do all the characters.  It’s the sort of thing you want to see in a book, it’s a shame that a book written in the 90s is more on it in terms of LGBT themes than actual society is now.

So, I liked this book.  There’s always something almost whimsical about the way Winterson writes.  As I mentioned earlier, it’s poetic and meanders along to no sort of conclusion.  Louise disappears.  There is no happy resolution, or a truly tragic one.  Although her disappearance is a gaping hole in the narrative, in the narrator’s life, things continue.  Life continues.  And that, the fact that it ends when it does makes it so hard to get a grasp on the book.  It just ends. 

My next read is Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis.

Far From the Madding Crowd

For the longest time I thought that Thomas Hardy’s famous book was called Far From the Maddening Crowd.  I mean until I was about twenty.  It makes sense.  I’d want to be as far away from this hypothetical maddening crowd as possible and I respected Hardy’s honesty in that fact and decided said maddening crowd was a good reason not to read this book.  Anyway, turns out that it’s actually a line from a poem and “madding” just means frenzied.  So, I put off reading the book for ages for no good reason and instead choose Tess of the D’Urbervilles as my Hardy starter book years ago.  Naturally, with my feminist inclinations, I do not love that book.  Tess is wonderful and it’s very well written, but just all the men are utterly terrible.  Literally all of them.  I’ve been told that I’m being too sensitive in regards to this, but my point stands. 

Anyway, back to the book in question; Far From the Madding Crowd.  It’s good.  Really good.  The plot, in brief, is the tale of Bathsheba Everdene, wealthy farmer, bailiff and independent woman.  I like Bathsheba.  Two local men, Gabriel Oak and William Boldwood both fall madly in love with Bathsheba and, after a slew of refused marriage proposals; she elopes with soldier Frank Troy.  This is an incredibly poor decision on Bathsheba’s part as he is pretty much the only man in the entire book who doesn’t love her.  There’s quite a lot of rural shit happening too.  Multiple sheep-based plot point occur that I won’t bother to go into here.  They manly serve to drive Gabriel and Bathsheba together or apart, depending on what would be most dramatic at any given point.

As I mentioned, I like Bathsheba.  She is so ahead of her time it’s unreal.  She inherits her uncle’s farm and instead of getting a man to run the place she mucks right in and not only makes runs it, she makes it flourish.  She proves that she doesn’t need a man, despite the fact that men all around her are desperate to marry her.  Yes, sometimes the balance between independent woman and total dick falls on the wrong side of the line, but she is a young, single woman who voices her opinions even when they don’t agree with those of the men around her. 

It’s the men who let the book down really.  At proposal number one, Gabriel tells Bathsheba that she essentially has to marry him because he loves her and this is more important than the fact that she doesn’t love him.  She’ll get the hang of doing so in time.  Boldwood is jealously aggressive when it comes to Bathsheba’s relationship with Troy.  The entire book is made up of men trying to possess or to tame Bathsheba and she resists it throughout. 

It’s wonderful to see a book written at this time, 1874, celebrate a strong woman in the way that it does; in a way that a lot of media even now doesn’t and it really surprised me.  The women Hardy wrote about are the kind that laid the groundwork for feminism and I didn’t expect that from this book.  Far From the Madding Crowd is great.  Well, there are great bits of it.  If you don’t look too closely at the bits about sheep bloat, it’s utterly wonderful.  And my mum likes it.

I’ve now moved on to Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson.