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screen_memory's reviews
234 reviews
Suicide by Édouard Levé
2.0
Suicide is an austere portrait of an unnamed "You" remembered by the narrator twenty-five years after their suicide. There are no chapters, and the events remembered by the narrator are recollected according to no discernible pattern and quickly passed by in order to accommodate the hasty retelling of further circumstance. They are not recollected in a chronological fashion, and soon enough they begin to list off like a laundry list of trivialities, of minutiae which we would have little to no interest in were it not for the factual suicide of the author.
The significance of Suicide is made coherent by the same action Leve undertook days after turning the manuscript for Suicide over to his editor. Otherwise, Suicide would seem incoherent, decrypted, or, at worst, it would seem boring, unnecessary. Indeed, the narrative is quite bland. I was constantly wondering what significance nearly every anecdote had to the story, but I suppose it all comes back to, “Oh, yeah, I guess he did commit suicide.” Unfortunately, that single grandiose act of self-annihilation, of the elimination of all possibility, is not enough to lend every tedious memory importance. Of course, what do we have left of the dead but memories alone? This makes Suicide a jaunt through an avenue of memory regarding a life that the narrator fails to make the reader interested in.
Who was this "You"? Why did the cause of his suicide remain undivulged? Why, following the conclusion of Suicide, were we left with more questions than answers were given? One grand reply to dispel all questions yet still leave them unanswered would be that Leve was as confused by his own inevitable suicide as readers were over the cause of the unnamed man in the story. It was probable that he contended with far more questions than any of his readers had formed in response to his work. Edouard was bargaining with uncertainty and ultimately passed on to forever experience the grand phenomenological negation of death. It is unfortunate that his act of suicide could not invigorate the tedious prose.
The significance of Suicide is made coherent by the same action Leve undertook days after turning the manuscript for Suicide over to his editor. Otherwise, Suicide would seem incoherent, decrypted, or, at worst, it would seem boring, unnecessary. Indeed, the narrative is quite bland. I was constantly wondering what significance nearly every anecdote had to the story, but I suppose it all comes back to, “Oh, yeah, I guess he did commit suicide.” Unfortunately, that single grandiose act of self-annihilation, of the elimination of all possibility, is not enough to lend every tedious memory importance. Of course, what do we have left of the dead but memories alone? This makes Suicide a jaunt through an avenue of memory regarding a life that the narrator fails to make the reader interested in.
Who was this "You"? Why did the cause of his suicide remain undivulged? Why, following the conclusion of Suicide, were we left with more questions than answers were given? One grand reply to dispel all questions yet still leave them unanswered would be that Leve was as confused by his own inevitable suicide as readers were over the cause of the unnamed man in the story. It was probable that he contended with far more questions than any of his readers had formed in response to his work. Edouard was bargaining with uncertainty and ultimately passed on to forever experience the grand phenomenological negation of death. It is unfortunate that his act of suicide could not invigorate the tedious prose.
The Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera
4.0
The Festival of Insignificance marks Kundera's return to his literary Ithaca after a thirteen year odyssey away. Each character within the story in their own wise participates in this absurd festival, that is, an existence in a world that cannot be contemplated in earnest. This is the Kundera we have read in Slowness. We cannot take him seriously. This is not to say that what he has written is without value or exists as mere farce. Far from it. Kundera merely means to, through scenes such as the schizophrenic episode in which the navel-gazing Alain, by some seeming chaos in space and time, jostles his absentee mother, or Stalin intruding on the final scene, lead us away from the grave seriousness man adopts to defend against life's absurdity. Nearly every episode, even those more despondent in tone, possesses some element of the comical.
The novel opens with Alain meditating on the navel, figuring that this recently uncurtained region of the feminine form comprises the final of four erotic anatomical features of a woman. The ass, breasts and thighs comprise the first three which man has always known to arouse desire, each of them serving to distinguish one woman from another. Alain says a man could identify his lovers ass from a crowd of asses, yet no man could identify a woman's navel, however dear she was to him. A woman's navel becomes, for Alain, representative of their sexual uniformity.
We then meet D'Ardelo who is visiting his doctor to learn of the results from his recent tests to determine whether or not he has cancer. It is near his birthday, and he plans to celebrate not only the occasion of his very distant birth, but also the occasion of his possibly very near death. However, the doctor's smiling face dashes this design. For some reason, D'Ardelo, who runs into Ramon afterward, tells him that he does, in fact, have cancer. We can only assume that D’Ardelo lied out of a spirit of prankishness as we later learn Ramon and D'Ardelo feel no particular sort of way about each other.
Ramon continues on to call on his friend, Charles, who is in business with his friend Caliban as caterers with a plan to throw a cocktail party for D'Ardelo's birthday. This desire of Ramon's is bolstered by a strange sort of affection he now feels for "the jerk," D'Ardelo. This party then becomes the venue of a farcical soiree.
Caliban once was an actor eventually failing to land further stints. For the occasion of the party, he decides to impersonate a Pakistani man. He makes the acquaintance of a Portuguese woman, a lonely housemaid who feels united to Caliban through their seeming linguistic estrangement. She communicates with him in Portuguese, not knowing he speaks perfect French, and Caliban replies in his fabricated Pakistani. The conversation proceeds naturally as though they seem to understand one another. Indeed, on some primordial level, despite differences in culture and language (which is a perpetuated joke on Caliban's end), they do.
Here also we have Madame La Franck in attendance, a mature woman in her 50's who none in the party have made the acquaintance yet who is well known by all through pictures. During an awkward attempt at introduction, D'Ardelo's daughter continues to repeat herself as Madame La Franck negotiates with a large morsel of food in her mouth. After swallowing the food, she makes a random remark that "Human existence is nothing but solitude."
"Oh, how true that is!" D'Ardelo's daughter responds.
La Franck continues: "A solitude surrounded by other solitudes."
Alain, rustled by his meditations on the navel, having been spurned into this contemplation by a memory he has of the last time he saw his mother in which she tickled his navel before running off to America, begins to have conversations with his mother through a framed photo of her on his wall and seemingly through telepathy whilst on his motorcycle. As stated earlier, he had bumped into her on her way back home after a failed suicide attempt motivated by her unwanted pregnancy. She had attempted to drown herself (what is it with Kundera and the acts of drowning that mark the exit, attempted or successful, of so many of his characters?), deciding only to live after pushing the head of a would-be rescuer underwater, ultimately drowning him. She had fought to defend her death from rescue. Why, then, had she decided against committing the act of suicide after murdering her wishful savior?
The conversations he has with his mother are bleak. She calls him an idiot after expressing her guilt for bringing him into a world he did not ask to be born into.
"I'll be frank," Alain's mother says. "I've always felt it's horrible to send a person into the world who didn't ask to be there....You're here as you are because I was weak. That was my fault. Forgive me."
Alain finally says, after some moments of silence: "What is it you feel guilty for? For not having the strength to prevent my birth? Or for not reconciling yourself to my life, which, as it happens, is actually not so bad?"
Interspersed throughout the narratives of the cast of characters participating in the festival of insignificance are interludes of Stalin's farcical escapades. He regales his comrades with an anecdote of how, once when he was hunting in the winter, he came across twenty-four partridges. Having only a dozen rounds, he picked off half of the crowd, returned home to reload, then returned to the same site where the surviving partridges remained and eliminated them as well. Krueschev, after the men made for the pissoir (Stalin pissed in a private bathroom), expressed his incredulity over Stalin's unbelievable story. Later we learn Stalin was outside the pissoir listening to their remarks, amused at the hilarity of their disbelief over what Stalin had meant as a joke. This, for Kundera, marked the birth of the post-joke age, the advent of an era that has forgotten humor, a humanity that takes its world seriously.
As Ramon and Charles, along with Caliban and Alain, discuss how, years ago, their relatives had supported Stalin, who was the perceived "great hero of progress," Charles says to Ramon, "I imagine your father was already a little skeptical about him, your generation more so, and for mine, he had become the greatest criminal of all."
Ramon's reply is as poignant as it is wise: "Yes, that's how it goes. People meet in the course of life, they talk together, they discuss, they quarrel, without realizing that they're talking to one another across a distance, each from an observation post standing in a different place in time."
Is this not one of man's greatest tragedies; that even lovers who have known each other for years could still remain incomprehensible to one another?
Kalinin, a dear comrade of Stalin's, has problems with his prostate and needs to relieve himself frequently. The occasion of his speeches became a sort of debacle with him exiting the stage every fifteen or so minutes to relieve himself. While Kalinin was away a symphony would begin to play while dancers performed for the crowd. When Stalin had been giving a particular speech, he noticed Kalinin's tortured movements, the grim, pale expressions haunting his face as he struggled to contain himself. Noticing this, Stalin, to amuse himself, would slow the proceeding of the speech, his enunciation becoming more deliberate, his oration more precise. Finally, once his comrades expression turned to relief, thus communicating that he had pissed himself and conquered his grand struggle against his natural imperative, Stalin would quickly bring the speech to its conclusion.
The boys take to the park after visiting a museum. Eventually, Stalin emerges on the scene accompanied with his comrade Kalinin, who is eager to piss. Stalin takes aim and blasts the nose off of the statue of the Queen of France, Marie de Medicis, a woman known for her ugly looks. The crowd, not sure whether to hiss at him or applaud him, remains observant. Kalinin ducks behind numerous statues to avoid being seen pissing by the crowd.
"Pissing in the most famous French park -- that's forbidden!" Stalin shouts, bursting into laughter. His laughter invites the puzzled crowd into joining him in his good humor.
When D'Ardelo comments on Stalin and Kalinin, perceiving them as two struggling actors, struggling to live, he recalls his fabricated affliction and continues: "I'm struggling too."
This invites Ramon to discuss the matter of insignificance with this man he rather dislikes yet is moved to feel some sort of sympathy for owing to his faked illness.
"Insignificance," he says, "is the essence of existence. It is all around us, and everywhere and always. It is present even when no one wants to see it: in horror, in bloody battles, in the worst disasters. It often takes courage to acknowledge it in such dramatic situations, and to call it by name. But it is not only a matter of acknowledging it, we must love insignificance, we must learn to love it....The children laughing...without knowing why -- isn't that beautiful?"
Soon thereafter, Stalin takes his comrade Kalinin by the shoulders and announces that "My old friend here has sworn on his honor that he will never again piss on the ladies of France!"
Afterwards, a carriage conducted by a child pick chauffeurs the two comrades through the Luxembourg Gardens and out of sight. Our story ends here.
My primary complaint with the book is that it is so short. We have waited thirteen years to hear from Kundera once more, yet we are only granted enough material to last the better part of two hours. We are not given the rich and detailed personal histories with which he has crafted his characters in other stories. Perhaps this was deliberate, though.
Ramon makes the remark on two people being unable to understand one another when conversing at two differing points in time, delivered into an encounter with another through the circumstantial difference of each person's personal history. This elimination of the characters' history offers their being as it appears in itself at that particular time. We do not encounter Alain or Charles or D'Ardelo in the context of their personal history -- they do not communicate to us from a specific point in time, thus they are not, and will not become at a later time, incomprehensible. They appear to us as they are, born of an era that has forgotten humor.
If the author in his advanced age, thirteen years following what was at that time his final novel, still retains his poignant sense of humor in the face of life's misfortunes, despite all he has lived through, considering the "termites of reduction" which are eating away at the art form he holds most dear, and mankind's all-encompassing inclination towards forgetting; if Kundera is able to laugh at life's tragicomic insignificance, does The Festival of Insignificance not ask that we endeavor to do the same?
The novel opens with Alain meditating on the navel, figuring that this recently uncurtained region of the feminine form comprises the final of four erotic anatomical features of a woman. The ass, breasts and thighs comprise the first three which man has always known to arouse desire, each of them serving to distinguish one woman from another. Alain says a man could identify his lovers ass from a crowd of asses, yet no man could identify a woman's navel, however dear she was to him. A woman's navel becomes, for Alain, representative of their sexual uniformity.
We then meet D'Ardelo who is visiting his doctor to learn of the results from his recent tests to determine whether or not he has cancer. It is near his birthday, and he plans to celebrate not only the occasion of his very distant birth, but also the occasion of his possibly very near death. However, the doctor's smiling face dashes this design. For some reason, D'Ardelo, who runs into Ramon afterward, tells him that he does, in fact, have cancer. We can only assume that D’Ardelo lied out of a spirit of prankishness as we later learn Ramon and D'Ardelo feel no particular sort of way about each other.
Ramon continues on to call on his friend, Charles, who is in business with his friend Caliban as caterers with a plan to throw a cocktail party for D'Ardelo's birthday. This desire of Ramon's is bolstered by a strange sort of affection he now feels for "the jerk," D'Ardelo. This party then becomes the venue of a farcical soiree.
Caliban once was an actor eventually failing to land further stints. For the occasion of the party, he decides to impersonate a Pakistani man. He makes the acquaintance of a Portuguese woman, a lonely housemaid who feels united to Caliban through their seeming linguistic estrangement. She communicates with him in Portuguese, not knowing he speaks perfect French, and Caliban replies in his fabricated Pakistani. The conversation proceeds naturally as though they seem to understand one another. Indeed, on some primordial level, despite differences in culture and language (which is a perpetuated joke on Caliban's end), they do.
Here also we have Madame La Franck in attendance, a mature woman in her 50's who none in the party have made the acquaintance yet who is well known by all through pictures. During an awkward attempt at introduction, D'Ardelo's daughter continues to repeat herself as Madame La Franck negotiates with a large morsel of food in her mouth. After swallowing the food, she makes a random remark that "Human existence is nothing but solitude."
"Oh, how true that is!" D'Ardelo's daughter responds.
La Franck continues: "A solitude surrounded by other solitudes."
Alain, rustled by his meditations on the navel, having been spurned into this contemplation by a memory he has of the last time he saw his mother in which she tickled his navel before running off to America, begins to have conversations with his mother through a framed photo of her on his wall and seemingly through telepathy whilst on his motorcycle. As stated earlier, he had bumped into her on her way back home after a failed suicide attempt motivated by her unwanted pregnancy. She had attempted to drown herself (what is it with Kundera and the acts of drowning that mark the exit, attempted or successful, of so many of his characters?), deciding only to live after pushing the head of a would-be rescuer underwater, ultimately drowning him. She had fought to defend her death from rescue. Why, then, had she decided against committing the act of suicide after murdering her wishful savior?
The conversations he has with his mother are bleak. She calls him an idiot after expressing her guilt for bringing him into a world he did not ask to be born into.
"I'll be frank," Alain's mother says. "I've always felt it's horrible to send a person into the world who didn't ask to be there....You're here as you are because I was weak. That was my fault. Forgive me."
Alain finally says, after some moments of silence: "What is it you feel guilty for? For not having the strength to prevent my birth? Or for not reconciling yourself to my life, which, as it happens, is actually not so bad?"
Interspersed throughout the narratives of the cast of characters participating in the festival of insignificance are interludes of Stalin's farcical escapades. He regales his comrades with an anecdote of how, once when he was hunting in the winter, he came across twenty-four partridges. Having only a dozen rounds, he picked off half of the crowd, returned home to reload, then returned to the same site where the surviving partridges remained and eliminated them as well. Krueschev, after the men made for the pissoir (Stalin pissed in a private bathroom), expressed his incredulity over Stalin's unbelievable story. Later we learn Stalin was outside the pissoir listening to their remarks, amused at the hilarity of their disbelief over what Stalin had meant as a joke. This, for Kundera, marked the birth of the post-joke age, the advent of an era that has forgotten humor, a humanity that takes its world seriously.
As Ramon and Charles, along with Caliban and Alain, discuss how, years ago, their relatives had supported Stalin, who was the perceived "great hero of progress," Charles says to Ramon, "I imagine your father was already a little skeptical about him, your generation more so, and for mine, he had become the greatest criminal of all."
Ramon's reply is as poignant as it is wise: "Yes, that's how it goes. People meet in the course of life, they talk together, they discuss, they quarrel, without realizing that they're talking to one another across a distance, each from an observation post standing in a different place in time."
Is this not one of man's greatest tragedies; that even lovers who have known each other for years could still remain incomprehensible to one another?
Kalinin, a dear comrade of Stalin's, has problems with his prostate and needs to relieve himself frequently. The occasion of his speeches became a sort of debacle with him exiting the stage every fifteen or so minutes to relieve himself. While Kalinin was away a symphony would begin to play while dancers performed for the crowd. When Stalin had been giving a particular speech, he noticed Kalinin's tortured movements, the grim, pale expressions haunting his face as he struggled to contain himself. Noticing this, Stalin, to amuse himself, would slow the proceeding of the speech, his enunciation becoming more deliberate, his oration more precise. Finally, once his comrades expression turned to relief, thus communicating that he had pissed himself and conquered his grand struggle against his natural imperative, Stalin would quickly bring the speech to its conclusion.
The boys take to the park after visiting a museum. Eventually, Stalin emerges on the scene accompanied with his comrade Kalinin, who is eager to piss. Stalin takes aim and blasts the nose off of the statue of the Queen of France, Marie de Medicis, a woman known for her ugly looks. The crowd, not sure whether to hiss at him or applaud him, remains observant. Kalinin ducks behind numerous statues to avoid being seen pissing by the crowd.
"Pissing in the most famous French park -- that's forbidden!" Stalin shouts, bursting into laughter. His laughter invites the puzzled crowd into joining him in his good humor.
When D'Ardelo comments on Stalin and Kalinin, perceiving them as two struggling actors, struggling to live, he recalls his fabricated affliction and continues: "I'm struggling too."
This invites Ramon to discuss the matter of insignificance with this man he rather dislikes yet is moved to feel some sort of sympathy for owing to his faked illness.
"Insignificance," he says, "is the essence of existence. It is all around us, and everywhere and always. It is present even when no one wants to see it: in horror, in bloody battles, in the worst disasters. It often takes courage to acknowledge it in such dramatic situations, and to call it by name. But it is not only a matter of acknowledging it, we must love insignificance, we must learn to love it....The children laughing...without knowing why -- isn't that beautiful?"
Soon thereafter, Stalin takes his comrade Kalinin by the shoulders and announces that "My old friend here has sworn on his honor that he will never again piss on the ladies of France!"
Afterwards, a carriage conducted by a child pick chauffeurs the two comrades through the Luxembourg Gardens and out of sight. Our story ends here.
My primary complaint with the book is that it is so short. We have waited thirteen years to hear from Kundera once more, yet we are only granted enough material to last the better part of two hours. We are not given the rich and detailed personal histories with which he has crafted his characters in other stories. Perhaps this was deliberate, though.
Ramon makes the remark on two people being unable to understand one another when conversing at two differing points in time, delivered into an encounter with another through the circumstantial difference of each person's personal history. This elimination of the characters' history offers their being as it appears in itself at that particular time. We do not encounter Alain or Charles or D'Ardelo in the context of their personal history -- they do not communicate to us from a specific point in time, thus they are not, and will not become at a later time, incomprehensible. They appear to us as they are, born of an era that has forgotten humor.
If the author in his advanced age, thirteen years following what was at that time his final novel, still retains his poignant sense of humor in the face of life's misfortunes, despite all he has lived through, considering the "termites of reduction" which are eating away at the art form he holds most dear, and mankind's all-encompassing inclination towards forgetting; if Kundera is able to laugh at life's tragicomic insignificance, does The Festival of Insignificance not ask that we endeavor to do the same?
Heidegger by Michael J. Inwood
4.0
Inwood does an excellent job of presenting a very brief and concise analytic of Heidegger's infamously grandiloquent and labyrinthine philosophy, condensing the ideas Heidegger outlined in some 420 pages down to a easy 120 pages. This is a sort of Sparksnotes on Heidegger, and, thankfully, Inwood does not opt to provide much autobiographical detail of Heidegger's life, save for a quick summary of his life and background and a short chapter on his views and involvement regarding Nazism (he saw Nazism as its possibilities, not as what Nazism revealed itself to be in essence). It is not the place of this review to bolster the text herein with the reviewer's own summary of the philosophy discussed within the book. It is for the potential reader to explore within "Heidegger."
I have been reading this alongside Magda King's "A Guide To Heidegger's Being and Time." Magda gives the ideas presented in Being and Time a much more intimate and thorough examination. Inwood's text, though, is no less critical than King's. What King offers in an analytic of slightly less profundity Inwood presents to the quick, and it is so refreshing to review Heidegger's philosophy in much simpler terms. Also included is a chapter on Heidegger's conception of art and its function to Dasein which Heidegger wrote of in later works.
"Heidegger" is a perfect introduction for the unacquainted and/or those who quiver before the obvious complexity of Heidegger's work, as well as a wonderful companion to Heidegger's text.
I have been reading this alongside Magda King's "A Guide To Heidegger's Being and Time." Magda gives the ideas presented in Being and Time a much more intimate and thorough examination. Inwood's text, though, is no less critical than King's. What King offers in an analytic of slightly less profundity Inwood presents to the quick, and it is so refreshing to review Heidegger's philosophy in much simpler terms. Also included is a chapter on Heidegger's conception of art and its function to Dasein which Heidegger wrote of in later works.
"Heidegger" is a perfect introduction for the unacquainted and/or those who quiver before the obvious complexity of Heidegger's work, as well as a wonderful companion to Heidegger's text.
Cousin Pons by Honoré de Balzac
5.0
Perfect through and through. Balzac masterfully fashions a web of deceit, subterfuge and betrayal between a network of Parisians who are of the utmost virtue until they are presented with a scheme to con their way into inheriting Pons's fortune. Once one such scheme is devised between a group of co-conspirators, one among the alliance secretly employs the service of another, intending to con the original alliance out of the money. The plot is dense with numerous methods of betrayal, and Balzac once again asserts his status as a once-living encyclopedia of any and all things French. His compiled knowledge of history, law, finance, business, art, music and literature is unparalleled. Balzac is truly a master of the novel,