The Mastersinger from Minsk

 By Morley Torgov, 2012 

To start with the positive, this is a clever conception for a comic novel – Richard Wagner is preparing the premier of his opera, Der Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and someone is killing off his star performers. Torgov nicely shows both the megalomania of Wagner and the glorious style of his music. (And he describes the pleasures of other musical performances in a sensitive language, as well.) The over-the-top personality of Wagner deserves an over-the-top storyline that punctures the balloon of self-importance he lives on.

Sadly, the execution of this conception is pretty awful. I was well into the story before I asked myself, Is this supposed to be comical? And I decided that it couldn’t be. The story seemed so ridiculous that it couldn’t be serious, but it seemed too earnest and clumsy to be humour. Later, reading on the book cover that Torgov won the Leacock award for humour for another book, I concluded that I was wrong: it is supposed to be comical, although it’s still not funny.

Humour is a personal thing, so perhaps it’s humorous for other readers. But the characters are also stereotyped and unbelievable, the sex scenes are gratuitous, the conclusion is contrived. Torgov tells us the facts to move the plot along, but doesn’t show them in his writing. He sticks bits of background into the narrative as if he needed to pad the scenes, but doesn’t create the atmosphere to make them fit in. The characters are illogical puppets who act to suit the plot, but have nothing interesting about them.

It would be fun if someone were to write a comic novel about Wagner with realistic characters who weren’t just silly. Unfortunately, this isn’t that

Telegraph Avenue

 By Michael Chabon, 2012 

A comic novel that leads into all kinds of unexpected corners, this novel takes us into revolutionary politics and black exploitation films of the 1970s, the practice of midwifery in contemporary California, the tribulations of small business operators in Oakland, the second-hand jazz recording market, inter-racial relationships in the USA, fatherhood and the relations between two loner 14-year-olds. And it’s fun to read, with 500 pages of creative, apt prose.

I was completely drawn into the story because of the characters: although most of them are ordinary folks getting through life, they are trying to work out complex issues. I would not expect to be very interested in the story of two businessmen trying to keep Brokeland, their record shop, going, even when the story includes the threat of a mega music retailer planning to move into their neighbourhood. But Chabon gives them a history and culture that are quirky, comic and touching. The characters have their own complex lives, some outrageous and some fairly banal, so that I felt curious about all of them, wanting to understand more about them and how their stories would develop. Even the minor characters, like Mrs Jew the martial arts teacher, or Cochise Jones the musician,  have surprising depths to their personalities.

One of the central themes that Chabon explores is fatherhood and masculinity – themes that are also important in his other recent books. The men are all a bit silly in their relations to their parents and sons – they are not very good at it because they have other, more important and typically male, preoccupations. Archie avoids and evades responsibility, while Nat is more responsible but petulant. Their sons meanwhile are exploring masculinity as they see it in stylized movies. This contrasts with the seriousness with which their wives treat birthing and motherhood. The men are stuck in a muddle – to some extent, a fantasyland – until they start to get serious about their own sons.

And their sons need that connection to get their own lives in order. The novel opens with a scene of the two boys, Titus and Julius, almost flying on skateboard and bike, and closes with them grounded in a solid but positive pathway to their futures. Julius has a gay crush on Titus, and Titus deals with it in a modern matter-of-fact way that is nice to see. Together they try to figure out the bizarre background of the adults in their lives.

The theme of friendship between Black and white Americans is also central. The leading characters do have a long and close relationship in spite of the fact that one family is white and Jewish and the other is Black. They also have a complex class background – Gwen is striving for an affluent middle-class life while Nat seems to have abandoned his comfortable middle-class life for a comfortable lower-middle-class one. Chabon describes Nat’s belief “that the real and ordinary friendship between Black people and white people is possible, at least here, in the streets of the minor kingdom of Brokeland, California.” But this may be an illusory foundation, as even this minor kingdom is undermined by the men themselves. The final outcome is about as reliable as the blimp that might carry them away.

What seems more real is how Gwen, a Black midwife, uses the fact of her racialization to turn around her situation and get what she really wants. (But I wonder how Black Americans see this scene – I suspect that it’s not quite so easy to overcome racialized prejudice and use it to your advantage, a trope that exists more in the imagination of racists. Gwen’s white partner says her policy is, “What do I know about being Black?” I’m not sure of Chabon’s answer to this question.)

Still, I enjoyed reading this book. It’s a warm-hearted, entertaining look at parts of American culture that I’m not exposed to, with complex and empathetic characters. It’s a complex, lengthy story line, and I enjoyed every page.

Klara and the Sun

 By Kazuo Ishiguro, 2021

As in his other books (those I have read), Ishiguro poses profound questions by slowly revealing a painful reality through the limited perspective of one of his characters. The perspective here is that of an artificial consciousness, embodied in an organic robot but developed with a high level of sensitivity to human emotions. Naturally, this gives Klara, the robot, an unusual perspective on the human relationships that she sees, but with an imperfect ability to understand them.

In spite of the fact that Klara is a robot, or an Artificial Friend, an AF as she is called – and Ishiguro emphasizes this throughout – she is the most sympathetic character in the story. Perhaps it’s because she is telling the story and we see everything through her eyes, but she is also consistently warm, generous, uncomplaining and thoughtful. The human characters are mostly deeply flawed, showing selfishness, shallowness, fear and carelessness toward each other, together with more positive traits. I found that I was more interested in what was going to happen to Klara than to the human characters. And the ultimate resolution seemed quite sad, although also satisfying because it fulfilled Klara’s desires (or programing objectives).

The fact that Klara is content with her fate is a contrast with the human society that Ishiguro portrays. The humans seem never to accept their conditions, whether it relates to their health, their emotions or their economy. It’s never clear exactly why, but they seem to be living in some kind of social breakdown. It appears that technology, apparently related to genetic editing, is not only tied to economic collapse, but has also affected the health of young people. And this leads to a range of reactions: a new underclass rejects the technology at significant cost, while those with more assets attempt to overcome the problems with even more questionable technology. Ishiguro leaves us with the question of whether stasis like Klara’s might be a better outcome than a continuing, highly problematic struggle to advance.

Interestingly, each artificial personality learns from its own experience and builds its own picture of reality. (This is much like Oliver Sacks’ description of people building consciousness by mapping their individual experiences.) This means that each AF is different, and each has some similarity with human consciousness, although in distinct and unique ways. Thus, they model human consciousness. Klara, for example, while highly attuned to human emotions is very ignorant about the basics of life. She thinks of the sun as a godlike male because he gives her energy and spreads warmth. She makes basic human mistakes like thinking he can heal illness because she saw someone get better after sunlight fell on him. This seems like what a pre-scientific human might have understood about the gods, but it also illustrates how contemporary human thinking is subject to misperception and false logic. Like us, she can’t distinguish between reality and the perceptions caused by her sensors and processors. In this way, the story becomes an exploration of religious belief. Belief and prayer are very real to Klara.

I did feel that some aspects of the novel were odd – Klara’s stiff and unnatural use of language, for example, and her lack of knowledge about basic facts like what the sun is. Initially, this just seemed to reflect a weak understanding on Ishiguro’s part (and his editors’) about how programmed machines are likely to work in human culture. It’s partly explained by indicating that Klara is an early generation of her type and later generations are more advanced. Perhaps it’s also a trade-off for the processing power that her emotional analysis and empathy take. I grew more comfortable with it as the novel moves along, accepting it as a reflection of Klara’s imperfect learning and understanding. Human society is complicated and technology does not get it all right. And, we know, developers are apt to release early technology before all the bugs are worked out.

I like the quiet thoughtfulness in Ishiguro’s writing, and I’ll look forward to reading more of his books.

On the Move: A Life

 By Oliver Sacks

I thought that the life of Oliver Sacks would be interesting, but I did not know that it would take me into weightlifting culture, motorcycling, the gay scene of the 1960s, and the philosophy of consciousness. Perhaps I could have guessed the latter, as his books that I know of (but haven’t read) are about consciousness and perception. But the incidents of his life – as selected and highlighted here – show him as an impetuous, obsessive and deeply thoughtful personality – the sort of person you would enjoy spending an evening with if he were not also rather shy and withdrawn.

Fortunately, though, like many shy people, when you get him going on his subject he can ramble on endlessly with fascinating details. He does ramble more or less chronologically through his life, stopping at various points to describe anecdotes of his experiences. He jumps around a bit, and over some chunks of his life, but the anecdotes he tells seem to be at key incidents that led to insights about himself or about the psychology of the mind. For example, his initial repressed homosexuality in London in 1959 contrasts with his jump into the lively gay sexuality of San Francisco in the 1960s and ’70s. He then seems to have become celibate until meeting his life partner Billy in 2008, completely skipping over the AIDS health crisis of the 1980s and ’90s. This spotty anecdotal approach makes this more of a selection of memoirs than an autobiography, although it does reveal a lot about how his thinking develops and how it affected his approach to psychology and neurology.

Sacks describes himself as a storyteller, a trait he says he picked up from his mother. Storytelling is the style he adopted for his professional writing, describing case histories of his patients rather than abstracting their stories to symptoms and outcomes. This in part may explain why his books have met resistance among other neurologists but have also been so popular among general readers. In seeing his patients as people with life stories, rather than as the abstractions common in conventional medical writing, he understands them more deeply than other researchers might. It appears that he takes his patients’ histories and ponders them extensively as he attempts to describe them, sometimes taking months to write each one. With this approach, it’s understandable that his patients grow deeply attached to him and many become long-time friends. It’s probably not possible to say that this is a better approach than the conventional one, but certainly it seems invaluable to have some researchers taking an in-depth holistic view while others take the focused examination.

Fascinatingly, later in his life, Sacks comes to the conclusion that perception, experience and consciousness are constructed phenomena, formed by each individual in a way similar to the way that learning and memory are individually constructed. Paraphrasing Gerald Edelman, he says “As we move about, our sense organs take samplings of the world, and from these, maps are created in the brain. There then occurs with experience a selective strengthening of those mappings that corresponds to successful perceptions – successful in that they prove the most useful and powerful for the building of ‘reality.’ ” This of course implies that each individual builds a unique picture of reality and a unique consciousness, although presumably with a coherence among other people with “successful” mappings. This radical understanding comes late in Sacks’ life, so he does not have time in this book to talk about its implications.

In a way, this book is a bit of a teaser leading a reader into Sacks’ other books. He touches on many of them in a tantalizing way without going into what he has already developed at book length. But he makes them so intriguing, and his storytelling is so engaging, that this book makes me want to pick up the others and find out what more he has to say.

The Wind from the Plain

 By Yaşar Kemal

This story tells of the lives of a poor peasant family struggling through epic challenges to survive and get ahead in a mid-century Turkish village. The family makes an annual trek over a mountain pass to the cotton fields where they hope to have a good enough harvest to improve their lives. But everything seems to be against them: village families fight among each other for advantage; corrupt village leaders play them off to get a profitable deal from the landowners; different generations within the family fight for respect and attention; the land, the weather, even the spirits, seem to exist just to make things harder. And the final result from their labours is disappointment. (This book is the first of a trilogy, so maybe things will get better in the future.)

The story has the feel of an epic struggle against fate and the elements, but told within the personal details of peasant life. Ali is a heroic and sympathetic character. He tries to build up his family’s position by taking on enormous tasks and facing overwhelming risks. Inspired by his mother, he pushes on against a raging storm (his mother rages against her fate like Lear in the storm). He tries to help his village and the lying braggart Old Halil, although they don’t return his support. Ali is a good soul who would be a good friend, although he is beaten down by bad luck time after time.

While his story is unrelenting struggle, it is not unending misery. The family cares for each other, even while they play out their personal issues. Ali resents his mother, but over and over he risks his life and his family’s future to look after her. Ali’s wife makes his favourite foods even though she has only what she can carry on her back. His kids play and sing, but they also have their ideas about how they can support the family. Occasionally, it seems that things are going their way, and they can take a break. Then their life appears almost idyllic, loving and rich.

The concrete details of their environment and their lives make the story real and relatable. The smells in the wind, the sparkle of a stubble field, the offerings hanging from a holy tree seem to come from first-hand knowledge, and they place a reader in the scene. They give insight into what the characters are seeing and feeling, and help a Canadian urban reader empathize with them on their journey over the Turkish mountains.

This makes the struggle of a traditional family in the modern world more poignant. Things don’t work the way they used to, and a corrupt modern political and economic system undermines them as much as their struggles against nature. They face their epic struggle yearly, and the village leaders aligned with the modern Turkish state of the 1950s exploit them for their labour or send them off to the army. The villagers know they need to organize to protect themselves, but they are stuck in their atomized families, each one struggling alone to survive.

Perhaps this conflict is the key theme that Yashar Kemal wants to point to in the novel – the need for traditional Turkish peasantry to organize together instead of fighting alone among themselves. He shows that it will not be easy – their attempts flounder twice in the novel, and the village leader is shown trying to buy off each family individually – but it seems to be the only way that the families will get ahead in a market economy that does not support them.

Although set in a culture and place that I know nothing about, the story and the characters are interesting enough that I want to read the rest of the trilogy.

Candide

 By Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)

What a horrific story! All of the central characters, and many others, suffer the most brutal cruelties from the first page, with only brief pauses to set up the next horror. While I do enjoy a good satire, this story made me want to quit reading. 

The story might have been more enjoyable to read if the storyline were more nuanced, but the point is fully evident within the first ten pages and, in stringing it out, Voltaire merely inflicts the pain on his readers as well as his characters. Piling one misery on top of another makes Voltaire’s view of the nature of the world inescapable and affirms that there is neither reason nor consolation in philosophy. The only chance of wisdom and security seems to lie in staying home and cultivating one’s garden, although even this is far from secure.

Who would want to read a story of endless varieties of torture and misery if they did not lead to some outcome? This is like watching a horror movie with no resolution (and I’m not one who chooses to watch horror movies anyway). The satire might be justified if it took on a worthy target, but this storyline is not the true nature of the world. The philosophers Voltaire describes are thoughtless idiots, a false caricature that is not worth satirizing. And nor is Voltaire’s picture of the world any more realistic. While there is pain and misery in life for no purpose, most of us lead a good part of our lives in general comfort and even well-being. Even acknowledging the relative privilege I enjoy as a middle-class Canadian, I don’t think the people living in poverty or in underdeveloped countries or countries at war live lives of unrelenting pain.

Len & Cub: A Queer History

by Meredith Batt and Dusty Green

Len and Cub were two rural New Brunswick men who, it seems, had a loving relationship for several years in the early decades of the twentieth century. The photos collected in this book give insight into their lives. But the book is equally valuable for the careful way it lays out the contemporary social and legal circumstances of their society, and how the authors pieced together their stories through inferences and interpretations of the few facts available.

Based entirely on photos with the barest of notations (subjects, dates, locations at best) and a few remembered rumours, supplemented with a few surviving official records and news clippings, the story is drawn out by two archivists who came across the photo collection with the description that it referred to a man and his “boyfriend.” I’d be curious, too, especially since many of the photos, taken by Len, illustrate a close and intimate friendship. The authors use their professional training and what must have been a significant amount of personal time to piece together the story, without romanticizing or going beyond reasonable inference. As a result, they create a detailed portrait of what a same-sex relationship must have been like in their specific time and place. This is a much richer and more human picture than one gets in broader histories, which often rely only on collections of small snippets and anecdotes to represent a social setting in general terms. It’s a remarkable addition to the “microhistory” approach that focuses in depth on a specific story to add understanding that is hard to get out of a broader historical approach.

Their story seems similar in many ways to what might occur in a rural town 100 years later. A young man, Len, finds that his interest in a younger neighbour, Cub, is reciprocated. They hang out together, becoming increasingly close. Having a car allows Len, the more affluent of the pair, to arrange private getaways, and having a camera allows him to make a record of their friendship. In their gossipy town, they keep their relationship private, in a way that many do now. They risk social sanctions and perhaps condemnation from their families and friends, although the danger of criminal prosecution that they faced no longer exists. Over time, their relationship weakens, possibly because the structures that could strengthen it did not exist. Len is driven from the town over a scandal that is apparently covered up by his family’s social standing. Cub enters a childless marriage to a 39-year-old woman, and after a time moves to a larger city. While the legal repercussions are no longer as strong, and a couple today would have many more options, young men today who want to remain within a conservative small town could find themselves on similar tracks.

While the personal details are thin, the photos themselves give the richness that makes the book unique. Len was an early photo buff and apparently took thousands of photos of his friends and family, his surroundings and, with the aid of a timer, himself. Many are deliberately posed to show the relationship that Len wanted to capture. Some are candid snapshots. Some are not great shots and the reproduction in some is unfortunately grey, but many show the facial expressions, gestures and physicality of their relationship. A reader can see the lives of Len and Cub in the photos and from the pictures infer a story that is much more concrete and memorable than a simple text description would be.

A string of lucky circumstances led to the photos being saved by Len’s sister, purchased and donated to the New Brunswick archive, and then discovered and researched by the authors. They offer a unique view into the lives of two men who could perhaps stand in for many of those living in small towns across Canada and the USA in the 1910s and ’20s.