Station Eleven

By Emily St. John Mandel (2014)

I enjoyed reading this novel, although I’m not completely sure how the different parts hang together. It’s a complex story in which a piece of art and an art project link several individuals and communities following a catastrophe that separates them and everyone around them.

The piece of art is a graphic novel called Station Eleven, written by one character and shared with some of the others. It doesn’t seem to have a narrative and rather than inspiring, it seems to be captivating imagery about a very repressive society. Nevertheless, everyone who sees it seems to be inspired by its beauty. Or perhaps they just don’t want to lose the few objects of beauty that remain.

The art project is a travelling group of players who perform music and Shakespearean plays in the isolated surviving communities after the disaster, taking the motto from a Star Wars episode, “Because survival is insufficient.” Clearly the survivors of the catastrophe agree, because they flock to see the shows even at a time when strangers are a potential risk.

Outside of these remnants, the survivors struggle to live in a world where modern ways of life cease to exist. The health catastrophe has led to a social breakdown in which people fight each other for any remaining resources. St. John Mandel doesn’t dwell on this period, saying that people don’t want to remember it. It’s not what St. John Mandel wants to write about, and not I would choose to read about, either.

While small communities live together, they are on the alert for roving bands that might want to rob them of what they have. Without people to manage a fuel infrastructure, essentials such as heat, water and electricity fall back to whatever communities can make on their own. All this seems realistic, reflecting what a collapsed modern society would look like. While dangers from other people and the loss of modern technology would certainly be threatening, many people would join together to support each other and rebuild a cooperative society. They couldn’t survive in any other way.

And they would be looking for something beyond survival – art to give them a sense of something beyond daily life. I think we do look for this, even those of us who are materialists and don’t believe in a spiritual world. We have to accept that the non-rational has a place in human life. However, the role that St. John Mandel gives the graphic novel in linking the characters seems a bit mystical. It may be best to think of it as a literary device that casts a light on different lives – people respond to it in different ways. Even the nastiest character, who does not know its history or significance, keeps his copy and seems to value it. It turns out that people are linked in surprising ways, even if the links are not meaningful. The meaning comes only from what we give it, not from intrinsic value. Perhaps this is what the novel shows: even in the worst times, we look for art that goes beyond daily life and we give it our own meaning. Sometimes that is a connection with other people and sometimes not, but that does not diminish its power as art.

The novel has many different story lines that don’t really seem connected: the successful actor and his unsuccessful relationships, the friend who is successful at an unrewarding job, the actor in the travelling players, and the medic who cannot save everyone but provides the services that he can. They all find meaning in their lives, linked to each other even they don’t know it. They seek connection and the hopeful ending comes from the possibility of rebuilding it. Interestingly, while the human links are essential to each of the characters, the links are also what causes the catastrophe. Without easy travel and close living conditions, the disease that destroys human life would likely have been limited to a small area and died out before infecting the world. Like the storyline in the graphic novel, the novel is very ambiguous and supports multiple interpretations. It’s not a simple narrative, but that makes it richer and more rewarding. I didn’t expect the novel to take me in this direction, and that may be its greatest strength.

Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

By Jan Morris, 2001

Jan Morris finds Trieste a genial place where, like many others, she fits in and feels comfortable. I read this book thinking that it might be a relaxing place to visit for a few days after spending a busy week or two in Vienna. But Morris’ description makes me wonder if it might be too quiet. How many days do I want to spend drinking a quiet coffee by the harbour and walking out for a visit to contemplate one of the many small museums?

In truth, Morris says she has been drawn to Trieste many times over the years because of its quiet charm, welcoming people and slow pace. She does point out that in the 2000s, after she finished drafting the book, it has become more modern and linked into contemporary culture. In the twenty-first century, it has developed a vigorous growth in tourism, science, education, business. But Morris isn’t interested in that, and makes Trieste seem a sleepy town best suited for recuperation. I was in fact thinking of a quiet place to relax after my city vacation, but do I want something a little more stimulating?  

Morris describes the architectural highlights in a sympathetic way, suggesting that they complement the town with understated glory. The long history as a coastal town is best represented in the harbour and the remaining bourgeois palaces of the late Austrian empire. Trieste was the holiday resort for the middle class of Austria. It became an important sea port for central Europe until the Austrian empire fell apart and trading patterns shifted. It links the coast to the harsh environment of the surrounding karst mountains. And it has been a place where the Slavic peoples of the Balkans worked and lived together with the Italians and Austrians. James Joyce and other European figures spent significant parts of their lives here (often complaining of the weather and culture). But all this seems to be about a past time that has moved on.

Morris suggests that Trieste makes the most of a long-gone history, becoming an ideal spot for philosophical reflection. “The fundamental fact about modern Trieste, underlying all that happens here, is that it was built ad hoc – to be the principal port of the continental empire. Ever since that purpose was lost, the city has been trying to find substitute functions for itself… and has been more or less stagnant.” So says Morris. And yet she felt drawn to return several times to appreciate the pleasures of a slower life relaxing and wandering with no necessary destination. She can withdraw and contemplate what it means to be nowhere in particular.

I wonder if it is Morris’ attraction to the quietude that makes Trieste sound so sleepy. I have after all spent time visiting historic towns that a less sympathetic travel writer might call out-of-date backwaters. Lucca, Porto and other cities could be described in terms of their past histories and slow streets, although they are very vibrant with lots of street culture. And Trieste is well positioned for a daytrip to Venice or down the Illyrian coast.

I have friends who have recently visited Trieste, and found it surprisingly pleasant. It’s barely on the tourist list, which is a point in its favour. It may be just a matter of getting into the right frame of mind, as Morris suggests, enjoying the coffee and a convivial read rather than looking for romanticized features that in the end seem a bit disappointing.

Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare

By Will Tosh, 2024

I enjoy going to the Bard on the Beach Shakespeare festival every summer, and watching a play or two at the Globe Theatre when I’m in London. This book shows how the queer cultures in the England of the late 1500s shaped William Shakespeare’s life and are reflected in his writing.

Tosh says in the introduction to the book that, while it may be fruitless to speculate about Shakespeare’s sexuality, it is very rewarding to look at the queer settings in which he was working. He imagines several scenes to illustrate his themes: the idealized same-sex love in the Greek and Roman classics that school boys learned; the imagery and language (and abuse) around the boy actors on the London stages; the close male relationships among young men learning the law (or not) in the Inns of Court; and the explicit homoeroticism in the written poetry of Shakespeare and some of his contemporaries. However, as Tosh points out, while there clearly was a strong undercurrent of homoeroticism in Shakespeare’s milieu, there was also repression of homosexuality should it become too visible. This helps explain why Shakespeare limited its expression within acceptable limits of stage and print.

Tosh’s descriptions offer several perspectives new to me. It’s not surprising to read that sexual activity (and sexual abuse) was common among the boy choirs and the commercial stage companies, although I’ve not seen it discussed by Shakespeare historians. The references to homosexual activity among the Greeks and Romans are pretty widely known, although I didn’t realize how central it was to the education of young Elizabethan men. As Tosh says, it may have been idealized and downplayed by the instructors, but students know what is really going on. And Tosh shows how Shakespeare reflects this knowledge in his plays and poems. The fact that we’ve gone so long without acknowledging it really reflects mainly on the Victorian commentators who chose to bury it, and on the homophobia that shapes current perceptions.

A few years ago, I saw a production of “The Merchant of Venice” that showed the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio as a queer relationship. It had always seemed inexplicably overwrought as a close but straight friendship, but it makes much more sense as a queer relationship. Tosh’s explanation of idealized male friendship and partnership gives it meaning that helps understand Shakespeare’s other plays as well.

In addition to the sociological setting in which Shakespeare wrote, Tosh analyzes the influence of other writers. Marlowe’s queer history, “Edward II,” showed Shakespeare the possibility of bringing out universal human stories in the plays instead of stock characters. He also shows how the explicit homoeroticism of Shakespeare’s contemporary, Richard Barnfield, opened the possibilities of voicing queer male desire in the sonnets. While Barnfield was first valorized, then rejected, for his explicit queer poetry, Shakespeare’s often more ambiguous language escaped criticism. Tosh suggests that, after seeing how his society turned on Barnsfield, Shakespeare may have deliberately delayed publication of his sonnets, which for years circulated among friends in hand-copied sheets only. After the flamboyantly queer lifestyle of James I of England, a social crackdown on public expression of homosexuality led to censorship. Shakespeare retired to an affluent and comfortable home life in Stratford, perhaps unwilling to risk what he had won.

Tosh says his book “… has been an invitation to think honestly about Shakespeare’s evolution as a queer artist, to examine the factors that helped and hindered his growth, and to consider the ways his culture both endorsed and suppressed queer desire.” I think it succeeds in laying out a queer way to understand Shakespeare’s works in their historical context as well as in our times.

The Pornographer of Vienna

 By Lewis Crofts, 2011

Lewis Crofts sets up a dark anti-romantic perspective in the first line of this novel: “While on his honeymoon in Trieste, Adolf infected his wife with syphilis.” He makes a point of continuing this tone throughout the novel. This is in keeping with the subject of the novel – Egon Shiele apparently lived most of his short life in poverty, alienation and social rejection, crossing over into a grimy criminality when it suited him. In the last few years of his life, he was recognized as one of the best painters in Europe with commissions in demand before he died in the 1918 flu epidemic.

Schiele sketched and painted young girls and prostitutes in provocative and sexually revealing poses. He seemed to be obsessed with capturing them in paint and frequently had casual sex with his portrait subjects. In this novel, he pays prostitutes for posing and for sex, but also seduces the daughters of the wealthy men who commissioned him to paint them. He paints the decadence of Viennese society in the early 20^th century until the society destroys itself – and him – in the collapse of its empire in the First World War.

Crofts uses language and scenes in the same way to tell Shiele’s life amid the corruption. Like Shiele, he doesn’t spare the corruption, describing the exploitation, violence and hypocrisy of the self-satisfied society. He writes what Shiele sees, vivid descriptions of blood, dirt, vomit, skin, hair. Crofts is equally vivid in describing the smooth skin, luminous hair, voluptuous fabrics and elegant lines that Shiele paints, although it’s the grittier details that stand out.

Shiele appears to be carnal and driven, but not unkind, manipulative or exploitive – if Crofts is correct, he seems to have paid for his models and they appreciated it. His more complicated relationships are with other men – his painting mentor Gustav Klimt, his patron and friend Roessler, his domineering father and uncle. They sometimes support him, but also play on his insecurities and manipulate him to get the art that they want. It’s not always clear if they just want pornographic pictures or if they appreciate Shiele’s artistry. To a degree, this story seems to reflect the model of the struggling artist who draws beauty out of adversity. While Shiele struggles with poverty and acceptance, as Crofts tells it his deeper struggles are with his internal drives and the men who want to manipulate him. Toward the end of his career, when he seems happier in marriage, he tells his friend that he has chosen to adopt a more commercial style so that he can support his family. His friend tells him that he was a better artist when he was less successful.

Whenever I read this kind of personalized biography, I wonder what’s real and what’s made to fit the author’s story. According to Wikipedia, the facts of Crofts’ story are accurate. The backroom dialogues and intimate details must be Crofts’ creation to support the story he wants to tell. They seem to fit the characters, coloured as needed by the shading and angles that an artist must put into a portrait.

I’ve admired Shiele’s work without knowing anything of his life. In parts, Crofts’ story makes it more challenging to admire Shiele. With today’s view of the exploitation of women and children, a view more critical than Shiele would have accepted, some of his practices seem abhorrent. The frequent conflict between the artistic creator and the artistic product is not resolved in this story, although it offers a detailed and unvarnished view for consideration. I read this novel as a way to start thinking about a trip to Vienna, and I will certainly have this story in mind whenever I view Shiele’s work and the comfortable bourgeois lifestyle it punctures.

The Tobacconist

By Robert Seethaler, 2012
(Translator:  Charlotte Collins)

This book seems a bit like a fable reset in the mid-20^th century. It opens with Franz, a simple/innocent young man in a forest village, who loses his father and has to make his own way in the world. He discovers much about life that is not good. In his innocence, he tries to side with truth, justice and love. And, as in many of the original European fairy tales, this life journey does not end well. The strength of the story is in what it illuminates about life, not the happy ending of the hero.

Instead of going into the forest to seek his future, at his mother’s bidding our modern hero goes to the capital city, Vienna. There he meets a one-legged gnome, (his mother’s former lover) who advises him to read the newspapers in his tobacco shop so that he will gain knowledge about what his customers want. He meets a wise man who can offer him no advice. He falls for a beautiful young woman who cannot return his love. When he objects to the terrible things he sees in 1937 Vienna as the Nazis take power, the henchmen of the evil leader take him off to prison.

While certainly not fated to a bad end – Franz could have made many choices that might have led to a different outcome – he finds himself in conflict with history and society. Many of those around him go along with the evil around them, sometimes enthusiastically. His love, who is certainly the least idealistic character in the story, chooses to make her accommodations with evil, and seems to be the only one who survives. Some people choose to oppose the Nazis, but they come across as heroic but futile sacrifices. Franz is himself one of these sacrifices, although I wonder to what extent he is heroic, and to what extent he is merely innocent, or foolish. He knows that he is facing an overwhelming power, but he sees no alternative other than direct opposition. In the face of Naziism, this is not a winning strategy.

There may be something of a happy ending. Franz tries to share his dreams, which people find whimsical, but meaningless. Nevertheless, at least one person seems to be inspired by them and keeps Franz alive in her heart.

The writing reinforces this fable-like sense. Seethaler’s simple declarative sentences and poetic descriptions of nature and of the streets of Vienna give them a universal character. The writing is in fact quite engrossing and makes a moving story.

Modern western fables often end with a simple moral, but there’s no simple moral here. Franz has an unquestioning innocent belief in justice and love, but his belief does not guide him to a positive resolution. And how could it in an overwhelmingly evil society? The story offers no guidance to a reader other than the sad reality that certain forces – such as Naziism – will not be defeated by idealism. It was only the combined military force of a world war that defeated it, although Seethaler is more interested in the lead up to the war than in its conclusion. Austria, notably, has tended to avoid, rather than to acknowledge, its embrace of Nazi power. Seethaler here shows how the ordinary citizens of Austria accepted the clear and brutal evil of Naziism in spite of the examples of those who opposed it.

While it may have been futile for individuals to oppose it on their own, a united resistance by ordinary citizens before the Austrian Nazis gained power might have changed this history. This may be Seethaler’s hope in writing this book, that it would lead to Austria starting to face its past.

Berlin Alexanderplatz

 By Alfred Döblin (Michael Hofmann, Translator), 1929

Franz Biberkopf is a weak man. He tries to make good in his life and to make the right choices, but he can’t succeed. Everything seems to work against him. Certainly, he makes some bad decisions, but in working-class Berlin in the 1920s his options are limited. I don’t want to make excuses for a man who, before the story begins, has drunkenly killed his girlfriend, and who trades girlfriends around like objects. He tries to make a living peddling, but he is ripped off by his friends. He commits thefts, although only from profitable businesses. And he pimps his girlfriend, although she is happy enough to make money for him. And yet in this story, Franz’s struggle to get by becomes a comic epic.

Döblin sets the story within the chaos of life, bringing in a wonderfully rich background of the sounds, sights and especially the texts of Franz’s time. Franz’s story would be quite pathetic without the rich background. He would be a sad-sack loser who stumbles along until he somehow has a miraculous conversion. By capturing the whole scene, Döblin makes Franz a kind of Everyman who has to face everything that the Fates choose to throw at him. He struggles doggedly, often making mistakes or falling prey to his own weakness, but coming back time and again to his effort to get things right. Ironically, his most epic and successful struggle occurs when he is motionless in a hospital bed after Death has written him off saying you only think about yourself and you don’t even deserve to die.

Although highly specific to one small area of Berlin in the 1920s, the complex literary references also shift it into a universal theme. While Franz struggles in his life, the narrator compares him to the biblical Job (I didn’t realize how terrible Job’s afflictions were until I read Döblin’s paraphrase) and comments on the contemporary political slogans and advertisements that Franz spouts.

The narrator is a key part of the book. He (a male in my mind – I wonder how it would sound in a female voice) tells us what a loser Franz is, and tells Franz to smarten up. In fact, he tells us the whole story in half a page at the beginning of the book, and again at the start of each section, so there is no mystery to the plot. The only question is what Franz will go through to get to the end. But while the narrator comments acidly on Franz and Berlin, he also has some remarkable lyrical passages. He is poetic about the thoughts of a calf waiting in the slaughterhouse. Other parts are like rants against the failings of the German republic: “parliamentary democracy merely prolongs the agony of the proletariat,” the narrator says. It is corrupt and preserves the bureaucratic state. “We aim to destroy all the institutions of state by direct action.” Although this is in quotes, it’s not clear who is saying this – the narrator seems to be voicing a sentiment that is in the air.

There is much about Franz and his friends that is ugly, not merely a question of bad choices. Women are secondary objects in this world of men, and most relationships with them are transactional. Although Franz and Mitzi develop a caring relationship for each other, he beats her badly when she embarrasses him. His friend Reinhold is a psychopath, who turns on him, as well as on the women in his own life. Their lives are shaped by a toxic masculinity that we would recognize today, 100 years after the book was written. They often turn to violence to resolve issues, and they are drunks and criminals. They are anti-Semitic, although the first generous exchange Franz has after getting out of prison is with a Jewish shopkeeper. They are nationalistic, although they don’t take Nazis, socialists or anarchists very seriously.

While showing the details of their behaviours and relationships, Döblin’s style places them in a holistic web of social influences. Their poverty and inability to see any alternatives come from the disintegrating society after World War I. It is specific to Germany but seems universal in the wild cultural soup that Döblin creates. It appears extreme, but in many ways it describes the confusion and futility that lead people today to authoritarian figures offering clarity. Somehow, in the end, Franz escapes this and finds a way out, but this is more like the satisfying conclusion of an epic story than a likely resolution.

Kingdom of the Blind

By Louise Penny, 2018

Some things about this novel are well done, but if Louise Penny were not someone whose writing is recommended by people I respect, I might not have read further than the first chapter.

To give Penny her due, this is a well crafted, suspenseful novel that holds a reader’s interest and moves propulsively from one plot point to another. New events and storylines introduce different angles that engage a reader’s intrigue. The details of the police procedures seem plausible. And Penny doesn’t gloss over the psychological impacts of a life trying to understand murders and crime. (If anything, she overdoes the psychology, musing on the implications of each line of dialogue. In a Henry James novel, I like this slow-paced, considered story-telling, but it does slow down the suspense of a story driven by events.)

The detailed description of rural Quebec life in the depths of winter is engaging. The cold, the challenges of driving in snow, the camaraderie of the village friends are nice details. I might have been aware of these lifestyle details in a vague sense, but Penny shows it in a way that goes beyond the romanticized postcard view. She makes sure that, while admiring the beauty and the human warmth, a reader also sees how it can be miserable and life-threatening.

But in spite of Penny’s strengths, I found the writing annoying and contrived. Some things I didn’t like: Penny’s portentous language seems intended to set a suspenseful tone but it becomes tiresome. The repeated structure of half-sentences feels like an overworked device to create a fast-moving pace, a beginner technique from a suspense-writing class. The frequent authorial asides don’t add to the characters or the plot; they often seem obvious and unnecessary. Many of the characters are clumsy stereotypes (the prickly poet, the charming gay couple, the understanding partner), with no depth. And throwing in the odd French expression to remind us that we are in Quebec feels patronizing rather than authentic.

Some of the language I found extreme and oversimplified. The repeated references to fentanyl as a gateway to hellish and fatal existence, while grounded in reality, doesn’t reflect the fact that the fatal issue is the contamination of the drug, not the drug use itself. It plays into drug-war rhetoric to describe fentanyl as a categorical evil, as Penny does here. And her formulaic references to “junkies, trannies and whores” doesn’t help when it reduces drug users to empty stereotypes. This language makes Penny sound like a moralistic anti-drug preacher.

Also, I did find both of the storylines a bit ridiculous. The set up of the mysterious will seems so implausible that I kept asking myself why these supposedly rational people would go along with it. The second storyline of the drugs on the street and the strategy to recover them seem equally implausible. While I’m sure there is a lot of backbiting and bureaucracy in the Quebec police forces, I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t work to recover the drugs if the threat were as serious as Penny describes it.

With all of this, the tidy wrap up feels constructed and contrived. The bad guys are taken out, society is safe, warm feelings return to the village. Ho hum.

I know that many people like Penny’s writing, and I see from other comments that this may not be her best writing. My response to the book is, of course, idiosyncratic. If I had to find a book to read in an airport with a tiny selection, I might well pick up another of her novels, but she is not to my taste, and I won’t be searching for another.