Palahniuk “Stranger than Fiction: True Stories”

Chuck Palahniuk’s Stranger than Fiction: True Stories (Non-Fiction) from 2004 is a collection of short articles and non fiction essay-type things with titles like “Where Meat Comes From”, “My Life as a Dog”, “Confessions in Stone”, “In Her Own Words” and “The Lip Enhancer”.

I’m a fan.

That probably skews my perspective somewhat, but hey, at least I am honest about it.

In general, and on principal, I find that most authors, actors, sculptors and musicians should stay well clear of trying to talk about themselves and their works. Ninety-nine percent of them should just stick to doing what they do well, which is to say write fiction, play music and sculpt, doing what they do best so that the reader, viewer, listener doesn’t have to be subjected to the invariably pompous and self-centred prattle that is only of interest to sycophants and those that can’t escape, i.e. friends and family.

Sometimes, though, you actually get an author, sculptor or musician that understands that if you are going to talk in front of the whole class you should make sure that you have something to say that is of interest to the audience as a whole. Palahniuk is one of them.

It probably has something to do with this understanding of what the written word is for, and what it does. Palahniuk tells stories even when he tries to be non fictional. He talks of his inspiration for Fight Club. He talks about his own personal and individual tragedies, the violence that seems to have followed his family around. He talks about shaving his head and not following the instructions on his hair removal crème.

And all this is interesting and riveting and funny and tragic and comical and not the least bit self-serving or pompous.

It’s not confessional literature, either, even though there’s a piece about using steroids and another about Palahniuk and a friend renting costumes (he’s in a spotted, smiling Dalmatian costume) and just walking around seeing what kind of reactions they get. Palahniuk talks about writing too, and about what kinds of reactions he’s gotten over Fight Club and everything that entails.

There are also interviews with Marilyn Manson, Juliette Lewis and The Rocket Guy, as well as an open letter to Ira Levin and a sort of review of Amy Hempel’s “The Harvest” as a minimalist masterpiece.

All these things, all these observations and highly personal information are given in the prose style that makes me a fan, so of course I am going to enjoy it, even if it still gives you those drop off points that make it feel like the cable just snapped in the elevator you’re riding. You know what I mean, that sudden drop in your stomach. It feels personal, even when it’s not. And it takes your thinking in different directions than you expect when you start a new essay, so that even if you’re reading about Marilyn Manson you will wind up thinking about the Columbine massacre.

At one point Palahniuk says:

“That’s why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. And writing makes you look back. Because since you can’t control life, at least you can control your version.” (p. 205).

I think there are plenty of more reasons given within this text, and that’s just one of them. To me there’s a difference between writing because you have the need, being a manqué soul like that, and writing because you’ve fallen in love with the idea of being an Author (capitol A and arrogant accent to it, too).

This is funny, tragic and thought provoking and a lot of other things besides. You get glimpses of a lot of interesting individual lives, like the guys that build castles in America, or the people that celebrate the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival. It’s part freak show, part life being stranger than fiction, and that’s pretty much where I live anyway.

What can I say? Chuck’s my man.

Mule

The Prestige by Christopher Priest

This is a Christopher Priest novel written in 1995.

Now this novel has all the trappings that should make a successful story. At the heart of the story is the bitter feud between two stage magicians Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier.

The reader is first introduced to the grandchildren of these two magicians who are investigating what really happened between the two and the effects this has had on their own lives almost a century later.

The overall structure is very familiar to anyone who has even a glancing knowledge of the classical Gothic horror story. We have the large house with its unspeakable secrets hidden in the basement, in this particular case the Tesla machine, we have the secrets hidden in the manuscripts of Borden and Angier – manuscripts found and read in the middle of a dark and stormy night leading to horrible conclusions. And towards the very end the main character even goes into the cavernous basement where the past becomes known in all its decadent gory glory. The basement also happens to double as a family tomb.

So – yeah, I’ve seen this before.

Another main theme of the novel is the “dark double”, another Gothic classic. Stage magicians rely heavily on the prestige, the reveal at the end of a magic trick. And they rely on deceit. Some magicians go further than others in staging an illusion – and there is throughout the novel a discussion of whether Borden is one or two men. He might actually be a set of identical twins, something that figures heavily in his most famous trick “The New Transported Man” – an illusion that plagues and harrows Angier until he actually finds a way to replicate and improve on act.

But Angier takes it further than Borden. He finds a way to actually transport himself, at a high cost, via his Tesla machine. The machine itself is a classic Gothic horror too, complete with coils and wires and electrical flashes. He pays through the nose to have the machine constructed and then pays a more subtle price for using it.

All this makes for one fine and lurid tale indeed. Problem is, I know the conventions too well and find myself unaffected by the prose. The epistolary style leaves me cold, it is written in a way that’s meant to be a couple of diaries and when the voice does not appeal to you as a reader you quickly lose interest. I like Borden, there is a greater sense of mystery there, but the diary of Angier is quite frankly dull. It doesn’t bother with evoking the period, it doesn’t sketch the personality of the author to any great extent,  merely cataloguing the main events.

The ending is supposed to be a big reveal, but by the time we get there I have frankly lost interest. Borden, who is the foil all through the action, is summarily knocked-off earlier and we are left with the vestiges of the prestige of Angier

I can’t really go in to it in greater detail than that without giving it all away.

I remain sadly unimpressed. But then I have read all the classics in the genre, The Castle of Otranto, Frankenstein, Dracula, The Inmost Light and The Fall of the House of Usher to mention but a few – and they are by far a much more interesting read. Mostly I think because in and around the horrors are woven the minute and detailed character portraits that drive the action. If you want Gothic go straight to the source.  Start with Arthur Machen. Leave The Prestige for those who have not read the forerunners.

Or watch the movie. It makes good the promises of costume, time and suspense in a way you could only infer in the novel.

Mule

Michael Ondaatje – The English Patient – Deserts

The English Patient (1992) is probably the best known of Ondaatje’s novels, largely due to Anthony Mingella’s movie of the same title made in -96. There are always varying opinions about books made into film, ususally on the theme “the book is not like the film, is not enough like the film, is too much like the film” and I personally think this has to do with the idea that the movie and the book can be the same thing, which is of course physically impossible. Not only is the movie a collective effort, it is also a completely different medium – seems obvious when you set it in writing, doesn’t it? So why do people argue the point?

I believe it is because we hold the filmmaker up to our own imaginings and try to see how well they’ve managed to translate the cinematography of the thearte of our minds onto the big screen.  But I digress.

The English Patient is one of those novels that offer a variety of different interpretations depending on what you focus on. You can say that about most novels, true, but normally you have to work harder for it. In this case the question of identity comes to the fore right from the first page. Identity and nationality.

The patient, count Almásy, is actually Hungarian by birth but has during his work in the desert come to the conclusion that nationality does not really matter in the select company of desert explorers he keeps before the war. He falls in love with Catherine Clifton, the wife of Geoffrey Clifton, both of them British. Almásy finally winds up in an Italian villa with a Canadian thief by the name of Caravaggio, a nurse named Hana, also Canadian, and a Sikh sapper working for the British by the name of Kip (or actually – Kirpahl Singh).

The action travels from Cairo to Italy via the Desert and mentions the places alive in peoples memories, such as English gardens and the Canadian lakes. Kip talks of India, and late in the action mentions Hiroshima and Nagasaki, claiming the wise old fathers would not have done such a thing to the brown races of the world. Activate Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism here if you like.

Another aspect is the interpersonal relationships and all their inherent politics. Almáshy and Catherine have an extra marital affair that has devastating consequences, and not only for them personally. In the end it results in Almáshy helping Rommel across the desert. When Clifton tries for a murder/suicide to punish his wife and Almáshy for their betrayal Catherine is hurt badly and when Almáshy tries to go for help he is rejected by the British who regard any foreign national as a threat at this time. Almáshy gets help from the Germans instead on the condition that he guides them through the desert. Catherine is waiting for him in the Gelf Kebir, but she is long dead by the time he gets there. It is when he tries to fly out of the desert in an old plane that has laid buried in the sand for a long time that he catches fire and falls burning from the sky. Rescued and kept alive by a desert tribe he is finally brought in to hospital, claiming to no longer know his name. He becomes The English Patient, and the irony is not lost on him.

The other crucial realtionship in this novel is that between Hana and Kip – the Canadian nurse caring for Almáshy and the Indian Sikh solider trying to clear the area in Italy where the Villa San Girolamo is situated of mines. Hana falls in love with the Sikh and seems fascinated in part with his otherness, the colour of his skin, the sing-song of his dialect, his long dark hair and so on. Hana has been a nurse all through the war and is described as having suffered shell-shock, not so much from the action as from the death of her father. She and Kip negotiate a complicated territory between them. She is scarred by the war and her own personal tragedies, Kip seems to distance himself from personal realtionships from the sheer need of distance. He is a sapper, after all. Death is just a step away for him at all times.

If you go at this book as a parable of love and indentity there are many interesting observations to make. Relationships are messy at best and fail, but for very different reasons. The landscape Almáshy has chosen to live in is the desert. His deep fascination with it seems to rub off on his charater. Catherine misses her green English gardens and never seems at home in the harsh dryness. Kip brings with him the fecundity of India and Hana speaks of the snow and lakes of Canada. It is more than just description of where the characters were born. It speaks instead of everyhting they are, to themselves and others.

On the level of language Ondaatje never disappoints. He delivers one magical image after another, replete with a deep afterthought on what these images will conjure up. One of my favourites is the description of the sand dunes as the corrugated surface of the roof of a dog’s mouth. And the idea that the desert explorer who is reported to have written this sentence was liked by his peers for having the kind of inquisitive curiosity that would stick his hand in the maw of a dog. Double and tripple meanings to everything. Beautiful, caustic at times, opulent at times.

Caravaggio, who has worked as a spy for the allies during the war has been caught and tortured by Nazi soliders who cut off his thumbs. He has since then been addicted to morphine and at one point he is described as wearing the false limbs that morphia promises. A beautiful summation of how damaged he is, and how addicted and scarred.

Ondaatje has done his homework and managed to write intelligently about WWII without falling into the typical genre traps and clichées. He takes hold of his subject and pours everything into it until the text is so rich and layered you can read and re-read his novel and still find more substance to it. The way he treats stories and timelines and subject matter always offers more than any paltry review can do justice to. This is not just another period piece love story. It has far more to offer.

MULE

Billy the Kid

Staying on the trail of Michael Ondaatje I would like to get in to The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970). If you have come into contact with Ondaatje’s work through his novels you will probably be a bit surprised by his poetry and books like this one, which is a sort of prose poem combining differnt styles and modes of expression.

The main character is the outlaw gunman Billy the Kid (1859-1881) also known as William H. Bonney or Henry McCarty. Undoubtedly you’ve seen some cowboy western featuring Billy, there have been a few made of varying quality (I wont pass judgement on Young Guns or even Billy the Kid v.s. Dracula). He is one of those iconic figures that loom out of the myths of Manifest Destiny along with Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Black Elk and so on and so forth.

Ondaatje takes hold of his subject with a mixture of scholarly intensity and poetic verve. Some passages read like newspaper articles, others are short lists (people that have been killed, for example) again others are copies of the Penny Dreadfuls of the time featuring wild west characters. There’s a rough kind of humor in some passages, lyrical descriptions of a love interest, sex, death, horses… And the wide landscape Billy travels through. The descriptions are intense and slightly dreamy. They are the kind of distant musings you’d expect from someone who spends the entire day on horseback staring at the horizon.

Ondaatje also changes perspecitves in the sense that the narrative voice shifts, quoting Miss Sallie Chisum for instance. I like the diversity of the many voices and different types of text. It creates a collage of thoughts and impressions surrounding the iconic figure of Billy giving the reader a different image of what he was like as well as what the times were like. History is often recited as a given truth and this accentuates that you can never really know what actions and events are really like when you depend on eye witness accounts and the impressions of others. You get a kind of historical event refractured through many minds and voices – and this realates to the novle I wrote about previously Coming Through Slaughter.

I would say that this idea of history, disjointed accounts and fractured voices is a central theme in all of Ondaatjes work. Just like the lyrical passages and the obvious romance with language which is ever present in his body of work. He not only takes care to find the right word, he also creates a voice for each character which is distinct and clear. This care of language and voice is one of the reasons I keep coming back to his material, pouring over it and tracing the lines with my curious mental fingers. Touching the words tentatively, moulding their shapes, turning them over and over.

This is one of my favourite passages in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.

You know hunters

are the gentlest

anywhere in the world

they halt caterpillars

from path dangers

lift a drowning moth from a bowl

remarkable in peace

in the same way assassins

come to chaos neutral.

It’s terse, lyrical and nicely exemplifies the duality of the characters. Violence and poetry in a balanced blend – my favourite.

MULE

Hardboiled Falling Angel and Voodoo in Central Park

Falling Angel  ( 1978 )  by William Hjortsberg is probably known to an audience through the movie Angel Heart from 1987, directed by Allan Parker and starring a messed up Mickey Rourke, a slick Robert de Niro and a drop-dead gorgeous Lisa Bonet.

It seems I read a lot of books made into movies. However I usually get a hold of the novel first and then some clever little screenwriter gets a hold of the same novel and makes a movie out of it, sells the idea to a director then it gets made, preferably staring some big glittering Hollywood actor. Well, what can I say? Great minds think alike?

It’s an odd experience watching the movie made out of the book you’ve read. It either coincides with what you’ve envisioned or it doesn’t. This novel for instance does a very good job of describing New York City in 1959 – Times square, Central Park voodoo rituals, Coney island off season. Eisenhower was president, cars had all the tailfins and chrome you can wish for… Harry Angel takes you around the city, into the jazz clubs and favourite restaurants, some of them very fancy (because that’s where you’ll find Louis Cyphre having some eggs), down to the mean streets and less pleasant neighbourhoods. The movie moves the action down south. Louisiana and voodoo go together in the public mind. I find I prefer the idea of the voodoo ceremony taking place in Central Park and devil worship in the abandoned subway stations under the city.

The story is a very basic hardboiled detective story. You can almost hear the Raymond Chandler/ film noir/Dashiell Hammett/Humphrey Bogart voice-over come in as you read the first line: ”It was Friday the thirteenth and yesterday’s snowstorm lingered in the streets like a leftover curse”. Now, I’m not overly fond of the detective genre. To be quite frank I never read the stuff because it bores me. There are several different reasons for this, mostly connected with the genre conventions, but I do enjoy real classic Noir as it was meant to be. All the women are “dames” and the men wear hats and drink more whiskey in a day than is prudent for a small alcoholic elephant and survive the most absurd knocks on the head with no ill side effects… this is one of those kinds of stories. Thrown in on top of that you have the devil as your client – oh, don’t worry I’m not really giving anything away here, the alias he uses us Louis Cyphre – doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out.

Harry Angel is hired to find the singer Johnny Liebling, better known under his stagename Johnny Favourite. The trail is stone cold since Johnny hasn’t been around since the war. He was drafted and got shot in the head and has been vegetating decorously in an upstate hospital for at least a decade. Or has he? Every lead Harry Angel follows leads to a brutal bloody murder, some of which he himself gets implicated in. He manages to fall in love with a beautiful voodoo priestess called Evangeline Proudfoot and, as I have mentioned earlier, gets knocked on the head an impressive number of times in the course of the action.

It’s the thoroughly enjoyable clash of two genres, horror and noir, with all the conventions you could wish for cooked down to hard liquor. It has well-written and interesting scenery, dark rituals at midnight and all the sex and violence you can stomach. And at its root it is the same basic question as all Mephistophelian tales, best expressed in the gospel according to Mark: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

Mule

Project Mayhem and other social clubs

Mule:

Me and Librarian are going to do a call-and-response thing about Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996). This is the first novel published by Palahniuk and it was turned into a very successful film directed by David Fincher (Fincher has also directed Aliens 3 and Seven). The movie starred Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter.

Mule:
If you just see the posters for the movie Fight Club you might think it’s just another of those testosterone-heavy boys-will-be-boys kind of things. But for those of us who actually read we know the story is a lot darker than that. And the book is definitely darker than the movie.
So, Librarian, what surprised you most about the book?

Librarian:
Well, I was dragged kicking and screaming to see the movie on DVD (already having fallen asleep on the couch during the first few scenes once, and still thinking precisely that it was some testosterone filled, street fighting glorifying crap) and then it completely blew me away once I realised it wasn’t at all what I’d expected. Anyway, having seen the movie before finally reading the book, the actual topic and story line obviously didn’t surprise me as much as it might have – but the style of writing certainly did! I was not in the least prepared for Palahniuk’s terse narrator’s voice. I’m not sure what I had expected, but those sparse, short, clipped sentences really bugged me for 10-20 pages. “Would it kill you to use an adjective once in a while? Sheeesh.” But it grew on me, it really did.

Mule:
I guess it’s only fitting that you can actually fall asleep while watching Fight Club since one of the basic premises for the existence of Tyler Durden is insomnia, but still…
Speaking of insomnia, let me just say that the description given of sleep deprivation is actually dead on. The state of mind that you get into after a couple of days – if you don’t turn into Tyler Durden, that is, is that everything seems like a copy of a copy of a copy. The colour drains out of reality. I know what I’m talking about here, I have had that. The main character also states that you’re not really awake, but you don’t really sleep either. And that is exactly what it’s like. It’s not that you don’t sleep. It’s more like you can’t really sense when you’re awake and when you’re sleeping. The style of writing is just like Librarian says, really terse. It’s also a textbook example of the “unreliable narrator” – you shouldn’t really trust the narrating voice too much. He even starts off by giving little hints like “I know this, because Tyler knows this”. The voice is also witty and sarcastic and dark. How did that work for you Librarian?

Librarian:
The witty and sarcastic narrator’s voice worked very well for me once I got used to the clipped writing style. That voice lingers. And it certainly matches my sense of humour. So many episodes and one-liners in this novel had me chuckling – at times a slightly uncomfortable chuckle, true, but still. As for the “unreliable narrator”, I agree that the clues are there – but I think I would have been deceived by that narrator, had I not seen the movie already. I am used to evaluating and scrutinizing bits and pieces of information, I do it every day at work – hell, I even teach others how to do it – but for some reason I often switch that process off when reading fiction. I guess I like being surprised by the twists and turns of the story as it unfolds.

Mule:

With fiction you do what Coleridge recommended – the wiling suspension of disbelief. It sort of goes with the territory.
Since I am one of the odd breed that has ten years of university and still works menial jobs through no fault of my own it’s easy for me to identify with lines like “they have us working jobs that we hate so we can buy stuff that we don’t need”. It is a comment on the inherent premise of modern western living that make us sit and try to figure out which coffee-table defines us as a person so we can buy that and fulfil our obligations as consumers. But being a consumer is not the same as being a member of society. Or even a human being for that matter. The basic message of Fight Club seems to be that we have become so far removed from the basic struggle of life that we now focus on stuff that doesn’t matter. And even though I agree with that it is a truth that only applies to the western life-style. And let’s face it – we are spoiled. And like spoiled children we easily forget that not everyone’s experience of life is like ours. Another aspect of the novel and the movie worth spending a few lines on is the role of women in this new society – what about Marla and her sister victims in this story?

Librarian:
In all honesty, I think the few women portrayed in this novel are so exceptionally weird and in such odd places in their lives that I hardly even think of them as women. They are just quirky additions to the story line. I remember thinking, as I read Fight Club, that the author didn’t really have to make Marla *that* much over the top, female or not. While on this topic – another thing that bugged me a bit was the absolute exclusion of women in Tyler’s troops. Why would a personality as clever as Tyler consciously omit half of all the “little people” he could have added to his ranks once the whole plot escalated to being something beyond just the Fight Club sessions per se? I don’t remember if the issue was even explicitly addressed in the novel.

Mule:
I suppose it is kind of difficult to see women getting the same kind of basic gratification from pure testosterone based violence. I do think the terrorist department of project Mayhem definitely could have used a few key women who were active. Marla is basically a damsel in distress. At one point she describes a bridesmaid’s dress as something somebody loved intensely for one day and then threw away. You get the feeling she is describing human interaction in general and her own relationships in particular.

I’d like to close with my favourite quote:

“We’re the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve you dinner. We make your bed. We guard you while you’re asleep. We drive the ambulances. We direct your call. We are cooks and taxi drivers and we know everything about you. We process your insurance claims and credit card charges. We control every part of your life. We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we’ll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won’t – and we are just learning this fact, Tyler said. So don’t fuck with us.”

Librarian and Mule