It's a Pity: Stephan Zweig's Novel Isn't Read More

My current afflictions--shingles--have led me think about stories where the protagonists conquer or succumb to malady.   Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain comes immediately to mind, but it is a huge book and not one that I'm likely to pick up again. Canadian writer Timothy Findley also delves into illnes in his Pilgrim, which is heavy on Jungian psychology and its physical manifestations.

But as l Iimp around--the nerves involved include one of the motor ones in my left leg and foot--I begin to understand the special problems of people with "mobility problems," as they say politely now.

Stephan Zweig's Beware of Pity has a title which sounds very un-politically correct.  Shouldn't pity be something any sensitive person brings to a friendship with someone who has health problems?  Advocates for "differently abled" people might say "no" because pity undermines  dignity, but that won't stop them for fighting for more wheel chair access and non-discriminatory hiring policies.  

Zweig, however, is not talking about good intentioned condescension.  His hero allows himself to become involved with the crippled daughter of a rich landowner.  His intitial motivation is a more or less genuine pity for the girl, but he soon is in over his head, in large part because he can't stop himself from taking advantage of the situation. 

This means, I think, that the title is to be taken ironically, that the narrator ( in one translator it is the protaganist, although in another the framing narration is deleted) is as unreliable as the one in Ford Madox Ford's "saddest story" The Good Soldier.  Zweig, a German Jew, was poised on an escape to Brazil when he published the novel in 1938, so it's tempting to read political commentary into it.  Doing that, though, robs a fascinating tale of its subtleties.  Better to read it without a political manifesto in mind, and ruminate on ambition, disability and love.

Anna Gavalda: Running out of Steam?

One of the most delightful books I've read in the last 10 years or so is Anna Gavalda's Hunting and Gathering, Ensemble, C'est tout in the French original.  As recently as last moth, I was delighted that one of my library reading groups--nearly all over 50, and Anglophone--almost unanimously found the story set in present day Paris amusing, encouraging and, yes, at moments profound.

In the novel Camille (a near-anorexic young painter), Franck (a chef with a grandmother he loves but can't see very often,) Philo (a rich, stuttering "failure" whose family has charged with squatting in an apartment they think they ought to inherit, and Franck's grandmother form an unlikely ménage à quatre.  There are many ups and downs, but in the end together the four of them create something very fine.  (If you want  to know what, run find the book at Amazon.com or in your library.)

So when I received Gavalda's latest Billie I looked forward to having a few nights of uninterrupted reading to enjoy it.  But what a disappointment!  The story is told by Billie, a young woman from la France profonde (think Dellarobia in Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior) who finds herself pleading with the gods  as she and her buddy Franck lie trapped at the bottom of a crevasse in a French national park.  Seems she and Franck were outcasts at their secondary school.  Their one moment of glory came they performed a scene from a famous short story by Alfred de Musset for a French class.  In it Billie plays Camille (yes, hard as it to believe) and Franck, Perdican who have their hearts broken. The experience was illuminating, casting shadows 10 years later.

There should be a sub-genre called "saved by  a book."  You know, all those Dead Poets Society, Mr. Pip, and The Elegance of the Hedgehog where a book or books make the difference for a poor/misunderstood/ struggling character to find sense in his or her life.  While it's true that books really can make a difference in one's life, reading one of these stories frequently makes me grind my teeth.  The world is more complicated than that, and there are times when the stories seem designed for a specific school market.

That is the case with Billie: I can imagine  teachers all over France putting the book on reading lists even though the language is pretty rough in places.  But what eally annoys me is the way Gavalda recycles elements from her truly excellent earlier book (the characters names, a father who leaves a small inheritance, a girl struggling not to become the preyof rapacioius men).  ended with a marriage and a big party and  new book  ends in a promise of that kind of celebration, even though  Franck really prefers guys.
Hunting and Gathering

So I think that Gavalda has run out of material.  She's begun repeating herself, which is a shame, because with her powers of observation I'm sure she can find other stories to tell. 

The Lowland--Jhumpa Lahiri's Almost Great Novel of a Wider World

Jhumpa Lahiri's stories have always pleased me, although when she published her last collection Unaccustomed Earth I complained that her world was too circumscribed.
Only once do outside events intrude: one story  contains a reference to the 2004 tsunami.
And, as I noted in my review, "It seems Lahiri is a little uncomfortable about that even. “The real event just sort of caught my character in there,” she told one interviewer. “I don’t tackle major global events. I don’t like to read about something—an event, a cataclysm—in fiction for the sake of reading it." Better to turn to non-fiction for accounts of events, she said: "that’s what good nonfiction is for. And I think that the fact there is a major global event in (my) book—I don’t know if it was okay or not.”"

At the time I thought it was most definitely  okay. " In the future," I wrote then, " I hope she continues to tell us stories about how the people she imagines fit into a world wider than one of good schools, deadly but well-managed illness and love which sometimes is arranged and sometimes is not."

In her newest book, The Lowland, she certainly has embraced a bigger world view.  The story of two brothers born in Calcutta shortly before Indian independence covers a good 65 years and more than half the globe.  The younger brother becomes involved in an radical group, and is executed by police, leaving a young pregnant wife.  The older brother, who is much less political, comes back, marries the woman, and brings her to the US. The novel explores how this second marriage goes wrong and how the characters struggle with their destinies against political events beyond their control and social context that they only slowly understand.

The lowland in which the brothers grow up, and the seashore where the older one spends his professional life are points off correspondance between one part of the world and another, and I spent some time trying unsuccessfully to figure out what the symbolism of the landscape was.

Neverthless the book is compelling reading and had it not come so highly praised, I probably would have been blown away by it.  But, as noted in the last post, sometimes literary success comes with a down side--expectations too high to be successfully fulfilled.

Lahiri seems to have much better control of her material in the first two-thirds of the book.  But the narrative arc becomes indistinct as she progresses: there are at least a half dozen places she could have ended the story, several of which might have made a tauter book.  As it is she takes us to nearly the end of her major characters lives, gives us a little "lady or the tiger" moment when it looks like one character might end it all, and repeats many times  scenes she's presented earlier. 

The result isn't a failure, but it isn't as completely realized as I'd hoped it would be.  She should be given points, however, for trying to expand her horizons.