Cain by José Saramago

Cain is the last novel by José Saramago and I was somewhat afraid that for this reason it might lack that wit, originality and playfulness which characterize his earlier books. But it soon turned out that this was not case, and Cain isn’t just an afterthought at the end of a lifetime, but an excellent, fresh novel – it’s a worthy closing piece of a great oeuvre.

Even though the protagonist of the novel is Cain, the story starts not with him but with Adam, Eve and their life in Paradise. But Saramago deviates from the usual depictions of Paradise right at the beginning, and he makes God out as a rather ridiculous being. It turns out that God is not pleased with his creations: Adam and Eve cannot speak, and God knows that he has to blame himself for this. To rectify the situation, he swiftly and thoughtlessly places tongues in their mouths and then leaves them to fend for themselves in the Garden of Eden. Afterwards things happen more or less in the way known from the Bible: Adam and Eve are expelled from Paradise; their children are born; Cain kills Abel, after which God punishes him by marking his forehead and by condemning him to eternal wandering. And the real story unfolds during the course of Cain’s wanderings.

During his ramblings, Cain sometimes unexpectedly finds himself at different, unknown places and times, and this way he witnesses several well-known Biblical events: he’s there when Abraham is getting ready to sacrifice Isaac; he’s there when Jericho is destroyed; and he’s also there when Satan tempts the god-fearing Job. And Cain doesn’t only observe these events – he often interferes, and tries to change them. After living through a whole lot of bloody and cruel episodes, his opinion about God deteriorates rapidly, and he gives voice to his doubts during his bitter and passionate arguments with God.

It’s quite obvious from the very beginning that Saramago’s God is neither benevolent, nor fearsome, nor omnipotent. And while we follow Cain’s adventures, we get more and more proof of his impotence, and we can ascertain that this God is dumb, inconsistent, cruel, selfish, indecisive, inhuman, and prone to making one mistake after the other.

Of course we should bear in mind that we see God’s actions through the eyes of the first murderer of humankind. Cain is by no means irreproachable – he’s an impetuous, instinctive, stubborn, and rather immoral man, and he often gets into unpleasant situations due to these characteristics. So it’s rather ironic that Cain dares to criticize God even though he’s very much like Him. Still, in the end Cain – with all his human weaknesses and sins – appears to be a wiser and more humane being than God with his godly weaknesses and sins.

As regards the style of the novel, it’s the same as the style of the earlier works of Saramago: the sentences are paragraph-long; the dialogs are not set apart from the descriptive parts in the usual way; and the narrator often comments ironically or pragmatically on certain events, and he addresses these comments directly to the reader.

I guess that Saramago’s stylistic oddities and his disrespectful, doubting, desecrating tone might not equally please every reader. As for me, I highly appreciate his unique style and playfulness, and I don’t find his tone disagreeable because I feel that behind all his lack of respect, there’s the philosophy that human beings are the most sacred and precious entities in this world.

But even though this novel features Saramago’s trademark humanism, Cain is still his most bitter and pessimistic novel I’ve read so far (I don’t know all his books yet.) Cain’s wanderings and time travels seem to be postmodern, somewhat aimless games for a while – but then it turns out what consequences these travels have, and the end of the story leaves the reader with very little hope for humankind.

Case Closed by Patrik Ouředník

It’s impossible for me to summarize the plot of this novel, since Case Closed doesn’t have a story proper. Instead, there are several disconnected story-lines which sometimes seem to merge, and sometimes for a moment it seems that perhaps there is a regular story – but when you think you finally understand something, you always realize that there’s no real story after all. But to give you an idea of what this book is about, here’s a couple of story-lines: among other things, Case Closed is about a murder case which happened forty years ago; about the suicide of an old woman; about a couple of mysterious fires; and about the rape of a young student who lost her way in the city. So, the novel is all about crime, and about mysterious cases which should be solved, but finding the solutions and uncovering the mysteries is not easy (or downright impossible) because the victims, the detectives and the suspects keep misunderstanding one another.

Just to give you an example: at the beginning of the novel, the student who will later be raped asks a jovial pensioner for directions. She wants to go the Academy of Fine Arts, but the old guy sends her in a totally different direction – just for the fun of it. While the girl is wandering around the streets, someone grabs her in a dark doorway and rapes her. Later, when she is interviewed by the police, the police officer doesn’t understand how she could have ended up in the street where she was raped if she claims that she was going to the Academy – which is in the other direction. The girl keeps repeating that she was indeed going to the Academy, and the officer keeps wondering what she was doing in that particular street then. This is a misunderstanding which would probably be easy to resolve, but it seems impossible that the characters of this novel will ever be able to do this.

Because of the communication problems of the characters, the several different story-lines, the constant merging of real events and dreams, and the all-permeating paranoia of the text, it is very difficult to understand everything here at first reading, but this is no problem for me. Reading Case Closed almost felt like reading a Thomas Pynchon novel: I had a fun time, despite the fact that I could only follow the events up the a certain point (rather early on) in the book, and after reaching that point, I was just going with the flow of the text and I didn’t try to understand everything. Especially since I have a hunch that perhaps after all there aren’t so many mysteries here to uncover and understand.

As it’s mentioned on the cover of the Hungarian edition, according to the writer / narrator of Case Closed, there are two possibilities here: either the writer is an idiot, or the reader. But I think it’s not absolutely necessary to choose from these options – it’s also possible that neither the writer, not the reader is an idiot. Ouředník is obviously not an idiot: his text is so witty, funny and clever that I rule out the possibility that he is stupid or that his mind is befuddled. And as regards the reader (in this case: me): I didn’t feel particularly stupid while reading this book. I know from my earlier reading of novels by Thomas Pynchon what it feels like when a book really does make me feel stupid. Well, Case Closed is far from invoking this unique feeling.

Anyway, I don’t mean this as criticism – this is a really clever, absurd and funny piece of postmodern literature.

Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

Probably everyone who has at least a tiny bit of interest in 19th century English fiction is familiar with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Compared to her sisters, Anne Brontë seems to be a bit slighted. I haven’t read any of her books either before reading Agnes Grey – and now I think she doesn’t deserve the relative neglect she suffers beside her more famous sisters, because this is an excellent novel.

The semi-autobiographical novel tells the story of Agnes, the daughter of a poverty-stricken minister. She grows up in a loving and nurturing family, and her mother and sisters spare her in every possible way. Agnes, however, would like to contribute to the family budget and she would also like to see if she can stand on her own in the world so she decides to become a governess. She quickly fails in her first position, but she keeps her second one for several years, and while she tries to teach her spoiled, reckless, irresponsible and flirtatious young pupils how to be wise and moral, she also learns a lot about worldly life, and tender feelings arise in her bosom when she gets acquainted with the new curate of the village, Edward Weston.

Their relationship at first appears to be doomed, since Agnes is only a shy and neglected employee of a wealthy family, while Weston is a confident, popular and very manly man. Moreover, one of Agnes’ pupils also tries to capture to attentions of the curate, so it seems hopeless that Agnes’ gentle emotions will ever be reciprocated…

If I try to compare Anne Brontë’s novel to her sisters’ books, I don’t get too far. Agnes Grey lacks the wild, life-altering passions so abundant in Wuthering Heights, and it also lacks the outspokenness and the modern-and-gothic quality which characterizes Jane Eyre. Anne Brontë’s novel reminds me more of Jane Austen’s novels: she depicts a society where the fate of a woman is never an easy one, and where the heroine has to defeat several unscrupulous and scheming adversaries to reach the safe haven of marriage. But in Agnes Grey, there’s never any doubt that the enduring and virtuous heroine will finally win the man she desires, and the wicked adversaries will be duly punished.

Besides the very interesting portrait of society Anne Brontë gives in this novel, the author’s nice and easy sense of humor and irony is also worth mentioning. The first part of the book – which deals with Agnes’ family background and her first experiences as a governess – is especially entertaining. For instance, the naive Agnes believes that it’s enough for her to recall her own childhood to be able to deal with every child – however, it soon turns out that this is not the case: she is unable to discipline the children in her care. So her fate is hardly enviable, and she often has a hard time with her pupils – still, it’s nearly impossible to take her difficulties too seriously since the tone and style of the novel make it obvious from the very beginning that this is a story which must end well.

But despite the happy-end (which is really easy to foresee, so I don’t think I’m giving you any spoilers here), this novel is far from being a sentimental love story. True, Agnes is a bit naive, but she’s also very level-headed and she refrains from any extremes, so she’s far from being a hysterical drama queen. And her modest and graceful behavior, her kindness and her tendency to be self-critical make her a very likeable heroine – and I definitely like to read about the good fortune of likeable heroines.

Counterpoint by Anna Enquist

Anna Enquist’s novel is based on music – or, more precisely, on Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The narrator of the book is an unnamed pianist, a mother who lost her adult daughter in a tragic accident. After her daughter’s death, she decides to learn (or rather: re-learn) to play the Goldberg Variations, which she used to find very difficult to master when she was younger, and which she and her daughter equally loved and admired. Re-learning the variations is not at all easy, and while she dedicates herself to Bach’s pieces, the narrator struggles both with the physical difficulties of playing the music, and with her memories of her daughter’s life – which the music brings back to her vividly. But music doesn’t only make her remember – it also helps her to sort through and bring some order to her jumbled and painful memories.

Each chapter of the novel is based on a particular Goldberg variation, and in each chapter we learn something about the piece itself (what technical difficulties need to be overcome while playing it; what kind of melodies and intervals it contains and what these mean; etc.), and while the narrator slowly learns how best to render and interpret the music, we also learn what moment of her daughter’s life the actual variation reminds her of. Her memories relate to all kinds of events, big and small, and they are only fragments in themselves (about family holidays; about the day her daughter moved to her own flat from her childhood home; or about the day when a doctor told her daughter that her vocal chords are not strong enough for her to become a professional singer). Moreover, they don’t necessarily come in chronological order. Still, reading through these fragments, we slowly get a vivid picture of the narrator’s daughter, and we learn a lot about an enthusiastic, warm-hearted, often insecure girl – a girl who was the most amazing person in the world for the narrator.

Like I said, the novel is based on the Goldberg Variations, and music here is not only a backdrop or an atmospheric element – it’s vitally important. While learning them, the narrator meticulously deconstructs and interprets the pieces, and she uses such terminology while doing this that it was sometimes difficult for me to understand what exactly she’s saying about a particular piece, because – apart from loving to listen to it – I have no knowledge about music. Therefore I sat down in front of YouTube, searched for the variations, and I read the first several chapters in a way that I simultaneously listened to the corresponding piece as well (sometimes in more than one interpretation). Reading Counterpoint this way was a unique experience – listening to the music the narrator is playing, to the music which makes her remember. Because even if a certain variation sounds different in, say, Glenn Gould’s interpretation than in the interpretation I imagine based on the narrator’s words, listening to the music she plays still makes me understand what she’s saying when she talks about technicalities, and I can easily fathom why and how any given Bach piece reminds her of a certain moment of her daughter’s life.

So I’d recommend that you read the book while listening to the music, because reading it like that almost feels as if you really entered into the narrator’s mind and learned her innermost thoughts and emotions. The novel might also be read and understood without the musical accompaniment (I read the second half this way and had no serious problems understanding it), but I’d still say – read it with the music if possible, because it will bring you closer to the book; it won’t necessarily make you understand it better, but it will definitely make you feel it better.

Last Orders by Graham Swift

Umberto Eco mentions in his notes to The Name of the Rose that the first 100 pages of the novel is deliberately difficult and hard to approach. He says that he uses these pages to test his readers, so that only those will be able to reach the monastery – where all the excitement begins – who are insistent and curious enough. He builds a mountain of his text which needs to be climbed in the same way as his characters need to climb the real mountain on top of which the monastery lies. Umberto Eco and Graham Swift do not have too much in common, still, Swift’s novel reminded me of this Eco-style mountain-climbing.

In Last Orders, Graham Swift doesn’t deal with intriguing murder mysteries. He deals with people, and people are more mysterious and harder to decipher than the most extraordinary murder case – therefore I wasn’t much disconcerted when I realized that I had to read about a hundred pages of this (300-page) novel before I got some idea about the identity of the characters Swift writes about. Of course I don’t know anything for sure, not even after finishing the book, but when it comes to „real” people (like the ones in this novel) this hardly comes as a surprise.

Last Orders is the story of a single day when four old friends start off on a journey, in order to execute the last will of their friend, the recently deceased butcher, Jack Dodds, and throw his ashes into the sea. The four friends are Vic, an undertaker; Ray, an office clerk who’s also a horse-racing maniac; Lenny, a guy who wanted to become a professional boxer but ended up being a greengrocer; and Vincey, a used-car dealer, Jack’s adopted son. These four men, and Jack’s wife, Amy take turns telling the story. And while the men are on their way from London to Margate (the place designated by Jack for the scattering of his ashes), they all get into a nostalgic mood, and through their memories we slowly learn how they are related to each other and to their deceased friend, and we also get to know the most important details of the lives they have lived.

Of course I could mention dozens of nostalgic books, and hundreds of life-stories told in flashbacks – but Last Orders is far above the average nostalgic-flashback novel. One reason for this is that it’s amazingly truthful and it lacks any kind of melodrama or histrionics: the common lives of these common characters don’t appear more beautiful and exciting in hindsight, but at the same time, Swift doesn’t shock or crush you with unimaginably horrible tragedies, either. In this novel both the good and the bad are bearable, common and perhaps inevitable: illnesses; faithful and unfaithful marriages; some nights out with friends; some success in business or a lucky bet on a race-horse; love, family dramas and compromises – all of these are only „big” for the one who actually lives through them. And Graham Swift writes about these themes in such a way that he simultaneously shows their ordinariness and their most extraordinary uniqueness – since these are the most important, most special events in someone’s (anyone’s) life.

Besides this, the language use and humor of the novel are also remarkable. It’s a real pleasure to read the informal, not too sophisticated, but very expressive and emotional words of the characters. Swift sticks to the common in his language as well: his average characters don’t speak BBC English, but they don’t talk like the heroes of a slum novel either. They simply talk as an average Cockney speaker would, and I happen to like this kind of linguistic authenticity. And as regards the humor: Swift’s humor is beautifully under-toned, absurd, slightly bizarre and slightly dark, but basically it’s a sympathetic and empathic kind of humor. The novel’s humor (and its plot) reminds me a bit of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and of Beryl Bainbridge’s The Bottle Factory Outing.

Last Orders is a good novel. It’s beautiful, uplifting, and the end is truly cathartic (and mind you, I don’t tend to use this word very often).

Arkansas by David Leavitt

According to the blurb of the Hungarian edition, this book belongs to the genre of gay fiction but it also says that you could easily leave the „gay” out of its description. And this is certainly true – this book is indeed fiction, and it doesn’t matter that the stories are mostly about gay people. (Someone raised the question in a short discussion about Arkansas: if you could safely omit „gay” from the genre description, why say it at all? Good question, indeed.)

Anyway, getting down to Arkansas. The book contains three rather long short stories (or short novellas, perhaps). Each story is very different from the other two, so it’s easier and more meaningful to deal with them separately. The first one, The Term Paper Artist is about a writer who’s currently not writing at all. He moves back (temporarily) to his family to Los Angeles so that he can spend his time free from all worldly difficulties while pretending to work. He spends his days in the library, supposedly doing research for his next book, and in a specialized bookshop, flicking through porn magazines. He’s lazy as hell, but he’s well-educated and he really can write well, so when a college student approaches him and asks him to write a term-paper for him in return for sexual favors, the writer agrees to the offer. And after the first occasion, several more would-be clients approach him with the same request.

I found it a bit surprising, but this story is actually very funny. Even though the world in which it is set reminds me heavily of the Los Angeles of Bret Easton Ellis’ early fiction, and the characters also resemble the protagonists of Ellis’ books in the sense that they have absolutely no moral concerns about anything (they trade freely in sexual services; they smoke weed just as naturally as other people would smoke regular cigarettes; and so on), this story isn’t nearly as depressing and unsettling as a novel by Bret Easton Ellis. The reason for this may be that Leavitt’s characters are not nihilistic or disillusioned (on the contrary: they even seem to have some aims in their lives) and this gives a nice, light-hearted touch to the story.

The second novella, The Wooden Anniversary is very different from the first one: it’s not like a sunnier Ellis story – it’s more like a TV sit-com. It tells the story of two old friends (a straight woman and a gay man) visiting their mutual friend in Italy, where she teaches cooking, together with a charismatic Italian man, while her alienated husband spends most of his time in Rome. The company spends the visit reminiscing about the past, cooking, drinking and going on day-trips – and of course, all kinds of complicated feelings and desires arise among them, and there are a lot of head games going on in the background. There are a couple of bizarre and very dark details in the story (e.g., one of the characters has a frightful, hallucination-like experience in a park in Florence which he visits with the intention of picking up someone for a couple of hours), but on the whole this is also a relatively light story, and all the emotional fussing around is more comic than tragic or even dramatic. (Of course, it’s painful for the characters, but this story isn’t written in a way that it would be painful for the reader, too.)

The last story, Saturn Street is again very different. It’s about a young man who has a voluntary job at a food delivery service, and delivers meals to HIV positive patients. He strikes up a friendship with one of his clients, sometimes sharing a meal or watching a video with him. He feels a tender desire for his dying client, while simultaneously he tries to get over the recent death of his long-term partner. Saturn Street is a very sad and very gentle story; it’s full of longing, nostalgia, pain and disenchantment, and it has a touching, dream-like quality – it’s certainly a memorable read for me.

Luke and Jon by Robert Williams

When the mother of 13-year-old Luke dies in a car crash, his father – a talented toy maker – has a complete breakdown. He starts drinking, neglects his work, lags behind with the bills, and finally father and son are forced to give up their house and move to a derelict house somewhere in a small town off the map, because that’s all they can afford. In their new home, Luke and his father continue with their lives as it has been since the death of the mother: the father goes on drinking and does some odd bits of work in his workshop, and Luke uses art to empty his brain – he spends all his afternoons on the hills around their house and paints stone piles, and in the remaining time he either day-dreams about his mother, or worries about the approaching end of the summer holidays when he will have to go to school again, and be the „new kid” in the class, and endure all the unpleasantness of this situation. But then one morning Jon, a boy of weird appearance and behavior living in the neighborhood comes over uninvited and things slowly start to change. Luke and Jon strike up a friendship, and the constant presence of a third person seems to shake Luke’s father out of his apathy – and instead of drowning his energies and his sense of loss in alcohol, he starts out on a major new project: the biggest and greatest toy he ever wanted to create.

The novel crowds a surprising number of themes into a relatively small number of pages: the story, for instance, deals with the difficulty of overcoming the loss of a parent or a spouse, the way one can live together with someone suffering from a mental or nervous disorder, and also how mentally ill people are looked upon with a certain kind of fear and suspicion in general (as it turns out, Luke’s mother had manic-depressive disorder, and since she hadn’t been taking her medications before her accident happened, the authorities consider her death a result of suicide). Another important themes are school bullying; taking responsibility for others; and also the healing power of art and creation.

All this may seem a bit too much, but Robert Williams manages the multitude and seriousness of these topics well. Or, in fact, more than just well: the novel is basically serious in tone and it’s not shallow, yet it’s still an easy and entertaining read. Of course, if you feel like it, you can even learn from it – but fortunately not because Williams spoon-feeds you with good-for-everything solutions or great lessons. He simply shows how his characters deal with their difficulties, but doesn’t suggest that all their decisions are the right examples to follow.

Finally, the narrative voice is also worth mentioning: the narrator of the novel is Luke himself, and his lively, dreamy and very engaging voice and his sometimes truly child-like and sometimes surprisingly mature and empathic way of thinking make this a very a likeable book – both for teenagers and for adults.