First Stop in the New World

We have become both urban and urbane.  The relationship of those two words, as any old pedant will tell you, has as much to do with technology and society's development as with a persistent snobbery about those who live among strangers, who govern and shrive and housel and judge.  Nature should not be forgotten, and we can learn so many things from naturalists that our schools cannot or would not teach; but it is residing in a community with thousands or millions of others sharing similar goals and opportunities that defines modern existence.  Having spent my life almost entirely in capital cities I have a fondness for the countryside that is, in its essence, both Romantic and unrealistic, and what should be admired about the surroundings in this novella or this novel I may not want to experience for myself.  As the last two centuries have demonstrated, city life can be absolutely fabulous and absolutely miserable, paradise and penury lurking on opposite banks of a river that neither party really intends to cross.  And as our cities have grown, magnificent and proud structures, tributes to man's ingenuity, supremacy and sweat, art has reflected this shift: it has become more self-assured, less deferential, less keen on the mysteries of nature and more focused on the achievement of earth's most evolved species.  This is, for a variety of reasons, good and bad.  The bad consequence of our manmade landscapes is that we have come to believe that there is nothing beyond our grasp, that forests and hills and oceans are unkempt studies for true perfection.  While not all of us are so convinced, we can still revel in fine surveys of some of our more riveting urban sprawls.  One such location would be the former capital of the Aztec empire, now the Mecca of all sorts of empires, none of which seems to be unstinting towards its impoverished minions – which brings us to this recent book.

Mexico City is the most populous city in the Western Hemisphere, yet few have ventured a study into what makes it tick.  The habitual excuse will likely contain synonyms for "crazy," "unwieldy," "dangerous," and "colonialist," or maybe even those very words, leaving the curious reader who does not have the privilege of visiting quite cold.  As it were, the Distrito Federal (also known as D.F., in the spirit of Americans' D.C.) cannot be categorized as particularly safe, placid or easy to manage; if that's what you want in life, Geneva is still available.  No, D.F. screams tantalizing opportunities, huge disparities in those opportunities, and a certain ability to handle the vicissitudes of urban life that would make most spoiled Westerners quail.  In fact, given the plethora of negative information on Mexico City over the last few decades, there would be hardly an American of non-Mexican heritage that would ever want to consider a life there. 

Yet there are exceptions such as David Lida.  A New Yorker by birth and disposition, Lida has been a resident and proponent of D.F. since 1990 when he moved there after a succession of pleasant short-term stays.  All those years have given him access to changes and persons that would completely escape the casual observer, researcher or intrepid journalist armed with a handful of popular guides and a pocket dictionary.  Lida's knowledge is therefore profound, biased and laced with small chains of detail that could not have possibly occurred to someone unwilling to make a home out of his subject matter.  He bleeds and fights for a place that is not kind to its majority (and oftentimes pernicious to its minority), stubbornly persuaded that Mexico City will be the future.  Whose future is the only question:

People who complain that Mexico City has become agringada [Americanized] are in fact revealing that they never stray beyond the affluent neighborhoods.  However globalized, the city resists becoming the stereotype of a place that has lost its identity or become ruined due to contemporary capitalism.  There are probably many reasons, but the principal one is poverty.  Globalization functions for the middle class and the well-to-do, who increasingly find themselves living, working, and shopping in enclaves modeled after their counterparts in the United States.  The poor cannot afford such places, and globalization passes them by (106).

Unfortunately, there is nothing more commonplace and banal than poverty.  Lida's contribution aims to harpoon the traditional notions of mythic beasts such as postcolonialism, sexism, and the particularly Mexican malinchismo, which may be loosely rendered in English as a preference or prejudice for foreigners and foreign things, by adjusting the chiaroscuro.   Yes, Mexico City is poor (minimum wage is five dollars a day; only twelve percent of the working population earns more than twenty-three dollars a day).  Yes, Mexico City is as corrupt, unsafe and unpredictable as you might expect from a city that has only had non-appointed, elected mayors since 1997.  But what Lida finds is remarkable: he casts his eyes about and discovers the art and food of La Condesa; the vocabulary of death, fate and sexual interaction; the gentle winds that blow in from other nations and their impressions of Mexicans, by most accounts some of the friendliest people in the world.  One remarkable short chapter (there are thirty-three chapters, a tidy, unintentionally Christian number) relates the legend of the Island of the Dolls; another, longer entry surveys Mexico's diverse and brazen culinary combinations; and a lengthy chapter, fittingly the physical center of the book, is devoted to the sex industry at home, work and play.  Perhaps such prurience is unavoidable in our day and age consecrated so unabashedly to hedonism; whatever the explanation, it is not out of place given what the Spaniards accomplished and what we come to think about repressed lusts in countries that will overtly preach the contrary.

Lida may be a journalist accustomed to deadline, but he does not hurry his conclusions.  He admits that he did not immediately understand the complexity of the allusive phrase, "Soy chino libre"; and he has come to see the value of religion (which he clearly does not endorse) and Catholic motifs and rituals.  There is also an artistic touch to so many of his expressions, such as when he describes the inequities of daily existence: "people with money perceive the poor as abstractions, blurs who only come into focus when they wait on them" (29); or when he addresses the city's notorious penchant for gangdom: "Criminologists' explanation for the discrepancy has to do with the chilango's [Mexico City native's] perception of time. When surveyed, victims nearly always believe that the crimes have occurred more recently than they did" (209).  Would you want to read an urban diary whose author was not in love with that city, who wasn't prone to fits of exaggeration, who wouldn't place a charming twist on the most morose and sordid details?  This is neither obstruction nor propaganda, this is love.  When we love, we may espy the faults of our beloved, but we bask in the glory of her advantages, her ecstasies, her passions.  Lida took his time and found almost everything praiseworthy about an ancient city that most dismiss with a careless gesture.  Another chaotic valley of trouble, perched high above even less fortunate warrens of humanity?  That's only one way to look at it.

The Valley of Fear

Once upon a time, a young, impecunious Scottish physician had a brilliant idea for making a bundle of money, and, more importantly, for squeezing some pulp out of his burgeoning creative juices.  He would concoct a story that would combine the latest elements of forensic science with the camaraderie of old knighting tales, and throw in some historical relevance for good measure.  After a sufficient amount of superficial research, he had come up with the names of his protagonists, a suitable method for introducing them (one would narrate the tale, the other would star in it), and a topical setting that evoked a wide array of interest and emotion.  The year is the palindromic 1881, and another physician of likely Scottish provenance has returned  from an Afghan war to the tranquility of London.  Needing a room, as bachelors those days were expected not to be able to do anything for themselves,  he learns of a man also looking for lodgings whose "studies are very desultory and eccentric" and who "has amassed a lot of out-of-the-way knowledge which would astonish his professors."  Our physician, a humble soul by the name of Watson, is rather impressed by this man with "a passion for definite and exact knowledge," precisely the type of desires that should plague a man of medicine, but which, in the case of Watson, most properly do not.  How odd that the trained scientist is then the Romantic, and that his thin, ferocious, animated and highly mood-driven partner with the soul and wit of a poet is the man of unadulterated rationality; stranger still that this thinker would have an encyclopaedic command of all the crime committed in London in the last two decades.  This "walking calendar of crime" is, of course, Sherlock Holmes, and his first novel and appearance, A Study in Scarlet, is mimicked in structure by this unusual narrative, his last novel.

Unlike other tales which commence with a brief example of Holmes's deductive genius, Holmes and Watson are hardly at home or at peace for much time before Holmes receives a mysterious coded message from a man with the erudite pseudonym of Porlock.  Never identified or actually present in physical form in the novel, Porlock is one of the oddities in the Holmesian universe, an underling of the satanic Professor Moriarty who dares disobey his patron.  Money may be behind his betrayal, although Holmes unusually discusses the salary ("more than the Prime Minister gets") of Moriarty's prime henchman and Holmes's antagonist in this story; more likely is the reason Holmes surmises almost immediately: "because he feared that I would make some inquiry after him in that case, and bring trouble on him."  The case in question is deciphered with the help of Whitaker's Almanac:

There is danger/ may come very soon/ one Douglas rich/ country now at Birlstone/ confidence is pressing.

It is then far from shocking when, shortly thereafter, a Scotland Yard inspector by the name of MacDonald visits the duo to inform them that "Mr. Douglas of Birlstone Manor House was horribly murdered last night."  John Douglas to be exact, a Sussex resident of a large moated house equaled in size only by his wealth and boyish vigor.  He was "somewhat offhand in his manners," suggesting that "he had seen life in social strata on some far lower horizon," freely mingled with people of all classes including the nearby villagers whose businesses he patronized again and again, and "had spent a part of his life in America."  He was married to "a beautiful woman, tall, dark and slender, some twenty years younger than" her fiftyish husband, and very often visited in his residence by a dangerous-looking man called Cecil Barker.  But the most interesting thing about the late John Douglas was his tenacity:

The good impression which had been produced by his generosity and by his democratic manners was increased by a reputation gained for utter indifference to danger.  Though a wretched rider, he turned out at every meet, and took the most amazing falls in his determination to hold his own with the best.  When the vicarage caught fire he distinguished himself also by the fearlessness with which he reentered the building to save property, after the local fire brigade had given it up as impossible.  Thus it came about that John Douglas of the Manor House had within five years won himself quite a reputation in Birlstone.  

It is said that in premeditated crimes the character of the victim will reveal the culprit.  Determine what kind of man John Douglas was and you will soon have the reason for which he was killed; the gruesome method of execution – a sawed-off shotgun literally blowing his head to pieces and the perpetrator bounding out a tower window into the moat – will greatly distract the modern mind from this more essential matter.  And so, Holmes proceeds with great alacrity through the palette of possible solutions before arriving at one of the best thought-out plots and most satisfying explanations that Doyle would ever devise.

Yet the novella is hardly perfect.  As it were, it suffers from the same shortcoming that diminishes both A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four: a rambling, wholly unwarranted back story. Whether readers truly care about the origin of a crime may be less pertinent than Conan Doyle's limitations as a novelist.  In any case, a quick flip through the book's second half will demonstrate how one writer possessed by a spirit of genius and originality – a font of sustained brilliance rarely matched in English literature – can produce dull prose that reads like a cross between a macabre fable and something from this legendary German author of westerns.  For those readers who have not tried non-Holmes tales by Conan Doyle, there is happy news: his best work always featured Holmes and always featured Watson.  So when critics chide Conan Doyle's forays into the fantastic, the Arthurian, and the spiritual, we would do well to recall his description of MacDonald: mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.  And, occasionally, genius doesn't quite realize what it has accomplished.

The Kreutzer Sonata

He shook my hand and smiled at the same time, a smile which seemed unabashedly mocking, and then began to explain to me how he had brought the notes to prepare for Sunday and that they were in disagreement as to what to play: should they tackle something more complicated and classic, namely Beethoven's violin sonata, or resign themselves to smaller, trivial pieces?

In the last century and a half – since, as it were, the dawn of science's urge to explain everything – we have come to impute our irrationalities to faults of nature.  No longer are we responsible for the evil thoughts we harbor (childhood anxieties writ large) or the actions that we take against the freedoms and rights of others (we only care about ourselves, anyway), nor the crimes for which we are ultimately tried and acquitted because we are insane.  Insane has come to mean irrational, and anyone who is irrational is clearly not in control of what he may inflict upon his fellow humans and their environment.  I cannot speak for all my readers, but you may want to consider what part of your day you actually spend in unadulterated rationality.  Are the caffeine and alcohol you imbibe or grease you consume helping you live longer and in better health?  The casual encounters with persons whose sexual histories could not possibly be known to you?  The wild thoughts scattered throughout your day about promotions, raises, sports teams, past relationships, annoyances, physical tics, and other neurotic trivialities that seem to be the hallmark of modern societies of privilege?  If we were truly rational, we would be very careful with what we eat, choose one mate and stay with her forever, exercise regularly, stop worrying about whether we will make our payment on our car or home, and be nice to everyone and everything, because over time most intelligent people come to see that so-called 'rational behavior' comprises only caring about your survival to the possible detriment of everyone else's.  Yet for people of faith, faith and rationality are synonymous.  They are synonymous not because we are too foolish to think for ourselves, but because believing in something greater than yourself becomes, with the proper spiritual insight, the most rational thing you could ever do precisely because there is no reason to do it other than itself.  Belief is how we form friendships, think of country, nation, and heritage, and, perhaps most importantly, how we love.  We love without evidence, because there can be no evidence for the intangible twine that binds one soul to another.  I may believe someone loves me, but I am guided in my belief by a covenant that what that person and I have is sacred and can defeat time, space and every other obstacle to immortality.  A fine way to segue into this controversial novella.

The narrator and the reader will spend their time fascinated by one lowly man, Pozdnyshev, whom the narrator meets in a train compartment as marriage and love are being discussed.  The time is the late nineteenth century and Romanticism has been replaced by railroads, distant love by the all-too-familiar commute of the factory worker.  What love used to be – wild, enchanting, a font of salvation – has now become a series of morose gestures packaged in the understanding that we must continue evolution from amoeba to ape to human to enough humans to conquer the globe with the breadth of our immediate desires.  And Pozdnyshev has indeed been very unlucky in love.  His views stem from a long marriage to a woman he once loved and the five children she bore him.  They married when he was still young and after he had had his fill of public houses, and they quickly settled into the habits of a typically haute bourgeoisie household.  Soon all aspects of what should have been love and affection begin to shrivel and flake, and it is, surprisingly enough, family life and marriage that are to blame.  Pozdnyshev comments that, "the attraction to children, the animal need to feed, nurture, and defend them, was present in my wife as in so many women as nothing more than precisely an animal instinct and the complete lack of imagination or reason."  The reproduction of the human race is exactly what Pozdnyshev sees as its downfall: an attempt to immortalize the flesh instead of the soul, a very topical retort in the late nineteenth century.  But this is not the crux of his issue with his family.  No, his problems commence when his wife decides to return to playing the piano.  

Little by little, it is this common if somewhat privileged life (the Pozdnyshevs reside in a much more splendid house than your average city dweller) that Pozdnyshev comes to see as a "vile lie."  And with his whole existence now subject to scrutiny in every detail, it is hardly remarkable that he hears more than one layer of meaning in his wife's everyday statements:

She began thinking of another love, one pure and new, or at least that's what I thought.   And here is where she began looking about as if in expectation of something.  I noticed this and could not help but feel an onrush of panic and anxiety.  She would talk to others, people she would happen to meet or accost, and I understood that what she was saying was actually directed at me.  She expressed herself boldly with nary a thought for the fact that merely an hour ago she had endorsed a wholly opposing position; she spoke half in jest about a mother's concerns – and any mother who says she doesn't have such concerns is lying – about devoting herself to her children while she is still young and while she can still enjoy life.  She looked after the children less, but not with the despair of before, and spent more and more time tending to herself, to her appearance, although she tried to hide this, as well as to her pleasures and her self-perfection.  It was then that she returned to the piano with great interest, the piano which she had once completely abandoned.  This is where it all began.

Whatever one may think of The Kreutzer Sonata, this passage contains its essence, but not in the form assumed by the cursory reader who might believe that Tolstoy is valuing family over individualism.  Once upon a time, a rakish and rather immoral young Lev regaled himself on the sweetness of life, on Wein, Weiber und Gesang, as Pozdnyshev himself comments, and forgot his greater purposes.  After a long, troubled, and fecund marriage to a woman who simply could not compare to his interest in writing, Tolstoy abandoned everything and condemned both facets of his previous existence: that of a Lothario and of a family man.  Neither one is praised because both in tandem represent the two easy options for modern human beings, be it the comfort of home and its concomitant security, love and plain living, or the lascivious freedoms and lightness of a life without any responsibility to anyone except yourself.  What Tolstoy comes to advocate is a life of abstinence and self-discovery in unison with one's spiritual beliefs – a noble cause if one taken to an unnecessary extreme by a mind that was always prone to extremes.  Pozdnyshev has lived both parts of Tolstoy's life and, while it is unproductive to weld fiction to fact, has decided on the basis of one important event to join his creator in hermitage.  That event is the arrival of the music teacher Trukhachevsky.

His father was a petty merchant; he was the youngest of three boys and the only one sent to his godmother in Paris to study at the conservatory.  And yet Trukhachevsky wasn't even a professional musician, but a "semi-professional."  He was not particularly handsome, but he did not need looks to attract a woman, he needed music.  And to Pozdnyshev there was something positively demonic about music:

They say that music has an elevating and sublimating effect on the soul.  Untrue!  Utter nonsense!  It most certainly has an effect, a terrible effect, not of sublimation nor of denigration, but one of disturbance.  How should I put it ... music forces me to forget myself, my true position in life, and under music's spell I seem to feel what I actually do not feel and understand what I don't really understand, and be able to do what I in fact cannot.  I would explain this phenomenon by saying that music acts like a yawn or like laughter; I am not sleepy but I yawn looking at someone yawning; and there is nothing to laugh about and yet I laugh when I hear someone laughing.

In other words, music, because of the rigidity of its form and the ineluctability that is its nature, must be understood by the common man as something to be understood, something that is done, something that everyone does.  It is, for Pozdnyshev, the bellwether of common values, easy morals, and plain decisions that shape the vast majority of human lives, and his wife is about to be cheapened by all these banalities and perhaps slip into that most banal and horrific crime of all, betrayal.  This is why Pozdnyshev finds the most insufferable circumstances that plague men of jealousy to be "those well-known bourgeois conditions in which the great and dangerous proximity of man to woman is permitted."  These circumstances are numerous: doctor's visits, balls, art lessons, and that most pernicious of all situations, music.  His wife's return to her piano, her neglect of her children (in her husband's estimation), and most of all, her interest in something greater than herself and her family all damn her to a crime that she may or may not have committed, although on more than one occasion we are presented with some ocular proof and left to ponder the ending without either possibility being confirmed.

Yet this story is not really about jealousy, it is about the decisions of man.  While his monumental novels are widely praised, Tolstoy is the type of writer who thrives on two great facets for short story writers: directness of characterization and a certain momentum that gets derailed in longer narratives.  In that vein, many have quibbled that The Kreutzer Sonata is one of his weaker works, owing in no small part to the moral framework that seems superimposed.  But the work must be commended on its clarity: the concatenation of small details of jealousy, one of the easiest emotions to write about because it is, with hatred, one of the most consuming, is made more remarkable by how similarly most tales of jealousy progress.  Jealousy allows one to find everything wrong and nothing right; to depict the world in conspiracy against you; and to portray the greatest crime of all, the one for which Judas and Pilate were sentenced to the last circle of hell.  There are many stories that start with ridiculous, almost insane premises, but very few follow them to their illogical ends.  More often than not, the reader is emotionally manipulated into seeing a world that appears far removed from contemporary reality and then provided with a last minute explanation for this odd state.  But bold is the tale that shirks the need for a comprehensive ending and sticks to its guns.  Or, in this case, its daggers.

The Ring of Words

The last ten years have borne witness to a revival of interest in the works of this author, whom I first encountered at the merry age of ten when my school's curriculum obliged me to read this novel.  At the time the stuff was well beyond my capacities; but unlike other mature books that I tackled while very young, I felt no glorious anticipation of future re–readings (which I certainly experienced when, at fourteen, I first read this author's entire oeuvre).   So, when I returned to The Hobbit and even leafed through the Rings trilogy, I expected to be bored, and not only because I am no fan of science fiction or fantasy.  There is something ultradense about Tolkien's style, an abstruse concinnity usually found in obscure humanities journals that doesn't so much as bore as distract me.  When you read a great writer, especially someone with particularly clear ideas and morals, you get (if you have a proclivity for it) an undeniable urge to compose.  Even small samplings of Melville or Chesterton suffice to make our minds race through fictive scenarios searching for another allegory for art.  And there are other writers who are learned if a bit dull and best enjoyed in non–fictional settings, such as this text describing Tolkien's work and passion for languages.

 

Being a student of Old English and Old Norse, I am most appreciative of Tolkien's contributions to lexicography.  As was mentioned a few thousand times during the revival of his trilogy, Tolkien's first means of financial support was as an editor and researcher for the greatest dictionary in the history of the English language.  I do love dictionaries but wonder whether I might become disenchanted from having to research every last form for a limited section of one letter's entries (Tolkien's expertise in the Germanic languages got him the assignment of "W").  Well, however bored the young scholar might have been, he certainly made use of his time.  Tolkien's work on these entries, including marvelous intuitive speculation on an old name for this evil bird (one of my favorites), is detailed by the authors in the first part of The Ring of Words.  The second and third parts go over Tolkien's own fashionings of brave new words for his warriors and warlocks.  Now, if you are knowledgeable about the aforementioned ancient tongues and Norse mythology in general, the whole endeavor of hobbits, ents, silharrows, and weapontakes loses much of its luster (much as a knowledge of Russian impedes any enjoyment of this ballyhooed novel).  That a child would find these words magically new and exciting tells you how much puerile enthusiasm is required to fall in love with Tolkien's inventiveness and unswervable desire to inject into his religious parables some very old blood.

 

What are the best selections from his lexicon?  Weapontake (exactly what it looks like, although its historical sense is the subject of some complicated logodaedaly) and silharrow (an ethnonym for "men of the south") are exquisitely beautiful, as are dwimmerlaik (practice of occult art or goety),  north–away and south–away (in those directions), mithril ("grey brilliance," or "silver"), hame ("coat" or "skin," as Old Norse's hamfarir means "magical travel in the shape of an animal") and kingsfoil (a plant).   Tolkien sticks to the old saying that writing well in English means using native Germanic (and often shorter) words rather than the foreign Latinate borrowings, ideally with a fine balance between the two.  His world is an unabashed satellite of Asgard, Midgard and Valhalla, broken off and spinning in revolution to the same days and nights and seasons of the Norse gods that Tolkien, a very Christian man whose books are at once very Christian and very Norse, fell in love with as a child and worshiped as a man.

 

A strange and deep concurrence runs between Thor and Odin and Christian beliefs that I have never been able to explain.  The Norse deities are structured in a similar hierarchy to the Greek pantheon but their stories are unique and far more compelling, perhaps because instead of interfering in and laughing at the pathetic lives of mortals, the Gods themselves are doomed to perish.  You will understand my disappointment when I returned to Tolkien after almost twenty years of indifference only to find that, while worthy themes were being acted out by worthy men, there was little more to these stories than complex, verbose parables.  The Ring of Words offers insight and a wonderful slew of definitions you will never find anywhere else.  It also maintains Tolkien's reputation as a first–rate scholar sidetracked by heavenly aspirations about lowly creatures be eldern dawes, "in the days of our forefathers."         

The Invitation

There is a style no longer in circulation among our literary works because we no longer wish to merge with eternity.  We have come to entertain notions of a beyond as an unknowable consequence of very knowable processes, and the inevitable outcome of billions of years of inevitable outcomes.  In principio erat verbum, et verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat verbum all sounds very nice, but now we have moved past God – and sometimes it seems like He has returned the favor – and into the much more tenable field of hard science.  Our verbs (or words, as verba means both) bestowed upon us by a benevolent Creator who willed the universe into shape have been evicted from their cozy domiciles and replaced with volatile and complicated droids owing their allegiance solely to the latest whims of the latest wizards.  These wizards would advise me – if I ever bothered listening to them instead of just humming a happy tune whose melody I cannot quite explain – that our life is simply a collection of detail and we are simply collectors.  The best observers are those who leave no stone unturned, no star unnamed, no fossil uncarbondated, and no deity unblasphemed.  Come now, ignoramus, who could be smarter than we are?  After all, we've almost got everything figured out except where we came from and where we go, if anywhere.  All the intermediary steps, however, are as crystal clear as the ice on the planet billions of miles away that we can make out at times but which has to exist because, unlike our eyes, our machines are manmade and can be trusted to the ultimate degree.  When has our reason ever failed us?  Only, I suppose, all those centuries as conspiring sacerdotal agents blinded us, piling up lie after lie so that we remain enslaved to their evil and all-encompassing plan.   Yet we have finally broken free.  Now when we gaze upon nature's contours, all we see is a composite of data, molecules, light particles, atoms, quarks, and the potpourri and whatever other blandishments time has coaxed out of that endless and unswerving metal rod, evolution.  With this fact now happily proven, let us rejoice and examine this superb novel.    

The site of our novel's events is a place near the border of two large, powerful and mysterious countries.  One of them has since crumbled beneath the falsehoods of its imposed doctrines; the other, once party to those same doctrines, has growled and beaten its chest and moved on to the much more justifiable plan of unbridled capitalism, albeit with a few political restrictions.  And as is appropriate given the host country's dimensions, the titular invitation involves fifteen dignitaries from around our lonely planet, a motley assortment of men of power:  two preachers from Harlem, one of whom turns out to be an actor; another American who scribbles indignant notes as the speakers hold forth; a priest from the local church who serves as a sort of co-host; military representatives from more than one country; a Russian, "the Nero of cinema," now a naturalized subject of the British queen; and the ostensible master of ceremonies, a man "with the massive head of a mountain dweller."  What they talk about is, apart from the occasional aside, never expressed directly; instead, they are described in detail which the average reader will find intolerable.  Take, for example, the approach to the invitation site:

Now the procession of heavy cars preceded by the police car crossed through the town (and the town rose from the steppe, whose language was once Chinese, then Chinese transcribed in Latin characters, then Chinese transcribed into Cyrillic characters; where without counting a good twenty languages – languages of the sons of camel drivers, of Mongol horsemen, of inhabitants descended from those monstrous mountains, of caravaning Tartars, Afghans, Kyrgyz, Turkmens, Uzbeks, ancient slaves, newly arrived peoples ... there was even, the interpreter said, a German colony – two official languages were now spoken, both in Cyrillic characters) which sixty years ago had been nothing more than a simple village (or maybe not even that: a stopover, a point at the end of the endless steppes and before the passage to those terrifying mountains) and which now had a population of almost one million people of all races.

Those races are then qualified, and followed by other links in a chain of qualifications which extends through many pages and an incredible range of sensory perceptions.  We are dealing with the repetitions and surfaces of a very particular brand of writing, one that came about and shook its readers shortly after the Second World War and which has lost some of its reputation by virtue of our readily shrinking attention spans.  True enough, without a brilliant architect behind its towers the nouveau roman can become a dreary exercise in concatenation; at its best, however, it is as close as literature can get to painting its own picture.  No image exists without the wealth of otherness in its vicinity; and no person can be an island unto himself without the tidal wave of sensation from the millions of other living beings breathing his air and distracting him from the solipsistic extremes to which, we are told, he is naturally prone.

As opposed to other proponents within the movement (with the notable exception of this recently deceased French writer, its greatest representative), Simon is much more cohesive and allegorical than one would first imagine.  Yes, his world is fractured along the aleatory whims of association, proximity and pure chance.  But from among these pieces he fashions an alternative reality that is richer than that of his contemporaries or, for that matter, the silly ramblings of so many modern writers who eschew plot in favor of an old shoebox of scattered observations that are neither interesting nor artistic.  On every page Simon's artistry prevents him from slipping into such easy victories of style.  His parenthetical commentary (the second word of the novel is already trapped within its bubble) often supersedes the plain text before and after it, and we come to see that it is the circumjacent detail that outranks the prime focus.  Even a funeral can seem fragmented along the numerous storylines that it obliges to intersect:

(... the bust of the new General Secretary now cut off by the parapet at the top of the cube of red marble at that place where, before him, so many old men were kept, surrounded by the highest dignitaries with, to his immediate left, looking at him, a man with a fur hat atop a pensive face, devastated, akin perhaps to an old and tired wolf (maybe not old exactly, just devastated; maybe not interested, just pensive), whereas the new General Secretary had his head uncovered, with his baldness, his surprisingly young almost doll-like features, scrutinized and evaluated by millions of men, women, diplomats, journalists, and creators of theories) ... and now, seated at the end of that table which so resembled the table of some dull administrative board of some joint stock company or perhaps didn't, or that of an international bank or perhaps not that of an international bank, with its tray waxed like a mirror, its glasses and bottles of mineral water, in that room of bare walls without a single portrait, neither of his predecessors nor of him.

There is so much to admire about this passage and countless others, all perfectly waxed and reflecting each and every other page like a perverse hall of mirrors.  Simon is read less than he should be precisely because we have grown allergic to longer paragraphs (such as the book-long masterpieces of this Austrian writer) and prefer our literature like our scotch: neat and plain.  But then again, the truth is rarely as neat or plain as we might hope.