Excerpts + Thoughts: Life A User’s Manual (Georges Perec)

“Cinoc, who was then about fifty, pursued a curious profession. As he said himself, he was a “word-killer”: he worked at keeping Larousse dictionaries up to date. But whilst other compilers sought out new words and meanings, his job was to make room for them by eliminating all the words and meanings that had fallen into disuse.

When he retired in nineteen sixty-five, after fifty-three years of scrupulous service, he had disposed of hundreds and thousands of tools, techniques, customs, beliefs, sayings, dishes, games, nick-names, weights and measures; he had wiped dozens of islands, hundreds of cities and rivers, and thousands of townships off the map; he had returned to taxonomic anonymity hundreds of varieties of cattle, species of birds, insects, and snakes, rather special sorts of fish, kinds of crustaceans, slightly dissimilar plants and particular breeds of vegetables and fruit; and cohorts of geographers, missionaries, entomologists, Church Fathers, men of letters, generals, Gods & Demons had been swept by his hand into eternal obscurity.”

[This seems to be the antithesis of what Perec’s trying to accomplish in this book. He’s trying to document the minutiae, to impress upon the reader that behind everything and everyone in this random Paris apartment block among countless others there is a story to be told and a context to be appreciated, richness beneath apparent mundanities.]

But pretentious literary analysis aside, I was thinking about how much I would hate to be a word-killer. The notion of making a living out of the fall of entities depresses me immensely – to do a proper job you would first have to become familiar with their genesis, their emerging into common parlance, then stagnation, then obsolescence. And after all this your job wouldn’t be to document lives but to cement over them.

Waiting For Vanya

(On Thursday)

The good news is that I finally got to watch Uncle Vanya, the bad news is that I had to spend two and a half hours shivering on the pavement outside the Donmar Warehouse on an exceptionally cold morning for the privilege. It didn’t really help that I’d rushed out of the house and forgotten my tissues, and my nose chose today to make the transition proper from its Suez-Canal-in-the-1950s impression to Ben Johnson in 1988.

I’d brought Life: A User’s Manual with me to read in the queue, hoping that such enforced commitment would help me make significant headway instead of the plodding progress I’ve been making lately. This succeeded to an extent – out of sheer necessity to concentrate on something other than the cold and my nose, I managed another 100 pages and am now almost halfway through its 500 or so. It’s still slow going because of the nature of the book – you’d have to read it to really understand, but basically it’s about a Paris apartment block and its inhabitants, and everything gets described in exhaustive, sometimes almost ridiculous, detail. There isn’t any sort of continuous narrative; we move from apartment to apartment, through entrance halls, up staircases, and every thing and person we encounter has a history. It’s definitely getting better now, and I’ll stick it out till the end, but I still wouldn’t call it absorbing reading, and sneaked a number of envious glances at the Economist in the hands of the friendly man behind me. (Hello, friendly man! You were friendly, unlike snooty man in front of me. I didn’t like snooty man at all.)

So anyway, I was queuing. It was either coincidence or sadism that as I shuffled past the doorstep of the Paul Frank store the music blaring inside it just happened to be the RHCP song with the lyrics Standing in line to see the show tonight. By the time I managed to get a ticket, my toes seemed to have ceased to exist, but the healing powers of eggnog latte (how very bourgeois) eventually nursed them back to health.

Rereading White Fang

The only thing that’s keeping me reading Life A User’s Manual (Georges Perec) are these effusive Amazon reviews, which promise that if I just stick it out a bit longer all will become clear and wonderful and no longer stupefyingly boring. I’ve been reminding myself of all this for 78 pages now, which is not unreasonably long for a book to get going (many others have wonderful beginnings and then meander into mediocrity), but I must say that much of what’s keeping me grimly soldiering on is the need to believe that I’m still an intellectual being in fields other than the law.

Another obstacle to my making headway with the book is the presence of White Fang on my bedside table. Somewhere in Spain, talking about childhood reading, we discovered that we both really loved White Fang but were less enthused with The Call Of The Wild, because White Fang was way cooler than Buck, who sometimes tended towards wussiness. But despite the fact that I knew I’d always had a definite preference, and I’d probably read both books over ten times each when I was younger, I couldn’t actually remember distinct plotlines for each one any more. These memory lapses tend to trouble me quite a lot, less because of the simple argh-it’s-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue aspect of trying and failing to remember, more because of that old worry I have about how much I’ve forgotten – that I haven’t just forgotten particular nuggets of knowledge, but that I’ve also forgotten I ever possessed the knowledge at all.

So I got the book out of the UCL library the other day, and it’s honestly been like a homecoming. What’s fascinating is that standard aspects of narrative like plot and the names of characters are still hazy. What swims back to me with startlingly familiar clarity are little, relatively insignificant things. At the beginning, the revelation of the lone man battling the pack of wolves with firebrands, of the wonderful intricacy of his being – the way his little finger, too close to the flame, automatically re-adjusts itself on the wood. I used to be able to see that little finger shrinking from the flame, the wolves skulking in the darkness out of the corner of my eye. When the puppy later named White Fang first ventures out of the den where he was born, tumbles into a nest of baby ptarmigans, picks one up in his mouth and naturally begins to eat it, I could always taste the salt of its blood, feel the splintering of delicate bones.

Postgrad Library Privileges Totally Rock

Finally I can point to a tangible benefit I am obtaining from this Masters: as a postgraduate I can now borrow TWENTY, COUNT ‘EM!, books from the UCL library, instead of my previous limit of ten. I tottered home happily yesterday with nine books and will return for a second lot soon. Only two were actually about law.

  • The Past (Galway Kinnell)
  • Corson’s Inlet (A.R. Ammons)
  • Collected Poems (Philip Larkin)
  • Poems For The Millennium (a huuuuuuge anthology and therefore enticing even if naffly titled)
  • A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man (James Joyce, first foray – fingers crossed)
  • Life A User’s Manual (Georges Perec)
  • The Real Life Of Sebastian Knight (Vladimir Nabokov)
  • Legal Aspects Of The Information Age (Ian Lloyd)
  • Cases And Materials On Intellectual Property (W.R. Cornish)

I’m a happy bookworm. Between this and the fact that after two years of living in a hall with no Internet connections I now have unlimited access in my flat, the pertinent (rhetorical) question I am beginning to ask is: who needs a social life?

Thoughts On Ian McEwan

(Written 14 August)

Amsterdam was the third stop in my summer self-administered crash course in Ian McEwan. I’d decided long ago that he was one of the Famous Authors I Really Should Read But Haven’t, and since the Marine Parade Library has all his books except Atonement, I thought it was as good a time as any to start.

I think most of the impressions I formed of his writing in the first two books I read (Enduring Love and The Child In Time) are borne out quite clearly in Amsterdam. His plots are consistently compelling – I never have difficulty focusing on the read, whereas with, say, Kavalier & Clay (my other most recent read) I often had to consciously commit myself to finishing a chapter. There, it was sometimes hard to figure out the point of what I’d just read, if any, and whether it was going anywhere worth going. A question I often ask myself is why the author’s decided to leave something in, what exact contribution it’s made which enabled it to survive the brutal editorial process.

I don’t have any problems answering these questions with Ian McEwan books, especially Amsterdam. On the contrary, he sometimes seems a little heavy-handed with his Messages; in Amsterdam he repeatedly follows a certain pattern in setting up his morality points: i) man is aware of another person’s misfortune or distress, ii) man briefly considers this, perhaps even experiences a small surge of caring, although it’s probably more accurate to say he’s briefly aware that he should care but doesn’t necessarily actually feel anything, iii) self-absorption takes over and man is caught up in his own needs and interests, iv) man chooses to serve his own interests and rationalizes this to himself without much effort.

There is also almost a fixation with making his characters authors or musicians, but since I like the way he writes about both art forms, this is an observation rather than a criticism.

While I think he’s more pointed than he needs to be sometimes, what really makes the reading worthwhile is the quality of the prose. It’s clean, hardly ever more complex than it needs to be, and effectively conveys an insight that feels very real to me. In the opening chapters of Enduring Love he writes about love the way I feel it. The teetering balance between his characters’ self-immersion and their connections with other people seemed spot-on in Enduring Love and The Child In Time, but Clive and Vernon seemed exaggeratedly narcissistic in Amsterdam. Then again, it may also be because the former two books both dealt with this in the context of the breakdown and reconstruction of romantic relationships, while Amsterdam deals with it in terms of how the characters deal with certain issues of principle. I suppose the point is that I’m more capable of a personal response to his writing about relationships (though I have little experience thus far of the foundering of a happy relationship), whereas Amsterdam’s choices aren’t choices I’ve ever had to directly confront.

Anyways. The reading’s been worthwhile so far, and I’m definitely starting on Atonement when I get back to the UK and can buy it used off Amazon.

Excerpt: Amsterdam (Ian McEwan)

From Amsterdam:

The following day the editor presided over a subdued meeting with his senior staff. Tony Montano sat to one side, a silent observer.

‘It’s time we ran more regular columns. They’re cheap, and everyone else is doing them. You know, we hire someone of low to medium intelligence, possibly female, to write about, well, nothing much. You’ve seen the sort of thing. Goes to a party and can’t remember someone’s name. Twelve hundred words.’

‘Sort of navel gazing,’ Jeremy Ball suggested

‘Not quite. Gazing is too intellectual. More like navel chat.’

Minority Report

The rest of the day was given over to wandering from eatery to eatery, which tends to form the substantive bulk of my social activity over here, simply because most eateries are air-conditioned enough for conversation to be about something other than how hot we all are. From gourmet sandwiches at Olio Dome to char kuay teow at Kopitiam to cakes at Cafe Cartel to bubble tea and salty chicken at Quickly to meatball soup at the Marina Square food court in various group compositions (Me, Felice, Ken, for a spell, Jonathan, eventually just me and Ken). Conversational highlights of the afternoon included Ken calling me a slut (highly amusing if you know Ken) and the Who Would I Shag In This Shopping Centre? game. Also brief forays into schools of legal and political thought, but that doesn’t sell papers, dah-ling.

Minority Report thankfully managed to exorcise me of my A.I. demons, in that it was a sci-fi movie with a lot more brain and subtlety, and a lot less saccharine cringeworthiness, although I still had to roll my eyes at the ending sequences.

But because I can never resist the urge to nitpick: they set up the loss of Anderton’s son as the driving force behind his belief in pre-crime (the why, so crucial in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I’m enjoying immensely these days). Multiple statements are made about how pre-crime could have saved his son if it had only been set up 6 months earlier. But it can only detect murders, not rapes, not assaults, presumably not abductions, and his interrogation of Leo Crow later reveals that he doesn’t actually know if his son is still alive or dead. So pre-crime would have been useless if his son had merely been abducted and, say, ritually tortured. Also, the law student in me wonders how the system draws what can often be an exceedingly hazy line between murder and manslaughter, given that they seem to have dispensed with all relevance of actus reus (the act) and mens rea (the state of mind) as elements of a crime.

But I admit these are easy and not particularly penetrating criticisms to make, and they don’t detract from the fact that it’s a stunningly-made film with fairly good adherence to continuity (this is important to me. Other disgruntled X-Philes will understand) which didn’t bore me for a second – overall, well worth my seven fifty, which I don’t find myself able to say about most films I see.

Especially since I am about to leave the house to watch The Eye with Ken, a movie we are inexplicably determined to see despite everyone else giving us dire warnings to the contrary. We only settled for Minority Report yesterday because The Eye wasn’t showing where we were, and only after a long tussle between the pros and cons of travelling to Tampines to watch The Eye (pro: we’d watch The Eye; con: we’d watch The Eye).

Book-A-Minute Odyssey

I wish I’d read the Book-A-Minute synopsis of Catcher In The Rye before I ploughed through the whole bloody thing all those years ago, because (I know I’ll probably tramp on lots of toes here) their synopsis is spot on and much less of a waste of time:

Angst angst angst swear curse swear crazy crazy angst swear curse, society sucks, and I’m a stupid jerk.

Other quality works well-showcased here are Animal Farm, Slaughterhouse Five and War And Peace.

In the SF/Fantasy section, I can also vouch for the worth of their synopses of Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn, and The Shadow Rising. Somewhere in the middle of book five I decided that four overly thick, repetitive books of intensely irritating characters with little or no redeeming qualities had been quite enough, and gave up in disgust – I therefore cannot comment on the accuracy of further synopses of the next, oh, ten million books in the series, but insofar as they ridicule it, they’re probably right.

I disagree with their David Eddings synopses because the Mallorean didn’t mirror the Belgariad. A more accurate approach would be to summarize the Belgariad and the Mallorean, then describe the Elenium and the Tamuli as “See the Belgariad and the Mallorean”. If you’ve never read David Eddings, this will have made absolutely no sense to you, but if you have, you will know exactly what I mean.

Enduring Love For Trail of Dead

The two boxes of books and CDs I sent home in early June, when I didn’t know whether I was staying or going (cue Clash song in the soundtrack of my life, ha ha), have arrived. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed Source Tags And Codes until it started distracting me from Enduring Love, which I’d been hunched over till very late the previous night.

Perhaps it was strange coincidence, but just as the album started getting better, the book started losing its momentum. An uneasy balance between ears and eyes had been maintained for the first five songs, which are “merely” catchy, but then Heart In The Hand Of The Matter came along, with its bells and crashing pianos and amazing drumming, and from then on Trail Of Dead started majorly kicking Ian McEwan’s ass.

By the time Relative Ways began, I’d become thoroughly annoyed with the book’s protagonist for his whining and paranoia, which I do think then begat more reasons for whining and paranoia for him than may originally have been likely, and I was getting depressed by the way the relationship in the book managed to spiral so suddenly out of fairly idyllic conjugal bliss into a minefield of recrimination and bitterness. On a personal level I wasn’t feeling great either. But there was something powerfully persuasive about those It’s okay passages, a sudden hushed drama in the music and the chord changes, a heartfelt earnestness in the vocals akin to how in Tonight Tonight (Smashing Pumpkins) Billy Corgan beseeches us to believe. And I always find myself believing, and so too, yesterday, everything really did feel okay for a while.

Every now and then something always manages to get under my skin sufficiently to manipulate me (even if just temporarily) despite all the cynical rationality I think I epitomize. It’s good when that happens.

Neverwhere

I re-read Neverwhere, after chatting to Luke, who was reading it for the first time. I love this book quite madly, probably due to the combination of loving Neil Gaiman and loving London madly as well.

I love the way the hugely different worlds of London Above and London Below overlap, yet don’t quite merge, at stations of the London Underground. The Gap is a ravenous predatorial pouncing fog if you’re from London Below, as opposed to the minor hazard we’re told to Mind by a disembodied voice that’s become background noise to most of us. If you get off at British Museum (long-closed to London Above), ads for moustache wax and two shilling seaside holidays are still plastered on the walls.

There’s something about London, and the London Neil Gaiman presents in Neverwhere, that makes it almost easy to believe that in London Below there are black friars at Blackfriars, an actual angel in Islington, shepherds in Shepherd’s Bush who you should hope you never have to meet, Coke and chocolates from platform vending machines are served if you are a guest at Earl’s Court, and you have to get to the floating market at Harrod’s (the previous one was in Big Ben – it floats from place to place) by crossing Night’s Bridge.