Less by Andrew Sean Greer
Little, Brown, and Company 2017I'm reading this for book club. I don't expect to have much to say about it here, but I'm finding it a novelty (ha) to be reading a novel for a change. And not a novel of ideas like The Brothers K or The Magic Mountain. So far this book is like a mash up of Cherie and early David Lodge (Small World, for example).
And so far -- just finished the first chapter -- the most interesting thing is a sudden change in the POV for a page towards the end of the chapter. I think I know who's POV that was -- Cherie -- but I'm not absolutely positive.
Our protagonist is a writer, and there's that stuff about the life of a writer, but not really that much about writing. Not the way Martha Grimes's novels are so much about writing. More about aging (fun!). Only marginally more interesting a topic than Hamsun's "hunger."
I do get an almost giddy feeling racing through the pages without feeling the need to copy out anything.
Much later
This is really much better than I was expecting. on p95 we learn the term for what I've long speculated about. Less, the character, is trying to account for the disproportionate reputation and popularity of his novel in Italy,
Less begins to imagine... that he has been mistranslated, or -- what is the word? -- supertranslated, his novel given to an unacknowledged genius of a poet... who worked his mediocre English into breathtaking Italian...
And there is humor! After Italy he travels to Germany. He is under the impression that he speaks German quite well,
p101 ...How heartening it is to watch him speak; how disconcerting, however, to listen.
...What Less did not know was that the charming Fraulein [his German teacher] had never been to Germany, nor spoken German outside of Yorkville. She was ostensibly German speaking, just as seventeen-year-old Less was ostensibly gay. Both had the fantasy; neither had carried it out.
The grad student, Hans, assigned by the university to guide Less about, is preparing for a doctoral exam on Derrida. They meet some of Hans's friends when they go out to eat,
p105 ...it is a relief to have someone other than a Derridean to talk with...
And sometimes it's just wonderful,
p113 He [Less] kisses -- how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you...
And in his surprisingly (to him) popular class he teaches, in his bold but puzzling German, among other writers, both Proust and Ford Madox Ford!
Trying desperately to dodge his 50th birthday, Less goes shopping in Paris. This results in,
p137 From Enrico [who's shop he is in]: "I have... no words..."
...
...He looks like a Fire Island supervillain rapper...
p191 Is there a term for a midlife crisis Bildungsroman? Surely the Germans have mashed together these words in just this way.
The wonderful thing about this wandering novel structure Greer has chosen, is that he can constantly throw in new characters. The latest, the reason he is in Morocco, is a colorful woman a day older than Less, so that they are celebrating their 50th together. Her lover has just left her after "being struck by lightning" and she is still in shock. Her speculation about love is quite interesting, she doesn't believe -- hasn't experienced -- that kind of love, but is ready to believe it is something real.
One of the (many) reasons I'm single is that I've known that, if I were in her romantic position, I would think my lover really must follow her heart. That is a romantic position for anyone but the lover. Seems rather bad form for the lover. Who wants a philosophical lover?
Much much later
The difference (for me) between good non-fiction and a good novel is that with the former, when it gets better I take even more notes, but with the latter I write less -- mostly.
p237 Arthur Less's life with Robert [the famous poet he was with for a long time when they were both much younger] ended around the time he finished reading Proust. It was one of the grandest and most dismaying experiences in Less's life -- Marcel Proust, that is -- and the three thousand pages of In Search of Lost Time took him five committed summers to finish. [*Sigh* Reading time-wise that's about right, but how do you wait so long? I can't imagine taking much over a year to finish Proust.] And on that fifth summer, when he was lying abed in a friend's Cape Cod house one afternoon, about two-thirds of the way through the last volume, suddenly, without any warning at all, he read the words The End. In his right hand he held perhaps two hundred pages more -- but they were not Proust; they were the cruel trick of some editor's notes and afterword. He felt cheated, swindled, denied a pleasure for which he had spent five years preparing. He went back twenty pages; he tried to build up the feeling again. But it was too late; that possible joy had departed forever.
p238 This was how he felt when Robert left him.
His point here is that Less, the character, had imagined a lengthy process of couple's counseling leading inevitably to an eventual parting of the ways. But Robert had already seen where their tale was tending and put a period to it.
Why anyone would miss that breaking up process is a mystery to me (Mr. Single, never been married.)
But let's return to Proust for a moment. When I first read this I thought he meant the book ended in fact before the end -- perhaps I thought this because I don't care for the way Proust dragged it on into and past the Great War when I feel the Dreyfus Affair is the natural heart of the work. But what he means -- of course -- is that you can be fooled by the physical size of a book when there's a great deal of supplemental material at the end. Arthur Less would hate the Norton Critical Editions.
I'll give Greer credit, I've never heard this one before. It's more common to hear that the dwindling pages are giving away the approach of the novel's ending.
And with Proust, especially when you've taken five fucking years to read him, the obvious, and natural solution to Arthur Less's disappointment is to instantly start again at the beginning. To dip your eyes into Proust's river of prose, ever changing and now informed by your First reading.
A little later still, now in Japan
p247 Over the next three hours he [Less] is served grilled and simmered and raw plates of butter bean, mugwort, and sea bream. [For the second time that day and third time in two days.] He greets each dish with a mad smile, recognizing the spiral nature of being. Nietzsche's concept of eternal return. He murmurs quietly: You again.
Bravo. Though there are better ways to play with this concept. Getting your heart broken. Experiencing a hangover or food poisoning.
p248 ...his international driving permit, which looks to him like a flimsy phony, is taken very seriously and photocopied numerous times, as if to be handed out as keepsakes. He is shown to a car as small, bland, and white as a hospital dessert and enters to find the steering wheel missing -- then is shown to the driver's side, all the time merrily thinking: Oh, I guess they drive on the other side over here? Somehow he never thought of it; should they give out international driving permits to people who never think of it?...
...he takes the wheel of what basically feels like an enameled toaster and follows the clear, perfect signs out of Kyoto...
p251 The restaurant [for his third kaiseki meal of the day, he's supposed to be writing about them] sits on a rock above the river and is very old and water stained in ways that would delight a painter and trouble a contractor...
p252 ...The young woman [who guided him to his seat] exits through the little door [you have to crawl through]. He hears her struggling to close it behind her; it has clearly suffered for centuries and is ready to die.
And the ending is not a surprise, but so satisfying.
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