extreme legibility

Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

Hated it.  An endless rant by an inordinately uninteresting crazy man followed by a very brief inconsequential narrative about his liaison with a gold-hearted prostitute.  This book seemed, like Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as  Young Man (another supposedly great book that I hated), especially designed to discourage young readers from ever wanting to pick up another book.

A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble (William Morrow and Company, 1964)

 

Having recently re-read The Garrick Year, which I believe was Drabble's second novel, I decided to revisit her debut, which I first read in 1979 (fifteen years after it was first published in 1964).

A Summer Bird-Cage -- the title is never mentioned in the book, but it must be a reference to something* -- is a rather tepid, underdeveloped story about two sisters, one who is recently married to a somewhat famous but completely undesirable author (he might be queer).  Neither sister is very sympathetic, but there is something bracing about their nastiness, and Drabble's intelligence and eloquence are both fully displayed, especially as manifested in the first-person narrative voice.  One feels that Drabble is, at this very early stage of her career, an excellent writer but a facile observer of human life.  She is ahead of herself technically, which results in a polished but minor book.

 

*According to Wikipedia, the title of the novel is taken from a quotation from the play The White Devil by John Webster:  ‘"Tis just like a summer bird-cage in a garden: the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out."

*The Exquisite Corpse by Alfred Chester (Simon and Schuster, 1967)

 

The Exquisite Corpse is an audacious and fascinating, but failed, attempt to push the boundaries of literary fiction to the extreme edges (or beyond) of obscenity.

It is designed  to work in the manner of the folded-page drawing game whereby a picture of a human body is created by juxtaposing parts randomly drawn by various artists.  In the novel Chester moves arbitrarily from one chapter to the next by introducing a new character,  or a different version of an already introduced character, and in this way attempts to create a whole that is larger and more meaningful than the sum of its many parts.  Unfortunately, Exquisite Corpse doesn't achieve that goal, but individual chapters provide a unique and stimulating reading experience.  Chester embraces -- nay, celebrates -- many subjects not often encountered in conventional, mainstream fiction: sexual aberration (homosexuality, transvestitism, necrophilia, bestiality, S&M), colostomy bags (erupting), and many other taboos.  His smart, funny, and oddly humane writing make all of this almost palatable, and often quite amusing, yet one wishes all the sex and gore amounted to something a bit more powerful and resonant.