the hive (camilo josé cela tr. james womack)

It’s an interesting side-note to learn, after reading The Hive, that Cela not only won the Nobel prize for literature, but he was also on the Nationalist side in the civil war. In my reconfigured world, no Franquista can be a good guy. The novel is set during WW2, the early years of Franco’s regime. Whilst Franco is never referred to, there are several characters who are rooting for the Nazis. As I read it, before discovering the above, I took it as the writer’s way of illustrating their character’s lack of historical judgement, but the above information suggests this might not have been the case. At the same time, the novel was censored in Franco’s Spain, and had to be originally published in Argentina, a source of some ironic mirth on the part of the writer, as noted in his introduction.

The Hive is one of the more remarkable works of twentieth century literature. It features a multitude of characters (at least 160, according to the writer’s intro.) There is no coherent plot. The characters drift in and out of the book. Whilst the first section occurs in a cafe, and one thinks this is the bedrock of the novel, subsequent sections range out into other barrios of Madrid. Only one character, the impoverished poet, Martin, maintains any kind of a followable thread. The effect is, as the title suggests, a representation of the city as a teeming nucleus of souls, all of them with their own agenda. Sometimes the paths of these souls will cross, but more often than not they won’t. It’s a Cubist novel, and as brilliant a representation of the life of a city as you are likely to come across, a sister novel to Ulysses or Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Whilst one might imagine that a novel so lacking in plot or narrative might be unreadable, the opposite is the case. The Hive is a breezy, gossipy read. We drop in on people’s lives, and then drop out. There are pearls of wisdom, and gobbets of stupidity. Every character has their fears and their desires. The Hive might be another  way of thinking about the very idea of the novel. Stories scribbled on the subway wall, buried beneath the streets.

I started the novel last Thursday, during the final hours in my stay in the Spanish capital. I was sitting in a cafe, near my hotel, on the Calle Fuencarral. I did not expect that the novel would lead me into another cafe on Calle Fuencarral, peopled like this one, with the flotsam of the streets, the teeming life of a city that lives in its streets and its cafes and bars, a city which was little different from the one I was inhabiting, in spite of the bridge of seventy years of history. 

susana (d. buñuel, w. manuel reachi, jaime salvador, rodolfo usigli)

 Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 2/6

There were mild guffaws in the audience as Buñuel’s overripe plot reached its melodramatic denouement. The narrative revolves around the tempestuous titular character, who escapes from the reformatory and is then taken in by a wealthy, kindly family on their estancia. The fetching Susana proceeds to cause havoc, as the master, played again by Fernando Soler, his son, and the head of the estancia all fall for her charms, with predictably chaotic results. The ending is so banal it’s positively subversive, as Susana is rearrested and everything returns to an idealised normal. However, in Susana one can begin to trace elements of Buñuel’s later work. The examination of the way in which a seemingly stable and righteous social order is vulnerable to Dionysian attack. The subversive power of sexuality. The fragility of civilisation. All these elements are at play within the film, which Buñuel again directed from someone else’s script. 

hangsaman (shirley jackson)

Hangsaman is one of those books that reward in the reflection as much as the reading. It’s a quasi-surreal tome which tells a story from the POV of a late teen woman-girl, Natalie, which veers between comic description of college life to nightmarish passages which intimate rape and psychological breakdown. The novel takes place at Natalie’s home, dominated by her rarefied, pseudo-intellectual father, and at the college where she is sent to. In the college she is both the odd one out but also the observer, whose ability to describe the absurdities and cruelties of college life permits Natalie the breathing space she needs to survive. This is a weird book, coming out of the suburban backwoods of post-war USA, hanging the strange Lynchian dirty washing on the line for the reader to gawp at. It’s Lolita told from the other side, where the psychological damage of people’s actions and the world’s hypocrisy flowers on the protagonist’s strange skin. 

the end of the affair [graham greene]

The End of the Affair is a multi-faceted novel. It is all of the following: a dissertation on love and its limitations; an investigation of the catholic faith, and the notion of faith in general; a subversive portrayal of Second World War Britain; and a meditation on what it means to be British. The book’s spine is the affair between Bendrix and Sarah, who is presented as something of a femme fatale. Their affair takes place during the course of the war and is terminated by the arrival of the V-1 missiles. (A kind of anti-Slothropian trope). Neither Bendrix not Sarah’s husband, Henry, are serving in the army. They live nearby in Clapham, (the influence of the novel on McEwan’s Atonement is an interesting aside), Bendrix on the unfashionable South Side, Sarah and Henry on the smarter North. Not so close that there’s much danger of them running into one another, but close enough for Sarah to visit Bendrix’s flat without difficulty. 

The fact that Greene frames his narrative around men who didn’t fight in the war immediately suggests an anti-heroic stance. The author isn’t interested in strength, but weakness. Henry is a weak husband, who fails to satisfy Sarah on any level. Bendrix is revealed to be a fool, opening the novel talking about his hatred for Sarah, who he presumed had dumped him for another man, and Henry, before gradually realising the idiocy of this hatred as the novel unfurls. And Sarah, who seems to be the strongest of the three, dies prematurely young after contracting a bout of flu. However, within this seemingly critical narrative set-up, the characters emerge as increasingly sympathetic. Just as Bendrix’s misplaced assumptions begin to fall away, so do the reader’s. 

In addition, it’s also worth noting that Bendrix is a novelist. Greene offers plenty of details regarding his working practice. 500 words a day, without fail. The way in which the unconscious shapes the novelist’s work at all times. The duty to render those unconscious thoughts/ impulses into a coherent text. These details are fascinating and instructive. It’s hard for the reader to separate the novelist himself from his novelist character. In which case, what is the End of the Affair? A work which is the product of an exculpatory urge? An act of self-flagellation? Does Greene identify with the insipid intellectual who never got his hands dirty in the war? And if not, why pick such an unsympathetic figure as a guide to love and faith? 

These are too many questions which in a sense only serve to illustrate the complexity of Greene’s text. A complexity which is echoed in the structure, as the novel flits back and forth across the timeframe of the affair in a non-linear fashion. Firstly, the novel picks up two years after the affair has ended. Then it doubles back to recount how the affair began. There’s a crucial account of the affair’s final moments, when the doodlebug struck. Then, audaciously, the author allows himself the contrivance of the discovery of Sarah’s diary, which means we revisit the narrative all over again from a second perspective. Thereafter, the novel jumps forward towards a kind of present, wound up in the days that follow Sarah’s untimely and slightly convenient death. 

This structural inquietude, along with the meditations on Catholicism, do not appear, at first sight, particularly British. It’s almost as though, just as the narrative of Britain’s glorious victory in the war is being burnished, (a narrative which is far easier to sell for the second than the first world war), Greene sets out to make a counter-narrative.  The dominant narrative still resonates, politically and culturally: Britain’s greatness and heroism, a narrative for internal consumption, which helped to gloss over the crimes of colonialism, helped to fuel the endless identity crisis with regard to Europe and could be said to have found its latest instalment in the go-it-along bravura of Brexit, should one choose to see it that way. But Greene chooses to focus on a few underwhelming metropolitan types. And, it seems to this reader, revels in their messiness, their awkwardness, their anti-heroism. This is Hamlet Britain, not the Henry the Fifth version. And I would argue that these values: awkwardness, anti-heroism, a reluctance to fight, an understanding of the messiness of life which means that, after Sarah’s death, Bendrix actually ends up living with Henry in a morbid menage a trois, (minus one), which are the attributes that distinguish the British. Not for nothing did we used to be masters of the slightly sordid art of diplomacy, an art which involves recognising the unfeasibility of an unambiguous standpoint. As Hamlet gleaned, life is far too complex for absolutes. Bendrix tries to arm himself with a shield of hatred, but as the book goes on he realises how foolish he has been to do so. 

Greene adds the great irony that the only surefire winner in life is a god that might not exist. That’s where he and Beckett perhaps overlap. The Catholicism almost seems to railroad the last part of the novel,  which goes to far as suggest, perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek, that Sarah attained some kind of sainthood. It’s of course possible to view the issue of religion as fundamental to the novel, but it seems to me that it’s a red herring. The real substance of the novel is tied up in the title. The contemplation of God occurs after the contemplation of love has been forcibly abandoned.