mister tavares’ neighborhood

Yesterday evening, Mister Interpolations passed a kidney stone in the shape of a book. Literally. It plopped in the strainer.

Blinking with relief, Mister Interpolations fished it out and marveled at just how wonderful he felt.

He sighed: “It’s passed, it’s over.”

Then his mind began to work. How could a book be this painful? It doesn’t make sense.

To calm his wonder, Mister Interpolations opened the kidney stone and read it edge to edge in one sitting.

He concluded: “It hurts for a very good reason.”

Tired, he slept and dreamed of Gonçalo Tavares, a neighbor, leaping over fences that were obstacles one moment, ice statues the next, then fragments of pencils and finally shards of volcanic stone.

It was a fitful night’s sleep, tossing.

. . .

This is what Mister Tavares thought: “I want to write a novel.” Instead he writes a book. It’s called The Neighborhood.

Then mister Tavares peoples it with literary types.

Mister Valery is one such neighbor. Mister Calvino is another and there are Misters Juarroz, Henri and Kraus, too.

They cut amusing figures, ambling here and there trying to do X when Y would suffice and likely result in Z. OK, maybe P.

. . .

One day when Mister Tavares was writing, he thought: “Writing is a spatial exercise.” And to prove his point, he wrote down these words: “He wrote down these words.”

Mister Tavares smiled because the words looked right, they made sense.

Then he wrote them this way: “Words these down wrote he” and because he was feeling impish, Mister Tavares wrote them this way, too: “Sdrow eseht nwod etorw eh.”

Yes, he thought, writing is a spatial exercise. Semantics, too.

His eyebrows tilted in and up like a shallow V. Mister Tavares blurted: “One string of letters is meaningful, the others aren’t, but if the others aren’t, then they’re examples of things that don’t make sense.”

He paused, with good reason, and then the good reason passed.

He continued: “But if they’re examples of things that don’t make sense, then that’s their sense, they make sense.”

Mister Tavares felt good about the results of his experiment, but confused.

. . .

Mister Tavares enjoys wandering around the city until he’s lost.

To find himself lost more quickly, he gulped the last of his coffee, then smoothed out a map before him on the table, planning his steps carefully for his daily perambulations, excited.

. . .

Mister Tavares fancies pencils and pens. He doesn’t write with them, however.

He’s heard of computers and has even recommended them to others. But he doesn’t trust them.

That’s because they come with keyboards. And keyboards are made for tapping. Which is why he doesn’t like typewriters, either. Or dancing.

So he writes with marbles instead. This doesn’t make sense. But it doesn’t prevent Mr. Tavares from shooting words at other words with a fastidiously closed pirate eye.

. . .

A loves B. B loves C. A doesn’t love C.

A is Mister Interpolations, B is Saramago, and C is Tavares. Love isn’t a transitive property. This is proof.

Now C loved B and B would have loved A if only B had known A, because A is handsome and loves B’s prose with a passion bordering on romance.

This shows nothing. Mister Interpolations mutters in his sleep: “Perhaps that’s the point.”

. . .

At last Mister Interpolations stirs, moans.

There’s no plot in The Neighborhood — no setting, no characterization, little or no sensory details, a few snappy metaphors, and only a few plucky observations.

Other than that, Mister Interpolations thinks The Neighborhood is a fine piece of prose fiction.

. . .

Mister Tavares’ neighborhood is pre-apocalyptic. That is, Mister Interpolations wants to visit destruction on it.

. . .

Postscript. I may not enjoy wandering Mister Tavares’ neighborhood but others do. Check out Trevor’s outstanding review at The Mookse and the Gripes. He plays the antidote to my venom.

the magician behind the baron

Melville fools readers of Moby Dick into the belief that Ahab and not Ishmael is the truly obsessed mind.

In The Baron in the Trees, Calvino performs a similar trick by fooling readers into believing that Cosimo is our hero, our “real” protagonist, and that the story is about Cosimo’s arboreal exploits and adventures.

Cosimo isn’t our protagonist.

Nor is the story “about” him except as a pretext for talking about something else.

Enter: Biagio, the younger brother of Cosimo. From his first person point of view, Biagio offers an account of Cosimo’s life in the trees. The story is cobbled together, he alleges, from Cosimo’s own words, plucked from the lower branches of the canopy, ripe or rotten we don’t really know. I mean, if Cosimo is outlandish enough to take to the trees in the first place, then he’s certainly inventive enough to confabulate.

As Biagio politely warns, Cosimo isn’t an entirely reliable source of information. In recounting his experiences in the trees, Cosimo amplifies, expands, subtracts and exaggerates until he hits the narrative nail on the head. So if the account of Cosimo’s life seems outlandish, Biagio isn’t to blame. He’s just reporting what Cosimo has told him.

Now if Cosimo is prone to exaggeration, why isn’t Biagio just as prone to it, too—maybe even more so? Perhaps he is the one “carried away by the mania of the storyteller.”

Yes, conventionality has its advantages. But walking the straight line of truth isn’t one of them.

So what’s fictionally “real” in The Baron in the Trees?

In Moby Dick, the whale is real although its meanings are many.

In Robinson Crusoe, Friday is fictionally real even though it’s Tuesday. Trust me.

In Atonement, Cecilia and Robbie’s consummated love isn’t fictionally real. It’s a narrator’s device to seek atonement.

In the Life of Pi, the Bengal tiger isn’t fictionally real. I’ve done the math. Richard Parker is a narrator’s device to show that some stories are so charming we should believe them. (God, I hate that book!)

In The Baron in the Trees, Biagio is fictionally real but his brother Cosimo flitting through the trees and making love to women and translating Virgil and hunting boar is not.

In the final and longest sentence of the novel, Calvino breathlessly reveals his ruse by identifying trees, which are symbols of playfulness, perspective and invention, with the life-enhancing powers of language and storytelling.

“That mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and froth, minute and endless, with the sky glimpsed only in sudden specks and splinters, perhaps it was only there so that my brother could pass through it with his tomtit’s tread, was embroidered on nothing, like this thread of ink which I have let run on for page after page, swarming with cancellations, corrections, doodles, blots and gaps, bursting at times into clear big berries coagulating at others into piles of tiny starry seeds, then twisting away, forking off, surrounding buds of phrases with frameworks of leaves and clouds, then interweaving again, and so running on and one and on until it splutters and bursts into a last senseless cluster of words, ideas, dreams, and so ends.”

Biagio is our real hero.

And the story is about the glorious power of language. Cosimo, then, is a narrator’s device to show that storytelling is an essential element of life—providing support, shade, perspective, oxygen.

The Baron in the Trees is proof.

escargot in ombrosa, or no wonder cosimo bolts for the trees

Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees is a brilliant and inventive novel.

Because I want to focus mainly on aspects that occur beneath the surface of the story, let’s knock the plot out of the way, fast.

In June, 1767, Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo, 12, is fed up with family life and vanishes “from sight among the close-knit silvery leaves,” of olives, oaks and cherries. Cosimo never sets foot on ground again, ever. From arboreal heights, he hunts boar, foxes, hares and pheasants. He sews clothing, plants crops and trades with other villagers. He takes lovers in the trees, many of them, and studies the classics. But mostly he reads, reads, reads. This is noteworthy: Cosimo is a character in a novel made up of words who consumes words like carbon dioxide and gives off something else in return. What this something is will have to wait till next time when I share the glorious magic of the last sentence of Calvino’s superb fairy tale.

At the moment, however, having little or no ambition, I simply want to recount the horrors of Battista, Cosimo’s older sister. After all, she sends him fluttering to the trees in the first place. I savor the visually precise details of Calvino’s writing and hope you do, too. Apparently Battista is a cross between a rat and a witch cruelly disguised as a sister. Even her dad “did not dare look at her, for, with her staring eyes under the starched coif, her narrow teeth set tight in her yellow rodent’s face, she frightened him too.” In addition to her snoutish appearance, Battista has a knack for plating wicked culinary delights. “Once she made some pate toast, really exquisite, of rats’ livers; this she never told us until we had eaten them and pronounced them good; and some grasshoppers’ claws, crisp and sectioned, laid on an open tart in a mosaic; and pigs’ tails baked as if they were little cakes; and once she cooked a complete porcupine with all its quills…, a baby porcupine, rosy and certainly tender.”

At last Battista serves a plate of sadistically prepared snails and Cosimo bolts for the upper canopy, and is gone.

The Sharon in the Trees

In the early forties, he once stood in the fork of an apple tree, my dad. He was alone, or thought he was alone, leaning there in the tree, standing in the midst of a silent orchard. He climbed apple trees often. On this warm day in summer, who knows what prompted him to these arboreal heights. But in the fork of the tree, he heard a sound like a tune or a whistle that wasn’t the wind but was, to his surprise, a little boy running through the apple orchard. A four-year old boy in flight, singing a tune and running stark naked through the trees, bobbing and weaving his way to the edge of the property, where he’d likely filch harvested vegetables or a hand shovel. His name was Craig, the little naked boy, and in time he would bury field goals 25 feet or more from the basket — and this long before the three-point line was established — and would fall in love with a young woman named Charlene and self-publish a work of poetry dedicated to her called None Such and would disappear into the wild of Alaska where, to survive, he broke into a small hunting cabin for warmth and gnawed at the corners of a leather rug for nourishment and would later, very tragically, put a shotgun in his mouth and toe-push the trigger. Many details of his life have filtered down through my family from accounts that Craig himself shared with my uncle Dave in the long ago. So it’s hard to know where the ruse of invention ends and the truth of fiction begins. Have I just introduced The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino? Yes, I think so. I do.

Postscript. My dad’s birth name is Sharon, by the way. A boy named Sharon. In the army, a drill sergeant simply refused to call him by his name. “You are Joe,” shouted the drill sergeant, during basic training. And from that moment on, he was.

taking stock then plunging ahead

Unlike the Pequod I’ve returned safely to shore after a nice long slow read of Moby Dick — but not before reflecting on just how little I know about why I take to Moby Dick as Ishmael takes to the ocean, and not before musing on the symbolism of water and Ishmael’s likely vocation as a country schoolmaster before becoming a merchant seaman and whaler, and not before appreciating tantalizing clues in a painting (and what a lovely painting it is!), and not before muttering a few vows over what D.G. Myers kindly coined in a Tweet Ishmael and Queequeg’s gay marriage, and not before turning the pages of Melville’s whale taxonomy, and not before marveling at Moby Dick’s handsomely endowed thingamajig, which is longer “than a Kentuckian is tall,” and not before drawing attention to Melville’s marvelous bit of trickery in fooling the reader to think that Ahab, and not Ishmael, is the true monomaniac, and lastly not before wrestling with the invisible this and the invisible that haunting Ishmael. I am done, with Moby Dick for now and the preceding sentence for sure. And in the spirit of long and longer sentences, I’m eager to share the closing sentence of Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, where Calvino performs his own bit of narrative trickery, on par with Melville’s. But that will have to wait till I come down from the oaks and pines and sycamores, where I’m rather enjoying myself at the moment.

wherein ishmael wrestles with invisibilities in moby dick

Reading Moby Dick is like floating about in a world filled with signs and portents of invisible things.

Absence is everywhere, from fish, sharks and whales seething beneath the surface of the ocean, to the stowaway Fedallah hidden in the bowels of the ship.

Even Ahab is absent until Chapter 28 when he emerges at last from a deep hold of the Pequod.

And the plot, too, disappears for long stretches of time, sounding beneath the surface of Melville’s expository prose. No wonder Melville candidly observes, ”So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book…” Yes, there’s very little narrative in Moby Dick.

Various and sundry grades of invisibility lurk everywhere—and Ishmael is haunted by them.

One. Other people are mysterious entities. We see them clearly enough smoking a pipe or ascending a masthead. But who they are to become in time is perceived only dimly if at all. Take Queequeg, for instance. He’s covered in tattoos. Combine that with Ishmael’s description of him as “a creature in the transition state — neither caterpillar nor butterfly” and we have an image of a man who is emerging from a mottled chrysalis. What he’s to become when the transformation is complete is unknown to us.

Two. Subjectivity is a mystery in that we only perceive its hints and signs in others from a third-person point of view. Ahab’s storm of ideas and emotions, his motives, beliefs and passions, are experienced by him from a first-person point of view. But to everyone else, from the jocular Stub and the righteous Starbuck to the poetic-philosophic Ishmael, Ahab’s seething inner world is only divined by its manifestations, by his tortured brow and wracked body.

Three. Poetic resemblances are entirely absent — they literally don’t exist — until they are created by an Ishmael or some other wanderer and outcast who perceives things differently. Whale skin is what it is; it’s whale skin. But only Ishmael broods on it and perceives in it an “isinglass” through which the world itself is perceived, with floating motes and squigglys superimposed on it like the “finest Italian line engravings.” Without imaginative conception, poetic resemblances don’t even exist as ghosts.

Four. Just as Ahab’s brow is the body of his torment made visible, so the world itself is a sign of an unseen agency. Unlike religious believers who interpret the world optimistically, Melville strongly suggests a more pessimistic view. The world is an incarnation of malicious forces. Behind the veil of appearances, an inscrutable force fashions a world where snakes eat plump mice, where men and women devour tasty little lambs and slaughter whales to burn oil in churches and preach ever-lasting peace and compassion to the world.

Why Ishmael is all cracked up

At times Moby Dick is a painfully boring book to read.

Often narrative takes a back seat to a broad range of topics treated in an expository mode.

Ishmael describes cabin customs, quarterdeck politics, and forecastle rituals. He provides a minor treatise on cetology and even a history of specksynders. Who doesn’t love a good specksynder? Ishmael offers a lengthy musing on the phrenology of the whale’s head; the sperm whale lacks a nose! And owing to an incorrigible metaphysical impulse, he interrogates the significance of being-in-the-world-without-a-nose with Germanic philosophical intensity. And he takes a firm stand on the ticklish matter of where whale skin ends and blubber begins, and whether a whale’s “mystical” spout is vapor or water or an intermingling of the two.

No matter how varied your interests are, you will at some point be bored to tears by the ceaselessly rocking waves of Melville’s expository prose. Your mind will go numb.

But more than any novel I can think of, boredom is absolutely central to the experience of reading Moby Dick.

Without boredom, you cannot be jolted out of the lethargy fast upon you and gasp at the glories of the novel. Its poetry, for instance, “A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior whalemen!” or “I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.” Or its humor, “Queequeg is George Washington cannibalistically developed.” Or its insight, “And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher…”

But more important than poetry, humor, and insight is the realization born of boredom that Ishmael is the most obsessed mind in the novel. His head is cracked and sorely in need of mending. Queequeg and Ahab have nothing on him. The former clutches at a small black idol; the latter, a large white idol. Big deal. Only Ishmael has the whole visible and invisible world as the object of his obsession. And mostly the world in its invisible aspect, which pervades all Yojos and Pequods and Moby Dicks, and beyond. Ishmael is haunted by invisibility.

Next week I’ll try to spell this out in detail while avoiding Nabokov’s “moonshine of generalization.”

Good luck to me.