In the Cafe of Lost Youth

How quickly the writer draws us into the world of this slender, gauzy novel.  Within a few pages I was mesmerized, in a kind of suspenseful trance.

Yet if someone had asked me what the book was about, I wouldn't have been able to answer. I was simply pulled along, masterful sentence by masterful sentence, hypnotized, into this vast no-mans-land, somewhere between dream and nightmare, lodged firmly both in the past and the future.  There is both a vein of nostalgia and prescience; this is the past, yes, of the lost youth, but also the future, of regrets and loss.

There is Paris, a character unto itself.  And there is Louki, the enigmatic, obscure object of longing, who flits through the pages and is lost, even to herself.  She unites the separate linked narratives: one by the young man who is convinced to drop out of school by his experiences at the cafe, one by the detective hired to find her, one by her last lover, and one even by herself.  There are little hints of lesbianism, of promiscuity, of petty crime and of flirtations with the occult, but they are ultimately not meaningful, simply details in the world that she navigates, lost and slightly bewildered, and above all unmoored and afraid.  This is not an existential crisis, this is not a portrait of modern alienation.  In my opinion it is only as simple, sad, and commonplace as the empty space which could have been filled by love.


The characters are always searching, torn between a desire for "fixed points" in the anonymity and constant flow of city life, and a desire for escape to "neutral spaces" that are located in certain neighborhoods but not of them.  They are often looking for specific street addresses but also for nameless hotels, for deep connections but also escape to fleeting encounters.

And occasionally they are happy.  Roland, who loves Louki, says:

I still had about two thousand francs left ....  We were rich.  The future was ours ....  We walked without any specific destination, we had the whole night ahead of us.... Where to?  We didn't know yet.... The places no longer mattered in the least, they had all blended together into one.  The lone goal of our journey was to go to the heart of summer, that place where time stops and the hands of the clock permanently show the same hour: twelve noon.

And later:

We reached the place de l'Eglise, in front of the Metro station.  And there, I can say it now that I no longer have anything to lose: I felt for the first time in my life, what the Eternal Return really was... .  It was just before we went down the steps into the Metro at Eglise-d'Auteiul.  Why there, of all places?  I haven't the slightest idea, and it doesn't matter anyway.  I stood still for a moment and I held her arm tightly.  We were there, together, in the same place, for all of eternity, and our stroll through Auteuil, we had already taken it during thousands and thousands of other lives.  No need to look at my watch.  I knew it was noon.

I had never really heard of Patrick Modiano and found that he recently won the Nobel.  I don't know what the rest of his stuff is like but I intend to find out.  When I am able.

4*
June 2020

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Haruki Murakami, 2014.

I resisted this book from the start.  Partly because of Murakami’s fame, I must confess.  And also a long time ago I read a short of his in The New Yorker which, although set in Japan and with a Japanese protagonist, was such a “New Yorker” story - clever, hip, ironic, unabashed in direct, almost coarse, male phallic references and imagery.  I came to the conclusion that Murakami isn't a Japanese writer at all, he is a Western writer, or at least an international writer heavily brainwashed with Western hegemony. In other words, he inhabits the high-brow international airport travel lounges of the peripatetic global jet set, as perhaps Pico Iyer might put it.  There was nothing of Japanese roots that I could find in his story, nothing that gave me any insight into the uniqueness and depth of Japanese culture, just the universal post-modern malaises of affluent humanity. In other words, he struck me as being a Salman Rushdie, not an R. K. Narayan.

But I was about to take another trip to Japan, and so bought this at San Francisco airport.  It took a while to get into it. But gradually the story worked its way into me, until I was identifying with the protagonist, even the specifics of his loss and his pilgrimage, and the strange emotional and mental quirks that made up his lonely existence.  The final scenes, where he visits an old friend from his teenage years, are beautiful and elegeic without sentimentality, and his emergence from his self-imprisonment seems plausible, real and even inevitable.

So yes, there is little of Japan here, at least that I could discern as a foreigner and with an untrained eye.  The anonymity and alienation of Tsukuru’s life could indeed be of anyone in countless cities worldwide. The book is technically flawless; I read it in translation, obviously, but even so it seemed exquisitely well wrought.  However technical skill was what I expected and it alone would not have sufficed. But the mastery of the complex, subtle emotions, the intimate knowledge of the dark, subterranean passages that run through all of us, was powerful and ultimately what made the story so compelling.  

I get a sense from the jacket that this book differs from his usual fare -- but now I will have to read more to find out.

3.5*

April 2018

Commonwealth

Commonwealth

Ann Patchett, 2016

I finished this book in hopes that there was going to be some payoff at the end for the long slog it was.  But I am still mystified at the heaps of praise it has received – “exquisite” (NYT), “a transporting experience” (LA Times), and on and on.  What is there that has captivated this A-list of critics, other than the inevitability of praise for someone who has won all the accolades this writer has?  Book reviewers seem to have the same herd mentality that we associate with Wall Street and silicon valley and fashion week.

Because what it is, is simply a long saga exploring different states of siblinghood.  Two couples that divorce, remarry, remarry again, as seen through the eyes of their children from their first marriages, over the course of their lives.  Threading it, to provide some suspense, is the death of one of the teenage sons under circumstances that are hinted to be transgressive and shocking but in the end are finally revealed to be comparatively pedestrian, if still sad and unfortunate.  Where are the “keen insights”, the “minimalism” that the esteemed critics see?  I am bemused.

The main sibling characters mostly failed to arouse my sympathy – and worse, the two girls whose pov is taken (Jeannette and Franny) are almost indistinguishable in their voices.  As is often the case in novels like these, it’s the men who are the worst, either selfish (Bert, the philandering father), blind (Fix, the cuckolded father), addicted (Albie, the confused son), hopelessly angry (Cal, who drugs Albie), or manipulative bastards (Leo, the famous older writer who Franny falls for). 

The women can be catty or overwhelmed, but not fundamentally flawed or malicious.  And in that sense, I suspect that is why the novel itself is weak.  It subconsciously guides us to take the side of the women, and in doing so loses the power that comes to a narrative from villains and flawed heroes – since these are actually located in the other gender. 

The characters that did intrigue me were in fact some of the side roles: Bonnie, the easily drunk, good-looking sister overshadowed by her movie-star beautiful sister Beverly; the priest who dances with her at the christening party in the opening chapter; Jeannette’s Guinean husband and baby; Franny’s Indian husband and kids.  Unfortunately, these are merely cardboard characters, quickly sketched and equally quickly discarded.  In fact the characterizations of Jeannette’s and Franny’s husband skate close to being convenient, multi-culti tokens designed to make the narrative feel contemporary and the wives seem liberally open-minded and “interesting”.

The actual storyboarding is technically skillful.  A complex set of family relationships is sketched with interleaving and nested flashbacks and flash-forwards.  It doesn’t always work – until the end I had difficulty keeping straight which kids belonged to which parent, and the last chapter, somewhat irrelevantly, brings in still more siblings out of the blue – but generally it is quite accomplished.  The suspense of the teenage son’s death is dosed out with great finesse,  Perhaps that is what the reviewers were responding to.  But, for all the technique, and all the finesse, there seems to be nothing substantial at the core.  Inadvertently, that may be the real message, the emptiness at the center of fragmented, confusing, modern American lives.

2*
Nov 2017