The God of Nightmares
Paula Fox
I read a lot of books. My house is overcrowded with them. Hello, my name is Danna and I hoard books.
I write in almost every book I read: underline favorite lines, make seriously pithy comments like,(oh sure), chew out the characters, and the author in the margins, makes lists of vocabulary words on the back pages. I talk about books a lot. I am passionate about books. Once, I tore a book in half and threw it across the room because the ending was so ridiculous, (it was a hardbound book, and no, I've never done that again, but I have torn out the last few pages of a book and I wrote a note to the editor about never letting a writer get away with such a lame conceit, and no, I did not send the note to the editor). I also hate movies that wave all the wildness of a plot away with the excuse that it was all a dream. Hate them.
Back to the point. I realized that I spend a great deal of my real time reading and talking about books, but realized I hardly make mention of the books I'm reading on this blog, probably because it would be long, long, long. The solution? Quickie reviews, because sometimes a quickie book review is just as satisfying as... You know exactly what I'm talking about.
Quickie Review will include: book jacket, quick thoughts, first sentence, favorite parts, author bio, best reviews.
So, here goes.
Quick Thoughts:
This is the first novel I've read by Paula Fox, and although the book didn't grab me by the throat and shake me, it did manage subtle tremors and aftershocks. I'm still thinking of Claude and his libation to Epiales, the god of nightmares, of Helen and her inability to forgive her mother, or to keep herself from becoming her, of Gerald and his never ceasing capacity to forgive, and of Marlene and her too small shoes and her reinvention as a sociologist, and most of all, of New Orleans, so much so that I checked homes to rent for a writing retreat vacation. And Lulu, horrible, wonderful Lulu.
Fox's prose is beautiful and spare like a bone picked clean. Her characters inner selves, their secrets and motivations are revealed in the manner of a child's game of guessing what the hand behind your back holds.
I could have done without Part Two where all the loose ends are collected,betrayals unearthed, impotent accusations slung. All too late. But I suppose that is how life is. We have to wait a lifetime to make sense of our choices, of what we chose to see, to ignore, and to forgive ourselves who we are.
First Sentence:
In the early spring of 1941, thirteen years after he'd left home, my father, Lincoln Bynum, died far away from my mother and me in a seaside village in northern California.
Favorite Parts:
"The faint and steady clink of the spoon against the side of the pot suggested a dejected signal of distress." p. 9
"I used to wonder what she imagined the Armenians, restored to life and well-fed, would concern themselves with if not daily life and its troubles, those human concerns that from the huge perspective of catastrophe dwindled down to nothing." p. 12
"...as swiftly as a swallow flying psst a window at dusk, a shadowed image of myself somewhere else came and went." p. 22
"It was as if the whole visible world-- the train and the mysterious, continuously disappearing landscape through which it traveled--had been shaped by the blade of a knife, as sharply did I perceive it all." p. 28
"The air smelled of ripe peaches and unknown flowers and, faintly, of something brackish, watery, ad in the French Market, of a kind of coffee to which chicory gave a bracing bitter sting." p. 32
I stood and looked at the colored jazzmen whose derbies tipped rakishly over their brows; they huddled together on a small platform held up, it seemed, by the thick cigarette smoke, their instruments shining like streaks of gold in their dark-skinned hands." p. 33
"The Royal Street streetcars rumbled along, slow as sleepy mammals, and they had names printed on boards attached to their sides. I kept pace for a long block with Piety." p. 43
"I had the sense of a weight pressing down from above, an extreme darkness. The room was immense, circular. I looked up. The domed ceiling so far above was a blue-black sky across which were flung, like fishermen's nets, the constellations, each star as distinct as a white thorn." p. 45
"I liked gin... It glowed, amber, in the parlor bay window, and all the romance between us was held in those moments like a butterfly still alive in the net that has captured it." p. 57
"They spoke about themselves. It was as though they unfolded maps of their lives: here is a hill, a village, a river, here are the crossroads." p. 58
"Were people utterly unknown to themselves?" p. 71
"This is the end of the country--not the delta, not those vile little settlements in that hellish swamp..." p. 72
"The stars make me feel huge--as if I could eat them all up." p. 73
"People steal into one's consciousness and occupy what seems, in retrospect, to have been their place all along." p.79
"A knowledge I didn't want entered me stealthily...But there is a difference between knowing and seeing." p. 81
"Kindly thoughts aren't the issue. Thoughts change anyhow, but they'll never change without fair laws." p. 83
"Gerald's poems were not like any I had read. They didn't rhyme; they were short, eight or ten lines. They were like small explosions in bare rooms, and the last lines had a kind of delayed effect on me, the way you suddenly see something you thought you'd understood forever, in an entirely different way." p. 87
"We're speaking of tribes," Claude said. "In one way or another, it's what people mostly talk about." "And food."... "And love." p. 91
"Laws may be he nearest human beings get to self-criticism." p. 94
"How can sympathy be anything but cheap sentiment if you don't know the dark side?" p. 95
"I imagined poets caught their poems from the air." p. 116
"Poems are found and then made." --
"When we give our favors, we must bear the consequences." p. 128
"I heard in all our voices, in the things we said, a heightened awareness that perilous elements were gathering force at the core of his hidden life--which, in truth, was never truly hidden except in the sense that the ultimate being of another person is always, unavailingly, hidden." p. 151
"First comes the word, then a shove, then a slap and then a fist is doubled up. They both know it will happen. It's not the first time. Why do you suppose they let it happen?" p. 172
"People can defend themselves after all, even if they can't defend life." p. 173
"The ancients said that since we can't attain happiness, we might as well be happy without it." p. 192
"No," she had not married again. "Once was enough. There were more dignified choice for a woman to make." p. 196
"We do not grow old in our secret selves." p.203
"We don't have to face everything at once." p. 224
Author Bio:
Spurned at birth in New York by her mother, Paula Fox had a turbulent childhood in the US and Cuba. At 20 she gave up her own daughter for adoption. She went on to write controversial but award-winning children's books as well as autobiographical novels. At 80, she is enjoying a revival as her adult fiction is championed by a new generation of American writers. Aida Edemariam reports In the past few years Paula Fox has been rediscovered as the author of six novels, at least two of which, Desperate Characters and The Widow's Children - both published in Britain for the first time this month - have a cliam to a place on the list of 20th-century American classics. Fox is already well-known as the author of two dozen much-loved and generously garlanded children's novels. Yet until they were recently reissued in the US with specially commissioned introductions and much fanfare, the last of her adult novels had been out of print since 1992. Most of the earlier books had been unavailable for decades. Jonathan Franzen has, notoriously, ranked her above Roth, Bellow and Updike and others have compared her with Kafka, Chekhov and Flaubert.
Some of the recent fuss has focused on Fox's life. In 2001, prompted in part by a mugging that left her with serious cranial bleeding and a sudden intimation of mortality, she published a memoir of her childhood, Borrowed Finery, which was excerpted in the New Yorker and published here last year. It is a tale of startling neglect, told with a combination of directness and reticence unusual for the form. As with her fiction, the impression is of distanced, though not unfeeling, control - and so what you don't expect is the warmth and vigour of her physical presence (she turned 80 in April, but looks far younger) and her laughter. Then there's her voice: husky, perfectly modulated, very deep, capable of great "tonal drama", to borrow a phrase from The Widow's Children .
Fox's mother Elsie, determined not to have children, had already had three or four abortions, but did not realise she was pregnant with Paula until too late, so the baby was instead deposited at a foundling home in New York. From there she was rescued by Elsie's mother, Candelaria de Sola, once the beautiful Spanish child-wife of a Cuban plantation owner, now sad and passive, "the paid companion of an ancient cuckoo woman" on another Cuban plantation, and temporarily visiting the States. The baby was passed from friend to friend. When she was five months old, a Congregational minister, the Reverend Elwood Corning, doing the rounds of his parishioners in Orange County, New York, noticed her. "I struck him in some way - so he took me and he kept me with him until I was almost six years old." Fox laughs. "Mr Corning was my first conquest. Alas, my mother and father were not."
To read more about Fox, (and you really should, because it's so juicy, it reads like a Dickens novel), check out The Guardian's article, A Qualified Optimist by Aida Edemariam.
Best Reviews:
Boston Review:A thoughtful and incisive review by Randall Curb.
Publisher's Weekly:More a concise synopsis than review.
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