A pox on storytelling

In 1936 Walter Benjamin wrote something illuminating about the place of storytelling in Western culture. 

Storytelling is alive in traditional societies, he said, but dying a slow death in Western one's. Why? Because Western societies are being consumed by the power of information.

A little context here: Benjamin was writing against the grain of rising fascism, a social system that relied heavily on information and technology to anchor itself in Western Europe after World War I. 

Stories communicate unique truths that lie at the heart of experiences in a relatively unmediated way. An individual would tell a story of survival to another individual, or to a group gathered communally perhaps on the occasion of a death or birth. 

Information, on the other hand, is mediated because it's distributed in a more or less standardized format through technology. In Benjamin's day, the technological apparati used both by the state and business conglomerates would be the mass media.

News of death, especially deaths of soldiers in the war zones of Europe, would be transmitted; similarly stories of survival would be appropriated by the state and transmitted as narratives of triumph or heroism. 

Mourning would cease to be an occasion to share unique experiences in common physical space.

Death in this Benjaminian cosmology occupies not a place of recoil and terror, but one of renewal or creation. People would congregate around the dying or the dead and find new meaning in their lives through sharing their experiences, memories, of or around the dying subject.

The 21st century, an era allegedly of hypermodernity, is an era where storytelling is back with a vengeance. 

As fiction writer Sam Lipsyte says in a discussion of his recent New Yorker story, The Naturals, we are living in a cultural moment where everything is communicated on the back of a story: 

You don’t just buy some jam or a loaf of bread or a chair or a car. You have to hear a whole story about how the product came about, often a tedious tale about how somebody quit the rat race (after making a mint in advertising or data mining or manufacturing weapons) and discovered an old family recipe and then made friends with local farmers and woodsmen. 

The hero of the story is a "free range cultural consultant" which is an euphemism for a storyteller; his job is to help the government build structures in public spaces on the back of stories, as though it isn't just enough to build, the building project from inception to completion has to be wrapped in a story.

Lipsyte's hero rebels against the blind adoption of storytelling as the only vehicle via which the worth of experiences and products can be communicated. He refuses to be a storyteller in the story; consequence? He loses the contract.

But the kind of storytelling that is preponderant in our cultural moment is not the kind of storytelling that Benjamin mourned the loss of. Our storytelling is largely an elaborate sales pitch, of ourselves, our lives, our achievements and of course of the products we consume. 

Today's storytelling is intrinsic to sales and is indistinguishable from information whose effects Benjamin decried not too long ago. When Benjamin said "story" he didn't mean the selling of ourselves/marketing ourselves to the world; he meant seeking new dots of meaning through the telling of them regardless of how spontaneous and messy they sound. 

A person, in Benjamin's vision, might seek hilarity from death, because that is how he specifically experiences death. 

In our contemporary storytelling, we have to narrate events of death in one way and one way only, in a monotonous, monochromatic tone of solemnity. This tantamounts to the selling of death as anti-life.

Lipsyte's hero encounters death--the death of his father. He flies halfway across the country to speak to his dying father after a long interregnum of icy silence between father and son.

Indeed, in a Benjaminian way, the hero becomes the son, the one and unique son of the one and unique father, and experiences meaningful changes within himself, which by the time the story ends, he refuses to share with the readers.

A pox on storytelling.

What does the insect (in love) say?

The illustration accompanying Haruki Murakami's new story, Samsa in Love (The New Yorker, October 28) is an insect shaped like a human heart, or more specifically, like one of those heart-shaped candy-infested Valentine's day gift boxes. 

A central theme of the story is love. But the exploration of this most quintessential of human emotions is wrapped in layers of mystery.

The first mystery is the identity and the personal history of Gregor Samsa. Murakami, a great re teller of Kafka's themes, introduces Samsa as a human waking up from a strange, yet, by all indications, a lengthy sleep of oblivion:

He woke to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become Gregor Samsa.

We don't know who he was prior to this moment of awakening. Was he an insect? The last time we saw Gregor Samsa, the poor fellow had metamorphosed into an insect. But Murakami's fellow seems to have had a reverse metamorphosis.

There are hints that Samsa was locked up in his room by his parents, and that the Samsas are an upper class family living in a grand house in a grand part of the city of Prague in Czechoslovakia. Was he locked up because he had become a gigantic insect?

It's impossible to tell, because Samsa wakes up into a cold and abandoned house. When he takes a tour of the house, his own house, he is like a stranger in a city, lost and stumbling through corridors and rooms. He navigates his way into the dining room and the table is laid out, but at the moment of dinner the people had fled, or so Samsa surmises.

The story is about an overwhelming mystery that Samsa can't solve, yet wants to solve. 

A young hunchback woman arrives at the scene, and she is a locksmith. She's come to help fix a lock that had been broken into, she says.

She takes Samsa to be the child of the household and converses with him freely, without any knowledge of the metamorphosis. Or, so it seems.

The hunchback tells Samsa of an upheaval that has plunged the city of Prague into a crisis. Everybody, especially the men, are huddling indoors, not daring to brave the military who have apparently taken over the city.

Samsa listens with awe and wonder to the hunchback and finds his body undergoing certain experiences which he can't name or understand. His male instrument bulges to an extreme and flashes of warm currents courses through his veins.

We understand he is experiencing love--for the hunchback; she is wonderful to Samsa because she is the first female human form he has seen since his awakening.

Is his love, a visceral sexual response to the body of the female?

We are led to believe it is. We are led to believe that Samsa is entering life as we know human life to be, through the gateway of the most primal and "human" of human experiences--the emotion of love.

Samsa likes it; initially he had prefered to have been reborn as a "sunflower" or a "fish", but after experiencing love he is happy he has morphed into a human.

But there are these showers of contextual cues, which tells us that the love that Samsa experiences isn't quite the kind of mindless emotion we have reduced to a cliche in our thinking of it. 

The love appears first when the hunchback starts speaking about things which we take for granted, and to which Samsa is an alien. She speaks of god, locks, keys, fucking, revolution, of the "world falling apart" outside, on the streets.

Samsa wants to know what these are; he wants to unlock the mystery to life and the woman would be his ideal locksmith in this process of unlocking.

Samsa is thirsty for knowing. The body of the woman isn't what fills him up with warmth inside and causes his instrument to bulge. It's the promise of knowing that he falls in love with.

When the woman is done with her task, Samsa asks if he can her again.

The woman, taken aback with the invitation asks Samsa, what would they do if they were to meet.

Samsa says:

Talk...about this world. About you. About me. I feel like there are so many things we need to talk about. Tanks, for instance. And God. And brassieres. And locks.

Chicxulub

Such is the title of a 2004 New Yorker short fiction by T Choraghessan Boyle (T.C. Boyle).

T.C. Boyle writes of his fictional vision in the current New Yorker and mentions Chicxulub in passing.

He says:

There is a daunting power in storytelling and a daunting responsibility too. We each receive the world according to our lights and what the sparking loop of our senses affords us and all I can do is hope to capture it in an individual way, to represent the phenomena that crowd in on us through every conscious moment as they appear and vanish again. I want to be playful and serious, investigative and imaginative, curious and more curious still, and I don’t want distractions. I don’t make music anymore, I don’t write articles or film scripts or histories, I don’t play sports or do crossword puzzles or tinker with engines—it’s all too much. The art—the doing of it—that’s what absorbs me to the exclusion of all else. Each day I have the privilege of reviewing the world as it comes to me and transforming it into another form altogether, the very form I would have wrought in the first place if only it was I who’d been the demiurge and the original creator—the one, the being, the force, whether spirit or random principle, that set all this delirious life in motion.

Incredible titles

Some of the current works of fiction have intriguing titles, a trend that I attribute to Milan Kundera's The Incredible Lightness of Being.

Some recent titles of novels:

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

A Marker To Measure Drift

In contrast, a title like The Flamethrowers, is concrete and un bewildering, and harks back to an age of innocence in book titles, when titles would signify something historical or allude to something that is factored into the plan of the book.

Prediction

I predict that Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers will win the 2014 Pulitzer prize for fiction.

Fiction is stranger than truth

Chinese-American writer Bill Cheng's debut novel Southern Cross the Dog, is wowing critics, especially those of the South.

The novel is set in the Mississippi of the 1920s and the great Mississippi flood of 1927 is a focal point of the novel's plot. 

Cheng has been able to recreate the texture of the 20s South with such skill that he has been compared to William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, two stalwarts of the Southern literary establishment. And these comparisons have been made by avid readers of Southern literature, especially the Southern Gothic.

Bill Cheng has never visited Mississippi or any of the Southern states. He was born and raised in Queens, New York and now lives in Brooklyn. He received an MFA in fiction from Hunter College.

Southern Cross the Dog began as a thesis manuscript.

My take on this unconventional, therefore refreshing, instance of an "immigrant" writer writing not about the expected Chinese-American experience, and not having a single Asian character in his novel, is a "bravo!"

Not only is it unusual for Cheng to have written a non-immigrant novel, but also the fact that he undertook to represent the American South, a cultural subject matter about which the Southerner is particularly protective (and possessive), proves his ability to transcend/defy labels.

Recently, an Indian-American novelist, Amit Majumdar, wrote of how fraught the category of the immigrant writer is, and I tentatively agreed, but upon reading of Bill Cheng's venture, I think it's possible for "immigrant" writers to crossover into native territories and represent, if not conquer them.

But then again, what's the big fuss about? If Adam Johnson can write about North Korea (The Orphan Master's Son) without setting foot on North Korean soil, and go on to win a Pulitzer for it, then why should it surprise the world that a Chinese American from Queens should be able to write about a geographical part of a nation in which he was born and raised?

A preview of the novel Southern Cross the Dog can be found here.

Orientalizing Oklahoma

In his 1979 book Orientalism, Edward Said described "Orientalization" as a process, whereby concrete and palpable people and places are transformed, through the act of writing, painting (and in the modern era, via film), into ideas.

The "Orient," wrote Said, in reference to the geographical East/non-West, was less of a geographical reality, and more of a concept imagined by the West, particularly the imperialist West of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

In Orientalism, we see the dark side of rendering real geographies into ideas--they could be then treated like ideas, flung around from text to text and projected on to, thereby creating asymmetrical relationships of power between those who represent and those who are represented.

So when I read of Imaginary Oklahoma, a collection of short fiction on Oklahoma composed by writers who have never visited the place, but have the power to imagine it into existence through words, I thought of the fate of the real Oklahoma as hanging in the proverbial balance--between becoming an idea and then appropriated for other uses.

But I'm wrong, Oklahoma is in no danger of being Orientalized out of contention as a real place. The collection has been praised in the Paris Review as an exemplar of writing space (and time) in an innovative way and making the idea of Oklahoma surprisingly palpable.

The best stories in the collection are those that deal with the ghosts of Oklahoma's bloody past, i.e. the history of the displaced and deceived Indian tribes. The modern state of Oklahoma is conceptualized in these stories as a palimpsest that rests on the other geography, which needs to be seen and felt as well.

Theodore Dreiser's descendants

Theodore Dreiser, popularized as one of America's earliest and best novelist of the "naturalist" school, wrote about the poor and the working class.

Yet, Dreiser's working class-poor were mostly people who left their homes in the American countryside, to have a better life in the cities.

The cities turned out to be hellish, rewarding the vicious, and punishing virtue.

In other words, Dreiser's world was a dichotomous one, with the countryside or small town America perceived as poor but golden, and the cities perceived as dens of corruption.

The 21st century descendents of Dreiser, seem not to care for such dichotomies. Characters in the stories of Frank Bill and Donald Ray Pollock, for instance, live in hell, and can't leave it because it doesn't occur to them to leave.

These hells are not imagined, but are located in the rural areas of the American Midwest. While Bill's hell is mostly in South Indiana, Pollock's is in Ohio. Violence, meth and ruthless poverty mark these places, and the lives of the people therein.  

As Craig Fehrman notes in a recent story, writers like Bill and Pollock, don't romanticize the Midwest, but depict them as they are. The title of Pollock's novel pretty much says that there has never been a "golden" era in the rural Midwest; it's always been hellish.

Fehrman names the emergent genre of fiction as "Country noir." 

Incidentally, both Bill and Pollock are natives of the places they write about and they are factory-workers who took up fiction writing at later ages. They aren't products of creative writing workshops.

While Bill was inspired by Chuck Palhanuik's The Fight Club, and decided to transpose masculine violence from the city to the country, he also makes masculine violence as a way of life in rural America, rather than as a fight back against emasculating forces of consumerism in the cities. 

Pretty, dirty and dignified

The short story, Checking Out, by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche (I didn't know if the writer were a she or a he, till I saw a picture of her's) reminds me of the movie Dirty, Pretty Things (2002) directed by Stephen Frears. 

Both narratives have a Nigerian at the center of the immigration saga that unfolds. And both are set in Britain, and show the heartless attitude that Britain shows toward those who arrive at its shores from other worlds.

But what binds the two narratives together, in my eyes is the sublime dignity which form the core of the characters'--the "dirty," yet "pretty" people, who dot the margins of the nations' landscape but have to remain hidden.

In Adiche's story, the illegal Nigerian immigrant Obinze is the son of an University "staffer" back home in Lagos, Nigeria. He has a nice middle-class life, yet wants to have more--he wants to have more choices, he muses--and migrates to the UK in search of a life with a wider arc of choices. Tragically enough he migrates with a 6 month visa, which does not grant him the right to work for a living. So, Obinze works illegally with a fellow Nigerian's ID. 

His first encounter with the dirt underlying the illegal immigrant's experience is the inevitable toilet.

Obinze gets a job cleaning toilets in a real estate agent's office in a London building.

The job goes well till a moment of reckoning arrives:

The toilets were not bad--some urine outside the urinal, some unfinished flushing. So he was shocked, one evening, to walk into a stall and discover a mound of shit on the toilet lid, solid, tapering, centered, as though it had been carefully arranged. It looked like a puppy curled on a mat. It was a performance. He thought about the famed repression of the English. There was, in this performance, something of an unbuttoning. A person who had been fired? Obinze stared at the mound of shit for a long time, feeling smaller and smaller as he did so, until it became a personal affront, a punch to his jaw. And all for three quid an hour. He took off his gloves, placed them next to the mound of shit, and left the building.

Life and love in Zombieland

I can't help but archive this story: I am a Zombie in Love. I feel like the story is complex at many levels.

I see it implying the following: we are all zombies under capitalism.

The narrator's voice, deadpan, reminds me of the narrator (role played by Edward Norton) of David Fincher's The Fight Club (based on Chuck Palanhuik's novel of the same name): The man is an insomniac cog in the machinery of capitalism; he looks like he is sleep-walking through life, emasculated, not in control of what he is eating or accumulating. He was a zombie till the time, the arrival of his brute alter ego, Tyler Durden, makes him fall into "life". 

The zombie-narrator of I am is more living than the living of our times are. His observations are taut with irony, a sign that he isn't a stereotypical zombie. The story disabuses us of the immaculate misconceptions of the un-dead and the living that we have. 

Issac Marion, the writer, went on to expand the story into a novel. The film Warm Bodies is based on the novel.

Upon reading this story I have a provisional judgment: the real Zombieland isn't all that bad of a country to live in.

Write like you were dead

Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides's speech given at the 2012 Whiting Awards (awards given annually to ten emergent American writers of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and plays) centers around the idea of writing posthumously.

It's a liberating idea; by this I mean, Eugenides seeks to liberate young writers from the burden of writing under the "usual constraints--of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public, and perhaps especially, intellectual opinion."

All of the above-mentioned constraints, says Eugenides, "represent a deformation of the self":

To follow literary fashion, to write for money, to censor your true feelings and thoughts or adopt ideas because they’re popular requires a writer to suppress the very promptings that got him or her writing in the first place.

Eugenides's models his figure of the posthumous writer on Franz Kafka, who is famous for his refusal to write with an eye to publicity and fame or popularity:

When Kafka was diagnosed with tuberculosis, in Berlin, he reacted at first with a serenity amounting almost to relief. As his health deteriorated, he became more fearful: “What I have playacted is really going to happen,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. “I have not bought myself off by my writing. I died my whole life and now I will really die.”

To be Kafkaesque is 

To die your whole life. Despite the morbidity, I can’t think of a better definition of the writing life. There’s something about writing that demands a leave-taking, an abandonment of the world, paradoxically, in order to see it clearly. This retreat has to be accomplished without severing the vital connection to the world, and to people, that feeds the imagination. It’s a difficult balance. And here is where these ruminations about writing touch on morality. The same constraints to writing well are also constraints to living fully. Not to be a slave to fashion or commerce, not to succumb to arid self-censorship, not to bow to popular opinion—what is all that but a description of the educated, enlightened life?

Eugenides is one of the few contemporary American writers who cares little for publicity and has an absolutely zero social media presence.

In praise of the "slow" and "demanding"

Giles Harvey composes a wonderful paean to Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's 4 and a 1/2 hour long avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach.

But the tribute is really paid to all works of art that are "slow", like Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and consequently "demanding," i.e. cannot be consumed instantly.

According to Harvey such works of art are all the more valuable in an era of distraction and short attention span.

Some moments from the piece:

The thought of spending a month, or several months, with a single work—a “The Magic Mountain” or an “In Search of Lost Time”—is somehow enervating [...] Of course, there is a pernicious logic at work here. Why read a long novel when you can read a short one? Why read a short novel when you can watch a movie? Why watch a movie when you can watch a TV show? Why watch a TV when you catch a minute-long video of a kitten and a puppy cuddling on YouTube? As soon as we start to think of art simply as something to be consumed, discarded, and replaced, we rob it of one of its greatest powers: its capacity to free us from the grip of easier but shallower pleasures.

The experience of witnessing "slow" and "demanding" art works is rewarding:

The payoff is handsome [...] I saw “Einstein on the Beach” over three months ago, but I have hardly stopped thinking about it since; the manically even “Night Train” duet plays on an almost endless loop inside my head.

It can sometimes seem as though modern life has no room for four-and-a-half-hour-long experimental operas or difficult poetry; but this is a mistake. In a world of speed and distraction, the slow, demanding art work is more indispensable than ever, for it holds out the possibility of those elusive commodities: stillness, clarity, and peace.

Two books: One a memoir by Ingeborg Day, a former editor of MS Magazine, and another an erotica by Elizabeth McNeill.

The themes of the books may be separated like heaven and earth are, but as Sarah Weinman unravels, they are penned by the same person.

In her memoir, The Ghost Waltz, Day among other things, grapples agonizingly with her Austrian father's Nazi past. 

As Elizabeth McNeill, Day writes about a grueling, sadomasochistic relationship with a man, which ends after 9 1/2 weeks.

During the time Day wrote the erotica under a pseudonym, she was an editor of the feminist MS magazine. Weinman writes that there is no knowing whether the magazine found out about this "other" Day, but the character in the erotica does have a day job as a New York City editor. She confides that she has no problem keeping her sanity and her day-persona intact, while at night she walks in the shoes of the sex-charged woman:

Throughout the entire period, the daytime rules of my life continued as before: I was independent, I supported myself (to the extent of my lunches, at any rate, and of keeping up an empty apartment, gas and phone bills at a minimum), came to my own decisions, made my choices. The nighttime rules decreed that I was helpless, dependent, totally taken care of. No decisions were expected of me, I had no responsibilities. I had no choice.

I loved it. I loved it, I loved it, I loved it, I loved it.

Ultimately when Ingebor Day is let go of as a MS editor, the reason isn't, Weinman argues, her secret sexual identity, but her anti-semitism. 

Weinman strikes up a fascinating connection between the two books as they are threaded inside the same personality thus:

Reading “Ghost Waltz” and “Nine and a Half Weeks” side by side, Day’s vulnerabilities come shimmering into view. Both books examine the consequences of relationships marked by withholding—be it her lover’s effortless domineering humiliation or her parents’ shutting the door on discussing Herr Seiler’s deep-seated Nazi ties. The absence and emotional deprivation that young Ingeborg detects and learns to live with permeated her adult life, and must have been tied up with her brief but toxic relationship, in which submissive infatuation was mistaken for something more. The pair of books allow us access to Day’s mind, demonstrating her obsessive need for order in the face of extreme emotional chaos. But they also offer insight into a particular moment in history ripe for both a self-excusing memoir of a Nazi past and a self-punishing memoir of sexual obsession. The prolonged social upheaval of the decade threw secrets into the light and enabled the discussion of formerly taboo topics. To pilfer from the title of one of the more popular self-help books of the period, if Day’s book-length confessions enabled her to be O.K., then perhaps we could be similarly O.K. with our own darkest fears and desires.

Lovely lines

I like to occasionally open my mind to stirring evocations of human, especially female, beauty in literature.

Here is an instance of it from Mark Helprin's new novel In Sunlight and in Shadows:

When she put down her purse on a bench the strap fell over the arm in two perfect, parallel sine waves, as if she were infused with so much beauty it had to find outlet even in her accidents

I feel like I could draw this.

Spielberg's Poetics?

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln

Once upon a time, literature students used to grapple with the question of art and the the accuracy of history. 

In my case, the grappling was grounded in a seminal text on this topic: The Poetics by ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.

In essence, Aristotle, sharing the concern of other Greek thinkers that art, or a dramatic representation of reality, could beguile people into confusing representation with the real, made one thing volubly clear: art is a second order dramatization of the reality of history. One cannot and should not go to art for accurate information about the past. 

In light of the debate swirling around Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln, the Aristotelian dictum comes to mind.

Critics have been worrying about the film's "historical accuracy," forgetting what historian Philip Zelikow has thoughtfully pointed out: Spielberg and other artists are not to be burdened with the mantle of a "historian", but accepted as folks who are free to interpret a moment in history according to their particular artistic needs. 

Challenging as it is, Zelikow says, to translate the "tangle of history" into good "streamlined art," Spielberg's (and screenwriter Tony Kushner's) Lincoln has accomplished just what it is expected to--a specific view of that moment in history (the passing of the 13th Amendment through the U.S. Congress).

In a country with more poor people than in the 26 most impoverished countries in Africa combined, [the affluent's] apathy [to the poor] is a failure not merely of intellectual curiosity, but of moral instinct. Aman Sethi’s first book, A Free Man addresses this vacuum through the narratives of a small group of Delhi’s marginal, manual laborers: construction workers, rickshaw pullers, porters.

The New York Times

Fiction versus non-fiction

If David Coleman, President of the College Board has his way, he would convert an entire generation of potential "workers"--i.e. 4th through 10th graders in the nation's public schools--into precisely that: "workers".

Coleman's is the leading brain in designing the new English curriculum, or the Common Core Standard, for future K-12 in PS's across the nation. Thus, starting in 2014, when the new Common Core will be in effect, Language Arts teachers will find themselves teaching more non-fiction than fiction.

Coleman's rationale for ushering out fiction and ushering in non-fiction into the curriculum is as follows: 

English classes today focus too much on self-expression [...] It is rare in a working environment, [...] that someone says, Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.

If the above doesn't represent reductive thinking, then I don't know what does; what's scarier is that this kind of thinking springs from the head of the president of the College Board.

Let's look at the non-fiction that Coleman has in mind to produce future workers who can churn out market-analysis with robotic efficiency: historical documents, scientific tracts, maps and other “informational texts” — like recipes and train schedules.

I've always known fiction to encompass all the above and much more. When was the last time one heard of fiction being lumped together as a genre of "self-expression?"

For lack of a better explanation, one has to assume that Coleman has narrow conceptions of both fiction and non-fiction, and probably has little respect for the in-between genre of creative non-fiction.

I support Sara Mosle's corrective. Mosle suggests teaching good non-fiction, not just "informational texts." 

A writer's Thanksgiving prayer

American novelist Anne Lamott, carves out a beautiful Thanksgiving prayer, thanking, primarily her parents for making her into a book-lover and writer.

Lammot's father, Kenneth Lammot was a well-known San Francisco-based travel writer who passed away in his mid-fifties.

The highlight of Anne's "prayer" is a rewriting of playwright Eugene O'Neil's observation that man is born broken; God's grace is the glue: the secondary glue that kept her parents together in their marriage were the children, but the primary "collagen" were "Books and the New Yorker."

Marriage

I am in the process of collecting fictional observations on the institution of marriage.

I don't think one has to reflect on marriage only if one is married. At a certain bare level it's an institution, a framework for organizing society and social/familial ideologies.

Thus it's important to see what folks have said about it.

A few samples:

Happiness in marriage is but a matter of chance. If the disposition of the parties are ever so well-known to each other, or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always contrive to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation; and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.

---Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

---Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)

A marriage is like a very sensitive virus that thrives in darkness, in the damp, airtight dungeon of secrecy. It will die upon exposure to the light.

---Karl Taro Greenfeld, Triburbia: A Novel (2012)

Marriage after all was a destination toward which all parents [...] and all daughters journeyed inevitably [...] No matter how high, how low or how middling the stature of the social orbit into which they are born—the fact of [a daughter's] marriage, taking place ideally by the age of twenty-five, becomes registered on the subconscious of both parent and child as an imminence—something that’s as universal as the biological fact of the human body.

---Sharmila Mukherjee, Green Rose: Tale of an Indian Lesbian (forthcoming) 

Done with the novel

Veteran Philip Roth has declared that he is finished with the novel.

Nemesis will be his last one.

Roth said the following in defense of his decision:

I don’t want to read any more of it, write any more of it, and I don’t even want to talk about it anymore. I have dedicated my life to the novel: I have studied it, I have taught it, I have written it and I have read it. To the exclusion of almost everything else. It’s enough. I no longer feel this dedication to write what I have experienced my whole life. The idea of struggling once more with writing is unbearable to me.

Many say that Roth's break-up, as it were, with the novel, is a sign of his disappointment at never winning the Nobel.