16 March 2008

Emile Zola - The Kill

This book, the second in Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle, is so markedly different from the first that they could have been by different authors. Which is a very good thing, because the first was a bit of a struggle, and this was exceptionally good.

Zola intended to illustrate different aspects of French society with each novel - mining (Germinal), farming (La Terre), painting (The Masterpiece), courtesans (Nana), etc - and The Kill (La Curée) is about the reconstruction of Paris by Haussmann in the 1860s. While Paris is admired now for the straight boulevards and uninterrupted sightlines, which were designed by Haussmann, at the time they were controversial, and a source of corruption, speculation, great wealth created as ancient districts were destroyed to make way for the new roads. Zola saw all this as emblematic of the Second Empire, and depicted it in this novel.

It's a novel about transformation and transgression. France has recently changed from a Republic to an Empire, and now Paris is being transformed by these designs, imperiously ordered. To enable the building works, Paris sucks in workers from around France, further urbanising the country. And to finance the works, Haussmann engineers various smart enterprises, such as selling bonds to developers for the right to land alongside the new avenues. In doing so he creates a need for modern financial institutions, so France develops a more sophisticated banking system.

All this is the background to the novel, but essential to it. The main plot is sufficiently transgressive to sustain the book on its own. The main characters are Aristide Rougon, first encountered in The Fortune of the Rougons, his son Maxime by his first marriage, and Renée, his second wife, much younger than him, and whose dowry and marriage 'gift' enabled him to start his speculative enterprises.

Renée is highly sexually voracious, although not for her husband, who is mostly wrapped up in business and is unconcerned. Aristide and Renée's activities are placed in parallel - his financial transgressions, frauds and manipulations are comparable to her sexual affairs. She seeks an experience beyond the normal, and starts an affair with her stepson, who is only eight years younger and has been an intimate friend since her marriage to his father.

The affair itself is multiply transgressive. Not only the 'incest' (not technically as there's no blood relationship, but the term still applied), but Maxime is throughout described unequivocally as effeminate. Renée is boyish in appearance, with short hair, and very sexually assertive with Maxime, almost taking the man's role. Renée's closest female friends have an unhidden relationship - all this debauchery is, for Zola, one manifestation of the immorality of the Empire.

Apparently this book has long been one of the most popular of Zola's novels, for obvious reasons - a plot that involves incest, financial speculation and corruption that has regular and periodic topical relevance. On to the next volume.



8 March 2008

Michael Blake - A Thousand Faces

Lon Chaney was one of the pre-eminent stars of the silent film era, and one of its finest actors. Modern audiences, if they know the name, often confuse it with his son, Creighton, known as Lon Chaney Jr, who appeared in several horror films such as The Wolfman, and so conflate the two stars and consider the father also to have been a horror actor. The fact that his best known roles were The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera adds to this misperception, although neither of those films were strictly "horror".

Chaney was known as 'The man of a thousand faces' (hence the title of this film biography) because of his remarkable ability to transform himself, using make-up and his own physical dexterity, into any sort of grotesque. Most of his roles exploited this facility - in addition to the deformed Hunchback and scarred Phantom he famously played characters with no arms or no legs, creating seemingly impossible effects that entranced audiences.

But his popularity wasn't based just on his make-up skills, he was an exceptional actor too. In the silent era, the success of an actor's performance depended entirely on his ability to express a range of emotions, and few could match Chaney in this. His talent arose out of his curious upbringing - both his parents were deaf, so he learnt how to communicate with them through facial and bodily expressions. As a child he would come home in the evening and reenact the events of the day for them. Could there possibly be better training for a silent film actor?

Sadly, most of Chaney's 160 odd films are lost- about 40 are known to exist, of which maybe half are available on DVD. The most famous, Hunchback and Phantom, get regular screenings as there's a new fashion and appreciation for silent film classics. The Unknown, a remarkable film directed by Tod Browning, who made 10 films with Chaney, is also available in a modern print and on DVD. The best I've seen, and one of the best silent films ever, is He Who Gets Slapped, directed by Victor Sjostrom, father of Swedish cinema and main influence on Ingmar Bergman, who cast him in the lead in Wild Strawberries. I saw it with a live score composed by Will Gregory of Goldfrapp, and performed by him and the BBC Concert orchestra. An extraordinary experience. It's not yet available on DVD, nor is it often broadcast, but it is available to watch here.

Michael Blake is a professional make-up artist, which is his initial interest in Lon Chaney, and is the leading historian of the actor. He has previously written a biography (called, unimaginatively, The man behind the thousand faces), and this is more of a filmography, detailing his major performances and the circumstances around the production. The trouble with this is that Blake has no special talent as a film critic, nor is he a particularly good writer. His enthusiasm for his subject is evident, but he is wont to resort to cliché, and many of his plot expositions serve no purpose. Chaney was a remarkable actor, who died aged 47 after making just one sound film, and he deserves a wider appreciation than he now has. At least the increasing provision of niche market DVDs means that his current fans can see his craft.


7 March 2008

Alberto Manguel - A History of Reading

Alberto Manguel is becoming a small publishing phenomenon, producing a couple of books a year on a variety of subjects, most of them connected with bibliophilia. His The Library at Night, out next month, is eagerly anticipated, and I wrote about A Reading Diary recently. This book, published in 1996 and now out of print in the UK (I got mine from amazon.com) has already achieved classic status, which is fully justified.

Manguel approaches his subject on a thematic basis.There are chapters on reading aloud and reading in private - apparently it was normal for books to be read aloud, even when in private contemplation, so the low murmuring of monks at study was common, and Alexander was noted with astonishment when he read a letter in front of his troop without moving his lips. Reading was thus originally about vocalising text, and it went through a transition to become internalised comprehension.

This book is full of fascinating information like this, and Manguel is a beguiling guide. His easy style makes this book more of a leisurely chat than an academic lecture, and he hops from one subject to another without effort. His historical anecdotes are not just entertaining but pertinent, and the illustrations within the text are neatly embedded so that they appear alongside the reference, enhancing the reading experience.

Manguel's mentor was Borges - as a sixteen year old he was employed as a reader to the blind writer - and his final chapter is deliberately Borgesian. He describes all the things he might have written about reading, an infinite book, like Borges's infinite library. It's a witty conclusion inkeeping with the tone of the book.

This is a book to be savoured rather than devoured - I read it in a couple of weeks, one short chapter per night. (Manguel also has things to say about eating metaphors for reading) It's highly appropriate that a book on the pleasures of reading should be such a pleasure to read.


5 March 2008

Emile Zola - The Fortune of the Rougons

I was warned that this, the first of Zola's huge 20 volume Rougon-Macquart cycle, wasn't one of the best, and that was by someone who read the whole cycle in French. I found it a slog - it took me two months to read, on and off, not helped by the dubious 110 year old translation, and the horrible typesetting in this edition.

Zola's ambition was to use the history of an extended family to illustrate the history of France from 1852 to 1870, the Second Empire under Louis-Napoleon III, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. He had particular ideas of hereditary traits, such as irascibility and drunkenness that afflict some of his most prominent characters, but that theme is mostly secondary to the broad narrative of French social life, inspired by Balzac's Comedie Humaine.

This novel deals with the coup d'etat in 1852 that begins the Second Empire - Louis Napoleon, the President of the Second Republic since the revolution of 1848, took absolute power, much as his uncle had done nearly fifty years before. This was relatively recent history for Zola's readers, twenty years after the event, although the writer himself was a mere 12 years old at the time. But for modern English readers, the events are a little confusing, and the narrative a bit hard to follow.

Zola sets the novel in a provincial town, divided between Republicans and Bonapartists, essentially conservatives. It opens with a Republican force marching by the town, joined by two young patriotic inhabitants, Silvere and Miette. Their relationship is a sentimental tragedy that forms the central episode of the book. Much of the rest is concerned with the manoeuverings of the Rougon family, predominantly Bonapartists, to attain influence despite their personal cowardice and the uncertain outcome of the coup.

Zola's intent is twofold in the book - to introduce the characters of his cycle, and to satirise the conservatives at the time of the coup. He takes an anti-Second Empire stance throughout his novels - as a political radical his opposition to despotism is fundamental. The trouble is that his ability isn't yet competent to fulfil his ambition - this novel feels rushed and uneven, there are too many authorial digressions, and the characters are shallow and unbelievable. There are elements which show Zola's budding talent, as evident in the previously published Therese Raquin, such as the action scenes involving Silvere, and the comical counter-revolution in the town. But as a whole the book doesn't work, and should be avoided, except by completists, of which I am currently one.


3 March 2008

Charles Rosen - Piano Notes

Charles Rosen is, apparently, a world-renowned concert pianist and music critic. The fact that I didn't know that before I read the introduction to this book establishes my minimal knowledge of classical music. I am an ingenu, but a willing learner who has been going regularly to concerts on the South Bank for the last six months, expanding my repertoire as a listener, and my appreciation. There's inevitably a limit to my participation - I can't play an instrument, in fact my musical experience is limited to grade one piano (theory only) aged nine, and a term of clarinet, so the technicalities of musical performance are beyond me. I may know that a piece is hard to perform, and admire the audacity of the performer, but I can't really appreciate the performer's experience.

This book attempts to convey a bit of that. It is a populist primer to 'the hidden world of the pianist', as it's subtitled, and uses anecdotes, history, written examples and his own experience to try to show why the concert pianist has such a special regard.

As well as being a very knowledgeable music historian, Rosen is a witty writer, and the book speeds along. Some of it was above my head, despite the unacademic approach - I couldn't appreciate the written music, and would have to play recordings of the pieces to get close to understanding his point. He moves easily from funny anecdote to the philosophy of music, of which here's a fine example:

"...performance in public seems like the natural goal of the aesthetic philosophy that has dominated Western art and music since the eighteenth century. A work of art is supposed to have a value independent of its social function, and even of its role in the artist's biography, and the public concert is at once a metaphor for this independence and its demonstration in the economy of modern life. This independence may be to some extent a fiction, but it is indispensable to our idea of artistic creation.The work of music may be the expression of an individual sensibility, and we may say the same of a performance: but once published, once played, they have become public property. That is why we can maintain that a composer does not always know how best to interpret his own work. His knowledge of the piece may be more intimate at first, but he cannot control future performances, and his opinion of how to play it may be interesting but not absolutely privileged. We may say that the performer ought to realise the composer's intentions, but we must also admit that very often the composer, the poet or the visual artist does not fully understand his own intentions - at least, this is a doctrine of artistic composition that is as old as Plato."

I learnt plenty from this book - I was amazed at first at how pianists could play several pieces, totalling perhaps two hours, without reference to the score, whereas an orchestra mostly sight-reads. The act of memorising seemed an extraordinary feat, for something as complex as a Beethoven piano concerto or sonata, for example. Rosen clarified this for me by saying that by the time he'd reached 18, he knew most of the classical piano canon, even if he hadn't played it in concert. A child's mind, especially one so musically precocious, and relentlessly inquisitive, can memorise an awful lot very quickly, and once it has done so it remains. He states that he can play far more easily pieces he first knew as a teenager than pieces he learnt within the past year. This partly explains the achievement of Daniel Barenboim's recent performance of the whole Beethoven Sonata cycle, of which I saw four out of eight concerts. This was the fourth time Barenboim had played the full cycle, over a period of 45 years, but the memorising had been done when he was a child; at this age the focus is on interpretation and delivery.

Rosen laments the culture of music conservatories and contests, which focus the student upon the one or two major performances he has to make in a year, and that they can leave music school only knowing well the three pieces they have to play in examination at the end of each year. This culture, for obvious reasons, creates a conservative and narrow canon amongst young performers, which limited repertoire will make it hard for them to distinguish themselves later.

I can't say I got the most out of this book, there was too much that required at least some musical knowledge, but it wasn't impenetrable, and it should help me a little to appreciate the pianists I watch in future.