Reread Detour

[recognito]

All my friends are reading Sebald, so I checked some of his books out from the library and chose to reread two books I originally read in 2018: The Idiot by Batuman and Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei. The Idiot touches on a few books I've covered recently, while Invisibility Cloak is more of a "I don't know what the fuck the reviewers are going on about and I'm also not sure what's going on in this book?!" style of a review.

As with everything I've reread recently, I like it more on reread than I did when I first read it… Let's start with The Idiot, since I have less to say there.

The Idiot, Batuman - I first came to Batuman's writing through her essay collection on Russian literature, The Possessed. Her essays were remarkably funny and full of anecdotes that you cannot find on Wikipedia—genuinely, if you are a writer and in the habit of googling as you read, you will find this increasingly rare. On top of that, she's willing to take slightly outre positions—famously, I think, she wrote an essay proposing Tolstoy died from poison at his home—and argue them without seeming like a smug contrarian…

Flipping through The Possessed again, I'm like, these are great literary essays! Light touch, deep reading, tons of primary and secondary sources, and exciting adventures to go to libraries and universities. You read her essays and come away thinking, "Wow! Being a comparative literature PhD sounds amazing! You get to do so much and learn so much! You can explore so many different topics, even if you have to go to conferences for them, too. But the conferences don't sound too bad? She's having a great time! I wish I could get this much information out of going to Russia." Learning and reading itself is really fun, full of surprises, and even the research avenues that go nowhere still reveal something exciting for the reader… unfortunately, getting a PhD does require you to get a PhD.

Batuman's novel is about Selin, a freshman in Harvard, who starts the novel wanting to be a writer. The premise of this does not fill most readers with excitement ("Ugh, a writer??? Harvard???"), but I think it's a lot of fun… One of the voyeuristic pleasures of the novel is Selin's encounters with her new environment—that's to say, we open with Selin getting her first e-mail account, then attending various orientations, then going to the bank, and so on. As Batuman notes, in the decades it took her to write the novel, it's become something of a historical artifact.

The first time I read The Idiot, I remember feeling impatient with the Ivan story line and how it never felt like it was going anywhere, but this time around, I really do feel bad for Selin and how her pursuit of understanding how language and words affect people leads her to a doomed e-mail exchange with Ivan, who's never overtly cruel but also never completely honest or straightforward, and then to teaching English to villagers in Hungary, where she and Ivan proceed to never kiss or do more than hug. Many eighteen year old characters are really prone to boldly announcing their mistaken impressions of the world and then being pummelled into the author's vision of correctness; Batuman I think is slyer and capably leads us through Selin's increasing mystification with the world, language, and people. Selin's a character who starts the novel unconcerned with traditions and "evaluate[s] every situation from scratch, as if it had arisen for the first time;" from this, we understand that Batuman's project is one that seeks to defamiliarize us with traditional forms and conventionally held opinions. Her best friend, Svetlana, is Selin's opposite. In a memorable and funny passage:

It was a mystery to me how Svetlana generated so many opinions. Any piece of information seemed to produce an opinion on contact. Meanwhile, I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened. In high school I had been full of opinions, but high school had been like prison, with constant opposition and obstacles. Once the obstacles were gone, meaning seemed to vanish, too. It was just like Chekhov said, in "The Darling":

She saw objects round her and understood everything that was going on, but she could not form opinions about anything and did not know what to talk about. How awful it is not to have an opinion! You see a bottle, for example, standing there, or the rain falling, or a peasant going along in his cart, but what the bottle or rain or peasant are for, what sense they make, you can't say and couldn't say, even if they offered you a thousand rubles.

Every now and then, a book had something like that in it, and it was some comfort. But it wasn't quite the same thing as having an opinion.

I made the usual mistake of looking at the Goodreads reviews, and I do feel like it's a book that's enjoyed and hated incorrectly by many people there… A common charge against this book is that it's plotless, but the plot of The Idiot is not only really clear and straightforward (writer enters college, meets a hot guy, and decides to follow him to Hungary), the point-counterpoint melody is pretty darn obvious?! I was actually a little like sad at points because, after reading a good number of fragmentary novels, The Idiot's fragments are some of the few that I find tonally and narratively well-balanced. This is a common irritation I have with most audiences, which is that their sense of what is and is not plot is so entangled with physical action, personal growth, and change.

it's not plotless! It's ironic, but for the most part not cruelly. Batuman has a sense of humor, and you may need to calibrate your enjoyment based on that. If you enjoyed The Possessed, you may or may not enjoy this. I feel like I enjoyed The Possessed more, but I find this to be a good novel rather than qualifying it with "perhaps it's a good first novel but not so much a good novel." Hope that helps.

 

The Invisibility Cloak, Ge - I picked this up from a used bookshop back in 2018, read it, and went, "Wow! Cool!" and picked up Peach Blossom Paradise afterwards.

Flipping through the reviews of The Invisibility Cloak, I'm kind of fascinated by the unwillingness of a lot of reviewers to make a definitive statement on the ending. There's a lot of commentary on the genre (a satire, a comic novel, a parable, a horror story), the two Beijings (the nouveau riche vs. the old world represented by the gangsters), class resentment, and the introduction of the gangster, Ding Caichen, but hardly anyone seems willing to make a statement on the way Ge unites these themes in the final chapter…

Cui is a crotchety loser: broke, divorced, and living in his sister's apartment and about to be kicked out. He builds high-end sound systems for a dwindling pool of wealthy clients. Cui dislikes his clients, who he sees as posers prone to passionately bullshitting about politics, taking on multiple contradictory arguments that always end with Cui being an inferior chump. Cui waxes nostalgic for the 90s, when he made good money building audio systems and his clients at least listened to classical records instead of pop albums.

Cui lives in his sister's apartment while his sister and her husband live in their deceased mother's house. The apartment has a giant crack in the wall, but Cui can't really do much better with his meager finances. His sister wants him to leave the apartment. Cui resists, knowing he won't be able to afford another place in Beijing, but eventually agrees to sign a statement that he'll leave by the end of the month. His sister boldly tries to set him up with another woman, who is kind but lives in a shabby apartment; Cui finds neither the woman nor the apartment to his liking. His first wife was extraordinarily beautiful, but, as his mother warned him, was not "meant" for him; she cheated on him, then left him. The base irony set up by the novel is that Cui can build amazing sound systems and obtain a beautiful wife but cannot keep them for himself.

Cui's attempts to ply his friend, Jiang Songping, a smooth-talking factory owner who grew up with Cui in Beijing, for a place to stay or money go nowhere, save for a reference to Ding Caichen, a gangster who lives in a remote, clean-aired, leafy suburb of Beijing. Building a sound system for Ding will give Cui the ability to buy a house, even if it means giving up the most precious and expensive amplifiers Cui owns. 

The gangster is much more to Cui's liking: unpretentious, quiet, and capable of appreciating classical music, even if he is apparently unfamiliar with it. He pays a third of the money upfront without complaint. The one discordant note is an incident at a restaurant, where a waitress asks Ding to stop smoking. In response, Ding puts a gun on the table.

As Cui's eviction approaches, Ding disappears, leaving Cui without the money he needs to buy the house. Cui, distraught, goes back to Ding's house in the suburbs. He meets the disfigured woman in Ding's house, for whom Ding requested the sound system. The unnamed woman is the one who loves music, apparently the true inheritor of Cui's beloved amplifiers. She invites Cui to stay in the house, and he does.

At the end of the novel, he's fathered a child with her and continues living in Ding's house. His new wife says that she was kidnapped, the same as Cui; Cui rejects this interpretation. After all, he can go where he likes, he continues on with building sound systems—but his life is haunted by a maddening ambiguity. Cui decides to live, as his wife suggested, with one eye open and one eye shut.

What exactly is the invisibility cloak? It's mentioned explicitly as an item owned by Mou Qishan, a famous figure in the audiophile community in Beijing. Mou Qishan was a "celebrity tycoon, … a household name in Beijing" who was rumored to be "eccentric and often unpredictable" who could "show up at any event unseen because he wore an invisibility cloak;" Cui then goes on to say that he had met Mou a few times in life, which ought to disprove the theory. Some reviewers seem to think Cui himself wears an invisibility cloak as he goes apparently unnoticed through the novel or that the speakers themselves transfer invisibility, but I find this to be a mistaken read. Cui goes unseen because of his class and low status; the speakers represent, to Cui, something precious that makes up for his lousy luck and bitterness over his ex-wife's infidelity. The speakers connect Cui to the last bits of his idealism, his faith in a genuine and pure world.

The "two Beijings" mentioned in the novel are, I think, much closer than they initially appear. The old Beijing is represented by people like Cui and his sister, while Jiang Songping, their childhood friend and factory owner, links the old to new Beijing, which is full of hot air academics and the nouveau riche. (It may not surprise you to learn that Ge Fei is a professor at Tsinghua University.) By the end of the novel, Cui's estranged from both his sister and Jiang Songping. Cui cannot bring himself to embrace his sister after all the tricks she pulled to toss him out of the apartment, and Jiang Songping is furious when Cui goes to him to ask for money after Ding's disappearance and breaks their friendship off for good; the implication seems to be that Ding was funding Jiang Songping and, with Ding's assets frozen, Jiang Songping may be in hot water himself.

The only other character who has a claim to invisibility is Ding Caichen, who apparently dies by suicide, only to "reappear" through the transfer of money to Cui at the very end of the novel. Cui begins the novel without a wife and about to be evicted; he's forced to sell his speakers to a gangster; the gangster disappears, and Cui ends up living in his house with one of the gangster's hostages. Cui doesn't marry his fellow hostage and doesn't even know her real name—she steadfastly refuses to give it to him. He lives in Ding Caichen's house but does not own it. He starts the novel without much to his name except his idealism and ends it living as a hostage and choosing to think he's free. His material circumstances have improved, but things are looking pretty bleak otherwise.

The commentary on the state of China seems pretty obvious: China's new culture of materialism alienates people from each other, rewards bullshitters, and degrades or mutilates the best elements of China while allowing for the darker ones to flourish. Cui sees himself as fundamentally honest, but ends the novel deciding it's better to fool himself than to look too closely at his life; and so, China, too, has chosen to shut one eye and not pry too deeply into what's around them, lest they lose the ability to find any of life beautiful.

It's a surprisingly easy read but harder to fully grasp than I realized. I'm glad I got a chance to come back to it after almost eight years.

Next time in book blog: I'm going to try to synthesize my thoughts on Hikaru no Go, Medalist, and Akane Banashi in a post that may or may not be coherent or uh, you know… good. please look forward to it!