Strange sense of time warp all day today. Heavy snow last night, so there’s that. We’re still in Winter even though the slant of the sunlight every day sings more and more Spring Spring Spring (Cole Porter version, if it exists).
The Oscars last night. Weird show, also a bit time warpey?
And this evening after skimming more of Susan Cheever’s memoir I finished Doris Lessing’s novel The Good Terrorist. Liked it a lot but by the end I wondered if I had not read it years ago. It is from 1985. Could be that she just captures that period so well—-IRA bombings in London. She captures well I think how an odd group of young misfits could end up bombing the front of a big hotel, rather like what happened in Mumbai a few months ago. Differing ideological fogs perhaps but her novel would say, well, but the interior psychological weather at work within terrorists may not be as different from culture to culture as we might at first assume. Lessing’s treatment of her characters, their motives, is as subtle and complex as any “post-modernist fabulist” would want yet she writes firmly within the tradition of literary realism. Psychological realism without any doctrines or guiding dogmas—at least none detectable.
The result is not a tragic novel but a moving and sad one. Lessing manages to make us sympathetic with this cluster (these days we would use the more hip term “clusterf*ck” of spoiled middle class revolutionaries and fully exasperated with them at the same time. I can hear her saying, well, yes, that is the point of “realism” in the first place, isn’t it? Make sure you look up the video on YouTube of hearing the news that she has won the Nobel Prize—after all these years. “Oh, Christ,” she says, walking from a cab to her front door as a group of reporters tells her.
John Lukacs, my history prof from freshman year at LaSalle, has a new book out this month. Ordered it. Continues his memoir. A reprint, I found out on Amazon, of his earlier book, “Confessions of an Original Sinner,” has a striking photo of himself as a young man, maybe early to mid-thirties, probably soon after he arrived in this country from Hungary? I did not know until I looked at his Wikipedia article that he had had to work in a Hungarian labor battalion for converted Jews because his mother was Jewish. I did know he had deserted the Hungarian army to get out before the Russians arrived and managed to get to the States.
His book is called Last Rites.
Larry Poons in an interview with Robert Ayers.
