Books for a long journey III

41. Silvina Ocampo, The Promise: Ocampo is overshadowed in the Anglophone world by her far
more famous friend Jorge Luis Borges and her somewhat more famous husband Adolfo Bioy Casares;
but she was a towering figure in the extraordinarily rich Argentine literature of the twentieth
century, and a truly great short-story writer in her own right (of the “cast a cold eye” variety).  This is
her sole novel, at which she labored—despite its brevity—from the mid-1960’s almost until her
death in 1993.  Even then, who can say whether she ever finished it as she wished to do?  It was
rescued from her posthumous papers and published in 2011.  A hypnotic work, at least at first, and
then increasingly hallucinatory, it is told from the perspective of a woman who, having fallen from
the ship on which she had been traveling, is now adrift at sea in the Atlantic.  She prays to St. Rita,
patroness of impossible causes, for deliverance, promising to write a votive hagiography in exchange
for her life; but, of course, she is floating toward her death, and as she does so her thoughts and
memories are gradually dissolving into an ever more dreamlike riot of images and reflections.  The
knowledge that Ocampo apparently wrote the book’s final pages as she herself was slowly taking
leave of the world imbues the text with an additional and haunting air of sad beauty.  There are few
meditations on mortality in modern literature that are nearly as captivating.  It lacks the epic
proportions or pretensions of Hermann Broch’s Death of Virgil, and is ultimately the better book for
just that reason.

42. Ono no Komachi, Poems:  The literature of Japan’s great Heian period was dominated by women,
at least as far as works of prose are concerned, and certainly women writers were the chief
innovators of the time.  Ono no Komachi, however, was the only woman ranked among the six
great Rokkasen, the early Heian virtuosi of Waka verse. Still, she is generally credited with
inaugurating a style of verbal complexity that would be much imitated by later generations of poets,
and that marks most of the verse collected in the famous Kokinshū anthology. She is admired also
for the intense and in many ways unprecedented expressiveness of her poems. She was, according
to legend, an extraordinary beauty in her youth who was never wanting for the attention of
handsome young courtiers; but her surviving verse is suffused by a deep, twilit melancholy, attesting
principally to nights of loneliness, memories of failed loves, and an ever deepening sense of time’s
passage. I am aware of only two volumes of her poems available in English, and one of those she
shares with the equally marvelous Izumi Shikabu; but take what you can get.

43. Lesley Blanch, The Nine Tiger Man: This was the sole “long” (actually it’s quite short) work of
fiction written by the splendid travel-writer, historian, biographer, and parchingly dry wit Lesley
Blanch.  (Mind you, some would argue that even her nonfiction—especially her scintillating magnum
opus, The Wilder Shores of Love—occasionally exceeds the bounds of strict veracity.)  This small,
perfectly crafted, thoroughly entertaining erotic romp (not lewd, but also not for the kids) is set
principally in the Raj during the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion—Blanch wrote it while recovering from a leg
injury in Rajasthan—and it tells of the plight of a collection of English women sheltering from the
violence on a river island in Jaipur under the “protection” of the altogether picaresque Rao
Jagnabad, who is renowned for having killed nine tigers and who has no great scruples about taking
advantage of the situation he finds himself in.  Among the women is Florence, a recently married
and painfully respectable upper-class young woman who has been nursing and feebly resisting her
own infatuation with the Rao ever since meeting him in England some time before. And then there is
Florence’s brave, enterprising, and invincibly pragmatic maid Rosie (in many ways, the tale’s true
heroine).
44. Enheduanna, Inanna, Lady of the Largest Heart and Princess, Priestess, Poet: The Sumerian
Temple Hymns of Enheduanna: These are the titles given the best editions of Enheduanna’s poems
and hymns in English, both edited and translated by Betty De Shong Meador.  Inasmuch as
Enheduenna—who floruit in the twenty-third century BC, was high priestess of the moon god Nanna
in Ur, and had a special devotion to the goddess Inanna (alter ego of or close cousin to Ishtar and
Aphrodite)—was the first poet in the whole of human letters whose name has survived into the
present, it seems to me that we owe her at least the tribute of reading what she left behind.  But her
compositions recommend themselves for reasons other than historical interest.  They are
fascinating, often sublime, frequently beautiful works of deep love and reverence, now and then
shot through with expressions of the sort of conscious introspective self-awareness that Julian
Jaynes denied ancient peoples possessed.  Inanna, moreover, is the earliest hell-harrowing deity of
whom we have records, whose mythology includes all sorts of tantalizing similarities to later myths,
such as those of Orpheus and Eurydice, Demeter and Persephone, Theseus and Pirithous... (I’ll leave
off there).
45. Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star: If Silvina Ocampo’s eye was cold, the Brazilian writer
Clarice Lispector’s was a shard of ice. This is her last novel, and it is as unsparing and emotionally
piercing as any of her earlier works. But, of course, the secret of Lispector’s impassive voice and
astringent style is a strange tenderness, always present just below the surface of whatever tale she is
telling, a compassion that is all the more uncompromising because it is not clouded by
sentimentality or that most pernicious of vices, optimism. The book tells the tale of a young typist
named Macabéa, lonely, sad, sickly, and often confused by the seeming hostility of the world around
her, but somehow able to believe in a happier destiny lying open before her.  It is a short work, and I
cannot reveal much more without giving practically everything away; I will say only that the pity the
story evokes—of the anguished variety, I should warn—seems very much to be the point of reading
it. That and, of course, its considerable technical brilliance.

46. “Mother of Michitsuna”, The Mayfly Diary: At least, that is how the Japanese title Kagerō Nikki is
often translated; but it can also mean something like “Spiderweb Journal,” and in fact the work is
often called by the title Edward Seidensticker gave it, The Gossamer Years.  In any event, it is yet
another distinguished entry in the Heian genre of court ladies’ “private” diaries, embellished with
poems, at times as delicate and luminous as the best of its rivals (the Sarashina Nikki), but
distinguished from all the others of the period chiefly by its emotional candor and the boldness of
the author’s impatience with the marriage customs of her time. Indeed, a great deal of what we
know about marriage in the upper classes of tenth century Japan (including the practice of keeping
two residences, the wife living with her parents and the husband visiting her there at his
convenience) we know principally from this one text. It is a moving if morose portrait of a woman
who is at first devoted to her new husband (“the Prince”) but who then must endure his dalliances
with other women, his neglect of his vows, and finally his abandonment of her and their son
Michitsuna. The loveliest portions of the journal tell of her pilgrimages to holy mountains and
Buddhist temples, her desire to become a Buddhist nun, and her ultimate refusal to do so in order
that instead she may care properly for her son and for a girl she adopts as her daughter. The
melancholy is deep but often exquisite (in that ineffably and inimitably Japanese way).

47. Renata Adler, Speedboat: Arguably the most entertainingly diffuse novel of the last century. Only
Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds might lay a better claim to that distinction. Then again, both
works resist comparison, either to one another or to any other books, so that is neither here nor
there.  Adler’s book is a kind of impressionist mosaic, composed from seemingly unrelated narrative
tesserae, describing the experiences, thoughts, and intuitions of one Jen Fain, a young journalist who
lives in New York (and who can be taken as, if not a portrait, at least an emanation of Adler
herself). The plot, such as it is, can be discerned if one steps back far enough from the picture; even
then, it is not laid out in a continuous chronological order. Each isolated passage is connected to
those coming before and after it more by bonds of accidental association than by diegetic logic; and
frequently even those bonds are of a rather tenuous nature. And yet the total effect is altogether
delightful.  The wit is sharp and dry, the pathos unexpectedly affecting, and the personality of the
narrator wholly captivating. (Adler later wrote another novel in the same vein, Pitch Dark, which is
every bit as good, if psychologically somewhat more disturbing.)

48. Ueda Akinari, Tales of Moonlight and Rain: In Japanese, Ugetsu Monogatari. It is in keeping with
the peculiar aesthetic genius of Japan, of course, that the language should be hospitable to a lovely
portmanteau word like “ugetsu” (“u” meaning “rain” and “getsu” meaning “moon”); just as the
special atmosphere of the nine ghost stories constituting this eighteenth century classic of “refined
fiction” (monogatari) is entirely in keeping with a special Japanese genius for the literature of the
beguilingly uncanny. These are tales meant not to terrify so much as to impart a sense of an unseen
realm at once extraordinarily near at hand, just on the other side of quotidian experience, and yet
wholly incomprehensible, unpredictable, and implacable. Two of the tales were the inspiration for
Mizoguchi’s 1953 film Ugetsu, the most diaphanously lovely of his many masterpieces and a fixture
on any perceptive cineaste’s list of the five or ten greatest films ever made.
49. Boris Vian, Froth on the Daydream: That was the title, at any rate, of the first available English
version of the book, though it has also appeared in English under the titles Mood Indigo and Foam of
the Daze (the last being a not particularly nimble play on the actual title in French, L'Écume des
jours, The Foam of the Days). Vian was a novelist very much in the French surrealist tradition, as well
as a poet, a translator, a talented engineer, an actor, and a Jazz musician whose attitude to Duke
Ellington was, by his own account, one of worship. This is his best-known and most delightful book, a
strangely joyous work even though it is technically a tragic love-story. Its dreamlike elements—a
talking mouse and cat, a girl with a lung infested by a water-lily, an ice-skating rink where the
clientele frequently die from crashing into one another and the surrounding railings, only to be
casually swept up by the janitors—should by all rights be a little grotesque; but Vian wrote with so
light a hand and such whimsical detachment that the ultimate effect is deftly and oddly touching.

50. Basil Bunting, The Poems of Basil Bunting: Bunting was among the greatest of modernist poets,
and yet (at least, until very recently) has rarely received the recognition he deserved. A devoted son
of Northumberland, shaped (he claimed) by Quaker mysticism, socialist politics, and northern English
landscapes, he regarded poetry as more a subdivision of music than of literature. He called many of
his poems “Sonatas”—Scarlatti’s being his chief exemplars. He was also a distinguished translator of
Persian verse, and even spent many years mid-century in Iran (working for British Military
Intelligence). His masterpiece, the long poem Briggflatts (1966), is among the glories of British
twentieth century verse, a work whose austere lyricism and hauntingly mysterious imagery create a
world of sensibility unlike any other. (Moreover, his middle name was Cheesman, and you can’t do
better than that.)