Our friend and royalty-earning author Michael Moats (“The Real Holden Caulfield”) has some advice about how to describe the famously indescribable Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace. It’s a touching essay, and it’s been picked up by The Rumpus, so you should check it out, right here, right now. Mike knows the shit out of DFW—he’s been eloquently live-blogging his second reading of Infinite Jest.
- Fiction Advocate
Filed under DFW, Hooray Fiction!
The Long Ships, originally written in Swedish and translated into English in 1955, was reissued by New York Review Books in 2010. Michael Chabon gives it an enthusiastic introduction, marveling that he knows only three other people who have read the book. But this isn’t exactly a lost gem. The Long Ships has been a classic in Sweden for many generations, and it formed the basis of a 1964 movie starring Sidney Poitier.
The hero of The Long Ships—this is definitely a story with a Hero—is Red Orm, a Danish warrior who stumbles and pillages his way through Europe and Scandinavia in 1000 AD, rubbing elbows with the great kings of the Dark Ages and shedding blood in pivotal conquests. His misadventures at sea bring him to the palaces of Moorish Spain, the rocky monasteries of Ireland, and the nomadic tribes of the Russian steppe. Orm may not be as clever as Odysseus, but he’s luckier and more brutal in battle, and he travels more of the known world. Between sea voyages he dutifully raises a boisterous family on the edge of the Swedish forest.
Although it’s chiefly an adventure tale, with enough bloody swords and casual rape to satisfy a lusty 12-year-old, The Long Ships draws on extensive historical research and a rich literary tradition. Bengtsson, who wrote a PhD on Geoffrey Chaucer, studied many of the same sources that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien to write his contemporaneous The Lord of the Rings. Bengtsson sends Orm, for example, to the Battle of Maldon in 991, which Tolkien fictionalized in “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son.” With its glorification of Danish warriors and its credulity toward witches and trolls, The Long Ships echoes Beowulf. And it may be fair to surmise that Bengtsson relied on the same lost manuscript of a 10th century Arab-Viking encounter that inspired Michael Crichton to write Eaters of the Dead.
This legwork allows Bengtsson to craft his adventure tale with all the artistic authenticity it can handle. His language is deliberately archaic and feels instantly legendary—the kind of text you expect to be indexed by chapter and verse. It contains monologues, embedded folklore, and entire passages of crafty deliberation, which can be even more exciting than bloodshed.
They saw men climb ashore wearing garments barked with ice, among them a tall chieftain in a blue cloak and another, of equal stature, clothed in red. King Harald scanned them as closely as he could from where he stood, and said: “It looks like a Jomsviking or perhaps a Swedish ship, and it is boldly manned, for its crew approach the King of the Danes with no shield of peace upon their masthead. I know of but three men who would dare to come thus: Skoglar-Toste, Vagn Akesson, and Styrbjörn. Morover, they have brought their ship alongside without removing their dragon-head, though they know well that the trolls of the mainland do not love dragon-heads; and I know of but two men who do not care what the trolls think, and they are Vagn and Styrbjörn. But I see from the ship’s condition that its captain disdained to seek shelter from last night’s storm, and there is but one man who would refuse to bow to such a tempest. It is my guess, therefore, that this must be my son-in-law Styrbjörn.”
The stately, slow procession of language contrasts beautifully with the sudden turns of plot and the precarious cheapness of life in 1000 AD. Violence comes quickly, but our view of a bustling, exotic world, stretching from Córdoba to Kiev, unfolds magisterially. We learn about Orm’s world through his limited perspective—what he sees from the bow of his ship, what he hears as rumor—and the information feels late and unreliable, but somehow romantic, like gazing at a star whose light is a million years old.
It’s easy to see why Sweden loves this lively, readable epic. It flatters their national self-identity by offering an imagined history of the far North, with Irish jesters, dancing bears, strong ale, poetry, punitive beard-shaving, and ancient wild oxen. It valorizes berserker rage, plunder, and wife-theft as honorable deeds undertaken for the good of family and kingdom. Its only glaring fabrication is Orm’s true love for Ylva, the daughter of King Harald Bluetooth—an anachronism that makes our hero more endearing.
The Long Ships is a tribute to the moment in history when a barbaric society gives way to an ordered civilization. In Scandinavia Christianity did much of this work, and The Long Ships is highly ambivalent about Christianity. Priests are hypocritical, nattering twits who believe in love potions and the healing power of leeches. But they are also wise and loyal friends. Orm himself is a pragmatist; at sea he makes sacrifices to the Norse god Agir, Allah, and St. James, covering all the bases. But as he matures, he builds a church and oversees the baptism of his family and neighbors. Orm’s conversion signals the transition of Viking clans into modern Scandinavia.
After all of Red Orm’s voyages “there were no local incidents worth mentioning, apart from the usual murders at feasts and weddings, and a few men burned in their houses as the result of neighborly disputes.” Orm is both proud and sad to be hanging up his sword, and so is Bengtsson, and so are we.
- Brian Hurley
Filed under Hooray Fiction!, review
My office is holding a blood drive. There are signs in the elevators. “Donate Blood and Save Three Lives.”
Why three? The “three lives” statistic is commonly cited by the American Red Cross. It refers to the fact that a typical blood donation of 450 mL contains 2-3 of the four types of transfusable blood products: red cells, platelets, plasma, and cryoprecipitate. The Red Cross doesn’t guarantee that a donation will contain any usable blood products. It doesn’t guarantee that a donation will be used at all. It only says “each donation can help save up to three lives.” But the signs in the elevators are emphatic. “Donate Blood,” they say, “and Save Three Lives.”
It doesn’t take much to save a life these days. The World Health Organization says you can save lives by washing your hands. They suggest you “create an action plan” based on “the WHO Hand Hygiene Self-Assessment Framework.” I’ve already used the bathroom twice today. I washed my hands both times. Perhaps I saved two lives. You’re welcome, whoever you are.
Yoplait has an advertising campaign called “Save Lids to Save Lives.” Basically they raise money for breast cancer research. Raising money for breast cancer research is a very good thing. Does it save lives? We don’t have a cure for breast cancer yet. But for each Yoplait product that you purchase, a penny (or a fraction of a penny) is helping to keep the lights on at a research facility somewhere. We call this saving lives.
What else saves lives? Guns. A web site called Guns Save Lives collects the stories of people who commit homicide with firearms in self-defense. The logic behind “saving a life” is such that you can even do it by killing someone.
We still have everyday heroes, whether they crow about “saving lives” or not. Boys’ Life, the 101-year-old magazine of the Boy Scouts of America, runs a column called “Scouts in Action.” It’s a comic strip that dramatizes the real-life exploits of Boy Scouts who rescue people in their communities. Sometimes an old lady needs CPR; sometimes a swimmer gets swept downriver. In each case a brave little man steps in to palpate granny’s heart or dive after the drowning man. There is an immediate need for help, a clear understanding of what must be done, and direct, successful action. There is very little sanctimony. These stories typically end with the boy standing aside while the ambulance—the adult—takes over.
The problem with the rhetoric of “saving a life” is that it places trivial things, like washing your hands or buying a Yoplait yogurt, on par with momentous things, like safely landing a plane on the Hudson River and rescuing all 155 people aboard from a fatal crash. With our language we’re making it easier and easier to credit someone with “saving a life.” It’s become so wildly inaccurate that we can throw around half-baked numbers—like the “three lives” I will save by donating a pint of blood—without flinching. There will come a day when nobody gets out of bed unless it saves 6 lives. Whose lives? We can’t say.
And why save them, anyway? Keeping people around is not an inherently virtuous thing. We have a responsibility to be caretakers of our society, our population, and our planet. But we don’t become life-saving heroes by buying candles from a web site that pays for heart surgeries for Iraqi kids.
Besides, you can’t save a life. You can only postpone a death.
- Brian Hurley
Filed under language, theory of everything
It’s a humor memoir.
The author has appeared on Conan O’Brien, has written for Saturday Night Live, teaches at Upright Citizens Brigade, currently has 8,651 Twitter followers, and claims to be a blue belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
The book contains the following passage:
“Gomez,” I said. “Look at me. I’m gonna tell you one more fucking time, and then we’re going to have a serious fucking problem. I don’t want to fuck a whore.”
What am I baiting this mouse trap with?
Filed under Chris Gethard, Hooray Fiction!
Each section of I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur begins the same way. “I started this one business that builds skyscrapers in your likeness.” “I started this one business that snuck into the bedrooms of children to leave little bits of cold flesh beneath their pillows.” “I started this one business that made music that nobody knew was music.” The stories go on to describe technicians who install padlocks in clouds, “elegant ladies made of glass” who give tours of Europe, an office that sells every kind of pencil you could need. Each vignette is coherent and delightful—a sudden flight of fancy caught in a jar, glowing. Many of them arrive at startling conclusions about the ideas that bind an individual and a community together.
For what is a man but the internalization of so many other humans, the little twist of the neck unconsciously stolen from a childhood teacher who could never remember his name, the fixed voice his father used just before the door was locked.
All of this is made absurd and pointedly political by the overall premise of the book, as stated in the title and the recurring first line, which is that a company could manufacture and sell the ineffable. The businesses in I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur are essentially selling mystery, empathy, inspiration, consolation, and “things that can’t be learned.” It’s both thrilling and scary to envision a commercial market for the kinds of sensations and epiphanies that are typically found only in daily life and great art. But, as the book asks, “What else do we make the money for?” If money is truly “the ambient guts of the universe,” then we better damn well have entrepreneurs as crafty and compassionate as this one.
Part literature, part prank, I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur is a clever and absorbing book that rewards multiple re-readings.
- Brian Hurley
Filed under Hooray Fiction!, review
Accolades for Leaving the Atocha Station—from James Wood in the New Yorker, Lorin Stein in the New York Review of Books, Paul Auster, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Tao Lin, and probably your barber, and the person changing next to you at the gym—call it a funny book. Good god, do I disagree. Do you find it “hilarious” (Electric Literature) when a despondent poet has reason to quote, in casual conversation, a line from W. H. Auden’s eulogy for W. B. Yeats? If so you need help. Get help. Not from me. The other expectation for this slim, semi-autobiographical novel is that it will be poetic. Both the author and the narrator are young, accomplished poets. The former has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the latter tends to cite John Ashberry. But if “poetic” is blurb-speak for “lyrical” or “painterly” or “richly evocative,” then forget it. Here is a sample sentence from this poet’s novel about a poet:
The intensity of my listening did at least return strangeness to each word, force me to confront it as a sound, and then to recapture the miracle of sound opening or almost opening into sense, and I managed to suspend my disgust.
What this book is is brainy. Brainy as a motherfucker. So brainy, the only way to describe it is to fall back on swear words, like a motherfucker. It’s narrated by a young American poet who goes to Madrid on a fellowship and wastes his time smoking hashish and taking pills and fearing he’s a complete fraud. He is a fraud. But after a series of encounters with Madrid’s poets and student political activists, which he over-analyzes like a motherfucker (this must be what everyone finds so funny), Adam Gordon has an epiphany: his fraudulence as a poet and a person is not an issue, since all language and life is an act of translation—from one brain or tongue to another—and we only exist insofar as we are translated within other people’s minds. So we’re all frauds, we’re all tongue-tied gringos, and everything is everything, a star is a satellite is a plane, according to how we translate it. This sounds so cheesy when I explain it. I am not Ben Lerner. You should really be hearing this from Ben Lerner. When he writes it, as fiction, with pages on love and jealousy and art history and the Alhambra and Barcelona, it’s brilliant. Cold and brainy and almost selfishly introspective, but brilliant.
If the king geeks of the literary world are eager to fellate this novel—gosh, sorry for all the profanity; the book is so articulate that I feel crass by comparison—it’s because Leaving the Atocha Station flatters the image of the writer as a troubled, soulful, exceptional intellectual. Which is maybe a bit self-serving. But do you remember that scene in The Matrix where Neo sees, for the first time, that his existence is just a waterfall of numbers and codes cascading all around him, and he can manipulate the code at will? Leaving the Atocha Station left me with a similar feeling about the limitlessness of language and thought. So don’t worry, there are infinite ways to end this review that don’t involve another dick joke.
- Brian Hurley
Filed under review
