Bookstorm

"I have to return some videotapes."

Right: so I watched the film version of American Psycho last night and I might be one of the few people who's twisted enough to think it's one of the funniest movies ever made. (If irony and sharp satire isn't your thing, or if you're a feminist, you might not want to put this in your Netflix queue.) Then I followed it with Jessa's interview with the Book Guys and, after listening to her cute voice and infectious giggling, wound up feeling like a dirty misogynist for getting such a kick out of a movie about a Wall Street yuppie who dismembers the women he sleeps with. ("Sorbet?") Still: I went to the bookstore this afternoon and, upon walking through the double doors, felt like lurking in the Sexuality section and approaching every attractive woman and saying, "Your name is Christie. You will only respond to Christie. Understood?" (Now you know why I'm hopelessly single.)

In the end, I decided against that and instead re-bought my lost copy of Tom McCarthy's Remainder.

The 2008 Tournament of Books has begun. I'm glad, though not particularly surprised, to see my own nominations--Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End and Tom McCarthy's Remainder--as two of this year's contestants. Get reading, kids.

I'm not budging from my "burn it" stance regarding Vladimir Nabokov's dying wish to have his final novel torched. Then Tom Stoppard comes along and nails it, and has me grinning for the rest of the day:

It's perfectly straightforward: Nabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it. There is no superior imperative. The argument about saving it for the "greater good" of the literary world is null, as far as I'm concerned. There are parallel universes, might-have-been worlds, full of lost works, and no doubt some of them would have been masterpieces. But our desire to possess them all is just a neurosis, a completeness complex, as though we must have everything that's going and it's a tragedy if we don't. It's nonsense, an impossible desire for absoluteness. At best, it's natural curiosity--personally, I'd love to read Nabokov's last work, but since he didn't want me to read it, I won't--and it’s hardly modest to make one’s own desire more important than his.

And I can't resist sharing the last sentence, because I love Stoppard's "fuck you" attitude:

In all honour, we must honour the only fact: that he said "Burn it." Everything else is speculation--mostly self-serving speculation on the part of the Nabokov industry, the last people we should listen to.

I'd gleefully burn those fifty notecards myself.

Maybe I'm subconsciously channelling Friedrich Nietzsche (who, in Ecce Homo, wonders how anyone can read during the day), but I'm finding it almost impossible to concentrate on Dante's Purgatorio if I read it during the daylight hours. I tore through several cantos on the night I picked it up, then stalled the next morning, lamely finishing one canto and wondering why I was so distracted. Then I took the book to the office, thinking I would get in a canto or two during lunch, but it say in my work area, untouched and uncommented upon by my co-workers. (I admit that, every time I looked at the Purgatorio, I told myself that Dante's fundamentalism would put today's Christian right to shame.)

I read a new translation of one of the canticles every year, so I can vouch for the Jean Hollander/Robert Hollander translation. I initially bought the book on the strength of its extensive notes, but the translation itself is quite readable, even if the language doesn't evoke as many images as does the Inferno. The Purgatorio is more intimate than the Inferno, which might explain my frustrating lack of concentration. Dante makes a point of addressing the reader numerous times, and given the poem's relative calmness, as compared to the violance and rapid-fire pacing of the Interno, Purgatorio reads like an interlude of sorts: if you managed to survive the horrors of hell, you'll need purgatory to get the stench of sulfur off your skin.

But if the Inferno is awash in utter helplessness and despair, then the Purgatorio offers some much needed light and respite. Any arduous journey would likely force introspection, and that's ultimately what the Purgatorio is: Dante and Virgil often analyze their motivations and the consequences of some of their choices. Whether you believe in God or not, Dante is one of those artists who is truly universal. Sure, the Divine Comedy is a product of its time, when high art was supposed to glorify the ways of God, and with the Purgatorio, Dante not only sings God's praises with unmatched clarity and devotion, but he also makes you question whether or not you even you're even ready for paradise. Don't feel too bad if you can't immediately answer that question--even Dante, perfectly aware of his own flaws, was full of self-doubt.

And that, I suppose, is what makes the Comedy one of the most human works ever written.