Happy New Year

 

Jan 1, 2013. The new year not even 20 hours old yet. We saw the year in from the same rooftop we saw 2012 arrive. Friends' rooftop that gives an obscured view of the big fireworks show the city puts on and views of the equally-if-not-more marvelous show of independently lit fireworks, south and east. In other words, a panorama of fireworks, big and small, whistling up, cascading and sparkling into night sky, all colors.

I spent the day making a soup (beans, smoked turkey leg) and finishing Tom McCarthy’s Men in Space. After a failed attempt to read the much loved Remainder, I forced myself to acclimate to this book’s dizzying splits in narrative, the disorienting wealth of details, and the evasive plot line(s). The book follows a gang of hoodlums, artists, and bohemians living in the Czech Republic during the early 1990s. A plot to copy and steal a painting of a Saint’s ascension – a painting of unknown but probably Byzantine provenance and (more importantly) enormous value – is underfoot. (The book also ends with scenes from New Years Eve revelry and Jan. 1: whoo.) There isn’t an ending, a single resolution, to give away because the book is made of a set of disjointed individual stories. If a single resolution exists it is that Men in Space is about men occupying totally solitary trajectories, nearly indifferent to each other.

In reviews, much has been made of McCarthy’s way of novel-writing as challenge to linear narrative in realism and more realisitc. The narrative is disjointed, energetic but fragmented. In the noise of details, and the quicksilver speed of shuttling the reader from details that a single character experiences to omnipresent third person view, the effect is alienating and ultimately lonely. Perhaps loneliness that McCarthy evinces is truer to reality than traditional narrative. (This calls to mind an outstanding section in the book where two characters talk about replication in early Christian art, zography, and transcendence arising out of ritual.) I’m just not sure that this type of authenticity is what I want from a book.

On the radio the other day, I heard Ira Glass speaking to a mapmaker about his quest to map every bit of information possible onto a single map. Isn’t the purpose of a map, IG asked the man, to make sense of all possible information by choosing relevant information to show? I’ve always thought the same of fiction; isn’t its purpose to isolate a series of events, observations, from the white noise of routine –in order to get us someplace new? I’ve been thinking about this writing/editing process, in mapmaking and in fiction (linked in something I’ve been working on). Isn’t the beauty of fiction, poetry, etc. that it gets to make sense? For me, anyways, the answer is yes.

2013! 2013! May it bring wonderful things!

Happy new year.