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219 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1968
The crusades were a proper time in which to observe human nature – the pursuit of holiness for the sake of money, the use of torture for the sake of identity, a time of passionate care and commitment. Those who distributed pain were politicians; those who profited, saints. Either way life was not easy; unless you died young, which was recommended.
They were in love. They seemed a definition of this term – like dinosaurs of extinction. Love is out of date now because it is annoying to others; exposure causes embarrassment.
What had made Nietzsche say that he had murdered God was, the police alleged, a visit he had made to a brothel in Bonn twenty years earlier. There he had caught syphilis, did not marry, and went insane…
I remembered a fairy story by Oscar Wilde in which Narcissus looks into his pool and asks the water what it thinks of him; and the water answers that it sees its own reflection in his eyes…
I was reading Suetonius. In Suetonius, men and women do little except murder one another.
Love is Noise.The impossibility of life. The impossibility of love.
Love is silence.
In love you’re human.
In love you possess magical powers.
In love you shelter yourself.
In love, you expose yourself.
When God arrived in the Argentine he had his forged papers and remodelled nose and just the clothes he stood up in and nothing else...He lay out on the beach all day and watched the girls playing volley-ball. He read his obituaries.This book was published in 1968 and reading it in 2013 made me appreciate it a lot more since Mosley reminded me of my favorite books and writers. Apart from being a splendid example of metafiction, there is a strong reflection of Wittgenstein's Mistress in dreamy musings of characters, there is a poetic touch of Woolf’s prose in the italic sentences, there are endearing repetitions which Javier Marías so effortlessly pulls off in his works and there is the presence of Italo Calvino’s sense of acute observation in describing the intangibility of human emotions. So here’s a writer, who must have been a brilliant student and later on become an influential teacher of literature, of words, of art.
I have a terrible compulsion to do as much hurt as I can while I can. I think this is what love is, an attempt to get what you can't and then to destroy it. There's a shred of sanity left which tells you what's happening; but this doesn't help, it only means you can't escape it.
It isn’t our fault that everything works in opposites.
It was at these times that I did see what he meant about love being contained in some sort of impossibility, that we only possessed it when it was impossible.
"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence -- even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine'? If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you." [p 341]The latter reaction is considered the rare one, while the former is a more common source of anxiety, if not about the literal truth of recurrence then the idea that nothing is new. The anxiety about eternal recurrence comes, in my opinion, from our internalizing expectations (or desires) for both novelty and authenticity and indeed the division of authenticity into one kind which is conflated with novelty (so it's not just a copy of something "already done") and another kind conflated with accepted norms and tested truths (so it's not just "made up"). Why else must things become passe? Why must there be fashions? Why must movements, styles, schools, and approaches be revamped, rebooted, replaced, but eventually returned to? All fine and dandy if we're talking about clothes or art, altogether different if we are talking about human relations, human sensations, and human feeling, expecting a simultaneous originality and universality, unique novelty and timeless authenticity.
"The key problem here... This was obviously a difficult idea to pull off, but did seem to be a true literary equivalent of the impossible image: a representation of the fact that human beings seem inevitably to construct impossibilities and tragedies (such is their nature) but that when they recognize this (from some further viewpoint) they in some sense are absolved from the predicament. So—-the impossible predicament, in three dimensions, becomes possible if you can stand back (into a fourth) and represent it in art (in two)." [my bold]Yep. All you have to do is withhold names and present contradictory information. Unfortunately, this reader finds all that only a skosh more respectable than the old ...or was it all just a dream? ending. That would be utterly forgivable (to me) if the sentence-level writing had been more to my tastes, or if the philosophy hinted at by reference had resounded with more of the drama(s), or if it had been funny, or if thinking about these obscured interrelations of the stories hadn't revealed scenarios that seem a little like they hadn't been thought out by the author. In the quote above he makes the idea of "the girl 'liking unhappy endings'," seem very much like an afterthought. This, coupled with being separated by several chapters, makes it easier to understand how one could miss the startling hostility manifest if we imagine the truth, reconstructed, as Husband A says to his lover, Wife Two:
I wanted to write you something impossible, like a staircase climbing a spiral to come out where it started or a cube with a vertical line at the back overlapping a horizontal one in front. These cannot exist in three dimensions but can be drawn in two; by cutting out one dimension a fourth is created. The object is that life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality. A mirror is held to the back of the head and one's hand has to move the opposite way from what was intended.It's important to remember that writers are magicians. Their art always starts with deception. In this way, writing is closely related to love. In the last section of the book, the author--Mosley--who happens to be a master magician, weaves an allegory about a princess and a woodcutter. But the magician--Mosley--casts his spell over his tale and reveals them as the witch and magician they really were. Thus another romance starts with deception and ends in the deception of art. For we find out later--too late?--that the magician--woodcutter--and the witch--princess--are both on stage, performing a ridiculous tableau.
"What is the point of being a witch and a magician," said the magician, "if we cannot become something different?"Meanwhile back in the "real"/main story, the female lover disagrees:
I knew that he always thought that life could be refashioned and go on, but I thought that it should not. There are some things for which one cannot be forgiven.But the magician--Mosley, in this case--does believe in this refashioning. His mode of magicianship has always been this art of transformation--rabbits out of hats, if you will--the metaphor and the simile, and he has never been shy about either.
p16: She sat with her hands between her legs; like mimosa.And he's written his novel around this heavy-handed sleight of hand: story after story, the interlocking mechanism is at first unclear--maybe a connection is made by a similar comparison of a face to Cleopatra's, or a mention of a seaside town. At first the pieces do not add up, like a jigsaw puzzle in which you have focused too much on one problematic piece. By the end, you see that all the pieces do indeed fit, but the problem is now that they fit in too well, like a staircase that has connected itself back to its origin, making a convincing but impossible whole.
p14: She had a soft mouth which birds could peck crumbs off.
p215: Beyond the waves their heads kept appearing and disappearing like oil.
"Nietzsche said that everything goes round and round ... He said that everything eternally recurs; or rather that we should act as if everything did." My wife said "Why?" ... I said "Because this is the only way in which life is bearable." My wife looked disinterested. I said "As if everything that we do were such that we were going to go on doing it for ever."This is a theme in the book. The male idea of being able to repeat something over and over, and the female idea that some things cannot. Thus Mosley--magician-- repeats the age-old, almost impossible theme of love. Can it or can it not be repeated? Likewise can love be repeated or only the disposable actions of love. The idea of acting comes in often, artifice:
We had been sitting in the pub in London one day and I had asked--Then what is our point?--and he had said in his voice that suddenly became like an actor--To maintain ecstasy. (p. 208, emphasis mine)And the idea of a point. If the point is ecstasy, then love is just artifice, like writing. A set of mirrors to trick ourselves into thinking we are constantly at its height:
What I did not like was that for him life seemed to depend on complexity and flux: and this was not quite real, it was stimulated.This is a carefully constructed, cynically dosed conception of love, art, and war (if they are not the same thing) that may or may not have anything to do with reality. But I highly recommend you read it anyway.
"I have a terrible compulsion to do as much hurt as I can while I can. I think this is what love is, an attempt to get what you can't and then to destroy it. There's a shred of sanity left which tells you what's happening; but this doesn't help, it only means you can't escape it."Love: impossible to live with; impossible to live without - making life impossible either way? As another writer/character, in another story (A Journey Into The Mind) puts it:
"All life is impossible; you hope for reality."
"My sons were embarrassed.
They went downstairs like ambulance men."
I said "This is a fairy story. None of it is quite real."
She said "Do you think you're God?"
"Nietzsche said that everything goes round and round; have I told you this before?"
"He said that everything eternally recurs; or rather, that we should act as if everything did."
"As if everything we do were such that we were going to go on doing it for ever."
"All life is a struggle; then you come to the end of it."
When you fall in love you don't want to get what you want, or how could you be in love with it?Do we love out of narcissism? Masochism? Do we truly desire the one for whom we claim we would willingly lay down our life, or is there a more selfish motive at work? Why do we continually place ourselves in vulnerable positions, time and time again—and is not loving one of the most vulnerable of all positions?—despite the lacerations, the recollections, and the bodily wounds that would have it otherwise?
I wanted to write you something impossible, like a staircase climbing a spiral to come out where it started or a cube with a vertical line at the back overlapping a horizontal one in front. These cannot exist in three dimensions but can be drawn in two; by cutting out one dimension a fourth is created. The object is that life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality. A mirror is held to the back of the head and one's hand has to move the opposite way from what was intended.Obviously the above quote is important – it’s right there in the title of the book, and it’s quoted, in part, in the back copy of all the Dalkey editions of the book. I want to briefly discuss the quote in relation to the book, but first I need to touch on the structure of the novel.