Gonna give you my love
Being in Japan for the last 8 months, where I’ve been not just isolated from the world, but cut off by language from most of the people here, has increased my sense of the importance of family and friendship. In the past I kept to myself, turned down invitations in favor of quiet nights at home, stewed in loneliness, and kept at bay the people I ought to have been close to. I wasted time on media escapism, time I should have spent on conversation, dinners, drinking and dancing.
When I left, I’d been stuck in life and love for a long time, and the only way of breaking free that I could find was to cut loose, to leave without a plan for coming back. Had I chosen a place worth living in, maybe I’d have stayed. But my old home is, from what I hear, among the best of cities. I chose my destination poorly, but my action wisely. Eight months in what may as well have been outer space cleared out my complacency, despair, and my reluctance to live boldly.
There are people I didn’t pay enough attention to while I was in Melbourne, and people I didn’t say goodbye to properly. There’s no excuse, but I’ll try to make amends. I’ll be back next Friday: expect to hear from me.
How to Be Good (review)
Nick Hornby, How to Be Good (London: Penguin, 2001), 244pp. ★★★ (3 stars)
I got this as a Christmas present from Mum and Dad: unusual, since in Australia I’ve got so many unread books that I never read anything that people give me, and I think they know that. But they rightly guessed that books, of which I have few here, would cheer me up in Japan, where I am thoroughly miserable, and they were right.
It’s fitting, then, that the protagonist of this book comes closest to happiness at the end of the story, when, reading a biography of Vanessa Bell, she realises:
It is the act of reading itself I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn’t stale, that hasn’t been breathed by my family a thousand times already. (242)
This is Katie Carr, the doctor who, some 240 pages earlier, told her husband that she didn’t like living with him any more and wanted a divorce. Trouble is, the divorce didn’t take. Her obnoxious, angry, and sarcastic husband, David, first refused to acknowledge it, then underwent a miscellaneous spiritual conversion that drove him to make the lives of the downtrodden better, at the cost of making his family’s life chaotic and miserable. Finally, David’s fervour having receded, Katie rediscovers reading while settling back into a marriage that acts as perfect evidence for her despair at life. “Anyway, who lives a beautiful life that I know?”, she asks,
It’s no longer possible, surely, for anyone who works for a living, or lives in a city, or shops in a supermarket, or watches TV, or reads a newspaper, or drives a car, or eats frozen pizzas. A nice life, possibly, with a huge slice of luck and a little spare cash. And maybe even a good life, if… Well, let’s not go into all that. But rich and beautiful lives seem to be a discontinued line. (241)
In between her first attempt to leave her husband, and the final page on which she gazes out into the emptiness of space, into which escapes her last flicker (for the book) of family feeling, Katie lives through a veritable maelstrom of family drama and social activism. Yet both she and her husband emerge from it as emotionally dead as they were before. It’s this deadness, apparently, that Katie and David try to compensate for. First they do it with anger, then with attempts to be “good” by taking in homeless children, bringing crazy patients home for dinner. Through it all, they wallow in the compulsory bucketloads of in-bad-faith middle-class guilt.
How to Be Good appears, at first, to really ask: “how can one live a ‘good’ life”, and to do it at the same time as lampooning middle-class, bleeding-heart leftism and charity. And although Hornby manages to extract some laughs, an enjoyable read, and some clever writing from David and Katie’s respectively willing and unwilling adventures in philanthropy, this is one of those books that struggles to know what it is about, what its point and message is. So, too, Katie and David fail to discover what it is that they are or should be about: hence Katie’s eventual belief that beautiful lives are no longer even possible.
The problem, I’d venture to say, is that they chose the wrong path. The trick to a rich life is to be not good, but great; to do what is beautiful and what enriches oneself, instead of what helps others. Katie and David ultimately lack the imagination and the guts to find and do that which will enlarge them, and sink back into the drab life they began the book attempting to escape. And that is very ugly and depressing indeed. The lost will find no worthy solutions here to whatever malaise they feel.
They may, however, find some solace in Hornby’s very convincing depictions of everyday spiritual deadness and romantic unfulfilment. Several passages about Katie and David’s relationship breakdown reminded me very much of the dullness and the mounting resentment that beset my last relationship. In this area, Hornby has a stunning eye for detail and for the feeling of withered loves. While there’s little cheer to be had here, it’s in this observational element that How to be Good becomes worth reading, a book with something to teach. It is a warning, perhaps, against letting our feelings and our loves die once, since they are not easily resurrected.
When Nietzsche Wept (review)
Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept: A novel of obsession (1992; repr. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1993).
It’s sometimes argued that Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical work demonstrates an interest in psychology, introspection, and relations of power and desire, that in some way prefigures the development of psychoanalysis. As a Nietzsche fan who’s also read a moderate amount on psychoanalysis, I’m not sure that a real connection or affinity exists between the two bodies of ideas. Nevertheless, such an affinity is assumed as the basis of this novel, which imagines what might have happened had Josef Breuer tried to test his “talking cure,†developed in his treatment of Bertha Pappenheim, on Nietzsche in the Viennese winter of 1882.
In the novel, Breuer takes Nietzsche as a patient at the behest of Lou Salomé, who believes that Nietzsche’s obsession with her has driven him to the brink of suicide. Given Nietzsche’s extremely solitary and independent nature, she advises Breuer to keep the treatment a secret even from his patient. Breuer tries a variety of strategies to lure Nietzsche into treatment, eventually trying the subterfuge of exchanging treatments. Breuer will treat, at a private clinic, Nietzsche’s epic attacks of migraine, while Nietzsche tries to develop a philosophical treatment for Breuer’s despair.
Breuer soon finds that his despair, and his obsession with his hysterical patient Bertha, is far more serious than he imagined, and spends less and less time as Nietzsche’s doctor, and more as his patient. Nietzsche’s proto-psychoanalysis of Breuer takes occupies most of the novel, giving Yalom a chance to work much of Nietzsche’s early philosophy into the dialogue. While his evocation of Breuer’s life as a wealthy doctor in late-19th-century Vienna is interesting in itself, it’s Nietzsche’s words (often near-quotations from his books) that make the novel shine. It’s for this reason that while When Nietzsche Wept is an extremely compelling book at times, it’s hard to give Yalom all the credit. What he’s really doing, when not painting historical portraits of Vienna and of famous figures like Nietzsche, Breuer, Salomé and Sigmund Freud, is setting up a stage on which Nietzsche gets to speak.
So, for people who aren’t yet acquainted with Nietzsche’s philosophy, this is a good fictional introduction to the man and his thought. While a better book for finding out about Nietzsche is Thus Spoke Zarathustra, reading it requires stamina and dedication. That book, though, is among the few I have ever read that has truly changed the way I live my life. Nietzsche’s gift to anyone who reads his words is to hand them control over themselves and their destiny.
When Nietzsche Wept is a pleasant introduction to some powerful, possibly life-altering ideas. 6/10
