Jim Grimsley

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have read the Seidensticker translation three times and this one by Royall Tyler once. The novel itself is superb and deserves its reputation in every way. It is a good idea to read more than one translation since more than one can be good, and each gives a new glimpse of the book. Borges wrote that this is the beauty of reading translations in the first place, since each translation brings something new. That is certainly the case in the Tyler version of the book, which does away with Seidensticker’s use of names in favor of something closer to the Japanese text, in which the identity of a character is often hinted at rather than made explicit. Genji is such a soft, flowery hero, clouded in perfume and surrounded by such lush finery. He becomes a menace at times, visiting a woman, wooing her, taking her to his home, sometimes by force; but in the novel she swoons, resists, swoons some more. I have heard this called the earliest novel in the world, and its author is a woman of the Imperial court. The book is difficult to describe, built out of intimate events, processions, celebrations, dances, feasts, poetry contests; the portrait of a life of consummate sensuality and beauty emerges. It is not a book for you if you are looking for an adventure story or if you don’t enjoy history, because the book is as much a history lesson (for me, anyway) as it is a masterful experience of fiction.

Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Ford is a puzzle for me; he has such a sublime sentence gift, and he maintains it at such a level. The series of books here is masterful in so many ways and puzzling in others. Never try to read it in a hurry and never try to hurry it. The leisure with which he forms this vision of the era of the Great War can be maddening, though in my case I gave way to it and learned to love the grace and fullness. Ford draws out the fullness of every moment, and there are many passages that I remember with a rare clarity, even though it has been a few years since I read the books. There is the long passage in the trenches and in the hotel in the middle novel, Christopher and Sylvia; there is Christopher’s brother in the third novel, having stopped speaking, lying abed under a tent outdoors; there are the parties in the first novel; there are more, too many to name really, so that the reading, in hindsight, proves its worth. If one can deal with the pace of the narrative, its intricate trodding through each moment, this is a wonderful experience. Masterful in many ways. But it has such a gut-deep flaw running all through it, the character of Sylvia, the utter venom with which she is written. There is so little balance to that portrait, even when Ford attempts sympathy for her. It’s not that she’s uncomplicated or a type; she is a character who is hated very deeply by her author. At least that what was what I thought. Spoiled the book for me, though I finished it, and still appreciated the artistry. This was the first time a book struck me in this way, though it’s happened much more often as I age.

Maurice by E.M. Forster
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Of the writers whom I admired most when I was younger, Forster is one whose luster has dimmed in peculiar ways. I know perfectly well that he wrote fine novels and thought them some of the finest ever when I first read them. They suited the romantic ideas I had in my twenties, when having love in one’s life appeared to mean everything. Then along came Maurice, a book that he had written in the early part of the century but kept from publication till after his death. It was a book that barely touched the kind of music in his other novels, for me. The fact that it was about men loving men should have made the reading of it a transcendent experience, but that was not what happened. I found it tepid. There was some aspect of my reaction to it that puzzled me; by then I had read other gay books that really did reach me – this would have been the mid 1970s when I was in college. What puzzled me most about Maurice was that Forster wrote it so long ago – 1914 is the date that I have read, though I am no scholar and have not researched whether this is correct. But he died in 1970. It’s likely correct that its publication at that time would have ended his career – but he stopped writing and publishing novels in the 1920s anyway. And it’s also true that braver souls did publish gay novels in that era; Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness is one example, from 1928. By the time he died, gay novels and novelists were stepping forward. What a boon it would have been if Maurice had been presented while he was still alive to talk about it, and about himself, and what he knew. I have no idea what his motives were but the fact of this timidity – when compared to the apparent courage of Maurice himself – spoiled the book utterly. I cared even less for the movie, and have not reread any of Forster other than his prescient story “The Machine Stops” in a very long time. It’s likely that Forster’s self-hatred touched my own and threatened me in some way. My admiration went underground. In my novel Dream Boy I echoed the ending of Maurice rather consciously, when my two boys in love disappear into the greenwood, just as Maurice did. I’m certain that my reaction is not at all fair. But one wants one’s heroes to be heroic, and Forster was not. This is the Forster I built up in my mind, and not the real man, who owed me nothing, who lived his life his own way, and I’m aware of all that. I suppose I feel guilty for liking this book so little, and for reasons that have less to do with the book than with its context. But there you have it.

In a German Pension: 13 Stories by Katherine Mansfield
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I encountered Mansfield’s stories when I read The Garden Party some years back and have decided to read more. This is her first collection of stories, and they are exactly what I want to read now: clear, concise, brief, without a moment wasted. She has an exactness that always pleases me when I encounter it in a writer; she begins with a sentence that makes a moment just so, and builds on it with writing so precise it feels as if it emerges out of my own consciousness, as though I am the one sitting at a dinner table with awkward company. The English narrator is critiquing the Germans and the Germans are being boorish about the English; this is a bit queasy at moments, but this is the way people see one another, and the date of the collection is 1911, just before those tensions erupt into mass carnage. There is nothing about the stories to dislike; they simply flow through, and touch at the ending, something that makes me close the book and think for a while. It is all done so easily that one nearly doesn’t notice. The stories are small. Does that matter? Not while I am in them, because the drama of the small is so much part of my own life now. I have a feeling that the stories are young, not fully formed – but I have another feeling, that I am projecting this onto the stories because I know this is an early collection. Am happy at the prospect of reading more.

The Oblique Place by Caterina Pascual Söderbaum
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A woman who is part Spaniard and part Swede grew up in a household in which a portrait of Hitler was a prominent and honored feature of the house; her father was a Spanish admirer of Hitler and supporter of fascists. This memory haunts the pages of this complex book. Söderbaum died after preparing this book for publication; it is a shame that there can be no more of her writing. But this book is one-0f-a-kind from the outset, and the consolation of that reminds me that she likely poured everything into the creation of this fiction. It certainly reads that way. This stream of consciousness in which she creates her novel is readable in spite of the length of the sentences and paragraphs, and the work one puts into the unpacking of the language makes the experience unforgettable, or at least did so for me. I did not expect to like the book when I began it but found myself drawn into it more and more. She is writing about familiar material, the trauma of Nazism, using as her touchstone an album of photographs from her childhood that, like the Hitler portrait, has grown more ominous with time. She slowly uncovers her own connection to atrocities, journeying into the past through her study of the photographs and travels with her family to some of the places where these atrocities occur. The book is filled with beautiful images of light and landscape, a dreamy and sensual revisiting of a past that remains horrific even when viewed from beautiful vistas and peaceful modern shores. A big, ambitious book that succeeds on its own terms.