The Book of Disquiet

Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet is like nothing I'd ever read before, and probably like nothing I'll ever read again. Pessoa was a flaneur (the short way to define this is "street walker", but that's not feasible, for obvious reasons. It means a cultured observer, who strolls throughout a city) in Lisbon during the first 30someodd years of the 20th century, but this book isn't quite what would be expected. Rather than a record of the various characters one encounters while walking, the bustle of the markets, the crowds in squares, public transport, the views and buildings, this is a diary of an inner life, slightly informed by these scenes.

Pessoa's dreamy, expansive work is divided into nearly 500 fragments, and nearly fifty short essays. A few are so short as to be aphorisms, but none stretch more than a few pages. This makes the book easy to swallow, but difficult to digest. It took me at least a month and a half to finish this, and I doubt I fully absorbed it all. Due to its structure, this isn't a book to read straight through a second time, and perhaps not even the first. Perhaps I'll build a randomizer to pick a passage.

Pessoa spends a lot of time dwelling on tedium and withdrawal from life, on how to experience reality, on how the weather, or the scenery, or a chance encounter makes him feel. Or not so much feel, as how these stimuli set his thoughts in a certain direction. It's a different way to think, that I think we'd all do well to delve into.

Tyrants

Marshall N. Klimasweski's Tyrants is an uneven collection of short stories, likely due to the stories being written over the course of several years. "Jun Hee" was first published in 1991 in The New Yorker, and "Nobile's Airship" was first published in 1999 in The Yale Review. I'm assuming that some of the stories are more recent than that, but I'm not going to check. Klimasewiski does not provide initial publication dates in the acknowledgments, and I don't feel the need to plug story/author names into Google (and it's not in the edition notice either. So it goes.)

"Nobile's Airship", which opens this collection, is unquestionably a highlight -- it follows Ugo Lago, a Fascist journalist, and his experiences in the days leading up to Nobile's expedition, as well as his experiences while accompanying said expedition. The shock of foreign culture and climate, his solitude as a passenger on a zeppelin, and how superfluous a writer rather than a (sailor? aeronaut? crew member?) is on an airship are very well conveyed. A coda of airship accidents and the end of Nobile's life is also well done. My major issue is the lack of punctuation for speech used here, which makes the text marginally more difficult to read. Since Klimasewiski's other stories do use quotation marks, I have to assume that this is a recent affectation that I cannot support, regardless of what Gertrude Stein may think. (Two novels that I have read and enjoyed that did not use quotation marks -- The Tango Singer, by Tomas Eloy Martinez, and Death with Interruptions, by Jose Saramago. Of course, that may be a function of the translation, and either of those gentlemen can write circles around Mr. Klimasewiski.) Regardless, "Nobile's Airship" is a fine story, but unfortunately not much of a harbinger of what is to come.

Following "Nobile's Airship", we have a trio of stories concerning a man and his relationship with his fiancee and her parents, taking his son in tow to a lovers' rendezvous, and finally the son's experiences with women and his memories of the father. These are crap, crap, and crap. This is followed by a surreal story about a woman's experiences with Stalin during the Second World War, which is a step up from the previous three stories, but isn't any great shakes. That's followed by another trio of stories, concerning a couple's relationship, and the stresses caused by being from different backgrounds, illnesses of parents, desires and dreams. I'd say this trio is a step up from the previous trio, but it fails to grab me. The final story is "Aeronauts", which I can't decide if I like or dislike -- it's not so much a story as it is a series of out-of-sequence short acts, as if from a play, interspersed with letters and commentary from the principals. It turns out that this story depicts a real personage, and much of the dialogue and letters are historical record, but fiction is interpolated into his life to color his acts appropriately. So what in actuality is poor planning, becomes in fiction a romantic and desperate beacon. While I did like the execution, I'm unsure if this cheapens the life of the historical personage depicted.

I really wanted to love this collection, especially after the beginning of "Nobile's Airship", but I just can't. I may be alone here -- the reviews on both LibraryThing and Amazon are largely positive, as are other reviews around the web. While there's some good stuff here (the opening story, parts of the other stories), this collection fails overall to make much of an impression on me. The title of the collection is meant to evoke how people act in the shadow of an autocrat, which helps the stories concerning Mussolini and Stalin, but the stories fall flat on their faces when confronted with the softer and more subtle tyrannies of sex and domesticity. There is material here to like, but I can't say that I'll be picking up Klimasewiski's next novel, unless I read something to change my mind in the interim.