The Tempest / Foe

[This was written much earlier, on the 30th June 2013. I'll post my thoughts on the more recent books I've read soon.] 

Recently, I have been extremely lucky to have a streak of productive reading, finishing quite a few books that were previously merely gathering dust on my “to-read” list, due to a lack of time or pure laziness (mostly the latter). I rather guiltily suspect (no, admit that) the sense of happiness that I currently feel is quite akin to that of a couch potato experiencing a post-workout high. Nevertheless, to the books!

The Tempest, William Shakespeare

“We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” 

One of the things that struck me as I finished reading The Tempest was how tightly and intricately crafted it is compared to Shakespeare’s other plays.* It is one of his few plays** that observe all the three Aristotelian unities: action (the main plot is Prospero’s plan to reclaim his usurped dukedom), space (everything happens on the island), time (the whole play takes place in real time, less than one day). The result is a sense of tightness in the plot, which is further strengthened by the fact that Prospero almost single-handedly drives the play's action by manipulating all the characters to fulfil his purpose: he is the one who creates the eponymous storm, gets Miranda and Ferdinand together, and gets Alonso to restore him as Duke of Milan.

Curiously, Prospero's dominance in the play reminded me of another Shakespearean character, the crafty Iago, who displays a similar skilfulness in exploiting everyone around him to advance his grand strategy of sabotaging Othello. They are also similar in that a sense of having suffered injustice is a key source of motivation for both characters' actions as well. Of course, while Prospero has indeed suffered injustice by being usurped and then exiled by his brother Antonio, Iago's claims of injustice in being passed over for promotion are much more tenuous. A scrupulousness of means also differentiates the two. Not content on solely destroying Othello, Iago displays a strong willingness to take revenge on anyone for the lightest of provocations, be it Desdemona, Cassio, Roderigo (whom he kills after he ceases to be useful to him) and even his wife Emilia. In contrast, Prospero specifically sets out to make sure no one is unharmed in his plans to right the wrongs he has suffered, seen in how he very clearly (and painstakingly) instructs Ariel such that the tempest created wrecks the ship but leaves no person harmed, “not a hair perish’d”. Finally, they also differ in their respective plans' ultimate outcomes. While Emilia thwarts Iago's sinister plans by revealing the truth, Prospero successfully defuses all potential disruptions, be it Antonio and Sebastian’s conspiracy to kill Alonso, or Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban’s attempts to kill him. Prospero remains fully in control throughout, thanks to his powerful magic. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that the general movement of the characters throughout the play is a “moving-in” towards Prospero (from all the different corners of the island) like many dots being drawn towards a central point. Indeed, the story ends with Prospero asking them to “draw near”. I thought Prospero's manipulation of the trajectory of the characters' paths across the island is highly symbolic of the overall control that he wields over everybody else in the play.

It is due to Prospero's dominance as the main driving force of the play’s plot, as well as his apparent omniscience in knowing all that happens in the play, that has led some critics to suggest that Shakespeare wrote the Tempest as an allegory for playwriting (with himself, the playwright, being represented by Prospero as the principal architect of the story). It certainly seems very plausible. Links are frequently drawn in the play between Prospero’s magical arts with theatrical illusion, especially in Prospero’s epilogue, where his renunciation of magic and resultant powerlessness is much like how playwrights and actors lose their skills of illusion once the play ends. 

[On a tenuously related note, this seems eerily similar to Inception, where the film’s crafting of a dream has been compared by critics as a metaphor for the crafting of a film itself. How meta!]

I find the Tempest very interesting in its use of the pastoral space. As with many other of Shakespeare’s plays, the country setting of the island provides a conducive environment where tensions and conflict between the characters can be resolved in contrast to the moral corruption of the court (which was where Prospero was overthrown in the first place). It is only after Prospero reclaims his rightful dukedom and marriage successfully unites the families of Naples and Milan that the entourage then sets off back to Italy. A comparison a professor made online to an equivalent situation in the modern world seemed to me very apt; Prospero is akin to the business manager who flies the conflicted parties to a country club resort to smoothen relations and seal the deal.***

I also must express my admiration for the intricacy of the play’s structure, where dualities shimmer throughout like a series of mirrors. Many of the characters can be conceived in multifold pairings: Alonso/Prospero (the two dukes), Miranda/Ferdinand (their respective children), Gonzalo/Ariel (their assistants), Caliban/Ariel (two contrasting servants to Prospero), Caliban/Ferdinand (parallels in carrying wood for Prospero in Act II Scene II and Act III Scene I), Prospero/Sycorax (‘white’ vs. ‘black’ magic), Miranda/Caliban (characters who were taught by Prospero, but with very different results), the stormy arrival vs. the calm departure, etc. Certainly I would find it hard to believe if this complex symmetrical structure was a result of pure accident rather careful thought and design on Shakespeare’s part.

I shall stop here, but if you’re looking to read more of Shakespeare’s plays I would really recommend The Tempest. It is not as long and as intimidating as Hamlet, though working through the text is part of the fun too, right?

Foe, J. M. Coetzee

“An aversion came over me that we feel for all the mutilated. Why is that so, do you think? Because they put us in mind of what we would rather forget: how easily, at the stroke of a sword or a knife, wholeness and beauty are forever undone? Perhaps. But toward you I felt a deeper revulsion. I could not put out of mind the softness of the tongue, its softness and wetness, and the fact that it does not live in the light; also how helpless it is before the knife, once the barrier of teeth has been passed. The tongue is like the heart, in that way, is it not?”

Foe is a brilliant and compelling reimagination of Robinson Crusoe, told from the perspective of a castaway, Susan Barton, who is trying to get her story of her life on the island with Cruso and Friday written down and published by the writer Daniel Foe in England. Coetzee has always been a writer with a sleek style, and reading Foe was definitely a treat in that aspect.****

I will not try to summarise the plot, but what I found particularly interesting was the twists on the original story of Robinson Crusoe. Coetzee has inverted the perspective of the tale from one told by "Cruso" to that of a hitherto unmentioned/unknown female castaway, and in this version, Friday is also tongueless.

That which is really intriguing about the novel is not Susan's life on the island itself, which seems rather bleak and difficult, but her attempts to tell her story of her life on the island to others without having it being twisted into something inauthentic, something that is false to her understanding. In this sense, Foe is very much concerned with the dynamics of power behind storytelling. In letting Daniel write her story, Susan feels increasingly powerless as he threatens to take over the narrative, ignoring what she finds important in her own story (her search for her lost daughter in Brazil before being cast away on the island) and distorting it with his own fabulations about Cruso. The tongueless Friday is also a haunting presence in the novel; unable to speak his mind, he compels Susan to speculate on what he thinks and remembers, perhaps suggesting to us the moral imperative of speaking out for the powerless, which is also simultaneously fraught with the danger of distorting what they actually wish to say. What Friday actually thinks we never find out, for Susan's attempts to teach him to write and understand words all end in failure - Friday remains a disturbing void in the story to the very end.

Foe ends with a beautifully enigmatic section (Part IV) which has become renowned for being notoriously inscrutable. I’ve read one online review that interprets it as the symbolic enactment of the voice of the poetic imagination, which sounds really eloquent, though I'm not sure what it exactly means. (Isn't quite a lot of literary analysis like that?)

My two cents worth is that I suspect the last segment of Foe is not meant to be understood, at least, in rational terms. It is a passage that soars above meaning with its surreal, otherworldly beauty, which can only be taken in through the logic of dreams as a subjective experience of consciousness where Susan tries to imagine and sympathise with what exactly goes on in Friday's mind. 

I did enjoy the ending very much, which, quite frankly, is one of the most beautifully written sections of a novel that I have read, a testament to Coetzee’s understated but always graceful prose. Of course, like most, if not all, of Coetzee's novels, the ending raises even more questions than it answers, but then again, perhaps an open-ended conclusion would have been the most fitting for a novel so concerned with questions about the control and interpretation of narrative in the eyes of others.

*Disclaimer: I am not saying that Shakespeare's other plays are not intricately crafted! I'm just saying that his other plays seem more expansive in their scope and structure (some of his plays span years in its plot, notably The Winter's Tale) and have a different kind of beauty compared to the almost geometrically polished structure of the Tempest.
**A Midsummer's Night Dream also happens in less than a day, but it does not observe the unity of plot nor of space (it is set in both the forest and in Athens).
***I concede that this analogy fails to the extent that 1) an apparently life threatening storm is certainly different from a first-class plane ticket to a business meeting; 2) the commercialised country club resort differs greatly from the environment of the island, which is haunting, filled with spirits, and generally speaking, much more treacherous...
****I really love Coetzee's works. I highly, highly recommend Diary of a Bad Year (which is really underrated), Slow Man, and Disgrace. Please read it, and if you love his stuff, spread the message! Good literature deserves to be shared and I don't think enough people know about Coetzee!

***

"Hope deferred maketh the something sick, who said that?" - Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett

I must admit that I currently feel very, very jealous looking at my friends' photos of their fabulous adventures studying and living abroad. How I long to travel, it is like a burning ache in my heart, this desire to roam and discover! 

For the moment I live a circumscribed life. A wider life is only possible through books. This is what they cannot take away; my imagination, even if I cannot share what I think, even if I must keep it alone.

Surely it is not by coincidence that every night I dream of elsewhere. Anywhere but here.

I cannot live such an unfree life for so long. Thank god it is not forever. At least I have been spared that.

A sweeter life in Moscow

[This article is an English translation that I have made of an article by Marie Jégo in the French newspaper Le Monde, "Plus belle la vie à Moscou", 6 September 2013. It is accessible here: http://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2013/09/06/plus-belle-la-vie-a-moscou_3472430_3214.html

Instead of literally translating the article, I have opted to prioritise meaning. This means that the phrasing might be quite different from the original French.]

***

America has its Big Apple, Russia has its Big Cabbage*:  Moscow, its sprawling capital where 80% of the country's financial wealth is concentrated. The showcase of Putinian Russia has gotten back on its feet with the revenue from gas and petrol sales. With 12 million inhabitants, more than 8% of the country's total population, Moscow is like a state within a state.

"Moscow is not Russia," the Muscovites always say, concerned about preserving their privileged status. The state does more for them than for the rest of Russia, spending on average nearly four times more for the province (3600 euros/person/year in the capital, 950 elsewhere).

The "Big Cabbage" excites provincial appetites. It is like a magnet for the citizens of the former "Sister Republics" of the USSR, exempted from visas. Endowed with a  incomparably better quality of life than the other ex-Soviet capitals, Moscow is an El Dorado for the men and women of what was previously called the "Near Abroad", that is, the states situated in the periphery of the Federation.

The new train stations regurgitate an armada of workers every day - Ukrainians, Moldovans, Belorussians, Armenians, Kyrgyzstanis, Uzbeks, Tajiks - who disembark in search of small jobs to support their families that remain in their countries. For Tajikistan, a poor ex-Soviet country in Central Asia that borders Afghanistan, remittances make up 40% of its GDP.

A worrying demographic haemmorhage

The five Muscovite airports tirelessly transport businessmen, tourists, and students that come to try their luck or to entertain themselves in the "fat capital of a starved Russia", as described by poet Dmitry Bykov. As a result, in contrast to the rest of the Federation, the victim of a worrying demographic haemmorhage, Moscow has seen its population grow by 11% in the previous 8 years.

Immense, noisy and colourful, with its babushkas that sell kittens on Arbat Street, its Azerbaijani vendors of dried fruit and groceries in Dorogomilovski Market, its luxury boutiques on Petrovska Street, the city is also terribly modern, capable of making its European homologues turn pale with envy.

Wi-Fi access is almost universal; it is free in the airports, the circular line of the metro and in 14 public parks in the capital. The restaurants are open every hour, day and night; the theatres and the concert halls are packed full house; trendy places sprout like mushrooms.

After the transformation of the decommissioned factories Artplay, Vinzavod and Krasnyi Oktiabr into spaces for exhibitions and recreation, Garaj, a contemporary art museum, has seen its day, established recently in Gorky Park. A few months ago, a documentary cinema centre opened on Zoubovski Boulevard. In 2012, four offices were mobilised to study the redevelopment of land previously occupied by automobile factory ZIL in Moscow's South. The former cultural house in ZIL has been transformed into a centre for urban studies.

Trendy Muscovite youth are fond of this type of places. "There is now a public life in Moscow without password or right of entry, where anybody who wishes to participate can do so. In the past, we went to the museum or the cinema; now, we dance in the parks, we are passionate about urban planning. And such happiness it is to show strangers that life is hectic, that Muscovites are on speaking terms, that the city has become more open," rejoices Anastasia Lipatova, 25 years old, proofreader of Aficha magazine.

In these five preceding years, the city has become more practical, more comely, more gentle too. Want to do shopping at midnight? No problem, the majority of supermarkets are open 24/7. You no longer need to reassure yourself, before crossing the road, that you would not be pulverised by one of the many cars turning at breackneck speed around the Koltso, a very noisy and polluted eight-lane expressway located well in the city centre. Car drivers have slowly learnt to respect the pedestrian.

Poverty prowls around the train stations, but wealth is spread over streets of downtown, luxury cars and chauffeurs. (...)**

The evil tongues which claim that the Muscovite is "arrogant", "stingy", "evil", and "unfeeling", making up 60% of those interviewed in a survey by the Levada Centre published on 31st August, must be wrong.

Certainly, the guards of the escalators in the metro always have a surly air, enclosed in their glass cabins where it is written: "We do not provide assistance", but the quality of service has improved altogether. Gone are the waiters that snub you, the sellers that browbeat you; friendliness is pretty much here, even if a smile is not yet the right of the city.

A Copernican revolution has taken place with the transformation of Gorky Park, a vast green space that spreads itself along the length of Moscow until the hill of Mount Moineaux, where it is said that Napoleon Bonaparte had scornfully eyed the city destroy itself with fire in order to not let itself fall into the hands of their French enemies in September 1812.

There's a revolution opposite Gorky Park too

The Park, reputed to be a real cut-throat area in the 1990s, has become the preferred place for all the confused generations of Muscovites. Couples go there with their children to play volleyball, petanque, ping-pong, to go cycling, ride a pedal-boat, or to tan themselves in their swimsuits along the banks, fitted in the style of the "Paris Plages". Secondary and university students dash here after classes. Seated on the banks in the shade of the tall oaks, they feverishly check their tablet PCs. "Gorky Park is the best thing to happen to us lately," reckons Ania Grichina, 21 years old, journalism student at Moscow State University.

There's a revolution opposite Gorky Park too. The park with statues named Museon has had a makeover, with chaises longues, small cafes and open-air film screenings during summer nights when the weather permits. "Urban planning is in fashion. It all started two years ago, in the time of protests on the street and of the civic movement against the powers-that-be. This preoccupation with urban planning was partly stimulated even earlier by the Strelka Institute (specialising in design and development) and by Village magazine", recalls Dmitri Levenets, 23 years old, civic rights activist and founder of a project to improve the environment, and above all, road infrastructure.

Slayer of corruption, Dmitri has joined for a moment the team of Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin's No. 1 critic, who contested the mayoral elections for Moscow planned for 8 September. The charismatic lawyer Navalny, enfant terrible of the blogosphere, will cross swords with his adversary Sergei Sobyanin, the current mayor and protégé of Vladimir Putin, whose inefficient management Navalny denounces.

Endowed with an annual budget of $52 million (39.6 million Euros), Moscow has transformed itself, but "the quality of life is still very poor", affirms Alexei Navalny during one of his meetings with the electorate. According to a study recently conducted by the Strategic Partners Group, related to the state bank Sberbank, 64% of Muscovite interviewed deplored the pollution, traffic jams and piteous state of health services. "When it rains, puddles form everywhere on the sidewalks and roadways because the drainage system is poorly made. It's unbearable," explains the blogger Maria Gontcharova, 23 years old.

Anastasia Stognei, 23 years old, a former student of Voronej, established in Moscow since 5 years ago, deplores the absence of nearby shops: "Looking for matches at Auchan's place, in a shopping mall devilishly far away? No thanks." She laments that the road near to her place at the metro station Akademitcheskaya is rebuilt every year: "It makes a lot of dust and noise." For Dmitri Levenets, who has studied the issue closely, road repair is one of the most juicy activities from the perspective of corruption: "The functionaries make do with low quality materials without any regard for quotations so that ever year, they must do it again."

There remains much to be done to make Moscow a city where one can live well. The authorities assure that they do not skimp on their means: 185 million of euros have been invested over three decades. Gone is the metropolis, bloated from morning till night by kilometres of traffic jams, gone are the packed metros and trolleybuses, gone are the cars parked in double and triple file. Regulated parking, new metro stations, tramways and extra buses are here, and perhaps even a Moscow on which boats and their passsengers could navigate during the six months of the year when the river is not frozen.

Inspired by Paris, the mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, "taciturn" but "efficient" according to his mentor Vladimir Putin, wants to realise the vision of a "Great Moscow" and shift its administration to distant suburbs. The Moscow Urban Forum, a exposition organised each year by the city hall to present the capital of the future, also has grand projects for Moscow. "We wish to ensure that Moscow would have a light Venetian touch by the end of the year", anticipates Andrei Vladimirovitch Charonov, the adjunct mayor in charge of the Forum. Next up: Gondolas in Moscow?

Footnotes:

*"Chou", in addition to its meaning as "cabbage", is also a term of endearment in French, akin to "sweetheart" or "darling".
**I was unsure how to understand the sentence, so I only translated the first segment.

On the purpose of this blog

Dear Reader(s)

I have started this blog for 2 reasons:

1) To write about what I love: Books, be it fiction or non-fiction;

2) To practice my French, which is definitely getting rusty after I stopped taking lessons 2 years ago.

As such, you will find here my rambling thoughts on the former and my shoddy attempts at translation on the latter. 

Perhaps it is no coincidence that the word for translator in Italian (traduttore) is remarkably similar to the word traitor (traditore).

I have many interests, mostly in the humanities and social sciences, for instance: literature, history, economics, politics, philosophy, languages, etc.

I have started blogs before, most of which have, unfortunately, crumbled into a state of disuse within a month. I hope that this will not be the case for this blog.

Thank you for your good humour.