The Waves by Virginia Woolf
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven
Critics of Robbe Grillet point out that his mode of storytelling fixates on the listing of things seen, in an objective, non-allegorical, “definitive interrogation of the object”. Barthe describes his Grillet's style as “man’s direct experience of what surrounds him without his being able to shield himself with a psychology, a metaphysic, or a psychoanalytic method in his combat with the objective world he discovers”. Bruce Morrisette explained that there was an “absence of any psychological analysis”, “a rejection of introspection, interior monologues or thoughts”. While this is true in the strictest sense, Grillet does a marvelous job of positioning the reader behind the narrator’s eyes. By explaining what the narrator is looking at, whether in real time or in memory, Grillet allows the reader to fill in any blanks psychologically for the character. As the reader looks at what the narrator looks at, he can’t help himself but ask why is the narrator looking at that? What is the purpose of describing that object? Is what the narrator describing even real? By answering the questions that are raised, the reader is able to deduce the thoughts, actions, and emotional state of the narrator.
For example, the narrator starts out by describing his house and the movements of A (presumably his wife). She has something in her hands, but the narrator isn’t sure what it is but infers that it is “probably…a sheet of paper”. He is only able to surmise that it is probably a sheet of paper because he notices a sheet of paper later in the narration that gives him suspicion. So we can tell that this narration is not “Now” as is indicated in the beginning paragraph, but a recreation in his memory.
Later having drinks with Franck, the neighbor, A... leans over to listen to Franck, but the narrator can’t distinguish what is said and decides that Franck is “probably thanking her”. It is as if the narrator is simply trying to come up with the most plausible, most benign exchange he can think of. There are a number of instances where the narrator is clearly trying to rebuild scenes, thinking through details which might give him clues about…something. “Memory succeeds…in reconstituting several movements of her right hand and her lips…which might be considered significant…which, on reflection, does not prove beyond a doubt that she tasted the soup today. Now the boy clears away the plates. It then becomes impossible to check again the stain in A…’s plate--or their absence, if she has not served herself.”
This passage not only points out the inconsistencies and ambiguities of memory, but also brings up the motif of stains that are presented throughout the story. There are some marks left on a sheet of writing paper, oil stains left by Franck’s car, even the glow of Franck's shirt in the dying light of dusk standing out against the dark wall, but of primary interest is the stain left by a centipede Franck smashed on the wall one night at dinner. The details of this incident is told over and over in detail, although it happened “at the beginning of the month, perhaps the month before, or later.” Each time the incident is recalled, more incriminating evidence is revealed. The first time, the narrator says “A…seems to be breathing a little faster, but this may be an illusion. Her left hand gradually closes over her knife…The hand with the tapering fingers has clenched around the knife handle”. Another time, he amends “The hand with the tapering fingers has clenched into a fist on the white cloth.” Then, “The hand with tapering fingers has clenched into a fist on the white cloth. The five widespaced fingers have closed over the palm with such force that they have pulled the cloth with them”, the creases of which spread out until they touch Franck’s hand where he rests it next to a “knife blade [which] has left on the cloth a tiny, dark, elongated, sinuous stain surround by more tenuous marks” before Franck's hand rises to push down a suspicious letter in his shirt pocket. Finally, the incident is recalled in a different setting altogether, being in the bedroom not the dining room: “he comes back toward the bed…The hand with the tapering fingers has clenched into a fist on the white sheet. The five widespread fingers have drawn the cloth with them…” The narrator may only be describing what he remembers, but it clear that his memory reflects his psychology: the incident of the centipede killing goes from incidental to incriminating.
Even the description of the stain reveals the narrator’s state of mind: “the outline seems indelible. It has no relief, none of the thickness of a dried stain which would come off if scratched at with a fingernail. It looks more like brown ink impregnating the surface layer of the paint.” “It has no relief” describes the nature of stain but also reflects the attitude of the narrator: he, too, has no relief from the thoughts that keep running through his mind. The ink “impregnating” the surface once again reveals that the narrator feels there is something sexual going on.
The killing of the centipede becomes the focus of the narrator, but its precise significance eludes us. Is the centipede the affair, the stain on an otherwise serviceable relationship? Or is the centipede the narrator, causing consternation in A and quickly dispatched without mercy by Franck? Or does the killing of the centipede symbolize the way Franck can meet the needs of A, swift and sure, while the narrator simply sits and watches? Each reader, perhaps, gives a different interpretation and hence the story's meaning and impact changes with each reader.
As significant as the descriptions of these stains are in the story, the efforts the narrator goes through to eradicate them is just as telling. Some stains are simple to erase, just adjusting the angle of perspective--“It is easy to make this spot disappear thanks to the flaws in the rough window”, while others require real effort, such as the removal of the centipede stain that requires an eraser and a razor: “There now remains only a vaguely outlined paler area, without any apparent depression of the surface, which might pass for an insignificant defect in the finish, at worst.” One can’t help but wonder if the narrator is thinking of using some sort of tool to extirpate the interloper in his marriage. “The precision for the tool permits the area exposed to its effect to be carefully determined.” How can the narrator remove these thoughts, the apparent treachery and all that it entails, and restore his relationship to what it was before, to make this all “insignificant”, “without any apparent depression”? At one point the narrator describes a car crash with Franck inside, the “car immediately bursts into flames…It is the sound the centipede makes”. This “observation”, another memory that is apparently only imagined, is probably one of the closest clues we get to the true feelings of the narrator.
Interestingly, it is not the centipede stain that is so hard to erase but marks left on the blue paper. This is tangible evidence that she has written to Franck something secret, something that she has not shared with the narrator, that she has orchestrated a miscommunication with the servant to maneuver the narrator out of the room so she could deliver it to Franck, and that Franck then tried to hide in his shirt pocket. It is this interchange more than any other that causes the narrator to then rethink all that has gone before and after. The remaining evidence, the “two short pen strokes” appear to resist both the eraser and the razor, “doubtless because they were made too heavily. Unless a new word, skillfully arranged to cover up these two unnecessary strokes, replaces the old one on the page, the traces of black ink will still be visible there.” What is that new word? What will replace the suspicion, jealousy, and uncertainty?
Another way that the author allows us to glimpse inside the thoughts of the narrator is to follow his observations. As he waits for his wife to come home that fateful night when she and Franck had “car trouble” and had to spend the night, the narrator reflects more on the sounds of things around him, the insects and animals “shrill and short”, the kerosene lamp “it’s sound plainative, high pitched, somewhat nasal”, and most tellingly, the sound of trucks that rumble by : “it is moving just as fast as the preceding one, which for a moment might cause it to be confused with a touring car…” All the while the narrator observes that “A…should have been back long since” and reasons they might be delayed from “engine trouble” to “driver’s fatigue”. As the reader reads the descriptions of all these sounds, he can feel the how intently the narrator is listening for his wife’s return, his anxiety as he waits in vain.
As the night progresses, the description turns to A’s bedroom and the content of her drawers, as though the narrator is looking for something, some evidence perhaps of the infidelity he imagines when “the light suddenly goes out”. In the absence of the light, the abrupt cessation of the kerosene’s hissing, the narrator seems overcome by the darkness and silence: “the faintest movements become impracticable”. Even his ability to measure, or describe becomes hindered in the “total darkness”. Not only can the reader discern the apparent depression and despair of the narrator in that moment, but the reader can also see that the incessant descriptions, of the rows of banana trees in the plantation, the shadow length of the columns, the explication of insect behavior, all of it is a means of distraction for the narrator as he attempts not to see what he thinks he sees: his wife falling in love with another man.
Grillot’s style does more than experiment with the style of narration. The entire act of taking reflection, motivation, even the ubiquitous “I” from the story reveals the feeling of powerlessness the narrator has about what is happening. He is reduced to simply a bystander, peering through the blinds as it were, grasping at memories and trying to piece together the story from snippets of conversations and moments of observations. He is like the workmen in the plantation surrounding the termite-ridden logs, looking at the problem from all the angles, and yet remaining motionless. Are his observations true? What was it that he did see? What does all of it mean? He constantly questions himself--”it may…be false, entirely made up,...or even imaginary”.
Grillet has not removed psychology from his story, rather he has left the precise motivations, anxieties, and conclusions up to the reader to puzzle out using the narrator’s account to provide the clues. Using vocabulary, time shifting, and motifs the reader is able to not only deduce what happened but what the narrator’s feelings are, and empathize with him as if the reader were the narrator himself, inside his brain, re-living all of the true, false, imaginary observations. Grillet does not tell us the psychology of his narrator, he allows the reader to live it with him.
MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood
Another Man's War: The Story of a Burma Boy in Britain's Forgotten African Army by Barnaby Phillips
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
Something in the Water by Catherine Steadman
Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Midnight at Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
The Beantown Girls by Jane Healey
Colonel Chabert / Atheist's Mass by Honoré de Balzac
The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance by Ross King
Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life by Adam Phillips
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Fever by Mary Beth Keane
Macbeth by William ShakespeareWilliam Faulkner used this quote from the Odyssey as inspiration for the title of his book As I Lay Dying: “As I lay dying the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes for me as I descended into Hades” The speaker in the Odyssey is bitter because he would rather not see and experience the sights on the way to hell. As I Lay Dying too has myriad of eyes open and watching as Addie dies and then as her body is taken to her home-town of Jefferson to be buried. Each chapter, with its multitude of characters, watching and looking, sees what is before them in different angles, different perspectives, different motivations. From the portentous eye of the sun to the fish’s eye covered with dust, this novel is full of watchful eyes and eyes that are blinded by greed, fear, and pain. Indeed, Addie must have been in her own hell if she could see the foolishness and selfishness of her family during their pilgrimage.
Anse, the father of the family, is perhaps the worst offender. His unwise decisions coupled with his unrelenting complaints and unreasonable obstinance causes the devastation of the remaining members of the family. Anse often bemoans that he has no luck, and that life has dealt him a hard blow, but it is also known that he does nothing that makes him sweat, leaving the hard work to others. A man who doesn’t work is hardly a man in the place and time he grew up in, underlining Addie’s observation that “then he died. He did not know he was dead.” His eyes are described as “burnt-out cinder” as if any life that was in him has also fled. His inaction and inability to reason, to have compassion or to adjust to circumstances--characteristics of being fully human-- becomes the family’s greatest downfall. But Anse’s main problem is only seeing what he wants to see. He is described as being “constantly surprised to see his wife in bed” as if he carried an image of her alive and healthy in his head, and couldn’t accept the reality of her sickness. He also refused to meet Jewel’s eyes as he reveals the negotiation for a new pack of mules resulted in the trade of Jewel’s horses, as if by not witnessing the anger in Jewel’s reaction he could pretend it was alright.
Addie’s eyes are described as “steam” or “lamps blaring up just before the oll is gone’. They reflect that she is dying, and that her will to live is also fading away--”all her failing life appears to drain into her eyes, urgent, irremediable.” She has lived a life where expediency was the driving force. She was a school teacher not because she loved the children or learning, but simply because that was how she could make a living. She married Anse only because she knew he would have her. She took the preacher as a lover without shame or remorse because she desired him, and when he called it off, she went back to Anse and became his dutiful wife because there was no other option. “I gave Anse the children. I did not ask for them. I did not even ask him for what he could have given me: not-Anse. That was my duty to him, to not ask that, and that duty I fulfilled.” Although Addie describes Anse as dead, she too, has lived her life without the passion and fulfillment that would make one truly alive. “My father said that the reason for living is getting ready to stay dead. I know at last what he meant…” After her fling with the pastor, Addie has simply lived so that she can die without Anse’s reproach. And her stipulation that she be buried in Jefferson becomes the revenge on him that she could not exact in her lifetime.
Cash becomes the pragmatic character in the novel. Even his name speaks of the practicalities of life. His main concern is getting the coffin built and doing it correctly. He makes the coffin on the bevel simply because that is the way of “animal magnetism”, the way the “earth sinks down” and the “natural” way of things. Once the body is in the coffin, his priority is to get the body balanced. His worries go unheeded, and as a result, the coffin spills out of the wagon as they try to ford the stream. Just before they cross, Cash and Darl exchange a look--”looks that plunge unimpeded through one another’s eyes and into the ultimate secret place where for an instant Cash and Darl crouch flagrant and unabashed in all the old terror and the old forboding, alert and secret and without shame.” This is perhaps the only time in the novel when Darl has an accomplice, where they acknowledge the danger and futility of their mission. They seem to read each other’s minds and Cash feels the burden of being pragmatic in a fantastic situation. Why hasn’t he foreseen this disaster? He should have come out and got a “sight on it”, prepared the road and wagon for this eventuality. Cash becomes the casualty of the river crossing and ends up unconscious. His eyes from this point on are only occasionally opened as if he cannot behold the increasingly unreasonable actions of his family. His role from this point on is to simply endure all that follows.
Jewel’s eyes are described often as “pale”, “hard”, and “wrong”: “his face and eyes were two colors of wood, the wrong one pale and the wrong one dark.” It makes his eyes appear inhuman like wood, plates, or marbles. Coupled with the intensity of his glares, the shortness and abruptness of this speech, and the quickness of his temper, Jewel is presented as a formidable presence. He seems to have a strong dislike of his family, refusing to ride with them, and often not responding when they speak to him. Yet he is also the one to save Addie again and again--when she falls in the water, and from the fire Darl sets in the barn. He has worked and sacrificed for his horse but ultimately gives it up to buy a team of mules to replace the ones drowned in the fire. Out of all the members of the family, Jewel shows the most dedication for his mother. Indeed, Addie had prophesied this when she said “ He will save me from the water and from the fire. Even though I have laid down my life, he will save me.”
If Jewel acts with blind devotion, Darl is cursed with seeing too much. He can surmise that this trip will ruin his family, that the best thing would be to let Addie go--by water, by fire--than to continue on this trip that will cost Cash his leg, Jewel his horse, and Dewey Dell her dignity. His eyes are described as looking as though the “land dug out of his skull and the holes filled with distance beyond the land”. He seems to float just outside of reality, with an ability to discern what is happening around him without actually being there, such as when he describes the death of Addie while he and Jewel are on the road. Unlike Jewel, whose eyes look wrong, it is Darl’s look that is wrong. He “can’t see eye to eye with most folks”, “It’s like he had got into the inside of you, someway. Like somehow you was looking at yourself and your doings outen his eyes.” It is a heavy load to carry, and although setting fire to the barn was a logical solution to the problem of their journey, his family elects to have him committed--perhaps to keep them out of financial obligations towards the farmer, or perhaps because they cannot stand to see themselves reflected in his discerning eyes.
Dewey Dell, particularly, can not stand to see herself through Darl’s eyes. Somehow Darl has surmised that Dewey Dell is carrying Lafe’s baby. She is determined to solve this problem with a pharmacist in town and Lafe’s money. It is the consequence of a choice made for her by chance--she would only go into the woods with Lafe if her bag were full, and Lafe filled it for her, so she had no choice. While Jewel’s eyes are pale, her’s are dark, but just as hard. She often turns her head and refuses to look at things, her sole purpose driving her on, while she seems to only give a passing regard to what else is going on around her. Her looks are “blank” and “repudiant”, and she herself describes herself as blind to things that happen around her :“I could not see”. Her fear and worry has pin-pointed her focus to her one need, and everything else becomes ancillary to it.
Vardaman’s eyes are described as “round” and “big-eyed”. He is the youngest of the family, and although he sees everything, he often cannot understand the cause and effect. He knows his fish was alive, and now it is dead, and they eat it for supper. He also understands his mother is dead, but cannot understand how she died. Could she also not breathe? Is there a connection between the doctor and her death, for when he came she died. If the doctor leaves now will she live? Throughout the trip, Vardaman becomes a non-judgemental witness to the scenes around him, and only the reader can discern the import of what he sees.
Neighbors and witnesses along the way fill in the gaps, often describing the trip and the players as foolish, obstinate, and queer. People try to help, or to talk them out of their plans, but most go unheeded. As readers we become yet another witness to this tragedy and our judgements and experiences to add yet another layer to the tale.
What Faulkner has done is more than simply describe a funeral trek. By abandoning an omniscient narrator he surrenders an authoritative pronouncement on his characters. The myriad of open eyes looking and seeing from their own point of view, through their own lenses, brings a sort of reflective quality to the picture. We can collect the pieces and fit them together in what we think is the right order, and get a general idea of the overall narrative, but there are still gaps that the reader must fill in with their own knowledge. Ironically, by creating such a multi-faceted look, the picture itself becomes somewhat fragmented and instead of getting a definitive idea of what happened, each piece both fills in gaps and obscures other parts. It is as though Faulkner is pointing out that what we witness is both what happened and what we perceive as having happened. Each look is tainted with each character’s motivations, experiences, and prejudices. The dog-eyed woman may not allow us to close our eyes, but it is clear that there is more than one way to not see what is before us, and that what we think we see may not be what others see.
A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré
The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone
Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields by Wendy Lower
The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan
The Secret Pilgrim by John le Carré
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré
The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carré
Smiley's People by John le CarréChasing Apollo across a continent
We arrive at the city in night
Stalagmites glow at the heart
Christmas lights laid out beyond, blinking it
Dawns on me they are porch lights
Peeping in and out through branches
Suburban home fires warming to the
American dream of couched laughter and
Candlelit casseroles
Red lights scream along dark ribbons
White light feels anxiously ahead
An itching need to reach those strung out lights
All happy families are alike
warm baths clean sheets
waltzes in stocking feet
every house the same beat
“How was your day, dear”
two steps right
“Smashing, darling”
one step back
“You look lovely, doll”
left, left
blink, blink, *blush*
up
Up in the sky they are all just playthings
Lights flickering silent in the dark
Too far away to see dirt and grime,
Hear sobbing behind the radio,
See families lonely wreathed with webbed halos.
From here, I can hold the house in my palm
right, right, back
Put my eye up to the window
left, left, up
Before I shake it, and toss it away into the dark.
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
The Looking Glass War by John le Carré
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John le Carré
A Murder of Quality by John le Carré
Call for the Dead by John le Carré
The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese by Michael Paterniti
Submergence by J.M. LedgardFor him, it was a very dark and specific place.
What will happen next? The failure of Marx’s vision has created the need for another vision, not for a rejection of all visions. What remains today is the idea of responsibility (when the nineteenth-century idea of progress has died out), which works against the loneliness and indifference of an individual living in the belly of a whale.
For example, at the Helsinki University of Technology’s low temperature lab, in 2001, a Bose-Einstein condensate cooled near to the absolute zero of minus 273 ° Celsius stopped dead a beam of light traveling at 978 million kilometers per hour.
Because in many ways the ocean is more hostile than space. Space flight is a journey outward. You can see where you are going, which is why the crews in spaceships generally sit in swivel chairs facing a giant window or screen. Space is about weightlessness and speeds never before achieved by machines and that can scarcely be felt; the discharge of aerosol is enough to propel a vessel forward, a nudge of a pencil sets its course, and all the while the air inside of it presses against the void outside. Ocean flight is, by contrast, a journey inward, toward blindness. It is about weight, the stopping of the craft on thermal layers, the pressure of water pushing in, and the discomfiting realization that most of the planet you call your own is hostile to you. There will never be a Neil Armstrong moment in the ocean. There is nothing to light the way, no prospect, no horizon; even encased in a metal suit the human body is too liquescent to contemplate stepping out onto the deep sea floor.
