The Departed

[Bruce Appelbaum]

The local Barnes and Noble had copies of the 3-volume boxed paperback  
set last night. Started on the first part.  The fictional author who  
is the subject of the four critics' attention has more than a passing  
resemblance to  another non-fictional writer.


Bruce

> "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to  
> worry about answers."

        --- Thomas Pynchon





On Nov 7, 2008, at 3:21 PM, Dave Monroe wrote:

> The Departed
> By JONATHAN LETHEM
> Published: November 9, 2008
>
>
> In Philip K. Dick's 1953 short story "The Preserving Machine," an
> impassioned inventor creates a device for "preserving" the canon of
> classical music — the sacred and, he fears, impermanent beauties of
> Schubert, Chopin, Beethoven and so forth — by feeding it into a device
> that transforms the compositions into living creatures: birds, beetles
> and animals resembling armadillos and porcupines. Outfitting the
> classic pieces in this manner, then setting them free, the inventor
> means to guarantee their persistence beyond the frailties of human
> commemoration, to give them a set of defenses adequate to their value.
> Alas, the musical-animals become disagreeable and violent, turn on one
> another and, when the inventor attempts to reverse-engineer his
> creations in order to prove that the music has survived, reveal
> themselves as a barely recognizable cacophony, nothing like the
> originals. Or has the preserving machine revealed true essences —
> irregularities, ferocities — disguised within the classical pieces to
> begin with?
>
> Dick's parable evokes the absurd yearning embedded in our reverence
> toward art, and the tragicomic paradoxes "masterpieces" embody in the
> human realm that brings them forth and gives them their only value. If
> we fear ourselves unworthy of the sublimities glimpsed at the summit
> of art, what relevance does such exalted stuff have to our grubby
> lives? Con versely, if on investigation such works, and their makers,
> are revealed as ordinary, subject to the same provisions and defects
> as the rest of what we've plopped onto the planet — all these cities,
> nations, languages, histories — then why get worked up in the first
> place? Perfect or, more likely, imperfect, we may suspect art of being
> useless in either case.
>
> Literature is more susceptible to these doubts than music or the
> visual arts, which can at least play at abstract beauty. Novels and
> stories, even poems, are helplessly built from the imperfect stuff:
> language, history, squalid human incident and dream. When so many
> accept as their inevitable subject the long odds the universe gives
> the aspirations of our species, degraded as it finds itself by the
> brutalities of animal instinct and time's remorseless toll, books may
> seem to disqualify themselves from grace: how could such losers cobble
> together anything particularly sublime?
>
> The Chilean exile poet Roberto Bolaño, born in 1953, lived in Mexico,
> France and Spain before his death in 2003, at 50, from liver disease
> traceable to heroin use years before. In a burst of invention now
> legendary in contemporary Spanish-language literature, and rapidly
> becoming so internationally, Bolaño in the last decade of his life,
> writing with the urgency of poverty and his failing health,
> constructed a remarkable body of stories and novels out of precisely
> such doubts....
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Lethem-t.html
>

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