Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (1962) (translated from the Russian by Ron Hingley and Max Hayward) – Has Solzhenitsyn experienced a sales bump from being name-checked by Jordan Peterson, I wonder? Either way, I picked this one up at the usual getting place, the library sale. He’s been enlisted — volunteered, really — to be the literary placeholder for the totalitarianism thesis, the idea that the Gulag was the same as the Holocaust and therefore we need to destroy Vietnam/cut the marginal tax rate/not use trans peoples pronouns. My understanding is that started backfiring a little once the Soviet Union actually fell and he was still around, saying weird shit about the Jews and publishing unreadable novels, but by then the job had been done.

That’s not quite the figure we have here- the Cold War martyr-saint/embarrassing uncle. In “Ivan Denisovich” he’s near the beginning of his career. The novel is exactly what it says it is- a description of one day in the life of a relatively “standard” gulag prisoner. Ivan Denisovich is not notably political- he’s in there because he got captured by the Nazis during WWII, and it was assumed many of the Soviet soldiers who were captured had been turned into spies. The book is short and the prose is brisk.

Politics doesn’t really enter it, not openly, anyway. No one really seems to care about communism- no “re-education,” no lectures from commissars. If anything, that could be the point- what defines “Ivan Denisovich” is power, pure and simple; its use, abuse, and avoidance. Over the course of the day Ivan needs to negotiate several different power structures, from the doctors to the work gangs to the kitchen gangs and the guards and on and on. He’s always cold and usually hungry, with only porridge to look forward to. He’s not a big man in the prison, but he’s not at the bottom of the pecking order either. He’s a capable worker, which helps. Solzhenitsyn’s descriptions of work are probably the highlight of the book. Building walls in the middle of nowhere, presumably to house more prisoners to the do the same thing… if Cold War academics didn’t bound up the Gulag, the terror, the famines, and everything else bad the Soviets did (or didn’t) into one big ball of associations, the takeaway of “Ivan Denisovich” would be the meaningless misery, identical to that practiced by numerous other systems, of what was supposed to be a wholly new kind of society. ****

Jeanette Winterson, “Sexing the Cherry” (1989) – This was a pretty fun, short read. A gargantua-style “Dog Woman” and her beautiful small non-son Jordan get unstuck in time. They start out mostly in seventeenth century Britain, but seeking out fruit, shelter from civil wars, and love send both characters, but especially Jordan, wandering around getting in various magical realism adventures with a feminist spin. It’s pretty fun and not weirdly self-aware like a lot of big time “literary” writers are when they dip a toe into the speculative side of things. Think Italo Calvino with a sense of humor.

Because I’m weird, I found myself thinking less about its take on time, gender, myth, or any of the other big themes Winterson plays adroitly with, but about one time in particular- the time surrounding the English Civil War. The Dog Woman, the main narrator, falls firmly on the royalist side. The Roundheads are presented as prissy, hypocritical, not allowing of fun, and also totally gay for each other. The executed King Charles is depicted as a tragic figure beloved by all. In short, the Royalist side was the side of the kind of funky, weird, subversive types that Winterson asks the reader to identify with, and the Parliament side represents the martinets who try to keep them down.

It’s less that I object to this — my ideas about the English Civil War are complicated, to say the least — and more that I feel like this isn’t the only artistic work from its era by notional lefties (or at least counterculture habitues) who identify with one or another conservative ancien regime. This is usually held in opposition to some new order, like the Roundheads, supposedly progressive but actually just the force of cold rationality. The ancien regime is seen as more organic, funkier, warmer, authentic. I feel like, but can’t quite remember, others did this with the Royalist side in the English Civil War, or with the Restoration. Definitely you saw it with figures like Richard Brautigan and his “Confederate General from Big Sur,” who lives a life of liberated fecklessness that the narrator seeks to join, fleeing from the buttoned-down life in the rest of the union. Ishmael Reed was a complicated writer but hated many kinds of radicals and tended to prefer figures who carve out spaces of freedom inside of a system whether than trying to overthrow it. You see something like that in parts of Robert Anton Wilson’s “Illuminatus!,” which is basically Ishmael Reed for literal-minded white nerds… anyway, not sure what to make of it but I think it could be a thread worth tugging on. I don’t think it takes away from the book at all, which was pretty good, but I get fixated on weird stuff some times, lay off me! ****’

Yukio Mishima, “The Decay of the Angel” (translated from the Japanese by Edward Seidensticker) (1971) – Mishima — forty five years old and a highly respected and popular, if somewhat controversial, writer at the time — finished the manuscript of “The Decay of the Angel,” the final book in the “Sea of Fertility” tetralogy, and then went off to die. With a small handful of followers, he walked on to a Japanese Self-Defense Force base and took the commanding officer — with whom he had a friendly relationship, previously — hostage with samurai swords. They forced him to call the troops to assemble, and there, Mishima harangued them, demanding that they follow him in restoring Japan’s imperial glory. They all laughed at him. Mishima then disembowled himself.

There’s a big “spoiler” at the end of “The Decay of the Angel” that I won’t reveal. What I will say is, it provides a certain degree of credence to the argument that Mishima’s final gesture was more an act of depression and self-loathing than of hateful nationalistic fervor. I say “a certain amount,” and moreover, don’t see the two as necessarily mutually exclusive. People want to see Mishima as a tragic figure as opposed to a fascist, much like they wanted to see Heidegger as a sage rather than a Nazi, and have been revising their apologies downwards ever since. There’s any number of ways to express loathing for self and world that don’t involve embracing fascism.

If anything, Mishima was something of an expert on loathing by the time his life was over, Many registers of disgust with the world characterize the “Sea of Fertility” series and its last volume especially. Viewpoint character Honda is now an old man. He lives with an old lesbian who trolls him all the time. They stumble upon one last reincarnation of Honda’s friend from adolescence, who has been reincarnation roughly every twenty years (because they keep dying young)- a teenage lighthouse keeper named Tōru. Honda adopts him, which apparently you can just do with random youths in 1960s Japan, and sets about trying to help the boy live past twenty, which none of the previous incarnations have yet managed.

I know I should say more about, like, Mishima’s aesthetic and philosophical meditations in this, his final work, but I can’t help but focus on how often Honda just gets owned in this book. Tōru is an asshole, basically a feral human, and makes Honda’s life hell. He steals Honda’s money. He makes fun of Honda all the time. He sabotages Honda’s efforts to teach him how to get along in society. He cruelly persecutes various women who like him. He outs Honda as a voyeur, ruining his reputation at the end of the life. He is, in general, a dick. And moreover, various clues start to lead Honda to believe that maybe he got mixed up about the whole reincarnation business.

More than the particulars of reincarnation, I think the story is about beauty, decay, and the point of existence. What both drove Mishima to fascism and also limited his effective expression of the ideology was the same thing that drove his creative efforts and his life generally- an amoral aesthetic vision where beauty is the only thing that matters, and it’s defined by youth, purity, and violence. In this volume, Mishima rubs our nose in both ends of what sucks about that. It sucks to get old, because old = decay and ugliness in his world, and there’s no values that can redeem your old stinky ugly hide. It also sucks to be, or be around, beautiful youth, because they’re amoral, stupid pricks who will suck you dry.

So what are you left with? Along with whatever else both the book and its aftermath were, they were also manifestations of Mishima’s panic of growing old. He was never particularly emotionally stable to begin with — artists, you know? — and, like the Japanese imperialists he idolized, he was willing to go that extra mile to make a point… the extra mile usually meaning spilling blood, though at least in this case it was only his own. One wonders if he would have been pleased with his posthumous reputation. He seems like a hard guy to keep happy but objectively speaking he seems to have done pretty well dead.

Still and all… one wonders if this would have come off as this sad tragedy to so many people if it had been undertaken by someone from the part of humanity who actually has good reasons to obsess over aesthetic judgment of their bodies, i.e., a woman. If a literary woman in her forties had an extended freakout about the decay of her body, ending in tetralogies, hostage taking, and suicide, well- probably some people would see that as tragic and symbolic but I tend to think more people would find it pathetic and funny.

But expecting fairness from literature is a bit like expecting justice from the weather. Mishima might have been the last one who could really put over the modernist literary enfant terrible thing in a way that didn’t come off as cheap trolling to cover up a lack of talent (cf Bret Easton Ellis). We tend to equate “saying something” in literature with some didactic “message” — Mishima had something to say but more faith in the aesthetic whole than its educational payload. ****

Yukio Mishima, “The Temple of Dawn” (translated from the Japanese by E. Dale Saunders and Cecilia Segawa Seigle) (1970) – Ok! Book three of Mishima’s final tetralogy. Gotta say… this one is kind of slow. There’s a lot of travelogue stuff — Mishima was a big traveler — about Thailand and India which is decently written but doesn’t interest me that much. There’s several essay-length disquisitions about different ideas of reincarnation. Moreover, the book in general is about decay. In keeping with the larger thesis of the “Sea of Fertility” books, very few things can transcend the earthly tendency to decay- mostly, beautiful dead youths. This one emphasizes the decay state that beautiful death needs to transcend, so… a little slow.

It’s 1940, Japan is on the verge of war, and viewpoint character Honda Shigekuni is in Thailand. In full middle age by this point, and a successful corporate lawyer, Honda’s doing deals when he realizes that an eight year old Thai princess, Ying Chan, is the reincarnation of his high school friend Kiyoaki, who had been reincarnated in the previous book in the form of Isao, an ultranationalist high school student. This little girl who had never left Thailand keeps babbling about how she should be back in Japan, knows stuff only Kiyoaki or Isao would know, etc. Of course, being surrounded by minders and eight, there’s not much that can come of it, plus the war happens.

Fast forward to the postwar years. Honda does well from the occupation, but feels serious weltschmerz hanging out with the other Japanese elites who have done the same. He gets into voyeurism. He befriends some writers who are probably analogues to Japanese writers Mishima wants to say something unpleasant about. Ying Chan, now in her late teens, shows up in the circles Honda spends time in, and he gets all weird about her. He wants Ying Chan to sleep with his neighbor, for reasons I honestly can’t remember. It’s like that Gombrowicz novel “Pornografia,” where two old litterateurs try to get an attractive young couple to get together in the ruins of wartime Poland. What’s with that time period that weird old literary leches were trying to get attractive young people to bang, as though they wouldn’t anyway? Maybe it’s easy to believe in the end of all that when it seemed like the world was ending. Well, it works out for Honda, but spoiler alert: the princess dies, or else there wouldn’t be a third reincarnation of Kiyoaki for the last book.

I’m basically glad I’ve read these, even if this one is less rewarding. I’m starting to think maybe I should’ve started my Mishima reading with more popular fare like “The Sailor Who Fell Out of Grace With the Sea” but there’s always time for that. I suppose I’m interested in his big statement, and this book’s sequel is the literal last thing he ever wrote before meeting his self-imposed violent end, so… we’ll see. ***’

Roberto Bolaño, “The Return” (2001) (translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews) – I haven’t got a ton to say about Bolaño that doesn’t reproduce the usual cliches. Symbolic figure of Latin American literature in the wrecked shambles of both the Boom and the dreams of twentieth century Latin America, check. Career tragically foreshortened and not even by something glamorous, check. Nihilism and with it enough dead women and sex workers to be suspect by today’s prevailing moral codes in literary circles, check. Most of all, the paradox of literature- utterly incapable of making the world a better place, in Bolaño’s telling, but also as essential as air to life as he knows it. Check.

The stories in “The Return” are Bolaño in fine form. If the magical realism promulgated by the Boom writers sought to weave dream logic into everyday life, Bolaño’s major theme is the nightmare logic that is already there. Bolaño’s Latin America was the Latin America of the narco wars, of structural adjustment, and most of all, of Pinochet and the other dictators who killed, at least for a generation, whatever fleeting hopes the continent had previously had for forging their own path forward. Violence permeates his surreal moments the way wonder permeated magical realism.

Bolaño doesn’t see incipient fascism as lurking under a mask of normality. In his stories, normality and fascism constitute each other; at its most remote, fascism is the norms — masculine norms above all, but norms of family, religion, nation, culture in general — militarized and let loose to rule by terror. The violence of a fascist cop shades into the violence of the soccer hooligans which shades into the violence of cartel enforcers which shades into the violence of exile and malaise, of cramped lives dependent on precarious employment and even more precarious literary patronage. All of which is expressed in large part through violence against women. Moreover, fascism (in a phenomenological sense if not a strict political one) lives in the decision to see all this as normal, fine, even as it produces spectacular, surreal, and horrifying results.

The collection’s best stories, in my opinion, are: “Detectives,” a dialogue between two cops who, we find out, went to high school with a “Belano” and jailed him after the coup- this based on a strongly-disputed part of Bolaño’s origin story, where he went to Chile as a young man to assist the revolution, only to be jailed and released to leave Chile for good; and “The Prefiguration of Lalo Cura,” the closest you’re going to get to an epic in short story form. There was a podcast called “Tales of Serious Literature,” which doesn’t seem to be running anymore, which had a good episode on the story. I don’t think I can say much that the host (who had a perfect, deeply amusing pedant voice, and a real love of literature) couldn’t.

Some of the stories about layabouts and their paranoid women troubles were kind of drags. Bolaño’s not the worst depressive writer when it comes to women but that’s not saying much. Misanthropy all too often shades into misogyny, though I get that he was trying to depict a milieu more than his own life. Some people see Bolaño as wallowing in paranoia and filth. I wouldn’t say he’s a sunny writer, but in continuing to create remarkable artifacts with literature — a tool he constantly harps is, at the very least, deeply compromised in the face of the world’s brutality — I think he actually affirms life more than a lot of cheery material does. ****’

J.G. Ballard, “Crash” (1973) – British cringe-comedy “Peep Show” had a few good Easter egg jokes that paid off only to obsessive viewers like me. One of the better ones is where posh dilettante actress Big Suze says she is auditioning for “a stage version of the movie ‘Crash,’” twice, multiple seasons apart. One of them is the undeserved-Oscar-winning movie about race, and the other is about “people who get sexy about road traffic accidents.” In a grim irony, the actress who played Big Suze, Sophie Winkleman, was in a terrible car accident last year and fractured her spine. She’s expected to make a full recovery, thankfully.