Doug suggested this short novel which comes garlanded with huge praise and has won several prizes One day the unnamed American male narrator, cruising in the bathrooms of the National Palace of Culture in Sofia, comes across the compelling hustler Mitka, and there follows a tale of unrequited sexual obsession, of overwhelming desire met by hard-headed manipulation, all told in the incantatory prose which has earned the book such admiration.
Unfortunately, our group was not so captivated. Doug began with a slightly apologetic air (presumably for having suggested the book), immediately referring to the narrator as 'self-pitying', and almost everyone else nodded in agreement. I wouldn't call the narrator self-pitying, but I did agree that the emotion that came over was not so much the narrator's obsession with Mitka as the narrator's obsession with himself. It was in fact hard to see what is attractive about Mitka: he's thoroughly amoral and self-centred, and is clearly using the narrator's obsession with him to get what he can; we are treated to physical descriptions of him and of their sexual encounters, but these seem plainly, even sometimes mechanistically told: there is little imagistic or metaphorical element in these descriptions to create any emotional dimension the reader can share. Yet the prose otherwise rings with a deep emptiness of yearning, and the overall focus is the narrator's own more general emotional state.
While there was an initial tendency in the group to dismiss the novel for this, people became more positive as we turned our attention to the second of the three parts, which begins when the narrator's English class at the American College is interrupted by news from home. This prompts an agonised avalanche of memories of a rejecting, homophobic background: the scenes are horrifying and deeply moving, and I for one was in tears as I read. It's clear from now on that what is propelling the narrator's yearnings and his emotional entrapment in a destructive relationship, and perhaps accounting for any self-obsession, is huge, unquenchable grief.
There is no doubt for me that the prose of this book is brilliant, so I was a bit shocked when Mark complained about its long sentences and lack of paragraphing - there can be pages and pages unbroken by paragraphs. Clare and I hotly objected that this formally encodes the unrelenting obsessiveness of the narrator's mentality, allowing the reader to read in such a way that draws them in to share that mentality. Mark stuck to his guns, pointing out that in Lolita, for instance, another book about sexual obsession, there are paragraphs and sentences of decent length. We said that that was because the sensibility of the narrator in that book is cool and calculated (for most of the book): the prose of any first-person narrator - the language, rhythm and cadence created by those technical structures of paragraphing and punctuation - necessarily reflects their mentality. Mark however insisted that this book was unnecessarily too difficult a read.
There does seem to be a current prejudice against long sentences, possibly affected by the culture of soundbites, but this book I'd say is a great illustration of the power of long sentences. Take this sentence at the very beginning of this book:
Even as I descended the stairs I heard his voice, which like the rest of him was too large for those subterranean rooms, spilling out of them as if to climb back into the bright afternoon that, though it was mid-October, had nothing autumnal about it; the grapes that hung from vines throughout the city burst warm in one's mouth.
There might be a temptation here, for the sake of immediate clarity and ease of reading, to separate this into two sentences, ending the first after the word 'afternoon' and making the description of the afternoon a separate sentence. But the fact that the author does not do this creates a special alchemy: because he doesn't, the October afternoon becomes more closely linked with Mitka, and its apparent promise (its warmth) yet its deceptiveness with him. And there is a clear sexual note to that final image of the grapes bursting in the mouth, linked to the earlier sentence and Mitka by a semicolon, rather than separated with a full stop.
Having begun the meeting on a somewhat negative note, most of the room ended up vigorously defending this book for its wonderful prose.
Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here
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