Let's do a small survey first: What books did you read during the Spring Festival holiday?
Many friends around me said that in the few days of the holiday, they finally finished reading the novel they had always wanted to read. In an increasingly impetuous, fast-paced life, it seems that reading a book for a few days seems to be a very luxurious thing, and reading a long novel seems to require a better reading state.
Following "Twilight" and "Last Night", james Sauter, the "forgotten hero of contemporary American literature", has also met readers with his long-winded work "All This" created at the age of nearly 90. This is the story of an ordinary person and a rich social chronicle. With his magical literary charm, Sauter brings out even the tiniest events in the bleak everyday. As the media gave the book: "Like the compact stories that emerge in the minds of dying writers in Hemingway's The Snow of Kilimanjaro, the stories in All This Have a bright and moving vitality that profoundly evoke a person's life and a whole vanished world." ”
Today to share a book review from @Bright Place Is Where You and I Return, in the lively New Year's Festival, reading such a long novel is "like sinking into quiet and deep cold water". This perfect work, like the densely emerging memories of the last minute, is finally realized as if all the lives have been experienced: these lives together complete a person's life.
"When she said goodbye, it was as if a drama had ended."
Text/The light is where you and I return
In the midst of the booming new year, I slowly finished reading Sauter's long book "All This", like sinking into quiet and deep cold water.
In 1944, at the end of the Pacific War, the protagonist Bowman appeared as a lieutenant in the Navy. After the war, he enrolled at Harvard University and then into publishing, wandering through cities and women until his twilight years. The story is not complicated, and what is more breathtaking than the plot is a cold and sad atmosphere - everything is passing, and the pursuit is never-ending.
The novel begins with a full chapter of the maritime war. When I first read it, I felt that this part was very different from the following text. When I read it a second time, I suddenly realized that not only the memory of the war was like a shadow hanging over the whole book, but even the chapter itself was already like a proverb, foreshadowing all the themes that reappeared in the story.
01
Those things that were invisible when I was young
In the first chapter, Bauman and his comrade-in-arms Kimmel have this conversation:
"Is there anything there?"
"Nothing."
"You can't see."
Years after leaving the sea, Bowman falls in love with Vivian, a southern girl he meets at a bar, and on the eve of their marriage, Bowman's mother is full of worries because "she knows the things that people can't see when they are too young."
What Baumann could not see when he was too young was the irreconcilable difference between him and Vivian.
Vivian was born into a family of manor owners in Virginia. It was a "place of order and style, the epitome of the kingdom," where people rode horses, hunted, and attended banquets. Inheritance is a haunting theme. Vivian's family has black leather hardcover books "handed down from generation to generation" and "silverware and furniture from great-great-grandmothers." Years later, the marriage was long dead, and Bowman referred to his former father-in-law, Amerson, as "the man with ancestral silverware." It is this phrase that distinguishes the "arrogant, intolerant class" to which Vivian belongs from his own experience. Interestingly, at the wedding, Baumann and his relatives and friends felt out of place in the woman's house, and only his colleague Edins was successful. After reading it, it was suddenly discovered that Edins was also a southerner, and his mother had "an old-fashioned dining table that has belonged to her family since the eighteenth century."
It is not only furniture that is inherited, but more importantly, a life. Vivian's peers are "in many ways a replica of her parents," but when she was young, she was quite bold and unwilling to think of herself as a replica. That's probably why she chose Bowman, a guy from Manhattan. He gave her a book on a date, "It's not something that boys she knows do." Unfortunately, however, Vivian underestimated the weight that had been placed on her in the past. She and Bowman had never been human beings, and the rift, even though most of it was obscured by fiery passion, was still looming in the details of life.
The "horse" is the center of life in the South to which Vivian belongs. And this became the most important metaphor for their failed marriages. Vivian's father, Amerson, objected, saying, "She's not a city girl. She has had her own horse since she was a child." Vivian and Bowman moved into an apartment in New York after marriage, and among the few things she brought with her were two photographs, "on the dresser, and in the picture was her Prancing Horse figure." This is something that Vivian can hardly give up, and that Bowman cannot understand. When they were still in love, there was a conversation:
"You remind me of a pony." He said affectionately.
"Pony? Why? ”
"You are so beautiful and free."
"I don't understand how it can be like a pony," she said, "besides, the pony bites." My ponies bite. ”
This conversation inevitably reminds me of what Kundera wrote in The Unbearable Lightness of Life that people's understanding of the same word will be very different from their respective experiences, so that although people speak the same language, they are separated by a deep chasm. He listened eagerly to her story about his life, and she listened to him with the same eagerness. They fully understood the logical meaning of what they were saying to each other, but they could not hear the whispers of the river of semantics flowing between the words. ”
Vivian and Bowman are exactly the same. Just as Bowman could not understand Vivian's ponies, Vivian had difficulty entering Bowman's literary world. In the night of sharing the bed, "he wanted to continue to talk about Ezra Pound, to introduce the subjects of the poems, and perhaps to read to her one or two of the most wonderful ones, but Vivian's mind had gone elsewhere, and he was not very curious about where they went." Such a sentence is very sad to read, this is Sauter, silently unveiling the corner of the curtain, giving people a glimpse of the core of destruction.
02
The real danger will come from heaven
Although to Baumann his marriage seems to have suddenly collapsed—Vivian left home to care for her mother, and suddenly wrote him a farewell letter, "We have nothing in common and have parted ways," none of this was without warning. Their conversations around "Ponies," their poems that Bowman can't talk about, or the dinner they go to the publisher Baum's house, which Bowman sees as "a passport into their lives, a world he longs for," but Vivian feels out of place.
Bowman was not unaware of the estrangement between them, but always thought it could be repaired until the letter was unfolded, "and with a fierce and sharp remorse he discovered that he was wrong." Perhaps Bowman's problem is that he is too optimistic, or that he "can't see" something in life. The first time he took Vivian home, Bowman excitedly told Vivian about Hemingway's novel The Killer, saying that it took place in the restaurant where they were sitting. Years later, he had long since separated from Vivian, and by chance learned, "That's not the restaurant Hemingway wrote about at all." It was in another place near Chicago, also called Summit, and there were other misconceptions at the time. He was wrong in a lot of things. Not only is it wrong to tell an uninterested audience, but even what is told is a mistake in itself, but it is too late to find out, that everything has long been destroyed, or, as in "they sit in Hemingway's restaurant", which has always existed only in Bowman's wishful thinking. Feeling this layer of absurdity, I can't help but be particularly sad.
Soot's story is often like this, and there is a crisis lurking in the quiet. Even the quieter it is, the more ominous it becomes.
As he writes in another part of the book: "There will be a time, usually at the end of August, when summer strikes the trees with a dizzying force, and they flourish, but suddenly one day they come to a strange standstill, as if they were full of anticipation, but at that moment they suddenly realized." They all know it. Everything is known. Beetles, frogs, crows solemnly walking across the lawn, they all knew. The sun climbs to the zenith and embraces the world, but it is coming to an end, and everything people love is in danger. ”
Compared to the slow erosion of Baumann's marriage to Vivian, there is another blow in "All This", more sudden, more unstoppable, purely a joke of fate. Bowman's relationship with Christine was such that one day "everything was still asleep, untouched by the wand", and the next day "suddenly everything fell apart". The same is true of Edins's marriage to Dinah, who put her and her children on the ordinary homecoming train, never imagining the fire in the carriage at night, "in this house, living a happy life, away from all dangers....Here, as if falling from the sky, a huge engine fell off a high plane, no one saw, no one heard, galloping down, death and destruction struck, like a sharpened wooden stake piercing into life".
In the first chapter, Bowman's fleet was attacked by warplanes and "the real danger will come from the sky." This sentence may also be seen as a footnote to Sauter's story.
Dramatic fate, danger falling from the sky, the road suddenly broken.
03
A giant opera with an infinite cast
The theme of the play is repeated in the book.
When Bowman was at Harvard, his teacher preached to them about English drama: "The clouds are thick, the lightning bolts, and in this setting we can see these strangely shaped figures, dressed in surprisingly ornate costumes, twitching and trembling under the gloomy passion." This passage is also very appropriate to describe the story of "All This". Bowman's life, the lives of dozens of people who weave through the story, is like a tragicomedy. As Bowman thought of as he strolled the streets after meeting a couple of writers: "Countless temptations in the city, art, carnal desires, amplified desires." Like a giant opera with an infinite cast, there are scenes of hustle and bustle, and scenes of loneliness. ”
Bowman may indeed see his life as a drama. The important points in life, the metaphors that remind him, are always dramatic. Saying goodbye to Enid, "when she said goodbye, it was as if a drama had ended." The first time he saw Christine, the woman who was so important in his life but cruelly betrayed him, he thought, "It was like a drama, a brilliant first act", "That was her appearance, her first appearance, in his life".
And the two reunions of the deceased who suddenly returned from the past.
Long after divorcing Vivian, he meets Vivian's sister and her husband. After an awkward but polite greeting, the couple said they were going to see a play called "Buddy Joey." A similar scene reappears near the end of the story. This time Bowman met Kimmel, his comrades in arms in the Pacific, whom they had not seen since the end of the war until that moment. As he said goodbye, Kimmel said he was going to see Evita.
Two dramatic re-enactments of the past also ended in real drama.
04
They seemed to be part of his bloodline
Bowman didn't realize when he was younger, "The problem with Vivian is that she belongs so involuntarily to everything: drinking, the mansion, the mud-stained car in the trunk, the bags of dog food in it, self-affirmation, and money." All of this used to seem insignificant, even ridiculous."
It's a loyalty. As Aidins put it, "the people there are loyal" and "it's all in the blood, deeply engraved in it."
But loyalty to the past is by no means unique to Southerners. When Bowman was in the Navy, the deputy captain was Colonel McLeely. Souter wrote, "Colonel McLearney has no future, but he remains true to the standards of the past." So was Bauman himself, who was "loyal to the ship and his duties on board" and also "faithful to a tradition he respected."
This loyalty is not necessarily intentional. The past has its own weight, nailing people into their own grids. Vivian was at first dismissive of the life represented by the South and was not afraid to leave, until she desperately realized that she was "one of them, there is no place to stay, only to live there."
Bowman's connection to the past seems weaker than Vivian's. When he returned home from demobilization from the Navy, he saw "the same houses, shops and streets" again, and realized for the first time that "everything he remembered and knew from childhood, inconspicuous, but belonged to him alone." Years later he returned home again, passing through familiar landscapes, with a rare feeling that "they seemed to be part of his bloodline, floating dreamlikely like the lonely gray outlines of the Empire State Building on the horizon." ”
Bowman's looser relationship with the past may stem in part from the ambiguity of memory itself. Bauman's memories always appear as "dreams" or "dream-like scenes." His childhood was bumpy, and his father left him and his mother early. They had borrowed money at one point at his mother's distant relative's house, but for the mansion on Fifth Avenue, perhaps because he was too young at the time, or because his mother "never told him everything she knew," he had only the impression of a dream that "he remembered being pointed out to him." Did he remember it all, or was it a dream? Three or four floors of dark granite, green roofs, iron and glass doors? Maybe it doesn't really exist. He had been expecting to pass by it one day, but never had."
The possibility of connection with the past, with the passing of a loved one, collapses more and more completely again and again. Bowman learned of the death of his father, whom they had not seen since leaving their mother and son, from the newspaper. At that moment he felt "something stabbed him, not grief, and he felt that time had been strangely jolted, as if he had been living a semi-false life, and though he had never seen his father or heard from him all these years, some basic connection was now gone".
The death of the mother is more metaphorical. She suffered from Louis's disease and gradually lost her memory. On the eve of her death, she no longer recognized her son, although she had cherished the memories with him as much as she had been— "all the days, all things," "all the past, hopes and ambitions, years filled with joy," "mother and son, without end." In the final days, "the life she once had, the people she knew, and the deep pools of memory and knowledge, either disappeared, or dried up, or fell apart", if these memories are all that is, what can one keep after losing all this?
05
It was all a dream
The perspective of "All This" is retrospective, it is not a picture that slowly unfolds as the protagonist grows older, but the last look back of the dying old man.
Souter writes on the title page of the book:
"Someday you'll realize,
It was all a dream.
Only those things that are preserved in writing,
It is possible to be true. ”
As I read deeper, I kept thinking, what does Souter want to keep by writing? What is "all" in the title "All this"?
At the end of the novel, Bowman also reaches the age of thinking about death: "He will go to the same place as them— it's hard to believe — and everything he once knew will go with him... Everything he knew, everything he never knew but was there anyway, the things of his time, all the years... That immeasurable life, the life that was once open to him and had been owned by him..."
Maybe it's these, "all of it", "all the years", "the immeasurable life". All this anchors the existence of man in the world, and even often becomes a burden that cannot be broken, but it will eventually disappear with the end of life.
This may also be why there is a strong fear of "passing" and "dying" in the novel.
As small as the farewell to Enid, "things are passing and he is powerless to stop it", as large as an industry, "the power of the novel in this country's culture has diminished, the glory has faded", and even greater is an entire era, "war has changed everything." In some ways it clings to its traditions, but the old days are fading." The sense of class and order that runs through the story, the "big house of five hundred years", the "silverware handed down", the rules of the publishing industry, the laws of old life, their existence is so indestructible, but between the lines, there is a hidden crisis.
With a few pages left, I suddenly thought of Bowman himself. I've tried to imagine himself as someone who spends his life going back and forth between banquets, hotels, and social occasions, never ending a similar journey, going to a new city with every woman who falls in love, making a memory and parting ways. What exactly is he after?
In middle age, Sauert writes that Bowman "felt a lack, that what was missing was not necessarily marriage, but a touchable core in life around which things could take shape and find a place." The answer Bowman found for this missing thing was the house — he thought he deserved to own the house of his dreams.
Reading this, I suddenly remembered the mansion on Fifth Avenue that always seemed to appear in his dreams. That was all his mother hadn't had time to tell him, "he had been expecting to pass by it one day, but never".
Illustrations and cover images Source: "The Veil", "The Great Gatsby"
"Revolutionary Road", "Eye-opening Ring", "Love Before Midnight"
"All This" is the trajectory of an ordinary person's life, but also a rich social chronicle, the narrative perspective switches freely between the protagonist and dozens of characters. A large number of insightful details give it an epic quality, the scenes, interludes and characters are as precise and neat as diamond cuts, and the story and the emotions it contains continue to expand and spread, reflecting the contours of the lives of all the characters who appear in time.
Known as "the forgotten hero of contemporary American literature" and "the well-known master of secrecy among writers," James Sauter knows exactly what makes even the tiniest events worth telling, and through the magic of words, makes them shine in the bleak everyday. This perfect work, which he completed at the age of nearly 90, is like a dense spring of events at the last moment, and the final effect is as if he has experienced all his life: these lives together complete a person's life. The author uses memory as a fortress against oblivion, profoundly evoking an immeasurable world, "a life that was once open to him and possessed by him."
Republic produced by James Sauter
"A Game once a Pastime", "Light Years"
《Living Color》Last Night》
James Sauter Series