A Gentle Breath

A tale by this Russian writer.  You can read the original here.

At the cemetery upon the fresh clay embankment stands a new oaken cross, strong, heavy, and smooth. 

Those gray days of April!  The tombstones of the spacious district cemetery can still be seen at a distance through the naked trees, and a cold wind jingles and jingles the cross's pedestals and the ceramic wreath.

On that same cross a large raised ceramic medallion has been fashioned, and on the medallion a photograph of a high school girl with happy and remarkably lively eyes.

This is Olya Meshcherskaya.

When she was younger she could never have been picked out of the crowd of brown high school uniforms. What could we say about her, apart from mentioning that she was one of a number of pretty, rich, and happy girls, and that she was quite clever, but also mischievous and very insouciant of those admonitions offered by her classroom teacher?  Then she began to bloom, changing and developing not by the day, but by the hour.  At the age of fourteen she had a slender waist and shapely legs, as well as a well-defined chest and all those curves whose charms had yet to be expressed in the words of man.  At fifteen she was already renowned as a beauty.  How assiduously some of her friends did their hair!  How tidy they were!  How they minded their restrained manners!  She, on the other hand, feared absolutely nothing – from ink marks on her fingers, to a flushed complexion or disheveled hair, to even baring her knee after a fall while racing about. 

Without care or effort, and somehow also without much notice, she gained those qualities which would distinguish her for her last two high school years: elegance, smartness of dress, dexterity, and a certain gleam in her eyes ... No one danced at balls like Olya Meshcherskaya; no one skated like she did; no one was wooed at those same balls like she was; and for some reason no one was as beloved by the younger classes as she was.  Without much notice she had become a young lady and her high school fame had been consolidated, and yet some already whispered that she was shallow, that she could not live without admirers, and that one student, Shenshin, was so madly in love with her that it seemed she reciprocated his affection, but was so fickle towards him that he attempted suicide ...          

During her last winter Olya Meshcherskaya in her merrymaking got, as they tend to say in high school, rather carried away.  That winter was snowy, sunny, and frozen; the sun would set early behind the great fir tree in the snowy high school garden – a progressively more pleasant and radiant sun, promising more sunshine and ice tomorrow, a walk on Soborny street, skating around the city park, a pink evening sky, music and, descending from all sides upon the rink, that crowd in which Olya Meshcherskaya seemed to be the most carefree and the happiest.

And so, one time during the longer recess, after she had whisked herself off to the assembly hall to escape her pursuers and the blissful yelps of the first graders, she was unexpectedly summoned to the principal's office.  She stopped while running at full speed, took a single deep breath, fixed her hair in a rapid female movement that was already second nature, yanked the corners of her frock towards her shoulders, and, her eyes beaming, rushed upstairs.  The young-looking yet greying principal was sitting calmly with her knitting in her hands at a desk beneath a portrait of the Tsar.

"Good day, Mademoiselle Meshcherskaya," she said in French, not lifting her eyes from her knitting.  "Unfortunately this is not the first time I have been obliged to call you in to talk to you about your behavior."

"Yes, Madame," Meshcherskaya answered approaching the desk and giving her an attentive and lively look from a face otherwise devoid of any expression.  She sat down in that light and gracious way that was unique to her.

"You're not going to listen properly, I fear, to what I have to say.  Of this I am quite convinced," said the principal pulling on a thread and twirling the ball of yarn sitting on the polished floor.  Meshcherskaya looked at that ball with curiosity.  Then the principal raised her eyes at last:

"I am neither going to repeat myself nor talk at length."

Meshcherskaya very much liked this unusually clean and large office, which smelled so pleasantly during those freezing days of the warmth of the radiant tiled stove and the freshness of the desk's lilies.  She looked first at the young Tsar depicted at his full height amidst some resplendent hall, then at the principal's thick milky hair carefully parted in the middle, and then waited expectantly in silence.   

"You are no longer a girl," said the principal knowingly.  She was secretly beginning to get annoyed.

"Yes, Madame," was Meshcherskaya's simple, almost jolly response.

"Yet neither are you a woman," said the principal again knowingly.  And her dull matted face turned ever so slightly crimson.  "First and foremost, what kind of hairstyle is that?  It's the hairstyle of a woman!"

"Madame, I cannot be faulted for having nice hair," replied Meshcherskaya and almost touched her beautifully coiffed head with both hands.

"Ah, that's just it, you can't be faulted!"  said the principal.  "You can't be faulted for your hairstyle, you can't be faulted for those expensive barrettes, you can't be faulted that your parents splurge on your twenty-ruble shoes!  Yet I say to you again, you are completely losing sight of the fact that you are still only a high-schooler."

And here Meshcherskaya, not losing her simplicity or calm, suddenly and politely interrupted her:

"Pardon me, madame, you are quite wrong!  I am a woman.  And you know who can be faulted for that?  A friend and neighbor of my father's – your brother Aleksei Mikhailovich Malyutin.  That event took place last summer in the country..."

II

A month after this conversation, however, an unattractive and plebeian-looking Cossack officer, having absolutely nothing in common with the circles to which she belonged, shot Olya Meshcherskaya dead on a train station platform amidst a large crowd of people who had just come in with the train.  And that improbable confession on the part of Olya Meshcherskaya which had so staggered her principal turned out to be utterly correct.  Before the judicial investigator the officer declared that Meshcherskaya had enticed him, gotten close to him, and sworn to become his wife.  And yet at the station on the day of the murder, as she accompanied him to Novocherkassk, she suddenly said to him that she had never even thought of loving him, that all their talks of marriage were merely meant to mock him, and she handed him the very page of her diary where she spoke of Malyutin.

"I raced through those lines and right where she was strolling on the platform, waiting until I had finished reading, I shot her," said the officer.  "And if you want to take a look at the diary, here it is, here's what was written on July 10th of last year." 

The diary contained the following:

"It is now two o'clock in the morning.  I fell into a deep sleep but then woke up just as quickly ... I had just become a woman!  Mom, Dad, and Tolya had already gone back into town and I was left alone.   I was so happy to be alone!  In the morning I would walk in the garden and the fields.  And when I was in the woods it seemed like I was alone on this earth, and my thoughts and mind had never been so clear.  I even ate alone, then spent the next hour playing to the music, and I had the feeling that I would live forever and be as happy as no one had ever been before.  Then I fell asleep in Dad's office and did not wake until Katya woke me at four and said that Aleksey Mikhailovich had arrived. 

"I was so happy to see him!  It was so pleasant to welcome him and to practice.  He had come on a pair of his lovely vyatkas, and they remained at attention by the porch.  He stayed because of the rain and because he wanted everything to dry out by evening.  He regretted not finding Dad at home, but was vivacious and a perfect gentleman, joking often about how he had always been in love with me.  The weather was magnificent again as we strolled together in the garden before teatime: the sun shined through the garden's wetness even though it had gotten quite cold, and he took me by the arm and said that we were Faust and Margarita.  He was fifty-six years old and yet still very handsome and always well-dressed.  The only thing I didn't like was when he showed up in a long sleeveless cloak – he reeked of English cologne and his eyes were completely young again, black, and his beard was elegantly split into two long parts and perfectly silver.  We drank our tea sitting on the glass veranda and I felt somewhat ill and lay down on the long ottoman.  He smoked for a while before sitting down next to me.  He began anew with his sweet nothings then looked at my hand and kissed it.  I covered my face with a silk handkerchief and he kissed me several times on the lips through this makeshift veil ... I do not understand how this could have happened; I must have lost my mind.  I never thought I was like that!  Now I have only one way out ... towards him I feel such repugnance that I do not think I can live through this!"

During these April days the city becomes pure, dry, whitened by its stones, and so easy and pleasant to walk through.  Every Sunday after Mass, on Soborny street leading to the road out of the city, a small woman walks in mourning garb, in black kid-skin gloves, with an umbrella made of black wood.  By the main road she crosses the dirty square near a number of frozen smithies as the fresh air from the fields blows in.  Further along, between the monastery and the local jail, a slope of clouds whitens in the sky as the springtime fields become more gray.  And then, once one navigates the puddles by the monastery wall and turns left, something akin to a large, low garden can be seen surrounded by a white fence whose gates bear the inscription Assumption of the Holy Mother.  The small woman gently crosses herself and walks as is her custom along the main alley.  As she approaches the bench facing the oaken cross, she sits for an hour in the wind and springtime chill, maybe even two hours, until her legs in her light boots and her narrow kid-skin hands are almost numb with cold.  She listens to the birds of spring sing sweetly even in the cold; she listens to the sound of the wind against the ceramic wreath and thinks sometimes that she would hand over half her life if only this dead wreath did not sit before her eyes.  That wreath, that mound, that oaken crest!  Is it really possible that beneath it lies she whose eyes gleam immortally from the crest's raised ceramic medallion?  And how then is one to combine that pure gaze with the horror now affixed to the name Olya Meshcherskaya?  Yet in the depths of her soul the small woman is happy as are all people devoted to some kind of passionate dream.        

This woman is Olya Meshcherskaya's old classroom teacher – an old spinster is more like it – long since nourished on a fabrication that has replaced her own real life.  At first this fabrication assumed the contours of her brother, a poor and undistinguished lieutenant; she joined her entire life to him, to his future, which for some reason seemed to her to be brilliant.  When he was killed at Mukden she convinced herself that she was a progressive laborer, but Olya Meshcherskaya's death filled her with a new dream.  Olya Meshcherskaya is now the subject of her unreachable thoughts and feelings.  She walks to the grave every holiday and for hours her eyes do not stray from the wooden cross.  She remembered Olya Meshcherskaya's pale face in the grave among the flowers, as well as what she heard once: once, during the longer recess, walking along the high school's garden, Olya Meshcherskaya told her closest friend, that tall and rather full girl Subbotina:     

"I read in one of Dad's books – he has a ton of old, funny books – how a woman is supposed to be beautiful.  There is, you see, so much information that you'll never remember it all!  Naturally, black eyes burning like tar – I swear, it says 'burning like tar'!  Black lashes like the night, a delicately playful cheek, a svelte figure, arms longer than normal – do you see, longer than normal!  Small feet the size of a large breast, properly curved calves, knees the color of a shell, sloping shoulders.  I learned quite a bit almost by heart, since all of it is so true!  But do you know what the most important thing is?  A gentle breath!  And you see I have that already!  Listen to how I exhale – I do have it, don't I?"

And now this gentle breath has again been dispersed into the world, into that sky of clouds, into that cold springtime wind.

Absurdistan

If man is truly a political animal – and every time we vote we reconsider the proposition – one should ask why politics inevitably resolves itself into a struggle for money and power or a balance of these two insatiables.  Now I am not a cynical person by any means; but a healthy view of political systems should be tempered by the reality that even democratically elected governance, if unwise, can be as destructive as the most prideless king.  Alliances form and fade like waves; betrayal becomes the expected result of all human commitment; and only one rock-solid principle remains: those who hold sway even over the smallest municipality will do whatever it takes to keep it.  A good adage to paste upon the cover of this recent novel.  

Our hero is Misha Vainberg, a Russian-American mountain of a man, a millionaire, and most importantly, perhaps, a secular Jew.  Born and raised in St. Petersburg, Misha is dispatched around Communism's last May Day blowout to an American left-wing haven (perhaps not the best tonic for a lifelong victim of Marxist stupidity), Accidental College, to learn proper English and become a true man of the world.  That is the ostensible reason.  We may add that Misha and his gangster father Boris – commonly referred to simply as "Beloved Papa" – have lost the stabilizing force in their miserable existences, Misha's equally Beloved Mama, who died of cancer, her abridged life having begun with Stalin and ended with Andropov (as Misha quips, "what a pathetic time to have been alive").  Misha spends a good decade becoming American, listening to rap (the novel's most omissible passages), gorging himself on every sort of delicacy, and understanding the choices of a real man, which means, we can safely assume, that he does some drugs and women and reflects on the endless possibilities of both habits. 

Ah, America.  We are only given snippets of this magical realm.  But is evident that Misha Vainberg sincerely embraced the fifty nifty states for being free enough to allow someone of his girth and insecurities to pursue a relatively normal life at a relatively normal college and fall in love with, among other nebulous entities, multiculturalism.  If there is one overarching and underlying theme in Absurdistan, it is that variety is the spice of life; the only problem is whether your tastebuds are sufficiently discriminating.  These are good times, fast times even; and although Misha does not reasonably expect to outlive the average dead Russian male of fifty-six, he also does not expect to return to his native land where Jews were so unabashedly abused and so happily released.  That is, until Boris murders an Oklahoman over some trivial dispute and Misha finds that the State Department no longer wishes to facilitate his travel, legitimate or otherwise.  Morose, lacquered by booze and hangers-on, and the son of "the 1238th richest man in Russia," Misha endures nine non-immigrant visa refusals at the St. Petersburg consulate before Boris's gangster lifestyle catches up with him – and takes his head off in the process.  It is at this terrible juncture that Misha realizes he needs another plan, and it involves a Belgian passport, an unscrupulous private defense company, and a small former Soviet Republic called, among other things, Absurdistan.

From the beginning we know Misha's limitations: obesity, Judaism, the fact that he is an orphan and an exile, as well as someone who is rich because of his family's disreputable dealings.  These limitations cannot be dismissed for the plot's convenience.  Since one should be an astute observer of what careful artists place at the center of their works, it is worth noting that Misha is abandoned in Absurdistan by his best friend Alyosha-Bob precisely halfway through his fictional odyssey (Misha is omnipresently known as being "sophisticated and melancholic," as well as for having slept with his stepmother, but that's a tale for another day).  The plot or plots that Misha encounters in Absurdistan bespeak a political disingenuousness on his part that no real Russian could ever have, and yet we are squarely convinced that he knows no better.  He loves a large woman of color named Rouenna, but she will leave him for the dissolute rising star author Jerry Shteynfarb.  Comfort is found in his twenty-one-year-old stepmother's bed, an event that contradicts his oath never to sleep with his co-nationals, then in the arms of Nana, the daughter of a very important Absurdi leader.  Nana is a tour guide during the summers between her semesters at NYU, and it is in this harmless context that Misha and she meet as only two lovers of New York far away from that megapolis could:

They [the Svanii, Nana's Absurdi clan] had reached all kinds of accommodations with their Persian (or Ottoman) overlords during the Three Hundred Year War of the Footrest Secession, and they had the habit of putting stones around Sevo [the other clan's] churches to claim them for their own.  I'm not sure why this was significant, but the serious way in which Nana related these preposterous things only made me hotter for her, for when she talked her hooey, she resembled an actress longing to be recognized, a veritable American starlet with a full-moon face and the readiest of lips. 

This sleazy and somewhat irreverent paragraph may be taken out of context as the typical postmodern tripe about pleasure-seeking and historical relativism.  But Shteyngart is thankfully not a member of those back-slapping, self-congratulatory fraud circles that would never, in any case, be featured on these pages.  I perused his novel a couple of years ago, then came back to it after recently attending one of his readings and being surprised to find a self-effacing, chirpy intellectual bereft of the pessimism so common in satirists.  What sets Absurdistan apart from his other works as well as similar strikes at the already long-dead Socialist stallion is the type of protagonist employed.  Misha is a fat, repulsive Philistine tasked with mocking a country now led by fat, repulsive Philistines – or so we're told – that inherited the selfsame land from another bunch of Philistines, just as fat and repulsive, but now old or dead.  In a word, little has changed except consumerism, which is only remarkable to, well, a Philistine. 

The result has Misha as both the brave anathema to the Soviet machine and a typical New Russian basking in the sun's glow off his stacks of bullion.  Our rotund protagonist humbly recognizes this duality (there is, shall we say, enough of him to go around), which may explain his frightful indecision.  The inherent problem with satire is that it can only really be as profound as the material it abuses.  And even if it is somewhat more profound, it will soon discover that laughter and mockery only take it so far.  Shteyngart's comic gifts are much heralded (how Alyosha-Bob books their accommodations in the Absurdi capital had me roaring), but his precision of thought is even better:

The palaces on Nevsky Prospekt, wishing to say goodbye to me properly, dusted themselves off and bowed their chipped baldachins in my direction; the canals flowed most romantically, hoping to outdo one another; the moon fell and the sun rose to demonstrate the nocturnal and diurnal lay of the land; but I would not be moved.

There are dozens such passages in Absurdistan, but they are outyelled by politics and philandering misfits, hookers and oil derricks, thugs and Kalashnikovs, and the ever-present voice of Boris Vainberg – father, husband, Zionist, millionaire, murderer – a valiant oligarch who once urinated on an anti-Semitic dog.  Not that your average, run-of-the-mill Soviet Jew mechanical engineer could ever have spawned a gentle giant like Misha Vainberg.   

If They Knew Yvonne

If you cannot stand an insect buzzing at your ear while you are trying to sleep, how can you stand the eternal punishment of hell?

There are many stories to admire by this late writer, with one having been turned into a widely acclaimed film.  Unlike the majority of screen adaptations, however, suspense is heightened not diminished.  That story's title ("Killings") and opening paragraph reveal that one person is dead and at least one other will die by Hammurabic justice; yet the film gives little indication of this horrific turn of events and even boasts a title that is apparently a lobstering term.   Should we interpret this as a failing of the author's prose?  Dubus's corpus possess certainly qualities that I do not immediately regard as interesting literature: an overreliance on localisms; a preoccupation (to put it mildly) with the Catholic Church's accomplishments and restrictions; and a tendency to slip into the casually banal conversations that distinguish lesser writers.  Yet despite these flaws, his sense of detail and tone – perhaps a writer's greatest asset – is remarkable and consistently surprising.  Few writers are able nowadays to build a reputation solely on short stories, a curiously dying art considering how truncated our attention spans have become.  But Dubus was no ordinary writer, nor, from many reports, an ordinary human being, and the labyrinth of his soul's contours offers a perspective unique among twentieth-century American artists. So if you are still conflicted about the Catholic traditions of your youth, a handful of his tales will set you straight.  Or at least color your memories, as in this story of emerging sexuality and deep faith.

Our hero is Harry, a twelve-year-old Louisiana boy attending the Brothers academy like any other good Catholic son.  We will get snippets from his life until twenty or so, halfway through college, after the girl we know he will meet and love, and the lessons he will learn from these essential experiences.  Yet before we broach the inevitable, we are introduced to Brother Thomas, a man who preaches celibacy by underscoring the tribulations of the Church's greatest thinker and not his own.  Which might explain why the following passage makes so much sense:

He [Brother Thomas] had been talking with the excited voice yet wandering eyes of a man repeating by rote what he truly believes.  But now his eyes focused on something out the window, as though a new truth had actually appeared to him on the dusty school ground of that hot spring day.  One hand rose to scratch his jaw.

What can be deduced from a simian reflex coupled with the oddity of this revelation – if it is indeed a revelation?  In less subtle works, or works that pounce on human frailty as if it were the meekest of prey, the priest would be denounced as a fraud and religion exposed as the crutch of the madman and impoverished ignoramus.  A peek at the end of our tale does involve a confession by Harry (one of many he makes to his family, friends, and to us) and one by the Father who listens to his every word then admits a violent action of his own that might surprise you.  This latter admission actually strengthens the Church's cause, as well as Harry's volition that some decrees might not necessarily have to be swallowed in their entirety.   The arc of the story is therefore a simple one.  A boy plagued by a fear of sin and, ultimately, a fear of "the awful diaphanous bulk of God" (a beautiful description), turns to his own innermost desires and does not find them sinful.  As well he shouldn't.  He watches his sister Janet get pregnant at eighteen to a serviceman whom their parents instinctively dislike in the way that children should heed but rarely do ("he was an airman from the SAC base, so she had to argue with Mother for the first week or so"), and infers that women are in command of their sexual urges if for reasons that differ from his.  That, he thinks, would explain Yvonne.

When we finally meet Yvonne, our narrator begins to notice details that eluded him before, mostly because he was taught to follow not to notice.   They debate the sins of their mounting ecstasies and then "she finished our argument, won it, [and] soaked her small handkerchief in my casuistry"; when she warns him, only implicitly, that they are doomed to fail because they don't know better, he comments that "she was right to look for defeat in that direction"; and when they finally do break up, he is relieved that although "the campus was not a very large one ... it was large enough so you could avoid seeing someone."  There is an old chestnut among critics (you will often find it pasted on the back of Dubus's helpless tomes) that the familiarity of the subject matter, a rite of passage for the sexually liberated masses that we call the postwar generations, makes a work all the more charming ("Like the voice of a dear old relative" is one particularly nauseating quip).  That is not why we should enjoy these works.  We should enjoy them because they take the basic problems of man and convert them into the basic problems of literature, blurring the line that should never have existed in the first place.  Dubus does not know where religion and faith stop and where art begins; he sees them all as the product of something greater than himself.  So when our tale opens with Harry's epiphany about what he really wants and believes – a phase we tend to refer to as adolescence – and moves quietly to a nondescript ending with his two nephews bagging crabs and wondering about the mortality of these animals they have trapped to eat, we see no lines.  We see children behaving cruelly and ignorantly but harmlessly at the same time, innocence as it evolves into morality.  And no, the nephews don't know better.  But Harry now does.

The Silver Swan

The Silver Swan, who living had no Note,

When Death approached, unlocked her silent throat.

Leaning her breast upon the reedy shore,

Thus sang her first and last, and sang no more:

"Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes!

"More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise."

                                                                                                                  – Orlando Gibbons

Since the beginnings of the last century art has been moving away from plots of diabolical origin and into the keen, misty balefulness of the genre called noir.  Why must a world be dark to be evil?  Perhaps it is not so much that the world itself is dark, but the intentions of man impervious to the Light that may very well be his salvation.  In noir, there is little of that oddity we have come to call hope.  Each person may be an enemy, and becomes especially suspicious when he wishes to be your friend; each street is somehow guarded by wicked sentinels with little remorse for their purposes; and sex, that all-encompassing pastime, can only really lead to your perdition.  And within this now-rampant genre two types can be identified: that of the labyrinthine plot that may mimic the devilry some believe engirds the world, and that which is simple yet profound in its intentions.  The latter may describe the majority of us, and may direct our reading of this novel.

Our protagonist is a Dublin coroner by the name of Garret Quirke, a long-time widower and a brand-new teetotaler.  The reasons for such asceticism – he is asked more than once what he does now in the evening – are less puzzling than the plain unlikelihood of a heavy-set man using his large, shaking fingers to examine corpse after corpse.  When such contrivances occur in real life they are accepted as nature's eccentricity, yet in fiction they are dismissed as improbable.  Given little power over his own existence, Quirke is relegated to an almost bureaucratic undertaker role requiring silence, mansuetude, and a willingness to grease a few wheels.  Why such an environment?  One supposes that the average coroner would be less compelled to meet the desires of the next-of-kin, especially when some of these desires are underhanded and disturbing.  Quirke has, of course, no such qualms.  This makes him both an excellent noir hero – no noir hero can really manage straitlaced morals – and an easy victim of those who prey on the ethically conflicted.  And it is initially unclear as to which category Billy Hunt fits. 

A traveling salesman, Billy was in another unlikely coincidence once Quirke's classmate in medical school.  His failure to finish his studies has its reason, as we learn much later in the novel, but he does bear more than a passing resemblance to Quirke: he is strapping and large, likes his gargle, and his wife, Deidre, was recently found naked and drowned in a cove (a fact made doubly strange by Billy's confession that the late Mrs. Hunt neither disrobed entirely for her husband nor knew how to swim).  An unstated implication arises, echoed by Quirke's discovery of needle marks on Deidre's inner forearm, and allows our coroner to be sympathetic to his classmate's request to declare the affair a suicide.  This he does, unconvincingly, before the local judge prior to launching into his own investigation of the matter with the help of the police and, well, his own preoccupation with dead wives.  A third widower appears, Quirke's brother-in-law, and a loathsome family secret is revealed: upon the death of his wife Delia at childbirth, Quirke entrusted their child to his wife's sister, Sarah and her husband Mal.  Yes, one guesses an alcoholic coroner would not be the ideal single parent.  But the hand-off is made more appalling by the knowledge that Quirke had always preferred Sarah to Delia, yet only Delia would allow herself to be deflowered before they exchanged vows.  That sidelight may be endemic to noir fiction: that even while a person wants to do good, the result as well as the impetus may both be foul.

There are others: Leslie White, a tall, pale Lothario and his voluptuous if ignored wife Kate; Phoebe, Quirke's daughter by birth alone; Hackett, the detective inspector at whom Quirke hurls some probatory missiles; Rose, the widow of an old, rich Irishman; and a "spiv" of a spiritual healer by the name of Kreutz, half-Austrian, half-Indian, but Sufi in his practices.  It is this latter being, who seems to Deidre to hail from another dimension, that maligns no one and yet possesses, "something ... that would make a person wary of being completely frank in talking about him."  The bromides are thankfully few, but with such a host of characters the portraits contain usually no more than a few wide strokes.  Take, for example, what is inflicted upon poor Hackett: 

He was in shirtsleeves and broad braces.  Quirke recognized the voluminous blue trousers, shined to a high polish at seat and knee, that were one half of what must still be the only suit he owned.  His big square face, with its slash of mouth and watchful eyes, was shiny too, especially about the jowls and chin.  His brilliantined black hair was brushed back fiercely from his forehead in a raptor's crest.  Quirke was not sure that he had ever seen Hackett before without his hat.  It was two years since he and Hackett had last spoken, and he was faintly surprised to discover how pleased he was to see the wily old brute, box-head and carp's mouth and shiny serge and all.

A clear image surfaces in our minds, if enhanced by hundreds of close matches.  And while Quirke is rather an original concoction – a recovering drunk, stubborn, and both highly sensitive and almost emotionless – most of the personae suggest old cut-outs of the kind so commonly incident to noir and its shallow, filthy canals.  Deidre, who goes by the nom de scène Laura Swan, emerges from a hardscrabble existence to marry the very unnecessary Billy and then begin a very unnecessary affair with the unmarriable Leslie – and not only the names bespeak little children.  That they come to run jointly a beauty salon and massage parlor should explain Quirke's discomposure at Billy's pleas to file this all away under that most lamentable of Catholic sins – and we should stay our pens right about there.

Benjamin Black is the poorly concealed pseudonym of this fine Irish writer, who has been both praised and lambasted for his venture into what might be broadly termed popular fiction.  Since Banville's bugbear (as with most writers of his talent) has always been overcoming the superficiality of structure, a neat knot of threads may be just what he could use to weave his ivies.  And weave he does: Deidre's hair was "a shining reddish gold, like a million strands of soft, supple metal, catching the light from all angles and glowing even in the half-dark"; at Kreutz's place she finds "three unreally perfect, glossy apples in the copper dish, each one reflecting on its cheek an identical gleaming spot of light from the window"; and a waiter "present[s] the wine bottle for Rose's inspection, like a conjurer showing a dove preparatory to making it disappear."  There are many other such moments, transparent moments that show the old, sturdy, unflappable Banville toggling between the lush madness of aesthetic prose and the austerity of these quiet detective tales.  There is something satisfying in their composition, which is why one is not surprised to hear Banville admit, as he did in a recent interview, that while he can only manage about five hundred words a day for his normal prose, he can pump out up to nine thousand for a noir text.  Must be the quiet, introspective setting.  Bloody and quiet, that is.

Vorwort zu "Köln fünf Uhr dreißig"

A work ("Foreword to 'Cologne, 5:30'") by this German writer on this German photographer.  You can read the original in this collection.

One would have to look at these photographs all at once, one after the other in the flash of a single moment: a large city in the morning between five and five-thirty.  Only then would the deception of a single photo be eliminated.  And the deception consists of the fact that the city has a name, as well as a hidden history that inevitably adds to the photos' effect.  The name of the city is Cologne, and it is practically impossible to photograph its inner space without somewhere catching a part of the Cathedral, a city gate or one of the Roman churches.  The name of the city is as indifferent as its history, which can only be interesting for tourism, thus only for commercial reasons.  What is more, it could just as well be called Duisburg, Essen or Stuttgart and, like all cities, it is there for cars and car drivers.  And precisely because there are no cars to be found in these photos one sees that they are what belongs to the city – as all other cities belong to them.  It would also be logical, as it were, to leave this city nameless by labeling it with a combination of license plates and postal stamps: 5 K 1; the danger that one might confuse this designation with an obscure tonic can be allayed by means of a computer.

The problems in these cities are well-known: parking and the "flow" of traffic.  It is also well-known that both problems can never be resolved because all construction takes a very long time, and what could have been a solution for 1970 may in reality very well be the solution for 1965.  The madness is as evident as the emperor's new clothes, but one is still obliged to turn a blind eye to two matters: the free market economy and a certain something that we can call individualism.  It would be faineant here to ponder the price of land; the newspapers are chock full of such musings, everyone knows it, everyone laments it and nevertheless everything proceeds apace.  "We will march on," and we will continue to turn not one but two blind eyes to all this.  Probably in a few years' time that theory regarding the inhospitality of our cities will be categorized as euphoric, and the theory of the cities' unlivability will then arise, and when it does it will turn out to be quite applicable.  The privileged know how to help themselves: they betake themselves to a house in the country or leave the parking problem to their driver.  Since, comically enough, umpteen workplaces – radio stations, banks, insurance companies and department stores – are being built in the middle of the city, we have put the hounds on the parking, etcetera, etcetera.  The question "how much land does a man need" should be asked anew; a parking space is generally only a tad bigger than a grave.

I live in this city.  I was born there.  Were one to ask me whether it was my home, I would not have an answer.  It is rather the home of my memory; for an author this may be very significant, but for whom else could it possibly mean a thing?  This is something I cannot judge.  I am only sure that the concept of banishment requires a new definition.  I cannot provide such a definition here, I can only recall a certain pair of blind eyes turned away that enabled destroyed cities to be destroyed a second time.  By means of enormous administrative construction projects whose (somewhat controversial) architectonic elegance is also deceptive, a deception that becomes even worse owing to "the small houses there on the corner" which one leaves standing in order to erect a memorial to individualism.  All this comprises a system of architectural dominance for which "the small houses there on the corner" become a servant whose master treats him with merciful contempt.