We left off last time in our consideration of David Szalay’s fourth story in the collection All That Man Is,  with the protagonist, Balazs, realizing, perhaps belatedly, that the object of his erotic obsession, Emma, is a high-class prostitute. Moreover, he is employed by her husband, Gabor, to provide security for her during a working trip to London. “It is awkward, especially that first night.” This describes Balazs’ experience sitting most of the night in a car with Gabor, waiting for Emma to finish working. ‘Kay. Once the guys retrieve a sleepy Emma, they all go back to the hotel. Balazs handles (no pun intended) his feelings by masturbating in the shower while thinking in erotic terms about Emma. There is really nothing else in the story about his feelings concerning the situation; it is up to the reader to infer them. And this is in keeping with Balazs’ character; he is not an introspective man. The following day, Gabor engages Balasz in conversation—Gabor apparently is introspective. “‘Sometimes I wonder about my attitude to women,’ Gabor says… ‘what would you do in my position?’ … ‘What d’you mean?’ ‘If you and Emma were…whatever,’ Gabor says impatiently. ‘Would you let her do this?’ ‘Would I let her?’ … Balazs is having trouble imagining, with any emotional specificity, the situation Gabor wants him to—a situation in which he and Emma were…whatever. Sex is all he is able to imagine and that of an impossibly lubricious kind. ‘Don’t know,’ he says.” Please note, first of all, the use of the word “lubricious.” This is the narrator’s voice as lubricious is not a word Balazs would use. Second, this is a fine characterization of a character who is male, late twenties, not terribly articulate, and not driven by any career plan. He is horny, best B. After an incident where Balazs is called upon to set limits with one of Emma’s clients, (foreshadowing), he encounters her the next day. Gabor is away. In the context of Balazs waking up on the couch and seeing Emma, we have. “She looks at him, sitting there, up to his waist in the sleeping bag, his tattooed biceps and toaster-like pecs, his small pale eyes obscurely imploring.” An interesting passage, no? It would seem to be from Emma’s perspective, when she has never had one before, always being an object. I don’t know, my friends, this could also be from the narrator’s perspective, but it is a bit jarring. Why? you ask. Because texts teach us to read them by establishing rules of who the protagonist is, which characters enjoy a perspective. If you suddenly break one of these conventions, it’s a shock that needs to be reconciled. Emma has been presented as aloof and unattainable thus far, in this passage, we have evidence of her consciousness checking Balazs out. She is not who we thought she was. The two of them decide to go out for coffee. “They are in the habit of speaking to each other now, up to a point. Still, it feels extremely intimate to pass through the downstairs hall together, to leave the house, and walk down the street.” After coffee, they decide rather clumsily to go to Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks. Balazs suggests this because he thinks Emma would like it. She seems to agree because she thinks he wants to go. She has returned in the story to being an admired object, a “black box,” if you will, mysterious to Balazs. The entrance line is long at the Waxworks, and they decide to go to a park. Emma asks Balazs a series of questions about himself, indicating some interest in him. Finally she says: “…Are you in a relationship?” He says no, and they go to have a drink together. Well, Emma has again emerged from the black box; she surprises Balazs and she surprises us with her interest. Once at the pub, Emma says, “Do you know why I like you? …You don’t judge people.” This flirtation goes on, but finally Emma says she has to return to the apartment to prepare for the night’s work. Balazs is disappointed as he would like to continue being alone with her, but they set off. So far, then, we have a story in which the protagonist, Balazs, seems to be presented with the strong possibility of achieving his goal—bedding the beautiful Emma. Much to his surprise, she seems to be interested in him and is much friendlier than he’d previously experienced. Her questions make him confront his identity or lack there of. Balazs is, I think, on the edge of realizing he is missing something in life. He is late twenties and drifting. I think we the readers get a sense of the story being about two misfits who are lonely and find each other. Let’s stop here and find out what happens next time. Till then. #AllThatanIs #DavidSzalay #AlanBray

I was going to embark on a new story this week, a new book, that is, but I’ve been enjoying the David Szalay book, All That Man Is , so much that I wanted to focus on one more of its stories, the third one, also untitled. As we’ve noted, all the stories in this collection have as their protagonist, a man of a particular age. This story has to do with Balazs, a Hungarian man in his late twenties. So, in keeping with the rest of the book, we would expect this story to explore issues relevant to men in their late twenties. Here is the first line: “It is ten o’clock in the morning and the kitchen is full of standing smoke and the smell of stuffed cabbages.” In short order, we are introduced to an entity known as Emma’s mother, and then to Gabor, who we learn is “off” to London. Halfway down the first page, a third character appears: “She puts a plate with two slices of bread on it on the small square table next to Balazs’ Michaelangelesque elbow. (His mouth working, he acknowledges it with a nod of his head).” I have to confess I had some trouble making sense of this first scene, as far as who is the protagonist—is it Emma’s mother? Gabor? Balazs? (Hint: it’s Balazs) So what questions arise in this beginning? Whose kitchen are they in, and why does it smell of smoke and cabbage? Who are these people? Who and why are they traveling to London? What’s going on with Balazs’ Michaelangelesque elbow? This seems to imply that he’s well-muscled. What of the names? Balazs and Gabor are well…Hungarian sounding names in a story written in the English language. Please remember: there are no coincidences. Nothing is random. A skilled writer like Mr. Szalay doesn’t just name characters because he feels like it; the names have some meaning. In this case, I believe they establish one of the themes of all the stories in this book, that the protagonists are all men who are living in and/or journeying to a country not their own. Finally, thus far, can we detect anything relating to a theme? (we’re on the lookout for something late twenties). Nope. Not yet, best B. As is true with all the stories, the narrative is in present tense and third person. And there is a somewhat hidden narrator who directs our attention and describes people and things. (Please see the first line). In the story’s first scenes, we get a sense of the characters, particularly Balazs. He is a veteran of Hungary’s military deployment to Iraq, a time in his life he remembers fondly as “safe, and there were things to do.” Now, he is Gabor’s personal trainer and works for him sometimes to provide security, a role that he assumes in this story. Gabor is a shady businessman who is perhaps involved in making pornographic films. His wife is Emma (Emma Bovary?) a beautiful woman whom Balazs lusts after although she is aloof. Balazs has no lady friend, and his attraction to Emma preoccupies him. “It is extremely stressful, he finds, to be in her presence outside the safely purposeful space of the gym…he would be so intensely aware of her presence, of the miniscule squeaks when she moved on the leather seat” (of the car) “or flipped down the sun visor to tweak an eyebrow in the vanity mirror, that, just to hold himself together, he had to fix his eyes on some object outside the darkened window.” This, then, is Balazs’ state as the story begins—single and well…horny. And he is somewhat adrift, having no career interest. He is nostalgic for his military service when, we can infer, his life was organized by others. Perhaps we see here a presentation of the state of some men in their late twenties. (Aha!) We should contrast this presentation with Karel, the man of the same age as Balazs in story number four, which we looked at a couple of weeks ago. He is deeply immersed in his career as an academic but coming to terms with the needs of his pregnant girlfriend. He is similarly pre-occupied with sex but is a different beastie than Balazs who has no other interest. The precipitating event occurs when Balazs and the reader learn more about the purpose of the trip to London. “Gabor says, ‘Emma’s going to be doing some work in London…And your job…’ He finds a more satisfactory pronoun. (The narrator’s voice) ‘Our job is to look after her. Okay?’” Balazs, Emma, and Gabor journey to London where they meet a man named Zoli and go to a hotel. Balazs learns Emma will be going to work right away—that night. She leaves the guys, disappearing into the bathroom with her make-up bag. When she emerges, standing in the doorway, dressed for the evening, the guys are awestruck by her beautiful appearance. “’Wow,’ Zoli had said…‘ Wow .’” (Italics for emphasis). While it is never explained explicitly, it has become clear to the reader and to Balazs that Emma is a high-class prostitute, and that they have all come to London so she can work. ‘Kay. Let’s stop there and resume next time. Till then. #AllThatManIs #DavidSzalay #AlanBray

Last time, we left off amidst David Szalay’s linked short story collection All That Man Is . We were studying the final story which deals with Tony, a man near the end of his life. Unfortunately for Tony, he has just been in a serious car accident and is recovering. We the readers wonder if this traumatic experience leads to some transformation in a character who is darkly focused on the meaninglessness of his life. Tony’s wife Joanna drives him home from the hospital. “On the drive home, however, his spirits are low. He isn’t sure, now, what he was looking forward to. It is snowing lightly, ineffectually. Small flakes that won’t settle, that melt as they touch anything.” A nice passage, no? The small flakes that won’t settle, that melt as soon as they touch anything—it’s a temporary world Tony is moving through. Impermanent and ineffective. It does seem that Tony is still stuck in dysphoria. However, Joanna tells Tony that although she herself can’t stay, their adult daughter Cordelia will be visiting him for a week. Tony is pleased although he tries not to show it. Joanna proposes they watch a film together. “He notices the full glass of wine in her hand. She’s drinking a lot of wine, he thinks. She’s uneasy, with them here together like this.” Tony and Joanna are estranged, as they say. An amusing scene follows of Joanna suggesting a series of films to watch— Groundhog Day, On Golden Pond, The Bucket List, Driving Miss Daisy, About Schmidt —Tony rejects them all. The films are of note as they all have to do with mortality and ageing—more or less successfully. Here is a nice example of there being nothing random in good fiction. The scene could be a self-indulgent opportunity for the author to show how many cool films he knows. Instead, they all relate to the story’s theme; they amplify it. Tony and Joanna quarrel but reconcile and choose to watch The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel  together. In a new chapter, the story’s mostly invisible narrator addresses us: “One always imagines that there will be some sort of serenity at the end. Some sort of serenity. Not just an awful sordid mess of shit and pain and tears. Some sort of serenity. Whatever that might mean. And what that actually might mean becomes problematic up close. Amemuse eterna e non periterna.  That would seem to be sound advice, if serenity is what one is after.” Of course, this passage reflects Tony’s predicament. We see again the use of repetition here. Joanna leaves, and their daughter Cordelia, who is forty-three, arrives. Tony is happy his daughter is there, although he tries to hide it, remaining kind of grumpy and mopish. He finds her studying a photo of he and Joanna and thinks about the emptiness of the marriage and how Cordelia has suffered.   They go out shopping for a new car for Tony, and at lunch, Tony tries to explain some of the insights he’s recently had. “’It’s important,’ he says, struggling to make sense, he can that on her face, ‘to feel part of something larger, something…something permanent. ‘Yeah,’ she says patiently, pouring herself some more water. She doesn’t see the point of this, he thinks. He’s not sure he does either. It seems so elusive, even to him, when he tries to put it into words—or indeed when he doesn’t. ‘I’m not making much sense,’ he apologizes. ‘No, it’s interesting,’ Cordelia says.” “She has started on the ravioli. ‘Is it okay?’ he asks. ‘Lovely,’ she says. And he is very moved, suddenly, by the sight of her. Overwhelmed. She notices his moist-eyed stare and smiles at him.” Tony returns to dark, empty thoughts about mortality. Then, “Cordelia is talking about Simon (her son, the protagonist of the very first story). Normally she talks about him a lot. This week she has made an effort not to. He is aware of that…She is touching on the aspects of her son that strike other people as odd and admitting, unusually, that she worries about them sometimes. He tries to soothe her…I shouldn’t worry, he tells her, putting his hand over hers. She nods. It’s what she wants to hear. Whether it is true or not, who knows. Only time will tell.” They leave the restaurant. The last lines: “The air is frigid, stings the skin of his face. Via Maggiore is fading away in the dusk.” Well, best B, what I make of this is that Tony has been stuck in feeling sorry for himself, and probably will be stuck again, but for this brief moment in a restaurant, he’s pulled out of it into realizing how important his daughter is to him and he to her. He struggles to offer her sage advice but then really does, very simply, consoling her about her maternal cares. He forgets, however briefly, the everyday cares of his life and immerses himself in the eternal cycle of parent and offspring. He comforts her and is comforted. A beautiful story. Let’s stop there and return next time. Till then. #AllThatManIs #DavidSzalay #AlanBray

Hello. We are in the middle of examining the final, untitled story in David Szalay’s collection All That Man Is . Last time, we noted how things begin with the protagonist, a seventy-three-year-old man named Tony, pre-occupied with thoughts of death and the end of his individual existence which seems to make his life lack meaning. As we continue, Tony talks to the cleaning lady and has breakfast. He checks email and reads one from his daughter Cordelia (King Lear fans take note!). We learn that his grandson is Simon, the protagonist of the first story in the collection. It is a year after the time of that story, and Simon is in his first year at Oxford and has had a poem published in “some magazine.” Here we may note again how poetry is a part of Szalay’s prose. This poem is presented in full. It describes the Turkish (Ottoman) ruler Mehmet II holding a rose, a somewhat incongruous act for a man who was a fierce warrior and ruthless monarch. But the poem talks about how Mehmet is smelling the rose and experiencing:   Just a moment’s immersion in the texture of existence   Tony likes the poem. “The words made him think of the way he spent a minute or two, earlier that morning, staring at the wardrobe upstairs. The sense he had then of losing himself in the act of perception.” This picks out the theme of the story, that someone who’s spent their life dealing with power and commerce relationships can learn to “smell the roses.” It’s a nice feature of Mr. Szalay’s prose to present it this way—using a poem written by the protagonist’s grandson. Alternatives might be to present it in dialogue with another character, perhaps combined with inner reactions, or less successfully, in narrative summary, explaining something that can be shown. Mr. Szalay finds a creative option. Then, a crisis. Tony is restless and journeys out to see some nearby historic sites. He has lunch in a café and observes a little girl who is singing a song to herself. It is a song probably designed to teach the young singer the months of the year and consists of their names and a brief description of what occurs during their time. Thus, “In January it snows, February is masked…November, an extra jumper. December, Jesus.” Tony praises the child’s singing. This certainly continues the theme in the story of the passage of time. Leaving, he has a serious car accident, caused by his misjudgment. Perhaps, this brush with death is transformative. Brushes with death often are, best B. Immediately after the accident, we have a new chapter, very short, presenting a Latin phrase: Amemus eterna e non peritura. Let us love that which is eternal and not what is transient. This is an inscription Tony saw on the ruins he visited. It certainly resonates with the story’s theme. Tony is seriously injured in the crash but recovers. His condition and limited awareness after being in a coma forces him to “lose himself” in the act of perception. Here, he’s lying in the hospital bed. “The door had a panel of frosted glass in it, and figures slide across it sometimes, dark smudges, animating the facets of the panel for a moment.” His wife Joanna visits him, and we learn that the couple is estranged. More on this to come. Tony sees his injured face in the hospital mirror and muses: “So what is eternal? (thinking of the Latin inscription) Nothing, that’s the problem. Nothing on earth. Not the earth itself. Not the sun. Not the stars in the night sky. Everything has an end. Everything. We know that now.” Please note here the structure of the lines, separated as they are, and the repetition (noted last time) of the phrases beginning with “Not.” These poetic devices certainly draw attention to Tony’s inner feelings, a sort of bleakness in which he seems to accept his own mortality amid the persistence of the sensory world. But he tries to find the eternal and isn't done. Is this the transformation? Part of it, I think but there will be more. Thus far, we see Tony feeling he doesn't know what's eternal, that perhaps his death will be the death of everything. A lack of transcendence, as it were. Let’s stop there and plan to tackle the end next time. Till then. #AllThatManIs #DavidSzalay #AlanBray

Hello, we’re back! Today, we’ll examine the final (ninth of nine) story in David Szalay’s book, All That Man Is . To begin this one, there is no title, but we have an epigraph:   Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know.   This is the beginning of W.H. Auden’s 1940 poem, If I Could Tell You. We’ve noted how Mr. Szalay seems to appreciate the poet Philip Larkin and weave Larkin’s style into his prose. Here we have further evidence of Mr. Szalays’s appreciation of poetry and its expressiveness. Let’s say more about this when we’re farther along. I’m guessing that if you’re not familiar with the story or the poem, this epigraph is mysterious. It refers to the experience of time and age as being difficult to communicate. There is always more time till there isn’t, and at that point of death, a human can’t communicate her/his subjective experience. Here’s the story’s first line: “The next morning he needs to do the shopping.” For those of us keeping track, this opening raises the question, most obviously, who is “he?” Why does he need to do the shopping? This story is about an Englishman, Tony, seventy-three, who has gone from London to stay at a vacation home he and his wife own in Italy. He’s alone—for reasons that will be revealed, and so must do his own shopping. We’ve noted before that each story in this collection has to do with men at different points in their lives, men who are experiencing an emotional crisis over what is truly meaningful. And we must note that this is the final story and that Tony is the oldest subject. As we’ve discussed before, we humans have different experiences of time. There is chronological time, the thing we measure in minutes, days, and years. We say and/or think: It’s gonna take three hours to get where I’m going! And there is experiential time, which is what meaning we make of our perception of chronologic time. Three hours of my precious life! Wasted. The stories in All That Man Is  have to do with experiential time. The first story we looked at, the one about Simon (who will appear in this last one) is about someone making meaning out of being seventeen, that it is an age for adventure and excitement. Last time, we examined Karel, who at thirty apparently concludes it’s time to settle down. Let’s look at Tony’s story. “He arrived last night at Bologna airport…The taxi through the wintry darkness to the house. The house was cold. Entropic forces were gnawing at it. There were mouse droppings on the floor.” Here, we are reassured by the persistence of the author’s style—the short sentences and fragments that impart a jagged choppiness to the story. For a contrast, please read Marcel Proust who writes very long sentences with many clauses and consider what a difference this makes in terms of tone. “He thinks about death quite a lot now. It is hard not to think about it. Obviously, he doesn’t have that much time left. Ten years? In ten years he will be eighty-three. “It still seems incredible to him that he is actually going to die. That this is just going to stop. This. Him. It still seems like something that happens to other people. “There is something very strange about trying to imagine the world without him. The strangeness, he thinks, is to do with the fact that the only world he knows is the one he perceives himself—and that world will die with him…It is the ending of the stream of perception that seems so strange. So unimaginable.” So, Tony is contemplating his demise and finds that it makes his life somewhat disappointing. He fears the fact that the life that he’s cherished so much will end, renders it unimportant. Let’s remind ourselves that, in terms of story structure, this is Tony’s state at the beginning, before any transformation. He worries that his life is meaningless. This scene continues with Tony hearing the cleaning lady arrive. He interacts with her briefly while fixing breakfast and thinks about how she lives with her son and that he sometimes gives her a ride home. “Her son must be thirty. A handsome man. He has met him a few times…” And this introduces a feature of the story that will be developed as we continue, although I don’t think Tony’s noticing handsome men is the story’s “point.” Let’s pick things up next time. Till then. #AllThatManIs #DavidSzalay #AlanBray

Last time, we left off studying the fourth, unnamed story in David Szalay’s All That Man Is , a tale of a man in his early thirties, an English graduate student who is involved in a love affair with a woman named Waleria. The protagonist (whose name is Karel—I forgot that he was named last time) is delivering an expensive, leased car to a man in Poland, a man who happens to be Valeria’s father, and plans to meet Valeria and spend a few days with her at a German resort. We saw how Karel is shown as being caught up in his career as an academic and also relentlessly focused on the present with all its sensuous delights—including Waleria, who, however, warns him that he needs to settle down. (A nice touch of foreshadowing). Karel parks at the airport where he plans to meet Valeria. “He finds a space. And then it happens. There is a loud ugly metallic noise that for a moment he does not understand. The he does and his heart stops. When it starts again, he is sweating heavily.” Of course, he has had what we Americans would call a “fender-bender,” but to him, supposedly delivering a car he does not own, it is a catastrophe. He dreads presenting the problem to Waleria’s father, who happens to be a policeman. He meets Waleria inside, and tells her about the accident, saying he hopes her father won’t be too angry. She seems anxious but is supportive, then says, ‘There’s something I need to tell you, Karel.’ “… The number of things she might have to tell him shrinks, as the silence extends, until there are only one or two left. … She is either about to end their little affair…or ‘You’re pregnant,’ he says… He hopes she will immediately negative this. Instead, the silence just prolongs further. … ‘Are you?’ he asks. Those moments when everything changes. How many in a life? Not more than a few. Here, now, the moment. On this rainswept German motorway. Here and now.” So, we have a touch of dramatic irony in this plot twist. Karel mars the perfection of the luxury vehicle he’s been driving, just as the perfection of his care-free affair with Waleria is about to be damaged by the reality of her being pregnant. It is of interest that Karel has had it in the back of his mind that Waleria either might end their affair or be pregnant. It has occurred to him. In any case, his life changes. “That’s shit.” is his unfortunate, initial response to Waleria’s confirmation of her pregnancy, and she begins crying. We have fairly classic story structure here, folks. A protagonist, enjoying the heck out of his carefree, single life runs into a “scrape.” His girlfriend is pregnant. Next we would expect he would attempt to avoid responsibility but experience complications. Let’s see. Waleria becomes quite upset at his pronouncement and demands that Karel let her out of the car. He does so and eventually finds her walking. She is angry and says she wants to get away from him. “It has been his assumption, from the first moment, that there will be an abortion, that that is what she wants as well. “Now he starts to see, as if it is something still far away, that that may not be so.” “In a sense, this is the true moment of shock. “He fights off a splurge of panic.” They resume their journey to the resort, driving in silence. “Then she said, ‘You don’t understand.’ “Sliding across a mysterious foggy junction, he said, ‘What don’t I understand?’ “That I love you,’ she said drily.” “ Well, she would say that , he thought. Wouldn’t she . Still his hands took a firmer hold on the wheel.” Why are the above thoughts in italics when others are not? I don’t know, my friend. I don’t know. This section is in past tense, because the scene occurs in the past and shows what occurred during their drive to the resort. At the resort, in present tense, “Sex happens, surprisingly…This time, however, he makes no effort to please her. He wants her to dislike him. if she decides she dislikes him, he thinks, she may decide that she does not want this pregnancy.” “And when she is in tears afterwards, he sits on the toilet with his head in his hands.” It is difficult to regard Karel’s character as positive here. Troubled, yes, but kind of a jerk. Karel works to convince Waleria to get an abortion, rationalizing it as being good for her, as she has a successful career as a TV journalist that she wouldn’t want to interrupt. She agrees. “It is like waking up from a nightmare, to find your life still there, as you left it…in fact, there is a trace of sadness now, somewhere inside him—a sort of vapour trail of sadness on the otherwise blue sky of his mind.” This is an interesting comment, showing that Karel isn’t one-dimensional. Of course, Waleria’s hesitant agreement to getting an abortion doesn’t last. Karel desperately tries to re-convince her, repeating all the arguments he’d already presented, but she is adamant. “‘It’s all true what you’re saying,’ she says… ‘And none of it makes any difference. I just can’t.’ “Do you understand?’ she wants to know, in a whisper. “‘No,’ he says. It is not quite true. Not quite. More humanity in Karel. Hurrah! “The situation, anyway, is simpler than he thought. It was always very simple. The last two days have been a sort of illusion. There was always only one possible outcome. He sees that now. “‘Now what?’ he says finally. What he means is: Where does this leave us? Where does this leave our two lives? … He finds it hard to imagine anything. The future, again, seems no longer to be there. “‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she says. “‘Where?’ Having lifted his head, he is looking at the elegantly minimalist room as if he does not know where he is. “‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Wherever. Why don’t you put some trousers on?’ “Docilely, he does.   “They leave the hotel and start to walk…Traffic sometimes whizzes past. Sometimes there is silence. Sometimes there are trees, or from somewhere the smell of cut grass. It is five kilometers to Konigstein, the sign says. They do not stop…The light will last for hours. They have time to walk it, if they want to.” The text is pretty open, leaving room for other interpretations, however, in keeping with the theme of the book, I believe we have her a beautiful depiction of Karel accepting fatherhood. He struggles hard, pushing for a solution that will allow him to continue his “young man” lifestyle. But in the end “docilely” puts on his trousers, a sign perhaps of not only going along with what Waleria wants but also assuming manly garb. If you will allow me, he “girds his loins” for the next stage of his life as a father. Fathers frequently must wear clothing, best B. A father can’t go around in his knickers. Karel looks around the hotel room longingly, knowing that everything will change. There is no more mention of the “fenderbender” because it’s not necessary to tie up a minor detail. Let’s stop there. Next time, we’ll examine the final story in this collection, a story of a man near the end of his life. Till then. #AllThatManIs #DavidSzalay #AlanBray

This time, let’s examine the fourth story in David Szalay’s All That Man Is . It is untitled and tells a tale about an unnamed man who we can infer is about thirty years old. He is English, a graduate student at Oxford in Medieval German Languages, and is involved with a Polish woman, who is named, Waleria. He has a side job of delivering leased luxury cars throughout Europe, and the story occurs during one of these deliveries when he’s arranged to meet up with Waleria and stay together a few days at a resort in Germany. The story begins with the protagonist in London: “It is light when he leaves the hotel. Primordial sunlight disclosing empty streets, disclosing form with shadow, the stucco facades. And silence.” We can immediately assure ourselves that we are in third-person, present tense narration, and that the style of the first story, with its sentence fragments and poetic descriptive style, continues. There is, as well, an anonymous narrator/observer, who is telling the story. “It” sees the protagonist leaving the hotel and describes the scene in lovely prose. Questions immediately arise! Why is “he” leaving the hotel? Who the heck is “he” and what is his goal? Also, we know from our reading of the book so far, that each story presents a man at a different age who is experiencing a crisis of meaning. So, we wonder how this story and this protagonist fits this pattern. What is the protagonist like in the beginning? He goes to his car and sits inside a moment, “enjoying a feeling of inviolable solitude. Solitude, freedom. They seem like nearly the same thing…” He starts the engine. “He is aware that he does not know exactly which way to go.” Last night, he met with a colleague, a fellow academic who drunkenly asked the protagonist, “‘How’s your sex life?’” “Well, he had mentioned Waleria. Said something about her. Something non-committal.” He passes a gas (petrol to you) station, and here we have another textual variation, an indented sentence fragment combined with repetition. “Only at the petrol stations are there signs of life. Someone filling up.                                                 Someone walking away.” What do these features accomplish? The pedantic man tells us: “ Repetition of words  is  a literary and rhetorical device using repeated words or phrases for emphasis, rhythm, or clarity , with specific types like  anaphora  (beginning of clauses) and  epistrophe  (end of clauses) creating powerful effects, while unintentional repetition can weaken writing. It helps make ideas memorable, persuades, adds musicality, and can signify importance, though overuse can be tedious.” In the above case, I think, the repetition and indenting serve to highlight a feature of the protagonist’s inner state, that his experience of the streets is lyric; he attends to the emptiness and anonymity of life and experiences it as moving and poetic. Is this the existential crisis that all the protagonists in these stories confront? No, best B. I don’t think so. This preoccupation with the present moment seems to be a sort of steady state for this protagonist, a characteristic of him before he faces the crisis of the story. As he drives on through London, headed for the Channel ferry, the protagonist muses on his chosen profession; “Wonderful to imagine it, though. The whole appeal of medieval studies—the languages, the literature, the art and architecture—to immerse oneself in that world. That other world. Safely other.” “…yet he still thinks of his adulthood as something that is just getting underway.” A colleague asks him about Waleria, “what was happening there?” “I don’t know…Something. Maybe. We’re seeing each other. I don’t know.” The protagonist remembers an interaction with Waleria, and it is appropriately in past tense. She was visiting him in Oxford and had just done a tarot reading of him. (He is surprised by her New Age side). “’I think these cards are suggesting that you should stop thinking about your…thing all the time.’ “He laughed. ‘My thing?’ She put her finger on it. ‘What it means,’ she said, looking him in the eye, ‘is that your skirt-chasing days are over.’” The protagonist is a still single man—he regards himself as single, despite being in a relationship with a woman—who likes to think he lives very much in the present. It is ironic that his career interest is in the past—medieval studies. He revels in the beauty of the world, the sensuous world, unencumbered by responsibility. A part of that world is his girlfriend, Waleria, who is attractive and sexual. He revels too in remembering other girlfriends, regarding them, perhaps as conquests made rather than existing as other fellow humans. Solitude is equated with freedom. In the forefront of his mind is an incident where she “put her finger on” the issue of his approaching maturity, of the need for him to settle down and stop “chasing skirt.” She is like a messenger from the future who wisely tries to warn him of something he’s not ready to hear. He is on the brink of something he fears—commitment feels like a loss of freedom. ‘Kay. Let’s stop there and resume next time. We’ll see what becomes of our young scholar. Till then. #AllThatManIs #DavidSzalay #AlanBray

We left off seeking answers to the question, “What Am I Doing Here?” which is posed in the first story in David Szalay’s linked story collection All That Man Is . Each story in this book covers different men who progress in age from youth to old age, so in this first story where the protagonist, Simon, is seventeen, the question is, what is a seventeen-year-old doing here in his life? Last time, I mentioned the influence of the British poet Philip Larkin on this story and there’s plenty more evidence of this as we continue to read, although Larkin is not explicitly mentioned. Henry James is, as is T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. “They (Simon and his traveling buddy Ferdinand), are in love with Eliot, with his melodious pessimism. They are in awe of Joyce. He is what they want to be, a monument to them. These are the writers whose works made them friends…” We learn that “Simon is plowing joylessly through the works of Henry James, hoping to start at Oxford in the autumn.” And he is obsessed with Karen Fielding, a young woman he has only seen at his school, never spoken to. She is fantasy. “He would like nothing more than to spend the entire afternoon talking about her, or just hearing her name spoken aloud again and again, those four syllables that seem to hold withing them everything worth living for in the whole world.” What am I doing here, indeed. A strong theme in this story is of desire, of wanting what you don’t have. Another is of searching for authenticity when you don’t feel authentic, the tension created between what you want and what you actually have. Youth is the time for exploration, for taking chances. Simon is reading Henry James’ The Ambassadors and marks a passage as the “main theme.” Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had? I’m too old—too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses, one loses, make no mistake about that…Do what you like…Live, live! But Simon is afraid that he is not living his life to the fullest as evidenced by his constant ruminations over, “what am I doing here?” “What am I doing here? What am I doing here? The train whacks over points. What am I The train slows                                     doing here? into a station, open to the air —Warschauer Strasse. Windy platforms, a wasteland all around. A waste land. April is the… Warschauer Strasse. Trains move among the lusty weeds. Spring showers strafe the peeling boardings, the overpasses spilling the sound of unseen traffic. Karen Fielding.” It’s easy to see from this passage how the story is not a conventional prose piece. It attempts (successfully, I think) to capture a human’s inner thoughts, the stream of consciousness of a particular human, Simon, a seventeen-year-old man. The guys journey to Prague and decide to attend a performance that night of Mozart’s Mass in C Minor. That day, they go to a pub near the venue and see two young women. Simon’s companion, Ferdinand, invites the women to join them. “Simon is irritated by Ferdinand’s manner. He thinks of it as a sort of mask that his friend puts on for encounters with strangers, as if there were somehow an intrinsic hypocrisy to it, and thinks of his own silence as a protest against this hypocrisy.” This is classic adolescent ideation, best B. Ferdinand invites the women to join them at the concert, but the women do not appear. An interesting textual maneuver occurs when the guys settle down to listen. “The music starts.” The chapter ends, and the next chapter consists of only two words: “The Music.” The all but blank page seems to be an effort to use space to communicate meaning, something that Lawrence Sterne did during the seventeen hundreds in Tristam Shandy . A different maneuver would be to try to express in words the guys’ experience of the music. After the concert, Simon is moved and remains irritated by Ferdinand’s seeming distraction over the young women not showing up. The guys return to the place they’re staying—a hostel with a lascivious landlady, who is… “somewhat negligent with her dressing gown, and it is not clear what—if anything—she is wearing underneath it…She sits down…and lays a hand on Simon’s knee… ‘And girls?’ she asks. ‘You like girls?’ The question embarrasses Ferdinand less than it does Simon, and he says…’Of course we like girls.’ She laughs again. ‘Of course!’ She is staring at Simon, who is staring at the table. She says, ‘You will find lots of girls in Prague.’” ‘Kay. So we have the classic scenario in this story of the young men who are hormonally excited and unattached encountering a slightly older woman who seems more than receptive to their maleness. What happens? After the concert and the unsuccessful rendezvous, the guys stay up late with their landlady, drinking. She addresses Simon: “’When I was young,’ she says. ‘I would very much like to meet handsome boy like you.’” The next morning, the guys return to the city to try to find the young women they’d met the previous day. Simon ruminates about their failed connection: “A simple failure to mix perhaps…And love?             Karen Fielding Well love, he thinks, would be something like this—a flicker in the middle of the liquids, that mingle so that they seem to be only one transparent liquid             Karen Fielding the flicker steadying to a point, which strengthens slowly until the whole mixture emits a soft, steady light.             Karen Fielding Yes, he thinks, that is love.                                                                         And the day slips away.” Again, here we see the poetic textual effects, poetic as opposed to typical prose paragraphs. This passage shows his thoughts, his innerness, as he thinks about a possible love and continually shifts to at least repeating the name of his fantasy object.    When the guys return to their friendly hostel, the landlady’s efforts at seducing Simon are rejected. “’Stay with me,’ she says quietly…her hand moving around to the front of his thigh. ‘Please’ he says, seeming nearly tearful. ‘I’m sorry, I’m tired.’ And then he just leaves, and follows his friend into the dark…” The next day, Ferdinand encourages Simon to have sex with the landlady, but Simon says he’s not interested; she’s too old, he’s not attracted, he says. That night, Ferdinand leaves their room after Simon has fallen asleep, and has a tryst with the landlady. The next day, the guys depart for Vienna. Simon muses: “There is a strange sense of loss, a sense of loss without an obvious object.” “He takes his seat (on the train). He looks at his friend, sleeping opposite him, and for the first time, he feels a sort of envy. That he…With her…If Ferdinand was willing to…and saw her. Her dressing gown, there on the kitchen floor. The Ambassadors  makes him sleepy.” There’s a sense here of a young man being ambivalent about adult sexuality, of being intimidated by it and running away but then feeling curious and wanting what he doesn’t have. The Ambassadors , that text that promotes seeking experience while you’re young, makes him sleepy; he retreats from its voice into unconsciousness. He’s sleepy in the same way he was with the landlady. What’s the point, Walter? The point, best B. is that this story captures something about being a teenager on the edge of being an adult but still reluctant to abandon childhood, and that it does so by using textual effects derived from poetry. There is a gulf between existence and asking the question, What am I doing here? Next time, let’s look at a different story in this collection, a different story and a different stage of life. Till then. #AllThatManIs #DavidSzalay #AlanBray

Today, let’s look at David Szalay’s (pronounced SOL-loy) 2015 book, “ All That Man Is .” Mr. Szalay recently won the Booker Prize for his novel, “ Flesh .” The book is a series of nine linked short stories—not that they share characters but have similar themes. Each concerns a man of a defined age, beginning with seventeen and continuing up to seventy-three, who is usually away from home and becomes pre-occupied with questioning the meaning of his life. Well, okay, all of us do that from time to time but we don’t have short stories written about us (not always). The book is written in first person and present tense and calls upon a reliable and hidden narrator to propel things along. There is a lack of backstory. In a sense, each character, each man, is encountered by the reader in the present and is poor in context—this is not a criticism but an observation. Szalay has a distinctive style, making liberal use of free indirect speech and many sentence fragments. Mr. Szalay, in a Paris Review interview from 2015 says: “ What does it mean to write a ­series like this? It means that each story isn’t expected to carry its own solitary burden of meaning. It means you get a richer texture. It also imposes a kind of economy. This is important. Each story is short, ten to fifteen thousand words approximately. I think part of the problem, when I contemplated writing a new novel, was that all the masses of incidental detail—which you need in a novel, if only to make it long enough—seemed pointless. None of the characters in this book have elaborate backstories. You don’t know much about their pasts. You don’t know much about their family backgrounds. They’re points on an arc, rather than being arcs in themselves. That let me focus on narrative. It’s not as if a huge amount happens in each story, but they’re not nothing-happens stories either. There’s a very clear—simple, I hope—­narrative progression. Working in that smaller form was a relief and a pleasure. I didn’t have to elaborate for the sake of elaboration, which is how it can sometimes feel to write a novel, or how it had come to feel.” Kevin Porter, in a recent New York Review  article (All the Sad Unliterary Men, January 15 th , 2026), writes about Szalay’s loyalty to the realist tradition in his fiction. He quotes Szalay: “As I see it, the purpose of writing fiction isn’t to have original ideas, but to express platitudes—that is, ideas that almost everyone would accept as true—in an imaginatively compelling way.” Hmmm. The stories in All That Man Is  do present the characters in a realistic way, and address common human themes of love, death, ageing, car accidents, and parenting—the meaning of life thing. I wouldn’t necessarily call them platitudes, that characterization seems to me to be more about how these themes are addressed rather than if. Perhaps Mr. Szalay is being rather hard on himself, I think he’s written a very fine book about the human condition, in particular, the male half. Mr. Szalay’s protagonists are often inarticulate and prone to using violence to solve problems. They are caught up in somewhat petty, self-centered concerns but in each story, reach a point where they are confronted with existence and mortality. Let’s consider the first story as an example. Like the rest, it has no title, only the number 1. And then an epigram: Seventeen, I fell in love… It begins: “Berlin-Hauptbahnhof It is where the trains from Poland get in and the two young Englishmen are newly arrived from Krakow…One of them, Simon, stares listlessly at nothing. He is a handsome boy, high- cheekboned, with a solemn, inexpressive, nervous face.” We immediately get the realist style, and the sense of an unnamed narrator observing and explaining. We know where we are—Berlin, and who the story is about—two young Englishmen, one named Simon. We get some sense of what the story is about from the epigram: An “I” is or was seventeen and imagines or does fall in love. Questions arise! In love with whom? Why are these lads arriving in Berlin from Poland? Why does Simon have a solemn and nervous face? What would that look like? Most importantly, we wonder what the story is about. We are not in a story about whether the lads do or don’t arrive in Berlin from Poland, nor are we in a story about whether or not someone falls in love (or imagines they do). No sir. These questions are decided for us by the story, making us focus on other questions. Mr. Szalay comments: “…your question isn’t what’s going to happen but how will it happen and how will the characters react. That creates far more tension than the question of what’s going to happen. Because the question of  what ’s going to happen is often just too open-ended, you know? After all, anything could happen.” The first scene of the story involves Simon and his companion, Ferdinand, being in the train station. Ferdinand is attempting to arrange a visit with someone he knows. While he is phoning, the narrator uses the simple past tense to provide context: “There was an altercation with the waiter—whether it would be possible to have two cups with a single Kaffeekanchen . It was not possible…The waiter had been insolent with them.” Please note that this is an example of free indirect speech, that is, the comment about the waiter shows Simon’s thoughts instead of saying, “He thinks about how the waiter was insolent with them.” Simon observes the waiter dealing with an older customer. “The waiter literally bows to the suited man.” Although it is not written, there’s a sense that Simon makes meaning of this encounter with the waiter and concludes the man mistreats he and Ferdinand because they are young. Then: “The life of the station plunges and swirls like a dirty stream. People. People moving through the station like a dirty stream. And that question again - What am I doing here? The text is written just like this with that existential question tabbed several times, and one can imagine Mr. Szalay telling the publisher, “Bro, I want it done just like that!” Kevin Porter notes a pervasive influence of the British poet Philip Larkin in Mr. Szalay’s work, and sure enough, Larkin’s poetry is full of expressive indents. And—this passage is a fine example of the story presenting a character moved to make heavy meaning of a somewhat mundane situation. Simon observes the station and the waiter and almost disassociates, comparing the people to a dirty stream of water. He (or the narrator) poses the question: What am I doing here? ‘Kay. Let’s stop here and seek answers next time. Till then. #AllThatManIs #DavidSzalay #AlanBray

Cesar Pavese’s novella The House on the Hill  has an unconventional structure, one that lulls the reader into thinking things will be one way, and then showing them as being different, thereby underscoring the story’s point about wartime trauma. As mentioned last time, the story, which takes place during a “state of siege” in 1943 Italy, has to do with a man—the narrator—who escapes the nightly bombing of Turin by going to the countryside. There he meets Cate, a fellow refugee from Turin and also an old paramour. They resume their romance, and at this point, the story possesses a fairly identifiable form. A narrator, who struggles with being alone meets an old lover by chance. He could run away from her but pursues she and her son whom the narrator believes may be his own. The narrator is hopeful he and Cate have overcome the problems that had previously drawn them apart and, for a time, all is well—except for the war. Then, as I mentioned last time, disaster strikes when the Germans arrest Cate for being a partisan. One might expect the narrator to try to rescue her, but he does not. He is not a partisan but expects arrest even so, and runs away, and this is where I believe the story diverges from more conventional storytelling to focus on the destruction—both external and internal—caused by war. The narrator initially finds refuge in a seminary but fears he will be pursued there and arrested. He receives a letter from his parents who live in the even more remote countryside and decides to journey there for safety. “The last time I’d been up there the year before the war, even then I’d said: ‘If only I could die up here,’ because, when you imagine it in advance, war is a rest, a piece.” An interesting comment. When you imagine war in advance, it doesn’t seem dreadful but like a different time, set apart from normal time. On the way to his childhood home, the narrator meets with considerable danger. There are German patrols, Fascist Italian patrols—he must even deal with partisans who are fighting the Germans but who are suspicious of him. He survives the partisan ambush of Fascists, experiencing the horror of war, the dead. Later, he reflects: “But I have seen those unknown dead, the little men of the Republic. It was they who woke me up. If a stranger, an enemy, becomes a thing like that when he dies, if one stops short and is afraid to walk over him, it means that even beaten our enemy is someone, that after having shed his blood, one must placate it, give this blood a voice, justify the man who shed it: One has the impression that the same fate that threw these bodies to the ground holds us nailed to the spot to see them, to fill our eyes with the sight. It’s not fear, not our usual cowardice. One feels humiliated because one understands…that we might be in their place ourselves; that there would be no difference, and if we live we owe it to this dirtied corpse. That is why every war is a civil war; every fallen man resembles one who remains and calls him to account.” So the experience of war gives the narrator a sense of tragic connection to those who have been vilified as the enemy—the other. The narrator escapes the polarization that occurs during war and broods on the human tragedy of death for both sides. He finally reaches his parents’ home. Although, he remains fearful about arrest, it seems he is much safer in that remote location. The narration switches to present tense: “Nothing has happened. I’ve been at home for six months and the war still goes on.” Of course, this is the vantage point of the beginning of the story when the narrator refers to the hills where he grew up. He is safe but alone. He wonders what became of Cate and Dino but one gets the sense he thinks of them at a vast distance, one he could not cross. The war and the fear of death has contributed to his passivity and fatalism. He experiences the world, not as an arena for action and purpose, but as a place where one must endure things done. We have a novella that follows a standard form—the protagonist is conflicted about human connection and then connects with an old lover and her son. For a time, he nearly finds happiness, but the state of siege shatters his life and this part of the story. From there on, he is on a quest to survive, alone. It should be noted that the novella is very close to memoir, following the real events of Pavese’s life, but memoir must have a narrative form too. Perhaps, although written in 1949, The House on the Hill  speaks to us in our time of daily dismay and struggle against oppression. There is a choice shown in the story: when you live in a state of siege where the rules are arbitrary, either you respond by fighting back or by running to refuge. The story shows the psychological cost to someone who loses almost everything and despairs. Next time, a new story, best B. Till then. #TheHouseOnTheHill #CesarePavese #AlanBray

Last time, we talked about how Pavese’s The House on the Hill  fits/doesn’t fit into expectations of traditional story structure. Essentially, this is the story of a 40-year-old man, a teacher, who is living in the midst of WWII in Turin, Italy. To escape the nightly Allied bombing raids, he and many others go to the countryside to sleep, returning to the city in the morning to work. The narrator—this man—is single; he ruminates at length about how a solitary life is the best, one without responsibility for others. However, he is very conflicted and also yearns for human connection. An initial turning point occurs when, in the countryside, he meets a woman—Cate —he’d had a love affair with ten years before and had broken off. She too is trying to escape the war’s devastation. Cate has a son whom the narrator suspects is his own. The narrator rationalizes his breaking up with Cate in terms of what he saw as her faults, denying his own, and rationalizes their renewed relationship in terms of how she’s changed for the better: “Now I was forty and here were Cate and Dino. No matter whose son he was, what mattered was that we were together again this summer after the absurd harshness of before, that Cate now knew what she was living for and for whom. Cate had a purpose, the will to be outraged, a full life and her own. Was I being futile once more, hanging around her half-lost, half-humiliated?” He spends more time with Cate: “Now Cate and I were walking in silence, arm in arm like lovers and between us walked a hope, a summer restlessness…Everything seemed resolved, promising, forgivable…The new thing that had entered the world that evening was canceling out all harshnesses, rancors, defenses. There seemed almost nothing to be afraid of. We could talk.” The story takes place during a “state of siege” and refers to this state explicitly. A state of siege is a legal/political condition where the military imposes martial law on an area in response to invasion, rebellion and war. Normal civil liberties are suspended; dissent is suppressed. In this particular case, the story occurs just before and during Benito Mussolini’s 1943 abdication during WWII in response to the Allies landing troops in Sicily. Mussolini escaped and established a smaller fascist state known as Salo, and the Germans—unwilling to lose Italy—took up the fight against the invading Allies. It was a period of chaos and violence, of people who were opposed to Mussolini’s rule feeling empowered to fight him and dissent. “There was no more room for doubt. What had been happening all over Europe, was now happening to us—cities and countrysides in equal terror, crossed by armies and by fearful voices. Not only the autumn was dying…The winter came and it was I who was afraid…It wasn’t discomfort or the ruins, perhaps not even a threat of death from the sky; rather it was a final grasp of the truth that sweet hills could exist, a city softened by fog, a comfortable tomorrow, while at any moment bestial things might be taking place only a few yards away, things people discussed only in whispers.” The narrator resumes his affair with Cate, although she denies Dino is his son. They are, apparently close, and as we see in the above quote, the narrator contemplates a long-term relationship, possibly marriage. The group of friends that spends the nights at the inn in the countryside discuss what should be done in the face of the civil war that is raging. However, there is a sense that the narrator believes taking any action—particularly political—is ill-advised. He denies his personal agency and believes it’s best to stay out of trouble. But the war worsens. Partisans store weapons at the inn, and some of the narrator’s friends are arrested. He thinks: “Suppose I had to flee, I asked myself, had to hide. Where would I go, where would I sleep or find something to eat?…I felt hunted and guilty, ashamed of my quiet days. But I thought of the rumors and stories of people who had taken refuge in towers, convents, sacristies.” The narrator experiences a moment of peace and grace while in a local church. Then the Germans raid the inn while the narrator is out walking. He returns to observe from a hiding place that everyone—including Cate—is arrested. Only Dino escapes. He despairs, but Elvira takes Dino in and finds the narrator a refuge in a seminary. Given the relationship between the narrator and Cate, and his desire for connection, we might expect that, next, he would insist on staying and trying to free Cate. But he does not. He journeys to the refuge and essentially abandons Cate and Dino and all his friends. A key question is whether this abandonment and emotional break is due to the war, the state of siege that shatters connection, or is it an expression of who the narrator is on a deeper level? Probably both, best B. Let’s stop there and resume next time. Till then. #TheHouseOnTheHill #CesarePavese @AlanBray

I have decided not to do a post this week on Pavese's The House on the Hill . Why? you ask. I had one ready but was not satisfied. The story is so great, and I felt my post was not doing it justice. I will return next week, never fear.