'Tinker, Tailor...' Anyone?, or, New Life in Venice

'Who will spy on the spies?' What unlikely Hercules (in a trench coat) will 'clean the stables'?

The big news so far from the Venice Film Festival has been the critical raves for Tomas Alfredson's new adaptation of John le Carré's 1974 novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, starring no less than Gary Oldman (as George Smiley), Kathy Burke, Benedict Cumberbatch, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Ciarán Hinds, John Hurt, Toby Jones, Mark Strong...: an amazing cast. (The film opens at the end of next week in the UK and Ireland, and in early December in the US.)

Le Carré's novel, which, along with the 1979 BBC adaptation starring Alec Guinness, taught most of the English-speaking world the term 'mole' (in the sense of embedded double agent, 'defector in place': who is the mole?), was the first, and best-remembered, in the so-called Karla trilogy, but Smiley had been a recurring character in le Carré's books since Call for the Dead (1961).

The new film has received enthusiastic reviews in the Guardian and the Telegraph (which also used the occasion this morning to salute le Carré himself).

I've just been realizing that I haven't read the novel since the 1970s. I have a habit of yielding with very little resistance to the marketer's general exhortation to 'read the book, see the movie' (which I'd like to blog about another time, but which obviously plays a role even in my choice of 'content' for this blog)--and it wasn't long ago that I decided that any book I hadn't read for seven or more years I could count as more or less unread. So I've downloaded a copy of Tinker, Tailor… and will be inhaling it soon. (Yes, sometimes Jascha just reads!)

The purpose of this post is to invite you to join me in the process. This is one of the few times I'll roll out all the links at my disposal: Kindle UK, iBooks UK, Kindle US, nook, Kindle Germany and iBooks Germany. I'd love to hear what you think of both the book and the film. (Of course, if you have problems with these or any other links, let me know that, too, and I'll do my best to fix what's wrong.) So let's... stay in touch....

From Beryl Bainbridge, 'According to Queeney': Epigraph 1.1 - Better in Translation

Beryl Bainbridge (1932-2010) was admired by critics throughout her career but achieved greatest popular success with the historical novels she published in the final decades of her life. At home in England the popular press cast her as the Susan Lucci of the Booker Prize (always a bridesmaid...), and I always found that this distracted potential readers from her fine, dry wit and the nuanced sensibilities that set her apart from the herd (even the Booker herd). She's been on my mind lately because of the recent publication of her posthumous novel The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress (set in the year of American assassinations, 1968) and of this morning's announcement of the new Booker shortlist (where she's not even a bridesmaid this time).

One of her best historical novels, According to Queeney (2001), presents a view of Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) through his relationship with 'Mrs. Thrale' (Hester Lynch Thrale, later Piozzi, 1741-1821), a relationship that literary historians believe grew to be far closer than the one between Johnson and his best-known biographer, James Boswell. The novel provides two of the epigraphs for A Kiss Before You Leave Me, including the first epigraph of all:

[Dr. Johnson told Mrs. Thrale] that he had written her a letter which he wished her to read when she was alone. It was not for careless eyes and was in French. 

'Why French?' she asked. 

'The sentiments in it,' he said, 'are best conveyed in another language.'

Bainbridge's reader well understands by this point in the novel the embarrassment of the great (not to say immense) 18th-century lexicographer who wants to draw even closer to a much younger woman, the wife of his best friend (a wealthy brewer and Member of Parliament), in the midst of the couple's entire household, of which Johnson himself was a member for extended periods of time. Even (or especially?) lexicographers may be reluctant to call things by name, even or especially the things they desire. (The letter itself, when Mrs. Thrale finally reads it, turns out to be more puzzling than conventionally seductive.) The tension here could be seen as residing in the ambiguity of the word 'best'. 'Best conveyed in another language': conveyed most effectively (as we might expect of a great lexicographer) or conveyed in the way discretion, secrecy and embarrassment dictate?

Of course, French is not just any 'other language', especially to an Englishman, and especially in the great century of libertinism (and marivaudage). When we smile at the lines Bainbridge gives Johnson, our smile embraces all of this.

The question of translation and multiple languages crops up in A Kiss Before You Leave Me with Jack's grandmother Elise's diaries, which Miranda agrees to translate, and never really goes away. (See 'In Context, Out of Context', paragraph 5.) We readers are uncertain, especially at first, why Elise insisted that the diaries, which she kept in French, be translated into English; we don't know what the choice of languages meant to her at different points in her life. But we do suspect that the content of the diaries is erotic (we're right), and we'll soon see that the diaries both (a) seduce Miranda as a reader and translator and (b) pull her in the direction of a relationship with Elise's (married) grandson: the book as go-between, as in Dante (see 'Five Faces of Emma', paragraph 2), with an assist from a different sort of matchmaker.

We'll return to Bainbridge's Johnson, and to the binary opposition between Boswell and Mrs. Thrale, when we talk about the second epigraph from According to Queeney.

Kaffeeklatsch

If I delay much longer my promised blogpost containing Brent Mashburn's coffee secrets, the first anniversary of the promise will be upon us.

First, a reprise of the essentials of my earlier post about coffee. I recommend a (short) latte made with 1+ ounce (30 - 40 ml.) of brewed espresso and 2 ounces (60 ml.) of heated (not boiled) whole milk, sweetened with a single packet of Sugar in the Raw (optional). Recommended methods for brewing espresso: (a) a Nespresso coffee maker, using a capsule of 'Ristretto'; or (b) a 'moka' espresso maker, using illy beans you grind yourself. Let me add that, if you want to froth the milk, you can get an inexpensive frother from IKEA for about two dollars U.S., plus postage if you're ordering through Amazon and not picking it up in person at an IKEA store.

Brent Mashburn, who is known to the public as an investment research analyst and research engineer (his blog is Luminous Logic), also happens to have forgotten more about coffee than I, at least, will ever know. He readily shared his recipe for 'skinny' cappuccino when I asked for it last year, and gave me permission to pass it along to you. Here goes, with thanks to Brent and apologies to you for the delay.

Brent prepares the coffee component using a Nespresso machine and capsules. His personal choice of capsule (like mine) is 'Ristretto'; his wife's is 'Arpeggio'. They use the larger button on the Nespresso machine, which dispenses a larger quantity of liquid. They prepare the milk using a Nespresso Aeroccino frother and organic fat-free milk (fat-free being the key to better frothing). 'Pour the milk into the Aeroccino until it just barely covers the spinning frother part on the bottom'--about 3.5 ounces (100+ ml.). 'The only other secret is to dump in the milk clumsily as soon as the Aeroccino cuts off.  That way it's still a foamy mixture and "dumping" it in achieves the same effect as if you'd stirred it in--it all mixes well.' (If you delay adding the foamed milk to the coffee component, the milk and froth tend to separate, and blending and clean-up are more difficult.)

I've also been keeping you waiting for a few lines about the connection between Balzac and coffee--but you may know all about it already. He had a passion for coffee that even Brent Mashburn and I could never match; witness the fact that there are few or no coffee merchants or cafés named Mashburn's or Hulbert's and so many named for Balzac. If you're feeling brave you can explore the extent of his coffee addiction at the website The Old Foodie--and even there what you'll find is mostly limited to Balzac's public admissions....

In Context, Out of Context

It strikes me that we set great store by context. We believe we understand, in general and in specific cases, what (the) context is. Ignoring or forgetting or misunderstanding the context is always something other people do, not us. And one of our favorite ways of dismissing what is otherwise the most compelling evidence against us is to allege that it has been 'taken out of context'. Never mind that quotations by their very nature are detached from their original contexts. (We'll see something similar in the Kiss epigraph [2.1] from Burroughs: 'All pictures are faked.')

So you may well think less of me when I shine the spotlight, however briefly, on two sentences in my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me that run afoul of the conventions of context. I tweeted each of them recently, providing only the title of the novel and an ordering link--thus assuring that they would be read in a certain way, in a certain context, which is different from their original contexts in the novel.

Here are the two sentences, as they appear--in context--in Kiss.

'This wasn't a story about how things happened in the art world; it was a story, perhaps, about letting go' (chapter 9). The point of view is that of Mark, a journalist attempting to write honestly about changes in the life of an emerging painter who has cut his ties to certain parts of his previous life. Mark is justifying his failure to divulge his own role in the painter's early success (Mark provided the painter's introduction to the gallery that took him on); in fact, Mark's own detachment is compromised at best. (A more careful reading of the entire paragraph might focus on the words 'detachment', 'foreground' and 'background', and the problems they pose.)

'"My grandmother said it was really an American story"' (chapter 1). Jack Emery is explaining his need for someone to translate into English his grandmother's Paris diary, kept in French in the late 1920s; the imperative is one of the conditions posed by the grandmother herself before her death. Her family of origin was transplanted at least twice (from France to Quebec, from Quebec to the U.S.), as she subsequently was herself (to Paris and back); her words 'really an American story' may be puzzling until the reader knows much more about the eventual course of the grandmother's life and its possible significance for Jack.

You can see where this is going, especially if you've read the book. From the get-go, I wrote both sentences with the intent not only that they satisfy the immediate contextual needs of the passages in which they appear but also that they apply to the totality of the novel--that they suggest to the reader that A Kiss Before You Leave Me itself is more about 'letting go' than about 'how things happen in the art world'... and that it is 'really an American story'.

I've touched on some of the 'letting go' issues in a recent post about the title of the novel; readers may associate these issues with the final chapter and its playing off of 'letting go' against 'recovery'.

But it would be indiscreet to say much here about the Americanness of Kiss, except to predict that it may be clearer to international readers than to their American counterparts. In fact, this is how I sometimes explain my particular gratitude for international readers: among other things, they will be most able to read it as a novel 'about' the United States. They, precisely, may be the ones with the context in which to read it.

From Pablo Picasso: Epigraph 3.2 - That Worrisome Picnic

Since this is, in the U.S., a weekend for picnics--and since we all take our inspiration where we can--I thought this might be a good time to return to talking about the epigraphs that introduce sections of A Kiss Before You Leave Me and to focus on the one that refers to the real-life painting that anticipates (and perhaps triggers) so much in the plot of the novel.

Edouard Manet, 'Le déjeuner sur l'herbe' (1862-63)

The epigraph is surprisingly innocent, in part perhaps precisely because it warns rather than reassures. Its import is approximately: When I, Pablo Picasso, look at Manet's 'Luncheon on the Grass', I know that it will spell trouble for me down the road. This is the sense in which Picasso's French sentence is usually translated, and it is (correctly, I believe) taken as an admission by the Picasso of the 1930s of a certain 'anxiety of influence' that he would not resolve until he did his own (very Picasso-esque versions of) 'Luncheon on the Grass' decades later. When I was translating the sentence for use as an epigraph in my novel, I granted myself the translator's license of rendering Picasso's intuition more general, so that it could also apply to dangers awaiting (a) Manet and his famous model Victorine Meurent and (b) the fictitious artists and models in A Kiss Before You Leave Me who, like Picasso, go on picnics (in the 1920s and in the present, respectively) that are inspired by Manet's but take different turns. So the epigraph reads, 'When I see "Luncheon on the Grass", I think: there are trials and tribulations still to come.'

Today, I googled 'CMNF' and got 2 million hits. This may not prove unequivocally that images of clothed males with naked females are no longer taboo--but it does indicate a major shift since 1863, when Manet's painting was refused by the Paris Salon. It was one of the most controversial paintings of the 19th century--and is of course today considered one of the greatest.

I find myself in the familiar situation of being unable to spell out the connections between Manet's painting and my novel without giving away far too much. But let me note, just in passing, in addition to what I've said here and what is repeated everywhere about the painting, that (a) the group of figures in the foreground is a threesome and (b) there is a fourth figure in the background, whom we neglect at our peril.

Now! Enjoy your picnic!