Sunday, February 26, 2006

 

Mercury and Minotaur

This weekend I managed to finish Brad Watson's Heaven of Mercury. Brad's a great writer, and has been swell to work with in workshop. His novel I liked very much, and comes alive when Parnell comes on the scene--there's a few sections about necrophilia that are amazing, complex, and yeah, endearing.

I also read Benjamin Tammuz's Minotaur, by the suggestion of Brad. A great book. Told in four sections, mixing letters and narration, the lives intersect and twine through the main narrative of Alexander, the secret agent. There's some unbelievable stuff packed in about Palestine and Israel, love, murder. His writing style is wonderful, composed and reserved and explodes on the pages at the important moments. I've copied a few of my favorite passages. . .

The first is a scene where the farmer's wife comes into Alexander's room. He is fourteen, and a virgin:

Alexander knew at that moment that he was betraying almost all the values that he had decided must guide him though life. Her face was not beautiful, her hair was not clean, bristles of black hair covered an alarmingly large area, five times what seemed fit to him; every one of her shameful movements made a lump of fat quiver on her enormous thighs, and her body exuded the smell of sweat at the end of a days work on the farm, the smell of a body long unwashed. Nevertheless he was drawn toward her as a sheaf of corn is borne in a tremendous storm, and as he penetrated her, he struck her flesh and bit the damp, greasy, slippery skin.


And then, only a few pages later, after his first sex, he has his first murder, where he avenges his childhood loves' father's death by a Palestine by killing another Palestine adolescent.

Alexander bent over the Bedouins face in order to increase the pressure of his hands, and he felt how his fingers and nails were stuck between the neck muscles, touching the artery and tearing the skin. His hands continued to press down, and he heard a faint choking sound and suddenly noticed a smell that he had not noticed all that time.
It was a smell from the mans clothes, his body and hair. The smell of the smoke of an Arab stove that burned dung, the smell that used to fill the courtyard of their house at sunset in the days of his childhood, when the Arab workers left their work to go and bake bread and sit down to their meal. Unbeknown to his mother, he would be given pieces of warm pita by the workers, and as he ate it hungrily, he felt grains of sand being ground between his teeth.
Alexander saw before him bulging eyes, a swarthy face, and a final redness draining away from beneath the graying skin. Now the body twitched under him, as if wanting to be embraced and surrender. Between his knees the Bedouins ribs sank to the earth and Alexander knew that what had been done could not be undone. Now only the smell remained, and all around there was a sudden stillness; and out of the stillness, from far off, there came the sound of dogs barking and some indistinct bleating, or perhaps the sound of a bird. Alexander let go of the mans neck. His fingers were seized by spasms and he shook them, straightening and bending them until they became flexible again. He was still sitting on the dead mans chest and he brushed the sand off his victims dace, closed his eyes, and considered the face, both strange and familiar at the same time, and got to his feet. Stumbling, almost crawling on all fours, he make his way to the tool shed of the plantation and came back with a shovel in his hands. He dragged the body between the trees, dug a pit, and buried the dead man in it, taking care to spread dry earth over the grave. In order to blur tracks Alexander waded a few hundred meters along an irrigation ditch full of water, got out onto the road, and from there he went back to the farmyard.




In the middle of that scene, Alexander thinks back to his childhood, as he was raised in Palestine, and how the love in his heart is for the Arabic people. That grain of sand in the pita! Yet he grows to be a secret agent working for Israel and British and kills Palestinians. The division of Alexander’s two sides echoes the division in Israel and it's astounding how Tammuz pulls this off in the book, and here in this scene.

Meanwhile, I went to see Match Point last night. It was good, not what I was expecting. The acting was mediocre but the story and camera work was great. It sparked a lot of thought in me about killing—and as soon as I got home I started a new story, which is based on my trips upstate to a friend of mine’s house on Lake Champlain. Someone, I think, will die—but I don’t know who. I’ve been working on it today too, and it may be my first submission for workshop next quarter, the first time I’ve departed from the novel I’ve been working on.

Comments:
Favorit pages... I loved reading Alexander, story. I was full with tears. His avenages, made me think. Anyone could be their? Great page! Send more pages, on the book's you read.
 
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