Tag: suicide in fiction

fiction, Hubert Selby, Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn, literary classics, Waiting Period

Vengeance is mine. Want some? Hubert Selby’s Waiting Period
Click here to search for choice of secondhand copies available from Bookfinder. FYI, the search is set for UK destination, but you can change that with a quick click.

(Please note: the only edition of this title in print is costly because it’s a hardback; however, if you want to search for a variety of options for a secondhand copy, just click on the book cover to the left.)

Hubert Selby, Jr. is one of the true masters of 20th century literature.

An uncompromising, fearless and visceral writer from the outset with Last Exit to Brooklyn, Selby’s first novel arguably remains the most controversial fiction he ever published. It caused such outrage at the time of its publication, including being banned (in the UK) and there remain readers to this day that find it difficult to stomach. With an unrelenting power it conveys the lives of his overwhelmingly desperate characters: miserable, troubled, often extremely violent, amoral, women-hating, angry, self-loathing individuals. The novel remains an existential nightmare that most contemporary fiction can’t match for its intensity and dark vision of despair. (Click here to see my review of it on this site.)

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Waiting Period focuses on the huge frustration and anger that we all feel about the ‘forces’ in our life (read: bureaucracy, government and other institutions, suffocating status quo attitudes and behaviour, endless forms to fill in, a demanded subservience to authority).

There are several powerful reasons to read this novel: Most importantly, it gives a compelling, meaningful voice for those in society whom, for one or more reasons, are disenfranchised, struggling, oppressed, exploited; for those who are most often made silent by the oppressive forces and circumstances of their lives; the vast many who feel their lives are slowly in a state of entropy; wasting away, drained, the long-term neglected under-class; society’s invisible many.

The nameless first-person narrator of the story speaks directly to you, though the stream of words inside his head — frankly, it starts as a sluggish stream, reflecting his depression and evolves – regresses? You follow his thoughts and apparent actions as if in real-time; his Dostoyevskian his trough of despair; his unbearable state of being. 

As you “listen” to him, you soon understand he represents of the invisible whose lives are seeping away into nothingness.

Frustratingly for him, he has always been a responsible citizen: he’s served the government, done his duty (he’s a war veteran) and yet his life as we ‘meet’ him is consumed with the endless arbitrage of dealing with government bureaucracy to receive benefits that are rightly his.

Humiliated by facing this Dantesque nightmare, of having been continually ignored over too much time, and feeling, in conclusion, desperately suicidal, he decides to buy a gun and kill himself.

And this is where the novel suddenly takes a dramatic turn; a wild, lusting leap into the fantasy of revenge: When he applies to buy his handgun, there’s a glitch in the computer system for vetting those who buy them and the few days it takes for him to wait for delivery makes him radically re-interpret his future actions and purpose.

He decides, instead of killing himself, he should kill at least the principal figure who controls the finances of the government administration and who, automatically, continues to deny him his rightful claims to support.  Most especially, because you are reading the novel from his deeply personal, angry viewpoint, you are left with no choice as a reader but to figure out for yourself whether what he’s thinking, says he’s going to do and does, is simply fantasy and fiction or real truth, or a strange mixture of the two.

Is he enacting these thoughts in life as some sort of retribution for the tormented misery of his otherwise plodding, passive, lonely life, or has he in reality transfigured from potential suicide to an obsessive, relentless dark angel of destruction, a slayer of the demons who have made his life – and those of others — such a misery, as he thinks further on the matter, spiralling ever downwards into a more entrenched, visceral anger.

One aspect of Selby’s genius is that he enables you to experience these violent emotions, the narrator’s depression and sense of deprivation, frustration and anxiety of a Vet, changing over time to emotions that are manifestly pure vengeance.  And all the while you’re ‘hearing’ the narrator trying, always, to rationalise his behaviour, because he is determined to do the ‘right’ thing; he has always led an ethical, morally responsible and socially conformist life. 

You ask yourself during the course of reading the novel whether or not he’s ‘only’ unhinged from his terrible depression and miserable life, or is he becoming something/someone genuinely dangerous to others, as well as himself? 

What further draws you in — and again is a quality that Selby cleverly gives his narrator, is logic: whatever he’s thinking, he seems to do so with such unerring logic; but is it logic without a heart and therefore invidious, corrupt?  Or is it a logic that stems from a clarity of truth that leads him to such a violent conclusion in terms of action he feels compelled to take?

The novel’s sheer, unrelenting intensity and power of narrative — comparable to Celine, but more visceral, I think, going far beyond the nightmare quality envisaged by that superb modernist — seems to intend to draw you only to one conclusion and this point is yet another part of Selby’s genius: helplessly, as it were, inevitably, you feel — frankly, even justifiably — you should side with the narrator as he fantasises and commits acts of — well, what should we call them as we begin to find ourselves cheering for him, wanting him to commit these acts?  Have you, as the reader, become corrupted, being inside the narrator’s mind, or are you seeing things logically?  Is he actually seeing/doing these things he thinks of?  Are they thoughts or actions of ‘justifiable homicide with mitigating circumstances’?; Death Wish-like ‘executions’?  Well, Selby so cleverly reels you in that you can’t help but feel the character is not a vigilante but doing what is right and what is justified, period. (I know, scary thought, that.)

After all, consider for a moment those whom he claims to kills or intends to kill — keeping in mind, all the while a key question: if he is indeed actually killing or intending to do so, or simply day-dreaming; the dreams of a lost soul with nothing but fantasies to live for on his sad and sorry arse. He targets the person at the Veteran Association who smugly and shamelessly continues to deny him his right to his benefits; besides the most disgusting, sulphur-stenched unrepentant racists, who joyously celebrate together as an entire town for their peers who have sadistically murdered black people; the town folk thereafter glorifying such actions by yearly family festivities, fairground rides, barbecues, beer and hotdogs included.

Click on this image to go to Selby’s official website & other great details about his books & life

This is without a doubt an amazing novel: incredibly focused, relentless, overwhelming, addictive. And it packs one helluva punch. Yet it’s also deeply moving and, as with all Selby’s lost souls who are his characters, while he never justifies their actions, he can get into their hearts and minds so you know them as if they were a part of you or vice versa.  He never judges, simply tells you the story from inside his characters’ own minds; that is his ultimate genius, because you have nowhere and no one to turn to when immersed in the reading, but your own self and perspective. 

Waiting Period is an important novel and a literary classic.  It’s a howl of despair, anxiety, alienation and frustration screamed at the powerful, the institutions and society that Celine first articulated in the 1930s onwards and whom, with Selby’s fiction, a literary heir to his legacy was realised.  But since his death, who is there now that continues such a legacy and that writes so well about the dispossessed and the lives of those who remain nameless, underground and invisible?  Please do let me now if you have any reading recommendations and/or thoughts on any of the above.

Anthea Bell, Beware of Pity, Burning Secret by Zweig, Chess by Zeig, Confusion by Zweig, Fear by Zweig, fiction, literary classics, Stefan Zweig

Beware of Pity – Stefan Zweig’s classic 20th century novel

Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was a polymath and intellectual from pre-WW2 Europe, who managed to escape Austria  from the Nazis (Zweig was an Austrian Jew) in 1934, after Hitler’s rise to power. He wrote prolifically,  with great depth and beauty across a range of subjects and genres, including many biographies of novelists, and a large number of short stories, besides a significant study of European literature, and some novels. Sadly, his second wife and he both committed suicide together in Brazil in 1942, feeling they could no longer meaningful lives given their sense of a meaningless future, in light of the holocaust, and the complete devastation of their own, dearly loved private and cultural world and former circle of friends, as  they once knew them.

Click this image to link you to a Book Depository order of this novel

Beware of Pity — the link takes you to what I think is the best translation — is published the marvellous indie publisher, Pushkin Press — by Anthea Bell, the incredibly talented, award-winning and prolific translator; she has translated at least 13 of his fictions, and Pushkin itself, as far as I can tell, has published 11 of them.  The novel was originally published in 1939 and it remains one of the great European 20th century fictions, as well as being the most popular and — justifiably — the most renowned of Zweig’s novels.  This is a thoughtful, moving and disturbingly provocative novel (by the very nature of its core subject/theme).  Set in 1914 in a small, provincial garrison town near the Hungarian border, the main part of the story is told as a series of recollections, using the present tense, by Anton Hofmiller, the principal character, a second lieutenant in the army.

Bored with the town and his dull life (while being a good Army man, disciplined and focused, and respected by his charges), he accepts a dinner invitation from Herr von ‘Kekesfalva’ (Hofmiller protects his and his family’s true identity, no doubt to avoid bringing further shame upon them and himself, as well, presumably, out of a sense of honour and integrity), who is the ‘richest man in the neighbourhood. Practically everything belonged to him— ’.  Hofmiller not only takes up the invitation out of a wish for an exciting change to his otherwise dull life, but also more from a wish to be introduced to Kekesfalva’s niece, whom he describes upon first seeing in a patisserie as an ‘elegant nymph’, and more besides, that already we know he is absolutely smitten by her.

Intoxicated emotionally and quite literally from the riches of the evening of the dinner — the delicious food, fine wines, cigars, the elegant service, the beautiful house, and the dancing afterwards – Hofmiller only late in the evening suddenly realises that he has committed a terrible faux-pas: throughout the entire evening, he has neither spoken to, nor asked a dance of her, Herr Kekesfalva’s only daughter. And soon enough, we are gradually, relentlessly along with Hofmiller drawn into a profound, troubling story of how his original sense of honour and good intentions, intermingle seamlessly with a sense of pity for the daughter, who cannot walk without crutches. In turn she misunderstands his intentions, even at one dramatic point challenging him, he still denies his true state of feelings, because in some ways he does come to love her genuinely, though again this originates from the complex issue of pity and, by the time he truly realises his love for her, it is, tragically, too late.

It is a fascinating, remarkable, melancholic, philosophical novel: a deeply searching and questioning exploration on the complex subject of pity as it plays itself out — inevitably, of course, and most powerfully so, the idea and experience of pity, including its many terrible ramifications: from guilt, anxiety, angst, sleeplessness, fear, hatred, a sense of claustrophobic suffocation and panic, to self-loathing, then to dishonour, betrayal, and, desperately, eventually, a devastating loss in the form of suicide.  And yet, while complex in terms of psychological depth and characterisation, it is a story that is told elegantly, smoothly, is easily absorbed and increasingly gripping and troubling as you travel further into the story. Unsurprisingly, in general studies of European literature, it continues to live on as one of the most important novels by one of Europe’s most important 20th century intellectuals.

Considering my edition of Beware runs to 362 pages, perhaps for those who haven’t read Zweig before may wish first to dip their literary toes into something shorter in length by him by way of an introduction. Alternatively, then, I would recommend some of his compelling shorter works, in particular Confusion, Burning Secret, Fear or Chess, or a selection of his short stories.