Christopher Narozny

Halfway through your life you decide that you’re no longer you: not figuratively, but literally.   Your brother, your wife, your mistress all confront you with what they believe to be shared memories, but you emphatically shake your head and insist that they’ve confused you with someone else.  This is likely a fantasy we’ve all entertained to one degree or another, but Herr Stiller, anti-hero of Max Frisch’s I’m Not Stiller (the title gives the plot away), acts upon it: sorry, I’m not your brother, not your husband, not your lover–I would apologize for the many wrongs this man has done you, but how can I pretend to be someone I’m not?  It sounds like a great idea, but the fantasy turns ugly when the Swiss judicial system forces poor Stiller to relive–through eye-witness accounts, no less–his life thus far.

The pleasure of Stiller comes in large part from watching the first-person narrator consider his life as though he’s only just learned of it second hand: “Any reasonably experienced man–which Stiller obviously was not–would immediately have recognized in this fascinating little person (his wife) a case of extreme frigidity”; “This behavior was something Julika has not forgotten to this day, the expression of an unrestrained egocentricity, as I fully agree, on the part of the missing man.”  [Italics mine.]  The replacement biography Stiller has invented–as Jim White, he committed murders in the Mexican desert and stole other men’s wives–is no less pleasurable, but what ultimately distinguishes this novel from other first-person mid-century fiction is the fact that its narrator appears sane–conflicted, obsessive, and cowed by the prospect of who he can’t help but be–but sane nonetheless.  His decision to preference invention over experience is a calculated one based on an unsparingly accurate self-diagnosis.  This is where the novel’s realism emerges with great and gritty force: what Stiller hopes to extricate himself from by becoming Jim White is nothing short of human relationship, not just a relationship (though his marriage does sit front and center), but all of it, from the largest to the most insignificant betrayals and acts of cowardice.  The great irony is that the attempt to turn away ultimately forces him to take a long, hard look.

People often talk about Man in the Holocene as Frisch’s “tour de force”, but I’m Not Stiller, along with Gantenbein and Homo Faber, ought to be included in any “great-novels-of-the-20th-century” discussion.

“What else?  You haven’t even started yet.  Go on,” my father used to say to me and my siblings when we were children, when we were young.

In Javier Marias’ Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, this paternal advice doubles as narrative strategy and moral imperative.  Protagonist and narrator Jaime Deza spends most the trilogy’s thousand-plus pages thinking, but unlike many (most?) first-person narrators of the 20th and early 21st centuries, very little of his interior monologue focuses on himself (or on the self).  Instead, Marias, through Deza, models, in an often imperfect and very human way, “the courage to look hard and to translate and to think beyond the necessary,” a value instilled in him by his father and by a former professor, both of whom lived through World War II and the Spanish Civil War.  At their core, the novels are most concerned with history and legacy: what can we (must we?) learn from the people who managed to live through a time of chaos and slaughter–a time when humanity at large seemed to have derailed–with integrity and, most importantly, intelligence?  In radically compressed form, the lesson is this: think.  Think, and then speak.  The problem, Deza tells us in the final volume, is that “because we hate certainty, no one dares any more to say or to acknowledge that they see what they see, what is quite simply there, perhaps unspoken or almost unsaid, but nevertheless there… no one wants to know, and the idea of knowing something beforehand, well, it simply fills people with horror, with a kind of biographical, moral horror.”

As with most writers of Marias’ ilk, there’s a bit of snark in the narration (Has anyone else noticed just how many of Nabokov’s novels feature an overreaching middle-class character who speaks French very badly?  Well, there’s some of that here.), but this is more than counterbalanced by the genuine and often downright touching affection the narrator feels toward two characters in particular: his father and his former professor.  In the acknowledgements, Marias writes: “Separate mention must be made of my father, Julián Marias, and Sir Peter Russell, who was born Peter Wheeler, without whose borrowed lives this book would not have existed.  May they both rest now, in the fiction of these pages as well.”  The trilogy is, on one important level, a remarkably loving and measured attempt to keep the best of a previous generation alive.

I’m opening my blog with a film recommendation: Go see Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation!

What struck me most about the film is its utter absence of sheen.  The main characters’ apartment looks more like a middle class apartment lived in by a middle class family than any onscreen home I can remember seeing.  The people all look and talk like people, and they appear exhausted in the way that people most often do–not abruptly and theatrically exhausted (they don’t collapse onto sofas and say things like, I’m just so tired, you know?), but rather worn thin by the kind of sustained fatigue that comes with being responsible for and to other people.

For the rest (plot, performances, etc.), The Onion does it justice in this review:

http://www.avclub.com/articles/a-separation,67050/

Welcome to the Web site/blog of my forthcoming novel, Jonah Man.  The blog will be up and running shortly; in the meantime, I’ve posted an overview of the novel, some advance praise, an excerpt, and an author Q&A.  Enjoy!