Carrere's razor

Emmanuel Carrere’s unnerving novella The Mustache (1986) begins with a husband asking his wife:

What would you say if I shaved off my mustache?

She ignores him, knowing he’s not serious. On a whim, he goes ahead and shaves it, but his wife acts as if she sees nothing different. She then refuses to acknowledge that he has ever worn a mustache. His friends and coworkers, as well, seem to see nothing different about his clean-shaven face. He starts questioning himself. Are they putting him on? He did have a mustache, didn’t he?

Within less than a hundred pages, the missing mustache has led the man, step by unexpected step, to the point where he can’t be sure that anything in his life is what it seems. His wife disagrees with him about where they were two nights ago. She swears they didn’t vacation the previous year in Java; he’s sure they did. Is she putting him on for some nefarious reason? Is she losing it? Or is he?

Carrere, who recently published a biography of Philip K. Dick (under the magnificent title of I Am Alive and You Are Dead), is working in territory Dick mined for his Time Out of Joint (1959), in which a man reaches for a light pull in his closet, only to be confronted with a switch, the first misfire in a slow unraveling of his whole world. There are elements of Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), too, once true paranoia begins setting in. But whereas Time Out of Joint is ultimately a variety of sci-fi, and Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte resolves itself as a gothic thriller, The Mustache is more interested in the questions such losses create. How reliable is memory? Can it even be said to exist if it’s not shared with anyone? Without corroboration, there’s simply never enough evidence to prove any memory:

One should always hold on to everything, never overlook the slightest bit of evidence. Like that animist tribe in the village where they’d bought the blanket. The tradition was disappearing, but they’d been told that once upon a time, the inhabitants fastidiously collected their fingernail clippings, their excrement, their hair—their facial and body hair as well—everything that was a part of them and that would allow them to enter the gates of paradise in one whole and unmutilated piece.

In the United States, The Mustache is packaged with another Carrere novel, Class Trip (1995), which deals with similar questions from the perspective of a young boy, in similarly creepy fashion. The boy in Class Trip is young and insecure enough to be constantly overwhelmed by his manifold fears of the unknown in everyday life, whereas the man in The Mustache has replaced those fears with the confidence, acquired by most capable adults, that he has the elements of his life under control. Carrere wants us to entertain, at least for a couple of hours, the unsettling possibility that the boy knows better than the man.

He succeeds, at least with me: the night after I read the first thirty pages of Class Trip, I had several very creepy dreams. Maybe I should only read Carrere in the morning, leaving the nightstand to The Bedside Book of Birds.

Of fashion and matters sartorial, part 5 of 8

Then there is the darker side of fashion, ranging from simple visual horrors to the actual evils of furs and feathers. And always, in fashion and clothing as in nearly everything, the Romans did it first, and worst.

From P. G. Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

”Jeeves is a great believer in the moral effect of clothes. He thinks I just as good, but I objected to the boots.”

I saw his point. There is enough sadness in life without having fellows like Gussie Fink-Nottle going about in sea-boots.

From Anthony Powell’s A Writer’s Notebook (2001)

A man says with horror, “Later, I saw him without a hat.”

From David Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions (1996), collected in Graeme Gibson's Bedside Book of Birds (2005)

The indigenous people also took their toll on the native birds. The spectacular feathered capes and helmets that became uniforms of rank among Hawaiian chiefs, and the ceremonial feather-garments known as kahilis (loosely translated, “fly flaps”), cost thousands of avian lives. During early periods of Hawaiian history, commoners were even obliged to pay tribute to their alii in the currency of feathers. Shiny black plumage from one species, scarlet from another, green from another. Yellow was the most valued color, a stroke of bad luck for species like Drepanis pacifica, the Hawaii mamo, with its bright yellow rump highlighted against a starling-black body. The annals of Hawaiian fashion tell us that one chief, Kamehameha the Great, possessed a resplendent yellow cape containing the feathers of eighty thousand mamo.

From Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934)

About this time Julia went quite bald. I do not know whether [her mother] Livia had a hand in this: it seems not improbable, though certainly baldness was in the Caesar family. At all events, Augustus found an Egyptian wig-maker who made her one of the most magnificent fair wigs that was ever seen, and her charms were thus rather increased than diminished by her mischance; she had not had very good hair of her own. It is said that the wig was not built, in the usual way, on a base of hair net but was the whole scalp of a German chieftain’s daughter shrunk to the exact size of Julia’s head and kept alive and pliant by occasional rubbing with a special ointment. But I must say that I don’t believe this.

After the harvest

The last three months of the year are a great time to be a book lover. I said to Stacey that going into my regular bookstore (57th Street Books) in late October is, I imagine, like seeing the harvest all brought in safely, the granaries filled to bursting. Only my position is the inverse of the farmer’s in that situation. He hopes to make the harvest last the amount of time he needs until the next harvest; I hope to make the time last until I can eat up all the books.

I’ve thought about putting together a list of my favorite books of the year, but I think I’m going to take a pass, partly because so many books came out in the last few months of the year that I bought and put on my shelf, but haven’t gotten to yet.

How about instead a single book that I’ve been enjoying for months now? It’s a book I happened across at Shaman Drum Bookshop while visiting my friends Jeremy and Catherine in Ann Arbor, Graeme Gibson’s The Bedside Book of Birds. Gibson, who is Margaret Atwood’s husband, has compiled what the subtitle calls an avian miscellany, an anthology of images of and writings about birds, ranging from cave paintings (“When an anonymous artist incised an owl in the cave at Chauvet, there were probably fewer people on earth than in the Greater Toronto area today.”) to Saki writing about birds on the Western Front in World War I:

At the corner of a stricken wood (which has had a name made for it in history, but shall remain nameless here), at a moment when lyddite and shrapnel and machine-gun fire swept and raked and bespattered that devoted spot as though the artillery of an entire Division had suddenly concentrated upon it, a wee hen-chaffinch flitted wistfully to and fro, amid splintered and falling branches that had never a green bough left on them. The wounded lying there, if any of them noticed the small bird, may well have wondered why anything having wings and no pressing reason for remaining should have chosen to stay in such a place. There was a battered orchard alongside the stricken wood, and the probable explanation of the bird’s presence was that it had a nest of young ones that it was too scared to feed, too loyal to desert. Later on, a small flock of chaffinches blundered into the n the solitary hen-bird, they made no secret of their desire to get away as fast as their dazed wits would let them. The only other bird I ever saw there was a magpie, flying low over the wreckage of fallen tree limbs; “one for sorrow,” says the old superstition. There was sorrow enough in that wood.

to naturalist Peter Matthiessen:

The restlessness of shorebirds, their kinship with the distances and swift seasons, the wistful signal of their voices down the long coastlines of the world make them, for me, the most affecting of wild creatures. I think of them as birds of wind, as “wind birds.” To the traveler confounded by exotic birds, not to speak of exotic specimens of his own kind, the voice of the wind birds may be the lone familiar note in a strange land, and I have many times been glad to find them; meeting a whimbrel one fine summer day of February in Tierra del Fuego, I wondered if I had not seen this very bird, a half-year earlier, at home.

I’ve been using the book as its title asks, reading a bit here and a bit there before bed, so after several months, I’m only about fifteen percent through it. As in birdwatching—even of the lazy sort that Stacey and I do from our front window, of sparrows and finches and juncos and doves—patience is important, and hurry can be counterproductive. Perfect for bedtime, too, in other words.