Narrative Junkie

You are not your bookcase

So says Megan Hustad in Salon.

Reading and romance

It's Not You, It's Your Books (NY Times)
Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!” (full article)

That Tolstoy could write...

...except for this sentence, which I came upon in the much-heralded Pevear-Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina:

"The prince enjoyed a health remarkable even among princes; such strength that, despite the intemperance with which he gave himself up to pleasure, he was as fresh as a big, green, waxy Dutch cucumber."

If on "Jeopardy" I was given the clue: "It's big, green, waxy, and Dutch," I would have guessed "What is a Rembrandt booger snot."

Linkateria:

• The Translation Wars (David Remnick, New Yorker)
  
• Anna Karenina full text
  

After the MFA

A friend of mine has an interesting blog called After the MFA, about what to do post-graduate writing program. Good stuff here for fiction writers.

Alain Robbe-Grilet

The man who ruined the novel, according to Stephen Marche in Salon.

The Godfather -- the movies vs the book

After watching The Godfather and The Godfather Part II for the sixth or seventh time, I decided to read the novel. The book, published in 1969, was a big bestseller and has now sold more than 20 million copies. But I wondered: The Godfather films are classics – does the novel hold up?

Nope. This is one of those rare cases in which the artistry of the film clearly surpasses that of the book. Puzo is an indifferent, even clunky stylist. He also tends to wander from the main story, at one point spending pages describing the events around an operation to shrink the vagina of Sonny’s former mistress. (I'm not joking.) The film does make use of some of the best of the book’s dialogue, but Coppolla (along with Puzo as his co-screenwriter) was shrewd enough to pick out the gems in the midst of the more prosaic back-and-forths. (Plus I couldn't find the canolli line in the book.) And of course the actors must be given credit for not only stimulating those frissons an audience feels at many of the famous lines (“I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse” just doesn’t have the same punch in the book), but also the relationships between the characters that give the story texture. For example, in the book, when Tom Hagen and Sonny discuss the best way to respond to the shooting of Don Corleone, Hagen argues that Sonny is foolish to start an all-out war. In the film, the same lines are delivered by Robert Duvall with impatience and irritation, reinforcing our view of Sonny as a hothead and too immature to replace his father. This resonates later when Michael ousts Hagen as consigliere; as Hagen has shown previously that he may have been more capable than Sonny, there is a sense that Michael has an ulterior motive.

To watch the films then read the book is to understand the difference between merely a good idea and its artistic execution. Puzo’s rendering of Don Corleone’s death:

"Quite suddenly it felt as if the sun had come down very close to his head. The air filled with dancing golden specks. Michael’s oldest boy came running through the garden toward where the Don knelt and the boy was enveloped by a yellow shield of blinding light. But the Don was not to be tricked, he was too old a hand. Death hid  behind that flaming yellow shield ready to pounce out on him and the Don with a wave of his hand warned the boy away from his presence. Just in time. The sledgehammer blow inside his chest made him choke for air. The Don pitched forward into the earth."

Now picture Marlon Brando chasing his toddler grandson among the tomato plants, collapsing, his corpse undergoing the indignity of being sprayed with a fumigator by the unknowing child.

A similar difference exists between the book and movie versions of the scene in which Michael’s minions gather around him in obeisance, a tribute to his new status as Corleone family head. It’s Coppolla who adds the touch of the door slamming shut on the prying Kay, underscoring her marginalization from this part of her husband’s life.

The Godfather has always been accused of romanticizing the Mafia. But in this area the film doesn't even come close to the novel. Puzo portrays the Corleones upholding a culture and credo that the sociopaths in The Sopranos only pay lip service to while acting on their worst narcissistic impulses. In this speech, Michael explains to Kay why the Corleones aren't morally culpable for acting outside the law:

“You’ve got the wrong idea of my father and the Corleone family. l’ll make a final explanation and this one will be really final. My father is a businessman trying to provide for his wife and children and those friends he might need somed ay in a time of trouble. He doesn’t accept the rules of the society we live in because those rules would have condemned him to a life not suitable to a man like himself, a man of extraordinary force and character. What you have to understand is that he considers himself the equal of all those great men like Presidents and Prime Ministers and Supreme Court Justices and Governors of the States. He refuses to live by rules set up by others, rules which condemn him to a defeated life. But his ultimate aim is to enter that society with a certain power since society doesn’t really protect its members who do not have their own individual power. In the meantime he operates on a code of ethics he considers far superior to the legal structures of society.” 

One reason I read the book is the niggling narrative gaps I frequently perceive when I watch the movies.  Some of these are filled in by watching “The Godfather: A Novel for Television," in which Coppola re-edited the two films to tell the story chronologically, starting with II’s kid-Vito-in-Sicily sequence, and added scenes cut from the originals. A more likely source is The Godfather Collection, a boxed set of all three films that includes the additional material as an extra. One of the scenes even includes the characters of Carmine and Augustino Coppola, the director’s father and grandfather. My favorite: an early meeting between Robert DeNiro Vito and a teenage Hyman Roth.

From these scenes and from reading the book, I managed to sooth all the little pinpricks of incompletion I experience when watching the theatrical releases. To wit:

-The Corleones frequently make reference to Genco, Don Corleone’s longtime consigliere whom their olive oil company is named after. When Sonny and Tom Hagen butt heads over the strategy necessary to win the gang war, Sonny hostilely laments about and to Tom, “Pop had Genco, look what I got.” So I've always wondered, who exactly is Genco, and if he was such a hotshot, why doesn't he appear in the film?

Turns out the answer appears in a scene from the book that was deleted from the final cut of the film, in which Don Corleone and sons visit the moribund Genco Abbandando at the hospital. It’s not a great scene: The consigliere asks Don Corleone to pull some strings for him to get him off the hook with Death,  rather overstating the point that those in the Don’s sphere ascribe to him mystical powers of control. Another point cleared up: I was never sure if Robert DeNiro Vito’s companion at the Italian comic operetta in II (his employer’s son) was Genco or not, because we never actually see that character consorting with young Vito, young Clemenza, and young unbelievably-handsomer-than-Abe-Vigoda- even-at-that-age Tessio. And I've never caught anyone calling him by name. Answer: He is. In a deleted scene, Vito actually refers to the character as Genco.

-In the opening scene of The Godfather, Connie’s wedding, a brief shot shows Sonny’s wife sitting among  giggling girlfriends while she makes the “big penis” gesture with her hands, holding them parallel in front of her chest about six inches apart and then spreading them farther. I always wondered: Is she saying Sonny has a big dick, or is she expressing her wish for a man who can fulfill her, since it’s already been implied that Sonny cheats on her? The definite answer from the book: the former.

-I’ve always felt that Luca Brazzi’s story seems to be missing, being that such an imposing character is sent to bed with the fishes a quarter of the way through the movie. At one point, after Solozzo has had the Godfather shot and he has taken Tom Hagen hostage, trying to scare him into brokering a deal over the drug issue with the Don, Hagen says, “Even the Don won’t be able to call off Luca Brasi.” Meaning Luca is so loyal to the Godfather that his shooting will render him as uncontrollable as a mad dog. The book explains Luca’s relationship to the Corleones – that he was their number one enforcer, psychopathically brutal, and one of the pillars of Don Corleone’s empire. Luca's just a killing machine, and an indispensable asset. That’s why in the film, when Sonny can’t get in touch with Luca, he comments that if the hitman has turned traitor, they’re all in big trouble. I think what's missing in the film is a scene in which Luca kills somebody in inimitable fashion, so we actually see how powerful he was.

-After the meeting with all the dons in which the Godfather sues for peace after the murder of Santino, he realizes that it’s Barzini who’s been behind the current troubles, only using the Tattaglias as a front.  The Don says, “Tattaglia never could have outfought Santino.” I have always found this a curious statement, since Sonny up till then had been viewed mostly as a hothead who leapt before he looked. In the book, however, it’s explained that Sonny, though quick to the trigger, knows how to martial his resources when it's time to go to the mattresses. (Sonny mentions this himself in one of the deleted scenes.)

-I never really understood why Michael removed Tom Hagen as consigliore. Even though it was mentioned twice that Hagen was not a “wartime consigliore,” if he was good enough for the Don, who is described as having unerring judgment, why won’t he do for Michael, who puts a premium on family? (It’s true Hagen isn’t related by blood, but he was brought up as a son by Vito Corleone.) Part of the answer to this lies in the excision of the Genco death scene. That scene makes it clear that Tom has been promoted to fill the gap created when Genco took ill. The book addresses the issue in greater detail: Because Hagen isn't Sicilian, let alone Italian, this subjects the Corleones to a certain amount of ridicule. (They're called by the other families “the Irish mob.”) Because only a Sicilian carries inside him the devious, crafty, and vengeful qualities that allows him to strategize correctly in a gangland brouhaha.  “No Irishman could hope to equal a Sicilian for cunning,” Puzo summarizes.

Other differences between the movies and the book:

-The missing years between the Robert DeNiro Vito and the Marlon Brando Vito are filled in, with a long step-by-step section on  how the Don built his empire. But the whole Nevada storyline from Godfather II appears in the film only.

-The book features long (and boring) sections on singer Johnny Fontaine, a more minor character in the films.

-In the book, Lucy Mancini, the bridesmaid that Sonny sneaks off to hump at Connie’s wedding, and whose son appears in The Godfather III in the person of Andy Garcia, is a much bigger character. (She's also the one with the capacious vagina.)

-In the book, and in a deleted scene from II, Michael has the Sicilian bodyguard whose betrayal led to the death of his Italian bride, Apollonia, tracked down in America and killed.

-Mama Corleone, a minor presence in the films, gets a bit more attention in the book, though not much. However, one interesting aspect is that she subtly disrespects hubby Vito when he’s not around.

-Albert Neri, Michael’s number one henchman and a shadowy figure in both I and II, is fleshed out in the book. In the famous sequence cross-cutting between the baptism and the vengeance killing at the end of the first film, Neri poses as a policeman to get close enough to Barzini to shoot him on the courthouse steps. Turns out in the book he’s an ex-cop who got ousted from the force because he beat up a rapist and found his true calling in the Corleone family. Clemenza calls Neri “The new Luca Brasi.”