Three Dollars and his books
'Three Dollars' is the title of another book of Elliot Perlman's which I have been reading, or more accurately, have just finished reading.
There have been certain observations which I have made of his style of prose and his way of story-telling from reading 2 of his books in such short succession. They might not be accurate since it is an unspoken but universal rule that '3', not '2', is the magic number when it comes to making conclusive conclusions about anything. You need at least 3 points for a graph but we were often required to have double the mininum in order to minimise any error which, even if present, would not impact us in any visible or life-shattering way other than a bad grade. Though, it is not unreasonable to suggest that a bad grade was essentially life-shattering to us then, preoccupied as we were with grades and little of anything less.
In Perlman's stories, there is always (again the claim is weak when you only have 2 stories for comparison) a protagonist who has a heart that is larger than the rest of us. When everyone else is just trying to live his own damn life, there is always someone, in his stories, who has the time and good-humour, though not necessary the resources, to spare the less fortunate, the downcast and the outcast a slice of hope and a tinge of warmth. In 'Seven Types of Ambiguity', it was Simon who was constantly reminded of the world and its imperfections and inequalities and who refused to judge prostitutes the way society judged them. In 'Three Dollars', the protagonist took the form of Eddie who proffered his hand to a man who could not see his children because a restraining order against him and who had more dogs than he could care for. This was the same Eddie who ran in the rain to get aspirin for a stranger he met in the cafe, whose chair gave way.
And he is always a literature buff, constantly quoting from authors who are sometimes too obscure for our acquaintance. He is melancholy but it is debatable whether it is a result of a genetic predisposition to melancholiness or whether it is a melancholiness adopted for the litterateur persona. Or it could be his readings which lend him the air of melancholy, one which lingers with the persistence of cigarette smoke. He dates women who have an equal passion for literature as he has, if neither surpassing nor paling in comparison to his. He is a gentle lover and a humourous man. He often makes smart-ass comments about things even when the sombreness of the situation does not call for them. And he is almost always romantically involved with 2 women, though not always at the same time.
As I have speculated in my previous entry, I think the author has projected a large part of himself onto his novels or rather, more precisely, onto his protagonists. Even if the part about 2 women is less than true, one can safely deduce that he is a litterateur, with more than a passing interest in other subjects ranging from economics, philosophy, psychiatry, sociology, geography, history to the more scientific ones like physics, chemistry and mathematics. An aspiring Da Vinci no doubt, though how ironic it is that with information so much more accessible to us now as compared to Da Vinci's time, no one is truly simultaneously proficient in both the arts and the sciences as the great master was.
Nevertheless, I think Perlman has enticed me with enough of Kant, von Hayek, Voltaire and Hobbes, among others, to make me want to read more about them in my free time, or until I am stumped by the complexity of the ideas and theories of these great men before him and certainly way before me.
Actually there is a very fine distinction between trying to educate your readers and showing off your knowledge. In fact, the distinction is so indistinct that even the author is probably not able to recall his original intentions without bias. It might be the subconsciousness talking. He could genuinely have wanted to edify us on anomie - the ultimate self-imposed exile from the society. And he must have truly believed that a return to Keynesian economics would help balance the imbalances that so characterize the modern economies. In fact, from what I gather, he is a strong opponent of what we call the laissez-faire economy. Or he could have littered Hobbes, Empson and Voltaire like gold flakes on a pretentious dessert, you know, like those $1000 sundaes that are really no more than ice cream with non-toxic heavy metal. Either way, I am glad he did because I have an insatiable hunger for knowledge. But, unfortunately, I have a limited ability to digest and absorb.
What really strikes me about Perlman is the way he plays with semantics. After all, I am more easily impressed with the style of prose than the prose itself. Then again, it is not just about putting together of words in the smart-ass kind of way, which he does but also the keen observation and the literary aptitude required to translate into words feelings that the more mediocre amongst us can only catch a fleeting, vague sense of.
As a sucker for categorizing things, I have attempted to categorize the various techniques he has employed in his writing. Examples are taken from 'Three Dollars'.
Cat A: Play with the words in the smart-ass sort of way
"This might not be so bad under certain circumstances. I cannot imagine what they might be but I was not under them."
"He smelled of beer so much that thereafter beer would always smell a little of him."
“… a series of unsuccessful relationships, unsuccessful in that they had ended”
“On hot days the car begged to be put out of its misery and on cold days it behaved as if it had been.”
"... past the farms and pastoral properties to the nothingness between the pastoral properties and other pastoral properties."
"... people who once had not known whether it was good or bad to live on a train line and now had no choice but to know..."
Cat B: Twist on the cliches
"I had no choice but to breathe in as much of his grief as I could stand and to store the rest for a rainy day."
"We were all like peas in a pod in those days except that Paul was only trying it out, just visiting. He did not have to stay in the pod. We stayed thee and ripened only to be thrown into an industrial-sized cauldron and turned into pea soup for a chain restaurant. His parents owned the franchise."
"Although neither of us are getting any younger, your father seems to have stopped getting younger with a new and unparallel vigour."
"Not content with hitting any rock bottom, Tanya had kept going past the sediments of the Palaeozoic era all the way down to the Archaen rocks she had never known before."
Cat C: Connecting 2 completely different things
"The woman serving in the wheatgerm queue had grown impatient, perhaps with me, perhaps with the vegetative nature of her professional life." (wheatgerm <-> vegetative nature of her job)
"I was always suspicious of the bush balladeering sentimentality of, say, the Jindyworobaks and its more recent socio-political manifestation, that type of often unyielding, unscientific, dogmatic, and bombastic environmentalism that does for society’s habitat what the followers of Foucault and Derrida did for the promotion of literature as a source of sustainable enjoyment." (environmentalism <-> sustainable enjoyment)
"Childhood summers are always better than adult summers. I have heard a variety of explanations for this: memory improves the past by natural selection, it is the origin of the specious" (origin of the 'species')
"Gerard was one of the first people I knew to deify cardiovascular fitness and make regular sacrifices at the alter end of the bench press." (idol worship and working out)
Cat D: Personification (Is it what these are called?)
"It was a malice but it was dressed up hastily, awkwardly, coming undone at the back, and enough of it was exposed to shatter any illusions."
"The next day, fresh and unshamed in the white light of childhood summers, seemed to possess an innocence so pristine as to make a lie of the previous day."
Cat E: The things we might have thought about, which he has described better than the version in our subconscious
"‘Are you alright?’ I asked in the manner we ask people who clearly are not."
"It is with inadequate understanding of Tanya’s capacity to enthuse other people and to enlighten them in ways they would never forget, and with disregard for the consequences to her financial and emotional well-being, that the university regrets it is unable to extend her contract of employment. They would like to take this opportunity to offer her grave self-doubts and to employ a meaningful cliche towards the bottom of the letter, without fond sincerity, without gratitude for past service, so that the printed words on the page, when viewed in the middle distance through unfocused eyes, generate the image of an upside-down Christmas tree. " (more or less the way I felt, reading the rejection letter from NUS)
"… of the relief she always has when Rachel leaves. And Rachel, not yet fully down the drive would know this is what the aunt was feeling because when they have lived a couple of decades and people are relieved each time you leave a place, you cannot miss it every time."
"Small dread is grey. Anxiety is brighter. Grey dread seeps. Anxiety is chauffeur-driven to the centre of your consciousness."
Cat F: The humorous
"We talked about the possibility of introducing a ‘wheel’ segment into her lectures, ‘Tanya’s Wheel’, in which she might give away our car or a weekend for two staying with my parents at the home they dreamt of on the Gold Coast."
“God! I thought it was you”
“I’m not God. You’ve mistaken me for someone else”
“I’m going to have to do something big to solidify my position within the department.”
“We could have a child and donate it to the library”
Oh for those of you who like (or dislike) globalisation and 'that kinda thing', there is a length discussion about it somewhere in book. Just as surveys of the twentieth century will not do without mentioning science and technology, the books published at the beginning of the twenty-first century must pay tribute to the phenomenon known as globalisation.
There have been certain observations which I have made of his style of prose and his way of story-telling from reading 2 of his books in such short succession. They might not be accurate since it is an unspoken but universal rule that '3', not '2', is the magic number when it comes to making conclusive conclusions about anything. You need at least 3 points for a graph but we were often required to have double the mininum in order to minimise any error which, even if present, would not impact us in any visible or life-shattering way other than a bad grade. Though, it is not unreasonable to suggest that a bad grade was essentially life-shattering to us then, preoccupied as we were with grades and little of anything less.
In Perlman's stories, there is always (again the claim is weak when you only have 2 stories for comparison) a protagonist who has a heart that is larger than the rest of us. When everyone else is just trying to live his own damn life, there is always someone, in his stories, who has the time and good-humour, though not necessary the resources, to spare the less fortunate, the downcast and the outcast a slice of hope and a tinge of warmth. In 'Seven Types of Ambiguity', it was Simon who was constantly reminded of the world and its imperfections and inequalities and who refused to judge prostitutes the way society judged them. In 'Three Dollars', the protagonist took the form of Eddie who proffered his hand to a man who could not see his children because a restraining order against him and who had more dogs than he could care for. This was the same Eddie who ran in the rain to get aspirin for a stranger he met in the cafe, whose chair gave way.
And he is always a literature buff, constantly quoting from authors who are sometimes too obscure for our acquaintance. He is melancholy but it is debatable whether it is a result of a genetic predisposition to melancholiness or whether it is a melancholiness adopted for the litterateur persona. Or it could be his readings which lend him the air of melancholy, one which lingers with the persistence of cigarette smoke. He dates women who have an equal passion for literature as he has, if neither surpassing nor paling in comparison to his. He is a gentle lover and a humourous man. He often makes smart-ass comments about things even when the sombreness of the situation does not call for them. And he is almost always romantically involved with 2 women, though not always at the same time.
As I have speculated in my previous entry, I think the author has projected a large part of himself onto his novels or rather, more precisely, onto his protagonists. Even if the part about 2 women is less than true, one can safely deduce that he is a litterateur, with more than a passing interest in other subjects ranging from economics, philosophy, psychiatry, sociology, geography, history to the more scientific ones like physics, chemistry and mathematics. An aspiring Da Vinci no doubt, though how ironic it is that with information so much more accessible to us now as compared to Da Vinci's time, no one is truly simultaneously proficient in both the arts and the sciences as the great master was.
Nevertheless, I think Perlman has enticed me with enough of Kant, von Hayek, Voltaire and Hobbes, among others, to make me want to read more about them in my free time, or until I am stumped by the complexity of the ideas and theories of these great men before him and certainly way before me.
Actually there is a very fine distinction between trying to educate your readers and showing off your knowledge. In fact, the distinction is so indistinct that even the author is probably not able to recall his original intentions without bias. It might be the subconsciousness talking. He could genuinely have wanted to edify us on anomie - the ultimate self-imposed exile from the society. And he must have truly believed that a return to Keynesian economics would help balance the imbalances that so characterize the modern economies. In fact, from what I gather, he is a strong opponent of what we call the laissez-faire economy. Or he could have littered Hobbes, Empson and Voltaire like gold flakes on a pretentious dessert, you know, like those $1000 sundaes that are really no more than ice cream with non-toxic heavy metal. Either way, I am glad he did because I have an insatiable hunger for knowledge. But, unfortunately, I have a limited ability to digest and absorb.
What really strikes me about Perlman is the way he plays with semantics. After all, I am more easily impressed with the style of prose than the prose itself. Then again, it is not just about putting together of words in the smart-ass kind of way, which he does but also the keen observation and the literary aptitude required to translate into words feelings that the more mediocre amongst us can only catch a fleeting, vague sense of.
As a sucker for categorizing things, I have attempted to categorize the various techniques he has employed in his writing. Examples are taken from 'Three Dollars'.
Cat A: Play with the words in the smart-ass sort of way
"This might not be so bad under certain circumstances. I cannot imagine what they might be but I was not under them."
"He smelled of beer so much that thereafter beer would always smell a little of him."
“… a series of unsuccessful relationships, unsuccessful in that they had ended”
“On hot days the car begged to be put out of its misery and on cold days it behaved as if it had been.”
"... past the farms and pastoral properties to the nothingness between the pastoral properties and other pastoral properties."
"... people who once had not known whether it was good or bad to live on a train line and now had no choice but to know..."
Cat B: Twist on the cliches
"I had no choice but to breathe in as much of his grief as I could stand and to store the rest for a rainy day."
"We were all like peas in a pod in those days except that Paul was only trying it out, just visiting. He did not have to stay in the pod. We stayed thee and ripened only to be thrown into an industrial-sized cauldron and turned into pea soup for a chain restaurant. His parents owned the franchise."
"Although neither of us are getting any younger, your father seems to have stopped getting younger with a new and unparallel vigour."
"Not content with hitting any rock bottom, Tanya had kept going past the sediments of the Palaeozoic era all the way down to the Archaen rocks she had never known before."
Cat C: Connecting 2 completely different things
"The woman serving in the wheatgerm queue had grown impatient, perhaps with me, perhaps with the vegetative nature of her professional life." (wheatgerm <-> vegetative nature of her job)
"I was always suspicious of the bush balladeering sentimentality of, say, the Jindyworobaks and its more recent socio-political manifestation, that type of often unyielding, unscientific, dogmatic, and bombastic environmentalism that does for society’s habitat what the followers of Foucault and Derrida did for the promotion of literature as a source of sustainable enjoyment." (environmentalism <-> sustainable enjoyment)
"Childhood summers are always better than adult summers. I have heard a variety of explanations for this: memory improves the past by natural selection, it is the origin of the specious" (origin of the 'species')
"Gerard was one of the first people I knew to deify cardiovascular fitness and make regular sacrifices at the alter end of the bench press." (idol worship and working out)
Cat D: Personification (Is it what these are called?)
"It was a malice but it was dressed up hastily, awkwardly, coming undone at the back, and enough of it was exposed to shatter any illusions."
"The next day, fresh and unshamed in the white light of childhood summers, seemed to possess an innocence so pristine as to make a lie of the previous day."
Cat E: The things we might have thought about, which he has described better than the version in our subconscious
"‘Are you alright?’ I asked in the manner we ask people who clearly are not."
"It is with inadequate understanding of Tanya’s capacity to enthuse other people and to enlighten them in ways they would never forget, and with disregard for the consequences to her financial and emotional well-being, that the university regrets it is unable to extend her contract of employment. They would like to take this opportunity to offer her grave self-doubts and to employ a meaningful cliche towards the bottom of the letter, without fond sincerity, without gratitude for past service, so that the printed words on the page, when viewed in the middle distance through unfocused eyes, generate the image of an upside-down Christmas tree. " (more or less the way I felt, reading the rejection letter from NUS)
"… of the relief she always has when Rachel leaves. And Rachel, not yet fully down the drive would know this is what the aunt was feeling because when they have lived a couple of decades and people are relieved each time you leave a place, you cannot miss it every time."
"Small dread is grey. Anxiety is brighter. Grey dread seeps. Anxiety is chauffeur-driven to the centre of your consciousness."
Cat F: The humorous
"We talked about the possibility of introducing a ‘wheel’ segment into her lectures, ‘Tanya’s Wheel’, in which she might give away our car or a weekend for two staying with my parents at the home they dreamt of on the Gold Coast."
“God! I thought it was you”
“I’m not God. You’ve mistaken me for someone else”
“I’m going to have to do something big to solidify my position within the department.”
“We could have a child and donate it to the library”
Oh for those of you who like (or dislike) globalisation and 'that kinda thing', there is a length discussion about it somewhere in book. Just as surveys of the twentieth century will not do without mentioning science and technology, the books published at the beginning of the twenty-first century must pay tribute to the phenomenon known as globalisation.
1 Comments:
Getting KTFO'd and having a slight blemish on his precious pro record. A lot of men feel they need to embellish on many of the details of their life and while this may sound good at first; it could be devastating down the road. Your question also needs to be SIMPLE enough for her to respond without a ton of thought.
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