Names

I'm going through a rough patch with my reading, these days. Seems like the books I've read since The End of Mr. Y take these great premises and bury them underneath other things that I don't care about. A sleight of hand where they lure you in with one thing and the next thing you know you're the proud owner of a three humped camel and a future stake in the Brooklyn Bridge. Or they just mail in the ending. A mediocre ending can totally destroy everything else that happened before it.

Up until recently, I'd never been the type to abandon a book, no matter how bad and I've read some crap, mind you. A Confederacy of Dunces, though... I couldn't separate the prose from what came off as a never ending fart joke, Pulitzer winning fart joke, mind you. Had to set that one down and the odds of picking it up again are about as likely as Patricia Highsmith cranking out another Ripley book. (Famous last words)

So I decided to bring in the big guns and go for an open and shut case. The Glass Key came to mind because whether or not Hammett's plots make sense have nothing to do with the enjoyability of his prose. Supposedly the book inspired my FAVORITE MOVIE EVER, Miller's Crossing, and I've been dying to read it since finding that out. I read the first few pages at a bookstore and was hooked instantly but I'd already blown my wad on other things on that particular visit. I was also in a bit of a crash crunch after spending my savings on a new motherboard and cpu (YAY for new computer shininess!) so that was another wrinkle.

My next option, and just to be clear, I have a bunch of self-imposed restraints that prohibit me from basically reading things by the same authors over and over. I want to write well and I think part of writing well comes from reading well. I don't believe that limiting myself to a handful of writers that I adore will accomplish that, considering the plethora of voices that are out there. You just never know when you'll discover your new favorite writer if you don't go out and look for them.

So my next option became Anna Karenina, a highly regarded novel that you may have heard of.
It was selected as the best novel ever written by one group of authors and it's considered one of the best to come out of the 19th century. I dug the book up from my library, where it sat on a stack of Dostoevsky works: Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment and House of the Dead, flipped it open and proceeded to read the foreword which is something I never do. Stupid lit scholars never bother to tell you there may be spoilers in the foreword.

After reading how Tolstoy came to the decision to write the book, I was hooked. I brought it downstairs to my desk, put my feet up, skimmed the rest of the foreword and got to a part, right before the prose that said: "Besides being more direct than earlier translations and closer to current speech, it has the great advantage of simplifying the Russian names, so that the reader is no longer confused by all the -evnas and -oviches an can give his full attention to the story as Tolstoy wanted us to do."

I didn't even have to read the next part to know it was coming but the main character's name Karenina is a patronymic: daughter of Karenin, I believe. Someone more familiar with Russian feel free to correct me. The translation uses a simplified naming convention that effectively breaks the title of the novel.

Um... what?

Because I don't speak Russian and will probably never learn it, I like to hope that when I'm reading something translated they're adhering to the rules as much as possible. To me, simplifying an established naming convention doesn't do that. It makes me think of Ellis Island immigrants giving their names to the Yankee gatekeepers, uncultured and unfamiliar with anything un-American, if they couldn't pronounce it they changed it to "to make it easier."

Pardon me for not believing names should be easy.

This isn't an original thought (its' touched on in Percival Everett's Glyph at least) but if you think about it your name is as inherited from your parents as much as your nose or any other genetic condition. In most cases, parents have decided what they're going to call you before they've even seen you, when you're nothing but a dream to them. In the case of my name, I share it with my Father and many members of my extended family. I don't know if this makes me more sensitive because of that, but I think you have to give the proper respect to what a name represents. Most of us do not choose them, they are given to us by people that have been on the planet longer than us.

But it's just fiction right?

Well yes, artistic vision aside, you could say that about any piece of art and that would end the argument.

But I think that art is much more important that and if Tolstoy had chosen to call his characters something easy, something non-Russian, then that's what he would have done. He didn't do that though.

It took me awhile to understand Russian names, and how a single character could have like 6 different names (if you include all the nicknames etc.) but it's really not that hard to piece together if you pay attention. Plus, I like the conversational familiarity provided by people fluidly switching from one affective name to another. It gives me the "This is how they really talk" over there feeling. It would be a big turnoff for me to pick up a book with a different time and setting than my own that sounded just like people talk here and now. Isn't the goal of most fiction to transport you to another time and place?

Anyway, long story short, I need a better translation of Anna Karenina for one and for two I decided to punt and I'm reading Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch because I know I'll enjoy it. Then I'll head back to the bookstore when this holiday madness dies down to grab Middlemarch and see what this Eliot chick is all about.

Us realists need to stick together and so forth.