Rosa, Peter Greenaway (365 Books, Day 15)
Sep. 16th, 2010 08:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksUseful link on an unrelated subject to this post: Brainstorming post for Wiscon panels on Islam, Islamophobia, and the intersection of the two with SF/F following Elizabeth Moon's extremely, distressingly wrong post of earlier today. More context included there. I also recommend ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nihilistic_kid's take on it.
This review is of a book I read on September thirteenth. Rosa was a present fromsovay.
Peter Greenaway has been for many years one of my favorite film directors and probably was my favorite outright until I encountered the work of Ulrike Ottinger. This preference was formed primarily on extremely repeated viewings of Prospero's Books and The Pillow Book and secondarily on two views of The Draughtsmen's Contract; I've never managed to see any of his others. Both The Pillow Book and Prospero's Books are intricate, ornate, visually lush literary adaptations, brilliantly acted, impressively layered and fetishizing the word and text to a degree almost incomprehensible until you've seen it. The Draughtsman's Contract is less obviously this way but still a profoundly literary movie, a vicious little Augustan melodrama that is dripping with invisible citations. Text and music, text and image, text on body, the body as text: I honestly don't think Greenaway sees any difference between those. He is far too disciplined to be a Surrealist and far too impressionist to be anything else. His weakness is, sometimes, obscurity, and something most people seem to register as cruelty that causes a lot of people to find his films very disturbing, though apparently I am not built for it to bother me.
This is the novel he wrote about the staging of an imaginary opera, to be seen, in the reader's mind, as a film. It claims on the flap to be a libretto and one of a series of libretti, from a series of operas about conspiracies leading to the deaths of composers. It is supposed to be the sixth in this series. The particular composer involved here, Juan Manuel de la Rosa, is as far as I can find out fictional, although he shares a name with a Spanish-Argentinian politician and dictator who was responsible for a genocide among the Argentinian native peoples. The composer is described as having made a name with music for Westerns and as having been shot by persons unknown for unknown reasons in 1957.
As a result, I tend to hear the music referred to in the book as a mixture of Michael Nyman and Ennio Morricone, although there is no sheet music included and I find upon internet search that there is a full-length opera score composed after the book came out by Louis Andriessen, which I really need to go listen to.
I don't know how to explain how good this is, how much pleasure I found in it. I don't remember who it was who said 'a pleasure so pure I shut the book to feel it better', but I did shut this book, just to sit there, breathing, in delight. I have no idea in the world whether anyone else (besidessovay would remotely like this book, but it is a me book, one of the ones that instantly becomes part of my personal treasure.
Firstly, and this probably is just me: it is, exactly and precisely, the novel that Angela Carter would have written if she had ever written a novel about Hollywood and the American West. It is the book I could see nebulously hovering behind American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, so it is like reading a lost work by a writer I am fond of, as well as being a new work by a writer I am differently fond of.
Secondly: the imagery invoked is so precise that I can mentally see every shot as I know that Greenaway would have done it in the film. I know his aesthetic well enough that this felt more like watching a movie than like reading a book, but it had all the things I enjoy about reading a book. I have no idea whether it would do this if you are not familiar with Greenaway.
Thirdly: this is one of the few pieces of post-modern fiction I've encountered that really, simply works. Greenaway begins by describing the set. Then he brings on a singer, to sing his description of the set. Then he brings on a second singer, to footnote the first. Then he mentions that the set is an illustration, bounded by a page, which is a part of a libretto. Then the footnotes develop a commentary independent of the singers. The singers develop characters independent of the footnotes. The audience has an opinion. The director has an opinion. The author has an opinion about himself as a director. The reader (me) has a curiosity, which the director remarks on, about the technical aspects of staging an opera in an illustration of its own libretto. The reader (not me) has decided to turn the page, only to understand that it contains the same illustration. The actress playing the footnote singer would like to be billed as the lead. The character of Rosa would like to know whether he is being enacted. And all of these layers slip into and out of each other with an ease, grace, humor, naturalness; you are never confused and never stranded. It's like Calvino, but assumes your complicity. The sly intelligence behind this book wants to befriend you.
Fourthly: complicity. There's the rub. There is a conspiracy in this book, and there is a murder mystery, although not (necessarily) the one you might think it is. There is a lot of gore in this opera; your tolerance for horrible things must be very, very high. This is a work in which the characters (personated by the actors, maybe, and maybe not) behave with almost unspeakable brutality to one another, and although as I have said I do not seem to be bothered by Greenaway, ever, I fully expect that the imagery here would be found very upsetting by just about everybody else, even at the layers of remove it plays with being at. There's also a lot of the thing Greenaway does which looks a lot like misogyny, in which many terrible things happen to women, and yet in the final analysis women are the only people in the entire thing who have any agency. But this is not a book which is trying to implicate the audience, the way a lot of post-modern film does (badly and annoyingly). It is a book which reveals a crime under a layer of meticulous and beautiful double-crosses and knows perfectly well that you are neither responsible for it nor complicit in it, because it is fictional and you, the audience, are not. But this leads to the question of why it comes so close to the usual ways one tries to implicate an audience in the first place? Because:
Fifthly: conspiracy. This is almost-- not quite-- a nihilistic book, a series of cruelties and stage sets and empty cleverness. The reason it isn't nihilistic is that it is about conspiracy and the reasons behind conspiracy. The one thing it believes in is this unspoken axiom: always question why someone is telling you a story.
And when I consider why Greenaway is telling me this story, the thing implodes and twists back on itself and becomes just ridiculously, profoundly impressive, a set of perfectly interlocking concepts to sit and enjoy while the Index Singer (who will be there after everyone comes home from the opera) comes out to sing everyone the index. (Which index does not, in fact, exist in the book.)
Also, in a small way, the thing is very funny.
I cannot wholeheartedly recommend this to everybody, as I really cannot overemphasize the disturbingness of the imagery. I have not seen worse in a film or book that I recall, period, end of sentence, though it is true that I do not go out and watch or read things that are trying to be disturbing just to be disturbing; I do however watch and read a fair amount of horror. With that caveat, this is the best book I've read this year.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
comments over there.
nihilistic_kid's take on it.This review is of a book I read on September thirteenth. Rosa was a present from
sovay.Peter Greenaway has been for many years one of my favorite film directors and probably was my favorite outright until I encountered the work of Ulrike Ottinger. This preference was formed primarily on extremely repeated viewings of Prospero's Books and The Pillow Book and secondarily on two views of The Draughtsmen's Contract; I've never managed to see any of his others. Both The Pillow Book and Prospero's Books are intricate, ornate, visually lush literary adaptations, brilliantly acted, impressively layered and fetishizing the word and text to a degree almost incomprehensible until you've seen it. The Draughtsman's Contract is less obviously this way but still a profoundly literary movie, a vicious little Augustan melodrama that is dripping with invisible citations. Text and music, text and image, text on body, the body as text: I honestly don't think Greenaway sees any difference between those. He is far too disciplined to be a Surrealist and far too impressionist to be anything else. His weakness is, sometimes, obscurity, and something most people seem to register as cruelty that causes a lot of people to find his films very disturbing, though apparently I am not built for it to bother me.
This is the novel he wrote about the staging of an imaginary opera, to be seen, in the reader's mind, as a film. It claims on the flap to be a libretto and one of a series of libretti, from a series of operas about conspiracies leading to the deaths of composers. It is supposed to be the sixth in this series. The particular composer involved here, Juan Manuel de la Rosa, is as far as I can find out fictional, although he shares a name with a Spanish-Argentinian politician and dictator who was responsible for a genocide among the Argentinian native peoples. The composer is described as having made a name with music for Westerns and as having been shot by persons unknown for unknown reasons in 1957.
As a result, I tend to hear the music referred to in the book as a mixture of Michael Nyman and Ennio Morricone, although there is no sheet music included and I find upon internet search that there is a full-length opera score composed after the book came out by Louis Andriessen, which I really need to go listen to.
I don't know how to explain how good this is, how much pleasure I found in it. I don't remember who it was who said 'a pleasure so pure I shut the book to feel it better', but I did shut this book, just to sit there, breathing, in delight. I have no idea in the world whether anyone else (besides
sovay would remotely like this book, but it is a me book, one of the ones that instantly becomes part of my personal treasure. Firstly, and this probably is just me: it is, exactly and precisely, the novel that Angela Carter would have written if she had ever written a novel about Hollywood and the American West. It is the book I could see nebulously hovering behind American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, so it is like reading a lost work by a writer I am fond of, as well as being a new work by a writer I am differently fond of.
Secondly: the imagery invoked is so precise that I can mentally see every shot as I know that Greenaway would have done it in the film. I know his aesthetic well enough that this felt more like watching a movie than like reading a book, but it had all the things I enjoy about reading a book. I have no idea whether it would do this if you are not familiar with Greenaway.
Thirdly: this is one of the few pieces of post-modern fiction I've encountered that really, simply works. Greenaway begins by describing the set. Then he brings on a singer, to sing his description of the set. Then he brings on a second singer, to footnote the first. Then he mentions that the set is an illustration, bounded by a page, which is a part of a libretto. Then the footnotes develop a commentary independent of the singers. The singers develop characters independent of the footnotes. The audience has an opinion. The director has an opinion. The author has an opinion about himself as a director. The reader (me) has a curiosity, which the director remarks on, about the technical aspects of staging an opera in an illustration of its own libretto. The reader (not me) has decided to turn the page, only to understand that it contains the same illustration. The actress playing the footnote singer would like to be billed as the lead. The character of Rosa would like to know whether he is being enacted. And all of these layers slip into and out of each other with an ease, grace, humor, naturalness; you are never confused and never stranded. It's like Calvino, but assumes your complicity. The sly intelligence behind this book wants to befriend you.
Fourthly: complicity. There's the rub. There is a conspiracy in this book, and there is a murder mystery, although not (necessarily) the one you might think it is. There is a lot of gore in this opera; your tolerance for horrible things must be very, very high. This is a work in which the characters (personated by the actors, maybe, and maybe not) behave with almost unspeakable brutality to one another, and although as I have said I do not seem to be bothered by Greenaway, ever, I fully expect that the imagery here would be found very upsetting by just about everybody else, even at the layers of remove it plays with being at. There's also a lot of the thing Greenaway does which looks a lot like misogyny, in which many terrible things happen to women, and yet in the final analysis women are the only people in the entire thing who have any agency. But this is not a book which is trying to implicate the audience, the way a lot of post-modern film does (badly and annoyingly). It is a book which reveals a crime under a layer of meticulous and beautiful double-crosses and knows perfectly well that you are neither responsible for it nor complicit in it, because it is fictional and you, the audience, are not. But this leads to the question of why it comes so close to the usual ways one tries to implicate an audience in the first place? Because:
Fifthly: conspiracy. This is almost-- not quite-- a nihilistic book, a series of cruelties and stage sets and empty cleverness. The reason it isn't nihilistic is that it is about conspiracy and the reasons behind conspiracy. The one thing it believes in is this unspoken axiom: always question why someone is telling you a story.
And when I consider why Greenaway is telling me this story, the thing implodes and twists back on itself and becomes just ridiculously, profoundly impressive, a set of perfectly interlocking concepts to sit and enjoy while the Index Singer (who will be there after everyone comes home from the opera) comes out to sing everyone the index. (Which index does not, in fact, exist in the book.)
Also, in a small way, the thing is very funny.
I cannot wholeheartedly recommend this to everybody, as I really cannot overemphasize the disturbingness of the imagery. I have not seen worse in a film or book that I recall, period, end of sentence, though it is true that I do not go out and watch or read things that are trying to be disturbing just to be disturbing; I do however watch and read a fair amount of horror. With that caveat, this is the best book I've read this year.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
